"Manifesto Against Labour"

Gruppe Krisis

1. The rule of dead labour

A corpse rules society -- the corpse of labour. All powers around the globe formed an alliance to defend its rule: the Pope and the World Bank, Tony Blair and Jörg Haider, trade unions and entrepreneurs, German ecologists and French socialists. They don't know but one slogan: jobs, jobs, jobs!

An anonymous coward writes:

"The New Model of Imperialism:

Saddam on Parade

Tariq Ali

My first reaction to the capture of Saddam Hussein was both anger and
disgust. Anger with the old dictator who could not even die honourably. He
preferred to be captured by his old friends than to go down fighting, the
one decent thing he could have done for his country.

An anonymous coward writes:

"When NGOs Attack:

Implications of the Coup in Georgia"

Jacob Levich

Nongovernmental organizations -- the notionally independent, reputedly
humanitarian groups known as NGOs -- are now being openly integrated into
Washington's overall strategy for consolidating global supremacy.

Events surrounding last month's coup in post-Soviet Georgia, read in light of
recent State Department documents, suggest that seemingly innocuous NGOs now
play a central role in the policy of US-engineered "regime change" set forth
in the notorious National Security Strategy of the United States.

hydrarchist writes this from the cover page of the pamphlet P2P Fightsharing produced by the WSIS We Seize! group in Rome.

Seizing -- You Can't Beat the Feeling!

The WSIS positions itself as an opportunity to develop a common vision of an 'information society' and bundles with it a series of promises; a just world; more transparent government; bridging of digital divides. An examination of the material propositions, trade agreeement (WTO, FTAA) realpolitik, and the positions of market dominance and social misery left untouched, and unmentioned, tell a different story.

As communications networks spread information becomes central to both production and the organization of social institutions. But rather than making life easier, informationalization supplements and intensifies production and labor. Spiralling demand for productivity imposes close-quarters labor surveillance; dockers’ movements tracked as they move palettes around a warehouse; the waitress whose orders are memorized and who must balance her float exactly at the end of the shift; the temporary worker assigned to a new data entry office or call center every couple of days. Benefits of digitalization accrue principally to those who have the capital resources and power to capture them, and the fight over the laws regulating the digital sphere is a struggle over the destination of this wealth between global regions and social classes.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"(Not Your Usual) Notes on Miami"
PK and Friends

We did not get arrested and we are not naïve enough to believe Miami was the greatest day of modern-day revolutionary activity. However, in light of the wave of dejected accounts from the streets and the jails and the ensuing reflections, we feel a gaping whole has been left in the analyses of the events in Miami. Enough material has already been generated in the past two weeks concerning both the nasty, deliberate consequences of the FTAA and the police repression during the ministerial. This article will not attempt to analyze, nor undermine, the importance of the former and the existence of the latter. Nor do we encourage the dwelling on or fetishization of mass demonstrations. We feel that in spite of all the negativity, fear, and outrage surrounding the ministerial and its aftermath, there was an exciting, fundamental shift in resistance strategy (and its popular acceptance) that, once realized, cannot be lost. That is what this article will discuss; and that is what needs to be addressed, applauded, and further developed without hesitation.

Anonymous Comrade writes

"The Parable of Samarra"

John Chuckman, December 9, 2003

Front-page stories announced the greatest battle since the end of combat in Iraq with fifty-four insurgents killed and not an American soldier lost. We were given breathtaking details about two separate, coordinated attacks, the firing of rocket-propelled grenades at American vehicles, and the fact that many of the attackers wore Fedayeen militia uniforms associated with Saddam Hussein. Early reports even claimed eleven insurgents were captured.

"Michel Foucault and Pornography"

Wendy McElroy

"Feminist scholars, many drawing on the insights
offered by Michel Foucault, have urged us to develop
new ways of thinking and speaking."(1) So write the
editors of the book Analyzing Gender. In their
scholarly work Knowing Women: Feminism and Knowledge,
two different feminist editors explain why the French
philosopher Michel Foucault is quoted extensively
therein: "Foucault's discourse theory and the
'post-structuralist' methods of analysis which depend
on it have become very influential within feminist
studies."(2) Since I have an antipathy to fully
one-third of the words in the preceding sentence, I
tend to screen out such scholarly discussions of
Foucault for the sake of my digestion.

hydrarchist writes:

"This paper discusses the importance of the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) scheduled to take place in December 2003 in Geneva, as well as providing a critique of it, along with a discussion of the apparent advantages of organising a counter-summit like WE SEIZE!"

Which Information Society Are You Talking About?


On the Way to WSIS: We Seize!


George N. Dafermos

0. Doomed Agendas


The World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) is scheduled to take place in the next month (December 10-12, 2003) in Geneva. This much celebrated meeting will supposedly shed light upon the obstacles that the so-called information society faces, and wil discuss ways to deal with them in the most efficient manner for the greater good of all. In a nutshell, the WSIS is the place to be if you're interested in how we all together can widen authentic civic engagement in matters rooted in the epicentre of the information society.

An anonymous coward writes:

The Libre Manifesto

A constellation of interests is now seeking to increase their ownership and control of creativity. They tell us that they require new laws and rights that allow them to control concepts and ideas and protect them from exploitation. They say that this will enrich our lives, create new products and safeguard the possibility of future prosperity. But this is an absolute disaster for creativity, whose health depends on an ongoing, free and open conversation between ideas from the past and the present.

— In response, we wish to defend the idea of a creative sphere of concepts and ideas that are free from ownership.(1)

nolympics submits:

"Extraordinary Times:

Dissent and the New Model of Homeland Defense"
J Pupovac, December 1, 2003

Miami is the land of opportunity for your typical South American drug king pin, the narcotics agent that spent years pursuing him and the flaming Cuban salsa instructor he had an affair with years ago. So why does a middle-class, white suburban activist chick have such a hard time getting along? Well, I'll tell you why. The activist is the only one who gives a damn about the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), a hemispheric trade agreement that seeks to expand NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), a botched plan for trade "liberalization" that has had a devastating effect on the working class of Mexico, the US and Canada.