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The New Spaces of Freedom
Félix Guattari
Montréal, November 1984
Translated by Arianna Bove and Noe Le Blanc

From New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty
http://www.minorcompositions.info/newlines.html

We might refuse to resign ourselves to it, but we know for a fact that
both in the East and in the majority of the Third World rights and
liberties are subject to the discretionary powers of the political
forces in charge of the state. Yet we are not so ready to admit, and
often refuse to confront, the fact that they are equally threatened in
the West, in countries that like to call themselves ‘champions of the
free world’.

This hard question, so close to the skin and pregnant with dramatic
human implications, is hardly resolved if we remain at a level of
statements of principle. It would be impossible to fail to recognize
the fact that for a dozen years a whole bundle of rights and freedoms
and a whole series of spaces of freedom continued to lose ground in
Europe. If we consider what is happening to immigrants and the
distortions that the right to political asylum is undergoing in France
alone this fact is manifestly unequivocal. But the defeat stares us in
the face even when detached from mere narrow jurisprudence, when
considering the actual evolution of the ‘right’ to dispose of basic
material means of survival and labor for millions of people in Europe
(the unemployed, young and old people, the precarious); the ‘right to
difference’ for all kinds of minorities; and the ‘right’ to effective
democratic expression for the large majority of peoples. Militants
might object that the conflicts related to formal juridical freedoms
should not be treated on par with the conquest of new spaces of
freedom because only the latter is relevant to concrete struggles (to
be fair, this reaction is reminiscing of an era that has long gone).
Justice never kept out of the social fray (it never stood over and
above social struggles); democracy was always more or less
manipulated; there is nothing, no greatness, to be expected from the
realm of formal juridical freedom, whilst, on the contrary, everything
is still to be done when it comes to new spaces of freedom. As far as
I’m concerned, after taking an interest in the extradition cases and
political trials of Bifo, Klauss Croissant, Piperno, Pace, Francois
Pain, Toni Negri and others, I was forced to revise my opinion on the
importance of these supposedly formal freedoms. Today they seem to me
almost completely inseparable from other freedoms ‘on the ground’, to
speak like the ethnologists. Now more than ever we must refuse to
remain at the level of a global denunciation of bourgeois justice:
doing so would be formal indeed. The independence of the judiciary is
often really nothing but a decoy; instead of resigning to this and
returning to a mythology of spontaneity and the so-called ‘people’s
tribunals’, we should think of ways to make it actual. The
specialization of social functions and the division of labor are what
they are; besides, nothing would seem to justify any expectations of
deep changes in public opinion in the short or medium term; and there
is no way of hoping that organized societies will manage to do without
a judicial apparatus any time soon! This does not mean that we have to
accept it as it is, quite the opposite: it is crucial to redefine its
mode of development, its competences, its means, and its possible
articulations in a democratic environment… To do so struggles for
freedoms must also be given new instruments to take us forward:

- Ad hoc interventions in practical affaires where rights and freedoms
are undermined;
- Longer term activities, such as liaising with groups of lawyers,
magistrates, social workers and prisoners … in view of developing
alternative forms of systems of justice.

Statement from Jonathan D. Katz, co-curator of the National Portrait Gallery's Hide/Seek:Difference and Desire in American Portraiture

I curated, with David C. Ward of the National Portrait Gallery, the groundbreaking exhibition Hide/Seek. Sadly, I was not consulted when the Smithsonian elected to censor a work by David Wojnarowicz, and then redoubled that insult by referring to "AIDS victims" in their statement˜employing the very victimizing locution Wojnarowicz fought with his dying breath to oppose. (Ward was "consulted" but his objections were ignored.) An exhibition explicitly intended to finally, in 2010, break a 21-year-old blacklist against the representation of same sex desire in America‚s major museums now, ironically, finds itself in the same boat. In 1989, Senator Jesse Helms demonized Robert Mapplethorpe's sexuality, and by extension, his art, and with little effort pulled a cowering art world to its knees. His weapon was threatening to disrupt the already pitiful Federal support for the arts. And once again, that same weapon is being brandished and once again we cower. When will it be time for the decent majority of Americans stand against a far-Right fringe that sees censorship as a replacement for dialog and debate? There are larger principles at work, and generations hence will judge our actions today.

CommonDreams.org
11 Years After the WTO Uprising: Seattle, Detroit, Cancun, Immokalee
by David Solnit

Eleven years ago yesterday, on November 30, 1999, a public uprising shut down the World Trade Organizationand occupied downtown Seattle.

That same week in 1999, three thousand miles away in Immokalee, Florida, farmworkers carried out a five-day general strike against abusive growers paying starvation wages. Two weeks ago, on November 16, 2010 those same growers -- the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange representing 90% of the industry -- publicly agreed to every one of the farmworkers "Fair Food" demands.

Now seems like an important time to remind ourselves that when we organize, have some strategy and rebel, we can build power and win change. The Seattle uprising was just a warm-up for what is needed and to come as we face the crisis of wars, corporate capitalism and climate. We continue to win victories and build movements; from recent historic farm worker victory in Florida, to the successful US Social Forum in Detroit in the Spring to the climate justice mobilization today in Cancun, Mexico.

COVERSTORY - interview below

Andy Greenberg
SECURITY
WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange Wants To Spill Your Corporate Secrets

In a rare interview, Assange tells Forbes that the release of Pentagon and State Department documents are just the beginning. His next target: big business.
Early next year, Julian Assange says, a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out. Tens of thousands of its internal documents will be exposed on Wikileaks.org with no polite requests for executives’ response or other forewarnings. The data dump will lay bare the finance firm’s secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every regulator to examine and pass judgment on.

When? Which bank? What documents? Cagey as always, Assange won’t say, so his claim is impossible to verify. But he has always followed through on his threats. Sitting for a rare interview in a London garden flat on a rainy November day, he compares what he is ready to unleash to the damning e-mails that poured out of the Enron trial: a comprehensive vivisection of corporate bad behavior. “You could call it the ecosystem of corruption,” he says, refusing to characterize the coming release in more detail. “But it’s also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight that’s not done, the priorities of executives, how they think they’re fulfilling their own self-interest.”

Documents Show NYT and Washington Post Shilling for US Government on Iran Missile "Threat"

Wikileaks Exposes Complicity of the Press

By GARETH PORTER

A diplomatic cable from last February released by Wikileaks provides a detailed account of how Russian specialists on the Iranian ballistic missile program refuted the U.S. suggestion that Iran has missiles that could target European capitals or intends to develop such a capability.

In fact, the Russians challenged the very existence of the mystery missile the U.S. claims Iran acquired from North Korea.

But readers of the two leading U.S. newspapers never learned those key facts about the document.

The New York Times and Washington Post reported only that the United States believed Iran had acquired such missiles - supposedly called the BM-25 - from North Korea. Neither newspaper reported the detailed Russian refutation of the U.S. view on the issue or the lack of hard evidence for the BM-25 from the U.S. side.

The Times, which had obtained the diplomatic cables not from Wikileaks but from The Guardian, according to a Washington Post story Monday, did not publish the text of the cable.