"The Empire Strikes Back"

Anatol Lieven

A few years in Washington, DC, snake-oil capital of the universe, and you begin to think that anything can be packaged as something else. Well, almost anything. Until I read Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, I would never have believed that a postmodernist paean to Italian anarcho-syndicalism could be presented by its publishers as a defense of "the idealism of the Founders and Abraham Lincoln," and of the universal validity of the US Constitution.

nolympics submits:

"Back to the Motherland: Cuba in Africa"
Christian Parenti. Published by Monthly Review.

reviewiing Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 576 pages, cloth $34.95, paper $24.95

Angola is by most accounts a decimated, nearly hopeless land, ruined by more than three decades of war. But there was a moment in the mid-seventies when this former Portuguese colony shone as a beacon of hope for all Africa. It was here that the mythic power of white military supremacy was smashed by black troops from Angola and Cuba. And though the role of Cuban volunteers in this victory inspired Africans and left internationals everywhere, the details of the story have remained largely hidden and even in Cuba, uncelebrated.

Historian Piero Gleijeses’ new book, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976, recovers this politically far away time. It is a truly impressive accomplishment, based on ten years of research using declassified U.S. intelligence, interviews with principal players, and most importantly, vaults of never before revealed Cuban documents from the Communist Party Central Committee, armed forces, and foreign ministry. This highly detailed but superbly told story recounts Cuba’s many bold, often noble, sometimes successful interventions in Africa. The operations ranged from briefly aiding revolutionary Algeria under Ahmed Ben Bella; fighting and doctoring with Amilcar Cabral’s guerrillas in Guinea Bissau; and Che’s lost year in the Congo with the demoralized rank and file of Laurent Kabila’s Simbas; to Cuba’s finest hour, outgunned and outnumbered, on the battlefields of Angola. This last adventure forms the heart of the book and was Cuba’s largest engagement, thus its details are worth recounting.

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"Reach-Me-Down Romantic"

Terry Eagleton

George Orwell by Gordon Bowker | Little, Brown, 495 pp, £20.00

Orwell: The Life by D.J. Taylor | Chatto, 448 pp, £20.00

Orwell: Life and Times by Scott Lucas | Haus, 180 pp, £8.99

He was the son of a servant of the Crown from a well-heeled South of England background, who shone at prep school but proved something of an academic flop later on. A passionate left-wing polemicist, he nonetheless retained more than a few traces of his public-school breeding, including a plummy accent and a horde of posh friends. He combined cultural Englishness with political cosmopolitanism, and detested political personality cults while sedulously cultivating a public image of himself. From a vantage-point of relative security, he made the odd foray into the lives of the blighted and dispossessed, partly to keep his political nose to the ground and partly because such trips furnished him with precious journalistic copy. Coruscatingly intelligent though not in the strict sense an intellectual, he had the ornery, bloody-minded streak of the independent leftist and idiosyncratic Englishman, as adept at ruffling the feathers of his fellow socialists as at outraging the opposition. As he grew older, this cussedness became more pronounced, until his hatred of benighted autocratic states led him in the eyes of many to betray his left-wing views altogether.

jim submits:

"Lacanian Anarchism and the Left"

Todd May

A review of From Bakunin to Lacan:

Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power

Saul Newman, (Lexington Press)

1.

The overall goal of Saul Newman's new book, From
Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the
Dislocation of Power, is to offer a critique of the
way power, and specifically political power, is
commonly conceived. He avoids the standard approach to

such discussions that runs through an embrace or
modification of Marx, turning instead to the more
neglected arena of anarchism and articulating it with
current thinkers associated with the term
"post-structuralism." Newman argues that what he calls

the "place of power," the idea that treatments of
power seem often to constrain it conceptually to a
certain region or type -- in effect, essentializing
power into a natural kind -- misconceive the true
operation of power. Power is, as many recent thinkers
have argued, more diffuse and uncircumscribed than
traditional progressive treatments of it, especially
Marxism, have been able to recognize.

Anonymous Comrade submits:

Change the World Without Taking Power:

  The Meaning of Revolution Today

John Holloway (London, Pluto Press  2002)
Reviewed by Thomas Guthmann

"Political power grows from the barrel of a gun." (Mao Tse Tung)

As we know from history Mao gained power in China after a long civil war, including the Long March. At the beginning of 2001 the Mexican Zapatistas marched from Chiapas to the capital Mexico City. They did not come to power but spoke in the Mexican parliament and on the Zocalo, the main square of the Mexican capital.


John Holloway is one of the theoretical backers of the Zapatista insurgency. In his new book Change the World Without Taking Power -- The Meaning of Revolution Today, he draws a picture of a new form of revolution.

jim submits:

"Samuel R. Delany, Dangerous Visionary"

Anthony Miller, LA Weekly, May 9-15, 2003

Samuel R. Delany is an author so multifaceted in his identity that he navigates, with equal grace, the disparate worlds of academic conferences and comic-book conventions. As a black, gay science-fiction writer, Delany spans both highbrow literature and underground culture -- as comfortable discussing poststructuralism and semiotics as he is fetishism and S&M. On a quiet Sunday morning he meets me in an old taproom in midtown Manhattan. Carrying a cane and stroking his flowing white beard, Delany comments on the passersby who have likened him to Santa Claus; once, he laughs, he was instead compared to Karl Marx.

nolympics submits:

"Writers as Freedom Fighters"

hydrarchist submits:

"The Ballad of Buenos
Aires"

Toni Negri (trans. Nate Holdren*)

A critique of
the Italian edition of the book Notes for the New Social Protagonism
by Colectivo Situaciones

This book speaks of
the events of the 19th and 20th of December, 2001 in Argentina, when the inhabitants
of Buenos Aires took to the streets and aimed themselves at Congress, forcing
the flight of the President, and the successive resignation of the government.
But not only that: it also speaks of before and after the insurrection, speaks
of the new political and social situation that was aimed at dividing the miltary
dictatorship of 1976-83 and the neoliberal decade (1989-1999).

The Spring edition of "Perspectives on Anarchist Theory," the Institute
for Anarchist Studies' biannual newsletter, is now available online.

This issue of "Perspectives" interviews historian and radical critic
Howard Zinn. Also included is a piece on what everyday life is like for
Palestinians who live under a military occupation: what techniques are
used to maintain control; how violence and the threat of such differs
from other colonial regimes; and how anarchists may understand this
conflict and contribute to understanding and resistance. Also included
is Chuck Morse's regular contribution, "What's happening: Books and
Events," which reports on new books, articles, and other resources that
are relevant to the anarchist community.

Chuck Morse submits "
Chasing the Tornado

Review by Uri Gordon

Review of: The Trajectory of Change by Michael Albert Cambridge, MA:
South End Press, May 2002

Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising by Starhawk Gabriola
Island, BC: New Society Publishers, August 2002

Change the World Without Taking Power by John Holloway London: Pluto
Press, March 2002

From the spring 2003 Issue of The
New Formulation: An Anti-Authoritarian Review of Books

In the ever-ticklish relationship between practice and theory, a significant
role has always existed for what we can call, for lack of a better name, “movement
literature.” Locke’s Two Treatises, Burke’s Reflections, Paine’s
response in Rights of Man, Marx and Engel’s Manifesto, Lenin’s What
Is To Be Done and Debray’s Critique of Arms—these are only the most
famous examples of works that were deeply rooted in their authors’ concrete
political activity and which reflected and influenced ongoing processes of social
transformation.(1) Not surprisingly, the current upsurge of anti-capitalist
struggle is also accompanied by a great bulk of such literature, with the three
books reviewed here being merely a selection from the most recent crop. Two
of the authors, Michael Albert and Starhawk, are veteran American activists
and the third, Holloway is an involved academic closely following the Zapatista
rebellion. These books all convey an ongoing process of self-assessment by today’s
emancipatory networks. However, each one also displays a completely different
variant of writing-as-activism. Michael Albert’s The Trajectory of Change
adopts a very didactic approach, attempting to identify “problems”
in an allegedly unitary “movement” and sort them out. Starhawk’s
Webs of Power, on the other hand, combines very personal writing with theoretical
reflections that are only gently presented as advice to activists. While Holloway’s
Change the World Without Taking Power could just as well be written without
a coexisting struggle to address—it is an entirely theoretical work in
critical Marxism—it nevertheless captures (and will inevitably impact)
the thinking of activists who read it. Each approach, as we shall shortly see,
has telling results.