Ten Years After and a Global Crisis Later… – Preface to Indian Edition of ‘Hotlines: Call Centre, Inquiry, Communism’, by Kolinko
Guragon Workers News

Call centres were the archetype of a workplace for the capitalist cycle between the early 1990s and late 2000s. Located in the dominant sectors of the cycle in the global north, e.g. banking, insurances and personal services, they were able to absorb and combine both surplus capital (which had escaped the shrinking profit margins in the industries); and surplus labour (in form of the unemployed graduate and dismissed industrial worker). Call centres became de facto outsourced university departments where students were forced to work off their student debts and get used to their future perspective as precarious wage dependents. The call centres’ outer-face resembled less the factories of the past; but rather their culture of ‘work-time/leisure-time’-balance was supposed to turn the collective experience of work into a question of individual life-management. They formed part of the general propaganda proclaiming the ‘end of the working class’, which prevailed since the 1980s – while at the same time concentrating and ‘proletarianising’ large sections of previously ‘white-collar’ workers under one roof and subjecting them to a Taylorised ‘factory-mode’ of production. Instead of individualising neo-liberal subjects, call centres simply extended the industrial system into the office world and collectivised a section of the working class who previously saw themselves as ‘educated employees’, such as bank clerks or administrators. As a labour intensive and mobile industry, call centres quickly combined labour in different parts of the globe.

Video of Madrid Demonstrations, Sept 25-29, 2012

This short film chronicles the events of September 25-29th in Madrid, Spain where tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets to demand the resignation of the government and an end to police brutality. Many of the protests ended in clashes with the police.

Since the stand off began on September 25th , the images of police brutality have travelled the world over, shocking and inspiring people across Europe and leading to an international day of action on September 29th. This film tells the story of why so many people took to the streets and follows these events as they unfolded. Go to globaluprisings.org for the full series of mini-documenaries about reactions to the economic crisis around the world.

http://www.desrealitat.org/2012/10/madrid-25-29-septimebre-2012.html

Grabbing ‘Green’: Questioning the Green Economy

17 May – 19 May 2013
University of Toronto, Canada

Abstracts due: Nov. 7, 2012
Papers due: March 1, 2013

Description:

Over the past two decades 'the market' has increasingly been represented as the solution to issues of sustainability and conservation, leading to a reimagining of 'nature'. Market forces are now deeply embedded in the policy, planning and practice, of environmental management and conservation leading to constructs such as ecosystems services (and payments for them), biodiversity derivatives and new conservation finance mechanisms like REDD, REDD+, species banking, and carbon trading. These changes reflect a larger transformation in international environmental governance—one in which the discourse of global ecology has accommodated an ontology of natural capital, culminating in the production of what is taking shape as “The Green Economy.” This “Green Economy” is not a natural or coincidental development, but is contingent upon, and to varying degrees coordinated by, actors drawn together around familiar (UNEP, States, World Bank, etc) and emergent institutions of environmental governance (TEEB, WBCSB, investment companies, etc). While case studies have begun to reveal the social and ecological marginalization associated with the implementation of market mechanisms in particular sites, this conference seeks to explore the more systemic dimensions involved in the production, circulation and consumption of “The Green Economy,” and the neoliberal 'logics' within environmental policy, conservation, development, and business that are mobilizing it.

"Cannabis Chassidis: The Ancient and Emerging Torah of Drugs"
Book Presentation with author Yoseph Leib ibn Mardachya

7PM, Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2012
Bluestockings Bookstore
172 Allen Street
New York City, NY

Is marijuana kosher? Please join Autonomedia and Atzmos Press from Jerusalem for a presentation of "Cannabis Chassidis: The Ancient and Emerging Torah of Drugs" with author Yoseph Leib ibn Mardachya.

Is Marijuana Kosher?