- No upcoming events available
« April 2024 »
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
| 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
| 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 |
| 28 | 29 | 30 | | | | |
|
Bristol Anarchist Bookfair September 12th
The Island, Bridewell St, Bristol BS1 2PY
10.30am to 6pm.
The 2009 Bristol Anarchist Bookfair takes place amidst the worst worldwide economic recession, and crisis of capitalism, for 80 years. It is no surprise then that this years bookfair is loosely themed around the ideas of Resistance and Alternatives to Recession. We live in dark and worrying times, but they are also times of hope as people question the viciousness, stupidity, inherent greed and unsustainability of a socio-economic model based on exploitation, profit and control...
New York CIty's "Picture the Homeless" Forms Tent City
Beka Economopoulos
On Thursday at 11:00 AM, members of Picture the Homeless orchestrated a spirited occupation of a warehoused (vacant) lot, currently owned by the firm JPMorgan Chase, a recent beneficiary of billions in taxpayer bailout money.
Homeless New Yorkers and their allies turned a fenced-off grassy lot in El Barrio/East Harlem into a vibrant Tent City, creatively adorned with makeshift dwellings, colorful art and banners. Under the slogan “NYC: A Place to Call Home,” they demanded that warehoused lots and buildings be accounted for by the city, and transformed into housing for poor and homeless people.
Burning Message to the State in the Fire of the Poor’s Rebellion
Richard Pithouse
DU NOON, Diepsloot, Dinokana, Khayelitsha, KwaZakhele, Masiphumelele, Lindelani, Piet Retief and Samora Machel. We are back, after a brief lull during the election, to road blockades, burnt-out police cars and the whole sorry mess of tear gas, stun grenades and mass arrests. Already this month, a girl has been shot in the head in KwaZakhele, three men have been shot dead in Piet Retief, and a man from Khayelitsha is in a critical condition.
There are many countries where a single death at the hands of the police can tear apart the contract by which the people accept the authority of the state. But this is not Greece. Here the lives of the black poor count for something between very little and nothing. When the fate of protesters killed or wounded by the police makes it into the elite public sphere, they are generally not even named.
Refugee Camp in Greece Destroyed
Movement for the Rights of Refugees and Immigrants in Patras.
The consequences of the war by EU and US in Afghanistan are more than apparent in Greece. This war created thousands of refugees who are trying to survive by traveling to “democratic” Europe. Thousands have died on this “journey” and those that arrived alive face a “fortress Europe.” The following is a report about the destruction of a point of arrival, a refugee camp, in the third biggest town in Greece, Patras.
The Patras refugee camp was destroyed on July 12, 2009. It had a lifetime of approximately eight years. Located in the north of the city, next to a small river - Milichos - behind Iroon Polytechniou Avenue, it consisted of about 150 small huts, in an area of 5 to 6 acres, with a mosque in the center and a few improvised shops. It hosted and protected 1000 to 2000 refugees from Afghanistan. Though it was an improvised camp, under miserable hygienic conditions, it was the last refuge, the last hope for refugees in Patras. At least 300 of them had applied for asylum and had managed to get a “red card,” while 200 others wanted one, but could not apply, since the authorities who are responsible for accepting and processing applications did not have a translator.
The Mapuche Community in Southern Chile
Yeupeko-Filkun
The following is a communique concerning a recent police raid on the Mapuche community, Yeupeko-Filkun. The Mapuche Nation, located in the occupied territories of southern Chile and Argentina, has been in a war for autonomy and self-determination since Spanish colonization. Yeupeko-Filkun is on the Chilean side of the colonial border. The Chilean state continues to engage in highly militarized and repressive tactics against the Mapuche communities in conflict, including its use of the Pinochet era anti-terrorism law. The anti-terrorism law allows the state to utilize unidentified witnesses.
“Our Bolivian Model is not Communist, but Community Based”
Michelle Amaral da Silva
Fernando Huanacuni, one of the most important Aymara intellectual references in Bolivia, defends that the foundation for the process of change in the country is structured around the return to their original culture.
Fernando Huanacuni, uma das principais referências intelectuais dos aymara na Bolívia, sustenta que a base do processo de mudança no país está na retomada de culturas originárias
The current Bolivian political process has undoubtedly attracted the attention of the Brazilian left. The high level of protagonism from popular movements in national politics and the fact that the country elected an indigenous President, the fierce confrontations with a racist elite – which renders a state coup a plausible possibility – their international struggles to assure sovereignty over their natural resources, the strong presence of the ethnic component as the motto for mobilizations, the changes in the Constitution of a country that now defines itself as a Plurinational State, among other elements, attract attention to Bolivia, giving it credentials as the main political laboratory now.
The Right to Stay Put: Contesting Displacement in Urban Regeneration
Friday 28th and Saturday 29th August
Venue: Ida Kinsley Village Centre, 17 Guide Post Road, Grove Village, Manchester M13 9HP
A Participatory Geographies Working Group event as part of the Royal Geographical Society / Institute of British Geographers Annual International Conference see www.rgs.org
Free admission / open to public
It is now 25 years since Chester Hartman first advanced the notion of the right to stay put for lower income group struggles against gentrification. Since then, gentrification and related processes of privatisation and marketisation have become integral to neoliberal urban strategies across the world. Despite this proliferation, academics have generally responded poorly to Hartmans call to arms. Rather, as Slater observes (2006, 2008), gentrification research has generally lost its critical edge, and from some quarters gentrification has even been celebrated as beneficial to incumbent low-income groups (Freeman, 2006; Vigdor, 2002). This is not our experience and with this session we seek to restore Hartmans principle to the heart of gentrification research by inviting contributions from activist geographers in the widest sense of the term (academics, teachers, housing professionals, campaigners, trade unionists and ordinary residents) to share and exchange their experiences, insights and methods to better defend peoples right to stay put. In the spirit of making geography relevant beyond the policy-academy complex, the session will have a practical orientation and will offer reflections, stories, tactics, lessons and strategies for developing successful urban resistances. The aims are to: (1) share experiences and develop practical knowledges about what works in urban resistance; (2) create an educational space for encounter and dialogue between those involved in similar critical work and activism; and (3) start to develop an action research network and a knowledge/resource base for wider dissemination.
B'Eau-Pal Water Scares Dow Execs Into Hiding
A new, beautifully-designed line of bottled water - this time not from the melting Alps, nor from faraway, clean-water-deprived Fiji, but rather from the contaminated ground near the site of the 1984 Bhopal catastrophe - scared Dow Chemical's London management team into hiding today.
Twenty Bhopal activists, including Sathyu Sarangi of the Sambhavna Clinic in Bhopal, showed up at Dow headquarters near London to find that the entire building had been vacated.
Had they not fled, Dow employees could have read on the bottles' elegant labels:
B'eau-Pal: Our Story
Workers Creating Hope: Factory Occupations and Self-Management
Shawn Hattingh
Monthly Review Zine
In most countries, political leaders and bosses are using the global economic crisis to once again unleash an attack on workers and the poor. As part of this, we have seen corporations around the world trying to make workers pay for the crisis by retrenching tens of millions of people. In the most extreme cases, workers arrive at their companies in the morning and are told they no longer have a job. With all these retrenchments, corporations are not just taking away jobs but they are also attacking people's dignity. They are literally throwing people into a very uncertain world where it is getting harder and harder to even get the basics of life such as food and shelter. Of course, the corporate elite are not worried if people starve or live in misery, what they care about is their profit margins and bottom lines. Through retrenchments, therefore, the elite are waging a war on workers and the poor in the name of corporate survival and profit prospects. Fortunately, workers around the world have started resisting. Strikes against retrenchments have occurred from France to China and from Greece to South Korea. In some cases, workers have even kidnapped their bosses and occupied factories and offices to stop being made 'redundant.'1 It is through this type of direct action that the workers involved are winning concessions from the elite. Indeed, workplace occupations seem to be one of the most effective ways for people to win their demands and reclaim their dignity back from the elite.
Robert Jasper Grootveld: Artist and activist who helped found the Dutch Provos in the 1960s
David Winner
The Independent
No single person can be said to have created the worldwide cultural phenomenon we call "the Sixties". But the Dutch anti-smoking "magician" and voodoo showman Robert Jasper Grootveld has a better claim than most. In the early Sixties, his surreal, dadaist "happenings" in Amsterdam electrified the city's bored youth and led to the creation of the playful Provo movement (short for "provocation"). With the charismatic, flamboyantly transvestite Grootveld as a spokesman, Provo was a catalyst for cultural revolution. The group provided free bicycles, subverted a royal wedding and humiliated the stiff-necked Dutch establishment and Amsterdam police force so effectively that both groups – and the country - underwent a near-total personality change. Provo lasted only from 1965 to 1967 but the spirit of what Grootveld dubbed "International Magic Centre Amsterdam" broke old Holland, inspired hippies in San Francisco and musicians and artists in London and paved the way, among other things, for the summer of love, Dutch total football and the green movement.
|
|
