Radical media, politics and culture.
October 14, 2011 - 9:46am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Culture

The Indignados of Football and the Arab Spring
Play the Game Conference Day 1
Martin Hardie

When Organizer Jens Sejer Andersen addressed the opening session of the 2012 Play The Game Conference, which is being hosted by the German Sports University in Cologne, he spoke of the fact that today is a holiday in Germany which celebrates the fall of the Berlin Wall. Play The Game he said gave asylum to those who speak the unheard of stories of global sport – the stories that the institutions and the corrupt of the sporting world would rather not hear, the stories they would rather suppress. The image he intentionally created was that the Conference was a place for the indignados of the sporting world to come together, to hear each other, to reflect, and hopefully to inspire action.

October 13, 2011 - 9:16am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Economy

Prospects for Eco-Socialism
Saral Sarkar

I. The Question

In Beijing, one of the listeners of my lecture on Eco-Socialism said after hearing me that he was fully convinced, but, he asked, “When will eco-socialism come?” It was a very difficult question, a short answer to which was not possible. I only answered that I was not an astrologer. It was, however, an interesting question, though not exactly in this form. It is better to ask: what are the prospects for eco-socialism? Or: are there indications today that give us hope that the majority of the people of the world or of some countries would in the near future embrace eco-socialism and transform their capitalist society to an eco-socialist one? It is a question worth reflecting upon because, as the world situation is today, it cannot go on like this for long.

October 12, 2011 - 7:29pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

A Call to the Army of Love and to the Army of Software
Franco "Bifo" Berardi and Geert Lovink

October 2011. The fight opposing financial dictatorship is erupting.

The so-called ‘financial markets’ and their cynical services are destroying the very foundations of social civilization. The legacy of the postwar compromise between the working class and progressive bourgeoisie has all but disappeared. Neoliberal policies are cutting back education and the public health system and is cancelling the right to a salary and a pension. The outcome will be impoverishment of large parts the population, a growing precarity of labor conditions (freelance, short-term contracts, periods of unemployment) and daily humiliation of workers. The yet to be seen effect of the financial crisis will be violence, as people conjure up scapegoats in order to vent their rage. Ethnic cleansing, civil war, obliteration of democracy. This is a system we call financial Nazism: FINAZISM.

October 12, 2011 - 11:38am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Culture

Cognitive Capitalism and the University
Enda Brophy

[Foreword to “The Production of Living Knowledge: The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America” (Gigi Roggero, Temple University Press, 2011), http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/2134_reg.html ]

What is the status of the university in an era when knowledge, communication, culture, and affect have been “put to work” with unprecedented intensity? This is the question that Gigi Roggero’s text confronts, beginning with the premise that it is impossible to grasp the contemporary transformation of the university without considering the equally seismic shifts that are occurring in the condition of labor. The Production of Living Knowledge offers us the first extended analysis of the transformation of the university as read against the hypothesized emergence of cognitive capitalism and the forms of labor sustaining it. As such this book adds itself to a growing body of post-operaista (“post-workerist,” or autonomist) research that has been inquiring into this planetary, knowledge-intensive, and deeply unstable paradigm of capital accumulation over the last decade. Roggero’s critique of the contemporary university is a valuable contribution to the debates surrounding the politics of knowledge production within cognitive capitalism, and this introduction aims to offer the reader some context for his challenging book and the perspective that animates it.

October 9, 2011 - 10:46am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

Specificity: Demands vs. Claims

Yet there is a strong undercurrent in these accounts, including some sympathizers as well as critics, that the movement’s demands are unspecified, unclear, lacking in useful formulation, uncertain of actual and concrete goals.

Is that criticism justified? I think not, with one exception. I think it results from a misinterpretation of the movement’s sources and has political consequences that undermine the movement’s potential for desired radical change.

October 8, 2011 - 3:22pm -- kawonid
Analysis & Polemic
Theory









 
 
 
 

October 6, 2011 - 1:55pm -- stevphen
Analysis & Polemic
Culture

The privatisation of stress
Mark Fisher
KAFCA

The numerous pathologies generated by neoliberalism can only be cured within a revivified public sphere.

Ivor Southwood tells the story of how, at a time when was living in a condition of underemployment - relying on short-term contracts given to him at the last minute by employment agencies - he one morning made the mistake of going to the supermarket. [1] When he returned home he found that an agency had left him a message offering him work for the day. But when he called the agency he was told that the vacancy was already filled - and upbraided for his slackness. As he comments ‘ten minutes is a luxury the day-labourer cannot afford’. Such labourers are expected to be waiting outside the metaphorical factory gates with their boots on, every morning (p72). In such conditions:

daily life becomes precarious. Planning ahead becomes difficult, routines are impossible to establish. Work, of whatever sort, might begin or end anywhere at a moment’s notice, and the burden is always on the worker to create the next opportunity and to surf between roles. The individual must exist in a state of constant readiness. Predictable income, savings, the fixed category of ‘occupation’: all belong to another historical world (p15).

It is hardly surprising that people who live in such conditions - where their hours and pay can always be increased or decreased, and their terms of employment are extremely tenuous - should experience anxiety, depression and hopelessness. And it may at first seem remarkable that so many workers have been persuaded to except such deteriorating conditions as ‘natural’, and to look inward - into their brain chemistry or into their personal history - for the sources of any stress they may be feeling. But in the ideological field that Southwood describes from the inside, this privatisation of stress has become just one more taken-for-granted dimension of a seemingly depoliticised world. ‘Capitalist realism’ is the term I have used to describe this ideological field; and the privatisation of stress has played a crucial role in its emergence. [2]

September 24, 2011 - 6:21pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

Nobody Can Predict the Moment of Revolution
Martyna Starosta

My friend Iva Rad and I just finished a video about the ongoing Wall Street Occupation which started last Saturday, September 17:
NOBODY CAN PREDICT THE MOMENT OF REVOLUTION

We want to share insights into the formation of a new social movement as it is still taking shape in real time. The video was shot during the 5th and 6th day of the occupation.

This idea to take over a public square in New York's financial district was inspired by recent uprisings in Spain, Greece, Egypt, and Tunisia which most of us were following online. Despite of the corporate media's effort to silence the protests, and Yahoo's attempt to censor e-mail communication, the occupation is quickly growing in numbers and spreading to other cities in the US and abroad. Please forward our video to like-minded people via email, facebook, twitter - and make the voices of dissent circulate.

September 24, 2011 - 6:11pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Culture

The Fiction of the Creative Industries
Florian Cramer

[This text was written for the emergency issue of the journal "Open"
by the Dutch Foundation for Art and the Public Space (Stichting Kunst
en Openbare Ruimte / SKOR) SKOR/Open is one of the arts organizations
to lose their funding in the Netherlands. The complete
(Dutch-language) emergency issue of Open can be downloaded from:
http://www.skor.nl/nl/site/item/open-noodnummer-over-de-nieuwe-politiek-...

The German artist Gerhard Merz said in 1991 that "creativity is for
hairdressers".[^1] Professional artists and designers never had a high
opinion of the word "creative" and the people bearing it on their
business cards, from creative directors to creative consultants and
creativity trainers. An exception perhaps was Merz' colleague at the
Dusseldorf Academy of Fine Art, Joseph Beuys. Anticipating much of
today's community art, he embraced the notion of creativity in its
broadest sense and sanctioned any type of socially constructive work
as art. And Merz, while making a sound point against romanticized
artistic subjectivity and the overall stupidity of the word
"creative", was a highbrow art snob dismissing the lower crafts.

September 22, 2011 - 5:42am -- stevphen
Analysis & Polemic
Economy

Two Aspects of Austerity
Bar-Yuchnei
Endnotes

What are we to make of the current round of austerity? Should we believe Keynesians like Paul Krugman, when they argue that capitalists are acting against their own best interests in calling for cuts? Are government finances really under stress, or is it all just a ploy to undermine the last remaining gains won by workers' struggles? Some members of Endnotes throw in their hats...

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