Building a Mass Movement Save the Planet, Fight Racism Anonymous Comrade I’ve spent forty years of my life as a serious activist. I’ve been to prison as a result and I’ve also had fun. I’ve been involved in one way or another in about every “issue” to come down the left wing pike during that time. I’ve seen some changes. I haven’t seen nearly enough. I’m tied of hearing about past movements. Though I was there, I’m tired of hearing about the 60s. The suggestions I’m about to make are aimed at folks one hell of a lot younger than me. Young activists have the energy, the spirit, the strength to make things happen. Young activists have not become cynical like so many of my compatriots. I should note that I come from a framework which I would describe as anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and Marxist. For me, what we used to call the primary contradictions are race and class. It is through that prism that I view the world.
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The Edu-factory Project: Inside and Against the Transformation of the Knowledge Production. Struggles and the Common within the Crisis. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Shanghai University 7 December, 2009 Speakers: Paolo Do, Ned Rossiter, Jon Solomon
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2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit Fears Green Christiania Squat Nearby Stefanie Marsh The Danish government will be cracking down on the Christiania squatter camp despite its green credentials Less than two weeks before the start of the UN’s climate summit in Copenhagen, a counter-cultural enclave in the heart of the capital has again been attracting the attention of the Danish authorities. Christiania, the sprawling commune that clings limpet-like to 32 hectares of prime property in the centre of Copenhagen, has been an anarchist stronghold and municipal headache ever since a group of squatters seized a former military barracks there in the late 1960s. Since the squat is technically illegal, by rights this part of Christianshavn should long ago have been converted into apartments. Instead this is where a population of more than 700 bikers, hippies, skaters, drug dealers, artists, anarchists, punks, activists, strays and vagrants live in a kind of organised chaos, pariahs to the Danish People’s Party, an increasingly popular and influential far-Right group that says Christiania is dangerous and want to see it demolished. It is feared that the dilapidated “state within a state” will form a mecca for the thousands of anti-globalisation protesters who are expected to descend on Denmark in the second week of December.
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Chto Delat, or self-organization as method: London December 1st Make art/knowledge politically Dmitry Vilensky & Alexei Penzin Chto delat/What is to be done? Lecture: Tuesday December 1st at 6.00pm Small Hall / Cinema (to the side of Loafers) Richard Hoggart Building Goldsmiths College, New Cross, London SE14 6NW The main idea of self-organized structures is to keep under their control the full tasks of the creation, production and distribution of the art and critical knowledge. They realize its activity in the form of "Art Soviets" that are able to politicize cultural production through a process of collective subjectivization. The main goal of this structure is to cultivate political awareness, raise class consciousness of the oppressed, and provoke a democratic, emancipatory activity in the spheres of labor, politics and aesthetics based on research and conceptualization of post-socialist world. The discussion will be about anti-capitalist practices and collective emancipation in Post-Soviet political and cultural situation, radical poverty, publishing a newspaper in precarious conditions, debate concerning the common, how to combine "entrism" and exodus, non-alienated relations, the public as co-creator, social impact of micro-political interventions, local optic, search for the solidarity, and how art and theory do not just reflect or interpret the world, but takes risk to change it.
"Eyes Closed and Covered:" The "Internationalist" Blockade in Germany Volker Weiss [The long-standing conflicts inside the Left in Germany on the issue of nationalism emerged again a few weeks ago in Hamburg when some activists violently blockaded the showing of the film "Why Israel?" by former Jewish anti-fascist partisan Claude Lanzmann. This text analyzes the incident, and attempts to contextualize it within a broader political and historical framework.] After the violent blockade of a film showing of Claude Lanzmann’s “Why Israel” in Hamburg, Germany, the coalition around the Internationalist Center B5 has sought to make an explanation. This Autumn in Germany the showing of 2 films were forcefully prevented: In Hoyerswerda, a bomb threat caused the cancellation of Quentin Tarantinos “Inglorious Basterds,” and in Hamburg the showing of the documentary “Pourquoi Israel” (1972) of the French filmmaker and former antifascist partisan Claude Lanzmann was also not allowed to take place. In contrast to in Hoyerswerda, where the film showing was prevented by Neo-nazis, in Hamburg it required internationalist window dressing. At the end of October, a coalition around the “Internationalist Center B5″ blockaded a theater in their direct vicinity, the Independent Cinema B Movie. With physical blows and wild remarks, [ed. multiple sources reported that the B5 activists shouted "Jewish pigs" and "fairies" ("Shuchteln") at those seeking to enter the theater, and had physically assaulted some of them] the activists made clear that, the causing of injuries to a few people was worth it to them to prevent an engagement with the theme “Why Israel?”
The Necrosocial Occupied UC Berkeley 18 November 2009 "Being president of the University of California is like being manager of a cemetery: there are many people under you, but no one is listening." UC President Mark Yudof "Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor." Karl Marx "Politics is death that lives a human life." Achille Mbembe Yes, very much a cemetery. Only here there are no dirges, no prayers, only the repeated testing of our threshold for anxiety, humiliation, and debt. The classroom just like the workplace just like the university just like the state just like the economy manages our social death, translating what we once knew from high school, from work, from our family life into academic parlance, into acceptable forms of social conflict.
All Charges Dropped Against the Pemary 13, But Someone Needs to Answer for Police Attacks Abahlali basePemary Ridge Press Statement 16 November, 20:42 Abahlali basePemary Ridge is happy that all charges were dropped against 13 of our members, who were arrested in a brutal attack last Friday by the Sydenham police. Abahlali has said, since 2005, “My lawyer is my neighbour.” In court today, the Pemary 13 were not represented by a lawyer, but by the Chairperson of Abahlali baseMotala Heights , Shamita Naidoo, who learned about justice through years of experience working in her community, and about the law seeing case after political case brought by police against shack-dwellers. Shamita spoke powerfully and with a lot of anger against the police violence so common in Abahlali communities, and in all shack settlements.
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Holloway, Jameson, Ticktin at London's Historical Materialism Conference Historical Materialism Conference, Friday 27 to Sunday 29 November, SOAS, Malet St., London. Speakers include: John Holloway, Frederic Jameson, Hillel Ticktin, Turbulence and many more. Timetable at: http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/historicalmaterialism/message/531
Beneath the University, the Commons A conference at the University of Minnesota April 8-11, 2010 // Antioch 05.08 // Rome 10.08 // Athens 12.08 // New York City 12.08 // Helsinki 03.09 // Zagreb 05.09 // Heidelberg 06.09 // London 06.09 //Santa Cruz 09.09// Seemingly discrete struggles over the conditions of university life have erupted around the world within the past year. These struggles share certain commonalities: outrage over precarious and exploitative conditions, the occupation of university spaces, and goals of reclaiming education from state and corporate interests. It is becoming increasingly apparent that recent struggles over the university are not merely discrete events. They express a wider collective desire for direct control over the means of production and forms of life; a desire to create relationships of learning, collaboration, and innovation beyond the university’s attempts to quantify and discipline them. Although the modern university has served the interests of the state and capital since its inception, the past thirty years have witnessed tightened ties with corporate, financial, and geopolitical interests. The subsumption of higher education under capital-driven business models has intensified the expropriation of the products of cooperative labor. With the proliferation of student-consumer and scholar-manager subjectivities, we increasingly find ourselves uncomfortably and often unwittingly occupying the role of active participants in these trends. As the global struggles over the past year have illustrated, however, opposition to these mechanisms of capture is mounting, as are creative strategies for alternatives and exodus. Struggles against the corporate university are linking up across borders; the slogan of the International Student Movement, “One World – One Struggle : Education is Not for Sale,” and the slogan of the Anomalous Wave, “We Won’t Pay for Your Crisis,” appear in actions across Europe, the Americas, and South Asia.
"Two New Publications on Greece's 2008 Revolt" Anonymous Comrade With only weeks to go before December 6th, the day marking one year from the assassination of Alexis Grigoropoulos, two new excellent publications on the uprising of 2008 have come out by comrades in the UK and the US.
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