Andrew Flood looks at Paul Mason’s recently published book ‘Why its kicking off everywhere’ and in particular what Mason has to say about the internet and the emergance of the ‘Networked Individual’. The recording is of a WSM supporters meeting in Dublin and the 20 minute presentation is followed by 30 minutes of discussion on the ideas outlined, roughly as summarised below.
What do you do when the people making the right arguments are manipulative idiots who have so alienated people that opening their mouths amounts to emptying a full magazine into their feet? I started this blog having just come from an Occupy Dame Street assembly. There I witnessed a car crash in glorious slow motion. I felt that deep sort of frustration, where you can see just what is coming, but remain unable to tear your eyes off the disaster as it wrecks all around.
The issue on the face of it is simple. The Dublin Council of Trade Unions has called a pre-budget demonstration and would like Occupy Dame Street to co-organise it. Straightforward enough you’d imagine. Well it’s a bit more complex. Occupy Dame Street is a little prone to an anti-union line that is about the 8/10’s Sunday Independent’s ‘The unions are running the country’ and 2/10’s the left communist’s ‘The unions are running the country.’ [Ian, please note that the 2/10’s comprises both people who might be called ‘autonomists’ with some degree of accuracy: Everyone else, there are two in-jokes there, only one of which most of you have a hope of working out].
Like I suspect many other Anarchist Writers readers I’ve been playing a part in the Occupy X movement. I’ve visited the camps in Cork & London (and published photos of both, see end of this post for images from Dublin) and I’ve been active from time to time in the General Assembly of the Dublin Camp at Occupy Dame Street. I also did a workshop on activist journalism at Occupy Dame Street about 10 days back.
This article from 1995 was written as the internet started to go ‘mainstream’ and looks at the anarchist resources that already existed at that point in time online including the first WSM site online.
An examination of the first attempts to censor anarchists online from 1995. The current structure of the internet makes effectively censoring it a very difficult prospect. And the crude attempts to set activists up for persecution has already met a heated response as thousands have e-mailed protest letters to some of the publications involved. A key factor in keeping the information freely flowing will be how far workers using and maintaining the net go along with or oppose this censorship.
This report of the second Zapatista encounter in Spain is something of a break with my normal writing style as I got swept up in the romance (and as it happens a romance) of the second encounter in Spain. Don’t panic, the center section is a fairly detailed description of some of the actual discussions at the encounter. I spent the last day by the river and hence missed the decision by some to stay an extra couple of days and set up what became ‘Peoples Global Action’! Bad revolutionary!
Strategies for breaking up assemblages must be based on an understanding of the different possible relationships between the components of the assemblage. To examine two different types of assemblage we will consider the chain and the starfish.
The chain is an assemblage of links. For the chain assemblage to maintain it’s integrity under stress, every single link component must not fail. The failure of any single link brings about the catastrophic failure of the entire chain assemblage.
The publication of Empire in 2000 created an intense level of discussion in left academic circles that even spilled over at times into the liberal press. This should please the authors, Antonio Negri, one of the main theoreticians of Italian ‘autonomous Marxism’ and a previously obscure literature professor Michael Hardt. It is clear that they see Empire as the start of a project comparable to Karl’s Marx’s Das Kapital. The Marxist Slavoj Zizek has called Empire "The Communist Manifesto for our time".
With the emergence of the summit protest movement into the public eye after J18 and Seattle, anarchism gained an influence way beyond what the numbers of anarchists and the level of anarchist organisation might have led you to predict. Quite quickly in the English speaking world, anarchism emerged from being a fairly obscure and historical critique of the left to become one of the main poles in the globalisation movement.
It is an old cliché that anarchists are against organisation – the media loves to point out an imagined contradiction between anarchism and organisation. The reality is that (among other things) anarchism is a theory of organisation. The circled A often seen sprayed on walls represents the A of anarchism within the O of organisation. [In Greek]