Category: Work and Labour Commoning

WORK AND LABOUR COMMONING – De-commodification of Work – Cultural Work and Immaterial Work – In 2009 the OECD calculated that half of the workers of the world worked in the informal economy. By 2020 it will be 2/3 of the global working population. In fact, the technologically determinist assumption, made by some post-capitalist scholars (Mason, 2016 and Srnicek and Williams, 2015) that the world is moving towards automated, information-driven and attention-based ‘platform capitalism’ (Srnicek, 2016) or even the idea of a global proletariat (Standing, 2016) underestimates the huge scale of the global informal economy, the low-skilled manual jobs in the service and tourism economies and the feminization and racialization of the economy that started in the peripheries in 1990s, has now reached the old centres. More research needs to be done on contemporary forms of precarious, domestic, informal and semi-rural employment for instance, on the subsistence of eco-femminist perspectives of Maria Miers (1999) and Vandana Shiva (2005); the domestic economy and the reproductive commons discussed by Silvia Federici (2012) and Federica Giardini (2015) and on the informal economy (Breman, 1996, Mollona, 2005). Informal workers tend to self-organise themselves in anti-establishment and community-based political groups and undercommons for instance, the urban cooperatives in El-Alto (Zibechi, 2005) and Rio de Janeiro or Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India. An important form of labour commoning is cooperative work. Cooperativism was central in anti-colonial, anti-capitalist and anti-dictatorship movements in Latin America, India and other non-aligned regions in the 1970s and 1980s. Then in the 2000s it was appropriated by the start-ups in Silicon Valley -for instance see the domesticated version of cooperativism by Wolff (2012). Can the IRI organize itself along the principles of mutuality and of cooperative labour?

Art for UBI, Presentation, The School of Mutation, Work and Labour Commoning

Art for UBI (Manifesto) | Berlin & online Book Event

RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab is pleased to partner with IRI: the Institute of Radical Imagination for the fourth installment of the Magma Editions salon series, this time to celebrate and discuss the publication of Art for UBI (manifesto).

Sunday, November 27, 13h00
Live location (spaces limited): Berlin 10247 (in Friedrichshain) – exact address supplied on registration (see below).
Livestream: link coming soon

About the event

At this event, editors and authors of Art for UBI (manifesto) will speak and participate in a facilitated discussion about art, universal basic income and the prospects for decolonization, mutual aid and creative collaboration.

Speakers include:

Erik Bordeleau
Emanuele Braga
Julio Linares
Gabriella Riccio
Cassie Thornton

About the book

Art for UBI (published by BRUNO) is a manifesto: the world of art positions itself in favor of universal and unconditional basic income, placing in the foreground its advantageous conditions in economic, social and ecological terms. The manifesto was born as collective writing within the School of Mutations, a project of the Institute of Radical Imagination, an international platform of artists, researchers, activists and curators engaged in the experimentation of post-capitalist artistic practices.

In addition to the introduction by the curators, the volume contains the contributions of diverse artists, theorists and activists addressing UBI in the panorama of the generalized precariousness of artistic work, the demand for income in trans-feminist and decolonial struggles, mutualism practices in the independent art scene, the relationship between finance, fabulation and crypto philosophy.

Editors: Marco Baravalle, Emanuele Braga, Gabriella Riccio

Contributors: Emanuele Braga, Kuba Szreder, Ilenia Caleo, Maddalena Fragnito and Raising Care Assembly, Gabriela Cabaña and Julio Linares, Erik Bordeleau

About the venue, access and comfort

This event is happening in a private home that is on the third floor. There is no elevator. We ask all participants to avoid using scented products. Some presenters may show images.

Light refreshments will be served.

About the hosts

RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab is a workshop for the radical imagination, social justice and decolonization with an office in Thunder Bay, Canada and activities around the world. Magma Editions is RiVAL’s Berlin salon series, hosted by Cassie Thornton and Max Haiven.

The Institute of Radical Imagination is a think-tank inviting experts – political scientists, economists, lawyers, architects, hackers, activists, artists and cultural producers to share knowledge on a continuous base with the aim of defining and implementing zones of post-capitalism in Europe’s South and the Mediterranean. The think-tank works nomadically across the nodes of the network – Madrid, Athens, Istanbul, Cairo, Palestine, Naples – and connects with other nodes in “global south” – Eastern Europe, Latin America, South-East Asia.

Registration for the live Berlin event

As the venue is a private residence and space is limited, all participants must pre-register and the address will be sent to the email provided.

Please use the following form to register for the event: https://poetictechnologies.upho.net/apps/forms/sCkYQMnFP2mzJPiT

Livestream

https://meet.jit.si/ART4UBIBERLIN

Illustration by Kaya, On the Biennale's ruins, 2020.

IRI Publications, Space and Architecture of the Commons, Work and Labour Commoning

ON THE BIENNALE’S RUINS? INHABITING THE VOID, COVERING THE DISTANCE by Marco Baravalle

Illustration by Kaya, On the Biennale’s ruins, 2020.

On Biennale’s Ruins? by Marco Baravalle Download

Too much love and friendship connect me to many people working for and around Venice Biennale. Too much admiration connects me to many that thanks to La Biennale made Venice a place to come back to instead of a “once-in-a-lifetime” tourist destination. Not light-heartedly these pages will go down as an exercise of speculation and critique. I am participating in the uncertainty of those people risking to lose their jobs, watching their business fail, not getting their contracts renewed, being unable to access the already miserable existing welfare measures. Considering the earnings in monetary terms: room attendants, janitors, technicians, workers, freelancers, researchers, teachers, journalists, tourist-guides, artists, architects, curators, performers, etc. will – more or less – lose something due to a possible (yet hopefully unlikely) cancellation or postponed events programmes linked to the various departments of La Biennale.

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IRI Publications, Rethinking Citizenship, Work and Labour Commoning

GESTURES OF RADICAL IMAGINATION: A PROGRAM FOR THE USEFUL REVOLUTION by Emanuele Braga

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translation by Gabriella Riccio

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Do we change, now? It will probably always be worse: the techno-authoritarian drift

Coronavirus management risks dragging everyone into techno-authoritarianism: a social life awaits us in which we are controlled every move we make. Through GPS, cell phones, cameras in public spaces and streets it will be possible to understand if we really respect the rules of social distancing. At first they will tell us that their data collection will respect anonymity and that it will be performed “only” to understand mass behavior. Then they will come to individual sanctions and integrated ranking systems. Those who are unemployed will have to stay at home or go shopping at the most, only those with a job will be allowed to move or take a plane.