NEW ISSUE OF CNS OUT; BAGHDAD BURNING OUT

the new issue of Capitalism Nature Socialism came in the mail yesterday. I guess you can read the articles here if you have access. John Clark's piece on the post-hurricane denouement in New Orleans is in it. One can read this piece elsewhere on the net. Clark is an anarchist, and hopefully he will be at the anarchist conference at Pitzer college (see yesterday's entry). Clark relates his own story to the story of Elisee Reclus, a mid-19th-century anarchist who visited New Orleans for a couple of years. Clark's discussion has a lot of very specific details in it -- he spent some time taking with Mama D, an important New Orleans community activist.

Maria Mies has a very articulate and concise explanation of the "subsistence economy" in it, complete with a set of principles. The center of Mies' "subsistence economy" is that life is the only purpose of the subsistence economy, as opposed to money, which is what capitalism is about.

Chaone Mallory has a piece on treesitting in the "Biscuit" area of the Siskiyou National Forest of southern Oregon. Mallory relates something of the ecofeminism shared by the treesitters. I found another of her pieces here.

A cluster of works in the middle of this issue deal with biopower and (Hardt and Negri's) "Empire." Ahmed Allahwala discusses "biopolitics" in a review of an issue of the Austrian journal Kurswechsel. This is a very abstract piece. Thomas Atzert has a short piece on "biopower" as it relates to Hardt and Negri's Empire. Christoph Hermann discusses private enterprise "networks" as a relatively new form of capitalist organization. Susanne Schultz discusses the feminist critique of Hardt and Negri's Empire.

Jasmin Sydee and Sharon Beder discuss a private corporation called "Earth Sanctuaries Limited" which buys up parcels of Australian land, keeps feral animals off of them so that native Australian species can thrive, and opens up said parcels to ecotourism. Sydee and Beder conclude that "Earth Sanctuaries Limited" is not sustainable nor necessarily public-friendly. Timothy W. Luke has a piece called "The System of Sustainable Degradation" which tries to recast "sustainable development" as sustainable degradation. A set of book reviews graces the end.

Academic journals are a petit-bourgeois thing. To pay for publication costs, they go whoring after library funds, charging the libraries lots of money to carry them. CNS is in an even more difficult situation because it is not available in as many libraries as many of the other journals. The problem, for those of us who know better, is in getting access to this stuff. If you have the money, I suppose you should consider subscribing to CNS -- it's $51/ year or something. Ecosocialist discussion and theory are extremely hard to come by, and this is one of the few journals I know of that publishes such discussion in English.

Also, a new Baghdad Burning came out. It should dispel the illusion that there is a real "Iraq government" out there.