Download or read book Organisation of the Organisationless written by Rodrigo Nunes and published by Mute. This book was released on 2014-03 with total page 54 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rejecting the dichotomy of centralism and horizontalism that has deeply marked millennial politics, Rodrigo Nunes' close analysis of network systems demonstrates how organising within contemporary social and political movements exists somewhere between - or beyond - the two. Rather than the party or chaos, the one or the multitude, he discovers a 'bestiary' of hybrid organisational forms and practices that render such disjunctives false. The resulting picture shows how social and technical networks can and do facilitate strategic action and fluid distributions of power at the same time. It is by developing the strategic potentials that are already immanent to networks, he argues, that contemporary solutions to the question of organisation can be developed. Part of the PML Books series. A collaboration between Mute and the Post-Media Lab. http: //metamute.org
Download or read book Organisation of the Organisationless written by and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 53 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Neither Vertical nor Horizontal written by Rodrigo Nunes and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A decade ago, a wave of mass mobilisations described as "horizontal" and "leaderless" swept the planet, holding the promise of real democracy and justice for the 99%. Many saw its subsequent ebb as proof of the need to go back to what was once called "the question of organisation". For something so often described as essential, however, political organisation remains a surprisingly under-theorised field. In this book, Rodrigo Nunes proposes to remedy that lack by starting again from scratch. Redefining the terms of the problem, he rejects the confusion between organisation and any of the forms it can take, such as the party, and argues that organisation must be understood as always supposing a diverse ecology of different initiatives and organisational forms. Drawing from a wide array of sources and traditions that include cybernetics, poststructuralism, network theory and Marxism, Nunes develops a grammar that eschews easy oppositions between "verticalism" and "horizontalism", centralisation and dispersion, and offers a fresh approach to enduring issues like spontaneity, leadership, democracy, strategy, populism, revolution, and the relationship between movements and parties.
Download or read book The People Are Not an Image written by Peter Snowdon and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major intervention in media studies theorizes the politics and aesthetics of internet video The wave of uprisings and revolutions that swept the Middle East and North Africa between 2010 and 2012 were most vividly transmitted throughout the world not by television or even social media, but in short videos produced by the participants themselves and circulated anonymously on the internet. In The People Are Not An Image, Snowdon explores this radical shift in revolutionary self-representation, showing that the political consequences of these videos cannot be located without reference to their aesthetic form. Looking at videos from Tunisia, Bahrain, Syria, Libya, and Egypt, Snowdon attends closely to the circumstances of both their production and circulation, drawing on a wide range of historical and theoretical material, to discover what they can tell us about the potential for revolution in our time and the possibilities of video as a genuinely decentralized and vernacular medium.
Download or read book Paisajes insurrectos written by Rossana Reguillo and published by NED Ediciones. This book was released on 2017-10-15 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ¿Es posible hablar de insurrecciones 2.0?, ¿de nuevas formas de acuerpamiento social?, ¿de nuevas formas de protesta y organización colectiva? ¿Qué desafíos plantea la ola de insurrecciones que han irrumpido en la escena del siglo XXI? Este libro busca repensar las preguntas que nos hacemos en torno a las culturas políticas de los jóvenes y su acción colectiva. También reflexiona sobre la idea de sujeto y sus formas de expresión. Un sujeto que busca deslindarse de los determinismos, que sale a campo abierto, en plena tempestad sin certezas. Un sujeto que se arriesga no para decretar, sino para comprender, para asir lo inasible “garantizando su estatuto de inasible”, como quería Levinas. La autora habla acerca, de, sobre y especialmente con quienes han construido una inmensa red de conversaciones colectivas, de acciones, de estéticas y de lenguajes. Estos movimientos sociales surgidos en la red y trasladados a la calle, han logrado interrumpir el monólogo de los poderes propietarios.
Download or read book Inventing the Future written by Nick Srnicek and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neoliberalism isn't working. Austerity is forcing millions into poverty and many more into precarious work, while the left remains trapped in stagnant political practices that offer no respite. Inventing the Future is a bold new manifesto for life after capitalism. Against the confused understanding of our high-tech world by both the right and the left, this book claims that the emancipatory and future-oriented possibilities of our society can be reclaimed. Instead of running from a complex future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams demand a postcapitalist economy capable of advancing standards, liberating humanity from work and developing technologies that expand our freedoms. This new edition includes a new chapter where they respond to their various critics.
Download or read book Politics of the Many written by Benjamin Halligan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-09-09 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Politics of the Many draws inspiration from Percy Bysshe Shelley's celebrated call to arms: 'Ye are many – they are few!' This idea of the Many, as a general form of emancipatory subjectivity that cannot be erased for the sake of the One, is the philosophical and political assumption shared by contributors to this book. They raise questions of collective agency, and its crisis in contemporary capitalism, via new engagements with Marxist philosophy, psychoanalysis, theories of social reproduction and value-form, and post-colonial critiques, and drawing on activist thought and strategies. This book interrogates both established and emergent formations of the Many (the people, classes, publics, crowds, masses, multitudes), tracing their genealogies, their recent failures and victories, and their potentials to change the world. The book proposes and explores an intense and provoking series of new or reinvented concepts, figures, and theoretical constellations, including dividuality, the centaur, unintentional vanguard, insomnia at work, always-on capitalism, multitude (from its 'voiding' to a '(non)emergence'), crowds, necropolitics, and the link between political subjectivity and value-form. The contributors to Politics of the Many are both acclaimed and emergent thinkers including Carina Brand, Rebecca Carson, Luhuna Carvalho, Lorenzo Chiesa, Jodi Dean, Dario Gentili, Benjamin Halligan, Marc James Léger, Paul Mazzocchi, Alexei Penzin, Stefano Pippa, Gerald Raunig, and Stevphen Shukaitis.
Download or read book Parties and Party Systems written by Giovanni Sartori and published by ECPR Press. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this rich and broad-ranging volume, Giovanni Sartori outlines what is now recognised to be the most comprehensive and authoritative approach to the classification of party systems. He also offers an extensive review of the concept and rationale of the political party, and develops a sharp critique of various spatial models of party competition. This is political science at its best – combining the intelligent use of theory with sophisticated analytic arguments, and grounding all of this on a substantial cross-national empirical base. Parties and Party Systems is one of the classics of postwar political science, and is now established as the foremost work in its field.
Download or read book Movements of Movements written by Jai Sen and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2018-02-01 with total page 835 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our world today is not only a world in crisis but also a world in profound movement, with increasing numbers of people joining or forming movements: local, national, transnational, and global. The dazzling diversity of ideas and experiences recorded in this collection captures something of the fluidity within campaigns for a more equitable planet. This book, taking internationalism seriously without tired dogmas, provides a bracing window into some of the central ideas to have emerged from within grassroots struggles from 2006 to 2010. The essays here cross borders to look at the politics of caste, class, gender, religion, and indigeneity, and move from the local to the global. Rethinking Our Dance, the second of two volumes, offers a wide range of essays from frontline activists in Afghanistan, Argentina, Brazil, Niger, and Taiwan, as well as from Europe and North America that address the question, “What do we need to do in order to bring about justice and peace?” The Movements of Movements aims to make the bewildering range of contemporary movements more meaningful to the observer and also to be a space where global movements speak to each other. This book will be useful to all who work for egalitarian social change—be they in universities, parties, trade unions, social movements, or religious organisations. Contributors include Kolya Abramsky, Ezequiel Adamovsky, Ousseina Alidou, Samir Amin, Chris Carlsson, John Brown Childs, Lee Cormie, Anila Daulatzai, Massimo De Angelis, The Free Association, David Graeber, Josephine Ho, John Holloway, François Houtart, Jeffrey Juris, Michael Löwy, Tomás Mac Sheoin, Matt Meyer, Muto Ichiyo, Rodrigo Nunes, Michal Osterweil, Shailja Patel, Geoffrey Pleyers, Stephanie Ross, and Nicola Yeates.
Download or read book Boycotts Past and Present written by David Feldman and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-12-29 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book historians and social scientists examine boycotts from the eighteenth century to the present day. Employed in struggles against British rule in the American colonies, against racial discrimination in the United States during the Civil Rights movement, and Apartheid in South Africa, today it is Israel that is the focus of a campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). Boycotts have featured in campaigns undertaken by labour, consumer and nationalist movements. Jews were the focus of some boycotts instigated by nationalist movements in Central and Eastern Europe and Jewish businesses were targeted by the National Socialist regime in Germany. In this collection, contributors explore the history of past boycott movements and examine the different narratives put forward by proponents and opponents of the current BDS movement directed against Israel: one which places the movement within a history of struggles for ‘human rights’; the other which regards BDS as the latest manifestation of an antisemitic tradition.
Download or read book A Political Psychology Approach to Militancy and Prefigurative Activism written by André Luis Leite de Figueirêdo Sales and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-03-06 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book frames a series of protests occurred in Brazil from 2013 to 2016 as exemplary cases of global trends in contentious politics to analyze the tension between two forms of collective action: the militant (militante) and the prefigurative activist (ativista). Building on sociology, political science, and psychology, it explores the relationship between protestors' activities and conceptions of political participation with their subjectivity and agency. The protest cycle triggered by the June 2013 events in Brazil gave strength and popularity to repertoires and strategies of collective action uncommon and innovative. Those praxes defied political parties' conventions, highlighted the limitations of militant unionist tradition, and brought prefigurative activism to the Brazilian left-wing agenda. In this book, Andre Luis Leite de Figueirêdo Sales combines theoretical tools and traditions from South and North America to build an interdisciplinary approach to Political Psychology and answer the question: what psycho-political differences lie behind the disparate forms of political action adopted by militantes (militants) and ativistas (prefigurative activists) in Brazil? Inspired by books of short stories, the chapters discuss different aspects of the distinction between militancy and prefigurative activism. On them, the author deals with problems such as: how are the ongoing changes in Brazilian protest culture connected with the rising popularity of autonomist movements across the globe? What differences does it make rooting protest strategies in principles like resistance or refusal? How does the culture informing militants and prefigurative activists' conduct affect their political goals and horizons? How does militant and prefigurative activist culture relate to militants and prefigurative activists' forms of political consciousness? A Political Psychology Approach to Militancy and Prefigurative Activism: The Case of Brazil will be a valuable tool for social movement researchers from different disciplines interested in understanding how can subjectivity be, at the same time, a determiner of activities performed in collective action, and determined by these same transformative deeds.
Download or read book Technotopia written by Clemens Apprich and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-10-05 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many technologies and practices that define the Internet today date back to the 1990s – such as user-generated content, participatory platforms and social media. Indeed, many early ideas about the future of the Internet have been implemented, albeit without fulfilling the envisioned political utopias. By tracing back the technotopian vision, Clemens Apprich develops a media genealogical perspecive that helps us to better understand how digital networks have transformed over the last 30 years and therefore to think beyond the current state of our socio-technical reality. This highly original book informs our understanding of new forms of media and social practices, such that have become part of our everyday culture. Apprich revisits a critical time when the Internet was not yet an everyday reality, but when its potential was already understood and fiercely debated. The historical context of net cultures provides the basis from which the author critically engages with current debates about the weal and woe of the Internet and challenges today’s predominant network model.
Download or read book Fighting Global Neo Extractivism written by Jasper Finkeldey and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-08-02 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fighting Global Neo-Extractivism: Fossil-Free Social Movements in South Africa analyzes social struggles over damaging new fossil fuel projects in the Global South with a focus on South Africa, Africa’s biggest fossil fuel emitter. Fossil fuel extraction in South Africa has reached a new accelerated phase in which the fossil fuel frontier is moving beyond historical ‘sacrifice zones’ into non-traditional spaces, such as conservation parks and middle-class neighbourhoods, and provoking fervent opposition from grassroots activists. This book examines campaigns such as Frack Free South Africa and Save our iMfolozi Wilderness, viewing them as struggles against neo-extractivism driven by the state and industry. Through a series of detailed case studies, it highlights the shaping of mobilisation patterns by prior land use practices and the capacity to mobilize different social groups across race and class. Developing the notion of the fossil fuel frontier as the material and political boundary that activists in South Africa and elsewhere in the world render visible, this volume provides a theoretical framework to understanding global mobilization patterns. This timely and impassioned book will appeal to students and researchers interested in a range of subjects, including environmentalism, social movements, political ecology, and development studies.
Download or read book Democracy Here and Now written by Pablo Ouziel and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Spain, on May 15, 2011, a movement against austerity measures began. In a time when representative democracies were under threat, 15M came to life as a virtuous and democratic response to the slide into far-right populism and authoritarianism. More than a social movement, 15M became a mode of being with transformative, democratizing potential. In Democracy Here and Now, Pablo Ouziel offers a grounded analysis of 15M. At the time of the movement and during the ensuing encampments, Ouziel travelled extensively, speaking to participants, and keeping an ongoing record of his conversations. Presenting an original participatory mode of research, the book reveals six types of intersubjective, "joining hands" relationships that 15M has brought into being and works to carry on in creative ways. The book shows how the movement’s way of being and temporality persists in Spain following the square occupations, while 15M citizens continue to learn and move forward in less perceptible ways. Democracy Here and Now sheds light on a deeply relational, intersectional, and eco-social mode of democracy, and shows how 15M’s ongoing democratization practices are exemplary of similar grassroots movements around the world, broadening our understandings of what it means to be democratic in the here and now.
Download or read book Common and Counter Hegemonic Politics written by Kioupkiolis Alexandros Kioupkiolis and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-22 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alexandros Kioupkiolis re-conceptualises the common in tandem with the political. By engaging with key thinkers of community and the commons, including Nancy, Ostrom, Hardt and Negri, he harnesses the political thrust of a radical democratic politics of solidarity, equality and collective self-organisation. He calls into play poststructuralist conceptions of agonism and hegemony, put forward by thinkers such as Mouffe and Laclau, to remedy the failure of existing theories of the commons to address power relations and division.
Download or read book Improper Names written by Marco Deseriis and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Improper Names offers a genealogy and theory of the “improper name,” which author Marco Deseriis defines as the adoption of the same pseudonym by organized collectives, affinity groups, and individual authors. Although such names are often invented to pursue a specific social or political agenda, they are soon appropriated for different and sometimes diverging purposes. This book examines the tension arising from struggles for control of a pseudonym’s symbolic power. Deseriis provides five fascinating and widely varying case studies. Ned Ludd was the legendary and eponymous leader of the English Luddites, textile workers who threatened the destruction of industrial machinery and then advanced a variety of economic and political demands. Alan Smithee—an alias coined by Hollywood film directors in 1969 in order to disown films that were recut by producers—became a contested signature and was therefore no longer effective to signal prevarication to Hollywood insiders. Monty Cantsin was an “open pop star” created by U.S. and Canadian artists in the late 1970s to critique bourgeois notions of authorship, but its communal character was compromised by excessive identification with individual users of the name. The Italian media activists calling themselves Luther Blissett, aware of the Cantsin experience, implemented measures to prevent individuals from assuming the alias, which was used to author media pranks, sell apocryphal manuscripts to publishers, fabricate artists and artworks, and author best-selling novels. The longest chapter here is devoted to the contemporary “hacktivist” group known as Anonymous, which protests censorship and restricted access to information and information technologies. After delving into a rich philosophical debate on community among those who have nothing in common, the book concludes with a reflection on how the politics of improper names affects present-day anticapitalist social movements such as Occupy and 15-M.
Download or read book T he Commons written by Vangelis Papadimitropoulos and published by University of Westminster Press. This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the potential creation of a broader collaborative economy through commons-based peer production (P2P) and the emergent role of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The book seeks to critically engage in the political discussion of commons-based peer production, which can be classified into three basic arguments: the liberal, the reformist and the anti-capitalist. This book categorises the liberal argument as being in favour of the coexistence of the commons with the market and the state. Reformists, on the other hand, advocate for the gradual adjustment of the state and of capitalism to the commons, while anti-capitalists situate the commons against capitalism and the state. By discussing these three viewpoints, the book contributes to contemporary debates concerning the future of commons-based peer production. Further, the author argues that for the commons to become a fully operational mode of peer production, it needs to reach critical mass arguing that the liberal argument underestimates the reformist insight that technology has the potential to decentralise production, thereby forcing capitalism to transition to post-capitalism. Surveying the three main strands of commons-based peer production, this book makes the case for a post-capitalist commons-orientated transition that moves beyond neoliberalism.
