7 March 2008
Friends,
Team Colors is pleased to announce our partnership with
Journal of Aesthetics and Protest to produce a publication titled In the Middle of a Whirlwind: 2008 Convention Protests, Movement, and Movements, which will seek to intervene in and around the upcoming protests against the Republican and Democratic National Conventions.
In the Middle of a Whirlwind is a one-off online journal of theory, action and organizing, to be released 15 May 2008. A Request for Proposals has been circulated to a diverse array of authors and organizations; and is
available online.
For future updates and announcements on In the Middle of a Whirlwind subscribe to our
E-Newsletter; and while the journal will be available free online Team Colors will be printing and shipping posters and postcards to infoshops, indie and radical bookstores, zine libraries, workers centers, coops, bike spaces, diy venues, and other radical spaces -
consider making a contribution toward supporting this project at the Team Colors website.
Put out the word on Whirlwinds with our initial
announcement flyer; an updated version with the list of contributors and articles will be released in the coming weeks.
Organizing:
Activists are already organizing toward holding protests and direct actions at the site of the conventions in the Twin Cities (RNC) and Denver (DNC).
Unconventional Action:: National Organizing
Recreate 68:: Denver Organizing
RNC Welcoming Committee:: Twin Cities Organizing
On the Publication:
In the Middle of a Whirlwind seeks to intervene in the organizing around and through the 2008 convention protests by providing strategic commentary and analysis of contemporary class composition and movement strength.
These protest actions provide opportunities for inquiry into the political composition of the working class and an analysis of the state of current movements in the context of the current technical composition of capital, the regime of biopower and the society of control. Through this analysis, we hope to identify sites for intervention and movement within movements.
Taking a cue from our friends and comrades in Turbulence: Ideas for Movement –
www.turbulence.uk.org – we are commissioning articles focusing on the United States and drawn from counter-globalization, counter-cultural, anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist and community-organizing movements.
The purpose of this publication is not only to intervene at the site of the convention protests, but in the organizing leading up to the actions, as well as in the everyday struggles taking place across the United States. Each essay will address the issues of movement, working class power and composition, and/or give strategic insight into strengths and weaknesses of current movement/s in the U.S.
Background:
This is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man. (But remember: most of mankind is not all of mankind.) But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.
- James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
The “crime of which I accuse my country” that James Baldwin speaks of – of racism and prison, state violence and hunger – is still very much part of daily life in the United States, and since these words were first published in 1963 a fire has raged across the country and the planet. This fire moved throughout the south, finding its way north, and through the movements that marked the cycle of struggles that became just embers by the beginning of the 1980s.
Since then we find not a fire but a whirlwind. Small gusts have circulated across the United States, through cities, borders, fields, homes and workplaces throughout the past three decades. More recently, these whirlwinds sent off storms: in Seattle, in New Orleans (here the hurricane and the states winds are countered by the winds of activity after Katrina), in May 2006 with the Si Se Puede movements and in various other moments.
In the Middle of a Whirlwind: 2008 Convention Protests, Movement and Movements explores these whirlwinds as they cycle up to travel towards the 2008 convention protests; focusing not only on these actions themselves, but on the organizing activities and strategies that blow around and though our everyday lives.
Contact Team Colors:
To sign up on for the Team Colors E-Newsletter, make a contribution toward the production of In the Middle of a Whirlwind, access previous Team Colors articles, or contact the collective visit us at:
Team Colors Website: www.WarMachines.Info
Team Colors @ Myspace
Email Team Colors: teamcolors@warmachines.info
Contact Journals of Aesthetics and Protest
Journal of Aesthetics and Protest: www.JournalofAestheticsandProtest.Org
# # #
