ALLy ALLy oxen free….
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 16 years ago, in 2008, on the World Wide Web.
Guess who wins a government award, from the Ministry of Cultural Exchange in this secessionist republic of one, for the most attractive ALL local outreach logo?
The answer is Shawn Wilbur, of the Northwest Alliance of the Libertarian Left, with his call for ALLiance in Occupied Cascadia:
Sure beats my photoshop defacements of tourist traps and paint company logos, anyway. Congrats, Shawn!
Now, then. Do you know any individualist anarchists, agorists, mutualists, left-Rothbardians or others on the libertarian left in or nearby any of the following metropolitan areas, who might be interested in getting involved, or getting more involved, in local activism and organizing? (If that description matches you yourself, that's good enough, too.)
If so, please drop me a line with their contact information. I have some requests from prospective local organizers who are looking for people to start locals for the Alliance of the Libertarian Left. I would love to be able to put them in touch with anyone locally who might be interested.
On the subject of the Organizing Committee website, I’ve been getting some very good suggestions from other ALLies about materials to make available up there, and sketching out a few ideas of my own on paper. Most of these I hope to be adding over the next several days.
The main one that is now available, more or less live, is a feature to provide contact pages specific to each location where the Organizing Committee has gotten inquiries (click through on the links to each city above — for example, Baltimore — to see what it looks like). The main point is to have a landing-pad for each place we get an inquiry from, and to give prospective ALLies more information about how many people are interested in getting organized. Right now, this consists of a landing page, a map with one or more pins representing inquiring ALLies, and a quick count of the number who have inquired. My hope is to make this somewhat more sophisticated over time (right now, it’s mainly just some pretty wrapper over an e-mail form; I hope to add some features to find, e.g., how many people are interested in a particular state, possibly some sort of public Wall
feature, etc.). But this will do for a start.
What I’d like to work on for the next few days is adding advice on getting started, on organizing, on ideas for activism, and so on. I’ll be incorporating some of the suggestions I’ve gotten already, and I’d like to put together some pages specifically on:
A step-by-step guide to starting a new ALL local (along the lines of guides like Seven Steps To Starting A Food Not Bombs Group);
Some advice focusing on organizing locals on college campuses, in particular;
A sampler platter of actions and projects that existing ALLs have worked on, with an eye to giving people ideas for what they can do to kick off their ALL local, and what they might do as they get themselves established.
Which leads me to ask you all, gentle readers:
If you have any suggestions, either for particular ideas or pieces of advice to add, or for focused sections that you think would be particularly useful, let me know. Let’s discuss in comments. And…
If you were to pick out a sampler of four or five actions or projects that your own ALL local has worked on, or that some ALLies you know about have worked on, which you would like to add as suggestions for ALL organizers trying to make plans for a new ALL local, what would you pick? Let’s discuss in comments.
Onward.
Follow
I’d be interested in getting involved in an Atlanta chapter, though I don’t want to be the main person in charge of organizing things.
Also, I’ve been thinking a lot about the need for intentional agorist communities lately, SEK3-style, where ALL-minded people live and work together in a free-market commune. Do any such communities exist? Are there people working on starting one?
My email is mghertner at gmail, by the way.
Micha,
I think some ALL locals in the Dirty South would be a great development.
I don’t know of anyone yet who is working on new Anarchovillages, although I’d love to be proven wrong. Back when a couple places were standing empty for months in my complex, I was thinking of encouraging a couple of ALLies to move in, but it seems that over the summer we’ve had some Obamarchist move in next door.
For what it’s worth, I think that an ALL local could potentially provide a very good springboard for agorist projects like Anarchovillages and the like. (The first goal is to find each other; then you can start doing whatever most logically follows.)
I’m doing some asking around about Atlanta, and I’ve added you to the list at the Organizing Committee website. I’ll drop you a line privately about some of the nitty-gritty stuff.
Charles,
In this atmosphere, I don’t think anarcho-villages of ALLs would do anything but attract police repression.
Unless you’re talking about people who live together in as much of a left-libertarian fashion as allowed by the current state of affairs.
Personally, I am hesitant to do anything major or involving much risk now. My RAWA benefit idea is a nice enjoyable low key legal event that will do some good without likely getting me pegged as a subversive.
Then again, as aspiring fascist in chief John McCain says: country first!
In this case, I am responding with: rights for Afghani women before U.S. policy! Death to the U.S. supported Islamist regime of Kabul.
Ah; I do like dramatics ( :
I got all of your emails about an ALL around here. I am interested, and I’ve been meaning to write back to you about it. I’ll do that this weekend. Marja and I are on good terms, so we could coordinate with each other easily. My reservations about starting one mostly deal with civil liberties questions. If we do, I’d like to do low key legal stuff that won’t get me locked up. There was a time when I would have fought in risky fashion for liberty in America, but I am now in the process of finding a way to leave America. I am still interested in meeting socially-culturally liberal libertarian types who I can trust not to make anti-statist power centers a boon for theocrats though. I am more cautious about anti-statism in a meta-context right now, but I could use some support networks of likeminded people on a more localized level.
Ah, it’s Micha “Mr. Consequentialist” Ghertner. I’m surprised to hear you speak favorably about free-market communes; weren’t you getting an MBA or something?