Building a Third Camp Tendency: An Interview with Samuel Farber

Samuel Farber (1939-) is a prominent scholar, essayist, and political activist. Born and raised in Marianao, Cuba, Farber participated in the popular movement against the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship as a high school student. In 1958, he moved to the United States, where he shifted further left and embraced a third camp, anticapitalist/anti-Stalinist perspective. He took part in the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and played an active role in the Independent Socialist Clubs (ISC) and its successor organization, the International Socialists (IS) during the 1960s and 1970s. In recent years he has become a prolific political commentator, contributing to numerous online and print publications, including Jacobin, New Politics, Foreign Policy in Focus, Havana Times, Spectre, Revista Sin Permiso, and La Joven Cuba (the last two in Spanish)

Third Camp Politics in Theory and Practice: An Interview with Joanne Landy and Thomas Harrison

An interview covering Joanne Landy and Thomas Harrison's work as Third Camp activists and co-directors of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy

The bitter taste of payback: the pathologising effect of TV revengendas

The thirst for vengeance is a timeless subject in popular entertainment. One need only think of Old Testament scripture; Shakespeare\u27s Hamlet; Quentin Tarantino\u27s Kill Bill or the TV series Revenge, and we immediately conjure up images of a protagonist striving to seek justice to avenge a heinous wrong committed against them. These texts, and others like it, speak to that which is ingrained in our human spirit about not only holding others responsible for their actions, but also about retaliation as payback. This article seeks to problematise the way the popular revenge narrative effectively constructs the vendetta as a guilty pleasure through which the audience can vicariously gain satisfaction, while at the same time perpetuates law\u27s rhetoric that personal desires for vengeance are to be repressed and denied. In particular, the article will demonstrate the way such popular revenge narratives contribute to the pathologising of human desire for payback

The punisher and the politics of retributive justice

The archetypal character of the retributive antihero – one who makes his own rules and follows his own conscience – is a familiar figure in mass culture, appearing in film, television, video games, and comics. This character represents the frustrations of millions of people who feel powerless and who fantasize about striking back at their enemies, be they real or imagined. This essay looks at one of the most prominent vigilantes in contemporary pop culture, the Punisher, and explores the relationship between Punisher comics, and vigilante entertainment more generally, to time-honored debates over justice, morality, and the law. In this essay I will argue that the Punisher represents an inherently political worldview, one that values emotion over reason and unchecked anger over due process. The character makes the case for the notion that white-hot rage, channeled into the right kind of 330 Worcester self-generated military campaign, has redemptive social value. For the Punisher, anger is not a feral emotion that should be expelled from the political or legal realm. Instead, it is a dissolvent that allows us to apprehend things as they really are