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a
web journal for other values
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may
2001 |
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 electric
new commons - Franco
Barchiesi - Delivery
From Below, Resistance From Above. Electricity and the Politics of
Struggle for People's Needs in Tembisa
[abstract]
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shall we kill the banks? -
George
Caffentzis. Varieties
of Bancocide: Left and Right Critiques of the World Bank and IMF.
[abstract]
- [complete] |
| flexibility for
whom? - Anne
Costello & Les Levidow - Flexploitation
Strategies: UK Lessons for Europe. [abstract]
- [complete] |
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the rat race disguised as freedom -
Massimo De Angelis - Global Capital,
Abstract Labour, and the Fractal-Panopticon. [abstract]
- [complete] |
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war is on the agenda -
Silvia Federici - War,
Globalization, and Reproduction. [abstract]
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photograph
by Steve Walker
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the
commoner
In the
beginning there is the doing, the social flow of human interaction and
creativity, and the doing is imprisoned by the deed, and the deed wants to
dominate the doing and life, and the doing is turned into work, and people
into things. Thus the world is crazy, and revolts are also practices of
hope.
This
journal is about living in a world in which the doing is separated from the
deed, in which this separation is extended in an increasing numbers of spheres
of life, in which the revolt about this separation is ubiquitous. It is not
easy to keep deed and doing separated. Struggles are everywhere, because
everywhere is the realm of the commoner, and the commoners have just a simple
idea in mind: end the enclosures, end the separation between the deeds and the
doers, the means of existence must be free for all!
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electric new
commons_____________________
Franco
Barchiesi. Delivery
From Below, Resistance From Above. Electricity and the Politics of
Struggle for People's Needs in Tembisa.
The people in Tembisa, South Africa, struggle against new
enclosures and practice forms of new commons: they know how to reconnect
electricity when this is disconnected by the electricity company for non payment.
In this article, Franco Barchiesi discusses the events and their contexts. He
concludes that a innovative critical left should base its politics on
self-organization, self-management, decentralized reappropriation of economic
and political power, networking of plural resistant subjects, social needs as a
terrain of popular and working class counter-offensive through new and pragmatic
levels of radicalism. [complete]
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shall we kill the
banks?___________________
George Caffentzis. Varieties
of Bancocide: Left and Right Critiques of the World Bank and IMF
The aging Bretton Woods twins seem now facing a mortal
crisis. However, the
danger for bancocides (from banco, medieval Latin for "bench" and cide,
Latin for "killing", therefore bancocide , which literally means
"bank killing") of the late twentieth century is exactly the symmetry
of the critical situation. In this paper George Caffentzis examines the peculiar
impasse bancocide movements face given the symmetric annihilation of Left and
Right critiques of the IMF and WB. The author argues that both the Left and
Right critiques of the World Bank and IMF miss their essential function in this
period in capitalist development, viz., as prime agents for "the New
Enclosures" which are to reestablish the conditions for capitalist
exploitation in the face of the proletarian struggles since the end of WWII.
Thus for this perspective, the bancocide of the World Bank and IMF is therefore
an essential condition for undermining the centralized economic surveillance,
communication and control of the planet. He then suggests a Great Gamble to the
two bancocidal movements: join to Abolish the Banks and Cancel the Debt. If the
Right is correct, the abolition of the IMF and World Bank would destroy a major
hindrance to the stability and development of capitalism on a world-scale. The
"market mechanism" would finally begin to get a test on a world scale.
If the Left is correct, the cancellation of the debt would release billions of
people in Asia, Africa and the Americas from chronic debt-bondage and structural
adjustment ideologies. If the New Enclosures perspective is correct, the
abolition of the Bretton Woods banks would disorient world capitalist planning
and cancellation of the Debt would make more social surplus available for a new
round of collective appropriation. [complete]
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flexibility for
whom?_____________________
Anne Costello
& Les Levidow. Flexploitation Strategies: UK Lessons for Europe.
Labour 'flexibility' is always a relation of class
struggle. Historically, such flexibility' has sometimes provided a bargaining weapon
against capitalist work-discipline. Since the 1980s, however, labour has been
newly flexibilized to intensify its exploitation. Often called casual labour or precarité,
this flexploitation imposes insecurity, indignity and greater discipline. The
real motives for labour flexibilisation can be seen by analysing the European
Union and the United Kingdom in particular. This essay will argue the following
points: 1) EU integration has been bound up with flexploitation agendas; 2) the
UK has provided a Europe-wide impetus and model for them; 3) some trade unions
have internalised and enforced flexploitation agendas; 4) resistance has in some
ways gone beyond demands for waged-labour; 5) a Europe-wide resistance can learn
from the UK experience, and vice versa. [complete]
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the rat race disguised as
freedom___________
Massimo De Angelis.
Global
Capital, Abstract Labour, and the Fractal-Panopticon.
The main underlying thesis of this paper is that the realm of
capitalist work has not declined with the emergence of the neoliberal form of
global capital, but has increased. De Angelis discusses the main features of the
strategic framework within which capitalist work is imposed today. He does so in
terms of the "fusion" of two systems: the market order as conceived by
neoliberal economist Friedrich Hayek, and the panopticon as conceptualised by
Jeremy Bentham. The result of this "fusion" is the planned
architecture of a "fractal-panopticon", a mechanism that presupposes
property rights and enclosures and is aimed at extracting labour from the
entirety of the global social field. He then proceeds to illustrate how some
recent trends in the global economy, namely international trade and foreign
direct investment, can be conceived in terms of this mechanism, and how the
latter is rooted in struggle. Finally, he concludes with some remarks regarding
the constitution of subjectivities beyond abstract labour and the global
fractal-panopticon. [complete]
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war is on the
agenda______________________
Silvia Federici. War, Globalization, and Reproduction.
As the proliferation of conflicts in Africa, Asia, and the Middle
East, and
the zest of the US for military intervention throughout the 1980s and 1990s
demonstrate, war is on the global agenda. What is the connection between global
economy and war? Federici argues that war is today on the global agenda because
the new phase of capitalist expansionism that we are witnessing requires the
destruction of any economic activity not subordinated to the logic of
accumulation, and this is necessarily a violent process. Corporate capital
cannot extend its reach over the planet's resources --from the seas to the
forests to people's labour, to our very genetic pools-- without generating an
intense resistance worldwide. Moreover, it is in the nature of the present
capitalist crisis that no mediations are possible, and that development planning
in the Third World give way to war. [complete
not available. This paper will soon be published by Zed books in a collection
titled There is an alternative.]
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