Dear Midnight Notes Friends,

The breakdown of the Wall Street financial machine makes the task that we outlined in our June meeting more urgent. In June we planned to rethink Midnight Notes in view of the restructuring of the accumulation process and class relations carried out through the neoliberal turn and Structural Adjustment. We can now define this project more precisely: what do the current crisis and restructuring of the financial system imply for us as we join the rest of the world in the dog house of structural adjustment in the twilight of the American empire?

An Anarchist Study of the Rotinonshón:ni Polity

First report from the Social Forum and the Bolivarian Camp in Venezuela

On January 24 the Polycentric World Social Forum of Caracas began.

Simultaneously several Bolivarian rank and file organisations like the National Peasant Front Ezequiel Zamora, the Collective Alexis Vive, the Popular Coordination of Caracas, anti-imperialist movements from different countries, among them the Anti-imperialist Camp, are holding an International Bolivarian Camp dedicated to break the chains of imperialism.

*courtesy of Left Turn (leftturn.org) and Colours of Resistance (colours.mahost.org)*

Left Turn as a network, and later a magazine, was born out of the World Trade Organization (WTO) protests that took place in Seattle during the fall of 1999. In the aftermath of those protests, a long time Chicana activist Elizabeth 'Betita' Martinez wrote an important essay titled 'Where was the color in Seattle' which appeared in Color Lines magazine. The article whose subtitle was 'Looking for reasons why the Great Battle was so white' was widely circulated throughout various activist communities and its wide-ranging impacts continue to be felt to this day.

Charles Glass on US failures in Afghanistan
London Review of Books, volume 26, number 22, 18 November 2004

Kabul, since 1776 the nominal if forever ignored capital of Afghanistan,
hides itself within thousands of forbidding walls. Mounds of ancient brick
race up hillsides, remnants of the fifth-century ramparts that failed to
preserve decadent Hindu rule from Mughal conquest. Every private house and
most public buildings are set inside mud and brick enclosures that give the
city an unwelcoming air. Behind the walls, in gardens needing rain, lie
separate huts for women, for cooking, for eating and for receiving guests.
Only the shops open directly onto broken pavements, with random displays of
carpets, stationery, books, computers, cameras, jewellery and mobile phones.
The customers, like the shopkeepers, are men, most of them clothed in
traditional sharwal khameez and jaunty turbans. 'Now and then,' Robert Byron
wrote in 1933, 'a calico beehive with a window at the top flits across the
scene. This is a woman.' Contemporary Kabul is closer to Byron's description
than to a 1977 guidebook's city of 'mini-skirted schoolgirls'. The
schoolgirls are now matrons, who venture out in their beehives to shop in
the Women's Bazaar. Their mini-skirts long abandoned, they would not dare to
enter a tea house or linger in a public square.

Free Society Collective's Seminar on Anarchism and Philosophy

with Todd May and Peter Staudenmaier

Cosponsored by the Institute for Anarchist Studies and Black Sheep Books

JACQUES RANCIERE AND RADICAL EQUALITY

Presenter: Todd May

French theorist Jacques Ranciere has promoted an idea
of politics as acting from the presumption of radical
equality - a presumption most societies deny in their
actions if not in their words. His ideas intersect
with both anarchist theory and with the thought of
recent theorists like Michel Foucault. We will discuss
how Ranciere's ideas might help us think through
political organization and political action. Each of
the three sessions will consider one chapter from
Ranciere's 100-page "On the Shores of Politics" (it is
highly recommended that participants read chapters 2-4
in advance of this seminar).

Cosponsored by the Institute for Anarchist Studies
and Black Sheep Books

The Free Society Collective's (FSC) seminar series
aims to provide an independent space for ongoing
inquiries into social, political, cultural, economic,
historical, and other fields of study from an
anti-authoritarian left perspective. The seminar
series draws on a variety of radical traditions,
revolutionary histories, contemporary social
movements, and social and political analyses,
including anarchism, Western and autonomous marxisms,
and other libertarian left tendencies. By exploring
the past as well as the present, these weekend-long
seminars are meant to deepen our understanding of
dynamic social phenomena such as capitalism,
statecraft, racism, gender, and the devastation of the
natural world, to name a few. The seminars are also a
way of reclaiming our own education and scholarship --
by mentoring, learning from, and challenging each
other in a highly participatory setting. And over
time, it is the FSC's hope that this seminar series
will contribute to the development of public
intellectuals, theoretical insights, and sophisticated
forms of praxis as well as social organization in our
struggle for a nonhierarchical, egalitarian society.

by Elizabeth (Betita) Martinez, courtesy of Z Magazine, from Colours of resistance, www.colours.mahost.org

Part I: Why "Anti-War" has to be "Anti-Racist" too

As a speaker at a San Francisco anti-war rally last fall, I tried to emphasize the importance of seeing the threatened war on Iraq in terms of this country's racism here and around the world. In that spirit, I ended my comments with a chant by some activists of color marching to the rally: "One, two, three, four/We don't want your racist war!"

Edward Said, Derek Walcott, E.P. Thompson, V.S. Naipaul, Mark Kingwell, Tariq Ali, Stuart Hall, Linton Kwesi Johnson – these are but a few of the many thinkers, writers, and political figures who have been influenced by the work of C.L.R. James. As a thinker who has been described as a modern Plato, C.L.R. James was the quintessential Renaissance man whose contributions in the areas of political theory, history, literary criticism, sport, popular culture, and philosophy have earned him respect as one of the great and most influential thinkers of the 20th century.

On May 3, 2005 at 9 pm, The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s IDEAS will air the first in a three part radio documentary, The Black Jacobin, on the life and work of C.L.R. James (parts two and three will air on May 10 and 17, also at 9 pm).

by Black Commentator; Black Commentator; April 16, 2005

The debate on the draft, to the extent it exists, focuses too heavily on the U.S. military crisis in Iraq and far too little on American domestic arrangements that enabled the Bush Pirates to launch their War Against All, in which Iraq was supposed to be only the first, triumphal episode. Although it is unquestionably true that Iraqi resistance has strained U.S. forces to the breaking point – compelling the Bush men to torture their own soldiers with extended tours of duty and to prepare a selective draft of citizens possessing special skills – it does not follow that a draft will rescue the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld Grand Plan. Quite the opposite: a universal military and national service draft such as proposed by Harlem’s Charles Rangel and a small group of other congressmen would utterly wreck the social compact that makes endless war politically possible, by forcing Americans to ponder the consequences of U.S. foreign policy to their own families and friends for the first time in 32 years.

Upping the Anti: Number 1.

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, 2004.

Reviewed by D. Oswald Mitchell

One approach to understanding the democracy of the multitude is as an open-source society, that is, a society whose source code is revealed so that we can all work collaboratively to solve its bugs.

- Hardt and Negri, Multitude, (340)

After the unprecedented commercial and critical success of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s dense and manic Empire (2000), which the Marxist critic Frederic Jameson called “the first great new theoretical synthesis of the new millennium,” and cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek praised as “nothing less than a rewriting of The Communist Manifesto for our time,” the publication of its sequel, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004), has generated a significant amount of interest. Empire’s theorization of “a fundamentally new form of rule,” a new global sovereignty that transcends both national borders and modern imperialism, was eagerly seized upon by many in the anti-globalization movement and the academic Left seeking a theoretical framework for naming that-which-they-opposed, in place of the vague and inaccurate term “globalization.” Hardt and Negri’s new book Multitude picks up where Empire left off, theorizing the potential forms that popular resistance to Empire might take.

From Upping the Anti: Number 1
Undoing Gender by Judith Butler, Routledge, 2004
Reviewed by Erin Gray

In Undoing Gender, Judith Butler develops upon her earlier work in gender and queer theory. Butler, a professor in Rhetoric, Comparative Literature, and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is best known for the groundbreaking Gender Trouble, in which she outlined her theory of gender performativity and the construction of sexuality. Since Undoing Gender appeared in 1990, feminist, queer, and literary work in the humanities has been heavily influenced by Butler’s nuanced exposure of gender’s construction. Moving beyond a binary frame in which gender is assumed to signify an essential self, Butler exposes the categories of sex, desire and gender as effects of specific power structures. Focusing more on linguistic action than on a theatrical sense of performativity, Butler defines the latter as a stylized repetition of acts that produces the effect of an internal, natural core on the surface of the body. Because gender is often assumed to be an extension of natural interiority, its sociality and public function is often overlooked. Butler’s emphasis on the simultaneity of improvisation/performance and constraint underscores the paradoxical nature of gendered identity construction.

part 1 of 2.

For over 60 years Grace Lee Boggs has been thinking about and working towards making social change. Along with her late husband, the African-American writer and activist Jimmy Boggs (1919-1993), she has been centrally involved in numerous grassroots organizations including the Johnston-Forest Tendency, Correspondence, the National Organization for an American Revolution, the Freedom Now Party and Detroit Summer. She has worked with and provided counsel to hundreds of writers and activists including Malcolm X, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Kwame Nkrumah and Stokely Carmichael.

by Richard York; Monthly Review, March, 2005

The discovery by a team of Indonesian and Australian researchers of the remains of a previously unknown species of hominid, Homo floresiensis, on the Indonesian island of Flores was characterized by some scholars as the greatest discovery in anthropology in a half-century and was selected by Science magazine as the leading runner-up for the 2004 “breakthrough of the year” (first place went to the discoveries of the Mars Exploration Rovers that indicate Mars was once wetter than it is today and potentially capable of supporting life).

From the Social Forum to an Anti-imperialist Forum

There is no doubt that the movement against globalisation has constituted for the last decade an opposition force to the mono-polar capitalist world which developed out of the bi-polar set-up of the Cold War period. However, faced with its incapacity to point out strategic parameters in order to turn into a force of resistance to concrete imperialism of Yankee domination, we find ourselves in front of two challenges. Firstly we have to explain both the factors which allowed the temporary success of the anti-globalisation movement in unifying very diverse forces and its political failure to develop into an anti-imperialist resistance force. Secondly we have to outline the possibilities of going beyond the anti-globalisation movement towards a movement prepared to resist the central pillar of world capitalism in the next period, Yankee imperialism.

Review by Chris Crass

I cry quite often at movement events these days. In political marches, looking out at the delegations and contingents of people from churches, unions, community groups and schools. At conferences, when people speak about how much they love their community and organizations. When I saw the first person jump over the fence to protest against the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, the tears ran down my face as I held hands with the Unitarian Universalist activists I was with. I cry because as I get older, my appreciation for the dedication, hardship, necessity and beauty of left/radical struggle in the world has deepened tremendously. I cry because as more and more of my comrades have children, the next generation whose futures we fight for are real people with names and personalities rather then a rhetorical concept. I cry because as I begin to say good-bye to loved ones of the older generation who are passing, I realize just how much they have done for us and how much we have to live up to.

Historical Materialism seeks to reappropriate and refine the classical Marxist tradition for emancipatory purposes. It promotes a genuine and open dialogue between individuals working in different traditions of Marxism and encourages an interdisciplinary, international debate between researchers and academics. Historical Materialism sees itself as encouraging a new generation of Marxist writers and researchers. Future issues will focus on Africa, the visual arts, Empire, anticapitalism, film, dialectics, modes of production, sexuality and postcolonial fascism.

by Samir Hussain; ZNet, December 14, 2004

"The faceless beast has many faces.
The most dangerous face is the one that comes with a smile."
- James "OJ" Pitawanakwat [1]

On November 30, 2004, there was a massive mobilisation to protest George W. Bush's presence in Ottawa. This event provided an insightful example of how varied (and oftentimes mutually exclusive) agendas can occasionally fall under one banner. Indeed, a veritable motley crew of interests were represented - anarchists, communists, anti-imperialists, anti-capitalists, environmentalists, John Kerry supporters, and Canadian nationalists, among others. Unfortunately, this did not translate into having any common understandings aside from a shared opposition to, and disdain for, George W. Bush. Personally, organising as an Indigenous solidarity activist with sharp critiques of the Canadian state, I found the fervent Canadian nationalism/patriotism that reared its ugly head on several occasions to be quite unsettling.

From Perspectives, a publication of the Institute for Anarchist Studies

John Holloway and Marina Sitrin exchanged questions, answers, and more questions during the month of August. John Holloway is the author of Change the World Without Taking Power (Pluto Press, 2002) and co-author of Zapatista! Rethinking Revolution in Mexico (Pluto Press, 1998). Marina Sitrin is completing an oral history (in Spanish and English) of the autonomous social movements in Argentina, a project for which she received a grant from the Institute for Anarchist Studies.

The following interview is an appetizer to various theories, experiences, and questions as well as an invitation to further exploration of our theories and practices.

Could you explain what events or activities in your life brought you to the point where you are now doing considerable theoretical as well as practical work on the question of power and, specifically, to challenge the concept of taking power?

There's No There There: Debating a Neocon

by Stan Goff

When I was first invited by Dr. Stephen Smith to speak at Winthrop University in South Carolina, I was preparing a trip to Haiti and I didn't give much thought to how I would handle the engagement. I'd just finished being pole-axed by a bout of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and it was everything I could do to just pull the Haiti trip together. So I didn't pay much attention to the person who would appear with me - one Patrick Clawson - to represent "the other side" in a forum/debate billed as "What Next in Iraq? A Post-Election Perspective."

by Devin Burke

The following address was delivered by Devin Burke, a member of the Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Movement (IPSM) in Montreal, on August 20, 2004, as part of an evening of speakers, film and music in support of the Kanehsatake Mohawk community. In his speech, Devin explores the idea of active "decolonization", and the practice of self-determination by non-native individuals and communities. His views outline eloquently many of the principles that the No One Is Illegal Campaign in Montreal have tried to assert in the past two years, undertaking our work within migrant and refugee communities while maintaining active solidarity with indigenous struggles in the Canadian state.

by Jennifer Efting

On October 16, after watching TransLink directors vote
overwhelmingly in favour of moving forward on the
latest bus fare increase, fourteen organizers from the
Bus Riders Union (BRU) stood up, marched to the front
of the room, and shut down the meeting. I am one of
the organizers who shut down the meeting that day.

From an interview for the International Socialist Review Issue 38,
November-December 2004 with David Barsamian.
Posted on Colours of Resistance

DB: I'D LIKE to start with a quote from a recent interview I did with you,
published in the July-August issue of the International Socialist Review.
You said, "It's that we're up against an economic system that is
suffocating the majority of the people in this world. What are we going to
do about it? How are we going to address it?" So I thought that would be a
really easy way to begin. What are we going to do about it, and how are we
going to address it?

A&S Members in Toronto are organizing an anti-imperialist reading group,
which will be meeting over the coming year. The aim of the reading group is to grapple with questions surrounding the development of capitalism, racism and imperialism, and what these mean for our organizing today.

Tide? Or Ivory Snow? Public Power in the Age of Empire

by Arundhati Roy

Published by www.alternatives.ca August 29th, 2004

I've been asked to speak about "Public Power in the Age of Empire. "I'm not used to doing as I'm told but by happy coincidence, it's exactly what I'd like to speak about tonight. When language has been butchered and bled of meaning, how do we understand "public power"? When freedom means occupation, when democracy means neo-liberal capitalism, when reform means repression, when words like "empowerment" and "peacekeeping" make your blood run cold - why, then, "public power" could mean whatever you want it to mean. A biceps building machine, or a Community Power Shower. So, I'll just have to define "public power" as I go along, in my own self-serving sort of way.

By Chris Crass

From Left Turn magazine #14

How do we use the Presidential election to not only advance our politics
and build our organizations and movements, but also deliver a measurable

by Max Uhlenbeck

from Left Turn

"New York City is rising. The Republicans believe they can exploit our
city to further their regressive political agenda. Together we will prove

1. Resistance: The Origin of Black August, from the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement

2. Black August, Transcript of a radio broadcast by Mumia Abu-Jamal, 24 May 2003

3. Black August 2000: A story of African freedom fighters,

Part 1 of 2

by Harsha Walia and Stefan Christoff; August 05, 2004 (ZNet)

As hundreds of thousands gather in New York to protest the Republican National Convention at the end of August, a smaller and less historic but perhaps more profound convergence will be taking place in the interior of British Columbia. More profound in its demands. More profound in representing over 500 years of struggle.