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Books
The falsification of May 1968 in France
NOT BORED!
(Note from NOT BORED!: We had planned to translate this entire book, which was written in 1998 by Maurice Rajsfus. But while translating its first chapter, we discovered that it is Leftist horseshit, full of disinformation about the May 1968 movement, and so doesn't merit being translated. We have contented ourselves with providing critical footnotes to the chapters we had already translated before making our decision to abandon our efforts.)
May 68
Under the paving stones, the repression (May 1968-March 1974)
The Assassination of a Utopia
When one does not assassinate men, one strives, despite everything, to kill ideas. The murder ritual is nonetheless realized. Times have changed in our civilized West and one no longer needs to spill blood to impose a way of life refused by the greatest number of people. Fear is sufficient... .
All that remains of May 1968 is the memory of the epic for the nostalgiacs, the memory of the fear experienced by the old-fashioned. Forgotten is the ferocious repression that followed the great student demonstrations.[1] Forgotten are the Marcellin years,[2] which were nevertheless years of losses and profits. Certainly there weren't any great slaughters, as in June 1848 or May 1871, or small bloody reprisals as was in the case in February 1934, October 1961 and February 1962. It isn't any less the case that the herd-driving of those who remained persuaded of the need to invent -- as the days went by -- a better world was of long duration.
In May and June 1968, the police did not kill or not very often. This was very fortunate. They simply contented themselves with humiliating, bludgeoning, injuring, reactivating racism and the hatred of the other. The good-hearted people saw nothing and the hardest avengers were happy with the return to political and moral order from which France should never have departed. Which did not only signify a return to the point of departure, but the beginning of a questioning of the individual liberties obtained after decades of struggle.[3] It is also certain that the great fear experienced by the supporters of established power, the silent majority,[4] was never calmed. And then one forgot the years of repression, congratulating oneself with the re-established order, all by routinely perfecting the indispensable backfires, so as to prevent all return of potential flames.
Anonymous Comrade writes: The Geography of Disaster
Reg Johanson, Rain
Reviewing Mike Davis, Planet of Slums
(London: Verso, 2006)
In Planet of Slums geographer of disaster Mike Davis turns his attention to the human disaster of slums in order to understand the scope and the meaning of the economic disaster of neoliberalism. Arguing from research that includes UN, World Bank, IMF, CIA, and Pentagon reports as well as literature on urbanism and housing, Davis observes that cities will account for all future population growth, and that “ninety five percent of this final build-out of humanity will occur in the urban areas of developing countries” (2).
This massive transfer of population from the country to the city, Davis argues, was generated by the equally massive transfer of wealth from the Third World to the First orchestrated by North American and European states “with the IMF as bad cop and World Bank as good cop” (70), a transfer that has produced what will probably be a widely quoted statistic from Planet of Slums: “Global inequality, as measured by World Bank economists across the entire world population, reached an incredible GINI coefficient level of 0.67 by the end of the century—this is mathematically equivalent to a situation where the poorest two thirds of the world receive zero income, and the top third receives everything” (165).
But while rural populations fled for the cities because they were no longer permitted to practice the subsistence economies that had previously sustained them, Davis shows that in most of the developing world, urban growth is exploding without economic growth. In fact, just the opposite is occurring: with few exceptions, there has been a de-industrialization of the big cities of the global south. As Davis says, “the size of a city’s economy […] often bears surprisingly little relationship to its population” (13). Cities are growing with a decreasing capacity to support residents, creating a widely varying “informal economy” of subsistence, housing, and infrastructure.
In Praise of Pageantry
By Jen Angel
From In These Times
This past January I spent a week in a chilly warehouse in Tacoma, Wash.,
making puppets with 20 other activists to support Army First Lt. Ehren
Watada, the first commissioned officer to publicly refuse deployment to
Iraq. We were creating a play to perform on Feb. 5 at the vigil outside
the gates of Fort Lewis, Wash., where his court-martial—which would end
in a mistrial—was being held.
We spent hours painting, taping, cutting, gluing, eating and talking.
For the characters in our play, we created a 15-foot-tall judge with a
sculpted cardboard head and paper mâché hands, jurors and witnesses,
and, for our finale, doves and suns to end with a vision of a beautiful
future.
But art and activism aren't just about pageantry. Skilled activists use
culture as an entry point into larger discussions of politics and
theory, and use art and culture to celebrate victories and mourn losses.
Art becomes a way to engage the public, reinspire activists who are
tired of the same old marches and chants, and at its best, model a
future world where our lives are both productive and enjoyable.
But connections between art and activism are often tenuous. Individuals
who straddle the two communities face artists who don't care about
politics and activists who don't take art seriously. Realizing the
Impossible: Art Against Authority, a new and beautifully illustrated
anthology edited by Josh MacPhee and Erik Reuland, explores these
intersections and contradictions while linking art, culture and
anarchist politics.
NOT BORED! writes: Two Recent Books from Factory School
NOT BORED!
In fact, the truths set forth or the facts recorded must be endorsed and supported by man’s own experience before man can appreciate or understand them. Words become living agencies as soon as they express the thing we know to be true. The words of the writer may be used to convey a live thought, a spiritual message, but we are unprepared mentally and spiritually, there is no thought exchange or spiritual message transferred to us. Look, observe, think and assimilate and thus create your own book. – Elizabeth Byrne Ferm
Over the course of the last year or so, Factory School has published many interesting books, two of which are closely related: Freedom in Education, by Elizabeth Byrne Ferm (2005), and The Modern School of Stelton: A Sketch, by several different authors (2006). The latter was originally published in 1925 by the Modern School Association of North America, which intended to celebrate the tenth anniversary of its founding of the first libertarian school for children in the United States.
Solution to a Stalled Revolution: Write a Mystery Novel
New York Times
What should a rebel leader with a little extra time on his hands do to get attention? Subcommander Marcos, the elusive and charismatic leader of the Zapatista movement in southern Mexico, has apparently decided the answer is to write a crime novel.
Two weeks ago, Pablo Ignacio Taibo II, a successful writer of detective stories set in Mexico City, received a clandestine letter from the guerrilla leader. In it, Subcommander Marcos, the rebel leader who made wearing a black ski mask sexy, proposed that they team up to write a detective story, alternating chapters.
"I thought about it for 10 seconds and said 'No, not right now. I'm very happy with my Pancho Villa book, which I'm writing, and this new project will drive me crazy," Mr. Taibo recalled. "Then rapidly, 10 seconds later, I said yes. It had the enormous attraction of insanity. For a writer like me who is always bordering on insanity, it was part of my, shall we say, greatest obsessions to do something like that."
Confronting Capitalism: Dispatches from a Global Movement, edited by Eddie Yuen, Daniel Burton-Rose and George Katsiaficas (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2004) Christina Gerhardt
From the upcoming edition of Faultlines
Confronting Capitalism, an updated version of The Battle of Seattle, takes stock of what has shifted in the movement in the four years since the Seattle WTO protests in 1999. In his astute introduction, Eddie Yuen (one of the volume’s editors) adeptly lays out not so much a linear history, but rather a constellation of concerns and tactics.
Arguing that “the potential of a deepening global network of workers, students, farmers, youth, indigenous people, immigrants, and ‘marginals,’ is the greatest source of hope today” (vii), Yuen shows the commonalities that draw together a global movement. Yet he also pinpoints how the battle in the north contrasts with that of the south.
Sarai Reader 04: Crisis/Media We are happy to announce the print and web publication of Sarai Reader 04: Crisis/Media.
Crisis/Media, the fourth publication in the Sarai Reader series, examines issues of global crises — (war, civil conflict, terrorism and state terror, the deep instabilities of everyday life, technologies of surveillance and political life, threats to the freedom of expression) — and critically analyses the representation of these crises in the media. Are the crises in the media also instances of crises of the media? Have current forms of media practice lost the ability to articulate questions of conflict and contention, other than in terms of crises? Can media practitioners evolve
forms of practice that are not beholden to the idea of Crisis?
The Sarai brings together several distinguished critical voices, as well as new, emerging writers from all over the world (and especially from South Asia) to attend to ideas, situations, contexts and dillemmas related to crises and the media.
hydrarchist writes... here's an oddish interview with Siva Vaidhyanathan about his new book. Elsewhere he is the author of the first general cultural history of the origins and development of coopyright law, "Copyrights and Copywrongs".
The Anarchist in the Library (Basic Books, 2004)
Q: This is a very provocative title. Who is the anarchist and where is the
library?
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN:
The anarchist is a specter. It’s a symbol of an imagined threat. There
are powerful forces trying to close up our information worlds so they can
control its flows and charge admission. To accomplish their goals, they
raise fears about “anarchists in libraries,” uncontrollable,
dangerous forces threatening us from within. The library is a metaphor for
our information ecosystems. I argue we should be as careful with our
information ecosystems as we should be with our real ecosystems. Small
changes can have huge effects.
Simon Wiesenthal Centre Testifies in Paris Libel Suit Against Norman Finkelstein
From Wiesenthal Center Los Angeles
Paris, 26 March 2004
Norman Finkelstein, the American author of The Holocaust Industry, and his publisher, are being sued under French law against libel. The French edition (based on the English-language original) is considered actionable and replete with Holocaust revisionism and incitement to antisemitism.
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Director for International Liaison, Dr. Shimon Samuels, who three years ago publicly debated Finkelstein when the book was first published in London, presented the following testimony for today's Paris hearing:
"The Holocaust Industry presents a great danger. Mr. Finkelstein's thesis is an extremist attack on Jews in general, and American Jews in particular, accusing them of exploiting the suffering of the Shoah as 'a pretext for their crimes in the context of the Middle-East conflict. This thesis, so close to that of Roger Garaudy [a condemned French Holocaust denier and anti-Jewish hate-monger] today constitutes the principal credo of modern antisemitism. With particularly acute intellectual perversity, Finkelstein exploits his own Jewish antecedents in order to attack, as 'racist,' specific Jewish leaders, their organizations and the Jewish people.
I am convinced that, as in the aforementioned Garaudy trial, only a judicial penalty will contain the damage wreaked by this particularly offensive libel."
"die jüdische" 25.03.2004 20:17
http://www.juedische.at/TCgi/TCgi.cgi?target=home& Param_Kat=15&Param_RB=&Param_Red=1956
From Socialism and Democracy
Joel Kovel, THE ENEMY OF NATURE: THE END OF CAPITALISM OR THE END OF THE WORLD? (London: Zed Books, 2002).
Reviewed by Laurie A. Gates “Truth is stranger than fiction,” it is said, and lest one be put off by the apocalyptic title, it accurately represents the main point ofJoel Kovel’s latest book. Rather than offeringfire-and-brimstone catastrophism, Kovel detailswith great sobriety the matter-of-fact implications of capitalism for nature and humanity. Also outside the realm of fantasy, he speaks of ecosocialist alternatives as real and fundamental transformations that must occur, and suggests actions to be taken today, by all people, to realize ecosocialism in the future. One thing this requires is the healing of divisions. This book contributes to that end by linking the fight against capitalism with the struggle to preserve the environment.
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