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against the biotechnology of the domination info campain

international preparation meeting 19 - 21 october
squat DELTA thessaloniki

The network peoples global action is a global project inspired by zapatista
insurrection and the new forms of internationalism developed in the 90s. But
what does PGA mean?

From the 23th until the 25th of February 1998, movements from all around the
world met in Geneva-Switzerland to discuss the idea of a network of
resistance against the global market and the WTO. PGA is a network based on
decentralisation and autonomy, a network without representatives, members or
juridical personality.

The PGA network in europe has allready attempted and organised 4 meetings.
Several hundreds of activists, exchanged experiences and prospects,
organised campaigns and actions, reclaimed the daily communication via
internet and physical meetings. These meetings took place in Milan (italy)
2001, in Laiden (the netherlands) 2002, in belgrade post yugoslavia 2004 and
in southern france 2006 (the centralised meeting took place in Dijon).

The majority of the PGA meetings (3 out of 4) took place in physical
autonomous spaces. That was clearly a political choice. For the people and
the collectives involved in the PGA it is vitally important to support
autonomous projects, spaces where people try to organise their daily life
beyond the capitalistic relations of dominance.

After a lot of difficulties and problems to find a space and a convenor to
moderate the next PGA conference, activists from the greek region launched
and encourage the idea of a PGA conference in north greece. Choosing this
location was the outcome of lengthy discussions which will be included in
the presentation text (call out) for the 5th PGA conference.

Not only for the needs of this conference but also for the further
networking and coordination of the resistance we are starting a one-month
infotour in the balkan region.

Following the belgrade conference in 2004 there has been great enthusiasm
about the beginning of a balkan network of collectives, grassroots,
antiauthoritarian, anticapitalist and other groups or individuals.
Unfortunately, this enthusiasm was not fruitful enough perhaps due to the
lack of concrete objectives, or even perhaps some  participants sensed the
traditional "networking for the networking" problem.

The idea of an infotour is not a novelty. Nonetheless, it is the first time
activists from a balkan country decided to visit groups and individuals who
share resembling ideas and the face similar problems.

We feel necessary to stress the following concepts about the infotour:

a) Not only we begin this journey on the occasion of the PGA conference,
which alone is a perfect opportunity to meet and act in solidarity in the
future, but also we aim to discuss, perhaps for the first time, about tools
and ideas that can give us ability to border on common grounds.

b) To call anti-authoritarian, autonomous anti-capitalistic and other groups
groups to assist in the shaping and the organisation of the PGA conference.

c) To discuss and exchange views on the current status in the Balkans, the
rise of capitalism and the state violence, especially after the wall has
fallen and a series of wars have ravaged this region.

d) Finally, we want to emphasise that our call targets on groups,
collectives and individuals who act and think of themselves beyond
hierarchical social structures, who struggle against dominance and
capitalism without consent.

Although a more detailed subject list will follow in the near future, aiming
to analyse issues that will either be discussed in the upcoming PGA
conference or have been discussed in previous conferences, we briefly state
that we are currently working on the following subjects:

- Digital struggles and tools for an alternative flow of information /
indymedia tools - radio projects etc.

- Against biotechnology of dominance and biotechnology corporate lobbies

- Autonomous spaces

- Precarity

- No border

- The Balkans

- The Middle East

- Student Struggles

- Zapatistas and indigenous spaces

- Eco-communities (land and autonomy)

- Antiglobalisation movement (g8, summits etc)

- Repression / control state and Solidarity

- Patriarchy, sexism in the activist scene

- Climate change and environmental topics

- DIY

- Food not bombs

* We consider evident enough the fact that the conference subject list is
open to any additions

Working groups we wish to operate in sight of this conference:

- translation

- group for visas

- technical team

- location

- newsletter

- presentation and networking

Proposal for the discussion on the course and process of the network

*infopoint network
*global conference
*future campaigns
*future of pga
*tools of the network
*next european conference

Infotour stops and dates:

- Istanbul

- Sofia

- Romania

- Ljubljana

- Budapest

- Zagreb

contact mailto:infotour_@no-log.org

Yet another house has been squatted in Freiburg in an ongoing string of
squatting actions precipitated by the preposterous housing prices in the
area, especially the lack of dignified and affordable housing for students
and low-income persons. The privatization-fetishist Mayor (Dieter Salomon,
Green Party) spends time coddling multinational real estate speculating
firms rather than maintain or create more affordable housing. He attempted
to sell off 7900 units of public housing several months ago but failed
when a referendum went markedly against the wishes of the pro-sell-off
alliance between the conservative CDU Party and the Green Party. Fuck him
and the party he rode in on.
Mayor Salomon has also eagerly called for substantial police violence
against squatters in the past (as well as students and activist
convention-goers), so it is expected that a horde of his green-clad
stormtrooper thugs will be arriving soonish.

You can express your thoughts to him here:
 http://www.freiburg.de/servlet/PB/menu/1161132/index.html

we ve discussed tonight with a few activists from greece and we decided 
to try to meet again next wednesday, same time:
9 pm - greece
8 pm - germany
7 pm - uk

it'll be probably rather a small irc chat
topic will be *greek convenorship*
but you can also fit in with *topic proposals* for the wintermeeting

the channel will be irc.indymedia.org #pga

tuesday 21-2

  Hope-producing political hardware looks as rusty as ever, yet rust
never sleeps. From Berlin to Palestine, a wall is built for a wall that
falls, the Third World War faded into the cries declaring the desperate
triumph of the Fourth with the 1991 Iraq invasion. Each expedition brings
home bitter loot. What is it worth?

      The language of the media which confuses genocide with crusade, and
bombardment with humanitarian intervention can hardly think up any
convincing answers. The "end of history" and the "clash of civilizations"
were announced in the same breath. In a final flicker of political radiance,
the Spectacle produced the realization that there was nothing to be said
beyond the end of time and the conflict over space. The Spectacle became its
own insurance company.

      For what is the "end of history" if not the very description of the
full-scale occupation by Capital of Time. What is the end of history for the
neo-liberal conception of social evolution if not the desired completion of
the process of colonization at once of populations at large and of
individual bodies, turning every day into productive * durations *and every
body into a sum of recyclable parts?

      And what is the alleged "conflict of cultures" if not a series of
violent arrangements of space ownership and access? Any effective resistance
to the blind tumult of capital is labelled "cultural" so that it can be
explained away through a deactivated term, so that it can be blunted by the
logic of perpetual war and economic imposition, the logic that goes beyond
all "culture". After all, the commodity relationship itself, and the
processes by which it spreads spatially and temporally, form the ultimate
"culture of cultures". There is controlled access to everything, control of
borders, control of data circulation, control of resources like water, oil,
knowledge or medicine - how "cultural" is resistance to control?

      All agree that security is the main ideological commodity which can
still safely reproduce itself, even more so since 9/11. Security preserves
the sperm of fear within its cryogenic womb. But then, *why all this fun*?
The "Western world" still consumes pornography, takes training courses in
management and self-promotion, campaigns for voting at elections where arty
types like Cicciolina or Reagan have been replaced by fundamentalist
Christians and neo-con ecologists, floods history museums (out of a radical
inability to feel nostalgia for any viable future), joins mass
demonstrations advertized on TV for football, for peace, for the pope, for
Orthodox or Muslim minorites and majorities, goes furious over abortions or
drugs, actively supports the barter of human organs and the pharmaceutical
industry…

The subjects of the Antiterrorist Empire do not cease to piously celebrate
the daily rituals of the capitalist calender, whether they derive from the
old world of Enlightenment ideals, or the even older one of submission to
the priesthood. What kind of apocalypse are they expecting? What is keeping
the societies of surplus value from exploding?

      The effective propagandas of democracy, consumerism, or socialism in
the last century just about managed to keep the ideology of the "active
citizen" alive. Their credibility would lose vital points with every
Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Vietnam or Chernobyl. But at least each camp in the
Cold War had its own distinct rhetoric.

      Today, two acts after the curtain call of the Cold War, the language
of the spectacle of terrorism, while never boring or exhausted, can
nevertheless hardly keep reproducing the fear that created it in the first
place. Fear might be productive as a parasite, yet it is sterile when it
cannot feed on a counter-feeling like  hope, hate, or greed: hence the
conservative turn. Yet capitalism cannot survive forever on its bygone
glories. It cannot restore the political promises of the old world of the
liberals who talked of freedom of transport and consumption, social mobility
and easy trade, or of the communists who preferred to talk of equality
before the law, mass education, and independence of the people and its
productive classes…*For sheer long-term effectivity and intensity,
traditional political illusions cannot compete with plastic surgery and
brain transplants*.

      There is only one promise that carries the magic wand of a unifying
ideology. Its twin roots are the deceptive impression that one can
manufacture the human species in an optimal codification of its ingredients
on the one hand, and the twisted desire to overcome all technical limits to
intervening with life on the other. *Sounds like the swan song of culture:
The fear of death is mingled with a guilty drive for self-destruction.*

      It seems the only stable and constant 'content', rather than form, of
images, genetically programmed into the Spectacle, is the *biotic discourse*:
From facelifts to diets, from biometrics to iridology, to cloning and
genetic engineering of plants, a new totalitarianism is steadily attacking
and corrupting the Social Question. Three basic ideas inspire the
metaphysical technoscientific propaganda, the research programmes and the
market of biotechnology: the generalization of intelligence, the mass
restoration of health and the ending of poverty. These three ideas
ironically address people who have lost all intelligent hope (otherwise how
would they ever trust those in charge?), people who die of the diseases of
civilization, (like heart disease and cancer, but know there are no research
funds left for older diseases claiming millions of lives in the Third
World), and who see wealth growing at the same rate as the inequality of its
distribution. Yet the hope is born of a fundamental fear of managers and
politicians before the last magical process on earth. How can they actually
control human, animal and plant reproduction, the last vestige of whatever
Nature ever used to be? That is their question.

      The reversal of the genitive in the title of this text, the
biotechnology of spectacle and the spectacle of biotechnology, offers, we
feel, a precise description of our age, rather than yet another go at
nostalgic wordplay. Biotechnology, the endpoint of technoscientific military
progress and also the only hope for the industrial amelioration of the
species, is the dominant content of the Spectacle and provides its main
ideological justification. Biotechnology is the utopia of the Spectacle.
Reversely, the Spectacle today can unravel* * its entire biopolitical
influence, after it has managed to usurp all aspects of life. Capital fully
classifies and consumes the time and space of all conceivable entities, from
genes to planets, while the logic of the Commodity duplicates and claims the
creative processes of conscience.

      The biotic discourse directly aims at the body, separating it from its
voice, its time and its space. Today's emerging type of person listens to
their own voice dubbed on TV through synchronized speaking. Their everyday
time is departmentalized into work time, free time, sleep time - partytime
for biopolitics. Their time produces capital intensively until Time becomes
capital itself. Their space is a measured quantity pending between material
virtuality and virtual materiality: From the nucleus of the universe to the
remotest galaxy, the norm is set by property rights, patents, access codes
and data banks, all with emergency button attached for every violation.

      And what are we to do? Does it suffice to merely demystify reality
with the conventional weapon of a crystal historical conscience? If the
Spectacle always determined publicity, was it ever enough to merely talk of
"seeking the Truth" through "exposing lies", in an effort to counter the
effects of propaganda through propaganda? Geneticists believe they can pose
(and solve) the question of conscience in a slightly altered fashion: The
DNA chaingang workers and the gene conspiracy theorists believe they will
soon "demystify" the function of the human brain itself and will thus
explain the mechanics of ideas - and while they're at it, why not also the
historical evolution of human societies… Those who offer their elms for
bioethical reservations are merely dragging their good intentions along with
them on the road to hell. How long until they are convinced too?

      How are we to recognize the current dynamics of domination if we too
are blinded by the rays of biotic transparency, today's pseudopublic sphere,
for which all social pathologies are reduced to matters of genetic
correctibility? Biopolitics, more than an echo of postmodernist mottos, is
about the genome, the elementary building unit, as much as it is about the
global family, it is about the Soul as much as it is about the Ecumene, it
cannot distinguish between subject and object, it resides within
institutions and is reproduced by them, you cannot escape it, since there is
no escape from the prison of language or the prison of power-knowledge.
There is no subject, there is only "subjectivity", there are no
relationships between people, there is only a certain substance, capitalist
value, which runs through their blood stream and determines their needs.

      Indeed, how can one talk of subjects, when the objectivity against
which the subject is measured (nature and society) is merely the mirror
image of a quantitatively database, a kind of planetary bio-mass? For
bio-ideology, natural selection favours less densely populated areas with
charismatic bio-types. Biotypes on overpopulated territories, consisting of
slums, shantytowns and pure border areas, tend to be fundamentalist, poor
and uneducated, they are useful when they don't do too much noise at work,
and also serve as human spare-parts: that way they are productive even after
they are dead.

      A population management based mainly on the collection of data and on
the design and employment of disciplinary methods within existing
institutions, (which often operate on their lower hierarchical levels as
"participatory" and "representative" organizations), has almost established
a new nature. It looks like it has always been there.  Resistance looks
impossible, if not irrational. For the first time, the principles of
democracy are cooperating so smoothly with forms of outright totalitarianism
in order to disseminate the feelings of confusion and impotence. War is
named peace, every time a military attack (Iraq, Bosnia, or Afghanistan
lately) is named a humanitarian intervention. But, more to the point, peace
is actual war. The condition of peace is perpetual war against the whole of
society, a society potentially "criminal" and "ill", that can only be saved
by the systems of institutionalization, surveillance and scientific
correction.

      In his *Comments to the Society of the Spectacle, * Guy Debord wrote
that "once the running of state involves a permanent and massive shortage of
historical knowledge, that State can no longer be led strategically." Is
there a strategy then? Is the war machine of technoscientific Spectacle,
promising wholesale immortality and mass intelligence and wealth, actually
programmed to lead somewhere? Is there any farreaching plan to clone and
train a new bionic elite alongside indefatigable and obedient
soldier-slaves? Is there any plan as to where to end the vicious circle of
pharmaceuticals that function as antidotes to other pharmaceuticals, where
to set a limit to patents on life? It looks like there isn't one.
      We definitely have no excuse whatsoever to rely on the biotic
pseudo-discourse. They want us to decide: Do we or don't we want to know the
percentage of gmos in supermarket products, do we or don't we accept gm
crops next to conventional ones, do we or don't we like cloning, pesticides,
family programming, cosmetic surgery etc etc? The process of dehumanization
cannot be halted through such false dilemmas. Dilemmas phrased that way are
designed to keep us blind to the paranoia of those who manage and monitor
society through their industries and governments, and to condition us into
believing that it is all up to the voter-consumer's momentary choice at the
counter. We should never allow ourselves the comfortable illusion that it's
all a matter of handling our individual consumer guilt. Awareness of the
biotechnology of the spectacle and the spectacle of biotechnology refines
our understanding of capitalist domination today and our collective tactics
to resist it.

news from berlin and elsewhere!

Friday, December 7, 2007

newsletter#3 inspired by PGA

Monday, November 19, 2007

pga logo

Sunday, October 7, 2007

Monday, July 30, 2007

Friday, July 27, 2007

Friday, June 1, 2007

pga flyer for the g8

Saturday, May 5, 2007

Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

irc chat on wintermeeting postponed! NEW DATE

Monday, February 12, 2007

pga wintermeting 23-25 february

Thursday, February 1, 2007

pga hallmarks

HALLMARKS:

hits

Balkan Decentralized Network

other PGA infopoints in the world

links with blogs

links with web sites

PGA infopoint in Berlin

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