The National has published an early review of Richard Dienst's The Bonds of Debt—and it is a review which mimics the form and content of the book itself: brief yet wonderful. In the words of reviewer Nick March, The Bonds of Debt is an "astute portrait of the recession ... on one rich canvas," and Dienst's "tracking of the 'apocalyptic rhetoric' of late 2008 is exquisite."
In an article for Jacobin, republished at SocialistWorker.org, Steve Early discusses the history of the United Farm Workers union, making reference to Frank Bardarke's forthcoming book:
As Chávez critic Frank Bardacke points out in his forthcoming book from Verso, Trampling Out The Vintage, UFW leaders and staff were even more detached from the membership than in other, more labor organizations because UFW "had its own source of income, separate from union dues." Between 1970 and 1985, payments from workers represented less than 50 percent of UFW income; the rest of the union's money was generated by boycott-related direct mail activity or from donations by wealthy individuals, other unions, and church groups. The UFW established and continues to operate, in the name of its dead founder, "a network of organizations which receive money form private foundations and government grants." The UFW was always a combination of farm worker advocacy group and collective bargaining organization. According to Bardacke, initial (but hard to reproduce) UFW success with wine, table grape, and lettuce boycotts convinced Chávez "that the essential power of the union was among its supporters in the cities rather than among workers in the fields."
Visit Jacobin or SocialistWorker.org to read the article in full.
In an open letter published today in Le Monde diplomatique, Marcello Svirksy critiques Bernard-Henri Lévy's recent and much vaunted support of the Libyan revolution, asking the question: And what of the Palestinian struggle? Surely Palestinians deserve no less than other Arabs?
[A]s we witness the West rushing to support revolutionary struggles throughout the Arab world, it is hard not to wonder why the Palestinian struggle has not enjoyed the same political fortune. And this is exactly what I find lamentable, and the reason for this letter.
Everyone nowadays starts from the assumption that the Gaddafi regime was unbearable for larger parts of the Libyan citizenry, and that therefore the present revolt should be encouraged for their benefit. Gaddafi's repression of and war on his own citizens is unquestionably repugnant and compels the international community to consider how to assist the rebels. Hence your support for the Libyan transitionary government engaged in a legitimate struggle to end a regime of oppression.
But we should be under no illusions: for governments, cosying up to those who may become the future rulers of Libya would facilitate the exploitation of the country's vast resources in the future. By contrast, an Israeli-Palestinian agreement, and the stabilisation of the region that would bring along, is far less attractive to Europe and the West's interests.
In a recent article for the London Review of Books, Judith Butler examines the political and cultural implications of the on-going trial in Tel Aviv to determine the future stewardship of boxes of Kafka’s original writings, the majority of which is currently unpublished. Butler discusses the claim of the National Library of Israel, which takes the position that Kafka’s writing is a cultural asset belonging to the Jewish people, and as such, rightly belongs to the Jewish state:
If Kafka is claimed as a primarily Jewish writer, he comes to belong primarily to the Jewish people, and his writing to the cultural assets of the Jewish people. This claim, already controversial (since it effaces other modes of belonging or, rather, non-belonging), becomes all the more so when we realise that the legal case rests on the presumption that it is the state of Israel that represents the Jewish people. This may seem a merely descriptive claim, but it carries with it extraordinary, and contradictory, consequences. First, the claim overcomes the distinction between Jews who are Zionist and Jews who are not, for example Jews in the diaspora for whom the homeland is not a place of inevitable return or a final destination. Second, the claim that it is Israel that represents the Jewish people has domestic consequences as well. Indeed, Israel’s problem of how best to achieve and maintain a demographic majority over its non-Jewish population, now estimated to constitute more than 20 per cent of the population within its existing borders, is predicated on the fact that Israel is not a restrictively Jewish state and that, if it is to represent its population fairly or equally, it must represent both Jewish and non-Jewish citizens. The assertion that Israel represents the Jewish people thus denies the vast number of Jews outside Israel who are not represented by it, either legally or politically, but also the Palestinian and other non-Jewish citizens of that state. The position of the National Library relies on a conception of the nation of Israel that casts the Jewish population outside its territory as living in the Galut, in a state of exile and despondency that should be reversed, and can be reversed only through a return to Israel. The implicit understanding is that all Jews and Jewish cultural assets—whatever that might mean—outside Israel eventually and properly belong to Israel, since Israel represents not only all Jews but all significant Jewish cultural production.