anarchism - article - 2011 - Anarchism's Appeal to German Workers, 1887-1914

Anarchism’s Appeal to German Workers, 1878-1914
Elun Gabriel
Journal for the Study of Radicalism
Vol 5, No 1: 2011
pp. 33-66
Michigan State University Press

Elun Gabriel is an associate professor at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, where he teaches courses on modern European history.  He has published a number of articles on anarchism in Europe (and more specifically, Germany) and his CV on the St. Lawrence U. website states that he has a soon-to-be-published book titled Anarchism, Social Democracy, and the Political Culture of Imperial Germany, 1871-1918.  His focus appears to be upon the influence of anarchist thought and practice on a left-wing population that preferred socialism.  His hypothesis is that, while Germany never developed an anarchist movement as other European nations did, there was still a significant degree of anarchistic pathos among that country’s socialist populace.

The above statements comprise the thesis of Gabriel’s article, Anarchism’s Appeal to German Workers, 1878-1914, published in an anarchism themed issue, Vol 5, No 1, of the Journal for the Study of Radicalism.  Gabriel discusses how late 19th to early 20th century Germany had a small number of anarchists but among them were individuals who were vocal and quite popular with the German working class.  Of particular interest to Gabriel was Johann Most, a Bavarian-born member of the Social Democratic party who was incredibly popular among Germany’s industrial workers and was, in 1874, elected to the Reichstag as a political representative.  While Most was a Social Democrat, he gravitated towards international socialism and then towards insurrectionist politics.  His advocacy for revolutionary violence and ‘propaganda by the deed’ actions lead to his expulsion from the Social Democratic Party in 1880.  Still, Most’s writings remained popular with workers who read his far-left paper, Freiheit, (the German word for ‘liberty’) without actually becoming anarchists.

Gabriel’s idea for why anarchism appealed to the German workers stems from a working class ethos of drinking and brawling.  The workers were, generally, socialists, but official socialism as represented by the Social Democratic Party looked down upon the ‘rough culture’ of their working class constituents.  An anarchism of incendiary rhetoric and calls for violent direct action held great appeal for workers whose culture was treated in a condescending manner by the political party that represented their ideals.  Furthermore, anarchism appealed to workers who understood and desired social change through violent confrontation rather than policy change via official channels.  Furthermore, according to Gabriel, the reading of anarchist texts helped workers articulate frustrations with Germany’s class system and with a Social Democratic Party who attributed the proletariat popularity of Most’s Freheit newspaper, to give an example of the degree of their condescension, with a political immaturity among workers.  In this, it sounds as though anarchist writings and rhetoric appealed to the hearts of German workers while socialism appealed to their minds.

Elun Gabriel’s article opens a new dimension for anarchist scholarship in which the influence of anarchism is studied beyond the boundaries of those historical movements that pledged allegiance to that ideology.  His heavy emphasis on Johann Most, an SDP party member whose fiery rhetoric exceeded the limits of mannered socialism demonstrates the nerve centre of this phenomena, as Most was not truly anarchist during the height of his popularity although he was a conduit for anarchist words and ideals.

critical mass - zine - 2007 - Bipedal, By Pedal!: Experiences and Thoughts Around the Critical Mass Bicycle Movement!

Bipedal, By Pedal: Experiences and Thoughts Around the Critical Mass Bicycle Movement!
Joe Biel et. al.
Microcosm Publishing
2007
43 pages

Critical Mass is a monthly bicycle oriented event that occurs in most major North American and European cities, as well as in many mid-sized cities and at other locales around the world.  The event originated in mid-1990s San Francisco (although it has its origins in earlier events held in Mexico City, plus it takes some of its inspiration from cycling practices observed in urban China) by Chris Carlsson (editor of Processed World magazine, and more recently author of the book Nowtopia) and a group of cyclist friends.  The basic concept for the event is that cyclists congregate at an agreed-upon time and place to embark upon a meandering ride through the city streets, preferably during the evening peak traffic period.  The basic intention of the event is to assert that the bicycle has a place in a contemporary urban environment that has been designed (rather inefficiently) for the automobile.  Participants are free to bring whatever motivations they have to the ride, as it is leaderless, and no one is authorized to impose onto riders an adherence to a particular ideology or will.  Many riders participate in the mass because it has the potential to provide an opportunity to unbind aggressions, many riders participate because its a relatively fun and safe way to bike through the city.

Critical Mass is inevitably a contentious event, as many individuals presume that the urban road is strictly for motor vehicles. Therefore plenty of drivers think that cyclists have no business occupying part of it if it leads to their minor inconvenience.  Naturally, such an event, which most likely appears to be spontaneous to drivers, where cyclists ride en mass through the streets without a unifying goal or purpose, is incomprehensible and utterly transgressive.  Furthermore, the average critical mass is full of normal people who simply like cycling but the mass is essentially represented by its sloganeers who shout things like “we’re not blocking traffic, we are traffic,”  thus giving the event the sheen of political protest.  

Critical mass is NOT strictly a political protest organized around radical bicycle advocacy, (although it is that, among other things) but it does call up linkages to a number of interesting theories developed by radical thinkers.  Such theories include Hakim Bey’s concept of a temporary autonomous zone, a term which refers to a limited opening in space and time within which greater levels of freedom are enjoyed by its inhabitants.  The critical mass also touches upon the Situationist concept of psychogeography, under which individuals are cognisiant of the effects of different forms of the city upon the mind.  Furthermore, this CTheory article, Urban Meanderthals and the City of "Desire Lines" by Matthew Tiessen discusses the roving object (the author refers to an individual but his idea also works with a cycling horde) that slowly moves through the urban space forces others to take up alternate routes to reach destinations and therefore find new ways to engage with the city.

Joe Biel’s Bipedal, By Pedal is essentially a primer of the critical mass rides for people who are potential participants, or simply interested in what can be said abut the events.  Bipedal is a zine offered by the author as a companion to Chris Carlsson’s 2002 book Critical Mass: Bicycling’s Defiant Celebration, which is probably the essential informational resource on the subject.  Carlesson’s book is a collection of reports, news items, and musings on the monthly bike ride, from a variety of sources.  Biel’s 43 page zine does not venture too far, conceptually, from Carlsson’s text, although Bipedal is mostly told from Biel’s own perspective, with additional writings from some of his zinester friends.  Like their motorized counterparts, bicycles are the technological centre for a number of interesting cultural forms, and the genre of bike zines is among them.

The structure of this zine is similar to Biel's, and collaborator Bill Brent’s, instructional text, Make a Zine!, in that Biel’s own thoughts are buttressed by some brief textual pieces written by friends.  As the founder of Microcosm Publishing, Biel is plugged into an underground of interesting writers and artists who can provide complementary texts to his own honest writings.  There are many bike/critical mass related graphics and illustrations, some of which (including the cover, I think) are by Matt Gauck and other friends, and some images are appropriated, also appearing in Carlsson’s book.  

Unfortunately, Critical Mass is not an event that can adequately be explained primarily from a single perspective.  The mass of each city has its own character, and that character can shift from month to month.  Issues that Biel discusses from the rides he’s been present on in Portland and San Francisco are not necessarily present at the rides in Toronto and Ottawa (where I have riden) and its likely that other cities critical mass rides may have their own issues that are altogether absent in the four cities already mentioned.  This is not to say that Biel’s thoughts are irrelevant but a reader should consider that his perspective is connected to places and times.  Overall Biel understands Critical Mass, as he expresses his understanding that the ride has no central goal even though he’s frustrated when people come to the event motivated to ride with a purpose different from his own.  I’m sure that, because of the ideologically divergent nature of the event, most riders have felt (and overcome) such frustration to some extent.

Bipedal, By Pedal! (which won an award for Best English Language zine at the 2007 Expozine event) covers the basics of the critical mass ride, and serves as an informative introduction to the monthly event.  Biel addresses issues that anyone should know are routine aspects of the ride, including aggressive participants and conflicts with authorities and municipal politicians.  Furthermore, while Biel provides an overview of the event, his writer friends supply opinions that demonstrate the variety of attitudes and motivations people may bring to it, with documentary filmmaker (and CM co-founder) Ted White advocating for the ride to be a spectacular celebration of urban cycling, while Scott Larkin (author of the zine, Go By Bicycle) laments the event’s lack of political force.  The zine conveys, in textual form, the short-lived tensions and community of the rides that come into being for a few hours at the end of every month.

zines - zine - 2008 - My Time Annihilator: A Brief History of 1930s Science Fiction Fanzines

My Time Annihilator: A Brief History of 1930’s Science Fiction Fanzines
Christopher Todd
2008

My Time Annihilator is a zine I procured for a dollar from Microcosm Publishing distro.  This zine takes as its focus the phenomena of science fiction fanzines that were published by proto-nerds of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.  These publications were perhaps one of the more immediate ancestors to the practice of zine production of the 1980s and 90s (with radical pamphlets, avant-garde art journals, and the underground press as more distant predecessors in either time or in practice).  
According to the author, Christopher Todd, the science-fiction fanzine emerged as a kind of distributed message post to enable communication between sci-fi fans about their favorite genre of literature when few fellow fans existed in their immediate environs.  

The writing in My Time Annihilator, like the writing in most zines, is far less formal and much more personal than most other forms of published material.  Christopher Todd’s opinions about his subject matter are casually expressed through the zine, letting the reader know that even though he considers sci-fi fanzines to be interesting as a broad topic, he found that the particular content of each publication was boring.  Furthermore, the zine describes Todd’s experience of conducting research into the fanzines, where he gained access to an archive of fanzines held at Temple University in Philidelphia through the using a found student ID.  Todd also gives his opinion on zines in general, and despite his efforts as a zine producer, he primarily sees the amateur publications as disposable and unworthy of widespread attention.

Todd’s zine focuses on three aspects of the fanzines, their content, formats and methods of production.  Of these aspects, content is specifically science-fiction related, which Todd describes in broad generalizations.  According to the author,  fanzines were made up of book and event reviews, letters and responses, and criticism of other fanzines.  Todd claimed to find many zines difficult to read as they developed their own linguistic forms and sets of inside jokes, thus bringing up issues of cultural capital as Todd relates these language issues to analogues found in the jargon deployed in many modern punk zines.  Todd also briefly describes methods of printing production in a pre-xerox era (1930s-1950s), including the spirit duplicator and the more popular mimeograph technologies.  Most interesting was Todd’s discussion of formatting ideas that have been lost in current self-publishing practice, such as the fanzine printed on a single postcard.

Books about zines, such as Stephen Duncombe’s Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture do mention the science-fiction predecessor to the zine phenomena.  With that being said, Christopher Todd’s short zine about the early fanzines is the most attention that I have seen given, in print, to that material.  Todd also includes in his zine an appendix featuring a number of covers of old fanzines, and some examples of text, to give the reader some idea of the materials he discusses.  Some of his examples look as though they could be contemporary zines rather than 1930s artifacts.

nativism - film - 2010 - Machete

Machete

Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis

Troublemaker Studios

2010

105 minutes

In 2007, directors Robert Rodiguez and Quentin Tarantino released Grindhouse, a two movie package that was more of a hyperreal b-cinema theater experience than a cohesive set of films.  The two full-length features that comprised Grindhouse, Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, and Tarantino’s Death Proof, were separated by a series of trailers, directed by friends of the two feature auteurs, for movies that did not exist.  One of those trailers was for Machete which has since been expanded into an ultra-violent full-length revenge bloodfeast.  

The title refers to the film’s central character.  'Machete' is the code-name of a former Mexican federal officer turned illegal immigrant turned blade-wielding superhero avenger.  The two ‘turns’ previously mentioned occurred after Machete was first tricked into a set-up that resulted in the death of his family and him being left for dead at the hands of a crime kingpin named Torrez.  Machete apparently recovers from this assault and turns up three years later in Texas.  The second turn occurred after he was double-crossed on an attempt to assassinate a politician who ran on a nativist platform, a betrayal that revealed an intricate conspiracy of corrupt politicians, business leaders, and the crimelord who killed Machete's family back in Mexico.  Machete slashes his way back to the top of this conspiracy, taking revenge on Torrez following an all-out melee between armed Mexican immigrants and nativist border patrols.

Depending on one’s perspective, Machete can be read as the fantasy projections of a marginal population, or a paranoid vision of an American south overrun with violent Mexican illegal maniacs. Presumably, the intention of directors Rodriguez and Maniquis was the former, although almost immediately after the promotional trailers for this film began airing , numerous nativist groups assumed the latter.   Assorted ultra-right-wing outfits went into full-blown cold-war defense mode and called their sympathizers to prepare for a race war. Example: conspiracy theorist and ultra-conservative doomsayer Alex Jones has produced numerous videos and radio spots pertaining to the Machete scare.

In this video, one of many Machete-related clips produced by Jones, allusions to the official script for Machete are combined with footage of actual Mexican-immigrant protests.  The effect of this is to intertwine real efforts made by a vulnerable community to improve its social conditions with film violence in order to maximize paranoia.  Jones cynically conflates a real struggle for social justice with a fictional violence against  racist whites in an attempt to mobilize whites against Mexicans under the guise of concern for their safety.  His conflation is intended to instruct the viewer to be on-guard against any form of Mexican or anti-nativist protest, as Jones implied that the end-result of such activity is what is envisioned in Machete. 

Andrew Yeoman, leader and spokesperson for the Bay Area National Anarchists directed his cadre of neo-nazi ‘anarchists’ to picket theatres showing Machete.  White Nationalist publication (and white power online news centre) American Renaissance, a publication discussed at length in Carol M Swain’s 2002 analysis of the contemporary white power scene, The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration,  published a number of articles criticizing the film as racist... for portraying whites as racist.  Alex Jones claims that the film is propaganda in the tradition of the Third Reich.  Incidentally, Robert De Niro plays a nativist senator who accompanies the border vigilantes on patrol and even kills illegal border-crossers himself.  De Niro's Senator McLaughlin runs a campaign advertisement comparing illegal immigrants to worms and cockroaches, in a metaphoric use of imagery that recalls the Nazi comparison of Jews to rats in the 1940 German propaganda film, Jew Süss.  Additionally, the fictional Senator McLaughlin ad, shown here:

is simply an exaggerated parody of a real campaign ad by ultra-right wing congressional hero, Ron Paul, shown here:

Indeed, the film’s white characters are, for the most part, racist, although there are cracks in the nativist analysis of the film, and besides, there really are border vigilantes assaulting and murdering Mexican immigrants.  The film also shows that Senator McLaughlan was losing ground in his election due to his racist rhetoric - in Texas, no less - implying that a mostly white state had lost its taste for hate politics.  Additionally, in Machete the illegals of Texas are assisted with meeting their needs by a loosely organized underground community of white and Mexican American citizens referred to as ‘The Network’.  In this film, whites are not strictly portrayed as racist and it is significant that Machete only kills men who are explicitly criminals and/or members of unofficial nativist vigilante border patrols.  

Generally, those who called the film racist are, themselves, notoriously proud racists who used the film as a thin pretense for advancing their own cruel rhetoric against one of the most exploited and vulnerable populations in the United States.  The ‘threat’ of migrant labour from Mexico and Central America has become the paranoid soil upon which new forms of race-based laws enforcing white supremacy are constructed.  The ‘race war’ rhetoric of the hatemongers, who think Machete is little more than a propagandistic call to action, falters.  It appears more that the film serves to expose how rabidly ludicrous the views of such people are.  Of course, a wave of Machete-inspired anti-white violence never occurred although racist anti-Mexican-immigrant attacks, both symbolic and physical, are ongoing in the American southwest.  

The film provides a superhero to the population of Mexican illegal immigrants. Machete is a Punisher-type avenging figure who is shown through the movie to be so effective at killing his enemies that his ultimate victory is a foregone conclusion.  In the film’s use of actual socio-political conditions as grounds for an ethnic hero, it recalls John Singleton’s 1997 film Rosewood, which depicted an anachronistic superhero named Mann (played by Ving Rhames) who fought against lynch mobs in the 1923 anti-black massacre at Rosewood, Florida (an actual event).  Racism and hate is still an organizing principle for American society and a driving force for American politics (websites like AlterNet, Thinkprogress and SLPC’s Hatewatch publish near-daily critical accounts of racist, nativist, Islamophobic and homophobic rhetoric and behavior amongst organizations and high-profile politicians such as Michele Bachman and Rick Santorum.  In reality, the forms of hatred (and its accompanying violence) against Mexicans depicted in Machete has counterparts in the real world, what the real world lacks is a Machete figure to avenge those crimes.

anti-globalization - book - 2003 - We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism

We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism
Notes from Nowhere Collective (editors)
Verso
2003
521 pages

Hello out there on the internet!  I borrowed We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism from the Toronto Public Library.

There are at least two texts that are fundamentally important to the study of the worldwide movement to resist globalization.  The first of these texts is Naomi Klein’s No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, which examines the global effects of consumer branding and its associated activities, with regards to consumption, production, and opposition.  The other text is Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire, a theoretical text proposing that a shift in political and social organization has occurred from a period of modernist capitalism to a postmodernist ‘empire’ oriented around networks and perpetual crisis.  We Are Everywhere can be added to this list as a companion text that details numerous accounts of resistance to the damaging actions of multi-national corporations and international administrative organizations.  

We Are Everywhere is a book assembled by the Notes from Nowhere Collective, a group of western (I gather from reading each member’s brief bio at the back of the book that most of them are from the U.K. although at least one member appears to be American) writers, educators and activists.  They are all involved with other activist media outlets and events such as Indymedia and Reclaim the Streets parties.  Through their engagement with an international activist media, and with anti-globalization efforts in their home countries, the collective appeared to develop a holistic view of the worldwide activist scene, which they brought to this text.  

We Are Everywhere is a comprehensive series of dispatches, written by a large number of different writers and in a number of different forms, from the global anti-capitalist movement.  The book includes articles and anecdotes about various actions, writings whereby individuals representing an activist group survey that groups actions, photo-essays and interviews with activists.  The book also maintains a timeline, of events of significance to the anti-globalization movement, that runs along a bottom register of most of its pages.  

In addition to its wide array of textual forms, We Are Everywhere strives to be truly global in its scope. The Notes from Nowhere collective begin the book with accounts of the 1994 events in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas surrounding the foundation of the ELZN movement and their demands for autonomy for the indigenous populations of that region.  Thus the book charts a history of international activism that begins in January 1994 in Mexico and attempts to include pieces on actions and protests from as many different locales as possible, from Mexico to Italy, Kenya, Brazil, Paupa New Guinea and so forth, everywhere, ending with a 2003(?) interview with South African activist and intellectual, Ashwin Desai.  In Empire, Hardt and Negri discuss how multi-national corporations have realized some of the ideas put forth by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, where the localized nodes of networked corporations can adjust their operations to suit the contours of the location.  Many pieces featured in We Are Everywhere describe the unique tactics of protest and sabotage developed by local activist organizations in counter-force to shape-shifting corporations. Furthermore, many pieces describe anti-globalization protests as carnivalesque (c.f. Reclaim the Streets), and out of the hundreds of black-and-white photos featured in the book many of them depict protesters in costume and blur the lines between revelry and serious political activity.  

The Notes from Nowhere collective have compiled a volume that fits into a book-type that attempt to survey a global activist scene.  Other such books include The New Revolutionaries, edited by Tariq Ali, which represents the global far-left scene of the 1960s, and Goran Therborn’s From Marxism to Post-Marxism?, which surveys Marxist activity worldwide in the contemporary period.  Ali’s book is primarily written by well-known movement intellectuals and spokespeople, and From Marxism is the work of a single author.  The editors of We Are Everywhere give voice to the participants of the movement and its associated sub-movements, and provides a view into global efforts to confront global capital between the years 1994 and 2003.  

Related: see the Signalfire blog for daily accounts of anti-globalization activity, workers strikes, student protests and general unrest from around the world.