The Decade to Come Brian Holmes It was the heyday of globalization, the high point of the Internet boom and the last gasp of the New Economy: the WTO ministerial in Seattle was meant to celebrate the advent of a corporate millennium extending “free trade” to the furthest corners of the earth. Nobody on that fall morning of Tuesday, 30 November 1999, could have predicted that by nightfall the summit would be disrupted, downtown Seattle would be paralyzed by demonstrations and a full-scale police riot would have broken out, revealing to everyone what democracy really looks like and plunging the city into five days of chaos. Nobody, that is, except the thousands of protesters who prepared for months to put their bodies on the line and shut down the World Trade Organization – as well as their hundreds of thousands of other bodies across the world who learned the potentials of the networked society by participating in the far-flung renewal of leftist, anarchist, social justice and ecology movements that began in the wake of the Zapatista uprising five years before. The 30th of November was their day, our day, a tumultuous day in the streets, inaugurating a movement of movements whose resistance had become as transnational as capital.

Building a Mass Movement Save the Planet, Fight Racism Anonymous Comrade I’ve spent forty years of my life as a serious activist. I’ve been to prison as a result and I’ve also had fun. I’ve been involved in one way or another in about every “issue” to come down the left wing pike during that time. I’ve seen some changes. I haven’t seen nearly enough. I’m tied of hearing about past movements. Though I was there, I’m tired of hearing about the 60s. The suggestions I’m about to make are aimed at folks one hell of a lot younger than me. Young activists have the energy, the spirit, the strength to make things happen. Young activists have not become cynical like so many of my compatriots. I should note that I come from a framework which I would describe as anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and Marxist. For me, what we used to call the primary contradictions are race and class. It is through that prism that I view the world.

"Eyes Closed and Covered:" The "Internationalist" Blockade in Germany Volker Weiss [The long-standing conflicts inside the Left in Germany on the issue of nationalism emerged again a few weeks ago in Hamburg when some activists violently blockaded the showing of the film "Why Israel?" by former Jewish anti-fascist partisan Claude Lanzmann. This text analyzes the incident, and attempts to contextualize it within a broader political and historical framework.] After the violent blockade of a film showing of Claude Lanzmann’s “Why Israel” in Hamburg, Germany, the coalition around the Internationalist Center B5 has sought to make an explanation. This Autumn in Germany the showing of 2 films were forcefully prevented: In Hoyerswerda, a bomb threat caused the cancellation of Quentin Tarantinos “Inglorious Basterds,” and in Hamburg the showing of the documentary “Pourquoi Israel” (1972) of the French filmmaker and former antifascist partisan Claude Lanzmann was also not allowed to take place. In contrast to in Hoyerswerda, where the film showing was prevented by Neo-nazis, in Hamburg it required internationalist window dressing. At the end of October, a coalition around the “Internationalist Center B5″ blockaded a theater in their direct vicinity, the Independent Cinema B Movie. With physical blows and wild remarks, [ed. multiple sources reported that the B5 activists shouted "Jewish pigs" and "fairies" ("Shuchteln") at those seeking to enter the theater, and had physically assaulted some of them] the activists made clear that, the causing of injuries to a few people was worth it to them to prevent an engagement with the theme “Why Israel?”

The Necrosocial Occupied UC Berkeley 18 November 2009 "Being president of the University of California is like being manager of a cemetery: there are many people under you, but no one is listening." UC President Mark Yudof "Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor." Karl Marx "Politics is death that lives a human life." Achille Mbembe Yes, very much a cemetery. Only here there are no dirges, no prayers, only the repeated testing of our threshold for anxiety, humiliation, and debt. The classroom just like the workplace just like the university just like the state just like the economy manages our social death, translating what we once knew from high school, from work, from our family life into academic parlance, into acceptable forms of social conflict.

Conversation with Raoul Vaneigem Hans Ulrich Obrist Hans Ulrich Obrist: I just visited Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, who have written an appeal to Barack Obama. What would your appeal and/or advice be to Obama? Raoul Vaneigem: I refuse to cultivate any relationship whatsoever with people of power. I agree with the Zapatistas from Chiapas who want nothing to do with either the state or its masters, the multinational mafias. I call for civil disobedience so that local communities can form, coordinate, and begin self-producing natural power, a more natural form of farming, and public services that are finally liberated from the scams of government by the Left or the Right. On the other hand, I welcome the appeal by Chamoiseau, Glissant, and their friends for the creation of an existence in which the poetry of a life rediscovered will put an end to the deadly stranglehold of the commodity.

End Times in Copenhagen Joel Kovel October 29th 2009 It's hard to overstate the importance of the upcoming December meetings at Copenhagen, Denmark, set up by the UN for the purpose of renegotiating the climate protocols set forth in Kyoto, in 1997 and due to expire in 2012. These latter were greeted with a certain modicum of hope and a small offsetting of skepticism. As Copenhagen looms, the skeptics have been proven right in spades, those who thought something good would come out of Kyoto stand revealed as fools or liars and charlatans. In the sober words of Nature from 2007, the Kyoto protocols, which demanded of wealthy countries that they reduce carbon emissions by 2012 to six-to-eight percent below 1990 levels, have "produced no demonstrable reductions in emissions or even in anticipated emissions growth."

Climate Change, Nuclear Power and Democracy Res0nance Monday saw Ed Milliband make public plans to overhaul the UK energy system. Whilst the plan includes an overhaul of renewables and coal fired power perhaps the most controversial aspect of this overhaul is the emphasis being placed on nuclear energy generation. A new generation of 10 nuclear plants has been proposed which could provide up to 40% of the UK’s energy by 2025. This will be “the most ambitious fleet of new nuclear reactors in Europe” according to the Guardian. This overhaul, according to Labour, has been designed to address the twin problems of climate change and energy security.

“Socialism in One Country” Before Stalin, and the Origins of Reactionary “Anti-Imperialism”: The Case of Turkey, 1917-1925 Loren Goldner “All information on the situation in Khiva, in Persia, in Bukhara and in Afghanistan confirm the fact that a Soviet revolution in these countries is going to cause us major difficulties at the present time…. Until the situation in the West is stabilized and until our industries and transport systems have improved, a Soviet expansion in the east could prove to be no less dangerous than a war in the West…a potential Soviet revolution in the east is today to our advantage principally as an important element in diplomatic relations with England. From this I conclude that: 1) in the east we should devote ourselves to political and educational work…and at the same time advise all possible caution in actions calculated to require our military support, or which might require it; 2) we have to continue by all possible channels at our disposal to arrive at an understanding with England about the east.” — Leon Trotsky, Secret memo to Lenin, Zinoviev et al. June 1920[1] [Prefatory Note: The following article had its origin in a “Letter to the Editor”, ca. 2001, to a Trotskyist group, inquiring about a commercial treaty signed by the Soviet Union with Kemalist Turkey in March 1921, a mere two months after 15 leading Turkish Communists were murdered just off the Turkish coast. Those who ordered and those who committed these murders were never identified and are the basis for numerous theories, but everything points to some person or persons in the Kemalist movement, up to the highest levels. What interested me was of course not a murder mystery but the fact that the Soviet Union entered into an alliance with a government that was patently killing and jailing pro-Soviet communist militants, and said and did little or nothing about it. That dynamic was of course familiar to anyone acquainted with post-1945 world history, as in the case of Nasser’s Egypt or other “progressive” Third World regimes, but here was the same pattern only four years after the Russian Revolution, i.e. in a period when almost everyone, myself included, thought that the dominance of Soviet national interests over “proletarian internationalism” really emerged into full view only with the triumph of Stalin and “socialism in one country” in 1924.

ACTA Treaty is DMCA on Steroids Kevin Carson [Reposted from Center for a Stateless Society] In last year’s election campaign Obama came across as vaguely more friendly to open-culture than the alternatives, among other things supporting “fair use” reform of the DMCA and opposing requirements for ISP data retention (both issues on which Hillary waffled). As somebody put it, “Obama’s a Mac and Hillary’s a PC.” Even the U.S. Pirate Party endorsed Obama as the least evil candidate. But if recent events are any indication, Obama’s stance on the preexisting digital copyright regime is that of Rehoboam: “My little finger shall be thicker than my father’s loins. For whereas my father put a heavy yoke upon you, I will put more to your yoke.” It was a safe bet something was up when Obama refused to discuss—for “national security” reasons, of course—the terms of the forthcoming Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (a secret copyright treaty). Now the Internet chapter has leaked, according to Cory Doctorow, and “It’s bad. Very bad.” Among other things:

Grasping the Political in the Event Maurizio Lazzarato [This interview with Maurizio Lazzarato (ML) was conducted on 27 November 2008 by Brian Massumi (BM) and Erin Manning (EM). It is reposted from "Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics," Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation, No. 3. October 2009. Maurizio Lazzarato: ML Brian Massumi: BM Erin Manning: EM BM: I thought I would take as the point of departure a recent article I read in the New York Times (2008), where a certain kind of rhetoric – seen everywhere these days – was mobilized. This was an article about Morgan Stanley, one of the large financial institutions, which stated that the problem is that we consume too much. We are dying of consumption. The economic crisis was caused by an excess of consumption, and it’s the fault of individual consumers who got themselves too indebted: it’s a personal moral fault. You speak of debt as a technique that is an aspect of an ensemble of governmental assemblages. Could you elaborate on and react to this idea that the crisis was caused by the individual behaviour of consumers? ML: I think that the financial crisis brings to the fore the governmental technique which is debt. I think that debt, therefore credit, is a governmental technique that is more widespread in the US than it is here in France. It is at once an economic technique and a technique for the production or the control of subjectivity. These things go together. It’s interesting to see how governmentality produces itself at the crossing of different assemblages: the production of subjectivity and the economy. We can see very clearly what was the neo-liberal project: generally speaking we can say that finance was a machine to transform rights into credits. Instead of getting a raise in salary, you would get a credit. Instead of having a right to retirement, you would get an individual life insurance. Instead of having a right to lodging, you would get the right to a mortgage. These are techniques of individualization.