Porto Marghera – the last firebrands
Screening and presentation/discussion
Friday, 9th of November, 7.30pm, Pullens Estate community centre [see end of page for details]

A film about petrochemical workers who took matters into their own hands in the giant industrial zone engulfing Venice.  The mass refusal of literally toxic work forced hours on the job down at the same time as driving wages up.  The labour hierarchy that sets white collar against blue, permanent against casual, was attacked by workers insisting on the maximum for everyone.  The battle in the factory was linked to working-class life outside through direct appropriation of basic social needs (electricity, housing, food).  

Re-posted from : Interactivist Info Exchange Collaborative Authorship, Collective Intelligence http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=05/08/24/1936241

"Antonio Negri:
A Revolt That Never Ends"

A documentary about Toni Negri entitled "Antonio Negri: A Revolt that Never Ends" is now available via the collaborative video network V2V.

The film was made for Arte and to my knowledge is the first english-language film to recount Italy's recent revolutionary history; from Potere Operaia and the long '68 (1968-77) to autonomia operaia. Nice archival material is used, and there is an attempt to articulate the development of Negri's ideas. Whilst appreciating the effort invested by the film-makers, some criticisms must be mentioned.

Mute interviews the Dresden for Free and Hamburg for Free groups on their campaigns inciting people to go 'proletarian shopping'

Who is a city for if not for those who live there? Why do we have to pay to take a bus, go swimming, eat, or watch a movie? Beginning with such simple but, under capitalism, explosive questions, a wave of ‘for free’ campaigns have spread across German cities. Projects such as Hamburg for Free and Dresden for Free attempt to challenge the dominion of money in the increasingly gentrified and privatised metropolis. The Hamburg group have led mass free eat-ins at university canteens in protest against price rises and student fees (students and staff all joined in), organised a free night out at the local multiplex cinema for 70 activists (quickly aborted by the police) while Dresden for Free have staged actions in swimming pools, on public transport, and in theatres, a direct response to ongoing closures and cutbacks. Mute spoke to some of the activists involved

A Mute survey of self-instituted educational projects

Activist community born in the ashes of post-industrial Asturias, in north-western Spain.

Three or four years ago, a number of individuals rooted in the European activist scene began planning a project that would enable them to develop their political activism beyond short-term campaigns or involvement in spectacular events. They wanted to move towards the goal so often talked about in the social movements — the construction of sustainable alternatives to capitalist social relations, in the form of a space that would actually show the possibility of new kinds of social relation.

In the light of eugenic IQ-monger Charles Murray’s recent visit to London’s ICA, Matthew Hyland and JJ King investigate the function of ‘intelligence’ in contemporary biopower

Quand on est bête, c’est pour longtemps
-19th century educational axiom denied by Alfred Binet

Cognitive intelligence testing is easy to dismiss as antiquated science, a surviving fragment of an obsolete apparatus of discipline. Yet its logic, historically inseparable from the eugenic dream realised by contemporary genomics, is applied more vigorously than ever today in, for example, work and education.

As the author of a publication called Cyber-Marx remarks on its back cover, Aut-op-sy editor Steve Wright’s critical history of autonomist Marxism appears amid ‘a new wave of anti-capitalist activism’ and a slight revival of specialist interest in this diffuse set of practices, which seemed not long ago to have receded into the most rarefied political unconscious. Academics’ and activists’ recent flurry of excitement over Hardt and Negri’s Empire may risk further obscuring the autonomist current’s more austere rigours and troubling limitations. One of the book’s aims is to correct this tendency, resuming serious evaluation of the autonomist contribution to a future ‘without bosses.’

'Education systems are crumbling ... ' in a communique to the Copenhagen Free University, Howard Slater muses amongst the ruins

"Become many, brave the outside world, split off somewhere else..."
– Michel Serres

Education systems are crumbling. Whatever country it is to which we do not belong, whatever state or nationality we have been abstracted into, whatever desire it is that can never be granted... we can agree that education is concerned with the reproduction of conformist subjectivities; it produces isolated beings rather than social becomings, it produces conscientiousness rather than self-consciousness, political emancipation rather than human emancipation.

Mute on 'prosumers', collaborative production and the future of the magazine - a Mute infomercial