A War of Position and Movement

2009-03-09T17:20:00.000-07:00

This Blog is moving...

To www.warofposition.com

I have ported over old entires and will now be working at a new location. The only reason is the freedom offered by my own space and wordpress.

Do it!

www.warofposition.com

This work by E. Colin Ruggero is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

2009-02-25T09:18:00.000-08:00

Articles for today:

Making power explicit in sustainable water innovation: re-linking subjectivity, institution and structure through environmental citizenship

'I do therefore there is': enlivening socio-environmental theory

Against ecological sovereignty: Agamben, politics and globalisation

Last Night's Address: Yes, Mr. President. More money for loans to create solvency for banks to lend for more spending. Encourage savings to capitalize banks? Meh. Allen White drops on this tip in his note to the NYT regarding Japan's Lost Decade: "Perhaps the current recession is a time for American consumers to rethink what well-being really means"

I was looking forward to hearing comments coming out of the 'The Beirut International Forum for Resistance, Anti-Imperialism, Solidarity between Peoples and Alternatives.' I was not expecting this speech, given by Nadine Rosa-Rosso, opened my eyes to the continued influence of what appear to be an old Left guard that continue to strangle the far Left. The racist, xenophobic and contradictory position of the old Left (criticism of imperialism but resistant to support for Hamas or Hezbollah due to religious overtones) is built upon a misreading of Marx, "[religion] is the opium of the people." His full passage reads:

Religion is the general theory of this world, (…), its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. (…) The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

Another great post at The Oil Drum, this one a reverse engineered analysis of the IEA's detailed decline analysis (decline of oil reserves and production). Also, pretty charts:

Ok, so please watch this video shot in the finals moments of the NYU Kimmel occupation before reading discussion below:

The Painful Last Minutes of the NYU Kimmel Occupation

I encountered this video through a number of channels yesterday, but it was the very lengthy discussion on a particular message board that really made it hang around in my head all day. There are a number of issues at work and things worth commenting on. I will work on this throughout today and in the next couple days. There is something crucial here.

Radical Green Populism

2009-02-11T14:31:00.001-08:00

This is it, this is the keystone in this argument. Combining the anti-authoritarianism of anarchist politics with the communitarian aims of socialism and Kropotkins mutual aid AND the productive power of DIY....

Hilariously, a google phrase search for "radical green populism" only brings up this blog....

is it "mine"? (get it? populism...mine)

2008-12-11T15:55:00.001-08:00

The following text is coming together as part of my thesis, so it reads like part of a larger whole. Also, formatting this for a blog is very lame.

Gramsci, Weber and Counter-Hegemony

Foundations for a Radical Civil Society Theory
Today's mainstream theories of civil society, it has been argued, overlook practices that are not aimed at influencing centers of political and economic authority. These may be specific actions of otherwise 'engaged' movements, the entire action repertoire of movements purposefully avoiding institutional encounters or even social forces for which the term 'movement' is inappropriate.
Of course, this problem is not confined to civil society literature. The theoretical trends between related disciplines are reflective. In this case, social movement theory's intimate connections with theories of civil society has imported many statist assumptions. Mainstream social movement theories (political process theory, resource mobilization theory, NSM etc.) revolve around the same structuralist core as the statist theories of civil society outlined above. The discipline's focus on movement strategy is housed in a political contention paradigm that views movements as "vehicles for making political claims and acting in relation to the state;" consequently, as with theories of civil society, it "fails to examine the ways in which movements reshape beliefs, moral codes, identities, and other cultural elements" (Flacks, 2004:136).
The structuralist paradigm is insufficient for understanding the actions, forms, and goals of numerous current political and social forces. Among them, radical communities have been uniquely impacted by this deficit. The popularity of structuralist theories has hampered social movement theory's ability to engage with communities built upon explicitly anti-statist values. It misses the small, relational associations that form the social foundations of these communities. The radical perspective is rooted in an all together different understanding power and social change. It is their view that Kaldor's 'centers of political and economic authority' are some of the last places to look to foment social change. Therefore, before we can construct social movement theory that is relevant for radical communities, we must develop a theory frameowrk that reflects the radical view of power and social change. This begins not by asking 'what is radical civil society?' but 'where in civil society are radicals?'

Hints from Radical Theory
Rather than patching current, mainstream civil society theories until they fit the task at hand, it is necessary to build from the bottom up, reclaiming terms and concepts for use in a new, radical theory of civil society. A critical step in this process is the careful incorporation movement-created theory. If the discipline wants to fully understand the processes of social change initiated by or involving radical communities and movements, it must listen to what they are saying. There is no shortage of literature. This delay may be due to the inherent and constructed barriers within and between radical pedagogy and activist communities. However, all claims of over- and anti-intellectualism aside, the fundamental fact is that there is theory being developed within radical movements and communities.
When we look at this theory we see an interesting trend, one that may help cross the academy-movement divide. The discussions regarding the mechanics of social change, that is, the radical view of the dynamics and factors affecting social change, echoes the work of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci argues that the complex program of radical social change in a modern liberal democracy involves - more than anything - the development of a strong and dynamic culture capable of establishing the necessary institutions for a subversion of power. The articulation of contemporary radical politics has evolved its early focus on style, moved past a primary focus on direct confrontation with political society, and has blossomed into a body of communities, organizations and institutions that closely mirror Gramsci's culturally thick, passion-infused, counter-hegemonic base (Carlsson, 2008; Day, 2005; Gordon, 2007; O'Hara, 2001; Spannos, 2008).
Despite his potential usefulness, a clear problem with bringing Gramsci into the discussion is the volume of literature surrounding his work. His is hardly an uncontroversial body of ideas. The Civil Society concept experienced a surge in popularity following the dismantling of the Soviet bloc and Gramsci's Civil Society was re-awoken as part of the scramble to explain the quick, unanticipated and dramatic changes taking place. However, its use by Sovietologists, intellectuals and the media did not arise from a thorough analysis and application of Gramsci's work. Joseph Buttigeig, arguably the leading expert on Gramsci's texts in the US, notes that the increasingly frequent allusions to the concept were not, in most cases "accompanied by a clear understanding of its intricate genealogy and of its many different nuances, or, even less, by an awareness of Gramsci's perspicacious treatment of it" (Buttigieg, 1995:2). This is a particularly important accusation as it comes from a linguist who has undertaken a mammoth, multi-volume translation of Gramsci's complete Prison Notebooks.
This trend continues today. Looking at the influential interpretation offered by the London School of Economics Centre for Civil Society's Global Civil Society yearbook, the concept is identified with - or is defined as - an ensemble of popular progressive movements not necessarily linked to any political party. It is equated with 'the people' standing in opposition to 'the state,' meaning government. The worldwide participation of millions in the 2003 Iraq War protests is described as "the mobilisation of global civil society" (Kaldor et al., 2003:3-4 in Buttigieg, 2005). The normative prescriptions and the implied state/non-state opposition paradigm limits the concept's unique flexibility. More importantly, though these interpretations of civil society refer to and rely on Gramsci's ideas, they are built upon a serious misreading of his work. Buttigieg argues,

The editors of the Global Civil Society yearbook misconstrue Gramsci’s core ideas on the State and civil society even while invoking him to bolster their incompatible basic thesis that civil society is 'the non-state and the non-economic area of social interaction.' They are blinded, it seems, by an unwavering determination to draw a line that clearly demarcates the absolute autonomy of civil society.

(Buttigieg, 2005:41-2)

It may seem strange to turn to an author whose legacy seems to have become so messy. However, the focus on Gramsci is not simply an effort to clear his name or tarnish those of other scholars; in fact, this is exactly what a radical relevance focused project must avoid.
I take Gramsci's development of the term as my focus because his original meaning serves radical communities well in the process of elucidating their vision: their theory of power, movement and change.

Gramsci's Library
To get at those elements of Gramsci's work that seem relevant based on what radical communities are saying, we must slice through the maze of Gramscian discourse. The application of loaded phrases brings a history of academic arguments that is largely irrelevant to these communities and invites further divisiveness that may only change the intended focus: relevant radical theory. "Rather than simplistically believing Gramsci has the answers or holds the key to different historical and contemporary problems," Adam David Morton argues, stress should be placed on "the importance of thinking in a Gramscian way" (Morton, 2007:35). Scholars should aim to internalize his method so as to approach the issue of contemporary radical communities in a truly Gramsican way. This means shaking off compromised terms, rebuilding and reclaiming them with their subject in mind. In short, we must start over. We do not have to reinvent the wheel, but we cannot begin with the car.
Therefore, I introduce Gramsci's writing with the understanding that his work should be reexamined in order to develop "a point of departure to deal with similar problematics in our own time" (Morton, 2007:36). Of course, there is no space here for a full historical picture of Gramsci and the totality of his work. Instead, I will deal with those portions of Gramsci's thought most relevant to contemporary radical communities and those most commonly rendered in radical-produced theory: Hegemony, Domination, Civil Society and the State. In an effort to pull away from a 'simplistic' relation of Gramsci's ideas and instead develop a Gramscian vision, I situate his work alongside that of Max Weber. Taken together, Weber and Gramsci provide a broader picture of the encounter of socialism and modern sociology, a particularly useful framework given the goal of developing social movement theory attuned to the experience of contemporary radical communities. Of course, a major bridge between the work for Gramsci and Weber is Marx. Consequently, it must be kept in mind that the critique of capitalism and the work of Marx serve as sort of common ground, a backdrop that helps to bind together Gramscian Marxism and Weberian sociology.

Gramsci and Weber: Isolated Contemporaries
First, it seems important to highlight some biographical details about Gramsci to provide a clearer picture of the extent of Gramsci's knowledge of Weber before his incarceration and during his imprisonment.
Gramsci was born in Sardinia in 1891. He attended the University of Turin on scholarship and joined the Socialist Party there in 1914. While in Turin he made a name for himself as a journalist and leader in Turin's factory council movement. He joined a Socialist congress walkout and in 1921 helped to form the Communist Party of Italy, which he became leader of. Between 1922 and 1926, Gramsci and the party struggled against the rise of Italian fascism under Mussolini. Political repression was rampant and reached a head in 1926 under a new set of emergency laws. Gramsci was arrested, despite supposed parliamentary immunity, and his trial was little more than a show. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Gramsci suffered from health complications his entire life and his time in prison aggravated these problems. Due to the severity of his condition, only eight years after his arrest Gramsci transfered to a guarded hospital in Rome where he spent the last two years of his life before his death in 1937 (Buttigieg, 2002:67).
Much of Gramsci's work comes from a series of notebooks he kept while in prison. The notebooks themselves cover a wide array of topics and their translation and interpretation has been the focus of numerous scholars since their first appearance in 1946. In that time, the connections between Gramsci's words and the writings of Max Weber has interested a number of scholars, most notably Carl Levy. He notes that while there is room for comparison of the main themes found in Gramsci's and Weber's political and scientific writings, the assertion that "a good deal of the political reflections found in the Prison Notebooks were characterized by explicit or implicit, specific or generic references to Max Weber...is greatly exaggerated" (Levy, 1987:382).
First, there is the question of the extent of Gramsci's knowledge of Weber's work before and during his imprisonment. Gramsci was fully aquatinted with Weber's Parliament and Government before prison. In work completed in 1922, Gramsci had "translated Weber's example of Junker domination and distortion of the prewar German state into its Italian equivalent" (Levy, 1987:388). Once in prison, though, Gramsci's resources were severely limited and his access to and engagement with Weber's work became more sporadic. In the Notebooks, Gramsci uses three Weberian texts:

Parliament and Government (1919), not available in prison but quoted from memory on several occasions; passages from Economy and Society, transmitted via an article by Robert Michels...and The Protestant Ethic, available via an Italian serialization in 1931-32
(Levy, 1987: 389)

Gramsci also has access to a number of Robert Michels' works while in prison. Michels had been a student of Weber and taught at the University of Turin while Gramsci attended.
Though Weber is only referenced directly in five passages of the Notebooks, Weberian concepts appear throughout the texts without direct reference. Of interest here are: 1) the similarities of Weber and Gramsci's discussions of the state and domination and 2) the intersections of Weber's analysis of the Protestant sects in America and Gramsci's view of culture in the development of hegemony and counter-hegemony.

Gramsci and Weber: Domination and the State
Weber's definition of the state is presented quite clearly in Politics as a Vocation. He views the state as a type of political association. It is the modern form in historical progression and "[l]ike the political institutions historically preceding it, the state is a relation of men dominating men..." (Weber, 1946: 78). Thus, individual forms of political association are defined less by their 'ends' - domination - than by the 'means' they employ.
When Weber discusses 'means' he is referring to the form of power exercised in order to overcome the resistance of another. Power can manifest itself in a number of forms. Appealing to the self-interest of resisters, convincing resistance to willingly submit and the use of sheer physical force (i.e violence) are all examples. Domination, though, is never a settled position. Political associations must continually interface with the dominated through these power relations to maintain the authority they claim.
The state, Weber argues, like other political associations, employs all of these power dynamics to varying degrees. However, the state's use of violence is unique. The state alone "claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within given territory" (Weber, 1946:78).
But what, Weber asks, does state domination rest upon? "When and why do men obey? Upon what inner justifications and upon what external means does this domination rest" (Weber, 1946:78). He describes three basic forms of 'inner justifications' or legitimations of domination: Charismatic, Traditional and Legal.
Charismatic legitimation rests on the personal charisma of a leader. "Men do not obey him by virture of tradition or statute, but because they believe in him" (Weber, 1946:79). This form of legitimacy does not mesh with a heavy use of force as it is tied to a continued reverence for the particular charasmatic leader. Legitimacy built on tradition appeals to the notion of the 'eternal yesterday,' as Weber puts it. The accumulated precedent of a particular form of political association lends credence to its legitimacy simply by virtue of its age and routine.
Legal legitimacy rests on the accepted validity of a particular set of rules. The modern state relies primarily on legal rationality for its legitimacy (though it can and has mixed other forms). In this sense, for example, the state develops a set of rules for the appropriate and accepted use of violence, as in the social contract surrounding the conduct of the police. Thus, the state becomes the "sole source of the right to use violence" (Weber, 1946:78).
It is possible to find similar themes in Gramsci's work. In his sixth notebook, Gramsci makes clear his theory of the state:

For it should be noted that certain elements that fall under the general notion of the state must be restored to the notion of civil society (in the sense, one might say, that state = political society + civil society, that is, hegemony protected by the armor of coercion)
(Gramsci, 2007:75)

Immediately we can see that Gramsci, like Weber, understands the state as more than the common (and more narrow) definition of the state as government. From a Weberian and Gramscian perspective, the state is a complex of social relations, a particular social order that represents the domination of a particular social group over others.
Gramsci's development of the means by which dominance is maintained echoes Weber's three-fold power array (appealing to self interest, violence and willing submission), but develops it further into a more structured model. Gramsci theorized that dominant groups maintain their position through a mix of sheer force (coercion through political society) and, more importantly, with the active participation of the subordinate groups (consent through hegemony in civil society).
The use of coercion in the process of domination is the domain of what he calls 'political society,' meaning "the armed forces, police, law courts and prisons, together with all the administrative departments concerning taxation finance, trade, industry, social security, etc." (Simon, 1990:71). In Gramsci's view, however, these are only a portion of the state's domination framework. Indeed, the role of political society, the "apparatus of state coercive power," is to enforce "discipline on those groups who do not 'consent'" (Gramsci, 2003:12). The state, or dominant group, only turns to coercive tactics if efforts to manufacture consent fail.
Consent to domination, the second portion of Gramsci's formula of power, is developed within civil society. It is an internalized form of domination that differs from the external, "direct domination" achieved through the coercive force of political society (Gramsci, 2003:12). Civil society is the sphere within which the state pursues (and maintains) hegemony, a social order where "a common social-moral language is spoken, in which one concept of reality is dominant, informing with its spirit all modes of thought and behaviour" (Femia, 1981:24). Hegemony, however, is not simply achieved through the alignment of the free choices of subordinate groups. Consent is actively manufactured within civil society; hegemony is pursued through "extremely complex mediums, diverse institutions, and constantly changing processes" (Buttigieg, 1995:7). "Through their presence and participation in various institutions, cultural activities, and many other forms of social interaction, the dominant classes 'lead' the society in certain directions" (Buttigieg, 2005:44). Hegemony operates through the social institutions of civil society: the church, the educational system, the press, all the bodies which help create in people certain modes of behaviour and expectations consistent with the hegemonic social order. Gramsci's civil society "is best described not as the sphere of freedom but of hegemony" (Buttigieg, 1995:6).
If we are to internalize a Gramscian perspective as a 'point of departure' for analyzing contemporary problems, we must allow his models to remain flexible. Fortunately, one of the key strengths of Gramsci’s 'state = political society + civil society' formula is its versatility. In contrast to defining boundaries or components based on specific, tangible characteristics, he conceives of civil society as a theoretical space, a plane where the myriad processes of hegemony creation, retention and opposition take place. Consequently, the institutions of civil society through which hegemony is built can and will vary between different societies and different times. Further, Gramsci understood that the delineation between consent and coercion, and between political and civil society, is a porous one. For example, recalling Weber's notion of the 'right to violence,' the police and courts - organs of coercion - operate with a high level of consent in many societies today. Indeed, in modern democracies, the overt use of force by the government to coerce opponents has given way to more subtle forms of coercion. Buttigieg alludes to this in his discussion on the US-led War on Terror:

In the United States, both in the aftermath of 9/11 and in the buildup to the Iraq War, the Bush administration did not arrest anyone who opposed its interpretation of events, nor did it shut down any newspaper, television network, or radio station that questioned its views and policies. Instead, it invoked patriotism, national security, and the obligation to support ‘‘our troops,’’ and, then, left it to the most inﬂuential institutions of civil society to bring the overwhelming majority of the citizenry into line and to marginalize the dissenters through a campaign of viliﬁcation.
(Buttigieg, 2005:46)

This is an excellent example of a modern application of a Gramscian perspective on power and dominance, allowing his concepts to remain somewhat “loose and elastic,” attaining precision when "brought into contact with a particular situation which it helps to explain – a contact which develops the meaning of the concepts” (Cox, 1983:162-3).
Gramsci's notion of hegemony within civil society as means of dominance by way of "presence and participation in various institutions, cultural activities, and many other forms of social interaction" is particularly interesting when we compare it with Weber's discussions of religion and its effects within society and his views on culture (Buttigieg, 2005:44). Weber's Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism explores the role of 'church-mindedness' in American society around the turn of the century. It is possible to apply a Gramscian formula to his analysis, further fusing the work of these two theorists into the sort of internalized, Gramscian perspective suggested above.

Gramsci and Weber: Culture, Counter-Hegemony and the Protestant Sects in America
There seem to be significant points of convergence between Gramsci's views on culture as a means to hegemony and Weber's views on religion and its effects within society, particularly in America. Further, Weber's subtle critique of over-determinant materialism in Marx can be seen, though not as explicitly, in Gramsci's broadened understanding of processes of hegemony formation.
In Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber discusses the role of religious affiliations and organizations in early 20th century America, a society whose formerly pervasive 'church-mindedness' was succumbing to increased secularization. In an earlier America, observes Weber, church-mindedness went unquestioned. It formed an integral social function within society and "the question of religious affiliation was almost always posed in social life and in business life" (Weber, 1946:303). In contrast to church membership, sect affiliation is voluntary and thus open to discrimination based on the individual's perceived moral character. Thus, acceptance serves as a sort of guarantee of one's personal moral qualifications.
Sect membership carried with it access to a host of social, business and, by extension, political opportunities. Once recognized by others as an upstanding and reputable individual (confirmed by membership), new avenues for credit, business opportunities and support in times of trouble are opened. Conversely, Weber notes, "expulsion from one's sect for moral offenses has meant, economically, loss of credit and, socially, being declassed" (Weber, 1946:306).
Sect membership brought with it a particular set of behavioral requirements in the conduct of business and social life, a key to understanding the social power of these associations. Of course, coming from a religious body, these mandates are tied to notions of 'goodness.' However, Weber notes that while the idea that the gods give riches to those who please them is pervasive among the religions of the world, Protestant sects in America brought this notion into practice and connected it with economic life. Protestant sects tied their religious justifications for material success to a range of economic and social practices and values deemed 'good.' This included, in Weber's Methodist example, prohibition of usury, haggling, irresponsible borrowing, etc. Weber argues that while the range of practices may have varied among the sects, the overall ethic was the same. A premium was placed upon the individualism of 'proving' oneself before man and god, helping to "deliver the 'spirit' of modern capitalism, its specific ethos: the ethos of the modern bourgeois middle classes" (Weber, 1946: 321)
Consequently, these associations served as "vehicles of social ascent into the circle of the entrepreneurial middle class. They served to diffuse and to maintain the bourgeois capitalist ethos among the broad strata of the middle class" (Weber 1946:308). Here we see the Protestant sects as conduits for instilling capitalist values amongst a wide base of American society, born on the back of theology. Weber notes that without diffusion and maintenance of these principles through religious communities, "...capitalism today, even in America, would not be what it is" (Weber, 1946:309).
As mentioned above, Weber noted a marked decrease in American church-mindedness over the two decades spanning the turn of the century. Secular clubs and societies had moved to fill the vacuum left by the declining importance of religious sect or fraternity affiliation. Formerly, membership in a distinguished sect or fraternity affirmed qualities of the individual, "the self-made man [over] the heir" (Weber, 1946:310). In contrast, the increasingly secularized American society valued affiliation with a distinguished club, a proven Pilgrim pedigree, the type of home one owns or particular modes of dress and sport. The new secularized associational landscape was increasingly built upon the "prestige of birth and inherited wealth, of the office and educational diploma" (Weber, 1946:310). The process of secularization introduced an element of stratification and signaled a 'rising plutocracy' that, in Weber's eyes, stemmed from an increased Europeanization of American society (Weber, 1946:310).
Marx provides an interesting link between Weber's illustration above and Gramsci's analysis of the role of culture in building and maintaing hegemony. In Marx we see a similar concern for the material consequences of religion within society, particularly in terms of stratification and caste systems. In On the Jewish Question, Marx asked what it means for a Jew to seek and achieve 'political emancipation' in Germany, a state with explicitly Christian foundations (Marx, 1978). By emancipation, he means freedom of religion, or, freedom from religion. The political emancipation of a religious man is the emancipation of the state from religion in general; the state gives no preference to any religion and asserts itself only 'the state.' The state is no longer constituted on the basis of any particular religion and, in the eyes of the state, everyone one is 'citizen' (Marx, 1978:29).
In Marx's view, though, the secularization of the state does not necessarily erase its influence on social life. Marx suggests moving the debate to the United States where the state's secularity is explicit and constitutionally mandated. He notes that while the state is explicitly secular in the US, it remains "pre-eminently the country of religiosity" (Marx, 1978: 31). Consequently, individuals become split into both citizens (the secular, public person) and religious men (the private person). The result, again, is not an absence of religiosity in society. Anticipating Weber's observations on the influence of religious associations, Marx notes that the division of a man into 'citizen' and 'religious man' only displaces religion "from the state to civil society" (Marx, 1978:35).
Though Marx and Weber seem to share a view on the social function of religion within civil society, Weber is keen to set his analysis against what he saw as Marxism's one-sided materialist conception of history (Löwith, 1993: 121). However, Weber makes clear that his critique should not be understood as an attempt to "substitute for a one-sided materialistic an equally one-sided spiritualistic causal interpretation of culture and of history" (Weber, 1988: 183; Löwith, 1993:121). It is Weber's view that the elements which merge to create society are too complex for any simple formula and "purely economic factors [are] indispensable, but not by themselves sufficient for understanding the nature of capitalism" (Sen, 1985: 5). Thus, Sen continues,

Weber made it clear that the overthrow of capitalism would require a change in the very ethos of human social action which made sense to individuals in terms of their belief in an 'oughtness.' He stressed the correspondence between a set of moral principles and a particular social and historical context.
(Sen, 1985: 10)

Gramsci appears to fuse these positions in the development of his own formulation of the role of cultural factors in the building of a socialist counter-hegemony under conditions of late capitalism. He moves past Weber's somewhat simplistic reading of Marx, incorporating economic materialism while retaining an emphasis on culture.
Culture is used here to mean a system of values and norms that underpin elements of civil society, and in the case of the hegemonic culture, political society as well. Culture is the wellspring from which the rationale and validation for innumerable institutions and practices flows. Like ripples in water, the existence, structure and behavior of the myriad facets of political and civil society can be traced back to culture. We might also use the word 'ideology' in the sense that culture provides social phenomena with a set of rules, codes, and conventions imbued with meanings particular to specific social groups. Gramsci understood cultures as groupings of "all the social elements which share the same mode of thinking and acting" (Gramsci, 2003:324). Thus, different cultures may view the same phenomena in disparate ways as their particular ideological systems (Gramsci refers to this as a culture's 'common sense') color their experiences.
Consequently, the term does not indicate any particular group of values and norms. While it is possible to speak of a dominant culture, it is by no means the only culture. Further, Gramsci viewed culture as a 'precipitate;' ways of being and living that are formed by the "interaction of a multitude of historical processes at particular moments of time" (Crehan, 2002:72). Thus, cultures (and their 'common sense') are somewhat transitory, arenas where "dominant, subordinate and oppositional cultural values meet and intermingle...vying with one another to secure the spaces within which they can [frame and organize] popular experience and consciousness" (Bennett, 1986:xix). There is a striking similarity here between Gramsci's view and Weber's discussion of culture and the 'nation' concept in Structures of Power:

If the concept of 'nation' can in any way be defined unambiguously, it certainly cannot be stated in terms of empirical qualities common to those who count as members of the nation. In the sense of those using the term at a given time, the concept undoubtedly means, above all, that one may exact from certain groups of men a specific sentiment of solidarity in the face of other groups. Thus the concept belongs in the sphere of values.
(Weber, 1946: 172)

It is important to understand this view of culture as we begin to discuss Gramsci's ideas about social change.
Gramsci conceived of two methods for challenging hegemony: a ‘war of maneuver’ and a ‘war of position,’ best understood as points on a continuum rather than mutually exclusive options. A 'war of maneuver' involves physically overwhelming the coercive apparatus of the state. However, the success of this strategy depends on the nature of the state's hegemony, that is, its position within civil society. In a comparison of the state in Czarist Russia with that in liberal democracies (referred to as the East and the West respectively), Gramsci notes that the strength of the latter lies in a sturdy civil society [here Gramsci uses the term State to mean government, or political society, as opposed to his more broad definition used elsewhere and throughout this text (i.e. State= political society + civil society)]:

In the East the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society, and when the state tottered, a sturdy structure of civil society was immediately revealed. The State was just a forward trench; behind it stood a succession of sturdy fortresses and emplacements.
(Gramsci, 2007:169)

In modern liberal democracies, direct confrontation (armed uprising, general strike, etc.) will not threaten the dominant groups so long as their credibility and authority is firmly rooted in civil society. Buttigieg notes, "civil society, in other words, far from being a threat to political society in a liberal democracy, reinforces it—this is the fundamental meaning of hegemony" (Buttigieg, 2005:41).
However, Gramsci does not give up on the notion of radical change in liberal democracies, he was a writer principally focused on a radical transformation of capitalist society. His central concern was "how might a more equitable and just order be brought about, and what is it about how people live and imagine their lives in particular times and places that advances or hampers progress to this more equitable and just order" (Crehan, 2002:71). Consequently, it was his view that "one should refrain from facile rhetoric about direct attacks against the State and concentrate instead on the difﬁcult and immensely complicated tasks that a 'war of position' within civil society entails" (Buttigieg, 2005:41)
Described by Gramsci as "the only viable possibility in the West," a 'war of position' is resistance to domination with culture, rather than physical might, as its foundation (Gramsci, 2007:168). Cox succinctly describes a 'war of position' as process which "slowly builds up the strength of the social foundations of a new state" by "creating alternative institutions and alternative intellectual resources within existing society" (Cox, 1983:165). For Gramsci, issues of culture are what lie at the heart of any revolutionary project; culture is "how class is lived," it shapes how people see their world and how they maneuver within in it and, more importantly, "it shapes their ability to imagine how it might be changed, and wether they see such changes as feasible or desirable" (Crehan, 2002:71).
The complex program of radical social change in a modern liberal democracy, as described by Gramsci, involves more than anything, developing a strong and dynamic culture capable of establishing the necessary institutions for a subversion of hegemony. Gramsci notes that it must be born of a popular, mass culture in order to create the shared vision necessary for challenging hegemony:

An historical act can only be performed by 'collective man', and this presupposes the attainment of a 'cultural-social' unity through which a multiplicity of dispersed wills, with heterogeneous aims, are welded together with a single aim, on the basis of an equal and common conception of the world, both general and particular, operating in transitory bursts (in emotional ways) or permanently (where the intellectual base is so well rooted, assimilated and experienced that it becomes passion).
(Gramsci, 2003:349)

An Internalized Gramscian Perspective
Weber's theories of power and it's appearance in his analysis of the Protestant sects in America support and, perhaps, influenced Gramsci's thinking. Gramsci accepts the Weberian view of the role of violence in domination, incorporating it into one side of his 'state = political society + civil society' formula (i.e. coercion through political society). Gramsci also appears to adopt a Weberian view of culture as a means of social consolidation, encouraging a sense of solidarity among "all those who think of themselves as being the specific 'partners' of a specific 'culture' diffused among the members of the polity" (Weber, 1946: 172).
However, Gramsci improves upon Weber, synthesizing these perspectives into a somewhat more methodical formula. Further, Gramsci's analysis benefits from his observations of the political tumult and rise of fascism in Italy. Gramsci offers a more forward looking framework, arguing that in modern liberal democracies, power is maintained primarily through hegemony in civil society, that is, through culture. While coercive tactics can be useful, domination is insured by hegemony within civil society. The hegemonic culture 1) encourages behavior that supports the goals of the dominant group, 2) contains mechanisms that encourage the dominated to willingly adopt and internalize the hegemonic system of values and norms and 3) discourages behavior that does not advance the goals goals of the dominant class or challenges their supremacy.
The aim here has been to distill a Gramscian perspective from Gramsci's work so as to move past a single-minded adherence on his words and bring his ideas into contemporary contexts. By connecting Gramsci's work with Weber's writings on domination and culture, the specifics of their individual texts, to some extent, fall away, leaving a generalized Gramscian perspective on domination and resistance.
A counter-hegemonic project of social change informed by Gramsci is two-fold: 1) identifying the direct relationship between particular social problems and the hegemonic value system and 2) identifying the mechanisms by which the hegemonic value system masks its relation to those problems, insinuates itself into the minds of the subordinate, and creates behavior that reenforces its primacy. This careful analysis is vital in order to accurately design an appropriate cultural response. This response is a deliberate and shrewd articulation of an alternative system of values and norms, subsequently expressed through alternative social institutions and intellectual resources, aimed at dismantling hegemony by subverting it. This is counter-hegemony.
This distilled Gramscian perspective is particularly helpful as we begin to look at radical communities' program of social change. The articulation of contemporary radical politics has evolved it's early focus on style, moved past a primary focus on direct confrontation with political society, and has blossomed into body of communities, organizations and institutions that closely mirror Gramsci's culturally thick, passion-infused counter-hegemonic base.
An important example of this counter-hegemonic maturation process is the birth and development of the modern DiY/Punk community. As mainstream culture lost interest in punk in the early 1980s, a new punk began to emerge. Partly an answer to the excess and wasted recklessness that preceded it, DiY (Do-it-Yourself) initially surfaced when bands began creating their own record labels and recording spaces as major record labels became disinterested in the genre. However, DiY quickly became fused to the core of the modern punk movement and over the last 25 years, the DiY/Punk movement has blossomed into a massive and "widely varied political subculture," one which shares many members with the movements of the new transnational activism. Ultimately, the DiY ethic is about "creating your own alternative" and "being aware of your own possibilities" (Poldervaart, 2001: 151).
Accordingly, the 'common sense' of DiY/Punk culture has served as the foundation for the development of a diverse body of social and intellectual resources that, in many cases, explicitly aim to replace their hegemonic counterparts in the lives of community members. Though it began with the institutions of the music industry (creation, recording, distribution, promotion) and continued into other 'entertainment' media (film, print, theatre, etc.), this cultural construction project has branched into bookstores, restaurants, cafes, youth centers, alternative media outlets, community centers, gardening cooperatives, community-focused political action groups (Food not bombs, Books through Bars), radio stations, retail stores and countless others institutions. Further, and perhaps more importantly, this process has seen the refinement of intellectual resources as well; the culture is getting better at expressing its 'common sense,' not only to 'outsiders' but back on itself as well. The participatory ethic of the culture is repeatedly given voice and reenforced every time someone decides to 'do-it-themselves;' it is how this community "actualiz[es] the ideal that anyone can (and should) be a producer of culture" (Spencer, 2005: 200).
Not only is the DiY/Punk story itself an illustration of the intellectual, cultural and institutional development that radical politics has undergone over the past three decades, but the DiY/Punk community is home to many of the activists, organizations and ideas that are frequently lost in the analytic aggregation under the 'antiglobalization' label. Further, the DiY/Punk community is extremely globalized, represented on every continent in a concrete way that few contemporary movements or communities can claim to be. DiY/Punk is developing the intellectual and institutional foundations unknown to radical politics since their modern heyday at the turn of the century; this thanks to a strong and change-focused culture that has linked its ideology, its 'common sense,' with experience, action and passion.
This paper will now turn to a detailed look at DiY/Punk from the Gramscian perspective for a more nuanced understanding how radical communities understand the nature of power today. Armed with this new lens, we can turn to the task of developing a social movement theory relevant to these communities. Given the importance of 'alternative social institutions' discussed above, our social movement theory should focus on these institutions as the nucleus of today's radical movements. We should examine what these institutions means to community members, how they serve the community, and how (or if) they portend radical social change on a broad scale.

Bibliography
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Buttigieg, J.A. 1995. "Gramsci on Civil Society" Boundary 2, 22(3): 1-32.

— 2002. "On Gramsci" Daedalus, 131(3), 67-70.

— 2005. 'The Contemporary Discourse on Civil Society: A Gramscian Critique' Boundary 2, 32(1), 33-52

Carlsson, C. 2008. Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant-Lot Gardeners are Inventing the Future Today! Oakland: AK Press.

Cox, R. (1983) ‘Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 12(2):162-175

Crehan, K. (2002). Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology. 1st ed. University of California Press, 2002.

Day, R. J.F. 2005. Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements. Pluto Press.

Femia, J. V. (1981) Gramsci's Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary Process, Oxford: Clarendon. 1981.

Flacks, R. 2004. "Knowledge for What? Thoughts on the State of Social Movement Studies" in
Goodwin, J., Jasper, J.M. eds. 2004. Rethinking Social Movements: Structure, Meaning, and Emotion. New York: Rowman & Littlefield

Gordon, U. 2007. Anarchy Alive!: Anti-authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory. New York: Pluto Press

Gramsci, A. (2003). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Hoare, Q., Nowell Smith, G.,
eds. New York: International Publishers (2003).

— (2007). Prison Notebooks, Volume 3. trans. J.A. Buttigieg. Columbia University Press, 2007.

Kaldor, M. 2003. Global Civil Society: An Answer to War. Cambridge: Polity. 2003.

Levy, C. 1987. "Max Weber and Antonio Gramsci" in Mommsen, W.J. and Osterhammel, J. eds., Max Weber and his Contemporaries. London: Unwin Hyman.

Lowith, K. 1993. Max Weber and Karl Marx. New York: Routledge.

Marx, K., and Friedrich Engels. 1978. The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition. New York: W. W. Norton.

Morton, A. D. 2007. Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy. New York: Pluto Press

O'Hara, C. 2001. The Philosophy of Punk: More Than Noise. Oakland: AK Press

Poldervaart, S. (2001) ‘Utopian Aspects of Social Movements in Postmodern Times. Some Examples of DiY Politics in Holland’, Utopian Studies (12)2: 143-63

Sen, A. 1985. "Weber, Gramsci and Capitalism" Social Scientist 13(1): 3-22.
Simon, R. 1990. Gramsci's Political Thought: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Lawrence & Wishart Ltd, 1990.

Spannos, Chris. 2008. Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21st Century. Oakland: AK Press
Spencer, A. 2005. DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture, London: Marion Boyars. 2005.

Weber, M. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. eds. and trans. Gerth, H.H., C. Wright Mills, New York: Oxford University Press.

— 1988. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Glouchester, MA: Peter Smith

This work by E. Colin Ruggero is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

2008-10-13T08:44:00.000-07:00

Over the next few days I will be posting a fair body of my academic writing history. Mostly this is a step for me to move forward is developinga a coherent portfolio that represents my thoughts and interests. I am currently listening to an interview with "upset" activists that are denouncing the work of the conventional environmental movement. This was the subject of my undergraduate thesis, finished four years ago.

I feel that I can help these conversations move forward as I have moved forward in my thinking. These facts are established, the important question is HOW to move forward...

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Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

2008-10-06T17:28:00.001-07:00

Thesis work like crazy

Conclusions: Radical Green Populism

??

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Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Ginger Beer

2008-05-19T17:07:00.001-07:00

This year's first batch of Ginger Beer is done and I made a label that I feel is both cheesy and awesome...either way, delicious

Up on Infoshop

2008-05-19T17:06:00.001-07:00

An article I wrote appeared on Infoshop, from the depths of the internet:

Infoshop News: Gramsci and White Kids With Dreadlocks: Foundations for a Movement-Relevant Theory

Article published on Infoshop

2008-04-29T09:05:00.001-07:00

An article I wrote some time ago for an academic journal was posted to InfoshopNews this morning. I wonder who chose to, either way, it's appreciated.

Gramsci and White Kids with Dreadlocks: Foundations for a Movement Relevant Theory

2008-02-21T10:41:00.001-08:00

I wrote to Eat The State Last year in Response to the Namo Collective's call for "more action." You can find the Namo article here

My response:

More than Disruption: A Reply to the Namo Collective

The Namo Collective's recent diatribe on what is and what is not "effective action" sent curious vibrations up my young spine. Their obvious frustration with activists' limp response to the atrocities of the most recent Iraq war seeps through their attempt to remain calm. Indeed, their dissatisfaction serves to cloud their otherwise bright call for more "effective" action. While I agree that anti-Bush bumper stickers do little more than make people feel better about themselves, their sweeping call to "abandon all hope that marches, political theater, potlucks, education, lobbying, e-petitions, and campaigning are useful" is a bit short sighted. However, the thing that is so goddamn frustrating is that the Namo sentiment is not uncommon among the bright minds of many activist communities. We're tired of sitting on our hands while hot-headed men around the world march us forward into flames, at least I am. Regardless, I feel the need to respond to Namo's statement.

First, what the collective has got right. Their understanding of the fine line between powerful and powerless protest should be applauded. There should be little doubt that protest-with-permits is something of an insulting oxymoron. Anything bearing the stamp of the swollen white Bastards wielding the Big Stick is pointless. I was even happier to see them call out yard-sign-and-bumper-sticker activists. The "No Iraq War" placard in the back of a gleaming Audi on its way to buy a five dollar cup of coffee isn't helping anything and there is a real danger in believing it is. Finally, Namo's stance on Bush-bashing is a welcome position; they should dispatch operatives to every coffee shop west of the Continental Divide. I sincerely hope that we vibrating and furious few will be more willing to speak out to those who seek to pin all this shit on one administration. The vicious and dreadful situation we find ourselves in is far more complicated; we've been heading this way for decades and targeting Bush only serves to absolve any blame that might be aimed at inept responses to American imperialism over the past twenty-five years.

The supremely complex nature of this mindfuck of a precipice on which we stand is also at the root of what Namo has gotten wrong. First, by focusing on the Iraq war, they prevent any understanding of the war as only a symptom of a much larger and terminal illness. The Iraq war is a distraction; we cannot focus on "ending the war." Not only would the country immediately devolve into a vicious civil war but all the greedy and bloodthirsty fingers that pried their way into that country would simply find something else to devour; cutting off the hands of the beast will not kill the head.

This is why I take issue with the Namo collective's damnation of all "marches, political theater, potlucks, education, lobbying, e-petitions, and campaigning." As I said above, there is certainly room for improvement, but the collective's demand that all activists focus on disruptive strategies seems to ignore the possibility that they might actually succeed. What do you expect to happen? Because this war is only one piece of the dreadful Puzzle, you must be prepared to tackle every aspect of contemporary American society. If you succeed in dethroning the warmongers, what, exactly, do you plan to do? History has shown us that leaving post-victory plans for post-victory times opens the dangerous possibility that the victors will only fall back upon the system they just crushed. If we hope to truly build a better world, we had better plan ahead.

Here lies the validity of potlucks, education and other forms of community building that the Namo collective seems tired of. While serious, disruptive and possibly violent action will have its time, we must be prepared to win. If we hope to create lasting change we must develop a strong and diverse subculture, a counter-society if you will. The creation of the social foundations vital to a counter-society will only come through the more inwardly focused activities that seem to have been lumped into the Namo Collective's list-of-the-damned.

To be sure, this is a delicate and complex issue and I don't presume to have a master plan. Indeed, a master plan would be counter-productive and dictatorial. However, only through progressive, creative and constructive dialogue within our communities can we actually develop the necessary social, economic and political foundations for a future which is truly different from the past.

--Colin Ruggero

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2008-02-21T09:21:00.000-08:00

I found this after some nastiness with copyright allegations consumed a friend. ALL POST BELOW AND SUBSEQUENT ARE COVERED BY:

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Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Chez Gawdy [sic]

2008-02-05T12:16:00.001-08:00

There are places like this in every city, some are just bigger magnets for the Plastic Militancy

Diamond Dog Dream

2008-02-05T12:10:00.001-08:00

This is part of a dream I had a few weeks ago...diamond dogs?

A letter to a Mike

2008-02-05T12:07:00.001-08:00

This a letter I wrote, one of the few of my more recent letters (2005 onwards) that survived The Great Wax Accident of 2007...I like this one...

Profitable Change

2008-02-05T12:04:00.001-08:00

It is important to remember that we are small in number, but our ideas can spread if packaged in the most basic and easily digested way...

A Wedding

2008-02-05T12:03:00.001-08:00

I attended a wedding of a good friend some time ago. I enjoy the 'going' part of short trips like this; the hurried motion in airports and hotel lobbies. Also opening the door for room service at 3 AM in a half-shut bathrobe, bottle in one hand and ream of typing paper in the other creates this dizzy feeling; momentarily jumping back into the real world long enough to pull a silver cart into the pit and return once again to the humming command center...

Once again, names changed to protect the innocent

Seattle

2008-02-05T11:58:00.001-08:00

Living in Seattle added a new lens to my toolkit. As it turns out, the lens in highly reflective and seeing myself, I shake...

Violence and Terrorism

2008-02-05T11:56:00.001-08:00

Violence inevitably leads to the one-upping game and nothing is accomplished

Something in the News...

2008-02-05T10:25:00.001-08:00

This is another old one, something in the paper about higher education must have set me off...some names have been changed to protect the innocent

A Battle with the Inanimate

2008-02-05T09:45:00.001-08:00

This is pretty old, summer time in a college town...

2008-02-05T09:06:00.000-08:00

A New Year:

I am trying to use this more, as I have no doubt committed to in the past. Apparently some people look at this. I am going to post images of pages from my typewriter from way back, paper is fragile. Also, this will be the easiest way for me to post the stuff I pay the most attention to...its hard to get going in front of the computer, the persistent drum beat of the keys, the rhythmic drhum-hum eggs me on in ways the luminescent future-machine can't....

be ready///

2007-04-05T18:49:00.000-07:00

Part II...please comment, share, whatever. I need to know if I am self-absorbed, alone or somewhere near the truth...the truth...The Bridge.

We found a bar on 64^th St., someplace called O’Neal’s. Kim dragged me onto a stool as I argued furiously with the DS-4000. She ordered drinks and took the recorder from me in the middle of some worthless rant,

“…Such overwhelming uniformity in a culture that presents itself as the standard bearer of diversity and creativity! I mean…Ikea, Whole foods, Bugaboo strollers; it’s our whole morning in Park Slope for fucks sake! The New York Times Magazine, Harpers, NPR, Atlantic Monthly. Pitchfork, American Apparel and Urban Outfitters. All that’s missing is a barker: ‘Buy your rebellion at these fine outlets; we offer a fine selection of Che Guevara iPod covers! Trade it in for a futon and New Yorker subscription on your 25^th birthday!’”

“I think you’re being too hard on people, and simplifying a great deal,” Kim argued gently. “Surely not everyone that buys those things is a zombie and not all lefty zombies buy those things.”

“I suppose so, but these stereotypes are not unfounded. In fact, I think they’re pretty damn relevant! Don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about. Besides, consumption patterns are only the beginning; there are far more perilous and unsettling forms of uniformity to consider. The widespread, idle philosophizing of social ills with no results, other than self-gratification, for example. Or the dark cultural hole of their Press! They’re no better than the class worshippers of the Paris salons.”

Short on money, we left the bar quickly, one at a time, faking towards the bathroom and bolting out the door, running for the subway. We took advantage of the train ride to collect our thoughts and finish the last of the drugs. We stared out the dirty windows at the city as the train passed over the East River. Kim scribbled on the seat next to her as I tried to work out this delicate and menacing analysis in a notebook.

When we got back to Peter’s house, I replayed the recordings I had made and was not surprised to find that, indeed, the others in line were reciting from articles in the New Yorker (“The Revolutionist,” 10.30.2006) and The New York Times (“Mapping Stoppard’s Circuitous ‘Coast’,” 11.24.2006). Jesus, I thought, how many people in that line were playing the same game? How many had read the same articles, developed the same bastardized understanding of the characters in this production. It’s like they gave up their Saturday just to keep up with one another.

“It’s just like Gramsci described.”

“You need to stop,” begged Kim. She grabbed the Scrabble board and went upstairs to get high with Peter and Sara leaving only me, the DS-4000 and Giant Steps on repeat to work out the details. I found a bit of grass on the table, took out some papers and tobacco and turned the recorder on.

“There can be little doubt that the American sub-culture which produces coffee shop squatters like that plagiarizing little shit at Lincoln Center has real power. The political shift that took place in November of 2006, the hordes of aging Barak Obama devotees and the sheer number of ‘Trim Bush,’ ‘Ivy University’ and ‘Bloc Party’ bumper stickers that sit side by side on Jettas all over the country are testament to that. The New Salon Culture is not to be trifled with.

New Salon elders wear the turmoil of the 1960s like a badge; they sip imported organic chai on the porch of a $1.5m eco-friendly house in the suburbs of Seattle, patting each other on the back for the ‘Impeach Bush’ stickers on their Audis. They have repackaged the self-gratifying rebellion of their youth as true struggle – and they act is if they won! As if they were even fighting for anything specific in the first place! They are the headwaters of this river of shit. From them flows a churning cascade of escapism, rationalization, and patchouli scented greed.

College campuses across the country crawl with a scourge of their wealthy, oblivious brats – the children of the elders, the youngest New Salonists. They blindly parrot watered down Chomsky and articles in Harpers Magazine.

But the middle-aged New Salonists are the meat. They are responsible for atrocities like MoveOn.org, the blogosphere, and the sickening disease that is destroying this country. They feel they are involved, politically savvy, and aware. They are sheep, held captive by their self-obsession, kept docile through consumption and mediocrity.

This is The New Salon Culture.

As a part of the struggle upwards, through any number of private colleges and universities and into the upper echelons of the liberal elite ruling class, to share in the power it wields, you must buy its propaganda. You must be able to speak its language, engage in its custom, and share its values. This includes gobbling up the excrement of an inert Press and wearing it around like a badge – The Grand Star of the Aware and Learned.

It is hardly a stretch to describe The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harpers, NPR, Slate.com or, ironically, Salon.com as constituents of The New Salon Press. Far from independent or objective, it is hardly uncommon to read the same story in the New York Times, Harpers and hear it on NPR (multiple times) within a week. They’re all staring at each other, jerking off for producing such investigative, creative and original work – content and idle! And the endless revolution of ideas through the same Press machinery hammers the ideas deep into the mind. The result is a huge swath of rich white people who all think exactly the same! They are blinded and fed the same stories, six different ways, over and over.

Indeed, in all likelihood, New Salonists encountered the same enamored discussions of Stoppards “The Coast of Utopia” in multiple places. At the center, the Sunday edition of The New York Times. The aforementioned ‘Circuitous ‘Coast’’ article appeared in the Sunday Times, which boasted a readership of 1,683,855 in 2006. Any number of, cultural magazines, ‘literary publications’ or similar periodicals featured articles on The Coast (eg. The New Yorker, New York Magazine, etc). Also, the suffocating airwaves. Multiple NPR programs – some syndicated through Public Radio International, American Public Media, etc. – featured pieces on this play.

What is ironic – supremely, gaping and insanely ironic – is that Bakunin, a central character in Stoppard’s opus, wrote and fumed about exactly this sort of cultural hegemony. He saw the danger of a learned elite that rules through a language only its members can understand. There should be little doubt that the political and cultural discussions of The New Salon Press are exclusive; only a small portion of the population can relate to it or even has the time to learn to relate to it. Working 60 hours a week in a box factory leaves little time to consider the larger contemporary cultural ramifications of Stoppard’s resuscitations of Russian radical culture, no matter how liberal you might be.

But the play is only one example. In fact, it is one of the least significant items traversing the vast network of repetition and self-indulgence that is the New Salon Press. There is a great sweating sea of feeble information that rots in the mouths of the New Salonists. It is spayed, neutralized, devoid of anything that might disrupt the subtle balance of criticism and idleness that simultaneously maintains the elite power structure and massages the ego of The New Salonists.

Antonio Gramsci wrote about the power of the Press. Imprisoned by Mussolini in 1926, he detailed the way a particular alignment of cultural and political institutions can serve to empower a particular class or segment of the population and convince others to buy into their own repression. In this case, The New Salon Culture is repressed by being made to feel empowered. The language of The New Salon social ladder, its customs and cultural resources, reinforce the hegemony of capital – the worship of wealth, acquisition, and class. At the same time, organics from Whole Foods, New York Times Magazine features on global poverty and just about anything on NPR serve to pacify…Just enough ‘radicalism’ to keep them feeling progressive but not enough to encourage deep criticism or obstruct consumption…”

The recording ends there.

I remember waking up in the middle of the night wedged between Kim and a huge wooden dresser. I quickly became disoriented and woke her up as I scrambled to find the recorder.

“It’s in your shoes, like usual. Please lay down, don’t tell me the Valium wore off already”

“What Valium?” I suddenly remembered the ginger ale she brought me around 3AM. I barely registered the gesture at the time; in retrospect, I should learn to be more suspect.

I lay back down and my mind collapsed around the weight of Kim’s hand resting on my chest. The amphetamine flutter had faded and I no longer wanted to think about the irony of keffiyahs for sale in Urban Outfitters. This shit doesn’t stop, and it comes in a myriad of flavors. The only way to ensure your taste buds remain sharp is to routinely bathe them in the baptismal saliva of honest love.

2007-03-15T22:54:00.000-07:00

This is the first part of an article I am working on. Intended audience: equally resigned and bitter know-it-alls...

I set my new watch, finished the last of the blow, and left Philadelphia at around 8pm. Merging onto 95 North, Kim nearly killed some poor bastard in a Honda while trying to restrain me from hurling her iPod from the car. All I wanted was an empty radio station to pick up the iFucker’s signal, but seeking up and down the FM band had only rammed home the god awful reality of our situation: at the end of another brutal year, living once again in The Ugly and Menacing Swath – the developer’s masturbatory fantasy that stretches from DC to Boston. The suffocating airwaves imitate the suffocating square miles that border I-95.

It was a goddamn eerie night; for three states, the highway was encased in a thick fog. Django Reinhardt guided us into the Joyce Kilmer rest-area to get some water for the whiskey and new lighter. Inside, a miniature version of Dick Clark’s American Bandstand Restaurant blared the Isley Brothers into an empty, tiled cavern. On the way out of the men’s room I caught the eye of a father escorting his son towards the urinals. He seemed deeply put off by my lingering stare. I thought of a story I read about a man who hung around public restrooms, collecting and drinking the urine of young boys. He placed cups in the urinals; he said the fluid gave him strength and kept him young. As I passed through the sticky swinging doors and lit another cigarette, I wondered what I looked like though that man’s eyes, as a potential piss drinker.

Kim had gathered the supplies and was already waiting outside. She was leaning against the car, smoking, and I was reminded of some nameless film I had seen on TV earlier that week. Kim has an elegance of character that lends itself well to time travel. Under the parking lot lights, against the grayscale of fog, she was idling a stolen motorcycle, West Berlin, 1938.

We crossed the Verrazano with only 10 feet of visibility. All of Brooklyn was a grey cloud and the lights of Manhattan were invisible. We parked the car in front of Peter’s house and stepped out into the warm January night; I took another 30 mg, grabbed the bags from the trunk, and sighed heavily.

Peter.

Peter is a good looking, tall boy. He is smart, quick, and can come off as self-obsessed – which he is. He worships Chuck Klosterman. When we lived together in college, he once mentioned Eric Begosian’s name 43 times in one week.

Peter was guarded as we shook hands and I stepped onto the porch. It got worse from there. Ripe with the nervous energy of mutual antagonism and the drive of prescription grade amphetamine, the night quickly devolved into a series of increasingly lude and manic impressions of Chris Angel, Mindfreak.

Saturday was no better. It was unseasonably warm for January, nearly fifty-degrees, and everyone in Park Slope was out pushing strollers. When my hosts got distracted by a flea market in the playground of school on 7^th Ave, I went in search of coffee and cigarettes. Somehow, in the eight minutes I had been gone, Kim managed to send some hipster antiques dealer into a whirling cone of self-righteousness. Apparently he didn’t appreciate her subtle suggestion that his prices were, ‘fucking ridiculous.’

“Well, sweetheart, for the third time, my prices are non-negotiable.”

“You swollen thief!”

She was thoroughly incensed; I’ve seen her hit men for less. She once punched a meth addict in the eye, knocking him into 3 lanes of traffic for half-heartedly trying to rob us. But she had a point; most of his stuff was crap. He had also harassed Peter’s roommate for “keeping her hands a little to close to the merchandise.” He kept repeating that word, merchandise. Kim and I quickly managed to talk ourselves up into some sort of weird vigilante game; bent on our own brand of justice, we stole a pair of shoes, a belt, two pairs of bifocals and a pipe lighter before I was forced to spill my coffee on his lunch to create a diversion. We were probably halfway to Manhattan before he noticed anything was missing, but there is no doubt in my mind he’ll know who’s responsible.

Stepping off the train at Union Square, I realized I didn’t know what was supposed to happen next. Where were we going? North or South? Why were we even in New York? We had to get aboveground, find a drink; we had to collect our thoughts otherwise this entire thing might come down on top of us. We each had a Chartreuse and things began to get clearer. Two months earlier, I had picked up the New York Times and read about Tom Stoppard’s latest endeavor: a three-part exposition somehow involving the intellectual underground of pre-revolution Russia – The Coast of Utopia. What caught my eye was the mention of Mikhail Bakunin. A quick tussle with Wikipedia revealed that, in fact, I was familiar with one Tom Stoppard – Brazil helped to cultivate a healthy paranoia early in my life that I rely on today. However, it was Bakunin that made me leave Philadelphia.

When I first read Mikhail Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy, I was tired. The Empire I call home was gearing up for war and the liberal elite of this country acted like their mere existence was action enough. I was reeling from a bad experience at NCOR (National Conference for Organized Resistance) and I was tired, fed up with the romantics of contemporary anarcho-hogwash literature (Days of War, Nights of Love, etc.). Bakunin was a break from all that. He conquers and pushes through the obvious denouncements of the State, war, Religion and other paternalistic garbage. He cuts into the deepest worthlessness: ‘doctrinaire revolutionaries.’

“Without renouncing any of the satisfactions and advantages that existing society affords the rich and privileged minority, they want to acquire or preserve the reputation of people truly dedicated to the cause of popular liberation, or even of revolutionaries – as long as it does not entail excessive inconvenience…They look out for and care of their own dear persons above all, while at the same time wanting to pass for progressive individuals in every respect.”[1]

It is precisely this slick of detestable beings that brought things to a head on that hot Saturday in New York.

Refreshed, we pushed away from the bar and headed underground. Lincoln Center is only 7 stops and one transfer from Union Square. By my calculations, we needed a good 40 min in the student rush line to have the slightest hope of making it inside, which gave us 8 min for the subway.

The good graces of some lost saint delivered us unto Lincoln Center without incident and we eventually found a reasonably comfortable spot in line. I lit a cigarette, Kim took out a book, and we both settled against a wall. A week earlier I had procured a digital voice recorder through a Philadelphia dealer specializing in the latest Japanese technology. The DS-4000 has a massive brain and easily fits inside a closed fist. As is my habit in public places, I turned that fucker on and hoped for a marital fight or drive by shooting.

Everyone in line, as far as I could tell, hovered between 19 and 29; as you might expect, everyone chatted intensely with each other. To our left were two girls and a boy, all dressed very hip and smoking, arguing about Hugo Chavez. To our right, a boy and girl looked as if they were on their third or fourth date. The boy had his iPod out, reading off artists, quizzing her about Wolf Eyes, CocoRosie and that Sun Kill Moon collection of Modest Mouse covers. She would either parry with 200 well chosen words on ‘form,’ or sheepishly admit to only having ‘heard of it.’ It struck me as odd. The curly haired, bespectacled boy had a clear tone of excited superiority in his voice. Why would you engage in this sort of cultural trump game, in public, with someone you clearly hoped to have sex with?

I heard a similar game from the trio to my left, though I assumed the stakes weren’t as high. They challenged each other to recall details from other Stoppard plays and were frequently forced to talk over one another to make their self-conscious soliloquies heard.

“Dividing the play into 3 parts is so Stoppard,” noted the boy. “Besides, a subject so epic, so, I dunno, Tolstoyan in scale couldn’t possibly fit into one play.”

Jesus that sounds familiar, I thought. I played the recording over and over again in my ear. And then it hit me, the goddamn New York Times.

“Where did you read that,” I demanded.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me you fucking thief. I insist that you admit it to me and the DS-4000! I read that fucking article too, you prick!”

The kid stood motionless and hardly noticed his two paramours tugging at his sleeve, dragging him towards Columbus Avenue.

As the line began to shuffle towards the box office I started to sweat. Looking around, I felt outnumbered; the others in line were clearly upset by my antics. After all, these are members of the same upwardly mobile, successfully stable class as the boy I had assaulted. They’re the Latte-drinking, New York Times reading, NPR listening, Whole Foods shopping Liberal stereotype: over-educated and well-insured.

Their faces were closing in on me. By the time we made it to the box office I was relieved to find that we couldn’t get tickets; I wanted nothing more than to get away from that horrible place and those terrifying people.

[1] Bakunin, Mikhail Statism and Anarchy Cambridge University Press, 1990. pg. 199

The League of Robots and Monsters: Ironclad Jackson

2007-03-15T22:50:00.000-07:00

My new favorite anything is this man, Dr. Thadeus E. "Ironclad" Jackson:

He is found here:
The League of Robots and Monsters: Ironclad Jackson

Arson at Sedition Books, Houston

2007-02-27T16:22:00.001-08:00

clipped from www.infoshop.org

Sedition Books Burns

Then the HPD arson investigators arrived, and straight off one of them started to question me about my politics... "Looks like you guys are pretty anti-american, what's the deal with that?" "Don't you know capitalism makes everything run?" I was so dazed from the smoke and the shock that I actually strated to argue politics with him, but then said "What the fuck, am I under investigation for my political beliefs or are you investigating a fire?" His boss took over and was more polite but their main interest still seemed to be devoted to the radical politics on display in the infoshop... what do you protest against, do you have guns, are you against the federal government, blah blah blah...

They said it was almost definitely an intentional fire, because it was started form the outside... then they told us that "if you get too extreme like this, this is what happens" and "if you do this again somewhere else, this kind of stuff is just gonna follow you..."

2007-01-07T18:07:00.000-08:00

Help...

Let me introduce you to a social science term: hegemony. (Murmurs: thats a political term; he's wearing no pants) Rather, the term hegemony as described by Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci was a 19^th century social theorist who was jailed by a newly fascist

Italy

for being a leader in the communist party. Eighty years later, his work is still debated and utilized. Imagine, say, a less ivory-tower Chomsky being thrown in jail today and producing over 2000 pages of theory which remained relevant through 2090; fucking aces. Gramsci used the word hegemony to describe relations of social dominance and subordination. A hegemonic social class is able to coerce subordinate classes into accepting, adopting and internalizing its system of values and norms. Gramsci his take on hegemony to describe the shit situation he was faced with then and, ironically, with which we are faced now: the pungent and strapping tendrils of consumer capitalism.

Our reining hegemony, like all hegemonies, maintains it power through a mix of consent and coercion (like Machiavelli’s prince for those who care or are pretending to care). Coercion is exercised through the legal apparatus of the State and consent is fostered through control of the social institutions of civil society. Our most minute action, our daily left-foot, right-foot bullshit is profoundly prejudiced by an amorphous conglomerate dubbed ‘civil society’: the ensemble of voluntary ideological and culture relations which form the fabric of our social lives. Grandma’s erotic book club, Grandpa’s whittling circle, Neo-nazi gangs, environmental advocacy groups, its all in there, everything outside of the force-backed structures of the State. Within civil society, there are bodies, institutions that, perhaps unwittingly, work to underpin a specific political structure in civil society: “the church, the educational system, the press, all the institutions which helped create in people certain modes of behavior and expectations consistent with the hegemonic social order” (Cox 1983: 164).

(is it too heavy, can they hear me? …)

It seems clear that the American educational system is geared towards producing producers, human capital for feeding hungry machines. Today’s students jump through standardized hurdles with a #2 pencil clenched between increasingly dulled teeth; they are learning to repeat. The press, jesus. It whores out fifteen second sound clips and thoughtless discussion with a swagger that belies it’s role as a mind control device; its content makes love to the status quo while the whole mess professes its role as guard of truth and reality. Endless Baby-Jessicas are falling down wells, fusing all eyes to the scrolling headlines and stock quotes, between which, with the right kind of eyes, you can see the terror that lies just beyond the electrified boundaries of this Magic Kingdom nation.

The influence of the Hegemony is so bare it would be hilarious if it wasn’t so fucking frightening. What can be done? Gramsci dreamed of two ways to challenge hegemony. One, a ‘war of movement,’ is useless here; polishing up our glocks and attempting to overwhelm the physical apparatus of the State will not destroy this hegemony, it is firmly entrenched within civil society. Neither guns nor anti-guns can stop the Hegemony, if the State falls, there will be an endless array of processes to back it up. Consumer capitalist values are all but grafted to the modern psyche; it will take more than bloody revolution to change that. Instead, we choose a ‘war of position’ in which we create alternatives; new social institutions, new relationships, a new civil society which undermines the power of the Hegemony through propagating a counter-hegemonic way of life.

(Swaying from left to right, the reader wants to know how this is relevant)

2006-12-26T19:51:00.000-08:00

(I’ve been trying hard to make it across. Across the razor’s edge of my subconscious. The idea is there, the words on the tip of my tongue. Seems like DE rapper Marchitect and I have something in common, I just can’t spit; I can’t get the sweet spot past my teeth. Do it now.)

Is this culture? Am I surrounded by the trappings of a culture as thick as any other? God help us if there really is little more to it than vinyl and complaining. Am I simply mired in a world of ideas, out of touch with the physical realities of the world around me? This is the first part of a rather involved attempt to flesh out the nuances of the relationship between contemporary counterculture and the culture it is supposed to counter.

-----
Like a confused father: What is all this and what is it supposed to mean? Beat-as-fuck, ironically old and gaudy tee-shirts featuring ponies or some other asinine shit; are they statements? Are they one individual’s attempt to lay into that fabulous gale, the global consumer culture? Or are they, in fact, a reflection of that very same culture; just another manifestation of the pervasive belief that we can purchase our way into a sense of belonging. Consider: My parents replaced all of the art in their house with Crate & Barrel prints of the Italian countryside. At over $300 a piece, they come with a “textural, brushstroke acrylic finish for an authentic painterly effect” (Crate and Barrel.com). Naturally, these prints match all of the other catalogue accessories from the Mexican, Spanish or Italian collections. They want to live inside those catalogues. Yet, there is nothing unique about this; this is America, this is consumer capitalism. Ponder: are we faced with an attempted hijacking of contemporary counterculture through a similar mechanism? Hot Topic, Corporate Punk, and Diesel jeans jiggle my eight-ball towards a bluish ‘yes.’

But who cares, right? Why should it matter that a huge portion of young America talks out of both sides of their mouth – purchasing punk? Because as this terrible vogue feeds off the honest relic it mimics, it co-opts, weakens, and could eventually destroy that once true core. $30K Jetta’s with iPod add-ons and fair-trade, anti-Bush bumper stickers parked in GentrificationHill, recycled-tire driveways, attached to exclusively-organic-textile-and-Ikea clad, two-bedroom walkups aren’t helping anything, that’s obvious. But this is an innocuous example, incapable of destroying anything powerful, for good or evil. Mall-punk, however, is an evil ideal veiled, leeching off of a belief system that seeks to destroy it. Danger lurks in the possible loss of that honest core to ideological simplification through commodification. Hot Topic is an easy target; it gets thornier.

(Can I get it across, what the fuck do I mean? I need help, we need help!)

Help is on the way…

Over indulgent mirages of self-importance...

2006-10-03T20:47:00.000-07:00

In rural Pennsylvania school house
over-indulgent mirages of self-importance result in the sort of vile bloodshed
that recalls Rome
400 A.D. and demands nothing short of cultural sabotage.

Over our heads, a
trans-oceanic pissing contest with horrific stakes continues to threaten
humanity's par for devastating self-destruction. Again, over-indulgent
mirages of self-importance cloud minds. In this case, however, we are all
in that school house; we are all subject to the whims of crazed gunman with
suits and diplomatic immunity.

It seems that I am always surrounded, deeply affected by the flotsam of
over-indulgent mirages of self-importance. Is it American culture?
Western culture? Human nature? The former feels warmer. We
are the master's of the universe, right? Wolfe's McCoy,
an archetype, peaks through the spotty complexions of the thousands I pass on
the Street each day. We are made to believe that, sometimes, we are the
center of the universe, other times, deeply connected to everyone on the
planet. Groomed to consume. Myriad and infinite over-indulgent
mirages of self-importance have yielded a vicious indoctrination machine.
While non-conspiratorial, this machine has all the trappings of intentional
obfuscation and delusion. We are made to spin in on ourselves when
profitable and made to self-consciously spin out when the action can be
exploited.

The end result, of course, is billions of people who assume that their personal
delusions of grandeur are worth a damn. The Pennsylvania man, world leaders, McCoy,
myself. Chances are quite good that what we think is important is not,
nothing but games.

This is the Void, the mindless abyss of self-indulgence and abstraction.
Without the Bridge, the gleaming responsibility of our own destiny, of
construction, re-development and compassion we will spiral
downwards. We cannot remain self contained vessels of credit and ego, it
simply will implode.

2006-08-10T21:47:00.000-07:00

CrimethInc kids here tonight, staying over for PointlessFest 2006...

I don't know what it is about those sneering youth that pisses me off so damn much. To be sure, I have no problem with the archetype per se; black-clad, dreadlocks and so on. I would much prefer if the know-it-all Inc-ers came to me in Brooks Brothers cod pieces like all the rest.

No no no, its the quasi-anarchic yet wholly authoritarian and reactionary attitude, found attatched to the sleeves of a number of self-proclaimed 'radicals,' that truly gets me. CrimethInc, with it's massive audience and surprising printing successes has such potential to really set a vast number of people free. Free from the bonds of capitalist wage-labor, free from the grips of a zombifiying culture, and free from the disappointment of paper-thin avatars...

Their declarations and denunciations of even the most obviously vile and deranged limbs of The Void feel a bit saccharine. Telling those who have found this book that they should question their reality, that they should explore the idea of something else is redundant. Masturbatory passages that sound like tirades against Dad will free no one from anything...

Don't read this wrong, though; when I first picked up CrimethInc tomes, I was excited. I eagerly awaited more publications and copied passages for other's to read. But there is this sort of loop built into the CrimethInc doctrine, as well as the myriad other radical entities they mirror. Is seeking a path towards emancipation, the focus is on ever-deeper understanding of the length, circumference and composition of our chains. There may be hints at how to shake them off, but what then? "Build a new world," while relevant, is hardly helpful...

How can people feed themselves and their families? How can they work towards a body of technology that balances it's good and ill effects? Disengagment is the clear choice for many, but once disconnected, we cannot all simply drift, this is simply another form of The Void.

Again, The Bridge...

2006-08-03T23:47:00.000-07:00

BEGIN, Being, begin.....

The first fire from the feed assures me that pesky midwest teens are being dutifully dispatched by brownshirts on loan from whoever we let borrow our bill of rights. What in the fuck does it mean when I can sit comfortably in air conditioned and whiskey soaked malificent opulence while similars, clones in the eyes of Watchers, are taunted in wall-to-walled living rooms across that great Valley? It means that even us, the privledged and lucky sperm club of this Great Nation, are seeing the Void press closer every day.

The Void? The Void is the place where we are fucked for the sake of it by huge White Men with large teeth, all the while being fed waste and nonsense, on paper and in cans, and we love it. We love it because everything else is too fucking sad to focus on. Our personal information feeds will be tuned out of what hurts and in on youth pills, genitals and credit. None of us can escape the Void, and therein lies its power. We will be either swallowed or destroyed as it rolls over poetry, grass and love. The Void knows nothing but it's own progression. The Void seeks nothing but the path of least resistance, over us all.

But the Void is not inevitable, despite the noise it makes.

We have The Bridge.....