Anarchoblogs

I'm back for another stint blogging at The Art of the Possible. My first post for this run is "Left Opportunism and Crackpot Realism." Readers of this blog will probably also enjoy, especially, two recent posts by Jim Henley and Jackson on the questionable validity of the GDP as a metric.

The aspect of riot porn I have always enjoyed isn’t the strapping young lads standing up to “the man”. They have their charms but after years of sitting in rooms with them I prefer them from a distance…

The part I enjoy is a leap away from a riot, a protest, or demonstration. There I have a hard time seeing anything other than the future compromises of the politicians who claim to speak on behalf of the rioters or the mediocre demands of the most political of the rioters. Here my imagination is cynical. My imagination is constrained by politicians.

What I enjoy is the risk of action without constraint. The action of setting a fire or destroying a vehicle not because of the injustice happening somewhere else to someone else but for reasons undeterminable outside the action itself.

We can inscribe our own motives but they are ours, not theirs. City blocks & cop cars, architects & cops, campuses and academics are all in league with each other and even the symbolic act against their regime brings a smile to my face.

Here are some recent smiles.

smile!Guard at federal prison fatally stabbed – Michael Taylor, Chronicle Staff Writer

(06-21) 13:18 PDT — A recently hired guard at the federal prison in Merced County was fatally stabbed Friday by two inmates wielding homemade weapons, a prison official said today.

Jose Rivera, a 22-year-old guard at the United States penitentiary in Atwater, near the old Castle Air Force Base, was rushed to Mercy Medical Center in Merced at 3:30 p.m. Friday. He was declared dead at 4:15 p.m. Rivera, who lived in Chowchilla (Madera County), had been a guard at the prison since Aug. 5, 2007.

Prison spokesman Jesse Gonzalez said Rivera was assaulted “in a housing unit of the prison by two inmates with homemade weapons.” The high-security prison houses more than 1,100 inmates.

The FBI is investigating the case.

Violence ‘driving teachers away’

Teachers are warning that pupils’ violent behaviour is causing staff to leave the profession.

A third of teachers in the UK have faced physical aggression from pupils, a survey for the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) suggests.

And more than half have known of colleagues who had left teaching because of poor pupil behaviour…

Green Capitalism Attacked in Santa Cruz

Inspired by the recent actions of solidarity happening in Santa Cruz, we decided to actualize our discontent and outrage at the disgusting lie that green-capitalism tells us: that there is such thing as sustainable industry. Thus our local green-capitalist home furnishing center, “Greenspace,” got a landscaping rock thrown through its window.

And how great it felt to hear the giant plate glass shatter along with the illusion that commerce is invulnerable to our attacks. It was so easy it makes us giddy to think that such an act is infinitely reproducible. Not an hour out of our lives was wasted…

Continue reading at Aragorn! …

Another draft chapter from the org theory project:

Chapter Twelve. The Cost Principle

...is OK, just so long as it's the left boot.

Matthew Yglesias quotes Daniel Kurtz-Phelan:

Yglesias occasionally assumes the bloggerish pose of an outsider screaming at the Establishment, but in its substance his preferred foreign policy is as Establishment as could be. What he offers is a livelier version of the sort of "liberal internationalist" platform that might be found in, say, a task-force report put out by a center-left think tank.

Yglesias responded:

To me, though, this is the point. My ideas really are basically the ideas that were at the core of the bipartisan, establishment consensus throughout the Cold War years. And they're ideas that could and should have been the key ideas of center-left think tanks in the post-9/11 world. But that's not what actually happened. Instead, a set of ideas that originally existed as a fringe right-wing position wound up being espoused not only by nearly the entire Republican Party but by a huge swathe of the broader establishment.

When Samuel P. Huntington wrote, in The Crisis of Democracy, of the United States as "hegemonic power in a system of world order," and argued that this hegemonic status depended on the U.S. being

governed by the president acting with the support and cooperation of key individuals and groups in the Executive office, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the more important businesses, banks, law firms, foundations, and media, which constitute the private establishment...

...he was talking mainly about a Cold War liberal establishment dating back to FDR and Truman. This is what I had in mind when I left this comment under Yglesias' post:

As a left-wing outsider, I'm struck by the similarities between the old liberal foreign policy establishment you're so nostaligic for and the neoconservative approach. Despite significant differences, you have more positions in common than not. The liberal foreign policy establishment agrees with the neocons that the U.S. should (it goes without saying) have the strongest military in the world, that the U.S. is the rightful guarantor of a corporate world order, and that the U.S. is the only power in the world that has the right to define as a "threat" either what some country on the other side of the world does within a few hundred miles of its own border, or the refusal to recognize the U.S. as hegemonic power. The liberal foreign policy consensus got us all the nasty shit Gabriel Kolko wrote about, like forcibly suppressing leftist resistance movements in former Axis-occupied territories and putting former Axis puppets back in power. It got us Korea and Vietnam (including the installation and subsequent overthrow of Diem, and the Tonkin Gulf incident). It got us Suharto, and endless other dictatorships of, by, and for the landed oligarchs and TNCs.

In short, your "liberal establishment" foreign policy, to the extent that it differs from that of the neocons, reminds me of Chomsky's quip about the liberal wing of the Nazi party that only wanted to kill half the Jews. While it's arguably an improvement, it's still utterly reprehensible.

Yglesias is a textbook illustration of the tendency Arthur Silber observed in "even the most intelligent of liberal-progressive writers and bloggers":

their seeming inability to appreciate the continuity and uniformity of American foreign policy over the last century, and particularly since World War II. It appears that their determination to turn virtually every episode in our national life, no matter how disastrous, into an opportunity for partisan advantage and electoral victory overcomes analytic abilities which can often be very insightful on more limited questions. This myopic slant proceeds, in turn, from a willingness to allow the demands of tribal political identity to trump a more dispassionate (and I would submit, much more accurate) assessment of how the current Bush administration differs from previous administrations -- and how it does not.

Alfred Chandler, like Joseph Schumpeter and John Kenneth Galbraith, was thoroughly sold on the greater efficiencies of the large corporation. Like them, he equted large size both to greater efficiency and greater innovativeness.He argued that the mode…

Continue reading at Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism …

I've got a two-part guest post at the P2P Foundation on reciprocity and privilege.

Kevin Carson on reciprocity in an (un)free market (1)
Kevin Carson reciprocity in an (un)free market (2): the problem of artificial scarcity

Check it out.

William Waddell and Norman Bodek in Rebirth of American Industry: A Study of Lean Management (Vancouver, WA: PCS Press, 2005).Most of the material in this review will appear in a future version of Chapter Eight of the org theory book, and most of the…

Continue reading at Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism …

I have a couple new projects that I don't want to announce before they get off the ground but would like to get some help with. Asking for help has never been easy for me and trying to attract people to "spotlight" projects (like writing) has met with mixed success. I'm not sure if this method is public enough to reach all the people who might be interested or provides enough context to be appealing to who I'd like to reach but I will give it a try...

The first project involves reference, using Content Management Software (with the benefit of having experience with CMSs), and working with a small group of people building a large anarchist website. Ideally I would like to build a team of people who share a broad anarchist vision (anarchist without adjectives), who have some experience working with distributed groups, and who are comfortable with web-based Internet technologies. The hope is that a group of about a half-dozen people will participate in this project and they can be trained if they are interested.

Science!

The second project is going to be a bit harder to find people for. I am in the beginning stages of trying to build a "new" technology collective that is involved in supporting anarchist (and other anti-authoritarian) projects. Ideally it would include at least a half a dozen people with strong Unix skills and experience (and opinions) with the LAMP and LAPP stack, Postfix (ClamAV, SpamAssassin, etc), Xen, and server management technologies. Additionally it would include a couple of people with experience with popular PHP applications (support, installation, and maintenance), HTML, Python, etc.

If either of these projects seem interesting to you at all drop me an email at aragorn at anarchymag.org. I'll respond on this thread if there are any general questions.