Two days ago, the same day we discussed violence, the ineffable Condoleezza Rice, a US official, declared that what was happening in Gaza was the Palestinians’ fault, due to their violent nature.

The underground rivers that crisscross the world can change their geography, but they sing the same song.

And the one we hear now is one of war and pain.

Not far from here, in a place called Gaza, in Palestine, in the Middle East, right here next to us, the Israeli government’s heavily trained and armed military continues its march of death and destruction.

The steps it has taken are those of a classic military war of conquest: first an intense mass bombing in order to destroy “strategic” military points (that’s how the military manuals put it) and to “soften” the resistance’s reinforcements; next a fierce control over information: everything that is heard and seen “in the outside world,” that is, outside the theater of operations, must be selected with military criteria; now intense artillery fire against the enemy infantry to protect the advance of troop to new positions; then there will be a siege to weaken the enemy garrison; then the assault that conquers the position and annihilates the enemy, then the “cleaning out” of the probable “nests of resistance.”

The military manual of modern war, with a few variations and additions, is being followed step-by-step by the invading military forces.

We don’t know a lot about this, and there are surely specialists in the so-called “conflict in the Middle East,” but from this corner we have something to say: According to the news photos, the “strategic” points destroyed by the Israeli government’s air force are houses, shacks, civilian buildings. We haven’t seen a single bunker, nor a barracks, nor a military airport, nor cannons, amongst the rubble. So–and please excuse our ignorance–we think that either the planes’ guns have bad aim, or in Gaza such “strategic” military points don’t exist.
(more…)

by Saul Newman

Max Stirner’s impact on contemporary political theory is often neglected. However in Stirner’s political thinking there can be found a surprising convergence with poststructuralist theory, particularly with regard to the function of power. Andrew Koch, for instance, sees Stirner as a thinker who transcends the Hegelian tradition he is usually placed in, arguing that his work is a precursor poststructuralist ideas about the foundations of knowledge and truth (Koch 1997). Koch argues that Stirner’s individualistic challenge to the philosophical bases of the State goes beyond the limits of traditional Western philosophy, presenting a challenge to its transcendentalist epistemology. In light of this connection established by Koch between Stirner and poststructuralist epistemology, I shall look at Stirner’s convergence with a certain poststructuralist thinker, Gilles Deleuze, on the question of the State and political power. There are many important parallels between these two thinkers, and they may be viewed, in different ways, as anti-State, anti-authoritarian philosophers. I want to show the way in which Stirner’s critique of the State anticipates Deleuze’s poststructuralist rejection of State thought, and more importantly, the ways in which their anti-essentialist, post-humanist anarchism transcends and, thus, reflects upon, the limits of classical anarchism. The paper looks at the links between human essence, desire and power that form the bases of State authority. So while Koch focuses on Stirner’s rejection of the epistemological foundations of the State, the emphasis of this paper is on Stirner’s radical ontology – his unmasking of the subtle connections between humanism, desire and power. I will also argue that this critique of humanist power that both Stirner and Deleuze are engaged in can provide us with contemporary strategies of resistance to State domination.
It must be understood, however, that while there are important similarities between Stirner and Deleuze, there are also many differences, and, in many ways, it may seem an unusual approach to bring these two thinkers together. For instance, Stirner was, along with Marx, one of the Young Hegelians, whose work emerged as a supremely individualistic critique of German Idealism, particularly of the Feuerbachian and Hegelian kind. Deleuze, on the other hand, was a twentieth century philosopher who, along with Foucault and Derrida, is regarded as one of the chief ‘poststructuralist’ thinkers. While Deleuze’s work can also be seen as an attack on Hegelianism, it follows different and more diverse paths, from politics and psychoanalysis, to literature and film theory. Stirner is not generally regarded as a ‘poststructuralist’, and, apart from Koch’s groundbreaking article (Koch 1997) and Derrida’s work on Marx (Derrida 1994), he has received virtually no attention in the light of contemporary theory. However, and this is perhaps the problem with labels like ‘poststructuralism’, there are several crucial planes of convergence between these two thinkers – particularly in their critique of political domination and authority - that one can tease out, and which would be denied if one stuck to such labels. It is precisely in this rejection of the tyranny of ‘labels’, essential identities, abstractions and ‘fixed ideas’ - this attack on authoritarian concepts which limit thought - that Stirner and Deleuze achieve some sort of common ground. This is not to ignore the differences between them, but on the contrary, to show how these differences to resonate together in unpredictable and contingent ways to form, in Deleuze’s words, ‘planes of consistency’ from which new political concepts can be formed.
(more…)

Simon Tormey
April 2006

“To sleep perchance to dream, ay there’s the rub” (Hamlet)

I close my eyes and I dream of ‘revolution’. What do I see? The world turns black and white, though perhaps tinged with sepia. I see a white male, balding with a goatee beard haranguing an audience infused with enthusiasm for his message of class struggle, heroic deeds, new and optimistic visions of machines and men working in perfect harmony – a pain-free, alienation-free future. This world is an absolute or complete break from the present. It is a world where the pain and fear of our world, the hunger, the agony has disappeared. Those listening to the bald man try to imagine a world that is so radically different from the one they are in that when they think of how they are going to get there they describe this process as a ‘revolution’. Revolution is not reform – how could it be when what they want is so radically different to the world that exists? NO, it must be a revolution – a fast-spinning vortex of energy, desire, solidarity. They see some pain, but not as much as staying where they are. Some shots are fired, screams, guns, bombs, firing squads. The dream turns black.

I wake up. Did I dream all of this? Yes, I must have done. It must be a dream because it is no longer ‘real’ in some meaningful respect –or it must not be real in the part of the world I inhabit. In this world, my world, those things that we thought of as components of the revolutionary dream seem to have shrivelled to the point of irrelevance. Modernist dreams of impressive new world orders have died in my world, withered on the vine of disappointments, despondency, dictatorships. As Lyotard puts it, we are no longer ‘believers’ in revolution. We have become Pagans – we live for today, for the corporeal, the immediate, the sensual, the personal.

And yet (contra Lyotard) we are angry, and getting angrier – at war, at imperialism, at poverty, at environmental degradation, at waste, at oppression, at the abuse of our fellow men and women. History has not come to an end. We still care; but we do not care for ‘revolution’. ‘We scream’, as John Holloway aptly puts it, but where do the resources to turn the scream into the kind of action that will relieve our agony come from? How do we turn the scream into something that overturns that which makes us scream? This is the question of ‘revolution’ today.
(more…)

J.K. Gibson-Graham
April 2006

It seems that the making of a new revolutionary imaginary is underway. Coming into being over the past few decades and into visibility and self-awareness through the Internet, independent media and most recently the World Social Forums, this emergent imaginary confounds the time-worn oppositions between global and local, revolution and reform, opposition and experiment, institutional and individual transformation. It is not that these paired evaluative terms are no longer useful but that they now refer to processes that inevitably overlap and intertwine.
We glimpse the broad outlines of this new imaginary in the performative self-designations of the “movement of movements”—We Are Everywhere, Other Economies are Possible, One No, Many Yeses, Life After Capitalism —and in the statements of movement activists like John Jordan:

Our movements are trying to create a politics that challenges all the certainties of traditional leftist politics, not by replacing them with new ones, but by dissolving any notion that we have answers, plans or strategies that are watertight or universal…We are trying to build a politics…that acts in the moment, not to create something in the future but to build in the present, it’s the politics of the here and now.
(more…)

Saul Newman
March 2006

In 1798, Kant wrote the following about the French Revolution:

But even if the end viewed in connection with this event should not now be attained, even if the revolution or reform of a national constitution should finally miscarry, or, after some time had elapsed, everything should relapse into its former rut (as politicians now predict), that philosophical prophecy should lose nothing of its force. For this event is too important, too much interwoven with the interest of humanity, and its influence too widely propagated in all areas of the world to not be recalled on any favourable occasion by nations which would then be roused to a repetition of new efforts of this kind…

For Kant, the enthusiasm that the1789 Revolution inspired in onlookers was a clear sign of human progress. It revealed a disposition for improvement and a confidence in being able to achieve the fundamental goal of humanity – a republican constitution which would, moreover, prevent offensive war. Even if the upheaval itself proved to be a failure, even if it drowned itself in blood, the Revolution created a permanent fissure in the fabric of time, inscribing itself on the collective memory of history. It was an event which would continue to exist, whose significance would continue to reverberate long after the din of cannons had died away and despite the restoration of reactionary regimes in its wake. It would be a permanent horizon of human progress - something which could be recalled to memory and invoked in subsequent struggles.
(more…)

by Saul Newman

Max Stirner and Michel Foucault are two thinkers not often examined together. However, it has been suggested that the long-ignored Stirner may be seen as a precursor to contemporary poststructuralist thought. Indeed, there are many extraordinary parallels between Stirner’s critique of Enlightenment humanism, universal rationality, and essential identities, and similar critiques developed by thinkers such as Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and others. However, the purpose of this paper is not merely to situate Stirner in the “poststructuralist” tradition, but rather to examine his thinking on the question of freedom, and to explore the connections here with Foucault’s own development of the concept in the context of power relations and subjectivity. Broadly speaking, both thinkers see the classical Kantian idea of freedom as deeply problematic, as it involves essentialist and universal presuppositions which are themselves often oppressive. Rather, the concept of freedom must be rethought. It can no longer be seen in solely negative terms, as freedom from constraint, but must involve more positive notions of individual autonomy, particularly the freedom of the individual to construct new modes of subjectivity. Stirner, as we shall see, dispenses with the classical notion of freedom altogether and develops a theory of ownness [Eigenheit] to describe this radical individual autonomy. I suggest in this paper that such a theory of ownness as a non-essentialist form of freedom has many similarities with Foucault’s own project of freedom, which involves a critical ethos and an aestheticization of the self. Indeed, Foucault questions the anthropological and universal rational foundations of the discourse of freedom, redefining it in terms of ethical practices. Both Stirner and Foucault are therefore crucial to the understanding of freedom in a contemporary sense–they show that freedom can no longer be limited by rational absolutes and universal moral categories. They take the understanding of freedom beyond the confines of the Kantian project–grounding it instead in concrete and contingent strategies of the self.
(more…)

Dmitrov (Moscow province)
21 December, 1920
Respected Vladimir Illich,
An announcement has been placed in Izvestiia and in Pravda which makes known the decision of the Soviet government to seize as hostages SRs [Social Revolutionary party members] from the Savinkov groups, White Guards of the nationalist and tactical center, and Wrangel officers; and, in case of an [assassination] attempt on the leaders of the soviets, to “mercilessly exterminate” these hostages.
Is there really no one around you to remind your comrades and to persuade them that such measures represent a return to the worst period of the Middle Ages and religious wars, and are undeserving of people who have taken it upon themselves to create a future society on communist principles? Whoever holds dear the future of communism cannot embark upon such measures.
Is there really no one around you to remind your comrades and to persuade them that such measures represent a return to the worst period of the Middle Ages and religious wars, and are undeserving of people who have taken it upon themselves to create a future society on communist principles? Whoever holds dear the future of communism cannot embark upon such measures.
It is possible that no one has explained what a hostage really is? A hostage is imprisoned not as punishment for some crime. He is held in order to blackmail the enemy with his death. “If you kill one of ours, we will kill one of yours.” But is this not the same thing as leading a man to the scaffold each morning and taking him back, saying: “Wait awhile, not today…”
(more…)