"Thought Control for Middle East Studies"

Joel Beinin, CommonDreams.org

A band of neoconservative pundits with close ties to
Israel have mounted a campaign against American
scholars who study the Middle East. Martin Kramer, an
Israeli-American and former director of the Dayan
Center for Middle East Studies at Tel-Aviv University,
has led the way in blaming these scholars for failing
to warn the American public about the dangers of
radical Islam, claiming they bear some of the
responsibility for what befell us on September 11. In
2003, proponents of this position took their complaints
to Congress. The Senate is expected to review them
soon, as it discusses the Higher Education
Reauthorization bill.

Foucault, Marxism and History

Mark Poster (First published, 1984)

This book is intended as a set of essays examining the value of the recent works of Michel Foucault for social theory and social history. Foucault's works written since 1968 (Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality and numerous shorter pieces) contain some important advances in social theory and in the writing of social history. My purpose is to separate out those advances from other features of Foucault's thought which I find less beneficial. I am not attempting to give an assessment of Foucault's work as a whole but to focus on and analyze certain features of it.

To that end I situate Foucault's work in a double problematic: those of critical social theory and a new social formation that I call the mode of information. Although Foucault's politics may be ambiguous, his works are profitably situated in relation to critical theory. He provides, I will argue, models of analysis that contain theoretical elements which, properly interpreted, open up new directions for critical theory, directions that can lead it out of its current impasses. But these new directions only become apparent when certain important changes in the social formation of advanced trial society are recognized. To that end I have coined the somewhat infelicitous phrase 'mode of information' to represent these changes and to contrast the current situation to Marx's concept of the mode of production.

Whole book is online here.

Che Guevara, Paulo Friere and the Politics of Hope:
Reclaiming Critical Pedagogy

by Peter Maclaren

On a recent voyage to the rain forests of Costa Rica, I rode a bus through
the beautiful city of Cartago. From my window I noticed a young man with a
long ponytail running beside the bus. As the bus passed him, he glanced up
and our eyes momentarily met; I noticed that he was wearing a Che T-shirt
with the inscription ‘¡Che Vive!’. A fleeting sensation of plaintive
connectedness overcame me, and I managed to give him a quick ‘thumbs-up’
gesture of affirmation just in time for him to return a broad smile to the
crazy gringo. For a brief moment, I felt that this ponytailed stranger and I
were linked by a project larger than both of us. During that instant, I
could tangibly sense between us a collective yearning for a world free from
the burdens of this one, and I knew that I was not alone. The image of Che
that he wore on his breast like a secular Panagia pointed to a realm of
revolutionary values held in trust by all those who wish to break the chains
of capital and be free. Che has a way of connecting—if only in this
whimsical way—people who share a common resolve to fight injustice and to
liberate the world from cruelty and exploitation. There was no way of
knowing the politics of this young man and how seriously he identified with
the life and teachings of El Che. But Che’s image brings out the promise of
such a connection and the political fecundity of even this momentary
reverie.

"Crossing Lines"

Kathy Kelly, 29 March 2004 

This weekend, I'm preparing for an April 6, 2004 entry into the Pekin FCI (Federal Correctional Institute) in Peoria. I'm one of several dozen people who, on November 22, 2003, crossed the line at the US Army's military combat training school in Fort Benning, GA. With caring friends, I've shared gentle and sometimes nervous laughter as we try to make the best of a difficult reality.

"The Countessa of Empire:

Condoleezza Rice's Idea of Democracy"

John Chuckman

Condoleezza Rice wants to bring democracy to the Middle East. Ms. Rice, an expert on what is now an obsolete subject, the Soviet Union, believes this can be done the way the United States brought democracy to Chile or Iran or Afghanistan--that is, by violently overthrowing governments.

MIKE DAVIS

PLANET OF SLUMS

Sometime in the next year, a woman will give birth in the Lagos slum of Ajegunle, a young man will flee his village in west Java for the bright lights of Jakarta, or a farmer will move his impoverished family into one of Lima’s innumerable pueblos jovenes. The exact event is unimportant and it will pass entirely unnoticed. Nonetheless it will constitute a watershed in human history. For the first time the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural. Indeed, given the imprecisions of Third World censuses, this epochal transition may already have occurred.

Read the rest at
New Left Review

mobiustrip44 writes
When Jews cry wolf
Students at York University in Toronto are claiming victimhood and calling their recent suspension "the new Concordia." The truth is they're crying wolf, and they're not alone.

by Daniel Sieradski March 26, 2004

Toronto's York University has suspended their campus Hillel and a pro-Palestinian activist group after an altercation last week in which more than 100 Jewish students verbally and physically confronted a group of 25 activists who were partaking in an act of guerilla theatre depicting an Israeli military checkpoint.

"The Resurrection of Jacqueline and Other Ghosts"

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada, Prensa Latina

A new style is making headway in US journalism: to reveal
that some of its main stories were the spurious work of
frauds violating every ethical principle in order to lie,
falsify and plagiarize.

"Work, Value and Domination:

On the Continuing Relevance of the Marxian Labor Theory of Value
in the Crisis of the Keynesian Planner State"

Harry Cleaver

During the last decade or so, in the midst of a profound and lengthy international crisis of capitalist command, the Marxian labor theory of value has been subjected to severe critiques on both theoretical and historical grounds. The major theoretical critique — from Steedman and other Social Democrats — reformulated earlier attacks on the so-called metaphysical character of the theory and called for the abandonment of a value theory that was neither meaningful nor necessary. This attack, as others before it, has been been rejected, more or less convincingly depending on the character of the arguments, by Marxists of all stripes.

More serious than this rejection on abstract grounds, have been a series of arguments that the Marxian labor theory of value, while perhaps once pertinent for the understanding of the dynamics of capitalist development, has been rendered obsolete by the historical evolution of capital accumulation. In other words, new theory is needed to understand and fight new forms of domination which emerged out of the old dynamics of the class relationship itself. This paper analyses and responds to two of the more interesting formulations of this perspective: those of Claus Offe and Toni Negri.

"A Universal History of Contingency:

Deleuze and Guattari on the History of Capitalism"

Jason Read, Borderlands

 

It would be a mistake to read Anti-Oedipus as the new theoretical reference (you know, that much heralded theory that finally encompasses everything, that finally totalizes and reassures, the one that we are told we 'need so badly' in our age of dispersion and specialization where 'hope' is lacking). One must not look for a 'philosophy' amid the extraordinary profusion of new notions and surprise concepts: Anti-Oedipus is not a flashy Hegel. —Michel Foucault (1983)

Retrospective

1. One of the difficult characteristics of the writing of Gilles Deleuze, alone and in collaboration with Félix Guattari, is, in Deleuze's terms, its extremely "untimely" nature. Philosophical and theoretical positions that have generally been abandoned or rendered untenable by the passage of time are advocated by Deleuze and Guattari only to be subsequently twisted so as to be rendered unrecognizable. There are multiple specific examples of this: the turn to vitalism, to naturalism, or to pre-critical philosophical positions, but more generally it is possible to say that Deleuze and Guattari write as if the general breakdown of the lofty aspirations of philosophy, the critique of metaphysics and of the systematizing pretensions of philosophy, had not happened. Or do they? Even as Deleuze and Guattari seem to produce a metaphysics and even a cosmology that encompasses everything from the geological history of the earth to the contemporary technological and political transformations of capital they do so with such a perverse humor that it is impossible to assume what is at stake in such writing. Is this simply the worst sort of totalizing metaphysical philosophizing, or is it all just some sort of joke? Or is something altogether different happening — another practice of philosophy, that is neither a return of the grand systematic aspirations of philosophy nor the dismantling of it?

Full article continues here.