Becoming Multitudes: Workers, Students and French Social Movements Jason Francis McGimsey Officially speaking, the mass mobilizations against the now congressionally approved pension reform in France have come to an end. The biggest unions met yesterday (November 8th), collectively signing a document that promises another day of action on November 23rd, promoting “multiform actions” that will, however, be decided on by “local and professional categories”. Substantially, unions are strategically biding their time and delegating the responsibility for the movement for two reasons. First and foremost, they are waiting for the right moment to take advantage from the crushing popular opposition to Sarkozy’s policies: the presidential elections for 2012. Their fear is that continuing strikes will eventually alienate the popular consensus that they have enjoyed so far, “degenerating” into radical actions that they would then be forced to distance themselves from. The second and more interesting reason why French unions have backed down from full-contact opposition to the government is that they never were in control of the movement in the first place. Over the last few months, in the best case scenario, unions functioned as temporary organizational tools, loose containers that provided communication networks between various groups and resources. In the worst case scenario, they assumed their (typical) role of paternalistic social intermediaries, quelling the more heated expressions of social opposition and reconducting them within union lines. In reality, smaller antagonistic flares continue to sporadically erupt throughout France. There are unannounced strikes, slowdowns and pickets in sectors ranging from transportation to services and oil refineries. Solidarity groups of inter-professional strikers remain active, passing from one strike to the next, blocking entrance ways and insisting that the movement is far from over. And they’re right: although the national bonfire of révolution is not burning brightly, the cinders are still incandescent and there is no smoke in sight.

Saharawi Protest Camp Attacked; Several Killed, Hundreds Injured Free Western Sahara Network In the early hours of Monday morning the Moroccan security forces razed the Sahararwi protest camp containing 20,000 people to the ground. Several were killed and hundreds injured. Riots are erupting in El Auoun and could spread.

A Permanent Economic Emergency Slavoj Zizek During this year's protests against the Eurozone's austerity measures — in Greece and, on a smaller scale, Ireland, Italy and Spain — two stories have imposed themselves.[1] The predominant, establishment story proposes a de-politicized naturalization of the crisis: the regulatory measures are presented not as decisions grounded in political choices, but as the imperatives of a neutral financial logic — if we want our economies to stabilize, we simply have to swallow the bitter pill. The other story, that of the protesting workers, students and pensioners, would see the austerity measures as yet another attempt by international financial capital to dismantle the last remainders of the welfare state. The IMF thus appears from one perspective as a neutral agent of discipline and order, and from the other as the oppressive agent of global capital.

Cognitarian Subjectivation Franco "Bifo" Berardi Recent years have witnessed a new techno-social framework of contemporary subjectivation. And I would like to ask whether a process of autonomous, collective self-definition is possible in the present age. The concept of “general intellect” associated with Italian post-operaist thought in the 1990s (Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, Christian Marazzi) emphasizes the interaction between labor and language: social labor is the endless recombination of myriad fragments producing, elaborating, distributing, and decoding signs and informational units of all kinds. Every semiotic segment produced by the information worker must meet and match innumerable other semiotic segments in order to form the combinatory frame of the info-commodity, semiocapital.

Google Is Polluting the Internet ">Micah White An advertising agency has monopolised, disorganised, and commercialised the largest library in human history. Without a fundamental rethinking of the way knowledge is organised in the digital era, Google's information coup d'état will have profound existential consequences. Google was originally conceived to be a commercial-free search engine. Twelve years ago, in the first public documentation of their technology, the inventors of Google warned that advertising corrupts search engines. "[W]e expect that advertising-funded search engines," Larry Page and Sergey Brin wrote, "will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers." And they condemned as particularly "insidious" the sale of the top spot on search results; a practice Google now champions.

Farewell to The Corporate University Andrew Ross The Chronicle of Higher Education The term "corporate university" barely raises an eyebrow these days. That is unfortunate. It's perfectly fine for a collegial kvetch around the department water cooler, but it's not all that helpful for analyzing how institutions like ours are being restructured. In fact, the term is a lazy shorthand for understanding the changes coursing through higher education. Admittedly, there is a pile of evidence to support the idea that universities have gone corporate. The casualization of the academic work force is the most obvious—arguably, the loss of professional job security has occurred at a rate faster than in any other occupational sector. The polarization in salaries is another example of marketization: The ratio of executive compensation to the pay of the average adjunct instructor bears comparison with that in most top-down corporations. So too have universities, like corporations, gone offshore, cutting costs, spreading assets, and polishing their brands in "emerging markets." The shift in attention and funds toward commercially relevant fields has also been quite pronounced, and the production of a jumbo pool of student debt has made universities into vehicles, if not instruments, for bankers' profits. Some of the most delicious water-cooler tales emphasize how our administrators are adopting managerial techniques from corporate America. But there the analogy begins to unravel. At my own university—no slouch when it comes to entrepreneurial moves—the administration recently introduced a "re-engineering" campaign to cut costs and improve managerial efficiency. Transplants from the corporate world might have concluded they were in a time warp. After all, the heyday of the managerial fad known as "re-engineering" was in the early 1990s, sparked by Michael Hammer and James Champy's Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution (HarperBusiness, 1993).

The Tombstone Blues James Howard Kunstler The latest version of Pretend - going on a couple of weeks now - is the nation whistling past the graveyard of mortgage documentation fraud while skeletons dance around everything connected with the money system. Halloween came early this year. The USA is getting to look like one big Masque of the Red Death, so I suppose it's convenient that our pop culture has been saturated with vampires, zombies, and werewolves for a decade, coincident with the self-cannibalizing of our economy. Something in the zeitgeist told us to get with the program of a twilight existence. We're well-schooled now in the ways of the undead, operating under cover of darkness, going for the neck at every opportunity, even eating our young - if you consider the debt orgy, both private and public, as a way to party like it's 1999 by consuming your childrens' future.