Resistance and Organization in Postfordism: On the Attempt of a Militant Research of Precarious Labor

Robert Foltin

A tool for recognizing class composition[1] is the "militant research " (or "questionnaire" or "workers inquiry" or "joint research"), which is currently experiencing an astonishing comeback in various contexts. The con-ricerca, which emerged in Italy in the 1960s, was intended to recognize the technical composition of the working class, and to not only recognize its political composition or recomposition (in other words the workers battles and organization), but also to promote and influence it. Communication and mutual information among the workers were to be set in motion and, as it was once bombastically formulated by Wildcat (still as the city paper for Karlsruhe), to prepare "spontaneous" battles (Karlsruher Stadtzeitung reprint 1985).

Based on the experience that many small actions of resistance against the capitalist system occurred again and again, especially after the major student strike in spring 1996 in Vienna and Austria[2], a small group was founded in 1997 that called itself "Koordination". Its goal was to promote communication and information about the battles and to step out of the ghetto of the scene at the same time. The name was inspired by the "Coordinations" in France. These had formed in all the strikes since the mid-1980s and never became integrated in dominant structures. Leftist organizations attempted to introduce permanence into the Coordinations, but they did not allow themselves to become bureaucratized as the self-organization of the revolts. They vanished with the end of demonstrations and strikes, but reappeared again with every new confrontation and picked up from their previous experiences.

Our "Koordination" was intended to be a tool to make communication and information available to the "small" battles. To this end we produced a regularly published information bulletin and also made its contents available on the net, which additionally served as an information pool for radical leftist papers (such as TATblatt). Due to a lack of battles in Vienna, however, in the long term we limited ourselves to collecting international news.

David Graeber: Anarchist and More

By Rebecca White

From Souldish

David Graeber, intrepid anthropologist and anarchist, talks about the magical battles and spiritual jujitsu of Madagascar, the trials of being a political dissident, and the emerging "Anarchist Century."

It's not often that we get to sneak a peak into the minds that will no doubt be remembered. David Graeber is one such mind. But more than a mind, he is a man whose work has been met with varying opinion in the past few years due to the threatening nature of his anarchist beliefs.

When I met him, I was faced with a slew of discussion topics to choose from. In the scholarly world he's known for his research on Madagascar. In the world of gossip, he's known for being the anthropology professor at Yale who was fired without due cause.

Either way you look at it, David is an anthropological scholar, an anarachist, and an all around witty guy with a wry sense of humor one wouldn't expect from someone so feared by the "ruling class".

Are you an anthropologist that’s an anarchist or an anarchist that happens to be an anthropologist?

I guess it depends on what kind of day it is. In a way, both. I guess I considered myself an anarchist for most of my life, but then I’ve been interested in anthropology for most of my life, too. I imagine they came from the same impulse which was this sort of belief that there’s got to be something better than this. An interest in human possibilities.

Much of your anthropological work was done in Madagascar. Why did you choose Madagascar for your doctoral thesis?

That’s an interesting question. I wasn’t originally thinking of studying Madagascar when I went to graduate school. I was sort of vaguely thinking somewhere in Indonesia. There seemed to be various practical reasons that that wasn’t such a good idea. Polynesia was also an option but I decided not to go there because I didn’t want to eat yams everyday. I don’t really like yams.

Then my advisor mentioned I should take a look at Madagascar, so I started reading about it. I started reading folk tales, actually. I wanted to get an idea of what people were like there. What I found was they’re incredibly subversive. There’s all these stories about people playing tricks on God. It just seemed like these were people whose attitude I would appreciate.

Finding the Real Punk

By Richa Jha and Sandhya Gurung

From Kantipur

“Anarchy”, “Punks not dead”, “Burn in hell” and other more hostile graffiti spray painted on the walls of buildings and even temples grab your eye while walking around Kathmandu. The typical reaction is, "Must be the work of a punk”.

And when you think of "punk" you visualize young people with torn clothes, unkempt hair, spiked or dyed and usually carrying a bad attitude with a loitering intent. But is punk all about vandalizing public property and being a nuisance to society? Is it only that?

"Punk was an activist movement in the late 70s in the UK and spread across Europe. It was a synthesis of music and action that opposed fascist and imperialist foreign policies formulated by governments there that usually ignored problems at home (e.g. the US today), which rendered qualified youth unemployed”, says Sareena Rai who has been involved in punk since 1990, and is in the punk band Rai Ko Ris in Nepal. "It was initially to stand against suppression especially of a ‘classist’ nature, but with time, it certainly has got lost in translation."

Ezequiel Adamovsky writes:

"Autonomous Politics and its Problems:
Thinking the Passage from Social to Political"
Ezequiel Adamovsky

Part One:
Two Hypotheses on a
New Strategy for an Autonomous Politics

My aim in this article is to present some hypotheses on issues of strategy for anti-capitalist emancipatory movements. The idea is to rethink the conditions for an effective politics, with the capacity to radically change the society we live in.

Even if I will not have the space to analyze concrete cases, these reflections are not a purely "theoretical" endeavor, but spring from the observation of a series of movements I had the chance to be part of — the movement of neighbor's assemblies in Argentina, some processes of the World Social Forum, and other global networks — or that I followed closely in the past years — the piquetero (unemployed) movement also in Argentina, and the Zapatistas in Mexico.

From the viewpoint of strategy, the current emancipatory movements can be said to be in two opposite situations (somewhat schematically). The first one is that in which they manage to mobilize a great deal of social energy in favor of a political project, but they do that in a way that make them fall in the traps of "heteronomous politics".

By "heteronomous" I refer to the political mechanisms by means of which all that social energy ends up being channeled in a way that benefits the interests of the ruling class or, at least, minimize the radical potential of that popular mobilization. This is, for example, the fate of Brazil's PT under Lula, and also of some social movements (for example certain sections of the feminist movement) that turned into single-issue lobby organizations with no connection to any broader radical movement.

The second situation is that of those movements and collectives that reject any contact with the state and with heteronomous politics in general (parties, lobbies, elections, etc.) only to find themselves reduced to small identity-groups with little chances to have a real impact in terms of radical change. This is the case, for example, of some of the unemployed movements in Argentina, but also of many anti-capitalist small collectives throughout the world. The cost of their political "purity" is the inability to connect with larger sections of society.

To be sure, this is just a schematic picture: there are many experiments here and there of new strategic paths that may escape those two dead-end situations (the most visible example being that of the Zapatistas and their "Sixth Declaration"). The reflections I present here are aimed at contributing to those explorations.

"Inequality Counts"

The Nation

Every three years since 1989, the Federal Reserve Board has prepared a
Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), which carefully measures the net worth of
all households in the nation — that is, the total assets owned by all
Americans. The survey, the most complete and thorough analysis of individual
wealth, summarizes the financial resources of different groups of the
population, such as bank accounts, stocks, bonds, business assets and real
estate. The most recent report, issued early in April 2006, details the
massive inequality of wealth in the United States between a small number of
households at the top of the income scale and those in the bottom half. This
report and other similar studies emphasize that this wealth inequality is
growing and is becoming a permanent part of our society.

The latest report examined the distribution of wealth in 2004 and makes
detailed comparisons showing the change in wealth among various population
groups. It notes the following:

The total net worth of all Americans in 1989 was $25 trillion (in 2004
dollars). Of that amount, the top 1 percent owned 30 percent, or $7.775
trillion. The bottom half owned 3 percent of the total, or $763 billion.

Fifteen years later, in 2004, the total wealth of all Americans had doubled
to $50.25 trillion. The top 1 percent of the population now owns 33.4
percent of the total, or $16.774 trillion. Their percentage share of the
total has increased by more than 3 percent in fifteen years. At the same
time, the total wealth owned by the bottom 50 percent increased to $1.278
trillion, but its percentage of total wealth declined from 3 percent to 2.5
percent in the same time period.

Thus the wealth of the top 1 percent was ten times the wealth of the bottom
50 percent in 1989. Fifteen years later, the wealth of the top 1 percent was
thirteen times the wealth of the bottom 50 percent.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"The Iceman Cometh"

Canada's New Prime Minister, Stephan Harper, Starts Governing

John Chuckman

Stephan Harper's first budget, while making little economic and social sense, makes a great deal of political sense. Tidbits of spending are distributed to enough disparate groups to aim at luring a majority-making coalition of diverse interests. At the same time, Harper toughly enforces quiet from party members known for blurting out embarrassing, socially-backward views.

His minority government represents little more than an intense public relations effort to achieve majority government, free of existing artificial restraints. The hazards this represents are suggested even under current restraints.

Why do I say the budget makes little economic sense? Every trained economist, including Harper, knows that skewing taxes back to favor consumption - his lowering of the GST (Goods and Services Tax) - is in principle unsound policy.

But if you were determined to re-tilt taxes to favor consumption, a tiny change is not the way to do it, because it is costly and inefficient to re-set the system for a consumer gain of one percent. A huge effort is now needed to re-program or replace countless cash registers and calculators, not to mention the reprinting of forms, receipts, and reports of many kinds.

In economics, often, events that mean one thing for individuals mean something else for the community. Thus, Harper's small change in the GST, which will be almost imperceptible to consumers in their individual purchases, still will manage to deprive the federal treasury of a substantial annual sum.

The measure does keep a campaign promise, but it was never a sensible promise, tailored, as it was, to appeal to people's prejudice towards a tax that features in most purchases, a promise offered without explaining the necessary consequences for federal finances.

Meet the Shock Troops of the Christian Youth
Battle Cry for Theocracy!

Sunsara Taylor

If you've been waiting until the Christian fascist movement started filling stadiums with young people and hyping them up to do battle in "God's army" to get alarmed, wait no longer.

In recent weeks, Battle Cry, a Christian fundamentalist youth movement, has attracted more than 25,000 to mega-rally rock concerts in San Francisco and Detroit and this weekend they plan to fill Wachovia Stadium in Philadelphia.

The Poor Man's Air Force

A History of the Car Bomb (Part 1)
By Mike Davis

Buda's Wagon (1920)

You have shown no pity to us! We will do likewise. We will dynamite you!
-- Anarchist warning (1919)

On a warm September day in 1920, a few months after the arrest of his comrades Sacco and Vanzetti, a vengeful Italian anarchist named Mario Buda parked his horse-drawn wagon near the corner of Wall and Broad Streets, directly across from J. P. Morgan Company. He nonchalantly climbed down and disappeared, unnoticed, into the lunchtime crowd. A few blocks away, a startled postal worker found strange leaflets warning: "Free the Political Prisoners or it will be Sure Death for All of You!" They were signed: "American Anarchist Fighters." The bells of nearby Trinity Church began to toll at noon. When they stopped, the wagon -- packed with dynamite and iron slugs -- exploded in a fireball of shrapnel.

"The horse and wagon were blown to bits," writes Paul Avrich, the celebrated historian of American anarchism who uncovered the true story. "Glass showered down from office windows, and awnings twelve stories above the street burst into flames. People fled in terror as a great cloud of dust enveloped the area. In Morgan's offices, Thomas Joyce of the securities department fell dead on his desk amid a rubble of plaster and walls. Outside scores of bodies littered the streets."

nolympics writes:

"Car Bombs with Wings:
A History of the Car Bomb" (Part 2)
Mike Davis

"The CIA officers that Yousef worked with closely impressed upon him one rule: never use the terms sabotage or assassination when speaking with visiting congressmen." — Steve Coll, Ghost Wars

Gunboat diplomacy had been defeated by car bombs in Lebanon, but the Reagan administration and, above all, CIA Director William Casey were left thirsting for revenge against Hezbollah. "Finally in 1985," according to the Washington Post's Bob Woodward in Veil, his book on Casey's career, "he worked out with the Saudis a plan to use a car bomb to kill [Hezbollah leader] Sheikh Fadlallah who they determined was one of the people behind, not only the Marine barracks, but was involved in the taking of American hostages in Beirut… It was Casey on his own, saying, ‘I‘m going to solve the big problem by essentially getting tougher or as tough as the terrorists in using their weapon — the car bomb.'"

"Even Death if it's Necessary"
The Other Campaign's Challenge to the Rich and Powerful

Hermann Bellinghausen y Emir Olivares

Mexico City, May 1, 2006. — "Even death if it's necessary," is the phrase which Subcomandante Marcos has heard the most in the south and center of the country, expressed by groups most below to repudiate neoliberalism: indigenous, women, campesinos, small business people, workers, children, elders, students, exploited workers. "Even death if it's necessary" was the phrase with which the Zapatista delegate returned, after five years, to the heart of Mexico. Which is the same that he heard in Chiapas before 1994, "when women, men, children and old ones decided to rise up in arms against the supreme government" he recalled, in reference to the Zapatista villages in whose name he arrived here for the commemoration of the "other" May 1st.