Did this a while back. Was reminded of it this week.
Category Archives: Politics
Why I Joined the Industrial Workers of the World
So I joined the wobblies. You can too. If you sign up and pay your dues (which are sliding scale, based on your income), someone will be in touch with you to talk about what’s happening locally and how you can get involved.The preamble of the constitution of the IWW was written by Thomas Hagerty, an itinerant Catholic preacher who was kicked out of the church for his political organizing and wound up a mystic on the streets of Chicago. How can I not love it? The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the earth. We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the evergrowing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers. These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.. Instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, “Abolition of the wage system.” It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
Metapolis | Work After Coronavirus
Bob Black is an American social philosopher known for his work on anarchism. The author of various books and numerous political essays, he specializes in the sociology and ethnography of law. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and Georgetown Law School. He is most widely known for his 1985 essay «The Abolition of Work,» which has been widely disseminated in at least 13 languages. His most recent publication, «Instead of Work,» includes a compendium of his writings and an update on his 1985 essay.
This article is a continuation of that work, and i found it to be an interesting read of some of the potential things that could , and have happened since Corona. (Link to full article at bottom.)
The general tendency will be toward local autonomy amidst regional diversity. Local neighborhoods and settlements will not be fortified, gated communities with delusions of sovereignty. Regions, cultural regions, will often focus on bioregions, with permeable boundaries. [51] Diversity will flourish locally, regionally, and internationally. We will be better off by exploring the possibilities of what is closer. Big cities have brought us together physically, but separated us socially. Big workplaces have done the same thing. Mass society has given rise to «the lonely crowd»: [52] people being alone together. Paradoxically, social distancing might complement bringing people together emotionally, in a shared way of life that is more sociable than mass society.Is it contrived for me to promote this agenda as a response to the COVID-19 crisis? Of course, I do not think so. The virus is a challenge to other ideologies too, and maybe to all ideologies. Health issues, especially public health issues, are often not just health issues. Contagious disease is clearly not just a private concern for individuals and their physicians. It is a social issue. Even the physicians know that. And they know that diet, rest, safety, anxiety, insecurity, and even sociability strongly influence physical and mental health. How we live has a lot to do with how long we live, and with how well we live. Fatigue, stress, boredom, and even a touch of fear, which are often inflicted by work – they really are hazardous to your health! They adversely affect the immune system. And they just do not feel good. Maybe happiness is healthy. And maybe freedom is healthy.
Happy May Day
Did you know the May Day is actually two different holidays in one? Well it is.
The tradition of May baskets and May poles come from the celebration of Beltane and Walpurgis, ancient “pagan” holidays to celebrate the beginning of summer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Day
It is, also, International Workers Day (ie. Labor Day). The US and other countries don’t celebrate it as such an that stems “from a resistance to emboldening worldwide working-class unity”.
Read more here : https://www.npr.org/2022/04/30/1095729592/what-is-may-day-history
So whether you’re a pagan, or a Wobblie; Happy May Day!
Progressive utilisation theory
The Progressive Utilization Theory (PROUT) is the basis for an economic system which is an alternative to both capitalism and communism. PROUT was conceived by P.R. Sarkar in 1959 who in the article below outlines some of the basic features of a decentralised, cooperative economic system built upon the principles of PROUT.
Source: Progressive utilisation theory
10 Libertarian Thoughts on the Civil War | RealClearHistory
10 Libertarian Thoughts on the Civil War
An interesting article on mid 19th century world history and the civil war. The section on Brazil makes me wonder if that may be why Nazis moved there after WWII.
By Brandon Christensen
August 23, 2018
…
2. Brazil and Dom Pedro II. Brazil shares many similarities with the United States, including a long history of slavery. In fact, Brazil was last country to abolish the slave trade (1853) and abolish slavery (1888), and while the country remained neutral during the Civil War, its impact could be felt. Most notably, after the confederacy surrendered to the north, 20,000 slave owners fled the United States and moved to Brazil, where they established new plantations and became known as “Confederados.” Brazil was a monarchy at the time, and its emperor, Dom Pedro II, had sent recruiters to the American south in order to bring skilled tradesmen and farmers to his country. While the emperor himself worked to abolish slavery in his country, he could not pass up the opportunity to invite tens of thousands of skilled migrants into his realm to help spur economic, political, and cultural development. The last monarch of Brazil, Pedro II’s Brazil fought two wars during the American Civil War, one against Paraguay and one in Uruguay as an intervening neighbor. The Paraguayan War, which lasted from 1864-70, was the deadliest interstate war in Latin American history and was fought between Paraguay and an alliance of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. Brazil’s role in the Uruguayan War (1864-65) was to bolster the support of the governing party (“Blanco party”) and help it fight a rebellious party (“Colorado party”) that was supported financially and ideologically (but not militarily) by Argentina, Brazil’s ally in the Paraguayan War. Brazil emerged from these series of wars as a regional hegemon and Pedro II is admired domestically for his statesmanship involving these wars….
Trumpasaurus Rex
I heard it was Trumpos birthday ( a couple months ago), and that he was turning 72. I thought: “Well dinosaurs are still ruling the earth, aren’t they?” That started the seed of the idea… Well a couple months later here’s the finished product.
Here’s the original pencil sketch.
Samuel R Delaney’s Take on Information Gathering
Twelve years ago some public channeler had made a great stir because the government had an average ten hours videotaped and otherwise recorded information on every citizen with a set of government credit tokens and/ or government identity card. Eleven years ago another public channeler had pointed out that ninety-nine point nine nine and several nines percent more of this information was, a) never reviewed by human eyes (it was taken, developed, and catalogued by machine), b) was of a perfectly innocuous nature, and, c) could quite easily be released to the public without the least threat to government security.
Ten years ago a statute was passed that any citizen had the right to demand a review of all government information on him or her. Some other public channeler had made a stir about getting the government simply to stop collecting such information; but such systems, once begun, insinuate themselves into the greater system in overdetermined ways: Jobs depended on them , space had been set aside for them, research was going on over how to do them more efficiently— such overdetermined systems, hard enough to revise, are even harder to abolish.
Eight years ago, someone whose name never got mentioned came up with the idea of ego-booster booths, to offer minor credit (and, hopefully, slightly more major psychological) support to the Government Information Retention Program: Put a two-franq token into the slot (it used to be half a franq , but the tokens had been devalued again a year back), feed your government identity card into the slip and see, on the thirty-by-forty centimeter screen, three minutes’ videotape of you, accompanied by three minutes of your recorded speech, selected at random from the government’s own information files. Beside the screen (in this booth, someone had, bizarrely, spilled red syrup down it, some of which had been thumb-smudged away, some scraped off with a fingernail), the explanatory plaque explained: “The chances are ninety nine point nine nine and several nines percent more that no one but you has ever seen before what you are about to see. Or,” as the plaque continued cheerily, “to put it another way, there is a greater chance that you will have a surprise heart attack as you step from this booth today than that this confidential material has ever been viewed by other human eyes than yours. Do not forget to retrieve your card and your token. Thank you.”Delany, Samuel R. (2011-03-01). Trouble on Triton (Kindle Locations 220-238). Wesleyan University Press. Kindle Edition.
Yeah the NSA etc. sucks. This is just one view of what a future society with very little, to no privacy, might look like. From Trouble on Triton first published in 1976 (I had it when it was just titled Triton)
These Are The Prices AT&T, Verizon and Sprint Charge For Cellphone Wiretaps – Forbes
If Americans aren’t disturbed by phone carriers’ practices of handing over cell phone users’ personal data to law enforcement en masse–in many cases without a warrant–we might at least be interested to learn just how much that service is costing us in tax dollars: often hundreds or thousands per individual snooped.
Earlier this week the American Civil Liberties Union revealed a trove of documents it had obtained through Freedom of Information Requests to more than 200 police departments around the country. They show a pattern of police tracking cell phone locations and gathering other data like call logs without warrants, using devices that impersonate cell towers to intercept cellular signals, and encouraging officers to refrain from speaking about cell-tracking technology to the public, all detailed in a New York Times story.
via These Are The Prices AT&T, Verizon and Sprint Charge For Cellphone Wiretaps – Forbes.