Rogueish
05/02/12
OIC, when the Alameda Sheriffs were throwing people to the ground and beating my friends with sticks, they’d just mistaken us for participants in their government-funded Half-Life 2 LARP.
(Source: twitter.com)
The consequences of demands for jobs
03/21/12
In 1933 the Senate even passed Senator Hugo Black’s Depression-era bill limiting the work week to thirty hours, which was shortly thereafter abandoned in favor of the Roosevelt administration’s preference for creating jobs instead of reducing work. As Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt notes, in the same period that government support for the “right to work” a full-time job grew, the movement for shorter hours lost momentum. Job creation, once derided by union activists as “make work,” emerged as a centerpiece of US economic ideology (1996) 34).
Kathi Weeks, relevant to the discussion a while back about the group arguing for a “jobs for all” demand at OWS.
n 1: Concerning the Violent Peace-Police→
02/09/12
Gandhian strategies have not historically worked in the US; in fact, they haven’t really worked on a mass scale since the civil rights movement. This is because the US media is simply constitutionally incapable of reporting acts of police repression as “violence.”
Chris Hedges: The Cancer in Occupy - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig→
02/06/12
Groups of Black Bloc protesters, for example, smashed the windows of a locally owned coffee shop in November in Oakland and looted it.
You know who owns “locally owned businesses”? Capitalists. But the criticism of vandalism against small businesses actually prevents thinking about what “small businesses” are. I think the coffee shop Hedges is talking about here is a Tully’s, a branch of a multinational coffee company, but it’s a franchise operation, so “locally owned” is technically accurate. The question is, are nominal owners of a franchise operation really owners of the means of production in a meaningful sense? It seems to me that the answer is no - the “owner” of a franchise is more like an employee who is given a bit more management responsibility so that the company can force them to take on significantly more risk. Smashing the windows of a Tully’s franchise, just like smashing the windows of a bank, may have some effect on the capitalist owners, but it will also have a significant effect on the employees, and that needs be taken into account. So it may well have been wrong to smash the windows of this coffee shop, but not because it is a “locally owned business”; in fact, quite the opposite.
12/09/11
All political economists of any standing admit that the introduction of new machinery has a baneful effect on the workmen in the old handicrafts and manufactures with which this machinery at first competes. Almost all of them bemoan the slavery of the factory operative. And what is the great trump-card that they play? That machinery, after the horrors of the period of introduction and development have subsided, instead of diminishing, in the long run increases the number of the slaves of labour! Yes, Political Economy revels in the hideous theory, hideous to every “philanthropist” who believes in the eternal Nature-ordained necessity for capitalist production, that after a period of growth and transition, even its crowning success, the factory system based on machinery, grinds down more workpeople than on its first introduction it throws on the streets.
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FAO people who want OWS to demand full employment.
11/20/11
A sticker I saw on a lamppost in San Francisco yesterday.
a) I hope we really are about to see an exact replica of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.
b) How do I get my hands on some of that sweet Illuminati cash?
11/20/11
After the unprovoked police assault on the pink papier-mâché dinosaur, I think Occupy Cal needs to escalate and deploy a real dinosaur to stand guard over protests. Hopefully the comrades in the division of Genetics, Genomics and Development are on that.
10/25/11
Doonesbury misunderstanding the “no demands” thing here. It’s like the old rules of anarchist football - you don’t have boundaries, but you do have goals.
