The Heart of India Is Under Attack Arundhati Roy A shortened version of this article appeared in The Guardian (UK), Friday, October 30, 2009. This is the full version. Ed.] To justify enforcing a corporate land grab, the state needs an enemy — and it has chosen the Maoists The low, flat-topped hills of south Orissa have been home to the Dongria Kondh long before there was a country called India or a state called Orissa. The hills watched over the Kondh. The Kondh watched over the hills and worshipped them as living deities. Now these hills have been sold for the bauxite they contain. For the Kondh it's as though god had been sold. They ask how much god would go for if the god were Ram or Allah or Jesus Christ.

"Marx, Cognitive Capitalism and the Transition to the Commons" Michel Bauwens [Snatched from a longer list-exchange at the Institute for Distributed Creativity, ed.] I think we do have to accept that we are no longer in a mercantile, nor industrial capitalist logic, but in a third phase of cognitive capitalism. My thesis is that the marxist thesis, of a organized working class taking power and then changing society, has been discredited. Not only because it didn't happen in the last 200 years, but because it is based on a misreading of history. In the previous transitions, revolutions were always the end point of a long process of reconfiguration. Hence, both slave owners and slaves morphed to serfdom as domain lords and serfs, first as an individual strategy to survive the collapse of the Roman slave economy, and thus in paradoxical ways saving and strenghtening the system; and both nobility and working strata of feudal society morphed to capitalist relations and practices, with the same effect. The point is that these changes, initially seen as a way out for the old system, turned out to be more productive overall, and eventually it made no longer sense to keep the old social order, which precluded this higher productivity to occur on a general scale.

"Driven From Below": A Look at Tenant Organizing and the New Gentrification Andrea Gibbons From Institute for Anarchist Studies This essay is the beginning of an attempt to combine theory and practice for radical organizers and activists working to combat gentrification and displacement in cities across the United States. Based on the premise that all real change has to be driven by those most affected by injustice, it takes a detailed look at some of the practical challenges involved in tenant organizing, and the building of long-lived and sustainable structures for horizontal organization and direct democracy. This organizing work is understood to be situated within a framework of neoliberalism and globalization that are the ultimate causes of gentrification and displacement in the inner city. In August of 2002, two different families came to Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE) because the manager of the Morrison Hotel had stopped accepting their rent. As tenant organizers, we had found this to be a common tactic to evade the laws of rent control and illegally force people from their homes. Typically the managers would not accept rent for a couple of months, then tell tenants that they had to leave. If the tenants did not leave they would be evicted in court for non-payment of rent, their only defense a claim that the managers had refused their rent. The managers themselves would contradict this while under oath, if it ever actually went before the judge. Such a tactic generally came into play when an owner was trying to empty a building, either to sell for higher profit, or to rehabilitate it and then rent the apartments at four or five times the original rent.

On the Digital Labor Question Andrew Ross (Transcribed October 16th, 2009 from a lecture presented at September 29, 2009, at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School) The Freelancers Union was established in 2007 to offer a social safety net and political advocacy on behalf of independent workers who contract their labor to multiple employers. Though it is now the fastest growing union in New York, a city with far more than its per capita share of creative workers, its services model has not yet been fully acknowledged by the labor movement, not even as the national share of “non-standard employment” approaches 33% (almost certainly an undercounted figure). The union emerged from the chrysalis of Sara Horowitz’s Working Today, which earned its laurels in the late 1990s, at the height of the New Economy push to promote “free agency” among the city’s burgeoning digital workforce. A decade later, it remains the only real institutional effort to provide stability to the precarious lives of the city’s independent workers, many of whom were the first to fall into the deep hole of the current recession. The needs of this workforce has attracted a good deal of commentary in recent years as part of a burgeoning analysis of the creative labor of artists (broadly defined) who were once considered marginal to the productive economy, but are increasingly profiled and promoted as the model workers of the new economy. Wherever their labor is organized into the formal silos of the so-called “creative industries,” it has garnered the attention of national statisticians bent on building the case for a new high-growth sector, irresistible to investors, politicians, and real estate speculators who know the presence of artists can have on land value. [1] But well beneath the statisticians’ radar there is a more telling story about the degradation of work that has occurred as part of the transition to a Internet-centered economy based on the widespread use of non-paid amateur or user labor. This short essay will review some of the features of that transition.

A Revolutionary Proposal: Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds Alexander Trocchi [Published as "Technique du coupe du monde," Internationale Situationniste #8 (January 1963; reposted from Not Bored).] "And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signalling through the flames." -- Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, 1958 Revolt is understandably unpopular. As soon as it is defined, it has provoked the measures for its confinement. The prudent man will avoid his definition which is in effect his death-sentence. Besides, it is a limit. We are concerned not with the coup d'etat [seizure of the state] of Trotsky and Lenin, but with the coup du monde [seizure of the world], a transition of necessity more complex, more diffuse than the other, and so more gradual, less spectacular. Our methods will vary with the empirical facts pertaining here and now, there and then. Political revolt is and must be ineffectual precisely because it must come to grips at the prevailing level of political process. Beyond the backwaters of civilization it is an anarchronism. Meanwhile, with the world at the edge of extinction, we cannot afford to wait for the mass. Nor to brawl with it.

Party Politics Versus Living Politics University of KwaZulu-Natal Forum Lecture Thursday 22 October 2009 Party Politic Vs Living Politic in Kennedy Road The Kennedy Road settlement, like all other Abahlali baseMjondolo settlements, has been embarking on a living politic. This politic is a living politic because it talks about the realities of our democracy – a democracy that serves the interests of a minority while the majority our people continue to live and to die in inhuman conditions.

Protest as Embodied State Practices: An Examination of Hegemonic and Counter-Hegemonic Protest Tactics Sabrina Alimahomed and Jake Alimahomed-Wilson[1] From Institute for Anarchist Studies Mass mobilization demonstrations have attracted numerous participants to protest a wide array of issues, including capitalist globalization, US militarism, political conventions, and transnational business operations. These recent political convergences in the United States have attracted an endless amount of attention from the state and the media. Numbers of participants have ranged from several hundred to tens of thousands.

Democratic Terrorization A Not Bored interview with Claude Guillon Q: You will soon publish Democratic Terrorization (Libertalia), which analyzes in detail the French and European legislative arsenals concerning anti-terrorism. Can you develop the thesis of your book and compare the situations in 1986 and today?

The Heckler Reverend Billy Talen Three weeks to go to the election. Last night I interrupted Mike Bloomberg’s opening statement in the debate. We’re trying to poke through the $65 million TV screen that weighs down on us in Gotham City. My prayer for bravery was posted with you earlier yesterday, “…there is something powerful in a quiet voice when the words are whole.” I warmed up my voice shouting in the street before they opened the El Museo del Barrio to those of us who had political connections or groundling tickets like me. The hour before the debate, on the edge of Central Park in the twilight, Savitri and I hosted a Coney Island sideshow – a shoe-tossing with an effigy of Mike Bloomberg. We had debated all week about throwing a shoe at him during the debate, or maybe even a light-weight not-injurious Chinese flat-heel, but lawyer friends explained assault charges and the likelihood of being shot before I could get my missile out of my hand.

Statement in support of Abahlali baseMjondolo 9 October 2009 The South African shack-dwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) is an egalitarian, democratic organisation dedicated to the self-empowerment and self-education of thousands of disadvantaged people. We the undersigned support the resolve of AbM activists to play a leading part in the determination of their own future, and to help make, rather than suffer, public decisions about housing, land, and development. We condemn all acts of violence and intimidation against AbM members and the residents of South Africa's informal settlements. We condemn any participation or collusion of the government and police in the recent assault against AbM leaders and their families, and in the destruction of their homes and offices. We call on the government to do all that is required to repair the damage done in recent weeks, and to protect AbM activists and settlement residents from any future violence; we note in particular the repeated death threats against AbM President S'bu Zikode and Vice President Mashumi Figlan. We call on the ANC to respect and facilitate, rather than discourage, popular participation in the governing of South Africa.