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"The Revolt of a Generation"
Paolo Do
More than 200 people from different Italian cities, together with students and precarious workers from Vienna, Madrid, London and Tunisia animated the Euro-mediterrean happening "The Revolt of a Generation" at La Sapienza University on the 12th and 13th of May, in Rome. It was an important moment of discussion and elaboration: the revolution of Tunisia confronted with the experiences of the Italian universities; the Spanish network of Juventud sin futuro and the UK's Uncut discussed together with the antiracist student collectives from Vienna, while the experience of the Feminist university of Tunisia confronted with the challenge of the self-education and the critical knowledge.
Sol, or When the Impossible Becomes Unstoppable
Marta Malo
Write to orient oneself, at the velocity imposed by the moment. Between poetics and theory, write to offer something to the confabulation of the world, to contribute, from inside, to the creation of the square, to prolong the event which is Sol. Because yes, Sol has been an event: one of those unexpected occurrences that redraws the map and reopen the horizon of the possible.
In the demonstration the 15th of May, overflowing with joy at the size of the demonstration and its fresh atmosphere, a Radio Mobile Unit interviewed some of those present. “What does the future look like to you?” Despite all the energy circulating, many of the interviews were clearly pessimistic: “It looks grim.” On Monday, when news of the camp in Sol started to blow like gunpowder in the social networks, in a list for exchanging goods and services someone wrote: “What does it matter if some people are camping, as long as others are shopping at the department store next door?” It does matter, because this wasn’t just any camp: the bold gesture of a few became a signal to the many: it was “now or never” and the hunger for doing was set loose, the hunger to speak.
Arabs Are Democracy's New Pioneers
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
One challenge facing observers of the uprisings spreading across north Africa and the Middle East is to read them as not so many repetitions of the past but as original experiments that open new political possibilities, relevant well beyond the region, for freedom and democracy. Indeed, our hope is that through this cycle of struggles the Arab world becomes for the next decade what Latin America was for the last – that is, a laboratory of political experimentation between powerful social movements and progressive governments from Argentina to Venezuela, and from Brazil to Bolivia.
"For a New Europe: University Struggles Against Austerity"
Edu-Factory Collective
The common statement from the recent Paris meeting, now in English,
French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Turkish and Korean.
We, the student and precarious workers of Europe, Tunisia, Japan, the
US, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Peru and Argentina, met in Paris over the
weekend of the 11th-13th of February, 2011 to discuss and organize a
common network based on our common struggles.
"The Rebellion of the Poor Comes to Grahamstown"
Xola Mali, Ayanda Kota, Nombulelo Yame
The rebellion of the poor has been spreading from town to town, from
squatter camp to squatter camp, since 2004. Last week it arrived in
Grahamstown.
There is no third force, political party or communist academic behind
our struggle. It is oppression at the hands of the African National
Congress that has driven us into the rebellion of the poor. We are in
rebellion because we are being forced to live without dignity, safety
or hope.
Anarchism in Indonesia
Can you tell us about the history of anarchism in Indonesia?
MT: As far as I know from my friends' stories and from what I’ve learned, the origin of anarchism in Indonesia came together with the arrival of punk music around 1998. At that time anarchy was synonymous with punk and some people in that community began to delve deeper into anarchic ideology and values. Since that time anarchist discourse began to develop amongst individuals or collectives in the punk / hardcore community, and later to a broader range of groups such as activists, students, workers; essentially reaching a wider public with different backgrounds.
Along with the spread of anarchic discourse, many discussions on this topic began to occur, and anarchy began to be debated, analysed and criticized more deeply (and this process continues until today, now with a wider arena of different analyses). The next step was to bring it into praxis, for instance forming collectives with anarchic principals and values (decentralized, non-hierarchical & consensus). Despite the many problems these collectives faced, collective models like this could be seen as something different, a counter to the model of groups which always seek to dominate (both in the political sphere and the non-political) through their hierarchical, centralist, and authoritarian forms or structures.
Actions such as Food Not Bombs can be regarded as one of the early forms of direct action emerging from an anarchic praxis here, along with producing zines and other publication such as newsletter, pamphlets, etc. At first the themes and issues of zines were mostly about the punk / hardcore surroundings, but as time went on and the process developed, more varied themes and issues were presented such as feminism, anarchy values, anti-capitalism, global & social resistance, varients of anarchism, environmental and animal movements, political news , and others. The progress of anarchy is also helped by the increasing levels of Internet access; internet media are used by our friends to disseminate information about anarchist discourse.
"Piracy, Control Practices, and Alternatives"
Alex Galloway, with Pavlos Hatzopoulos and Thanasis Priftis
[From "Piracy as activism" special issue - http://www.re-public.gr/en/]
P.H. - T.P.: With what types of practices would you relate the concept
of piracy in networks? Is it problematic, from a critical standpoint,
to confine piracy to file-sharing?
Alexander Galloway: The pirates are on the rise. With their black
markets and black hats, pirates commandeer ships and copy DVDs. They
crack software systems and resell them under the counter. At the same
time immaterial goods proliferate in file-sharing networks, many
thousands labor away on their contributions to open source projects,
and millions more labor away in online games.
So perhaps to begin one might make a basic distinction between piracy
and the kind of collaborative sharing we associate with culture and
community. In a strict sense piracy is a form of commerce, illicit to
be sure, but commerce nonetheless. Something is stolen and resold via
the black market. Pirates are above all businessmen. Contrast this
with the anti-market activity of sharing, borrowing, or stealing. The
continuum is broad here-for example one is free to endorse sharing
while rejecting stealing-yet it is clear that such activities are
not black-market activities in any traditional sense. In fact I
would guess that very little real piracy takes place in file sharing
networks. It's mostly sharing, borrowing or stealing.
I include stealing here simply to appease the right. I personally have
very little against these kinds of activities and find it difficult
to label them "stealing" in any real sense of the word. In fact there
are lots of cases in which borrowing or even stealing is justified,
particularly in today's economy in which so much of human life is
stolen and debased by commercial and state interests. Reverse stealing
is often a necessity.
The Libertarian Left:
Free-Market Anti-Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal
Sheldon Richman
Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign introduced many people to the word
“libertarian.” Since Paul is a Republican and Republicans, like
libertarians, use the rhetoric of free markets and private enterprise,
people naturally assume that libertarians are some kind of quirky
offshoot of the American right wing. To be sure, some libertarian
positions fit uneasily with mainstream conservatism—complete drug
decriminalization, legal same-sex marriage, and the critique of the
national-security state alienate many on the right from libertarianism.
"Surrealism in the Arab World"
Maroin Dib, Abdul Kadar El-Janabi, Faroq El Juridy, Fadil Abas Hadi, Farid Lariby & Ghazi Younis
The current resurgence of surrealism in the Arab world is a revolutionary development of the greatest significance, demonstrating once more that the strategy of the unfettered imagination is always and necessarily global.
We publish here in English translation a manifesto in which our Arab comrades express their unequivocal interventionist orientation, sharply defined against their specific political and cultural background.
"Surrealism, Politics and Culture"
Neil Matheson
The celebrated photographs of André Breton, Diego Rivera and Léon Trotsky posing together in Mexico in 1938, at the time of their joint manifesto Pour un Art révolutionnaire indépendant, are usually seen as emblematic of a certain convergence of culture and revolutionary politics – and yet, paradoxically, most accounts of Surrealism’s engagement with politics pose the tide of revolutionary fervour as already receding by 1935, while 1938 has also been viewed as the year that Surrealism made the volte-face ‘from the street to the salon.’ A re-appraisal of Surrealism’s troubled relationship with political activism and organised politics has been long overdue, and therefore a collection which sets out not only to analyse in depth some of the key themes and crucial moments in that engagement, but also to rethink the condition of ‘the political’ itself in its relationship with culture, is to be welcomed.
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