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C.L.R. James, “A New Notion”

On Thursday, July 1st, THIS IS FOREVER Event and Discussion Series will be hosting Noel Ignatiev for a presentation and discussion of C.L.R. James’ classic essays “Every Cook Can Govern” and “The Invading Socialist Society.”  Both essays can be found with an introduction by Noel in the recently published “A New Notion” (PM Press, 2010).

The event will be at Bluestockings Bookstore at 7PM.  Discussion to follow.

Noel Ignatiev is a teacher at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, the editor of Lesson of the Hour: Wendell Phillips on Abolition and Strategy, the co-editor of Race Traitor and the author of How the Irish Became White. He lives in Boston.

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By admin
July 1, 2010

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Finance and Financialization as Class Struggle

On Friday, May 7th, THIS IS FOREVER Event and Discussion Series will be hosting Conrad Herold for a presentation on the role of finance in class struggle today.  The event will be at Bluestockings Bookstore at 7PM.

Can the Marxian framework comprehend the new, financialized, character of class struggle today?  Despite important differences between Marx’s time and ours, there are also significant similarities.  His was also an era of financial innovation, financial integration, and international financial crisis.  Specifying what is new and what is not is a first step toward clarifying how Marx might analyze finance today.  Likewise, examining how capital responded to financial crisis in the past can clarify where we may want to put our energies today.

Discussion to follow.

Conrad Herold is Professor of Economics and History at Hofstra University, New York. His research interest is contemporary Latin American Political Economy and Macroeconomics. He was born and raised in South America.

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By admin
May 6, 2010

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Resurrecting a Revolutionary Cinema

On Sunday — 04.04.10, noon to 6PM — join us for  Resurrecting a Revolutionary Cinema: The Hour of the Furnaces, a film screening and discussion co-presented by DocTruck, Libertad Gills, Red Channels, and the UnionDocs Collaborative and co-sponsored by Cinema Tropical and This is Forever.

On Easter Sunday we will present a daylong, open-ended, collaborative and community screening of Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas’ The Hour of the Furnaces. In organizing such an event the usual questions arise: what does a film about Argentina mean to us in the United States; what does a film from 1968 mean to us in 2010; and, more broadly, what is the function of a political film, a revolutionary cinema, in our contemporary cultural political and digitally mediated landscape.

The Hour of the Furnaces is historically seen as a benchmark, a landmark, of militant cinema; but with that it also becomes a remnant of a certain time and a place, a relic of a long-since-passed Zeitgeist. The danger
comes from the potential of presenting a memorial service; that the ceremonial structure of such an event will be an acting out, an anachronism.

The film’s tone, scope, scale, and exhibition demands necessitate a certain theatricality. Furnaces has a 4-hour running time, and three distinct parts with built-in intermissions designed for audience participation and open discussion. We will discuss all of this with a focus on the present. Coffee, tea, juice, bagels, and a simple brunch will be available throughout the day.

–The Hour of the Furnaces: Notes and Testimonies on Neocolonialism, Violence and Liberation -

Octavio Getino & Fernando Ezequiel Solanas,
1968, 230 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 230 minutes | Digital Projection

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By Malav Kanuga
March 31, 2010

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This is Forever: An Exploration of Contemporary Autonomist Politics

The following series event is taking place in Portland, Oregon.  Please forward to friends and comrades in the area.

Thursday, 25 March, 7pm
Red & Black Cafe – 400 SE 12th avenue (at Oak)
www.redandblackcafe.com <http://www.redandblackcafe.com/>

This is Forever: An Exploration of Contemporary Autonomist Politics
An evening with Autonomedia, Minor Compositions and the Team Colors Collective.

Join us for an evening with two autonomist authors and organizers from Portland and London in exploring contemporary politics, the continued imposition of work, current struggles in the University and elsewhere, militant and co-research, and in celebrating the release of their recent books.  In the U.S. and across the planet struggles against enclosures, the dismantling of the University, for public and community space, against “the endless imposition of work”, and against a form of life that is increasingly precarious – are currently taking place.  By “reading” these and neighboring struggles we seek to create a world in which many worlds fit. A discussion on these issues and other topics will follow short talks.

“This is Forever” is a discussion series based in Bluestockings Books (NYC) and currently expanding to other cities around the United States.

Event presenters:
Stevphen Shukaitis | Autonomedia / Minor Compositions. Shukaitis is the author of the recently book Imaginal Machines: Autonomy and Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life (Minor Compositions, 2009), an editor at Autonomedia and lecturer at the University of Essex. He is the editor (with Erika Biddle and David Graeber) of Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization (AK Press, 2007). His research focuses on the emergence of collective imagination in social movements and the changing compositions of cultural and artistic labor.  www.autonomedia.org & www.minorcompositions.info.

Kevin Van Meter | Team Colors Collective. As member of the militant research collective, Van Meter has been involved in editing the collectives forthcoming collection Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States (AK Press, 2010), co-authoring Radical Community Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible (Pamphlet, 2010), and has participated in radical community organizing initiatives for more then a decade. www.warmachines.info.

Copies of Imaginal Machines and Radical Community Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible will be available at the event.

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By admin
March 11, 2010

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Engaging Contemporary Movement: Inquiry and Radical Organizing in the United States

Join Team Colors on Thursday, MARCH 18th at 7PM at Bluestockings as they reflect on organizing in context of current capitalist and movement crises, and discuss the uses of militant research and inquiry into radical movements in the U.S. They will explore the intention, method and content of their new pamphlet “Radical Community Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible” and their forthcoming AK Press collection “Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States.”

Team Colors is a national militant research collective. Their approach has developed from involvement in community organizing projects, resistance activities and radical research efforts for more than a decade.  Their forthcoming pamphlet “Radical Community Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible” will be available for sale at the event.

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By admin
March 11, 2010

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Inquiry into Immigration in an Era of Mass Incarceration

Please join us at Bluestockings Bookstore on Wednesday, MARCH 17th at 7PM for a presentation and discussion of migrant struggles in U.S. by Jenna Loyd, a researcher at CUNY, who will share what she learned in the two months traveling this fall in the US South and Southwest.  Joining her will be Seth Wessler, a researcher at Applied Research Center, who traveled to Jamaica to look at the often forgotten effects of mass deportation; as well as Manisha Vaze, with Families for Freedom, who brings the focus back home to talk about how people in New York are living with and responding to immigrant policing, detention, and deportation.

Rooted in an inquiry into the past 30 years of criminalizing communities of color and how that has shaped the lives of migrant communities of color in the United States, tonight’s discussion will also attempt to expound the uses of militant research in better understanding and circulating these struggles.

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By admin
March 10, 2010

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Edu-Factory Book Launch and Discussion

On Sunday, FEBRUARY 28th at 7PM at Bluestockings Bookstore, This Is Forever will be celebrating the release of “Toward a Global Autonomous University: Cognitive Labor, The Production of Knowledge and Exodus from the Education Factory,“ recently compiled by the Edu-Factory Collective and published by Autonomedia.  Join contributors and collaborators of the Edu-Factory project for an investigation and discussion of the relationships between the crisis of the university and the emergence of an increasingly international and militant student movement.

As this international student and university movement spreads, points on the map of recent mass demonstrations, occupations, and self-organized university initiatives belie a true sense of how the university world-wide is the site of an increasingly militant struggle.  Both the geographic, social and analytic scale of this movement requires careful attention in order to understand the implications, connections, and points of divergence of a struggle that seeks to simultaneously transform the present conditions of labor and creativity that circulate through the university as well as create autonomous universities organized as a commons.

Tonight’s discussion aims to circulate political insights and perspectives on this movement as well as connect to organizing efforts for the March 4th Day of Action to Defend Public Education.

The event is also sponsored by Edu-Factory and Autonomedia. Edu-factory is a transnational collective engaged in the transformations of the global university and conflicts in knowledge production. The website of the global network (www.edu-factory.org) collects and connects theoretical investigations and reports from university struggles. The network has organized meetings all around the world, paying particular attention to the intertwining of student and faculty struggles. In addition to English, the collective has published the volume in Italian, as Univerisità globale: Il nuovo mercato del sapere (Manifestolibri, 2008), and in Spanish, as Universidad en Conflicto (Traficantes de sueños, 2010).

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By Malav Kanuga
February 21, 2010

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Report back from COP 15 and ‘Something Completely Different?’

On Monday, JANUARY 11th at 7PM, This Is Forever has the pleasure of hosting Tina Gerhardt, activist, academic and free-lance journalist, as she reports to us about the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference (COP15) that took place from December 7th to December 18th, 2009.

Tina arrived in Copenhagen before the summit started and left after it ended. She wrote daily about events inside the Bella Center and demos and actions outside on the streets.

She will bring us her reflections from COP15 as well as the climate justice movement.  Tonight’s event will lay out in simple and understandable terms what the Copenhagen Accord includes, what it means, and how it contrasts with the science demands and what other groups of nations, such as the G77, AOSIS and the EU, as well as science calls for. Additionally, we have an opportunity to discuss actions related to the summit, exploring new directions, potentials, limits and the implications of state repression.

On the next evening, Tuesday, JANUARY 12th at 7PM, join Ben Trott, member of the Turbulence Collective, for a presentation and discussion of Issue 5 of their journal, entitled “And Now For Something Completely Different?”

Turbulence: Ideas for Movement is a journal that explores many of the political and strategic directions of the ‘movement of movements’ of the counter-globalization days and into the development of global movements today.  The journal is a key space for debate and investigation into core logics, practices, and visions of an international network of movements.

The current issue discusses the condition of anti-capitalist movements in the wake of various crises: of financial capital, of the doctrines of neoliberalism, of our planetary commons and the environment, of social and political forms of equitable life, and of our movements themselves.

Ben will be presenting the arguments of the collective’s  article “Life in Limbo?” that introduces the new issue as well as the political project of the journal itself.

Both events will take place at 7PM at Bluestockings Bookstore, 172 Allen Street, NYC 10002. Print copies of the journal will be available to all attendees.  You can find more information about Turbulence here as well as download the entire issue here.

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By Malav Kanuga
January 6, 2010

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Stevphen Shukaitis on ‘Imaginal Machines’

Our first TIF event in the new year and quite a celebration: At Bluestockings on Friday, JANUARY 8th at 7PM there will be a release party and book discussion for Stevphen Shukaitis‘ recently published Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life.  Stevphen explores the limits and possibilities of collective imagination in the age of spectacular recuperation.  In what ways has ‘the power of imagination’, a radical bulwark for over forty years, been seized and corrupted by the image-commodity?  Attending to this problem, Stevphen explores and mutates various autonomist political traditions with subversive avant-garde movements and many instances of self-organization in everyday life.  In order to reorganize our radical imaginaries such that they (and we) remain a terrain of conflict and antagonism to capitalist subsumption, Stevphen invites us to think of our collective struggles as machines – ones that perhaps work best when paradoxically breaking down.

As Stevphen writes, “the task is to explore the construction of imaginal machines, comprising the socially and historically embedded manifestations of the radical imagination. Imagination as a composite of our capacities to affect and be affected by the world, to develop movements toward new forms of autonomous sociality and collective self-determination.”

This event also celebrates the recent militant publishing venture of Minor Compositions, a new project dedicated to inquiry into radical and movement histories, autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and revolutions of everyday life, as forms of research militancy useful to present organizing.  More info can be found on thier website – http://www.minorcompositions.info/

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By Malav Kanuga
January 6, 2010

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Wu Ming at Bluestockings

Wu Ming will be at Bluestockings Bookstore on FRIDAY, November 20th to present Manituana, their latest book to be translated into the English.

It was written in the 2003-07 period and published in Italy in 2007. It is the first episode of an 18th-century pan-Atlantic trilogy which the authors call “the Atlantic Triptych”. All novels will be set in the 1770s, all across the Atlantic Ocean (North America, Europe, the West Indies and Africa), before and during the American Revolution. A story from the wrong side of history, when everything was still possible. In 1775, at the dawn of the revolution that gave birth to the United States of America, British loyalists and rebels compete for an alliance with the Six Nations of the Iroquois. The Iroquois, the most powerful indigenous tribal group in the Mohawk River Valley, with a constitution hundreds of years old, have coexisted with the colonists for generations. Now they must make a painful decision that gravely endangers the future of their mixed community. Together, English and Indian representatives of that community undertake a long voyage to London, capital of the British Empire, knowing that the road back will be paved with war.

Wu Ming (extended name: Wu Ming Foundation) is a pseudonym for a group of Italian authors formed in 2000 from a subset of the Luther Blissett community in Bologna. In their pre-Wu Ming days, the group wrote the novel Q (first edition 1999). Unlike the open name “Luther Blissett”, “Wu Ming” stands for a defined group of writers active in literature and popular culture. The band authored several novels, some of which have been translated in many countries.  Their books are seen as part of a body of literary works (the “nebula”, as it is frequently called in Italy) described as the New Italian Epic, a phrase that was proposed by Wu Ming themselves.

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By Malav Kanuga
November 19, 2009

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