official state media for a secessionist republic of one
(Thanks to Francois Tremblay 2008-08-19.)
Here’s a famous old Wobbly cartoon, The Pyramid of the Capitalist System. (As you can see from the diagram, capitalist
is being used here to refer to the the state capitalist system of political privilege to the capitalist class, not to a free market in the means of production. The perplexed may consult GT 2005-03-31: Anarquistas por La Causa as a guide.)
And here’s the new version for this modern world:
ALLies,
First things first. 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.
Which brings me to my broader topic. In principle, one of the great things about a decentralized outfit like the Alliance of the Libertarian Left is that it’s easy for supporters to organize new locals and begin building alternatives in their own community. Since there’s no central bureaucracy you need to ask for permission and no paperwork to fill out, all you need to do is find people in your hometown, declare yourself a cell of the A.L.L., and start working on actions and projects in your own community. That’s a pretty low barrier to entry. But Just organize in your own community!
is a bit easier said than done. One of the downsides of a decentralized outfit like the Alliance of the Libertarian Left is that there’s little in the way of a ready-made structure or resources for people to find each other, or to know how to move the organizing forward once a core group has managed to find each other. If we’re going to do this decentralism thing, one of the things we’ll have to do is to work out decentralized methods of making these resources available to new organizers who want or need them.
Recently I’ve gotten a number of e-mails from people who are looking for local ALL contacts, or who want to start an ALL but need help with some of the logistics (for example, with getting web space for their group). In order to help make it easier to start up new locals, I’m proposing that we establish an ALL Ad Hoc Global Organizing Committee. In fact, it’s so ad hoc, that I’ve already started it: http://libertarianleft.org/.
The purpose of the Organizing Committee is to serve as a clearing-house for currently active ALLies to help put other ALLies in touch with each other and to provide some information, some advice and some resources that will help people get going on local organizing. Any and all ALLies who are interested in participating are invited to do so. Here’s a couple ways that you can help right now.
Help us network to put local ALLies in touch with each other — I’ve set up an Organizing Committee listserv for two purposes. One purpose is to do some brainstorming and scheming about methods of outreach and resources for newbie organizers to make available through the Organizing Committee website or by other means. (About which, see below.) The other important function is to for us to network so that we can help prospective local organizers find other people in their own neck of the woods. If you happen to know a lot of libertarians or anarchists outside of your hometown (or know people who know a lot of libertarians and anarchists outside of your hometown), you can help out a lot just by signing up to the list as a sort of activist matchmaker — so that if someone gets an inquiry from an ALLy in Walla Walla, say, we can check in with each other to see if anyone knows good contacts in Walla Walla.
Brainstorming useful resources, information, and advice to make available through the page — for example, there’s currently a rudimentary page for helping solitary local left-libertarians find ALLies in their area for the purposes of organizing an ALL local. The page currently consists of a landing-pad that encourages them to e-mail members of the organizing committee, along with Shawn Wilbur’s ALL Frappr map as a means for people to find each other based on geographical location. What it could use are some links to useful resources and some concrete advice on other ways to get the word out. What would you suggest for things to add to this page, either in terms of services that existing ALLies can directly offer, or links we can point to, or advice we can give, on finding other like-minded people in your community?
More generally, what would you like to see on the Organizing Committee website as a whole? What kind of services can we offer that would be most useful to you, or to prospective local organizers? What kind of information and advice do you think would help out the most? Let’s discuss in the comments section.
Finally, I’d like to mention that, as part of the Organizing Committee effort, I (Rad Geek) am making subdomains and webhosting space available to ALL locals that need them. If you are organizing, or hope to organize, a local ALL chapter, and you want web space for your group (to make contact information available, to provide some information about what A.L.L. is all about, to put up news and announcements, to provide an online landing-pad for people who see flyers or other literature that you might distribute around town, etc.), then I can hook you up. You will get use of a subdomain name of your choice (in the format yourhometown.libertarianleft.org), and, if you need it, I can provide you with free web hosting space on my own web servers. As long as traffic remains relatively low, the hosting will be completely free. If in the course of the Revolution traffic should spike to the point that I need to upgrade my servers or Internet connection to handle it, I would just ask a small cost-price-based fee to help handle the upgrade–good mutualist practice, and far less than anything you'd get from buying a commercial web hosting plan. (Solidarity economy and all that.)
Onward.
From Feminist Daily News (2008-08-08): Rape, Sex Abuse of Afghan Girls Continues:
Afghan girls continue to be sexually exploited, reported the Afghan Interior Ministry Thursday. The Ministry told Reuters that the number of sexual assaults on children has significantly increased. The Afghanistan Human Rights Organization (AHRO) has reported that in January a 10 year-old girl was raped in Jowzjan province and that groups of men raped a 12 year-old girl in June in Sar-I-Pol province and a 3 year-old girl in July in Jowzjan province. Cases like these abound.
A 12 year-old girl who was raped at gunpoint by five men has publicly spoken about the gang rape. A video of the girl and her family was posted online by the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan. The girl pleads for help from Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Since the video became public, the family has met with Karzai, who has reportedly fired the police chief where the attack occurred, according to
CNN .Relatedly, an Islamic cleric was detained for allegedly presiding over a marriage of a 7 year-old girl to a 17 or 18 year-old man. Legally, girls under 16 and boys under 18 can not marry in Afghanistan. However, according to the United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence Against Women 57% of Afghan girls are married before age 16, frequently to settle their family's debts or other disputes.
— Feminist Daily News Wire (2008-08-08): Rape, Sex Abuse of Afghan Girls Continues
It’s important to remember that, whatever problems Afghan men may or may not have as a cultural group, the rampant violence against women and girls in Afghanistan has nothing essentially to do with some peculiar vice of Afghans, or with some peculiar vice of Muslims. The violence and the devaluing of girls’ lives and freedoms has to do with some things that are shared by all known cultures — violent patriarchy, male sexual entitlement — and a lot also to do with a set of political and economic circumstances — the political elevation and unchecked power of regional warlords with the arms and backing of the U.S. military, the ongoing civil war between U.S.-backed and Taliban-backed fundamentalist factions, the grinding poverty produced by years of war and sustained by a military occupation and an insane, U.S.-sponsored attack on Afghanistan’s most lucrative cash crop, and so on — which sustain an environment of poverty, terror, and insecurity, which the most vulnerable people — especially women and girls — bear the brunt of. War is the health of the patriarchy, and the conditions created and sustained by war and occupation and the zealous effort to impose the U.S. government’s imperial policies (such as the terror-famine drug eradication policy) on Afghanistan, are all part and parcel of the problem. As I said in an earlier post, on the issue of marrying off young girls:
One good way to make any existing form of oppression even worse is to throw the people involved in it into desperate poverty: the first victims of poverty are always the most vulnerable people within the poor community, and in places where the human dignity and well-being of women and girls is worth less than nothing to the men who hold cultural and political power, one of the things that poor families are going to “sell” is likely to be the lives of their young girls.
And the point goes not just for the specific policy of opium eradication (as disastrous and idiotic as that particular policy is), but for the whole program of U.S. Empire in Afghanistan.
Please support the life-saving work of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, which is working to provide refuges and schools for women, to oppose warlordism and misogynist fundamentalism, and to end the U.S. government’s ongoing occupation and war against the people of Afghanistan.
Question: in a city racked by poverty and a long history of antagonism between cops and the local populace, how can you instill trust and inspire public confidence in your police department?
Answer: by firing police who attempt to communicate with the public. Let’s thank Flint police chief David Dicks for this useful tip.
Remember, nothing says transparency
like opacity, and nothing says public servants
like a tightly-organized, intensely secretive cabal of heavily-armed professional muscle, who absolutely refuse to discuss their business in the open.
Everyone wish L. a happy birthday!
Then, since it’s Sunday, let me know what you all wrote about this week–leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments.