1. First, everyone should read this intervention by some Michigan folks into the the politics of the general assembly-form. I really appreciate both the substance of the authors' critique, ("Ultimately the long, drawn out, romantically declarative GA felt like a fetishistic performance of what we imagined politics to be") and the way in which they raise it, which I think provides a sympathetic but also rigorously critical account of what kinds of political imaginary is at work in the general assembly and the role it was understood to play by many participants in the post 9/17/2011 occupy movement. I'm particularly appreciative of the position of critical solidarity the authors chart, which strikes me as a less abstracted (and certainly more charitable) but equally valuable critique of the GA to that found in, say, The Coming Insurrection. I do have a couple criticisms of the piece, neither of which pertain to the four hypotheses which constitute the main argumentative thrust of the article and which are, I think, entirely correct. First, as someone who spent most of the fall of 2011 hanging around Occupy Boston GAs, I think the authors are a bit too quick to let the large urban GAs off the hook in drawing an early contrast between the Zuccotti Park GAs and those in smaller and more intimate locales such as university campuses. As the authors themselves note, neither “better facilitation” nor “bigger GAs” would have changed the political valence of the Occupy model." Second, the article concludes with some more general conclusions on campus organizing. I think there's much to agree with here, especially the insistence that the university is a "trap" which our struggles must escape. But, for the moment, the authors cast the student as the privileged subject of radical organizing. There may be sociological evidence for this as a demographic reality, (fuck if I know) but I think it forecloses some escape routes by unintentionally erasing the other political subjects of the university and/or positing them as secondary to the students' struggle, to be organized by the students at a later date once the students have organized themselves. Without fetishizing trade unionism I would like to note that noninstructional university workers and other members of the "communities that surround us" have their own histories of struggle against and beyond the university we need to learn more from. Nevertheless I think this reflection and its hypotheses are exciting and I.m definitely looking forward to seeing what conversations and/or occupations follow them.
2. Another must-read: Prima Porta on austerity and/as the crisis of the social reproduction of the wage relation
The fight against austerity can only go in one direction: towards supplying ourselves with the materials and tools necessary for living together, reproducing ourselves as an ensemble: a commune. At the very least, we might start by rejecting the model of the nuclear family tout court - personally, but also politically (in this sense, queer theory and communization theory align on the question of the family). Patriarchy is at issue here, but is not the only issue; the persistence of the family-form has long served to atomize and contain proletarian communities, branding the inclination to socialize as a leisure activity without political standing and applying the mold of the nuclear family as a means of disciplining the poor, preventing extended families and expanded societies from acquiring economic validity. It is therefore not enough to merely laud promiscuity or polyamory; we must also seek to demolish the economic priority of the family-form, replacing it with the commune-form. This means politicizing the decision to separate into isolated families, agitating to subvert the reproductive importance of the heterosexual couple. Practices of communist child-rearing are in order, and also of communist sexuality; we will not find them in utopian experiments, however, but rather in political activity contra capital. There can be no avoidance of anti-austerity struggles, in other words; but only when we refuse austerity in the name of no future will emancipation be possible in the here and now.
3. Darwin Bond-Graham on the University of California's role in Monsanto's privatization of agriculture
4. Princeton's suppressed a survey of female students in which 1 in 6 reported being raped during their time at the university. Rape is notoriously underrated on campuses, and Princeton is neither the only nor the first institution to "juke the stats" in such a manner. I am not defending Princeton. Princeton needs to be communized. Let's all dance in the ruins of its eating clubs. Etc. But the methodical disappearing of sexual violence by university administrations seems to be a pandemic condition rather than an isolated or egregious incident. So, fuck them all.
5. David Price and Marshall Sahlins on Chagnon, military research, and the National Academy of Sciences.
6. nepotism here: my brother's band Krallice, IIIIIIII (Acheron, Brooklyn, 3.2.2013)
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