the high degree of social danger inherent in the choice of implements and the method of execution / expropriations and searches proletarian fires and corruption of the public good kidnappings and sequestering of persons beatings wounds / sufficient evidence of guilt can be inferred from the laws as formulated in the index books / carried out in houses and adjacent rooms in the middle of the night / 1) the copious documentation seized or acquired above all those parts that celebrate and program the violence and the armed struggle / the final goal being the general overthrow of the existing system / they will arise and assert themselves subversive acts by their nature promote and incite the violent overthrow of the system / to direct the violent overthrow of the systems that constitute the state / 2) from the Red Autonomous magazines that reveal counter-information and from many other newspapers brochures flyers and from writings that contain subversive content / and it is imposed because of the exceptional gravity of the threat to the state and its institutions
Nanni Balestrini | Blackout (Translation by Peter Valente)
Chris Nealon | The Shore
Then came fire / It wasn’t yet a new world, or the end of the old one / But water, money, feeling overspilled their banks / There was finally something real to be afraid of / There was finally no reason to fear / Even animals approached us as they hadn’t in ten thousand years / Buildings were either shelter or they weren’t / Music got quiet / And poetry — / Poetry began to ask the question it had hidden in the forest Poetry returned to lists, enumeration, inventory / It chose sides / This was not the same as prophecy / Look around you now and ask yourself / Which of these — / The innovators, profit-makers, the ones behind high walls, / The ones who are planning for the great catastrophes— / Or the ones with no ability to plan, / Who live from hour to hour, year to year, / In whom terror waits to be uncurdled, / Who live in the great wide world— / Which of these will be the victorious ones? / Nobody knows. ⇒⇒⇒
Endnotes #5
We Unhappy Few | Error | Friends of the Classless Society; Contours of the World Commune | Jasper Bernes; Revolutionary Motives | Jacques Camatte, etc.; The Passion of Communism | Mårten Björk; Life Against Nature | ME O’Brien | To Abolish the Family | Jeanne Neton; Notes from the Chemo Room ⇒⇒⇒
Heiner Müller | Waiting on the Opposite Stage
“Unlike Lenin, Hitler came to power in a free election, which makes Auschwitz also the result of free elections.” ⇒⇒⇒
Audre Lorde| dream of europe
DREAM OF EUROPE elucidates Lorde’s methodology as a poet, mentor, and activist during the last decade of her life. This volume compiles a series of seminars, interviews, and conversations held by the author and collaborators across Berlin, Western Europe, and The Caribbean between 1984-1992. While Lorde stood at the intersection of various historical and literary movements in The United States—the uprising of black social life after the Harlem Renaissance, poetry of the AIDS epidemic, and the unfolding of the Civil Rights Movement—this selection of texts reveals Lorde as a catalyst for the first movement of Black Germans in West Berlin. Lorde’s intermittent residence in Berlin lasted for nearly ten years, a period when she inspired many important local and global initiatives. The legacy of this “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” has been well preserved by her colleagues in Germany. ⇒⇒⇒
Brendan Joyce | Unemployment Insurance
When I shave my head I will / claim each hair as a dependent / on my taxes. When I am denied / by unemployment I will send / the bag of rotting potatoes / in my pantry to the state house./ When they ask for work search / activities I will instead say fuck the police, / because Sean Bonney told me to. / When my boss blocks my / unemployment / claim I will simply block their driveway / until I decompose, / elegantly, in / their driveway apron. I will send / a bouquet of past due bills / to whoever gave them 5 stars on Yelp. / I will enter in every week until / I expire the birth dates of the dead / — the coordinates to where / we are throttling– in the weekly / claims field. The conspiracy / of a dying empire is only to / kill faster. I am entirely overwhelmed / by the collapse of the political / economy in my body so I am / sorry for the late reply. ⇒⇒⇒
Jean-Luc Godard talks language, information, virus and semantics on Instagram live
Though not altogether new to the technology, legendary French director Jean-Luc Godard surprised the world on Tuesday when he appeared on Instagram Live, talking to Lionel Baier, head of the cinema department at ECAL University of Art and Design in Lausanne, the Swiss city where the director resides. Baier and Godard, together with frequent collaborator Fabrice Aragno, were all actually in the same room at Godard’s house, with Baier and Aragno wearing face masks, which the director remarked made them look “like figures in a James Ensor painting”. ⇒⇒⇒
Mustapha Khayati | Captive Words (Preface to a Situationist Dictionary)
Our dictionary will be a sort of code book enabling one to decipher the news and rend the ideological veils that cover reality. We will give possible translations that will enable people to grasp the different aspects of the society of the spectacle, and show how the slightest signs and indications contribute to maintaining it. In a sense it will be a bilingual dictionary, since each word has an “ideological” meaning for power and a real meaning that we think corresponds to real life in the present historical phase. Thus we will be able at each step to determine the various positions of words in the social war. If the problem of ideology is how to descend from the heaven of ideas to the real world, our dictionary will be a contribution to the elaboration of the new revolutionary theory where the problem is how to effect the transition from language to life. The real appropriation of the words that work cannot be realized outside the appropriation of work itself. The inauguration of free creative activity will at the same time be the inauguration of true communication, freed at last. The transparency of human relations will replace the poverty of words under the old regime of opacity. Words will not cease to work until people do. ⇒⇒⇒
Tiqqun | The Cybernetic Hypothesis
The Cybernetic Hypothesis presents a genealogy of our “technical” present that doesn’t point out the political and ethical dilemmas embedded in it as if they were puzzles to be solved, but rather unmasks an enemy force to be engaged and defeated. Cybernetics in this context is the teknê of threat reduction, which unfortunately has required the reduction of a disturbing humanity to packets of manageable information. Not so easily done. Not smooth. A matter of civil war, in fact. According to the authors, cybernetics is the latest master fable, welcomed at a certain crisis juncture in late capitalism. And now the interesting question is: Has the guest in the house become the master of the house? ⇒⇒⇒
Dziga Vertov Group | British Sounds (with Anna Mendelssohn)
The bourgeoisie have destroyed all human relationships except those of naked self-interest and the callousness of cash on the line on the never-never.
Masses of labourers herded into factories and offices are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army, they are put under the command of a hierarchy of sergeants and officers. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class and the bourgeois state, they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overseer, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer and his representatives.
The more openly this despotism claims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful, and the more embittering it is. ⇒⇒⇒
Sam Rivers | Black Africa!
Drums, Percussion – Sidney Smart / Producer – Aldo Sinesio / Tenor Saxophone, Soprano Saxophone, Flute, Piano, Voice – Sam Rivers / Tuba, Euphonium – Joe Daley / Written-By – Sam Rivers / Recorded live at Villalago (Umbria Jazz) July 24, 1976. ⇒⇒⇒
Free May Day Book #9: Cherish & Abolish
It’s a 6 x 8.5-inch, 256-page paperback featuring Ruth Wilson Gilmore, bell hooks, Dev Hynes, Gilles Bertin, Kuwasi Balagoon, Toni Morrison, Zoé Samudzi, Jean Weir, Willem Van Spronsen, Michael Kimble, EZLN, Black Panther Party, Jean Genet, George Jackson, Kanno Sugako, Marilyn Buck, Stevie Wilson, and a new translation of Katerina Gogou’s 1978 book Three Clicks Left. ⇒⇒⇒
Carla Lonzi | Let’s Spit on Hegel
Woman is oppressed as a woman, at all social levels; not as a class, but as a sex. This gap in Marxist theory is no accident, nor would it be filled by stretching the concept of class to make room for women as a new class. Why has it been overlooked that women play a part in the productive process through their work in reproducing labour-power within the family? And that their exploitation in the home is an essential function of the accumulation of capital? By trusting all hopes of a revolutionary future to the working class, Marxism has ignored women, both as oppressed people and as bearers of the future. Its revolutionary theory was developed within the framework of a patriarchal culture. ⇒⇒⇒
Michael Heinrich | Karl Marx und die Geburt der modernen Gesellschaft. Band I: 1818-1841
This new Marx biography comprises three volumes. […] It will address Marx’s youth in Trier and his studies in Bonn and Berlin more extensively than a foregoing publications did as well as elaborate on his work as an editor of «Rheinische Zeitung» and as a publisher of the «Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher» (German-French Annals). It is during this period when biographical crises and distortions in his intellectual development already emerged, which caused him to abandon initiated projects and to reconceptualise his critical enterprises.
There are «Theoretical ruptures» – and not just between «young» and «old» Marx. Developments are by far too complex to be squeezed into a two- or three-stage model, and the popular dichotomy of «continuity» or «rupture» for characterising the development of his works proves itself to be far too schematic. Furthermore, the development towards «The Capital» as his «magnum opus» is not imperative. Marx does not start with a critique of politics and end with a critique of economy. Although he never got to write his planned work about the state and although he concentrated on his critique of economy for the last 30 years of his life, the critique of politics is always present and evolves substantially, and so does his notion of communism. ⇒⇒⇒
M. NourbeSe Philip | ZONG!
ZONG! #12
it
is said
has been decided
was justified
appeared impossible
is not necessary
is another ground
need not be proved
it
was a throwing overboard
it
is a particular circumstance
need not be proved
is another ground
is not necessary
appeared impossible
was justified
has been decided
is said
it
was
Mhonum Ajike Odunmbaku Maizah Oku Lizige
ZONG! #14
the truth was
the ship sailed
the rains came
the loss arose
the truth is
the ship sailed
the rains came
the loss arose
the negroes is
the truth was
Nkrumah Ato Nobanzi Oduneye Opa Fagbulu
ZONG! #15
defend the dead
weight of circumstance
ground
to usual &
etc
where the ratio of just
in less than
is necessary
to murder
the subject in property
the save in underwriter
where etc tunes justice
and the ratio of murder
is
the usual in occurred
[…]
Akilah Falope Ouma Weke Jubade
BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)) 