Slavoj Zizek Is a Bourgeois Snob! Christian Lorentzen A long line of fans formed around the stage at Cooper Union to have Slavoj Zizek sign books. They rattled off their names for the philosopher's dedication.

Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment Sushil Yadav The fast-paced, consumerist lifestyle of Industrial Society is causing exponential rise in psychological problems besides destroying the environment. All issues are interlinked. Our Minds cannot be peaceful when attention-spans are down to nanoseconds, microseconds and milliseconds. Our Minds cannot be peaceful if we destroy Nature.

A Letter to Our German Comrades Abahlali baseMjondolo A Letter from Abahlali baseMjondolo in Durban, South Africa, to Basta! in Wuppertal, German, Saturday 19 June 2010 Friede unter den HüttenbewohnerInnen - Kampf der Macht der Reichen! "Peace amongst the shack dwellers - struggle against the power of the rich" The rich are killing our world. The rich in business, in government and in civil society are killing our world. They are killing our world with a top down system and by putting money before human beings. Since 2005 we have been resisting as Abahlali baseMjondolo. We are struggling for equality and for dignity. We are struggling to put the human being at the centre of the world. Every person has the same right to contribute to making all the decisions that affect that person. Every person has the right to contribute freely and without fear to all discussions. People have the same right to justice and to dignity wherever they were born. The land and the wealth of this world must be shared by the people of this world. Obviously we do not want the rich to monopolise ownership of the land and the wealth. But we also do not want the state to own the land and the wealth for the people. We want the people to own and to manage the blessings and fruits of this world directly. Some of us call this a living communism.

"Serving our Life Sentence in the Shacks" Abahlali baseMjondolo People all over South Africa have been asking the leaders of Abahlali baseMjondolo as to why the government continues to ignore the demands of the shack dwellers. They have been asking why after all the marches, statements, reports and meetings the Kennedy Road settlement continues to get burnt down through the endless shack fires. They have been referring in particular to the recent Kennedy Road shack fire on Sunday, 4 July 2010 that took four lives, leaving more than three thousand people displaced and homeless.

Interview with Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&I...

"We've Lost The Battle, But We Haven't Lost The War" Haiti Six Months After The Earthquake Beverly Bell Truthout - July 15, 2010, http://www.truth-out.org/weve-lost-battle-we-havent-lost-war-haiti-six-m... Haiti during the World Cup is much like my hometown of New Orleans was during the Superbowl. Don't try to make plans with anyone to do anything during a game. (In the more cash- rich New Orleans, the ban on non-game-related activity stretched back a day or two before a game, because there was

The Political Meaning of the Attacks on Abahlali baseMjondolo Michael Neocosmos The background and consequences of the recent violent destruction of the Kennedy Road organisation of the Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) movement of shack dwellers by a combination of gangs recruited for the purpose, police action and local and regional ANC structures needs to be analysed at some depth. The reason is that this event and the actions surrounding it by various state apparatuses have major consequences for the democracy and citizenship rights which have been painfully fought for and constructed through popular struggle in this country over many years, but particularly during the popular upsurge of the 1980s. At this stage, AbM is trying to reconstitute itself in response to the ongoing attacks on its key militants but it is not yet clear how the attacks will change the movement.

Cooperation and Human Nature Bernard Marszalek JAS Econ Here are two excerpts from a recent news feature. "I cannot direct anybody to do anything that they do not want to do. All decision-making is by consensus." All around . . . groups organized themselves in democratic cooperatives, arranged in an anti-hierarchy. All deliberations are open -- and exhaustive. Everyone gets their say no matter how long it takes. "It is bottom-up and not top-down." Members of cooperatives will recognize these comments. In fact they are so commonplace as to be burdened with a ton of baggage. For some a smile will approach the lips in appreciation of the value of these statements. Others might feel their teeth clenching in anticipation of the seemingly endless meetings that they associate with deliberations over meaningless details. The quotes however do not emanate from a co-op board meeting. They are attributed, in a Wall Street Journal blog, to the scientists working on “the largest machine in the world.”1 That happens to be the Large Hadron Collider -- a $6 billion particle accelerator near Geneva, with thousands scientists involved in its operation.

The Brave New World of Work Armin Medosch The Next Layer This text is a first draft, trying to identify key topics for an inquiry into the new organisation of labour. It starts with a historic analysis and then explores the notion of Post-Fordism.Specific sections are devoted to cognitive capitalism, the creative industries, informational capitalism and the split between manual and mental labour. It ends with a modest proposal for an alternative path of development. The human species cannot exist without work. Even if automation is driven to absurd limits, there will always be a rest of socially necessary labour. Labour is essentially the work of self-creation of the human species. And insofar this is true, there is no fixed or permanent understanding of labour and the social relationships which it is part of and which it creates. Therefore a reassessment of labour in the 21st century is urgently necessary. We are interested in an inquiry inte the new organisation of labour not because we are obsessed with work. We also do not privilege in our analysis the wage-labour relationship. The question of labour of course implies forms of non-labour or what Marx called 'reproduction'; it implies idleness, affective labour, the labour of love, learning, experimentation and many other forms of labour which are not captured 100% by the notion of 'productive' labour in wage-labour relationships. Our interest in labour is stimulated by the sense of crisis that reaches much deeper than the recent banking crisis and the ongoing market volatility. We think that we are going through a phase of transition during which either the tracks can be laid for a future development of human civilisation that is more beneficial in its relationship with the biosphere, including our own physical and mental resources; or we are bound to suffer from further rapid cycles of accumulation of capital and collapses, of speeded up developments and of break-downs, which will cause poverty, hunger and devastation on a global scale, but inadvertently hitting the poor much worse than those living in the comfort zone of the relatively wealthy countries. We propose to undertake an inquiry which looks at the reality of living labour today. Putting labour into a central position is a methodological decision designed to counter the tendency of the reification of theories, a one-sided process of abstraction which creates false totalities.

We Want the Full Loaf (not just a child support grant) Mnikelo Ndabankulu [Presentation at the Development Action Group Workshop, Cape Town, South Africa, 18 November 2009] The Slums Act The Slums Act first came to our ears as a Bill in 2006. The information about this Bill came to us indirectly through our sources. It was clear that we needed to discuss this Bill as Abahlali. M'du Hlongwa and I both went to the Government Communications to ask a copy. We had two copies and we shared these copies and we analysed the Bill. We had a number of meetings where we read the Bill together going one line by one line. Before we could get into the Bill the name of the Bill was already frustrating us as it talked about shack settlements as 'Slums'. Yes our communities are under developed and they need development. That is obvious. But they are not 'slums'. A slum is a place where there there is nothing good, where there is no survival. We immediately thought that it is wrong to call our communities 'slums'. We immediately thought that the government must recognise that our settlements are communities – communities that are underdeveloped due to neglect by the government - and that they need to be developed by that same government. They need to be made formal – not to be eradicated.