Carnival at the End of the World

A Benefit for Fifth Estate Magazine

New York City, Sunday, July 8, 4-6 pm

Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery
just north of Houston

(F or V train to Second Avenue, 6 to Bleecker St.)

212-614-0505

$6 (admission includes free issue of magazine and subscription for the next issue)

An Afternoon of Poetry, Anarchism and Banjos

Banjos:

Eli Smith

Joe Maynard

Speakers:

Spencer Sunshine

Cara Hoffman

Jack Bratich

Stevphen Shukaitis

Poets:

Steve Dalachinsky

Jim Feast

Ron Kolm

Yuko Otomo

Jill Rapaport

Jessica Slote

"Uprooting the Capitalist Law of Value"

New York News and Letters

News and Letters invites you to participate in our discussions on Monday nights at a new location:

MONDAY, JUNE 25 at 7:00 – 9:15 p.m. sharp

"UPROOTING THE CAPITALIST LAW OF VALUE”

Presentation by Andrew Kliman on a 1948 essay by Raya Dunayevskaya, published in 2 parts in the April-May & June-July issues of News & Letters newspaper and on the website. In it she takes up the Soviet Union’s 1943 theoretical justification for state-capitalism—the assertion that the law of value still operates under socialism. From the essay:

“The break with the structure of Marx's CAPITAL lays the theoretical groundwork for a complete revision of Marxist economic theory, but the new edifice still remains to be constructed. It is no simple matter to extend the operation of the law of value to a "socialist" society. So solid was the structure Marx had built to prove the opposite that no one--not even the all-powerful Politburo of the Russian Communist Party--could merely circumvent what Marx called his major original contribution: the analysis of the twofold character of labor.”

Our next discussion after this one will be MONDAY JULY 16, when the topic will be our publications.
Discussions will continue weekly from July 16 through August 20. You can always check the website under “Events” or call the local phone for topics and other information.

All discussions are at

TRS Inc. Professional Suite

44 East 32nd Street, 11th floor

between Park and Madison Avenues, Manhattan



Admission is free; all are welcome.

Sponsored by N.Y. News and Letters Committee

information: www.newsandletters.org

(212) 663-3631 arise@newsandletters.org

Planning the Sacco & Vanzetti Memorial

New York City, Aug. 23, 2007

New York City's Libertarian Book Club is organizing a memorial for Thur., Aug. 23 in Union Square of the judicial murder of Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in the history of the US.

We held our first organizing meeting for the memorial two weeks ago; our next meeting will be on Wednesday, June 13, at 7pm in the Muste Room at 339 Lafayette Street (the War Resisters League Building.

Anyone interested in contributing their time and talents to the memorial is invited to attend. The memorial will be preceded by a teach-in at St Joseph's Church (6th Ave at West 4th Street), and include talks, performance, music, etc.

THIS AIN'T JUST HISTORY! Immigrants, anarchists, and others on the "terrorist" hit list are being targeted today by the institutional heirs of the J Edgar Hoover-era FBI and all the others who fomented the Red Scare that led to the deaths of Sacco and Vanzetti. Their deaths marked the beginning of an era of state terror in America that's still going strong.

339 Lafayette is at Lafayette and Bleecker Streets. It's easily accessible by the N, R, F, D, and 6 Subway lines.

Ben Trott writes:

"Moving against the G8"

Ben Trott, Red Pepper

[When the G8 travelling circus rolls up to Rostock in Germany later this month, it will again be met with mass protests. Ben Trott reports on the efforts of the German left to unite and draw lessons from the protests at the 2005 Gleneagles summit.]

The G8 last met in Germany in the summer of 1999, six months before the World Trade Organisation (WTO) protests in Seattle, and well into the socalled ‘cycle of struggles’ that began with the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. Yet for Germany’s ‘globalisationcritical movement’, as it came to be known, the mobilisation against the Cologne G8 Summit was a false start.

The mobilisation was split in numerous directions. Confusion had been created by the role that the German Greens – and in particular Joschka Fischer, who was foreign secretary and their most senior member of parliament – were playing in steering Nato towards a military intervention in Kosovo.The radicals, meanwhile, were split into two different camps and unable to exert much influence within the broader coalition.The turnout on the streets was low, huge police repression was experienced and the protests were generally considered a disaster.The mobilisation around this year’s G8 summit, to be held in Heiligendamm near Rostock on 6-8 June, has sought to learn from this experience.

The Habits of Freedom:

Legacies of Paul Goodman

The June Anarchist Forum

On Tuesday, June 12, at 7:30pm, the Libertarian Book Club's Anarchist
Forum
will present a panel discussing the life, work and legacy of Paul Goodman.

Goodman
who lived from 1911 to 1972, is considered to have been a pacifist,
anarchist, poet,
and author of novels and plays. He has been called one of the most
influential social critics of the 1960s. His famous book Growing Up
Absurd has been said to establish
him as “the philosopher of the New Left in the 1960s.”

He organized against
the
Vietnam War. His plans for organizing social structures included keeping
private cars
out of Manhattan. The panel will include Taylor Stoehr, who is Goodman’s
literary executor; Wayne Price; and Jonathan Lee, a filmmaker who will show a
preview of
his movie “Growing Up With Paul Goodman.”

After putting their ideas forward, the panel will answer questions
and respond to audience comments.

The event will take place at:
The Living Theatre
21 Clinton Street

Manhattan (just south of Houston St)
(212-792-8050).

Coming from uptown,
take the F or V train to "2nd Avenue" (exit front of train on 1st Ave, walk
east
along Houston and turn right on Clinton) or coming from downtown, take the
F, V, M or Z train to "Delancey–Essex" and walk east on Delancey 3 blocks
and turn left on Clinton for 2 and a half blocks.

Everybody is welcome and invited to come and to have their say. There is no
set fee for the presentation, but a contribution to aid the LBC is
suggested. If
you have questions, contact the LBC /Anarchist Forum
212-979-8353
or
e-mail: roberterler@erols.com

The Living Theatre and the LBC unite to let the Anarchist Voice be heard.

Two anarchist groups, that were begun in the 1940’s to get the word out on
what our society really is and how it can be healed if it switches to
anarchist principles, have united again to get our message heard. The
Living Theatre
has opened a New York show place again after years of wandering from site
to site. They have offered their new space to the LBC so that the Anarchist
Forum and other LBC events can have a home with our comrades.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

The Shacks Fight Back!
The Shack Dwellers Movement in South Africa

Three talks by Richard Pithouse of the South African shack dwellers movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo.

Abahlali have fought for the right of Durban's shack dwellers to basic amenities — housing, water, land. This democratic grassroots movement has confronted the lies and evasions of local government and aid agencies to show that real participatory democracy is possible: when it is organised by and for the dispossessed.

Richard Pithouse, an academic and journalist who has been active in the movement since its inception, will talk about the struggle, show some short videos, and answer questions.

Community activists from the East End and South London will be in attendance. We hope that the parallels between Abahlali's struggle and that of Londoners fighting the decay and privatisation of their services will provide inspiration and a chance to think.

Please come and join in the discussion!

dr.woooo writes:

Summit: Non-Aligned Initiatives in Education Culture

Berlin, May 24-28, 2007

Two weeks before this years G-8 meeting in Heiligendamm near Rostock
various projects, initiatives and protagonists from the fields of art,
culture and political activism are going to gather in Berlin for
SUMMIT — Non-Aligned Initiatives in Education Culture.

SUMMIT is a proposal to question and to change some of the fundamental
terms of the debate around education, knowledge production and
information society.

SUMMIT seeks to bring together various approaches from different
genres and calls to come forth and unalign. Unalign from both, the
tendencies of bureaucratization and privatization of knowledge and
education. The four-day event focusses on four thematic tracks:
"Knowledge and Migrancy", "Self-authorization, -organization,
-valorization", "Creative Practices" and "Education unrealized and
ongoing".

Kibush 40 writes:

40 Years is Enough!
Six Days of Action against the Occupation of Palestine
June 6–12 2007
Global Day of Action — June 9 2007

Kibush 40 coalition – http://www.kibush40.org

The second week of June will mark forty years since the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 Six Day war. This is now the longest enduring military occupation in the world. While the Israeli government evades negotiations that would end the occupation and lead to a just peace, the lives of Palestinians continue to be crushed daily by closures and economic strangulation, their land confiscated for settlements and their communities made into prisons by the Segregation Wall.

At the same time, violence in the region continues to supply ideological fuel for the G8 governments in their ‘War on Terror’, explicitly declared as a never-ending, pre-emptive global war which justifies erasing civil liberties, supporting oppressive regimes, and attacking refugees and migrants. We are all victims of this war: in Palestine and Israel, in Iraq and in Colombia, in Germany and in the U.S.A.

80th Anniversary of Sacco & Vanzetti Executions

New York City, August 23, 2007

August 23rd is the 80th anniversary of the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti — Italian immigrants who were framed for a robbery and murder and themselves judicially murdered for being anarchists. In this country, has anything really changed?

NYC's Libertarian Book Club is organizing an observance for Thur., Aug. 23 (the day S&V were hanged), in Union Square (the sight of a mass rally of New Yorkers in support of the condemned).

Come to a meeting of the LBC on Wed. May 30, at 7pm at 339 Lafayette Street (the War Resisters League Building), Room 202, to join in planning for this observance. Five years ago, on the 75th anniversary of S&V's execution, we held a memorial in the same location that included music, performance (by the Living Theater), and a lecture by the late historian Paul Avrich.

Today, with Gitmo, the INS, and the ICE cops ruining immigrants' lives and anarchists and supporters of animal rights on a hit list of "terrorists," it's more important than ever to let the state know that we know our history.

339 Lafayette is at Lafayette and Bleecker Streets. It's easily accessible by the R and 6 Subway lines.

Tactics of Resistance: Limitations & Possibilities

London, Ontario, October 12–13, 2007

An interdisciplinary graduate conference hosted by the Centre for the Study
of Theory and Criticism, University of Western Ontario, Canada

The aim of this conference is to discuss various forms of resistance.
Considering late capitalism's ability to accommodate sites of resistance and
the ensuing incapacitation of revolutionary tactics and impulses, we are
faced with the questions: Where can we find sites of resistance today? How
do social, cultural and political constraints impact on the prospects of
emerging forms of resistance? Must tactics always remain 'marginal,'
situational and contextual?

We are looking for papers addressing alternative conceptions and frameworks
of resistance, and their potential for revolutionary change. We welcome
students, professors, artists and activists to re-think resistance through
an interdisciplinary alliance.