Radical media, politics and culture.

A nice piece of interactive visual critique on work may be found here:

More-Inc

More-Inc. is an artistic simulation of lifestyle in a capitalist
culture. The project is dedicated to employee number 12995 and to his
frustrations and angst. Wesley Thomas Meyer analyses, with irony, the human being's
role in a world dominated by corporations and the New Economy. The user
is invited to participate in the daily routine of a faceless employee
and to interact with the endless meetings, paper pushing, form filing,
homogeneity, subversion, and anxiety that are typical in the corporate
work world. Later, the user's interaction travels beyond the job to
employee 12995's domestic life and dreamy subconscious leading to an
experiential crescendo realized in breakdown, dissimulation, and
resurrection.

Lula and the Markets

Gwynne Dyer

George Soros, the world's leading currency speculator, told a
Brazilian newspaper in August that the 170 million Brazilians simply
wouldn't be allowed to have Labour Party leader Luiz Inacio 'Lula' da
Silva as their president. The higher his standing rose in the opinion
polls, the fiercer would be the speculative attacks on Brazil's currency,
the real. If he actually won the presidency, the markets' reaction would
be so negative that the country would have to declare a moratorium on its
huge $260 billion foreign debt.

"Giving is Receiving"

Richard Barbrook

One of the most striking features of the Net is the ubiquity of its hi-tech
version of the gift economy. When you go on-line, most information is
available for free. Other users are happy to share music, movies and
software with you. People spend hours building websites which they don't
charge you for visiting. You are invited to join listservers which will
fill your in-box with e-mails every day. Compared to the media developed
during the past 200 years, what makes the new media into something new is
the vitality of these non-commercial activities. Information is for sharing
not for selling. Knowledge is a gift not a commodity. The Net is a strange
and novel form of mass communications.

hydrarchist writes

"Marcel Mauss: Give It Away"

David Graeber


Have
you noticed how there aren't any new French intellectuals any more? There
was a veritable flood in the late '70s and early '80s: Derrida, Foucault,
Baudrillard, Kristeva, Lyotard, de Certeau ... but there has been almost
no one since. Trendy academics and intellectual hipsters have been forced
to endlessly recycle theories now 20 or 30 years old, or turn to countries
like Italy or even Slovenia for dazzling meta-theory.

hydrarchist writes:


"Fencing Off Ideas: Enclosure and the
Disappearance of the Public Domain"

James Boyle




The law locks up the man or woman

Who steals the goose from off the common

But leaves the greater villain loose

Who steals the common from off the goose.


The law demands that we atone

When we take things we do not own

But leaves the lords and ladies fine

Who take things that are yours and mine.


The poor and wretched don't escape

If they conspire the law to break;

This must be so but they endure

Those who conspire to make the law.


The law locks up the man or woman

Who steals the goose from off the common

And geese will still a common lack

Till they go and steal it back.


This poem is one of the pithiest condemnations of the English enclosure
movement, the process of fencing off
common land and turning it into private
property. (Although we refer to it as 'the
enclosure movement', it was actually a
series of enclosures that started in the
fifteenth century and went on, with differing means, ends, and varieties of state
involvement, until the nineteenth.) The
poem manages in a few lines to criticize
double standards, expose the artificial
and controversial nature of property
rights, and take a slap at the legitimacy
of state power. And it does it all with
humor, without jargon, and in rhyming
couplets.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

This paper written by Chris Carrico will be presented Oct. 23 at the Inter-Guianas Conference, University of Guyana, Turkeyen, Co-operative Republic of Guyana.

Guyana and the Amerindian Question

Christopher R. Carrico

Introduction

In current legal theory regarding indigenous peoples, one of the most commonly cited differences between indigenous societies and modern states is their divergent notions of property. Since anthropology's formation as a science in the nineteenth century, anthropologists have been aware that indigenous peoples have a communal mode of property, while capitalist states are founded on the idea of individual private property. This idea from anthropology contributed in a fundamental way to the thinking of social theorist Karl Marx. In his critiques of the assumptions of political economy he often showed how Adam Smith and the entire classical tradition naturalized the social conditions of capitalist society and projected its image backwards onto human origins. Classical political economy assumed that human beings in their original state were self-maximizing individual owners of property, an observation that was not borne out by ethnographic fact, and was not the state of much of the world prior to the age of European colonialism.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

Here's is the complete poem "Somebody Blew Up America" by Amiri Baraka, which is widely reported as the cause which prompted New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevy to ask for the immediate resignation of the state's "poet laureate."

Taking It To London's Streets

The New Anti-War Movement

Tariq Ali, Counterpunch, September 30, 2002

London: Saturday 28th September. It was a beautiful clear blue sky. No mists but a great deal of mellow fruitfulness. The Stop the War Coalition--- a united front that includes socialists of most stripes, liberals and radicals, pacifists and the moderate Muslim groups----had expected 200,000 people, but the mood in Britain was uneasy and large numbers of people, many of them conservative or even apolitical, had decided to swell the march.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

If anyone needs any further confirmation how far down a certain path we have come, ask them to look here:

http://www.adtdl.army.mil/cgi-bin/atdl.dll/fm/3-19.40/toc.htm

hydrarchist writes:

"The End of Work or the Renaissance of Slavery?

A Critique of Rifkin and Negri"


Constantine George Caffentzis

Introduction

The last few years in the U.S. has seen a return of a discussion of work that
is reminiscent of the mid-1970s, but with a number of twists. In the earlier period, books like Where Have All
the Robots Gone?
(Sheppard 1972), False Promises (Aronowitz 1972)and Work in America (Special
Task Force 1973), and phrases like "blue collar blues," "zerowork" and "the refusal of
work" revealed a crisis of the assembly line worker which expressed itself most dramatically in wildcat strikes
in U.S. auto factories in 1973 and 1974 (Linebaugh and Ramirez 1992). These strikes were aimed at negating the
correlation between wages and productivity that had been the basis of the "deal" auto capital struck
with the auto unions in the 1940s. As Linebaugh and Ramirez wrote of the Dodge Truck plant wildcat involving 6000
workers in Warren, Michigan between June 10-14, 1974:


Demands were not formulated until the third day of
the strike. They asked for "everything." One worker said, "I just don't want to work." The
separation between income and productivity, enforced by the struggle, could not have been clearer (Linebaugh and
Ramirez 1992: 160).

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