Theory

"Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint" Silvia Federici
by Michael Neocosmos, 5 June 2008 http://www.hydrarchy.net
Food Riots Show the Need to Overcome Capitalism During the past weeks a series of revolts, protests and strikes against the rising food and energy prices have broken out in many countries of the capitalist periphery. At recent meetings the guard dogs of the capitalist institutions - IMF, World Bank and G 8 - have warned of a gigantic destabilisation and conflicts in almost 40 countries around the world.
"On Indymedia and Climate Camp" Shift Magazine This is an editorial from the third issue of the UK-zine 'Shift'. Online at www.shiftmag.co.uk For many of us a visit to Indymedia UK is a frustrating experience. Its open publishing newswire reveals an array of bizarre opinion posts, advertisements for activist meetings, petition requests and photo stories mixed in with the odd action or demonstration report. However, the number and diversity of articles on the newswire are more than an inconvenience. Most exasperating are the countless posts obsessed with the Israel-Palestine conflict, which are telling of some of the political viewpoints we are happy to associate with.
The Strategy of Concealment: Towards an Anarchist Critique of Communication Roger Farr [An earlier version of this essay appeared in Fifth Estate #375 (Spring 2007)] "Having, then, to take account of readers who are both attentive and diversely influential, one obviously cannot speak with complete freedom. Above all, one must take care not to give too much information to just anybody." — Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle
Governance and the Undercommons Stefano Harney The Third Term 1. Governance is a third term, beyond sovereignty or governmentality. Although the term governance may still mark a form of government. It is longer only a political term. Governance is also now a term of the economy, not in the sense that the economy is also governed, as in corporate governance, but as economy itself. Governance is a form of economic production itself.
* This is a brief outline of the libertarian footprint in the history of Venezuela, prepared by members of the Collective Editorship of El Libertario www.nodo50.org/ellibertario. We hope that this serves as a useful point of reference for those who are interested in the subject.
The assassinations of Salvador Allende and Amílcar Cabral in 1973 mark the end of the last truly transformative sequence in world politics, the sequence of national liberation associated with the victories of Mao Tse-tung, Mohandas Gandhi, and Fidel Castro. It may be that this end is itself now coming to an end, through the clarification of what Mao might have called a new ‘‘principal contradiction’’—the convergence, most obviously in Iraq and Haiti, of ever more
Governance and the Undercommons Stefano Harney The Third Term
 1. Governance is a third term, beyond sovereignty or
governmentality. Although the term governance may still mark a form
of government. It is longer only a political term. Governance is
also now a term of the economy, not in the sense that the economy is
also governed, as in corporate governance, but as economy itself.
Governance is a form of economic production itself. 2. Sovereignty establishes the public and private. Governmentality
makes this establishment of the private productive, through the
production of the public. Governance today marks the emergence of
the public as directly productive. No longer is the public, in all
its micropolitics of subjectivity and macropolitics of population, an
instrument for creating a private that can then be exploited. Today
the public itself in all its anti-social glory, because the public is
the most anti-social moment of capitalist society, is also a direct
and dominant source of capitalist wealth. This is because the public
holds all of the social qualities of the general intellect up to the
light, making the general intellect obvious even in its disfiguration
in the figure of the public, and offering up this captured aspect of
the general intellect for exploitation. 3. Governance puts the public to work, or, perhaps we could say,
after Mario Tronti, governance is the new labour process. Mario
Tronti said the capitalist brings only this labour process, brings
only work, while the worker brings her class relation, her
socialisation, and her living labour, in short she brings the
capital. Today we could say the capitalist brings only governance,
as for instance one might understand the Davos meetings, or the rise
of the business schools of ignorance, or the sinister efforts of
African debt relief, all experiments in governance as labour process,
in governance as the effort to locate the general intellect and, as
Tiziana Terranova says, to harness it. The capitalist brings
governance as a desperate attempt to arrange a labour process beyond
his control. And how does he do this? How does governance work as a 
labour process?
Invaders from Marx: On the Uses of Marxian Theory, and the Difficulties of a Contemporary Reading By Michael Heinrich, Berlin [The following text is the slightly reworked version of an article which appeared on 21 September 2005 in “Jungle World”, a leftist German weekly newspaper. In a previous issue, Karl Heinz Roth. one of the main German representatives of Operaismo, had argued that some important Marxian categories are not able to grasp contemporary capitalism. The text at hand answers this critique, stressing the difference between Marxian theory and traditional Marxism, emphasizing the “new reading of Marx”, which developed through the last decades. The German text can be found at the website of the author: www.oekonomiekritik.de] In the past 120 years, Marx has been read and understood in widely varying ways. In the Social Democratic and Communist worker’s movement, Marx was viewed as the great Economist, who proved the exploitation of the workers, the unavoidable collapse of capitalism, and the inevitability of proletarian revolution. This sort of “Marxist political economy” was embedded in a Marxist worldview (Weltanschauung) which provided answers for all pre-existing historical, social, and philosophical questions. This omniscient kind of “Marxism” was analytically without much use, but was eminently well-suited as a means of propaganda and as an instrument of authority against those who questioned the party line. Already in the 1920s and 1930s, a Left critique of such Marxism emerged, but was nonetheless choked off by Stalinism and Fascism and did not receive a hearing in the Cold War era. This situation began to change in the 1960s, as Marx was read anew during the rise of the student movement and protests against the Vietnam War. A New Left arose beyond the classical worker’s movement which saw itself positioned on two fronts: on the one hand against the global capitalist system, on the other hand against an authoritarian and dogmatically petrified Communist movement, which was viewed as a force propping up domination.
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