Wikileaks Beyond Wikileaks? Saroj Giri Wikileaks’ close collaboration with big corporate media and the ‘redactions’ raise serious doubts over whether information is actually flowing freely (Michel Chossudovsky, ‘Who is Behind Wikileaks?’ Dec 13, 2010, Global Research). And yet the Wikileaks’ intervention cannot be cast away in a cynical manner – the only way to welcome it however is by saving it from Wikileaks itself, in particular from its liberal slide. Let us problematise the kind of politics or the ‘attacks on power’ which Wikileaks represents, even as stories circulate about corporate-funding and CIA-backing. Indeed one gets deeply suspicious when for example The Guardian reports that, for the hackers, ‘the first global cyber-war has begun’, ‘the first sustained clash between the established order and the organic, grassroots culture of the net’. On the other hand, for someone like Jemima Khan typical of a whole swathe of liberal supporters, Wikileaks stands for something far less dramatic. In her already apologetic piece, ‘Why did I back Assange?’, she states that it is only about ‘a new type of investigative journalism’, about freedom of information and so on. What is it really?

The Student Loan Debt Abolition Movement in the U.S. George Caffentzis Debt has had a crushing impact on the lives of those who must take student loans to finance their university education in the US. For tuition fees that have been so notoriously high in private universities now are rising in public universities so quickly they are far out-pacing inflation. Student loan debt in the US has been much higher than in Europe (with the exception of Sweden), though recent developments there would indicate that this gap may soon no longer exist (Usher). We should also take into account the fraudulent way in which the loans have been administered by the banks and the vindictiveness with which those who have been unable to pay back have been pursued by collection agents. The most frustrating aspect of student loan debt being the legally toothless position the debtor is in, because government policy has relentlessly vested all the bargaining power in the hands of the creditors. But however agonizing the situation of the indebted, the debt is growing. As of September 2010 total student loan debt amounted to $850 billion, having just surpassed credit card debt by about $20 billion for the first time. And it is rising at a catastrophic rate, e.g., by 25% in 2009 to meet the rising cost of tuition and other college fees. Even the Great Recession has not put an end to this financial explosion. On the contrary, while credit card debt has leveled off, student borrowing has continued to grow to cover the rising costs of living as well as the tuition fees, especially by unemployed workers who are “going back to school” to get a “better,” or at least some, job in the future.

"Hope Against Hope: A Necessary Betrayal" Nicolas What has been taken from them to make them so angry? Hope, that's what. Hope, and the fragile bubble of social aspiration that sustained us through decades of mounting inequality; hope and the belief that if we worked hard and did as we were told and bought the right things, some of us at least would get the good jobs and safe places to live that we'd been promised. - Laurie Penny, New Statesman A single image from a day of movement marks out competing visions of hope. A boot through a Millbank window fed the dreams of resistance that many in the Left have been craving since talk of austerity started. The same boot posed a question that plays out in the university occupations that preceded it and have since blossomed in its wake: what is it exactly that we are hoping for? The question of how students have inspired people to act, engage and organize to combat the Government’s austerity plans is an important one. It is one that also potentially contrasts with some of the views of students themselves. For let’s be clear – it is not necessarily (or even principally) the University or its defence that mobilizes people’s desires and dreams outside the student movement. Defending the ‘right to education’ may be what sparked student revolts, but those of us who are not students have been drawn in because we want, more than anything, to resist and fight. And to resist and fight you need to know that resistance is possible, that you will not be alone, and that you can win. For the most part the resistance so far to the regime of austerity has been rote and uninspiring – a betrayed strike here, a sacked workforce there.

"Abandoning Illusions, Preparing to Fight" Franco Berardi What is happening in Rome and in many other Italian cities, what happened in London only few days ago, marks the beginning of the new decade. It’s going to be a decade of conflict, of the self-defense of society against a ruling class that is violent and corrupt, against financial capitalism that is literally starving the social sphere, against the mafia, that is using power to embezzle social resources.

Europe Calling: This Is Just the Beginning! Uniriot Roma …You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows: occupation of universities everywhere in Europe, blockage of the cities, manif sauvage, rage. This is the answer of a generation to whom they want to cut the future with debts for studying, cuts of welfare state and increasing of tuition fees. The determination of thousand of students in London, the rage of those who assault the Italian Senate house against the austerity and the education cuts, has opened the present time: this is because the future is something to gain that starts when you decide collectively to take risk and to struggle.

Riots Break Out in Rome as Berlusconi Wins Vote of Confidence

The center of Rome is under siege. As the House was voting the confidence to a moribund Berlusconi government (which he won with a 2 votes margin, which means that his agony is just extended) thousands of demonstrators of the "Movements United Against the Crises" tried to reach the Parliament. As a result riots broke out in the most central streets of the city (Via del Corso, Via del Babbuino, Piazza del Popolo, etc.) which are usually one of the favorite mainlands of the global tourist industry.

The Return of King Mob Armin Medosch The student demonstrations against the rise of tuition fees, the fourth of which took place yesterday, 9 December 2010, signals the return of King Mob to the streets of London. King Mob was the name of a British Situationist splinter group formed in the early 1970s which took its name from the Gordon Riots of June 1780, in which rioters daubed the slogan "His Majesty King Mob"' on the walls of Newgate prison, after gutting the building, Wikipedia informs us.

2011 Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints Radical Heroes for the New Millennium Our 19th annual wall calendar, with artwork by James Koehnline, and text by the Autonomedia Collective. Hundreds of radical cultural and political heroes are celebrated here, along with the animating ideas that continue to guide this project — a reprieve from the 500-year-long sentence to life-at-hard-labor that the European colonization of the "New World" and the ensuing devastations of the rest of the world has represented. It is increasingly clear — at the dawn of this new millennium — that the Planetary Work Machine will not rule forever! Celebrate with this calendar on which every day is a holiday! 32 pages, 12 x 16 inches, saddlestitched ISBN: 978-1-57027-227-1 : price $9.95 : 32 pages Buy two, get one free!

The New Spaces of Freedom Félix Guattari Montréal, November 1984 Translated by Arianna Bove and Noe Le Blanc We might refuse to resign ourselves to it, but we know for a fact that both in the East and in the majority of the Third World rights and liberties are subject to the discretionary powers of the political forces in charge of the state. Yet we are not so ready to admit, and often refuse to confront, the fact that they are equally threatened in the West, in countries that like to call themselves ‘champions of the free world’. This hard question, so close to the skin and pregnant with dramatic human implications, is hardly resolved if we remain at a level of statements of principle. It would be impossible to fail to recognize the fact that for a dozen years a whole bundle of rights and freedoms and a whole series of spaces of freedom continued to lose ground in Europe. If we consider what is happening to immigrants and the distortions that the right to political asylum is undergoing in France alone this fact is manifestly unequivocal. But the defeat stares us in the face even when detached from mere narrow jurisprudence, when considering the actual evolution of the ‘right’ to dispose of basic material means of survival and labor for millions of people in Europe (the unemployed, young and old people, the precarious); the ‘right to difference’ for all kinds of minorities; and the ‘right’ to effective democratic expression for the large majority of peoples. Militants might object that the conflicts related to formal juridical freedoms should not be treated on par with the conquest of new spaces of freedom because only the latter is relevant to concrete struggles (to be fair, this reaction is reminiscing of an era that has long gone). Justice never kept out of the social fray (it never stood over and above social struggles); democracy was always more or less manipulated; there is nothing, no greatness, to be expected from the realm of formal juridical freedom, whilst, on the contrary, everything is still to be done when it comes to new spaces of freedom.

Social Security and the Global Crisis Andreas Exne In 2007, few people believed that the financial turbulences in the US housing market would have any significant repercussions on the world economy, let alone that they would trigger a financial 9/11 as the failure of Lehmann Brothers 2008 was called afterwards. Even less would have argued, that the global system of capitalism headed full speed into a systemic crisis that would shatter its foundations in a way the world hasn’t seen since the interwar period in the 1930s. Though, there have been such people and we can draw on their analyses. My task here is to develop a line of thoughts concerning the challenges to social security in a time of global crisis. This task thus involves a threefold analyses: (1) what is the character of crisis, (2) which role does social security play and (3) how does the crisis influence security? All three questions relate to the question, which kind of society it is, that we actually live in.