Remembering the Impossible Tomorrow:
Italian Political Thought and the Recent Crisis in Capitalism
The British Society for Phenomenology 2013 Annual Conference
5th- 7th April, 2013 St Hilda’s College Oxford

During Marx’s time radical thought was formed from a convergence of three sources: German philosophy, English economics, and French politics. In the introduction to Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (1996) Michael Hardt argued that these tides had shifted, with radical movements drawing from French philosophy, US economics, and Italian politics. More recently, Matteo Pasquinelli has argued that ‘Italian theory’ has attained an academic hegemony comparable to that held by French philosophy in the 1980s.

But despite the proliferation of analysis and organizing drawing from and inspired by the history of autonomous politics in Italy, where are these voices today? In 2012, if you listened to the mainstream politicians and economic experts and no one else, you would hardly know that there was any financial crisis in 2008. You might have a faint recollection that for a brief moment alternative voices were heard in the media, but now it as if nothing at all had happened. The waters that once had parted have now engulfed us again. It is the same voices articulating the same tired ideas as the whole of Europe slides into the nightmare of austerity, despite the fact they do not appear to have any relation to reality, and even those who speak them seem exhausted and worn out.

London's Freedom Bookshop Firebombed
International Times

FREEDOM BOOKSHOP, London’s most famous anarchist press and bookshop, has been firebombed. The attack on the Whitechapel premises took place on Friday morning in the small hours. Police were alerted by the Fire Brigade at 5.30am. The downstairs section of the shop is badly damaged. Electrics are damaged. Many books are burnt or charred. Upstairs is untouched. No one was hurt.

My Encounter with the "Precarious and Service Workers Assembly" of Occupy Oakland
Alexander Selkirk

In early spring of 2012, announcements appeared at various internet sites calling for a “Workers Against Work -- Precarious and Service Workers Assembly,” ostensibly connected to or an outgrowth of the Occupy movement in Oakland, California.

The first leaflet I saw for it said this:

“As service workers, we are often both overworked and underpaid; with Management forcing workers to work ever faster in an ever shorter amount of time. Productivity and speed-of-service requirements increase while hours per week are slashed. It’s clear: The harder we work, and the less we get paid, the richer they get! Many of us are already in tough situations as parents, immigrants, young people and students. Racism is blatantly apparent at many of our workplaces, with Latino and immigrant workers confined to back of the house positions, maintaining a racial hierarchy to keep us separated. For some, a job at a restaurant or a café is a 2nd or even 3rd job, a result of the declining wages of other careers. Even worse, we often find ourselves forced into student loan and credit card debt because of low pay. All the while, rent, food, and transportation costs climb through the roof.

From Dining in Refugee Camps to dOCUMENTA 13: The Art of Seeking Sahrawi Independence

There are few recurring global exhibitions of contemporary art more renown, prestigious and selective than dOCUMENTA, held every five years in Kassal Germany. Which is what makes it so very remarkable that one of the highlights of last year's dOCUMENTA 13 was the inclusion of a refugee encampment made by what are arguably among the least known people on the face of the earth--the Sahrawi of North Africa.

Organized by New York artist Robin Kahn, philosopher Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey), and dOCUMENTA 13's Creative Director, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and with photo documentation by Artforum critic Kirby Gookin and artist Edi Escobar, the installation was intended to bring attention to the Sahrawi's 38-year struggle for independence. Even more remarkable is that the cross-cultural collaboration came about as the result of a dream. Not a dream of success, as the art world is plethorically marked by, but by a literal dream that came to one of the organizers when asleep. As for whose dream and what it led to, I defer to Robin Kahn's exuberant account below.

Balkans Anarchist Bookfair May 24-26 Ljubljana

Federation for Anarchist Organizing (FAO) invites everyone to come to Ljubljana this May and join us at the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair (BAB). It has been ten years since BAB started its voyage across the Balkans with the aim to connect local and regional, as well as international anarchist community and to provide space for exchange of anarchist ideas, practices, literature, materials, cultural events, workshops and public discussions.

By now the fact that we are living in the midst of a general social crisis has become undeniable. Finding ourselves in the middle of the whirlwind of capitalist destruction, we often feel weak and frustrated. Capitalism is destroying our lives daily and in so many different and very real ways. It is taking our future away from us. Often we are finding out that some of the old mechanisms of struggle, that were once the source of our power, are no longer effective enough. Yet it is all too clear that for us there can be no other option but to struggle and build against and beyond the existing. We certainly don’t lack useful analyses, critiques, seminars and conferences. It is time to take action.

Practices of resistance, solidarity and the construction of communities against and beyond capitalism have always existed through history and have constituted an integral part of anarchist communities. Today the need for such practices has again spread far beyond our small communities and into the wider society. The desert that capitalist devastation leaves behind, is a space that needs to be filled with imagination and everyday practices that stem directly from us and our desires. For everyone.

Sol Yurick, 1925–2013

Sol Yurick was born in the Bronx, New York in 1925 to a working class family of politically active Jewish immigrants. At the age of 14, Yurick became disillusioned with politics after the Hitler-Stalin pact. He enlisted during World War II, where he trained as a surgical technician. He studied at New York University after the war, majoring in literature. After graduation, he took a job with the welfare department as a social investigator, a job he held until the early 1960s, when he took up writing full time.

Yurick was involved in Students for a Democratic Society and the anti-war movement at this time. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

In 1972, Yurick was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

His first novel, The Warriors, appeared in 1965. It combined a classical Greek story, Anabasis, with a fictional account of gang wars in New York City. It inspired the 1979 film of the same name.

His other works include: Fertig (1966), The Bag (1968), Someone Just Like You (1972), An Island Death (1976), Richard A (1981), Behold Metatron, the Recording Angel (1985), Confession (1999). Yurick was still an active writer until his death on January 5, 2013.

15M Exhibition in NYC January 9 - February 15

Digital prints from the Archivo 15M in Madrid will be exhibited at the Bluestockings radical bookstore and activist center in New York from January 9th to February 15th, 2013. The show was prepared by the caretakers of the archive of the famous encampment in the square of Puerta del Sol in Madrid. This camp sparked the 15th of May movement throughout Spain, the strongest European echo of the Arab Spring, and the forerunner of Occupy Wall Street.

The Archivo 15M group was formed only five days after the plaza takeovers flowered across Spain in May 2011. They began by asking people for materials that “spoke about the settlement,” documenting events and activities as they occurred.

All the originals of this material are now bricked up in the building which housed the evicted social center Casablanca. The self-organized occupied social center was evicted September 19, 2012. A re-occupation attempt failed, and now the building is sealed to its top floors and guarded by police.

FBI Documents Reveal Secret Nationwide Occupy Monitoring Issue:
Free Speech Gov't Transparency Case
Occupy Crackdown FOIA Requests
Partnership for Civil Justice Fund

FBI documents just obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund
(PCJF) pursuant to the PCJF’s Freedom of Information Act demands reveal
that from its inception, the FBI treated the Occupy movement as a
potential criminal and terrorist threat even though the agency
acknowledges in documents that organizers explicitly called for peaceful
protest and did “not condone the use of violence” at occupy protests.

The PCJF has obtained heavily redacted documents showing that FBI
offices and agents around the country were in high gear conducting
surveillance against the movement even as early as August 2011, a month
prior to the establishment of the OWS encampment in Zuccotti Park and
other Occupy actions around the country.

2013 Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints
Radical Heroes for the New Millennium!
James Koehnline and the Autonomedia Collective

Autonomedia's Jubilee Saints Calendar for 2013! Our 21st annual wall calendar, with artwork by James Koehnline, and text by the Autonomedia Collective.

Hundreds of radical cultural and political heroes are celebrated here, along with the animating ideas that continue to guide this project — a reprieve from the 500-year-long sentence to life-at-hard-labor that the European colonization of the "New World" and the ensuing devastations of the rest of the world has represented. It is increasingly clear — at the dawn of this new millennium — that the Planetary Work Machine will not rule forever!

Celebrate with this calendar on which every day is a holiday!

32 pages, 12 x 16 inches, saddlestitched

isbn 978-1-57027-259-2 : price $9.95 : 32 pages

Pay for two, and we will send a third calendar for free!

CFP The Politics of Workers’ Inquiry
May 2-3, 2013 @ University of Essex

Workers’ inquiry is an approach to and practice of knowledge production that seeks to understand the changing composition of labor and its potential for revolutionary social transformation. It is the practice of turning the tools of the social sciences into weapons of class struggle. Workers’ inquiry seeks to map the continuing imposition of the class relation, not as a disinterested investigation, but rather to deepen and intensify social and political antagonisms.

Mario Tronti argues that weapons for working class revolt have always been taken from the bosses’ arsenal. But, has not it often been suggested, to use Audre Lorde’s phrasing, that it is not possible to take apart the master’s house with the master’s tools? While not forgetting Lorde’s question, it is clear that Tronti said this with good reason, for he was writing from a context where this is precisely what was taking place. Italian autonomous politics greatly benefited from borrowing from sociology and industrial relations – and by using these tools proceeded to build massive cycles of struggle transforming the grounds of politics.