Imaginary Futures

Imaginary Futures is published in Polish

admin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:52:09 +0000

Przyszłości Wyobrażone - the Polish translation by Jan Dzierzgowski of Imaginary Futures - has been published by Muza SA in their Spectrum series. For more information, check out the Muza website.

ANARCHISM

Richard Barbrook — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 22:52:16 +0000

The 1872 Hague Congress of the International Workingmen’s Association
The split in the First International:
British, German & Dutch Sections v. Swiss, Spanish & Italian Sections
Socialism v. Anarchism
Karl Marx v. Mikhail Bakunin
mass party v. revolutionary conspiracy
democratic republic v. local communes
working class v. peasants, students & bandits
organised labour v. spontaneous uprisings

Bakuninists’ forerunners of anarchism:
William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1789)
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property? (1840)
Max Stirner, Ego and His Own (1845)

1889 Second International: parliamentary socialism, trade unions and cooperatives
German Social Democratic Party, British Labour Party and French Socialist Party
Friedrich Engels, The Bakuninists at Work
Paul Thomas, Karl Marx and the Anarchists

Libertarianism: invisible dictatorship, propaganda of the deed and collectives
Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy
Sergei Nechaev, The Catechism of a Revolutionary
Errico Malatesta, Anarchy

Individualist anarchism v. collectivist anarchism

Anarchist terrorism:
Tsar Alexander II (1881), US President McKinley (1901)
Sidney Street siege (1911), Bonnot gang (1911-12)

Anarcho-syndicalism:
General Strike, labour exchanges and workers’ cooperatives
CGT in France, CNT in Spain and IWW in USA
1905 Russian Revolution
Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence
Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid

Socialist Maximalism: anti-parliamentary and syndicalist
Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions

Outbreak of 1st World War 1914: patriotism v. internationalism
Benito Mussolini, National Syndicalism, Italian Fascism and the corporate state

October 1917 Russian Revolution
Marx + Bakunin = Bolshevism
vanguard party, revolutionary dictatorship and worker-peasant alliance
1918 dissolution of Constituent Assembly
1921 suppression of the Kronstadt Soviet
V.I. Lenin, State & Revolution
Karl Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat

1919 Third International
Totalitarian Communism v. Council Communism
V.I. Lenin, Left-Wing Communism: an infantile disorder
Anton Pannekoek, World Revolution and Communist Tactics

1936 Spanish Revolution
Barcelona workers’ uprising v. fascist military coup
CNT, FAI and the Durruti Column
workers’ militias and peasants’ cooperatives
Popular Front against fascism
1937 Barcelona May Days:
Catalan Nationalists, Stalinists and Socialists v. Anarchists and POUM
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
Abel Paz, Durruti

New Left revival of anarchism:
1956 Hungarian Revolution and the Budapest Workers’ Council
1957 CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) and the Aldermaston marches
1964 Free Speech Movement in UC Berkeley
1965 American invasion of Vietnam
Hippie counter-culture: folk music, rock ‘n’ roll, festivals, happenings, pot, LSD and rural communes
Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism
Charles Reich, The Greening of America
Abbie Hoffman, Woodstock Nation

May ‘68 French Revolution
Sorbonne occupation, general strike and worker-student alliance
Situationist International, Kommune 1 and Italian Autonomism
urban squats, rural communes, feminism, gay liberation and anti-racism
Weather Underground, Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof Gang
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
Dany & Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism: the left-wing alternative
Toni Negri, Revolution Retrieved

Punk subculture: independent labels, pirate radio and fanzines
Sex Pistols, Anarchy in the UK (1976)
Class War (1983-9), Stop the City (1983-4, Bash the Rich marches (1984-5) and Poll Tax riot (1990)
Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming
Class War, A Decade of Disorder

Post-modern anarchism: new social movements, anti-prisons and anti-psychiatry
Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish
Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Thousand Plateaus

Green anarchism:
Earth First!, monkey wrenching and primitivism
Theodore Kaczynski, The Unabomber Manifesto
John Zerzan, Why Primitivism?

Alter-globalisation movement:
1999 Seattle protests, World Social Forum and the Black Block
IndyMedia, DIY Culture and social networks
Toni Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire
George McKay, DiY Culture
nettime.org
metamute.org

Imaginary Futures Author at Transmediale 10

admin — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 23:19:44 +0000

Dr Richard Barbrook will be appearing at Transmediale 10 to open its The Futurity Long Conversation - ‘a relay of one-to-one conversations, brings 21 leading artists, designers, theorists, journalists and media interventionists together to discuss, contextualise and explore the abstract and qualitative elements defining what we conceive of the future today’ - at 1.00pm on Friday 5th February in Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany. For more information, check out the Transmediale website.

Editora Peirópolis Publishes Futuros Imaginários

admin — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 16:24:17 +0000

Editora Peirópolis from São Paulo, Brazil, have just published Futuros Imaginários - das máquinas pensantes à aldeia global - the Portuguese translation of Imaginary Futures. Richard Barbrook will be visiting the country over the next two weeks for a lecture tour to promote the book. His first appearance will be at the International Seminar “Information, Power, and Politics: new institutional and technological mediations” on 15th-17th April at the Auditorium of the CPRM – Research Company for Mineral Resources, Av. Pasteur, 404, 4th floor, Urca, Rio de Janeiro.

Buy the book

Download the pdf version

Imaginary Futures Author at Creative Cities Symposium in Vienna

Richard Barbrook — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 20:12:25 +0000

Dr Richard Barbrook will be giving a talk entitled ‘Creative Labour and Proletarian Playtime’ at the ORF Symposium on Creative Cities on the afternoon of Tuesday 31st March at RadioKulturhaus, Großer Sendesaal, Argentinierstraße 30a, 1040 Wien, Austria.

For more details, check out the ORF website.

Imaginary Futures Author at Transmediale ‘09

admin — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 18:56:24 +0000

Dr Richard Barbrook will speaking the Transmediale Festival ‘09 in the session on ‘How Enthusiasts, Amateurs and Hobbyists Shape the (Music) World’ at 3.00pm on Tuesday 27th February at Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien, Mariannenplatz 2. 10997 Berlin-Kreuzberg. For further details, see the Transmediale Festival website.

imaginary futures at the Radiator Festival

Richard Barbrook — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 14:58:11 +0000

Dr Richard Barbrook will speaking about Imaginary Futures at the 4th Radiator Festival - “Exploits in the Wireless City” - on Thursday afternoon on 15th March at the Broadway Media Centre, Nottingham, England. For further details, see the Radiator festival website.

Imaginary Futures at St. Petersburg Art Academy

Richard Barbrook — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 07:04:23 +0000

Dr. Richard Barbrook will speaking about Imaginary Futures as part of a Digital Artisans’ Evening at the ProArte Institute in the Peter & Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg on Wednesday 26th November. For further details, see the ProArte Institute’s website: http://www.proarte.ru

imaginary Futures at Cold War Culture conference

Richard Barbrook — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 17:04:45 +0000

Dr. Richard Barbrook will be appearing at the Cold War Culture conference which takes place at the Victoria & Albert museum in London on Friday 21st - Saturday 22nd November. This major conference brings together some of the most exciting thinkers on art, design and architecture in the post-1945 period to reflect on the ways in which Cold War politics shaped art and design. Organised in conjunction with the V&A’s landmark Cold War Modern exhibition, it offers new perspectives on a period which continues to grip the imagination today.

Richard’s lecture - ‘Cold War Imaginary Futures: cybernetic communism and the information society’ - is scheduled for the Saturday afternoon session of the confernce.

More details about the Cold War Culture conference can be found on the V&A website.

CREATIVE CITY THESES

Richard Barbrook — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:22:01 +0000

1) We Must Invent New Futures

The information society has arrived – and the McLuhanist prophecy of the network utopia has been disappointed. The critical analysis of the creative city provides an opportunity to devise new futures to guide our actions in the present.

2) The New Class of the New

Like their forebears who moved from artisan workshops into the Fordist factory, the present generation is learning how to make new things in new ways with new technologies. This study will examine how far the flattened hierarchies and cooperative ethos of cognitive capitalism are remaking the shape of the city’s economy.

3) Mapping the Creative Workforce

The emergence of a new class of the new lives is not just an economic phenomenon, but also social, political and cultural. This study will measure the vital statistics of the creative class: age, gender, ethnicity, education and ideology. In parallel, psychogeographical research will both delineate the neighbourhoods where its members congregate and trace their links with the global diaspora of intellectual labour.

4) Funky Businesses in Trendy Locations

Just like the artisan trades of medieval times, the creative sector is clustered in specific areas of the world city. Forming a distinct subculture, its members wear the same clothes, drink in the same bars, listen to the same music and share a common obsession with cutting-edge technology. This study will examine the role of these marks of distinction in forming the new class of the new.

5) The Cultural Vanguard of Property Speculation

The creative sector is making a major contribution to the regeneration of neglected inner-city areas. Unfortunately, in many cases, the original inhabitants of these neighbourhoods have been bypassed by this economic turn around. They lack the technical skills, cultural outlook and social connections required for employment within this post-industrial sector. Worst of all, an influx of creative companies and their employees causes a rapid inflation in property prices and commercial rents in the area. This study will track this gentrification of inner city neighbourhoods and how its negative consequences can be countered.

6) Self-Managed Exploitation

The neo-liberal cult of authoritarian managerial power has become an anachronism within the creative industries. Instead, as the business manuals of the dotcom boom explained, the spread of contract working and job insecurity can be rebranded as extending individual freedom and career opportunities. Among the most talented employers and employees, the measure of success isn’t just making lots of money, but also creating something cool. This research will investigate how respect and autonomy for knowledge workers are the preconditions of innovation and excellence in this sector.

7) The Carnival Economy

For most of the citizens of the world city, creativity is what happens when they’re playing outside the workplace. Within popular music, the new thing appears on the dance floor and in the streets before it’s repackaged as a commodity. This study will investigate how those who earn their living outside the creative industries are not just participating in cultural production, but also, in many cases, driving forward innovation in this sector.

8 ) Sharing Knowledge as Collective Production

The information society isn’t just a new phase of capitalism, but also an evolutionary stage beyond capitalism. Alongside orders and commodities, gifts are now one of the principle methods of organising collective labour. The technical icon of the knowledge economy – the Net – is primarily a tool for sharing knowledge not selling information. This study will examine how the principles of open architecture and open source can be extended from the virtual realm into the real world.

9) Libertarian Social Democracy

Social welfare and economic security provide the best foundations for constant change and perpetual innovation. Contrary to the neo-liberal prognosis, public housing, free healthcare, subsidised culture and state education are still the preconditions of a modern civilisation. This study will ponder how this reformist programme can be updated and extended for the new conditions of the 21st century. Political democracy requires cultural democracy. If everyone is a voter, then everyone is also a creator. When mapping out the route to the future of libertarian social democracy, our vision of the new class must become inclusive.