Gathering Storms: A Team Colors Statement on the Upcoming 2008 Convention Protests
Conor Cash, Craig Hughes, Stevie Peace & Kevin Van Meter | Team Colors Collective

On the eve of this year’s Democratic National Convention in Denver, and mere days before the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, we have borne witness to a number of narratives unfolding in the political landscape. We see an election year play out before us; we see an astonishing upsurge of activism and participation, much of it connected to the campaign of Senator Obama; we see organizations and individuals planning a wide array of protests, mobilizations, and direct actions. Many of these intertwining strands will converge into massive storms of activity and interaction at the upcoming conventions. We at Team Colors sought to examine narratives such as these, and over the past several months, have collected articles, interviews, discussions, essays - any and all evidence we could dredge up, recording the ways and means of today’s movements. We uncovered a lot - some problematic, some confusing, some even deplorable - but thankfully, enough whirlwinds of promise and potential emerged before our eyes to lend credence to a feeling of change, of gathering storms.

Yet despite these discoveries – or rather, primarily because of them - we feel compelled to state that the storms that intrigue us the most will not show themselves at the convention protests. We don’t disallow the potential for new wrinkles and exciting surprises as the actions unfold - indeed, we’d welcome them - but we also can’t ignore the honest circumstances of where we are at: these protests, overwhelmingly, do not come out of substantial movements, and will not generate substantial movements.

This deficiency necessarily clouds over any ‘successes’ and ‘gains’ from the protests, a gloomy yet heartening prospect; after all, we may see ourselves better without the dazzling sun that inadvertently blinds us.

And we know those sunlit moments all too well: skill-sharing, long-term institutions, creating spaces, increasing morale among radicals, tapping into larger networks, diversity of tactics frameworks, solidarity between causes, better planning, better communication - the list of ‘betters’ is seemingly endless when it comes to these protests. As a collective, we have heard even more pronounced claims than these - that this will be “one of the largest actions at a convention in history,” that this won’t be “the same old ritualized protest,” that “we’ll be a stronger movement afterwards” by “bringing the struggles home.” Behind these rejuvenating words lies a vacuum, an inability to understand or discuss movements; specifically, where (if anywhere) are the convention protests situated in the flow of movements, and how do all the ‘betters’ contribute to movements, if at all. The notion of “bringing the struggles home” as a key to movement, while comforting, is especially dangerous when unquestioned; for we may define ‘home’ as a very small ‘radical community’ marked by regression and fear, rather than a larger field of growth, openness and genuine encounter - the basic ingredients of movements.

The Legalization of Squatting
Punkerslut

Until all governments are abolished in favor of a just, mutual, and cooperative relationship between all civilizations, until that day, all states, governments, and councils should legalize squatting; that is, they should allow people to sleep in unused buildings, even if privately owned. The rights to freedom of speech, press, religion, and association are powerful safeguards for the Democratic spirit of any people. These concessions made by the government in giving their people more liberty are never done peaceably The people must always demand, they must always fight, they must always struggle, and inevitably, to create a true social change, they must bring themselves to a violent standoff with their enemies. Martin Luther King changed America by marching in the streets and letting himself be subject to the torture of the police. When those images of vicious police brutality appeared on the television sets of every American, it instantly became a social issue that people had to face. King's campaign was to change the way the this country looked at race. He followed along the guidelines of Gandhi, who also subjected himself to the brutalities of a tyrannical and undemocratic government. Again, the revolution in social progress was made possible by making people look at the brutality of the status quo.

"The Worst and Best of Times"
Grace Lee Boggs, The Michigan Citizen

My first column with this title appeared in the December 31-January 6, 2007 issue of the Citizen. We were living in the worst of times, I wrote, because of the Iraq war, the planetary emergency, the growing gulf between rich and poor, corporate takeover of the media, and a president who was acting like a king and losing all connection with reality.

But it was also the best of times, I said, because Americans were beginning to create new forms of community-based economic institutions that are less vulnerable to globalization, like coops and ESOPs (employee stock ownership enterprises). Local and state governments were assuming the responsibility, abdicated by the federal government, to reduce global warming. The urban gardening movement was growing by leaps and bounds.

ephemera 8.2. ‘Alternatively’ released

ephemera 8.2., ‘Alternatively.’ is now online: http://www.ephemeraweb.org. In its focus on alternatives, the latest ephemera issue addresses one of the main tasks that critique has (to) set for itself: to counter political paralysis of any kind, construed by the right and left, by pointing at the false logic behind it, indeed, by means of the formulation and practice of alternative logics.

There are many ways of organizing social life other than on the basis of and dictated by the kind of free market- or neoliberalism that reigns in large parts of the world. In other words, this issue, its editorial specifically and its contributions in their own way attempt to delegitimize the notorious post-communist ‘There Is No Alternative’-logic of thinking (TINA). At the same time, this issue also warns against the defeatist way of thinking represented by the casting of commodification as a totalizing force that leaves nothing beyond its grasp. While this threat is real, to portray consumer capitalism thus is a process of abstraction that is not only politically paralyzing, but can even be construed as conformist, like any belief in ‘this is how things are’, like TINA.

To suggest that things can be otherwise, the shift of perspective might be an important part of alteration (the act of producing alternatives), including shifting our perspective on how to appreciate alternatives. That is, rather than attributing appreciation based on the potential for realizability, the editorial suggests that alternatives might prove politically enabling precisely because they seem unrealizable. Alternatives understood in this way do not function as different solutions but as different problems; not as alternative answers to the same questions but as alternative questions opening up for new answers. Whereas any alternative solution keeps the problem which it solves intact, an alternative problem breaks with and delegitimizes the existing solution. It divides, twists and thoroughly subverts established Truths as well as breaking the ground for new ways of thinking. As such, the moment of alteration transforms the horizon of the given by way of giving us new questions to ask.

50 Ways To Leave Your Love,
Or, let's find a completely new art criticism
Brian Holmes

For most of the twentieth century, art was judged with respect to the previously existing state of the medium. What mattered was the kind of rupture it made, the unexpected formal or semiotic elements that it brought into play, the way it displaced the conventions of the genre or the tradition. The prize at the end of the evaluative process was a different sense of what art could be, a new realm of possibility for the aesthetic. Let's take it as axiomatic that all that has changed, definitively.

The backdrop against which art stands out now is a particular state of society. What an installation, a performance, a concept or a mediated representation can do with its formal, affective and semiotic means is to mark out a possible or effective shift with respect to the laws, the customs, the measures, the mores, the technical and organizational devices that define how we must behave and how we can relate to each other at a given time and in a given place. What you look for in art is a different way to live, a fresh chance at coexistence. Anything less is just the seduction of novelty - the hedonism of insignificance.

If that's the case (if the axiom really holds), then a number of fascinating questions arise - for the artist, of course, but also for the critic. Where the critic is concerned, one good question is this: How do you address yourself to artists or publics or potential peers across the dividing lines that separate entire societies? How do you evaluate what counts as a positive or at least a promising change in the existing balance of a foreign culture?

I'm sure you immediately see how difficult this is. Already in the past, it was hard enough to say that a particular aesthetic tradition and a particular state of the medium defined the leading edge, the point at which a rupture became interesting. Yet still there were times when all the painters seemed to flock to Rome, then later to Paris, then later to New York City; and so through the sheer aggregation of techniques and styles, the fiction of a leading edge could be maintained, at least by some. But in the face of a simultaneous splintering and decline of what used to be called "the West," and a correlative rise of some of "the Rest," who could seriously say that certain local, national or regional laws, customs, measures, mores and technical or organizational devices are really the most interesting ones to transgress or even break into pieces, in hopes of a better way of being? Or to be even cruder about it, and closer to the actual state of things: Who can seriously claim that the Euro-American forms of society are the benchmark against which change must be measured - even if those societies are still the most opulent and most developed and most heavily armed with all the nastiest of technological weapons?

Among all the buzz surrounding the upcoming convention protests in the United States has been a palpable silence surrounding the question we will inevitably face: after the delegates are blockaded from the conventions, after the tear gas, the arrests, the media spectacle, trauma and recovery, what will happen next? I am writing this essay with the hope that we begin trying to answer this question now and through discussion over the coming months, rather than wait for the day after expecting that momentum will carry us forward.

"Resistance from the Other South Africa"
Neha Nimmagudda

"Leaders are meant to lead and to be led [by those who elected them]" — Lindela Figlan, Abahlali baseMjondolo movement

Fourteen years since the transition to democracy, leadership in South Africa is in a state of flux—and South Africans know a thing or two about leaders. For every Mandela, after all, there is an Mbeki. In his seven years of presidency, Mbeki has mistaken denialism for leadership and appeasement for diplomacy. The liberation victors in the ANC have tied up the ruling party in its own historical mythologizing, determined to hold its grasp on the state. Now, for every Mbeki, there is the possibility of a Zuma.

"Unfinished Business, The Cultural Commodity and its Labour Process"
Stefano Harney

We argue that the problems of managing in the creative industries cannot be fully understood in the current and most common overviews of the industries. We review the two ways the industries are understood as social trends before suggesting that they are both insufficiently broad and encompassing. We then use the history of cultural studies, its origins and engagements, to extend the horizon of the creative industries and also to focus on where the work takes place in these industries. This in turn leads us to post-workerist thought and its conception of the cultural commodity, a conception with modify with cultural studies. We then return within this wider frame to what we regard as the central problematic for management with the rise of the creative industries: the location of the labour process that produces the cultural commodity and its value.

"On the Pogroms in South Africa"
Richard Pithouse

The industrial and mining towns on the Eastern outskirts of Johannesburg are unlovely places. They’re set on flat windswept plains amidst the dumps of sterile sand left over from old mines. In winter the wind bites, the sky is a very pale blue and it seems to be all coal braziers, starved dogs, faded strip malls, gun shops and rusting factories and mine headgear. All that seems new are the police cars and, round the corner from the Harry Gwala shack settlement, a double story facebrick strip club.

Against Social Exclusion and Neoliberalism at Japanese G8 Summit

ACTION AGAINST SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND CALL FOR FAIR LABOR
JOIN US IN THE MOVEMENT AGAINST G8

The G8 Summit will be held at Toyako in Hokkaido from July 7-9. We
believe that this is an arbitrary meeting of the governments which lead
neoliberalism. The world's eight most powerful economies have imposed
neoliberalism onto other nations, while dominating the global financial
market with the World Trade Organization and the Free Trade Agreement.
The developing nations are forced to accept the free trade in exchange
of ODA. Privatizations, labor market flexibility, and deregulations are
introduced not only in the developing nations but also in the
industrialized counterparts. Inequality and poverty are accelerating.
Social welfare is reduced. Socially disadvantaged people are excluded
and their fundamental rights are violated. Also in Japan, working poor
are also victims of neoliberalism since the early 2000s under the Prime
Minister Junichiro Koizumi's government.