Occupy The System: Confronting Global Capitalism
A 3-day Left Forum @ Pace University, NYC
About the Theme:
http://www.leftforum.org/conference/conference-theme
Registration:
http://www.leftforum.org/civicrm/event/info?id=632&reset=1
Occupy Wall Street To Besiege Romney at Waldorf Astoria Fundraiser
Activists Crash Luncheon, Confront Income Inequality, Corporate Personhood
What: Rally & March
When: Wednesday March 11am - 2pm
Where: Waldorf Astoria Hotel
(Rallying Point at 51st St. & Park Ave. at 11am)
[NEW YORK, NY] A pop-up occupation will confront Governor Mitt Romney as he arrives in New York for a fundraising luncheon at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel at 11am on Wednesday, March 14th 2012. This event targeting the presidential hopeful and his fundraising base of special interest lobbyists is one of the first in a series of actions some occupiers are calling "The American Spring."
Occupy Wall Street, along with a broad coalition of community advocacy organizations including UnitedNY, the Strong Economy for All Coalition, Occupy the Dream, New York Communities for Change, Dream Act Scholars / NY Dream Act Coalition, Rebuild the Dream, Community Voices Heard, Move On, Vocal New York and Make the Road New York have signed onto this large event, uniting themselves around a message that our elections are not for sale and that corporations (unlike voters) are not people.
'Occupy' As a Business Model:
The Emerging Open-Source Civilisation
Michel Bauwens
Last week I discussed the value crisis of contemporary capitalism: the broken feedback loop between the productive publics who create exponentially increasing use value, and those who capture this value through social media - but do not return these income streams to the value "produsers".
In other words, the current so-called "knowledge economy" is a sham and a pipe dream - because abundant goods do not fare well in a market economy. For the sake of the world's workers, who live in an increasingly precarious situation, is there a way out of this conundrum? Can we restore the broken feedback loop?
Reassessing Recomposition: 40 Years After the Publication of Anti-Oedipus
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi
1. Post-Oedipal
The process of subjectivation is based on conditions that have dramatically changed in the forty years since the publication of Deleuze and Guttari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Reading that book was a defining moment in my intellectual and political experience, in the first years of the 19070s, when students and workers were fighting and organizing spaces of autonomy and separation from capitalist exploitation. Forty years after the publication of that book the landscape has changed so deeply that very concept of desire has to be re-thought, as it is marking the field of subjectivation in a very different way.
The proliferation of sources of enunciation in this age of the networks, the globalization of the economy and the media, was predicted and in a sense pre-conceptualized Deleuze and Guattari, but they could not know in advance the effects that global capitalism has produced on the unconscious and the dynamics of desire. As production, media and daily life have been subsumed into the sphere of semiocapital we need to reconsider the unconscious from this transformed position.
My starting question is thus: what is capitalism and what is schizophrenia after the psychosocial landscape has been reshaped by the tendencies described by Deleuze and Guattari?
Hakim Bey: Intellectual Magician
International Times
I cannot think of Hakim Bey as anything other than an intellectual magician.
This review of his book of ‘new poetic rants and prose poems’ from 2008 is belated, but the book deserves reviewing not least because of what’s happened to Western civilisation since he wrote it. No collection I’m aware of is more ‘on the money’.
As with his book Millennium from 1996 which was so prescient in its vitriolic musings about Capital and Jihad, Bey was once again just ahead of his time, as a good weatherman should be. As Millennium was a useful companion during Y2K and 9/11, so Black Fez Manifesto &c. is a lyrical guidebook to the current meltdown, and a really funny consolatio. Some of the poems in the generous 100 page volume must have been written before late 2007 when the shit hit the fan, and certainly before 2008 when it began to spatter ubiquitously. He is laughing in advance at the botched alchemy of America and its spiritual colonies.
Seminar on Political Organization Essex March 12th
Essex Centre for Work, Organization and Society Seminar
Lessons of 2011: Three Theses on Political Organization
Rodrigo Nunes, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande Do Sul
March 12th, 4PM-6PM @ University of Essex Room 5N.7.23
With the Arab Spring, the Spanish indignados, Occupy and so much more, 2011 is likely to go down in history as a very special year – perhaps even the beginning of something. But what would that something be? This presentation attempts to draw some conclusions about the present state and future of politics and organization by examining the practices of the movements that erupted in the last year. Thinking beyond their usual representation by the media, trying to avoid either describing them as something entirely new and unheard of or as manifestations of an ultimately non-political culture, what can be the lessons of 2011?
The Struggle of Sahrawi Women for Freedom
Fatma Medhi
Friday March 9, 2012 at 6.30 pm
CUNY Graduate Center Room 5307
365 Fifth Avenue
This event is free and open to the public.
Fatma Medhi was forced to flee her Western Sahara home at the age of 7, escaping amidst bombs and napalm. Today Medhi is the Secretary General of the National Union of Saharawi Women. She is in New York to share the story of her compatriots with you, given the media blockage on the Western Sahara conflict, its history and its future dreams.
Underground Politics: Belarus
Friday, March 9, 2012 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm
Occupy Chicago Headquarters, 500 W Cermak, Room 501,
This teach-in will explore the effects of state repression on contemporary political practice in Belarus. When “traditional” methods for free speech and civil disobedience aren’t available, how does one adapt? The facilitator, a young anarchist philosopher from Minsk, will discuss some of the noncommercial and alternative spaces in his hometown that have thrived under the blanket of neoliberalism. A short video about recent crackdowns will be shown, as well as a film about the Masterskaya squat that existed in Minsk from May to October of 2008. We’ll also hear about Rebel Studies Library, an educational project he began with friends.
Call for Papers: ‘The Anomie of the Earth’ – UNC Chapel Hill 3-5 May 2012
@ The Institute for the Arts and Humanities/Global Education Center
in collaboration with the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and NWO
The conference The Anomie of the Earth is a follow-up to the Post/autonomy conference held in Amsterdam in May 2011.
While the Post/autonomy meeting focused on the European dissemination of autonomist thought, the second conference will build on its American location and explore a plurality of notions and practices of cultural-political autonomy. Though privileging the context of North and South America, the conference will also address European, African and Asian perspectives.
"Enter the Swarm: Anonymous and the Global Protest Movements"
Felix Stalder
In the course of just one year, using the identity “Anonymous,” highly
efficient digital attacks have been carried out against global
corporations and national governments. All in the name of freedom
of speech and social justice. The media coverage has done little
to clarify the events, rather, contradictory characterizations of
Anonymous have been espoused, ranging from an elite hacker conspiracy,
to a loose network of ignorant teenagers, from a major cyber-terrorist
threat to a mere nuisance driven by sophomoric humor. None of these
characterizations is entirely incorrect, because each captures some
fragments of the phenomenon, but they all miss the central element of
Anonymous, namely that it is not one, but many, and that it is not a
group or a network, but a swarm, or to be correct, multiple swarms
that feed off each other.
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