Anarchoblogs

No place for race hatred Editorial November 1, 2009 THERE is no place in a modern multicultural society such as ours for race-hate groups. Sadly, they do exist. One that has recently come to our attention is an insidious neo-Nazi group calling itself the Australian chapter of Blood and Honour. Members of this group profess hatred for Africans, Asians, Jews, [...]

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More urban guerrilla attacks in Greece
taxikipali
libcom.org
October 30, 2009

Two more urban guerrilla attacks occurred in Athens and Salonica respectively within 24 hours of the armed attack against a police station in Athens [see : Police station attack tests Greek government, John Hadoulis/AFP, The Sydney Morning Herald, October 28, 2009]. A time-bomb hit the house of a leading conservative politician in Athens and another explosive mechanism hit the Spanish consulate in Salonica. At the same time confusion reigns over the communique with which a new armed group appears to be claiming responsibility for Tuesday’s attack.

Within only 24 hours of the Tuesday armed attack against the police station of Agia Paraskevi in Athens which has left 6 police officers seriously wounded (two remain in intensive care), two more attacks, with explosives this time, have come to add up tension to the already heated social and political climate in greece.

On the early hours of Friday 30 of October, a time-bomb hit the entrance of the house of a leading conservative politician, Ms Marietta Giannakou, causing material damage but no human injuries, as a phone-call by the urban guerrillas to the press had warned of the explosion. Ms Giannakou is the leading MEP of the now in opposition New Democracy right-wing party, and was the Minister of Education during the massive movement against educational reforms in 2006-2007. The attack against Ms Giannakou’s house has been claimed through a long communique by the Nuclei of Fire Conspiracy who amongst other things used the opportunity to communicate their views against anarchist participation in educational protest marches, professing once again their self-proclaimed nihilist platform.

Earlier this week the Minister of Public Order, Mr Chrisochoidis, has gone public urging the 6 persons wanted in relation to the Nuclei of Fire bomb campaign to surrender, arguing that the State will show leniency due to [their yoof].

The same night in Salonica, the Spanish Consulate was hit by an explosive mechanism. A communique by a first appearing group has claimed the attack was in solidarity to Amadeu Casellas, a long-term anarchist prisoner in Spain. [According to one source, "the attack in Thessaloniki has been claimed by the “international chamber for the diffusion of revolutionary violence”...".] Last week more explosive mechanisms in Salonica had hit several MP offices, including the office of the Deputy Minister of Public Order, Mr Vougias, as well as the house of the extreme-right minded Archbishop of Salonica.

The new attacks come to add to the climate of escalating tension in the country, to which considerable confusion was added by a communique published on Friday in the daily press, claiming responsibility for the Tuesday attack against the police station of Agia Paraskevi. The communique which employs long quotes from the Communist Party leader during the Civil War, Nikos Zachariadis, as well as from the Communist International, is signed by the acronyms OPLA, the name of the Communist Party “Groups for the Protection of People’s Struggle’, [Organization for the Protection of the People's Struggle (Greek: Οργάνωση Προστασίας Λαϊκού Αγώνα, abbreviated ΟΠΛΑ - OPLA)] an elite corps of combat units and intelligence teams during the Civil War, notorious for assassinations of both monarchofascists and political opponents within the communist movement. Besides changing the acronym to now mean “Groups of Popular Proletarian Self-Defense”, the communique consists largely of paraphrases of the original text announcing the forming of OPLA in the 1940s, urging “the organisation of structures of mass popular self-defense” against state and parastate repression. The Communist Party of Greece has responded angrily, denouncing the communique as a provocation and a mockery of history and the armed struggle of the Democratic Army of Greece (DSE). The authenticity of the communique remains highly disputed and controversial.

I was stopped by a soldier, said he, “You are a swine”
He beat me with his baton and he kicked me in the groin
I bowed and I scraped, sure me manners were polite
But all the time I’m thinking of me little Armalite…

Sure a brave RUC man came up into our street
Six hundred British soldiers were gathered round his feet
“Come out, ye cowardly Fenians”, said he, “Come out and fight”
But he cried, “I’m only joking”, when he heard the Armalite

See also : Racism and fascist violence in Northern Ireland PLUS (June 18, 2009) | The Mother of a Thousand Dead Still Not Quite Dead… Yet (March 12, 2008)

If you only got your news from the Jerusalem Post, you’d think that Amnesty International was the vilest, most hate-filled organization on the planet. You’d probably think it was a branch of Hamas. You’d probably have no idea that it’s actually…

Continue reading at Don Emmerich's Peace Blog …

This, if it is true, is a very sad report.

The Mondragon Experiment, except for their ignorance of social ecology, was a very promising alternative socialist organization.

They formed successful workers' cooperatives, which spawned others, and they grew to relieve poverty and disaffection in their isolated region.

The problems started as they grew too big and began to need to integrate their business operations with the Capitalist world that surrounded them. The expediency of business operations and personal greed began to outweigh the egalitarian and solidarity principles based on the ICA principles.

Although they carefully built a very democratic cooperative corporate governance model, the complexity of large-scale operations and the accelerating pace eventually began to erode the vigilance and influence of the holders of the founding principles.

If I were beginning a socialist business entity, I would most certainly start with Mondragon, their founding principles and their early history as a positive example. I would study where they went wrong and try to devise mitigating interventions so that the new socialist economy was not corrupted.

The problem is that there IS a Capitalist system, where corporations have certain strategies and tactics (e.g. diversification, economy of scale, worker and environmental exploitation and the eschewing of those costs, etc.) to defeat small business. Otherwise, I'd suggest that the next Mondragon stick to the small mutualist business model and form community alliances only. However, that would not be realistic and successful. As long as there are corporate capitalist conglomerates, it will be impossible to build an alternative socialist economy.

We need world unity, understanding and cooperation.

Nothing less.


Mike Morin
Eugene, OR, USA

1 November 2009

In the eighth section of the sixth book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle takes a closer look at practical wisdom, and its relation to the political arts, to universal and particular knowledge, and to intuition.

Practical wisdom, or prudence (phronesis), is one of the five faculties by which people can grasp the truth. Aristotle covered it in section three of this book, where he said that it is a virtue of the deliberative part of the rational part of the soul that manifests as the ability to deliberate about what actions would be beneficial and expedient in leading a life of virtue and eudaimonia.

Here (and in the trailing paragraphs of section seven, which some people fold into this section), he has a few more things to say about it:

• Practical wisdom is concerned with down-to-earth, human things, and things that it makes sense to deliberate about — that is, things that have a purpose that human action can influence (there’s no reason, for instance, to deliberate about whether to grow old or not).
• Practical wisdom requires knowledge of both universals and particulars. In this respect, it is like Philosophy (see section seven), though Philosophy concerns itself with impractical-though-interesting things. The “universals” and “particulars” bit has to do with the syllogism. For example:

  All men are mortal (universal)
  
  Socrates is a man (particular)
  
  ∴ Socrates is mortal (practical wisdom about Socrates!)

  You can go wrong in practical wisdom by failing to know the truth about either the universal or the particular. For instance:

  Cans that are swollen may contain rotten food that can make you sick (universal)
  
  The food you’re about to eat came from a swollen can (particular)
  
  ∴ You may get sick if you eat it (practical wisdom about your future!)

  In this case, if you have faulty understanding of either the universal truth about swollen cans or of the particular truth about the can you’ve just opened, you’ll lack the important practical wisdom that will keep you from getting sick. Or, try on this anarchist syllogism:

  Theft is wrong (universal)
  
  Taxation is a variety of theft (particular)
  
  ∴ Taxation is wrong (practical wisdom)

  You need the universal, the particular, and the logical process in order to get to the conclusion, and you can go wrong at any of these stages. Intuition will get you the universal, but it may take practical wisdom itself to get you the particular from which you can draw appropriate conclusions.
• Practical wisdom comes under different headings, depending on the sphere in which it is exercised. For example:

  heading	sphere
  prudence	self-government
  domestic management	home economics
  legislation	the universal principles of politics
  deliberative government	executive government; the carrying out in particular cases of the universals enacted by legislation
  judicial government

  

  The varieties of practical wisdom, from R.W. Browne’s The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle (1889)

  

  The varieties of practical wisdom, from J.H. Muirhead’s Chapters from Aristotle’s Ethics (1900)

  

  The varieties of practical wisdom, from Alexander Grant’s The Ethics of Aristotle (1874)

• People who apply practical wisdom in their own lives are considered people of practical wisdom, while those who apply it to other peoples’ lives (for instance, the legislators, deliberators, and judges in the list above) “are considered meddlesome.” But Aristotle asks us to consider whether it might be impossible for most people to mind their own business if some people didn’t try to apply their wisdom to problems of the community, and whether it is possible to mind your own business without at the same time minding the business, at least to some extent, of those you interact with, either in your household or in the community at large.
• While it’s possible for a young person to be a savant with a genius understanding of something like mathematics, practical wisdom seems to be something that must be acquired through long experience. Aristotle thinks this is because expertise in mathematics largely requires an intellectual understanding of abstract universals, while practical wisdom requires actual encounters with real-life particulars. When you teach a young savant a mathematical truth, he or she grasps it as a truth immediately; but when you teach a truth of practical wisdom, the same student may have reason to be skeptical and to need to see that truth exemplified in real-life examples first before he or she can internalize it into his or her worldview.
• Practical wisdom concerns things of “common sense” — knowledge that like that gained via Intuition (see section six) is known but cannot be justified via logical deduction from other facts. However, knowledge gained by Intuition has to do with general, universal “first principles,” while the knowledge of practical wisdom has to do with particulars. The sense we use to gain this knowledge is the one we use when, for instance, we see a drawing of a triangle and think “that is a triangle” without actually measuring the angles and counting the sides. It is the sense that allows us to go from an observation to a particular fact, breaking out of the potentially endless loop of skeptical ratiocination to decide “aha! I know such-and-such about such-and-such, so there.”

Comment on today’s Picket Line!

This is a recent bit of correspondence that I received from an anonymous victim-blamer through my online contact form. Apparently in response to my post from October 2007 on Officer Dan Gilroy, a grown-ass man who has no problem using his position as government police to repeatedly punch 15-year-old black girls in the face over allegedly walking outside after midnight. Our anonymous correspondent thinks that Shelwanda Riley — the 15-year-old victim of Officer Dan Gilroy’s sado-fascist power-trip anger management problem — is the one whose conduct ought to be at issue. And would like us to know, I guess, that she ought to feel grateful that the pig didn’t break her ribs or something:

From: Anonymous (no e-mail address provided)
Date: 10/28/2009 10:47 AM
Subject: Shelwanda Riley (radgeek.com feedback form)

I know this is old. I just saw the youtube video of the cop and the resister. That girl was fortunate to only have been beaten as badly as she was for the terrible behavior she exhibited. Police brutality is different with each situation, and if I was that cop… The cops will not mess with anyone who is not acting stupidly.

Oh, O.K., what with the girl walking alone at night and not doing exactly what this hyperviolent control-freak ordered her to do, well, obviously she was asking for it. Of course.

From Bob O’Brien’s “Sanity Check,” a succinct account of why the “fail to deliver” problem is a big and serious one: • The DTCC, via Cede & Co., is the registered owner of all shares held in “Street Name,” which are all shares in margin accounts. • Margin accounts represent the bulk of independent investor account types. • [...]

Towards the end of the 19th century there was a big to do regarding the fact that Rodin didn't do all of his work on stone sculptures himself. Instead, he had assistants rough them out and went in and did the finishing touches afterwards. People were concerned that they weren't getting 100% Rodin's. Sounds straightforward, right? After all, what are finishing touches anyways? It's not that