Photo by Narinder Nanu/AFP/Getty

Raza Rumi writes a review of the book, Indian Mass Media and the Politics of Change, a collection of essays about how the Indian mass media, centered on the rising Indian middle class, controls and shapes the narrative of a rising capitalist India.

Fernandes makes an unpopular (and increasingly ‘unpatriotic’) conclusion: that despite the shining India narratives, India remains a poor, developing country with myriad problems. Using the stories of a reputed journalist P Sainath, this essay looks at the ‘other’ India which the ‘hyperreal’ media has rendered invisible to provide a more palatable vision for its key corporate target – the middle classes. The conclusion of the essay is haunting as it cites the infamous TV commercial where the legendary actor Amitabh Bachchan indirectly blames the poor for “preventing India from realizing its true potential”. Pohjonen’s introduction also cites this memorable line from Sainath: “Evading reality helps no one…a society that does not know itself cannot cope.”

Bus drivers are forced back to work by their union bosses and made to put up signs denouncing the strike (photo by Hossam el-Hamalawy).

In the past, the state backed unions played a central role in controlling and/or mobilizing the working class on behalf of Mubarak. Today, the continue to be the loyal servants of the regime and its new masters, the army junta.

Over at my other blog I quote from Dr. Robyn Magalit Rodriguez‘s new book on globalization, “labor brokerage”, and Filipina/o migrant workers  (you can gain access to her current lectures at UC Davis here).  Her work offers a critique of current scholarship on globalization (and hence postcolonial and transnational theory).  Especially in the field of Filipina/o studies where a huge focus has been on ignoring the roles of nation states and class structures under the current flows of global capitalism and American imperialism.

Philippine international migration is emblematic of globalization.  In describing the increasing mobility of labor, it is often Filipina and Filipino migrants that scholars refer to as a primary example of this phenomenon.  To suggest that the Philippine state is crucial to an understanding of Philippine international migration, as I do here, therefore, it to make an important intervention in the scholarship on international migration.  Much of the scholarship on international migration of late has tended to reify capital flows from “above” to undersand global labor flows or, in opposition to this scholarship, has examined globalization, specifically immigrant transnationalism from “below.”  My research shows that the state plays a central role in both these processes, but just as importantly my research shows how the state links and mediates between these two processes through a case study of Philippine migration.  I argue that the state is fundamental to globalization, just as importantly global processes constitute the state.

The lastest BAYAN-USA podcast is out, hosted by myself and the Secretary-General of BAYAN-USA Rhonda Ramiro.

You can check it out on iTunes here.

According to the San Jose Mercury News:

[T]housands of Kaiser employees walked off the job to protest stalled negotiations over a new contract.

Kaiser brought in replacement workers and planned to keep all of its hospitals and medical offices open during the one-day action, which ends at 7 a.m. Wednesday.

But some drop-in services such as optical sales may be closed in certain locations, Kaiser noted in a letter to patients.

The strike was called by the 4,000 members of National Union of Healthcare Workers, representing mental health clinicians, clinical psychologists, licensed social workers and opticians. The union began bargaining for a new contract in 2010.

Two other unions agreed to walk out in sympathy — up to 17,000 registered nurses with the California Nurses Association/ National Nurses United, and 650 members of Stationary Engineers Local 39.

Also the NUHW website has the latest coverage of the strike here.

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Video found via Hossam.

On my blog The Excerpt Mill I post a quote from an essay on Mao Zeodong’s philosophical  thought by Richard Johnson:

Because, relative to that of the Communist, the socioeconomic persona of the proletariat is limited–and, give the empirical existence of political vicissitudes, may remain so indefinitely–the chance that from such a basis alone will be launched a coherent, direct, and enlightened politics, is slight.  Understandable then, in this light, is the enigmatic logic of the Manifesto, where, inscribed among the historic character of communists, is the task of the “formation of the proletariat into a class.”  The apparent paradox that an entity that is already a class, must be made to become a class, is comprehensible when it is remembered that the historical process of consciousness is not identical to the consciousness of the historical process; that, moreover, “ideological forms” have a historical depth related to, but not immediately determined by, material development.  It is thus by this logic that the qualitative transformation of empirical, perhaps sporadic, political action into direct, and conscious, class-based political programs exists within the historical scope of an organizing medium led by a group of enlightened elites, vis Communists).

Click on the pic for full and timely updates by Hossam el-Hamalawy (Photo by Moises Saman)

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Over at my blog The Excerpt Mill I quote philosopher Jacques Derrida on the idea of logocentrism within European philosophical thought:

Within this age of metaphysics, between Descartes and Hegel, Rousseau is undoubtedly the only one or the first one to make a theme or a system of the reduction of writing profoundly implied by the entire age.  He repeats the inaugural movement of the Phaedurs and of De interpretatione but starts from a new model of presence: the subject’s self-presence within consciousness or feeling.  What he excluded more violently than others must, of course, have fascinated and tormented him more than it did others.  Descartes had driven out the sign–and particularly the written sign–from the cogito and from clear and distinct evidence; the latter being the very presence of the idea of the soul, the sign was an accessory abandoned in the region of the senses and the imagination.  Hegel reappropriates the sensible sign to the movement of the Idea.  He criticizes Leibniz and praises phonetic writing within the horizon of an absolutely self-present logos, remaining close t itself within the unity of its speech and its concept.  But neither Descartes nor Hegel grappled with the problem of writing.  The place of this combat and crisis is called the eighteenth century.  Not only because it restores the rights of sensibility, the imagination, and the sign, but because attempts of the Leibnizian type had opened a breach within logocentric security.  We must bring to light what it was that, right from the start, within these attempts at a universal characteristic, limited the power and extent of the breakthrough.  Before Hegel and in explicit terms, Rousseau condemned the universal characteristic; not  because of the theological foundation which ordained its possibility for the infinite understanding of logos of God, but because it seemed to suspend the voice.  ”Through” this condemnation can be read the most energetic eighteenth-century reaction organizing the defense of phonologism and of logocentric metaphysics.  What threatens is indeed writing.  It is not an accidental and haphazard threat; it reconciles within a single historical system the projects of pasigraphy, the discovery of non-European scripts, or at any rate the massive progress of the techniques and deciphering, and finally the idea of a general science of language and writing.  Against all of these prussures, a battle is then declared.  ”Hegelianism” will be its finest scar.