August 23, 2007 – I Quit My Day Job in the Movement

I resigned my gig as Tuesday guest editor at STR yesterday. Partly for political reasons and partly for health considerations.

My liver disease and kidney problems are putting a great strain on my body and I require frequent medical treatment, which takes up a lot of my time and energy. And so something had to give, and the STR gig was one of things I had to let go of. It takes a least four hours to put together a good daily edition and that fours hours is a bitch when I am groggy and weak from treatment and when I just want to lay down and take a nap. But if you have an edition to get ready you can’t rest when you feel like it without compromising the quality of your edition, which was something I was loathe to do.

The political considerations were an issue too. I believe that oppression is what it is, and I see no distinction as to whether you are being squashed down directly by a state entity (i.e., courts, cops, bureaucrats, and politicians) or by some “private” entity (monopolists, rent-seekers, special interest groups and such ilk) who influence the state with money-bought political clout.

Microsoft, the RIAA, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, and similar groups and wealthy individuals should have no means to do what they do to assert their views on us. Foisting an unpopular agenda without a state provided system of law courts and judges (who are all ultimately backed up by armed police) to make us conform to their will is what the state-privileged sorts do. They use force without actual violence, (at first anyhow) to repress and dominate us, but my friends the anarcho-capitalists and the big and small “L” libertarians just don’t see it that way.

But as I said yesterday, some see “private” coercion, (that is, special interests using the state as a catspaw for their own ends) as somehow different and somehow acceptable because see, it’s supposedly “private” and “voluntary.” Which of course any rational analysis shows to be false. There is nothing “private” about a cop arresting you, or “voluntary” about being sued. I really don’t question the anarcho-capitalists and libertarians sincerity of belief, but I do reject their dismissal of my critique of their idea of what constitutes liberty.

And so there you have it.

oppression libertarian anarcho-capitalist special_interest_groups, gun_control liberty class_struggle rent_seeking

July 24, 2007 - No Working Class Solidarity Here Guys!

According to this article in the Washington Post, a carpenter's union local outsourced their picket line to paid local homeless types in order to raise its numbers. Sheesh. Not much working class solidarity here, you guys. Outsourcing your own labor struggle is kinda of a tip-off that you either don't have much support for your actions within your own base or the membership feels itself too good for such tasks. Either way though...

"Although their placards identify the picketers as being with the Mid-Atlantic Regional Council of Carpenters" says the article, "they are not union members. They're hired feet, or, as the union calls them, temporary workers, paid $8 an hour to picket. Many were recruited from homeless shelters or transitional houses. Several have recently been released from prison. Others are between jobs. ‘It's about the cash," said Tina Shaw, 44, who lives in a House of Ruth women's shelter and has walked the line at various sites. 'We're against low wages, but I'm here for the cash.' Carpenters locals across the country are outsourcing their picket lines, hiring the homeless, students, retirees and day laborers to get their message across. Larry Hujo, a spokesman for the Indiana-Kentucky Regional Council of Carpenters, calls it a 'shift in the paradigm' of picketing."

Unions suck in this country. They actually operate more as labor agencies whose sole purpose is fiduciary; that is to say, to get their members the best possible deal on wages, benefits, and working conditions, and give short shrift to the concept of class struggle and labor solidarity. That however should be their main purpose; elevating the condition and power of the working class. And which is how the unions act in Europe and most other places. In America though the political dimension of class struggle has totally escaped the often corrupt and always politically oblivious labor union leadership.

Tech Tags: labor_unions, class_consciousness, labor_solidarity

01.01.07- "The Complete Letters of Insurgents" in Podcast

Anarchists being real; what a concept, eh? For once, they speak in their own voices and talk about poverty, jail, repression, internecine squabbling within the movement, the price of cigarettes and groceries, or arguments with their wives; how much they love, and fear for, their kids. I’ve only listened to few of the theses podcasts so far, but if the first few are any indicator, they’re going to be a great listen.

From the moxieO blog.

”After three months of reading aloud to each-other on late nights, Freddy Perlman's Letters of Insurgents has now been recorded in its entirety for Audio Anarchy. The book is a long collection of fictional letters between two eastern European workers who were separated after a failed revolution 20 year prior. It presents anarchist ideas in a way that only a story about relationships could, and the reader is left with a set of questions that are subtle, nuanced, and infinitely complex. While this book explores so much (from Platformism to Situationism, from Hungary '56 to May '68, from Council Communism to Stalinism, from the Watts Riots to Spain '36), it ultimately serves to sketch a line; the line between those who are seeking to realize their own potentialities among others doing the same, and those who are building the crystal palaces which always become barracks.

Reading these 850 pages aloud took us through delirium, laughing fits, and lucid conversations. The 31 hours of recorded audio mean a lot to us, and we will be making merit badges for those who listen to all of it. We hope those who do listen will get as much out of it as we did by recording it.”

Technorati Tags: anarchy, anarchist, anarchism, labor_movement, politics, class_struggle

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