:: Call for Papers, Presentations, and Interventions ::

The State of Things: Towards a Political Economy of Artifice and Artefacts
April 29th to May 1st, 2009
Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy, University of Leicester

Keynote speakers:
Tiziana Terranova, University of Naples L’orientale
Natalie Jeremijenko, New York University
Nick Dyer-Witheford, University of Western Ontario

In a more wistful moment, Marx asked what commodities would say if they could speak. Surely, if he listened long enough, they would have announced the various traumas of their exploitatative and violent birthing to him. Eventually, one imagines, they would have described the nature of the various forms of labour necessary for their production as the apparitionally elementary components of the capitalist mode of production. So would the commodity’s autobiography be the same now, one wonders.

Today we live in a much different state of things: the artifice of artefacts is evident all around us. A parliament of communication technologies, from RFIDS to bluetooth devices, constantly exchange information and network all around and through us. Wireless networks of communication, control, and cooperation proliferate in mysterious ways, all speaking an infra-language of organization, inscribing new techniques of governance. But these networks have become all the more indiscernible by the open secret of their appearance.

"Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint"
Silvia Federici

by Michael Neocosmos, 5 June 2008
http://www.hydrarchy.net

Food Riots Show the Need to Overcome Capitalism

During the past weeks a series of revolts, protests and strikes against the rising food and energy prices have broken out in many countries of the capitalist periphery. At recent meetings the guard dogs of the capitalist institutions - IMF, World Bank and G 8 - have warned of a gigantic destabilisation and conflicts in almost 40 countries around the world.

"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.

* This is a brief outline of the libertarian footprint in the history of Venezuela, prepared by members of the Collective Editorship of El Libertario www.nodo50.org/ellibertario. We hope that this serves as a useful point of reference for those who are interested in the subject.

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

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.