Electoral Fraud and Rebellion in Mexico

Roger Burbach

Over half a million people took to the streets of Mexico City on
Saturday to protest the fraudulent election of Felipe Calderon.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the real winner of the presidential
election, told the huge crowd, "the elections were fraudulent from
the start," adding the incumbent president, Vincente Fox "has
betrayed democracy."

The reason Fox and his National Action Party (PAN) pulled out all the
stops to steal the election is quite simple — they are desperately
afraid of the growing class rebellion by Mexico's poor and oppressed.
The campaign slogan of Lopez Obrador was straight forward: "For the
good of all, the poor first." In a country where almost half the
population lives below the poverty line Lopez Obrador pledged to
provide a stipend to the elderly and health care for the poor.
Millions of jobs will also be created, particularly by undertaking
large construction projects to modernize Mexico's dilapidated
transportation system. He also promised to renegotiate the North
American Free Trade Agreement with the United States, particularly
the clauses that allow the importation of cheap subsidized grains
that undermine Mexico's peasant producers.

No Tolls on The Internet

Lawrence Lessig and Robert W. McChesney

Congress is about to cast a historic vote on the future of the Internet.
It will decide whether the Internet remains a free and open technology
fostering innovation, economic growth and democratic communication, or
instead becomes the property of cable and phone companies that can put
toll booths at every on-ramp and exit on the information superhighway.

At the center of the debate is the most important public policy you've
probably never heard of: "network neutrality." Net neutrality means
simply that all like Internet content must be treated alike and move at
the same speed over the network. The owners of the Internet's wires
cannot discriminate. This is the simple but brilliant "end-to-end"
design of the Internet that has made it such a powerful force for
economic and social good: All of the intelligence and control is held by
producers and users, not the networks that connect them.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"EuroMayDay's Social Contradictions"
Helsinki Network

The evening before Mayday Helsinki saw EuroMayDay event as a part of Europe-wide day of action.

The event was a breakthrough in Finland. It didn't only successfully attack the proposals to weaken social and labour rights — presented by the Confederation of Finnish Industries (EK) — but it also took initiative to introduce our demand for basic income. Now our demands are discussed from editorials to cafeterias.

First of all our demand for basic income is about less control on people's lives and a more just distribution of income. Basic income would be a remuneration for production outside wage labour and at the same time it would enhance the bargaining position of flexworkers.
One of the conflicts of current economy is that time spent working gets longer while share of GDP spent on wages is getting smaller.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"The Circulation of the Common"

Nick Dyer-Witheford

Introduction

This paper makes theoretical propositions to assist conceive an emergent communism, a °coming community" that is neither capitalist, socialist nor anarchic, and the place within it of °immaterial labor." [1] Its argument, in brief, is as follows.

Marx deemed the cellular form of capitalism to be the commodity, a good produced for exchange between private owners. His model of the circulation of capital traced the metamorphosis of the commodity into money, which commands the acquisition of further resources to be transformed into more commodities. The theorists of autonomist Marxism demonstrated how this circulation of capital is also a circulation of struggles, meeting resistances at every point.

But although this concept proved important for understanding the multiplicity of contemporary anti-capital, it says very little about the kind of society towards which these struggles move, a point on which the autonomist tradition has mainly been mute. Today, new theorizations about multitude and biopolitics should to reconsider this silence.

I suggest that the cellular form of communism is the common, a good produced to be shared in association. The circuit of the common traces how shared resources generate forms of social cooperation — associations — that coordinate the conversion of further resources into expanded commons. On the basis of the circuit of capital, Marx identified different kinds of capital — mercantile, industrial and financial — unfolding at different historical moments yet together contributing to an overall societal subsumption. By analogy, we should recognise differing moments in the circulation of the common. These include terrestrial commons (the customary sharing of natural resources in traditional societies); planner commons (for example, command socialism and the liberal democratic welfare state); and networked commons (the free associations open source software, peer-to-peer networks, grid computing and the numerous other socializations of technoscience). Capital today operates as a systemic unity of mercantile, industrial and financial moments, but the commanding point in its contemporary, neoliberal, phase is financial capital.

A twenty-first century communism can, again by analogy, be envisioned as a complex unity of terrestrial, state and networked commons, but the strategic and enabling point in this ensemble is the networked commons. These must however, also be seen in their dependency on, and even potential contradiction, with the other commons sectors. The concept of a complex, composite communism based on the circulation between multiple but commons forms is opens possibilities for new combinations of convivial custom, planetary planning and autonomous association. What follows expand on these cryptic observations.