jim submits:

Here is the first part of an extensive interview by Greek comrades with George Caffentzis. The second installment can be found here.

TPTG's Conversation with George Caffentzis

PREFACE


George Caffentzis, an offspring of Greek immigrants from Lakonia, a place in southern Greece, is associate professor in the Department of Philosophy, University of Southern Maine. But, as you will see it for yourselves, the 15th of October, 2000, was not for us "an evening with a philosopher". George is an activist to a fault. We met him for the first time in Athens on the 14th of October, 2000, but we have been in correspondence with Midnight Notes editors since 1993. By that time we had published two texts of our own on the Gulf War and the Macedonian Question and we had distributed here some important documents about the Gulf War (like Ten Days That Shook Iraq). So, we were looking for comrades abroad who had done some theoretical work on the connection between capitalism and war and who had also taken part in anti-war movements. That year we discovered the 10th issue of Midnight Notes which was devoted to the "New Enclosures". We immediately understood that we had to do with a very important work and that we had to learn more about their activities. So we came in touch with them and they sent us a few back issues and their book called Midnight Oil which had just been published by Autonomedia in New York. Without any exaggeration, only Marx's and Kropotkin's work, Debord's Society of the Spectacle, Barrot's Fascism/Antifascism and the critique of counterculture by the american Situationists had as a decisive influence on us as Midnight Oil. Some of the articles in the book lent credit to our belief that war is a means of keeping the working class under discipline. But, most important, we discovered in it one of the most original and open-minded definitions of the working class and its struggles. The study of Zerowork/Midnight Notes' work was fundamental for us. In the last 8 years we' ve tried to combine their views on unwaged work, the community/circulation of working class struggles and the crisis of social reproduction with Marx's and the Situationists' critique of alienation and ideology and we believe that this has helped a lot the development of our theoretical/practical activity. (For example, see our articles on Mexico and the struggles in education in Greece). But our disagreements with George are fundamental, too. His text, "Notes on the Antiglobalisation Movement 1985-2000", which he had given us the night before, sparked off the debate between us in the second part of the conversation. Our disagreements do not arise from different interpretations of the debt crisis (it certainly was a crisis of class relations) or of the origins of the "antiglobalization movement" (if the word "globalization" is another word for Structural Adjustment Programmes or global neoliberalism, it is certainly true that the "movement" started as a series of non-coordinated, spontaneous reactions against it)-- they arise from George's refusal to draw a distinction between social uprisings against SAPs and their political, reformist representation (a form of representation one can find both in the "first" and the "third" world). Then again, unlike George, we consider a movement to be proletarian judging not only by its social composition but also by its forms of activity and its objectives. We believe that this conversation was of benefit to both sides: we started examining "globalization" and the movements against it more carefully and George -- in a critical text he wrote about Genoa -- admitted that the "movement" is disconnected from the needs of the inhabitants of the cities in which the demonstrations take place (which is an indirect admission of the fact that there is a communication gap between the "movement" and the working-class).

jim submits: here is part II. The printable version of Part I is to be found here.

Part II

>

G: This will bring us to the second part of the interview. My question is: what has this "antiglobalization movement" contributed to the cause of the liberation of the planetary proletariat? I saw in the text you gave us that you consider the "antiglobalization movement" to be a working class movement. I don't agree with that. Until now we have been talking about issues of wage, capitalist restructuring, decomposition and recomposition of the working class. Now this political movement which started growing in the late 1990s (due perhaps to the social movements against Structural Adjustment Programs in the so-called Third World) doesn't care to mention any of these things we have been discussing. As far as I see, the "antiglobalization movement" is putting the whole question in terms of institutional reforms. That is why I was surprised to see that you considered this as a working class movement.

jim submits:

"The Casting of Shadows:

10 Abstract Questions, and More Notes for Brutal Times"

Thomas Zummer

"...government is merely the shadow cast on culture by big business...."

It was in a recent conversation that the above phrase came up. It was
attributed to Harry S. Truman, and, without checking references, I am
reasonably sure that that is at least a likely attribution. Nonetheless,
I have left it in the form in which it was pronounced, at second hand, a
possible paraphrase, in order to open a series of questions. So much of
what passes for public discourse operates as a paraphrase, even if in
only the most minimal sense, as occurs in the recording and transmission
of spoken dialogue, or the presumed verisimilitude of an unintentional,
unimpeded, camera.

tomobedlam writes:

Please visit Endpage Text Archive For a large library of Autonomist, Libertarian Marxist, Situationist, Anarchist and otherwise fun texts and articles, along with a few mirrored sites. Please feel free to submit texts you feel need archiving (and which won't get my ass sued). Read up, use your brain or someone else will!

jim submits
"Reappropriations of Public Space"

Toni Negri

1. For a good twenty years things had followed a fairly regular pattern -- at least since the crisis of 1971-74, when, having digested the struggles of the 1960s and defeat in the Vietnam War, multinational capital relaunched its project of development in terms of liberal policies and post-industrial modernisation. These were the years in which neo-liberalism imposed itself: grey years, even if they were illuminated, as was the case in France, by a number of working-class offensives (that of 1986, for example) and by a succession of student explosions -- the first manifestations of the revolt of immaterial labour -- around which social protest attempted in vain to organise itself. December 1995 in France marked the first mass break with the political, economic and ideological regime of the liberal epoch.

jim submits:

"Between 'Historic Compromise' and Terrorism:

Reviewing the Experience of Italy in the 1970s"

Toni Negri, Le Monde Diplomatique, August-September, 1998

Translated by Ed Emery

[Toni Negri was one of the historic leadership of the Italian revolutionary group Potere Operaio (Workers' Power) and is currently serving a prison sentence in Rebibbia prison, Rome. Negri gave himself up on 1 July 1997 after 14 years' exile in Paris in a bid to close a chapter in his own personal "judicial history" and that of other far-left militants still in exile. Originally sentenced to 30 years' imprisonment for "armed insurrection against the state" and to four and a half years for "moral responsibility" for the clashes between revolutionary activists and police in Milan between 1973 and 1977, he theoretically still has over four years to serve. Waiting for a general remission (indulto) from the Italian parliament which has not as yet materialised, he was authorised to work on day-release at the end of July. In the following article, he recalls the political experience of the 1970s in Italy.]

To speak of what the 1970s represented in Italy's political history is to speak also of the present. In part, because the consequences of the repressive policies of those years are still very much with us. The Special Laws have not been repealed, at least 200 people are still in prison and about the same number are living their lives in exile(1). Also, because the disintegration of the post-war political system, shattered to pieces by the fall of the Berlin Wall, had reached intolerable limits. But above all, because the social (and psychological) traumas of that decade have still not been healed or distanced.

jim submits:

"French Intellectuals Mobilise for the Liberation of Toni Negri"

Catherine Bedarida, Le Monde, translated by Ed Emery, December 13, 1997

A thousand people have signed a petition in support of the philosopher Toni Negri, at the same time as Italian public opinion is becoming increasingly concerned about the fate of another former leading figure in the extreme Left, Adriano Sofri.

Jason Adams writes:

"The Re-embedding of the War Machine:

Resistance to Mediation in Societies of Primary Orality and Primary Literacy"

By Jason Adams

"The problem is that the exteriority of the war machine in relation to the State apparatus is everywhere apparent but remains difficult to conceptualize -- the State has no war machine of its own; it can only appropriate one in the form of a military institution. Could it be that it is at the moment the war machine ceases to exist, conquered by the State, that it displays to the utmost its irreducibility, that it scatters into thinking, loving, dying or creating machines that have at their disposal vital or revolutionary powers capable of challenging or conquering the State?" -- Deleuze and Guattari, 1987

Introduction

In the course of "Treatise on Nomadology: the War Machine," Deleuze and Guattari construct a theory about the mediation of everyday life, based on Clastres' argument that nomadic (oral, gatherer-hunter) societies are marked by the presence of a "war machine" at the core of their social being, which serves to ward off the emergence of the state-form. Thus the function of war in oral societies is not to win hegemony but rather "to assure the permanence of the dispersion, the parceling, the atomization of groups" which, as Deleuze and Guattari state, valorizes the smooth space of difference over and against the striated space of identity. These assertions are well supported by contemporary political anthropology; as I will show in this essay, Sahlins, Goody and others have demonstrated that the Paleolithic era was marked primarily by multiplicity and abundance; thus hegemony and scarcity were not, as is often stated, the norm for the majority of the species' lifespan prior to "civilization."

malatesta writes "Time for Revolution, by Antonio Negri has just been published by Continuum Books. It consists of two works 1) The Constitution of Time written in 1980-1981 and, 2) Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo written in 1999?
Slavoj Zizek's review says: "This book is a must: it provides the proper background for Negri's widely circulated analysis of the global capitalist Empire.""

dr.woooo writes:

"Dissonance and Mutations: Theorising Counter-Culture"

David Eden

Could there be a more telling example? The (International) Noise Conspiracy an apparently revolutionary rock band from Sweden, made up of punks-come-mods, steeped in Situationist esqu rhetoric dancing on mainstream music programs in uber-stylish clothes singing "Everything is up for sale"? Is it the ultimate subversion, the recapturing and repositioning of dominant structures of the culture industry and turning them into opposition voices? Or is it the ultimate recuperation, the transformation of expression of alienation and revolt into niche commodities for expanding youth markets, the conversion of dissent into a spectacle of harmless dissent? Counter-culture( especially that based around "youth") is now a fundamental part of the life of global cyber-industrial civilisation. Often critiqued as a past time for middle-class children in Western nations, young ( and not so young) people all over the world participate in counter-culture on deep personal levels. Anecdotal evidence suggests Malaysia has a larger "death metal" scene than Australia.