Download Machete 18 February (6.6 MB)

GARETH JAMES, Buenos Aires (cover) / AVI ALPERT, Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War/ EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS, Postcards From Venice/ DAVID MUENZER – GARETH JAMES, Interview/ LUDWIG FISCHER, Artist Project/ WILLIAM WELTY, How To Succeed In Revolution Without Really Trying/ MIKE VASS, Surviving Life (Theory and Practice): Swimming Lessons with Dr. Svankmajer

Download OCCUPY PHILLY – machete 03 2011 December (1.3MB)

SID ROTHSTEIN, Occupy Philly: Machete Issue 3/ JOHN SCHULTZ, Eviction and Occupation/ Occupy Everything: interview with BEN WEBSTER/ AARON KREIDER, Debunking the Rumors of an Occupy Philly Power Elite/ HOMAY KING, Antiphon: Notes on the People’s Microphone/ MATT, To the “They Have No Message and/or They Haven’t Accomplished Anything” Crowd of Naysayers:/ LORI D. GINZBERG, Social Movements/ EDWARD SCHEXNAYDER, art project

Download OCCUPY PHILLY – machete 02 2011 October (2.6MB)

AVI ALPERT, NANCY FRASER, GABRIEL ROCKHILL and ANNIKA THIEM, Capitalism and the State: Machete Confrontation at Occupy Philadelphia/ SV, You Can’t Go Home Again, and Other Messages from the Ideology Machine/ CR, Beneath the Beach, the Sidewalk?/ Autumn practices; Vacate X; But if these are the means, then to what purpose?/ ÇETIN GüRER, On Angela Davis’s Visit to Occupy Philly: Call for Diversity within Philly and Solidarity with Oakland/ RT, Political Disobedience/ WILL CAVERLY, Concrete Idealism: Philadelphia’s Agora

Intersections: Race, Class, Gender and the Occupy Movement

Tuesday, 8 November, 5 p.m. at the Occupy Philly Library

Machete Group Members Avi Alpert and Gabriel Rockhill in dialogue with Annika Thiem

Continiung our Confrontations series in experimental Public Pedagogy in support of the Occupy Together Movement, the Machete Group proposes a collective symposium on “Intersections: Race, Class, Gender and the Occupy Movement.” Building on classic readings by Angela Davis and Cornel West, we will bring to the fore the question of who is the 99%. Through these readings and the discussion that develops, we aim to foster critical dialogue while at the same time foregrounding the point that paying attention to race, class and gender is not divisive, but rather can help strengthen the movement. We hope to engage with various voices trying to understand how our different social positions can come together to make a lasting and sustainable movement.

Although it is not a requirement for participation, the texts of reference are available for download below. A limited number of hardcopies will also be made available at the Occupy Philadelphia Library.

Download Angela Davis “Class and Race in the Early Women’s Rights Campaign” (432KB)

Download OCCUPY PHILLY – machete 01 2011 October (3.1MB)

JOHN SCHULTZ, Introduction to Occupy Philly: Machete/ GABRIEL ROCKHILL, Rethinking Revolution, The Time of Change/ ÇETIN GüRER, Interview with Charles Holmes, Resident of Occupy Wall Street at Liberty Plaza, October 13th , 2011/ AMRIT HEER, What do we mean by ‘Direct’ Democracy?/ AVI ALPERT, Thoreau and Revolution/ Self interview No.1 (Excerpt)

Occupy Philadelphia, like the other occupations, is an attempt at creative disruption. It is disruptive in taking over Dilworth Plaza and rupturing—even if marginally—the flow of bodies and traffic in the city and soon perhaps the construction of a $50 million skating rink scheduled to start in November at the plaza. The occupation has launched a critique of the “democratic” processes of our city and country by trying to construct a more direct kind of democracy on the steps of the city’s bureaucratic machine. But this is a kind of creation as well: the protestors endeavor to forge a democracy that exists for people, not for corporate profit and not for economic efficiency. And they have constructed a city of over 300 tents and in that city created mechanisms to address sanitary, dietary, medical, and educational needs and to exercise greater political freedom.

The project of this special series of Machete is to express that creative disruption in thought. This magazine means to be a public space where our occupation can question itself and argue among itself and with those outside it about its meaning and the course of its movement. It is a space in which traditions about revolution, democracy, rebellion and protest can be questioned and ruptured, and in which critique is possible. But it can also be an arena for experimentation with new ideas about the movement in which traditional concepts can be reconfigured into newer, better forms more adequate to what we’re doing in Dilworth Plaza and elsewhere. The goal is creative conflict: with undemocratic politics, with our crisis-ridden economy, and among protestors and their interlocutors.

This magazine thereby means to fight the attempts of politics and popular media to tell the occupation what it is. To Obama we’re simply “frustrated” people who don’t know what else to do and so have taken to the streets. To Eric Cantor we’re a “mob,” and to Herman Cain we’re “lazy” and “jealous.” Despite the differences the message is always the same: the occupations are literally thoughtless. We’re pure, idiotic emotion without the capacity to speak or to think for ourselves. The job of American politics is to give us our voice, they say, in order to make us intelligible for the first time and so they can address our irrational needs.

The occupation movement doesn’t need their voices because it has begun developing its own in the General Assembly, in its direct actions and marches, in the creation of signs and the construction of tent cities, and in the experimental demands already suggested by Occupy Wall Street and those beginning to be formed at Dilworth Plaza. This magazine is meant to be a tool by which those voices already at work can engage themselves as well as others in creative conflict.
-John Schultz

Download machete 17 November (3.6 MB)

ALEXI KUKULJEVIC (front cover)/ MIKE VASS, Dead Roots: Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life/ DANIEL GERWIN, The Present, Tense/ CHRIS KASPER, Open Letter to Labor Servicing the Culture Industry/ HADASSA GOLDVICHT, Heart Juice 5/ AVI ALPERT, Reflections on What Might Be

Institutions and Interventions

The Problem of Social Emancipation from the Status Quo:
From Revolutions to Occupations

Workshop for the Marcuse Society Conference Critical Refusals
Participants: Gabriel Rockhill (Villanova University, Collège International de Philosophie, Machete Group), Adam Takacs (Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary), Annika Thiem (Villanova University).

Thursday, October 27th, 7-8:30 pm
Slought Foundation
4017 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104-3513

This workshop, run in conjunction with the Machete Group’s new series at the Slought Foundation, will focus on one of the central themes of Herbert Marcuse’s work: the relationship between the institutions of the status quo and the acts of critical intervention that seek to overcome them through projects of social emancipation. More specifically, it will concentrate on the paradoxical situation of social criticism, which purports to transcend the status quo while being squarely situated within a social nexus. This problematic of immanent transcendence is further complicated by the necessity of not only breaking with the status quo but also establishing alternative institutions that aim at orienting society in a new direction. In short, the central question of this workshop will be: how can we transform society from within, and what role can philosophy play in this process?

Rather than a traditional academic panel, we would like to propose a workshop that explores the legacy of Marcuse’s socio-philosophical project and its relevancy to the contemporary conjuncture. We thereby seek to call into question traditional modes of knowledge production and transmission in the name of mobilizing theoretical tools from the past for pressing practical issues in the present. To this end, each participant in the workshop will explore the conundrum of social criticism through a concise presentation of a specific social institution in order to generate a larger, collective discussion. The respective titles of the individual presentations are: “Can History Have an Emancipatory Power? Reflections on the Possibility of a ‘Revolutionary’ Historical Science” (Takacs), “New Affects for a New Society: Beyond Repression vs. Liberation” (Thiem) and “Revolution or Recuperation? Overcoming False Polarizations in the Art World” (Rockhill). The methodological orientation of the entire workshop will be to draw on the work of Marcuse in order to discuss modes of critical intervention in the current conjuncture of status quo institutions.

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Machete on Marcuse at Slought

Marcuse’s The Aesthetic Dimension: A Performative Symposium on Art and Politics

Thursday, October 27th, 9pm-11pm
Slought Foundation
4017 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104-3513

As part of our continual effort to investigate the interactions between art, philosophy, and politics, the Machete Group hosts a presentation/conversation on Marcuse’s The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (1978) as part of our series, “Prisms of the Possible.” The goal of this symposium is to stage an aesthetic and theoretical constellation through which we collectively test and explore – with all those in attendance – the performative power of theory. Each of the three short presentations by Avi Alpert, Alexi Kukuljevic and Gabriel Rockhill will function as individual prisms to refract Marcuse’s work and open up possibilities for its use and interpretation – as we struggle with ideas, thoughts and images that speak to our present condition.

Please note:

As this will be a participatory and interactive symposium, attendees are encouraged to review Marcuse’s The Aesthetic Dimension in order to take part in a dynamic public exchange.

Download Herbert Marcuse “The Aesthetic Dimension” (1.1MB)

For more information: http://machetegroup.wordpress.com/

Reform and Radical Social Transformation

Open Seminar by Gabriel Rockhill, Annika Thiem and Adam Takacs

Wednesday, 26 October, 2011 at 5:30 p.m.
The Library of Occupy Philadelphia, Central Arch of City Hall (west side),
Intersection of Market Street and Broad Street, Philadelphia

As an extension of the Machete Group’s Confrontations series (see “Capitalism and the State” and “Resistance and Revolution”), we are proposing an open seminar that explores the longstanding debate between reform and revolution. By taking two exemplary texts by Rosa Luxemburg and Herbert Marcuse as our starting points, we will critically reflect on the binary opposition between the status quo and its transcendence. More specifically, we will question the relevancy of this dichotomy to contemporary social and political movements.

Download Rosa Luxemburg “Social Reform or Revolution” (2.2MB)

Download Herbert Marcuse “Art and Revolution” (1.9MB)

For more information: https://machetegroup.wordpress.com/

Capitalism and the State: Machete Confrontation at Occupy Philadelphia

Machete Group members Avi Alpert and Gabriel Rockhill in dialogue with Nancy Fraser and Annika Thiem

Friday, 21 October, 2011 at 5:45 p.m.

The Library of Occupy Philadelphia (SE Corner of Encampment)
City Hall, at the Intersection of Market Street and Broad Street, Philadelphia

As a continuation of our Confrontations series on Public Pedagogy in support of the Occupy Together Movement, the Machete Group proposes a collective symposium on “Capitalism and the State.” Based on the confrontation between various texts (see below) and points of view, we propose a public discussion on the transformations of capitalism and the state. We will critically explore the supposed opposition between the state and the ‘free market,’ questioning the credo of economic liberalism. We will also raise questions regarding the history of the relationship between capitalism and state intervention in order to shed light on our current conjuncture and debates on the ‘new spirit of capitalism.’

Although it is not a requirement for participation, the texts of reference are available for download below. A limited number of hardcopies will also be made available at the Occupy Philadelphia Library.

Download Sebastian Budgen “A New ‘Spirit of Capitalism’” (52KB)

Download David Harvey, selection from A Brief History of Neoliberalism (808KB)

Download Friedrich Engels & Karl Marx “Manifesto of the Communist Party”(636KB)

Download Karl Polanyi, selection from The Great Transformation (664KB)

For more information: http://machetegroup.wordpress.com/

Resistance and Revolution: Machete at Occupy Philadelphia

Saturday, 15 October, 2011 at 6 p.m.
City Hall

As part of what we hope will be a new series on Public Pedagogy in suppport of the Occupy Together Movement, the Machete Group proposes a collective symposium on “Resistance and Revolution.” Convinced that in the era of corporate media and the academy as big businness it is absolutely necessary to cultivate alternative forms of public pedagogy, the Machete Group would like to orchestrate a series of public conversations around the theme, “Confrontations.” In these events, two or three authors or points of view are confronted (from the Latin, “face together”) on the very issue ofconfrontation. The events dramatize the need for us to all “face together” the necessary confrontations with our failing economic and political systems. For the first symposium, we will explore the relationship between Henry David Thoreau’s call for resistance to government in the 19th century and Cornelius Castoriadis’ endeavor to redefine the very nature of revolution in the 20th century. These two reference points will allow us to generate a collective discussion based on brief presentations–by Avi Alpert and Gabriel Rockhill–of the basic stakes of these two texts.

Although it is not a requirement for participation, the texts of reference are available for download below. A limited number of hardcopies will also be made available at the Occupy Philly Library tent by Wednesday night.

Download Henry David Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government” (136 KB)

Download Paul Cardan, a.k.a. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Redefining Revolution” (1.9 MB)