Radical media, politics and culture.

No Tolls on The Internet

Lawrence Lessig and Robert W. McChesney

Congress is about to cast a historic vote on the future of the Internet.
It will decide whether the Internet remains a free and open technology
fostering innovation, economic growth and democratic communication, or
instead becomes the property of cable and phone companies that can put
toll booths at every on-ramp and exit on the information superhighway.


At the center of the debate is the most important public policy you've
probably never heard of: "network neutrality." Net neutrality means
simply that all like Internet content must be treated alike and move at
the same speed over the network. The owners of the Internet's wires
cannot discriminate. This is the simple but brilliant "end-to-end"
design of the Internet that has made it such a powerful force for
economic and social good: All of the intelligence and control is held by
producers and users, not the networks that connect them.

Redwood Mary writes:

"A New Anthem for America?"
Redwood Mary

I was pondering this week how to celebrate the 4th of July, the birth of our country. It was a grand experiment — an act that shook the world when a group of men, all immigrants, convened to draft a declaration of independence for freedom and liberty — a declaration that sparked the War for Independence from British rule. War and freedom so interlinked. How can that be I asked myself?

Recently, within the last six months I was able to talk to a dear friend of my father as he was struggling in his last days with cancer. He and my dad were both immigrant refugees. They were like brothers to each other. Coming from war torn Europe and liberated by the British Army they later found themselves in a DP (Displaced Persons) Camp and grateful to be under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army. They landed on these shores in the 1950's — in NY Harbor — greeted by the Statue of Liberty. They were on fire with dreams of a future in a land of the free. My Dad's best friend said to me before he died, “You know that your father and I went through war and it was horrible and war solves nothing and war has to stop. We have to stop all war. and Mr. Bush was wrong for starting this war. This war was not right.”

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"EuroMayDay's Social Contradictions"
Helsinki Network

The evening before Mayday Helsinki saw EuroMayDay event as a part of Europe-wide day of action.


The event was a breakthrough in Finland. It didn't only successfully attack the proposals to weaken social and labour rights — presented by the Confederation of Finnish Industries (EK) — but it also took initiative to introduce our demand for basic income. Now our demands are discussed from editorials to cafeterias.

First of all our demand for basic income is about less control on people's lives and a more just distribution of income. Basic income would be a remuneration for production outside wage labour and at the same time it would enhance the bargaining position of flexworkers.
One of the conflicts of current economy is that time spent working gets longer while share of GDP spent on wages is getting smaller.

Anonymous Comrade writes:


"The Circulation of the Common"

Nick Dyer-Witheford


Introduction


This paper makes theoretical propositions to assist conceive an emergent communism, a °coming community" that is neither capitalist, socialist nor anarchic, and the place within it of °immaterial labor." [1] Its argument, in brief, is as follows.

Marx deemed the cellular form of capitalism to be the commodity, a good produced for exchange between private owners. His model of the circulation of capital traced the metamorphosis of the commodity into money, which commands the acquisition of further resources to be transformed into more commodities. The theorists of autonomist Marxism demonstrated how this circulation of capital is also a circulation of struggles, meeting resistances at every point.

But although this concept proved important for understanding the multiplicity of contemporary anti-capital, it says very little about the kind of society towards which these struggles move, a point on which the autonomist tradition has mainly been mute. Today, new theorizations about multitude and biopolitics should to reconsider this silence.


I suggest that the cellular form of communism is the common, a good produced to be shared in association. The circuit of the common traces how shared resources generate forms of social cooperation — associations — that coordinate the conversion of further resources into expanded commons. On the basis of the circuit of capital, Marx identified different kinds of capital — mercantile, industrial and financial — unfolding at different historical moments yet together contributing to an overall societal subsumption. By analogy, we should recognise differing moments in the circulation of the common. These include terrestrial commons (the customary sharing of natural resources in traditional societies); planner commons (for example, command socialism and the liberal democratic welfare state); and networked commons (the free associations open source software, peer-to-peer networks, grid computing and the numerous other socializations of technoscience). Capital today operates as a systemic unity of mercantile, industrial and financial moments, but the commanding point in its contemporary, neoliberal, phase is financial capital.

A twenty-first century communism can, again by analogy, be envisioned as a complex unity of terrestrial, state and networked commons, but the strategic and enabling point in this ensemble is the networked commons. These must however, also be seen in their dependency on, and even potential contradiction, with the other commons sectors. The concept of a complex, composite communism based on the circulation between multiple but commons forms is opens possibilities for new combinations of convivial custom, planetary planning and autonomous association. What follows expand on these cryptic observations.

Anonymous Comrade writes:


"The Circulation of the Common"

Nick Dyer-Witheford


Introduction


This paper makes theoretical propositions to assist conceive an emergent communism, a °coming community" that is neither capitalist, socialist nor anarchic, and the place within it of °immaterial labor." [1] Its argument, in brief, is as follows.

Marx deemed the cellular form of capitalism to be the commodity, a good produced for exchange between private owners. His model of the circulation of capital traced the metamorphosis of the commodity into money, which commands the acquisition of further resources to be transformed into more commodities. The theorists of autonomist Marxism demonstrated how this circulation of capital is also a circulation of struggles, meeting resistances at every point.

But although this concept proved important for understanding the multiplicity of contemporary anti-capital, it says very little about the kind of society towards which these struggles move, a point on which the autonomist tradition has mainly been mute. Today, new theorizations about multitude and biopolitics should to reconsider this silence.


I suggest that the cellular form of communism is the common, a good produced to be shared in association. The circuit of the common traces how shared resources generate forms of social cooperation — associations — that coordinate the conversion of further resources into expanded commons. On the basis of the circuit of capital, Marx identified different kinds of capital — mercantile, industrial and financial — unfolding at different historical moments yet together contributing to an overall societal subsumption. By analogy, we should recognise differing moments in the circulation of the common. These include terrestrial commons (the customary sharing of natural resources in traditional societies); planner commons (for example, command socialism and the liberal democratic welfare state); and networked commons (the free associations open source software, peer-to-peer networks, grid computing and the numerous other socializations of technoscience). Capital today operates as a systemic unity of mercantile, industrial and financial moments, but the commanding point in its contemporary, neoliberal, phase is financial capital.

A twenty-first century communism can, again by analogy, be envisioned as a complex unity of terrestrial, state and networked commons, but the strategic and enabling point in this ensemble is the networked commons. These must however, also be seen in their dependency on, and even potential contradiction, with the other commons sectors. The concept of a complex, composite communism based on the circulation between multiple but commons forms is opens possibilities for new combinations of convivial custom, planetary planning and autonomous association. What follows expand on these cryptic observations.

Orwell & the 70th Anniversary of the Spanish Civil War

Markin, IndyBay

Reviewing

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1952


I have been interested, as a pro-Republican partisan, in the Spanish Civil War since I was a teenager. Underlying my interests has always been a nagging question of how that struggle could have been won by the working class. The Spanish proletariat certainly was capable of both heroic action and the ability to create organizations that reflected its own class interests i.e. the worker militias and factory committees.

Demoradical vs Demoliberal Regulation

By Alex Foti


Never a decline of the west has been more apparent. The US and its
European major ally, the UK, supported by minor bushist partners such
as Berlusconi's Italy and Aznar's Spain, have been inflicting
barbarism and spreading ethnic strife in Irak and elsewhere. The
continuous, structural human rights violations inflicted by the US and
its allies, from kidnappings and secret prisons in Europe, down to
Guantanamo, Abu Grahib and Haditha, are a crying shame for all
enlightened westerners: progressives have failed at stopping the
totalitarian forces – namely the salafi brand of sunni fundamentalism,
the neoliberal interpretation of evangelical protestantism, and shia
integralism supported by the islamic republic of Iran – that are
plunging the world in a clash of civilizations, where reactionary and
defensive identities prevail over transnational movements and global
issues of environmental balance and social justice.

Of course, the early XXI-century twilight of American neoliberal
hegemony and its European ramifications, as framed by the monetarist
and pro-corporate philosophy of the EU single currency and market, is
not without geopolitical consequences. On one side, Indian and
Bolivarian America have possibly dealt a lethal blow to the Monroe
Doctrine of unlimited US power on the Southern Hemisphere. On the
other side, China and India are rising giants beating the westerners
at their own game of globalization. Liberalziation of world markets
was set in motion in 1971-1973, when the end of international
Keynesism was officially proclaimed, and incipient energy crises and
financial deregulations started undermining Fordism and the
progressive forces that had developed under its wings. The 1980s and
1990s opened the gates to a new, more turbulent world, the world of
neoliberal regulation. This was an explicit conservative
counteroffensive against the unintended social (and anti-imperialist)
effects of postkeynesian regulation, reasserting the right to manage
and the economic privileges of financial elites in the new digital,
networked, flexible, postindustrial economy. The world of high
profits, high rents and low wages, of massive labor market and
financial deregulations, of large-scale privatization of public
assets, outsourcing and offshoring of manufacturing and services, and
widespread tightening of social spending. My contention is that
neoliberal regulation is now over: the 1999-2003 international cycle
of struggle, 9/11 and 7-7, the bushist rise to power and the invasions
of Afghanistan and Irak, repeated financial instability and
environmental disaster, have all undermined the political bases of the
Washington Consensus that constituted the essence of western policy
and geopolitical projection in the 1980s and 1990s. Globalization is
yielding to global regionalism, neoliberal multiculturalism is leaving
the place to bushist occidentalism, free trade is becoming managed
protectionism, while the professed multilateral internationalism of
the Clinton era has turned into a one-sided and naked (but failed)
attempt to unrivalled world hegemomy.

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."

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