Radical media, politics and culture.

"Ronda de Pensamiento Autónomo, Presente!"

Stevphen Shukaitis

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The first hit of the drum shatters the silence over the sun-baked fields,
ringed by reclaimed factories and several hundred organizers, activists,
artists, families, members of asambleas, unions of the unemployed, and
self-managed collectives. The burst is followed by another, then a
succession of alternating rhythms and as a band of children and the young
at heart enter the field dancing, chanting, and being cheered on by
on-lookers.

"A Rift in Empire?

The Multitudes in the Face of War"

Brian Holmes

The February 15 [2003] antiwar demonstrations proved it: the self-organization of free singularities is possible on a planetary scale. And that was an event, despite all that followed. In a manifesto-text written just after those demonstrations, I used the language of Negri and Hardt to say that the multitudes could create a rift in Empire. In a context where the Aristocracy (the great transnational companies) had been weakened by a string of financial disasters, where the Monarchy (the political and military command of the earth) had fallen apart in serious dissension, I wanted to encourage the democratic action of the Plebe, against the scorn of the American, British, Spanish and Italian leaders. It was a moment that had multiplied the world's political stages, overflowing the traditional mechanisms of representation.

rob eshelman writes:

Amidst the Rubble with Baghdad Squatters
Rob Eshelman

In the Karada neighborhood of Baghdad, Saddam Hussein’s formerly grand, high modern Air Defense Ministry building has been reduced to a bombed-out, crumbling ruin. Evidence of the destruction is everywhere: windows are burnt-out voids, the ground is covered with a layer of rusty metal, broken foam ceiling tiles, and pieces of charred aluminum. Walking through the skeletal remains of the compound’s forward building one emerges on to a courtyard containing a once marble spiraled staircase, brick walls stripped of their tiles, and an Olympic-size swimming pool half full of murky water and debris. Since the fall of Saddam’s government, this once luxurious complex has been transformed into a shantytown of Shia squatters. Approximately 400 families now try to survive here as best they can; around them lies an increasingly dysfunctional mega-city of six million people.

hydrarchist writes

"What is the Meaning of Autonomy Today?


Subjectivation, Social Composition, Refusal of Work"
Bifo


I do not intend to
make an historical recapitulation of the movement called
autonomy, but I want to understand its peculiarity through
an overview of some concepts like "refusal of work",
and "class composition".
Journalists often
use the word "operaismo" to define a political
and philosophical movement which surfaced in Italy during
the 60s. I absolutely dislike this term, because it
reduces the complexity of the social reality to the
mere datum of the centrality of the industrial workers
in the social dynamics of late modernity.

The origin of this philosophical
and political movement can be identified in the works
of Mario Tronti, Romano Alquati, Raniero Panzieri, Toni
Negri, and its central focus can be seen in the emancipation
from the Hegelian concept of subject.

In the place of the historical
subject inherited from the Hegelian legacy, we should
speak of the process of subjectivation. Subjectivation
takes the conceptual place of subject. This conceptual
move is very close to the contemporary modification
of the philosophical landscape that was promoted by
French post-structuralism. Subjectivation in the place
of subject. That means that we should not focus on the
identity, but on the process of becoming. This also
means that the concept of social class is not to be
seen as an ontological concept, but rather as a vectorial
concept.

"Facts Must Be Free Whatever The Cost"

Patti Waldmeir, Financial Times, January 12, 2004

Talk is cheap on thc internet but facts, for the most part, are free. That
is the best thing about life in thc digital age: free music is a sideshow;
free information is what really makes the internet worth having.

"Net Culture:

Culture Between Conformity and Resistance"

Wolfgang Schirmacher

The human individual is a cultural being that with the aid of linguistic symbols creates a world not provided for by nature. We are ‘artificial by nature,’ as the philosophical anthropologist Hellmuth Plessner emphasized, and our cultural achievement consists in technological ingenuity, in the constructs of institutions; it reveals itself ideally in media and art. With culture we create a human sphere and establish realms of private and public encounter. In the last few years a cultural phenomenon has developed with the Internet which seeks its equal in history in its intellectual consequence and incomparable power to generate and foster communal belonging. Not even in their golden ages did the world religions possess such global force of attraction, allowing a world culture to hold sway and rendering regional differences obsolete. In the Internet, cultural imagination meets with the material conditions of many varied societies and transcends these. The long dominant difference between public and private sphere has been suspended, and the Internet has become the universal venue of encounter. The functioning of society at a very basic level is affected here, one which usually escapes our attention. The cultural change effected through the new media cannot be overestimated, but it is yet uncertain where it will lead.

"Gaps in the Net"

Ignacio Ramonet, Le Monde diplomatique

Geneva hosted the first World Summit on the Information Society in December, organised at the request of the United Nations by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). This was an important event: in terms of the range of its remit, the issues and eventual outcomes, this summit will be as significant for communications technology as the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio was for the environment.

Anonymous Comrade writes

"The President from Podunk Drilling Inc."

John Chuckman, January 15, 2004

Thinking people aren't surprised to be told that failed-oilman George Bush qualifies as a moral and intellectual dry hole.


Bush's halting words come from a mouth so long smugly-set it can scarcely form the shapes of vowels, but enormous ignorance also manages to come through. Still, it never hurts to have a first-hand account, expert testimony, to reinforce even our strongest perceptions, and former Bush Cabinet-member Paul O'Neill has now supplied that in spades.

Anonymous Comrade writes

"The Old Left for Another World?
Mumbai Resistance and the World Social Forum"
Saroj Giri


The time has come for a certain Marxism to assert itself and this is possibly the Marxism of the old Leninist tradition. It is good to find that the debate between the two Marxisms has again come to the fore in the Indian context with the Mumbai Resistance taking up issue with World Social Forum. For with the WSF happening in India, all sorts of objectively dubious and opportunist forces and tendencies on the Communist left in India are finally coming out open and clear with their long hidden ideological and political bankruptcy.

"RNC Not Welcome"

The Good Riddance

The Good Riddance [TGR] recently met with one of the founders of RNC [Republican National Convention] Not Welcome to talk about organizing against the upcoming Republican National Convention, which is scheduled to occur in New York City, close to the anniversary of the September 11th attacks. We started off by talking about the Demilitarize the Police rally that occurred at One Police Plaza a few days earlier. The rally focused partially on the use of "less-than-lethal weapons," such as rubber bullets and tear gas to control demonstrators.

RNCNW: I wouldn't be satisfied if, for instance, the cops decided that they weren't going to use less-than-lethal weapons, because in New York, they rely more on systems of control than they do on brute force.

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