Everybody is now talking about the student debt crisis, but nothing is being done about it
Occupy Student Debt

Thanks in large part to the great public amplifier of the Occupy movement, this year’s presidential contenders have been forced to embrace student loan reform as a talking point in their respective campaigns. But the debt relief being pushed by the Obama administration is a token gesture, aimed at getting some traction on the youth vote -- especially the more disillusioned or alienated student constituencies. Recent bills introduced in Congress -- Student Loan Forgiveness Act (H.R. 4170) and the Private Student Bankruptcy Fairness Act (H.R. 2028) -- have zero chance of passing in anything like their current form. Practically speaking, no reform program of any substance is on the legislative horizon, least of all one that would regulate the predatory lending practices of Wall Street banks.

Here’s Three Chords, Now Form a Journal: Brighton June 7th
:: A Book Release / Discussion ::
Cowley Club, 6PM
12 London Road Brighton BN1 4JA

Book Release & Discussion with McKenzie Wark, Richard Gilman-Opalsky, and Stevphen Shukaitis

In the thirty years since Dick Hebdige published Subculture: The Meaning of Style, the seemingly antithetical worlds of punk rock and academia have converged in some rather interesting, if not peculiar, ways. A once marginal subculture documented in homemade ‘zines has become fodder for dozens of scholarly articles, books, PhD dissertations, and conversations amongst well-mannered conference panelists.

At the same time, the academic ranks have been increasingly infiltrated by professors and graduate students whose educations began not in the classroom, but in the lyric sheets of 7” records and the cramped confines of all-ages shows. And taking up the call to learn three chords and form a band, academics in recent years have extended DIY tactics into the academic world in terms of anything from autonomous publishing to free schools.

Come join us to celebrate the release of Punkademics, a collection of essays exploring the bastard convergences-mutations of punk rock and the academy.

Slovenian Anarchist Bookfair Maribor May 25-26

Pekarna magdalenske mreže, Maribor, Slovenia
An open call for participation to anarchist groups/organizations and individuals, anarchist publishers and distributions Federation for anarchist organizing (FAO), an anarchist federation in Slovenia, is organizing Anarh, anarchist book-fair and festival for the second year in the row. Following the idea of decentralization this year’s event will take place in Maribor, the second largest city in Slovenia, at Pekarna magdalenske mreže (Ob železnici 8), during 25 and 26 of May 2012

The main concept of our event is a book-fair with anarchist literature/materials and other autonomous production, cultural events, public kitchen, different workshops and public discussions with guests from Slovenia and abroad about open issues of capitalism and anarchist alternatives to it.

An Evening on Communisation: Presentations and Release of Sic Volume 1: International Journal for Communisation

Friday April 20th – 7pm
16 Beaver Street 4th Floor New York, NY 10004

We invite you to join us for an evening of presentations and discussion on the theme of communisation with the release of Sic: International Journal for Communisation.

THIS IS HOW WE DO IT A Festival of Dialogues
about another world under construction
April 20-22 @ Cooper Union

There are people and communities all across the world who are no longer waiting for the systems around them to change, who are engaged in alternative practices right now -- in the workplace, in politics, in public safety initiatives, in media and communications, in new economic systems and more. This year Foundry Dialogues will feature the practices and experiences -- the how -- of some of these remarkable innovators.

In our lifetimes, in these times, how do we realize a more just, democratic, sustainable way of life? This is how we do it.

Rage Against the Rule of Money
A Talk by John Holloway

Tuesday, March 20, 2012 | 7.00 – 9.00 PM
Concourse Level, Room C203
CUNY Grad Center
365 5th Avenue, NY, NY 10016

JOHN HOLLOWAY is a Professor in the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades of the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla in Mexico. His publications include Crack Capitalism (Pluto, 2010), Change the World Without Taking Power (Pluto, 2005), Zapatista! Rethinking Revolution in Mexico (co-editor, Pluto, 1998) and Global Capital, National State and The Politics of Money (co-editor, 1994).

His latest book, Crack Capitalism, argues that radical change can only come about through the creation, expansion and multiplication of 'cracks' in the capitalist system. These cracks are ordinary moments or spaces of rebellion in which we assert a different type of doing.

John Holloway's previous book, Change the World Without Taking Power, sparked a world-wide debate among activists and scholars about the most effective methods of going beyond capitalism.

Free and open to the public

Occupy Wall Street To Besiege Romney at Waldorf Astoria Fundraiser
Activists Crash Luncheon, Confront Income Inequality, Corporate Personhood

What: Rally & March
When: Wednesday March 11am - 2pm
Where: Waldorf Astoria Hotel
(Rallying Point at 51st St. & Park Ave. at 11am)

[NEW YORK, NY] A pop-up occupation will confront Governor Mitt Romney as he arrives in New York for a fundraising luncheon at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel at 11am on Wednesday, March 14th 2012. This event targeting the presidential hopeful and his fundraising base of special interest lobbyists is one of the first in a series of actions some occupiers are calling "The American Spring."

Occupy Wall Street, along with a broad coalition of community advocacy organizations including UnitedNY, the Strong Economy for All Coalition, Occupy the Dream, New York Communities for Change, Dream Act Scholars / NY Dream Act Coalition, Rebuild the Dream, Community Voices Heard, Move On, Vocal New York and Make the Road New York have signed onto this large event, uniting themselves around a message that our elections are not for sale and that corporations (unlike voters) are not people.

Signal:Noise II
Friday 20 – Saturday 21 January 2012
The Showroom Gallery, 63 Penfold Street, London NW8

Building on the success of Signal:Noise I in January 2011, the second iteration of Signal:Noise is produced in collaboration with Mute and Queen Mary School of Business and Management. Signal:Noise II will look into feedback as a form of agency.

Feedback can be seen as an operational mode that overrides distinctions between form and content. Cybernetic ideas of self-regulation – whether in the workplace or within processes of government – have often involved harnessing the means of autonomy in order to increase control. This has proceeded by and large through techniques of participation and feedback.

But these same techniques and forms are also key to certain progressive social and aesthetic projects – from anti-psychiatry and radical pedagogy, to post-humanist philosophy and aesthetics. Troubling issues of agency, intention and consciousness, they have been used to produce new relations of power, truth and aesthetics.

From the schematising of these processes in art, design and urban planning, to the constant relay between emancipation and control in the social logic of participation, feedback will act as a prism for reading history and our present through presentations, screenings, performances and workshops in distributed and militant pedagogy.

Reading: Richard Gilman-Opalsky “Spectacular Capitalism”
Friday, January 13th Bluestockings @ 7PM – Free
172 Allen St. New York, NY 10002

The ideas and practices of Guy Debord and the Situationist International have become a constant reference point for those involved in radical politics, the arts, and cultural theory. Drawing on the work of Debord, Richard Gilman-Opalsky’s latest book Spectacular Capitalism: Guy Debord and the Practice of Radical Philosophy argues that the theory of practice and practice of theory are superseded by social upheavals that do the work of philosophy directly. Reading, with discussion following.

Capitalism or Markets?: An Exchange
Bernard Stiegler and Scott Lash
Monday 9 January 2012, 5pm-6.45pm
Cinema, Richard Hoggart Building
Goldsmiths, London

What is critical political economy today? Has neo-liberalism produced a system of domination in which capital has reduced labour not just to an object but to what Heidegger called a 'standing reserve',: that is a Marxist ‘reserve army of labour’ that no longer has a stake in the productive system resulting in conflagrations like Tottenham 2011? Or does a new industrialism driven by technological media open up a possible political space of 'care', enabling open relations of bonding between humans and among human and code-driven machines? How would such a political economy address the emerging powers in an age when Obama is destined to be the last president of what will have been the world's most powerful nation? Is China (India) neo-liberal or is it possible to have the sociality of markets without capitalism? Is Foucault right to counterpose the positivity of a liberalism based in a classical political economy of Smith and Ricardo against the bio-poli! tical domination of a neo-liberalism and today’s neo-classical economics? Do we live in a post-industrial, knowledge society, or instead in the possibility of a new industrial order, in which industrial classes are pitted against the excesses of finance capital? Bernard Stiegler (Paris) and Scott Lash will address these and other issues in an exchange on 9 January in the second in the Goldsmiths’ Centre for Cultural Studies’ series of Interventions in Critical Political Economy.