Collective Action: A Bad Subjects Anthology

231 Pages·2004·2.43 MB·English

by  Megan Shaw Prelinger

Collective Action
A Bad Subjects Anthology
Edited by
Megan Shaw Prelinger and Joel Schalit
P
Pluto Press
LONDON • ANN ARBOR
Prelinger 00 prelims 3 5/3/04 5:04:29 pm
First published 2004 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © this collection Megan Shaw Prelinger and Joel Schalit 2004
‘Bodies’ by the Sex Pistols © Paul Cook, Steve Jones, Johnny Rotten, and Sid Vicious,
1977. Published by Careers Music, Inc., BMI/WB Music
The right of the contributors to be identified as the authors of
this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 2180 1 hardback
ISBN 0 7453 2179 8 paperback
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Collective action : a Bad Subjects anthology / edited by Megan Shaw
Prelinger and Joel Schalit.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0–7453–2180–1 –– ISBN 0–7453–2179–8 (pbk.)
1. United States––Civilization––1970– 2. United States––Politics and government––
1989– 3. Politics and culture––United States. 4. Radicalism––United States. 5. United
States––Social conditions––1980– 6. Civilization, Modern––1950– 7. World politics–
–1989– 8. Politics and culture. 9. Social history––1970– I. Prelinger, Megan Shaw. II.
Schalit, Joel. III. Bad Subjects (Organization)
E169.12.C548 2004
973.931––dc22
2004001897
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by
Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England
Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Printed and bound in the European Union by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England
Prelinger 00 prelims 4 5/3/04 5:04:29 pm
Contents
Acknowledgments viii
Introduction 1
Part I Politics Old and New 9
1. Prison Activist’s Notes 12
Karl MacRae
2. Iraq War Culture 18
Joe Lockard
3. Beyond Copyright Consciousness 23
Rick Prelinger
4. I Was a Teenage Reactionary 29
Doug Henwood
5. Voodoo Politics: Tyranny and Enlightenment in Haiti and Britain 32
David Hawkes
6. When Neofascists Storm into Government (a Context for Genoa) 37
Edmund Zimmerman
7. Blacks and Reds in Polish Technicolor 44
Ewa Pagacz
8. Marxism, Class Analysis, and the USSR: a Y2K Perspective 49
Richard D. Wolff
Part II Remembering History 55
9. New Year’s Eve in Berlin: Firecrackers, Fascist Light Shows, and
Witnessing History in the Hauptstadt 57
John Brady
10. The Tenth Anniversary of the Siege at Waco and April 2003 63
Megan Shaw Prelinger
11. The FSM Café: History, Memory, and the Political Legacy of Coffee 68
Tomás F. Sandoval, Jr. and Jason M. Ferreira
12. Are Diplomatic Ties with Tyrants More Important Than
Civil Rights? Life During APEC ’97 73
Elisabeth Hurst
13. Marx v. Weber, Uno Mas! 78
J.C. Myers
Contents v
Prelinger 00 prelims 5 5/3/04 5:04:30 pm
Part III In and Out of the Academy 85
14. San Francisco: Dangerous for Whores/I’d Rather Be a Whore
Than an Academic 87
Lisa Archer
15. Left Conservatism: a Conference Report 92
Matt Wray
16. Caretaking the Echo Pond: the Practice of Art in the Fin-de-Siècle
Academy 98
Mark Van Proyen
17. In-between Days: Intellectual Work and Intelligent Life at the
Crossroads 103
Scott Schaffer
18. Make It a Double: My Dual Lives as Barkeep and Grad Student 108
Wayde Grinstead
19. Inside the Idea Factory 113
Katie Simon
Part IV Crossing Borders 119
20. Girls (Forced to) Dance Naked! The Politics and Presumptions of
Antitrafficking Laws 121
Gretchen Soderlund and Emma Grant
21. Driving Through the Minefields of Love 126
Joel Schalit
22. Cross-dressing in Bulgaria: Gay Identity, Postcommunist Fear,
and Magical Love 132
Robin S. Brooks
23. Marxing Across the Border 137
Frederick Luis Aldama
24. Securing Profits 141
Carrie A. Rentschler
25. Dangerous Bodies: Globalization, the Militarization of Borders,
and New (Old) Forms of Slavery 146
Arturo J. Aldama
26. The Race to Be Mobile 150
Kevin Carollo
Part V The Personal Is the Political 155
27. On the Merits of Racial Identity 157
Tomas F. Sandoval
vi Collective Action
Prelinger 00 prelims 6 5/3/04 5:04:30 pm
28. Outside In: the Failings of Alternative Communities 162
Kim Nicolini
29. Marxism After Ho Chi Minh 167
Viet Thanh Nguyen
30. Reporting Rape v. a Woman’s Right to Speak: I Won’t Get Fooled
Again 171
Cynthia Hoffman
31. My Dad Kicked Ass for a Living 178
Zach Furness
Part VI Media and Response 183
32. ‘Hotel California’: Learning How to Read 185
Charlie Bertsch
33. ‘Bodies’: Sex Pistols and Abortion Art 189
Mike Mosher
34. Marx’s Media Corps 195
Jonathan Sterne
35. Fetishizing the Communication Gap: the AT&T ‘Vietnam’
Commercial 198
Robert Shaw and Megan Shaw Prelinger
36. Heterosexual Love 203
Annalee Newitz
Notes on Contributors 209
Index 215
Contents vii
Prelinger 00 prelims 7 5/3/04 5:04:30 pm
Acknowledgments
This volume represents a group effort of the Bad Subjects editorial collective
and community of contributors. The collective is Cynthia Hoffman, Jonathan
Sterne, Robert Soza, Joe Lockard, Rachel Swan, Mike Mosher, Geoff Sauer, Charlie
Bertsch, Elisabeth Hurst, Kim Nicolini, Megan Shaw Prelinger, Joel Schalit, John
Brady, Scott Schaffer, Zach Furness, Arturo J. Aldama, Frederick Luis Aldama,
and J.C. Myers.
The coeditors of this book would like to extend their deep appreciation to
Charlie Bertsch, who provided special assistance with the manuscript preparation,
and to Aaron Shuman and Jonathan Sterne, who at different times performed
essential administrative duties on behalf of the collective as this book was
being prepared.
It is impossible to acknowledge every individual who has contributed to
Bad Subjects over the past ten years. Nevertheless, we would like to thank the
following people, without whom the Bad Subjects collective would not have
reached its current manifestation: founders Annalee Newitz and Joe Sartelle;
former production team members Ron Alcalay, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Carlos
Camargo, Elliot Cola, Ana Marie Cox, Brock Craft, Lindsey Eck, Peter Ives, Ed
Korthof, Jeremiah Luna, Paul Rosenbaum, Steven Rubio, Jeremy Russell, Jillian
Sandell, Aaron Shuman, and Matt Wray.
Bad Subjects would also like to thank Ewa Pagacz, Carrie A. Rentschler,
Chrysanthe Mosher, Doug Henwood, and Rick Prelinger, all of whom have
made noteworthy contributions to the magazine over the years. We would also
like to extend our gratitude to everyone who has contributed to Bad Subjects
since its beginning in 1992.
Bad Subjects is an online publication that has attracted over 200,000 readers
per issue. Without the web mastering, design, and layout skills of Geoff Sauer
and his groundbreaking English server (www.eserver.org) none of this would
have been possible.
Bad Subjects is also indebted to the generosity of several institutions: the
University of California at Berkeley’s Townsend Center for the Humanities and
Graduate Assembly for ten years of financial support; Carnegie Mellon University
and the University of Washington for service space and technical assistance;
and Iowa State University, the current home of the English server.
viii Collective Action
Prelinger 00 prelims 8 5/3/04 5:04:30 pm
Introduction
Charlie Bertsch, Joel Schalit,
Jonathan Sterne, and Megan Shaw Prelinger
There aren’t many rules at Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life. Nobody
gets paid to work on the magazine. Footnotes are a no-no. And showing off
knowledge of multisyllabic words like ‘polysemy’ and ‘envagination’ is strongly
discouraged. But we have never drawn a party line in the sand. If a piece seems
likely to get our readers thinking about their lives politically, it will probably
pass editorial muster. Given the choice between a perfectly polished essay that
muffles the injunction to ‘change your life,’ and a provocative polemic, we have
invariably opted for the latter.
Despite major changes in the membership of our editorial board and readership
since the publication debuted in September 1992, the policy our cofounders
Joe Sartelle and Annalee Newitz articulated in the introduction to our first issue
continues to be integral to our mission: ‘The purpose of a Bad Subjects article is
to take a stand, preferably one which is defiant of conventional leftist wisdom
in the service of leftist politics.’ This volume represents a collective effort. The
essays were selected by the entire Bad Subjects collective nominating their favorite
essays. The named coeditors of this volume took the table of contents that had
been developed by all hands and saw it through to publication.
Although the left may not be tongue-tied as it seemed to our contributors
in 1992, there is still a lot of room for improvement. While we welcome the
decline of both Marxist and multicultural orthodoxy around the world, leftist
intellectuals continue to display a distressing herd instinct. Just because everyone
is quoting Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s breathtaking Empire instead of
the Critique of the Gotha Program doesn’t mean that freedom of inquiry has
triumphed. At Bad Subjects, we remain convinced that leftists need more spaces
where they are comfortable taking intellectual and political risks. They need to
express themselves without the protective coating of specialized terminology.
And they have to want a larger, more diverse audience instead of retreating into
the comfort of familiar professional and political circles.
Obviously, we can’t hope to satisfy the need for new spaces on the left in
isolation. As the Louis Althusser quote from which we took our name implies,
bad subjects resist the dominant ideology by refusing to work ‘all by themselves.’
For each of us, Bad Subjects is a link in a chain of affiliation, not an end in itself.
Introduction 1
Prelinger 01 intro 1 5/3/04 5:04:40 pm
Because we are an all-volunteer organization, without advertising or distribution
in the marketplace, Bad Subjects will never make the inroads that ‘professional’
publications take for granted. What we can do, however, like like-minded people
in the world of independent publishing, music, and filmmaking, is lead by
example. As Bad Subjects has gradually moved away from its student origins we
have seen what real-world pressures can do to a collective organized around the
understanding that no one should profit financially from its efforts. But we like
to believe that the price we pay for our idealism—the inefficiency of a volunteer
organization—is more than compensated for by what we demonstrate in holding
on to that idealism in the face of adversity. While we recognize that nothing is
truly ‘free’ in a world structured by global capitalism, there is still something
special about labor freely given. It testifies to the conviction that people would
be doing something better with their time, if they only had the time in which
to do it. That’s the sort of utopianism we endorse wholeheartedly.
* * *
As great thinkers on the left have regularly reminded us, however, the dream
of a better life too readily becomes a nightmare when it is cut off from the
reality of everyday life. We are the lucky ones. Our status as intellectuals in
the developed world gives us the opportunity to donate time to political and
cultural organizations. Most citizens of the planet never have the chance to
give their labor freely to a project like Bad Subjects. Even as we imagine the day
when everybody will able to work as they please, we confront the hard, cold
facts of the contemporary workplace. In almost every respect, the situation
of workers in the developed world is worse than it was 25 years ago. But for
most people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, there is no Golden Age of
workers’ empowerment to remember nostalgically. That doesn’t mean that leftist
intellectuals should wring their hands in anguish over their own privilege or,
worse still, project their self-loathing onto others as Chinese leaders did during
the Cultural Revolution. What we need is an awareness of history that takes
account of national, regional, and religious differences without forgetting that
those differences are themselves the product of human labor.
Fundamental to Bad Subjects’ approach is the conviction that history isn’t
simply the province of textbooks. Marx’s famous statement from the 18th
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that ‘people make their own history,’ but ‘not under
circumstances of their choosing’ should be the foundation for all leftist politics.
In a world that bombards us with the message that individuals are powerless,
we need continually to remind ourselves that the power used against us is our
own. But we also must be mindful of the circumstances of our disempowerment.
The struggle against free market economics and state terror is as relevant as
2 Introduction
Prelinger 01 intro 2 5/3/04 5:04:40 pm
it was in Marx’s day, but waging it successfully demands an attention to the
details of history. We aren’t living in 1850 or 1900, after all. More pertinently,
we aren’t living in 2000 either. As short a lifespan as Bad Subjects has had, we
have nevertheless witnessed dramatic developments in world affairs. And we
need to attend to them in their specificity if we are to take the lessons of the
18th Brumaire to heart and not recreate the failed revolutionary past as our own
desired future.
When the United States invaded Iraq in early 2003, commentators around
the world remarked on the way the war recalled its predecessor, Desert Storm.
The continuity editors did a bang-up job on New World Order: The Sequel: a Bush
in the White House, Saddam Hussein playing the role of poor man’s Hitler,
shadowy hardliners from the Reagan era once again driving American foreign
policy. And the Wal-Marts of the world urged us to party like it was 1991. But
the celebration of the second Gulf war was more half-hearted than the first.
Republican strategists worried that George W. Bush’s approval ratings would
suffer the same fate as his father’s, as Democrats rediscovered the power of the
economy. North Korea expressed no shock and awe over the military campaign
in Iraq. And fear of SARS beat down the romance of globalization so mercilessly
that news organizations started looking for file stories on consumers’ response
to the Black Death. In short, the euphoria of victory lasted about as long as it
took to load the CNN home page on a high-speed internet connection.
Less obvious was the second Gulf war’s effect on collective memory. By taking
us back to the anxieties that came to a head with Desert Storm, the final days of
Saddam Hussein’s regime threw the last clods of dirt on the grave of the 1990s. In
the San Francisco Bay Area, where Bad Subjects was born, the sunny days of Bill
Clinton’s presidency made the memory of Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf seem
as distant as the Napoleonic Wars. The stock market was climbing the stairway
to heaven. Intellectuals were quitting the academy to make improbable salaries
describing a future of borderless consumer satisfaction. The dominant fear for
many privileged Americans, to reference a popular television commercial, was
that the tow-truck drivers who had invested before them would buy up all the
good islands.
It didn’t take a genius to see that the bubble would eventually burst. But
some very smart people, from Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan on
down, gravely underestimated the force of the explosion. It is not likely that
September 11, 2001 will ever dissolve into the amorphous flow of history. The
images were too striking, the effect on the American psyche too devastating. Yet
we are beginning to put that fateful day in perspective, to recognize that, like
the storming of the Bastille, it was both a long time coming and a long time
going. The war in Iraq in the spring of 2003 made it all too apparent that the
relative stability of the Clinton years represented an insignificant pause in the
Introduction 3
Prelinger 01 intro 3 5/3/04 5:04:41 pm