The extreme weather of 2012 and recent news that climate change is worse than previously thought have made it a front-page issue again. The Obama campaign’s silence on the issue and worldwide government paralysis have added to activists’ frustration and fueled participation in 350.org’s historic February 17th demonstration and campus fossil fuel divestment campaigns. This has also opened the door to a more radical analysis of global warming and environmental destruction.
For a radicalizing and substantial fringe of people touched by the ideas of Occupy, an ongoing economic crisis and growing ecological crisis, they recognize that it’s not enough to limit your analysis to only fossil fuel corporations (though that’s a good start) or absolve politicians based on the lobbying power of those particular companies.
"We Have Populism Because There Is No People" Mario Tronti
'Quite a number of the terms that we use all the time, and which we thus believe that we understand in all their significance, are, in reality, only fully clear to a privileged few. As in the case of the terms “circle” or “square”, which everyone uses, though only mathematicians have a clear and precise idea of what they really mean; so, too, the word “people” is on everyone's lips, without them ever getting a clear idea in mind of its real meaning'. So said the mathematician and philosopher Frédéric de Castillon, victorious participant in the 1778 contest held by the Royal Prussian Academy on the question, close to the heart of Frederick the Great, 'is it useful for the people to be tricked?' 'Normally, by “the people” we mean' – Castillon continued – 'the majority of the population, almost constantly occupied by mechanical, rough and wearisome tasks, and excluded from government and roles in public life'. Here, we are dealing with the eve of the French Revolution – but in Germany, where nation and people had not yet met, as they already had some time before in England, France and Spain, by way of their absolute monarchies. Thus we are also talking about here, in Italy. Frédéric de Castillon arrived in Berlin having come from Tuscany. Nation and people grew together in the modern age. And what brings them together is the modern state. There is no nation, without the state. But there is no people, without the state. This is important, first in order to understand the question, and moreover in order to grasp it within the time that concerns us, and in which we are engaged. Because the theme is an eternal one, Biblical more than it is historical.
Karl Marx wrote that the only way to write about the origins of capitalism in the 16th century is in the letters of blood and fire used to drive workers from the common lands, forests and waters. In this collection of essays, George Caffentzis argues that the same is true for the annals of twenty-first-century capitalism. Information technology, immaterial production, financialization, and globalization have been trumpeted as inaugurating a new phase of capitalism that puts it beyond its violent origins. Instead of being a period of major social and economic novelty, however, the course of recent decades has been a return to the fire and blood of struggles at the advent of capitalism.
RIP Thomas McEvilley, Radical Art Historian, Classicist Scholar Charles Bernstein
Scholar, poet, novelist, art historian, critic, and translator Thomas McEvilley died March 2, 2013 at Memorial Sloan-Kettering hospital in New York. He was 73 years old. He is survived by his wife, Joyce Burstein and two sons, Thomas and Monte (his middle son, Alexander, died some years earlier). His death was the result of complications from cancer, according to his wife.
First Comox Valley Anarchist Book Fair
Vancouver Island, British Columbia, May 4, 2013
On Saturday, May 4, 2013, the Village Muse Bookstore in Cumberland (centrally located on Vancouver Island in British Columbia) will be hosting the first ever Comox Valley Anarchist Book Fair at The Abbey, featuring a May Day feast of subversive ideas and creative resistance possibilities. As a black and green event, it is bathed in both the radical legacy of the Cumberland mine wars and the soaring Beltane spirit of the Merry Month of May, and has absolutely nothing to do with Queen Victoria's birthday. This anarchist festival of the book has been fomented in the cooperative spirit of mutual aid that unites Cumberland and Denman Island co-conspirators. While we anticipate that lots of anarchists and anarchist-friendly folks will converge on Cumberland that weekend, you don't have to be a self-described anarchist to attend the Book Fair. All you need is an open mind and an anti-authoritarian sense of curiosity.
3rd Futurological Symposium on "Free Cultural Spaces"
Ruigoord, Amsterdam, July 19-27, 2013
In 2013, Ruigoord celebrates its fortieth anniversary as a “Free Cultural Space.” The whole year through, manifestations will take place in honor of this wonderful fact. The climax, however, will be on the weeks before and after the 24th of July; the anniversary of the day the village was squatted. To commemorate this event we are planning a 3rd Futurological Symposium on “Free Cultural Spaces” from a global perspective.
“Perder” Important Show of Latin American Political Art
Perder la forma humana. Una imagen sísmica de los años ochenta en América Latina
(Losing the human form. A seismic image of the eighties in Latin America)
Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid
October 26, 2012 - March 11, 2013
Introduction by Alan Moore– This is a major exhibition of political art. It is probably the best I have ever seen. “Perder la Forma Humana” presents the situations and the creative responses to the epoch of dictatorships in Latin America in the 1980s. The presidency of plastic hero Ronald Reagan was a disaster for our neighbors to the south if they professed any opposition to the smooth workings of multinational capital. Activists, most of them young, were detained, tortured and killed by the tens of thousands during many long years of harsh rule by right-wing generals. The U.S. military helped to coordinate these repressions. (This kind of federal coordination was recently echoed in the nationwide shutdown, benign by comparison, of the encampments of the U.S. Occcupy movement.)
Clinton St. theater was behind on its rent. Anarchism and Utopian views have cut down on grants.
A lower East Side theater that championed anarchism, Utopian experimentalism for 66 years will close for good this week — and its fiery founder will spend her remaining days in an unhappy retirement.
Judith Malina will move Thursday to the Lillian Booth home for retired artists in New Jersey after losing her lease on Clinton Street's Living Theatre, where she produced cutting-edge theater for six decades.
"I'm in the theater because I'm a revolutionary and I'm very unhappy about having to give this place up," Malina told The News.
Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, Part 2
Mar 7-9, 2013, Berlin, Germany
An international array of philosophers, critical theorists, media theorists, art historians, architects, and artists will discuss the state of the mind and brain under the conditions of contemporary capitalism, in which these cognitive apparati have become the new focus of labouring.
