The seminar runs from THURSDAY, August 18th to SATURDAY, August 20th. Start times are listed below. For full schedule including a description of the seminar and list of suggested readings, see UPCOMING EVENTS and SEMINARS.

Thursday, August 18th, doors at 4pm
Friday, August 19th, doors at 4pm
Saturday, August 20th, doors at 1pm

RAGS make paper
PAPER makes money
MONEY makes banks
BANKS make loans
LOANS make beggars
BEGGARS make
RAGS

Click here to download Introductory Remarks for the Seminar, with schedule and recommended readings.

[NOTE] The seminar is free but reservation is encouraged and can be sent, along with other inquiries, to seminars[AT]16beavergroup.com.  A special website dedicated to the seminar has been created and is the best place to follow changes or updates.

Activist-researcher, writer and ecofeminist, Maria Mies is one of the world’s original thinkers. Combined memoir and political tract, “The Village and the World,” packs in seventy-seven years of militant living: from the peasant origins of German village childhood to the world of the Indian subcontinent, from international campaigns to groundbreaking theory and feminist organizing.  Silvia Federici, autonomist feminist thinker and close collaborator, will present on behalf of Mies, connecting issues of her life and times to urgent political questions of the day.

Maria Mies’ achievements include developing groundbreaking praxis and theory around the concept of “housewifisation”, the violence of colonisation and profound writings about ecofeminism. She fights the Multilateral Agreement of Investment, she fights the General Agreement on Trade in Services, she fights against the patenting of life and tackles reproductive and genetic engineering as well as food security, but she never gives up hope that there is an alternative to present day injustice and exploitation; that “the good life” is possible. Her books include Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Stage

Silvia Federici is a scholar, teacher, and internationally renowned activist of autonomist feminist Marxist tradition. She is the author of Caliban and the Witch and editor of several books including Enduring Western Civilization: The Construction of the Concept of Western Civilization and Its Others.

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

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).

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.

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/

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.

The event is moderated by Ashley Dawson, Associate Professor of English, The Graduate Center, CUNY.  The event will take place at the Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave btwn 34th and 35th (The Skylight Room, 9100)

]]> http://www.thisisforever.org/archives/439/feed 0 http://www.thisisforever.org/archives/435 http://www.thisisforever.org/archives/435#comments Sun, 25 Oct 2009 04:00:10 +0000 Malav Kanuga http://www.thisisforever.org/?p=435 On Wednesday, November 11th at 7:00PM, ARIEL SALLEH will be presenting on a feminist and ecologically integrated politics of the commons, themes central to her recently edited volume, Eco-Sufficiency & Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology (Pluto Press, 2009).  She will be introduced by and in dialogue with SILVIA FEDERICI. The event takes place at Bluestockings Bookstore (172 Allen Street, NYC 10002).

For more information, please see the UPCOMING EVENTS and SEMINARS sidebar.

This event will take place at 16 Beaver Group (16 Beaver Street, 4th  fl., New York, NY 10004).  See the UPCOMING EVENTS and SEMINAR page for more information or click here.