Having been purged might be the best thing
The person behind it seems deliberately intent on getting on my nerves, she called me a fed and is now implying I'm a gun toting maniac because I own a battered up Tokarev rifle (which she calls a gun collection *rolleyes* - I was shopping for a first/probably only gun when we started ows and I didn't hide my opinion that anyone should IMO know how to handle a rifle). In Canada. Which is not legal in the US anyway (because it was still in red army service when Reagan passed his gun control bills).
That evacuated, I'm working on something more serious.
I respect revolutionary unions like the wobblies, however there's something which imo most groups of the sort have been lacking: educational missions. I don't mean educating people about unions, I mean educating people into skills, trades, and how to self manage in an autonomous workers' collective. How to essentially not merely seize the mens of production, but how to actually run them through workers' democracy. While I don't believe that governance is a techne (Plato was a self centered aristocrat and thus his conclusions are full of shit), the logistical, organizational part of running a cooperative, imo, is, and people are not taught enough about it unless they reach the ranks of the white collars (the real white collars, not cubicle drones in the code mines).
The idea is essentially based around setting up something akin to coopertives, which would operate with an educational mission. Effectively cooperative trade schools which woul give hands on teaching in the things I said above (trades, skills, self organization as a workers' collective), introducing people to non capitalist forms of labor relations. I've got a few people who would be willing to help with this, including a few trained leftist craftsmen who find the project interesting, and I could potentially get a foot in the door about it with the wobs, a few of whom are already very interested. We need space and people who would be interested in learning these skills. We might have access to two spaces soon - one is in Manhattan, the other is in eastern Tennessee. The other plan for spaces involved scouting out for abandoned buildings with unclear, dubious or contested ownership, where we'd move in and do restoration work both as a way to establish our locals AND as part of the educational project. The idea being that the skilled workers are not there as overseers but as trainers.
I will readily admit that some of the inspiration actually comes from the organization of the leftist militias in Spain (which inevitably mixed people with military experience with regular volunteers, the former effectively getting the latter up to speed on the intricacies of working as a unit and how does this rifle thing work). In other words, a democratic organization based on the idea that transmitting skills is a potential revolutionary tool, especially skills which can show workers (unemployed or not) who may not have any affinity with left wing ideals how to work without a boss, thus showing how we can make capitalist power relations superfluous, and how we can have a system of orgnization where your sweat is not a commodity to trade for survival. At the same time it helps develop skills in people who may not have skills or whose skills are not necessrily all that useful (not that I expect to see laid off MBAs and unemployed lawyers to come flocking to our doors but yeah).
That evacuated, I'm working on something more serious.
I respect revolutionary unions like the wobblies, however there's something which imo most groups of the sort have been lacking: educational missions. I don't mean educating people about unions, I mean educating people into skills, trades, and how to self manage in an autonomous workers' collective. How to essentially not merely seize the mens of production, but how to actually run them through workers' democracy. While I don't believe that governance is a techne (Plato was a self centered aristocrat and thus his conclusions are full of shit), the logistical, organizational part of running a cooperative, imo, is, and people are not taught enough about it unless they reach the ranks of the white collars (the real white collars, not cubicle drones in the code mines).
The idea is essentially based around setting up something akin to coopertives, which would operate with an educational mission. Effectively cooperative trade schools which woul give hands on teaching in the things I said above (trades, skills, self organization as a workers' collective), introducing people to non capitalist forms of labor relations. I've got a few people who would be willing to help with this, including a few trained leftist craftsmen who find the project interesting, and I could potentially get a foot in the door about it with the wobs, a few of whom are already very interested. We need space and people who would be interested in learning these skills. We might have access to two spaces soon - one is in Manhattan, the other is in eastern Tennessee. The other plan for spaces involved scouting out for abandoned buildings with unclear, dubious or contested ownership, where we'd move in and do restoration work both as a way to establish our locals AND as part of the educational project. The idea being that the skilled workers are not there as overseers but as trainers.
I will readily admit that some of the inspiration actually comes from the organization of the leftist militias in Spain (which inevitably mixed people with military experience with regular volunteers, the former effectively getting the latter up to speed on the intricacies of working as a unit and how does this rifle thing work). In other words, a democratic organization based on the idea that transmitting skills is a potential revolutionary tool, especially skills which can show workers (unemployed or not) who may not have any affinity with left wing ideals how to work without a boss, thus showing how we can make capitalist power relations superfluous, and how we can have a system of orgnization where your sweat is not a commodity to trade for survival. At the same time it helps develop skills in people who may not have skills or whose skills are not necessrily all that useful (not that I expect to see laid off MBAs and unemployed lawyers to come flocking to our doors but yeah).