Signatories Sought in Response to "Tutorials in Terrorism"

The document below was drafted in response to an article by Keith Windschuttle last week in The Australian. The text of this article can be found online (here).

If you'd like to sign the document below, contact Jon Roffe at overground@imap.cc.

“Civilised values” indeed. What we actually find in Keith Windschuttle’s article, “Tutorials in Terrorism,” (The Australian, March 16 2005*) is a thin polemical canvas thrown over a series of gross simplifications, factual omissions and pre-emptive judgements in relation to the life and work of Italian philosopher Antonio Negri.

The Yellow House of Cinema

Russian Film Symposium 2005
May 2-7, 2005

University of Pittsburgh

What feast is in the Yellow House afoot,
And wherefore are the multitudes there thronging??
— Boris Pil'niak, Mahogany

"Yellow house," a Russian colloquialism, means "insane asylum." Russia's film union and its principal screening venue is Moscow's famous House of Cinema. This year Pittsburgh's annual Russian Film Symposium invites you to visit the Yellow House of Cinema, a selection of Russia's newest and most interesting films.

"The Yellow House of Cinema" examines the themes, visual practices, and cultural politics in recent Russian cinema around issues of social psychosis, dementia, mania, folly, lunacy, aberration, and the absurd.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Triangle Fire Commemoration -- 94th Anniversary of Workplace Disaster

What: In 1911, 146 young immigrant garment workers died in a tragic fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. This tragedy galvanized a city to fight for labor reforms and for fire safety in the workplace.

Sensorium:
Philosophy and Aesthetics

University of Melbourne, Australia,
22—24 June, 2005

This three-day conference will cover a range of thinkers and issues in contemporary philosophy and aesthetics, with a particular focus on two French philosophers, Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze. Offers of papers are invited from researchers in the fields of philosophy, the social sciences, literary and performance studies, the visual arts, architecture, and other creative disciplines interested in the work of Deleuze, Lyotard, or in aesthetics more generally.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

Left Forum 2005
New York City, April 15–17, 2005

As many supporters of the Socialist Scholars Conference know, 7 of the 16 members of that conference's Board of Directors resigned last spring in protest of the lack of democratic and participatory governance procedures.

Nevertheless, we value the two decades-old tradition of the Socialist Scholars Conference and wish the remaining board members well. However, in response to numerous requests from individuals and organizations, we ourselves have decided to sponsor an event, a conference to be held at the CUNY Graduate Center on the weekend of April 15-17, and we are asking you and others to participate with us in this conference.

"State Your Re-Action to State Repression" Conference

April 24, 2005, Syracuse University

Free!

On September 11, 2001, the political landscape changed
dramatically. Instantaneously, it became unpatriotic to
criticize President Bush, the government, or US policy on
any front. Activist groups like the Sierra Club announced
that they were indefinitely suspending all criticism
against Bush’s pro-corporate agenda as the nation tried to
pull together.” (Best and Nocella, 2004, p. 9).

The
depletion of civil rights and freedoms are nowhere more
obvious than with the October 26, 2001 passage of the USA
PATRIOT Act, which gave the green light to the government
to have unlimited mobility of their powers of
surveillance, search and seizure, detention, and
suppression of dissent. The American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU) believes,

Many parts of this sweeping legislation [PATRIOT Act]
take away checks on law enforcement and threaten the
very rights and freedoms that we are struggling to
protect. For example, without a warrant and without
probable cause, the FBI now has the power to access
your most private medical records, your library
records, and your student records... and can prevent
anyone from telling you it was done.

Neo-McCarthyism is upon us and the United States citizens
are dumbfounded.

Anonymous Comrade writes "NEW ANTI-CAPITALIST WEBSITE: PROLE.INFO

Announcing a new anti-capitalist website:

http://www.prole.info

It has lots of pamphlets in PDF form, as well as a number of online texts.

Check it out.

"Prole" is short for "proletarian" a word used by Karl Marx to describe the working class under capitalism. We are all the people in this society who do not own property or a business we can make money from, and therefore have to sell our time and energy to a boss--we are forced to work. Our work is the basis of this society.

We are not just a sociological category. Work, and the society that grows out of it are alienating and miserable for us. We are constantly fighting against the conditions of our lives. Simply standing up for our own interests brings us into conflict with bosses, bureaucrats, landlords, police and politicians everywhere. These everyday struggles are the starting point to undermining capitalism. We are not just the working class; we are the working class that struggles to do away with work and class, and the society built around them.

The experience of those who are forced to work, and who struggle against the society based on work, creates certain kinds of ideas. When we are actively fighting for our own interests, these ideas solidify into a subversive, anti-capitalist perspective. This has at times been called "communism" or "anarchism". We do not need political groups to bring us these ideas, but we do need to think about how to fight for ourselves. To that end, this site is a collection of writings from a subversive and anti-capitalist perspective on theory as well as history. Some of them use needlessly obscure language, and parts of them are definitely outdated. But they all raise important issues for the modern day prole. Hopefully they will be useful to you."

Robert Graham writes

Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas

Volume One of Robert Graham's much anticipated anthology of historic anarchist writings, Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, subtitled From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE–1939), will be published by (Black Rose Books) at the end of March 2005.

The collection includes signicant material from China, Japan, Korea and Latin America that has never before appeared in English, together with newly translated European materials and selections from several out of print and difficult to find sources.

Topics covered include Daoist anarchy, freedom and servitude, enlightenment and revolution, the industrial revolution and the emergence of socialism, the Paris Commune and the First International, anarchist communism, anarcho-syndicalism, art and anarchy, anarchy and education, women, love and marriage, propaganda by the deed and direct action, anti-militarism and anti-colonialism, fascism and the rise of totalitarianism, technology and the organization of work under capitalism, and the Mexican, Russian and Spanish Revolutions.

In addition to the usual suspects (Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman, etc.), contributors include Gustav Landauer, Jean Grave, Voltairine de Cleyre, Ba Jin, Manuel Gonzalez Prada, Herbert Read, Sebastien Faure, and several other authors whose work has never before been translated into English. For a full table of contents, check out the Black Rose website (note that the book will be over 500 pages long, not the 300 pages listed in the catalog).

Tarantula Distribution writes:

Tarantula Distribution
New List and Website

This is just a brief announcement that the second Tarantula Distribution list is out now. If you'd like a hard copy, just write or send an email to the address below.

Tarantula is a radical, anarchist and communist literature distribution. The words we pass on are tools to be used — by affinity groups, study circles and individual rebels. No pamphlet or book is a revolution in itself; the only thing analysis can do is make our rebellion more precise. Our texts are for those willing to take risks, those wanting to hurry on a world with no more buying and selling!

The list is also online as a .pdf file on the new distribution website — www.socialwar.net

We have just reprinted “For a World Without Moral Order” from La Banquise, as well as “The Prison Within the Prison,” a dossier on struggles against the FIES isolation regime within Spanish prisons – check the website for details.

You'll also find some free writings, posters and other subversive content there.

Tarantula Distribution

818 SW 3rd Ave PMB 1237

Portland, OR 97204

tarantula@socialwar.net

Biodemocracy 2005: Reclaim the Commons!

Call to Action: Converge in Philadelphia, June 18th to 21st, 2005

CALLING ON ALL PEOPLE who resent the demise of democracy and hold to
the promise of authentic popular empowerment! All who dare to paint
poems of resistance on walls of oppression, dance in city streets in
defiance of police states, and plant seeds of sedition in the shadows
of Empire: come to Philadelphia! As the world?s leading agents of
eco-devastation and medical malpractice meet here in June, we cannot
stand quiet. Join us to challenge the corporate crime, poisons for
profit, and flagrant lies of the biotechnology industry, at the time of
their annual international convention, with a creative uprising for
truth, life and justice!