Wednesday, September 26, 2012

“Democracy kidnapped” in Spain






 

 Thousands marched yesterday in Spain near the parliament building, demanding the resignation of Mariano Rajoy’s government as well as the rewrite of constitution. The police have fired rubber bullets and baton-charged protesters. Spanish media reported that at least 32 people were detained and more than a dozen injured. The protesters dispersed after MPs left the building. A demonstrator, Montse Puigdavall spoke at BBC:
I’m here because of all the social cuts and rights that we have lost, that took a lot of hard work to achieve – we are here because we’re determined not to lose them
ROARMAG’s writer Carlos Delclos appeared live on RT during today’s clashes in front of Congress, explaining how Spain’s democracy has been kidnapped.
What you are seeing out here right now is the Spanish — and by extension the European — citizenry reacting against austerity. Austerity right now is at a level where it’s affecting people’s daily lives. It’s affecting whether or not people can get medical attention. It’s affecting whether or not people can advance socially through education and social progress.
What you’re seeing now is a country where an entire generation is being relegated to a class of emigrants. People that have been invested in with public money, to be educated, are now going to move out and generate wealth in other countries. That’s not a project for a country. Meanwhile, child poverty in Spain has increased exponentially.
I think the first thing the government can do is call for a referendum on paying back the debt, and on the constitutional amendment that they made. It’s no mistake that these people are gathered here today to talk about the constitution of Spain; a constitution that has been around since the transition from the Francoist government, and it was always said that it couldn’t be touched, that it was the basis for what Spain is today.
But they did change it without a referendum or even consulting the citizenry or submitting it to public debate, to pay back an illegitimate debt taken on by the private sector.
source: Eagainst [ http://eagainst.com/articles/democracy-kidnapped-in-spain/ ]


A bar owner in Madrid protects the protestors in his store



Sunday, September 23, 2012

"Modernity and Biospheric Meltdown: Rethinking Exits, Austerities and Biopolitics by Gene Ray







 

In setting out the agenda for this conference, Yannis Stavrakakis calls for a critical and postcolonial reflection on the Greek crisis. He asks us to think about the current politics of debt and austerity within the historical force-fields of “Heterodox Modernity”: “A global crisis provides the opportunity for the enforcement of one more project of ‘modernizing’ Greek culture under circumstances of a quasi-state of emergency.” The terms constellated in this formulation point me to the emerging crisis within modernity itself.
    
My thesis here is that modernity exists but cannot be sustained. It stands exposed today as untenable and unviable – indeed, terminally so. Why? For all the good old reasons set out by critical theory long ago, but also, now, for some new ones. Today, biospheric or ecological meltdown and mass extinction announce the end of modernity. Our challenge now is to rescue ourselves from it: we need an exit from the logic it imposes, not a fix that would prologue it.
    
Given the stakes, which I clarify below, this challenge should be at the very center of political discourse and debate. It should be included now in every serious discussion about the so-called sovereign debt crisis, or art, or the postcolonial. Instead, we continue to leave it out. For many reasons, we’re avoiding this challenge. It’s too huge, too unthinkably catastrophic, too difficult and uncomfortable on so many levels. But avoidance and disavowal won’t make the biospheric crisis go away. It will impose itself now as the absolute material limit of modernity – the real constraining objectivity that will shape all politics, all possible futures.



Limits of a Master Logic. Modernity. What is that, what are we talking about? Is it a process, a logic, an object, a program, an ideology? All of the above: modernity is a global social process that, unfolding, transforms the world. But it’s not a random process; it has as logic. Modernity cannot be separated from the processes of valorization and capital accumulation. Indeed, the history of modernity is the history of capital: from the so-called primitive accumulation of the colonial era to the new enclosures and postcolonial debtors’ prisons of our time. Modernity develops and takes hold unevenly, the pain and the benefits of capital fall differentially, domination is asymmetrical. In this postcolonial sense, we speak of multiple or heterodox modernities.
    
The global social process is the sum of many divergent logics, many tendencies and counter-tendencies, many modes and forms and flows. But there is hierarchy in this force-field: the postmodernist thesis of the death of master logics and narratives does not hold up. The logic of accumulation continues to dominate, integrate and order all rival logics and does so in the most impersonal and indifferent way. Capital, profits, economies must grow, must be made to grow, at whatever cost: this is what we’re living through, the austerity-immiseration program that is devastating Greece and so many other places today is the enforcement of a master logic.
    
The accumulation process is a viciously expanding circle: Marx called it an “automatic subject” – an “animated monster.” It’s not reducible to the greed of bankers or financiers; the current banking and finance system is just a symptom of the master logic. And the pressures of this logic long ago overwhelmed the political process of so-called democracy. Since 1945, technocratic governance has become the norm. In the spectacle of what some call post-politics, politicians provide the faces and personalities, but the important decisions are increasingly made by technocrats - the managers and directors of economies, corporations and war-machines. No need to elaborate here, we’re in the grips of this.
     


From a biospheric perspective, the relentless imperative of growth and acceleration is precisely the problem. The ecological limits of capital have been recognized and probed by a growing group of theorists and writers, including James O’Connor, Midnight Notes, Iain Boal and Retort, Eddie Yuan and Joel Kovel, to name a few. Even some global elites of capital have been worried about the inevitable Limits to Growth, as the study commissioned by the Club of Rome had put it in 1972. These limits are now arriving, and scientists warn us that a real hell is brewing. But it doesn’t seem to matter. Public attention, ever pulled and prodded, remains unfocused and confused, while time after time, the political process fails to confront and address this crisis – as the debacles of the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change and more recently the Rio+20 Summit clearly show.
    
Two new disarticulations seem to be at work here: the growing gap between science and policymaking and an opening fissure between technocrats charged with planning and risk assessment and politicians bound to short-term election cycles. Rationally, the technocrats should address what is clearly a threat. But the conflicts between risk assessment and the pressures of quarterly earnings reports is already reflected in the divergent positions of the insurance industry and energy sector regarding global warming. But if the technocrats have been unable to bridge these fissures, the main reason is because the master logic strictly forbids it. Aside from the psychological factors that support inaction, we are paralyzed before the biospheric meltdown because acknowledging it calls into question the master logic itself. The solutions cannot be found within the given paradigm of growth and accumulation. The hard numbers, some of which I’ll review shortly, show that “green capitalism” and techno-fixes are rosy delusions.


Saturday, September 15, 2012

Delta squat (Thessaloniki/Greece) eviction






letter from the imprisoned comrades before the trial takes part. The trial finished today. 9 comrades released with accusations and 1 probably will be deported from Greece... please send us translations in your languages or links with actions of solidarity.

We all live in an economic politic system, tightly closed and illiberal, which defends with every way the interests of the bosses, every kind, of overhead.

On the other side of the scale, there are the oppressed, all who face daily the problem of survival. The biggest part of the society, a few hundred million, are on the limits of poverty, receives daily attack from the small class of the bosses, with their protectors of their wealth, their command applicators, the state and the authority. Especially the last years, with the new economic crisis invented by the bosses, which is nothing but an obvious restructuring and re-accumulation of wealth for their benefit, and an attempt of total control of every aspect of society, more and more people find themselves in a desperate situation and they decide to take their lives in their hands.

So they decide to create unmediated social structures, away from the coercive logic of capitalism and the relationships which defined by money.

As people who belong in anarchist and antiauthoritarian movement, we are against in every form of ownership and trade, economic relations. We support places and groups who act in self-organization, solidarity, antiierarchia and anticommercial. Such ventures are occupations, locals and social centers.

Delta squat is one of them, one open, social and political space with antiauthoritarian characteristics. Inside the squat operating openly , self-managed workshops (photography, stained glass, silk screening), groups of self-education, library, open gym, translation team, self-organized prinding, free dance lessons and playground for children, open political meetings and discussions, video projections, social meals and self-organized, anticommercial  concerts. These events gather money, available for support radical struggles and other needs of the movement.

Delta squat, like many other political places, are part of a wide antiauthoritarian - anarchist movement, which operates competitive and hostile against the sociopolitical system and the fight for individual and social liberation and for this reason receives the non stop attack of state and power. Especially the last years we are witness of an orgy of repression against groups and places, not only in Greece but in the entire world.

The abandoned buildings, which belongs to the state or privately owned, in this period that society becomes poor, stand defiantly, when all around us there are so many people who lack the basic need of housing. We, as anarchists, we stand in solidarity with the efforts of people to squat places and their development in areas of life.

As our presence disturbs them, their goal is our extinction. From our side we will deny the accusations of the authorities and laugh with the machinations  created against us.

A typical example is that the cops tried to charge us our permanent residence to Delta squat while we were declared permanent addresses of our homes.

Finally, while we consider not important to speak about the matter of body control, despite the denial and violent ablation of fingerprints, we would not ask from any authority to care about this issue. We just want to show that this is their democracy and they will ​​find us against them forever.