Brea|k

I’m taking a break from blogging for a week or two as ZOG has demanded that Agent Gerbil and I attend an important conference of Miscegenists, Race Traitors and Zionist Puppets in Jerusalem. Or possibly Tahiti. Anyway, we’ve both been promised there’ll be loads of booze, chicks, drugs and food. Or not. In the meantime, a few items of interest…

one

AK Press finally done got themselves a blog: Revolution By the Book : AK Press Blog.

two

There’s a new film about

p0rn

The Price of Pleasure: Pornography, Sexuality and Relationships

Once relegated to the margins of society, pornography has become one of the most visible and profitable sectors of the cultural industries in the United States. It is estimated that the pornography industry’s annual revenue has reached $13 billion. At the same time, the content of pornography has become more aggressive, more overtly sexist and racist.

The film features the voices of consumers, critics, and pornography producers and performers. It is particularly revealing when male pornographers openly discuss their views about women and how men should relate to them, and when male and female porn users candidly discuss the role pornography has played in shaping their sexual imaginations and relationships. The film paints both a nuanced and complex portrait of how pleasure and pain, commerce and power, and liberty and responsibility are intertwined in the most intimate aspects of human relations.

At the same time, the film examines the unprecedented role that commercial pornography now occupies in U.S. popular culture. Going beyond the debate of liberal versus conservative so common in the culture, The Price of Pleasure provides a holistic understanding of pornography as it debunks common myths about the genre.

The film features interviews with scholars of mass media (Gail Dines and Robert Jensen), economics (Richard Wolff), and psychology (Dr. Ana Bridges); writers on pornography and popular culture (Ariel Levy and Pamela Paul); producers and performers from the pornography industry (John Stagliano, Joanna Angel and Ernest Greene); and a former stripper/porn performer-turned-author (Sarah Katherine Lewis).

three

Climate change camp has given George Monbiot an opportunity to reiterate his craptastic critique of anarchism, one which echoes his thoughts in that book he wrote.

Climate change is not anarchy’s football
“In seeking to put politics ahead of action, Ewa Jasiewicz is engaging in magical thinking of the most desperate kind”
George Monbiot
guardian.co.uk
August 22, 2008

four

The IWCA — which emerged during the late 1990s, and partly as a result of the dissolution of the Marxist groupuscule Red Action — done some analysis on immigration and its implications for working class struggle in the UK:

Kicking away the ladder at home and abroad: immigration, globalisation and neo-liberalism
Independent Working Class Association
August 8, 2008

The administrators of the British economy and UK plc have openly admitted that the recent large scale immigration into the UK has acted to depress wages, something they welcome as a positive development. Meanwhile, the middle class left condemns anyone who acknowledges the possibility that immigration may being used as a weapon of class warfare by business against the domestic working class as reactionary, racist and right-wing, a stance that benefits no-one except the BNP. What might be a progressive, pro-working class position on this most contentious of issues?

five

Some techno dude known as Adultnapper got some interesting stuff to say about music and politics:

Against the day: Adultnapper
RA
Todd L. Burns
August 7, 2008

Brainy philosopher, schizophrenic comic book character, or globe-trotting DJ? Try all three. RA’s Todd L. Burns tries to keep up with Adultnapper as he gets ready for his upcoming sets at New York’s Minitek and Sunday School for Degenerates.

“To me, if you’re having someone say that you can’t be a techno producer if you aren’t getting rid of vinyl and involving yourself fully in new technologies, tells me that you’re saying “fuck you” to Underground Resistance and to everybody who was against that consumer capitalism. And the moment that techno becomes associated with consumer capitalism, I’ll fucking walk right away. I don’t give a shit. Sure, I want to make a living, but I don’t want to invest fully in my artform to create this consumer product for people to digest—and contribute to an ever-growing problem of people who don’t want to take the time to understand an art or take the time to understand to actually involve themselves in something and have a real conversation about something. And I think the digital realm takes that away. Everybody thought that if you open the internet that it was going to be, “Oh wow, it’s freedom.” But as you can see, it’s basically populist fascism.

That sounds really pretentious, doesn’t it?”

And here’s the other half…

six

What is Real Utopia?
Chris Spannos
ZNet
July 5, 2008

UTOPIAS HAVE A LONG, mixed history in Left movements. Sometimes they have propelled our imagination toward what better worlds might look like. Other times they have trumpeted heaven on earth, a world for angels rather than mortals, a far fetched leap to the impossible, where birds can play guitar and human beings are able to flap their arms to fly. Utopia, the word, has its origins in Greek, meaning “nowhere,” suggesting that it doesn’t—and maybe cannot—exist. Still, it has been conceived as an island perfectly designed in all ways societal and moral, and an ideal place or state of being where no wrong can be done. Where utopia offers vision escaping reality it has rightly been rejected by serious Leftists. But even when vision is not pie in the sky, objections are made that any long-term goals can become a blueprint that carries inherent danger of authoritarianism with people reacting as spellbound children naively following the Pied Piper. In this book,1 we hope to transcend all such problems by drawing from history and real-world conditions, offering vision and strategy for what is possible in transforming society’s defining institutions and in revolutionizing human existence in all spheres of life.

seven

Reading Gay Pride: New Books for the Queer Left
Kenyon Farrow
The Indypendent
June 26, 2008

If you’re a grumpy, anti-capitalist, nearing middle-aged queer like myself, the June Gay Pride festivities can be really annoying — especially in New York. Because there are five boroughs, the events seem to go on forever. Rainbow striped flags, key chains and booty shorts sprout all over the city, defying the drab earth tones of your camouflage shorts and black tank top. Cheesy dance remixes of even cheesier top 40 songs drown out your reflective folk tunes. Yep, June is no bowl of organic free-trade cherries for the political queers.

eight

Terrorists Shouldn’t Profit From Their Crimes
David Gelertner
The Wall Street Journal
June 20, 2008

An unrepentant terrorist named Theodore Kaczynski (the “Unabomber”) used mail bombs to kill three people and injure 28 – including me – between 1978 and 1995. He is now attempting to cash in on his brutal crimes, and a federal appeals court will soon decide his case.

nine

Agent of Influence: Reassessing Wilfred Burchett
Robert Manne
The Monthly
June 2008

Following the collapse of communism in Europe and the conversion of China from Marxism-Leninism to an unpleasantly authoritarian version of Market-Leninism, the reputation of Wilfred Burchett, the most controversial and influential communist in Australian history, seemed destined gradually to sink. Oddly enough, this has by no means been the case. At present two Australians, Ross Fitzgerald and Simon Nasht, are reported to be making films on Burchett. In the past three or so years, Melbourne University Press has published a long pro-Burchett biography, Tom Heenan’s From Traveller to Traitor; the University of New South Wales Press, an enormous unabridged autobiography, Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist; and Cambridge University Press, an anthology of Burchett’s work, Rebel Journalism: The Writings of Wilfred Burchett. The reception to these publications revealed that Burchett is, in general, still supported by leading Australian left-wing academics, like Stuart Macintyre, Gavan McCormack and Ben Kiernan; by some of its most prominent expatriate left-wing journalists, like John Pilger and Phillip Knightley; and by some talented student Leftists as well (last year a stridently pro-Burchett thesis won a University of Sydney undergraduate prize)…

ten

Pedagogy, Ideology, and Space in the Classical Anarchist Conception of Freedom
Michael Vastola
Reconstruction 6.2 (Spring 2006)

Abstract: This article attempts to understand the term “freedom” through a comparative analysis of how it was mobilized in various anarchist texts from the nineteenth century. Such an analysis helps to differentiate the anarchist conception from its mainstream liberal and libertarian variants. This is accomplished with the aid of a broad spatial framework in which incommensurable notions of space and spatiality are clarified. Likewise, the framework demonstrates the extent to which popular assumptions about pedagogy from the anarchist tradition are based on a contradictory recognition of ideal educational practices. Such practices often utilize a propaganda model that is in many respects antithetical to their ideas about the spatial dimensions of freedom, as well as the central role of freedom in a moral social relation. Though critical of their conception of state power, the author claims that there is still much to learn from the philosophical foundations of classical anarchist thought, particularly when they draw upon (in a largely critical fashion) some of the indispensable concerns and suppositions of the Enlightenment—which may modestly contribute to the post-postmodern reactualization of theories of subjectivity, ideology, and praxis for our historical moment. The importance of new theories of ideology is emphasized, since the absence of a more sophisticated recognition of the concept is a major reason why the anarchist tradition has often failed to sufficiently consider real power relations in its immediate circumstances—as exemplified by many of its simplistic assumptions about authority and pedagogy in the nineteenth century.