Show 11/7

Teishan and Pete stoke the airwaves on a cold and rainy saturday with red-hot news and analysis of the recent Students of Sustainability conference; the aniversary of the 1999 student uprising in Iran in relation to the current movement challenging the status quo in Iran, at the forefront of which are Iranian students; the Victorian Government’s planned ‘Harmony Walk’, supposedly to promote tolerance in the face of racist attacks on Indian students, but which Indian students will not be allowed to address!  – will this turn into another cynical attempt to shore up the international student market by stifling the voices of international students?And the funding crisis at the notorious Central Queensland University.

Next up we take the blowtorch to a recently penned revolutionary manifesto out of France, “The Coming Insurrection”.  This particular book forms the primary evidence against the ‘Tarnac Nine’, who are up against terrorism charges for disrupting the French public transport system. Written in the style of the situationist manifestos of Guy Debord, and channelling the spectre of Marx’s Communist Manifesto (updated by a whole gamut of contemporary left theorists out of Europe, from Antonio Negri to Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben), it gives a devastating analysis of the contemporary state of capitalist society. “We have to see that the economy is not ‘in’ crisis”, the authors state, “the economy is itself the crisis.” But the authors see in the very forms this perpetual crisis and emergency of capitalism take the potential for alternative forms of collective existence: squat the empty buildings, occupy the flailing factories, form “communes”, the authors shout. Will this text be swept into the dustheap of history with so many other revolutionary texts, or stoke the fires of insurrection against capitalist hegemony? Read it here and decide for yourself – click ‘download printable booklet’ for the English translation.

About these ads

Posted in: Shows 2009