jim writes:

"Beyond Miami: The Future of the ACG Movement"

Matt Gaines

There are several ways to look at what happened in Miami recently
during the anti-FTAA demonstrations that took place there from November
19th-21st, 2003. No matter how the event is interpreted, however, it must
first and foremost be remembered that the FTAA has not yet been stopped. It
still remains a looming possibility. Trade ministers, although they ended
the meetings earlier than originally scheduled, refused to call it quits
altogether, and unlike many predicated, what occurred in Miami was not
another Cancun. The real significance of Miami was, more than anything
else, how it revealed the true nature of this wider movement that is
dedicated to opposing all forms of corporate power and achieving global
social, economic, and environmental justice.

"The End of Oil"

George Monbiot, London Guardian, Tuesday December 2, 2003

The oil industry is buzzing. On Thursday, the government approved the
development of the biggest deposit discovered in British territory for at
least 10 years. Everywhere we are told that this is a "huge" find, which
dispels the idea that North Sea oil is in terminal decline. You begin to
recognise how serious the human predicament has become when you discover
that this "huge" new field will supply the world with oil for five and a
quarter days.

"Derrida's Deconstruction of Authority"

Saul Newman

The political aspect of Jacques Derrida's thinking, in particular his critique of authority, has been somewhat neglected. However his interrogation of rational and essentialist structures in philosophy makes his work crucial to any contemporary critique of political institutions and discourses, and indeed any understanding of radical politics.

Derrida instigates a series of strategies or 'moves' to unmask the suppressed antagonisms and differences within the Western philosophical discourse whose claims to universality, wholeness and lucid self-reflection have been sounded since the time of Plato. His critique has important implications for political theory: his questioning of the claims of philosophy may be applied to the claims of political institutions founded upon them.

"Questions about The New Imperialism:

An Interview with David Harvey

Nader Vossoughian, http://www.agglutinations.com

In his recently published The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), geographer and social theorist David Harvey makes the case for a "New Deal" brand of imperialism in which the responsibilities of government are carried out by a “benevolent… coalition of capitalist powers.”

Against foes of globalization, he argues that the effects of global capitalism are undoable, that advocates of social reform must learn to work within the framework of the marketplace. By the same token, he remains critical of American foreign policy, whose objectives, he argues, have been shaped to a large degree by the neo-liberalism of the moderate left (think US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin) and more recently by the neo-conservatism of the right (think US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld).

In the interview that follows, I ask Harvey to elaborate on his views, particularly on the point of how he distinguishes his vision from those articulated by peer intellectuals of the political left.

rob eshelman writes:

"Miami, Laboratory of Repression"
Writer’s Block

At Thursday’s direct action against the FTAA, we gathered in the ghost town of Miami city center. Some only partially awake at this early hour; sipped hot dark liquids while others danced to the sound of drums and protest chants. A group of steelworkers, not happy in only attending the ritualized AFL-CIO sponsored rally later in the day, were nervously grouped on the perimeter of the gathering. A smattering of public sector workers who hadn’t been given the day off in anticipation of violence and property damage looked on in curiosity, some popping off a few shots from their disposable cameras. This was the kick off to the day of direct action against the Free Trade Area of the Americas and it was shaping up to be a total disaster.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"The Doomsday Machine"

John Chuckman, November 27, 2003

It occurred to me to write a satire about Osama and the boys sitting around in the mountains somewhere holding a conference about the worst possible damage they could inflict on the United States and deciding that it would be whatever act got Bush re-elected.

But retired American General Tommy Franks came along and spoiled the fun. General Franks has followed the advice of the fictional Doctor Strangelove by announcing to the world what he believes will happen if the United States is attacked by terrorists using strategic weapons: he says Americans will scrap the Constitution and set up a military government.

An anonymous coward writes:

"The Heroes of Hell"
Mike Davis Talks with Jon Wiener
Radical History Review 85(2003), 227-237

Jon Wiener: I've heard through the grapevine that you are working on a book about terrorism.

Mike Davis: My day job currently is a grassroots history of Los Angeles in the sixties ["Setting the Night on Fire"]. But I have also been busy on an extracurricular project entitled, after a poem in Mother Earth, "Heroes of Hell." It aims to be a world history of revolutionary terrorism from 1878 to 1932.

"The War on Dissent: Heavy-handed Police and Propaganda Tactics Brought Baghdad to Miami"

Naomi Klein, Globe and Mail, November 25, 2003

In December, 1990, U.S. President George Bush Sr. travelled through South
America to sell the continent on a bold new dream: "a free-trade system that
links all of the Americas." Addressing the Argentine congress, he said that
the plan, later to be named the Free-Trade Area of the Americas would be
"our hemisphere's new declaration of interdependence . . . the brilliant new
dawn of a splendid new world."

Last week, Mr. Bush's two sons joined forces to try to usher in that new
world by holding the FTAA negotiations in friendly Florida.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"From the Dangerous Classes to the Danger of the Multitude"
Toni Negri

The "corsi e ricorsi" of history are strange. It is renowned that throughout the history of capitalism the definition of ‘dangerous classes’ has been very flexible.

In the era of manufacture the poor were the dangerous: the multitude of penniless and vagabonds agricultural workers and landless peasants forced to move towards cities and factories. In the era of large industry, the workers became the ‘dangerous class’: assembled en masse in the factory, they exercised a pressure that affected all social relations; the dangerous class had to be pushed on the path of poverty, unemployment, and the industrial reserve army.

Today the poor is the enemy once again: in Postfordism, the flexible worker -- mobile and precarious, capable of producing cognitive and intellectual surplus -- is the enemy, threatened by means of exclusion, as if poverty was not enough. Precarious middle classes, taylorised intellectual labour and an immaterial labour force degraded through industrial instrumentalisation and the alienation of value: this is the fate of the new condition of poverty.

Rob Eshelman writes:

"The Capital of Violence and the Violence of Capital"
Writer’s Bloc

We’ve already won. The City of Miami, Department of Homeland Security, and an array of private dicks and corporate media boosters have successfully accomplished what the movement aims to achieve at each anti-capitalist convergence -- the total shutdown of the host city.

Because of this victory, the carnival has begun, and as the late afternoon sun arcs down into the West and a cool evening Caribbean breeze blows across Biscayne Bay onto the Florida mainland, 300 anti-globalization activists march on downtown Miami.