70-71

Hustlers, Beats & Others by Ned Polsky

New York: The Lyons Press, 1998 [1967]

266 pages. Paper. $27.95

Reviewed by Ralph Dumont

Apparently the one book Polsky wrote, Hustlers, Beats & Others is a collection of essays about various subjects (pool hustlers, Greenwich Village beats, criminological research methods, and pornography) linked together as a study in the sociology of “deviance” in American society. -e expanded 1998 edition is superior to the 2007 reprint of the 1967 original, owing to added material including numerous addenda in the text and footnotes (mostly from 1969) as well as a foreword and a new concluding chapter called “Thirty Years On,” written shortly before the author’s death in 2000. I decided to write about this book because I found it fascinating, well written, and free of the boring jargon and stale ideas that seem to characterize most sociological writing. Although anarchism is not a specic focus of Polsky’s, it is mentioned in the essay on the beats; the book is full of themes relating to work, leisure, crime, deviant subcultural identities, and the quest for freedom that deserve the attention of anarchists as well as anyone with a curious and critical mind. Polsky was no moralist, as is shown in his definition of deviance: “Deviance is what is morally stigmatized, at a particular time in a particular society, by that society’s decisive power groups” (204).

Read more: Hustlers, Beats & Others

Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International (June 1957-1960)

By Guy Debord

Semiotext(e)
397 pages. Paper.

Reviewed by Clayten James
The Situationist movement was exciting without a doubt. Their exhilarating lives and words are now being fleshed out by a variety of translations and biographies. The latest piece to the pantheon of critique is Correspondence, a series of letters written by Guy Debord, the secretary for the S.I. and main theorist for the group. While the group produced provocative papers, the letters contained in this long collection are boring, boring, and boring. Only a few of them need to be read to get across the main thrust of the collection.

Read more: Review of Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International

The Departure of Radical Pretense:
A Critical Post-Left Response to Chris Spannos’s “The Coming Insurrection or the Arrival of Suicidal Nonsense?”1

by Lawrence Jarach

A Few Introductory Remarks
It may seem strange to use so much space for a critical response to a negative review of someone else's book, especially if that book is not wholly or uncritically embraced by regular readers and contributors to this journal (see the critical appraisals elsewhere in this issue2). However, the hatchet job from one ostensibly anarchist critic of The Coming Insurrection is full of the kinds of misreadings, distortions, caricatures, and bizarre imputations that are among the most notable instinctive and/or default positions of most Leftists (some anarchists included) when faced with anything even slightly outside their typical celebration of reformist mass movement politics. As such, we decided that a specifically post-left response would be a positive exercise in explaining and promoting the distinctions between that perspective and the usual Leftist absurdities epitomized by Chris Spannos’s apoplectic and delirious rantings.

Read more: The Departure of Radical Pretense

On the Winter of WikiLeaks

It’s impossible to know how all the drama from WikiLeaks and the arrest of co-founder Julian Assange will shake out. From the freezing of their bank accounts to revenge hackers targeting PayPal, online credit card companies, and banks, from hundreds of sympathetic webmasters mirroring the exposed documents to calls from elected officials for Assange’s (extra)judicial murder, developments occur on all sides quicker than the fastest internet connection and everything that’s happening as I write this in December will have been long superseded by the time this issue is published. What’s important for anarchists is not only how we and our allies dance with the foundational myth of the (now-indispensable?) internet – the alleged free flow of information – but the arguably more important issue of the meaning of accurately exposing the mundane duplicity of government policy-makers and shapers. I wrote this a few issues back:

Secrecy, or the division of labor based on access to information, is a cornerstone of all government, all bureaucracy. The most important function of bureaucracy is self-preservation and the maintenance of hierarchy; restriction of knowledge is the best and most effective guarantee for this… the smooth running of a bureaucracy is based on the self-perpetuating cycle of knowledge and secrecy… Then there is the secrecy necessary for diplomacy and espionage, not to mention war. The obsession with secrecy [is] a standard operating procedure for maintaining government control. (Anarchy #60, Fall/Winter 2005/6)

Read more: Issue 70 editorial