tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14532613885189452472024-02-22T12:18:50.526+02:00hydrarchy...seeking the red thread... so that we can weave a red threatUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger90125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1453261388518945247.post-79639031471504004722013-05-07T11:31:00.000+02:002013-05-07T11:32:13.377+02:00The Urban Peripheries: Counter-Powers from Below?by Raúl Zibechi, Chapter 15, from Territories in Resistance
If a specter is haunting Latin American elites at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is for sure living in the peripheries of the large cities. The main challenges to the dominant system in the last two decades have emerged from the heart of the poor urban peripheries.
Click here to download this essay in Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1453261388518945247.post-51030217557107462312012-10-16T06:11:00.001+02:002012-10-16T06:11:12.395+02:00The neighborhood is the new factoryby Liz Mason-Deese, Viewpoint Magazine
In 2001, Argentina suffered an economic crisis, similar to the one that much of the world is experiencing today. After more than a decade of IMF-mandated structural adjustment, which only deepened poverty and unemployment, the government was forced to default on over $100 billion of public debt and declared a state of emergency in an attempt to calm Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1453261388518945247.post-18454067955123350752012-10-04T09:05:00.003+02:002012-10-04T09:05:34.871+02:00The Right against the cityby Antonis Vradis, Antipode
“Reclaim our cities”. “Self-organise”. “Take neighbourhood action”. Consider these slogans for a moment. Sound familiar? Indeed they should, echoing as they do a body of scholarship (e.g. Amin and Thrift 2005; Butler 2012; Chatterton 2010; Dikeç 2001; Harvey 2003; Leontidou 2006; 2010; Marcuse 2009; Mayer 2009; Simone 2005) stemming from Henri Lefebvre’s (1996) idea Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1453261388518945247.post-20609680746711313042012-08-21T10:00:00.000+02:002012-08-21T10:04:29.689+02:00Senzeni Na?by Chris Rodrigues, Rolling Stone
By the time you read these words, the miners of Marikana will have long crossed the river Styx. Contemplate dear reader: These men with dirt in their pockets, their ears ringing with the noise of exploding lead, the holes through their bodies.
Imagine some nocturnal body of water. And a boat, with such passengers, steered by a ferryman with a sureUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1453261388518945247.post-89849899469628040772012-06-12T13:19:00.000+02:002012-06-19T13:28:35.540+02:00The day after the day after tomorrowby Antonis Vradis, City
The world is watching Greece: hands on smartphones, fingers on shutter buttons breathlessly waiting to capture and tweet the iconic Fall of the Euro…
In the minds of many the images are already there, alive and vivid: locked-up ATMs, angry crowds banging at empty bank building shutters Argentina-style, an overnight return to national currencies and then… then what?Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1453261388518945247.post-49407889812331644152012-06-08T11:45:00.001+02:002012-06-08T11:45:31.820+02:00Restore Democracy! Etienne Balibar and Others Declare Solidarity With Greek LeftFollowing on the chain of events that, in just three years have plunged Greece into the abyss, everyone knows that the responsibility of the parties in office ever since 1974 is overwhelming. New Democracy (the Right) and PASOK (the Socialists) have not only maintained the system of corruption and privilege — they have benefitted from it and enabled Greece’s suppliers and creditors to profit Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1453261388518945247.post-3728989956544611762012-01-08T12:04:00.000+02:002012-01-08T12:04:27.092+02:00Democracy as a Community Lifeby Achille Mbembe, Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism
What might be the conditions of a radical, future-oriented politics in contemporary South Africa? Interrogating the salience of wealth and property, race and difference as central idioms in the framing and naming of ongoing social struggles, Achille Mbembe investigates the possibility of reimagining democracy not only as a form of Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1453261388518945247.post-47722672110900957432011-10-26T13:00:00.000+02:002011-10-26T13:00:22.780+02:00No More Bubble Gumby Mike Davis, Los Angeles Review of Books
Who could have envisioned Occupy Wall Street and its sudden wildflower-like profusion in cities large and small?
John Carpenter could have, and did. Almost a quarter of a century ago (1988), the master of date-night terror (Halloween, The Thing), wrote and directed They Live, depicting the Age of Reagan as a catastrophic alien invasion. In one of Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1453261388518945247.post-49651329219059527222011-10-26T12:59:00.000+02:002012-10-08T09:28:34.199+02:00On the Wall Street Occupationby Richard Pithouse, SACSIS
In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck's novel about the Great Depression, Tom Joad, the novel's central character, a man who has been made poor and who is on the run from the law, tells his mother in the climactic scene that: “I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and good rich land layin' fallow. Or maybe one guy with a million acres and aUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1453261388518945247.post-60429777950293679122011-09-23T15:11:00.000+02:002011-09-23T15:11:15.086+02:00The Weight of the Poor: Cornel West interviews Frances Fox PivenThe professor Glenn Beck loves to hate speaks with Cornel West about waitressing, black nationalism, how the radical right helped her define her politics, and why she’s gloomy about America’s future.
The conservative media stalwart Glenn Beck may be partially responsible for reinstating Frances Fox Piven into mainstream sociopolitical discourse. Nary a mention of Piven goes by without referring Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1453261388518945247.post-71264331739666148142011-08-22T21:53:00.000+02:002011-08-22T21:53:17.383+02:00What more could we want of ourselves!by Jacqueline Rose, The London Review of Books
The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg edited by Georg Adler, Peter Hudis and Annelies Laschitza, translated by George Shriver
Verso, 609 pp, £25.00, February 2011, ISBN 978 1 84467 453 4
We live in revolutionary times. I cannot imagine now what it would have been like to be thinking about Rosa Luxemburg if the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya had Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1453261388518945247.post-77924408262659529692011-08-13T11:23:00.000+02:002011-08-13T11:23:48.225+02:00A Nation of Shopkeepersby Peter Linebaugh, CounterPunch
I thought Napoleon said it. But no, it's in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776), book IV, section vii, part 3 (about half way through). Here's what he says, "To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1453261388518945247.post-64932348205399362322011-07-24T16:32:00.000+02:002011-07-24T16:32:59.662+02:00Fellow Prisonersby John Berger, Guernica
The wonderful American poet Adrienne Rich pointed out in a recent lecture about poetry that “this year, a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics finds that one out of every 136 residents of the United States is behind bars—many in jails, unconvicted.”
In the same lecture she quoted the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos:
In the field the last swallow had lingered lateUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1453261388518945247.post-4860839142434671692011-05-25T11:25:00.001+02:002011-05-25T11:25:48.768+02:00The Rationality of RebellionNigel Gibson, Seminar Presentation at the Centre for Sociological Research, University of Johannesburg, 25 May 2011
The Problem of Humanism
What is Fanon’s humanism, or better to say his new humanism? Simply put it is about putting invention into existence, or life into being. His is a living humanism. In Black Skin, Fanon speaks of this abstractly, he says, “yes to freedom no to exploitation”;Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1453261388518945247.post-65629963372558173852011-05-07T15:55:00.001+02:002011-05-07T15:55:55.955+02:00The Un-Shock Doctrineby Slavoj Žižek, Guernica
The Left today faces the difficult task of emphasizing that we are dealing with political economy—that there is nothing “natural” in the present crisis, that the existing global economic system relies on a series of political decisions—while simultaneously acknowledging that, insofar as we remain within the capitalist system, violating its rules will indeed cause Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1453261388518945247.post-8563008132870467792011-03-07T20:55:00.000+02:002011-03-07T20:56:26.787+02:00Tunisia, Egypt: When an Eastern Wind Sweeps Away The Wind of The Westby Alain Badiou, El KilomboUntil when will the idle and crepuscular West, the “international community” of those who still believe themselves to be the rulers of the world, continue to give lessons in good management and good behavior to the rest of the world? Is it not laughable to see well-paid and well-fed intellectuals, retreating soldiers of the capital-parliamentarism that serves us as a Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1453261388518945247.post-17667792856410604472011-02-24T08:31:00.000+02:002011-02-24T08:32:48.594+02:00Arab uprisings mark a turning point for the takingby Peter Hallward, The GuardianIn the late 1940s, Simone de Beauvoir was already bemoaning our tendency to "think that we are not the master of our destiny; we no longer hope to help make history, we are resigned to submitting to it". By the late 70s such regret, repackaged as celebration, had become the stuff of a growing consensus. By the late 80s, we were told that history itself had come to Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1453261388518945247.post-91229739970582514992011-02-19T11:03:00.001+02:002011-02-19T11:03:25.023+02:00Egypt and the revolution in our mindsby Nigel Gibson, Radical Africa‘What makes the lid blow off?’ Fanon asks in ‘The Wretched of the Earth’, reflecting on the revolution against French colonialism in Algeria 50 years ago and thinking about the future ‘African revolution.’ In Egypt, a country where 50 per cent of the population is under 30 years old and which has known no other regime than Mubarak’s state of emergency, with its Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1453261388518945247.post-4840966462386061982011-02-19T10:59:00.000+02:002011-02-19T10:59:46.179+02:00Revolution Comes Like a Thief in the Nightby Richard Pithouse, SACSISLife, ordinary life, is meant to follow certain rhythms. We grow, seasons change and we assume new positions in the world. When you have finished being a child you put away childish things and move on to the next stage of life. But there is a multitude of people in this world who cannot build a home, marry and care for their children and aging parents. There is a Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1453261388518945247.post-38020458844475947392011-02-01T15:22:00.000+02:002011-02-01T15:22:54.250+02:00In Egypt and Tunisia the will of the people is not a hollow clicheby Peter Hallward, The GuardianFrom revolutionary France and America to modern north Africa, this is a concept that can topple governmentsThe day after popular pressure forced Tunisia's autocratic president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali from power on 14 January, Egypt's government declared that it "respects the will of the Tunisian people". So did the governments of Yemen and Iran, and so did the Arab Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1453261388518945247.post-23466326643233354642011-02-01T15:18:00.000+02:002011-02-01T15:19:59.452+02:00Feminism And the Politics of the Commonsby Silvia Federici, The CommonerAt least since the Zapatistas took over the zócalo in San Cristobal de las Casas on December 31, 1993 to protest legislation dissolving the ejidal lands of Mexico, the concept of ‘the commons’ has been gaining popularity among the radical left, internationally and in the U.S., appearing as a basis for convergence among anarchists, Marxists, socialists, ecologists, Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1453261388518945247.post-74358026544962667442011-01-12T14:52:00.000+02:002011-01-12T14:54:30.178+02:00Meandering on the Semantical-Historical Paths of Communism and Commonsby Peter Linebaugh, The CommonerThe story begins at Blue Mountain Lake in the Adirondacks when, at a gathering of cultural workers for the commons and through no wish of their own, Peter and George Caffentzis were asked to speak about violence and the commons. Accordingly following dinner after what had been a chilly October day, they settled into armchairs by the fire and explained to the Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1453261388518945247.post-13021007870049806192010-11-24T13:09:00.000+02:002010-11-24T13:10:30.651+02:00The Politics of Dignity and the Politics of Povertyby John HollowayThis is the text and notes for a talk given in Nottingham.How far is Latin America from Nottingham? It depends on how you measure it. You can measure it in terms of a politics of poverty or you can measure it in terms of a politics of dignity.If we speak of a Pink Tide in the area, we must remember that Pink is not a primary colour, that what seems to be pink is in fact a blend ofUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1453261388518945247.post-4206153099056304342010-11-23T13:13:00.000+02:002010-11-23T13:16:24.057+02:00Governments and Movements: Autonomy or New Forms of Domination?by Raúl Zibechi, Envisioning a Post-Capitalist OrderThe end of 2008 marked the ten-year anniversary of Hugo Chávez's first electoral victory (December 6, 1998), which initiated a new period marked by the emergence of progressive and left governments in South America. His clinching of the presidency was the result of a long process of struggles from below, beginning in February 1989 with the Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1453261388518945247.post-41863360885152821302010-08-19T12:18:00.000+02:002010-08-19T12:20:56.598+02:00Serving Our Life Sentence in the Shacksby Zodwa Nsibande & S'bu Zikode, El KilomboPeople all over South Africa have been asking the leaders of Abahlali baseMjondolo as to why the government continues to ignore the demands of the shack dwellers. They have been asking why after all the marches, statements, reports and meetings the Kennedy Road settlement continues to get burnt down through the endless shack fires.They have been Unknownnoreply@blogger.com