ANNOUNCEMENT: RECENT EVENTS
to get information on the next few events in the series, see sidebar of UPCOMING EVENTS and SEMINARS

Recent Events and Activity: This Is Forever Event and Discussion Series returns to highlight, co-sponsor and coordinate a series of events in March.

The first event is FRIDAY March 11th at The Commons Brooklyn at 7PM.  See below for complete listings. More info can be found below.

___________________________________________________
EVENT ONE

A public meeting on the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East

Friday, March 11th at 7PM
The Commons Brooklyn
388 Atlantic Avenue
Brooklyn, NY

The Egyptian and Tunisian governments have already fallen, while those in Yemen and Bahrain are on the brink. Meanwhile Qaddafi is waging war on the Libyan people and mass protests are sparking off from Iran and Iraq to Algeria and Mauritania. Only a few months ago nobody could have predicted the intensity and the dimension of these uprisings, which are challenging hegemonic, culturalist and traditional assumptions about the politics of the region. Nor could anyone have foreseen the resonances that these movements would have across the world.

These uprisings pose far-reaching questions: What are we to make of the confluence of two “youths” united by an absent future, one educated and “middle class”, one banished to the slum periphery? What about the connection between these unemployed youth and the striking workers of Egypt? And what of the women who have played such a central role in these movements?

This meeting will feature speakers from the region with a critical analysis of the uprisings. There will also be a discussion for us to share information on the current situation in the region, its implications for struggles here and elsewhere, and what it can tell us about revolutionary practice in the Twenty-first Century.
___________________________________________________

EVENT TWO

Women, Egypt and Revolution: Seminar and Teach-in
with Nawal El Saadawi

Wednesday, March 16th at 4PM
Room 5114, Graduate Center CUNY
365 Fifth Ave, New York, NY 10016

Organized by the Center for Place, Culture and Politics. PLEASE RSVP to pcp@gc.cuny.edu if you would like to attend this event.

Seating is limited and readings will be circulated beforehand.

Nawal El Saadawi is a leading Egyptian feminist, sociologist, medical doctor and militant writer on Arab women’s problems. She is the author of Women at Point Zero (1979); Memoirs from the Women’s Prison (1984); The Nawal El Saadwai Reader (1997) amongst others, and is one of the most widely translated contemporary Egyptian writers, with her work available in twelve languages

Her writing presents the full range of her extraordinary work. She explores a host of topics from women’s oppression at the hands of recent interpretations of Islam to the role of women in African literature, from sexual politics of development initiatives to tourism in a ‘post-colonial’ age. She looks at the nature of cultural identity to the subversive potential of creativity, from the fight against female genital mutilation to problems facing the internationalization of the women’s movement. Throughout her writing she sheds new light on the power of women in resistance – against poverty, racism, fundamentalism, and inequality of all kinds. Nawal El Saadawi has received three literary awards.

In 1980, as a culmination of the long war she had fought for Egyptian women’s social and intellectual freedom, an activity that had closed all avenues of official jobs to her, she was imprisoned under the Sadat regime, for alleged “crimes against the state. Even after her release from prison, El Saadawi’s life was threatened by those who opposed her work, mainly Islamic fundamentalists, and armed guards were stationed outside her house in Giza for several years until she left the country to be a visiting professor at North American universities. El Saadawi was the writer in residence at Duke University’s Asian and African Languages Department from 1993-1996. She also taught at Washington State University in Seattle. She has since held positions at a number of prestigious colleges and universities including Cairo University, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the Sorbonne, Georgetown, Florida State University, and the University of California, Berkeley. In 1996, she moved back to Egypt and was among the protesters in Tahrir Square earlier this year.  El Saadawi continues to devote her time to being a writer, journalist and worldwide speaker on women’s issues.
___________________________________________________

EVENT THREE

Movement, generation and moments of excess

with Free Association (UK) and Friends
http://www.leftforum.org/content/movement-generation-and-moments-excess

Saturday, March 19th at 3PM
Left Forum 2011
44 W626, Pace University

Note: Registration with the Left Forum is required to attend this panel.

Join Free Association (UK) and friends for a discussion on political regeneration in times of crisis. The cycle of struggle associated with the “movement of movements” have all but drawn to a close. In the face of a new round of austerity, and a deepening crisis of social reproduction, new struggles and new antagonistic social subjects are emerging, particularly in the North. With the dawning of a new and unknown era we consider the question of inheritance and new generations. But how do political generations form and can the experience of past generations play a useful role in this? How do emerging generations relate to previous movements, without conceding ground and losing their singularity? How do we allow the past to “live in us”, whilst preventing it from weighing “like a nightmare upon the brains of the living”?

___________________________________________________

Joining the Truth & Politics Series intiated by 16 Beaver earlier in the year, we will explore with Emma Dowling the politics and responses of austerity measures in the UK.  Through waves of occupations of universities and banks, days of protest, and walkouts, many thousands have expressed their refusal of the imposition of working class austerity as a solution to this crisis.  As they contest the politics of crisis, how do these struggles develop beyond a crisis of politics?

Consider subscribing to the 16 Beaver list (http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday/subscribe.php) or visit thier website (http://www.16beavergroup.org/) for more information.
___________________________________________________

EVENT FIVE

Affect: Toward movement, thought and changing forms-of-life

with Melissa Gregg and select Contributors

Tonight’s event launches The Affect Theory Reader, a field-defining collection that gathers central theorists of affect—those visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing that can serve to drive us toward movement, thought, and ever-changing forms of relation.

From “cruel optimism” (Lauren Berlant), the affective logic of public threat (Brian Massumi), to shame (Elspeth Probyn), the book’s many contributors show how an awareness of affect theory illuminates the intertwined realms of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the political as they play out across bodies (human and non-human) in both mundane and extraordinary ways. They reveal the broad theoretical possibilities opened by an awareness of affect as they reflect on topics including ethics, food, public morale, glamor, snark in the workplace, and mental health regimes.

In the book, the editors suggest ways of defining affect, trace the concept’s history, and highlight the role of affect theory in various areas of study.  Contributors. Sara Ahmed, Ben Anderson, Lauren Berlant, Lone Bertelsen, Steven D. Brown, Patricia Ticineto Clough, Anna Gibbs, Melissa Gregg, Lawrence Grossberg, Ben Highmore, Brian Massumi, Andrew Murphie, Elspeth Probyn, Gregory J. Seigworth, Kathleen Stewart, Nigel Thrift, Ian Tucker , Megan Watkins

* * *

Please join us at Bluestockings Bookstore on Wednesday, MARCH 17th 2010 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.

Then, on Thursday, MARCH 18th at 7PM at Bluestockings, please join Team Colors 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.

Edu-Factory: “Toward a Global Autonomous University

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.

This is Forever is sponsoring the next event in the series on Friday, JANUARY 8th, 2010 at 7PM at Bluestockings.  The next events are Monday and Tuesday, JANUARY 11th and 12th, also at Bluestockings at 7PM. Details below.  The next few are listed below that:

Climate Justice, Movement(s), and Crisis: A Report back from COP15 and a discussion with Turbulence

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. 

Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life

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/

Towards a Global Labor History with van der Linden

Saturday, October 31st 2009 @ 12PM – 2PM

Marcel van der Linden:  Working Class History from Below

16 Beaver Street, 4th  fl.

New York, NY 10004

Marcel van der Linden will be presenting research from his book, “Workers of the World, Essays Towards a Global labor History,” which builds the foundations of a global history of capitalism from below: a history freed from Eurocentrism and methodological nationalism. Using literature from diverse regions, epochs and disciplines, van der Linden provides arguments and conceptual tools for a different interpretation of history – a labor history which integrates the history of slavery, indentured labor, and subsistence labor; and which pays serious attention to diverging yet interconnected developments in different parts of the world.

“Workers of the World: Essays Toward a Global Labor History” (September 2008) was published in the Netherlands by Brill Publishers.

While the discussion will span themes from the entire book, the book’s Introduction (pp. 1-14 of the book’s pagination) is a useful starting point.  So, too, are the sectionsConceptualizations (Chapters Two through Four, pp. 17-78) and Forms of Resistance(Chapters Nine through Twelve, pp. 171-283)

Tea and coffee will be provided; any simple food contributions are appreciated, such as bread, cheese, honey, jam, fruit, etc.

Crude World: The Politics of Oil

SILVIA FEDERICI and GEORGE CAFFENTZIS in Conversation with PETER MAASS

Tuesday November 10th, 2009 6:30 pm

Graduate Center

365 5th Ave btwn 34th and 35th (The Skylight Room, 9100)

The environmental devastation wrought by the world’s reliance on petroleum can no longer be denied, but the insidious cultural effects of oil extraction, production, and exportation still receive scant attention. Join Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis as they discuss big oil’s cultural and political violence with Peter Maass, contributing editor at The New York Times Magazine and the author of the recently published Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil. The event is moderated by Ashley Dawson, Associate Professor of English, The Graduate Center, CUNY.

George Caffentzsis and Silvia Federici have collaborated on a number of pieces dealing with the political and class implications of oil.

Most notable is the 2001 publication of Midnight Oil:Work, Energy, War 1973-1992by Midnight Notes.

Organized by The Center for Humanities at the Graduate Center CUNY.

Ecological Debt: Embodied Debt

ARIEL SALLEH on a feminist and ecologically integrated politics of the commons; introduced and in dialogue with SILVIA FEDERICI

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 7:00PM

Bluestockings Bokstore

172 Allen Street

New York, New York 10002

In a time of financial meltdown and global warming, alter-globalisation movements look for a shared political analysis – one that is sex-gender literate,  culturally inclusive, and grounded materially in nature. Understanding the specific character of peasant, indigenous, and household labor will be critical for an integrated move toward the commons. Such labor models an epistemology that protects ecological integrity and the social metabolism. Ariel Salleh seeks to re-frame political ecology with new concepts like – embodied debt, meta-industrial labour, eco-sufficiency, and metabolic value.

Ariel Salleh will be speaking on themes from her recently edited volume, Eco-Sufficiency & Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology (Pluto Press, 2009)

Ariel Salleh’s work is widely debated in ecopolitics and her Ecofeminism as Politics (Zed Books, 1997) is a classic in the field. She is published in Environmental Politics, New Left Review, Economic and Political Weekly, Futures, Organization & Environment. A researcher in Political Economy at the University of Sydney, Australia, and a co-editor of Capitalism Nature Socialism, she is a seasoned activist in biodiversity and water politics, and has taught at universities in North America and the Asia-Pacific region.

Bristol Radical History Group

This Is Forever is excited to announce three New York City events with the Bristol Radical HIstory Group, on Thursday NOVEMBER 12th, Friday NOVEMBER 13th and Sunday NOVEMBER 15th.

Since 2006 Bristol Radical History Group (BRHG) have organised nearly 100 history events; staging walks, talks, gigs, reconstructions, films, exhibitions, trips through the archives and fireside story telling. We also publish a range of pamphlets and host a comprehensive website (http://www.brh.org.uk).

Brecht Forum

Thursday, November 12th @ 7:30PM

Bristol Radical History Group: Radical History ‘From Below’

451 West Street (between Bank & Bethune Streets

New York, NY 10014

http://brechtforum.org/

The ‘History Workshop’ movement was founded in 1966 in Ruskin College, Oxford, U.K. by the Marxist academic Raphael Samuel, a champion of ‘history from below.’ He famously defined this movement as being “the belief that history is or ought to be a collaborative enterprise, one in which the researcher, the archivist, the curator and the teacher, the ‘do-it-yourself’ enthusiast and the local historian, the family history societies and the individual archaeologist, should all be regarded as
equally engaged.”

In 2006 in the U.K., Bristol Radical History Group was formed with a view opening up some of the hidden history of their home city to public scrutiny, to challenge some commonly held ideas about historical events and approach this history from ‘below’. Unlike Samuel’s ‘History Workshop,’ the group actually came ‘from below’ its genesis being in an expanded sports club rather than in the academy. As a result it has been able to successfully integrate both the formal lecture with street performance, the organic intellectual with the academic and engage the public in the excitement of radical history by the use of different media.

Members of Bristol Radical History Group will be outlining the influences that inspired their project from E.P.Thompson to punk rock, describing their forays into the battles over the historical representations of their city from slavery to labour history and looking to the future of radical history from ‘below’. So if you want to find out what unites a 17th Century blasphemous preacher and some drunken Can-Can dancers this is the event for you.

16 Beaver Group

Friday, November 13th @ 4PM – 9PM

Bristol Radical History Group: Why History Matters and Why Radical History Matters More

16 Beaver Street, 4th  fl.

New York, NY 10004

http://www.16beavergroup.org

An afternoon/evening of lectures, presentations and discussion presented by Bristol Radical History Group (BRHG) emphasising the importance and relevance of radical history. Using a diverse series of historical case studies the speakers will demonstrate the various interventions BRHG have made into their local and national histories including:  uncovering hidden histories / challenging established narratives / questioning previous generations of ‘radical history’ / linking new narratives and critiques with current struggles.

Case studies include:

‘A Barbarous and Ungovernable People’: The Miners of Kingswood Forest: Steve Mills explains the nature of the commons and the content of ‘commoning’ by studying the English forest and its rebellious inhabitants. Focusing on Kingswood (east of Bristol) between the 17th and 19th centuries he examines the moral economy of the native colliers, their struggles against enclosure and the attempts by the authorities to pacify the area.

‘From Peterloo to Captain Swing’: Victims or Insurgents?: Roger Wilson critiques received ‘radical’ narratives of enfranchisement and the formation of Trade Unions in Britain by focusing on the hidden history of uprising and insurrection in the early 19th Century. Why have some events been ignored or denigrated and others been championed by the left and the labour movement?

‘Votes for Ladies’: The Suffragette Movement 1903-1914: An examination of the established narrative of the struggle for the enfranchisement of women. Anny Cullum critiques the composition and outlook of this iconic movement from a class perspective.

‘My Holiday Snaps’: The Indian Enclosures: Richard Grove presents an illustrated talk charting the Adivasi’s and Dalits’ struggle to protect their land from the encroachments sponsored by industry and the World Bank in a contemporary world-wide wave of enclosures.

Bluestockings Bookstore

Sunday, November 15th @ 7PM

Bristol Radical History Group: History as Inquiry and Militant Research

172 Allen Street

New York, NY 10002

http://www.bluestockings.com

Since 2006 Bristol Radical History Group (BRHG) have organised a bewildering range of history events; staging walks, talks, gigs, reconstructions, films, exhibitions, trips through the archives and fireside story telling.  Tonight, the Bristol Radical History Group (BRHG) will give an account of its own formation as a group, the arc of their activities in Bristol and beyond, as well as how the methods and techniques employed in their history from below relates to practices of militant research.

Bristol Radical History Group member Dan Bennett will also present  “A History of Commercial Corporations”, in which he exposes the hidden and chequered history of the Corporation explaining in the process what corporations are, where they come from and how they derive their power.

Events sponsored by ‘This is Forever’: From Inquiry to Refusal’, an event and discussion series dedicated to understanding the current composition of political movements and struggles using the lens of autonomist thought.  For more information, please seewww.thisisforever.org

Niklas Frykman on the Revolutionary Atlantic

Join Niklas Frykman on Saturday, OCT 3rd for a long history of the class and political compositions that comprised resistance struggles against Empire during the Late 18th-Century.  Frykman will focus on the naval wars of the 1790s, the “shock proletarianization at sea,” and the wide-scale desertion and mutiny of workers forced into warships.

At the height of the French Revolutionary Wars of the 1790s, hundreds of mutinies repeatedly pushed military discipline in Europe’s war-fleets to the very brink of collapse, and sometimes beyond. Please join Niklas Frykman in remembering one of the largest, most radical frontline resistance movements of our history.

The event will take place at Bluestockings Bookstore at 7pm on Saturday, OCT 3rd.  Niklas Frykman currently lives in Pittsburgh where he is finishing his PhD with Marcus Rediker (author of The Many-Headed Hydrawith Peter Linebaugh) at the University of Pittsburgh.

You can find Frykman’s article, “Seamen on Late 18th-Century European Warships” here.

Michael Hardt on “Commonwealth”

“Connective Mutations” Seminar with Franco Berardi

The recent militant publishing project Minor Compositions and 16 Beaver are organizing a four-day seminar with Bifo, from Thursday, September 3rd to Sunday, September 6th. “Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of Post-Alpha Generation,” Bifo’s most recent book will be available for free to all seminar participants.

The seminar will take place at 16 Beaver: Thursday schedule will be from 5pm – 8pm. Friday will be from 12:00pm to 10pm. Saturday, and Sunday will go from 11:00am to 10pm. A sliding scale fee of $25-50 is requested to help defray costs associated with bringing Bifo to NYC, as well as covering food for the 4 days.

Updates and readings are available at the 16 Beaver website here and other queries can be directed to subject [AT] 16beavergroup [DOT] org.

Affective Politics & the Imagination of Everyday Resistance
Summer Seminar 2009

Wednesdays 4-6PM (July 15th to August 26th)
Bluestockings Bookstore
Lower East Side | 172 Allen Street (btw. Stanton and Rivington)

Instructors: Jack Z. Bratich & Stevphen Shukaitis

Recently, “affect” has been a key concept for research in politics, aesthetics, marketing, neuroscience, and sociology. This course seeks to draw together some of the more innovative work within this “affective turn,” focusing on the political composition of subjectivities, especially via cultural practices.  After a survey of some conceptual foundations of affectivity, we explore its relation to group-formation, labor, technology, value, passions (fear, panic, trauma, joy, love), actions, and creativity. The course will feature guest speakers engaged in affective politics and involve group discussions on the affective nature of practices participants are involved in.

Readings (available here):
Readings are divided into core and supplementary readings. The core readings (noted with a star *, approximately 50 pages) will be used to form the basis of discussion of the topics for the given week. Supplementary readings are materials arguments will be drawn from and would be useful for pursuing particular topics further but are not necessary to read before discussion. Reading core materials is highly encouraged and will greatly aid in having engaging and interesting discussions.

Discussion of “Giorgio Agamben’s ‘What is an Apparatus?’

Friday, JUNE 5th 2009 at 7PM
Bluestockings Bookstore, 172 Allen Street, NYC 10002

The discussion will begin as a conversation with translators David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella of the recently published english translation of Giorgio Agamben’s “What is an Apparatus? The three essays collected in this book offer a succinct introduction to Agamben’s recent work through an investigation of Foucault’s notion of “apparatus” (or dispositif), a meditation on the intimate link of philosophy to friendship, and a reflection on the singular relation with one’s own time that we call contemporariness. The evening will also offer a sneak peak of “Nudity,” Agamben’s forthcoming book.

The event will take place at Bluestockings Bookstore and is free (suggested donation/purchase the book).

“French Precarity Struggles in the Crisis”

Saturday, MAY 2nd 2009 at 7PM
Bluestockings Bookstore, 172 Allen Street, NYC 10002

Emmanuelle Cosse, former president of Paris ACT UP, will address how French struggles against precarity have been affected by, and responded to, the global capitalist crises. Cosse will emphasize movement tactics, strategies and composition in France, and the implications for precarity struggles elsewhere in Europe. Discussion to follow presentation.

Click here to access Emmanuelle’s essay, “The Precarious Go Marching,” published May 2008 in the journal ‘In the Middle of a Whirlwind.’  Organized by Team Colors Collective (www.warmachines.info).

Capitalist Crisis, Energy and the Commons

Saturday, APRIL 18th at 10AM to 12PM

Iain Boal (Chair) – University of California, Berkeley and Santa Cruz
Peter Linebaugh – University of Toledo
George Caffentzis – Philosophy, University of Southern Maine
Silvia Federici – Hofstra University

Class Struggle and the Crisis: From Workers to Capital and Back Again

Sunday, APRIL 19th at 10AM to 12PM

George Caffentzis (Chair) – Philosophy, University of Southern Maine
Silvia Federici – Hofstra University
Peter Linebaugh – University of Toledo
Monty Neill – Deputy Director of FairTest
Eddie Yuen – San Francisco Art Institute

Both panels at the LEFT FORUM at Pace University
One Pace Plaza, New York, NY 10038

‘Reading’ Struggles from Athens to Oakland

Saturday, APRIL 11th 2009 at 4:30PM to 6PM
NYC Anarchist Bookfair
Kimmel Hall, NYU Room 908
60 Washington Square Park South

Midnight Notes will engage in a discussion of the current capitalist crisis and some of its most potent responses by reading the variety of struggles that have cropped up in recent months, such as in Greece, Oakland, and the Italian anomalous wave. How does organized refusal of capitalist command provoke crisis? How are movements able to circulate across the globe, short-circuit international divisions and hierarchies, and gain power?

Through a reading of current struggles, we will revisit key concepts in relation to self-activity such as the meaning of autonomy; how struggles connect themes of refusal, exodus and revolution; what working class composition means; how circulation and cycles of struggles operate; and how one ‘reads’ struggles politically and strategically.

From Mutual Aid to Collective Reproduction in the Capitalist Crisis

ANARCHIST BOOKFAIR

These divisions are continuously recreated and are our fundamental weakness. Thus we need to develop the tools to overcome them. Sivlia Federici, author, scholar, and feminist, will draw out the significance of collective reproduction in our struggles against capitalism. We will discuss how our anti-capitalist struggles can foster forms of support and develop our ability to collectively organize our own reproduction.

Silvia Federici is a scholar, teacher and activist with roots in the Italian women’s liberation movement. Federici the co-founder (with George Caffentzis) of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, a member of the Midnight Notes Collective, a radical group that studies global political economy, and author of author of “Caliban and the Witch,” a groundbreaking study of the role of women’s oppression in the creation of capitalism.

George Caffentzis is a member of the Midnight Notes Collective. He has edited with the Collective numerous journals, pamphlets and two books published by Autonomedia: “Midnight Oil: Work, Energy War, 1973-1992″ and “Auroras of the Zapatistas: Local and Global Struggles of the Fourth World War.”

Urban Struggle and the Crisis

By connecting the theme of urban struggle in-and-against the crisis, Midnight Notes editors and friends will discuss the strategic areas in which the economic crisis is impacting forms of life in the city as well as the struggles that exist in relation to it.

We are becoming increasingly aware to what extent this economic crisis is meant to also become a crisis of the working class itself.  This crisis will be first and foremost experienced at the level of social reproduction, in our ability to reproduce our lives.  Will increased hierarchies further individuate us and fragment our power?  Will we develop ways of living in common that refuse this capitalist crisis?  Does organizing refusal help us determine where we go from here, how we might find an ‘exit’ to capitalist command?  How do ’self-reproducing movements’ relate to organizing revolution in this context?  Whatever the scenario, one thing seems clear:  it will either be the capitalists reconstituting everyday life or it will be us.

Tuesday, MARCH 3rd, 2009 at 7pm
Bluestockings Bookstore, 172 Allen Street, NYC 10002

Join the Bluestockings and the Team Colors Collective for a discussion and presentation on the current crisis of care, “creating communities of care and movements of self-reproduction.”

How do radical movements respond to personal crises, trauma, care as well as issues that flow through our everyday lives? Beyond seeing politics as a simply a set of issues and positions, how do we begin to construct new relationships, activities and projects that address issues such as mental health, care, trauma and grief, sexual assault, and interpersonal violence? This discussion seeks to address some of these questions in a series of short presentations and a facilitated workshop session.
The event will begin with substantive presentations from Kevin Van Meter, of the research collective Team Colors & Portland, OR based Dicentra Collective, and Silvia Federici of the Midnight Notes Collective, who has for the past three decades been involved in radical struggles against capital and research into the working class, women and reproductive labor. A discussion will follow the presentations, with the intent of intertwining projects and narratives for the audiences’ own lives into the event.

Some of the questions to be discussed are:
How does the current economic crisis and the crisis of care (care giving, care work, the care industry) disproportionately affect women, both in the United States and in the global south? What does the crisis and the crisis of care mean for the movement against capital and the state. What struggles are taking place during this crisis around care – as well as before it erupted – that we can “read”, draw from, amplify and connect with toward a new world?

Can radical movements respond to personal crises and can they provide personal care? Moving beyond politics as a set of issues and positions, let’s consider what radical projects can do to address physical illness and chronic pain, mental illness, intimate violence, trauma and grief, and other experiences and realities.

Speakers Biographies:
Silvia Federici is a scholar, teacher and activist with roots in the Italian women’s liberation movement. Federici the co-founder (with George Caffentzis) of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, a member of the Midnight Notes Collective, a radical group that studies global political economy, and author of author of Caliban and the Witch, a groundbreaking study of the role of women’s oppression in the creation of capitalism. Federici is currently
focusing inward, examining the role of caretakers within contemporary capitalism. Silvia’s current undertaking focuses on personal stories and individual struggles – exploring what it is means for women to act as caretakers. She discusses the intersection of personal experiences and global structures of power.  In this way, Federici is an important and holistic theorist – synthesizing the personal with the political. Midnight Notes Collective: www.midnightnotes.org

Kevin Van Meter is a community organizer and researcher (focusing on everyday resistance) originally from Long Island and a member of the militant research collective Team Colors.  Van Meter appears, along with Benjamin Holtzman and Craig Hughes, in the AK Press collection Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigation // Collective Theorization, with an article titled “DIY and the Movement Beyond Capitalism”; an excerpt from his article “The Moment I Cannot Escape: Care, Death, Mourning and the Struggle Against It All” is published in the recent zine collection “The Worst.  Currently based in Portland, OR Van Meter works with the Dicentra Collective toward their goal of “creating radical communities of care”.  Team Colors: www.warmachines.info; Dicentra Collective: www.dicentracollective.org