Sixth General Assembly

New York Metro Alliance of Anarchists

January 21, 2007

Calling all anarchists, anti-authoritarians, horizontalists, and grassroots activists! Come join us as we plant the seeds of the anarchist century!

Mark your calendars: You are cordially invited to the Sixth General Assembly of the New York Metro Alliance of Anarchists / Alianza de anarquistas del área metropolitana de Nueva York (NYMAA).

Date: Sunday, January 21, 2007
Time: 2:00 p.m. - 6:30 p.m.

Place: Sixth Street Community Center, 638 East 6th Street between Avenues B and C in Manhattan.

In the midst of a deep, dark winter, what better way to spend a grey Sunday afternoon than gathering together with scores of like-minded revolutionaries who are organizing to build a better world?

On March 4, 2006, 65 radicals, revolutionists, and anarchists came together in an historic gathering and founded an explicitly anarchist organization--the first of its kind in NYC in nearly 100 years! Since then, much has been accomplished, yet much more must be done in order to forge a lasting antiauthoritarian presence on the streets of New York.

In order for the ideas of horizontalism and revolution to firmly take root among broad swaths of people, anarchists need to band together for the purpose of initiating and nurturing a wide range of projects. NYMAA's aim is to build momentum and contribute to a genuine movement of resistance and liberation that can ultimately uproot the brutality of authoritarianism, capitalism, and oppression.

Along those lines, NYMAA has arguably initiated the largest upswing in anarchist organizing that this city has seen in a very long time, marking as its accomplishments a number of ongoing projects, groups, and campaigns. This is truly a historic time, as we continue to build anarchist communities and projects while connecting and facilitating communication with other radical and revolutionary groups and organizations.

You can read more about NYMAA and familiarize yourself with its basic organizational structure (we strongly encourage this) by visiting: http://www.nymaa.org

Proposals and other agenda items for the General Assembly are welcomed. Please e-mail them along with any RSVPs (especially if you're bringing
kids!) to: nymaa-comms [at] riseup [dot] net

Food and beverages, as well as childcare, will also be provided.

History / Herstory in the making! Don't miss it! See you there!

Justseeds.org Needs Your Help!

Josh MacPhee

1. Last week the company that was filling Justseeds' online orders (including hosting the webstore, processing payments, and shipping products), unexpectedly went bankrupt, immediately shutting down Justseeds' online store. This was a complete shock to me, as the fulfillment company was going through a transition of ownership, but no one had mentioned the possibility of collapse or bankruptcy. On top of shutting down distribution, the fulfillment house owed Justseeds upwards of $10,000 (most of that money in turn was owed directly to artists and zinesters who sold items on the site).

This has come at a terrible time — the holiday season is hardly the time to close up shop. Additionally, justseeds was in the process of transitioning to become an artist/worker owned and operated collective, with over a half dozen artists linking together to make a much more exciting and dynamic website and store. All the artists involved would make the site the primary venue for distributing their work, bringing dozens of new prints, posters, books and zines to the site. We also had plans of merging with the political street art website VisualResistance.org to add a political art blogging feature. Now this is all in jeopardy. The formation of our new collective entity will be near impossible if we are saddled with such a huge debt before we even get off the ground.

New 2007 Jubilee Saints Calendar

Autonomedia

Autonomedia's new Jubilee Saints Calendar for 2007 is now back from the printers, for our fifteenth year in a row.

Hundreds of radical cultural and political heroes are celebrated here, along with the animating ideas that continue to guide this project — a reprieve from the 500-year-long sentence to life-at-hard-labor that the European colonization of the "New World" and the ensuing devastations of the rest of the world has represented. It is increasingly clear — at the dawn of this new millennium — that the Planetary Work Machine will not rule forever! Celebrate with this calendar on which every day is a holiday!

Please note:

The list price is US $9.95, but orders of 5-9 copies of the calendar will receive a 20% discount ($7.96 each). Orders of 10 or more copies will receive a 40% discount ($5.97 each). Orders for the 2007 calendar, individually or with discounts on orders in these small quantities, can be placed here.

SPACE Course Listing for Spring 2007

The New SPACE (The New School for Pluralistic Anti-Capitalist Education)
presents:

MARX’S CAPITAL, VOLUME I

Andrew Kliman

Thursdays, Feb. 15 - May 24, 7:00 - 9:00 p.m.

(No class March 22)

Tuition: $150–$180, sliding scale

This 14-week course is devoted to Volume I of Karl Marx's _Capital: A
critique of political economy_. Marx analyzes the capital relation as a
process of “self-expanding value.” Throughout the course, we will stress
the relevance of this concept to the contemporary expansionism of the
capitalist system and the new movements against global capitalism. The
specific character of Marx's critique of capital, and its differences from
others' critiques, will also be highlighted.

Audio Recording of Brad Will Memorial

New York City, Nov. 11, 2006

Audio recorded and compiled by your friends at the August Sound
Coalition

Brad Will Memorial

St Mark's Church

New York, NY

November 11, 2006

Segment

John Wright "Hobo's Lullabye" (partial)

Frank Morales Introduction

Simon discusses current situation in Oaxaca

"Brad's Song" by Stephanie Rogers

Brandon Jourdan

Dyan Neary + video

Segment 2

David Rovics

Rockdove Collective Meditation

Jenny Smith, John Wright and Mark Read sing "I'll Fly Away"

Al Penley speaks

Ann Waldman, Phil Good and Bernadette Mayer read poems

Julie Patton

Pastrami sings "A Drop of Water"

Roger Manning

Segment 3


Brant Sharman

Lower East Side video footage of Brad

Aresh Javadi, Harry Bubbins and Emily Nobel Maxwell read excerpts from
"We Are Everywhere"

Tofu sings "Willie Says"

Pria/Warcry

Andy Stern + Brad's sister Wendy read Brad's last dispatch from Oaxaca

Stephan Said sings "It Rose from the Dead" to Hungry March Band
procession (partial)

og writes

Presenting Toni Negri's Goodbye Mr. Socialism Milano, Nov. 16, 2006

Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Foundation has announced that there will be a presentation of Antonio Negri's new book, Goodbye Mr. Socialism, which was just published by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore. Christian Marazzi and Raf Valvola Scelsi will discuss the book along with its author. Date and venue details, and information on the book are below.

Thursday, 16 November at 5:30 p.m. in Via Romagnosi, 3 - 20121 Milano, Italy

Goodbye Mr. Socialism

Revolutionary Literature
Victor Serge and Communist Totalitarianism
A Talk by Richard Greeman

Sunday Nov. 19 at 7:00 p.m.
New York City

Victor Serge, author of “Birth of Our Power,” “Men in Prison” and other works, participated in the Spanish Civil War, the Russian Revolution, and the Mexican Revolution. He spent over 10 years in French and Russian prisons. Born in 1890 of Russian émigré parents in Brussels, he died a refugee in Mexico 57 years later
—a man with no possessions and no nationality. His work captures with rare authority the spirit and life of the revolutions of the first half of the 20th century.

The translator and biographer of Victor Serge, Richard Greeman is now based in Montpellier, France, where he is Secretary of the International Victor Serge Foundation. He is also a member of Praxis Center (Moscow). He was a professor at Columbia, Wesleyan and the University of Hartford, as well as an activist since the 1950s in anti-racist, anti-war, human rights and labor struggles in the U.S. and internationally.

Free admission. All welcome. Open discussion.

Location: 39 West 14th Street, Rm. 205 (Identity House—ring buzzer 205 and come to second floor), Manhattan (north side of 14th St., between 5th and 6th Aves.; take any train to 14th St. or Union Square).

Panoply Lab writes:

50 Actions in Union Square

Panoply Lab

The guerrilla arts org Panoply Laboratory is planning this year's "50 Actions in Union Square" for the last day of 2006, 1pm. All artists/activists/performers are invited to participate with less-than-one-minute actions. Send a description of your action and its title to panoplylab@hotmail.com to be included in the one page free handout that will be provided to the public.

michel chevalier writes:

target: autonopop

Michel Chevalier

Has something fundamental changed in the art world in the last few years?
Or, let's say: since the '70s, since the outset of western capitalism's ongoing crisis? Have mechanisms set in that narrow the range of what artists/critics/curators can do?

«target: autonopop» answers yes to all these questions and takes aim at the commercial art gallery circuit, its products, and the somewhat less (overtly) market-oriented art-institutional context. Safe generalizations that spare people's feelings and preserve confortable arrangements are not on the agenda; instead: a regularly updated process in which art is "consumed" in a different way.

«target: autonopop» examines the articulation between the market/gallery and institutional spheres, their cooptational and coercive instances, their aversion to any critique which has real consequences.

Visual, social, and historical investigations supplement a project which is not merely theoretical: to retrace and critique the art-circuit's tacit dogma of ambivalence and non-oppositionality. On the curatorial and production level, «target: autonopop» has been fostering and generating activity which avails itself to exactly these "unartistic", unambiguous and frontal means when necessary, be it in an art or a non-art context.

«target: autonopop»
is featured at the XV Biennale de Paris

Emilia Sixtensson writes:

"Black Gold"
Wake up and Smell the Coffee

Official Invite: Screening

Do you know where your coffee comes from?
We promise that it will never taste the same again after watching.
This documentary style film which probes into the global grind behind your indulgent Latte and asks blunt questions like:
Why does just 1 or 2 cents of the $4 we pay for designer caffeine go to the bean farmers?

The film follows Tadesse Meskela (the General Manager of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Co-operative Union in Ethiopia ) on his mission to save 74,000 struggling coffee bean farmers from bankruptcy. Against the backdrop of Tadasee's journey around the world, trying to find buyers willing to pay fair market price, the enormous power of the players that dominate the world's coffee trade becomes apparent.

At the end of this film you will have a whole new understanding of Fair Trade and you will probably view your corner coffee shop in a whole new light, but you may also see how a single consumer can help change the destiny of thousands of people.

The film is followed by an in-theater Q&A session attended by the films leading role Mr. Tadesse Meskela

We continue discussion at Smorgas Chef Restaurant & Lounge.