Anonymous Comrade writes

"The President from Podunk Drilling Inc."

John Chuckman, January 15, 2004

Thinking people aren't surprised to be told that failed-oilman George Bush qualifies as a moral and intellectual dry hole.

Bush's halting words come from a mouth so long smugly-set it can scarcely form the shapes of vowels, but enormous ignorance also manages to come through. Still, it never hurts to have a first-hand account, expert testimony, to reinforce even our strongest perceptions, and former Bush Cabinet-member Paul O'Neill has now supplied that in spades.

Anonymous Comrade writes

"The Old Left for Another World?
Mumbai Resistance and the World Social Forum"
Saroj Giri

The time has come for a certain Marxism to assert itself and this is possibly the Marxism of the old Leninist tradition. It is good to find that the debate between the two Marxisms has again come to the fore in the Indian context with the Mumbai Resistance taking up issue with World Social Forum. For with the WSF happening in India, all sorts of objectively dubious and opportunist forces and tendencies on the Communist left in India are finally coming out open and clear with their long hidden ideological and political bankruptcy.

"RNC Not Welcome"

The Good Riddance

The Good Riddance [TGR] recently met with one of the founders of RNC [Republican National Convention] Not Welcome to talk about organizing against the upcoming Republican National Convention, which is scheduled to occur in New York City, close to the anniversary of the September 11th attacks. We started off by talking about the Demilitarize the Police rally that occurred at One Police Plaza a few days earlier. The rally focused partially on the use of "less-than-lethal weapons," such as rubber bullets and tear gas to control demonstrators.

RNCNW: I wouldn't be satisfied if, for instance, the cops decided that they weren't going to use less-than-lethal weapons, because in New York, they rely more on systems of control than they do on brute force.

Anonymous Fls
writes here is a long article in three parts, the first below, the Part II and Part III. All footnotes are at the end of the final segment.

"Precarias: First Stutterings of Precarias a la Deriva"


Precarias a la Deriva

Trabajo flexible ¿Es que somos invisibles?

Trabajo inmaterial ¡Ay que estrés mental!

Trabajo de jornalera ¡Eso es la repera!


(Little song by Precarias a la Deriva in the General Strike of 20 June 2002)

THE PICKET-SURVEY

"Precarias a la deriva" (Precarious women workers adrift) is a collective project of investigation and action. The concerns of the participants in this open project converged the 20th of June 2002, the day of the general strike called by the major unions in Spain. Some of us had already initiated a trajectory of reflection and intervention in questions of the transformations of labor (in groups such as ‘ZeroWork’ and Sex, Lies and Precariousness, or individually), others wished to begin to think through these themes. In the days before the strike we came together to brainstorm an intervention which would reflect our times, aware that the labor strike, as the culminating expression of a process of struggle, was unsatisfactory for us for three reasons: (1) for not taking up –and this is no novelty- the experience and the unjust division of domestic work and care, almost entirely done by women in the ‘non-productive’ sphere, (2) for the marginalization to which both the forms of action and the proposals of the strike condemn those in types of work –ever more common- which are generally lumped together as ‘precarious’[1] and (3) for not taking into consideration precarious, flexible, invisible or undervalued work, specifically that of women and/or migrants (sexual, domestic, assistance, etc.). As a friend recently pointed out in the context of the more recent ‘political’ strike against the war (April 10, 2003), “How do we invent new forms of striking when production fragments and dislocates itself, when it is organized in such a way that to stop working for a few hours (or even 24) does not necessarily effect the production process, and when our contract situation is so fragile that striking today means risking the possibility of working tomorrow?”

Part I of a two part essay. Find Part II here.

"Oil Wars and World Orders New and Old"

Aufheben

Introduction

The American-led interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s were
presented as 'humanitarian wars'. With the widespread, if not always universal,
support of the 'international (bourgeois) community', the liberal apologists for
such wars were able to claim that they were being waged to uphold the universal
norms of the 'civilised world' that now overrode the old principles of national
sovereignty. The conflicting material interests underlying these military
adventures were far from apparent.

"Anarchism, or The Revolutionary Movement
of The Twenty-First Century"

David Graeber and Andrej Grubacic

It is becoming increasingly clear that the age of revolutions is not over. It's becoming equally clear that the global revolutionary movement in the 21st century will be one that traces its origins less to the tradition of Marxism, or even of socialism narrowly defined, but of anarchism.

Comrade Fls writes

Michael Hardt: Affective Labor

Focus on the production of affects in our labor and our social practices has often served as a useful ground for anticapitalist projects, in the context of discourses for instance on desire or on use-value. Affective labor is itself and directly the constitution of communities and collective subjectivities. The productive circuit of affect and value has thus seemed in many respects as an autonomous circuit for the constitutions of subjectivity, alternative to the processes of capitalist valorization. Theoretical frameworks that have brought together Marx and Freud have conceived of affective labor using terms such as desiring production and more significantly numerous feminist investigations analyzing the potentials within what has been designated traditionally as women's work have grasped affective labor with terms such as kin work and caring labor. Each of these analyses reveal the processes whereby our laboring practices produce collective subjectivities, produce sociality, and ultimately produce society itself.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

The Call of the Void
Is there anything common between the US-British invasion of Iraq, the American rule over Afghan disorder, the implosion of Argentina in 2001-2002, a mass resurging protest that claims to be anti-capitalist, and the downfall of what was yesterday heralded as the coming of a new technological era ? (1)

"The State of Emergency"

Giorgio Agamben

In his Political Theology (1922), Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) established the essential proximity between the state of emergency and sovereignty. But although his famous definition of the sovereign as "the one who can proclaim a state of emergency" has been commented on many times, we still lack a genuine theory of the state of emergency within public law. For legal theorists as well as legal historians it seems as if the problem would be more of a factual question than an authentic legal question.

hydrarchist writes "Here is Part II. Go back to Part I

The third Gulf War (2003) and the New World Order of Bush Jnr.