Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

http://eagainst.com/articles/the-vocabu ... neo-nazis/

The Vocabulary of Greek Neo-Nazis
22/06/2012 | » Efor




Anti-Greek: He who hates the Nation. Participate in strikes, demonstrations, attacks the Βenefactors of the Νation, such as banks and offshore companies, wants to participate in assemblies, does not hate his enemies, the Turks, does not have Greek flag tattoos, does not hold a knife. You can recognize him by the correct spelling.

Love: Idea, artificial construct of those filthy leftists, which they use to express in a highbrow way their sexual perversions and their supposed humanitarianism. The word is now removed from the official vocabulary, and is replaced by the word Faith.

Fighter: Greek, proud of the Leader and his Nation. He holds a peg with the sacred Greek flag, honours the Army parades, wipes off barbarians, salutes to the standards of the ancestors of the Third Reich, and is a glorious model of national education.

Blood: The sanctified characteristic of the unity of the Race. The blood flowing in our veins differs from that of the barbarian peoples, and is common only with some European races, like the Germans and the Austrians. It is prohibited to Greek Men and women to contaminate the Greek blood with barbarians, either through embracing or through the sexual act that can have disastrous results for Purity.

Anarchy: A false ideology, which embrace the enemies of the Nation, usually long-haired people, students, drug addicts, homosexuals and the lazy. Composed by the privative particle -”an” and the word “archy” [1], which means without Statutory Authority. This fact alone excludes the word from the neo-fascist vocabulary. It also promotes anti-Hellenic notions such as self-organization, autonomy, self, freedom, equality and other such nonsense. The anti-Hellenic monstrosities of Camus, Dostoevsky, Bakunin, Malatesta, Kropotkin, Goldman, Castoriadis, Orwell and others will be burned in public view, as well as the records of Trypes, Clash, Sex Pistols, Manu Chao, Generation of Chaos, P.Sidiropoulos etc., along with films funded by Soros such as “What to do in case of fire”, “Land and Freedom”, The days of plenty are numbered, etc.

Anti-authoritarians: The enemies of the Leader and the fascist front. Anti-Greeks, paid agents of the Illuminati and the Jews, atheists, antichrists. Usually distinguished by their long hair, beards, but now may also be citizens above suspicion. You will know them by the frequent mention of the word “solidarity” and “power”. Springing up like mushrooms, although any free social space has been demolished for years past. Το be delivered alive to local authorities, which will take immediate advantage of their labor force.

Police: Along with the militia, the Snitch Service, and the Fascist Front, they are the fortification of the nation against anti-Greek worms, strikes, demonstrations, rallies of more than 3 people, noisy debates, thinking, the evening counting in houses, the morning counting in schools, the afternoon counting οf food on the tables. They have the right to beat, torture, rape, however it is prohibited to damage property of citizens approved by the State, Greek or Foreign National Benefactors-Investors. Each bank branch is entitled to 10 public security officers. Each party official is entitled to a squad of riot police on every block around their home, office, the shop where they drink Greek coffee.

Library: Building in which one can read the approved books of the National Censorship Comittee. At the moment the library contains 4 books by Michalovlakas [2] (including his last book “My days in KYP” [3]), 29 by Liakopoulos [4] Putin, 2 by Plevris the Old [5], 4 by Hitler, 45 books on the Third Reich, 3 books on Ancient Greece, and the second book of Kokodiaris [6] with instructions on tactical communication for Fascists.

Woman: Woman is honoured as Greek mother, and a key element of continuity of the Race and the Blood. The Greek Male has leadership rights in his home, and the woman has to obey the commands. Any domestic problem, of course, should be reported by the Man to the local authorities.

Internet: Tool of misinformation and propaganda which promotes the condemned free choice of information. All National historians refute the foreign propaganda that it was used by neo-fascists to recruit Young Greeks. We were and are against this tool of the New World Order, and therefore it was forbidden throughout the country.

Strength: As the Nazi minister of propaganda, Goebbels was saying, and as our Leader repeats, only the strong have the right to survive, and we must always be characterised by Strength. The law is the law of the powerful and the strong. The weak to Keadas [7].

Jew: The source of all evil.

Work: Sacred duty towards the Fatherland, to make National Economy an example for imitation, able to meet the needs of military equipment. All Greeks are obliged to work at the National Centers of Production initially for two years without pay, and then to be transferred to a private company that chooses them. The salaries are adjusted according to national needs and the secret special purposes of the Nation, but all the Greeks have a job.

Piece: As defined by the Great Leader Michalovlakas, it is the interval between the Holy Wars. The pitiful period during which people engage in such shameless acts as love, travels, friendships, conversations. The nation does not need peace; whoever is a pacifist should join the hippies.

Leader: The brain, the soul, and the exponent of the Nation and its Ideas. His decisions are immediately accepted and enforced by the servants of the Nation. He may not have the appearance of the White Supreme Leader, whose advent was predicted by of the monk Pastitsios [8], but he is proven direct descendant of our ancient ancestors, namely of Ephialtes [9].

Capitalism: Jew’s domination in all its glory.

Communism: Ideology made by Jews to serve their own interests: the Jews and their allies, the Communists, are secretly planning to conquer the world and enslave humanity. Marx’s Capital and other anti-Hellenic baloney were eventually discovered to be part of the Protocols of Zion.

New World Order: A secret conspiracy which wants to destroy Greece and enslave it to the interests of Jews. Financial funds from around the world, along with local traitors are fabricating plans for the annihilation of Greek civilization.

Stranger: Hymanoid material used as raw material in the camps for experimental purposes. Material trying to cross the Greek electrifed border will be used as mobile mines in enemy territory. Anyone who protects foreign elements, faces consequences similar to those of a foreigner.

War: The main instrument of the Nation, for the occupation of the memorable Homelands, and the Holy Land of the Greeks. All Greeks are considered potential warriors of the Nation, live and breathe with it in mind. For this reason, there will be placed special equipment in kindergartens for “fire and motion” exercises with plastic replicated guns, shooting lessons and martial arts will be incorporated in primary schools, and free guide to survival in the forest will be distributed. For graduation from primary school students must pass a special devil-week in desert soil, after which they will receive swastika tattoos.

Multiculturalism: A social model promoted by the Jews, based on interracial relationships, aiming to alter the ethnic composition of whites around the world. The White Race is in danger of extinction because of mass migration and invasion of non-whites (who are of course inferior) in the Western world.

Sex: Procedure for the reproduction of the Nation. The Pimps of the State are entitled to get together with precautions in specially designed rooms with full comfort and privacy, only 30 mnes for ten minutes, in the hotel chain New Fascist Dream.

School: Schools are divided into Civil, Police, and Military. The first are to be attended by all Greek students until the age of 15, and then choose between the second and third to take the necessary National Discipline and military or police training. The Universities of the country belong to private companies, but the evaluations of their programs are undertaken by the special Authority for National Revival.

Comrade: Greeting used by Agents of the Nation, Anarchists and Bolsheviks. Permanently prohibited and replaced by ComGreek [10]. No salutation is addressed to women; they are required to bow their heads at the sight of a Greek man.

Jimmy Panousis [11]: One of the biggest anti-Greek, and agent of Jews.

Price: The highest virtue of every Greek Man. Concerns mainly the attitude towards the Holy Nation and the Race. Any personal issue is put aside in front of the sacred duty towards the Greek blood. Honour is beyond humanity or sympathy towards the inferior sex, and of any personal attitude.

Liberalism: Another attempt of Jews to control the world through plutocracy and ethno-nihilism promoted by the anti-Hellenic world order.

Greetings: The traditional salutation of Aristotle, Hippocrates, Aristophanes, the goddess Athena and all the ancient Greeks, that is to say the so-called Nazi salutation, returns as a State Law.

Hitler: Great Hellenist and a lover of the ancient Greek tradition, especially the huge intellectual and cultural heritage of ancient Sparta. Benefactor of the Nation of Greece and Saviour of the ideas of obscurantism. He contributed greatly to science by overfunding of experiments eugenics, during which he used DNA of Greeks among others. Here lies the great historic lie of global New World Order. The Nazis killed dozens of supposedly Greeks, but not because of hatred. They just detected with their expertise the contaminated by eastern peoples blood, and cleared once and for all the Greeks from the dirt. To the mention of his name we exclaim “Heil Hitler” with screeching voice, stretching our body.

Christianity: After the discovery that the supposed words of Jesus were forgeries by Jews, and the discovery of his true words, the Christian religion is consistent with the principles of the nation. According to the Holy Text of father Nazimon the Sinless [12], Jesus Naziraios [13] (this was his real name) had the virtues of Racism, Xenophobia, was declared fan of Totalitarianism, and was having fun with burnt offerings and Pogroms. The regime he promoted was dictatorship, and instead of humiliating dialogues, he preferred torture and the application of the Law of the Potent. He also had a shaved head, was not hairy, and had a tattoo with the ancient swastika on his right arm. Finally, DNA tests revealed the fact that he was Greek.


Notes:

1. An-Αrchy translated : without Authority.
2. A pun. The surname of Golden Dawn leader’s is Mihaloliakos. “Mihalovlacas” could be translated as “Mihalo-idiot”.
3. KYP is the old name of the EYP, the National Information Agency.
4. A nationalist ridiculous writer who wrote many books in which he argues for the most crazy and funny conspiracy theories. He always declares his admiration to Putin – the man who will destroy the evil which tries to destroy the greek nation.
5. The oldest Greek nazi writer. His “books” was the reason for a lot of prosecutions against him. His son, Thanasis Plevris, is now member of the conservative party of Antonis Samaras. A month ago he was still a member of the far-right party LA.O.S.
6. Ilias Kasidiaris is Golden Dawn’s spokesman. He was the man who threw a glass of water to a woman deputy of the Left party and punched a woman deputy of the Communist party in a live television broadcast. The prosecutor ordered his arrest. He was hiding for 48 hours to avoid it, according to the Greek penal low. The word “Kokodiaris” is a pun with Kasidiaris’ surname and the word “Rooster” in Greek.
7. Keadas was the name of steep cliff near ancient Sparta where, according to the myth, the ancient Spartans threw handicapped or sickly infants in order to ensure the eugenics of their race. Keadas is also the nick-name of Giorgos Germenis (MP of Golden Dawn) who was the bassist of black metal band Naer Mataron. He is the one who, during the Golden Dawn victory press conference, shouted at the journalists to rise in the presence of Mihaloliakos.
8. Monk Paisios is supposed to be a kind of prophet, and saint for the Greek Christians. Greek atheists called him Pastitsios which is a Greek version of an Italian recipe, a food.
9. Ephialtes of Trachis was an acient Spartan who, according to Herodotus, betrayed his homeland by showing the Persian forces a path around the allied Greek position at the pass of Thermopylae, which helped them win the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC.
10. A pun.
11. A defiant greek rocker who is atheist, anarchocommunist (or something like that…).
12. A pun with Zinon the Sinless.
13. Jesus of Nazareth or Jesus the Nazaren. In Greek it sounds “Nazoraios” and “Naziraios” is another pun.
Translation by Eagainst. Many thanks to Liverpool Antifascists (Working Class Unity against fascism) for their good try to translate the vocabulary. We have to admit that they understand the Greek language better than the Greek neo-nazis. Solidarity comrades!

The article in Greek
http://eagainst.com/articles/το-λεξικό-των-ελλήνων-νεοναζί/

Shortlink: http://wp.me/pyR3u-aT3

[American Dream]

Antisemitic Elmo

Elmo was removed from Central Park zoo in an ambulance after embarking on a anti-semitic tirade: "the scariest Elmo I've ever seen in my life," observed a bystander.

[American Dream]

http://recomposition.info/2012/06/27/di ... s-at-home/

Direct Action Begins at Home

June 27, 2012



Our friend Amédée Garneau sends along this story about tenant organizing in New York.

Direct Action Begins at Home: On organizing with fellow tenants
by Amédée Garneau

The other day I met a student named Yusuf who said he wanted to figure out how to organize with the other tenants in his building. “I was active in community stuff when I was back in L.A.” he said. “But since I moved to New York, I haven’t met any of my neighbours. The one time I did was when my upstairs neighbour had locked himself out of his apartment, and he needed to crawl through my window and onto to fire escape to go in his own window. Other than that, I haven’t met anyone and I don’t know how. I barely see them.”

I understood his frustration – it took me years to meet my own neighbours. People in New York aren’t as unfriendly as our reputation suggests, but we don’t tend to form relationships with the people down the hall, in part because we all work different schedules, and in part because people move around a lot, usually in search of a slightly better combination of rent, closeness to the subway, roommates, and space, and so you’re never sure how long your fellow tenants are going to hang around.

I can also understand why Yusuf wanted to organize. Being a renter in New York is pretty tough – rents are really high, and the living conditions aren’t great. The buildings are old, and much of them were built cheaply in the first place, which makes infrastructure like plumbing and heating unreliable – I have a recurring roof leak, my apartment isn’t hot enough in the winter, and my water takes a long time to run hot. Being a populated city, New York also has a lot of vermin like cockroaches and mice – I have dealt with both. There is also noise and light pollution from nearby bars or construction, which some buildings block out better than others. Landlords tend to move very slowly in resolving any of issues. It took me seven months of calling and emailing my landlord before my last roof leak was fixed – seven months of catching drips with towels, and plaster falling from the ceiling.

Housing, Capitalism and the Law

There is a reason why landlords aren’t very motivated to spend money on repairs. In a capitalist society, the goal of housing is not to give people shelter, but to generate a profit. We’ve seen this with the latest economic crisis: when a homeowner can’t make their mortgage payments, even if those payments no longer have anything to do with the value of the house, they are no longer allowed to live in that house: the bank would rather see it sit empty. The same principle of profit-generation applies to rent. Rent is not determined by what a person can pay, or what kinds of amenities an apartment has, but by what a landlord can command for their own profit. There are a lot of empty buildings in New York just because their owners don’t think the profits would be big enough if they were to get them up and running and fill them with tenants. With the buildings that they do operate, landlords always try to squeeze as much rent as possible out of tenants while providing as little in terms of living conditions as they can get away with. That makes us our interests opposite to the landlords’, and if they have the upper hand, we are vulnerable.

For this reason, some cities like New York have actually written a series of laws to protect tenants. These laws are meant to give tenants some rights to healthy and safe living conditions, to protect them against eviction, and to rein in skyrocketing rents. Without the intervention of these laws in New York, working people would have been completely displaced out of Manhattan a long time ago.

The problem is, those laws don’t always help much, in practice. Most tenants don’t really know their rights, and enforcing them means going through a very slow-moving city bureaucracy, and/or hiring a lawyer. I learned this firsthand when I challenged my landlord for refusing to stabilize the rent on my apartment, even though it legally should have been. I filed a claim, and it took almost a year to get a response from the City, and that was just the beginning of a process that dragged on for several more months. In the meantime, my landlord sic’ed their lawyer on me, and I didn’t have one of my own. Out of fear I settled, dropping my claim about the rent stabilized status of my apartment in exchange for slightly lower rent.

Landlords harass and exploit and bargain with each tenant individually, just like bosses do in the workplace, and they use their superior resources to intimidate us, even finding bogus ways of evicting people if they cause too much trouble (which I was afraid of too). Because of my experiences, and of what I’ve heard from other people, I now believe that tenants, like workers, only have power when united, and that we have to band together to get what we need and want. So Yusuf’s question about organizing is very on point. And I was happy to realize that I had some advice for him.

The Story of My Building

About six months ago, something interesting happened in my building. One of my neighbours, Dean, had managed to collect most of the tenants’ email addresses, just by stopping them in the hallway and asking them. I think his original intention was to invite people to his gigs, since he is a musician. But one day, out of the blue, Dean emailed our landlord’s property manager, Steve, asking very politely if the hallways could be cleaned – they were very dirty, there was mold pushing through the paint, and some minor repairs needed to be done. Dean had emailed the landlord about this many times in the past, but this time he also cc’ed the six other tenants whose email addresses he had collected.

The response from Steve was almost immediate, which was pretty remarkable for a guy who often doesn’t respond at all. Steve told Dean that he would attend to the hallways soon. More interestingly, he asked Dean not to cc the other tenants on correspondence about maintenance issues.

His reaction told us we were on to something. Sure enough, the very next day, for the first time in ten years, the landlord started cleaning the hallways. They sanded down the areas where the mold had grown, scraped the grit off the tile floor, and taped the baseboards and door frames for painting. We were all amazed – ten years of asking for these things, and finally we had some action. It was then that we knew how powerful our simple tactic of speaking to the landlord in unison had been.

A few days later, the hallway work stopped. A week went by. Again, the tenants emailed the landlord, this time with a different neighbour initiating the email chain. And the following day, work started on the hallways again. At this point, people realized this was how to get things done. We started voicing our concerns over this email chain about our own apartments: one tenant’s bathroom tile work was unfinished, and mold was developing; another was suffocating from the dryer exhaust whenever anyone did laundry. The email chain got to be about fifteen emails long with complaints.

Somewhere in this period, I invited everyone on the email list (except Steve, of course) to my apartment for a coffee klatch. A bunch of people rsvp’ed, and a few actually showed. Two of the newer tenants were able to learn from one who had been around for longer about the struggles that had taken place with the landlord in the past. Apparently this wasn’t the first time that the tenants had banded together to get a problem solved. About six years ago, they had formed a coalition to pressure the landlord to reinforce one of the foundation walls, which was showing cracks. One of the tenants knew a good lawyer, and collectively they took the landlord to court. The judge found in the tenants’ favour, but the landlord continued to drag their feet on the repairs. The lawyer then had everyone’s rent reduced to one dollar a month until repairs were done. It seemed like even when using a lawyer to enforce tenants’ rights, it was important to band together, to share the legal resources people were aware of, and to make sure everyone got the same deal.

Once my neighbours and I got in touch, we realized some specific ways we could help each other out directly. One day, my neighbour Jen left a note in my mailbox asking if I could keep an eye on her apartment. She attached an article from the New York Post about a rent-controlled tenant whose landlord had evicted all of her stuff while she was away on vacation. Jen was going away for the weekend, and as a rent-controlled tenant, she wanted to make sure this didn’t happen to her. Of course, I watched her apartment, and kept in touch with her via text while she was away.

The most inspiring moment in our tenant organizing came a few weeks after the hallway work started. The landlord had painted a few swatches of colour in the front entrance hall, apparently testing out different paints to see how they would look. And spontaneously, without any coordination happening over email, the tenants voted on them. There were strips of masking tape beneath each colour swatch, and we wrote our thoughts about the colours directly on them: “Ick!” “Too dark!” “Gross!” “YES!” “This one.” As it happened, the vote was unanimous. And a few weeks later, the landlord painted the hallways with our chosen colour.




This seems like a small thing, but it felt great. We had never had an opportunity to exercise a democratic impulse as tenants. For a long time, we had experienced a landlord who didn’t give a crap about how we felt, never consulting us where the building was concerned, and even ignoring us when we expressed our demands. Now we were talking amongst ourselves, and speaking in unison, and the landlord was actually listening to us.

Extending the Struggle

When Yusuf asked me about tenant organizing, I told him this story. I mentioned the email chain, which seems to work in cases where people have very different schedules. I also talked about posting a “grievances collection” sheet in the lobby, next to the mailboxes, as a neighbour had once done in my building. This is useful for letting tenants know they are not alone in their complaints – maybe everyone has drafty windows, maybe everyone has mice. A grievances sheet can also be used in legal battles with the landlord to show evidence of their negligence. I also mentioned the idea of inviting people to a meeting in his apartment like I had done, sending the invite either via email or a sign posted in the lobby. Yusuf seemed excited about these ideas.

I feel that my experience with my fellow tenants shows once again that the direct action efforts of a small group of united people can accomplish a lot. This time, we didn’t even have to take legal or coercive action to get what we wanted. The very unity of our voice got the goods. And it felt great to use a little bit of democracy to do so.

It was also great to realize that I had advice for Yusuf about tenant organizing. Winning short-term gains from my landlord was satisfying, but helping someone else build their own struggle is even better. If this kind of tenant organizing could spread – to all of the buildings owned by my landlord, further around the neighbourhood, and around the city – we could really get something going.

[American Dream]

http://www.linchpin.ca/content/Common-C ... ics-Theory

Review: Disability Politics and Theory

Disability Politics and Theory
By AJ Withers
Fernwood Publishing



Review by Karine Wehlm

"(D)isability falls somewhere in a constellation. Like the constellation in the sky, disability is in constant flux and appears different depending on the positioning of the onlooker."(p.99)

Disability Politics and Theory is an excellent new book that critically examines the key models of disability that have shaped how disability and disabled people have been viewed in North America throughout the capitalist era and to this current day. The book's author, AJ Withers applies an intersectional and anti-capitalist analysis on these models and suggests an alternative model, the radical model of disability, as a analytical tool to move the disabled people’s movement forward. Withers' arguments stem from an understanding that multiple oppressions are intertwined with one another and cannot be dealt with separately. The author also argues that capitalism is inherently problematic since, among other things, it assigns individual self-worth and value based on whether one can work for a wage (and so produce profits for someone else). Withers ends with a call for both non-disabled people’s movements and the disabled people’s movement to organize inclusively for social justice and radical access.

The book begins by explaining the Eugenic model, the Medical model and the Charity model – all of which individualize disability and emphasize the necessity to cure, reduce or eliminate disability, rather than focusing efforts on improving disabled people’s conditions by reducing barriers and giving them power back over their lives. These models all stem from the belief that the problems posed by disability are inherent to disabled individuals themselves, rather than products of the negative reaction of society to human diversity. Withers goes on to explain how these models are still widely applied today: the Medical model still being the dominant mainstream model for dealing with disability and the Eugenic model still operating, for example, in the field of genetic research on reproduction.

The author goes on to explain the importance of the Disability Rights movement model and the Social model, while maintaining a critical analysis of both. The Disability Rights movement views disabled people as a minority. This movement fights to end discrimination towards disabled people and to help them become accepted in the current society; the Social model, on the other hand, demands a change in society itself. This model heralded an important shift in thinking about disability and was a response to the individualization of disability posed by the earlier models. The Social model separates impairment, which is part of an individual’s characteristics, from disability, which is "the oppression that people with impairment face" (p. 86.). For example, for a person using a wheelchair to move around town, their impairment could be the fact that their legs are paralysed while their disability could be their inability to access a building because of stairs. In the Social model, a person is only disabled if the environment and society is not accessible or adapted to their needs. It is the environment and society that needs to change and not the person with the impairment. Disability is therefore a social construct and not inherent to the disabled person.

Withers finishes by explaining an alternative model, the Radical model of disability, which tries to address both the oppression of disabled people and disabled minds and bodies while intersecting with other forms of oppression. By choosing to speak in terms of minds and bodies, the author means who and what we are: we are physical, mental, intellectual, sensory bodies and minds. We have different ages, life experiences, cultures, languages, skin colours, genders, sexuality and class backgrounds. The radical model rejects the binary of impairment and disability in the Social model and sees impairment as also a social construct, because of the fact that impairment too has different meanings depending on the society we live in. To take the same example as before, a person unable to use their legs would be in an entirely different situation if we lived in an environment where there were no stairs. In this case, the meaning assigned to this particular physical fact would be something different. Withers chooses to talk about minds and bodies as a much more inclusive and non-oppressive way of discussing our difficulties, because we all have our challenges, disabled and non-disabled people alike. Using the words minds and bodies is an attempt to move away from categorical labels and towards a terminology that includes us all.

Withers also proposes an alternative to universal accessibility. Although universal accessibility is already much more inclusive than just adding a ramp to a building, because it tries to address in a comprehensive way all accessibility needs relating to the physical environment, it only addresses the physical aspect of the environment. Radical access, instead, articulates a broad accessibility analysis that is inclusive of other oppressions, such as the inability to afford a ride on the bus – even though it can be accessed using a wheelchair.

One thing that caught my attention in this book is how Withers dismantles the myth of independence. Being independent means that someone can do a task by themselves, without needing the help of anyone. Withers instead argues that we are all interdependent – after all, very few of us make our own clothes or grow our own food. It is simply that certain dependencies have been normalized, while others have been marginalized. I would also add that we should aim at being autonomous rather than this ideal of being independent, which means being able to make our own choices in our lives. This includes choosing to have help or not. Very few people can say they are truly autonomous because of the way our society grants control and power to a few. Only real social change, including the abolishment of capitalism, hierarchy and the fight against all forms of oppression will make this possible for everyone.

Disability Politics and Theory is an easy-to-read book giving a thorough analysis of the key concepts and models of disability. It is an eye-opener on disability and it should be read by anybody seeking to move this society towards social justice. This book is urging us to fight to create the changes we want, because they won’t be handed to us. "We must work in solidarity with other marginalized groups, and we must get past our differences and fight for justice, dignity, equality and access." (p.120)

[American Dream]

http://boingboing.net/2012/06/28/chines ... oting.html

Chinese corruption and looting on a vast scale: industry, government, and military
By Cory Doctorow at 2:00 pm Thursday, Jun 28

Here's a well-cited and pretty scary article describing the vast scale of corruption at the highest levels in China, and the extent to which "the success of 300m Chinese who live in western level prosperity depends on the continued exploitation and good nature of one billion people who live on an average of $5000 per annum." The author, Steve Keen (Professor of Economics & Finance at the University of Western Sydney) ranges widely over Chinese industry, government, and the military.


Zoomlion has an interesting business model, it is similar in many of ways to Caterpillar, except whereas Caterpillar report falling sales, Zoomlion reports astounding sales growth with a fivefold increase in revenue since 2007. Zoomlion customers sometimes buy ten concrete mixers when they planned to initially by one or two. They have a perverse incentive to buy more than they need because these concrete trucks are purchased via finance packages supplied by Zoomlion.

Then the machines can be garaged and used as collateral to borrow further funds from other lenders. Zoomlion continues to grow while cement sales have plunged. In May, cement output increased 4.3 per cent YoY, down from 19.2 per cent recorded last year. Zoomlion’s new debt of $22.5B buys roughly 900,000 trucks which could produce enough concrete (at six loads a day) to build over thirty Great Pyramids of Giza a day .

Every sector is infected with these kinds of perverse business practices, steel traders used loans meant for steel projects to speculate in property and stocks , it has been common (apparently) for steel traders to secure loans to buy steel then use this same steel as collateral to borrow funds to invest in property development and the stock market. In many ways this is the steel version of the Zoomlion model. A fundamental foundation of any lending market is the ability of the lender to ensure title and guarantee ownership of collateral...

...The current political leadership of China represents the greatest looting of a country by the political class ever seen in history. In the Hurun Report released in March 2012—the richest 70 members of the government have a net worth of $89.8 billion, an average of over $1B each. This compares to $7.5 billion for the 660 for the US government, an average of $11M each. China’s Billionaire People’s Congress Makes Capitol Hill Look Like Paupers. In a country so indoctrinated in the works of Marx, it seems only a matter of time before the current Chinese proletariat, suffering under extreme wealth distribution, will rise up. One only has to look at the geographic distribution of wealth to see where the problems might begin.

Furthermore, this does not take into account the wealth held by the families of these politicians. Nor is this corruption limited to politicians. The military, according to John Garnaut’s report, has become one of the most corrupt state enterprises of all. China’s wealth distribution is becoming completely one sided The success of 300m Chinese who live in western level prosperity depends on the continued exploitation and good nature of one billion people who live on an average of $5000 per annum. This week Chinese military leaders have been ordered to report assets under the following CCP directive – The General Political Department, Discipline Inspection Commission: Leaders Must Report Income, Real Estate Holdings and Investments. This is likely to be met with extraordinary resistance. This could result in a standoff between the CCP and the PLA , where both bodies equally riddled with corruption struggle for the upper hand.

The Looting of China by the Kleptokapitalist Bourgeoisie Roaders (via Naked Capitalism)

[American Dream]

http://libcom.org/library/direct-action-introduction

Direct action - an introduction

libcom.org's brief introduction to direct action and why we prefer it to other forms of political activity.


Many people today are worried about the direction that the world is heading in. Whether it's about their working conditions or unemployment, the environment, housing, war or any number of other problems, it's certain that millions (even billions?) of people at some point look for some form of political action to solve their problem.

Why direct action?

There are loads of different methods which people use to try and change the world, too many to mention here. Often, however, we think that we can look for help from various 'specialists' like politicians, union leaders, legal experts and the like.

In reality, this isn't the case. Politicians and union leaders have interests different from our own, like basically anyone earning six-figure salaries or even those bumbling around £80-90,000 a year. And trying to find protection behind the law can leave us equally at sea, as the laws that protect us today can simply be changed tomorrow - assuming they're even enforced in the first place!

At the same time, we sometimes decide that at least we can decide to not 'take part' in the worst parts of capitalism. We can choose not to buy from certain 'unethical' companies or even grow our own food.

However, the problem with this is that it makes resistance to capitalism an individual lifestyle choice, and one that not all people can make. For instance, 'fair trade' and organic products are often more expensive than food which is neither.

More seriously though, it makes social problems about individual companies or governments which behave 'badly' rather than a problem with society as a whole. And it still leaves us to face them alone, through our consumer choices. Business as usual continues, just for different businesses. Exploitation continues and there's no amount of fair trade cashew nuts that's gonna change that!

This is why we favour direct action: because it relies on our collective strength to stop 'business as usual' rather than our individual lifestyle choices or appeals to political and union leaders. And because at the end of the day, it means relying each other – the others who share our situation – rather than on so-called 'experts' who ultimately won't have to live with our problems.

What is direct action?

Put simply, direct action is when people take action to further their goals, without the interference of a third party. This means the rejection of lobbying politicians or appealing to our employers' generosity to improve our conditions. Ultimately, it's not even just that they don't care – it's that they profit from making our conditions worse. For more on this, read our introduction to class and class struggle.

So we take action ourselves to force improvements to our conditions. In doing so, we empower ourselves by taking control of and responsibility for our actions. So, fundamental to direct action is the idea that we can only depend on each other to achieve our goals

Direct action takes place at the point where we experience the sharp end of capitalism. Often this will mean where we work, as our bosses try to sack us or make us work harder, for less money. Or it can be where we live, as local politicians try to cut spending by getting rid of public services.

Direct action in the workplace

Direct action at work is basically any action that interferes with the bosses' ability to manage, forcing them to cave in to their staff's demands.

The best-known form of direct action at work is the strike, where workers walk off the job until they get what they want. However, strike action can sometimes be limited by union bureaucrats and anti-strike laws. That said, workers often successfully ignore these limits and hold unofficial, or 'wildcat', strikes which return a lot of the impact of strike action.

Though there are too many to mention here, some other direct action tactics used by workers are:

occupations; where workers lock bosses out of a workplace, effectively striking but not letting the boss replace them with strike-breakers (also known as 'scabs').
Go-slows; where workers work much slower than usual so as to ensure that less work is done (and so less profit made).
Work-to-rules, another form of on-the-job action, where workers follow every little rule to the letter, again so as to slow down the pace of work.

There are many examples of these kinds of tactics being used successfully. In 1999, London Underground workers engaged in a 'piss strike' against not being allowed to go home once their work was finished. Instead of pissing by the tracks as usual, they would insist on being accompanied to a toilet by the safety supervisor, who had to bring the rest of the team with them (for safety). On their return, someone else would 'realise' they had to go as well, effectively stopping any work happening!

In Brighton in 2009, refuse workers held a successful wildcat strike over management bullying while the same year saw Visteon workers in London and Belfast occupy their factories against redundancies.

Direct action in the workplace has often been used for political ends as well. For instance, in 2008, South African dockers refused to unload arms that were to be taken to Zimbabwe.

However, it is possible for successful direct action to take place outside of the workplace as well, over a variety of issues.

Direct action in the community

The 2003 Iraq war saw huge demonstrations, including the biggest in British history in London on February 15th where over a million people got really wet marching to Hyde Park. This was unsurprisingly ignored by politicians, who didn't really care about how wet, cold or numerous we were. But direct action outside the workplace and in the community can be effective.

The most famous example in recent British history is the Poll Tax. When Margaret Thatcher attempted to bring in the unpopular tax in 1989, up to 17 million working class people across the country refused to pay it. Non-payment groups spread through communities all over the UK and people set up local anti-eviction networks to confront bailiffs. By 1990, Margaret Thatcher and the Poll Tax had both been beaten. She was also later filmed crying on telly.

Similar non-payment campaigns successfully beat increasing water charges (1993-1996) and bin taxes (2003-2004) in Ireland. In 2011, working people in Greece began the 'We Won't Pay' campaign against rising prices, with people refusing to pay motorway tolls, public transport tickets and some doctors even refusing to charge patients for their treatment.

Mainland Europe has also seen the spread of 'economic blockades'. Often used by students or workers where strike action has not been hugely effective, they involve participants blocking major roads or transport hubs. The idea is that by stopping people getting to work or slowing the transportation of goods and services, the protesters block the economy in much the same way as a strike would.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been involved in tactics like these, breaking out from government-approved (and ineffective) tactics such as lobbying and A-to-B marches.

Rejecting ‘powerlessness’

Direct action is a rejection of the idea that we are powerless to change our conditions. Improvements to our lives are not handed down from above. They must be (and have always been) fought for.

We are always told about how people fought for the vote. Rarely, however, is it mentioned how workers fought for the welfare state, for decent housing, health care, wages, decent working hours, safe working conditions and pensions.

But direct action is more than just an effective means for defending or improving conditions. It is also, as anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker said, the “school of socialism”, preparing us for the free society many of us strive to create.

Like former Liverpool manager Bill Shankley's approach to life and football, direct action involves collective effort, everyone working for each other and helping each other for a common end. By using direct action, even when we make mistakes, we learn from experience that we don't need to leave things to ‘experts’ or professional politicians. This course offers us nothing but betrayal and broken promises as well as that long-felt sense of powerlessness.

Direct action teaches us to control our own struggles. To build a culture of resistance that links with other workers in their struggles.

And as our confidence grows in the strength of our solidarity, so too does our confidence in our ability to change the world. And as this grows, the focus moves from controlling our own struggles to controlling our entire lives.


Based on/stolen from What is Direct Action? by Organise! Ireland.

[American Dream]

John Trudell - Look at us

[American Dream]

Set De Prisoners Free

[American Dream]

http://mehreenkasana.tumblr.com/post/25027689503

Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism

Modern colonialism won its great victories not so much through its military and technological prowess as through its ability to create secular hierarchies incompatible with the traditional order. These hierarchies opened up new vistas for many, particularly for those exploited or cornered within the traditional order. To them the new order looked like - and here lay its psychological pull - the first step towards a more just and equal world. That was why some of the finest critical minds in Europe - and [some] in the East - were to feel that colonialism, by introducing modern structures into the barbaric world, would open up the non-West to the modern critic-analytic spirit. Like the ‘hideous heathen god who refused to drink nectar except from the skulls of murdered men’, Karl Marx felt, history would produce out of oppression, violence and cultural dislocation not merely new technological and social forces but also a new social consciousness in Asia and Africa. It would be critical in the sense in which the Western tradition of social criticism-from Vico to Marx-had been critical and it would be rational in the sense in which post Cartesian Europe had been rational. It is thus that the a historical primitives would one day, the expectation went, learn to see themselves as masters of nature and, hence, as masters of their own fate.

Many many decades later, in the aftermath of that marvel of modern technology called the Second World War and perhaps that modern encounter of cultures called Vietnam, it has become obvious that the drive for mastery over men is not merely a by-product of a faulty political economy but also of a world view which believes in the absolute superiority of the human over the nonhuman and the subhuman, the masculine over the feminine, the adult over the child, the historical over the ahistorical, and the modern or progressive over the traditional or the savage. It has become more and more apparent that genocides, ecodisasters and ethnocides are but the underside of corrupt sciences and psychopathic technologies wedded to new secular hierarchies, which have reduced major civilizations to the status of a set of empty rituals. The ancient forces of human greed and violence, one recognizes, have merely found a new legitimacy in anthropocentric doctrines of secular salvation, in the ideologies of progress, normality and hyper-masculinity, and in theories of cumulative growth of science and technology.

This awareness has not made everyone give up his theory of progress but it has given confidence to a few to look askance at the old universalism within which the earlier critiques of colonialism were offered. It is now possible for some to combine fundamental social criticism with a defence of non-modern cultures and traditions. It is possible to speak of the plurality of critical traditions and of human rationality. At long last we seem to have recognized that neither is Descartes the last word on reason nor is Marx that on the critical spirit.

The awareness has come at a time when the attack on the non-modern cultures has become a threat to their survival. As this century with its bloodstained record draws to a close, the nineteenth century dream of one world has re-emerged, this time as a nightmare. It haunts us with the prospect of a fully homogenized, technologically controlled, absolutely hierarchized world, defined by [flawed] polarities like the modern and the primitive, the secular and the non-secular, the scientific and the unscientific, the expert and the layman, the normal and the abnormal, the developed and the underdeveloped, the vanguard and the led, the liberated and the savable.

This colonialism colonizes minds in addition to bodies and it releases forces within the colonized societies to alter their cultural priorities once for all. In the process, it helps generalize the concept of the modern West from a geographical and temporal entity to a psychological category. The West is now everywhere, within the West and outside; in structures and in minds.

Thus, the colonized Indians do not remain in these pages simple-hearted victims of colonialism; they become participants in a moral and cognitive venture against oppression. They make choices. And to the extent they have chosen their alternative within the West, they have also evaluated the evidence, judged, and sentenced some while acquitting others. I reject the model of the gullible, hopeless victim of colonialism caught in the hinges of history. I see him as fighting his own battle for survival in his own way, sometimes consciously, sometimes by default.

Ultimately, modern oppression, as opposed to the traditional oppression, is not an encounter between the self and the enemy, the rulers and the ruled, or the gods and the demons. It is a battle between dehumanized self and the objectified enemy, the technologized bureaucrat and his reified victim, pseudo-rulers and their fearsome other selves projected on to their ‘subjects’.

- Ashish Nandy

Wherein Mr. Nandy strategically attacks the brutality and hypocrisy carried out by the West on their colonized subjects in the East - the Subcontinent (the then-British India) which later on resurfaced as India and Pakistan. More importantly he goes on to spot fallacies and conformism present within colonized structures taught by their colonizers, subsequently turning voices of dissent into “ornamental dissenters” and nothing more. The real fight, he argues, is a lot deeper than vicious rhetoric; It is the consistent act of healing oneself as an individual belonging to a land and people that was once colonized and that, even now, has its elements of a colonized mind and is, as we speak, experiencing neo-colonialism today that may or may not involve Western military and technology but psychological and rhetorical reinforcement that states, quite shamelessly but typically, the West as superior and the East as inferior. That colonialism continues to exist even now but in a different form.

B is for brilliant. R is for read this. Scroll back up.

[American Dream]

Breeze - Aid Travels With A Bomb

[American Dream]

http://libcom.org/library/anarchy-preca ... niel-gross

Anarchy, precarity, and the revenge of the IWW: An interview with Starbucks union organiser Daniel Gross

Interview with IWW organizer Daniel Gross where he discusses 'solidarity unionism,' the innovative organizing model that has made gains for Starbucks workers where bureaucratic unions have failed.



In this wide-ranging interview with IWW organizer Daniel Gross conducted by the UK-based Now or Never!, Gross discusses the innovative worker-controlled organizing model, known as solidarity unionism, that has made gains for Starbucks workers where the bureaucratic union model has failed.

Gross explains the role of anarchists and anti-authoritarians in the global Starbucks Workers Union effort as well as his own anarchist worldview. He highlights the resurgence of the IWW, the challenge of precarious work, and calls for a direct action movement across borders to challenge the hegemony of corporate power. Gross also pays tribute to fallen comrade Brad Will who was a supporter of the Starbucks Workers Union and radical labor.

IWW Starbucks Workers Union
Interview conducted by Youth Section

Since 2004, the managers at Starbucks stores across America have been trembling in the workplace, for the infamous revolutionary union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies) has been organising with workers and fighting for a better wage and a better world. When I set out to conduct an interview with some of the rank and file union members, I soon discovered that getting a hold of these people can be very difficult (apparently they’re all very busy fighting the class war). Eventually, Daniel Gross, who has been with the Starbucks Workers Union from the beginning, was kind enough to grant me an interview.

NoN!: Briefly, can you explain who you are and your history within Starbucks?

Daniel Gross: I'm a worker and a Wobbly. I got started in corporate retail at Borders Books and Music. In 2003, I began working as a barista at Starbucks in New York City. The IWW Starbucks Workers Union [www.StarbucksUnion.org] was founded on May 17, 2004. In the summer of 2006, Starbucks fired me in retaliation for union activity and I’m currently fighting for my job back along with five other wrongfully discharged IWW baristas.

The company’s pretext for my termination was a sham investigation of a picket line held in solidarity with an embattled co-worker and a fellow Wobbly. Starbucks lied and said I threatened a district manager without even interviewing the other current Starbucks employees who were at the picket.

NoN!: Why did you feel you needed to unionise?

DG: First, there's bread and butter. 6, 7, or 8 dollars an hour is a poverty wage and disgraceful from a $23 billion company showing record profits quarter after quarter. Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz, already a billionaire, took in over $102 million in compensation last year while baristas hover at or below the poverty line. Many Starbucks workers depend on government benefits for the poor to survive.

The most staggering part of the financial picture at Starbucks is the scheduling of work hours. Every barista, busser, and shift supervisor- representing the overwhelming majority of the almost 150,000 employees at the company- is part-time.

Not a single one is guaranteed any number of work hours each week. For example, you can come to work one week and get 35 work hours; get 23 hours the next; and end up with 12 hours the following week.

Starbucks calls this scheduling system flexibility. The appropriate term is precarity- the regime by which human beings are treated like other "inputs" in the production process like fuel or soy beans. The company buys as much labor as it wants, when it wants. Just-in-time inventory meets human flesh. Baristas aren't day laborers but we’re talking about the same ball park- with our schedules dependent on the company’s whim week-by-week, we certainly feel a kinship with our sisters and brothers working in day labor.

Second, there's dignity, which at the end of the day is more important than bread and butter. Going to sleep having been humiliated and infantilized at your retail job still stings even if the bills are paid, which they usually are not. Indignities large and small, physical and psychological are rained upon Starbucks workers every day.

Management refuses to schedule enough workers on the shop floor to meet the extraordinary consumer demand that Starbucks stores face. At the same time, the company fails to implement the most elemental of ergonomic standards. The result is damage to the physical integrity of the body via repetitive stress injuries and other musculo-skeletal strain.

Absolute power for management is the rule in retail and Starbucks is no exception. The smallest detail of your work life is mapped out by the company and arbitrary discipline is enforced through a variety of sanctions and surveillance. Starbucks tells you to shake the ice tea 10 times. Management is terrified of an independent workers’ voice saying 9 shakes is ok. The company expects workers to stay after their shifts are done when it’s busy no matter what after-work commitment you may have. But heaven forbid if you have to leave work a little early to get to a doctor’s appointment. If you talk back while you’re getting written up, it’s not uncommon for management to cut your hours the next week.

Working the closing shift (closer) and then the opening shift (opener) the following morning, dubbed the "clopener" by some Starbucks workers, is a common source of frustration. After the commute you hardly have time to sleep and let me tell you, dealing with Starbucks customers two shifts in a row with very little sleep can drive you crazy if you do it enough times.

A little tangent- speaking of the commute and precarity- humans actually have it worse than other “inputs”. When Starbucks or McDonald’s wants coffee or paper cups delivered, it pays freights costs to get them to the store. As working people, we pay our own way to deliver ourselves to the boss. In NYC for example, Starbucks baristas and other low-wage workers struggle with the $76 charge for a 30-day pass on the subway and many of us can’t make the $76 one time payment so we end up paying more each month at $2 per ride. A demand for the low-wage employers to pay commuting costs might be a good issue to organize around.

On the issue of dignity again, the abuse at Starbucks really runs the gamut. One Starbucks barista had her grandmother die a few hours before her shift. This worker was responsible for making the final arrangements for her grandmother’s funeral and burial and was in the process of doing so. She called the manager in charge to explain that she couldn’t make it to work that day. First, the manager replied with disbelief that her grandmother had actually died even though she was obviously extremely distraught. He then ordered her to call other baristas to get her shift covered on threat of termination. The barista was so disgusted, she quit.

A barista named Sherry Brown, a long-time activist in the African-American community, was fired from his Washington D.C. Starbucks for asserting himself to a customer who had threatened his life.

Religious discrimination against a couple of Wiccan employees, discrimination against a roasting plant employee over Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, I mean the list goes on and on.

The prevailing reality behind the socially responsible rhetoric at Starbucks is simply intolerable. We’re calling on the company to immediately respect our right to have a union, reinstate our fired members, pay a living wage, guarantee our work hours, and staff stores appropriately to avoid strain and injuries.

NoN!: How did the Starbucks Workers Union get started?

DG: The SWU was started by a group of Starbucks workers in New York City who were fed up with living in poverty and being mistreated. We started meeting outside of work and concluded that for us the only way forward was to fight back with our own organization. The union now has a public presence at nine Starbucks stores in four U.S. states and dues-paying members of the IWW are operating quietly at the company in several other states.

NoN!: Why was the IWW chosen opposed to a more mainstream union?

DG: First and foremost, workers wanted a union that we would control. If I had to pick one element that really sets apart the IWW from many other unions, I'd have to say it’s the reality of rank and file control. We were alienated enough by our employer and we didn't want to duplicate that with our union.

Second, the traditional trade union model has failed to make an impact for retail workers in the United States. Recent Bureau of Labor Statistics have confirmed this, finding that union membership in U.S. retail has fallen to just 5% of employees in the industry. A perfect storm of political and economic factors including neoliberalism, fierce employer resistance, and a fatally flawed labor law regime has made the goal of the traditional trade unions for exclusive bargaining status increasingly elusive.

We felt that the IWW's direct action method would allow us to improve our life at work without falling into the various pitfalls which have made unions irrelevant to the overwhelming majority of retail workers.

Finally, we wanted a union we could afford. At $6 dollars per month, the price was right.

NoN!: How did Baristas react to the radical politics of the IWW? Was anyone hostile to the strong anti-capitalist stance that the union takes?

DG: Any workplace or community organizer knows there are a lot of challenges in this work. Organizing is rewarding, it’s pretty simple more or less, but it’s not easy. I can tell you though that the IWW's long-term vision has not been a significant impediment to reaching out to our co-workers. Stripped of all the fear-mongering instigated by anti-worker forces, the IWW’s long-term vision is simply a world where deep democracy exists in the workplace and the community.

On a day-to-day level the radicalism of the IWW translates into workers controlling their own campaign and taking direct action without letting the government get in the way. This approach, far from an impediment, is actually a competitive advantage. It might actually be the only approach working right now for retail employees in the United States.

Starbucks likes to talk about the worldview of the IWW in its propaganda but astutely avoids our immediate demands for respect and dignity on the job today. In one 2006 “High importance” memo to “partners”, Starbucks wrote that the, “Industrial Workers of the World is a small, radical anarchist group, far outside of the mainstream of the U.S. labor movement. According to its website, the IWW calls for the abolition of the wage system and seeks to ‘do away with capitalism’.”

Besides the suggestion that we are an anarchist organization, Starbucks contention there was accurate, which is unusual for this company. However, in my experience low-wage workers do not have a particular affection for the economic system in which we find ourselves. I can only think of a single case where a worker who was supportive of the union turned against us and started talking about Communist front group nonsense and the like. But I think that worker had other issues and just latched onto the anti-radicalism he heard from management as a pretext.

Again, I have actually seen the radicalism of the IWW become a competitive advantage as workers experience their union as their own and not another bureaucracy in their lives.

Far worse than the red-baiting, the greatest hurdle we must overcome as we continue to grow is the anti-union terminations. More than a few workers have shied away from joining the campaign because of the multiple retaliatory firings by Starbucks. That's why it's so important for us to impose significant economic, political, and social costs when the company fires someone for union activity. The only way we can do that is with a movement of people who reject the hegemony of corporate power.

The global justice movement has energized and stood with us shoulder-to-shoulder and without that movement we would not be where we are today. We reached out for solidarity and received it, in too many ways to recount here. The CNT-F entered Starbucks stores in Paris en masse with solidarity leaflets protesting the firing of SWU activists. Wobblies in England and Scotland rose up with Zapatista supporters against the retaliatory firings and to lend support when I was facing politically-motivated criminal charges for a 2004 protest in front of the Starbucks store where I worked. The protest coalition served free Zapatista-grown Fair Trade coffee outside of Starbucks stores and handed out information against union-busting and exploitative land practices in Mexico.

Starbucks baristas in New Zealand who are members of the Unite Union strongly condemned my termination in the same spirit of mutual aid that our campaign exhibited when they struck Starbucks in Auckland. The postal workers’ union in Canada has stood with us, as has the Korean Teachers Union and the National Lawyers Guild, the largest progressive legal organization in the United States.

Last May 17th during our annual Day of Action to commemorate the founding of the SWU, Wobblies and supporters reached out to baristas or did other actions in 20 cities, spanning 4 countries. There are many more examples and I wish there was time to mention them all, but those folks know who they are and I hope they know how much their support means to us.

NoN!: How did the management react when the union first started? Has their opinion changed over time?

DG: Starbucks responded with scorched earth union-busting and hasn't let up since. Eight anti-union terminations spanning six Starbucks stores, countless threats, multiple bribes, extensive surveillance, misleading propaganda, intense pressure, anti-union maneuvers from law firm Akin Gump, and more.

Workers disciplined for discussing the union on the job or after work; kicked out of work for wearing union pins. The type of union picket Starbucks fired me for has been protected, at least on paper, for over seventy years in this country.

Union-busting from Starbucks and Wal-Mart is indistinguishable. Starbucks CEO Jim Donald is actually a former Wal-Mart executive. Chairman Howard Schultz is the driving force behind the union-busting. Almost 150,000 workers and countless coffee farming families are exploited by this man whom the corporate media hails as a hero.

Sometimes we do get a good laugh out of the union-busting. The company printed out the IWW Constitution on a couple occasions and handed it out to workers in an effort to deter them from the union. It’s not clear why the company thought this would scare off workers since the IWW constitution outlines an organization that workers control as opposed to Starbucks’ corporate by-laws which govern an organization which is tyrannically controlled from the top-down with no input from workers. We joked that we appreciated the company saving the union some printing costs.

In Chicago, a team of management officials were laying into the union to a group of workers. The managers said that the union, “didn’t exist” to workers who were carrying red IWW membership cards in their pocket. We still chuckle about that incident.

With the backing of grassroots actions from Starbucks Union activists, we were able to prevail against Starbucks in the legal arena. In the first labor case brought by Starbucks baristas, the company and the National Labor Relations Board entered a settlement agreement in which the company had to reinstate two discharged IWW baristas and rescind nationwide policies against sharing written union information and wearing union pins.

The company started breaking the law again almost immediately after the settlement. Far from desisting from illegal activities, they actually went for the jugular. Six IWW baristas are still out of job right now through anti-union terminations. We’re fighting the company on these terminations in the streets and at the Labor Board. Given this intense hostility, it's a testament to the courage of my co-workers on this campaign and the breadth of support from around the world that the Starbucks Workers Union is still enjoying consistent growth and delivering the heaviest blows yet against the company.

NoN!: Would you consider the union to have been successful and why?

DG: I think the proof is in the pudding. Starbucks company-owned cafes in the United States were totally untouched by unions before the advent of the IWW campaign. Now Starbucks workers have our own voice on the job, in the community, and in the broader public arena.

We've been a major factor in pressuring the company into broad-based wage increases, our members have more secure hours, and we've remedied many grievances with management in a wide variety of areas from discrimination to safety.

For instance, many NYC baristas at Starbucks have seen wages increase of almost 25% in a period when retail wages in the city have been essentially stagnant. While we still have not achieved a living wage and guaranteed hours, more money in our pocket because of pay increases and more regular hours makes life better on and off the job.

In addition to the systemic gains, the grievances remedied have been important as well and I’ll cite a few examples. SWU members in Chicago shamed management into purchasing a stepladder the workers had sought for years by bringing in an IWW ladder to work with a sticker reading, “for a safer healthier workplace.” Management couldn’t tolerate a useful tool from the IWW that workers wanted to avoid unsafe reaching and climbing on tables so management hurried out and bought a ladder they had consistently refused to provide.

Suley Ayala, an Ecuadorian mother of four, used a combination of public protest, a legal filing, media pressure, and a union direct action on the shop floor to fight religious discrimination. Starbucks had been kicking her off the job for wearing a Wiccan Pentagram. The support campaign triumphed when Suley’s co-worker and fellow union member put on Suley’s Pentagram after she got kicked out on one occasion and thereby got kicked out of work himself. The company’s will on the issue had been broken; Suley has not been sent home since and the company reimbursed her for her financial losses.

Disgusted at having to work around rat or insect infestation at many NYC Starbucks, baristas took action after several written requests to the company had been ignored. The union assembled video and photographic evidence of the infestation and called a press conference in front of a Starbucks store with a 30-foot inflatable rat in the background. The resulting widespread media coverage spurred the company to implement some structural and sanitation fixes that have improved the barista work environment.

Sarah Bender struck a blow for the right of all baristas to organize when she coordinated her own defense campaign following an anti-union termination by Starbucks. Grassroots coalition-building and countless actions played an instrumental role in Starbucks’ settlement with the Labor Board which reinstated Sarah. In one memorable action, union baristas partnered with the “Billionaires for Bush and Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz” who entered Sarah’s store in full aristocratic regalia to present a framed union-buster of the year award to the district manager that fired her. The Billionaires argued for the abolition of the labor movement and praised the inequitable distribution of wealth under Capitalism. They said that Starbucks was their kind of company.

We love creative provocative tactics. One favorite we’ve used is to pack a Starbucks with union supporters and have them wait in line to get a drink. They order a drink and pay for it: penny-by-penny-by-penny. It doesn’t take long to jam up the company’s operation for an injustice against a worker or our union. Going forward, any effective and ethically-sound tactic is on the table.

Solidarity has poured in from around the world and for the first time workers at a multinational retailer are reaching across the supply chain to build power. In fact, our delegation of SWU activists has just returned from Ethiopia where they were building connections with coffee farmers who grow beans for Starbucks.

Most importantly, the initiative, creativity, and strength of workers themselves have achieved these victories. The model is called solidarity unionism, a term coined by labor activist, author, and working-class lawyer Staughton Lynd. Folks who aren't familiar with his work should take a look. Staughton, better than anyone I know, both facilitates the expression of rank and file voices and understands the primacy of the rank and file in social change. Without solidarity unionism, Starbucks workers would still have no voice, caught in the intersection of a flawed labor law regime, fierce employer resistance, and a disinterested trade union bureaucracy. Staughton's incredibly modest so I probably shouldn't say this but the truth is you could say that the IWW Starbucks campaign is Staughton Lynd applied.

Because solidarity unionism has been so critical to the gains we’ve made thus far, I think it’s worth saying a bit more about the model. Solidarity unionism is workplace organizing in its purest form. Simply put, a solidarity union is a group of workers sticking together to take on the boss and make work better. Avoiding entanglements with the legal apparatus and mediation by union bureaucrats, a solidarity union harnesses the power of direct action to address concerns on the job and does so in a time frame relevant to retail workers.

Unlike the business-union model, the end-all-be-all for a solidarity union is not necessarily a collective bargaining agreement. If the rank and file desires such an agreement, so be it. But workers can just as well fight for systemic gains and address grievances as they arise outside of a contractual setting.

Given the high-turnover in the precarious sector, it’s important that workers can organize without lengthy certification or recognition processes which require majority support. In the United States, a business union will not take on 49% of a given work unit as members if they can’t cross the 50% threshold. By contrast, whether 49% of workers are on-board or 100%, a solidarity union can fight on. Fighting with or without a majority is a feature of solidarity unionism uniquely suited to the dynamic of precarious work.

Along the same lines, when a worker moves from one employer to another they keep their union membership whereas they would lose their membership in a traditional U.S. trade union. The center of the solidarity union world is the worker not a government-certified unionized workplace. When a solidarity union worker moves on to another job, instead of a sure loss to the union, there is the potential for a broadening of the organization to other workplaces.

The essence of a solidarity union is rank and file control. IWW baristas make our own strategic, tactical, and moral decisions. As far as bringing in new members, ‘every member an organizer’ is much more than a slogan in solidarity unionism. Our concrete objective is to train every single member as an organizer and to facilitate them reaching out to co-workers.

We ourselves engage in Direct Action (with the support, of course, of other workers) around pay, scheduling, disrespectful treatment from management, and so forth. Traditional trade unionists are often surprised when they find out how we remedy grievances. “You call your union rep when you have a problem with management right?” more than one traditional unionist has wondered. No. We make the demand to management ourselves. And then we fight the boss to win on it directly, not through a representative.

NoN!: Has the anarchist movement been supportive of your cause?

DG: Extremely supportive and words can never do justice to how grateful I am. The long commute early on a winter morning for the opening shift or the late-night commute home after the closing shift can be very dark and lonely. Alienation and humiliation- personal and financial-run high in the multinational retail workplace. That so many anarchists have understood this dynamic and supported our struggle with action is very moving and is a beautiful homage to the birth of Anarchism in the labor movement.

Also, like radicalism, the IWW Starbucks Workers Union has embraced cross-border solidarity as a competitive advantage and anarchists have been a critical part of that.

The global justice movement and the IWW Starbucks Workers Union lost a great friend and anarchist supporter in 2006 with the assassination of Indymedia journalist Brad Will by government forces in Oaxaca, Mexico. Brad was a fixture at Starbucks Union benefit events; no one felt the radical folk music more deeply than he, fully alive, dancing arm-in-arm with his long-time friend and anarchist comrade, Priya Warcry. Brad is well-remembered for his contribution to many movements- environmental, squatters’, anti-corporate globalization, and many more. I hope Brad’s legacy will also include the fact that he was often a wage earner- a stage technician- and a true supporter of laboring people. He loved radical labor culture; the last time I was with him he was playing IWW songs with a few of us singing along at one of the Wobbly campaign houses in NYC. He will be missed and his death will not have been in vain.

NoN!: What about other left wing groups? Have any authoritarian socialist groups helped (or hindered) your struggle?

DG: Groups of this type have also been supportive of the struggle - publicizing information about the campaign, turning out people to picket lines, and so forth.

NoN!: What reaction have you received from the general public?

DG: What you’d expect. Support generally from working people; opposition from capitalist interests, their political operatives and their media (with a couple exceptions).

Starbucks has a public relations machine unparalleled in the corporate world. It has convinced many people that Starbucks is a different kind of corporation and a good place to work. Health care is its biggest myth. In reality, the company insures a lower percentage of its workforce than notorious Wal-Mart, just 42%. So there is an educational process we have to engage in sometimes to move folks past the myths.

NoN!: Politically, what would you describe yourself as? Has your experience with the Starbucks Union changed your views at all?

DG: It’s important to note first that the IWW is a non-partisan union and I speak only for myself here. We’ve never endorsed a political candidate or contributed funds to a political party. This is how it should be in my opinion. The IWW should continue to be an independent workers’ organization that is not beholden to any political party, ideology, or government. It should, in my view, be welcoming to all members of the working class, regardless of political affiliation, except prison guards, police, and prosecutors.

The IWW pursues a vision of a world where workers control their workplaces and community members control their community in harmony with the Earth. To get there, we organize as a rank and file union. That is, unions where workers themselves control their own campaigns, formulate strategy, and carry out tactics. There’s no professional bureaucracy or “representatives” in the IWW.

Workers become protagonists of change and develop their initiative in the day-to-day struggle for decent working conditions and dignity at work. At the same time, workers build a fighting force that can meaningfully, with the help of other movements, confront Capitalism and State. Whether it’s Barcelona in 1936 or Oaxaca in 2006, we’ve seen the transformative role that labor can play in society.

I am an anarchist. The Starbucks campaign hasn’t changed my views so much as deepened them. Forming a union at Starbucks has put certain issues in sharp relief, for example: the moral imperative of overcoming the tyranny of the multinational corporations on the job and in the community; the State’s role in protecting class privilege and capitalist hegemony; the marginalization of labor issues in the corporate media; and the fundamental decency and beauty of the working class. The class that builds and creates.

I half-joke with folks who have read about class struggle but aren’t sure if it exists; I tell them, try to organize your workplace and then get back to me.

NoN!: In your opinion, what does the future hold for the Starbucks Workers Union?

DG: Well it’s impossible to say for certain since the direction of the campaign is controlled horizontally by the entirety of the membership but as you suggest I’ll offer my view.

If we continue to develop and deploy strategies that win material gains on the job, cultivate the initiative and skills of members, and increase our power as a campaign and movement, I think we’ll continue to do well. If we neglect these pillars, we’ll falter.

We should keep innovating and challenging paradigms because being without a voice at work is just not an option and existing traditional models just aren’t doing it for retail workers. In this regard, we feel quite a kinship with groups like the Milan-based Chainworkers organization which refused to concede that precarious workers are powerless and sought out tactics and messages that resonate. We also work closely with the worker center movement in the U.S. which has delivered powerful results with workers who had been left out of many traditional labor unions especially immigrant workers.

A powerful property of solidarity unionism is its scalability. It’s pretty straight forward. Co-workers start meeting with each other, get organized, and start fighting for what they care about. It’s not a financially intensive model and you don’t need to be a “specialist” or “professional”. So I’m hopeful that the SWU will continue to grow along these lines.

To keep building on the gains we have won thus far though, we need to grapple with the anti-union terminations. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how devastating they can be. Firing someone for union activism not only deprives them of their ability to pay the bills, it sends an unmistakable chill to other co-workers contemplating union membership. When Starbucks fires a worker for asserting their right to free association in the form a union, it commits a grave and intensely personal wrong. Such an affront against liberty requires a vigorous response with a proportional level of intensity from the SWU and autonomous activists.

There’s no way we can do this alone and that’s why the SWU situates itself as part of the global justice movement. From supporting baristas in New Zealand to farm workers in Florida or Ethiopia to indigenous Oaxacan rebels, we’re committed to global solidarity. IWW baristas participated in the historic events of May 1, 2006 in the United States calling for the respect of all workers regardless of immigration status- the biggest May Day in memory or maybe ever- and will do so again this year.

We’re very excited about our Justice from Bean to Cup! initiative which links baristas and coffee farmers across the Starbucks supply chain. It’s the first time we know of that rank and file retail workers have reached across the supply chain and across borders to build power. As I mentioned, our barista delegation just returned from Ethiopia where we built relationships with impoverished farmers growing coffee for Starbucks and we will be doing a lot of work in this area going forward.

Let there be no mistake that it will take a movement to reclaim our autonomy from the multinational corporations and arrive at the day when Wal-Mart “associates”, Starbucks “partners”, Borders “booksellers”, and Kinko’s “team members”, and the rest, march together under the red and black banner: “Abolition of the Wage System.”

For folks interested in staying connected with the campaign, our website is StarbucksUnion.org.

NoN!: And what about the future of the IWW in general?

DG: We’re in our 102nd year and things are looking better than they have in quite a while. A combination of repression and co-optation of course delivered a brutal but not fatal blow against our union in the early part of the 20th Century. Yet, the Wobbly ethos of Direct Action, rank and file control, and unequivocal solidarity that rejects racism and xenophobia, is as relevant today as it ever was.

An organizing renaissance has emerged in the IWW. Whether it’s the Starbucks campaign, movie theater workers in California, bike messengers in Chicago, retail and restaurant workers in Philadelphia, troqueros in Los Angeles, education workers in Michigan or Scotland, immigrant food warehouse workers in Brooklyn, or the Baristas United campaign in the British Isles, the IWW is back as a serious organizing force.

The heroism of our martyrs and class struggle prisoners, folks like Frank Little- organizing in the copper mines, Judi Bari uniting timber workers and radical environmentalists, or Ben Fletcher organizing on the docks, and most importantly the Wobblies first on the picket lines and last to go home whose names we may never know, inspire us and offer us a practical guide to a life in solidarity.

Building an agile and effective grassroots union is a tremendously difficult task no doubt and we need all the help we can get. I’ll mention the website for folks who want to get involved; it’s iww.org.

NoN!: What advice would you give to someone who wanted to organise their own workplace?

DG: First of all, do it. Don’t talk yourself out of it. You can convince yourself with a million bad reasons why you shouldn’t fight and you’ll keep getting screwed. By organizing you’ll improve your life on and off the job while becoming part of a global justice movement for a more humane society. Shortly after the Starbucks campaign went public, a progressive woman got in touch to express support. She told us, “workers are heroes, workers who organize are superheroes.”

Organizers help co-workers overcome fear all the time. But organizers too have to overcome our own fear. The media, schools, politicians, many religious institutions inculcate deference to authority- and the bosses love it. Confront your fear of sitting down with a co-worker to talk union or looking the boss in the eyes and overcome it.

Environmental degradation, greedy slumlords, war with no apparent end, racism and police brutality, three billion people living on less the two dollars a day, our elders left to die without dignity, this is the reality of capitalism. My working hypothesis is that where Capital most needs our obedience, we will most feel its weight. For many people though certainly not all, this location is the workplace. I think where Capital most needs your obedience is a good place to struggle.

IWW martyr Joe Hill, murdered by the state of Utah, said it well when he wrote, “If the workers take a notion…They can tie with mighty chains;…Every mine and every mill, Fleets and armies of the nation, Will at their command stand still.”

Your best bet is to contact a union as early as possible to gain the support you’re going to need to win. My preference of course if for unions which are member-controlled in theory and in fact whether it’s the IWW, CNT, or Frente Autentico del Trabajo in Mexico.

If you’re going to go independent (or with an existing union for that matter) build deep coalitions with other groups to carry out your work.

There’s a lot more I’d share, too much to go into here, but in brief I’d say: research your target intensively and identify its strengths and weaknesses; spend ample time learning organizing skills like how to have a union conversation with a co-worker and how to map a workplace; think critically about sustainability issues and organizing strategies in the face of asymmetric resources; tackle racism and sexism from day one; create mechanisms to share skills with members; develop and articulate compelling campaign narratives; harness the power of the internet and digital video; facilitate workers to tell their own stories; finally, know your labor history, familiarize yourself with contemporary union campaigns and worker struggles, but don’t be afraid to experiment with new approaches.

Develop the determination to prevail because it’s not going to be easy. But it is rewarding, the prospect of a just world is so sweet, and together we win.

NoN!: What would you say to someone who was considering working at Starbucks?

DG: Get hired and contact the IWW Starbucks Workers Union through StarbucksUnion.org. If you’re in the UK contact Baristas United at http://www.baritasunited.org.uk.


A version of this interview appears in Now or Never! issue 11
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[American Dream]

Horizontal, as it sounds, is a level space for decision making, a place where one can look directly at the other person across from you, and discuss things that matter most to all of us – we decide the agenda. Horizontalism is more than just being against hierarchy, or people having power over others – it is about creating something new together in our relationships. The means are a part of the ends. The forms of organizing manifest what we desire; it is not a question of demands, but rather a manifestation of an alternative way of being and relating.”

http://www.truth-out.org/power-occupy-w ... 1322681060

[American Dream]

http://www.possible-futures.org/2012/01 ... territory/

Horizontalism and Territory

by Marina Sitrin



Horizontal social relationships and the creation of new territory, through the use of geographic space, are the most generalized and innovative of the experiences of the Occupy movement. What we have been witnessing across the United States since September 17th is new in a myriad of ways, yet also, as everything, has local and global antecedents. In this essay I will describe these two innovations, and ground them in the more recent past, specifically in the global south in Argentina. I do this so as to examine commonalities and differences, but also to remind us that these ways of organizing have multiple and diverse precedents, and ones from which we can hopefully learn.

Horizontalidad

Horizontalidad, horizontality, and horizontalism are words that encapsulate the ideas upon which many of the social relationships and political interactions in the new global movements are grounded—from Spain to Greece, and now most recently here in the US Occupy movement.

Horizontalidad is a social relationship that implies, as its name suggests, a flat plane upon which to communicate. Horizontalidad necessarily implies the use of direct democracy and the striving for consensus, processes in which attempts are made so that everyone is heard and new relationships are created. Horizontalidad is a new way of relating, based in affective politics and against all the implications of “isms.”1 It is a dynamic social relationship. It is not an ideology or political program that must be met so as to create a new society or new idea. It is a break with these sorts of vertical ways of organizing and relating, and a break that is an opening.

To participate in any of the assemblies taking place throughout the US, and in many places around the globe, means to stand or sit in a circle, with a handful of facilitators, and speak and listen in turn, usually with general guidelines and principles of unity, and then together attempt to reach consensus—meaning to reach a general agreement that all can feel satisfied with, but that is not necessarily perfect, on whatever issue is raised, all the while doing so through the process of active listening. If one were to ask a participant about this process, which I have done countless times, she would most likely explain the need to listen to one another, perhaps she might use the language of democracy—something like direct, real, or participatory democracy—or maybe she would say that we do not have a society in which people can really participate, so that is what we are trying to do here, in this space and with this assembly. Often in these conversations, some version of horizontalism will arise. So similar is this current experience in the US to what took place in Argentina, beginning in December of 2001, where I then lived and compiled an oral history, that it is not only remarkable, it requires reflection and historical grounding.

The word horizontalidad was first heard in the days after the December 2001 popular rebellion in Argentina. No one recalls where it came from or who first might have said it. It was a new word, and emerged from a new practice. The practice was that of people coming together, looking to one another, without anyone in charge or with power over another, beginning to find ways to solve their problems together, and by doing this together, they were creating a new relationship. Both the decision making process and the ways in which they wanted to relate in the future were horizontal. What this meant was, and still is, to be discovered in its practice, or as the Zapatistas in Chiapas say, in the walk, and always questioning as we walk.

The rebellion in Argentina came in response to a growing economic crisis that had already left hundreds of thousands without work and many thousands hungry. The state provided no possible way out—and in fact offered quite the opposite. In the days before the popular rebellion, in early December 2001, the government froze all personal bank accounts, fearing a run on the banks. In response, first one person, and then another, and then hundreds, thousands, and hundreds of thousands came out into the street, banging pots and pans,cacerolando. They were not led by any party, and were not following any slogans, they merely sang, “Que Se Vayan Todos! Que No Quede Ni Uno Solo!” (They all must go! Not even one should remain!). Within two weeks four governments had resigned, the Minister of the Economy being the first to flee.

In the days of the popular rebellion people who had been out in the streets cacerolandodescribe finding themselves, finding each other, looking around at one another, introducing themselves, wondering what was next, and beginning to ask questions together.

One of the most significant things about the social movements that emerged in Argentina after the 19th and 20th of December is how generalized the experience of horizontalidad was and is: from the middle class organized into neighborhood assemblies to the unemployed in neighborhoods, and with workers taking back their work places. Horizontalidad, and a rejection of hierarchy and political parties was the norm for thousands of assemblies, taking place on street corners, in workplaces and throughout the unemployed neighborhoods. And now, ten years later, as people come together to organize, the assumption is that it will be horizontal, from the hundreds of assemblies currently occurring up and down the Andes fighting against international mining companies, to the thousands of Bachilleratos, alternative high school diploma programs organized by former assembly participants and housed in recuperated workplaces.

Horizontalidad is a living word, reflecting an ever-changing experience. Months after the popular rebellion, many movement participants began to speak of their relationships as horizontal as a way of describing the new forms of decision-making. Years after the rebellion, those continuing to build new movements speak of horizontalidad as a goal as well as a tool. All social relationships are still deeply affected by capitalism and hierarchy, and thus by the sort of power dynamics it promotes in all collective and creative spaces, especially how people relate to one another in terms of economic resources, gender, race, access to information, and experience. As a result, until these fundamental social dynamics are overcome, the goal ofhorizontalidad cannot be achieved. Time has taught that, in the face of this, simply desiring a relationship does not make it so. But the process of horizontalidad is a tool for the achievement of this goal. Thus horizontalidad is desired, and is a goal, but it is also the means, the tool, for achieving this end.

Occupy participants in the United States—as well as around the globe, from Spain and Greece to London and Berlin—organize with directly democratic assemblies, and many even use the specific language of horizontal, horizontalism, and horizontalidad. They are using horizontal forms so as to create the most open and participatory spaces possible, while now, many months into the occupations, participants are speaking of the challenges to the process as well, similarly reflecting that horizontalidad is not a thing but rather a process, and as with the Argentines, both a tool and a goal.2

In the months since the Occupy movement began in the United States there has been a tremendous interest in what occurred in Argentina.3 Countless people come up to me or write to me to share that what they read about Argentina is exactly what they are feeling, and the forms of organization are remarkably similar. They then usually ask me how that is possible. Similarly in Greece, a few months into the occupation of Syntagma Square, the group SKYA (the assembly for the circulation of struggles) asked to translate Horizontalism into Greek. It has since been translated, and in November I traveled to Athens and met with various assemblies who were beginning to use the book as a political and popular education tool. Again, as in the United States, movement participants shared how the experiences, especially of horizontalism, were so similar to the ways in which they were organizing.

Territory and Space

Not only do people in the current global movements organize in ways that are horizontal, but they are also doing so in open and public spaces. Part of the politics, as described by people all over the world, is the need to come together and to do so without hierarchy and in open spaces, where not only all can look at one another, but where a space in society is opened up and changed, whether that be a park or an occupied plaza. This opening of space is not limited to cities and large towns either. I have spoken to dozens of people involved in the movement in the United States from small towns and villages, who meet on a street corner or in a local plaza, perhaps with only a few dozen people, but still in public space. In one such instance it is a village of only 300 people.4 The importance is being visible to others, and using and changing space. It is part of the politics of intervening in a larger conversation, but on our own terms.

The importance of location to the Occupy movement—consistently sited in public spaces so as to gather participants face to face—cannot be underestimated or seen as something coincidental: it is a at the heart of the politics of the movement. Participants at each site of occupation choose to gather together and decide their own agenda. Occupiers are not protesting the state or city governments and asking them to resolve the problems of society: the politics of the movement necessarily imply that the state cannot fix the problems of society. Of course this is not to say that things cannot be made better or that there are not countless things the Occupiers want changed, such as access to housing, education, food, etc., but the crux of the politics is that the point of reference is not above (it is not the state), but is across, (looking to one another and in horizontal ways). And from that vantage point tactics and strategies are decided.

Sometimes, as with Occupy Wall Street, a place was chosen based on politics. In the case of OWS, many assemblies occurred before the actual occupation to decide what might be the best possible locations (of which there was a list of 8 potentials). Settling on Zuccotti Park was indeed a political choice, both being in the Wall Street area and also being a privatized park. But the point was, again, not to make a demand. One of the first decisions of the assembly in OWS was to rename the park Liberty Plaza, claiming it as a collective space and not, for example, asking that it be made public or demanding more public space in New York. Again, we see the gaze of Occupiers focused not on demands of the “other” but on and amongst themselves.

In Argentina the use of space and concept of territory was also central. This was true for the neighborhood assembly movement, the unemployed movements, and the recuperated workplaces. People spoke of a new place where they were meeting, one without the forms of institutional powers that previously existed. As one assembly participant described:

I understand [i]horizontalidad in terms of the metaphor of territories, and a way of practicing politics through the construction of territory, it is grounded there, and direct democracy has to do with this. It is like it needs to occupy a space[/i].5

The recuperated workplace movement, now numbering close to 300 workplaces, organized under the slogan of “Occupy, Resist, Produce” are almost all run horizontally and without bosses or hierarchy, and are necessarily located in specific geographic spaces. Within this space of the workplace, workers speak of the construction of new territories—and by this they are referring to not only the fact that they have occupied a space, but the ways in which they are running the workplaces together, and in solidarity with people from the community and other workplaces. The new territory is created in how they run the workplace, not just in the fact of taking it over.

The unemployed workers movements first began as protests demanding an unemployment subsidy from the state, but shortly thereafter, in the midst of the protests, they began to create something different together. Their protest took the form of a blockade: not having a place of work, they took to bridges or major intersections, with the intention of shutting down that major artery. At the same time, while blockading, they were creating horizontal assemblies to decide what to do, and developing an entire infrastructure of food, health care, media, and child care, together opening up a new space on the other side, yet as a part of the blockade. Many began to refer to this space as new, free “teritorio” (territory). Raul Zibechi’s book, “Territorios en resistencia: Cartografía de las periferias urbanas latinoamericanos,” published in 2009, deals precisely with this issue. He speaks to the importance of territory as places that are rapidly becoming sites not only of struggle, but of organization. As Zibechi describes elsewhere:

The real divergence from previous time periods is the creation of territories: the long process of conformation of a social sector that can only be built while constructing spaces to house the differences. Viewed from the popular sectors, from the bottom of our societies, these territories are the product of the roots of different social relations. Life is spread out in its social, cultural, economic, and political totality through initiatives of production, health, education, celebration, and power in these physical spaces.6

Emergency Breaks and Now Time

The various sites of the Occupy movement have all created the same two features, and ones that must be explored in depth and taken seriously: horizontal spaces and new territories in which to create new social relationships.

“Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on the train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency break.”7 Walter Benjamin’s words perfectly illuminate what has been going on around the globe throughout 2011—and in many places before this as well, such as with the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico and in Argentina. The movements are about shouting “No!,” “Ya Basta!,” “Que Se Vayan Todos!,” about the collective refusal to remain passive in an untenable situation. And so we pull the emergency brake, and in that moment freeze time and begin to open up and create something totally new. What it is still is not totally clear, and that is a part of it. There is a desire to stop time and open something new, creating new relationships and more free spaces. What this looks like is being discovered, as a part of the process, as it is created, which is also how it is being created, horizontally and in geographic space.



1My choice to translate horizontalidad into horizontalism in 2005 was perhaps in error, it is actually an anti-ism, and the use of horizontalism might now have created some confusion. At the time the decision was made thinking that it would be a play on the word, and that translations such as horizontality did not sufficiently reflect a changing relationship. ↩

2I traveled to Greece, London, and Berlin in November of 2011 and spoke with people in the various Occupy movements.↩

3This is reflected even in the increase in sales of Horizontalism, the book I edited on popular power in Argentina. ↩

4This village, Point Reyes, located 30 miles north of San Francisco CA, has since created an alternative option to the use of the police with a conflict resolution team, as well as promoted the use of alternative currency and has obtained the necessary number of signatures to force out their one bank and now will have a credit union. ↩

5Marina Sitrin, ed., Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (Oakland, CA and Edinburgh, Scotland: AK Press, 2006), 60. ↩

6Raúl Zibechi, “The Revolution of 1968: When Those From Below Said Enough!,” Americas Program, March 6, 2008,http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/662. ↩

7Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 402. ↩

[American Dream]

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/20 ... -to-guide/

PATRIARCHAL BARGAIN HOW-TO GUIDE
by Gwen Sharp



A while back, in a post about Kim Kardashian’s fame, Lisa summarized the concept of a patriarchal bargain as “a decision to accept gender rules that disadvantage women in exchange for whatever power one can wrest from the system. It is an individual strategy designed to manipulate the system to one’s best advantage, but one that leaves the system itself intact.”

Christine B. sent in an excellent example of an individual-level attempt at empowerment with the confines of gender inequality. The video, part of the Howcast series of how-to videos, explains to women how to get men to buy them drinks at a bar:




In case you didn’t feel like watching the video, I can sum it up for you:


Dress sexy, but not slutty, or you’re asking for it. How do you know if you’ve crossed the line? Well, if any men act inappropriately toward you, you must have shown too much boob. Better luck next time!

Instead of planning a fun night out with your female friends, select only one — the bubbliest one, obviously — and go find a male-dominated environment.

Buy yourself one drink right off the bat, so it looks like you’re an independent-minded woman who isn’t trying to get free shit in return for being pretty. I mean, you are doing that, but you don’t want to make it obvious. Men might be turned off if the gendered exchange were made explicit.

Assume all men are stupid.

Don’t ever stop to question a system that tells women that trading on our appearance, faking interest in people, excluding friends from social outings because they might be annoying to random men you’ve never met, and being manipulative are all totally empowering and socially-acceptable ways to behave as long as ladies get a fairly low-cost item for free in return for our efforts.


Transcript after the jump.

{more…)

[American Dream]