A week and a half ago, when I first drove to Little Axe, Oklahoma, to take a look at post-tornado recovery efforts, the countryside was still in crisis mode. Mountains of rubble and garbage filled gravel roads and red dirt paths leading to the remains of homes. Neighborhoods that had been full of working-class houses were uprooted and dirty, unsafe tent camps were all that remained. Just 30 minutes away, the big NGOs and FEMA operated, bringing national attention to Moore – a badly struck area, to be sure. But not the only one affected.
Read more »Communiqués
iSlaves: Presentation on Foxconn
Ralf Ruckus from the Gongchao Collective in China will be in the Bay Area this weekend doing a series of public presentations (called iSlaves: Workers’ Struggles in Chinese Production)
Read more »Statement from a Resister
“On the morning of July 25th, 2012, my life was turned upside down in a matter of hours. FBI agents from around Washington and Oregon and Joint Terrorism Task Force agents from Washington busted down the front door of my house with a battering ram, handcuffed my house mates and me at gunpoint, and held us hostage in our backyard while they read us a search warrant and ransacked our home. They said it was in connection to May Day vandalism that occurred in Seattle, Washington earlier this year.”
Read more »Seeing Red (Part 2): United Teachers vs. Bipartisan Opposition
It has been four years since the financial collapse of 2008 set off the greatest world economic crisis since the 1930s. “Reform” measures put into place to stop the hemorrhaging have succeeded only in exacerbating socio-economic inequalities around the country, with the poor, once again, bearing the highest costs.…
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Seeing Red (Part 1): The High Cost of Higher Education
In the face of mounting tuition hikes, layoffs and budget cuts, thousands of students and educators have hit the streets in university towns across the Americas. The demonstrations have cut across race, gender, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds, bringing disparate groups together to make the education system more transparent and democratic.
Read more »Southern California Warehouse Workers on Strike
RIVERSIDE, Calif. – Warehouse workers went on strike to protest unfair labor practices they have faced on the job Wednesday morning, following months of working in hot temperatures under extreme pressure in a major Walmart-contracted warehouse in Southern California.
Read more »Bailing Ourselves Out: Leveraging Against Banking Barons in America’s Heartland
Capitalism is a pervasive ideology; to deny its recuperative mechanisms requires interrupting the spectacle of the status quo – and acting in those liberated spaces, both physical and mental. The answer to some of these questions may already be well-known; getting to the substance of the question and actualizing the answer requires more. It requires a leap of faith.
Read more »House Available: 55 El Mirador Dr Nicasio CA
Fabulous Nicasio estate formerly owned by Jerry Garcia. Gated and private, this amazing property sits on a sunny knoll top with views of Tam and the East Bay. Gorgeous main home with wonderful indoor/outdoor connection with pools, fountains, garden beds, play area for children and so much more. Artist’s studio and six car garage.
Read more »Job Opportunity: UC Berkeley’s Operational Excellence/OE initiative seeks a Communications Manager
The Communications Manager involves developing, implementing and executing a comprehensive, multidisciplinary communications program to support UC Berkeley’s Operational Excellence (OE) initiative.
Read more »Features
Socialism and Surplus: Why Planning Cannot Overthrow Capitalism
As the economic crisis continues along with militant action against it, the idea of socialist planning has emerged from the grave. However, at bottom, socialism is subject to the same compulsions as capitalism. Its planning is the planning of the management of surplus; the category which is the foundation of domination. If it might attenuate some of the most vicious results of the capitalist hell, it cannot help us escape it.
Read more »The Big Sleep
For nine days this past December, the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach lay sleeping. Fifteen container vessels sat anchored off the coast. We were told that “featherbedding” will not be tolerated and the management complains of operational “nightmares”. The supply chain oneiric aspires toward an efficiency it can never obtain under capitalism, but it won’t ever be able to believe this. Instead, it intends to produce/instrumentalize more docile and flexible humans—and fewer of them.
Read more »Empire Logistics
Empire Logistics is a collaborative initiative to research and articulate (through online mapping, video, text and other media) the impact and ‘externalized costs’—human, economic, social and environmental— of the international goods movement industry. An initial area of focus has been “The Inland Empire,” an area of Southern California that was hit hardest by the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 and the ensuing depression. The Inland Empire continues to face some of the highest home foreclosure rates in the country, staggering unemployment far above the national average, a rise in homelessness, and a decline in the median wage.
Read more »Administrative Totalitarianism at the UC and the Necessity of Direct Action by Faculty
The fact is that the faculty have far more power than do the students of the UC system, though we have been far more reluctant to use it. So students are fighting on our behalf (if we care about the public character of the university) against privatization. And they are thus bearing the burden of administrative repression. But the administration cannot repress the faculty of the university in the same fashion, if we act together.
Read more »Occupation as Political Form
We already occupy everything, so how can we occupy everything? What matters is the minimal difference, the shift in perspective the injunction to occupy effects. It’s a shift crucial to occupation as a political form that organizes the incompatibility between the people and capitalism. It enjoins us to occupy in a different mode, to assert our presence in and for itself, for the common, not for the few, the one percent. “Occupy Everything’s” shift in perspective highlights and amplifies the gap between what has been and what can be, between what “capitalist realism” told us what the only alternative and what the actuality of movement forced us to wake up to. The gap it names is the gap of communist desire, a collective desire for collectivity: we occupy everything because it is already ours in common.
Read more »Demands on Education: Things, We’ve Learned …
The exhibition 2 or 3 Things, we’ve learned explored, by way of a subjective collection and discursive as well as performative interventions, the demands that art, education and social movements make on each other. The central issues are those of space, image and collectivity. The search is focussed on the eruptive moments and the consequences of ongoing interventions and change over a long period of time, as well as changes and interventions that last.
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