Announcements

"The Yes Men Fix The World" Movie Premiere Dear friends, After a very busy week - including a fake New York Post with real news (for a change), the launch of a nationwide civil disobedience program, some prime-time news, and even a night in jail - we are very happy to be opening our new film in New York City next week (October 7). But we need your help spreading the word. Our film's all about TAKING ACTION. We're even accompanying the film's rollout with a very pesky program that's all about saying: we all know what's wrong, now let's DO something about it. But it all starts in New York. If it does well here, theaters throughout the US will want it too. If it doesn't, they won't.
CFP Affinities #4 – What is Radical Imagination: Horizons beyond “The Crisis” Edited by Alex Khasnabish and Max Haiven The social crises of neoliberalism, so evident and provocative throughout the rest of the world, have finally come "home" to the global North in the form of a cataclysmic financial crisis wreaking havoc on the lives of people, workers and communities, intensifying already intolerable injustices and inequalities and justifying the intensification of surveillance, policing and militarization.
The Mapuche Community in Southern Chile Yeupeko-Filkun The following is a communique concerning a recent police raid on the Mapuche community, Yeupeko-Filkun. The Mapuche Nation, located in the occupied territories of southern Chile and Argentina, has been in a war for autonomy and self-determination since Spanish colonization. Yeupeko-Filkun is on the Chilean side of the colonial border. The Chilean state continues to engage in highly militarized and repressive tactics against the Mapuche communities in conflict, including its use of the Pinochet era anti-terrorism law. The anti-terrorism law allows the state to utilize unidentified witnesses.
A Post-Fordist struggle: Report & reflections on the UK Ford-Visteon dispute 2009 NEW PAMPHLET FROM PAST TENSE past tense has a new FREE pamphlet available for your delectations In June 2000 Ford Motor Company outsourced the production of certain component parts to a new company called Visteon - in reality a spin off company of Ford in which Ford retained a 60% holding. In England a deal between the Ford company and the union promised all former Ford workers – now employees of Visteon –the same wage and pension conditions they'd had with Ford. But all newly hired Visteon workers were employed under inferior contracts. On 31st of March 2009 Ford/Visteon announced the closure of three factories in the UK and the sacking of 610 workers. The company was declared insolvent and put into receivership: workers were sacked with only a few minutes notice. No guarantees were given concerning redundancy or pensions payments. The management had made the workers work up to the last minute, knowing that they would not even receive any wages for their final shifts. On the 31st workers in Belfast responded to the closure announcement by occupying their factory spontaneously… the Basildon (Essex), and Enfield (north London) Visteon plants also occupied the next day… While the Basildon workers’ occupation ended quickly, the Enfield and Belfast plants remained in the workers’ for several weeks. Written by a member of the Visteon Support group who was active in the struggle at Enfield, this pamphlet briefly details the occupation there, relates the occupiers dealings with Visteon, with the Unite union, the support they received, and the outcome of the dispute… ‘A Post-Fordist Struggle’ is FREE, available from Past Tense for just 2 stamps (first or second class); write to us c/o 56a info Shop, 56 Crampton Street, London SE17 3AE. If you want a few copies to distribute, drop us a line: (a small donation would be appreciated though not compulsory).
Mayday magazine was launched to improve and liven up political debate amongst those seeking ways forward in the complex world we now live in. The problems of capitalism are huge and myriad, whilst the trauma of Marxism emerging from the domination of orthodox Communist parties has meant that the working class is without mechanisms of self reproduction and independent political development. Towards this end Mayday engages politically with the world as it is, rather than impose plans from above. We seek to encourage and spread existing struggles and attempts at progressive political renewal.
Loren Goldner and Howie Seligman, NYC Summer Study Group on Capitalist Crisis Howie Seligman and I will be doing a 9-week study group in the New York City area on Marxian theory and the current crisis. If you are interested, read on. As the group is limited to 15 people, we will give priority to "advanced beginners" rather than to the pros who tend to predominate on Meltdown. But all applicants are welcome. SUMMER STUDY GROUP ON MARX’S CAPITAL AND THE CURRENT CRISIS Loren Goldner and Howie Seligman will be organizing a weekly study group in July and August for New York City-area people on Marx’s Capital (and other writings), linking Marx’s critique of political economy to the current crisis of the world capitalist system. The group will meet every Tuesday in from July 7 through September 1, 7-10 PM, in an East Village location. For purposes of both space and group viability, the group will be limited to 15 people. If you are interested in participating, please contact Loren Goldner asap at lrgoldner@yahoo.com Participants should be committed to regular weekly attendance and to keeping up with 50-100 pages per week of reading. Barring a need to change venues, the meetings will be free of charge, except for occasional contributions for photocopy expenses, refreshments, etc. Readings will consist of selections from Marx’s Capital, and articles (to be decided in consultation with the group) on contemporary developments.
The Oakland Rebellions The Unfinished Acts Crew After its debut at the San Francisco and New York City anarchist bookfairs, we're happy to offer up the final run, all cleaned up and freshly dropped on the internet. Read it here: http://issuu.com/unfinishedacts/docs/unfinished_acts Low res for slower connections here: http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/06/15/18601725.php Comment on the indybay site if you decide to print and distro it! In conversation, unfinished acts crew From the introduction: Unfinished Acts was written collectively by a group of anarchists who were and still are actively present in the rebellion following Oscar Grant’s execution -- a collective recounting and analysis of events surrounding the shooting of an unarmed 22-year-old Black man in Oakland. Oscar Grant III was executed by Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police officers during the first hours of 2009 on the platform of the Fruitvale station. The following pages include a few short histories of significant social movements to help contextualize the rebellions. This history acts as intermissions for a documentary dramatization (but factually correct!) of some of the events that unfolded in the streets during the first month of 2009. We have reconstructed the narrative and dialogue from collective stories, personal experiences and videos of the rebellions posted online. We conclude with our own analysis and lessons.
Unfinished Acts: The Oakland Rebellions From the introduction: Unfinished Acts was written collectively by a group of anarchists who were and still are actively present in the rebellion following Oscar Grant’s execution-- a collective recounting and analysis of events surrounding the shooting of an unarmed 22-year-old Black man in Oakland. Oscar Grant III was executed by Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police officers during the first hours of 2009 on the platform of the Fruitvale station. The following pages include a few short histories of significant social movements to help contextualize the rebellions. This history acts as intermissions for a documentary dramatization (but factually correct!) of some of the events that unfolded in the streets during the first month of 2009. We have reconstructed the narrative and dialogue from collective stories, personal experiences and videos of the rebellions posted online. We conclude with our own analysis and lessons.
Film: Visteon Workers Fight for a Better Deal The UK education charity and its alternative news channel WORLDbytes has released a filmed report covering the Visteon protests in Enfield. The report draws out the situation workers faced upon being made redundant and what prompted them to take matters into their own hands and occupy the car part factory. Interviews conducted directly after the workers left the occupation capture the mood at the time: a great uncertainty about what the future holds yet hope and defiance that ultimately led Visteon bosses to meet their demands.
City from Below Issue of the Indypendent Reader The new issue of Baltimore’s Indypendent Reader, which comes out of the recent “City from Below” gathering, has been released. Information about it below. This special national issue of the Indypendent Reader comes out of a conference held in Baltimore this March called the City From Below, which was co-organized by the Indyreader, Participation Park (a political project centered around a community garden on a reclaimed vacant lot in East Baltimore), and Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse, a worker-owned and democratically managed collective project in Baltimore’s Mt. Vernon neighborhood. The conference came out of our recognition that all of our projects were in very concrete ways focusing their energies on what might be called a politics of urban infrastructure – working towards a media platform for Baltimore’s social movements, creating a public space and sustainable urban agricultural alternative, building a business oriented not towards profit but towards social justice, and the distribution of radical information – and in a way such that all of our individual projects reinforce each other through the larger horizontal networks of social movements we all exist within. For us and our projects, this kind of mutually reinforcing dynamic is one of the most exciting things about this kind of city-centric activism and organizing – it’s not only that we’re working to make the cities we live in a better place, but in some sense, it’s the city itself that’s working towards this goal. Taken to its limit, it’s a vision of urban democracy where the city’s inhabitants themselves directly control the way the city works and how it grows – not in the sense that they get to elect a mayor or a councilperson once every few years, but that they actively participate in a thriving fabric of locally controlled projects and initiatives which build and manage the urban environment.
Syndicate content