Building Union Power in AOT Year One: 2015 In Review[1]
AOT-VSEA Union Workers In The Randolph Garage
Provided by David Van Deusen,
Senior Union Representative-VSEA/AOT
January 1, 2016
AOT 2015 Highlights:
All 61 Garages are Organized, with a Union Activist deployed in each (71 overall activists in the Garages including Labor Management Delegates, Stewards, Council Members, & official Garage/Union Contacts);
180 Acts of collective Union activism recorded in the Garages, including participation in the Fight Back Rally (AOT composed 20% of the VSEA memb (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
The neo-liberal myth of unstoppable development linked to the spread of the market has evaporated, leaving a painful trail of contracted markets, only apparently resolvable through a sharpening of competition and international social dumping.
Thus, while capitalism is re-designing its geography, it finds apparent unity in shifting the responsibility (thanks to globalization) for its financial crisis onto the real economies of individual States and entire continents.
Because capitalism has always taken advantage of crises in order to regenerate itself, and re-work the strength ratios of the classes to its advantage.
In particular, throughout the West the working class is being forced to pay the price of a crisis it did not create, to acce... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
February 1937
On 5 February, the Iron Column convened a meeting in Valencia of all the confederal militia units in the Levante in an attempt to resolve the problem of militarization. Taking part were representatives from the columns Tierra y Libertad, the Durruti Column, the Extremadura Andalusia Column, the Valdepeñas and Manzanares Sectors, the Ascaso, Iberia, Iron, Ortíz, Temple y Rebeldía columns and the CNT 13 Column. The CNT’s National Committee was neither invited nor informed, but a representative turned up all the same. There were two items on the agenda: “(1) The attitude to be adopted by the columns in the face of the mobilization decree and, (2) the effects this will have upon us.”
Fern... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
First of May Anarchist Alliance spoke to Erik D. secretary of the Twin Cities GDC Local 14 about the history and work of the General Defense Committee there. Erik is a father, husband, education worker, and wobbly,[1] who’s also been involved in the youth-focused intergenerational group, the Junior Wobblies.
Fellow Worker Erik – can you tell us about the origins and history of the General Defense Committee, its relationship to the IWW and how the militants who founded the current Local conceived of it?
As I understand it, the General Defense Committee (GDC) was first founded by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1917, in response to the repression of wobblies and anti-WWI draft protests. I haven’t learned eno... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Introduction: Class Struggle, the Left and Power
Twenty-five years into democracy the black working class majority in South Africa has not experienced any meaningful improvements in its conditions. The apartheid legacy of unequal education, healthcare and housing and the super-exploitation of black workers continues under the ANC and is perpetuated by the neoliberal policies it has imposed.
These troubles are part of the world’s troubles; this neoliberalism is part of global neoliberalism. As the global economic crisis deepens, the global ruling class is making the working class pay, transferring the costs to workers and the poor, leading to increased poverty, unemployment, inequality and insecurity. And so in South Afri... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Introduction
As far as we are aware, this new edition of Bulgaria: The New Spain is the first since the original was published by the Alexander Berkman Aid Fund thirty-five years ago. The title is most apt, for just as Stalinism drowned in blood the Spanish Revolution of 1936 so it drowned in blood, the blood of many thousands of workers and peasants, the Bulgarian Revolution of 1944 when the people of Bulgaria liberated themselves from years of fascist tyranny. Like Spain, Bulgaria had a powerful libertarian movement, a movement which constituted the major obstacle to Stalinism’s efforts at establishing a bureaucratic dictatorship on the Soviet model. Yet despite the hard evidence of Kronstadt, of Ukraine, of Spain, of Bulgari... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Bulgaria had a strong anarchist tradition prior to the movement being smashed and driven underground or into exile after Bulgaria was consigned to the Stalinist sphere of influence in the post-1945 carve-up of Europe.
The national revolutionary movement that developed around 1870 was to free the Bulgarians from five centuries of Turkish domination (1393 through 1877) was heavily influenced by the Russian revolutionaries of the time. including the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Cristo Botev, the Bulgarian national hero who died fighting for Bulgarian independence in the mountains, was a disciple of Proudhon and Bakunin.
After national independence anarchism remained a force in Bulgarian society. The movement's historic paper Rabotn... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Let’s be clear: we don’t endorse shooting, stabbing, bombing, garroting, guillotining, or electrocuting the President of the United States. Yes, we’ve published a convincing argument that, if there were any justice in this world, “Donald Trump would walk across the desert on a broken ankle, pursued by helicopters and armed men with dogs, before dying of dehydration, terrified and alone, within miles of hospital facilities—as he has forced others to do simply in hopes of rejoining their families.” But we would argue strenuously against anyone attempting to inflict this fate on him. On the contrary, we hope Donald Trump will die of natural causes—and the sooner the better, before anyone gets any crazy... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Bibliography
Ackroyd, Stephen, and Paul Thompson. Organizational Misbehavior. London: Sage, 1999.
Anderson, Perry. Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism. London: Verso Press, 1974.
Applebaum, Herbert. The Concept of Work: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (SUNY Series in the Anthropology of Work). Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
Baumeister, Roy, Sara Wotman, and Arlene Stillwell. “Unrequited Love: On Heartbreak, Anger, Guilt, Scriptlessness, and Humiliation.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64, no. 3 (1993): 377–94.
Beder, Sharon. Selling the Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate PR. L... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
In February and early March 1991, during the first Gulf War, U.S. forces bombed, shelled, and otherwise set fire to thousands of young Iraqi men who were trying to flee Kuwait. There were a series of such incidents—the “Highway of Death,” “Highway 8,” the “Battle of Rumaila”—in which U.S. air power cut off columns of retreating Iraqis and engaged in what the military refers to as a “turkey shoot,” where trapped soldiers are simply slaughtered in their vehicles. Images of charred bodies trying desperately to crawl from their trucks became iconic symbols of the war.
I have never understood why this mass slaughter of Iraqi men isn’t considered a war crime. It’s clea... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
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