The information society has arrived – and the McLuhanist prophecy of the network utopia has been disappointed. The critical analysis of the creative city provides an opportunity to devise new futures to guide our actions in the present.

2) The New Class of the New

Like their forebears who moved from artisan workshops into the Fordist factory, the present generation is learning how to make new things in new ways with new technologies. This study will examine how far the flattened hierarchies and cooperative ethos of cognitive capitalism are remaking the shape of the city’s economy.

3) Mapping the Creative Workforce

The emergence of a new class of the new lives is not just an economic phenomenon, but also social, political and cultural. This study will measure the vital statistics of the creative class: age, gender, ethnicity, education and ideology. In parallel, psychogeographical research will both delineate the neighbourhoods where its members congregate and trace their links with the global diaspora of intellectual labour.

4) Funky Businesses in Trendy Locations

Just like the artisan trades of medieval times, the creative sector is clustered in specific areas of the world city. Forming a distinct subculture, its members wear the same clothes, drink in the same bars, listen to the same music and share a common obsession with cutting-edge technology. This study will examine the role of these marks of distinction in forming the new class of the new.

5) The Cultural Vanguard of Property Speculation

The creative sector is making a major contribution to the regeneration of neglected inner-city areas. Unfortunately, in many cases, the original inhabitants of these neighbourhoods have been bypassed by this economic turn around. They lack the technical skills, cultural outlook and social connections required for employment within this post-industrial sector. Worst of all, an influx of creative companies and their employees causes a rapid inflation in property prices and commercial rents in the area. This study will track this gentrification of inner city neighbourhoods and how its negative consequences can be countered.

6) Self-Managed Exploitation

The neo-liberal cult of authoritarian managerial power has become an anachronism within the creative industries. Instead, as the business manuals of the dotcom boom explained, the spread of contract working and job insecurity can be rebranded as extending individual freedom and career opportunities. Among the most talented employers and employees, the measure of success isn’t just making lots of money, but also creating something cool. This research will investigate how respect and autonomy for knowledge workers are the preconditions of innovation and excellence in this sector.

7) The Carnival Economy

For most of the citizens of the world city, creativity is what happens when they’re playing outside the workplace. Within popular music, the new thing appears on the dance floor and in the streets before it’s repackaged as a commodity. This study will investigate how those who earn their living outside the creative industries are not just participating in cultural production, but also, in many cases, driving forward innovation in this sector.

8 ) Sharing Knowledge as Collective Production

The information society isn’t just a new phase of capitalism, but also an evolutionary stage beyond capitalism. Alongside orders and commodities, gifts are now one of the principle methods of organising collective labour. The technical icon of the knowledge economy – the Net – is primarily a tool for sharing knowledge not selling information. This study will examine how the principles of open architecture and open source can be extended from the virtual realm into the real world.

9) Libertarian Social Democracy

Social welfare and economic security provide the best foundations for constant change and perpetual innovation. Contrary to the neo-liberal prognosis, public housing, free healthcare, subsidised culture and state education are still the preconditions of a modern civilisation. This study will ponder how this reformist programme can be updated and extended for the new conditions of the 21st century. Political democracy requires cultural democracy. If everyone is a voter, then everyone is also a creator. When mapping out the route to the future of libertarian social democracy, our vision of the new class must become inclusive.

More news by category Topic -: Buy phentermine saturday delivery ohio Tramadol hydrochloride tablets Picture of xanax pills Free shipping cheap phentermine Buying phentermine without prescription Safety of phentermine Pyridium Generic viagra cialis Cialis generic india Pink oval pill 17 xanax identification Buy free phentermine shipping Best price for generic viagra Information about street drugs or xanax bars Ordering viagra Snorting phentermine Hydrocodone overdose Lithium Amiodarone Get online viagra Order viagra prescription Order xanax paying cod Cheap phentermine free shipping Imiquimod Tramadol next day Linkdomain buy online viagra info domain buy onlin Pfizer viagra sperm Vidarabine Cheapest viagra price Prevacid Viagra cialis levitra comparison Dutasteride Lisinopril Thiotepa Female spray viagra Black market phentermine Betamethasone Cialis forums What does xanax look like Loss phentermine story success weight Order xanax overnight Viagra alternative uk Diet online phentermine pill Order xanax cod Mecamylamine Eulexin Cheap hydrocodone Buy cheapest viagra Viagra xenical Phentermine with no prior prescription Xanax in urine Macrodantin Cheap phentermine with online consultation Epivir Buy phentermine epharmacist Ditropan Woman use viagra Cialis erectile dysfunction Xanax withdrawl message boards Viagra online store Atorvastatin Generic ambien Is phentermine addictive Next day delivery on phentermine Buy online viagra Ethanol Natural phentermine Avandamet Xanax long term use Diet page phentermine pill yellow 5 cheap Cheapest secure delivery cialis uk Information medical phentermine Cialis experience Phentermine no perscription Compare ionamin phentermine Viagra cialis levivia dose comparison Noroxin Effects of viagra on women Buy cheap cialis Viagra shelf life Hydroxyurea Phentermine discount no prescription Buy cheap online viagra Dog xanax Online cialis Viagra class action Viagra price Phentermine without prescription and energy pill Hydrocodone cod only Nicoumalone Cheapest viagra Cheap ambien Vicodin without prescription Phentermine prescription online Phentermine snorting Mirtazapine Quazepam Isradipine Buy generic viagra online Xanax look alike Moxifloxacin Viagra experiences Piroxicam Nicorette Free try viagra Sotalol Cash on delivery shipping of phentermine How do i stop taking phentermine Xanax prescriptions Cheapest phentermine 90 day order Niacinamide Phentermine weight loss Phentermine

I continued, “It’s particularly good to see that – after 25 years – the Autonomists have at long last aligned their practice with their theory.” Back in the early-1980s, Simon and I had both diligently studied the Red Notes booklets which had first made available the key texts by Negri, Tronti and their comrades to an English-speaking audience. What was then so striking about the writings of the Autonomists was their engagement with Marx’s critique of political economy. In contrast with their Althusserian and Trotskyist peers, these Italian leftists did have something intelligent to say about the neo-liberal restructuring of capitalism. However, at this point, the Autonomists’ admiration for Marx’s theory didn’t extend to his practice. Far from being social democrats, they took pride in their revolutionary intransigence. Autonomism was the extreme left of the Ultra-Left.

“What was the comrades’ reaction to Andrea Fumagalli’s speech?” Simon asked. “As you might have guessed”, I replied, “it didn’t go down very well with most of his audience. For the old school, it was a betrayal of the holy precepts of Autonomism. For the younger generation, it was a bit like going to see Johnny Rotten and discovering that he had always been a Bee Gees fan!” “What did they expect?”, Simon exclaimed. “It was obvious that Autonomism was reformist right from the beginning. Haven’t they ever read Negri’s article on Keynes from the mid-1970s? If you – correctly – point out that ‘effective demand’ is a euphemism for working class struggle, then you’re arguing in favour of social democracy!” “Maybe”, I mused, “their horrified reaction proves that the revolutionary image of Autonomism was always more important than its theoretical achievements? It can’t be an accident that its acolytes prefer reading the Grundrisse to Capital. If they carefully studied the chapter on the Factory Acts in Volume 1, they would realise that Marx himself was a social democrat!”

“So was your visit to Cambridge worthwhile?”, Simon enquired. “Back in the early-1980s, we might have disagreed with their politics, but we always enjoyed going to their conferences.” “Of course”, I responded. “It’s not just that our politics which have converged. Do you remember the cyber-communism article which I wrote in the late-1990s for the McLuhan conference in New York? At the time, it was meant as a satirical piece: America invented the only working model of communism in human history – it’s called the Net! Well, you’ll be pleased to hear that there were two excellent papers at the conference which put forward the same argument.” “Very good”, Simon said. “But do you think that anyone outside the academic Left is listening to what was said?” “I do hope so since the conference was – rather appropriately – being held in Keynes Hall at Kings. Looking at the current state of the Labour Party, it certainly needs some fresh ideas. Maybe – as in the 1930s – Cambridge can again provide them?” My comrade smiled somewhat sceptically, “I look forward to that day!” “You never know”, I joked, “in a couple of decades time, we could be going to a similar conference in the Negri Hall at Kings.” “After Blairism”, Simon announced, “Autonomist reformism!” “We should drink to this future!”, I concluded – and so we left for the pub to continue the conversation over a few pints…

Past recipients of this award include Francis Fukuyama, Doug Rushkoff and Neil Postman.

The official presentation of the award will at the MEA’s annual convention which is being held at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley, California, USA on 19th-22nd June 2008.

Dr. Richard Barbrook will be attending the awards ceremony on Friday 20th June and will give a lecture about his book.

Further details can be obtained from the MEA website.

“No hay mejor forma para entender el sistema político mexicano en su parte trágica y en su parte cómica que Hamlet, Macbeth y El Quijote”
[“There is no better way to understand the Mexican political system in its tragic and comic side, than with Hamlet, Macbeth and Don Quixote”]
Sub Comandante Marcos 21st March 2001

— Durito the beetle is taking a rest after traveling around the world for 80 days, his tortoise, “Pegasus”, is waiting for him laying on the grass, chewing British grass in Westminster abbey. Durito is concerned, the gray skies, the cold weather, neither Excalibur nor its name (El ilustre hidalgo Don Durito de la Lacandona) have any presence in there. Quickly he takes out a new tool that the European community of beetles gave to him, a computer.

Durito remembers the time when he was with his friend Sub comandante Marcos in the Lacandon Jungle in Chiapas in 1994, concerned about the satellites that tried to end their huge meeting in the jungle. More than 10 years have gone by since that moment when they begun their history in Chiapas, in a nice jungle, inhabited by people with many problems and surrounded by injustice. Durito is part of the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional: The Zapatista Army of National Liberation) and now he has been invited to Europe to talk about the future of globalisation and neoliberalism, but mostly about cyberactivism. That is the reason that the European community of beetles gave him the computer, to keep the cyberactivism struggle, to develop a new revolution in the revolution. He is impresed because now he knows that the EZLN.org is the most famous Mexican web site in Europe and probably in the world. So maybe someone knows him because of the Sub comandante Marcos writings.

Durito starts walking trough the streets of London, Hyde Park is the place were he will meet everyone and begin the next stage of this fight. Now Durito knows that internet network, is the tool of the moment. Everyone is waiting for him; the grasshoppers are part of the reception, and then his speech begins.—

Durito: Long time ago the EZLN started as a movement in the Southeast of Mexico, this was labeled a guerrilla movement by the government of Mexico. But this movement started long time ago, since the Spanish colonization of Mexico. After 500 years, some people got together to elaborate a new Revolution in Mexico. The presence of resistance is implicit in everyday of our lives; resistance is not necessarily directed at the immediate source of appropriation. In as much as the objective of the resisters is typically to meet such pressing needs as physical safety, food, land, or income and to do so with relative safety, they may simply follow the line of less resistance (Scott 2002: 92-94). These are called “ ‘everyday forms of resistance’, were some part of the population will disagree with the ‘betters’” (Scott 2002:92), not always in political aspects, but in everyday life and so the movement of cultural resistance begins.

“Cultural resistance provides a sort of “free space” for developing ideas and practices. Freed from the limits and constraints of the dominant culture, you can experiment with new ways of seeing and being, and develop tools and resources for resistance” (Ducombe 2002: 5).

And this is what can make different forms of resistance, what is very important for the EZLN and therefore the use of the poetry of the zapatista uprising (of their communiqués and their actions) is not peripheral to their movement, not the external decoration of a fundamentally serious movement, but central to their whole struggle. Poetry (and indeed other forms of artistic expression) have come to play a central role in anti-capitalist struggle: poetry not as pretty words but as struggle against the prosaic logic of the world, poetry as the call of a world that does not yet exist (Holloway 2005) — Durito takes out from a huge bag some slippers, a hair brush and a tooth brush, and says — this were the first items that I used for traveling and with these I also taught the Sub comandante Marcos about the EZLN ideals — he displays them in the panel — now, I am going to explain their use and the metaphor of our problems, in Chiapas.

a) The slippers are an alternative to the boots, as you know, the Zapatistas use this kind of shoes, but my idea is that they are not convenient for the circumstances, the mud, the sticky floor, the slippers can be removed easily. Besides that, the slippers are part of our ancient outfit, and people use them representing fewer problems than boots.
b) The hairbrushes are very useful in events like these, where nostalgia is a contagious disease. Blowing through a small paper, you will have a musical instrument; with music you can give joy to the heart and feet. For dancing, there is nothing better than the slippers, ohh and they also work as hairbrushes!!
c) The toothbrushes are very useful for scratching the back. They come in different colours, shapes and sizes. Even if they are all different they all work for the same purpose, what everyone in the world knows, they are for scratching the back.
d) The slippers show the logic and the boots do not work when you are dancing or dreaming. The hairbrushes show that for music and love everything is an excuse. The toothbrushes demonstrate that you can be different or the same.
e) Dance, music, pleasure and consciousness, those are the flags for the humanity and against the neoliberalism, those who doesn’t understand this is because they have a cardboard for a brain.
c) Finally, the bags can be classified in two kinds, their bags and ours. Theirs are the “bolsas de valores” stock exchange, remarkable, because they don’t have any value, and our bags “bolsas”, that as they are called, their function is to carry things, like our slippers, hairbrushes and toothbrushes. So, one bag that can’t carry all these things is a bag that doesn’t deserve to be used. (Sub Comandante Marcos. 1996).

— All the other attendants to the meeting were speechless; the words of Durito were very interesting but, at the same time, confusing. Durito, drunk some green tea, and continued his speech. —
Durito: Ok, I can see your faces, this is not very understandable for people with other languages, but as my friend — he smiled — Gramsci said “the philosophy is contained in: I. Language itself, which is a totality of determinate notions and concepts and not just of words grammatically devoid of content. II. ‘Common sense’ and ‘good sense’. III. Popular religion and, therefore, the entire system of beliefs, superstitions, opinions, which are collectively bundled together under the name of ‘folklore’” (Gramsci 2002: 59) — he smiled again —. So what I’m saying is that as cultural resistance can be happening in a small place like Chiapas, the general concern can be similar. “Being a diverse class of ‘low classness’, scattered across the countryside, often lacking the discipline and leadership that would encourage opposition of a more organized sort, the peasantry is best suited to extended guerrilla-style campaigns of attrition that require little or no coordination”(Scott 2002: 95). That doesn´t mean that everybody in this world has to carry the same tools as we do, that is why if you go to Chiapas you would find lots of new propaganda and zapatista items, such as keyrings, hats, t-shirts, belts, toys, dolls, lighters. When I arrived here I saw a girl wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt, and in Mexico you can find a lot of people wearing something of the zapatistas. It is part of the propaganda that we use, the EZLN is not only known by internet or comuniquees, but by all this items, mostly made by indigenous artisans, or some other colaboration groups and part of the income of this sellings goes to our aims. Now, lets see the start of this organization. In 1994 the NAFTA (Northern American Free Trade Agreement) agreement was signed and running in Mexico, United States and Canada, reducing the possibilities of having a better life quality in some sectors in Mexico, and that was the point when EZLN decided to take arms and fight for a common cause.

“Zapatism, a movement opposed to neoliberalism [that] seeks, on a modest scale, to re-enchant the world. It is a movement freighted with magic, with myths, utopias, poetry, romanticism, enthusiasm, and wild hopes, with ‘mysticism’ and with faith.” (Lowy 1999:216).

My friend Sub comandante Marcos, who was a teacher of Media and Communication in the United States a long time ago, leads the EZLN. On the 1st January 1994, besides taking over some places in Chiapas, the EZLN started a new fight, using communication, helped by other organizations and friends; we sent the first Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle talking about the manifesto of EZLN, our ideas, and the way we were going to fight for them. “Contrary to widely held misconceptions, the EZLN’s struggle has the characteristics of a class conflict rather than a purely ethnic one” (Castro 1999: xxxii). And we are using and creating a kind of cyberspectacle for everyone interested in us. With this name we are not saying that everybody outside the EZLN is a spectator, or just audience, but they are part of the listeners, and also they can become part of the play on the scenario. Here is when we have to think about the public interest. With the years we have seen that the international audience, mostly anti-globalisation, anti-neoliberalism and anti-capitalism groups have been interested in us. Some have been contributing with money, supporting or publishing our ideas. Indeed some organizations have taken the Subcomandante Marcos cominiquees and adapted to their fights. Some others have come to Chiapas for interviews, documentaries, books and also closely support. All of them are part of this struggle and their help is fundamental for our existence in Mexico and also around the world.

Now, let’s go inside the EZLN ideas. Historical evidence supports the contention that the choice of guerrilla warfare, as a tactical weapon, is dictated by the conditions at the time of the insurgency, a desirable outcome for the insurgents is dependent, in most of the cases, on timing and the existing relations of power in the location where the insurgency takes place (Castro 1999: xxiii).

“The main aim of revolutionary strategy is the transformation of the permanent political crisis into an armed struggle and of the political situation into a military solution destroying the bureaucratic-military machine of the state and replacing it with the people in arms (Marighella 1999: 148).”

— Someone in the meeting raised his hand (leg) and asked: Why does the guerrilla fighter fight? —
Durito: As Che Guevara said: “We must come to the inevitable conclusion that the guerrilla fighter is a social reformer that takes up arms responding to the protest of the people against their oppressors. He fights in order to change the social system that keeps all his unnamed brothers in ignominy and misery” (Guevara 1999:68). Talking about Che Guevara, I’m going to go deeper in the threads of EZLN, but lets try to understand that even if they are a basis for the EZLN ideals, there is a rupture between this and the zapatistas, we are considering all, but we are taking them inside a new way of revolution. “But we do not want just to struggle against the negation of dignity, we want to create a society based upon the mutual recognition of dignity. Our struggle, then, is not the struggle of Revolution, not just of rebellion, but of revolution. In this revolutionary struggle, there are no models, no recipes, just a desperately urgent question. Not an empty question but a question filled with a thousand answers” (Holloway 2005).

The most important of all the revolutionary ideas in the EZLN is the foco theory, which maintains that in any country in which class contradictions aren’t tolerated it is possible for a small nucleus of well armed individuals to begin a guerrilla campaign that would act as a catalyst to mobilize the population at large to topple the existing system (Castro 1999: xviii). People must see clearly the futility of maintaining a fight for social goals within the framework of civil debate. Peace is considered already broken when the forces of oppression maintain the power for themselves against established law. It is important to emphasize that guerrilla warfare is a war of the masses, a war of the people (Guevara 1999: 66-67). This theory is used as a base and modified for our purposes. As well as Guevara and Castro changed the proletarian revolution of Marx to a peasant revolution. We take their ideas to our aims in Chiapas.

Now we can see the most visible threads of the EZLN:
It is in the very spirit of the EZLN to retain elements of this heritage, the importance of armed forces and the peasantry, the rifle as a material expression of the distrustful relation between the exploited people and their oppressors, the readiness to risk one’s life for the emancipation of one’s brothers and sisters but that is not everything for EZLN, weapons are symbols of this revolution, symbols for the rest of the world, so the resistance could be take it seriously, even if is not more than a self defense tool inside our group.
Talking about heritage and symbols the most direct, is of course the legacy of Emiliano Zapata in the Mexican Revolution. It is the uprising of the peasantry and indigenous people, the Ejército del Sur as an army of the masses, the uncompromising struggle against the powerful that does not seek to seize power, the agrarian program for the redistribution of land, and the community organization of peasant life. But at the same time it is Zapata the internationalist who, in a famous letter, in February 1918, hailed the Russian Revolution, emphasizing “the visible analogy, the obvious parallelism, the absolute parity” between it and the agrarian Revolution in Mexico. (Lowy 1999: 216). The Mexican Revolution transformed the character and nature of guerrilla warfare (Castro 1999: xvii).
Zapata was drawn early into conflict with the system, defending his fellow workers against the haciendas and the local police and “rurales” (rural constabulary) (Castro 1999: 24). The situation is not different nowadays, and that’s why I’m going to read something written by Zapata: “we do not want the peace of slaves nor the peace of the grave… we want peace based on liberty, on the political and agrarian reform promised by our political creed; we are incapable of trafficking with the blood of our brothers and we do not want the bones of our victims to serve us as a staircase to public offices, prebends or canonships” (Castro 1999: 29). This sentence and his phrase “Land and Liberty” remain the central slogan of the new Zapatistas, who are continuing a revolution “interrupted” in 1919 with the assassination of Zapata in Chinameca.

Other thread is perhaps the most important, in matters of geography, the Mayan culture of the native people of Chiapas, with its magical relation to nature, its community solidarity, its resistance to neoliberal modernization. As Spanish domination spread to the mainland, so did popular resistance. In almost every instance, the rebel’s choice of guerrilla warfare was dictated more by the conditions prevailing at the time of the insurgency than by the exigencies of a preconceived strategy (Castro 1999: xv).

But inside is necessary a revolutionary theory that supports the foco, this could be the Guevarism-Marxism- Leninism. Since the Cuban Revolution this line became the main theory of rebellious movements in Latin America. Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Camilo Cienfuegos gave birth to these new ideas of revolutionary struggle. But the important change is that zapatistas are not following the same examples, and we are tranforming this theories to our own purposes. Remember that EZLN is not using arms all the time, is just a defence tool, and part of the identity of a revolutionary fighter. This Cuban revolution was based on Marx’s ideals, as well as some of Lenin and Mao. Lets see some of their ideas:

Marx said (clarifying that the Latin American and EZLN struggles have never use the proletarian but the peasant word) “The proletarian revolution will abolish all classes, the proletarian included, as a culmination of a process.” (Chaliand 1977:152). Remember that for Marx the proletarians were the only ones that could start a revolution, but zapatista movement is taking the peasants, indegenous, and the women, in a struggle for the dignity of all the people.

In Lenin’s case, in a certain way different from Marx’s, but using the communism ideas: “the working class would exercise its dictatorship by way of councils whose members would be directly elected by the workers and subject to recall. The economy and the state would be built from the bottom” (Chaliand 1977:153). This is considered one of the main aspects of all the Cuban Revolution and also, the Cuba problem. That takes us to a question very important to clarify, is EZLN a vanguard party? “¡Ya basta! turns too against a Left that had grown stale and stiff and alienating. It is the rejection both the Lenin’s revolutionary vanguardism and the Marx’s state-oriented reformism, the rejection of the party as an organisational form and of the pursuit of power as an aim” (Holloway 2005), and that is why is created the councils, is related to the question of community. Is the idea of knowing the people you are living with, because of the common work practices or decision making, what is very common on places like Chiapas. The revival of a council or assembly is the rejection of the party.

Maoist theory of people’s war divides warfare into three phases. “In the first phase, the guerrillas gain support of the population through attacks on the machinery of government and propaganda distribution. In the second phase, escalating attacks are made on the government’s military and vital institutions. In the third phase, conventional fighting is used to seize cities, overthrow the government and take control of the country” (Guerrilla definitions. 2005). These theory was taken by Guevara for the Cuban revolution, because is more appropriate in terms of the countryside, peasants and mass resistance.
All these theories represent the base of the struggle, but is important to point out that these are updated and adapted into the Chiapas situation, what is making a difference between other revolutionary acts around the world.

“The last, most recent thread, added to the others after January 1994, consists of the democratic demands made by Mexican civil society, by that vast network of unions, neighborhood associations that have risen up through at Mexico to support the demands of the Zapatistas: democracy, dignity, justice” (Lowy 1999: 217).

After considering the unsuccessful rebellions in Latin America in the last 20 years, the EZLN decided to explore other parts of the theories like the one Che Guevara proposed for Latin America guerrillas. These can be the three fundamental lessons to the success of revolutionary movements in America, but lets remember that they are not the main aim of zapatistas even if it looks like what we are doing.
1. Popular forces can win a war against the army.
2. It is not necessary to wait until all conditions for making revolution exist; the insurrection can create them.
3. In undeveloped America the countryside is the basic area for armed fighting.

The Guatemala, Nicaragua, Venezuela and other struggles in Latin America never succeed; the reason could be probably because they could never adapt the theory to their situation, because in every country the situations are different. The politics that they used were most of the times meetings and speeches of the theories, that were not suitable for the rest of the group. And also because they did not try to take politics after the armed revolutions, this happened also with Zapata, he never took the presidency seat, and perhaps that could have been the real change for Mexico.

After the Cold War the two visible revolutions still existing are the Colombian and Mexican with the EZLN. Both very different in strategies and in a certain way they are living the same kind of guerrilla in the countryside, but they are adapting these to a new moment to their demands and proposals.

Because of the countryside isolation the communication with the outer world is difficult, and therefore it should include a series of intermediate points named by people of complete reliability, where products can be stored and where contacts can go to hide themselves at critical times. Internal lines of communication can also be created (Guevara 1999: 80).

“The fundamental characteristic of a guerrilla band is mobility.” (Guevara 1999: 73)

Having this mobility, Sub comandante Marcos came with an idea, which for me was too extravagant and difficult to accomplish, mostly considering my size and my mobility. He decided to use the internet network as the most important weapon of the rebellion. This is part of the political campaigns on the EZLN, the councils, the encounters, the march, but not meetings or demonstrations, the visibility is inside the network and inside the media, that is the tactic taken. Here is when thousands of questions came to my mind and to the other member’s heads. The main questions where: how are we going to use internet if Chiapas is one of the poorest, and the second most non technologic states in Mexico in 1994? My magic is not good enough to create such technologically advanced systems to communicate immediately with the rest of the world, mostly if telephone is not available where we were staying. Then the other questions were: how are we going to use a computer if we don’t even know how to write and read? And where are we going to get the money to pay for those items? What would be the government’s and the world’s reaction? Would it work? Sub comandante Marcos smoked his pipe, thinking about the answers of all these questions, and I was on his side, pointing with my sword on his neck, waiting for a clever and sensible answer. I remember his answer: “cyberactivism”. That was the word, and after that he left and started writing some of these ideas he then showed me. He was talking with me about this word that I had never heard before.

What I remember of his words is this: cyberactivism is more effective than traditional activism for a number of reasons. First of all, activism generally involves a large number of people in a protest. This is a problem because not only is it hard to find big crowds, but also arrests are easy. Cyberactivism avoids this because only a small number of people, who are very skilled at computers, are needed and they can move from place to place, avoiding the authorities. Secondly, cyberactivism reaches everyone all over the globe. Cyberactivism works outside the government, giving email evidence directly to the independent press. A protest can be blocked, but electronic evidence is almost impossible to ignore. And it can always remain nonviolent. (Kronk , Supernant and Wahlen 2005).

I couldn’t believe what I was listening in that moment, and then he decided to write a letter to everyone in the world where it said something about this, so here I include two paragraphs of it that I’m going to read:

“Bases for cyberactivism:
First. That we will make a collective network of all our particular struggles and resistances. An intercontinental network of resistance against neoliberalism, an intercontinental network of resistance for humanity.
Second. That we will make a network of communication among all our struggles and resistances. An intercontinental network of alternative communication against neoliberalism, an intercontinental network of alternative communication for humanit.”y (Sub comandante Marcos, 1994).

All this started after the problem with the censored information in newspapers, television and radio in Mexico; they weren’t showing the reality of the conflict. The advantage that we had was the relationship with activist groups around the world, they gave us their support the first months. Initially, the Internet was used mainly by academics to provide information about the Zapatistas conflict and its background, until then a relatively unknown force (Froehling 2002). However, as the conflict persisted email listservs such as Chiapas95 and bulletin boards sprung up, accompanied by actions such as write-in and fax campaigns to Mexican consulates, protests, rallies and the U.S. government urging a nonmilitary resolution of the conflict. In addition, web pages like ZAPNET were constructed, with up-to-date and extensive background information, pictures, and links to other sites. The Zapatista dispatches went out to Usenet groups, Peacenet conferences and Internet lists whose members were already concerned with Mexico (Andrychuk 2002). Now we can look into a very good example, Ricardo Dominguez (another good friend of mine) said that “we discovered that Zapatistas no longer have to be this kind of a modernist guerrilla, movement that followed; you know “death on arms”. Instead we created this kind of information guerrilla movement” (Stepard and Ducombe 2002: 385). He was part of the Electronic Disturbance, and with his group hacked the main Mexico government website, crashing the system and making a big issue in the Mexican government, the United States, the C.I.A. and random corporations. This is one kind of support by activism that was given and is still given by some in the world. With this, we keep the whole idea of spectacle, the zapatista movement was more famous because of these incidents, and EZLN had power over the media, was a new and interestig subject to put on papers, and television news, some new polemical topic; and because of that untouchable, in a certain way. The government would not risk anything more to stop this movement, because everyone in the world would know, and its relationships and interest would be over.

But the questions were still in the air, the insurrection offers the seeming contradiction of a high-tech medium assisting an uprising of indigenous peasants who are hardly aware of its existence (Froehling 2002). Despite those kind of critics, we know that the plan was different, the EZLN is not communicating directly with the internet, it is following in a certain way the idea of Che Guevara, of using different people in strategical points to establish communication, but to resist in the same place, as in 2003 the Sub comandante Marcos said in an interview with García Marquez, a famous writer, that he sends the writings or declarations with some of the reporters or international helpers and then they send it or post it to different places, or media. Even the “official” Internet presence of the EZLN on the internet is actually a site created and maintained by Zapatista supporters. The internet acts as a tool for supporters, who coordinate actions, disperse information and relay EZLN communiqués.

Two key advantages of the internet as a vehicle for social movements are apparent. First, unlike traditional forms of communication, the Internet allows for uncensored, nonhierarchical discussion. Second, the international scope of the Internet permits world opinion to be voiced, thereby pressuring the Mexican government and influencing its actions not necessarily directly but because of what the government fears would happen (Froehling 2002). The contrast of this is the radio, also used by the Zapatistas, making a link between radio and the cyberactivism, the Radio Insurgente, adapts radio discussions into a web space, therefore the McLuhan idea of “The spoken word” was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way (McLuhan 1964:63) this same idea can be adapted to the internet, and its versatility can give more space to start a new kind of movement. McLuhan also proposed that the electronic media inaugurates a generalized planetary communication and should conduct us, by the mental effect alone of new technologies, beyond the atomizing rationality of the Gutenberg galaxy to the global village, to the new electronic tribalism (Baudrillard 2002: 101). “The media are making possible mass participation in a social and socialized productive process, the practical means of wich are in the hands of the masses themselves” (Enzensberger 1977: 22). Thinking about these two statements, made before the internet worked, we have to consider that probably at this stage of history internet and cyberactivism are the most logical solutions involving there the New Left, which takes the media as one of the bases for their politics.

“Propaganda, which does not release self relience but limits it, fits in to the same pattern. It leads to depoliticization” (Enzensberger 1977: 22).

The new media can be buit up intensively and also spread it extensively, is “egalitarian in structure. Anyone can take part in them by simple switching process” (Enzensberger 1977: 30).

Even if it is considered as something for the present and not for tradition, is also opposed to the eternity of burgeois culture, and is something done towards action, not contemplation (Enzensberger 1977: 31). Sub comandante Marcos has probaly taken some of this ideas and developed them into the new form of cyberactivism on the internet.

The internet makes possible to conduct new kinds of campaigns, such as “electronic direct action” or “electronic civil disobedience” (Wray 2002). As social conflicts have moved into cyberspace so too have traditional methods of protest. Tactics such as protest letter-writing campaigns, sit-ins, blockades, and graffiti and billboard art-modification have been adapted to the electronic environment. A minority of activists is challenging the idea that the internet should only be used as a platform for communication. Rather, they see the Internet as a tool for “electronic direct action” the electronic equivalent of the more traditional methods of protest. A common technique is to send a flood of email messages in some cases from pre-programmed computers hoping to cause the recipient’s computer to crash (Bray 2002).

— A big pause happened in that moment, the audience whispering between them, and again Durito speech —
Durito: But my ideas also criticize this kind of movement. Yes, I believe that the internet is a good and advanced weapon, but in a certain way, even if we are getting a lot of support from other countries, it is obvious that is not completely egalitarian, it is hierarchical because it does not consider the entire population around the world, and the worst part is that the most segregated, isolated and poorest population is the one that is not having the access to this information, to this movement, to the words of the movement. In a certain way we are not playing the role of a warfare made by the masses for the masses, it is not considering all the people. The good part is that we are getting support and we have survived for more than 10 years, physically isolated, but mentally free and sharing. We are using the media and communication theories besides the old and used books of guerrilla movements. I think we are the first group of people (and bugs) doing this, and probably we will give ideas for new mobilizations around the world. Does that mean that the EZLN is a pioneer of the net for global justice movements? If you think about the Indymedia network or the anti-globalisation groups then you can see that the ideas of politic propaganda through media and network is more popular around the world, and probably this could be part of the EZLN legacy.

I have to tell you that the advances in Mexico have been many, and very different, from other guerrilla or revolutionary movements, we have started a free conversation and and new possibilities with the rest of the world, and now almost everywhere people know something about us. Perhaps one of the interior changes could be the change of party form neoliberalist party to the right party, and probably this change because the people in Mexico understood that the first ones were not solving the Chiapas problem, but the contradiction is that the right has not change anything yet, even if the President Vicente Fox said that the Chiapas problem would be solved in 15 minutes. The population in Chiapas has always been free in taking any side that they want, lots of them have come to the conclusion that the EZLN is not a guerrilla movement, but a society movement, a new revolution, trying to help, and the help unfortunately doesn’t come from Mexico itself, but from other countries, with money, tools, work, tourism, exportation without exploitation. Mexican government is not supporting those ideas, and Chiapas is still the second poorest and most isolated state in the southeast of Mexico, if the struggle stays there, what is the concern of the government? Should we see into the Strategies of Urban and Rural Struggle.

“1. The urban struggle acts as a complementary part to the rural struggle, and thus all urban warfare, whether from the guerrilla front or from the mass front (with the support of the respective supply network) always assumes a tactical character.
2. It will try to maneuver the proletarian which lacking the support of its fundamental ally, the peasantry, will try to preserve untouched the bureaucratic-military apparatus of the state’” (Marighella 1999: 149).

In 2003 with the Marcha Zapatista to Mexico City we tried to accomplish these ideas, but always knowing that EZLN is not planning to become an urban guerrilla warfare, but the government didn’t agree with our petitions and even if we have a lot of followers that doesn’t mean that everyone understood the Chiapas situation, there is still a lot of work to do. But that also has to happen with the help of Mexican people. Social movements have occurred throughout history. The advent of communications technology, whether telephone or fax machine, have historically played important roles, allowing social activists greater abilities to disseminate information and mobilize for a cause. Worldwide interactive telecommunication networks, the internet and World Wide Web, have given social activists an even greater platform from which to operate, whether through dissemination of information or calls to action.

— Everyone clapped, believing that the speech had finished, but Durito interrupted everyone with his hand. —
Durito: Ok, as a conclusion of my ideas on this movement, despite their ongoing clashes with the Mexican army, military victory has never been the primary aim of the Zapatistas. The Zapatistas reliance on words and ideas over weapons signals a new type of warfare. “Will this poetic romanticism prove more realistic than the previous socialist realism? We do not know. What we know is that the realism of power politics failed to achieve radical social change and that hope lies in breaking reality, in establishing our own reality, our own logic, our own language, our own colours, our own music, our own time, our own space. That is the core of the struggle not only against ’them’ but against ourselves, that is the core of the zapatista resonance”(Holloway 2005).

From the beginning, our logic has been that of “we are ordinary, therefore rebels” and their way forward has been a constant experimenting, a “caminar preguntando” (walk asking). This latest uprising by a large Latin American indigenous group captured the world’s attention and imagination. As a result, the true nature of the Chiapas rebellion has become the object of a multitude of arguments (Lowy 1999: 215) in the New Left and the anti-globalisation organizations, such as indymedia and Seattle lefty party.

“If the coordination is not working out between guerrilla activities and urban political struggle, the guerrillas are doomed forever to mark time in the countryside” (Chaliand 1977: 45-46).

That could be part of our problem, because EZLN is not sharing agreements with other organizations in Mexico City or in other state capitals in Mexico, and we don’t want to be part of other unsuccessful society movement. In Latin America, as we have seen, the fundamental cause for the failure of the various urban and rural guerrilla movements in the last fifteen years, is that they could not get the population to recognize the struggle as both national and social (Chaliand 1977: 179), and also the United States intervention, like in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala (that during 1960- 1990 had loose 150.000 people in the most devastating and hidded murder operation), and like Acteal in Chiapas in 1997 where 47 people were murdered by the Mexican army without being involved with the zapatistas. We have been playing this match against these capitalist governments with the media, with the idea of letting everyone know us. Bring every journalist into Chiapas Jungle, so they understand and spread the voice, that we are alive and fighting for the dignity of all the people.

We have to keep our ideals and analyse other theories to succeed in this globalised struggle, lets take the Zapata way to fight: That was part of the new way to make revolutions, wait for a dialog, attack, make some pressure, stop, dialog, and finally if it was possible, again fight, and then lets put in there the cyberactivism ideas. But remember: The crisis in Chiapas, or anywhere else, will not be solved in cyberspace. The Internet is as a powerful and useful tool for activism and for the rapid dissemination of information.
By itself, cyberspace provides only an illusion of participation. The true gage of success of the Internet as a vehicle for social movements can be measured by the actions information dissemination generates. Knowledge may be power, but one must do something with that knowledge if they are to affect change (Andrychuk 2002). The author has to work as the agent of the masses. He can lose himself in them only when they themselves become authors, the authors of history (Enzensberger 1977: 53).

— After that, Durito gave a strong “YA BASTA!” And everyone clapped.
He decided to stay for a while, listen to some other members of the European community of beetles and then, in the afternoon, left with his sword, his Pegasus and a big box of green tea, back to the Lacandon Jungle in Chiapas —.

Bibliography

Castro, D. (1999) Revolution & Revolutionaries: Guerrilla Movements in Latin America. London: Scholarly Resources Inc.

Guevara, E. (1999) ‘General Principles of Guerrilla Warfare’ in Castro, D. (ed.), Revolution & Revolutionaries: Guerrilla Movements in Latin America. London: Scholarly Resources Inc.

Lowy, M. (1999) ‘Sources and Resources of Zapatism’ in Castro, D. (ed.), Revolution & Revolutionaries: Guerrilla Movements in Latin America. London: Scholarly Resources Inc.

Marighella, C. (1999) ‘Problems and Principles of Strategy’ in Castro, in Castro, D. (ed.), Revolution & Revolutionaries. Guerrilla Movements in Latin America. London: Scholarly Resources Inc.

Chaliand, G. (1977) Revolution in the First World: Myths and Prospects. Sussex:The Harvester Press.

Ducombe, S. (2002) Cultural Resistance Reader. London: Verso.

Baudrillard, J (2002) ‘The Masses: The Implosion on the Social in the Media, Resistance’ in Ducombe, S. (ed.), Cultural Resistance Reader. London: Verso.

Gramsci, A. (2002) ‘Selections from the prison notebooks’ in Ducombe, S. (ed.), Cultural Resistance Reader. London: Verso.

Stepard B. and Ducombe, S.(2002) ‘Ricardo Dominguez Interview’, in Ducombe, S. (ed.), Cultural Resistance Reader. London: Verso.

Scott, J. (2002) ‘Weapons of the weak. Every day Forms of Peasant Resistance’ in Ducombe, S. (ed.), Cultural Resistance Reader. London: Verso.

Enzenberger, H. (1977) Raids and Recostructions: Essays in Politics, Crime & Culture. London: Pluto.

McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media. London:Routledge.

Sub Comandante Marcos (2001) ‘Interview to Sub comandante Marcos’ by García G. La Jornada, Mexico.

Sub Comandante Marcos (1996) ‘Ponencia a 7 voces’

Sub Comandante Marcos (1994) Ciberactivismo

Holloway, John (2005) ‘Is the Zapatista Struggle an Anti-Capitalist Struggle?’/ ‘Zapatismo Urbano’/ ‘Ordinary People, that is, Rebels’.

Andrychuk S. (2002) ‘The Internet as a Vehicle for Social Movements’, The School of Library, Archival and Information Studies The University of British Columbia

Froehling,O. (2002) ‘The Cyberspace “War of Ink and Internet” in Chiapas, Mexico,’ in Andrychuk S. ‘The Internet as a Vehicle for Social Movements’.

Bray, J. (2002), ‘Web Wars: NGOs, Companies and Governments in an Internet-Connected World’ in Andrychuk S. (2002) ‘The Internet as a Vehicle for Social Movements’.

Wray, S. (2002) ‘On Electronic Civil Disobedience’ in Andrychuk S. ‘The Internet as a Vehicle for Social Movements’.

Kronk, J., Supernant A., and Wahlen P., (2005). ‘The Zapatistas and cyberactivism’.

Guerrilla definitions, (2005)<>

“His politically apt and historically well informed argument presents a strong antidote to the euphoric manifestos of the net’s postmodern leftist theorists of the likes of Antonio Negri, without falling for the techno-pessimistic traps of an oversimplifying critique of ideology. Indeed, to quote Barbrook, ‘those who forget the future are condemned to repeat it’.”

Read Famir Amin’s review.

John Barker’s Up For Grabs in Science as Culture, Number 4, Volume 16, 2007, pages 481-488.

“By giving us the history of intellectuals thriving on an ahistorical view of the world, and what this view leads to, [Barbrook] has given depth to the critique that began with The Californian Ideology, and provided the tools to see through new versions of the same, however attractively packaged. The imaginary future is an area of contestation.”

Bruce Robinson’s The Future Is What It Used to Be in Solidarity & Workers’ Liberty, 3rd December 2007.

“The book tells an important story well. The left should neither forget the history and ideology of the Net in a blaze of techno-enthusiasm, nor simply retreat into “neo-Luddism”. Telling the story of the past of the future is a useful aid to orienting ourselves in the “Information Age”.”

His starting point is the 1964 World’s Fair in New York that took place during an intense period of the Cold War, its planning no doubt underway during the time of the Cuban missile crisis. With its futurist IBM Pavilion the Fair acted as Trojan-Horse type propaganda. “Instruments of genocide,” Barbrook writes “were successfully disguised as benefactors of humanity.” Nuclear weapons, militarized computing, and militarized space use were presented as the utopian future being made real in the present.

To make the particular nature of this futurism clear, he contrasts the Fair with London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, which instead disguised Britain’s modern hi-tech world in the medieval fantasies of the Gothic Revival; and with the American exhibition of 1939 whose promise of a suburban America built around the motor car was realized, and had a New Deal rhetoric of a cohesive and peaceful society. On the other hand, the 1964 promises of unmetered energy (nuclear fusion), tourism to the moon, and intelligent computers, have been unfulfilled and, since Chernobyl and an Apollo crash at take-off, have been discredited. Only the Holy Grail of Artificial Intelligence is still on the table, pursued with a fanaticism borne of some deep and perverse psychic need, and enabled by the non-stop levels of its research budget, forthcoming during the period described here, because of an equally deep ideological need to disguise the grotesque military ‘game-playing’ it allowed for.

Barbrook himself was at the 1964 Fair as a boy with his mother, sister, and an academic father who he comes to realize was part of what he calls the cold-war left, one which willingly made accommodation with the technological fantasies on display there, and the ‘military definition of reality’ as described by C. Wright Mills. This, given that he hates this view of the world and what it lead to, gives the book its drive and its edge. It ends with a rousing cry for the equality of an intelligent citizenry, allied to use of the world wide web as a liberatory tool, but it is also an angry lament, that a generation of self-styled progressives should have destroyed social democracy both as a possible, perhaps likely, governmental mode, and as an ideal.

What destroys it is the Vietnam War, though he is scrupulous enough to avoid his anger becoming yet another version of this being ‘an American Tragedy’. He is forthright in saying that this was a Vietnamese tragedy, and is horrified that here were nominal progressives who became obsessed with how many Vietnamese peasants could be killed. This callousness began with an ideological notion of what was modernity – a Cold War version – but also from a faith in technology itself. This faith — in line with the top-down history of social democracy — involved a denial of human agency. Describing the IBM Pavilion at the 1964 Fair, he argues that it wasn’t just military use being disguised, but that the imaginary future of electronic brains concealed the human labour involved. Computers were described as ‘thinking’ so that the hard work, the surplus-value producing labour of designing, building and operating of them, could be discounted.

EX-MARXISTS MADE GOOD

In the course of World War II, various intellectuals, including Marxists, and ex-Marxists, found a place in positions of responsibility and power in a militarized government. This wartime government was the genesis of what C. Wright Mills came to call the Power Elite, and as it morphed into Cold War governments, the ‘military definition of reality’ became a crucial cohesive force for it. In this transition the newcomer intellectuals who remained in this elite included ex-Marxists, and especially ex-Trotskyists whose hostility to the USSR as it existed, made the switch to a wholly militarized American view of the world not so difficult. (1)

Barbrook sees them as playing an important role in the creation of this ‘counter futurism.’ We have seen something depressingly similar among the ‘Blairites’ of New Labour, and the presence of ex-Marxists among today’s American neo-cons has also been noted. He quotes from Ignazio Silone that “the final struggle (for global hegemony)…will be between the Communists and the ex-Communists.” But with both the neo-cons of today, and the real villains of this book, their influence is rather over played for polemical effect. In this book those real villains are intellectuals, social democrat Keynesians if pushed, but with a penchant for American military superiority, and a role in the Power Elite, who had read some Marx, understood the idea of historical materialism, and wanted to create a class-free version of it.

Early in the book he introduces the ex-Trotskyist leader James Burnham, who had made such a switch, to describe a revolution in which a managerial class was the deservedly new elite, one most developed in the USA. To give this notion force, Burnham wanted to give it the Shock and Awe touch, inevitability. It is true that managerialism was new in its ideological and practical importance for the Power Elite, and that computer development would only strengthen this development. Equally, the imagined future was dependent on managerial capacity, but of itself, managerialism provided none of the required appeal.

HEROES AND VILLAINS

Instead, Barbrook presents the advent of cybernetics, and soon after the ‘global village’ notions of converging communication technologies pioneered in new style by Marshall McLuhan. Both were, and are, capable of varying interpretation and so become, though he is hesitant to say it, sites of ‘struggle’. He traces the history of cybernetics back to ‘the Macy Conferences’, and from this there emerge hero and villain. The hero, and this is the big rescue job of the book, is Norbert Wiener. True, Wiener’s theory of a continual feedback between information and action which could be used to describe the behaviour of living organisms and technological systems would seem to make misuse possible, even likely, but he also challenged the ‘patriotic consensus’ of the Cold War which allowed scientists to rationalize their military-funded research; and asserted the need for humans to control their machines.

Later he became an inspiration to a short-lived reformist faction of the USSR elite and their utopian idea of computerized and interactive planning, a “new cybernetic model of communism: the ‘unified information network’.” It did not survive the return to centralized control under Brezhnev, but in turn, spurred the American cybernetic world to make something more inspiring than one dominated by military use and Artificial Intelligence fanaticism. This is how Barbrook characterizes the turn cybernetics had taken when it became dominated by John von Neumann, mathematician and Cold War enthusiast, who had been involved in developing the atomic bomb and then in building a prototype mainframe computer for the US Navy. The inherent danger of metaphor and analogy in scientific work, allowed him to argue that ‘feedback’ meant that computers operated like humans. He is the first of Barbrook’s villains whose propagandizing of AI, allowed the development of war games with a clean conscience for those doing the work.

But this, no more than Burnham’s managerial elite, created much of an attractive version of the future. Enter Marshall McLuhan, an obscure literature professor in Canada with a suitably modern mish-mash of snappy perceptions based on the ideas of Harold Innis. that ‘the movement of information’ played the primary role in shaping human societies. In Understanding Media and the more snappier titled The Gutenberg Galaxy, he postulated a convergence of a communication technologies, and neutral gloablisation. For him “print consciousness – the indifference of rationalism – would be superseded by electronic media consciousness – the empathy of intuition,” as Barbrook puts it. One might object to the domineering arrogance of some of its proponents, but the superseding of rationalism, can only make one nervous. The intellectuals of the Power Elite on the other hand, were all to happy keep their monopoly on rationalism, while taking up McLuhan’s ideas. What appealed to them in his work was not just the heralding of the information age, but in particular the converging and ‘unification’ of computing, media and telecommunications, and how this provided a vision of the future in which the USA already had an unassailable lead. The technical determinism implied in his argument – a changed technological mode of communication making for a new mode of consciousness - also meant that, in the right hands, the ideas could be rendered ideologically safe.

MCLUHANISM WITHOUT MCLUHAN

The intellectuals, the ones Barbrook calls ‘the cold war left’, were of the type who tell you what you were really saying the moment you’ve finished saying it. In this instance there was not even acknowledgement of what McLuhan had said.. He had to be interpreted and unacknowledged because he himself was too off-the-wall to provide a Cold War imaginary future, or to be useful to academic careerists. Without acknowledgement, interpretation becomes appropriation, and what was constructed was McLuhanism without McLuhan. This when McLuhan himself had shown his ‘flakiness’ when, at a 1969 meeting of the Bilderberg Group he asked, “What are we fighting Communism for? We are the most Communist people in world history.”

The appropriation of the ideas and breakthroughs of inventers, innovators, and mavericks by those with institutional and financial power is hardly new. In the case of McLuhan, his appropriators were real operators, Daniel Bell and the geopolitical cold warrior Zbigniew Brzezinski, a member of Bell’s multi-disciplinary Commission which had come out of the American Cybernetics Conference of 1964 and was financed by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Bell had already provided an early version of the ‘Third Way’ with his The End of Ideology, (“The end of ideology is not – and should not – be the end of utopia as well”) having already proved himself a reliable hatchet man for the Power Elite with a critique of Wright Mills’ book, that depended on nod-and-wink put-downs and the distortions that arise from simply ignoring the phenomena it highlighted.(2) As well as professional academics, the Commission also involved think-tankers like Herman Kahn who, in the 1950s, had claimed a nuclear war against the USSR was winnable on the basis of simulated war games. It was he and a colleague from the Hudson Institute who came up with a list of 100 imminent inventions for the Commission. Much was predicated on the power of ‘thinking machines’. Meanwhile Brzezinski in a 1968 article and a 1970 book, reproduced McLuhanism as academic sociology with technology as the driving form of human history, no class conflict involved. And this time it was new technology which was effecting a new economy, and a view of the world to go with it, the information society replacing the industrial with the USA in the lead.

Barbrook argues that Bell found this insufficient, that it didn’t offer their own vision of “the emancipated society”, their vision of utopia, and that this was his self-appointed job. His point of view was essentially similar however: “As in earlier stages of growth, people were spectators of an evolutionary movement outside of their control,” Barbrook writes. Certain ironies also arise. For one thing, there is a distinct whiff of ‘the end of history’ in Bell’s conclusions, and the end of history itself sounds all too like the thousand year Reich, an absurd claim, inviting hubris. Already there has been a new version of the end of history, American also, but from a rather different viewpoint. Then there is the date of Bell’s final ‘canonical text’ (a phrase Barbrook is overly fond of) The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. It finally appeared in 1973, but by then the political-ideological base it had been built on, had gone. Not that the technological developments towards the information society as network (net) came to a stop, far from it, but that his ‘third way version’ had been discredited by the Vietnam War, a triple whammy.

HUBRIS

First of all information technology was used not just in a callous manner in this war, it also created delusions of victory. It is also the Vietnamese – and this irony Barbrook does emphasize – who used television to greater effect, making it integral to the Tet Offensive which had such an impact on American opinion. Then a youth counter-culture which had already smelled something rotten, a technological determinism which was intrinsically anti-democratic in this notion of a post-industrial society, saw that the War brought it out into the open. This counter-culture included students who, for Bell, were to be integral to, leaders of the information society, with bases in the universities. They were integral to his society. Instead many students became militant opponents of the War and all that went with it.

Longer term, the costs of the war was a catalyst for a radical shift in general capitalist policy. The Keynesianism which had been taken for granted by the cold war left was in any case becoming unacceptable to capital and its representative power elite, blamed for its failure to deliver social discipline. The costs of the war and those of the Great Society, and then the oil price shock in the same year that Bell finally published, made this shift in capitalist strategy both necessary and possible. It was a switch aimed at making people work harder for the same, or less money. Computerized technology, developed as it was within the capitalist relations of production that Bell airbrushed out of the picture, was an important means of making this happen. Instead of the greater free time for creativity inherent in the cold war left’s imaginary future, people have come to work harder and for longer hours.

Barbrook describes the political ironies, but remains ambivalent about them because of the longevity he ascribes to the conception of the information society as both imaginary future and fetish, that was developed by this group with Bell as its synthesiser and promoter. But before he gets there, and what this means and has meant for the present, the real villain of this cold war left, W.W. Rostow steps out of his role as a key intellectual contributor to cold war leftist ideology, to become the most enthusiastic of the Washington desk bombers of Vietnam; and the one who could not give up on its supposed efficacy. The saddest off-stage individuals in the book are his parents who had optimistically christened him Walt Whitman. For Rostow, the global village required the destruction of real villages that did not, and had no chance of following his stages of growth,

ARMCHAIR WARRIORS

The ideological contribution was his stages of economic growth theory which had the merit of providing a historical materialist alternative to Marxism as against the dominant bourgeois theories of the market and equilibrium. He understood, as Barbrook puts it, that “market competition was a historical creation rather than an immutable law of nature.” But that was as far as it went, ‘progressive’ only in relation to the pre-New Deal economics of laisser-faire, and in its promise of everyone a consumer of the goods technology had made available. It is a theory which eradicates class and class conflict as a motor of economic growth; and leaves out the crucial importance of the military budget for both research and armaments to the US economic growth of the time, something at least recognized by ex-President Eisenhower in his ‘military-industrial complex’ warning speech of 1961. Most of all the theory itself is also ahistorical, believing that the American model was the only ‘modern’ one in town, and that it was universally available, its prescriptive stages ultimately unrecognizing of all the advantages and violence of the USA’s economic history. For development to take place for Rostow, a change in attitudes to technology was required, along with a “willingness to work”.

However, its claim as a model for modernity and the future for the “Third World” in a period when a proxy Cold War was being fought in this world, fell down when even “communist economics” seemed more modern and realistic, given the USA’s support for the most regressive forms of the elites of that world. That this was the case was intolerable not just to Rostow and the Cold War left, but to American ultra-nationalists wholly imbued with a ‘military definition of reality’ like Samuel Huntington who, at this time, was railing – with racist overtones – about a surfeit of democracy within the USA, itself, and who hated the very idea of the Great Society. (3) With some consistency, his solution to the ‘Maoist threat’ was to destroy the Vietnamese peasantry as a class, the non-modern peasant class. This coalition of forces, the cold war left and authoritarian nationalists, has recently returned to cause more misery to other people, and exhibited the same characteristics:

-the same arrogant ignorance. In the earlier case they could not even be bothered to know Vietnam’s history of fierce independence towards China, when China was presumed to be the instigator of ‘dominos’ falling.
-the same gruesome wishful thinking
-the same absolute belief in the abstract violence of its military technology.

Noting the importance of games theory, and then war gaming, Barbrook says “When processed through a computer, the irrational could be made to appear rational … and according to ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency, an agency with financial backing from the military) computer simulations, the success of their B52 air offensive was guaranteed. When their losses in people and property reached the critical breaking point, the Communists would be forced to admit defeat and abandon the struggle against South Vietnam.”

For Rostow, the war criminal, the people whose losses were to reach breaking point were abstractions, and whose deaths were required to prove a point. At the same time, he never questioned the reliability of the data provided by the US military (with its own interests), and placed his trust in “the mediated interpretation of the war provided by information technologies.” That the people killed in wars are abstract figures for those who perpetuate them was not new, but the fetishizing of information technology took it to new levels, while all the time, this same technology was being proclaimed for making a liberatory society possible.

INTELLECTUALS AND THEIR USES

Imaginary Futures is a history lesson. Its purpose to show how the Net both as shorthand for, and realization of the Information Society, was theorized by the cold war left he describes. He argues that this theorizing made in the circumstances of the Cold War, has somehow survived the limits of its time and, one way or another, established the parameters within which it is imagined. The blind faith in American superiority in information age warfare, re-packed as Shock and Awe, has played a great part in the devastation heaped on the people of Iraq. The notion that any model other than the American information society is of the dinosaur variety (a handy and clichéd symbol implying what is heavy, slow-moving, and awaiting distinction) has had great resonance, as well as minimizing the political impact of a decline in US manufacturing and its balance of trade.

This is true, but as a history of the intellectuals in this process, questions remain. An alternative view of these cold war leftists might be that those who ally themselves with the power elite, are its ‘useful idiots’, useful only at certain times. In this case, that it was not just the Vietnam War, but a shift in the elite’s requirements that meant that any ‘progressive’ elements that existed in their imaginary future could be ditched, and just the rhetoric maintained. This is not a single case. Monetarism for example, economic theory from the 1920s, was dusted down to be used in the capitalist offensive of the 1970s. Lip service to Milton Friedman was still to be paid until his recent death, but voodoo economics and militarized Keynesianism have been the order of the day ever since.

Barbrook cannot bring himself to give this alternative view. It is a history of intellectuals, but he has a problem with them. With a nasty piece of work like von Neumann, the ‘fanatical Cold War warrior’, there is a psycho-political history attached; he was “traumatized by the nationalization of his family’s bank during the Hungarian revolution of 1919”. What we don’t get is any real history of more ‘progressive figures’ in the story. Or rather, a question posed by Armin Medosch, is whether the psycho-political histories of the technologists who helped make some of the building blocks of the Net as a reality, played a part in the nature of the technical developments they worked on. Barbrook makes the practical suggestion that as with reading Marx himself, rather than the Bolshevik version, we should read Norbert Wiener and McLuhan in their own words. Wiener the pacifist socialist he implies is the person who theorized cybernetics as a non-hierarchical form of interaction. But what of J.C.R. Licklider and his ARPA group. Of these he says that some of the cybernetic radicals who had been ‘persuaded’ to serve the US military were able to “hardwire the academic gift economy into its social mores and technical architecture.” This begs the question as to whether certain technical achievements were the product of some ‘socialist’ consciousness. Paul Baran for example, and Licklider himself, was such consciousness at work in the development of packet-switching?

Technological and scientific leaps have been made, or managed by, people committed to such advances being public property. There is the well-known case of Tim Beners-Lee and the world wide web. Sir John Sulston has been very clear about the moral basis of the long battle to keep the Human Genome Project as public property against Craig Venter’s push for profitable patenting. In this instance, motivation did not change the nature of the human genome, but given that it is in this field we are likely to see a new wave of technological determinism, that it is public knowledge is likely to be crucial.

Neither Berners-Lee nor Sulston were financed by the military however, so that motivations are visible. In the case of packet-switching, Barbrook is not helpful with his ‘persuaded’ and ‘hardwired’, a word that seems to substitute itself for explanation. Is the net as gift economy an accidental, ironic outcome of ARPA, or is he suggesting that Licklider and Baran consciously mad a ‘deal with the devil’ knowing the ultimate public good that could come from packet-switching. (4)

If this question, now perhaps being resolved in the world of the computer itself by the ‘hactivists’ of Open Source Culture, is not answered in the book, it is much clearer in the case of the maverick McLuhan. He has been as Barbrook shows, open to interpretation from all sides (5), but it is the “we are the most communist people in history,” that he says to the Bilderberg Conference, which should stand out to us.. It is this possibility, this possible view of the present, which has stood out in Barbrook’s own writing from the famous The Californian Ideology onwards.(6) This is, in a sense, the miracle; an internet which regardless of the motives of those making its constituent parts has real elements of the gift economy and the public ownership of knowledge so important to Sulston, This is what Barbrook aims to celebrate. It is accompanied by his consistent attack on technological determinism, and an insistence on people-made decisions as to how technology can and should be developed. It follows up his previous attacks on capitalist versions of the Net. By giving us the history of intellectuals thriving on an ahistorical view of the world, and what this view leads to, he has given depth to the critique that began with The Californian Ideology, and provided the tools to see through new versions of the same, however attractively packaged.

The imaginary future is an area of contestation. Harlan K. Ullman, co-author of Shock and Awe, a man with his own military consultancy business sits on the Advisory Board of the Roosevelt Group, a characteristically Power Elite organization, a mega-consultancy for CEOs and their senior corporate executives who are “charged with leading, indeed inventing the future.” Given how much technological research is financially controlled by military and corporate interests, a grim future is what they have in mind. Imaginary Futures gives us some tools to recognize and contest the flim-flam with which it will be presented as it was in the New York World’s Fair of 1964.

NOTES

(1) This was not a wholly new phenomena however. In Mimesis, Eric Auerbach describes a frequent trajectory in Europe between the World Wars, of ultra-leftists to the extreme right.

(2) The American Journal of Sociology, November 1958. Reprinted in C.Wright Mills and the Power Elite, Beacon Press 1969. Essays collected by G.William Domhoff and Hoyt B. Ballard.

(3) In his essay in The Crisis of Democracy, Huntington aghast at an excess of democracy makes a plea for cultivating “discouragement and apathy.” He goes on to say “Democracy is only one way of constituting authority, and is not necessarily a universally applicable one. In many situations the claims of expertise, seniority, experience and special talents may override the claims of democracy as a way of constituting authority.” And with the brazen cheek for which he is well known goes on to say – this when the budget for waging war on Vietnam was almost limitless – that “a government which lacks authority and which is committed to substantial domestic programmes will have little ability, short of a cataclysmic crisis, to impose on its people the sacrifices which may be necessary to deal with foreign policy problems and defense.”

(4) Don de Lillo has a fine passage in the Epilogue section of Underground on consciousness and technological outcome financed by the military. The protagonist is watching a weapons demonstration in free enterprise Russia. “Viktor asks me if I’ve ever witnessed a nuclear explosion. No. It is interesting, he says how weapons reflect the soul of the maker. The Soviets always wanted bigger yield, bigger stockpiles. They had to convince themselves they were a superpower. Throw-weight. What is throw-weight? We don’t know exactly but we agree it sounds like hurled bulk, the hurled will of the collective. Soviet long-range missiles had greater throw-weight…
And the USA, I say…
It was the US, Viktor says, that designed the neutron bomb. Many buzzing neutrons, very little blast. The perfect capitalist tool. Kill people, spare property.”

(5) It could be argued that what McLuhan really provides is a vocabulary-led weltanschaung for what was emerging somewhat in the manner of William Gibson’s Neuromancer trilogy, fiction that is also open to various interpretations.

(6) Co-written with Andy Cameron.

Tuesday 23rd October 2007 at 6.00pm

01zero-one
Westminster Kingsway College
Soho Centre
Peter Street
London
W1F 0HS

(01zero-one’s main entrance is on Hopkins Street)

Class Wargames

The Game

Class Wargames will play Guy Debord’s The Game of War using a replica of his original 1977 design for the board game.

“Politics is a continuation of war by other means.”

The Game of War is a Clausewitz simulator: a Napoleonic-era military strategy game where armies must maintain their communications structure to survive - and where victory is achieved by smashing your opponent’s supply network rather than by taking their pieces.

“The 1789 French Revolution brought great changes in the art of war. Similarly, the establishment of spectacular domination has radically altered the art of government.”

Debord is celebrated as the leader of the Situationist International and as the author of the searing critique of the media-saturated society of consumer capitalism: The Society of the Spectacle. What is much less well known is that after the May ’68 Revolution, Debord and his partner - Alice Becker-Ho - quit Paris and went to live in a remote French village. Over the next two decades, Debord devoted much of the rest of his life to inventing, refining and promoting what he came to regard as his most important project: The Game of War.

“Wargames are a continuation of politics by other means.”

For Debord, The Game of War wasn’t just a game - it was a guide to how people should live their lives within Fordist society. By playing this Clausewitz simulator, revolutionary activists could learn how to fight and win against the oppressors of spectacular society.

“An untrained militant would only be an object of embarrassment to the vanguard.”

Now, in 2007, Debord’s fascination with wargames is finally being discovered. Coinciding with the publication by Atlas Press of the English translation of Debord and Becker-Ho’s The Game of War book, Class Wargames in London and the Radical Software Group in New York are playing matches in public and developing their own versions of the game.

On Tuesday 23rd October, you will have your chance to see The Game of War in action and to question the Class Wargamers about this Clausewitz simulator. Let battle commence!

The Players

The members of Class Wargames are:

Dr. Richard Barbrook, University of Westminster and author.

Rod Dickinson, University of the West of England and artist.

Alex Veness, University of Southampton and artist.

Ilze Black, Waterman’s Art Gallery and artist.

Fabian Tompsett, London Psychogeographical Association and author.

Mark Copplestone, Copplestone Castings and figure designer.

Lucy Blake, designer and e-learning developer.

Links

London Games Festival Fringe 2007

Class Wargames photos

Atlas Press

Radical Software Group

Download the workshop programme (PDF)

Download the press release (Word)

Dr. Richard Barbrook
Room 408 Wells Street
Extension 2313
R.Barbrook (a) wmin.ac.uk

Option: International Political Economy

Code: 1POL547

Staff: Richard Barbrook and Nik Howard

Time and Location: Thursdays 2.00pm - 5.00pm
Fyvie Lecture Theatre

Assessment Scheme: Essay (2,500 – 3,000 words): 30%
Unseen Examination: 70%

Assessment Criteria: Full Details in your handbook.

Synopsis: Criteria for grading assessed work will include the following:

Structure and Quality of Argument
Use of Evidence
Contents
Writing, Presentation and Communication Skills

Assignment Deadline: Tuesday 8th January 2008

Office Hours: Please email or phone to make an appointment

Room 408 Wells Street

Website: http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/author/ipe/

There is a link in the blogroll on the bottom right-hand side of the Imaginary Futures website.

Key text: Meghnad Desai, Marx’s Revenge: the resurgence of capitalism and the death of statist socialism, Verso, London 2002.

The quickest and easiest way to obtain a copy of this book is from abebooks.

Essay Questions

LECTURE PROGRAMME

1. 27th September
Introduction: What is International Political Economy and why does it determine your life? (RB)

2. 4th October
The Lessons of History: the East Asian miracle and Japan’s bubble economy of the late 1980s. (NH)

3. 11th October
The 18th and 19th Century Theories of the Global Political Economy: Liberalism versus Nationalism versus Marxism. (RB)

4. 18th October
The 20th Century Theories of the Global Political Economy:
Leninism versus Keynesianism versus Neo-Liberalism. (RB)

5. 25th October
Theory into Practice: North Korea and South Korea. (NH)

6. 1st November
Building the World Market: the rise and fall of the British empire 1649– 1914. (RB)

7. 8th November
Private Study Week

8. 15th November
Managing the Global Economy: the ascendancy and decline of the American empire 1914-2007. (RB)

9. 22nd November
Money as Command: chaos and order in the international financial system. (RB)

10. 29th November
The Carbon Economy: the affluent society and the limits to growth. (RB)

11. 6th December
The Global Village: the Net as dotcom capitalism and cybernetic communism. (RB)

12. 13th December
Think Locally, Act Globally: beyond the neo-liberal paradigm. (RB)

READING LIST

Michel Aglietta, M. (1979) A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: the US experience, Verso, London.

Albert, M. (1993) Capitalism vs. Capitalism, Four Wall Eight Windows, New York.

Ambrose, S. (1971) Rise to Globalism: American foreign policy 1938-1970, Penguin, London.

Aoki Masahiko, Kim Hyung-ki and Okuno-Fujiwara Masahiro (eds.) (1998) The Role of Government in East Asian Economic Development: Comparative Institutional Analysis, Oxford University Press. New York.

Atkinson, B and Johns S (2001) Studying Economics, Palgrave.

Bacevich, A. (2002) American Empire: the realities and consequences of U.S. diplomacy, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass.

Barbrook, R. (1990) ‘Mistranslations: Lipietz in London and Paris’, http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/02/01/mistranslations-lipietz-in-london-and-paris-by-richard-barbrook/

Barbrook, R. (2006) The Class of the New, Open Mute, http://www.theclassofthenew.net

Barbrook, R. (2007), Imaginary Futures: from artificial intelligence to the global village, Pluto, London, http://www.imaginaryfutures.net

Bell, D. (1973) The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: a venture in social forecasting, Basic Books, New York.

Walden, B. and Rosenfeld, S. (1992) Dragons in Distress: Asia’s Miracle Economies in Crisis, Penguin Books. London.

Berry, C. (1997) Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.

Bhagwati, J. (2004) In Defence of Globalisation, Oxford University Press.

Brenner, R. (2002) The Boom and the Bubble: the US in the world economy, Verso, London.

Buchan, J. (2006) Adam Smith and The Pursuit of Perfect Liberty, Profile.

Cain, P.J. and Hopkins, A.G. (1993) British Imperialism: innovation and expansion 1688-1914, Longman, London.

Cassidy, J. (2002) dot.con: the greatest story ever sold, Penguin, London.

Castells, M. (1996) The Rise of the Network Society: the information age - economy, society and culture volume 1, Blackwell, Oxford.

Chiu, Stephen W.K. and So, Alvin Y. (1995) East Asia and the World Economy, Sage Publications. California, London and New Delhi.

Crump, J. (2003) Nikkeiren and Japanese Capitalism, Routledge/Curzon. Richmond, England.

Cumings, B. (2004) North Korea: Another Country, New Press.

Meadows, D and the Club of Rome (1972) The Limits to Growth, Earth Island, London.

Desai, M. (2002) Marx’s Revenge: the resurgence of capitalism and the death of statist socialism, Verso, London.

Diamond, J (1997) Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, New York: Norton.

Earle E M (ed) Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton and Friedrich List, The Economic Foundations of Military Power, Makers of Modern Strategy.

Eckert, C. J. et al. (1990) Korea Old and New: A History, Ilchokak Publishers. Seoul.

Economides, S and Wilson, P (2001) The Economic Factor in International Relations.

Fallows, J. (1994) Looking at the Sun: The Rise of the New East Asian Economic and Political System, Vintage.

Florida, R. (2002) The Rise of the Creative Class: and how it’s transforming work, leisure, community and everyday life, Basic, New York.

Frieden, J and Lake, D (eds) (2001) International Political Economy: Perspectives on Global Power and Wealth, New York: St Martins Press.

Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man, Penguin, London.

Galbraith, J.K. (1961) The Great Crash 1929, Penguin, London.

Galbraith, J.K. (1970) The Affluent Society, Penguin, London.

Gilpin, R (2001) Global Political Economy, Princeton University Press.

Gittings, J. (2006) The Changing Face of China: from Mao to market, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Godard, R and Cronin, P (ed) (2003) International Political Economy, Palgrave.

Gruber, H. (1991) Red Vienna: experiment in working-class culture 1919-1934, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Gundar Frank, A. (1969) Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: historical studies of Chile and Brazil, Monthly Review, New York.

Halliday, J. and McCormack, G. (1973) Japanese Imperialism Today: ‘Co-Prosperity in Greater East Asia’, Penguin Books.

Harris, N. (1987) The End of the Third World: newly industrialising countries and the decline of an ideology, Penguin, London.

Hayek, F. A. (1944) The Road to Serfdom, Routledge, London.

Held, D and McGrew, A. (1999) Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Helleiner, E. (1994) States and the Re-Emergence of Global Finance, Cornell.

Hersh, J. (1993) The USA and the Rise of East Asia since 1945: Dilemmas of the Postwar International Political Economy, Macmillan, London.

Hettine, B. (ed) (2001) International Political Economy, London: Zed Books.

Hilferding, R. (1981) Finance Capital: a study of the latest phase of capitalist development, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

Hirst, P. and Thompson, G. (2000) Globalisation in Question, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Hobsbawm, E. (1968) Industry and Empire: an economic history of Britain since 1750, Penguin, London.

Hobson, J.A. (1902) Imperialism: a study, George Allen & Unwin, London.

Huntington, S. (2002) The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order, Free Press, London.

Hyam, R. (2002) Britain’s Imperial Century 1815-1914: a study of empire and expansion, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.

Irwin, D. A. (1996) Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade, Princeton University Press.

Johnson, C. (1982). MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975, Stanford University Press.

Jones, G. S. (2005) An End to Poverty: A Historical Debate, Profile Books.

Kalecki, M. (1972) The Last Phase in the Transformation of Capitalism, Monthly Review, New York.

Kant, I. (1983 ) ‘To Perpetual Peace: a philosophical sketch’, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, Hackett, Indianapolis, pages 107-143.

Kelly, K. (1998) New Rules for the New Economy: 10 ways that the network economy is changing everything, Fourth Estate, London.

Kennedy, P. (1989) The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: economic change and military conflict from 1500 to 2000, Fontana, London.

Keynes, J.M. (1936) The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, MacMillan, London.

Kihl, Young Whan, ed (1994) Korea and the World: Beyond the Cold War, Westview Press, Boulder Colorado.

Krugman, P. (November 1994). “The Myth of Asia’s Miracle: A Cautionary Fable”. Foreign Affairs.

Landes, D. (1998) The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, New York: W W Norton.

Lenin, V.I. (1965) Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism, Progress, Moscow.

Lipietz, A. (1987) Mirages and Miracles: the crises of global Fordism, Verso, London.

Luxemburg, R. (1963) The Accumulation of Capital, Routledge, London.

Madison, A (2001) The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, OECD 2001.

Mandel, E. (1980) Long Waves of Capitalist Development, CUP, Cambridge.

Mao, Z. (1967) ‘Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society’, Selected Works of Mao Zedong Volume 1, Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, pages 13-21.

Marx, K. (1976) Capital Volume 1: a critique of political economy, Penguin, London.

Marx, K. (1978) Capital Volume 2: a critique of political economy, Penguin/New Left Review, London.

Marx, K. (1981) Capital Volume 3: a critique of political economy, Penguin/New Left Review, London.
McLean, B. and Elkind, P. (2004) The Smartest Guys in the Room: the amazing rise and scandalous fall of Enron, Portfolio, New York.

McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: the extensions of man, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

Meiskens Wood, E. (2003) Empire of Capital, Verso, London.

von Mises, L. (1947) Planned Chaos, Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-On-Hudson.
Negri, T. (1988) ‘Keynes and the Capitalist Theory of the State’, Revolution Retrieved: selected writings on Marx, Keynes, capitalist crisis & new social subjects 1967-83, Red Notes, London, pages 9-42.

Negri T. and Hardt, M. (2000) Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass.

Ocalan, A. (2007) Prison Writings: the roots of civilisation, Pluto, London.

Odell, J. S. (2000) Negotiating the World Economy, Cornell University Press.

Okina Y., Shirakawa M., and Shiratsuka S., ‘The Asset Price Bubble and Monetary Policy: Japan’s Experience in the Late 1980s and the Lessons’, Monetary and Economic Studies (February 2001).

Pilbeam, K. (2006) Finance and Financial Markets, Palgrave.

Phillips, N. (2006) Globalising International Political Economy, Palgrave.

Pressman, S. (1999) Fifty Major Economists, Routledge, London.

Reich, R. (1991) The Work of Nations: a blueprint for the future, Simon &
Schuster, London.

Ricardo, D. (1911) The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Everyman, London.

Richardson, B. (1997) Japanese Democracy: Power, Coordination, and Performance, Yale University Press. New Haven and London.

Ridderstråle, J. and Nordström, K. (2000) Funky Business: talent makes capital dance, ft.com, London.

Roberts, P. (2004) The End of Oil, Bloomsbury.

Rostow, W.W. (1960) The Stages of Economic Growth: a non-communist manifesto, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Rubin, I.I. (1979) A History of Economic Thought, Ink Links, London.

Sachs, J. (2005) The End of Poverty, Penguin.

Scholte, J. (2000) Globalisation, Critical Introduction, London: Macmillan.

Schumpeter, J. (1976) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Harper, New York.

Smith, A. (1976) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations Volume 1 & Volume 2, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Stiglitz, Joseph and Yusuf S. eds. (2001) Rethinking the East Asian Miracle, World Bank and Oxford University Press, Washington DC and New York.

Stiglitz, Joseph (2003) Globalization and Its Discontents, Penguin Books, London.

Stubbs, S. and Underhill, G. (1999) Political Economy and the Changing Global Order, Palgrave.

Szporluk, R. (1988) Communism & Nationalism: Karl Marx versus Friedrich List, OUP, Oxford.

Todd, T. (2004) After the Empire: the breakdown of the American order, Constable, London.

Toynbee, A. (1946) A Study of History, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

van Wolferen, K. (1990) The Enigma of Japanese Power: People and Politics in a Stateless Nation, Random Books.

Wallerstein, I. (1979) The Capitalist World-Economy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Warren, B. (1980) Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism, Verso, London.

White, D. (1996) The American Century: the Rise & Decline of the United States as a World Power, Yale University Press, New Haven 1996.

Wood, C. (2005). The Bubble Economy: Japan’s Extraordinary Speculative Boom of the ‘80s and the Dramatic Bust of the ‘90s, Barnes and Noble.

World Bank (1993) The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy, Oxford University Press.

World Bank (2004) World Development Indicators, Washington DC: World Bank.

Yarborough, B. and Yarborough, Y. (1997) The World Economy: Trade and Finance, Dryden Press.

PERIODICALS

The Economist
Capital & Class
Journal of Political Economy
International Studies Perspectives
The World Economy
Third World Quarterly
Race and Class
New Left Review
Journal of World Trade
OPEC Review
Asian Pacific Review
World Development
The Journal of Asian Studies
The Journal of Japanese Studies
Japan Forum

WEBSITES

http://www.imf.org/external/data.htm
http://www.iccwbo.org/
http://www.europa.eu.int
http://worldbank.org/
http://eldis.org/
http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/
http://www.newunionism.net/
http://www.un.org/climatechange/
http://www.japanesestudies.org.uk
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/

Assignment

Answer ONE question, typed in 12 point or above and approximately 2,500 words in length.

Submit to the Assessment Letterbox in the SSHL Undergraduate Office, Wells Street by 6.00pm, Tuesday 8th January 2008.

Severe penalties will apply to