"Marx, Cognitive Capitalism and the Transition to the Commons" Michel Bauwens [Snatched from a longer list-exchange at the Institute for Distributed Creativity, ed.] I think we do have to accept that we are no longer in a mercantile, nor industrial capitalist logic, but in a third phase of cognitive capitalism. My thesis is that the marxist thesis, of a organized working class taking power and then changing society, has been discredited. Not only because it didn't happen in the last 200 years, but because it is based on a misreading of history. In the previous transitions, revolutions were always the end point of a long process of reconfiguration. Hence, both slave owners and slaves morphed to serfdom as domain lords and serfs, first as an individual strategy to survive the collapse of the Roman slave economy, and thus in paradoxical ways saving and strenghtening the system; and both nobility and working strata of feudal society morphed to capitalist relations and practices, with the same effect. The point is that these changes, initially seen as a way out for the old system, turned out to be more productive overall, and eventually it made no longer sense to keep the old social order, which precluded this higher productivity to occur on a general scale.

"Driven From Below": A Look at Tenant Organizing and the New Gentrification Andrea Gibbons From Institute for Anarchist Studies This essay is the beginning of an attempt to combine theory and practice for radical organizers and activists working to combat gentrification and displacement in cities across the United States. Based on the premise that all real change has to be driven by those most affected by injustice, it takes a detailed look at some of the practical challenges involved in tenant organizing, and the building of long-lived and sustainable structures for horizontal organization and direct democracy. This organizing work is understood to be situated within a framework of neoliberalism and globalization that are the ultimate causes of gentrification and displacement in the inner city. In August of 2002, two different families came to Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE) because the manager of the Morrison Hotel had stopped accepting their rent. As tenant organizers, we had found this to be a common tactic to evade the laws of rent control and illegally force people from their homes. Typically the managers would not accept rent for a couple of months, then tell tenants that they had to leave. If the tenants did not leave they would be evicted in court for non-payment of rent, their only defense a claim that the managers had refused their rent. The managers themselves would contradict this while under oath, if it ever actually went before the judge. Such a tactic generally came into play when an owner was trying to empty a building, either to sell for higher profit, or to rehabilitate it and then rent the apartments at four or five times the original rent.

On the Digital Labor Question Andrew Ross (Transcribed October 16th, 2009 from a lecture presented at September 29, 2009, at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School) The Freelancers Union was established in 2007 to offer a social safety net and political advocacy on behalf of independent workers who contract their labor to multiple employers. Though it is now the fastest growing union in New York, a city with far more than its per capita share of creative workers, its services model has not yet been fully acknowledged by the labor movement, not even as the national share of “non-standard employment” approaches 33% (almost certainly an undercounted figure). The union emerged from the chrysalis of Sara Horowitz’s Working Today, which earned its laurels in the late 1990s, at the height of the New Economy push to promote “free agency” among the city’s burgeoning digital workforce. A decade later, it remains the only real institutional effort to provide stability to the precarious lives of the city’s independent workers, many of whom were the first to fall into the deep hole of the current recession. The needs of this workforce has attracted a good deal of commentary in recent years as part of a burgeoning analysis of the creative labor of artists (broadly defined) who were once considered marginal to the productive economy, but are increasingly profiled and promoted as the model workers of the new economy. Wherever their labor is organized into the formal silos of the so-called “creative industries,” it has garnered the attention of national statisticians bent on building the case for a new high-growth sector, irresistible to investors, politicians, and real estate speculators who know the presence of artists can have on land value. [1] But well beneath the statisticians’ radar there is a more telling story about the degradation of work that has occurred as part of the transition to a Internet-centered economy based on the widespread use of non-paid amateur or user labor. This short essay will review some of the features of that transition.

Work, Play & Boredom May 2010 Conference CFP Call for Papers for an ephemera Conference at University of St. Andrews, 5-7 May 2010. Deadline for abstracts: 31 January 2010. In recent years, play has become an abiding concern in the popular business literature and a crucial aspect of organizational culture. While managerial interest in play has certainly been with us for some time, there is a sense that organizations are becoming ever-more receptive to incorporating fun and frivolity into everyday working life. Team-building exercises, simulation games, puzzle-solving activities, office parties, themed dress-down days, and colourful, aesthetically-stimulating workplaces are notable examples of this trend. Through play, employees are encouraged to express themselves and their capabilities, thus enhancing job satisfaction, motivation, and commitment. Play also serves to unleash an untapped creative potential in management thinking that will supposedly result in innovative product design, imaginative marketing strategies and, ultimately, superior organizational performance. Play, it seems, is a very serious business indeed.

A Revolutionary Proposal: Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds Alexander Trocchi [Published as "Technique du coupe du monde," Internationale Situationniste #8 (January 1963; reposted from Not Bored).] "And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signalling through the flames." -- Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, 1958 Revolt is understandably unpopular. As soon as it is defined, it has provoked the measures for its confinement. The prudent man will avoid his definition which is in effect his death-sentence. Besides, it is a limit. We are concerned not with the coup d'etat [seizure of the state] of Trotsky and Lenin, but with the coup du monde [seizure of the world], a transition of necessity more complex, more diffuse than the other, and so more gradual, less spectacular. Our methods will vary with the empirical facts pertaining here and now, there and then. Political revolt is and must be ineffectual precisely because it must come to grips at the prevailing level of political process. Beyond the backwaters of civilization it is an anarchronism. Meanwhile, with the world at the edge of extinction, we cannot afford to wait for the mass. Nor to brawl with it.