Evening event downtown at the Elon University School of Law 201 N Elm.

Sponsored by Elon National Lawyers Guild and The Fund for Democratic Communities

A Conversation
 
Sponsored by the Urban Democracy Lab, North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), and the Center for Artistic Activism
 

They Can’t Represent Us by Marina Sitrin and Dario Azzellini is a fiery indictment of electoral politics and a riveting defense of real democracy.

The European Central Bank has now made borrowing money cheaper than ever. Its benchmark lending rate has been dropped to just 0.15%, and borrower banks will in the future pay penalties for parking money there. ECB President Mario Draghi hopes the move will encourage more lending to crisis-stricken EU Member States.But is that move too political in nature for Europe’s most important banker to make

In one month's time the Soccer World Cup kicks off in Brazil. But the country has a serious problem with violence in the poor urban neighbourhoods called favelas. And the problem is spreading: Brazil's tourist centres are increasingly affected. Angry people are using the World Cup to draw attention to the appaling conditions they are forced to live in and to the failures of their government.

Invitation to discussion on

Post-Chávez Venezuela: New Directions under the Presidency of Nicolás Maduro?

Saturday, May 31, 05:00pm - 06:50pm in Room 1.124

John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York

Before Hugo Chávez became president of Venezuela in 1999, the barrios of Caracas, built provisionally on the hills surrounding the capital, did not even appear on the city map. Officially they did not exist, so neither the city nor the state maintained their infrastructure. The poor inhabitants of these neighborhoods obtained water and electricity by tapping pipes and cables themselves. They lacked access to services such as garbage collection, health care and education altogether.

Join the authors Marina Sitrin and Dario Azzellini as they launch their new book!

While the excitement around Occupy Wall Street has diminished in the United States, dynamic movements of democratic participation continue to arise across the globe, calling on people to rethink and remake their relationships to each other and themselves.

”We’re in a new historic epoch. The world is in movement, societies are in movement,” said Dario Azzellini and Marina Sitrin in their lecture on new global movements and democracy on March 26.

The activist couple have participated in a number of movements and demonstrations all around the world. Sitrin and Azzellini talked about what they found was common in the “second wave of the anti-representational protests” after 2011.

Venezuelan law allows for an entity called the consejo communal (communal council), which empowers citizens to initiate local development projects through neighbourhood-based elected councils. Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler’s film, Comuna under construction (2010), begins with the story of a poor hillside community in Caracas as its inhabitants decide whether they want to organize a consejo communal.

In more than 30.000 Consejos Comunales the Venezuelan inhabitants decide on their concerns collectively via assemblies. Several Consejos Comunales can form a Comuna and finally a communal town.
The film “Comuna Under Construction” follows these developments throughout the hillside of the shantytowns of Caracas and the vast and wet plains of Barinas in the countryside.

Is it even possible to bring together state and autonomy?

A Film by Dario Azzellini & Oliver Ressler

Kefya! Ya Basta! Enough!

Words shouted by millions against an untenable situation. Simultaneously proposing "Democracia Real Ya! We are the 99!"

Dario Azzellini and Marina Sitrin address the common forms and practices of the "new" movements and their collective journey for radical social change beyond capitalism.

Sponsored by the New College of Florida Sociology Dept.

We have organized a Congress here. Why? What reason can there be for artists, the freest, most independent people in society; people who live like "the lily of the field", to come together, organize themselves, and undertake theoretical discussions?> -Asger Jorn (1956)

"The purpose of this chapter is to explore practices in the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela linked to the idea of a transition to socialism through the construction of communal production and consumption cycles controlled by workers and communities. The envisioned transition combines local self-administrat on and workers’ control of the means of production. The present work concentrates mainly on the experiences of local self-administration.