http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/ en-us 2010-03-15T20:21:15-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003066.php CHRIS MARKER’S SECOND LIFE Iggy Atlas: Why is this conversation on SL [Second Life] rather than in RL [real life]? Sergei Murasaki: I hope it’ll go faster. IA: How did you come to have an exhibition on SL? SM: Curiosity at first. Then it becomes addictive. IA: How so? SM: Have you read Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel? IA: No, neither of us have read it. Shame on us? SM: Well, it’s nothing to be proud of. In any event, it’s exactly the world of that masterpiece that I came to find in SL. IA: Can you describe it for us? SM: A dream state. The sense of porousness between the real and the virtual. IA: Actually, what has your experience been in this virtual world? SM: An example: when Serge told me there’d be two of you, my REFLEX was, “We’ll need a third chair.” Which in reality would be stupid, but isn’t here. IA: This island, the objects that are here, the Museum . . . Are you their creator and owner? SM: No, I’ve never been the owner of anything. Some Viennese friends took care of putting it all together. They’re pretty neat folks. IA: How much time do you spend on SL? SM: Not an enormous amount, because I still have LOTS of work in RL. But if I could . . . IA: If you could? SM: I would retire here for good. Like Brando in Tahiti. There’d be fewer worries in terms of maintenance. IA: How do you perceive the way in which this virtual space and its users have invented a life, an economy, a virtual commerce of things and monies? SM: The whole commerce aspect of it I find just as boring as I do in real life. Besides, I don’t understand it at all. But then again, I don’t understand the economy of the real world to begin with . . . IA: How does SL fit into the context of your artistic preoccupations? SM: I don’t believe I’ve ever had “artistic preoccupations.” I’m a cobbler. This is supercobbling. IA: What you’ve managed to cobble to date, when it was made, seems to have prophesized today’s technologies, almost as if it was conjuring them, don’t you think? SM: You really ought to lighten up your vocabulary. “Artistic,” “prophesize.” None of this is like me in the least. I think I’ll stick to cobbling, with all that’s inherently honorable in artisanal undertakings. IA: Doesn’t SL, and don’t all these new ways of communicating, let you indulge your proclivity for secrecy and mystery? SM: It would seem if you’re not on TV all the time, then you have a proclivity for mystery. Let’s just leave it at that. Though I did like that a critic, who wrote about the Zurich exhibition, said I was “born to be an avatar.” IA: Precisely. The choice of a pseudonym, your absence from the media, make so much sense in this enterprise, and the adopting of a new virtual avatar. SM: Are there any real avatars? IA: Masks? SM: Ah, that’s something else altogether. Max Jacob used to tell the story of two Masks who made a rendezvous, having never seen each other, naturally. And when they removed their masks, surprise: “It was neither one nor the other.” IA: Is an avatar or a pseudonym a mask for you? A way of creating a partition between your cobbling and what the rest of the world calls “a work,” “of art” . . . ? SM: I’m much more pragmatic than that. I chose a pseudonym, Chris Marker, that is easy to pronounce in most languages because I intended to travel. You need search no further than that. IA: But since then, you’ve created a character that’s universally considered to be an artist. SM: I never much worried about how I was considered. IA: The delocalized exhibition on SL is entitled “A Farewell to the Movies.” How should this farewell be interpreted? SM: Please . . . It’s “A Farewell TO Movies.” An homage to Hemingway. A way of saying farewell to cinema, undoubtedly, but without exaggerating. The constitutional right to contradict oneself was inscribed in the charter Baudelaire drew up. IA: From a farewell to arms to a farewell to films . . . Should we consider that film is an arm? SM: Of course not. That’s simply a euphonic correspondance. You must never attribute so much intentionality to me. IA: So . . . does cinema belong to the past? SM: One can play with that idea. Godard does it very well. But he is a filmmaker. IA: Have you never considered yourself a filmmaker? SM: Ne-ver. IA: What label would you prefer, then? Multimedia cobbler? SM: Cobbler, definitely. Multimedia . . . well, that belongs to contemporary jargon. IA: Will new technologies in some way modify your relationship to images, to sounds, and what you do with them? SM: Of course. To be able to make a whole film, The Case of the Grinning Cat [2004], with my own ten fingers, without any external support or intervention . . . and to then go sell the DVDs I’d burned myself at the Saint-Blaise market . . . I confess, I felt triumphant. From producer to consumer, directly. No surplus value. Marx’s dream come true. IA: Speaking of which, the exhibition mixes portraits of artists, images from older and more recent demonstrations, photos of political personalities. How would you define the relationship between your cobbling and what is commonly called ideology? SM: I’m afraid what is commonly called ideology no longer has any relationship at all with its original defintion. To begin with, it was a ruse of war. Today, it’s merely a substitute for a war that doesn’t exist. But we could go on about this at length . . . IA: Hasn’t your work always had a political dimension? SM: It has been said to. Myself, to put it in a nutshell, I’ve always said that politics, which is the art of compromise—and thank goodness for that—in no way interests me. What does interest me is history. I would add: “Politics interests me to the extent it cuts a slice into history.” But I hate repeating myself. IA: In films such as 2084, your work outlined a hypothetical future. Today, there’s talk of the end of ideologies, you’re saying farewell to films, Godard talks about the death of cinema, the real is no longer all there is . . . What has been eclipsed for you, even as other things have been born? SM: Malraux had a wonderful formula, which curiously no one has taken up: “The thing that is born where values die, and that does not replace them.” The difficulty of these times is that before bringing in new ideas, we’d have to destroy all the simulacra that the century and its favorite instrument, television, have generated to replace everything that has disappeared. This is why I’m passionate about the new information grid, the Internet, blogs, etc. Inevitably, there’s some slag, but a new culture will be born of it. Cobbling rene 2010-03-15T20:21:15-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003065.php Counterpunch Diary Relax, the Empire's in Safe Hands By ALEXANDER COCKBURN Are they really bumblers? The establishment’s opinion columns quiver with reproofs for maladroit handling of foreign policy by President Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, those who cherished foolish illusions that Obama’s election might presage a shift to the left in foreign policy fret about “worrisome signs” that this is not the case. It’s true that there have been some embarrassing moments. Vice President Biden, on a supposed mission of peace to Israel, is given the traditional welcome – a pledge by Israel to build more settlements, plus adamant refusal to reverse the accelerating evictions of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem. Hillary Clinton, touring Latin America, was not greeted with gobs of spit, like vice president Nixon back in 1958, but she did get a couple of robust diplomatic slaps from Brazil’s foreign minister, Celso Armorim, rejecting Mrs. Clinton’s hostile references to Venezuela and call for tougher action toward Iran. Amid detailed news reports of butchered activists in Tegucigalpa, Latin Americans and even some Democratic members of the U.S. Congress listened incredulously to Mrs. Clinton’s brazen hosannas to the supposedly violence-free election of Honduras’ new, U.S.-sanctioned President Lobo in a process to which both the Organization of American States and the European Union refused to lend the sanction of official observers. Meanwhile, China signals its displeasure at the U.S. with stentorian protests about Obama’s friendliness toward the Dalai Lama. The PRC continues its rumblings about shrinking its vast position in U.S. Treasury bonds. The Turks recall their ambassador from Washington in the wake of a vote in a U.S. congressional committee to recognize the massacre of the Armenians in 1916 as “genocide.” Russia signals its grave displeasure at Mrs. Clinton’s rejection, in a speech at the Ecole Militaire in Paris, of President Medvedev’s proposal to negotiate a new security pact for Europe. “We object to any spheres of influence claimed in Europe in which one country seeks to control another's future,” she said. Shortly before this categorical statement, Poland announced that the U.S. would deploy Patriot missiles on its territory, less than 50 miles from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea. US Analysis rene 2010-03-12T19:02:54-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003063.php An Interview with Eric Toussaint and Olivier Bonfond Will Capitalism Absorb the World Social Forum? By MARGA TOJO GONZALES From 21 January to 2 February 2010 Eric Toussaint and Olivier Bonfond, both involved in alterglobalization activism, members of the International Council of the WSF, of the world coordination of social movements, and of the international network CADTM[1] (Committee for the Abolition of the Third World Debt), participated in various international events and meetings in Brazil: international seminar of social movements (Sao Paulo, 21 - 23 January), international youth camp at Novo Hamburgo, international seminar entitled '10 years later: challenges and proposals for another possible world' organised by the Group of Reflection and Support for the WSF Process, that consists of several Brazilian organizations, among which IBASE, Ethos and Instituto Paulo Freire (Porto Alegre, 25 - 29 January 2010), the assembly of social movements (Porto Alegre, 29 January). Though they develop a critical analysis, Eric Toussaint and Olivier Bonfond consider that the World Social Forum can still act as a positive stimulant, but only in specific conditions. Interview. Marga Tojo Gonzales : 10 years after the first use of the catchphrase 'another world is possible,' a majority of humankind still live in subhuman conditions, and with the international financial crisis the situation has become even worse. Does this mean that the alterglobalist movement has failed? Interviews rene 2010-03-11T20:22:02-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003054.php Radical Philosophy 157 (September/October 2009) They the people Problems of alter-globalization Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak You have asked for current thinking about different concepts and forms of political collectivity.* If I were speaking as an academic, I would, I suppose, look once again at the implications of `multitudes', as conceived by our colleagues and allies Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. Speaking as an activist, however, I am obliged to say that the bold and indeed brave and intriguing notion of the multitude does not quite match up yet to the practical fact of the transformation of Antonio Gramsci's Modern Prince into what is too easily called international civil society. I will speak about the world's `people' as constructed by this haphazardly put together episteme, `international' by default. The developmental logic of the expression `international civil society' might be taken to run as follows: first step, `social' as opposed to `political' – in other words, movement as opposed to party; second step, non-governmental, effective social engagement as opposed to party politics; third step, a management-style decision not to use the negative (`non'-governmental), but to invent a positive, not-state-therefore-civil-society. The crucial political-theoretical fact that the emergence of `civil society' presupposed a certain type of social contract, which linked it to the production of an urbanity in a controlling relationship with a specific state, is completely ignored here. The importance of the bürgerliche Gesellschaft to the bourgeois state is therefore precisely forgotten, as the possibility of the welfare state as accountable is closed off more and more in the interest of a globalization that alter-globalization must accept in order to come into existence. This potted possible history is always in my mind as I use the expression `international civil society'.1 It is well known that Gramsci thought of the Party as the Modern Prince.2 As Laclau and Mouffe, and before them Christine Buci-Glucksmann, have pointed out, the ideas in Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, which he circled around in many different ways, are most often what Derrida has called pharmakon.3 Ideas like hegemony, the Party and indeed the state have the ambivalence of something that can be both poison and medicine. Gramsci's work is a blueprint for practical and epistemological activism. Parties still have a degree of archaic importance in local and national politics, with their local and national traditions, spiced by human intrigue. After the failure of state and revolution, in this era of world governance, the importance that Gramsci perceived in the intellectual formation called the Party, belonging to a democratic international socialism, has displaced itself. The mood of the Left is altogether in favour of what, twenty years ago, Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi and Terence Hopkins called `anti-systemic movements' – the then newish social movements – extra-state collective action to attend to problems neglected by state and party alike.4 Wallerstein's fear then was that they would seek state power. Now, these movements have gained so much strength that they bypass the state almost completely and provoke us into asking if they should take the helm of world governance. My title today is directed to their clientele. What is called terrorism can also be defined as extra-state collective action. George W. Bush attempted to take up arms against this from the point of view of the state. I will not here be able to consider how the `war on terror' haphazardly took the shape of international governance, in spite of the petulant and self-centralizing role of the USA. I would, however, like to draw a parallel between the war on terror and the control of migration. For just as the violent management of international extra-state violence was undertaken nationally by the United States of America and became internationalized, so migration is provoked * This is the text of a talk to the Radical Philosophy conference, Power to the People?, London, 9 May 2009. I should like to dedicate these few words to Professor Nanjundaswamy, valiant fighter against Cargill and Monsanto, who died in 2004, and who was imprisoned for destroying a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Bangalore, India in 1997. It was my great good fortune to spend some time with him that year. I could not join forces with him because, although we ourselves could converse in English, his field of operation was in the idiom of Kannada, the language of his native state, mine in Bengali. However, as I will argue here, linguistic diversity is not an obstacle to an effectively international socialism, but rather its constitutive double bind. 32 by globalization in a heterogeneous way, as can be seen in Amit Bhaduri's critical focus on what the Right calls `the managerial state', brought into being by the pressures of globalization.5 We live in an uneven world, determined by global and state-based imperatives, with geopolitical difference determined by history and geography, not yet inhabited by a multitude. Into this world steps the international civil society, `we the saviours', with its clientele of `they, the people', and a jubilant cry: `Another world is possible.' After Bernard Cassen's 2003 interview in New Left Review,6 we all know that the ATTAC (Association pour la Taxation des Transactions pour l'Aide de Citoyens) – the French organization at the helm of alter-globalization or the international integration of globalization – spawned the World Social Forum. But it is also possible to say that the World Social Forum is a necessary outcome of that slow failure of state and revolution, by internal and external forces, which is one of the major narratives of the past century. This décalage, between the efficient and the necessary cause of the World Social Forum, has created a radical philosophy that can allow for only a sentimental version of auto-critique, if at all; far indeed from the systemic goals of Marxism. The difference between `Another Europe is Possible' and `Another World is Possible' is a crucial part of this. The South and the North It was between the inception of the social movements in the 1980s and the founding of the ATTAC in 1998 that the slow appropriation of these movements by the forces of international capital and the recognition of so-called international civil society by our imperfect but venerable organization of world governance (I refer, of course, to the United Nations) took place, in 1994: the opening of the NGO forum at the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo. It is significant that the theme of the ICPD dealt with reproductive heteronormativity in the context of `development', which was blatantly an alibi for transnational capitalism, then even without any serious commitment to the figure of `sustainability', hovering over the nakedness of its double bind. Never had the real difference between North and South come clearer, and also, of course, the usefulness of acknowledging gender in this re-coding of `the people'.7 This is a supremely important point. None of the words in the subtitle of this conference – the people, proletariat, workers, masses, nations, communities, multitudes, commons – pays the slightest attention to gendering. But capitalism, as it freed labour, also produced what we recognize as feminism in the enlightened European eighteenth century. At last, in Cairo, the two came together as that crucial connection between town and state, included within Marx's own narrative, loosened. This is something that requires an Eighteenth Brumaire type of analysis of its own. I travelled with UBINIG that year, a Bangladeshi non-governmental organization that was not registered as an NGO, precisely because of the narrative I have laid out in the international context, and also because in the context of the poorer nation-states, the connections between the managerial state and the NGOs were in fact strong. In other words, UBINIG wanted to retain an older sense of `we the people', recoding ideological feudality in the tradition of a Rosa Luxemburg or a W.E.B. Du Bois theorizing the general strike, where the agent is the `worker'; not in terms of a strike, which would relate to the Gramscian concept of the Modern Prince, but as slowly creating another world – not as decreed by the whirlwind activism of the World Social Forum. We were working against pharmaceutical dumping on women's bodies; our sense of reproductive rights was against enforced sterilization. We could only be perceived as `consensus breakers' against the overwhelming Northern perception that the right to a legal abortion – which we strictly supported, of course – was the only right that could be mentioned in the draft resolution. As a member of the Asian Women's Human Rights Council, I wrote an open letter that year to Gro Harlem Brundtland, then chair of the World Commission on Environment and Development. I cite it here to give you a sense of what it is to think from the perspective of Bangladesh, to create a simulacrum of membership in a `we', rather than a distant obligation to a `they'. I am not Bangladeshi, I am Indian. The perspective is here a linguistic link that pre-dates artificial frontiers. The national language of India is not my mother tongue, but the national language of Bangladesh is. In order to come close to achieving a simulacrum of idiomatic continuity with oppressed groups so that the activism in a social movement can represent them as portrait – `we' – as well as proxy – for `us' – activists have to learn to inhabit the `lingual memory' of the oppressed. (The idea that the `oppressed themselves' agitate in the social movements is questionable.) Since the question of representation in the social movements is not subject to the abstract structures of state-run democratic procedure (for better or for worse), this is particularly important in this sphere and gives the lie to universalism in a practical way. Unless universalism is mediated by linguistic Resistance? rene 2010-02-27T08:11:25-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003053.php Even amongst the informed and querulous segments ( those who are so unsure about what to do with Maoist militancy and are concerned about the impact on democratic mass movements), there is limited awareness of the massive development work done by them--through mass organizations--because in the final analysis everyone is swept away by the mainstream media's continuous portrayal of them as violent militarists who swoop down from jungles and disappear into jungles after massive ambushes etc.. The steady work done by them in mobile education, health clinics, irrigation, culture work and parallel structures that have benefitted tribals --is not on the minds today. Maoists are simply enforcing the Directive Principles of the Indian constitution, which no one has done for 62 years. Not the government, not any other mass organization. Stuff like boiling water, enforcing minimum wages, digging irrigation canals, ensuring the end of continuous mistreatment of women by landlord culture is stopped and getting better price for agricultural produce. Everyone is caught up in discussing Kishenji, phone calls, faxes, deadlines etc....and the rogue manipulations of the teflon Indian home minister and former Enron lawyer PCChidambaram. Please take time out to listen to this 29 minute broadcast from New York FRSN. http://www.fsrn.org/audio/special-documentary-friday-december-25-2009/59\ 49 India rene 2010-02-27T08:08:42-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003052.php Petition - Freedom for six political prisoners in Serbia Petition text: His Excellency Boris Tadić, President of the Republic of Serbia Madame Slavica Đukić Dejanović, Speaker of the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia Premier Mirko Cvetković, Premier of the Government of the Republic of Serbia His Excellency Ambassador Vincent Degert, Head of the EU Delegation to the Republic of Serbia His Excellency Ambassador Constantin Yerocostopoulos, Special Representative of the General Secretary of the Council of Europe to the Republic of Serbia Petition FREEDOM FOR SIX POLITICAL PRISONERS IN SERBIA! In bringing this matter to your kind attention, we petition for dismissal of the indictment against Sanja Dojkić (19), Tadej Kurepa (24), Nikola Mitrović (29), Ivan Savić (25), Ratibor Trivunac (28) and Ivan Vulović (24) and/or for their release. These six young civil activists and union members from Belgrade have been in custody since September, 2009 under the charge of committing ‘an act of international terrorism’ for which, under the Criminal Code of the Republic of Serbia, a prison term of between three and fifteen years is foreseen. The trial will commence on 17th February 2010. Amplification I On 3rd and 4th September, 2009 police in Belgrade arrested six citizens suspected of having thrown two Molotov cocktails at the building of the Greek Embassy in Belgrade on 25th August, 2009, which caused minor material damage to a window frame and part of a window pane of the Embassy. The persons in question are young civil activists and union members: Sanja Dojkić (19), Tadej Kurepa (24), Nikola Mitrović (29), Ivan Savić (25), Ratibor Trivunac (28) and Ivan Vulović (24). Responsibility for this act was taken by the Crni Ilija [Black Ilija] group, unknown to the public until then, with the explanation that they had wanted thereby to direct attention to the case of the Greek activist Theodoris Iliopoulos, who was on a hunger strike in prison at that time. Although they were arrested under the suspicion of ‘causing general jeopardy’, the act for which the arrested persons were suspected was pre-qualified into ‘an act of international terrorism’, by which throwing two beer bottles filled with petrol was equalised with an act that the Criminal Code of the Republic of Serbia classifies alongside genocide, crimes against Humanity, war crimes against civil populations, organising and inciting the execution of genocide and war crimes, and aggressive war. It was ruled that the suspects be kept in custody for a month, which was then extended twice so that now (at the end of January) they have been incarcerated for almost five months. At the beginning of November, 2009 the final indictment was entered against the defendants, and that for an act of international terrorism, for which, according to the Criminal Code of the Republic of Serbia, a prison term of between three and fifteen years is foreseen. At the end of January, 2010 it was announced that the trial would begin at the High Court in Belgrade on 17th February 2010. rene 2010-02-27T08:05:37-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003051.php Squatting the Crisis Lina Dokuzović / Eduard Freudmann On the current protests in education and perspectives on radical change languages English Deutsch “We won’t pay for your crisis!” has echoed throughout universities worldwide. The significance of this is that the statement’s momentum has not only spread throughout educational institutions, but has also been present in other areas of society, bringing attention to the general failure of neoliberal capitalism and its appropriation of all spheres of life. What has been defined as the “crisis in education,” which should be remedied through a wave of reforms, has been dealt with in terms of economic crisis-based measures, with measures for increasing profit. A homogenization in the way of a reform wave has taken place through the Bologna Process for establishing the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). Through this regulated norm of educational standards of comparability, EUrope aims to enter and be at the forefront of the growing competitive knowledge economy and of research-based profit, through the parallel establishment of the European Research Area (ERA). The systematic removal of democratic structures in universities in Austria has been taking place with the implementation of the Bologna Process. Democratically elected bodies have been degraded to a kind of staff committee, while the dean’s office has been upgraded to a CEO-like singular leading body, which is checked and balanced by a university-external supervisory board, the so-called University Board. Universities are not only increasingly being run like corporations, but a smooth transition to what much of Anglo-American or international private schools have been subjected to is taking place. They are being run BY corporations. An example of corporate shareholder interest can be seen in the international media corporation, Bertelsmann, having recently sold their shares in Sony, stating they would begin investing into education instead, since it is becoming more profitable than the music industry.[1] Through the reform processes, an education economy with knowledge as a tradable commodity has been created. The result has not only been that education is considered profitable, but that education itself can be measured and sold. This correlates to the principles of the all-embodying privatization and commodification within neoliberal capitalism. In Australia, for example, one of EUrope’s major competitors in the international education market, education services ranked as the third largest export industry, behind coal and iron ore, according to 2006–07 figures.[2] The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna is squatted! Following the dissatisfaction resulting from a lengthy process of attempts to democratically negotiate the future of the institution, a public meeting was called by the Academy’s students and staff in front of its main building on October 20th, 2009. A statement was read out, which called for the reinstatement of the democratic structures that had been systematically removed in the course of establishing a system of increased competitiveness and commodification of the institution and everything within its walls. A list of precisely articulated demands was then read out to the dean. He was called on to fulfill his duty and represent the position of the institution rather than taking a gamble in his own professional and profitable interests, in the negotiation of the Budgetary Agreement with the Ministry of Science and Research, on the following day. A proclamation of solidarity was then expressed with all the protestors against educational reform around the world, which then included: Bangladesh, Brazil, Croatia, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, India, Iran, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Serbia, South Africa, South Korea and the USA. Subsequently, the approximately 250 individuals entered the building and occupied the assembly hall, the most representative space in the institution. The squatters installed a plenum in a grassroots democratic structure, whereupon it was decided that the space would remain occupied until the demands were met. Two days later, a group of Academy staff and students protested in front of the Ministry of Science and Research, expressing their dissatisfaction and rejection of the Budgetary Agreement, a legally-binding contract that defines the performance of the former in relation to the amount of financing by the latter, which was being negotiated in an entirely non-transparent and non-democratic fashion at that very moment. The demonstrating group continued to several other university auditoria and major spaces presenting the situation, bringing the students and staff present along with them, increasing the group’s size, snowballing, until it ended up in Austria’s largest lecture hall, where a plenum was held, declaring that space squatted. The representation and size of that space was significant, as it brought immediate media attention, which has focused primarily on the events of that singular space ever since, although over the following days, the protests expanded rapidly to a number of other universities throughout Austria and expanded to or joined those existing across Europe, bringing hundreds of thousands of people into the streets in protest. There are 76 universities in nine countries throughout Europe, with more being continually announced, squatted at this very moment.[3] Emancipatory speech and decentralization The processes within the context of the protests have taken place through a grassroots democratic structure of collective decision-making, carried out in regular plenums. Tasks and insights are assigned to work groups, which maintain a dynamic fluctuation of participants. The intention of non-hierarchical forms of communication, established through some basic rules, have aimed to encourage all those present to actively contribute to discussions. Since representing the protests is a task which no one person can or should accomplish alone, it is vital that no spokesperson(s) is/are selected, but rather that a consistent rotation of speakers takes place. The consequence is a low rate of NLP (neuro-linguistic programmed) speeches, presenting the demands and expressions of the groups in a manner which is not trained or conditioned. This form of direct communication represents an emancipatory speech act, because existing codes of commodified language and the sale of speech are rejected through the very mechanism of the act of speaking itself. Another significant element, resonating throughout the protests on all levels, has been decentralization. It has derived from the very process, which has taken place over recent years, of the de-democratization of universities within which all democratically-legitimized regulating bodies have been degraded to a pseudo-democratic facade, and thereby entirely disabled. The fact that the protests have not been led by individuals elected through procedures of representative democracy and have not been associated with parliamentary parties, left politicians, such as deans or the Minister of Science and Research perplexed, not knowing how to handle the protests. The decentralization not only refers to the aforementioned fluctuation, but also refers to direct actions, such as the temporary squatting of the vice dean’s office at the Academy of Fine Arts, squatting the cafeteria at the Ministry of Science and Research or taking over the stage during a play at the Burgtheater, Vienna’s most renowned theater. Academic Freedom? rene 2010-02-27T08:04:20-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003047.php The War on Consumers and Labor Heats Up Wall Street Moves in for the Kill By MICHAEL HUDSON Former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson wrote an op-ed in The New York Times yesterday, February 16 outlining how to put the U.S. economy on rations. Not in those words, of course. Just the opposite: If the government hadn’t bailed out Wall Street’s bad loans, he claims, “unemployment could have exceeded the 25 per cent level of the Great Depression.” Without wealth at the top, there would be nothing to trickle down. The reality, of course, is that bailing out casino capitalist speculators on the winning side of A.I.G.’s debt swaps and CDO derivatives didn’t save a single job. It certainly hasn’t lowered the economy’s debt overhead. But matters will soon improve, if Congress will dispel the present cloud of “uncertainty” as to whether any agency less friendly than the Federal Reserve might regulate the banks. Paulson spelled out in step-by-step detail the strategy of “doing God’s work,” as his Goldman Sachs colleague Larry Blankfein sanctimoniously explained Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Now that pro-financial free-market doctrine is achieving the status of religion, I wonder whether this proposal violates the separation of church and state. Neoliberal economics may be a travesty of religion, but it is the closest thing to a Church that Americans have these days, replete with its Inquisition operating out of the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Columbia. If the salvation is to give Wall Street a free hand, anathema is the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency intended to deter predatory behavior by mortgage lenders and credit-card issuers. The same day that Paulson’s op-ed appeared, the Financial Times published a report explaining that “Republicans say they are unconvinced that any regulator can even define systemic risk. … the whole concept is too vague for an immediate introduction of sweeping powers. …” Republican Senator Bob Corker from Tennessee was willing to join with the Democrats “to ensure ‘there is not some new roaming regulator out there … putting companies unbeknownst to them under its regime.” Paulson uses the same argument: Because the instability extends not just to the banks but also to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, A.I.G. and Wall Street underwriters, it would be folly to try to regulate the banks alone! And because the financial sector is so far-flung and complex, it is best to leave everything deregulated. Indeed, there simply is no time to discuss what kind of regulation is appropriate, except for the Fed’s familiar protective hand: “delays are creating uncertainty, undermining the ability of financial institutions to increase lending to businesses of all sizes that want to invest and fuel our recovery.” So Paulson’s crocodile tears are all for the people. (Except that the banks are not lending at home, but are shoveling money out of the U.S. economy as fast as they can.) As Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel put it, a crisis is too good a thing to waste. Having created the crisis, Wall Street wants to use its momentum to knock out any potential checks to its power. “No systemic risk regulator, no matter how powerful, can be relied on to see everything and prevent future problems,” Paulson explained. “That’s why our regulatory system must reinforce the responsibility of lenders, investors, borrowers and all market participants to analyze risk and make informed decisions,” In other words, blame the victims! The way to protect victims of predatory bank lending (and crooked sales of junk securities) is not new regulations but just the opposite: “to simplify the patchwork quilt of regulatory agencies and improve transparency so that consumers and investors can punish excesses through their own informed investing decisions.” Simplification means the Fed, not a Consumer Financial Protection Agency. the Meltdown rene 2010-02-18T09:01:56-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003042.php The Fourth Invasion Securing Disaster in Haiti By PETER HALLWARD Nine days after the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010, it's now clear that the initial phase of the U.S.-led relief operation has conformed to the three fundamental tendencies that have shaped the more general course of the island's recent history. It has adopted military priorities and strategies. It has sidelined Haiti's own leaders and government, and ignored the needs of the majority of its people. And it has proceeded in ways that reinforce the already harrowing gap between rich and poor. All three tendencies aren't just connected, they are mutually reinforcing. These same tendencies will continue to govern the imminent reconstruction effort as well, unless determined political action is taken to counteract them. I Haiti is not only one of the poorest countries in the world, it is also one of the most polarized and unequal in its disparities in wealth and access to political power.1 A small clique of rich and well-connected families continues to dominate the country and its economy while more than half the population, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), survives on a household income of around 44 U.S. pennies per day.2 Mass destitution has grown far more severe in recent decades. Starting in the 1970s, internationally imposed neo-liberal "adjustments" and austerity measures finally succeeded in doing what no Haitian government had managed to do since winning independence in 1804: in order to set the country on the road toward "economic development," they have driven large numbers of small farmers off their land and into densely crowded urban slums. A small minority of these internal refugees may be lucky enough to find sweatshop jobs that pay the lowest wages in the region. These wages currently average $2 or $3 a day; in real terms they are worth less than a quarter of their 1980 value. Haiti's tiny elite owes its privileges to exclusion, exploitation, and violence, and it is only violence that allows it to retain them. For much of the last century, Haiti's military and paramilitary forces (with substantial amounts of U.S. support) were able to preserve these privileges on their own. Over the course of the 1980s, however, it started to look as if local military repression might no longer be up to the job. A massive and courageous popular mobilization (known as Lavalas) culminated in 1990 with the landslide election of the liberation theologian Jean-Bertrand Aristide as president. Large numbers of ordinary people began to participate in the political system for the first time, and as political scientist Robert Fatton remembers, "Panic seized the dominant class. It dreaded living in close proximity to la populace and barricaded itself against Lavalas."3 Nine months later, the army dealt with this popular threat in the time-honored way—with a coup d'etat. Over the next three years, around 4,000 Aristide supporters were killed. However, when the U.S. government eventually allowed Aristide to return in October 1994, he took a surprising and unprecedented step: he abolished the army that had deposed him. As human rights lawyer Brian Concannon (director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti) observed a few years later, "It is impossible to overestimate the impact of this accomplishment. It has been called the greatest human rights development in Haiti since emancipation, and is wildly popular."4 In 2000, the Haitian electorate gave Aristide a second overwhelming mandate when his party (Fanmi Lavalas) won more than 90% of the seats in parliament. II More than anything else, what has happened in Haiti since 1990 should be understood as the progressive clarification of this basic dichotomy—democracy or the army. Unadulterated democracy might one day allow the interests of the numerical majority to prevail, and thereby challenge the privileges of the elite. In 2000, such a challenge became a genuine possibility: the overwhelming victory of Fanmi Lavalas, at all levels of government, raised the prospect of genuine political change in a context in which there was no obvious extra-political mechanism—no army—to prevent it. In order to avoid this outcome, the main strategy of Haiti's little ruling class has been to redefine political questions in terms of "stability" and "security," and in particular the security of property and investments. Mere numbers may well win an election or sustain a popular movement but as everyone knows, only an army is equipped to deal with insecurity. The well-armed "friend of Haiti" that is the United States knows this better than anyone. As soon as Aristide was re-elected, a systematic international campaign to bankrupt and destabilize his second government set the stage for a paramilitary insurrection and another coup d'etat. In 2004, thousands of U.S. troops again invaded Haiti (as they first did back in 1915) to "restore stability and security" to their "troubled island neighbor." An expensive and long-term UN stabilization mission, staffed by 9,000 heavily armed troops, soon took over the job of helping to pacify the population and criminalize the resistance. By the end of 2006, thousands more Aristide supporters had been killed. Over the course of 2009, a suitably stabilized Haitian government agreed to persevere with the privatization of the country's remaining public assets,5 veto a proposal to increase minimum wages to $5 a day, and bar Fanmi Lavalas (and several other political parties) from participating in the next round of legislative elections. When it comes to providing stability, today's UN troops are clearly a big improvement over the old national forces. If things get so unstable that even the ground begins to shake, however, there's still nothing that can beat the world's leading provider of security—the U.S. Armed Forces. Haiti rene 2010-01-30T13:44:16-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003041.php Fifty years later, Camus lives on Silence of a very grand grave by Robert Zaretsky Back in 1960 the New York Times reported that Albert Camus had died in a car crash, and that his body had been moved to a nearby town where the “Algerian-born writer’s body” was draped in a “large French flag”. Even in death the tension between France and Algeria, an opposition that haunted Camus his entire life, continued. How appropriate and how absurd that, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of his death this January, France was once again divided over his legacy. President Sarkozy’s efforts to inter Camus’s body in the Pantheon to mark this anniversary, have led voices on the left such as Olivier Todd, Camus’s biographer, to accuse Sarkozy of trying to hijack the writer’s legacy for his own political benefit. There were even charges in the French press of grave-robbing. Foreigners may think this absurd. But few writers wrestled as heroically with the absurd as Camus, and even fewer in the knowledge that they would inevitably fail. The absurdities begin with Camus’s proposed resting place, the Pantheon. Think of Mount Rushmore shrunk and shipped to Cooperstown. Looming over Paris, with “Aux grands hommes, la patrie reconnaissante” inscribed across its pediment, this neo-classical pile is dedicated to perpetuating the memory of, well, great men. (The only woman who got in was Marie Curie.) Yet, as soon as the ceremonial pomp and circumstance ends and the tombs close on these great men, their compatriots forget them. Victor Hugo, Jean Moulin, Emile Zola, Voltaire, Rousseau are known to most Frenchmen (and women). The other 70 or so residents are like character actors in old movies: we know we have seen them but cannot remember their names and won’t wait for the credits. Commissioned by Louis XV and designed by Jacques Soufflot, the Church of Sainte Geneviève had scarcely opened for business when the French Revolution kidnapped the limestone hulk and relabelled it the Pantheon. Over the next century, the building changed identities as often as France changed regimes. When a republic sent a king packing, the crosses were taken down and the famous inscription put back up; when a monarchy (or a Napoleon) returned, the inscription was removed and the crosses dusted off. Only in 1885, when the Third Republic lowered Victor Hugo into the building’s bowels, did the Pantheon become a republican shrine in perpetuity. While the nation’s thank you note to great men flickered on and off outside the dome, there was turmoil inside as well. For every newly minted grand homme, an older one was taken out of circulation. Robespierre and his fellow terrorists pushed out the first resident, le Comte de Mirabeau, soon after they inducted JP Marat. It was no accident that Mirabeau’s political moderation, unlike Marat’s bloody-minded fanaticism, was disliked by the Terror. Nor was it coincidental that, with Robespierre’s overthrow, Marat was hustled out the Pantheon’s back door. (He ended up in a neighbouring church and, contrary to popular belief, wasn’t chucked into the sewers.) France rene 2010-01-25T13:10:39-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003040.php Another revolution is possible: Foucault, ethics, and politics Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2007, volume 25, pages 191 Guest editorial It is time to think about revolution again. After the failures of the Russian revolution signaled by Stalin's defensive slogan, ``socialism in one country'' (every bit as oxymoronic as ``capitalism in one firm''), the 1960s reawakened a sense of revolution from some- thing of a slumber. New Year's eve in Havana, 1959, brought the Cuban revolution and over the next two decades an extraordinary series of events put revolution squarely back on the agenda: successful anticolonial struggles and preemptive declarations of independence in Africa and Asia (prefigured in the Asian subcontinent in 1947), Vietnamese opposition to imperialism, antiwar uprisings in various continents, the feminist revolt, the global crescendo of 1968, working-class rebellion from Santiago to London, antiracist and civil rights movements, the demise of fascism in Spain and Portugal, environmental and queer rebellions, Sandinista victory in Nicaragua, a workers' revolt turned clerical clampdown in Iran. Whatever the very real successes of these movements, they did not remain revolu- tionary and with only a few exceptionsöforemost Cuba, perhapsöthey did not dislodge the integument of capitalist social relations. On the contrary, the response to many of these challenges was the opposite: a forceful, often military, counterrevolution, often with US support, which eventually strengthened local capitalism under the banners of an emergent globalization and neoliberalism, injecting capitalist social relations deeper and deeper into the marrow of daily life. The reprise of capital after the mid-1970s therefore hastened another political retreat from revolution, and by the 1990s those who continued to think in terms of revolution or even speak its possibility seemed archaic, out of touch, hopelessly unrealistic (for an exploration, see Berlant, 1995). The truth today in the so-called advanced industrial world is that our stunted imaginations have largely lost the ability to think what a society other than capitalismöwith all its repressive and oppressive aspects, and spanning the gamut of social relations might look like. Resistance? rene 2010-01-24T19:14:34-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003039.php The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle By Scott Horton This is the full text of an exclusive advance feature by Scott Horton that will appear in the March 2010 Harper’s Magazine. The issue will be available on newsstands the week of February 15. 1. “Asymmetrical Warfare” When President Barack Obama took office last year, he promised to “restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great.” Toward that end, the president issued an executive order declaring that the extra-constitutional prison camp at Guantánamo “shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order.” Obama has failed to fulfill his promise. Some prisoners are being charged with crimes, others released, but the date for closing the camp seems to recede steadily into the future. Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama’s young administration with crimes that occurred during the Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously—and may even have continued—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006. Late in the evening on June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners. Guantanamo Bay rene 2010-01-24T10:59:08-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003038.php Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List 20/01/2010 by: Andy Worthington, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis On Friday, the ACLU secured a significant victory in its campaign to secure information about the prisoners held in the US prison at Bagram airbase, Afghanistan (known as the Bagram Theater Internment Facility), when the Pentagon released a list of the names of the 645 prisoners who were held on September 22, 2009. Even so, at first glance the document appears to be of little use. Names - spooling out like some randomly generated version of an Afghan census - are all that this heavily redacted list provided. When the FOIA request was first filed in April 2009, the ACLU asked the Obama administration "to make public records pertaining to the number of people currently detained at Bagram, their names, citizenship, place of capture and length of detention, as well as records pertaining to the process afforded those prisoners to challenge their detention and designation as 'enemy combatants.'" However, as Melissa Goodman, a staff attorney at the ACLU, explained in a statement accompanying the release of the list on Friday: Releasing the names of those held at Bagram is an important step toward transparency and accountability at the secretive Bagram prison, but it is just a first step ... Full transparency and accountability about Bagram requires disclosing how long these people have been imprisoned, where they are from and whether they were captured far from any battlefield or in other countries far from Afghanistan. Afghanistan rene 2010-01-24T10:56:18-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003036.php une biopolitique mineure entretien avec Giorgio Agamben entretien réalisé par Stany Grelet & Mathieu Potte-Bonneville Giorgio Agamben est philosophe. Il a notamment théorisé, dans la lignée de Foucault, la « biopolitique ». Une structure de pouvoir très ancienne, dont il fait remonter la généalogie à l’Antiquité occidentale et qui n’a cessé de s’épandre depuis, jusqu’à devenir la forme dominante de la politique dans les États modernes : un « état d’exception devenu la règle ». L’objet propre de la biopolitique, c’est la « vie nue » (zôè), qui désignait chez les Grecs « le simple fait de vivre », commun à tous les êtres vivants (animaux, hommes ou dieux), distincte de la « vie qualifiée » (bios) qui indiquait « la forme ou la façon de vivre propre à un individu ou un groupe ». L’objet de la souveraineté, selon Giorgio Agamben, c’est non pas la vie qualifiée du citoyen, bavard et bardé de droits, mais la vie nue et réduite au silence des réfugiés, des déportés ou des bannis : celle d’un « homo sacer » exposé sans médiation à l’exercice, sur son corps biologique, d’une force de correction, d’enfermement ou de mort. Au modèle de la cité, censé régir la politique occidentale depuis toujours, il oppose celui du camp, « nomos de la modernité », paradigme de cette « politisation de la vie nue » qui est devenu l’ordinaire du pouvoir. La structure de la politique occidentale, nous dit-il, ça n’est pas la parole, c’est le ban [1]. Cette thèse a une actualité évidente. Les mesures de santé publique, de mise au travail, de contrôle de l’immigration ou la prohibition des drogues révèlent la nature éminemment biopolitique des politiques publiques contemporaines. Elles s’appliquent précisément à des vies nues prises dans les catégories et les dispositifs d’un pouvoir qui les traitent comme telles - vies exposées et administrées. On pense immédiatement aux sans-papiers, bien sûr, objets de camps très littéraux, très réels. Mais aussi aux usagers de drogues, enjoints au soin ou incarcérés ; aux chômeurs, enjoints au travail ou condamnés à la misère d’un welfare de plus en plus chiche ; ou bien d’autres. Ça n’est sans doute pas un hasard si les récents débats sur le PACS ont vu la prolifération de métaphores animalières. Au Parlement même, cœur théorique des cités parlementaires, le bios cède le pas à la zôè dès qu’on légifère sur des vies. Mais Giorgio Agamben ne s’en tient pas à un diagnostic conceptuel. À plusieurs reprises, il appelle et annonce, d’une manière assez prophétique, une « autre politique » [2]. Celle-ci se déploiera nécessairement au lieu même où s’exerce la souveraineté moderne, parce qu’on n’y échappe pas. Celle-ci, pour être « autre », devra sinon s’en abstraire, du moins l’affronter, ou le subvertir. Or il se pourrait bien que les groupes les plus exposés au biopouvoir soient en train, depuis l’expérience qu’ils en font et les résistances qu’ils lui opposent, d’inventer l’alternative que Giorgio Agamben appelle de ses vœux. Pris dans les appareils du biopouvoir, sans véritable opportunité d’en sortir (comme échapper au pouvoir médical lorsqu’on est atteint par le VIH, à l’administration du welfare lorsqu’on n’a pas de revenus, aux guichets des préfectures, aux centres de rétention ou aux zones d’attente lorsqu’on n’a pas de papiers, etc. ?), ces groupes inventent une biopolitique mineure, en contrepoint de celle de l’adversaire. En revendiquant de quoi vivre : des traitements anti-rétroviraux, un revenu minimum garanti, des drogues légales et sûres, etc. En affrontant le pouvoir là où il s’exerce : au guichet des administrations, dans les bureaucraties sanitaires, dans les tribunaux ordinaires, etc. En cherchant, en quelque sorte, le bios de leur zôè. Si nous avons souhaité vous rencontrer, c’est en particulier pour vous interroger sur « l’autre versant », si l’on peut dire, de la biopolitique dont vous parlez. Un certain nombre de mouvements - ceux, précisément, dont nous sommes issus ou dont nous sommes proches : celui des sans-papiers, celui des précaires, celui des malades du sida ou celui, émergent, des usagers de drogues - se déploient exactement dans le lieu politique que vous avez identifié : dans cette zone d’indictinction « entre public et privé, corps biologique et corps politique, zôè et bios », dans cet « état d’exception qui est devenu la règle ». Or de ces mouvements vous parlez peu, ou indirectement. Ils rôdent entre vos lignes, mais plutôt comme objets (des camps, du welfare ou du pouvoir médical) que comme sujets. Vous analysez avec précision la biopolitique majeure, celle de l’ennemi, dont vous tracez minutieusement la généalogie, dont le foyer, dites-vous, serait cet « homo sacer », vie nue exposée au pouvoir souverain, et dont vous examinez attentivement les dispositifs, comme le camp ; mais vous délaissez les biopolitiques de riposte ou de réappropriation, les biopolitiques mineures, « notre » biopolitique, pour ainsi dire : celle d’AC !, des collectifs de sans-papiers ou d’Act Up. Vous en pensez pourtant la possibilité, et la nécessité : « C’est », dites-vous, « à partir de ce terrain incertain, de zone opaque d’indifférenciation, que nous devons aujourd’hui retrouver le chemin d’une autre politique, d’un autre corps, d’une autre parole. Je ne saurais renoncer sous aucun prétexte à cette indistinction entre public et privé, corps biologique et corps politique, zôè et bios. C’est là que je dois retrouver mon espace - là, ou en nul autre lieu. Seule une politique partant de cette conscience peut m’intéresser. » Mais vous n’explorez pas les formes concrètes de lutte qui pratiquent, précisément, la politique depuis cette conscience - et cette expérience - de l’état d’exception. Or n’y a-t-il pas là, justement, lorsque des chômeurs réclament un revenu garanti, lorsque des malades du sida exigent des traitements, ou lorsque des usagers de drogue revendiquent des drogues sûres, l’embryon de cette autre biopolitique que vous appelez de vos vœux ? Dans un sens, il faudrait plutôt renverser la question. C’est plutôt des acteurs en question qu’il faudrait attendre une réponse. Cela dit, si les mouvements et les sujets dont vous parlez « rôdent entre mes lignes plutôt comme objets que comme sujets », c’est que je vois là un problème majeur : la question du sujet, précisément, que je ne peux concevoir qu’en terme de processus de subjectivation et de désubjectivation - ou plutôt comme un écart ou un reste entre ces processus. Qui est le sujet de cette nouvelle biopolitique, ou plutôt de cette biopolitique mineure dont vous parlez ? C’est un problème toujours essentiel dans la politique classique, lorsqu’il s’agit de trouver qui est le sujet révolutionnaire, par exemple. Il y a des gens qui continuent de poser ce problème dans le sens ancien du terme : celui de la classe, du prolétariat. Ce ne sont pas des problèmes obsolètes, mais dès qu’on se pose sur le nouveau terrain dont on parle, celui du biopouvoir, de la biopolitique, le problème est autrement difficile. Parce que l’État moderne fonctionne, me semble-t-il, comme une espèce de machine à désubjectiver, c’est-à-dire comme une machine qui brouille toutes les identités classiques et, dans le même temps, Foucault le montre bien, comme une machine à recoder, juridiquement notamment, les identités dissoutes : il y a toujours une resubjectivation, une réidentification de ces sujets détruits, de ces sujets vidés de toute identité. Aujourd’hui, il me semble que le terrain politique est une espèce de champ de bataille où se déroulent ces deux processus : en même temps destruction de tout ce qui était identité traditionnelle - je le dis sans aucune nostalgie bien sûr - et resubjectivation immédiate par l’État ; et pas seulement par l’État, mais aussi par les sujets eux-mêmes. C’est ce que vous évoquiez dans votre question : le conflit décisif se joue désormais, pour chacun de ses protagonistes, y compris les nouveaux sujets dont vous parlez, sur le terrain de ce que j’appelle la zôè, la vie biologique. Et en effet il n’en est pas d’autre : il n’est pas question, je crois, de revenir à l’opposition politique classique qui sépare clairement privé et public, corps politique et corps privé, etc. Mais ce terrain est aussi celui qui nous expose aux processus d’assujettissement du biopouvoir. Il y a donc là une ambiguïté, un risque. C’est ce que montrait Foucault : le risque est qu’on se réidentifie, qu’on investisse cette situation d’une nouvelle identité, qu’on produise un sujet nouveau, soit, mais assujetti à l’État, et qu’on reconduise dès lors, malgré soi, ce processus infini de subjectivation et d’assujettissement qui définit justement le biopouvoir. Je crois qu’on ne peut pas échapper au problème. Interviews rene 2010-01-24T10:23:11-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/003035.php True that one cannot judge the future of this presidency on the first year alone (though clearly, an immense opportunity for pushing through significant changes on the military and financial ends of policy have been missed). And one can speak of structural problems, of the impossibility for any single person, including a president, from confronting all of the forces lined up in favor of corporate/military domination in this country. But neither of these concessions can be an excuse for avoiding a glaring reality: the current form of representative democracy shared between two ruling parties in the United States (especially given the recent rulings on campaign financing) offer no way out of this impasse. What the answer out of this impasse is, remains to be experimented with. Unplugging from "the political" as it is understood conventionally seems suicidal. It is this apparent suicide that is used as blackmail by the liberal parties the world over, to convince people to vote for their parties. Moreover, building a grass-roots party in increasingly corporate controlled media and corporately infused subjectivities would need some pretty incredible organizing (or subjectivation processes?). One option this article does not explore is wide spread revolt and insurrection. But I suppose, even in that case, a lack of organization can always be used by a few people, to usurp the work of the multitudes (as witnessed in many parts of the former-communist-socialist east). So the question of organization remains to be thought, but on what scale and how to build upon association or affinity or common interest while avoiding centralization? - gdr Don't Look Back Just Walk Away From the Democrats By RON JACOBS The left needs to organize the unorganized. The working people, the unemployed, the young, and the restless. The right wing has their core group of supporters who organize around fear of the other. The liberals have those who believe in the myth of American equality because they have no class analysis. The Left needs to organize the rest and they need to do so without the Democratic Party. It should be quite clear to almost every left-leaning American by now that the Democrats are nothing more than another wing of the party that works for Wall Street and the Pentagon. To continue to work for and elect their candidates is self-defeating. As the first year of the Obama presidency has clearly shown, not only do the Democrats support the right wing agenda, that support makes it easier for the right wing to put their candidates into power. Why? Because after promising progressive reforms and then failing to deliver, voters tend to either not vote or vote for the right wing candidates out of anger and frustration. This occurs because the current system provides no alternative. There is no progressive third party or grassroots movement to support such a party. There is not even a grassroots movement that vocalizes the desires of millions for a fair and just society where people's needs come before Wall Street's profits and the Pentagon's wars that help protect and expand those profits. So, the Democrats step in as they have always done and pretend that they are the party that will address these desires. There was a time when such an argument was plausible. From FDR to LBJ, the Democrats were the party that passed many reforms making life better for America's working people. They even passed bills outlawing racial segregation. Of course, this occurred because of immense pressure from the Left--pressure a hundred times greater than the pressure from America's right that the Democrats claim has caused them to compromise on virtually every progressive piece of legislation during the current period. Yes, there was a time when that claim could have been made. 2008 Election rene 2010-01-24T10:10:52-05:00