Noam Chomsky: The Kind of Anarchism I Believe in, and What's Wrong with Libertarians

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/noam-chomsky-kind-anarchism-i-believe-and-whats-wrong-libertarians?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark
oam Chomsky:Well, anarchism is, in my view, basically a kind of tendency in human thought which shows up in different forms in different circumstances, and has some leading characteristics.  Primarily it is a tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy.  It seeks structures of hierarchy and domination in human life over the whole range, extending from, say, patriarchal families to, say, imperial systems, and it asks whether those systems are justified.  It assumes that the burden of proof for anyone in a position of power and authority lies on them.  Their authority is not self-justifying.  They have to give a reason for it, a justification.  And if they can’t justify that authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by something more free and just.  And, as I understand it, anarchy is just that tendency.  It takes different forms at different times.
Anarcho-syndicalism is a particular variety of anarchism which was concerned primarily, though not solely, but primarily with control over work, over the work place, over production.  It took for granted that working people ought to control their own work, its conditions, [that] they ought to control the enterprises in which they work, along with communities, so they should be associated with one another in free associations, and … democracy of that kind should be the foundational elements of a more general free society.  And then, you know, ideas are worked out about how exactly that should manifest itself, but I think that is the core of anarcho-syndicalist thinking.  I mean it’s not at all the general image that you described — people running around the streets, you know, breaking store windows — but [anarcho-syndicalism] is a conception of a very organized society, but organized from below by direct participation at every level, with as little control and domination as is feasible, maybe none.

Response to a Trotskyist (ISO) Criticism of Anarchism

clipped from: theanarchistlibrary.org
The ISO is in the wing of Trotskyism which rejects Trotsky’s theory that the Soviet Union under Stalin remained a “degenerated workers’ state.” Instead the ISO regarded the USSR, more-or-less correctly, as “state capitalist. socialists who did not identify socialism with state tyranny, as the Stalinists had done.

demonstrations by unemployed workers to demand jobs. His anarchist friends refused to support this because they believed that “fighting for ‘the right to work’...was to fight for the right to be exploited. Instead they advocated dropping out
too often...personal revolt becomes a substitute for social and collective struggle for a better world.”

He came to dislike the anarchists’ use of consensus, instead of majority rule consensus led to endless long meetings, acrimony, and de facto minority rule.

by no means did all anarchists abstain from struggle for purist reasons, but ‘lifestyle’ anarchism is a strong strain in the movement not opposed to being vegetarians, riding bicycles, alternate institutions, squats or coops

I do not regard this approach as a strategy for getting rid of capitalism and the state.

I advocate mass struggles by workers and oppressed people, leading ultimately to a workers’ revolution. Nor do we insist on consensus we use majority rule and democratic procedures, the trend of anarchist-communism

Trotsky about anarchism

In and of itself, this self-justification that “we did not seize power not because we were unable but because we did not wish to, because we were against every kind of dictatorship,” and the like, contains an irrevocable condemnation of anarchism as an utterly anti-revolutionary doctrine. To renounce the conquest of power is voluntarily to leave the power with those who wield it, the exploiters. The essence of every revolution consisted and consists in putting a new class in power, thus enabling it to realize its own program in life. It is impossible to wage war and to reject victory. It is impossible to lead the masses towards insurrection without preparing for the conquest power.

No one could have prevented the Anarchists after the conquest of power from establishing the sort of regime they deem necessary, assuming, of course, that their program is realizable. But the Anarchist leaders themselves lost faith in it. They hid from power not because they are against “every kind of dictatorship” – in actuality, grumbling and whining, they supported and still support the dictatorship of Stalin-Negrin – but because they completely lost their principles and courage, if they ever had any. They were afraid of everything: “isolation,” “involvement,” “fascism.” They were afraid of France and England. More than anything these phrasemongers feared the revolutionary masses.

The renunciation of the conquest of power inevitably throws every workers’ organization into the swamp of reformism and turns it into a toy of the bourgeoisie; it cannot be otherwise in view of the class structure of society. In opposing the goal, the conquest of power, the Anarchists could not in the end fail to oppose the means, the revolution. The leaders of the CNT and FAI not only helped the bourgeoisie hold on to the shadow of power in July 1936; they also helped it to reestablish bit by bit what it had lost at one stroke. In May 1937, they sabotaged the uprising of the workers and thereby saved the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Thus anarchism, which wished merely to be anti-political, proved in reality to be anti-revolutionary and in the more critical moments – counter-revolutionary.

The Anarchist theoreticians, who after the great test of 1931-37 continue to repeat the old reactionary nonsense about Kronstadt, and who affirm that “Stalinism is the inevitable result of Marxism and Bolshevism,” simply demonstrate by this they are forever dead for the revolution.

(Trotsky, December 1937).

Gladio reprise: 2011 will see the new fake threat of Islamist terrorism and ‘anarchism’

By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer


Jan 4, 2011, 00:21

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The corporatists and fascists who have steered Europe into bankruptcy are now using their media assets to morph their favorite threat over the last two decades -- Islamist terrorism -- to a combined menace of Islamist terrorists teamed up with an international network of anarchists. The change of threat was necessary with corporatists and fascist-led governments in Europe besieged by workers and students who are militantly opposed to severe cuts in social spending that were dictated from supranational institutions in order to financially bail out greedy bankers and their lackeys in governments.

In Greece and Italy, where governments are under street pressure to resign over corruption and austerity moves, there are already signs that the paradigm shift from Islamist terrorism to leftist anarchism is already occurring, with highly-suspicious and likely false flag bombings taking place at embassies and other facilities.

Europe has seen such false flag terrorist attacks in the past blamed on leftist revolutionary groups like the Italian Red Brigades and the West German Red Army Faction, but actually carried out by a network of CIA and fascist operatives, supported by local police and intelligence agencies, to blame leftists for such attacks. The operation, known generally as “Gladio,” was a ploy to damage the reputation of the Communist parties of Western Europe in order that they were not invited to join in any leftist government coalitions, particularly in Italy and France.

Anarcho-capitalist FAQ

1. What is anarcho-capitalism?
2. Why should one consider anarcho-capitalism?
3. Do anarcho-capitalists favor chaos?
4. Isn't anarcho-capitalism utopian?
5. Isn't laissez-faire capitalism exploitative?
6. What justifications are there for anarcho-capitalism?
7. Are anarcho-capitalists anti-war?
8. What are the myths of statism?
9. What are the myths of socialism?
10. Why don't you just leave?
11. Are there different types of anarcho-capitalism?
12. How do anarcho-capitalists compare with other anarchists?
13. Is anarcho-capitalism the same thing as libertarianism?
14. Who are the major anarcho-capitalist thinkers?
15. How would anarcho-capitalism work?
16. How would anarcho-capitalists handle the "public goods" problem?
17. Have there been any anarcho-capitalist societies?
18. How might an anarcho-capitalist society be achieved?
19. What are some major anarcho-capitalist writings?
20. Where can I find anarcho-capitalist web sites?

For info about anarchism in general (not restricted to anarcho-capitalism), see Bryan Caplan's Anarchist Theory FAQ. Here are some general anarchism links and libertarian/minarchism links.

"PROGRESSIVE IS THE NEW REACTIONARY"

Does progressivism point the way to a brighter future, or has it become the last line of defense for a failed political and economic status quo?

In his latest research study, released today by the Center for a Stateless Society, Kevin Carson makes the case for progressives as the bitter-enders of a social project made obsolete by liberating technologies and the production and distribution methods those technologies make possible.

“Thermidor of the Progressives: Managerialist Liberalism’s Hostility to Decentralized Organization” traces the development of managerialism in the political and economic realms, the history of progressive attachment to the managerial vision, and the siege mentality displayed by progressives as they confront what Carson calls the “Network Revolution.”

“For liberals,” writes Carson, author of _The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low Overhead Manifesto_, “the American Golden Age was the ‘Consensus Capitalism’ of the New Deal and the first post-WWII generation. … This general affinity for large-scale organization and hierarchy, more recently, has been reflected in hostility to the new forms of networked organization permitted by the emerging technologies of the late twentieth century.”

THE CURSED BOLSHEVIKS

The cursed Bolsheviks
June 12th, 2010

“Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of ‘justice’ but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when ‘freedom’ becomes a
special privilege.

“A few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless idealism direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an élite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously – at bottom, then, a clique affair – a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat, however, but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians, that is a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense, in the sense of the rule of the Jacobins. [. . .] Yes, we could go even further: such conditions must inevitably cause a brutalisation of public life – assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc.”

Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution (1917)

Johann Hari on Chomsky, Hitchens, Iraq, and anarchism

Link to: Nick Cohen: Writing from London


having a kind of anarchistic temperament towards power is quite useful. Serially doubting what people in power are telling you, and assuming that they will only do good things if they are forced to by social movements, is a very sensible way of looking at the world.

he basically disputes the two major institutions of power in the world today: the nation-state and any institution of market capitalism

as a first premise: The world should not be in any way as it is now, very valuable when you are looking at the IMF and World Bank – completely illegitimate institutions of corporate fundamentalism that are imposing on poor countries a completely failed economic model.

firstly the alternatives that Chomsky posits are unbelievably vague and, at times, incoherent; and secondly, when you look at his philosophy on markets

alternatives are voluntaristic, anarchist communities. Firstly
how that could work except on a very small scale. he gives an example of anarchist communities that sprang up during the Spanish civil war

But they were crushed precisely because they were anarchists and unable to mount a proper defence. should they have an army to defend themselves? Chomsky said, “I’m not going to get into that. implausibility of these voluntaristic, anarchist communities in a world of 6 billion people with extremely complex urban societies can be organized in that way.

you have to acknowledge there will be some structure of power and that they should be a damn sight more democratic.

For example, he voted for Kerry rather than Bush. John Pilger, who refused to acknowledge any difference and basically said voting in America is pointless and you have to wait for the revolution.

He has used the word “bullshit” to describe the idea that markets in any way generate wealth. markets are a tool need to be extremely tightly regulated. They do things
like abuse workers’ rights or trash the environment. you need very strict, tight democratic regulations and strong trade unions within those regulations. they generate wealth. Chomsky denies that

And there’s another element of Chomsky’s thought which is very important which is his analysis of the media. I was initially skeptical of it but I think there is some truth in it.

MK: You write in the mainstream media.

MK: Do you feel pressure? Do you think if you said certain things your editors would mention something?

MK: It’s unspoken?

JH: Yes. What he would say is you internalize the norms and there are certain things that you don’t say. I think that is how it works; it doesn’t work as self-censorship
I think trusting one of the most important institutions in a free society – the media – to the benevolence of billionaires is pretty dodgy

MK: How else do you structure it though? You can’t have it under state control can you?

MK: He’s into independent non-corporate media though isn’t he? But that’s hard to get off the ground.

JH: The Guardian is a good example but he would say that is corrupted by the fact they have to take advertising from corporations

It is a manufacturing of a common sense that people do absorb. I’ve seen it most clearly on things like asylum.

Norman Finkelstein.

What he has done in exposing Joan Peters who is a fraud and liar was amazing. I think he is now doing the same thing with Alan Dershowitz. I think it is very valuable. I love what he says about Elie Wiesel. I hate the mystification of the Holocaust and the attempt to turn it into a kind of quasi-religious thing. I love – partly because Finkelstein has the unimpeachable moral authority of having two parents who survived the Holocaust – he can say this in a way that if other people said it you would instinctively be more suspicious of it. Elie Wiesel says things like “the Holocaust cannot be comprehended by human beings.” That is a ridiculous thing to say. It was one of the worst crimes of the 20th century. It was unbelievably evil but it is comprehensible. if you set it up as being incomprehensible you increase the chances of happening again

The American occupation has bought with it a program of extreme neo-liberalism – far more extreme than anything tried in any democratic country, just like the one imposed on Russia. When I interviewed Joseph Stiglitz about this he said “The way they are acting in Iraq suggests they think what they did in Russia after the fall of Communism was a great success,” when in fact it saw the country slide back towards fascism which is basically where it is under Putin

Islamism is a totalitarian movement. There’s another half to that equation. Totalitarian movements do not emerge in vacuums. The context for Nazism was the humiliation imposed by the Versailles treaty. the context for this psychopathic, totalitarian ideology is what has been done to the Arab world over the last 60 years
“It’s a psychopathic movement” – yes, that’s true but psychosis rarely occurs in a vacuum. The reason why this psychotic movement has developed is that for the last 60 years Western governments have systematically murdered all the liberals and democrats in those countries. When there was a profoundly democratic movement in Iran in the 1950’s what did we do? We installed a sub-fascist dictator because they wanted a stable access to oil.

look at Chechnya. Look at what happened in Beslan – murdering and torturing school children. look what’s happened with the Chechens over the last 40 years Chechnya was deported by Stalin to Siberia, half died half died on the way back. Soviet Union fell they wanted to be independent.

They weren’t allowed to be and they were further brutalized. And a third of the population of Chechnya has died since 1991. You look at aerial picture of Grozny and it looks like it’s been nuked.

BUENAVENTURA DURRUTI

"We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to
accommodate ourselves for a while. For you must not forget that we can
also build. It is we who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and
America and everywhere. We, the workers. We can build others to take their
place. And better ones. We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are
going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that.
The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the
stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is
growing in this minute." - Buenaventura Durruti, Spain 1936

IMMIGRANTS

Fear of immigrants was widespread in the United States. In this cartoon, published five years after the Haymarket Square riot and one year before the Homestead Strike, illustrator Grant Hamilton placed a judge scolding Uncle Sam: "If Immigration was properly Restricted you would no longer be troubled with Anarchy, Socialism, the Mafia and such kindred evils!" From New York Harbor behind them comes a horde of arriving immigrants labeled "German socialist," "Russian anarchist," "Polish vagabond," "Italian brigand," "English convict," and "Irish pauper."

HAYMARKET SQUARE

By the spring of 1886, the movement for an eight-hour day had grown. On May 1,
350,000 workers in 11,562 establishments all over the country went out on strike
Chicago Mail on May 1 asked that Albert Parsons and August Spies, the anarchist leaders of the International Working People's Association, be watched

On May 3, in front of the McCormick Harvester Works, where strikers and sympathizers fought scabs, the police fired into a crowd of strikers, wounded many of them, and killed four

A meeting was called for Haymarket Square on the evening of May 4, and about three thousand persons assembled. the hour grew late, the crowd dwindled to a few hundred. A detachment of 180 policemen showed up, advanced on the speakers' platform
A bomb then exploded in the midst of the police, wounding sixty-six policemen, of whom seven later died. The police fired into the crowd, killing several

With no evidence, the police arrested eight anarchist leaders in Chicago

accessories to crime, anyone inciting a murder was guilty of that murder.

The evidence against the eight anarchists was their ideas, their literature; none had been at Haymarket that day except Fielden. they were sentenced to death. This created an international excitement

A year after the trial, four of the convicted anarchists-Albert Parsons, a printer, August Spies, an upholsterer, Adolph Eischer, and George Engel-were hanged. Louis Lingg, a twenty-one-year-old carpenter, blew himself up in his cell by exploding a dynamite tube in his mouth. Three remained in prison.

Evergreen Cooperatives

The Evergreen Cooperatives of Cleveland, Ohio are pioneering innovative models of job creation, wealth building, and sustainability. Evergreen’s employee-owned, for-profit companies are based locally and hire locally. We create meaningful green jobs and keep precious financial resources within our community. Our workers earn a living wage and build equity in their firms as owners of the business.

The first Evergreen Cooperative businesses – Evergreen Cooperative Laundry, Ohio Cooperative Solar, and Green City Growers Cooperative – are launching in 2009–2010. Watch the video.

Evergreen is a partnership between the residents of six of our city’s neighborhoods and some of Cleveland’s most important “anchor institutions” – the Cleveland Foundation, the City of Cleveland, Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, and many others. Help us build community wealth to transform Cleveland and change lives.

Support the growing network of Evergreen Cooperatives. Together, we can transform our community.

THE MONDRAGON COMPANY

The MONDRAGON Corporation is a federation of worker cooperatives based in the Basque region of Spain.

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Currently it is the seventh largest Spanish company in terms of turnover and the leading business group in the Basque Country. At the end of 2008 it was providing employment for 92,773 people working in 256 companies in four areas of activity

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The MONDRAGON Co-operatives operate in accordance with a business model based on People and the Sovereignty of Labour, which has made it possible to develop highly participative companies rooted in solidarity, with a strong social dimension but without neglecting business excellence. The Co-operatives are owned by their worker-members and power is based on the principle of one person one vote ^[1]

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The determining factor in the creation of the Co-operatives

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1941 of a young priest José Mª Arizmendiarrieta

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suffering the painful consequences of the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War:

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create employment based on solidarity

Before setting up the first co-operative, Arizmendiarrieta spent a number of years educating young people about a form of humanism based on solidarity and participation, with Christian roots, and the importance of acquiring the necessary technical knowledge.

In October 2009, the United Steelworkers announced an agreement with Mondragon to create worker cooperatives in the United States.^[4]

Bendable Business

Cooperatives less likely to break in economic crises

On October 27, 2009 the United Steelworkers announced a framework agreement with Mondragon to develop unionized worker cooperatives in the manufacturing sector in the US. Under the agreement, both parties have pledged to develop a model that combines the collective bargaining system with the “one worker, one vote” hallmark of cooperatives. While it will not be the first time worker cooperatives have looked to unionization, the scale and formal partnership of the Mondragon-Steelworkers proposal is without precedent and could signal a way for cooperatives and unions to work collaboratively in weathering economic storms.

THE CLEVELAND MODEL

The Cleveland Model
By Gar Alperovitz, Ted Howard & Thad Williamson
February 11, 2010

a new model of large-scale worker- and community-benefiting enterprises is beginning to build serious momentum. The Evergreen Cooperative Laundry (ECL)--a worker-owned, industrial-size, thoroughly "green" operation. There are ten major enterprises in the works in Cleveland. this is an employee-owned business. The Evergreen model draws heavily on the experience of the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in the Basque Country of Spain, the world's most successful large-scale cooperative effort (now employing 100,000 workers in an integrated network of more than 120 high-tech, industrial, service, construction, financial and other largely cooperatively owned businesses).

The Evergreen Cooperative Laundry, the flagship works off the demand from the healthcare industry, which is 16 percent of GDP and growing. employees begin to buy into by payroll deductions of 50 cents an hour. ECL has the smallest carbon footprint of any. most use three gallons, ECL use just eight-tenths
gallon.

A second, part of the Evergreen effort. Ohio Cooperative Solar. large-scale installations of solar panels on the roofs of the city's largest nonprofit health, education and municipal buildings. 100 employee-owners weatherization program.

Another, $10 million in federal loans and grants already in hand) is Green City Growers, hydroponic food, 230,000-square-foot greenhouse--larger than the average Wal-Mart superstore.

A fourth co-op, Neighborhood Voice, 500 jobs over the next five years, focusing on the local market and anchor institutions.

Evergreen Business Services, to support. back-office services, etc.

resources, Cleveland Foundation, local foundations, banks and the municipal government. Evergreen Cooperative Development Fund, capitalized by $5 million in grant, leverage up $40 million.

go green, worker-owned co-ops, national buzz, models are being considered in Atlanta, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Detroit.

Cleveland model could be applied in hard-hit industries and working-class communities around the nation. It takes us beyond both traditional capitalism and traditional socialism. The key link between national sectors of expanding public activity and procurement, on the one hand, and a new local economic entity, on the other, that "democratizes" ownership and is deeply anchored in the community.

In healthcare the link is to a sector in which some implicit or explicit form of "national planning", the movement toward universal healthcare will all but certainly increase public influence and concern with how funds are used.

Cleveland effort is targeted at very low-income, largely minority communities, the same principles could easily be applied in cities like Detroit and aimed at black and white workers displaced by the economic crisis.

massive planning failures of the nation's main auto companies. in October
the Mondragon Corporation and the million-plus-member United Steelworker union announced an alliance to develop

an alliance to develop Mondragon-type manufacturing cooperatives in the United States and Canada. Says USW's Rob Witherell: "We are seeking the right opportunities to make it work, probably in manufacturing markets that we both understand." what might happen if the government and the UAW used the stock they own in General Motors because of the bailout to reorganize the company along full or joint worker-ownership lines--and if the new General Motors product line were linked to a plan to develop the nation's mass transit and rail system. Since mass transit is a sector that is certain to expand, there is every reason to plan its taxpayer-financed growth and integrate it with new community-stabilizing ownership strategies. The same is true of high-speed rail. Moreover, there are currently no US-owned companies producing subway cars. Nor do any American-owned companies build the kind of equipment needed for high-speed rail.

2007 public authorities nationwide bought 600 new rail and subway cars, roughly 15,000 buses and smaller "paratransit" vehicles. current capital outlays on vehicles alone amount to $3.8 billion, total annual investment outlays (vehicles plus
infrastructure) are $14.5 billion.

Depart of Trans estimate $48 billion investment in transit capital projects could generate 1.3 million new green jobs in the next two years alone. It makes sense to expedite the retirement of aging buses and replace them with more efficient energy-saving vehicles. create more jobs

Obama has endorsed high-speed rail a priority. he announced support for rail expansion in thirteen corridors. based on an $8 billion "down payment"
November 2008 voters in California approved a $10 billion bond to build high-speed rail.

a new industry organized on new principles, the impact of future oil shortages, building 15,000 miles) of track devoted to high-speed rail by 2025. total costs at $2 trillion, $140 billion each year for fifteen years

expanding economic sector, dominated by public funds and public planning. In the absence of a national capacity will likely end up awarding to other countries.

Providing infrastructure will generate a long list of required equipment. a restructured group of vehicle production companies could help produce, help create new forms of ownership that anchor the economies of the local communities involved.

current ownership structure of General Motors suggests the nascent Cleveland effort
possibility of an important new strategic approach

activities financed by the public is used to create enterprises that are more democratically owned, target jobs to communities in distress, it serves a private market and hence faces the "discipline" of the market.

the threshold of developing national policy approach for transportation
It is not too early to get serious about the Clevelands, moving an economically decaying nation toward a new economic vision.

Gar Alperovitz, author of America Beyond Capitalism, and (with Lew Daly) of Unjust Deserts, is a professor at the University of Maryland and a principal of its Democracy Collaborative, an organization that has been assisting the Cleveland development effort. Ted Howard is executive director of the Democracy Collaborative. Thad Williamson is an assistant professor at the University of Richmond's Jepson School of Leadership Studies.

WORLD SOCIAL FORUM

World Social Forum

a permanent space and process to build alternatives to neoliberalism"
It tends to meet in January at the same time as its "great capitalist rival", the World Economic Forum's meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

the first WSF, January 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, led by the Brazilian Worker's Party (PT). Brasil during a moment of transformation that later would lead to the electoral victory of the PT candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. alternative future. "Reinventing Democracy"

second WSF, Porto Alegre, February 2002, Ralph Nader's Public Citizen organization. AFL-CIO and the SEIU were very active

third WSF, Porto Alegre, January 2003, Life After Capitalism, Among the speakers Noam Chomsky.

fourth WSF, Mumbai, India, January 2004, key speakers, Joseph Stiglitz

fifth World Social Forum, Porto Alegre

sixth, "polycentric", Caracas, Bamako (Mali), Karachi

seventh, Nairobi, Kenya, 'an NGO fair

eighth, globally thousands of local organizations, Global Call for Action

ninth, Brazilian city of Belém

2010, WSF will happen in a permanent way

World Social Forum homepage

EVERGREEN COOPERATIVE LAUNDRY

The Evergreen Cooperative Laundry (ECL) in Cleveland is thoroughly green and worker-owned, and a blueprint for the future, see this? also here, and here

Something important is happening in Cleveland: a new model...These are not your traditional small-scale co-ops. The Evergreen model draws heavily on the experience of the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in the Basque Country of Spain, the world's most successful large-scale cooperative effort (now employing 100,000 workers in an integrated network of more than 120 high-tech, industrial, service, construction, financial and other largely cooperatively owned businesses).



Also, this coming up in Detroit. A part of the World Social Forum

The US Social Forum (USSF) is a movement building process. It is not a
 conference but it is a space to come up with the peoples’ solutions to the 
economic and ecological crisis. The USSF is the next most important step in our
 struggle to build a powerful multi-racial, multi-sectoral, inter-generational,
 diverse, inclusive, internationalist movement that transforms this country and
 changes history. For more information about United States and World Social Forum history, visit the About page.

Lessons from the Luddites

"Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines."

This wise maxim of Herbert Read's is what Wordsworth and the other Romantic poets of the Luddite era expressed in their own way as they saw the Satanic mills and Stygian forges

Mercantile capitalism showed scant regard for nature
but until the 19th century it had not developed many technologies capable of wholesale destruction
What happens when an economy is not embedded in a due regard for the natural world
It also loses its sense of the human as a species and the individual as an animal
needing
land and air, decent food and shelter, intact communities and nurturing families
An economy without any kind of ecological grounding will be as disregardful of the human members as of the nonhuman
4. The nation-state, synergistically intertwined with industrialism, will always come to its aid and defense, making revolt futile and reform ineffectual.
There is no sign of hurt or astonishment in any of the Luddite letters written in reaction to the government's decision to defend the new industrialism with some 14,000 troops
so stark and clumsy and brutal, and accompanied by systems of spies & informers, zealous magistrates, illegal arrests, and rigged trials --- to control

its own populace.
the real meaning of laissez-faire: force would be used by the state to ensure that manufacturers would be free to do what they wished, especially with labor.
the industrial regime hardly cares which cadres run the state
it can accommodate itself to almost any national system --- Marxist Russia, capitalist Japan, China under a vicious dictator, Singapore under a benevolent one, messy and riven India, tidy and cohesive Norway, Jewish Israel, Moslem Egypt --- and in return asks only that its priorities dominate, its markets rule, its values penetrate, and its interests be defended, with 14,000 troops if necessary, or even an entire Desert Storm.
Some among the Luddites might have entertained a dream that the British government could be overthrown
Some among the Luddites also entertained a dream that the British government could be reformed
no figure of the Luddite era more pathetic than that of Gravener Henson
organizing Nottingham stockingers
getting Parliament to consider

to consider a bill preventing "Frauds and Abuses" in the knitting trades, only to see his bill become so distorted
that it ended up allowing manufac- turers to "Cheat, Rob, Pilfer" as never before --- and then finding that even that bill was rejected by the Lords.
5. But resistance to the industrial system, based on some grasp of moral principles and rooted in some sense of moral revulsion, is not only possible but necessary.
it is true that in a general sense the Luddites were not successful either in the short-run aim of halting the detestable machinery or the long-run task of stopping the Industrial Revolution and its multiple miseries
is that they resisted, not that they won
Luddism as a moral challenge, "a sort of moral earthquake," as Charlotte Bronte saw it
perception of right and wrong that went down deep in the English soul.
somewhere in the blood, in the place inside
where pain and fear and anger intersect,
one is finally moved to refusal and defiance: "No more."

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part," is the way that Mario Savio put it before another movement in 1964. "And you've got to put your bodies upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop."
The "Great Refusal," in the words of Michel Foucault, is made up of "a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable, others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, or violent." Lewis Mumford, at the end of his lengthy analysis of "the myth of the machine" a generation ago, argued that indeed anyone could "play a part in extricating himself from the power system" by "quiet acts of mental and physical withdrawal," and he thought he saw such resistance "in a hundred different places":

Though no immediate and complete escape from the ongoing power system
is possible, least of all through mass violence, the changes that will restore
autonomy and initiative to the human person all lie within the province of
each individual soul, once it is roused. Nothing could be more damaging to
the myth of the machine, and to the dehumanized social order it has brought
into existence, than a steady withdrawal of interest, a slowing down of tempo,
a stoppage of senseless routines and mindless acts.
the Old Order Amish communities from Pennsylvania to Iowa and the traditional Indian communities found on many reservations right across the country.

The political task of resistance today, then --- beyond the "quiet acts" of personal withdrawal Mumford urges --- is to try to make the culture of industrialism and its assumptions less invisible and to put the issue of its technology
on the political agenda
Neil Postmen, a professor of communications at New York University and author of Technopoly, "it is necessary for a great debate" to take place
Is this invention
nothing but, as Thoreau put it, and improved means to an unimproved end?
who the principle beneficiaries
large, bureaucratic, complex, and secretive organizations of the industrial world
an immensely self-satisfied laissez-faire plutocracy whose access to means of forcing debates and framing issues
that task ought not to be so difficult --- in spite of the continued opposition of a plutocracy grown only more powerful and complacent
some of the fish at least not only seem to be seeing the water but realizing it is polluted. Industrialism
is on a collision course with the biosphere

Industrial societies
shot through with inequality, injustice, instability, and incivility
tribal societies
devoid for the most part of crime or addiction or anomie or poverty or suicide
they did not have atomic bombs and death camps, toxic wastes, traffic jams, strip mining, organized crime, psychosurgery, advertising, unemployment, or genocide.
For durability, however, they are not enough, they do not sustain a commitment that lasts through the adversities of repression and trials, they do not forge a solidarity that prevents the infiltration of spies and stooges, they do not engender strategies and tactics that adapt to shifting conditions and adversaries, and they do not develop analyses that make clear the nature of the enemy and the alternatives to put in its place.
elements of such an analysis
are in existence
Mumford and Schumacher and Wendell Berry and Jerry Mander and the Chellis Glendinning manifesto
Earth-First!ers
bioregionalists
deep ecologists
Amish
Irokwa
essentials of that analysis

opposed the principle of biocentrism and the spiritual identification of the human with all living species and systems.
its economic and military expression, is the guiding strategy of that civilization, to which must be opposed the strategy of localism, based upon the empowerment of the coherent bioregion and the small community.
Industrialism, the ethos encapsulating the values and technologies of Western civilization, is seriously endangering stable social and environmental existence on this planet, to which must be opposed the values and techniques of an organic ethos that seeks to preserve the integrity, stability, and harmony of the biotic community, and the human community within it.
Anthropocentrism, and its expression in both humanism and monotheism, is the ruling principle of that civilization, to which must be opposed the principle of biocentrism and the spiritual identification of the human with all living species and systems

Globalism, and its economic and military expression, is the guiding strategy of that civilization, to which must be opposed the strategy of localism, based upon the empowerment of the coherent bioregion and the small community.
Industrial capitalism, as an economy built upon the exploitation and degradation of the earth, is the productive and distributive enterprise of that civilization, to which must be opposed the practices of an ecological and sustainable economy built upon the accommodation and commitment to the earth and following principles of conservation, stability, self-sufficiency, and cooperation.
8. If the edifice of industrial civilization does not eventually crumble
as a result of a determined resistance within its very walls, it seems
certain to crumble of its own accumulated excesses and instabilities
within not more than a few decades, perhaps sooner, after which t
here may be space for alternative societies to arise.
The two chief strains pulling this edifice apart, environmental overload and social dislocation
Industrial civilization is different only in that it is now much larger and more powerful than any known before, by geometric differen-

ces in all dimensions, and its collapse will be far more extensive and thorough-
going, far more calamitous.
It is possible that such a collapse will be attended by environmental and social dislocations so severe that they will threaten the continuation of life
But it is also possible that it will come about more by decay and distension, the gradual erosion of nation-state arrangements made obsolete and unworkable, the disintegration of corporate behemoths unable to comprehend and respond, and thus with the slow resurrection and re-empowerment of small bioregions and coherent communities having control over their own political and economic destinies.
It is now the task of the neo-Luddites

http://reason.com/archives/2001/07/01/rage-against-the-machines

ANARCHISM IN AMERICA (DOCUMENTARY) PART 1 OF 8