Radical media, politics and culture.

"Immaterial Civil War

Prototypes of Conflict within Cognitive Capitalism"

Matteo Pasquinelli

We are implicit, here, all of us, in a vast
physical construct of artificially linked
nervous systems. Invisible. We cannot touch it.
— William Gibson, "In the visegrips of Dr. Satan"

Conflict is not a commodity. On the contrary,
commodity is above all conflict.
— guerrigliamarketing.it

1. A revival of the Creative Industries

In early 2006 the term Creative Industries (CI) pops up in the
mailboxes and mailing lists of many cultural workers, artists,
activists and researchers across Europe, as well as in the calls for
seminars and events. An old question spins back: curiously, for the
first time, a term is picked up from institutional jargon and brought
unchanged into alt culture, used so far to debate other keywords
(that may deserve an acronym as well!) and other post-structures like
network culture (NC), knowledge economy (KE), immaterial labour (IL),
general intellect (GI) and of course Free Software (FS), Creative
Commons (CC) etc. The original 1998 definition adopted by the
Creative Industries Task Force set up by Tony Blair stated: "Those
industries that have their origin in individual creativity, skill and
talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through
the generation and exploitation of intellectual property".1 As you
can see, social creativity remains largely left out of that
definition: after many years Tony Blair is still stealing your ideas.
Let's try to do another backstory.

Peter Waterman writes:


The International Union Merger of November 2006:
Top-Down, Eurocentric and…Invisible?
Peter Waterman


At a conference in Vienna, early November, 2006, there will take place the unification of most of the major international and of certain national trade unions in a new organisation. Unlike previous such launchings, however, this is occurring without any general global upsurge of union protest or expressions of labour self-confidence, and without public knowledge. Although the parties involved talk about the creation of a new union international, the word ‘merger’ seems rather more appropriate. This for two reasons.

Erdogan_Mayayo writes:


"The Saturated Generic Identity of the Working Class"

An Interview with Alain Badiou

[Alain Badiou gave this interview on the occasion of a conference titled "Is a History of the Cultural Revolution Possible?" The conference was held at the University of Washington in February, 2006. Most of the following questions were prepared by Nicolas Veroli, who could not be present. Diana George conducted the interview.]

Q: I'd like to ask you about your political and intellectual trajectory from the mid 60s until today. How have your views about revolutionary politics, Marxism, and Maoism changed since then?

Badiou: During the first years of my political activity, there were two fundamental events. The first was the fight against the colonial war in Algeria at the end of the 50s and the beginning of the 60s. I learned during this fight that political conviction is not a question of numbers, of majority. Because at the beginning of the Algerian war, we were really very few against the war. It was a lesson for me; you have to do something when you think it's a necessity, when it's right, without caring about the numbers.

The second event was May 68. During May 68, I learned that we have to organize direct relations between intellectuals and workers. We cannot do that only by the mediation of parties, associations, and so on. We have to directly experience the relation with the political. My interest in Maoism and the Cultural Revolution during the end of 60s and the beginning of the 70s, was this: a political conviction that organizes something like direct relations between intellectuals and workers.

I'll recapitulate, if you like. There were two great lessons: It's my conviction today that political action has to be a process which is a process of principles, convictions, and not of a majority. So there is a practical dimension. And secondly, there is the necessity of direct relations between intellectuals and workers.

Coveting the Holocaust

Chris Hedges

From TruthDig


I sent my New York University journalism students out to write stories based on any one of the themes in the Ten Commandments. A woman of Armenian descent came back with an article about how Armenians she had interviewed were covetous of the Jewish Holocaust. The idea that one people who suffered near decimation could be covetous of another that also suffered near decimation was, to say the least, different. And when the French lower house of parliament approved a bill earlier this month making it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide I began to wonder what it was she, and those she had interviewed, actually coveted.

She was not writing about the Holocaust itself—no one covets the suffering of another—but how it has become a potent political and ideological weapon in the hands of the Israeli government and many in the American Jewish community. While Armenians are still fighting to have the genocide of some 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks accepted as historical fact, many Jews have found in the Nazi Holocaust a useful instrument to deflect criticism of Israel and the dubious actions of the pro-Israeli lobby as well as many Jewish groups in the United States.

Anonymous Comrade writes:


"Decline of the American Empire"

John Chuckman

The rise now of China, Japan, Europe, and others – India, Korea, and to some extent Russia and Brazil – means the United States must be relatively diminished on the world stage, much as an only child whose mother just gave birth to quintuplets.


The United States is loosing its capacity as supplier of many useful things to the world. This role is being seized by China and others. The American working class, which briefly achieved the status of world's working-class aristocracy after World War II — industrial workers who enjoyed homes, cars, long vacations, and even boats — has seen real wages declining for many years. It works against rising competitors who can now deliver the benefits of their much lower costs to the world owing to the phenomenon of globalization. American manufacturing jobs are moving to the lower-cost places, replaced at home if at all by relatively low-wage service jobs.

"Toward a Post-Post-Critical Future"

Trebor Scholz, Institute for Distributed Creativity

How can we overcome global social problems if we see them as secondary
in relation to technology? How can we divorce political and
technological discourses? The technological future cannot be discussed
in terms of de-contextualized (networked) objects because they are
everything but autonomous players.

It is equally unhelpful to create a dichotomy between two camps: those
with conformist views of technology and others who see technology as a
monster that swallows us. Marcuse as well as Foucault analyze society as
a life-draining machinery fueled by dominated people. The question about
technology is not whether "to take it or leave it." While the assembly
line was the long arm of management in 1913, today machines are powered
by networked technological systems. In 1941 the Ford Motor Company
experienced its first general strike at the River Rouge Plant and a
survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project predicts a movement
of "tech refuseniks" who live completely off the network and "will
commit acts of violence and terror against technology-inspired change"
in 2020. [1]


We could link such pessimism back to the late 1970s when
Langdon Winner and Jacques Ellul ask how technology has improved human
dignity, well-being, and freedom. Marx, who is otherwise sometimes
perceived as a technological determinist, writes in Manuscripts that
"The more the worker expends himself in the work the more powerful
becomes the world of objects which he creates in face of himself, the
poorer he becomes in his inner life, and the less he belongs to
himself." (Marx, p 122)

"Economies of Affectivity"

Juan Martín Prada

Life and Biopolitics

It is no longer an exaggeration to claim that we are in the "biological
century", judging by the intense development and the dimension of the
achievements attained in recent years in some of the life sciences, such as
Genomics and Biotechnology. However, let us not forget that the increasingly
more efficient knowledge of the biological processes or genetic
determinations of life and its functional mechanisms is only a small part of
biopolitical action, whose real capacity for regulation is much more
extensive, spanning all of the vital processes that ultimately make up the
collective production of subjectivity. Thus, the capacity to improve or
transform bodies or the biological conditions of a life are no longer
prevalent among the keys of biopolitics but rather, more than anything else,
the production and reproduction of ways of living.


Therefore, the permanent questioning of the limits of what is natural and of
human ethics as regards genetic manipulation or the fact that the scientific
industries aimed at these areas of work should be the most probable
environment for the future capitalism revolutions[1] to take place, are just
a minimum number of problems within the extremely complex series of
biopolitical practices with which any exercise of power is integrated with
the logics of vitality (and from which it would be non-differentiable).

Dmytri Kleiner writes:

"WOS4: The Creative Anti-Commons and the Poverty of Networks"
Dmytri Kleiner

The Wizard of OS conference is currently underway in Berlin, as is to be expected, the fourth edition of this biannual gathering of proponents of free software, free culture and alternative economics has brought together a fascinating group of presenters and participants.

The dominant themes of this year's conference are centred around the work of Lawrence Lessig and his many collaborators in the Creative Commons family of resources and projects, and Yochai Benkler's ideas relating to "commons-based peer-production" or "Social Production" as expressed in his book "The Wealth of Networks."

In his key-note address Lessig presented a history of culture framed in the idea of a "Read-Write" culture, a culture of free sharing and collaborative authorship, having been the norm for the majority of history and having been, over the course of the last century, thwarted and exterminated by Intellectual Property legislation and converted to "Read-Only" culture dominated by a regime of Producer-Control.

Kim Müller writes

Proletarian Management:
Informal Workplace Organization
Kim Müller

The emancipation of the working class can not only be conquered by the working class themselves but the emancipating practices of the working class are of its own making too. So the question about workers autonomy isn’t primarily a political question but a question about organization, and this article deals with concrete and actual workers autonomy and how it exist in Sweden today in the 21st century.

Our main thesis is that the workplace struggles are not first and foremost happening through the mediation of the unions, but through the informal organization that often tend to take place among fellow workers. However, this organization is not something that creates itself; it has to be produced, and can therefore be developed and extended. Our basic assumption has always been that the potentiality of radical anti-capitalist workers’ struggle exist where it is actually taking place. Today this struggle is not carried out under the regime of the unions, but through informal workplace organization, and it is the independent, informal, and immediate character of this struggle that makes it truly radical and anti-capitalist.

Obituary for Pierre Vidal-Naquet

Maurice Ulrich, >l'Humanité

Original French title: "Pierre Vidal-Naquet n’est plus,"
by Maurice Ulrich, translated by Patrick Bolland

An internationally recognised historian, a rigorous and committed intellectual, Pierre Vidal-Naquet was actively engaged in all the struggles for justice in his incessant and courageous search for “fragments of truth”. He died last week [July 29, 2006] at the age of 76.


“It is human beings, real people, who are killed by torture” he told Jean-Paul Montferran in an interview published in l’Humanité on 3 November 2000.

Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who fell victim to a cerebral hemorrhage last Monday passed away on Friday night. He had decribed himself as “an activist historian, determined to participate in society as a full citizen”. He directed his erudite passion to Ancient Greece where the very idea of democracy was born. He also led the most principled struggles of our own times for justice and truth.

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