A Caring Strike – Precarias a la Deriva

Tuesday, August 22 – 7pm – Bluestockings Books, Café, and Activism Center

172 Allen Street, NYC – $5 to 10 donation

Precarias a la Deriva is a Madrid based activist research project which has worked for the last few years to map and to explore the changing life and work situations of its participants, seeking those fragile moments and places of aggregation which allow us to break the solitude and the impotence of our individual—and very different—lives and imagine relevant forms of organization and collective resistance. Recently we have focused on the notion of care, both as a common ground of universal necessity and as a specifically feminized and unregulated sector of work: What would it mean to organize care? What would a care strike look like? How might care be structured differently? Maggie Schmidt will speak briefly about the history and methodology of Precarias a la Deriva as a collective research-action project and within the emerging European discussions on precarious work, present some of the debates around care, and introduce the current project which has arisen out of Precarias: the ‘Agency of Precarious Affairs,’ a center for resources, organizing and mutual aid. She looks forward to getting in touch with similar projects and processes in the US.‘This is Forever’: From Inquiry to Refusal A Discussion Series Dedicated to Understanding the Current Composition of Political Movements and Struggles Using the Lens of Autonomist Thought.

‘This is Forever’ – this is for the future. What we will in the present cracks open the actually existing to unleash potentials for the yet-to-come. What we affirm now will return to us, accumulating a set of powers and virtues into a body capable of refusing command and of claiming its own irreversible destiny. This is an inquiry into the current composition of political movements and struggle, which seeks to understand acts of refusal that are taking place on the terrain of everyday life and on the level of planetary antagonisms. This is the attempt to theorize from these positions toward new ways of life, and new ways of organizing society.

‘This is Forever’: From Inquiry to Refusal is a series of discussions dedicated to an inquiry into class composition: into the current political composition of movements and struggles particularly in the United States, and generally across the planet; the technical composition of the imposition of work and under capital, in both productive and reproductive spheres, and its changing nature in capitals neoliberal phase; the myriad of mechanisms which capture, overcode, divide, and suppress our desires and creative capacities; and the ways in which act of refusal and resistance are in exodus from the relations of power that define capital and the state-from, as well as the gender binary, heteronormativity, race, legal status, and other socially constructed divisions and power relations.

Additional upcoming events: George Caffentzis (Fall 2006), Todd May (Winter 2006), and others discussions are currently being planned. Series website: http://www.teamcolors.blogspot.com