The Art of Rent Spring 2008 University of London, Queen Mary http://www.generation-online.org/other/artofrent.htm As part of an ongoing collective project, the organisers of this seminar series seek to promote a discussion on the rise of rent as a form of capitalist appropriation and the way that new levels of association in the arts and culture, in information and communication, in public taste and ambience have made this rise possible, and from the perspective of private accumulation, necessary. To this end, the seminar brings together various perspectives on the Art of Rent taking in analysis of cognitive capitalism, of the financialisation of the quotidian and the bodily, of gentrification and the metroversity, of new international division of labour and of governance. The seminar will conclude with a special two-day event in September on the cultural industries. Behind this series is the sense that the Art of Rent is a reaction to a new collective power among bodies assembled to labour and a capacity for ensemble in the social individual, all provoked by the migrations of work into culture, language, and affect and the work of migrations into these registers of life. For those who work in the university, in the arts, and in politics long seeking to subvert the relationship between innovation and wage, the rise of the relationship between innovation and rent calls not for subversion but sabotage of the creative process. Seminars will feature presentation from the speakers followed by structured discussion and questions and answers. Presentations to be made by Carlo Vercellone, Matteo Pasquinelli, Christian Marazzi, Randy Martin, Costas Lapavitsas, Sandro Mezzadra, Xiang Biao, Judith Revel, Stefano Harney, and others.

Multitudes-Icônes Launched

Multitudes is pleased to announce the inauguration of its new website, Multitudes-Icônes, which is dedicated to contemporary art

Multitudes-Icônes was launched during a workshop organized by Multitudes at Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany (Documenta Halle, June 25-28, 2007). The site brings together three parallel projects: Multitude’s counter-project in response to the invitation to participate in Documenta 12; an artist residence project in which artists have been invited to engage with the site in order to produce a specific project; and, finally, archives of texts and Icônes portfolios (projects about and by artists) published in the journal since its inception in March 2000.

Multitudes was asked by the Documenta 12 organizers to respond to the exhibition’s three questions/themes (“Is modernity our antiquity?“; “What is Bare Life?“; and “What is to be done?“). The journal’s answer was to create a counter-project on Multitudes-Icônes called Critical and Clinical Documentation. On the site, the three questions were reformulated (that is, appropriated and détourned) and addressed to artists in a provocative way. Artists were asked to situate their work in relation to Documenta 12’s themes but also in relation to their participation or non-participation in the exhibition. The ensemble of responses—visual, verbal, sonorous—constitute alternative, multiple, and ironic points of view, or “critical and clinical” perspectives, regarding the exhibition’s themes and Documenta itself. The website’s organization of the artists’ responses provides an open framework, allowing users to articulate relations between replies, creating hybrid interventions, and transforming each user into a curator-artist of another, virtual-real Documenta.

"Bookin' for Daniel": A Marathon Run for Daniel McGowan

A participant in an organized marathon this summer will run its full 26 miles and 385 yards in order to raise funds and show support for eco-defense prisoner Daniel McGowan. All proceeds from this run will go directly to Daniel McGowan's educational fund. This fund will assist with payment for Daniel's master's degree, which he will complete while serving a seven-year sentence in federal prison.

Daniel McGowan is an environmental and social justice activist from New York City. He was arrested in a multi-state raid against the environmental community that revealed itself to be part of a much larger wave of repression known as the "Green Scare." On June 4, 2007 McGowan was sentenced to seven years in prison for charges of conspiracy and arson. These charges relate to two eco-defense actions that occurred in Oregon in 2001. While Daniel took a guilty plea and accepted responsibility for his own actions, he and three other defendants refused to name names as part of their "global resolution" plea deal. During his sentencing, Daniel was given a "terrorism" enhancement to his sentence, based on his involvement in acts of property destruction which hurt no living being. The National Lawyers Guild has decried this sentencing enhancement as an "unnecessary and excessive government tactic to discourage the exercise of free speech."

Some of you may know the runner, Esther of Portland, Oregon's Eberhardt Press, not only from her publishing efforts, but also from her consistent work around the "Operation Backfire" eco-sabotage cases. In a recent blog entry, Esther states her reasons for training for and participating in the marathon, writing: "I want to communicate to Daniel and his family that we who support him are down for the long haul. Today, tomorrow, after 26 miles or seven years we will continue to struggle for the health of our planet and the freedom of all humans, including our comrades behind bars."

For more details about the "Bookin' for Daniel!" run, or to make a pledge to Daniel McGowan's educational fund as sponsorship for this event, please visit: http://bookinfordaniel.eberhardtpress.org/ Every little bit counts!

Background on Daniel McGowan's case and general support information is available at: http://www.supportdaniel.org/

El Kilombo Intergaláctico writes:

Second Encounter of the Zapatista Peoples with the Peoples of the World

Translation by El Kilombo Intergaláctico

Communiqué of the Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee—General Command of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation

June of 2007

To the People of Mexico:
To the Peoples of the World:
To the Adherents of the Zexta Internazional:
To the Adherents of the Sixth Declaration:

Compañeros and Compañeras:
Brothers and Sisters:

As was announced at the First Encounter of Zapatista Peoples with the Peoples of the World (held in January of this year), the Second Encounter will be held in the coming month of July. The objective of this encounter is that persons, groups, collectives, and organizations that struggle against neoliberalism, in Mexico and all over the world, hear directly the word of the EZLN’s bases of support on the process of the construction of autonomy in the Zapatista indigenous communities of Chiapas. For this reason, the EZLN, through its Intergalactic and Sixth Commissions, convokes:

The Second Encounter of Zapatista Peoples with the Peoples of the World.

To be held in Zapatista territory July 20 through 28 of the year 2007, with the following characteristics:

New Issue of The Commoner Released

The Commoner N.12 - spring/summer 2007

Value strata, migration and “other  values”  

This issue proposes some lines of enquiry around three interrelated themes: the migratory flows of people in today global factory, the dynamics and hierarchies underpinning the production of value for capital, and the production of values other than those for capital. The search for the connection among these themes is what allows us to weave together these papers so much different in style and subject matter.

"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

Chiapas Media Project, Fall Tour 2007

Chiapas Media Project (CMP)/Promedios seeks university, cultural and
community-based sponsors to host screenings on our Fall Tour 2007.

The tour will
feature videos produced by indigenous video makers from the states of Chiapas
and Guerrero, Mexico. Dates are scheduled on a first come, first-served basis
and fill up fast, so please contact us as soon as possible.

CMP/Promedios is an award winning, bi-national partnership that provides
video equipment, computers and training enabling marginalized indigenous and
campesino communities in Southern Mexico to create their own media.

From WARPORN to PORNWAR, from porn to resistance

How can porn and the production of porn be an instrument of nomad war
against empire? How can the performance of erotic labor for a copyleft
model, outside of financial exchange, inform our bodies, change them,
activate them to a new level of resistance? What if the most desired
kind of images in the economy were available freely and under Creative
Commons licenses?

Matteo Pasquinelli's recent essay "WARPORN! WARPUNK! Autonomous
Videopoesis in wartime" makes an important link from struggle against
the war in Iraq to autonomous video projects to create new Videopoiesis
that will "activate" bodies in resistance. One component that seems to
be missing is the step from the creation of videos to resistance.
SharingIsSexy.org is one effort that fills in that gap, engaging in
PORNWAR, fighting capitalism, bio-empire, patriarchy and
heteronormativity through the creation of porn. Porn war replaces class
war in this time of the multitude, singularities who don't identify with
"the working class" and whose only sense of the real and drive to
resistance comes from their own bodies.

SharingIsSexy.org is a collaborative open source porn laboratory. We are
a group of queer, tranny and people with othered bodies coming together
to create a site for free porn that is licensed under Creative Commons
(A-NC-SA 3.0). Some of us will be creating our own porn using
photography, video, writing or whatever form suits us. The site will
also be open for anyone to post on, although our collective retains
editorial control to prevent content which is sexist, racist,
homophobic, etc...

ephemera "Immaterial and affective labor: explored" issue released

The new issue (7.1) of ephemera: theory & politics in organization, entitled "immaterial and affective labor: explored," has just been published at http://www.ephemeraweb.org. This latest special issue offers a critical engagement with the conceptual and political territory animated by the deployment of such ideas in the work of Hardt, Negri, Lazzarato, Virno and others, and follows previous explorations of class composition and politics in ephemera (for instance in the issues on 'the theory of the multitude' and 'writing: labour').

That it refers to both a conceptual and a political territory means two things: on the one hand, that the critical engagements herein are not aimed at theoretical clarification alone, but seek to address directly the questions and practices of politics and organisation thrown up by debates on immaterial and affective labour; on the other, that the form of the engagement is not reduced to the field of (post-)Operaismo, but aims at bringing together empirical insights into the present forms of organisation of labour, and is open to inflections coming from other disciplines and areas, such as organisation studies and labour process theory.

As our guest editors suggest, the space in which these debates take place is defined by a 'double ambivalence' deriving from, on the one hand, the excess that labour always produces and that capital always necessarily needs to recuperate, and, on the other, the particular novelty of contemporary cycles of struggle, that is, their capacity to intercommunicate and the heightened attention to the composition of difference they require. It is this ambivalence that makes questions of flight and capture, 'victory' and 'defeat', impossible to pose and foreclose within a general theoretical framework. This is what necessitates an analysis of resistance and struggle, class composition as well as political organization, as an enquiry placed alongside the actual practices of those who work and struggle today: theory as an element in organisation, rather than as an end in itself.

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.