Historian, activist and sociologist, George Katisaficas, discusses what he has termed ‘the eros effect,’ the spread of people governed movements across Europe, Asia and the Americas. He discusses how in each case the goal surrounds similar concerns: to reconstitute and reconfigure power in order to abolish hunger/poverty, to give people freedom, to produce a real democracy.
Recently we have seen mass demonstrations held in Copenhagen and Tehran, and just yesterday a peaceful protesters were denied freedom of assembly in Moscow. In Canada, we know that anti-Olympic protesters are being censored. While the media always creates the illusion that people are apathetic and uninformed, this video provides a counter-opinion, where it shows that in the last four decades there has been an increased number of demonstrations lead by civilians.
I came to Katsiaficas’ work through research on the Italian Autonomia movement of the 1970s and 80s. His book The Subversion of Politics discusses the Italian and German political autonomy movements of the late twentieth century and the violent state oppression and state sponsored terror that ensued.
Since I’ve been back east for the holidays, many people have asked me about my feelings toward the Olympics. The media has done a pretty decent job selling the Olympics as a good thing for Vancouver to Eastern Canadians.
Amy Goodman’s experience of getting detained at the border, and the follow-up story on Democracy Now, provides a thorough explanation of why so many Vancouverites are against the 2010 Olympics. Watch the whole thing. Toward the end the report explains that more is at stake than censorship: it’s about an infringement of the Constitutional rights of Canadians, a misuse of taxpayers dollars to support corporations, a mistreatment of people who live in the city at large, an illusion of Green games, etc.
There was a time when access to the Bible was considered the unchallenged prerogative of the Church. Free access to the Bible was considered dangerous by the authorities. Today the problem is posed at the level of knowledge in general, which is to say at the level of language. Language has become the foundation of life. Everything has become linguistic and biopolitical. And the authorities consider as dangerous everything that lies within reach of the poor, which is to say those who have no other wealth than their life. — Antonio Negri
The new issue, Canadian Special, of ActionYes is up online, curated by François Luong. The issue features a lovely assortment of Canadian poets, including five poems my newest crop with the working title ‘the reality series’.
Other Can poets in the issue include:
Daniel Canty, Angela Carr, Jason Christie, Sarah Dowling, Darren Wershler-Henry & Bill Kennedy, Ray Hsu, Sonnet L’Abbé, Chantal Neveu, A. Rawlings, glenN robsoN, Hector Ruiz, Jenny Sampirisi, Jordan Scott, Angela Szczepaniak, François Turcot.
The recent circulation of Paul Zukofsky’s threat to graduate students and his philistine, preposterous, name calling of intelligent people who work in the arts has generated a substantial uproar—one can only hope he recognizes that his demands aren’t legal.
