Interesting commentary at the Industrial Workers of the World site: Mr. Block lives!

How about this, all public workers stop working for one week and then the next week all politicians stop what ever it is they do for a week. In the first day of public workers not working people would be complaining and demanding that they go back to work. As for the politicians taking a week off, next to no one would even notice it. So who is the most important in all of this? Those that do the work that people depend upon or politicians just passing gas?

I find the talking points about teachers’ salaries being higher than average salaries unconvincing. First of all, so what? The assertion that they get paid more than other people says nothing about whether or not their work is more valuable. A surgeon should get more compensation than a janitor because his/her skill is more unique and requires more investment. Second of all, there are high-paid teachers and there are low-paid teachers.

If you want to make the case that government teachers are overpaid, it would be more convincing to compare their pay to private school teachers or people in similar occupations than to the average salary. Or present metrics on time and money invested versus compensation. Or make an actual argument that involves the government distortion of market signals.

But the most important problem with government education and private education modeled on it isn’t that it’s too expensive; it’s that the system is a coercive monopoly where the young are forced into an institution that teaches obedience and statistical valuation of achievement over initiative and personal development. Talking down to teachers won’t change that.

As I said in Chris Christie Won’t Solve Public Education, people arguing for cheaper government schools,

still want a system that teaches people from before they can read until they reach voting age to salute the flag, follow the bell, and satisfy the demands of authority. They just want to implement what they consider a more cost-effective program of control.

If you don’t know what this is spoofing, you really need to watch They Live.

I’m posting some particularly interesting articles on revolts in Egypt and Libya. If you have other suggestions, please share.

How to Help Libyans Stay On the Internet Despite Government Restrictions

Libya: protesters vow to march on Gaddafi’s palace

Roots of the Egyptian revolutionary moment

Twenty reasons why it’s kicking off everywhere

The Secret Rally That Sparked an Uprising

Made in America: Mubarak’s Most Brutal Thugs Trained With FBI

Behind the Arab Revolt is a Word We Dare Not Speak

The Arab world is on fire: dialogue with a Syrian anarchist

Here are some books that readers of this blog might find useful.

The Russian Anarchists by Paul Avrich is a great source on anarchism in Russia from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century.

I haven’t yet read any of Nestor Makhno’s accounts of the revolution and civil war in Ukraine, but I presume they will be excellent.

The Russian Revolution by Sheila Fitzpatrick is an excellent short overview of the events of 1917.

Agorists in particular might be interested in Chapter 6 of Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain. In Kotkin’s narrative, the “shadow economy” in Stalinist Russia is a sphere of freedom and source of basic goods for the individual, but is also a mechanism by which Stalinist projects were able to be sustained.

Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, by David Remnick, is an excellent account of the collapse of the Soviet Union from an American journalist inside the USSR.

Check out my latest commentary at Center for a Stateless Society.

Excerpt from The System Needs Us – We Don’t Need the System:

But exploitation and rulership are not needed to maintain a peaceful and prosperous society of freedom. Instead, power can be dispersed among equals. Elites provide nothing that cannot be better provided without them. Security? Elites undermine it, and the foundations of true security are social bonds and solidarity that thugs are keen to disrupt. Transportation infrastructure? The system builds according to the demands of power, sometimes demolishing neighborhoods in the process, and skims off into the pockets of numerous cronies before it delivers anything. Education? People are eager to learn and teach, and only authoritarian structures, administrative excess, and the nonsense used to prop up the system obstructs them. Environmental protection? Elites market green and pass laws, but encourage waste and destruction. And so on. Power structures are made to support the powerful, and people do best by getting rid of them.

“Acts of solidarity are going to be either gifts or entrepreneurial affairs, depending on how you understand the basic dynamics. If you wait around for someone in this tangled-up culture of ours to “deserve” solidarity, you’ll just sit on your hands and nothing will change (except for the worse.) You “merit” solidarity by crawling out on your own limb.”
- Shawn Wilbur

My bi-weekly commentary is up at Center for a Stateless Society. In Build Counter-Power, Create an Authority Vacuum, I explore the relation of power, authority, and autonomy while addressing the oft-dreaded “power vacuum.”

Anarchy would mean that power is dispersed among individuals who would rather safeguard each others’ freedom than rule over each other. And if power is firmly in the hands of organized people then there is no power vacuum.

If you like seeing this kind of work and you can contribute some funds to keep it going, the Center could use your help.

News report via George Donnelly.