As Jim bought me a drink last Sunday, the least I can do is give a plug for his political webpage.
From sitting in on the business meeting of the New York Branch of the IWW that same day, it does like that they are doing more than just celebrating their hundredth anniversary this year. Fair play to them.
3 comments:
Shall we see you soon becoming a wobbly and taking out another little red membership card ?
From sitting in on their Branch meeting, they seem to be doing some interesting work. Of course the Starbucks campaign is the current cause celebre, but there are also attempts to organise immigrant factory workers in Brooklyn, and the workforce at a food distribution company in New York.
I guess I should have blogged about the meeting but it may have come across as a wee bit cheeky 'cos it was like every other lefty Branch meeting I've ever attended, even down to the in-jokes and the dress code. ;-)
I tried to post a private e-mail to the address given in your profile, but it bounced. Do you have a more current e-mail address? Do you want to receive e-mails in response to your blog posts? Anyway, since I couldn't e-mail you, I'm going to write a lengthy comment (which still won't include everything that I was going to say in the e-mail). Here's some NYC stuff that you might not know about...
The only radical project in NYC that I've encountered in the past year or so that really interests me is the New SPACE, which has its Web site at http://new-space.mahost.org/ . It's a radical educational institution based on Manhattan's Lower East Side, founded by people who split off from the Brecht Forum. (In the NYC radical left, there are lots of split-offs, and there's lots of infighting. Although I'm sure that wouldn't come as a great surprise to people...) Anyway, this new educational space aims to be pluralistic and succeeds at that fairly well, but I find that it's particularly friendly to ultra-leftism, as in left communism. I took a good class there last spring with Loren Goldner.
Here in Staten Island a few years ago, we founded a collective called the Common Wheel Collective. About two years ago, three out of the four members in the group were former NYC Wobblies, and the fourth one, who is known to some people in the blogosphere as "asfo_del," was (and still is) the girlfriend of one of those former NYC Wobblies (i.e., Mike).
The Common Wheel Collective did a few things here and there for a while, but if we're known for anything at all, it's for the project called the Collective Book on Collective Process (found at http://www.geocities.com/collectivebook), which is something mainly co-written by me and asfo_del (who, btw, blogs at Living on Less: http://livingonless.journalspace.com/ ).
The main focus of this particular project, as it developed, turned out to be our criticism of the lack of democratic process and other problems, often related to authoritarian behaviors by unofficial leaders, vilfication, and purges, that we encountered in certain NYC groups, especially those who considered themselves "anti-authoritarian." And, I'm sorry to say (sort of), that we probably did put out a pretty good warning for people about the stuff they might have to deal with if they get too involved in this kind of scene - especially in NYC (because that's where we write from) but also, as we have learned, in a lot of other places.
Now, I don't know how long you plan to stay in NYC, but maybe you'd like to visit a few of us in the "forgotten borough" if you want to get a slightly different perspective on things.
Our neighborhoods aren't quite as cool and trendy as those hotbeds of revolutionary agitation (with soaring rents) known as Park Slope and Williamsburg, and, in fact, my neighborhood is a pretty serious slum that you might not want to walk through at night (occupied mostly by genuine poor people, not "revolutionaries"); however, a few of us here on the North Shore of Staten Island might provide some interesting conversation and show you a few cool things stored on our cheap, old computers.
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