Gathering Storms: A Team Colors Statement on the Upcoming 2008 Convention Protests
Conor Cash, Craig Hughes, Stevie Peace & Kevin Van Meter | Team Colors Collective

On the eve of this year’s Democratic National Convention in Denver, and mere days before the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, we have borne witness to a number of narratives unfolding in the political landscape. We see an election year play out before us; we see an astonishing upsurge of activism and participation, much of it connected to the campaign of Senator Obama; we see organizations and individuals planning a wide array of protests, mobilizations, and direct actions. Many of these intertwining strands will converge into massive storms of activity and interaction at the upcoming conventions. We at Team Colors sought to examine narratives such as these, and over the past several months, have collected articles, interviews, discussions, essays - any and all evidence we could dredge up, recording the ways and means of today’s movements. We uncovered a lot - some problematic, some confusing, some even deplorable - but thankfully, enough whirlwinds of promise and potential emerged before our eyes to lend credence to a feeling of change, of gathering storms.

Yet despite these discoveries – or rather, primarily because of them - we feel compelled to state that the storms that intrigue us the most will not show themselves at the convention protests. We don’t disallow the potential for new wrinkles and exciting surprises as the actions unfold - indeed, we’d welcome them - but we also can’t ignore the honest circumstances of where we are at: these protests, overwhelmingly, do not come out of substantial movements, and will not generate substantial movements.

This deficiency necessarily clouds over any ‘successes’ and ‘gains’ from the protests, a gloomy yet heartening prospect; after all, we may see ourselves better without the dazzling sun that inadvertently blinds us.

And we know those sunlit moments all too well: skill-sharing, long-term institutions, creating spaces, increasing morale among radicals, tapping into larger networks, diversity of tactics frameworks, solidarity between causes, better planning, better communication - the list of ‘betters’ is seemingly endless when it comes to these protests. As a collective, we have heard even more pronounced claims than these - that this will be “one of the largest actions at a convention in history,” that this won’t be “the same old ritualized protest,” that “we’ll be a stronger movement afterwards” by “bringing the struggles home.” Behind these rejuvenating words lies a vacuum, an inability to understand or discuss movements; specifically, where (if anywhere) are the convention protests situated in the flow of movements, and how do all the ‘betters’ contribute to movements, if at all. The notion of “bringing the struggles home” as a key to movement, while comforting, is especially dangerous when unquestioned; for we may define ‘home’ as a very small ‘radical community’ marked by regression and fear, rather than a larger field of growth, openness and genuine encounter - the basic ingredients of movements.

ANTIWAR ACTIVISTS WIN $2 MILLION SETTLEMENT FROM NEW YORK CITY

A group of 52 local activists today announced a $2 million settlement in their lawsuit against the City of New York. The activists were illegally arrested on April 7, 2003 while protesting against the Iraq war in front of a military contractor's offices in midtown. The settlement in Kunstler et al v. New York City follows the dismissal in 2003 of all criminal charges brought against these individuals and four costly years of delays by the City in negotiating an end to the civil lawsuit.

“The New York Police Department violated core constitutional rights when it arrested a group of peaceful demonstrators who were lawfully protesting against the commencement of the Iraq war and those who stood to profit from it,” notes Sarah Netburn, attorney with Emery Celli Brinkerhoff Abady LLP, which handled the civil rights case along with the Center for Constitutional Rights. “We are gratified by the City’s decision to compensate these individuals whose targeted arrests were without probable cause and intended to quell future protest in New York City. This lawsuit, and this settlement, vindicates our clients’ rights to assemble and speak their mind free from the fear that they will be punished for their views.”

Attorneys and plaintiffs noted, however, that the City's decision to drag the case out is part of a long and disturbing pattern by which it attempts to “wear down” plaintiffs to avoid political damage, even at huge expense of tax dollars and City resources. “My question is, why did the NYPD send over 100 police in riot gear, along with vehicles to block the street and disrupt the flow of morning rush hour traffic, all to stop a legal, peaceful protest, when there are far more important matters they could be pursuing? And, why did they fight us in court so doggedly when they knew the evidence proved that we were arrested without any police orders to leave?” asked Ahmad Shirazi, a film editor and grandfather and one of the plaintiffs in the case.

Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now
September 20 – November 22, 2008
Opening: September 20, 2008, 7-10pm
Exit Art, 475 Tenth Ave., New York City

Signs of Change is a major exhibition opening at Exit Art on September 20, 2008, chronicling 50 years of the cultural productions of social movements. Dara Greenwald and Josh MacPhee have curated over 600 posters, prints, photographs, moving images, audio clips, and other ephemera from over 30 countries. Signs of Change provides a dialogue with the past and an engagement with the present about the important cultural work of social movements. From the American Indian Movement to Women's Liberation, the South African Anti-Apartheid struggle to Portugal's Revolution of the Carnations, German Autonomen and squatters to South Korea's Kwang Ju uprising, this exhibition carries us through the whirlwind of people taking action to change the world.

Kittichai Restaurant Stops Serving Wild Edibles Seafood Over Workers' Rights Concerns

New York, NY- Kittichai, the popular Thai restaurant in Soho, has stopped serving seafood from wholesaler and retailer, Wild Edibles, Inc. over concern for employee rights. Wild Edibles workers and their allies have been campaigning for almost a year to reclaim stolen overtime pay; to compel compliance with workplace laws including the right to support a labor union; and to win a more livable wage as well as a health care and retirement plan.

"The Worst and Best of Times"
Grace Lee Boggs, The Michigan Citizen

My first column with this title appeared in the December 31-January 6, 2007 issue of the Citizen. We were living in the worst of times, I wrote, because of the Iraq war, the planetary emergency, the growing gulf between rich and poor, corporate takeover of the media, and a president who was acting like a king and losing all connection with reality.

But it was also the best of times, I said, because Americans were beginning to create new forms of community-based economic institutions that are less vulnerable to globalization, like coops and ESOPs (employee stock ownership enterprises). Local and state governments were assuming the responsibility, abdicated by the federal government, to reduce global warming. The urban gardening movement was growing by leaps and bounds.

RENEWING THE ANARCHIST TRADITION
A Scholarly Conference
November 7-9, 2008 in Montpelier, Vermont

The ninth edition of the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition (RAT) conference, sponsored by the Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS), once again aims to provide a participatory and scholarly space in which to reexamine, reinvigorate, and make relevant the social and political tradition of anarchism.

Each year, RAT brings together anarchists, anti-authoritarians, and libertarian leftists who want to critically engage both the tradition itself and the world in which we live. Participants and presenters at the conference thereby contribute to developing a more rigorous contemporary theoretical framework for anarchism as well as a stronger basis from which nonhierarchical movements can organize and resist.

2008 is a strange time to be an anarchist in North America. Thomas Friedman is calling for a green revolution, and Bono is at the forefront of a global war on poverty. The bright light of the U.S. presidential election campaign, anointed by Silicon Valley capital, has harnessed massive popular desire for radical social transformation--"Change"--to propel himself toward the White House. The reception he receives abroad articulates a thirst for a genuine internationalism, even as he signals his readiness to command more of the same military interventionism that has devastated people and social movements around the world. As anarchists and anti-authoritarians, it is easy to feel marginal, dissipated, defeated, and irrelevant as we watch some of our dearest ideas co-opted, sucked of content, turned inside out, and projected into the mainstream political scene.

What better moment, then, to come together to reflect on and honestly appraise the practices, platforms, convictions, dogmas, truisms, and theories that anarchism offers? What better moment to reimbue that tradition with a crucial sense of urgency and the substance that can genuinely challenge racism, imperialism, sexism, colonial pillage, capitalist exploitation, and the multifold and mutually reinforcing forms of oppression and systems of domination?

BENEFIT CD RE-RELEASE: MARIE MASON’S ‘NOT FOR PROFIT’

This music CD is a 2008 benefit re-release of Marie Mason's ‘Not For Profit’, which was originally released in 1999. A classic anarchist neo-folk record, these eight songs feature Marie (accompanied by guitarist and Earth First! activist Darryl Cherney) singing against the destruction of the earth and the oppression of humanity.

Mason is a recent Green Scare arrestee who is facing Life in prison for two acts of property destruction in which no one was hurt.. She is a long-time IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) and Earth First! activist, as well as a writer for ‘Fifth’ Estate magazine. All proceeds from this re-release go to the Marie Mason General Support Fund. For more information visit: http://freemarie.org.

ephemera 8.2. ‘Alternatively’ released

ephemera 8.2., ‘Alternatively.’ is now online: http://www.ephemeraweb.org. In its focus on alternatives, the latest ephemera issue addresses one of the main tasks that critique has (to) set for itself: to counter political paralysis of any kind, construed by the right and left, by pointing at the false logic behind it, indeed, by means of the formulation and practice of alternative logics.

There are many ways of organizing social life other than on the basis of and dictated by the kind of free market- or neoliberalism that reigns in large parts of the world. In other words, this issue, its editorial specifically and its contributions in their own way attempt to delegitimize the notorious post-communist ‘There Is No Alternative’-logic of thinking (TINA). At the same time, this issue also warns against the defeatist way of thinking represented by the casting of commodification as a totalizing force that leaves nothing beyond its grasp. While this threat is real, to portray consumer capitalism thus is a process of abstraction that is not only politically paralyzing, but can even be construed as conformist, like any belief in ‘this is how things are’, like TINA.

To suggest that things can be otherwise, the shift of perspective might be an important part of alteration (the act of producing alternatives), including shifting our perspective on how to appreciate alternatives. That is, rather than attributing appreciation based on the potential for realizability, the editorial suggests that alternatives might prove politically enabling precisely because they seem unrealizable. Alternatives understood in this way do not function as different solutions but as different problems; not as alternative answers to the same questions but as alternative questions opening up for new answers. Whereas any alternative solution keeps the problem which it solves intact, an alternative problem breaks with and delegitimizes the existing solution. It divides, twists and thoroughly subverts established Truths as well as breaking the ground for new ways of thinking. As such, the moment of alteration transforms the horizon of the given by way of giving us new questions to ask.

THE ASSAULT ON CULTURE: A Mute Magazine talk on privatisation and critical artistic practice

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Does private-public funding and management of culture mark the death of institutional and critical autonomy? And is direct censorship an anomaly, the most visible form of a wider constriction of cultural freedom, or the shape of cultural policy to come?

Mute has invited a range of practitioners along to discuss the perils and opportunities for critical cultural activity in neoliberalising institutions:

Leigh French, co-editor of /Variant/ magazine and contributor Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt will discuss the recent censorship of /Variant/ by Culture & Sport Glasgow, the new private charitable trust that manages the city's arts and leisure. They will be joined by Richard Birkett, assistant curator of the ICA's current Nought to Sixty programme and David Garcia, 'tactical media' theorist and Dean of Chelsea College of Art and Design London.

The talk will raise some of the following questions:

Does commercialisation enhance or corrode 'critical' culture? Why does an institutional turn to 'openness', collaborative and politicised art practices coincide with privatisation? And how will capitalist crisis impact on arts funding and cultural practice – a shift from radical reformism to conservative reaction or revolutionary refusal?

Where: Upstairs at Publish and Be Damned self-publishing fair, Rochelle School, Arnold Circus, London E2.

50 Ways To Leave Your Love,
Or, let's find a completely new art criticism
Brian Holmes

For most of the twentieth century, art was judged with respect to the previously existing state of the medium. What mattered was the kind of rupture it made, the unexpected formal or semiotic elements that it brought into play, the way it displaced the conventions of the genre or the tradition. The prize at the end of the evaluative process was a different sense of what art could be, a new realm of possibility for the aesthetic. Let's take it as axiomatic that all that has changed, definitively.

The backdrop against which art stands out now is a particular state of society. What an installation, a performance, a concept or a mediated representation can do with its formal, affective and semiotic means is to mark out a possible or effective shift with respect to the laws, the customs, the measures, the mores, the technical and organizational devices that define how we must behave and how we can relate to each other at a given time and in a given place. What you look for in art is a different way to live, a fresh chance at coexistence. Anything less is just the seduction of novelty - the hedonism of insignificance.

If that's the case (if the axiom really holds), then a number of fascinating questions arise - for the artist, of course, but also for the critic. Where the critic is concerned, one good question is this: How do you address yourself to artists or publics or potential peers across the dividing lines that separate entire societies? How do you evaluate what counts as a positive or at least a promising change in the existing balance of a foreign culture?

I'm sure you immediately see how difficult this is. Already in the past, it was hard enough to say that a particular aesthetic tradition and a particular state of the medium defined the leading edge, the point at which a rupture became interesting. Yet still there were times when all the painters seemed to flock to Rome, then later to Paris, then later to New York City; and so through the sheer aggregation of techniques and styles, the fiction of a leading edge could be maintained, at least by some. But in the face of a simultaneous splintering and decline of what used to be called "the West," and a correlative rise of some of "the Rest," who could seriously say that certain local, national or regional laws, customs, measures, mores and technical or organizational devices are really the most interesting ones to transgress or even break into pieces, in hopes of a better way of being? Or to be even cruder about it, and closer to the actual state of things: Who can seriously claim that the Euro-American forms of society are the benchmark against which change must be measured - even if those societies are still the most opulent and most developed and most heavily armed with all the nastiest of technological weapons?