If the duration of history is not synonymous with the duration of the harvest, then history, in effect, is no more than a fleeting and cruel shadow in which man has no more part. He who dedicates himself to this history dedicates himself to nothing and, in his turn, is nothing. But he who dedicates himself to the duration of his life, to the house be builds, to the dignity of mankind, dedicates himself to the earth and reaps from it the harvest that sows its seed and sustains the world again and again. Finally, it is those who know how to rebel, at the appropriate moment, against history who really advance its interests.
The Rebel
Albert Camus
The Rebel
Albert Camus
Taking the Power Back! And the Money...
“The people of Brixton have a very strong identity and are very proud to live
in this area, where there are a multitude of small businesses and a great
diversity which we want to keep. It’s with initiatives like this that the local
community improves”.
These are the words of Simon Woolf, who belongs to “Move your Money”
– a campaign that states that it is possible to build a better banking system –
and who took part in the initiative on the 24th that protested against the banks
at the same time as helping the district. Read More
in this area, where there are a multitude of small businesses and a great
diversity which we want to keep. It’s with initiatives like this that the local
community improves”.
These are the words of Simon Woolf, who belongs to “Move your Money”
– a campaign that states that it is possible to build a better banking system –
and who took part in the initiative on the 24th that protested against the banks
at the same time as helping the district. Read More
Let there be Protest: Guy Debord and the Society of the Spectacle
...Accordingly, Debord's concept of spectacle may hold the greatest importance for
a discussion of the big ideas of today because it serves as an emphatic reminder
that unless we take pleasure in thinking dynamically about the role spectacles
play in shaping our social existence, we will find ourselves as extras in
whatever scene they establish. At a moment when the spectacle of the global
stock market is increasingly taken for granted as an indisputable justification
for dismantling various social programmes, we must learn to mobilise the
critical resources of spectacle as ingeniously as Debord's own text does. Read More
a discussion of the big ideas of today because it serves as an emphatic reminder
that unless we take pleasure in thinking dynamically about the role spectacles
play in shaping our social existence, we will find ourselves as extras in
whatever scene they establish. At a moment when the spectacle of the global
stock market is increasingly taken for granted as an indisputable justification
for dismantling various social programmes, we must learn to mobilise the
critical resources of spectacle as ingeniously as Debord's own text does. Read More
Guy Debord - The Society of the Spectacle
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David Harvey asks whether we are at the end of capitalism and if so, what next.
Radical Alternatives to Conventional Publishing
Organic Farmers Fight Back
More than 270,000 organic farmers are taking on corporate agriculture
giant Monsanto in a lawsuit filed March 30. Led by the Organic Seed Growers and Trade
Association, the family farmers are fighting for
the right to keep a portion of the world food supply organic—and preemptively
protecting themselves from accusations of stealing genetically modified seeds
that drift on to their pristine crop fields. Read more...
Can organic farming feed the world?
giant Monsanto in a lawsuit filed March 30. Led by the Organic Seed Growers and Trade
Association, the family farmers are fighting for
the right to keep a portion of the world food supply organic—and preemptively
protecting themselves from accusations of stealing genetically modified seeds
that drift on to their pristine crop fields. Read more...
Can organic farming feed the world?
Rebellious Media Conference
Occupy
A day out at Occupy.
The civility of the state is measured by the freedom to scream
“I want out” and by the number who listen.
The number who want out is growing.
The screams though are being throttled by a bigoted media; puppet
politicians; private security firms; uniformed whores and an
instrumentalist education strategy that serves up ignorance measured in
bliss.
Those who are listening is growing but the message is stifled by
interests aligned to an inanimate method of exchange.
We should be proud of those who put the future
before the present.
We should rejoice that there is a humanity that resists
corporate greed and the complicit tentacles of the
state.
We should welcome the door that beckons us to open and pass
through it.
One day we will have no choice and we should
remember those who pointed the way and those who looked elsewhere.
It could have been oh so different.
The civility of the state is measured by the freedom to scream
“I want out” and by the number who listen.
The number who want out is growing.
The screams though are being throttled by a bigoted media; puppet
politicians; private security firms; uniformed whores and an
instrumentalist education strategy that serves up ignorance measured in
bliss.
Those who are listening is growing but the message is stifled by
interests aligned to an inanimate method of exchange.
We should be proud of those who put the future
before the present.
We should rejoice that there is a humanity that resists
corporate greed and the complicit tentacles of the
state.
We should welcome the door that beckons us to open and pass
through it.
One day we will have no choice and we should
remember those who pointed the way and those who looked elsewhere.
It could have been oh so different.
Stir, the brilliant new magazine that dedicates itself to solutions. Stir is about the public ownership of ideas that will lead the commons to reclaim their power and independence and be a vanguard in emanipation. Please see below for the first edition.
At the beginning of The Take, a documentary about the Argentinean Recovered Factories Movement (Fabrique recuperada), Naomi Klein shows an interview she had done a few years earlier, where having presented a list of the ‘gruesome acts’ and horrors of capitalism, the interviewer challenges her by saying “But you’re not giving us any alternatives?” To this, she later admits, “He had a good point…at a certain point you have to talk about what you’re fighting for”.
The reason for the existence of this magazine is the self-evident need to move beyond the idea of critique as a catalogue of crises and problems by producing and referring to various social groups and community’s strategies that will inspire and en-courage us to surmount the particular challenges we face. To be clear, this is not to say that we should stop speaking about the catastrophe that capitalism plainly is but that while it is of key importance to begin with a restatement and review of the problem and clearly announce new problems as they arise, this is our starting point and not where we come to rest.
This point may seem obvious and superfluous to some but it has been evident, for the most part, that critique has been more than adequate in describing and naming the problems we face, but has been insufficient in devising feasible and viable ways of living and exchanging that are not subordinated to wealth creation. It is for us, as the Plane Stupid activist argues, to create spaces outside of the market where our “passions, needs and desires” remain inalienable.
After Alain Badiou, one of the most important recent philosophers, we acknowledge that everybody has an “immediate intelligence” of inequality and this means that we can avoid one of the Left’s main preoccupations: explaining exploitation to the exploited! It’s no secret!
Our task, then, is not a quasi-religious attempt to ‘enlighten’ the ‘masses’ and add to the already overloaded descriptions of the brutal inefficiencies and defects of capitalism (no shortage there!), but rather to share the same recognition as Immanuel Kant who argued in What is Enlightenment? that political inaction is not a result of a “defect of the intellect” but a “weakness of will” – the surrendering and ‘giving up’ of the will and agency that is required for the introduction and application of a new kind of politics: a real alternative. This is to say that there needs to be a shift from only calling state power and the market into question – the need for an alternative, to actually embodying the alternative.
It is on this point, that Badiou’s important intervention against Simon Critchley’s claim that “all philosophy, political or religious, commences in disappointment” is very instructive. Badiou challenges the claim that political practice finds its origins in crisis by saying: “I think that we can have negative feelings, negative experience concerning injustice, the horrors of the world, terrible wars and so on. But all great movements in the political and historical field have been created, have been provoked not by that sort of negative feeling but always by a local victory. If we appreciate, for example, why we have during two years the great revolt of the slaves in the Roman Empire, under the leadership of Spartacus, it is not because slaves have the feeling of injustice…Because they always have that, it is their experience day after day. It is rather because in one small place, a small group of slaves finds new means, finally to create a victory. A small victory, a local victory.”
Well then, what does a local victory look like? It is when academics publish their works in open access journals, it is when airport expansion is resisted and the threatened area is transformed into a community garden, it is when thousands of collaborators build a free software operating system, it is when those maintaining the commons from the intense privatization of our woods and forests defend them, as Edward Abbey always insisted, by using and enjoying it – cycling, walking, foraging. It is when medical researchers make their findings freely available by publishing under a creative commons license (Public Library of Science) that permits any company to manufacture generic reproductions of lifesaving drugs, it is when students find they cannot rely on suppliers to guarantee their food is ethically and locally grown so they teach themselves to set up member-owned and user-driven cooperative cafes that enables them to reclaim control over their food production, and when resident groups who are resisting energy monopolies find that the current legal system is inadequate to their problems and decide to create their own ordinance – a new Bill of Rights.
It is encountering these inspiring and encouraging examples where people and communities have built, as Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons asserts, their “own open, commons-friendly infrastructure”, that we are roused into action.
I hope this magazine will become what academic and activist David Bollier has called ‘The annals of the inalienable’: a collection of all the courageous and inspiring communities whose innovations have empowered them to take back control over all of the aspects of their lives.
—Jonathan Gordon-Farleigh
TURNING THE TIDE TOGETHER
Immanuel Kant: Towards a Perpetual Peace
...Rather, my external (juridical) freedom is to
be defined as follows: It is the privilege to lend obedience to no external
laws except those to which I could have given consent. Similarly, external
(juridical) equality in a state is that relationship among the citizens in
which no one can lawfully bind another without at the same time subjecting himself to the law by which he also can be bound. Read More...
be defined as follows: It is the privilege to lend obedience to no external
laws except those to which I could have given consent. Similarly, external
(juridical) equality in a state is that relationship among the citizens in
which no one can lawfully bind another without at the same time subjecting himself to the law by which he also can be bound. Read More...
Jacques Ranciere - Education as Liberation
Equality as a starting point and not a destination is a radical and inspiring concept. Peter Hallward provides an enlightened assessment of both the empirical and the normative. Ranciere's ideas could be called the 'new normative' as it moves away from education being a tool for liberation and suggests that education re-invents itself so that the outcome and the process become indivisable.
Also included is the text from 'The Ignorant Schoolmaster', an absolute must read for anyone who values intellectual emancipation and The Nights of Labor that explains the 'three glorious days' of the 1830 July revolution in post Napoleonic France.
Jacques Ranciere
Also included is the text from 'The Ignorant Schoolmaster', an absolute must read for anyone who values intellectual emancipation and The Nights of Labor that explains the 'three glorious days' of the 1830 July revolution in post Napoleonic France.
Jacques Ranciere
peter-hallwards_analysis_of_jacques-ranciere-and-the-subversion-of-mastery.pdf | |
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the_ignorant_schoolmaster.pdf | |
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One of the chief architects for the lifting of the tyranny of inequality is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Herewith are some lectures and texts that explain his work and contributions to the philosophy of liberation.
Slavoj Zizek
A more contemporary contributor to liberationist philosophy is Slavoj Zizek. Please find the you tube page detailing his many lectures/interviews/cultural critiques...
Zizek at your leisure
Interview: The Believer 2004
Zizek at your leisure
Interview: The Believer 2004