Commie Curmudgeon

I've been reading up on how people are coping with the fact that Pluto is no longer a planet. Man Robot Monster has some Live Journal dialogue going about how we are going to have to change the old phrases that children learned in school for so many years to remember the order and names of the planets. Personally speaking, I never heard of that method of learning; it seems that the phrases themselves ("My Very Excellent Mother," etc.) are harder to remember than the names and order of the planets.

Anyway, it doesn't seem so significant to me that we lost Pluto. We might as well get rid of Neptune too. With all this talk of the outer planets, I couldn't help thinking about how this is the Age of Uranus...

As dubbed in a song that Tuli Kupferberg wrote about ten years ago. Tuli wrote this during the Clinton years, but it's at least as relevant now. And the fact that it was so relevant during the time of Clinton and Gingrich should be a reminder to people that Bush II wasn't preceded by some kind of golden age that we're all going to return to if a Democrat gets elected to the White House or if Republicans lose one or both houses of Congress. Democrats, Republicans, they're all shits.

The age of Uranus:

When the stools are in the Gringrich House
And Senators align with Mars
Then Greed will guide our country
Pure Ego steer our Pol-Stars

This is the dawning of the Age of Uranus
The Age of Uranus
Uranus, Uranus

Simony, misunderstanding
Cruelty, sad lusts abounding
Lots more lying and derision
Golden parachutes their vision
Mystic racist fulmination
Nation-soul in constipation

Uranus, Uranus

When the Pricks are in the Clintrich House
And Congressmen are paged with bribes
Then Idiots will damn our destiny
And Shits will ruin our lives

This is the dawning of the Age of Uranus
The Age of Uranus
Uranus, Uranus

Conspiracy and underhandling
Media control astounding
Circuses with bread omission
Downsize lives without contrition

Uranus, Uranus

Now the Ghouls are in the Masters House
And Murderers kill us en masse
Now the Rule they Rule the Planet
And wipeout the Underclass

This is the Sundown of the Age of Uranus
The Age of Uranus
Uranus, Uranus

Let the Moonshine
Let the Moonshine
Let the Moonshine
Let the Moonshine in!

Actually, this stuff doesn’t appear at Inveresk Street Ingrate, but in an interview with Darren of that blog that appears at the Normblog Profile (though I’m not exactly sure what that is). Although I’ve met Darren and I read his blog regularly, I was still pleasantly surprised to see Commie Curmudgeon mentioned as one of his (three) favorite blogs. Assuming that this doesn’t look too much like a mutual back-patting session, I’d like to add that I am somewhat flattered, too, because I often find Darren’s blog to be witty and informative, and I do like both his politics and his taste in music (though I might have a few differences with him in both areas, but probably nothing too big in the scheme of things).

I was also pleased by some other comments that Darren made in the interview. I was delighted to see him name Sheila Rowbotham as one of his "intellectual heroes" (in addition to the excellent choices of Karl Marx and Stephen Jay Gould, as well as two others whom I admit not recognizing so easily). I have been interested in Rowbotham’s work for more than a few years now, and I’ve also mentioned her to a few people, especially to women who've claimed a strong interest in feminism or women's struggles. (I was disappointed to see that some of these women, especially in the younger crowd, had never heard of her - but I’m assuming they know about plenty of stuff that I’ve never heard of either). And Rowbotham's collection Threads Through Time has popped into the "Books" section of my profile a few times. In fact, I consider that collection to be among the most significant sources of my own education in social history.

I also couldn't agree more with some of Darren's other answers, especially his listing of Rosa Luxemburg as one of his "political heroes." (Though I have mixed feelings about this whole idea of listing "heroes," but if we’ve got to pick some heroes, Darren picks them well.)

But best of all was his response to the question,

What do you consider to be the main threat to the future peace and security of the world?

Answer: Capitalism

...An answer that I would have given too, more quickly than any other response.

The Stuff I'm Listening to This Week (probably no more explanation needed for most of this at this point):

New(ish) Releases:

1. M.I.A. - Arular
2. Saint Etienne - Tales from Turnpike House
3. Natacha Atlas - Mishmaoul

And Older Stuff:

4. Leftfield - Rhythm and Stealth
5. Tricky - Maxinquaye
6. Mystic Groove (Quango Records compilation from 2001, includes Najma (mixed by Talvin Singh), Black Star Liner, Thievery Corporation...)
7. Saint Etienne - Finisterre
8. Transglobal Underground - Rejoice Rejoice
9. Laibach - WAT

Well, people who know a little about me (including my musical, cultural, and human aesthetics) would not be surprised that I might be a bit intrigued by the new, rising British-Sri Lankan electro-dancehall-hip-hop-grime star named Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam, aka M.I.A. I just saw some footage of a show she did at Central Park's Summerstage (broadcast by New York City's NYC TV/Channel 25, which may be my favorite TV station now - as well as the only one I'm getting in clearly at the moment)... And I think that seeing a little bit of Maya kind of pulled me out of the funk I was in (good funk - or some descendent thereof - can always pull me out of a funk, I think)... I don't know exactly what I think of her lyrics yet, and I imagine some political comrades out there might not be too thrilled if I jumped on the bandwagon for M.I.A (though it wouldn't be as bad as my defending Fun-Da-Mental, I suppose). After all, this daughter of a famous Tamil militant might be a little careless in throwing around some of the violent imagery that she's known all too well (though give her credit because she does know it all too well - this is not some poser talking about shit she hasn't seen). And outside of criticizing the Western media for its distortedly one-sided picture of the struggles near her part of the world, and maybe vaguely remembering some of her father's Tamil nationalism(?), I'm not sure where she wants to take her politics, if she's really taking on politics at all. (Just from a brief glimpse, I don't think she's as political as a few reviews are trying to make her out to be - though there certainly is global relevance to her perspective and her history.) But as current pop stars go, I think she makes for a pretty good working class hero, much better than most. I came to that conclusion, especially, after reading a very fun interview with her in The Guardian. I particularly enjoyed a passage concerning her roommate arrangement with Justine Frischmann from the notoriously middle-class, plagiaristic group Elastica (whose music I admit I still enjoyed listening to, especially when my turntable needle broke and I couldn't play my old Stranglers and Wire records)...

Still, she tells me at Cornerstone, she feels at home in New York. 'All the good cheap food?' I joke. Her eyes widen.

'That's seriously important. In Britain no one can afford to live. You know how miserable bad food makes you? I found that out in Notting Hill when I discovered the secret of how rich people feed organic chicken to their cats. I was like, "Your cat has got better skin than me 'cos I eat fucking trash chicken from the petrol station."'

By 'Notting Hill' she is referring to her time on the sofa as roommate of Justine Frischmann. Her relationship with Frischmann appears complex. She has her own place in Bermondsey, still talks to 'Jus' once a month and is grateful they wound up together, if only so they could wind each other up.

'She used to be like, "Maya, you're so desperate. I can't help you because you're too desperate." I couldn't stand up to Jus when she said that 'cos obviously she comes from a really privileged place. But one thing Britpop always banged on about was the Sex Pistols and they came out of desperation, so don't gimme that shit.'

And yet Frischmann was the motivating factor in Maya going to her bedroom with her Casio,...

In fact, I don't see how anybody could read that Guardian interview and not be rooting for M.I.A. afterwards. (Start from the very beginning, about how she had lost most of her teeth from malnutrition and how, when she arrived in London as a child, she didn't have any teeth, and how she was spit on in the street by local kids indulging in the post-punk gobbing craze (her own first memory of punk)...)

Even if I didn't like her music (which I do like so far) and I didn't enjoy watching her on stage so much, I think I would still enjoy reading her story and the stuff that she says in her interviews. So I hope that this M.I.A. sticks around for a while - I look forward to hearing and seeing more about her as time goes on...

Courtesy of the World Socialist Web Site (which I'm obviously finding to be an invaluable source of good daily current events reporting even though I am of course not a Trotskyist)... It seems that Northwest Airlines has been kind enough to encourage their laid-off workers to go dumpster diving:

Earlier this month Northwest Airlines, the fifth largest carrier in the US, sent soon-to-be-laid-off customer service workers and baggage handlers a handbook with "tips" for managing their unemployed state. The four-page booklet, "Preparing for a Financial Setback," contains a section entitled, "101 ways to save money." Among its patronizing or insulting suggestions: urging workers to shop in thrift stores and not be "shy about pulling something you like out of the trash."

Now, if you're some "freegan" eco-anarchist organizer who likes to pull everything out of the trash and you want to encourage other people to follow your fine example, or if you're somebody into voluntary simplicity who is actually trying to live on the same budget you are recommending to other people (and you know who you are ;), that's one thing... But if you're part of some business leadership that just fired a bunch of workers, broke a strike, and imposed a new contract that cut workers' salaries and benefits almost in half, that is something else entirely. Especially if, while you direct this campaign telling fired workers to shop in thrift stores and fetch things out of the garbage, you happen to be wining and dining in the fanciest places and buying yourself custom-made suits. This is stuff right out of some 19th Century melodrama (and welcome to the 21st Century)...

Jackie Diebel, a Northwest employee in Bismarck [North Dakota] who will lose her job in November, told the media she wept when faced with the reality of her plight, as well as the company adding insult to injury. “They want us to sell our cars, our house, go to food banks for food for our families,” she said.

By contrast, an April 2006 report in Forbes Magazine reveals that Douglas Steenland, Northwest’s president and CEO, is pulling in nearly $1.5 million, while Baselinemag.com records the 2006 compensation of Chief Information Officer Philip Haan as totaling more than $2 million. Salary.com reports that in fiscal year 2004, the combined compensation of the company’s top six executives exceeded $20 million.

Meanwhile, a lot of other people may have to pay closer attention to the Northwest executives' advice fairly soon. Because, while we are all nice and distracted with the threats of apocalypse in the Middle East, few people (at least in the media and on the blogs, I guess) are noticing the Warnings of a US recession and global slowdown:

Three commentaries published in the Financial Times over the past week have pointed to the increasing likelihood of a US recession that would have major implications for the global economy.

In an article published on August 10 under the title "The world must prepare for America's recession," New York University economist Nouriel Roubini warned that while the US Federal Reserve Board may have been hoping for a "soft landing" when it decided earlier this month to halt its cycle of interest rate rises, the decision has come too late and it now confronts a recession.

"The US recession will be triggered by three unstoppable forces: the housing slowdown; higher oil prices; and higher interest rates. The US consumer, already burdened with high debt and falling real wages, will be hard hit by these shocks," he wrote....

Similar predictions were made in a comment by Morgan Stanley chief economist Stephen Roach published on Monday....

"The world's main growth engine, the US, is slowing. That is the verdict from the labour market, with job growth in the past four months running 35 percent below the average since early 2004. It is the verdict from the housing market, where an emerging downturn in residential construction activity is knocking at least 1 percentage point off the GDP growth trend of the past three years."

So, if you get a chance to breathe a sigh of relief that we've somehow averted World War III again, try not to relax for too long, because here comes the next Depression.

This isn't a real post and will probably be deleted soon. However, I thought I'd put a query out there. What happened to Boredom Won't Get Me Tonight? It seems to have disappeared, so I have had to delete it from my side links. If anyone wants to give me more information on that, please comment here or send me a note through private e-mail. I have really appreciated Quinlan's political ideas (which are very close to my own in many ways), and it would be a shame to lose that blog.

Then there are the blogs from the other two kids in that corner of the Sphere,, Breaking the Social Contract and Chronicles of a Mutineer. (Hmm, looks like the beginning of a poem there...) Is anybody going to post something to one of these blogs in the near future? Or do I need to delete them too? That would be a shame.

Thank you to Recording Surface for posting a good statement from the Class War Federation, HezBollocks and IsRabies. Since this statement can be found in a couple of places now, I'll just mention my favorite lines:

Lebanon is being turned into a grotesque war-games board as the real protagonists - The USA and Iran - use their proxies to slug it out

Neither the Israeli army nor Hezbollah give a flying fuck about 'their' civilians, except as bloody totems to hang in front of the cameras of the world's press in order to justify their own next atrocity.
...
The Israeli state oppresses the Palestinians, driving them into the hands of the fanatics of Hamas out of despair at the failure of the secular Palestinian left. In turn the suicide bombers provide for the Israeli state 'proof' of the murderous nature of the Palestinians and drives the Israeli public to support harsher and harsher measures against the 'terrorists'.

This is a self destructive spiral and must be broken.
...
We should stand shoulder to shoulder with those struggling against the oppressors of the Israeli state and the Palestinian bantustan. We fight against our 'own' rulers who attempt to use this slaughter to their own ends and use measly words 'condemning the violence' whilst writing out the receipts for the latest arms contract.

Any state solution is a continuation of the same bullshit.

No Borders
No States
No Gods
No War but the Class War

And in a short while, I think I'll add Class War to my links.

I assume I'm not the only one who regarded with suspicion the extremely loud alarms being sounded over the recently thwarted terror plot, in which a number of people ostensibly came seriously close to carrying out a plan to blow up as many as ten airliners flying from the UK to the US... The World Socialist Web Site correctly raises some skeptical points about the lack of information and lack of valid questions answered in all the usual sensationalist media coverage. The WSWS has been producing good articles all along with regard to the recent spell of supposedly thwarted terror plots, all of which, at least prior to this one, turned out to be absurdly insubstantial. Maybe it was because of the prior jokes on the public that we are being assured repeatedly (though with inadequate backing information) that this was the "real deal." In any event, the timing of this raid and supposed thwarting was kind of curious. The WSWS pointed out that, "[i]t should be noted that only hours before Thursday’s raids, British Home Secretary Reid gave a major speech in London in which he accused opponents of the government’s anti-democratic legislation of undermining the 'war on terror."' Meanwhile, I found it curious that this scare occurred just one day after primary elections in the U.S. sent warning messages to incumbents of both major political parties. Of course, everyone's talking about the demise of that creep named Joe Lieberman, who was supported by all the big names in the Democratic Party establishment, but was defeated anyway mainly because of his support of the Iraq war, and maybe just a little bit because of his support of other war-mongering, anti-democratic policies being pushed by Bush and the other fascists in our government. The press was all abuzz with talk of rising dissent and a backlash against the incumbent politicians. So, wouldn't this be the perfect time to build up a little fear in the hearts of the public once again? And a good time for another good crackdown on the civil liberties of the public in both countries, ostensibly justified?

I'm not a conspiracy theorist; I don't think the governments in the U.S. and the U.K. had a hand in building up this terror plot (and I think that all these claims that we hear from people about how the Bush government planned 9-11 are positively ridiculous). And I don't even doubt the governments' claim that this plot was a bit more real than the other supposed plots that we heard about recently (which amounted to a lot of empty talk and no action worthy of attention and/or a lot of entrapment by government agents to get people to participate in such talk). However, I do wonder about whether the actual raid that took place was timed somewhat conveniently, and whether the sounding of big alarms and the raising of the terror color really are fully justified. (And if they are, forgive my skepticism about the home security people who have already too often cried wolf.)

We can only hope that more news will come in regarding the details of this plot and how exactly it was thwarted and why, exactly, the raids occured when they did. (And isn't it a bit convenient, one might add, that the agents in the U.S. are claiming several people involved are still at large? So, we better be afraid, very afraid!) But if by chance any news comes in that there wasn't exactly as much cause for alarm as had first been thought, we can be sure that this update will be buried in middle of any newsaper, if the newspapers decide to to publish it at all.
---------------
P.S. All right, I guess I should add - for those people who don't know it - that the title of this post is the title of an old Brian Eno song. I've been wanting to use that one for a while...

**********************

I - TRYING TO ASSESS JOE BAGEANT

The recent post and comments section debate at Living on Less, revolving around some excerpts from an interview with Joe Bageant, have brought to my mind a number of thoughts about the American "left," the class struggle, and the writings and words of Bageant himself. These are somewhat different thoughts, and might appear somewhat scattered, but in addition to lacking adequate time to put together a more cohesive post on the subject (an excuse I like to make now and then), I think I have difficulty forming one concrete good or bad opinion about Bageant. I think this is in part because, while he says some things that I like and some things I agree with (good), he also gets a little sloppy and contradicts himself or maybe even works against his own goals (not so good). So, trying to write a cohesive post about this subject, I've ended up revising a number of times during the night. Bageant? He's not so good in places, but he's good in others; well, give him credit, at least he's caused me to write a lengthy post.

II - SOME LEFTIST NOTION ABOUT AMERICAN "PROSPERITY" (?)

Let's start with the central comment quoted at Living on Less:

But liberals are too comfortable. So they deny reality. They are not going to do anything so long as they are comfortably insulated in the middle class. They are not going to wade into that hate filled ditch of political action, real political action that requires sacrifice, to battle for America's soul -- not as long as they are still living on a good street, sending their kids to Montessori and getting their slice of the American quiche. I guess what I'm saying is that until we get a real left in this country, one capable of creating change through radical action, one willing to risk everything for what they believe, we should not be talking about what our pseudo-left should be doing. Our pseudo-left is doing exactly what it should be doing. Posturing, bickering amid itself and boring the hell out of the rest of America....

American progressives need to wake up to the fact that they are just as big a part of the world's problems as the Republicans, so long as they insist on living the American lifestyle. As long as they continue to thoughtlessly consume the world as if it were their birthright. All talk and no walk. Buying organic toilet paper and voting for evasive Democratic hacks just isn't going to cut it guys.

To some extent, these comments conjure up in my mind a sort of frustration that I have with some of the American left in its criticisms of...the American left: There seems to be this conception that if there is no effective class struggle in America (effective, that is, for the working class), and that if there is no real political action, it’s because Americans are too content with their lives, consume too much, and have it too good. But this does not make much sense when you compare the present situation to what’s going on in other countries, or when you compare it to what’s gone on in the U.S. historically. Over in Western Europe, for example, the "ordinary citizens" have it much better than we do, materially, in many ways: they have universal access to healthcare; they don’t have to work as much to earn a living; they have much greater financial protections in times of unemployment and a much bigger social safety net; they are less likely to end up in prison; they are more likely to move up the ladder of social mobility; and they have less inequality in general, with a much smaller wealth gap. Yet, in these countries in Western Europe, people will more readily organize in the streets to defend themselves from crackdowns by the rich and powerful against the workers and the poor. In France last winter, we saw an amazing class-based mobilization to defend younger people from being cut out of a legal form of job protection that Americans could never even dream of having in the first place. (A law requiring bosses to give a good reason for firing you - this would be quite a novel concept in the U.S.!) And all over Western Europe, the people, especially the working class (but also many "professionals" whom many of us would identify as being in the "middle class"), would not put up with the outrageous crackdowns against poor people, working people, and "ordinary" citizens that are so typical in the U.S. without putting up a tremendous fight. Even just a trace of American-style crackdown gets people out in the streets and, especially, gets the workers out in the streets.

Historically, the U.S. has experienced much more promising moments of protest and class struggle at a time when many people who would be considered "ordinary citizens" had a much better economic life. This is true, for example, of the boom years in the 1960s. (While during the past 30 years, especially, the economic freedom, security, and overall situation for most people have been in decline.) It is also true that at times of serious economic depression, the people rose up as well, as exemplified by the movements of the 1930s and 1880s (which probably offered much better examples of militant class struggle than the 1960s). But there obviously is no simplistic correlation, in any direction, between the well-being or affluence of the average citizen and the degree of class struggle and protest or lack thereof.

III - JOE BAGEANT AND THE WORKING CLASS

Bageant's quote works better for me if I think of it not simply as another criticism based on the idea that Americans have it too good, but more on the idea that American liberals - what generally passes for our "left" - are, ironically, much more affluent, than the rest of the population. (From what I've seen, by the way, this comment might also apply to America's academic-based Marxists as well.) But that point, I think, maybe should have been made clearer from the start. It becomes a little clearer later in the interview, when he says:

They all come from the 25% of Americans who get a college degree. They have no fucking idea what it is like for the other 60-70% of Americans who have to survive in our brutal corporatized state without the benefit of genuine education, insight or even honest news programming to see what is going on around them. These workers are being cultivated as a human crop by global business. A crop of toilers, consumers, and when need be, mechanized killers to be sent abroad.

However, those words bring up a few other problems that I have with Bageant...

First of all, obviously, he is a bit too quick to equate college education with being above the working class, and to make some all-too-familiar associations about the cultural nature of the working class. His words get particularly irritating when he says:

The one thing the thinking left and urban liberals will not do is trod the soil of the Goth - subject themselves to my people here in places like my hometown, Winchester, Virginia. Subject themselves to the unwashed working class America, that church-going, hunting and fishing, Bud Lite drinking, never-been-to-Europe- and-don't-wanna-go, provincial America. The people who cannot, and do not even care to, locate Iraq or France on a map - assuming there is even an atlas in their homes. Few educated lefties will ever find themselves sucking down canned beer at the local dirt track or listening to the preacher explain the infallibility of the Bible on every known topic from biology to the designated hitter rule, never attend awards night at a Christian school or get drunk to Teddy and the Starlight Ramblers playing C&W at the Eagles Club. Well HO! HO! HO! Welcome to my world!

There are definitely a few flaws in this typical "What’s the matter with Kansas?" (a la Tom Frank) type of picture (and even if Bageant is creating it from his own reality, I thnk he's still using it as a more general picture of the working class). The first is that there is still a huge working class population in the cities, including people of all races, national origins, and ethnicities, who do not fit this stereotype at all. And if the liberals need to spend time with the real working class - even taken to mean strictly the traditional, blue-collar working class (which is already a misleading way to focus) - there are other kinds of places where they can spend some time, with people who have vey different social attitudes from what Bageant describes. But I suspect that this is true of many working class people in the rural areas as well...

Having read a couple of Bageant’s articles as well as this interview, I can only come to the conclusion that he too often reinforces stereotypes or generalizations about the working class that many upper-middle class people and ruling elites have traditionally used to keep the working class in its social place - and also to keep as few people as possible from getting together through self-identification as the working class.

This brings me to another problem, that Bageant’s notion of the working class does not make room for the oh-so-many new proletarians, many of whom have college educations, who have never fit into the traditional blue collar stereotypes.

At the present time, I consider myself part of that new proletariat (being a temp worker in information services - though at the non-tech end), so when I talk about this, I am, admittedly, speaking a lot out of self interest. However, I’ve always maintained that if we want to have a good movement for class struggle or resistance or, especially, revolution, we need to have people collectively acting in a way that they perceive to be in their self interest, rather than trying to build a movement upon people’s sense of moral/higher good. This is one reason that, to use the famous Marxist saying (from Marx/Engels/Luxemurg/Trotsky?), the emancipation of the working class must come from the working class itself. We can’t expect the better off and less exploited to fight for the interests of the poor, the working people, the exploited, etc., by appealing to the higher class people's sense of good, especially if these better-off people feel that they might have something to lose if they do so.

And as I always say, the Europeans seem to have their eyes much more open to the changing nature of class, and to expanding concept of class to fit new situations (and to build solidarity) than Americans ever do. This is just one reason they have more innovative and effective movements in class struggle (one of many reasons, most of them having to do with historical orientation and social development). As I commented over at Living on Less:

In Europe there's a movement going on around the issue of "precarity," people being temp workers and that sort of thing. And they've accomplished a great deal of effective class-based protest (look at France) in part because people who don't fit into old/traditional ideas about the working class realized that they were still working class, and emphasized this new form/dimension of being proletarian. We need to have more of this kind of reflection and awareness in this country. The left here doesn't provide it. For the vast majority of the left here, the workers' class struggle is limited to supporting the (few remaining) traditional unions, which do very limited things, mainly for people in the traditional working class (and usually sell those people out anyway).

IV - GOOD DEFINITIONS ELSEWHERE

Of course, in order even to address the issue of class struggle, we need to have some good, basic ideas about social classes, with some well-thought-out definitions. I think the autonomists do a lot of good work in exploring how concepts about class and class struggle might be changed to keep up with the changing nature of capital and its methods of domination (as well as the many new ways that the proletariat can find to resist). But even more basic, traditional Marxist journals can offer a much more concrete idea about class and how it is comprised than you’ll find in most "political" writings today.

For example, there’s some good, basic Marxist writing over at the present issue of Monthly Review. (Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find it at the newsstands this time, which is a shame. As poor as I am, myself, I much prefer to buy the hard copy - for $5.00 - and read it wherever and whenever I can than have to keep my eyes glued to the monitor and/or try to print all this stuff out.)

One very informative article is Michael Zweig’s Six Points of Class. Here, Zweig precisely states:

The working class are those people with relatively little power at work - white-collar bank tellers, call-center workers, and cashiers; blue-collar machinists, construction workers, and assembly-line workers; pink-collar secretaries, nurses, and home-health-care workers - skilled and unskilled, men and women of all races, nationalities, and sexual preferences. The working class are those with little personal control over the pace or content of their work and without supervisory control over the work lives of others. There are nearly 90 million working-class people in the U.S. labor force today. The United States has a substantial working-class majority.

Zweig's article isn't perfect - there are some confusing points, things that become a little vague, especially when he talks about "professionals" and the middle class (which are also very problematic labels, probably the cause of more arguments than the defintion of "working class") - but Zweig's article, like much of this issue, provides a good starting point for people to better understand the true nature of the different classes and their concrete interrelationships.

Well, getting to the promised list of links, etc.... There is a whole bunch of stuff on Bookchin to check out right now at Infoshop. And it was nice to stumble upon another post with a good short tribute (also citing the same article), the Porcupine Blog. (I wrote a comment there saying a little more about the subject, though it was probably kind of rushed. But I liked stumbling upon this blog - which I'm pretty sure I've seen before, just not sure when, exactly I saw it - and I think I'll be adding it to my list.)

As a lot of people have pointed out, there is a good collection of Bookchin articles at the Anarchy Archives, and, as might be expected, there's a bunch of stuff at the library page of the Institute for Social Ecology.

I've met a few people who knew Bookchin over at the the ISE, and I've met some other people who knew him in the '60s (who have some interesting thoughts on the matter - not always agreeing with him, by any means, but some of the most interesting and/or fun comments about Bookchin come from people who didn't exactly agree with him - which is a pretty large group of people, since he was not one to shy away from controversy). Thus, though I never met him myself, I feel as though I sort of knew him, which is why I sometimes resort to calling him by first name.

As I mentioned before, I got into some trouble eight or so years ago with an elder anarchist who was upset that I had said that Bookchin was a "cranky fart" (I think those were my words). I believe that my comment - which was not exactly the product of a lot of thinking - was influenced by some acquaintances' reaction to his most cranky words on social anarchism vs. lifestyle anarchism (a short book and then some), which probably made too many broad generalizations about the sharp contrasts between these supposedly different camps (even though I have met quite a few people who could be a lot of both kinds of anarchist at the same time). But within a year or two of that, I read some more of Bookchin, as well as writers influenced by him, and realized that I was very much a social anarchist myself - if I was any kind of anarchist (and I was more quick to say that I was at that time).

My favorite Bookchin book over the years was actually an underrated work published by Black Rose Books as Urbanization Without Cities (originally entitled The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship), where Bookchin brilliantly fleshed out certain ideas about cities and democracy (more accurately described by the original title, I think). At the time that I was reading this book, I was embarking on what I like to refer as my amateur urban studies program (connected to no university!), which also included Andre Gorz, Lewis Mumford, and couple of books by David Harvey, all of which complemented one another very well. That was quite a few years ago but, of course, I still have a lot of interest in this subject, and I intend to reread Mumford as well as that Bookchin book, soon.

I've also come to appreciate some of Bookchin's very critical words about consensus process, especially as it tends to be realized in activist groups. I discovered some of that work about three years ago while doing some research with asfo_del for the Collective Book on Collective Process; you can find a nice excerpt connected to our links page there...

And, of course, as I posted recently, I've finally delved into The Ecology of Freedom, which many people consider his most significant work. (It is quite good, if, admittedly, a bit dense at times.)

I could mention more - for instance, my first exposure to Bookchin was reading his books on the Spanish Revolution - but maybe it's time to let people (i.e., those few people reading this post) move on to another tribute on another site. Certainly, there are quite a few of those - as I may have mentioned - and there probably will be quite a few more in the coming days and weeks.