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.

"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.

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.

Conversation with Raoul Vaneigem Hans Ulrich Obrist Hans Ulrich Obrist: I just visited Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, who have written an appeal to Barack Obama. What would your appeal and/or advice be to Obama? Raoul Vaneigem: I refuse to cultivate any relationship whatsoever with people of power. I agree with the Zapatistas from Chiapas who want nothing to do with either the state or its masters, the multinational mafias. I call for civil disobedience so that local communities can form, coordinate, and begin self-producing natural power, a more natural form of farming, and public services that are finally liberated from the scams of government by the Left or the Right. On the other hand, I welcome the appeal by Chamoiseau, Glissant, and their friends for the creation of an existence in which the poetry of a life rediscovered will put an end to the deadly stranglehold of the commodity.

End Times in Copenhagen Joel Kovel October 29th 2009 It's hard to overstate the importance of the upcoming December meetings at Copenhagen, Denmark, set up by the UN for the purpose of renegotiating the climate protocols set forth in Kyoto, in 1997 and due to expire in 2012. These latter were greeted with a certain modicum of hope and a small offsetting of skepticism. As Copenhagen looms, the skeptics have been proven right in spades, those who thought something good would come out of Kyoto stand revealed as fools or liars and charlatans. In the sober words of Nature from 2007, the Kyoto protocols, which demanded of wealthy countries that they reduce carbon emissions by 2012 to six-to-eight percent below 1990 levels, have "produced no demonstrable reductions in emissions or even in anticipated emissions growth."