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Interview: Zygmunt Bauman: "Social media are a trap" | In English | EL PAÍS - 0 views

elpais.com/...1453208692_424660.html social movements intervention development corporate theory geography bauman
shared by Arabica Robusta on 31 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • He has outlined his pessimistic world view in books such as 2014’s Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All?, which argues that the world is paying a high price for the neoliberal revolution that began in the 1980s and that wealth has not trickled down to the rest of society. In Moral Blindness, published last year, he and co-author Leonidas Donskis warn about the loss of community in our increasingly individualistic world.
  • Power has been globalized, but politics is as local as before. Politics has had its hands cut off. People no longer believe in the democratic system because it doesn’t keep its promises.
  • Forty years ago we believed that freedom had triumphed and we began an orgy of consumerism. Everything seemed possible by borrowing money: cars, homes… and you just paid for it later. The wakeup call in 2008 was a bitter one, when the loans dried up.
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  • Conflict is no longer between classes, but between each person and society. It isn’t just a lack of security, but a lack of freedom.
  • Changing one party for another will not solve the problem. The problem is not that the parties are wrong, but that they don’t control things. Spain’s problems are part of a global problem. It’s a mistake to think you can solve things internally.
  • I think we’re still following the principles of Versailles, when the idea of each nation’s right to self rule was established. But that’s a fiction in today’s world, when there are no more homogeneous territories. Today, every society is just a collection of diasporas. People join the societies to which they are loyal and pay their taxes, but at the same time, they do not want to give up their identity. The connection between where you live and identity has been broken.
  • most people use social media not to unite, not to open their horizons wider, but on the contrary, to cut themselves a comfort zone where the only sounds they hear are the echoes of their own voice, where the only things they see are the reflections of their own face. Social media are very useful, they provide pleasure, but they are a trap.
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Social Movements In Spain: Insiders' Perspectives | PopularResistance.Org - 0 views

www.popularresistance.org/in-spain-insiders-perspectives podemos spain social movements social movements globalization liberation neoliberalism
shared by Arabica Robusta on 23 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • After more than four years of austerity, with increasingly harmful effects for most sections of the Greek population, the new government was welcomed as much needed “breathing space”.
  • In the end, it is irrelevant whether Tsipras and his allies deliberately planned this course of action from the start, or whether their project collapsed under the enormous pressure of the Troika’s neo-liberal hegemony – with a key role reserved for the German government.
  • Of course, many activists now argue that this development was foreseeable and its outcome was intended from the start. We consider this position as wrong, and believe that such processes always count. An I-knew-everything-beforehand-attitude allows people to ignore their responsibility to try and shape history, and, even worse, to look down on those who accept the challenge to provoke change.
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  • It is much more important to learn from these experiences and generate strategic debate. Whilst it is crucial to continue to ask questions, we still have to carry on.
  • During our investigation of these forms of solidarity, we often found ourselves in social centers. Four out of six of our conversational partners considered these places as an important starting point of their political development. The two others, both local groups of the PAH did not start from a social center, but organized most of their work in, and with social centers. It’s impossible to deduct a homogeneous political “strategy of the social centers” just from the thoughts and ideas of our conversational partners.
  • Those who still have hope must carry on asking about how we can organize a life away from domination, coercion and poverty. Within this debate of the left, the political developments in Spain (from our point of view of discussions about Germany) needed more clarity. The reasons for that may be many, but an intensified debate about the local developments seem to us to be even more important. We chose the interview as the form of presentation so as to give voice to the activists themselves – they contain a variety of positions on the many different issues that were discussed.
  • Podemos, Ahora Madrid and Barcelona en comú, as well as and other leftist parties and regional coalitions, grew in strength and won many of the biggest town halls. These were the democratic results of that eruption of anger. Several mass demonstrations with hundreds of thousands people in the streets together with a strong independence movement in Catalonia, and many regional and national campaigns against the political establishment have together created this “new democracy”.
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The poetics and politics of Oromo resistance | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...d-politics-of-oromo-resistance oromo social movements stateless ethiopia war on terror
shared by Arabica Robusta on 12 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • What makes the Oromo experience so incomprehensible is the fact that they remained one of the last oppressed majority groups of the world in a country in which identity is both the constitutive and regulative principle of political life.
  • It is here, in this reservoir of songs, in the unruly dances and heart-breaking ballads, that one finds the story of the Oromo nation and its struggle for self-determination, not in the official archives and historiographies of the Ethiopian state.
  • wo decades on, however, no such law is forthcoming, and to add insult to injury, the ruling party announced what it calls the ‘Addis Ababa Integrated Master Plan’, allowing the unprecedented expansion of the city into Oromia. Emboldened by a symbolic election victory in which the ruling party won 100% of the 442 seats announced thus far, the government is set to implement the Master Plan, threatening the wellbeing and livelihood of Oromo farmers neighboring the city.
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  • It is in this most unpromising and unhistorical of places, in lyrics full of emotions and nostalgia but expressive of the devastation of the social fabric, that one finds the authentic experience of the Oromo.
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New Lines: a parliament for the Rojava revolution | ROAR Magazine - 0 views

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shared by Arabica Robusta on 12 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • oday, many of these groups are blacklisted, as a direct result of the so-called War on Terror. This has resulted in the freezing of bank accounts, the enforcement of travel bans, and the cancellation of passports.Cynically enough, this means that through the act of blacklisting, those who are already without a state are turned stateless once more, facing a double negation. Blacklisting these organizations — literally placing them “outside” of democracy — has much to do with the threat they pose to the status quo of the global capitalist doctrine.
  • A collectively written text, the “Social Contract,” clarified the points of departure: Rojava was to become a non-state entity, where self-governance, gender equality, ethnic and religious diversity, the right to self-defense and communal economy would form the foundational pillars. Ever since — while in the middle of a war against the Islamic State and other jihadist groups such as the Al-Nusra Front, and surrounded by the forces of the Assad regime, Russian troops and the international “coalition forces” — Rojava revolutionaries have begun to put their new ideals of self-governance into practice.
  • The lines drawn throughout North Africa and the Middle-East were drawn by bureaucrats and colonists. As artist Golrokh Nafisi has said, it is time to draw new lines. Not according to the occupiers, but according to the resistance. Not lines that isolate one nation from another, but lines of new shapes and forms that allow us to enact this world anew. To create a new world we need the imaginary of what that world could or should look like. As such, every political imaginary needs an artistic imaginary as well.
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I cite: Campus protests: struggle and safety - 0 views

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shared by Arabica Robusta on 23 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Some universities present themselves as caring, as providing mental health services and a personalized environment that will help students meet their individual needs and goals. For the most part, this is advertising -- as everybody knows. The reality is  stress, debt, the reproduction of privilege, and, for some, a few years of extreme partying.
  • What's innovative in the last round of protests is the weaponization of safety and vulnerability. Think cultural revolution rather than therapy, hundreds and thousands of students on campus after campus rejecting the status quo and demanding change. The attack on privilege is an attack on hierarchies of race and class, waged in the language available to those told they live in a post-racial society offering no alternative to capitalism.
  • The risk of invoking vulnerability and appealing to safety comes in the reinforcing of an authority who would promise security, who would recognize the vulnerable as vulnerable and guarantee that he would protect them from harm.
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  • From the changing climate to the barbarous economy, the university can't shore itself up against the society it includes and reproduces. 
  • Arabica Robusta on 23 Nov 15
     
    "That said, the rhetoric of safe spaces, vulnerability, and civility does seem part of the current moment. Why? Gitlin too quickly dismisses political economic considerations -- the enormity of student debt, diminished economic prospects, loss of rewarding work, and intensified financial insecurity facing this generation of students. He notes, only to discard, the surveillance part of contemporary life. I think these political economic factors are more important than Gitlin allows. They establish the terms through which the students are voicing their critique. Students frame their opposition in a language of safety and vulnerability because that is the language available to them after forty years of neoliberalism and in the second decade of the war on terror."
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tabula gaza - 0 views

tabulagaza.blogspot.com social movements arab egypt
shared by Arabica Robusta on 15 Aug 15 - Cached
  • The widespread indifference toward the August 14 massacre that accompanied a rising fascistic spirit just confirmed that fall from grace.
  • Though I do not affirm the Brotherhood's cause to return to power, I believe in their right to dissent. All those that risk their bodies, like Bassem, risk the bullet. I will by no means try to justify the shocking actions of Egyptians that started the morning of June 30, the rise of the fascistic, the acceptance of the torment of others. The most powerful tool to these ends is the discourse of terrorism that has fed into the deep fear in the hearts of so many living inside a regime of terror. 
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