Grassroots political militants: Banlieusards and politics
French cities burst back into flames after President Sarkozy’s election on a ‘clean the scum off the streets with a high-pressure hose’ ticket. It won't be the last time, as long as the factors necessitating the mass revolt of November 2005 remain in place, in France and elsewhere. This text, based on Emilio Quadrelli's interviews in the Paris banlieues during and after the 2005 events, overthrows the whole spectrum of slurs against the racialised, pathologised racaille. The myth of an all-boy riot is trashed by female combatant leaders, and leftist commonplaces incur special scorn, above all those about the inarticulate cry for help of the ‘socially excluded’.
Go home, white boy, we don’t need you – Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, Voice of Freedom
Incipit. things and words*
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The lessons of 2011: Three theses on organisation
Rodrigo Nunes looks at the social movements of 2011 and their implications for organising, rejecting the opposite conceptions of the vanguardist party and the loose virtual network.
2011 was an exceptional year, one which could – hopefully – come to be remembered in the same breath as 1968 and 1848. That being so will depend on whether the coming years will fulfil its promise, making it appear retrospectively as the start of something. Understanding the nature of that promise, and the means by which it can be fulfilled, therefore, are part and parcel of making that happen.
Rip-roaring markets and massive inequality - an interview with Paul Mason
Newsnight's engaged economics editor and author of Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere, talks to Mute's Peter Carty about global revolution, Chinese female biker gangs and ghosts
Paul Mason is an unusual BBC journalist. He has an intellectual approach to his work which goes far beyond soundbites and rehashes from other mainstream media outlets. While he doesn’t identify himself with any particular political line, his professional interest in the current crisis of capitalism extends to a variety of theoretical perspectives from the left.
Adventures in the sausage factory: a cursory overview of UK university struggles, November 2010 – July 2011
Nearly a year after the attenuation of a wave of further and higher education struggles against state-led ‘decomposition’, Danny Hayward looks back at the faultlines within this resistance and the future which follows its defeat
Decomposing Higher Education: Stage One
What next for education struggles?
After August’s riots and with a student demonstration on 9 November and a national strike on 30 November planned Sarah Taylor asks, will the contradictions of last year’s student movement resolve or simply extend themselves?
Last year was so simple. The government wanted to triple fees and there was a vote coming up. Smashing Millbank made everything seem possible. Demonstrations stopped going where they were told, school students played truant to run riot in Oxford Street, occupations at universities became the norm. But the vote was lost. Tired and cold, we went home and didn’t come back.
What the RFID is that?
Brian Ashton zooms in on the microscopic technologies surveilling and shaping working lives, part of a series of articles on logistics, workplace surveillance and national security for Mute magazine
Quote:
You already have zero privacy. Get over it. – Scott McNally, Chief Executive of Sun Microsystems1
- 1. New York Times, 3 March, 1999.
Murdoch phone-hack shocker: Capitalism eats itself - James Heartfield
The phone-hacking scandal hasn't only revealed the true sleaziness of Britain's establishment, but also the resounding hollowness of a post-ideological elite held together by little more than self-interest - writes James Heartfield
*60 Metropolitan Police officers have widened their investigation of News International to take in the rest of the national press.
*The Government has appointed the Right Honorable Lord Justice Leveson to enquire into standards in the Press, and proposals include a licensing system for journalists and newspapers.
Updates from the Greek Squares and People's Assemblies
Submitted by Django on Jul 4 2011 20:13
Reports from the last week of struggle against austerity in Greece.
Republished from Mute
Saturday, 9 July 2011
The Mayor of Athens yesterday stated that he intends to remove the 'slums' from Syntagma square. At the moment policing in the square is still low key...
Casa Pound and the new radical right in Italy
You'd be forgiven for thinking that a group of zine-publishing techie squatters into rock music, baiting the state and defending the working class were part of the anarchist left. But, writes the Moyote Project, Italy's Casa Pound movement is symptomatic of the radical right's growing ability to assimilate progressive agendas into a toxic and populist political brew.
In 1973 the Italian neo-fascist group Nuova Destra (New Right) started publishing the DIY fanzine The Voice from the Sewer, as an ironic response to the left-wing slogan that incited (neo)fascists to return to the only place that they possibly could have emerged from.
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