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).