Announcements

Christianity and Black Oppression:
Duppy Know Who Fe Frighten
Zay D Green

February 8th, 2013 7:30 PM,
Brecht Forum, New York City

"Christianity and Black Oppression: Duppy Know Who Fe Frighten" presents the argument: How is it that Blacks have been Christianized for more than four hundred years and yet Blacks are stereotyped as morally and mentally inferior. At the very first encounter between Europeans and Africans, Africans were perceived as “pagan”, “heathen”, “devil worshippers”.

The Beginning and End(s) of the Internet:
Surveillance, Censorship, and the Future of Cyber-Utopia

The Departments of Communication and History at the University of Utah
are seeking submissions for the fourth Frontiers of New Media Symposium
to be held on the campus of the University of Utah, September, 20-21,
2013. The Frontiers symposium, which has been held every other year
since 2009, brings together a diverse group of scholars to discuss the
past, present, and future of media and communication technologies.

This year’s theme, “The Beginning and End(s) of the Internet:
Surveillance, Censorship, and the Future of Cyber-Utopia,” asks
scholars, activists, and journalists to consider the past, present, and
possible futures of the Internet as a force for good in the world.

Balkans Anarchist Bookfair May 24-26 Ljubljana

Federation for Anarchist Organizing (FAO) invites everyone to come to Ljubljana this May and join us at the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair (BAB). It has been ten years since BAB started its voyage across the Balkans with the aim to connect local and regional, as well as international anarchist community and to provide space for exchange of anarchist ideas, practices, literature, materials, cultural events, workshops and public discussions.

By now the fact that we are living in the midst of a general social crisis has become undeniable. Finding ourselves in the middle of the whirlwind of capitalist destruction, we often feel weak and frustrated. Capitalism is destroying our lives daily and in so many different and very real ways. It is taking our future away from us. Often we are finding out that some of the old mechanisms of struggle, that were once the source of our power, are no longer effective enough. Yet it is all too clear that for us there can be no other option but to struggle and build against and beyond the existing. We certainly don’t lack useful analyses, critiques, seminars and conferences. It is time to take action.

Practices of resistance, solidarity and the construction of communities against and beyond capitalism have always existed through history and have constituted an integral part of anarchist communities. Today the need for such practices has again spread far beyond our small communities and into the wider society. The desert that capitalist devastation leaves behind, is a space that needs to be filled with imagination and everyday practices that stem directly from us and our desires. For everyone.

15M Exhibition in NYC January 9 - February 15

Digital prints from the Archivo 15M in Madrid will be exhibited at the Bluestockings radical bookstore and activist center in New York from January 9th to February 15th, 2013. The show was prepared by the caretakers of the archive of the famous encampment in the square of Puerta del Sol in Madrid. This camp sparked the 15th of May movement throughout Spain, the strongest European echo of the Arab Spring, and the forerunner of Occupy Wall Street.

The Archivo 15M group was formed only five days after the plaza takeovers flowered across Spain in May 2011. They began by asking people for materials that “spoke about the settlement,” documenting events and activities as they occurred.

All the originals of this material are now bricked up in the building which housed the evicted social center Casablanca. The self-organized occupied social center was evicted September 19, 2012. A re-occupation attempt failed, and now the building is sealed to its top floors and guarded by police.

2013 Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints
Radical Heroes for the New Millennium!
James Koehnline and the Autonomedia Collective

Autonomedia's Jubilee Saints Calendar for 2013! Our 21st annual wall calendar, with artwork by James Koehnline, and text by the Autonomedia Collective.

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!

32 pages, 12 x 16 inches, saddlestitched

isbn 978-1-57027-259-2 : price $9.95 : 32 pages

Pay for two, and we will send a third calendar for free!

CFP The Politics of Workers’ Inquiry
May 2-3, 2013 @ University of Essex

Workers’ inquiry is an approach to and practice of knowledge production that seeks to understand the changing composition of labor and its potential for revolutionary social transformation. It is the practice of turning the tools of the social sciences into weapons of class struggle. Workers’ inquiry seeks to map the continuing imposition of the class relation, not as a disinterested investigation, but rather to deepen and intensify social and political antagonisms.

Mario Tronti argues that weapons for working class revolt have always been taken from the bosses’ arsenal. But, has not it often been suggested, to use Audre Lorde’s phrasing, that it is not possible to take apart the master’s house with the master’s tools? While not forgetting Lorde’s question, it is clear that Tronti said this with good reason, for he was writing from a context where this is precisely what was taking place. Italian autonomous politics greatly benefited from borrowing from sociology and industrial relations – and by using these tools proceeded to build massive cycles of struggle transforming the grounds of politics.

Invitation 3rd Futurological Symposium
'Free Cultural' Spaces
on Friday 20 July, 2013 in Ruigoord, Amsterdam

Dear friend(s),

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 week before and the week after the 24th of July; the day the village was squatted.

To commemorate this event we are planning a 3rd Futurological Symposium 'Free Cultural Spaces' from a global perspective.

"Dictionary of Operations"
Konrad Becker

A Performance by Konrad Becker and Discussion
with Ayreen Anastas, Stephen Duncombe and Fran Ilich
Moderated by Jim Fleming

Thursday, December13, 06:30 PM
Austrian Cultural Forum
11 East 52nd Street, New York, NY 10022
(212) 319-5300

The Austrian Cultural Forum is pleased to present this event featuring Austrian electronic media pioneer Konrad Becker, in conjunction with the exhibition Against The Specialist: Contemporary References to Arnold Schoenberg in Image and Sound.

WITH: Ayreen Anastas (16beaver), Stephen Duncombe (NYU), and Fran Ilich (author/artist)
Moderator: Jim Fleming

Konrad Becker's "Operations" highlights the subtext of the politics of information and the underlying framework of media reality in digital networks. If every communication is an oracle, who owns meaning which authorizes legitimate knowledge? Dictionary of Operations reflects illusory mirror worlds and excavates media-archaeological ghost stories that continue to haunt the world. Tracing the omnipresent trails of monsters, zombies and ghosts in the infosphere it declares "To be human is to be haunted, bound in chains to a past dominating the present."

"Operations" is a performance series based on a series of books published by Autonomedia. Dictionary of Operations, is the third in a series of new lexica. After defining the field of Tactical Reality (2002) and Strategic Reality (2009), this manual to the contemporary cognitive environment analyzes 72 terms to access the operative logics of social and anti-social media.

Konrad Becker will perform excerpts from "Operations": a spoken word electro-poetry show of psycho-acoustic beats that explores mimetic communication machines. "Operations" evokes the phantasmagoric qualities of digital media environments. The performance unveils media history to be haunted by reoccurring themes of ghosts, mirror worlds and dangerous trans-communications.

Dictionary of Operations, Autonomedia 2012 ISBN: 978-1-57027-261-5

New InterfaceIssue of the global emancipation of labour
Interface
For the global emancipation of labour: new movements and struggles around work, workers and precarity

Volume four, issue two of Interface, a peer-reviewed e-journal produced and refereed by social movement practitioners and engaged movement researchers, is now out, on the special theme "For the global emancipation of labour: new movements and struggles around work, workers and precarity”.

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.

Ten Years After and a Global Crisis Later… – Preface to Indian Edition of ‘Hotlines: Call Centre, Inquiry, Communism’, by Kolinko
Guragon Workers News

Call centres were the archetype of a workplace for the capitalist cycle between the early 1990s and late 2000s. Located in the dominant sectors of the cycle in the global north, e.g. banking, insurances and personal services, they were able to absorb and combine both surplus capital (which had escaped the shrinking profit margins in the industries); and surplus labour (in form of the unemployed graduate and dismissed industrial worker). Call centres became de facto outsourced university departments where students were forced to work off their student debts and get used to their future perspective as precarious wage dependents. The call centres’ outer-face resembled less the factories of the past; but rather their culture of ‘work-time/leisure-time’-balance was supposed to turn the collective experience of work into a question of individual life-management. They formed part of the general propaganda proclaiming the ‘end of the working class’, which prevailed since the 1980s – while at the same time concentrating and ‘proletarianising’ large sections of previously ‘white-collar’ workers under one roof and subjecting them to a Taylorised ‘factory-mode’ of production. Instead of individualising neo-liberal subjects, call centres simply extended the industrial system into the office world and collectivised a section of the working class who previously saw themselves as ‘educated employees’, such as bank clerks or administrators. As a labour intensive and mobile industry, call centres quickly combined labour in different parts of the globe.

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