Describe a revolution while standing on one leg...

One Big Union. General Strike. Community Technology. LETS. Private Currency. Microcredit. Mutual Aid Societies. Permanent Autonomous Zones. Voluntary Socialism!

Community Technology

Community technology by Karl Hess is one of the most inspiring books I've read in a long time. Hess is (extremely) light on theory and heavy on both hope and cold hard ideas. His basic supposition is a call to local autonomy of communities. This fits extremely well, in my mind at least, with the Anarchist idea of a counter economy. Imagine a community functioning without any connection or reliance on the Corporate-State economy. The three things that struck me most were the things they were able to successfully pull off in the run down Adam-Morgans neighborhood.

Food.

Hess shows how a community, even an entirely urban community, can supply large portions of it's own food by using un-used space. Roof-tops or unused warehouse space, basements, or abandoned lots can be converted to green house hydroponics, yielding high volume of fruits or vegetables considering the amount of labor/space. People themselves can grow "victory gardens" and collaborate their yields in local "farmer's markets", or simply supplement their own diets. As far as protein goes, Hess outlines how aquaculture can, again using unused space, generate an enormous amount of a simply raised fish, rainbow trout in the book. Again, using un-used space a moderate amount of labor can have an enormous yield compared to the market needed to fulfill.

Energy.

Even more so than when the book was written, solar should allow complete energy independence for a given community. Covering rooftops with solar panels would create a local energy grid, shifting power where it's needed in the community. Electric cars would be run off of the solar generated electricity and easily provide the transportation needs of the overwhelming majority of a city's residents.

Other things he mentions is saving up money for renters to buy the apartment buildings they live in. Adding a few Anarchist ideas like a People's Bank and a general strike to drive out the remnants of the Corporate-State economy, which would then be appropriated according to Rothbard's confiscation principle, and you're looking at a beautiful thing. A revolution without firing a shot.

Say you want a revolution?

Lately, one can't help but notice the word revolution enter the lexicon. On message boards, youtube videos and statements to the press I keep hearing this country might be headed for a revolution. And, as an anarchist, as much as I oppose our current corrupt murderous system, an amry of gun-stockpiling conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, angry white men all, is more frightening than anything we're likely (fingers crossed) to see from the Obama administration.

The Ghetto in our Hearts

(part 2)

As the Gilded Age winded down, the great business empires were continually frustrtated by their failure to achieve either monopoly or industry cartels. US Steel, Standard Oil and their ilk were enormously wealthy, but unceasing competition were starting to contract profits of these unwieldy behemoths. And they did what every good businessman in trouble does: ask the government for help. And although there was much dis-agreement between business leaders, regulators and the Presidents, the major continuity remained clear: to cartelize each industry to provide "stability". Competition is war, after all, and war is Hell.

A good example is Teddy Roosevelt's Pure Food and Drug Laws. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair had created a furor for clean food laws. No one seemed to notice that this wasn't the point of the novel, nor (as Sinclair points out in the novels) was the industry opposed to it. The Meat Trust couldn't sell their disgusting products in foregin markets, they had been entirely blocked, and The Jungle was giving them a ton of bad PR. So the Bull-Moose himself stepped in. With the new FDA seal of approval, foregin markets allowed American meat in again, and the public's disgust began to subside. Was there in any improvment in the quality of the meat? In some cases, marginal improvements, more often than not though the regulators worked at the discretion of the Meat Trust.

And so it goes. When Populist outrage (justifiably) grew against the "Money Trust", the handful of super banks running the economy, when recessions followed recession without sight in end, business people began writing proposals to "stabilize" the banking industry. Legislation first drafted by Chambers of Commerce would end up getting proposed in Congress. And that's where the Federal Reserve came from. And so it goes, again and again. The public is outraged, as they usually should be, but any attempt at "reform" is drafted and supervised by the very people who are being "reformed", conforming to very narrow lines of thought, and although concessions to the public are usually made, the winners are always the same.

The Ghetto in our Hearts

Discussions of the American economy are so rife with mis-charectorization and outright falsehoods, a person needs a sword to cut through all the cobwebs. Or, short of a sword, a book.

Two such books are The Triumph of Conservatism and Regulating the Poor. Both books deal with two areas of the American economy most commonly mis-understood: regulation and welfare.

Triumph of Conservatism by Gabriel Kolko is a revionist look at the "Progressive Era", the period at the tail end of the Gilded Age whereupon the modern regulatory apparatus was born. The book traces the Roosevelt administration and the two subsequent presidencies, Taft and Wilson.

The common myth of regulation has two sides, either the government is filled with naive do gooder liberals who attempt to fiddle with economy, to the detriment of everyone involved, out of either a misguided and quixotic quest for equality, a hatred for the wealthy, or perhaps a deep seated love of Karl Marx; or, the government is simply trying to mitigate the excesses of the market place. Both these views are completely false. They contain a fundamental mis-understanding, a beleif that Big Business and Big Government are opposed. A cursory understanding of history shows the relationship to not be one of either antagonism or even parasitism, but of a symbiosis. Big Business and Big Government feed off and support each other to rob cheat and steal from the rest of the country.

(end of part 1)