Articles

Copying and pasting emails. Inventing meaningless tasks for others. Just looking busy. Why do so many people feel their work is completely unnecessary?

On November 9, the day Germany celebrated the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, standing on Alexanderplatz, we observed something extraordinary: nobody was there.

What is a revolution? We used to think we knew. Revolutions were seizures of power by pop- ular forces aiming to transform the very nature of the political, social, and economic system in the country in which the revolution took place, usually according to some visionary dream of a just society.

I’ve been asked to respond to the review of Utopia of Rules by Anastasia Piliavsky, but I must confess I find myself rather at a loss for how to do so.
The book is a collection of essays (I had originally wanted to call it “Three Essays on Bureaucracy”) which I had hoped might spark a debate about what I call the present “age of total bureaucratization.”

There is a growing feeling, among those who have the responsibility of managing large economies, that the discipline of economics is no longer fit for purpose. It is beginning to look like a science designed to solve problems that no longer exist.

On Saturday, 16th October 2010, some 500 activists gathered at convergence points across Lon- don, knowing only that they were about to embark on a direct action called Crude Awakening, aimed against the ecological devastation of the global oil industry, but with no clear idea of what they were about to do.

Remember those plucky Kurdish forces who so heroically defended the Syrian city of Kobane from Isis? They risk being wiped out by Nato.
The autonomous Kurdish region of Rojava in Northeast Syria, which includes Kobane, faces invasion.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the age of revolutions is not over. It’s becoming equally clear that the global revolutionary movement in the twenty first century, will be one that traces its origins less to the tradition of Marxism, or even of socialism narrowly defined, but of anarchism.

We would like to offer some initial thoughts on exactly how the art world can operate simultaneously as a dream of liberation, and a structure of exclusion; how its guiding principle is both that everyone should really be an artist, and that this is absolutely and irrevocably not the case.

The Romantic legacy has by no means disappeared from the contemporary art world—it’s just retained only its most elitist elements. We still worship the individual genius, mad, tortured, or otherwise; what has been purged is any explicit belief that we all begin as artists, and could, in a future society in which forms of institutional violence are rooted out, become artists once again.

In the first two parts of this essay, we analyzed the contemporary art world less in terms of how it works than in terms of what it does, in what is at stake in its existence.