Large and Small Organizations

Published at 08:04 on 14 April 2016

This is the first of two posts which I had written down intending to repost here long ago, and only just recently rediscovered.

Any organization the size of Google, Microsoft, GM, Exxon Mobil, etc. should have its autonomy significantly curtailed and restricted by some form of public participation. Only relatively small organizations are deserving of autonomy. And all economic organizations should be non-authoritarian.

That latter one in particular is an ideal that would take serious time to implement throughout society. But the former part would be quite a bit easier. It need not take the traditional state socialist form of nationalization. In fact, in a world of increased globalization, traditional nationalization is less and less relevant.

Requiring such participation will inevitably bog down and restrict large economic players. That’s not a problem; in fact, that’s a large part of the point. Innovations are decisions about the future and such things are too important to be decided by unaccountable authoritarian power structures. The proper role of large organizations is in overseeing and coordinating established economic activities that cannot practically be undertaken by smaller organizations.

Small organizations would still have the autonomy to innovate under this proposal. That is the proper place for innovation to take place, where it subsequently has to prove itself to larger society via competition and other means, rather than having an authority structure clear an artificially easy path for it.

Squaring this with traditional anarchism might not always be easy. In particular the part about the large organizations might be tricky. Autonomy for smaller ones isn’t that different from what anarchism has always proposed.

David Fry is the Worrisome One

Published at 07:54 on 31 January 2016

I don’t have time to research all the links to back this up (so you’ll have to do that yourself), but he was very close to LaVoy Finicum, the other militant that was shot and killed. Like Finicum, he has many times used extreme rhetoric about preferring to be killed rather then being incarcerated. He’s the loose cannon who has blogged in support of Nazis and ISIS and advocated nuking Israel. In interviews, his father (who has been worried about him for some time and who tried to talk him out of going to Oregon) has openly worried about him choosing to commit “suicide by cop.”

In other words, he’s just about the last person you’d want to be amongst the final few holdouts. And that’s precisely where he is now.

We may not have seen the last of the bloodshed during this thing.

The Bundy “Militia” is a Joke

Published at 09:20 on 30 January 2016

Nothing proves this more than a recent quote from Ammon Bundy himself:

“This was never meant to be an armed standoff. Please do not make it about something it wasn’t supposed to be. Go home to your families.”

Oh, really now? Then why were people allowed — encouraged, even — to show up with firearms? Yes, yes — I know: You’re a big fan of the right to keep and bear arms. Well, guess what? Just because it’s your right to do something does not automatically make it a wise decision.

And it was not your right to occupy the Malheur NWR and:

  • Prevent Federal employees from doing their jobs,
  • Interfere with the freedom of other citizens to visit their public lands,
  • Vandalize government property,
  • Use government computer and Internet resources without permission, and
  • Steal government vehicles.

All of these things are quite illegal, in fact criminal, acts. You may not personally like the fact that the Federal government owns so much land, but the fact is that it does and that current law (upheld by court after court) allows it to.

All of this means that in choosing to engage in an illegal action, you chose to expose yourself to criminal charges. As such, it was your job to:

  • Research what those charges were likely to be,
  • Research what the consequences (punishments) would likely be,
  • Decide if you were willing to accept those consequences, and
  • Modify or call off the action if you were not.

This is all very basic stuff. Left-wing groups I’ve been involved with do this whenever they plan actions. (And committing a crime armed is a great way to enhance the charges and punishments you face for it.)

If you let people participate whose beliefs and goals did not mesh with your own, that is your fault. It was your responsibility to clearly state your goals and methods, and to screen those directly supporting you to ensure they agreed to those standards.

This is an instance of a general failure to communicate and plan which the comments of other participants that I’ve seen in the media makes most evident. (For example, many were surprised by your decision to depart for that forum in John Day, and didn’t even realize you had planned to until the moment your convoy left the refuge.)

That you failed in all of the above indicates just what a joke your “militia” is. You clowns couldn’t even properly organize a takeover of a bird refuge while it was closed during the winter holidays, yet you act as if you’re some sort of a military force? It is to laugh.

laugh

So the Occupation is Winding Down… Finally

Published at 07:22 on 28 January 2016

After sitting around and basically doing nothing for most of a month and watching the occupiers get increasingly destructive in recent days (bulldozing new roads through sensitive areas), action was finally taken by law enforcement.

It’s a pity that it’s lead to someone’s death, but the individual who died is on record as being one of the most militant in his rhetoric, going so far as to say that he’d die before he’d let anyone arrest him. Moreover, two of his fellow occupiers say that the way he got shot is by fleeing a traffic stop, encountering a roadblock soon afterwards, and confronting a law enforcement officer there.

This guy apparently got shot while armed and charging a cop. Trying to equate that to getting shot while unarmed and fleeing a cop is false equivalence, to say the least.

And there is not much equivalence to movements like Occupy Wall Street, either. That movement was unarmed and occupied public parks. It did not take over whole facilities while armed and prevent their operation.

Israel, not Congress, was Spied On

Published at 07:36 on 31 December 2015

So why did Obama “spy on Congress?” The short answer is he really didn’t.

He spied on Israel (for good reason; see the post immediately below), and in the process of spying on Israel caught Israeli officials communicating with Congressmen in an attempt to influence them to oppose the nuclear deal with Iran. In some cases, Israel passed classified information to Congress in an attempt to influence it.

So while this is a scandal involving a national leader, the scandalized national leader is Benjamin Netanyahu, not Barack Obama.

One of Jack London’s Greatest Hits

Published at 11:07 on 20 December 2015

Is his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, written over 100 years ago. Consider how concisely London lays out the inevitability of class struggle (and by implication the hypocrisy of those who denounce demands of anyone who’s not a capitalist for more):

“Are you discussing the ideal man?” Ernest asked, “–unselfish and godlike, and so few in numbers as to be practically non-existent, or are you discussing the common and ordinary average man?”

“The common and ordinary man,” was the answer.

“Who is weak and fallible, prone to error?”

Bishop Morehouse nodded.

“And petty and selfish?”

Again he nodded.

“Watch out!” Ernest warned. “I said ‘selfish.'”

“The average man IS selfish,” the Bishop affirmed valiantly.

“Wants all he can get?”

“Wants all he can get–true but deplorable.”

“Then I’ve got you.” Ernest’s jaw snapped like a trap. “Let me show you. Here is a man who works on the street railways.”

“He couldn’t work if it weren’t for capital,” the Bishop interrupted.

“True, and you will grant that capital would perish if there were no labor to earn the dividends.”

The Bishop was silent.

“Won’t you?” Ernest insisted.

The Bishop nodded.

“Then our statements cancel each other,” Ernest said in a matter-of-fact tone, “and we are where we were. Now to begin again. The workingmen on the street railway furnish the labor. The stockholders furnish the capital. By the joint effort of the workingmen and the capital, money is earned.* They divide between them this money that is earned. Capital’s share is called ‘dividends.’ Labor’s share is called ‘wages.'”

* In those days, groups of predatory individuals controlled all the means of transportation, and for the use of same levied toll upon the public.

“Very good,” the Bishop interposed. “And there is no reason that the division should not be amicable.”

“You have already forgotten what we had agreed upon,” Ernest replied. “We agreed that the average man is selfish. He is the man that is. You have gone up in the air and are arranging a division between the kind of men that ought to be but are not. But to return to the earth, the workingman, being selfish, wants all he can get in the division. The capitalist, being selfish, wants all he can get in the division. When there is only so much of the same thing, and when two men want all they can get of the same thing, there is a conflict of interest between labor and capital. And it is an irreconcilable conflict. As long as workingmen and capitalists exist, they will continue to quarrel over the division. If you were in San Francisco this afternoon, you’d have to walk. There isn’t a street car running.”

The whole book is, by the way, now in the public domain and thus available for free.

Probably the first political work of London’s I encountered was What Life Means to Me, as a freshman or sophomore in college. It was I believe the first piece of socialist propaganda I had read which really resonated with me. (I had looked at Marx and found his prose mostly inscrutable; I still find his writing very heavy and difficult to parse.)

As an aside, in general, the writers who have the greatest influence on my beliefs have been not political theorists but authors of fiction who have also written political works, for the very reason that they do a better job of explaining things to those, like me, who are not academics in the field of political science.

Why the Polarization

Published at 07:45 on 5 December 2015

So, the other day I overheard on the ferry this guy, older than me and by all outer appearances quite educated, go on about how he sincerely believed Barack Obama is a secret Muslim who is set on destroying America.

How does one have a reasonable conversation with someone who believes such nutty things? Short answer: you can’t. So I didn’t even try.

If someone is running that much on deeply-felt gut beliefs that he or she will buy into some loopy theory for which there is absolutely no hard factual evidence, that individual is obviously in a mental space where facts and logic basically don’t matter anymore when it comes to the subject that belief falls into. As such, no basis exists anymore for having a reasonable discussion with someone who has differing political opinions.

Now switch to Congress. How does one achieve compromise is one side is dominated by individuals like that? Same answer: you can’t. For basically the same reason.

And that is why “gridlock” exists.

No, loopy theories don’t exclusively lie on one side of the political fence. When I was volunteering at a radical bookstore in Portland, one guy in the collective believed in a conspiracy involving shape-shifting aliens and several believed that 9/11 was all a vast, planned conspiracy by the Bush Administration.

But such beliefs are not equally spread across the spectrum, and it’s not the Left where they predominate. As an example, consider which of the two parties has denial of ample scientific evidence for human-caused global warming as a core part of its platform.

The political moderates’ dictum that all sides have an equally valid amount of input to offer is simply not a valid one; it is not always true. If you have an argument between one person who claims that 2 + 2 = 4, and another who insists 2 + 2 = 5, one does not obtain a correct answer by concluding therefore 2 + 2 = 4.5.