"Harass the Brass"
Anonymous

A friend who was in the U.S. military during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War told me that before President G.H.W. Bush visited the troops in Saudi Arabia, enlisted men and women who would be in Bush's immediate vicinity had their rifle and pistol ammunition taken away from them. This was supposedly done to avoid "accidents." But it was also clear to people on the scene that Bush and his corporate handlers were somewhat afraid of the enlisted people who Bush would soon be killing in his unsuccessful re-election campaign.

"A Rift in Empire?

The Multitudes in the Face of War"

Brian Holmes

The February 15 [2003] antiwar demonstrations proved it: the self-organization of free singularities is possible on a planetary scale. And that was an event, despite all that followed. In a manifesto-text written just after those demonstrations, I used the language of Negri and Hardt to say that the multitudes could create a rift in Empire. In a context where the Aristocracy (the great transnational companies) had been weakened by a string of financial disasters, where the Monarchy (the political and military command of the earth) had fallen apart in serious dissension, I wanted to encourage the democratic action of the Plebe, against the scorn of the American, British, Spanish and Italian leaders. It was a moment that had multiplied the world's political stages, overflowing the traditional mechanisms of representation.

hydrarchist writes

"What is the Meaning of Autonomy Today?


Subjectivation, Social Composition, Refusal of Work"
Bifo

I do not intend to
make an historical recapitulation of the movement called
autonomy, but I want to understand its peculiarity through
an overview of some concepts like "refusal of work",
and "class composition".
Journalists often
use the word "operaismo" to define a political
and philosophical movement which surfaced in Italy during
the 60s. I absolutely dislike this term, because it
reduces the complexity of the social reality to the
mere datum of the centrality of the industrial workers
in the social dynamics of late modernity.

The origin of this philosophical
and political movement can be identified in the works
of Mario Tronti, Romano Alquati, Raniero Panzieri, Toni
Negri, and its central focus can be seen in the emancipation
from the Hegelian concept of subject.

In the place of the historical
subject inherited from the Hegelian legacy, we should
speak of the process of subjectivation. Subjectivation
takes the conceptual place of subject. This conceptual
move is very close to the contemporary modification
of the philosophical landscape that was promoted by
French post-structuralism. Subjectivation in the place
of subject. That means that we should not focus on the
identity, but on the process of becoming. This also
means that the concept of social class is not to be
seen as an ontological concept, but rather as a vectorial
concept.

"Net Culture:

Culture Between Conformity and Resistance"

Wolfgang Schirmacher

The human individual is a cultural being that with the aid of linguistic symbols creates a world not provided for by nature. We are ‘artificial by nature,’ as the philosophical anthropologist Hellmuth Plessner emphasized, and our cultural achievement consists in technological ingenuity, in the constructs of institutions; it reveals itself ideally in media and art. With culture we create a human sphere and establish realms of private and public encounter. In the last few years a cultural phenomenon has developed with the Internet which seeks its equal in history in its intellectual consequence and incomparable power to generate and foster communal belonging. Not even in their golden ages did the world religions possess such global force of attraction, allowing a world culture to hold sway and rendering regional differences obsolete. In the Internet, cultural imagination meets with the material conditions of many varied societies and transcends these. The long dominant difference between public and private sphere has been suspended, and the Internet has become the universal venue of encounter. The functioning of society at a very basic level is affected here, one which usually escapes our attention. The cultural change effected through the new media cannot be overestimated, but it is yet uncertain where it will lead.