Social Struggles in South Arica
Zach Levenson

CUNY Grad Center, 34th and 5th Avenue, New York City
4PM, Sunday, Dec. 8, 2014

Insurgent Notes (http://insurgentnotes.com) is sponsoring a talk by Zach Levenson on recent struggles in South Africa’s townships, in which he was involved, both as a participant and an observer, for six months earlier this year.

He will speak on state and private land grabs and relocations, ethnic divisions, stratification within the casualized and unemployed work force, and some attempts by the township populations to self-organize. He will also discuss
the false dichotomy between “social democratic” and “neo-liberal” policies
at containment by the ruling African National Congress (ANC).

The talk will take place at the CUNY Graduate Center, at Fifth Avenue and 34th St., Manhattan, Room 5414, on Sunday Dec. 8th at 4 PM. Please bring photo ID to show at the main entrance.

Zachary Levenson is writing a dissertation on urban dispossession in South African cities after apartheid in UC Berkeley's Department of Sociology. He has been active in the student-worker movement at Berkeley, anti-austerity struggles in Oakland, and housing organizing in Cape Town. He returned last month from 6 months in South Africa, his second such stint in the past 2 years.

Review of Squatting in Europe
Amy Starecheski, City

Squatting in Europe: Radical Spaces, Urban Struggles is a collection of 10 essays edited by the Squatting Europe Kollective (SqEK). SqEK is a network of activists and scholars that formed in 2009 and has been remarkably productive over the past four years, convening nine gatherings and supporting the development of numerous research projects. This is their first book. SqEK’s organization mirrors that of the movements they study: horizontal and open. Both the SqEK project and this volume have intertwined activist and political aims, and these authors see the production and dissemination of knowledge about squatting as an essential part of their activism. In the service of that goal, the book is available as a free download, but has also been published as a printed volume. SqEK seeks to marshal the power of social scientific academic knowledge production to intervene with authority in current political discourse, and the essays included here largely fit within that frame. Most are written in the third person, and in a neutral, professional tone. While many participants have been involved in squatting and take their inspiration from those experiences, they are also serious researchers who ‘work together in order to develop a thorough, systematic and critical knowledge about this so frequently forgotten social movement’ (273). Much of the research in this volume would not have been possible without the authors’ direct participation in the movements they document, and it is one weakness of the work that the authors do not draw more directly upon their own experiences and personal insights.

"States of Exception" Film Screenings, New York City, Nov. 12, 2013
Tuesday, November 12, 7:00pm @ Anthology Film Archives

States of Exception, Exceptional States: The Iron Grip of Nationalism
Filmmaker and author Ariella Azoulay and writer, activist and scholar Joel Kovel will be present for a post-screening discussion moderated by Benj Gerdes, political artist, writer and activist.

The Food Chain
The Food Chain
Israel, Palestine, Syria: the unending crisis in the Middle East, unstable states caught up in a state of exception…. These films militate against the militarized state and its ideology.

"It Is Simply All Too Much"
An Interview with the Italian Philosopher Franco "Bifo" Berardi
Tim Stüttgen

[Franco "Bifo" Berardi is an author, philosopher and media activist. Alongside Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Paolo Virno and Maurizio Lazzarato, he is one of the most influential proponents of so-called post-operaism. He was in charge of the magazine »A/traverso« (1975–1981) and associated with the left-wing radical radio station Alice (1976-1978). Like many other members of the Autonomia movement, he fled to Paris in the 1970s, where he made the acquaintance of Félix Guattari. With Guattari, he studied schizoanalysis, which led to experimental collaborations with many artists and activists. His most recent publications include "The Soul at Work" (2009), "Precarious Rhapsody" (2009) and "After the Future" (2011).]

Tim Stüttgen: Let us begin straight away with the theses put forward in your book "The Soul at Work".... In the book, you describe how all the characteristics of a person – language, creativity, affectivity – have been integrated into the working process of neo-liberalism, leading to new forms of alienation.

Franco Berardi: The most significant productive powers in our era are cognitive and affective forms of work. You can also call it semiotic work, as it mainly has to do with semiotic material. So the old concept of alienation moves away from its former Hegelian context and becomes relevant to a materialistic analysis of class make-up. Contemporary alienation is an effect produced by a combination of several factors: the technological acceleration of information combined with the neurotic compulsion to engage in economic competition, and the virtualisation of communication and the consequent isolation of bodies. In this context, alienation no longer means the loss of an allegedly human authenticity, as it did in the old humanist or idealist sense. Here, alienation means a psychopathological state, a psychological form of suffering, that has its roots in a new escalation of psychological exploitation.

The Reasonable “Madness” of Revolt
Richard Gilman-Opalsky
Fifth Estate Issue 390

In the existing world, largely governed by the logic of capital and the pathologies of accumulation, real madness is the absence of revolt. Wherever revolt is absent in the world today, we should worry about human health and sanity. A society that does not revolt against a social order that damages it with such escalating facility—psychologically, collectively, ecologically—is a society at the terminal stage. Revolt is the healthy expression of reasonable refusal.

For those who want to throw the existing world into question, the liberal political philosophy of John Rawls (1921 – 2002) is of little use. After the publication of his first major work, A Theory of Justice (1971), Rawls became the most influential liberal philosopher of the second half of the 20th century, receiving accolades and awards from scholars, and from politicians like Bill Clinton. He remains a touchstone intellectual for contemporary liberalism, and as one of its greatest advocates, Rawls is relevant to considerations of the disastrous limitations and contradictions of his own worldview.

Among Rawls’ many errors, the most fatal was his contention that “justice” and “fairness” could be satisfactorily realized within the limits of capitalist society. This same premise continues to ground the most fundamental liberal conceits, including that perplexingly unshakeable faith in “capitalist democracy.” Like most liberals, Rawls never took riot, revolt, or revolution seriously, since he viewed them as superfluous to the interests of the “least advantaged members of society,” as he frequently called them. Instead, Rawls devoted his life’s work to theorizing a “practical” way toward that greatest of all contradictions in terms, a fair capitalist society. Most liberals agree with these contentions, making it fair to conclude that they scarcely understand the logic of capital, and the countless catastrophes of capitalist society.

"The Dream of Anarchy and the Anarchy of Dreams:
Urgent Communiques From the Crossroads of Anarchy and Surrealism"
Ron Sakolsky

Friday, October 18th @ 7 pm
Bluestockings, 172 Allen, NYC

Ron Sakolsky will read from his twenty-first century anarcho-surrealist trilogy: Creating Anarchy (Fifth Estate, 2005/Ardent, 2013), Swift Winds (Eberhardt, 2012), and Scratching the Tiger's Belly (Eberhardt, 2012). Together these books comprise a radical mixtape of outrageous ideas-in-action, hidden histories, mutinous rants, rebel poems, razor sharp polemics, incendiary broadsides, slyly subversive stories, rollicking manifestos, impossible demands, utopian adventures, and provocative parables.

Sakolsky is the editor or co-editor of the Autonomedia anthologies Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings & Images by the Surrealist Movement in the United States; Sounding Off: Music as Resistance / Rebellion / Revolution; and Gone to Croatan: Origins of North American Dropout Culture.

Protest at South African Consulate in New York,
in Solidarity with the Shackdwellers Movement!

Date: Monday October 14th
Time: 11:30am-2:00pm
Where: South African Consulate, 333 E 38th St NYC

On Monday, members of New York City's social justice community led by Picture the Homeless will hold a solidarity rally in front of the South African Embassy to show support for our brothers and sisters facing state violence & repression in Durban. We hope you can join us. Please spread the word!

Our purpose is to show solidarity with the Abahlali baseMjondolo Movement in Durban and include messaging about World Zero Eviction Days.

Statement in Defense of the Abahlali BaseMjondolo members

To: James Nxumalo, Mayor, eThekwini Municipality, Durban, South Africa Senzo Mchunu, Premier, KwaZulu-Natal Jacob Zuma, President, Republic of South Africa

Since 2005, the ABAHLALI BASEMJONDOLO (Shack Dwellers) movement has mobilized to fulfill the needs of a large number of inhabitants in the city of Durban who live without access to land, housing, food, education and basic services such as clean water, sanitation, electricity and health care.

In response to this mobilization, the South African Police Service, the Ethekwini Municipality and the ruling political party (ANC) have attempted to criminalize the actions of this movement.

In particular, we have observed:
The continued intimidation, beatings and unlawful detention of activists.
The torture of individuals held in detention.
The demolition and bulldozing of thousands of homes.
The use of the press to slander the movement and its various leaders.

Video from the Third Futurological Symposium on Free Cultural
Spaces, Ruigoord, Amsterdam, Netherlands, July 2013

Hans Kup and Alan Dearling have produced a nine-minute video from the Third Futurological Symposium on Free Cultural Spaces held in Ruigoord, Amsterdam, Netherlands in July, 2013.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqlW985bn3Y&feature=youtu.be

Arbeitselig, or, Blissful Work
Gustav Landauer
Originally published as “Arbeitselig”, Der Sozialist, May 1, 1913.
Translated by Gabriel Kuhn

Every era of a people has different cultural layers, next to and above one another. This applies to the words that are being used as well. Words are full of nuances that have strong effects, yet people do not pay attention to these unless someone points them out. The word Heim (home/house), for example (a word that is slowly disappearing from everyday speech, entering the realm of “poetic” language), no longer evokes feelings of joy and comfort, but of yearning and alienation. We just need to look at the word Heimarbeit (housework), which refers to something unpleasant, shameful, full of privation. It is not that the home loses grace, comfort, and tranquility because of the work, but the work is considered dishonorable and dangerous instead of acceptable and endurable, as it would be if it occurred outside of the home. If we pay attention to these subtleties, we understand more deeply what the bare facts should already tell us, namely that, today, the home is a beautiful reality to some, the object of occasional nostalgic longing to all, and a cause of great concern to parts of the working class.

How about the word Arbeit (work)? In itself, it has become a neutral term. What is important is how it is used, that is, the sentence, in which it appears. This is what makes the implications clear; implications that may differ greatly. On the one hand, there might be an artist who, after domestic quarrels or problems with friends, pulls himself together, flexes his muscles, and says with utter conviction: I still have my work! On the other hand, there might be a factory worker who, after spending a few minutes in the early morning hours with his wife and children, tears himself away from the family by explaining: I have to go to work.