Abahlali baseMjondolo Press Release
Monday 21 April 2008

Abahlali baseMjondolo to Mourn UnFreedom Day Once Again

Time: 9:00 a.m., Sunday 27 April 2008
Venue: Community Hall, Kennedy Road Shack Settlement, Clare Estate, Durban

The Kennedy Road shack settlement was were Abahlali baseMjondolo began and although the movement now has 14 affiliated settlements and a further 25 branches the state has always been obsessed with the Kennedy Road settlement. This is where the brunt of the repression has been borne and where, a week and one year ago, 6 key activists were arrested on trumped up murder charges (the same tactic had been used against the Landless People's Movement in Johannesburg a year before).

It’s not just the founders of hippy communes or artists like Amy Balkin who are looking for ‘a breathing space from the State’ in which to experiment with freedom and free-time. Big IT companies like Google apparently share their ideals. With a commitment to ‘me time’, the production of ‘universal access’, and (energy) sovereignty, corporates are leveraging the dream of the commons

As a lead in to Mute’s climate change special issue, Iain Boal reports on BP’s recent biofuel deal with University of California, Berkeley. In the name of a planetary emergency, the oil behemoth has both managed to greenwash biotech research and further entrench campus capitalism

The Counterpunch video interview with Peter Linebaugh is at:
http://www.counterpunch.org/ruspoli03142007.html

Robert Neuwirth's urgently necessary 'Squattercity' draws attention to the Takebacktheland occupation in Miami, where on the site of a demolished block of cheap apartments the homeless are building and defending the housing that the 'market' and the state will never provide.  As Neuwirth suggests, imagine if this supposedly 'third world' phenomenon were to spread to New Orleans and...and...
http://squattercity.blogspot.com/

Thursday, January 04, 2007

The Pottinger Settlement

Just what it says in the title: Peter Linebaugh and companions take a walk in Oaxaca in the aftermath of the state's bloody suppression of indigenous counter-power that may actually have posed a threat. 

January 10, 2007

A Twelfth Night Tale

A Walk in Oaxaca

By PETER LINEBAUGH

This text, reviewing Lawrence Lessig's lecture at September's Wizards of OS conference in Berlin, adds to the broadening consensus that Creative Commons licenses and their apologists are more interested in mutating (intellectual) property than abolishing it altogether. Here Dmytri Kleiner warns that these Sirens of 'free culture' are diluting the efforts of those fighting for a truly free culture, i.e. one which does not merely float as a fictitious layer upon an underlying and profit-reaping capitalist base