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.

Stuff it: The Video Essay in the Digital Age

Edited by Ursula Biemann, Zurich Institute for Theory of Art and Design

With the entry of documentarisms into the arts, the video essay, as a visual reflection on reality, has gained much attention in recent art debates. Moreover, due to its subjective, dissociative, and highly self-reflexive characteristics, this video genre has become a preferred visual medium for theoretical considerations regarding the major shifts taking place in visual culture.

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.

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.

"The Radical Imagination of Cornelius Castoriadis"

Scott McLemee

Paris in the forties was a city awash in forged identities and remade lives.
But few transformed themselves as completely as Cornelius Castoriadis. When
the young Greek émigré arrived, in 1945, he settled down to write a doctoral
thesis on the inevitable culmination of all Western philosophies in "aporias
and impasses." But by the end of the decade, he had quit academia to lead a
curious double life. As Cornelius Castoriadis, he worked as a professional
economist, crunching numbers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development. Meanwhile, adopting a number of aliases, he developed one
of the most influential bodies of political thought to emerge from the
non-Communist left over the last half century. Mr. Castoriadis's covert
writings helped to rally France's beleaguered anti-Stalinist left in the
fifties and to inspire the spectacular Paris revolt of 1968.

Ryan Griffis reviews:

Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices

A subRosa project, edited by Maria Fernandez, Faith Wilding, Michelle M. Wright

Published by Autonomedia, 2003

"Mesa says that many of the women she worked with in the clean rooms are dead, gone before their time. 'I alone know of ten women who worked with me who are no longer here. It's more than just a coincidence.'" Ioffee, Karina, "The Clean Room Paradox," El Andar Magazine, Fall/Winter 2001

"Well the bosses think they're pretty clever with their doubletalk, and that we're just a bunch of dumb aliens. But it takes two to use a see-saw. What we're gradually figuring out here is how to use their own logic against them." Indian microelectronics worker quoted in Prema Murthy's "Mythic Hybrid"2002

"First-," "Second-" and "Third-Wave." It is interesting that the same metaphor has been used to describe social-technological paradigms as well as historical movements in feminism. Feminism may not often be associated with technological developments in the popular imagination, but there is a record of linkages between the trajectories of gender consciousness and technology.

House of Nehesi Publishers writes:

"Two New Books by Amiri Baraka"

SINT MAARTEN (October 2003)—The Essence of Reparations and Somebody Blew Up America and Other Poems, by controversial American author Amiri Baraka have just been published here by House of Nehesi Publishers.

Linebaugh's London Hanged

John Lea

Reviewing The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (second edition)

Peter Linebaugh, 2003 London: Verso books.

ISBN 1-85984-638-6, 491 pages

This review first appeared in The Chartist

Verso have done a great service by republishing Peter Linebaugh's magnificent study, first published in 1991, of the men and women of eighteenth century London hanged on the gallows at Tyburn. Linebaugh set out, as he put it, to "explore the relationship between the organised death of living labour (capital punishment) and the oppression of the living by dead labour (the punishment of capital).” Through a meticulous study of the historical documents and court records he demonstratedthat those hanged at Tyburn were, in the main, representatives, not of some special class of professional criminals or a lumpen ‘underclass’, but ordinary working men and women, largely indistinguishable from the working masses as a whole. The ‘crimes’ they had committed were in fact varieties of resistance to the growing imposition of the capitalist wage relationship by means of the criminalisation of traditional forms of distribution tolerated by and integrated into the lives of the poor as a whole.