Dear Friends of the Turtle,

Welcome to the second monthly Bulletin of the Turtle! Fraternal greetings to those who have stood shoulder-to-shell with the Didactic Pleasure Monster in the six months since our first bold steps into cyberspace, but also and especially to those comrades who have joined our subscription list for the first time!

The contours of the class struggle have shaped a new political order in this important recent Red-Green October: the governing coalition has come together in Germany and the Italian premiership has finally fallen into the lap of Massimo D'Alema, leader of the former Partito Communista Italiana. The arrest of Augusto Pinochet in London has given joy to the peoples of Latin America, and we wait to see whether the British courts will send him to trial or succumb to a predictable rightist deviation. And on this anniversary weekend of the Great October Socialist Revolution we celebrate the Fall of Gingrich: the People have said Niet! to Newt! Finally, the Turtle also lifts its head and salutes Amartya Sen, for his victory over the massed ranks of the bourgeois political economists in the competition for the Nobel Prize in Economics!

Shifting our gaze from the global to the local (while noting with dialectical satisfaction that the local is accessible globally), we want to draw your attention this month to three kinds of revolutionary practice that combine to transform our webspace. First, to the new feature that Raj has managed to engineer, so that bits of the screen turn an inspiring red when the mouse passes over them. Ever more exciting graphics contributions are on their way with moving parts, and we have a new slogan: "It's Always 1917 At The Voice of the Turtle! Second, to the new content, in particular to Arash Abizadeh's debut contribution, and to the electronic discussion of Antebellum Parasexuality which has finally appeared in the Turtle's archives. Just in time for this Bulletin, we welcome Dave Renton back to our pages: the debate about "New Labour" was bound to reach our pages before too long, and he has kicked it off by rolling a particularly contentious juicy apple into our midst. Michaele Ferguson cracked the Turtle's wordsearch competition, and found the mistake in it (!), and she has kindly provided us with a new Communist-themed puzzle. We continue to supply Bolshevik Soundbites for the front page of the Turtle, and we are also proud to present our new set of Gramsci links. Third, to the launch of the Turtle's latest cyber-venture, the Dictionary of the Turtle, whose first pages are being posted to the site simultaneously with the distribution of this message.

The Dictionary of the Turtle will be a vital reference work for the new millennium and an important resource for oppositional struggle. Steeped in the tradition of Pierre Bayle and Denis Diderot while ever-alert to embrace the emancipatory potentialities of the new, the Dictionary will arm a generation of militants with the knowledge they need to transform themselves and their social and physical environments. An encyclopaedia of history and politics, culture, science, struggle, and of the various forms of ideological mystification, the Dictionary of the Turtle will shed its light into the nooks and crannies of our collective existence and help to forge new paths. Above all, however, the Dictionary must be a collaborative effort. Between us, we must prove the truth of the post-structuralist maxim that all reading is writing by bringing this beast to birth as painlessly as possible. The first entries have been posted; together we must produce the rest, and to this end a rather useful on-line form has been created on which the Turtle's friends and allies can compose their own Dictionary articles. Please join us, and help to make this exciting new project a success.

Work in the pipeline from last month is still regrettably stuck behind the U-bend of history: Raj has had his hands full organising a conference on the dialectics of globalisation at Cornell and Chris is still waiting for the bloody University of Minnesota Press to send him the book he ordered two months ago. But hope always springs eternal, and we know from experience that the most unlikely submissions always arrive from the less likely sources. The usual plea goes out again today: we need a steady supply of articles, because we live in fear that one day the Turtle will wake up and have nothing in particular to say. Political argument is, as ever, the lifeblood of the Turtle, and if you can help her (or him - we still don't know how to sex Turtles!) find the right words, then your name will live forever in the annals of Amphibious Reform Politics. Please send your articles, editorials, op-eds, poems, letters, advertisements, news, interviews, reviews, previews, rants, raves and -- of course -- Dictionary entries to us, and we will fast-track them onto the site.

Our subscription list grows slowly but inexorably. Please continue to spread the Good News that is the Cyber-Turtle, encourage your friends and colleagues to visit and bookmark our pages, to subscribe their names, and to join our magnificent voyage to a new society, whose outlines are but dimly perceived yet whose advent is as inevitable as the rising sun.

With comradely greetings,

The Editors.