Roundup #1

Get Organized (On the Elections) by the Zapatista Army for National Liberation

“We don’t call for people to vote, nor do we call for them not to vote. It just doesn’t interest us. What’s more, it doesn’t worry us. What interests us as Zapatistas is knowing how to resist and confront the many heads of the capitalist system that exploits us, represses us, disappears us, and steals from us.”

Politics Without Politics by Anselm Jappe

“Everywhere, these representatives of the “radical” left end up supporting neoliberal policies. Do we need, then, to form “truly” radical parties, parties that will not founder in such swamps? Or are the reasons for these “betrayals” structural; does every instance of participation in politics inevitably lead to surrender to the market and its laws, regardless of any subjective intentions to the contrary?”

The Coming Global Civil War: Is There Any Way Out? by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

“In order to grasp the dynamic that drives the global civil war, we first have to see the relation between the icy wind of financial abstraction and the reaction of the aggressive body of society separated from its brain.”

Secular Stagnation, or is it worse? by Immanuel Wallerstein

“Here is the danger of not going far enough in critical analyses of the system. Only if one sees clearly that there is no way out of persistent stagnation can one in fact become strong enough to win the moral and political struggle. One prong of the fork stands for the replacement of capitalism by another system that will be as bad or even worse, retaining the crucial features of hierarchy, exploitation, and polarization. The other prong stands for a new system that is relatively egalitarian and relatively democratic.”

Who owns our cities – and why this urban takeover should concern us all by Saskia Sassen

“It is easy to explain the post-2008 urban investment surge as ‘more of the same’… But an examination of the current trends shows some significant differences and points to a whole new phase in the character and logics of foreign and national corporate acquisitions… We are witnessing an unusually large scale of corporate buying of whole pieces of cities in the last few years.”