Sunday -- 07.31.11 -- For General Assemblies in Every Part of the World
16 Beaver - New York
Attempt 1 : (to summarize this event into one line)
Anti-austerity/pro-democracy groups and individuals meeting at 16Beaver
Attempt 2 : A day devoted to exploring the inter-relations of recent
global/local struggles through first-hand accounts
Attempt 3 : A day dedicated to create short-circuits in our imaginaries
Attempt 4 : (breaking the one line rule)
This Sunday is a special day at 16 Beaver, as we will be attempting to bring together reports on various struggles from North Africa, Spain and Greece, post-Fukushima Japan, and trying to connect them to contemporary struggles right here in New York and the US. The event comes together out of the interest of various individuals and groups here in New York to build upon some of these developments globally, learn from them, and put them into play here.
Anarchist, Liberal and Authoritarian Enlightenments: Notes From the Arab Spring
Mohammed A. Bamyeh
The Arab spring, as far as we can see, appears to require no guardian intellectual authority, no political leadership, no organized parties. In fact even after revolutionary success, those elements still fail to materialize: there is no party of the revolution anywhere, no leader emerges to embody its historical spirit, and intellectuals still ponder the meaning of revolutions that most of them endorsed but none expected. Furthermore, these apparent absences—political, organizational, intellectual--were not due to any unfamiliarity with parties, leaders, ideologues or ideologies of revolt, for all of those have been tried before.
A revolution is an experiment in enlightenment. Experiments, as we know, may succeed, fail, or suggest revisions in their method, sometimes a reconsideration of what they are supposed to discover. 19th century revolutionary thought in Europe is often traced to the Enlightenment critique of the arbitrariness of absolute power, and to the Enlightenment's elaboration of the creative capacity of human will, reason, and freedom. Since these philosophical propositions were social in their implications, they could only be verified (or amended, or abandoned) only with the aid of grand experiments in the political, cultural and economic realms.
Preliminary Balance Sheet of the 13-Days Sit-Down Strike at Maruti Suzuki Factory in Manesar/Gurgaon, India
Guragon Workers News
From 4th to 17th of June around 2,000 young workers engaged in a wildcat sit-down strike at Maruti Suzuki factory in Manesar [1]. With the following text we hope to contribute to the necessary debate about this important strike and invite friends and comrades, particularly in Delhi area, to share their experiences and views. Before we go into chronological details of the strike we try to provide a rough political summary.
It was an important strike in local terms. The two Maruti assembly plants coordinate hundreds of local supplying factories [2], the Manesar plant dominates a new industrial area of major importance. There has been silence at Maruti Suzuki for more than a decade: the workers in Gurgaon plant have been silenced by the lock-out in 2000/01 [3], and they did not join the strike in June. The Manesar plant was opened in 2006/07, but the young and casualised work-force had not found their voice as yet.
Austerity is Prison
Anticut 3?
Now, finally, the money is gone. The world has run out of future, used it up, wasted it on the grotesque fantasies of the rich, on technologies of death and alienation, on dead cities. Everywhere the same refrain, the same banners and headlines: there is nothing left for you. From the US to Greece, from Chile to Spain, whatever human face the State might have had: gone. The State is no longer a provider of education or care, jobs or housing. It is just a police force, a prison system, a bureaucracy with guns. . .
Sometimes, maybe, we get treated to some political theater: faked expressions of concern or outrage from the puffy, grimacing faces. But the result is always the same –in Oakland, in Sacramento, in Washington, in the offices of the IMF –whatever the owners of wealth want, they get. The rest of us are sacrificed on the altar of the bottom line. No money on which to retire after a lifetime of crushing work. No money to go to college. No money for the grade schools and high schools, which every day look more and more like prisons. No money for the people maimed, sickened and driven insane by this unbearable society.
We could go through the new California budget line by line, but you basically already know what it contains. It’s not a budget but a bludgeon. Every line says the same thing: Fuck you. Die.
Happy Birthday, America
James Howard Kunstler
Do you, too, sense the dread abiding in our annual celebration of
national wonderfulness? Outside today's barbeque bubble the dark shapes
of wild events loom, exciting primal fears of unresolved woe and
travail. Yesterday, I saw a man on a back street of a small town with
spider webs tattooed on his elbows and a screaming skull on the back of
his neck. America, meet your new normal: a citizenry of exterminating
angels. Our political exertions mean nothing to them. They think Ronald
Reagan was the offspring of John Wayne and Minnie Mouse and the House of
representatives is a reality TV show about home improvement. Once they
are on the loose, even Rush Limbaugh and other like-minded jingo creeps
of the airwaves will despair.
Life and Labor in the Era of Climate Justice
Andrew Ross
As radicals, it is our job to respond to the very newest political formations, and few have presented themselves with the urgency of the tendencies that have sprung up to address and combat the climate crisis. For the purposes of this talk, let me outline four of these tendencies
1) The first is the emergence of the carbon calculus as an overriding measure of our ability to meet the crisis. If we cannot afford to allow atmospheric carbon levels to rise to 450ppm, should we hold the threshold at 400ppm or demand a reduction to 350ppm? For some climate activists, this is the only important question, and, for those who favor the quickest form of emissions reduction, we must proceed by any means necessary, even if it involves following pathways that are undemocratic. But the most everyday manifestation of this new calculus is the growing habit of assessing the carbon footprint of every product and every personal movement, including acts of labor. Indeed, quantifying the world’s energy throughput on the microlevel of personal conduct is becoming a pseudopolitical obsession. In some ways, it is a perverse spin on the statistical tyranny of the GDP, reducing our actions and our use of material things to a data-set––the outcome of which is a moral assessment of our thermodynamic performance. Carbon-Neutral Man is the goal, a model of ascetic behavior that is the obverse of the wasteful hyperconsumer.
All Power to the Free Universities of the Future
Statement in Relation to the Outlawing of the Copenhagen Free University
The Copenhagen Free University was an attempt to reinvigorate the emancipatory aspect of research and learning, in the midst of an ongoing economisation of all knowledge production in society. Seeing how education and research were being subsumed into an industry structured by a corporate way of thinking, we intended to bring the idea of the university back to life. By life, we mean the messy life people live within the contradictions of capitalism. We wanted to reconnect knowledge production, learning and skill sharing to the everyday within a self-organised institutional framework of a free university. Our intention was multi-layered and was of course partly utopian, but also practical and experimental. We turned our flat in Copenhagen into a university by the very simple act of declaring 'this is a university'. By this transformative speech act the domestic setting of our flat became a university. It didn't take any alterations to the architecture other than the small things needed in terms of having people in your home staying over, presenting thoughts, researching archival material, screening films, presenting documents and works of art. Our home became a public institution dedicated to the production process of communal knowledge and fluctuating desires.
The Tactics of Camping: Yes We Camp!
Eric Kluitenberg
Michel de Certeau observed that the tactics employed by the ‘weak’ are always on the watch for opportunities, and that these opportunities must be seized “on the wing”. Tactics, de Certeau writes, have no base at their disposal from where they can capitalise on their advantages, prepare their expansions, or secure their independence from circumstances. Instead tactics ‘insinuate’ themselves into the places of others. They operate on the terrain of strategic power, ‘fragmentarily’, without taking it over in its entirety. Whatever these tactics win, they cannot keep. [1]
Hence, tactics are always nomadic.
The Anarchist Stuart Christie and His Very Peculiar Literary Bedfellow,
The Neo-Conservative War Propagandist Stephen Schwartz
Part One: The Anarchists and Spain: "Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda…"
Kevin Keating
In 1964, a courageous young Scottish anarchist named Stuart Christie was arrested in Spain for taking part in an effort to assasinate dictator Francisco Franco. If the attempt on Franco's life had succeeded it would have been one of the most emotionally satisfying political killings of the 20th century. But alas, like many earlier efforts against the Generalissmo this attempt failed, and Christie's role in this failure had several aspects. First, shortly before going to Spain, Christie participated in a television inteview where he made it clear he thought killing Franco would be desirable. Along with the obvious lack of discretion demonstrated by Christie, it later turned out the journalist interviewing Christie, Malcolm Muggeridge, had been involved with British intelligence services during World War Two. This compounded the fact that it was neither the time nor the place for Christie to voice his fiery sentiments.
"Art As The Imagination of the After-Future"
Franco Berardi
Utopia was the dominant feature of xxth century avant-garde, although flows of dystopia have been interweaved in the imagination of cinema, poetry and narration. Only today, at the beginning of the 21st century, does dystopia take centre stage and conquer the whole field of the artistic imagination, thus drawing the narrative horizon of the century with no future. In the expression of contemporary poetry, in cinema, video-art and novels, the marks of an epidemic of psychopathology proliferate. In its highest expressions, in my view, Art of the years zero zero has been phenomenology of mental suffering, of disorder provoked by connective mutation of the Psychosphere.
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