"We have done this because we love liberty and hate authority." – Voltairine de Cleyre
Archive for June, 2010
BPUSA
Jun 13th
The following is a reader submission.
BPUSA
By Keith
The BP Deepwater Horizon oil gusher demonstrates the necessity of building civil society within American communities. In fact if anything it demonstrates how community agency, the capacity to act for collective purposes, has been eroded due to a persistent effort to erode civil society and create dependency upon state and corporate actors. This is done through a number of mechanisms: (1) subsuming mutual aid and not-for-profit actors into government welfare; (2) slowly chipping away at the capacity of welfare and social service agencies through diminished funding, increased bureaucracy, and enhanced regulation that undermines the core mission of the agency and; (3) finally by transferring such services over to corporate actors who seek to maximize profit by distributing material (not social) goods that fail to offer a semblance of empowerment nor promises to build individual capacity for transformative change. The purposeful erosion of civil society leaves communities extremely vulnerable in times of crises, as the Deepwater Horizon disaster demonstrates.
Gulf coastal communities were assured by BP and the United States government that the effects of the spill were being mitigated through public-private partnerships without actively engaging the local level communities or regional working groups. As a recent Rolling Stone article notes, these actors are attempting to protect their own interests to the detriment of an entire ecosystem. BP, the criminal perpetrator, is in essence being empowered to act as judge, jury, and I dare say executioner. More >
ALLiance #6 is gearing up and looking for submissions!
Jun 12th
It’s that time again. ALLiance is seeking submissions. ALLiance aims to be a movement journal for the Alliance of the Libertarian Left (ALL).
ALL’s “mission statement”:
The Alliance of the Libertarian Left is a multi-tendency coalition of mutualists, agorists, voluntaryists, geolibertarians, left-Rothbardians, green libertarians, dialectical anarchists, radical minarchists, and others on the libertarian left, united by an opposition to statism and militarism, to cultural intolerance (including sexism, racism, and homophobia), and to the prevailing corporatist capitalism falsely called a free market; as well as by an emphasis on education, direct action, and building alternative institutions, rather than on electoral politics, as our chief strategy for achieving liberation.
ALLiance #6 will focus on Education and Organization as components of Emancipation. We are looking for articles, essays, poems, or artwork relating to anarchist theories of education and organization.
If you are interested in advertising or promoting a project with ALLiance #6, please contact us.
Our working deadline is September 1, 2010.
The Red and Black Stands Its Ground.
Jun 4th
Dear Friends, Fellow Workers and ALLies,
The community and workers of Portland’s Red and Black Café, an IWW, anarchist, vegan, co-op, needs your support and solidarity.
A uniformed police officer, James Crooker, entered the Red and Black Café and ordered a cup of coffee. On his way out of the store he was delayed by another customer who wanted to let him know how much they appreciate the police and the service they perform (keeping the homeless out of sight, the workers working, minorities in jail, and the angry away from the throats of “Our [corporate and political] leaders [who] invent nothing, but new taxes, and conquer nothing but the pockets of their subjects”1).
John Langley, one of the co-owners and Fellow Worker, of the Café approached Officer Crooker and asked him to leave, stating how uncomfortable he felt having an armed Police Officer inside an Anarchist Café.
As John Langley explained to Lynne Terry:
“It’s not about the police,” Langley said. “It’s about what the police represent to many people who frequent the cafe.
The cafe draws vegans — of course — along with homeless people and animal-rights and environmental activists who Langley said have been targets of police abuse and harassment.
Now this story has gone national and the Conservative/Liberal Statists are up in arms. William Gillis, in a letter to Roderick Long, describes the impact on the Café:
“I have good friends on staff and their phones are ringing off the hook with death threats. Mainstream conservative and liberal pundits have talked of showing up with weapons to start a confrontation… My friends could really use some support; in this environment some kind words or awareness from those who aren’t fanatical devotees of the police state would go a long way.”
The anarchist stands resolute against rulership, against authority, against oppression – period. This is why we will sit at a lunch counter against the wishes of its racist owner and, at the same time and in the same respect, remove the statist myrmidon from our own coffee shop.
This is not a contradiction; this is consistency!
So help out the Red and Black if you can, give them a shout, drop a buck or two in their paypal and make the Neo-Con-Liberals tremble.
“Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again the black and red unite.” — Otto von Bismarck.
1. Thomas Hodgskin
ALLiance #5 Recommended Reading.
Jun 1st
Due to space constraints, ALLiance #5′s recommended reading list has been moved to this blog. Also look forward to a bibliography for my article ALL Wobbly to appear here as well.
I hope to provide food for thought and vindication for left-libertarian theory and strategy.
ALL the best and enjoy:
1. The State by Franz Oppenheimer with Introduction by George H. Smith (ISBN: 0-930073-23-1).
For those unfamiliar with Franz Oppenheimer’s classic work of political theory and sociology, I envy you because it is electric with radicalizing energy. In one slim book Oppenheimer brings together many important philosophical and political threads and, most importantly, points out our opposition, our enemy: the “political means.”
“For a most enlightening treatment of the genesis and nature of the State, I refer my readers to Franz Oppenheimer’s short treatise on the subject (“The State …”). It is sufficient here to define it as an organization primarily designed to perpetuate the division of Society into an owning and exploiting class and a landless, exploited class. In its genesis it is an organization of a conquering group, by means of which that group maintains its economic exploitation of those subjugated. In its later stages, when the conquering class has become merely an owning class, the State is an organization controlled by this class through its control of wealth, for the purpose of protecting ownership against the propertyless classes and facilitating their exploitation by the owning class. The State is thus the natural enemy of all its citizens except those of the owning class.” –Suzanne LaFollette, Concerning Women, footnote on pg 6-7.
I would like to highlight three important contributions this, particular, book offers to radical anarcho-libertarianism. First, Mr. Oppenheimer offers us a link to the radical French Liberals that identified “class theory” sociology and a bridge to its contemporary incarnation: “agorism.”
Second, a clear contrast is made between Internal and External class production, which contrasts Oppenheimer from Marx. As George H. Smith points out in endnote #2, another good reason to check out this version of The State is Mr. Smith Introduction,
“The Marxian approach, like that of Oppenheimer, is frequently placed in the “conflict school” of sociology, but with this difference: the former upholds a theory of the State based on “internal conflict” (i.e., of classes), whereas the latter is a theory of “external conflict.” Proponents of “external conflict” believe that the State emerged from the conflict and forcible merger of two groups, victors and vanquished, which had formerly existed as separate communities. (This is the modern “conquest theory” of the origin of the State.)
And third, as was mentioned in the quoted endnote, the historiography presented and vindicated, in The State, for the origin of the state is conquest. Not with social contract, general will or divine appointment, but with the sword, the bullet, violence and subjugation.
But we already knew this, didn’t we?
“A small minority has stolen the heritage of humanity.” –Franz Oppenheimer
2. Solidarity Forever: An Oral History of the IWW by Stewart Bird, Dan Georgakas and Deborah Shaffer (ISBN: 0-941702-12-X)
Solidarity Forever is a great storied invitation to the trials and victories of the rank and file Fellow Worker. This book will take you from the forests of the American Pacific Northwest to the textile mills of New York City; and through all the prisons in between. From the introduction:
“Long regarded as belonging to a social movement whose time has come and gone, the IWW may yet prove to have been ahead of its time, developing and popularizing ideas very relevant to economic and political challenges undreamed of in 1905. Knowing that humans must always err, the IWWs dared to err on the side of liberty. The photographs we have gathered here show how that commitment to freedom blossomed into a profound mass movement. The words of rank and file IWWs that we present embody that sense of justice and reason which prompted ordinary workers to deeds of extraordinary courage.”
3. The Industrial Workers of the World: Its First 100 Years by Fred W. Thompson and Jon Bekken (ISBN: 978-0-917124-02-0)
The First 100 Years is great introduction to The Industrial Workers of the World. It is written by two Fellow Workers, Fred W. Thompson and Jon Bekken, who have lived through and participated in many of the chronicled labor actions. This book does not gloss over the failures or blow out of proportion the successes of the Union, but rather presents a living, growing phenomenon. The IWW has weathered many storms, hard winters and police brutality, but has remained and maintained its core radicalism: workers don’t need bosses to get the job done. From the introduction:
“The IWW was stated in 1905 by “seasoned old unionist,” as Gene Debs called them, who realized that American labor could not win with the sort of labor movement it had. There was too much “organized scabbery” of one union on another, too much jurisdictional squabbling, too much autocracy, and too much hobnobbing between prosperous labor leaders and the millionaires in the National Civic Federation. There was too little solidarity, too little straight labor education, and consequently too little vision of what could be won, and too little will to win it.”
4. The New Harmony Movement by George B. Lockwood (ISBN: 0-486-22719-7)
Those of use in the Alliance of the Libertarian Left who come from the Individualist and Mutualist perspectives will find this a great introduction to Robert Owen: friend and mentor to Josiah Warren. It presents a number of other social experiments, the practical counterpart to social theory, that were occurring in the American heartland and frontier. There is also a whole chapter devoted to the life and experiments of Josiah Warren.
5. AGITATE! EDUCATE! ORGANIZE!: American Labor Posters by Lincoln Cushing & Timothy W. Drescher (ISBN: 978-0-8014-7427-9)
This a great collection of labor activism and art. There is very little text which is fine because the purpose of each piece is to grab your attention, communicate a message and point you in a direction.
