your friends are my friends: they are nos amis
people this is an inchoate set of sentences provoked by the reading of à nos amis - which is the best piece of revolutionary theory since empire by h&n (btw tarnac despises toni - in fact they seem to have precious few amis - anarchists are ringards, anonymous are naive, autonomist marxists unlike themselves are enemies). it's a trip, it's a rush, it's the revolutionary text that alone is able to convey meaning to athens tahrir gezi oakland. today a nos amis knowingly or unknowingly inspires the black-clad neet youth to riot in Frankfurt (blockupy, the morning) and Milano (mayday 2015), and the resto of the EU. In fucking old europe, one of the liveliest and freshest revolutionary texts has been produced. not all is lost. financial, neoliberal, rentier capitalism has not won the day. the oligarchy is not safe. so the book by coupat and his comrades must be read and discussed widely. because it deals with a historical present of opportunity (political instability and disaffection everywhere) and a recent past of partial defeats: the insurrection came, but not the revolution. the book's most persuasive points are: a revolution is needed and we need to organize destituent power in a certain way - we need to prepare for the ecological crisis - the left is dead: its remnants with their empty rhetoric actually prevent the mass activation of sectors of the population and stymieing its rebelliousness and undermining attempts to overthrow the state. the least persuasive: the city and everything urban sucks, real democracy is for fools, freedom is the negation of what it says, the west is evil, we are the Party and we're invisible - crude marxist theory is never far (the over-repetition of certain 70s terms has zeliged me into use the word bourgeois back again, for instance) - a certain excommunicating style typical of situationism permeates all the writing - the Party wants you to be happy, but how? - man, what's up with all that agamben? i'd love to hear your views on this fundamental work of political thought. best ciaos to maydayers all over the world (i kept track of milano, istanbul, wuppertal, chicago, glasgow, tokyo, melbourne, oakland - tell me other protest highlights on international workers' day in 2015 on my email, if you care to share) luv n rev lx # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: Guardian > Irvine Welsh > Labour risks failing the English -- just like it did the Scottish Did
"What gave me, and many on the left, the biggest problem with Scottish independence, was the idea that we were running out on our English comrades, leaving them to the mercy of a built-in Tory power block. " Reading as a Canadian, this hits home. Losing the Quebec / sovereignist left in the bigger Canadian picture would be a disaster, and a Quebec separation would add the nightmare of a physically-split have-not Maritimes, ripe for nothing so much as US absorption (although some radical leftists out there dream of independence as well, conservatives seem to have the upper hand even in harnessing the independence spirit). The idea of an independent Quebec also raises the hackles of the conservative west which rattles its oil-powered sabres about creating an independent conservative nation in response. Moreover, the Quebec independence movement was always stuck in a quandary between recognizing their own colonization by the English (-Canadians and -Americans), without acknowledging their own identity as a colonizing force as well. The question of Aboriginal secession from a separate Quebec is enough to get tempers flaring in any discussion of Quebec sovereignty. I think Scotland lacks this complexity. Now Quebec's left has moved in the opposite direction from Scotland's, especially after the racist "reasonable accommodation" debate revealed that the rural elements of the Parti Quebecois were actually extremely Xenophobic. With their "Charter of Values" they chased a muslim MLA out of their caucus and alienated the multicultural elements in their party, small as they were. Quebec has now moved to a Liberal government provincially and abandoned the Bloc Quebecois for the (sort-of-like-Labour) NDP federally, which, as I said, is the opposite of what's happened in Scotland. The left is actually having some great success fighting tuition raises, etc, so it's not like the fight's gone out of them. -- * WHERE'S MY ARTICLE, WORLD? http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Flick_Harrison * FLICK's WEBSITE: http://www.flickharrison.com Zero for Conduct ^| Grab this Headline Animator # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
May Day 2015 Status Update | Networked Labour
Emancipation, Knowledge, and Production through Peer to Peer Co-Operation Research Networked Labour project was kicked off as an outcome of an international seminar held in Amsterdam between 7-9 May 2013. The seminar was initially supported by Networked Politics, transform! europe, Transnational Institute and IGOPNET (Institut de Govern the Pol??tiques P??bliques). At the end of the seminar several ideas have emerged one of which was to improve a web space and try to transform it into a transnational and distributed network space through which we could build new ties and expand our nets of collaboration. Collaborative learning of networks, organising, and emancipation May 2013 and May 2015 period has been an intense analytical, political, cultural, ecological and practical co-learning of the nature of changing world of labour and production, emerging new movements, political actors, old-new politics, and mode of thoughts. We have discussed, and exchanged theoretical, political and practical knowledge and ideas on these topics as well as in relation to the accelerating developments in the ICTs, using mainly the Networked Labour e-mail list, hoping such efforts and collaboration would create new synergies by bringing together contributors, observers and participants to the recent social changes, innovation, movements, protests, and mobilizations, and believing that this would enable us to increase our collective understanding of the new possibilities emerging in front of all of us for broader radical social change. May Day 2015, status update: Towards an emancipatory co-operation research unit How to build sort of an integrated and p2p counter ???operation research??? unit, that would be focusing on intelligence, creative action and media design for global emancipation of labour have become clear since May 2013, after exactly two years. Had to spend enormous time and energy on learning ???how-to???s of complex technical aspects of web-mastering craft and the craft of building something ???truly??? independent and autonomous from any political, ideological, state, or corporate influence, while staying genuinely being cooperative and political, in a useful and productive way, one might get exhausted. As a facilitator have I become more and more aware of the fact that such approach would run the risk to stay isolated, unproductive under heavy burden and setting for own death in isolated solo work, without coming up that would be something working and used. Taking such risk caused by the huge costs of the oppressing and co-optative systemic ???externalities??? on the one hand, and by problematic ???internalities??? like tendency to enclose inward and generate entropy out of hyperactivity on the other, however, becomes inevitable to achieve something that would sincerely and genuinely focus on the target like global emancipation with precision. Without producing degenerative contradictions at the code level, by Machiavellian or Jakobin politics. Hence, have I been more than aware of the fact that one can hardly expect any organic cooperation under such conditions, when old is dying and the new can not be born. Alternative which has been the most important part embedded in the idea of ???networked labour??? from the beginning, and has gained momentum globally. So, in last two years Networked Labour has been developed as a modular and integrated co-operative project. The current status of the various parts and modules of the project, that are still needed to be developed and integrated to others can be seen below. As you will see such co-operative functions are built-in parts of the design. Web-portal: http://www.networkedlabour.net/Peer and co-operative learning platform (test): http://networkedlabour.networg.nl/moodle/ Open Value Network (test): http://nrp.webfactional.com/ Here is the cooperative funding campaign launched on coopfunding.net (though needs to be updated): https://www.coopfunding.net/en/campaigns/global-networked-labour-union/ Any opinion suggestion, critic, and solidarity as always, is more then welcome. And if you are interested in joining or following this open discussion and development trajectory you can do this by simply choosing any one or more channels listed below. Facebook Page: The Facebook page is a tool for expanding in the debate by spreading calls, papers, events, and other info posted on our blog or the email list, within the groups of the embedded social network on our web site etc. While we could expand in the public sphere, in return we would be able to get feed*backs and info from Facebook to the blog and so on. Facebook Group: Facebook groups are very useful to expand and strengthen ties amongst the nodes, by allowing a continuous exchange,. debate, so producing and sharing information. Along the day. Scoop.It: Is a app to harvest links from the Net and very useful in creating an increased ripple effect when you want to spread viral via your online networks. When
Guardian > Irvine Welsh > Labour risks failing the English -- just like it did the Scottish Did
< http://www.theguardian.com/politics/commentisfree/2015/may/07/labour-risks-failing-the-english-just-like-it-did-the-scottish > Labour risks failing the English - just like it did the Scottish Thursday 7 May 2015 07.00 BST Last modified on Friday 8 May 2015 15.57 BST Irvine Welsh The UK is now a pointless entity, existing solely to protect entrenched privilege and continue the transference of the country's resources to a global elite. For most citizens it's a failed state, which cannot guarantee social progress, a decent education, the opportunity for useful employment or a debt-free life. With Scotland cast in the role as the conscience of Britain, or a running sore on its politics (delete to taste), as it continues to both manoeuvre and be manoeuvred out the UK door, the unionist rightwing desperately proclaim that the Scots have "gone mad". Neoliberalism, austerity, the preservation and protection of a secretive nonce ruling class, and the destruction of a Britain founded on the welfare state: it seems inherently sane to want independence from all of that. The real madness lies in tolerating this twisted nonsense, while assuming it's going to fix itself. If it could, it already would have done so. Ed Miliband proclaimed, to party conference Groundhog Day cheers, that Labour would abolish the House of Lords. But there is no inherent desire from Westminster parties for major constitutional reform. The UK can't go for the full-out federalism it probably needs to save it: that just wouldn't play in the populous south-east region, financially bloated with private money from Russian and Saudi oligarchs on the back of the public investment by the rest of UK, through our unitary state. So don't look for real change there, expect more of the same anti-immigrant drivel that's been churned out for years. (It's not really the billionaires that are driving property prices up, and working people out of the capital, it's those pesky minimum-wage Polish cleaners.) That the Conservatives, as Lord Forsyth admits, are now overtly abandoning Scotland in order to shore up core support in the south, should surprise nobody. One of the biggest myths is that those "unionists" actually care about the union. If they can't have it on their own terms, it's little more than an inconvenience to them. Bottom line: they want to win elections. If you are a Scottish Tory the news that you do not matter to your party ought to have registered years ago. But the Conservatives now have nothing to lose by alienating their remaining Scottish voters; for Labour, who opted to follow suit by hanging Jim Murphy out to dry, with Miliband, Balls and Umunna literally queuing up to publicly humiliate him, it's much more serious. Of course, Labour had already made the massive tactical error of standing shoulder to shoulder with the Conservatives in Better Together, during the seismic referendum campaign. This greatly hastened a secular decline, giving generations of Scottish leftists the excuse to jump ship. For many Scots, publicly supporting the SNP even last year would have felt like taking your secret lover to your long-term partner's funeral. Once it was confirmed that this partner had been screwing around with your much hated, corpulent boss for years, that outing turned from one of shame into a joyous party. With the devo max ship probably having sailed, Scottish Labour are now in the position of fighting the Tories to be unionism's top dogs north of the border. But for the London-based parties, Scotland is now about overt posturing while drawing everything towards the steady conclusion of political separatism. The real emerging issue is about the sort of democracy people want to build in England, and the attendant struggle for English national identity. We have an avaricious pro-establishment rightwing nationalism playing the Johnny Foreigner card in all its manifestations, in order to provide easy non-answers to the more gullible subjects. This Greater Englandism has replaced Britishness as the major cultural force in the south, and it has redrawn the border, de facto excluding Scotland. With the Tory/Ukip/establishment right calling the shots on the issue of English national identity, the left has been way off the pace, and for understandable reasons. In any grossly inequitable society the real, substantive political cleavage must always be class and wealth, and there is the natural tendency to be suspicious of anything that seems to cut across that divide. So while rightwingers regard Scottish nationalism as some kind of Marxist, separatist threat to the empire, the English left have traditionally tended to view it as a reactionary smokescreen with poor, gullible Scots being bamboozled by opportunists
Wireless After the End of the WWW
Dear Nettime, I thought the following short conversation/interview I recently conducted with the artists Dennis de Del and Roel Roscam Abbing might be of interest to the list. It covers their currently work on post-digital, wireless, radio, DIY and other critical media topics. Cheers, - Wireless After the End of the WWW: A Conversation with Dennis de Del and Roel Roscam Abbing For the 2015 Fiber Festival (http://2015.fiberfestival.nl/), Michael Dieter spoke with the Rotterdam-based artist researchers Dennis de Bel and Roel Roscam Abbing about their current project on radio transmissions and wireless technologies. At the event, they will run a workshop ‘Write the Wave’ which explores the possibilities for reutilizing the radio spectrum as a new commons in the forthcoming ‘digital radio switchover’. The conversation took place on May 1st at Open Coop, Amsterdam. Michael Dieter (MD): Can I start by asking you a bit about the workshop? What sort of things will you be doing at the Fiber Festival? Roel Roscam Abbing (RRA): We want to start the workshop with giving the participants an insight in what happens with radio signal all around us, everywhere; everything that has no strings attached (wireless) is basically using radio technology, so it’s nice to give the people an impression of what is happening. For the Fiber Festival in Amsterdam, we want to scan the spectrum around the A Lab space, we want to listen to the ferries, to the air traffic into Schiphol airport; well, everything up to the GSM 3G signals which we can hear. MD: And the idea is that then you’ll also build transmitters in the workshop to use the FM spectrum, but for data? RRA: We have not really decided which spectrum we’ll use. Generally the lower in the spectrum you go, towards 1MHz and lower, the further you can reach, but the larger your equipment needs to be. The antenna always has a relation to the size of the physical wave; in the case of 1MHz, it’s 300 meters. So then you take 1/100 of that you have a three meter antenna, so for FM it would be 100 times smaller, it’s around a 100MHz range, but then you have interference of radio stations. Dennis de Bel (DB): We want to create devices that can be parallel to the devices we already have in our pockets and then create some sort of a parallel network based on existing consumer hardware, but solder it yourself from scratch. Therefore, we still have to decide what’s going to be practical in the workshop. MD: Do you have a background in radio? DB/RRA: No, no, no… RRA: We always start working with something that we know nothing about and then you dive straight into it. DB: Then you ‘die’ straight into it. MD: So how did you come to work on radio transmission? RRA: We came from different backgrounds. Personally I was researched a lot into the physical infrastructure of the internet and sort of the politics behind that and the implications. I did a few projects and as I was reading about the history of telecommunications, there was this recurrent theme when it came to power over networks. That wireless managed to give an alternative to people who did not have power over cables. At the end of the 19th century, the British had the entire world connected to London. They had all the islands and geopolitical sweet spots that they needed for their shipping network, like the Rock of Gibraltar, and could use these to run that vast cable network. The competing European powers also wanted private communication networks to connect to their colonies, but had a hard time doing so because they couldn’t make direct connections. Because of this their telegrams flowed partly through British cables which made it possible for the British to censor or eavesdrop messages or cut it off when they found it inappropriate but then radio happened. So Germany and France were excited and invested a lot into radio technology to make direct links to the colonies so they would not need to rely on British cables anymore. From that moment on you see that wireless versus wired is a bit of a recurring trend so when I started thinking about network infrastructures my interest drifted towards wireless because of the different way of how things can be done.. one can own cables but one can't own radio waves.. And yeah then you also realize there was already an internet as we know it, you already had radio amateurs making worldwide with data connections via radio in the 80s; a bit of forgotten history about a technology that we are only familiar with in the form of Giel Beelen and 3FM. MD: This workshop, of course, is also interesting from the context of critical media theory that runs alongside the history that you are tracing. With Bertolt Brecht’s famous essay on radio picked up by Hans Magnus Enzensberger and then Jean Baudrillard’s response to that, the technology inspired an ongoing discussion on the ‘two faced’ aspects of media and how it always seemed to end up in another centralized arrangeme
Aesthetics of Crisis
[ On Tuesday, the French National Assembly passed a law granting the state sweeping powers of surveillance in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. On Wednesday, the city council of Chicago passed the first US law granting reparations to African Americans tortured by the city's own police force. I discuss the backgrounds of these two events in the article below, which was just published in the 20th anniversary edition of the Austrian art journal Springerin. But the scale I am really dealing with here is neither global nor national nor even metropolitan. It's intimate. The article asks what happens, in you, when the normative structures of justice break down entirely. ] THE AESTHETICS OF CRISIS Art in the Arrested Democracies A large body of research in the social sciences shows that about once every forty years industrial capitalism is disrupted by a major crisis, in the course of which structural elements of the social order undergo slow but fundamental change. The 1930s were marked by that kind of crisis, like the 1970s. Today we are again experiencing a major crisis of capitalism.[1] There is much to be said about the present situation, but here I want to focus on the experience of crisis, or what I'll call the aesthetics of crisis. So I'm going to ask some very subjective questions. How does the crisis feel? What kinds of changes does it bring into one's orientation and sense of self? What kinds of affects does it generate, and how do they circulate among other people? How is the crisis expressed and transmitted? What are the cultural consequences of these expressions? These questions don't have right or wrong answers. They are ethical questions, requiring each of us to ask about the meaning of intimate experiences which are very different in each country, at each class level and for each person. Now, to speak of aesthetics is to speak of art. Yet what I'm looking for can't be reduced to the art object. Instead, I'll refer to what Raymond Williams called "structures of feeling." By that phrase he meant an emergent set of attitudes, of likes and dislikes, enthusiasms and hesitations, insights and constitutive blindnesses that allow people to recognize each other as participating in a shared present, as being on the cusp of something that only they can fully grasp and bring into being. Williams writes: "We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and inter-relating continuity."[2] What he's talking about is something so subtle and uncertain that one can well imagine it takes an artwork to even point to such things, and to conjure them up in forms tangible enough to discuss. The aesthetics of crisis is therefore about the forms through which an emergent process of social change becomes perceptible and sensible. By knitting together a certain atmosphere, a range of images, a sequence of rhythms, a set of situations, presuppositions, conflicts and hopes, an artwork can evoke an incipient structure of feeling for a particular group at a particular moment, or for a whole generation. Everyone knows the feeling of potential you can have before an artwork or a performance that seems to be expressing what's on the tip of your tongue. In Turkey recently, during the Gezi Park demonstrations, a structure of feeling was enacted by the performance artist Erdem Gündüz, who became known as the "standing man." After the violent repression of the protests, he just stood there in public, stopped still, arrested, unmoving. Everyone could sense the potential of resistance he embodied. Soon his performance was adopted and transformed by thousands of people, who stood in public, reading. Reading Kafka, for instance, under the gaze of the police. So we're talking about aesthetics as a structure of feeling, for a group and especially for a generation. But I'm going to throw in a twist. I'm going to ask about the moments when structures of feeling break down, so that what we sense is not their presence but their absence, their emptiness, their futility. What's more, I want to suggest that there is a structure of the breakdown itself. This broken structure must somehow be given by the dysfunction or collapse of society's most overarching law. In the case of the capitalist democracies, that law is economic. Strange as it may seem, there are people from other generations who have thought about exactly these issues. Like an American Marxist you probably never heard of, James O'Connor. He lived through the crisis of the welfare state in the 1970s and analyzed it as a collapse of legitimacy.[3] Then he went on to investigate some of the lasting consequences. His key insight was that capitalism - a system based on the producti
Re: a graceful exit
After considering these and other options, and trying to imagine how we could 'upgrade' nettime's creaky infrastructure so that it'd at least have a chance, we've reluctantly come to the conclusion that it would be better to make a graceful exit. It made me think back to a book that resides on one of the book shelves in my house De l?autodissolution des avant-gardes ?ditions Galil?e en 1980 The references of this study are mostly French, but the subject matter is of course international and local everywhere http://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?rubrique64 Manifestes d?autodissolution des avant-gardes [1] : ? 1 - Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1871 ? 2 - Premi?re Internationale, Philadelphie, 1876 ? 3 - Ecole symboliste, Paris, 1891 ? 4 - Groupe de l?Abbaye de Cr?teil, 1908 ? 5 - Deuxi?me Internationale, 1914 ? 6 - Groupe de Zimmerwald, Moscou, 1919 ? 7 - Dada, 1921 et 1922 ? 8 - Dada, 1923 ? 9 - Groupe "R?volution", Allemagne, 1923 ? 10 - Troisi?me Internationale, 1943 ? 11 - Arguments I, 1962 ? 12 - Arguments II, 1962 ? 13 - Socialisme ou Barbarie, 1967 ? 14 - B.A.P.U. de Strasbourg, 1967 ? 15 - U.N.E.F., 1967 ? 16 - Surr?alisme, 1969 ? 17 - Internationale situationniste, 1971 ? 18 - Groupe "Oser lutter", Paris, 1972 ? 19 - Librairie "La Vieille Taupe", 1972 ? 20 - Gauche prol?tarienne, 1973 ? 21 - Echanges et dialogues, Paris, 1975 ? 22 - Actuel, 1975 ? 23 - Fondation Brigitte-Bardot, 1976 ? 24 - M.L.A.C., Aix-en-Provence, 1976 ? 25 - Section du XVIIe Art de Paris de la L.C.R., 1977 ? 26 - Syndicat d??leveurs du Charolais, 1977 ? 27 - H?pital psychiatrique de Triestre, 1977 ? 28 - Politique-Hebdo, 1978 ? 29 - Sex Pistols, 1978 ? 30 - Th??tre Mouffetard, 1978 ? 31 - L?ordinaire du psychanaliste, 1978 ? 32 - Les cahiers du Grif, Bruxelles, 1978 ? 33 - Antirouille, 1979 ? 34 - Biocoop de Rambouillet, 1979 ? 35 - C.E.P.R.E.G., Paris, 1979 ? 36 - Ecole freudienne de Paris, 1980 ? 37 - Avant-gardisme, Panderma, 1958 ? 38 - Ligue des communistes, Engels, 1885 ? 39 - Eglise romaine, Hans K?ng, 1967 ? 40 - Etat fran?ais, Bakounine, 1871 Autres manifestes d?autodissolution : ? 41 - Section carr?ment anti-Le Pen/R?seau d??tude, de Formation et de Lutte contre l?Extr?me droite et la X?nophobie (SCALP-Reflex), Janvier 2013 ? 42 - Non Fides, Novembre 2009 ? 43 - Indymedia Paris, Novembre 2014 ? 44 - Organisation Libertaire et Sociale, D?cembre 2014 "Bien de se retrouver ensemble" (( so nettime finds itself in good company as a movement is a means to something and not an end in itself Let me note that the Dutch Provo movement of the mid-sixties dissolved itself in the summer of 1967 that I remember having assisted at several auto-dissolutions like one of the very early squatters organisations in Amsterdam 'Woningburo de Kraker' (1968-1969) and the Aktiegroep Nieuwmarkt (1970-1976), the last one with a real manifesto, I just check and on a state sponsored web-site (het geheugenvannederland/the memoryofthenetherlands) one can still find that manifesto: http://www.geheugenvannederland.nl/?/nl/items/NAGO02:IISG-30051002734751/ What does it say: "OPGEHEVEN? al sinds enige tijd door omstandigheden/ AKTIEGROEP NIEUWMARKT/ als het er om gaat dat wij ons eigen leven bepalen, inplaats van geleefd te worden, dan moeten wij niet koste wat kost groepen in stand houden, als de omstandigheden waaruit die groepen zijn voortgekomen, gewijzigd zijn. Het gaat om de beweging niet om de groep. VOORTGEZET/ is de aktie: in en rondom de Nieuwmarktbuurt zijn vele gebouwen en woningen bezet, zelf zijn ingrijpende verbouwingen ter hand genomen, muren zijn gemetseld, leiding gelegd, enz. BEDREIGD voelen zich de autoriteiten die de heersende wanorde in stand willen houden... " DISSOLVED already for some time because of circumstances ACTION GROUP NIEUWMARKT (a neighbourhood in the inner town of Amsterdam where there was fierce resistance against demolition of (squatted) and other houses for a new subway system in the early seventies) when we opt for controlling our own lives in stead of being lived, we must not at all cost preserve groups, when the circumstances from which these groups has risen, have changed. It is about the movement, not about the group. CONTINUED the actio: in and around the Nieuwmarkt neighbourhood many buildings and houses are squatted, serious reconstructions have been taken to hand, waal have been laid, cables fixed, etc. THREATENED are those authorities that try to keep the disorder they produce in tact...? What we did at that time was dissolve an action group that had to confront a major challenge over several years (ending in a series of ev
