Call Montreal’s 6th Annual International Anarchist Theatre Festival The Montreal International Anarchist Theatre Festival (MIATF), the only theatre festival in the world dedicated to showcasing anarchist theatre, is currently seeking submissions to be staged in May 2011. Application deadline for the Montreal International Anarchist Theatre Festival: January 20, 2011.

The Antagonistic University? A Conversation on Cuts, Conviviality and Capitalism Anja: Let me begin by posing three questions. Firstly, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that modes of labour are appropriating cognitive, communicational and affective skills. What does this mean to you for the political potential of academic and collaborative work? Secondly, given that there are massive cuts being proposed to the education sector through a regime of austerity measures, and given that the current labour paradigm is one that produces precarious, alienated, competitive and individualised relations between workers, do you think that the university as an institution (and the kinds of labour it engenders) is a potent site of struggle and strike? And thirdly, what kinds of collective relations between people and modes of organising do you think are possible for the university struggles, and where do you think we should place our emphasis? How can we negotiate a transversal between micro- and macro- political desires, anxieties, exhaustions, solidarities and hopes? (Please feel free to comment on strategies you think are useful for building more caring and collective common worlds in general as well if you like).

Embodied Materialism in Action: An Interview with Ariel Salleh Gerry Canavan, Lisa Klarr, and Ryan Vu Ariel Salleh has been working at the intersection of ecology, feminism, and materialism since the early 1980s. Her emphasis on the need for an embodied materialist analysis of global capitalism offers a crucial antidote to the objective idealisms of postmodern and poststructuralist thought. Her seminal work Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx, and the Postmodern (1997) seeks to politicize ecofeminism, a branch of ecological thought often imagined to be “murky” and “essentialist,” particularly in its 1970s iteration. In Ecofeminism as Politics, Salleh introduces the ideological formation Man/Woman = Nature to underscore how the aligning of “woman” with “nature” allows for the instrumentalist appropriation of both nature and woman-as-nature. Climate change, overfarming, ocean acidification—all ecological crises stem from this basic ideological structure. In other words, all of these crises are sex-gendered. For Salleh, this is the hidden complication subtending the human/nature split, holding it in place despite the work of otherwise astute critical analysis. Her work is thus a key intervention into the fields of Marxism, socialism, and ecology, and it was with the intent of bringing the insights of feminism into conversation with scholars striving after eco-socialist aims that Salleh joined the editorial board of Capitalism Nature Socialism in 1988, a position she continues to hold. Salleh’s embodied materialist understanding of nature, society, and capitalism has evolved through decades of activist work. She has been a co-convener of the Movement Against Uranium Mining, founding member of the Greens, a participant in local catchment campaigning, the representative ecologist on the Australian government’s Gene Technology Ethics Committee, and an original signatory of the 2001 Eco-Socialist Manifesto.

“We’re Coming”: COP 16 Mexico Protests Dawn Paley “We’re coming, and we’re going to take over public spaces.” That is the message that Gustavo Castro Soto, a community organizer in Chiapas, has for the Mexican government and the world in the lead up to the COP-16 Summit in Cancún. Even though they’ve been getting the runaround from local and state governments about renting halls and meeting places during the COP-16, environmental and social movements throughout Mexico have put out a call for an alternative gathering, dubbed a “Climate Dialogue,” outside of the official summit.

Comments on Li Minqi's The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy Lang Yan The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy attempts to fit the rise of China into the world-systems approach of Immanuel Wallerstein. Luckily Li is much more critical of the contemporary Chinese model of development for creating a post-capitalist world than Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing. For all the talk about the rise of China and China’s relationship to the US-centered world economy, this is not something that has been well-theorized to date. The book, however, focuses more on introducing the world-systems approach than on contemporary China. The strongest chapter on China shows well the contradictions of socialist accumulation during the Maoist period. I wish there was an equally strong chapter on the political economy of the reform period, for such a chapter would surely support Li’s argument about China’s place in contemporary global capitalism. His section of China’s macroeconomic imbalances could benefit from a discussion of present attempts by the state to generate expanded internal demand, such as the New Socialist Countryside policy.

Gulf Coast Resistance: What Does Resistance Look Like? The Niger Delta Model Ray Boudreaux Calculated Risks When black plumes of oil began gushing forth from the silent bottom deep in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20th, everyone in South Louisiana reverted to the crisis mode we have all lived in for periods of time since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Our first question became “What can we do to help save our wetlands?” Thousands of willing Louisianians signed up to volunteer in the protection and cleanup efforts, and people began planning to carpool down the road to the coast to help out.

“Peak Oil” and “Resource Curses” from a Class Perspective George Caffentzis [From a presentation at the Historical Materialism Conference, CUNY Grad Center, New York, NY, Jan. 14-16, 2010.] The intention of these notes is simple: to strip both the peak oil hypothesis of its apocalyptic pathos and the “resource curse” conjecture of its apologetic halo and examine them in the light of historical materialist categories. This translation from the realms of apocalypse and apology to a class analysis is a modest but, I believe, necessary step in fashioning an anti-capitalist energy politics. I do this not because I am an adherent of what I call the “peak oil complex,” or of the “resource curse” hypothesis, but because they have become major features of contemporary energy politics, and in order to enter into the discussion, one must recognize the milestones along the way.

Emancipation under Conditions that the Left Didn’t Want: Generalized Resource Shortages as a Historical Crisis of the Social Andreas Exner, Christian Lauk & Konstantin Kulterer “If there is a lack of appropriate analysis of environmental processes and societal relations to nature because they don’t fit into the wishful thinking of ‘eternal capitalism,’ dangerous ways of ideologically processing the crisis can gain momentum.” Rising prices for food are increasing hunger, a global recession is waiting in the wings, and at the same time, energy is getting more and more expensive. Within only a few years, the terrain has changed dramatically for left movements. Nonetheless, many people are still holding on to well-known formulas. Unfortunately, they don’t fit the new circumstances.

TRAVOL 2011: Volunteer Summer Camp An autonomous gathering of people, organizations, and community experiences Second World Forum of Applied Knowledge January 10th to February 20, 2011 TraVol will take place in the village of Polpaiko, which is located at the edge of the municipality of Tiltil in the northern part of the Metropolitan Region of Santiago, Chile.

"Government Cuts: As Stupid As They Seem?" Hillel Ticktin [There are a surprising lack of convincing explanations as to why the capitalist class is pushing through the present unprecedented austerity drive - even at the risk of provoking both mass opposition and a double-dip recession. The following excerpts, from Hillel Ticktin's recent articles in Critique, do offer an interesting partial explanation.] It remains very unclear why a section of the ruling class is going for these cuts. It is one thing to reduce government spending and raise taxes during an upturn, as Canada did in the 1990s, and quite another to do so today. The large scale unemployment consequent on such reductions in the public sector is being matched with substantial salary reductions. As there are often disproportionate numbers of female employees in the sectors being proposed for downsizing, the measures will bear heavily on women and families. There are suggestions that the poorest will be protected, but this is a fig leaf to provide a semblance of humanity. The poorest may be protected but most people are by definition not in that category, but are nonetheless scraping by, with incomes a fraction of the so-called upper middle class. Whatever their present views, they will be jolted into opposition to the government and ultimately to the system.