Urgent Appeal From Classe

Request for solidarity and support for the Legal Committee of the CLASSE

Sisters, brothers,

We write you during a dark time for democratic, human and associative rights in Quebec with the following appeal for your help and solidarity. As you have no doubt heard, the government recently enacted legislation that amounts to the single biggest attack on the right to organize and freedom of expression in North America since the McCarthy period and the biggest attack on civil and democratic rights since the enactment of the War Measures Act in 1970. Arguably, this recent law will unduly criminalize more law-abiding citizens than even McCarthy’s hearings and the War Measures Act ever could.

Among other draconian elements brought forward by this law, any gathering of 50 or more people must submit their plans to the police eight hours ahead of time and must agree to any changes to the gathering’s trajectory, starttime, etc. Any failure to comply with this stifling of freedom of assembly and association will be met with a fine of up to $5,000 for every participant, $35,000 for someone representing a ‘leadership’ position, or $125,000 if a union – labour or student – is deemed to be in charge.  The participation of any university staff (either support staff or professors) in any student demonstration (even one that follows the police’s trajectory and instructions) is equally punishable by these fines. Promoting the violation of any of these prohibitions is considered, legally, equivalent to having violated them and is equally punishable by these crippling fines.

Yes, this is Vancouver

On June 15 (Fri) the Museum of Vancouver is hosting a dialogue, Is This Vancouver? Reflections on the 2011 Hockey Riot Boards. As we remember, the boards drew crowds post-riot, and “citizens” etched their reactions towards the unrest into multiple slabs of plywood. The riot was an affective response to a year of media hype and build-up and it disturbed Vancouver’s carefully polished identity as a benevolent and beautiful city. Taking issue with a tarnished reputation, the apologizers (along with the media narratives) aimed to rectify the city’s image by casting the rioters outside of it and anthropomorphizing the city into a scorned lover.

Civil Society and Your Career

After a long hiatus the PLG of Vancouver reconvened one Monday evening in a teeny-tiny apartment over red wine and vodka sodas. Reason for our absence has had a lot to do with finishing the program at SLAIS and there are only so many times one can blog about how “we got really drunk and cried together about how there are no jobs.” The rarity of finding work (from public libraries to …well…anything) has presented itself more and more troublesome.

Putain, Putin, Putnam, Poutine

What’s the deal with Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital”?

Putnam’s main thesis is that there is striking evidence that the vibrancy of American civil society has notably declined over the past several decades (66) and that “there is reason to suspect that the democratic disarray may be linked to a broad and continuing erosion of civic engagement that began a quarter-century ago” (77).

Open Letter to the Anarchists of Occupy Oakland

http://appliednonexistence.org/?p=212

Launch of Species Branding by Danielle LaFrance

CUE Books is pleased to announce the launch of
Species Branding by Danielle LaFrance:

Saturday October 1st
7:00 – 9:00 pm
Pulp Fiction Books
2422 Main Street @ E. Broadway
Vancouver, BC

“Abjection, translation, insurrection: in LaFrance’s Species Branding these coordinates give new garb to some of poetry’s most enduring idealisms and abstractions: beauty, desire, and friendship. No frame is left uncatalogued. Every bastion of the bourgeoisie is stormed. Every wall – every gender – is scaled. In other words, ‘revolution ends here, man.’”

6 x 8 | Paper | 72 pp. | ISBN: 978-0-9810122-8-5 | $15

disclaimer: twist slowly and away from your face

After I almost lost my eye opening a bottle of German mineral water, the PLGers discussed Matteo Pasquinelli’s “Digital Neofeudalism” and “Immaterial Civil War.” Pasquinelli and Franco “Bifo” Berardi were the organizers behind Rekombinant, a listblog, that lasted between 2000 and 2009. The listblog was “a minimal blog running as a web interface of a collective mailing list” that evolved out of the “intersection of radical philosophy, digital culture and post-Seattle global movements focusing also on art avant-gardes and university activism.” It predominantly circulated through the Italian intellectual skools.

Pasquinelli’s work, much like Bifo’s, focuses on the networks of cognitive labour, adapting Hardt and Negri’s “there is no outside” (from Empire) into a digital context. Class divisions are no longer clear, because of the shift from material to immaterial production. This shift changes our relationship to time and space: everything is now, there is no future, and all is here…