Hobsbawm Article

An article by renowned English historian Eric Hobsbawm on the futility and danger of the U.S. neocon project of trying to violently export liberal democratic institutions (and neoliberal capitalist economics).

Eminem's "Mosh"

I have what I think is a fairly standard relationship to hip-hop for a white leftist male of my generation -- my main avenue into it is its more political strand, and it definitely does interest me, but I am not at all connected to grassroots hip-hop culture. And I also am exposed to bits and pieces of mainstream, popular hip-hop in my swim through our popular cultural environment.

I have always found Eminem to be an interesting figure -- his music is often inane, sometimes deeply offensive, but also, at times, catchy. But more important, the phenomenon of Eminem is an interesting nexus in our popular culture for understanding race, class, gender, and sexuality, and how they work.

Progressive media have been making a bit of a stir about his song and video "Mosh." Both, but particularly the video, have progressive political and powerfully anti-Bush content. The video's final message of "Vote" is a bit disappointing in some ways, but there are lots of messages in there about the importance of being active beyond voting too.

A progressive political edge is something new for Eminem, though I think his film 8 Mile had some interesting content to it as well -- its answers were all American Dreamy, but even the fact that it showed a more open portrayal of both white and Black working class reality in the U.S. made it rare in the current mass media environment.

The best commentary I've read about the new song/video is on Justin Podur's blog.

I also found the article about it on AlterNet to be interesting, though not necesarily in good ways. I think that article unwittingly illustrates ways that racism shapes progressive movements in North America, and how distant progressive white spaces are from radical Black spaces much of the time.

For one thing, the article's obliteration of the history of conscious hip-hop is breathtaking. It quotes a youthful responder on some MTV board saying of Eminem's new song, "Not since Chuck D has a hip hop artist spoken so eloquently of the power in numbers. If we stand up as a bloc and vote, both the president and the senator will have no choice but to listen." Other than a mention much earlier in the article of P. Diddy's ridiculous "Vote or Die" campaign, this is the only mention of a hip-hop artist or music that is both Black and political, and stands in the context in which it is presented as being an authoritative statement. Hello!! What about about The Coup? What about Dead Prez? What about the countless conscious hip-hop artists (e.g. check this out) at the grassroots in lots of cities across this continent that a disconnected white guy like me knows nothing about either?

There's lots of other really relevant stuff that the article doesn't mention -- there is all sorts of stuff about the role of Em's whiteness and previously apolitical content in his rise to fame, and how the music business selects for those things. And the fact that the big purchasing power in hip-hop these days is young suburban white boys and men, and how their racist fantasies of Blackness and the power of their dollars have helped shape mainstream hip-hop, and which parts of the realities of life in urban America get amplified and which get silenced.

And what about talking about the insight that Eminem's cultural location and role, both in general and with respect to this song, can provide into the contradictory political location of the white working class in this country? (He may be a millionaire many times over, but his place in the culture, and I think to a certain extent his actual origins, are symbolic of working class and poor white America.) This article treats "Mosh" as a sea change and a redemption for Em, rather than as emblematic of contradictions that permeate society -- the fact that being in the class-exploited but still white- and male-privileged position of a working class white man puts you at a place in the social hierarchy where being screwed by the ruling class might mean getting together with your buddies and fighting the boss, or it might contribute to enforcing your own not-bottom place in the pyramid by going home and beating your wife (something, I hasten to add, that middle-class and owning-class men are just as prone to do, if not more), or it might mean both. Sure, there may be a change in consciousness on the part of Eminem, but I doubt it is anything that makes the significance of his earlier misogyny and homophobia disappear. Dealing with contradictions in analysis and in standpoint head on is more useful than shallowly papering over them for the sake of political expediency in the moment.

Anyway, I do really like the video, and I do hope that it's a sign of an ongoing process of politicization by Eminem. We'll see.

Deaths Due to U.S. Occupation of Iraq

One of the world's most prestigious medical journals, The Lancet, today published a study quantifying the number of Iraqi deaths due to the U.S. invasion and occupation using a technique known as a "cluster sample survey." You can find it in PDF form here or here.

The authors conclude:

Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100 000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths.

Commenting

Hi!

Not too many people read this site anyway, so it's not a big deal, but I thought I would let those few of you who do know that I have changed the parameters for posting comments...I had thought that when I set it up I chose the option that made it the least possible hassle for readers to post comments, but apparently I did not and you have, until now, had to go through the rigamarole of logging in.

I have now changed it so you can just go ahead and comment.

I'm not expecting a flood (or even a sustained trickle) of comments because of this, or anything, but I thought I would let people know!

Writing, Accessibility, and Standpoint (Part 1)

Recently my movement history project has moved decisively from the phase of processing interview material (though bits and pieces of that will drag on for months, still) to producing a book proposal and, ultimately, a book. That has led me to think a lot about the phenomena of writing from a particular standpoint and/or for a particular audience.

First Question

What I've been thinking about divides into two questions. The more general question is about what exactly the role and significance are of accessibilty versus specialization of discourse. When is it a problem that only a limited number of people could easily understand what you write (or say)?

I remember really being struck by this issue a few years ago, when a friend was talking about her time at a conference related to popular education and social change (or something like that) and was frustrated by all of the jargon -- it was a bunch of largely white, overeducated, privileged progressives talking about popular education that would happen in the context of working class communities of colour, working class white communities, and immigrant communities. The way it was being talked about was such that many people in those communities would find completely alienating and inaccessible. This is a particularly galling example of inaccessible discourse because it wasn't some random topic, it was very much about the people to whom it would be inaccessible. In a way, it treated these people as objects of the discourse, rather than as subjects welcome to participate in shaping it.

But while there is obviously lots wrong in that example, it doesn't follow that all instances of discourse that are in some way inaccessible or geared towards a specialist audience are therefore bad. For one thing, there is no such thing as universally accessible communication -- any world that I can imagine in which one piece of writing would be understandable by all would be one shaped by cultural imperialism of some kind, or perhaps some sort of armageddon-like catastrophe. Of course recognizing that all communication is limited in some way is potentially dangerous; it is kind of a reduction to the point of absurdity that risks trivializing questions of accessibility. However, I still think it's an important point to start with, because it makes us realize that some sort of abstracted, idealized notion of universal accessibility is neither possible nor useful, and that it is important to figure out the significance of accessibility and its lack as lived experience when trying to figure out how they should shape our writing.

When might inaccessibility be forgiveable? Well, it is hard to imagine having some kinds of technical writing be accessible to everyone. Cutting open somebody's heart and fixing bits of it is a pretty tricky thing and it is pretty darn important, when communicating about methods and conditions and circumstances, to be precise, so there is a certain legitimacy to medical literature on heart surgery containing specialized language that is inaccessible to most of us.

In terms of academia outside of science and technical pursuits, there are certainly times where inaccessible discourse is all about bowing to institutional or disciplinary fashion, showing off to colleagues, producing a particular aesthetic without concern for exclusion, and other less than noble things. But sometimes new ways of using language that are not easy to pick up on are actually useful -- sometimes that approach is really the most effective way of conveying a new and important ways of thinking about things that matter.

However, even when it is justified, specialized, inaccessible discourse still has some downsides that are tied up with power and authority. The technical nature of mainstream medical discourse and the authority that health care providers have lead some people to, quite sensibly, rebel and seek more empowering alternatives. However, precisely because of the inaccessible nature of the discourse, often this rebellion is not as productive as it could be -- it is often reactive rather than well grounded in a solid understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of conventional medicine. This often makes all that much easier for medical professionals to refuse to listen to the counter-arguments, because even though they are based on sound principles, they are significantly flawed in terms of the details.

In other words, specialist discourse in many cases functions to preserve illegitimate authority, regardless of the intentions of individual users of that discourse.

The most extreme examples of this, such as some vanguardist, authoritarian leftists, or the neoconservative disciples of Leo Strauss deliberately employ language in ways that protect their monopoly on power in a given arena, and limit the rest of us to responding to what they say and do rather than shaping the options for ourselves.

So how does this relate to my book?

In a way, the discussion so far leads mostly to fairly obvious conclusions when applied to this book-in-progress: a major point of this work is to bring social movement history and progressive ideas to new people, so I need to maximize accessibility. This should mostly be fairly easy to do. There is lots of material out there that I think is important to understanding history and how power works that might be inaccessible to the average reader, but most of that I won't need to draw on, and what I do I can present in an accessible way.

But this leads to the second facet of this issue which I have been pondering: not only does the technical complexity/obscurity of a piece of writing impact on the ability of readers to read it, but so does the standpoint or point-of-view from/to which it is written. But I think I'll deal with that in another posting.

Gay Missouri

An interesting article in an English newspaper about life and politics in a gay community in the Deep South of the U.S. of A., in Springflied, Missouri.

Conspiracy

Generally speaking, I'm a fan of Jerry Quickly. He hosts the 5-6 pm current affairs show on KPFK on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. He's entertaining, engaging, and, most of the time, politically astute. He's so good at what he does, in fact, that when the show is expanded during fundraising drives (like the one going on now) they have him host the two hour extra-long version of Beneath The Surface every day, Monday to Friday.

But he seems to have a weakness for 9/11 conspiracy theorists, and I find that frustrating and hard to understand. Today, for example, the main gift for donations was some "documentary" in that general area. They played audio clips and had the creator on as a guest, intermixed with Jerry doing his "give us money" patter.

Now, I'm all for having an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out. I can't comment on the big deal they were making of flashes of light and things under the 9/11 planes where they shouldn't be, because all I heard was the audio. But there is one point they made a big deal of that anyone should be able to rebutt with ease.

The point in question is that George W. Bush, at some point in the last couple of years, answered a question from an adoring young fan about what he was doing on 9/11 in a way that included saying he watched the first plane hit the WTC on television. There is only one known piece of footage of that event. It was captured by some French documentary filmmakers who happened to be there and it was not released until some time after. So this guest and Jerry go to the wall saying that the only possible explanations are that Bush was deliberately lying on that day, which he would have no reason to do, or he and the government knew what was going to happen (or even planned it) and watched the whole thing on some feed from a secret government videographer who was lying in wait to film it.

Uh-huh. Really.

Or how about the fact that he's a big dummy who says stupid, inane, incoherent, incorrect things all the time? It seems to me that Occam's Razor -- the principle that the simplest explanation is the most likely -- dictates that this piece of data is most easily accounted for by the "guy who says dumb, wrong stuff all the time said a dumb, wrong thing" explanation.

Neither Jerry nor his guest mentioned this.

Sigh.

Anyway, KPFK still rocks most of the time. Donate if you have money to spare!

Dred Scott Decoded

Remember a few posts back, when I bemoaned my misfortune at having to watch the second presidential debate? I noted George Bush's seemingly incoherent non-sequitur about the Dred Scott case, a judicial decision by the U.S. Supreme Court back in 1857 allowing slavecatchers to pursue escaped slaves into states that did not have slavery. Well, apparently I wasn't the only person who noticed and it is actually a reference designed to be understood by his religious right base, for whom it is often linked to the much more modern and relevant Roe vs. Wade, which made abortion legal in the United States. Yes, that wasn't gibberish he was speaking, it was code.

Revolutionary Art

An eloquent, angry polemic on radical art: Art at War: Revolutionary Art Against Cultural Imperialism by Ewuare Osayande.

The Battle for Saudi Arabia

Written by As'ad Abukhalil and published by Seven Stories Press.

This is a handy little book about a country that is very important but about which little is known and what is known is poorly understood. The book talks about the history of Wahhabbiyah (the brand of Islam that is the state religion there), the history of the state, the role of oil, domestic and foreign policy, human rights, and so on. Abukhalil's central theme is the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the Saudi regime: the bases of its legitimacy are unquestioning, long-term support by the United States and official adherence to Wahhabbiyah. These two things pull in different directions in at least some respects, and both pulls are becoming stronger in the wake of 9/11.

This is my first detailed introduction to the history of this country so I don't have a lot of background knowledge that would allow me to pick at details. Nonetheless, the fact that it is neither an apology for the Saudi state nor an indulgence in the orientalism that seems to mar so much Western writing on the topic makes it an important piece of background reading for anyone trying to understand that part of the world.

Political Differences

I have been thinking for awhile of writing a post contrasting the space for political imagination in Canada in the United States, in my experience of the two countries. Or, perhaps, given the diversity within the two, it is more accurate to say that I would be contrasting Hamilton and Los Angeles, though I think aspects are generalizeable.

Mostly what I have been thinking about is the progressive side of the equation. I'm not convinced that I can articulate anything yet that comes even close to the essence, but I have at least come up with a few things to say.

In both places there is a small grouping that has a range of imaginative goals that might be simplified as "revolutionary consciousness." This would include Marxist grouplets, some anarchists, and others who don't necessarily claim a lable linking them to a classical left tradition but whose ideas and practice place them in the same overall camp.

Given my thus-far limited experience it is hard to judge, both are equally marginal but I think it might be accurate to say that this grouping in the U.S. is a bit better grounded -- there seems to be more effort, at least on the part of some, to not only link revolutionary consciousness with real, current, vital struggles on the ground but also include gender and race analysis in a more substantive way and make analysis responsive to new influences and broader communities (perhaps a result of differing political realities in the two countries in the early '70s). Of course this is a total generalization and might be meaningless, but it's a starting hypothesis.

The more interesting difference is with that range of political imaginative space that might be grouped as "reformist consciousness." This group varies in two significant ways between the countries: I think in Canada there is a greater infusion of leftist (generally social democratic) vision in this grouping, whereas in the U.S. it is more pervasively liberal. But there seem to be more people in this grouping in the U.S. who are more active than their counterparts in Canada, even when said counterparts have a nominally more progressive vision.

In a way, this totally follows from the material conditions in each country: In Canada, the political consensus is more generally liberal than in the United States. Though I hasten to correct any Michael Moore-esque romanticization of the difference, things like socialized medicine (however beseiged it might be) and greater recognition of the rights of queer people do create a little more space for people who are exploited and/or oppressed. (Though it is important to note that they remain exploited and/or oppressed in both places.) Though progressive policies and ideas are under attack in Canada, it's worse here. Also, there is a social democratic party and tradition in Canada to create a different shape of debate in mass public spaces, and the media is marginally more open.

In other words, there are historical and institutional reasons why there is more public space for social democratic ideas (even if they are under constant attack), which also mean that progressives with "reformist consciousness" don't feel (however shortsighted this might be) as threatened or, as a consequence, as much need to be politically engaged (or those with racial and class privilege don't, anyway). On the flip side, though it seems to be late and short-sighted and inadequate, privileged liberals in the U.S. recognize they are gettin' whupped and are therefore more likely to be trying to do something about it.

But it doesn't make sense to try and understand something while ignoring its context -- with respect to my musings in this area I knew I was missing something important but I couldn't quite articulate it. Then I came across this entry in Justin Podur's blog. He is also a Canadian, and in that post talks about the United States. Because I found it so striking, let me quote extensively from it:

[T]he difference between John Kerry and George W. Bush is not so much what they say or what they promise to do or what they will do once in office. The difference is that John Kerry is a slimy politician flailing around looking for a winning formula and George Bush is at the head of a massive, incredibly well organized, incredibly well disciplined, incredibly well resourced, truly revolutionary movement. And movements, radicals ought to understand, are serious business.

Movements can force governments out of power. Movements can constrain what elites can do even from a position of opposition. Movements can organize for the long haul and change the culture and context in which everyone has to operate. Movements can set the agenda even if they do not have majority support, compensating for that with ideological clarity, discipline, and organization. And that is exactly what the right has done in the US.

...

I realize I'm coming to all this a little late in the game, but that's part of the point -- people outside of the US have very little idea what an important development the coming to power of this movement is. Partly because the movement itself is so oriented towards the US and part of its ideology is contempt for the rest of the world. Partly because radicals in the rest of the world are so focused on neoliberalism as the enemy.

...

What's important for radicals to understand though is that the enemy isn't just elites and it isn't just the business class or corporations or neoliberals. It is an organized mass movement, including a huge number of poor people. Bush is so effective because he concentrates on his constituency and ignores the rest -- the majority of the population. Liberals might be more effective if they did the same: if they focused on blacks, latinos, women, unionists, immigrants -- on cultural, social, and political issues. Making moral arguments and writing off the hard right movement's constituencies the way the hard right has written off these constituencies. But they won't do so. What's left for them is to try to convince the elite that they can do the job better than the Republicans can. The trouble is that this movement is now a player in the game, perhaps every bit as powerful as the elite, and has to be taken into account in any equation of power. This is a new environment. Radicals have to understand this in order to figure out how to operate in the world.

Recognizing that the religious right in the U.S. is movement-like is fairly common, but I think we on the left don't really appreciate what that means. Contextualizing it as Podur does is vital. Movements can change how power works -- that's why we try to build them! And as he points out, the rightist movement in the U.S. is not a fiction manufactured by PR firms and CEOs; it is a full-fledged movement in its own right (no pun intended), with an agenda that overlaps extensively with but is not the same as business-based neoliberalism.

I've read a number of things recently debating terminology and historical precedents for the current authoritarian turn in the U.S., but I think Podur's observations are crucial to that discussion: a right-wing mass movement in an industrialized country that is "perhaps every bit as powerful as the elite." Though there are undoubtedly historical and institutional differences, the last time that was true in any powerful nation was before World War II. You can guess which countries I mean. And I don't do this to take a cheap, ahistorical shot with the term "fascist" as so many progressives do, but rather to reemphasize that "This is a new environment. Radicals have to understand this in order to figure out how to operate in the world."

And the lesson for Canadians in this should not be a smug "You have it, we don't." The builders of this movement haven't been as successful in Canada, but anyone who has been paying attention knows how hard they've been trying. This is our problem too, but we have a chance to do more, earlier. But of course when the powerful country next to you (the elephant on which you, the mouse, rests) has such a shift in political reality, figuring out what to do to be effective is complicated.

So I guess to tie this ramble back to where I started, a central difference in political imagination between progressives in the two countries is that it has been forced in the U.S. to include a keen awareness that goofiness doesn't preclude the righter-than-business-neoliberalism right from winning in a very profound way. Despite the Klein, Harris, and Campbell provincial governments, I don't think most Canadian progressives really appreciate this danger.

New Writing: Parenting Talk

Hi! Sorry I haven't posted in a few days. We were gone to San Fransisco for two nights -- amazing city, I want to go back, and I want to live next door to City Lights Bookseller and Publisher -- and I've been working on this new piece of writing (rather than on the oral history project like I should have been.)

The new piece is a short article written for a zine on progressive parenting that my sister Kathryn is producing for a media class she is taking. I'm not sure what the title of the zine is yet but I'll insert that in the appropriate location once I know. I started out trying to answer the question, "What does it mean to engage in progressive or radical parenting when your child is only one year old?" But when I tried to answer that I got sidetracked into thinking about the ways in which how we talk about parenting limits our ability to imagine good answers to that and similar questions. I don't know if I'll have time to pursue this, but I feel that this article contains the seeds for a significantly longer piece that could include an answer to my original question as well as a discussion of how mainstream parenting talk reinforces the values and agenda of neoliberalism.

Anyway, please check out the article!

Pain, Pain, Pain

Earlier tonight, poor unsuspecting me went to the weekly peace vigil near our apartment, and what should I find there but a radio and a television playing tonight's presidential debate. I'm not a citizen in this country so I'm not a voter and I most definitely am not undecided, so I had planned on sparing myself the discomfort, nausea, and irritation of this theatrical charade between ruling-class stooges named Bad and Worse.

At least George Bush is kind of funny, in an apocalyptic, anxiety-inducing kind of way. The funniest (saddest) part was when, in his answer to some question about judicial appointments, he made some babbled reference to the Dred Scott case -- I couldn't tell if he was supporting or opposing the right of slavecatchers to apprehend escaped slaves in non-slavery states.

As my partner's cousin back in Canada said in an email to her the day after watching the first presidential debate: "You guys are f**ked."

Canadian Bullets, Iraqi Civilians

"Abstaining Only in Concept from War: Canadian Firms Soaked in Iraqi and Afghan Blood," published at CounterPunch and written by activist and friend Matthew Behrens of Toronto Action for Social Change and Homes Not Bombs.

Violence Against Aboriginal Women

Check out "Canada: Indifference to the safety of Indigenous women must end" a new report by Amnesty International. This is an issue that oral history project participant Leslie Spillett of Winnipeg has been heavily involved with in recent years. The organization she is currently with is called Mother of Red Nations.

Book Fair and Conference

Today I attended a book fair and conference put on by the Southern California chapter of Americans for Democratic Action. It's not a group I knew much about, but apparently it is a liberal/progressive para-Democratic Party organization that was originally co-founded by Eleanor Roosevelt. Had I known this, I might have had a better idea of what to expect -- I just thought it would be cool to go to a place with a bunch of progressive authors.

I found it a very disappointing experience on many levels, though I did pick up a couple of good books.

To begin with, it didn't start on time. I admit, activist events seldom do, and considering that I tend to be pathalogically early to almost everything it is perhaps a bit peculiar that this fact doesn't usually bother me that much. But this event was really late in starting and it did actually bother me. They also had endless technical glitches with the sound system before the musical performance in the middle of the day, which further threw the conference behind schedule.

It was held at the LA Convention Centre, presumably a well-equipped venue, but there was little provision for people to eat lunch, especially for vegetarians. I had to content myself with a mediocre pastry and a coffee.

Though LA proper is comprised of a majority of people of colour, the roster of authors who spoke included 15 white men and 3 white women.

It was quite sparsely attended. I mean, this was an event where the pull was speeches, Q & A sessions, and book signings with 18 authors, some reasonably well known (at least to progressives) and it was held in the middle of a metropolitan area of 13 million people. I was shocked by how few people were present. This group and these authors supposedly represent the fiery liberal base of the Democrats, and despite such a rich (in some ways) array of content they can't even get more than a hundred people in such a staunchly Democratic county? No wonder they lose so often.

The ratio of celebrities to participants was startlingly high, though this is LA: the MCs were Ed Asner (well-known actor) and Mimi Kennedy (actor from Dharma and Greg, or so I'm told) and the guy who plays the father on That '70s Show was in the audience. I found Asner sexist and obnoxious. In the context of the poor turnout, the presence of "TV faces" felt kind of like it was a rather pathetic attempt to make up for actual organizing.

I found the politics of the event and of most of the authors to be disappointing if not downright distasteful. I should mention that I stuck around until about 3 pm, which, because they were so behind schedule, allowed me to hear all of the morning speakers but only the first of the afternoon speakers (whom I stayed to hear because he looked like he would be the best of the afternoon bunch).

Most of the content was very focused on the election, with minimal structural or analytical context, and an emphasis on personalities, dirty tricks, scandals, and the spectacle that passes for politics in the modern media environment.

Only two speakers challenged this in a significant way. Eric Mann, whom I have mentioned before on this site, is a white anti-racist and anti-imperialist activist with decades of experience in grassroots organizing -- he presented an independent leftist position, and was quite open in challenging the racism that permeated the proceedings (which was obviously appreciated by the handful of people of colour in the room). I got the impression that most of the other authors and a good part of the audience dismissed him as a leftist kook. On the other hand, I kind of got the impression that part of the point of having this event one month before the presidential election was to fire up the anti-Bush base (dazzlingly unsuccessful to start with because of the poor attendance) and Mann's staunch passion at a couple of points got some of the most enthusiastic applause of the day.

The other author to present meaningful content was the guy from the start of the afternoon, Carl Boggs. He's a local academic (though he taught at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, for awhile) who edited and contributed to a book of leftist analysis on U.S. militarism. Being an academic rather than an organizer, his talk and his book seemed to be less engaged than Mann's, but I was interested by his emphasis on broader questions of militarism and exploration of its cultural dimensions.

There was some other element to the whole affair that was bugging me, and I didn't figure it out until not long before I left: Most of the discussion (with the exception of Mann and, in a different way, Boggs) incorporated similar tacit assumptions about the nature of political agency, or at least about political agency that was thought to matter.

A digression to illustrate what I mean: Every piece of writing has some kind of a standpoint, and particularly when it is a piece of political writing that standpoint is implicitly or explicitly attached to what the author thinks should be done. The same thing is true of a political speech or discussion. Often this standpoint and the corresponding beliefs about action are not articulated explicitly, but just sort of emerge from the writing. For example, I am a big fan of the Socialist Register series of annuals. However, almost everything in them tends to be written from a standpoint that has basic units that are massive, like "the state" or "the U.S. labour movement" or "the British working class." By treating those as the basic units for analysis and by not making explicit efforts to link large scale collective entities to action at the human scale, it is those basic units that come to be encoded as having the capacity for relevant agency. Therefore any thinking these highly analytical essays might spark with respect to action (and it does tend to be mostly implicit in these books) tends to be at those levels that are totally divorced from the human scale. This means that, while it is useful for understanding the world in an abstract sense, it really has little to do with individuals and small collectives making decisions about how to change the world.

Back to the event: At this book fair and conference, the overriding narrative encoded agency in progressive individuals and in the Kerry campaign. In a way this shouldn't be surprising, since this gathering was one of progressive individuals who wish Kerry to win (while being more or less critical of him in various ways). But it leaves out what for me is the absolute most important part of social change: social movements. Or, to put it another way, other than Mann's discussion, there did not seem to be any space devoted to discussing the agency of politicized collectives outside of the campaign structure -- only the campaign and politicized individuals. Given that I have taken the position (pretty much since I was initially politicized) that it is social movements that matter in enlarging the space for justice and liberation, it is social movement momentum that is most sorely lacking in North America right now, and that parties should be dealt with reluctantly and tactically, this omission is pretty disappointing.

Anyway, enough complaining. I got to see a part of the downtown that I hadn't seen before and take a bus route I had never been on. I also got two new books that look like they'll be pretty cool: The 2004 Elections -- A Turning Point for the U.S. Left by Eric Mann and Masters of War: Militarism and Blowback in the Era of American Empire edited by Carl Boggs. Contributors to the latter include Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Peter McClaren, Norman Solomon, and Chalmers Johnson.

Theories of Clashing

This is an interesting analysis of the historical context and future of Islamist movements by progressive scholar Sadik Al-Azm.