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Part 1 of 9 – a brilliant and vivid look at Neoliberalism and those who struggle against it on all parts of the globe. bilingual (English/Spanish).
This great, short essay “Against School” targets modern, mass, mandatory schooling as an educational fraud, arguing that the real purpose of school is to divide, demoralize, and train youth for lifetimes as workers and consumers. In other words, to produce obedience and helplessness on an industrial scale. I think a second function, which the author does not address, is that mass mandatory schooling takes children away from their parents for the entire day, freeing up the adults for higher levels of work and consumption. Thus the “daycare prisons” we send our kids to every day help facilitate the “daily grind” that imprisons our parents in the rat-race of toil and buying that powers industrial production and profits.
How public education cripples our kids, and why
By John Taylor Gatto
John Taylor Gatto is a former New York State and New York City Teacher of the Year and the author, most recently, of The Underground History of American Education. He was a participant in the Harper’s Magazine forum “School on a Hill,” which appeared in the September 2003 issue.
I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: The said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
“The Culture of Make Believe”
by Derrick Jensen
2004 Chelsea Green
Derrick Jensen has a knack for compiling some of the most horrible atrocities ever committed and piecing them together within a compelling and provocative thread. This book is more “socially” focused than A Language Older Than Words (which was more ecological), so in that sense I got more out of it, but it’s probably not as well written as that earlier book.
The best parts here are about the KKK, IWW, J.P. Morgan and the turn of the century big capitalists and war profiteers, the Nazis, and slave labor in the US and around the world. as usual though, he covers about 100 topics in this 600+ page book.
The thing I struggle with when reading Jensen and other ‘anti-civ’ writers is that I agree 99% with their diagnosis of the problem (class society is inherently built on violence and must be dismantled – the industrial ‘economy’ is a machine designed to turn the living into the dead), but their solutions, or lack thereof, are difficult to accept. Instead of organizing for social change or revolution, Jensen advocates that we basically weep for the world we’ve lost, and perhaps engage in property damage…
“Red Emma Speaks: Selected Writings and Speeches”
Emma Goldman
1972 Random House
Probably the best of the three ‘anarchist’ books I’ve read recently, because Emma Goldman was an American and lived during the 20th century, so has the most relevant things to say about this stupid and messed-up society we live in. Her essays here range from feminism, to education, to sexuality, to prisons, to war, to violence, to revolution and counter-revolution.
My favorite pieces here are the Afterword to her wonderful anti-Bolshevik book “My Disillusionment in Russia” and her essay “There Is No Communism in Russia” – both on the subject of how dictatorship in the name of the people is in no way synonymous with freedom, nor capable of leading to it. Read the rest of this entry »
Reposted from Indymedia UK.
by David Graeber
The biggest problem facing direct action movements is that we don’t know how to handle victory.
This might seem an odd thing to say because of a lot of us haven’t been feeling particularly victorious of late. Most anarchists today feel the global justice movement was kind of a blip: inspiring, certainly, while it lasted, but not a movement that succeeded either in putting down lasting organizational roots or transforming the contours of power in the world. The anti-war movement was even more frustrating, since anarchists and anarchist tactics were largely marginalized. The war will end, of course, but that’s just because wars always do. No one is feeling they contributed much to it.
I want to suggest an alternative interpretation. Let me lay out three initial propositions here:
1) Odd though it may seem, the ruling classes live in fear of us. They appear to still be haunted by the possibility that, if average Americans really get wind of what they’re up to, they might all end up hanging from trees. It know it seems implausible but it’s hard to come up with any other explanation for the way they go into panic mode the moment there is any sign of mass mobilization, and especially mass direct action, and usually try to distract attention by starting some kind of war.
2) In a way this panic is justified. Mass direct action—especially when organized on democratic lines—is incredibly effective. Over the last thirty years in America, there have been only two instances of mass action of this sort: the anti-nuclear movement in the late ‘70s, and the so called “anti-globalization” movement from roughly 1999-2001. In each case, the movement’s main political goals were reached far more quickly than almost anyone involved imagined possible.
3) The real problem such movements face is that they always get taken by surprise by the speed of their initial success. We are never prepared for victory. It throws us into confusion. We start fighting each other. The ratcheting of repression and appeals to nationalism that inevitably accompanies some new round of war mobilization then plays into the hands of authoritarians on every side of the political spectrum. As a result, by the time the full impact of our initial victory becomes clear, we’re usually too busy feeling like failures to even notice it. Read the rest of this entry »
“Bakunin on Anarchy”
Mikhail Bakunin
1972 A.A. Knopf
Collection of some of Bakunin’s most important writings and essays. Having not really read much Bakunin before, I’m a little disappointed, I must say. Not for what he says, but what he doesn’t.
He tended to repeat his own ideas a lot, which are of course valid (the state must be destroyed, not reformed; revolution must be decentralized and spontaneous by the masses of people, not handed down by a privileged elite), but also simplistic and formulaic. Overall, Bakunin’s writings are not very useful in contexts beyond the theoretical and philosophical, and you can take them more as guiding and grounding principles rather than any kind of program for revolutionary action.
Then again, there’s some important stuff here, especially about Bakunin’s relationship with Marx and other socialists of his day, the nature of the First International being especially interesting. Recommended but not by much.
See this awesome Graph-Presentation.
Originally published in the Wall Street Journal.
Boom Cuts U.S. Clout,
Revives Middle East;
Dark Days for Detroit
By NEIL KING JR. , CHIP CUMMINS and RUSSELL GOLD
January 3, 2008; Page A1
The surging price of oil, from just over $10 a barrel a decade ago to $100 yesterday, is altering the wealth and influence of nations and industries around the world.
These power shifts will only widen if prices keep climbing, as many analysts predict. Costly oil already is forcing sweeping changes in the airline and auto sectors. It is intensifying the politics of climate change and adding urgency to the search both for fresh sources of crude and for oil alternatives once deemed fringe.
![[Go to graphic.]](https://i0.wp.com/s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-AW546_oil100_20080102152434.jpg)
The long oil-price boom is posing wrenching challenges for the world’s poorest nations, while enriching and emboldening producers in the Middle East, Russia and Venezuela. Their increasing muscle has a flip side: a decline of U.S. clout in many parts of the world.
Steep gasoline prices also threaten America’s long love affair with the automobile, while putting strains on many lower-income people outside big cities, who must spend an increasing share of their budgets just on fuel to get to work. Read the rest of this entry »
A little 20-min. video that gives a basic lesson in political economy for the average American consumer. Brilliant!
The End of Capitalism 
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