Acker Avant-Garde Arts Awards Party
New York City, June 6, 2013

Date: Thursday, June 6, 2013
Time: 7pm – 10pm
Location: SoHo House 139 Ludlow LES, 2nd floor, NYC

The Acker Awards is a tribute given to members of the avant garde arts community who have made outstanding contributions in their discipline in defiance of convention, or else served their fellow writers and artists in outstanding ways.

new ephemera issue on free work released
The relationship between freedom and work is a complex one. For some, they are considered opposites: ‘true’ freedom is possible only once the necessity of work is removed, and a life of luxury attained. For others, work itself provides an opportunity to achieve a sense of freedom and authenticity. In recent years for example, advances in human resource management have promoted hard work, a deep sense of commitment to one’s job, and the acceptance of working conditions that are ostensibly exploitative, as offering the promise of freedom. Recent corporate and entrepreneurial celebrations of playfulness also provide examples of the deep entanglement of contemporary forms of knowledge work with ideals of freedom.

In this issue of ephemera, our contributors inquire into the relation between freedom and work. They ask, for example, whether it is even possible to free oneself from ideals of freedom? Or is the fantasy of an imagined place of freedom, the utopia in which no work taints our lives, simply too prevalent? It may be the case that in contemporary life, we fool ourselves yet further when we ask for freedom within our working life. But can we free ourselves from the very prospect of freedom?

Call for an Ecosocialist Conference
Saturday, April 20, 2013, New York City

[Schedule, presentations and workshops in formation.]

To endorse and participate in conference planning, contact Chris, ecologyandsocialism@gmail.com or Michael, michaelware1205@gmail.com

The extreme weather of 2012 and recent news that climate change is worse than previously thought have made it a front-page issue again. The Obama campaign’s silence on the issue and worldwide government paralysis have added to activists’ frustration and fueled participation in 350.org’s historic February 17th demonstration and campus fossil fuel divestment campaigns. This has also opened the door to a more radical analysis of global warming and environmental destruction.

For a radicalizing and substantial fringe of people touched by the ideas of Occupy, an ongoing economic crisis and growing ecological crisis, they recognize that it’s not enough to limit your analysis to only fossil fuel corporations (though that’s a good start) or absolve politicians based on the lobbying power of those particular companies.

In Letters of Blood and Fire
Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism
George Caffentzis

Karl Marx wrote that the only way to write about the origins of capitalism in the 16th century is in the letters of blood and fire used to drive workers from the common lands, forests and waters. In this collection of essays, George Caffentzis argues that the same is true for the annals of twenty-first-century capitalism. Information technology, immaterial production, financialization, and globalization have been trumpeted as inaugurating a new phase of capitalism that puts it beyond its violent origins. Instead of being a period of major social and economic novelty, however, the course of recent decades has been a return to the fire and blood of struggles at the advent of capitalism.

3rd Futurological Symposium on
 "Free Cultural Spaces"
Ruigoord, Amsterdam, July 19-27, 2013

In 2013, Ruigoord celebrates its fortieth anniversary as a “Free Cultural Space.” The whole year through, manifestations will take place in honor of this wonderful fact. The climax, however, will be on the weeks before and after the 24th of July; the anniversary of the day the village was squatted. 
To commemorate this event we are planning a 3rd Futurological Symposium on “Free Cultural Spaces” from a global perspective.

Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, Part 2
Mar 7-9, 2013, Berlin, Germany

An international array of philosophers, critical theorists, media theorists, art historians, architects, and artists will discuss the state of the mind and brain under the conditions of contemporary capitalism, in which these cognitive apparati have become the new focus of labouring.

Commons Charters: From The Great Lakes to Madrid, and Reclaiming a Common(s), NYC, Feb. 14, 2013

What: Discussion
When: Thursday February 14th 6:00pm
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor
Who: Free and open to all

We would like to invite everyone to a discussion and evening organized
with our friends from Making Worlds.

The event builds upon existing discussions that we have each organized
over the last few years around the common(s) and more recent discussions
in which we have tried to imagine collectively different modes of pairing
struggle and antagonism to capitalism with formal/informal processes of
mutual aid, collective care and cultivation of the common(s).

The questions are basic ones concerning the processes of destruction or
privatization of the basic premises of life (food, water, air, genes,
seeds, ideas, language, learning, land, ...) and include the material
needs of being able to collectively reproduce our lives in struggle. They
also revolve around the capacity of this change in climate (both
ecologically and socio-politically) we are living through to posit or
propose alternatives to state (public?) or corporate (private?) control of
life.

2013 New York CIty Anarchist Book Fair
Clemente Soto Velez Community Center, April 6-7, 2013

The 2013 New York CIty ANARCHIST BOOKFAIR will be held April 6 and 7 2013 at the CLEMENTE SOTO VELEZ COMMUNITY CENTER, 107 Suffolk Street in New York City's Lower East Side, from 10 AM to 6 PM both days.

Many workshops will be throughout venues in the nearby area.

For more information, please visit NYC Anarchist Book Fair.

Historical Materialism Conference: Confronting Capital
April 26-28, 2013, New York University

Critical investigations into the present moment quickly reveal that the current crisis of capitalism shows no sign of abating. The failure of austerity to restore growth has sent ruling class politicians scrambling, as the assault of capital on all fronts of life—ecological, economic and social—grows exponentially.

This is not without resistance however. From the ongoing Arab revolution, to Occupy and Greece, confrontations of capital and regimes of power continue to proliferate, push forth new political horizons and sustain influence on a global scale.

Rebel Newsprint: The Underground Press Exhibit
Interference Archive, New York City

An exhibition, running from February 21 to March 24, 2013
Opening reception: Thursday, February 21 , 2013, 7:00-10:00 p.m.

The Vietnam War, class inequality, black liberation, and women’s struggles—against this backdrop of social upheaval, a rebellious counterculture produced a vibrant underground newspaper scene. In four short years, from 1965 to 1969, the underground press grew from five small newspapers in as many cities in the United States to over five hundred newspapers—with millions of readers—all over the world. Completely circumventing (and subverting) establishment media by utilizing its own news service and freely sharing content among the papers, the underground press at its height became the unifying institution for the alternative culture of the 1960s and 1970s. It also allowed for all sorts of intriguing and compelling art, design, and writing on its pages.