Protesting Degree Zero:
On Black Bloc Tactics, Culture and Building the Movement
Marc James Léger

[The following considers the use of Black Bloc tactics at anti-capitalist demonstrations with a particular focus on the Toronto 2010 protest marches. My conclusion is that the calculated use of violence, usually the smashing of windows of retail chain stores, can best be understood through an aesthetic appreciation of political action – politics interpreted through the lens of culture. I relate Black Bloc tactics to three works of contemporary art that examine contemporary conflicts in terms of training and role-playing. While anarchist politics typically refuse the logic of representation, mediation could be said to return in the symbolic performance of conflict. The fact that capital feeds on subjective violence, and the fact that systemic violence cannot be attributed to individuals, as Žižek argues, allows us to perceive both the merits of anarchist practice and some of its theoretical limitations.]

Bowles-Simpson: The Unequal Marriage of Reaganomics and Rubinomics People's Pension Eric Laursen The Bowles-Simpson plan isn't a fair and equitable way to reduce the long-term federal deficit, whatever its co-authors might claim. In fact, it's the biggest proposed experiment in supply-side economics since early Reagan. Long story short: The proposal put on the table last week by the co-chairs of the president's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform is essentially a wedding of Rubinomics and Reaganomics. As such, it's what we might get if Bill Clinton and the late Ronald Reagan were locked in a room together and required to cut the long-term budget deficit – without any regard for the impact of their handiwork on low- and middle-income people. You've probably guessed which partner has the upper hand in this deal. And we'll explore that in a moment. But first, some background.

Capitalist Instability and the Current Crisis Hillel Ticktin [The article considers whether there are limits to capitalist strategies for survival. It argues that the present downturn represents a crisis in the capitalist system itself, in that the mediating forms by which it could maintain control and grow have reached their limits. As there is no working class opposition or any socialist opposition worth the name, capitalism is not in danger of overthrow, but low growth or stagnation and disintegration are possibilities. In brief, the article argues that capitalism has used imperialism, war, and the welfare state as successful mediations in the contradictions of capitalism. However, Stalinism played the crucial role through the Cold War, controlling the left, ruining Marxism and providing the basis for an anti-communist ideology. In the last period, finance capital played a particular role of control which, in the end, became cannibalistic in that it was using and devouring itself. With the end Stalinism and of the Cold War, the implosion of finance capital, the failure of the present wars and the limited welfare state, there is one alternative—to go for growth and reflate, as in the immediate post-war period. However, capital would find that too dangerous, as it risks a repeat of the militancy of the 1960s and 1970s.] Capitalism has used imperialism, war and the welfare state as successful mediations in the contradictions of capitalism. However, Stalinism controlled the left, ruining Marxism and providing the basis for an anti-communist ideology. In the last period, finance capital played a particular role of control which, in the end, became cannibalistic in that it was using and devouring itself. With the end Stalinism and of the Cold War, the implosion of finance capital, the failure of the present wars and the limited welfare state, there is one alternative—to go for growth and reflate. However, capital would find that too dangerous, as it risks a repeat of the militancy of the 1960s and 1970s.

Q&A: An Interview with Noam Chomsky David Samuels The world’s most important leftist intellectual talks about his Zionist childhood and his time with Hezbollah It seems safe to say that no living intellectual has enraged more people with more predictable regularity than Noam Chomsky. A biting and voluble critic of American power, Chomsky has been denounced as a traitor, a well-poisoner, the author of over 200 largely unreadable books, a pompous would-be prophet drunk on his own claims to moral authority, and a naïve apologist for Hezbollah [1] and the Khmer Rouge [2]. His political writings, speeches, and interviews over the past five decades have made him a hero of the global left and the world’s most quoted living thinker.

"Raging Skull" Adam Rathe It’s a short walk from 24 E. 12th St. to 19 W. 21st St., but for Soft Skull Press the trip took almost 20 years. And it’s been a wild ride. The two rooms that Soft Skull inhabits sit at the end of a hall in the offices of a commercial art firm, and today both are almost empty. It’s the day before the office is closing and operations move to Berkeley, Calif., where Counterpoint Press, the book publisher that bought Soft Skull in 2007, is based. It’s essentially the end of the line for a company born in 1993 at a Kinko’s just below Union Square that has, over the years, been one of the most provocative, daring, loved and hated independent presses in New York. “The whole ethos of Soft Skull came out of a very New York, punk, Lower East Side, radical place,” says Denise Oswald, Soft Skull’s editorial director, sitting in her office the day before she would be out of a job. “A lot of writers were situated here and, by its very nature, it’s representative of a counterculture that exists here.”

Outrage, Misguided Noam Chomsky The U.S. midterm elections register a level of anger, fear and disillusionment in the country like nothing I can recall in my lifetime. Since the Democrats are in power, they bear the brunt of the revulsion over our current socioeconomic and political situation. More than half the "mainstream Americans" in a Rasmussen poll last month said they view the Tea Party movement favorably-a reflection of the spirit of disenchantment. The grievances are legitimate. For more than 30 years, real incomes for the majority of the population have stagnated or declined while work hours and insecurity have increased, along with debt. Wealth has accumulated, but in very few pockets, leading to unprecedented inequality.

Against Kamikaze Capitalism Oil, Climate Change and the French Refinery Blockades David Graeber On Saturday, 16th October 2010, some 500 activists gathered at convergence points across London, knowing only that they were about to embark on a direct action called Crude Awakening, aimed against the ecological devastation of the global oil industry, but with no clear idea of what they were about to do. The plan was quite a clever one. Organizers had dropped hints they were intending to hit targets in London itself, but instead, participants—who had been told only to bring full-charged metro cards, lunch, and outdoor clothing—were led in brigades to a commuter train for Essex. At one stop, bags full of white chemical jumpsuits marked with skeletons and dollars, gear, and lock-boxes mysteriously appeared; shortly thereafter, hastily appointed spokespeople in each carriage received word of the day’s real plan: to blockade the access road to the giant Coryton refinery near Stanford-le-Hope – the road over which 80% of all oil consumed in London flows. An affinity group of about a dozen women were already locked down to vans near the refinery’s gate and had turned back several tankers; we were going to make it impossible for the police to overwhelm and arrest them.

Becoming Multitudes: Workers, Students and French Social Movements Jason Francis McGimsey Officially speaking, the mass mobilizations against the now congressionally approved pension reform in France have come to an end. The biggest unions met yesterday (November 8th), collectively signing a document that promises another day of action on November 23rd, promoting “multiform actions” that will, however, be decided on by “local and professional categories”. Substantially, unions are strategically biding their time and delegating the responsibility for the movement for two reasons. First and foremost, they are waiting for the right moment to take advantage from the crushing popular opposition to Sarkozy’s policies: the presidential elections for 2012. Their fear is that continuing strikes will eventually alienate the popular consensus that they have enjoyed so far, “degenerating” into radical actions that they would then be forced to distance themselves from. The second and more interesting reason why French unions have backed down from full-contact opposition to the government is that they never were in control of the movement in the first place. Over the last few months, in the best case scenario, unions functioned as temporary organizational tools, loose containers that provided communication networks between various groups and resources. In the worst case scenario, they assumed their (typical) role of paternalistic social intermediaries, quelling the more heated expressions of social opposition and reconducting them within union lines. In reality, smaller antagonistic flares continue to sporadically erupt throughout France. There are unannounced strikes, slowdowns and pickets in sectors ranging from transportation to services and oil refineries. Solidarity groups of inter-professional strikers remain active, passing from one strike to the next, blocking entrance ways and insisting that the movement is far from over. And they’re right: although the national bonfire of révolution is not burning brightly, the cinders are still incandescent and there is no smoke in sight.

A Permanent Economic Emergency Slavoj Zizek During this year's protests against the Eurozone's austerity measures — in Greece and, on a smaller scale, Ireland, Italy and Spain — two stories have imposed themselves.[1] The predominant, establishment story proposes a de-politicized naturalization of the crisis: the regulatory measures are presented not as decisions grounded in political choices, but as the imperatives of a neutral financial logic — if we want our economies to stabilize, we simply have to swallow the bitter pill. The other story, that of the protesting workers, students and pensioners, would see the austerity measures as yet another attempt by international financial capital to dismantle the last remainders of the welfare state. The IMF thus appears from one perspective as a neutral agent of discipline and order, and from the other as the oppressive agent of global capital.

Cognitarian Subjectivation Franco "Bifo" Berardi Recent years have witnessed a new techno-social framework of contemporary subjectivation. And I would like to ask whether a process of autonomous, collective self-definition is possible in the present age. The concept of “general intellect” associated with Italian post-operaist thought in the 1990s (Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, Christian Marazzi) emphasizes the interaction between labor and language: social labor is the endless recombination of myriad fragments producing, elaborating, distributing, and decoding signs and informational units of all kinds. Every semiotic segment produced by the information worker must meet and match innumerable other semiotic segments in order to form the combinatory frame of the info-commodity, semiocapital.