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Reading Nietzsche Like a Loser

For a long time people have said that to really think with Nietzsche is to think against him. Yet, as it stands, so many of the writers, philosophers and critics who draw on him or self-identify as "Nietzscheans" rarely, if ever, seek to contest the rhetoric or dominant narratives of strength and superiority in his writings. Surely anyone who has read Nietzsche will be familiar with the seductiveness of his prose and the remarkable ease with which one can --- consciously or not --- identify with the powerful and the masterly. Nonetheless, in spite of this well-known aspect of reading him, it has not been until quite recently that writers on Nietzsche have begun to question the apparent failure to resist this temptation and what broader implications it has on understandings of his thought.

Over at The New Inquiry, David Winters has reviewed Malcolm Bull's new book Anti-Nietzsche, which takes this question centrally and, in an astonishing twist, exhorts us to try and "read Nietzsche like a loser." That is, he encourages us to read Nietzsche's texts through a process of consciously dis-identifying with its dominant perspective and, rather than simply reproducing the relations of dominance it posits, enter into a critical engagement against the grain of the work. For Bull, to do this is to seriously attend to the radical ideas under the surface of Nietzsche's writings, and, crucially, to open oneself up to the radical force and political salience of his thought today.

In his review, Winters notes that,

Bull begins a sort of thought experiment, although it's far from an arid theoretical exercise - at times its tone approaches that of Swiftian satire. To read Nietzsche like a loser, Bull reasons, is not to reject his arguments but to accept them, even at their most reprehensible. If Nietzsche wants to write about rising above the herd or enslaving the weak, then he's welcome to. Only, in following his flights of fancy, we're not to fall into the trap of identifying ourselves with his fictional victors. Rather, Bull says that we must "make ourselves the victims" of these texts. We should side with the slaves, the sick, the defeated, at all times turning Nietzsche's arguments against ourselves. In this way we can depart from Nietzsche "without having to meet him again," reading for victory neither with nor over him but only ever over ourselves. To read like a loser is to refuse to collude in a fiction of dominance.

Visit the New Inquiry to read the review in full.

Paul Mason on Democracy Now!: "The underpinnings of this new global unrest"

This morning, Paul Mason appeared on Democracy Now! for a long discussion about the Eurozone, austerity, and the protests that are about to sweep Greece as they await another massive bailout. Drawing from his recent journalism for the BBC and his new book Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, Mason highlights the deeper unrest that is the source of these protests, and points toward the often ignored human costs that underlie the riots that otherwise dominate our mainstream news-cycles.

What doesn't make so many headlines is what is happening to real people. We're living in a time where the world has, in the last couple of years, erupted in a way many people thought they would never see again since the 1960s. The underpinnings of this new global unrest are, from Cairo to Greece to NYC to Albuquerque, people are sick of seeing the rich get richer during a crisis- that's what they're sick of."

Visit Democracy Now! to listen in full and for a complete transcript of the interview.

"Business as Usual"?: Paul Mason and the Graduate without a Future

A young generation of digital natives are "revolting against...the processing of information", according to Paul Mason in a recent interview with New Scientist, and it is having global repercussions, shaking both tyrants and the world economy.

The revolts of the Arab Spring, as well as uprisings in Greece and angry protests against austerity across Europe, are different in their make-up from earlier political rebellions and revolutions, says Mason, and this is largely due to the technological developments which are allowing rapid communication and non-centralised organisational opportunities.

Mason recognises that the shift technological development has engendered is more than an organisational issue, however. It is also changing popular demands for the forms of organisation people want, and enabling self-organisation to help, for example, aid charities provide services more effectively, or build sustainable, tech-aware slums. Technology is leveling power and access to information simultaneously:

The reason that this horizontalism is such a prevalent ideology is because the technology and the expanded power of the individual allow you to create something in between: areas of autonomy, either in your personal life, online, or among a smaller community.

Reviewing Mason's new book in the New Statesman, George Eaton suspects that, whilst non-hierarchical decision-making processes may have taken off and launch groups like UK Uncut and Occupy into the lime-light, they are failing to produce any concrete results in terms of policy:

It was the National Trust that forced the biggest U-turn of the coalition government's first year in office, over the attempted privatisation of forests.

Despite that, Eaton is thrilled by Mason's "compulsively vivid style" and the renewed upsurge in popular social movements it depicts:

After years in which the parameters of political debate narrowed, however, there is something thrilling about the chance to have such discussions again.

It's a position that Dan Hancox, writing in Frieze, picks up, with perhaps a little more enthusiasm:

This can be an optimistic moment. New definitions of democracy, and entire new political economies can be forged from the ashes of Lehman Brothers, and from the ashes of the London riots – shaped from the ground up.

Hancox draws on Paul Mason's conception of a "graduate with no future" being a common trope of protests from the UK to Egypt, arguing that such a generation is having it's political horizons shaped by being bought up in a "post-political" era, where hope for social change was cashed-in, in return for a promise of a gradual improvement in living standards over a lifetime. That promise is gone, Hancox says; "‘Business as usual' has created this proto-Utopian generation: because it will leave them worse off than their parents". Mason

...has argued that the primary catalyst connecting 2011's global crises and uprisings was exactly these people... What he might have gone on to say is that well-educated young people with no future are liable to create one for themselves - and perhaps, for everyone.

Visit the New Scientist to read the interview in full.

Visit the New Statesman to read George Eaton's review in full.

Visit Frieze to read Dan Hancox's article in full.

A Civil State of Emergency—a photoessay by Ariella Azoulay

Jeff Wall, Citizen, 1996, black-and-white photograph, 71 1/4 x 92 1/8".

CITIZEN

The man sleeping in a public park in Jeff Wall's Citizen, 1996, represents an act of criticism, a transgression of borders, an inspiring example of both potential and practical citizenship. Ever since seeing Wall's photograph at Documenta 10 in 1997, whenever I see anyone asleep in a public park-whether someone homeless or someone, like the man in this image, who looks like he or she has a home to go to-I cannot help thinking of him or her as claiming a share in a public space. And if citizens can assert their right to sleep in public, they can also rebel against a sign prohibiting the erection of tents, such as the one that addresses visitors to Manhattan's Zuccotti Park.

Occupy Wall Street activists in Zuccotti Park, New York, September 18, 2011. Photo: Tess Scheflan/Activestills.

CITIZENS

It obviously makes no sense to speak of the massive outpouring of citizens into the streets in Cairo, Madrid, Tel Aviv, and New York merely as a deliberate flouting of municipal regulations. Many people, no doubt including some who are protesting now, would in normal times and under normal circumstances sympathize with what Zuccotti Park's owners wrote to the New York police commissioner:

The protesters have set up living spaces with tarpaulins, mattresses, sleeping bags, tables, bookshelves, gasoline-powered generators and other items that are inconsistent with the rules and normal public use of the Park. At all hours of the day and night, protesters are sleeping on benches and walkways, blocking normal pedestrian access to the general public and preventing cleaning and maintenance workers from performing necessary upkeep. When not blocked by protesters, the walkways throughout the Park are blocked by the various items and equipment brought to the Park by the protesters.

In response to the owner's complaints, the demonstrators began to clean the park with the same dedication with which they would tidy their own homes. Indeed, the very fact of crowds carrying out in the open activities that usually take place in the intimacy of the home-sleeping, doing the dishes, preparing food, etc.-radically disrupts the relations between these two spheres. Rather than seeking to abolish the boundary between them, however, the civil struggle that has been spreading to the West from the Arab world seeks to restore these domains, but differently from how they have previously been instituted. In the US and elsewhere it is evident that neoliberalism promoted a two-faced process: Private space became unaffordable for many citizens, while the privatization of the public realm reached a point where citizens' use of it for all but the most passive purposes became an infringement of the law.

Until the public realm benefits all of society and the right to affordable housing is secured, occupiers around the world will not leave voluntarily, and they will insist on populating public space with the clusters of private zones they have instituted through tents, mats, and plastic sheets. Their demands cannot be fulfilled within the existing structure of corporate democracy or the nation-state; they amount to a call for a radical change in the ways the world is shared, a call for a regime in which the interests and well-being of the entire population-not only those the government defines as citizens-find expression in a new civil language and set the stakes for a new politics.

Occupy Wall Street activists, Wall Street, New York, September 18, 2011. Photo: Tess Scheflan/Activestills

MAKING SIGNS

I propose that we interpret the act of constructing private space in the heart of public space as the declaration of a civil state of emergency. Rather than any government, citizens themselves have declared this state of emergency-which is also a demand for the reorganization of the polis, the environment in which they live.

A civil state of emergency is very different from a demonstration or local strike. It is the suspension of the existing state of affairs, in which the law has deprived citizens of access to both private and public space. The declaration of this state of emergency also means that the duration of this occupation will not be determined within the logic of the present regime but by the citizens themselves. The people will no longer support a regime that has sanctified the corporation and the nation, which has forgotten the citizens whom it is supposed to serve and for whom it should exist. One image typical of the occupation movements is the annotated photograph with a caption or slogan, such as HOW MANY WALL STREET THUGS DOES IT TAKE TO BRUTALIZE A WOMAN? Another is the sign worn on the body: A cardboard surface that conveys a complaint or a proposal has become a necessary accessory in the city square. Rather than the bulk-printed posters that used to be distributed at demonstrations, each individual protester now has his or her own sign, with a personal justification for participating in the declaration of a state of emergency. This form of occupying public space enables citizens to learn about themselves from one another-and to understand what they experience privately as a part of a general structure of oppression, unbounded by the city or even the country in which they live.

Occupy Wall Street protesters in Times Square, New York, October 15, 2011. Photo: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters.

OCCUPY TIMES SQUARE

One would think that a large protest needs a large square, but New York's Zuccotti Park is a small plaza, where, moreover, protesters have been allowed to assemble only under limited conditions. Yet even a small public park can, contrary to the laws of physics and the market, expand and grow seemingly endlessly-providing more and more room for teach-ins, a public kitchen, a library, a first-aid area, performance spaces, and, crucially, encounters with many strangers. The bustling activity in which thousands of protesters partake daily is a kind of language, one diametrically opposed to the regimenting and compartmentalizing language of sovereign power, which separates citizens from one another and-out of fear of the consequences-seeks to prevent their contingent gathering to share a public space. After a recent visit to Zuccotti Park, I stood on the sidewalk in order to photograph the square from the outside. At once, a policeman-one of dozens surrounding the park-pounced on me and ordered me away, claiming that on the sidewalk "you have to keep walking." This was of course a lesson in the language of sovereign power: as if standing on a sidewalk were against the law!

The distance between these two languages was in plain view on the evening of October 15, the "global day of protest." In New York, Times Square then became the site of occupation. Tens of thousands of demonstrators were crowded on the sidewalks behind mobile fences, facing one another yet separated, as hundreds of policemen with shiny plastic handcuffs paced the streets, which were demonstrably emptied of citizens. Once in a while a vehicle drove slowly down Broadway, as if to prove that demonstrators would not be allowed to disrupt the city's traffic. The language of the sovereign was spoken univocally in the space between the groups of protesters, and the police clearly enjoyed making use of all the means at their disposal to make it difficult for the citizens to declare a civil state of emergency-yet this is exactly what they nevertheless managed to do.

The violent dismantling of the encampment in Oakland, California, in October was another expression of the fact that the civil use of public space is incompatible with the present political order. When citizens no longer have a place in the polis, they declare a state of civil emergency each time they reoccupy the commons and assert their right to use it.

The forgotten language that citizens have begun to relearn-the language of bodies, of chanting in groups, of demands and complaints-will not be easily extinguished. People are eager to use it and to improvise with it, and its silencing will require more than plastic cuffs, tear-gas grenades, and rubber bullets. And we are learning, from one city after another, that this new civil language does not need much in order to spread: It is contagious.

Which of these two languages will win? Time will tell. Even the fact that one has no choice these days but to say, "Time will tell," shows that perhaps we are indeed standing at the threshold of a kind of revolution, driven forward by the continuous articulation of a new language, in public and by the public.

Signs attached to Tent 48 during a protest, Rothschild Boulevard, Tel Aviv, July 29, 2011. Photo: Oren Ziv/Activestills.

TENTS

The Arab Spring did not pass Israel by. When it arrived in the streets of Tel Aviv this past summer, the life of Palestinians under the Israeli regime was not a central issue. But for almost the first time since the founding of the state of Israel, citizens challenged the national agenda, in which keeping the Palestinians on the threshold of catastrophe has played a major role. The protesters' numerous demands meant that in every single encampment in Israeli cities, one major principle took root-to allow for heterogeneous claims and to reject any exclusionary stake. In the context of Israeli apartheid, this is itself a radical position: It transformed the demonstrators' demands for "social justice" into a universal claim. And the choice of Israeli citizens to occupy public space with tents cannot be separated from the tent being itself already a vehicle of meaning, a kind of statement in use in the local sovereign language. The very walls of a Palestinian house are penetrable by Israeli force. Given the risk of demolition of their homes, Palestinians may turn into tent dwellers at any given moment. For the Israeli regime, the tent is considered the natural home of Palestinians, their predicament, the essence of their very existence.

In choosing the tent, Israeli protesters replicated a symbol of the state's oppression of the Palestinian population, but in doing so, they inverted its signification, turning it into a challenge to the political system. Among other things, they were demanding recognition of the "regime-made disaster" that has been ongoing since Israel's foundation, the destruction of landscapes and environments, the damage to cities and villages, the invasions and distortions of public and private space-all of which affect the entire governed population. Now, when the whole world chooses the verb occupy to designate the reclamation of civil rights in public space, the need to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the need to "reoccupy" public space all over the world are linked more clearly than ever. One sign carried by a woman at a recent protest spells it out: OCCUPY WALL ST. NOT PALESTINE.

Protesters in the Puerta del Sol, Madrid, October 15, 2011. Photo: Dominique Faget/AFP Getty Images.SHARING THE STREETS

The growing vocabulary of the new civil language includes models of sharing and allocation, forms of learning and listening, amplification through the "human microphone" and communication through hand signals, procedures for the distribution of food and other goods, logistics of recycling and site maintenance, participatory decision making, the redefinition of leadership and struggle, solidarity with populations whose dispossession is conceived as a symptom of a more widespread regime, new approaches to the flexible distribution of space and the exercise of authority, and public dancing and singing. This language cries out for public space, and it cannot be articulated only in the hours and locations permitted by the police. So its speakers, every day and all over the world, occupy more and more spaces. Sometimes they assemble for a specific purpose, as when Bostonians resolved to occupy the local Goldman Sachs offices, or demonstrators in Tel Aviv created a human chain to protest against the deportation of migrant workers. But even when their momentary aim is only loosely defined, citizens are performing a civil language, and in so doing, they recognize its power and learn its possibilities.

This essay first appeared in the December 2011 issue of Artforum. Reprinted with their kind permission.

Translated from Hebrew by Tal Haran.

Ariella Azoulay is Director of the Photo-Lexic International Research Group at the Minerva Center at Tel Aviv University. A Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography will be published in July 2012.

The Concrete Facts of Love: Investigating Sex in the Observer

Despite occuring over 80 years ago, the discussions in Investigating Sex feel refreshingly contemporary in their frankness, according to Zoe Strimpel in the Observer- although the attitudes towards women feel more than dated.

Occuring between 1928 and 1932, this series of round-table talks only occasionally featured women, something that comes across very clearly in the focus and timbre of the debate:

Whether the surrealists had much experience or understanding of women as people, rather than as sex objects, is something I remain unsure about.

The futility of the conversations are noted, also. The surrealist discussions sat uncomfortably across the boundaries of art, science and psychoanalysis, failing to score direct hits in any discipline, but revealing much about themselves as thinkers, creative practioners and (mainly) men of their time. As JoAnn Wypijewski notes in her introduction:

It is good, by the way, that the 'Recherches' fail as science. What the pages that follow reproduce is vivid, unruly. Most, and best of all, it is embarrassing. Science is not embarrassing.

With its heated and highly subjective musings on what is to be "feminine", its offensive caricatures of homosexual men and its faux-rebellious brashness on subjects such as masturbation and contraception, Strimpel astutely observes that the discussions within Investigating Sex bear more that a passing resemblance to"the brunch chats in Sex and the City". Still, says Strimpel, "readers are in for a treat: a cascade of opinion, at times insightful, frequently infuriating, often comedic."

Visit the Observer to read the review in full.

Costas Lapavitsas on escaping the Eurozone Crisis

The myth of Greek profligacy must be broken, according the Costas Lapavitsas, in order to confront the problems in the Eurozone. Rather, the current crisis in Europe must be traced back to a global crisis which has been "deflected through the institutions of the monetary union". It is the divergent competitiveness of the periphery states that has led to the current account imbalances, the structural surpluses and deficits. An unbalanced monetary union has led to debt accumulation, not a bloated public sector.

Lapavitsas outlines the response of the EU to the situation across the European periphery states- the PIIGS, as they are known (an acronym for Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain), who find themselves in different stages of crisis. The first response is to try to reverse the accumulation of public debt by stabilising the economies of those countries through a heavy-handed austerity programme, crushing unit labour costs to destroy the competitiveness gap between the periphery and the core. The second response is a classic neoliberal blood-letting technique, removing regulation and introducing further privatisation in order to promote growth.

The problem with such a policy, according to Lapavitsas, is simple: it isn't working. What emerged as a banking crisis was shifted onto the public sector, but is threatening to return to the financial sector as banks become tied to national economies.

Lapavitsas, at an event at SOAS with Paul Mason, George Irvin and Stathis Kouvelakis, chaired by Seumas Milne, then discusses possible escape routes for crisis, including the threat of national solutions to international problems, and the rise of popular social movements.

Lapavitsas' new book, forthcoming in May 2012, is the first analysis of the Eurozone crisis – with a controversial call to break up the Eurozone to stop the debt crisis. Crisis in the Eurozone offers a radical critique of the economic structures that are overseeing the destruction of national economies on the periphery of Europe, and controversially posits a possible solution: a debtor-led, democratic default on sovereign debt bolstered by the forces of civil society and organised labour.

Visit the Research on Money and Finance website to read the report in full.

JSA + Expenses: The Future of Work?

As youth unemployment raises to well over 1 million, with little sign of a crest to that wave of misery, Tesco offer a chink of light. A dream job: a permanent placement (no pension) working nights (no sick pay) with training (30 hours per week). The wage? Nothing. But, if you don't take it, you're liable to have your benefits and job seekers allowance removed for up to 6 months.

Effectively, working 30 hours a week for your JSA will give you an hourly wage of £2.25 (or £1.78 p/h if you're one of the 1.04 million unemployed youth). Welcome to Workfare Britain.

From May to November last year over 24,000 jobseekers were forced to engage in Mandatory Work Activity (MWA), for 30 hours per week, providing participating corporations with hundreds of thousands of hours of free labour each week, according to the Guardian. There was also a high variance in ethnic minorities forced into unpaid labour, with 24% of those involved coming from ethnic minorities, as opposed to 13% on voluntary "work experience" schemes. Under MWA any recipient of Job Seekers Allowance (JSA) faces having their JSA stripped for 3 months for refusing the take part in the scheme, with a 6 month sanction for a second offence. Plans are currently underway to introduce a sanction for a third offence, meaning those who refuse to offer their labour for free will face being banned from claiming JSA for three years. There are plans afoot to implement a similar system for the long-term sick and disabled.

A grass-roots campaign aimed at exposing companies profiting from Workfare, and taking action against them. Boycott Workfare has already planned a UK-wide day of action against the scheme, after a successful protest against Tescos in Westminster on Saturday 18th February. It is also attempting to build pressure from the rank and file of Trade Unions- not least the Communication Workers Union (CWU) whose leadership have backed the scheme within the Royal Mail.

The introduction of Workfare is both a retrenchment of policies introduced by the previous Labour Government under the "Flexible New Deal" scheme and a formalisation of unpaid "training" in the form of internships, whereby unremunerated labour plays a vital role in post-fordist employment policy, forcing down wages and providing a pool of desperate, precarious workers lacking financial security, workplace rights or (often) recognition from Trade Unions.

Like the reaction to Workfare, the growth of internship-as-free-labour has also created a grassroots opposition movement, with groups such as the Precarious Workers Brigade, the CarrotWorkers Collective and Pay Your Interns documenting abusive labour practices, providing practical advice for interns and organising both inside and outside the workplace.

The issue of exploitative internships isn't limited to high-end, white collar industries in the post-industrial West. In China, for example, Foxconn, producer of luxury Apple products, uses 100,000's of "interns" each year, some as young as 16, working night-shifts to produce consumer electronics in often unbearable conditions. In the USA, Disney employ over 8000 university-age interns a year as part of their College Program, working within their theme-parks as everything from chambermaids to hot-dog vendors, in order to earn academic credits.

Cheap labour that simultaneously reduces the bargaining power of workers; insecure, short-term contracts and now free labour, holding the unemployed hostage with the threat of poverty: is this the future of work?

Owen Jones on BBC Question Time

Appearing on BBC Question Time last night, Owen Jones attacked the government's Health Reform Bill, stating that the "Tories have absolutely no mandate for what they're doing to our NHS", as well as slamming New Labour for "laying the foundations" for the privatisation of the health service.

As unemployment figures near the 3 million mark, Jones was one of the few voices of the panel (which featured Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke, Lib Dem peer Baroness Kramer, Lord Prescott and businesswoman Julie Meyer) to oppose the governments policy of harsh austerity measures, emphasising that the "austerity agenda has disastrously failed" and said the UK should look towards America for policies of public stimulus to relieve unemployment. When Meyer responded by praising a new entrepreneurial spirit that she hopes will boost economic growth, Jones pointed out that entrepreneurship is meaningless if there is no demand in the economy.

The panellists also covered issues of elected police commisioners (a position Lord Prescott is planning to stand for), Baroness Warsi's warnings of a rise of aggressive, militant secularism, and Scottish devolution.

To watch the episode in full, please visit BBC iPlayer (UK only).

The Wisdom of Gravediggers: Paul Mason at the LSE

In his recent address to LSE, available now as a video and podcast, Paul Mason delves into the complex behavioural mechanics and social and economic phenoma that, for him, suggest the uprisings that began in 2011 may be something very unusual: not a normal business cycle, or a "50-year Kondratiev Wave", but an epoch-changing convergence of economic collapse, technological revolution and new networked subjectivities.

First outlining the collapse of North African regimes throughout the Arab Spring through the analogy of a Shakespearean history plays, Mason goes on to look at the shifting change in peoples' relationship with power structures, and how the development of new communication technologies have opened up public discourse about those power structures.

Unable to maintain a narrative of dignity and respect, the old authoritarians who maintained social order at the price of justice saw their ideological foundations slip away in the face of public derision. Like those very Shakespeare plays, Mason says, "the innkeepers and gravediggers sound like philosophers", whilst the strong-men and their courtiers look increasingly like fools, holding on to the certainties of old dogmas that are being washed away.

What is causing this erosion of respect, or appearance of such, for authority? For Mason, it is the combined result of the economic repercussions of neoliberalism - namely, wage repressions hitting the educated middle-class and the growth of post-Fordist labour models replacing production based upon the mass worker - and new technological developments changing our consciousness and relationships with others in society.

This was a distinction grasped by those Mason calls 'The Graduate without a Future', a sociological type raised to expect a higher standard of living but now looking forward to significant personal and financial insecurity, long before the Arab Spring shook the world. A generation whose "future has been stolen" were aware of the impending crunch of expectations: Mason cites the pamphlet Communique from an Absent Future as evidence of an understanding the inevitability of the crisis as a result of the economic fatal flaw within neoliberalism: the "gap between consumption driven growth and stagnation at level of incomes is driven by credit", a credit system that is now bust. It is also this generation, with its similarities in economic prospects, "weak ties" in organisational forms and shared cultural references, that make comparison between anti-austerity struggles in Europe and those in Tahrir Square possible, however outrageous it might seem to an older generation. This young middle-class are the contemporary equivalent of Hippolyte Taine's Jacobins in the garret- except now "the Jacobin has a laptop."

The influence of technology upon personal relationships with power and dissent can hardly be underestimated, according to Mason. He begins a basic, cohesive narrative of the "networked revolution", not with techno-utopian zeal but by acknowledging that fundamentally it is the human agency of the maligned citizen which activates that technology. Still, Mason posits, we need to study how the growth of communication technology is changing us. He cites Granovetter's "Strength of Weak Ties" as a key principle of new political insurgency, drawing people together not as tight comrades, but as large networks of individuals with common aims. This network, in contrast to a hierarchical movement, is capable of new tactics of swarm and dispersal, and is inherently much harder for monolithic state power to crush.

The sense of new possibilities is palpable in the lecture: dipping into early internet theorists, network ideology and proxy connection technology as well as the implications of Islamism, the Govian "reality-based community" and the lessons we can learn from the collapse of feudalism, Mason attempts to draw out some sense of coherence about our contemporary state. But how that state plays out is another question. For Mason, we must focus on how new technologies can engender social justice. He invokes George Orwell, writing about an Italian soldier he encountered whilst fighting in the International Brigades:

He symbolises for me the flower of the European working class, harried by the police of all countries, the people who fill the mass graves of the Spanish battlefields and are now, to the tune of several millions, rotting in forced-labour camps... The question is very simple. Shall people like that Italian soldier be allowed to live the decent, fully human life which is now technically achievable, or shan't they? Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud, or shall he not? I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win his fight sooner or later, but I want it to be sooner and not later--some time within the next hundred years, say and not some time within the next ten thousand.

As technology collapses time and shrinks space, that fight becomes imperative: an issue of decades, if not years.

To see the full video, or to download the podcast, please visit the LSE website.

Re-thinking Marx's 'Capital' Today: "A politics of revolt and the poetry of the future"

Earlier this week, Fredric Jameson was interviewed by Rabble.ca, one of Canada's most progressive media outlets, to discuss his recent book Representing Capital and to remind readers of the continued relevance of Marx in the 21st century. He explains the urgency of Marx not so much in terms of nostalgic affirmations of a pastoral communist vision, but as a tremendous resource for understanding the deeper nature of crisis, unemployment and globalization, which, needless to say, are among the most defining political and economic issues of the present. In the interview, Jameson emphasizes the indispensability of Marx's magnum opus and its value in finding alternative ways of thinking through the structural effects of this "infernal machine that is capitalism." Also, clarifying some of the prevailing misconceptions and obfuscations made by others over Marx's original thoughts, he points to the possibilities for today's readers of being nourished by the surprising timeliness and force of much of 'Capital''s analyses. For instance, he is particularly hopeful about the book's ability to guide readers to overcome much of the "self-defeating conservatism" currently hobbling today's Left.

He mentions, for example, that:

Marx himself was always quite excited about new discoveries . . . It is very clear that he thought of socialism as more advanced technologically and in every other way. Raymond Williams wrote about how people think that socialism is a nostalgic return to a simpler society. Williams challenged that saying socialism won't be simpler, it will be much more complicated. There is a tendency among the Left today -- and I mean all varieties of the Left -- of being reduced to protecting things. It is a kind of conservatism; saving all the things that capitalism destroys which range from nature to communities, cities, culture and so on. The Left is placed in a very self-defeating nostalgic position, just trying to slow down the movement of history. I don't think Marx thought about it like that at all. It seems to me that Marx thought that productivity would increase by getting rid of capitalism. On the level of organization, technology and production, Marx did not want a return to handicraft labour, but to go on into all kinds of complex forms of automation and computerization [as it would emerge] and so. The historical accident of something like socialism or communism taking place in a place what was essentially a third world country, Russia, an underdeveloped country, that's made us think of socialism in a way that was not Marx's way of imagining it. The socialist movement has to itself be inspired by this other type of vision.

Visit Rabble.ca to read the interview in full.

"Old School, New School, Frankfurt School": Minima Moralia goes punk

A keen writer on music and an extraordinarily sharp theorist, Theodor Adorno once wrote "The task of art today is to bring chaos into order."

His own selection of essays and journalism on music, Quasi Una Fantasia, reverberates with his deep conviction in the human properties of music as a form capable of resisting barbarity. We're not sure, therefore, how he'd feel about Minima Moralia EP.

Inspired by a "glib aside" from Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces, about how Adorno's seminal text of critical theory Minima Moralia would be better realised not as a book but as a punk album, US author, artist and musician Brian Joseph Davies did just that.

A full frontal assault of sub-riot-grrrl trash punk, Minima Moralia EP punctures its own pretentions, but only just. It's good, but also, it's really not good. In fact, it's best summed up by Davis himself- "It's a bad idea."

Looking Back at the UFW, a Union With Two Souls: An Interview with Frank Bardacke in The Nation

Gabriel Thompson, author of Working in the Shadows (Nation Books, 2010) interviewed the author of Trampling Out the Vintage in the February 13, 2012 issue of The Nation.

Q: You spent six seasons in the fields, working on celery and lettuce crews. How did your time as a farmworker influence the way you approached the book?

A: If I hadn’t worked in the fields, there wouldn’t have been a book. I started just writing about farmworkers, telling the story of the UFW from the point of view of the militant rank-and-file lettuce crews. But that didn’t work. To make any sense of it, I had to tell the story from the point of view of the staff and the executive board as well. That’s the crux of it; that’s what’s so fascinating: the interchange between these groups. When they were working together, they were a very powerful force; and when in opposition, the union came undone.

Read the entire interview here.

Ronald Fraser: 1930 - 2012

We are sad to announce the death on 10th February of Ronald Fraser, the most distinguished English historian of Spain, and a member of the New Left Trust. Ronnie played a huge part in helping to establish, first New Left Review (as its Business Manager in 1963) and later New Left Books, the parent company of Verso in 1969. Till the very end he kept a watchful, if distant, eye on both institutions.

From the very beginning he was a great exponent of interviewing working people (in Britain) and peasants (in the villages of Andalucia) as a way to create a new historical archive based on the experiences of the subaltern classes. The existence of both New Left Review and Verso owes a great deal to his business skills at a time when left intellectuals regarded money matters as ‘vulgar' and not worth too much thought.

In the near future we will be organising an evening in London to pay homage to his work. In the meantime the tribute he would have greatly appreciated was a new generation of scholars and activists finding a way to his books.

Tariq Ali

UPDATE: His obituary in the Guardian, written by Tariq Ali.

UPDATE 21st Feb: His obituary in the New York Times, written by Douglas Martin.

UPDATE 22nd Feb: His obituary in the Washington Post, written by Matt Schudel.

For writing by Ronald Fraser, see below.

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We re-publish here two pieces by Ronald Fraser that bookended his series of interviews on work published in New Left Review in the 1960s.

INTRODUCTION TO 'WORK' SERIES

‘The worker feels himself at home only outside his work and feels absent from himself in his work. He feels at home when he is not working, and not at home when he is working. His work is not freely consented to, but is a constrained, forced labour. Work is thus not a satisfaction of a need, but only a means to satisfy needs outside of work.'

In these terms Marx analysed work relations over a century ago, at a time when the physical conditions of work were, almost everywhere brutal and dehumanizing. From a contemporary perspective, this description of work during the Industrial Revolution cannot fail to ring true: forced labour was indeed the condition of the working class. But it is hardly necessary to recall that Marx was not engaged solely in a description of working conditions in his time; the purpose of his critique was to pierce the opaqueness of the capitalist system and to reveal those aspects-including the relations and purpose of work-that were fundamental to it.

In our epoch of the so-called second Industrial Revolution, when ‘human relations engineering' is said to have resolved such problems, it is critically important to enlarge our knowledge of the experience and meaning of work. Have work relations changed significantly, is the worker now ‘at home' in his work, has work become a free, creative activity? Or is it still a means to satisfy needs outside of work, a forced activity whose purpose (and product) lies beyond the worker in a system he does not control?

Rather than try to provide the answers in an analytical study of work relations in neo-capitalist society, we are proposing to publish a series of personal accounts of work, written specially for NLR, over several issues. These accounts are expressly subjective in form, for we are concerned here with the feeling of work, work as it modifies and shapes people's experience of life, their relations with others, their leisure, their aspirations and assumptions. These accounts will, of course, differ widely. Some contributors, as our first article shows, experience their work as a life wasted; others find satisfactions which make their work rewarding, the job interesting. But whatever the differences, one fact remains fundamental; even in an ‘affluent' society, work is the primary activity by which not only society but man is produced.

Whether these accounts answer the major human questions will remain for the reader to judge. It is however, worth noting, that capitalism has engendered the view that work is ‘only a means to satisfy needs outside work'. But the truth is that the satisfaction of these needs does not take place in a vacuum divorced from the productive system) these needs, and the means of their satisfaction, are moulded by that system. Consumer and producer are one person. And it is in the producer, whose role it reduced to passive participation, that capitalism is largely able to create the passive consumer it requires to buy whatever is most profitable to produce. This passivity does not, of course, preclude the individual from deriving a sense of satisfaction from the use of his skills; it points rather to a contradiction between the active creativity of work and the purpose which is assigned to it.

A great deal has been written about the ‘embourgeoisement' of the working class; very little by contrast about the ‘proletarianization' of the middle class. White collar work appears increasingly to be becoming part of a process over which the white collar worker has no control, in which he is equally divorced from what is produced, in which he is aware of his work as alien to him and his needs. It is to explore this field more fully that we are devoting a part of this work series to the experiences of white collar workers.

Finally, the experiences of the capitalist are worth noting; his anxieties, frustrations and satisfactions are as revealing of the condition and purpose of work as many others.

These accounts will speak for themselves. Their style is personal and diverse, and we have not tried to impose any form on them. If any of our readers feel that they have something to say on the subject, we should be glad to hear from them. For it is increasingly important for socialists to engage with the problem and purpose of work-a purpose which shapes the quality of the society we live in.

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NOTE ON 'WORK' SERIES

With the present essay we are ending the series on Work which NLR inaugurated nearly four years ago. Since then we have published some 50 personal work accounts-half in the Review and the remainder in Work (Pelican Original, January 1968) and its successor Work Volume 2 which has just appeared from the same publishers.

The widespread interest in this series points to the lack of occasion under monopoly capitalism for serious individual expression of the meaning and purpose of work. This lack, which we have tried in part to make good, is hardly fortuitous; the extent of bourgeois hegemony is manifested in the individual's interiorizations of its daily routines, in acquiescence to its fundamental assumptions. The capitalist work rationale is central to this. To talk about work other than instrumentally is, however fragmentarily, to question its hasic capitalist nature rather than solely its inequitable economic returns.

A large number of these essays were deliberately solicited from and written by non-socialists. What can be learnt from them? That work for many remains a constrained, forced activity, a time of dissatisfaction, of wasted opportunities, of unfulfilled potential? This hardly needs stressing. More to the point is the expression-sometimes explicit, more often implicit-of the need felt for control, control not only of the work process but of the purpose of work. In the individual's demands, often seen in terms of status, money and self-respect, the social nature of work is clearly posed. The basic capitalist contradiction between work that is inherently social and that yet remains controlled for private and sectional ends is, in these essays, a lived experience for many.

The concluding essay is an eloquent reminder of the many accounts of this theme. As the bourgeois vision of work remains an integral part of its hegemony, so the hopes and partial demands expressed in essays like these must be integrated in the vision of a socialist hegemony-a hegemony which, in destroying capitalist rationality, creates a society which will shape the necessity of work in accord with human needs.

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See other articles by Ronald Fraser in New Left Review.

Talks on Torture by Joshua E.S. Phillips

Tune into the Firedoglake Book Salon on Saturday, February 18 at 2pm PST (5pm EST) to join author Joshua E.S. Phillips in an online discussion of his book None of Us Were Like This Before: American Soldiers and Torture. In real time, participants, led by TruthOut's Jason Leopold, will weigh in on Phillips' incisive account of how ordinary soldiers in a US tank battalion, ill trained for the responsibilities foisted upon them, descended into the degradation of abuse.

Joshua Phillips will also speak on the following dates:

Tuesday, February 14: Boston University (two talks)

Thursday, Feburary 16: Reed College with leading torture expert Darius Rejali

Saturday, March 10: Panel discussion as part of Another Life

Paul Mason: 'Kicking Off' North American Appearances

Exciting news! Paul Mason, the Orwell-prize nominated journalist and economics editor of BBC's Newsnight, is embarking on a mini North American tour next week to promote his new book Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions. As part of his visit, he will be giving readings and discussions, weighing in on the past year's global revolutions from London to Cairo and Wisconsin to Tripoli.

Taking an especially close look at the resurgence of activism and political energy around the globe, Mason will be elaborating on Why It's Kicking Off's incisive account of both the rediscovered power of individual agency and the historically new forms of collective action at the disposal of younger activists. With his critical eye and thorough on-the-ground reportage, his appearances promise a clear-sighted look at the revolutionary movements, bringing into sharp relief the urges for political alternatives and democratic change being felt everywhere.

Please click below for his tour dates.

Tour Dates:

Tuesday, February 21, from 6-8 at the Graduate Center for Worker Education in New York City

Wednesday, February 22, he will be at Busboys & Poets in Washington DC for a discussion and book signing.

Thursday, February 23, he will be appearing in San Francisco at the World Affairs Council.

Be sure to check out our events page for more details.

"Smelling the Funk" With Simon Critchley and Cornel West at the BAM

Last Tuesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Simon Critchley and Cornel West sat down to a lively evening of conversation and philosophical reflection. Orbiting around the main themes of Critchley's new book, The Faith of the Faithless, the two touched on everything from the constitutive role of love and belief in forming political bonds of solidarity to, yes, the power of soul and funk music. To paraphrase the incomparable Brother West, the two also did not shy away from "smelling the funk" over the course of the evening. Together with their theoretical reflections on spirituality, religion and radical democracy, each addressed New York's controversial "Stop and Frisk" program, the "prison-industrial complex" of the United States and the Left and Right wing media's joint complicity in ignoring and reproducing the underlying structures of an increasingly oligarchic society.

BAM has uploaded full audio of the discussion as well as several video clips on their blog, accompanied by Critchley's running commentary and his suggestion--which Verso will be do its best to help carry out!--- that West will join him again for

a serious philosophical rumination at BAM about music, about poetry, about the great Otis Redding, James Brown, Al Green, Bootsy Collins, Parliament and Funkadelic and the sacred and true President Clinton, George not Bill, and greatest of them all, the poet and activist Curtis Mayfield.

Visit the BAM's blog to watch the clips and listen to the debate in full.

The world's single largest internship program?

In a new investigation of the deplorable labor conditions at the Foxconn factories in China, Arun Gupta reveals that the exploitation of workers runs deeper than anyone had imagined: astonishingly, thousands of teenagers, some as young as sixteen, are being forced to work as "interns" at Foxconn as a requirement for graduation from vocational schools and universities. Intern Nation author Ross Perlin spoke to Gupta about the ways in which government and university officials have collaborated to provide a flowing supply of employees to the electronics manufacturer:

Foxconn is conspiring with government officials and universities in China to run what may be the world's single largest internship program – and one of the most exploitative. Students at vocational schools – including those whose studies have nothing to do with consumer electronics – are literally forced to move far from home to work for Foxconn, threatened that otherwise they won't be allowed to graduate. Assembling our iPhones and Kindles for meager wages, they work under the same conditions, or worse, as other workers in the Foxconn sweatshops.

Visit AlterNet to read the story in full.

Ross Perlin will be participating in a panel co-sponsored by Dissent on internships and precarious work at Left Forum.

'A prophetic apocalyptic sublime' – Savage Messiah reviewed in Times Literary Supplement

Reading Savage Messiah, Roz Kaveney finds moments of “inchoate skinhead anarchism,” sitting alongside moments of mixed-media art that, “approach the condition of poetry.”

Kaveney admires Savage Messiah for its ability to, “see in the scruffy and semi-derelict a sort of beauty, a prophetic apocalyptic sublime,” but worries that Laura Oldfield Ford’s London is,

a city of white working-class resistance; it is an able-bodied, exclusively heterosexual world in which the only ideology is a sort of inchoate skinhead anarchism devoid of theory.

Kaveney, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, describes the content of Savage Messiah as a series of, “collages, fragments of text, dingy-looking photographs, sketches of buildings, deliberately stylized portraits. She interprets Oldfield Ford’s low-tech approach as, “in part a deliberate rejection of the sort of psychogeography she associates with Iain Sinclair and Stewart Home, and sees as a deliberate packaging of the bizarre for middle-class consumers.” She highlights the ways in which the apparently derelict and run-down areas of London that are depicted in Savage Messiah become symbols of struggle against urban and political hegemony, writing that

[Oldfield Ford] sees temporarily occupied drinking dens, factories where alienated workers sabotage the machines that fill cheap chocolates with nasty fondant, high streets full of kebab and pound shops, as sites of resistance to the squeaky clean consumerism of contemporary Britain.

In particular Kavaney draws attention to Oldfield Ford’s particular interest in the coming Olympics and the social, political and geographical transformation being wrought on the London landscape. In Savage Messiah the Olympics, she writes, and the public works associated with them, become, “a destruction of space that was once fascinating and wild, as an extension of surveillance into what was once free turf.”

Instead, she argues, Oldfield Ford's loyalties lie with the “lost generations,” and those who live, “hard-edged, often brutal lives.” However, it is precisely the presentation of these celebrated figures from the margin that worry Kaveney. She analyses the main male figures in the book and finds them lacking in depth and outlook, suggesting that,

Most of her angry young men evince little inner life beyond a sense of wounded pride and a habit of requiting perceived slights and failures of attention; one the few exception is a Nigerian engineering student who reads Borges where no one can see him doing it.

Her London is…a city of white working-class resistance; it is an able-bodied, exclusively heterosexual world in which the only ideology is a sort of inchoate skinhead anarchism devoid of theory. It is a thug London sanitized of racism, oddly tolerant of domestic violence and men who sponge off women, even in the punk era to which she looks back, there was Rock against Racism and the first inklings of Riot Grrrl politics.

Despite Kaveney’s thoughtful critique, she cannot help but find uplifting moments in the journeys and landscapes of Savage Messiah; moments that offer the promise of something extraordinary,

But when [Oldfield Ford] elegizes clean, polite old men who offer cups of tea, or celebrates moments of Bakhtinian riot among the chocolate machines – when she photographs half-ruined house and the hole in the ground where their neighbours stood, or when she talks of an inchoate sense of doom – at such moments she produces something which is both a total work of mixed-media art and an impressive vision.

At these moments, she writes, the “ideological collages” that make up Savage Messiah, “approach the condition of poetry.”

You can read the full article in the print version of Times Literary Supplement, which comes out on Friday 10 February.

This Saturday in New York: Public Symposium on the 'Occupy' Movements and the Left

This Saturday afternoon, the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, together with the New School will be co-hosting a public symposium on the Occupy movement and the current state of the Left in the United States. Billed under the banner of "The Winter of our Discontent," it will hold lengthy sessions touching on the wider interlocking themes of long-term goals, short-term tactics and the possible means of social change. Among the participants are Verso authors Marina Sitrin and Rebecca Solnit, both of whom contributed to Occupy! Scenes from an Occupied America, Verso and n+1's in-depth coverage and analysis of the Occupy movements. They will be appearing on Saturday alongside a number of other activists, political organizers and academics who have been deeply engaged in the Occupy movements and other projects helping promote democratic and social change. Included among the speakers are Todd Gitlin, James Miller and Jonathan Schell, as well as David Graeber and Lawrence Weschler.

Promising a sympathetic, though importantly self-critical approach to the current state of the Left and where it should be headed "given the game-changing forces unleashed by Occupy Wall Street," it should prove to be an exciting and thought-provoking afternoon.

Click below for the details.

THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT

Stepping Back, Taking Stock, and Gazing Forward in the Wake of Occupy Wall Street

SATURDAY FEBRUARY 11, 2012, 1pm - 6pm
Tishman Auditorium at The New School
66 West 12th Street, NYC
Free & Open to the Public

Also, visit www.nyihumanities.org for further updates.

Joshua E.S. Phillips on uncovering the failures of the Detainee Abuse Task Force

Though the horrific images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib have been burned into the American cultural consciousness, what modes of redress are actually available to victims of US military torture? In an interview with Erika Eichelberger of the Nation Institute, Joshua E.S. Phillips discusses the grim shortcomings of the Detainee Abuse Task Force that he uncovered while researching his incisive investigation of American soldiers and torture, None of Us Were Like This Before. The DATF, Phillips explains, too often fails to properly investigate and resolve reports of torture:

I was in the Middle East doing reporting for my book in Syria, Jordan, and to a lesser extent Lebanon, interviewing former detainees. And one of the things that I would commonly hear about, of course apart from their experience, their journey of being arrested, detained, interrogated, abused and sometimes tortured, was also the limited experience with approaching military investigators about what they have gone through … There were some detainees I met, very, very few, in Afghanistan, who said that the military actually did interview them about other cases of detainee torture, but that was really a minority position.

Visit the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute to read the interview and listen to the audio.

Joshua E.S. Phillips will be speaking about the damaging legacy of torture on both detainees and soldiers at Boston University on February 14 and Reed College on February 16.

"Real Utopias" and the "Revolutionary and Evolutionary" Culture and Politics of Detroit

Drawing on the work of Jacques Ranciere and Erik Olin Wright, Vince Carducci at Deliberately Considered has written a remarkable reflection on the renewed experience of aesthetic and political community in Detroit. In the face of decades of blight and increased "demassification," the city has, in a stunning dialectical movement, recently begun to witness an unprecedented creative flourishing and reclamation of the city's downtown space. In his article, Carducci points to the ways that the city's neglected spaces, foreclosed homes and abandoned buildings have suddenly come to "open up a new field of cultural production" that has, of late, encouraged young artists to repurpose them and, in effect, reimagine and assert a robust new understanding of the "commons". That is, by using as their raw material the virtually abandoned ruins of the city, artists in Detroit are seizing opportunities to use them to boldly re-articulate new understandings of what public space, community and urban experience mean to them today.

Allowed to bypass conventional property relations and the prevailing logic of privatization elsewhere enforced by modern capitalism, they are seizing their unique position to take the veritably dystopian landscape of Detroit (the product of three decades of neo-liberalism) to reinvent spaces in which they can begin to prise open space for social and political alternatives.

Carducci notes that in this milieu, Detroit has given rise to the emergence of new artistic collectives, galleries and organizations that are all facilitating collaborative artistic and community projects throughout the city. He then, crucially, ties this new appearance of the ‘commons' and cultural community engagement to the theoretical formulation of "real utopias" offered by Wright. A "real" utopian project, defined in opposition to the classic idealist strain by its insistence on the rigorous pursuit of attainable goals, places its aspirations on actualizing viable emancipatory social and political achievements through the principled and pragmatic transformation of dominant institutional structures. Following Wright in this vein, Carducci suggests that, with the burgeoning artistic scene of Detroit and the deeply intertwined and mutually reinforcing nature of aesthetics and politics, the city is beginning to feel itself undergoing serious "revolutionary" and "evolutionary" changes and possible "utopian" alternatives to the former reigning institutions of privatized and corporate space and culture.

Visit Deliberately Considered to read the article in full.

Ross Perlin crushes the notion that internships are a "win-win situation"

On yesterday's Minnesota Public Radio Midmorning segment, Ross Perlin, author of Intern Nation, squared off against David Lat, who declared internships a "win-win situation" in a New York Times Room for Debate piece earlier this week.

Both Perlin and listeners who called in to join the discussion pointed out that internships that offer college credit in exchange for core work are often illegal and exploitative ways for employers to avoid paying minimum wage, and create situations in which interns are essentially paying tuition to work. Perlin also reiterated that internships routinely displace and replace regular employees, and bar those who can't afford to work for free from entire industries where unpaid internships serve as the only entry.

"I think the law as it stands is adequate," Perlin concluded, in response to Midmorning host Kerri Miller's question of whether the Department of Labor's internship guidelines needed to be changed. "We just need to see enforcement of the law, and interns understanding their rights and standing up for themselves."

As the recent high-profile lawsuits against companies like Fox Searchlight and Hearst seem to indicate, more and more interns are doing just that.

Visit MPR Midmorning with Kerri Miller to hear the full podcast.

Ross Perlin will be participating in a panel co-sponsored by Dissent on internships and precarious work at Left Forum.

What Simon Critchley is Reading

Although he seems to be everywhere these days, Simon Critchley still finds the time to indulge in his obsessive reading habits. Currently steeped in the world of ancient Greek tragedy and fully absorbed by its "massive and unacknowledged relevance to the contemporary psychical and political situation," he recently shared with The Believer a short list of some of the standouts from his current reading list.

With a good balance of the classic and the contemporary, the scholarly and the dramatic, he offers a diverse set of titles that are worth checking out to get a better idea of tragedy’s “savage and troubling beauty, its conflict with and superiority to philosophy,” and, of course, its endless supply of insights into the present day. Not to mention the fact, as he rightfully notes, that Seneca and Euripides can just be a lot of fun to read!

Not to keep you in suspense about the list, visit The Believer to read Critchley's recommendations in full.

Simon Critchley's The Faith of the Faithless is also now out in hardback.

The Faith of the Faithless and Political Activism

With the publication of Simon Critchley's Faith of the Faithless, the journal Political Theology has provided readers an excerpt from the introduction of the book on its blog, and is planning on hosting a series of longer responses to it in the coming weeks.

In Critchley's introduction, you can find the conceptual foundations of the book's larger argument and its clearest elucidation of its titular trope, "the faith of the faithless." Together, these set the groundwork for the book's striking "experiments" in political theology and inform its bracing readings of Rousseau, Heidegger, St. Paul and Agamben. As the book's opening salvo, it also explicitly delineates the political dimensions of religious belief and theology today, and suggests how they may be properly thought in relation to the eventual possibilities for self-realization and the formation of collective bonds of identity organized around "infinitely demanding" ethical and political responsibilities and action.

For instance, in the introduction, he writes,

The political question-which will be my constant concern in the experiments that follow-is how such a faith of the faithless might be able to bind together a confraternity, a consorority or, to use Rousseau's key term, an association. If political life is to arrest a slide into demotivated cynicism, then it would seem to require a motivating and authorizing faith which, while not reducible to a specific context, might be capable of forming solidarity in a locality, a site, a region-in Wilde's case a prison cell. This faith of the faithless cannot have for its object anything external to the self or subject, any external, divine command, any transcendent reality. As Wilde says: "But whether it be faith or agnosticism, it must be nothing external to me. Its symbols must be of my own creating."

Giving a powerful illustration of the kind of concrete political practicability that Critchley's seemingly abstract philosophical "experiments" can have in real life,
Bill Rose Thorn has written a lengthy reflection on how Critchley's work has allowed him to usefully re-think traditional notions of political activism and resistance in his involvement with Occupy Oakland.

Drawing on Critchley, he notes:

When Critchley writes "for me, politics is all about the movement between no power and state power and it takes place through the creation of what I call ‘interstitial distance' within the state", I see the same kind of politics arising from the Occupy movement. Remaining within the state and even the city, these protests break away from politics-as-usual in style and substance (collective decisions and community forging) refusing to play by the state's rules but refusing to leave it either. This sets up a site of confrontation between the powerful representatives of the people (who coordinate with predators) and the people themselves (the prey). The confrontation will yield battles (in the street, the press), the outcome of which remains to be seen. The force of these communes are weak compared to the multiple weapons of the state, but all genuinely new ideas and bodies of political significance start small, gaining momentum through the righteous energy of the ethical call.

Visit Bill Rose Thorn to read his essay in full, and be sure to check out Political Theology for the excerpt and for the coming responses to it in the future.

Learning from Ignatieff's #fail

Recent coverage of Michael Ignatieff: The Lesser Evil? by Derrick O'Keefe includes:

An interview with O'Keefe on Redeye: Vancouver Cooperative Radio

An interview in The New Left Project

Ignatieff was a key figure in rallying liberal support for that disastrous, immoral war. In fact, on the night that the "Shock and Awe" invasion of Iraq began, Ignatieff was out with his Harvard colleague Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi ex-Trotskyite turned war hawk and key source for the neo-conservatives in Washington, D.C. Each in their own way, Ignatieff and Makiya were – to borrow the late Tony Judt’s description of liberal war boosters – "useful idiots" for the Bush administration.

This alone would have qualified Ignatieff for inclusion in Verso’s Counterblasts, a series of polemical books aimed at key apologists for Empire and Capital. But I also wanted to examine the full arc of his career as a public intellectual; it seemed to contain lessons about the political retreat of the past 30 years and about the real nature of liberalism today.

And a blog post by O'Keefe on Rabble.ca

In general, however, there's been too much focus on personality over policy in analyzing Ignatieff's historic failure. We can start with a hat trick of concrete examples where political decisions -- all to varying degrees at odds with previous leader Stephane Dion -- managed to drive the party even lower in the polls.

Nothing about Ignatieff's spectacular failure in electoral politics seems to have humbled him. Witness his op-ed in the Financial Times last week advising new Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti on how to win the hearts and minds of the victims of looming austerity measures. The FT headline, making reference to Monti's nickname "the professor," is unintentionally hilarious: "One professor to another: listen to the people, or fail."

Nicholas Noe in the New York Times on What to do in Syria

In yesterday's New York Times, Nicholas Noe, editor of Verso's Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, weighed in on the "enormous moral and strategic distaster" currently besieging Syria. Surveying the different options and the broader geopolitical implications of different responses to the crisis, he comes down especially hard against the dominant viewpoints promoting the "controlled collapse" of Assad's regime. In particular, he brings up, among other things, the critical role Iran plays in supporting Assad's rule, as the latter is one of the main conduits for Iran's backing of Hezbollah. As Noe carefully notes, any actions in Syria must factor in the possibility of a scenario in which Assad, Iran and Hezbollah use their combined force to try a "bloody last-ditch effort" to save the Syrian government. He cautions against the danger of responses that could unwittingly exacerbate the violence in Syria, or inadvertently lead to escalated regional conflict which would potentially introduce Iran and Israel into the equation.

Visit the New York Times to read Noe's op-ed in full.

"The best proponent of hope... stricken with hopelessness": Stuart Kelly reviews The Faith of the Faithless

In his recent review of Simon's Critchley's "movingly optimistic" new book for the Guardian, Stuart Kelly finds a work detailing new possibilities for an "anarchism of responsibility", skipping from Rousseau to Zizek, touching upon Agamben, St Paul and Schmitt upon the way. Focusing on the process of modernity as a reformulation of sacralisations, Critchley's book is less of a development of a position as a series of "variations on a theme":

The chapters of this new book do not establish and develop an argument. Instead, they parry and complement each other; it is better to think of them as symphonic movements.

Whilst the core of the book focuses upon the potential (and preexisting) political radicalism and moral authority of the religious position, Kelly finds the final chapter, a "barbative" excoriation of Slavoj Zizek, the funniest:

and, rather than simply opposing his beliefs, puts him on the couch instead. Coyly claiming to "depolemicise" the debate, he turns Žižek into a teenager, who sits by idly while fantasising about smashing up either the state or the local Tesco.

For Kelly, however, this "moving" book is written in sorrow, tinged not with utopianism but a melancholy for what is lost.

"Everything to be true must become a religion," Wilde says, and Critchley, poetically and persuasively, suggests ways in which this might be accomplished. Yet he seems racked by doubt on whether it ever will.

Read the full review of The Faith of the Faithless at the Guardian.

An interview with Jason Barker, director of Marx Reloaded

Marx Reloaded is a documentary on the political relevancy of the economic and political philosophy of Karl Marx in the light of the global financial crisis, featuring insight and interviews from such figures as Slavoj Zizek, Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière and Peter Sloterdijk. As the film hits cinemas next week, we asked its director, Jason Barker, a few questions.

Marx Reloaded is your new film, in which you focus on the resurgence of interest in the political philosopher and his works. What were your intentions in making this film?

Quite modest in trying to respond to the "crisis of capitalism" while at the same time exploring the "idea of communism". I was determined to confront the "communism is great idea in theory, but impossible to implement in practice" cliché. The other aim was to explore the "reloading" of Marx. The title of the film seemed important. It's about a transformation and that's clearly what Badiou, Negri and Zizek have in mind for Marx, albeit with slightly different nuances. Is there such thing as Marx without Marxism? In this proto-communism of Badiou and Zizek? I take the point that Marx wasn't or didn't want to be a Marxist. Although, as Rancière points out somewhere, Marx was at least a member of his own party. Anyway, the attempt to try to reload or reimagine Marx as a thinker, without the usual totalitarian moralising, seemed long overdue.

Since the banking crisis we've seen the figure of Marx reappear within the popular and financial press- do you perceive as simply "looking for a new angle", or is it due to a more serious reappraisal of his ideas on the crises of capitalism?

Well, I imagine it's partly circulation grabbing and partly an attempt at appropriation. The bourgeois press has always loved to flirt with Marx. Time magazine loves him, don't they? He's become the philosopher of choice for the middle classes (he was voted the most popular philosopher in a BBC Radio 4 poll some years ago). Maybe I'm even contributing to the love affair with this film. Then again when Nouriel Roubini says "Marx was right" it seems like an unconscious effort to move against the full implications of his work. It's like a preemptive strike. "We know the Marx debate is coming so let's head it off". This brings us back to the cliché that I mentioned before. You always have this qualified endorsement where Marx's diagnoses of capitalism are validated whereas his "prescription" of communism is rubbished on the grounds that it's "utopian". John Gray adopted precisely this position in the film and repeated it in a Radio 4 series last year, arguing that Marx was right about capitalism but wrong about communism. It's a mistake because when Marx says "communism is the real movement that abolishes the present state of things" he is making it quite clear that communism is already at work within capitalism. However it's always the utopian cliché that people expect to hear and as far as I can see that's what the popular and financial press are providing them with.

Your film features a wealth of contemporary philosophers and thinkers- Slavoj Zizek, Antonio Negri, Nina Power and Michael Hardt to name but a few- all of whom produce books that are widely read by the general public. Zizek has even been the subject of a feature-length popular documentary, and is sometimes referred to as "the Elvis of cultural theory". Are we in the age of the popular Marxism, and if so, is this really helping popularise his ideas on political economy?

Are those you mention really so popular? I know Zizek is the Elvis of cultural theory but he isn't the Elvis of Las Vegas. Has he ever been to Las Vegas? I suspect if he ever went few there would recognise him. I don't consume enough popular media to know whether we're in the age of popular Marxism, nor am I sure what precise measure of popularity we're talking about here. Personally I respect Zizek as a theorist and don't much care about the wider reception of his work or how many films he's made - despite the fact that I've been trying to persuade him to accept a role in my new one! I'm too much of an old-fashioned Platonist to worry about the spectacle of consumption. If an idea has integrity then it'll find a way through the noise. I suppose if a wider public discovers Marx and Marxism through Zizek or, dare I say, Marx Reloaded then perhaps it might add something to debates in which Marx is more than simply the subject of polite, after-dinner conversation. But there is clearly more at stake with Marx than the "popularity" of his ideas.

In Marx Reloaded, philosopher Antonio Negri states that the "return of Marx" rests upon developing a practical critique of, and political militancy within, post-fordist workers and those engaged in "immaterial labour". Do you agree, or is this line becoming increasingly popular because it reflects the lived experience of academics and those with a self-declared interest in Marx? And if not, do you think Marx is actually necessary for this project?

Marxist social theory owes Negri a huge debt for his readings of the Grundrisse. I often think that if Negri's seminars at the Ecole normale (published as Marx Beyond Marx in 1991) had been given twenty years earlier then it would have sent Althusser in a completely different direction. Having said that the way in which his work evolved in the Empire trilogy I find less convincing, although of course it has propelled the Marx revivals. In the Grundrisse we already have Marx's analysis of two types of labour: abstract and concrete labour. Work is abstract in being relatively independent of the individual workers who produce commodities. And as Alberto Toscano puts it in Marx Reloaded, whether the work is "immaterial" or cognitive, or material or physical, seems less important than how that work is practically organized. As for whether immaterial labour reflects the real experience of academics, I don't think we need be so wary of people's motivations. I think it's possible to be a public intellectual while at the same time generating important and original research.

Does this current wave of interest in Marx really foreshadow a return of communism as a political force? Is communism a spectre that haunts the world, or is it rather just the spectre of Marx haunting the academies?

Again I don't see any contradiction here. The idea of communism conferences - which were billed as philosophical conferences - strike me as an important reference point. What I took away from them was the idea that political thinking today is again converging on precisely the type of social conditions in which Marx lived. This is the important discipline of political thinking that Badiou always highlights. Forget the faithful transmission of Marx's works. If Marx still has something to teach us then it's as a thinker who helps us to think those very conditions which take us back, not to 1968, but to 1848. Badiou isn't the only one who's mentioned the historical significance of 1848 recently. Hobsbawm has too. This is the revolution whose lessons we really need to grasp in light of what's been going on over the past year or so, from the Arab Spring to the occupy movements.

For more information on the film, please visit the official Marx Reloaded website.

Soundtrack to the Arab Spring: Sujatha Fernandes on This Morning's The Takeaway

Sujatha Fernades, former emcee and author of last fall's Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation was featured on today's The Takeway in a discussion about the up-and-coming rappers whose voices have rung out against corruption, political repression and economic disenfranchisement in Senegal, Tunisia and Egypt.

Part of The Takeway's special on global protest music, in the segment Fernandes guides Takeaway co-host John Hockenberry through a listening tour of the music that is helping to build solidarity across borders, "shaping a language that allows young people to negotiate a political voice for themselves in their societies." [Fernandes, from Close to the Edge].

Despite the lack of an organized music industry in many locales, these artists are finding ways to get their music heard, speaking not just to their localized situations but to a global consciouness of the oppressed.

Go to The Takeaway to listen to the segment in full.

Ross Perlin in New York Times Room for Debate: "Not Your Father's Internships"

The stories about internships are well known by now: highly coveted positions auctioned off to the highest bidder; long hours and overtime work rewarded with little to no remuneration; barely anything in the way of training or education; and, to top it all off, no real guarantee of future employment or the proverbial foot in the door. While most of this has already become the object of common knowledge and is typically accepted with a blasé shrug by millions of students and recent grads, the normalization of exploitative and illegal labor practices in today's internships are finally beginning to receive serious challenge and wider coverage in the public eye.

In Sunday's New York Times Room for Debate discussion, Ross Perlin, whose acclaimed Intern Nation comes out in paperback this spring, clearly lays out for a wider audience the largely disavowed yet nonetheless brutal damage internships have been wreaking for years among younger generations. He writes:

The damage is everywhere. Youth unemployment hovers above 18 percent, near an all-time high. The entry-level job is fast becoming an endangered species. A whole generation of twentysomethings feels adrift - crushed by debt, living with their parents, delaying traditional milestones of adulthood, unable to become independent stakeholders in society. Meanwhile, the labor of unpaid interns has quietly replaced or displaced untold thousands of workers. Lucrative and influential professions - politics, media and entertainment, to name a few - now virtually require a period of unpaid work, effectively barring young people from less privileged backgrounds. There are even broader effects of the internship boom: constricted social and professional mobility, growing inequality, and an economy whose top tier is becoming less and less diverse. Even more seriously, a fundamental ethic in American life is under threat: the idea that a hard day's work demands a fair wage.

With recent high-profile class action lawsuits filed by former interns, growing frustration at what feels like perpetual job precarity, and Occupy protest movements taking note, many are calling for some form of government involvement and collective action to offer a meaningful response to the legally questionable and morally dubious arrangements that have happily sustained this ongoing exploitation of millions under the auspices of "mutually beneficial" and "valuable" work experience. Perlin concludes his post by invoking the government's fundamental responsibility to legally enforce its labor laws and ensure that the "labor market remains a level playing field."

Not just an expose into the seamy underbelly of this world, Intern Nation is a pioneering work and it has already been hailed as a landmark investigation calling for serious legal and political reform to put a stop to the vast catalogue of labor abuses and illegal exploitation that has unfortunately been allowed to remain the norm for most internship experiences.

Visit the New York Times Room For Debate to read the post and the responses to it in full.

The Faith of the Faithless: How to Re-think the Role of Religion in the "Post-Secular" 21st Century

The remarkable resurgence of interest in religion has become one of the defining issues of our time. Whether approached from a "post-secular" perspective, or fanatically affirmed/denied by fundamentalists of both religious and atheistic persuasions, we are living in a moment where religion and a wider constellation of its concerns have an inescapable hold over us.

Simon Critchley's new book The Faith of the Faithless attempts to philosophically re-frame the nature of the current debates over the role of religion in the 21st century. In the book, out today, Critchley proposes a new perspective on belief---one that attempts to avoid the obstacles that have increasingly hobbled serious reflection and constructive dialogue about religion in our world.

Together with the book's release, Critchley will be speaking at the New York Public Library tomorrow night with Mark Mazower, where he hosts the next installment of his ongoing conversation series "On Truth (and Lies)." The topic of the conversation is "The Historian's Truth." Next Tuesday, February 7th at 7pm, Critchley will appear at BAM with the ever profound and provocative brother Cornel West, where the two will discuss the concept of religion and faith in secular society.

By rejecting the problematic and simplistic binary of religion versus atheism that has predominantly structured how we approach faith, Critchley puts forward a wider host of ethical, political and philosophical questions that rigorously re-conceptualize both the underlying foundations, and terrain of, political theology.

As a self-professed "catechism of the citizen," The Faith of the Faithless is a timely reminder of the inextricable link between politics, religion and culture, and a welcome rejoinder for us to re-investigate the relation between social transformation, belief, spirituality, and morality in our everyday experience.

Simon Critchley will continue to appear publicly to promote The Faith of the Faithless. Stay tuned to versobooks.com for details.

Dropping a new mixtape and "inaugurating a different kind of politics"-- Sujatha Fernandes' OpEd in the New York Times

Hip-hop music hasn't been this politically urgent or charged with energy since NWA and Public Enemy protested police brutality and told us all to ‘Fight the Power!' in the late 80s and early 90s. Although, if you didn't yet know, it's probably because the rappers of today's protest songs and new faces of popular dissent aren't in New York or LA and are definitely not on MTV, the news or any big music blogs. They are, instead, central figures in the global protest movements that have been sweeping through both the Arab and African worlds over the past year.

In today's New York Times, Sujatha Fernandes, author of Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation, had an illuminating op-ed piece on this nascent phenomenon, highlighting the crucial role that hip-hop is currently playing in galvanizing global revolutions. Whether it is by calling out repression and corruption, sustaining the popular energy of the movements or, in some cases, even helping promote community development and political alternatives, hip-hop has been instrumental in the ousting of repressive regimes and dictatorial control.

She writes,

Rap music has played a critical role in articulating citizen discontent over poverty, rising food prices, blackouts, unemployment, police repression and political corruption. Rap songs in Arabic in particular - the new lingua franca of the hip-hop world - have spread through YouTube, Facebook, mixtapes, ringtones and MP3s from Tunisia to Egypt, Libya and Algeria, helping to disseminate ideas and anthems as the insurrections progressed . . . The young populations of these regions are looking to rappers as voices of clarity and leadership. [One] raises money at his shows to support his community because, like many of his fans, he believes that "waiting for our political leaders to give us opportunities is a waste of time." Other Senegalese rappers helped found the movement Y'en a Marre ("We're Fed Up"), which has crystallized opposition to President Wade and led a campaign to register young voters for the elections next month. Some are even supporting candidates for president . . . Rappers are hoping to inaugurate a different kind of politics. They would sooner make a pilgrimage to the South Bronx than to the Senegalese, Sufi holy city of Touba; they reject the predefined roles available within the political arena.

From right in the middle of their respective movements, these young rappers have emerged as the most powerful voices of opposition, becoming uniquely responsible for giving wide and vocal expression to the once muted and marginalized populations everywhere from Egypt to Tunisia and Senegal to Guinea.

Visit the New York Times to read the article in full.

"Reading like a loser" — Costica Bradatan reviews Anti-Nietzsche

Costica Bradatan describes Malcolm Bull's new book, Anti-Nietzsche, as a work that is not "about" Nietzsche but one "with" Nietzsche. Writing in Times Higher Education, he praises Bull as an "excellent writer of philosophical prose" and admires his writing for the way that it

plays with Nietzschean topics andthemes...experiments with them by undermining, inflating or taking them to the extreme; in order either to validate or invalidate them, it systematically pushes them to a breaking point.

Bradatan identifies Bull as a disciple of Nietzsche, but only "in a profoundly Nietzschean sense, which means he is obliged to rebel against his master." This is something Bull openly acknowledges, suggesting that his project in this book is not to provide a "post-Nietzschean, view" (unlike other critics who he believes "appropriate Nietzsche for their own ends,") but to produce a, "post-Nietzschean anti-Nietzschean perspective" that is designed not "prevent" us from getting to Nietzsche, but to "enable us to get over him."

Bull's "economic, efficient and witty" style keeps Bradatan's attention throughout, but it is Bull's "remarkable" and "sophisticated" art of reading that he most appreciates. He offers the following example;

[Bull] distinguishes between different approaches to reading Nietzsche. Say you come across Nietzsche's famous statement "I am not a man, I am dynamite." Faced with these words, you can adopt a "reading for victory" approach ("Reading these words, who has not felt the sudden thrill of something explosive within themselves...?"), but alternatively you can read it "like a loser". For Bull, "reading like a loser" is a distinct form of reading, if not an entire worldview. When we decide to read Nietzsche's statement "like a loser", we start to behave like one: we immediately think that "there may be an explosion; that we might get hurt; that we are too close to someone who could harm us. Reading like losers will make us feel powerless and vulnerable."

Bradatan closes his review by arguing that whether or not one agrees with everything that Bull writes, "it is hard to deny the boldness of his thinking or the seductive force of his writing."

Visit Times Higher Education to read the review in full.

"An agit-prop classic" — reviews of Cities Under Siege

Writing in the Glasgow Herald, Alastair Mabbott argues that Stephen Graham's Cities Under Siege has "the potential to be an agit-prop classic," but laments the fact that it is not geared towards a more "general" audience. Linking Graham's discussion of the way that "'military dreams of high-tech omniscience' have lodged firmly in the civilian sphere," to the recent crack down on the Occupy movement, Mabbott writes that, "there couldn't have been a more timely moment for publication."

In a considered response to Graham's book, Mabbott advises us not to, "rush to the window to see what's changed" outside, as we are "unlikely to spot the difference straight away": our cities are gradually transforming, being "reshaped for military convenience." The tactics learned in Iraq and Afghanistan have come full circle and are now being applied to cities at home. Mabbott points out that, "after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the US Army talked of reclaiming New Orleans from 'insurgents.'" He goes on to elucidate Grahams "dystopian vision," suggesting that,

If Orwell's vision of a boot stamping on a human face sounded too melodramatic a vision of the future for you, then try to imagine the city you live in functioning like an airport, an image of all-too-convincing banality.

Jeff Haydon, reviewing Cities Under Siege for Review31, draws on his own experiences of living in downtown Toronto during the G20 summit in the summer of 2010. "Myriad CCTV cameras were erected," he writes, "additional police were imported from multiple municipalities close to the city, and a barrier was established around the Convention Centre that would protect the leaders of nations from the Great Unwashed." The final result was a "new Toronto" in which "the condition of living became a process of negotiation and where attempts were made to avoid any act that would qualify as 'conspicuous.'"

However, in light of Graham's book, Haydon dubs the security trends around the G20 summit relatively "mundane." This is due to Graham's

Overwhelming amount of research and carefully considered theoretical applications to linked trends in security and the production of the visible citizen...Graham's uncovering of the mechanisms being developed and the general approach to the control of urban populations...opens up the question of how the contemporary condition of urbanity functions on political and sociopolitical levels.

For Haydon explaining the introduction of military practice into urban areas at home is not simply a case of restating Focault's argument in Society Must Be Defended, that as

colonial powers...transplanted their values and governing practices to the cultures they invaded, newly developed techniques of control that were the result of colonial practices would often be carried back to the domestic sphere.

Instead Haydon argues that,

the degree to which a regime of control is transferable from one theatre of conflict to another now seems to come down to the approach a dominant power structure takes toward its own population. Going back to the G20, the shift I noticed personally in the way an area feels, or in how I related to my surroundings, was substantial. The ease with which practices that would have been refined in the construction of the 'green zone' in Baghdad were transferred to an alternate city was unnerving.

In light of military procedures becoming "available to virtually every police force on the planet," Haydon poses several questions;

in what sense are cities things that still belong to those who live in them? Is a city a place that belongs to its citizens or is it an organism that is forever under surveillance, under inspection for fear of a disease that might be rotting it out from the core?

Cities Under Siege, he argues, answers these questions with a "breathtaking assemblage of research coupled with a reasoned, considered take on the likely direction of the mechanisms of control that are becoming more and more commonplace." As a result he deems the book a "text that should be compulsory reading for anyone planning to research the contemporary condition of urbanity.

Visit Review31 to read the review in full.

Competition: Tahrir Square, One Year On

A year on from the revolutionary uprisings in Egypt, PhilosophyFootball.com has produced a "Tahrir Square" t-shirt honouring those who took to the streets to demand the overthrow of President Mubarak. Verso have teamed up with PhilosophyFootball.com to offer you the chance to win a copy of Paul Mason's Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere and one of five t-shirts, whose unique design is based upon the city traffic signs leading up the square which became the focus of the world.

View the t-shirt on PhilosophyFootball.com

To win the prize, simply answer this question:

Tahrir Square used to be known as Ismailia Square, named in honour of Isma'il Pasha, the former Khedive of Egypt, but in which year was Khedive Isma'il deposed?

Email your answer with your preferred T-shirt size, name and address to admin@philosophyfootball.com. Entries close 31 January 2012, no purchase necessary to enter.

Prepare for an American Spring: Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America in Guardian & Financial Times

Andrew Ross, reviewing Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America, Verso's new book of essays and reflections on the Occupy movement, thinks we may be looking forward to an American Spring, or at least a resurgence in grassroots activism across the United States. In the meantime, he suggests we take advantage of the lull in antipathies to assess the impact and lessons of OWS.

Occupy! reads, according to Ross, "like a series of diary entries – on-the-ground vignettes, testimonials of events, and snap analysis of where it might all be heading." It's a good starting point, then, to pull apart the complex tangle of ideologies, grievances and ambitions that make up the movement. Unsuprisingly for an urban movement of predominantly young people, Occupy has been adept at creating its own media outlets. But perhaps incoherence is programmed into the ideological structure of Occupy–Carl Wilkinson, writing for the Financial Times, certainly thinks so, claiming the "essays, diaries and sketches...reflect the protest's freeform nature and lack of coherent message."

This mix of perspectives is, for Ross, the value of Occupy!. It throws light on the logistical difficulties faced by occupiers, such as how to confront "the homeless question" at the camps, as well as issues around organisation emerging from the General Assembly (GA) model of consensus decision-making, such as avoiding reproducing the very patterns of oppression and privilege it was trying to combat:

Complaints about the neglect of race and gender are the most common, righteous cause of disturbance, and when the outcome reinforces the GA's reliance on the "progressive stack" - whereby speakers of (white, male-identified) privilege are encouraged to "step back" - the interference has an alchemy that is breathtaking. Manissa Maharawal describes how she and other members of South Asians for Justice stood up to block the GA consensus on the Declaration of the Occupation of Wall Street: she "felt like something important had just happened, that we had just pushed the movement a little bit closer to the movement I would like to see".

These are insights into a process which is under constant change, as well as constant stress. For Carl Wilkinson, a highlight of the collection is an essay on violence and the state by Rebecca Solnit which "underlines hopes for a new form of dialogue", as well Marco Roth's 'Letters of Resignation from the American Dream', which tackles the disparate nature of the antagonisms behind the protests, "the array of complaints collected under the catch-all banner of "We are the 99%".

These are the documents of a movement focused on, as Ross puts it, "prefiguration"–a fluctuating, amorphous social force trying to formulate its angers and desire in an inclusive, positive manner, learning from its mistakes as it goes. That inclusivity forms the backbone of the book as an editorial project; the editorial team grew from Occupy!: An OWS-Inspired Gazette, an impromptu publication aimed at reflecting the struggle from the point of view of those on the ground. Although the book features transcripts of addresses to the GA by Angela Davis, Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler, the majority of the book, according to Ross, are the voices of "movement participants – not armchair analysts or journos on a short deadline – so the pages of each volume ring with authenticity."

Andrew Ross' review is now available on the Guardian website.

Carl Wilkinson's review can be read at the Financial Times.

To read more on the editorial process and the creation of Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America, please see our roundtable discussion with the editors.

Mixed forms, mixed feelings: Stephen Walker reviews The Art-Architecture Complex

Writing in Times Higher Education, Stephan Walker, a Senior Lecture in the Architecture Department at the University of Sheffield, praises Hal Foster's The Art-Architecture Complex for addressing itself to a 'wide audience', but criticises its tendency to perpetuate a 'highly institutional and geographically delimited discourse, with New York the implicit centre,' and failing to include detailed discussion of artists currently working collaboratively.

Describing Foster's overall project, Walker writes that, 'The shifts in artistic and architectural practice he traces serve as a broad barometer of cultural change.' While the mid 20th Century remained dominated by the legacy of High Modernism, which, as Walker puts it, 'actively policed the separation between sculpture, painting and architecture,' more recent years have seen a flowering of 'inter-relationships and possible collaborations between artists and architects.' Foster draws attention to the fact that, 'the cultural conditions and questions that such inter-relationships raise are currently undergoing significant change.' Foster's primary concern, he notes,

is with the image, with surface, superficiality and spectacle, and throughout the book he makes use of Pop and Minimalism (as artistic, architectural and critical movements) to frame his discussions. Pop's concern with the image can provide a contrast with Minimalism's direct physical engagement with material or space, although Foster is at pains to contest this easy opposition, arguing that they cross over into and inform each other. His lament is that while they fuelled and checked each other in the years following their emergence during the 1960s, this balance has recently been lost as the image has become dominant.

Walker argues that Foster's most 'important contribution' to this ongoing debate is his ability to 'follow the trajectory of this awkward relationship through links to technology, politics, and various moments and forms of practice.'

Although Walker finds Foster's account of the lineage and currency of the complex mixing between art and architecture 'persuasive,' and his discussion of the links between the two disciplines 'nuanced,' he deems the book as a whole 'disappointing.' While he finds sections on the arts practices of Richard Serra, Anthony McCall and Dan Flavin 'engaging,' Walker nonetheless feels there is not enough 'express examination of how these might inform the main questions of the book.' Walker ends his review by asserting that,

There are many collaborative practices where artists and architects (and others) do now work together, but who approach Foster's concerns regarding superficiality, identity and human agency from different and more political positions, who work with different tools, and who produce projects that are harder to recognise as either art or architecture: they, however, don't feature here.

Visit Times Higher Education to read the full review.

Jacques Rancière postpones visit to Israel following an appeal from Palestinian boycott movement

French political philosopher and leading intellectual Jacques Rancière has postponed a visit to Israel, where he was due to speak at Tel Aviv University, after receiving an open letter from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).

PACBI, in a letter published online, wrote to Rancière urging him "in the strongest terms" to cancel his visit to the university which they claim "is complicit in maintaining a regime of occupation, colonialism and apartheid." The letter went on to explain that Rancière's decision to ignore the letter would "violate the Palestinian call for boycott," and, "constitute a blunt rejection of the appeal from over 170 civil society organisations that comprise the Palestinian BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement."

Rancière was invited to Tel Aviv by, among others, Ariella Azoulay director of the Photo Lexic Research Group at the Minerva Humanities Center. In response to the letter from the PACBI, Rancière, who was due to give a lecture on 25 January, explained why he initially agreed to speak in Israel,

I accepted the invitation to contribute to the debate on the image, of a research group whose work on photography is closely related to the exposure of violations of the rights of the Palestinian people since the birth of the State of Israel.

However, he goes on to argue that the "intervention" of the PACBI has "changed the meaning of this visit," by framing it is as a "breach of the boycott" and therefore a "public demonstration" of, "support to the State that is responsible for these violations and the situation of oppression of the Palestinian people." He explains,

I am personally opposed to collective sanctions against all citizens of a State and against its researchers, without taking into account their own attitude towards the policy of this State. I have therefore neither respected nor violated a decision that I did not personally endorse. But it appears that in the present situation, the content of what I might say in response to the invitation that was sent to me has become completely secondary to this simple alternative.

Rancière's decision, and his struggle with the "dual demands" of an invitation from an Israeli institution may serve to once more reignite the debate surrounding the policies of PACBI and the tactics of boycott, divestment and sanctions. In their letter to Rancière, PACBI write that they believe, "that the only avenue open to achieving justice and upholding international law is sustained work on the part of Palestinian and international civil society to put pressure on Israel and its complicit institutions to end this oppression." But why target universities? Does that not constitute a breach of academic and individual freedom? In their press release following Rancière decision, the PACBI tackle this problem head-on:

Jacques Rancière is 'opposed to collective sanctions against all the citizens and scholars of a state.' So are we. PACBI, like the Collectif Palestine Paris 8, AUDRIP, and the BDS France campaign, has no objection to dialogue amongst intellectuals of all countries, including Israel. What we cannot accept is the complicity of the University of Tel Aviv, and of all the other Israeli universities, with the segregationist policies of the Israeli state, and indeed, with its policy of military occupation. For this reason we firmly reject the exploitation by such an institution of the prestige of an intellectual of Rancière's stature.

Following this line of thinking, Judith Butler, who has also heeded the calls of Palestinian civil society by refusing to speak in Israel, has called on us to question,

the classically liberal conception of academic freedom with a view that grasps the political realities at stake, and see that our struggles for academic freedom must work in concert with the opposition to state violence, ideological surveillance, and the systematic devastation of everyday life.

Heeding the call for academic boycott does not, however, mean never venturing inside Israel. In the summer of 2011, Slavoj Žižek spoke at Tolaat Sfarim café in Tel Aviv. The organisers of the talk pointed out that

He did so following the guidelines of the PACBI, stipulating that he will only speak at a venue that will publically renounce the occupation, and state unequivocal support for equal rights for Palestinians. In doing so, Žižek did not only support the Palestinian-led non-violent struggle for equality and freedom, but also showed how the call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israeli oppression of Palestinians is not aimed at suppressing free-speech, or closing-off dialogue, but rather serve as a means to engage intellectuals and the entire artistic community in an honest conversation about the true mission of thinkers, artists, and activists around the globe: to unveil the ideological bigotry and mystification behind repressive regimes, and the pave the way for new paradigms of thought and action.

In choosing not to break the boycott, Rancière joins the ranks of many others who have publicly supported the tactic, including musicians Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, Elvis Costello, The Pixies and Verso writers Arundhati Roy, Eduardo Galeano, John Berger and Judith Butler.

A Roundtable with the editors of Occupy!

This roundtable discussion between myself and the editors of Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America happened over email from December 7-9, 2011. Occupy!, the book, grew out of a forty-page broadsheet called Occupy!: An OWS-Inspired Gazette, put together by the same crew, and distributed at a select number of occupations around the country.

Occupy! editors Astra Taylor, director of the documentary films Zizek! and Examined Life; Keith Gessen, Mark Greif, Nikil Saval, Eli Schmitt and Carla Blumenkranz of the literary journal n+1; and Sarah Resnick, editor of Triple Canopy all participated in the discussion.

How did the Gazette come about?

Astra: Wasn't it Keith's idea? But I like Mark Greif's observation to me that Occupy! is a strange hybrid of my childhood newsletter, Keith Gessen's high school paper, and Sarah Leonard's college paper. I'm sure others made zines and other things too. In other words, we were destined to make the Gazette!

Mark: I think when I tried to explain it to people, I said, "You go home from the park, and you want to read about what you just saw. The Occupiers are doing this incredible thing, and they'll want to read about what they're doing. Maybe we could mirror the park to itself, for the Occupiers and the visitors and the bystanders." To help. Didn't we talk about the fence-sitters too--all the people we knew, who we thought should support what the Occupiers were doing? But they kept coming up with excuses not to come down to the park? Literary and political types. So we would bring the park to them. And it was definitely Keith's idea, the paper.

Nikil: Yep, Keith's idea for sure. I think the other term I kept using (to describe it to people) was "fellow travelers"--i.e. not just undecided people, but ones who wouldn't spend a bunch of time at the park, who nonetheless offered support and wanted to understand what was going on. People ideologically, if not organizationally, committed to OWS. Of which it turns out there are a lot. It was enough that there were people whose brain was like a homologue of the city--just like Zuccotti was always there in some crammed corner way south, your head could be burdened with daily life but still lighted by the obscure sense that the occupation was going on; growing, even.

And it wasn't just bringing the park to them, but bringing other places, plazas (Dilworth, Oscar Grant) to us. I think we all felt the importance of wanting to know about other places besides New York from the very start--the fact that it spread so quickly was the sign of something big.

Eli: I like what Astra said about us being destined to make it. We were looking for a way to participate in the movement in a meaningful way, so we did what we know how to do, which is collect a bunch of good writing and proliferate it. Collectively, we had all the resources to do a publishing project; it's through publishing projects that a lot of us knew each other. But I also think the Gazette has been unlike a lot of other print media that we've worked on. Like much of OWS-related organizing, it was very spontaneous, and required spare energy and time we didn't even know we had!

Keith: It should be said that Astra, Mark, Eli, Sarah Leonard, Sarah Resnick, and Elizabeth Gumport were there on the first day, on September 17, and wrote these great dispatches for the n+1 website about what it felt like to be there, what the process was like, why it was exciting. Eli even wrote down the short list of demands that their small group discussed, which I later saw turned into a slideshow by, I think, Business Insider, under the headline, "What the OWS Protesters Want," thereby demonstrating once again the voracious media hunger for demands. Carla as web editor was posting these pieces and asking for more; and then Nikil wrote a great piece about what it was like at the planning meeting before the Philadelphia occupation, when OWS went national, which Carla also posted. So we already had the most important thing that a new publication can have, which is: some articles.

But I didn't realize this right away. The first time I came to Zuccotti Park a woman handed me a leaflet from the CPUSA, and I thought: If the Communists can hand stuff out, so can we! But what? My first thought was that we should print up a little pamphlet of old n+1 pieces--all the political pieces and proposals we'd published in our Politics ghetto that no one had ever really wanted to read--but people felt this was 1) boring and 2) condescending, as if we had all the answers and we'd just print them up and hand them out.

But eventually we all started emailing--Astra would come back from Zuccotti and write an email about what she'd seen, and Sarah L. would come back from an assembly in Washington Square and write that up, and then Astra's sister Sunaura started occupying Oakland--and it just felt like there were so many things going on, that each had genuine significance, that you couldn't be in all places at once, and that, moreover, neither could the occupiers. I mean, if you're occupying a park, you don't really have that much time to run around New York, much less Philadelphia and Oakland, to see what's going on, but neither do you have time to sit online all day monitoring the news feed. It really seemed like a print publication that would be distributed for free in the park would have genuine value to those living in the park.

Then our designer Dan O. Williams came up with a brilliant design--I had imagined something much more like a newspaper, with kind of static one-page or two-page spreads, whereas Dan O made it really dynamic, in two colors and lots of different type-faces, so that we were able to basically run our reportage of the day-to-day events at Zuccotti in the top half, and then various historical analyses--Marina Sitrin on the history of horizontalism, Amy Offner on the Harvard living-wage occupation from 2001, Doug Henwood on whether to abolish the Federal Reserve--along the bottom. So, visually, it was, like, practice at the top, and some very interesting theory undergirding it--which is exactly right.

In the Preface to Occupy!, you write that you started as participant-observers, then gradually became "observers more explicitly." But even as we were going to press with the book, you were all still actively participating - several of you were even hauled off to jail a few days later, on N17. So what exactly did you mean in the Preface?

Mark: I wonder what the others think. I wrote those words. What I had in mind was that we had gone to Zuccotti Park originally as demonstrators, when there was no indication this would be more than a few days of demonstration. It was a pretty interesting scene right from the beginning. But there was no need to choose a role. As it went on, we saw the dedication of the occupiers, often kids who were there day and night, who were creating a huge organization, and coming from all over the country. Then we had to think more about our role.

We thought we could be documentarians. That's what writers like us could do, to be like the the screenprinters or the computer and social media volunteers or the folks who who were lining up support from unions or musicians. We could get in touch with visual artists and poster makers and cartoonists, too. But we we had to become observers explicitly and deliberately. And line up more people's observations--from people we met at the park, and different networks of working groups, theorists, historians. We would do history on the fly, as it was happening.

Also, I should point out, a lot of the book is in diary form. That has its perils. It's different from formal reporting with its rules and boundaries. But you don't want people to think it means you've decided you're a significant player. We didn't want the use of "I" to seem to suggest we thought we were protagonists in the drama. We weren't. But we did want to put what credibility and goodwill we hold as professional writers and filmmakers and editors on the line for this, for each person to say: "This is only what I saw. But I saw it with my own eyes, and tried to reckon with it. Whatever propaganda you read elsewhere, this is what I felt and thought about. When I understood it right away, and more often when I didn't, and had to search for other perspectives." We remained observers for the sake of the Occupy! Gazette and the book, even if we were taking part in actions.

Sarah R.: To start, I'd like to correct one factual error made earlier: I was not there that first day on September 17. I had intended to go, I had plans to go. But instead I was at home in bed with a fever and a box of tissues. And even as I was disappointed that I was home that day, I felt fairly certain I wasn't missing anything I hadn't already seen. I'd been to many protests over the years and the same few hundred people would turn up and we'd march or stand around before heading home a few hours later and I'd kind of forget it ever happened.

In May, for instance, Astra and I attended a march with what we later discovered was more than 20,000 other people, even though we still wonder where they all were or if we had somehow bypassed the main event. Later, on the night of the 17th, I read about the day's activities-only 1000 people had come out. I went to bed feeling I hadn't missed much. And a few days would go by before I realized that in fact I had. I ended up writing a diary for the first Gazette, but it wasn't until plans for the second issue and the book were under way that I started to working in an editorial role.

Which brings me to the question about the Preface. Mark explains our position well, though I'll add that I'm not sure observation and participation need to be understood as dichotomous. I've always interpreted the line about our becoming "observers more explicitly" as an eventual decision to treat our role as observers with more care and seriousness and dedication, though never at the expense of participation (except when closing an issue of the Gazette, which demands a lot of time at home on the computer). I've considered myself an active participant all along: I attended the same meetings and marches and actions I would have otherwise. But becoming an observer did mean directing a different kind of attention at the movement, one that is diligent and wholly immersed and boundless in a way. In fact, to some extent becoming observers meant broadening the scope of our involvement in the movement-to attend even more meetings and actions. And for me I know it also meant very deliberately following conversations on Facebook and on Twitter, and reading as much as possible whenever possible. I absolutely agree with Mark though when he says that for the sake of the Gazette we remained observers. Because even as we were taking part in actions, we were never the people organizing them, and we were never the significant players, and it was important that this would be apparent to our readers.

You are all rushing to complete the third issue of Gazette right now. This will be the first issue since Liberty Square and most of the other major occupations were cleared out. The movement is far from dead - in fact, it is evolving in exciting ways - but do you feel your role as media-makers and documentarians has shifted in any way?

Keith: I guess I think we're participant-observers. Sarah R. and Astra are sure as hell both attending a lot of meetings, though it's true there are even more meetings out there, and more meetings beyond that. But OWS has been really good so far about keeping itself open in a kind of perpetual meeting that you can join at any time. Naturally the number of participation points you get is directly proportional to how much time and effort you put in--but OWS has managed to keep the various expanding circles involved, I think, with the hope of expanding them further.

As an editor and writer, I've never felt so involved with a readership: n+1, when we started it, was an attempt to write the history of the present as it was happening, but there's always been a kind of delay or disconnect--which is ok--but here it felt like we were really doing it. When they came to the park in the middle of the night and kicked everyone out, that was our readers they were kicking out! We've continued handing out the Gazette in the park during GAs, and at 60 Wall Street, and also around the city--though it's not like it used to be, when we could drop 700 copies off at the Info Desk and they'd be gone in a couple of hours.

I think the issue of the Gazette we're working on now (#3) is a little more historically minded than the others have been--we're looking back at other movements of the past--the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, ACT-UP, even the New School occupation from 2008, to see how they dealt with adversity and kept their spirits up.

Carla: I would just add in response to the first question that while we all have our own explanations what it felt most like was a truly spontaneous project. As Mark said, we wanted to read about what we heard and saw-and since we collectively had the resources to write and solicit and edit and publish, creating the thing we wanted to read became almost like an obligation. Although most of us already knew each other, as a group we really solidified around wanting and together having the ability to make that happen.

"Break the swarm": Paul Mason reflects on the new politics of the network

In a thought-provoking video interview with Oliver Laughland for the Guardian, Paul Mason elaborates on how technological development and the banking crisis have "nullified" the ideological impasse of the past 30 years, and how the decodified, radicalised youth springing up in its wake are beginning to tear up decades of stagnation with a new, networked form of activism.

"It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" – so wrote Fredric Jameson in Archeologies of the Future, and this, for Mason, best sums up the "Roveian Reality" which shaped the popular imagination since the 1970s:

The social theorist Mark Fisher calls this "capitalist realism"... There is no alternative to the reality you can't escape from- the reality of marketisation, neoliberalism, the individualisation of people's lives, the retreat of a generation in between the two earbuds of the iPod, into a cocoon... I think Fisher, in that concept, really succinctly put his finger on what the intellectual zeitgeist of, broadly speaking, the Left, had been for 20 years.

For both Fisher and Mason, the credit crunch and the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers "represented a rend in the fabric" of capitalist realism:

...suddenly you could imagine an end of capitalism. Some in the markets couldn't imagine anything but an end of capitalism. What it's done for a generation is kind of cancelled their future, and a generation, that lived for the future, sees their predictable future cancelled, suddenly adopts really quite radical ideas in response.

Mason cites the financial crisis as an impetus for radicalism, but notes that it is enabled by advances in technology which operate on more than a level of effective communication. Networks are not simply the routes of information passed between activists, but the basic ideology in itself. Horizontal organisational structures, consensus decision-making, the wisdom of the hive mind: these have replaced the fixed programmes for social transformation that marked previous anti-authoritarian movements. According to Mason this creates new opportunities for side-stepping authority:

social media in a revolution gives you a free hit of extra knowledge, and a momentum... you can sense when the time comes to break the swarm, swarm away, and stop attacking. You can sense the moment very easily when consensus is over. To the 20th century theorist of social order this a terrible weakness, that they are mercurial. Actually, what I write in the book is this ability to swarm and then break the swarm is one of the crucial things about nonheirarchical protest that leaves the heirarchies really struggling to cope with them.

Whether these movements can actually deliver social transformation without a more established political programme, or whether we can expect capitalism to fail through its own contradictions, is left open here. Writing in the Huffington Post James Deneslow points 0ut that it is

the critical heart of Mason's argument that while technology has allowed empowered individuals to overthrow authoritarian governments, globalisation itself may fail as the economics of the financial crisis of 2008 continue to unravel.

Mason explores the relationship between technological innovations and young protestors in his new book, Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere. Ian Finlayson, writing in the Times this Saturday, says "Mason writes like he sounds on TV and radio - headlong, well-informed, enthusiastic and hands-on."

Visit the Guardian to watch the video in full. James Denselow's review of Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere can be found on the Huffington Post.

The Tailor of Ulm: An “insider’s history” of Italian Communism

Lucio Magri's The Tailor of Ulm: Communism in the Twentieth Century is "a perfectly sound account" of the history of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), writes Donald Sassoon for the Observer. The book tells how the PCI evolved from "a small, ineffectual, persecuted sect" under Fascism to an organization with more than two million members after World War 2. In the post-war years, Italian Communists "thrived as a responsible opposition under the democratic constitution they had helped to shape." The city councils that were under Communist control "gave Italians a feel for what Swedish social democracy might look like." The trajectory of the Party came abruptly to an end after 1989. In the last two decades, Italian post-Communists have changed the name of their political organizations several times, "as if to bury neurotically all traces of the past," Sassoon points out.

In Sassoon's view, The Tailor of Ulm can be described an "insider's history" of the PCI. Magri was one of the foremost "critical voices" in the party until 1969, when he was expelled with the fellow members of the Manifesto group. Nonetheless, the Manifesto people "never became one of the groupuscules that infested the far left," and eventually rejoined the Party in the 1980s. Despite the misunderstandings between Magri and the orthodox Communist leadership, The Tailor of Ulm is not "a rancorous memoir", but instead "an honest effort to be judicious and balanced," Sassoon notes. Magri's narration at times sounds quite "intimate"

One can feel the pain of a life spent fighting for a better Italy ending up facing such a ridiculous opponent as Silvio Berlusconi, brought down not by the masses but by the markets.

Visit the Observer to read Donald Sassoon's review in full.

'This unknown territory has become my biography': Iain Sinclair reviews Savage Messiah

Iain Sinclair has been out walking in the footsteps of Laura Oldfield Ford. Sinclair opens his review of Savage Messiah, Ford's cut-n-paste zine of psychogeographic drifts through London, with a description of his own walks through the city's changing landscape.

Writing for the Guardian, Sinclair documents his own experiences of journeying through an East London altered irrevocably by Olympic construction and the "fork-tongued instruments of global capitalism, hellbent on improving the image of destruction." Such dramatic change has, he claims, spawned a counter-reaction of 'Sentimentalists of every stripe' seeking to capture a landscape on the verge of disappearance: "raiding parties bearing cameras and notebooks, the tattered footsoldiers of anarchy: retro-geographers, punk Vorticists." Walking alongside these lone chroniclers of a lost London, Sinclair ponders the violent collision of new money and old city:

Old Stratford, transport hub, retail cathedral, birthplace of the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, drew me back with its intimations of a new England, a city state outside time and beyond culture. Compulsory diversions have been arranged, systems of barricades and cones, to funnel random pedestrians through chasms of glass and steel towards the shimmering illusion of the Westfield oasis. It took something special to make me reach for my camera, all the evidence had already been logged and relogged. Just as my futile presence, in its turn, was captured on hours of security tape, scans from overhead drones.

However, whilst 'logging' this 'relogged' landscape might sometimes seem pointless, Sinclair admires Laura Oldfield Ford's "relentless Xeroxing of the entire genealogy of protest from Blast to Sniffin' Glue, by way of Situationism and psychogeography." He writes:

Oldfield Ford displays authentic gifts as a recorder and mapper of terrain. She is a necessary kind of writer, smart enough to bring document and poetry together in a scissors-and-paste, post-authorial form. Like so many before her, psychotic or inspired, she trudges far enough to dissolve ego and to identify with the non-spaces into which she is voyaging. "This unknown territory has become my biography."

Visit the Guardian to read the review in full.

Meanwhile, Oldfield Ford has been busy walking elsewhere. She has produced new work - inspired by 'drifts' around Walsall - that forms part of a new exhibition entitled There Is A Place, opening on January 20 at The New Art Gallery Walsall. She will be giving a talk on her new work on 25 February, at 2pm, and discussing how she was inspired by her walks in and around Walsall to present an alternative view of the town.

The exhibition aims to bring together a group of artists to explore our psychic connectivity to landscape;

The drawings, paintings and prints within the exhibition reveal 'a sense of place' as seemingly generic urban and suburban views evoke personal and collective memories. The reverie of teenage hideouts, suburban housing estates and motorway junctions, each depicted in painstaking detail, are at once familiar yet unnerving for all.

The artists in this exhibition capture the most overlooked and peripheral spaces of our towns and cities, those unremarkable and unclaimed spaces that we each make our own.

You can find out more about the exhibition and talk here, or visit The New Art Gallery Walsall website here.

"Little Switzerlands": Farmworker Power, Ethnic Solidarities and the Birth of the UFW

This conversation came out of an email exchange between myself and Frank Bardacke in December 2011. Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers is the dramatic new history of the rise and fall of the UFW.

The Economist's only real complaint about Trampling Out the Vintage (apart from you being a leftist!) was that you "insufficiently acknowledged" Cesar Chavez's "significant legacy." What is your response?

It's not true. I fully acknowledge Cesar's role in founding the UFW, organizing the grape boycott, and inspiring Chicanos. What I don't do is reduce the history of the UFW to an aspect of Cesar's biography. That's what people have always done before. Instead, I write about the lives, working skills, and politics of the farm workers who were responsible for so much of what the UFW won in the fields. I don't think the folks at The Economist were much interested in that. They dismiss it as Leftism.

In fact, you describe in Trampling Out the Vintage how farmworker power actually predates the UFW.

Yes, that's right. Farm worker power is built into the very nature of agricultural production. Before you can reap, you must sow. Before growers can make a profit they have to pay land rent, cultivate and prepare the soil, irrigate, weed, thin, and often weed again. During that time, the grower has no product to sell. The only time the grower can make a profit is during the harvest, and if the harvest is lost or interrupted for any reason, the grower loses everything. Unlike in industry, if there is a strike, the grower can't warehouse the raw materials, and then put people on triple shifts after the strike and make back some of what was lost. If the harvest is lost, it is lost forever. And in some fruits and vegetables, the harvest lasts a very short time.

Head lettuce, to give an example of one of the most important crops in UFW history, has to be harvested within three days of when it is ready. All of this gives farm workers considerable power during a harvest. And within farm worker culture there is a tradition of using that power through harvest strikes, slowdowns, and forms of minor sabotage, like damaging the crop when picking it or barn burning. Farm workers taught these tactics to the UFW staff, not the reverse.

So what did the UFW (or more accurately, its precursor, the National Farm Worker Association (NFWA)) have to offer the farmworkers when they first started out?

The periodic power of the crews during the harvest was considerable, but it was not enough to build a successful union. People had to organize on a wider basis. The NFWA was an attempt to do that. They set out to be a community organization that would also sign union contracts, trying to organize farm workers around issues on and off the job. When the 1965 strike was forced upon them, they were in a position to keep the strike symbolically alive after it was defeated, and to link farm workers to their supporters-unionists, consumers, religious folks, and students-through the boycott. They couldn't have done that without the NFWA, and without the strategic genius of Cesar Chavez.

What about Larry Itliong and the AWOC, the largely Filipino farmworkers organization that merged with the NFWA to form the UFW in 1965?

In 1965, as the grape strike began, about 30 percent of the people working in the Delano table grapes were Filipinos. They were mostly "Manong" who had come to California as young men between 1923 and 1934. In 1965, they were they were the true bearers of trade union militancy and success in the California fields. As a result of their intense internal solidarity and their monopoly of specific skills (they were the very best asparagus pickers in the US) they had built two unions, the Filipino Labor Union (FLU) in Santa Maria, and the Filipino Agricultural Labor Association in Stockton. These unions had collective bargaining agreements, union halls, and joint labor-management grievance boards. Their unions fell apart only at the beginning of the World War II when so many of the Filipino workers went into the Army to earn full US citizenship.

The Filipinos grape pickers were the first workers to strike the Delano grape fields in 1965. A group of rank and file workers forced the strike on the formal leadership of AWOC, and their lead organizer, Larry Itliong. He had been involved in labor struggles since he first got off the boat from the Philippines in 1929, and once he was convinced that the workers could not be talked out of their strike (they were sitting in the vineyards) he brought the whole weight of the AFL-CIO-sponsored AWOC into the strike. The NFWA, which would become the UFW, had to decide what it would do about the Filipino strike. The leadership of the NFWA, especially Chavez, thought that the strike would be defeated fairly quickly (as it was) but didn't think the the NFWA could stay out of it. If if did abstain, the Filipinos would surely lose, he reasoned, and would blame the Mexican NFWA for their loss. For the foreseeable future it would be impossible to unite Filipinos and Mexicans and therefore impossible to win in the grape vineyards. So the NFWA joined what they knew would be a losing strike. And, thus, the UFW was born in act of solidarity between Mexicans and Filipinos, quite unusual in California history where more typically national and ethnic groups scab on each others' strikes.

But this is just the beginning of the long story of Filipino-Mexican relations inside the UFW.

So the UFW really was a multicultural and multi-ethnic movement: in addition to its largely Mexican and Filipino membership, the organizers were largely a mixture of Mexican Americans, like Cesar and Dolores Huerta, and white radicals from the student movement, like Marshall Ganz. How did this contribute to the UFW's success, and to its eventual fall?

Yes. The birth of the UFW in the fields depends on an act of inter-ethnic solidarity: A Mexican-American organization supports a Filipino union's strike. And the successful grape boycott that follows depends on a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, mixed-class alliance of progressives, liberals and radicals that was organized by the UFW's proudly diverse staff. And remember: this alliance was built in the late 1960s when liberals and radicals were sharply divided over the question of the war in Vietnam. Also, when the Black Power movement had replaced the Civil Rights movement, and black activists were no longer supported by Democratic Party liberals. The grand alliance of the early sixties had fallen apart everywhere except on the UFW boycott. The boycott committees were like little Switzerlands, where people who otherwise weren't talking to each other were working together. All of that was crucial to the UFW's early success.

Thus during the grape boycott, the union developed into what I call a "two-souled" organization: A boycott-advocacy soul made up of the diverse union staff, and its supporters and a farm worker soul made up of Mexican farm workers covered by UFW contracts. When these two souls worked together, the UFW was able to win a significant measure of power both in the fields and in the rest of society. But, eventually, those two souls were in conflict, and the resulting battle debilitated the union, setting it up for the grower offensive in the early 1980s that robbed it of its contracts and its power.

How that came to happen is one of the major themes of the book. It is sad, no doubt, but also instructive. And, in my humble opinion, fascinating in its particulars.

Thank you Frank!

Why it's kicking off in Romania

As a country with little protesting experience, it has taken Romanians a bit longer to come out on the streets to protest austerity measures. Sparked by the president Traian Basescu publicly denigrating Dr Raed Arafat, then the deputy health minister for opposing the privatisation of the ambulance-paramedics system, the movement has grown over the past week to include people protesting against, among other things, salary and public spending cuts, low pensions and the decision to delay regional elections and thus illegally lengthening mandates by six months. But most of all, the protests are a reaction to political corruption. As one protester has put it, "we apologise, we do not produce as much as you steal".

26 NGOs have publicly declared their support for the University Square movement, and are rejecting the "sham" dialogue the government has invited them to until the latter has apologised for calling protesters "worms" and an "inept and violent slum". With a strong hold on power, the government and the president show no signs of willingness to resign, and have been telling the people to go home and clear the streets. As an extra incentive, late yesterday evening the gendarmes again violently chased protestors out of University Square, beating some of them up and arresting dozens of others.

For coverage of events in English, see the Economist and BBC websites. For live images, check out the University Square facebook page. The Romanian diasporas are starting to show solidarity as well, with movements taking place in London, Vienna, Italy, and forthcoming over the weekend in Paris, Berlin and Stuttgart.

Trampling Out the Vintage featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, on KPFK and The Nation.com

The San Francisco Chronicle named the book one of its 100 recommended books of the year in its December 25th issue and offered praise for the book:

Bardacke has written what bids to become the union's definitive history.

Frank Bardacke was interviewed by KPFK's Jon Wiener, who called the book "a masterpiece of sorts, on the order of Parting of the Waters by Taylor Branch." The interview aired on KPFK on January 5th and was also posted on The Nation magazine's website. A sample from this lively and informative discussion:

Q: What is the significance of this story for what's left of the labor movement today?

A: There's no substitute for democracy. That's the major lesson of the UFW experience. Democracy inside unions might be difficult and seem like a waste of time, but it's only through democratic debate that people build the kind of commitment that is necessary to stand together. The UFW had no locals. That was a tremendous mistake. There's no substitute for face to face debate, people having direct control over their local union affairs. That's the way you build strength.

The Progressive magazine's best of 2011 list features two Verso titles

The Progressive's editor Matthew Rothschild included The S Word on his list of best books of 2011.

John Nichols chose News for All the People for his list of best books of 2011.

"Avoiding Race, Ethnicity and Oppression"

Over the last week, CNN, Salon, Wordstrike and various other media outlets have been providing ongoing coverage of the Tucson Unified School District board's recent decision to shut down Mexican American Studies in its public schools. The governing board, which voted in a 4-1 decision to indefinitely suspend the programs, made their decision on the basis of the unbelievable recent state ruling that Mexican American Studies "promote resentment towards a race or class of people" and in the face of the threatened loss of $15 million in state funding.

(UPDATE: Sign this petition to Superintendent John Pedicone to reverse the decision and reinstate Mexican American Studies Programs in Tucson public schools, and visit the 'Save Ethnic Studies in Arizona' Facebook page for more information and updates)

The ruling comes largely as the result of Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal's longstanding crusade to remove Mexican American Studies from Arizona school curricula. He has campaigned on the basis of this issue in the past and, in an earlier statement, has even gone as far as to suggest that Mexican Studies is "not an education at all . . . is not teaching these kids to think critically" and, in a perverse reversal, is little more than "indoctrination." The school board's decision was also accompanied by the equally discomfiting recent news that a list of books by Chicano, Native and Mexican authors were also to be effectively banned --- or, according to a later statement by the TUSD, "moved to a district storage facility" for some unspecified and, presumably, indefinitely prolonged period of time.

Among the banned are school textbooks, titles by award-winning authors and poets, and bizarrely enough, Shakespeare's Tempest, as teachers have reportedly been instructed to avoid topics touching on "race, ethnicity and oppression". Also included are books written by Verso author Rodolfo Acuna, who has been called the "W.E.B. du Bois of Chicano Studies" and whose Occupied America has become a classic in the field. Like his other works, Anything But Mexican: A History of Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles (which Verso released in the 1990s) offers a provocative challenge to the many prevailing myths about Mexican Americans and immigration in the southwestern United States. It has been hailed as a "classic" and "required reading" for Chicanos in the Southwest, and has also been cited for helping "define political and social space for Latinos" in the United States.

So far, the TUSD's decision has sparked a response of outrage, yet it has also been met with an equal measure of fear and unease by the Latin American community. The ruling undoubtedly sets a new and dangerous precedent, and it also reflects the ratcheting up of anti-immigration legislation and rhetoric over recent years by increasingly vociferous and self-confident Republican politicians.

Acuna has written an op-ed piece for the Tucson Citzen, "Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition," in which he situates the recent events in a larger historical context. He writes,

Censorship is criminal. We live in a world of knowledge; books and education give us access to that knowledge; if we are deprived of it, the inquisitors deny us the right to make rational choices.

Arizona schools have abandoned its mission to educate students; they have intentionally denied Mexican American students access to knowledge. Consequently the Arizona bureaucracy has deliberately kept them in the fields, the mines and the prisons, hoping to deny them alternatives.

The purpose of critical thinking is to give students alternatives and to dispel myths and repel blind allegiance to those who deny them alternatives.

He also candidly speaks to Michelle Chen of CultureStrike where he discusses the lead-up to the abolition of Mexican Studies, the political failures of Obama, and the future of public education in the US. Visit WordStrike to read the interview in full,

"Theorizing a communism for the twenty-first century"- The Idea of Communism reviewed on Libcom

In his rigorous review of The Idea of Communism for Libcom, Alasdair Thompson walks us through the main themes of this collection of essays by some of today's most important political thinkers. Edited by Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek, The Idea of Communism was developed in the wake of a 2009 conference of the same name at Birkbeck Institute of the Humanities. Thompson's review looks at a number of these texts in relation to each other, including work by Michael Hardt, Alain Badiou and Alberto Toscano.

"The spectre of Mao" has hung over his political life for the past 12 months, and for Thompson that spectre has been profoundly influential on this book. For that reason Thompson finds Alessandro Russo's "fascinating history" of the Cultural Revolution an important contextualising piece for the entire book, explaining how Mao's "attack on the party-state as singular legitimate seat of politics" created the mise-en-scene for the collapse of the socialist bloc two decades later. Thompson explains that this collapse has lead to a strict formal division:

Communism is split into "a name in philosophy", which still exists as an ideal which requires discussion and thought, as in this collection, and "a name in politics" which attaches to the party-state in China.

It is this split that has lead Russo to the position that "communism" is a defunct, counterproductive term, but Thompson is more cautious, asking "Should we be that quick to throw away the history and meaning of Communism, the word?". If not, what form of emancipatory project does it describe?

One such possible project, explored in the book by Michael Hardt, is that of the reassertion of an idea of "the common", whereby Hardt posits that the historic transition from immobile property (i.e. land) to mobile property (extracting profit from surplus labour) is today echoed in the transition to immaterial and biopolitical production—"that is the forms that property as a dominant entity in the late twentieth and twenty-first century take ... as ideas, images, knowledge, brands, relationships, affects and so on - information in a broad sense." Emphasis on the domination of immaterial production is strongly caveated though:

Hardt stresses that his periodisation should be seen as a qualitative dominance of one form of property, not necessarily of which form constitutes the quantitatively largest share of the economy in a given era; mobile property as expressed through the industrial revolution becomes dominant while agriculture, as representative of immobile property and rent, still makes up the largest fraction of the economy, for example. Similarly, that immaterial production is now the dominant form should not be taken to ignore the fact that most people globally are still employed in material production.

Thompson links this to the work of economist Christian Marazzi which focuses on the delinking of material and immaterial capital as part of the financialisation of the economy. For Hardt, however, the immaterial is a productive force which, in Thompson's words, is "constantly under pressure to escape into common ownership":

Considering communism as the idea that against both private and public property all should be held in common, we are informed that immaterial property is both particularly amenable to common (or non) ownership (there is no issue of scarcity and temporal control over ideas or information, whereas such considerations do have to be handled for material property) and also already (or in some cases still) held in that form.

Thompson counters the idea that capitalist development into reliance upon the common is a contradiction that empowers the autonomy of the common (therefore bringing us closer to the realisation of communism as a social project) by reprising the critique of Hardt and Negri by the British autonomist-influenced journal Aufheben:

Aufheben argue that far from being natural and autonomous from capital, immaterial labour is in fact best seen as a specific division of labour. As they say "[w]e do not eat, drive or wear ideas. Pure ideation can exist as such only because there is a stage of pure execution somewhere else."...Immateriality then presents itself not as a natural stage of production which moves us closer to communism but as an impediment with which we must break and radically overcome.

Both these critiques, according to Thompson, are radically different from that of Žižek, whose essay How to Begin from the Beginning confronts the "revolutionary antagonism of the commons" not as an inherent contradiction within capitalism, but merely "a series of challenges to the current form of capitalism, but not the underlying content".

Žižek's essay leaves a bad taste for Thompson, interspersed as it is "with the inevitable apologetics for and assertions of the need for a dose of 'Jacobin-Leninism' ". For the reviewer this touches on the unresolved tension within the Left, and it is this tension which forms the crux of the debate within The Idea of Communism- what role the state plays in the transition to a stateless society. Thompson contrasts Badiou and Žižek's echoes of Lenin—"the State as organizer of the transition to the non-State"—with Negri's contribution to the book—"Being communist means being against the State" in both it's public and private conceptions.

These differences are what make the book " an extremely interesting collection of essays" for Thompson:

[A]s an introduction to the task ahead of us in asserting a positive vision of society which goes beyond simply a rejection of capitalism, this book is a great place to begin and a useful contribution to how the idea of communism relates both to politics and philosophy today.

To see the full review, visit Libcom.

‘You are not powerless’: Dan Hind, author of Return of the Public writing for Al Jazeera

'What's the point of political action?' Dan Hind asks in his latest opinion piece for Al Jazeera. He begins by outlining the general and widespread cynicism that has characterised our attitude to the public protest in recent years,

In Britain, vast public demonstrations in 2003 failed to prevent our government from joining the United States in a war of aggression in Iraq. If they can get away with that, why bother?

Politics has, for some time, been the reserve of politicians and broadcasters, who have been free to decide what is and isn't political for all of us. It seemed that we, the public, had given up the fight. However, in the light of recent events, Hind argues that what may have seemed like 'common sense' a decade ago now appears absurd; 'There is too much evidence that direct action, if sustained and sufficiently troubling to the established order, works.' Using the actions of protest group UK Uncut against tax avoidance as an example, Hind points out that,

A relatively small number of people who aren't supposed to act politically have begun to act in ways that effectively disrupt the orderly circulation of idea, goods, and alibis for inaction. In assembling and discussing matters of common concern they have exceeded the formal limits of polite protest. Their methods are demonstrably effective.

We, the public, have been waking up to the power we have to create change in the world around us. Although politicians and broadcasters may 'continue to insist that they, and only they, are entitled to determine the scope and content of the political,' Hind predicts that 2012 will be an important year for an emboldened public,

This year we look set to find out what we can do once more than a handful of us start acting like free citizens in a democracy. When we spend as much time talking with one another as we spend listening to talking heads on the television, we will discover the full extent of our shared power to describe and change the world.

The full article is available at Al Jazeera.

Dan Hind's The Return of the Public will be published by Verso in paperback this May.

A thinker for tumultuous times: Peter Hudis on Rosa Luxemburg's legacy

Against the Grain, the alternative radio and web-media project based out of Berkeley, California has recently included in their podcast series a lengthy interview with Peter Hudis, editor of The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, published by Verso in February 2011. Hudis spoke to Against the Grain about Luxemburg's legacy and her role in the history and evolution of both Marxist theory and practice.

Verso intends to publish the entire fourteen-volume Collected Works of Rosa Luxemburg over the next decade. Highlighting the importance of this "thinker for our tumultuous times," Hudis offers a timely consideration of the importance of Luxemburg's radical poltics and vision for us today, nearly a century after her assassination.

Visit Against the Grain to listen to the interview in full.

‘A clarion call for peace’: recent coverage of Kashmir: The Case for Freedom

Arifa Akbar writes in the Independent that Kashmir is full of 'urgent truths' about the disputed region and its struggle for independence, praising Arundhati Roy for a particularly 'powerful' contribution. Paris Review recently published a short interview with Roy about her other recent book, Walking with the Comrades, in which she argues that in her opinion there is more hope to be found among the oppressed than their oppressors:

I always find it interesting that when you’re with people who are really at the receiving end of oppression, you find a lot less despair than you do in middle-class drawing rooms. In these situations, despair is not an option. I wonder if the amount of information that is hammered into our heads day and night leads people to think that the world’s problems are so huge they’re insurmountable. Whereas people who are fighting against something in a more or less localized way are far clearer about what they have to do and how they have to do it.

Writing in Muslim News, Muhammad Khan suggests that Kashmir makes 'a compelling case for Kashmiri freedom and independence,' and argues

This book represents a clarion call for peace, freedom and stability in a region brutalised by mindless violence and killing; highly recommended reading for politicians, policy makers, academics, journalists and lay-people alike.

He highlights Tariq Ali's 'scathing criticism' of India, Pakistan and their Western allies for actions that have turned the 'beautiful' valley of Kashmir into, 'an ugly centre of tension, intrigue and warfare.'

Visit Muslim News to read the full review.

Z.G. Muhammad, reviewing Kashmir for Greater Kashmir online, describes the book as 'an important addition to literature in Kashmir,' and specifically admires Pankaj Mishra's 'incisive' introduction that takes a dig at Indian writers and intellectuals refusing to take a stand on the issue. By contrast, the contributors to Kashmir remind Muhammad of

the galaxy of American writers like Robert Bly, David Rat, Robert Lowell, Grace Paley and many others who under the banner of American writers Against Vietnam War raised their voice against their government.

Visit Greater Kashmir to read the full review.

Radical Thinkers Set 6: Win the complete new set!

Thank you to all who took part in our Radical Thinkers competition. Our lightening-fast winners have now been notified. We've added the answers you've all been waiting for below!

To celebrate the release of the Set 6 of Radical Thinkers titles, Verso is offering two readers the chance to win the complete set of 12 beautiful books. Continue reading for the full details of how to enter.

First launched in 2005, Radical Thinkers are key works from the world's most important philosophers in stylish and affordable editions. Covering the full spectrum of critical thought, the series includes work from radical thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard, Henri Lefebvre, Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Jean-Paul Sartre, Theodor Adorno and many more.

Two lucky readers will recieve the complete new set of 12 titles, including Metapolitics by Alain Badiou, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory by Ernesto Laclau and Ethics of the Real by Alenka Zupančič.

There will be 6 questions in total, each relating to a title from Set 6 of the Radical Thinkers series. One fiendishly difficult question will be posted each working day from today.

The final questions will be posted at 4pm GMT on Wednesday 25th January. The winners will be the first person in each territory (North America and UK and ROW) to email the collated, correct answers to all six questions after that time, when more details on how to enter will be posted.

Please do not post the answers on Facebook, Twitter or anywhere else—entries accepted by email only. Any comments posting the answers will be deleted.

Questions

1. In his address on the centenary of Mahler's birth, Adorno comments on the Austrian tradition within the composer's work.Listening to his Ninth Symphony, Adorno is reminded of a traditional Ländler, or dance, played upon which instrument?

ANSWER: The Fiddle

2. Reminiscing upon his childhood, Sartre insists that although he wasn't ugly, he was preparing to become so, and wished for people to be charmed not by his looks, but by his creative works. He looked for comparisons in literature; whilst enchanted by Zamacoïs' Les Bouffons, he was "shocked and distressed" by which semi-fictionalised literary figure?

ANSWER: Cyrano de Bergerac

3. Alain Badiou devotes a chapter of Metapolitics to examining the "Thermidoreans", a counter-revolutionary movement against the Terror in the French Revolution. The men of Fréron, a revolutionary leader who turned on Robespierre as part of the Thermidorean Reaction, we known as the jeunesse dorée, or "gilded youth". According to Badiou, what was the war cry of this militia?

ANSWER: "Down with the Jacobins!"

4. According to Althusser, the act of using the dialectic to question the dialectic is what constituted "the grandeur" of which political figure?

ANSWER: Chairman Mao

5. Artists Carsten Höller and Rosemarie Trockel's 1997 work 'Ein Haus für Schweine und Menschen' is, according to Jean Baudrillard, an updated rendering of which 17th Century painting?

ANSWER: Velázquez's Las Meninas

6. Henri Lefebvre thought the influence of the Russian Revolution on French culture can not be underestimated. Without which Russian cultural export, according to Lefebvre, would the art of Pablo Picasso have been impossible?

ANSWER: Diaghilev's Ballet Russes

If you are entering from North America, please send your entries to verso@versobooks.com

If you are entering from the UK, Europe or the rest of the world, please send your entries to enquiries@verso.co.uk

Please use the subject line RADICAL THINKERS COMPETITION. The winner will be the first person in each territory to submit correct answers to all 6 questions. Good luck!

"A loss of fear and a loss of apathy": Paul Mason appears on Frost Over The World

Is Paul Mason "an old testament, doom-laden prophet"? That was the impression Sir David Frost got from Mason's new book, Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere, but the BBC economics editor begs to differ. Rather, he has been inspired by seeing a young generation "unplug the earbuds of the iPod and listen to what's going on", taking to the streets in the cause of social, political and economic change. In an interview with Sir David for Frost over the World on Al-Jazeera, Mason said that "a loss of fear and a loss of apathy" amongst protestors—particularly a core of educated, networked young graduates—who have "had their future cancelled" was what has stimulated anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist political protests across the world.

Writing for the Scotland on Sunday Kenny Farquharson finds the linking of protestors in, say, Tahrir Square in Cairo and Zuccotti Park in New York City "bordering on bad taste, if not downright offensive". Whilst there is no political comparison between the two, according to Farquharson, even if both share similar attitudes toward technology and organisation. Despite this criticism, his review is keen to praise Mason for the strength of his analysis and being

...capable of looking at world events and seeing not just isolated happenings and the actions of individuals, but the broad sweep of historic change, powered by dynamic social and economic forces. This gives Mason the confidence to step into the chaos of Tahrir Square, or the ferment of an Athens riot, or the tension of an Occupy Wall Street stand-off, and see what's happening as symptom and consequence, not just actualité.

Meanwhile, writing for the Camden New Journal, Dan Carrier is impressed at Mason's contextualisation of these tumultuous events within a historical framework, with precedents in the 1848 European revolutions —the so called "Spring of Nations"—and the technological developments of the industrial revolution which enabled it.

But for Carrier, Mason's real insights come from his first-hand experience of the frontlines of the struggles of the past year:

He is aware of how lucky he is to have a job that has given him the chance to bear witness to a global revolution whose end game is far from clear. Like those who were on the Paris barricades of 1968. saw the 10 days that shook the world in 1917, or watched police shoot students in Berkeley, he has seen the moments that will define a generation. And in this he finds hope: referring to the student movements of the 1960s, he says: "You may have thought such days were gone such idealism, such eloquence, such creativity and hope.Well, they're back."

Phil Harrison is similarly enthused by Mason's "approachable guide to the fault lines" of the global crisis, in his review of Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere for Time Out. According to Harrison the book is full of the energy of its time. He finds the book "unashamedly episodic, a series of urgent, pertinent snapshots of cause and effect" from across the world:

As a writer, he's lively, funny, and engaging, trading in an energy derived from the thrill and signifiance of what he's witnessing. It's a courageous journalist who volunteers a first draft of history in a period as volatile as this, and Mason is potentially a hostage to fortune.

Perhaps Sir David Frost is playing the role of hostage negotiator when he attempts to tease out some predictions for 2012 from Mason. Asked what he foresees in the coming twelve months, he is happy to offer some reflections. Whilst 2011 was a year of revolutions, 2012 will be a year of consolidation, even counter-revolution, coming down to "who get's what out of these revolutions". "I see a year of economic nationalism" says Mason, offering the prospect of populations looking to domestic politicians to "offer people a national exit route". Mason doesn't elaborate on this, but, for a journalist who, according to a recent interview in the Financial Times, is "very attached to the idea of social justice", there lies within that exit route a very real implicit threat.

Read reviews of Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere at Scotland on Sunday and the Camden New Journal. His interview with the Financial Times can be found here.

Did Pope Benedict really call gay marriage a "threat to the future of humanity"?

Peter Montgomery, writing for Religious Dispatches, digs deeper on the current furore over the Pope's recent speech to the diplomatic corps. Andrew Brown, of the Guardian, objected to Reuters reporting the head of the Catholic Church stating

that gay marriage was one of several threats to the traditional family that undermined 'the future of humanity itself'.

Brown claims he "he didn't mention it at all, whereas he did take up several other sexual issues". Montgomery, returning to the original text of the speech, claims Brown is being purposefully obtuse on this point:

The Pope didn't use the phrase "gay marriage," but he didn't have to; not in the context of his "marriage of a man and a woman" comment.

Though the Pope steered clear of the actual words, it appears his speech did prominently reference the exclusive form of marriage as between a man and a woman, stating:

[E]ducation needs settings. Among these, pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman. This is not a simple social convention, but rather the fundamental cell of every society. Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself.

The story of Pope Benedict's complex personal and doctrinal relationship towards homosexuality is explored more full in The Pope is Not Gay!, an insightful examination of the former Cardinal's development as a reactionary theologian by the late Italian anarchist and poet Angelo Quattrocchi. It includes an appendix of Ratzinger's key writings on homosexuality.

Sharp ideas skewed by ideology: Ian Birrell finds Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere hard to swallow

Paul Mason is straightjacketed by his own ideological leanings, according to Ian Birrell in the Observer, and this leads him to seriously misattribute the causes of the Arab Spring and the "amazing events" of the last year.

Despite his "undoubted reporting skills" and "sharp ideas", Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere is, according to Birrell, fatally flawed in its failure to acknowledge that the legacies of neo-liberal market reforms worldwide are not precarious economic uncertainties and the impoverishment of workforces in the west, but "global rises in living standards, health and lifestyles unmatched in history."

Mason's reportage is one of the highlights of BBC Newsnight, with the reporter making his name from blending

concise global analysis with sympathetic news from the frontline, revealing angry and scared people staring into a bleak future amid the wreckage of shattered certainties.

But despite this background of frontline reporting, Birrell feels that Mason misses the underlying causes of the Arab Spring. For Birrell, who rose to prominence as speechwriter for David Cameron and rhetorical architect behind the "Big Society", the uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East are more representative of a zeitgeist of revolt against government red-tape and nanny-state restrictions on small business. Mason's critique of neo-liberalism leads him to ignore a fundamental truth: the key event that triggered the revolts, the self-immolation of street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, was not a protest against autocracy but the cry of a

repressed entrepreneur, and this is why it reverberated so strongly around the region, where so many people's attempts to earn a living were hampered by corrupt officials and governing kleptocracies.

Likewise, Mason's reports on urban slums, from Estero de Paco in Manila to Moqattam in Cairo, fail to offer a more even-sided economic analysis, focusing on their existence as "the hidden consequence of 20 years of untrammelled market forces, greed, neglect and graft", and ignoring their role as an "entry point to a more prosperous life."

For Birrell, such an ideological, anti-neoliberal slant indicates a very dangerous tendency to throw the free-market baby out with its authoritarian bathwater. Despite the entrepeneurial inspirations for the Arab Spring, the Egyptian insurrection is now in danger of choking Gamal Mubarak's "market-based reforms" that were "just starting to deliver results before the revolution".

Birrell finds Mason's examination of the implications of graduate unemployment, rising food prices, horizontal organisational structures, and technological developments to be focused and insightful. But ultimately, for Birrell, Mason's ideological bias against Hayek "and the principles of selfishness and greed he espoused" prevents him from seeing that the desire for economic deregulation and an end to state interference was a key driving force behind last year's insurrections.

Visit the Observer to read the review in full.

Michael Ignatieff: Intellectual hypocrisy

Al Jazeera posted an excerpt from Michael Ignatieff: The Lesser Evil? on December 31, 2011:

As Canada's Liberal leader, the intellectual- turned-politician became an uncritical supporter of Israeli aggression.

The case of Michael Ignatieff, who resigned as Liberal leader in May 2011 after a devastating electoral defeat, is exemplary. Ignatieff came to Canadian politics after a long career as a public intellectual in the United Kingdom and the United States. And although he was a high profile supporter of war and empire, prior to returning to Canada his work still featured occasional, but sharp critiques of Israeli occupation.

As Liberal leader, he became an uncritical supporter of Israel, even joining in the now routine attempts by the Harper government to demonise and criminalise Palestine solidarity activism in Canada.

Recent coverage of The Imperial Messenger

Pankaj Mishra chose the book as one of his "books of the year" in Outlook India:

There is no wittier or sharper account of Thomas Friedman's intellectual and moral atrocities as Belén Fernández's The Imperial Messenger.

Doug Henwood interviewed Belén Fernández on Behind the News on December, 3, 2011 and included the recording of Friedman’s infamous “Suck. On. This” performance on Charlie Rose on behalf of the Iraq war effort. Henwood remarked in response: “It’s like junior high school, only with automatic weapons and high explosives”.

A review was posted on Asia Times online on December 10, 2011:

[R]aises thought-provoking questions about the objectivity of mainstream media when it comes to US economic and foreign policy interests.

An excerpt in NY Times Examiner ran on December 21, 2011

A review was posted on Counter Currents on December 22, 2011:

[S]hould be the companion volume to any and all reading of Friedman.

Our Man in Boston posted a review on December 29, 2011:

Journalist Belén Fernández’s new opus Imperial Messenger effectively eviscerating the NYT’s Thomas Friedman (whom Alexander Cockburn, not one to pull punches, has called “the silliest man on the planet”) strikes me as an example of the kind of book that a supine establishment,mainstream media herd must exert some effort to avoid paying even minimal attention.

The chairman of The Institute for Political Economy asks why Belén Fernández isn't the New York Times’ lead columnist

Paul Craig Roberts included The Imperial Messenger as one of "three books to stimulate thought" and had this to say about the book's author:

Belén Fernández reveals New York Times' columnist Thomas Friedman as a handmaiden of the elite. In exchange for preparing the electorate to be receptive to elite-determined agendas, such as globalism, the invasion of Iraq and the war on terror, Friedman was given a third Pulitzer prize, reducing this once meaningful award to the current status of the Nobel peace prize, and provided with cushy speaking fees.

Fernández subjects Friedman to careful scrutiny and assigns him failing grades for logic, consistency, and integrity. After reading Fernández dissect Friedman column by column, the unavoidable question is: How did Friedman ever pass himself off as a journalist? Why isn’t Belén Fernández the New York Times' lead columnist? The answer is clear. Fernandez won’t lie for the establishment.

"We need to break this cycle": Melissa Benn on the Coalition's Education Reforms

As Michael Gove launches his "sharpest attack yet", Melissa Benn's School Wars tells the truth about how Britain's education system is being turned from a public service into a marketplace, extending and perpetuating social division.

In a thought provoking interview for Berfois, Benn argues that, to some extent, the ideological argument for comprehensive education has been at least partially won – but it is now being used as cover to introduce business to the classroom:

I doubt that even a decade ago, you would have had a Tory front bench arguing passionately for high quality all-ability non-selective schools even if that same front bench does have a narrow definition of quality (in my view) and looks to economically efficient Shanghai rather than to fair minded Finland, with its strong state and social democratic traditions, for its model.

But that shouldn't distract us from the nature of current government education policy; the traditional Conservative support for the hierarchies of the secondary modern/grammar system may not now be de rigueur with young Cameronite Tories, but there still looms beneath the surface a strong desire to entrench social division and privilege in favour of middle-class pupils. Whilst the Left has focused on Gove's populist drive to reintroduce "proper" education (such as the rote learning of the Kings and Queens of England), it is failing to address the Coalition's more pervasive threat to progressive educational values:

It is only interested in pushing academies and free schools, a model that mixes rigid centralisation with widespread privatisation. It is using public money and the language of accountability and standards to bribe and bully schools away from local democratic involvement and scrutiny. So in that sense, we are heading, via a cleverly constructed version of the comprehensive dream towards a privatised nightmare.

Indeed it is through adopting the supposedly progressive language of "choice" and empowerment that education reforms are reverting the school system to a three-tier model. Writing in the Guardian Benn notes that "we are seeing a return of the powerful "social mobility" narrative in relation to grammars":

Grammar school education clearly provided some children from families of modest means - the Alan Bennetts and Ted Heaths of this world - with undreamed-of educational possibilities in a world dominated by the powerful public schools. But the wider claim that grammars gave a significant boost to working-class youngsters simply does not stand up to statistical analysis.

The 11+ exam, although now being deferred to 13 or 14, helps entrench class privilege and social division, as Andrew Fleming highlights in his review of School Wars for Ceasefire magazine. Whilst ostensibly selecting purely on academic merit, the exam helps filter apart the children of middle-class families from those from poorer families:

For various reasons, especially the financial freedom to spend more time helping children learn at home or even pay for private tuition to ensure success in entrance exams, these continue to have a predominantly middle-class intake. This means that, coupled with slightly shady admissions tricks from better-performing non-selective schools, the remaining schools are left to educate the majority whose parents aren't sufficiently wealthy or clued-in to play the game.

So from the start of their secondary education young people are divided by class more than aptitude or ability, with poorer children attending poorer schools. For Benn, this undermines the role of schools in helping social cohesion and means those schools at the lower end of the spectrum in terms of results continue to lose out in a vicious cycle of social division. The introduction of private finance via academies is only exacerbating this educational divide, with free schools and academies recieving public monies whilst bypassing the local authority –and brokering their own deals of admissions policies:

Each one is governed by a separate funding contract with the government, and it has recently been announced that some free schools can vary their admissions arrangements but we don't know what those variations are. It's a highly complex and increasingly undemocratic mess.

The resulting class division so early in life has lasting ramifications for working-class youth. In his eye-opening article for the Guardian, journalist Jeevan Vasagar sat in on the admissions board at Churchill College, Cambridge, and recorded with alarming candour the barriers of class privilege that a working-class student have to leapfrog to access it's hallowed halls. As the examine the application of a student from a failing state school, they discuss her suitability for the course:

Peering at his laptop when her name is announced, Nick Cutler, an admissions tutor at Churchill, says there are "multiple flags". The flags are used to indicate factors such as poverty, or a school that performs very poorly at GCSE. There are six categories in all - including whether an applicant has spent time in care. There is evidence that a strong candidate from a bad school is likely to perform well when they come to Cambridge. But the academics are concerned that in this case, the school has been so turbulent that she simply lacks essential knowledge. Her examination and interview marks are low.

The rapid pace of Cambridge would "kill her", one of the academics says. Another agrees: "I would really like to give her a place, but for her own sanity, she's much better going to one of the other redbrick, Russell Group universities, and just taking her time."

Partington says: "If we gave her a chance she would do what everybody else would do, and think: 'I'll probably be all right' and she will probably be wrong."

It is this twisting double-helix of deprivation and privilege that Benn takes on with School Wars, attempting to counter the slippery corporate agenda of the Coalition masked in the populist language of Gove with a clear analysis and historical context for the reforms. As Fleming writes:

As Melissa Benn’s superb book makes clear, however, a focus on the reactionary, back-to-basics language of such reforms threatens to obscure a vastly more important and unprecedented change to the way our nation’s schools work: the importation of the language and culture of private industry, with its relentless focus on quantity (that is to say, formal results), rather than the quality of a rounded education.

School Wars provides ample evidence that an approach to education inspired by the free market, and founded on a competition in which the dice are loaded, is deleterious, regressive and unjust.

Fleming's review can be read on the Ceasefire magazine.

Melissa Benn was writing in the Guardian and was interviewed by Russell Bennett for Befrois magazine.

Euphoria and doom: Andy Beckett reviews Paul Mason's Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere

Paul Mason's new book offers a ambitious tour around the uprisings and revolutions that have followed the global financial crisis, according the Andy Beckett's review of Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere. But despite the difficulties of accurately summarising such a fast pace of political change — "Revolutions ... can make fools of excited writers as well as complacent politicians", according to Beckett — the book offers a strong analysis, avoiding truisms and examining the "paradox" of a technologically advanced anti-capitalist revolt.

How do you write an instant book about something as fast-moving and diffuse, as half-finished and unpredictable, as historically pivotal or, possibly, trivial, as the sudden surge of protest around the world since 2010? The most up-to-date pages of this slim, ambitious volume are dated 26 October 2011 – almost three months ago; a small eternity in some of the feverish and ongoing political stories it covers ...

Is there much value in describing again the demonstrations, encampments and activist movements already covered, seemingly exhaustively, by the traditional and new media over the last two years? The quality of Mason's observation and storytelling quickly dispels any such doubts.

The book combines "Mason's authoritative knowledge of modern western business culture and free-market economics" with "compact, urgent, present-tense, declarative, addictive" reportage." He understands the dynamics of protest movements, and can add colour to his prose, because he is on the ground, following the action, literally a stone's throw from the clashes between protestors and the authorities they are facing down.

Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere offers "fresh and persuasive" analysis of the uprisings in the context of changing labour markets, disenfranchised young graduates and — vitally — the role of technological innovation in not just the strategies of protestors, but in informing their very ideology, with an emphasis on freedom of knowledge and communication. Dissent has escaped the "19th-century-style activities" of mass rallies and pamphleteering that has constituted political activism in the last few decades:

"The plebeian groups that kicked things off," he writes on the concluding page, "possess ... skill, ingenuity and intelligence. Info-capitalism has educated them."

Breaking away from staid critiques of the political situation (and "let loose from his BBC shackles") Mason has offered more than a journalistic survey of the international political environment on the streets; he has turned the focus to the role of technological development and young economic and political subjectivities in the sea-change of popular opinion worldwide. As Beckett concludes, gripping as Mason's account of the past year's insurrections is, what will be most fascinating is how this plays out in the coming months.

Visit the Guardian to read the review in full.

"Had Occupy Wall Street been just a dream?": Sukhdev Sandhu reviews writing from the Occupy Movement

The Occupy Movement hinges, according to Sukhdev Sandhu's survey of new books borne from it, upon a war of words as much as any type of direct action. In doing so, it has inspired a wave of written provocations, communiqué and other literary responses to this upsurge in popular, media-savvy dissent.

Such disparate forms, from microblogs to theoretical journals, mirror the different tasks of this new body of writing; some are aimed at garnering support from sympathetic bystanders, others at discussing theory and strategy within the movement or trying to make sense of the financial crisis and how it affects the ordinary citizen. Discussing the first books to emerge from the movement in the Daily Telegraph, Sandhu is already starting to uncover prominent themes:

What comes through most forcefully – aptly since the Occupy movement believes in the indivisibility of labour and ethics – is the abiding sense of protest as a form of labour. Right-wing pundits portrayed those at Zuccotti Park as shirkers and layabouts; the reverse was true [...] they committed themselves to the difficult task of doing without leaders and making decisions collectively.

As Occupy groups start to shift towards more confrontational direct action, with occupations of abandoned and foreclosed buildings in the UK, US and Europe, books like Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America document this "decolonisation of the American mind, in which the Newspeak of “budget crisis” and “debt ceilings” was replaced by cant-busting terms such as “greed”, “inequality” and “unfairness”". For Sandhu, part of their power comes from the writers situation not within the "ivory-towered elite", but within a precarious, un-unionised profession that is very much part of "the 99%".

Occupy Wall Street continues to push the parameters of the national conversation in the US, with "port shutdowns" over the winter period, whilst in the UK the movement is diversifying from tactics of direct action, meeting with politicians and business leaders to work to increase transparency within the political and business worlds. The early literature from Occupy records a young movement in its vital first days; complicated, passionate and fluid, finding its ideological feet and creating a new language of dissent.

Visit the Telegraph to read the article in full.

Another Road For Europe: a draft appeal from the Florence Forum

Activists, authors, trade-unionists and students from across Europe have launched a call for a reconfiguration of European social policy in order to reclaim the true democratic meaning of the European project:

Now, in the midst of the crisis of finance, markets and bureaucracies, we must commence to practice an egalitarian, peaceful, green and democratic Europe. We must reclaim the dignity of Europeans and our fellow world citizens.

Drafted at the Florence Forum, ‘The way out. Europe and Italy, economic crisis and democracy', the appeal, entitled "Another Road For Europe" proposes six new objectives for a new, more open and democratic Europe. It has been signed by a range of European social-activists and thinkers, including founder of Il Manifesto Rossana Rossanda and author Paul Ginsborg.

These include increased financial regulation and restructuring, tax harmonisation and economic integration, a focus on environmental sustainability and "the ecological conversion of Europe’s economy".

It also calls upon Europe to use public expenditure to stimulate demand and protect welfare services whilst encouraging wage stability and labour rights.

The appeal frames these changes within a call to renew European democracy, emphasising the divergence between the desires of European citizens (manifest in social movements such the indignados) and the political bureaucracies that control the European Union.

To read the draft appeal and for the full list of signatories, visit Open Democracy.

The paramilitarisation of policing—Stephen Graham on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed

Stephen Graham appeared on Radio 4's Thinking Allowed to discuss Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism with Laurie Taylor and Melissa Butcher of the Open University.

Graham explains how military ideas of controlling space, honed in war zone cities like Baghdad, are being repackaged and sold to civilian police in Western cities. Concepts like 'smart' CCTV which attempts to identify suspicious behaviours in urban crowds, & the creation of fortified enclaves in certain areas, modelled on the Iraqi Green Zone, and the use of surveillance drones are all being imported back to Western cities after being developed in foreign warzones.

Graham views these new methods as more Minority Report than Big Brother - new CCTV technologies are designed to attempt to prempt terrorist attacks by scanning crowds, learning from previous incidents and trying to predict suspicious activity through monitoring behaviour.

The discussion goes on to consider the ways these new security methods and terrorist threats can both enable and encourage the shutting down of public spaces of democracy and dissent in new and brutal ways, such as in the 'paramilitarised' responses to Occupy protests.

Visit BBC iPlayer to listen to the programme (available until Wednesday 11th January)

"Politics is falling apart": Dazed and Confused talk to Paul Mason about memetics, dissent and a doomed heirarchy

Despite the scale of our current crisis, Paul Mason sees great hope in 2012, as he explains to Dazed and Confused. Talking with the magazine about his new book Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, Paul says that though we may see financial and political systems crashing around us, we're also seeing the end of an

age where you just accept humanity can’t control the economy and the planet it lives on. It can, but we won’t go back to the old way of state control. It’ll be people’s control and that is what's happening now.

The seeming lack of organisational alternatives isn't necessarily a result of disorganisation or a lack of commitment, but the by-product of a powerful streak of internet-induced anti-authoritarianism. Speeded-up communications trigger faster, enhanced information sharing and learning processes, where "the form of a student occupation changes every year" due to the feedback loop inherent in these new networks. Paul understands that the political influence of the internet isn't simply in organisational and communicative forms (the simplistic narrative of the "Facebook Revolution"), but also in its radical content, from the "rough and ready democracy" of memes to the powerful drive for autonomy in digital nativism:

...the more committed someone is to what you might call autonomy and freedom, the more they use the internet. But over time, this is the observation, the more they use the internet, the more committed to autonomous and free lifestyles they become. Now, that is a phenomenal discovery!

The idea of the personal freedom might be a core value of digital natives from the earliest days, finding political expression in everything from open-source technology to internet sovereignty campaigns, but today both online ideologies and technologies are having major offline repercussions:

Why didn’t Mubarak in Egypt implement a fascist style of dictatorship? Because he couldn’t. For two or three years before the Egyptian Revolution, on Facebook 70,000 people were all liking a technically illegal page, putting their real name. That means the dictatorship can’t handle the networked form of protest.

That's not to say we're on the breakout of a better world. Paul's economic forecast is stormy, with a potential domino effect of financial and political collapse in Europe on the horizon, and globalisation leaving the world economically imbalanced and socially unjust. But the spirit of the age is on the side of dissent and revolution, a young and angry drive to pull down the dead systems built for the old world with the technological tools of the new:

There is an unprecedented outbreak of the desire for freedom and the means to achieve it, and the network is beating the hierarchy every time the two go together.

Read the full interview on Dazed Digital. Paul also featured on BBC2's Jeremy Vine Show, talking with the presenter about capitalism and the financial crisis. UK readers can listen again on the BBC iPlayer.

Congratulations from Verso to all new Knights and Dames

In recognition of those elevated in the 2012 New Year Honours list, Verso is proud to announce a special offer of 50% off Britain's Empire by Richard Gott for all new Knights, Commanders, Officers and Members of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

From the slave islands of the Carribean to the hunting of Australian Aborigines, follow Gott as he traces the unique history of a very British institution, using military dictatorship and systematic violence to extract the mineral and human wealth from the world for the greater glory of God and monarch.

Examining rebellions from the Ashanti to the Xhosa, Britain's Empire tells how the subjects and slaves of the Empire refused to defer on bended knee to a civilization built upon "crimes of humanity on an infamous scale", but consistently and furiously rebelled against it, puncturing the still widely-held belief that the British Empire was an enlightened and civilizing enterprise of great benefit to its subject peoples.

Britain's Empire is a vital resource for all those rewarded for their service; rich with anecdotes of former prestigious recipients of honours and decorations, this really is the indispensable handbook of the trophies of imperial glory .

Knights and Dames, take advantage of this cheap reward and pick up your copy of this enlightening and educational book today.

"A network can usually defeat a hierarchy"—Paul Mason extract in the Guardian

An extract from Paul Mason's Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions is published in the Guardian's G2 supplement today. Mason explains the role of technology and the importance of the network in recent global unrest.

Social media and new technology were crucial in shaping the revolutions of 2011, just as they shaped industry, finance and mass culture in the preceding decade. What's important is not that the Egyptian youth used Facebook, or that the British students used Twitter and the Greek rioters organised via Indymedia, but what they used these media for - and what such technology does to hierarchies, ideas and actions.

Here, the crucial concept is the network - whose impact on politics has been a long time coming. The network's basic law was explained by Bell Telephone boss Theodore Vail as early as 1908: the more people who use the network, the more useful it becomes to each user. (The most obvious impact of the "network effect" has been on the media and ideology. Long before people started using Twitter to foment social unrest, mainstream journalists noticed - to their dismay -that the size of one's public persona or pay cheque carried no guarantee of popularity online. People's status rises and falls with the reliability and truthfulness of what they contribute.)

If you look at the full suite of information tools that were employed to spread the revolutions of 2009-11, it goes like this: Facebook is used to form groups, covert and overt - in order to establish those strong but flexible connections. Twitter is used for real-time organisation and news dissemination, bypassing the cumbersome newsgathering operations of the mainstream media. YouTube and the Twitter-linked photographic sites - Yfrog, Flickr and Twitpic - are used to provide instant evidence of the claims being made. Link-shorteners such as bit.ly are used to disseminate key articles via Twitter.

Underpinning the social media is mobile telephony: in the crush of every crowd we see arms holding cellphones in the air, like small flocks of ostriches, snapping scenes of repression or revolt, offering instant and indelible image-capture to a global audience.

And in all the theatres of revolution, blogs have offered a vital resource: somewhere to link to. Their impact can be measured by the fact that, in 2011, 7% of Middle Eastern bloggers surveyed reported they had been arrested by their respective security forces. The ability to deploy, without expert knowledge, a whole suite of information tools has allowed protesters across the world to outwit the police, to beam their message into the newsrooms of global media, and above all to assert a cool, cutting-edge identity in the face of what WH Auden once called "the elderly rubbish dictators talk". It has given today's protest movements a massive psychological advantage, one that no revolt has enjoyed since 1968.

Suddenly, the form of today's protests seems entirely congruent with the way people live their lives. It is modern; it is immune to charges of "resisting progress". Indeed, it utilises technology that is so essential to modern work and leisure, governments cannot turn it off without harming their economies. And, as Mubarak, Gaddafi and the Bahraini royals discovered, even turning it off does not work.

Because - and here is the technological fact that underpins the social and political aspects of what has happened - a network can usually defeat a hierarchy.

Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere expands on the idea of "viral unrest", looking at popular movements from Eygpt to Winsconsin as well as the global context; the slums of Manila, the super-rich and a jobless generation.

Visit the Guardian to read the full extract.

Paul has also been talking with Carole Cadwalladr for the Observer about his new novel, Rare Earth, a tale of a flagging TV journalist who stumbles upon corruption, criminality, female biker gangs and the real China. Paul says:

When you go to the industrial part of China, when you are among ordinary Chinese people, it is a bit like being in 1970s England. I had a moment where I was sat in a room full of bureaucrats who ran the communist state trade union and the icebreaker was when I said my dad was a miner and they suddenly softened.

Visit the Observer to read the interview in full. Paul will return to the Guardian soon with an original article building on some of the themes of his new book and looking forward to what 2012 might bring.

On Thursday 2nd February Paul Mason will be appearing at the Southbank Centre to talk about the links between the financial and social crises. Tickets can be booked on the Southbank Centre website. Please note that more information on participants and details are to follow.

"Democracy must be reinvented"—Žižek on Occupy & the Arab Spring

Slavoj Zizek in an interview for Germany's Deutsche Welle television, talking about Occupy, communism and the need for a reinvention of democracy.

New Left Review—new issue out now

The November/December issue of the New Left Review has been released, and includes the following essays:

Mike Davis: Spring Confronts Winter

Against a backdrop of world economic slump, what forces will shape the outcome of contests between a raddled system and its emergent challengers? Mike Davis examines echoes of past rebellions in 2011's global upsurge of protest.

Mike Davis is author of Planet of Slums.

Robin Blackburn: Crisis 2.0

Internationally, austerity measures have resulted in unemployment, stagnation, the imposition of technocracies, the destruction of welfare systems and a collapse in global demand. Robin Blackburn outlines some radical transitional policy responses that could address the underlying causes of the financial crisis.

Robin Blackburn is the author of Age Shock: How Finance is Failing Us and The American Crucible.

Perry Anderson: Magri's Farewell

Perry Anderson looks back upon the life and work of Lucio Magri, the Italian revolutionary and writer who died last year. An incisive critic of the PCI from both inside and outside of the Party, Anderson traces Magri's unique synthesis of theory and popular struggle from the Hungarian Revolt to the Iraq War, including his last work, The Tailor of Ulm.

Visit the New Left Review website to read the essays in full (subscribers only)

"The stuff of nightmares"—Cities Under Siege reviewed in the Guardian

On reading Stephen Graham's Cities Under Siege, Nicholas Lezard is gripped with an uneasy fear about the spread of military strategies from warzones to domestic cities in the US and Europe. The fact the book is well referenced and the author "knows whereof he speaks ... has the facts at his fingertips, and he is able to make connections" only makes matters worse, as he explains in his review for the Guardian.

The combination of mainstream US politicians' contempt for cosmopolitan populations, increased urban surveillance and the generalisation of Israel's strategies against Gaza—described by Graham as "a mere ‘terrorist infrastructure’ to be destroyed in toto”—raise for Lezard a terrifying spectre of militarised dystopian state so real that "you begin to wonder whether books like this will be allowed to be published for much longer."

The prospect of this nascent potential cityscape of political violence, "the kind of society whose aim is to monitor and control every single inhabitant", far from scaremongering is already underway:

Look, you're just going to have to read this book. Because what's happening in Baghdad and other contested or occupied cities - not just the surveillance, but the militarisation too - is going to happen here. In some cases it already is, or there are in place contingency plans for it, should serious trouble arise.

Visit the Guardian to read the review in full.

Carbon Democracy: One of Foreign Policy Magazine's 2011 Best Books on the Middle East

Marc Lynch named Timothy Mitchell's Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil to Foreign Policy's Best Books on the Middle East, 2011 list. Placing the story of the rise of petrol-based economies at the center of the history of Western democracy, imperialism and empire, Mitchell's book, says Lynch, is

a challenging, sophisticated, and important book that undermines expectations in the best kind of intellectual provocation.

Visit Foreign Policy to read the article in full.

How to stock a protest library: with Ross Perlin's Intern Nation and Žižek's Welcome to the Desert of the Real

TIME Magazine has announced its much-anticipated person of the year, the protestor, and has included Verso's Intern Nation by Ross Perlin and Welcome to the Desert of the Real by Slavoj Žižek on their list of the movement's "canonical titles." Intern Nation is Perlin's brand-new exposé on the ballooning arena of unpaid internships, while Desert of the Real is Žižek's assessment of 9/11 and the fiasco of the predominant leftist response to the events leading up to, and after.

Other books that made TIME's list: Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, Gramsci's Prison Notebooks and bell hooks' Ain't I a Woman.

From Tunisia to Egypt, Wisconsin, Spain and New York City, the article profiles the viral spread of international activism in the heart of empire and beyond. Add this to the growing list of insightful mainstream media pieces on the new global protest movements.

And check out TIME to read the article in full.

Two-stepping, two dollar Brooklyn Lagers and two hundred-plus sold-out copies of Occupy!

Verso had a very, very good weekend, kicked off Friday by our party with n +1 to celebrate the publication of Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America, the book based on n+1's broadsheet the Occupied Gazette on the movement that has changed the radical landscape and inspired a generation.

Rachel Hurn of The Millions reported on the festivities on the literary site's blog.

The Gazette trilogy was laid out on a side table, distinguished by primary colors — red for the first issue, blue for the second, and green for the third. Scenes from Zucotti Park projected against a white wall. The Occupy! book lay on a different table, on sale for $5 a copy.

Other happenings at Friday's party included OR Books' occupation of the DJ table--and a sign saying as much--with copies of their title on the movement, dancing, and a stunning view of the illuminated Manhattan skyline.

Turnout was, at its height, over two hundred, and we sold out of our two hundred-plus copies of the book.

Then, on Sunday, we co-sponsored the "Occupy Onwards" conference with n+1 , on issues forming the crux of the Occupy movement, featuring panelists Doug Henwood, Julia Ott and Occupy! co-editor Astra Taylor, among others.

We'll post audio from the conference soon. Check out The Millions for a full report of Friday's event. And scuttle over to your local, independent-owned bookstore to pick up a copy of Occupy! for yourself and your friends. Our comrades at St Mark's Bookshop and McNally Jackson in NYC have plenty in stock!

Happy three-month anniversary, Occupy.

Art-Architecture Complex in the Barnes and Noble Review

Hal Foster's new book comes off as a litlle bit menacing, according to Jason Farrago, reviewing The Art-Architecture Complex for the Barnes and Noble Review. With the allusion to Roosevelt's well-known phrase leading the charge, Foster menaces and critiques his way to a convincing argument that "'image-making and space-shaping' have become part of one continuous field ... and that might not be such a good thing."

Why, exactly, this might not be such a good thing, has much to do with the economics and the ideology that informs artists and architects who, "in tune with the abstraction of cybernetic spaces and financial systems," encase the ever-increasing unaccountability and predation of financial and governmental institutions in ethereal skylines and transparent glass domes.

According to Farrago, Foster "is at his best" in this "nexus" of art and architecture, taking a "withering look at "the design of art museums, the churches or palaces of our time"—monuments to an age where money is made from money, and institutions seem determined to consume until everything has disappeared but the buildings.

Visit Barnes and Noble Review to read the article in full.

Anarchism on Film at the Anthology Film Archives

Film critic and historian Richard Porton, author of Film and the Anarchist Imagination, will be introducing selected screenings from Anarchism on Film, a new series presented by Anthology Film Archives and Cineaste magazine, featuring "historical films that excavate a submerged anarchist history and films that synthesize an anti-authoritarian political impetus with innovative formal strategies."

The series will run December 16th to the 23rd. Screenings will be held at Anthology Film Archives, on 32 2nd Ave in Manhattan.

For more information on this series, visit Anthology Film Archives.

Simon Critchley asks "What is Normal?"

In Adbusters December "Big Ideas of 2012" issue Simon Critchley, author of Infinitely Demanding and the forthcoming Faith of the Faithless, teases out the demands called forth by the masses who participated in the Arab Spring. Namely: no to empty variations of Western liberal democracy and yes to the sovereignty of the people

The various movements in North Africa and the Middle East...aim at one thing: autonomy. They demand collective ownership of the places where one lives, works, thinks and plays. Let's be clear: it is not just democracy that is being demanded all across the Arab world; it is socialism. And the tactics that have been developed to bring it about are anarchist.

Nearly a year after Mohamed Bouazizi's self-imolation in Tunisia, the indignados' encampments in public squares across Spain, the flowering of the Occupy movement and infinite other autonomous manifestations, we see that people across the globe are standing up and fighting back against marginalization, alienation and the dictatorship of capital. While none of us know what's next, Critchley asserts, surely it is a future much different than the reality—some might say nightmare—in which we are now living

...we are entering into a period of increasingly massive social dislocations and disorder which harbors within it countless risks, dialectical inversions, defeats, dangers, false dawns and fake defeats. But...we are all coming to the powerful and simple realization that human beings acting peacefully together in concert can do anything–and nothing can stop them.

Something is happening. Something is shifting in the relations between politics and power. We don't know where it will lead, but the four-decade ideological consensus that has simply allowed the creation of grotesque inequality has broken down, and anything and everything is suddenly possible.

Visit Adbusters to read the article in full.

Simon Critchley's The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology will be published by Verso in February 2012.

"Reclaiming the anarcho-punk radical critique from Shoreditch" Savage Messiah reviewed

Laura Oldfield Ford's Savage Messiah is reviewed for domus by Owen Hatherley. Hatherley describes it as a "self-published montage of fragmentary memoir, revolutionary fantasy and startlingly raw architectural draughtsmanship." In Hatherley's eyes, Ford's artworks are

pervaded alternately with ghostly, overgrown renderings of the harsh, sublime social architecture of the 1960s, especially well represented in Oldfield Ford's native West Yorkshire and adoptive East London.

Hatherley stresses how Laura Oldfield Ford magisterially represents the interpolation of deprived areas and lavish suburbs that is typical of the UK urban landscape—the scenario in which the summer riots exploded:

Brutalist towers sit next to Victorian church next to terraced housing next to derelict factory next to call centre, with any attempt at zoning utterly futile.

One of the most impressive features of Savage Messiah is, for Hatherley, "its dialectical montage, its lost futures erupting into and over-running the seamless, optimistic spectacle of redevelopment and speculation."

Whereas Hatherley looks at the (lost) possible futures that are sketched in the book, Oliver Basciano, in a review for Building Design, focuses on the images from the urban past that populate Savage Messiah's pages. Basciano points out how in Ford's zine, "the assiduous line-drawn urban vistas ... present scenes from the underbelly of city life." According to Basciano, Ford's artworks are "filled with pathos for the human inhabitants just getting by within these confines", and convey "a politically charged anger." The reviewer highlights the autobiographical background of Savage Messiah: born in an economically depressed town in Yorkshire, in her youth Ford experienced the final years of punk, the emergence of the rave scene, and went into squatting. In this sense, the book is also "a eulogy for the party she and her friends had enjoyed." Her story is a story of resistance, rooted in some specific places—the "increasingly rare areas that counter the myth of an all-pervasive white-collar middle class." It is also a piece of British history, seen through her eyes:

Looking at Oldfield Ford's work, one sees the last three decades of urban flux laid out as singular snapshots—from the infinite, utopic possibilities of abandoned land that rave culture picked up, to the increasing civic and corporate control of space.

In Icon, Chris Hall compares Savage Messiah to "a shifting of grim black-and-white photographs and drawings of those people and areas more resistant to gentrification." The atmospheric images in the book are reminiscent of "the 1980s folded into and cut up with the 21st century." To say it with Hall, in Savage Messiah

There is poetry ... there is anger ... there are calls to arms ... and thankfully, there is humour—an hilarious account of a shift in a biscuit factory that could have come from Irvine Welsh.

The fight against the commodification of the city and resistant spaces is not over: Laura Oldfield Ford "wants to reclaim the anarcho-punk radical critique of the 70s and 80s from the Shoreditch club nights."

Owen Hatherley's review appeared in domus, print edition dated October 2011.

Oliver Basciano's review appeared in Building Design, print edition dated 25 November 2011.

Chris Hall's review appeared in Icon Magazine, print edition dated January 2012.

An exceptional encounter: Alain Badiou and Michel Foucault in conversation

Two giants of French philosophy discuss psychology, Western culture and the Kantian turn in the history of philosophy in this hidden gem of a video. Michel Foucault is interviewed by Alain Badiou, the acclaimed author of many books including Pocket Pantheon, and the forthcoming The Adventure of French Philosophy (2012), which both engage with Foucault's thought.

The interview was originally recorded in 1965, and is now accompanied by English subtitles. With thanks to @thewarmjets and @demoboroi.

All Over the Map makes Artforum's "Best of 2011" list

As chosen by Anthony Vidler, a Professor of Architecture and the Dean of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, Cooper Union, New York

A witty, incisive, critical, and brilliantly written invitation to see contemporary architecture and urbanism as a complex result of economic, political, and ideological forces that are hardly masked by the formal expressions of architects. This is criticism as we rarely read it, of the sort that Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford provided in an earlier era. These essays demonstrate that Sorkin goes well beyond his own advice, and that he adds something else for good measure: a deep and broad knowledge of architecture and cities, a love of both, and a profound belief in the role of architecture in constructing a just city.

I'm with the Bears is Editor's choice in the Chicago Tribune

Praise from Elizabeth Taylor, the Chicago Tribune's Literary Editor

Famed naturalist and writer John Muir (a founder of the Sierra Club) once observed that if it ever came down to a war between the races, he would side with the bears. That remark inspired the title of this compelling collection of short fiction concerned with climate change.

This collection is a jolt out of our armchairs, a call to arms, because scientific evidence has its limitations. The all-star array of fiction writers who have contributed to this book helps us feel what it would be like to live in a very different landscape. T.C. Boyle's disturbing story involves early eco-activists; David Mitchell imagines a world dramatically changed by oil prices; Nathaniel Rich has a darkly comic story about a crab and a marine biologist.

Together, these stories inspire both fear and hope about our environmental future. Of course, the other reason this little volume is so terrific is that the stories are written with verve and style. Feel good about the purchase: Royalties go to 350.org, a group working to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

"Helping get the party started" - An interview on Punk Rock

Stir features a long interview with the editors of White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race, Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay. The "basic premise" on which the book is grounded, Duncombe and Tremblay explain, is that "race is deeply embedded in Punk Rock, not just musically ... but integral to its very formations." Punk was one of the first subcultures that "acknowledged that we (in the UK and US) were now all living in a multicultural society." At the same time, the book also aims to debunk a white-only representation of the punk scene, stressing

those contributions of non-white punks who were part of the scene from the very beginning yet tend to be marginalized or white-washed entirely out of standard punk histories.

There is much to learn from the history of punk. In an age in which racism seems to be again on the rise, today's young radicals should bear in mind how white punks who claimed to have an anti-racist approach ended up hegemonising the movement, Maxwell Tremblay emphasises:

The lesson of punk rock's attempt to do this is to be mindful of the ways in which subcultures can, in fact, replicate that white power structure within their own limits.

The two editors also touch on the fundamental question of how music can contribute to radical politics. In their view, music can help challenge "our ideas about power and race, about what's 'natural' and inevitable and what's possible and can be changed." This, however, is not enough: "you also have to change the social, political and economic structures in which they live." To say it with Maxwell Tremblay,

punk rock isn't necessarily analogous to the nuts and bolts work of political organizing, but it can, to be a bit cheeky, help get the party started.

Duncombe and Tremblay emphasises one of the basic tensions that is inherent in punk. The punk message tend often to offer quite a simplistic reading of reality, in which the source of oppression is identified with generic words such as "state" or "fascism". On the one hand this makes the movement appealing:

in punk's more-or-less ambiguous "Fuck You!", [one can find] a formal representation of rage that is easily tapped into, and one that can be further filled out with more explicit political content.

At the same time, however, to an extent this take on reality does not allow an in-depth analysis of the real reasons for social problems, and also leaves "less room to talk about forms of oppression that do arise within the scene."

Finally, the debate moves to the topic of punk and race. Punk was one of the first subcultures in which white people thought of themselves as "white" in a self-conscious way: "whiteness, within punk, becomes something to define and articulate." This awareness could either bring about anti-racist feelings or turn into racism, as in the case of the White Power sub-genre. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge the existence, from the very beginning of punk, of non-white bands:

Punk might like to think of itself as white, but in reality it never has been...and is becoming increasingly less so.The most vibrant punk scenes today are no longer in London or New York but in cities like Mexico City or Jakarta, Indonesia. This globalization of punk decenters the assumed whiteness of punk; it also problematizes the racial dichotomies at the heart of punk. Black/white, Asian/white, Latino/white - the racial axes around which punk has revolved for decades have little meaning in a place like Jakarta, so punks there do there what they've always done: adapt and adopt the culture so that it speaks to the concerns that are relevant to them. And in the process the riot that is punk becomes, racially and ideologically, a lot more multi-hued.

Visit Stir to read the interview in full.

Laura Oldfield Ford: Transmissions from a Discarded Future

The acclaimed artist Laura Oldfield Ford, author of Savage Messiah, is currently exhibiting a selection of her works at Hales Gallery. Transmissions from a Discarded Future collects images of "confrontational billboards, tender portraits and maps of riot torn postcodes," forming "an unfinished collage where the hidden narratives of the city are made fleetingly visible." Ford invites the visitors to explore "London's large abandoned housing estates," inhabited by

ghosts of brutalist architecture, 90s convoy culture, rave scenes, 80s political movements and a virulent black economy of scavengers, peddlers and shoplifters.

But there is not just alienation in Ford's art:

In the sudden moment of collective engagement the city becomes elevated, it is then that it belongs to you. Platitudes rendered anodyne in aspirational ad campaigns become splinters in the spectacle. 'It is your time, seize the moment" ... The street becomes the territory of the collective, in that instant rubble strewn avenues open and a multitude of futures beckon.

Transmissions from a Discarded Future will be on show at Hales Gallery until 14 January 2012.

Visit Laura Oldfield Ford's blog to see a preview of some of the works collected in the exhibition.

Towards a "Republican Monarchy"? Tom Nairn extract in The Scotsman

The Scotsman has published an extract from the new edition of The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy, the acclaimed dissection of Britain's relationship with its monarchy, by the foremost historian of nationalism Tom Nairn. In the extract, Nairn discusses the idea of a "Republican Monarchy":

The term appears self-contradictory, and yet nothing else corresponds to what may be emerging right now, following the decisive SNP victory in the Scottish Parliamentary election. There will be a referendum on Scottish independence quite soon, and Premier Alex Salmond has repeatedly made it clear he does not want outright republicanism to be part of the bid. The future envisaged is therefore one of statehood equality over the former United Kingdom, in which a crowned head of state will remain, as the symbol of partnership and good will, established social and personal relations, and the historic closeness derived from 1688. It should also change and probably moderate the "surrogacy" mentioned earlier, through which English national identity has been transmuted into an adulatory obsession with royalty. One way the English have avoided "little England" (the country on its own) has been the curiously amplified elevation of a regal family dynasty described in this book, informally shared by the peripheral countries. A formal agreement between the periphery and the core-majority, by contrast, could include the acceptance of monarchy in a spirit different from what has so far prevailed. In effect, the replacement of "enchantment" and emotionality by a straightforward calculation of joint benefits and their costs.

Visit the Scotsman to read the extract in full.

Verso titles selected as Books of the Year 2011 across UK broadsheets and periodicals

As the year draws to a close, newspapers have been asking the great and the good which books have most impressed them in 2011. Here we have collected the Verso books that were featured.

In the New Statesman, Guardian and Observer Books of the Year round ups, Hari Kunzru selected two Verso books as standing out from other books published this year. He explained the appeal of the titles to the New Statesman:

Hari Kunzru

With the Occupy movement gaining ground throughout the world, McKenzie Wark's smart overview of the situationist movement, The Beach Beneath the Street: the Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International, feels particularly timely. For years, Laura Oldfield Ford, who is very influenced by situationism, has produced a fanzine, based on her derives around London, with words and beautiful, confrontational line drawings of the city's forgotten people and neglected places. Now, Savage Messiah has been collected in book form. It is a wake-up call to anyone who can only see modern cities through the lens of gentrification.

In the Guardian feature on the Best Books of 2011, a number of Verso titles were selected by those asked.

Eric Hobsbawm

Among the 2011 books that came my way I particularly welcomed Owen Jones's Chavs, a passionate and well-documented denunciation of the upper-class contempt for the proles that has recently become so visible in the British class system.

John Lanchester

I loved two very different books of criticism...[one was] Owen Hatherley's furiously pro-Modernist A Guide to the New Ruins of Britain

Pankaj Mishra

Liberalism: A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo stimulatingly uncovers the contradictions of an ideology that is much too self-righteously invoked.

Ahdaf Soueif

I'm reading Chris Harman's A People's History of the World. It's really helpful to zoom out from time to time when you're living massive events at very close quarters.

The Glasgow Herald asked a variety of commentators and writers what books they most enjoyed this year:

Ruth Wishart, Journalist

Undoubtedly Owen Jones, whose Chavs. a timely slice of social commentary, hit the shelves immediately after the summer riots.

Reviewers from The Oxford Times were asked to choose their books of the year,

Phil Bloomfield

My book of the year is Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones , which tells in shocking detail how millions of our people been pushed to the margins, how their children get far fewer life-chances than middle-class children (think Rose Hill and North Oxford) and how it has become fashionable to make fun of them. We would be outraged, as he rightly says, if any other group was so ill-used or treated with such contempt."

In the Times Literary Supplement seventy-two writers selected their favorite books from around the world.

John Burnside

I hugely enjoyed McKenzie Wark's The Beach Beneath the Street, a playful, smart and occasionally epigrammatic study of the Situationists. Wark has a gift for stark and provocative summary: "We are bored with this planet .... Capitalism or barbarism, those are the choices. This is an epoch governed by this blackmail: either more and more of the same, or the end times". What Wark offers in this brilliant account of a misunderstood period in twentieth-century history is nothing less than a crazed, insomniac and visceral call worthy of the Situationists themselves, to "escape the twenty-first century while we still can" and become truly alive. And not only is this an essential work for our own times; it also comes with a cover that, with the minimum of manual dexterity, folds out into a collaborative graphic essay, "Totality for beginners", written by Wark and designed by Kevin C. Pyle.

The Scotsman asked a gallery of authors to name their favorite books from this year.

Meaghan Delahunt, novelist

John Berger's Bento's Sketchbook displays his trademark lyrical precision-meditations on art, writing and philosophy interspersed with his own drawings.

John Burnside, poet

The book I read three times back to back was McKenzie Wark's brilliant study of the Situationists, The Beach Beneath the Street.

The Sunday Herald asked a variety of figures involved in the world of literature, media and literacy to nominate their picks.

Pat Kane, writer

In The Beach Beneath The Street, McKenzie Wark writes attractively about those post-war European progenitors of the Occupy movements, the Situationists - and defies Kindlism by making the hardback's wrap cover unfold into a comic-strip wallposter.

Tariq Ali, writer

Tom Nairn's classic on the British monarchy, with a new introduction, The Enchanted Glass: Britain And Its Monarchy. The timing is good. For the first time since the Act of Union, the Scots are challenging Unionist hegemony and, who knows, the country might be independent once again, hopefully a republic. Balmoral should not be reduced to luxury apartments a la Trump in New York, but should become a public space for festivals and such like and a museum of Scottish history.

Visit the Scotsman, Sunday Herald, Glasgow Herald, New Statesman, Guardian and Observer to read the articles in full. The Times Literary Supplement piece is available to subscribers or in print.

"A revolutionary without revolution"—Donald Sassoon on Lucio Magri

In today's Guardian, Donald Sassoon remembers Lucio Magri, the author of The Tailor of Ulm: Communism in the Twentieth Century, who sadly passed away last week. In Sassoon's words, Magri was "was a veteran of the Italian new left of the 1960s and 70s." One of his hallmarks was to be "a born dissident ... strong on principles and unwilling to submit to discipline." In his youth, Magri joined the Christian Democrats, but adhering to its left-wing fringe.

In 1958, he decided to move to the Communist Party, where he "quickly became part of a group of young communist radicals who included Rossana Rossanda and Luciana Castellina." Together, in June 1969 they created the journal il manifesto, which was "was a great success - too great for the Communist party leadership," to the point that Magri and the others were expelled. Following their expulsion, however, the manifesto dissidents did not stop to search a dialogue with the PCI:

they never ceased to regard the PCI as the only political structure that could take the country in an anti-capitalist direction. Unlike many of the other radical parties springing up, they saw themselves as a ginger group rather than as the vanguard of the revolution.

Lucio Magri continued to be politically active until 1995, when he withdrew from the Rifondazione Comunista Party. Sassoon describes him as

a handsome and elegant man who was popular in the radical, chic salons of Rome. He could have achieved far greater renown and visibility had he espoused the political cynicism prevailing in high circles and epitomised by Silvio Berlusconi. But he was the genuine article—a revolutionary without a revolution.

Read the Guardian to read the article in full.

Occupy Wall Street is moving into your house

Astra Taylor, filmmaker, activist, and co-editor of Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America, writes for the Nation about the latest sites being occupied: houses and apartments under threat of foreclosure and eviction.

As the Occupy Wall Street movement approaches the three-month mark, encampments in Oakland, Manhattan, Portland, Los Angeles, and around the country have been evicted in a series of coordinated crackdowns. With temperatures dropping and police violence increasing, the movement is seeking out and discussing new strategies and points of escalation. A major tactic that has emerged from these meetings is literally "occupying the home front" by taking over and defending homes under threat of foreclosure and eviction. December 6th marked a national day of action to kick off this new campaign, and Taylor attended an event here in Brooklyn, in East New York:

December 6 was the result of weeks of careful planning and alliance building, a sign in itself that the Occupy movement is evolving in exciting ways. In Chicago, a homeless woman and her baby moved into a foreclosed home with the blessing of the previous owner and the help of over forty supporters; in Atlanta, protesters made an appearance at foreclosure auctions in three counties; in Denver, activists collected garbage from abandoned properties and delivered it to the mayor; in Oakland, a mother of three reclaimed the townhouse she lost after becoming unemployed while another group held a barbeque at a property owned by Fannie Mae. Over twenty cities hosted protests, all told.

In New York, Occupy activists worked with community organizations and other allies to host a foreclosure tour and coordinate the "liberation" and re-occupation of a vacant bank-owned property in a Brooklyn neighborhood where the foreclosure rate is estimated to be five times the state average.

Helping facilitate the actions are various groups like Take Back the Land, who are longtime organizers in the housing rights movement. Predatory lending, exploitative landlords, and evictions have been violent institutions in many low-income neighborhoods and communities of color, so why are occupiers adopting this tactic now?

Though Americans are fed up with income inequality and generally disgusted by the bad behavior of big banks, the task Occupy Wall Street has chosen isn't exactly an easy one. Even though public sentiment on economic issues may align with the movement, organizing against something as abstract as finance capital is a challenge. How do you launch a campaign against something that is everywhere and nowhere? For those who don't live near lower Manhattan, it's not obvious what the proper protest target should be.

This is why focusing on the mortgage crisis-which a recent study suggests is only half over-is a brilliant next step. "To occupy a house owned by Bank of America is to occupy Wall Street," said Ryan Acuff, who has been working with Take Back The Land in Rochester, NY doing these kinds of actions since Sept 2010. "We are literally occupying Wall Street in our own communities." The reclamation of foreclosed homes and defense of individuals facing unfair eviction helps make arcane economic issues like deregulation and securitization, local and personal.

People who previously knew little about eviction resistance are proving to be quick studies—support for direct actions in affected neighborhoods is palpable, with neighbors joining in the occupiers' block party and hanging signs on their windows. Banks, too, are taking notice:

While banks often refuse to negotiate with individuals, taking advantage of those who are intimidated or can't afford legal counsel, they often change their tune when threatened with serious scrutiny. Once a bunch of people show up on a lawn to form a blockade and have a press conference, once intransigent institutions are suddenly willing to compromise. In Rochester, one bank called off an eviction when they got wind of plans for direct action.

This new wave of actions is bringing resistance to folks' front doors, and to the forefront of their political consciousness, as communities begin to self-organize and defend themselves. Like Tasha Glasgow, who recently moved into a liberated home with her two children, says,

"There are a lot of homeless people in the world and hopefully people see this and see that something needs to be done and people will change the world ... I'm no Martin Luther King, but I'm something."

Visit The Nation to read the article in full.

“A devil for provocative judgement:” McKenzie Wark, Situationism and Occupy

In the age of the Occupy movement, Situationism has become "the stuff of legend," for it was "one of those rare avant-gardes whose radical arts and radical politics were forged in unison," Alex Danchev writes in a review of McKenzie Wark's The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International for the Times Literary Supplement. According to Danchev, the book is a "marvellous guide to the microsociety of the Situationists." "A devil for the provocative judgement," Wark is able to outline the contours of the Situationist history with "a necessary sympathy, an encyclopaedic knowledge, and a certain stylistic irrepressibility," Danchev points out. Wark's account is "excellent on détournement" and "suitably eccentric," because it focuses not just on big names, but also some less famous figures such as the Danish artist theorist Asger Jorn and the Situationist successor of Tristan Tzara, Isidore Isou.

McKenzie Wark is one of the contributors, together with Franco Berardi and Slavoj Žižek, to the special issue of the journal Theory and Event, devoted to Occupy Wall Street. His piece is vividly entitled 'This Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit,' after one of the banners of the Occupy protesters. In the article, Wark examines the reasons why the Occupy slogan "We are the 99%" has grabbed so much attention:

It's a way of saying: we are not the ruling class. Our solidarity, that fragile thing, orbits what it is not. ... Nobody is quite ready to call the 1% what they are: a ruling class. Nor are they quite ready to identify what kind of ruling class they are: a rentier class. It's not important. It is only ever a minority who are attracted to an analytical language to explain their circumstances. Popular revolt run on affect, and affect runs on images and stories. Still the instincts of Occupy Wall Street have been pretty keen. It has identified its own problems: jobs and debt. It has provisionally identified the problem causing their problems: the 1%.

In Wark's view, 21st century rentier class differs substantially from the "robber barons" that were at the helm of US economy in the 19th century. However greedy the latter were, they contributed to produce something. This is no longer the case:

They have no interest in the care and feeding of populations. All they care about is extracting the rent. It doesn't matter to them if we get sick, if we can't read, if we are not being raised up and developed to our full capacity. We're just peons. We owe the 1% the vigorish not because they're going to invest it in anything useful and productive. We just owe it. Or else.

Instead of capitalist, Wark prefers to describe the new ruling class as "vectorialist:" in fact, "It collects a rent by controlling the 'vectors' along which information shuttles, not to mention that information itself." The Occupy movement challenges the unrestrained control of the ruling class over the vectors, by "occupying whatever abstract means of communication are at their disposal." Wark gives a Situationist reading of the occupations all over the world:

What transpired is a brilliant example of détournement. Both an actual place in the city of New York, and the symbolic place it occupies in the global spectacle as a symbol have been appropriated as if they were common property, as if they belonged to us all. That's the essence of détournement: that both the space of the city and the space of culture always and already are a common.

Wark emphasises in what ways the legacy of Situationism is connected with Occupy. For example, he refers to Raoul Vaneigem's idea that revolutionary practice has to be linked to everyday life:

Hence the significance of the stories on tumblr, on the taking of space in Zuccotti park, of the generosity of so many people in making the occupation a reality.

The experience of the occupations is a good example of how a different way of living together is possible:

The Occupation is a living workshop in 'communism', but also in the gift economy of exchange. Every day, people buy stuff and covert it back into gifts to total strangers. Every day, people discover solidarity through camping together, cooking together, and picking up the trash. ... These spaces are poorly equipped, shoddily built exemplars of something remarkable. That there could be other social relations, besides finance, security and the commodity. That if any of this stuff is remotely scalable, then why do we even need this ruling class at all?

Alex Danchev's review appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, print edition dated 18 November 2011.

Visit Theory and Event to read McKenzie Wark's article.

Imperial history told “as no historian has done before”—Britain's Empire reviewed

There was no year, between 1750 and 1860, in which the history of the British Empire was not tainted by "conflicts, large and small wars, uprisings, repression and reprisals of astonishing brutality." This is what the reader can learn from Richard Gott's Britain's Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt, Richard Drayton writes in a review for the Guardian. In his words,

Gott's achievement is to show, as no historian has done before, that violence was a central, constant and ubiquitous part of the making and keeping of the British empire.

Such a searing, detailed critique of imperial history is "newer than it seems," Drayton points out. Apologist historians have never stopped "to profitably sell happy stories of the empire to the British public," and the only other book that has rigorously challenged their narratives is John Newsinger's The Blood Never Dried (2006).

In Drayton's view, Britain's Empire is not just a well-researched book, but also an enjoyable reading:

readers with interests in grand strategy and war, or students searching for vignettes to anchor essays, will derive as much pleasure and benefit from Britain's Empire as those reading for the drama of situation and personality.

Richard Gott does not limit himself to collect an impressive number of outrageous stories of imperial oppression; he also emphasizes the possibility to stand up and resist oppression, as in the case of a

dazzling series of extraordinary men and women - Pontiac in North America, Tacky and Nanny in Jamaica, Papineau in Quebec, Wickrama Sinha in Ceylon, Myat Toon in Burma, Lakshmi Bai in India.

Their example has not only fostered later waves of anti-colonial resistance; but it is still relevant today, in the former imperial Metropolis, for it can help British people move beyond an Empire-centered national identity:

today's Britons can, if they dare, choose to identify with the rebels rather than the conquerors, and to claim Lakshmi Bai and Gandhi, rather than Victoria and Churchill, as spiritual ancestors.

Visit the Guardian to read the review in full.

Sheila Rowbotham announced as Writer in Residence at the British Library

Trailblazing socialist feminist Sheila Rowbotham has been announced as the first ever Writer in Residence at the British Library's Eccles Centre for American Studies, alongside author Naomi Wood. In this role, both writers will work to raise awareness of the British Library's North American collections and also make use of them for their next projects with the generous support from the Eccles Centre.

Rowbotham was selected due to her "innovative ideas" and the uniqueness of her proposed use of the Library's collections in researching her forthcoming book with Verso, Rebel Crossings: New Women, Free Lovers and Radicals in the US and Britain 1880 to 1910. The book will trace a small network of British and American radicals during the turn of the century.

Philip Davies, Director of the Eccles Centre for American Studies, commented that, "It is a particular thrill to launch this award by doubling the number of recipients for its first year. Sheila Rowbotham and Naomi Wood will pursue their research within the breathtaking range of resources at the British Library, and will simultaneously bring new initiatives to the Centre's programme".

Rowbotham's classic text, A Century of Women, in which she charts the dramatic changes that have taken place in women's lives over the course of the last century and details the ways in which women in turn shaped their era, will be released in a new edition next year. Her book Dreamers of a New Day, an exploration of the women who revolutionized American and British life is available now.

Jean-Paul Sartre on Frantz Fanon (1961-2011)

Anti-colonialist thinker, writer and revolutionary Frantz Fanon died fifty years ago today, on December 6, 1961

To mark the anniversary, here's an extract from Jean-Paul Sartre's preface to The Wretched of the Earth, published in Fanon's final year:

Not so very long ago, the earth numbered two thousand million inhabitants: five hundred million men, and one thousand five hundred million natives. The former had the Word; the others had the use of it. Between the two there were hired kinglets, overlords and a bourgeoisie, sham from beginning to end, which served as go-betweens. In the colonies the truth stood naked, but the citizens of the mother country preferred it with clothes on: the native had to love them, something in the way mothers are loved. The European élite undertook to manufacture a native élite. They picked out promising adolescents; they branded them, as with a red-hot iron, with the principles of western culture, they stuffed their mouths full with high-sounding phrases, grand glutinous words that stuck to the teeth. After a short stay in the mother country they were sent home, whitewashed. These walking lies had nothing left to say to their brothers; they only echoed. From Paris, from London, from Amsterdam we would utter the words ‘Parthenon! Brotherhood!' and somewhere in Africa or Asia lips would open ... thenon! ... therhood!' It was the golden age.

It came to an end; the mouths opened by themselves; the yellow and black voices still spoke of our humanism but only to reproach us with our inhumanity. We listened without displeasure to these polite statements of resentment, at first with proud amazement. What? They are able to talk by themselves? Just look at what we have made of them! We did not doubt but that they would accept our ideals, since they accused us of not being faithful to them. Then, indeed, Europe could believe in her mission; she had hellenized the Asians; she had created a new breed, the Graeco-Latin Negroes. We might add, quite between ourselves, as men of the world: ‘After all, let them bawl their heads off, it relieves their feelings; dogs that bark don't bite.'

A new generation came on the scene, which changed the issue. With unbelievable patience, its writers and poets tried to explain to us that our values and the true facts of their lives did not hang together, and that they could neither reject them completely nor yet assimilate them. By and large, what they were saying was this: ‘You are making us into monstrosities; your humanism claims we are at one with the rest of humanity but your racist methods set us apart.' Very much at our ease, we listened to them all; colonial administrators are not paid to read Hegel, and for that matter they do not read much of him, but they do not need a philosopher to tell them that uneasy consciences are caught up in their own contradictions. They will not get anywhere; so, let us perpetuate their discomfort; nothing will come of it but talk. If they were, the experts told us, asking for anything at all precise in their wailing, it would be integration. Of course, there is no question of granting that; the system, which depends on over-exploitation, as you know, would be ruined. But it's enough to hold the carrot in front of their noses, they'll gallop all right. As to a revolt, we need not worry at all; what native in his senses would go off to massacre the fair sons of Europe simply to become European as they are? In short, we encouraged these disconsolate spirits and thought it not a bad idea for once to award the Prix Goncourt to a Negro. That was before '39.

1961. Listen: ‘Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience.' The tone is new. Who dares to speak thus? It is an African, a man from the Third World, an ex-‘native'. He adds: ‘Europe now lives at such a mad, reckless pace that she is running headlong into the abyss; we would do well to keep away from it.' In other words, she's done for. A truth which is not pleasant to state but of which we are all convinced, are we not, fellow-Europeans, in the marrow of our bones?

We must however make one reservation. When a Frenchman, for example, says to other Frenchmen ‘The country is done for' - which has happened, I should think, almost every day since 1930 - it is emotional talk; burning with love and fury, the speaker includes himself with his fellow-countrymen. And then, usually, he adds ‘Unless ...' His meaning is clear; no more mistakes must be made; if his instructions are not carried out to the letter, then and only then will the country go to pieces. In short, it is a threat followed by a piece of advice and these remarks are so much the less shocking in that they spring from a national intersubjectivity. But on the contrary when Fanon says of Europe that she is rushing to her doom, far from sounding the alarm he is merely setting out a diagnosis. This doctor neither claims that she is a hopeless case - miracles have been known to exist - nor does he give her the means to cure herself. He certifies that she is dying, on external evidence, founded on symptoms that he can observe. As to curing her, no; he has other things to think about; he does not give a damn whether she lives or dies. Because of this, his book is scandalous. And if you murmur, jokingly embarrassed, ‘He has it in for us!' the true nature of the scandal escapes you; for Fanon has nothing in for you at all; his work - red-hot for some - in what concerns you is as cold as ice; he speaks of you often, never to you. The black Goncourts and the yellow Nobels are finished; the days of colonized laureats are over. An ex-native French-speaking, bends that language to new requirements, makes use of it, and speaks to the colonized only: ‘Natives of an under-developed countries, unite!' What a downfall! For the fathers, we alone were the speakers; the sons no longer even consider us as valid intermediaries: we are the objects of their speeches. Of course, Fanon mentions in passing our well-known crimes: Sétif, Hanoi, Madagascar: but he does not waste his time in condemning them; he uses them. If he demonstrates the tactics of colonialism, the complex play of relations which unite and oppose the colonists to the people of the mother country, it is for his brothers; his aim is to teach them to beat us at our own game.

In short, the Third World finds itself and speaks to itself through his voice. We know that it is not a homogeneous world; we know too that enslaved peoples are still to be found there, together with some who have achieved a simulacrum of phoney independence, others who are still fighting to attain sovereignty and others again who have obtained complete freedom but who live under the constant menace of imperialist aggression. These differences are born of colonial history, in other words of oppression. Here, the mother country is satisfied to keep some feudal rulers in her pay; there, dividing and ruling she has created a native bourgeoisie, sham from beginning to end; elsewhere she has played a double game: the colony is planted with settlers and exploited at the same time. Thus Europe has multiplied divisions and opposing groups, has fashioned classes and sometimes even racial prejudices, and has endeavoured by every means to bring about and intensify the stratification of colonized societies. Fanon hides nothing: in order to fight against us the former colony must fight against itself: or, rather, the two struggles form part of a whole. In the heat of battle, all internal barriers break down; the puppet bourgeoisie of businessmen and shopkeepers, the urban proletariat, which is always in a privileged position, the lumpen-proletariat of the shanty towns - all fall into line with the stand made by the rural masses, that veritable reservoir of a national revolutionary army; for in those countries where colonialism has deliberately held up development, the peasantry, when it rises, quickly stands out as the revolutionary class. For it knows naked oppression, and suffers far more from it than the workers in the towns, and in order not to die of hunger, it demands no less than a complete demolishing of all existing structures. In order to triumph, the national revolution must be socialist; if its career is cut short, if the native bourgeoisie takes over power, the new State, in spite of its formal sovereignty, remains in the hands of the imperialists. The example of Katanga illustrates this quite well. Thus the unity of the Third World is not yet achieved. It is a work in progress, which begins by the union, in each country, after independence as before, of the whole of the colonized under the command of the peasant class. This is what Fanon explains to his brothers in Africa, Asia and Latin America: we must achieve revolutionary socialism all together everywhere, or else one by one we will be defeated by our former masters. He hides nothing, neither weaknesses, nor discords, nor mystification. Here, the movement gets off to a bad start; then, after a striking initial success it loses momentum; elsewhere it has come to a standstill, and if it is to start again, the peasants must throw their bourgeoisie overboard. The reader is sternly put on his guard against the most dangerous will o' the wisps: the cult of the leader and of personalities, Western culture, and what is equally to be feared, the withdrawal into the twilight of past African culture. For the only true culture is that of the Revolution; that is to say, it is constantly in the making. Fanon speaks out loud; we Europeans can hear him, as the fact that you hold this book in your hand proves; is he not then afraid that the colonial powers may take advantage of his sincerity?

No; he fears nothing. Our methods are out-of-date; they can sometimes delay emancipation, but not stop it. And do not think that we can change our ways; neo-colonialism, that idle dream of mother countries, is a lot of hot air; the ‘Third Forces' don't exist, or if they do they are only the tin-pot bourgeoisies that colonialism has already placed in the saddle. Our Machiavellianism has little purchase on this wide-awake world that has run our falsehoods to earth one after the other. The settler has only recourse to one thing: brute force, when he can command it; the native has only one choice, between servitude or supremacy. What does Fanon care whether you read his work or not? It is to his brothers that he denounces our old tricks, and he is sure we have no more up our sleeves. It is to them he says: ‘Europe has laid her hands on our continents, and we must slash at her fingers till she lets go. It's a good moment; nothing can happen at Bizerta, at Elizabethville or in the Algerian bled that the whole world does not hear about. The rival blocks take opposite sides, and hold each other in check; let us take advantage of this paralysis, let us burst into history, forcing it by our invasion into universality for the first time. Let us start fighting; and if we've no other arms, the waiting knife's enough.'

Europeans, you must open this book and enter into it. After a few steps in the darkness you will see strangers gathered around a fire; come close, and listen, for they are talking of the destiny they will mete out to your trading-centres and to the hired soldiers who defend them. They will see you, perhaps, but they will go on talking among themselves, without even lowering their voices. This indifference strikes home: their fathers, shadowy creatures, your creatures, were but dead souls; you it was who allowed them glimpses of light, to you only did they dare speak, and you did not bother to reply to such zombies. Their sons ignore you; a fire warms them and sheds light around them, and you have not lit it. Now, at a respectful distance, it is you who will feel furtive, nightbound and perished with cold. Turn and turn about; in these shadows from whence a new dawn will break, it is you who are the zombies.

In this case, you will say, let's throw away this book. Why read it if it is not written for us? For two reasons; the first is that Fanon explains you to his brothers and shows them the mechanism by which we are estranged from ourselves; take advantage of this, and get to know yourselves seen in the light of truth, objectively. Our victims know us by their scars and by their chains, and it is this that makes their evidence irrefutable. It is enough that they show us what we have made of them for us to realize what we have made of ourselves. But is it any use? Yes, for Europe is at death's door. But, you will say, we live in the mother country, and we disapprove of her excesses. It is true, you are not settlers, but you are no better. For the pioneers belonged to you; you sent them overseas, and it was you they enriched. You warned them that if they shed too much blood you would disown them, or say you did, in something of the same way as any state maintains abroad a mob of agitators, agents provocateurs and spies whom it disowns when they are caught. You, who are so liberal and so humane, who have such an exaggerated adoration of culture that it verges on affectation, you pretend to forget that you own colonies and that in them men are massacred in your name. Fanon reveals to his comrades above all to some of them who are rather too Westernized - the solidarity of the people of the mother country and of their representatives in the colonies. Have the courage to read this book, for in the first place it will make you ashamed, and shame, as Marx said, is a revolutionary sentiment. You see, I, too, am incapable of ridding myself of subjective illusions; I, too, say to you: ‘All is lost, unless ...' As a European, I steal the enemy's book, and out of it I fashion a remedy for Europe. Make the most of it.

And here is the second reason: if you set aside Sorel's fascist utterances, you will find that Fanon is the first since Engels to bring the processes of history into the clear light of day. Moreover, you need not think that hot-headedness or an unhappy childhood have given him some uncommon taste for violence; he acts as the interpreter of the situation, that's all. But this is enough to enable him to constitute, step by step, the dialectic which liberal hypocrisy hides from you and which is as much responsible for our existence as for his.

During the last century, the middle classes looked on the workers as covetous creatures, made lawless by their greedy desires; but they took care to include these great brutes in our own species, or at least they considered that they were free men - that is to say, free to sell their labour. In France, as in England, humanism claimed to be universal.

In the case of forced labour, it is quite the contrary. There is no contract; moreover, there must be intimidation and thus oppression grows. Our soldiers overseas, rejecting the universalism of the mother country, apply the ‘numerus clausus' to the human race: since none may enslave, rob or kill his fellowman without committing a crime, they lay down the principle that the native is not one of our fellow-men. Our striking-power has been given the mission of changing this abstract certainty into reality: the order is given to reduce the inhabitants of the annexed country to the level of superior monkeys in order to justify the settler's treatment of them as beasts of burden. Violence in the colonies does not only have for its aim the keeping of these enslaved men at arm's length; it seeks to dehumanize them. Everything will be done to wipe out their traditions, to substitute our language for theirs and to destroy their culture without giving them ours. Sheer physical fatigue will stupefy them. Starved and ill, if they have any spirit left, fear will finish the job; guns are levelled at the peasant; civilians come to take over his land and force him by dint of flogging to till the land for them. If he shows fight, the soldiers fire and he's a dead man; if he gives in, he degrades himself and he is no longer a man at all; shame and fear will split up his character and make his inmost self fall to pieces. The business is conducted with flying colours and by experts: the ‘psychological services' weren't established yesterday; nor was brain-washing. And yet, in spite of an these efforts, their ends are nowhere achieved: neither in the Congo, where Negroes' hands were cut off, nor in Angola, where until very recently malcontents' lips were pierced in order to shut them with padlocks. I do not say that it is impossible to change a Man into an animal I simply say that you won't get there without weakening him considerably. Blows will never suffice; you have to push the starvation further, and that's the trouble with slavery.

For when you domesticate a member of our own species, you reduce his output, and however little you may give him, a farmyard man finishes by costing more than he brings in. For this reason the settlers are obliged to stop the breaking-in half-way; the result, neither man nor animal, is the native. Beaten, under-nourished, ill, terrified - but only up to a certain point - he has, whether he's black, yellow or white, always the same traits of character: he's a sly-boots, a lazybones and a thief, who lives on nothing, and who understands only violence.

Poor settler; here is his contradiction naked, shorn of its trappings. He ought to kill those he plunders, as they say djinns do. Now, this is not possible, because he must exploit them as well. Because he can't carry massacre on to genocide, and slavery to animal-like degradation, he loses control, the machine goes into reverse, and a relentless logic leads him on to decolonization.

But it does not happen immediately. At first the European's reign continues. He has already lost the battle, but this is not obvious; he does not yet know that the natives are only half-native; to hear him talk, it would seem that he ill-treats them in order to destroy or to repress the evil that they have rooted in them; and after three generations their pernicious instincts will reappear no more. What instincts does he mean? The instincts that urge slaves on to massacre their master? Can he not here recognize his own cruelty turned against himself? In the savagery of these oppressed peasants, does he not find his own settler's savagery, which they have absorbed through every pore and for which there is no cure? The reason is simple; this imperious being, crazed by his absolute power and by the fear of losing it, no longer remembers clearly that he was once a man; he takes himself for a horsewhip or a gun; he has come to believe that the domestication of the ‘inferior races' will come about by the conditioning of their reflexes. But in this he leaves out of account the human memory and the ineffaceable marks left upon it; and then, above all there is something which perhaps he has never known: we only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us. Three generations did we say? Hardly has the second generation opened their eyes than from then on they've seen their fathers being flogged. In psychiatric terms, they are ‘traumatized', for life. But these constantly renewed aggressions, far from bringing them to submission, thrust them into an unbearable contradiction which the European will pay for sooner or later. After that, when it is their turn to be broken in, when they are taught what shame and hunger and pain are, all that is stirred up in them is a volcanic fury whose force is equal to that of the pressure put upon them. You said they understand nothing but violence? Of course; first, the only violence is the settlers; but soon they will make it their own; that is to say, the same violence is thrown back upon us as when our reflection comes forward to meet us when we go towards a mirror.

Read the rest here.

In Spring 2012 Verso will publish a new and fully updated edition of David Macey's acclaimed Frantz Fanon: A Biography.

“Entertaining, nerve-racking, truly worthy art:” Two reviews of I’m With the Bears

I'm With the Bears: Short Stories from a Damaged Planet has been picked as the Book of the Month by Dazed and Confused as

a devastating collection of short fiction that envisions the terrifying destruction ... in the face of climate change.

The reviewer highlights the "cumulative effect" of the "cautionary tales" included in the volume, which are "stimulating and frightening in equal measure." Special mention is made of the contributions by Margaret Atwood, Helen Simpson and David Mitchell, "masterly, genuinely nightmare inducing visions." The reviewer has no doubts: "This is a great collection of entertaining, nerve-racking, truly worthy art."

Laura McLean-Ferris also reviews the book for Art Review. According to McLean-Ferris, I'm With the Bears holds both horror and hope:

the kind of unremittingly horrific baby-barbecuing bleakness seen in Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) ... the darkest of dark ages.

All the stories collected in the book "fizz with human spirit." In her view, one of the best is Wu Ming1's Arzèstula

a rather beautiful account ..... of the way language gets lost in the rubble, by following a female prophet who travels through Italy to a place where she practises clairvoyancy with a group of misfits.

The review selecting I'm With the Bears as the Book of the Month appeared in Dazed and Confused, print edition dated 1 December 2011.

Laura McLean-Ferris review appeared in the Art Review, print edition dated 1 December 2011.

Wu Ming1: "After the world we know has fallen down"

On the occasion of the publication of I'm With the Bears: Short Stories from a Damaged Planet, Stir Magazine has interviewed one of the contributors, Wu Ming1, part of the quintet behind the novel Manituana.Wu Ming1 describes his short story in the anthology, Arzèstula, as

a heavily, disturbingly autobiographical story ... a surrealistic, dreamlike tale of hope and redemption.

Asked about the limits of science, the Italian novelist emphasises how deeply rational knowledge and emotions are interwoven: "I think that there's no real comprehension of the world without feelings," he says. Referring to philosophers such as Nietzsche, Deleuze and Foucault, Wu Ming1 notes that

continental philosophy developed a very fruitful relationship with poetry and literature, and sometimes even merged with them.

With humanity facing an environmental crisis on a potentially apocalyptic scale, the role that writers can play is to

raise awareness of a great problem and take part in spurring a decision process. ... Moreover, literature and fiction can make us imagine "worst case scenarios" and thus serve as admonitions, to avert further deterioration of the situations.

In Wu Ming1's view, good examples of this kind of arts are the anti-nuclear movie The Day After, or Stephen King's The Dead Zone. In the present scenario, however, the question may no longer be whether a catastrophe will happen, but instead "how people could go on and live and find a new sense of community after the world we know has fallen down," he argues.

In the interview, Wu Ming1 also salutes the birth of the Occupy Movement. Compared with the early alter-globalization movements, Occupy "is already a step—maybe several steps—ahead", he says. In fact, the targets of the movement are not farcical events such as the G8 summits, but instead the centres of financial capital:

There is a more precise insight on how power works. In Italy we had "Occupy Bank of Italy": campers weren't really occupying the bank, they were shifting the focus of public discussion from Burlesquoni's theatrical antics to the austerity measures dictated to Italy by the European Central Bank. They chose Banca d'Italia as a target because that was Mario Draghi's last week as governor of the Bank. He was going to become president of the ECB. The movement was attacking enemy troops not in the positions they were leaving, but in the positions they were about to take possess of. In short, there were no trivialities like "Let's besiege the palaces of power.

Visit Stir to read the interview with Wu Ming1 in full.

Goodbye, Lucio

On Saturday 3 December, Lucio Magri was laid to rest in Recanati, together with his beloved wife Mara. "Lucio and Mara together forever," says the memorial plaque. In his last will, Magri asked forgo an official funeral. Thus, his friend Famiano Crucianelli simply read his last letter to the dozens of friends who gathered to say goodbye; then, Mozart's "Requiem" was played.

Magri has also been remembered by the youth movement of the Greek coalition Synaspismos during a demonstration against austerity. The young Greeks paid tribute to him by singing the traditional left-wing song "Bandiera Rossa":

Tariq Ali: "World in Crisis" Broadcast

On December 6, 2-3 PM EST, Alternative Radio will be broadcasting Part Two of "World in Crisis," a special two-part program and interview with Tariq Ali.

On December 17, 2010 Muhammad Bouazizi, a street vendor in a small town in Tunisia, burned himself to death. He was protesting harassment and mistreatment by state authorities. His death fueled a revolt in Tunisia which toppled the Ben Ali dictatorship. The spark spread to Egypt and within weeks the decades old Mubarak regime was overthrown. The so-called Arab Spring rocked the entrenched old order. Those revolutionary currents have stirred the waters elsewhere. The economic collapse is shaking things up in the U.S. Witness the Occupy Wall Street movement. Americans, fed up and struggling to make ends meet, watch their military bomb and occupy countries from Pakistan to Yemen, are taking to the streets. Citizens are challenging and questioning the status quo. Are we on the edge of genuine change in the structure of power and privilege?

Tariq Ali, an internationally renowned writer and activist, was born in Lahore, Pakistan. For many years he has been based in London where he is an editor of New Left Review. A charismatic speaker, he is in great demand all over the world. In his spare time he is a filmmaker, playwright and novelist. He is the author of many books including The Clash of Fundamentalisms, Pirates of the Caribbean, Speaking of Empire & Resistance with David Barsamian, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, The Obama Syndrome, and On History with Oliver Stone.

The Economist on Frank Bardacke and César Chávez's legacy

"A Mexican-American equivalent of Martin Luther King:" it is thus that César Chávez, the leader of the United Farm Workers of America and one of the foremost figures of the US Latino community, is described in a review of Frank Bardacke's Trampling Out the Vintage: César Chávez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers in the Economist.

Bardacke's book is an "intelligent, thorough history", and his opinion on Chávez is mixed, the Economist notes:

As he sees it Chávez had two main responsibilities: to sustain support for boycotts, "which he did magnificently", and to administer the union, "which he did badly". The author notes that the union's membership continued to decline in the late 1980s even after Chávez fasted for 36 days to support its grape boycott and anti-pesticide campaign.

The reviewer concurs with Bardacke about the final demise of the UWF: today, the union is "a shadow of its former self." Nonetheless, the reviewer feels that "Chávez left a significant legacy which is insufficiently acknowledged by Mr Bardacke,". Chávez is remembered as one of the most influential figures in the history of the Latino community, to the point that his birthday is a state holiday in California. The extent to which the myth surrounding Chávez's own persona has contributed to improving the living conditions of rural labourers, however, seems to be debatable.

Visit the Economist to read the review in full.

“The dark side of liberal thought and practice:” Ed Rooksby on Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History

Ed Rooksby reviews Domenico Losurdo's Liberalism: A Counter-History in an in-depth two-part article for the New Left Project. In Rooksby's words, questioning "liberal hagiography," "Losurdo's argument is certainly striking" and

highly effective ... Even those familiar with radical critique of liberalism and, indeed, with the historical crimes committed in liberalism's name, will find some of the practices and political positions uncovered by the author shocking.

According to Rooksby, the crux of Losurdo's argument is that the hallmark of liberalism is an "internal logic of inclusion/exclusion" that "separat[es] the legitimately free from the legitimately unfree, masters from servants, ‘us' from ‘them'."

In Rooksby's view, this is "a powerful argument", but not entirely convincing. He concurs with Losurdo that the logic of exclusion has been constantly at work in the history of liberalism. And yet, this cannot be considered the "defining feature" of liberal ideology. According to Rooksby,

one sees a commitment to principles of liberty and equality running through the history of liberal thought. These principles crop up time and again in liberal political philosophy. These political commitments are, in addition, typically rooted in an underlying philosophical individualism. ... The liberal view of individual liberty in itself implies equality. Liberal individuals are equal primarily in terms of their individuality. They are equally unique. This ontological and ethical worldview, then, and the normative commitments to liberty and equality (or a particular individualistic conception of those principles), is what defines liberalism as a political philosophical tradition.

It is true that historically there has been a gulf between proclaimed principles and liberal politics, Rooksby writes. Nonetheless, in his view, oppressed people appealed themselves to liberal principles to fight against their exclusion:

It is quite difficult to explain the successes of the ‘struggle for recognition' waged by the excluded unless we understand that this struggle drew on the normative resources provided by liberalism itself. ... It is precisely because liberalism proclaims universal values for itself—commitment to liberty and equality for all—that these values provide a kind of ideological-ethical ammunition for struggle on the part of those who are, in practice, subjected to conditions of unfreedom and inequality.

Rooksby concludes by describing the age of liberalism as

characterised not merely by exclusion but also by a process of permanent revolution in which a series of social groups—slaves, women, workers—rise up to stake their claim to liberty and equality. In this process liberal ideals are pushed forward and made progressively realised more fully by the struggles of the marginalised.

One could note that, by reducing political radicalism to a "progressive," emancipatory form of liberalism, here Rooksby's seems to overlook the importance that pre-liberal ideas about moral economy and social justice had in shaping European radical labour movements. There are few doubts, however, that the tensions between principles and practice inherent in liberalism have been a powerful argument for the oppressed in their struggles:

Liberalism has always been a battleground—a shifting terrain of struggle on which a war between masters and servants, exploiters and exploited has been fought out.

Visit the New Left Project website to read Part 1 and Part 2 of Ed Rooksby's review.

"History in a very different light:" The Tailor of Ulm reviewed

In the week of Lucio Magri's tragic passing, The Tailor of Ulm: Communism in the Twentieth Century is reviewed in the British press. Magri's book is "one of the most significant and important books I've read on the history of communism during the 20th century," writes John Green in the Morning Star. In Green's words,

Magri's assessments and ideas are not only fascinating for those who are themselves Marxists or communists but would be invaluable to anyone seeking a deeper understanding of our recent history and for ways of overcoming the present global and systemic crisis. Even though the author develops his perspectives from his experience within the Italian communist party (PCI), they have much wider implications and significance.

The Tailor of Ulm sheds light on the centrality of the figure of Gramsci in the history of Italian Communism, a thinker who "can still offer a vital source of creative Marxist praxis—the realisation of theory in practice," Green notes.

The reviewer also stresses how Magri rejects a stereotypical reading of Communism as a form of totalitarianism. Instead, The Tailor of Ulm points to the failures of social democracy at the time of World War I as the main reason for the rise of Communist parties all over the world.

But, Green notes, Magri's book is not just a reflection about what twentieth-century Communism was; it is also a call to arms for today's Left to fight against "a narrow and unaccountable ruling elite", in order to save humanity from barbarism. In Green's opinion,

History is seen in a very different light after reading Magri's learned and insightful discourse.

The Tailor of Ulm is also reviewed by Mark Bergfeld in the Socialist Review. Bergfeld underlines how the book follows the trajectory of the PCI in the second half of the twentieth century —"a story of confrontation and compromise." Magri was drawn to the PCI by the role that the latter had played in the Antifascist Resistance during World War II; as the war was over, however, "the PCI was committed to the Italian state and was not only hailed as a model for communists but also for left social democrats," Bergfeld notes. This tension between giving support to workers' struggles and integration into the Italian institutions was the hallmark of the entire post-war history of the PCI, Bergfeld argues. In his view,

The history of Italian Communism is Magri's story, but is an experience which many communists share. His balance sheet in which compromise with the system far outweighs confrontation might prove that we did not learn to fly first time round, but it does not prove that we never will.

Lucio Magri is also remembered in the London Review of Books blog, referring to articles by Perry Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm. In 2009, Anderson wrote that the manifesto group (of which Magri was one of the leading figures) "produced by far the most coherent and incisive strategic analysis of the problems facing the left, and Italy as a whole." In 2010, in a review of the Italian edition of The Tailor of Ulm, Hobsbawm defined Magri's book "an extremely shrewd and despondent book."

John Green's review appeared in the Morning Star print edition dated 30 November 2011.

Visit the Socialist Review to read Mark Bergfeld's review in full.

Visit the London Review of Books blog to read the post on Lucio Magri.

"Why are we following the US into a schools policy disaster?" — Melissa Benn on the charter school example

Melissa Benn, author of the acclaimed School Wars: The Battle for Britain's Education, has written an article for the Guardian tackling Michael Gove's obsession with using the American charter schools movement as a model for his breakneck paced reform of the British education system, as following a "dangerous template".

The main problem in adopting charter schools as a guide, for Benn, is that while people have heard of the American charter schools, they actually know little about their operational context and the impact they have on state schools. She unveils the true context of charter schools:

The model goes something like this: a set of new schools, apparently dedicated to radically improved education of the poor, is set up in competition to existing public provision. Heavily backed by corporate or philanthropic interests, with some working on a "for profit" basis, they are reliant on high-stakes results, strict discipline, a punitive approach to teachers and unions, and tend to have more control over their admissions, higher rates of exclusion, and to take fewer students with special needs or those for whom English is not their first language.

Meanwhile, public (state) schools, many suffering toxic spending cuts, drowning in often unjustified public and political criticism, must continue to educate anyone who comes through their gates, making the alternative new model look shinier still. Yet many still provide an outstanding education, particularly in deprived areas. Sound familiar?"

Benn contests the view that charter schools have been an unbridled triumph. Some charter schools networks such as, Harlem Children's Zone, have achieved high results but this has been with millions of dollars of private funding, a model not reproducible for all schools. These indications of mixed performance are supported by a study cited by Benn: "the authoritative 2009 Stanford Credo study, 17% outperform public schools, 46% show no difference and 37% get lower results." Benn points out that similiarly, in the UK, the coalition government continues to plow forward with reforms at great speed, despite the latest Ofsted report finding that "the proportion of academies judged good or outstanding is similar to that for all secondary schools."

Benn concludes by considering what the coalition's reforms could mean for the British education system in the long term:

Gove's "quiet revolution" continues unabated. Under the new Education Act, only academies and free schools can now be set up. No new community schools. Many maintained schools continue to be under intense pressure to become academies. Some governors report being asked to special briefings on the achievements of the US charter school model, followed up by invitations to join one of the new educational chains.

Longer term, these developments risk pitting school against school, easing the way for for-profit providers into a key public service, alienating many teachers and undermining across-the-board educational progress. Surely we have learned by now not to blindly follow the US into unproven and expensive policy disasters?

Visit the Guardian to read the article in full.

His gravest sin: leaving this way

By Luciana Castellina

It is not easy for me to write about the death of Lucio Magri: we were not just fellow travellers in our political journeys for more than half a century, but we were also partners (although a very long time ago). And yet I write, as the comrades of il manifesto have asked, because Lucio was out of politics for so many years, and many people contacted me to know what he was doing, where he was.

In an age when politics is all about image, he had been out of the scene. He had already renounced re-election in Parliament in 1994, he no longer wrote in newspapers and only occasionally agreed to take part in public events. The youngest—those who were born when the PCI was about to be disbanded and the PDUP no longer existed—might never have heard of him, if not from their parents.

Thus, I have something to tell, especially for those who did not have a chance to meet him, or who met him in the wrong way. He was not apathetic, Lucio, even now, not at all. First, I must mention the years when the second series of La rivista del manifesto was published—a journal with contributions by both comrades who had been in the first manifesto group, and some others who had decided to stay in the PCI, including Ingrao and Tortorella. It went on for five years, between 1999 and 2003, and then, for several reasons, it was closed. A real pity, and I urge you to re-read it, there are plenty of very interesting writings, by Lucio and other comrades. Until some time ago it was possible to read it in the website of il manifesto, I think it is still there.

From then on, Lucio worked on a book that was published two years ago, and now is in paperback; it has already been translated to English (by Verso) published in Spain and Argentina, and is currently being translated in Brazil. A substantial work, not an autobiography, but a documented piece of research on Italian Communism, considered in the international context, a thoughtful reflection, perhaps the only one that has been written, about the largest Communist party in the West, on the reasons for its success and its final demise. There is also space—and this ability to question his own doings was one of Lucio's virtues—for a critique of some oversimplification of our manifesto group, even though the book does not focus on our experience. The book is titled The Tailor of Ulm, after a parable by Bertold Brecht. In the parable, a tailor asserts that humanity will be able to fly, whereas a prince-bishop does not believe it. In the end, fed up with the stubbornness of the tailor, the prince-bishop tells him: "then try: go up to the bell tower and throw yourself down." The tailor throws himself and crashes. But who was right? Because it is true that, at his time, the tailor did not succeed, but later humanity has learned to fly. The parable is valid for Communism: for now, it has failed, but tomorrow maybe it will succeed.

Lucio's book is not pessimistic nor defeatist. Instead, there is the stubborn belief that even though a profound renewal of the PCI was certainly needed, there were good reasons to keep the party alive. The document in the appendix that Lucio had written in 1988 as the platform for the XVIII party congress, still appears relevant, in strategic terms.

In fact, Lucio was extremely good at foreseeing future developments: with Famiano Crucianelli and Aldo Grazia, in recent times, he started collecting writings and documents of our history, from the years before 1968, the era of the so-called corrente ingraiana, and from later years, from il manifesto and the PDUP, many of which were drafted by Lucio himself. These articles are of great interest because many of the themes that today we consider "new" had actually already been discussed: environmental issues, the crisis of democracy, the decline of the US as a superpower and its consequences. The "new contradictions of our age" are not just named (as is usually done) but analysed, and become the starting point for a new strategy. I think that we must collect these writings and circulate them, perhaps also as a way to remember Lucio now that he is no longer with us, and given that he said that he did not want a funeral.

Travelling across Italy, I meet many, really many, comrades who tell me that the political era through which we went together was crucial for their political education. The history of the PDUP, which was born from the merger between what was called "Movimento Organizzato del Manifesto" and the ex-PSIUP group led by Vittorio Foa, should also, I think, be re-read and discussed.

We always thought of this party as a temporary thing, for we wanted to reunite the ranks of Italian communism and not establish a small party—a difficult decision that many groups of the New Left did not understand, and actually made fun of. In 1984 we started the debate about whether to re-join the PCI or not: it was the time of Craxi and anti-Communism spread anew; being divided did not make sense, and also because there had been what had been called "the second svolta di Salerno", when Berlinguer put an end to his policy of national unity, denounced the corruption of politics and broke the last ties with the USSR. Without notice, Berlinguer came to listen to Lucio's report at our 1984 Congress, and then asked us re-join the PCI, since the differences between us had been overcome. Maybe he sensed that the PCI needed the fresh energy of our cadres, in order to forestall its normalizing drift. But, a few months later, Berlinguer died and we found ourselves in a very different PCI, which was even worse compared with the one from which we had been expelled. And thus Lucio spearheaded dissent—from a perspective that was not conservative, but innovative—when the party was disbanded. The report that he delivered at Arco—where the last assembly of the group that opposed the disbandment of the PCI in the run up to the XXI Congress of the PCI was held—is a clear and modern platform for the Left. This, also, should be re-read.

Getting along with Lucio was not easy. His best friend, Michelangelo Notarianni, used to say that Lucio had outstanding virtues, but he lacked smoothness. It was absolutely true: despite his intellectual generosity—a wealth of anonymous texts were written by him, but he did not care at all about taking merit for them, he just wanted them circulated as widely as possible—Lucio came across as impolite and arrogant. He was always ready to admit his own mistakes, but he had no patience with those of others, because he was extremely (and irritatingly) principled.

But his gravest sin was leaving this way. He thought that he could not contribute in any ways to the rebirth of the Left, of which he said "it will happen, but it will take decades and anyway I will not be able to play any role in it." Having looked after Mara, the partner with whom he lived for 25 years and whom he loved so much, in her awful agony for three years, day after day, he fell into depression and was eventually torn apart. Lucio did not have any more reasons to stay with us, and we, his friends and comrades, did not succeed in giving him enough of them.

Luciana Castellina's article appears in il manifesto print edition dated 30 November 2011 (in Italian).

(translated to English by Leo Goretti)

Keith Gessen describes his arrest, and the lack of bathrooms in jail

On the morning of Occupy Wall Street's second month anniversary, several of the editors of Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America were arrested as they practiced non-violent disobedience in front of the Wall Street police barricades. One of them was Keith Gessen, who spent thirty-six hours in jail—sitting on the floor, singing "Bohemian Rhapsody," eating Corn Flakes, and explaining to a drug dealer that he was richer than most Americans because he had no debt.

Also, thirty-six hours of holding it in. The toilet was filthy, he writes in the New Yorker, and covered in piss. Read his account here.

Watch out for events in NYC over the next few weeks with the editors and writers of Occupy!, along with movement participants and allies. In fact, a discussion panel at Housing Works on November 7—moderated by Keith Gessen, and including editors Astra Taylor and Sarah Resnick, along with Mark Levinson, Liza Featherstone, Meaghan Linnick and myself—wound up being Housing Works' most well-attended event of the season.

Occupy! features the editors and writers of the celebrated n+1 magazine, as well as some of the world’s leading radical thinkers, such as Slavoj Žižek, Angela Davis, and Rebecca Solnit.

Continuons le combat: Valentino Parlato on Lucio Magri

by Valentino Parlato

It was a long time ago that Lucio Magri first told us that he wanted to take his life. We talked to him and tried to persuade him not to, because we needed him, his intelligence and his commitment. We did not succeed. His decision was a highly rational one. At almost 80 years old, the loss of his partner Mara had been devastating for him. The general context also did not help. Lucio made his choice in extreme rationality (and when he made a choice he never changed his mind) and did what he had decided to. Suicide is a basic freedom for the individual. Those who are masters of themselves, as all human beings are, can legitimately and morally set out to bring their life to an end.

Lucio was the mind and soul of our collective life. Together we founded the journal and then the newspaper. There was a short break at the time of the PDUP, but our relationship remained strong, even when we disagreed.

The question is what does Lucio leave with us, to what does Lucio urge us with his suicide? I will try to give an answer. First he invites us to call into question and fight against the present state of things. His culture, his politics and his writings provide us with ideas and knowledge. The tailor of Ulm, who tried to fly before the time had come, crashed, but then humanity learnt to fly. This was his message; and his suicide, although due to his emotional state, is also an act of refusal, of struggle of everything but passive disillusionment. Lucio's analysis and his reading of history are an essential resource, and thus we set out to work on his (many and important) unpublished writings. We will try to learn his lessons better than we have done recently, in order to renew ourselves and fight more effectively. In order to face the present, and historical, crisis of the left, in order to give women and men fresh hope for change, in order to find a way out of the present, vilifying condition that human beings are in.

Lucio's suicide is not a private act, not an act of withdrawal. He had talked to us about it several times and in his last journey he was accompanied by Rossana Rossanda.

Tomorrow is another day, as we used to say in 1968, continuons le combat.

Visit il Manifesto to read the original article (in Italian).

(translated to English by Leo Goretti)

Lucio Magri (1932—2011)

It is our sad duty to announce the passing of Lucio Magri, one of the foremost Italian left-wing intellectuals. A member of the Italian Communist Party from the mid 1950s, Magri was expelled in 1969 along with the group of dissidents who had established the journal il manifesto. In the ensuing decades, he was active in the Independent Left and the peace movement. After the disbandment of the PCI in 1991, Magri joined the Rifondazione Comunista party and acted as the editor of La rivista del Manifesto. In the words of Simonetta Fiori, Magri was "a great chess-player, a talented skier, and a generous politician", who remained "clear-headed and rational, until the end." Verso has recently translated to English his last book and political testament, The Tailor of Ulm: Communism in the Twentieth Century. A first extract from the book was published in 2008 in New Left Review.

Belén Fernández and the Curious Mr. Friedman

Following a recent appearance in Guernica, The Imperial Messenger has been excerpted in the London Review of Books. In the book, author Belén Fernández systematically demolishes the façade of principled criticism that Friedman projects, and exposes instead the mass of contradictory assertions and disingenuous equivocation—not to mention, terrible writing—that is the acclaimed New York Times columnist's true hallmark.

Ever since literary blogs, alternative news outlets, and nifty "read later" contraptions infested the once-venerable tangle of data that is the Internet, it has become dishearteningly easier to read good, intelligent writing that is as informative as it is well-crafted. Rambling, incoherent, cartoonishly bad and ethically suspect writing no longer populate our screens; and we have been left with nostalgia for the days when we still hadn't quite figured out our RSS subscription preferences.

Thankfully, Thomas Friedman is still getting published.

If you have not yet experienced the literary coup de poudre that is Friedman's writing, you can read his New York Times column, which runs twice-weekly because Friedman stauchly supports torture without legal consequences. For short but still painful reminders of the current state of political discourse in this country, you can follow @NYTFriedman on Twitter.

But burying this kind of rhetoric at the bottom of a reader feed is not enough—it has to be brought to light and thoroughly dismantled. If you want to understand how Friedman is "a testament to the degenerate state of the mainstream media in the United States" and a mouthpiece for imperial violence and aggression around the world, you should read Belén Fernández's witty, incisive take-down of this apologist for empire.

Chavs included on top 10 list in the New York Times

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class was chosen as one of the ten “best nonfiction books of 2011” by Dwight Garner in the New York Times

"The noun chav, in Britain, essentially means 'ugly prole': loutish, tacky, probably drunken and possibly violent. Think Snooki with a cockney accent. Mr. Jones’s book is a cleareyed examination of the British class system, and it poses this brutal question: 'How has hatred of working-class people become so socially acceptable?' His timely answers combine wit, left-wing politics and outrage."

Visit the New York Times to read the article in full.

The book was also included on Matthew Higgs’ “Best of 2011” list in Artforum (December 2011, print version)

"Seen in the light of the riots and the worldwide Occupy protests, his lucid analysis of a divided society appears uncannily prescient."

The Professor’s advice: Michael Ignatieff enlightens European technocrats

In an article devoted to the new technocratic governments in Greece and Italy published in the Financial Times, the "liberal" professor and former politician Michael Ignatieff notes:

it is a good sign that Mr Monti [the new Italian Prime Minister] is being called "the professor". It's an indication that the people want him to succeed. Having been a professor myself and having done my time in politics, I would offer only one piece of advice: convince your people that you are doing this not for the banks, not for Europe, not for the bond market, but for them, your fellow countrymen and women.

In the light of the outstanding achievements of Professor Ignatieff as the leader of the Canadian Liberal Party, one can really wonder what Professor Monti should make of this advice. Last May, under Professor Ignatieff's leadership, the Canadian Liberal Party underwent its worst electoral result ever, forcing him to resign. Apparently, Canadian "countrymen and women" were not very convinced by Professor Ignatieff's enlightened views.

From the attacks on the miners' strikes in Thatcher's Britain to his support to the war in Iraq, the political and intellectual trajectory of Professor Ignatieff is dissected by Derrick O'Keefe in the new book Michael Ignatieff: The Lesser Evil? , part of the Counterblasts series. The book also reminds us of Professor Ignatieff's appalling views on violence and war —for example, when in 2006 he described the death of 28 civilians (including 16 children) as a result of an Israeli air strike in Lebanon as "inevitable ... This is the kind of dirty war you're in when you have to do this and I'm not losing sleep about that," he commented.

Visit the Financial Times to read Professor Ignatieff's wise advice to Professor Monti and the European leaders in full.

Thomas Friedman at Work: a book trailer by author Belén Fernández

Photos from News for All the People DC book launch

On Friday, October 28, the Langston Room in Busboys and Poets was filled to capacity for an event featuring Juan González, Joe Torres, and Amy Goodman. WPFW, Free Press, Democracy Now!, Busboys and Poets, and Teaching for Change hosted the event which featured an interview with the authors by Amy Goodman and a book signing.

View photos from the event here.

We are all occupiers - Arundhati Roy at Occupy Wall Street

Arundhati Roy spoke at the People's University in Washington Square Park, New York on 16th November.

What you have achieved since 17 September, when the Occupy movement began in the United States, is to introduce a new imagination, a new political language into the heart of empire. You have reintroduced the right to dream into a system that tried to turn everybody into zombies mesmerised into equating mindless consumerism with happiness and fulfilment.

She went on to outline some possible demands for the Occupy movement:

We want to put a lid on this system that manufactures inequality. We want to put a cap on the unfettered accumulation of wealth and property by individuals as well as corporations. As "cap-ists" and "lid-ites", we demand:

• An end to cross-ownership in businesses. For example, weapons manufacturers cannot own TV stations; mining corporations cannot run newspapers; business houses cannot fund universities; drug companies cannot control public health funds.

• Natural resources and essential infrastructure - water supply, electricity, health, and education - cannot be privatised.

• Everybody must have the right to shelter, education and healthcare.

• The children of the rich cannot inherit their parents' wealth.

This struggle has re-awakened our imagination. Somewhere along the way, capitalism reduced the idea of justice to mean just "human rights", and the idea of dreaming of equality became blasphemous. We are not fighting to tinker with reforming a system that needs to be replaced.

Visit the Guardian for a full transcript.

Arundhati Roy is a contributor to Kashmir: The Case for Freedom (out now).

#whatif by @mckenziewark

#whatif the rich paid the same taxes as everybody else?

#whatif we just circulated ideas rather than respond to the demand to make ‘demands'?

#whatif nobody had to go homeless?

#whatif we declared war on poverty rather than on other countries?

#whatif we occupied twitter with a questioning of our needs and desires?

#whatif all children had access to free quality health care?

#whatif the banks served the economy; rather than the economy the banks?

#whatif people could make ends meet doing just one job that had reasonable hours?

#whatif people asked themselves why the 1% wants them to believe obvious bullsh%t about #ows?

#whatif everyone thought about what was really in their own interests?

#whatif the 1% were held as accountable for their actions as the rest of us?

#whatif elections were publicly funded?

#whatif we invested in education as a public good?

#whatif those who lent money had to take a risk to get their interest on it, and lost their bet if they lent unwisely?

#whatif we were impossible and demanded the realistic?

#whatif people asked themselves whether they really want to see their fellow Americans go without food and shelter?

#whatif we invested in new science rather than new weapons?

#whatif we rewarded those who create new ideas rather than those who just own the old ones?

#whatif we put creating jobs ahead of paying off the bond holders?

#whatif we forgive some of the principle on both housing and student debt?

#whatif people organized at their place of work to improve working conditions?

#whatif there were indictments for 2008 financial fraud?

#whatif there was actually a politics, rather than patronage and infomercials?

#whatif we just said no to neo-fascists who can only feel good by making someone else suffer?

#whatif there were conservatives who actually wanted to conserve rather than destroy?

#whatif the news actually reported some news?

#whatif we rewarded only those investors who take actual risks?

#whatif we built schools rather than prisons?

#whatif the government supported farmers who want to grow food rather than agribusiness making corn syrup?

#whatif our cities were for living in rather than real estate speculation?

#whatif the 1% had to actually invest in new industries rather than just loot the state?

#whatif the people made their own agenda?

#whatif the Democratic Party was actually Democratic, and actually a Party?

#whatif we threw Faux News in the dumpster rather than books?

#whatif public spaces were actually for the public?

#whatif we invested in green engineering, not 'financial engineering'?

#whatif we took climate change seriously and employed people to prepare for it?

#whatif you thought about what would really make things better, not just for you but for everybody?

Editors of new Verso book Occupy! arrested today at N17 protest

Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America editors Keith Gessen, co-founder of n+1, Sarah Leonard, an editor at Dissent and The New Inquiry, Kathleen Ross, business manager of n+1, and Eli Schmitt, an editor of the Occupy! Gazette, were arrested while protesting in downtown Manhattan the morning of November 17, 2011.

Kathleen, Sarah, and Eli were released later that day and and returned to join the gathering at Foley Square that evening. Each was given two counts of disorderly conduct.

Keith was charged with two counts of disorderly conduct, plus an additional charge of disrupting government administration, a misdemeanor. The reason is unclear. It could be because he declined to stand and walk to the paddywagon, and allowed police to carry him there.

Keith was released, along with the last of the OWS detainees, late the following night. The reason given for his being detained for over 36 hours was that the arresting officer forgot to sign his statement.

ABC News ran footage of Keith's arrest and the statement he gave while in handcuffs:

"Our political system is broken, our politicians get to Washington and don't do what we ask them to do and it seems like they don't listen to our votes. We don't have the money or resources and we have to come out to the street."

Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America features the editors and writers of the celebrated n+1 magazine, as well as some of the world’s leading radical thinkers, such as Slavoj Žižek, Angela Davis, and Rebecca Solnit.

The Imperial Messenger excerpted in Guernica

Thomas Friedman—Greenwashing Imperial Messenger?

In this excerpt from her latest book, Belén Fernández gapes incredulously at the logical missteps of a three-time Pulitzer winner.

Read the full excerpt here.

David Harvey at #OccupyLSX—"This is going to change politics in a very fundamental way"

Last Saturday, November the 12th, David Harvey visited Occupy London Stock Exchange. The author—amongst others—of A Companion to Marx's Capital and Spaces of Global Capitalism described Occupy LSX as "a marvelous kind of site" and invited the protesters to "keep at it, keep at it, keep at it." We publish below the full speech, transcribed by Elaine Castillo.

"This is, this is absolutely fabulous, this is fantastic. I mean, you know, this is great—I couldn’t imagine that London could get like this! And you’re doing a really, really great job. And this is really, I think, going to change things.

Because one of the things that I think we’re learning over the last few years actually and particularly over the last few months, is that it’s people—on the street, in the squares—that really matters, in the end. Because that’s the only political force we’ve got. They’ve got the money, they can buy politics, the can buy the media, they can buy anything they want. We don’t have that. The only thing we have is people. And a mass of people. And the more people mass on the street, the harder and harder it becomes for them to say, ‘Oh, no, your interests are not our interests.’

And the other thing that needs to be established here is that, you know, we live in a world where people talk about the importance of public space. But most of the time the public is not allowed to be in that public space. What you’re showing is: people belong in this public space. And when we get in this public space, we can turn it from a public space into a commons. Into a political space. Where we can start to discuss and understand, and start to militate against the incredible, incredible concentrations of wealth and power.

And we’ve been through something called a crisis, a crisis for whom? Actually, you look at the number of billionaires around the world, there are about 30% more billionaires now than there were three years ago. The crisis has been a way of assembling even more wealth in fewer and fewer hands. And the way in which it is done is to go after people who are the most vulnerable. That is, you extract wealth from those who can least afford to have that extraction visited on them.

And at the same time, this crisis is one where the real questions are never being addressed. And the three big questions indeed I think to be addressed are these: firstly, there’s the question of global poverty. And it’s not only global poverty but it’s global inequality. And it’s not only inequality of wealth and inequality of income, but it’s the inequality of political power. That in fact, that wealth, that income, is being used to buy politics. And this of course this is a bit of an old tradition, I mean, in the United States, Mark Twain said of the US Congress, he said: ‘The United States always has the best Congress that money can buy.’

And this is actually how politics has been evolving, over the last 30 years in particular. More and more money buys influence and buys political power. It also structures the media. Increasingly we find it dominates what’s going on inside of universities. It dominates our educational system, so that universities increasingly become places where all you learn is neoliberal ideology. Where all you learn is corporatist managerial techniques. And those corporatist managerial techniques are about actually how to squeeze more and more money out of those who can least afford it.

Now, one of the ways in which people like to take on the question of global poverty is this. They say, Well, okay, we should have more and more NGOs, we should set up, you know, things and try to help people in poverty by doing this and doing that, you know, dividing blankets here and a bit of medical care there. Which is not all bad. But the problem, I try to say to people who are into that, the one thing you don’t seem to understand, is that you cannot solve the problem of global poverty without going after the accumulation of global wealth. And until you all leave your anti-poverty campaigns and you actually join the anti-wealth campaigns, nothing’s going to happen.

I mean, I’m old enough to remember the anti-poverty rhetoric of the 1950s and I remember it in the 1960s, I remember it in the 1970s, and the 1980s—-and then we had the millenium goals, ‘We’re going to eliminate global poverty by 2015,’ and here we are, four years to go, and it’s much worse than it was. We hear it again and again and again. And the reason that happens is that the solution we are told that must be applied to solve global poverty is the very set of mechanisms that produce it. That is, free markets, free trade, free right on the part of capitalist class to exploit, to the hilt, everybody that they can get their hands on.

Furthermore, it’s not only about exploiting labor. What is now going on is that we are finding more and more that accumulation of wealth is through the dispossesion of others’ wealth. I mean, the capitalist class doesn’t even know how to produce wealth anymore. What they are very good at is stealing. They’re good at robbery. they’re good at actually legalizing the extraction of wealth by all sorts of means. ‘Eminent domain’, ‘move populations out of here…’ And right now, worldwide, there is what we call a ‘land grab’ going on. That is, an attempt to color all of the resources of planet earth so that, actually, a small group of people effectively control all of the resources which allow social life to flourish. We cannot let that concentration of wealth continue. It has to be stopped. It has to be reversed.

And how can it be reversed when we don’t have the money to buy politics, when we don’t have the money to buy the media, when we don’t have the money to dominate the television, when don’t have all the… how do we do it? Well, you’re showing ow you do it. You assemble in places like this. And you stay in places like this. You don’t say, We’re going to have a demonstration and then go home. No. You stay. You stay.

And the fact that you’re staying is, I think, the most, one of the most significant political events that’s actually happened, over the last ten, fifteen, even fifty years. And I think that is absolutely why this is such a fabulous situation that you’ve created. You’re taking a public space, you’re turning it into a commons, and you’re saying, ‘Our intersts have to be heard, our voices have to be heard.’ And at this particular point, it doesn’t really matter exactly what you’re saying, the most important thing is that you are here, and you’re goddamn staying here.

Now I suggested that one of the big problems in the world is global poverty, now that’s associated with something which I think is another aspect of our political situation. Capital works in such a way that it incurs certain costs in what it does. But what it also does is to try to shed those costs and make somebody else liable for them. And there are a whole bundle of costs which are associated with the reproduction of society. We talk about education, we talk about health care, we talk about basic human services, we talk about caring for the elderly, we talk about dealing with the problems that are created through alienation in terrible work environments, we talk about all of those issues. Well, the economists have a little word for this. They call it ‘externalities.’ And what’s meant by that is actually you take a cost which you should bear, but you get rid of it. You turn the cost into an externality that somebody has to pay for.

Well, since Thatcher, there’s been a systematic assault, to try to turn more of the costs of social reproduction into externalities. Costs that capital will not bear. ‘You bear the cost of your own education, you bear the cost of your own health care. and if you get sick and you die, that’s your own fault. It’s not capital’s fault.’

Now in the 1950s and 1960s, the state was forced by political circumstances to bear some of those costs and to tax capital, to bear some of those costs. But what Margaret Thatcher started to do was to say, ‘Look, we are actually not going to pay those costs anymore, they’re up to your wn personal responsibilties, it’s up to your own personal savings, it’s your own personal life and you have to take care of it, and if you don’t take care of it and get into trouble, that’s your problem.’

Now that was what Thatcher launched, and actually there’s a pattern that goes on here. Everybody thought when Thatcher was gone—-got rid of Major as well—-that things would change. No! We got Tony Blair. And what did Blair do, he deepened what was going on. Blair started to introduce the top-up fees at universities, Blair is the one who started to push this Thatcherite agenda even further. And right now what we’ve got is a situation where the Thatcherite agenda is with us even though she is long gone.

And this is a global problem. I mean, I was in Chile recently, fabulous situation in Chile, I hope you can establish links with then. The students there have occupied all of the public universities. And mind you, they’re not moving! They’re not going anywhere and they’ve been doing it for four or five months. Quite a few of the high schools ae actually occupied. And what they’re saying is this: ‘Pinochet privatized all of the educational system; when Pinochet went and we got social democracy, we got rid of the dictatorship, we imagined that things would change. They didn’t change; in fact, they’ve got worse. So what we have to do is to end that process that Pinochet started.’ This is what they’re saying.

And we have to end what Thatcher started, and reverse it entirely. In other words, what we have to have is a political program to end the whole Thatcher era because it has not ended at all, and what we see with the current conservatives right now is that they want to make it even more Thatcherite than Thatcher.

That this, if you like, what the political task is. To force capital to bear all of those costs that it doesn’t want to bear. It should take care of education. We should have a free decent education for everybody. And it should be an equal quality education; none of this nonsense about, If you go live in this suburb, you get decent education and if you live in the inner city, you get crap. No. We should actually equalize educational opportunity everywhere. And the same occurs with questions of health care. The same thing happens with all of the forms of social services; they have to be revolutionized. They have to be actually transformed in such a way that they’re not run through some abstract bureaucracy but they’re run on a popular kind of basis. In other words, what we want is not simply the restablishment of some bureaucratic welfare state, what we want is the restoration of the right to decent health care, decent caring, and for that to actually be then rendered on a popular basis. It is, if you like, popular assemblies that should decide about hospital populations, it’s things of that sort that need to be dealt with in a much more democratic kind of way.

The other huge problem there is globally is the problem of environmental degradation. Again, capital does not want to bear those costs. It says basically, well, if islands go underwater because of global warming and sea levels rise, let other people bother with the costs. Not us. So again, it’s a matter of real costs which are visited upon people, all around the world—-indigenous populations in particualr are being very hard hurt by all of this. These costs have to be brought back and capital has to be forced to pay those costs. But they’re not going to do it voluntarily; they’re only going to do it if they’re forced to. And they’re going to be forced by political process, and they’re going to be forced by political oposition.

So those it seems to me are the two big global issues that we face, and it’s going to take a global movement to deal with them. And what we see is a global movement emerging. I mean, there have been elements of it that have been working for a long tme, you have things like, groups like the landless peasant group in Brazil; fantastic movement. You have the Chilean students who have been militating along these lines now for some for or five years. Let’s give a shout for the Chilean students…

We have a Maoist insurrection in Central India, which is portrayed as a very cruel and horrible kind of thing, but it turns out if you read Arundhati Roy, or something like that, these are people who are really struggling, just to say alive, in the circumstance where they’re constantly being attacked by the political power and the police power of the state apparatus. And the same would be true in countries like Bolivia, where you see indigenous populations mobilizing, and they’ve mobilized in very very strong kinds of ways. So all around the world there is a growing sense that the system which has been constructed does not and cannot work, and furthermore it must not be allowed to work any further.

And there is, to me anyway, one of the big final problems, which is that capital is always about growth. You see the newspapers, and what are they saying, they say, ‘Oh, there’s a crisis, we have no growth.’ And people only stop talking about criss when we get three percent growth minimum. Which means that this form of society we live in is actually given over to compound growth forever. Three percent compound growth forever. Now think of that for a moment. Three percent compound growth on all the resources that we consume. Three percent compound growth on all the money which we accumulate. When capital was about what was happening in Manchester and Birmingham, and that kind of thing in say 1820, three percent compound growth for a long time looked okay. I mean, there were all these areas of the world that hadn’t been conquered by capital yet, you know, Asia, China in particular, there were plenty of places to go.

So where does the three percent growth come from now? The whole world is saturated, saturated with consumer goods, saturated with that growth. And what has to happen is we have to start to think about the move towards about a zero growth economy. and as we think about that, we have to understand very clearly that that is a non-capitalist economy. That is a non-capitalist economy for a very simple reason that capital is about accumulation, it’s about growth.

And what we’re moving to right now is a situation of low growth, but continuous capital accumulation by that small group that controls most of the resources. And so three percent growth is going on for them, and their rates of remuneration continue to rise. I mean, I thought it was obscene and wrote violently about it back in 2003, when the leading hedge fund managers around New York City in one year received 250 million dollars of personal compensation just for themsemlves, I thought that was grossly and absolutely unethical. And then in the middle of the crisis just two years ago, the top five hedge fund owners in New York received, in personal remuneration, three billion dollars each in one year.

Now what my students say to me is, ‘How do you become one of those?’

And I say, ‘Well, you know, you can go try, but they’ve got it all locked up, there’s no way you’re gonna get it; the only way you can get a piece of that action is to make sure you reclaim it back.’

Now when you look at the structure, when you say, look at the bonuses, the billions of bonuses—

(microphone shorts out briefly)

…yeah, bonuses, you know, the thing that struck me about that, the very year they were receiving something like, in Wall Street they were getting something like, 40 billion dollars in bonuses in one year. In that very same year about 2 million people lost their houses to foreclosure. And what that meant was, there was actually a transfer of wealth going on. Because all of those houses, may of which were illegally foreclosed, were actually, then, that wealth was flowing up to the coffers of the bankers. This is what I mean by predatory practices, this is what I mean by stealing. The capitalist class doesn’t actually work anymore; it uses the financial system to steal.

Now one of the things that occurs to me, and I think this is significant, is to start thinking about how to organize political movements that actually have a big impact. And I want to give you just a couple of examples in recent years of political movements that have had a big impact in the short term and have some long term lessons to teach us.

One movement I’ll mention first is the immigrant rights movement of 2006 in the United States. There was at that time a proposal to criminalize all illegal aliens. Now this is a very terrible thing to propose. And what happened was, the response was, immigrant workers, many of them illegal, decided they were not going to go to work. And when they decided that, collectively, suddenly what we saw was: cities stopped. Los Angeles closed down. Chicago closed down. New York almost closed down, San Francisco almost closed own. And many other places, companies seeing what was happening, particularly those employing illegal workers, just decided they weren’t going to open their doors anyway, there was no point.

Now what this showed was a tremendous show of force. A tremendous show of force. We can close whole cities down. And actually when you start to look at it, you see that in closing the city down, you can actually stop capital accumulation.

We saw an unfortunate example of that in the wake of 9/11 in New York City. The city was shut down, you couldn’t pass through the bridges, you couldn’t use the tunnels, you couldn’t move, and that went on for about two or three days. And then all of a sudden people realized if this went on for much longer, this was the end of capitalism. So the mayor came on and said, For god’s sakes, get out your credit cards and start shopping. For god’s sake, get in to the restaurants and go to the Broadway shows and just go back, you know, and… enjoy the… the… the ‘situation.’

So what you need, what is clear, is that if you stop the movement of capital, and it’s very easy to do—-cities are very vulnerable, the food chain into New York City, if you disrupt that, this is a major catastrophe. And there’s a tremendous amount of political power. So one of the thing that we have to think about is how to organize political actions in the city that actually have an impact upon how the city works. And as you do that, start to use that as a threat because we need to mobilize in such a way that we can genuinely threaten major commercial and financial interests.

And one of the other examples I would mention would be a city like Cochabamba in Bolivia or El Alto in Bolivia. I mean, El Alto, essentially, the whole city went on strike. And it brought down two presidents. And because it brought down two presidents, it meant that Evo Morales could get elected.

So yes, indeed, bring down David Cameron, how are you going to do that? But there’s a problem with that, which is you would like to think if you bring down David Cameron, there would be someone on the other side who would do what you want to see done, but there’s not. So what we need to do is to start to build a political force that forces someone on the other side to do what you are asking for. Which is: move away from this gross inequality of wealth, take care of the environmental dilemmas, and do something radically different to end Thatcherism. That is what we have to do. Clean it out, clean it out, start all over again. Start all over again, how do we do that? Well, you have to start from the bottom up. And this is again something that’s very significant here, that this movement is not guided by some ideology from the top down, it’s guided from the bottom up and that is crucial.

Because until we know how to create democracy at the local level and then build that democracy into configurations that remain democratic right to the top, then we will not be able to implement a program. We will see good ideas co-opted by capital. And that is one of the most serious difficulties of any political movenent; you come up with good ideas, and then they co-opt them for their own purposes. No.

Just going back to the immigrant rights movment, the interesting thing about it was the way it got demobilized was actually dividing immigrants from other low-paid workers. And in particular it pointed to the immigrants, who were mainly Hispanics, and the right wing had this enormous propaganda campaign in which it said that basically: ‘Unemployment in the African American community is due to Latin American immigration.’ It divided. It divided. And because it divided, it ruled.

So one of the things that it seems to me that’s terrific about these assemblies, is that it seems to me there is a spirit that says, ‘Even though we are very different and have different ideas, we will not be divided. Furthermore, not only will we not be divided, but we will not be diverted.’

Because the way in which they operate is generally to create some sort of argument that kind of says, ‘Well, you’re really talking about the wrong thing, why don’t you worry about this over here, rather than worry about that over there.’ In other words, there are tremendous attemps in the media and elsewhere to divert you from what it is you want to do. Tremendous attempts will be fostered to divide you.

And it will be hard sometimes. I mean, I’ve been in political movements where it’s hard not to be divided. It’s hard to stick with your own position and at the same time compromise with others who have very different positions. These are not easy things to do. But if you set yourself the rule: I will not be diverted, I will not, we will not be divided. Then it seems to me, you have a long way to go and in fact you’re gonna have a terrific impact upon the political climate of this country.

So these, it seems to me, are some of the issues that I would want to bring to the table. I left New York about four days before they occupied wall street so I haven’t actually been to Wall Street yet, this is my first time to one of these meetings. And I think this is absolutely great, and I think when I get back I’m gonna get to try to get together with the Wall Street folk as well. And what I’m sure they would want me to say to you is: Keep the struggle going. Keep going. The struggle continues, as they say. Keep it going. And that is the crucial question: that we have to be persistent, as well as undiverted and undivided.

So I’m going to stop here because I want to have more of a conversation and get kind of responses from what you think, and how you think, because I want to take some ideas back with me to the United States when I get there and perhaps also when I return to Argentina, try to have some conversations there. Because this movement is not just about London. You’re in the heart of the beast, the belly of the beast. And your job is to give the beast stomachache.

But the more stomachache they get, the more grouchy they’re likely to get. So you have to understand that that is likely to happen. And then you have to stiffen your resolve. This is going to be a long haul for all of this, I think, and so I congratulate you on what you’ve done. This is a marvelous kind of site, I think it’s a marvelous initiative that you’ve taken, and I think that, like I say, this is going to change politics in a very fundamental way. And keep at it, keep at it, keep at it.”

Transcript by Elaine Castillo.

"Society has the right to have a discussion:" Paul Mason, the Eurozone crisis and Occupy

Paul Mason comments on the way in which the global crisis has been dealt with by politicians in a discussion with Gillian Tett for the Guardian.

It's a problem of the sclerosis of politics. I despair of the level of political leadership ... Never in any of the policy actions do you see the seeds of the new, the basis for a new version of capitalism

Asked whether the reforms introduced by European governments will be effective in tackling the crisis, the author of Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed and the forthcoming Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions answered that in all likelihood in the next months we will see "the emergence of mainstream politicians saying this far and no further, protectionism, roll back the free market." In his view, the situation will quickly reach the boiling point:

I was leaked some bank research and the sliding scale of banks that went bust was so frightening I decided it was impossible to report without causing panic.

Mason and Tett agreed that there is no chance to see the debts being paid back. The real issue is who is going to bear the brunt of these huge amount of unpaid money: "society has the right to have a discussion about whether we repress —ie inflate people's debts and savings away —or wipe clean ... We have the right to talk about it, because there are social implications," he says. This is exactly what the Occupy movement is about: putting into question the idea that it is the '99%' — ordinary people and workers — who have to pay the price of the systemic crisis of finance and banking.

In an article on the 2011 global protest for the Guardian, John Harris refers extensively to Mason's famous blogpost Twenty reasons why it's kicking off everywhere, the piece that has also inspired his forthcoming book. The crux of Mason's take on the 2011 revolutions is that they are "tangled up with new(ish) means of communication, and a new sense of what it is to be politically organised," Harris notes.

The Internet and the social media pave the way for a new way in which individuals can relate themselves to society and politics and develop collective forms of resistance:

The idea of any seemingly arbitrary authority standing in the way of all that can easily become an affront —and at the same time, your means of communication offers you a method of opposition and resistance: online, in the real world, or both.

Harris also emphasises how, in Mason's view, the events of 2011 can be fruitfully compared with the wave of revolutions that swept across Europe in 1848, more than the student movements of 1968:

in 1848 we have had an explosion that goes from one country to another as fast the mode of communication of the time, and then doesn't stop, and feeds off a zeitgeist that is about freedom, which crosses borders, and involves people identifying with each other from very different cultures.

Visit the Guardian to read Paul Mason's interview and to read John Harris' article in full.

Stephen Graham on the Occupy movements, in an interview with Democracy Now

Stephen Graham, academic and author of the new in paperback Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism, appeared on Democracy Now today to discuss his book in the context of the occupy movements around the world, and the police crackdown on protesters in New York City early Tuesday morning.

In discussion with Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh, Graham detailed the process by which urban police forces have incorporated sophisticated technologies, heightened levels of surveillance and increased militarization into their policing, creating targets out of the homeless, the poor and others they deem undesirable.

I think it's important to put this debate in the bigger context of how cities have changed. And cities in the last 20 or 30 years, particularly in North America, have become much more sanitized, much more controlled by questions of zero tolerance, by questions of really aggressive policing, to clear out those that are deemed to be sort of not fitting a model of urban life, which centers on consumption, which centers on business. So there's been a really powerful shift in cities to sort of criminalize homelessness, to criminalize panhandlers, to criminalize those not seen to belong in this-what Neil Smith in New York has called the "revanchist city," the city taking back spaces for the wealthy, effectively. That was very much Mayor Giuliani's strategy.

So, in a way, I think what the Occupy movement is so powerful at is demonstrating that by occupying public spaces around the world, and particularly these extremely symbolic public spaces, it's reasserting that the city is the foundation space for democracy. And we have to reassert that symbolically and with the actual groupings of the activists in space. So the internet is not enough. It's very much necessary to reassert that cities are political spaces which need to be used to mobilize social and political change.

Tomorrow night at 7pm, on the two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, Bluestockings Bookstore and Café will host a discussion with Stephen Graham on Cities Under Siege. The event is free and open to the public.

With news coming down that mayors in 18 U.S. cities held conference calls before the week's police crackdowns to coordinate efforts, the discussion will provide a critical framework for understanding the new world of surveillance against which we must resist.

Visit Democracy Now to watch the segment in full.

Click here for more details or to RSVP for Stephen Graham's book discussion.

"A very human angle on what it means to be endangered and waiting for extinction" - I'm With the Bears reviewed on The Short Review

Pauline Masurel of The Short Review has reviewed I'm With the Bears: Short Stories from a Damaged Planet, royalties from the sale of which will go to 350.org, an international grassroots movement working to reduce the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere. Bill McKibben has written the introduction to the collection and Masurel used his arrest while protesting against the tar sands pipeline to highlight the controversial issues raised by the stories in the collection. She opened her review by quoting him writing about the tar sands battle:

This is really, really important. Jim Hansen, the world's most important climatologist, has said that if we burn these tar sands in a big way it will be "essentially game over for the climate." That's worth reading again. The oil companies and the Koch Bros are willing to take a few years of big profits in return for cratering the planet's climate system.

In a warm and in-depth review, Masurel noted that the book "aims to show that fiction can speak as persuasively as fact in making the point about the wounds we are inflicting upon our own planet" and does so with "an impressive array of internationally-acclaimed authors". While wary of finding the content preachy, Masurel happily found "a lot of variety in tone and subject matter and the authors' approach to the topic."

On the tone of the stories, she went on to say that many of them have "a tinge of sadness despite the jokey style". Praising the humor of Toby Litt and Nathaniel Rich's contributions, Masurel commended the high impact of the stories by Helen Simpson and David Mitchell:

Helen Simpson's contribution is a diary account and possibly the most terrifying vision of societal breakdown to go with climate destruction. David Mitchell's The Siphoners is also a scarey vision of the future, featuring a story within a story, reminiscent of the complexity of his novel Cloud Atlas. But it also involves a sobering reflection upon the possibilities and implications of population control.

However, it was Lydia Millet's tale, that Masurel found particularly affecting:

My favourite stories in the book take a more oblique angle on the theme. In Lydia Millet's Zoogoing there is no immediate, overt environmental angle. Initially this seems to be the story of someone who likes getting too close for most people's comfort to animals in zoos. But the story goes on to consider a very human angle on what it means to be endangered and waiting for extinction.

She concluded that:

One of the impressive features of this collection is the variety of different approaches to the topic, including reflections upon the numerous different ways in which we have trashed our planet, or at least exploited it, and may one day be called to account.

Visit The Short Review to read the review in full.

I'm With the Bears stories "dazzle the reader with their imaginative range and depth"

The stories contained in I'm With the Bears "dazzle the reader with their imaginative range and depth," writes Arifa Akbar in a review for the Independent. The reviewer stresses how the book—royalties from which will go to 350.org, an international grassroots movement working to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere—can be described as "an ‘imaginative intervention' in response to the dearth of fiction dealing with climate change."

Including contributions from world-class authors such as TC Boyle, David Mitchell and Wu Ming 1, the book brings together "an impressive line-up of contributors." Their stories "envisage a plethora of apocalyptic or disaster scenarios:" from the diary entries dated 2040, after "the collapse", in Helen Simpson's piece, to Margaret Atwood's "short but epic take on the destruction of epochs."

Visit the Independent to read the review in full.

Biblioclasm: or, You Can't Evict an Idea

Verso NY found itself in a strange situation last night: we were putting the finishing touches to our new book on the Occupy movement, written and edited by our comrades at n+1, at the very moment that NYPD were evicting Liberty Park. While doing so, the city authorities threw the 5,000-book People’s Library into a sanitation truck—joining, in their own sordid way, a tradition that stretches from the the sacking of the libraries of Alexandria and Baghdad, through the Nazis burning Jewish books, to the destruction of libraries in Sarajevo and Baghdad in 1992 and 2003.

The Occupy movement has now spread its roots across the globe, with over 100 occupations in the US alone—and brutal evictions in other cities have tended to lead to new, stronger encampments, often within twenty-four hours. As I write this post, lawyers are fighting the city and NYPD in court, to allow protesters back in, with their belongings. The OWS general assembly met in Foley Square last night—and a new poll shows that a clear majority of New York voters support the 24-hour occupation. The Writers and Artists Affinity Group is planning to help restock the People’s Library, and Verso will of course be contributing (once again) a lot of books. As the protesters chanted last night: “You can't evict an idea.”

Occupy! will be published on December 17th, the three-month anniversary of OWS. Free, as far as possible, at your local occupation; on sale, for $14.95 or £9.99, everywhere else. You choose!

Sujatha Fernandes: "West Harlem has caught the OWS fever"

Sujatha Fernandes, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Queens College and author of Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation, blogs for the Huffington Post about the growth of the occupation movement in communities of color around New York City. She stresses that, while Occupy Wall Street has brought much attention to protesters and activists in downtown Manhattan, the movement has deep roots and a history of militant escalation in Harlem, Washington Heights, Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn:

The predominantly African-American and Latino communities of the West Harlem area have long been struggling to fight unemployment, predatory lenders, gentrification, police brutality, and poor access to education and health services. These issues are now being highlighted more broadly as OWS moves into cities and neighborhoods across the globe. And slogans such as the 99% are producing new lines of solidarity that might bring together these different issues and help build connections between existing groups.

OWS is often discredited by claiming that its members are white, middle- and upper-class discontents whose goals and methods are divorced from the lived reality of the poorest and most oppressed communities in the United States. Skeptics scoff at practices like twinkling, the people's mic, and other practices perceived as bizarre or affected. Concensus is roundly condemned as impractical and "unscalable." Yet these methods have a long history in the movement; they have been used by student, community, and workplace organizers for years.

Occupy Wall Street has only popularized these tools, making them available for people with the desire to organize their communities but without the experience or practical resources to do so. Facilitation and Direct Action trainings, held regularly at Liberty Park, are helping to change this situation.

Democratic procedure is at the core of the vision of the diverse West Harlem organizing collective, who have been inspired by the horizontal democracy techniques they are learning at OWS. Colby Hopkins, an unemployed 32-year-old community worker attended several of the facilitation trainings downtown and helped bring those to the group. "The principles of horizontal democracy are so fundamental to the movement," he said. "It's important to spread the concepts and processes and let people figure out how best to use them and adapt them."

As for the notion that antiauthoritarianism, direct democracy, and horizontal organization are somehow alien concepts for people of color, Fernandes highlights groups that have longstanding presences in both New York City and around the global south:

Movement for Justice in El Barrio -- a northeastern neighborhood of Harlem -- held an evening of dialogue with OWS. Building alliances between OWS and organizations such as this with its strong membership of Mexican immigrants is crucial, particularly given the low presence in OWS of immigrants who had mobilized in large numbers in recent years. Speakers at the event focused on the commonalities between their organization and OWS, most notably the fight against the 1%, which they referred to as "capitalism."

The Movement has close ties to the Zapatista liberation movement in southern Mexico, and works with the tools of horizontal democracy key to both movements. The centrality of direct democracy techniques in the everyday work of the Movement for Justice in El Barrio should caution us against thinking that democratic methods are simply being brought from downtown to uptown. Rather, it reminds us that horizontal democracy as being practiced in OWS is influenced by the techniques forged in Zapatista village assemblies and neighborhood meetings in places like Argentina.

The misunderstandings and impasses between communities is a sign of the heterogeneity of the movement, says Fernandes, and issues like race, class, and gender, must be worked through consistently and democratically for the movement to move forward. Yet thus far, the power of people to imagine better a better world for themselves, and to imagine the means to bring it about, constitute a vital unifying force, both in the city and around the country.

Visit the Huffington Post to read the article in full.

Meet Me at the Race Riot: People of Color in Zines from 1990-Today

Verso's September release White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race, edited by Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay, tries to reconstruct the subtle and complex conversations punks have had around issues of racial identity and inequality.

These dialogues are, needless to say, still taking place, and the work is far from finished.

If you're in the New York area, and at all interested in these problems, you need to go to this.

via For the Birds:

"
Meet Me at the Race Riot: People of Color in Zines from 1990-Today
Wednesday, November 16 · 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Barnard College
307 Milbank Hall (3rd floor)
North end of campus
3009 Broadway
New York, NY 10027

The People of Color (POC) Zine Project, Barnard Zine Library and For The Birds Collective are excited to announce a zine reading/community event featuring poc zinesters with diverse backgrounds in zine culture and activism.

Confirmed readers and details:

MIMI THI NGUYEN (EVOLUTION OF A RACE RIOT)

OSA ATOE (SHOTGUN SEAMSTRESS)

JAMIE VARRIALE VELEZ (ROCK AND THE SINGLE GIRL)

DANIELA CAPISTRANO (BAD MEXICAN)

MARIAM BASTANI (MAXIMUM ROCKNROLL)

JORDAN ALAM

Milkbank Hall is on the north end of the Barnard College campus. There will be signs posted to guide you to the 3rd floor location.

Directions to Barnard College

Barnard Zine Libary
Barnard's zines are written by women (cis- and transgender) with an emphasis on zines by women of color. We collect zines on feminism and femme identity by people of all genders. The zines are personal and political publications on activism, anarchism, body image, third wave feminism, gender, parenting, queer community, riot grrrl, sexual assault, trans experience, and other topics.

FOR THE BIRDS
FOR THE BIRDS is a New York City-based feminist collective. We work towards establishing alternative spaces that promote the creative interests of women-identified community members. For the Birds is a collaborative group of organizers with backgrounds in feminism, social justice work, and various artistic pursuits. Through DIY feminist cultural activism, For The Birds aims to empower and support radical women of action.

POC ZINE PROJECT
We want to make it easier for POC (People of Color) zine fans and their supporters to find a diverse selection of zines made by POC. Zines are a vital component in the long tradition of self-publication. They share knowledge and experiences that supplement (and often contradict) the information that other sources distribute, encouraging free thought. There are many valuable zine collections in the United States (many accessible online) but none that are devoted to curating POC zines. POC Zine Project's mission is to makes ALL zines by POC easy to find, share, and distribute.

Email POC Zine project with any questions, comments or suggestions.

Visit For the Birds for more information.

White Riot on the Air

Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay's White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race is continuing to spark wildly overdue conversations on the role of race in music culture. One of these much needed and often awkward conversations was broadcast on the Michael Eric Dyson Show. Another, a conversation between the editors and Souciant magazine, is transcribed online.

In their Souiciant interview, Steve and Max talk about White supremacy, the historicization of punk, and how people of color had already done much of their editorial work for them:

[Stephen Duncombe]: Luckily, we didn't have to [articulate the racial identity of punks of color], because punks of color did that work for us in a number of ways. One thing we did do is showcase the history of non-white punks in punk that has always been there from the beginning. It ain't hard to do, OK? You look at Bad Brains. Or you look at Black Flag. When they're singing "White Minority," the lead singer is Puerto Rican, the drummer is Latino, the producer is black. But somehow that gets written out of punk and we think of Henry Rollins, the Über White Guy, as identified with Black Flag. So some of it was just resurrecting the real history of punk rock which, while the majority, demographically, is white, has hardcore contributions from punks of color from the get-go.

Visit Souciant magazine for the full interview.

With cultural critic, author, academic and public intellectual Michael Eric Dyson, Duncombe and Tremblay explored the motivations that led them to put together their anthology:

It's because it wasn't the most obvious subject, but it's been obvious to anybody who's been part of the punk scene for a long time. The punk scene is about race. it's about race from its very get-go, not just [about] the inclusion of punks of color, but also [about] how whites try to define their whiteness growing up in a multicultural society. So we think, actually—and sort of the premise of the book is—you can't really understand punk rock without also grappling with the issue of race.

By "teasing out the threads" of an ongoing conversation on race among punks, White Riot brings together zinemakers, academics, and musicians' voices to analyze the critical discourse produced, but often ignored, on punk racialization. As the history of punk and the color line, the conflict that emerges is about the future of the scene. The last section of the book includes

the stories of kids—punks of color—who enter into the punk scene hoping for a scene outside of the world of racism, but find instead that that racism has continued into the scene, and the real struggle to either stay in and fight it out or actually leave the scene.

Visit the Michael Eric Dyson Show online to hear the segment in full.

News for All the People hits the best seller lists

Verso authors Juan González and Joseph Torres trump Dick Cheney!

News for All the People debuted on the November 13th New York Times' bestseller list at #30, notably squeezed between Harry Belafonte at #29 and Dick Cheney at #31.

The book also made it onto the the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association bestseller list at #13 on the October 30th hardcover nonfiction list.

Bill versus the Pipeline

Author and activist Bill McKibben, who wrote the introduction to I'm With the Bears: Stories from a Damaged Planet, has a message for environmental activists working against the proposed Keyston XL pipeline:

Um, we won. You won.

Except... "Not completely." McKibben is referring to President Obama's recent decision to order a second environmental review, a move which some analysts consider to signal the proposal's certain demise. McKibben is promising to see this through, directly addressing activists working with his organization 350.org and encouraging them to continue their involvement in the campaign until the decision to shut down the pipeline project is finalized.

We will watch [the environmental review] process like hawks, making sure that it doesn't succumb to more cronyism. Perhaps this effort will go some tiny way towards cleaning up the Washington culture of corporate dominance that came so dramatically to light here in emails and lobbyist disclosure forms ...

There's a pledge to take bold action against the pipeline up on our site, and I'll be keeping your names an emails safely stored away so that you'll be the first to know about anything we need to do down the road.

Meanwhile, newspapers and industry news services are describing the Obama Administration's decision as no more than a "delay;" and Joe Oliver, the Canadian Minister of National Resources, is seeking support for an alternative route to supply Canadian oil to the Chinese market if Keystone XL falls through.

Finally, McKibben promises to escalate, should it prove necessary:

Our fight, of course, is barely begun. Some in our movement will say that this decision is just politics as usual: that the President wants us off the streets—and off his front lawn—until after the election, at which point the administration can approve the pipeline, alienating its supporters without electoral consequence. The president should know that if this pipeline proposal somehow reemerges from the review process we will use every tool at our disposal to keep it from ever being built; if there's a lesson of the last few months, both in our work and in the Occupy encampments around the world, it's that sometimes we have to put our bodies on the line.

Visit 350.org to read Bill's comments in full.

Savage Messiah excerpted in The New Inquiry

Editors at the up-and-coming, and quite excellent, literary journal The New Inquiry have excerpted a few plates from Savage Messiah, Laura Oldfield Ford's zine and pastiche-as-polemic against the gentrification of London and the commodification of everything. A collection of the zine, also titled Savage Messiah, is now available from Verso with an introduction by Mark Fisher.

These images have exceeded, perhaps, their creator's expectations at the moment of their creation. The psychogeographer, wandering the city at twilight, challenging the wartime curfew, appropriating the constitutive elements of the city for a free play that reinvents the landscape, seems already a quaint figure from that impossible time when wandering the city could be seen as an act of revolutionary struggle in the everyday, rather than the simply unfortunate lot of thousands of the young, angry, and newly unemployed.

And so we find, like de Certeau's "transitory fugitive," several plates of Laura Oldfield Ford's Savage Messiah online. Through the dark veil of image compression, we see the ineffable traces of fingers and data—Ford's scissors, paper, glue, and fingers assembling text and image, urban landscape and black background, into a zine, already an old medium when she began the project in 2005. We see, also, or we imagine, the hands of a TNI editor lovingly or carelessly scanning not a zine, but a book—an even older, brutally older, medium—on the abused and little understood office copy machine.

Maybe, or maybe it's all made up, and it's impossible to even try and imagine the route Ford's writing has taken, and continues to take through media, through time, through the city itself—London, New York, or can we now drop the pretense and just say Brooklyn?— to reach us. Maybe that's the point.

It's not that the psychogeographer isn't dead, nor the zinemaker. Of course they're dead. The point is, they continue to haunt. Like Mark Fisher says in his introduction to Savage Messiah (the book):

Savage Messiah uses anachronism as a weapon. At first sight, at first touch—and tactility is crucial to the experience, the zine doesn't feel the same when it's JPEGed on screen—Savage Messiah seems like something familiar. The form itself, the mix of photographs, typeface-text and drawings, the use of scissors and glue rather than digital cut and paste; all of this makes Savage Messiah seem out of time, which is not to say out of date.

If haunting is, as Fisher argues, "a staining of place with particularly intense moments of time," then it's maybe the reader who is out of date, who is on the wrong side of the screen, and who must, by any mediatic means necessary, find a way to reinvent that lost tactility—to feel text, image, and city anew. To intensify.

Strangely, obtusely, the letter reaches its destination. A web entry featuring scanned and digitized images of a book, recently published by Verso, made from scanned, digitized, and then reprinted images of a zine, made of some original printed matter. But of course, we've all read our Baudrillard and know there's no such thing. But maybe, too, we've read our Borges, and know that it doesn't matter.

N9: Students to march and join Occupy LSX

On Wednesday, the voice of British students will resonate again in the streets of London. A national march against fees, cuts and privatisation has been called for next Wednesday 9 November, by the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts, with the support of NUS, UCU and UK Uncut. Starting from Malet Street, this time the students will march not to Parliament, but on the City of London, to join the Occupy LSX protesters. The march will then end at Moorgate Junction, next to London Metropolitan University—one of the university which is suffering most from the public spending cuts as well as having more black and ethnic minority students than all the universities of the Russell group.

The British student movement rose exactly one year ago, with the occupation of Millbank, as is chronicled by the Verso anthology Springtime: The New Student Rebellions, edited by the former ULU President Clare Solomon and Tania Palmieri. As Matt McGregor has written in a review for Bookslut, the book, with its "impressionistic accounts of protests and occupations, compelling radicalism, and excellent historical backgrounds, is a success". Reading the svelte, brisk contributions collected in Springtime —"more a series of clicked links than a typical academic anthology"—one year later, one is under the impression that the student movement has opened a season of change:

This is a real movement, motivated by real fears. The rhetoric of political change is tiresome, unless political change is actually on the cards. This book is rife with the excited hyperbole of collective action, some of which you may have heard before. The difference, of course, is that hundreds of thousands of students actually took to the streets. The unity of the coalition government in Britain was shaken. North African governments have fallen. Silvio Berlusconi recently lost his majority. So, when we hear that "Britain's political landscape has been transformed," perhaps we should halt the upward eye roll. After all, who is to say that it hasn't?

Visit the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts for more information about the student demonstration on 9 November.

Visit Bookslut to read the review of Springtime in full.

Be Impossible, Demand the Realistic

McKenzie Wark, author of The Beach Beneath the Street, spoke to the Occupy Washington Square Park Teach In on 6th November. The original text of his speech is below:

There is a specter haunting Wall St, the specter of a people. We've got them spooked—that unholy alliance of closet fascists and pseudo-liberals who deny we exist: Bloomberg and Fox News, David Brooks and Larry Summers. Its high time that we speak for ourselves, that we take the mic and pass it around.

Those who talk about the 99% without talking about what they really love, what they really desire, what everyday life is a struggle about—they are speaking with a corpse in their mouth. The struggle to live unites us all—in all our differences.

Our ideas are on everybody's minds. Be impossible, demand the realistic. There is tenderness only in the crudest demands. Nobody should go hungry. Nobody should go homeless. Or be crushed by debt.

But what haunts our waking dreams is the power to imagine: The world made real. The world come alive The shadow of a new world without the ded hand of capital and lifeless spectacles.

To Fox and Friends, we are Halloween clowns. To us they are zombies. Wall street are zombies. Fox news are zombies. Congress are zombies. They want to eat our brains. Braaaaaiiiinnns!

We are not afraid of zombies. We are scarier than zombies. We are the old haunting specter, the anonymous class. We are legion, everywhere and nowhere. We come in the name of the grand old cause, to take the world back, before zombies destroy it.

We ghosts have a message, but not from the past. We come from the future. When the lights come on, and the zombies are gone. The owls of Minerva have already flown. They flock at dawn.

“Authors at the top of their game, tackling the most pressing issue of our generation” – I’m With the Bears reviewed

I'm With the Bears: Short Stories from a Damaged Planet, in which world-class novelists envision the terrors of impending climate change, has been widely reviewed in the press. The contributors to the volume, such as Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell, aim to shape an emotional response to mankind's unwitting creation of a tough new planet. While issue based fiction will by its very nature divide opinion, the collection has received a largely positive response. The New Internationalist summed up their review with a resounding endorsement: "10 authors at the top of their game, tackling the most pressing issue of our generation".

Michael Marshall, reviewing for the New Scientist, had mixed feelings about the anthology, appreciating some contributions more than others as he felt was inevitable when reading a collection. He praised the writing of Mitchell and Helen Simpson but saved highest commendation for Paolo Bacigalupi:

Short story collections are always a mixed bag, and this set of 10 pieces inspired by global warming is no different...The high point for me was Paolo Bacigalupi's The Tamarisk Hunter, a near future story of a farmer struggling to make a living on a drought-ridden Colorado river, issues such as water rights, which can be rather (excuse the pun)dry, come to life because Bacigalupi makes them part of the plot and shows how they affect his characters...More than any other story in the collection, it makes climate change feel real.

Marshall concluded that:

We haven't yet had the definitive climate-change novel, but the strongest stories in I'm With the Bears do at least hint at what it might be like.

William Leith for the Evening Standard noted the "impassioned" introduction from Bill McKibben and captured the power of Simpson's vision in his description of her story:

There's a story by Helen Simpson, set in 2040, about what might happen if our worst nightmares come true. The Earth is barely habitable, and people turn nasty, while governments struggle even to communicate, let alone keep control.

The choice of contributors and the ambition of the writing for I'm With the Bears was roundly commended. However, some reviewers felt that no matter how strong the merits of the project, devoting a whole anthology to a single issue was not without its drawbacks. Kate Saunders, writing for the Times appreciated the "distinguished" list of authors, noting that "all the writing in this volume is excellent", but also wondered whether "it's a bit of a symphony on one note". However, reviewed in the Metro, the stories in I'm With the Bears were described as "disconcerting" and ultimately powerful in impact:

The line-up of mostly British and North American talent is impressive - TC Boyle, Toby Litt, David Mitchell - and while they sometimes bash you around the head with a blunt instrument (Nathaniel Rich), the best are fierce and fearless, including Helen Simpson's acerbic, apocalyptic Diary Of An Interesting Year.

Visit the Daily Mail and New Scientist to read the reviews in full.

To read the other reviews in full please see the Times from October 29th, the Metro from September 29th, the Evening Standard from October 20th and the New Internationalist from November 1st.

Paul Mason v. Sarkozy: "Rest assured I have a whole bunch of other impertinent questions to ask heads of state"

Fresh from shouting "how can people take you seriously?" at the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi as he arrived at the Cannes G20 summit, Paul Mason has also clashed with French President Nicholas Sarkozy. As Mason writes for the BBC News website, Sarkozy fumed when the journalist, during the press conference, asked him

It's evident that you and Mme Merkel, the two most powerful governments in Europe, are trying to change the governments of Italy and Greece. How is that just? And once it's started, where does it stop?

Sarkozy bitterly retorted that Mason does not understand "the subtleties of the European construction" because he is "from an island."

Given that within hours Italy has been forced to accept IMF "surveillance," and that EU officials are at pains to establish a national unity government in Greece, Mason's questions surely deserve a better answer.

In his piece, Mason also points out the inability of the global leaders to handle the Eurozone crisis:

It is like pass the parcel with a stick of financial Semtex: Greece as the detonator, Italy as the explosive mass.

While austerity measures are imposed on ordinary people and the world leaders look helpless, it is the journalist's duty to raise uncomfortable questions, Mason writes:

Europe's problems nearly always start with miscommunication: the Ems telegram and the Zidane headbutt being just two examples. It's better to vent frustration and to address the unasked questions.

Rest assured I have a whole bunch of other impertinent questions to ask the heads of state of China, Russia etc should they care to come on Newsnight.

Visit the BBC News to read Paul Mason's article in full.

John Nichols for The Nation: "The 99 Percent Rise Up"

John Nichols, Washington correspondent for The Nation and author of The "S" Word: A Short History of an American Tradition... Socialism writes on the three things Occupy Wall Street have gotten right from the start, and where to go from here.

The target

By aiming activism not at the government but at the warren of bankers, CEOs and hedge-fund managers to whom the government is beholden, Occupy Wall Street went to the heart of the matter ... Like the populists, the socialists and the best of the progressive reformers of a century ago, Occupy Wall Street has not gotten distracted by electoral politics; it has gone after the manipulator of both major parties–what the radicals of old referred to as "the money power."

The numbers

The brilliance of Occupy Wall STreet's message, "We are the 99%," is that it invites just about everyone who isn't a billionaire to recognize themselves as members of the class that has suffered what Thomas Jefferson once described as "a long train of abuses and usurpations."

The demands

The most comic complaint about Occupy Wall Street—not just from critics but even from some elite sympathizers—is that it lacks well-defined demands. In fact, the objection of the occupiers to a system of corporate domination and growing inequality, and their desire to change that system, makes a lot more sense to a lot more Americans than anything being said by politicians ... The American people desperately wanted this movement. That is proven not only by the polls but by the practical embrace of the Occupy Wall Street ethos in more than a thousand communities accross the nation.

Nichols draws on his knowledge of the radical tradition in the United States to comment insightfully on the emerging movement and its relationship to the electoral politics that would appropriate and neutralize it:

America needs a new politics, as much of the streets as of the polling place, a politics that, like the labor movement of the 1930s, the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, the environmental movement of the early 1970s, forces both parties to transform. Anything less is more of the same—more poverty, more inequality, more economic injustice. And if occupy Wall Street is anything at all, it is a south from the 99 percenters: "We have had it!"

Visit The Nation to read the piece in full.

Verso Books at the Occupy Boston Library

Via Stephen Squibb, a photo of Verso titles proudly stacked on the Occupy Boston Library milk crates:

Books in the photograph:

Planet of Slums, by Mike Davis

Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation, by Sujatha Fernandes

I'm with the Bears: Stories from a Damaged Planet, with contributions by Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, T.C. Boyle, Toby Litt, Lydia Millet, David Mitchell, Nathaniel Rich, Kim Stanley Robinson, Helen Simpson, and Wu Ming 1, and with an introduction by Bill McKibben

The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad, by Tariq Ali

Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed, by Paul Mason

The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation, and Human Rights, by Robin Blackburn

News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, by Juan González and Joseph Torres

Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers, by Frank Bardacke

'Occupy London urgently seeks direction' — "History has yet to turn again"

An extract from an article originally published in the New Statesman

It was a few days before Margaret Thatcher marched into Downing Street in May 1979, but as far as the then Labour prime minister, James Callaghan, was concerned, the game was already up. "You know, there are times, perhaps once every 30 years, when there is a sea change in politics," he told his adviser Bernard Donoughue. "It does not matter what you say or what you do. I suspect there is now such a sea change - and it is for Mrs Thatcher." His pessimism was well founded. The postwar consensus, with its pillars of a mixed economy, strong unions and high taxes on the wealthy, was coming to an end. Callaghan could no longer preserve the disintegrating centre. What became known as Thatcherism - or neoliberalism - emerged victorious.

As I stood in Finsbury Square just outside the City of London, on Sunday 23 October, I could not help but be reminded of "Callaghan's Law". Around me was the first offshoot from Occupy the London Stock Exchange, a protest camp set up eight days earlier. A couple of dozen tents were neatly arranged in rows (apparently to comply with health and safety regulations) and several protesters were dancing cheerfully as a brass band called Horns of Plenty belted out left-wing anthems. It was just the latest addition to the fastest-growing political force on earth: the Occupy movement, which now has a presence in up to a thousand cities. Was this the most compelling sign yet of a "sea change" - of a global repudiation of the neoliberal order that began teetering when Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008?

This drive to seize and hold urban space for political ends was born during the Egyptian revolution this year. Unlike the occupants of Finsbury Square, the Egyptian people directed their fury chiefly at a tyrannical regime, rather than the financial elite; but the images of defiant crowds occupying Tahrir Square beamed across the planet have inspired a new generation on every continent.

In May, thousands of young Spaniards, radicalised by a youth unemployment rate that has topped 40 per cent, defied legal bans and seized Madrid's main square during local elections. The indignados (the indignant) took on the political establishment: they urged voters to vote for neither the governing Socialists nor the opposition, conservative People's Party.

The wave of occupations specifically directed at financial centres began nearly six weeks ago on Wall Street, New York. Occupy Wall Street set the tone for all those that have followed: run by open assemblies and working groups with remits ranging from outreach to direct action, and organised primarily through Twitter. And there is the slogan - "We are the 99 per cent" - reflecting a sense that the overwhelming majority are being made to pay for the economic crisis while the wealth of the top 1 per cent continues to grow. You can see why this line of attack resonates in the US, where real wages have stagnated since 1973 and where - under George W Bush's benighted presidency - 65 per cent of economic gains went to the top 1 per cent of people.

"There is no typical kind of person that is attracted to the movement," says Karanja Gaçuça, who is co-ordinating press for minority groups at Occupy Wall Street. "We have professionals, students, unemployed folk, parents with their kids, as well as people who identify as the 1 per cent economically." The basis for unity is a deep-seated resentment at the response to the financial crisis. For Karanja, it is an attempt to take on a three-decade-long consensus based on low taxes for the rich, deregulation and privatisation; to reflect "shifting sensibilities", as he puts it. "There's a paradigm shift whereby people are thinking about the question of fairness and equality, and access from a human perspective rather than from a purely profit perspective as has been the sensibility over the past few decades."

The polls suggest that is true. A survey this month for Time magazine showed that 54 per cent of Americans had a favourable opinion of the Occupy movement; only half as many felt the same about the right-wing Tea Party. Of those familiar with the protests, 86 per cent felt that Wall Street and its lobbyists had too much political influence; nearly eight out of ten felt that the gap between rich and poor "has grown too large"; over seven in ten wanted financial executives prosecuted for their role in the economic crash; and nearly as many wanted the rich to pay more taxes.

By tapping in to these sentiments with clear proposals, the Occupy movement could become a progressive version of the Tea Party, transforming the political debate. And, according to a Wall Street Journal poll, that is the hope of many protesters. When asked what they wanted the movement to achieve, 35 per cent opted for influencing the Democrats the way the Tea Party has influenced the Republicans (the next most popular aim, breaking "the two-party duopoly", registered 11 per cent support).

Visit the New Statesman to read the rest of the article.

“Art of breathtaking precision, political sensitivity and power”—Savage Messiah reviewed by Bidisha

Laura Oldfield Ford's Savage Messiah, collecting issues of her acclaimed art zine that charted her psychogeographic drifts through a decaying city, has been reviewed by Bidisha for Notes on Culture, her new online magazine. Bidisha praised the book, describing it as "reportage turned into art of breathtaking precision, political sensitivity and power." In a rich and engaging review, Bidisha gave her thoughts on the nature of Ford's artistic project in Savage Messiah and why the zines are so effective.

Ford observes, sketches and photographs these areas, which are simultaneously forgotten and earmarked for exploitation, making notes and speaking to residents. The result is not straight reportage or urban landscape recording but reality with the zoom lens sniper eye tuned to the max. The cracks in walls, the scrubby greenery growing between slabs, the broad backs of massed riot police and the sad, scratchy graffiti cut into the page with intense monochrome menace. There is, appropriately, a savagery and sharpness underlying Ford's work, equal parts anger, despair, love and urgency. The images are beautiful and terrible: fantasy figures of fashion brand advertising on hoardings next to blocks of flats with smashed out windows.

Bidisha then turned her attention to the literary aspects of Ford's practice:

I would like to see equal recognition of the complementary element of Savage Messiah: the text. Printed in white Courier font on the inky matte background, Ford composes journalistic essays based on her observation of the sites she visits (her riffs on the gleaming monstrosity of Westfield shopping centre are hilarious), reports on her experiences and relays candid conversations with the many hundreds of residents of the unglossy areas usually ignored by lifestyle mag articles on the coolness of the East End. The stories are sad, funny, tragic and true. They are not reported verbatim but are as honed, edited, balanced and polished as the visuals.

She concludes that Savage Messiah's particular achievement lies in it ability to capture East London in its present crisis, past history and future ruination:

Savage Messiah functions as both a literary and an artistic history of the vast geographical area Ford covers, often starting with a present moment like a property earmarked for demolition or an area blocked against wanderers or trespassers. It then moves back in time to excavate the experiences of locals, uncover previous uses of the site and reveal many different biographical, architectural, social and cultural manifestations across the decades. It is as much a seemingly-spontaneous (but actually highly refined) postwar people's history as a fierce and visually stunning contemporary elegy for an East London that will soon be engulfed in the razzmatazz of the 2012 Olympics - before being abandoned once more.

Visit Notes on Culture to read the review in full.

COMPETITION: Towards a twitter #manifesto? Win a set of books from Verso

Towards a New Manifesto. A philosophical jam session between the two Frankfurt School legends Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the book is a record of their free-flowing exchange of ideas in the spring of 1956, recorded with a view to the production of a contemporary version of The Communist Manifesto.

In the book, Adorno notes that "we live in the society we criticize." Furthermore, in the twenty-first century, we also tweet in the society we criticize.

Thus to launch the book, we are pleased to announce a brand-new twitter competition challenging you to tweet a #manifesto for a communism for the twenty-first century.

The five most creative participants will win a set of books:

Towards a New Manifesto, the titles of The Communist Hypothesis set, as well as The Communist Manifesto and the Scum Manifesto.

The rules:

No external links are allowed: you must be able to sum up your digital call for revolution in no more than 140 characters.

The competition closes on Friday 4 November at 3pm GMT; tweets after this time will not be considered.

The competition is open to #manifestos from all over the world.

Please do not respond via Facebook or email, and include the hashtag #manifesto. Tweeting @VersoBooks would also be helpful!

We are looking forward to reading your #manifestos—bearing in mind that, to paraphrase Adorno, a twitter account is of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants.

Slavoj Žižek on the Occupy movement for Al Jazeera— videos and transcript

Slavoj Žižek has been interviewed by Al Jazeera to give his unique perspective on the tumultuous changes happening in the world financial and political systems. In an extensive conversation with Tom Ackerman, Žižek discussed the Arab Spring, London Riots and the Occupy movement, as well as the various financial and political crises across the world from Europe to India. Throughout the discussion, Žižek explored the themes of violence across the political spectrum and his irresistible desire to provoke friends and enemies alike.

Visit Al Jazeera to view the interview in situ.

Žižek also visited St Marks bookshop to discuss his views on the Occupy Wall Street protest.

Žižek argued that now was the time for careful, critical thinking in order to avoid the Left being paralized by melancholy. Impose Magazine has produced a transcript of the talk:

I will simply begin by certain historical observations. You probably notice how some people, and I think precisely the wrong people, started to celebrate the Wall Street events as a new form of social carnival: so nice, we have there this horizontal organization, no terror, we are free, egalitarian, everybody can say whatever he or she wants, and so on, all that stuff. It is as if some kind of a carnivalesque collective experience is returning. And this tendency, much more than here, is alive, as you can expect, on the West Coast. A couple of days ago at Stanford they told me that - the other Sunday, about 9 days ago - that in the center of San Francisco, a guy speaking on behalf of those who occupy, said something like, "They are asking you what's your program. They don't get it. We don't have a program. We are here to enjoy ourselves. Have a nice collective experience," and so on and so on. That's precisely what I want to render problematic. How? You know, I would like to start with maybe a surprising point: the relationship between melancholy and prohibitions. The idea is the following one: modern subject paradigmatically is melancholic and the thing he is melancholic about, the lost object, is precisely collective, transgressive experience of carnival. For example, there is quite a nice a book from 2007 by Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets, where her thesis is that with modernity proper, not renaissance, what is lost is precisely this collective carnivalesque experience: we are no longer dancing in the streets, pleasure becomes a private thing, and so on and so on.

What I want to problematize is precisely the implicit causality, which is: first something was prohibited, or rendered inaccessible - collective dancing in the streets, whatever - and then we get melancholic. But I think it's the opposite way around. I think that melancholy comes first and prohibition is a way to avoid the deadlock of melancholy.

One has to be very precise here about the structure of melancholy. The usual, I call it in a friendly way, [?], Judith Butler reading is that melancholics are more radical, faithful than those who go through the work of mourning. The idea is that mourning, the Freudian [?], means to accept the loss of the object. You work to it symbolize the loss and you pass over to the real object. Why? A melancholic is not able to drop the object, remains faithful to the object. Those of you know Judith's work on gender and so on: remember what's her precise point. A kind of a tricky, ethical, strictly ethical, rehabilitation of both gay and lesbian homosexuality. The idea is that our first object of libidal investment is the same sex parent. Why? The price for becoming normal heterosexual is that you identify with the lost object, and in this way you become the normative subject, like a woman identifies with mother's feminity, a son with father's masculinity. And in this way, you accept the loss because you yourself identify with the lost object and become normal. She delves into this in detail if you want, in her maybe best book, I claim, The Psychic Life of Power. And then the idea is that gay people are a little bit more ethical here. They don't accept the loss of the, as it were, primordial object.

Okay, I see here many problems. The first one is, you know that Butler's basic theory of gender is that gender is nothing natural, our gender identities are constructed through performative practices, re-enactments, so on and so on. My first very naive question here is: if this is true, how then can the child identify with the same sex parent prior to any performative identification and so on? It's as if the child nonetheless experiences sexual difference, father, mother before... okay it's another one.

What I want to say is that I want to problematize the underlining notion of melancholy. I think a good old-fashioned return to Freud, which has political bearing today, is very helpful here. Namely if you read closely Freud in his Mourning and Melancholy, he says something almost exactly opposite. His point is not melancholic subject more remains faithful to the object - no no no. He says something wonderful: he says that melancholy is something like mourning in advance. A melancholic treats the object of libidinal investment as lost while the object is still here[...]

Visit Impose Magazine to read the transcript in full.

"Who Owns People's Park?"—Frank Bardacke in NYC

In May 1969—forty-two years before Zucotti Park was occupied—People's Park in Berkeley, CA became the scene of a major standoff between student protesters and the police. Two years earlier, the University of California had acquired the site through eminent domain, then abandoned plans to build a student parking lot and playing field when funds ran dry. Seeing an opportunity to create public space, local residents, merchants and activists occupied the site (against the wishes of the university) and built the park that stands today. The police, called in by Governor Ronald Reagan (who saw this as a challenge to the university's property rights), fatally shot one bystander and blinded another. May 15, 1969 is now known as "Bloody Thursday."

Frank Bardacke, a leader of the People's Park occupation, wrote this call to defend the park in 1969. He will be at the Brecht Forum in New York on November 10 to speak about his new book, Trampling Out the Vintage. On November 12, he will be at Zucotti Park, celebrating the two occupations.

It reads:

Someday a petty official will appear with a piece of paper, called a land title, which states that the University of California owns the land of the People's Park. Where did that piece of paper come from? What is it worth?

A long time ago the Costanoan Indians lived in the area now called Berkeley. They had no concept of land ownership. They believed that the land was under the care and guardianship of the people who used it and lived on it.

Catholic missionaries took the land away from the Indians. No agreements were made. No papers were signed. They ripped it off in the name of God.

The Mexican Government took the land away from the Church. The Mexican government had guns and an army. God's word was not as strong.

The Mexican Government wanted to pretend that it was not the army that guaranteed them the land. They drew up some papers which said they legally owned it. No Indians signed those papers.

The Americans were not fooled by the papers. They had a stronger army than the Mexicans. They beat them in a war and took the land. Then they wrote some papers of their own and forced the Mexicans to sign them.

The American Government sold the land to some white settlers. The Government gave the settlers a piece of paper called a land title in exchange for some money. All this time there were still some Indians around who claimed the land. The American army killed most of them.

The piece of paper saying who owned the land was passed around among rich white men.

Sometimes the white men were interested in taking care of the land. Usually they were just interested in making money. Finally some very rich men, who run the University of California, bought the land.

Immediately these men destroyed the houses that had been built on the land. The land went the way of so much other land in America—it became a parking lot.

We are building a park on the land. We will take care of it and guard it, in the spirit of the Costanoan Indians. When the University comes with its land title we will tell them: "Your land title is covered with blood. We won't touch it. Your people ripped off the land from the Indians a long time ago. If you want it back now, you will have to fight for it again."

Shooting Žižek—and the winner is...

We're delighted to announce that the winner of the Shooting Žižek short film competition is...

Jamie Jones & Liam Saint Pierre, for The Last Capitalist.

THE LAST CAPITALIST from jamie jones on Vimeo.

The competition was run by Verso, Little White Lies and Huck magazines.

The winner was chosen by Žižek himself, but all involved agreed that The Last Capitalist was the most entertaining and creative response to Žižek's Living in the End Times.

Jamie & Liam win a selection of radical literature, including Žižek's entire Verso backlist and the Revolutions series .

Read the original brief here.

David Harvey—The Party of Wall Street Meets its Nemesis

The Party of Wall Street has ruled unchallenged in the United States for far too long. It has totally (as opposed to partially) dominated the policies of Presidents over at least four decades (if not longer), no matter whether individual Presidents have been its willing agents or not. It has legally corrupted Congress via the craven dependency of politicians in both parties upon its raw money power and access to the mainstream media that it controls. Thanks to the appointments made and approved by Presidents and Congress, the Party of Wall Street dominates much of the state apparatus as well as the judiciary, in particular the Supreme Court, whose partisan judgments increasingly favor venal money interests, in spheres as diverse as electoral, labor, environmental and contract law.

The Party of Wall Street has one universal principle of rule: that there shall be no serious challenge to the absolute power of money to rule absolutely. And that power is to be exercised with one objective. Those possessed of money power shall not only be privileged to accumulate wealth endlessly at will, but they shall have the right to inherit the earth, taking either direct or indirect dominion not only of the land and all the resources and productive capacities that reside therein, but also assume absolute command, directly or indirectly, over the labor and creative potentialities of all those others it needs. The rest of humanity shall be deemed disposable.

These principles and practices do not arise out of individual greed, short-sightedness or mere malfeasance (although all of these are plentifully to be found). These principles have been carved into the body politic of our world through the collective will of a capitalist class animated by the coercive laws of competition. If my lobbying group spends less than yours then I will get less in the way of favors. If this jurisdiction spends on people’s needs it shall be deemed uncompetitive.

Many decent people are locked into the embrace of a system that is rotten to the core. If they are to earn even a reasonable living they have no other job option except to give the devil his due: they are only “following orders,” as Adolf Eichmann famously claimed, or “doing what the system demands” as others now put it, acceding to the barbarous and immoral principles and practices of the Party of Wall Street. The coercive laws of competition force us all, to some degree or other, to obey the rules of this ruthless and uncaring system. The problem is systemic, not individual.

The Party’s favored slogans of freedom and liberty to be guaranteed by private property rights, free markets and free trade, actually translate into the freedom to exploit the labor of others, to dispossess the assets of the common people at will and the freedom to pillage the environment for individual or class benefit.

Once in control of the state apparatus, the Party of Wall Street typically privatizes all the juicy morsels at below market value to open new terrains for their capital accumulation. They arrange subcontracting (the military-industrial complex being a prime example) and taxation practices (subsidies to agro-business and low capital gains taxes) that permit them freely to ransack the public coffers. They deliberately foster such complicated regulatory systems and such astonishing administrative incompetence within the rest of the state apparatus (remember the EPA under Reagan, and FEMA and “heck-of-a job” Brown under Bush) as to convince an inherently skeptical public that the state can never ever play a constructive or supportive role in improving the daily life or the future prospects of anyone. And, finally, they use the monopoly of violence that all sovereign states claim, to exclude the public from much of what passes for public space and to harass, put under surveillance and, if necessary, criminalize and incarcerate all those who do not broadly accede to its dictates. It excels in practices of repressive tolerance that perpetuate the illusion of freedom of expression as long as that expression does not ruthlessly expose the true nature of their project and the repressive apparatus upon which it rests.

The Party of Wall Street ceaselessly wages class war. “Of course there is class war,” says Warren Buffett, “and it is my class, the rich, who are making it and we are winning.” Much of this war is waged in secret, behind a series of masks and obfuscations through which the aims and objectives of the Party of Wall Street are disguised.

The Party of Wall Street knows all too well that when profound political and economic questions are transformed into cultural issues they become unanswerable. It regularly calls up a huge range of captive expert opinion, for the most part employed in the think tanks and universities they fund and splattered throughout the media they control, to create controversies out of all manner of issues that simply do not matter and to propose solutions to questions that do not exist. One minute they talk of nothing other than the austerity necessary for everyone else to cure the deficit, and the next they are proposing to reduce their own taxation no matter what impact this may have on the deficit. The one thing that can never be openly debated and discussed, is the true nature of the class war they have been so ceaselessly and ruthlessly waging. To depict something as “class war” is, in the current political climate and in their expert judgment, to place it beyond the pale of serious consideration, even to be branded a fool, if not seditious.

But now, for the first time, there is an explicit movement to confront The Party of Wall Street and its unalloyed money power. The “street” in Wall Street is being occupied—oh horror upon horrors—by others! Spreading from city to city, the tactics of Occupy Wall Street are to take a central public space, a park or a square, close to where many of the levers of power are centered, and by putting human bodies there convert public space into a political commons, a place for open discussion and debate over what that power is doing and how best to oppose its reach. This tactic, most conspicuously re-animated in the noble and on-going struggles centered on Tahrir Square in Cairo, has spread across the world (Plaza del Sol in Madrid, Syntagma Square in Athens, now the steps of Saint Paul’s in London as well as Wall Street itself). It shows us that the collective power of bodies in public space is still the most effective instrument of opposition when all other means of access are blocked. What Tahrir Square showed to the world was an obvious truth: that it is bodies on the street and in the squares not the babble of sentiments on Twitter or Facebook that really matter.

The aim of this movement in the United States is simple. It says: “We the people are determined to take back our country from the moneyed powers that currently run it. Our aim is to prove Warren Buffett wrong. His class, the rich, shall no longer rule unchallenged nor automatically inherit the earth. Nor is his class, the rich, always destined to win.”

It says “we are the 99 percent.” We have the majority and this majority can, must and shall prevail. Since all other channels of expression are closed to us by money power, we have no other option except to occupy the parks, squares and streets of our cities until our opinions are heard and our needs attended to.

To succeed, the movement has to reach out to the 99 percent. This it can do and is doing step by step. First, there are all those being plunged into immiseration by unemployment, and all those who have been or are now being dispossessed of their houses and their assets by the Wall Street phalanx. It must forge broad coalitions between students, immigrants, the underemployed and all those threatened by the totally unnecessary and draconian austerity politics being inflicted upon the nation and the world, at the behest of the Party of Wall Street. It must focus on the astonishing levels of exploitation in workplaces—from the immigrant domestic workers who the rich so ruthlessly exploit in their homes, to the restaurant workers who slave for almost nothing in the kitchens of the establishments in which the rich so grandly eat. It must bring together the creative workers and artists whose talents are so often turned into commercial products under the control of big money power.

The movement must above all reach out to all the alienated, the dissatisfied and the discontented, all those who recognize and deeply feel in their gut that there is something profoundly wrong, that the system the Party of Wall Street has devised is not only barbaric, unethical and morally wrong, but also broken.

All this has to be democratically assembled into a coherent opposition, which must also freely contemplate what an alternative city, an alternative political system and, ultimately, an alternative way of organizing production, distribution and consumption for the benefit of the people, might look like. Otherwise, a future for the young that points to spiraling private indebtedness and deepening public austerity, all for the benefit of the one percent, is no future at all.

In response to the Occupy Wall Street movement the state backed by capitalist class power makes an astonishing claim: that they and only they have the exclusive right to regulate and dispose of public space. The public has no common right to public space! By what right do mayors, police chiefs, military officers and state officials tell we, the people, that they have the right to determine what is public about “our” public space, and who may occupy that space, and when? When did they presume to evict us, the people, from any space we, the people, decide collectively and peacefully to occupy? They claim they are taking action in the public interest (and cite laws to prove it), but it is we who are the public! Where is “our interest” in all of this? And, by the way, is it not “our” money that the banks and financiers so blatantly use to accumulate “their” bonuses?

In the face of the organized power of the Party of Wall Street to divide and rule, the movement that is emerging must also take as one of its founding principles that it will neither be divided nor diverted until the Party of Wall Street is brought either to its senses—to see that the common good must prevail over narrow venal interests—or to its knees. Corporate privileges to have all of the rights of individuals without the responsibiities of true citizens must be rolled back. Public goods such as education and health care must be publically provided and made freely available. The monopoly powers in the media must be broken. The buying of elections must be ruled unconstitutional. The privatization of knowledge and culture must be prohibited. The freedom to exploit and dispossess others must be severely curbed and ultimately outlawed.

Americans believe in equality. Polling data show they believe (no matter what their general political allegiances might be) that the top twenty percent of the population might be justified in claiming thirty percent of the total wealth. That the top twenty percent now control 85 percent of the wealth is unacceptable. That most of that is controlled by the top one percent is totally unacceptable. What the Occupy Wall Street movement proposes is that we, the people of the United States, commit to a reversal of that level of inequality, not only of wealth and income, but even more importantly of the political power that such a disparity confers. The people of the United States are rightly proud of the their democracy, but it has always been endangered by capital’s corruptive power. Now that it is dominated by that power, the time is surely nigh, as Jefferson long ago suggested would be necessary, to make another American revolution: one based on social justice, equality and a caring and thoughtful approach to the relation to nature.

The struggle that has broken out—the People versus the Party of Wall Street—is crucial to our collective future. The struggle is global as well as local in its nature. It brings together Chilean students who are locked in a life-and-death struggle with political power to create a free and quality education system for all, and so begin dismantling the neoliberal model that Pinochet so brutally imposed. It embraces the agitators in Tahrir Square who recognize that the fall of Mubarak (like the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship) was but the first step in an emancipatory struggle to break free from money power. It includes the “indignados” in Spain, the striking workers in Greece, the militant opposition emerging all around the world, from London to Durban, Buenos Aires, Shenzhen and Mumbai. The brutal dominations of big capital and sheer money power are everywhere on the defensive.

Whose side will each of us as individuals come down on? Which street will we occupy? Only time will tell. But what we do know is that the time is now. The system is not only broken and exposed but incapable of any response other than repression. So we, the people, have no option but to struggle for the collective right to decide how that system shall be reconstructed and in what image. The Party of Wall Street has had its day and failed miserably. How to construct an alternative on its ruins is both an inescapable opportunity and an obligation that none of us can or would ever want to avoid.

Shooting Žižek - final entries

Finally, the last shortlisted entry for the Shooting Žižek short film competition. The winner will be announced on Monday.

The End Times are Upon Us by Emalee Arroyo and Rod Mahdavi:

Special mention also goes to Daniel Bird's excellent animation, Seed, which was too long for this brief but is well worth a watch.

More selected entries from the Shooting Žižek short film competition

Two more of the best entries from the Shooting Zizek competition:

Jamie Jones' The Last Capitalist:

THE LAST CAPITALIST from jamie jones on Vimeo.

And In The End Times by Svitlana Biedarieva:

In the End Times from Svitlana Biedarieva on Vimeo.

Occupy first, make demands later—Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek writes in the Guardian on the Occupy movement, its taboo-breaking nature, and why hard and patient work is now required.

Carnivals come cheap - the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work - they are the beginning, not the end. Their basic message is: the taboo is broken; we do not live in the best possible world; we are allowed, obliged even, to think about alternatives.

He goes on to respond to some of the criticisms of the Occupy protests:

Are the protesters violent? True, their very language may appear violent (occupation, and so on), but they are violent only in the sense in which Mahatma Gandhi was violent. They are violent because they want to put a stop to the way things are - but what is this violence compared with the violence needed to sustain the smooth functioning of the global capitalist system?

They are called losers - but are the true losers not there on Wall Street, who received massive bailouts? They are called socialists - but in the US, there already is socialism for the rich. They are accused of not respecting private property - but the Wall Street speculations that led to the crash of 2008 erased more hard-earned private property than if the protesters were to be destroying it night and day - just think of thousands of homes repossessed.

They are not communists, if communism means the system that deservedly collapsed in 1990 - and remember that communists who are still in power run today the most ruthless capitalism. The success of Chinese communist-run capitalism is an ominous sign that the marriage between capitalism and democracy is approaching a divorce. The only sense in which the protesters are communists is that they care for the commons - the commons of nature, of knowledge - which are threatened by the system.

They are dismissed as dreamers, but the true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are, just with some cosmetic changes. They are not dreamers; they are the awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare. They are not destroying anything, but reacting to how the system is gradually destroying itself. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice but goes on walking; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. The protesters are just reminding those in power to look down.

Finally, Žižek asserts the importance of silence:

What one should always bear in mind is that any debate here and now necessarily remains a debate on enemy's turf; time is needed to deploy the new content. All we say now can be taken from us - everything except our silence. This silence, this rejection of dialogue, of all forms of clinching, is our "terror", ominous and threatening as it should be.

Humour and 'readability': Margaret Atwood and Helen Simpson discuss I'm With The Bears

Prize-winning writers Margaret Atwood and Helen Simpson, contributors to I'm With The Bears: Short Stories From a Damaged Planet a collection themed around climate change, appeared on BBC Radio 4's Open Book program in conversation with Mariella Frostrup. Atwood read an excerpt from her story in the anthology,'Time Capsule Found on a Dead Planet' and Simpson read from 'Diary of an Interesting Year', before both authors discussed their writing practice.

Framing their discussion in light of the popular trend in contemporary fiction for environmental disaster fiction, exemplified by Cormac McCarthy's The Road, they considered the challenges of making issue based fiction attractive to audiences who may be wary of feeling sermonized to. Simpson acknowledged the difficulty, commenting: "moralizing, that's about as popular as telling someone they need to lose weight. It's the nagging and being preached at element that is very hard to avoid around this subject".

In light of the recent Booker Prize furore over readablity as a criteria for the literary prize, it was interesting that this issue was also put to the authors by Frostrup. She asked them about the particularities of depicting complicated and controversial issues of such enormity as climate change within the demands of a literary narrative. Simpson described how she employed the tension of the believer and the non-believer in her story, allowing her characters to argue the issues out for readers of either persuasion. Both writers emphasized the importance of humor and the banal drama of the everyday as devices that tether the narrative of issue based fiction, making it realistic and readable. On whether making these stories funny and palatable trivialized the issues concerned, Atwood countered that "they are only funny in parts" with Simpson adding that "black comedy tells the truth, black comedy is one of the best modes of getting things over". Atwood went on to surmise:

Making jokes of that [dark] kind is one thing that human beings do, even at moments of crisis and catastrophe. It's a way of coping, it's a way of diffusing the panic, horror and fright, and terror and all of those things that you also feel

Considering the weaknesses of dystopian fiction, Atwood and Simpson observed that the majority of books in that genre highlight the "pioneer-like" capabilities of the male protagonist while maligning the role of women in the post-apocalyptic world. Simpson put it thusly, "the women in dystopias, obviously they've got extra worries, they've got rape and childbirth. Just generally, they're demoted to much lower than they were before."

Frostrup questioned whether readers might by skeptical when faced with a collection such as I'm With The Bears, which has an overall topic. Atwood elaborated the dilemma as common to all writers, and objected to the idea that readability is a separate issue from the process of writing fiction in general:

This is a very, very old argument, which is of how much should be instruction and how much should be delight. Unless it's delight you're not going to turn the pages. Unless there's some content to it, you're only going to read it once. So that is the problem facing any writer of fiction when you sit down: 'how do I make it interesting enough so that page one becomes page two as the reader is reading?' All you have is five pages, if you can't get them through five pages they're not going to go on.

I'm with the Bears brings the capacity of the human imagination to better comprehend ecological disasters of inhuman proportions. Royalties from the sale of the book will go to 350.org, an international grassroots movement working to reduce the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

On on November 14th contributors to the book, Helen Simpson and Toby Litt, will be taking part in The Book Stops Here, a free literary party night in London with book readings from the featured authors.

Visit Open Book listen to the program in full, it will be available until 12:00AM 1^st Jan 2099. The program will also be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 again on Thursday 27^th October at 16:00.

To read more about their events, visit The Book Stops Here.

Two more entries from the Shooting Žižek short film competition

Two more of the best entries from the Shooting Žižek short film competition...

First up, Temujin Doran's Living in the End Times:

Living in the End Times from Studiocanoe on Vimeo.

Next is Chado, by Andrej Uduč of V.A.T. (Visual Alternative Trbovlje)

Two more shorts will be posted tomorrow.

Deep Mountain: Across the Turkish-Armenian Divide garners divided responses

The legacy of the history and historiography of the 1915 Armenian genocide is a fraught one. Ece Temelkuran's Deep Mountain: Across the Turkish-Armenian Divide, an exploration of the controversial subject of the living history and continuing denial of the Armenian genocide, has attracted both high praise and strong criticisms from different quarters.

For the New Left Project, Jamie Stern-Weiner describes Deep Mountain as "a thoughtful reflection on the personal and communal politics of nationalism". Introducing his interview with Temelkuran, he summarizes his thoughts on the book thusly:

Its value, in my view, lies primarily in its exposition of the subjective experience of nationalism and the ways in which personal and communal identity can become bound up with political demands.

While Stern-Weiner's views are characteristic of the more positive reviews, the book has also garnered a response of a very different kind. G. M. Goshgarian writing for New Politics has penned a scathing attack on the book which he deems as "genocide denial light". In an in-depth and comprehensive piece, he explains that he was baffled as to why Verso had published a book that, in his words, could be best be likened to "latter-day national- socialist treatments of the holocaust". With the aim of facilitating an open dialogue on this sensitive issue, it is interesting to present his critique here. Goshgarian hopes that his review will add to a wider discussion that "may help spark a badly needed clarification of the ambiguities muddying the political and ideological movement that has spawned Temelkuran's book."

Goshgarian argues that Temelkuran:

1) indirectly justifies, in Part I of Deep Mountain, Ankara's main policy objective vis-à-vis Armenia, a normalization of diplomatic and economic relations without prior recognition of the genocide; 2) firmly condemns, in Part II, a proposed French law, which Ankara is fighting tooth and nail, to make denial of the Armenian genocide a crime, as Holocaust denial already is; and 3) faithfully reproduces, in Part III, Turkish diplomacy's and the Turkish mass media's stock image of the mighty U.S. Armenian lobby and the fanaticized Diasporan masses at its beck and call. More generally, she downplays issues of responsibility and reparations, and banishes the very thought that redress might involve territorial adjustments.

He goes on to examine her prescription for a "Turkish-Armenian "dialogue" without preconditions", surmising that:

The short form of her lesson is: let them talk about their "genocide" all they want, and listen sympathetically to their tales of woe until they finally get tired and stop. A certain family resemblance between that proposal and Ankara's is hard to miss. Her humanist justification for hers, to be sure, is her own: only dialogue will allow the two sides to dissolve their differences in their Common Humanity. The purity of her intentions is beyond doubt. That does not necessarily recommend them.

He further objects to the characterisation of Armenians in the book and the nature of the dialogue depicted:

Many are, rather, "hardline sectarians" (180), also known as "shouters" (153, 248). These Armenian enemies of dialogue routinely identify themselves as such by rudely "thrusting" Turks such as Temelkuran "into the position of someone who has to 'deny' or 'recognize' genocide" (208)... Temelkuran by no means denies that the Armenian fanatics who insist on genocide recognition have their opposite numbers on the other side of the Turkish-Armenian divide. One of her central theses, in fact, is that there are "hardline sectarians positioned on opposing sides of the same game" (180). The Turkish sectarians are the ultra-nationalists and fascists. Whence a fine distinction. "Those who assault writers as they're hauled into court," Temelkuran declares (perhaps thinking of the thugs who tried to attack Orhan Pamuk when he was brought to court under Article 301 in December 2005 for affirming in an interview that "we killed a million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds") "are no more representative of my people than those who chant 'Recognize the genocide or get lost!' are representative of all the Armenians living in distant lands" (99, emphasis added). The "all" is all-important: it indicates that the Armenian-Turkish divide runs between a representative majority of Armenian extremists and an atypical minority of ultra-nationalist Turks. That may explain why Deep Mountain's "illuminating look at the part nationalism plays in the way we see ourselves and others" (the blurb) is essentially a look at the blinding effects of Armenian nationalism on Armenians. The Turkish shouters are neither named nor described, let alone interviewed. Despite the subtitle (for which the author may bear no blame), Deep Mountain is thus about, not the Turkish-Armenian, but the Armenian-Armenian divide.

Further probing Temelkuran's arguments, he states:

Temelkuran would appear to concede, most of the time, that the wounds to be healed are mostly the Armenians'. From this it follows that the dialogue is of a special sort, so that it might be better "if we replaced 'dialogue' with a different word: listen. Listen in silence until they've said all they need to say" (235). This will "alleviate the burden of these conflicting versions of a shared past.... That's what they need" (208).

"We," however, know that most of "them" do not know that "that's what they need." Our fantasy therefore threatens to founder on the fact that the real supports of our imaginary relation are, on our own witness, mainly sectarian shouters, resistant to therapeutic dialogue with such as us. Deep Mountain proposes the classic humanist solution to this problem. It runs: 1) the basis on which we can "share [their] stories" is our "common humanity" (199); 2) de-Middle-Easternized Brownians and Smithians aside, even Armenian hardliners have a share in it; ergo 3) "people like us" can experience fleeting moments of communion even with hardliners. We may thus reasonably hope that they, too, will one day become willing partners in the all-embracing dialogue of reconciliation that will efface the Armenian-Armenian and, simultaneously, Armenian-Turkish divides. Meanwhile, it isn't our fault if they haven't come round.

The crucial corollary runs: Just as, in much of the world, our Common Humanity is Northern European, so in Eastern Turkey - Anatolia - our Common Humanity is Anatolian. With that, we have arrived at the fantasy that sustains the fantasy of therapeutic reconciliation, the one on which Deep Mountain ultimately rests.

Temelkuran did not invent it. Anatolianism is currently in vogue on one Turkish leftish fringe... "Us," to be sure, is us Anatolians, not us Turks. Anatolia, however, has been under Ottoman or Turkish rule since about 1500 CE.

He concludes by examining Temelkuran's vision and what he views as the ultimate problem of the book:

"If the label we attach to our pain makes it impossible to discuss that pain" (100), should we not, as patriotic Anatolians, forget about "mere labels," remember that we are "a people bound together by tales of Anatolia," and get on to the real, the only serious business to hand: telling and listening to those stories? It is a matter of some urgency: "our people have scattered, to Armenia, France, America, and who knows how many other places [our Anatolian people have scattered to Armenia?] - members of a Diaspora even in their own countries" (192).

It was necessary to reproduce this much of Temelkuran's vision in order to make that last sentence comprehensible. Many a reader will still not have understood it. Those who have will also have understood that it is, at the discursive level - her manifestly good, internationalist intentions notwithstanding, there is unfortunately no avoiding the word - genocidal. One hopes the movement she belongs to will notice the fact, and point that out, not last to her.

To read Stern-Weiner's interview with Ece Temelkuran in full please visit New Left Project.

To read Goshgarian's review in full please visit New Politics.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Notes on the Rome Riot

On Saturday 15 October, no fewer than 900 cities all over the world have hosted demonstrations linked to the Occupy movement. The main targets of the protesters have been financial citadels such as Wall Street and the London Stock Exchange, where those who have caused the crisis but refuse to pay for it have their headquarters. The large majority of these demonstrations have taken the form of peaceful gatherings, culminating in acts of civil disobedience, namely the occupation of public spaces.

However, there was one demonstration—one of the largest, indeed, gathering some 200,000 people—that turned soon into a dramatic series of violent crashes between a minority of the protesters and the police, and amongst protesters themselves; the square where the final rally was planned became a real battlefield. This is was what happened on 15 October in Rome: a huge, colourful mass mobilization, and a youth riot, both at the same time.

The "Roman anomaly" was described in the media as the "bad" exception, compared with the "good" global Occupy movement. The degeneration of the Italian demonstration was explained in the light of an alleged Italian "national character" (prone to unbridled passions and irrationality), the tradition of radicalism and political violence in Italy, or... the Berlusconi government (which seems to be the all-explaining explanatory factor for commentators in Italy—whatever happens, it's all Berlusconi's fault). This reading is not completely meaningless: for example, there is no doubt that the squalid display of bribery and incompetence that was staged in the Italian Parliament the day before the march (when the Berlusconi government survived a confidence vote, partly also because of the ineptitude of the parliamentary opposition) ignited the protesters. And yet, saying that the Italian demonstration was a black stain on the immaculate balance sheet of the Occupy movement is not entirely convincing. Instead, what happened in Italy sheds light on some issues and contradictions that the global Occupy movement will have to face, sooner or later.

The same kind of dichotomist representation informed the accounts on how the protest in Rome unfolded. A huge demonstration, involving hundreds of thousands of "good" outraged citizens and young people, has been hijacked by a tiny, organised, criminal bunch of "bad" (and hooded) hooligans—this is the narrative that Italian newspapers and politicians have adopted to describe the facts of 15 October. Interestingly enough, there seems to be a broad consensus on this representation, both on the Left and the Right. The impressive size of the Rome parade makes it impossible a general condemnation of the protesters—it would imply the criminalization of hundreds of thousands of people.

Of course, the emphasis and the tones vary. While right-wingers focus on the need to repress with all means the rioters, left-wingers stress more the fact that there was a "99%" (again!) of peaceful demonstrators. A vignette that is going viral in Facebook depicts a pacific mass of protesters who call for honesty, jobs and equality but are ignored by journalists, because the latter are too busy in shooting pictures of the one and only looter. Plot theories regarding the infiltration of Neofascists and police moles are popping up like mushrooms among the militants of what remains (not much indeed) of the political Left. There are plenty of stories regarding heroic attempts of brave activists to stop the "hooligans", to fight with them and even to hand them over to the police—like the case of the fifty-year-old man who engaged in a courageous fight with a young "hoodie" who had broken an icon of the Madonna.

But is this representation of the reality an exhaustive one? Probably not. Of course, most of 15 October protesters did not (nor were they willing to) take part in violent actions - otherwise the tally of the damage would be certainly higher than the estimated 2mn Euro. Certainly, amongst the "hooligans" there were also apolitical troublemakers and infiltrated people (this is an old tactics employed by the Italian police). And without doubts the focus of the media on the riot was disproportionate compared with the number of people who were demonstrating in Rome. And yet...

... and yet, reading the many "unofficial" accounts of the protest, sensing the feelings of many comrades, and watching the footage that was broadcast live from Piazza san Giovanni (the final meeting point), one is under the impression that there is also another, "ugly" story to be told. It is the story of a generation of Italian young people that has no jobs and perceives to have no future; a generation of young people who are not just "indignant" - they are bitter, resentful, and angry at a system that does not represent them. That this sense of frustration and marginalization can turn into the performance of violence against the system should not surprise.

Of course, in today's Italy, violence can eventually give vent (for an afternoon) to the anger of some hundreds of young people, but is a dead end, as a political strategy. The only result that the Rome riot will bring about is repression, a number of arrests, new liberticide laws (the Italian Minister of Interior has proposed that from now on the organisers of public demonstrations have pro provide economic coverage for possible damage—and they have to do it in advance) and—probably the worst aspect—the isolation of the radical Left and the social opposition. From now on, the label of "black bloc" will be easily wielded as a weapon against anyone who dares to call into question "the present state of things". Clusters of militant resistance relying on genuine popular support - such as the NO Tav movement, a group of activists of the val di Susa, in the Piedmont region, that since 2005 are fighting against the construction of a high-speed railway and who are strongly supported by the locals - risk to fall victim of the wave of hysteria that is spreading across the country.

The point here is that what happened in Rome is the result of the inability of the Italian radical Left, and the anti-capitalist/alter-globalist/indignant social movements, to build a united opposition front. Factional rivalries, widespread "anti-political" feelings and—the most important—strong disagreements (and to an extent, a lack of ideas) regarding what is the purpose of the mobilization - to put it more clearly: regarding what is the alternative to neoliberal capitalism—made it impossible to put together a platform for the movement that could go beyond the watchword of "indignation" (in fact, different movements and coalitions drafted different documents before 15 October). And if many people (also outside the traditional constituencies of the Left) are outraged and angry, indignation and anger are not enough. Better, they are the expression of a widespread social malaise, but they are not a solution, they are not a cure to it.

To an extent, the "good" occupy movement is a step forward compared with the "bad" Rome march of 15 October. There is not just widespread indignation amongst its members, but also a substantial agreement on the resistance practices to employ- not violence, but civil disobedience. At the same time, however, a question that was dramatically left unanswered in Rome hovers in the air also in New York, London and the rest of the world: what's next? What's the goal of these movements? What is the alternative to financial greed and plutocracy? Until the movement does not find a political answer to these "ugly" questions, until a shared sense of fighting together is not combined also with a shared sense of purpose, the risk of falling back into understandable, but minoritarian and sterile rage, as happened in Italy, will be there.

To conclude, as a young activist has put it in a brilliant letter sent to the heterodox Communist newspaper il manifesto, the riot of Rome resembles the fight of Captain Achab against Moby Dick: an "inescapable tragedy, which is superior to human will". What happened in Rome "does not represent anything of what we believe is just, but it is the right representation for our impotence. And once more, the game of searching for those who were responsible for it will impair us to think about our impotence, and raise our awareness."

Visit Counterfire to read the article in situ.

"How do the ninety-nine percenters compare with mass protests of the past - and can they succeed?"— Tariq Ali

Tariq Ali, author of Obama Syndrome, has written a piece for the Sunday Herald on the ninety-nine percent protesters at Occupy sites around the world, but most famously at Occupy Wall Street. In it he compares this fledgling activist movement with the mass protests of the past. A section of the article is reproduced here:

"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth glancing at," wrote Oscar Wilde, "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." The spirit of that 19th century socialist is alive among the idealistic young people who have come out in protest against the turbo-charged global capitalism that has dominated the world ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters who have taken up residence at the heart of New York's financial distract, are demonstrating against a system of despotic finance-capital: a greed-infected vampire that must suck the blood of the non-rich in order to survive. The protesters are showing their contempt for bankers, for financial speculators and for their media hirelings who continue to insist that there is no alternative. Since the Wall Street system dominates Europe, local versions of that model exist here too. (Interestingly it was the Wall Street occupiers rather than the indignados of Spain or the striking workers of Greece who had an impact in Britain, revealing once again that the real affinities of this country are Atlanticist rather than European.) The young people being pepper-sprayed by the NYPD may not have worked out what they want, but they sure as hell know what they're against and that's an important start.

How did we get here? Following the collapse of communism in 1991, Edmund Burke's notion that "in all societies, consisting of different classes, certain classes must necessarily be uppermost" and that "the apostles of equality only change and pervert the natural order of things", became the common-sense wisdom of the age. Money corrupted politics, big money corrupted absolutely. Throughout the heartlands of capital we witnessed the emergence of: Republicans and Democrats in the United States; New Labour and Tories in the vassal state of Britain; Socialists and Conservatives in France; the German coalitions, the Scandinavian centre-right and centre-left, and so on. In virtually each case the two-party system morphed into an effective national government. A new market extremism came into play. The entry of capital in the most hallowed domains of social provision was regarded as a necessary "reform". Private finance initiatives that punished the public sector became the norm and countries (such as France and Germany) that were seen as not proceeding fast enough in the direction of the neo-liberal paradise were regularly denounced in the Economist and the Financial Times.

To question this turn, to defend the public sector, to argue in favour of state ownership of utilities, to challenge the fire-sale of public housing, was to be regarded as a "conservative" dinosaur. Everyone was now a customer, rather than a citizen: young, upwardly mobile, New Labour academics would coyly refer to those forced to read their books as "customers", as if to say we are all capitalists now. The social and economic power elites reflected the new realities. The market became the new God, preferable to the state.

But those who swallowed this line never asked: how come this happened? In fact the state was necessary to make the transition. State intervention to shore up the market and help the rich was fine. And given that no party offered any alternatives, the citizens of North America and Europe trusted their politicians and went sleepwalking to disaster.

The politicians of the centre, intoxicated by the triumphs of capitalism, were unprepared for the Wall Street crisis of 2008. So were most citizens, hoodwinked by huge advertising campaigns offering easy loans and a tame, uncritical media, into believing that all was well. Their leaders might not be charismatic but they knew how to handle the system. Leave it all to the politicians. The price for this institutionalised apathy is now being paid. (To be fair, the Irish and the French people scented disaster in the arguments over the EU constitution that enshrined neo-liberalism at its heart, and voted against it. They were ignored.)

Yet it was obvious to many economists that Wall Street deliberately planned the housing bubble, spending billions on advertising campaigns to encourage people to take out second mortgages and increase personal debt to spend blindly on consumption. The bubble had to burst and when it did the system tottered till the state rescued the banks from total collapse. Socialism for the rich. As the crisis spread to Europe, the single market and competition rules were flushed down the toilet as the EU mounted a rescue operation. The disciplines of the market were now conveniently forgotten. The extreme right is small. The extreme left barely exists. It is the extreme centre that dominates political and social life.

As some countries collapsed (Iceland, Ireland, Greece) and others (Portugal, Spain, Italy) stared into the abyss, the EU (in reality the BU, a Bankers Union) stepped in to impose austerity and to save the German, French and British banking systems. The tensions between the market and democratic accountability could no longer be masked. The Greek elite was blackmailed into total submission and the austerity measures being thrust down the throats of the citizenry have brought the country to the brink of revolution. Greece is the weakest link in the chain of European capitalism, its democracy long submerged beneath the waves of capitalism in crisis. General strikes and creative protests have made the task of the centre extremists very difficult. Watching recent images from Athens, where the police have used force to prevent 10s of thousands of citizens entering parliament, one feels that the rulers of the country might not be able to rule in the same old way for too long.

To read the article in full see the Sunday Herald for Sunday October 23rd 2011.

Shooting Žižek short film competition: selected entries

Back in May Verso and The Church of London launched a short film competition - Shooting Žižek - in which entrants were asked to respond to the themes of Slavoj Žižek's latest book, Living in the End Times, with a one-minute film.

We've had weird and wonderful entries from around the world. The winner will be announced on Monday 31st October, but in the run up we'll be posting two of the best entries every day this week.

First up are Gabriel Tupinambá's Living in the End Times and Sam Norton's Enough.

Living in the End Times from Gabriel Tupinambá on Vimeo.

Enough from Sam Norton on Vimeo.

“If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the impossible.”— Judith Butler at Occupy Wall Street video

Judith Butler, author of Frames of War and Precarious Life, visited Occupy Wall Street to lend her support to the protesters there. In a rallying speech, amplified through the human microphone, she gave her thoughts on the reception of the movement and its demands.

I came here to lend my support to you today, to offer my solidarity, for this unprecedented display of democracy and popular will. People have asked, 'So what are the demands? What are the demands all these people are making?' Either they say there are no demands and that leaves your critics confused - or they say that the demands for social equality and economic justice are impossible demands. And impossible demands, they say, are just not practical.

If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the impossible. If the right to shelter, food and employment are impossible demands, then we demand the impossible. If it is impossible to demand that those who profit from the recession redistribute their wealth and cease their greed then yes, we demand the impossible.

But it is true that there are no demands that you can submit to arbitration here because we are not just demanding economic justice and social equality, we are assembling in public, we are coming together as bodies in alliance, in the street and in the square. We're standing here together making democracy, enacting the phrase 'We the people!'

A video of Butler delivering her speech at Occupy Wall Street is available below.

Savage Messiah reviewed in Herald Scotland: "There are no superheroes in Oldfield Ford's London"

A review of Laura Oldfield Ford's acclaimed Savage Messiah appears in the article 'Graphic novels shake off the superheroes' in the Herald Scotland. In the piece, the reviewer emphasises the unique style of Ford's artwork:

Savage Messiah is a gather-up of Oldfield Ford's psychogeographical fanzines that collage black-and-white photocopied photographs of decaying bits of London with her own pencilled drawings of people she meets.

The main characters of Savage Messiah are social outcasts who are kept at the margins of the flashy, gentrified, greed-driven twenty-first century London:

punks and skins, squatters and shell-suited working class who live in the bits of the capital city that have yet to be reclaimed by the moneyed middle classes.

The diet of these anti-heroes consists of "bad food, bad pills, bad sex, punk gigs, raves and rucks"; their lives are "overlooked by money and power."

And yet Savage Messiah is not a nihilist book, but a deeply political one, the reviewer notes:

It's a book pulsing with anger and class politics, disgusted with the "millennial mediocrity" of modern London, its flashy empty promises, its bare minimum-wage opportunities. ... There are no superheroes in Oldfield Ford's London. But there is something heroic about it too. Fight the power!

Visit the Herald Scotland to read the review in full (free registration required).

Mike Davis: Wall Street through the augmented eyes of “Rowdy” Roddy Piper

Who could have envisioned Occupy Wall Street and its sudden wildflower-like profusion in cities large and small?

John Carpenter could have, and did. Almost a quarter of a century ago (1988), the master of date-night terror (Halloween, The Thing), wrote and directed They Live, depicting the Age of Reagan as a catastrophic alien invasion. In one of the film’s brilliant early scenes, a huge third-world shantytown is reflected across the Hollywood Freeway in the sinister mirror-glass of Bunker Hill’s corporate skyscrapers.

They Live remains Carpenter’s subversive tour de force. Few who’ve seen it could forget his portrayal of billionaire bankers and evil mediacrats and their zombie-distant rule over a pulverized American working class living in tents on a rubble-strewn hillside and begging for jobs. From this negative equality of homelessness and despair, and thanks to the magic dark glasses found by the enigmatic Nada (played by “Rowdy” Roddy Piper), the proletariat finally achieves interracial unity, sees through the subliminal deceptions of capitalism, and gets angry.

Very angry.

Yes, I know, I’m reading ahead. The Occupy the World movement is still looking for its magic glasses (program, demands, strategy, and so on) and its anger remains on Gandhian low heat. But, as Carpenter foresaw, force enough Americans out of their homes and/or careers (or at least torment tens of millions with the possibility) and something new and huge will begin to slouch towards Goldman Sachs. And unlike the “Tea Party,” so far it has no puppet strings.

In 1965, when I was just eighteen and on the national staff of Students for a Democratic Society, I planned a sit-in at the Chase Manhattan Bank, for its key role in financing South Africa after the massacre of peaceful demonstrators, for being “a partner in Apartheid.” It was the first protest on Wall Street in a generation and 41 people were hauled away by the NYPD.

One of the most important facts about the current uprising is simply that it has occupied the street and created an existential identification with the homeless. (Though, frankly, my generation, trained in the civil rights movement, would have thought first of sitting inside the buildings and waiting for the police to drag and club us out the door; today, the cops prefer pepper spray and “pain compliance techniques.”) I think taking over the skyscrapers is a wonderful idea, but for a later stage in the struggle. The genius of Occupy Wall Street, for now, is that it has temporarily liberated some of the most expensive real estate in the world and turned a privatized square into a magnetic public space and catalyst for protest.

Our sit-in 46 years ago was a guerrilla raid; this is Wall Street under siege by the Lilliputians. It’s also the triumph of the supposedly archaic principle of face-to-face, dialogic organizing. Social media is important, sure, but not omnipotent. Activist self-organization—the crystallization of political will from free discussion—still thrives best in actual urban fora. Put another way, most of our internet conversations are preaching to the choir; even the mega-sites like MoveOn.org are tuned to the channel of the already converted, or at least their probable demographic.

The occupations likewise are lightning rods, first and above all, for the scorned, alienated ranks of progressive Democrats, but they also appear to be breaking down generational barriers, providing the common ground, for instance, for imperiled, middle-aged school teachers to compare notes with young, pauperized college grads.

More radically, the encampments have become symbolic sites for healing the divisions within the New Deal coalition in place since the Nixon years. As Jon Wiener observed on his consistently smart blog at TheNation.com: “hard hats and hippies—together at last.”

Indeed. Who could not be moved when AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, who had brought his coalminers to Wall Street in 1989 during their bitter but ultimately successful strike against Pittston Coal Company, called upon his broad-shouldered women and men to “stand guard” over Zucotta Park in the face of an imminent attack by the NYPD?

It’s true that old radicals like me are quick to declare each new baby the messiah, but this Occupy Wall Street child has the rainbow sign. I believe that we’re seeing the rebirth of the quality that so markedly defined the migrants and strikers of the Great Depression, of my parents’ generation: a broad, spontaneous compassion and solidarity based on a dangerously egalitarian ethic. It says, Stop and give a hitch-hiking family a ride. Never cross a picket line, even when you can’t pay the rent. Share your last cigarette with a stranger. Steal milk when your kids have none and then give half to the little kids next door—what my own mother did repeatedly in 1936. Listen carefully to the profoundly quiet people who have lost everything but their dignity. Cultivate the generosity of the “we.”

What I mean to say, I suppose, is that I’m most impressed by folks who have rallied to defend the occupations despite significant differences in age, in social class and race. But equally, I adore the gutsy kids who are ready to face the coming winter on freezing streets, just like their homeless sisters and brothers.

Back to strategy, though: what’s the next link in the chain (in Lenin’s sense) that needs to be grasped? How imperative is it for the wildflowers to hold a convention, adopt programmatic demands, and thereby put themselves up for bid on the auction block of the 2012 elections? Obama and the Democrats will desperately need their energy and authenticity. But the occupationistas are unlikely to put themselves or their extraordinary self-organizing process up for sale.

Personally I lean toward the anarchist position and its obvious imperatives.

First, expose the pain of the 99 percent; put Wall Street on trial. Bring Harrisburg, Loredo, Riverside, Camden, Flint, Gallup, and Holly Springs to downtown New York. Confront the predators with their victims—a national tribunal on economic mass murder.

Second, continue to democratize and productively occupy public space (i.e. reclaim the Commons). The veteran Bronx activist-historian Mark Naison has proposed a bold plan for converting the derelict and abandoned spaces of New York into survival resources (gardens, campsites, playgrounds) for the unsheltered and unemployed. The Occupy protestors across the country now know what it’s like to be homeless and banned from sleeping in parks or under a tent. All the more reason to break the locks and scale the fences that separate unused space from urgent human needs.

Third, keep our eyes on the real prize. The great issue is not raising taxes on the rich or achieving a better regulation of banks. It’s economic democracy: the right of ordinary people to make macro-decisions about social investment, interest rates, capital flows, job creation, and global warming. If the debate isn’t about economic power, it’s irrelevant.

Fourth, the movement must survive the winter in order to fight the power in the next spring. It’s cold on the street in January. Bloomberg and every other mayor and local ruler is counting on a hard winter to deplete the protests. It is thus all-important to reinforce the occupations over the long Christmas break. Put on your overcoats.

Finally, we must calm down-the itinerary of the current protest is totally unpredictable. But if one erects a lightning rod, we shouldn’t be surprised if lightning eventually strikes.

Bankers, recently interviewed in the New York Times, claim to find the Occupy protests little more than a nuisance arising from an unsophisticated understanding of the financial sector. They should be more careful. Indeed, they should probably quake before the image of the tumbrel.

Since 1987, African Americans have lost more than half of their net worth; Latinos, an incredible two-thirds. Five-and-a-half million manufacturing jobs have been lost in the United Sates since 2000, more than 42,000 factories closed, and an entire generation of college graduates now face the highest rate of downward mobility in American history.

Wreck the American dream and the common people will put on you some serious hurt. Or as Nada explains to his unwary assailants in Carpenter’s great film: “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass ... and I’m all out of bubblegum.”

First published in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Situationism, the Occupy Movement and the London Riots— The Beach Beneath the Street review and article

Andrew Blake of the Independent has reviewed The Beach Beneath the Street, a fresh history of the Situationist International, commending its account of situationism as "a far more comprehensive overview than the usual defence of its best-known publication, Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle". Praising Wark's clarity in showing that "there was far more to Situationism than one clever book", Blake argues that Situationist ideas are still as relevant today as at its founding:

Neither the Tottenham looter or the "kid with the BitTorrent account" identified by Wark may be consciously opposed to the Society of the Spectacle, but their challenges indicate that we should continue to take Situationism seriously in thought, word, and deed.

In a piece on Occupy Wall Street for Asia Times Online, Pepe Escobar also recommends Situationism and The Beach Beneath the Street for their relevance to contemporary political movements.

At Zuccotti Park - Occupy Wall Street's headquarters in lower Manhattan - there's a free public library, with books donated by everyone who feels like it. A good first step would be for people to supply a good many copies of The Beach Beneath the Street, by McKenzie Wark, a gripping history of the Situationists - the key conceptual group led by Guy Debord at the heart of May 1968.

Moving on to discuss the new political language created by the Occupy movement, he turns to Wark's original blogpost 'How to Occupy an Abstraction':

Wark has also written a clinical essay detailing how instead of occupying an abstraction - Wall Street - the movement occupied another abstraction, "A more or less public park nestled in the downtown landscape of tower blocks, not too far from the old World Trade Center site," and from there proceeded to occupy "the virtual space of social media".

Wark concludes, "The abstraction that is the occupation is then a double one, an occupation of a place, somewhere near the actual Wall Street; and the occupation of the social media vector, with slogans, images, videos, stories. 'Keep on forwarding!' might not be a bad slogan for it. Not to mention keep on creating the actual language for a politics in the space of social media."

No wonder the 1% are puzzled. Occupy Wall Street is already creating a new political language, smashing old categories of cause and effect, using for instance what Guy Debord described as derive - a technique of moving like lightning through different settings (from physical to virtual, or from lower Manhattan to Washington Square and Times Square).

Visit the Independent to read the review in full, and Asia Times Online to read Pepe Escobar's article in full.

"A necessary corrective" to the apologists of the Empire—three reviews of Britain's Empire

Whatever one thinks about the British imperial past and its legacy, the circumstantial evidence of the crimes committed by British troops and officers overseas collected by Richard Gott in his Britain's Empire: Resistance, Rebellion and Repression can no longer be ignored. As Gavin Bowd points out in a review for the Scotland on Sunday, Britain's Empire is "a pungent and provocative book ... a rich compendium of revolt." Gott sheds light on how the British Empire was "the fruit of military conquest and brutal wars involving physical and cultural extermination of subject people." Reminding us of horrific episodes (e.g. the fact that white settlers in Australia "put strychnine in flour for Aborigines"), Britain's Empire powerfully debunks "the kind of glorious ‘narrative history' that Michael Gove has been calling for in British schools."

The distance between Gott's account and the official narrative on the British Empire is also stressed by Stephen Howe in a review for the Independent. In Howe's view, Britain's Empire is "much at odds with what remains of the mainstream view" about the British Empire—that is to say, the apologetic narrative that claims that the Empire was a civilizing enterprise. Writing from the perspective of the academic historian, Howe, a Professor in the History and Cultures of Colonialism at Bristol University, finds some shortcomings in Gott's book: for example, he points to the allegedly patchy nature of the bibliographic references. Nonetheless, Britain's Empire stands out as a passionate counter-history of the British imperial past, especially compared with other recent books geared to the general public such as Jeremy Paxman's Empire: What the World Did to the British and Kwasi Kwarteng's Ghosts of Empire. In his review, Howe points out how

Paxman seems more concerned to recall horrors committed on ‘us' by the ‘natives', and to reassure that most of those who ran the empire were not really such bad chaps after all.

As against this approach, Britain's Empire is "a welcome, even necessary, corrective," Howe writes.

The Indian writer Pankaj Mishra also offers a parallel reading of Gott's, Kwarteng's and Paxman's books for the Financial Times. Mishra underlines how both Paxman's and Kwarteng's books fail to investigate "the economic raison d'être of imperialism." Instead, Mishra stresses how

tens of millions were exposed ... to famine and early death in India and Ireland when the British turned them into laboratories for experiments in unfettered free trad.

In his words, these callous mass exterminations

were certainly the first of the modern era's uniquely ideological crimes, for which the central planners of communist regimes are more commonly blamed.

Mishra does not entirely agree with the parallel that Richard Gott draws between the rulers of the British Empire and the dictators of twentieth-century. But at the same time, he admits that Gott's judgment can be considered even mild, compared with the genuine outrage that the memory of British imperial crimes still awakens in today's China and India.

Gavin Bowd's review appeared in the Scotland on Sunday print edition dated Sunday 23 October.

Visit the Independent to read Stephen Howe's review in full.

Visit the Financial Times to read Pankaj Mishra's review in full.

Hal Foster's The Art-Architecture Complex: Reviews and Interviews

The Art-Architecture Complex by Hal Foster has been reviewed in the Art Review, Icon and Financial Times.

In a thoughtful review for Art Review, Martin Herbert was impressed by the scope of Foster's aims in the book:

The American writer now evidently has a worldview expansive enough to see dominant tendencies in contemporary architecture and (fairly) recent art as flipside of the same coin, and both as reflective of the contemporary political order. This, then, is criticism with vaulting ambitions.

Critically engaging with Foster's argument, Herbert pin-pointed what he considered a weakness in an otherwise strong critique: "Foster's problem, one he never quite resolve, is of temporal disjunction: he wants the approaches of Serra et al, which are initiated in the 1960s and early 70s, to critique and counterbalance contemporary starchitecture." While conceding that this "pretty much works", he felt that "it leads to certain amount of special pleading". All in all, Herbert concluded positively, finishing with "The Art-Architecture Complex posits a paradigm; one completes it as a believer."

Kieran Long, reviewing for Icon, is an admirer of Foster's work but came away from the book wishing that a broader perspective had been employed as he felt the book "turns a spotlight on famous buildings, but pays no heed to their contexts". In a measured review, Long enjoyed the project of the book, stating "it's always good to have an establishment figure having a go at these powerful, universally celebrated architects" and in particular praised Foster's critique of Renzo Piano, in which "he deftly demolishes the architect's claims of an "organic" architecture". However, the difference of theoretical perspective between Long and Foster remains divisive:

The problem is that in bringing a linear, author-focused attitude to architecture, his critique is stranded in abstract, art history. I didn't find a single mention of the city, of public life, of the street or of any of the things that surround the buildings he looks at...

The Art-Architecture Complex gently debunks the reputations of a series of ageing architects who probably don't give a damn what anybody thinks anymore, while offering little to the rest of us."

Edwin Heathcote has reviewed The Art-Architecture Complex for the Financial Times, and found it "an intriguing proposition". Heathcote admitted to being slightly disappointed that what he felt was a promising book was not more radical in it's criticism, arguing that:

The reason for any disappointment is that Foster has chosen exactly the right theme. For the early modernists, social housing was the holy grail; for the mid-century modernists it was the private house and the corporate office (equally political statements in their own way). But from the post-modern era onwards, most attention has been lavished on the museum... in concentrating on the cultural world, these global architects are shying away from their traditional social role; they are making themselves marginal whilst enjoying an enviable lifestyle of adulation and fame. As the glamour of culture rubs off on to architects, their real responsibilities for making the cities that will need to absorb hundreds of millions of new inhabitants each year fall by the wayside. Architecture has been depoliticised and architects are in danger of becoming mere decorators of minimalism - slowly diminishing their own justification for existing at all.

Heathcote, however, found other merits to the text and concluded:

None of this is to say this is a bad book. Foster writes well and, if the ground is unfamiliar to you, there is much to learn here. But what could have been an excoriating examination of the contemporary avant-garde instead becomes a friendly guide to an art and architecture phenomenon that now appears rather last century.

Foster has also been interviewed by Thomas Wensing for Architecture Today.In an engaging discussion, Foster considered the limitations and aims of work as a designer:

We are all confined by the limits of our own practice, but if you are able to work with your own means in a way that can show other possibilities- socially, culturally, economically- then that's an important achievement.

Visit the Financial Times to read the review in full. The Art Review and Icon reviews and Architecture Today interview are only available in full in their print editions.

"Strictly Come Learning"— Melissa Benn’s School Wars featured in the New Statesman and Counterfire

Neil Faulkner reviewed Melissa Benn's School Wars for Counterfire and argued that the conservative attack on the state education system it reveals is a key aspect of the wider assault on the welfare state. He charted that attack as beginning in the 1970s, its aims being spectacularly exposed in a senior Depart of Education and Science official's leaked memo:

There has to be selection because we are beginning to create aspirations which society cannot match. In some ways, this points to the success of education, in contrast to the public mythology which has been created.

When young people drop off the education production line and cannot find work at all, or work which meets their abilities and expectations, then we are creating frustration, with perhaps disturbing consequences. We have to select: to ration the educational opportunities, so that society can cope with the output of education ...

We are in a period of considerable social change. There may be social unrest, but we can cope with the Toxteths [riots]. But if we have a highly educated and idle population, we may possibly anticipate more serious social conflict. People must be educated once more to know their place (Quoted in G. Walford, 1990, Privatisation and Privilege in Education, p.1.).

Faulkner shared Benn's suspicion of the vitriol leveled at state schools by politicians and "hack journalists who do not use them", praising that "Benn is excellent at documenting the relentless and baseless attacks on a 'failing' school system". He agreed with Benn that this negative image of the education system was merely painted in order to pave the way for reform towards a more selective system. This reform had four main aims: selection so that working classes "once more know their place"; greater discipline to provide "socialization for labour"; privatization of the education market worth an estimated £100 billion; the destruction of the unions. Describing Benn's analysis as excellent, Faulkner compared the importance of School Wars for understanding the education system to the importance of The Plot Against the NHS by Colin Leys and Stewart Player for understanding healthcare reforms. He went so far as to say:

To read both books is to grasp our rulers' determination to destroy the welfare state, to understand their methods, and to learn how far they have already advanced towards their goal.

However, Faulkner expressed two reservations about the closing section of the book. Firstly, he felt that "concessions are made to the neoliberal right that are indefensible on the basis of the argument of the rest of the book". In particular, he disagreed with Benn that testing, input from the private sector and parental preference at secondary transfer have even a minor place in the state education system. Secondly, Faulkner was disappointed that while Benn passionately describes an ideal system, she does not offer a method as to how to realize it.

In a piece on the future of the state education system for the New Statesman, Samira Shackle speculated with Benn on the end goal of the education reforms underway. They delivered a chilling prediction of a free-market corporate education system:

Given the direction of travel, the future of schools under the Tory-led government is a series of corporate chains of academies. Local authorities are not perfect, but it is important to have accountable bodies on things like admissions, funding, special needs and exclusions, and to help schools collaborate, rather than just compete," argues Benn. "[Chains of academies] are unaccountable to anyone and they will probably make profit further down the line.

The prospect of this future is one of the motivating factors for the Coalition of Resistance meeting. At this time of mass strikes and protests against the Government's austerity agenda and radical reforms to the NHS, tuition fees and the education system, ULU is hosting a debate on what should be done. Melissa and Tony Benn will be speaking, along with Des Freedman. The meeting will take place on the 24^th October at UCL.

To read the review in full please visit Counterfire and visit the New Statesman to read the article.

To find out more about the Coalition of Resistance Meeting with Tony and Melissa Benn visit ULU campaigner.

Ruling the waves with armbands on? Richard Gott on the British Empire

Richard Gott makes the case that it is time to "end the myths of Britain's imperial past" of the sort that David Cameron relies on in an eloquent piece for the Guardian.

In his speech to the Conservative party conference this month, David Cameron looked back with Tory nostalgia to the days of empire: "Britannia didn't rule the waves with armbands on," he pointed out, suggesting that the shadow of health and safety did not hover over Britain's imperial operations when the British were building "a great nation".... Cameron was right about the armbands. The creation of the British empire caused large portions of the global map to be tinted a rich vermilion, and the colour turned out to be peculiarly appropriate. Britain's empire was established, and maintained for more than two centuries, through bloodshed, violence, brutality, conquest and war.

In the article, Gott outlines some of the key issues of his new book, Britain's Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt. The book is a critical reappraisal of British imperial history in the light of the experience of the subject people. As Gott notes,

Considerations of empire today must take account of two imperial traditions: that of the conquered as well as the conquerors. Traditionally, that first tradition has been conspicuous by its absence. ... Yet the subject peoples of empire did not go quietly into history's goodnight. Underneath the veneer of the official record exists a rather different story. Year in, year out, there was resistance to conquest, and rebellion against occupation, often followed by mutiny and revolt—by individuals, groups, armies and entire peoples.

Gott also points out how, also on the side of the conquerors, the price of imperial expansion was paid first and foremost by the working-classes: colonial soldiers were recruited mostly amongst unemployed, convicts and Irish migrants. Unfortunately, the logic of empire turned those who were oppressed at home into oppressors abroad:

White settlers, in the Americas, in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, Rhodesia and Kenya, simply took over land that was not theirs, often slaughtering, and even purposefully exterminating, the local indigenous population as if they were vermin.

The authoritarian, brutal, tyrannical nature of imperial rule has never been properly rethought in the Britain, Gott writes: "A self-satisfied and largely hegemonic belief survives in Britain that the empire was an imaginative, civilising enterprise, reluctantly undertaken, that brought the benefits of modern society to backward peoples." Many young historians have devoted revisionist works to the horrific reality of British dominion in individual countries, but a comprehensive overview on the crimes committed in the name of Empire had yet to be written.

Gott also notes how it was the British occupation of Ireland that in a way provided the blueprint for the bloody establishment of the Empire outside Europe:

The British affected to ignore or forget the Irish dimension to their empire, yet the Irish were always present within it, and wherever they landed and established themselves, they never forgot where they had come from. The British often perceived the Irish as "savages", and they used Ireland as an experimental laboratory for the other parts of their overseas empire, as a place to ship out settlers from, as well as a territory to practise techniques of repression and control.

If the British rule in Ireland was the background for Britain's worldwide expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, European empires were the breeding ground for racist ideas and extermination practices that would be tragically implemented during the twentieth century, Gott claims:

The drive towards the annihilation of dissidents and peoples in 20th-century Europe certainly had precedents in the 19th-century imperial operations in the colonial world, where the elimination of "inferior" peoples was seen by some to be historically inevitable, and where the experience helped in the construction of the racist ideologies that arose subsequently in Europe. Later technologies merely enlarged the scale of what had gone before. As Cameron remarked this month, Britannia did not rule the waves with armbands on.

Britain's Empire has also been reviewed by John Newsinger for the Socialist Review. According to Newsinger, the book is a "vital contribution" to the understanding of British imperialism, and an essential resource "to counter the pernicious influence of Niall Ferguson."

Visit the Guardian to read Richard Gott's article in full.

Visit the Socialist Review to read John Newsinger's review in full.

A new form of democracy is needed: Hardt and Negri on the Occupy movement

If democracy—that is, the democracy we have been given—is staggering under the blows of the economic crisis and is powerless to assert the will and interests of the multitude, then is now perhaps the moment to consider that form of democracy obsolete?

This is the crucial question posed by the Occupy movement, according to Michael Hardt and Toni Negri. In a piece for Foreign Affairs, the authors of Empire situate the Occupy Wall Street protest in a "cycle of struggles" that began in Tahrir Square in January, extended to Europe with the Spanish Democracia Real YA! Movement and eventually reached the United States. The hallmark of this wave of popular mobilization has been the practice of "encampments" — ordinary people repossessing public spaces that had fallen under the control of financial corporations and corrupted politicians. At the heart of the protest are both "indignation against corporate greed" and a deep critique of institutional politics:

One obvious and clear message of the protests, of course, is that the bankers and finance industries in no way represent us: What is good for Wall Street is certainly not good for the country (or the world). A more significant failure of representation, though, must be attributed to the politicians and political parties charged with representing the people's interests but in fact more clearly represent the banks and the creditors. Such a recognition leads to a seemingly naive, basic question: Is democracy not supposed to be the rule of the people over the polis—that is, the entirety of social and economic life? Instead, it seems that politics has become subservient to economic and financial interests.

In the eyes of Hardt and Negri, the Occupy movement is a laboratory for newer "horizontal" forms of democracy, based on assemblies and "participatory decision-making practices." They also emphasise the contribution that social networks are giving in this direction: "Twitter ... is useful not only for announcing an event but for polling the views of a large assembly on a specific decision in real time."

Distancing itself from institutional politics, the Occupy movement calls urgently for a deep renewal of community life, Negri and Hardt argue:

If the forces of wealth and finance have come to dominate supposedly democratic constitutions, including the U.S. Constitution, is it not possible and even necessary today to propose and construct new constitutional figures that can open avenues to again take up the project of the pursuit of collective happiness? With such reasoning and such demands, which were already very alive in the Mediterranean and European encampments, the protests spreading from Wall Street across the United States pose the need for a new democratic constituent process.

Visit Foreign Affairs to read the article in full.

Chris Westcott for Jacobin Magazine: "Escalating the Spectacle"

Former intern and friend of Verso Chris Westcott writes on Occupy Baltimore for Jacobin Magazine's blog.

To a passing observer, the recently launched Occupy Baltimore action looks like what any grad student parrot of Zizek might call an occupation without the occupation. It has the feel of an occupation specially ripened for the consumer, with all its pleasures but none of its messy consequences. No factories, offices, schools, or rowhouses commandeered. No barricades erected, nor bulleted lists of demands plastered on doors. No attempts made to paralyze the everyday operations of power. Its greatest challenge to authority has been its tent-free encampment in a 24-hour public park-something only discovered to be unlawful after the selection of the space. The greatest sacrifices most have made are of warmth and time.

Drawing on the discourses of Situationism and Media Studies, Westcott responds to the common claim that the protests "lack content":

If the Occupy movement is an occupation of leisure, it is much more an occupation of spectacle. Its most brilliant slogan ("We are the 99%") captures the sublime feeling of statistical supermajority, which today takes its most familiar form as the count of semi-anonymous Internet "hits." #Occupy has gone viral, and its encampments exist to generate the content that keeps the hits coming. It is a telling irony that the media reaction to the movement has thus far been that the movement lacks content. The content proper to it has in fact been precisely the spectacular content of reproduced assent that the popularity mill of social media, TV news, and political commentary all share.

Given the host of critiques of spectacular "protest" made in recent years, how does a movement engage in a struggle where the field of battle consists of city streets and bandwidth?

The advanced subtlety of homeland security and widespread techniques of accommodation, diversion, and false choice (the creation of phony crises, the relabeling of remote-controlled war, and so on) are specially designed to prevent meaningful escalation, peaceful or otherwise. As the extralegal war-making and lucky-pierre economic maneuvers of this administration have adequately proven, one cannot count on power's lack of cunning or suppose that transparency can by itself expel injustice. Standing on the liberal high ground of legality in the defensible space of McKeldin Park is not likely to generate the necessary momentum. New means of nonviolent escalation-ones that carry beyond the easily-neutralized project of voting with your Tweet-must be found.

The form the occupation movement is currently taking is, according to Westcott, transitional, amorphous, and proliferating to new locales and rapidly changing circumstances:

The return of occupation to factories, offices, schools, and rowhouses need not mean the abandonment of the occupation that started in the parks. Information, decision-making, and action must still be coordinated if the Occupy movement is to keep from dissolving into rogue or defenseless fragments. Its infinite unfulfilled demands can only find lasting expression in a coordinating whole. If some idea of a general assembly-and in the Occupy movement as a whole, many of these-cannot be dispensed with, it will be crucial to discover new, more efficient and more secure means of coordination and inclusion. The consensus decision-making strategies so far employed with relative success represent an important first step, but only a step. One senses that the problem being faced here may be the most urgent one. Its difficulty many be seen as sufficient reason to selectively steal from every available source, from the tactics of Wall Street itself to the secure openness and elective strikes of non-groups like Anonymous.

What is needed more than anything is ongoing internal research and discussion. To this end the movement will need to continue to cultivate journalism and opinions, hopefully in a format occupiers will read to engage with. Outrage alone can unite, but it can also undo. Whether the Occupy movement makes good on any speculations offered here-or even whether these speculations have any truth-is much less important than concerted self-reflection and debate.

That is, the task for the moment is not necessarily to give the occupations a determinate shape, direction, or set of demands, but—in a decidedly militant intellectual turn—to research, so that we may be better prepared for whatever may come.

Visit Jacobin Magazine to read the piece in full.

Arundhati Roy: India is colonizing itself

Arundhati Roy, interviewed for the Independent, speaks about the 'Maoist rebels' fighting India's internal colonization, and why their resistance is legitimate:

Today India is going down the same path travelled centuries back by the European colonial powers: identifying sources of strategic minerals, driving off the people living on top of them, extracting the iron ore, the bauxite and so on, and using it to industrialise and grow rich. The difference is that India has no Australia or Latin America it can plunder. Instead, as Roy says, "It is colonising itself, turning upon its own poor to extract raw materials."

Centuries after the plunder of mineral resources began, some people living in countries like ours began to understand the horrors that had been committed along the way: the indigenous peoples massacred, their traditions erased, the survivors reduced to penury. But by then, remorse came cheap: the damage had been done, the great fortunes made.

But in India all this is happening now, in real time. As a result, remorse is far more expensive: if sincerely meant, it could really throw a spanner in the happiness machine...

"From being stigmatised as criminals" - squatters on state-owned land - "now [the adivasis] have become terrorists," she says, "just for staying in their villages and planting their crops. This is terrorist activity because they are with the Maoists. Anybody who is in the forest is with the Maoists."

When her essay about the trip, 'Walking with the Comrades', first appeared in India last year, Roy was fiercely criticised for humanising these rebels. For the Indian middle class, wedded to Gandhian ideas about non-violence, their adherence to the gun put them beyond the pale. But, says Roy, what other option did they have?

"I believe that Gandhian resistance is an extremely effective and moral form of political theatre, provided you have a sympathetic audience," she says. "But what happens when you are a tribal village in the heart of the forest, miles away from anywhere? When the police surround your village, are you going to sit on a hunger strike? Can the hungry go on hunger strike?"..

"The country that I live in is becoming more and more repressive, more and more of a police state.... India is hardening as a state. It has to continue to give the impression of being a messy, cuddly democracy but actually what's going on outside the arc lights is really desperate."

Visit the Independent to read the full interview.

Arundhati Roy is a contributor to Kashmir: The Case for Freedom, out in November.

The politics of the encounter: Notes for the Occupy movement.

A politics of encounter explodes when moments collide, when affinity takes hold. How, then, can the intensity of the encounter be sustained, how can it be harmonized with an authentic politics of transformation, one that endures over the long haul?

Andy Merrifield raises some crucial questions in 'Crowd politics: Or, "Here Comes Everybody?"' for protesters of the Occupy Everywhere movement. Merrifield's piece, published in the latest issue of New Left Review, is a timely investigation of the on-line and off-line "politics of the encounter" in twenty-first century urban landscapes.

Merrifield starts with a reflection on the relationship between social networks and political participation. He moves from taking side in the (somewhat hackneyed) debate between Twitter enthusiasts and old-school supporters of more traditional (and less virtual) forms of activism: "Each thesis is insufficient in itself. Is it not possible to conceive of activism today as at once weak-tie and high-risk, both online and offline at the same time?"

He then moves on to discuss the way in which the "right to the city"—originally theorized in the 1960s by the French philosopher and urbanist Henri Lefebvre—can be articulated in the twenty-first-century scenario, where

neo-Haussmannization, integrating financial, corporate and state interests, sequesters land through forcible slum clearance and eminent domain, valorizing it while banishing former residents to the post-industrial hinterlands. ...

Yet even if we accept the ‘urban' as a specific terrain for political struggle, what would the ‘right to the city' actually look like? Would it resemble the Paris Commune, a great festival of merriment, people storming into the centre of town (when there was still a centre), occupying it, tearing down statues, abolishing rents for a while? If so, how would this deal with the problem Marx identified—those flows of capital and commodities? Even if people re-appropriated the downtown hqs of the big corporate and financial institutions, would this really destabilize ‘the system'? In 20th-century revolutionary traditions, wresting control over urban areas has often been the final icing on the cake: by then, the social movement had already been built, the bonds already forged; taking control of the city announced the culmination of victory, the storming of the Winter Palace, the social movement's final, joyous fling. Often, revolutionary currents have flowed from the countryside onto the urban streets. ... Mao, Che, Castro, Ortega and Subcomandante Marcos would doubtless concur: the city does not so much radicalize as neutralize popular elements.

The city, from this standpoint, is not so much a Lefebvrian dialectical oeuvre as a Sartrean practico-inert, the prison-house of past actions that inhibit active praxis. The practico-inert announces that dead labour dominates over living labour, that praxis has been absorbed into the form of the city itself. It would explain the relative conformity of the world's urban populations today: unemployed, sub-employed and multi-employed attendants, cut off from the past yet somehow excluded from the future; deadened by the daily grind of hustling a living. This is a generation of urban dwellers for whom ‘the right to the city' serves no purpose—either as a working concept or as a political programme. It remains at too high a level of abstraction to be existentially meaningful in everyday life. Put a little differently: the right to the city politicizes something that is too vast and at the same time too narrow to mobilize contemporary city-dwellers to act as a collectivity, a fused group. None of this is to deny the role of people fighting to maintain affordable rents or to ensure public spaces stay open. But to bundle these multiple struggles together under the loose rubric ‘right to the city' is to render what is tellingly concrete somehow vacuously abstract. It is too vast, because the scale of the city is out of reach for most people living at street level; yet it is too narrow as well, because when people do protest and take to the streets en masse, they frequently reach out beyond the scale of the city. What is required is something closer to home—something one can touch and smell and feel—and something larger than life, something world-historical: a praxis that can somehow conjoin both realms at once.

The praxis that Merrifield proposes is that of the "politics of the encounter:"

In a normative sense, the politics of the encounter can mediate between the lived and the historical; it can overcome the inertia of apparent mass and individual powerlessness. Active affects somehow replace passive affects; people start to recognize a ‘singular essence', especially humiliated and exploited people, who encounter one another not always directly, but through a mode of relating to the world, through unstated forms of solidarity. As people find one another, they start to piece together common notions: they universalize, make more coherent what seems, on the face of it, only specific, lived experience. What appears particular is in fact general; our plight is that of many people. A politics of the encounter utters no rights, voices no claims. It just acts, affirms, takes back. ...

The recent upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt, Greece and Spain could be read as a dramatic politics of the encounter. In each case, whether in Tunis, Cairo, Athens, Madrid—or Manhattan, with the latest Occupy Wall Street protests—encounters unfolded in the heart of the city, yet the stake was not about the city per se; rather, it was about democracy, in conditions of capitalist crisis. A lot of the activism and organizing was done de-territorially—post-urban, if you will—through Facebook and Twitter; people experienced the encounter in terms of an affinity. One of the slogans raised by young Spaniards mobilizing across their recession-ravaged land was: ‘no jobs, no houses, no pension, no fear.' Many in Spain were new protesters, with little to lose and everything to gain; disgusted with unions, who do nothing to represent their interests, and disillusioned with both psoe and the pp. Protests bloomed over Twitter and Facebook, triggered by WikiLeaks documents exposing government officials' behaviour; the government's attempt to shut down previously legal websites through antipiracy laws riled this new social media generation. ‘They were the spark,' one young protester claimed ...

The spark that triggers any explosive encounter is like that first Jackson Pollock drip: suddenly the paint falls onto the giant canvas; things explode at ground level, on the floor, in the street; dense skeins of black and white swirls disrupt the field of vision; brown and silver nebulae dazzle; paint is layered on swiftly, like meteorites flashing across a white void. There is neither beginning nor end here; entering is via some middle door; there is no meaning other than a pure intensity, a flow of pure becoming. Standing in front of a huge Pollock masterpiece like One: Number 31 (1950), or Autumn Rhythm (1950), shares something of the same dramatic (and unnerving) intensity of standing amid a huge crowd at a demonstration. The same spontaneous energies both incite and terrify; the splattering of colours and entangled lines are there before you. But now they are direct extensions of your own body. Now you are in the canvas. Those swift dripped lines somehow flow through you, become frenzied gestures of your own self in the crowd, the crowd in you. You are simply present here and now; passions are expressed rather than illustrated.

It is the process of the encounter that can be itself a transformative praxis, Merrifield argues:

The crowd that encounters itself at a mass demonstration expresses political ambitions before the political means necessary to realize them are created. The revolutionary in the crowd has to learn how to rehearse symbolically, how to translate inner force into an external, common and transformative praxis; one has to test oneself out in the collective and strategic drama of the historical performance itself. ...

Nobody can know in advance when an epic historical-geographical performance will be enacted, nor are there preconceived formulas for what makes a successful encounter. What is clear, however, is that any moment of encounter will likely be a kind of process without a subject, spreading like wildfire, a moment in which crowds become speedy ensembles of bodies, created via spontaneous online and offline ordering; participants will simultaneously act and react, in a human kaleidoscope in which joy and celebration, violence and wildness, tenderness and abandon somehow get defined. Participants will come together not only as a singularity sharing passions and affirming hopes, but also as a force that creates its own historical space. For the politics of the encounter will always be an encounter somewhere, a spatial meeting place. It will always be an illicit rendezvous of human bonding and solidarity, a virtual, emotional and material topography in which something disrupts and intervenes in the paralysis.

What takes hold is what Joyce in Finnegans Wake termed a ‘collideorscape'. The notion of the encounter is perhaps the central motif of Finnegans Wake, and the collideorscape marks for Joyce something of a ‘collide and escape', a kaleidoscope of sorts, a coincidence taking hold, shaking things up to give form to another reality; a portmanteau word for a new portmanteau politics. The spatial question will not go away: it will always be the battleground for political struggle, the centre stage of any encounter or collideorscape. But what kind of human—rather than urban—space will this be, and what kind of new social networks hold the key for a 21st-century politics of militant democracy? In what forms will the Joycean everybuddy—as Finnegans Wake puns, seemingly giving the nod to Facebook addicts everywhere—begin to express itself, as it challenges the crisis-ridden neoliberal order?

Visit New Left Review to read the article in full (subscribers only).

"Obama's Pipeline Mess" — Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben on the green cronyism scandal

Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben, author of the introduction to I'm with the Bears — a collection of short stories by world-class novelists envisioning the terrors of impending climate change — have written an article for The Daily Beast on the green cronyism scandals putting the environment and Obama's reputation at stake.

The Solyndra solar panel manufacturer loan controversy is getting a great deal of attention in the US due to allegations that the Obama administration may have unduly influenced the loan. However, Klein and McKibben argue in this article that "there's a far, far bigger Obama cronyism scandal breaking—and in this case, there's still time for the president to step in and stop it."

They go on to explain that activists have spotted that the State Department hearings on the Keystone XL pipeline were actually being run by a private company called Cardno Entrix. This is unusual in itself but Klein and McKibben state that in addition:

Cardno Entrix had in fact been contracted to run the entire environmental-review process for the pipeline. And if you go to the Cardno Entrix corporate website, it lists one of their major clients as TransCanada, the very company building the pipeline. That's almost unbelievable.

However, the story took a further twist last weekend as The New York Times uncovered further details about the relationship between the two companies.

TransCanada actually recommended the firm to the State Department, and that TransCanada had "managed the bidding process" that ended up picking Entrix...They quoted a Tulane law professor who specializes in environmental oversight...: Cardno Entrix had a "financial interest in the outcome of the project. Their primary loyalty is getting this project through, in the way the client wants.

Conveniently, the review found that the pipeline would have "limited adverse environmental impacts", whereas the fact that 20 of America's leading scientists wrote an open letter to Obama warning that it would cause terrible damage to the environment. Furthermore, Klein and McKibben point out that the report merely gives a minor mention to the Kalamazoo River oil spill from the pipeline drilling last year, despite that fact that they were the company hired by TransCanada to assess the damage of the spill.

Even though the industry bias is shockingly plain in this chain of events and the stakes are high, Klein and McKibben suspect that the scandal will go ignored. Partly due to the vested interests of the Republican party who are unlikely to draw attention to this therefore, and also because of close links between the administration and TransCanada; several big-money donors from the Clinton administration were found by the DeSmogBlog to be working for lobbyists contracted to TransCanada. Obama's year-long silence about Keystone is thus deeply conspicuous.

Klein and McKibben challenge Obama to do the right thing; the scandal is for them:

Filthy on a scale that demands real action—at the very least, Barack Obama must demand a new, thoroughly independent, expert review of the project. Better yet, he should use it as the perfect excuse to pull the plug on the whole damn project....

Here's the little bit of contingent good news: The crime is still in progress. It's as if TransCanada has robbed the bank, but the getaway car is stuck in traffic. Obama can still make the arrest. If he doesn't, we'll know an awful lot about him. Maybe more than we really want to."

On on November 14th contributors to the book, Helen Simpson and Toby Litt, will be taking part in The Book Stops Here, a free literary party night with book readings from the featured authors.

Read the article in full at The Daily Beast and the review in full at the Guardian.

To read more about their events, visit The Book Stops Here.

Immanuel Wallerstein: Occupy Wall Street is the most important political happening in America since 1968

The Occupy Wall Street movement - for now it is a movement - is the most important political happening in the United States since the uprisings in 1968, whose direct descendant or continuation it is.

Why it started in the United States when it did - and not three days, three months, three years earlier or later - we'll never know for sure. The conditions were there: acutely increasing economic pain not only for the truly poverty-stricken but for an ever-growing segment of the working poor (otherwise known as the "middle class"); incredible exaggeration (exploitation, greed) of the wealthiest 1% of the U.S. population ("Wall Street"); the example of angry upsurges around the world (the "Arab spring," the Spanish indignados, the Chilean students, the Wisconsin trade unions, and a long list of others). It doesn't really matter what the spark was that ignited the fire. It started.

In Stage one - the first few days - the movement was a handful of audacious, mostly young, persons who were trying to demonstrate. The press ignored them totally. Then some stupid police captains thought that a bit of brutality would end the demonstrations. They were caught on film and the film went viral on YouTube.

That brought us to Stage two - publicity. The press could no longer ignore the demonstrators entirely. So the press tried condescension. What did these foolish, ignorant youth (and a few elderly women) know about the economy? Did they have any positive program? Were they "disciplined"? The demonstrations, we were told, would soon fizzle. What the press and the powers that be didn't count on (they never seem to learn) is that the theme of the protest resonated widely and quickly caught on. In city after city, similar "occupations" began. Unemployed 50-year-olds started to join in. So did celebrities. So did trade-unions, including none less than the president of the AFL-CIO. The press outside the United States now began to follow the events. Asked what they wanted, the demonstrators replied "justice." This began to seem like a meaningful answer to more and more people.

This brought us to Stage three - legitimacy. Academics of a certain repute began to suggest that the attack on "Wall Street" had some justification. All of a sudden, the main voice of centrist respectability, The New York Times, ran an editorial on October 8 in which they said that the protestors did indeed have "a clear message and specific policy prescriptions" and that the movement was "more than a youth uprising." The Times went on: "Extreme inequality is the hallmark of a dysfunctional economy, dominated by a financial sector that is driven as much by speculation, gouging and government backing as by productive investment." Strong language for the Times. And then the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee started circulating a petition asking party supporters to declare "I stand with the Occupy Wall Street protests."

The movement had become respectable. And with respectability came danger - Stage four. A major protest movement that has caught on usually faces two major threats. One is the organization of a significant right-wing counterdemonstration in the streets. Eric Cantor, the hardline (and quite astute) Republican congressional leader, has already called for that in effect. These counterdemonstrations can be quite ferocious. The Occupy Wall Street movement needs to be prepared for this and think through how it intends to handle or contain it.

But the second and bigger threat comes from the very success of the movement. As it attracts more support, it increases the diversity of views among the active protestors. The problem here is, as it always is, how to avoid the Scylla of being a tight cult that would lose because it is too narrowly based, and the Charybdis of no longer having a political coherence because it is too broad. There is no simple formula of how to manage avoiding going to either extreme. It is difficult.

As to the future, it could be that the movement goes from strength to strength. It might be able to do two things: force short-term restructuring of what the government will actually do to minimize the pain that people are obviously feeling acutely; and bring about long-term transformation of how large segments of the American population think about the realities of the structural crisis of capitalism and the major geopolitical transformations that are occurring because we are now living in a multipolar world.

Even if the Occupy Wall Street movement were to begin to peter out because of exhaustion or repression, it has already succeeded and will leave a lasting legacy, just as the uprisings of 1968 did. The United States will have changed, and in a positive direction. As the saying goes, "Rome wasn't built in a day." A new and better world-system, a new and better United States, is a task that requires repeated effort by repeated generations. But another world is indeed possible (albeit not inevitable). And we can make a difference. Occupy Wall Street is making a difference, a big difference.

http://www.iwallerstein.com/

Two more reasons "Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere"

Paul Mason's Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed reported from the frontlines of the 2008 financial crash, from Wall Street and other centres of capitalism. Mason, anticipating the social consequences of the economic meltdown, wrote in 2010 that "The future ... depends on the complex interplay between the interests of die-hard political elites and the interests of the salariat,the urban youth,the manual working class and the elderly." Read more in an extract here. His blogpost Twenty Reasons Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere, written in the wake of the Arab Spring in February 2011, identified the social, economic and technological factors in the wave of social unrest, the first being the emergence of "a new sociological type: the graduate with no future".

OccupyLSX at St. Paul's Cathedral, which started the occupation on Saturday 15 October, prompted Mason to add to his original analysis after "nine months of political paralysis. And people have begun to feel the economic permafrost setting in." Observing the impulse to occupy public space, Mason suggests that it is

driven by two things: first it is - as I wrote in the 20 reasons - a meme. It is an effective action that is transmitting itself independent of any democratic structures and party political hierarchies: if you camp somewhere, the press turn up and you can get an instant hit of wellbeing by, however briefly and tenuously, living the dream of a communal, negotiated existence.

Second, because this communal, negotiated, networked life already exists in people's heads as a result of the rapid adoption of social networks and networked lifestyles. As Manuel Castells, one of the first sociologists of the internet, said: the more autonomous and rebellious a person's attitudes are, the more they use the internet; the more they use the internet, the more autonomous their lifestyle becomes.

The distance between the diverse group of "ordinary people" that gathered outside St. Paul's Cathedral and the lofty realm of institutional politics was also striking for Mason. The demographic, Mason observes, was made up by

Lots of student occupation activists from last winter; veteran leftists and veteran anarchists going back to the days of Saltley Gate; people involved in NGOs; an Oxbridge professor of computer science; a large smattering of "Anonymous" people - with their Guy Fawkes masks - who've become the new pole of attraction for the deep "autonomist" movement. Some women with their babies. And - the biggest group - just ordinary people.

A fundamental point shared by these diverse protesters is the deep desire for renewal in the relations between society, economy and politics:

most people involved in such protests have switched off from mainstream politics: they believe it's a rich-person's club and totally impenetrable to reason or pressure ... Occupy Everywhere, then, is the kind of movement you get when people start to believe mainstream politicians have lost their principles, or are trapped by vested interests, or are all crooked.

And with good reason: Mason notes that not a single politician showed up in support of the protest against the injustices of our current system. In his view, the Occupy Everywhere impulse is the global grassroots response of civil society to the failure of institutional politics to represent people's demands and is thus

much bigger than any single-issue campaign or cause. They [the protesters] mean to limit the power of finance capital and build a more equal society, while rejecting the hierarchical methods of the parties that once claimed to do so. In this sense the movement is a kind of replacement social democracy; a mirror image of the besuited young people who populate the think tanks of Labour, the SPD, the US Democrats etc.

Mason's forthcoming book Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, to be published in January 2012, charts the new forms of collective action, from London to Cairo, Wisconsin to Tehran.

Visit Idle Scrawl to read the article in full.

Listening to Zuccotti Park

From the beginning the protest on Wall Street has presented itself through a prolific array of Web outlets: Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, an immense Tumblr site, a nonstop Livestream video channel, multiple Youtube and Vimeo accounts, and three main websites (occupywallst.org, nycga.cc, and the original campaign page at www.adbusters.org.) Of course to say that the protest "presents itself" is already saying too much. Its strategy is multiplicity: whatever this protest is, it cannot be reduced to any single channel, any official voice, or any definitive agenda. Unlike all those demonstrations whose actions are designed solely to attract media coverage, Occupy Wall Street has managed to manifest itself and indeed to proliferate far beyond lower Manhattan without really presenting itself at all.

Instead, the occuption has thrived in the gap between airing grievances (which are many) and making demands (which would have to be few). Those who complain that the protest has failed to offer a clear program have failed to notice the precise ways in which such a program has been deliberately blocked or deferred. Meanwhile those who insist that the aims of the protest are quite obvious have overlooked not only the fact that its explicit aims keep shifting, but also that maintaining the occupation itself has been the only consistent aim all along. To ask "what is their message?" is misguided: there's no "their" there. Better many messages than the wrong one.

To whom should the messages be addressed, anyway? Not the government, since (as David Graeber put it in the Guardian) "that would imply recognizing the legitimacy of the politicians" against whom the protests are ranged. And not the mainstream media, who deal with the unruliness of the occupation by translating it into the usual repertoire of representations, alternating between gross generalizations and idiosyncratic vignettes. Here the medium really matters: the sheer profusion of messages circulating on social media has turned the whole movement into an open-ended experiment in political expression. On the ground and on the Internet, the protestors address their most radical questions to each other: who are we, really? what do we have in common? what do we want? No doubt some of them are keen to leverage the occupation into a political movement; they want to feel that they are standing at the start of something big. But many others are trying to see how it feels to secede from the dominant society altogether, for as long as they can. They would say that they have already succeeded.

None of this means that the protests are incoherent or inarticulate. In fact there have been several attempts at Zuccotti Park to draw up some kind of collective statement, with increasingly mixed results. So far there have four main texts presented as collective statements from the movement:

The occupywallst.org site features a text titled "A Modest Call for Action on this September 17," which has acquired a retrospective status as an inaugural document. It is sharp and succinct, offering an brusque critique of "the capitalist political system," rejecting various reform proposals, and calling for expanding protests, strikes, and occupations.

On September 21, the New York General Assembly released its fifth communiqué, taking up the question posed in the original Adbusters appeal, "what is our one demand?" The text offers eleven answers to that question, including "ending capital punishment," "ending poverty," "ending joblessness," "ending American imperialism," and "ending war." A note at the bottom indicates that "this is NOT a list of offical demands," and invites readers to participate in a democratic process to choose the "one demand." This approach was soon abandoned.

A few days later, on September 23, a draft statement of "Principles of Solidarity" was approved by consensus, consolidating handwritten public comments and committee deliberations into a brief 8-point list of "points of unity." It marked a strong shift toward affirmative values and a rhetoric of "engaging, exercising, empowering" people to build a "new socio-economic and political alternative."

This statement was then superceded by the General Assembly's September 29 "Declaration of the Occupation of New York City," which remains the primary collective document released by the group. It opens on a grand note: "As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies." The document levels 21 accusations against those "corporate forces," concluding with an appeal to "the people of the world" to "assert your power." This "non-inclusive" list of grievances is far-ranging but somewhat scattershot, encompassing not only specific complaints about bailouts, foreclosures, health insurance, and the cruel treatment of animals, but also sweeping rejections of colonialism, inequality, and economic policy. Compared to the September 17 and September 23 texts, this one is more concerned with rehearsing a litany of symptoms than identifying their structural causes.

In the weeks since this Declaration, the three main websites have largely stopped posting communiqués and General Assembly minutes, presumably because Twitter, Facebook, and the live video feed are providing more raw material than anyone can possibly digest. Perhaps the tactic of issuing official texts to the outside world has become obsolete, and the internal need to bind the group through a political testament for external audiences has dissipated. As the occupiers in Manhattan dig in and the network of resistance expands and strengthens, the movement reinvents itself daily by adding ideas, images, and addresses to the mix. Even if the cops don't move in and the weather doesn't turn bad, nobody can really say where it will go tomorrow. That is already a great accomplishment.

Kashmir author suspended from California Institute of Integral Studies

Next Saturday, October the 15th, the Anthropology students at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) will protest demanding the immediate re-instatement of two academics, Professor Angana P. Chatterij, the co-convener of the International People's Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir and Professor Richard Shapiro, the Department Chair and co-founder of the Jewish-Muslim Friendship Circle in Kashmir.

According to the petition established in their defence, Chatterij and Shapiro were a vocal political force, also known for their advocacy of student rights and faculty empowerment. The two faculty members were suspended in July and have been banned from teaching since that time. The petition also states that, in August, the American Association of University Professors urged the reinstatement of Chatterji and Shapiro. The university have not publicly stated the reasons for the suspension and the case is currently under discussion by a Faculty Hearing Board.

Asking for "academic freedom and accountability," their students at CIIS are demanding to be able to continue their degree with Chatterij and Shapiro. 35 of them have also retained legal representation to pursue legal action against the Institute. In their call for solidarity towards the two suspended professors, CIIS students emphasise that

Chatterji and Shapiro's scholarly and advocacy work have focused on justice and restitution in conflict areas, anti-oppression work, and scholarship critical of systematic forms of oppression. Chatterji has been threatened before due to her work in Kashmir and on Hindu nationalism, and Shapiro has been vocal at the Institute on issues of collaborative governance and academic freedom.

Sign the petition to reinstate Chatterji and Shapiro here.

For more information visit the Injustice at CIIS website.

Angana P. Chatterji is a contributor to Kashmir: The Case for Freedom, out in November.

“A radical, inclusive form of Britishness”—Owen Jones on British identity, nationalism and the disenfranchised youth

In an insightful and personal piece for the Guardian, Owen Jones, author of Chavs, draws on his own family history to explore the plight of Britishness as a collective identity today. He argues that while Britishness may be suffering a crisis of nationalism that threatens to divide us, our common heritage of radical dissent points to a hopeful future in which we are stronger together.

Jones explains that while he largely grew up in the North of England, his family have roots in Wales also, with many settling in Scotland. Owen describes himself as instinctively identifying as British rather than English due to his sense of his family history. However, he contrasts with the position of his cousin, who despite being born to English parents is a strongly patriotic Scot. Owen argues Britishness is built upon the fraught legacy of empire, so is inherently problematic. As the empire was disbanded and a "virtual state-enforced amnesia about the era" was introduced, our revolutionary past was also forgotten. When the postwar class solidarity that filled the vacuum that remained was systematically dismantled by Thatcher's government, Owen proposes that there was a feeling of betrayal in Scotland and Wales, "a deep resentment at voting against Thatcherism in the 1980s but suffering its worst excesses".

This betrayal, followed by New Labour's Thatcherite turn, contributed to an upsurge in nationalist movements. Nationalist movements co-opted the social democracy which was once the terrain of Labour, and the "unravelling of social bonds" particularly amongst younger generations continues to fuel their rise. Interestingly, Jones reveals that:

The most enthusiastic supporters of the new nationalisms can be found among my generation. Today's youth face a future of insecurity and declining living standards. With no coherent leftwing movements making sense of an economic crisis without apparent end, nationalism stands to benefit.

An Ipsos/Mori poll in August found nearly half of Scots under 25 aspired to independence; less than a third of those over 55 felt the same. Crucially, separatism was strongest among those without work or who lived in the poorest communities. It's a similar story with Plaid Cymru, which draws most support not from the likes of my ageing relatives, but from those under 35. A new generation has no truck with Britishness. If Britain disintegrates, it will be at the hands of today's disenfranchised youth."

So what hope is there then to unify the disparate collective identities of the British Isles into an inclusive British identity, and stem the trend towards "founding ever-smaller countries increasingly at the mercy of globalised capitalism"? For Jones, the answer lies in reclamation of our socialist tradition and "a rejection of the discredited top-down model of Britishness". He concludes:

"My socialist great uncle was part of a long history of collective struggle against authority that is common to all the peoples of this island. Our neglected history includes the revolutions of the 17th century; the Chartists, who were the world's first working-class political movement; the suffragettes; and the trade union movement. These struggles are not just part of our heritage - they helped construct a common identity. Here is a tradition that could form the basis of a radical, inclusive form of Britishness. The case is waiting to be made."

Visit the Guardian to read the article in full.

Punk Rock, Protest and the Structure of Opposition

Among the various claims Steve Duncombe and I make in our recent book White Riot: Punk Rock & the Politics of Race , one in particular seems to me to have been enlivened—or at least encouraged—by the "Occupy" actions of these past few weeks: the notion that the very abstractness or vagueness of punk's oppositional stance is one of the keys to its endurance and, occasionally, political efficacy. In other words, there is something about the immediate accessibility of punk's "Fuck Off! [and We'll Fill in the Details Later]" that makes the genre/subculture, despite its myriad shortcomings on issues of race and gender inequality, so attractive to all kinds of people.

Now, there are many more subtle and elaborate political critiques to be found within punk itself, but what makes them unique is that they come across with the kind of confrontational flair—whether Kathleen Hanna's "Suck my left one!" or Martín Sorrondeguy's "That's right motherfucker, we're that spic band!"—on whose wavelength one can get even if a more robust engagement with the specific content of the message may only come later (hopefully).

I'll keep this brief, but I bring this up because a good number of ostensibly progressive folk seem to be worrying their way to brand new brow furrows over a perceived deficit in policy- or goal-oriented thinking on the part of the protesters. And yes, a fundamental structural change in the way our society is organized would, I would think, require some kind of more or less cogent formulation of demands/proposals/polite requests.

But there remains ample time for that sort of work, and agonizing about its seeming absence misses precisely what is so exciting about Occupy Wall Street and its satellite movements: that it has found a symbolically potent and and abstract enough target to bring together thousands of different kinds of people who may not be in the business of putting together party platforms, but who have a very keen sense that, as one of my favorite #OWS signs would have it, "Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit"—or, rather, that something has gone hopelessly wrong with our economics, our politics, and our values. That fundamental truism, it seems to me, is where the energy of these protests is coming from, an energy— perhaps vague, but direct and confrontational—recognizable from punk's most powerful numbers.

So here's a few of my favorites, reflecting my own personal proclivities:

The Dils: 'Class War'

"City halls are falling down/There is no escape."

Basement 5: 'Riot'

"Riot in Iran/Riot in America/Riot in London."

Newtown Neurotics: 'Does Anyone Know Where the March Is?'

"It was causing the traffic jam that we were in!"

This is My Fist!: 'Voice from Occupation Land'

"The grey-suit man lurks nearby with the news and his suitcase full of stock quotes."

Feederz: '1984'

"Destroy what bores you on sight."

Bread & Circuits: 'Letter from Chase'

"There are questions – simple questions – they do not want you to ask."

Dicks: 'Executive Dive'

"I know he's jealous of my success."

Allergic to Bullshit: 'If This is What We're For, This is What We'll Get'

"We fight to win...until that day, we see no end."

Maxwell Tremblay will be be guest hosting Crucial Chaos on WNYU 89.1 FM and wnyu.org at 9pm EST.

Schools, not bombs! Brian Eno at the Anti-war Mass Assembly

Giving an extra £1,000 pounds a year to all the 800,000 British nurses and teachers would cost as much as two months of war in Afghanistan. Brian Eno presented this stunning figure in a speech at the Anti-war Mass Assembly, held in Trafalgar Square on Saturday, October 8th, the tenth anniversary of the war in Afghanistan.

In his speech at Trafalgar Square, Eno points out that the bill that British people are forced to pay by their government for the war amounts to £12m a day. Believe it or not, this means that the overall annual budget of BBC online is equivalent to no more than 24 minutes of war in Afghanistan—a war that is evidenly turning into a bloody, hopeless debacle, as is discussed in The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan. Thus, one cannot but feel compelled to ask, as Eno does, whether the money spent to wage war could be used in better ways:

What about youth centres? In the wake of the recent riots you might think that it would be a good idea to invest in anything that would help young people find their feet. For the cost of the war, you could build at least two a day - and those would be top-of-the-line places. Build a bit more modestly, and you could probably manage five or 10 a day.

Eno notes how austerity cuts and military expenditures are two sides of the same medal. Once again, it is the toiling classes, the workers, the poor, who take the brunt of both:

We're constantly being told that these are hard times and we have to tighten our belts, but as far as I can see the belts round the biggest bellies aren't tightening at all. As usual, it's the people at the bottom who suffer - both here and in Afghanistan.

Eno is a contributor to the anti-war anthology Not One More Death, published in 2006 in collaboration with the Stop the War coalition, and followed one year later by the complementary War With No End.

Visit the Stop the War website to read the transcript of Brian Eno's speech in full.

Dr David Macey 1949—2011

It is our sad duty to announce the loss of Dr David Macey, translator and writer. A much respected and admired Verso author and champion of Francophone thought in the English speaking world, he will be greatly missed. His colleague, Professor Diana Holmes of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Leeds, has written the following on his passing:

It is with great sadness that the French Subject groups at the Universities of Leeds and Nottingham report the death of Dr David Macey. David had been for many years a highly esteemed research associate at Leeds, and in 2010 was appointed Special Professor at Nottingham. David Macey, born in Sunderland in 1949, studied at University College London and became a highly acclaimed writer and translator particularly in the field of contemporary French philosophy and political thought. Among his numerous and influential publications, many of them widely translated, were Lacan in Contexts (1988), The Lives of Michel Foucault (1993), The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (2000), Frantz Fanon: A Life (2000 - described by the New Statesman as 'the year's biographical tour de force'), and Michel Foucault (2004). He translated over sixty books from French, including Michel Foucault's Society Must be Defended (2003), and more recently Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet, Suicide (2008) Jean-Claude Kauffmann, The Single Woman and the Fairy-Tale Prince (2008), Boris Cyrulnik, Resilience (2009), and Michel Wieviorka, Violence (2009). David was the husband of Professor Margaret Atack (University of Leeds), and the father of Aaron, John and Chantelle.

Macey was the subject of an interview with Theory, Culture & Society in January this year. In the interview Macey discussed the interplay of Fanon and Foucault in discourses of race, and went on to examine his own work and the difficulties of defining his methodological approach, a combination of biography and theoretical engagement. In the closing section of the interview, Macey reflected on the crucial importance of reading and his own practice, in what would turn out to be the last year of his life.

Whilst there is no denying the importance of what we call theory, it has to be said that the basic concern of any discourse-based discipline must surely be reading: there is little to be gained from turning to, say Foucault, before we have read Fanon or whoever it may be. Reading -at once the simplest and most difficult of skills-can never be an innocent activity, as we always read from within positions that are always/already constructed by prejudices, ideologies and philosophies. But we can make every effort to be aware of our non-innocence and to combat it. Perhaps that is where theory comes in, but the reading has to come first.

I do not have any more major projects planned. I am not well, and there are a lot of uncertainties ahead. That said, I don't think I could stand the four to five years in libraries that it would take to do anything serious ... So, minor projects - perhaps - but nothing epic. I do hope to do more work on translation with students in Nottingham: it will be nice to work with the living for a change.

Read the interview in full on Theory, Culture & Society.

On liberalism and property rights: a review of Losurdo's Counter-History

In a post entitled 'Liberals and Reactionaries,' Lenin's Tomb reviews Domenico Losurdo's acclaimed Liberalism: A Counter-History. Richard Seymour, author of The Liberal Defence of Murder, focusses on the relationship between property rights and liberal ideology. Seymour emphasises that, whereas Marxist thinkers generally see private property as the mainstay of liberal ideology, Losurdo seems rather to point to "the logic of exclusion"—that is to say, to those subjects who did not benefit from liberal rights and freedoms.

According to Seymour, Losurdo's approach does not question the revolutionary essence of liberalism itself—it rather underlines the distance between its ideals and practice. The socialist blogger instead stresses the interrelation between capitalism and liberalism:

Property rights have always been structured in such a way as to allow white Europeans to expropriate non-white non-Europeans, from Locke to Vattel onward. After Katrina, the property rights of working class Americans, especially African Americans, were cancelled by fiat—but this didn't disturb the basic politico-legal order of property rights. In fact, I would bet on the idea that the state authorities and companies who carried out this expropriation worked very hard on devising a legal justification for this theft. Moreover, it is the nature of capitalist property relations, to which liberalism is committed, that builds exclusions into liberalism.

In Seymour's view, another aspect that would deserve more investigation is the definition of radicals and conservatives as opposed to liberals. Losurdo's descriptions of American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison as a radical rather than a liberal, and of US pro-slavery Vice-President John Calhoun as a liberal rather than a conservative, are arguable, Seymour writes. In fact, one of the problems here is that "conservatism in its modern sense takes its cue from liberalism:" Locke and Smith are hugely popular among yesterday's and today's conservatives.

Seymour also underlines how Losurdo's Counter-History cannot be regarded just as an anti-liberal rant. Instead,

Losurdo's book is more appreciative of liberalism's merits than might appear to be the case from some of the tendentious readings —which, in a counter-history, has some validity. His conclusions are not indiscriminately hostile.

Visit the Lenin's Tomb to read the review in full.

Paul Mason: 'The Coming Global Crisis'

An extract from the updated edition of Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed, Paul Mason's account of the 2008 financial collapse, anticipating the social fall-out of the crisis. His exploration of the global wave of social revolt since 2008, Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, will be published in January 2012.

In the summer of 2010, any attempt to predict the future would be pointless. However, the fault-lines of the global recovery are clear. In the space of twenty-four months the risk has moved from housing to banking to states and now, in southern Europe, to social cohesion.

In searching for a metaphor to illustrate what's happened, I am drawn to the image of tank armour. When a depleted-uranium dart hits the armour of a tank its energy is diffused into layer-upon-layer of complex materials: metals, fabrics, ceramics. If you are lucky, the round never penetrates the final layer and the crew survives. But take a look at the armour plate: it is mangled, defabricated, and can never be used again. What you need to avoid at all costs is being hit by a second shot.

The anti-crisis measures improvised by the political elites during 2009 always fell short of being decisive but somehow worked: the sheer complexity of the tarp as implemented; the chutzpah of Chancellor Alistair Darling in underwriting stricken loans the size of Britain's gdp; the Mao-era heroism of the Chinese government, instructing banks to create money on the basis of a state guarantee. Only the eurozone's armour failed, making it the clear target now for the next shell.

Yet at a macro level nobody is completely out of the mire. A second stimulus in the United States is politically impossible; the stimulus in China has stored up massive problems for the banks there; Britain and Spain stand too close to the Greek contagion for comfort; Japan stands condemned to the prospect of a 250 per cent debt-to-GDP ratio by mid-decade and is destined to remain a stagnant economy until long after today's manga comics turn up in on the vintage shelves.

If the recovery fails to become self-sustaining into 2011, it is hard to see how the world can avoid a double-dip recession. In that situation, the massive over hang of debt — in the banks, among states, among consumers — would pull the weakest economies towards the deflation whirlpool. Once started, this second downturn could no longer be stopped by monetary and fiscal stimulus at the levels already achieved. It would have to be stopped by measures involving direct competition with rival states or economic blocs.

The options include, first, the conversion of the q QE strategies of 2009 into outright`monetization' — that is, where the central bank simply prints money to finance the government debt. Second, the acceleration of exchange-rate rivalry into outright trade rivalry, with import quotas and devaluations used to boost exports. Third — the inevitable result of both these policies — the active encouragement of domestic inflation. High and sustained inflation — not seen in the developed world on any scale since the early 1990s — has the advantage of imposing silent wage cuts on the workforce while whittling away at the value of the national debt.

Once you are into a combination of any of these three — monetization, trade rivalry and inflation— you are into the final phase for the meltdown that started on 15 September 2008.

Long before you get there, however, you are into the realm of social unrest and class conflict — but social unrest is also a pressure that can be relieved by competition between states. One obvious option for Greece and other eurozone members that come under pressure is to leave the euro and/or default on their debts. There are serious market commentators who believe Greece will be forced to do both.

What the world's rulers cling to, as they move from summit to summit, is the idea of global solidarity, the belief that the spectre of the 1930s will prevent a slide into rival exit strategies. In the best-case scenario, the Chinese recovery does not falter but pulls Asia into a more consumption-led and stable pattern of growth. America's banks survive any second global downturn, while the eurozone hits the bottom of its austerity drive sometime around 2013 and bounces back, writing off €230billion of outstanding toxic subprime loans in an orderly rather than chaotic way.

The stakes are massive, because many of the givens of the global situation militate against this best-case outcome. China's one-party dictatorship is determined to unleash the new model of consumption-driven growth at a pace commensurate with maintaining its own power and privilege — that is,slowly. America's banking elite will cling on to the hard-fought dominance it attained during the Clinton—Bush era. And Europe's working class, swelled by a new generation of disgruntled graduate youth, will not lightly give up the social gains that brought peace after the downfall of dictatorships.

Above all, any orderly rebalancing of the economy and re-regulation of the banking system must come through the multi-lateral forums. Once we are into serious unilateral re-regulation we are well down the route towards the breakup of the globalised economy. The danger is not, as the bank lobbyists often put it, that such action drives financial services elsewhere; it is that capital itself retreats to national and continental pools, permanently limiting the dynamism of the global economy.

The future, then, depends on the complex interplay between the interests of die-hard political elites and the interests of the salariat,the urban youth,the manual working class and the elderly.

For me, the abiding images of the months between Lehman and the euro crisis involve the forbearance shown by these plebeian social groups. The Chinese workers patiently transferring from factory to building site on the orders of macro-economic policy makers; the finance director of the Midlands component factory thin with worry; the autoworkers in Elkhart, Indiana; the dockers of Piraeus, Greece, who told me — despite the bloodcurdling Communist slogans on their canteen wall — 'We're family men, we don't do social explosions.'

They have been patient. The question is, how long will their patience hold out?

Slavoj Žižek at Occupy Wall Street: "We are not dreamers, we are the awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare"

Slavoj Žižek visited Liberty Plaza to speak to Occupy Wall Street protesters. Here is the original text of his speech — not a transcript, as originally described in error.

Don't fall in love with yourselves, with the nice time we are having here. Carnivals come cheap - the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. Fall in love with hard and patient work - we are the beginning, not the end. Our basic message is: the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world, we are allowed and obliged even to think about alternatives. There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions - questions not about what we do not want, but about what we DO want. What social organization can replace the existing capitalism? What type of new leaders we need? The XXth century alternatives obviously did not work.

So do not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not "Main street, not Wall street," but to change the system where main street cannot function without Wall street. Beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support us, but are already working hard to dilute our protest. In the same way we get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice-cream without fat, they will try to make us into a harmless moral protest. But the reason we are here is that we had enough of the world where to recycle your Coke cans, to give a couple of dollars for charity, or to buy Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes for the Third World troubles is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after the marriage agencies started to outsource even our dating, we see that for a long time we were allowing our political engagements also to be outsourced - we want them back.

They will tell us we are un-American. But when conservative fundamentalists tell you that America is a Christian nation, remember what Christianity is: the Holy Spirit, the free egalitarian community of believers united by love. We here are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street they are pagans worshipping false idols.

They will tell us we are violent, that our very language is violent: occupation, and so on. Yes we are violent, but only in the sense in which Mahathma Gandhi was violent. We are violent because we want to put a stop on the way things go - but what is this purely symbolic violence compared to the violence needed to sustain the smooth functioning of the global capitalist system?

We were called losers - but are the true losers not there on the Wall Street, and were they not bailed out by hundreds of billions of your money? You are called socialists - but in the US, there already is socialism for the rich. They will tell you that you don't respect private property - but the Wall Street speculations that led to the crash of 2008 erased more hard-earned private property than if we were to be destroying it here night and day - just think of thousands of homes foreclosed...

We are not Communists, if Communism means the system which deservedly collapsed in 1990 - and remember that Communists who are still in power run today the most ruthless capitalism (in China). The success of Chinese Communist-run capitalism is an ominous sign that the marriage between capitalism and democracy is approaching a divorce. The only sense in which we are Communists is that we care for the commons - the commons of nature, of knowledge - which are threatened by the system.

They will tell you that you are dreaming, but the true dreamers are those who think that things can go on indefinitely they way they are, just with some cosmetic changes. We are not dreamers, we are the awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything, we are merely witness how the system is gradually destroying itself. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. What we are doing is just reminding those in power to look down...

So is the change really possible? Today, the possible and the impossible are distributed in a strange way. In the domains of personal freedoms and scientific technology, the impossible is becoming increasingly possible (or so we are told): "nothing is impossible," we can enjoy sex in all its perverse versions; entire archives of music, films, and TV series are available for downloading; space travel is available to everyone (with the money...); we can enhance our physical and psychic abilities through interventions into the genome, right up to the techno-gnostic dream of achieving immortality by transforming our identity into a software program. On the other hand, in the domain of social and economic relations, we are bombarded all the time by a You cannot ... engage in collective political acts (which necessarily end in totalitarian terror), or cling to the old Welfare State (it makes you non-competitive and leads to economic crisis), or isolate yourself from the global market, and so on. When austerity measures are imposed, we are repeatedly told that this is simply what has to be done. Maybe, the time has come to turn around these coordinates of what is possible and what is impossible; maybe, we cannot become immortal, but we can have more solidarity and healthcare?

In mid-April 2011, the media reported that Chinese government has prohibited showing on TV and in theatres films which deal with time travel and alternate history, with the argument that such stories introduce frivolity into serious historical matters - even the fictional escape into alternate reality is considered too dangerous. We in the liberal West do not need such an explicit prohibition: ideology exerts enough material power to prevent alternate history narratives being taken with a minimum of seriousness. It is easy for us to imagine the end of the world - see numerous apocalyptic films -, but not end of capitalism.

In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: "Let's establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false." After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink: "Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair - the only thing unavailable is red ink." And is this not our situation till now? We have all the freedoms one wants - the only thing missing is the red ink: we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict - 'war on terror,' "democracy and freedom,' 'human rights,' etc - are FALSE terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it. You, here, you are giving to all of us red ink.

Visit Critical Legal Thinking to read a transcript of the speech as delivered.

"We are black..."—Verso books for Black History Month

We are black, it is true, but tell us, gentlemen, you who are so judicious, what is the law that says that the black man must belong to and be the property of the white man? ... Yes, gentleman, we are free like you, and it is only by your avarice and our ignorance that anyone is still held in slavery up to this day, and we can neither see nor find the right that you pretend to have over us ... We are your equals then, by natural right, and if nature pleases itself to diversify colours within the human race, it is not a crime to be born black nor an advantage to be white.

This excerpt is from a letter written in July 1792 by the leaders of the revolution of Haitian slaves. The letter has been republished in the collection of writings of the black leader Toussaint L'Overture, The Haitian Revolution, which includes also the correspondence between him and Napoleon Bonaparte. In the late eighteenth century, Toussaint L'Overture and his supporters established the first black republic in the world.

In the United Kingdom, October is Black History Month. The celebration was originally introduced in 1926 on the initiative of Carter G. Woodson, the editor of the Journal of Negro History. In 2007, no fewer than 6,000 events were held in the UK as part of its programme. Here are some key Verso titles relevant to the study and celebration of African and Caribbean history.

History of slavery and colonialism

Richard Gott's just-published Britain's Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt is a lively indictment of the crimes of British colonization and also a panoramic reconstruction of the many anti-colonial struggles against British rule-such as those of the Jamaican Maroons, or the Gambian troops led by Kemintang. Gott's book is the best response to the apologists of British brutal colonialism.

Robin Blackburn's The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery (1776-1848), first published in 1988, has hitherto been acclaimed as a masterpiece for the study of slavery and the abolitionist movement. Instead of focussing only on the anti-slavery campaigns conducted in the metropolis (a traditional limitation of European historians working in the field), The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery also sheds light on the role that slave revolts and resistance had in the decision to abolish slave trade. As Paul Gilroy wrote in a review for New Society, Robin Blackburn "never lets the detail of his European and anti-colonial narratives fog his basic commitment to act in furtherance of their own liberation."

The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery (1776-1848) has been recently been republished in a new edition, as part of the Verso World History Series. The series also features another Robin Blackburn's title, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern (1492-1800). Dealing with the history of plantation slavery from the fifteenth up to the nineteenth century, Blackburn highlights the intimate link between modernity and slavery—"the dark side of progress." The Making of New World Slavery highlights both the role played by private traders and settlers in establishing plantation slavery, and the intertwined process of racialization of the slave population.

In his most recent The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights, Blackburn widens the scope of research to slavery into the nineteenth century. The book also examines the case of those countries in which slave emancipation took part in the late 1800s: the United States, Cuba, and Brazil. Once again, the Haitian Revolution emerges as a defining moment for the history not just of abolitionism, but more generally of human rights: as Eric Foner notes in a review of the book for The Nation,

Ironically, if ‘the West' is to celebrate the idea of universal human rights as one of its distinctive contributions to modern civilization, part of the credit must go to the mostly African-born slave rebels of Haiti.

Race and racism

In early 2008, Barack Obama revived his presidential campaign by winning the Democrat primary in South Carolina. The victory was greeted by his supporters chanting "race doesn't matter!" Actually, Obama had polled 80 per cent of the African American votes, and no more than 25 of the votes of white Democrats. The striking racial divide among Democrat electors confirms the point made by Manning Marable in Beyond Black and White: Transforming African-American Politics: despite all the calls for ‘post-racial' politics, race still divides the US, politically, economically and socially. According to Marable, however, a separatist approach to politics would be a no-go: instead, African-Americans should value their own cultural identity, but also join all the other oppressed groups in a struggle for change.

Marable's book should be read together with David Roediger's investigation into How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon. The book offers a panoramic overview of the role played by race identities in the US history from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century-from the Fundamental Constitutions of South Carolina, drafted by John Locke, according to which "every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves," to today's US prison system, in which 60 per cent of the inmates are people of colour.

David Roediger's works are an illuminating demonstration of how the ideas of "whiteness" and "blackness" are intimately intertwined. In his groundbreaking study The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, first published in 1991, the Verso author sheds light on how the racial identity of white working-class Americans was forged in opposition to black laborers. According to Roediger, "whiteness was a way in which white workers responded to a fear of dependency on wage labor and to the necessity of capitalist work discipline."

The interrelation of racial, national and class identities is also the crux of the classic dialogue between Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein on Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, that has been recently republished in the Verso Radical Thinkers series. Moreover, in early 2012, Verso will also release a new edition of Theodore W. Allen's The Invention of the White Race, a seminal two-volume work that focuses on the birth of racism in seventeenth century America.

News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, by Juan González and Joseph Torres, is instead a fast-paced account of how American media contributed to racial segregation. The US media system has traditionally been under the hegemony of white journalists and businessmen (and still is: in 2005, just 7.7% US radio stations and virtually none of the daily newspapers were owned by people of colour, who made up 33% of the country's population). As a result, US white media have often been a vehicle for racist stereotypes, and racial hatred. Covering a number of cases ranging from the anti-abolitionist riots of 1835, to the Camp Grant massacre of Apaches in 1871, News for All the People shows how the white press has an appalling record in inciting racist violence. At the same time, the book tells us also "other" stories: the stories of non-white media (such as the Cherokee Phoenix, established in 1828) and journalists (for example, Thomas Morris Chester, the black correspondent for the Philadelphia Press during the final years of the Civil War), of how the rise of (white) media tycoons in the first half of the Twentieth Century reduced the spaces available to these "other" voices, and thus of how today's battles against media concentration are also battles to overcome the racial divide.

Stories of Africa

On 17 January 1961, the first Prime Minister of the Republic of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated. Many contemporary observers believed his killing to have been orchestrated by the US and Belgian governments, because of Lumumba's pan-African views and Western rapacious economic interests in the country. Famously, in 1964 Che Guevara stated that "Lumumba's murder should be a lesson" for all anti-imperialist fighters. It took almost forty years, however, for the truth to be uncovered. In his The Assassination of Lumumba, translated into English by Verso in 2001, the sociologist Ludo de Witte revealed the network of complicity in the murder, spreading from Belgium to the CIA and the United Nations. The book is a powerful demonstration of how Western interference in African politics continued far beyond the achievement of formal independence.

A complementary reading to The Assassination of Lumumba is Jules Marchal's Lord Leverhulme's Ghosts: Colonial Exploitation in the Congo. The book is a searing outcry against the system of forced labour implemented in colonial Congo, mainly at the hands of the British entrepreneur Lord Leverhulme. The brutal exploitation of native people reduced the population of Congo by half and accounted for more deaths than the Nazi Holocaust.

Moving to more recent years, Linda Melvern's Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide is a probing account of the events that led to the Rwandan genocide in 1994 (the estimated death toll is between half a million and one million). The book, voted the Best Book on Africa by Foreign Affairs and Outstanding Academic Title by Choice, is also a passionate indictment of the silent accomplices of the massacre sitting in the United Nations and the Western governments.

The idea of Western active intervention in today's Africa, however, is deeply ambiguous. Mahmood Mamdani's Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror is a thought-provoking critique of the Western narrative about the Darfur crisis. Mamdani challenges the idea that the Darfur conflict was an ethnic war between "Arab" perpetrators and "African" victims. Instead, he locates the Darfur crisis in its historical context, and argues that the real origin of the civil war was the growing tensions between tribes with land and tribes looking for land. In his view, calling for a humanitarian intervention in Darfur reflects the ideology lying behind George W. Bush's War on Terror.

The state of South African politics is the focus of Andrew Feinstein's After the Party: Corruption, the ANC and South Africa's Uncertain Future. A former MP in the South African Parliament, Feinstein questions the record in power of the African National Congress in South Africa; in particular, he denounces the corruption and the power struggles that took place at the top of South African politics under Nelson Mandela's successor Thabo Mbeki. In the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu,

this important and brave book illustrates the extent to which South Africa's multibillion-dollar arms deal has undermined the rule of law, accountability and constitutionality in the country.

A list of Verso books focusing on Africa can be found here.

Black skin, white music?

Q. Are you black or punk?
A. Both (and yes, FUCK YOU).

It is thus that James Spooner, the director of Afro-Punk, answers nowadays to the question that has nagged him since his teens. Growing up as a biracial kid with a penchant for punk rock was not easy: James felt compelled to choose between a black or a white punk identity.

The complex relationship between musical genre, subculture and racial identity is examined in depth in two new Verso books.

White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race, edited by Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay, is the first comprehensive study about racial identities in the punk scene. The book includes first-person writing, lyrics, letters to zines, and analyses of punk history from across the globe.

Part memoir, part travelogue, part in-depth study of global hip hop culture, Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation by Sujatha Fernandes is a vibrant and lyrical journey though the sounds and struggles of today's urban youth. Fernandes traces the black roots of hip hop culture, stressing the role played by figures such as the DJ Afrika Bambaataa, the founder of the Universal Zulu Nation. In the late 1990s, the linkage between hip hop culture and radical black activism was rekindled by the Black August Hip Hop Project.

A core text of black feminism, Michele Wallace's Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory also alludes in the title to the importance of music in the construction of gendered racial identities. In the book, Wallace notes how black female blues singer are often portrayed "as a paradigm of commercial, cultural and historical potency." Focussing on the invisibility that haunts black women, in her book Wallace also calls into question the traditional "white" paradigm in Western historiography:

My intention here is to point out the tendency for "history" in the major sense to corrobarate a racist, phallocentric hegemony by always marginalizing, trivializing, and decentering a black subject, even as its specific historical object may involve an apparent focus upon issues of ethnicity or racism or ... "minority revolutions."

McKenzie Wark: 'Zuccotti Park, a psychogeography'

The confrontations with the police usually get the most attention, but they're not the only thing going on at Occupy Wall Street. I went down to Zuccotti Park at about 9PM on Wednesday, 5th October after putting the kids to bed. I was alarmed by stuff on the twitter feed that detailed incidents of contact with the police but which were not clear about the location. I wanted to make sure our Park was still there.

Just off the subway, and heading down Church Street, I caught a glimpse of a march going North, up the street parallel to the east. I saw a mass of closely ranked bodies and banners and heard some vigorous chants. I wasn't sure where they'd be going, as Wall street is to the south. I decided to keep going down Church to Zuccotti Park and maybe catch up with that group later.

I could hear the Park before I saw it. At the western end, about a hundred people were chanting, singing, dancing, banging on drums. I hung out with the for a while. This crowd was young, fun, and a bit crusty. The financial district is usually so dead after working hours. Even the idea of a party at night here is something.

It was hard to work my way into the Park. Piles of stuff were arranged around the planting beds. Mostly disassembled tents. The police have been pretty clear that they will not tolerate "structures" without a permit, and apparently a tent is a "structure."

A young man lay flat on his back in a sleeping bag. I narrowly missed kicking him in the head on my way by. He looked exhausted, as did a few others in sleeping bags that I found in the west end of the Park just past the drum circle at its westerly end.

Under the sound of the drumming was the thrumb of a generator. A small knot of young men crouched around it, powering up devices. Most of the signs of organized activity were east of the crumpled tents and random sleepers. Knots of people clustered around tables dedicated to one function or other of keeping the Park running.

Here was where I found people you might think of as "anarchists," if only in the sartorial sense. People who have some experience at self-organization. Otherwise the crowd was mostly dressed like any other crowd of college or post college age young people in New York City, although here and there you would find older people as well.

A young woman explained what was "problematic" about the occupation to two friends, and allowed me to listen in to their conversation for a while. There were a lot of small groups talking amongst themselves A man in a business suit raised a red and black flag, while talking to another man in a track suit and hoodie.

A woman smiled at a man sitting on one of the stone benches. She parted her thighs and planted herself on his lap. He kissed her; she kissed him back. Her hands were in his hair. I thought of that line in Raoul Vaneigem about those who go on and on about class struggle without speaking of love. They speak with a corpse in their mouth, he says.

An older group, earnest, weathered, held up signs about class struggle so that the TV crew on the southern side could see them. They did not have the curious, expectant, hesitant look of some of the younger people. Not everybody finds all this so surprising. As another Situationist writer, René Viénet famously put it: our ideas are on everybody's minds.

At the eastern end of the Park was a group, about the same size as the drum circle, who preferred to chant slogans. They were standing tightly packed in an oval, doing call and response chants of the popular slogans of the occasion.

It struck me as curious how the Park was polarized between these two ambiences: the drum circle at one end and the chanters at the other. The drum circle understood the place as something like a festival. They weren't for or against anything, they just were. Here, in this improbable, unlikely place.

The chanters felt more in need of a binding ritual that would settle at least for the moment who we are and who we aren't. They seemed more interested in making explicit the terms of the coming together and the cleaving from.

The northern side was strangely bare. It is supposed to be an area for art and signs, but something about that part of the Park didn't seem appealing, even though people were tightly packed into the middle. Along the northern edge were hand made posters, arranged so they could be seen in a stroll down that side. My favorite was "the medium is the message." Done rather patiently in several colors.

Someone waded in with a stack of pizzas. The food carts that are usually here anyway were still open. I would have liked to know what they made of it all, but they were doing a fairly brisk business and I didn't want to hold anyone up. Both cops and occupiers lined up for coffee, and perhaps a few office workers held back late.

A police truck arrived and barriers were slid off and erected down the southern side. Quite a few people got up to watch. A rise in the level of tension was palpable. Who knows who ordered the new barriers or why? It could just have been to make people a little tense.

The police seemed relaxed, however. A policewoman leant against the barriers on north side and chatted on her cellphone. A cluster of maybe ten blue shirted officers leant against the wall outside the Brooks Brothers store on the other side of the street. A white shirt rested his bullhorn on the barriers for a moment. It isn't always like this, of course. I saw police arrest three people in broad daylight just a few days ago. At this moment all was calm. Nothing is forever in these kinds of situations.

Wandering around the Park, I talked briefly to a few people. I steered away from people who looked like old hands. I was interested in those people who seemed in a sort of a fugue state. Mostly, they could not quite find words to describe the sensation. There was just something about this moment in space and time that was hard to describe.

It wasn't obvious what one should be doing. It isn't work; it isn't leisure. There's nothing to buy. The union-organized marchers were long gone by the time I got there, so there wasn't really any protesting to be done. In the Park at that moment there were no police to confront. If you wanted to make the moment intelligible to yourself, you had to find your own way to do it.

The chanters and the drummers were two ways to go about it. Or perhaps it was a good moment just to try and sleep. There's always something to organize. There's always points to debate. Or, you could just be there. In some ways that's the hardest part. To just be there, in a moment carved out of the division of daily life between the time of work and the time of leisure. In a space that is suppose to be where office workers go for coffee and a cigarette on their breaks.

There's a division of the space of the Park into functions, and usually this does sort of function. At night, with such a big crowd in it, the space had started to redefine itself a bit, and more by ambience than function. People arranged themselves in it more according to how they felt about it. There was an unanswerable question in the air, or so it seemed to me, about what forms of life are possible. In different parts of the Park people gravitated toward different answers. This is what you might call the psychogeography of the place.

When there's nobody really watching, when there's nothing to confront, when there's nothing to debate - this is what's left: How is it possible to create forms of life for ourselves, even if its in the shadow of tall buildings that cast long shadows?

I left the Park and headed back to the subway. I had to get up the next morning to get the kids off the school. People were drifting away, although it was clear that a fairly large group would stay on for most of the night. And others would be back in the morning.

Not many people can inhabit this place outside of work time, but a lot of people come to visit, and to glimpse something of another way in which the city might function. Other lives are possible; sometimes they even actually exist.

No matter what happens here next day or next week, I just wanted to record the fact that this actually happened.

Ten Years of War, Ten Years of Popular Protest

On Saturday, October the 8th 2011, the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan, Trafalgar Square will turn into the meeting point for an "Anti-War Mass Assembly." The event will start at noon, and will be opened by Joe Glenton, an ex-soldier who was jailed for refusing to fight in Afghanistan, and Grace McCann, who in 2009 attempted a citizen's arrest on Tony Blair. Speeches and live performances will follow. A "Naming the Dead Ceremony" will be led by Joan Humphries, who lost her grandson in Afghanistan, and Rose Gentle, who lost her son in Iraq.

In September 2010, Verso published an anthology of writings on The Case fror Withdrawal from Afghanistan, edited by Nick Turse, and including contributions by Tariq Ali and Tom Engelhardt. The book is a must read for all those who oppose the deadly conflict that Barack Obama calls "just war."

Visit the Antiwar assembly website for more info on the demonstration, and to sign the "I will be there" pledge.

“Beyond the Barricades”— The City and the New Protest Movements

Michael Sayeau, contributor to Restless Cities, has written on the changing forms of demonstration across the world today for Frieze. Sayeau considers the various methods employed by groups such as UKUncut, the August rioters, Greek rioters and Arab Spring revolutions, and in turn sheds light on the Occupy movement. Sayeau draws inspiration for his enquiry from Eric Hazan's The Invention of Paris, a vibrant tour through the revolutionary past of the streets of Paris, a city shaped by the history of the barricades:

Hazan argues that the barricades - emblematic of both the practicalities and the romance of Parisian protest and a persistent symbol of civic unrest - were products of their time in all of its social, technological and political aspects. In a story that most of us are familiar with, their emergence and persistence sparked a reactionary revolution in urban planning and architecture, which to this day defines many of our modern cities.

But in recent months, as a wave of civic protest has washed over the world from Athens to Syria and from Spain to Egypt, a strange reversal has taken place in the practices of urban demonstrations - a reversal that suggests that nearly two centuries' worth of protest tactics and policing strategies are undergoing a paradigm shift.

Sayeau goes on to discuss 'Haussmannization' - the 19th-century programme of urban renewal in Paris named after the individual responsible for it, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. 'Haussmannization' attempted to make it impossible for protestors to barricade the streets of Paris through the creation of wide avenues that were easy for large deployments of police and troops to navigate but near impossible to blockade. This model spread to cities and university campuses around the world but Sayeau predicts that its effectiveness at deterring protest is coming to end.

Barricades have given way to flash mobs, the targets have shifted toward the emporiums of consumerism, and the cat-and-mouse battles between the police and those who resist them take place nearly as often online as in the physical places of the city. Despite differences of means and ends between the first set of anti-austerity protestors and the more recent rioters, several strands run between the two groups, all evocative of the new tactics and rules of urban disorder.

Contemporary protests and riots are notable for their mobility and mutability. The points of attacks are the corporate retail businesses that cover today's cities so if one target is protected by the police there are numerous others to choose from with protestors splintering-off and re-grouping rapidly. In Sayeau's opinion, protesters are at their most vulnerable when penned into a location, "into a situation reminiscent of those Parisian barricades of old".

Sayeau is quick to acknowledge the role of social networking and personal technology in catalysing this evolution, such as with use of Twitter, Facebook and Blackberry Messenger system. Up to the minute updates of the movements of the authorities allowed protesters and rioters to congregate in numbers so large and disperse so rapidly they were difficult, and at times impossible, to kettle. Unfortunately, new methods of protesting in the city are most effective at their first use, as Sayeau goes on to observe:

While all of this suggests that the scales are tipping in favour of those not in uniform, what we have already started to see - and can certainly expect more of - is the neo-Haussmannization of our new, immaterial conduits on the Internet. Facebook and Twitter have become the new warrens of urban protest, pathways where virtual barricades can be erected, meeting points established, and last stands can be plotted and even taken. The police and government have started to take note.

Sayeau concludes by meditating on the underlying connections between the Parisian barricades of the 19^th century and today's protests. His thoughts here are particularly insightful on the direct action of the Occupy movements, such as Occupy Wall Street, which buck the trend for the mobile protest.

It is important to remember that for all the profound changes we find in these new forms of revolt, some underlying issues remain the same. As Hazan notes, the 19th-century Parisian barricade was 'never [...] effective as a fighting instrument'. Rather than an invention that actually worked in the holding of streets, 'right from the start, the barricade played a role that doubled its fighting status with that of a stage set,' one which 'served as a call to action for the whole of Europe, as theoretical models and reasons for hope'. We will learn soon enough if the protests and riots in London and the shape that they took - as well as those at the many other hotspots around the world - come to provide their own updated models and reasons to the new movements of our century.

Visit Frieze to read the article in full.

News for All the People tour dates

Good news for all the people in New York, California, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, and DC.

Juan González and Joe Torres are embarking on a US tour to promote their new book, News for All the People—beginning with a kickoff event in New York presented by Juan’s Democracy Now! co-host, Amy Goodman.

Here is their schedule. Additional information for each event may be found by clicking on each individual headline:

Thursday, Oct. 20—New York, NY

7:00-9:00 pm
Book launch at Cooper Union Great Hall
Juan González and Joe Torres in conversation with Amy Goodman

Part of Democracy Now!’s 15th anniversary celebration.

Free and open to the public.

There is a special ticketed pre-event reception at 5:30 pm. More details and tickets for the reception can be purchased here.

Friday, Oct. 21—San Francisco, CA

2:00–4:00 pm
San Francisco State University, Journalism Department
Humanites Building, room 587

Sponsored by the Renaissance Journalism Center. Free and open to the public.

Friday, Oct. 21—Oakland, CA

7:00–9:00 pm
Bay Area Book Launch
First Congregational Church of Oakland
2501 Harrison St
Oakland, CA 94612

Special ticketed pre-event reception at 6:00 pm includes a meet and greet with the authors, light food and drink, a copy of the book, special book signing, and preferred seating at the event. Purchase pre-event tickets here.

The 7:00 pm presentation is free and open to the public.

Sponsors: KPFA, Democracy Now! & Free Press, with Center for Media Justice, Colorlines/ARC, Mother Jones, New American Media, Making Contact (National Radio Project), San Francisco Chapter of the Asian American Journalists Assoc., Bay Area Black Journalists Assoc., Northern California Soc. of Professional Journalists, G.W. Williams Center for Independent Journalism, Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, Pacific Media Workers Guild, ColorOfChange.org, Presente, Renaissance Journalism Center, KAXI1.

Saturday, Oct 22—Santa Cruz, CA

8:00–9:30 am
Morning Coffee with Juan González and Joseph Torres

Capitola Book Café
1475 41st Ave
Capitola, CA 95010

Please note the morning hour of this event. The bookstore and café will open at 7:30 am.

Saturday, Oct 22—Fresno, CA

12:30–2:00 pm
Free Speech Fund Raiser for KFCF 88.1 FM

CWA Local 9408 Union Hall
4422 E. Ashlan Ave
Fresno, CA

Plus private pre-event reception with the authors from noon to 12:30; includes a copy of the book and special book signing.
Purchase tickets for event and/or private reception here.

Saturday, Oct 22—Los Angeles, CA

7:30–9:00 pm
Benefit for KPFK
along with special guest Tom Hayden and others

Immanuel Presbyterian Church
Westminster Chapel
3300 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90010

Plus special ticketed pre-event reception from 6:30 to 7:30. Purchase reception tickets here.

Sunday, Oct 23—Santa Barbara, CA

6:00–8:00 pm
La Casa de la Raza
601 East Montecito St
Santa Barbara, CA 93103

Sponsored by KCSB FM and La Casa de la Raza. Free and open to the public.

Monday, Oct 24—Northridge, CA

9:00–10:30 am
Cal State Northridge
1811 Nordhoff St
Sierra Hall, Whitsel Room, 4th Floor
Northridge, CA 91330

Free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the Spanish-language Program at the Cal State Northridge Department of Journalism, the Chicana/no Studies, the CSUN Latino Journalists Student Club, and El Nuevo Sol, CSUN bilingual/multimedia outlet.

Monday, Oct 24—Los Angeles, CA

12:00–1:50 pm
University of Southern California—Annenberg
School for Communication & Journalism
3650 Watt Way, Room 204
Los Angeles, CA 90089

Monday, Oct 24—San Diego, CA

7:00–9:00 pm
Benefit for KNSJ Radio/Activist San Diego

First Church of the Brethren
The San Diego Friends Center
3850 Westgate Place
San Diego, CA 92105

Tuesday, Oct 25—Albuquerque, NM

12:00–2:00 pm
University of New Mexico
Student Union Building, Fiesta A & B
Albuquerque, NM

Free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the Media Literacy Project, the University of New Mexico Office for Equity and Inclusion, Democracy Now!, and Free Press.

Tuesday, Oct 25—Santa Fe, NM

7:30–9:30 pm
Benefit for KSFR

Armory for the Arts
1050 Old Pecos Trail
Santa Fe, NM 87502

Tickets are $15. For advance purchase, call KSFR at (505) 428-1527.

Wednesday, Oct 26—San Antonio, TX

11:30 am–1:30 pm
Media Justice League Speaker Luncheon

San Antonio Current
915 Dallas Street
San Antonio, TX 78215

A benefit for the Media Justice League's ongoing media literacy programs.

$20 ticket includes lunch, meet & greet, presentation, and signing. Limited seating. Purchase tickets here.

Books available on-site or in advance from the Twig Book Shop. For more information, contact the Media Justice League at (210) 222-2405.

Sponsors: Media Justice League, San Antonio Current, San Antonio Association of Hispanic Journalists, Free Press and Democracy Now!

Wednesday, Oct 26—Houston, TX

7:00–9:00 pm
Benefit for KPFT

Talento Bilingue de Houston
333 South Jensen Dr
Houston, TX 77003

$5 donation to support KPFT.

Pre-event reception from 6:00 to 7:00 pm, includes a copy of their new book, light food and beverage, and preferred seating at the public presentation. Purchase pre-event tickets here.

Sponsored by Democracy Now!, FreePress Houston, Verso Books, Nuestra Palabra and El Gato Media Network.

Thursday, Oct 27—Denver, CO

7:00–9:00 pm
Benefit for KGNU Community Radio

Highlands Church
3241 Lowell Blvd
Denver, CO
$10 for KGNU members and $15 for non-members.

Special ticketed pre-event reception from 6:00 to 7:00, includes light food and drink, a signed copy of the book, and entry to the main event.

For more information, call KGNU at (303) 449-4885 or email.

Friday, Oct 28—Washington, DC

6:30–8:30 pm
Benefit for WPFW
Interviewed by Amy Goodman, with special guests

Busboys & Poets
14th St NW at V Street
Washington, DC

Private reception from 5:30 to 6:30, includes a copy of the book, light food and drink, and a meet & greet with the authors and Amy Goodman. Special ticket required.

Sponsored by Free Press, Busboys & Poets, WPFW and Democracy Now!

Rethinking the Jewish paradigm: Esther Benbassa reviewed in the Jewish Quarterly

The last issue of the Jewish Quarterly features an insightful review of Esther Benbassa's Suffering as Identity: The Jewish Paradigm by Devorah Baum. The book, she writes, is "invaluable for both its political deconstruction of victimhood and its recollection of the lesser known, non-lachrymose history of the Jews."

In the review, Baum touches on the key points of Benbassa's book: the idea that shared suffering can be a powerful catalyser of collective identity; the emergence of a collective narrative of Jewish history as "lachrymose" that has also become a "model to imitate" for other oppressed groups; the relationship between Jewish historiography and religion; and the influence of the Christian tradition on the self-representation of Jewish communities:

this influence has only increased in the modern period, particularly post-war when Jews have often appeared in Jewish and Christian responses to Auschwitz as a martyred people whose martyrdom has been consistently compared to the figure of the suffering of Christ.

The reviewer also points to Benbassa's critique of Holocaust historiography. Baum concurs with Benbassa's "plea for a return to serious historical analysis and research," even though she does not agree with "all her suggestions:"

Readers of this book may recognise its forensic examination of the misuses to which Holocaust memory has been put in Israel, where successive generations of politicians have framed the country's security needs in terms of an existential threat recalling the European genocide. Benbassa puts this down to a failure of historical understanding regarding the Holocaust that has contributed to the state's continued insensitivity to other suffering subjects, and particularly those with whom it has engaged in conflict. Warning against the effort to link present events to Holocaust memory, Benbassa notes that nothing is more unstable than the identity of the victim: "Victims can so easily change sides!"

Devorah Baum's review appears in the Jewish Quarterly print version, September 2011. Online version for subscribers only.

Michael Sorkin & Occupy Wall Street: 'Liberty Square'

'Liberty Square' is from Michael Sorkin's All Over the Map

One of the basic rights enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution is that of "the people to freely assemble." Free assembly is the primary expression of democracy in space, the physical embodiment of liberty. This relationship far predates the American experience. Cities, in particular, have long been seen as especially conducive to freedom, as exemplified in the famous motto of the Hanseatic League: "City air makes you free." The just city is one where citizens move unimpeded and gather in many different forms for self-expression. In modern times, social progress has been directly linked to the variety of rallies, demonstrations, marches, and insurrections that have had as their arena the streets and squares of the city. From women's suffrage to civil rights to union organizing to anti- war protests, the power of bodies together in space has been crucial to the defense of our rights. In real democracy, the streets belong to the people.

In city after city, certain places have become linked to these gatherings, institutionalized by repeated use. While the street is the bedrock of the popular right to the city-the conduit of association-it is only part of the necessary infrastructure of assembly, which includes privatized spaces such as bars, cafés, lecture halls, stadia, and stoops, as well as bigger public spaces: the parks, plazas, and town squares that remain fundamental to sound urbanism. Whether the Zocalo in Mexico City, the Mall in Washington, or Tiananmen Square in Beijing, these great sites are zones of focus, the common property of those dedicated to the struggle for free association. Indeed, the right of the public to gather in these places continues to be defended in blood.

Such matters have been much in the news in the current political season. The protest cage at the Democratic Convention in Boston-a prison-like enclosure surrounded by razor-wire-suggests a sinister elision of the war on terror with the control of popular assembly. The frustrations of those seeking to demonstrate against the Republicans in New York have also provided ample evidence of the constraints on the popular right to make use of its own spaces. They also point up something else: the lack of enough suitable places for mass political rallies. Our main rallying spots in New York-whether Central Park, Times Square, or Fifth Avenue-all depend on the disruption of some other activity, whether traffic or recreation, and are thus subject to negotiation with the authorities who, as the present situation so vividly shows, can be recalcitrant. Other venues, like Union Square with its rich historic association with protest, are too small. Still others, including City Hall Park, have been fenced and "improved" to prevent gatherings.

The organizers of the largest New York demonstration, a group called United for Peace and Justice, originally applied for a permit to gather on the Great Lawn in Central Park. This was denied on the basis of the alleged fragility of the grass. The city offered as an alternative the West Side Highway, which the demonstrators refused, electing instead to march more visibly in the streets near Madison Square Garden. Insubordinate assembly is a crucial element both of democratic discourse and of the character, location, and political valence of the space that's crucial to such expression. Speech demands its audience and its places of transmission and reception.

This problematic lack of suitable space comes at a critical moment as the nation rushes breakneck to restrict freedom of movement under the guise of fighting terror. While vigilance is necessary, these restrictions also represent a victory for the enemies of freedom, both at home and abroad. The attacks of 9/11-the initiating event in this cycle-were both an act of murder and an assault on our freedom to assemble. The World Trade Center replacement project, however, contains remarkably little non-programmed gathering space. The major component, of course, is a memorial, but that is park-like and solemn, not the spot for mass rallies. Remaining spaces of nominal assembly-such as the Wedge of Light- are residual, scarcely more than enlarged sidewalks. The proposed cultural facilities may be public, but they are decidedly not political or about large gatherings. Ironically, the World Trade Center contained a larger plaza than anything currently proposed. It was, however, so inhospitable and its associated meanings so commercial that it never functioned as a place of assembly, simply as a windswept expanse to be crossed or avoided.

Instead of useful forms of assembly, the Ground Zero plan substitutes an iconography of freedom that slights its actual expression. The "Freedom Tower," for example, is an office building, doubtless one in which free access will be heavily circumscribed by security demands and sky-high rents. Its vague asymmetry is meant to evoke the Statue of Liberty, a devoluted icon for an icon, abstracted beyond recognition. The memorial is centered on the symbolism of the Trade Center footprints, which are to be water-filled and uncrossable. The Wedge of Light-should it actually be realized-calls for passive solemnity. The yet-to-be-conceived Museum of Freedom, however important it might become, will be a largely individual experience.

What has happened downtown is the creation of a plan that is essentially about recreating what was there before, validated as appropriate by a laying on of sacral iconography. Everything receives its label-Freedom Tower, Wedge of Light, Park of the Heroes-to create a nimbus of occluding piety. If anything points up the fast-and-loose style of reverence of the rebuilders, it is the recent announcement by the LMDC and Larry Silverstein that-given the flat office market and the failure to obtain a double payout from Swiss Re-they are likely to build "taxpayers" on the eastern portion of the site, an area (on either side of Santiago Calatrava's fine train station) that amounts to more than three city blocks. These proposed low-rise commercial buildings would be intended as placeholders for future office towers, which might not be constructed for decades. If this goes ahead, a shopping center would line the rebuilt Greenwich Street, facing the memorial and the two cultural buildings that the LMDC is currently developing.

Clearly, this is not the highest-and-best use for New York's most significant urban project. However, it does present a remarkable opportunity. These blocks might become the great public plaza that the city lacks.

Surrounded by a strong edge of building, highly accessible, and located on a site of remarkable resonance, the space might become not simply a symbol but the scene of liberty in action, a zone of free assembly and free speech. It is also in the heart of things, at the center of our institutions of governance and commerce, an apt and visible site for public expression. And, instead of managing remembrance through a series of themed activities that offer little opportunity for spontaneity or collectivity, it would truly belong to the people, an embodiment of our nation's greatest ethical and political power.

It is time to build Liberty Square.

McKenzie Wark on Occupy Wall Street: 'How to Occupy an Abstraction'

The occupation isn't actually on Wall Street, of course. And while there is actually a street called Wall Street in downtown Manhattan, "Wall Street" is more of a concept, an abstraction. So what the occupation is doing is taking over a little (quasi) public square in the general vicinity of Wall Street in the financial district and turning it into something like an allegory. Against the abstraction of Wall Street, it proposes another, perhaps no less abstract story.

The abstraction that is Wall Street already has a double aspect. On the one hand, Wall Street means a certain kind of power, an oligopoly of financial institutions which extract a rent from the rest of us and in exchange for which we don't seem to get very much. "What's good for General Motors is good for America" was the slogan of the old military industrial complex. These days the slogan of the rentier class is: "What's good for Goldman Sachs is none of your fucking business."

This rentier class is an oligopoly that makes French aristocrats of the 18^th century look like serious, well organized administrators. If the rhetoric of their political mouthpieces is to be believed, this rentier class are such hot house flowers that they won't get out of bed in the morning for less than a thousand dollars a day, and their constitutions are so sensitive that if anyone says anything bad about them they will take their money and sulk in the corner. They have, to cap it all, so mismanaged their own affairs that vast tracts of public money were required to keep them in business.

The abstraction that is Wall Street also stands for something else, for an inhuman kind of power, which one can imagine running beneath one's feet throughout the financial district. Let's call this power the vectoral. It's the combination of fiber optic cables and massive amounts of computer power. Some vast proportion of the money in circulation around the planet is being automatically traded even as you read this. Engineers are now seriously thinking about trading at the speed of light. Wall Street in this abstract sense means our new robot overlords, only they didn't come from outer space.

How can you occupy an abstraction? Perhaps only with another abstraction. Occupy Wall Street took over a more or less public park nestled in the downtown landscape of tower blocks, not too far from the old World Trade Center site, and set up camp. It is an occupation which, almost uniquely, does not have demands. It has at its core a suggestion: what if people came together and found a way to structure a conversation which might come up with a better way to run the world? Could they do any worse than the way it is run by the combined efforts of Wall Street as rentier class and Wall Street as computerized vectors trading intangible assets?

Some commentators have seen the modesty of this request as a weakness of Occupy Wall Street. They want a list of demands, and they are not shy about proposing some. But perhaps the best thing about Occupy Wall Street is its reluctance to make demands. What's left of pseudo-politics in the United States is full of demands. To reduce the debt, to cut taxes, to abolish regulations. Nobody even bothers with much justification for these any more. It is just sort of assumed that only what matters to the rentier class matters at all.

Its not that the rentier class buys politicians in America. Why bother when you can rent them by the hour? In this context, the most interesting thing about Occupy Wall Street is its suggestion that the main thing that's lacking is not demands, but process. What is lacking is politics itself.

It may sound counter-intuitive, but there really is no politics in the United States. There is exploitation, oppression, inequality, violence, there are rumors that there might still be a state. But there is no politics. There is only the semblance of politics. Its mostly just professionals renting influence to favor their interests. The state is no longer even capable of negotiating the common interests of its ruling class.

Politics from below is also simulated. The Tea Party is really just a great marketing campaign. It's a way of making the old rentier class demands seem at least temporarily appealing. Like fast food, it will seem delicious until the indigestion starts. It's the Contract on America, its Compassionate Conservatism, but with new ingredients! The Tea Party was quite successful. But you can't fool all of the people all of the time, and no doubt there's a new marketing campaign waiting in the wings for when it runs out of steam. But none of this is anything but the semblance of a politics.

So the genius of the occupation is simply to suggest that there could be a politics, one in which people meet and propose and negotiate. This suggestion points to the great absence at the center of American life: a whole nation, even an empire, with no politics.

Wall Street is a name for an abstraction with the double sense of a rentier class which uses vectoral power to control resources that bypasses political processes which at least had to negotiate with popular interests. Against this, the occupation proposes another abstraction, and it too has a double aspect.

On the one hand, it's a physical thing, a taking of space. This has confused the New York Police Department, which has responded with clumsy tactics. It just can't figure out what to do with an ongoing occupation that is peaceful and mostly content to camp out, but which swells on the weekends to thousands of people. There's a danger that it could become about the NYPD and its cack-handed arrests and either devious or incompetent crowd management.

It is possible that Occupy Wall Street has the rentier class a bit spooked. Not that they would be too bothered by a few anarchists, but they are bothered by the very possibility of any cascading of events that could really catch fire from this largely symbolic action. In the absence of any real competence at the growth and refinement of a political economy, the rentier class has basically decided to loot and pillage from what is left of the United States and to hell with the consequences. They just don't want to be caught doing it.

The taking of a tiny square in downtown New York hardly impinges on the power of the vector. It doesn't even inconvenience the minions who work in the surrounding offices, but the actual occupation is connected to a more abstract kind of occupation, and the slightest hint that it could spread disturbs the fragile constitutions of the rentier sensibility.

The occupation extends out into the intangible world of the vector, but not in the same way as Wall Street. The cop who was stupid enough to pepper-spray some women who were already cordoned off behind orange mesh was quickly identified by hackers, and all his information appeared on the internet for all to see. The incident on the Brooklyn bridge where the police let people onto the roadway and then arrested them for being on the roadway is on the internet from multiple angles. The occupation is also an occupation of the social media vector.

The so-called mainstream media doesn't quite know how to deal with this. The formalities of how 'news' is now made is so baroque that news outlets descended to weird debates about whether the occupation is 'news.' It doesn't have top tier publicists. It didn't issue free samples. It doesn't buy advertising space. It started without any celebrity spokesmodels. So how can it be news? The occupation exposed the poverty of reporting in America. And that in itself is news.

The abstraction that is the occupation is then a double one, an occupation of a place, somewhere near the actual Wall Street; and the occupation of the social media vector, with slogans, images, videos, stories. "Keep on forwarding!" might not be a bad slogan for it. Not to mention keep on creating the actual language for a politics in the space of social media. The companies that own those social media vectors will still collect a rent from all we say and do - not much can be done about that - but at least the space can be occupied by something other than cute cat pictures.

While intellectuals have gotten into the habit of talking about The Political, the occupation has proceeded by creating a lower-case-politics which is abstract and yet at the same time completely everyday. Its no accident that it started with what we might broadly define as 'anarchists', who have been working on both the theory and the practice for some time now.

The organized labor movement started paying attention when it looked like the anarchists and the following they drew would not be easily dissuaded by bad weather or the NYPD. It is as if organized labor woke up one morning, saw that the occupation was still going strong, and said to itself "I must follow them, for I am its leader!" It beats trying to steal members from already unionized workplaces, which seems to be mostly what the unions do.

By now what we have here is what I would call a weird global media event. It is an event in that nobody knows what will happen next. It is a media event in that it's fate is tied to the occupation of the double space of Zucotti square and the media at the same time. It is a global media event at least since the NYPD arrested people on the Brooklyn Bridge and handed the occupation great free publicity. (Thanks guys!) And it is a weird global media event in that it has unprecedented elements that set it outside the staple stories of now boredom, dissent, utopia and all that other stuff is usually managed and assuaged.

For example, commentators tie themselves in knots over whether it is a social movement or not. It is an occupation. It is in the title in case you missed it: Occupy Wall Street. Those who have been paying attention will notice it is part of a global wave of anarchist inspired occupations, big and small. My own university, the New School for Social Research, was occupied in 2008, however briefly. This is a tactic that has been tried and refined for a few years now.

An occupation is conceptually the opposite of a movement. A movement aimed for some internal consistency within itself but uses space just as a place to park its ranks. An occupation has no internal consistency in its ranks but chooses meaningful spaces which have significant resonance into the abstract terrain of symbolic geography.

That it just doesn't do some of the things social movements do is part of why its working, at least so far. It is as remote from The Political as some intellectuals would have it, but it is also different to the Social Forum politics of the recent past as well. For those who want a theory to go with the practice, you will have to look elsewhere than to Negri or Badizek (Badiou+Zizek). There's no multitude; there's no vanguard.

If the occupation is a little confusing for us intellectuals, take pity on our poor billionaire mayor! Bloomberg suggested that the occupation was inconveniencing regular banker struggling on a mere 40k-50k per year. The average household income in my neighborhood, which is quite a nice one, is just under 40k per year - and that's household income. The "poor bankers!" line seems unlikely to garner much sympathy.

So as to how this plays out, nobody knows. That's how it is with weird global media events. It's a test of wills. The NYPD are not quite ready to use strong force in case that's counter-productive. There could be quite a few people - anarchists or not - willing to get arrested. There could be quite a reservoir of popular support. For once the object of the occupation is something generally held in low regard by just about everybody who doesn't benefit from it. The key is keeping the focus on the abstraction that is Wall Street, the pernicious effects of which pretty much everyone feels in their daily life.

Interns file lawsuit against Fox Searchlight, Black Swan producers, citing Ross Perlin's Intern Nation

Released in 2010 to widespread critical acclaim, Black Swan is a psychological thriller that follows ballerinas Nina and Lily as they compete—in increasingly fierce and surreal ways—for a lead part in a production of Swan Lake. The film has received numerous awards and has gone on to gross over $300 million worldwide.

Yet, behind the scenes and on the set of Fox Searchlight Pictures, another surreal scene was taking place. According to a lawsuit recently filed by Eric Glatt and Alex Footman, two former interns at Fox Searchlight, about a hundred people were hired for the production, "functioning as production assistants and bookkeepers and performing secretarial and janitorial work," using their own laptops and cellphones for the production, and sometimes working more than 40 hours a week, or 10 hours a day. And they did all of this for free, as part of an unpaid internship.

Alex Footman was hired as a production intern for Black Swan from October 2009 to February 2010. But when he arrived on set, he found his responsibilities consisted largely of preparing and fetching coffee and taking and delivering lunch orders for the production staff, cleaning the office, and taking out the trash.

While unpaid internships are legally required to provide interns with valuable training and experience in their chosel field, many employers use their internship programs as a source of free labor. Because many interns are concerned about future employment prospects in an increasingly precarious economy, and because internship positions are opaque to labor regulation and workers' rights advocates, abuses often go unreported. And the number of unpaid internships only continues to grow.

"With this lawsuit," Footman says, "I hope that we can help interns and former interns throughout the entertainment industry who should have been paid wages under the law."

Instead of competing against, say, a fellow ballerina, mental illness, and violent hallucinations, like Natalie Portman's character in the film, Black Swan employees were pitted against each other by the production company to see who would do the most work for the least pay. Glatt says, "the practice of hiring unpaid interns generates downward pressure on the wages of all freelancers, who effectively have to compete with free entry-level labor when looking for work and negotiating their rates. It also excludes people who ... cannot afford to work for no pay."

The legal firm that is representing Glatt and Footman hopes to have the lawsuit certified as a class action for all unpaid interns who worked for Fox Searchlight since September 28, 2005 to recover unpaid wages and other damages.

When trying to understand the internship phenomenon and its abuses, attorneys turned to Ross Perlin, author of Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy. Perlin says,

"In recent years, the use of unpaid interns by private firms has gotten out of control. Perhaps nowhere is this more true than in the film and entertainment business, where unpaid interns, receiving little training but doing tons of work, are everywhere. This complaint represents an important step towards righting a major wrong, reminding the millions who intern each year that their hard work deserves a fair wage."

Tariq Ali on the Occupy Wall Street movement

Tariq Ali gives his take on the Occupy Wall Street protests on the London Review of Books blog, asking "After the hopeful Wisconsin flutter, might this be the beginning of an Egyptian summer in New York"?

Spring has absconded from the heart of political America for far too long. The frozen winters of the Reagan and Bush years didn't melt with Clinton or Obama: hollow men who rule over a hollow system where money overpowers all and the much-maligned state is used mainly to preserve the financial status quo and fund the wars of the 21st century. Discussion, serious debate, openness have virtually disappeared from mainstream political life in the United States and its more extreme versions in Europe, with Britain as the cock on the dung heap. The extreme right is small. The extreme left barely exists. It is the extreme centre that dominates political and financial life.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters are consciously or sub-consciously demonstrating against a system of despotic finance-capital; a greed-infected vampire that must suck the blood of the non-rich in order to survive. The protesters are showing their contempt for bankers, for financial speculators and for their media hirelings who continue to insist that there is no alternative.

Visit the LRB blog to read the article in full.

Richard Gott vs Kwasi Kwarteng on BBC 3's Night Waves

On BBC Radio 3's "Night Waves", Richard Gott, author of the forthcoming book, Britain's Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt again met with Kwasi Kwarteng, author of Ghost of Empire. They examined their conflicting views on the character of the British Empire, in a discussion chaired by presenter Philip Dodd.

In his book Gott surveyed the resistance to British rule from mid-18^th century to mid-19^th century, across the world from the Caribbean to Ireland. On the show, Gott explained that he had endeavoured to write a global history of the subject peoples from their point of view, resulting in a survey of resistance on a scale never attempted before. Kwarteng questioned the novelty of such as perspective by highlighting the parallels with subaltern studies and Marxist historiography but agreed that the book is very comprehensive and that its "originality comes in the scale of the rebellions at which it looks".

Kwarteng argued that while the perspective of the oppressed is important and often overlooked in histories of the British Empire, ultimately there was a greater degree of cooperation and mutual economic beneficence unaccounted for in Gott's book. Kwarteng continued, that after rule was established, imperial power was often benign and denied that the crimes of the British Empire could be likened to the systematic genocides and famines of the 20^th century. Gott agreed that there were rare cases of reasonably peaceful reign but that this was by no means the rule across the Empire, and that the establishment of British rule was often by violent methods. Gott questioned Kwarteng's image of a benign rule also, raising other examples of British violence against subjected peoples such as, allowed famines in India and extermination of peoples in America and Australia.

Dodd praised the account Gott gives in the book of the degree to which the British Empire overran Islamic countries and the light that sheds on Britain's complex relation with Islam today.

Visit the BBC website to listen to the debate in full (available until 4th October).

“Open the bloody gates”—Arundhati Roy on Kashmir

Arundhati Roy writes in the Guardian on the discovery of more mass unmarked graves in Kashmir and the supression of dissent by the Indian government. Foreign reporters who write about Kashmir are increasingly being deported, and Kashmiri journalists and activists face much more severe persecution:

David Barsamian is not the first person to be deported over the Indian government's sensitivities over Kashmir. Professor Richard Shapiro, an anthropologist from San Francisco, was deported from Delhi airport in November 2010 without being given any reason. It was probably a way of punishing his partner, Angana Chatterji, who is a co-convenor of the international peoples' tribunal on human rights and justice which first chronicled the existence of unmarked mass graves in Kashmir...

Kashmir is in the process of being isolated, cut off from the outside world by two concentric rings of border patrols - in Delhi as well as Srinagar - as though it's already a free country with its own visa regime. Within its borders of course, it's open season for the government and the army. The art of controlling Kashmiri journalists and ordinary people with a deadly combination of bribes, threats, blackmail and a whole spectrum of unutterable cruelty has evolved into a twisted art form.

While the government goes about trying to silence the living, the dead have begun to speak up. Perhaps it was insensitive of Barsamian to plan a trip to Kashmir just when the state human rights commission was finally shamed into officially acknowledging the existence of 2,700 unmarked graves from three districts in Kashmir. Reports of thousands of other graves are pouring in from other districts. Perhaps it is insensitive of the unmarked graves to embarrass the government of India just when India's record is due for review before the UN human rights council...

Eventually, here too the dead will begin to speak. And it will not just be dead human beings, it will be the dead land, dead rivers, dead mountains and dead creatures in dead forests that will insist on a hearing.

In this age of surveillance, internet policing and phone-tapping, as the clampdown on those who speak up becomes grimmer with every passing day, it's odd how India is becoming the dream destination of literary festivals. Many of these festivals are funded by the very corporations on whose behalf the police have unleashed their regime of terror...

The festive din of all this spurious freedom helps to muffle the sound of footsteps in airport corridors as the deported are frog-marched on to departing planes, to mute the click of handcuffs locking around strong, warm wrists and the cold metallic clang of prison doors.

Our lungs are gradually being depleted of oxygen. Perhaps it's time use whatever breath remains in our bodies to say: "Open the bloody gates."

Arundhati Roy and Angana P. Chatterji are both contributors to Kashmir: the Case for Freedom, which also includes writing by Tariq Ali, Pankaj Mishra and Hilal Bhat.

Visit the Guardian to read the full article.

Owen Jones: The most influential left-wing thinker of the year, and meeting Mr Miliband

Who would be able to outshine Ed Miliband, Ken Livingstone and Paul Krugman as "the most influential left-wing thinker of the year?" According to a survey carried out by the political blog Left Foot Forward, the answer is Owen Jones, the author of Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. Polling 42.1% of the readers' votes, Owen Jones came ahead of the leader of the Green Party Caroline Lucas, the media campaigner Tom Watson and the Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee.

Owen Jones was nominated for the award by Olly Parker and Natan Doron of the Fabian society. They motivated their endorsement stressing that:

Owen Jones has made an impressive contribution in bringing issues of inequality back to the discussion and debate which surround the future of, not just the Labour movement, but of the left more generally ...

Owen has managed re-launch the debate around class and inequality by finding new and accessible ways to make arguments that Labour thinkers have been making for years. He has also challenged the establishment by holding up a mirror to the way different people from different parts of the country are treated by the media and political elite in this country.

Visit Left Foot Forward to read Owen Jones' nomination and the poll results in full.

The Telegraph ranks Jones at number 72 in their list 'The Top 100 Most Influential People on the Left', pointing out that "he is increasingly called upon by the media to give up a 'left of Labour' view which he does with consummate skill and confidence."

Furthermore, according to the Independent, the Labour leader Ed Miliband told the author that he read Chavs during his summer holiday when the two met at the Labour Conference this year, with Melissa Benn, author of School Wars.

According to Benn on her website

I didn’t get a chance to discuss with Ed the merits – or otherwise – of academies and free schools ...Of course, that’s why we are still smiling …

Win free tickets for Tariq Ali, Dan Hind and Melissa Benn's events at the Bishopsgate Institute

Verso and the Bishopsgate Institute are offering three pairs of tickets for some lucky winners. They are for each of these three forthcoming events in London:

Tariq Ali will be discussing The Obama Syndrome with Bonnie Greer on 18 October.

Dan Hind, the author of The Threat to Reason and The Return of the Public, will take part in a debate on Resisting Control: Dissent, Protest and Organised Belligerence, with Bibi van der Zee, Alex Butterworth and others on 3 November.

Melissa Benn, the author of School Wars: The Battle for Britain's Education, will be in conversation with John White, Andy Thornton and Frank Furedi about the National Curruculum on 29 November.

Dan Hind's and Melissa Benn's talks are part of the Whose Mind is it Anyway events, a series of talks held at Bishopsgate Institute that considers what or who affects how we think and behave.

The rules

The first three readers who will email us with the right answer(s) will win a pair of free tickets for the relevant event. You can enter for just one event, sending just the corresponding answer, or for all.

Please send your answer(s) via email to: marketing@verso.co.uk Entries via the comments board, facebook or twitter will not be accepted. This competition is ONLY open to residents of the UK, or those who will be able to attend the talks in London.

Question about The Obama Syndrome:

Who expressed these views about the US presidency, and in what year?

It isn't a president who can help or hurt; it's the system. And this system is not only ruling us in America, it is ruling the world. Nowa- days, when a man is running for president of the United States, he is not running for president of the United States alone; he has to be accept- able to other areas of the world where American influence rules ... The only thing that made him acceptable to the world was that the shrewd capitalists, the shrewd imperialists, knew that the only way people would run towards the fox would be if you showed them a wolf. So they created a ghastly alternative.

Question about The Return of the Public:

How many estimated full-time investigative journalists are there at the moment in Britain?

Question about School Wars:

How many black undergraduate students got a place at Oxford University in 2009?

"Back to Victorian times?" An interview with Melissa Benn

In an interview with the Socialist Worker, Melissa Benn warns about the devastating impact of the coalition policies on the British schooling system. The author of School Wars: The Battle for Britain's Education emphasises how the introduction of academies de facto implies a privatization of education:

I think that what's really behind academies is getting rid of local democracy and shifting education towards the private sector. It will be state-funded-but not a state system.

In Benn's view, the new policies bring about more class segregation between richer and poorer pupils. This has been a long-term issue in British education. Conservative pundits often explain the separation of richer and poorer pupils with the argument that children at elite schools were naturally more intelligent —in other words, intelligence would determine class.

Instead, Benn argues, the problem is that class determines educational achievements. Working-class children are excluded a priori from private and grammar schools, and their local comprehensive schools are frequently underfinanced:

There's an underlying view of some in the elite that some children aren't worth educating ... or a fear that it would be dangerous to educate them.

The right says that poor children fail because of poor teaching and a 'mediocre' comprehensive ethos.

But poverty has a huge impact. Private and grammar schools select the more well-off students. They are much better resourced than comprehensives. Yet the Tories and the right wing press don't take this into account when judging schools.

In Benn's view, the diffusion of academies will only worsen this class divide. The idea itself of private business sponsoring schools would be harmful to local schools in deprived areas. The Tory policies might bring Britain's education "back to Victorian times," Benn says. The battle for a better and more equal education system, however, is not over yet:

Elites don't always get their own way, she says. If they could we'd probably still have a very clear hierarchy of schools with grammars and secondary moderns everywhere.

I'm beginning to feel more cheerful because I can see a way through all this - but mainstream politicians are not going to lead us through it. If those of us who think we're going the wrong way speak up, we can shift things.

In fact, as Francis Beckett points out in a review of School Wars for the New Statesman, "Benn still hopes that the ideal of a national education system, democratically accountable locally and giving all children an equal chance in life, can be rescued." In his view, the book is a major contribution to this cause:

School Wars is short, well written and passionate, and is meant to be read not just by those who are experts in education, but also by parents struggling for the first time with a system that must seem impenetrable and unfair, who must wonder if things have to be this way.

Visit the Socialist Worker to read the interview in full.

Visit the New Statesman to read the review in full.

Going adrift in Limehouse with McKenzie Wark

According to the Situationist theorist Guy Debord, a dérive is "a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances." Who would be a better companion for such an unplanned, quixotic metropolitan escapade than McKenzie Wark? In a long audio interview with Sean Gittins, originally broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM, the author of The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International roams around the area of Limehouse, in the London borough of Tower Hamlets.

An important trade hub in the heady days of the Industrial revolution, in the early post-war period the area turned into a deprived, crime-ridden suburb. It was thus that the 4^th Conference of the Situationist International met there, in 1960. Nowadays, the landscape of Limehouse has been reshaped anew. Giant glass skyscrapers, home to financial corporations, sit next to "areas of poverty, algae-covered canals and old style tower blocks."

As Gittins and Wark discuss, the stark contrast typical of the Limehouse scenery is "inextricably linked to the city and wider political economy." Limehouse is a place where one can see how crucial the idea—and the performance—of "spectacle" is for today's capitalism:

That the Situationists in 1960 met at a place which was to become a central site of the "spectacle" goes beyond mere serendipity. As they sat debating the Spectacle at the 4th Situationist International, having chosen an area renowned in society for its criminals, it's almost as if they knew what was to come.

After an hour and a half of walking, almost predictably yet unexpectedly, we find ourselves at the centre of towering banks in Canary Wharf. It seems to be a fitting place to end our dérive. Screens of market data on the sides of buildings show the markets are in the middle of another catastrophic day. Nobody seems bothered.

Visit the New Statesman to read the article.

The bookish Marx: Lesley Chamberlain on Karl Marx and World Literature

"A vivid biography, bringing the man back to life by decoding his prose expertly"—this is how writer and critic Lesley Chamberlain describes S. S. Prawer's Karl Marx and World Literature in a review for the New Statesman.

By delving into Marx's literary taste, Prawer's classic sheds light on how being an eager reader contributed to turn a young German doctoral student into a great political thinker, with a gift for vibrant metaphors, Chamberlain writes:

Alienation, fetishism and a topsy-turvy world that needs setting aright all began as moments Marx encountered in world literature. He conceived of literature, in a Goethean fashion, as Weltliteratur, the repository of universal human imagination. ... Literature taught Marx about life. There was scope for him to become carried away by his facility for coining metaphors and then to see them enacted in the industrial towns of his age.

Building on Prawer's book, Chamberlain argues that Marx's reflections on the relation between form and content in literary texts might also have influenced his views on society:

I say this faintly, as a criticism Siegbert Prawer doesn't make, but he was also a piercing literary critic who transferred notions of form and content, and a sense that they should harmonise, to an analysis of society. Where the form of an opponent's posturings differed from the content of the man, Marx skewered him.

Visit the New Statesman to read the review in full.

White Riot editors on WNYC Soundcheck

White Riot editors Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay were recently interviewed on WNYC Souncheck, where they discussed the complicated and problematic racial politics of punk rock.

Using Black Flag’s “White Minority” as an example—a song proclaiming “white pride” but sung by Puerto Rican Ron Reyes, accompanied on drums by Colombian American Roberto “Robo” Valverde, and produced by African American Glen Lockett (a.k.a. Spot)—Duncombe and Tremblay demonstrate that

The “white riot” was never white from it’s conception, yet it’s been remembered and thought of and articulated as white. And this creates an immense amount of frustration, of course, for punks of color.

Ducncombe and Tremblay took questions and comments from listeners with varying perceptions on punk and racial politics.

Listen to the interview in full below.

"Sorkin doesn't pull punches": All Over the Map reviewed in the Guardian

For the Guardian, Chris Hall reviews All Over the Map: Writing on Buildings and Cities by Michael Sorkin, "a flâneur with a sense of public purpose." The incisive critique of contemporary architecture by "America's most outspoken architect ... doesn't pull punches."

Hall points out how Sorkin questions the triumphal nature of the planned Ground Zero memorial in New York. Instead, Sorkin calls for "open, public space that encourages 'peaceable assembly'":

He is undistracted by the false debate about which was the best design in the Ground Zero competition, questioning the very idea that there must be buildings to replace those lost and looking at the wider context of the ecology of Lower Manhattan and beyond.

Sorkin's book, however, is not just about New York: "his critical thinking has wider implications," notes Hall. This is evident in the author's Manifesto: Twelve Qualities for Eutopian Cities, with which the book ends:

He argues for sustainable, bounded, polycentric and diverse cities, and is most interested, as someone who has long specialised in city planning, on "work at a scale that can genuinely be judged for its public arrangements and effects" rather than on individual buildings.

Visit the Guardian to read the review in full.

"Free schools", or segregated schools?

The creation of a "free school" system has been the lynchpin of the education policies pursued by the coalition government since spring 2010. "But what does this mean for Yorkshire schools?" asks Melissa Benn, author of the acclaimed School Wars: The Battle for Britain's Education, in an article for the Yorkshire Post.

Benn underlines that the budget cuts introduced by the government are hitting Yorkshire schools hard, particularly those situated in the most deprived areas. No fewer than 82 schools in the county have already been forced to drop their refurbishment plans. In Benn's view, government policies are creating a sort of a two-tier system, widening the gap between elite and non-elite schools:

while schools in affluent parts of the county, and selective schools such as grammars and private schools, are, unsurprisingly, doing well, many secondaries and primaries in poorer areas are still floundering.

The introduction of academies and free schools entails the risk of deepening "segregation along socio-economic lines." In a similar vein, the new E Bac assessment system proposed by the Education Secretary Michael Gove, that favours academic subjects, is detrimental to many non-elite schools.

Referring to some interviews with experienced school officers and trade unionists, Benn emphasises that, in order to improve the English school system, one should focus first and foremost on overcoming social barriers, and on the real children's needs.

Benn also discussed her views in defence of the comprehensive system in an interview given at the Leicester Exchanges live debate 'Comprehensive school education: policy mistake, lost ideal or model for the future?':

Visit the Yorkshire Post to read the article in full.

The Art-Architecture Complex— Reviews, videos and talks

Acclaimed art theorist Hal Foster's new book, The Art-Architecture Complex, tackles the fusion of architecture and art that has increasingly come to dominate both fields as the new 'global style'.

Foster's work has inspired fresh interest in these issues in the media. Reviewing for the Observer, architecture writer Rowan Moore, felt it "refreshing to encounter a degree of intellectual rigour you don't find too often" in writing on architecture.

Moore was initially moved to question whether Foster neglects the basic function of buildings in analysing them primarily as artworks, but ultimately found his critique persuasive:

"His basic premise is compelling - and he uses it to powerful effect - to reveal the gap between the reported effects of buildings and art pieces, and their actual ones,"

In an extended review for Building Design, Verso author Owen Hatherley engaged with Foster's "fair-minded but never merely flattering" critique and "anti-capitalist politics". Hatherley particularly commended Foster's fascinating analysis of the work of Norman Foster, remarking that "it is rare to see anyone taking Norman Foster this seriously today, and rather refreshing". Hatherley also found that "the best material here is often in the charting of theory as longe durée". Differing on a point of style, Hatherley voiced reservations about Foster's "cool, lapidary prose", stating that while "the measured, unruffled style is a means to make precise judgements and insights" there were points at which he wished Foster would have gone further in his criticisms. He concludes that:

"The Art-Architecture Complex is a persistently insightful, elliptical account of an ambiguous symbiosis. The more merciless treatment the subject deserves remains unwritten."

In contrast, Ossian Ward, reviewing for Time Out, was impressed by both the theoretical and critical vigour of Foster's "diatribe", describing it as a "timely tome with an urgent message for anyone on the art or architecture axis". Consequently, The Art-Architecture Complex was chosen as 'Book of the Week'.

Foster spoke to the Guardian about the politics of the Shard, soon to be Europe's tallest building, and proposed that "if the Shard is a symbol of anything it's a symbol of finance capitalism".

Visit the Observer to read the review in full and the Guardian to watch the video in situ. The Time Out review can be read in full in the issue from 22^nd September. Owen Hatherley's review for Building Design can be read by subscribers only but can be read online here.

Foster has also been taking part in a series of events recently. He participated in a Culture Now talk at the ICA to discuss the leading architects of our time and the conflict between the 'imagistic' and the 'embodied' in their work.

At the Bristol Festival of Ideas he spoke on the new 'global style' and it's conflation of art and architecture. You can listen to the full talk here.

School Wars—the story so far ...

For the past month, I have been writing, speaking about and debating the issues that I cover in my new book School Wars.

In the process,I have learned some important things about the way the education debate in particular, and political debate in general, is shaping up in this country.

Let's begin with the politics of silence. An odd place to start, you might think, given the discussion that education continually generates and the good coverage I have received for my book, at least on the left/liberal end of the spectrum. (School Wars has yet to receive a substantive review from the Times, Mail or Telegraph stables.)

But the silence from the right is understandable given that a substantial part of School Wars - and the pro -comprehensive argument in general - convincingly vindicates the non selective principle. Our critics are perfectly well aware that no mainstream political party advocates a return to academic selection or expansion of the grammars. Dividing our children at puberty into winners and losers does not sit comfortably with the values of a democratic society, or not one that claims to be.

But my book, and the comprehensive movement in general, also takes a close look at the causes and consequences of the privatisation of education. Our schools are fast being removed from any meaningful local accountability and scrutiny and in the process are being handed to a range of third sector, charitable and private providers with the potential for profit making further down the line.

So advanced and so politicised is this agenda that comprehensives and community schools no longer even figure on the DFE website and according to recent press reports, many civil servants within the DfE were already unhappy about government policy as early as the autumn of 2010.

The new school providers are not only politically canny and occasionally brutal: they are also suffering from historical amnesia. The active collusion of the political right in denying a decent education to most lower income children, via the poorly resourced secondary modern system, seems now to have been entirely expunged from the historical record.

Yesterday I was aggressively heckled by a Westminster Tory councillor - or two - who appeared to claim that the progressive left was entirely culpable for the inadequate education of poorer children, and that privatisation is the only answer to the problem in the gap in achievement. Clearly, some people have forgotten the frequently appalling record of the Tories when last in government in terms of state education.

But it is the future, not the past, that now most concerns me. What these occasionally unpleasant encounters have brought home to me is just how paternal and closed the new educational and political cultures have become. I now understand what it must feel like to learn and work in some of these schools and how little genuine questioning or debate is allowed. There is a clear official line and you deviate from it at your peril.

The new academy culture may sometimes produce good GCSE results - as I acknowledged at a debate at the RSA yesterday - but many local authority/community comprehensives are doing very well, and have rapidly improved in recent years, often without the scary authoritarian edge of some of the new providers. On our side, we must remain committed to rigorous standards and the drive to improve genuine all round achievement but within more open, democratic and genuinely creative environments.

Meanwhile, serious questions hang over the governance, funding and learning culture in some academies and free schools and that borrow so heavily from the Charter school experiment in the USA.

The Charter school experiment shows where the privatisation agenda is heading if we are not careful. It is not a good example, on so many counts. Many of the schools succeed by cherry picking from among the aspirational poor; there are high rates of attrition within Charters; the most successful depend on large amounts of extra private funding; it is aggressively anti union. And yet, overall, the results picture for Charters is very mixed. Most important of all, as anti reform academic and activist Diane Ravitch points out so cogently, the entire project is doing fatal damage to public - state - education.

A few more observations. How much does the incredible hostility that greets the comprehensive argument, for instance, stem from a profound dislike among the-powers-that-be of socially mixed education? The privatisation plan will increase social and faith segregation in our cities and communities. Much of it is a plan for the separate education of poorer children. Most importantly of all, as I argue in my book, it leaves the overall educational landscape - so profoundly shaped by selection and wealth - untouched.

One sees this reflected in the more personal politics of public debates. While it is open season on those of us who support mixed comprehensives and send our own children there, critics of state education who choose private education for their children are considered untouchable, particularly by the media.

I am not interested in personally attacking anyone. But this does not seem to stop those, like Michael Gove - the current Secretary of State for Education no less - from launching unpleasant broadsides against campaigners like Fiona Millar and myself - and on grounds of social class and alleged professional privilege.

On one level, it's a bloody cheek. Many of us have been campaigning for years to improve state education, certainly far longer than the current clutch of privatising edu-celebs. But on another level, the contempt of the right is simply odd. How warmly we would be welcomed into the right's reforming fold if we sent our children to Westminster or Eton!

Another thought: now much does liberal left support for the free school/academy experiment - as expressed, for example, by a recent Guardian editorial - stem from a form of personal and collective guilt? After all, if you genuinely don't consider comprehensives good enough for your own children and you don't want to join the campaign to improve them, in part because you have chosen private education, then of course the quasi- private school feel of some of the new school providers must seem an attractive conscience-salving option to push for the less well off.

But I return, finally, to the puzzling question of why the government and its allies are so defensive? Could it be, as Francis Beckett suggests, that they believe they have won the academy/privatisation argument so decisively that they simply cannot brook any criticism of it? But that doesn't make sense. The truly secure are always happy to debate.

If, in fact, they are not that confident, do they really hope to write off a growing movement of opposition to their policies by singling out a few individuals for attack? Who knows, perhaps some of those off piste e-mails might one day explain the wrong headed tactics of government and their allies in this regard?

Either way, the School Wars are here to stay for the foreseeable future. I will continue my travels around the country, more determined than ever to defend a properly accountable and local framework for our schools. Make no mistake. We are fighting for something important, in terms of our childrens' education, their future as citizens, who urgently need to learn how to live and work together, and the very future of democracy itself.

Visit the Local Schools Network website to read the article in situ.

Idea of Communism—Resources and commentary

Following on from our announcement of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek's New York conference, Communism, A New Beginning?, we have brought together the numerous reports, responses, commentary and resources relating to the first Idea of Communism conference in London.

If there's anything missing, please add in the comments below.

Do not be afraid, join us, come back! You've had your anti-communist fun, and you are pardoned for it—time to get serious once again!

Bob Diamond, Chief Executive of Barclays recently spoke of how "the time for remorse and apology for banks now needs to be over," mostly to a reaction of disbelief. A mere three years after causing the current financial crisis should the banks be forgiven and capitalism return to being beyond criticism? Some of the most influential intellectuals are asking, if so, is it not time to stop apologising for the brutalities done in the name of communism, and instead return to the idea of communism? In a quote from Michael Hardt's essay, appearing in The Idea of Communism, he states:

Many central concepts of our political vocabulary, including communism as well as democracy and freedom, have been so corrupted that they are almost unusable. In standard usage, in fact, communism has come to mean its opposite, that is, total state control of economic and social life. We could abandon these terms and invent new ones, of course, but we would leave behind too the long history of struggles, dreams and aspirations that are tied to them. I think it is better to fight over the concepts themselves in order to restore or renew their meaning.

Visit the Guardian to read an extract from the essay.

The crisis of capitalism in 2008 has seen stalwarts of left thinking moved out of the universities and back to central stage. More than ever they are being looked at to offer an alternative to capitalist realism—the elites are ferociously re-reading Marx in an attempt to understand the crisis and Fukuyama's idea of the valiant capitalist triumphant at the "end of history" is continually derided.

It is within this context that when lecturers at Birkbeck College in 2008 began to organise a conference on 'The Idea of Communism,' partially in response to Alain Badiou's The Communist Hypothesis, their estimates of 200 academic attendees were soon having to be drastically re-considered as they became inundated with registrations, eventually seeing over 1,200 people spilling over into rooms with live-video feed. Major international newspapers such as the Guardian picked up the story, identifying that "the international financial crisis has led to a resurgence of interest in a philosophy that many claimed had been buried with the collapse of the Soviet Union." While Der Spiegel offered a rather more po-faced feature focusing on "the big three:" Žižek, Negri and Badiou—though does recognise "exactly 21 months after the near—collapse of the capitalist status quo, there is apparently a new yearning-not for leftist policy, but for leftist theory."

THE COMMUNIST HYPOTHESIS

The idea for a frank, public debate on a reclaiming of the name communism came from Badiou in a short treatise for New Left Review. It touches on key subjects explored in The Meaning of Sarkozy, Polemics, The Communist Hypothesis and his essay for The Idea of Communism. Badiou's hypothesis outlines a distinct break from the communism and radical left of the past:

Between the end of the first sequence and the beginning of the second there was a forty-year interval during which the communist hypothesis was declared to be untenable: the decades from 1871 to 1914 saw imperialism triumphant across the globe. Since the second sequence came to an end in the 1970s we have been in another such interval, with the adversary in the ascendant once more. What is at stake in these circumstances is the eventual opening of a new sequence of the communist hypothesis. But it is clear that this will not be—cannot be—the continuation of the second one. Marxism, the workers' movement, mass democracy, Leninism, the party of the proletariat, the socialist state—all the inventions of the 20th century—are not really useful to us any more. At the theoretical level they certainly deserve further study and consideration; but at the level of practical politics they have become unworkable. The second sequence is over and it is pointless to try to restore it.

Visit New Left Review to read Badiou's article in full.

CONFERENCE RESOURCES

The responses and discussions sparked from Badiou's thinking were as diverse as the speakers themselves (though not as some pointed out in gender or nationality).

From the conference itself you can watch footage of Badiou, Žižek, Rancière and others on YouTube or listen to a selection of the lectures individually. Peter Hallward's 'Communism of the Intellect, Communism of the Will' and Bruno Bosteels' 'The Leftist Hypothesis: Communism in the Age of Terror' can both be listened to at Counterrealism.

Hardt's 'The Production of the Common,' the welcome from Costas Douzinas and Alain Badiou's introductory remarks can all be listened to at Daily Motion.

Alternatively, Counterrealism have the entire conference to listen to in 3 manageable chunks.

You can also read Alberto Toscano's paper, 'Communist Knowledge/Communist Power,' which looks at "what it might mean to be a communist in philosophy, and whether the idea of communism is indeed a philosophical idea" and "the need to define how philosophy was caught up in the very emergence of the idea of communism, and in what manner communism developed both from and against philosophy."

The specificity of communism stems from its intrinsic and specific temporality, from the fact that, while never simply non- or anti-philosophical, it is an idea that contains within it, inextricably, a tension towards realisation, transition, revolution.

Visit Infinite Thought to read the full article.

Peter Hallward's 'The Will of the People; Towards a Dialectical Voluntarism' focuses on popular will and voluntary collective action, summing up the current attitudes to "the masses" thus:

In spite of all that has changed over the past two hundred years, the alternative remains much the same: either an insistence on the primacy of popular self-determination, or a presumption that the people are too crude, barbaric or childlike to be capable of exercising a rational and deliberate will.

Visit Radical Philosophy to read the full piece—an expanded version appears in The Idea of Communism.

For those who speak French, a full version of Rancière's discussion 'Communists without Communism?' which looks at the relation between the communist hypothesis and the hypothesis of emancipation, can be watched at the European Graduate School website.

Costas Douzinas focuses his expertise in the field of law to look at a communist approach to human rights, and his essay poses the question "If communist practice was a denial of liberal rights, can the philosophical idea of communism save (human) rights?"

Universalism is the rallying cry of liberal humanitarians. The defence of the sans papiers, a major campaign of Badiou's organization politique, cannot avoid some version of rights-talk. Hardt and Negri's recipe for turning the claims of empire's into radical multitude's expression takes the form of social rights. Jacques Rancière finds in human rights a good example of the radical politics he espouses. An embarrassed flirtation between the left and rights has been renewed in a direction which combines the defence of universalism with the rejection of human rights ideology. This is the time to re-visit rights history and theory in the context of late capitalism.

Visit the Critical Legal Thinking blog to read the full article.

Jean-Luc Nancy's 'Communism, the word' charts the history and developing historical meaning of the word 'communism' and hints at how it has emerged again in the wake of the financial crash. His notes for the conference are published in full in The Idea of Communism.

Visit Lacan.com to read the full article, or Backdoor Broadcasting to for an audio version.

REVIEWS/CRITIQUES/NOTES

There are plenty of discussions, notes and reports of the actual event such as Nina Power's and the Commune which calls for more discussion of practical applications.

As Rancière himself argued, communism is not some dream you cling on to like a religion, but a mode of societal organisation which can only [be] brought about by the concrete activity of real human beings.

Pinocchio Theory follows a similar tack, the N+1 blog offers a lengthy reflection and Total Assault on Culture has uploaded his notes from the conference. Radical Philosophy also filed a report from the event entitled 'Celebrity come Communism' which summed up the beginnings of the conference succinctly:

This conference's political conditions had been staked out in advance, on behalf of all the speakers, by Alain Badiou's essay 'The Communist Hypothesis'. These were the collapse of the Old Left of the Communist Party and state, and the demise of the social-democratic project. The financial crisis that has since intervened featured as an additional element and a frequent point of reference for speakers and audience.

Visit Radical Philosophy to read the article in full.

While Mark Fisher (aka K-Punk) wrote a review of the event for Frieze, stating:

More than one speaker warned that it will take more than the crisis to undermine capitalism. As Slavoj Žižek rightly insisted, the dominant narrative of the crisis—whereby the excesses of particular capitalists are blamed, rather than the capitalist system itself—will only enable people to continue to sleep in the guise of waking up. Is it time for a return to communism? And, if so, to which idea of communism must we turn?

Visit Frieze to read the article in full.

An analysis comes from Nathan Coombs in a comment on Lacan.com in which he too identifies the differences between groups of the speakers before discussing each groups individual contributions.

Visit Lacan.com to read the full comment.

Logical Regression offered a critique before the conference even began, along with this prophetic cartoon imagining Žižek's dominance over proceedings:

Mute too filed an extensive and insightful report, discussing again the arching theme of communist philosophy versus communist actuality:

Something immediately striking on reflection is that, in spite of the opening remarks and the stated aims of the conference which tried to distinguish between communism as politics and as philosophy, so much attention was devoted to this relationship. There turned out to be much less consensus than originally implied.

Visit Metamute to read the article in full.

EXTENDED READING

This specific relationship between theory and action and many of the other subjects raised at the conference and in the subsequent debates have been followed through and expanded upon elsewhere. Žižek expands on his lecture in the five part masterclass 'Notes Towards a Definition of Communist Culture' which you can listen to in full at Backdoor Broadcasting. Badiou has written on the re-appropriation of the idea and word 'communism' in his article 'Is the word communism forever doomed?'

Communism in fact is a heuristic hypothesis frequently used in politics even if the word does not appear.

Visit Lacan.com to read the article in full.

Jacques Rancière too in his piece 'From the actuality of communism to its inactuality' puts forward this same notion, and addresses the balance between the philosophical idea and the reality of its application.

Firstly communism is not an ideal. It is an actual form of life. While democracy means freedom and equality only represented in the separate form of law and state, communism is their sensory reality, embedded in the forms of an existing common world.

Visit After 1968 to read the article in full.

And lastly Bruno Bosteels, the rising star of American cultural theory, has expanded on his essay and the discourses initiated at the conference, collected in the latest addition to the Verso Communist Hypothesis series. The Actuality of Communism discusses the recent resurgence in communist thought and discusses its key subjects—the masses, class, state, etc—in real, applicable terms.

(Thanks to Pete Willis for collating and writing up.)

Losurdo's Liberalism: A Counter-History sparks debate

Domenico Losurdo's Liberalism: A Counter-History is a thorn in the side of twenty-first century liberals. Losurdo's mordant exposition of the racist, classist ideas put forward by giants of liberalism, such as John Locke, Jeremy Bentham or Alexis De Tocqueville, calls into question the liberal nature itself of their thought. In a long review for the Times Literary Supplement, Jennifer Pitts, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Chicago University, takes Losurdo's counter-history as a starting point to reflect on: "how, and why ... should we tell the history of liberalism today?"

Pitts recognizes that Liberalism: A Counter-History "is a book of wide reference and real erudition." The modern, liberal reader cannot but find some of the excerpts quoted by Losurdo (for example, Tocqueville's brutal views on how to wage war on Algerian natives) "duly dismaying." Nonetheless, in her view, Losurdo tells just one side of the story: "this is a history as partial as any apologia." According to her, Losurdo's book would focus only on the "most unsavoury positions" expressed by classic liberals, and would tend to overlook "their ambivalence, internal disagreements and compromises."

Pitts herself, however, does not provide a convincing explanation for the glaring contradiction between advocating ideals of freedom and, say, supporting European colonialism, as in the case of Mill or Tocqueville. The questions that Losurdo's book asks to today's liberals are still to be answered:

We might return to the idea of liberalism as a set of characteristic dispositions, and ask in a more critical vein what sorts of arguments or policies have tended to emerge from these inclinations under various historical circumstances. What have been liberals' current preoccupations? What sort of apparent inconsistencies have they habitually betrayed, and what do these tell us about liberal commitments? When are seeming inconsistencies evidence of hypocrisy or a self-interested refusal to extend privileges claimed on behalf of one group to others? When do they reveal unexamined cultural prejudices, or racism? When do they point to other, perhaps unacknowledged but no less characteristic, liberal dispositions?

Jennifers Pitts review appears in the Times Literary Supplement print edition dated 23 September.

COMMUNISM, A NEW BEGINNING? Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek with Verso Books at Cooper Union, New York, October 14th-16th 2011

Verso will LIVE STREAM the conference on this website, from Friday, Oct 14th at 6pm. The video will be on this discussion page—you’ll need to log in to access it, so please register now if you don't yet have an account.

A new conference with leading thinkers to discuss the continued relevance of the communist idea.

“The long night of the Left is coming to a close” wrote Slavoj Žižek and Costas Douzinas in their introduction to The Idea of Communism. The continuing economic crisis, the shift away from a unipolar world defined by American hegemony, and the ecological crisis mean that growing numbers of people are keen to explore an alternative, and to rediscover the idea of communism. With the advent of the Arab Awakening, millions have sought new ways to overcome corruption and dictatorship—and they’ve now been joined by the wave of occupations in the US, challenging runaway inequality and the power of corporations and the super-rich.

Responding to Alain Badiou’s proposition of the ‘communist hypothesis,’ the leading thinkers of the Left convened in London in 2009 to discuss the persistent notion that, in a truly emancipated society, all things should be owned in common. Now Slavoj Žižek is hosting a new discussion, at Cooper Union in New York.

Organised with Verso Books, eight leading thinkers will be discussing 'Communism, A New Beginning? at Cooper Union on the weekend of October 14th-16th. Entry will be by ticket only, and all tickets are now sold out. Please register on the Verso website to watch the event LIVE on this discussion page.

With great regret we have to announce that, due to illness, Alain Badiou will not be able to attend the conference this weekend. We are all extremely disappointed but we hope you'll join us in wishing Alain a swift recovery. He has prepared a text to be read by Bruno Bosteels—so he will still be able to contribute to the conference, and we still expect the conference to be an extraordinary event.

PROGRAM

COMMUNISM, A NEW BEGINNING?

COOPER UNION, New York, October 14-16, 2011
Organizers: Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou

Session 1: Friday, Oct 14, 6:00 pm–9:00 pm
Slavoj Žižek: Short Introductory Remarks
Frank Ruda: Remembering the Impossible: For a Meta-Critical Anamnesis of Communism
Alain Badiou: Politics and State, Mass Movement and Terror (read by Bruno Bosteels)

Session 2: Saturday, Oct 15, 10:00 am–1:00 pm
Bruno Bosteels: On the Christian Question
Susan Buck-Morss: Communism and Ethics

Session 3: Saturday, Oct 15, 3:00 pm–6:00 pm
Adrian Johnston: From Scientific Socialism to Socialist Science: Naturdialektik Then and Now
Étienne Balibar: Communism as Commitment, Imagination, and Politics

Session 4: Sunday, Oct 16, 10:00 am–1:00 pm
Jodi Dean: Communist Desire
Slavoj Žižek: Conclusion: Freedom in the Clouds

In search of McKenzie Wark’s pdf

McKenzie Wark's history of the Situationist International, The Beach Beneath the Street, gets more coverage. In an inspiring interview with David Winters for 3:AM, the author explains how his writing style aims "to give a sense of the immediacy of ideas to everyday life, and of the role that different forms of social interaction play in producing this self-critical everyday life." In fact, the Situationist idea of détournement is not just discussed, but also performed, in the book:

The Beach Beneath the Street applies the concept of détournement to the legacy of the Situationist International itself. For critical theory not to lapse into hypocritical theory, but to give rise to a critical practice, then it has to broach questions of how knowledge is practiced. There's probably a pdf of the book circulating out there by now. That too is détournement. That too is part of the practice of memory.

In a review of the book for the Camden New Journal, Kate Webb emphasises the influence of Situationist thinking on today's intellectual debates-from the issue of intellectual property to the relationship between the recent riots and consumerism: in a way, the Situationist slogan "our ideas are on everyone's mind" is as topical as ever. In spite of (post-)modern urban alienation, The Beach Beneath the Street gives the reader a positive message:

Wark's book dares us to keep our spirits up, asking us to think about how to maintain creative resistance, how to keep fidelity with some detournéed idea of the Marxist and Situationist past, and, following their goal of ideas in action, how best to practise our passionate "solidarity without faith."

Visit 3:AM to read the interview in full.

Visit the Camden New Journal to read the review in full.

9/11 in Havana: Sujatha Fernandes on hip hop versus the war on terror

Sujatha Fernandes, author of Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation writes for the Huffington Post:

On September 11, 2001, I was living in Havana, carrying out research on the movement of Cuban rap when the planes hit the towers. The grandmother in the house where I stayed flicked between the two channels available on state TV. The images of planes crashing into buildings were unreal.

While many in the United States remember their bafflement at George W. Bush's slow response immediately following the attacks—he was reading The Pet Goat with a second-grade classroom in Florida—, Fernandes recalls watching Fidel Castro, who was also attending an elementary school function, react somewhat more eloquently as he issued a prescient warning:

I watched the live broadcast from the school where Fidel addressed a packed hall of elementary school kids. Resplendent in his military fatigues, for three hours Fidel cajoled, provoked, and meditated on the events of the day before a group of 10 and 11 year olds. He expressed his sympathies for the American people. He offered the resources of the country to assist in treatment of the victims. And he urged caution on the part of the American government.

"Whenever there is a tragedy like this one, no matter how difficult to avoid it may be, I see no other way but to keep calm," advised Fidel. "And if at some point I am allowed to make a suggestion to an adversary who has been tough with us for many years, we would advise the leaders of the powerful empire to keep their composure, to act calmly, not to be carried away by a fit of rage or hatred and not to start hunting people down, dropping bombs just anywhere."

But of course, the decade that followed has seen very little of calm and composure and much of hunting people down and dropping bombs from the United States. In response to renewed U.S. aggression under the banner of a "war on terror," Cuban rappers like Sekou Umoja from the group Anónimo Consejo utilized the resources at their disposal—many of them coming from the Cuban state—to re-emphasize international solidarity and shared struggles around the globe.

In July 2002, rapper Sekou Umoja from the group Anónimo Consejo spoke passionately to a gathered crowd at the Casa de la Cultura. Sekou, formerly known as Yosmel Sarrías, had taken on an African name to emphasize his spiritual connections with Africa ...

"Afghanistan has been the first casualty of the war on terror," Sekou told the crowd. "Who will be next? Iraq? Maybe Cuba? We, as Hip Hop, say no to war and imperialism. Anónimo Consejo Revolución!" The crowd cheered. "Hip Hop Revolución. Put your fist in the air." More cheers and whistles. The aging sound equipment came to life with a few static groans. As the beat kicked in, Anónimo Consejo launched into their song, "No more war! No more deaths!/ Talkin' 'bout something real, this ain't a game/ Prepare yourself for what's coming/ I know what it is, stay calm, I take action."

While much has been said of how "the world changed irrevocably" after September 11, Sujatha Fernandes goes on to describe how cultures of resistance adapt to the constantly transforming crises of war and imperialism.

Visit the Huffington Post to read the article in full.

White Riot reviewed in the Boston Globe

White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race, edited by Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay, has been reviewed in the Boston Sunday Globe:

Taking its title from the 1977 Clash song, this collection ponders the whiteness of punk. Sure, there are black, Latino, and Asian punks, both musicians and fans. But just as Eminem and millions of suburban teenagers don't erase hip-hop's black urban roots, punk has always contained (though seldom grappled with) its own paleness. Editors Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay, academics who bring deep familiarity to the topic, gather pieces by a fittingly motley assortment of punk musicians, journalists, zine writers, and cultural studies types to hash out the important questions.

If you, too, want to talk about punk, race, and all the strong, conflicting feelings you get when listening to Black Flag, join the editors of White Riot for a discussion and film screening this September 18 at Union Docs.

Visit the Boston Sunday Globe to read the review in full.

Losurdo, liberalism, and the Middle East revolutions

According to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen issued at the onset of the French Revolution, men were said to be "born and remain free and equal in rights" — as long as they were white, male, and possibly upper-class. The "unfolding dialectic of freedom and un-freedom" that has been inherent from the very beginning in liberalism, is one of the main foci of Losurdo's Liberalism: A Counter-History, Tom Whittaker points out in a review for Counterfire.

In his piece, Whittaker stresses the coexistence of groups of free and excluded individuals that has been characteristic of liberal societies: Losurdo's account shows how the "boundaries" between them historically "ran as much along class as along racial or national lines." It is true that, in the West, political and social rights were progressively extended to the working-class —"but only after further and more intense social struggles on behalf of the excluded." Globally, however, colonial oppression and imperialism were the dark side of the liberal myth:

Ultimately, Losurdo deems the most important reason for rejecting this myth to be the tangle of emancipation and dis-emancipation, meaning that the extension of the suffrage in Europe, was accompanied with simultaneous colonial expansion and the subjugation of peoples and races deemed inferior. Above all, liberalism sacrificed democracy on the altar of colonialism, slavery and empire.

In Whittaker's eyes, Losurdo's counter-history of liberalism is a warning for those who, following the recent wave of revolutions in North Africa, have enthusiastically hailed an advent of liberal democracy in the region:

In 2011, as great political struggles for democracy shake the Middle East and beyond, debates will emerge as to which ideological visions can best harness people's desires for emancipation. Liberalism, despite its recent regression into neo-liberalism and consequent association with powerful economic elites, will no doubt be touted as the default ideological setting for these movements to adopt. Those who seek a deeper emancipation and more radical solutions will however need to move beyond the contradictions of liberalism. In such an ideological context, Losurdo's critical history is a timely and invaluable contribution.

Visit Counterfire to read the review in full.

Springtime is not over!

With the new academic year approaching, Verso's anthology on the 2010 student movement, Springtime, gains further attention in the British press. In the Tribune, Ian Sinclair reviews the book, describing it as "an exciting mixture of eyewitness accounts, sharp analysis and pages of tweets and photo essays."

Sinclair points out that Springtime revolves around "two clever narrative devices" that make the book stand out. On the one hand, it pairs twenty-first century student protest with the events and the protagonists of the era of youth radicalism par excellence—1968. On the other, by juxtaposing different national cases, Springtime sheds light on the political core of the student mobilization:

Comparing and contrasting student rebellions in California, France, Italy, Greece and North Africa, some common points of experience emerge. The widespread police brutality strongly suggests the police are not a neutral force in service to all of society but are there to protect the interests of the government and the establishment. It is clear the central threat to higher education across the industrialised world is neo-liberal politics.

According to Sinclair, Springtime is not just the document of a glorious, yet bygone, season; it is also note of hope for those who are frustrated by the present stalemate in the British student movement:

Springtime is a valiant and sometimes impressive attempt to mark the revival of anger and protest that will influence the political landscape for years to come. And while the British student movement seems to be at a low ebb currently, its voice will no doubt be heard again as resistance to the coalition's austerity measures increases, as it surely will.

Visit the Tribune to read the review in full.

"Totality for Beginners" and a Situationist competition!

Avid Verso readers and SI devotees know that McKenzie Wark’s The Beach Beneath the Street features a dustjacket that folds out to a full-length double-sided poster, doubling as a graphic essay. The graphic essay, “Totality for Beginners,” is illustrated by Kevin C. Pyle with texts selected by McKenzie Wark.

“Totality for Kids” is the interactive version of the graphic essay, hosted by Vectors Journal and available at www.beachbeneaththestreet.com.

To introduce you to “Totality for Kids,” we are announcing our latest online competitionNow we’re aware that our last competition proved time-consuming for many participants, resulting in a marked decrease in worker productivity. To ensure that doesn’t happen again, we have made this competition much easier, less open to interpretation and less time-consuming.

In fact, all the answers can be found within the “Totality for Kids” site.

Here are the rules:

Time
There will be three questions a day, beginning on September 12 and ending on September 16. Contestants should submit their answers to all fifteen questions by email after the final questions are posted on September 16.

We will post the proper email address to submit answers to at that time.

Winners

There will be one winner for North America and one winner for the UK and the rest of the world.

There will also be five runners-up for each region.

The winner will be the first entry received with all fifteen correct answers. The runners-up will be the following five people to email with all correct answers. Please do not enter before the final questions are published on September 16th.

Prizes

The two winners will receive:

Volumes 1–3 of Critique of Everyday Life
The Situationists and the City
Panegyric
Comments on the Society of the Spectacle
The Beach Beneath the Street
The Beach Beneath the Street poster

The runners-up will each receive a poster and a copy of Panegyric.

Remember to please do not post answers to the competition questions in the comments below. Answers posted below will be deleted and not counted.

Questions
Note that all questions refer to the site www.beachbeneaththestreet.com.

Day 1:
1. Which quarter of Paris does the narrative start in?
Saint-Germain-des-Prés

2. Where did one of the characters throw up?
Monieu’s

3. Who opened the bar L’Homme de Main?
Ghislain de Marbaix

Day 2:
4. Who said the following, and where was it said: “While I have written much less than most people who write, I have drunk much more than most people who drink.”
Guy Debord in Panegyric

5. Poetry should be made (and unmade) by whom?
By all

6. I take my desires for reality—what do I take reality for?
My desires

Day 3:
7. Who mounted the pulpit of Notre Dame and announced the death of God?
Michel Mourre

8. “Let the dead bury the dead.” Debord is quoting which author quoting which religious text?
Marx, quoting Gospel of Matthew

9. What is the film advertised between Critique of Separation and Breathless?
The Naked City

Day 4:
10. What Debord film title is a palindrome?
In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

11. Who came up with the line, “Our ideas are on everybody’s mind”?
René Viénet

12. “We live to tread on kings.” Who said this, and in what Situationist text is it cited?
Shakespeare (Henry IV), cited in Debord’s Society of the Spectacle

Day 5:
13. Why should we beware of the man with the bullhorn?
He is thinking to himself: “I must follow them, for I am their leader.”

14. Sociologists and psychologists are the new what?
Cops

15. What can you get a 5% raise with?
Unions

The competition has ended, and all winners have been notified. Thank you for participating! For those who didn’t win, there will be more opportunities in the future. Subscribe to our Twitter feed and Facebook page to stay abreast.

Tariq Ali on 9/11 in a Question Time special episode and the Guardian

On Thursday 8 September on BBC One, Question Time returned for a new series with a special programme - ten years on from the September 11 attacks.

Tariq Ali, author of The Obama Syndrome, was on the panel, along with Defence Secretary Liam Fox, former Foreign Secretary David Miliband, the leading advocate of regime change in Iraq Richard Perle, American-born playwright Bonnie Greer and Christina Schmidt, whose husband Olaf, a British Army bomb disposal expert, was killed in Afghanistan. Chaired by David Dimbleby from London.

Visit youtube to watch part 2 and part 3 of the episode.

In an article for the Guardian, Ali engaged with Carl Schmitt's work on the state of emergency, declaring that "the exception is the rule."

A decade after the attentats of 9/11, the US and its European allies are trapped in a quagmire. The events of that year were simply used as a pretext to remake the world and to punish those states that did not comply. And today while the majority of Euro-American citizens flounder in a moral desert, now unhappy with the wars, now resigned, now propagandised into differentiating what is, in effect, an overarching imperial strategy into good/bad wars, the US General Petraeus (currently commanding the CIA) tells us: "You have to recognise also that I don't think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. It's a little bit like Iraq, actually... Yes, there has been enormous progress in Iraq. But there are still horrific attacks in Iraq, and you have to stay vigilant. You have to stay after it. This is the kind of fight we're in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids' lives." Thus speaks the voice of a sovereign power, determining in this case that the exception is the rule...

Apart from Obama's windy rhetoric, little now divides this administration from its predecessor. Ignore, for a moment, the power of politicians and propagandists to enforce their taboos and prejudices on American society as a whole, a power often used ruthlessly and vindictively to silence opposition from all quarters – Bradley Manning, Thomas Drake (released after a huge outcry in the liberal media), Julian Assange, Stephen Kim, currently being treated as criminals and public enemies, know this better than most.

Nothing illustrates this debasement so well as the assassination of Osama bin Laden in Abbotabad. He could have been captured and put on trial, but that was never the intention. The liberal mood was reflected by the chants heard in New York on that day: "U-S-A. U-S-A. Obama got Osama. Obama got Osama. You can't beat us (clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap) You can't beat us. Fuck Bin La-den. Fuck Bin La-den." These were echoed in more diplomatic language by the leaders of Europe, junior partners in the imperial family of nations, incapable of self-determination. Cant and hypocrisy have become the coinage of political culture ...

The assassination of Bin Laden was greeted by European leaders as something that would make the world safer. Tell that to the fairies.

Visit the Guardian to read the article in full.

School Wars: “an important watershed”, and the hidden costs of Free Schools

Melissa Benn's School Wars, a timely exploration of the struggle for Britain's education system, has received yet more positive reviews.

In the Independent, Phil Beadle heralded Benn's "lightness of touch" and deft irony. He concluded:

In terms of future education policy, Benn's book could well be an important watershed. It is a clear-sighted re-statement of why universal, comprehensive education is - obviously - the best option. It should, and hopefully will, be taken as a rallying call to the left: to reconnect with their principles, and replace populist pragmatism with the optimistic idealism through which an informed and egalitarian approach to education policy can at least try to deliver us a more equal society.

Nick Fletcher, for the Camden New Journal, commended Benn's forensic ability and defence of the comprehensive system.

What Melissa Benn's superb, evidence-based history of the educational battleground during the second half of the last century proves, is that today comprehensives are mainly Good or Outstanding (according to schools inspector OFSTED), are getting higher standards in national tests and exam results, and are delivering social mobility.

Benn tackled the issue of the hidden costs of Free Schools head-on in a piece for the Guardian today. In it she revealed the devastating costs the initiative is inflicting upon Local Authorities:

Like it or loathe it - and I loathe it - large sums are being ploughed into free schools; £130m has been laid out on capital costs already, and there is clearly more being spent that government won't disclose. It has been estimated that there is now one civil servant per 30 children working on making free schools a success ...

The new academies are being funded by top-slicing local authority budgets, handing disproportionately large sums of money to already advantaged schools. Meanwhile, many local schools are struggling to deal with the impact of budget cuts from every quarter. Last week it was predicted that there will soon be a terrifying £1bn black hole in local authority finances as a result of the government's school policies, which councils are warning might lead to higher local taxes.

Visit the Independent to read Phil Beadle's and the Camden New Journal to read Nick Fletcher's review in full. Visit the Guardian to read Benn's article in full.

Simon Critchley everywhere on 9/11

Simon Critchley is making multiple appearances—online, on film and in person—to apply context to the world after 9/11.

Ten Years of Terror is Critchley’s new film, co-directed by Brad Evans, featuring discussions with notable thinkers such as Michael Hardt, Saskia Sassen, Noam Chomsky and Zygmunt Bauman—all reflecting on the post-9/11 environment.

The Guardian is hosting short clips from these sessions.

Here is Critchley on the ideology of securitization:

The complete lectures will be available on the “Histories of Violence” website on September 11, 2011.

Critchley and Evans will also be presenting Ten Years of Terror at the Guggenheim Museum on September 9, 12 and 13.

Then on “The Stone,” the online opinion series moderated by Critchley and hosted by the New York Times, Critchley examines “The Cycle of Revenge” and commands the reader to

Ask yourself: what if nothing had happened after 9/11? No revenge, no retribution, no failed surgical strikes on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, no poorly planned bloody fiasco in Iraq, no surges and no insurgencies to surge against; nothing.

Visit “The Stone” to read the essay in full.

Crtichley’s latest book, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology, is due early next year.

A Survey of Verso's Responses to 9/11

Sparing no room for nuance, the magazine covers are all reminding us that the United States—and hence the planet—is set to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, a day that not only changed the world and signaled the end of innocence and spawned a new greatest generation, but also launched a thousand new slogans with which to label that day, and inspired thousands of speeches intent on inspiring thousands more.

However, despite the horror, anger, uncertainty—and yes, for some, glee—from the damage inflicted on that momentous day, there remained, in the aftermath and up to now, a limited vocabulary within the mainstream with which to describe the events of that time and the trail of destruction that followed.

And since we aren’t anticipating a commemorative circuitous flight over the country on Air Force One with the President of the United States, we would like to offer an alternate journey—that is, a survey of Verso’s responses to 9/11:

We begin with Tariq Ali’s Clash of Fundamentalisms, which provides a historical perspective to the events leading up to September 11, 2001. And the lead-up was expanse: Ali begins his account in the seventh century and only arrives at 9/11 by chapter 21, eliminating any pretense that what happened on 9/11 started with 9/11.

Then, on the first anniversary of the attacks, Verso published a series of three books by notable European intellectuals diversifying the context on the scenes which 9/11 produced. The series featured Jean Baudrillard with The Spirit of Terrorism, Paul Virilo with Ground Zero, and Slavoj Žižek with Welcome to the Desert of the Real.

Reflecting on the meanings granted to the deaths on 9/11, Judith Butler’s Precarious Life explores “the differential allocation of grievability that decides what kind of subject is and must be grieved, and which kind of subject must not, operates to produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human: what counts as a livable life and a grievable death?”

Meanwhile, in Afflicted Powers, the Retort collective finds that the ideas expounded by Debord and the Situationists established a suitable home in 9/11.

Susan Buck-Morss calls for a global public sphere with room for inclusion for Islamism in Thinking Past Terror.

Jacqueline Rose confronts evil in “The Body of Evil: Arendt, Coetzee and 9/11,” as part of The Last Resistance: “When you accuse someone of evil, history disappears. In the great and uneven distribution of the world’s resources, it becomes strictly irrelevant where or who they are.”

Speaking of which, Osama bin Laden’s words gave Verso a surprising plug this year when conservative talk radio host Chuck Morse reviewed Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden. Morse referred to Verso as “a very fashionable leftist book publisher.” (And who doubts him? Anybody who’s anybody is wearing Verso these days.) Yet Morse inferred from this impeccable observation that by publishing bin Laden’s statements, Verso had surely restored bin Laden to his rightful place as a full-fledged Communist—a deduction whose antecedents are more Glenn Beck than Žižek.

Verso author Simon Critchley cites from one of bin Laden’s statements, “The Towers of Lebanon” (chapter 23), in his recent 9/11 contribution to the New York Times online, “The Cycle of Revenge”—one of a series of appearances Critchley is making during this anniversary period.

In What Happened Here, Eliot Wieinberger gives a first-hand account of life in his home town in chapters entitled “New York: The Day After,” “New York: Three Weeks After,” “New York: Four Weeks After,” “New York: One Year After,” and “New York: Sixteen Months After.”

And while many commentators were quick to compare 9/11 to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, John Berger in Hold Everything Dear was reminded of August 6, 1945, the day the US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The comparison was not in quantity of casualties—which would not register on the same scale—but rather:

The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki announced that the United States was henceforth the supreme armed power in the world. The attack of 11 September announced that this power was no longer guaranteed invulnerability on its home ground. The two events mark the beginning and end of a certain historical period.

Michael Sorkin evokes 9/11 in several essays appearing in All Over the Map, discovering its remnants finely dispersed throughout the urban landscape of New York.

While in Cities Under Siege, Stephen Graham situates 9/11 in the context of “the new military urbanism” and notes that

at least a hundred nationalities were represented on the list of the dead that grim day, and many of those people were “illegal” immigrants working in New York City ... Posthumously, the dead of 9/11 were aggressively nationalized, re-emerging as heroic Americans whose deaths necessitated a global war orchestrated through Manichaean renderings of world geography. The transformation is ironic, to put it kindly, given that many would no doubt have been struggling as “illegal aliens” to attain such nationalization during their lifetime.

Tom Engelhardt reminds readers in The World According to TomDispatch that the Pentagon was attacked as well, but he does so only to wipe it completely from their memories:

On the fifth anniversary of September 11, there will, for instance, be no memorial documentaries focusing on American Flight 77, which plowed into the Pentagon. That destructive but non-apocalyptic-looking attack didn’t satisfy the same built-in expectations. Though the term “ground zero Washington” initially floated through the media ether, it never stuck.

Beyond the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, 9/11 evokes those heady days of anthrax, the DC sniper and excessive (even for the United States) flag displays. In Portents of the Real, Susan Willis gives us a critical look at such unexpected cultural markers of that time.

Finally, we cannot complete our 9/11 survey without acknowedging the other September 11, the one with the scenes of smoke and fine dust billowing from the Presidential Palace of Chile in 1973.

Verso titles that provide context to that time include The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende's Chile by Jonathan Haslam, Pinochet and Me by Marc Cooper, The Trial of Henry Kissinger by a pre-9/11 (2001, that is) Christopher Hitchens, and Emir Sader’s forthcoming book, The New Mole: Paths of the Latin American Left.

Melissa Benn's School Wars—reviews, debates and interviews

School Wars, Melissa Benn's impassioned exploration of the inequalities of our current education system, has been reviewed in the Guardian by Andy Beckett and in the Observer by Anthony Seldon.

Finding Benn's "measured tone refreshing, in a debate usually full of denunciations", Andy Beckett engaged with her position in the book:

Benn already finds the status quo - if the ever-shifting world of English education can be said to have one - alarming. With the fluent indignation of the committed activist, she writes: "Most state schools occupy an uncomfortable space between public and private; they are neither business enterprises, nor a robust public service ...

Driven by league tables, [they] are expected to deliver ever higher standards and improved results without the necessary resources, judged against far more selective or far better resourced schools." Alongside this bracing polemic runs a warmer current of idealism about what state education can achieve: "A good local school is a mix of self-interest and shared interest that transcends, and nullifies, the values of profit and consumption, commerce and customer." When I'm rushing for pick-up at my children's primary, jostling with the other work-fried parents, school life doesn't feel as elevated as that; but from more collaborative school occasions, I know what she means.

Whilst himself a proponent of 'parental choice' in a schools marketplace, Anthony Seldon commended Benn's "powerful vision" and gave high praise in a review for the Observer.

This is a tremendous book. It is a passionate polemic about the most important policy divide of the day, schooling, the area changing more at the hands of the coalition government than any other. It is powerful but also reasonably argued, and avoids the spite which is common in the "school wars".

The book is pithy and benefits from being very well written (as befits the author of two published novels). Melissa Benn's conviction emanates not merely from being on the ideological left; it is informed by her own experience, too.

In addition, Benn has been interviewed by Peter Wilby for the Guardian. In a wide-ranging profile, she emphasised the need to inspire a public affection for the comprehensive system akin to that felt for the NHS.

Education's problems go back to 1944. The NHS became a symbol of common citizenship but education couldn't because it divided 20% of the population from the other 80%. Ed Miliband recently talked of the things that bind us together, but he didn't mention schools. People are always talking about the importance of churches, post offices and pubs to communities, but not about schools. If we make the political weather, we can change that.

At certain points in the profile, Wilby's descriptions of Benn's life and views differed from how she would have herself characterised them. Details of her corrections and commentary can be found on her website.

She was also interviewed for the Huffington Post and discussed, amongst other things, about the nature of education, and whether schools are about more than just grades:

It's more about education being more than just exams. It's about learning about life. You can't measure schools like St Paul's in London and Lilian Baylis in Kennington by the same league table. How can you compare those two schools? The latter is taking children the education system is trying to get rid of and giving them an education and their GCSE results are pretty stellar given their intake. I find league tables pernicious, deceitful and unhelpful. It's crazy to set schools up like rival shops.

Benn has also contributed to a series of debates recently. For the Guardian she took part in a rigorous roundtable debate on the 21st century challenges facing schools in light of the Free School initiative. For Prospect, Melissa engaged in a penetrating debate with Rachel Wolfe, director of the New Schools Network, on the whether Free Schools will raise education standards.

Radio Four's Woman's Hour featured an animated discussion between Melissa and Anne McElvoy, Public Policy Editor for the Economist, on schooling today and how it may develop in future years.

Visit the Guardian to read Andy Beckett's and the Observer to read Antony Seldon's review in full. Visit the Guardian and the Huffington Post to read the interviews in full.

Visit the Guardian and Prospect to read the debates on free schools in full. The Woman's Hour discussion can be heard in full on iplayer or their site.

"Rage is a defining feature of our times": Sujatha Fernandes on riots, social critique, and the global hip hop community

With conservatives in Britain blaming "black street culture" for the recent London riots, it's time to reconsider hip hop's power as a tool for social critique, writes sociologist Sujatha Fernandes—author of Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation—for the Huffington Post:

Five years ago, the American rapper Nas proclaimed that "Hip Hop is Dead." But while hip hop culture may have succumbed to the music industry in the U.S., four decades after its birth in the Bronx, rap music has become the soundtrack to the social unrest sweeping the globe from Tunisia to Libya and London.

Following the tracks of uprisings around the world, Fernandes explains that for young people living on the edge of globalization, hip hop and rap culture provide a means of creative resistance and self-organization, insistently calling attention to the same social fissures that lead to uprisings:

Many were shocked by the recent riots in London, sparked after the killing of a black man. But if we look to the recent history of major riots sparked by police violence, from the beating of Rodney King in the 1992 LA rebellion to the police-caused deaths of North African teenagers in the 2005 Paris riots, the events are not surprising at all ... British rappers and emcees from dancehall-hip hop-garage influenced grime music have been warning about the explosive potential of police harassment, youth unemployment, and cutbacks for some time.

Some of these tracks, Fernandes notes, are as threatening to the political establishment as they are to the artistic one, with mixtapes and insurrectionary ideas often spreading in unison and boosting each other's signals:

In the revolutionary movements sweeping the Arab world, rap music has emerged as a soundtrack for youth rebellion. Rap songs protesting police violence and authority have spread from Tunisia to Egypt through Youtube, ringtones and MP3s. The Tunisian rapper El Général was arrested and detained by the regime for his biting rhymes. But his music spread through Facebook and Al Jazeera television coverage, and upon his release he became an icon for the movement in his own nation and beyond.

Yet this alliance between radical politics and hip hop isn't new– hip hop culture has been a global phenomenon from early on, as the introduction to Close to the Edge—recently excerpted by PopMatters—emphasizes:

By the early 1980s the global circulation of hip hop through the music industry was being paralleled by the efforts of hip hop ambassadors like Afrika Bambaataa to spread a message of black brotherhood and unity.

Taking advantage of world tours to promote political education and race-consciousness along with their music, Black diasporic artists developed strong followings across continental and linguistic divides, with verses, beats and politics taking root in the streets of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe:

Bambaataa's mission, to forge a global hip hop community, echoed the aspirations of the Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey. His mission was taken up by the next three generations. Chuck D of Public Enemy took Garvey's vision of a black planet around the globe in the late 1980s, visiting local communities while on foreign tours. The Black August Hip Hop Project was formed in the late 1990s to draw connections between radical black activism and hip hop culture. The group organized exchanges between militant rappers in the US, Cuba, and South Africa. And the new millennium was the era of diasporic rappers, who forged a politics of global solidarity from within the heart of empire.

And in the decades that have followed,

Four generations of hip hop ambassadors have traversed the globe with the desire to transcend their immediate realities and link up with others through a universal politics of justice.

Visit the Huffington Post to read the article in full.

Visit PopMatters to read the excerpt in full.

Gareth Peirce interviewed on Democracy Now!

English human rights solicitor and Dispatches from the Dark Side author Gareth Peirce joined Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, where she discussed recently uncovered files detailing ties between U.S. and British intelligence and the Gaddafi regime's torture of dissidents.

In response to Prime Minister Cameron and President Obama's rejection of investigations into torture and extraordinary rendition, Peirce says,

It is absolutely critical that this not be put to rest, it's critical that if it's investigated, it be done publicly. Every organization in the world that has experience in how to eradicate torture insists upon two essential ingredients: first, that all the data that reveals torture is publicly known and understood; and secondly, that those on whose watch it happened, who were responsible, be brought to account. And neither of those preconditions is in existence in the construct that is present in Britain at the moment.

As for the prospects of human rights in the new Libya and internationally, Peirce comments,

Governments, yours and mine, have constantly not just backed the wrong horse—it isn't that simplistic a choice—we have backed and encouraged leaders of those countries that have been monsters, who have oppressed their people. If ever there was a moment for a revolution in our thinking, this is it.

Long live low theory!—McKenzie Wark on the legacy and continued relevance of Situationism

On his whirlwind tour through the UK, McKenzie Wark (author of The Beach Beneath The Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International) has given a number of fascinating interviews on the contemporary relevance of Situationist thought and practice. In an interview with STIR, over a game of Guy Debord's own Game of War no less, Wark suggests revisiting the Situationist canon in order to make sense of the commodity form (both virtual and real) and resist the institutionalization of knowledge:

So, why look at this stuff again? Well, if you are interested in how to think critically about everyday life, how to think and act outside of institutionalized forms of knowledge, in ways of inventing practices that are at least partially outside of the commodity system, then they are great precursors for dozens of things happening now such as Copy Left and Creative Commons on one side and forms of autonomous organizations in the media on the other.

One of the most valuable legacies of Situationism, although by no means unique to it, is the importance of "low theory," or the autonomous production of knowledge outside of institutional channels:

I am interested in low theory, which comprise those somewhat rarer moments when, coming out of everyday life, you get a certain milieu that can think itself. It happens when there is a mixing of the classes (another thing higher education doesn't do). It happens in certain spaces that we used to call bohemia. Low theory is the attempt to think everyday life within practices created in and of and for everyday life, using or misusing high theory to other ends. It happens in collaborative practices that invent their own economies of knowledge.

Situationism is often mistakenly credited with inciting the French revolt of 1968 instead of being a mere cultural component of the general collective consciousness. The Observer's Christopher Bray takes this common error to the point of hyperbole by suggesting that without Debord, there "would have been no David Bowie, no Tracey Emin, no Sex Pistols, no Wachowski brothers ... Certainly there would have been no Jean Baudrillard." While he was certainly their chief theorist, Wark's book is in fact a rather welcome attempt to decenter the story away from Debord.

In The Beach Beneath the Street I wanted to tell the stories and extract the concepts of some of the figures who have not really been discussed. I have to say, though, now I am in the UK, that it is British comrades who have done a lot of work in saying that is not just about Debord-it's also about Jacqueline De Jong, Alexander Trocchi, Asger Jorn.

Retrieving this lost past speaks to the present, or as he tells an interviewer from Berfois it can help illuminate the darkness of the present political moment:

At the moment, there is a real fetishising of ‘the Political', and I think that in an era when politics is so miserably failing, why are our philosophers fetishising ‘the Political'? Isn't that the last place you'd want to go? So Constant asks, why don't we think of the infrastructural organisation of life, and how that could be done differently?

Rethinking and redesigning politics and theory in everyday life were, of course, enduring Situationist legacies that have inspired countless theorists. There exists, however, a great tension between this theory and radical practice, between the imagined and the real; a contradiction that Situationists were not afraid of. While our Observer reviewer considers this "a book for anyone not convinced that there is no alternative to the way we live now," the Situationist dream of a better world seems to lie in a murkier realm— somewhere in the drink soaked streets of Paris, between the conceptual and the practical. As Wark puts it:

I think critique should press to the limit and Situationist's critique is a good example of the critique of the totality of everyday life, but their actions are modest and particular. Theirs is a kind of negative action that keeps alive the distance between what can be thought and what can be done ... One can do both at same time: one's practices are specific but one's ambition, conceptually, should be the world-and we live in the gap between the two.

White Riot editors on punk, race and politics for the Guardian Music Weekly

White Riot editors Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay discussed punk, race and politics with Alexis Petridis for the Guardian Music Weekly podcast.

Going through the 'album' accompanying the book, the editors describe The Clash's 'White Riot' as

the quintessential articulation of radical whiteness ... It has all the complicated notions of the racial identity of punk rock - which is at one and the same time, a radical articulation of racial solidarity and anti-racist sentiment.

We purposely started the book with a non-punk piece, Norman Mailer's 'White Negro', because what we're trying to point out is that punk slips into a long line of bohemian cultural expressions of being able to and desiring to identify with the Other as a way of freeing oneself from white bourgeois restrictions; Patti Smith's 'Rock n Roll Nigger' is exactly within that tradition - and that haunts punk rock for 40 years.

For the full youtube playlist and commentary for White Riot - The Album, compiled by Stephen Dunmore and Maxwell Tremblay, see here.

The editors also elaborate on the controversial inclusion of the 'White Power' by Skrewdriver for the Guardian podcast:

We wanted to make people uncomfortable because there's a very uncomfortable history of punk rock, which is aligned with white power ... the idea is to not to repeat the mistake of so many knee-jerk anti-racist punks and say that Nazism itself is the target, but to rather to look very closely at what these white power bands are doing from a scholarly perspective, and to think about both the differences and strange continuities between the way they articulate themselves and the way the more mainstream status quo punk rock articulates itself.

To play out, Duncombe and Tremblay choose one of the most recent tracks 'The Power of Medusa' by Anti-Product as

It is one of the most potent and relevant for where race and punk rock is at this moment. It's about a Puerto Rican woman attempting to come to terms with white standards of beauty both outside the punk scene and within ...

[Otherwise] it would be a song from a punk band we don't know about in Jakarta, in Mexico City, in Brazil, and so on. Because that's where punk has gone, and when it moves to those places the binaries of black and white, or white and latino, just don't work any more. Instead punks in those countries work out their own complex. And punk evolves in that way.

Ken Olende's review of White Riot for the Socialist Worker tracks on this spread of punk worldwide. Visit the Socialist Worker to read the review in full.

Ben Myers, reviewing for 3:AM, praises the "simultaneously scholarly and digestible" compendium, noting

It's a salient point that underpins this book: the idea that the best punk came not from those who tried to be black - or who saw a flirtation with black culture as a short-cut to shocking the parents - but who identified with reggae's revolutionary spirit and applied it to their own austere times back home. It's no coincidence that the best punk music was made by those sussed enough to reach beyond rock 'n' roll's white archetypes (Presley, Vincent, Cochran etc) and take a broader sonic world view: The Clash, The Ruts, The Slits, PiL and, slightly later in post-punk, The Pop Group, Scritti Politti, Gang Of Four, New Age Steppers and co... What White Riot shows is that - excuse the pun - race is not a black and white issue. It is much more complex than that. Gradients and subtleties are at play and no two people - let alone two races - think, act or live the same.

Visit 3:AM to read the review in full.

Visit the Guardian to listen to the podcast in full.

Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay present: White Riot: The Album

Here's something for your ears from while you're perusing White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race: an 'album' of songs treated in the text, with commentary by yours truly. Bop along, enjoy - though not the Skrewdriver track, which is offered only in the interest of scholarly completeness - and hear how different punks have lived and negotiated racial identity.

1. The Clash: 'White Riot'

Composed after witnessing black youth fight back against police presence - at the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival - "White Riot" calls for white youth to do the same, to have a "riot of [their] own." Its message of anti-racist solidarity with people of color is still, to this day, characteristic of most white punks, but it still problematically frames punk, at its inception, as an exclusively white phenomenon.

2. Patti Smith: 'Rock n Roll Nigger'

Here, in a gesture that was somewhat common in white bohemian culture at the time, Smith tries to redefine the term "nigger" as a badge of honor that could be shared by society's outcasts, in particular, other white bohemians. The gesture is problematic in countless ways - it is clearly a mark of white privilege to think that such a poisonous racial slur could simply be taken up and appropriated by anyone - and places Smith in a tradition of fetishizing racial others for what is thought to be some quasi-mystical transgressive power.

3. Bob Marley: 'Punky Reggae Party'
On this track, Marley offers a vision of the kind of interracial aesthetic solidarity the Clash called for: punk bands and reggae artists, playing together, finding common ground in being "rejected by society." This is both a realistic picture of the influence of reggae on early punk rock, but also a kind of idealized vision, which reinforces white punks' understanding of their own anti-racism.

4. X: 'White Girl'

X have written songs that manifest punk's (white) inchoate rage against otherness, like "Los Angeles" which attempts to perform society's decline by using a litany of racial epithets, and have come under rigorous criticism for it. Here, however, they show us a characteristic gesture of punk's approach to whiteness: the category, rather than remaining the de facto and dubious ‘neutral' as it does in society at large, becomes marked and identified, a category that must be thought through, critiqued and justified.

5. Black Flag: 'White Minority'

Written as a satire of anti-immigrant zealots and sung by Ron Reyes, who is Latino, "White Minority" is still often interpreted as expressing a sincere fear of whites becoming a minority in Los Angeles. This indicates both the tricky nature of irony in songs written from the first person perspective, as well as the accessibility of oppositional rage at the other to legions of young white punks.

6 The Plugz: 'La Bamba'

One of the first instances of a punk band singing in Spanish, The Plugz were both ironically protesting the stereotypes associated with Mexican-American identity and also sincerely trying to navigate what that identity meant. Not only does this provide another example among countless others that punk, despite its own narrative framing, was never exclusively white, but it also shows a perhaps uniquely ‘punk' way of negotiating issues of identity: with a sense of both investment and distance, of sincerity and satire.

7. Minor Threat: 'Guilty of Being White'

Ian MacKaye gives voice on this tune to the sort of oppositional white rage and fear that "White Minority" is often thought to endorse, lashing out at the black residents of his native Washington, D.C. for associating him with the historical abuses of whites. But MacKaye's misstep, of course, is that he is associated with that history, and benefits from white privilege. However, there's a kind of truth to what MacKaye is struggling with, which is what whiteness means as a punk.

8. Bad Brains: 'Attitude'

"We got that PMA!" shouts Bad Brains vocalist H.R. on one of their most famous songs, appropriating an old motivational slogan about "positive mental attitude" for his own ends. The all-black band not only showed that they were more than capable of doing the same with punk by speeding it the hell up and wedding it to reggae, but their interest in Rasta proved a kind of structural model for punk political commitment - to anarchism, straight edge, etc.

9. Skrewdriver: White Power

As abhorrent as white power skinheads are, no examination of race in punk would be complete without thinking through what they represent. Additionally, current events have resulted in the partial mainstreaming of ideas not too far off from those expressed in this track - I'm looking at you, David Starkey - making it all the more imperative that we understand their attraction in order to confront them. Nazi racists are often quite candid about why punk appeals to them as a vehicle for their hate, and this track by white power punks Skrewdriver, with a chorus both horrifying and objectively catchy, shows it: they want to get in kids' heads, and will use whatever means they can to do so. And punk rock music - with its sheen of outsider rebellion and shout-along choruses - has proven quite effective in this regard.

10. Alien Kulture: Asian Youth

Race in punk for most of its history was understood along the overly simple white/black binary. As punks of color, how do you disrupt this binary and fight back? If you're the three second-generation Pakistani immigrants of British band Alien Kulture, you write ripping Clash-inspired songs chronicling your own experience of the in-between. In this tune, they illustrate how punk provided a way of living a different version of their own race and ethnicity, at the same time contesting the dominant racist culture, their own cultural inheritance, and the intransigence of youth culture itself.

11. Anti-Product: The Power of Medusa

Raging out of Albany, New York, Anti-Product's Puerto Rican front-woman Taina Del Valle indicts the oppressive strictures of white standards of beauty over driving crust. Del Valle also chafed against the aesthetic boundaries of punk rock, incorporating poetry and conga drumming into her live performance - a tactic which inspired a fair amount of reactionary dismissal from white punk audiences, illustrating the possible ties between punk's relatively monochromatic demographics and sound.

12. Los Crudos: We're that Spic Band

Los Crudos were one of the most universally adored hardcore bands of the 1990s, and challenged the white punk status quo by both singing in Spanish and filling in the effaced history of Latinos in punk rock - giving the lie to punk's usual characterization of itself as white. This track, their only one in English, directly counters the racism of fans who both dismissed and tokenized them as "that Spic Band."

Croatian students were the first!

Springtime: The New Student Rebellions covers student revolts beginning in the autumn of 2009, jumping from the UK to Italy to California to France to Greece to Tunisia. But as Verso reader Miroslav Andjelic points out, Croatia was already in the midst of its own revolt over the imposition of tuition fees in higher education.

And here’s the proof:

Blokada (“Blockade”) is a 90-minute documentary film on the student protests in Croatia—focusing on the spring 2009 occupation at the University of Zagreb—in what became the largest Croatian student uprising since the “Croatian Spring” in 1971.

According to the official synopsis:

The film chronologically follows the preparatory meetings of a group of students who plan to take over their faculty’s building during one week, the action of taking over the building by the students and the process of communication and the attempts of these students to communicate with authorities. After the initial week it becomes clear that the blockade is becoming bigger than its initiators and the method of blocking classes spreads to about twenty other faculties around the country, it goes on for 34 days and becomes the number one media topic in Croatia. The film follows the lives of the participants during the blockade, the conflicts between them and their uncompromising joint struggle, and finally the deliberation on the decision to cease the blockade and continue the campaign through other actions.

Directed by Igor Bezinović, Blokada is still in post-production and is set to premiere in early 2012.

September: the month of White Riot

For all you punk rock and critical race theory fans out there, three NYC White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race events to stimulate your mind and your ears:

Sunday, September 18th, 7:30pm | Film Screenings and Discussion | UnionDocs | 322 Union Ave Brooklyn | L to Lorimer or G to Metropolitan

A look at the varied voices that have explored punk rock and race in film, featuring selections from Rude Boy, Decline of Western Civilization, Afro-punk, Mas alla de los gritos/Beyond the Screams and The Punks Are Alright

Suggested donation $9; click here for more info

Thursday, September 22nd, 8pm | Book Release Party / SLEEPiES Show | Death By Audio | 49 South 2nd Street (between Wythe & Kent), Brooklyn | L to Bedford

SLEEPiES show (with White Riot co-editor Max Tremblay on the drums), plus discussion with journalist and music writer Siddhartha Mitter and other special guests at DIY punk space Death by Audio

Free; click here for more info

Thursday, October 6th, 7pm | Literary Listening Party | Strand Books | 828 Broadway, New York | near Union Square

Listen to key records that illuminate punk rock's racial dimensions, and dish with the editors about the ways the Clash, Patti Smith, Black Flag, Los Crudos, Alien Kulture, Bad Brains, Minor Threat, Bob Marley and other punks have lived and negotiated racial identity, as they present an "album" of songs treated in the text. Held in the legendary Strand Books' 3rd floor Rare Book Room.

Buy the book or a $10 Strand Gift Card to admit two people; click here for more info

Steve, Max and special guests will also appear at the Baltimore Book Festival Saturday, September 24th at 6pm, in the Radical Bookfair Pavilion being organized by Red Emmas, for a discussion on the intersections of music, identity, privilege, and solidarity.

More info here

...and at Wooden Shoe Books, 704 South Street Philadelphia, PA to do readings from the book.

More info here

"America's most invigorating writer on architecture"—Praise for Michael Sorkin's All Over The Map

Michael Sorkin's All Over the Map: Writing on Buildings and Cities, just published in hardback by Verso, has been garnering its fair share of praise on both sides of the Atlantic from popular media and urban design publications alike. The Guardian's architecture critic Rowan Moore has described Sorkin as "an enraged but forever hopeful liberal" wandering the streets of his dear lower Manhattan with a keen eye and sharp tongue for those corporate architects—watch out Rem Koolhaas—and their fawning critics "who dress the works that crush the freedoms." If there is a narrative that runs through these essays, it is in the particulate of September 11th that still coats Sorkin's architectural psyche:

The most persistent theme is the architectural response to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre, which happened in Sorkin's neighbourhood, early in the time span of All Over the Map. He combines his usual astute analysis of the politics with his own ideas of what might be built there—"A World Peace Dome" for example.

A review in the UK Telegraph cites a rather amusing but telling anecdote from the book: Sorkin claims to have stood up in a public meeting on the fate of Ground Zero and bellowed "Bullshit!" at the moderators. This announcement encapsulates Aldo van Eyck's statement, quoted in his introduction, that "democracy means no freedom for fascism!" Sorkin's radical suggestion for Ground Zero was remarkable, but rather unsurprisingly failed to influence tycoon developers:

Sorkin's preference, which he championed in the face of the winning proposal by "starchitect" Daniel Libeskind, was to create a large, empty square in which freedom could be expressed by the simple means of human movement and assembly. New York would renew itself by returning to the original function of a city, a way of bringing people together in an ever-changing community.

Sorkin is masterful in both criticizing the imagineering of corporate landscapes and conceptualizing utopian alternatives of his own. Writing in Canada's Spacing Magazine, Sean Ruthen describes Sorkin's hallucinatory journey from post-911 New York to "a whole new urban plan for the displaced commercial space and imagining it all distributed through the boroughs rather than continuing to concentrate it all in one place." Similarly, Architecture Today praises Sorkin's ability "to yoke two heterogeneous thoughts or experiences together in ways which illuminate both."

His eye ranges widely, taking in the turbo-charged growth of Asian cities, petro-development in Latin America and the contested spaces of the Middle East... Although the subjects are locally-specific, the topics—among them large-scale regeneration, participatory planning and the security agenda—are equally pertinent in cities from Manchester to Madrid.

Sorkin's imaginative landscapes are so powerful that the Telegraph proposes a second career move."If the architectural work dries up, Sorkin would make a fascinating novelist."

"Education is in the streets"—Springtime reviewed in Inside Higher Ed

The incredulity of media and government at the recent London riots indicates a remarkably short historical memory. If they had a copy of Springtime: The New Student Rebellions at hand, they would have had a textual reference for both the horrors of police brutality and the simmering anger of students, workers and the poor. But unlike the London rioters, the student protesters of Springtime have introduced, what an Inside Higher Ed review calls "a new vocabulary of protest." The review refers to the "book bloc" phenomenon as one such example:

By the time an enormous anti-Berlusconi protest took place in Rome on December 14, a group of Italian faculty members had decided on a syllabus of 20 titles worth carrying into battle. It's all over the place: The Odyssey and Fahrenheit 451, Spinoza's Ethics and Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto, Foucault and Fight Club. And so when the forces of law and order descended on the protesters, swinging, it was a visual allegory of culture in the age of austerity—budget-cutting raining blows on the life of the mind, though also, perhaps, the canon as defensive weapon.

Written with the "adrenaline and endorphins still flowing," the book has the feel of a "scrapbook—with articles, photographs, and street posters taped in alongside printouts of Twitter exchanges." Appropriately citing Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire, the reviewer objects to the "jarringly inapposite" inclusion of 60s boomer nostalgia as a "nightmare on the brains of the living."

The relevance of the slogans of 1968 (with their assumptions about alienation amid growing affluence and free time) is now just about nil. Maybe we should forget them for a while. The student protests of the past two years have resembled wildcat strikes or factory occupations more than reenactments of the Free Speech Movement or Vietnam-era teach-ins.

While the lessons of the past are by no means irrelevant, the struggles of Springtime are indeed unique creations of neoliberal states, the ennui of postfordism and the rapid commodification of knowledge and learning. This multi-faceted rage is reflected in the book's structure, which outlines the

contemporary overlap of problems: the economic pressures on all levels of education, on the one hand; and the difficulty of defining education's social value when the labor market can't absorb many new graduates, on the other. ("A university diploma is now worth no more than a share in General Motors," in the words of an acerbic pamphlet from the California protests.)

Visit Inside Higher Ed to read the review in full.

"From Progress to Catastrophe"—Perry Anderson on the historical novel

In an essay for the London Review of Books, Perry Anderson discusses the changing forms of the historical novel, charting its development throughout the 19th and 20th century. Using the "best-known of all works of Marxist literary theory", Lukács's The Historical Novel, as a starting point, Anderson reflects on the "strange career" of the form in an essay traversing War and Peace, Alexandre Dumas, and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.

Examining the classical forms of the genre, Anderson writes:

For Lukács, the historical novel was essentially epic in form. It was an extensive representation, in Hegelian terms, of the ‘totality of objects', as opposed to the more concentrated ‘totality of movement' proper to drama. But if this is a plausible description of the origins of the form, it cannot account for its diffusion. There, it was not an aspiration to epic totality that would ensure the enormous popularity of fictions about the past, but rather the pre-constituted repertoire of scenes or stories of that history, still overwhelmingly written from the standpoint of battles, conspiracies, intrigues, treacheries, seductions, infamies, heroic deeds and deathless sacrifices - everything that was not prosaic daily life in the 19th century. Here was the road, so to speak, from Jeanie Deans to Milady. The historical novel that conquered European reading publics in the second half of the 19th century would not offend patriotic sentiment, but no longer had a nation-building vocation. The Three Musketeers and its innumerable imitations were entertainment literature.

Side by side with it, persisted ‘high' forms of the genre. Now, however, the typical development was for leading authors to try their hand at the historical novel, composing one or two such works in a corpus otherwise devoted to realistic representations of contemporary life. Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities, Henry Esmond, Romola and Salammbô illustrate this pattern. Lower down, but still above the stratum of Dumas or Ainsworth, figured writers like Stevenson and Bulwer-Lytton. The central fact to grasp, however (the evidence for this is graphically laid out in Franco Moretti's Atlas of the European Novel), is that the historical novel as a genre predominated massively over all other forms of narrative down to the Edwardian era. It combined enormous market success with continuing aesthetic prestige. In the last season of the Belle Epoque, Anatole France was publishing Les Dieux ont soif, Ford Madox Ford his Fifth Queen; even Conrad would end his career with a couple of historical fictions, set once more in Napoleonic times.

Anderson also examines the impact of the First World War on the writing of the genre, elucidating how styles from the pre-war period were abandoned in line with the rise of modernism.

Twenty years later, the scene was utterly changed. By the interwar period, the historical novel had become déclassé, falling precipitously out of the ranks of serious fiction. There were two body blows to its position in the hierarchy of genres. One was the massacres of the First World War, which stripped the glamour from battles and high politics, discrediting malignant foes and sacrificial heroes alike. Staged by both sides in 1914 as a gigantic historical contest between good and evil, the war left the survivors with a terrible hangover from melodrama. The swashbuckling fare of Weyman or Sabatini looked risible from the trenches. But there was also the critical effect of the rise of modernism, broadly construed, to which Jameson has rightly drawn our attention. He points to its primacy of perception as incompatible with totalising retrospect, rendering impossible a modernist version of the kind of historical novel theorised by Lukács. To this could be added its hostility to the corrupting effects of aesthetic facility – to all that was too readily or immediately available – which struck down the popular and middlebrow versions of the historical novel still more stringently.

Thus if we look at the interwar scene, the historical novel becomes a recessive form, at virtually all levels, in Europe. In the United States, on the other hand, shielded from the shock of the war, Faulkner produced a Gothic variant, flinching before no melodramatic licence, in Absalom, Absalom, while at a less ambitious level its middle range flourished as never before – Thornton Wilder, for example, enjoying a reputation that would have seemed odd in Europe. More spectacularly, Gone with the Wind, a tale of Civil War and Reconstruction with a lightweight resemblance to the romantic nation-building fiction of the previous century, became the most successful historical novel of all time. Significantly, what Europe produced in this middle market mode was principally Robert Graves’s I Claudius, the mental escape of a First World War veteran into antiquity, later fodder for a slack television serial. At a higher level, similar reflexes generated a cluster of historical novels by German exiles – the elder Mann, Döblin, Broch, Brecht – in which Fascism was allegorised into the past, as the rise of Julius Caesar, mobs howling for Augustus, or the killers of the Catholic League, in a deliberately modernising spirit completely at variance with the classical conception of the historical novel.

In the past thirty years, the historical novel has undergone "one of the most astonishing transformations in literary history" - the romaticised portrayal of past heroic figures and proud nation-building struggles being abandoned as post-modernism took hold on the genre.

Military tyranny; race murder; omnipresent surveillance; technological war; and programmed genocide. The persistent backdrops to the historical fiction of the postmodern period are at the antipodes of its classical forms. Not the emergence of the nation, but the ravages of empire; not progress as emancipation, but impending or consummated catastrophe. In Joycean terms, history as a nightmare from which we still cannot wake up. But if we look, not at the sources or themes of this literature, but at its forms, Jameson suggests we should reverse the judgment. The postmodern revival, by throwing verisimilitude to the winds, fabricating periods and outraging probabilities, ought rather to be seen as a desperate attempt to waken us to history, in a time when any real sense of it has gone dead.

Still, he concludes, in just these conditions does not the Lukácsian connection between great social events and the existential fate of individuals remain typically out of reach? Benjamin, who detested the idea of progress nurtured by 19th-century historicism, would not have been surprised, or perhaps felt much regret. He used yet another image of awakening. The angel of history is moving away from something he stares at. ‘Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed.' Part of the impulse behind the contemporary historical novel may also lie here.

Vist the London Review of Books to read the full article.

New Left Review—new issue out now

The July/ August issue of the New Left Review has been released, featuring, amongst others, the following essays:

Malcolm Bull: Levelling Out

Beyond existing articles about equality, might the praxes of permanent and passive revolution offer a way to conceptualise a more expansionary levelling? Drawing on motifs from Nietzsche, Babeuf, Marx and Gramsci, Malcolm Bull traces the contours and consequences of extra-egalitarianism.
Malcolm Bull is the author of the forthcoming Verso book, Anti-Nietzsche.

Kheya Bag: Rise and Fall of Red Bengal

After the CPM's ejection from office in Calcutta, how to explain the remarkable longevity of its rule and causes of its eventual downfall? Kheya Bag surveys the record of its three decades in power, and the mechanisms that sustained - and subverted - the party's hold on the state.

This issue also features the following two book reviews:

Tony Wood on Anabel Hernández, Los senores del narco. The structures of political complicity and corruption that have fuelled Mexico's drug wars.
Tony Wood is the author of Chechnya.

Alexander Zevin on Paige Arthur, Unfinished Projects. Restoring Sartre's engagements with decolonization and anti-imperialism to their rightful place within his oeuvre.
Paige Arthur's Unfinished Projects is available in both hardback and paperback.

Visit the New Left Review website to access the current issue.

Bill McKibben arrested during Tar Sands protest

Activist and writer Bill Mckibben has been arrested in Washington DC this weekend while protesting against TransCanada's proposed plans to build a pipeline that would carry oil from the Alberta tar sands 1,700 miles to Texas.

Mckibben, who penned the introduction for I'm With the Bears, was campaigning as part of plans to raise awareness of the project and prevent its construction. Although he knew that he and fellow protesters risked arrest prior to the demonstration taking place, in a post for Red, Green and Blue, Mckibben emphasised the importance of spreading the message about these plans.

1) This is really really important. Jim Hansen, the world’s most important climatologist, has said that if we burn these tar sands in a big way it will be “essentially game over for the climate.” That’s worth reading again. The oil companies and the Koch Bros are willing to take a few years of big profits in return for cratering the planet’s climate system.
Source: Red Green & Blue (http://s.tt/134Cb)

This is really really important. Jim Hansen, the world's most important climatologist, has said that if we burn these tar sands in a big way it will be "essentially game over for the climate." That's worth reading again. The oil companies and the Koch Bros are willing to take a few years of big profits in return for cratering the planet's climate system.

President Obama, thank God, can stop this one all by himself. The endless debate about how much he's been hamstrung by Congress doesn't apply here; the law requires that he, and he alone, sign the necessary certificate that this is in the public interest. If he vetoes it, the pipeline can't be built. As. Simple. As. That.

President Obama, thank God, can stop this one all by himself. The endless debate about how much he’s been hamstrung by Congress doesn’t apply here; the law requires that he, and he alone, sign the necessary certificate that this is in the public interest. If he vetoes it, the pipeline can’t be built. As. Simple. As. That.
Source: Red Green & Blue (http://s.tt/134Cb)

McKibben and some 50 other protesters are being held until a hearing on 2pm Monday.McKibben and other campaigners, including Naomi Klein, had put out a call for direct action:

it's time to stop letting corporate power make the most important decisions our planet faces. We don't have the money to compete with those corporations, but we do have our bodies, and beginning in mid August many of us will use them. We will, each day, march on the White House, risking arrest with our trespass. We will do it in dignified fashion, demonstrating that in this case we are the conservatives, and that our foes-who would change the composition of the atmosphere are dangerous radicals. Come dressed as if for a business meeting-this is, in fact, serious business.

The Tar Sands protest is scheduled to last for two weeks; over 2,000 people have signed up to protest and risk being arrested.

There is speculation that the police are trying to deter the protest so that it does not detract from the dedication of the new Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial in Washington, scheduled for August 28.

Visit Care2 to read more about the arrest, and Red, Green and Blue to read Mckibben's article on the pipeline.

Visit the Tar Sand website to sign a petition to President Obama or, if you're feeling feisty, to volunteer to participate in the August protests.

Alain Badiou on riots and racism: 'Daily Humiliation'

'Daily Humiliation' is from Alain Badiou's Polemics, first published in Le Monde following the riots in Parisian banlieues and throughout France in November 2005.

'Constant identity checks and questioning by police.' Of all the complaints made by the youth of this country in revolt, the omnipresence of police checks and being arrested in their everyday lives, this harassment without respite, is the most constant, the most widely shared. Do we really realize what this grievance means? The dose of humiliation and violence it implies?

I have a 16-year-old, adopted son who is black. Let's call him Gérard. No sociological or misérabiliste 'explanations' can be applied to him. He grew up in Paris, in all simplicity.

Between the March 31 (Gérard wasn't yet 15) and today, I have not been able to keep count of the police checks on him in the street. Innumerable - there is no other word. Arrests: six! In eighteen months . . . I call an 'arrest' being taken handcuffed to the police station, being insulted, being handcuffed to a bench, and left there hours upon end, sometimes for a day or two. All for nothing.

The worst aspects of persecution often lie in the details. So I'll tell you in a quite detailed way about the most recent arrest. Gérard, accompanied by his friend Kemal (born in France, therefore French, from a Turkish family), was outside a private high school (attended by young girls) at about 4:30 pm. While Gérard was displaying his gallantry, Kemal negotiated the purchase of a bike from a student from a neighbouring school. At twenty euros this bicycle was a bargain! Fishy, there's no doubt. Take note that, although he does not have many, Kemal has a few euros, because he works: he is a chef's assistant in a créperie. Three 'young lads' come up to them. One of them, with a slightly distraught look, says, 'That's my bicycle, a guy borrowed it from me an hour and a half ago and didn't come back with it.' Oh no! So it seems the seller was a 'borrower'. Discussion ensues. Gérard sees only one solution: give the bike back. Ill-gotten gains bring nothing but trouble. Kemal resigns himself to the fact. The lads go off with the machine.

It is at this point that a police car, brakes screeching, pulls up to the kerb. Two of its occupants jump out and pounce on Gérard and Kemal, pinning them to the ground; they then cuff their hands behind their backs, and line them up against the wall. Insults and threats: 'Idiots! Arseholes!' Our two heroes ask what they've done: 'You know damn well! Turn around.' Still hand- cuffed, they are made to face the passers-by in the street: 'Everyone should see who you are and what you did!' A revival of the medieval pillory (they are exposed like this for half an hour), but with a novelty: it's done prior to any judgement, prior even to any accusation. Up pulls a police wagon. 'You're in for it when we've got you alone.' 'You like dogs?' 'There'll be no one to help you at the station.'

The 'young lads ' say, 'They didn't do anything, they gave us the bike back.' Never mind, they're all thrown into the van, Gérard, Kemal, the three 'young lads', and the bike. Is the accursed bike the culprit? It should be stated that it wasn't. That's the last we'll hear of the bike. Moreover, at the station, Gérard and Kemal are separated off from the three 'young lads' and the bike, the three good little 'whites' are sent free back onto the streets. It's another matter for the black and the Turk. Now, they tell us, comes the 'worst' part. Handcuffed to a bench, kicked in the shins every time a policeman passed by them, insults, especially for Gérard: 'Fat pig', 'Filth' . . . This goes on for an hour and a half without their knowing what they're accused of and how they've become criminals. Eventually they're told that they are being kept in detention on suspicion of having committed a gang mugging fifteen days ago. They start feeling really sick, not knowing what will happen. Characteristics of police custody: the body search, the cell. It is 10 pm. At home, I await my son. Two and a half hours later the telephone rings: 'Your son is being held in detention on probability of gang assault.' I love that 'probability'. Meanwhile, a less complicit policeman says to Gérard: 'It doesn't seem to me you've been involved in any of these things. What are you doing here still?' A mystery, indeed.

As regards the black, my son, let's just say that no one recognized him. It's over now, said a cop, a little embarrassed. Accept our apologies. Where did all this trouble come from? A denunciation, again, as always. A supervisor from the girls' school had identified him as the guy who participated in this infamous mugging two weeks before. Wasn't he at all involved then? A black guy and another black guy, you know . . .

Apropos of high schools, supervisors and informing, I'll mention in passing that at the time of the third of Gérard's arrests - as futile and brutal as the five others - his high school had been asked for the photos and school files of all the black students. Yes, you read that right - the black students. And as the file in question was on the police inspector's desk, I'd have to suppose that the secondary school, turned into a police agent, had carried out this curious 'selection.'

We were called well after 10 pm to come to pick up our son: he hasn't done anything; apologies are given. Apologies? Who would be content with that? And I suppose that those from the suburbs don't even have the right to apologies. Who cannot see that the mark of infamy they hope to inscribe in the everyday lives of these kids will have effects, devastating effects? And if the police intend to indicate that, after all, since they are stopped and checked for no reason, it might well happen that, one day, and 'as a group', they are picked up for something, and who would object?

We have the riots we deserve. A state in which what is called public order is only a coupling of the protection of private wealth and dogs unleashed on children of working people and people of foreign origin is purely and simply despicable.

Polemics will be published in paperback in February 2012.

Jonathan Derbyshire on The Beach Beneath the Street for the Guardian and New Statesman

Jonathan Derbyshire reviews McKenzie Wark's The Beach Beneath The Street for the Guardian. He follows the trail of the Situationist International in Britain— where a significant turning point came in 1960 at a "shambolic appearance" at the ICA in London.

It was as romantic revolt rather than social critique that situationism survived in this country. Its principal anglophone representative was the writer Alexander Trocchi, whose novels of disaffected hipsterdom (notably Cain's Book) owe more to William Burroughs and the Beats than they do to, say, Bakunin. Today, Trocchi's influence is felt in the obsessive pamphleteering of the poète maudit Stewart Home, who revived Rumney's London Psychogeographical Association in the early 90s and continues to pledge his allegiance to "non-Debordist situationism". And a vestigial folk memory of situationist dérive ("street ethnography" Wark calls it), as it was practised by Debord and his lettrist comrade Ivan Chtcheglov in Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the 50s, is preserved in the literary peregrinations of Iain Sinclair and Will Self, where psychogeography is parlayed into a kind of Blakean metropolitan mysticism.

The British situationists of the late 60s thought Debord and the others had taken a wrong turn. SI apostate Christopher Gray, whose band of London-based provocateurs King Mob included the future Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, opined: "What they [Debord et al] gained in intellectual power and scope they had lost in terms of the richness and verve of their own everyday lives." The SI, Gray argued, "turned inward". "Cultural sabotage" and "drunken exuberance" had been replaced by theoretical austerity.

Describing the book as "fascinating," Derbyshire nonetheless challenges Wark's focus on the Situationist movement as a whole rather than some of the most famous individuals.

Because he doesn't want to tell that same tale over again, Wark decides to turn the focus away from Debord and to place it instead upon a "large cast of disparate characters" - artists, bohemians and sundry fellow-travellers of the situationist project. "To reduce a movement to a biography," he writes, "is to cut a piece away from what made it of interest in the first place."

Wark is probably right about the limitations of the great man theory of history. But he also declares at the start of the book that his aim is to find in situationism what is "specific to the demands of this present", to tease out its "contemporary resonance". To do that, you can't ignore Debord, who was described recently, without hyperbole, by political historian and theorist Jan-Werner Müller, as the "most innovative Marxist thinker in Europe after 1945".

Although Derbyshire suggests that this approach hinders Wark's ability to make the Situationist ideas relevant to contemporary times, he offers a different line in a subsequent article.

Writing for the New Statesman, he praises the pertinence of Wark's book, saying that it "makes a strong case for the 'contemporary resonance' of situationism." Derbyshire links two recent stories (on the Olympic Stadium's adjacent shopping mall, and on the government's recent white paper on higher education) to the situationist idea of commodity achieving "total occupation of social life" in this country.

Visit the Guardian to read the review in full and the New Statesman to read the article.

McKenzie Wark will be appearing at a number of events in London this week speaking about The Beach Beneath the Street. Visit our events page for details.

COMPETITION: Win the entire Radical Thinkers backlist!

And here are the answers you've all been so patiently waiting for. Congratulations to our incredibly well-read winners!

Get your radical thinking caps on...To celebrate the publication of Set 5 of the Radical Thinkers series, Verso is offering 2 lucky winners the chance to win all available titles in the five sets published to date.

The highly popular series publishes new editions of important works of continental philosophy in beautifully-designed and affordable editions. Covering the full spectrum of critical thought, the series includes work from radical thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Louis Althusser, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Georg Lukács, Jean-Paul Sartre, Theodor Adorno and many more.

First published in 2005, there are now 60 titles in the series. In 2009, set 4 was launched with a stunning and acclaimed new cover design from Rumors, which has become a hallmark of the series. They have been widely praised, including in the Guardian, Bookforum and the New Statesman.

Two winners (one from the US/Canada and one from the rest of the world), will win all available titles in the five series published so far. Two runners up will win a full set 5.

There will be 10 questions in total, each relating to a title from Set 5 of the Radical Thinkers series. Two questions will be posted each day this week. Be warned - they are not easy.

The final questions will be posted at 4pm GMT on Friday 26th August. The winners will be the first person in each territory to email the correct answers to all ten questions after this time. More details will be posted on Friday - please do not attempt to enter before then!

Please do not post the answers on Facebook, Twitter or anywhere else - entries accepted by email only. Any comments posting the answers will be deleted.

Good luck!

Questions

Day 1: Postmodern Geographies and Machiavelli and Us

1. The final chapter in Postmodern Geographies was inspired by which Jorge Luis Borges's short story?

ANSWER: The Aleph

2. Which literary work takes its title(s) from a famous Machiavellian quote on warfare, and is credited by Tony Blair with sparking his interest in politics ?

ANSWER: Isaac Deutscher's 3-volume Trotsky biography

Day 2: Design and Crime and Brecht and Method

3. From which polemic by a Viennese critic of Art Nouveau does Hal Foster take his title?

ANSWER: Ornament and Crime (Alfred Loos)

4. Jameson cites a book of cultural analysis as ‘the most usable form of the Brechtian method.' To which author and title was he referring?

ANSWER: Barthes, Mythologies

Day 3: Comments on the Society of the Spectacle and The Politics of Time

5. The Japanese nuclear crisis was one of the biggest media spectacles of this spring. In Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, Debord cites a British nuclear failure that was hushed up by the British government. By which two names is the English nuclear plant known, and in what year did the failure take place?

ANSWER: Sellafield, Windscale, 1957

6. Peter Osborne's The Politics of Time opens with a quote by Louis Aragon. Name another Verso title (HINT: by a French author) that begins with a quote by a famous surrealist.

ANSWER: Eric Hazan's The Invention of Paris

Day 4: Passwords and The Panopticon Writings

7. In Passwords, Baudrillard borrows the concept of the ‘continental divide’ that occurs in the United States to illustrate the idea of a ‘definitive separation.’ Which natural process does he liken to the continental divide, and with which of his passwords is it connected?

ANSWER: Birth, destiny

8. Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon Writings define the panopticon as "a machine which on assembly is already inhabited by a ghost." Bentham himself inhabits a London locale from beyond the grave. In what context has his name appeared in the media in the last year connected to that location?

ANSWER: Students occupied the Jeremy Bentham room at UCL as part of the November protests.

Day 5: Freudian Slip and ...

9. Sebastiano Timpanaro cites a ‘Freudian slip' made by Heine in regards to a list of feminine characters from Goethe. Listing ‘a Filina, a Kathchen, a Klarchen and such like charming creatures.' Which of that list is commonly thought to have been a slip of the pen, and what name should it be replaced with?

ANSWER: Kathchen, should be replaced by Gretchen.

10. Etienne Balibar's interpretation of which philosopher was informed by Immanuel Wallerstein's analysis of Dutch hegemony in the seventeenth century?

ANSWER: Spinoza

Those in North America, email verso@versobooks.com. For the rest of the world, including the UK, email enquiries@verso.co.uk. Please put RADICAL THINKERS COMPETITION in the subject line or your entry may not be counted. The winners will be announced on Friday 2nd September. Final questions will be available at 4pm GMT. Please do not e-mail before this time.

Bill McKibben on Obama's defining climate change decision

It comes as no surprise that GOP presidential nominee Rick Perry has called climate change a lie and accused scientists of doctoring information to suit their own ends—indeed, these seem to me some of his tamer anti-science assertions. But even the political centre seems averse to calling out climate change skeptics and taking any meaningful steps to reduce emissions—denial by inaction some would call it. In a column in the Washington Post, author and activist Bill McKibben (who penned the introduction for Verso's upcoming I'm With the Bears: Short Stories from a Damaged Planet) takes aim at Obama's climate change intransigence:

Still, the final call rests with Barack Obama, who said the night that he clinched the Democratic nomination in June 2008 that his ascension would mark the moment when 'the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.' Now he gets a chance to prove that he meant it. In basketball terms, he's alone at the top of the key—will he take the 20-foot jumper or pass the ball? It's a rare, character-defining moment. Obama can't escape it simply by saying that someone else will burn the oil if we don't.

At issue is the Keystone XL pipeline, which is set to snake across the continent from the Mordor-like tar sands of Alberta, Canada all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. McKibben and a host of organizations and scientists are calling on Obama to block construction of the pipeline, in what is expected to be

the biggest display of civil disobedience in the environmental movement in decades and one of the largest nonviolent direct actions since the World Trade Organization demonstrations in Seattle back before Sept. 11.

Twenty of the country's leading climate scientists have endorsed the action and encouraged people to head to Washington, including NASA climatologist James Hansen, who explained in a paper issued this summer that emmissions from the Tar Sands would "means it's essentially game over for the climate."

Visit The Washington Post to read Bill McKibben's article in full.

Visit Tar Sands Action to follow the campaign to shut down the Keystone XL pipeline.

'Shoplifters of the World Unite': Slavoj Žižek on the UK riots and the end of revolution

Slavoj Žižek writes for the London Review of Books on the UK riots:

Repetition, according to Hegel, plays a crucial role in history: when something happens just once, it may be dismissed as an accident, something that might have been avoided if the situation had been handled differently; but when the same event repeats itself, it is a sign that a deeper historical process is unfolding. When Napoleon lost at Leipzig in 1813, it looked like bad luck; when he lost again at Waterloo, it was clear that his time was over. The same holds for the continuing financial crisis. In September 2008, it was presented by some as an anomaly that could be corrected through better regulations etc; now that signs of a repeated financial meltdown are gathering it is clear that we are dealing with a structural phenomenon.

We are told again and again that we are living through a debt crisis, and that we all have to share the burden and tighten our belts. All, that is, except the (very) rich. The idea of taxing them more is taboo: if we did, the argument runs, the rich would have no incentive to invest, fewer jobs would be created and we would all suffer. The only way to save ourselves from hard times is for the poor to get poorer and the rich to get richer. What should the poor do? What can they do?

...

Alain Badiou has argued that we live in a social space which is increasingly experienced as ‘worldless': in such a space, the only form protest can take is meaningless violence. Perhaps this is one of the main dangers of capitalism: although by virtue of being global it encompasses the whole world, it sustains a ‘worldless' ideological constellation in which people are deprived of their ways of locating meaning. The fundamental lesson of globalisation is that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilisations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West to East: there is no global ‘capitalist worldview', no ‘capitalist civilisation' proper. The global dimension of capitalism represents truth without meaning

...

The first conclusion to be drawn from the riots, therefore, is that both conservative and liberal reactions to the unrest are inadequate...It is meaningless to ponder which of these two reactions, conservative or liberal, is the worse: as Stalin would have put it, they are both worse.

Visit the London Review of Books to read the full article.

Can't find the new punk? You're not looking hard enough—grime, hip hop and the UK riots

In the days since the UK riots, there's been a strand of commentary lamenting the lack of a musical backdrop equivalent to punk in the 1980s. Last week, Krissi Murison of the NME wrote in the Guardian:

"They [punks] talk of the boredom of living in the council high-rise blocks, of living at home with parents, of dole queues, of the mind-destroying jobs offered to unemployed school-leavers. They talk of how there is nothing to do."...

If that was punk's manifesto in 1976, then here's the closest thing music has to one in 2011: Kill People. Burn Shit. Fuck School. It's a song by Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, whose apathetic anarchy is perhaps a more fitting, if unwitting, soundtrack to the riots of last week than the Clash's...This, though, is apparently what rebellion sounds like in 2011: dead-eyed, mob-like and opportunistic. There's certainly no one else currently trying to articulate anything more meaningful in pop culture.

It's a strange choice of example. Odd Future's nihilistic art-rap is a million miles from the buzzing UK hip hop and grime scenes. While it is easy to underestimate the importance of music outside one's own scene or era (and while Murison has a point about the state of much mainstream music) you really don't have to look far to see that there is a wealth of political expression happening in UK music.

Hip hop and grime occupies much the same space today as punk did in the eighties. As with punk, some appears pretty much apolitical, some expresses a purely emotional response to a contemporary situation, and some provides as biting a political analysis as one would hope to find anywhere.

Back in February, Dan Hancox wrote of how Lethal Bizzle's Pow - a track whose 'riotous energy' was considered so incendiary even the instrumental was banned from clubs - had become the unofficial anthem of the student movement.

Last week, mere days after the riots, Hancox wrote in the Guardian about the UK rap/grime scene's response to the riots:

Two decades ago Chuck D famously described rap music as "the black CNN" - a means of describing the kind of daily lives which the real news network would never care to investigate; by this token, grime and UK rap is the BBC News 24 of the British urban working-class - not necessarily black, not necessarily young, but mostly so....

Grime describes the world politicians of all parties have ignored - its misery (eg Dizzee Rascal's Sitting Here), its volatile energy (Lethal Bizzle's Pow), its gleeful rowdiness (Mr Wong's Orchestra Boroughs), its self-knowledge (Wiley's Oxford Street), its local pride (Southside Allstars' Southside Run Tings).

But grime not only describes the realities of young people today, it has also been vocal in the responses and explanations of the riots. As Hancox writes, grime artists have been involved in political debates for some time Remember Lethal Bizzle calling Cameron a 'donut'? He also said "if you don't pay attention to the youth, it's going to get silly". And it did.

If it seems a little premature for journalists to be asking why UK rap hasn't responded to the riots, it is also unfounded. Writing only two days after the heaviest night of rioting across London, Dan Hancox summarised the musical responses so far:

In only two days we have had Genesis Elijah's raw, captivating a cappella UK Riots...Bashy and Ed Sheeran's Angels Can't Fly seems a bit rushed, but then it presumably was...Reveal's I Predict a Riot, with crushing inevitability, samples Kaiser Chiefs, but is otherwise powerful...Meanwhile dancehall artist Fresharda's response, Tottenham Riot, calls for "more ghetto yout' [who] stand firm and stay strong/ planning dem future in education".

The most extraordinary of the bunch is also the most full-on. They Will Not Control Us, a snarling litany of dispossesion and rage against politicians, police and the media...Talking about firing RPGs at parliament is not what you could call a constructive political response, but it would be ridiculous to say the song is not explicitly political - in its broad-ranging, nihilistic anger against all authority.

These responses are hardly indicative of an apathetic, unengaged youth culture. At the time they are happening, such music scenes rarely appear as cohesive cultural responses to the particular social and political context in which they appear. This is as true of punk then as it is of grime now. But the energy is unmistakable, and to dismiss hip hop and grime as means of political expression because it has no coherent voice is a category mistake.

All over the world, wherever there is social deprivation and large numbers of young people, a unique local rap scene is almost certain to be found. From the banlieues of Paris to the refugee camps of Palestine, from the streets of London to the projects of Los Angeles, from the barrios of Caracas to the townships of South Africa, hip hop has been the soundtrack to social unrest.

Some of these scenes are chronicled in Sujatha Fernandes Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation. She writes:

Rage was a defining feature of our times, and hip hop was a tool for expressing, catalyzing and creatively transforming that rage into social criticism and musical innovation."

Fernandes is writing about 90s LA, but it could just as easily be London, 2011.

Visit the Guardian to read the full Krissi Murison and Dan Hancox articles. See Dan Hancox's blog for more, including this excellent article at Mute on grime and the 'EMA kids'

Sujatha Fernandes' Close to the Edge will be published on 3rd October.

White Riot: Punk and the Politics of Race, edited by Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay, is out on 5th September.

Close to the Edge author and subjects featured in the New York Daily News

The New York Daily News profiles Sujatha Fernandes, Queens College sociology professor, former hip hop MC, and author of Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation. The Daily News article focuses on members of the global hip hop generation immigrating to New York:

As an “Indian-Australian-Portuguese gringa,” Fernandes said settling down here felt natural. “In some ways, I was really looking for home.”

Also profiled are two Cuban-born artists featured in the book, Ariel Fernández Díaz and Julio Cardenas, both of whom now live in New York:

Fernández Díaz says he was captivated by American hip hop and helped bring it to life in Havana, where he ran a festival and a magazine tied to the movement. But he felt like his voice wasn’t being heard in Cuba and grew frustrated, he said.

“I always felt connected with the hip-hop culture of New York,” he said of his decision to leave his country in 2005. He now lives in East Flatbush, Brooklyn.

Visit the New York Daily News to read the article in full.

The Beach Beneath The Street sheds light on the riots of 1968 and 2011— Financial Times review

McKenzie Wark's The Beach Beneath the Street has received more positive reviews, this time from the Financial Times and the Morning Star.

Financial Times architecture critic Edwin Heathcote praises Wark's readable treatment of the Situationist movement; a movement whose "enticing" ideas on boredom, work, protest and and capitalism are particularly pertinent in light of the UK's recent rioting.

Wark's readable explanation of the movement's ideas about how to deal with increasing leisure time in a capitalist context where free time is treated as an extension of service to the consumer society, a kind of enforced consumption, is the best I have read.

Wark has done us a great favour by explaining how situationist ideas (which included a proto-internet, an information super-network free of government control) still represent the sharpest and most surprisingly prescient critiques of the contemporary city.

Michal Boncza, writing for the Morning Star, concurs with this sentiment, noting that the recent UK riots are a reflection of notable themes and ideas expressed by leading Situationist thinkers.

McKenzie Wark's engaging narrative could not have come at a better time - last week's riots demonstrated tragically the profound alienation, even despair, of swathes of urban poor and destitute and minorities' worrying descent into hellish criminality.

Visit the Financial Times and Morning Star to read the reviews in full.

Melissa Benn: School Wars and street wars

In an article for the Guardian, Melissa Benn illuminates the link between the crisis facing Britain's education system, and the recent rioting across the UK.

Benn, author of the forthcoming School Wars: The Battle for Britain's Education, examines the inequality between education for the rich, and education for the poor. She argues that the effects of this divisive issue can be seen as starting to manifest themselves in the social unrest of last week.

Street wars. School wars. We cannot, surely, directly link our much-debated state education system and the chaos we saw in our cities last week. Or can we? The political right has not held back from doing so.

Too often, political leaders blame neighbourhood schools for our social ills, when the truth is that these schools are educating our poorest children, in the most difficult circumstances. Community and comprehensive schools are barely mentioned on the Department for Education website, which now continually emphasises a free schools and academies programme. But community schools will surely play a vital role in the months and years to come, to bring neighbourhoods together, in the wake of this summer's events.

As education and youth service cuts implemented by the coalition take hold, the crisis facing our education system looks set to become even more pertinent in the coming years. Inevitably, it is the poor and disadvantaged who are disproportionately affected by such developments, creating further divides in our already fractious and volatile society.

As well as real-term cuts in education spending, community schools are facing declining revenue and disruptive structural reform, and as a result the private sector will end up taking a much bigger role in our education system. What then, can be done? Benn makes a passionate case for renewing the comprehensive education system:

We need to keep arguing about resources, campaigning for smaller classes, a richer curriculum – for all children, not just the academic ones. We need more apprenticeships, more teachers and the best teachers in the most deprived schools. Non-subject specialists concentrating on mechanised delivery and pushing up test results are the worst teachers possible for our most disengaged youth.

And for those who say we can't afford it, look at how much we are spending on policing and a criminal justice service, mopping up the result of social, and school, failure.

So let's have less panic, and hyperbolic talk of punishment. Let the courts do their jobs, while we in civil society recommit ourselves to a fairer school system, the creation of strong, mixed schools in every community. Long ago, that dream was called the comprehensive, a noble ideal persistently smeared, and now smashed up, by the elitist right. But what's in a name? The principle remains, as vital as ever to a fair and sane society.

Visit the Guardian to read the article in full.

Owen Hatherley on the "horrible logic" of evicting rioters' families

Owen Hatherley condemns the governement reaction to the riots as "brutal," undemocratic and illegal. In an article for the Guardian, the author of A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain discusses controversial proposals to evict rioters' families from their homes, which have already implemented by Wandsworth council, with many other councils preparing to follow suit.

Hatherley argues that such a response is ideologically motivated and designed to accord with previously existing agendas on social housing and benefit cuts.

The coalition sets time limits on council tenancies and freezes the already meagre levels of social housebuilding; Labour councils embark on massive demolition programmes of large estates and their replacement with developer-led mixed private and supposedly affordable estates. Both have much the same effect - removing the "undeserving" poor from highly profitable inner-city sites.

He suggests that the strategy of evictions "exemplifies that failure of the most basic social understanding that at least helped trigger these riots" and will only perpetuate the underlying causes of the unrest.

The idea seems to be that those in social housing could just find somewhere else, they could just walk into private housing. Like the similar proposals for taking away housing benefit from miscreants, it is based on an inability to imagine what poverty is like, to think for a second what might happen to a family when it loses its income or its home.

Furthermore, Hatherley questions the legality of these evictions, arguing that such punishments are completely unprecedented in a democratic nation.

On another level it is of dubious legality – for a council tenancy to be rescinded, the tenant has to have been convicted of an offence on or near the premises, not always the case in these highly mobile riots; and given that so many of the rioters were minors, their parents will be those being evicted. There's a term for this – collective punishment. It is illegal under international law.

Discussing how such proposals link to a wider agenda on public housing, Hatherley links the recent developments to previously announced government plans to decrease spending on housing benefits - plans which were already threatening to drive the poor away from more prosperous inner city areas.

This is an intensification of that already existing agenda. Knowing that many of the thousands of young people who rioted were living on estates, their expulsion can free up some more space, clear that overstretched waiting list a little. It will make our cities even more Balkanised and unequal, and it will make the young even more dispossessed and angry. Brutal as these proposals may be, they are hardly inconsistent. Like the long-predicted riots themselves, they have not come out of the blue.

Visit the Guardian to read the article in full.

Daniel Trilling on the relation between the far-right and the political mainstream

In an article for the New Statesman, Daniel Trilling examines the growing use of far-right rhetoric in the political mainstream. Out of the embers of the economic collapse, Trilling claims, has arisen a dissatisfied and disillusioned Europe; a Europe ready to accept and absorb increasingly nationalistic and xenophobic messages.

Although the atrocities committed by Anders Behring Brevik in Norway were a reminder of the dangers posed by far-right extremists, Trilling's article reminds us that the opinions and political ideologies motivating the attacks are in fact more widespread than many may be prepared to accept. As well as documenting examples of growing movements in Hungary and France, Trilling also discusses the rise of the EDL in Britain.

The speed at which the mainstream has accepted the EDL's language is shocking. The Daily Star - a national newspaper with a circulation of nearly a million - has all but endorsed the group, giving it acres of uncritical coverage, culminating in February's front-page story "English Defence League to become political party". (It wasn't true but, judging by the tone of that day's leader column, it is easy to suspect that the Star wished it was.)

The increased acceptance of the rhetoric put forward by groups such as the EDL needs to be addressed, claims Trilling, if we are to tackle the issues and challenges posed by them. We can no longer ignore such talk as fringe and remote; it is increasingly a part of our culture, and the problem needs to be looked at in a new way.

This context should serve as a reminder that we cannot expect the state alone to counter the threat posed by far-right politics effectively. Terrorism by the likes of Breivik may cause untold misery to its victims, but no fascist movement has ever achieved power only by force: even Hitler was invited into government by a ruling class desperate to preserve its position at a time of economic turmoil. We will hear calls to act on "extremism" but it is equally important to consider which elements of extremist ideology parts of the political mainstream share.

Visit the New Statesman to read the article.

Daniel Trillings' book on the BNP, Bloody Nasty People, will be published by Verso in 2012.

Paul Mason: 'Slumlands—filthy secret of the modern mega-city'

Across the world, slums are home to a billion people. The rich elite want the shanty towns cleared, but residents are surprisingly determined not to leave. In a report for BBC Newsnight and an article for the New Statesman, Paul Mason, author of Meltdown, explores this issue, looking at the reality of life in Philippine slums, and the arguments surrounding the plans for their clearance.

Describing his visit to the slums of Manila, Mason writes:

There is a long curve of water and, as far as the eye can see, there are shacks, garbage, washing, tin, bits of wood, scraps of cloth, rats and children. The water is grey, but at the edges there's a flotsam of multicoloured plastic rubbish. This is the Estero de San Miguel, the front line in an undeclared war between the rich and poor of Manila. Figures emerge from creaky doors to move along bits of walkway. In the deep distance is the dome of a mosque; beyond that are skyscrapers.

Mena Cinco, a community leader here, volunteers to take me in - but only about 50 yards. After that, she cannot guarantee my safety. At the bottom of a ladder, the central mystery of the Estero de San Miguel is revealed: a long tunnel, four feet wide, dark except for the occasional bare bulb. It's just like an old coal mine, with rickety joists, shafts of light and pools of what I'm hoping is water on the floor. All along the tunnel are doors into the homes of as many as 6,000 people.

Despite the conditions, the article reveals that the issues surrounding closing such settlements are complex and varied; economic and social considerations often dividing politicians and dwellers.

The debate, at the global level, is no longer about how fast to tear these places down but whether we can meet the rapidly developing aspirations of highly educated people in tin shacks. To those who dream that, as capitalism develops, it will eradicate slums, Sinclair of Architecture for Humanity says dream on. "You can't fight something that has a stronger model than you [do]. It's never going to happen again. The fact of it is that if you tried to do it in some of these informal settlements, they could take out the city . . . march on the central business district, and it's game over."

Visit the New Statesman to read the article in full. Visit the BBC to watch the programme.

Mason's forthcoming book Why Everything is Kicking Off Everywhere will be published in January 2012.

"The most brilliant Marxist intellectual"— Christopher Hitchens reviews The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg

Christopher Hitchens is a divisive figure for many on the Left. But despite some of his politically problematic positions, his knowledge of the Marxist canon—Trotsky's thought in particular— is a welcome antidote to those public intellectuals who wholly dismiss Marxism as an unwelcome chapter in the triumphant narrative of democratic liberalism. Hitchens refers to precisely this intellectual repudiation in his review of The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg in the Atlantic. The generally accepted verdict on twentieth century ideology, he writes, is "that its 'totalitarian' character eclipses any of the ostensible differences between its 'left' and 'right' versions." Scholars who castigate Marxism without scrutinizing the serious variances and debates within it risk severely limiting their knowledge of modern history. In this milieu, one figure who has earned and deserves public attention is Rosa Luxemburg, who, for Hitchens is

... the most brilliant-and the most engaging-of these Marxist intellectuals was Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-born Jew who was the most charismatic figure in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD).

Markedly different from the clinical writings of other European Marxists—the coldest scientific Marxism—Luxemburg was known for her humanism and joie de vivre. Through her correspondence with lovers, friends and comrades, we discover a figure deeply moved by not only politics, but art, literature and nature. As Hitchens notes:

Her correspondence shows her to have been an active and ardent lover, as well as a woman constantly distracted from politics by her humanism and her love for nature and literature. In a single letter to her inamorato Hans Diefenbach (whose life was to be thrown away on the western front), written from a Breslau jail in the summer of 1917, there are tender and remorseful reflections on the deaths of parents; some crisp appraisals of the style of Romain Rolland; a recommendation that Diefenbach read Hauptmann's The Fool in Christ, Emanuel Quint; and some extended observations on the ingenious habits of wasps and birds, as observed through the windows of her cell.

While they shared the same political project, there were deep rifts between Lenin and Luxemburg—with Luxemburg accusing Lenin of upholding a "barracks mentality" of socialist progress. Her most famous tongue-lashing for the early Soviet Union came in her defence of free speech: "Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently."

For Hitchens it is Luxemburg's revolutionary optimism but also her deep despair—a melancholy for the barbarism to come— that "can give one a lump in the throat." Her untimely death marks the twentieth century's violent degeneration, or as Hitchens puts it,

Over her corpse-later thrown into the Landwehr Canal-was to step a barbarism even more ruthless and intense than any she had dared to imagine. Had Germany gone the other way, is it completely fanciful to imagine an outcome that would have preempted not just Nazism but, by precept and example, Stalinism too? However debatable that might be, one cannot read the writings of Rosa Luxemburg, even at this distance, without an acute yet mournful awareness of what Perry Anderson once termed "the history of possibility."

Visit The Atlantic to read the review in full.

McKenzie Wark: 'The Logic of Riots'

Riots have their own logic. Both those who celebrate and decry them tend to think of riots as irrational outbursts, which can be channeled back towards order either by offering a few concessions or by sending in more police. There is invariably some moralizing that goes along with all this, none of it terribly helpful for understanding why riots are a constant of modern urban life rather than some inexplicable exception.

There's a short text that always does the rounds whenever riots occur again. It was written by Guy Debord, legendary co-founder of the Situationist International, and bearing the jargon-heavy title of ‘The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy.' These days you don't have to hunt around for the photocopies passed from hand to hand, it can be easily googled. Its subject is the Watts riots of 1965. Its leading provocation, and the reason for its underground popularity, is this: "But who has defended the rioters of Watts in the terms they deserve?

"The Los Angeles revolt was a revolt against the commodity," Debord said. It was at least partly so. "The flames of Watts consumed consumption." In the spectacle of consumer society advertises a life in which all that is good appears on television and all that appears on television is good. This constant circulation of images of the consumer lifestyle, which came into its own in the sixties, could but be a cruel reminder for African Americans in particular of the inequities underlying such images.

The spectacle of consumable life ranks goods in order of their desirability. The fancy brands are so much better than generic knock-offs. But this is also an order that ranks its subjects. To be Black in the sixties is to be at the bottom of the visible order. Just as the ranking of which are the better brands changes over time, so too does the league table of desirable kinds of people. You have your Kate Middletons, and then you have your chavs.

The Watts riot was a moment when African Americans saw through this hierarchy of images. As Debord says: "they demand the egalitarian realization of the American spectacle of everyday life." This is a constant of the modern riot. Those who are told, at one and the same time, that these and the things they should desire, but that they themselves are not desirable, will periodically get the message, and respond in kind. Like the Watts rioters, they see the swag on offer - and loot it.

The signature Situationist concept for such - recurring - events is potlatch. Where Marx compared the transformation of the object of labor into a commodity to a transubstantiation, the Situationists were interested in a kind of reverse miracle, by which the thing lost its status as commodity and became the gift. The looted object is no longer a commodity. But the perversity of the gesture is that its seizure does not break the spell of exchange and return to things their value. Rather, looting takes the spectacle at its word. In the spectacle, what is good appears and what appears is good. The looter jumps the gap between desire and the commodity. The looter takes desires for necessity, and necessity for their desires, but freeing the commodity from exchange does not expunge exchange from the commodity.

The riot contains a quite contrary movement as well - arson. The arsonist is not quite the same as the looter. The arsonist's is a negative relation to what appears, particularly to the built environment. The arsonist's actions are marked by the refusal of spectacular form. Enormous energy is being withdrawn from the labor process and it finds no other outlet than in aggression prompted by dissatisfaction. In the riot, that aggression turns against two of its sources: against the time of the commodity form; against an alienating urban space.

Looting and arson are recurring events within what the Situationists called the "overdeveloped world." They are the mark of overdevelopment, of the quantitative expansion of production outstripping the qualitative transformation of everyday life, of desires spinning their wheels, without traction in the elaboration of needs. The proximate causes may vary, and are usually to do with the thuggery of the police and the indifference of the state.

What the Situationists point to is the consistency and persistence of what follows, the twin forks of seize it all, or burn it down. Sometimes, the riot takes a different form, and passes toward rebellion, even toward revolution, or perhaps those in the middle of it think it does. This is why May ‘68 has a special place in not only the theory but also the mythology of the Situationists. It was more than a riot. It was the fabled general strike.

There is a lot that is missing from Debord's account of Watts: The thirty dead, the thousand injured, the four thousand arrests. Still, it might have interested him that later investigations upheld his hunch that while the riots were leaderless they were not without organization. Impromptu meetings in the park after dark coordinated movements, for example. Riots are neither irrational, spontaneous outbursts, nor the secret workings of some conspiracy or other.

They, are rather, the working out of an inner tension in commodified life. That tension is usually finessed through the fine idea that if everyone just knuckles under and does their best, all will be well. The yawning gap between the promise of the spectacle and its actuality can be narrowed with hard work and a bit of luck. When that carrot turns out to be a rotten promise, then there's nothing for it but the stick. The modern, spectacular society would prefer to be loved, but when push comes to shoved it will settle for being feared.

Robin Blackburn's The American Crucible reviewed in The Nation

The historian Eric Foner begins his review of Robin Blackburn's The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights with a welcome dig at Niall Ferguson's Civilization television series and its neglect of slavery as a pivotal force in western ascendancy and dominance.

Only after forty-five minutes of the one-hour show did Ferguson mention the existence of slaves—the majority of South Carolina's population. When slavery was finally discussed, it was presented not as a crucial structural feature of early American society but as a moral dilemma, an "original sin" expiated by the election of Barack Obama.

More than any other institution, it was the slave plantation and the massive extractions of wealth from exploited black labor that led to the West's dominance over the rest of the world. "Without slavery there could have been no colonization," is the starting point for the evolution of Blackburn's historical narrative. Calling it an "Atlantic or transnational history," Foner praises Blackburn's work for its broad international approach and careful attention to local circumstances.

The American Crucible takes its place alongside David Brion Davis's Inhuman Bondage as one of the finest one-volume histories of the rise and fall of modern slavery.

Among the many virtues of the text is Blackburn's nuanced understanding of abolitionist thought. Cautioning against the idea of a preordained "irresistible advance" toward emancipation, or the popular notion that historical chains were torn apart by the lofty ideals of the founding fathers, Blackburn turns instead to the rich history of slave revolts in the periphery and political crisis in the centre. Foner summarizes Blackburn's position succinctly:

High ideals alone did not abolish slavery. And while not neglecting slave agency, Blackburn argues that the concessions and customary rights wrested by slaves from their owners over a long period of day-to-day struggle did not pose a fundamental challenge to the system. Rather, he insists, emancipation emerged from specific historical circumstances-a nexus of slave resistance, ideological conflict and political crisis.

On the topic of human rights, the book's third element, Blackburn places the slave uprisings in Haiti and St. Dominique at the centre of his analysis—rather than the genteel anti-slavery thought of European abolitionists. These rebellious slaves profoundly affected Atlantic political culture and the idea of universal human rights, as Foner notes:

Ironically, if "the West" is to celebrate the idea of universal human rights as one of its distinctive contributions to modern civilization, part of the credit must go to the mostly African-born slave rebels of Haiti.

Visit The Nation to read the review in full.

Los Angeles Review of Books challenges the legitimacy of economic soothsayers

“Autumn of the Empire” is the title to Joshua Clover’s analysis of the current economic crisis, approached within the context of four books reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Among the titles that Clover discusses are Robert Brenner’s The Economics of Global Turbulence and two books by the late Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century and Adam Smith in Beijing.

All of the books were first published before the economic bubble burst—a significant detail because like many before him, Clover disputes the retrospective argument that the crisis was unforeseen. More importantly:

The question of why so many danger cries went unheeded may seem to invite an inquiry into ideological blindness. On a different conceptual plane, however, it may be more interesting to ask instead: What counts as a prediction? Or, perhaps, the practical corollary: Who counts as an economist?

After all, other thinkers—other sorts of thinkers, concerned with broader understandings than the tightly focused technicians who dominate contemporary debates—grasped the situation at a considerable distance and with remarkable acuity. They mostly don’t appear in surveys of crisis callers, even as their predictions may have the most significant things to tell us about how best to peer from our current vantage, toward the horizon.

Among those possessing exceptional acuity is Robert Brenner, described by Clover as “capital’s most lucid contemporary historian,” and whose Economics of Global Turbulence details this contemporary history “with remarkable and sustained insight.” Explains Clover:

The brute situation, far more striking than most will admit, can be summarized in a single stark fact: During the “Long Boom” of 1948–1973, the lowest annual profit rate in the U.S. industrial sector was still higher than the highest such rate in the ensuing period, the “Long Bust.” This fact is all the more shocking for being so contrary to the largely accepted story—often centered around the Reagan presidency, or Clinton’s “new economy,” depending on one’s party preference—of recent American history as one of minor falls and major lifts.

Brenner’s argument about how this came to pass is rigorous and buttressed by extraordinarily careful empirical research.

As for Arrighi, Clover declares that The Long Twentieth Century has “the grandeur of a sprawling epic, and the schematic grace of a Richard Neutra blueprint”:

It is the single most useful text on offer for anyone who wants to narrate the story of world capitalism—from its nascent form on the rim of the Mediterranean to the current reach of the United States’ empire, and beyond.

With the principal insights of Brenner and Arrighi in mind, Clover then revisits the notion of economic prognosticators:

When we talk casually about “who predicted the crisis,” we habitually don’t mean those who understood the mechanisms, who had an analytic method that might help us understand the future that crashes in upon us. We don’t mean to discover who is capable of historical thought, or what that thought might be.

We mean stock pickers, more or less. We mean those whose insights could direct us when to get in and when to get out. This is the only mode of thought recognized by The Economist and the economists sanctioned by the guild’s conventions. Such thought has moved from being a hobby of speculators to an entire episteme, a mode of knowledge that dominates all others.

Like democracy itself, this official thought presents itself as having subtleties, wings, parties. But the oppositions on offer—NYT vs. WSJ, Krugman vs. Cochrane, saltwater vs. freshwater schools of economics—can’t begin to grasp the fullness of the situation. Whether discovering “green shoots” or hand-wringing over a “jobless recovery,” they think unquestioningly in terms of a return to normalcy, debating only the rate and method: the crisis a mere blink in the long stare of empire.

But the scandalous lesson we learn from heterodox thinkers like Brenner, Duncan, and Arrighi is quite a different one: that the American experience is grand, outsized, but not entirely novel. Industrial growth is bound to undo itself as a profit center, to be replaced by a regime of finance; this regime’s profit mechanism is always the bubble and its total crisis inescapable; and this is how empires end.

Visit the Los Angeles Review of Books to read the article in full.

Owen Jones and Starkeygate: "It was Enoch Powell meets Alan Partridge"

Historian David Starkey has provoked controversy following his Friday appearance on Newsnight, in which he suggested that Britain's recent riots were in part caused by an adoption and integration of "black culture" amongst the white working class.

Owen Jones, author of Chavs and fellow guest on Newsnight along with Dreda Say Mitchell, described Starkey's offensive opinions as "Enoch Powell meets Alan Partridge." In an article for the New Statesman following the experience, Jones continues the debate:

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation completed an extensive study into gangs: I doubt Starkey has read it. It found that there was a strong link between "territorial behaviour" and poorer communities. Gangs could provide some young people with fun, excitement and support they otherwise lacked. It "appeared for some to be a product of deprivation, a lack of opportunities and attractive activities, limited aspirations and an expression of identity", as well as a "coping mechanism" for those living in poverty.

It's nothing to do with ethnicity, in other words. It's to do with poverty.

The controversy surrounding Starkey's interview has spawned numerous parody videos online - our favourite being this rap version of his Newsnight diatribe. Really, David Starkey of all people should know about the dangers of hip hop...

Visit BBC iPlayer to watch the debate in full, or watch a clip on YouTube.

Visit New Statesman to read Owen Jones' article about the event.

Selected parody videos can be found here, here, and here.

"The riots are a catastrophe"—Owen Jones

In a blog post for Labour List, Owen Jones, author of Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, describes the riots as a catastrophe; the political consequences of which may be felt for a long time to come.

Jones fears that the growing backlash against rioters may be indicative of an impending swing to the right. With public mood supportive of an authoritarian response to those involved, and discourse surrounding the debate one of prejudicial and divisive generalisation, it seems that right-wing attitudes are primed to take hold across Britain. As Jones writes:

My real fear is that we have just witnessed another crucial stage in the political ascendancy of the right. When asked how he would cure what he described as a "sickness", one of David Cameron's key suggestions was "a welfare state that doesn't reward idleness". And so begins an attempt to link the actions of a few with benefit claimants as a whole.

By offering criticisms of benefit claimants and the welfare state, Cameron is tapping into a huge well of public support, one which will allow the PM to distract attention away from the deeper socio-political issues highlighted by the rioting.

To even look at possible reasons why a relatively small proportion of people engaged in these acts means to be slapped down as an "apologist". For many who are now enraged, scared, or both, it is outrageous to suggest that the rioters are anything other than mindless, feral criminals. This is, without doubt, completely understandable. Suggestions that we should look at a wider context to stop this from happening again risk being instantly shouted down: that one in five young people out of work nationally, a figure that is even higher in many of the communities worst affected by the riots; that half of all children growing up in Tottenham, for example, grow up in poverty; that the poorest living alongside the most affluent in boroughs like Hackney, looking at lives they will never have; or to examine the impact of a consumerist society in which to have status is to own things.

Although Jones is keen to point out that such underlying factors do not justify the actions of those involved, they may go some way to explain them. However, it is of course convenient for the government to paint recent events as a purely criminal issue, divorced from wider concerns regarding their policies and spending cuts.

Jones is all too aware of the effect this may have on an already divided and fearful public. In his book, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, society's attitudes and prejudices against the likes of those involved in the riots are explored at length. The scapegoating of 'chavs' and the 'underclass' discussed within is particularly pertinent given the increased backlash the riots have fostered - a connection Jones highlights in the article.

The caricature of the idle, feckless benefit recipient is more hated than ever because of the economic crisis. A crisis of the financial sector was turned into a crisis of public spending. A crisis of public spending was, in part, turned into a crisis of welfare expenditure. To justify slashing benefits, it is necessary to demonise those receiving them.

Visit Labour List to read the article in full.

A Nation of Shopkeepers

I thought Napoleon said it. But no, it's in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776), book IV, section vii, part 3 (about half way through). Here's what he says:

To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.

We might want to add news-mongers, phone hackers, cops on the take, MPs slurping up the lard at the trough, all the bankers and the other high net worth individuals.

But what was Adam Smith on about?

He was criticizing the Navigation Acts of 1651, which gave a monopoly of colonial produce to the shopkeepers of England. The maintenance of this monopoly was "perhaps the sole end and purpose of the dominion which Great Britain assumes over her colonies." The produce was the product of slavery, the slavery was at first Irish and poor English, then it became African. Hundreds of thousands for two centuries were consumed under the lash, the sun, and manacles of oppression for the shopkeepers of England who raised a nation of customers, far, far away from the cries of the enslaved. Yes, a "consumer" society "served" by shopkeepers, as it appeared. But behind every consumer is a producer (there's no getting away from it!) and the descendants of slaves followed the produce produced by their ancestors, and this was long before the Empire Windrush arrived in 1948 at Tilbury docks with the Jamaican veterans of World War II.

The story as a whole is well told by Eric Williams or C.L.R. James, both from Trinidad, and centered in London. Or, you can find it in Robin Blackburn's magnificent summary, The American Crucible: Slavery Emancipation and Human Rights. London is a world city, and has been for centuries, a commune in the Middle Ages, the first commune. Between 1620 and 1660 the shopkeepers totally got their way - Adam Smith said it. We called it the "bourgeois revolution" (take that, Napoleon!). A generation of scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic studied the municipal rebellions of the 1960s to help understand the riots of the 1760s. Didn't we sort that out? Weren't the politicians taught those lessons in school? Enclosure? Criminalization of custom? Moral economy? Slavery?

Evidently not.

In the eighteenth century they threw product to "customers", generally drugs (coffee, tea, sugar), and then in the 19th century brought in police to divide and rule (gender, religion, race, employed/unemployed, seniors/youth). A people composed of customers and a nation of shopkeepers sucked dry a world of slaves in far away lands. The chickens have come home to roost, as Malcolm X said at another teachable moment (when JFK was killed). Only now, the globalization is complete. This is why Darcus Howe speaks of Tottenham and Syria, Tottenham and Port au Prince. Actually the whole story has not half been told. This is what makes it an historic moment, as Darcus also said.

A second commune? An archipelago of communes?

Adam Smith himself feared such a thing: "The tribunes, when they had a mind to animate the people against the rich and the great, put them in mind of the ancient division of lands, and represented the law which restricted this sort of private property as the fundamental law of the republic." The fear of the commons caused imperial expansion, conquest, and colonization, as he argues under "Of the Motives for establishing new Colonies."

Peter Linebaugh is the author of The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century and co-author of Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England, a new edition of which is published in September.

Something has snapped, and it has been a long time coming

One of the most succinct and intelligent descriptions of 'urban regeneration' was a film by Jonathan Meades called On the Brandwagon. It begins with the 1981 riots in Liverpool, a city whose population had halved and whose dockyards had closed down, then moves through the government's attempts to put a sticking plaster over the wound. First, ineptly, through the Garden Festivals bestowed on the city, alongside the first 'enterprise zone' version of Regeneration; then more dramatically through New Labour's abortive attempt to turn our chaotic, suburban-urban cities into places more akin to, say, Paris, that riot-free model of social peace. The middle-class return to the cities, adaptive re-use, luxury apartment blocks, Mitterandian Lottery-funded grands projets, loft conversions in the factories whose closure brought about the main problem in the first place. The film ends in Salford Quays, its gleaming titanium a ram-raid's distance from some of the poorest places in Western Europe. The likely result? 'There will be no riots within the ring-road'.

We've long congratulated ourselves, in London, of the fact that we have no banlieue. We applauded ourselves especially smugly when zoned, segregated Paris rioted a few years ago. It's not like it's untrue - give or take the odd exception (a Thamesmead, a Chelmlsey Wood) our poverty is not concentrated in peripheral housing estates. Edinburgh might wall off its poor in Muirhouse or Leith, and Oxford might try not to think about Blackbird Leys, but in London, Manchester/Salford, Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol, Nottingham—the cities that erupted on Monday 8th August—the rich live, by and large, next to the poor: £1,000,000 Georgian terraces next to estates with some of the deepest poverty in the EU. We're so pleased with this that we've even extended the principle to how we plan the trickledown dribble of social housing built over the last two decades, those Housing Association schemes where the deserving poor are 'pepper-potted' with stockbrokers. We've learnt about 'spatial segregation', so we do things differently now. Someone commenting on James Meek's great London Review of Books article on parallel Hackneys mentioned China Miéville's recent science fiction novel The City and The City, where two cities literally do occupy the same space, with all inhabitants acting as if they don't. Miéville set it in Eastern Europe, but the inspiration is surely London.

All of us, all along - if we're honest for a microsecond - knew this was a ludicrous way to build a city, to live in a city. I, like most of the people now waving brooms in the air and representing the 'real London', was not born in London, and I know only two or three people who were. Occasionally, during the 12 years I've lived in the city, I'd often idly wonder when the riots would come: when the situation of organic delis next to pound shops, of crumbling maisonettes next to furiously speculated-on Victoriana, of artists shipped into architect-designed Brutalist towers to make them safe for Regeneration, of endless boosterist self-congratulation, would finally collapse in on itself. Like most thoughts of this sort, it stayed in the back of the mind, and I'd almost forgotten about it when it finally happened. When it did on Monday night, I wasn't in the country; I'm still not now, so I don't truthfully know how things are on the ground. I do know that the nearest rioting to my flat above a shop - the looting of a retail park in Charlton - was nearly a petrol bomb's-throw away, so I'm not completely unqualified. I understand and apologise if anyone's irritated by a writer pontificating from a safe distance. What I don't understand is how absolutely anyone in any large British city could possibly be shocked by all this.

Look at the looted, torched places, look at what they all have in common. Look at Bristol, a port where you could walk for miles and wonder where its working class had disappeared to, which seems to have been given over completely to post-hippy tourism, 'subversive' graffiti, students and shopping. Well, those invisible young, 'socially excluded' (how that mealy-mouthed phrase suddenly seems to acquired a certain truth) people arrived in the shiny new Cabot Circus mall and took what they wanted, what they couldn't afford, what they'd been told time and time again they were worthless without. Look at Woolwich, where the former main employer, the Arsenal, is now a vast development of luxury flats, and where efforts to ameliorate poverty and unemployment centre on a giant Tesco, just opposite the Jobcentre. Look at Peckham, where 'Bellenden Village' pretends to be excited by the vibrant desperation of Rye Lane. Look at Liverpool, where council semis rub up against the mall-without-walls of Liverpool One, whose heavy-security streets were claimed by the RIBA to have 'single-handedly transformed Liverpool's fortunes' - as if a shopping mall could replace the docks. Look at Croydon, where you can walk along the spotless main street of the central privately owned, privately patrolled Business Improvement District and then suddenly find yourself in the rotting mess around West Croydon station. Look at Manchester's city centre, the most complete regeneration showpiece, practically walled-off from those who exist outside the ring-road. Look at Salford, where Urban Splash sells terraces gutted and cleared of their working class population, to MediaCity employees with the slogan 'own your own Coronation Street home'. Look at Nottingham, where private student accommodation looming over council estates features a giant advert promising 'a plasma screen TV in every room'. Look at Brixton, where Zaha Hadid's hedge-funded Academy has a disciplinary regime harsher than some prisons, and aims to create little entrepreneurs, little CEOs out of the lamentably unaspirational estate-dwellers. Look at Birmingham's new Bull Ring, yards away from the scar of no-man's land separating it from the dilapidated estates and empty light-industrial units of Digbeth and Deritend. This is urban Britain, and though the cuts have made it worse, the damage was done long before.

With his customary haplessness, Ed Miliband says that 'there must be no no-go areas', but these places are nothing of the sort: they're parallel areas occupying exactly the same space. Any urban theory stuck in the problems of an earlier era, fulminating against the evils of mono-class estates and rigid zoning, is helpless even to begin to describe what's going on.

That isn't to say that all insights from history are useless. Over the last week ex-punks, chroniclers of rebel rock, 'Situationists' and 'leftists' have decided that these riots are somehow different, somehow apolitical, compared to those that went before. The bizarrely romanticised Gordon Riots, in which Catholics were massacred. The Watts Riots of 1965, where corner shops were burned and ransacked with as much intensity as they were on Monday, only with more firearms. Neither were corner shops spared in the riots of 1981. The 1992 LA riots, where innocent truck drivers were dragged from their vehicles and killed. Riots always start with an immediate grievance - a hugely corrupt police force shooting a man to death, this time - and become a free-for-all, where people exploit the absence of the law, in which the people who suffer are often innocent. Rioting is a politics of despair, but to claim that these riots are somehow different, somehow 'neoliberal', because of the allegedly novel phenomenon of mass looting, is asinine. It would be infantile to cheer on rioters against corner shopkeepers trying to defend their already small livelihoods; but equally so to pretend that this had nothing to do with the demonisation of the young and poor, nothing to do with our brutally unequal society and our pathetic trickle-down attempts at amelioration. Then we line up with those who think that looting Foot Locker is worse than the looting of an entire economy.

Something has snapped, and it has been a long time coming. Listen to what those few rioters to have got near a journalist have said: 'the whole country is burning, man', 'we're showing the rich people we can do what we want', 'they're screwing the system so only white middle-class kids can get an education...everyone's heard about the police and members of parliament taking bribes, the members of parliament stealing thousands with their expenses. They set the example. It's time to loot'. It's an excuse, sure, but it's also a truth. The right will not waste the opportunity to treat this as a meaningless outbreak of thuggery, needing the smack of firm government, but that doesn't mean we should do the same. Over the last few years, the ruling class has kept trying to commit suicide—financial crisis, expenses scandal, News International, the Met, financial crisis mark two—and most of us won't let them. We'd rather Keep Calm and Carry On. These kids, venal and stupid as some of their actions obviously are, don't want to carry on. They want to see the whole bloody thing burn.

Feral, slash-and-burn capitalism is the new normal - David Harvey on the UK riots

David Harvey writes on feral capitalism and the UK riots:

"Nihilistic and feral teenagers" the Daily Mail called them: the crazy youths from all walks of life who raced around the streets mindlessly and desperately hurling bricks, stones and bottles at the cops while looting here and setting bonfires there, leading the authorities on a merry chase of catch-as-catch-can as they tweeted their way from one strategic target to another.

The word "feral" pulled me up short. It reminded me of how the communards in Paris in 1871 were depicted as wild animals, as hyenas, that deserved to be (and often were) summarily executed in the name of the sanctity of private property, morality, religion, and the family...

But the problem is that we live in a society where capitalism itself has become rampantly feral. Feral politicians cheat on their expenses, feral bankers plunder the public purse for all its worth, CEOs, hedge fund operators and private equity geniuses loot the world of wealth, telephone and credit card companies load mysterious charges on everyone's bills, shopkeepers price gouge, and, at the drop of a hat swindlers and scam artists get to practice three-card monte right up into the highest echelons of the corporate and political world.

A political economy of mass dispossession, of predatory practices to the point of daylight robbery, particularly of the poor and the vulnerable, the unsophisticated and the legally unprotected, has become the order of the day...What I say may sound shocking. Most of us don't see it because we don't want to. Certainly no politician dare say it and the press would only print it to heap scorn upon the sayer. But my guess is that every street rioter knows exactly what I mean. They are only doing what everyone else is doing, though in a different way - more blatently and visibly in the streets. Thatcherism unchained the feral instincts of capitalism (the "animal spirits" of the entreprenuer they coyly named it) and nothing has transpired to curb them since. Slash and burn is now openly the motto of the ruling classes pretty much everywhere.

This is the new normal in which we live.

Visit David Harvey's blog to read the full article.

A vile logic—Slavoj Žižek on Anders Breivik and antisemitism

Slavoj Žižek writes for the Guardian on the disturbing logic behind Anders Breivik's justfications for his actions in Norway. Comparing Breivik's ideology to that of Pim Fortuyn, Žižek argues that Breivik 'manifesto' fits into the growing intersection between right-wing populism and liberal political correctness.

Breivik's self-designation shuffles the cards of radical rightist ideology. Breivik advocates Christianity, but remains a secular agnostic: Christianity is for him merely a cultural construct to oppose Islam. He is anti-feminist and thinks women should be discouraged from pursuing higher education; but he favours a "secular" society, supports abortion and declares himself pro-gay.

His predecessor in this respect was Pim Fortuyn...a paradoxical figure: a rightist populist whose personal features and even opinions (most of them) were almost perfectly "politically correct". He was gay, had good personal relations with many immigrants, displayed an innate sense of irony - in short, he was a good tolerant liberal with regard to everything except his basic stance towards Muslim immigrants...

Indeed, he was the living proof that the opposition between rightist populism and liberal tolerance is a false one, that we are dealing with two sides of the same coin: ie we can have a racism which rejects the other with the argument that it is racist.

Žižek goes on to explore the paradox of Breivik's apparent antisemitism, which sits alongside support for Israel (as "the first line of defence against Muslim expansion"). Žižek compares this growing phenomenon amongst the far right to the "weird accommodation between Christian fundamentalists and Zionists in the US."

There is only one solution to this enigma: it is not that the US fundamentalists have changed, it is that Zionism itself has paradoxically come to adopt some antisemitic logic in its hatred of Jews who do not fully identify with the politics of the state of Israel. Their target, the figure of the Jew who doubts the Zionist project, is constructed in the same way as the European antisemites constructed the figures of the Jew - he is dangerous because he lives among us, but is not really one of us. Israel is playing a dangerous game here: Fox News, the main US voice of the radical right and a staunch supporter of Israeli expansionism, recently had to demote Glenn Beck, its most popular host, whose comments were getting openly antisemitic.

Visit the Guardian to read the full article.

Domenico Losurdo: “The phenomenon of urban jacqueries is set to be repeated in Europe”

Read an excerpt from Verso author Domenico Losurdo's book Democracy or Bonapartism, which touches on the urban revolts currently sweeping through England, and, as he suggests, soon to ignite the rest of Europe. Translation kindly provided by Gregory Elliott

The 1992 Los Angeles uprising was the flip side of rejection of the principle of proportional representation and of the political decapitation of the subaltern classes. Still subject to a significant degree of racial discrimination; following the victory of the minimalist definition of democracy reduced to a market; no longer regarded as the possessors of social and economic rights; lacking any party organization they could count on; without the possibility of access to the means of information and hampered in their access to the ballot box by voter registration laws; unable, ultimately, to make their voices heard at a properly political level, blacks could protest only by resorting to a kind of urban jacquerie—a furious, destructive rebellion that in no way alters the existing state of affairs.

As demonstrated, in particular, by the example of the French Fifth Republic, in this century too the march of Bonapartism has been punctuated by the imposition of uninominal constituencies. Electoral legislation compounds the effects that derive from the monopoly held by the very wealthy on a mass media apparatus of unprecedented power, accelerating and reinforcing the process of political decapitation of subaltern classes.

With the on-going triumph of the American model, the phenomenon of urban jacqueries is set to be repeated in Europe, fuelled by immigrants, lumpen proletarians, subaltern and marginalized social strata. This is already occurring in England. The process of emancipation, which in the last two centuries forced equal universal suffrage (one person, one vote), required proportional representation in the name of the 'equal representative value' of each individual vote. It challenged the monopoly on representative bodies, however configured and camouflaged, possessed by the wealthy. It linked political rights to social and economic rights. And it perceived and celebrated democracy as the emancipation of classes, 'races' and peoples hitherto kept in a condition of subalternity. But this process seems to have suffered a serious setback. In this sense, we are witnessing a phase of disemancipation—one of those phases that has marked the long, tortuous career of democracy, but of which there is at present no end in sight.

Domenico Losurdo is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Urbino, Italy and the author of Liberalism: A Counter-History

John G Rule: 1944-2011

The social historian of life and labour in Victorian and Georgian Britain John G Rule has died at age 67. Rule was part of a group of young historians who worked under the famous historian E.P. Thompson at the University of Warwick in the 1960s. Among Rule's many prestigious academic achievements is his remarkable chapter on "Wrecking and Coastal Plunder" in Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England. His obituary in the Guardian describes his contribution to this collection as follows:

John's contribution to the seminal collection Albion's Fatal Tree (1975) restored to history those Cornish coastal communities which, during the 18th century, accepted the flotsam and jetsam of the sea as a natural bounty to which no laws of property attached; and he destroyed the romantic myth of the Cornish wreckers with their false lights.

Verso is honoured to be republishing this marvellous study of British social history. It is but one of Rule's many publications which highlight the forgotten lives of labouring Britons in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Through his 50 publications, John brought to our attention Methodist labourers, Cornish tinners, fishing communities of the North Sea and the south-west, Sussex smugglers, sheep stealers, machine breakers, the London poor, the followers of Captain Swing and a myriad unknown trade unionists, along with many other groups, who lived lives and laboured at trades in accordance with moral economies whose sanctions were rooted in a consciousness which they argued justified their actions.

Visit the Guardian to read the obituary in full.

Nothing 'mindless' about these riots—Dan Hind

Dan Hind, author on The Return of the Public and The Threat to Reason, writes for Al Jazeera about the recent rioting across Britain.

Although cautious of the fact that any single, unified explanation for this civil unrest is unlikely to be forthcoming, Hind urges that we cannot treat recent events as mere 'mindless' violence, devoid of political or social meaning.

[..]broadly, any breakdown of civil order is inescapably political. Quite large numbers of mostly young people have decided that, on balance, they want to take to the streets and attack the forces of law and order, damage property or steal goods. Their motives may differ - they are bound to differ. But their actions can only be understood adequately in political terms.

Hind notes that although the rioting may take on the guise of political meaning through the opportunism of politicians and commentators; root causes are at risk of being ignored in the sensationalist media reporting and political point-scoring that will undoubtedly emerge in the aftermath of the unrest.

Highlighting the high rates of youth unemployment, economic inequality, and cuts to youth services, the article draws attention to the deeper meaning of the riots. Speaking of these issues, Hind writes:

All this is the consequence of decisions made by governments and there is little hope of rapid improvement. The same politicians now denouncing the mindless violence of the mob all supported a system of political economy that was as unstable as it was pernicious. They should have known that their policies would lead to disaster. They didn't know. Who then is more mindless?

[...]Those who want to see law and order restored must turn their attention to a menace that no amount of riot police will disperse; a social and political order that rewards vandalism and the looting of public property, so long as the perpetrators are sufficiently rich and powerful.

Vist Al Jazeera to read the full article.

Visit Mother Jones for a basic summary of the causes and effects of the rioting, including a reference to Dan Hind's Al Jazeera piece.

Why it's kicking off in Britain

You've probably heard it said a dozen times today: "It's like 28 Days Later out there." Every thirty seconds, there's a new riot zone. I've rarely known the capital to be this wound up. It's kicked off in East Ham, then Whitechapel, then Ealing Broadway (really?), then Waltham Forest... It's kicked off in Croydon, then Birmingham, then (just a rumour so far) Bradford... The banlieues of Britain are erupting in mass civil unrest. (Lenin's Tomb)

Tariq Ali, writing on the London Review of Books blog, asks the questions mainly absent from much of last night's coverage:

Why is it that the same areas always erupt first, whatever the cause? Pure accident? Might it have something to do with race and class and institutionalised poverty and the sheer grimness of everyday life? The coalition politicians (including new New Labour, who might well sign up to a national government if the recession continues apace) with their petrified ideologies can't say that because all three parties are equally responsible for the crisis. They made the mess.

They privilege the wealthy. They let it be known that judges and magistrates should set an example by giving punitive sentences to protesters found with peashooters. They never seriously question why no policeman is ever prosecuted for the 1000-plus deaths in custody since 1990. Whatever the party, whatever the skin colour of the MP, they spout the same clichés. Yes, we know violence on the streets in London is bad. Yes, we know that looting shops is wrong. But why is it happening now? Why didn't it happen last year? Because grievances build up over time, because when the system wills the death of a young black citizen from a deprived community, it simultaneously, if subconsciously, wills the response.

Nina Power, writing for the Guardian yesterday summarises some of the specific circumstances in which the riots are taking place, and argues that it is imperative to take this context into account in any analysis:

The policies of the past year may have clarified the division between the entitled and the dispossessed in extreme terms, but the context for social unrest cuts much deeper. The fatal shooting of Mark Duggan last Thursday, where it appears, contrary to initial accounts, that only police bullets were fired, is another tragic event in a longer history of the Metropolitan police's treatment of ordinary Londoners, especially those from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, and the singling out of specific areas and individuals for monitoring, stop and search and daily harassment.

One journalist wrote that he was surprised how many people in Tottenham knew of and were critical of the IPCC, but there should be nothing surprising about this. When you look at the figures for deaths in police custody (at least 333 since 1998 and not a single conviction of any police officer for any of them), then the IPCC and the courts are seen by many, quite reasonably, to be protecting the police rather than the people....

Images of burning buildings, cars aflame and stripped-out shops may provide spectacular fodder for a restless media, ever hungry for new stories and fresh groups to demonise, but we will understand nothing of these events if we ignore the history and the context in which they occur.

Laurie Penny, blogging at Penny Red, writes eloquently against the lazy opposition of 'mindless violence' versus 'political protest'.

Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there. Unquestionably there is far, far more to these riots than the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting sparked off the unrest on Saturday, when two police cars were set alight after a five-hour vigil at Tottenham police station. A peaceful protest over the death of a man at police hands, in a community where locals have been given every reason to mistrust the forces of law and order, is one sort of political statement. Raiding shops for technology and trainers that cost ten times as much as the benefits you're no longer entitled to is another. A co-ordinated, viral wave of civil unrest across the poorest boroughs of Britain, with young people coming from across the capital and the country to battle the police, is another.

However, Penny argues, the riots are also a cathartic expression of power by those least used to wielding it:

They cannot be stopped, and they know it..Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:

"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?"

Visit Google Maps to view all the areas affected in London so far.

Sujatha Fernandes profiles Cuban rap in the New York Times

Sujatha Fernandes, author of the forthcoming Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation, reports on Cuba's vibrant hip hop scene for the New York Times, detailing its origins in 1990s American rap music:

Rap was originally an import. In the early '90s, young Cubans built antennas from wire coat hangers and dangled their radios out of their windows to catch 2 Live Crew and Naughty by Nature on Miami's 99 Jamz. Aspiring Cuban M.C.'s rapping at house parties and in small local venues crassly mimicked their American counterparts.

In large part due to their isolation from the United States, however, Cuban rappers began to develop a unique hip hop culture. Says Fernandes:

The embargo...kept out the key tools of background beats - samplers, mixers and albums - so Cuban rappers instead drew on a rich heritage of traditional local music, recreating the rhythmic pulse of hip-hop with instruments like the melodic Batá drums, typically used in ceremonies of the Afro-Cuban Santería religion. In the tradition of Cuban a cappella groups like Vocal Sampling - which conjured up full salsa orchestras solely through their voices - Cuban rappers made up for the lack of digital technology by developing the human beat box, mimicking not just drum machines but congas, trumpets and even song samples.

Out of scarcity, Cuba's emcees have fashioned beats, rhymes and a lyrical style that both gives credit to hip hop's roots in the United States, and is a testament to the island's dynamic traditions.

Visit the the New York Times to read the article in full.

Annette Fuentes on the myths and realities of violence in US schools

Lockdown High author Annette Fuentes appeared on the Cultural Baggage Radio Show for a lengthy discussion on the impact of zero-tolerance policing in US schools and the myth that schools are havens for violent young offenders. Drawing on a wealth of historical sources cited in her book, Fuentes spoke about the history of schools as sites of active rebellion and resistance by students:

It was amazing to find these stories. They were, many of them, autobiographies, many of folks who had gone to these early schools where there was a tradition called "barring out the headmaster". The kids would get together and lock the school up. It might be that one-room schoolhouse in the prairie and forcibly confront the teacher and keep him from coming in. There were other stories about young women who were teachers being confronted by farm boys who had a six-inch jackknife that they whip out if the teacher tried to pull out her hickory stick. You know, schools have always been a place where young people challenge authority and where authority in the form of teachers and principals challenge kids. The limits of power and control get played out in schools and it always has been thusly.

Unlike today, these incidents were dealt with by school authorities rather than with armed guards, metal detectors and drug-sniffing dogs. Fernandes explains that the criminalization of children is part of the general atmosphere of fear and hysteria whipped up in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks. This criminal justice approach to schoolyard discipline has only led to higher rates of explusion accompanied by higher rates of youth incarceration.

We're treating the kids like suspects. We're treating the schools like house of detention, juvenile detention and we're forgetting that they're kids. Kids make mistakes and schools are places to teach them how to behave.

Visit the Cultural Baggage Radio Show to listen to the interview or read a transcript of the show.

Richard Gott debates the British empire with Kwasi Kwarteng on BBC Radio 4's Today

Richard Gott was on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Friday to discuss his forthcoming book, Britain's Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt with Kwasi Kwarteng, Conservative MP and author of Ghosts of Empire.

Kwarteng's book argues that the operation of the British empire was not systematic or centrally run, but haphazard, random and guided much more by local conditions and individual administrators idiosyncrasies than by Whitehall.

Gott agrees with this to an extent, but highlights that the British empire was gained by conquest - territories were fought and killed for and violence was integral to the empire's formation and continuation. Kwarteng takes issue with this, painting the incorporation of many territories as more of a collaboration between British administrators and local rulers. Whilst accepting that violence often occurred, Kwarteng argues that this was always as a product of the particular circumstances.

It's also worth a listen for James Naughtie's horror at the idea of being called a Marxist when he suggests that one of the systematic functions of the empire was to extract as much wealth as possible from the colonies.

Listen to the full programme here (available until Friday 12th August). The item begins about 2 hours, 53 minutes in.

Mckenzie Wark's The Beach Beneath the Street—reviews, articles and interviews.

The Beach Beneath the Street, McKenzie Wark's historical account of The Situationist International, has been recently reviewed by David Winters for Bookslut. Describing the book, he writes:

[T]his is no ordinary history. Instead, "it's a question of retrieving a past specific to the demands of the present." The Beach Beneath the Street rereads that past in a way that prefers not to smooth out its messier edges, refuses to reify (to pick up the jargon) what made it radical, what still makes it relevant.

Wark's title has also been the subject of an editorial piece at Mute Magazine, a piece in which Christopher Collier describes The Beach Beneath the Streets as a "beautifully written, exciting and broad study," - and a "sexy book for a sexy movement."

Throughout the text Wark deftly weaves a sustained engagement with the themes of situation, potlatch, détournement and dérive across an array of semi-biographical accounts of the main actors[...] In this Wark achieves something not to be under-estimated, producing a coherent and yet inherently pluralist work on the legacy of the SI and particularly their less well-known predecessors the Letterist International.

In addition, Mackenzie Wark has spoken at length about The Beach... on the ABC Night Air radio show. Discussing his thougts on the Situationist movement, his conversation with presenter Brent Clough touches on the development of the movement, as well its relation to Marxism, existentialism, psychogeography, and utopian thinking.

Lastly, 3:AM Magazine has run a fascinating interview with Wark, in he discusses with David Winters some of the topics covered in the book, and how they informed the style utilised in its writing. Speaking about his approach to writing, Wark says:

I wanted something that would give a sense of the immediacy of ideas to everyday life, and of the role that different forms of social interaction play in producing this self-critical everyday life. This I think produces that effect of a ‘derailment' or detour away from received ideas about the whole thing. At the same time, I want it to be seductive, to be a playful, pleasurable read. Certain kinds of sentence can produce that effect. As to which, and how to write them, well, that's a trade secret!

Visit Bookslut, Mute Magazine, ABC Night Air, and 3:AM Magazine to access the original sources.

Owen Jones nominated for most influential left-wing thinker of 2010/2011

Owen Jones, author of Chavs: Demonization of the Working Class, has been nominated for Left Foot Forward's Most Influential Left-Wing Thinker of 2010/2011, acknowledging his impressive contribution in bringing issues of inequality back into the debate surrounding the future of the Left.

Owen has intelligently and articulately argued the case that New Labour failed to address the politics of inequality, using the debate around the word ‘chav' to illustrate how modern Britain continues to be led by its attitudes and responses to class.

Further praising Jones' impact on the political discourse in the last year, Olly Parker and Natan Doron of the Fabian Society noted his ability to present progressive and honest viewpoints without alienating the more moderate audiences he often speaks to in his TV and media work.

[...] Owen has often managed to argue a traditional hard-left point of view without coming across as completely mad. The media love to drop your archetypal "mad lefty" - or indeed "mad right-winger" - into TV debates for the sake of entertainment. Owen has not played up to this but has instead sensibly made arguments that the public can understand and relate to.

Visit Left Foot Forward to read the full article. The shortlist for nominations is announced on Monday 12th September, and the poll closes on Friday 7th October, so don't forget to vote!

Internships and extended adolescence: Ross Perlin talks to Psychologies magazine

Does the predominance of unpaid internships offered to school and university leavers infantilise a generation of young adults? Does the increase in such roles contribute to the phenomenon of 'extended adolescence' - the growing trend of adults abstaining from settling down in a traditional sense, and living lives as perpetual teenagers?

Exploring these issues in the latest Psychologies magazine, Decca Aitkenhead asks the author of Intern Nation, Ross Perlin, his views on the social impact of the growing culture of exploitative internships.

"Internships in the traditional sense used to be something you would do in your Summer holidays while at school, but now they do them after they graduate and well into their twenties. And a third to half of all internships are unpaid, and the rest are not well paid."

Perlin goes on to concur with the sentiments expressed by Aitkenhead, and thinks that the increased use of interns as cheap labour providers can have a pronounced psychological impact.

..it's one of the factors that leads to this prolonged adolescence. I think we can consider it infantilising, because it means you cannot move into the stake-holder role in society that's traditionally been thought of as adulthood.

The article will appear in the September 2011 issue of Psychologies magazine (not yet available online).

Language, life and nationalisms—Ernest Gellner reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement

Timothy Snyder has reviewed John A. Hall’s book Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography for the Times Literary Supplement. Snyder praises Hall’s book for its invaluable insights into the life and thought of the great philosopher and anthropologist.

The theory of nationalism itself was Gellner’s life. John A. Hall’s admirable biography helps us to see how this is so, by providing essential biographical information and locating Gellner’s arguments within those of his interlocutors, friendly and otherwise.

Hall’s book is not only a descriptive account of Gellner’s life and intellectual trajectory, but also a rigorous critique of his concepts and theories. Himself an acclaimed scholar, Hall assesses the many layers in Gellner’s work, paying special attention to the connections he drew between language and political nationalism.

Hall shows that Gellner’s intuitions about language use were central to every stage of his career. He drops the clues that allow is to see how the theory of nationalism emerged, not so much from Czech history as from insights about the social significance of the individual experience of language use.

Although a friend and colleague of Gellner, Hall puts into perspective many of his controversial positions and recognizes the influence some of his critics had on him, most notably Wittgenstein.

Hall shows artfully that Gellner, in his anthropological work, borrowed his default notion of primitive language from the late Wittgenstein: that we all inhabit impenetrable forms of life defined by the language games that cohere within them. But Hall also follows Gellner to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, where Gellner proves that the late Wittgenstein was wrong by showing how tribesmen could react creatively to practical everyday problems for which their linguistic habits did not seem to provide a solution.

Visit the Times Literary Supplement to read the full review (subscribers only).

Alexander Tudor reviews Stephen Duncombe's White Riot for Drowned in Sound

Drowned In Sound's Alexander Tudor offers a largely positive review of Stephen Duncombe's White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race, praising the depth of the subject matter, and Duncombe's "fun" approach to the topic. He writes:

White Riot instantly raises itself above the various accounts of punk already available, by offering a panopticon of both UK and US punk in the Seventies and early Eighties, tracing its evolution into hardcore and straight-edge, while scattering snippets of numerous essays written on the subject, intelligently selected and edited.

However, Tudor does think the book would have benefitted from a slightly wider scope, and bemoans Duncombe's failure to perhaps explore all aspects of punk's social relevance:

One objection - and it's a large one - is that this neglects to contextualize punk-rock as a musical genre AND social movement, other than in relation to a limited range of black genres. Over and over again, we're told that that reggae was an ‘absent presence' for punks, or that ideas of 'blackness' were appropriated by whites as a token of their underdog status. In doing so, it becomes difficult for the reader to see how much punk may have achieved, by comparison with other movements.

Still, the overall impression is favourable, with Tudor saying that "in a sense, this is the most forward-looking book about music I've ever seen," and that it contains all the materials needed to form an argument about all that punk was, is, and should be.

Visit Drowned In Sound for the full review.

The growing culture of unpaid internships—Ross Perlin interviewed by U.S. News

Following up their article on The Ethics of Unpaid Internships, which traverses the legal and ethical swamp of the US intern economy, U.S. News has interviewed Intern Nation author Ross Perlin to get the full scoop on growing trends in internship culture. Ross describes the two main arguments in his book as follows:

One is that the internship system, if you can call it that, is chaotic and sprawling, and in many ways has gone off the rails; it's not working as it should ... Companies are not using internships in the way they used to in many cases, as a recruiting pipeline, as a way to bring talent into the firm. They're using them as a cheap labor force that they're cycling through without any prospect of bringing [interns] on as regular workers.

His second argument is that internships possess a highly unequal class character—perhaps not a phrase (or political argument) that the readers of the U.S. News business page are all too comfortable with.

There is a social justice issue here. If you have the gateway into the workforce being something where you have to come from a well-off-enough background ... people who are from [big cities] where internships are concentrated and have a place to live or are from families that have the money to enable somebody to work unpaid for a summer or six months or even a year, those people are at a serious advantage.

What makes Intern Nation unique and a truly fascinating read is the author's ability to tie the rise of the intern economy into "changes in academia, to changes in the labor market, to certain generational issues, and even to digital culture and the internet."

Visit U.S. News to read the interview in full.

Owen Jones discusses Chavs on BBC Breakfast

Owen Jones spoke about Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class on BBC Breakfast yesterday morning.

Joined by Daily Mail journalist Harry Phibbs, Owen talked about how the working class have increasingly become an object of fear and ridicule in modern Britain. In an enlivening debate, the discussion looked at commonly held attitudes towards the term 'chav,' and examined what such attitudes say about the social divides still apparent across Brtitain today.

Visit BBC Breakfast to watch the interview

Ian MacKaye now and then: Wugazi and "Guilty of Being White"

American producers Cecil Otter and Swiss Andy have created Wugazi: 13 Chambers, the result of "a year's worth of cutting up every imaginable Fugazi record and trying out every Wu-Tang acapella they could get their hands on."

Is hip hop Black America's answer to punk? The two genres of music and subcultures share plenty of traits such as oft-politicized lyrics, repetition, an incredible ability to annoy parents, as well as the central concern with identity that has been played out through the politics of race for decades.

Fugazi frontman and punk hero Ian MacKaye once held some views about race that now seem shocking. At the age of 19, MacKaye was interviewed about race and the Minor Threat song "Guilty of Being White" for Maximumrocknroll, which he later stated to be "an anti-racist song." White Riot editors Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay try to unpick his rants in their introduction to the interview:

Along with Black Flag and Bad Brains, Washington, D.C.'s Minor Threat was one of the templates for contemporary hardcore. Like Black Flag, they also managed to release one of the most infamous songs in the history of punk rock, "Guilty of Being White." Where "White Minority" was ambiguous and satirical, "Guilty" is shockingly sincere and tenfold more problematic. The singer Ian MacKaye has gone on to be a hero of independent music, doing pioneering work with the bands Embrace and Fugazi, as well as spearheading Dischord Records. At nineteen, however, MacKaye, responding viscerally to being a "white minority" attending D.C. public schools, was pleading to not be "blame[d] for slavery ... [a] hundred years before I was born," and to instead be treated as an individual, outside of the politics of race-a position he has since characterized as "antiracist." In this roundtable discussion, MacKaye, the MDC vocalist Dave Dictor, and Articles of Faith's Vic Bondi go over the complexities of the song, its intentions and interpretations, in the context of an overarching treatment of the role of politics in punk. MacKaye clearly taps into some of the oppositional White rage we have previously identified (see his comments about hating everybody), but interestingly, he advocates not a specificity of oppression, and opposition, that would be "White," but rather the dissolution of race as a category of social interaction and political salience altogether. As he asserts, he sees not races, but individuals. The problems with such a position are clear-one cannot merely wish away the historical and economic realities of racism's lineage-but it will prove to be a persistent one as punk moves forward.

Duncombe and Tremblay quote Dick Hebdige, another contributor to White Riot, as suggesting that "punk, in its first incarnations, was an attempt by young Whites, dissatisfied with the world they were born into, to grab and forge a new ethnicity for themselves." These impulses and tensions have been expressed in complex and confused ways such as "Guilty of Being White," but ultimately, for Duncombe and Tremblay,

Punk didn't deliver, it couldn't deliver ... Punk was and is a subculture, at best a haven in a heartless world, at worst the old world dressed up in a ripped T-shirt and sporting band badges. The problems of race and racism run deeper and wider than any subcultural scene; race as a concept stretches back for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and racism as an ideology and practice spans the entire globe ...It seems the more punks try to resolve issues of race within the scene, the more those solutions seem to elide them. Race isn't just a punk issue, and its resolution cannot take place in only a subcultural scene.

Listen to Wugazi:

Visit Rolling Stone for a track-by-track breakdown.

"Intern Nation should be read by employers in all sectors"

Professor Cary L. Cooper reviews Intern Nation for Times Higher Education (THE). recommending Ross Perlin's insightful account of the internship culture which dominates our cotemporary labour market, where young people and students “earn nothing and learn little”.

Ross Perlin has penned a serious and extremely well-written text that offers sophisticated historical material about the origins of internship and its impact on the individuals concerned, the firms that use it and the world of work more generally. Intern Nation is not merely a collection of narratives of intern experiences but takes a strongly critical view of the majority of intern users, pithily summed up in the statement: "they hawk hope, sell unpaid labor for a fee and peddle in human futures".

Intern Nation dispels some of the myths behind the role internships play in the pursuit of stable, full-paid positions. Furthermore, it shows the enormous economic benefits they represent for large corporations, such as Disneyland. Tracing the history of the rise and rise of internships, Perlin shows that the popularity of unpaid or underpaid internships is rife in Capitol Hill and Westminster:

According to the union Unite, he notes, in the UK less than 1 per cent of the significant number of interns working in the offices of MPs receive the UK minimum wage and half are not reimbursed for expenses. This practice is thought to save Parliament nearly £5 million a year.

Professor Cooper concludes that “Intern Nation should be read by employers in all sectors before they begin to offer internships.”

Visit Times Higher Education to read the review in full.

Double Standards: Richard Seymour on Press TV

Richard Seymour appears on the programme Double Standards to discuss key events of recent weeks, from the escalation of NATO bombardment in Libya to the phone hacking scandal. Seymour, author of The Liberal Defence of Murder , explores the reasons for and consequences of the involvement of Western powers in conflicts and politics around the world, and describes Murdoch’s media empire as the vehicle of neo-liberal ideology and the American economic crisis as the consequence of savage capitalism.

Visit Double Standards to watch this and other programmes.

Chavs across the Atlantic

Few North American readers will be familiar with the derogatory term chavs, as described by Owen Jones in his latest book, but they are no doubt well versed in the collective consciousness of the subtitle 'The Demonization of the Working Class.' The idea of "welfare queens" being an almost universal pejorative across the neoliberal universe. Pulitzer Prize winning writer Connie Schultz describes the term as the rough equivalent of North America's "trailer trash" in a review of Chavs in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Jones, she writes,

is at his strongest when he reports on real events, such as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's methodical dissembling of her country's manufacturing base. He also deftly dissects how British media increasingly promote a disregard for the real lives of the underprivileged.

While Jones is a "convincing champion for the underprivileged," he is criticized for romanticizing the working class and willingly explaining away their bad behavior. This curious observation from across the Atlantic is focused on the anti-immigrant and racist views of some members of the working class, which Jones describes "as almost entirely circumstantial." Schultz, on the other hand, argues that decent jobs and housing "will not eradicate blood-curdling bigotry." Schultz is unclear as to how such a change in working class thought will come about, but it seems unlikely that the proverbial cart of tolerance will be put before the horse of higher wages, stable jobs, health insurance, and immigration reform in particular.

This raises the question of whether the working class is demonized to a greater degree, or perhaps in different ways, in the US compared to the UK. Is "trailer trash" a suitable North American synonym for Chavs?

Visit the Cleveland Plain Dealer to read the full review.

Ross Perlin speaks to Graduate Fog: 'I'm over Nick Clegg's hypocrisy'

Ross Perlin, the author of Intern Nation, comments on the current fight against unpaid and underpaid internships in Britain. In an interview for Graduate Fog, Perlin discusses some of the positive steps which are being taken in order to end this harmful practice.

The name-and-shame culture in the UK is really interesting from a US perspective, where people are really reluctant to single out unscrupulous employers. Likewise, the Cashback for Interns scheme [organised by the National Union of Journalists] is very impressive: unions in America have steered clear of this issue, and there’s no one out there helping interns get justice or navigate all the legal issues out there.

Although the situation here is not as extreme as in the United States, Perlin warns us about falling down a slippery slope. Furthermore, since more and more companies are keeping their unpaid interns for longer periods, these practices are affecting the hiring processes and keeping unemployment high.

One way to engage the broader society in this discussion is to bring up how unpaid and underpaid internships are displacing regular workers and keeping unemployment high. Calling a halt to the dangerous new trend of longer-term unpaid work will strengthen the positive aspects of the British tradition of work experience and mean more paying jobs and opportunities for upward mobility across the board.

Visit Graduate Fog to read the interview in full.

The end is nigh—last chance to enter the Shooting Žižek short film competition

There's only a few days left to get your entries in for the Verso-Church of London short film competition.

The competition was launched in May and asks people to respond to the ideas of Slavoj Žižek's Living in the End Times with a short film of up to one minute. See the original brief here.

We've had minute-long masterpieces from all over the world including Italy, Tokyo, Slovenia and Rio de Janeiro.

But, it's not over yet. With an extended deadline of July 30, there's still time to shoot, edit and render a philosophical
short for our topical brief. Simply check out the Žižek brief guidelines and send us your entry via a video-hosting website like YouTube or Vimeo by the end of the month.

To inspire you, here are a couple of the amazing entries we've already received:

Living in the End Times from Gabriel Tupinambá on Vimeo.

Living in the End Times from Studiocanoe on Vimeo.

Visit The Church of London for more information.

Children as victims and violent perpetrators—Annette Fuentes interviewed by the Associated Press

In an interview with the Associated Press, Annette Fuentes, author of the myth busting Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jailhouse, insists that high-tech security and harsh disciplinary policies in schools have been used as ineffective political instruments—with the US security industry expanding their bottom-line inside the classroom. "There is just a huge disconnect between the public's perception of public schools and kids as dangerous and the reality," she tells the AP. "Kids today are no more violent than any other generation." Children today are paradoxically considered both victims of increasingly violent schoolyard behaviour and menacing perpetrators of great violence and mayhem themselves. In her book, Fuentes criticizes this mindset and the increasing militarization of education for creating a "school-to-prison pipeline," in which:

Students who are suspended in the lower grades are more likely to be suspended as they get older and by 9th grade, they are at risk of dropping out and into criminal activity. Failing schools create a pipeline into prison, in other words. Add to that a heavier police presence in many schools that means more students arrested for misbehaviors - pushing in the hallways becomes "assault" or "disorderly conduct" - and you have schools as feeders for the prison system.

Visit the Associated Press to read the article in full.

Friedrich Engels: 'Stockport is one of the duskiest, smokiest holes.' Owen Jones: 'Bit harsh'

Owen Jones returns to his hometown of Stockport with Stuart Jeffries and the Guardian to discuss its influence on the writing of Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, as well as the need for the return of working-class pride and more representation in politics and the media.

Visit the Guardian to watch the video in situ.

Writing in the end times—the Guardian interviews Slavoj Žižek

Stuart Jeffries has profiled philosopher Slavoj Žižek for the Guardian. In the lengthy interview, Žižek talks about his latest book, Living in the End Times, his recent encounter with Julian Assange and puts to bed the bogus rumours about his friendship with Lady Gaga.

"What would the Virginia Woolf burger be like?" he asks. "Dried out, topped with parsley, totally overrated. I always preferred Daphne du Maurier." He then launches into a denunciation of the pretensions of James Joyce, arguing that his literary career went downhill after Dubliners, and then into a eulogy to the radical minimalism of Beckett's Not I. Within minutes we're on to German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk's views on the Malaysian economic miracle, the prospects for Žižek's film theory course in Ramallah and Katarina Wagner's production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, in which Hans Sachs is depicted as a Heil Hitler-ing Nazi. One's task as a reader or interviewer of Žižek is rapidly to build a network of mental pontoon bridges to unite his seemingly autonomous intellectual territories.

On the Gaga rumours, about which the Daily Star reported that "pals fear the Lady Gaga's head is being filled with extremist ideas by Slovenia-born Slavoj Žižek " Jeffries rightly notes that "surely he might more plausibly have been corrupted by her extremist ideas?"

On the recent event with Julian Assange:

His performance with Assange and radical American journalist Amy Goodman at the Troxy theatre in east London proved better - part pomposity-deflating vaudeville turn and part devastating critique of contemporary capitalism. "I have to subvert these events," he tells me afterwards. "The pious questions, the solemn speeches. My God, how can you sit through these things without wanting to make a joke?" About 40 minutes into the event he yielded to temptation and mutated briefly into Frankie Boyle

Žižek's signature method of combining pop culture with philosophical theory - mainly Hegelian phenomenology - proves particularly effective in our convulsive, ever-changing times. Jeffries describes his style as:

Marxist, Hegelian and Lacanian thought juxtaposed with critical analyses of cinema and popular culture in a sometimes appealing sometimes exasperating written equivalent of jazz improvisation.

Žižek ends the interview with an open invitation to imagine a new society by reconsidering the legacy of communism. Echoing the ideas of the book he co-edited with Costas Douzinas, The Idea of Communism, he assesses the possibilities for emancipation and discovers that even in our neo-liberal societies imagining a better world is still possible. "I am utterly pessimistic about the future, about the possibility of an emancipated communist society. But that doesn't mean I don't want to imagine it."

Visit the Guardian to read the complete article.

Nicholas Noe considers a final Hezbollah showdown

In the National Interest, Nicholas Noe, editor of Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, examines the options for Hezbollah in the face of “a major existential challenge.” Its two major sponsors, the Iranian and Syrian regimes, are currently besieged, while Hezbollah’s support for Bashar al-Assad is eroding its popular support in the Middle East.

With its back to the wall and its options limited, Noe considers what Hezbollah is liable to do:

Should Assad’s multiplying list of enemies, including Saudi Arabia and Turkey, choose to go in for the kill, either bluntly or obliquely, Hezbollah, it now seems evident after meeting with party officials, is prepared to use all necessary means to fight back, and fight back widely.

A collapse of the Levant leg of the Resistance Axis is simply unacceptable for Hezbollah. And seeing no reasonable options for escaping such an outcome in a “just” manner (a course that was available in March 2000 when the party was ready to lay down its arms), Hezbollah will have little choice but to become a part and parcel of one last climactic conflict.

Noe concludes that other political actors, including the US and European powers, must carefully consider the destructive course they are currently pursuing in Middle East which will “in all probability, bring great destruction to the region, including to Israel whose home front will undoubtedly be a main frontline” in a Hezbollah showdown.

Visit the National Interest to read the article in full.

Annette Fuentes explores symbiotic relationship between schools and prisons

In an interview in the July 11 Hispanic Outlook, Annette Fuentes expands on the idea of the school-to-prison pipeline, which was featured prominently in her book Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jailhouse. While the concept of the school-to-prison pipeline has garnered increasing recognition in the education and criminal justice fields, Fuentes explains that the relationship is more than one-way:

“I would say there is a school-to-prison pipeline, but there is also a prison-to-school pipeline,” says Fuentes. The use of security hardware (cameras, metal detectors and retina detectors) and the practice of treating students as suspects are strategies of the criminal justice system, and they have been flowing into the schools. “It’s like a two-way street, a two-way system that mixes the educational and criminal justice systems. The end result is that we have schools in which the learning environment has been degraded and undermined because we are teaching kids to fear and feel that they are suspects at any particular time,” says Fuentes. “Educators talk about the teachable moments. Unfortunately, public fear of kids, public hysteria around another Columbine, has prevented people from remembering that the mission of public schools is to educate and help kids who have lost their way to find their way,” she says.

Fuentes also elaborates on other themes discussed in Lockdown High, such as the 1990s hysteria over a supposed wave of young Black and Latino “superpredators,” the rejection of a siege mentality in post-massacre Columbine, and alternatives to the school-as-prison framework—primarily the novel concept of nurturing and engaging with students rather than locking them down.

Read the article in full as a PDF from Hispanic Outlook.

"If there’s no working class, there’s no left": Owen Jones discusses Chavs with Kate Pickett and the New Left Project

Owen Jones was interviewed by Samuel Grove for the New Left Project about the 'chav' phenomenon and its underlying structural economic and political forces, as well as the crisis of working-class representation in politics and media, and a new class politics for the 21st century.

He concludes:

For me, if there’s no working-class, there’s no left. It is class politics that makes the left “the left”, rather than radical liberals. The left has to make the case that the working-class (those who cannot live a decent life without selling their labour, and who lack control over - or are alienated from - that labour) is the majority of society. The working-class isn’t at the centre of left politics out of simply abstract dogma: it’s the position of working-class people - as those directly exploited by capitalism, and whose interests are in direct conflict with those of wealthy businesspeople - that makes them the “gravediggers” of modern capitalism ...

That’s not to say that socialism should not aim to win over those who define themselves as “middle-class” (another contested term). It is in the interests of most middle-class people to have job security, rights in the workplace, good public services and cohesive communities; and, as polls have showed, support among middle-class people for higher taxes on the rich (like the 50p tax rate) is almost as strong as it is among working-class people. A left movement would only ever win with the support of a majority of working-class people and a sizable minority of middle-class people.

But of course socialism aims to emancipate all of humanity - working-class, middle-class - and even the wealthy elite, although they won’t necessarily appreciate being saved from themselves in the medium-term.

Visit the New Left Project to read the interview in full.

Listen to Owen Jones discuss many of these issues with Kate Pickett, co-author of The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, at the London Literature Festival as part of their 'State of the Nation' strand.

"Tawdry institutional pandering"-University of London refused to host Žižek-Assange event

The Institute of Education, part of the University of London, refused to host the conversation between Slavoj Žižek and Julian Assange, which eventually took place at the Troxy in East London on 2nd July.

The Institute initially expressed strong interest in hosting the event, and starting to make logistical arrangements, before having a sudden change of heart. In an email the head of conferences wrote:

An email...informed Frontline: "There are ongoing issues concerning wi-fi access and the provision of a bar for your visitors, the first of which I feel may be too difficult to resolve at our end.

"This - and the fact that the meeting's subject is of a nature which may attract considerable controversy - obliges me to inform you at this stage in the proceedings that we cannot offer hire of the Logan Hall on this occasion."

Assange, who has been on strict bail conditions...for over six months, was informed that the IOE had declined to hire the Logan Hall for the 2 July event on the grounds that it "may attract considerable controversy".

He said in response: "This is how everyday political censorship works in the United Kingdom, not jackboots at the door, but through tawdry institutional pandering.

On the day, there was no disruption whatsoever. The 1800 attendees waited patiently outside, and the closest there was to a heckle in the hall was when one man shouted from the balcony to ask for the mics to be turned up. The Troxy staff, used to hosting boxing matches, didn't bat an eyelid. But apparently you can't be too careful...

See the Frontline Club blog to read the full article.

New York Times announces a British class war, with Chavs as the manifesto

Under a headline stating that “a British class war is raging,” the New York Times recently published a glowing review of Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, accompanied by a lengthy excerpt from the same book.

Reviewer Dwight Garner describes author Owen Jones as “hideously talented”:

Reading Chavs, I often cursed aloud as if I’d banged my thumb with a mallet, which is how I express keen literary pleasure until I can arrive at something more coherent to say.

Thus is Garner’s response to Jones’s “intoxicating” combination of “wit and outrage,” as Jones traces the lineage of elitist contempt for the British working class.

Garner comes close to declaring Chavs “a rippling, rock-hard classic … the book you’d see peeking out of every college student’s back pocket and rucksack during the summer of 2011.” But his ultimate approbation is more sublime, consigning Chavs to the status of “something to behold, a work of passion, sympathy and moral grace.”

Visit the New York Times to read the review in full, along with a lengthy excerpt from Chavs.

CLARA HEYWORTH: 1983-2011

It is our sad duty to announce the tragic loss of Clara Heyworth, marketing manager at Verso, NY and one of the founders of this website. Clara was hit by a car as she crossed a street in Brooklyn, during the early hours of last Sunday (10 July). The injuries were severe. She never regained consciousness. We lost her on Monday morning. The loss to Verso is immeasurable. Clara was a young woman with many qualities. She first came to us as Office Manager and Publicist in the London office in 2006, delighting everyone with her enthusiasm and intelligence, a knowledge of our publishing history and a no-nonsense approach to everyone, including senior staff. While her primary interest was in publicity she had very strong editorial views and intervened forcefully whenever she felt that by taking on an inappropriate manuscript Verso's standards would be diluted.

A young life so meaninglessly and prematurely truncated pains us all, but we will not forget her or her bright-eyed smile that so often lit an entire office. Our condolences go out to all those who knew her and worked with her and will miss her presence, but primarily to the two people who meant the most to her. Her mother whom she adored not just as a parent, but as a friend and mentor and to her husband, Jacob Stevens, Verso's Managing Director.

We share your pain.

Tariq Ali

On behalf of Verso Board and staff.

Dan Hind and Owen Jones on the phone-hacking scandals

In a new article for openDemocracy, Dan Hind considers the wider consequences of the current phone-hacking scandals and advocates a democratic transformation of the British media. The recent events have uncovered the unhealthy – and at times illegal – relationship between the media, politicians and the police force. These revelations also show the difficulties of media accountability in general and the lack of opportunities for civil participation in news broadcasting.

For the first time in a generation we have an opportunity to discuss how the media currently operate and what we need from them. Their vast constitutional significance can no longer be waved away as a matter for single-issue obsessives and ultra-leftists.

Hind warns us about this moment passing “without a proper reckoning.” In other words, Hind argues we must not waste this opportunity for having a real national discussion on the state of our media and its relationship to democracy. In his most recent book, The Return of the Public, Hind sketches a media model which would empower the ordinary citizen and democratize the journalistic endeavour.

I argue that each of us must be given some control over what is investigated and researched and over the prominence given to the results. The power to commission investigation and the power to publicise what is discovered are currently in the hands of a tiny number of professional editors and owners. These powers can no longer be monopolised by individuals who are unrepresentative, unaccountable to the public, and vulnerable to all manner of private pressure and inducement.

Owen Jones, author of Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, agrees this is a unique opportunity to “call for a total overhaul of our over-powerful, unrepresentative, amoral press.” In an article for Morning Star he unmasks the dangers to democracy posed by Murdoch’s corporation.

Let's not just stand back while News International throws a few sacrificial lambs to the wolves. Let's call for the total transformation of a media that is way out of control and distorting our democracy. This could be the moment that the British press just pushed the British people too far and could prove the opening shot for a movement for a genuinely free press.

In the age of mass democracy, the power of communication shouldn’t reside solely in the hands of media moguls or overpaid public servants. Hind encourage us to take responsibility and shape a new system amid this scandal. ‘If we miss this moment’ he argues, ‘we will have only ourselves to blame.’

Visit openDemocracy to read the article in full and the Morning Star to read Owen Jones’ article in full.

On interns and exploitation north of the 49th parallel

It's rather common among Canadians to define themselves in the negative: not rude, not imperialist and, above all, not American. This despite the fact that Canada tends to hold the bully's coat on most imperial ventures, and sustain a free trade bloc that makes them economically co-dependent (with Canada being perhaps a little more needy). So it's been interesting to see how Ross Perlin's Intern Nation, which focuses on the US intern industry, has been received in the great white North.

Let's start from the right with the National Post, that bastion of objectivity that was once nourished by former newspaper baron Conrad Black. The Post review finds some clear parallels between US and Canadian student interns:

A 2009 poll of graduating students by the Canadian Undergraduate Survey Consortium found 55% had completed an internship, co-op program or other practical experience, up from 35% in 2000. The numbers are similar in the United States; the National Association of Colleges and Employers found 50% of graduating students had held internships in 2008.

The overwhelming tone of the article—National Post interns were not consulted on this I imagine—is "it sucks, but it's worth it." This battle-cry of the young precariat sounds the same both sides of the border. A reviewer in the Montreal Mirror sounds a more hopeful tone—but like a good, polite Canadian doesn't quite call for a general strike:

The internship explosion points to the increasing overall precariousness of the labour market, especially youth and contingent labour-temps, part-timers, freelancers, as well as seasonal and contract workers. Hopefully, with this excellent book, more attention will be paid to this nebulous and disturbing side of work, and its dubious role in undermining labour rights and perpetuating neoliberal economic policies.

Calgary's Fast Forward Weekly also opines the death of upward mobility in the workplace and, as they say, "The American (cough, Canadian) dream of climbing the ladder from the mailroom up is becoming just that: a dream." Once you inch your way out of the mailroom with an internship, however, research conducted by a University of Guelph sociology professor suggests that you'll make $8,000 more each year. Although...

As of 2009, a Canadian undergraduate degree has a price tag of about $80,000. That burden traditionally fell on families and individuals, but now, they're also tasked with the cost of buying work experience.

It's a buyers market, and interns, like most workers, have little say in the unfolding structure of this unpaid economy. According to Simon Fraser Communications Professor Edna Brophy:

You'll frequently hear employers suggest that a free internship is a choice that's made - it's not exploitation because someone walks freely into my office and asks for an internship. To an extent, they have a point... But when you have internships becoming necessary to access a job in the industry, then it becomes a lot less of a matter of choice and a lot more of a matter of necessity.

Canadian unpaid internships don't fall under any labour regulations and, similar to the US, don't include any worker's compensation or insurance coverage. Alberta, known for its boorish premiers, right wing politics and saturated oil wealth, amongst other things, recently launched a "Serving Communities Internship Program," which promises interns a measly $1000 on completion of their job. Without a hint of sarcasm, the program's tagline is:

How do you grow Alberta communities? That's easy. Simply add interns.

In its current Conservative embodiment, Canadian economic policy and politics is almost entirely in line with US interests--austerity and public sector reform amongst other foul deeds. In the world of workplace reform, its business elites share the same boardroom ideologies of lean production and temporary labour. The challenge then is for Canadian interns to break those stereotypes of politeness and give their bosses some lip.

Hamlet in the machine—Franco Moretti's distant reading in the New York Times

Finally, a solution for bibliophiles drowning under the weight of their own book purchases: don't read those voluminous tomes, feed them into a computer and make graphs instead! Heresy? This, according to literary scholar cum-statistician Franco Moretti, is the only way to grasp the immensity of world literature. William Gladstone claimed that one could read 22,000 books in a lifetime. But who has the time or shelf space? Luckily Moretti's Stanford Literary Lab is designed to solve such burning bookish anxieties. The New York Times had the following to say about Moretti's literary rebellions:

As its name suggests, the Lit Lab tackles literary problems by scientific means: hypothesis-testing, computational modeling, quantitative analysis. Similar efforts are currently proliferating under the broad rubric of "digital humanities," but Moretti's approach is among the more radical. He advocates what he terms "distant reading": understanding literature not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data.

In his book Graphs, Maps and Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary Theory, Moretti explains distant reading as an approach where distance "is not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of the overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models." Perceiving this approach as too rigid, guided more by the whirrings of microprocessors than the richness of subjective human sensibility, our journalist cries foul:

The trouble is that Moretti isn't studying a science. Literature is an artificial universe, and the written word, unlike the natural world, can't be counted on to obey a set of laws. Indeed, Moretti often mistakes metaphor for fact. Those "skeletons" he perceives inside stories are as imposed as exposed; and literary evolution, unlike the biological kind, is largely an analogy.

Say what you will about Moretti's scientific method, I can think of a few titles better off in graph form. Atlas Shrugged anyone?

Visit the New York Times to read the article in full.

Greg Grandin's Guardian review of Robin Blackburn's The American Crucible and An Unfinished Revolution

Greg Grandin reviews Robin Blackburn’s latest books for the Guardian. Grandin describes Blackburn’s The American Crucible not as “the capstone of an influential career” but rather as “a catching of breath and a continuation of arguments initially made by the great original theorists of the Atlantic World system.” In this monumental new book, Blackburn explores some of the historical conceptions and misconceptions of the complex system which sustained slavery and its economy in the Americas, with a new focus on the Haitian revolution:

The centrepiece of The American Crucible is Blackburn's measured reconstruction of the chronology of the Haitian revolution and its influence on freedom movements in the United States, Spanish America and Brazil, a persuasive rebuttal of scholarly assessments that the revolution was exceptionally bloody or that its leaders instituted a new form of anti-European racism.

Grandin also praises An Unfinished Revolution, Blackburn’s presentation of the correspondence between Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln. Blackburn’s extensive introduction brings to life the relationship of the two men who occupied very different worlds and held contrary views, yet who coincided on an issue of historic importance, bringing those worlds into fleeting contact with one another. He urges that the Civil War and Reconstruction – “America’s unfinished revolution” – was of larger influence on Marx than often understood – and likewise suggests that the ideas of Marx and Engels had a greater impact on the United States – a country notoriously hostile to socialism – than is usually allowed.

In addition to a range of writings and speeches by Lincoln and Marx, such as the Gettysburg Address and Marx’s journalism, An Unfinished Revolution includes Raya Dunaevskaya’s assessment of the impact of the Civil War on Marx’s theory and a survey by Frederick Engels of the progress of US labour in the 1880s.

What would have happened, Blackburn asks, had Marx – who in Europe supported both union and party building – relocated to New York or Chicago? His answer is necessarily wistful: just as Marx "saw the importance of slavery at the start of the civil war, so he would surely have focused on 'winning the battle of democracy'" by urging his comrades towards a more flexible, potentially successful strategy to secure both political liberty and social equality, which Blackburn, like Marx, understands to be indivisible.

Visit the Guardian to read the review in full.

Greg Grandin is the author of Who Is Rigoberta Menchú?

Bookslut illuminates City of Light’s insurrectionary past in a review of The Invention of Paris

A few short weeks ago, Bookslut reviewer Angela Meyer praised The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps by historian Eric Hazan for enabling her to "place [herself] not just topographically but, temporally" in Paris. Just published, the new paperback edition of The Invention of Paris includes new maps, fresh images and an updated introduction by the author. What could be a better companion for a radical walking tour of La Ville-Lumière?

With Hazan's insights to guide her, Angela Meyer uncovers the revolutionary narratives of the Boulevard Montmartre, Rue du Chevalier-de-la-Barre, right and left bank, and old quarters on a recent trip to Paris:

I didn't know much about the French Revolution and the ongoing struggles. The section on Red Paris is spirited and moving. So many names, so much blood and such continual resistance.

She continues,

The book is also a guide. So that you may visit, or live in Paris, and be aware of the layers of history under, above and around you. The crowds, dirt, ceremonies, entertainments, visions, the struggles and losses.

In what could be called a literary guidebook, Hazan convinces readers that the best way to experience the formation of "Red Paris" is à pied, his tome in hand. Meandering through sites of historical significance to the Paris Commune, French Revolution and 1968 student revolts, we see that the city's insurrectionary history is ever-present, right alongside its more mainstream cultural and literary ones.

Visit Bookslut for Meyer's full review of The Invention of Paris.

Life and love in the works of Gillian Rose—a new review of Love's Work

If her mind could be characterised it would be by a phrase something along the lines of: a fierce vigilance of thought.

This is how Nicholas Lezard, columnist and literary critic at the Guardian, describes the philosopher and sociologist Gillian Rose. In his recent review of Love's Work, Lezard reminds us of Rose’s determination and richness of thought, which characterise both her work and her life. Unapologetically blending prose with theory, Love's Work is an unconventional memoir that takes us through Rose’s love affairs, family relations and her brave fight against cancer.

"Love" and "life" are for Rose almost interchangeable words; we read the phrase "life affair" more than once. And for those who have suffered for and in love, this may prove to be one of the most useful books they will ever read.

Although an established academic –she was trained in Oxford, where she gained her PhD studying Adorno’s work- Rose’s independence and interdisciplinary approach put her at odds with the establishment. Her belief in reading philosophy through the teachings of history and her uncompromising research interests forced her to move from Sussex to the University of Warwick, where she worked until her death in 1995.

Caught between history and philosophy, Rose turned to Hegel’s dialectics as a way to understand the fundamental connections between life and theory. In perhaps her most influential book, Hegel contra Sociology, she engages with the contemporary dilemmas of Marxism and prescribes a dose of Hegel’s speculative discourse as an antidote to ossified sociological practices.

See Lezard’s article at the Guardian for the complete review of Love's Work and Hegel contra Sociology, part of our Radical Thinkers Series, for the theoretical foundations behind Gillian Rose's philosophy.

Why Owen Jones' Chavs is "very much needed for the American scene"

In his 4th of July special for the Huffington Post, "20 Of The Best Books From Independent Presses You Should Know About," Anis Shivani took Independence Day as an occasion to big up indie presses and their latest offerings. Included on his list is Owen Jones' Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, which is praised for its astute analysis of the working class and for the parallels it highlights between US and UK attitudes to middle-class aspirations and social mobility.

Owen Jones writes about the demonization of the British working class, pointing to a new middle-class license to abuse them in public, the Chavs terminology being an example of a wider phenomenon. Jones wonders how it became possible for the Labor Party to join in the conservative (Thatcherite) condemnation of supposedly lazy, irresponsible, and bigoted working men and women, and how it was that the working class fell out of progressive discourse altogether (a book like this is very much needed for the American scene, where the illusion is similarly perpetuated by the Democrats that the middle-class is all that matters, that everyone can aspire to join the middle-class or is already part of it).

The intentional dieindustrialization of Britain under Thatcher is a large part of the reason why the working-class is out of jobs and security, and Jones points to other institutional reasons why the working class finds itself in such dire straits. His advocacy of something like an industrial policy is heard often with regard to the US's similar dilemma, but doesn't seem to have much of a chance of realization in the globalized economy. Nonetheless, Jones's analysis of the condition of the working class is very astute, and as permanent long-term unemployment becomes a fact of life in the US, a similar dilemma emerges here.

Visit the Huffington Post to read about other titles on Shivani's list.

Slavic Review praises Speak, Nabokov for pushing the boundaries of Nabokov studies

In the Summer 2011 issue of Slavic Review, Galya Diment bemoans the “share of stagnant conformity” in Nabokov studies and declares that challenging this conformity “is a healthy critical stance—especially if the challenge is grounded in a quest that is both critically reasonable and open-minded.”

This is Diment’s cue for Michael Maar’s Speak, Nabokov, a book that “bravely locate[s] [itself] outside the mainstream of Nabokov studies by going into territory neither Nabokov nor Nabokov loyalists would approve of.”

Diment questions Maar’s links between Vladimir Nabokov and Thomas Mann ,  but nevertheless finds Maar “masterful when he offers interpretations of Nabokov’s works for their own sake, without linking them to German antecedents.”

These parts are so good that even if one finds oneself fumingly disagreeing with most other points, Nabokov, Perversely and Speak, Nabokov are still worth reading.

See the Summer 2011 issue of Slavic Review to read the review in full (online access limited to subscribers).

New report confirms links between the UN and the cholera outburst in Haiti

A new report by the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention shows additional links between the outburst of cholera in Haiti and the deployment of a Nepalese UN envoy. Since first detected, the disease has killed more than 5,500 people and affected more than 363,000 in an already struggling nation, coping with the aftermath of the shocking 2010 earthquake.

The study is the strongest argument yet that newly arrived Nepalese peacekeepers at a base near the town of Mirebalais brought with them the cholera, which spread through the waterways of the Artibonite region and elsewhere in the Caribbean country.

This revelation supports the views of Peter Hallward, who in an article in the Guardian earlier this year, raised suspicions on the UN connection to the epidemic. This incident is the latest in a number of catastrophic international interventions in the Caribbean island where, rather than helping with the development of the country, the UN has hindered the calls for democracy by the Haitian people and teamed up with Haiti's former and current colonial and neocolonial masters. As yet it has been reticent to accept any responsibility for this new calamity.

The basic political problem in Haiti, from colonial through post-colonial to neo-colonial times, has always been much the same: how can a tiny and precarious ruling class secure its property and privileges in the face of mass destitution and resentment? The Haitian elite owes its privileges to exclusion, exploitation and violence, and only quasi-monopoly control of violent power allows it to retain them.

For more background on Haiti’s recent history see Peter Hallward’s book Damming the Flood, which charts the systematic intrusions by Western powers in Haiti and the devastating effects on its political life. A fully updated edition was released in January 2011 with a lengthy new afterword examining the international response to the earthquake and its failures.

Visit the Guardian for the new report on the cholera outbreak in Haiti and Peter Hallward’s original article on its recent political history.

Greece, Cradle of “Debtocracy”

Richard Dienst is the author of Still Life in Real Time: Theory after Television and The Bonds of Debt, and a co-editor of Reading the Shape of the World. He teaches in the Department of English at Rutgers University. Here, in a special guest post for the Verso blog, Dienst comments on the film Debtocracy.

Soon after the 17 June 1953 workers' uprising in the DDR, Bertolt Brecht wrote a poem called "The Solution." He wanted to mock the official response to popular discontent: the Secretary of the Writer's Union had declared that the people had lost the confidence of the government and that they must earn it back by working twice as hard. "Wouldn't it be easier," Brecht suggested with pitch-perfect irony, "for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?"

Faced with nationwide general strikes, street riots in Athens, and jittery global markets, it is likely that Greek politicians are not the only ones who wish they could opt for such a solution. There must be presidents and legislators across the EU (not to mention bankers and investors around the world) who wish they could somehow dissolve the Greek people and replace them with a more docile, less demanding bunch, willing to work twice as hard for half as much.

World-historical anxieties about Greece reached a fever pitch on Wednesday, June 29, the second day of the latest general strike and the first day of parliamentary voting on the austerity package. A glance at the front page of the Financial Times offered a full menu of dark threats and bleak forecasts. A large color photograph showed a protestor in a gas mask standing in front of a burning van which had been ominously spraypainted "HUNG SOME BANKERS." A banner advertising Martin Wolf's column glumly suggested "‘Enjoy your slump’: Austerity alone risks disaster." Below, the main headline declared that "Greece faces ‘suicide’ vote." The headline rang true because it covered opposing poles of Greek opinion: while the Governor of the Bank of Greece warned that it would be national suicide to reject the austerity plan, people in the street clearly thought that it was suicide to pass it. On one hand, the ruling party insisted that failure to comply with the demands of the Troika (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the IMF) would result in a swift and messy economic collapse. On the other hand, protestors saw the acceptance of austerity and the capitulation to European pressure as a fatal loss of political sovereignty. Even though (or precisely because) the legislation passed, Greece remains on an official suicide watch: the economic medicine might not work, and the political order might fall apart.

All this talk of national self-destruction, however, is too neat and convenient. A recent Greek documentary, Debtocracy [1], argues forcefully that the troubles in Greece have nothing to do with suicidal tendencies or congenital weaknesses. The film, written and directed by Katerina Kitidi and Aris Chatzistefanou, refuses to accept the logic—which is built into the austerity plan—that Greek society must bear collective guilt for the current debt crisis. Instead, it outlines a widening circle of responsibility that reaches from the corrupt "czars of the local economy" to the missionaries and enforcers of global neoliberalism. Somewhere in between, the filmmakers cast doubt on the viability of the Eurozone itself, hobbled by the weakness of its political structure and the hypocrisy of its heavyweight members. But assigning blame, even when it is couched in a far-reaching historical and structural explanation, does not necessarily lead to a political strategy. Here, Debtocracy moves beyond the rhetoric of victimhood and proves itself to be an exemplary intervention, far more useful than the rash of recent US films about the ongoing economic disaster.

Building on interviews with Costas Lapavitsas, David Harvey, Samir Amin, Gerard Duménil, Éric Toussaint, and others, the film goes in search of historical lessons that might inspire and guide Greek resistance. In particular, it examines the cases of Argentina and Ecuador, both of which invented new political movements to survive debt default in the past decade. The Argentine example is presented as a demonstration of the power of popular dissent to force a government to defy international lenders and bargain for a favorable debt restructuring. It is the case of Ecuador, however, that attracts much more attention here, largely because President Correa based his repudiation of the country's debt on the argument that it was "odious," that is to say illegal, immoral, and thus unenforceable. As the film acknowledges, the concept of "odious debt"[2] is not without its problems, including its deployment by the US to erase Iraq's debt before installing a new financial regime. At the very least, its effectiveness as a legal strategy available to all debtors has yet to be truly tested. Nevertheless, the filmmakers present a convincing case that it provides a useful tool in the current situation, if only to expose the financial etiology of the present distress and thus to embarrass the ruling parties. Indeed Lapavitsas and Toussaint have proposed the formation of an independent Audit Committee (modelled on an Ecuadorian precedent) to decide which portions of Greece's debt might be dismissed. But even if all the debt is declared legitimate, Lapavitsas argues, it cannot all be paid.

Thus the film ends with five statements supporting a refusal to pay the Greek debt. It should be stressed that this collective position has nothing to do with those who argue that a restructuring of Greek debt is, as Martin Wolf has put it, a "necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for a return to economic health." (FT, June 22). There are many mainstream economists who oppose last week's deal on the grounds that it will provide a merely temporary fix, not going far enough to break the power of entrenched elites. To be sure, there is corruption to uproot and injustice to punish, but Debtocracy has something more revolutionary in mind. Lapavitsas sets the tone with his observation about the corrosive effects of austerity: "If honoring the debt and making it sustainable involves dismantling health care, dismantling education, dismantling the transport system, then the debt is socially unsustainable." Harvey adds that the PASOK deputies cannot honor the debt without losing their democratic legitimacy: "the government is saying in effect that they are going to default in relation to the Greek people." Duménil is more categorical: "There is only one single option in the coming decade. It is not to pay this debt, because it was based on neoliberalism, and the neoliberal endeavor was a crime against humanity." Amin echoes this view: "Nobody is obliged to pay this debt, since it was accrued by the vicious workings of the financial markets." Toussaint is even more blunt: "It is immoral to pay an immoral debt."

Mixing the pragmatic with the implacable, such attitudes—bedrock demands for social provision, terrible feelings of betrayal, and enduring outrage at the cruelty of contemporary capitalism—are animating new coalitions of the indebted around the world. It is not clear whether any political body within Greece will be able to promise a "sustainable" scheme of universal welfare, just as it is unclear whether any collective audience or addressee will be able to judge the economic crimes of recent history. In any case the events in Greece this week have not resolved the basic contradiction facing all of us between showing obedience to the dictates of the financial markets and taking responsibility for the common good. If anything, we have seen how far a government will go—eviscerating the public sector, levying punishing taxes across the board, selling off state assets, not to mention crushing dissent—to appear creditworthy to banks and bondholders. We have also seen how far indebted people will have to go—if long months of rational arguments, mass protests, and street confrontations aren't enough, what would be?—to change an unsustainable, illegitimate, and immoral system.

For now, everything still hangs in the balance. There is one shot in Debtocracy that captures the present mood: we see an old dog sitting on the sidewalk across from the Greek Parliament building. The building in the distance is brightly lit up, traffic hurtles past, and the dog stays put, apparently unconcerned. Then, sensing an opening, the dog gets up and starts to walk away. We gasp. How on earth could it possibly make it across the road without getting run over? The shot ends before we find out.

[1] Visit www.detocracy.gr to see the film. Press the Closed Captioning button for subtitles. Quotations from the film, when spoken in languages other than English, are taken from the subtitles. To read Aditya Chakrabortty's response to the film for the Guardian, see "Debtocracy: the samizdat of Greek debt."

[2] For a discussion of "odious debt," see Éric Toussaint and Damien Millet, Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank (Monthly Review, 2010), 248-52.

"If you are a terrorist, my God, what are they?" Report on the Assange-Žižek event including Amy Goodman's account

If you missed the livestream of the conversation between Slavoj Žižek, Amy Goodman and Julian Assange on Saturday 2nd July, you can watch the video here.

Thousands of people watched it live around the world. The hashtags #fcwiki and #zizek were both trending on twitter (Žižek was trending above Hannah Montana at one stage!). The event was filmed and streamed by Democracy Now!, and on various other sites including The Nation and michaelmoore.com.

Assange was interesting on the relationship between the liberal and right-wing media, and the potential for harnessing the more negative elements of the media to get information into the public domain. He noted that Fox News had showed far more than CNN of the notorious footage of a US helicopter attacking Iraqi civilians in 2007.

Assange also spoke candidly about Bradley Manning and his own extradition hearing. Startlingly, he also revealed that Daniel Ellsberg had told him that the New York Times had had many of the Pentagon Papers a month before he leaked them.

On the charges of terrorism against Assange, Žižek said that Assange was "a terrorist" in the same way that Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi was.

"As he tried to subvert the British colonial system, Assange is trying to interrupt the normal flow of information. This is a real revolution."

Žižek went on to say that, while discussion of terrorism always focuses on its disruption of the status quo, we should pay attention to the greater instances of terrorism aimed at keeping things the way they are, and finished by saying to Assange "if you are a terrorist, my god, what are they who say you are?"

Visit the Frontline Club blog for full reports of the event, plus live blog and photos from the day.

Amy Goodman has written an article giving her take on the day's events:

Frontline Club co-founder Vaughan Smith looked at the rare sunny sky fretfully, saying, "Londoners never come out to an indoor event on a day like this." Despite years of accurate reporting from Afghanistan to Kosovo, Smith was, in this case, completely wrong.

Close to 1,800 people showed up, evidence of the profound impact WikiLeaks has had, from exposing torture and corruption to toppling governments ...

At the London event, support for WikiLeaks ran high. Afterward, Julian Assange couldn't linger to talk. He had just enough time to get back to Norfolk to continue his house arrest. No matter what happens to Assange, WikiLeaks has changed the world forever.

Visit Truthdig to read the full article.

And, finally, there's a nice archive of tweets from the event here.

From Cairo to Madison: The Arab Revolution and a World in Motion

Tariq Ali, the acclaimed writer, filmmaker and author of The Obama Syndrome: Surrender At Home, War Abroad delivered a riveting talk at Brooklyn's Galapagos Art Space entitled "From Cairo to Madison: The Arab Revolution and a World in Motion." The sold-out event was co-sponsored by Verso and Haymarket Books. Delivering his usual sharp and insightful commentary, Tariq traced past and contemporary patterns of resistance in North Africa and the Middle East that accompanied imperial interference. It comes as no surprise then to discover commonalities between the so-called Arab Spring and resistance to anti-democratic assaults, like the ongoing attacks on public sector workers, in the imperial heartland.

Thanks are due to WeAreMany.org for shooting the event. You can watch the full video on their website.

Chávez returns to Venezuela in time for 200th anniversary of independence

Hugo Chávez has returned to Venezuela in time for the 200th anniversary of Venezuelan independence today. He had been undergoing treatment for cancer in Cuba.

Also, last week it was revealed through Wikileaks that the Catholic church was involved in the 2002 US-backed attempt to topple Chávez by military coup.

Among the latest revelations to emerge from WikiLeaks is that, in 2002, as plotters in Venezuela's capital Caracas were liaising with the US authorities about the conspiracy to topple President Hugo Chávez, the leaders of the Catholic church in that country were defying the instruction of Pope John Paul II to desist from having anything to do with the coup d'état. Instead they threw their lot in with Pedro Carmona, the extremist rightwing businessman, who took office for less than 48 hours during a brief military coup in April 2002.

The cables reveal that Cardinal Antonio Ignacio Velasco, the Salesian archbishop of Caracas, was on hand to sign papers purporting to legitimise the ridiculous Carmona as he dismissed the congress and the judges, and briefly sent Venezuelan politics back into the dark ages. Happily, the genuine popularity of the legitimate head of state was such that the Carmona gang and their military accomplices were routed and Chávez was restored to power.

Visit the Guardian to read the full article on the Wikileaks revelations.

For the definitive and most up-to-date account of Hugo Chávez's Bolivarian revolution, see the new edition of Richard Gott's Hugo Chávez, published today.

Slavoj Žižek and Julian Assange in London with Amy Goodman

Watch live streaming video from democracynow at livestream.com

Win tickets to 'Springtime: The New Student Rebellion' at the Southbank Centre

Springtime gathers stories of protest from across Europe and the Arab world, which brought a diverse student population together with activists through a savvy use of social media.

With J30 fresh on our minds, on Saturday 2 July, Clare Solomon will discuss new forms of resistance and the current threat to the future of education with Nina Power and Tyler Perkin.

For your chance to win a ticket, send an email to enquiries@verso.co.uk with ‘Springtime at Southbank' in the subject line, and your full name.

For more information on the event, which is part of this year's London Literature Festival, visit the Southbank Centre website.

Owen Jones discusses Chavs on Thinking Allowed and writes about the importance of today's strikes

In an article for New Left Project, Owen Jones explains the importance of today's strikes:

J30 can only be a start - and, more importantly, a catalyst. Think back to the first student demonstration in November. 52,000 students turned up, taking everyone by surprise - not least the demonstrators themselves. For the first time, many of them felt a sense of power. It kickstarted a wave of student protests and occupations. J30 must have a similar role for the labour movement, encouraging other workers to think that it is possible to resist.

He also suggests how the public sector unions might avoid being portayed as "sectional" interests and argues that the left must place demands on the Labour Party to "drag the Labour leadership into a position of properly fighting the Tories' cuts agenda."

Yesterday, Radio 4's Thinking Allowed featured Owen Jones talking about the demonization of the working class with Laurie Taylor and sociologist Imogen Tyler.

Visit BBC iPlayer to listen to Owen Jones on Thinking Allowed and visit New Left Project to read his article in full.

Verso editors read from The Verso Book of Dissent, in English and Chinese

Verso editors Andrew Hsiao and Audrea Lim recently gave readings during the event “Into East River(s): Chinese / American Artists and Asian American Poets” at City University of New York. Both read from The Verso Book of Dissent.

Because The Verso Book of Dissent features writings and speeches from around the globe spanning centuries, some appearing in English for the first time, it wasn’t difficult for Hsiao and Lim to find choice selections to read for the event.

Hsiao went back to 1887 to channel “one of the greatest of great New York smart-asses,” Wong Chin Foo, affirming Wong’s designation by recounting the time Wong challenged anti-Chinese populist and Tea Party forebear Denis Kearney to a duel to the death, with chopsticks. Hsiao read from “Why Am I A Heathen,” Wong’s response to Christian attacks against Chinese immigrants:

Lim followed by reading an excerpt from the 1976 poem “The Answer,” by Chinese dissident and poet Bei Dao (incidentally the husband of former Verso NY director Gan Qi). “The Answer,” which was not published until a few years after the 1976 Tiananmen protests that inspired it, eventually became an anthem for Chinese pro-democracy protests. Lim preceded the English reading with a reading from the original Mandarin Chinese:

The Return of Socialism

On June 23, John Nichols, author of The "S" Word: : A Short History of an American Tradition ... Socialism, joined Phil Gasper in Madison, WI for an event to discuss the history of socialism in America and its increasing popularity during today's crisis of capitalism. The event was sponsored by the International Socialist Organization, Haymarket Books, Verso Books, and WORT 89.9 FM Madison.

"One does not need to be a socialist to understand that socialism has been a part of this country's journey from the start."—John Nichols

LIVE from London via Democracy Now! this weekend: Slavoj Žižek and Julian Assange in conversation

In case you hadn't heard, Slavoj Žižek, author most recently of Living in the End Times and Julian Assange, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief, will be in conversation on stage in London this weekend for an event moderated by Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman.

For those in the UK, a few tickets remain (at the time of writing) for this meeting of "the most dangerous philosopher in the west" and "the most dangerous man in the world."

And thanks to Democracy Now!, US viewers can watch the discussion from afar: the event will be broadcast live at democracynow.org from 11am EDT this Saturday July 2. You can even submit questions for Žižek and Assange—see this, from the DN! website:

Within the past year, whistleblower website WikiLeaks has released three of the most significant leaks of classified information in history: the Iraq War Logs, the Guantánamo Bay files and Cablegate. Since then the world has undoubtedly changed. Ambassadors have resigned amid scandals exposed by leaked cables; governments have ordered reviews of their computer security; and pro-democracy movements have swept across the Middle East and North Africa-in part fueled, some believe, by WikiLeaks revelations ...

You can post your questions for the panelists ahead of time on the Democracy Now! Facebook page and submit them to the Frontline Club by emailing events@frontlineclub.com with the subject line "Question 2 July."

Focusing on the ethics and philosophy behind WikiLeaks' work, the talk will provide a rare opportunity to hear two of the world's most prominent thinkers discuss some of the most pressing issues of our time.

It will also mark the publication of the paperback edition of Žižek's Living in the End Times, in which he argues that new ways of using and sharing information, in particular WikiLeaks, are one of a number of harbingers of the end of global capitalism as we know it.

Visit Democracy Now! for more information.

"A challenge for the political future"–The American Crucible reviewed in the Independent

Reviewing The American Crucible in the Independent, Stephen Howe highlights the originality of Robin Blackburn's contribution:

If the thousands of historians who have written about Atlantic slavery and its abolition, only a handful have ever given us a really original perspective on that vast subject. Even fewer have proposed a satisfying, or stimulating, general theory about it, an attempt at explaining the rise, fall and enduring consequences of the entire New World slave system across the centuries and continents. Robin Blackburn is prominent—even pre-eminent—among those few. He has tackled the task in a formidable body of work beginning in the late 1980s; but in a rather idiosyncratic way.

Howe credits this originality to an underlying Marxist framework:

The achievement and originality lie in Blackburn's insistence on the crucial interrelation among slavery, colonialism and capitalism, seeking to map the different modes of production, of colonisation, and of enslavement on to one another. New World slavery was, Blackburn urges, a product—a central, not incidental, one—of the rise of capitalist modernity.

Insisting on the word "capitalist" here is not an empty political gesture, or a vague bow to Blackburn's Marxist background. However much Blackburn's work draws from and debates with a range of theorists and historians, including some conservative ones, he continues to maintain the indispensability of Marx's central insights.

The review also explores the relevance of the book to the present—especially to discourses on democracy and human rights—with Howe concluding that "The American Crucible poses a challenge for the political future as well as a bold reappraisal of the historical past."

Visit the Independent to read the review in full.

Blair puts The Prophet trilogy by Isaac Deutscher on his list of 'Desert Island Books'

While George W. Bush may be a touch disappointed to find his Decision Points omitted, we're sure Isaac Deutscher would have been more than a bit alarmed to find his sympathetic three-volume biography of Trotsky listed among Tony Blair's 'Desert Island Books.'

The nine-item list appeared in recently launched magazine We Love This Book and includes Treasure Island, The Lord of the Rings, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes and biographies of Mohammad and Jesus. On The Prophet, Blair writes:

This book may seem an odd choice for an originator of New Labour, which is about as far from Trotskyist politics on the progressive political wing as you can be, but it was, curiously, the first political book I read and the one that got me interested in politics. It is in three volumes. It was, for its time, hugely significant. In that era, the Soviet Union was supreme: Stalinism had crushed all dissent in the communist empire; Trotsky, one of Lenin's original lieutenants in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, was an outcast. Deutscher's trilogy was a powerful counterblast. It described Trotsky as the true revolutionary who stood out against the cruelty and oppression with which communism came to be associated. Trotskyism and its fight with the official Soviet-style left defined student politics in the 1960s and 1970s, and no one who lived through that period can forget it. But the most interesting thing for me is the character of Trotsky that Deutscher reveals. For all his faults and inconsistencies, the range of his thinking and the energy of the creativity were remarkable. And ultimately, despite his rigid adherence to Marxism, he was moved by an impulse far more moral than scientific.

In a 2009 review of two other biographies of Trotsky, Tariq Ali noted:

For over half a century, Isaac Deutscher's three-volume biography of Trotsky, a literary-historical masterpiece in its own right, was regarded as the last word on the subject. Many who were deeply hostile to the Russian revolution and all its leading actors nonetheless acclaimed these books: in 1997, asked to nominate his favourite book for National Book Day, the newly elected prime minister, Tony Blair, nominated the trilogy.

But don't let Blair's endorsement put you off Deutscher's magisterial work. It may have been the book that got him into politics, but the risk of reading it and being inadvertently transformed into a warmongering champion of neoliberalism is really rather negligible.

Lockdown High: The War on Drugs Goes to School

Truthout has run an excerpt from Annette Fuentes' Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jailhouse. The excerpt, adapted from chapter 5 of the book, "The War on Drugs Goes to School," opens with a portrait of one Chris Steffner, a "true believer in the national movement to randomly drug-test students."

Chris Steffner strode to the front of the packed audience, shunning the podium to deliver her sermon Oprah-style with a wireless mic transmitting the Word loud and clear. The pert, petite blonde is principal of Colts Neck High School in Monmouth County, New Jersey, and a true believer in the national movement to randomly drug-test students in order to save them from themselves and the perceived epidemic of youth drug and alcohol abuse. Steffner was among nine presenters at this, the second Regional Drug Testing Summit of 2007, organized by the federal Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) and held at the Hilton Hotel near Newark International Airport on February 27.

I'm not here to tell you, ‘You should drug-test your kids.' That's your decision," she declared. "It's not about how bad your drug problem is. It's about how much you're willing to do to keep your students off drugs." With a colorful PowerPoint presentation projected behind her, Steffner regaled the assembly with tales of what she was willing to do as principal at Hackettstown High School, her prior post, where she initiated a random drug-testing program in 2004 for athletes, club members, and students driving to and parking at school. There was the story of drunken students at the senior prom, whose vomiting tipped Steffner off to their condition: "I did what every red-blooded principal will do. I bend over and smell that vomit. If I do nothing, I tell those kids it's okay." Steffner also was willing to publicly humiliate students and told of calling an inebriated prom attendee's parents to cart him off before his peers. "They don't get that they can be out of control, they don't get that they can die," Steffner intoned. "That's the beauty of being a kid."

In the first year of drug testing at Hackettstown, Steffner claimed, 70 students from a pool of 1,000 were subjected to urinalysis, yielding one positive-for what drug she did not say. In the 2005-2006 school year, 740 of 1,000 eligible students were tested, producing no positives. A logical conclusion might be that the tests were a waste of time and money. But Steffner said the results were proof that testing was deterring drug use. She nodded to another presenter, "the guru, Lisa Brady," who as vice principal of Hunterdon Central in 1997 helped pioneer random drug testing in that New Jersey high school. One by one, Steffner deflected the arguments of student-drug-testing opponents, dismissing civil rights and privacy concerns, costliness, and the basic lack of scientifically based evidence that drug testing actually deters use among youth with the self-righteousness of a religious crusader.

Visit Truthout to read the excerpt in full.

Richard Dienst: The Case Against 'Saint Bono'

Activists are set to stage a protest against the tax status of U2 during the band's headline performance at Glastonbury festival this evening. Adding to the tax-centred criticism of Bono, Verso presents an extract from The Bonds of Debt by Richard Dienst that exposes further hypocrisy. Dienst untangles Bono's problematic relationship with George W. Bush over the war in Iraq, as well as his deeply misleading claims to represent the people of the Global South.

Over the course of 2005, Bono's image took on a new ubiquity, especially during the media blitz surrounding Live8 and the Gleneagles G8 meeting. As Jamie Drummond wrote, "Live8 and the G8 Summit garnered this year more than 2.7 billion media impressions in America alone according to our best estimates." It is striking that Drummond speaks as if Live8 and the G8 meeting were the same event. It is hard to know what a "media impression" is-let alone what kind of significance 2.7 billion of them might have-but let us take note of one televisual event: Bono's appearance on Meet the Press on June 26. Bono's face and voice were being transmitted from Dublin to the studio in Washington, so that Tim Russert could interview him "live." Just moments before, Russert had interviewed Donald Rumsfeld about the war in Iraq.

Even though Bono wasn't in the same studio as Rumsfeld, he shared the same program, separated only by a few commercials for financial services companies, Boeing Aerospace, and the agricultural conglomerate Archer Daniels Midland. It's easy to see that all of these images fit together nicely. From moment to moment, television has an ineluctable way of making connections, sometimes surprising and sometimes not surprising at all.

Russert asked Bono a number of good questions. Concerning Live8, he asked if it was true that Bono and Geldof had agreed to steer clear of any critique of Bush and Blair over the Iraq war. Bono replied, "Absolutely. This is the other war. This is a war that can be won so much more easily than the war against terror, and we wish the president and others luck in winning the war against terror." Concerning the "accountability" of aid for Africa, he told Russert:

This is the number-one problem facing Africa: corruption. Not natural calamity, not the AIDS virus. This is the number-one issue and there's no way around it. That's what was so clever about President Bush's Millennium Challenge. It was start-up money for new democracies. It was giving increases of aid flows only to countries that are tackling corruption. That's what's so clever. It's-the implementation of the Millennium Challenge has not happened. It is in trouble. They recognize that. President Bush is embarrassed about that. They're trying to put it right. But the idea, the concept, was a great one.

We've already seen just how narrowly focused and badly funded the Millennium Challenge Corporation was. Nevertheless Bono offered his full support once again, performing damage control for the Bush Administration at a crucial moment. No wonder the State Department posted a proud news release the day after this broadcast, headlined "US Aid to Africa Hits Record Levels; Geldof, Bono praise Bush before Group of Eight Summit in Scotland."

Just a few minutes earlier on the broadcast, Russert had asked Donald Rumsfeld about the progress of the war on terror and the prospects for democracy in Iraq. Rumsfeld replied:

[The] Iraqi people have a choice. They're either going to go down a dark path where the beheadings are, and a small group of people who run that whole country, as they have before, or they're going to have a representative system, where women participate and where people have to have protections against each other because of the constitution. And I think they're going to choose a path of lightness. There's-the sweep of human history is for freedom. Look at what's happened in Lebanon and Kurdistan and the Ukraine and these countries. I think there's-we can be optimistic about the future, but we have to recognize that it's a tough, tough, tough world, and there are going to be a lot of bumps in the road between now and then.

Is the Defense Secretary's visionary optimism, tempered with hardheaded realism, really all that different from Bono's? One is fighting poverty and corruption in Africa; the other is fighting an insurgency in Iraq. We keep hearing that it is the same war, without metaphor, as far as the eye can see.

While interviewing Bono, Russert replayed a portion of the ONE campaign ad, which includes this statement by Nelson Mandela: "We now need leadership, precision, and political courage." Russert remarked, " ‘Political courage.' Those words seem to be a direct challenge to President Bush and the other leaders." To which Bono responded: "Yeah. Yeah, it is a challenge." He praised European countries for boosting their development aid (as a percentage of GDP), while "the United States is down to about .17 [percent]; .2 is within sight. But really to get serious about this, the United States has to get up to .3, .4, .5. That's our wish here. And we know it will take time to get there. We know that you've got a deficit problem. We understand there's a war being fought."

Underline these numbers. Bono casually suggests that the US might raise the level of aid to 0.3, 0.4, or 0.5 percent of GDP. He must know that such an increase would require multiplying that Millennium Challenge promise three, five, or seven times. And given the difference between promises, specific agreements, and actual disbursements, it is clear that the whole aid system would have to grow more efficient and effective by several orders of magnitude in order to deliver the money. Given everything-that president, that Congress, that deficit, that war-this was simply not a serious wish. Russert did not raise a challenge, and viewers could hardly decide if Bono was admirably stubborn about his demands or simply disingenuous. To speak of such goals without speaking of the need to make fundamental changes in the political situation is not dreamy idealism, it's disinformation. In the mass media division of labor, politicians lie about facts and celebrities lie about hopes.

We can also set aside the question of whether or not this increase in aid would really do so much good, whether it would solve the problems of developing countries or "make poverty history." We need not enter into the arguments about how aid might be spent, although that is clearly a crucial issue. (The economist Robert Pollin has made a reasonable argument that Bono's proposal for aid in alliance with a neoliberal trade regime will be strikingly worse than an effort to build an alternative to neoliberalism.) For our purposes here, on the level of images, it is enough to show just how much euphemism and misdirection have to be employed in order to make Bono's campaign look disinterested and philanthropic, even as it allies itself with the most aggressive imperial powers.

Earlier in the broadcast, Russert quoted a statement by Rumsfeld's former deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, who testified to Congress in March 2003, "We're dealing with a country [Iraq] that can really finance its reconstruction relatively soon'. . . [The] oil revenues of that country could bring in between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years." Russert then asked Rumsfeld, "Did you make a misjudgement about the cost of the war?" And Rumsfeld dismissed the question with a shrug: "I never estimated the cost of the war. And how can one estimate the cost in lives or the cost in money? I've avoided it consistently." In his years directing the war, Rumsfeld had his own way with numbers, which was also his way with human lives: he didn't consider them at all.

When Wolfowitz was catastrophically wrong about the costs of the Iraq war, he was rewarded for his expertise with the presidency of the World Bank, a tenure that proved to be short-lived. He made a show of wanting to talk with Bono soon after his installation there, and Bono promptly took his calls. Later Wolfowitz met with Bono backstage at Live8, as the World Bank proudly advertised on its web pages. Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Robert Gates, and the rest of the administration remained openly dismissive of any attempt to count human costs along the "path of lightness." How could Bono put himself in such company and still invoke the moral authority of Nelson Mandela? Remember Mandela's criticisms of the rush to war: "[The] attitude of the United States of America is a threat to world peace'. . . [There] is no doubt that the United States now feels that they are the only superpower in the world and they can do what they like." Throughout the Bush administration, no matter what happened, Bono continued to do business with the president as well as with those around him.

Three and a half months after the Gleneagles G8 summit, where the multilateral debt relief and aid package had been announced, Bono visited the White House again for another photo opportunity. What was the deal this time? On whose behalf does he strike his deals? Who or what does he represent? Does he represent others like himself, well-meaning citizens of the West who feel indignant and guilty over the suffering of the poor and the sick? Or does he represent the poor and the sick themselves, as their self-appointed spokesman and champion? Bono made his position perfectly clear in a Rolling Stone interview published just before this meeting with Bush: "I'm representing the poorest and most vulnerable people. On a spiritual level, I have that with me. I'm throwing a punch, and the fist belongs to people who can't be in the room, whose rage, whose anger, whose hurt I represent. The moral force is way beyond mine, it's an argument that has much more weight than I have."

Is that so? By what right does he claim to represent the poorest and most vulnerable people? Does he represent all of them, everywhere around the world? It is hard to know what he could mean by such a statement. Political representation, at least in a democratic key, is supposed to involve some kind of deliberative process, whereby a group of people choose a representative as their surrogate, advocate, or intercessor. Moreover, this decision to name a representative has to be grounded in the principles of freedom and procedures of sovereignty that govern such acts, so that all parties-including representatives of other people-can accept the legitimacy of the representative. Only through such a process can a representative be considered responsible for and answerable to those people he or she represents. But enough of these technicalities. It is obvious that Bono cannot be the "literal" or "legal" representative of the poorest and most vulnerable people. If he were, he wouldn't be standing in the Oval Office.

Instead, he presents himself as the figurative and spiritual representative of a vast array of people, billions of them. He does not claim to represent their interests, their perspectives, or even their hopes, but rather their "rage, anger, and hurt." That is to say, he does not represent human beings, he represents affects, detached from real lives and filtered through his celebrity image. In his sleepy-eyed seriousness and sympatico slouch-which is the current signifier for "compassion"-he absorbs and deflects everything that those billions of people might actually say on their own behalf. It is not as if "the poorest and most vulnerable people" do not express themselves, in countless ways, all the time. They are articulate, deliberate, and far too various to be summed up just by their pain or their poverty. They have many representatives, too, in and out of governments. All of them are aching to be heard. None of that seems to matter when Bono goes to the White House. Indeed, we should make no mistake about it: he can stand there precisely because those people are so absent; he can speak for them exactly insofar as they are silenced; he can "throw a punch" at Bush, Blair, Obama, or any of the others only because he disguises the immense material force of their lives with the soft "moral force" of his rhetoric. The short circuit between imperial power and media spectacle makes every image of Bono-whether at the White House, Davos, Cannes, Ghana, or anywhere else-an apt visualization of the prevailing global order, shuttling between remote-control imperial projection and helping hand philanthropy. What is missing, invisible, off the agenda, is any belief that economic development can be a mode of collective self-determination, opening up a realm of freedom for the poor beyond that envisioned for them by billionaires.

The trajectory of Bono's campaigns over the past decade tells us a great deal about the limits of philanthropy, reform, and popular politics in a world where any feeling of global collectivity seems increasingly remote. In its earliest phases the debt relief effort drew upon established movements that were challenging longstanding historical injustices; Bono left those behind in order to strike deals with Bush and Blair (among others). As he encountered obstacles, he drove the agenda in wider circles, sweeping up disparate causes into an omnibus program that migrated toward the media mainstream, preferring conservative pieties to progressive abrasion. The Project Red campaign-a series of branding agreements that leverage symbolic synergies across sneakers, sunglasses, computers, and other aspirational goods-set out to prove that consumerism could trump both old-fashioned charity and official aid. After years of consolidation, the ONE organization (named after a U2 song) now functions as a kind of all-purpose NGO, a shadow UN fuelled by celebrity endorsements and colored wristbands. For a time it seemed as if Bono had succeeded in cornering the market in moral outrage, which he repackaged in a form that could turn a profit and soothe the uneasy heads of state. Yet in spite of his high-flown rhetoric, he does not want to forge a bond of solidarity and obligation between the mass audience he addresses in the West and the subjects in the South whom he claims to represent: such a bond might all too easily turn against the system he serves. Try as he might, he can hardly disguise the fact that the end of poverty will require a radical change in the current order of things. It will require new languages and new images-nothing like anything Bono has to offer.

Andrei Platonov, the Bush doctrine, and Robin Blackburn on human rights—new issue of New Left Review out now

The new issue of New Left Review (NLR 69 May/June 2011) is out now. Highlights include:

* Andrew Bacevich tracing the origins of the Bush doctrine of preemptive war to the thought of Albert Wohlstetter.

* Robin Blackburn, whose latest book, The American Crucible, examines the relationship between the struggle for emancipation and the discourse on human rights, reviewing The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History by Samuel Moyn.

* A study of Spain—last frontier of the Eurozone crisis and recent site of mass resistance to the austerity project—in which Isidro López and Emmanuel Rodríguez track the development of the Iberian bubble economy.

* A review of François Dosse’s biography of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari by Peter Osborne, author of The Politics of Time.

* ‘On the First Socialist Tragedy,’ an article from 1934 by Andrei Platonov, in which he reflects on man, technology and the dialectic of nature.

* Tariq Ali, whose book The Obama Syndrome is out in paperback soon, reviewing Manning Marable’s biography of Malcolm X.

For information on how to subscribe, visit New Left Review.

Owen Jones responds to his critics

Owen Jones will be answering questions about Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class on the discussion board on Tuesday 28 June, from 12 noon (BST). Post your questions here in advance and please join us on the day.

He responds to reviews of the book in the New Statesman, the Independent on Sunday and the Guardian.

In his review of my book Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class for the New Statesman, Michael Collins suggests that the "chav" word is somehow outmoded. I strongly disagree. Its usage remains prevalent: whether in daily conversations or internet forums. But above all the use of "chav" caricatures—whether the actual word "chav" is invoked or not-is still rampant. The idea that we're all middle class, apart from a feckless, work-shy rump living on "sink estates" is embraced by politicians and journalists alike. The reality of Britain's working-class majority remains absent from our TV screens, newspapers and from our politicians' speeches.

I don't agree that I define the "working-class" by "trade unions and council housing". In chapter 2, I point out that even at the peak of the trade union movement, around half of the workforce was unionised. Union membership has, today, collapsed: one of the features of the "new working-class" based in the service sector that I examine is the low level of union membership. As the book examines, only 15 per cent of private sector workers are unionised; in addition, less than 15 per cent of workers earning less than £7 an hour are union members. In call centres and supermarkets—now huge sources of employment—levels of unionisation are very low indeed. Yes, I advocate organising workers as a means of giving working-class people a voice, and I believe the decline of the labour movement is one of the reasons that working-class people have less power than they once did. However, in no way do I believe union membership is any kind of prerequisite to working-class identity.

The same goes for council housing. When I look at Thatcher's right-to-buy policy I point out that it was "undoubtedly popular with many working-class people. A million council homes were sold in a decade. Former tenants would mark their entry into home ownership by giving their properties a lick of paint." I go on to consider the fact that half of all people living in poverty own their own homes; and that there are "more homeowners in the bottom 10 per cent (or decile) than there are in each of the two deciles above it." Above all, I emphasise that "the fact that millions of people have had to borrow beyond their means, sooner than pay a subsidized rent, does not make them middle class."

Yes, I do believe right-to-buy combined with the failure to replace the housing stock sold off has undermined the original purpose of council housing-which was to support mixed communities. Indeed, many middle-class people were once council tenants. In 1979, a fifth of the top 10 per cent lived in council houses.

I define working-class in a fairly orthodox way: those who sell their labour in order to live, and lack control over their labour. I specifically argue against the idea that class is defined by home ownership-or membership of trade unions, for that matter.

Neither did I say that "anyone who moves beyond [trade unions and council housing] is guilty of breaking class solidarity and pursuing 'rugged individualism'." No evidence is provided to support this accusation, because it doesn't exist in the book and I have absolutely no sympathy with such an argument. I do argue that Thatcherism attempted to undermine both trade unions and council housing to promote "rugged individualism", but I doubt there are many who would disagree with that, including Thatcherites. Thatcher's right-hand man, Keith Joseph, himself argued for home ownership so as to resume "the forward march of embourgeoisement [becoming bourgeois] which went so far in Victorian times".

Collins talks about working-class "urbanites" leaving their communities, and that "those who stayed behind are alienated by the fallout from the immigration and multiculturalism imposed by New Labour." I think this is an over-generalisation. There's been a growing degree of mixing between people hailing from different ethnic backgrounds, for example. We have some of the highest levels of interracial relationships in the world—and that's particularly true in working-class communities, which are more likely to be ethnically diverse than most middle-class suburbs. Two-thirds of black men are in relationships with white women. The book argues that, above all, anti-immigrant backlash is being fuelled by insecurities over jobs and houses. In Dagenham—where the BNP enjoyed some of their greatest political victories—housing is the central grievance, as any anti-racist campaigner will tell you.

Collins argues that "the left came to loathe the insularity and localism it once championed in the working class, and shifted its focus to identity politics and minority interests". I think the first is a bit of a generalisation: the labour movement has a proud internationalist tradition, and long emphasised solidarity between workers across the country. But the book does critique the left for abandoning class in favour of identity politics—so I'm not sure why Collins portrays this as a disagreement.

Collins takes me to task for my argument that Thatcherism redefined aspiration from collective to individual. My point was that the historic mission of the labour movement—to raise the conditions of all through, for example, the welfare state—was heavily undermined. Instead, everyone was expected to "pull yourself up by your bootstraps", if you like-and to fail to do so was a sign of individual failure. To get on in life meant relying on your own efforts, not being part of a wider struggle.

But the idea that "this is the leftist equivalent of telling the working classes they should not get above their station" is pretty ridiculous, I think. The book has entire chapter entitled 'A Rigged Society' attacking the fact that all the professions have been turned into middle-class closed shops, keeping working-class people out. I attack this as "an invisible prison". As I put it: "As well as being manifestly unfair, the unrepresentative social composition of the professions ensures that Britain remains dominated by an Establishment from the narrowest of backgrounds. The result is a society run by the middle class, for the middle class." My point about social mobility is that, by definition, it only benefits a small minority. The same number of people would still be doing the jobs that society depends on to keep functioning. So, rather than focusing on creaming off a small minority of people, we have to address the interests and concerns of those who remain within the working-class majority.

Collins has an interesting passage about Samuel Barnett in the 1890s fearing that—in his words—"once the proles got their hands on cash, they would spend it on gambling and drink". As I say, interesting, but in no way an argument the book could ever be seen as supporting. The book focuses on the act that the wages of working-class Britain have—outrageously—been stagnating and even declining (which began before the crash) while the paypackets of the wealthy have continued to soar. I argue strongly for a militant trade union movement which fights for higher wages. That millions are trapped in poverty—not least because of low-paid jobs-is a central theme of the book. And I attack those, such as James Delingpole, who argue that excessive drinking is a working-class problem—studies show that middle-class people drink more booze than anyone.

As for who will read the book—well, I think Collins is a bit presumptuous there. The best part about writing the book so far has been the number of people getting in touch and linking the book to their own experiences. There's a few public examples on the book's Amazon page. And I can't be accused of sticking to a 'Guardianista' bubble: I've even written about the book in The Sun. Whether or not there are Sun readers who've listened to Chumbawumba in the past isn't a question I can answer, however.

As for Cole Moreton's review for the Independent on Sunday—safe to say he's not a fan! He felt there aren't enough working-class voices in the book; but other reviews (such as the one written by Jon Cruddas) felt that this was the book's strength. I certainly could have included more—but above all this was a book about how politicians and the media caricatured and demonised working-class people. The book never presented itself as a thorough study of working-class Britain—in the tradition of The Road to Wigan Pier, for example. I think that's a book that needs to be written—but I'm not the person to do it, and would never claim to be.

Moreton accuses me of attacking a journalist for being out of touch because he went to Oxford, when I went to Oxford myself. But I simply didn't do that. I criticised a journalist for describing Jade Goody as the face of "ugly white Britain", berating her garbled English and suggesting that she use her fortune to have "remedial education", and pointed out that while he was at Oxford, her dad was hiding guns under her cot. My point was that it was unfair for someone who undoubtedly had enjoyed many educational advantages to attack someone brought up in unimaginably difficult circumstances for not being sufficiently educated. If I were to do that, then I would deserve to be criticised in the same way.

Moreton attacks me for suggesting that "journalists sent to cover the [Shannon Matthews] story entered a world as alien to them as front-line Afghanistan". But I didn't: I quoted Melanie Reid in the Times arguing that "us douce middle classes" simply did not understand the case "because we are as removed from that kind of poverty as we are from events in Afghanistan. For life among the white working class of Dewsbury looks like a foreign country." He then attacks me for suggesting that "You will struggle to find anyone writing or broadcasting news who grew up somewhere even in remotely like the Dewsbury Moor estate", pointing out that he did himself. But Moreton is an exception: the Sutton Trust revealed that over half of our top 100 journalists are privately educated, and just over one in ten went to a comprehensive. The decline of local newspapers (which gave many working-class aspiring journalists a leg-up), the rise of unpaid internships and emphasis on getting expensive qualifications from places like City University has made it much harder for working-class people to break in the media.

Finally, Moreton breaks the exclusive that I'm using the book to launch my political career. This was news to me. So there's no doubt, I should point out that I'd prefer to stick pins in my eyes than have any kind of political career—and my background working for the hard left of the Labour party and left-wing unions like the RMT is a curious one for an aspiring political hack.

I was honoured that Lynsey Hanley—one of Britain's greatest writers on class and inequality—reviewed the book for the Guardian. There was a lot of food for thought. I would query a couple of criticisms, though. One was that I failed to "establish the link between being working class and holding far-right views". But I don't, in all honesty, think that there is a link: the vast majority of working-class people abhor far-right views. If we're talking about racism: well, working-class communities are more likely to be ethnically mixed than most middle-class suburbs; similarly working-class people are more likely to work with people from different ethnic backgrounds than many middle-class professionals. The Conservative Party—which has been the most resistant to the emancipation of ethnic minorities, and most likely to pander to racist sentiments—disproportionately attracts more prosperous voters, and only a minority of working-class votes. The trade union movement—that is, the organised workers' movement which still today has 7 million members—has always been a key bulwark against far-right views, in favour of equality and human emancipation. Campaigns against the BNP have been dependent on funds from trade unions.

I discussed this issue with my friend James, raised by his mum in the Rhondda Valley—he argued: "In fact the most brutal displays of bigotry I have witnessed was at the red brick university I attended, which had impeccable 'middle-class' credentials. I witnessed more prejudice in my three years there than during the previous nineteen spent in a quintessential working-class community, which was one of the most deprived areas in the UK."

Many of the people I know who were brought up in such traditional working-class areas show an unshakeable commitment to a set of values like community spirit, resilience and solidarity in the face of hardship, a commitment to helping those less fortunate and an instinctive commitment to greater fairness (both at home and abroad)—even at times inspiring optimism, which is all too often sold short by those in power. These values have always been an important element to the character of people growing up in a tough environment where many could fairly be excused for simply looking out for number one."

Lynsey also suggests that I prefer "to treat 'the working class' as a single political bloc". But I tried to emphasise how politically fragmented working-class Britain has always been. In chapter 2, I look at the long tradition of working-class Toryism, and look at how divided the working-class vote was under Thatcherism. The book also looks at how the working-class has never been homogenous—there's always been skilled and unskilled; those who once lived in slums, forms of social housing and homeowners; the employed and long-term unemployed; those in London and those in Scotland; and so on. The conclusion argues that a new class politics would "mean straddling the internal divisions within the working class that widened under Thatcherism".

Visit the New Statesman, the Independent on Sunday and the Guardian to read the reviews in full.

Internships and the 'New Economy': Intern Nation reviewed in the Spectator and the Financial Times

Alice Clegg's Financial Times review of Ross Perlin's book includes a handy do's and don't s list for interns and, drawing on interviews with recruiters, interns and lawyers, discusses what makes an internship good, bad or downright illegal:

When does give and take tip over into exploitation? In the UK, it boils down to whether an individual falls within one of four exemptions to the National Minimum Wage Act: volunteers; voluntary workers; work-shadowing/work experience; and students on course placements. Simply labelling someone an intern is not a get-out, says Alison Clements of Lewis Silkin, the law firm. What matters is whether “they are performing real work” and are obliged to work fixed hours.

Adam Foreman, a partner at Littler Mendelson, the law firm, says US law that guarantees interns a minimum wage is often ignored. Because “the interns are hoping to turn their internships into full-time jobs”, he says, transgressors are rarely hauled before the courts.

Reviewing for the Spectator, Edward King finds Intern Nation a "fascinating read," picking up on Perlin's innovative contributions to the debate:

One of Perlin’s main arguments is that the internship phenomenon has become a vehicle for an increasing interpenetration between the worlds of work and education. This is particularly pronounced in the US, where universities often run internship programmes hand-in-hand with businesses in which students can work for firms in return for academic credit. So far, UK universities have been more reluctant to open their doors to the market in this way (some Oxford colleges, for instance, forbid students from taking internships during holiday periods). But, with the radical overhaul in university funding, this is set to change. The problem with this encroachment of the business world into education, argues Perlin, is that it devalues both sides: replacing structured learning with nebulous ‘on the job experience’ and, in the case of the more unstructured internships, giving young people bad first impressions of the world of work.

Perlin is at his best when he attempts to situate the internship phenomenon within what he refers to as the ‘New Economy’. He argues that internships are part of a shift away from the company man to an entrepreneurial philosophy of ‘I am the CEO of me’. The benefit of most internships has little to do with learning about an industry or a career. Instead, internships are all about personal ‘branding’. Graduates gather internships as so many empty lines on a CV, evidence not so much of ability as connections and perseverance. In one of his most interesting arguments, Perlin links the increasing willingness to work for free to the ethos springing up around the intern, according to which businesses are willing to give their main commodity away for free and gain their financial rewards through subsidiary channels. In the internship system financial rewards are similarly deferred as graduates work for free in return for exposure, contacts, and references that are touted as the prerequisites to making money.

Visit the Financial Times and the Spectator to read the reviews in full.

New Political Science on Paige Arthur on Sartre on Iraq and Afghanistan (and perhaps Libya?)

Just prior to NATO’s military intervention in Libya, Joseph Peschek reviewed Paige Arthur’s Unfinished Projects for the journal New Political Science. Peschek first applauded Arthur for exploring an aspect of Jean-Paul Sartre seldom examined:

Among the vast array of Sartre studies, topics such as Sartre’s standpoints on Stalinism and the Soviet Union, and his related debates with Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty on morality, violence, and history, have been prominent. In this fine book Paige Arthur systematically examines from a fresh perspective a second political engagement of Sartre’s: as a critic of colonialism and neo-colonialism and as a supporter of Third World liberation struggles.

From there, Peschek summarized Arthur’s “four phases in the development of Sartre’s understanding of decolonization,” which spanned from 1945 to Sartre’s death in 1980.

However, Peschek didn’t end there. He hoped to deduce from Arthur what Sartre would say about current Western military interventions.

Quoting Peschek quoting Arthur on Sartre:

As Arthur explains, “By making human rights, and not self-determination and autonomy of peoples, the centerpiece of this reformulation, the socialist Left put itself in a position to effect a startling reversal of anti-colonial principles: a move toward a left-wing justification of intervention on humanitarian grounds.” One sorry offshoot of this turn was the support of many erstwhile leftists for US imperial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past decade. How much better Sartre, with his “consistent desire to take non-Western interlocutors seriously—to recognize them genuinely as subjects outright, and not as potential subjects or as victims in need of being saved.”

Visit New Political Science to read the review in full (for NSP subscribers and subscribing institutions only).

Deadline extended: Shooting Žižek - short film competition

Please note that the deadline has now been extended to 30 July.

Verso and The Church of London are pleased to announce a new short film competition to mark the publication of Slavoj Žižek's Living in the End Times. The competition is launched in the May/June issue of Little White Lies.

Shooting Zizek creative brief:

The end is nigh, film it fast ...

Global capitalism is fast approaching its end times, says "the Elvis of cultural theory" Slavoj Žižek in his new book, Living In The End Times.

The upcoming zero-point is heralded by these ‘four horsemen of the apocalypse':

ECOLOGY: impending enviromental disaster
ECONOMY: the global financial meltdown
BIOLOGY: the biogenetic revolution and its impact on human identity
SOCIETY: social divisions leading to the explosion of protest and revolutions worldwide

But from the ashes of the coming crisis, is there opportunity for a new beginning?

To celebrate the launch of Living In The End Times in paperback, Verso Books and The Church of London are inviting filmmakers to submit short films which respond, in creative and innovative ways, to Žižek's theory of the end times.

Instructions:

The film - up to ONE minute in total - can take any format: animation, drama, documentary, stop-motion or other.

The winner will be picked by Žižek himself!

The winning film will screen before an open lecture by Žižek in London and the winner will receive a selection of Verso's back catalogue, curated by the subversive publishers themselves.

Entries can be uploaded to a video-hosting website, like YouTube or Vimeo, with a link sent to zizekfilm@thechurchoflondon.com by July 30.

NOTE: Although filmmakers will retain ownership over their submissions, Verso Books and The Church Of London will have full permission to feature content across all their platforms.

For further info and updates see the Verso and The Church of London blogs and twitter feeds. More details and prizes to be announced.

For a little inspiration check out the wonderful RSAnimate video of Žižek talking about First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.

Comments on 'What more could we want of ourselves!', Jacqueline Rose’s review of The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg

Peter Hudis, an editor of The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, responds to 'What more could we want of ourselves!', Jacqueline Rose's review of the book in the London Review of Books (June 16, 2011).

One sign of the multidimensionality of Rosa Luxemburg's life and work is the way she appeals to thinkers and activists coming from a number of different directions. Some view her primarily as a brilliant economist, who wrote the first study (at least since Marx's Capital) of capitalism's inherent drive for global expansion. Others view her mainly as a path-breaking political thinker, because of her embrace of spontaneous forms of revolt and her searing critique of those who fail to grasp the centrality of mass participation and democracy in efforts at social revolution. Others are drawn to her largely because of her striking personality, which exhibited a fiercely independent spirit and a fascination with both the beauty and tragedy of the human and natural world. The great merit of Jacqueline Rose's review of The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg is that it focuses on what connects the many strands of Luxemburg's legacy—her profound appreciation of the transformative power of the human intellect.

As Rose correctly writes, Luxemburg understood that "the reason people will turn to revolution, [is] not just, to use Marx's terms, because of the clash between forces and relations of production, but because the mind always has the power to expose and outstrip injustice." She critiqued capitalism not only for its obvious economic inequities and political injustices but also because it robs the mass of humanity from "the common property of everyone"'—access to knowledge. The most lasting and important component of spontaneous freedom struggles, she held, was the "mental sediment" that they produce for the transformation of reality.[1] The development of this mental component, she held, was not a mere means to an end but is inseparable from the content of socialism itself. She understood, as did Marx, that "Capital in its true development combines mass labor with skill, but in such a way that the former loses its physical power, and skill resides not in the worker, but in the machine and in the scientific combination of both in the factory operating as a single whole. The social mind of labor acquires an objective existence outside the individual workers."[2] A society can only be held to have made a full break with capitalism if it reverses this alienation of humanity's mental powers. That is why, in Marx's view, the new society will be characterized by "the developed person, whose mind is the repository of the accumulated knowledge of society."[3]

Luxemburg's emphasis on the power of intellect is all the more remarkable given that she was a product of the Second International, which was largely dominated by a crass vulgar materialism. She was swimming against the stream in insisting that politics is primarily not about power but education. As Rose puts it, "Luxemburg did not want to be the master of the revolution, she wanted to be its teacher (the worst insult, she once said, was to suggest that intellectual life was beyond the workers' reach)." Indeed, it is virtually always the case that those who complain most about theory are not workers but a certain kind of radicalized intellectual who lacks confidence in the emancipatory potential of common people. "Theory" and ideas are presumably the property of those who are brought up to believe that it is their birthright and it is considered out of line to suggest that complex ideas be openly and directly discussed with workers themselves.

Luxemburg embodied a refusal to go along with such platitudes, which is one reason she encountered so much hostility from the leaders of the Second International. Rose makes an intriguing point in suggesting that she was hated by many of the leaders of German Social Democracy not only because she was a Jew and a Pole (which was surely the case) but also because she insisted on claiming her place as a theoretician. Perhaps one reason she was so sensitive to workers' thirst for knowledge is that she had to combat the prejudice that theory should be considered outside a woman's purview. For this reason, it seems to me, she chose not to mainly devote herself to the socialist women's movement. She did not disdain the work of Clara Zetkin and others in it; on the contrary, she encouraged it. Nor did she remain completely aloof from participating in it herself. But she did not want the leaders of German Social Democracy to marginalize her to "the woman question" while they monopolized the field of Marxist theory. Many a male leftist will credit a woman for various things, but to credit her for having an intellect greater than their own—now that is a rarity! (It is to Leo Jogiches credit that, for all his faults, he accepted Luxemburg as his intellectual superior). Luxemburg's life and work is living testimony that she lived by the principle (as voiced by Raya Dunayevskaya) that "The first act of liberation is to demand back our own heads."[4]

What I find especially important is Rose's discussion of how Luxemburg embraced uncertainty "as central to life and revolution." There is much to be said of this. Luxemburg understood, far better than most radicals before and after her, that revolution is about the unexpected. She never approached political phenomena with that "all too knowing look" that says, "well, we know how that is going to turn out." Her deep appreciation of spontaneous revolt was inseparable from an understanding that the actions of masses of people rarely if ever conform to the predictions of the "politically informed." This year's Arab Spring, so unexpected in both its timing and form, certainly brings to life Luxemburg's keen appreciation of the need to remain open to the possibilities released by struggles for emancipation.

At the same time, we need to be wary of the temptation to explain her contribution by a singular principle. While she held that "socialism is something which lies completely hidden in the mists of the future," she also considered it of great importance to directly delve into that mist by raising the question of what happens after the seizure of power. This was shown most of all in her critique of the Bolsheviks in The Russian Revolution. She understood that the revolution would strangle itself if the curtailment of democracy by the Bolsheviks persisted. Her book not only contained an important warning about the consequences of Lenin and Trotsky's policies, it also pointed to the necessity for spontaneity and democratic deliberation to continue and deepen after any revolution. For Luxemburg, an emphasis on the unpredictable nature of revolution did not foreclose the need to single out specific forms, such as democracy, which a revolution must incorporate in order to be successful. For social forms that facilitate spontaneous development enable the unpredictable nature of human praxis to begin to discover itself.

While it is crucial to bring out Luxemburg's differences with Lenin, Rose's review is somewhat inaccurate on several points. I know of no evidence that Lenin ordered that The Russian Revolution be "burned." Instead, in the very letter in which he attacked Paul Levi for publishing the work (after her death, in 1922), he insisted on the issuance of her complete writings-a task that is only fully being realized today, with Verso's publication of the 14-volume Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg. Rose may be confusing Leo Jogiches comment (as reported in Ettinger's biography of Luxemburg) that the manuscript of The Russian Revolution should be "burned" with Lenin's views, but Jogiches surely meant that in jest. For tactical reasons he opposed publishing it, despite Luxemburg's insistence. But Jogiches would have been the last person in the world to destroy any of Luxemburg's writings. In fact, he spent the last weeks of his life—at great danger to himself—collecting all of her writings that he could. As for Lenin, he wrote in his famous letter to Pravda in 1922: "Paul Levi now wants to achieve popularity with the bourgeoisie by republishing precisely those works of Luxemburg in which her errors appear." This appeared in the same letter in which he called her an "eagle" and insisted on the publication of "the complete edition of her works." When the book came out, Lenin applied tremendous pressure on Levi's allies at the time, such as Zetkin, to proclaim that Rosa had "changed her mind" about what she said in The Russian Revolution—something we know was not accurate. Indeed, Henriette Roland-Holst broke off relations with Zetkin after she joined in the attack on Levi for publishing the book on the grounds that Zetkin's capitulation showed a lack of principle.

Lenin's attitude was therefore at best ambivalent: he would have much preferred to see Luxemburg's entire work issued (or the process seriously underway) instead of having The Russian Revolution published on its own, as that would contextualize their many agreements as well as disagreements. Yet he also wanted to see her work appear in full (eventually) and would never advocate burning anything. After all, it wasn't until 1926 (at the earliest) that the tendency to group all leftist critics of the Soviet regime into one camp (such as lumping Luxemburg and Trotsky together) even began to be manifested.

But allow me to return to Luxemburg and the question of "uncertainty." It has often been said that precision should be sought in any field only to the extent that the subject matter allows.[5] The same can be said of certainty—and uncertainty. Luxemburg had a keen eye for the unexpected when it came to mass resistance and revolution, and for good reason: revolution is most of all about subjective reactions to objective conditions. There is never a one-to-one relation of objective to subjective, and the exact form of mass revolt can never be predicted in advance. Nor is it possible to affirm in advance which form of revolutionary organization is suited in all cases (those who fetishize a particular form, be it the "Leninist" vanguard party, the guerilla foco, the workers' council, or even the mass strike, tend to have a difficult time understanding that).

However, when it came to tracing out the trajectory of capital accumulation, uncertainty and unpredictability was not what Luxemburg emphasized. Her theory of capital accumulation was predicated on the argument that capitalism must of necessity take over and destroy non-capitalist strata in order for surplus value to be realized. No less central to her argument was her claim that precapitalist forms of land tenure and social relations would inevitably dissolve and be destroyed once the capital relation comes in contact with them. As Luxemburg states in her Introduction to Political Economy in speaking of non-capitalist social formations in the developing world (which Rose cites), "There is only one contact that it cannot tolerate or overcome; this is the contact with European civilization, i.e. with capitalism. For the old society, this encounter is deadly, universally and without exception."[6] Where is the emphasis on openness and uncertainty in this formulation? Clearly, when it came to analyzing the trajectory of capital, the alienated form of objectified labor, Luxemburg emphasized predictability and certainty above all else.

There were surely reasons for her to do so. After all, the trajectory of capital acccumulation does tend to undermine and destroy non-capitalist strata. But there is a difference between a tendency and an inevitable result. Despite the importance of her discussion of precapitalist societies in the Introduction to Political Economy and the Accumulation of Capital, Luxemburg's analysis lacked the subtlety and nuance of Marx's examination of non-capitalist social formations, especially as found in his writings on the Russian village commune at the end of his life.[7] Marx was much more cautious about making apodictic statements about the future of the village commune, on the grounds that it might be able to maintain itself and serve as the basis for a Russian revolution that bypasses a capitalist stage—provided specific historical conditions were present. He wrote, "What threatens the life of the Russian commune is neither a historical inevitability nor a theory; it is state oppression."[8]

Thus, while celebrating Luxemburg's theoretical contribution—of which we still have a great deal to learn—we should not overlook the fact that some aspects of her thought was informed by the unilinear evolutionism that defined the Second (and Third) International. Nor did she have access to most of Marx's unpublished writings on developing societies, which would have helped her counter the unilinear evolutionism that characterized the vantage point of post-Marx Marxism.

Rose is right, of course, that Luxemburg never expressed "slavish adherence" to any particular theoretical position—including those of Marx. Her independent spirit and intellect is one of her most important contributions. At the same time, it may give the wrong impression to suggest that she considered Marxism to be "a gout-ridden uncle afraid of the breeze." That was surely how many Marxists treated Marxism. But Luxemburg never approached any major political issue without attempting to root herself in Marx's work. A striking expression of this was her participation at the 1907 Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, held in London. In evaluating the lessons of the 1905 Russian Revolution, she exhaustively re-examined Marx's Communist Manifesto in light of recent events, arguing that "Clearly comrades, you in Russia at the present time have to begin, not where Marx began [in 1847], but where Marx ended in 1849, with a clearly expressed, independent proletarian class policy."[9] In insisting that "The course of the 1848 revolution ... cannot be the model for the present revolution in Russia," she also insisted that "The Russian Social-Democracy is the first to whom has fallen the difficult but honorable task of applying the principles of Marx's teaching ... in a stormy revolutionary period." Here is where Luxemburg's legacy especially comes alive—in her insistence that each generation needs to rethink what Marx's legacy means for today, in light of our specific realities.

For this reason, Rose touches on something very important when she says that Luxemburg was both "open" and "single-minded." Indeed, one can argue that the former is not truly possible without the latter. She repeatedly reproached Jogiches for allowing commitment to the cause to deter him from any serious engagement with "the question of the inner life." But it was not the cause to which he devoted his life that she criticized, but rather the manner of his approach to it. Complete and passionate dedication to a singular cause is no reason for lack of openness to life and experience; on the contrary, it can be seen as its precondition. For when the complete and total commitment is to freedom—not power or rule over others, but freedom—then how can one not open oneself up to the world?

As Frantz Fanon argued in a different context, there is no pathway to the universal that is not through the particular.[10] It is unfortunate that Luxemburg did not seem to appreciate this when it came to her relentless opposition to all forms of national self-determination—a position that has hardly stood the test of time. That said, on this point too some nuance is needed. Although Luxemburg fought groups like the Bund on many occasions, it is not the case that "She would have no truck with the Jewish socialist movement." Despite their differences, the Bund preferred to work with Jogiches and Luxemburg above all other Polish Marxists, and Luxemburg had several of her articles reprinted in the Bundist paper Der Yiddischer Arbeter in 1899. As Nettl notes, although John Mill of the Bund "found both Luxemburg and Jogiches resistant to his early appeals to them as Jews, and firmly opposed to any obligation to a specifically Jewish Socialist movement, he none the less saw them with an eye that at that time was politically and personally neutral, if not benevolent."[11]

Despite these reservations, I deeply appreciate Rose's review for bringing out so many aspects of the richness of Luxemburg's thought and personality. It makes the work in co-editing The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg all the more worthwhile.

Visit the London Review of Books to read Jacqueline Rose's review in full.

[1] See The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions, in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, edited by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson (New York: Monthly Review, 2004), p. 185

[2] See Marx's Grundrisse, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 28 (New York: International Publishers, 1986), p. 453

[3] Grundrisse, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 29, p. 97

[4] "The Women's Liberation Movement as Reason and as Revolutionary Force," in Women's Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution, by Raya Dunayevskaya (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1985), p. 28

[5] See Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, translated by Joe Sachs (Newburyport MA: Focus Publishing, 2002), p. 3: "It belongs to an educated person to look for just as much precision in each kind of discourse as the nature of the thing one is concerned with admits."

[6] "The Dissolution of Primitive Communism: From the Ancient Germans and the Incas to India, Russia, and Southern Africa, from Introduction to Political Economy," in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, p. 103

[7] For a study of this issue, see my "Accumulation, Imperialism, and Pre-Capitalist Formations: Luxemburg and Marx on the non-Western World," in Socialist Studies/Études socialistes, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2010), pp. 75-91

[8] "Marx-Zasulich Correspondence: Letters and Drafts," in Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the Peripheries of Capitalism, edited by Teodor Shanin (New York: Monthly Review, 1983), pp. 104-5

[9] "Rosa Luxemburg's Address to the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, London, 1907," in Women's Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution, by Raya Dunayevskaya (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1981), p. 205

[10] "The consciousness of self is not the closing of a door to communication. Philosophic thought teaches us, on the contrary, that it is its guarantee. National consciousness, that is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension." See Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, translated by Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1973), p. 247

[11] J.P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg (London: Oxord University Press, 1969), p. 83

The Intern Boom Just Gets Boomier—Ross Perlin's Intern Nation in the Irish Left Review

Angela Nagle reviews Intern Nation by Ross Perlin for the Irish Left Review. Nagle uses the book and recent action by groups like Carrotworkers’ Collective and Intern Aware as a starting poing to discuss how the internship pheonomenon effects Irish graduates.

Citing the growing trend of internships around the globe, she states:

In Ireland there has yet to be a comprehensive study of the phenomenon or a legal framework put in place to specifically deal with interns but ICTU's Esther Lynch called the internship boom a "worrying trend". She urged interns to come forward, citing a claim taken by an intern in Ireland against his employers in which the man, who was from Mauritius, showed that he was doing exactly the same work as his colleagues but was working for free and was not given an opportunity to advance to paid employment. He won the case and kept his job, with the full pay and benefits of his colleagues. Based on the International Labour Organisation's legislation the intern was able to prove that his work was of benefit to his employer and that it could no longer be described as "training". Perlin also cites legal cases made and won in the US on the grounds of unpaid interns doing profitable work for free. However, with the second highest unemployment rate in the EU and an economy dependant on the whim of global capital, this litigious approach to precarious labour falls short of dealing with the problem.

It is not just young graduates and white-collar professionals who have been affected. Work practices normalised in this area of the economy have trickled down so that jobs like window cleaning, forklift operating, town planning and working as a shop assistant now openly demand an internship period, often months long, through the government work agency, FÁS. During the recession the Irish government has been deeply complicit in this degradation of labour value through its creation of thousands of internship places in lieu of real and viable job opportunities. This allows them to give middle class voters their pound of flesh by forcing the unemployed off the couch and give the appearance of offering solutions to an unemployment problem that is demonstrably getting worse under austerity measures...

Throughout the Celtic Tiger, Irish universities sold exactly the same dream as everything else in the boom economy. A Dublin City University ad campaign boasted "you can go anywhere from here". Today, with bus routes to universities being cut and student unions not bothered to do anything about it, students are likely to find their ability to "go anywhere from here" increasingly hindered. With graduate emigration constantly rising, many graduates are in fact forced to "go anywhere"; anywhere but here, that is. To a generation of young people whose parents may not have attained a leaving cert let alone a degree, who found themselves educated and full of prospects, in a prolonged adolescence without the traditional expectations of marriage and family, a kind of cultural snobbery about work practices set in. It was in this potentially radical space, the university, and among this potentially radical group, individuals with more freedom and flexibility than any other Irish generation before them, who had rejected the values and work practices of their parents that this dream was bought into without question. Today it is this demographic who find themselves stapling things for successful people for free, with the prospect of real work slipping further and further away.

Visit the Irish Left Review to read the review in full.

Tariq Ali "One on One" with Riz Khan

Tariq Ali talks to Riz Khan “One on One” for Al Jazeera about growing up in Pakistan, his student days at Oxford University and involvement in the anti-War movement, the American Empire and paths of the international left.

Visit Al Jazeera to watch the video in situ.

The 20 best #philosophyfilms

We've been amazed at the response on Twitter to the #philosophyfilms hashtag over the last few days.

We gave prizes to our favourite three, which were Husserl and Flow (@_brennavan), Lukács Me If You Lacan (@Ulillillysses) & Brokeback Montaigne, by @julesevans77 who also came out with Voyage to De Botton of the Sea and Zeno Evil Hear No Evil .

There were so many it was impossible to look through them all, so we missed some corkers. Here are the best of the rest:

Badiou Tenant (@stevenpoole)

How Deleuze Friends and Alienate People (@terryacraven)

Fichte of Fury (@montserratian)

Bend it Like Bentham (@davidcmoulton)

Look Who's Dworkin (@donchip1)

I Hardt Huckabees (@shiftzine)

Fast Times at Ridgemont Heidegger (@endamacnally)

White Men Kant Jump (@dannybirchall)

All About the Walter Benjamins (@ezradulis)

Nietzsche From the Black Lagoon (@el_crawford)

Wild Wild Cornel West (@shralec)

Bataille of Algiers (@endamacnally)

Jameson and the Giant Peach (@DanHF)

Mad Marx (@jowtok)

Faster Pussycat! Mill! Mill! (@jderbyshire)

Apocalypse Mao (@jwassers)

Jung Guns (@madmerdoc)

Weil You Were Sleeping (@endamacnally)

Monty Python and the Holy Grayling (@evgenymorozov)

For Hume the Bell Tolls (@TheOrwellPrize)

Ten Things I Hate About Bourdieu (@bdrond87)