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

Description of the Mexican election circus elaborately suspended by rusty chains and pulleys over the class confrontation summarized by the same author a few days ago (see: Mexico, there's a riot going on, also from 'Counterpunch', posted here last week).  Inasmuch as it documents plain facts of fraud whose 'exposure' seems likely to change precisely nothing, perhaps the text can be read as a sort of funeral sermon for the faith in representative democracy recently renewed on Latin America's behalf by Western leftist well-wishers.

Overview of the exceptional extent and intensity of class confrontation going on in Mexico beneath the election circus.  From Counterpunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/ross07012006.html

'Mexico on the Brink : there's a riot going on'

By JOHN ROSS

Mexico City, Mexico.

Further New Orleans coverage, with terrible details of 'disaster-management' as class warfare, as described by George Caffentzis in the current Mute.  The foulest particulars make clear that what's going on there isn't just capitalist opportunism or enforcement 'excess': the militarized looting of the mainly black, working class city is a concentrated instance of the same kind of renewed enclosure that's going on around you right where you are now.  So, in the midst of an unprecedented housing crisis, 5,000 apartments are boarded up waiting for demolition for priv

URGENT BIOPOWER UPDATE, not in the dubious, never-defined sense of 'biopolitical struggle', but in its everyday, concrete meaning.  That is, institutions directly claiming administrative sovereignty over masses of human life-matter, with absolute priority over any subjective impulses from the flesh in question.  And of course it's not just any institutions or any flesh: US medical authorities are demanding that the medical system intervene to maintain ALL women's childbearing capacity regardless of those women's own wishes.  In the bluntest practical terms, t

I wrote a brief intro to this (excellent) article but it turned out quite long so im
going to paste it below the article. I can't help relating New Orleans back to
regenicide in Hackney East London, something I'm more familiar with. The
scale is different of course, but the common features striking: state-corporate
deployed emergency as tool for mass expropriation of poor (black) people;
primitive accumulation (of former public property) on an industrial scale;
(one-way) consultation at gunpoint; liquidity and displacement; and finally