Date: Thu, 17 Sep 1998 02:31:29 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: AUT: RE:  



In "The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Movements And The
Decolonization of Everyday Life" George Kastaficas makes a number of
criticisms of Negri, as well as Harry Cleaver and Michael Ryan. The basic
thrust of his criticism of Negri is that Negri's thought subsumes or
characterizes a range of social relations under the category of
work/production. Kastaficas favors a view that would hold class, race &
gender relations as seperate, without one determining the others, or as
primary, or (*it seems*) as tying them together (e.g concepts of "work" or
"reproduction"). 

Kastaficas seems to be articulating a position similar to that of Chomsky,
Cagan, Albert et al. in "Liberating Theory", where they draw on the new
physics associated with the thought of Ilya Prigogine, Stengers and others
to elaborate a political theory that derides a one-exclusive central
dynamic driving social relations. Is anyone out there aware of any
responses to Kastaficas on this?

On another note I'll also say that I'm an activist here in Binghamton
involved locally with Food Not Bombs (FNB), the local youth section of the
Democratic Socialists of America (the only left organization here that
will take me), and a left-student paper. Binghamton is a relatively small 
heavily post-industrial city in upstate New York, largely working class,
and also politically right wing & anti-union (this used to be the east
coast headquarters of the KKK!). Those politics come out of a sort of
Keynsianism & fordism in city government & industry. (Binghamton used to
be called "the home of the square deal"in refrence to good jobs, housing 
etc). More recently IBM has downsized, Kodak which was also based here has
recently left, Endicott-Johnson Shoes is long since gone and there ahs
been a steady increase in underemployment, as well as an influx out of the
city to larger metropolitan centers. There's been some inflow here from
southeast asians (the INS apparently favors this as an area for refugees
to settle), but overall the flow has been out. I'm not going to bore you
with more gory details because you can probably "connect the dots" and
"fill in the blanks" (e.g the rise of contigent work and temp agencies,
strip mall development etc). 

I'm really interested in people's comments, criticism and suggestions. I'm
also interested in hearing what projects others are engaged in towards
the realization of libertarian socialism. Some of the things that  
I'm trying to working around right now are:

*Developing an autonomous community center with a kitchen that FNB can
prepare meals out of*, as well as hold performances & punk shows in,
possibly have an info-shop space. As you can imagine there are alot of
empty buildings here, (but no squats), right now the rent for these places
are way out of our range so our only real option for this sort of thing in
the near future is squatting.*  

*A worker's center*-I first heard about workers' centers two years ago at
a talk given by Howie Hawkins, a Greens activist, at the Socialist Forum
in Syracuse on temp work. I also had a chance to actually see a Latino
workers' center in Manhattan's lower east side. The DSA local I've
worked with has had frustrating experiences with established unions and
also trying to use a "living wage" strategy. Esspecially with the
dispersal of work many of us here have become interested in "organizing by
community" & social unionism. We also would like to bring in an
aletrnative union like the IWW, but are not very close, geographically, to
any locals-still this is something we're-actually more just myself- 
am interested in. 

*An urban Earth First! Earth First! is a direct action oriented radical
ecology group based on autonomous local that are usually involved in using
militant tactics in protecting forests etc. Some city based earth 1sts!
are involved in solidarity work with the work of other locals in non-urban
areas. There are a number of EF! activists here and since last year some
of us have talked about the possibility for forming an EF! specifically
oriented towards urban working class issues (e.g toxic waste sites in low
income neighborhoods here) & trying to bring to bear some of the direct
action tactics used against clear cutting &extraction in this situation.
Another possibility to try adopt a more positive constructive approach  to
ecological issues as opposed to one that is fundamentally reactive and
defensive-& work around those issues.

*Food Not Bombs is basically known for operating on the basis of serving
vegan meals to homeless and poor people using food that's either been
discarded, or donated (but never bought). We've also begun to
distribute donated and discarded clothes. At the university-particulraly
with construction taking place here- there's also alot of waste involving
throwing out older model computers that are basically still functional, as
well as other miscellaneous items (bookshelves, lamps, storage dressers
etc). I'm interested in distributing these in a similar fashion
(particularly the computers-once we work on them a bit).The other
possibility would be to set up a "free store" such as those that Emile
Grogan's Diggers had on the west coast in the 60's (we really have enough
stuff). In Charles Jencks' book  "Heteropolis: LA, the riots and the
strange beauty of hetero-architecture", he includes an appendix with a
program by California Greens that calls for the creation of neighborhood
based computer centers (like the various pods and computer clusters on
college campuses) & micro power radio stations. There's also a
possibility that we could try to do something similar in a working class
neighborhood in Binghamton with the computers. Although I question the
potential for these types of efforts to increase the tension of "what is
and what could be" tapping into the potential of post scarcity society to
make the leap into "the realm of freedom", I do think that it potentially
puts important tools into the hands of the working class-& is a way of
approaching the project of "building the new society within the shell of
the old"

 

Thano



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