Tom Wetzel's home page
About
From Self-managed Solidarity Unionism to a
Self-managed Society (from ZNet, June 15, 2009)
Social Anarchism, Individualist Anarchism,
the State and Leninism: A Libertarian Critique of
Capitalism
Workers Power
and the Spanish Revolution (in HTML) Aug. 2006
Anti-displacement Victory in San Francisco (in PDF)
Workers' Liberation and Institutions of
Self-management in The Northeastern Anarchist #11, March 2006
San Francisco Transit
Fight
What is Gentrification? (revised 2004)
Slaughterhouse Fight: A Look at the
Hormel Strike (from ideas &
action 1986) (with Jake Edwards and Steve Boyce)
Workers Power and the Russian Revolution Revolution and Syndicalism (Part 1)
The Capitalist City or the Self-managed City? 2004
States of Affairs The Hidden Cost of the New Economy: A Study of the Northeast Mission
Industrial Zone
[In HTML]
[[In PDF]
Origins of the Union Shop (1989)
Life at the Bay Guardian (1987)
My piece linked below is part of a debate prompted by
Eric Kerl's article "Contemporary anarchism" in the July-August issue of
International Socialist Review:
http://www.isreview.org/issues/72/feat-anarchism.shtml
I wrote a review of that article which was published on the webzine of the Workers Solidarity Alliance:
http://ideasandaction.info/2010/07/review-international-socialist-review-on-contemporary-anarchism/
In the September-October issue of the ISO's journal the debate was continued with three short pieces, by myself,
Sebastian Lamb of the New Socialist Group in Canada, and Eric Kerl.
Read my rejoinder to Eric Kerl's response in that issue of ISR...
Challenges in a Time of Austerity:
American capitalism faces multiple worsening crises. Vast unemployment, huge numbers of home foreclosures, and cuts to public services are symptoms of an economic system in crisis. The role of the USA as world cop to protect corporate exploitation of labor and resources throughout the world creates human casualties — as in the endless war in Afghanistan — and also shifts resources away from social services that would benefit the working class population. Capitalism profits off the domination and exploitation of labor but also from plunder of the earth’s resources and shifting costs onto others through pollution. The threat posed by climate change is a clear and present danger and evidence that capitalism is not ecologically sustainable.
Radical economists usually distinguish two kinds of economic downturns. First, there are the recessions that are
part of the normal business cycle. And then there are less frequent "structural" crises that reflect more deep-seated
problems. The present epic recession seems to be a severe structural crisis.
The FAU has won its appeal on the right to call itself a "union". The appeals court based on its decision on freedom
of speech, that people have a right to express their opinion of what a "union" is. The FAU points out, however, that they
are still up against the German laws that make it illegal to engage in any direct action if you can't prove you have
the power to negotiate contracts with employers. Members of the FAU in Berlin previously were fined and jailed for
their boycott campaign against Babylon Cinema.
A struggle by the workers at the New Babylon Cinema in Berlin — a relatively small firm — has now blown up into a
fight with much larger legal consequences for German workers. A December 11, 2009 court edict in Berlin now poses
some serious questions: Will German workers have the legal right to a union of their own choosing? Will they have the
legal right to form grassroots alternative unions? By Cory Paul (San Francisco Chronicle)
Just a few years ago, floor boards popped up as Ji Jian-guang walked across his cramped Chinatown apartment.
His wife, Ru Mei Peng, washed vegetables in a sink the size of a shoe box. Their
two adult sons — along with a daughter-in-law and grandbaby — shared a
bedroom split by a bookcase.
Though cramped, 53 Columbus, Room 108, was home. For nearly a decade, the Jis feared
they would lose it to encroaching developers.
More than 200 people attended a victory celebration June 16th in San Francisco for a group of tenacious tenants who successfully
fought their eviction and now are in control of their building through their coop, the Columbus United
Cooperative, at 53 Columbus Avenue. This struggle goes back more than a decade ago when the San Francisco Community College District
bought a 3-story brick apartment building with the aim of knocking it down to build a new community
college campus.
From the Hoover administration's housing conference in 1930 to the present day there has been
an unrelenting focus on individual home purchase as the means of providing housing in the USA.
Since
the 1980s efforts to increase homeownership among working class people with lower incomes have
included government downpayment assistance programs and attacks on "redlining" practices of
banks in communities of color.
As banks sought to expand their mortgage business, they increasingly pushed lower income residents
into risky adjustable rate mortgages and mortgages with baloon payments. Studies have shown that many
people who were directed towards risky loans would in fact have qualified for less risky mortgages.
This did lead to a small increase in the rate of homeownership — from 64 percent in 1985 to
69 percent in 2004 (58 percent in California). Homeownership has been promoted as providing more security than renting since
you own and control your own dwelling. But the security becomes illusory when high debt and risky
loans drive households into foreclosure. And an epidemic of foreclosures de-stabilizes working class
neighborhoods as large numbers of families lose their home.
Transportation and the City, Past and Present
A Reply to the International Socialist Organization (from ZNet)
A Talk to the Alexander Berkman Social Club (Oct 2008)
(with James Tracy) Dollars & Sense, May/June 2006
Z Magazine November 2005
A Review of Maurice Brinton's For Workers Power, ZNet, 2005
Revolution and Syndicalism (Part 2)
A debate with the Workers Solidarity Movement (2003)
(from the City Lights anthology Globalize Liberation 2004)
[Entry in the Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2003]
[A Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition report (October 2000).]
The Italian Factory Occupations of 1920 Talk at a conference on workers' self-organization 1988
Debate with the International Socialist Organization
Understanding the Economic Crisis
Vacant Hotel Occupied
On July 19th members of Direct Action to Stop the Cuts occupied a vacant 41-room hotel in San Francisco's Mission District. The action was intended to demonstrate the city's inaction on housing. While thousands of people sleep on the streets or live in very crowded living conditions in small apartments, potential housing units sit vacant.
Victory in Fight for Union Freedom in Germany
Fight for Union Freedom in Germany
Chinatown land trust helps low-income housing
Tenants Celebrate Conversion of Building to Cooperative
The Shared Equity Solution: A Working Class Program for
Housing
Architect's Drawing of Columbus United Cooperative in San Francisco
Links
Workers Solidarity Alliance webzine
San Francisco Community Land Trust
Cooperative conversions of rental buildings and other programs for resident-controlled,
permanently affordable housing in S.F.
Video Activist Network Gentrification Report
Car Trouble (from Dollars & Sense)
Carfree Cities Web Site
Participatory Economics Web Site
Workers Solidarity Alliance
Web Site
Coalition of Immokalee Workers
United Electrical Workers
Union Workplace Rights Page
Agora TV