Left Wing Organisations & Libertarian Grassroots Unions Call for an International Day of Action March 31st
Left Wing Organisations and Libertarian Grassroots Unions Call for an International Day of Action During an international meeting in December 2011 in Frankfurt am Main, several left wing organisations and grassroots unions from Greece, Spain, Poland, Austria and Germany decided to launch a joint effort against capitalist reforms under the current crisis. On march 31st, there will be a “European Day of Action against Capitalism”, with simultaneous demonstrations in those countries, labeled “M31″. Groups from other countries are likely to join in, as networking continues. Protests will be directed against neoliberal and undemocratic impositions by the European Union (EU), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Activist Technology Demo Day NYC January 28th
Saturday, January 28 3-6pm
Urban Research Group Eyebeam Art + Technology Center
540 W 21st, New York, NY
From Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, technology has played an important role in shaping contemporary resistance and the representation of these events in the media. What new tools of protest and occupation have emerged over the past year? How does their use help to shape tomorrow’s democracies? The Urban Research Group @ Eyebeam and The Public School New York have invited activists, technologists, artists, designers, and community organizers who have a working prototype of an activist technology to occupy a worktable at Eyebeam and share their work with the public. Drawn from proposals submitted through an open call, we have selected a group of projects and communities that extend the creative use of technology and its social implications. Our interest is in creating a platform for encounter, conversation and collaboration. Visit http://demo-day.org/projects for participating project information.
This public event will culminate with a panel discussion at 5pm with special guest Stephen Duncombe, Associate Professor at the Gallatin School and the Department of Media, Culture and Communications of New York University and co-creator of the School for Creative Activism; Mary Mattingly, Eyebeam Fellow and the creator of Waterpod; and moderated by Taeyoon Choi, Eyebeam Fellow and member of The Public School New York committee.
A Memorial Event for Ira Cohen (1935-2011)
Poet, Filmmaker, Photographer
Sunday, Feb 5th, 2012, 6pm - 10pm at The Living Theatre, 21 Clinton St, NYC
Space is limited - please RSVP for further attendance details:
RSVP
"If Sabu came crashing
through the coconut palms
on his elephant to tell me
this was all a dream
I would not believe him."
-- Ira Cohen, ON WAKING
Readings In Memoriam by
Judith Malina, Allan Graubard, Tom Walker, Steve Dalachinsky, Jordan Zinovich, Valery Oisteanu, Bonny Finberg, Bill Wollak, Clayton Patterson, Louise Landes-Levi, Penny Arcade, Jeremiah Newton, Indra Tamang, Timothy Baum & others T.B.A.
Music & Performances In Memoriam by
Butch Morris Chorus of Poets, Alice Farley Dance Theatre, Wayne Lopes & Sylvie Degiez, Perry Robinson, Will Swofford Cameron & others T.B.A.
The event will include a video presentation of Ira Cohen reading poetry along with excerpts of his work in film and photography.
Donations to The Living Theatre will be accepted in lieu of admission.
Press inquires contact: press [at] iracohen [dot] org
Ira Harvey Cohen, of New York, NY, died peacefully on April 25th, 2011 at the age of 76. He will always be loved and always be missed. His legacy lives on.
Ira Cohen was born in New York, NY on February 3rd, 1935. He is the son of the late Lester Cohen and the late Faye Cohen. Mr. Cohen was an innovative and original poet, photographer, filmmaker, publisher, and editor. A self-described "Electronic Multimedia Shaman", he was an active humanist from the 1960s to the present. Mr. Cohen was educated at Horace Mann, Cornell and Columbia. He spent the early 1960s in Tangier, Morocco, where he lived and worked with William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Paul Bowles. While there, he prepared his first major work; editing and publishing the anthology Gnaoua (1964). This volume contained work by William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Jack Smith, and others.
Collateral Torture
Clark Stoeckley
an EIDIA HOUSE project
Plato's Cave
January 20 to February 18, 2012
Live 24-hour continuous performance with reception beginning at 7pm, Friday, January 20
EIDIA House Studio / 14 Dunham Place / Basement Left (street level doors) / Williamsburg Brooklyn / NY 11211 / 646 945 3830 / eidiahouse@earthlink.net / http://www.eidia.com/
Hours: 1-6pm Wednesday – Saturday
EIDIA House announces its continuing exhibition initiative, PLATO’S CAVE. The twelfth artist in the series, Clark Stoeckley presents performance and in situ installation: Collateral Torture.
Collateral Torture
Clark Stoeckley’s 24-hour live performance will portray a day of Private First Class Bradley Manning's tortured imprisonment—commencing at 5pm on Friday the 20th and concluding at 5pm on Saturday the 21st. This performance will be recorded, and the documentation will be projected in Plato's Cave for the remaining duration of the exhibition.
The Failure of Capitalist Production
Andrew Kleiman
Monday February 6th, 2012 @ 7:00 PM:
Bluestockings Books
172 Allen St.
New York, NY 10002
212.777.6028
Andrew Kliman will discuss his just-published book, The Failure of Capitalist Production (Pluto Press 2011), and how he was frequently surprised by what he uncovered when doing the research behind it. Much conventional wisdom on the left attributes the Great Recession to free-market policies, “financialization” of the economy, and stagnant wages. Kliman himself is a leftist economist, yet the more he delved into the data, the more he came to reject such explanations. In the end, he concluded, Karl Marx’s theory of economic crisis fits the facts. The Great Recession and its persistent after-effects are the results of a half-century-long decline in profitability and the consequences of that decline––decades of weak investment, sluggish economic growth, and mounting debt problems. Kliman will also explore possible pathways out of this crisis of profitability.
Occupations Conference
Toronto, Canada, April 27-29, 2012
CFP for Occupations
York & Ryerson Universities
Toronto, April 27-29, 2012—proposals due on February 1.
Some updates for Intersections / Cross Sections 2012: Occupations. See below for CFP.
1) We are extremely happy to announce Brian Holmes (Continental Drift) and Sarah Sharma (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) as our keynotes. Stay posted for additional speakers.
2) Edu-Factory’s “Our University! A Conference on Struggles Within and Beyond the Neoliberal University ” will be held in Toronto the same weekend. For more information on the Edu-Factory conference, see http://www.edu-factory.org/wp/the-university-is-ours/
3) There’s an Occupy Toronto Activist Assembly, January 20, 2012–January 22, 2012, at OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education) @ St. George and Bloor Street, Toronto, ON. For more information, see https://www.facebook.com/events/270078499716966/
INTERSECTIONS / CROSS SECTIONS 2012: OCCUPATIONS
11th Annual Graduate Conference in Communication and Culture
York University and Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada
April 27-29, 2012
http://thecomcult.wordpress.com
Keynotes: Brian Holmes, Continental Drift and Sarah Sharma, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
"Occupy but better yet, self manage…. The former option is basically passive—the latter is active and yields tasks and opportunities to contribute.… To occupy buildings, especially institutions like universities or media, isn’t just a matter of call it, or tweet it, and they will come. It is a matter of go get them, inform them, inspire them, enlist them, empower them, and they will come." — Michael Albert, “Occupy to Self Manage”
The unfolding events at Occupy Wall Street and elsewhere present possibilities for new politics, and new forms of learning from, living with and engaging each other. Occupations are attempts to build the social compositions that are the precondition for action. They are the working through of a problem that politics-as-usual works to suppress—the massive exploitation that is capitalism and the emergence of politics adequate to address it. At this stage, occupations are the connection of people, ideas and machines—the cumulation of assemblages that might build something. What happens next depends on what is being built now. We invite graduate students from all related disciplines to submit proposals for academic, artistic and activist presentations and workshops that explore and otherwise critically engage occupations.
Towards a Futurology of the Present
Marco Cuevas-Hewitt
‘Tomorrow never happens, man’ – Janis Joplinii
Has there ever been a revolution without its musicians, artists, and writers? Could we imagine the Zapatista movement, for example, without its poetry and lyricism? At this moment, I am writing from the specific location of the west coast of Australia, on land known to Aboriginal Australians as Beeliar Boodjar. Across the Indian Ocean, remarkable things are happening in North Africa. I listen on the internet to the songs of freedom being sung in Tahrir Square, as well as to the young hip-hop artists who provided the soundtrack to the revolution in Tunisia. But their YouTube videos are not the only things going viral. Significantly, their mutant desires, of which their music is an expression, are also beginning to ripple outwards. I feel it here at my kitchen table as I type, as viscerally as the caffeine flowing through my body. I also see it on the evening news in Spain and Greece. Perhaps the alterglobalisation movement never died, but was simply laying in wait. Perhaps we are only at the beginning. And perhaps there is little real difference in our movements between making music and making change; between the creation of art and the creation of new social relations through our activisms. Our common art is the crafting of new ways of being, of seeing, of valuing; in short, the cultivation of new forms of life, despite and beyond the deadening, ossified structures all around us.
All Eyes on Longview:
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All
Insurgent Notes
Dear friend(s) and comrade(s):
We are writing to inform you about a very serious class confrontation developing on the northwest coast of the U.S., in Longview (Washington state).
In that small city, an international grain company, EGT, owned jointly by three firms (U.S.-based Bunge North America, Japan-based Itochu and Korea-based STX Pan Ocean), spent $200 million constructing a new state- of- the-art grain terminal.
While the construction was underway, EGT indicated that it would continue to employ the 225 members of ILWU Local 21 in Longview, in keeping with the solid unionization of west coast American ports since the 1930’s by the ILWU (International Longshore Workers Union).
Instead, when the construction was completed, EGT turned to a “rogue” union, General Construction and Operating Engineers Local 701, with the intention of displacing the ILWU with a “sweetheart” contract saving the company (according to its estimates) $1 million a year in labor costs.
Signal:Noise II
Friday 20 – Saturday 21 January 2012
The Showroom Gallery, 63 Penfold Street, London NW8
Building on the success of Signal:Noise I in January 2011, the second iteration of Signal:Noise is produced in collaboration with Mute and Queen Mary School of Business and Management. Signal:Noise II will look into feedback as a form of agency.
Feedback can be seen as an operational mode that overrides distinctions between form and content. Cybernetic ideas of self-regulation – whether in the workplace or within processes of government – have often involved harnessing the means of autonomy in order to increase control. This has proceeded by and large through techniques of participation and feedback.
But these same techniques and forms are also key to certain progressive social and aesthetic projects – from anti-psychiatry and radical pedagogy, to post-humanist philosophy and aesthetics. Troubling issues of agency, intention and consciousness, they have been used to produce new relations of power, truth and aesthetics.
From the schematising of these processes in art, design and urban planning, to the constant relay between emancipation and control in the social logic of participation, feedback will act as a prism for reading history and our present through presentations, screenings, performances and workshops in distributed and militant pedagogy.
Building Up an Institution of the Common
Interview with Gigi Roggero from Edu-factory
“What was once the factory is now the university” states the international Edu-factory collective, which started off as a mailing list of 500 students, activists and researchers worldwide. They argue that in today’s cognitive capitalism, we have experienced the transformation from organising knowledge from above to the capture and expropriation of common knowledge after it is produced. This appropriation and exploitation of knowledge produced in the common opens up for a possibility that lies in the autonomy of knowledge production. The fact that knowledge today is produced in the common also makes it possible for us to re-appropriate it. The Edu-factory’s attempt to create a global autonomous university is a way of reclaiming such common knowledge. Edu-factory writes, “Theoretical practice is always political practice, and political practice is not only theoretical practice”. They claim that there is no production of knowledge that is not political. Theory is always a field of struggle and in times of “cognitive capitalism,” perhaps one of the most important. We met with Gigi Roggero, one of the initiators of Edu-factory at the Labour of the Multitude conference in Warsaw to talk about Edu-factory, recent university and precarious workers struggles, and ideas of autonomous education.
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