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NOTES, ANNOUNCEMENTS, AND SHORT REVIEWSMore about the Discussion Bulletin:
1) We now have a website thanks to the skill and generosity of
longtime subscriber Mike Lepore. To access DB 108 and future
issues use 2) Readers who are imprisoned and have received a sample copy should read the last sentence in SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION . It is an attempt to regularize prisoner subscriptions. 3) The DB has copies available of several publications. They will be mailed free of charge upon request. This a personal project and doesn't use DB funds. Among these items are current issues of the following journals New Unionist, Socialist Standard, The People, and the Industrial Worker; and the winter 1998 issue of the World Socialist Review featuring Ron Elbert's "New Paradigms for Old." a critique of New Democracy. Also available are a few of each of the following pamphlets: A Ballad Against Work, Reflections on Marx's Critique of Political Economy, and Self-Activityof Wage Workers: Toward a Critique of Representation & Delegation (All three published by Collectivities in Faridabad, India); and a pamphlet edition of chapters 3 and 4, "Anarcho-Communism" and "Impossiblism," from Non-Market Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. And finally 4) Subscribers will be getting this issue at least a week later than usual because of "technical problems" involving my computer. Trade Unions and Employment: Partnership or Confrontation is the newest pamphlet of the Socialist Party of Great Britain (Reconstituted). It takes on both the capitalist unions' "partnership of capital and labor" fraud as well as the basic idea of unionism: that our class can solve its problems by organizing and negotiating with our exploiters. Globalization has apparently had the same effect on labor union policy in Britain that it has in the U.S. The union urges workers to put aside their natural hostility toward their rulers. Here is the comment of the Labour Minister in the present Labour Party government: "The Days of "Them" and "Us" need to be put behind us. Business will only succeed when there is both a common endeavour and a common purpose. The central point is that partnership at work is a far more productive and profitable relationship than adversarial workplace relations ... In that way business is strengthened and so too is the whole economy." (Stakeholder Capitalism, 1998 p. 19) I think that most readers will find little new in it, but it might be helpful to friends who see unionism as the savior of the working class. 80 P (about 1.50) postpaid from The Socialist Party of Great Britain, 71 Ashbourne Court, London N12 8SB, U.K. AK Press Distribution - New Titles, Summer 2001. This news comes to DB readers a bit late, although it is still summer as this is being written. AK Distribution remains the largest and least restrictive of the distributors of radical literature as well as T shirts, CDs, posters and other goods with a possible relationship to radicalism. This 31 page catalog supplements the monster-size catalog published last fall with new items added since then. AK describes as its goal "...to make available radical books and other materials, titles that are published by independent publishers, not the corporate giants, titles with which you can make a positive change in the world." Just checking the non-fiction pages, I found a new printing of the Cohn-Bendits' Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative, Michael Albert's version of a reconstructed capitalism - Moving Forward: Program for a Participatory Capitalism; two by James Connolly: James Connolly: Selected Writings and a new one -The Last Writings of James Connolly. And those were in just the first few pages. From AK Press Distribution, 674-A 23rd St., Oakland, CA 94612; and AK Distribution, PO Box 12766, Edinburgh, EH8 9YE, Scotland. What Ever Happened to the Eight-Hour Day? A Working People's Library Publication by Arthur J. Miller. The author once had a shipyard job where he was required to work a 14-hour day, seven days a week for two and a half months, the sort of thing that focuses a worker's mind on the eight-hour day. His 23-page pamphlet takes us through one of these days from get-up to the end of the fourteenth hour including his thoughts from hour to hour. The section on getting up provides some background on the connection between the May 1, 1886 general strike for an eight-hour day in Chicago and the Haymarket Affair. Miller's hourly musings during this long day provide an excellent analysis of a worker's condition under capitalism. $2 from Industrial Workers of the World, PO Box 13476, Philadelphia, PA 19101. Arguments for a Four-Hour Day by Jon Bekken. This 16-page pamphlet begins by pointing out that today, despite the 40-hour week enacted in 1938, the average worker puts in a 49-hour week. Thus it seems to me that the author has cut the ground out from under his "argument" in the first pages of his essay. It is certainly true, as the author argues, that a four-hour day would decrease unemployment, make for a healthier, happier work force, improve family life, and even benefit our masters by raising productivity. What's to prevent Congress from enacting a four-hour day? And what's to prevent the bosses from working us 49 hours a week despite the law as they do on average now or 14 hours a day as Arthur Miller reports in his pamphlet? In a section headed "The Futility of Legislation" the author makes the point that winning and enforcing the four-hour day depends on workers organized at the point of production. It struck me that a working class able to win the four-hour day by action at the point of production could as easily win the abolition of the wages system. And indeed Bekken goes on to point out that shorter hours will not solve the problems that face workers: "The IWW argues that we should fight not merely to put people to work, but rather that we should organize workers as a class to reorganize society and production in our own interests." No price given. ($2?) From the Boston General Membership Branch, IWW, PO Box 391724, Cambridge, MA 02139. The Bad Days Will End (Numbers 4-5, Winter-Spring 2001) is "a bulletin advocating communism - the overthrow of capitalism by the international working class, and the creation of a stateless and truly egalitarian society from below by means of autonomous, radically-democratic and voluntarily federated workers' organizations." This 22-page double issue contains articles on armed forces mutinies. One of these, "Harass the Brass" by Kevin Keating, is a leaflet distributed to service people at San Francisco's, "Fleet Week" celebration. Much of the leaflet deals with shipboard mutinies during the Viet Nam War as well as "fragging" and similar activities. Another article describes a different aspect of resistance to the war: that of adherents of the U.S. "New Africa" movement. Other articles deal with the British protest against high gasoline prices and the interrelationship of gender, race, and class. Especially useful is BDWE's practice of noting the websites of groups and publications it mentions. $2 for a single copy; $8 (overseas $12) for a four-issue sub from Merrymount Publications, PO Box 441587, Somerville, MA 02144. Overtime is a monthly publication "Dedicated to reflecting the collective wisdom of enlightened workers." Each 16-page issue is devoted to one or more themes about which participants (subscribers and readers of the on-line edition or the hard copy) contribute their thoughts or submit selections from their reading. Although readers can obtain Overtime in the paper format, it was actually planned as an internet publication. Unfortunately its website is presently down. In its usual format each issue begins with the editor's brief introductory statement on the current topic followed by material sent in by contributors. The June 2001 topic was "human nature," but as one might expect, the articles and comments weren't limited to this subject. Writers tended to branch out into areas as varied as ecology, President Reagan, and cancer. The August 2001 number was reserved for "feminist issues" and included articles on Marx's daughter Eleanor, Queen Esther, Lady Godiva, and "Women and Poverty." Subscriptions are free from Linda Featheringill, 2208 Denison Ave. #6, Cleveland, OH 44109. Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed carries on its masthead the following motto: "Towards a Society based on Mutual Aid, Voluntary Cooperation & the Liberation of Desire." Regardless of the mutuality and cooperation called for in the masthead, Anarchy reflects on its side of the revolutionary movement in the U.S. the same fragmented condition we find in what passes for Marxism. Aside from the hate- Bookchin element, one of the most interesting divisions can be found among ecology-minded anarchists: the issue being "primitivism" - pro and con. This issue contains nearly 20 pages of debate on the subject: "Why I am a Primitivist" by Michael William, "A Dialog on Primitivism: Lawrence Jarach interviews John Zerzan," "Why I am not a Primitivist" by Jason McQuinn, the editor of Anarchy, and "Civilization and Its Latest Discontents." a reprint from Aufheben. Michael William, editor of the former primitivist journal Demolition Derby doesn't really address the "Why?" except to name it as his reaction to the role of civilization in degrading planet Earth. As to just what he means by primitivism, I gather that it could be either a universal return to sustainable agriculture or to a hunter/gatherer economy. He doesn't even raise the question of how a global society could go about changing the technology-oriented direction of its development: putting it into reverse so to speak. Zerzan's response to the suggestion that primitivism would result in an immense die-off of the human species is to raise the possibility of William's agricultural solution: We'll all raise our own food. Zerzan is much more forthcoming in other matters, though. Like William he uses the term "anti-civilization" but he places this strand of anarchism in its ideological context as a part of the whole range of anarchist thought with special attention to "anarcho-leftists" who defend the "old anarchism, the failed superficial, workerist, productivist model," and is satisfied to exclude the traditional strands of anarchism and, I would guess, such new strands as Bookchin's social ecology. Jason Quinn's essay recounts the history of primitivism as a current in anarchism-also Marxism via Fredy Perlman-and ends by rejecting the idea that society can move backward to a primitive state. The Aufheben essay (from issue #4 1995) rejects what it calls "leftism," the idea that a socialist revolution can tame technology and destroy its exploitive and ecologically destructive aspects. Moreover Aufheben remains Marxist enough to question primitivism's reduction of Marxism to a "productionist" philosophy. This 83-page issue also contains a major article on Quebec nationalism and a host of reviews and letters. The Working People's Revolutionary Socialist Network [USA] "Draft Program 3.0" is now available. Last May the DB received "Draft Program 1.0" along with a request for a review and a personal critique. Quite a bit of radical reform material arrives here at Box 1564, and I usually ignore it, assuming that the sender hasn't read the page 2 notice "About the DB," which explains the DB's purpose, which does not include promoting social democratic, Trotskyist, Maoist, and other branches of radical reformism. Chirevnet, the source of the Draft Program was a bit more insistent than the norm, and I finally jotted down some comments and sent them in. Soon I received the basically unchanged version #2, complete with its calls for a $100,000 money distribution, workers' militias, government payoffs of mortgages up to $500,000, improvements in Social Security and a host of other reforms. This time Chirevnet requested that I send in another critique and also mail copies at their expense to the DB mailing list. I didn't respond. And soon version #3 arrived. This one had an addendum accusing the DB of being sectarian because it had not become involved in what appear to be their efforts to re-invent the U.S. Socialist Workers Party of the 1950s and 60s. The prime mover of Chirevnet has a level of persistence worthy of a better cause. His latest ploy was to send a letter for publication to the DB repeating his accusations of sectarianism and calling for a debate on the subject of "what constitutes initial socialism as the on-going, revolutionary, international transition to communism." I'm not at all interested in opening the DB to a debate about something irrelevant to the DB's purpose. Interested readers can obtain all this material by writing to Boxholder, PO Box 578042, Chicago, IL 60657. In the meantime I would suggest Chirevnet seek the cooperation of journals that share its "revolutionary" perspective: People's Weekly World, Z Magazine, The Militant, Revolutionary Worker, etc. etc. On the Web
Discussion Bulletin
Processed World
Primitivism
Industrial Worker (IWW)
Democracy and Nature; The Greek journal Inclusive Democracy,
and the Archive
Socialist Party of Great Britain (Reconstituted)
The Bad Days Will End
Kersplebedeb Publications
Communist Workers Organization
Northeastern Anarchist - fg
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