Here is an interview of 2 hours long with our friend Ben Morea arranged by B.U.R.N. on 2010-05-10.

Up Against The Wall, MotherFukker! is an instrumental part of the living history of resistance and anarchy amerikkka. Ben Morea was a part of that movement, coming from the artist group Black Mask, they took to the streets in direct action campaigns that were spontaneous, immoral, toxic and all around good fun type of shenanigans. Ben joins B.U.R.N. to reinvigorate that lost spirit of the trickster in a time that is ripe for insurrection.

IWW 000 – 4^th world: Primitive Communism

0^th world? – Advanced Communism

The IWW classify workers industrially from 100-600, under three main categories of industry of a modern, capitalist economy: extraction of materials, production of goods, and provision of services. This very roughly corresponds with the use of Land in the 3^rd World (100 Agriculture, 200 Mining), Labour in the 2^nd World (300 Construction, 400 Manufacture) and Capital in the 1^st World (500 Transportation 600 Services). Since this system is from the early 1900s when the international Communist movement was in its first amplic phase, capital production has further developed. 2004’s IWW Commitee on industrial classification recommended that the classification be altered in order to account for this development. However this would have expanded the representation of workers in the First World (in Capital intensive production) , effectively mirroring the amplification of bourgeois control in the form of Enterprise as the 4^th factor of production and Entrepeneurship as an industrial locus of workers.  

Taking a worker centred approach, we can also classify production in these 3 dimensions of class as related to the senses of taste and smell (100-200), sight and touch (300-400) and hearing and thought (500-600). Psychic and data mining work therefore sits between 400 and 500 – ie the 1^st and 2^nd worlds – the ages of divinity and saints. This is a further reason why the current imperial world war manifests as a religious one between innovators and traditionalists. More importantly it means that since as data miners and psychic workers we have a direct access to the means of organisation, we must support and seek to be controlled and lead by those workers unions who do not – ie those in land and labour intensive modes of production in the 3^rd and 2^nd worlds (ages of prophets and sainthood). In this way we pass organisation power to those workers who need it more thatn us. On the other hand, we must seek to control and take power away from those in the more capital dominated areas of production (the 1^st world/ age of divinity). It should be noted that these categories are not strictly geographical/ temporal or classical but situgraphically (topologically) interwoven.

At 21:16 pm Spanish Time 20th July 2010 - I began my connection with the deadworkers of the furniture factories in "Angles" town in Cataluña. Karen Karnak assisted me in my work, as alone I would not be able to contain the psychic channel, such is and has always been the way. The factory lies abandoned and at the edge of the miserable town.

The veneer of the town is thin, woodworkers making not decorative or functional objects but a system of power transfer which uses psychic channels to convert a long hot day wasted within the dusty enclosure of the building, chained like a dog to a loud machine, into a relaxed teatime glance at the varnished finished of the ´quality´object. In the old town a tavern displays a complex door to the toilet. It is made from a series of small framed indents. Staring at the door during my stay in the toilet I noticed the amount of time and concentration which had gone into the work.

This same energy goes into the computer, into data mining, and all forms of skilled time exhaustive work. It can be said that assembly line work does not contain this psychic energy but it is true, when one has experienced the deep shamanic trance of the conveyor belt, the slippage of time, and the psychic jolt when the machine comes to rest for the regular three hour tea break.

Art Strike Information Maintenance and Dissemination Brigade (ASIMDB) ceases its transitional activities and dissolves into the current of DAta Miners & Travailleurs Psychique as a result of common positions and aims. The last day of ASIMDB activism is the 28th July, 2010 – The Death Strike.

The DAMTP constitution is to be announced soon afterwards.

We join the actions today, in support of the lecturer worker of Chosun University Dr. Seo Jeongmin, who comitted suicide. However rather than pray to Jesus, Isou or any other dead worker we hereby announce the
formation of a Dead Workers Union with whom we join forces to target the bosses.

This is an extension of the working class cultural practice of celebrating life and death, something targeted by right wingers as 'qabar puja'. This is because they have contempt for working class culture. Communists in the Sindh, whatever religion they are from and in rejecting religion, organized at shrines against imperial rule.

Since the death of Mohammed marks the end of the Age of Prophets it also opened the Age of Saints. It was the Lettrist Fazlallah who opened the Age of Divinity which was closed by the death of Isidore Isou in 2007.

Karen Eliot and I had planned to meet in Dartington so we decided to make it an open meeting as that weekend was both the Open Pop Star World Congress called for by Monty Cantsin as well as part of the month of remembrance for the victims of Foxconn such as Ma Xiangqian and Yun Li called by Students & Scholars Against Cooperate Misbehavior.

I was to traverse the so called “St Michaels” Leyline for much of the journey from Cambridge to Dartington. My son and I stopped at Stevenage on the line to pick up his mother and then met another Karen Karnak at Taunton further down the line before arriving at around midnight on Friday. My name Karen Karnak is of course a reference to the great pyramid at Karnak in Egypt and to the Hyperborean nexus at Carnac in France, chosen to disrupt the white supremacist designs of Evolan and Freemasonic groups that use the St. Michaels line. It was for this reason that evoL PsychogeogrAphix was summoned into being in Totnes is 2000 an event that the video Brown Julius commemorates.

At Dartington, I happened across Gustav Metzger on Saturday and invited him to the meeting. He told me of a symposium where he was speaking as part of the Art Colleges final Festival before being effectively closed. I went along and met Monty Cantsin and Karen Eliot there and we confirmed plans for the meeting for the following day. At the symposium, much of the talking was about the content of the art degree and how it would continue at Falmouth. Gustav however spoke about extinction – which he sees as the most urgent problem facing us – and that we need to get a 5 year plan in place to stop the ever increasing rate of extinction of species. He cautiously suggested also that this is a worse holocaust than the Shoah.

So far our negotiations with CAC at Vilnius did not gave any results we are informing about the situation and declaring our resolve.

Shortly about the pretext: later this year CAC at Vilnius is planning to held the even which would resume all the best art events through the last decade. CAC as an institution appointed itself to decide the historification of the national arts scene. Alytus biennial events were on the scope of the institution and the curators of the decennial contacted ASIMDB to discuss the presentation of the documentation from the archives.

 Since the first biennial “Beware! Politics!” our task was to propagate antibiennalization, to mock the structures of the “serious culture”, to avoid capitalist specialization and to erase the demarcation line between art and politics what means simply to bring back to life inherent human right to make himself social decisions and to have right for self expression, instead of watching the spectacle. 

 Therefore the invitation by CAC simply means the intent not only to enlist Alytus Biennial as one of the mostly influential Lithuanian Art factors, but also to reduce it till miserable artistic simulation. From the other side this particular invitation of the art strikers to partake elitist art stage event proves the absurdity of the art world structure: the real art workers, who are in trust of capitalist propaganda and working hard all the time, did not get any attention while the art mockers are getting the main attention. Is it really worth endeavour to still trust capitalist poisonous art promoting system?

Originally published in polish translation as “Z Johannesem Bergmarkiem rozmawia Krzysztof Gutfrański” (slightly abridged by KG), on the online magazine Intertext, 2010.

The interview was conducted vie email. The questions were sent to me in English and I print them here in the form I received them (only correcting some of the most obvious language mistakes). The explanations [marked like this] are clarifications by KG after I asked him to clarify some points that were unclear to me in his questions. His introduction was written after the interview was finished.

Introduction (KG)

If in the whole world surrealist groups are existing it seems that the history of the movement has extended without a brake since ninety years. Could we look at surrealism otherwise than as a dead point in the art history stream and if we're able to formulate opinions about history without a critical apparatus and approach? About surrealism as a life attitude, superiority of poetical phenomenons and singing inside the coffins tells Johannes Bergmark.

JB is one of the most interesting musicians on the free improvisation scene, he is also a musical instrument inventor, visual artist, active member of different surrealist movements in Sweden, Poland and some other countries.

Yan Li, 27, is the latest victim of Foxconn, the manufacturer of iPads and other high-tech items that has experienced a recent rash of worker suicides. He collapsed and died from exhaustion on 27 May after having
worked continuously for 34 hours. His wife said Yan had been on the night shift for a month and in that time had worked overtime every night. Yan, an engineer, had worked for Foxconn since April 2007.[1] The tragedy marks the 11th death at the corporation since January this year. To pay respect to these young lives, Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) designates 8 June 2010 as the Global Day of Remembrance for Foxconn’s Victims.

Despite pressure from civil society and the media, Foxconn continues to deny that the suicides are related to management methods. In a press conference on 26 May, Foxconn CEO Terry Gou said that the suicides were due to love affairs or other personal problems of the victims. He even asserted that some workers committed suicide because of the company’s willingness to compensate their families generously. It is evident that Foxconn shows no commitment to review the structural problem in the factory. Its attempt to evade responsibility is an insult to the dead and to the public.

"We don't really cherish our artists to the degree we should."
Sir Nicholas Serota, Director of Tate, quoted in the Evening Standard 23.04.10



As a grouping of national and international artists, we publicly challenge No Soul For Sale (NSFS) at Tate Modern over the weekend of 14th-16th May 2010.



The title No Soul For Sale re-enforces deeply reductive stereotypes about the artist and art production. With its romantic connotations of the soulful artist, who makes art from inner necessity without thought of recompense, No Soul For Sale implies that as artists we should expect to work for free and that it is acceptable to forego the right to be paid for our labor.



It has come to our attention that many participants are not being paid by Tate Modern for their efforts. In fact, most are self-funding their activities throughout the weekend. Tate describes this situation as a “spirit of reciprocal generosity between Tate and the contributors”. But at what point does expected generosity become a form of institutional exploitation? Once it becomes endemic within a large publicly funded art space?

In solidarity with all workers of the world, especially cultural/psychic, in opposition to 'clean' serious 'culture', on Thursday the 13th of May in the conservative south-west of England, we took action of disagreement.

Basically, the action was a dedication to Dartington College of Arts and their landlords - Dartington Hall Trust. College is moving out next year, due to landlords cleaning their premises of 'artists'. The nostalgic feelings towards rural England and commodification of conservative values were not the reason of us doing it. In this place, it is fckn boring, and it is not surprise for us that the conservatives won the election in 'the capital of alternative lifestyle and culture' called Totnes. Scrap the con hippie rubbish!

The Nazional Gallery in London’s Trafalgar Square boasts on its website that :

“This month Gallery talks look at the theme of revolution and dissent. Discover the subversive side of the collection”

Meanwhile, workers at London’s Nazional Gallery will stage the first strike since the formation of the new Lib-Con government when they walk out tomorrow in a row over pay.

Dear Bifo,

Thanks for your answer!

I agree that our disagreements are not so much important in general, but the way we argument our positions is much more important in trying to figure out how to deal really with the capitalist mechanisms. You're asking me where is bourgeoisie??? And you can't see them - common, it you and me first of all...and the biggest trouble of the so called cognitariat that the cannot realize it still and that makes impossible to move any step forward.

But first due to those criminals, corruptors and pimps from economic and political power - that's true - they are, but what is to be done with them?? to put them into the prisons?? to sue them?? To persuade or educate???

Actually there is one very good receipt - from the surrealist times, or even earlier - to disband the armies, to open the prisons...anyway the biggest criminals are never jailed...and what is the since of talking on human freedom if people use to suspend others people's freedom.

To come back to the term of bourgeoisie - there I can come from my own experience in that area of so called former "soviet-communist" camp - there are no angry and hungry intellectuals any more - they changed they behavior to look like "civilized Europeans", they changed they thinking, creating and even eating habits. They are imagining beeing themselves something they would like to see themselves on TV....also about those who would be tending to call themselves proletariat - soviet system as state capitalist state turned upside-down all the social system already before 90-ies - the workers already had all necessary bourgeois habits and imagination before they got able to embody it into practice. Those guys who emigrate to the west for economic reasons - they are coming back and turning themselves into the classical bourgeois environment and behavior... There is nothing else remaining in that society!!! When I was talking about eastern Europe - I have not mean the eastern EU buffer, but areas beyond them, but unfortunately they are going to make the same mistakes we did - they are already infected by bourgeois welfare and identifying it with a personal freedom.

We disagree on a crucial point, I see: you consider congitarians as part of a bourgeoisie (what is bourgeoisie nowadays? Do you see any bourgeoisie around? I don't, I only see criminals and corruptors and pimps in the places of economic power and of political too.

But I agree with when you say that the interesting acto of something new could be the hungry and angry intellectuals of East Europe and Middle East. That's true, but do not forget that the hyper-stressed underpaid cognitarians who are working in the info-production in London are part of the same pack.
Anyway it's not so important what we share and what we disagree. Important is the urgency of a new transnational movement of sensibility and of intelligence against the neoliberal dictatorship.
The Greek crisis is opening a prospect of economic catastrophe, and of spreading barbarianism. But also opens a window to social imagination.

As the European Union grows in power, Pan-European internationalism will create more problems than it solves. Whereas some may see “European-wide” links as being a healthy way of breaking out of the limits of the nation, for us the real key to internationalism lies in its universalism. We suggest that the abandonment of “Europe-wide” organizing is necessary to allow a more egalitarian way of organizing which does not privilege the “European”, whether understood in terms of culture, race or region.

It is precisely this three-fold ambiguity in the sense of the word “European” that gives it such a volatile ideological value. It can be understood by different people in different ways. Those that understand it terms of region, perforce must adopt the sort of territorialism which is characteristic of the state, in this case the emerging European Union. Another conception is racial, which originated in the consolidation of a White social elite in European colonies outside Europe. The third associates the highest level of human achievement with the history of Europe from the days of ancient Greece to today.

Poetry must be made by all and not by one, Lautreamont

That's true - the managers and politicians and all academicians and "serious culture" producing employees are stuck to the ground. Also the tourists starveling for continuous flow of the spectacle could be counted into it....to say strictly - mostly of them are bourgeoisie... so far I have a sharp disbelieve towards the 'serious' forms of the role to perform "continuous connection of European brain"...and the same about the "professional" entertainment forms usually called art - that's I found out great to see bourgeois culture stuck to the ground, interrupted spectacles, conferences, meetings etc. Instead people can simply start to look for local substitutes which would show for great reserves they have and never realized before. Also the stuck in foreign places professors can try to continuously give the same speeches till the final realizing how outdated they are and then to go beyond it. Nobody is answering the call [to fight for Europe 02] because the way it is said is wrong - the conferences and lectures are to the right places to receive answer, but rather the back call for an adequate event... the "cognitariat" does not weakens bourgeoisie, but strengthens it instead.

What I found more relative towards the real destroying of the EU is not the appeal to a square filled Norwegians but to the hungry-and-angry intellectuals from Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Turkey...and might be to go even further - Iran, India, China... why to be so stuck on the racist Europe, and especially on that over-self-estimated area of Western Europe, what in fact is just a western coast of Asia?

I' m stuck in Trondheim, a beautiful city of the Norwegian western coast. I was supposed to leave Thursday morning and fly back to Bologna for a meeting of Bologna citta libera. That morning I received a call from my friend Jean. She told me: something happens. All flights are cancelled, you have to leave tomorrow. Tomorrow I go to airport and they tell me you have to wait tomorrow. Then I started thinking. Ash is not going away. It will stay in the European atmosphere for days and weeks. Air companies are trying to figure out what the effect of this will be on their budget, already strained by the financial crisis. But the point is not there. The European leading class is stuck to ground. Managers and politicans, and all the cognitive workers who are daily busy in connecting the European brain are stuck to ground. They can't move. The fascist omophobic polish leadership has been annihilated by the impredictability of the sky. Now sky is just declaring that the end of this greedy Union is a matter of days.

The European Union, which has been unable and unwilling to deal with the Greek crisis, and is unable and unwilling to face recession with the removal of the Neoliberal politics that caused the recession, now is doomed.

 
What is happening in sky is a call to thought. Cognitarians and poets all over Europe should start to fight for Europe02, for a new concept of the process, based on the potency of intellectual work, not on the financial rule of the ECB.
But nobody is answering the call.

The integrated spectacle which incorporates the concentrated spectacle of
fascism and the diffuse spectacle of liberalism is well exemplified by
Group 4 Securicor. G4S, one of the biggest multinationals play a major
part in the integrated spectacle - securing focal points of the Capitalist
machine across the planet - from diamond mines in Africa to airports in
Iraq and Afghanistan and Detention Centres (Concentration Camps) in
England. The death of Eliud Nguli Nyenze on 15th April 2010 at G4SA run
Oakington Concentration Camp shows that the genocide that the British
government presides over does not guarantee that the gas chambers of
liberal capitalism are permanently off-shore - we already live in a state
without borders because as human beings we are all and already capital.