freely associating

As the Greek crisis develops and spreads, threatening to become a Europe-wide sovereign debt crisis, I thought the following line from The Economist's editorial on the matter ('Acropolis now', 1 May 2010) is worth noting: When the unthinkable suddenly becomes the inevitable, without pausing in the realm of the improbable, then you have contagion. Another piece in the same issue is entitled 'The cracks spread and widen', which reminds me ...

I've been thinking about some of the issues around events in Greece and also 'public concern' over government debt in many other countries, including here in the UK where all three main parties are promising austerity in order to sort out the 'public finances'. From the perspective of the financial markets, the number everybody's talking about is the spread on bond yields between Greek government debt and that ...

Last night I gave a short talk on behalf of We Won’t Pay For Their Crisis to the Climate Chaos Cafe at The CommonPlace. There’s nothing staggeringly original in it, but it does contain some nice insights harvested from all over the place (some chunks were lifted verbatim from the latest issue of The Commoner and libcom). WHAT DOES THE ECONOMIC CRISIS MEAN FOR THE CLIMATE CHANGE MOVEMENT? We are ...

On the 28th of April 2006 a group of activists dressed in Superhero costumes burst into the insanely expensive Hamburg delicatessen, Frische Paradies and ran out with 1500 Euros worth of expensive food. Despite several police cars and a helicopter rushing to the scene, the culprits they got clean away. Not, however, before they posed for the photo above, which they release along with a communiqué explaining that ...

I went to a really productive meeting at the CommonPlace last night, throwing about ideas on the financial crisis and trying to work out how best we can 'intervene' (ugh, bad word but you know what I mean). I'm slowly coming to terms to with the fact that I'm fairly crap in meetings: I get distracted too easily and lose the thread; plus I have the turning circle ...

As well as being a place to store our half-baked ideas, this blog is also meant to be a place where we can collect, record and circulate interesting stuff. And amidst all the shite that’s been written about the current credit/finance crisis, this piece (by George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici of Midnight Notes) really stands out. Read and think on… “MUST THE MOLECULES FEAR AS THE ENGINE DIES?” –NOTES ...

Or the incredible credit crisis. And so the dominoes begin to fall. In many ways this is a classic capitalist crisis, the popping of a 15 year credit fuelled consumer spending bubble, but it is also a singular event. It is singular because, the ‘credit fuelled' part of the sentence is not some foolish excess or avoidable side effect but is inherent to the neo-liberal wave of accumulation ...

A few years ago we commented (in Moments of Excess) that tactics of militant protest and direct action seemed to have spread, been usurped or hijacked even, by other rather dubious campaigns, such as the Countryside Alliance and Fathers 4 Justice. We then dismissed ‘militant lobbying’ and went on to talk about constitutive politics. Certainly both the Countryside Alliance and Fathers 4 Justice were pretty marginal campaigns in ...

We’ve been thinking antagonism recently and have drafted a piece entitled ‘Six impossible things before breakfast’, that we hope will be published in the forthcoming Turbulence product and also - in an extended form - in Antipode in a special issue on ‘autonomy’. In the piece we describe the 1980s UK anarchist practice of publishing names and addresses of those who dominate our lives as liberating and quote Lucy ...

Money and finance don’t normally get much discussed on this site. All that might change. Last summer’s ‘subprime’ mortgage crisis in the United States (and the run on Northern Rock bank-cum-building society over here) has developed into a full-blown ‘credit crisis’: the global financial markets are in what the commentators describe as ‘turmoil’ and ‘catastrophe’ threatens. Last week, the US’s fifth-largest investment bank, Bear Stearns, imploded. In a ...