SATURDAY, May 5th at 6pm is a time for us to think and organize anew, starting from the most recent irruptions of energy in which we’ve found ourselves. These include a series of convergences from which we’re advancing where the space of the city and the space of autonomous education combine. Thus, the seminar seeks to organize our collective intelligence and investigate the processes that make the city a site of struggle and a site of autonomous learning.

Months of organizing for the May Day demonstrations brought together new working groups, assemblies, affinity groups, organizations, and loose associations, to reorient the strategic field of alliance across the city’s many workers. This seminar asks how we can think of the city as a site of struggle and a site of recomposition. It is an opportunity to collaborate with visiting Italian comrades Gigi Roggero and Anna Curcio from the militant research networks Edu-Factory and Unionmade, who have built up processes of collaboration, inquiry, and organizing across Europe in the last years precisely through networked forms of militancy. We will also be joined by David Harvey, Miguel Robles-Duran, Making Worlds, and various friends and organizers from May Day.

The first event is on Monday, April 2nd at 7PM at Bluestockings and the second is on Wednesday, April 4th at 7pm at 16 Beaver.

The evolving circuits of struggle in the last year now looks like an expanded loop, of interconnected struggles producing and reproducing each other both across transnational fissures and new linkages: the 20th February movement in Morocco and the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia…the Jasmine Revolution and Tahrir Square in Cairo…Tahrir and the Generacao a rasca in Portugal…Generasao a rasca and the acampadas in Spain…the acampadas and Syntagma in Greece…Syntagma and Occupy Wall Street in NYC…the Occupy movements in the U.S. and…

We convene on Monday and Wednesday evening to expand our analysis and inquiry of organization in the field of new political cultures just on the heels of the General Strike in Spain. Ana Méndez de Andés from Madrid will join us for a closer look into the strike in the context of the May 15th movement and the #spanishrevolution, its new organizational forms, dispersions of power, and militant re-articulations in process. This transatlantic inquiry aims to share experiences in New York City and in Madrid as we build toward our own general strike in one month.

Monday, April 2nd | 7PM
Urban Commons in the new #SpanishRevolution
Bluestockings Bookstore
172 Allen Street

http://www.bluestockings.com

The social wave that has taken over the squares in Spain, in the middle of the first economic crisis of the 21st century, has developed new forms socialization, imaginary and political action that are reshaping the relations between what we consider to be public, private or collective.  Starting from this essential shift, Ana Mendez will discuss the possible articulations of urban commons.

Wednesday, April 4th | 7PM
“We didn´t come out of nowhere” — Swarms, multitude, and activism in a time of monsters
16 Beaver

http://www.16beavergroup.org

Related to and incipient of our forms of organization is knowledge production and the invention of activist devices with which to produce collectively militant knowledge and militant subjectivities. The act of exposing conditions in order to transform them is related to what George Caffentzis, Silvia Federici and the friends and comrades around Midnight Notes have called “reading the struggles,” a militant practice of investigating the general conditions in which resistance, refusal, and revolt emerge from the technical and political composition of work and social life.

On Wednesday, we will organize our discussions around a series of questions that aim to trigger thought on the question of research militancy, organization, and production:

(1) How can we know the exposition of social needs and desires constituting everyday life in order to intervene and facilitate a generalization of assemblies, strikes, recompositions, alliances, antagonisms, collective reproductions? How do militant research practices produce knowledge differently? How can such practices help us listen, speak, share, learn, and act in common?

(2) What metaphors and basic images do we utilize in our organizational imaginations? What is the role of the individual in the informal group, affinity group, formal organization, milieu, tendency, or assembly? And where to place friendship? How do we imagine and connect with the social world beyond our small networks of relations?

(3) What constitutes urban production in the present context? Which are the processes of capital accumulation that can be short-circuited, sabotaged, or neutralized?

(4) How has May 15 altered or informed the practice of an autonomous initiative like Observatorio Metropolitano? What kinds of questions has May 15 raised for those who identify themselves as radicals, militants, or activists? What new doors, if any, have been opened? And what remain its greatest challenges?

(5) Can we still rely on the notion of “movement” or is it, like the party, or union, a category that requires today, further scrutiny and rethinking?

(6) How have the shifting forms of political organization and struggle altered the terms of political actions such as the most recent General Strike?

These are questions that have been sharpened by new experiences organizing assemblies, actions, and our affinities in recent months. All of this will have to be put to test during the next phase of actions, both in NY and on the other side of the Atlantic. We hope you may join us to consider the collective intelligence articulating its political vocation through experiments with general assemblies everywhere, and today looks to reclaim and rethink the potential of striking everywhere.

As usual, the distro features new and class titles from AK Press, Autonomedia, Justseeds, South End Press, and PM Press. The table support celebrates the publications of first Common Notions’ first title, Selma James’ Sex, Race, and Class. See the imprint’s website for more info on recent and forthcoming publishing projects.

Here is the setlist, courtesy of Brooklyn Vegan:

John K. Samson Concert Setlist at Bowery Ballroom,
New York, NY, USA on March 15, 2012
One Great City! (The Weakerthans song) (solo)
Heart Of The Continent
Cruise Night
Letter in Icelandic From the Ninette San
Tournament of Hearts (The Weakerthans song)
Night Windows (The Weakerthans song)
Elegy for Gump Worsley (The Weakerthans song) (solo)
Pamphleteer (The Weakerthans song)
www.ipetitions.com/petition/rivertonrifle/
Longitudinal Centre
The Boat Dreams From the Hill (Jawbreaker cover)
The Last And
Highway 1 West
Left And Leaving

Encore:
Plea from a Cat Named Virtute (The Weakerthans song) (solo)
Gifts (Propagandhi song) (JKS on bass)
Anchorless (Propagandhi song) (JKS on bass)
Reconstruction Site (The Weakerthans song)
Stop Error

Encore 2:
My Favourite Chords (The Weakerthans song) (solo)
Virtute the Cat Explains Her Departure (The Weakerthans song) (solo)

The event will be at 16 Beaver at 12PM.  See UPCOMING EVENTS and SEMINARS for information.

The Weakerthans play the Bowery Ballroom from December 7th-10th. Their first album Fallow on December 7th; Left and Leaving on the 8th; Reconstruction Site the following night, and finally Reunion Tour on the last night. Hope to see you at the shows!

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.

While we are observing the new impetus of global uprising against capitalism and the state, the catastrophic situation is arising in Japan. Triggered by the earthquake and tsunami of maximal scale, Northeastern part of Honshu has been devastated by the increasing number of losses and refugees, and the worsening nuclear disaster. The activity of the planet has shown not only its unequivocal nonhuman force but also the degree in which our societies and their apparatuses forged by capitalism are relying on, merging with, implicated in and expanding over the planet in an extremely ominous manner. What the so-called natural disaster is showing on this occasion is nothing but the implication of the apparatus in the environment and its fatal effects.

In this situation, we intend to translate, quote and analyze as much information as possible from Japanese into English, and translate your encouragements, comments, suggestions, analysis, proposals and anything written in English into Japanese for the vantage point of the people struggling there and everywhere.

For more information, see the site: http://jfissures.wordpress.com/ and the updates and writings posted by the J-Fissures Editorial.

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.

The first event is FRIDAY March 11th at The Commons Brooklyn at 7PM on North African and Middle Eastern revolts.

See UPCOMING EVENTS and SEMINARS for information and a list of the next few events in the series.