1. The Invite
What: Roving Assembly
When: Tuesday -- 04.03.12
Where: Central Park, meet up at the steps of Metropolitan Museum
When: 6:00 pm
Who: Everyone (dress warm)
During the winter, we participated in a molecular seminar entitled
'Welcome to the New Paradigm; The Crisis of Everything Everywhere.' A
few hundred people attended over the course of 9 days, some staying
for a session, others for a day, and yet others for the entire
duration. Together we organized, disorganized, ate, spoke, disagreed,
speculated, walked, mapped, manifested, felt, listened, played, and
even mic checked Diego Rivera.
'Welcome to the New Paradigm' was an allusion to a banner we had seen
in Washington Square Park at the conclusion of a day of actions
globally on October 15. That same night, we discovered that Spivak
addressed, along with a lot of friends, the thought of a potential
General Strike. At the time, the occupations at Liberty and across the
globe were so powerful; it was still unclear whether the idea of a
General Strike was a nostalgic regression or potential mode of
amplification and generalization of refusal. After all, the
occupations were themselves a new paradigm of a strike, not just
striking against a work place or work but taking everything,
everywhere.
As the coordinated and violent attacks by police started in late Fall
on the encampments, there was an even greater urgency placed upon
everyone to consider how this refusal of austerity, of faux solutions,
of legalized robbery, of new forms of enclosure, of an increasing
surveillance / security state, of ever greater ecological ruin, of
continued structural racism, could be expressed, embodied, uttered,
collectively; and how could this be done in a forceful manner, without
further empowering or placing all of our collective attention into a
reactionary game with and on the police force.
In January, we returned to the question of the General Strike and we
asked one another: What it could mean the General Strike today given
the global dimension of financial capital, given the shifting
qualities of the workplace and work-time (namely its increased
itinerancy, placelessness, instability, meaninglessness), given the
ever more invasive forms of extracting productivity and value from the
basic reproduction of our life and social relations?
The winter provided to hundreds of people a season to formally and
informally meet, consider, propose plans and create possibilities for
the General Strike that has been called on May 1st.
In examining the shifted terrain of work, productivity, and thus
strike, the critical questions which emerge are:
How can this complex arrangement:
- of placed and non-placed labor (i.e., labor that occurs in a
recognizable workplace as well as Starbucks or the neighborhood
boutique cafe or the street or in the home)
- of recognized and unrecognized productivity (i.e., a waged job,
albeit badly paid and using Google, Facebook, YouTube)
- of remunerated and unremunerated life (i.e., the time which is paid
for a specific work and the time spent between any specific work just
making oneself available, preparing, learning new skills which could
be reapplied back into work)
- of visible and invisible, of legal and not legalized, of union and
non-unionized workers
redefine the strategies for a General Strike?
Where could be the sites of blockage? Where could be the site of
flow stoppage? Where could be the sites of non-cooperation? And where
could be the sites of cooperation, of communization, of convergence?
What qualities could a strike take to address the multiplicity of
sites of production? And if our consumption and everyday participation
is part of our productivity, if our everyday social reproduction is
the grease of the economic assemblage that increasingly surveys and
oppresses the multitudes and our shared habitats, how could May 1st
become the turning point to intensify a process not only of withdrawal
or a symbolic act but a call for the infinite strike, the closest we
can get of doing nothing, how actively we envision and realize our
lives without capitalism.
We are interested in continuing this discussion not only on
theoretical grounds but through proposals for specific actions online
and in the city. We would like to propose meeting at Central Park on
Tuesday afternoon for a walk and informal assembly.
The walking assembly will be unfacilitated by the Central Park
Exploratory Committee, an ungroup attempting to reassert the park as a
commons, and as potential site of convergence on the day of the
General Strike, resulting in a meshwork of refusal, food, music,
pleasure, sensuality, resistance, communization. The group is
interested in weaving together with others a vision and blindly
believes that such visions will resonate with the multitudes not only
on May Day but also for the days after.
Come join us.
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
