Social Struggles in South Arica
Zach Levenson

CUNY Grad Center, 34th and 5th Avenue, New York City
4PM, Sunday, Dec. 8, 2014

Insurgent Notes (http://insurgentnotes.com) is sponsoring a talk by Zach Levenson on recent struggles in South Africa’s townships, in which he was involved, both as a participant and an observer, for six months earlier this year.

He will speak on state and private land grabs and relocations, ethnic divisions, stratification within the casualized and unemployed work force, and some attempts by the township populations to self-organize. He will also discuss
the false dichotomy between “social democratic” and “neo-liberal” policies
at containment by the ruling African National Congress (ANC).

The talk will take place at the CUNY Graduate Center, at Fifth Avenue and 34th St., Manhattan, Room 5414, on Sunday Dec. 8th at 4 PM. Please bring photo ID to show at the main entrance.

Zachary Levenson is writing a dissertation on urban dispossession in South African cities after apartheid in UC Berkeley's Department of Sociology. He has been active in the student-worker movement at Berkeley, anti-austerity struggles in Oakland, and housing organizing in Cape Town. He returned last month from 6 months in South Africa, his second such stint in the past 2 years.

"States of Exception" Film Screenings, New York City, Nov. 12, 2013
Tuesday, November 12, 7:00pm @ Anthology Film Archives

States of Exception, Exceptional States: The Iron Grip of Nationalism
Filmmaker and author Ariella Azoulay and writer, activist and scholar Joel Kovel will be present for a post-screening discussion moderated by Benj Gerdes, political artist, writer and activist.

The Food Chain
The Food Chain
Israel, Palestine, Syria: the unending crisis in the Middle East, unstable states caught up in a state of exception…. These films militate against the militarized state and its ideology.

"The Dream of Anarchy and the Anarchy of Dreams:
Urgent Communiques From the Crossroads of Anarchy and Surrealism"
Ron Sakolsky

Friday, October 18th @ 7 pm
Bluestockings, 172 Allen, NYC

Ron Sakolsky will read from his twenty-first century anarcho-surrealist trilogy: Creating Anarchy (Fifth Estate, 2005/Ardent, 2013), Swift Winds (Eberhardt, 2012), and Scratching the Tiger's Belly (Eberhardt, 2012). Together these books comprise a radical mixtape of outrageous ideas-in-action, hidden histories, mutinous rants, rebel poems, razor sharp polemics, incendiary broadsides, slyly subversive stories, rollicking manifestos, impossible demands, utopian adventures, and provocative parables.

Sakolsky is the editor or co-editor of the Autonomedia anthologies Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings & Images by the Surrealist Movement in the United States; Sounding Off: Music as Resistance / Rebellion / Revolution; and Gone to Croatan: Origins of North American Dropout Culture.

Protest at South African Consulate in New York,
in Solidarity with the Shackdwellers Movement!

Date: Monday October 14th
Time: 11:30am-2:00pm
Where: South African Consulate, 333 E 38th St NYC

On Monday, members of New York City's social justice community led by Picture the Homeless will hold a solidarity rally in front of the South African Embassy to show support for our brothers and sisters facing state violence & repression in Durban. We hope you can join us. Please spread the word!

Our purpose is to show solidarity with the Abahlali baseMjondolo Movement in Durban and include messaging about World Zero Eviction Days.

Statement in Defense of the Abahlali BaseMjondolo members

To: James Nxumalo, Mayor, eThekwini Municipality, Durban, South Africa Senzo Mchunu, Premier, KwaZulu-Natal Jacob Zuma, President, Republic of South Africa

Since 2005, the ABAHLALI BASEMJONDOLO (Shack Dwellers) movement has mobilized to fulfill the needs of a large number of inhabitants in the city of Durban who live without access to land, housing, food, education and basic services such as clean water, sanitation, electricity and health care.

In response to this mobilization, the South African Police Service, the Ethekwini Municipality and the ruling political party (ANC) have attempted to criminalize the actions of this movement.

In particular, we have observed:
The continued intimidation, beatings and unlawful detention of activists.
The torture of individuals held in detention.
The demolition and bulldozing of thousands of homes.
The use of the press to slander the movement and its various leaders.

Video from the Third Futurological Symposium on Free Cultural
Spaces, Ruigoord, Amsterdam, Netherlands, July 2013

Hans Kup and Alan Dearling have produced a nine-minute video from the Third Futurological Symposium on Free Cultural Spaces held in Ruigoord, Amsterdam, Netherlands in July, 2013.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqlW985bn3Y&feature=youtu.be

"Global Revolt: Cinematic Ammunition" Film Series
New York City, Oct. 1, 2013

Flaherty NYC: Global Revolt: Cinematic Ammunition
Programmers: Sherry Millner and Ernie Larsen
Opening Night - Tuesday, October 1, 7pm
Refuse & Refusal: Anti-Authoritarian & Avant-Gardist Interventions
Tuesday, October 1, 7:00pm @ Anthology Film Archives (please note new venue)

Ben Morea, Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri will be present for a post screening discussion.

"The truth of a society is in its detritus." -Ella Shohat & Robert Stam
"The world is our garbage, we shall not want." -Black Mask

Ausfegen
The previously unquenchable spirit of the modernist avant-garde seems to have evaporated at almost the same moment as anti-authoritarian, autonomist, and anarchist movements re-surfaced in the 21st century. These films, which explore the unmistakable correspondence between refuse and refusal, should tell us a thing or two about this wholly unpredicted emergence.

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.

ephemera politics of consumption issue released
volume 13, number 2
The politics of consumption

This age of austerity comes on the back of a lengthened period of apparently rampant consumer excess: that was a party for which we are all now having to pay. A spectacular period of unsustainably funded over-indulgence, it seems, has now given rise to a sobering period of barely fundable mere-subsistence. Consumption, narrated along such lines, is a sin which has to be paid for. Beyond the deceptive theology of consumption, however, lies actual politics. In May 2012, we hosted a conference at Dublin’s Royal Society of the Antiquaries of Ireland in order to analyse and debate the politics of consumption. This special issue is the outcome of the discussions which took place during that event. It features conceptual and empirical investigations into the politics of consumption, a head-to-head debate on the idea of consumer citizenship, a series of notes on the relationship between art, politics, and consumption, and reviews of two recent books. Taken together, these diverse pieces underline the need for a politically-oriented analysis of consumption, not only for the sake of informing academic debates but also for the sake of informing contemporary consumption practices. Consumption, we argue, is political: to approach it otherwise is to dogmatically seek refuge in a world of fantasy.

Interface 5(1) now out. Struggles, strategies and analysis of anticolonial and postcolonial social movements
Interface: a journal for and about social movements
Issue editors: Aziz Choudry, Mandisi Majavu, Lesley Wood


Volume five, issue one of Interface, a peer-reviewed online journal produced and refereed by social movement practitioners and engaged movement researchers, is now out, on the special theme "Struggles, strategies and analysis of anticolonial and postcolonial social movements”. Interface is open-access (free), global and multilingual. Our overall aim is to "learn from each other's struggles": to develop a dialogue between practitioners and researchers, but also between different social movements, intellectual traditions and national or regional contexts.

Like all issues of Interface, this issue is free and open-access. You can download articles individually or a complete PDF of the issue (7.44 MB). Please note that you can also subscribe (free) on the right-hand side of the webpage to get email notification each time a new issue or call for papers is out. This issue of Interface includes 388 pages and 21 pieces, by authors writing from / about Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, India, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, the UK and the US among other countries.