Radical media, politics and culture.
January 13, 2004 - 10:03am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Work

Anonymous Fls
 writes here is a long article in three parts, the first below, the Part II and Part III. All footnotes are at the end of the final segment.

"Precarias: First Stutterings of Precarias a la Deriva"


Precarias a la Deriva


Trabajo flexible ¿Es que somos invisibles?

Trabajo inmaterial ¡Ay que estrés mental!

Trabajo de jornalera ¡Eso es la repera!


(Little song by Precarias a la Deriva in the General Strike of 20 June 2002)

THE PICKET-SURVEY

"Precarias a la deriva" (Precarious women workers adrift) is a collective project of investigation and action. The concerns of the participants in this open project converged the 20th of June 2002, the day of the general strike called by the major unions in Spain. Some of us had already initiated a trajectory of reflection and intervention in questions of the transformations of labor (in groups such as ‘ZeroWork’ and Sex, Lies and Precariousness, or individually), others wished to begin to think through these themes. In the days before the strike we came together to brainstorm an intervention which would reflect our times, aware that the labor strike, as the culminating expression of a process of struggle, was unsatisfactory for us for three reasons: (1) for not taking up –and this is no novelty- the experience and the unjust division of domestic work and care, almost entirely done by women in the ‘non-productive’ sphere, (2) for the marginalization to which both the forms of action and the proposals of the strike condemn those in types of work –ever more common- which are generally lumped together as ‘precarious’[1] and (3) for not taking into consideration precarious, flexible, invisible or undervalued work, specifically that of women and/or migrants (sexual, domestic, assistance, etc.). As a friend recently pointed out in the context of the more recent ‘political’ strike against the war (April 10, 2003), “How do we invent new forms of striking when production fragments and dislocates itself, when it is organized in such a way that to stop working for a few hours (or even 24) does not necessarily effect the production process, and when our contract situation is so fragile that striking today means risking the possibility of working tomorrow?”

January 9, 2004 - 9:59am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
The State

Part I of a two part essay. Find Part II here.

"Oil Wars and World Orders New and Old"

Aufheben

Introduction

The American-led interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s were
presented as 'humanitarian wars'. With the widespread, if not always universal,
support of the 'international (bourgeois) community', the liberal apologists for
such wars were able to claim that they were being waged to uphold the universal
norms of the 'civilised world' that now overrode the old principles of national
sovereignty. The conflicting material interests underlying these military
adventures were far from apparent.

January 7, 2004 - 9:47am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"Anarchism, or The Revolutionary Movement
of The Twenty-First Century"

David Graeber and Andrej Grubacic

It is becoming increasingly clear that the age of revolutions is not over. It's becoming equally clear that the global revolutionary movement in the 21st century will be one that traces its origins less to the tradition of Marxism, or even of socialism narrowly defined, but of anarchism.

January 7, 2004 - 7:56am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Work

Comrade Fls writes

Michael Hardt: Affective Labor

Focus on the production of affects in our labor and our social practices has often served as a useful ground for anticapitalist projects, in the context of discourses for instance on desire or on use-value. Affective labor is itself and directly the constitution of communities and collective subjectivities. The productive circuit of affect and value has thus seemed in many respects as an autonomous circuit for the constitutions of subjectivity, alternative to the processes of capitalist valorization. Theoretical frameworks that have brought together Marx and Freud have conceived of affective labor using terms such as desiring production and more significantly numerous feminist investigations analyzing the potentials within what has been designated traditionally as women's work have grasped affective labor with terms such as kin work and caring labor. Each of these analyses reveal the processes whereby our laboring practices produce collective subjectivities, produce sociality, and ultimately produce society itself.

January 7, 2004 - 4:16am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Anonymous Comrade writes:

The Call of the Void
Is there anything common between the US-British invasion of Iraq, the American rule over Afghan disorder, the implosion of Argentina in 2001-2002, a mass resurging protest that claims to be anti-capitalist, and the downfall of what was yesterday heralded as the coming of a new technological era ? (1)

January 5, 2004 - 10:32am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

"The State of Emergency"

Giorgio Agamben

In his Political Theology (1922), Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) established the essential proximity between the state of emergency and sovereignty. But although his famous definition of the sovereign as "the one who can proclaim a state of emergency" has been commented on many times, we still lack a genuine theory of the state of emergency within public law. For legal theorists as well as legal historians it seems as if the problem would be more of a factual question than an authentic legal question.

January 5, 2004 - 8:24am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
The State

hydrarchist writes "Here is Part II. Go back to Part I

The third Gulf War (2003) and the New World Order of Bush Jnr.

The immediate fundamental problem facing the oil industry in the 1980s and
1990s was that the world's capacity to produce oil was growing faster than the
world's consumption of oil. Whereas the 1970s had been an era of oil shortage
the following decades were to be an era of an oil glut. But by the mid-1990s the
more strategic thinkers of the bourgeoisie, particularly those within the oil
industry, were becoming concerned that in the not too distant future the world
could once again find itself facing an acute oil shortage and find itself
increasingly dependent on anti-western governments in the Gulf.

January 5, 2004 - 7:52am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Comrade Fls writes:

Antonio Negri, Alex Callinicos: Multitude or Working Class?

We all agree to the fact that we want to fight capital and renew the world. But I think this ain’t conceivable as a poetical process. Because the name »multitude« is not a poetical notion, but a class concept. When I talk about multitude as a class concept, I talk about the fact that workers today work in the same and in different ways compared to those they worked some centuries ago. The working class and its class composition are quite different in the distinct periods that followed each other since the beginning of the industrial age.

January 4, 2004 - 4:56pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"Creativity Out of Chaos: Anarchy and Organizing"

Jerzy Kociatkiewicz and Monika Kostera


Creativity versus managerialism

Creativity is said to be highly desired in post-modern and post-industrial organizations (for a presentation of the new creative organizing, see e.g. Letiche, 1998). It ensures the development of ideas and people, and is crucial for innovatinevess, knowledge and learning, perhaps the most preeminent traits of postmodern organizing (Hatch, 1997). Ola Alexandersson and Per Trossmark (1997) write about creativity and anarchy as opposed to managerialism.

If creativity is understood as anarchy, then the management ideal means perhaps an ordering antithesis. They are depicted as two different forms of knowledge (cf. Björkegren, 1993). Some do not use the word anarchy to signify the spontaneous and unplanned creative expression. Instead, creativity is connected with freedom. To create what one feels for, to express one"s ideas--that is what creativity is about (p. 124).

January 4, 2004 - 4:34am -- nolympics
Analysis & Polemic
All Topics

polo writes:

Small Victories and Long Struggles.
Not the best of times, nor the worst of times : a subdued 10th anniversary celebration in Zapatista heartlands.

By Ramor Ryan

Oventic, Chiapas, 31st December 2003

>On the eve of the 10th Anniversary of the Zapatista Uprising, Jan 1 1994, the indigenous rebels had an unexpected surprise for the thousands of supporters who gathered here in Chiapas to pay homage – they did nothing.
No spectacular celebration, no mass march upon San Cristobal, no bold new political initiatives, and certainly no new armed uprising. Instead there were a series of subdued celebrations in each of the 5 Zapatista Caracole centers, attended modestly by rank and file and somewhat more generously by national and international supporters.

Here in the Zapatista highlands headquarters of Oventic, some 800 people danced the night away cloaked in mud and fog. I recalled another New Years Eve here in this very arena some years ago and that night there were several thousand rebels out in force. Tonight’s demure festivities (midnight passes without much ado), the lackluster message read out by an unidentified masked rebel and the empty space enveloping the gathering, prompts some journalists present to ask - Where have the Zapatistas gone?

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