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."

Climate Change, Nuclear Power and Democracy Res0nance Monday saw Ed Milliband make public plans to overhaul the UK energy system. Whilst the plan includes an overhaul of renewables and coal fired power perhaps the most controversial aspect of this overhaul is the emphasis being placed on nuclear energy generation. A new generation of 10 nuclear plants has been proposed which could provide up to 40% of the UK’s energy by 2025. This will be “the most ambitious fleet of new nuclear reactors in Europe” according to the Guardian. This overhaul, according to Labour, has been designed to address the twin problems of climate change and energy security.

“Socialism in One Country” Before Stalin, and the Origins of Reactionary “Anti-Imperialism”: The Case of Turkey, 1917-1925 Loren Goldner “All information on the situation in Khiva, in Persia, in Bukhara and in Afghanistan confirm the fact that a Soviet revolution in these countries is going to cause us major difficulties at the present time…. Until the situation in the West is stabilized and until our industries and transport systems have improved, a Soviet expansion in the east could prove to be no less dangerous than a war in the West…a potential Soviet revolution in the east is today to our advantage principally as an important element in diplomatic relations with England. From this I conclude that: 1) in the east we should devote ourselves to political and educational work…and at the same time advise all possible caution in actions calculated to require our military support, or which might require it; 2) we have to continue by all possible channels at our disposal to arrive at an understanding with England about the east.” — Leon Trotsky, Secret memo to Lenin, Zinoviev et al. June 1920[1] [Prefatory Note: The following article had its origin in a “Letter to the Editor”, ca. 2001, to a Trotskyist group, inquiring about a commercial treaty signed by the Soviet Union with Kemalist Turkey in March 1921, a mere two months after 15 leading Turkish Communists were murdered just off the Turkish coast. Those who ordered and those who committed these murders were never identified and are the basis for numerous theories, but everything points to some person or persons in the Kemalist movement, up to the highest levels. What interested me was of course not a murder mystery but the fact that the Soviet Union entered into an alliance with a government that was patently killing and jailing pro-Soviet communist militants, and said and did little or nothing about it. That dynamic was of course familiar to anyone acquainted with post-1945 world history, as in the case of Nasser’s Egypt or other “progressive” Third World regimes, but here was the same pattern only four years after the Russian Revolution, i.e. in a period when almost everyone, myself included, thought that the dominance of Soviet national interests over “proletarian internationalism” really emerged into full view only with the triumph of Stalin and “socialism in one country” in 1924.

The Truth About The Coming Insurrection
Or, the Misadventures of a 'Pataphysical Hoax
by The Indigestible

[Reposted from Not Bored]

A member of the College of 'Pataphysics, at which I have a seat on the Commission of Liceites and Harmonies (Usury Sub-Commission), I have judged the moment favorable, notably with respect to the most recent developments in the "Tarnac Affair," to make several clarifications concerning both the activities of the aforementioned College and the true motivations behind my text, The Coming Insurrection.

ACTA Treaty is DMCA on Steroids Kevin Carson [Reposted from Center for a Stateless Society] In last year’s election campaign Obama came across as vaguely more friendly to open-culture than the alternatives, among other things supporting “fair use” reform of the DMCA and opposing requirements for ISP data retention (both issues on which Hillary waffled). As somebody put it, “Obama’s a Mac and Hillary’s a PC.” Even the U.S. Pirate Party endorsed Obama as the least evil candidate. But if recent events are any indication, Obama’s stance on the preexisting digital copyright regime is that of Rehoboam: “My little finger shall be thicker than my father’s loins. For whereas my father put a heavy yoke upon you, I will put more to your yoke.” It was a safe bet something was up when Obama refused to discuss—for “national security” reasons, of course—the terms of the forthcoming Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (a secret copyright treaty). Now the Internet chapter has leaked, according to Cory Doctorow, and “It’s bad. Very bad.” Among other things:

Who Were the Witches? Patriarchal Terror and the Creation of Capitalism Alex Knight This Halloween season, there is no book I could recommend more highly than Silvia Federici’s brilliant Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia 2004), which tells the dark saga of the Witch Hunt that consumed Europe for more than 200 years. In uncovering this forgotten history, Federici exposes the origins of capitalism in the heightened oppression of workers (represented by Shakespeare’s character Caliban), and most strikingly, in the brutal subjugation of women. She also brings to light the enormous and colorful European peasant movements that fought against the injustices of their time, connecting their defeat to the imposition of a new patriarchal order that divided male from female workers. Today, as more and more people question the usefulness of a capitalist system that has thrown the world into crisis, Caliban and the Witch stands out as essential reading for unmasking the shocking violence and inequality that capitalism has relied upon from its very creation.

Grasping the Political in the Event Maurizio Lazzarato [This interview with Maurizio Lazzarato (ML) was conducted on 27 November 2008 by Brian Massumi (BM) and Erin Manning (EM). It is reposted from "Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics," Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation, No. 3. October 2009. Maurizio Lazzarato: ML Brian Massumi: BM Erin Manning: EM BM: I thought I would take as the point of departure a recent article I read in the New York Times (2008), where a certain kind of rhetoric – seen everywhere these days – was mobilized. This was an article about Morgan Stanley, one of the large financial institutions, which stated that the problem is that we consume too much. We are dying of consumption. The economic crisis was caused by an excess of consumption, and it’s the fault of individual consumers who got themselves too indebted: it’s a personal moral fault. You speak of debt as a technique that is an aspect of an ensemble of governmental assemblages. Could you elaborate on and react to this idea that the crisis was caused by the individual behaviour of consumers? ML: I think that the financial crisis brings to the fore the governmental technique which is debt. I think that debt, therefore credit, is a governmental technique that is more widespread in the US than it is here in France. It is at once an economic technique and a technique for the production or the control of subjectivity. These things go together. It’s interesting to see how governmentality produces itself at the crossing of different assemblages: the production of subjectivity and the economy. We can see very clearly what was the neo-liberal project: generally speaking we can say that finance was a machine to transform rights into credits. Instead of getting a raise in salary, you would get a credit. Instead of having a right to retirement, you would get an individual life insurance. Instead of having a right to lodging, you would get the right to a mortgage. These are techniques of individualization.

Flying Universities - Flash Research Workshop - Warsaw November 4 - 8 2009 What was the flying universities? Could we make a map of the Flying Universities? Could we make a time-line? What kind of knowledge did the Flying Universities produce and reproduce? Who were the students? Who were the teachers? What was the relationship between 'flying' and occupation? How was the FU organised? Under which historical conditions was 'flying' necessary? To what extend were the Flying Universities kept secret? What is the advantage of secrecy? What does it mean to fly? Can we meet some of the people involved? Can we walk to some of the places where the flying universities were situated? Can we get access to documents? To what extend were they facilitation research? To what extend were they facilitating education? To what extend were they fascilitating resistance? What kind of economy was involved? What was the relationship between the teachers and the students? Gender and age of the flying students and scholars? Is flying still necessary? Are we under occupation? What kind of knowledge is lacking or excluded? Is the tradition still alive? How can we organise? What do we want to know? How can we fly? Workshop Participants so far is: Kuba Szreder (the Slow University), Romek Dziadkiewicz (Academy 36,6), Jakob Jakobsen (former Copenhagen Free University) and more