Neoliberalism is destroying Europe Christian Marazzi The Guardian The European sovereign debt crisis, which was caused by member states' public debt but increased because of the actions taken to rescue the banks after the 2008 crisis, demonstrates at least three things. First, that currency does not exist without a state. Second, that capitalism cannot be managed by the market alone. And third, that the austerity measures will not bring Europe out of the crisis but will in fact continue to make it worse – until the euro crashes. However, the most important point to emerge from the crisis is that Europe's political reinvention will depend exclusively on the social struggle against neoliberal politics. Neoliberalism, the absurd idea of economic government based solely on the market and its ability to self-regulate, is at the root of the great illusion of a leaderless Europe supposedly unified by a euro that has controlled the internal economic and social differences according to the logic of the financial markets. And yet, neoliberalism is still the only language used by European politicians to confront the crisis and to face the social conflicts that will break out over the next few months. There exists no European government; only management of austerity measures and of repression.

Immanent Singularities: An Interview with Bruno Gulli Minor Compositions As a philosopher and academic worker, Bruno Gulli is nothing if not untimely. In an era when the labor of thought, the work that creates new concepts, finds itself squeezed by an ever-increasing array of restrictions (from journal and publisher limitations to lack of time from overwork and precarious employment), Gulli bucks these trends in a spectacular fashion. Rather than composing 8000 word chunks of pabulum, simply recycling tired clichés or niceties, Gulli has embarked on composing a three-volume inquiry into the relation between ethics, labor, and ontology. Such an approach might not have seemed all that remarkable fifty years ago, but today to carry out such a fundamental rethinking of our categories of political thought and discourse is paradoxically no longer appreciated, and therefore all the more necessary. Gulli’s first book, The Labor of Fire (2005, Temple University Press) led Michael Hardt to comment that the work of Gulli, along with others carrying out similar work, will renew the Marxist tradition. This renewal, he claims, will not be of a scientific, structuralist, or humanist Marxism, but rather a philosophical approach to Marx centered on the concept of labor its power of social transformation. High words of praise indeed. This interview was conducted shortly after the publication of his most recent book Earthly Plenitudes: A Study on Sovereignty and Labor (2010, Temple University Press). Minor Compositions: First off I wanted to ask you about what you describe as the “dignity of individuation.” In particular how does this indicate a shift in theorizing the relation between ethics and politics? Could this perhaps be connected to the Zapatistas’ notion of the dignity of revolt or Simon Critchley’s elaboration (2007) of an anarchic meta-politics based upon the infinite demand of the ethical? Bruno Gulli: “Dignity of individuation” provides a metaphysical (or ontological) grounding for both politics and ethics. Conversely, it says that metaphysical (or ontological) definitions cannot escape a political and (especially) ethical dimension. It is then a synthetic and poetic concept, à la Vico, where some of the most basic problems of the philosophical tradition are reflected and, at the same time, expanded. The concept has two parts: “individuation” refers to, and is drawn from, the principle of individuation (principium individuationis), which, in particular, I understand in terms of John Duns Scotus’ concept of haecceity (or thisness), that is, what makes something the something that it is (but it has a history that goes beyond Duns Scotus). The problem with the concept of the principle of individuation, as Paolo Virno (2009) has also recently pointed out, has to do with the term “principle” – not with “individuation.” The latter indicates a process, and thus individuation is really individuating; the former, I might say from the point of view of my book, is a sign (anticipation or residue) of sovereignty. Conjugating “individuation” with “dignity,” once the word “principle” is eliminated, was for me an act of piracy – an act of piracy within philosophy. Differently from individuation, which can be and is applied to anything, which names the ordinary and regular, dignity is usually reserved for something which, to some degree, is extraordinary, which has distinguished itself for some reason. Even when we speak of human dignity (vis-à-vis other forms of life), we use this type of logic. Thus, the dignity of X indicates a lack, or a lesser degree, of dignity in Y. To say that dignity lies in individuation is to counter this type of logic, and following Leibniz, whose work I use a lot in the first chapter of my book, it is also to affirm that nothing is extraordinary, nothing other than regular, other than orderly – though of an order we may not like, not understand.

33 Lessons on Lenin: For a Marxist Reading of Lenin’s Marxism - Lesson 1 Toni Negri This year we will be working with Lenin, with no intention of reaching a comprehensive definition of this figure, but, rather, to confront a few problems which are born from Leninist thought with the problems which presently face the class movement, and we will do this in three blocs of lessons and some other interval and supplementary appendices. The three blocs of classes are the following: the first bloc has a propaedeutic character, on the internal dynamic of Leninist thought. We will seek to follow the way in which problems are formed in the political theory of Lenin, comparing them with the way in which we tackle similar themes. The second bloc of lessons will make reference, in a more specific form, to the discourse on organization and, in particular, on the subject of the soviet-party in the thought of Lenin. Lastly, in the third group of lessons the focus shall be on the subject of the extinction of the State starting from, on the one hand, from his work The State and Revolution and, on the other, from the actual conditions of the relations of force between classes and the development of the productive forces. In addition to these three blocs of lessons and questions a few notes and appendices (which work around the dialectic in Lenin, on sovietism, on Left-Wing Communism, an infantile disorder) Three blocs of lessons of uneven content and importance. Putting these disproportions aside, the invitation to think and act which a reading of Lenin provokes is so great and thrilling that it will be of great benefit, without a doubt, in this work.
We will begin with the first point: Lenin and us, Lenin and the political experience of the movement of these years and let us ask the question: what has been the contribution of Leninism to our theoretical and political formation? The question begs confrontation and, as happens with any confrontation, there appears implicitly the need for a standard or judgment, which can be radically expressed in this way: we ask if Lenin, for us, continues to mean something, if the method used by Lenin continues to be valid in our current era, and if this corresponds with the practice of investigation and action which, often spontaneously, we have found and renewed within the class struggle. “Spontaneously”; we say this not because ‘spontaneity’ is our religion, but because no one, during the 50’s and 60’s, helped us analyze the class struggle.

Call for papers - Edufactory Journal, No. 1 Transforming Universities: Measure, Transition, Institution EduFactory 'The old institutions are crumbling ...' - so began the introduction to the zero issue of Edufactory Journal on the double crisis of the university and the global economy. Paradoxically, one of the conditions of this double crisis is the global expansion of the university. The old institutions are crumbling but they are simultaneously trying to reinvent themselves, to transplant themselves, to network themselves. This issue of the Edufactory Journal will investigate two faces of this situation. The first section entitled 'Occupations' will examine the global transition of higher education with a focus on new institutions being established in different parts of the world. The second section entitled 'Anomalies' will focus on struggles against the 'system of measure' that presides over the transition of universities. As the overall ambition of the issue is to understand the connection between the globalization of higher education and the imposition of measure, we also welcome contributions that critically analyse the connections between these processes.'Occupations' will examine the proliferation of new universities. Not only do we witness the founding of online universities but also the massive expansion of the education market in countries such as India, China, Egypt and Brazil. New knowledge spaces are being established in special economic zones and new kinds of partnerships, consortia and divisions of labour are being forged between higher education institutions across the world. The opening of offshore branch campuses accompanies the establishment of new kinds of private institutions and the forging of international university chains or networks under different corporate banners and branding techniques. With these developments appear new transnational forms of institutional governance, new kinds of trade relations, and new kinds of connections between universities and societies. There also arise new knowledge practices and conflicts as institutions negotiate their structures with regard to disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and the 'conflict of the faculties'. The topic of 'new universities' is related to the question of transition. On one hand, we wish to enquire into the meaning and models of transition in concrete cases - for example, in the post-soviet world. On the other hand, if the concept of transition implies a non-historicist narration, we can also approach it as a space of possibility: that is to say, the permanent transition of capitalism also signals the possibility of new kinds of political thought and action. How do we read this possibility alongside the imperative to innovation, constant variation and adaptation that animates the globalization of higher education? And how do these changes produce new kinds of subjectivities and struggles in the production of knowledge?

Pirate Bay Down, Police Raids Across Europe thing.co.uk Police in up to 14 countries carried out raids against suspected file-sharing servers this morning. According to file-sharing news site TorrentFreak, the bulk of police action seems to have taken place in Sweden. Swedish Internet service provider ISP, which hosts both The Pirate Bay and whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks, earlier denied rumours of a police raid, saying that officers had visited them to ask questions over two

"The Origins of Primitivism" Radical Archives Radical Archives is happy to finally present our ‘Origins of Primitivism’ set. It consists of 16 documents related to the development of contemporary primitivist thought, which were first printed in 'Fifth Estate' between 1977 and 1988. All of these documents (listed at bottom) are available online for the first time. Additionally, David Watson has contributed a short introduction and reflection on these texts for the occasion of putting them online. (Radical Archives is an archival website with an emphasis on anarchist, libertarian marxist, situationist and primitivist perspectives. It looks at how these perspectives relate to a number of larger social and philosophical questions – including ontology, technology, religion, spirituality, nationalism and identity. Another strong interest is in Left-Right crossover, including Third Position fascism, and especially in Left antisemitism.)

The Aims of Education McKenzie Wark My fellow educators (by which I mean everyone, as we are all educators). Since our topic today is the aims of education, I thought I would start by imagining how my students would approach such a question. I imagine the first thing they would do is: consult the oracle. Not the oracle of Delphi, the oracle of The Daily Show: Jon Stewart. Not long ago Jon Stewart’s guest on The Daily Show was Tim Pawlenty, the human face of conservatism. While Stewart lobbed surprisingly softball questions at him, Governor Pawlenty explained how we can completely privatize education. Students will just buy their education a course at a time via iTunes on their iPads. Along with downloads of Lady Gaga videos and, for that matter, The Daily Show, you could just download Philosophy 101, or more likely, Marketing 101. I’ll come back to this vision, both thrilling and chilling, of education. Students don’t get all their information by consulting the oracle. They also practice a complex kind of divination using randomly cast spells, or in other words, Google. Using Google somewhat carelessly, one gets at least a fair glimpse of what commonsense opinion is about the aims of education. This commonsense opinion about education is curiously contradictory.

"Politics in the Slum: A View from South Africa" Abahlali baseMjondolo The modern state, and its civil society, have always been comfortable with workers in their allotted place – be it formed around the immediate needs of industrial production, like the migrant workers hostels in apartheid South Africa or contemporary Dubai, or an attempt at creating a haven, like the suburban home which has its roots in the gendered and raced class compromise reached in North America after the Second World War. When there has been a part of the population rendered or considered superfluous to the immediate needs of production there has been a degree of comfort with the inevitably bounded spaces into which these people have been abandoned or contained – prisons, ghettos, Bantustans etc. But both the modern state and civil society have always been acutely uncomfortable with that part of the ‘dangerous class’ - vagabonds or squatters - that are, by virtue of their occupation of space outside of state regulation, by definition out of place and threatening to domination constructed, along with other lines of force, on the ordering of space.

Attention & Zones of Human Resistance: Interview with Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi @ Autonomedia March 30th, 2009 With Malav Kanuga, Stevphen Shukaitis, and Jim Fleming You are suggesting that there is a reversal between the US and Europe. Bifo: Until six months ago, maybe three months ago, you could get the impression that Europe was where movements had a grasp on the institutional level and that the US was in very bad shape. Now all of a sudden it’s the exact opposite. I don’t know what is going to happen in the US but I feel that here – I mean I don’t know what is going to happen between in the relationship the state and US capitalism – but here I feel the ground is ready for a proliferation of social experiments, of cultural initiatives and so on. Europe, on the contrary seems to be eaten by a proliferation of fascist feelings. The economic crisis is probably worse here in the US than in Europe. But the difference is that in Europe we don’t have a federal budget. So what? So the different states are saying very bad things about protectionism but of course everybody is following a protectionist policy. You see Sarkozy against the Czechs, you see Angela Merkel in Germany saying we will not rescue the Lithuanian banks. You see Italy, Spain and Greece sinking more and more into a difficult situation and Germany and France pretending not to see. You see that everybody is going his own way. This could mean in the near future a real squandry of the European Union. The movements are charged with the political task of defending and protecting the cultural meaning of the Union. This could become interesting. The EU has been so far an economic alliance between banks. All of a sudden it could become the object of a social action. But at the same time the protectionists are producing very bad feelings in the population. Like fascism growing in Italy. The same can be said of Lithuania, Estonia, and the Baltic states. In France I have witnessed a very dangerous trend which is the militarization of the banlieues. Militarization in what sense? On one side police and on the other groups of young people using guns against the police. I mean the general trend of the EU landscape seems to be towards an aggressive and right wing radicalization. Of course things can change. But in general this is the trend.