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After a number of high profile crime reports in the Riverhead area recently, merchants on Main Street have mixed reactions.
Some business owners are battening down the hatches and amping up security systems; others feel concerns over a spike in crime are unwarranted.
Crimes reported around Riverhead in recent weeks include a string of armed robberies, including a hold-up at Barth's Drug Store on East Main Street; a couple held up at knifepoint after leaving the aquarium; a carjacking on Sound Avenue; and, most recently, armed gunmen who robbed CVS on Route 58. Another armed robbery was also reported on Doctors Path recently.
Barry Barth, owner of Barth's Drug Store, said he and employees were heartened to hear two men were charged with the robbery of his pharmacy.
"We feel relieved that they're off the street," Barth said. One individual, however, Barth said, has not yet been indicted.
Recalling the impact the experience had on his employees, Barth said, "It was extremely unnerving for the pharmacist and the technician that were here. It was very, very scary. We've been here since 1917 and never had anything like this has ever happened."
The robbers, Barth said, only asked for money. "They didn't ask for narcotics or controlled substances," he said. "And they took random stuff of the shelves. But you never know the mental state of the person carrying the gun. I've always told everyone here to give them whatever they want, so they get out ASAP."
After the crime, Barth said he "stepped the security system" for the business.
Barth also said the Suffolk County Community College Culinary Arts and Hospitality Center put cameras outside the perimeter of the building.
According to Drew Fawcett, associate dean for institutional advancement at Suffolk County Community College, "The college is mindful of maintaining a safe and secure environment across all of its locations. And as part of these security measures, surveillance cameras have been installed around the perimeter of the Suffolk County Community College Culinary Arts and Hospitality building." But, he added, "We haven't had any concerns voiced by our students in that location."
Speaking of the new security measures, Barth said, "It's a shame everyone has to spend this kind of money."
Despite the robbery at his store, Barth said he does not feel unsafe. "You need to pay attention," he said. "You never know. Those guys came in at 6 p.m. I can't close up at 4:30 in the afternoon and stay in business."
Steven Wirth, owner of Digger's on West Main Street, said he has had security in place. "We have done as much as we can do, including a security system and at least two or three employees at any given time," he said. "Other than that, there's nothing you can do. If someone decides to be a criminal, he's going to be a criminal."
Deeper, systemic problems exist, Wirth said; a growing population, he said, equals a spike across the board in crimes. In addition, he said, today's media allows for instant coverage of crimes worldwide.
And other problems exist: "Perception is reality," Wirth said. "Unfortunately for us, our founding fathers in this town decided 30 years ago that Section 8 housing and methadone clinics on Main Street were a good idea. And to put a jail in Riverside -- with a bridge so that people can walk into Riverhead, into the bodegas across the street. So the first thing people see is a handful of people that don't look nice -- and that's your first impression. It's unfortunate, becaue it's at the very mouth of our town."
Despite the recent crimes, Wirth said the winds of positive change continue in downtown Riverhead. "This is a great town with great people," he said. "More businesses are opening soon. We're opening a brewery. People are spending a lot of money."
Wirth credited Riverhead Town Supervisor Sean Walter and Police Chief David Hegermiller for doubling police patrols downtown and addressing the issue quickly.
Crime also flows in from Southampton Town, where a rash of incidents in Riverside and Flanders has residents crying out for more police protection.
"We need a border wall between Southampton Town and Riverhead," Wirth said.
Crime, Wirth said, "is always going to exist. But don't allow them to flaunt it in a place where people just want to go about their daily lives and bring their kids to school. Force them into the shadows -- get them out of sight. Cops have to be cops; we can't have politically correct cops. They have to be able to arrest the criminals and the judge has to give jail time."
On East Main Street, after a recent incident during which a couple was held up at knifepoint after a visit to the Long Island Aquarium & Exhibition Center, Johanna Zucaro, director of communications for the facility, said general manager Bryan DeLuca met with Hegermiller Thursday. "He shared with us that they've dramatically stepped up foot patrols and we, together, are actively exploring additional alternative options to improve public safety," Zucaro said.
Ray Pickersgill, owner of the Robert James Salon and also president of the Riverhead Business Improvement District's management association, said he has added extra lights around his store and will add more in the back. He and other BID members have asked for security cameras from the town for a few years, he said. "If the town won't agree, the stores will put them in the back and the front," he said.
Still, Pickersgill said he is not worried about crime as an issue. "I'm not concerned," he said. "I've been here eight years and I've never had a problem."
Vic Prusinowski, who owns Cody's BBQ & Grill on East Main Street, said those who are fearful of a crime epidemic are far off the mark.
"We do not have a crime wave in Riverhead," he said.
Prusinowski, who served on the town board for 16 years and is a business owner, said a number of recent incidents, including a "terrible hit-and-run accident," and the Barth's robbery, have been reported.
But the town supervisor responded promptly with enhanced foot patrols, he added.
Prusinowski said he would support surveillance cameras downtown, adding that costs have come down and technology is wireless. Cody's, he said, has a video system currently that police utilize and review.
Crime, he added, is actually down in Riverhead compared to years' past.
"The problem with my fellow citizens, not the general public, is that some people have to absorb misinformation -- and there's a group of people that love to overreact, and comment on blogs, blowing things out of proportion. It's unfair to paint with a wide brush."
Downtown Riverhead, Prusinowski said, is experiencing "a great turnaround," with new restaurants and stores coming, the Suffolk Theater opening, and progress being made on the old Woolworth building. "It's slowly coming back," he said. "There are a lot of good things going on."
And, he added, the Riverhead police are "very, very vigilant. We have a night business and the police department does an excellent job."
Crime is up nationwide, Prusinowski said, due to a flagging economy.
"It's safe to be downtown," he said. "Police are around all the time."
Hegermiller said it's "true," that crime is not up overall in recent years. The recent spike, he said, "is a little blip that we had. Statistically, it's down."
Residents, he said, may have become fearful. "They shouldn't be," he said. "I haven't seen the stats for the past year yet, but I'm hopeful. Obviously, you always have to be aware of your surroundings, but I don't think there's anything to worry about."


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Above the table is an antique stained glass light fixture from the L.E. Bragg, Sr. family home. The elder Braggs purchased this light fixture in their early years of marriage from Noble Antiques. It features a grape motif with individual pieces of colorful glass that curve and mimic the actual grape leaf.
The Brazilian cherry floors are accented by antique Persian rugs. The draperies in the eating area feature strawberries with coordinating ribbon fringe. They are left open to frame the beautiful view of the golf course and the valley below. The original oil painting above the server repeats the colors of the rug and draperies.
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subset: commoncrawl


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By Ed Stark
Is your character confounded by a metallic gizmo? Cant quite see how to operate that piece of siege weaponry? And what under the suns is that contraption?
If these exclamations sound familiar, or if your character is about to embark upon a campaign that blurs the line between fantasy and the future, our Spellbook has just the spell for you .
Understand Object
Level: Brd 1, Sor/Wiz 2
Components: S, M
Casting Time: 1 minute
Range: Touch
Targets: One touched object
Duration: Instantaneous
Saving Throw: None
Spell Resistance: No
Understand object determines the non-magical functions of an object or technological item. The caster must handle or touch the object throughout the casting time and spell duration to gain any knowledge. If the item has more than one function, the spell identifies its most general or most likely use. Casters can gather further information about the item only through additional uses of the spell. Understand object does not reveal magical functions (as identify would), only mechanical operations.
The spell is used most often to help casters understand the nature and use of an object from another technological level (such as a firearm found in a world where such weapons don't normally exist), or to gain some clues to extremely complex gadgets or puzzles.
If used in the latter manner, however, this spell can prove very, very dangerous. Using understand object to figure out how a trapped device operates can be disastrous, as the spell does not distinguish a harmful nonmagical trap from any other gadget! And, since the spell starts with the easiest or most general effect first (and traps are often much easier to trigger than non-trap functions of an item), understand object may just tell you how to kill yourself.
For example, a character might cast the spell on three interlocking rings found on what appears to be the locking mechanism of a box. The first use of the spell tells the caster that the interlocking rings are, indeed, a locking mechanism and they have to be turned in a certain way to cause a needle to spring out of the box (a trap, though the spell doesn't tell the caster that). On a second use of the spell, the caster learns that turning the interlocking rings also can cause the box to open. Since the interlocking rings have no other function, further uses of the spell reveal nothing. If opening the box causes a fire trap to go off in the opener's face, that is not revealed, since fire trap is a magical effect.
But when the spell is used in its most basic way, it can be a boon to adventurers who encounter technological items and strange objects that they have no way of understanding without help. New exotic weapons, high-tech gadgets, and the like are the province of understand object.


text:
The Shorter Reporter
I am glad that you stopped by to visit our little piece of the World Wide Web. We
have built this site with you in mind, and hope you find all you need to know about
Shorter, Alabama.
For our existing citizens, this site provides useful information about new developments,
meetings, and volunteer and membership opportunities. If you are a new resident,
potential business developer, or visitor, you will find information about our Town's
history, master planning efforts, town departments, services and obtain local maps.
Shorter sits close to everywhere, yet is far enough from everything to ensure peace
and tranquility from the hustle and bustle of more commercialized environments.
We are proud to boast about our excellent transportation access (interstate, highways,
rail, water) and abundance of affordable undisturbed land.
We are currently moving to develop a downtown in Shorter and invite you to claim
your part of it. Shorter is a new small Town with great potential for growth and
development. Each day, new jobs and homes are developed here. The only thing missing
is you. Stop by and find out why Shorter, Alabama is "A Town on the Move!"
Yours very truly,
Willie Mae Powell
Municipal government in the Town of Shorter is a mayor-council form. The Shorter
Town Council has five elected members serving four-year terms. Appointed committees
include the Shorter Planning Commission and Board of Adjustments and appointed positions
are the town clerk, the building official, police chief, fire chief, municipal judge,
court clerk, municipal prosecutor, and the town attorney.
Shorter, Alabama is located at exit 22 off of Interstate 85. Conveniently positioned
between major cities such as Atlanta to the North East and Montgomery to the South
The Town of Shorter is located in Macon County, and although the community has existed
for over a century, the Town was not officially incorporated until February 29,
1984. The Alabama Legislature created Macon County on 18 December 1832 from territory
acquired from the last cession of the Creek Indians on 24 March of the same year.
The county was named for Nathaniel Macon, a distinguished soldier and statesman
from North Carolina.
Macon County received its present dimensions in 1866. It is located in the east-central
portion of the state, and is bordered by Elmore, Tallapoosa, Lee, Russell, Bullock,
and Montgomery Counties. The county seat is located at Tuskegee, which is also the
site of Tuskegee Institute and Tuskegee University. Other towns in Macon County
include Tuskegee, Franklin, and Notasulga.


text:
Strategies To Help Parents Through the Preteen Years
Posted: September 17, 2012
There are many challenges when parenting a pre-early teen including dealing with their physical changes, mood swings, and their desire for independence. There's no one-size-fits-all remedy that will help parents through this challenging period, but there are a number of things that parents can do. Here are a few suggestions from Iowa State University to help parents develop positive relations with their youth and deal with problems when they arise.
* Notice good behavior. Make praise specific and frequent. Young people learn better from positive actions (encouragement and extra privileges) than from negative ones (punishment or losing privileges).
* Give a reward. Use special privileges and one-on-one time to reward good behavior.
* Plan time for family fun. Time spent doing fun things together helps build a reserve of good feelings that can help you get through hard times. Let your child help plan family events and outings.
* Practice reflective listening. When you are working together with your youth to solve a problem, stop to summarize what he or she has said so your youth knows you have really heard. Resist the temptation to criticize or lecture.
* Use driving time to talk. Most parents of pre- and early teens spend time driving the child to lessons, ball games or shopping. Children may be more willing to open up in this environment than when they are at home.
* Hold family meetings. Set a specific time each week with family members to set schedules, plan fun things to do together as a family, and deal with concerns. Start with compliments and end with a snack or game.
* Wait until you are calm to deal with a problem. Do not discipline your child when you are angry. Discussing a problem when either of you is upset only leads to fighting and additional negative feelings.
To learn more about developing positive relationships with your pre-early teen, register for the Strengthening Families Program: for Parents and Youth 10-14. Strengthening Families is a seven week program designed to reduce adolescent substance abuse and other problematic behaviors in youth ages 10 – 14 years. Five sessions will be held this fall in Scranton, Moscow and Carbondale. The Carbondale sessions will be held from 5:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. on Sundays starting on September 30 and on Thursdays beginning on October 4 at the Carbondale Area Elementary School.
The Scranton session will run on Thursdays starting October 4 from 5:30 p.m. -8:00 p.m. The Moscow sessions will be held on Tuesdays starting September 25 and on Wednesdays starting September 26 from 5:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. at the North Pocono Intermediate School. Youth and their caregivers should plan to attend one night each week for seven weeks. All sessions are free and include a free meal for the entire family, free child care for younger children and prizes for attendance. Youth and their parents/caregivers should plan to attend one night each week for seven weeks. For more information or to register for this fun, family oriented program, call Penn State Cooperative Extension at 963-6842 by September 20. Space is limited so registration will be taken on a first come, first serve basis.
Karen Thomas is a family and consumer sciences educator for Penn State Extension in Lackawanna County.


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EAST ST. LOUIS — City officials and International Association of Firefighters Union Local 23 reached an agreement Tuesday to prevent the 16 firefighters from being laid off.
"We have found a way to keep all 53 firefighters on through the end of the year. Second, if everything goes as planned, even beyond 2013 we plan to have no layoffs of firefighters in the foreseeable future. This could mean all of the way through 2016," Mayor Alvin Parks Jr. said.
"It is really commendable that all involved individuals have found creative ways to bring this solution about."
Union President Brandon Walls declined to discuss the terms of the agreement but said he was glad no one would be laid off. He also thanked the FAA and IAFF for the role they played.


text:
Got a question? Something on your mind? Talk to your community, directly.
by Lawrence Boys & Girls Club
by Luann Bianco
by duffy smiley
by Jfsah2haYa
by Windham Recreation
by Dineen Bartolo
by Glo Athletics Cheer Gym LLC
by Joseph Martelli
by Cathy Dunham
by Henry Stimpson
by Sarah Callahan
by Marisa Chiappini
by alice middlebrook
by J. G. Hayes
by Cardinal
by DJ Marshall
by Salem NH Farmers Mkt
by Keith Miller
by Brennan Ward
by Diane Steen
by David Costello
by Bruce Breton
by Henri Duboise
by Craig Dufton
Find your Patch
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Filed under: war-machine | Tags: anti-capitalism, blockade, capitalism, economy, general strike, oakland, oakland commune, the bay area, value circulation
From Bay of Rage:
By any reasonable measure, the November 2 general strike was a grand success. The day was certainly the most significant moment of the season of Occupy, and signaled the possibility of a new direction for the occupations, away from vague, self-reflexive democratism and toward open confrontation with the state and capital. At a local level, as a response to the first raid on the encampment, the strike showed Occupy Oakland capable of expanding while defending itself, organizing its own maintenance while at the same time directly attacking its enemy. This is what it means to refer to the encampment and its participants as the Oakland Commune, even if a true commune is only possible on the other side of insurrection.
Looking over the day's events it is clear that without the shutdown of the port this would not have been a general strike at all but rather a particularly powerful day of action. The tens of thousands of people who marched into the port surpassed all estimates. Neighbors, co-workers, relatives – one saw all kinds of people there who had never expressed any interest in such events, whose political activity had been limited to some angry mumbling at the television set and a yearly or biyearly trip to the voting booth. It was as if the entire population of the Bay Area had been transferred to some weird industrial purgatory, there to wander and wonder and encounter itself and its powers.
Now we have the chance to blockade the ports once again, on December 12, in conjunction with occupiers up and down the west coast. Already Los Angeles, San Diego, Portland, Tacoma, Seattle, Vancouver and even Anchorage have agreed to blockade their respective ports. These are exciting events, for sure. Now that many of the major encampments in the US have been cleared, we need an event like this to keep the sequence going through the winter months and provide a reference point for future manifestations. For reasons that will be explained shortly, we believe that actions like this – direct actions that focus on the circulation of capital, rather than its production – will play a major role in the inevitable uprisings and insurrections of the coming years, at least in the postindustrial countries. The confluence of this tactic with the ongoing attempts to directly expropriate abandoned buildings could transform the Occupy movement into something truly threatening to the present order. But in our view, many comrades continue thinking about these actions as essentially continuous with the class struggle of the twentieth century and the industrial age, never adequately remarking on how little the postindustrial Oakland General Strike of 2011 resembles the Oakland General Strike of 1946.
The placeless place of circulation
The shipping industry (and shipping in general) has long been one of the most important sectors for capital, and one of the privileged sites of class struggle. Capitalism essentially develops and spreads within the matrix of the great mercantile, colonialist and imperial experiments of post-medieval Europe, all of which are predicated upon sailors, ships and trade routes. But by the time that capitalism comes into view as a new social system in the 19th century the most important engine of accumulation is no longer trade itself, but the introduction of labor-saving technology into the production process. Superprofits achieved through mechanized production are funneled back into the development and purchase of new production machinery, not to mention the vast, infernal infrastructural projects this industrial system requires: mines and railways, highways and electricity plants, vast urban pours of wood, stone, concrete and metal as the metropolitan centers spread and absorb people expelled from the countryside. But by the 1970s, just as various futurologists and social forecasters were predicting a completely automated society of superabundance, the technologically-driven accumulation cycle was coming to an end. Labor-saving technology is double-edged for capital. Even though it temporarily allows for the extraction of enormous profits, the fact that capital treats laboring bodies as the foundation of its own wealth means that over the long term the expulsion of more and more people from the workplace eventually comes to undermine capital's own conditions of survival. Of course, one of the starkest horrors of capitalism is that capital's conditions of survival are also our own, no matter our hatred. Directly or indirectly, each of us is dependent on the wage and the market for our survival.
From the 1970s on, one of capital's responses to the reproduction crisis has been to shift its focus from the sites of production to the (non)sites of circulation. Once the introduction of labor-saving technology into the production of goods no longer generated substantial profits, firms focused on speeding up and more cheaply circulating both commodity capital (in the case of the shipping, wholesaling and retailing industries) and money capital (in the case of banking). Such restructuring is a big part of what is often termed "neoliberalism" or "globalization," modes of accumulation in which the shipping industry and globally-distributed supply chains assume a new primacy. The invention of the shipping container and container ship is analogous, in this way, to the reinvention of derivatives trading in the 1970s – a technical intervention which multiplies the volume of capital in circulation several times over.
This is why the general strike on Nov. 2 appeared as it did, not as the voluntary withdrawal of labor from large factories and the like (where so few of us work), but rather as masses of people who work in unorganized workplaces, who are unemployed or underemployed or precarious in one way or another, converging on the chokepoints of capital flow. Where workers in large workplaces –the ports, for instance– did withdraw their labor, this occurred after the fact of an intervention by an extrinsic proletariat. In such a situation, the flying picket, originally developed as a secondary instrument of solidarity, becomes the primary mechanism of the strike. If postindustrial capital focuses on the seaways and highways, the streets and the mall, focuses on accelerating and volatilizing its networked flows, then its antagonists will also need to be mobile and multiple. In November 2010, during the French general strike, we saw how a couple dozen flying pickets could effectively bring a city of millions to a halt. Such mobile blockades are the technique for an age and place in which production has been offshored, an age in which most of us work, if we work at all, in small and unorganized workplaces devoted to the transport, distribution, administration and sale of goods produced elsewhere.
Like the financial system which is its warped mirror, the present system for circulating commodities is incredibly brittle. Complex, computerized supply-chains based on just-in-time production models have reduced the need for warehouses and depots. This often means that workplaces and retailers have less than a day's reserves on hand, and rely on the constant arrival of new shipments. A few tactical interventions – at major ports, for instance – could bring an entire economy to its knees. This is obviously a problem for us as much as it is a problem for capital: the brittleness of the economy means that while it is easy for us to blockade the instruments of our own oppression, nowhere do we have access to the things that could replace it. There are few workplaces that we can take over and use to begin producing the things we need. We could take over the port and continue to import the things we need, but it's nearly impossible to imagine doing so without maintaining the violence of the economy at present.
Power to the vagabonds and therefore to no class
This brings us to a very important aspect of the present moment, already touched on above. The subject of the "strike" is no longer the working class as such, though workers are always involved. The strike no longer appears only as the voluntary withdrawal of labor from a workplace by those employed there, but as the blockade, suppression (or even sabotage or destruction) of that workplace by proletarians who are alien to it, and perhaps to wage-labor entirely. We need to jettison our ideas about the "proper" subjects of the strike or class struggle. Though it is always preferable and sometimes necessary to gain workers' support in order to shut down a particular workplace, it is not absolutely necessary, and we must admit that ideas about who has the right to strike or blockade a particular workplace are simply extensions of the law of property. If the historical general strikes involved the coordinated striking of large workplaces, around which "the masses," including students, women who did unwaged housework, the unemployed and lumpenproletarians of the informal sector eventually gathered to form a generalized offensive against capital, here the causality is precisely reversed. It has gone curiously unremarked that the encampments of the Occupy movement, while claiming themselves the essential manifestations of some vast hypermajority – the 99% – are formed in large part from the ranks of the homeless and the jobless, even if a more demographically diverse group fills them out during rallies and marches. That a group like this – with few ties to organized labor – could call for and successfully organize a General Strike should tell us something about how different the world of 2011 is from that of 1946.
We find it helpful here to distinguish between the working class and the proletariat. Though many of us are both members of the working class and proletarians, these terms do not necessarily mean the same thing. The working class is defined by work, by the fact that it works. It is defined by the wage, on the one hand, and its capacity to produce value on the other. But the proletariat is defined by propertylessness. In Rome, proletarius was the name for someone who owned no property save his own offspring and himself, and frequently sold both into slavery as a result. Proletarians are those who are "without reserves" and therefore dependent upon the wage and capital. They have "nothing to sell except their own skins." The important point to make here is that not all proletarians are working-class, since not all proletarians work for a wage. As the crisis of capitalism intensifies, such "wageless life" becomes more and more the norm. Of course, exploitation requires dispossession. These two terms name inextricable aspects of the conditions of life under the domination of capital, and even the proletarians who don't work depend upon those who do, in direct and indirect ways.
The point, for us, is that certain struggles tend to emphasize one or the other of these aspects. Struggles that emphasize the fact of exploitation – its unfairness, its brutality – and seek to ameliorate the terms and character of labor in capitalism, take the working-class as their subject. On the other hand, struggles that emphasize dispossession and the very fact of class, seeking to abolish the difference between those who are "without reserves" and everyone else, take as their subject the proletariat as such. Because of the restructuring of the economy and weakness of labor, present-day struggles have no choice but to become proletarian struggles, however much they dress themselves up in the language and weaponry of a defeated working class. This is why the Occupy movement, even as much as it mumbles vaguely about the weakest of redistributionary measures – taxing the banks, for instance – refuses to issue any demands. There are no demands to make. Worker's struggles these days tend to have few objects besides the preservation of jobs or the preservation of union contracts. They struggle to preserve the right to be exploited, the right to a wage, rather than for any expansion of pay and benefits. The power of the Occupy movement so far – despite the weakness of its discourse – is that it points in the direction of a proletarian struggle in which, instead of vainly petitioning the assorted rulers of the world, people begin to directly take the things they need to survive. Rather than an attempt to readjust the balance between the 99% and the 1%, such a struggle might be about people directly providing for themselves at a time when capital and the state can no longer provide for them.
Twilight of the unions
This brings us finally to the question of the unions, the ILWU in particular, its locals, and the rank-and-file port workers. Port workers in the US have an enormously radical history, participating in or instigating some of the most significant episodes in US labor history, from the Seattle General strike of 1919, to the battles on the San Francisco waterfront in 1934 and the sympathy strikes that spread up and down the coast. The ferocious actions by port workers in Longview, Washington – attempting to fight off the incursion of non-ILWU grain exporter EGT – recall this history in vivid detail. Wildcatting, blockading trains and emptying them of their cargo, fighting off the cops brought in to restore the orderly loading and unloading of cargo – the port workers in Longview remind us of the best of the labor movement, its unmediated conflict with capital. We expect to see more actions like this in this new era of austerity, unemployment and riot. Still, our excitement at the courage of Longview workers should not blind us to the place of this struggle in the current crisis of capitalism. We do not think that these actions point to some revitalization of radical unionism, but rather indicate a real crisis in the established forms of class struggle. They point to a moment in which even the most meager demands become impossible to win. These conditions of impossibility will have a radicalizing effect, but not in the way that many expect it to. They will bring us allies in the workers at Longview and elsewhere but not in the way many expect.
Though they employ the tactics of the historical workers' movement at its most radical, the content of the Longview struggle is quite different: they are not fighting for any expansions of pay or benefits, or attempting to unionize new workplaces, but merely to preserve their union's jurisdictional rights. It is a defensive struggle, in the same way that the Madison, Wisconsin capitol occupation was a defensive struggle – a fight undertaken to preserve the dubious legally-enshrined rights to collectively bargain. These are fights for the survival of unions as such, in an era in which unions have no real wind in their sails, at their best seeking to keep a floor below falling wages, at their worst collaborating with the bosses to quietly sell out workers. This is not to malign the actions of the workers themselves or their participation in such struggles – one can no more choose to participate in a fight for one's survival than one can choose to breathe, and sometimes such actions can become explosive trigger points that ignite a generalized antagonism. But we should be honest about the limits of these fights, and seek to push beyond them where possible. Too often, it seems as if we rely on a sentimental workerism, acting as if our alliance with port workers will restore to us some lost authenticity.
Let's remember that, in the present instance, the initiative is coming from outside the port and from outside the workers' movement as such, even though it involves workers and unions. For the most part, the initiative here has come from a motley band of people who work in non-unionized workplaces, or (for good reason) hate their unions, or work part-time or have no jobs at all. Alliances are important. We should be out there talking to truck drivers and crane operators and explaining the blockade, but that does not mean blindly following the recommendations of ILWU Local 10. For instance, we have been told time and again that, in order to blockade the port, we need to go to each and every berth, spreading out thousands of people into several groups over a distance of a few miles. This is because, under the system that ILWU has worked out with the employers' association, only a picket line at the gates to the port itself will allow the local arbitrator to rule conditions at the port unsafe, and therefore provide the workers with legal protection against unpermitted work action. In such a situation we are not really blockading the port. We are participating in a two-act play, a piece of legal theater, performed for the benefit of the arbitrator.
If this arbitration game is the only way we can avoid violent conflict with the port workers, then perhaps this is the way things have to be for the time being. But we find it more than depressing how little reflection there has been about this strategy, how little criticism of it, and how many people seem to reflexively accept the necessity of going through these motions. There are two reasons why this charade is problematic. For one, we must remember that the insertion of state-sanctioned forms of mediation and arbitration into the class struggle, the domestication of the class struggle by a vast legal apparatus, is the chief mechanism by which unions have been made into the helpmeet of capital, their monopoly over labor power an ideal partner for capital's monopoly over the means of production. Under such a system, trade unions not only make sure that the system produces a working-class with sufficient purchasing power (something that is less and less possible these days, except by way of credit) but also ensure that class antagonism finds only state-approved outlets, passing through the bureaucratic filter of the union and its legal apparatus, which says when, how, and why workers can act in their own benefit. This is what "arbitration" means.
Secondly, examined from a tactical position, putting us blockaders in small, stationary groups spread out over miles of roads leaves us in a very poor position to resist a police assault. As many have noted, it would be much easier to blockade the port by closing off the two main entrances to the port area– at Third and Adeline and Maritime and West Grand. Thousands of people at each of these intersections could completely shut down all traffic into the port, and these groups could be much more easily reinforced and provided with provisions (it's easier to get food, water, and reinforcements to these locations.) There is now substantial interest in extending the blockade past one shift, changing it from a temporary nuisance to something that might seriously affect the reproduction of capital in the Bay Area given the abovementioned reliance on just-in-time production. But doing so will likely bring a police attack. Therefore, in order to blockade the port with legal-theatrical means we sacrifice our ability – quite within reach – to blockade it materially. We allow ourselves to be deflected to a tactically-weak position on the plane of the symbolic.
The coming intensification of struggles both inside and outside the workplace will find no success in attempting to revitalize the moribund unions. Workers will need to participate in the same kinds of direct actions – occupations, blockades, sabotage – that have proven the highlights of the Occupy movement in the Bay Area. When tens of thousands of people marched to the port of Oakland on November 2nd in order to shut it down, by and large they did not do it to defend the jurisdiction of the ILWU, or to take a stand against union-busting (most people were, it appears, ignorant of these contexts). They did it because they hate the present-day economy, because they hate capitalism, and because the ports are one of the most obvious linkages in the web of misery in which we are all caught. Let's recognize this antagonism for what it is, and not dress it up in the costumes and ideologies of a bygone world.
-Society of Enemies
Filed under: war-machine | Tags: anti-capitalism, bay area, general assemblies, general strike, oakland commune, occupy, occupy everything, oscar grant plaza
From BayofRage:
In the early hours of Monday morning (11/14) the police conducted the second eviction of the Oakland Commune. Far less spectacular than the first, a few hundred campers and supporters picketed and protested inside police perimeters and under the ruthless lights of helicopters for hours. Numbers dwindled down to dozens by 9 a.m. The following day, as planned, a large rally was held at the downtown Oakland Public Library followed by a march back to Oscar Grant Plaza (OGP). Upon arriving at OGP no tents were raised, the kitchen was not re-established, and there was no library, no free store or medic tent. By the mayor's orders, the plaza was to be open to the public for 24 hours a day, but no camping would be tolerated and the plaza would be under police supervision for 3 full days thereafter. Next to the mud puddle that used to be our strong, police-free common space, we held our regular Monday night General Assembly under the eye of more than one hundred police, paddy wagons on hand. Despite how uninspired and crushed one could feel at this time, it was hard to forget, after all we've been through, that this is still Oakland.
On Tuesday, a contingent of Oaklanders marched from OGP to UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza to join the students' second attempt at an encampment on the evening of their campus-wide strike (called for the evening of their first attempted encampment of the plaza). As the march approached the University, rich with the history of 2009′s student occupations, they chanted "Here comes Oakland!". Occupy Cal's General Assembly was attended by thousands, and they set up camp and partied late into the night. Police presence was minimal compared to the first day of Occupy Cal. This day's activities overshadowed and largely disregarded the death of Christopher Travis, a UC Berkeley student who was shot and killed by the UCPD that same day (allegedly for having a gun on campus, though details are unclear).
Wednesday's GA drew out a rough blue print for actions to come. A proposal to establish a new camp at 19th and Telegraph[link], blocks away from OGP, passed among a crowd of at least 250. This was a particularly bold proposal because every detail of the event was disclosed publicly. It was a testament to the collective confidence and loss of fear that informs the people of OO.
At around 10:30pm it was brought to the attention of the new encampment that the sound truck (used during many marches and throughout the day of the General Strike) had been stopped by the police. This was clearly unwarranted harassment, but the pigs used the excuse of a local anti-sideshow law to impound the vehicle. Campers ran with excitement to 17th and MLK to try and stop them. After the drivers had left the truck, a cop got inside to drive it away, but people had it surrounded. It was only minutes after comrades responded that the police responded too – about 30 riot cops, running towards the comrades with their batons drawn. One of them, in an unmarked crown vic, drove into two people, leaving them without injury but in a fit of rage.
Some thoughts:
Occupy Oakland has received the warmest statements and actions of solidarity and inspiration from comrades in Chapel Hill, Seattle, Egypt, Mexico, St. Louis and many more. It is clear that Oakland has found a place in the hearts of rebels far and wide. But this is not enough. We must challenge ourselves to create our own media and to secure consistent communications among the rebels who carry each other. Meet these ends creatively and not under the illusion that we can subvert the mass media any more than we can subvert the banking industry, the misery of service work, or the police. May these lines of communication open as the veins and vessels in our own bodies did during the inception of Oscar Grant Plaza. Let's assess our thought processes and the practical application of our most complex theories and simplest desires. If your heart beats to see the world in communization, negated or in total ruins, you know that you will not find your revolution here. Your absent future, on the other hand, may be further realized at this time.
Like the impressive actions of those in black bloc during the Nov 2nd General Strike, or the spontaneous eruptions of spray painting, minor looting and window smashing of that evening, it is important that our demonstrations necessitate creative use of our bodies and minds. Saturday night, 500 or more people participated in tearing down the fence surrounding the lot on 19th and Telegraph. The collective realization that this barrier between Oaklanders and a vacant space could be destroyed spread like wild fire in a matter of seconds. Where we are economically and emotionally alienated from each other, we are also alienated from our own bodies, our desires, our individual and collective potentials. Many in Oakland have resolved to stop asking for their most basic needs to be met. Many more linger in the absence of artillery – friends.
If this movement really is doomed, we must push it to its limits, suspend ourselves in time and space for just now, and redecorate the insulting facade of this world with indications of its destruction. If not for today, than for the security of the network of rebels we must depend on tomorrow. #Occupy is the perfect example.
Keep in touch,
Filed under: war-machine | Tags: anarchists, anarchy, anti-capitalism, bay area, black bloc, broken windows, capitalism, general strike, oakland, oakland commune, port shut down, solidarity, vandalism
A letter of solidarity.
Filed under: war-machine | Tags: anti-capitalism, capitalism, crisis, crisis center, downtown oakland, general strike, oakland, occupation, Occupy oakland, occupy wall street
From Anti-Capital Projects:
Tonight we open the Crisis Center. In this abandoned building that once provided services to those in need, we open the Occupation Crisis Center. Capitalism cannot avoid crisis. Capitalism cannot resist crisis. But capitalism is not the crisis. We are the crisis. Capitalism is not hungry, homeless, jobless, excluded, exploited. We are. And across the globe, across the nation, across borders, across Oakland, we are moving to meet our immediate needs. We are reclaiming space that has been unused, used against us, left empty while we sleep outdoors, while we cook and organize and struggle outdoors. We open this building in this moment of crisis — in our moment — to continue our occupations, continue our struggles, to seize this crisis and make of it a new world in which everything belongs to everybody. We will use this space for organizing, for talking, for making plans. These are our needs. We will use this building to continue, to endure, and to grow. These are our needs. We will not be asking to have them met; we are here to meet them. To Occupy Oakland; to Occupy Wall Street; to our comrades in Greece and Oaxaca and Cairo: we know you are here with us. We are with you. We are you. You are all welcome here. Our true loves are everywhere, and we find each other in these spaces that we claim. We welcome you to the Crisis Center. We have much to do here, and we have already begun. For our friends and our loves: we are here. For the rest: we are coming.
Filed under: Milwaukee area, war-machine | Tags: anarchists, anti-capitalism, austerity, conference, crimethinc, intervention, look to wisconsin, madison, milwaukee, occupation, students, wisconsin
Some notes and reflections made by Crimethinc on the Look To Wisconsin Conference, which took place in Milwaukee last month (these are conclusions made by individuals from Crimethinc, and not some consensus made by the conference attendees):
On May 20-21, anarchists and fellow travelers gathered in Milwaukee for a small conference about the ongoing crisis of capitalism. In the final discussion, people from around the US compared notes on recent anti-austerity protests, focusing chiefly on the student movement in California and the recent protests in Wisconsin. We've summarized some of the conclusions here in hopes they can be useful in the next phase of anarchist organizing.
So far, anarchists have not been very successful in contributing to anti-austerity protests in the US. Starting in December 2008, anarchist participation in school occupations was instrumental in kick-starting a student movement, but by March 4, 2010 this movement was dominated by liberal and authoritarian organizing; it subsequently ran out of steam. More recently, anarchists participated in the occupation of the capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin in protest against anti-union legislation and occupied a university building in Milwaukee, without substantial impact on the course of events.
It's troubling that we've had such limited success in a context that should be conducive to our efforts. Eleven years ago, during the high point of the anti-globalization movement, anarchist participants were essentially the militant edge of an activist movement addressing issues that were distant from many people's day-to-day needs. Today, the livelihoods of millions like us are on the line; people should be much more likely to join in revolt now than they were a decade ago. If this isn't happening, it indicates that we're failing to organize effectively, or that the models we're offering aren't useful.
European anarchists have had more success, but they benefit from a richer and more continuous lineage of social movements. In the US, the birthplace of the generation gap, our task is not just to intensify ongoing struggles, but to generate new fighting formations—a much greater challenge. We seem to go through one generation of anarchists after another without any gains. Although our predecessors rightly caution us against measuring our efforts in purely quantitative terms, we can't hope to overthrow capitalism by our own isolated heroics, turning the world upside down one newspaper box at a time.
A small fire demands constant tending.
A bonfire can be let alone.
A conflagration spreads.
We have to figure out how to connect with everyone else who is suffering and angry. To that end, here are some observations and proposals derived from the conversations in Milwaukee.
—The anti-austerity protests in Wisconsin are not the last of their kind; on the contrary, they herald the arrival of a new era. It is paramount that we learn from our early failures to develop a more effective strategy for engaging in these conflicts.
—In Madison, anarchists largely focused on establishing infrastructure for the occupation. This is not the first time anarchists have contributed their organizational skills to an essentially liberal protest. At the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, about 100,000 people participated in demonstrations; this included thousands of anarchists, many of whom limited themselves to logistical roles. Afterwards, this was recognized as a tremendous missed opportunity—hence the efforts to take the lead in planning actions at the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Our task is not just to facilitate protests of whatever kind, but to ensure that they threaten the flows of capital—that they create a situation in which people abandon their roles in maintaining the current order. To this end, we have to seize the initiative to organize actions as well as infrastructure. Clashes with the state will be more controversial than free meals and childcare, but this controversy has to play out if we are ever to get anywhere.
—A wide range of sources concur that the occupation of the capitol building in Madison was undermined one tiny compromise at a time. First the police politely asked people not to be in one room—and they were being so nice about everything that no one could say no. Then they gently asked people to vacate another, and so on until the dumbfounded former occupiers found themselves out on the pavement. This underlines an important lesson: the first compromise might as well be the last one. Whenever we concede anything, we set a precedent that will be repeated again and again; we also embolden our enemies. We have to be absolutely uncompromising from the beginning to the end.
In popular struggles, anarchists can be the force that refuses to yield. We can also pass on our hard-won analyses to less experienced protesters—for example, emphasizing that however friendly individual police officers might be, they cannot be trusted as long as they are police. To do these things, however, we have to be in the thick of things, not looking on from the margins.
—A common complaint from the more combative participants in the Madison occupation was that leftist organizations had already gained the initiative and determined the character of the protest. Anarchists were afraid to act, taking the leftist control of the narrative as an indication that there was nothing they could do. Indeed, after the end of the occupation, liberal organizers channeled the remaining momentum into a recall campaign confined to the electoral sphere.
In fact, in circumstances like the capitol occupation, there's nothing to lose. The solutions promoted by authoritarian leftists and liberals don't point beyond the horizon of capitalism; even when they aren't utterly naïve, they're no better than the right-wing agenda, in that they serve to distract and neutralize those who desire real change. Where the field is split between left-wing and right-wing, we may as well disrupt this dichotomy by acting outside of it. Even if we fail, at least we show that something else is possible.
—One Wisconsin anarchist proposed that we should distinguish between two strategic terrains for action. Some events, such as the occupation of the capitol building in Madison, function as tremendous spectacles; the most we can hope to accomplish is to interrupt them, forcing a more challenging narrative into the public discourse. Other spaces that are under less pressure, like the occupation of the theater building in Milwaukee, offer an opportunity to develop new social connections and critiques.
In the latter, we can create new channels for discussion and decision-making that will serve us well in subsequent confrontations. We can measure our effectiveness by how well we accomplish this, not just by the material damage inflicted on targets or the numbers of people who show up to demonstrations.
In upheavals such as the one in Wisconsin, we can unmask authoritarian domination of resistance movements and debunk the idea that the democratic system can solve the problems created by capitalism.
—At no point during the buildup to the protests of March 4, 2010 or the occupations in Wisconsin did anarchists establish an autonomous, public organizing body to play a role such as the RNC Welcoming Committee played at the 2008 RNC or the PGRP played at the 2009 G20. This was a strategic error that enabled liberal and authoritarian organizers to monopolize the public discourse around the protests and determine their character and conditions in advance. In the Bay Area, the word on the street was that anarchists had established some sort of back-room deal with public organizers that the latter reneged on. This betrayal should come as no surprise: without the leverage afforded by public organizing of our own, we can always expect to be hoodwinked and betrayed by those who don't share our opposition to hierarchical power.
We need public, participatory calls and organizing structures, both to offer points of entry to everyone who might want to fight alongside us and to make it impossible for authoritarians to stifle revolt by arranging the battlefield to be unfavorable for it. Public organizing can complement other less public approaches; often, it's necessary to render them possible in the first place. Compare the 2008 RNC and 2009 G20 to March 4, 2010.
—As capitalism renders more and more people precarious or redundant, it will be harder and harder to fight from recognized positions of legitimacy within the system such as "workers" or "students." Last year's students fighting tuition hikes are this year's dropouts; last year's workers fighting job cuts are this year's unemployed. We have to legitimize fighting from outside, establishing a new narrative of struggle. Who is more entitled to occupy a school than those who cannot afford to attend it? Who is more entitled to occupy a workplace than those who have already lost their jobs?
If we can accomplish this, we will neutralize the allegations of being "outside agitators" that are always raised against those who revolt. Better, we will transform every austerity conflict into an opportunity to connect with everyone else that has been thrown away by capitalism. Our goal should not be to protect the privileges of those who retain their jobs and enrollment, but to channel outrage about everything that capitalism has taken from all of us.
—Anti-austerity protests may offer a new opportunity to resume the practice of convergence so important in the anti-globalization era. Anarchists could respond to upheavals like the one in Wisconsin by converging on these "hotspots" to force things to a head. But this would require local communities to be ready to host visitors—to have the necessary resources prepared in advance. These resources include food and housing, but also a relationship with the general public and leverage on the authorities, such as the Pittsburgh Organizing Group built up in the years leading up to the successful demonstrations against the 2009 G20.
—Between peaks of protest, we can attempt to connect with social circles that could be politicized. Punks entered the anti-globalization movement with a preexisting anticapitalist critique and antagonism towards authority, thanks to two decades of countercultural development. This enabled them to escalate the situation immediately, shifting the discourse from reform to revolution. The more people enter anti-austerity struggles thus equipped, the less time will be wasted relearning old lessons.
—In addition to exacerbating the contradictions inherent in the financial crisis, we should undertake to make life in upheavals more pleasurable and robust than workaday life. Those who participate in wildcat strikes and occupations should experience these as more exciting and fulfilling than their usual routines, to such an extent that it becomes possible to imagine life after capitalism. As many anarchists live in a permanent state of exclusion, making the best of it despite everything, we should be especially well-equipped to assist here.
In this regard, there is a real need for infrastructures that can provide for the practical needs of those who wrest themselves out of the functioning of the economy. But these infrastructures should not be simply ad hoc protest logistics; they must demonstrate the feasibility of radically different systems of production and distribution.
There is probably some new way of engaging, some "new intelligence" appropriate to this era that we haven't discovered yet; the formats we retain from the past may not serve us now. There is much experimenting to be done. Dear friends, may you succeed where others have failed.
Filed under: war-machine | Tags: anti-capitalism, capitalism, communism, composition, crisis, Greece, students, the university, theorie communiste
Amidst a sudden lack of happenings or information about them in Greece, in what seems like a defining moment of their struggle regarding the issue of revolutionary violence, here is an interesting article about the composition of the conflicts at play. (We do not necessarily agree with this position, but it is interesting):
"The riots1 (or the riot, spread out and fragmented in time and space) which broke out in Greece following the murder of the young Alexander on the evening of 6th December 2008, are productive of theory. They are practically – that is to say consciously – the self-understanding of this cycle of struggles in its current phase – they are a theoretical and chronological landmark. With all its limits, this movement is the first proletarian reaction (albeit non-global) to the crisis of restructured capital. In terms of its production of theory, this movement can be considered, more or less arbitrarily, according to six essential characteristics:
- The praxis and discourse of these riots make of the current crisis of capitalist reproduction a crisis of the future of this mode of production.
- The characterisation, in a topology of the reproduction of capitalist social relations, of the moment of oppression and coercion in the self-presupposition of capital.
- The question of whether the rioters had a "peripheral" character in relation to a "core" of the working class, that is to say the question of the unity of the class and of its recomposition.
- The overcoming of what was the contradictory dynamic of the anti-CPE movement in France, and this bears some relation to the second point.
- The overcoming in the struggle of the objectivity of the course of capital and the activities of the classes involved as choices, decisions, tactics, and strategies.
- The questioning of the theory of value and of the crisis of the capitalist mode of production in the light of an attack of capital outside of production and the spreading of practices of sabotage.
(some points have been gathered under one chapter)
1. The future
We can obviously refer to all the analyses of the permanent crisis of the educational system in Greece (and the recurrence of the struggles that take place there): its increasingly unbearable selectivity, "the intensification of student labour", the permanent lie about the opportunities it opens up, the fact that from being a "social elevator" it becomes a mere "reflection of injustices and of social cleavages". Studying becomes purely and simply the acceptance (without compensation) of all the relations of exploitation that give their form and content to the global education system. It is necessary to call all this to mind, and TPTG's text ]The permanent crisis in education: On some recent struggles in Greece does this very well. But this is not enough – we have to go further. If, in many countries, education happens to be a particularly unstable and restless sector of capitalist society, it is not only because of the "reforms" that the reproduction of capital has imposed on this sector, but because it is the reproduction of capital that has become problematic. It is by becoming problematic, that is to say by being in crisis as reproduction, that the self-presupposition of capital designates, at first, as the place for the crisis, sectors of society where its reproduction takes a specified form in relation to society itself. It affects primarily the "entrants", and constructs the social category of youth. This crisis of reproduction is concentrated in places specialising in reproduction, designating the precarious youth as its principal actor (the 600 Euros generation) of which the students remained the principal representatives throughout the movement. It is in this regard that the student movement was this general movement of riots.
Some Greek texts, like those of TPTG and Blaumachen, speak about university as a "fraction of capital" and consider the universities as work places – and places of exploitation. Consequently, the blockade of universities is understood as a hindrance to general reproduction, if not to production tout court, to the extent that the student is considered as the producer of a specific commodity- her labour-power. In such an approach, we should distinguish between what is said and what is implied, that is to say of what such an analysis – theoretically false – is the true symptom.
Unless they are private universities in which particular capitals requiring at least the average profit rate are invested, and in which the student is a consumer who buys the lesson as a commodity, universities are not fractions of capital (even in this case, universities would not be a productive sector). They are an essential function of the production / reproduction of labour-power, but regardless of their utility, to the extent that – via the state – it is money as revenue that functions here, and regardless of the necessity of the rationalisation of their performance (the less the student dawdles in his studies, the less it costs), they are not capitalist companies, as for any faux-frais of production. In studying, the student (we are not speaking here about the fact that "being a student" has become a position on the labour market for precarious jobs: there are "student" jobs, whether they are held by students or not) does not enter into a relation of purchase–sale of their labour-power and produces no commodity containing a surplus-value that her employer (the administration of the university) appropriates. The student must put a lot of herself into the production of her commodity – complex labour power – but she does not buy it from – nor sell it to – herself. As long as this commodity remains attached to his person, pure subjectivity, it does not enter any productive relation with capital. Even if we accepted the idea that the student manufactures a commodity, she would not be a productive worker (productive of capital), but at the most a petty independent producer bringing her commodity to market. We can here point out that this "left-wing idea" of the student as producer of a commodity is a recurring theme of the right-wing: each is the petty entrepreneur of their own person.
In the true self-understanding of the movement as anti-capitalist, what makes of it an anti-capitalist movement – the crisis of reproduction – produces a false self-understanding: the student is a productive worker, and the university is a capital. This "false" understanding is a true symptom of the situation which structures the "student" revolt. The movement did not construct itself as anti-repression, anti-government or anti-university-reform (and in this it breaks with the continuity of the student revolts in Greece). Indeed, in the school and university students' revolt, it is really the reproduction of capitalist society which is at stake, which is the object of the contradiction. However, as such, this revolt is stuck – despite all the shows of sympathy and solidarity from the "population" – in the institutional forms of this reproduction, as a "breach of contract", as the failure of a corrupted state under the close watch of the IMF and lying about its own functioning to the European Commission.
The capitalist mode of production itself has run out of future.
[What we have seen in Greece] is an original species of revolt, prefigured by earlier riots in Los Angeles, London and Paris, but arising from a new and more profound understanding that the future has been looted in advance. Indeed, what generation in modern history (apart from the sons of Europe in 1914) has ever been so comprehensively betrayed by the patriarchs? […] My "baby-boom" cohort bequeaths to its children a broken world economy, stupefying extremes of social inequality, brutal wars on the imperial frontiers, and an out of control planetary climate. (Mike Davis, The betrayed generation, interview given to a Greek magazine.)
If, in the Western capitalist area, the instances of sharper social conflicts are concentrated on the precarious youth (united in the riots in Greece, contrary to what happened in France in 2005 – 2006 between the banlieue riots and the anti-CPE struggle), it is because "youth" is a social construct. It is here that the link between the student movement and the riots lies, and in a totally immediate way, it is the labour contract which summarises this link. The crisis constructs and then attacks (in the same movement) the category of "entrants" depending on the modalities of their "entrance": educational training, precariousness (and those who are in a similar situation- the migrants). The main thing here is the labour contract which places this labour power in its relation to capitalist exploitation at the level of the changing needs of the market, the mobility of capital, etc. It is something that can be seen, in a more or less violent way, everywhere in Europe and in the USA. It is the crisis of reproduction as such that annihilates the future and constructs the youth as the subject of social protest. The future, in the capitalist mode of production, is the constantly renewed reproduction of the fundamental capitalist social relation between labour-power and means of production as the principal result of capitalist production itself. The crisis of financialised capital is not simply the setting, the canvas, the circumstance underlying the riots in Greece: it is the specific form of the capitalist mode of production running out of future, and by definition it immediately places the crisis at the level of reproduction.
The transformation of the student movement into a generalised movement of proletarian riots which took as their target the reproduction of capital as such in what would make this reproduction possible (we will see later that the limits of these riots lies here), that is to say the institutions, the state, the violence, the ideology, exchange, the commodity, has produced its actors from an already existing material. Since the Second World War, the development of capitalism in Greece has been chaotic, destroying previous social relations rather than constructing new ones that would involve and define the whole of society. A good example of this – the entry into the European Union – was, so far, the last step taking place. The Greek bourgeoisie has always shown a faintheartedness, placing it far behind the big capitalist powers (even since "independence"), and has looked more overseas than towards its own national territory. Greek capitalist industry, which first developed under the form of a couple of enclaves most often in the hands of foreign capital (as was the royal family), is now decrepit. Employment relies on the merchant navy, tourism and the construction sector that is linked to it, and administration. The revolt against a capitalism that never allowed it to live properly is intrinsic to Greek society.
The riots of December 2008 stand in the conjunction between this predatory capitalism whose organ is a state run by clientelist mafias, and the crystallisation, which this capitalism creates in the student movement, of a social defiance built from hatred and contempt. Because, in Greece, the student movement is a "social milieu" that largely goes beyond the situation of students and school children. In such a capitalism, the "margins" of the "600 Euros generation" can quickly come to represent the whole social functioning, especially when they are already organised, like in the Exarchia district in Athens, in a whole network of resistance and alternatives (social centres, printing-houses, cafés, associations, crafts, jumble sales, sewing workshops…), that is to say when they are massive and view capitalism and the state as one would a foreign army of occupation. The riots movement is not a student movement not only because the students and schoolchildren were immediately joined by a whole fraction of the precarious and immigrant population, and benefited from the sympathy and occasional participation of a part of the population, but also because the student movement was already not a "student" movement. The student situation is a social and political situation; that is to say a conflictual relation to the state, which is at the same time a future exploiter (the administration is almost the only job opportunity opened) but also a potential exploiter, which by turning someone down condemns him to a social no man's land. In this situation, produced by the very functioning of capitalism, the constraint and the exteriority of the capitalist social relation appear as a state, a point of departure, rather than as an activity (we can see here simultaneously the force and the limits of these riots). The production of one's class belonging and of the capitalist social relation as an exterior constraint, which is an activity of the class within the relation itself, appear here as a state of exteriority whose only social foundation is violence. It should be noted that the "exteriority" to which we refer is intrinsic to a class activity which includes for the class, against capital, its own putting into question: we are absolutely not speaking here of a militant exteriority, of interventionism or activism. Whatever the specific limits of the movement considered here, it would be completely wrong to apply the schemes of the critique of militantism and interventionism to it.
Logically the targets of these riots were the institutions where the reproduction of the mode of production acquires a separated form, separated from the society of which they are the political, economic as well as ideological institutions of reproduction, as well as the forms of circulation in which capital returns to itself. When the future is already looted and when practically and consciously a movement takes place at this level of reproduction, even if the latter remains understood and attacked as structures separated from production, there can be no demands, because there is no longer any alternative and not even the illusion, like in Italy at the same time, that one can exist. It is in this crisis of the reproduction of the social relations that, in the self-presupposition of capital, the moments of coercion and normality, of which the riots were not only the update but also practically the shaping, are fixed.
The police and the army are the last word in the self-presupposition of capital in the face of resistance to the provisions taken by the capitalist class in the spheres of work, social security (health, retirement…), and education. To be a precarious or migrant worker means, directly in the relation to work, that one must work whenever the boss needs it, must accept to work unpaid overtime and to be fired according to the vagaries of the moment. It also means being beaten up or attacked with acid for a single demand or even complaint. To be a precarious or migrant worker is already to live under a reign of terror, and for a "stable Greek" worker, the terror of work are the "incidents" whose multiplication corresponds to the intensification of exploitation. Absurdly, the wage and the reproduction of labour-power tend to become illegitimate for capital itself (cf "Revendiquer pour le salaire", Théorie Communiste 22)2. This is the crisis of reproduction, the running out of future. It is also for the proletariat, in the very objectivity of capital, the reproduction of its class belonging that becomes an exterior constraint in the very relation of exploitation that reproduces it as a class and links it inseparably, as a class, with capital. Everywhere in these riots a feeling is expressed that capital is in "breach of contract": "Will we earn enough to be able to have children?"
The riots in Greece show the end of the period that started, in the current cycle, with the strike wave in 1995 in France and the "anti-summit" gatherings of the end of the 90s, that is to say the end of radical democratism3 as the expression and fixation of the limits of class struggle. No other future is possible, because there is no longer a future: the alternative is dead.
Recall the anti-WTO demonstrations and the "Battle of Seattle" in 1999 which opened a new era of non-violent protest and grassroots activism4. The tremendous popularity of the World Social Forums, the millions-strong turnouts to protest Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the widespread support for the Kyoto Accord – all augured enormous hope that an "alter monde" might yet be born. Meanwhile, the war did not end, greenhouse gas emissions soared, and the social forum movement has languished. An entire cycle of protest came to an end just as the Wall Street boiler-room of globalized capitalism exploded, leaving in its wake both more radical problems and new opportunities for radicalism. The revolt in Athens ends the recent drought of anger. Its cadre seems to have little tolerance for hopeful slogans or optimistic solutions, thus distinguishing itself from the utopian demands of 1968 or the wishful spirit of 1999. This absence of demands for reform (and, thus, any conventional handle for managing the protests), of course, is what is most scandalous, not the Molotov cocktails or broken shop windows. It recalls not so much the student left of the 1960s as the intransigent revolts of underclass anarchism in Montmartre in the 1890s or Barcelona's Barrio Chino during the early 1930s.5
The lack of future lies not only in the disappearance of the promise of a better life, but also in the putting at stake of the possibility of being able to survive and to reproduce one's own body, as made of flesh and bones. And, wanted or not, proletarians are made of flesh and bones. This is not their fault: to be made of flesh and bones is a completely social constraint and a social condition, the proletarian is the first purely physical worker, a subjectivity without object (he has no objective or personal relation to any means of production or subsistence). When the proletariat is attacked in its physical constitution, it is its social definition which is at stake.
At the same time, the "slogans of hope" and "optimistic solutions" are still current in Italy. One can see in this dissonance a simple effect of the contrasting economic situations in Italy and Greece, where the degree of trust that investors have toward the state has just been downgraded. But tomorrow, Italy could be the scene of a wave of riots similar to Greece and Greece, the scene of a large movement pressing for reformist demands alongside the flowering of grass-roots collectives. We should keep in mind that class struggle is a global – but not homogeneous – process and that struggles do not take place on a chronological axis in which there would be "avant-garde movements" and "anachronisms". If the situation in which the proletariat acting as a class is in such a contradictory relation to capital that its struggle can be its own abolition, if this situation is the dynamic of this cycle of struggle, it stills develops itself in a chaotic manner. In some places, through wage demands that the capitalist mode of production neither can nor wants to fulfill, in others, through large self-organised grass-roots movements that propose alternatives, and in still others, through riots that produce one's class belonging as an exterior constraint and the relation of exploitation as a coercion pure and simple. Nobody is ahead of their time; nobody is backward, because nobody is independent.
All the same, in this chaos, all the terms are not identical and do not have the same relation to the dynamic of this cycle considered as a totality. The dynamic of this cycle is the swerve that some current practices create within what is the general limit of this cycle of struggles: to act as a class. Presently, the class activity of the proletariat is more and more torn in an internal way: as long as it remains the action of a class, it has capital as its sole horizon (because all liberation of work and affirmation of the proletariat as the dominant class have disappeared), simultaneously in its action against capital it is its own existence as a class that it faces and that it must treat as something to do away with. The majority of the current struggles have to live through this swerve, this internal split, and the riots in Greece did not escape it.
To act as a class entails a swerve towards oneself, to the extent that this action entails its own putting into question in relation to itself: the proletariat's negation of its existence as a class within its action as a class (and this is the swerve in the action as a class). In the riots in Greece, the proletariat does not demand anything and does not consider itself against capital as the basis for an alternative, it simply does not want to be what it is anymore.
At the same time, despite its larger scale, and the fact that it put into motion a large part of the working class, the Italian "Onda anomale" has to face – if only because of its simultaneity with the riots in Greece – its dead-ends, its lack of perspective. The riots in Greece mean that the Onda has no perspectives, does not point to the future of class struggle. Conversely, the very simultaneity of these struggles (Italian or Greek) give to these riots in Greece a meaning they would not have without this simultaneity, that is of pointing out, in the fact of acting as a class, the very nature of the current limits of class struggle within itself considered as a whole.
This entanglement, as swerve, of the elements of class struggle already has a meaning: that of the putting into question by the proletariat of its existence as a class in its struggle against capital. In Greece, the principal content of this putting into question was to show and to shape the reproduction of social relations as including coercion."
-Theorie Communiste
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: June 29, 2012
City sponsors Junior RBI Classic neighborhood litter control events
The City of Kansas City, Mo., will sponsor neighborhood litter control events at Cleveland Park, Satchel Paige Stadium and Clark-Ketterman Athletic Fields on Saturday, June 30 from 8 a.m. to noon. These events will support the Junior RBI Classic, a youth baseball tournament taking place during All-Star Week 2012, July 6-9.
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Polaris Pro X 2004 Workshop Repair Service Manual Snowmobile
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Download Complete factory workshop manual / repair manual / service manual for Polaris Pro X 2004 Snowmobile. This is what the dealerships use to fix your snowmobile (snow mobile). These manuals covers all the topics like: Engine, General Information, Drive train, Chasis, Lightning , Steering, Seats System, Clutch, Suspension, Locks, Brakes, Lubrication, Electrical, Fuel System, Battery and other topics. Contents include SPECIFICATIONS GENERAL MAINTENANCE FUEL DELIVERY ENGINES CLUTCHING FINAL DRIVE BRAKE SYSTEM STEERING FRONT SUSPENSION REAR SUSPENSION CHASSIS/HOOD ELECTRICAL WIRING DIAGRAMS FORMAT: pdf LANGUAGE: English COMPATIBLE: Win/Mac * INSTANT DOWNLOAD * NO SHIPPING COST * NO NEED TO WAIT FOR A CD-ROM
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Professor Hamish Spencer is a world renowned theoretical population geneticist best known for his work on genomic imprinting, frequency-dependent selection, and the selective maintenance of genetic variation. He uses molecular tools to understand evolutionary processes and enjoys strong collaborative links with scientists across the globe interested in the emerging field of evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo). Spencer is also a leading authority on the systematics of New Zealand's Molluscan fauna, and maintains an authoritative website that is used extensively by professionals and amateurs alike. Professor Spencer is an outstanding scientist with a remarkable depth and breadth of knowledge and understanding of the natural world. His recent work on the cousin marriage controversy published in PLos Biology is receiving intense interest worldwide.


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