apples from the underground

Demonstration at the Serbian Embassy in Budapest

2009-10-04T18:09:00.000-07:00

In the evening of 29 September the coalition of anarchist movements of Budapest represented by comrades from Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia and Ukraine, as well as LGBT (lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender) activists from various countries - Hungary, USA, Serbia, Austria, Russia etc. made a short demonstration in front of the Serbian embassy in Budapest. The major aim was to protest against state repression and governmental policies in Serbia.

The reasons - case studies - were:

a) imprisonment of 6 anarcho-syndicalists in Belgrade:
5, as it turned out later, 6 activists were accused without any evidence in a solidarity action (related to December events in Greece and murder of 15 y.o. anarchist) that took place on 25 August at the Greek embassy in Belgrade. They may get 3-15 years of prison: http://asi.zsp.net.pl/;

b) cancellation of Pride Parade in Belgrade one day before its date:
it was proclaimed that any demonstration is prohibited in Serbia from the date when the Pride Parade should have taken place, although the neo-nazi demo still happened that day.

The demo was supposed to be a short one, as it was not registered.

First, two big transparencies were put on the fence of the embassy

then the info-board of the embassy was covered by flyers (http://anarhobud.blogspot.com/2009/09/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none.html);

after some messages for the support of LGBT activists in Belgrade were put on stone parts of the fence;

a letter to the ambassador of Serbia in Hungary was put in the mail box together with some flyers. The letter aimed at attracting attention to the cancellation of Belgrade Pride Parade and asking for involvement of the Serbian authorities in LGBT issues and protection of LGBT rights;

finally, the rest of flyers were distributed among the participants (ca. 30) of the demonstration and thrown on the territory of the embassy and around.

This was a peaceful action aiming at attracting authorities' attention to current policies of the Serbian state and calling them to take action and protect rights of the groups that are victims of state repression - anarcho-syndicalists and LGBT activists.

Additional information: http://www.anarhobud.blogspot.com/

source balkans.puscii.nl

Anarchists & Police Clash 9/24/09 - Pittsburgh

2009-09-26T07:33:00.000-07:00

A Street Party aka. Kálvária Ball in Budapest

2009-09-24T13:21:00.000-07:00

Kálvária Square Ball

When

September 26, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Where

Kálvária square, 8th district, Budapest

Program

Kálvária Free Picnic: varios dishes made of the dumpster dived food collected at the market

Free Shop: a possibility to exchange clothes and things, bring something you do not need and take whatever you feel you need

Bad Kids Kálvária program

Discussions about life and future among representatives of NGOs, activists and civil people

Dínom-Dánom concert

Come and participate, taste the free food, share your thoughts, ideas and opinions about life and how to make it better!

Details (in Hungarian): http://kalvariabal.blogspot.com/

Saturday 26 of September

2009-09-15T06:58:00.000-07:00

An other interesting event organized by FUNXION collective and Urban danja in Athens , this time it will take place in Padeios university. NOCTURNAL from the UK is the special guess of the night. The party will be open air at the yard of the university building.

report from the Gay Pride in Budapest

2009-09-15T06:34:00.000-07:00

This year’s Pride Parade in Budapest was calm and rather boring, as fewer people showed up compared to the previous year. Indeed, Pride Parade 2008 was rather violent with neo-nazis and average observers, apparently homophobes, throwing eggs, tomatoes and bottles into the participants of Pride Parade 2008.

>> By the way, this violence is caused by the government headed by ex-prime minister Gyrcsany as before 2007 and 2008 the Pride Parade was peaceful and boring for the media. <<

The only positive thing about 2008 Pride was high attention of the media and increased security (Not all cops are bastards after all) this year. Not only Andrassy avenue, where the Parade took place this year, but also parallel streets were closed and surrounded by fences. Basically, a big part of central Budapest including metro was closed.

>> The right to free assembly is a basic constitutional right. But in gulyas democracy of Hungary this right has to be protected by hundreds of policemen and rows of fences. <<

Crowds of people were to be observed outside the fences, apparently not as many as previous year. Moreover, this day was a football match between Hungary and Sweden and most probably most hooligans were already at the stadium by the end of the Parade. The Parade participants turned out to be hard nuts for those willing to attack them, as police was escorting them even after the end of the Parade at Deak sq. and Blaha Lujza sq., as all the participants were recommended to go to Blaha Lujza by metro.
This decision was based on previous year’s accident when at the end of Pride Parade it turned out that the participants were trapped because most of neo-nazis gathered at the end point of the Pride 2008, Heroes’ sq.

To the Pride 2009 itself: there were a number of groups and individual people from both Hungary and abroad. The opening speeches were delivered by Juris Lavrikovs, Paata Sabelashvili (ILGA Europe) who welcomed the participants and shared tehir thoughts of the importance of the Pride. There were two cars with sound systems, a froup of people carrying a rainbow flag, and a number of smaller groups including Amnesty-Hungary (the yellow group) and the pink-black bloc.

Overall, it was just another good opportunity for queer people to claim for their right for equality and for their supporters to express their solidarity. Hopefully, the peacefulness of Pride Parade 2009 will become a good tradition and the tolerance in Hungarian society to queer people will grow to the level that no fences will be needed in the future.

Long Live Pride Parade in Budapest!

>> More pictures from the Pride Parade 2009 are to be found here <<

Fuck Parade fall out

2009-09-15T06:27:00.000-07:00

http://datacide.c8.com/fuckparade-fallout/

The yearly Fuckparade was taking place again in Berlin on August 22. The gathering point was Revaler Strasse, where the 17 trucks were warming up for the parade. A part of this warm up were also the obligatory speeches. For this, the Fuckparade organisers invited Hans Cousto and Dr. Motte, whose talks can be seen here. They deserve some attention, especially what Motte had to say.
Hans Cousto (who speaks first on the clip), is an author who published books on subjects such as “Cosmic Octave - Origin of Harmony” or “MDMA Tuning”. His angle is the same I criticised a couple of years ago in a praxis newsletter: The state is asked not to sell off its property to people who want to extract value out of “our” party culture, meaning “capitalists in other parts of the world”. He pleads that for a lively culture there is need for free spaces available to all. Fine, but to lobby the state to provide these spaces is pretty naive to say the least. In our opinion it’s politically objectionable - but all this is nothing new and would not be worth mentioning here if it wasn’t for Dr. Motte’s elaborations that follow on the clip at 4:20.
Dr. Motte is the founder of the Loveparade and a techno musician. Ironically the Fuckparade once upon a time set out to counter the commercialism and conformism of the Loveparade. When Motte himself lost control of the (now defunct) Loveparade, he started taking part of the Fuckparade.
He’s worth quoting:
After introducing himself he says: “I want to briefly sum up how I would like to define our electronic life culture. In a Nazi book about symbols I have read something great! You have to imagine - it was about runes!” He then not only describes the man rune, he also puts down the microphone and impersonates it streching out his hands and then says “it means something very beautiful, unfortunately” the peace movement turned it upside down and made it into something “greedy”, because the original man rune means something like creative development in freedom, according to Dr. Motte (or his “Nazi book”), and “this is the expression of our electronic music, and our politicians should please preserve our freedom and not sell it to property fonds who don’t care because this is our coutry, our country!!” After shouting the last words, and some applause by the Fuckparade audience, he continues: “It doesn’t belong to them but to us all, and I demand from all politicians also our mayor with his bad, gay politics that no one needs, to champion our ideals, our free spaces (…) for our free culture, not the culture of the empire from above”.
This tour de force took less than three minutes, but raises a number of questions. How can he link what he calls “our electronic life culture” to a “Nazi book” about runes? What does he mean with the “bad, gay politics that no one needs” of Berlin’s mayor Klaus Wowereit (who is openly gay)?
The second point was picked up by the mainstream press (Der Tagesspiegel from August 27-08-09), and Motte “apologized” to the mayor saying that “as an Anarchist” he respects the freedom of everybody else, including sexual freedom. But what did he mean? “The neoliberal politics” of the mayor is the answer. Gay = neoliberal?
The use of the word “gay” as “something bad” should not be tolerated at a supposedly left wing event that the Fuckparade purports to be. At least this time the statement became controversial at all - because it was not the first time he made it: At an anti-gentrification demo (Megaspree) on July 11 of this year he also went on about the “gay politics” of the gay mayor - on his own blog he still quotes himself saying it. Only now that he’s “found out” he “apologizes” (how serious he is about it is illustrated by the fact that his statement from the July 11 demo is still on his own website which suggests that the “apology” is just a PR exercise in damage control).
But even worse - and not picked up by the mainstream press - is that he explicitly bases his definition of “our electronic life culture” on Nazi esotericism - and was not challenged at the Fuckparade itself about this.
There has been very different kinds of research into the history and meaning of runes. This is not the place to go into it, but it is worth noting that the rune “research” of the Nazis is largely based on Guido von List, a charlatan who claimed to have received his rune wisdom in visions, author of “Das Geheimnis der Runen” (Secrets of the Runes) from 1908. I am no expert in the field but it appears that List’s Runology is practically completely made up to fit his völkisch-nationalist ideology. Via other far right esotericists such as Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels and Karl Maria Wiligut this became the basis for the Nazi interpretation of runes. Although we don’t know which book exactly Dr. Motte is referring to, we have to assume (since it’s a “Nazi book”) that it reflects the völkisch-racist and anti-semitic ideology of the mentioned authors.
Other enthusiasts for the man rune include Death In June who use it in the header of their web site as well as on the cover of their album “The Wörld Thät Sümmer”.
At least the Fuckparade realized they had to distance themselves clearly from Dr. Motte and did so on their web site on Sept. 1.

New Book on Techno, Rave, Club Culture “Global Nomads Techno and New Age as Transnational Countercultures in Ibiza and Goa By Anthony D’Andrea”

2009-08-31T12:01:00.000-07:00

It seems interesting actually I would like to read it

The book of the Antony D’ Andrea who makes the blog Global raver known also as Techno Tony )

About the Book

Global Nomads provides a unique introduction to the globalization of countercultures, a topic largely unknown in and outside academia. Anthony D’Andrea examines the social life of mobile expatriates who live within a global circuit of countercultural practice in paradoxical paradises.

Based on nomadic fieldwork across Spain and India, the study analyzes how and why these post-metropolitan subjects reject the homeland in order to shape an alternative lifestyle. They become artists, therapists, exotic traders and bohemian workers seeking to integrate labor, mobility and spirituality within a cosmopolitan culture of expressive individualism. These countercultural formations, however, unfold under neo-liberal regimes that appropriate utopian spaces, practices and imaginaries as commodities for tourism, entertainment and media consumption.

In order to understand the paradoxical globalization of countercultures, Global Nomads develops a dialogue between global and critical studies. By introducing the concept of ‘neo-nomadism’, this new theorization overcomes some of the shortcomings in studies of globalization.

This book is an essential reference for researchers and students of Sociology, Anthropology of Globalization, Cultural Studies, as well as Tourism, Lifestyle Migration, Subculture, Rave/Club, and New Age studies

These are just a few of the topics covered:

- Aesthetics of the self: post-sexualities in a digital age
- Counterculture and commodity
- Hippie scenes: autonomy and tourism
- Club scene in Ibiza: underground and industry
- Ethnography of the largest nightclub in the world
- Psytrance scene in Goa
- Nomadic spirituality in psychedelic rituals
- Global Countercultures

You can find Global Nomads at main online booksellers (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, eBay, Borders etc), you can click on the link on the right side of this blog, or you can obtain it directly from Routledge website:
http://www.routledge.com/books/Global-Nomads-isbn9780415553674

Fuck Parade 2009 report

2009-08-23T03:59:00.000-07:00

http://insti2te.wordpress.com/2009/08/23/fuckparade-2009-berlin/

fuckparade is a counterconcept to the loveparade. this year it was bigger and louder than the years before… the crowd was mixed: half innercity alternative minimal ravers and left wing folks and the other half hardcore gabba outer city disco folks, to speak in this black and white oversimplification. here are some pics:

Fuck Parade 2009

2009-08-21T08:10:00.000-07:00

Demonstration: Fuckparade August 22nd / 2 pm / Berlin (Germany)

The Fuckparade – a demonstration for subcultural claims and rights – will
be on the street again on August 22 this year. From a subcultural
perspective, 2009 was dominated so far by an increasing awareness of how
easily everybody’s lifestyle can be negatively affected by a growing
appetite of state institutions to control every aspect of life.Total
surveillance, non-acceptance of alternative lifestyles via tightened
budgets and higher living expenses, old fashioned 20th century regulations
ignoring every change of modern communication and artistic expression
(such as the GEMA) are just a few examples why subcultural people will once
more join on the streets of Berlin to celebrate the 12th anniversary of the
Fuckparade.

Demo:
Saturday, August 22, 2 pm
Revaler Straße
Berlin

——————————–

back after the summer break

2009-08-20T07:19:00.000-07:00

Apples from the underground starts functioning again after the summer break , full of new articles and updates.. You re always welcome to send us your news , reports and articles at sh1tuat1on1sts@gmail.com the official contact of the insti2te blog or just comment bellow the posts.

tonight in Athens

2009-07-10T08:58:00.000-07:00

If you re currently in Athens and you re searching for any good parties tonight , I guess this is a good solution. Aposidonismos collective is organizing one more event with the usual line up. Dupstep , drum n bass and experimental beats.

its been 10 years

2009-07-08T06:38:00.000-07:00

some articles about J18 (the june 18th actions against G8 and capitalism in 1999), ten years ago:

from transpontine

at datacide

also an old article in datacide

–

ten years later: there is still capitalism (in crisis) and no more G8 (but G20).
at least in berlin raves are still being used for protest (for example street parades against the jubilee of the nation, to protest the restructuring of central city areas for big business, and so on)…

info by Drofnothing "insti2te contributor"

my short report from Fusion Fest and some other general thoughts

2009-07-08T06:13:00.000-07:00

I wanted to start writing a report concerning Fusion festival since 3 days now , but I was still totally exhausted , tired, traveling back to the south. I will try to give an overview of Fusion Festival, what questions came up to my mind afterwards about the existing party scene as well as rave today. Im not expecting from myself now ,to extend on a political text ,analysis about the aim concerns of ir , nether putting efforts to reflect at the whole “alternative” concept of Fusion , something like that it needs time and long discussions with all my mates who joined the festival. In the other hand I shouldnt want as well to write just that everything was fine , yeah awesome. (but ok sure Fusion is a good experience for everyone.)

* A description briefly about the festival

Fusion is taking place since 1997 , it remains the biggest alternative festival in Germany or in other words Fusion is a “holiday communism”. 5 days , 12 stages is enough to get totally nostalgic when you live the festival. It takes place at an old soviet embassy approximately 200klm away from Berlin. The location easily reminds you something from the good days of the huge festivals during 90s. People from all around Germany and other countries traveled for some days party. Some of the people especially from Berlin usually join every year as far as I know at least. I arrived there already from the first day of the festival , we manage to set a tent and afterwards went to the main stage.

* main stage

The main stage was incredibly fabulous the opening day. A nice atmosphere , you should also check the youtube video post at the insti2te. Everybody was dancing , seemed everyone knew who is playing , the name of the track etc. That was impressive of course, nice people , nice music , perfect lights and a techno big tower in the middle. Unfortunately I didnt get the same impression for the rest of the days there. For instance on Saturday , the day that a big mass of people arrived in the fest (only for one night probably). It was over crowed , sometimes wasnt really possible to dance . An other point was the people were hmm , a bit alienated. They were not even smiling to each other ,something totally different than some other smaller stages. It was like beiing in the middle of nowhere , with unknown people , who are not even help full when someone was falling down , had an accident , was really drunk or whatever…

* cubes stage

The stage I liked the most , I guess. It was decoraded with nice cube iron constractions around the dancefloor (you can also look at the pics of Drofnothing). Minimal techno , house , electro djs were playing all days and nights good stuff , the people were friendly , good dancers etc.

* a stage near to the paradize bar (the main bar? of the festival)

A back yard something like a not announced stage. There sometimes was even better than my favorite cubes. As far as I know it wasnt announced and only faces I know from berlin were often hanging around there. Usually the line up was good electro stuff , some drum n bass and many more genres of every kind.

Well… I cant really write for every stage because all of them together were 12. On the rest of the stages you could find a huge diversity of artists and good sounds as well , such as drum n bass , post rock , dubstep even sometimes jungle and electro bands etc.

* food

All around the festival you could find several food wagons. All of them were selling vegetarian and vegan food such as the wagon burger place , a popular vegan burger. I really liked that wasnt really a place that you could buy meat , I suppose it wasnt tolerated by the organized group of the fest. Generally the food was cheap comparing at least with other festivals

political barrios and workshops.

Except the red communist and antifa flags , some german radical left groups from around Germany were spreading information for different political campaigns or organized workshops. People from media-spree , antifa as well as people who were organizing a couple of workshops concerning gender discrimination problems , helping people who faced sexism or homophobia during the festival and beyond.

* Kino

Several good movies projected at the kino space. One that finally didnt manage to go was the “Berlin calling”

* exhibitions

A lot of exhibitions , theatre performances took place at the “cazino” space and the theatre

some general thoughts about Fusion

Always when I am attending in an alternative festival specifically the last years , i really dont like the environment of the “consuming paradize” , alianation and extreme ignorance?? of the people. Sometimes I was annoyed by these who were throwing bottles , trash all around , making a mess , expecting from others to clean the space afterwards. Finally I attend to believe that it is impossible to create anywhere (at least inside the European states of control) relations based in equality , solidarity and without discrimination.At least not yet. Everything happens for money , everybody accepts that , only a short minority stands against. The relation also of organizers/party consumers , it remains something that only few people are reflecting as well. No questions about autonomy , horizontality or even further discussing for alternatives of life ways. Self management was missing once more. I dont wanna say that it is only the problem of the organizer committee. First “We” are also responsible for what kind of situations wanna build. when some are realizing that , the repression is coming. I think it is time to resist against it again. It is time for the sounds of resistance to occupy the soundsystem again )

As an ending point I would like to express my full Solidarity with the TEKNIVALS , free parades in France and all around the world…

Fusion Festival photos and a report

2009-07-01T04:35:00.000-07:00

Hello everybody .. A nice photo report is now available at insti2te blogzine , actually I already miss the atmosphere of the "holiday kommunismus" wanna go back :). If you also were at the festival please send me your reports and comments

photos and reports you can find here http://insti2te.wordpress.com/2009/06/30/fusion-2009-photos/

Fusion 09 opening

2009-06-29T13:03:00.000-07:00

http://insti2te.wordpress.com/2009/06/29/fusion-09-steve-bug-opening-turmbuhne/

video from the represion action of the Police in Paris against teknivals

2009-06-25T07:46:00.000-07:00

Free Parade and reppression in Paris

2009-06-23T16:11:00.000-07:00

beginning of the summer in Berlin

2009-06-23T16:08:00.000-07:00

http://insti2te.wordpress.com/2009/06/22/beginning-of-summer-in-berlin-our-party-weekend/

so again we went to Lokal on Saturday, for another session of “love techno hate germany”, seems like this becomes our regular party (it’s once a month and someone of us is there in most cases, for the first time i also had fancypunk with me)… i atleast went only there to chill a bit, but the set of yoko fono even got me to dance a bit, really nice.

sorry this is the only picture i have from the set, but i marked for you which areas are the djane …

then sunday was fete de la musique in berlin, it’s a festival around the world in big cities where they play music for free on the streets to celebrate the beginning of summer. we went first to schillingbrücke, where one of the more public techno areas is usually. this year it was to much commercial labeled for me (i mean most of the time i don’t care, but this time it was a bit strange). the last years it was different and i found it to be nicer then. anyways, we didn’t stay there long, although the music was pretty nice.

we went back to görlitzer park and got caught in the rain that washed away the summer beginning party… pilocka krach was playing. the atmosphere still was nice, because the visual spectacle of sun getting down in the light rain and some rainbows was pretty spectacular. many people were dancing in the mud of this wasted park. we were getting to wet and finally decided to head home, this fete de la musique thing only lasts until 22 o’clock anyways and we were still fucked up.

Chasse aux Ravers à Paris : des dizaines de blessé-es lors d'une Fête de la Musique Libre

2009-06-23T16:03:00.000-07:00

As soon As we get the english translation we will post it here!

Communiqué de presse du dimanche 21 juin 2009

Ce samedi 20 avril, une quinzaine de chars sonorisés et plusieurs milliers de Ravers ont défilé dans une ambiance festive à l’occasion d’une « Free Parade », manifestation en faveur des valeurs d'autonomie, de partage, de gratuité et de liberté (http://www.freeparadeparis.org/). En cette veille de fête de la musique, cet événement était aussi porteur d’un message d’alerte et d’inquiétude des acteurs et des actrices de cette scène musicale. Cette mobilisation visait à dénoncer la répression que subit la Tekno Libre (musique techno non-marchande), faisant ainsi écho aux manifestations de la semaine passée, qui avaient rassemblé plus de 1000 teufeurs et teufeuses dans les rues d'Évreux et de Mulhouse. C’est en effet toute une mouvance musicale et culturelle qui est en proie à une répression drastiquement durcie depuis quelques mois, dont le « traditionnel » Teknival du 1^er mai 2009 (festival autogéré rassemblant plusieurs milliers de Ravers et dont Nicolas Sarkozy s'etait engagé à faciliter la tenue chaque année) a constitué le point d’orgue : plus de 30 « Sounds Systems » français ont été arbitrairement saisis par les autorités de l’État (http://www.systematek.org/gargouilles/), qui ont réquisitionné tout le matériel de sonorisation de ces collectifs musicaux, artistiques et culturels (matériel dont la valeur peut être estimée à deux ou trois millions d'euros !). Des centaines de personnes se retrouvent ainsi dépossédées (voire ruinées) pour avoir voulu offrir des fêtes autonomes et non-commerciales. Une répression sans précédent en près de 20 ans de Zones d'Autonomie Temporaire festives...

À l’ère du numérique, saisir le matériel sonore n'est il pas une nouvelle forme d'autodafé ?

À la fin de cette Free Parade les manifestant-es ont décidé de prolonger la « teuf » au bois de Boulogne, en célébrant dès minuit une Fête de « leur » Musique, conçue comme une légitime mise en accusation de la réduction croissante du droit d'expression des artistes et musiciens amateurs lors des festivités officielles du 21 juin.

Quelques centaines de personnes se trouvaient déjà sur le site lorsqu'une cinquantaine d'agents de la B.A.C et de policiers en tenues anti-émeute, bientôt rejoint par de nombreux renforts, ont violemment chargé la foule à coups de matraques. Les gens se sont alors regroupés pour éviter les coups et protéger le matériel sonore. En dépit de cette réaction manifestement pacifique, la police a poursuivi les charges au moyen de grenades lacrymogènes et de pistolets flash-balls, parfois de façon particulièrement dangereuse (tirs tendus ou même à bout portant, en direction du buste ou du visage, etc.). Des individus à terre ont été roués de coups de pieds et aspergés de gaz ; un handicapé, membre de Médecins Du Monde, fut même jeté hors de son fauteuil roulant avant d'être molesté au sol. Au passage, les forces de police ont volontairement détérioré des véhicules et du matériel appartenant aux fêtards.

Empêchant l'accès aux véhicules, la police a pendant plusieurs heures conduit une véritable « chasse aux Ravers », n’hésitant pas à lâcher des chiens à leur poursuite… Une attitude d’autant plus paradoxale que les Sound Systems avaient commencé à partir dès l’intervention policière.

Tandis que les membres de Médecins Du Monde tentaient d’effectuer des premiers soins, les policiers ont interdit l'accès aux pompiers venus secourir les blessé-es. En plus des dizaines de blessé-es à déplorer, nombre de personnes se trouvent en état de choc suite à cette longue nuit où les forces de l’ordre ont fait preuve d'une violence inconcevable face à des jeunes qui dansaient paisiblement au bord d'un lac attendant l’aube d’un 21 juin normalement placé sous les auspices de la musique...

Nous demandons donc la liberation immediate des 4 interpelé-es et la restitution de tout les Sound Systems saisis, ainsi que l'arret des poursuites judiciaires à l'encontre des acteurs et des actrices de la mouvance Tekno !

Collectif des Sound Systems

A Propos de la Tekno Libre et des Free Party....

Ceux qui parlent de révolution et de lutte sans comprendre ce qu'il y a de subversif dans notre culture, de positif dans le refus des contraintes, ceux-là ont dans la bouche un cadavre !

Notre but est la participation immédiate à une abondance passionnelle de la vie, à travers le changement de moments périssables délibérément aménagés. La réussite de ces moments ne peut être que leur effet passager. Nous envisageons l'activité culturelle, du point de vue de la totalité, comme construction expérimentale de la vie quotidienne. Il s'agit de produire nous-mêmes, et non des choses qui nous asservissent. Notre identité est l'autogestion, la mobilisation infinie notre force, la danse et la musique l'expression de notre indéfectible liberté.

Or, la liberté absolue offense, déconcerte. On préfère alors invoquer la maladie, la démoralisation, la déviance… pour légitimer son oppression. Qui nous juge n'est pas né à l'esprit, à cet esprit de liberté que nous voulons dire, et qui est pour nous bien au-delà de ce que vous appelez la liberté.
Gare à vos logiques, Mes-sieurs-dames, gare à vos logiques, vous ne savez pas jusqu'où notre haine de la logique peut nous mener.

Il faut lutter sans plus attendre, dans notre culture, pour l'apparition concrète de l'ordre mouvant de l'avenir. Les forces réactionnaires à l'œuvre dans notre pays ne laisseront à aucun prix, tout en affirmant le contraire, une véritable contestation culturelle se développer en dehors de celle qu'elles ont pris soin d'organiser elles-mêmes. Des lois injustes existent : nous satisferons-nous de leur obéir ou tacherons-nous de les amender, de leur obéir jusqu'à ce que nous y ayons réussi, ou les transgresserons-nous sur le champ ? On estime en général devoir attendre d'avoir persuadé la majorité de les altérer. On pense que si l'on résistait, le remède serait pire que le mal. Or c'est de la responsabilité du gouvernement lui-même que le remède soit pire que le mal. C'est lui qui rend pire.

Alors jetez votre vote, pas un simple bout de papier, mais toute votre influence. Une minorité est impuissante tant qu'elle se conforme à la majorité. Ce n'est du reste plus une minorité, mais elle devient irrésistible quand elle la bloque de tout son poids. La victoire sera pour ceux qui auront su faire le désordre sans l'aimer.

Il nous reste, dans les limites où il nous appartient d'agir avec efficacité, à témoigner en toutes circonstances de notre attachement absolu à l'existence de notre culture, non pas seulement en assurant individuellement la sauvegarde de ce principe, non pas seulement en élevant une faible protestation contre chaque violation qui en est faite, mais encore en recourant, le cas échéant, aux moyens d'agitation générale les plus propices.

"Au vent qui sème la tempête, se récolte les jours de fête"

ready for FUSION?

2009-06-19T14:55:00.000-07:00

ok I got back to Berlin for a short time , visiting drofnothing and other friends as Pete , Hannan and so on. As Far as I realized here a lot of serious stuff are going on. People are willing to squat the airport of Tempelhof , the ravers are really inaction and the misarrable situation within the activist scene is still here , nothing change in that sense. Next week one of the biggest alternative festivals in Germany , fusion will take place as you possibly imagine I will attend together with people I mentioned before. Actually FUSION remains one immpresed event who more than 20.000 people go every year. If you re around Germany dont miss it.

solidarity with the Bulgarian queer June 27

2009-06-09T05:50:00.000-07:00


>
> Here is the statement of "AnarchoResistance", 3 days before the
> protests. I will try to translate also a brief article about what
> happened.
>
>
> ======================================================================
>                        About the upcoming protest
>
>
>
> This communique is a response to the rumors and statements circulating
> in the media and on the internet regarding the upcoming protest on
> January 14. We, the people gathered in the informal collective
> „AnarchoResistance“, decided to clearly express our attitude towards the
> upcoming protest even though writing declarations and using big words in
> not our prefered method of action. We do not pretend to represent anyone
> else but ourselves, and we are not purporting to speak on behalf of the
> entire anarchist movement in Bulgaria.
>
> First and foremost we want to clarify for those around us and for the
> media that we are NOT CO-ORGANIZERS or ORGANIZERS, and will not be
> supporting or attending this protest officially as a group. We do not
> want to get into a more serious debate with the organizers and
> co-organizers not because we don't have serious arguments and opinions
> SPECIFICALLY about this protest, but because we consider this to be
> inappropriate since we don't have a direct connection to the current
> organizers.
>
> We find it uncanny and detrimental that soccer fan groups and factions
> have suddenly become involved in the protests especially at a moment
> when the student movement was getting stronger and was clearly operating
> outside of the influence and manipulations of the state, the political
> parties and their leaders. We don't see the logic behind letting people
> with openly racist positions and neo-nazi affiliation to participate and
> frame the boundaries and tone of protests which have concrete goals and
> demands... unless of course certain political and economic circles are
> simply aiming to discredit the raising dissent. All of this is happening
> in an athmosphere of threats of „the ugliest scenes in Bulgaria“ and
> open attempts to instigate clashes between warrying soccer hooligan
> groups which threatens to sully the student protests and to give a
> formal excuse to the state and the medias for attacking and dismissing
> the goals of this protest. This is a way to channel the social tensions
> once again while discrediting the malcontent students, evironmentalists
> and ordinary citizens through the actions of a handful of soccer
> hooligans. As a result of these manipulations the demands of the
> students have already been completely obscured while the medias are
> awash with empty worlds and generalizations.
>
> This text is also a response to widely published lies and sick fantasies
> about some imaginary „support“ by Greek soccer hooligans, who
> purportedly were going to „return the favor to Bulgarians who supported
> last month's protests in Greece.“ This is a complete fabrication by the
> medias seeking cheap sensations and an attempt to discredit both the
> righteous rebellion in Greece and the participation of Bulgarian
> anarchists (not of soccer vandals) in it.
>
> We cannot stand behind a protest, which began as a youth and citizen
> movement, but is being represented consistently as „national“, wrapped
> in nationalist rethoric and symbols. The „national“ status of the
> protest implies a solidarity with all kinds of Bulgarian mafioso,
> ultra-right, and neoliberal groups and interests simply because it
> assigns belonging to a common, monolithic, undivided whole (unity) to
> each and every one of us. The „nation“ is a fiction that serves to
> frame, manage and manipulate various social groups and issues. It is
> populism and demagoguery. We recognize clearly in it the essence of that
> which we are fighting against.
>
> Various materials and video clips are circulating on the internet
> inviting people to participate in this protest. These materials are
> charged with clear political insinuations and are already damaging not
> only the outcome of this particular protest but the future of a movement
> of dissent in the long term. We are concerned that these protests will
> become nothing more that sanctioned parades. They are not challenging
> the state better, they not becoming more creative or more effective for
> that matter, they are turning into a shapeless crowd of people holding
> sings. People are already sick and tired of this kind of protest, and we
> all must seek more effective and more moving ways to express oursevles
> and achieve that which we are striving for. „The insertion“ of very
> different and real demands by various protesting groups into the common
> populist protest frame, of which we are all so tired, will turn this
> protest into a grotesque.
>
> In addition, the lack of coordination among all those concerned and
> expected to participate is creating a space for „leaders“ and an
> „avant-garde“ to step-up who are visibly enjoying the media attention
> and the courtship of various political parties without having a
> legitimate or moral right to represent all protesters. A protest framed
> in these terms serves directly and indirectly political parties such as
> GERB and ATAKA – right-wing populist formations which interestingly
> enough are not being recognized as part of the ruling gang.
>
> We support political demands and believe that we should not avoid
> „politicizing“ the protests when they have clear goals and transparent
> organizational methods. Those in power should be brought to their knees
> but that necessitates a political culture and clear consensus among
> protesters.
>
> We stand behind the environmental groups and the students in their anger
> against the continuing commercialization of the natural environment and
> of education. We support them in their outrage at the violence that is
> part of these anti-social processes of privatization. But we do not
> support protests with openly nationalist tendencies. We do not support a
> protest that will only serve the authorities and the state, a protest
> that will serve to channel the student dissent around a specific event
> and with concrete demands but will stop directly and indirectly future
> student protests, it will prevent the creation of an independent student
> activist network, it will stop the building of real, automonous citizen
> structures that could apply a constant pressure against the authorities
> and could seek change not only of the status quo but of the entire
> current system – the lies called „representative democracy“, „free
> market“, „market economy“ and „capitalism“.
>
> January 11, 2009
> automonous anti-authoriatiran group „Anarcho-Resistance“
> http://www.aresistance.net

Morze infoshop Budapest new poster

2009-06-03T09:12:00.000-07:00

Electrorode Festival in Rome Italy 12-13 of June

2009-06-01T03:42:00.000-07:00

It seems that in Italy this year , a lot of electronic festival are taking place. I found by reading the history is made at night blog a festival named ELECTRORODE will held in a social centre of Rome named Forte Prenestino. The line up is minimal techno as far as I understand from the flyer. Some artists that we constatly write at the insti2te blog will be there such as Anthony Rother. More info and the line up here

International Noise Conspiracy live in Athens Agricultural university/ 30-5

2009-05-26T06:55:00.000-07:00

The (International) Noise Conspiracy is a rock band formed in Sweeden in the late months of 1998. They will appear on the stage for a second time in Greece next saturday. They are definitely one of the most political bands of our days , combining anticapitalism with subcultures of resistance like punk music. There is much fanfare about the band’s Marxist ideology and position as communists, a label they in fact give themselves. This year the band is invited by a extraparliamentary left group ’s annual festival. Maybe you know the songs capitalism stole my virginity , we are not for sale that they traveled around the world and apparently have inspired the alter globalization and other alternative movements in the previous years. A kind of remarkable is that the band is playing mostly on political radical events around Europe such as rise against in Melbourne , lets make history in Madrin and many more other anticapitalist events and festivals. Beyond the political views of the band , their sounds are even more interesting , probably not so interesting for techno and rave crowds , but in the other hand everyone should have to reflect on the messages who they are trying to spread with their lyrics. If you are visiting Athens the next days or if you live there , it would be great to give them a change

more info about the Band

www.internationalnoise.com/

NO" to oil pipe-line "Bourgas-Alexandroupolis

2009-05-25T06:22:00.001-07:00

98.97 % out of the 14 900 people who voted in the Pomorie municipality
voted "NO" on the referendum about the oil pipe-line
"Bourgas-Alexandroupolis".

This became clear once 100% of the votes had been counted. The ones that
voted "Yes" are 1,03%, and the turnout is 50,12%, this had been stated by
the chair of the election commission - Luba Stravolevoma, as quoted in
Focus information agency. Such a turnout means that the locals had managed
to pass the 51% and that the referendum is legitimate. The Pomorian
referendum is the first legitimate referendum out of the three that had
place. In Bourgas 50 000 said 'no' to the project, 5000 from Sozopol, who
also expressed their negative attitude towards the project. But in both
cases the turnout did not go over the 51% barrier that would have made
them legitimate.

The question was "Do you agree on the construction of the oil pipeline
'Bourgas-Alexandroupolis', having its track and installations on the
territory of the Pomorie municipality?" The results will be send to the
local authorities as well as to the company that will be implementing the
project.

Earlier, the mass participation of the citizens of the Pomorie
municipality, had made the city mayor - Petar Zlatanov, happy. "I am
grateful to the citizens, that they went to give their vote. In this way
they help our administration, the help the government and the people, that
are engaged in the project. The referendum showed that citizens are
gaining confidence, that their opinion will be taken into account. I am
completely confident in this, because I see the useful contact between the
government, the municipal authorities and and companies that will
implement the project.

The election day started at 6.00 in 47 sections, reported the chair of the
municipal election commission. The activity of the citizens at about 9.00
am was 9.5% already, that is more in respect to the last local elections,
when at that point the turnout was at about 6%. At about 12.00 27% had
voted and it was expected that the turnout will be high and that it will
go over 50%.

In the Pomorie municipality there a bit more than 23 000 people have
voting rights.

Athens : report from Legalize Festival

2009-05-11T06:55:00.000-07:00

Legalize pro-testival is an annual event that takes place in Greece. A diversity of groups , artists , cultural activists gather every year to protest against the Greek drug policy. Legalize protestival is also a mobilization for all those people who faced the state repression because They like to smoke weed. This year the Festival has been divided in two parts (weekends). The first weekend of May the festival took place at Ermou street in the very (center)heart of Athens and the second at the park of environmental awarreness quite close to the city center. The first weekend , before the concerts , the big party and so on, a street parade inspired by reclaim the streets was extending in the big traffics of the city center. A diversity of music like reggae , drum n bass , trance , other accoustic styles , hip hop , punk etc and a lot of people who were willing to stand openly on the the streets for basic legal rights . Therefore the festival was successful , with a lot promises for its development next year. I was not in the organizational collective but I got impressed with the people who joined it as well as the radical overview of the organizers.

I think that even the most suspicious persons about the political background of that festival got satisfied from the participation as well as the collective’s announcement that I put forward bellow.

“This festival is organized from all of us ,for the benefit of all of us and it can take place only through the conscious participation and help from everybody. It is an open public celebration for Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Choice, Self-Determination, Personal and Social Autonomy. There is not any separation between the “organizers”, the “artists”, the cultural activists and all the participators. There is no ticket, no payments or any financial profit , Self-Organization,Voluntary participatory responsibility, Liberation of the Public Space, Anti-commercial logic, Non-Employment, Non-Profit Economics are the values that you find hidden inside the core of Athens Legalize it Festival , in the fight against all prohibitions and against all addictions, in the same way as in all events and festivals of the underground social and political movement in GreeceThis festival fights openly against any kind of drug culture, against the drug-dealers ,against heroin, against cocaine, against ego-trips, against using of multi substances, against junkie attidute and irrational overdose selfish using of substances (whatever kind of them! ) This festival is against stupefaction, freak-out and self-delusion Freedom, Love,Friendship, Music,Travelling, Celebrations,Existential experience of collective Joy,The Dreaming, Creativity, Opening of Consciousness Could never surrender to jailers, Judges, psychiatrists, policemen Or drug-dealers It is an obligation of all of us. This gathering to be a lesson From all of to all of us, An experience that can make us better people an empowering experience a gathering of awareness. This festival is organized against all prohibitions And against all addictions!”

refer links

:
www.iliosporoi.net
www.myspace.com/iliosporoi
www.voidnetwork.blogspot.com
www.elefsyna.org
www.ecogreens.gr
www.neoiprasinoi.blogspot.com
http://ashinartfriends.blogspot.com
http://naturalhighfamily.blogspot.com/

For all info about the festival:
www.legaliseprotestival.blogspot.com

London , Police represion and Rampart

2009-04-26T04:55:00.000-07:00

London: police represion in Rampart

In an obvious attempt to de-escalate the situation after the events of yesterday, police aggressively raided Rampart today.

How they got in

Somebody being led away under arrest

"evidence"

The FIT doing research work

Legal observer at work

People being searched outside

The FIT having a good day...

Budapest free party

2009-04-25T05:11:00.000-07:00

insti2te.wordpress.com newsletter #1

2009-04-15T11:33:00.000-07:00

the shituationist institute. poweravers with supermonster forces and laptops and stickers and glitter. wo-ha. we write about parties and extraordinary actions all over europe.

we started this blog as two party partners, always out there for you: fancypunk and dr0fn0thing… then others contribute aswell, and we are very glad for that. we will continue to write this thing, now every day, so check back. and there’s no end in sight, since we stumble over so much stuff here in the big cities of berlin, athens, budapest, london and this endless cyberspace. sometimes we don’tell you about a party, because many parties live from the fact that nobody writes openly about them, due to their illegal nature. if you happen to come to the cities where we live, just hook us up, the secrets are just to be kept away of the bad guys, officials and cops, with all their absurd limitations and repression to the anarchic party and art scene in this world.

don’t think that we just like to have expensive hobbies (to party as much as possible?…), infact we don’t, most of the time we smuggle our drinks inside the fancy places just like you, or try to score free stuff where we can. this blog is our way to say thank you and to support this scene that makes our boring lifes a little more adventurous. when we climb in an old factory in berlin at night and can hear the beat from far, when we sit on a square in athens and try to find out why everybody loves psytrance there. when we feel connected to complete strangers and just enjoy to understand that happiness is what is to be build up. we also organise parties ourselves from time to time, so if you need a techno party organiser, just ask.

well we don’t think that a live only full of techno parties is a joyfull live but we trust in the power of art to open the view for the needs of people. and we say one need of the people is to celebrate and feel unlimited in autonomous and collective spaces. in this little blog we tell you about the parties today, and what we dream of for tomorrow.

Bolsevik Festivals

2009-04-15T11:31:00.000-07:00

here’s a university paper on bolshevik festivals by james v. geldern. rave away the tsar, rave for revolt…. found it over at “only AA but XXX”

and remember what Mustapha Khayati of the SI (the situationist international, not the shituationist insti2te…) wrote together with guy debord in 1966: For proletarian revolt is a festival or it is nothing; in revolution the road of excess leads once and for all to the palace of wisdom.

party today in Athens

2009-04-11T06:12:00.000-07:00

Breaks / Dubstep / Drum n Bass PARTY ! .

an other night love techno hate germany in Berlin

2009-03-30T08:29:00.000-07:00

http://insti2te.wordpress.com

another part of the love techno hate germany party series, and again some little impressions for you.

that was a throughout nice event once again, cheap entrance, nice and nicely mixed crowd, the event not to overpolitical posing, but with a certain radical-left stance and some infomaterial for the little antifas.

i enjoyed it very much again. the cuba libre tasted like you forgot the coke. lokal is such a nice location, greetings to the crew, was a cheerful reunion passing by your club at around 14 o’clock…

the banner says: “state.nation.capital.bullshit.” makes sense to me.

next time is already in 2 weeks, again with ://about blank playing, so be there. 11th or april.

upcoming techno events against germany

2009-03-26T04:46:00.000-07:00

by dr0fn0thing http://insti2te.wordpress.com

the german state (urgs) wants the german people (what the f*ck!) to celebrate this year that the GDR broke down 20 years ago and all these germans (f*ck!) were reunited in their little stupid country. and much more, like the german constitution (f*ck!). since marx’ commentary (the german ideology) and atari teenage riot’s music (deutschland has gotta die), rostock/lichtenhagen and todays revitalised german patriotism, we have 2 or 3 things against the theory and practice of the german nation. so here we recommend you some parties where no deutschland-flag swinging, kicking “foreigners” & queers and schunkeln will happen.

27th of march with mombasajoe (4augenvoegeln) andDisko DNA (Delikat/dreiD) in the Lokal (right next to U8 Rosenthaler Platz). this series was always nice, so be there.

9th of april then in Köpi also an antinationalist party event. looking forward to that, too!

further information on the myspace profiles:

Love Techno Hate Germany & Des Rues de Sucre

kiezparade, techno open air in the park, butzke’s back

2009-03-21T06:11:00.000-07:00

by dr0fn0thing http://insti2te.wordpress.com

don’t know what you should do this weekend in berlin? on saturday is a rave/parade (”kiezparade”) against a nazi-shop (the label Thor Steinar, that’s closely associated to right-wing extremist structures). starting 12:00 at boxhagener platz, with the hedonist international playing some techno and keepitrollin playing drum’n'bass and more. that will scare those racist bastards with their bad taste of music surely away… their shop got attacked by antifascists almost immediatelly after the opening and has to close soon, from what i have heard (the landlords claims to be tricked by Thor Steinar).

also on saturday the first techno open air in the park to welcome spring… and the mysteriously missing ritter butzke is not back, but on tour. see you there

insti2te Special Edition: The Hedonist International manifesto… or better when rave meets self determination??

2009-03-15T05:33:00.000-07:00

Today at the insti2te , I decide to start a new special edition about various rave , tekno (and beyond) collectives around the globe. As usual We start with a manifesto or something more sofisticated connected with radical theory tendencies and the rave culture in general. we consider fully important for the scene to have examples like H.I. Especially this group who remains in the center of interest of the whole underground party scene today. We publish their manifesto bellow. Keep up the good work guys

wants joy, pleasure, happiness, and a life based on self-determination for all people.

doesn’t view hedonism as the engine of a society based on mindless materialist entertainment, but as the chance to overcome present circumstances.

is not an organization, but an idea, whose implementation is the responsibility of every individual. Nobody but the individual is responsible for his or her actions. Hedonists organize themselves in manifold ways to take specific or random action.

recognizes that the paths to a good life are circuitous and rocky. There is no single, simple solution, but many. Everywhere in peoples’ heads, ideas are being born. There is no ideology, master plan, wise president, or leader. There is only a process of gaining consciousness to which every person can contribute with their ideas and actions.

doesn’t know how these goals can be reached, but knows that something must happen so all people can enjoy freedom and happiness.

is convinced that political involvement and actions can be fun. Where hierarchy begins, fun ends. Where fun ends, hierarchy begins.

wants a world where highly developed technologies allow all human beings to live free of the necessity to work and be exploited, hereby allowing humankind to dedicate itself to the arts and the creation of beautiful things.

counts on the collaboration and free association of individuals with equal rights.

concedes that even small advances towards the goals of hedonism represent an improvement over current circumstances. Each step increases the potential for further developments.

creates temporary hedonist zones and situations beneficial to the flourishing of its ideas and realization of its goals.

believes in light-heartedness. Only this will keep us from taking ourselves too seriously.

is represented by the colors pink, black, gold, silver, and white.

wants joyful togetherness, anarchy, epicurean ideas, multifaceted joy, sensuality, diversion, friendship, justice, tolerance, freedom, sexual freedom, sustainability, peace, free access to information, the arts, a cosmopolitan existence, and a world without borders or discrimination, and everything else that is wonderful but not a reality today.

wants joy, freedom, everything !

The playground of ideas is vast. Do what you like, not what you must!

links

http://hedonist-international.org/?q=en/manifest

flyer of Morze infoshop Budapest

2009-03-15T05:25:00.000-07:00

solidarity with the prisoners of the greek revolt last December ..

2009-03-04T07:32:00.000-08:00

dynamics from electro crews in Athens organise this saturday a solidarity event in the central technical university in Athens .. We post the flyer as a message of solidarity .. see you there ...

apples from the underground blog zine

insti2te.wordpress.com special edition ACID HOUSE

2009-02-25T04:53:00.000-08:00

Following our ideas for a special edition of insti2te blog about “essential” blogzines , websites connected with one season , one generation , one subculture , one radical theory . Rave/Acid House is definitely one of the most remarkable subcultures of the contemporary days. Today we dedicate some lines for a really “super” website : the http://hardcorewillneverdie.com . A website who summarizes the anti-history of rave .. except nice photos , interesting articles and texts , we can also finds jungle mp3s for downloading for free. check it out .. We copy - paste some lines from the website concerning acid house anti history ??? and the UK

“Wayne Anthony took his first ecstasy tablet in Spain 1987. Then the Summer of Love hit Britain in ‘88 and, together with the rest of the youth of the UK, Wayne embraced the bright new Acid House lifestyle of dance music, MDMA and all-night celebrations as Britain partied like never before.

Yet when Wayne turned his natural East End entrepreneurial instincts to the rave world, and began organising the infamous Genesis dance parties for thousands of people, he quickly discovered the seamy downside of the Acid House dream. Beneath the shiny smiley surfaces lurked a vicious world of violence, police harassment, gangsters, protection rackets and organised crime.

In two years as an illegal dance party promoter, Wayne Anthony made-and lost – hundreds of thousands of pounds, took vast amounts of drugs, and jumped out of an airplane on LSD. He was also beaten up by psychotic ex-paratroopers, menaced by criminals and blackmailers, confronted with sawn-off shotguns, kidnapped and threatened with murder.

Wayne Anthony spent two years breaking and entering into warehouses and putting his life on the line in the vanguard of the dance party revolution which swept the UK in the late eighties. Class of 88 is his raw, idiosyncratic and fascinating account of how Acid House changed his life and Great Britain, and later the world, forever…”

insti2te.wordpress.com special edition underground labels presentation : JOP records

2009-02-22T12:45:00.000-08:00

Joint operation records Independent Electronic Music & Art JopRec is an indipendent electronic music label and artists network. JopRec is based Berlin born with the idea to breaking down terrestrial boundaries speaking the international language of electronic music and be a gateway for new talent and international electronic artists. The internationality of the structure and its innovative artists gives an incredible multicultural richness to the label. Started in 2005 publishing experimental, breakbeat, electro and minimal techno, releasing music on vinyl and cd. In the begining of 2008 JopRec started to release music also in digital format providing high-quality variable bitrate MP3’s for digital distributors and resellers. Joprec is not only music but also visual arts video animations check the website for upcoming news and releases www.joprec.org also on myspace wwww.myspace.com/joprec. Joprec is open to new Experiences and Co Operations. If you are interested in some Way to Collaborate with us write a Mail to: info@joprec.org or send your Materials to Joint Operation Records Gaertnerstr.21 10245 Berlin Germany

datacide party last friday in berlin

2009-02-22T12:40:00.000-08:00

from insti2te.wordpress.com

the datacide fundraiser was incredible. i mean, what can i say, i liked the concept of having a continous speeding up, every dj played harder than the one before, at least it occured to me.

and then the last dj that i saw just took it all down again, with some very quiet and low in energy stuff. i don’t know what was going on in details, because i think there were also some technical difficulties, but i totally liked it to have this as a last come-down set before going over to the köpi for a short late morning party.

anyways, thanks for the nice night

Dancing Questionnaires (12): Abbey from Boston

2009-02-18T15:06:00.000-08:00

taken by http://history-is-made-at-night.blogspot.com/

The latest dancing questionnaire has been completed by Abbey who lives in the Boston, MA area. Her summer camp dancing adventures reminded me of going to youth club discos and dancing round in a high kicking circle to Hi Ho Silver Lining by Jeff Beck as well as the perennial awkwardness - for boys and girls - of that last slow dance. We also played the B-52s at that youth club, who would have thought they would end up in the pop canon, but I guess they have - in fact only last week I played Love Shack out withn my ukulele band.

1. Can you remember your first experience of dancing?
Dancing in my family room to a video of a Parachute Express concert as a very small child. Ever since I’ve know what music is, I’ve danced to it.

2. What’s the most interesting/significant thing that has happened to you while out dancing?
Probably when I was at the dances at my camp last year. A slow song came on, and instead of wandering around and feeling awkward about not wanting to dance with guys, all of my friends and I broke into faux-ballet moves and just…let go. It wasn’t embarrasing, it wasn’t awkward, it was…so much fun.

3. You. Dancing. The best of times…
It all happens at camp for me. We’re all dorks, on the fringe of society at home, but when we get together, we just go crazy. Not just at the dances, but one incredible moment when it started pouring rain, and instead of running for cover, we danced. And sang Bohemian Rhapsody, but that’s a longer story.

4. You. Dancing. The worst of times…
I was at a dance at home, at a private boy’s school that my friend goes to. He invited me and a few of my friends, and after slight worry over the sex-deprived boy schoolers, we decided to go. A guy asked me to dance, and I was weirded out, since that never happens to me, but I said yes. …Before I realized what was happening, he started grinding with me. I was freaked out, and had no idea what to do, just sort of stood there until he stopped, said it was nice to meet me, and walked away. Apparently I’m not a very good grinding partner, which is nice, because I find it disgusting.

5. Can you give a quick tour of the different dancing scenes/times/places you’ve frequented?
Not much. I’m pretty young, pretty sheltered, and live in the most boring place in the universe. So the craziest I get is school or camp dances, or randomly instigated dancing in random places with my friends. We’re awesome like that.

6. When and where did you last dance?
If you mean seriously danced, it was at the winter semi-formal at my school, and it was some crazy awesome fun (as long as we avoided the sea of grinding taking up most of the dance floor). But for any dancing, the last time would be in the car, with my brother and dad, dancing in my seat when Revolution by the Beatles came on the radio. I make it a point to dance pretty much every day.

7. You’re on your death bed. What piece of music would make your leap up for one final dance?
American Pie. It’s played last at every dance at my camp, we know all the words, it’s packed with traditional dance “moves” and called responses to the lyrics. It’s the one song I’ve danced to that really affects me emotionally. This could actually be said about a few canon songs from my camp, including Tunak Tunak Tun, Love Shack, and the Time Warp.

activism and creativity the YOMANGO TANGO example

2009-02-15T10:53:00.000-08:00

Yomango Tango

YOMANGO Tango did its Christmas dis-shopping. What better way to celebrate the one year anniversary of the Argentinean revolt, then taking advantage of the generous christmas deals at the supermarket - a supermarket, by the way, who’s greedy tentacles reach all the way to Latin america. The special offer on champaign, "take 14, pay none!" seemed particularly appealing.

The police line protecting the Champion/Carrefour supermarket at the Ramblas of Barcelona was broken by a multitude dressed for tango, anonymous clients suddenly shed their overcoats and started dancing among the shelves... With elegance and style, to a techno-tango beat, they took champaign bottles and danced across the cash registers, entering time and again until they filled the YOMANGO christmas basket.

On the next day, there were pot-bangings and gatherings in front of the main offices of banks in the center of town. Yomango Tango penetrated the main office of the Santander Bank to uncork the bottles and drink a toast to the Argentinean people, and bring to the heart of the city, under a rain of champaign, their call “que se vayan todos!” - calling for all of them to go away (them meaning, among others, multinational corporations and banks that suck Argentina dry, but usually refering also to all politicians).

download this video: http://www.ngvision.org/mediabase/251 Yomango (2003). Run Time 6'12''. Size: 97.63 Mb. Format: mime type quicktime mov (video/quicktime). Licence: copyleft http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/

Brainstorm presents Datacide fundraiser @ Scharni 38 in Berlin F’hain 20.02.2009

2009-02-14T09:32:00.000-08:00

http://datacide.c8.com/brainstorm-presents-datacide-fundraiser-scharni-38-in-berlin-fhain-20022009/

some of the photos we used durring the presentation GREEK FIRE !!

2009-02-12T06:34:00.000-08:00

Will anti-Semitism succeed where the repression didn’t? a trip into radical theory #3

2009-02-12T06:26:00.000-08:00

Cafe Morgenland & Terminal 119
[January / 2009]

«For every known or unknown person whom we want or are forced to form an opinion of, we constantly and consistently make the same, stereotypical and set question: How would he or she react, how would this or the other collective or social group react if Auschwitz or something proportional would be repeated? The answer to this question is the dominant, the absolute and the decisive criterion by which we count and esteem the individuals and the groups, their actions and their behavior».

In 31.12.2008, a “revolutionary” attack took place against the Jewish synagogue in Volos (the older one was blown up by the Germans in 1943). The attack consisted of writing some threatening slogansi on the synagogue walls (elsewhere, they call it desecration or sacrilege). This act of disgraceful anti-Semitism, consists of another attempt at changing the direction in the radical scene (the first occurred at Athens Indymedia which, “for the Greek lords’ favour”, rapidly left behind the theme of the December riots in Greece so as to promote the Middle East issue with its all necessary reflexives and accesoires).

Because, of course, it is very convenient, after seeing in Greece an outburst, a rebellion, that at last, looking “inside,” found the enemy in the Greek state, and all the shit of Greek society, clearly attacked the local putrescence and conservatism… where even social de-alienation (“p l i a t s i k o” as it was called in a pejorative term) started to blossom in mid-Winter… now, to have those that that will start to burn American flags, those that will speak against the Jews about the international financial crisis and the war, those that will target synagogues, those that will care to “drake” the rebellion’s violence to targets (read here the embassies of Israel and USA) more compatible with local nationalism and the old, pure patriotic feelings that we have got used to blessing in every revolutionary-patriotic anniversary. Thus, it is very convenient when the structures that this rebellion left behind, go on to insinuate themselves using all possible connections among the immigrants and the workers that receive murder attacks with acid, like the immigrant syndicalist Konstantina Kouneva, and when, in solidarity to Kouneva, demonstrators attack and injure cops in response, in Piraeus and elsewhere. It is very convenient when someone wants to mislead us from the solidarity to the dozens of arrested immigrant rebels that this repression left behind, it is very convenient when over 50 Albanian and Arab immigrants have been put in jail for 18 months in Athens alone, and will be deported. It is very convenient when the Riot Police are tired to death by the thousands of rioters and when the para-militaries and indignant Greek citizens and fascists take their guns out and shoot people. It is precisely this moment, now, that it seems that anti-Semitism, always in the form of anti-Zionism, manages to repress whatever the cops “magic weapons”ii didn’t succeed in repressing…

At this definitive point, it is a fact that such actions can have only one goal and one result, namely to gather people once again around the Greek national pole, either for anti-imperialist or for humanist reasons, where, of course, one can make distinctions between these two. Thus, they try in this manner to bury one of the slogans shouted during the December riot: “Righteous are the rebels, national unity with blood is stained!”

Until now, the communist party of Greece was the “usual suspect” for such actions (desecration of the Holocaust memorial, mob gatherings by “communists” and other good citizens outside the offices of the Jewish community in Thessaloniki, screaming anti-Semitic chants against the Greek Jews in 2006, etc.), not to mention the neo-nazis of Golden Dawn and all the remaining democratic powers, each one of them, of course, for their very own political reasons. Now, another group took over, with the signature of “AK” (in Volos). What is strange about this last action is that there is no “AK Volos” group, as far as we knowiii, while it is definitive of this period that we live in, that we can’t distinguish which actions were carried out by neo-nazis and which ones by others. The only thing for certain is that not a few people from the “scene” cheered the action in Indymedia (and in “Stohos”, a greek nationalist newspaper). We say this without, of course, trying to lessen the value of many people’s opposition to the above “revolutionary” action.

The threat of their “intervention” yesterday is expressed with a rhetorical question in one of their slogans on a wall of the synagogue:
The state of Israel murders! Whose position do you support? (signature Α.Κ.).
Those who criticize Israel for corporate responsibility, without hesitation lash out with exactly the same accusation against the Greek Jews of Volos.
With their question, they don’t just express their curiosity, so as to learn their fellow citizens’ opinion, as they also never cared about their fellow citizens’ opinion about other issues, they have never cared about their blood-stained historyiv, the one that smells of Zyklon B and crematories, about their feelings, about their dreams and hopes. They demand that the Greek Jews of Volos take a position about the facts in Middle East and, thus, a position condemning Israel, as any other position will make them “guilty by definition”. Only so can they be certain that the stigmatised will not escape them.
Of course, they themselves give the answer that they ask of the OTHERS, those that are DIFFERENT, with their second slogan, as they already know, before they make their “visit” to the synagogue. Since the day they were born, they already knew everything about this chthonic race which is responsible and guilty for the politics of Israel (even in the greek “Antifa” magazine, the Jews are not even Greeks, but citizens, and thus agents, of a foreign country, Israel). So as not to leave any doubts, they respond to themselves with their second slogan:

In genocide there is no “neutrality” and “equal distance”! (signature Α.Κ.)

The threat to physical integrity, to property, synagogues, cemeteries, Holocaust memorials and, in general, everything that is or is supposed to be Jewish, manifest themselves as the tacit consequences of these slogans, consequences that the stigmatised will have caused the perpetrators to perpetrate, consequences that the stigmatised will have to bear.

Die Bedrohung der körperliche Unversehrtheit, des Eigentums, der Synagogen, der Friedhöfe, der Holocaust-Mahnmale, und generell allen was jüdisch ist oder als solcher definiert wird, sind die implizierten Konsequenzen solche Parolen, Konsequenzen, die die Stigmatisierte durch die „Angreifer“ zu tragen haben.

So, what will be the next step, their next “revolutionary” act, if (the Jews) do not abide and keep “a neutral position” or maintain an “equal distance”? What will their next dynamic action be, if they that survived Auschwitz, and their descendants, take a pro-Israeli stand? (Indeed, we don’t even want to imagine it). Others have already spread the rumor that they attacked the Larissa synagogue – a lie, as far as we know – and try, in this way, to create a wave of attacks against Jewish targets all over the country, by sweeping up more people from the mob, under the mask of their anti-Zionism and/ or opposition against… religions in general.

We will say it again here, without any hesitation. After Auschwitz, every anti-Semitic act and every anti-Semitic threat, is synonymous with annihilation. Don’t forget that, at the anteroom of the Holocaust, in parallel with the free smearing of the inferiority and noxiousness of the chthonic Jews (which a writer from Babylonia newspaper called “freedom of speech”), were also the attacks against Jewish synagogues (in “Kristallnacht”, for example), houses, shops etc. Back then, they were writing on the synagogue walls «Juda verrecke!» («death to the Jews») or «kauft nicht bei Juden!» («don’t buy from the Jews») etc. That, 70 years ago, they were not writing the same things on the walls as today, is simply because of the fact that there was no Middle East issue back then. Nothing else matters.

We condemn every action and expression of threat against the Greek Jews and we promise to do everything to stop these actions by any means, so as to allow every person and every Israelite community to freely decide, whether they want to be for or against Israel, whether they want to keep a neutral stand or no stand at all etc, without anyone daring to force them sign certificates of loyalty.

We demand from the anti-authoritarian scene, we demand from every person and group, that they themselves condemn and isolate such actions and groups as a phenomena of an anti-Semitic cesspit, of racist behavior and patriotic sublimity.

We demand from those intellectuals that write these abstract, spectacular articles against anti-Semitism and racism to condemn the particular.

Silence stands for Guilt by accessory!

Hands off the Greek Jews!

Café Morgenland – antifascist immigrant group from Germany

Terminal 119 – for social and individual autonomy

03/01/09

We call it Techno !

2009-02-09T16:17:00.000-08:00

Surfing on the internet is always useful. Some nights ago , I was siting on my bed really lazy. I thought that it is not good idea to watch a documenatary. Well I decide to watch the WE CALL IT TECHNO , a documentary film describing the first steps of techno , acid house scene and definitely the Legendary Love Parade … Type we call it techno on google videos and watch this documentary. It is kind interesting..

MY HOUSE IS YOUR HOUSE AND MY HOUSE IS MINE

http://www.sensemusic.de - WE CALL IT TECHNO! tells the story of a tempestuous phase in music history, the first time that pop culture was created significantly in Germany. With exclusive interviews and comprehensive, mostly unreleased film and photo archive material from the years 1988-1993! - OST: http://www.discogs.com/release/1388974

-3 Phase feat. Dr. Motte - Der Klang Der Familie Bam Bam - Give It To Me Cosmic Baby - Cosmic Trigger 4 Cosmic Baby - Galaxia Cosmic Baby - New Zone Cybersonik - Technarchy Dance 2 Trance - We Came In Peace D-Shake - Yaaaah! Eon - Spice F.U.S.E. - FU2 F.U.S.E. - Substance Abuse Frankie Bones - Call It Techno Kid Paul & The Weird Club - Acid In My House Komakino - Dynacore Mark N-R-G - Turn The Bass Microbots - Cosmic Evolution Microglobe - What Is Space Nitzer Ebb - Warsaw Ghetto Ongaku - Mihon 3 Resistance D. - Cosmic Love Sequential - Ambiant Block Sequential - Sonne Space Cube - Pure Tendency T-Bone Castro - Wize Guys Are Freakin’ Lower Teste - The Wipe Break Boys - My House Is Your House Overlords - Sundown Thomas P. Heckmann - Floatation Thomas P. Heckmann - The Sound Of Colour Umo Detic - Fahrenhei

when the streets are burning videos#2 from the open meeting

2009-02-08T11:29:00.000-08:00

when the streets are burning videos#1 from the open meeting

2009-02-08T11:16:00.000-08:00

a trip into RadiCaL theoRy#2 give up activism

2009-02-08T09:52:00.000-08:00

yes i posted this article for obvious reasons, unless otherwise specified

Pavlov is alive and well...

In 1999, in the aftermath of the June 18th global day of action, a pamphlet called Reflections on June 18th was produced by some people in London, as an open-access collection of "contributions on the politics behind the events that occurred in the City of London on June 18, 1999". Contained in this collection was an article called 'Give up Activism' which has generated quite a lot of discussion and debate both in the UK and internationally, being translated into several languages and reproduced in several different publications.[1] Here we republish the article together with a new postscript by the author addressing some comments and criticisms received since the original publication.

[See also the Postscript to this article]

One problem apparent in the June 18th day of action was the adoption of an activist mentality. This problem became particularly obvious with June 18th precisely because the people involved in organising it and the people involved on the day tried to push beyond these limitations. This piece is no criticism of anyone involved - rather an attempt to inspire some thought on the challenges that confront us if we are really serious in our intention of doing away with the capitalist mode of production.

Experts

By 'an activist mentality' what I mean is that people think of themselves primarily as activists and as belonging to some wider community of activists. The activist identifies with what they do and thinks of it as their role in life, like a job or career. In the same way some people will identify with their job as a doctor or a teacher, and instead of it being something they just happen to be doing, it becomes an essential part of their self-image.

The activist is a specialist or an expert in social change. To think of yourself as being an activist means to think of yourself as being somehow privileged or more advanced than others in your appreciation of the need for social change, in the knowledge of how to achieve it and as leading or being in the forefront of the practical struggle to create this change.

Activism, like all expert roles, has its basis in the division of labour - it is a specialised separate task. The division of labour is the foundation of class society, the fundamental division being that between mental and manual labour. The division of labour operates, for example, in medicine or education - instead of healing and bringing up kids being common knowledge and tasks that everyone has a hand in, this knowledge becomes the specialised property of doctors and teachers - experts that we must rely on to do these things for us. Experts jealously guard and mystify the skills they have. This keeps people separated and disempowered and reinforces hierarchical class society.

A division of labour implies that one person takes on a role on behalf of many others who relinquish this responsibility. A separation of tasks means that other people will grow your food and make your clothes and supply your electricity while you get on with achieving social change. The activist, being an expert in social change, assumes that other people aren't doing anything to change their lives and so feels a duty or a responsibility to do it on their behalf. Activists think they are compensating for the lack of activity by others. Defining ourselves as activists means defining our actions as the ones which will bring about social change, thus disregarding the activity of thousands upon thousands of other non-activists. Activism is based on this misconception that it is only activists who do social change - whereas of course class struggle is happening all the time.

Form and Content

The tension between the form of 'activism' in which our political activity appears and its increasingly radical content has only been growing over the last few years. The background of a lot of the people involved in June 18th is of being 'activists' who 'campaign' on an 'issue'. The political progress that has been made in the activist scene over the last few years has resulted in a situation where many people have moved beyond single issue campaigns against specific companies or developments to a rather ill-defined yet nonetheless promising anti-capitalist perspective. Yet although the content of the campaigning activity has altered, the form of activism has not. So instead of taking on Monsanto and going to their headquarters and occupying it, we have now seen beyond the single facet of capital represented by Monsanto and so develop a 'campaign' against capitalism. And where better to go and occupy than what is perceived as being the headquarters of capitalism - the City?

Our methods of operating are still the same as if we were taking on a specific corporation or development, despite the fact that capitalism is not at all the same sort of thing and the ways in which one might bring down a particular company are not at all the same as the ways in which you might bring down capitalism. For example, vigorous campaigning by animal rights activists has succeeded in wrecking both Consort dog breeders and Hillgrove Farm cat breeders. The businesses were ruined and went into receivership. Similarly the campaign waged against arch-vivisectionists Huntingdon Life Sciences succeeded in reducing their share price by 33%, but the company just about managed to survive by running a desperate PR campaign in the City to pick up prices.[2] Activism can very successfully accomplish bringing down a business, yet to bring down capitalism a lot more will be required than to simply extend this sort of activity to every business in every sector. Similarly with the targetting of butcher's shops by animal rights activists, the net result is probably only to aid the supermarkets in closing down all the small butcher's shops, thus assisting the process of competition and the 'natural selection' of the marketplace. Thus activists often succeed in destroying one small business while strengthening capital overall.

A similar thing applies with anti-roads activism. Wide-scale anti-roads protests have created opportunities for a whole new sector of capitalism - security, surveillance, tunnellers, climbers, experts and consultants. We are now one 'market risk' among others to be taken into account when bidding for a roads contract. We may have actually assisted the rule of market forces, by forcing out the companies that are weakest and least able to cope. Protest-bashing consultant Amanda Webster says: "The advent of the protest movement will actually provide market advantages to those contractors who can handle it effectively."[3] Again activism can bring down a business or stop a road but capitalism carries merrily on, if anything stronger than before.

These things are surely an indication, if one were needed, that tackling capitalism will require not only a quantitative change (more actions, more activists) but a qualitative one (we need to discover some more effective form of operating). It seems we have very little idea of what it might actually require to bring down capitalism. As if all it needed was some sort of critical mass of activists occupying offices to be reached and then we'd have a revolution...

The form of activism has been preserved even while the content of this activity has moved beyond the form that contains it. We still think in terms of being 'activists' doing a 'campaign' on an 'issue', and because we are 'direct action' activists we will go and 'do an action' against our target. The method of campaigning against specific developments or single companies has been carried over into this new thing of taking on capitalism. We're attempting to take on capitalism and conceptualising what we're doing in completely inappropriate terms, utilising a method of operating appropriate to liberal reformism. So we have the bizarre spectacle of 'doing an action' against capitalism - an utterly inadequate practice.

Roles

The role of the 'activist' is a role we adopt just like that of policeman, parent or priest - a strange psychological form we use to define ourselves and our relation to others. The 'activist' is a specialist or an expert in social change - yet the harder we cling to this role and notion of what we are, the more we actually impede the change we desire. A real revolution will involve the breaking out of all preconceived roles and the destruction of all specialism - the reclamation of our lives. The seizing control over our own destinies which is the act of revolution will involve the creation of new selves and new forms of interaction and community. 'Experts' in anything can only hinder this.

The Situationist International developed a stringent critique of roles and particularly the role of 'the militant'. Their criticism was mainly directed against leftist and social-democratic ideologies because that was mainly what they encountered. Although these forms of alienation still exist and are plain to be seen, in our particular milieu it is the liberal activist we encounter more often than the leftist militant. Nevertheless, they share many features in common (which of course is not surprising).

The Situationist Raoul Vaneigem defined roles like this: "Stereotypes are the dominant images of a period... The stereotype is the model of the role; the role is a model form of behaviour. The repetition of an attitude creates a role." To play a role is to cultivate an appearance to the neglect of everything authentic: "we succumb to the seduction of borrowed attitudes." As role-players we dwell in inauthenticity - reducing our lives to a string of clichés - "breaking [our] day down into a series of poses chosen more or less unconsciously from the range of dominant stereotypes."[4] This process has been at work since the early days of the anti-roads movement. At Twyford Down after Yellow Wednesday in December 92, press and media coverage focused on the Dongas Tribe and the dreadlocked countercultural aspect of the protests. Initially this was by no means the predominant element - there was a large group of ramblers at the eviction for example.[5] But people attracted to Twyford by the media coverage thought every single person there had dreadlocks. The media coverage had the effect of making 'ordinary' people stay away and more dreadlocked countercultural types turned up - decreasing the diversity of the protests. More recently, a similar thing has happened in the way in which people drawn to protest sites by the coverage of Swampy they had seen on TV began to replicate in their own lives the attitudes presented by the media as characteristic of the role of the 'eco-warrior'.[6]

"Just as the passivity of the consumer is an active passivity, so the passivity of the spectator lies in his ability to assimilate roles and play them according to official norms. The repetition of images and stereotypes offers a set of models from which everyone is supposed to choose a role."[7] The role of the militant or activist is just one of these roles, and therein, despite all the revolutionary rhetoric that goes with the role, lies its ultimate conservatism.

The supposedly revolutionary activity of the activist is a dull and sterile routine - a constant repetition of a few actions with no potential for change. Activists would probably resist change if it came because it would disrupt the easy certainties of their role and the nice little niche they've carved out for themselves. Like union bosses, activists are eternal representatives and mediators. In the same way as union leaders would be against their workers actually succeeding in their struggle because this would put them out of a job, the role of the activist is threatened by change. Indeed revolution, or even any real moves in that direction, would profoundly upset activists by depriving them of their role. If everyone is becoming revolutionary then you're not so special anymore, are you?

So why do we behave like activists? Simply because it's the easy cowards' option? It is easy to fall into playing the activist role because it fits into this society and doesn't challenge it - activism is an accepted form of dissent. Even if as activists we are doing things which are not accepted and are illegal, the form of activism itself - the way it is like a job - means that it fits in with our psychology and our upbringing. It has a certain attraction precisely because it is not revolutionary.

We Don't Need Any More Martyrs

The key to understanding both the role of the militant and the activist is self-sacrifice - the sacrifice of the self to 'the cause' which is seen as being separate from the self. This of course has nothing to do with real revolutionary activity which is the seizing of the self. Revolutionary martyrdom goes together with the identification of some cause separate from one's own life - an action against capitalism which identifies capitalism as 'out there' in the City is fundamentally mistaken - the real power of capital is right here in our everyday lives - we re-create its power every day because capital is not a thing but a social relation between people (and hence classes) mediated by things.

Of course I am not suggesting that everyone who was involved in June 18th shares in the adoption of this role and the self-sacrifice that goes with it to an equal extent. As I said above, the problem of activism was made particularly apparent by June 18th precisely because it was an attempt to break from these roles and our normal ways of operating. Much of what is outlined here is a 'worst case scenario' of what playing the role of an activist can lead to. The extent to which we can recognise this within our own movement will give us an indication of how much work there is still to be done.

The activist makes politics dull and sterile and drives people away from it, but playing the role also fucks up the activist herself. The role of the activist creates a separation between ends and means: self-sacrifice means creating a division between the revolution as love and joy in the future but duty and routine now. The worldview of activism is dominated by guilt and duty because the activist is not fighting for herself but for a separate cause: "All causes are equally inhuman."[8]

As an activist you have to deny your own desires because your political activity is defined such that these things do not count as 'politics'. You put 'politics' in a separate box to the rest of your life - it's like a job... you do 'politics' 9-5 and then go home and do something else. Because it is in this separate box, 'politics' exists unhampered by any real-world practical considerations of effectiveness. The activist feels obliged to keep plugging away at the same old routine unthinkingly, unable to stop or consider, the main thing being that the activist is kept busy and assuages her guilt by banging her head against a brick wall if necessary.

Part of being revolutionary might be knowing when to stop and wait. It might be important to know how and when to strike for maximum effectiveness and also how and when NOT to strike. Activists have this 'We must do something NOW!' attitude that seems fuelled by guilt. This is completely untactical.

The self-sacrifice of the militant or the activist is mirrored in their power over others as an expert - like a religion there is a kind of hierarchy of suffering and self-righteousness. The activist assumes power over others by virtue of her greater degree of suffering ('non-hierarchical' activist groups in fact form a 'dictatorship of the most committed'). The activist uses moral coercion and guilt to wield power over others less experienced in the theology of suffering. Their subordination of themselves goes hand in hand with their subordination of others - all enslaved to 'the cause'. Self-sacrificing politicos stunt their own lives and their own will to live - this generates a bitterness and an antipathy to life which is then turned outwards to wither everything else. They are "great despisers of life... the partisans of absolute self-sacrifice... their lives twisted by their monsterous asceticism."[9] We can see this in our own movement, for example on site, in the antagonism between the desire to sit around and have a good time versus the guilt-tripping build/fortify/barricade work ethic and in the sometimes excessive passion with which 'lunchouts' are denounced. The self-sacrificing martyr is offended and outraged when she sees others that are not sacrificing themselves. Like when the 'honest worker' attacks the scrounger or the layabout with such vitriol, we know it is actually because she hates her job and the martyrdom she has made of her life and therefore hates to see anyone escape this fate, hates to see anyone enjoying themselves while she is suffering - she must drag everyone down into the muck with her - an equality of self-sacrifice.

In the old religious cosmology, the successful martyr went to heaven. In the modern worldview, successful martyrs can look forward to going down in history. The greatest self-sacrifice, the greatest success in creating a role (or even better, in devising a whole new one for people to emulate - e.g. the eco-warrior) wins a reward in history - the bourgeois heaven.

The old left was quite open in its call for heroic sacrifice: "Sacrifice yourselves joyfully, brothers and sisters! For the Cause, for the Established Order, for the Party, for Unity, for Meat and Potatoes!"[10] But these days it is much more veiled: Vaneigem accuses "young leftist radicals" of "enter[ing] the service of a Cause - the 'best' of all Causes. The time they have for creative activity they squander on handing out leaflets, putting up posters, demonstrating or heckling local politicians. They become militants, fetishising action because others are doing their thinking for them."[11]

This resounds with us - particularly the thing about the fetishising of action - in left groups the militants are left free to engage in endless busywork because the group leader or guru has the 'theory' down pat, which is just accepted and lapped up - the 'party line'. With direct action activists it's slightly different - action is fetishised, but more out of an aversion to any theory whatsoever.

Although it is present, that element of the activist role which relies on self-sacrifice and duty was not so significant in June 18th. What is more of an issue for us is the feeling of separateness from 'ordinary people' that activism implies. People identify with some weird sub-culture or clique as being 'us' as opposed to the 'them' of everyone else in the world.

Isolation

The activist role is a self-imposed isolation from all the people we should be connecting to. Taking on the role of an activist separates you from the rest of the human race as someone special and different. People tend to think of their own first person plural (who are you referring to when you say 'we'?) as referring to some community of activists, rather than a class. For example, for some time now in the activist milieu it has been popular to argue for 'no more single issues' and for the importance of 'making links'. However, many people's conception of what this involved was to 'make links' with other activists and other campaign groups. June 18th demonstrated this quite well, the whole idea being to get all the representatives of all the various different causes or issues in one place at one time, voluntarily relegating ourselves to the ghetto of good causes.

Similarly, the various networking forums that have recently sprung up around the country - the Rebel Alliance in Brighton, NASA in Nottingham, Riotous Assembly in Manchester, the London Underground etc. have a similar goal - to get all the activist groups in the area talking to each other. I'm not knocking this - it is an essential pre-requisite for any further action, but it should be recognised for the extremely limited form of 'making links' that it is. It is also interesting in that what the groups attending these meetings have in common is that they are activist groups - what they are actually concerned with seems to be a secondary consideration.

It is not enough merely to seek to link together all the activists in the world, neither is it enough to seek to transform more people into activists. Contrary to what some people may think, we will not be any closer to a revolution if lots and lots of people become activists. Some people seem to have the strange idea that what is needed is for everyone to be somehow persuaded into becoming activists like us and then we'll have a revolution. Vaneigem says: "Revolution is made everyday despite, and in opposition to, the specialists of revolution."[12]

The militant or activist is a specialist in social change or revolution. The specialist recruits others to her own tiny area of specialism in order to increase her own power and thus dispel the realisation of her own powerlessness. "The specialist... enrols himself in order to enrol others."[13] Like a pyramid selling scheme, the hierarchy is self-replicating - you are recruited and in order not to be at the bottom of the pyramid, you have to recruit more people to be under you, who then do exactly the same. The reproduction of the alienated society of roles is accomplished through specialists.

Jacques Camatte in his essay 'On Organization'[14] makes the astute point that political groupings often end up as "gangs" defining themselves by exclusion - the group member's first loyalty becomes to the group rather than to the struggle. His critique applies especially to the myriad of Left sects and groupuscules at which it was directed but it applies also to a lesser extent to the activist mentality.

The political group or party substitutes itself for the proletariat and its own survival and reproduction become paramount - revolutionary activity becomes synonymous with 'building the party' and recruiting members. The group takes itself to have a unique grasp on truth and everyone outside the group is treated like an idiot in need of education by this vanguard. Instead of an equal debate between comrades we get instead the separation of theory and propaganda, where the group has its own theory, which is almost kept secret in the belief that the inherently less mentally able punters must be lured in the organisation with some strategy of populism before the politics are sprung on them by surprise. This dishonest method of dealing with those outside of the group is similar to a religious cult - they will never tell you upfront what they are about.

We can see here some similarities with activism, in the way that the activist milieu acts like a leftist sect. Activism as a whole has some of the characteristics of a "gang". Activist gangs can often end up being cross-class alliances, including all sorts of liberal reformists because they too are 'activists'. People think of themselves primarily as activists and their primary loyalty becomes to the community of activists and not to the struggle as such. The "gang" is illusory community, distracting us from creating a wider community of resistance. The essence of Camatte's critique is an attack on the creation of an interior/exterior division between the group and the class. We come to think of ourselves as being activists and therefore as being separate from and having different interests from the mass of working class people.

Our activity should be the immediate expression of a real struggle, not the affirmation of the separateness and distinctness of a particular group. In Marxist groups the possession of 'theory' is the all-important thing determining power - it's different in the activist milieu, but not that different - the possession of the relevant 'social capital' - knowledge, experience, contacts, equipment etc. is the primary thing determining power.

Activism reproduces the structure of this society in its operations: "When the rebel begins to believe that he is fighting for a higher good, the authoritarian principle gets a fillip."[15] This is no trivial matter, but is at the basis of capitalist social relations. Capital is a social relation between people mediated by things - the basic principle of alienation is that we live our lives in the service of some thing that we ourselves have created. If we reproduce this structure in the name of politics that declares itself anti-capitalist, we have lost before we have begun. You cannot fight alienation by alienated means.

A Modest Proposal

This is a modest proposal that we should develop ways of operating that are adequate to our radical ideas. This task will not be easy and the writer of this short piece has no clearer insight into how we should go about this than anyone else. I am not arguing that June 18th should have been abandoned or attacked, indeed it was a valiant attempt to get beyond our limitations and to create something better than what we have at present. However, in its attempts to break with antique and formulaic ways of doing things it has made clear the ties that still bind us to the past. The criticisms of activism that I have expressed above do not all apply to June 18th. However there is a certain paradigm of activism which at its worst includes all that I have outlined above and June 18th shared in this paradigm to a certain extent. To exactly what extent is for you to decide.

Activism is a form partly forced upon us by weakness. Like the joint action taken by Reclaim the Streets and the Liverpool dockers - we find ourselves in times in which radical politics is often the product of mutual weakness and isolation. If this is the case, it may not even be within our power to break out of the role of activists. It may be that in times of a downturn in struggle, those who continue to work for social revolution become marginalised and come to be seen (and to see themselves) as a special separate group of people. It may be that this is only capable of being corrected by a general upsurge in struggle when we won't be weirdos and freaks any more but will seem simply to be stating what is on everybody's minds. However, to work to escalate the struggle it will be necessary to break with the role of activists to whatever extent is possible - to constantly try to push at the boundaries of our limitations and constraints.

Historically, those movements that have come the closest to de-stabilising or removing or going beyond capitalism have not at all taken the form of activism. Activism is essentially a political form and a method of operating suited to liberal reformism that is being pushed beyond its own limits and used for revolutionary purposes. The activist role in itself must be problematic for those who desire social revolution..

[See also the Postscript to this article]

Notes

1) To my knowledge the article has been translated into French and published in Je sais tout (Association des 26-Cantons, 8, rue Lissignol CH-1201 Genève, Suisse) and in Échanges No. 93 (BP 241, 75866 Paris Cedex 18, France). It has been translated into Spanish and published in Ekintza Zuzena (Ediciones E.Z., Apdo. 235, 48080 Bilbo (Bizkaia), Spanish State). It has been republished in America in Collective Action Notes No. 16-17 (CAN, POB 22962, Baltimore, MD 21203, USA) and in the UK in Organise! No. 54 (AF, c/o 84b Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX, UK). It is also available on-line at: http://www.infoshop.org/octo/j18_rts1.html#give_up and http://tierra.ucsd.edu/~acf/online/j18/reflec1.html#GIVE If anyone knows of any other places it has been reproduced or critiqued, I would be grateful to hear of them, via Do or Die.

2) Squaring up to the Square Mile: A Rough Guide to the City of London (J18 Publications (UK), 1999) p.8

3) 'Direct Action: Six Years Down the Road' in Do or Die No. 7, p.3

4) Raoul Vaneigem - The Revolution of Everyday Life, (Left Bank Books/Rebel Press, 1994) - first published 1967, pp.131-3

5) 'The Day they Drove Twyford Down' in Do or Die No. 1, p.11

6) 'Personality Politics: The Spectacularisation of Fairmile' in Do or Die No. 7, p.35

7) Op. Cit. 4, p.128

8) Op. Cit. 4, p.107

9) Op. Cit. 4, p.109

10) Op. Cit. 4, p.108

11) Op. Cit. 4, p.109

12) Op. Cit. 4, p.111

13) Op. Cit. 4, p.143

14) Jacques Camatte - 'On Organization' (1969) in This World We Must Leave and Other Essays (New York, Autonomedia, 1995)

15) Op. Cit. 4, p.110

Do or Die DTP/web team: doordtp@yahoo.co.uk

when the streets are burning #photo report

2009-02-07T11:30:00.000-08:00

Around 60 people followed the event about the Greek riots in Budapest. The event organized by FP from apples from the underground and the dynamics of the Morze Infoshop in Budapest .. We post some interesting photos bellow

solidarity with cox 18

2009-02-03T06:58:00.000-08:00

http://cox18.noblogs.org/

Happy active X-tatic zone volume 1. by fancypUnK and Apples from the Underground Budapest February 6. DJ set

2009-02-02T09:43:00.000-08:00

COP 18 evicted .. Rave , Rage and solidarity with COP 18 .. 1 , 10 , 1000 autonomous spaces ! squat the world

2009-02-02T09:37:00.000-08:00

when the streets are burning , open discussion in Budapest with F.P apples from the underground

2009-02-01T11:50:00.000-08:00

Info event at Morze Infoshop
Tűzraktér, Hegedű utca 3., 1. emelet, end of the corridor"
2009, February 4., 18:30

The murder of Alexis Grigoropoulos last December initiated one of the more massive uprisings in Greece, from the era of dictatorship until now. The murder of the 15-year-old boy by the agents of violence and oppression from the state ignited a general insurrection of the greek youth, as well as an international solidarity movement. The solidarity movement was directed not only towards the actual incident of the murder, but also caused a number of actions and criticism against the innumerable capitalistic barbarities, financial crisis and the right wing government.

We call for a public info night including discussion about the Greek insurrection and the upcoming revolts in Europe as well as presenting/discussing the history of the Greek radical movements. According also with the current situation into the Greek youth during the ''new capitalist fact'' of the financial crisis , violent precarization and other related issues to that popular uprising.

We would like also to initiate a discussion about some questions and problems that this movement tried to make visible!

* "What does it means in the age of post fordist capitalist western or western ''inspired'' metropolis to win?"

* "Which popular demands are again in the surface of the movement?"

* "How horisontality can function successfully in the anticapitalist movements of the modern world?"

* "How can practical autonomy and local alternatives to global capitalism and self organization remain relevant?"

* "Which new forms of organization and networking are necessary to coordinate successfully the international resistance against capitalism in our daily lives?"

* and YES! for establishing again "new Seattles", "new greek revolts", "new temporary autonomous zones", "new grassroot movements and victories?"

These are only some questions related to the Greek insurrection but we hope to discuss more. Our aim is to avoid the gap between presenters and consumers. You are definitely welcome to add your questions and statements to this debate...

Apples from the Underground A Trip into the Radical theory #1

2009-02-01T10:18:00.000-08:00

Wrong direction: On Reclaiming a One-Way Street, by George Forrestier

[Thjs article was originally published in ‘reflections on june 18, contributions on the politics behind the events that occurred in the city of London on june 18, 1999’, London, October 1999, pages 16-21]

One has to repeat again and again that the critique of the capitalist mode of production is the critique of a mode of production, not a critique of a mode of exchange or distribution. If one wants to stage a political happening in the banking district, one has to take the greatest care to give precise reasons why and against what exactly the action is directed. A protest against the policies of the banks (for which there is certainly reason enough) must relate to what their actual part in the overall process of capitalist production is. In no way can we afford to be loose in our reasoning in this context. The difference in how to argue for such an action is the difference about the whole: This slippery slope is the borderline between progressive and reactionary critique of capitalism. I will try to go into some detail about this problem, after commenting on some ideological issues in the context of J18.

One of the groups involved in the J18 campaign has published a whole booklet with 32 pages of worthless and pointless knowledge collected from the garbage-bins of petit-bourgeois cleverness. In the whole booklet, the terms ‘capital’ and ‘capitalist’ appear only in the introduction and in the afterthoughts (one can not call these final paragraphs ‘conclusions’ because they don’t conclude anything from the body of the text - there is nothing to be concluded from there); actually, contrary to expectations, it is the leaflets that offer more political analysis and positioning than the booklet. I concentrate therefore on commenting on the leaflets, or rather those leaflets that I have been provided with (there are certainly some more).

The occasion of the event is the meeting of the G8 state leaders of whom the Golden Leaflet says, firstly that their agenda is the increase of the power of corporations (which implies that their own, i.e. state powers decrease), and secondly that the 'leaders' (put in inverted commas by the authors) are not in control. J18 adopt here the tabloid version of critique of globalization, regretting that the state leaders are not really leaders; our elected rulers are not allowed anymore to rule properly. It is suggested that 'our planet' is run by the financial market which is described as 'a giant video game' in which people use 'electronic screens'. Actually, however, it is not 'our' (‘our’? who is the ‘us’ behind the ‘our’? Humans? Mammals? Multicellular beings in general?) planet that is run, but it is society which is being run. However, society is not ‘run’ by the financial market, but by capital, in the form of the capitalist mode of production, and the fact that electronic screens are involved is irrelevant. The exclusive naming of financial capital instead of capital in its totality is a major theoretical flaw to which I will come back later on. It is completely unclear why the financial markets should resemble (or even be) a ‘video game’ - another naїve and populist, tabloid style notion (silently referring to the senile Baudrillard’s nonsense concept of post-modernity as an age of ‘simulation’).

If 'the choice is ours' as the flyer suggests, the question again is, who is the 'we' in this case (is it the same 'we' that owns the planet further up the page? Or is 'we' just an enlightened minority of street party followers?), and, if 'we' have the choice, why do we not choose to abolish capitalism? It seems that either we have the choice, but are too stupid or evil to choose the right thing, or perhaps we do not really have the choice. Actually, the specific difference of capitalist domination in contrast to for example pre-capitalist forms of domination is that in capitalism, being a form of abstract, objective domination, people do not have much choice at all, (which is one of the reasons not to like it). If somebody would take the rhetoric of 'the choice is ours' seriously, the limitations of our power would be inexplicable and quite frustrating. So part of a critique of capitalism has to be to explain why it is that we have very limited choices.

The definition of carnival is quite one-sided and romantic. Whoever has attended a carnival in Rio or Duesseldorf, must have noticed its affirmative catholic character: A carnival has a beginning and an end, and what looks to the naїve spectator like the 'subversion of authority' is designed to suppress the subversion of authority once the carnival is over - no carnival without Ash Wednesday. An unexpected carnival is not a carnival, and a carnival would be revolutionary only insofar it would not be a carnival.

The leaflet leaves it to the readers’ imagination to guess what 'authentic festivity' is, and why it is undistinguishable from preparing for a ‘general insurrection'. The jargon of 'authenticity' is reactionary; as far as I am concerned, I am perfectly happy with inauthentic festivities. However, I am indeed able to distinguish festivities, 'authentic' or not, from 'general insurrection'. At best, a festivity is not a general, but a very particular insurrection. The correct way of putting it would be: A general insurrection would include having the character of a festival, or else: an insurrection is a festival, but a festival is not an insurrection.

The definitions of capitalism given in the leaflets are very unspecific. To be 'a system by which the few profit from the exploitation of the many' is not characteristic of capitalism, but it is as well true of e.g. feudalism and most forms of society people have built so far. The point of defining capitalism would be to specify what particular form of exploitation it is. To lump it together with a general notion of exploitation as such is obscurantism. To describe capitalism as 'a mindset addicted to profit, work and debt' reduces capitalism to a psychological problem, an 'addicted mind'. If capitalism is a form of exploitation, it is not a 'mind-set' but a real, material form of social relations. Apart from that, how could a 'mindset' be 'addicted' to 'debt'? This is complete nonsense.

The same problem with the concept of 'ideology'. Capitalism produces ideologies (such as religions etc.) but it is not an ideology. Actually, capitalism produces an ideology of infinite growth, and this is indeed a characteristic of the capitalist mode of production; however, it would be necessary to qualify growth of what. Personally, I am quite obsessed with the idea of infinitely growing fun, wealth, and happiness, if possible beyond our homely little planet, and my mind is indeed quite addicted to these things.

Another naїve idea lies in the formulation 'around the world, the movement grows', followed by a list of actually very different movements. Another leaflet talks, more accurately, of 'a growing alliance of social and environmental movements' in the plural. The point is, that the quoted movements, most prominently the 'Zapatistas', make demands that are in themselves quite particular and specific, very often nationalistic, almost always regionalist, which belies the talk about 'the movement' in the singular. Based on the 'anti-Free-Trade' ideologies adopted by these movements, the most that can be achieved by such movements is indeed an 'alliance' of particular, different movements. The suggestion of the existence of one universal movement is wrong and patronizing. The interesting point will be, what sort of alliance can be reached, and what is the aim of the alliance.

To criticise Free Trade presupposes logically to embrace the nation-state as a ‘natural’, unquestioned social form: Who or what should limit or resist Free Trade if not a world system of nation-states, which protect their respective economic areas (plus backyards)?

While Marx clearly and repeatedly stated that the proletariat must not oppose or hinder Free Trade, the Marxist mainstream (including both Social Democracy and Bolshevism) did oppose Free Trade and surrendered to nationalism. Revolutionaries have no sides to take in the capitalist contradiction between Free Trade and nation state protectionism. To criticise Free Trade without criticising nation and state at the same time is a serious mistake because it fails to address the totality of the capital relation.

Free Trade creates the conditions for global class struggle to which revolutionaries have to contribute. Class as a global category, not a national one, is understood hereby as an abstract structuring principle basic to the capitalist mode of production, not as a concrete group of persons (sharing occupation, status, culture etc.) as the positivistic reductionist sociological concept of class wants to have it: For if class is taken seriously as a global category it goes without saying that class as a lived relation takes a different form of appearance in each and every concrete historical context all over the capitalist world. Global class is not the addition of many ‘national proletariats’ (a contradiction in terms) but a structuring category incompatible with the categories nation and state, therefore incompatible with a resistance to Free Trade.

J18, like Social Democracy and Bolshevism, takes sides against progressive liberalism (Free Trade: Adam Smith: Capital as the civilising process that dissolves traditional authority and narrow community), for reactionary liberalism (Protectionism: Friedrich List, Lasalle: capital’s immanent petit-bourgeois reaction to its own dynamism, creating new authorities and repressive narrow inhuman communities such as nation-states). Revolutionary politics are based on taking advantage of the progressive dynamism of capital against its reactionary side, in order to explode capital’s contradiction.

In the flyer, 'Day of Protest & party...', we read: 'The City of London produces nothing of real use to people’. This is followed by a correct formulation: 'It's financial transfers serve only to rob the poor to give to the rich. ... The City is a central part of the capitalist economic system which fails to provide for people's needs.' Yes: A central part. But nothing more.

The overall tone of the rhetoric of this J18 leaflet, however, comes down to: They don’t produce anything in the City, so let’s attack them. In a word, they are parasites.

As a devoted friend of unproductive activities, non-activities and parasites in general, I suggest that if it was true that they didn’t produce ‘anything’, this should be a reason not to ‘attack’ them, but to follow their good example.

(In reality, the do produce some things, namely services that seem to be useful for their customers, otherwise they would not be able to sell their services. A commodity that is not useful won’t be sold. The one thing, which they indeed don’t produce, is value: While they are useful within the framework of capitalist economy, they are unproductive only in the capitalist sense of the word, i.e. in the sense ‘political economy’ uses the term. In a non-capitalist & post-capitalist society a bank would be neither productive nor unproductive but simply impossible.) (The J18 ideologues will probably respond that they wanted to make the point that the usefulness of the commodity ‘banking service’ does not meet real human needs but only artificial, manipulated needs. However, needs are always the actually existing needs. There are no needs other than those that exist. Any other idea of virtual, sincere needs waiting somewhere for being kissed to life by some proletarian prince is metaphysical bollocks. True, banking services are the needs of capital - but insofar as we are capital, these are our needs, at the present time. These needs are false needs only insofar as we ourselves are false, i.e. we ourselves are constituted in alienated form: in the twin form of capital and labour. Did anybody say that we cannot say that we ourselves are false? – but we can, because we are not only what we are but we are what we could become, as well. From a future perspective, which we cannot really take in the present, i.e. from the perspective of what we are not yet, we can say, already in the present, that we are presently false. Nevertheless, we are what we are, and our needs, however false they might be, are our needs.)

'In the West any sense of community remaining is being steadily replaced by endless work and increasing consumerism both of which leave our lives feeling empty of any real meaning. The symptoms are easy to see, we must tackle the disease, a system based on money not need and on power not people.'

The inconspicuous word 'remaining' gives away the deeply conservative character of this pamphlet: The aim seems to be to defend a pre-existing form of 'community' - whatever that might be - as if life in a traditional 'community' has ever been a permanent vacation! Traditional community, we are told, is under attack from ‘work’ (indeed evil, but not as such a modern phenomenon: It is rather so that modern civilization creates for the first time in history the chance to reduce work to a minimum, while the subsumption of modern society to capitalist production with the specific form of work as abstract labour still prevents the actualization of that possibility) and from 'consumerism'. Unfortunately, I do not enjoy the privilege of suffering from 'consumerism' (probably I don’t work enough); I'd be glad if the authors of the pamphlet could tell me more about how it feels.

Another mystery is, why the replacement of 'sense of community' by work and 'consumerism' is restricted to 'the West'. Since the authors do probably not refer to 'the West' like in 'East and West' during the cold war, I have to assume that they mean 'the West' like in 'Occident and Orient'. It would be interesting to hear why the authors think that the oriental 'sense of community' is better suited to resist 'globalization' than the occidental 'sense of community', and, above all, what the reality of 'community' looks like, both East and West. Actually, while the metropolitan activists complain that their lives feel 'empty of any real meaning' (only loads of unreal meaning), comrades from overseas complain of a serious overkill of 'real meaning': From, amongst others, Christian fundamentalism to Jewish fundamentalism and Hindu fundamentalism to Muslim fundamentalism, there is no lack of 'sense of community' and 'real meaning'. However, for lack of consumerism, in particular lack of consumerism of food, sometimes this real meaning is not very full of life.

Although reality is, on second thoughts, usually quite complicated, the Doctors of Reclaiming find 'the symptoms are easy to see, we must tackle the disease'. The confused romanticism of the pamphlet switches now into higher gear with the invocation of the good old 'society is a body, and the wrong form of society is a disease' trick; for thousands of years, ‘the sick body of society’ has been the central organizing metaphor of reactionary ideologies; it is surprising that people who are unaware of such a basic thing get away with pretending to be radicals.

The disease, according to the Doctors of Reclaiming, is a system based on money and power, not on need and people. It has to be admitted that money is indeed a symptom, but not in the medical, but in the Marxist (or Hegelian) sense of the word: Which is to say, it is not the base. While capital is based on labour, money is just a form of representation (or of appearance, a ‘symptom’ in that sense) thereof, if obviously a central one.

It is unclear what the phrase a 'system based on needs' means. Capitalism is based on needs, anyway, because a commodity that does not meet any need at all, can not be sold. What we are fighting for, anyway, is not a 'system' but a society, and that would be one in which the fulfillment and the unrestricted development of needs would be the end of production, not simply ‘the base’.

Power in capitalist society is, however, indeed based on people: Capital is capital only as long as people go to work every day and play their parts in the script. People, in particular people doing productive labour (remember: the working class!), are the only base of the accumulation of capital, i.e. power in its specific capitalist form. To accuse 'the system' of being based on 'power not people' doesn’t therefore make any sense at all.

'Now's the time to change all that.' I'm glad somebody mentioned it, I nearly missed it. (I thought it was the week after.) 'June 18th is about Reclaiming Our World ... forever!' 'You've Reclaimed the Streets, now Reclaim the World!' Culminating in disgustingly Nazi-style enthusiasm, this phrasemongering contains a remarkable cocktail of nonsense. First of all, nothing is forever (hopefully). Remarkable is here the change between the first person ('our world') and the appellation in the second person ('You've reclaimed...'), leading up to the command: ‘Now Reclaim!’, a rhetorical trick more common amongst fascist dictators than amongst grassroots activists. The rhetoric suggests a continuity of successes from reclaiming streets to reclaiming 'the world'. However, although there is no doubt that a claim on rightful possession of the streets has been voiced from 'our' side, the streets have not been handed over, actually. The claim did not succeed any further than the act of claiming. It has to be expected that the claim on the whole world will not be more successful, but we will know more on June 19th. Perhaps we will have another chance later 'to change all that'.

Another problem is, again, what 'the world' is. Personally, I am not too keen on the whole world; I would be happy with claiming a little part of Haiti (access to the beach would be nice), whereas I would suggest not to claim the top of the Himalayas and the bottom of the sea because experience tells, they should rather be left alone. I don't think it's very nice there, anyway. The object of political struggle - to be precise: class struggle - is society, not ‘the world’.

Further, the syllable 're-' in ‘reclaiming’ seems problematic to me. I can reclaim an umbrella that I have lost or a book that has been stolen, and then I will hope that umbrella and book are still more or less in the same shape. What ‘reclaiming’ means is actually that I claim to have a legal title on a thing that I claim to possess, and if I can prove that claim, I will get it back from a legal authority that is entitled with settling legal claims. This is difficult to prove in the case of streets, and even more difficult in the case that the lost property is 'the world': First, the world changes every moment quite rapidly (remember: you never jump into the same river twice, the bottom line of dialectics, spelled out by Herakleitos 2500 years ago), so that it can not constitute a thing that could be re-claimed (in a philosophical term: the world, like Herakleitos' river, is ‘non-identical’). While the umbrella is very much the same today and in a week, this is not the case with 'the world' (as with every living or social object). For these reasons, it is utter nonsense to suggest that 'we' re-claim 'the world', because both 'we' and 'the world' are not distinct and stable entities. Legal concepts as developed by bourgeois society, however, are based on the existence of distinct and stable entities (such as ‘persons’): Bourgeois law assumes that both the umbrella and the owner remain the same. Therefore it is not a good idea to transfer bourgeois legal terms into communist political language. (The same problem affects, by the way, the concept of 'animal rights': Here, too, a legal concept - rights -, that makes (some) sense only in a very specific form of human society - bourgeois society - is transferred into the natural world. This won't help the little puppies very much, since not even human beings can eat, drink and sleep human 'rights'.)

This whole salsa is crowned by the statement: 'Our happiness depends on freedom and our freedom depends on courage'. That beats everything. This is so bare of any sense, it could be found in 'Mein Kampf' as well as in the welcome speech of a headmaster of a boarding school in the Midlands. Whoever wrote this, should seriously consider sending a CV to Downing Street ('Everybody is equally important. Everyone should be involved...' Actually I know one or two people I do not want to be involved too much. And sometimes I even have the feeling that some people are really more equally important than others). I hope I will catch the last flight to Haiti should people who produce such dangerous nonsense start building 'strong, diverse communities' one fine day. (For God’s sake, the risk is little.)

After these brief remarks on the kind of political understanding that seems to underlie the rhetoric of J18 publications, I’d like to go into more depth about what seems to me the major issue at stake, the fetishistic and reductionist attack on ‘financial capital’.

(It may seem strange, up to this point, why anybody should be bothered to analyze simple inconspicuous leaflets so pedantically and by reading between the lines, as it were; why split hairs, when leaflets go to the waste paper anyway, mostly unread? Must not the close reader of this ephemeral stuff rather be suspected of being the romantic searcher for The Perfect Leaflet, for the magic spell that single-handedly will make the movement good and powerful and that will make evil disappear? Not at all. However, the point is that leaflets do express something about their producers, just as political ‘praxis’ does. To be precise, thinking as well as expressing and communicating thoughts is essentially a part of the ensemble of social practices typical for human beings, and as such have to be neither privileged over other such practices nor can they be neglected as ‘mere’ transient shadows.)

The problem is, that even many experienced comrades and activists succumb to the easy appeal of the superficial success of this brand of populism, which makes it a frighteningly hegemonic movement, and this is for a reason far more important than the flawed character of this particular movement. The paradox that activities against a G8-meeting are led (in the UK) by environmentalists and ‘anti-road’ activists, is a telltale fact. It’s our declaration of bankruptcy: A most general issue, the fight against capital, is subsumed under the heading of a classical 70’s style one-point-movement (after all, and despite all disclaimers, it’s name is ‘reclaim the STREETS’, and don’t you tell me that this is just the particularly clever code name for a dangerous revolutionary organization). How is it possible that so many of the remaining radical militants subscribe to the bizarre ideological rubbish outlined above? Either they just don’t care about what gibberish is printed on the leaflets they hand out, i.e. they are degenerated cynical populists and insofar worthy descendants of Leninist demagoguery, or their own theoretical framework is eroded to near complete substancelessness.)

This substancelessness that makes them yield to elements of reactionary ideology can be illuminated with the help of a little detour on the concept of antisemitism.

(I refer hereby to an theoretical text written by Moishe Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism”, in: Rabinbach/Zipes (eds.): Germans and Jews since the Holocaust: The changing situation in West Germany, NY 1986).

(Just in case some people think they can’t be bothered with such ‘academic’ stuff: Moishe Postone, currently teaching history at Chicago University, wrote the essay as a result of discussions and experiences he had when he lived in Frankfurt, FRGermany, in the early eighties in the context of what was then the autonomous left. Efforts to understand antisemitism and, in this context, the failure of the working-class movement - after its overall defeat in 1923 - to prevent Nazism and Auschwitz, have been and are still - even more so today - central to the self-conception and praxis of the radical left in that country. These experiences and resulting discussions are of immediate relevance to an internationalist movement anywhere that subscribes to, amongst others, the Marxian category of class. It is often said - correctly - that theory results from praxis and experience; however, this refers to the totality of practices and experiences of emancipatory movements at many places at different times. It does not mean that any particular movement should develop ‘its own theory’ out of its own particular praxis and experience. This would be a disaster, because such a ‘theory’ would be not more than a conceptual duplication of the practical limitations of that particular movement. For this reason, the development of revolutionary theory has to be based on the widest knowledge and understanding of the history of such movements and their contexts as is possible. In some cases, people who can contribute to such knowledge and understanding are university professors, or they make their living with journalism (Karl Marx) or making films (Guy Debord), although all these are quite petit-bourgeois occupations. To avoid misunderstandings, the idea that one’s occupation directly determines one’s thinking (so called ‘sociology of knowledge’) has been formulated by naïve petit-bourgeois theorists and sociologists such as Karl Mannheim and is not a revolutionary, let alone a Marxian idea.

The language of theoretical contributions like the one adopted here is the language of Marx’s critique of political economy. This language is extremely difficult to understand because it refers to an object - modern bourgeois society - which is extremely difficult to understand. This is because its chief characteristic is that it replaced for good old forms of immediate, direct exploitation, mediated, abstract forms of exploitation. With the exception of social democratic, Stalinist and Trotskyist party demagogues, nobody has ever managed to boil this language down to an easy to read ‘Marx for beginners’ level. A radical - which means thorough - analysis of the capitalist mode of production is only possible for people who dedicate themselves to struggle with their whole social being for a long time (basically: a lifetime). However, just like everybody can learn Chinese or Sanskrit, everybody can learn the language of revolutionary theory (although, one’s particular conditions will make social knowledge more or less easy to appropriate). People who do dedicate themselves to the lifelong learning process which is revolution do in no way have to make excuses for this.

The concepts developed by Marx, which are a result of the experience of the failure of the revolutionary struggles of the mid 19th century in Europe and North America, mediated by subsequent years of hard and intense studies in the British Library (as hard and intense as no petit bourgeois student today would even dream about), differ from the babble we are taught at today’s universities because they are difficult to understand. While everybody - with a few years of thoughtless exercise - can understand and use the primitive, positivistic terminology of bourgeois social sciences and their popular derivatives that are content with describing a small aspect of the world, Marxian categories aim to comprehend and explain the dynamic of the totality of social relations, and for this purpose they have to be historically determinate, precise, dialectical, and therefore: difficult to understand. A language that is the immediate, one-dimensional result of everyday experience - ‘common sense’, ‘the man on the street’ talk - can never point beyond the everyday world. Actually, ‘common sense’ tends to level and make invisible the contradictions that can be found in everyday life by a critical sense, sensitive towards subtleties and fine nuances. But this is exactly what we need: To go beyond that which is, to transcend, to aufheben the order that is. One has to be highly suspicious about a thought that is immediately understandable: It is a trap. The language of the critique of political economy might be too demanding for the odd petit bourgeois and lumpen student; but it is exactly the right thing for the revolutionary, studying life.)

For the anti-Semite, ‘the Jews represent an immensely powerful, intangible, international conspiracy’. The power imputed to the Jews in modern anti-Semitism is ‘mysteriously intangible, abstract, and universal’. However, it must find a concrete carrier ‘through which it can work’ (Postone 1986: 305):

‘A graphic example of this vision is provided by a Nazi poster depicting Germany - represented as a strong, honest worker - threatened in the West by a fat, plutocratic John Bull and in the East by a brutal, barbaric Bolshevik Commissar. Yet, these two hostile forces are mere puppets. Peering over the edge of the globe, with the puppet strings firmly in his hands, is the Jew (ibid.).’

Since anti-Semitism, particularly in its Nazi-form, presents itself as opposed to both what it considers ‘Capitalism’ and ‘Communism’ it escapes being explained in terms of the political and social struggle between those two. Unless one wants to brush away this paradox as ‘mere propaganda’, Nazi-anti-Semitism cannot be understood only as ‘a weapon’ in capital’s struggle against the labour movement.

Another widely discussed interpretation of Anti-Semitism and National Socialism refers to the notion of ‘modernity’: Was National Socialism a ‘revolt against modernity’? On first glance, this seems convincing since both capitalism and communism can be seen as phenomena of ‘modernity’. (In such a perspective, Nazi-anti-Semitism would then just be something like today’s ‘primitivist’, Heideggerian, nationalist rebellion against modernisation and globalisation.) This cannot convince because ‘the attitude of National-Socialism to many other dimensions of modernity, especially toward modern technology, was affirmative rather than critical’.

With regard to capitalism, the Nazis’ ‘revolt’ was aimed exclusively against finance capital, not against industrial capital: against “raffendes” (greedy) not against “schaffendes” (creating) capital. Thus the ‘National Socialists’ - like other anti-Semites and some currents of socialism as well - related their notion of capitalism only to capitalism’s circulative sphere, not to its productive sphere. (Since this is particularly characteristic of those socialist traditions that were preferred objects of Marx’s critique as petit-bourgeois or ‘utopian’ (most favourite enemy: Proudhon), the term ‘Socialism’ in ‘National Socialism’ is not mere masquerade: Nazism does indeed epitomise some sorts of socialism, namely some ‘petit-bourgeois’, non-Marxian socialisms that did not intend to transcend commodity-production.) ‘The affirmation by modern anti-Semitism of industrial capital indicates that an approach is required that can distinguish between what modern capitalism is and the way it manifests itself, between its essence and its appearance.’

According to Marx’s critique of political economy, the double character of the commodity as value and use-value requires two separate appearances; because the value-side is ‘externalised’, fetishized, in the form of money, the reified commodity ‘appears only as its use-value dimension, as purely material and “thingly”.’ Thus, two dimensions of the same thing appear as two different and autonomous things.

‘One aspect of the fetish, then, is that capitalist social relations do not appear as such’ - as capitalist social relations - but each dimension ‘appears to be quasi-natural’: The abstract dimension appears in the form of abstract, universal, “objective” natural laws; the concrete dimension appears as pure “thingly” nature.

Fetishized consciousness can roughly be split up into two narratives: ‘Positive bourgeois thought’ hypostatizes the abstract as transhistorical; the romantic revolt, on the other hand, that understands itself as anti-bourgeois, hypostatizes the concrete. The romantic revolt tends to see only the abstract - e.g. money - as ‘the root of all evil’ and thus remains trapped within the antinomy of the commodity relation. The anti-Semite Proudhon e.g. understands concrete labor ‘as the non-capitalist moment opposed to the abstractness of money’. Therefore, he fails to challenge the concrete of capitalist production: capitalist labour. ‘Industrial capital then can appear as the linear descendent of “natural” artisanal labor, as “organically rooted” in opposition to “rootless”, “parasitic” finance capital. ... In this sense, the biological interpretation, which opposes the concrete dimension (of capitalism) as “natural” and “healthy” to the negativity of what is taken to be “capitalism”, does not stand in contradiction to a glorification of industrial capital and technology. Both are the “thingly” side of the antinomy. ... The point is that, in this form of fetishized “anticapitalism”, both blood and the machine are seen as concrete counterprinciples to the abstract.’

For the modern anti-Semite, nature, blood, soil, concrete labor, industrial machines, Gemeinschaft (community), Volk, race all stand on the same side of the binomial; the ‘artificial’; finance capital; liberalism; communism; class consciousness; ‘the Jew’: all appear on the other side.

Modern anti-Semitism is premised on a further reification: ‘The manifest abstract dimension was also biologized - as the Jews.’ The fetishized opposition of the concrete and the abstract became translated into the racial opposition between ‘Aryans’ and ‘Jews’. ‘International Jewry’ was the biologized form, the personification or reification of what was falsely understood as capitalism: Capitalism’s ‘abstract’ side, made material. This reification represents a second fetishization: Anti-Semitism not only separates the ensemble of (capitalist) social relations into two entities, but in a second step, as it were, reifies both sides into concrete matter.

I hope the little digression makes clear why the fuzzy logic of the J18 rhetoric is not just sloppy but actually dangerous. The reduction of capital to financial capital is what links vulgar, one-sided forms of Marxism with pre- and anti-Marxist forms of socialism, and, beyond that, have been instrumental for both Bolshevik/Stalinist and National-Socialist state-and capital-building projects. Even in details of the imagery the parallel is striking: The ‘inauthentic’ abstract power of financial capital, ruling ‘the world’ through inconspicuous computer screens, is the post-modern version of the Nazi’s notion of the Jew pulling the strings. Why, if not for a reactionary desire, should leaflet writers waste space in a small leaflet to mention computer screens? (In the event that the reactionary desire discovers that for each computer screen it decapitates there will grow five new ones, it might easily switch back to the Jew as the one who is supposed to pull the strings.)

The invocation of ‘utopian’, petit-bourgeois socialist ideologies is characteristic of many forms of populism. It might seem understandable when the activists of J18 try to get a few more people to attend their carnival, and choose the city as a location which works nicely as a representation of all that is evil in the world. Ironically, however, their populism makes them follow exactly in the footsteps of the most traditional parts of the British left, namely the Euro-communist mainstream with its characteristic invocations of ‘traditions of working-class radicalism’. (Eric Hobsbawm is a notorious example, who not only defends e.g. Chartist jingoism and sexism, but celebrates them as key elements to success.) In a similar way, J18 embrace the rotten mythology of ‘youth culture’, jazzed up with a bit of pseudo-situationist avantguardism, a post-modern combination of most unsavoury ideologies including Proudhonism, Bakuninism and Gramsciism, struggling for ‘hegemony’ over people’s hearts (and, secondarily, minds), re-staging the folkloristic song and dance project that was at the core of ‘Euro-communist’ populism to its deservedly bitter end: Juneeighteenism is the most post-modern stage of populism; those complaining about computer screens and the phantom-like government of finance capital are actually those who produce the simulation of an uprising which might even help obstructing a real one.

As for the actual event, it will have to be measured by what it will contribute to the development of revolutionary consciousness, and the defeat of reactionary ideologies; how it will handle the precarious relation of proletarian spontaneity and bureaucratic orchestration by a more or less secret society; and, how it will be able to avoid ending up as a bilateral military manoeuvre that effectively will improve on the one hand, policing, on the other hand, managing future uprisings.

June the 18th, the onehundredandeightyfourth anniversary of the victory of European aristocratic reaction at Waterloo, will find me sitting in the British Library, filling notebooks and raising my consciousness. Only at 5 o’clock, I might well take the chance and raise as well a 25 pence plastic cup of tea to Napoleon^¹.

1 On Napoleon cf.: Two Hundred Pharaohs Manifesto, London 1999, the chapter on Hegel ‘Contesting Uncle George’s Will’ (pages 28 – 33)

an open invitation to TEKNO djs , soundsystems - Budapest

2008-12-29T08:13:00.000-08:00

Budapest is a city with not may underground parties going on. This is the reason of writing an announcement in apples from the underground. We invite every party organizer , teknival and so on to come. We will organize the rest like accommodation and a party space. We would be glad if you contact us and discuss further details.

message by

tekno heads from the apples of the underground

electro cocktails

2008-12-27T13:55:00.000-08:00

Morze infoshop Budapest #-1

2008-12-26T19:40:00.000-08:00

An open lab of creativity , horizontalism , radical theory , ephemeral arts ,underground subcultures start functioning this week in Budapest. Morze infoshop is an open space for radical experiments , travelers who need information as well as militant research , counter information. The infoshop is into the Tuzrakter cultural centre.

The first big public event of the infoshop will take place at December 31st in the night. An electro fusion night including projections on the wall , cocktails and drinks.

more info : http://insti2te.blogspot.com/

datacide 10 out now!

2008-12-26T19:21:00.000-08:00

OUT NOW: with 56 pages the biggest datacide so far, it’s full of features and reviews.
Secessionist Outernational: Self-Exile and Poetry, Howard Slater: Convergent Suggestion - on Surrealism and Organisation, JR: Denial Networks - On Crisis and Continuity in the 9/11 Truth Movement, Neil Transpontine: A Loop Da Loop Era - towards an (anti-)history of Rave, CF: Radical Intersections, Controlled Weirdness: You’re Too Young to Remember the Eighties - Dancing in a different time, The Reverend: More than just a Night out - Rave as confrontation, Dan Hekate: All things fall and will be built again, Rafael Castellanos: Visible and invisible fragments of experiences (About Bogotrax festival), Hans-Christian Psaar: Commodities for the Jilted Generation, Alexis Wolton: Teknival and the emancipatory potential of technology, Riccardo Balli: Audio-Philosophical Dwellings.
Stewart Home on Peter Whitehead and the Sixties, Nemeton on Boris Mikhailov’s Unfinished Dissertation, JR on “The Description of Bankruptcy”, CF on François Genoud, Nemeton on “Everybody talks about the Weather… We don’t: The Writings of Ulriike Meinhof”, Balli on “Situationism on Wheels”, CF on “Battlenoise!” and the ideology of Martial Industrial, Plus record reviews, charts, Bloor Schleppy, End of Vinyl?, Pencilbreak and more.
available for EUR 3.00 from praxis.c8.com/catalog now
or from good stores and mail orders soon!

an image from the future?

2008-12-26T19:15:00.000-08:00