Gramsci and Left Managerialism Kees van der Pijl Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy Vol.8, No.4 December 2005 Abstract This essay argues that one way of understanding Gramsci today is as an organic intellectual of a class of managerial cadre which develops in advanced capitalism. With the growth of monopolistic structures and a deepening state role in capitalist society, [...]

Continue reading at slackbastard …

que bueno seria ver un show en ese lugar

punkdump:

(via yourheartisdying)

Vamos a hacer un festival para colocar mapas en OSM . Por un lado vamos a utilizar los mapas que libero la IMM y por otro lado vamos a usar gps y papel para recojer información nosotros.

La propuesta es comenzar a las 11am con un taller sobre osm y poner en comun gps y como utilizarlos o como hacer con lapiz y papel. Luego nos vamos a dividir en grupos y salir a recorrer. Luego que volvamos tendremos un taller sobre como volcar los mapas en osm. Quienes quieran quedarse (en vez de salir) podemos colocar los mapas de la imm.

La dirección de reunión sera Blanes 884, esquina Lauro Muller y el dia es sabado 11 de setiembre, 2010. Por favor reenviar a quienes les parezca pueda interesarles (agregándole la información que crean pertinente).

Forma-de-vida (Giorgio Agamben): Forma-de-vida. Giorgio Agamben Extraído de: Medios sin fin. Notas...

AMERICAN LABOUR NEW YORK: MOTTS STRIKE GOES PAST 100 DAY MARK:Molly has blogged before on the strike at the Motts’ production facility in Williamson New York (see here, here, here, here and here). At least one of those posts gathered quite a bit of com…

Continue reading at Molly'sBlog …

Likudniks’ rejection of conceding its occupation of Palestine confirms reports in the Israeli media that this week’s meetings between regional authorities are “ceremonial and not substantive”.

31 Aug 2010 | InfoShop News

The mainstream media as a whole is unified in marking this weeks meetings between representatives of the government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority (P.A.) as a “restart” of “peace talks”, but the most contentious issue of Israel’s settlement expansion into the Occupied Palestinian Territories is completely rejected by Israel’s ruling party, Likud.

A ten-month “partial settlement freeze” expires September 26 and “a senior cabinet minister told Reuters on Sunday” that “Israel will postpone any decision on whether to extend a partial freeze on settlement construction until after the September 2 start of peace talks in Washington”.

A leader of the Zionist settler movement was also in Washington to lobby Washington “leaders” to support expanding the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu landed in D.C. to meet with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today before a Wednesday dinner with President Barack Obama and P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas, Sheera Frenkel reported today at McClatchy:

Danny Dayan, settler leader and member of the Yesha settler council in Israel, was meeting Jewish and congressional leaders in Washington to try to convince them of the importance of expanding Israel’s settlements. Palestinians see the settlements as a key impediment to the peace talks, as they’re built on land earmarked for a future Palestinian state.

Netanyahu froze settlement expansion 10 months ago to allow indirect talks between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators to proceed. Now that the United States has convinced both parties to move to direct negotiations, experts are pointing at the settlements as a ticking time bomb, one that could end the newest efforts at peace talks before they get off the ground.

Abbas has said that he won’t proceed with talks if Israel resumes settlement construction. Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat put it more starkly, saying that if Israel “issued one building tender after September 26, we will consider the talks over.”

[...]

Much of Netanyahu’s largely right wing-coalition supports Dayan, however, and has made it clear that they aren’t interests in the sort of complete freeze the Palestinians seek.

Speaking to members of his Likud Party before he departed for Washington, Netanyahu sought to relieve their fears, telling them, “I am not naive.”

Writing in the Hebrew-language daily newspaper Yediot Ahronot, Shimon Shiffer said that Netanyahu was leaving for the United States “fully aware that his partners in the government are not prepared to accede to the Palestinians’ demand that the construction freeze be extended.”

Reports in Yediot Ahronot and another Hebrew daily, Maariv, concluded that the “prevailing assessment” was that the summit in Washington would be “ceremonial and not substantive.”

Weeks ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “rejected a Palestinian demand that direct negotiations be based on a statement by the Quartet confirming its position that the future Palestinian state will be based on the 1967 borders” when he met with the U.S. envoy to the region, George Mitchell, Avi Issacharoff and Barak Ravid reported at the Israel daily Ha’aretz.

Because borders are the inherent core conflict between an occupying power and representatives of the occupied, P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas said, Avi Issacharoff reported at Ha’aretz with the Associated Press (A.P.), “Israel will be held accountable for the failure of the talks if settlement construction should continue.”

“The negotiations need to bring about serious action that will be able to bring liberation from the occupation and independence,” he said, adding that Israel’s claim of “security concerns” is “not an excuse to expand settlements and steal land”.

“I want to clarify our stance on settlements, and their illegal status,” Mr. Abbas continued. “I have to say honestly and clearly that we notified all sides, including the American administration, before we agreed to conduct these talks, that Israel alone will bear the blame for the failure of the negotiations if the settlement construction continues in any way on any Palestinian land captured since 1967.”

U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 was unanimously passed in November 1967 declared territories occupied by the Israeli government after the launch of that year’s Six Day War between Israel and a coalition led by Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Israel has not only continued its occupations of the Gaza Strip, West Bank and Golan Heights since, but has expanded its occupation in the form of settlements, blockades and checkpoint-laden partitions of the lands.

A misconception is that the P.A.’s preconditions are stubborn acts of rejectionism. Such claims are ignorant of the enormous concessions Palestinians have accepted after decades of Israeli aggression, Professor Stephen Walt noted yesterday at his Foreign Policy blog:

Fatah has already recognized Israel’s existence and has surrendered any claims to 78 percent of original Mandate Palestine; all they are bargaining over now is the share they will get of the remaining 22 percent. Moreover, that 22 percent is already dotted with Israeli settlements (containing about 500,000 people), and carved up by settler-only bypass roads, checkpoints, fences, and walls. And even if they were to get an independent state on all of that remaining 22 percent (which isn’t likely) they will probably have to agree to some significant constraints on Palestinian sovereignty and they are going to have to compromise in some fashion on the issue of the “right of return.” The obvious point is that when you’ve got next to nothing, you’ve got very little left to give up, no matter how hard Uncle Sam twists your arm. At this point, the main concessions have to come from Israel, simply because it is the occupying power whose presence in the West Bank and whose physical control over Gaza makes a Palestinian state impossible. Some readers may think this characterization is unfair, but the issue isn’t so much one of “fairness” as one of simple practicality. How do you possibly create “two states for two peoples” if Israel doesn’t withdraw from virtually all of the West Bank?

Sick jokes in the form of human action like Alan Dershowitz treating the issue of stealing people’s homes by brute force as petty rejectionism is excessively vulgar, especially when the primary issue a racist foreign government occupying land. It’s a conscientious ignorance of the primary issues: borders, self-determination and even security.

It’s also counter-intuitive to Israelis’ claimed security concerns on day when Hamas claimed responsibility for the heinous slaughter of four settlers in Hebron and about 3,000 people celebrated the attack in Gaza. “Some 500 ultranationalist Jewish settlers live in heavily fortified enclaves in the city amid more than 100,000 Palestinians,” Mark Lavie added in his A.P. report.

This dehumanization of Zionist settlers is minimal relative to the powerful institutional Zionist dehumanization of Arabs, who always come with ramped up Israeli military presence and abuse of local Palestinians after the settlers occupy stolen land, is a nasty reaction to the long past of aggression from Tel Aviv—most recently, the brutal Operation Cast Lead—that accompanies the continued ‘arbitrary demolitions’ of Palestinian homes in the West Bank, which Human Rights Watch recently found has reached a “new peak”, and the humanitarian crisis forced by the blockade of Gaza.

“As B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, reported last month, Israeli settlements now control 42% of the West Bank,” The Electronic Intifada editor and co-founder Ali Abunimah wrote yesterday in an op-ed at the Los Angeles Times. “Virtually all of the Jordan Valley is off limits to Palestinians as Israel tightens its grip under the cover of a “peace process” that perpetually goes nowhere. In July alone, Israel demolished 141 homes and buildings belonging to Palestinians in the West Bank, the highest number since 2005, according to Human Rights Watch.”

He later added: “As Palestinian American entrepreneur Sam Bahour wrote recently in The Hill, only an end to Israel’s U.S.-subsidized occupation can unleash the economic potential in Palestine.”

Zbigniew Brzezinski, the excessively amoral and honest former national security adviser in the Carter Administration, described two approaches to diplomacy—specifically with Iran—that can be applied universally to very powerful factions:

1. Design the negotiations to fail and blame the other party for not making concessions to coercive demands and labeling them with catch phrases like “terrorist entity”; or
2. “Engage” the other party in a manner where at least “the possibility of consensual agreement” can “emerge”.

Unfortunately, superpowers and their clients are too vain and abusive to consider the second approach. The Likudnik approach to settlements in the West Bank are a prime example to prove that this week’s “peace talks” are indeed simply “ceremonial and not substantive”.

Filed under: Palestine-Israel, Political Science Tagged: Alan Dershowitz, Ali Abunimah, Barack Obama, Benjamin Netanyahu, Danny Dayan, international law, Israel, Likud, Mahmoud Abbas, Middle East, Middle East peace process, Newspeak, Obama Administration, Occupied Palestinian Territories, Palestinian Authority, Saeb Erekat, settlement expansion, two-state solution, United States, US, West Bank, Zionism

Well, John Riley and I had intended to do at least three installments in our anti-RCP series but events intervened, particularly on my end, and the third piece never got posted. I am hearing these days that most of the RCP wackos have left town now. Hopefully that's true.

I remember back in 2000 in LA for the DNC, when I first had the misfortune of running into these hacks, just what a joke the "flag on a flag" flag was that they waved around incessantly. For those who haven't seen it, I tried to find a picture online but the closest I could come was the image below (the flag on a banner, I suppose). Just picture it being waved around on a flag.

Lately I've been seeing these printed stencil on a poster images of RCP cult leader Bob Avakian floating around here and there. These aren't actual stencils, of course, printed on glossy paper such as they are. But they are printed to look like stencils, as if they have street cred. But in fact they rolled off some printing press somewhere. I think in many ways those posters and the "flag on a flag" really sums up the RCP. Something disconnected. A facsimile. And endlessly self-referential, for sure.


Just read their newspaper. I checked out their account of the May 29th immigrant march. You can't make this shit up:

At the same time, the agitation that this system can't solve the problems of humanity but the revolution CAN, was captivating for many others. Some people took up the chant started by the communists, "No tenemos que vivir así. Otro mundo es posible" ("We don't have to live this way. Another world is possible"), especially when the anti-immigrant reactionaries came out. And those who were more revolutionary-minded were drawn to the banner that said, "No hay un problema de inmigración, sí hay un problema del capitalismo, la revolución es la solución" ("There is no immigration problem, there is a capitalism problem, revolution is the solution") and the Message and Call from the RCP, USA: "The Revolution We Need… The Leadership We Have." Several college students spoke to the great disparities in the world and how resources exist which could meet the needs of the people, but are instead being used for profit while masses of people are forced to try to find ways to survive. After the rally, several people who were seriously looking for a way out of all this got together to watch Bob Avakian's talk, Revolution: Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, What It's All About, and stayed up talking into the night about historic questions of changing the world. (emphasis mine)

I mean, seriously? If you hadn't seen their pathetic little cadre with your own eyes you'd almost believe the people were rallying behind the RCP's bold representation of a flag on a flag. Fortunately, they were not. You'll note the unbearably long paragraphs (and revolutionary enthusiasm!) of the RCP writer -- a hallmark that derives from emulation of their leader, known for his endless, record-breaking even, sentences. What Castro is to the speech, Avakian is to the sentence. Consider this bit I took from a randomly selected article:

To briefly summarize this, the point is that you can conceive of the political structures and the way that they relate to the larger society in the U.S. as something of a pyramid: at the top you have the ruling class forces, which, speaking in broad strokes and for general purposes, are divided on the one hand into the Republican Party and on the other hand the Democratic Party, and what these parties represent in terms of "conservatism" and "liberalism" (about which I'll have more to say a little bit later); and then, continuing the metaphor of the pyramid, you have lines extending (or angling) from the top of the pyramid, where the ruling class sits with its two basic wings, down to the social bases that these different wings of the bourgeoisie at the top of the pyramid seek to appeal to—on the one side the "right," and on the other side the "left," in the terms that are utilized commonly in the framework of bourgeois politics. (emphasis mine)

I've been known to use a semi-colon in my day, but reading Avakian reminds me more than ever of the importance of Kurt Vonnegut's legendary caution against semi-colons: "Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college." Please, Bob, break that shit up!

Anyhow, the response from our series has been very good, with people noting articles and analysis on the RCP that we had forgotten over the years or that we neglected to link to for one reason or another. One comrade out there reminded us of the wonderful essay, "The World Can't Wake", a blistering attack on the RCP's front group during their anti-war organizing phase, World Can't Wait. I remember enjoying that piece when it came out. There's also "What you should know about the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP)" hosted at Infoshop, which has a lot of links and a recommended reading list that includes Daniel Cohn-Bendit's "Obsolete Communism" -- definitely a good read on the topic of authoritarian communists (even if Cohn-Bendit has disappointed us all more than a bit since May 1968).

But my favorite submission of all came from our abiding comrade in Tucson, Dan Todd, who sent along a poster he and John Zerzan distributed some years ago in the Bay, under their Anti-Authoritarians Anonymous monicker. Folks will remember Dan from his presentation at Beer & Revolution last January.

Perhaps there are others out there who have a copy of his collection of posters, "Cold Fury: Advertisements for Anarchy 1982-2010". Those who do will recognize the trademark Situationist-influenced style. Not included in his collection, I seem to remember it appearing in Zerzan's "Elements of Refusal", if memory serves, the RCP gets a mention, although it isn't the focus of the piece. However, the points made are universal and inform just how long the backward RCP has been mucking around the left, lurking and attaching itself like a lamprey to genuine peoples movements everywhere.

Anyhow, as (perhaps) the last in our series on the Revolutionary Communist Party, and as a prelude to a fond farewell (soon, I hope), I present it below.


Enjoy!

The third part of a series exploring anarcho-syndicalism, its aims and principles, and the practicalities of enacting them in the real world. Although it isn’t limited to workplace struggles as traditional syndicalism is, industry remains an important battleground for anarcho-syndicalism. After all, it is here that the working class create the wealth of the world, … Read more

Continue reading at Property is Theft! …