"A Visit with John Holloway:

How to Change the World Without Taking Power"

John Ross, Counterpunch

Puebla de Los Angeles, Mexico — One evening recently, a U.S. correspondent with a lengthy left-wing lineage sat down to dinner with two old comrades. Luis Cota had been a charter member of the long-defunct Mexican Communist Party and visited Moscow several times where he was enrolled at Patrice Lamumba University during the Brezhnev years. Pedro P. is a 40-year veteran of the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina whose travels on the left are encyclopedic. He had visited with Lenin's mummy four times (once each with Mao's and the Bulgarian Georgi Dimitrov's), he recounted.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Hanoi Jane and the City of God"
John Chuckman

A while back Jane Fonda found a new ally in her battle with being a decaying cutie-pie. Injections, face lifts, dye, flaky philosophy, and many hours a day of aerobics were no longer enough to hang on to even an out-of-focus resemblance to the poochy-lipped mannequin of Roger Vadim's "Barbarella."

Jane found Jesus. Not just any Jesus, but America's Jesus, the one who lets you be "born again," becoming a child again, a strong sales point where adults are obsessed with youth and living forever. Jane effectively committed herself to spending eternity with the likes of Franklin Graham, Tammy Faye, and George Bush — punishment enough I should think for far more than all her past errors.

stevphen writes:

"Physiognomy of Civilisation"
Angela Mitropoulos

Until recently, Sydney University was to hold a conference called 'Physiognomy of Origin'. Keynote speakers were Adrianna Cavarero and Antonio Negri, who were to open a discussion on the resurgent questions of embodiment, origin and potentiality — questions that, as it turns out, are quite central to what transpired.

In the Sydney Sun-Herald in January, Miranda Devine denounced Sydney University for inviting the 'suspected terrorist mastermind Antonio Negri' rather than offering students 'intellectual enlightenment'. Keith Windschuttle elaborated on that viewpoint in The Australian newspaper — 'education in the humanities was once supposed to be a civilising experience' — and repeated the accusation of 'terrorist' against Negri. He concluded his case against free speech by arguing that universities should not 'accommodate people with so little concern for civilised values'. (It is an irony that, in 1971, Australian Security Intelligence (ASIO) spies similarly vilified the then-leftist Windschuttle, whom they reported as giving 'the impression of being a violent revolutionary'.)

hydrarchist writes: "This article was published in Green Pepper Magazine's "Life Beyond the Market" issue.

"Community Currency Systems:

Formal Mutual Aid Networks with Anti-Capitalist Potential"

Andrew Willis

Anti-authoritarian anti-capitalists have two broad imperatives to guide our activism: the need to raise awareness of capitalist deficiency, and to begin to replace or supplement capitalism. For the latter imperative, we have two options: replace capitalism with another system outright, waiting until we have the consummate theoretical frameworks and public support to begin replacement on a wide scale. Or, we can build parallel institutions to begin experimenting with implementation of alternate systems.

For those of us impatient with the infinite holding pattern requisite of the former, experimenting with community-based mutual aid networks, systems, mechanisms or institutions reflective of cooperative, horizontal organization both represents an active, if incipient, embodiment of our ultimate goal and creates an effective outreach mechanism for education for critical consciousness.

"Nietzsche and the Anarchists"

Spencer Sunshine

[Spencer Sunshine recently completed editing the late John Moore's new anthology I Am Not A Man, I Am Dynamite! Friedrich Nietzsche and the Anarchist Tradition. This essay appeared originally in Fifth Estate #367, Winter 2004–2005.
Fifth Estate subscriptions are available for $10 (US), international $20.
PO Box 201016, Ferndale MI 48220]

The proposal to combine Nietzsche and anarchism must sound audacious to many people. Even if one doesn't hold to the old belief that the "working class" (whoever that might be today) are the only ones who can make revolutionary change, wasn't Nietzsche an influence on the fascists, and an individualist who championed the right of the strong to rule over the weak? And doesn't Nietzsche himself repeatedly denounce the anarchist movement of his day, calling them "dogs" and accusing them of ressentiment?

"The Tribe of Moles" (Part Two)
Sergio Bologna

[This essay continues from here.]

A New Political Cycle of Struggles:The Generalisation of the Political Behaviour of the Mass Worker

But if the identity of the mass worker as political subject was now dead — long live the mass worker! A political cycle of struggles as deeply rooted and powerful as that which led from the mass confrontation of Piazza Statuto (Turin, 1961) to the generalised offensive of the Hot Autumn (1969) — throughout which the mass worker of large-scale industry had acted as the central driving force — could hardly be expected to disappear without a trace! It was bound to set in motion a whole series of secondary effects and irreversible mechanisms, imposing its specific hegemony on the composition of the entire class.

"The Tribe of Moles" (Part One)

Sergio Bologna (1977)

This article is a provisional attempt to trace the internal development of the autonomous class movement in Italy, which led to the explosive confrontation around the University occupations in Spring 1977. Such an analysis is only meaningful if it allows us to uncover the new class composition underlying these struggles, and to indicate the first elements of a programme to advance and further generalise the movement.

Here we analyse the movement primarily in its relation to the Italian political system and the changes it has undergone through the period of crisis since 1968. With the Historic Compromise strategy of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) since 1974, the form of the State has taken a new leap forwards — towards the organisation of a "party system" which no longer aims to mediate or represent conflicts in civil society, but is increasingly compact and counterpoised against movements in civil society, and against the political programme of the new composition of the class.

The Two Temporalities of Counter-Power and Anti-Power

John Holloway

1.

Time is central to any consideration of power and counter power or
anti-power. The traditional left is centred on waiting, on patience. The
social democratic parties tell us “Wait until the next election, then we
will come to power and things will be different” The Leninist parties say
“wait for the revolution, then we’ll take power and life will begin”. But we
cannot wait. Capitalism is destroying the world and we cannot be patient. We
cannot wait for the next long wave or the next revolutionary opportunity. We
cannot wait until the time is right. We must revolt now, we must live now.

Peter Waterman writes:

"From ‘Decent Work’ to ‘The Liberation of Time from Work’:
Reflections on Work, Emancipation, Utopia and the Global Justice and Solidarity Movement"
Peter Waterman, Global Solidarity Dialogue Group

1. Introduction

"Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number —
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you —
Ye are many — they are few." — P. B. Shelley, "The Mask of Anarchy," 1819.

"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias." — Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891.

"The Future Is Not What It Used To Be." — Cited Sousa Santos 1995:479.

I want to here comment on a number of historical and contemporary understandings of work and workers, represented in the quotations below. I want to comment more particularly on the utopian ones. Utopian ideas have always been central to or lain beneath emancipatory movements, particular labour and socialist ones in their emancipatory moments (Beilharz 1992). I want, even more specifically, to comment on this problematic in relation to the World Social Forum (WSF), or to the Global Justice and Solidarity Movement (GJ&SM) in general. Because, at least with the Forum, we are confronted with the problem of an event largely dominated by a position on work that is quite literally pro-capitalist, whilst so far providing little hearing for any specific utopian (post-capitalist) position on such.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?"
Jacques Rancière

[From the South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2/3 (2004) pp. 297-310.]

As we know, the question raised by my title took on a new cogency during the last ten years of the twentieth century. The Rights of Man or Human Rights had just been rejuvenated in the seventies and eighties by the dissident movements in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe—a rejuvenation that was all the more significant as the "formalism" of those rights had been one of the first targets of the young Marx, so that the collapse of the Soviet Empire could appear as their revenge. After this collapse, they would appear as the charter of the irresistible movement leading to a peaceful posthistorical world where global democracy would match the global market of liberal economy.