:: Call for Papers, Presentations, and Interventions :: The State of Things: Towards a Political Economy of Artifice and Artefacts April 29th to May 1st, 2009 Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy, University of Leicester Keynote speakers: Tiziana Terranova, University of Naples L’orientale Natalie Jeremijenko, New York University Nick Dyer-Witheford, University of Western Ontario In a more wistful moment, Marx asked what commodities would say if they could speak. Surely, if he listened long enough, they would have announced the various traumas of their exploitatative and violent birthing to him. Eventually, one imagines, they would have described the nature of the various forms of labour necessary for their production as the apparitionally elementary components of the capitalist mode of production. So would the commodity’s autobiography be the same now, one wonders. Today we live in a much different state of things: the artifice of artefacts is evident all around us. A parliament of communication technologies, from RFIDS to bluetooth devices, constantly exchange information and network all around and through us. Wireless networks of communication, control, and cooperation proliferate in mysterious ways, all speaking an infra-language of organization, inscribing new techniques of governance. But these networks have become all the more indiscernible by the open secret of their appearance.

FIFTH ESTATE #378 (Summer 2008) now out! CONTENTS of ">FIFTH ESTATE #378: * “Green Scare Continues” – H. Read * “My Green Scare Arrest” – Marie Mason * “RNC: Shut It Down!” – RNC Welcoming Committee * “An Anarchist in Cuba: Socialism or Cell Phones” – Walker Lane * “Shamanism, Anarchy, and the End of the World” – Dave Hanson * “Tarot Cards and the Left” – Joshua Sperber * “The End of Money” – Daniel Pinchbeck * “An Arm of Jacks to Fight the Power” – Peter Lamborn Wilson * “Counterfeiting Sovereignty” – Don LaCoss * “Isn’t All Money Fake?” – E. B. Maple * “Wealth and Poverty: In the Shadow of an Exclusive Club” – Val Salvo (reprint from FE summer 1991) * “Down and Out in Athens” (Excerpt from ‘Nike’) – Cara Hoffman * “We Are All Slaves of Capital” (excerpt from ‘The Wandering of Humanity’) – Jacques Camatte * “Strike!” (poem) – Eugene V. Debs * “The African Road to Anarchism?” – Jim Feast * “Shoplifting and the Politics of Instant Gratification” – Cookie Orlando * “Victorian Proto-Punk, Riot Grrls: The Literary Legacy of Helen and Olivia Rossetti” – Cara Hoffman * ”The ‘60s, 40 Years Later: No Chicago in Denver” – Bernard Marszalek * “Organizing for Anarchism in Oreland” – interview with Andrew Flood and much much more...

"Unfinished Business, The Cultural Commodity and its Labour Process" Stefano Harney We argue that the problems of managing in the creative industries cannot be fully understood in the current and most common overviews of the industries. We review the two ways the industries are understood as social trends before suggesting that they are both insufficiently broad and encompassing. We then use the history of cultural studies, its origins and engagements, to extend the horizon of the creative industries and also to focus on where the work takes place in these industries. This in turn leads us to post-workerist thought and its conception of the cultural commodity, a conception with modify with cultural studies. We then return within this wider frame to what we regard as the central problematic for management with the rise of the creative industries: the location of the labour process that produces the cultural commodity and its value.

*Private Equity Sucks!* *Take action against KKR - Thursday July 17* *1pm, Trafalgar Square, under the lions* http://www.privateequitysucks.com *Join the Global Day of Action against one of the oldest and largest private equity firms in the world: KKR (Kohlberg, Kravitz and Roberts)* Private equity companies have gained massive influence, power and obscene wealth because they’ve stayed invisible to public attention and scrutiny. It is time for that to change! On Thursday 17 July 2008, thousands of trade unions, community organisations, environmentalists, workers and activists will be taking part in a global day of action against KKR - actions are planned in 100 cities in 25 countries. These actions will send a loud and clear message to private equity firms like KKR that we are sick and tired of a few people getting even richer and ruining our lives and the planet in the process. In London on July 17, the Private Equity Creative Action Network (PECAN) will be bringing a creative and strong message to the executives of KKR, including the delivery a giant invoice that makes it clear that KKR has a long overdue debt to our community and world. To help make this action a success and to kick off a summer of actions against private equity, we are inviting people to participate and to get involved on the day (in particular we are looking for: video artists, anti-capitalist cheerleaders, independent media makers, musicians, DJ's, clowns and of course - activists).

"On the Pogroms in South Africa" Richard Pithouse The industrial and mining towns on the Eastern outskirts of Johannesburg are unlovely places. They’re set on flat windswept plains amidst the dumps of sterile sand left over from old mines. In winter the wind bites, the sky is a very pale blue and it seems to be all coal braziers, starved dogs, faded strip malls, gun shops and rusting factories and mine headgear. All that seems new are the police cars and, round the corner from the Harry Gwala shack settlement, a double story facebrick strip club.

Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority Josh MacPhee and Erik Reuland, eds. Reviewed by Alan W. Moore 319 pp.; AK Press, Oakland and Edinburgh, 2007 The artist in capitalist society is necessarily a revolutionary. S/he is as well necessarily an entrepreneur. Between these two positions lies a wide gulf in understandings. The artist must strive to change society according to a vision, because s/he does not fit. Creativity is not an absolute good and value in this society, and the artist is absolutely committed to creativity. Still, the artist must survive, and so must do what that requires. What is that? What is longed-for utopia and what is impinging reality? The divide between our dreams of a perfect world and the realities of our lives, between what is necessary and what is desired has shifted. The Wall is gone; new walls are a’building. The organizers of the Documenta 12 exhibition recently proffered the assertion, “Modernity is our antiquity.” In finding new coordinates for radical position-takings today, we are continuously picking through those ruins for stuff we can use.

Allan Antliff, Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall 213 pp.; Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver, 2007 Reviewed by Alan W. Moore Anarchy and Art is a straightforward book, concerned with the drama, conflicts and tragedies of the modernist past. The book puts into wider context the close-grained work Allan Antliff did on the New York scene in his Anarchist Modernism (2001). For Antliff, anarchism is the subaltern social movement of the 20th century, colonized, exploited and brutalized by triumphant state socialism (and in the west, leeched by liberal labor movements). This is a story full of sadness, the texture of its histories riven with lost lives and forgotten narratives. Antliff’s book is straightforwardly written, a primer in a point of view that might be called doctrinaire anarchism. Antliff begins his book with a stirring chapter reasserting the significance of the primary texts – Proudhon, Kropotkin, and Goldman, and later Stirner and Reclus. His perspective is traditionally art historical emphasizing the impacts of anarchist theory rather than modes of organizing per se. As we pass over the seemingly familiar grounds of 19th century art history, Antliff deftly turns over one after another instance of anarchist influence.

Against Social Exclusion and Neoliberalism at Japanese G8 Summit ACTION AGAINST SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND CALL FOR FAIR LABOR JOIN US IN THE MOVEMENT AGAINST G8 The G8 Summit will be held at Toyako in Hokkaido from July 7-9. We believe that this is an arbitrary meeting of the governments which lead neoliberalism. The world's eight most powerful economies have imposed neoliberalism onto other nations, while dominating the global financial market with the World Trade Organization and the Free Trade Agreement. The developing nations are forced to accept the free trade in exchange of ODA. Privatizations, labor market flexibility, and deregulations are introduced not only in the developing nations but also in the industrialized counterparts. Inequality and poverty are accelerating. Social welfare is reduced. Socially disadvantaged people are excluded and their fundamental rights are violated. Also in Japan, working poor are also victims of neoliberalism since the early 2000s under the Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's government.

The 2008 G8 on Hokkaido, a Strategic Assessment Emergency Exit Collective Bristol, Mayday, 2008 zero The authors of this document are a collection of activists, scholars, and writers currently based in the United States and Western Europe who have gotten to know and work with each other in the movement against capitalist globalization. We’re writing this at the request of some members of No! G8 Action Japan, who asked us for a broad strategic analysis of the state of struggle as we see it, and particularly, of the role of the G8, what it represents, the dangers and opportunities that may lie hidden in the moment. It is in no sense programmatic. Mainly, it is an attempt to develop tools that we hope will be helpful for organizers, or for anyone engaged in the struggle against global capital.