Monday, February 19, 2007

Miguel Angel Hernandez launches blog

I just found out that Miguel Angel Hernandez, the most prominent theoretician of the Partido Revolucion y Socialismo (PRS) in Venezuela has started a blog. It is wordy and in Spanish, but should still be of great interest to many of you (click here for a machine translation). As with John Molyneux's blog, most of it seems to be articles written originally with other outlets in mind.

For those who don't know, PRS is the main (though often not most visible) Trotskyist group in Venezuela, and includes the most prominent leaders of the Union Nacional de los Trabajadores, probably the strongest trade union confederation there.

Friday, February 9, 2007

Antiwar roundup




First, the action we did around Ehren Watada's first day in court went quite well, considering the intense cold. We managed to stay out for about 45 minutes and got about 40 people to stop long enough to sign the petition, and hopefully several hundred more people at least have a vague idea about who this guy is. I posted a couple of pictures I took above; I know there are better ones out there somewhere. There was a short but decent piece in the Daily Targum about it.

We've got plenty coming up; Janis Karpinski is speaking at Rutgers on Tuesday, there will be a rally Thursday to do with the events at Santa Barbara, Columbia and so on, and then of course gearing up for March 20th.

I went to a meeting in Newark Tuesday night of what is now called The Coalition for Peace and Justice (more explanation in a previous post). Most of the big decisions had been made in advance, mainly by POP. The main items are an indoor rally on March 24th, days of action April 4th-7th leading up to the anniversary of the assassination of MLK, a big march "for Justice, Jobs, Equality, and Peace" in Newark on the anniversary of The March On Washington on August 25th, and a followup "People's Peace Conference" in January, also in Newark.

I've made a point a few times about the discussion process not being very open in this milieu; there has not really been much of an opening for people to have much input into the process. I do not think this is intentional (the POP organizers have been very forthcoming when asked for specific information, for example) but it is a problem. There was what seemed to me to be an extremely tentative attempt by the Coalition for Peace Action to shift the center of gravity a little ways away from POP by proposing that the conference be held in Trenton, but they dropped it before it even came close to coming to a vote. We'll see how things develop.

Sunday, February 4, 2007

Ehren Watada action at Rutgers tomorrow

There is going to be a quickie action at Rutgers tomorrow to call attention to the beginning of Lt. Ehren Watada's court-martial for refusing deployment to Iraq. Here is the centerpiece of it, which we just spent the afternoon painting:



I still need to build a stand for it. Grr.

Friday, February 2, 2007

Marxists.org under attack

Most of you will probably already be aware, but in the last three weeks the Marxist Internet Archive has experienced a series of denial of service attacks originating from mainland China and presumably from the Chinese government. The MIA has not made any appeals for help that I am aware of, but they are one of the most amazing things on the internet and deserve your financial support in any case.

Of course the irony is intense, although I'm sure there can't be more than a dozen people left out there who will be shocked by it. I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a young scientist from Beijing a couple of years back. It was the last night of a conference and myself and the Brazilian attendees had gotten smashed and started singing the Internationale. The eastern european attendees were shocked, but this one fellow came up to me, smiling from ear to ear, and told me that he hadn't heard anyone singing the song since 1989!

Incidentally, I found my notes from the SWP meeting I mentioned last week. One thing that I forgot was that Jack Barnes had mentioned that someone (I assume it was the CMI) was talking about setting up a Trotsky Library in Havana, and that he strongly hoped that they wouldn't. Not quite on the same scale, but...

PS: Since I first posted this I've gotten my first few readers from China. I'd very much appreciate any comments from you guys.

Thursday, February 1, 2007

Ken Macleod, Science Fiction and politics

I was very pleased to hear today that Resistance MP3s has posted new files from Marxism 2006. I've already listened to Ken MacLeod's talk on science fiction which is very interesting, though unfortunately his wrap up is missing, and I hope I haven't said anything unfair as a result.

I always enjoy talks like this, partly because looking back I've realized that a lot of what got me started thinking about politics and was reading Scifi, both good and bad. Ken's written some of each; his Fall Revolution series is absolutely fantastic on a lot of different levels, but his other books are mainly good for in-jokes (for example who naming a starship after a book by Tony Cliff), although still better than some. I think my favorite book of his is The Cassini Division, which deals with a the common problem in political Scifi -- that utopia is boring -- by contrasting two "utopias": the socialist society on earth and a sort of cyberpunk-libertarian "utopia" on the other side of the wormhole. It's one of my favorite depictions of a possible socialist society that I've seen anywhere.

For me the most interesting point in his talk the was about the prominence of the idea of a "singularity" and post-humanism in recent Scifi which I think he's quite right to see the as reflecting how much difficulty people have nowadays of envisioning an attractive human future and a sense of powerlessness. He puts this mainly down to the reaction to the collapse of the Soviet bloc and so forth. I'm sure this is significant; there were no shortage of science fiction writers who had the same kinds of attitudes about "really existing socialism" as other left and soft-left intellectuals (it always struck me how much Isaac Asimov's more pleasant future societies reminded me of an idealized version of the Soviet Union). However I think you can already see that demoralization in Cyberpunk and a lot of the dystopian turn in the eighties. As with the the shifts in the academic "left", I bet it has a lot more to do with disappointment in the outcome social movements and upheavals of the sixties and seventies. The shift from that towards posthumanism I think reflects a shift from a sense that things are more or less just decaying to more prominent feeling (presumably down to a sense of the effects of globalization and all that) that something overpowering is happening, and many people can't sort out whether or not they are frightened of it.

All this, and some of the comments in the discussion, also got me wondering about why people think so highly of Iain M. Banks -- although he's a very skilled rider in a lot of ways I don't find any of his work all that interesting, I think because he's so wrapped up in post-humanism that he just doesn't have that much to say to me. His culture series also has the Star Trek problem of having a supposedly classless etc. society which has to "defend" itself in a way that sneaks in a lot of bits from defenses of contemporary imperialism.

A lot of the discussions didn't touch that much on what Ken was saying but it did bring up some good points about what China MiƩville usually covers in these sorts of talks, the role of fantasy and imagination in politics. I was happy to hear a few people stick up for the politics of Firefly, although I think the comments actually didn't give it credit for being as subversive as it actually is. One intervention described the Alliance (the central government in Firefly) as totalitarian, but in fact it's a version of our contemporary government, admittedly viewed through a conspiratorial lens: a nominal democracy, actually dominated by big corporations, and perfectly willing to resort to all sorts of sinister means to maintain its power -- and the tremendous gap between the wealthy "core worlds" and the mostly impoverished periphery. It's a very good example of what I think another one of the participants was trying to get at, which is that Scifi can have a Brechtian effect (if you'll pardon me for being pretentious about it), of making a familiar thing more comprehensible by presenting it in an unfamiliar way.

This discussion took place in the summer, so there are two incredible examples to add since then. The first few episodes of the new season of Battlestar Galactica were one of the most incredible commentaries on the Iraq war I've seen anywhere near the mainstream media, and Children of Men (the film; I haven't had a chance to read the book yet) had more going on than I can hope to cover.