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Reviews
"You can't build a new society with a Stanley knife"
by Malcolm Bull, published in The London Review of Books
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n19/bull2319.htm
Forget Bob Geldof, Bono and the other do-gooders, Genoa's only significance was as the latest battle in the war of Neoliberalism. It was a clear victory this time for the 'anarchists'. Damaging property and street fighting proved the most effective forms of protest, and provoked an over-reaction from the police: they shot a man armed with a fire extinguisher and raided the headquarters of the Genoa Social Forum for no reason. Non-violent demonstrators like to claim that the 'anarchists' have hijacked legitimate protest, but that is not historically true: the Black Bloc were there to greet Reagan when he came to Europe in the 1980s, long before many of the other groups represented at Genoa were formed.The Tute Bianche ('white overalls') are a more recent and distinctively Post-Modern phenomenon, committed to the deconstruction of the opposition between violence and non-violence, but they, too, have roots in the autonomist movements of the 1970s. Demonstrations of this kind have been going on for a long time, and they are unlikely to stop. The only thing that seems uncertain is who is fighting on which side.
Bakunin's Statism and Anarchy
A review by Chris Gray
Statism and Anarchy (Gosudarstvo i Anarkhia) was written by Mikhail
Alexandrovich Bakunin in 1873. It is one of the most accessible of Bakunin's
writings in English translation, currently available in the Cambridge Texts
in the History of Political Thought series. The work admirably demonstrates
Bakunin's strengths and weaknesses as a political thinker. I wish to comment
here on certain aspects of the work, namely, the author's view of European
history from the sixteenth century to 1815, his Slav romanticism (and its
reverse side, anti-Germanism), his view of political power; above all it is
necessary to deal with the most glaring of Bakunin's many misrepresentations
of Marx's position in the book. To this end, it is necessary to look at the
revolutionary situation in Germany in 1848 and also at the struggle between
Marx and Bakunin in the First International.
hydrarchist writes: "
So you're a writer, and you've got this really cool series that's set to ship from Com.X in November called Cla$$war. The series, which is getting loads of pre-publication buzz, is about superheroes in a world just like ours - one ruled by multinational corporations, where politicians are corrupt at best, the strings are pulled by big business, and America's foreign policy is a joke and a half. Believing itself to be the most powerful nation on the planet, the powerful in Cla$$war's America believe it's population is too complacent to rise up or even unite for a cause, and it's mere reputation, superheroes, and financial might is enough to keep attacks of its borders from occurring. Frankly, it was a view of America that, aside from the superheroes, many held.
Writer Rob Williams and artist Trevor Hairsine were set to enter the world of comics in a big way when Cla$$war #1 hit the stands.
But something else hit first on September 11th.
As a result of the terrorist attacks, Cla$$war’s November release has been pushed back to 2002, the publisher opting not to bring out a book that has what some might see as views of America that are less than favorable in light of the attack. Cla$$war will come out – just not for a few more months.
However, we still wanted to take a look at the series from Com.X as well as speak with its creators, so here we are. As a side note, these interviews were conducted a week prior to the attack, and any comments made by Williams in no way are meant to reflect on America after the terrorist acts of the 11th.
The more dour stuff over, on with the show…
Autonomedia writes: "The Game of War: the life and death of Guy Debord
Andrew Hussey Jonathan Cape, 420pp, £18.99
The Map is Not the Territory
Alan Woods and Ralph Rumney Manchester University Press, 204pp, £25
When did the avant-garde die? It sounds like a title for the sort of frothy filler you might find, nowadays, fringing the review pages of any mainstream newspaper - and that, in itself, confirms the avant-garde's demise. But if you were looking for a plausible date, place and motive for the auto-destruction of that current which laid claim to being - by virtue of exclusivity, originality and audacity - the radical harbinger of cultural and political change in European society, it would have to be on 30 November 1994 in a large, gloomy farmhouse in the large, gloomy, remote French department of the Auvergne, where, as day faded into night, Guy Debord, once the leader of the Situationist International, put a gun to his breast and stopped his heart for ever.
Read the review here"
Robin D.G. Kelley writes: "'The Debt' Calls for America to Pay Up
More than 38 years ago, singer/composer Abbey Lincoln
proposed to the powers that be to "let the
restribution/ match the contribution." In his
remarkable new book, The Debt: What America Owes to
Blacks, Randall Robinson extends Lincoln's wry lyrics
to compose a veritable literary symphony, poetic tour
de force whose voice shifts easily from blues to
shouts, sorrow songs to field hollers, moaning to the
trance-mutations of free improvisation.
http://www.thedebt.net/reviews/emerge.shtml>"
Anonymous Comrade writes: "American Prospect
http://www.prospect.org/print/V12/14/biel-s.html
Intellectuals' Inaction
by Steven Biel
Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement, by Carol
Polsgrove. W.W. Norton, 296 pages, $26.95
W.E.B. du Bois's statement that "the problem of the Twentieth Century
is the problem of the color-line" has been quoted, cited, and
paraphrased so often that, by the century's end, it had passed beyond
bold prophecy into the safe realm of Great Thoughts. But has anybody
pointed out the historical irony of Du Bois's famous line? Here was
one of the century's most important American public intellectuals
emphatically announcing the problem, which other important public
intellectuals proceeded to ignore. John Dewey, Walter Lippmann, Lewis
Mumford, Reinhold Niebuhr, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Hannah
Arendt, Mary McCarthy--for all of them, race was at best an
occasional topic, hardly central to their work.
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