This is Forever is sponsoring two panels by Midnight Notes and friends at the upcoming City From Below conference in Baltimore from MARCH 27th to 29th, 2009.
Saturday, MARCH 28th 2009 at 5pm (City From Below, 2640 St. Paul St., Baltimore)
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.
What is at stake in this conversation is the possibility of a massive restructuring and re-spatialization of social relations in the metropolis; however, there are many potential outcomes that will be determined by the composition of current movements. Thus we ask: How are the effects of this crisis (and its many retaliations) experienced and organized across the many divisions and hierarchies within the working class? What might these new realities mean for struggles in key urban problematics such as: spatial de-concentration, transportation, communication, housing, food, work, health, services, the relationship of the city to its ‘outside’; immigration, and the intensification of separation.
We frame these questions in relation to other important questions at the heart of our “strategies of resistance”: What is the relationship between long-term organization, spontaneous forms of resistance and self-activity cropping up in many US urban contexts? What are the new qualities of struggle emerging in this period and what potential is there (though in some cases not immediately available) to shape a new terrain of struggle? At the level of both capitalist planning and our collective organizing, is what is happening in our contexts consistent with what is happening in cities outside Europe, US, and Japan?
Through discussion, we will be developing strategic insights into how we may approach the crisis politically and also begin to evaluate the composition of effective resistances.
Sunday, MARCH 29th 2009 at 2PM (City From Below, 2640 St. Paul St., Baltimore)
Urban Self-Reproducing Movements and Everyday life
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.
In the turbulent moments to come, the structures of everyday life may continue to crumble and in many ways it seems that the dominos are already falling: relations are breaking down; there is a generalized collapse of the wage; and issues of housing, work, and reproduction are intensifying.
It is with this urgency that we ask about forms of support and collectively produced forms of reproduction that exist in our movements. By focusing on collective reproduction we aim to raise questions about the current conditions affecting people’s power to reproduce their lives in ways that resist market discipline. How can our movements refuse the coda of entrenching working people in their own series of crises?
We develop the theoretical frame of ’self-reproducing movements’ in order to identify the myriad ways our organizing exposes and develops the (re)production of life that is not productive for capitalism, that is not an expansion of capitalist accumulation. In order to situate these concerns in the context of everyday life, we will investigate the composition and history of recent struggles to ask what lessons can be drawn from current organizing. By inquiring about the ramifications of these movements and the kinds of political solidarity and power they have generated, we also raise tensions between how things could be by drawing on historical experiences of previous movements. Thus, the panel aims to raise a discussion of our internal movement relations and the ability to grow and utilize political organization and power.