"Whatever Happened To Compassion?"

Zygmunt Baumann

In the USA ten years ago the income of company directors was 42 times
higher than that of the blue-collar workers; it is
now 419 times higher. Ninety-five per cent of the surplus of 1,100 billion
dollars generated between 1979 and 1999 has
been appropriated and consumed by 5 per cent of Americans.

What happens inside every single society occurs as well in the global
sphere — though on a much magnified scale. While the
worldwide consumption of goods and services was in 1997 twice as large as in
1975 and has multiplied since 1950 by a
factor of six — 1 billion people, according to a recent UN report, 'cannot
satisfy even their elementary needs'.

.... this is from the most recent issue of Republicart, which focuses on the theme of precarity, something which you'll be hearing a lot more about....

Spectacle Inside the State and Out:

Social Rights and the Appropriation of Public Spaces
The Battles of the French Intermittents

The strength of a political movement is found not only in its ability to reach a concrete objective. These kinds of successes depend mostly on the economy of power relations. The strength of a movement reveals itself more in its potential for raising new questions and providing new answers. And this much is certain: the battles of the precariously employed French cultural workers have raised new questions demanding new answers.[1]

U.S. Government Board Overturns TAs' Union Membership

Leigh Strope, Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Graduate teaching assistants at private universities can't
form unions because they are students, not employees, a
Republican-controlled federal labor board ruled, reversing a Clinton-era
decision.

"NYC Firefighters, Police Plan Protest"

William Murphy and Glenn Thrush, NewsDay

The labor protest is geared to coincide with the start of
work on the Garden to get it ready for next month's
Republican National Convention, the unions representing the
workers said Monday. The union announcement comes as
planning for convention-week protests intensified and Mayor
Michael Bloomberg vowed to prevent demonstrators from
sabotaging daily life for New Yorkers.

"No Past? No!"

An Interview with the Italian Analyst of Post-Fordism, Sergio Bologna

Klaus Ronneberger & Georg Schöllhammer

The social upheavals of the past two decades have invalidated conventional professional and class identities. Traditional forms and resources of a collective solidarity arising from the common experience of work under alienated conditions are vanishing. Social resistance is having a hard time finding an answer to the new and flexible strategies of post-Fordian capitalism. While some want to rescue the national welfare state to counter the tyranny of the market, others feel that new forms of independence have been created along with the changed balance of power within society. From this point of view, union-oriented labor and social policies have few chances of being popular with »Arbeitskraftunternehmer« [people who act as entrepreneurs of their own labor. Tr.].

Sergio Bologna, one of the most important European analysts of this change, has given us the most comprehensive study to date of the circumstances and perspectives inherent in this form of work in his book on the »new self-employed« in North Italy. In the following interview, Bologna outlines the genesis of the »class« of the »new self-employed,« not only as the consequence of economic strategies and technological developments, but also as a reaction to subtle forms of in-house resistance and post-modern patterns of socialization.

"Empty Runs: Truckers Call Trips in Iraq Wasteful"

Seth Borenstein, Detroit Free Press

WASHINGTON — A Halliburton Inc. subsidiary sent empty flatbed trucks crisscrossing Iraq more than 100 times this year, putting their drivers and military escorts at risk and handing taxpayers the bill with a little added profit.

The drivers were in peril of insurgent attack while taking empty rigs on the 300-mile resupply run from Camp Cedar in southern Iraq to Camp Anaconda near Baghdad, said 12 current and former drivers for the company.

The subsidiary, Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), billed the government for hauling what the drivers derisively called "sailboat fuel."

hydrarchist writes:

"Cognitive Capital Contested:

The Class Composition of the Video and Computer Game Industry"

Nick Dyer-Witheford

Version originale en langue anglaise de Composition de classe de l'industrie des jeux vidéo et sur ordinateur , Multitudes 10 : octobre 2002

1. Introduction [1]

If cognitive capital is a regime commodifying digitalized and networked processes, video and computer games are amongst its most important components. Over three decades digital play has transformed from a whimsy of bored Pentagon researchers into the fastest growing sector of the entertainment industry. The US interactive-game business is now larger than the Hollywood box-office. Lara Croft, shapely neo-colonial heroine of Tomb Raider, is a hot celebrity ; playgrounds are swept with Pokemon epidemics ; virtual communities coalescing around games like Quake, Counter-Strike and Everquest are e-commerce's last hope. In many ways, interactive game enterprises are the poster boys of information capitalism's « new economy, » for, as Nicholas Garnham notes, they « are in fact the first companies . . . to have created a successful and global multimedia product market. » [2] This paper analyses the class composition of the video and computer game industry, the new forms of contestation emerging within it, and the ideological valence of the virtual worlds it generates. But first, a sketch the history and organization of the sector.

Autonomist "Workers Power" Group Forms, Alberta

We have developed a new study group Workers Power! here in Edmonton
Alberta Canada with the object of going beyond the political
limitations of syndicalism to discuss and develop a political
strategy. Members include local anarchists, marxists, and wobblies.
We have begun with a monthly meeting and review of the works of the
council communists.

We have a listserve discussion page here, which is for the use of the group and our friends and comrades who
would like to participate in a discussion with us. There we are
posting our own position papers, online texts as well as links to the
mileux.

Below is our description of the project.

hydrarchist writes

"The Spaces of a Cultural Question"

E-mail interview with Brian Holmes by Marion von Osten in preparation of
"Atelier EUROPA. A small post-fordistic drama." opening at 2nd of April
2004 in the Munich Kunstverein.

Marion: You are editing the next issue of Multitudes on cultural and
creative labor. Can you explain why and out of what perspective you look
on cultural labor and creative work, i.e. do you think it is possible to
explain the inner dynamics of post-Fordist production modes due to this
specific form of work and its conditions?

Brian: Actually we have prepared what is called the "minor" of Multitudes
15 on the theme of "creativity at work." The basic notion of immaterial
labor is that the manipulation of information, but also the interplay of
affects, have become central in the contemporary working process even in
the factories, but much more so in the many forms of language-, image- and
ambiance-production. Workers can no longer be treated like Taylorist
gorillas, exploited for their purely physical force; the "spirit of the
worker" has to come down onto the factory floor, and from there it can
gain further autonomy by escaping into the flexible work situations
developing on the urban territory. These notions have made it through to
mainstream sociology, and several authors have taken artistic production
as the model for the new managerial techniques and ideologies of
contemporary capitalism, with all its inequality, self-exploitation and
exclusion. The most recent example is Pierre Menger's "Portrait de
l'artiste en travailleur" ["Portrait of the Artist as a Worker"]. We don't
see it exactly that way. Of course the individualization of innovative
work practices exposes people to flexible management; and linguistic and
affective labor is vital to the capitalist economy in terms of shaping the
mind-set in which a commodity can become desirable. But we also focus on
the real autonomy that people have gained. This is why we have devoted the
"major" of the issue to activist art practices, and the theme of "research
for the outside." We're also very interested in the ongoing struggle of
the part-time cinema and theater workers in France, concerning the special
unemployment status which they have won since 1969, which provides a
supplemental income making it possible to live an artist's life in an
efficiency-oriented capitalist society. The right-wing, neoliberal
government of Raffarin wants to dismantle this unemployment regime,
because they know that those who benefit are actively producing another
ideal of society.

Univ. Wisconsin Graduate Assistants Walk Off Job

Strike Plan Calls For Withholding Grades

Nahal Toosi,
Milwaukee Journal Sentinal

Madison, Wisoconsin — For the first time in almost 25 years,
unionized graduate assistants at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison walked off their jobs Tuesday to
protest contract offers from the state.
The two-day walkout by the assistants — about 1,200
were asked to participate — is the first part of the
Teaching Assistants' Association's strike plan. The
assistants also plan to withhold students' grades when
the semester ends.