What in the hell …

No, not Badiou. Laundries again. (more…)

Man I love Jawbreaker so much. I think I may take the plunge and get me one of them 4Fs as a tattoo. (more…)

I just stumbled across “The Sadness of Post-Workerism,” a review by David Graeber of an event that several thinkers from post-operaismo (often called autonomist marxism in a narrowing conflation). Graeber’s brief positive claims or gestures toward positive claims don’t move me, but his negative remarks are dead on. In many ways the essay works out his closing class for post-operaismo thinkers to “extricate [them]selves from the shackles of fashion, the need to constantly say that whatever is happening now is necessarily unique and unprecedented.” Extensive quotes below of the bits I like best. The review is worth reading in its entirety. Brought to you by the good people at The Commoner (commoner.org.uk). (more…)

The term I mean. I got into a brief argument with a friend about this recently. this is a placeholder to remind myself to write on it, why I think the term is at least acceptable and perhaps advisable.

From a dear friend -

By any objective measure, Mayday 2008 was an historic event. Not only did tens of thousands of immigrant rights activists take to the streets from Detroit to Chicago to LA, to demand legalization for all, but 25,000 dock workers on West Coast shut down West Coast ports for an entire day, to protest the ongoing war in Iraq! Rare are the moments in our nation’s history when so many working people take simultaneous actions demanding justice.

(…)

Regardless of whether the crowd was 10,000 or 30,000, the turn out last Thursday was the 3rd largest turnout for a Mayday march in at least the last 50 years of Chicago’s history. International worker’s day, born in Chicago with the events of 1883, was nearly forgotten in the city of its birth, for most of the past 125 years. For three years running, the immigrant rights movement has resurrected Mayday and recaptured the memory of our own history. It looks as if Mayday has come back to stay. But this was not the story reported in the mainstream press this Thursday and Friday. Instead the message repeated in almost every newspaper story and television news cast was the immigrant rights movement is in crisis and decline; that the movement has lost momentum. Never mind that tens of thousands who took a day off work to demand legalization for all despite the climate of fear created in the last year by what some estimates conclude is a 40% spike in workplace raids by ICE. Never mind that African-American organizations and individuals showed a greater level of solidarity with immigrant workers than ever before this Mayday (Operation Push was one of the main organizers of the Chicago march). Never mind that hundreds of thousands of new voters have been registered by the movement in recent months, and the media has at least acknowledged the Latino vote is likely to be pivotal this year. All that is conveniently forgotten and ignored by the mainstream press. Almost as if to blatantly to demonstrate a pro-xenophobic bias, the mainstream media’s message seems to be 2006 was a fluke and the new civil rights movement launched that year can now largely be dismissed.

http://pilsenprole.blogspot.com/2008/05/mainstream-media-ignores-and-lies-about.html

Got any other May Day news? Let’s hear it. (Hi Jerry! Miss you.)

All of it, of course. (more…)

I had the good fortune to hear Andrew speak the other night on his N American speaking tour. Blurb on the speaking engagement here - http://twincities.indymedia.org/newswire/display/33331/index.php

Read Andrew’s blog here - http://anarchism.pageabode.com/ - including details on the tour. Also a number of other things there worth reading.

While I’m tossing up links of stuff to read, let me also recommend Tom Wetzel’s home page - http://www.uncanny.net/~wetzel/ - the stuff on the WSA home page - http://www.workersolidarity.org/ - and this list of articles by Wayne Price - http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?topic=&region=&type=&language=en&media_type=&convert_dates=true&time_posted_upper_limit=&time_posted_lower_limit=&search_text=&text_where_mode=OR&author_name=wayne+price&author_name_exact=on&author_organisation=&author_address=&author_phone=&author_email=&story_title=&story_subtitle=&story_summary=&story_content= and all the web available content from ASR - http://www.syndicalist.org/.

Rough morning. I’ve got a cold coming on, not been getting enough sleep, working too much, doing too much other stuff, feeling crappy, and have lots more work left to do that I’m not sure I can get done within my deadlines. As a result I had a sort of “what the fuck are you doing?” moment when my wife woke me up early this morning. I’m not proud of that. (more…)