Mute magazine - Culture and politics after the net - Precarity

Mute Vol 2 #7 - Show Invisibles? Migration / Data / Work

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 16:41:01 +0000

We are living through an intensification of citizens’, and non-citizens’, visibility to capital. Database convergence, states of emergency and points-based immigration systems destroy the legal and informational grey zones in which the poor shelter and organise. As black economies and shadow sectors are exposed to the light of networked information in the interests of population management, border enforcement, welfare clamp-downs and, above all, profit, what are the risks and advantages of visibility? What do (political and artistic) representation and rights have to offer the illegal and ‘invisible’?

Power cut hell

Wed, 14 May 2008 10:59:43 +0000

ByHackney Gazette editorial

Apparently it's not considered newsworthy beyond the local press, but a whole block of the Morningside Estate in Hackney Wick/Homerton, i.e. prime Olympic boom territory, has been without electricity for SIX days and counting. The supplier (French state-controlled London Olympic bid sponsor EDF Energy) blames a water leak (Thames Water: acquired for £8 billion by Macquarie Bank of Sydney, 2006). You couldn't ask for a better display of how financialized infrastructure works: resource rundown by two fragments of the former utility system converges neatly to make life impossible for guess which class demographic (sitting on guess which real estate...)

Undocumented Migrants Win Unpaid Wages in Sweden

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 16:34:21 +0000

The syndicalist SAC union in Sweden has over the last few months been campaigning for fair wages for undocumented immigrants , resulting in thousands of pounds in unpaid wages being paid to migrant workers.

Outsourcing: lie of the land

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 03:18:57 +0000

ByPrivate Eye (In the Back section)

From Private Eye, a brief update on the lie detector system soon to be used across the UK on suspected 'benefit thieves'*, i.e. all claimants. The system comes from Mossad, but what's really alarming is that it is administered by scorched-earth PFI war machine Capita.
*NB. Readers with no sympathy for 'benefit thieves' have come to the wrong website.

Building worker newsletter - autumn 2007

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:55:25 +0000

ByBuilding workers rank & file committee

Bulletin from the Building Workers Rank & File Committee on organization beyond union opportunism in an Olympically-inflated sector where 'precarity' has a literal life-and-death meaning, and employer attempts to divide and stratify labour in relation to immigration status and other questions of 'legality' (eg 'fake self-employment') is endemic. (Also reproduced on Libcom.org and Indymedia.co.uk)

Tangled Up In Metronet

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 15:09:21 +0000

ByUnterschreber

The current tube strike in London demands guarantees that the insolvent Private Public Partnership (PPP) Metronet will not seek to cover its losses at the expense of labour. Unterschreber unravels the matrix of blame

Excerpt on the invasion

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 11:33:09 +0000

ByAngela Mitropoulos

This extract from an unfinished text by Angela Mitropoulos, posted on archive : s0metim3s (http://archive.blogsome.com/2007/08/07/indigenous-land/#comments), gives part of the historical background (which some European readers may have overlooked) to the current military-medical invasion of Aboriginal land in Australia's Northern Territory. Most importantly, the text explains the concrete connection between intervention in the name of 'health' and 'education', the blackmailing of the 'economically inactive' into the 'job-seeking' reserve army, and the rush to extract resource rents from legally inalienable Aboriginal land.

Lunch Poems

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 12:07:57 +0000

ByHoward Slater

An ordinary ordinance day.

A bureaucratic pounding.

Not a ritual, a procedure:

dirty pieces of silver paper.

***

The zags are cut lightly into card,

spires persist,

husbands are solicitors,

torn letters are posted into sewer vents,

lift engineers order teas,

leaves are vacuumed,

a filter despairs of its plastic sheath,

lunch ends it’s out to back.

***

In the square the jugglers

command the crowd.

A debt of sitting.

It’s not free: the order-word

of entertainment.

***

Spoke to suicide case’s father

(later re-let flat)

***

‘I feel I’d wake up if I didn’t have to go back to work’

***

Don’t expect them to think it’s not

theirs, they’ve paid and now they

Service level disagreements.

Expectant vehemence triumphs over the phone.

***

‘I, Abdi Ali Noor declare hereby that I

no longer live in this ghostly house.

I am now from the mental hospital. I

have returned back all your keys. I go

back to Belgium. Bye bye London.’

***

Cabbies look in longingly.

Sunglasses. Leaden boots.

Turbulence in the mock square’s corner.

Indifference is bliss.

Found people freed for an hour.

***

They’d taken me away.

But I went voluntarily.

You see, I needed food pills,

bio points and tobacco.

***

We accept euros for golfing trophies.

Narrow passage.

Emptied playground.

A tear on the brow of his cheekbone.

***

Impotent commands the worst,

usually instructed from above.

No real ground except the

communication of an order.

She is sacked in public.

She protests, seeking a rationale

other than the empty words of

the managerial chain. The reply

to her despairing request is

‘stop arguing with me’ and this

too is met with the delighted

sneers of her peers and colleagues.

****

Desperate right,

shot in the head

in Somalia,

in the past,

in transit,

in hospital

in temporary,

chucked out,

now he’s here

at the front desk.

***

Grout case file three.

Typical foisting.

An hallucination of hearing.

Use anger directed towards

you as a shield when your words run out.

Nothing can be heard.

Audible tweets at 12pm.

I am non but eponymous.

Calls come (again).

The restricted zones of personality

***

disable speech, make recalcitrance.

Good morning, how may I help you?

Some gifts still to pay for.

Paladins as housing, as icing.

The language of deflection is realer,

really procedural.

Thump the table.

Pock-mocked lumpen-face eats apple.

Veer to veto (again).

Get once lost letter late.

Genocidal consumption.

Details plead to become facts.

***

‘It can’t go on’ she says. But what

‘can’t go on’ is not what she’s here to

talk about. The ‘can’t go on’ is beyond

my remit in this room. Does the ‘can’t

go on’ relate to her husband’s death,

the debts? Can this death-debt not go on?

***

‘line line line line manager’

***

three weeks later

the same track at mother’s junction

post box

pill box

snow dots of tarmac

awe of calm opinionlessness

free to be

appointed

a basket of obscure steadfastness

***

You fuckers!

You stole our language,

our scope to ad-lib,

and now you’re coming

for our inflection!’

***

We are underpaid and overexposed

to their sociopathic greed – we

feed them paper and now they scream

at us. They dearly want what their

forebears taught us was useless.

They don’t have the means of their greed,

the desire to want difference to morph

want, and now they stamp our idiom to debt.

***

Howard Slater <howard.slater_AT_homesforislington.org.uk> is a trainee counsellor and sometimes writer who works in the buffer zone of social housing in Central London. The above 'spontanipoems' are drawn from notebooks (2002-2006) and were dubbed 'lunch poems' by a friend: the Manhattan noon of Frank O' Hara has nothing on the little yellow eggs you can get on Lever Street

Creative fights

Sat, 05 May 2007 18:43:25 +0000

Creative fights: the fights for control in the imaterial production process. Precarity, creative class, imaterial rights, art and activism, digital folk culture, intellectual commons and property and

Gurgaon workers' news

Fri, 04 May 2007 20:13:44 +0000

ByGurgaon workers' news

Latest essential bulletin of inquiry and analysis from an inside perspective in Gurgaon, India's largest Special Economic Zone. (See url below)

Gurgaon Workers News

Newsletter 2 (April 2007)

Gurgaon workers' news 3

Fri, 04 May 2007 19:59:34 +0000

ByGurgaon Workers News

Latest bulletin of essential description and analysis of the Gurgaon Special Economic Zone from inside. The text seems to refuse copying (if anyone finds a way around this please add it), but the full site is found at: http://gurgaonworkersnews.wordpress.com/
and can also be reached through a link on Prol-position.

Why the subprime bust will spread

Fri, 04 May 2007 20:29:53 +0000

ByHenry C K Liu

A pertinent reminder that the so-called 'housing bubble' isn't just a matter of subprime foreclosures and repossessions: the buyers of the 'financial products' through which mortgage debt is abstracted and redivided at the outer limits of algorithmic calculation are none other than private pension funds, so that capital's 'no alternative' answer to the pseudo-problem of the 'demographic bomb' may yet manage to create a real 'pensions crisis' where none need have existed

Take Me I'm Yours: Neoliberalising the Cultural Institution

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 20:31:41 +0000

ByAnthony Davies

While talk of precariousness is rife in cultural and political forums, ‘progressive’ institutions do not always practice what they preach. Anthony Davies looks behind the scenes of ‘radical reformism’

Super Size my pay

Sat, 10 Mar 2007 11:36:36 +0000

ByToby

Official 'New Zealand' is a sporty, soporific hell-hole of 'classless' good cheer. Fortunately successive generations of the Pacific proletariat (see also L.Goldner's Melville book and Fabian Thomsett's review of same on Metamute) refuse to learn that the colonial/class war is over.
(from Libcom: http://libcom.org/)

Embedded Adventurism

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 12:42:44 +0000

ByMatthew Hyland
Creative and professional class squatters are being lauded in The Financial Times as socially responsible agents of regeneration. Meanwhile, the UK’s market-driven housing crisis is making squatting more necessary and more insecure. Matthew Hyland analyses the changing social and political composition of squatting, and swings a wrecking ball at 5 1/2 Roofs, a recently released documentary ‘about’ squatters which claims to reveal a ‘rarely seen layer of London life’