Blogs

In The Subject and Power, Michael Foucault lays out a framework for understanding relationships between how we are placed as subjects, power, institutionalized power, and struggles surrounding these issues [1].

This month there has been news from Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam.

The film Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a surreal comedy-fantasy depiction of a city run on entertainment in which a corrupt judge, who runs a company that took over a trolley car line, attempts to take over and buy the city. The fantasy is based in some reality.

It’s a tired truism that the workers movement in the US is floundering without a real base or path forward. A new generation of experimentation, struggle, and militants emerged from the ashes of the union’s most recent collaborationist strategy of labor-management partnership, contractualism, and labor’s historical parochialism of our-jobs-for-us.

There is an old argument amongst anarchists. The argument starts with the nature of unions, and ends with the conclusion that revolutionaries shouldn't attempt to build libertarian alternatives outside the unions, and instead should enter into the established unions and agitate for anarchism there.

How is liberation possible? Or alternatively how can it be brought about? It was likely the Russian Revolution or perhaps the failures of the Paris Commune that stimulated the left’s appetite for strategizing on these issues. Faced with possibilities laid in front of revolutionaries, and without a clear path ahead, the appeal of a coherent move, revolutionary judo, is enticing.

“Es siempre la descomposición del viejo régimen, del Viejo sistema de Estado, acentuado por el impulso de las masas escalavas hacia la libertad, lo que hace surgir y desarrolla esos elementos[1]”. Peter Arshinov, Historia del Movimiento Maknovista

Today society is in transition. Workers in the capitalist core are seeing the stability and benefits that many enjoyed slip away. The relationships that defined the capitalist periphery nations are fundamentally being transformed by deeper integration into the world economic system.

Militancy is revered on the left. Whether insurrectionary violence or mass militancy of social movements, the form and level of militancy serves as a marker of the relative power and progressive nature of a movement. Insurrectionists fetishize either mere acts alone (independently of who does them, groups or individuals) or fetishize violent acts as signs of collective will.

Recently a debate has arisen around the nature of workers, workers’ struggles, and unions amongst the broad libertarian or autonomist left[1]. The aftermath of Occupy in the United States has corresponded to a number of happenings that have pushed unions to the center of debate.

There was a clear split in the May Day celebration in Bologna.

Politics has never been far from the surface in the world of combat sports. Whether we think of the boxer Primo Carnera, an icon of fascism in the 1930s, or Muhammad Ali, an icon of black power in the 1960s. Or of the predominance of Jews in East London’s boxing clubs before and immediately after World War 2, often using their training against Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.

The shooting took place just as the new members of the cabinet were taking their oath. After two months of political stalemate, the cabinet, brought together through dubious deals (“inciucio”) by politicians and experts from both sides of the political spectrum, was beginning its mandate; meanwhile, a few meters away, gunshots were being fired.

This was a curtain-raiser for the following day, World Earth Day, when marches were held across Italy, including Sardinia, about the protection of unoccupied land and fertile ground.

Universal Credit is set to replace Job Seeker’s Allowance, Employment & Support Allowance, income support, housing benefit and tax credits. The single payment will be less than the five separate benefits, making it a welfare cut as well as a significant reform. It is going live with a trial at Ashton-under-Lyne jobcentre from 29 April.

Original post published here. Thanks to Luca Pisapia and La Privata Repubblica.

“Always historicize.” Fredric Jameson

It has been a week of renewed struggle at Milan’s San Raffaele Hospital, with mass meetings, rooftop occupations, demonstrations and fights with the police.

As of April 20, 2013, Giorgio Napolitano is the new elected president of the Italian Republic. The 87-year old was elected for his second mandate with 738 votes after 5 failed rounds of elections.* None of his predecessors had ever served for a second mandate: reelection of an outgoing President is an unprecedented event in the history of the Italian Republic.

Neighborhood organizing, maybe because it is currently En Vogue for many radicals, is usually not thought of within the context of America's history of social movements.

Bosses at a strawberry farm in Manolada, Ileia opened fire on workers demanding back pay on Wednesday afternoon. More than 20 people were wounded and taken to hospital after the attack. The majority of the workers were immigrants from Bangladesh.