VersoBooks.com

“The Sweetness of Place”: Kristin Ross on the Zad and NoTAV struggles VersoBooks.com
▻http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3262-the-sweetness-of-place-kristin-ross-on-the-zad-and-notav-struggles

Two struggles have come to define the ground of activism in mainland Europe: the zad (Zone À Défendre - or the zone to defend), and NoTAV (the No to Treno ad Alta Velocità rail line). Despite these struggles being little known in the English-speaking world, each offers a continuation of the kinds of localised, spatial conflict whose genealogy can be traced from the Paris Commune, through Sanrizuka in Japan, the Zapatistas in Mexico and Standing Rock in America, a form of struggle which has been analysed most forcefully in the work of David Harvey. 

In this extract from the introduction to the new ebook The Zad and NoTAV by the French collective Mauvaise Troupe, which offers English readers the first and most comprehensive narrative of the interlinked stories of the two movements, Kristin Ross offers an introduction to this “never-ending process of soldering together black bloc anarchists and nuns, retired farmers and vegan lesbian separatists, lawyers and autonomistas into a tenacious and effective community”.

▻https://seenthis.net/messages/413445

Save the Georg Lukács Archive ▻http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2554-history-has-a-habit-of-intruding-save-the-lukacs-archive

By this time he had become a major figure in the world of ideas and his early works were being translated and starting to influence the New Left. For a brief time, he was treated by the New Left as one of the leading exponents of the Humanist Marxism that Althusser attacked. While it is possible to agree with Althusser that there is no subject called ‘Mankind’ who has been alienated by capitalism, it is less clear whether Lukács had such a figure in mind in the 1920s. It can be argued that there a major differences between the theory of reification that was developed in History and Class Consciousness and Marx’s theory of alienation, which remained in an unpublished manuscript until the 1930s. Lukács commented on the need to clarify this relationship in 1967, yet this remains to be done.

Nonetheless, all theories of totality had become suspect by the 1980s. With the end of the Cold War and the liberals’ talk of the “End of History”, his themes about class consciousness, historical tendencies and totality looked as out of place as a Lada in a Ferrari showroom. To many he was an embarrassment. Yet in the period of failing banks and political polarisation, perhaps 1923 is more timely than 1989. History has a habit of intruding – which is a very Lukácsian thing to say.

Certainly today people want to understand how capitalism works as a whole, how it is linked to all aspects of life. With the integration of the economic and the ecological crises, the search for totality is taking on even wider dimensions than during previous periods in the history of capitalism. The career of Georg Lukács is well worth preserving under such conditions.

The Archive is invaluable in this respect. Lukács wrote in German and Hungarian, and much of his work is unpublished or untranslated – either into English or German. There is nowhere apart from the archive where scholars and political activists can access this work.

cc @prac_6 @brunhilde @pguilli

Action : ▻http://www.save-georg-lukacs-archive.org

To put it in a nutshell, we should strive for an independent future for the GLA at its historical place – the former flat of Georg Lukacs in Budapest.

Psst! Downloading Isn’t Stealing [for today]
VersoBooks.com
▻http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2575-psst-downloading-isn-t-stealing-for-today
Donc à télécharger AUJOURD’HUI !

In January 2013, Aaron Swartz, under arrest and threatened with thirty-five years’ imprisonment, committed suicide. He was twenty-six. But in his short life he had changed the world: reshaping the Internet, questioning our assumptions about intellectual property, and creating some of the tools we use in our daily online lives.

In this recently published collection of his writings—The Boy Who Could Change the World—Swartz displays his passion for and in-depth knowledge of intellectual property, copyright, and the architecture of the Internet. The Boy Who Could Change the World contains the life’s work of one of the most original minds of our time, whose tragic suicide shook the world.

In tribute to Aaron Swartz—and to mark the publication of his writings—we’ve made the following ebooks available for FREE download for one day only! Unfortunately we don’t have the North American rights to The Boy Who Could Change the World so this is book is NOT available for download in North America, but there are 5 other books to choose from!

“Mourning becomes the law”
Letter from Judith Butler, in Paris, Saturday 14th November
►http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2337-mourning-becomes-the-law-judith-butler-from-paris

It was interesting to me that Hollande announced three days of mourning as he tightened security controls - another way to read the title of Gillian Rose’s book, “mourning becomes the law.” Are we grieving or are we submitting to increasingly militarized state power and suspended democracy? How does the latter work more easily when it is sold as the former? The public days of mourning are to be three, but the state of emergency can last up to twelve days before the national assembly has to approve it.

“Mourning becomes the law”—Judith #Butler from Paris
►http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2337-mourning-becomes-the-law-judith-butler-from-paris
Letter from Judith Butler, in Paris, Saturday 14th November

My wager is that the discourse on liberty will be important to track in the coming days and weeks, and that it will have implications for the security state and the narrowing versions of democracy before us. One version of liberty is attacked by the enemy, another version is restricted by the state. The state defends the version of liberty attacked as the very heart of France, and yet suspends freedom of assembly ("the right to demonstrate") in the midst of its mourning and prepares for an even more thorough militarization of the police. The political question seems to be, what version of the right-wing will prevail in the coming elections? And what now becomes a permissable right-wing once le Pen becomes the “center”. Horrific, sad, and foreboding times, but hopefully we can still think and speak and act in the midst of it.

Mourning seems fully restricted within the national frame. The nearly 50 dead in Beirut from the day before are barely mentioned, and neither are the 111 in Palestine killed in the last weeks alone, or the scores in Ankara. Most people I know describe themseves as “at an impasse”, not able to think the situation through. One way to think about it may be to come up with a concept of transversal grief, to consider how the metrics of grievability work, why the cafe as target pulls at my heart in ways that other targets cannot. It seems that fear and rage may well turn into a fierce embrace of a police state. I suppose this is why I prefer those who find themselves at an impasse. That means that this will take some time to think through. It is difficult to think when one is appalled. It requires time, and those who are willing to take it with you - something that has a chance of happening in an unauthorized “rassemblement.”

#attentats #paris

Decoding the current war in Syria : The WikiLeaks Files - Robert Naiman
▻http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2219-decoding-the-current-war-in-syria-the-wikileaks-files

By 2014, the sectarian Sunni-Shia character of the civil war in Syria was bemoaned in the United States as an unfortunate development. But in December 2006, the man heading the US embassy in Syria advocated in a cable to the Secretary of State and the White House that the US government collaborate with Saudi Arabia and Egypt to promote sectarian conflict in Syria between Sunni and Shia as a means of destabilizing the Syrian government. At that time, no one in the US government could credibly have claimed innocence of the possible implications of such a policy. This cable was written at the height of the sectarian Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq, which the US military was unsuccessfully trying to contain. US public disgust with the sectarian civil war in Iraq unleashed by the US invasion had just cost Republicans control of Congress in the November 2006 election. The election result immediately precipitated the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense. No one working for the US government on foreign policy at the time could have been unaware of the implications of promoting Sunni-Shia sectarianism.

L’auteur évoque le plan de déstabilisation proposé dans le cable 06DAMASCUS5399_a (note : il faut absolument lire ce câble) :
▻https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06DAMASCUS5399_a.html

–- Vulnerability:

–- THE ALLIANCE WITH TEHRAN: Bashar is walking a fine line in his increasingly strong relations with Iran, seeking necessary support while not completely alienating Syria’s moderate Sunni Arab neighbors by being perceived as aiding Persian and fundamentalist Shia interests. Bashar’s decision to not attend the Talabani ) Ahmadinejad summit in Tehran following FM Moallem’s trip to Iraq can be seen as a manifestation of Bashar’s sensitivity to the Arab optic on his Iranian alliance.

–- Possible action:

–- PLAY ON SUNNI FEARS OF IRANIAN INFLUENCE: There are fears in Syria that the Iranians are active in both Shia proselytizing and conversion of, mostly poor, Sunnis. Though often exaggerated, such fears reflect an element of the Sunni community in Syria that is increasingly upset by and focused on the spread of Iranian influence in their country through activities ranging from mosque construction to business. Both the local Egyptian and Saudi missions here, (as well as prominent Syrian Sunni religious leaders), are giving increasing attention to the matter and we should coordinate more closely with their governments on ways to better publicize and focus regional attention on the issue.

#cablegate #wikileaks

Note : câble référencé ici en septembre 2013 :
▻http://seenthis.net/messages/177610

VersoBooks.com
▻http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2146-wolfgang-streeck-the-euro-a-political-error

Très important entretien accordé par Wolfgang Streeck le 7 juillet à l’Espresso et désormais disponible en anglais.

Wolfgang Streeck dirige l’Institut d’Etudes sociales Max Planck de Cologne - son livre « Du temps acheté » a récemment été publié par Gallimard.

‘The euro is not Europe’. Wolfgang Streeck suggests this as a basis for an accurate analysis of the negotiations over the Greek debt. ‘The equation between the monetary union and Europe is simply ideology, and serves to conceal prosaic interests’, the director of Cologne’s Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Societies explains.

The interests of the countries of Northern Europe, against those of the South; of international finance against the peoples of the Mediterranean; of the ‘market people’ [Marktvolk] against the ‘state people’ [Staatvolk]; of capitalism against democracy. For the author of Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, the Greek case in fact merely represents the latest variant of a process dissolving the postwar democratic capitalist system. That is, the system that had fought to hold democracy and capitalism together in a fragile and unstable combination, and which gave rise to a social pact that has now exploded.

Even in Europe. And precisely because of a European Union that has become ‘the engine of the liberalisation of European capitalism, a tool of neoliberalism’. And because of a single currency that serves ‘the market’s interests’. For Wolfgang Streeck, one of today’s most influential sociologists, if we are to get out of the vicious circle of a free-market Europe condemned to austerity, we must start by renouncing the euro as a single currency. With a new European Bretton Woods.

#monnaie #dette #Grèce #Allemagne #Etalon_Or #austérité

VersoBooks.com
▻http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2059-the-war-on-the-neoliberal-trinity-s-europe-paolo-ercolani-reviews-a

Indeed, in a book that is of fundamental importance for understanding our time, Globalization and Its Discontents, Stiglitz provided a precisely-detailed, incontrovertible analysis of the collapse of the countries (for instance Argentina) that were subject to the global troika (IMF, World Bank, WTO) in the 1990s. Whereas in those same years China, for example – one of the countries that disdainfully rejected these impositions (also because it was able to do so, in virtue of its military power) – laid the bases for it to explode onto the world stage as an economic power.

Around a decade later, after the unforeseeable developments of finance capitalism had witnessed the growth of precisely those countries who had opposed neoliberal dogmas (China, but also India and Brazil), it was now Europe’s turn not only to deal with a very serious and prolonged phase of stagnation and crisis, but also with the very same diktats with which economic theology claims to offer the route to salvation.

By means of a new and particular troika (the European Commission, the ECB and the IMF), the vague and incomplete entity that answers to the name “Europe” found itself faced with the most dramatic déjà vu of its recent history. It could ignore the past and submit to the diktats that had led to disaster and widespread poverty everywhere that they were applied, or else stand strong against them and construct an alternative solution.

#dette #austérité #Lapavitsas #Syriza #UE #FMI #grexit #Europe #nous_travaillons_actuellement_pour_l'Europe #BCE #Grèce

Chrono-cartography of the Paris Commune

By Miri Davidson / 18 May 2015

▻http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2001-chrono-cartography-of-the-paris-commune

http://versobooks-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/000005/957/04-map-paris-commune-1871-army-offensives-leopold-lambert-fbefa664d4585e8fc75d14a50aa40afe.jpg

For Marx, the greatest achievement of the Paris Commune was its “actual working existence”, and we should certainly not exclude its geographical organisation and defensive arcitecture from this category. Ahead of Kristin Ross’ discussion with Alberto Toscano at Goldsmiths tonight on the political imaginary of the Paris Commune, we share a series of maps created by Leopold Lambert detailing the shifting architecture of the Commune over time. You can download a high-resolution version of the map here.

#cartographie #paris #histoire #commune #bibliographie

#Jacques_Rancière: The Front National’s useful idiots

According to the philosopher Jacques Rancière, a number of so-called French ‘republican’ intellectuals have been opening the door to the Front National for some time now. In an interview with Éric Aeschimannm, Rancière shows how universalist values have been perverted to the benefit of xenophobic discourse.

▻http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1936-jacques-ranciere-the-front-national-s-useful-idiots
#extrême-droite #extrême_droite #FN #front_national #France

#David_Harvey : On #Syriza and #Podemos

Marxist geographer David Harvey recently spoke with il manifesto about the contradictions inherent in capitalism, the possibilities for its undoing and where Syriza and Podemos fit within its opposition.

http://versobooks-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/000005/584/general_assembly_athens-4989c3ca0aa4305e1899f9770d303be0.jpg

#Charlie_Hebdo, fear and world war: two questions for #Toni_Negri

In a recent interview Antonio Negri takes a longer view on actions and reactions in Paris and addresses the possibilities for the future.

http://versobooks-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/000005/160/ton_negri_photo-ec1ea8aafd888547a8f0e53e3690387a.jpg

▻http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1814-charlie-hebdo-fear-and-world-war-two-questions-for-toni-negri
#peur #guerre

L’alternative de Syriza : passer sous la table ou la renverser, par Frédéric Lordon
▻http://blog.mondediplo.net/2015-01-19-L-alternative-de-Syriza-passer-sous-la-table-ou

Il y a maintenant longtemps que l’Europe s’est enfermée elle-même dans la nasse constitutionnelle des traités libéraux, d’où elle n’a plus laissé que deux voies de sortie, et deux seulement : 1) l’effondrement financier de la construction sous le poids de ses contradictions internes, ou bien 2) un accident politique qui renverse la table.

Arundhati Roy : feminism and foundations, burkas and Botox—An extract from Capitalism : A Ghost Story
▻http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1757-arundhati-roy-feminism-and-foundations-burkas-and-botox-an-extract-

The NGO-ization of the women’s movement has also made Western liberal feminism (by virtue of its being the most funded brand) the standard-bearer of what constitutes feminism. The battles, as usual, have been played out on women’s bodies, extruding Botox at one end and burkas at the other. (And then there are those who suffer the double whammy, Botox and the burka.)

VersoBooks.com

►http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/660-something-has-snapped-and-it-has-been-a-long-time-coming

Something has snapped, and it has been a long time coming

We’ve long congratulated ourselves, in London, of the fact that we have no banlieue. We applauded ourselves especially smugly when zoned, segregated Paris rioted a few years ago. It’s not like it’s untrue—give or take the odd exception (a Thamesmead, a Chelmlsey Wood) our poverty is not concentrated in peripheral housing estates. Edinburgh might wall off its poor in Muirhouse or Leith, and Oxford might try not to think about Blackbird Leys, but in London, Manchester/Salford, Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol, Nottingham—the cities that erupted on Monday 8th August—the rich live, by and large, next to the poor: £1,000,000 Georgian terraces next to estates with some of the deepest poverty in the EU. We’re so pleased with this that we’ve even extended the principle to how we plan the trickledown dribble of social housing built over the last two decades, those Housing Association schemes where the deserving poor are ’pepper-potted’ with stockbrokers. We’ve learnt about ’spatial segregation’, so we do things differently now. Someone commenting on James Meek’s great London Review of Books article on parallel Hackneys mentioned China Miéville’s recent science fiction novel The City and The City, where two cities literally do occupy the same space, with all inhabitants acting as if they don’t. Miéville set it in Eastern Europe, but the inspiration is surely London.

.....

That isn’t to say that all insights from history are useless. Over the last week ex-punks, chroniclers of rebel rock, ’Situationists’ and ’leftists’ have decided that these riots are somehow different, somehow apolitical, compared to those that went before. The bizarrely romanticised Gordon Riots, in which Catholics were massacred. The Watts Riots of 1965, where corner shops were burned and ransacked with as much intensity as they were on Monday, only with more firearms. Neither were corner shops spared in the riots of 1981. The 1992 LA riots, where innocent truck drivers were dragged from their vehicles and killed. Riots always start with an immediate grievance—a hugely corrupt police force shooting a man to death, this time—and become a free-for-all, where people exploit the absence of the law, in which the people who suffer are often innocent. Rioting is a politics of despair, but to claim that these riots are somehow different, somehow ’neoliberal’, because of the allegedly novel phenomenon of mass looting, is asinine. It would be infantile to cheer on rioters against corner shopkeepers trying to defend their already small livelihoods; but equally so to pretend that this had nothing to do with the demonisation of the young and poor, nothing to do with our brutally unequal society and our pathetic trickle-down attempts at amelioration. Then we line up with those who think that looting Foot Locker is worse than the looting of an entire economy.

#ukriots