florian schneider on Fri, 2 Nov 2001 23:56:26 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> munich volksbad declaration |
The Munich Volksbad Declaration http://make-world.org We met at the make world festival BORDER="0" LOCATION="YES" in Munich, October 18-21. The participants came from different parts of the world, Australia, India, Bangladesh, Korea, South Africa, the United States, Mexico, and all the countries of Europe from Finland to Italy, from Spain to Estonia. We are involved in media activism, migrants' struggles, global mobilization movements, new forms of social protest, net art, and artistic experiments of all sorts. Over the last few years we have seen many changes: Managers, migrants and social movements are on the move. Borders have shifted, unfolded, and moved from the outside to the inside. New technologies have been democratized; in return, they democratize society from beneath. Although the neoliberal ideology has promised peace, wealth, and security, peace has never been worldwide, well-being has never been for everybody, security has always been a trompe l'oeil. From Seattle to Genoa, creative protest and activism against the neoliberal edifice spread in many different ways, and gained support at many levels of society and from a broad political and social spectrum. We have fought against the neoliberal lies for so many years that we will not shed tears over one of the most arrogant and surrogated system humankind has endured. After September 11 we were constantly told that the world will never be the same. But nothing has really changed, instead we are facing a serious danger. The movement of movements is threatened by a return to marginal "moral protest" in the face of an immense challenge by terror. The openness of the movements is endangered by the emptiness of a panic response. Terror should not govern the social mind. Paranoia should not be internalized. We need more freedom, not less. The religious fanatics have declared a holy war against humanity, because they fear freedom and friendship, and sex and love. The economic fanatics have declared their own holy war and react with the same weapons: bombing and terror -- because they feel the smell of economic recession and fear the end of capitalist dictatorship. The religious fanatics and the economic fanatics are joining their efforts to make the world a hellish place where everybody is the enemy of everybody, a place where terror regulates all social relationships. Power can no more control the complexity of the networked society, so the holders of power are panicking. We should not panic with them. The networked society is our creation and our environment. In our environment we do not need control, we do not need security. We need freedom and friendship. The fanatics want to make war? Let them do that, and let them destroy each other! But please, don't ask human beings to enter this picture. They want us to fight their holy war; we will not. We shall transform the global war of fanaticism into a global secession of intelligence, creativity, and love. We shall not accept the regulations of war, and shall organize the free circulation of innovation, ideas, and persons. We shall develop a networked society without borders. We are not in favor of war, we are not against war. More than ever, we have to organize the struggles outside war, outside the organized panic. These times are about more communication, more blended, hybrid culture, more cities. We do not need a war economy but rather a net economy. We call on people to gather, link up, connect. We call for social forums, self-organization outside the craziness of extreme capitalism and fundamentalist clones. We need more autonomy, more democracy, all over the world. We need neither borders nor conscripted mobilization; we need the open frontier of a common project. Parallel to the militarisation of the global psyche, a great battle is unfolding around the issues of intellectual property rights, patents, labor and bio-rights, the genome as well as carbon emission in the atmosphere. It's a battle for open sources, free software and exchange, privacy and cryptography, for peer-to-peer networks. It's a battle for equal rights, flexible citizenships, living wage, documents and guaranteed income for all. Immaterial rights are meaningless without material rights and vice versa. The battle for access for all has to be extended to both: freedom of movement and freedom of information. These are the new frontiers of our liberties, this is the hope to transform the entire world, and this is what's to be done. Make world, not war! Franco Berardi Bifo (Bologne), Yann Moulier Boutang (Paris), Florian Schneider (Munich), Geert Lovink (Sydney), autonome a.f.r.i.k.a. gruppe, trabajoZero (Madrid), code flow (Sofia), Valery Rey Alzaga (Denver), Kimi Lee (Los Angeles). Signed by: Roberto Bui (Bologna), Aris Papatheodorou (Paris), Saskia Sassen (Chicago), Helmut Weiss (Dortmund), Giuseppe Cocco (Rio de Janeiro), François Matheron (Paris), Gianfranco Morosato (Verona), Sandro Mezzadra (Genoa), Eric Alliez (Vienna), Sandro Chignola (Verona), Jon Solomon (Taiwan), Emmanuel Videcoq (Paris), Franco Barchiesi (Johannesburg), Alisa del Ré (Pavia), Yoshihiko Ichida (Osaka), Pascal Houba (Brussels), Jùlio Béjar (Vigo), Brian Holmes (London), Daniel G Andùjar (Valencia), Juan Pedro García del Campo (Madrid), Abdul-karim Mustapha (Duke, USA), César Altamira (Buenos-Aires), Laurent Berthelot (Nantes), Richard Barbrook (London), Christian Brutsch (Zurich), Mikhaël Elbaz (Montreal), Charles Wolfe (Boston), Lucia Lucchesi, Gianni Cascone (Italy), Simona Bentivogli (Italy), Franco Cascone (Italy), Annarosa Apirani (Italy), Andrea Fumagalli (Pavia), Andrea Cusatelli, Emanuele Pistola (Cyberzone). -- http://make-world.org # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net