Comrade Fls writes:

Antonio Negri, Alex Callinicos: Multitude or Working Class?

We all agree to the fact that we want to fight capital and renew the world. But I think this ain’t conceivable as a poetical process. Because the name »multitude« is not a poetical notion, but a class concept. When I talk about multitude as a class concept, I talk about the fact that workers today work in the same and in different ways compared to those they worked some centuries ago. The working class and its class composition are quite different in the distinct periods that followed each other since the beginning of the industrial age.

"Creativity Out of Chaos: Anarchy and Organizing"

Jerzy Kociatkiewicz and Monika Kostera

Creativity versus managerialism

Creativity is said to be highly desired in post-modern and post-industrial organizations (for a presentation of the new creative organizing, see e.g. Letiche, 1998). It ensures the development of ideas and people, and is crucial for innovatinevess, knowledge and learning, perhaps the most preeminent traits of postmodern organizing (Hatch, 1997). Ola Alexandersson and Per Trossmark (1997) write about creativity and anarchy as opposed to managerialism.

If creativity is understood as anarchy, then the management ideal means perhaps an ordering antithesis. They are depicted as two different forms of knowledge (cf. Björkegren, 1993). Some do not use the word anarchy to signify the spontaneous and unplanned creative expression. Instead, creativity is connected with freedom. To create what one feels for, to express one"s ideas--that is what creativity is about (p. 124).

polo writes:

Small Victories and Long Struggles.
Not the best of times, nor the worst of times : a subdued 10th anniversary celebration in Zapatista heartlands.

By Ramor Ryan

Oventic, Chiapas, 31st December 2003

>On the eve of the 10th Anniversary of the Zapatista Uprising, Jan 1 1994, the indigenous rebels had an unexpected surprise for the thousands of supporters who gathered here in Chiapas to pay homage – they did nothing.
No spectacular celebration, no mass march upon San Cristobal, no bold new political initiatives, and certainly no new armed uprising. Instead there were a series of subdued celebrations in each of the 5 Zapatista Caracole centers, attended modestly by rank and file and somewhat more generously by national and international supporters.

Here in the Zapatista highlands headquarters of Oventic, some 800 people danced the night away cloaked in mud and fog. I recalled another New Years Eve here in this very arena some years ago and that night there were several thousand rebels out in force. Tonight’s demure festivities (midnight passes without much ado), the lackluster message read out by an unidentified masked rebel and the empty space enveloping the gathering, prompts some journalists present to ask - Where have the Zapatistas gone?

hydrarchist writes:
Dark Matter, Las Agencias, and the Aesthetics
of Tactical Embarrassment (1)

Gregory G. Sholette

photo courtesy of Las Agencias
and Jordi Claremonte

In January and February
of 2003 the focus of mass media outlets around the world converged
upon a series of historically unprecedented street demonstrations
organized in opposition to the pending US war in Iraq. Estimates range
from six to ten million protesters left their homes and businesses
to occupy urban spaces in over sixty nations (2).
As unique as these events were however, one can find significant precedents
in an earlier cycle of mass demonstrations against global capitalism
organized by a wide range of activists from anarchists and eco-feminists
to militant labor unions and youthful Trotskyists as well as farmers,
house wives and "naked" people. As the artist Alan Sekula
described the memorable 1999 protestation against the World Trade
Organization

“There were moments
of civic solemnity, of urban anxiety, and of carnival. Again, something
very simple is missed by descriptions of this as a movement founded
in cyberspace: the human body asserts itself in the city streets against
the abstraction of global capital….”(3)

Karl Fogel writes:

The Promise of a Post-Copyright World

Karl Fogel

There is one group of people not shocked by the record industry's
recent decision to sue randomly chosen file sharers: historians of
copyright. They already know what everyone else is slowly finding
out: that copyright was never about paying artists for their work, and
that far from being designed to support creators, copyright was
designed by and for distributors — that is,
publishers, which today includes record companies. But now that the
Internet has given us a world without distribution costs, it no longer
makes any sense to restrict sharing in order to pay for centralized
distribution. Abandoning copyright is now not only possible, but
desirable. Both artists and audiences would benefit, financially and
aesthetically. In place of corporate gatekeepers determining what can
and can't be distributed, a much finer-grained filtering process would
allow works to spread based on their merit alone. We would see a
return to an older and richer cosmology of creativity, one in which
copying and borrowing openly from others' works is simply a normal
part of the creative process, a way of acknowledging one's sources and
of improving on what has come before. And the old canard that artists
need copyright to earn a living would be revealed as the pretense it
has always been.

hydrarchist writes "Anonymous Comrade writes

Stirner and Foucault: Toward a Post-Kantian Freedom

Saul Newman

1. Max Stirner and Michel Foucault are two thinkers not often examined together. However, it has been suggested that the long-ignored Stirner may be seen as a precursor to contemporary poststructuralist thought.[1 ] Indeed, there are many extraordinary parallels between Stirner's critique of Enlightenment humanism, universal rationality, and essential identities, and similar critiques developed by thinkers such as Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and others. However, the purpose of this paper is not merely to situate Stirner in the "poststructuralist" tradition, but rather to examine his thinking on the question of freedom, and to explore the connections here with Foucault's own development of the concept
in the context of power relations and subjectivity. Broadly speaking, both thinkers see the classical Kantian idea of freedom as deeply problematic, as it involves essentialist and universal presuppositions which are themselves often oppressive. Rather, the concept of freedom must be rethought. It can no longer be seen in solely negative terms, as freedom from constraint, but must involve more positive notions of individual autonomy, particularly the freedom of the individual to construct new modes of subjectivity. Stirner, as we shall see, dispenses with the classical notion of freedom altogether and develops a theory of ownness [Eigneheit] to describe this radical individual autonomy. I suggest in this paper that such a theory of ownness as a non-essentialist form of freedom has many similarities with Foucault's own project of freedom, which involves a critical ethos and an aestheticization of the self. Indeed, Foucault questions the anthropological and universal rational foundations of the discourse of freedom, redefining it in terms of ethical practices.[2 ] Both Stirner and Foucault are therefore crucial to the understanding of freedom in a contemporary sense--they show that freedom can no longer be limited by rational absolutes and universal moral categories. They take the understanding of freedom beyond the confines of the Kantian project--grounding it instead in concrete and contingent strategies of the self.

hydrarchist writes:

This is the third part of the essay. All footnotes are collected at the bottom of this segment.

Part I.

Part II.

THE COMPANY’S LOGIC

Let’s just say that we have fallen into the same productivity that capital expects from a worker, that it expected from a factory worker, except that now the factory is life and we almost never do anything that does not have a clear purpose, whose end has not already been determined. (Drift with language workers).

hydrarchist writes ... continued from Part I

MOBILITY

Mobility is the quality which best describes the present malleability of the work force around the three axes: time, space and task. Mobility in the disposition of rhythms and schedules, mobility between jobs and, beyond that, in geography, in vital decisions, in lifestyle, and mobility in ‘unit acts’ and in the ways of developing them, always subject to mutations, to processes of evaluation and adjustment, a constant auditing. Mobility opposed to the old staticness, to bureaucratization and routine and, without a doubt, to the organizational capacity of persons who in any moment may find their functions modified and recombined, persons who don’t know the limits of what they have to do, and in general, of what they themselves are.

hydrarchist writes:

"The Free Software Movement - Anarchism in Action"

by Asa Winstanley

* Introduction

The free software movement has been around in at least since 1984, but there is little awareness or debate about it in anarchist or general activist circles, beyond a vague awareness of "Linux". A theoretical anarchist analysis of the movement and the lessons we can learn from it seems to be conspicuous only by its absence. Yet this is a movement which is currently affecting a revolution in the way individuals, groups and companies use and create computer systems. I intend this piece to stimulate further debate, as there is currently little. Also, I am no expert in anarchist history or theory, so would be happy to receive criticism of the inevitable shortcomings in my comparisons.

"The World Is (Not) a Commodity"

Ernst Lohoff

The anti-globalization protest has formed as a movement against neoliberalism. Across the spectrum of protest, certainly the ideas on how the ruling order is to be critiqued differ widely. There is also not exactly consensus on how the path to a more humane society could look. But all realize that the neoliberal dream of a total market is a nightmare.