[AUT] Police harrasment incident Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

[Pat Cuninghame <pgcuninghame@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everybody. I wish to report  an incident of police harasment of myself. This morning, 7 march 2007, at about 4.00am my time I was cycling home after working very late when I was stopped by the Ciudad Juarez police who made me pull over. The identity number of the car was 060. soon the single policeman, a young guy (20-25) 1m.65, light brown hair and light brown complexion, was joined by two other cops and their cars, all about the same height, their leader  had black hair a full moustache and was about 30-35, the third policeman was older than the others and wearing a baseball cap. He spent a lot of time checking my bike, about 10m away, while the other two made me empty my pockets and started rummaging through my backpack (again I was worried they were trying to plant drugs on me) while the other distracted me by asking the same questions over and over again. Basically they wanted to know what I was doing out so late, I showed them all my docs to prove my immigration and work status. the they invented that someone had seen a cyclist acting suspiciously 10 minutes before. I dont know if cycling as fast as you can to get home as quickly as you can as I had to get up early as well is "acting suspiciously" and in anycase who saw me at that time a part from the police? They then started to accuse me of taking and possessing cocaine and said that the dust inside a pen cap I use to write on my electronic agenda could be cocaine and that they would have to take me to the doctor to be tested for drug use. None of them identified themselves at any moment or had identity tags visible. This all went on for about 20 minutes until finally they let me go. Now I'm worried about cycling at any time of day or night in case the same thing happens again. I think you know what reputation the Mexican police enjoys... so I dont feel particularly safe and that's why I'm telling you all this on the principle that the more people know about this the safer I will be and the harder for them to harass me again. By the way I'm sure they know who I am, in fact I forgot to mention that they made it clear that thye have been either following me on other nights or know of my itinerary. It could also be the university the UACJ which is very right wing who are trying to pressurize me to leave, I am also helping a group of students who are trying to set up a free radio station inside the uni. It could just be a coincidence, but my house here was broken into in November 2004 and my laptop stolen (but nothing else) which seemed like a political robbery. Despite getting some important people to intervene to make the police do something about it, (the robbers left a crowbar behind they had used to remove the window bars), the police never took any interest, unlike last night... Thanks for your time.
Best,
Patrick Cuninghame
sociology lecturer at the Universidad Autonoma de Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

 
The great and only error lies in thinking that a line of flight consists in fleeing from life; the flight into the imaginary, or into art. On the contrary, to flee is to produce the real, to create life, to find a weapon. (Gilles Deleuze)


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Today's Topics:

   1. re: questions (Tahir Wood)
   2. Re: fun in bilbao yesterday afternoon ....... (Andy)
   3. Re: fun in bilbao yesterday afternoon ....... (martin hardie)
   4. Re: fun in bilbao yesterday afternoon ....... (Peter Jovanovic)
   5. Re: fun in bilbao yesterday afternoon ....... (martin hardie)
   6. Fwd: Announcing the Radical Theory Track at NCOR 2007
      (co-curated by the IAS and FSC) (Robert Augmann)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2007 16:00:04 +0200
From: "Tahir Wood" <twood@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [AUT] re: questions
To: "Operaismoand Class Composition Autonomia"
    <aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Message-ID: <45E6F884020000690000EBDD@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Thanks, I think you're right, we are agreeing on quite a bit here (not
everything). I'll take some time to digest before I respond.
Tahir

>>> "Andy" <ldxar1@xxxxxxxxx> 03/01/07 3:13 PM >>>
"Tahir: Well, there is the historical explanation, based on the
transition out of feudalism and the feudal state to capitalism and to
the capitalist state: The absolutist state arises as an alliance of
bourgeoisie and monarchy against the depredations of the lawless
aristocracy."

That's an explanation for the emergence of the modern state, as opposed
to a theory of the state.  I don't have a huge problem with it as an
explanation, but I'm not sure what it has to do with states today
(unless maybe they still contain feudal elements?).  There's a little
problem that "the state" is usually assumed to have pre-existed the
absolutist state particularly, and another that the status of the
bourgeoisie in pre-absolutist and absolutist Europe is tenuous (as to
whether extraction of surpluses through wage-labour actually existed),
but nothing really fatal for this explanation of the modern state.

"Tahir: Maybe I'm missing something here, but it seems to me that
society does predate capitalism. How exactly could it not?"

You're missing the point completely.  My point was about the
relationship between micro and macro levels, or in Hegelian Marxist
language, between the "totality" (e.g. capitalism) and the "moments"
(e.g. the state, the factory, mechanical reproduction, the prison, etc).
A lot of Hegelian Marxists "derive" the "moments" (e.g. the state) from
the "totality" (e.g. capitalism), when this doesn't make sense either in
terms of analysis (capitalism does not exist "before" the "moments"
analytically, it is an abstraction from them) or in terms of history
(many of these so-called "moments" preceded capitalism).  I have no idea
if you adhere to the thesis I'm criticising here or not.

"Tahir: The sovereign does act like this sometimes; and the liberal
bourgeoisie, armed with Voltaire et al, is always fighting against
that.
That goes on all the time; it is what one might call 'politics as
usual'. "

So you agree that the state is a "class" or "class-like force" or
"social force", not a simple representative of the bourgeoisie or of
society?  It seems to me you're here agreeing with the point I was
trying to make.

"The idea of the workers' state is a nonsense. It arises from
certain notions of the 'dictatorship or the proletariat', but
hypostatised into a state, rather than as a transition to
post-capitalist society."

Indeed.  It seems you're agreeing with me again.  I think, though, that
if the state is viewed in Hobbesian, or classified-Hobbesian, terms as
the representative or "general executive" of society or of a particular
class, then the idea of a workers' state is a logical outgrowth - the
state then becomes the "general executive" of the workers and represents
their interests "in general" against the "particular" sectors of workers
- this is in fact how the Bolsheviks often talk.

"I don't see how any of this adds anything new; it is really just
a static snapshot view of the power relations (i.e. leaving out the
history, and therefore the dynamics of the whole process). This kind
of
makes it impossible to understand what Marx calls the movement from
formal to real subsumption, the nature of capitalist crises and what
Camatte calls the 'running away of capital', i.e. a certain loss of
agency on the part of the bourgeoisie itself."

I'm not necessarily saying it adds anything new - I think for instance
that Kropotkin and Bakunin made similar arguments.  My point is that it
goes against what a lot of Marxists say - particularly those who either
reduce the state to a "moment" of capitalism, or who accord it autonomy
as an "institution" or "sphere" (without a specific class/discursive
logic of its own).

The kind of logic I'm here attributing to the state is similar in kind
to the idea of "tendency" in Marx - the attribution of general
tendencies to the capitalist class, which provide its intentionality or
dynamic in specific settings.  Such tendencies are a kind of static view
of the abstract machine of a class (its driving force), but hardly of
history, since in practice tendencies enter into conflict and syncretism
with different tendencies of different classes and forces - which is why
the "Eighteenth Brumaire" does not read like "Capital".  In other words,
it is quite compatible with a diachronic moment of analysis.

I don't see why it makes any of those other things impossible to
understand.  The "running away of capital" has to do with the loss of
agency of individual capitalists due to the kind of relations they
construct; it doesn't have much to do with the state at all.  As for
formal and real subsumption, this is to do with how capitalism interacts
with other tendencies associated with other classes - in formal
subsumption, other tendencies are left intact but overcoded by
capitalism; in real subsumption, the capitalist relation is established
directly, at the expense of other tendencies - so it's a difference
between syncretism and one-sided imposition with regard to
non-capitalist logics.  Obviously the state can also be syncretised with
or imposed on by capital (the corporate/welfare, authoritarian/fascist,
patronage, and developmental states would be more-or-less syncretic with
the state as well as with other class logics, whereas the neoliberal
state is more specifically capitalist); actually I think in the case of
the neoliberal state (and also the authoritarian state), capitalism
harnesses the state's logic to achieve capital's goals - which is not to
say that it ceases to exist as an independent logic, only that it is
channelled in such a way that it serves the purpose of another logic. 
(Early) Negri's analysis of the logic of "command" suggests that real
subsumption may actually involve a broader logic under which "real
subsumption" occurs, which is not "pure" capitalism but a fusion of
capitalist and state/despotic logics.

"Tahir: None of the 'why' questions can be answered by putting it this
way. Why a neoliberal state, why this fusion, etc. A fusion implies
two
different things coming together - where does each of them come from
if
not from a common historical process? From separate worlds?"

In a sense, from separate worlds, yes.  From different perspectives,
different ways of viewing the world, which come together or flow apart
in particular circumstances.

And, yes, I'm separating the moment of analysis of agents from the
moment of analysis of situations; social logics arise from particular
conceptions of the world which are connected to existential situations
but which emerge as distinct, often conflictual, forces, whereas a
situation does not arise from a single logic but rather an interaction
of all those existing in the prior situation, which either syncretise or
battle out whatever becomes the following situation.  Doesn't Marx do
precisely this in his historical works?  The "Eighteenth Brumaire" or
"Civil War in France" explains very little by reference to timeless
characteristics of capital, and a lot by contingent conflicts.

I'd say the "why" questions require both an understanding of the many
social logics operating in a situation, and an analysis of contingent
fusions and conflicts which are always and necessarily contingent.

If you're looking for general explanations which answer the "why"
questions from a "common historical process" underlying all the agents,
as if some single inexorable mechanism reproduces itself across time and
outcomes are inevitable rather than contingent, then you're looking for
something you can't have.  It requires a massive epistemic violence to
rewrite history so as to fit any such general explanation, and it
necessarily blurs the distinctions between social logics and historical
forces.

If I were trying to explain, say, the Zapatistas, obviously I'd want to
include the role of capitalist logics in transforming rural Mexico, the
destruction of the commons, neoliberal reforms in energy policy and so
on.  I'd want to include the specific development of capitalist society
and the state in Mexico, the PRI institutional bureaucracy and the
structures of corruption.  But none of this would explain why the
rebellion of the rural poor took the form it did.  To answer that "why
question", one would need also to refer to the discourses of the poor,
to the history of self-organisation, to the desire to resist, to
indigenous cosmologies and belief-systems, to the preservation and
transformation of indigenous discourse.  All of this is coming from a
"different world", from a sphere of life which is affected by capitalism
and sometimes syncretises with it, but which is not at all reducible to
it.  On the general level, the situation in Chiapas could logically as
easily have produced a traditional leftist guerrilla movement, or an
opposition political party, or no resistance at all.

"Tahir: I think it would be very hard to describe this kind of a state
separated from capitalism. According to the view being propounded here
such a thing makes no sense. "

I partly have in mind the absolutist state, but mainly I'm thinking of
the Stalinist regimes of the USSR, eastern Europe, China, North Korea
and so on, especially in their harshest "high Stalinist" form.  I don't
think that the "law of value" (apparent self-valorisation of
exchange-value) occurs in these societies, I don't think workers there
were "free wage labourers" who were given an empty freedom to sell their
labour to any employer (rather, they were conscripted by the state), and
I don't think a bourgeoisie living off surplus extracted from workers by
means of capital investment existed there either (as opposed to a
bureaucratic class which extracted surplus from workers by "political"
means of control of the finished product and despotic assignment of
wages).  Also, the capitalist world reacted to these states as it would
to an external class force, not as it would to a variant form of
capitalism.  These regimes weren't "entirely external" in that they
entered into relations with the capitalist world, and sometimes
introduced capitalist relations to obtain efficiency; but capitalism
wasn't the dominant social logic in these societies.

Andy
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Message: 2
Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 15:05:15 -0000
From: "Andy" <ldxar1@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [AUT] fun in bilbao yesterday afternoon .......
To: "Autonomia, Operaismo,and Class Composition"
    <aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Message-ID: <06be01c75c13$04907ae0$0202a8c0@andy1>
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1";
    reply-type=response

> Iraqi nationalists no doubt killed a bunch of people yesterday, would 
> videos of that be fun too?

If they beheaded Tony Blair it might.

>>fun in bilbao yesterday afternoon .......
>>a banned demonstration turned into a running street battle that spread 
>>from
>>one side of bilbao to the other ....

I seem to have missed the original post.  Given Peter's response, I assume 
it had a video linked?  Any chance someone could link me?

And good going Bilbao - that will give the police a lesson about what 
happens when the ban stuff. 




------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 16:22:47 +0100
From: "martin hardie" <martin.hardie@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [AUT] fun in bilbao yesterday afternoon .......
To: "Autonomia, Operaismo, and Class Composition"
    <aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Message-ID:
    <7ff9538b0703010722w4253f1a4w15fa1df6dda68c82@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-8913983103741203697&q=La+Ertzaintza+provoca+decenas+de+heridos

On 01/03/07, Andy <ldxar1@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > Iraqi nationalists no doubt killed a bunch of people yesterday, would
> > videos of that be fun too?
>
> If they beheaded Tony Blair it might.
>
> >>fun in bilbao yesterday afternoon .......
> >>a banned demonstration turned into a running street battle that spread
> >>from
> >>one side of bilbao to the other ....
>
> I seem to have missed the original post.  Given Peter's response, I assume
> it had a video linked?  Any chance someone could link me?
>
> And good going Bilbao - that will give the police a lesson about what
> happens when the ban stuff.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> aut-op-sy mailing list
> aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> https://lists.resist.ca/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/aut-op-sy
> aut-op-sy
>



-- 
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'...if you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, if you are
abnormal , then you are sick. These three categories, not being like
everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different
but have been reduced to the same thing'

Michel Foucault, (2004) 'Je suis un artificier'. In Roger-Pol Droit, ed.,
Michel Foucault, entretiens Paris: Odile Jacob. p. 95.
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Message: 4
Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 13:06:05 +1100
From: "Peter Jovanovic" <peterzoran@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [AUT] fun in bilbao yesterday afternoon .......
To: aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Message-ID: <BAY105-F29D2B5BF5B15B0B0CA8979D1870@xxxxxxx>
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed


>maybe you could enlighten me Peter about the relationship between iraqi
>nationalism - whatever that is; and the Bilbao demo
>
It's the nationalism I object to whether Iraqi or Basque or whatever. Sure 
the riot may have been fun, but a huge crowd of mostly workers (I presume) 
lining up for a bunch of nationalist gangsters is not something to be 
celebrated AFAIK.

_________________________________________________________________
Advertisement: Amazing holiday rentals? 
http://a.ninemsn.com.au/b.aspx?URL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eninemsn%2Erealestate%2Ecom%2Eau%2Fcgi%2Dbin%2Frsearch%3Fa%3Dbhp%26t%3Dhol%26cu%3DMSN&_t=758874163&_r=HM_Txt_Link_Holiday_Oct06&_m=EXT



------------------------------

Message: 5
Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 17:19:32 +0100
From: "martin hardie" <martin.hardie@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [AUT] fun in bilbao yesterday afternoon .......
To: "Autonomia, Operaismo, and Class Composition"
    <aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Message-ID:
    <7ff9538b0703020819h49910dc8w738c018bc9add0ed@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

yeh pete the basque thing is couched in nationalist terms but a bit more
complex, lots of anticapitalisdts are caught up in it. its hard to talk to
the about thing beyongd soverienty but when you walk out of a book shop  ( I
got the new petrer carey novel which is a godesend to a ex aussie) into that
shit all you can think is how much you hate the cops . in my head all i
heard was Joh Must Go, but then im showing my age.
besos
M

On 02/03/07, Peter Jovanovic <peterzoran@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> >maybe you could enlighten me Peter about the relationship between iraqi
> >nationalism - whatever that is; and the Bilbao demo
> >
> It's the nationalism I object to whether Iraqi or Basque or whatever. Sure
> the riot may have been fun, but a huge crowd of mostly workers (I presume)
> lining up for a bunch of nationalist gangsters is not something to be
> celebrated AFAIK.
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Advertisement: Amazing holiday rentals?
> rienty but when you walk out of the bookshop on a staurday arvo and rfun
> into that shit yoyu just say - i hate the cops, nada mas





http://a.ninemsn.com.au/b.aspx?URL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eninemsn%2Erealestate%2Ecom%2Eau%2Fcgi%2Dbin%2Frsearch%3Fa%3Dbhp%26t%3Dhol%26cu%3DMSN&_t=758874163&_r=HM_Txt_Link_Holiday_Oct06&_m=EXT
>
> _______________________________________________
> aut-op-sy mailing list
> aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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>



-- 
#+34 666519359
old web:     http://openflows.org/~auskadi/
blog:          http://auskadi.civiblog.org
wiki:           http://auskadi.omweb.org/
web mirror:  http://auskadi.tk
IRC: aussieman on #gentlegeeks at freenode.net


'...if you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, if you are
abnormal , then you are sick. These three categories, not being like
everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different
but have been reduced to the same thing'

Michel Foucault, (2004) 'Je suis un artificier'. In Roger-Pol Droit, ed.,
Michel Foucault, entretiens Paris: Odile Jacob. p. 95.
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Message: 6
Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2007 09:54:03 +0100
From: Robert Augmann <rob@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [AUT] Fwd: Announcing the Radical Theory Track at NCOR 2007
    (co-curated by the IAS and FSC)
To: nycanarchists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,
    acc-intl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Message-ID: <3CFB78FE-6974-4FFE-922F-226E99BBD842@xxxxxxxxxx>
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>
> NCOR RADICAL THEORY TRACK
> March 10-11, 2007
>
> co-curated by the Institute for Anarchist Studies
> and the Free Society Collective
>
> For the first time, the National Conference on
> Organized Resistance (NCOR,
> http://www.organizedresistance.org) held in
> Washington, DC, is offering a Radical Theory Track--a
> selection of ten talks and presentations explicitly
> aimed at activists who wish to explore how social
> theory both informs and is born out of our political
> work. Radicals have long acknowledged the importance
> of guiding thoughts in our work to transform the
> world. We also understand the need to develop and
> critically evaluate our own theories in a world rife
> with exploitation, oppression, and hegemonic thinking.
> Thus, the Radical Theory Track aims to provide a space
> at NCOR in which to engage in theoretical discussion
> and debate as political practice--a forum in which
> theoretical discussion is not divorced from movement
> concerns and experience, or bound up in abstraction,
> but in which careful and original analysis of dynamic
> concepts that are key to radical Left theory and
> strategy can be articulated, shared, critiqued,
> extended, and proliferated.
>
> The Radical Theory Track is co-curated by an
> organizing collective of the Institute for Anarchist
> Studies (IAS, http://www.anarchiststudies.org) and the
> Free Society Collective
> (http://www.freesocietycollective.org), with much
> support from the NCOR collective. The idea for the
> track emerged out of the annual Renewing the Anarchist
> Tradition conference, a project of the IAS, as a way
> to create more spaces for anti-authoritarian Left
> scholarship-as-praxis. We hope you will join us,
> whether for one, some, or all of the sessions.
>
> The ten sessions are:
>
> OPPRESSION, FREEDOM, AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION
> Mark Lance
>
> For anarchists and other leftists, various forms of
> social organization--be they governmental, economic,
> cultural, or sexual--can be oppressive. Indeed,
> oppression of the sort we meet in the modern world is
> not just caused or facilitated by social organization
> but is largely constituted by complex structures of
> social organization. For example, a society can be
> systemically racist, as a result of the broad function
> of its institutions, without any individual having
> racist attitudes or setting out to achieve racist
> ends. Some react to this connection by advocating some
> form of primitivism, a rejection of social
> organization beyond the most rudimentary. There is a
> philosophical tradition--found in Aristotle, and
> developed classically by Kant, Hegel, and Marx, but
> showing up in a wide range of thinkers--that argues
> that freedom is also constituted by social
> organization. Human autonomy, that is, is something
> quite different from the freedom of solitary animals
> and is inconceivable without social practices. Mark
> will explain and argue that both are true. But if
> social organization is both necessary for freedom and
> constitutes oppression, what is a poor radical to do?
> The devil is in the details; we?ll try to sort some of
> them out.
>
> Mark is a professor of philosophy and professor of
> justice and peace at Georgetown University. In his day
> job, he works on and teaches about philosophy of
> language, logic, epistemology, moral philosophy, and
> political philosophy. He has been an activist for over
> twenty years, working on a wide range of peace and
> social justice issues both local and global. Mark is
> currently on the board of the Institute for Anarchist
> Studies, the editorial collective of "Perspectives on
> Anarchist Theory," and is national co-chair of the US
> Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. He is also at
> work on a book defending an idiosyncratic version of
> anarchism.
>
> THE LEGACY OF FREEDOM IN MURRAY BOOKCHIN'S WORK
> Cindy Milstein
>
> Born in 1921, the same year that Peter Kropotkin died,
> Murray Bookchin?s own death this past July signals the
> end of another era in anarcho-communist theorizing.
> Bridging the Old and the New Left, his
> interdisciplinary body of work (over a dozen books,
> and countless articles and public talks) moved
> anarchism into the twentieth century, transforming it
> into a more rigorous political philosophy and a more
> directly democratic praxis. His exploration of the
> emergence of hierarchy in "The Ecology of Freedom" and
> his utopian stress on forms of freedom in
> "Post-Scarcity Anarchism" stand out in this regard.
> Yet he was often a controversial figure, displeasing
> Marxists and anarchists alike. This talk aims to take
> a critical look this self-educated, lifelong radical?s
> contributions to a revolutionary and libertarian Left.
> It will briefly introduce some of his key notions, and
> then delve into his work through three lens: the way
> he lived his life; the way he thought about society;
> and the way he thought about politics.
>
> Cindy is co-organizer of the annual Renewing the
> Anarchist Tradition conference, a board member of the
> Institute for Anarchist Studies, and a collective
> member of both the Free Society Collective and
> all-volunteer Black Sheep Books in Montpelier. She
> does grassroots political work in central Vermont and
> public speaking anywhere else. Her essays appear in
> several books, including "Realizing the Impossible:
> Art against Authority" (AK Press, 2007), "Globalize
> Liberation" (City Lights, 2004), and "Confronting
> Capitalism" (Soft Skull, 2004).
>
> CREATIVE DISRUPTIONS OF SPACE, MEMORY, AND POWER
> Bettina Escauriza and Dara Greenwald
>
> Public space is highly scripted. As users of space, we
> are constantly receiving cues on how to behave and
> make use of space. This scripting occurs due to
> pressures from agents of repression (capitalism, the
> state, sexism, and so on), which in turn aid in the
> construction of identities. We are interested in
> raising questions around how we comply and sometimes
> reinforce the different ways that power emerges in
> public space, asking what public space is anyway, and
> discussing strategies of how we might resist these
> dominant and pervasive scripts on our behavior. In
> this talk, we will present several creative projects
> that have attempted to challenge the scripting of
> public place and public memory through autonomous
> interventions, including performance, landmarking,
> modification of structures, media, and messages. We
> will do a multimedia presentation that will include
> video and images.
>
> Bettina was born in Paraguay and immigrated with her
> family in the late 1980s to Miami. She is interested
> in making art and public interventions that contest
> the coercive power of the built environment.
>
> Dara is a media artist living in Troy, New York. She
> has been committed to participating in collaborative
> and political cultural work for many years.
>
> CHALLENGES TO CAPITALISM, CHALLENGES TO THE LEFT:
> ANTI-SEMITISM, ISLAMOPHOBIA, AND THE THREE-WAY FIGHT
> Michael Staudenmaier
>
> The "three-way fight" analysis proposes that we
> reconfigure our understanding of global politics away
> from a binary opposition between "us" (good, radical,
> freedom-loving) and "them" (bad, capitalists,
> oppressive), and toward a multipolar assessment in
> which capitalism attempts to maintain its hegemony by
> fending off insurgent movements both Left (anarchists,
> Zapatistas, etc.) and Right (fascists, al-Qaeda,
> etc.). Michael will explore the implications of this
> analysis, taking as his starting point the perceived
> tension between those on the Left who prioritize the
> struggle against anti-Semitism and those who emphasize
> the fight against Islamophobia. His talk will address
> problems within the North American radical Left in
> order to examine the broad prospects for an insurgent
> anti-capitalist movement that can challenge capitalism
> from the Left.
>
> Michael is a longtime anarchist writer and activist
> from Chicago. He is currently working on a book-length
> history of the Sojourner Truth Organization, a
> revolutionary group largely based in the Midwest
> during the 1970s and 1980s. He spends much of his time
> trying to be a good dad.
>
> YOU STOLE MY TACTICS!
> CRITICALLY EXPLORING THE CAPITALIST CO-OPTATION
> OF DECENTRALIZED CULTURAL PRODUCTION
> Andréa Maria and Arthur Foelsche
>
> Radicals are often on the cutting edge of cultural
> production; many innovations in media, art, and
> organizational forms have their roots in social
> movements. This influence shouldn?t be
> underestimated--from the rise of "citizen journalism"
> to cooperative forms of production, tools and ideas
> that anti-authoritarian radicals have created and
> developed in struggles for autonomy and against
> capitalism abound. Yet neoliberal capitalism has done
> a remarkable job of co-opting and commodifying these
> tactics and tools for its own ends; in the process,
> the content of these forms has been vitiated of
> politically subversive or revolutionary meaning and
> effect. How has this happened? Why do radicals have so
> little success utilizing forms, tools, and tactics
> that they helped architect? What can we do to reclaim
> those tactics, and use them to their fullest potential
> for subversive and revolutionary ends? From another
> perspective, attempts by radicals as well as some
> liberals and progressives to criticize mainstream
> culture, shifts the focus toward a critique of
> cultural forms rather than the conditions that produce
> them. How can radicals maintain a perspective that
> both demands critical content in media, art, and
> organizational forms while maintaining a criticism of
> the broader social structures in which they occur?
>
> Andréa has reported on occupation and conflict from
> Iraq and Haiti, organized for migration justice and
> the right to housing, and written dispatches on
> international solidarity and anti-imperialism. Her
> articles have appeared in a range of online and print
> publications, from the "Guardian Weekend Magazine" to
> "Counterpunch," and an anthology, "Autonomous Media:
> Activating Resistance and Dissent" (2005). Andréa sits
> on the board of the Institute for Anarchist Studies.
> Her research interests include new media and digital
> resistance, and the commodification of political
> practices. She is currently working on a book of
> interviews with international solidarity organizers.
>
> Arthur is a member of the Free Society Collective and
> Black Sheep Books collective, and has been involved in
> a variety of media projects. He worked as an organizer
> for several Indymedia projects, produced two
> documentaries on the anti-globalization movement, has
> been involved in community radio news programming, and
> worked with a variety of nonprofit and progressive
> organizations to develop strategy and technological
> solutions for their needs. Arthur has taught at the
> Institute for Social Ecology, and currently programs
> for a living.
>
> WOMEN, THE BODY, AND CAPITALIST ACCUMULATION
> Silvia Federici
>
> This talk will discuss the function of female labor
> and the female body in the process of capitalist
> accumulation, and the reproduction of the working
> class. In addition, it will look at the struggle women
> have made on the terrain of reproduction, and the
> importance of a feminist viewpoint for both
> anti-capitalist movements and the construction of a
> nonexploitative society.
>
> Silvia is a longtime feminist activist and teacher.
> She has taught at the University of Port harcourt
> (Nigeria) and Hofstra University. Silvia is the author
> of many essays on culture, education, and women?s
> struggles. Her books include: "Caliban and the Witch:
> Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation,"
> "Enduring Western Civilization: The Construction of
> Western Civilization and Its 'Others'" (editor); "A
> Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles against Structural
> Adjustment in African Universities" (co-editor); and
> "African Visions: Literary Images, Political Change,
> and Social Struggles in Contemporary Africa"
> (co-editor).
>
> THE ENCLOSURE OF THE COMMONS--AND STEALING IT BACK
> Shiri Pasternak and George Caffentzis
>
> The commons and common property have revived in
> antagonism with the rise of neoliberalism, and provide
> an important political lingua franca for anarchists,
> ecologists, and Marxists. This co-presentation will
> look at property rights and privatization while
> surveying examples of the criminalization of
> collectivity; it will also examine how the robbery of
> the commons concept is taking place. Property rights
> regimes expose the inequalities of society;
> intellectual property rights regimes especially
> denaturalize the way things are owned and distributed.
> By comparing property rights systems around the world,
> we can see how property is not a "thing" but a social
> relationship, and a way of being in and knowing the
> world. Underpinning global privatization processes and
> colonization, the expansion of private property rights
> around the world threatens to destroy knowledge forms
> and community economy. But like material commons,
> these powerful common concepts can be enclosed too,
> and their "natural heirs" can be dispersed with
> nothing in their heads and hands! This is happening to
> the concept of commons and common property. This talk
> will also suggest some steps to stop the robbery of
> the commons and put forward a proposal for moving away
> from the public/private binary toward a radical
> commons.
>
> Shiri is a freelance writer and researcher based in
> Toronto, and the founder of the Property Taskforce
> think tank (www.propertytaskforce.org). She is a
> research associate at the Polis Project on Ecological
> Governance, and the former associate director of the
> Forum on Privatization and the Public Domain. Shiri is
> currently working on a direct democracy project with a
> small collective in Toronto, and researching
> co-optations of commons and common property movements.
>
> George is a member of the Midnight Notes Collective
> and a professor of philosophy at the University of
> Southern Maine. An e-book of his recent political
> essays can be downloaded from www.radicalpolytics.org.
>
> STREET ART AND COUNTER POWER
> Josh MacPhee
>
> This workshop is an in-depth and serious discussion
> about the efficacy of street art and graffiti, and its
> role in social movements. Through an assessment of the
> role street art has played in four historical examples
> (Paris, France in 1968; Nicaragua in the 1970s; South
> Africa in the 1980s; and Buenos Aires, Argentina, in
> 2001-2003), Josh will lay the groundwork for the idea
> that street-level artistic acts have the potential to
> become a democratic and grassroots counterinstitution
> to dominant mainstream media. When done in isolation,
> acts of street expression often primarily play the
> role of social release, allowing an individual to vent
> frustration against an unjust system or act, but when
> done en masse, collectively, street art can take on a
> powerful role that is essential to insurrections and
> radical social movements. The first half of the
> workshop will consist of a multimedia presentation of
> the material, containing nearly a hundred images of
> political street art and graffiti from the last forty
> years. The second half will be a group discussion
> about how to improve the role(s) street art plays in
> our contemporary social movements.
>
> Josh is an artist and activist who co-edited the just
> released "Realizing the Impossible: Art against
> Authority," a collection of writings on art and
> anarchism for AK Press. He also is working with a
> group of artists to collectivize the radical art
> distribution system at justseeds.org.
>
> WHAT A CONCEPT CAN DO: PUTTING THEORY TO WORK
> Stephen Turpin
>
> When we struggle against oppressive structures and
> authoritarian regimes, one of the decisive factors in
> mobilizing resistance is our dissatisfaction with the
> conditions of the present. As obvious at this
> incipient dissatisfaction may be for many activists,
> the question of how to create a broader understanding
> of contemporary conditions remains a serious challenge
> for radical political movements. In order to
> articulate these conditions in an accessible,
> meaningful, and compelling analysis, radical political
> organizations must continually work to develop
> concepts that can connect structures of domination,
> modes of oppression, and various other forms of
> authority with our lived experiences. In this
> discussion, Stephen takes up the question of how
> concepts are created and what they can do in order to
> demonstrate how concepts can be used as weapons in
> anti-authoritarian struggles. Drawing from
> contemporary and historical examples, as well as from
> the theoretical work of Michel Foucault, Gilles
> Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, we will explore the
> politics of concept production, and see how
> theoretical constructions can embolden our political
> imaginary while undermining forms of oppression and
> domination.
>
> Stephen is a PhD candidate at the Ontario Institute
> for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto,
> where he is researching the spatial pedagogies and
> attendant politics of contemporary installation art
> and architecture. His other research interests include
> the history of aesthetics, organizational science and
> complexity theory, anarchist theory, digital activist
> practices, and contemporary French philosophy.
> Stephen?s political work is focused on issues of
> resource recuperation and mutation through
> organizations like Books to Prisoners and the
> production of "waste-based" art, architecture, and
> design.
>
> NEOLIBERALISM AND THE LOSS OF THE POLITICAL
> Walter Hergt
>
> The neoliberal ethos suggests that social freedom and
> human well-being are best realized within the
> capitalist market--the deeper the reach of market
> transactions and imperatives that regulate our social,
> spiritual, and political lives, the better.
> Neoliberalism thus eviscerates the public sphere in
> two ways: through the privatization of its spaces, and
> by recrafting citizenship as the action fulfilled by
> the private, consuming, or entrepreneurial individual.
> What then remains of politics, and specifically what
> are the opportunities for radicals to advance politics
> in a depoliticized world? This talk will look at the
> origins and character of neoliberalism, how
> neoliberalism recasts historically political
> questions, such as the attainment of social goods, and
> particularly how the consumption of entertainment
> masks increasingly reactionary and repressive social
> conditions. We must acknowledge that neoliberalism is
> not simply a concern for society at large but that it
> also shapes and constrains the political responses of
> radicals. Together, we will explore the pitfalls of
> potentially apolitical Left responses, and how our
> theory and practice might better reclaim politics and
> lead toward meaningful confrontations with capitalism.
>
> Walter is a member of the Free Society Collective, a
> collective member of Black Sheep Books, a carpenter,
> and a graduate student at City University New York. He
> has been involved with numerous organizing,
> independent media, and radical educational projects.


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