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Anonymous Comrade writes "This article was printed in issue 222 of the British magazaine 'Black Flag'
The campaign "Against the Europe of the Capital" was a network of
activist groups, indymedia, and actions against the European summits in
Spain during the Spanish presidency of the EU from January to June
2002. The most important summits were Barcelona, Madrid and Sevilla.
However the campaign appears to have been a step back for the
anticapitalist movement after Prague and Genoa. Reformism, a lack of
direct action, failure to use blockades and a lot of police were some
reasons for this retreat.
Donald Nicholson-Smith writes "[The following is a translation of an article by Hervé Kempf that appeared in Le Monde for 25 November 2002 following a number of inaccurate reports on former enragé and situationist René Riesel's sentencing, his refusal to request a presidential pardon and his earlier break with José Bové and the Farmers' Confederation. The article gives a brief history of the affair and outlines Riesel's current positions.--Reuben Keehan]
WHY SHOULD SOLDIERS BOVÉ AND RIESEL BE RESCUED?
The resignation that has greeted the Court of Appeals' confirmation of the sentencing of José Bové and René Riesel to fourteen months in prison testifies to a singular amnesia on the part of French society and its political representation. For, in an astonishing paradox, France is prepared to lock up agitators for actions in Nérac and Montpellier that it has since itself acknowledged to be well founded. In order to understand this, we have to look at the recent past.
Born in 1950, René Riesel is a veteran of 1968 and a
sometime anarchist, enragé, and situationist. Since
1973 he has lived in the country, and for a dozen or
so years he has been a sheepfarmer. Invited to join
the Confédération Paysanne (Farmers' Confederation) in
1991, he was on its national secretariat from 1995 and
resigned from all his functions in March 1999. For
his role (along with José Bové and Francis Roux) in
the sabotage of transgenic maize in Nérac
(Lot-et-Garonne) in January 1998, he received a
suspended eight-month jail sentence. This suspension may be annulled, however, for on 20 December
2001, Riesel and codefendants
José Bové and Dominique Soullier, charged with
destroying experimental transgenic rice plants in
Montpellier in June 1999, were sentenced on appeal to further prison terms and heavy fines. Appeals to a higher court are pending.
See also Why Should soldiers Bové and Riesel be rescued? by Herve KEMPF (le Monde Diplomatique) and Biotechnology Public and Private by René Riesel.
Donald Nicholson-Smith writes:
SUPPORT RENÉ RIESEL!
Assuming failure of the very last remaining judicial recourse, namely a request that the Nérac suspended sentence not be revoked, then the decision handed down on 19 December 2002 by the Appeals Court means that Joseph Bové and René Riesel will each, as expected, serve fourteen-month prison terms. In addition, they must each pay a fine of 7,622 euros and damages, interest and costs of 12,103 euros. The sentence is in accord with Articles 475-1 and 618-1 of the Code of Legal Procedure and Article 1018A of the General Tax Code. The crime was the organizing, on 5 June 1999, of the destruction of experimental transgenic rice at a state-run agronomic research facility, the CIRAD of Montpellier.
Anonymous Comrade writes:"This important discussion going on at Infoshop.org at the moment. The link at the bottom will take you there.
The Sad Decline of Indymedia
by Chuck0
for Infoshop News
It was a great idea when the Independent Media Center opened up its first website for the Seattle anti-WTO protests in December 1999. The first IMC website came out of years of alternative and grassroots media activism. By a strange quirk of fate, the Seattle IMC also included something called the "open newswire," an experiment that allowed every reader to be a reporter, if they wanted to get involved in DIY, participatory media production. The IMC network recently observed its 3rd anniversary and the 100th IMC went online, but the IMC project is facing some serious problems which, if they aren't addressed by the supporters of the IMC network, will eventually destroy the wonderful idea that is Indymedia.
There are some that would argue that the Indymedia network needs a stronger organization to address its current and persistent problems. This may be somewhat true, but those of us who have pressed for reforms find ourselves at the mercy of a network of people who are afraid to step forward and make tough decisions. It might help if there were some more organized processes, but I see the chief problem with Indymedia these days to be a political one, not an organizational or technical problem.
Read the rest of this article."
hydrarchist writes:
The following is a dialogue with Anne DuFourmantelle from Negri's recently published "Abecedaire Politique" (Calmann-Levy 2002), and was translated by Thomas Seay.
"B" as in Red Brigade [Brigades Rouges]
Toni Negri: One should be careful not to think of the
Red Brigade as the sum-total of the 70s movement; nor
should one think of that movement as set off in
historical parentheses, an absolutely isolated,
singular separate phenomena. In reality, the movement
was rather a trajectory, a common route taken by a
large part of my generation. There are still people --
some of them ingenuous, but more often stupid -- who
continue to present me as chief of the Red Brigade,
the malevolent brain behind the organization. Being a
professor and political activist or, better yet,
university professor and communist could mean none
other than that: the bad-boy teacher, cattivo
maestro. It's a source of consternation.
hydrarchist writes:
The following is a dialogue with
Anne DuFourmantelle from Negri's recently published "Abecedaire Politique" (Calmann-Levy 2002), and was translated by Thomas Seay.
E as in Empire
Anne DuFourmantelle: What can you tell us about the
concept of Empire that you developed with Michael
Hardt?
Toni Negri: Our work together has been most of all a
work on linguistic clarification. Indeed, the word
"Empire" might seem ambiguous. It immediately
appeared in political and journalistic vocabularies
and rapidly became static. Nevertheless, by "Empire"
we intend something very precise: the transfer of
sovereignty from Nation-states to a superior entity.
This transfer has almost always been understood in
terms of an "internal analogy", that is to say, as if
Empire were implicitly a nation-state the size of the
world.
Anonymous Comrade writes "
Struggle against Value in a Swedish Hamburger Restaurant
[prol-position]
[Marcel, member of Kämpa Tillsammans/Sweden]][1]
This text has two goals. The first is to try to create an interest in the daily ongoing class struggle that is waged everyday in every workplace. I will try to show that something as completely unglamorous and ordinary as working at a restaurant, or rather the small hidden struggles that are waged against wage labour there, is part of the communist movement. [2] The other goal is to show that theoretical notions like capital, communism, use value and exchange value are not something abstract and academic, but rather something concrete that influence our lives and which we in turn influence.
Making hamburgers
My last job was at a privately owned hamburger restaurant. Although the restaurant didn't belong to any multinational company like McDonalds or Burgerking, it was quite big and was open every day in the week, only being closed between 7 and 10 in the morning. Most of the people who worked there were teenagers or people like me in their twenties, mainly girls. The majority had another job or went to school at while they were working at the restaurant. People came and went all the time. They didn't cope with the work conditions or they thought that the wage was too lousy. The majority of the staff were employed illegally and you had to work more than a year to get an ordinary contract and an ordinary wage. Before that, you were an apprentice with a much lower wage. Being an apprentice also meant that the boss could give you the sack whenever he felt like it. Most of the people who worked there chose not to work at the restaurant for more than a couple of months. We were all constantly looking for other jobs or other ways to get money.
"Misinformation About Iraq
A Fantastical Future, Predicted by the Terminally Disengaged"
By Edward Said, Counterpunch, December 3, 2002
The flurry of reports, leaks, and misinformation about the looming US war against Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq continues unabated. It is impossible to know, however, how much of this is a brilliantly managed campaign of psychological war against Iraq, how much the public floundering of a government uncertain about its next step. In any event, I find it as possible to believe that there will be a war as that there will not. Certainly the sheer belligerency of the verbal assaults on the average citizen are unprecedented in their ferocity, with the result that very little is totally certain about what is actually taking place. No one can independently confirm the various troop and navy movements reported on a daily basis, and given the lurching opacity of his thinking, George W Bush's real intentions are difficult to read. But that the whole world is concerned -- indeed, deeply anxious -- about the catastrophic chaos that will ensue after another Afghanistan-like air campaign against the people of Iraq, of that there is little doubt.
"Sibling Rivalry, Bretton Woods, IMF and the World Bank"
Henry C.K. Liu
The so-called Bretton Woods twins: the IMF and the World Bank, because
of recent noises made by Stiglitz, appeared to be at odds in their
policy focus. But this is mere sibling rivalry.
hydrarchist writes Welcome to Part 2
Moral Economy definition
What was Thompson's moral economy then, and how did it relate to the food riots? What were its' features and can we identify the same sorts of ideas into modern history? This 'Moral economy' theses is perhaps the most well known formulation of the social crime debate. In particular it speaks of the relationship between the rulers and capitalists, and the people within certain types of crowd.
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