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From http://lapismagazine.org
Lessons Still Unlearned:
"The Weather Underground," Thirty Years Later
BY JAY KINNEY
Every now and then, a film appears that has special resonance with the issues of the moment. The recent documentary, "The Weather Underground," is such a film.
At first glance it might seem unlikely that a film about a cult-like '60s New Left sect that fell apart by 1976 would have much light to shed upon the present. Yet, it is hard to walk away from seeing this film without reflecting on the curious parallels (and differences) between then and now.
"Hearing Noam Chomsky"
Mike Palecek
Being a product of the Nebraska educational system I
didn't hear of Noam Chomsky until I was in my 40s.
Maybe that's not Mr. Bruening's or Mr. Gibson's or
Mrs. Schmeichel's fault, totally. Probably it's mine,
along with the Norfolk Daily News, Omaha
World-Herald, as well as Isabel and Milosh Palecek's.
The collection is self published in NY, and is reviewed by AK press.
From Brooklyn To Balata:
First Hand Reports and Thoughts From Palestinian Solidarity Activists
Sean Sullivan, et al
pam
No ISBN, $4.00
This is a work of brilliance, that demands to be read. And discussed. Read again. Then acted upon. Herein you'll find first hand accounts of life in occupied Palestine from four NY Solidarity activists. All of their reports are incisive, well-written, eloquent, and illuminating. There are, fortunately, many such accounts, by Westerners and the Palestinians themselves. What makes this thick pamphlet particularly useful is the second half. There are two responses to the report-backs from New York State prisoners - very much bringing the war, and racism back home to America. And perhaps best of all, a lengthy afterword/essay, discussing the role of (largely) white activists in the Middle East, the structure, tactics and effectiveness of the International Solidarity Movement, why solidarity work (both in Palestine and here, at home) is vital, and how such work might be most effective. Some of the best writing to be found anywhere on the conflict, and what we might be doing about it. Really, really good.
While the U.S. "Big Media" rarely notice books that challenge the dominant ideology, this is not always so in other lands. Franklin Rosemont’s Joe Hill: The IWW and the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture (Charles H. Kerr, 2003) -- see Peter Linebaugh’s review here -- has not been mentioned in the New York Times or Newsweek, but here is an informative notice from the current (January 2004) issue of Le Monde Diplomatique, a paper with over 400,000 readers, published in Paris in nine languages. Reviewer Michael Lowy’s books in English include Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe and Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity.
Franklin Rosemont's Joe Hill
Michael Löwy
This is a splendid biography of Joe Hill (1877-1915), the legendary figure of American radicalism -- poet, composer, songwriter, cartoonist, and union militant, executed by the authorities of the State of Utah in 1915 after a notorious frame-up trial. But this book is also a history of the counterculture created by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the great revolutionary union movement in North America. The author analyzes the internationalist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, and profoundly subversive spirit of this movement, emphasizing the humor, poetry, creativity, and romanticism of its culture, which in many respects seems to anticipate surrealism.
Abundantly illustrated with images, drawings, comics, and paintings produced by Joe Hill and his IWW friends and fellow workers, this 639-page book restores a too-little-known chapter in the history of the North American workers’ movement.
"Life and Death Among the Pirates:
The Real Story of the Pirates of the Caribbean"
Marcus Rediker
A lecture given by Marcus Rediker at Emmanuel College
in Boston on October 9, 2003 and recorded by Roger
Leisner of Radio Free Maine (to order, see below).
Reviewed by Nikos Raptis
Historically the elite of any society have been able
to force upon the ordinary people of that society a
worldview which they (the elite) had constructed. The
elite of western societies are very adept in
constructing such a system of views. This they
accomplish by hammering these views in the heads of
ordinary people since childhood.
Surrealist Subversions:
Rants, Writings & Images by the Surrealist Movement in the United States
Edited by Ron Sakolsky; Autonomedia 2002; USA; ISBN 1-57027-122-4; pbk. 742pp
Reviewed by Doug Campbell, Edinburgh Review #111, pp.113-15
Each new retrospective exhibition brings a flood of articles which seek to pigeonhole Surrealism as a Parisian Art movement of the twenties and thirties, damn it by association with Guinness ads and Dali’s careerist antics, and bury it with Breton, if not the outbreak of the second world war. Over and above the fact that Surrealism was, for Surrealists, always about far more than art, this ignores the existence of the other Surrealist groups that sprang up across the globe and of their distinct traditions.
The story of the Chicago Surrealist group, and the wider U.S. Surrealist movement that grew out of it, is a colourful one, likely to be unfamiliar to those who know Surrealism only through art historical accounts.
"The Ontology and Politics of Gilles Deleuze"
Todd May
Reviewing:
Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000 [orig. pub. 1997]).
Paul Patton, Deleuze and the Political (New York, Routledge, 2000).
John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).
In the small but growing circle of Deleuze scholars on this side of the Atlantic, there has been a notable shift in recent years regarding the aspects of Deleuze's thought that receive emphasis. Early on, with the publication and subsequent translation of (and the stir in France about) Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze was treated here as primarily a political philosopher in the Nietzschean mold. Anti-Oedipus, co-authored with Felix Guattari, was (justly) taken to be political theory that was influenced by the events of May '68 in France, and was also (not quite so justly) taken to be emblematic of the entirety of Deleuze's thought.
In recent years, however, there has been a shift from the study of his political views toward his ontological ones, and with that shift has come a corresponding shift in attention from the later works, many of them co-authored with Guattari, toward the earlier ones. Deleuze's central work Difference and Repetition, long neglected here, appeared in translation by Paul Patton (one of the authors under review here) in 1994, and, alongside other earlier works, allows English speakers a full range of study of all of Deleuze's major early works. Combined with the focus placed on Deleuze's ontology by Constantin Boundas, his most significant promoter in North America, scholars of Deleuze's thought are now as likely to read the collaborative works with Felix Guattari through the eyes of Deleuze's earlier studies as the other way around.
‘Hegemony or Survival’: The Everything Explainer
Samantha Power, New York Times Book Review, 4 January 2004
Reviewing Hegemony or Survival:
America’s Quest for Global Dominance
Noam Chomsky
New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 278 pp.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have been heard to exclaim -- with
varying degrees of shame, bewilderment and indignation -- “Why do they
hate us?” The response tends to fall between two extremes. Bush
administration officials say, in essence, they hate us for who we are.
As President Bush has put it, “They hate progress, and freedom, and
choice, and culture, and music, and laughter, and women, and Christians,
and Jews and all Muslims who reject their distorted doctrines.” At the
opposite end stands the M.I.T. professor Noam Chomsky. “Why do they hate
us?” Chomsky asks in “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global
Dominance.” “Because of you and your associates, Mr. Bush, and what you
have done.
jim writes:
"Didn't See The Same Movie"
Loren Goldner
Reviewing Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air:
Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che
London/New York, Verso, 2002
"The sleep of dialectical reason will engender monsters."
Without exactly setting out to do so, Max Elbaum in his book Revolution In The Air, has managed to demonstrate the existence of progress in human history, namely in the decline and disappearance of the grotesque Stalinist-Maoist-'Third World Marxist" and Marxist-Leninist groups and ideologies he presents, under the rubric New Communist Movement, as the creations of pretty much the "best and the brightest" coming out of the American 1960's.
Who controls the past, Orwell said, controls the future. Read at a certain level, Elbaum's book (describing a mental universe that in many respects out-Orwells Orwell), aims, through extended self-criticism, to jettison 99% of what "Third World Marxism" stood for in its 1970's heyday, in order to salvage the 1% of further muddled "progressive politics" for the future, particularly where the Democratic Party and the unions are concerned, preparing "progressive" forces to paint a new face on the capitalist system after the neo-liberal phase has shot its bolt.
An anonymous coward writes:
"Comics Grow Up (Again):
World War 3 Chips Three Off the Old Block"
Paul Buhle
The Metamorphosis
By Peter Kuper
Crown, 79 pages, $18.00
Johnny Jihad: A Graphic Novel
By Ryan Inzana
NBM, 92 pages, $9.95
Portraits of Israelis & Palestinians (for My Parents)
By Seth Tobocman
Soft Skull Press, 120 pages, $15.95
We seem to be in the midst of a comics revival that comes, unanticipated and unbidden, from several quarters at once. Consider, for instance: On the heels of familiar Marvel figures at the megaplex, American Splendor serves up the art-house version, with Harvey Pekar as the Spider-Man of the smallish screen (and apparently on its way to Oscar nominations). Consider, at the literary highbrow level, the almost embarrassed miniburst of attention to assorted graphic-story hardbacks and their artists by the New York Times and New York Review of Books during the last 18 months or so, after an indifference decades in the making. And consider the current output.
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