"On Indymedia and Climate Camp"
Shift Magazine

This is an editorial from the third issue of the UK-zine 'Shift'. Online at www.shiftmag.co.uk

For many of us a visit to Indymedia UK is a frustrating experience. Its open publishing newswire reveals an array of bizarre opinion posts, advertisements for activist meetings, petition requests and photo stories mixed in with the odd action or demonstration report. However, the number and diversity of articles on the newswire are more than an inconvenience. Most exasperating are the countless posts obsessed with the Israel-Palestine conflict, which are telling of some of the political viewpoints we are happy to associate with.

The Strategy of Concealment:
Towards an Anarchist Critique of Communication
Roger Farr

[An earlier version of this essay appeared in Fifth Estate #375 (Spring 2007)]

"Having, then, to take account of readers who are both attentive and diversely influential, one obviously cannot speak with complete freedom. Above all, one must take care not to give too much information to just anybody."

— Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle

Governance and the Undercommons
Stefano Harney

The Third Term
1. Governance is a third term, beyond sovereignty or
governmentality. Although the term governance may still mark a form
of government. It is longer only a political term. Governance is
also now a term of the economy, not in the sense that the economy is
also governed, as in corporate governance, but as economy itself.
Governance is a form of economic production itself.

http://hydrarchy.blogspot.com/

by Meena Kandasamy in Ultra Violet, 14 April 2008

ON MARCH 28, Lalpari Devi, a 45-year-old Dalit woman was accused of being a witch by caste-Hindu, feudal villagers in Bihar who mercilessly beat her up, paraded her through the streets, tied her to a palm tree, cut her hair and smeared her face with limestone paste. She was saved from certain death by the timely arrival of the police. Lalpari somehow managed to survive the ordeal of social censure and hysteric, mob-driven humiliation. Many of her sisters have not been that lucky.

A response to the Feminist Political Education Project

by Grace Kwinjeh, 17 April 2008

I was just sent a copy of this statement by the Feminist Political Education Project [pasted in below] and must admit to being more than a little bewildered and shocked by what is suggested in light of recent events in Zimbabwe, by sisters whom I know very well – who are part of the Feminist Political Education Project.

The assassinations of Salvador Allende and Amílcar Cabral in 1973 mark the end of the last
truly transformative sequence in world politics, the sequence of national liberation associated
with the victories of Mao Tse-tung, Mohandas Gandhi, and Fidel Castro. It may be that this
end is itself now coming to an end, through the clarification of what Mao might have called a
new ‘‘principal contradiction’’—the convergence, most obviously in Iraq and Haiti, of ever more

"We Have Won"
Copenhagen Free University

The Copenhagen Free University ceased its activities by the end of
2007 and in connection with the abolition of the institution we have
written the following statement:

WE HAVE WON!

In the spring of 2001 we demanded: All Power to the Copenhagen Free
University. We had just opened a free university in our home in the
Norrebro district of Copenhagen. This impossible demand was put
forward in the form of a manifesto intended to provoke and unsettle
the collective imaginary and open new potential paths of action. We
wanted to take power.

Governance and the Undercommons
Stefano Harney

The Third Term
1. Governance is a third term, beyond sovereignty or
governmentality. Although the term governance may still mark a form
of government. It is longer only a political term. Governance is
also now a term of the economy, not in the sense that the economy is
also governed, as in corporate governance, but as economy itself.
Governance is a form of economic production itself.

2. Sovereignty establishes the public and private. Governmentality
makes this establishment of the private productive, through the
production of the public. Governance today marks the emergence of
the public as directly productive. No longer is the public, in all
its micropolitics of subjectivity and macropolitics of population, an
instrument for creating a private that can then be exploited. Today
the public itself in all its anti-social glory, because the public is
the most anti-social moment of capitalist society, is also a direct
and dominant source of capitalist wealth. This is because the public
holds all of the social qualities of the general intellect up to the
light, making the general intellect obvious even in its disfiguration
in the figure of the public, and offering up this captured aspect of
the general intellect for exploitation.

Empire or Humanity?
What the Classroom Didn't Teach Me About the American Empire
By Howard Zinn

With an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with
military bases and corporate bullying in every part of the world, there
is hardly a question any more of the existence of an American Empire.
Indeed, the once fervent denials have turned into a boastful, unashamed
embrace of the idea.

However, the very idea that the United States was an empire did not
occur to me until after I finished my work as a bombardier with the
Eighth Air Force in the Second World War, and came home. Even as I began
to have second thoughts about the purity of the "Good War," even after
being horrified by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even after rethinking my own
bombing of towns in Europe, I still did not put all that together in the
context of an American "Empire."

Invaders from Marx:
On the Uses of Marxian Theory, and the Difficulties of a Contemporary Reading
By Michael Heinrich, Berlin

[The following text is the slightly reworked version of an article which appeared on 21 September 2005 in “Jungle World”, a leftist German weekly newspaper. In a previous issue, Karl Heinz Roth. one of the main German representatives of Operaismo, had argued that some important Marxian categories are not able to grasp contemporary capitalism. The text at hand answers this critique, stressing the difference between Marxian theory and traditional Marxism, emphasizing the “new reading of Marx”, which developed through the last decades. The German text can be found at the website of the author: www.oekonomiekritik.de]

In the past 120 years, Marx has been read and understood in widely varying ways. In the Social Democratic and Communist worker’s movement, Marx was viewed as the great Economist, who proved the exploitation of the workers, the unavoidable collapse of capitalism, and the inevitability of proletarian revolution. This sort of “Marxist political economy” was embedded in a Marxist worldview (Weltanschauung) which provided answers for all pre-existing historical, social, and philosophical questions.

This omniscient kind of “Marxism” was analytically without much use, but was eminently well-suited as a means of propaganda and as an instrument of authority against those who questioned the party line. Already in the 1920s and 1930s, a Left critique of such Marxism emerged, but was nonetheless choked off by Stalinism and Fascism and did not receive a hearing in the Cold War era. This situation began to change in the 1960s, as Marx was read anew during the rise of the student movement and protests against the Vietnam War. A New Left arose beyond the classical worker’s movement which saw itself positioned on two fronts: on the one hand against the global capitalist system, on the other hand against an authoritarian and dogmatically petrified Communist movement, which was viewed as a force propping up domination.