"30 Books, Not One Review:

Chomsky and Academic History"

John H. Summers, Counterpunch

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." — Karl Marx, "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right"

Noam Chomsky has written more than 30 books over the last three decades. Yet neither the Journal of American History, nor the American Historical Review, nor Reviews in American History has reviewed them. If the journals had overlooked one or two of Chomsky's books, then the omissions might not rise to the status of a problem, and could be attributed to a combination of reasons each of them incidental to Chomsky himself. If the journals had in fact devoted attention to him, but the preponderance of the attention had been hostile, then they might stand accused of harboring a bias. This is the most respectable way to disagree about such matters. But the journals have not done enough to deserve the accusation. They have not reviewed a single one of his books. Chomsky is one of most widely read political intellectuals in the world. Academic history pretends he does not exist.

Why is this so?

"Children of a Lesser Marxism?"*

Steve Wright, Historical Materialism

Reviewing:

Futuro anteriore. Dai "Quaderni Rossi" ai movimenti globali: ricchezze e limiti dell’operaismo italiano
G. Borio, F. Pozzi & G. Roggero

Rome: Derive Approdi, 2002.

La nefasta utopia di Potere operaio. Lavoro tecnica movimento nel laboratorio politico del Sessantotto

F. Berardi

Rome: Castelvecchi. 1998.

1.

While it has inspired more than its share of critical essays and polemics over the past forty years, the political tendency of operaismo (workerism) has been the subject of few book-length analyses in Italy or elsewhere. Perhaps this is less surprising in the English-speaking world, where for whatever reason, Italian workerism has commonly been passed over in discussions of postwar marxism(s).(1)

In Italy’s case this is a little more perplexing, given operaismo’s influence for many years within the local left and labour movement. Back in the late seventies, it is true, there was a collection of papers from a conference organised by the Istituto Gramsci. There leading Communist party (PCI) intellectuals — many of them former workerists — grappled with the tendency’s historical significance, as well as its meaning for their own political commitments of that time.(2)

Interestingly enough, the conference in question also allowed a certain space for contributions from workerist intellectuals deemed ‘to reek of autonomia’,(3) at a time when that movement and the PCI were themselves daggers drawn. In any case, the arrests of 1979 onwards, led by Judge Calogero (himself close to the PCI), both put the final nail in Autonomia as a mass phenomenon, and marginalised operaismo as a current within Italy’s cultural and political life. To use a much-quoted phrase of Primo Moroni and Nanni Balestrini, the years that followed were ones of ‘cynicism, opportunism and fear’,(4) granting little time or space for dreams of a life beyond capital and the state.

"Suppressing a Sacrament?"

Joe McNally, Fortean Times

Reviewing:

The Ibogaine Story: Report on the Staten Island Project

Paul de Rienzo, Dana Beal, et al.

Autonomedia, pb, $20 , pp348, illus, appendices, index, refs, bib.

Fortean Rating — 4/4

Highly recommended.

Research into chemically altered states of consciousess seems to breed evangelism. One only has to look at the likes of Terence McKenna and his relentless proselytising on behalf of dimethyltriptamine (DMT) or the late D. M. Turner, and his boundless enthusiasm for almost every psychedelic under the sun, to see how workers in this controversial area seem to acquire an almost religious zeal for their particular substance of choice.

All this leads one to a certain scepticism when yet another chemical miracleworker comes along with their latest wonder soma. As forteans, however, we should feel obliged to assess each claim presented to us on its evidence; in the case of The Ibogaine Story, that evidence makes for compelling reading.

"American Splendor"

Paul Buhle

Reviewing:

Americn Splendor: Our Movie Year

By Harvey Pekar

Ballantine Books, 174 pp., $16.95

Whoever does not already know the basic Pekar story not only isn't a comics afficianado, he or she hasn't been watching the movies closely enough to spot one of the most attractive and innovative indies of recent years. If "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" brought animation to an adult audience as nothing since the Golden Age of Hollywood, when Bugs Bunny was watched mainly by grown-ups, "American Splendor" (the film, that is) matched actor to human original to animated version. Nothing quite this remarkable may have happened in Cleveland — forget the Rock 'n' Roll Museum, crowning the famous — since Satchel signed with the Indians.

A Secessionist Bibliography

1. Bryan, Frank and Bill Mares. Out! The Vermont Secession Book. Shelburne, VT: New England Press, 1987.

2. Bryan, Frank and John McClaughry. The Vermont Papers. White River Jct., VT: Chelsea Green, 1989.

3. Buchanan, Allen. Secession. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991.

4. Camus, Albert. The Rebel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954.

5. DiLorenzo, Thomas J. The Real Lincoln. Roseville, CA: Prima
Publishing, 2002.

6. Gordon, David (editor). Secession, State & Liberty. New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998.

7. Graham, John Remington. A Constitutional History of Secession.
Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 2002.

8. Jacobs, Jane. The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the
Struggle over Sovereignty. New York: Random House, 1980.

9. Kennan, George. Around the Cragged Hill. New York: W.W.
Norton, 1993, pp. 142-156.

10. Kohr, Leopold. The Breakdown of Nations. London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1957.

11. Livingston, Donald W. Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

12. Naylor, Thomas H. Rebel. Unpublished manuscript, 2004.

13. Naylor, Thomas H. The Vermont Manifesto. Philadelphia, PA:
Xlibris, 2003.

14. Naylor, Thomas H. and William H. Willimon. Downsizing the
U.S.A. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1997.

15. Sale, Kirkpatrick. Human Scale. New York: Coward, McCann, &
Geoghegan, 1980.

16. Schumacher, E.F. Small Is Beautiful. New York: Harper & Row,
1973.

Uri Gordon writes:

"The World Is Made Up of Stories, Not Atoms"

Uri Gordon, Perspectives on Anarchist Studies 8:2

Reviewing:

We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anti-Capitalism
Edited by Notes from Nowhere
(London/New York: Verso, 2003).

One No, Many Yesses: A Journey to the Heart of the Global Resistance Movement
Paul Kingsnorth

(London: Free Press, 2003).

Since the best-seller success of No Logo, the non-fiction market has seen a veritable torrent of books about "The Movement." Fascinated with the first wave of grassroots resistance to present a truly global face in real-time rather than in retrospect, scores of journalists, academics, commentators, and self-appointed "leaders" have taken a stab at publishing their own accounts and analyses. Thus, faced with the present publications, one might naturally want to ask: "Do we really need another two books about global anti-capitalism?" In these instances, the answer is perfectly clear: given the combination of inspiring text, poster-perfect photography, and inclusive anti-authoritarianism, it would be hard to get enough of them.

"The Micro-Physics of Theoretical Production and Border Crossings"
Angela Mitropoulos

Reviewing:
Jason Read, The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Pre-history of the Present
(New York: SUNY Press, 2003)

"The encounter between the flows of money and those who have nothing but their labour power to sell is constitutive of and constituted by new desires, new habits and new subjectivities." — Jason Read, The Micro-Politics of Capital

1. If for Althusser it seemed necessary to read "to the letter" — by which he did not mean a kind of punctilious scholasticism but alertness to both overt meanings and hesitations — it was just as important to declare what sort of reading one is guilty of. This is as much a review of a book that brilliantly puts that approach to work reading a number of theorists as it is a reading with regard for particular struggles and debates. What interests me here, given that I share the theoretical perspectives which inform The Micro-Politics of Capital, are what I see as the more troublesome details of those perspectives as they are brought to bear on political practices, specifically recent struggles around border policing and the writing of them.

"Witches of the 'First International'"
Steven Colatrella

Reviewing Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch:
Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation
[Autonomedia, 2004]

During the 16th and 17th century, hundreds of thousands of women were burned as witches across Europe. This holocaust, unprecedented in the history of any society before or since, is at the center of this brilliant new book by Silvia Federici, an early opponent of the IMF's role in Third World countries and veteran feminist theorist. This book is the most important new work on the origins of capitalism to appear in thirty years, since Immanual Wallerstein's The Modern World System. For activists today, Caliban and the Witch is more relevant and useful to our anticapitalist struggles and movements. For the inspiration for the book came from the author's years in Nigeria where she witnessed and participated in struggles against IMF and World Bank structural adjustment and privatization of land and resources. The book is part and parcel of the anticapitalist globalization movement (or global justice movement) and links the struggles at the dawn of the capitalist era with those in Chiapas, in Bolivia, in the oil fields of southern Nigeria, in the forests of Indonesia, against privatization of communally owned land and wealth.

Anthony McIntyre

Reviewing:
Moody
By Wensley Clarkson
The Blanket

When Gerard Tuite escaped in 1980 from Brixton prison it was a fillip for morale in the H Blocks. Seven men had passed the fifty-day stage of their hunger strike for political status and an end of some sort was imminent. Although Tuite was accompanied on the escape by two other remand prisoners, for the population of the H-Blocks Tuite's was the only name we cared for. He was the sole IRA escapee. The names of the other two men meant absolutely nothing to us. So concerned were we in the contentious crucible of the prison to assert our distinctive political motivation some in our number even wondered what Tuite was doing escaping alongside hoods. Most just envied him and hoped he would evade the security dragnet that would inevitably seek to pull him back inside.

"All Nietzscheans Now?"

John Moore

Reviewing:

Nitezsche Contra Rosseau: A Study of Nietzsche’s Moral and Political Thought

Keith Ansell-Pearson

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)

Why We Are Not Nietzscheans

Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, eds.

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)

The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche’s Zarathustra

Stanley Rosen

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)

In his rancorous polemic Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism, Murray Bookchin rightly identifies Nietzsche as one of the major influences on some of the most vital anarchist thinking of our day, even though Bookchin libels this thought with the grab bag label of ‘lifestylism.’ This fact in itself should indicate that Nietzsche is worth investigation from an anarchist perspective. Unfortunately, the three titles under review here add relatively little to such a perspective. Many interpreters of Nietzsche — Bookchin is a good example — nostalgically try to locate an ideological coherence in the work of the German philosopher which is inappropriate in the case of an anti-systemic thinker. Lamentably, these three texts, to one degree or another, fall for this red herring.