Photo 10:06 pm / 29 February 2012 by la quimica de la vida comun
February 2012
"A Letter To Other Occupiers" By Staughton Lynd 9:05 pm / 29 February 2012 by John Madziarczyk, at Lost Highway Times...Paths in Oblivion
Highly recommended.
"Bear with me if I continue this ancient Movement history.
In November 1965, there was a gathering in Washington DC of representatives from a myriad of ad hoc student groups formed to oppose the Vietnam war. During the weeks before this occasion several friends warned me that different Left groups were preparing to do battle for control of the new antiwar movement. I assured them that their fears were needless: that kind of thing might have happened in the 1930s, but we were a new Left, committed to listening to one another and to learning from our collective experience.
I was wrong. From the opening gavel, both Communists and Trotskyists sought to take control of the new activist network. In the process they seriously disillusioned many young persons who, perhaps involved in their first political protest, had come long distances in the hope of creating a common front against the war.
Paul Booth of SDS called this meeting “the crazy convention.” I remember sleeping on the floor of somebody’s apartment next to Dave Dellinger as the two of us sought to refocus attention on what was happening in Vietnam. I recall pleading near the end of the occasion with members of the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) to be allowed into a locked hotel room where, apparently having lost on the convention floor, they were forming a new national organization.
SDS faced the identical problem at the end of the 1960s with the Progressive Labor party (PL). Essentially what PL did was to caucus beforehand, to adopt tactics for promoting its line within a larger and more diffuse organization, and then, without any interest in what others might have to say, ramming through its predecided resolutions. After a season of hateful harangues and organizational division, very little remained.
Some Occupiers may respond, “But we’re not trying to take over anything! We only want to be able to follow our own consciences!” Sadly, though, the impact of Marxist-Leninist vanguardism and unrestrained individualism on a larger body of variegated protesters may be pretty much the same. In each case there may be a fixed belief that one knows the Truth and has correctly determined What Is To Be Done, which makes it an unnecessary waste of time to Listen To The Experience Of Others. Those who hold these attitudes are likely to act in a way that will wound or even destroy the larger Movement that gives them a platform.
In the period between Seattle in 1999 and September 11, 2001, many activists were into a pattern of behavior that might unkindly be described as summit-hopping. Two young men from Chicago who had been in Seattle stayed in our basement for a night on their way to the next encounter with globalization in Quebec. I was struck by the fact that, as they explained themselves, when they came back to Chicago from Seattle they had been somewhat at a loss about what to do next. As each successive summit (Quebec, Genoa, Cancun) presented itself, they expected to be off to confront the Powers That Be in a new location, leaving in suspended state whatever beginnings they were nurturing in their local communities. So far as an outsider like myself could discern, there did not seem to be a long-term strategy directed toward creating an “otro mundo,” a qualitatively new society.
This brings me to the forthcoming confrontation in Chicago in May. My wife Alice and I were living in Chicago in 1968. I was arrested and briefly jailed. Although many in the Movement considered the Chicago events to be a great victory, I believe it is the consensus of historians that the national perception of what happened in Chicago contributed to Nixon’s victory in the November 1968 election. More important, as some of us foresaw these predominantly Northern activists like their SNCC predecessors appeared to have great difficulty in picking up again the slow work of “accompanying” in local communities.
I dread the possibility of a re-run of this sequence of events in 2012."
"Bear with me if I continue this ancient Movement history.
In November 1965, there was a gathering in Washington DC of representatives from a myriad of ad hoc student groups formed to oppose the Vietnam war. During the weeks before this occasion several friends warned me that different Left groups were preparing to do battle for control of the new antiwar movement. I assured them that their fears were needless: that kind of thing might have happened in the 1930s, but we were a new Left, committed to listening to one another and to learning from our collective experience.
I was wrong. From the opening gavel, both Communists and Trotskyists sought to take control of the new activist network. In the process they seriously disillusioned many young persons who, perhaps involved in their first political protest, had come long distances in the hope of creating a common front against the war.
Paul Booth of SDS called this meeting “the crazy convention.” I remember sleeping on the floor of somebody’s apartment next to Dave Dellinger as the two of us sought to refocus attention on what was happening in Vietnam. I recall pleading near the end of the occasion with members of the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) to be allowed into a locked hotel room where, apparently having lost on the convention floor, they were forming a new national organization.
SDS faced the identical problem at the end of the 1960s with the Progressive Labor party (PL). Essentially what PL did was to caucus beforehand, to adopt tactics for promoting its line within a larger and more diffuse organization, and then, without any interest in what others might have to say, ramming through its predecided resolutions. After a season of hateful harangues and organizational division, very little remained.
Some Occupiers may respond, “But we’re not trying to take over anything! We only want to be able to follow our own consciences!” Sadly, though, the impact of Marxist-Leninist vanguardism and unrestrained individualism on a larger body of variegated protesters may be pretty much the same. In each case there may be a fixed belief that one knows the Truth and has correctly determined What Is To Be Done, which makes it an unnecessary waste of time to Listen To The Experience Of Others. Those who hold these attitudes are likely to act in a way that will wound or even destroy the larger Movement that gives them a platform.
In the period between Seattle in 1999 and September 11, 2001, many activists were into a pattern of behavior that might unkindly be described as summit-hopping. Two young men from Chicago who had been in Seattle stayed in our basement for a night on their way to the next encounter with globalization in Quebec. I was struck by the fact that, as they explained themselves, when they came back to Chicago from Seattle they had been somewhat at a loss about what to do next. As each successive summit (Quebec, Genoa, Cancun) presented itself, they expected to be off to confront the Powers That Be in a new location, leaving in suspended state whatever beginnings they were nurturing in their local communities. So far as an outsider like myself could discern, there did not seem to be a long-term strategy directed toward creating an “otro mundo,” a qualitatively new society.
This brings me to the forthcoming confrontation in Chicago in May. My wife Alice and I were living in Chicago in 1968. I was arrested and briefly jailed. Although many in the Movement considered the Chicago events to be a great victory, I believe it is the consensus of historians that the national perception of what happened in Chicago contributed to Nixon’s victory in the November 1968 election. More important, as some of us foresaw these predominantly Northern activists like their SNCC predecessors appeared to have great difficulty in picking up again the slow work of “accompanying” in local communities.
I dread the possibility of a re-run of this sequence of events in 2012."
Señales Mixtas 8:42 pm / 29 February 2012 by Roderick, at Austro-Athenian Empire
I just saw an ad in which ethnic-cleansing governor Jan Brewer was inviting people to “come to Arizona.”
Muchas gracias por la bienvenida, Señora Brewer.
es mas divertido q el teto 8:35 pm / 29 February 2012 by la quimica de la vida comun
es mas divertido q el teto
Seattle, Eastern Washington, and fussiness/uptightness 8:15 pm / 29 February 2012 by John Madziarczyk, at Lost Highway Times...Paths in Oblivion
I spent the weekend in Eastern Washington, the rural and Republican part of the state east of the Cascades, and it was an eye opener. Not because of it's conservatism, but because it came with a certain kind of familiarity of action and thought that's found not just in conservative areas but in the rest of the United States outside of the Pacific Northwest. Call it a kind of absence of myopia, if you will. Liberal and conservative, urban and rural, the rest of the U.S. is united in greater contact with basic reality outside of navel gazing self justification. if you go to New York City, to Chicago, D.C., Detroit, Miami, you won't find the sort of uptight, entitled, prissy, spoiled, presumptuous bullshit you have to put up with in Seattle and Portland. The most culturally refined sections of New York City will probably tell you to go to hell if you act like a spoiled little brat wanting everything your own way and objecting when your whims aren't acted on immediately or respected. In Seattle it's a different ball game.
All of your rich, yuppie, bullshit preferences, neuroses, and hang ups are indulged and respected, are treated like they aren't delusional acts by people with too much privilege and not enough contact with the real world, but are instead wise, thought out, processes of elder statesman and women, who very knowingly want to crucify someone for having the wrong species of dog leash, I mean harness (since dogs supposedly shouldn't be leashed, according to them).
I live in Seattle, and am happy here, but I'm not some sort of vacant cheerleader who swallows the Kool-Aid without criticizing bullshit when he sees it.
Here's to Eastern Washington, for sanity if not for social policy.
All of your rich, yuppie, bullshit preferences, neuroses, and hang ups are indulged and respected, are treated like they aren't delusional acts by people with too much privilege and not enough contact with the real world, but are instead wise, thought out, processes of elder statesman and women, who very knowingly want to crucify someone for having the wrong species of dog leash, I mean harness (since dogs supposedly shouldn't be leashed, according to them).
I live in Seattle, and am happy here, but I'm not some sort of vacant cheerleader who swallows the Kool-Aid without criticizing bullshit when he sees it.
Here's to Eastern Washington, for sanity if not for social policy.
Relevant for Occupy Wall Street: Rudolf Hilferding on Finance Capital 8:15 pm / 29 February 2012 by John Madziarczyk, at Lost Highway Times...Paths in Oblivion
Here. A solid thinker from the Austro-Marxist school, who opposed both the Social Democrats in Germany and the Third International. For "cartel" you could substitute "corporation".
"The cartel itself presupposes a large bank which is in a position to provide, on a regular basis, the vast credits needed for current payments and productive investment in a whole industrial sector. But the cartel also brings about a still closer relationship between banking and industry. When competition in an industry is eliminated there is, first of all, an increase in the rate of profit, which plays an important role. When the elimination of competition is achieved by a merger, a new undertaking is created which can count upon higher profits, and these profits can be capitalized and constitute promoter's profit.[1] With the development of trusts this process becomes important in two respects. First, its realization constitutes a very important motive for the banks to encourage monopolization; and second, a part of the promoter's profits can be used to induce reluctant but significant producers to sell their factories, by offering a higher purchase price, thus facilitating the establishment of the cartel. This can perhaps be expressed in the following way: the cartel exerts a demand on the enterprises in a particular branch of industry; this demand increases to a certain degree the price of the enterprises[2] and this higher price is then paid in part out of the promoter's profit."
The rest of the book, of which this is just an excerpt looks very interesting, and is available through the link, but unfortunately I've only read the above, and what's immediately linked to it, in, print in Tom Bottomore's collection "Austro-Marxism".
"The cartel itself presupposes a large bank which is in a position to provide, on a regular basis, the vast credits needed for current payments and productive investment in a whole industrial sector. But the cartel also brings about a still closer relationship between banking and industry. When competition in an industry is eliminated there is, first of all, an increase in the rate of profit, which plays an important role. When the elimination of competition is achieved by a merger, a new undertaking is created which can count upon higher profits, and these profits can be capitalized and constitute promoter's profit.[1] With the development of trusts this process becomes important in two respects. First, its realization constitutes a very important motive for the banks to encourage monopolization; and second, a part of the promoter's profits can be used to induce reluctant but significant producers to sell their factories, by offering a higher purchase price, thus facilitating the establishment of the cartel. This can perhaps be expressed in the following way: the cartel exerts a demand on the enterprises in a particular branch of industry; this demand increases to a certain degree the price of the enterprises[2] and this higher price is then paid in part out of the promoter's profit."
The rest of the book, of which this is just an excerpt looks very interesting, and is available through the link, but unfortunately I've only read the above, and what's immediately linked to it, in, print in Tom Bottomore's collection "Austro-Marxism".
mexicanloneliness: Here’s a love song for all you lovers out… 8:12 pm / 29 February 2012 by la quimica de la vida comun
An Ode to Wolff (Response to “Basic Political Principles”) 7:42 pm / 29 February 2012 by Nick, at The Anarchist Township
Introduction My good now-former-anarchist-friend Scott has just published this post. And it’s led me to re-open this blog as a bit of a forum or a way for me to further my anarchist values and ideas. While Scott has left his anarchism behind I shall push forward. It is my contention that anarchism not only [...]