(reposting from the new Gasworks Pipeline commentary & materials site - very contemporary counter-Green polemic from 1970)

The French Group, which has been invited to this conference, has decided not to bring a positive contribution.

The group believes that too many matters, and essential ones, have not been voiced here as regards the social and political status of Design, as regards the ideological functions and the mythology of environment.

In July last year Mute published Dmytri Kleiner's critique of copyright and its 'radical' copyleft alternative, presenting a reformist programme based on Ricardo's 'iron law of wages'. But Marx demolished this analysis 140 years ago, argues Stefan Meretz. Time for FLOSS to catch up?

"Your apartments are nice and tidy, but the stairways are covered with shit. What can you call this but a cult of space?"

– some interesting reflections on space, ludic and insightful, from Chto Delat?/ What Is To Be Done.

http://www.chtodelat.org/index.php?Itemid=127&id=267&option=com_content&task=view

Reads very well with Thomas Campbell and Dmitry Vorobyev's account of anti-privatisation/regen protests in St Petersburg elsewhere on metamute.org

B

The comic 'Staabucks Fukkee is Your Enemy' ran between articles by John Cunningham and Stewart Martin in the print edition of Mute Vol 2 #8

Post-Fordism’s appetite for self-directed activity is bringing about a crisis in progressive education. No longer perceived as threatening, a work force trained to think for itself has become highly desirable. So what should an emancipatory education entail today?, asks Stewart Martin

January's Art and Immaterial Labour conference at the Tate brought together some famous names from post-Autonomia to discuss conjunctions between the dematerialisation of art and immaterialisation of labour. John Cunningham reports

What is radical research? Does it emanate from grass roots social movements, the universities, both, or neither? Melancholic Troglodytes review AK Press’s recent collection of ‘militant research’ with an illustrated tour following the book's line of enquiry from the ‘ivory tower to the barricades’

Professor,
take off your bicycle glasses!
I myself will expound
those times
and myself.

Initially a vital component of experimental black film culture, the Black Audio Film Collective quickly arrived at retrospective respectability. Josephine Berry Slater enters the memory space of their recent show at FACT and retrieves the radical yet 'still born' possibilities from its multi-media memorial

Let them bear witness to the process by which the living transform the dead into partners in struggle, Handsworth Songs, BAFC

In their recent blockbuster show and doorstopper book Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel describe a horizontalised network of relations between people and things in which nothing can nor should be excluded from (political) representation. But, argues Anthony Iles, in seeking to universally include the excluded, they fail to allow for the negation of representational politics that such outsiders provoke