Ben Dangl at the Hemispheric Institute on the Americas
Nearly a decade after 2/15 …
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Today is February 15th, the 8th anniversary of 2/15, the largest global peace protest in modern history. February 15, 2003 was a global day of action against militarism and the war in the impending invasion of Iraq. Some 36 million people took part on over 3,000 demonstrations against the US invasion of Iraq over the months leading up to, and following the start of the war, but none of those demonstrations were more memorable than 2/15’s mass-coordinated global actions. It was proof that we can work together, across geographic boundaries, across race, and class, and creed, to demand an end to imperialism and warmongering. AK Press worked together with Hello NYC to produce a glorious tribute to the people and places that helped make 2/15 possible: 131 full-color photographs of the demonstrations from 30 cities—including Amsterdam, Baghdad, Tehran, Santiago de Chile, Tokyo, New York, Dhaka, Berlin, Copenhagen, London, Tel Aviv, Glasgow, Paris, Rome, Sydney, Cairo, and San Francisco—coupled with selected quotes from numerous notables and supporters, including Koki Annan, Uri Avnery, Leslie Cagan, Yuri Dojc, Gunter Grass, A.L. Kennedy, Michael Moore, Camille Paglia, Tim Robbins, Arundhati Roy, Jose Saramago, Susan Sontag, Thabo Mbeki, and Noam Chomsky, all in a lovely hardcover edition. We have just a few copies of 2/15 left! And, for one day only, get one for 75% off the cover price – which makes it $6.25! |
New AK Distro Titles in the Media!
We’re always telling you about new reviews of AK Press titles… now we’re also pleased to report some recent media coverage of a few of our newest distributed titles!
Microcosm Publishing’s Edible Secrets: A Food Tour of Classified U.S. History got a great review from the Village Voice.
From the review: “Hoerger and Partlow’s innovative method makes sense on many levels. Millions of pages of declassified docs can’t readily be sifted through, the authors’ logic goes, so an efficient way to track the federal government’s inner workings is to look at a specific cultural institution — food — as an angle. This offbeat approach winds up working damned well in a little more than 100 easy-to-read pages, creating a sort of hybrid between Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals.”
The first guidebook from the fine folks at Post-Car Press, Post-Car Adventuring: San Francisco Bay Area, was featured in this week’s East Bay Express.
From the article: “Each index-card-size, pull-out page aids readers in getting from their home anywhere in the Bay Area to the front door, so to speak, of wherever they’re headed—and that means using trains, buses, and bikes with equal abandon. … ‘One of our main goals is reducing the number of cars that are in the city,’ Eichenlaub explained. ‘At the end of the day, the carbon emission savings are useful, but they’re not as useful to us as the social costs and personal costs in an urban environment.’ Fewer cars make the city a more livable place, reduce traffic and accidents, and open up the streets to pedestrians and bicyclists, he said.”
And Jila Ghomeshi, author of Grammar Matters: The Social Significance of How We Use Language (Arbeiter Ring Publishing), recently discussed her book on CBC Radio’s Weekend Morning Show! Listen here.
According to Ghomeshi: “The main thing that I want to stress is that those qualities that we impute to people who use non-standard grammar, like they’re lazy or they’re uneducated, are problematic because there isn’t something lazy about using non-standard grammar … I don’t want to say we don’t need standard English and I don’t want to say that that’s not important for many reasons, but those particular reasons that are given—when someone says ‘this person is speaking poorly, badly, incorrectly because it’s not clear, logical, and precise,’ I wanted to present, actually, linguistic arguments for why that’s problematic.”
Don’t they all sound good? We thought so! Nice work, publishers…keep ’em coming!
On “Leaderless Revolutions” and the Fall of Mubarak
More from AK author David Porter on events in the Middle East…
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On “Leaderless Revolutions” and the Fall of Mubarak
by David Porter
“Leaderless revolutions,” as seen currently in North Africa, pose important challenges to outside media and to foreigners, generally, seeking authoritative voices to clarify the picture of fast-moving events. But genuine revolutions are made from below, with the myriad energies and objectives of hundreds of thousands or millions coalescing at least around certain fundamental demands. Time-constrained and impatient foreign journalists and audiences, dependent on fast analyses by the usual hierarchical menu of “experts” and political leaders, naturally resist an arduous process of grassroots inquiry.
Yet it is at the grassroots level and not simply in the media focus of Tahrir Square where the intense frustration, despair and rage has accumulated for years. It not the more abstract models and formulas of the political class that provide the essential building blocks of genuine revolution from below.
It is the slowly-accumulating momentum of hundreds of thousands of confrontations with local officials and elites, the organizing efforts of mutual assistance (including even Egyptian soccer clubs, as Dave Zirin points out), individual and group assertions of women’s rights, tireless attempts to solidify common stands of workers against bosses (as in the great waves of strikes in the textile city of Mahalla), students’ rejection of authoritarian school conditions, and efforts to defend local neighborhoods— almost always in the shadows out of sight of foreign media—that slowly develop the courage, confidence and essential horizontal networks bubbling below the surface of seemingly fixed political landscapes.
The sense of solidarity and community (and at least some partial small-scale victories) from local contexts gradually expands to awareness of similar struggles elsewhere and personal ties of trust and common objectives. At these local levels, responding to daily oppressive contexts, it is the individual decisions—often spontaneous—to resist instead of submit, small revolutions at the personal and community level, that accumulate over time into deeper and deeper determination to challenge ever-broader elements of the existing regime. Essentially, these are the true “leaders” of the revolution.
Without that growing accumulation of willful resistance by hundreds of thousands already at the grassroots level, no appeals by Twitter or Facebook, by liberal, radical or revolutionary organizations, or by charismatic national figures will inspire millions to risk the bloodshed and torture implied in confrontation with the harsh face of the regime’s police. Without large numbers already willing to take such risks, the hundreds of thousands or millions of previous bystanders would not dare to then express their own deeper feelings of alienation, resentment and rage. In turn, at a certain stage, the open use of repression by the regime, as with the pro-Mubarek thugs last week, simply fuels even greater rage and mass participation. When suddenly massive resistance declares itself in huge demonstrations, participants experience an unparalleled exuberance of community and utopian egalitarianism. These are the sentiments we’ve heard commonly expressed in Cairo and other cities in Egypt. These are the same feelings experienced in Paris in 1968, in Prague in 1989 and other revolutionary contexts. Even in non-revolutionary situations, as in the great civil rights and antiwar marches of the 60s in the United States, the same festive atmosphere of great hope and solidarity could be felt.
While the human face of the oppressive regime—as Mubarek in Egypt, Ben Ali in Tunisia and Bouteflika in Algiers—is despised with good reason on its own, such targets also symbolize a wide and deep range of grievances that extend from national- level organs of the state and military down to local-level daily humiliations of officials’ contempt, bosses’ exploitation, mistreatment of students and women’s exclusion from the workplace and political life. These are the larger realities of the existing “regime” of oppression. And this much larger dimension of grassroots revolution poses a whole other question of “leadership.” When certain “spokespeople” for the movement or independent “power brokers” become fixed in place—encouraged by negotiators for the old regime or by the media or by their own self-promotion—it is doubtful that those deep levels of revolutionary aspirations will be heard. This will be a key dynamic to watch in Egypt in the weeks to come.
When only the head of state like Mubarek, his cabinet, his ruling party or a few military leaders are discarded, when even a constitution is re-designed or replaced to allow greater representation, such changes rarely go deep enough to affect the realities of oppression in people’s daily lives. Understandably, there is genuine immediate relief from previous regime brutality and an opened atmosphere for free expression. These are great accomplishments by the Egyptian people. But if the hierarchical logics of capitalist economics, liberal democracy, dominant foreign powers and social exploitation such as sexism remain in place, a political revolution has only partially succeeded. Much of the old regime remains. Those millions of Egyptian “leaders” who have tasted the exuberant possibilities of utopian community, however briefly, will now confront the realities of resuming their long resistance struggles for lives of freedom and dignity.
David Porter researched and wrote on the large workers’ self-management experience in Algeria almost fifty years ago. He is a political science emeritus professor at SUNY/Empire State College where he taught numerous courses, including on comparative revolutions and modern Algerian history. He is the editor of Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution (rev. ed., AK Press, 2006) and will publish a book with AK Press this year concerning French anarchist perspectives on Algeria from 1954 to the present. He can be contacted at david.porter@esc.edu.
Original URL: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/02/11-11
Academic Repression video on YouTube!
I love it when authors email me and say, “Hey Kate, here’s a YouTube video I just made for my book!” I wish it happened more often … if anybody out there is looking for a way to volunteer some time to help AK Press out, we have tons of great books that would love to have their own promotional videos! And sadly, I have neither time nor skills to produce them … Email me if you do!
In the meantime, check out this one that Anthony Nocella, co-editor of Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic Industrial Complex, just sent me:
And, if you’re in the Baltimore area, don’t miss Anthony’s talk at Red Emma’s this Friday, February 11, at 7:30PM. Here’s the description from Red Emma’s:
Anthony Nocella on Academic Freedom and Repression
Friday, February 11 | 7:30PM | @ Red Emma’s
Enough is enough! “Hire” education across the country is being hijacked by the corporate agenda. Students are leaving college with a degree that they cannot get a job with and an average of $80,000.00 in debt. With more adjuncts, less tenure-faculty positions, and staff being hired only part-time to cut benefit costs, the corporate university has taken over. The academic industrial complex is on full exploitation throttle with critical education thrown out the window and replaced with standardization and normalcy. Anthony Nocella, activist, poet, author, and co-editor of Academic Repression: Reflections on the Academic Industrial Complex (AK Press 2010) will take us first hand into the complex, discussing his own experiences, how to resist, and how the book was created.
Don’t miss it!
Anthony Nocella discusses Academic Repression at Red Emma’s
Enough is enough! “Hire” education across the country is being hijacked by the corporate agenda. Students are leaving college with a degree that they cannot get a job with and an average of $80,000.00 in debt. With more adjuncts, less tenure-faculty positions, and staff being hired only part-time to cut benefit costs, the corporate university has taken over. The academic industrial complex is on full exploitation throttle with critical education thrown out the window and replaced with standardization and normalcy.
Join Anthony Nocella, activist, poet, author, and co-editor of Academic Repression: Reflections on the Academic Industrial Complex (AK Press 2010) on a first-hand journey at into the complex, discussing his own experiences, how to resist, and how the book was created. @ Red Emma’s, in Baltimore.
For Don Lacoss: 1964-2011
Last week, many of us were saddened by the passing of Don Lacoss, surrealist, anarchist, adventurer, author. Don was a friend and a comrade, and was, for me, one of the strongest ties between the surrealist movement and the anarchist movement in the United States, and both movements are diminished by the loss. Below is the statement on his passing issued by the Surrealist Movement in the United States. For those who knew Don, please visit http://donsblog64.blogspot.com/ to share your thoughts about his incredible life and work.
DON LACOSS (1964-2011)
When our friend Myrna Rochester, expert on the surrealist Rene Crevel, told us that we it was necessary for us to meet someone interested in surrealism, finishing his doctorate at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, we were skeptical, even perhaps somewhat hostile…There are, after all, lots of people interested in surrealism, most are interested in only a superficial way. But when we met Don Lacoss, we were impressed; not only did he know as much about surrealism as we did, but he loved it just as much as we did.
He was committed to poetry, freedom and love…. to their exaltation in daily life and to their actualization in the phenomenal world. It was as if we had known him forever or as if we had found, after searching for years, a long lost friend. We immediately began to elaborate, and continued to elaborate, a beautiful conversation about projects, hopes and dreams that was mutually inspiring and beneficial to all of us. That was a part of Don way of living, always sharing ideas, inspirations….working together was always fun, and wherever he was, there was laughter and pleasure and games.
He was fortunate to find Susan Crutchfield who shared his enthusiasms and he experienced again the great joys and magic of childhood with his son Benjamin. He kept us posted on the projects he and Benjamin were involved in. We had the feeling that every day was a passionate one for him, that he did not waste a minute, but filled his days with explorations in the emancipation of the imagination and his efforts toward actualization his imagination in daily life….after all, what now exists was at one time only imagined….and Don’s imagination was wild and free. He used his critical powers to attack alienation, reification, and false consciousness and urged us all “not to shy away from looking back on history to help imagine the unimaginable postcapitalist future.”
In the Introduction Lacoss wrote to Michael Lowy’s Morning Star: surrealism, marxism, anarchism, situationism utopia published by the University of Texas Press, he wrote that “surrealism with its commitments to an unorthodox Freudo-Hegelianism attempts to abolish unfreedom by the self-liberation of individual consciousness and the simultaneous transformation of the social world.” In a long essay published in booklet form as Surrealism in ‘68: Paris, Prague Chicago he analyzed that pivotal historic period in relationship to surrealism and the existing surrealist groups….after all “Be realistic, Demand the Impossible!” is a surrealist slogan.
Lacoss undertook the editing of the Surrealist Series at the University of Texas Press after the loss of his friend Franklin Rosemont. He was currently working on a book to be published by Texas on George Henein, Egyptian surrealism and surrealism in the Arab world entitled the Imp of the Perverse. The jazz musician Sun Ra was the subject of an inspired essay by Lacoss published in Ron Sakolsky’s magazine Oyster Catcher. He frequently edited issues of the Fifth Estate, one is currently in production.
With Ray Spiteri in 2003 he had collected and edited Surrealism, Politics and Culture. At 46, he still had so much to contribute, what a loss to us all and to surrealism. Don’s polemical side can be found in his contributions recently to our surrealist manifestoes “Another Paradise Lost: A Surrealist Program of Demands on the Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster” and “No War on the Moon!” Paul Garon, author with Beth Garon, of Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s Blues described Don’s style as “a wonderfully sharp and armor-piercing weapon.” Don was putting together some works for the International Surrealist Exhibition being organized by Joseph Jablonski in Harrisburg , PA, on the theme of Mayan Millennium in 2012.
Part of Don’s special passion was to search out and find the image of emancipation in comics or to detourn those images to bring out their latent content…..thus, remaking the past, inspiring the present and revolutionizing the image of the future…all at the same time and with glorious humor. The work Lacoss was doing is essential work for human emancipation, and somehow it must continue. It is our plan to do a collection of his essays and to finish his book on Henein, and surrealism. His work, his work with the Fifth Estate, alternative publications and causes that he held dear are incredibly significant…it is in these places that is found the laboratory of new ideas, the ones that shine like bright stars; the places where freedom stretches itself, and where the possibilities of a marvelous future are to be found.
The Surrealist Movement in the U.S.
“If power is not seized, counter-revolution will rise”: Vijay Prashad on the Arab revolt
I think this two-part interview with Vijay Prashad, which appeared on the Radical Notes website, is a great analysis of the situation in the Arab world. I’m not, of course, as optimistic as he is about possible State-oriented solutions in Egypt and elsewhere. For me, the question of how the Egyptian people wind up defining “power” is crucial. What exactly will be “seized” and what will be dismantled? How will the answer to those questions affect the future unfolding of events? What is “counter-revolution”? Does it mean the very immediate, and very real, danger of the State massacring protesters? The re-imposition of a dictatorship (Mubarak’s or anyone else’s) propped up by billions in US military aid? The comparatively peaceful reshuffling of oligarchic forces until class rule and exploitation take a more social-democratic, and less brutal, form?
Anyway, read Vijay’s interview. It’s very good.
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Vijay Prashad is a prominent Marxist scholar from South Asia. He is George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies at Trinity College, Connecticut. He has written extensively on international affairs for both academic and popular journals. His most recent book The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (2007) has been widely acclaimed as the most authentic rewriting of the world history of the postcolonial Global South and the idea of the “Third World.”
PART I
Pothik Ghosh (PG): In what sense can the recent events in the Arab World be called revolutions? How are they different from the colour revolutions of the past two decades?
Vijay Prashad (VP): All revolutions are not identical. The colour revolutions in Eastern Europe had a different tempo. They were also of a different class character. They were also along the grain of US imperialism, even though the people were acting not for US but for their own specific class and national interests. I have in mind the Rose Revolution in Georgia and the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine. Otpor in the Ukraine, among others, was well lubricated by George Soros’s Open Society and the US government’s National Democratic Institute. Russian money also swept in on both sides of the ledger. These Eastern European revolutions were mainly political battles in regions of the world still unsettled by the traumatic transition from state socialism to predatory capitalism.
The Arab revolt that we now witness is something akin to a “1968” for the Arab World. Sixty per cent of the Arab population is under 30 (70 per cent in Egypt). Their slogans are about dignity and employment. The resource curse brought wealth to a small population of their societies, but little economic development. Social development came to some parts of the Arab world: Tunisia’s literacy rate is 75 per cent, Egypt’s is just over 70 per cent, Libya almost 90 per cent. The educated lower-middle-class and middle-class youth have not been able to find jobs. The concatenation of humiliations revolts these young people: no job, no respect from an authoritarian state, and then to top it off the general malaise of being a second-class citizen on the world stage – second to the US-Israel and so on – was overwhelming. The chants on the streets are about this combination of dignity, justice and jobs.
PG: Does the so-called Jasmine Revolution have in it to transform the preponderant character of the politico-ideological topography of oppositional politics – from Islamist identitarianism to an organic variant of working-class politics – in West Asia and the Maghreb? Under what circumstances can this series of general strikes, which seem to be spreading like a brushfire through the region, morph into a constellation of counter-power? Or, would that in your eyes merely be a vicarious desire of Leftists from outside the region?
VP: I fear that we are being vicarious. The youth, the working class, the middle class have opened up the tempo of struggle. The direction it will take is not clear. I am given over to analogies when I see revolutions, largely because the events of change are so contingent.
It is in the melee that spontaneity and structure jostle. The organised working class is weaker than the organised theocratic bloc, at least in Egypt. Social change of a progressive type has come to the Arab lands largely through the Colonels. Workers’ struggles have not reached fruition in any country. In Iraq, where the workers movement was advanced in the 1950s, it was preempted by the military – and then they made a tacit alliance.
One cannot say what is going to happen with certainty. The Mexican Revolution opened up in 1911, but didn’t settle into the PRI regime till the writing of the 1917 constitution and the elevation of Carranza to the presidency in 1920 or perhaps Cardenas in 1934. I find many parallels between Mexico and Egypt. In both, the Left was not sufficiently developed. Perils of the Right always lingered. If the Pharonic state withers, as Porfirio Diaz’s state did, the peasants and the working class might move beyond spontaneity and come forward with some more structure. Spontaneity is fine, but if power is not seized effectively, counter-revolution will rise forth effectively and securely.
PG: What are, in your opinion, the perils if such a transformation fails to occur? Will not such a failure lead to an inevitable consolidation of the global neoliberal conjuncture, which manifests itself in West Asia as fascistic Islamism on one hand and authoritarianism on the other?
VP: If such a transformation fails, which god willing it won’t, then we are in for at least three options: (1) the military, under Egyptian ruling class and US pressure, will take control. This is off the cards in Tunisia for now, mainly because the second option presented itself; (2) elements of the ruling coalition are able to dissipate the crowds through a series of hasty concessions, notably the removal of the face of the autocracy (Ben Ali to Saudi Arabia). If Mubarak leaves and the reins of the Mubarakian state are handed over to the safe-keeping of one of his many bloodsoaked henchman such as Omar Suleiman…. Mubarak tried this with Ahmed Shafik, but he could as well have gone to Tantawi….all generals who are close to Mubarak and seen as safe by the ruling bloc. We shall wait to see who all among the elite will start to distance themselves from Mubarak, and try to reach out to the streets for credibility. As a last-ditch effort, the Shah of Iran put Shapour Bakhtiar as PM. That didn’t work. Then the revolt spread further. If that does not work, then, (3) the US embassy will send a message to Mohamed El-Baradei, giving him their green light. El-Baradei is seen by the Muslim Brotherhood as a credible candidate. Speaking to the crowds on January 30 he said that in a few days the matter will be settled. Does this mean that he will be the new state leader, with the backing of the Muslim Brotherhood, and certainly with sections of Mubarak’s clique? Will this be sufficient for the crowds? They might have to live with it. El-Baradei is a maverick, having irritated Washington at the IAEA over Iran. He will not be a pushover. On the other hand, he will probably carry on the economic policy of Mubarak. His entire agenda was for political reforms. This is along the grain of the IMF-World Bank Structural Adjustment part 2, viz., the same old privatisation agenda alongside “good governance”. El-Baradei wanted good governance in Egypt. The streets want more. It will be a truce for the moment, or as Chavez said, “por ahora”.
Annual Bay Area Anarchist Cafe
The Anarchist Cafe is on! Every year, the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair is preceded by the annual Anarchist Cafe, an sober-space gathering with vegan dinner and performances, that provides a space for folks to gather before the madness of Bookfair weekend sets in. Much fun, good eats, lots of good folks. Dinner is served until 9PM, so don’t show up too late! $5 – $10 sliding scale donation requested, no one turned away for lack of funds.
If you are interested in volunteering at the café contact Mike E. at mikee1051 (at) yahoo.com and include what you would like to do: make food or work door, approx. time.