Ruigoord’s Third Futurological Symposium on Free Cultural Spaces
Amsterdam, Netherlands, July 23–25, 2013

Space Is the Place
― Sun Ra

Free Cultural Space Is the Place! More particularly, the place is Ruigoord Culturele Vrijhaven, which between the 23rd and 25th of July 2013 will host the Third Futurological Symposium on Free Cultural Spaces. This year, again under the inspirational chairmanship of Felix Rottenberg, The Cosmopolitical Parliament welcomes an international group of presenters from important Free Cultural Spaces. Central aims of this year’s Symposium include generating a comprehensive collective vision of the extraordinary value and essential importance of Free Cultural Space and refining and publishing a Declaration on The Universal Right to Free Cultural Spaces.

Class Struggle in China:
“We Are Not Machines! The Struggles of Workers in China”
Members of the Gongchao Collective

New York City
April 15, 17, and 18, 2013

Presentation: “We Are Not Machines! The Struggles of Workers in China”
with Members of the Gongchao Collective

The Chinese-Taiwanese company Foxconn employs more than one million people in China alone. As the world’s biggest contract manufacturer in electronics, it works for Apple and many other large brands — but, as revealed in the spotlight drawn by a series of worker suicides in 2010, Foxconn’s workers face horrendous working conditions while producing Phones, Pads, and other desired products. A contributor to the Gongchao collective will report on the exploitation in these factories and Foxconn workers’ resistance, countering the image of a perfect digital world presented by the leading gadget
brands like Apple.

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When: Monday, April 15th @ 7PM
Where: Bluestockings Bookstore
172 Allen St.
New York, NY 10002
(212) 777-6028
Who: Free and open to all– $5 Suggested, but no one turned away.

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When: Wednesday, April 17th 7:00pm
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor
New York, NY
Who: Free and open to all

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When: Thursday, April 18 at 7:30PM
Where: The Brecht Forum
451 West Street (that's the West Side Highway) between Bank & Bethune Streets
NYC 10014
(212) 242-4201
Who: Sliding scale: $6/$10/$15

COUNTERING CONTINGENCY: TEACHING, SCHOLARSHIP, AND CREATIVITY IN THE AGE OF THE ADJUNCT
A conference sponsored by the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers
April 5-7, 2013

Inspired by the effort to organize by adjunct faculty at Duquesne University and the emerging discussion about adjunct faculty issues nationwide, this conference offers an opportunity to think more deeply about the state of contingent, non-tenure-stream faculty in the Pittsburgh region's colleges and universities. Contingent labor constitutes the majority of faculty, yet adjunct faculty are the lowest paid and most overburdened higher education workers. Adjunct faculty represent the foundation of academic experiences at the undergraduate level and offer irreplaceable interactions with students. They are artists, scholars, researchers, and examples of inspired teaching. This conference is an invitation to imagine the answers to crucial questions raised by adjunct faculty's tenuous position: How can we use what we know to create a more sustainable and equitable labor and educational system, one that will benefit everyone at the university? What change is most needed? What does it mean to constitute the new faculty majority at a college or university? What are the first and best steps to improve the conditions of adjunct faculty's labor and students' learning?

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.

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.

Historical Materialism Conference: Confronting Capital
April 26-28, 2013, New York University

Critical investigations into the present moment quickly reveal that the current crisis of capitalism shows no sign of abating. The failure of austerity to restore growth has sent ruling class politicians scrambling, as the assault of capital on all fronts of life—ecological, economic and social—grows exponentially.

This is not without resistance however. From the ongoing Arab revolution, to Occupy and Greece, confrontations of capital and regimes of power continue to proliferate, push forth new political horizons and sustain influence on a global scale.

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.

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.

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.