The problem of political culture

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Notes

¹Tom Goyens, “Gemeinschaft and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City.” Doctoral thesis, University of Louvain (Belgium), 2003.

²I remember my astonishment at being asked a few years after the fact, “What were you doing during the Revolution?”

³Ironically, one finds “progressive” forces lamenting the rather unsurprising fact that corporate-owned media represent the corporate interest rather than that of the public. Neither should it be surprising that when war is declared, a safely domesticated and anemic alternative such as NPR can so easily mutate into what has only half-humorously been labeled “Nationalistic Puppet Radio.”

⁴See the fascinating and inspiring documentary film “American Utopia” for the story of this community and the lessons that can be learned from its achievement and its weaknesses. Beverly Lewis (writer and director), “American Utopia,” Firefly Productions and Louisiana Public Broadcasting, 1994.

⁵With still small but quite notable exceptions such as Free Speech TV, which is available to eleven million homes through satellite and cable providers, and Indymedia, which is a powerful resource for the global justice movement.

⁶That is, one that remains, in Hegel's terminology, on the level of moralität as opposed to that of sittlichkeit.

⁷For one case study, see John P. Clark, “The Indigenous Struggle Against Violence, Exploitation and Ecological Destruction: Lessons of the West Papuan Resistance to State and Corporate Domination” in the Archives of the Centre d'Informations et d'Etudes sur les Stratégies Internationales des Mouvements et des Sociétés Américaines at http://www.u-grenoble3.fr/ciesimsa/ateliers/a10/art10-8.html. For a more comprehensive discussion of the lessons to be learned from traditional peoples, see Ariel Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics (London and New York: Zed Books, 1997), especially pp. 118–149.

⁸Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State (New York: Zone Books, 1987).