A Dictator Created Then Destroyed by America

Robert Fisk, Independent

Saddam to the gallows. It was an easy equation. Who could be more deserving
of that last walk to the scaffold — that crack of the neck at the end of a rope
— than the Beast of Baghdad, the Hitler of the Tigris, the man who murdered
untold hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis while spraying chemical weapons
over his enemies? Our masters will tell us in a few hours that it is a "great
day" for Iraqis and will hope that the Muslim world will forget that his
death sentence was signed — by the Iraqi "government", but on behalf of the
Americans — on the very eve of the Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, the
moment of greatest forgiveness in the Arab world.

But history will record that the Arabs and other Muslims and, indeed, many
millions in the West, will ask another question this weekend, a question that
will not be posed in other Western newspapers because it is not the narrative
laid down for us by our presidents and prime ministers — what about the other
guilty men?

No, Tony Blair is not Saddam. We don't gas our enemies. George W Bush is not
Saddam. He didn't invade Iran or Kuwait. He only invaded Iraq. But hundreds of
thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead — and thousands of Western troops are
dead — because Messrs Bush and Blair and the Spanish Prime Minister and the
Italian Prime Minister and the Australian Prime Minister went to war in 2003 on a
potage of lies and mendacity and, given the weapons we used, with great
brutality.

"These Sinister Christmas Holidays"

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Granma

Nobody remembers God at Christmas. There is such a roar of horns and
fireworks, so many garlands of colorful lights; so many innocent,
slaughtered turkeys; and so much stress from spending beyond our
means in order to look good that one wonders if anyone has any time
to ponder that such madness is to celebrate the birthday of a boy
born 2,000 years ago in a destitute horse stable, a short distance
from where a few thousand years before King David was born.

Nine hundred and fifty-four million Christians believe that this boy
was God reincarnated, but many celebrate his birth as if they don't
really believe it. In addition, there are several millions who have
never believed it but like to party and many others who would be
willing to turn the world upside down so that nobody would believe
it. It would be interesting to find out how many of them also
wholeheartedly believe that the Christmas of today is a revolting
holiday but don't dare say it for a prejudice that is no longer
religious, but social.

Kuwasi at 60

Kazembe Balagun

On December 16, 2006 over 75 people gathered at LAVA in West Philadelphia. The crowd was a mix of Black liberation movement veterans (young and old), anarchist punks and white queer activists from ACT UP. They came together to pay homage to the late Kuwasi Balagoon, who would have turned 60 years old this year. Balagoon is not an immediately recognizable name in the pantheon of revolutionaries, yet he has developed into an underground hero 20 years after his death. This is due in large part to the maze of contradictions that constructed Balagoon’s life.

As a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, he was the quintessential outlaw, escaping prison twice and leading units in the expropriation of banks, including the infamous Nyack armored car heist in 1983 (an incident that served as a basis for the film Dead Presidents). Balagoon was also a humanist, who enjoyed painting, writing poetry and baking for his fellow inmates. However, it was Kuwasi’s identification as a queer anarchist that has sparked renewed interest in his life. “He was an anarchist in a black nationalist movement, he was queer in a straight dominated movement, he was a guerrilla fighter after it was “chic,” and he never backed down from his ideals, his beliefs, the struggle or him self. And he demanded to be seen not as a revolutionary icon, but as a person, beautiful and flawed,” said Walidah Imarisha, poet and one of the presenters at the Balagoon memorial.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Revolution in the Post-Fordist Revolution?

Notes on the Internet as a Weapon of the Multitude"

Gene Ray

Is the Internet emerging as a viable site for what Paolo Virno calls a “non-servile republic,” a radical public sphere largely beyond the control of “administration”?

In 2005, four members of the collective Retort published Afflicted Powers, a compelling analysis of the new global mutation of primitive accumulation they call “military neo-liberalism.”[1] The book grew out of a broadsheet the group wrote for the global anti-war protests of 15 February 2003, which turned out to be the largest linked demonstrations in world history; “Neither Their War Nor Their Peace” offered two pages of “negative wisdom addressed to comrades in a dark and confusing time.”

The appalling destruction of Lebanon has spurred Retort to follow up these trenchant texts with a new broadsheet, this one bitterly titled "All Quiet on the Eastern Front.” Among its eleven paragraphs of lucid observations and critical propositions is the assertion that the “balance of power in the image-world is changing.” As never before, the reality “at the heart of modernity” has been exposed to view. “For more than a century, modernity and state terror from the air — modernity and mass civilian death — have been mutually constituent terms. But never before so instantly, so vividly, so ubiquitously.”[2] Retort points to the material basis of this shift with a biting quotation of US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s whining complaints about the brutal new context in which Empire must fight its wars of systemic enforcement:

“Today we’re engaged in the first war in history — unconventional and irregular as it may be — in an era of e-mails, blogs, cell phones, Blackberrys, Instant Messaging, digital cameras, a global Internet with no inhibitions, hand-held videocameras, talk radio, 24-hour news broadcasts, satellite television. There’s never been a war fought in this environment before.”[3]

Scrutinising this list of demons haunting the sleep of the war technocrat-in-chief, we can rapidly separate apparatuses of corporate and public sector media subordinated to the rule of profit and state administration (talk radio, twenty-four-hour news broadcasts, satellite television) from independent means of production and uncensored networks of communications (all the other items on his hate list). It is furthermore clear that “a global Internet with no inhibitions” — the open, distributed network that makes possible the rapid and uncontrolled planetary dissemination of images and discourses — is the techno-material factor that links all the mobile micro-means of production and tips the balance of power in the image-world.

Color and History: From the Invention of the White Race to the Invention of White Multiculturalism*

Yann Moulier Boutang

Translated by Lowe Laclau

We in our “civilized,” white and exceedingly developed democracies, despite twenty years of crises know surges of xenophobia, anti-Semitism and racism very well. It is easy to view such phenomena as a general return to a barbarism of inter-ethnic conflict such as those that shake the Wild Cities of Enki Bilal (from the Berlin of the Femme Piège, to Beirut by way of Sarajevo, or the Africa of resistance in Rwanda). As if times had become as rough and merciless as the “new look” of commercial capitalism. However, even if we leave aside the all against all ethnic wars, this supposed new state of nature that makes the market Leviathan more desirable, we are forced to draw up a doubly worrying assessment. Since the latter half of the Eighties, in the parliamentary democracies, the extreme right reconstructed themselves significantly on an institutional scale (the PEN in France, Haider in Austria, Pauline Hanson in Australia). One voter in ten no longer hesitated to cast his or her vote for a type of political program that the defeat of Fascism and Nazism had previously relegated in the sphere of the unnamable, the unpronounceable, or the unrepresentable. The second assessment is the relative inefficiency of the calls for tolerance and of democratic multiculturalism to reduce explosions of intolerance to a marginal and normal [sic] level.

Why have democracies seen themselves re-grow these venomous flowers, why is it that the “communicational act” is only made use of to keep police blunders and racist murders from turning into riots? Why so much inertia, why is there so much complacence before discourses on closing up borders and standing firm, discourses that earn the traditional right as well as the left, much desired voters, as has been shown with the issues of immigration regulation and border security? The response from the workers movement, from classical Marxism, from good natured Republicans, and even radical Americans is simple: in a society of class inequality, within an economy dominated by capitalist exploitation and domination, real democracy cannot exist, nor can pacified interethnic relations. One needs only search for who profits from the crime. The disjointedness of the multitude gives force to the multinationals etc. There's nothing completely false in summing it up in this manner, but there's also nothing completely persuasive about it either. It lacks some of the critical links within its reasoning, and this cuts down all operational and political character, relegating it to a sphere of moral testimony. Two books in English with very different styles and objectives propose exploring another track and of truly beginning the debate on the classical question of nation, race and class: a scouring essay from Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in an Multicultural Society (hereout WN) and two ambitious volumes from Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race Vol. 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control (hereout IWR1) and Vol 2: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (hereout IWR2).

The work from Ghassan Hage allows a diagnosis of the present situation of racism as well as the failures of multiculturalism. The two volumes from Theodore Allen make it possible to embrace another question at the other end of the historical chain of immigration: that of the colonization of catholic Ireland from the 16th to the 19th century and the concomitant enslavement of Blacks in the Virginia plantations. What relation would be demanded between multiculturalism, slavery and colonization? It is the question of social control through intermediaries because the normal intermediaries had not yet been set in place. What happens when a failed or too radical a polarization erodes the space of traditional political mediations?

Color and History: From the Invention of the White Race to the Invention of White Multiculturalism*

Yann Moulier Boutang

Translated by Lowe Laclau

We in our “civilized,” white and exceedingly developed democracies, despite twenty years of crises know surges of xenophobia, anti-Semitism and racism very well. It is easy to view such phenomena as a general return to a barbarism of inter-ethnic conflict such as those that shake the Wild Cities of Enki Bilal (from the Berlin of the Femme Piège, to Beirut by way of Sarajevo, or the Africa of resistance in Rwanda). As if times had become as rough and merciless as the “new look” of commercial capitalism. However, even if we leave aside the all against all ethnic wars, this supposed new state of nature that makes the market Leviathan more desirable, we are forced to draw up a doubly worrying assessment. Since the latter half of the Eighties, in the parliamentary democracies, the extreme right reconstructed themselves significantly on an institutional scale (the PEN in France, Haider in Austria, Pauline Hanson in Australia). One voter in ten no longer hesitated to cast his or her vote for a type of political program that the defeat of Fascism and Nazism had previously relegated in the sphere of the unnamable, the unpronounceable, or the unrepresentable. The second assessment is the relative inefficiency of the calls for tolerance and of democratic multiculturalism to reduce explosions of intolerance to a marginal and normal [sic] level.

Why have democracies seen themselves re-grow these venomous flowers, why is it that the “communicational act” is only made use of to keep police blunders and racist murders from turning into riots? Why so much inertia, why is there so much complacence before discourses on closing up borders and standing firm, discourses that earn the traditional right as well as the left, much desired voters, as has been shown with the issues of immigration regulation and border security? The response from the workers movement, from classical Marxism, from good natured Republicans, and even radical Americans is simple: in a society of class inequality, within an economy dominated by capitalist exploitation and domination, real democracy cannot exist, nor can pacified interethnic relations. One needs only search for who profits from the crime. The disjointedness of the multitude gives force to the multinationals etc. There's nothing completely false in summing it up in this manner, but there's also nothing completely persuasive about it either. It lacks some of the critical links within its reasoning, and this cuts down all operational and political character, relegating it to a sphere of moral testimony. Two books in English with very different styles and objectives propose exploring another track and of truly beginning the debate on the classical question of nation, race and class: a scouring essay from Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in an Multicultural Society (hereout WN) and two ambitious volumes from Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race Vol. 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control (hereout IWR1) and Vol 2: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (hereout IWR2).

The work from Ghassan Hage allows a diagnosis of the present situation of racism as well as the failures of multiculturalism. The two volumes from Theodore Allen make it possible to embrace another question at the other end of the historical chain of immigration: that of the colonization of catholic Ireland from the 16th to the 19th century and the concomitant enslavement of Blacks in the Virginia plantations. What relation would be demanded between multiculturalism, slavery and colonization? It is the question of social control through intermediaries because the normal intermediaries had not yet been set in place. What happens when a failed or too radical a polarization erodes the space of traditional political mediations?

Reflections on Tronti

Massimo De Angelis

From the commoner

It has been suggested to me, in the corridors of the Historical Materialism conference held over the week end, that what distinguishes what we may call, broadly speaking, autonomist marxism with other marxist approaches is the argument that the “working class” is the agent of transformation that pushes capital on the defence and forces its “economic” development rather then, on the contrary, being capital that “overdetermines” the rest by means of its agency. This suggestion furthermore is accompanied by the claim that this view is false, since capital has “more power.” In my view, the insight of 1960s operaismo with respect to working class agency were not falsified in light of 1980s capital’s agency, they were simply temporally bounded. Class struggle, in a process-like manner, have at least two broad actors, not one, and their tragic-comic struggle develop through highs and lows for both sides, “scoring points” for both sides. The process of this historical development of struggle, this very process of “point scoring” for one or the other, is the stuff of capitalist development. The problem is that acknowledging this does not give us any hint of how to go beyond capital and the very specific form of struggle shaping its development.

And I think it is at this point that it is important to underline that what distinguishes “autonomist marxism” in its operaiste roots to other forms of marxism, is a specific theoretical attitude, one that takes the processes that traditionally we understand as “political” and “economic.” as one. Its unique political methodology is one that allows to ask research questions as part of a heretic research program, heretic because it sees the world from one side, that which is constituted within, against and beyond capital’s own value program, and thus its broad horizon is the end of capitalism and the begining of history. It is therefore a stand from where to ask questions as articulated to walks of struggle, rather than reading the processes making up our world as something that have already been explained away by some form of marxist theory.

Copyright, Copyleft and the Creative Anti-Commons

Anna Nimus

A Genealogy of Authors’ Property Rights

The author has not always existed. The image of the author as a wellspring of originality, a genius guided by some secret compulsion to create works of art out of a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, is an 18th century invention.

This image continues to influence how people speak about the “great artists” of history, and it also trickles down to the more modest claims of the intellectual property regime that authors have original ideas that express their unique personality, and therefore have a natural right to own their works — or to sell their rights, if they should choose.

Although these ideas appear self-evident today, they were an anomaly during their own time. The different pre-Enlightenment traditions did not consider ideas to be original inventions that could be owned because knowledge was held in common. Art and philosophy were products of the accumulated wisdom of the past. There were no authors — in the sense of original creators and final authorities — but only masters of various crafts (sculpture, painting, poetry, philosophy) whose task was to appropriate existing knowledge, re-organize it, make it specific to their age, and transmit it further. Artists and sages were messengers, and their ability to make knowledge manifest was considered a gift from the gods. Art was governed by a gift economy: aristocratic patronage was a gift in return for the symbolic gift of the work. Even the neoclassical worldview that immediately preceded Romanticism viewed art as imitation of nature and the artist as a craftsman who transmitted ideas that belonged to a common culture.

Solve et Coagula writes:

"Islamic Banking:
Banking Without Usury or Interest"

Institute of Islamic Banking

Islamic banks appeared on the world scene as active players over two decades ago. But "many of the principles upon which Islamic banking is based have been commonly accepted all over the world, for centuries rather than decades".

The basic principle of Islamic banking is the prohibition of riba (usury — or interest):

"While a basic tenant of Islamic banking — the outlawing of riba, a term that encompasses not only the concept of usury, but also that of interest — has seldom been recognised as applicable beyond the Islamic world, many of its guiding principles have. The majority of these principles are based on simple morality and common sense, which form the bases of many religions, including Islam.

"The universal nature of these principles is immediately apparent even at a cursory glance of non-Muslim literature. Usury was prohibited in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, while Shakespeare and many other writers, particularly those writing in the 19th century, have attacked the barbarity of the practice. Much of the morality championed by Victorian writers such as Dickens — ranging from the equitable distribution of wealth through to man's fundamental right to work — is clearly present in modern Islamic society.

"Although the western media frequently suggest that Islamic banking in its present form is a recent phenomenon, in fact, the basic practices and principles date back to the early part of the seventh century." (Islamic Finance: A Euromoney Publication, 1997)

It is evident that Islamic finance was practiced predominantly in the Muslim world throughout the Middle Ages, fostering trade and business activities. In Spain and the Mediterranean and Baltic States, Islamic merchants became indispensable middlemen for trading activities. It is claimed that many concepts, techniques, and instruments of Islamic finance were later adopted by European financiers and businessmen.

Terraces & peripheries. Left snobbery & the radical right

Emilio Quadrelli

If anyone still had any doubts much has happened to dispel them. Many of the terraces of the Italian football stadiums are controlled to an increasing degree by the radical right. This is a fact. And it is necessary to start from here to attack, politically and not morally, a phenomenon which has been spreading for some time in metropolitan peripheries and which only becomes worthy of attention when it gains heavy media visibility. Only in the presence of swastikas, celtic crosses or explicit holocaust references dominating stadiums are many people stupefied, as if they were in a remake of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, and they forget at least a thing or two.

First, they [i.e. the fans associated with the radical right] don’t come from the moon, they also have a social life outside the stadiums, lived quite coherently with the ‘values’ expressed on the terraces. In other words, adherence to the nazi ‘lifestyle’ is not something purely symbolic and extemporaneous, adopted in a framework where carnival prevails, but a total and in many cases totalizing ‘lifestyle,’ with effects on everyday life. The second thing is the consent and legitimation which – without any kind of forcing, it should be noted – they can claim across areas which cannot necessarily be reductively described as belonging to the world of the radical right. To speak only of the Roman situation, it is worth recalling the ‘dead boy’ derby match.

This spurious story was circulated by some hardcore fringe fans, regarded by the ‘experts’ as marginal, isolated from the rest of the crowd, but it immediately became the unquestionable truth for the whole stadium. Essentially the story accused the security forces of killing a young boy during the baton charge that preceded the match. The denial by senior officers and by the highest municipal authorities met with a long deafening, chorus of ‘shame, shame’ (from Lazio and Roma fans alike), which left little room for interpretation and showed that, when it came to choosing between the institutional truth and the illegitimate truth of ‘small groups’ of ‘unruly fans’ the whole stadium showed little doubt about which side it was on. And this is only one of many episodes which could be cited. Posing a few questions, then, seems legitimate to say the least. As they are not aliens, the ‘stadium extremists’ do not come from outer space, they inhabit urban areas which are not particularly hard to identify: the peripheries.