Mayday magazine was launched to improve and liven up political debate amongst those seeking ways forward in the complex world we now live in. The problems of capitalism are huge and myriad, whilst the trauma of Marxism emerging from the domination of orthodox Communist parties has meant that the working class is without mechanisms of self reproduction and independent political development.

Towards this end Mayday engages politically with the world as it is, rather than impose plans from above. We seek to encourage and spread existing struggles and attempts at progressive political renewal.

The Oakland Rebellions
The Unfinished Acts Crew

After its debut at the San Francisco and New York City anarchist bookfairs, we're happy to offer up the
final run, all cleaned up and freshly dropped on the internet.

Read it here:
http://issuu.com/unfinishedacts/docs/unfinished_acts

Low res for slower connections here:
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/06/15/18601725.php

Comment on the indybay site if you decide to print and distro it!

In conversation,
unfinished acts crew

From the introduction:

Unfinished Acts was written collectively by a group of anarchists who were
and still are actively present in the rebellion following Oscar Grant’s
execution -- a collective recounting and analysis of events
surrounding the shooting of an unarmed 22-year-old Black man in Oakland.

Oscar Grant III was executed by Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police
officers during the first hours of 2009 on the platform of the Fruitvale
station. The following pages include a few short histories of
significant social movements to help contextualize the rebellions. This
history acts as intermissions for a documentary dramatization (but
factually correct!) of some of the events that unfolded in the streets
during the first month of 2009.

We have reconstructed the narrative and
dialogue from collective stories, personal experiences and videos of the
rebellions posted online. We conclude with our own analysis and lessons.

Film: Visteon Workers Fight for a Better Deal

The UK education charity and its alternative news channel WORLDbytes has released a filmed
report covering the Visteon protests in Enfield. The report draws out the situation workers faced
upon being made redundant and what prompted them to take matters into their own hands and
occupy the car part factory.

Interviews conducted directly after the workers left the occupation capture the mood at the
time: a great uncertainty about what the future holds yet hope and defiance that ultimately led
Visteon bosses to meet their demands.

City from Below Issue of the Indypendent Reader

The new issue of Baltimore’s Indypendent Reader, which comes out of the recent “City from Below” gathering, has been released. Information about it below.

This special national issue of the Indypendent Reader comes out of a conference held in Baltimore this March called the City From Below, which was co-organized by the Indyreader, Participation Park (a political project centered around a community garden on a reclaimed vacant lot in East Baltimore), and Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse, a worker-owned and democratically managed collective project in Baltimore’s Mt. Vernon neighborhood. The conference came out of our recognition that all of our projects were in very concrete ways focusing their energies on what might be called a politics of urban infrastructure – working towards a media platform for Baltimore’s social movements, creating a public space and sustainable urban agricultural alternative, building a business oriented not towards profit but towards social justice, and the distribution of radical information – and in a way such that all of our individual projects reinforce each other through the larger horizontal networks of social movements we all exist within.

For us and our projects, this kind of mutually reinforcing dynamic is one of the most exciting things about this kind of city-centric activism and organizing – it’s not only that we’re working to make the cities we live in a better place, but in some sense, it’s the city itself that’s working towards this goal. Taken to its limit, it’s a vision of urban democracy where the city’s inhabitants themselves directly control the way the city works and how it grows – not in the sense that they get to elect a mayor or a councilperson once every few years, but that they actively participate in a thriving fabric of locally controlled projects and initiatives which build and manage the urban environment.

Issue #7 Submission Call
Journal of Aesthetics and Protest

Go Post-Money!!!

For the 7th issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, we are looking for articles and compendiums in the form of manifestos, alphabets, radical critiques, how-tos, guides or ideas with expository or theoretical or curatorial text about (but not limited to) the following subjects:

"Direct Actions, Demonstrations, Appeals and Events Against the G8 Summit in Italy"
Gipfelsoli

BLOCK G8 2009!

In recent weeks progress is being made in the mobilization against the G8 summit in Italy. Particularly the planned transfer of the G8 site to the earthquake region of L´Aquila and to Rome (1) have caused intense debates and great interest in the present state of preparations.

Issue 3, Summer 2009
Mayday Magazine

Launched for Mayday 2009

Contents; Police violence and its history, the origins of the police and their 2 faced nature, analysis of the Credit Crunch, the global economic meltdown and what it means, John Bowden on the nature of prison, prisoners, solidarity and class struggle behind bars. The editorial introduction covers different struggles and their possibilities, the state of the movement and the way forward. 44 pages inc. cover.

http://mayday-magazine.vpweb.co.uk/

THe Mayday book collection;

http://www.amazon.co.uk/shops/mayday_politics

Last Week of "House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence," May 5-7, 2009

The “House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence” informational exhibit on European squatted social centers finishes its final week of programming at ABC No Rio. Then it will be boxed up and moved to Queens for the summer. After this week we'll be working on the catalogue zine, which will be a PDF posted in June.

Academic Freedom Controversy at the University of California Santa Barbara
Leading Radical Scholar Accused of Anti-Semitism

Professor William Robinson, a world renowned Jewish scholar, is facing charges of Anti-Semitism at the University of California Santa Barbara. A list of his publication and other information about his work can be found at: http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/robinson/