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.
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.
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.
Manifesto of the Federación Anarquista Revolucionaria de Venezuela (FARV)
1) The Federación Anarquista Revolucionaria de Venezuela is a collective that adopts the ideology of Libertarian Communism, a system where both capitalism and the bourgeois State that supports it are abolished, where the people as the producers of goods and services have control of what is produced in the form of collective ownership, where such production is distributed according to the principle "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs".
#occupybankitalia
Rome, October 12
Don’t pay their debt off, claim your social credit!
Every in the world people are taking the streets against the financial dictatorship of bankers and global speculators who are using the crisis to dismantle public services, welfare and education, rip people off their rights, put their hands on common goods.
Chinese Activists and Academics Support Occupy Wall Street
China Study Group
From the middle of September, a great “Wall Street Revolution” has broken out in the United States. This street revolution, going by the name of “Occupy Wall Street,” has already expanded to over 70 cities and countries in North America, Europe, and other areas. In their statement on “The Wall Street Revolution,” the American people have sworn that this demand for “a democratic country, not a corporate kingdom” mass democratic revolution must spread to every part of the world, and they will not rest until this goal is met. From the anti-capitalist demonstrations that began after the 2008 financial crisis, and which this year have spread across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and South America, this magnificent global mass democratic movement has finally spread to the center of capitalism’s financial empire–Wall Street.
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.
2011 Anarchist Bookfair
SATURDAY 22nd OCTOBER from 10am to 7pm
Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS.
Below are times and descriptions of all meetings with groups organising them where appropriate. All meetings, discussions, talks are 50 minutes unless stated.
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]
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.
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