"The Wobbly Legend Lives On in Popular Culture"

Paul Buhle, Chronicle of Higher Education

No title seems more likely to cause an academic publisher to dolefully predict sales in the low three figures these days than one stuck with the word "labor." More often than not, it is slipped into the subtitle, as if arriving in disguise. And no wonder, from one perspective: The American labor movement itself has been on a downward spiral, as a proportion of the work force, for more than two generations.

The aura attached to working-class studies by scholarly generations of the 1960s through the 1980s has also now badly faded. Despite a trove of well-crafted monographs, specialty journals, and annual meetings of regional groups with healthy admixtures of nonacademic enthusiasts, the mood in the field is insular, a holding pattern. Today's students with uncles, aunts, or grandparents in the labor movement often don't even know which particular unions so occupied their time and energy.

And yet the Wobblies continue to evoke interest, on campuses and off. The Industrial Workers of the World, as the movement was formally known, never exceeded 150,000 members and sank into memory by the 1930s. But its luster has somehow survived, perhaps because it never really depended upon numerical strength or bargaining power.

"Branded For Life"

Andy Beckett, The Guradian

Reviewing:

The Rebel Sell:
How the Counterculture Became Consumer Culture

by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter

352pp, Capstone, £16.99

Since Naomi Klein's bestselling anti-capitalist book No Logo was published
five years ago, its success in Britain and North America has been
accompanied by an intriguing political and economic mystery. While Klein and
her imitators have made sweatshops and bullying corporations and the other
costs of global consumerism into much more mainstream topics for public
discussion, this does not seem to have stopped many people from going
shopping. One conclusion you could draw is that political books are not as
life-changing as they were. A more provocative one would be that where the
dominance of modern capitalism is concerned, Klein's kind of thinking is not
part of the solution but part of the problem.

The Rebel Sell is a brave book. In places it is also unfair, light on
evidence and repetitively polemical. But the argument it makes is important
and original. Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, both young Canadian academics,
think that for nearly half a century critics of capitalism have profoundly
misunderstood their enemy. Worse than that, the authors argue, these critics
have — sometimes unintentionally, sometimes not — provided modern capitalism
with the fuel it runs on.

This was published a couple of months ago, but it's appropriately timed as Wu Ming's "54" has just been published in english. If you haven't already read "Q", an epic tale of adventure and revolt, fueled by the millenarian spirit and traversing seminal moments of european transformation (the birth of banking, early days of seditious books) then go and get it, and don't come out until you've read it ;). You can find other issues of the Digest in english here.

Giap/digest
#27 - The Fascists - 29 March 2005

0- Thank you + pieces of news

1- Getting Rid of the Constitution

2- The Fascists, a gonzoid story by Wu Ming 1

3- We Wonder if We've Answered the Question...

0

Here's a new issue of Giap/digest. Better
late than never. First of all, we would like to thank all the people
who, after our call for help, volunteered translation work. The English
language section of our website is getting richer and this newsletter
might even reach you on a less irregular basis. Some texts are already
on line, some are being edited, some others are still being translated.

The Times, London (UK),
May 14, 2005

Gang of five

By James Eve

Deep in the hills above Bologna a secretive band of writers has hatched
a truly evil plot — to overthrow the world of celebrity





If you believed everything that was written about the group of Italian
novelists known as Wu Ming, you would think that they were red-toothed
revolutionaries. Under their former pen name — that of the former
Watford and AC Milan footballer Luther Blissett — they published
Q, a sprawling, bloody spy story set in the religious wars of
16th-century Europe. It became a bestseller across the Continent, though
the group's non-literary activities, which according to several breathless
newspaper reports included hijacking a night bus in Rome, prompted as
much interest as the sales figures.

Negativeland's Negativity A Plus

Joseph Dewey, Review of Contemporary Fiction

Reviewing:
Doug Nufer, Negativeland

Autonomedia, 2004. 186 pp. Paper: $9.95.

Ken Honochick is both character and experiment. The winner of two gold medals in backstroke swimming at the cursed Munich Games, Honochick spends the next decade trying to cash in on his fragile celebrity (his medal count overshadowed by the Spitz glitz). Married off to a Tournament of Roses Queen, he gets involved in a health spa franchise that pitches spiritual as well as physical rejuvenation but that eventually folds amid a flurry of lawsuits.

By 1988, Honochick, bankrupt financially and morally, drives cross-country, seeking healing by returning to his Florida roots (the narrative is told backward, backstroked as it were). Once there, he confronts in a local tourist trap his own wax figure, a belt of ammo around its shoulder while rescuing a buxom gymnast — an outlandish invention that serves as Nufer’s savagely funny critique of America’s empty cult of celebrity.

But Ken Honochick is also part of a playfully ingenious narrative experiment, a novel executed within an entirely arbitrary constraint: every sentence, every sentence, uses a negative construction. As a Gen-X practitioner of the Oulipo school of self-validating process-texts, the midcentury Dadaist-inspired avant-garde movement that audaciously argued that creativity required not freedom but rather form, specifically rules — precise and entirely arbitrary — for its fullest expression, Nufer works with elegant virtuosity within the self-imposed discipline.

Surely the text threatens to be gimmicky, like watching a Scrabble tournament. But Nufer’s novel is a most satisfying read, an engrossing revelation of a character struggling within a vacuous American culture that is itself Negativeland: a culture defined by hype and hyperbole, celebrity and surface, relentlessly driven to embrace the image, thus perpetuating the cannibalism of expectation and disappointment. That Nufer ultimately resists this heavy negativity is the achievement: Honochick stumbles inelegantly toward the simple solace of another lonely soul. Two negatives, Nufer reminds us, equal a positive.

"Classics of Cannabis Culture Collected"

Michael R. Aldrich, Ph.D., O'Shaughnessy's

Reviewing:

Orgies of the Hemp Eaters

Cuisine, Slang, Literature and Ritual of Cannabis Culture

Hakim Bey & Abel Zug (eds.)

Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. 694 pages, $24.95.

Despite its provocative title, this book focuses on the religious use of cannabis in India (Vedic, Hindu, Buddhist and Tantric) and in the Muslim traditions from Afghanistan across the Middle East to North Africa. Since most religious use of cannabis historically has been with edibles and drinkables rather than smokables, a chapter is devoted to ancient and modern recipes for bhang, majoun, dawamesk, syrups, tinctures, extracts, and high-potency cuisine.

Rounding out the collection are scientific and literary commentaries, mostly 19th century, on the subject of hashish-eating, glossaries of slang for cannabis products in a dozen cultures, an amazing set of illustrations, and perhaps the best bibliography/netography of 2,000+ citations on religious cannabis ever compiled. It's a superb anthology!

"Declaring Forbidden What Is Not Forbidden Is Forbidden"

Phillip S. Smith, DRCNet

Reviewing:

Orgies of the Hemp Eaters:

Cuisine, Slang, Literature, and Ritual of Cannabis Culture

Hakim Bey and Abel Zug, eds. (2004, Autonomedia, $24.95).

As someone who writes about drug policy for a living, it is indeed refreshing to sit back and enjoy Orgies of the Hemp Eaters. There is very little of the standard drug policy reform rhetoric in this compilation of cannabis culture— no concern about teenage drug use, no worries about the link between pot-smoking and schizophrenia, no maneuvering over how to craft a political message that will appeal to the not-so-pot-friendly masses or political classes, no concessions to the prohibitionists. But while Orgies of the Hemp Eaters may have little to offer for drug reform wonks, what it does do — and very successfully — is remind us that there is indeed a whole pot-smoking (and -eating and -drinking) world out there in which drug czar John Walters and the rest of his prohibitionist posse are basically irrelevant.

John Doraemi writes:

Achilles’ Heel(s) of the US War Machine

John Doraemi

Recently I was introduced to Gene Sharp's manifesto on "regime change"
called: From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation
(1993). This
book — along with U.S. overt and covert "aid" — has brought down
at least three governments to date, including Serbia (Milosevic), Georgia (Shevardnadze),
and the Ukraine (Yanukovych). [1]

I found the book on a web page, available through Google, if you type in the
title. The book is used by US imperial "soft power" forces such as
the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute
(IRI), and "Freedom House." It was published through the Albert Einstein
Institute.

George Soros has been responsible for some of these US adventures in non-violent
overthrows of regimes deemed unacceptable to US power brokers.

'Still, the book itself is a manual on how to overthrow dictatorships, military
non-democratic despots, the sort of which we are becoming here in the U.S.

"Helen Macfarlane" Book Party

New York City, Jan. 30, 2005

Helen Macfarlane: A Feminist, Revolutionary Journalist and Philosopher in Mid-Nineteenth Century England

By David Black (Lexington Books, 2004)

Sunday, JAN. 30, 7:00–9:15 p.m.

A talk by Anne Jaclard, followed by open discussion. Free admission. Book available for purchase.

39 West 14th Street, Rm. 205 (Identity House — ring buzzer 205 and come to second floor), Manhattan (north side of 14th St., between 5th and 6th Aves.; take any train to 14th St. or Union Square)

This intellectual biography plunges the reader into the most revolutionary organizations and ideas of the era. A radical Chartist and colleague of Marx in 1849-50, Macfarlane was the first person to translate the Communist Manifesto into English and the first Britisher to translate and comment on Hegel's works. Yet she was nearly lost to history: no one published her name with her translation of the Manifesto, including the American edition published by the feminist Victoria Woodhull.

"Marketing and Digital Play"

Julian Kücklich

Reviewing Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture and Marketing

Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter

Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 2003. 368 pp. 24.95 USD. ISBN 0-7735-2591-2

Writing about the Web in 1996, science-fiction author William Gibson predicted that it would "evolve into something considerably less random, and less fun" [1]. The same seems to be true for digital games. As the industry tries to minimize the risks involved in game development, it churns out sequel after sequel and licenses everything that appeals to the masses. While this is hailed by some as the way to a broader audience for videogames, and thus more diversity and innovation, others take a more pessimistic view. From their perspective, the games industry is caught up in a downward spiral that leads to a prevalence of violence over variety, spectacle over depth and commodification over play.