Monday, January 30, 2012
Chomsky 2010: ZMI Woods Hole
http://vimeo.com/12472572
http://vimeo.com/12475369
Wide-ranging discourse on an array of issues, arising from questions at Z Media Institute.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
'All the privileged must have prizes' - Skewering Harvard
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=402674
' ... the core components of the consensus upheld by their liberal parents: the meaning of liberty lies in the personal choice of consumers; free competition in goods and morals regulates value; technological progress is an unmixed good; war is unfortunate.'
- John H. Summers
' ... the core components of the consensus upheld by their liberal parents: the meaning of liberty lies in the personal choice of consumers; free competition in goods and morals regulates value; technological progress is an unmixed good; war is unfortunate.'
- John H. Summers
Friday, January 27, 2012
Why Chomsky is excluded, even by 'radical' journals - John Summers
http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/01/08/chomsky-and-academic-history/
He does not say, with the post-liberal thinkers, that academic intellectuals need a whole new vocabulary to understand reality. He does not think of historical writing as a pathway to power, tenure, faculty club dinners, fund-raising, or anything else of this sort. He does not leave a clear idea of power in view, in part because his anarchism teaches him to view social status as a form of domination.
This explanation might be crude, but it can explain how the current generation of professional historians, many of them beginning in the restless mood of the 1960s and 1970s, have fitted themselves so effortlessly into the hierarchical arrangements of academic life. They have liberalized it to include once-marginalized social groups, but have done nothing to reverse the repression of labor power. The difference between a free professional and a university employee ought to be as wide as possible. Today the difference has been erased, and the history’s professional societies have left it undefended. The historians now preside over a structure of domination far greater in its scope and power than at any time in the past.
The question of power also explains why even history journals dedicated explicitly to radical analysis have ignored Chomsky. The Radical History Review has reviewed exactly one of his books, which it called "absurd." Whatever else the RHR has achieved since its founding in the 1970s, it represents the triumph of the career radical, the academic historian who is not merely unpunished for radical statements, but actively rewarded with money, prestige, book contacts for "radical readers," and so on. It is damnably difficult nowadays to tell the difference between a young business executive and a "radical historian."
Wright Mills' Power Elite revisited - John Summers
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/books/review/14summers.html?pagewanted=all
"The powers of ordinary men are circumscribed by the everyday worlds in which they live, yet even in these rounds of job, family and neighborhood they often seem driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern."
...
...
"For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end," Mills wrote in a sentence that remains as powerful and unsettling as it was 50 years ago. "Such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own."
"The powers of ordinary men are circumscribed by the everyday worlds in which they live, yet even in these rounds of job, family and neighborhood they often seem driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern."
...
...
The historical value of "The Power Elite" seems assured. It was the first book to offer a serious model of power that accounted for the secretive agencies of national security. Mills saw the postideological "postmodern epoch" (as he would later call it) at its inception, and his book remains a founding text in the continuing demand for democratically responsible political leadership — a demand echoed and amplified across the decades in books like Christopher Lasch's "Revolt of the Elites" (1995), Kevin Phillips's "Wealth and Democracy" (2002), Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of Empire" (2004) and Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter With Kansas?" (2004).
...
...
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Mark Rudd, ex Weatherman, on Organising
http://www.markrudd.com/?organizing-and-activism-now/1968-organizing-vs-activism.html
"If they’ve thought about the problem at all, the activists seem to believe that their repeated expressions of opposition to the war will eventually draw people in. Grimly soldiering on, they have run out of ideas, tactics, strategy. Activism, the expression of our deeply held feelings, used to be only one part of building a movement. It’s a tactic which has been elevated to the level of strategy, in the absence of strategy.
What’s happened is that we’ve lost the models of organizing that we once had. Those of us who were young in the anti-Vietnam War movement had the benefit of both the labor and civil rights movements contiguous in time with us. From veterans of these movements who were fighting the war we learned that we needed to build a base through education, agitation, and, most of all, direct connection with people. But there’s been at least a thirty year gap between the last successful mass social movements and young people now. A generation, maybe two, has come of age without knowing what organizing is, or even knowing what questions to ask. Most young activists think organizing means making the physical arrangements for a rally or benefit concert. And the words base-building and coalition are not even in the lexicon.
No wonder we don’t have an anti-war movement, even as public opinion has turned against the war and as the Republicans self-destruct. But public opinion is not a movement: it’s not organized for political action.
I hold my generation responsible for the lack of a movement now. After Vietnam and Watergate, too many of us retreated into our small personal and family concerns, perhaps tired of the demands of organizing. By and large we ceased working in our communities. Meanwhile, the Republicans didn’t give up on mass organizing—far from it. Under the tutelage of aggressive Young Republican organizers like Karl Rove, they learned from their early defeats and went on to master the arts of engagement, communication and coalition building. They were the ones who eventually seized state power, in case you hadn’t noticed, not the old SDS’ers.
Our efforts didn’t stop completely. We were able, from time to time, to organize small and influential movements, such as the one against nuclear power in the late seventies, which stopped the industry cold, but these efforts were sporadic and circumscribed, and they didn’t last as models. The same can be said of the Central America solidarity movement of the eighties, which was less successful. I was active in both.
Since then the left has lost the ability to speak with people unlike ourselves or even to contemplate the problem of strategy. It’s a caretaker operation at best. The millions of my generation who used to be active against the war stay home and listen to the latest Bush atrocities on NPR, Air America and Democracy Now. In Albuquerque, thousands, literally, turn out for Noam Chomsky and Amy Goodman when they come to town, but try to get them to walk precincts for a progressive Chicano candidate for mayor, forget it.
But there are hopeful signs. A new generation of young organizers asking the right questions has begun to emerge. The media hasn’t yet discovered them, and when they do, it’ll be a giant surprise, just like we were forty years ago. One of the best sources I can recommend to you, if you haven’t already seen it, is Letters from Young Activists, by Dan Berger, Chesa Boudin, and Kenyon Farrow. I learned the distinction between “activism” and “organizing” from Andy Cornell’s “Letter to Punk Activism.” He gave a name to a problem I’d been sensing, but was unable to describe until I read his critique of punk activism. Buy the book, read it. We can all learn something from these young people.
The new SDS organizers are very savvy. They’re not falling for the self-defeating sectarian ideological debates we ran aground on, nor for the dead end of hyper-militancy and violence which was Weatherman. They will have nothing at all to do with totalitarian ideologies like Marxism-Leninism or the bizarre organizations that continue to push them. They’ve gone back to participatory democracy, a lovely concept still to be defined in practice."
"If they’ve thought about the problem at all, the activists seem to believe that their repeated expressions of opposition to the war will eventually draw people in. Grimly soldiering on, they have run out of ideas, tactics, strategy. Activism, the expression of our deeply held feelings, used to be only one part of building a movement. It’s a tactic which has been elevated to the level of strategy, in the absence of strategy.
What’s happened is that we’ve lost the models of organizing that we once had. Those of us who were young in the anti-Vietnam War movement had the benefit of both the labor and civil rights movements contiguous in time with us. From veterans of these movements who were fighting the war we learned that we needed to build a base through education, agitation, and, most of all, direct connection with people. But there’s been at least a thirty year gap between the last successful mass social movements and young people now. A generation, maybe two, has come of age without knowing what organizing is, or even knowing what questions to ask. Most young activists think organizing means making the physical arrangements for a rally or benefit concert. And the words base-building and coalition are not even in the lexicon.
No wonder we don’t have an anti-war movement, even as public opinion has turned against the war and as the Republicans self-destruct. But public opinion is not a movement: it’s not organized for political action.
I hold my generation responsible for the lack of a movement now. After Vietnam and Watergate, too many of us retreated into our small personal and family concerns, perhaps tired of the demands of organizing. By and large we ceased working in our communities. Meanwhile, the Republicans didn’t give up on mass organizing—far from it. Under the tutelage of aggressive Young Republican organizers like Karl Rove, they learned from their early defeats and went on to master the arts of engagement, communication and coalition building. They were the ones who eventually seized state power, in case you hadn’t noticed, not the old SDS’ers.
Our efforts didn’t stop completely. We were able, from time to time, to organize small and influential movements, such as the one against nuclear power in the late seventies, which stopped the industry cold, but these efforts were sporadic and circumscribed, and they didn’t last as models. The same can be said of the Central America solidarity movement of the eighties, which was less successful. I was active in both.
Since then the left has lost the ability to speak with people unlike ourselves or even to contemplate the problem of strategy. It’s a caretaker operation at best. The millions of my generation who used to be active against the war stay home and listen to the latest Bush atrocities on NPR, Air America and Democracy Now. In Albuquerque, thousands, literally, turn out for Noam Chomsky and Amy Goodman when they come to town, but try to get them to walk precincts for a progressive Chicano candidate for mayor, forget it.
But there are hopeful signs. A new generation of young organizers asking the right questions has begun to emerge. The media hasn’t yet discovered them, and when they do, it’ll be a giant surprise, just like we were forty years ago. One of the best sources I can recommend to you, if you haven’t already seen it, is Letters from Young Activists, by Dan Berger, Chesa Boudin, and Kenyon Farrow. I learned the distinction between “activism” and “organizing” from Andy Cornell’s “Letter to Punk Activism.” He gave a name to a problem I’d been sensing, but was unable to describe until I read his critique of punk activism. Buy the book, read it. We can all learn something from these young people.
The new SDS organizers are very savvy. They’re not falling for the self-defeating sectarian ideological debates we ran aground on, nor for the dead end of hyper-militancy and violence which was Weatherman. They will have nothing at all to do with totalitarian ideologies like Marxism-Leninism or the bizarre organizations that continue to push them. They’ve gone back to participatory democracy, a lovely concept still to be defined in practice."
Friday, January 20, 2012
Texas today: The politics of crony capitalism
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/rick-perry-the-best-little-whore-in-texas-20111026
- from the November 10, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone: Matt Taibbi.
-
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)