Draft text in-progress (post being updated)
Production of revolutionary (emancipatory-liberating) subject and subject of revolutionary (emancipatory-liberating) production Continue reading
1. Culture and knowledge for classless societies is networked in process!
Networked Labour University is designed as an educational module to be integrated with a broader network composed of Global Networked Labour Union, Networked Labour Research unit, and networked labour coop GNLU. Tied to a greater ecology of universal, free and open access community projects, such as Faircoop, the Earth Cooperative, all our projects aim mutual empowerment at the bottom level. Unconditional empowerment of the dis-empowered, excluded, and oppressed with direct solidarity is the reason why we exist for. Our platform is designed to liberate knowledge from alienation and domination of any kind at the point of production and distribution. In order to enable money-free access to most essential cultural resources we rely on free/libre, open source software, but the platform also aims to facilitate broader solidarity economy by encouraging and enabling open-cooperative exchanges between participants.
Our invitation is an wide open one, anyone can join and contribute by offering and taking courses, moderating circles or skill shares, helping out with web design, platform development, promotion, or any other way!
2. Networked Labour University Opening Meeting
Date: 7 May 2015
Time: 14.00 – 17.00 (ECT / UCT+1)
Check-ins (14:00 – 14:15)
Opening and presentation of the system (14:15 – 15:00)
Networked Labour University and Worker to Worker Study Circles
Discussion (15:15 – 16:45)
How to use cross-border communication and which digital tools to build commons knowledge, culture, politics, and economy for the classless society and from the oppressed point of view?
Closing and Check-outs (16:45 – 17:00)
Access: Participation is on-line, open and free. What you need to do to is to open an account on the website below and to selfenrol for the event before. Working languages are English/Turkish
Website: networkedlabour.networg.nl/moodle
Email: networg@networg.nl
Social unionism and digital labor in the transnational space of European austerity
Over the past few years, European social movements have struggled to find new ways of cooperating and connecting in order to oppose the verticalization of European governance. Following the crash of 2008, in fact, a regime of austerity, that is severe cuts to public spending, has gone together with a remodulation of modes of welfare and work inspired by the German model. This model has seen the massive introduction of part-time, badly paid jobs (the so called mini-jobs ) which are part of a system of workfare where the state makes sure that everybody is forced to accept whatever job available through a new capillary control of recipients’ lives. While the European Central Bank like the Federal Reserve has deployed quantitative easing, and inundated the financial system with money, none of this has effectively gone into the creation of new jobs, into expanding credit to consumers and business or to essential public services. The process of complete precarization of labor and increasing accumulation of wealth is thus unfolding along the lines of a geographical and ethnic division of labor which sees the European Union divided between centre and periphery, North and South, East and West with war pressing in on its Eastern and Southern borders.
The verticalization of European governance has thus reinforced a whole series of trends: ‘the attack on waged labor, the compression of union rights, the dequalification and privatisation of learning and research, the enclosure of common goods, a new government of labor mobility and the exploitation of migrant labor’ (http://www.autistici.org/strikemeeting/). These considerations are central to the formation of a transnational space of action for social movements aiming to reverse the tide of complete neoliberalization of Europe and opening onto the global level as the only adequate dimension of struggle.
Below text is an excpert from unpublished and unedited 2012 article Another World, Now! Coming of the Transnational REvolutions and the P2P Prince.
The modern prince, the myth-prince, cannot be a real person, a concrete individual. It can only be an organism, a complex element of society in which a collective will, which has already been recognised and has to some extent asserted itself in action, begins to take concrete form. (A. Gramsci)
Italian political activist and theorist Antonio Gramsci’s core concepts like hegemony, organic crisis, historic bloc, war of position and war of manoeuvre are central to our understanding of today’s complex global capitalist system as well as the catastrophic changes that are currently taking place in it. Referring to the original concept developed by Gramsci, global political economy theorist Stephen Gill describes the 2008 global financial turmoil as the manifestation of an organic crisis at the global level. [1] We can also read the outcomes of the global organic crisis following another neo-Gramscian theorist Robert Cox as a mixture of three scenarios he describes.[2] First one is a global (military) Keynesian recovery being pushed by the West. Regional wars moving from the periphery to the centre involving massive destruction of lives, cities and the nature, as we witness it happening since the 9/11. The second scenario is the rise of global fascism in tandem with the regional wars. This has also been happening, especially increasingly in the centre, since 2007; highlighting the race to the bottom caused by the strengthening of totalitarian forms of capitalism at the main contenders like China, Russia and India. Finally and the last scenario is accompanying transnational revolutions, like the uprisings in the northern Africa, Americas and Europe also happening.[3]
What brought humanity to this point is not a secret and also made clear by many thinkers, intellectuals, and activists. The above mentioned article by Gill is only one of the public records. It is very clear however where we have to drive history as the humanity, the third option: Transnational revolutions. Again, following Gramsci and Gill, we can think of the realisation of the transnational revolutions in relation to the ‘Prince’. For his time Gramsci thought of it as the collective subjectivity which will give the moral leadership to a wider counter-hegemonic historic bloc, and shape the form and content of the communist revolution in a national context. And it was the communist part of the working class. Gill referred to the anti- and alter-globalisation movement. Continue reading
Independents Unite! – Preview Edition Now Available
The preview edition of Independents Unite! Inside the Freelancers’ Rights Movement is now available for download. This preview edition includes five chapters. Further chapters will be released in future editions of the book.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Around the world, independent workers are getting organized. No longer an ignorable minority in society, freelancers are waking up to the potential power within their growing number. They are combining through online communities, campaign groups, incorporated associations and even proto-unions to exert influence over their conditions.
Independents Unite! Inside the Freelancers Rights Movement, by Joel Dullroy and Anna Cashman, introduces the concept of the collective empowerment of freelancers. The book provides an overview of the existing elements of the freelancers’ movement, with comparisons of the organizations and campaigns currently at work and the goals they are striving to achieve. It lays out the conditions which have led to the growth of the freelancing workforce to show how the current situation has been purposefully created through political decisions, and can therefore be altered and improved by the same means.
With a foundational text in place, critical discussions on the topic of independent worker rights can continue to develop, in symbiosis with the freelancers’ movement itself.
PREVIEW EDITION:
This preview edition includes five complete chapters:
Introducing the Freelancers’ Movement
How Many? Counting Freelancers
Pushed: How Politics and Ideology Created the Freelancing Grey Zone
The Reaction Begins: How Freelancers are Getting Organized
Case Study: Freelancers Union
DOWNLOAD NOW:
The book is available as a free download, in both PDF format and .mobi format for Kindle readers. Supporters may also select to pay a donation to help the authors complete their research and writing.
Download free e-book – €0.00
Supporter – download book with donation – €5.00
Big Supporter – download book with donation – €10.00
The ruling elite way of dealing with the problem of ‘near zero marginal costs’ has been massive exploitation of zero labor cost (free labor). Now they like to capture free labor in the physical world by connecting devices and people “putting them at work on the move” -as Cisco and GE founders of the Industrial Internet Consortium publicly declare. While the translation of this ideal is the objectification of entire living labor and commons (should be read as human) to a global production process, why Rifkin celebrates this! If the plan is clearly to giving IP addresses to 50 billion devices in coming 10 years to form the IoE infrastructure, making it is possible a global scale surveillance an most logical outcome would be the total exploitation of artificially constructed happy playbouring produsers who would be living in sterile smart cities. As for the masses, there shall not be need for an hegemonic governance like bourgeois parliamentarian model what so ever in this new digital world. It has become clear by now that this ambitious capitalist project has the potential to replace the ancient industrial capitalism. It is certain by now that the fall of capitalism as we know it won’t be quite and painless. The attempt towards realizing this transition has brought about imperialist peripheral wars. If one look to the fierce clashes between Russian, Westerns and Chinese rulers in Syria, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Georgia, Chechnya, Ukraine and other frontiers of the Empires, the naked truth would appears in clear vision. The fact that crack between two giant tectonic plates is about to break up to a truly global corrective war between ruling classes. Titans are getting ready to clash, and planning for the aftermath of the great cleansing, of billions of un-exploitable and expensive to feed human.
Join Our Email List: https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/workersoftheworld
GNUnion encourages all its peers to collectivize their individual social and communicational power to swarm around dynamical, creative and positive actions. Such collective actions we know well by now that are capable of creating real impact at unpredicted magnitude on the chosen targets, regardless how large and powerful they are.
Combining peer to peer social relations and technologies and embedding them into all its internal and external processes and relationships, GNUnion ultimately aims at hyper-empowerment of all the nodes involved in one big mesh network.
Below are some of the spaces we collaborate on N-1, and the Organizing Network -online social network spaces developed as free nodes using Lorea.
Social Network-, Wiki-, Meta- Strikes
Our first direct and mesh networked action will be a transnational meta-strike to target PRISM contractors. Priority objectives of the strike will be forcing the state elite and capital to hand-off private and public data, and stop abusing people and democratic rights for their commercial and tyrannical objectives. The action will reclaim what is ‘social’ and belong to people in societal communication and bring about mass awareness about using FLOSS!
We will bring high-tech and industrial workers, hackers, system admins, digital artists and activists and their powers coming from production, consumption, communication and knowledge -so a being social individuals and society.
Working Groups on the ON and N-1: https://on.usilive.org/groups/profile/323/mayfirst-meta-strike
The below are Google Hangout videos taken from the USI’s website:
i. Hack the Union from US interviews with Andrew of Union Solidarity International: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4U4FNAkZtSc
ii. A small step for unions, but a giant step for global labour
emancipation?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=k6BmWC5lr8Y
This following link is to a nice article by Walton Patland introducing the ON platform:
http://www.scoop.it/t/networked-labour/p/4017080234/2014/03/05/karl-marx-on-facebook-what-is-the-ideology-of-your-social-network?hash=fd4c16ef-09d3-468d-a043-3b8de2a28135
All the fists of the world are GNUniting!
First Brainstorm – Online Meeting This Sunday at 13.00 PM GMT
https://www.facebook.com/GlobalNetworkedLabourUnion
We are the workers whose free labour and privacy has been stolen, and sold
for greed! We have been abused, spied on and betrayed constantly. Before
this massive exploitation and surveillance machine turns into a global
apparatus in the hands of fascism, being operationalized for direct
oppression, we have to unite our fists and strike back!
This May Day is the time… How and what is not decided yet, there are
initial ideas but much is needed to put the global collective intelligence
at work to defend our and our children’s rights and dignity! Join us this
Sunday and bring your most free, creative, powerful and peaceful ideas and
dreams along… We did beat Freon, Caesars, Barons, Kings, Emperors,
Merchants, Industrial Capitalists and Nazis in the past, we can beat the
TNCs, CEOs and 1% as well!
We call all the workers, hackers, makers, farmers, artists, indignant and
outraged to GNUnite all their constructive capacity around the most
spectacular free libre and open sourced swarm to fight back and win!
Hasta la Siempre Victoria!
https://www.facebook.com/events/583310555077672/?ref=3&ref_newsfeed_story_type=regular
https://www.facebook.com/events/252508808246947/?ref=22&source=3&source_newsfeed_story_type=regular
HOW DO WE ACHIEVE COMMONS-ORIENTED PHASE TRANSITION ?
READ THIS:
today we have a paradox, the more communistic the sharing license we use, the more capitalistic the practice, with the Linux commons becoming a corporate commons enriching IBM and the like … it works in a certain way, and seems acceptable to most free software developers, but is it the only way.
Hence, an alternative, having the choice not just for non-reciprocal communist licenses such as the GPL, but introducing a median choice of socialist licenses, based on reciprocity.
This is the choice of http://p2pfoundation.net/Peer_Production_License; it is not to be confused with the cc non commercial, as the logic is different; this is not to offer protection to individuals reluctant to share, but to enable and empower a counter-hegemonic reciprocal economy that combines commons that are open to all that contribute, while charging a license fee for the the forprofit companies who want to use without contributing. The PPL was originally designed by ‘venture communist’ dmytri kleiner and you can find it discussed athttp://p2pfoundation.net/Bauwens,_Kleiner,_Restakis_on_Cooperative,_Commons-Based_Venture_Funding (ful ltranscript now available)
Facebook Event: https://www.facebook.com/events/593164267417330/
HashTags: #WREF, #www
#www call: http://gnunion.wordpress.com/www/
#WREF: http://gnunion.wordpress.com/worl-revolutionary-forum/
GNUnion: http://gnunion.wordpress.com/
Hosted by GNUnion – One Big Meshwork for All the Working People
Again, 2014 will be full of struggles, actions and mobilisations for a real global change. This Mumble call will be about starting a new series of forums and assemblies that are open to all individuals who will able to make independent efforts from any corporate, state and NGO funded agenda and; who could be exactly themselves when changing the world, when getting together, discussing and collaborating with others; either as a part of a collective, group, network or individually, and by using either online, or face to face means, or both.
Commons-based peer production (CBPP) is a new and increasingly significant model of social innovation based on collaborative production by citizens through the Internet.
This project will foster the CBPP phenomenon by providing a techno-social software platform specifically designed to facilitate the creation of resilient and sustainable CBPP communities.
The design of the P2Pvalue platform will be empirically and experimentally grounded. Through a triangulation of qualitative and quantitative methods, we will elaborate guidelines for the institutional and technical features that favour value creation in CBPP.
The project focuses on three key areas of improvement over current platforms:
Global Networked Labour Union, GNUnion – One Big Mesh Network, is the released 1.0 Beta version of new generation, free to join, borderless worker self-organisation, a work in progress. Its main ispiration is the history, struggle and experiences of Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) on the one hand, and free-libre, and open source software GNU/Linux, on the other.
GNUnion is also inspired by comrades standing against global capitalism in women, Lgbt, immigrant, environmental and social justice movements, Zapatistas, anti & alter golobalisation movements, social forums, free knowledge- information and culture movements; as part of organisations like WikilLeaks, Caos Computer Club, MayFirst People Link, or of recent wave of digital and real world uprisings Anonymous, 15M, Occupy, Gezi and others.
“What can we do to change things?” It’s hard to avoid this issue when considering the sad state of our societies …
Let us quickly recall some elements in explaining the genealogy of this political crisis.
Poverty proceeds from a dialectic that Marx revealed diligently: a minority monopolizes wealth at the expense of a majority that nevertheless embodies the lifeblood of a society. This majority progressively structured by the aggregate of individual interests, becomes powerless before the interpenetration of financial monopolies.
And yet if there is a way out of this debacle, it is in our collective strength, particularly when arranged in a synergistic manner.
This is what we think.
rEvolutionary activists, immigrant-flex workers, lgbts, unionists, environmentalists, hackers, makers, artivists of the World,
MARCH TOGETHER!
Today, 14 Jun, 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Coordinado por +Domenico Di Siena (@urbanohumano) y +Bernardo Gutiérrez (@bernardosampa)La democracia representativa está viviendo el peor momento de su historia. La transformación hacia una democracia participativa, abierta, interactiva, parece inevitable. Sin embargo, no acabamos de llegar a un nuevo paradigma democrático. El rumbo de las etiquetas / líneas de trabajo #GobiernoAbierto, #DatosAbiertos y #Transparencia parecen insuficientes. El nuevo papel de las urbes en la política parece insinuar un nuevo orden de poderes en el que lo nacional, lo regional, lo municipal y lo global van de la mano. Por otro lado, algunos Gobiernos están creando plataformas y herramientas de participación ciudadana. Pero, en ocasiones, la participación es menor de la esperada. La comunidad, la ciudadanía, no acaba de entrar en los mecanismos participativos diseñados por el poder. Y la política, el comportamiento político, está ocurriendo en otras plataformas, en otros lugares, en otros territorios. En la era del WI-FI, los teléfonos móviles con conexión y la información ubicua, la democracia en tiempo real es posible. La democracia es algo que puede suceder en cualquier lugar, en cualquier momento
[Google translation]
Representative democracy is going through the worst time in its history. The transformation to a participatory democracy, open, interactive, seems inevitable. However, we just got a new democratic paradigm. The direction of the labels / lines work # GobiernoAbierto, # DatosAbiertos and # Transparency seem insufficient. The new role of cities in politics seems to suggest a new order of powers in which the national, the regional, the local and the global go together. On the other hand, some governments are creating platforms and tools for citizen participation. But sometimes, participation is lower than expected. The community, the citizens, not just entering participatory mechanisms designed for power. And politics, political behavior is happening on other platforms, elsewhere, in other territories. In the era of Wi-Fi, mobile phones with free and ubiquitous information, real-time democracy possible. Democracy is something that can happen anywhere, at any time
The #Walmartstrike on Black Friday was an historic moment for the global labour movement. It represents the public coming out of the synthesis of occupy direct action tactics and sustainable union structures to produce a direct unionism that has the capacity to overturn corporate hegemony.
Corporate USA, especially in the retail sector, had an extremely effective strategy for ensuring their underpaid staff don’t come together in a representative union structure. This anti-union induction video for Walmart competitor, Target, is a striking example of the strategy:
The video leaves a new Target worker with a number of messages:
16 November 2012 Hilary Wainwright Socialist Register
In a context of uncertainty and flux, it helps to start from the specific. My starting point is the rise of Syriza, the radical left coalition rooted in the movements resisting austerity that has become the main opposition party in the Greek parliament. Syriza’s ability to give a focused political voice to the anger and despair of millions has made a breakthrough from which we can learn.
This is a matter not only of its soaring electoral support, which rose from 4 per cent of the national vote in 2009 to 27 per cent in June 2012 on the basis of a refusal of the policies imposed by the IMF, the European Commission (EC) and the European Central Bank (ECB), but also of the fact that this electoral mandate is reinforced by organized movements and networks of solidarity that Syriza has been part of building.
This is not to imply that Syriza’s success is stable or that its momentum will necessarily be maintained. One of its 71 MPs, the ex-Pasok member and trade union leader, Dimtris Tsoukalas, warns that ‘votes can be like sand’.1 Threatening winds will blow persistently from a hostile media determined to exploit any sign of division; from national and European elites creating an atmosphere of fear towards the left and from an aggressive fascist party exploiting xenophobic tendencies in Greek society with some success, having won 7 per cent in the polls. Continue reading
The network is the vanguard.
Dan Gallin, Chair of the Global Labour Institute
The union movement and FaceBook are about the same size, as of October 2012. That’s about one billion members, or one seventh of the world’s population[1]. It’s a milestone that has attracted very little attention because, frankly, the comparison ends there.
But why?
In this discussion the author argues for a new type of social networking — one which takes great care to protect the user while actively promoting honesty and openness. This combination of safety and collegiality is vital if working people are to build international networks; it is all too easy to forget the real hazards faced by many who need a collective voice. Adding a social network layer to our existing model of unionism would also create a horizontal base, and bring tremendous new strength to the existing vertical structures.
Unlike FaceBook, the union movement grew organically, almost always in the face of resistance. The “new unionism” of the late 19th century ushered in an age of industrial unions, and by the beginning of the 20th century we were uniting workers and federating their unions along regional, sectoral and national lines. The first experiments with international structures began to appear in the very earliest years of the twentieth century. Back then, comparisons with FaceBook might have made sense.
Social Network Unionism 