8th International @lternative bookfair
21 February 2009
Ghent – De Centrale
Kraankinderstraat 2
Belgium
The place to be for critical, counter-current books and publications, hard to find in mainstream bookstores.
Archives: Blog entry
A <em>blog entry</em> is a single post to an online journal, or <em>blog</em>.
I’ve nearly finished Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Very interesting, although I did find his discussion on the evolutionary roots of religion somewhat unconvincing. That he argued that religious belief was a by-product of some other trait created by evolution was interesting (although no mention of Stephen Jay Gould’s Spandrels?).
Doug Henwood started his Jan 22th show by broadcasting segments of Obama’s inauguration speech selected to highlight the pro-militarism nationalist market driven neoliberal ideology he shares with the old boss followed by a Martin Luther King speech. Henwoood says he is throughly sick of comparisons between Obama and King.
1. Capitalism works by breaking down – The relation of crises to capitalism
The capitalist apologist view of the relation of crisis to capitalism is pretty clear. Crises are seen as undesirable, pathological or threatening to "business as usual". Crises are seen as an "external shock", as an exception to capitalist normality, which is growth.
Some critics of capitalism also see crises in a similar light – as the result of internal contradictions (i.e. pathology) and ultimately threatening the continued existence of the capitalist system. Many of the people who hold to this view (and they include both Marxists and non-Marxists) believe that there will be a series of ever-increasingly severe crises until "the final crisis" brings about the collapse of capitalism itself. We call these "crisis theorists". Note the similarity of their take on the growth/crisis relation to the apologist one.
Strategies for breaking up assemblages must be based on an understanding of the different possible relationships between the components of the assemblage. To examine two different types of assemblage we will consider the chain and the starfish.
The chain is an assemblage of links. For the chain assemblage to maintain it’s integrity under stress, every single link component must not fail. The failure of any single link brings about the catastrophic failure of the entire chain assemblage.
Anarchists in general hate trying to recruit people to their organizations. This probably arises from bad experiences with groups like the SWP who used to badger people who turn up at campaign meetings to ‘join the anti-capitalists’. But obviously it’s more than a little counter-productive if we allow that behaviour to scare us off completely.
Most anarchists (although not all) will find Richard Dawkins’ critique of god and religion in The God Delusion (Bantum Press, London, 2006) both admirable and timely. However, most would be surprised that any critique of god would fail to mention, never mind discuss, Bakunin’s God and the State.
Well it’s well over a year late but I thought I should record the first six stops of the ‘Building a popular anarchism’ speaking tour which took place in August and September if 2007. At the time they were the only 6 stops, all six were in Ontario and part of the organising project that became Common Cause.
I think my major dislike for Leninists is their arrogance. It seems unfounded, given the actual track record of Leninism (and mainstream Marxism). So when I saw a patronising article on the Greek riots in the Weekly Worker I had to reply pointing this out. I’ve added the letter to the end of this posting, for those interested.