I just spent a half hour drudging through two interconnected malls in search of a pair of cheap sneakers. All they had in the mall(s) were like Florsheim, ridiculously expensive hiking boots, a few nikes, reeboks, etc which were all way too expensive for me, and ither sundry footwear of unbelievablly high prices. I found the shoes i was looking for (fuck me and my brand loyalty) in an Urban Outfitters a few blocks away from the aforementioned malls. I now have a pair of shoes which are not open at the sole, a rare occurrence for me indeed. My shoes came with a tag that described them as an "American Original." Right below that, it says "tag made in Indonesia." Tres Thomas Freidman.



Speaking of Capitalism and its discontents, one of the greatest hip hop groups of the last decade, commie gangsta funkheads The Coup, have signed to Epitaph. I'm glad that Party Music, one of the best albums of the 2000s so far, is getting reissued, because it's a record everyone needs to hear and to study feverishly, and i'm eagerly awaiting the new album which is going to drop sometime in early '05. I'm also hoping that The Coup are able to circumvent "Epitaph syndrome" - that is, decent bands signing to the label and then producing terrible music. (The slackers found a way around it, and there's no comparison between the slackers and The Coup, no offense to the slackers.)



I love Josh. He's a fantastic organizer and a great person, and even though I got a little snappy with him sometimes over the course of the two years we organized together (and he thinks i banned him from the quotation page, which is a total lie,) i have a huge amount of respect for him. That said, i have a lot of gripes with this column, and i'm going to go into them at length, so bear with me. (I need to stop reading the YDN. I only do it cause i got booted from the fhue news listserve when i lost my yale address and i crave up to date information about the unions at yale, which they YDN really doesn't talk about that much anyway, unless people make them.)



My objections to Josh's piece concern the final three paragraphs and the arguments he makes about a progressive electoral and post-electoral strategy. I don't disagree with Josh that electing Kerry is a beginning rather than an end. I have to make GOTV calls all day tomorrow, and i'm ok with this because Bush needs to go. It's Josh's polite braiding of those on the left who "see critiquing politicians as noble but electing them as petty or contaminating" which initially commands my ire.



Josh, this strikes me as an extremely and irresponsibly simplified account of the relationship between, say, the global justice movements and state power. I wish you, as someone who has participated in these movements, wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the other kinds of power, and other kinds of relationships to that power, that activists and communities have fought to build in these new global social movements symbolized by the EZLN New Year's Day uprising in 1994, the mass mobilizations against the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, World Economic Forum, and the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and the global eruptions of protest against the US Invasion of Iraq on February 15, 2003. The rhetorical project of establishing two extreme wrong paths in order to plot out a correct middle strikes me as not only Friedmanian, but also as problematic in that at least one of these paths is so simplified as to give an insatisfactory if not altogether dishonest account of its position, not to mention the fact that this reduces Hardt and Negri's "multitude" to a unitary and sole fringe, speaking in broken and indecipherable platitudes rather than the roar of mass demonstrations or the "unintelligible and frightening rhythmic cries" of anticolonial revolt.



I agree with the claims you make about the importance of a Kerry presidency when it comes to the right to organize, the environment, the minimum wage, etc. But there are many even on the most indecent fringes of the north american left, anarchists, communists, primitivists, maoists, greens, even the leninists whose thesis of inherent contradictions you find abhorrent in the first sentence of your final paragraph, who agree with you that a kerry victory is not a "dead end," but (for them) a grim necessity in the face of total fucking global annihilation. I'm not sure against whom you see yourself as arguing -- Nader? Or maybe i'm just being self-centered or solipsistic.



Among the claims you make here that i have the greatest problem with, i think, is this one: that "organizing out of powerlessness doesn't do much good unless it manages to seize power." There have been entire books written about the struggle of the new social movements to "change the world without taking power," as John Holloway puts it, (though i've not yet read his book,) a political sentiment common to everyone from the Zapatistas to many uocistas. Building and seizing power are separate acts with separate implications and consequences and should not be confused. Where Hardt and Negri are persuasive for me is where they argue that these new movements are fighting to constitute a new global network of social relationships, that the movements we are building locate in the seizure of power the victory of the powerful over the "powerless" (although this is a problematic term employed so generally) and thus envision the constitution of a counterpower capable of destructuring capitalism. Dejargonified, what i mean is that when we talk about taking power, they win. Kerry needs to win the elction tomorrow because of card check and because bush is backed by all the virulent racists and homophobic ideologues, the anti-immigrant republicans who aren't backing nader, the homeland security fascists, the defense contractors and the cheerleaders of empire. But if Kerry wins tomorrow, that doesn't necessarily mean that we do. Apologies for the rant, i've been incoherently mulling over this for a while. And i'm sorry if i'm going overboard or being a schmuck cause that isn't my intent.



Incidentally, Stolen Honor was on TV this morning, and boy, i never realized that the "Hanoi Hilton," the new left, and POW torture were all Jane Fonda's fault. My stars!