are only slightly exaggerated: my health has crumbled and my mind is like scrambled eggs - I have barely moved in the last week and only slept every second night or so. I am still coughing like someone twice my age, while my liver is in revolt against me and I’m having some trouble putting down the insurrection: I’d start a revolution if I could get up in the morning, but instead I’ve been lying around groaning in pain or else killing time reading very violent gay porn or both.

But though I am feeling less than human, or all-too human, I am alive, and the last thing I want is for this blog to become some chronicle of decline. Decadence, sure.

And my days are overlapping.

OK, so project 1 and 2 are done, leaving the unfinished, probably unfinishable projects previously subterranean to the previous exaltant emanations of hostility and indifference.

Hence new title: Theory of the offensive.Three major prizes to anyone who spots the reference without googling. OK, my own favorite interpretations:

(a) considering what offends, what provokes or produces antipathy, insult, pain, etcetera, what can transgress, violate rules, norms, etiquette, good form - a project only-apparently in any way separate from

(b) attempting to think questions of contestation, of conducting an offensive, aufheben, class warfare as the continuation of daily class struggle by other means, accounts of possibilities to combine confontation with existing powers over the reproduction of capitalist social relations on the one hand, and communisation on the other i.e. the difference between dealing with low intensity conflict imposing and re-imposing the status quo, versus full-spectrum resistance seeking to overthrow the existing elites and their repressive forces, an offensive in the military sense but one conducted so as to create communism as a world of new individual and collective freedoms, projects and endless adventure.

Yet Another Televised Revolution, exclusively distributed as part of the Straight-to-Video Collection

My new bland ambition: a critique of schematic efforts at the periodisation of the combined and uneven subsumptions constituting this current moment in the history of capital, in which the concept of "the left-wings of capital" plays a substantial supporting role, with cameo and bit parts for leftists, "activists", insert your own etceteras, also providing technical assistance helping to give the left-wings of capital the illusion of three dimensions…

…in which illusion I include our new geopolitics of reification i.e. the illusion of three dimensions rather than four, the provision of special lighting to generate a depthless appearance of the always-already eternal, an occlusion of the conflictual constitution of the lived categories of capital thus, as a bonus, producing that flat Surrealpolitik making imaginable some sick, consensual left-wing capitalism in which we can all labour hard and manage the oh-so-fairer exchanges of the work-camps on whose ethical status we can found a good conscience, high moral ground and claim for surplus value…well, you get the picture, we can all assent to exploitation-as-liberation. Fight the class struggle: Kill a fair trader this winter.

In 1971 Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky discussed a range of politico-philosophical matters on a Dutch television series called ‘reflexive water’, devoted to putting together two different ‘thinkers’ in each episode. The Foucault-Chomsky episode can be watched and heard in full at http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/CHOMSKY/video/143726, in English with Dutch subtitles. At that time much the better known of the two, and not only in the Netherlands, most of the subsequent questions are to Chomsky,  but an attentive contemporry listener can observe foucault giving a good account of his views, ultimately far more interesting than Noam (but I would say that).

This is a version of the poster I had above my bed as a child and teen: though mine was more garish, almost unbelievably so, it did contain the same picture and slogan ("…and what will be left of them?"). See if you can guess why this came to mind today.

don’t get mad, don’t get even, just get out

Doctors, lawyers, courts, police/informants, a bank, the Federal Department of Concentration Camps, an ex-partner with control over my future she definitely does not wish to have, hard-to-shift bloodstains (don’t worry, not my blood), a phone I have managed to have working maybe a tenth of the time, and which has supplied electric shocks at random times, an internet account that has imploded for reasons of its own though it seems to be semi-working now (only four thousand unread e-mails, no joke). (On the plus side police seem to have finally stopped talking about the proposed ‘assault occasioning actual bodily harm on a police officer’ charge from three years ago, and have never turned up with the footage I know exists of me punching out an aggressive shop assistant in an inner city trendy location - unlike me, sure, but ‘these things’ happen or something.)

I’m too urban for run-to-the-hills/save-the-forest/eco-guerrillas-in-the-mist scenarios, which would only exacerbate the continual lowering of my brow and tendential fall in my rate of intelligence, plus country people scare me and I always thinks I’ll end up getting either lynched as a jew-commie-faggot-greenie-horse-thief, or else just sacrificed to the corn.

Still, running.

In 1971 one of my father’s sperms beat out several million others to be the first at my mother’s egg, fertilizing that egg and producing whatever eventually became whatever I am. That was the last time I ever came first in any competitive sporting event. I never ran to anything ever again, only from.

Anyway, those who keep up with events listed at whoisfuckingben.org will know that, as someone who has spent most of their life around goyim, anglo-gentiles in fact, I am now faced with a question other than the usual one concerning their astonishing capacity for denial, the new question being: how did I end up having sex simultaneously with two people demonstrably willing to wear black gloves with the fingers cut off? (OK, one was jewish, it is the aesthetic between homelessness and post-gothy-ness I’m invoking here.) Close to a full ninety seconds of incendiary action, and if necessary I’ll take a polygraph (means ‘many graphs’). If this keeps happening I may start wearing underwear.

………………….

Anyway, I just read an article appearing in theory@berkeley by some guy named Daniel Ross which I recommend highly. I love him like a brother (Jeb Bush). Can’t be bothered finding the link, so go look it up yourselves.

………………..

The Assassination Collective have now launched their ‘Fight,…or Assimilate and Die’ CD at the Tote, a night I missed through being inexcusibly self-absorbed, but anyone reading this should also look up TAC website (the band, not the transport accident people).

Though I hate to be one of those people who just repost stuff on their blogs, this one seems an effective illustration of certain emerging tendencies, even though ‘Reporters Without Borders’ are truly repulsive.

Yahoo evidence helped jail another Chinese journalist
by Staff Brand Republic 28 Apr 2006

http://urlsnip.com/297225

HONG KONG - A Chinese court has cited evidence given to it by internet giant Yahoo! in helping to jail a Chinese journalist for ten years.

The journalist Wang Xiaoning was jailed in 2003, but his sentencing and Yahoo!’s role in it has only now come to light, according to human rights group Human Rights in China (HRIC). Xiaoning is the fourth journalist to have been jailed with the help of evidence provided by Yahoo!.

Last year Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo!, admitted that the company helped Chinese authorities to jail another reporter, arguing that it had no choice and was obliged by local law to do so.

The internet company has been attacked by press freedom campaign Reporters
Without Borders for "going to any lengths to gain shares of the Chinese market".

In September, evidence provided by Yahoo! helped convict journalist Shi Tao,
a writer for Chinese newspaper Dangdai Shang Bao.

Xiaoning was convicted of the charge of incitement to "subvert state power" after he emailed documents calling for multi-party elections. Chinese authorities objected to such statements by Tao as "Never forget that China is still an authoritarian dictatorship", and attacks on China’s record of denying workers’ trade union rights.

The court cited evidence in its verdict that included information provided by Yahoo! in Hong Kong, which confirmed his Yahoo! email address was a China-based one as well as details about his Yahoo! group.

However, the judgment did not indicate whether Yahoo! Hong Kong or Yahoo! China, which is now operated by mainland-based Alibaba.com, provided specific information regarding Wang’s identity.

Sources in China told HRIC that Xiaoning suffered repeated physical abuse in detention between September 2002 and February 2004. He has since been denied appeal and told that if he appealed again he would be denied any opportunity for parole.

Yahoo! is not the only US internet firm to come under fire for co-operating with the Chinse authorities. Google has also been criticised after it agreed to allow its site to be censored in order to have access to millions of Chinese web users.

Chinese who type words such as Tibet, Taiwan, Falun Gong and Tiananmen Square into Google will come up with restricted results. Microsoft’s MSN has also restricted its search results in the country.

"’Not to indulge in storytelling’ still remains for me the one and 
only definition of materialism." Louis Althusser

A quick note: it is Freud’s birthday, and to celebrate I was hoping to bring a plague to America, but I’ve had a scheduling problem.

Yesterday was Marx’ birthday, which we marked in the usual way.

love and communist greetings to everyone I would, as a matter of course, offer such affectionate greetings to,

Benjamin