2nd July-4pm: READING CAPITAL POLITICALLY

Saturday 2nd July – 4PM
READING CAPITAL POLITICALLY
READING GROUP SESSION I

Okk/room 29
Prinzenallee 29
13359 Berlin

Join us to discuss Reading Capital Politically by Harry Cleaver.
This is the link to the book as pdf.

As social movements waned in the late 70s, the study of Marx seemed to take on a life of its own. Structuralist, post-structuralist, deconstructed Marxes bloomed in journals and seminar rooms across the US and Europe. These Marxes and their interpreters struggled to interpret the world, and sometimes to interpret Marx himself, losing sight at times of his dictum that the challenge is not to interpret the world but to change it. In 1979, Harry Cleaver tossed an incendiary device called Reading Capital Politically into those seminar rooms. Through a close reading of the first chapter, he shows that Das Kapital was written for the workers, not for academics, and that we need to expand our idea of workers to include housewives, students, the unemployed, and other non-waged workers. Reading Capital Politically provides a theoretical and historical bridge between struggles in Europe in the 60s and 70s and, particularly, the Autonomia of Italy to the Zapatistas of the 90s.

3rd July-5pm: OUR FRIENDSHIPS ARE CONSTRUCTED ON THE BASIS OF CONFLICT – COLLECTIVELY PRODUCED FILM AND VIDEO

Sunday 3rd July 2011 – 5PM
OUR FRIENDSHIPS ARE CONSTRUCTED ON THE BASIS OF CONFLICT
– COLLECTIVELY PRODUCED FILM AND VIDEO
SCREENING

West Germany
Skalitzer Straße 133
10999 Berlin
Entrance: free, suggested donation 3-5 EUR

Who made these movies? We did it together! This series features films and videos by media makers around the globe who operate as collectives, using group identities rather than assuming individual authorship. Whether a political statement or an artistic choice, working collectively means combining many individual visions into a cohesive whole – egos will be crushed.

An earlier version of this series was presented over 5-days at the Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn, NY.

5PM
—Everything Has Been Done – Azorro, 2003, 6 minutes (Polish with English subtitles)
—Builders – Chto Delat, 2005, 8 minutes (Russian with English subtitles)
—Oury Jalloh – Ak Kraak 2008, 5 minutes (English, German with English subtitles)
—Ethnoprop, 2008 – Ak Kraak, 2 minutes (German with English subtitles)
—Kraak-Reisen, 2008 – Ak Kraak, 2 minutes  (German with English subtitles)
—Nagai Park Elegy – Leo Sato [Nakazaki-cho Documentary Space), 2009, 63 minutes (Japanese with English subtitles)

Member of Ak Kraak will be present.

7PM

—Hope and Failure: Investigations in the American Dream 1 – Global Alien, 3 minutes (English)
—Hope and Failure: Investigations in the American Dream 2 – Global Alien, 18 minutes (English)
—The Terror and the Time – The Victor Jara Collective, 1978, 75 minutes (English)

Members of Global Alien will be present.

9PM
—Garbage – Newsreel, 1968, 10 minutes (English)
—Cop Humiliation in Their Own Domain – Voina, 2008, 12 minutes (Russian with English subtitles)
—Dick Captured by KGB! – Voina, 2010, 3 minutes (Russian)
—As a Crowd Gathers, Red Channels 2011, 40 minutes (English)

Members of Red Channels will be present.

4-12 July: RED CHANNELS MEETS RED MEGAPHONE – KUHLE WAMPE REVISITED

4-12 July
RED CHANNELS MEETS RED MEGAPHONE
– KUHLE WAMPE REVISITED
COLLECTIVE AUDIO VISUAL RESEARCH

Monday July 4th – 9PM
PART I
SCREENING AND DISCUSSION

b_books
Lübbener Straße 14
10997 Berlin

—Ø, Red Channels, 2011, 4 minutes
—From Wall Street to Wall Street to Wall Street, Red Channels, 2011, English, 5minutes
—Kuhle Wampe – Slatan Dudow, 1932, 68 minutes (German with English subtitles)
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 77 minutes | Digital Projection

PART II: (flexible schedule)
WORK-IN PROGRESS MEETINGS, DISCUSSIONS, EDITING-SESSIONS
okk/room29
Prinzenallee 29
13359 Berlin

Tuesday 12 July – 8pm
PART III
PRESENTATION AT OKK/ROOM 29

How is it possible to invent new forms of solidarity in times of imposed capitalist absurdity? How can we define new spaces of struggle against the suffering of budget cuts, mass unemployment and nationalist threat? And not what is to be done, but how is it to be done?

“Kuhle Wampe, or Who Owns The World” was a communist avant-garde cinema project conceived in the Berlin summer of 1932, under an atmosphere of no money, no time, and extreme political oppression. Immediately censored after its release by both the German state and the Soviet Union, Kuhle Wampe explores the tension between the petite bourgeoisie family and the principle of collective solidarity.

For the week following our screening of Kuhle Wampe, we will be based out of okk/room29 in Berlin-Wedding. We hope to facilitate a collective response to the film, open to all. Using video as our primary means of documentation, we invite everybody to collaborate with us on this research project, which is open to any media or practice.

We want to reimagine, retrace, remix, reenact, and reload Kuhle Wampe.
We want to film, perform, intervene, interrogate, walk, bike and sing Kuhle Wampe.
We want to create a cinematic compilation of our collective responses to Kuhle Wampe.

Free. Bring equipment if you have it.
Languages: German, English, Denglish.

Sign up to participate: martyna@redchannels.org

Texts on “Kuhle Wampe” and its historical context can be found here.

7th July-7pm: THE HUMAN STRIKE

Thursday July 7 – 7PM
THE HUMAN STRIKE
READING GROUP SESSION II

Okk/room 29
Prinzenallee 29
13359 Berlin

Join us to discuss two short texts by the French collective Claire Fontaine:
- Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike: A Few Clarifications
- Human Strike within the Field of the Libidinal Economy

More about Claire Fontaine:
- Notes on the “Human Strike” or the “Grève humaine”
- Interview with Claire Fontaine by Realismus Working Group
- Website of Claire Fontaine

One of the aspects of human strike is the rejection of activity, but this is somehow the aspect that the idea of human strike has in common with the one of general strike. Human strike is above all the interruption and the change of a behaviour that feeds oppression in an unapparent way. The movement of women is the best example: it fought amongst other things domestic exploitation, the implicit injunction to take responsibility for the care, the love, the infrastructure, the projections of male desires and so on. So human strike is the de-identification with one’s professional identity, which is a process that is always part of strikes, but that only becomes essential when the movement generalizes and when it reaches other categories of workers or people. This de-identification, de-subjectivation if you wish, is supposed to occur at the very first stage of the human strike in order to make it potentially general since the beginning and also immediately effective. The change is decreed and then other people join the struggle. It is maybe the only possible way to fight today for many.

(Historical Fiction as Realism, Claire Fontaine in an Interview with Realism Working Group)

July 11– 7.30pm: ARMED LOVE: A WALKING TOUR OF RED AND BLACK SITES OF ATTACK

Monday July 11– 7.30PM
ARMED LOVE: A WALKING TOUR OF RED AND BLACK SITES OF ATTACK
WALKING TOUR

Meeting point: Wiener Strasse 1-6 (in front of the mosque, U1 – Gōrlitzer Bahnhof)
Meeting time: 7.30pm

Starting at Berlin’s magic hour, the last hour of sunlight, we will convene a walking tour of sites attacked by leftist groups including “Bewegung 2. Juni”, “Rote Zora”, and others.

This tour follows a “Days of Rage” tour we organized in Chicago last March, retracing the first action organized by the Weatherman in October 1968; as well as a tour in Manhattan this May following bombings from 1920-2008 by the anarchist Galleanists, the FALN (Armed Forces of National Liberation), MIRA (Armed Revolutionary Independence Movement), WUO (Weather Underground Organization), and Sam Melville and Jane Alpert.

Sign up: armedlove@redchannels.org

July 10 – 8pm: LESS FETISH, MORE ACTION! ALL POWER TO COLLECTIVITY!

Sunday July 10 – 8pm
LESS FETISH, MORE ACTION! ALL POWER TO COLLECTIVITY!
ENCOUNTER AND DISCUSSION

Red Channels in discussion with Global Alien, Ak Kraak and Metanationale

Newyorck im Bethanien
Haus Bethanien Südflügel
Mariannenplatz 2
10997 Berlin

Creative forces often group temporarily together and experiment with identities and methods in plural. Thereby they activate “collective intelligences” (Pierre Lévy), and often recreate the rules of the game and liberate as a form of a “generalized aesthetics for once less fetishes than rather forces for action” (Michel Onfray).
Dr. Birte Kleine-Benne, Working Together in the Art of the Next Society, 2010

How do we gather around affinities and desires?
How do we take decisions together?
How do we invent new politics when working through our inter-collective conflicts?
How do our collective identities defy the categories of art and politics, activism and the media?