Michael Albert' Friends Messages

Hi Micheal, hope things are going well with the poll. Have you ever seen this book: http://libcom.org/history/tradition-workers-control-geoffrey-ostergaard ? Dispite the dreadful cover this is really interesting for parecon. By giving the historical failures and mutual criticisms between anarchists and guild socialists he basically lists the weaknesses of both that parecon is explicitly meant to address very concisely. The thing I really wanted to point out was that Ostergaard defines the co-ordinator class and its role here. Here we see a British anarchist in 1954 writing "The Fabian theory of state ownership in the interests of the community, coupled with the insistence of the subordinate role of the trade unions and co-operatives and the importance of experts, the bureaucrat and the manager, is one that is of direct interest to the managerial class, just as it is opposed to the interests of both the workers and (in the long run) to the capitalist owner." By giving the historical failures and mutual criticisms between anarchists and guild socialists he basically lists the weaknesses of both that parecon is explicitly meant to address. He cites a (not so radical) sociologist called James Burnham on "The manegerial revolution". He goes a lot further than Bakunin here. I find nowhere where he explicitly says this is what happenned in Russia but he comes close. While I'm writing there are two other things I was meaning to ask, both citations. One is for the fact that bombs deliberately designed to attract children were dropped on Vietnam, and the other was for the deliberate flooding of US inner cities with drugs in the 70's. What;s the best place to read about these two things? Thanks, Joe

Albert, I wrote a blog trying to get a group to donate at once, if you could circulate it I think it would have a better chance of working. Justin

I have removed the paypal button from the group page. I apologize if there was any confusion. We will find somewhere else to park the button.

Hi! I have the following problem: I uploaded two articles: http://ruby.zcommunications.org/environmental-grassroots-protests-in-bulgaria-by-peter-peter http://ruby.zcommunications.org/the-anarchist-communist-mass-line-bulgarian-anarchism-armed-by-peter-peter but they don't appear on my ZSpace page in "Most Recent Content", although I've checked everything in the Content Type filters...