Yesterday afternoon I was able to go back to Baltimore City. I had to be at Red Emma's later that night for a meeting, since I'm trying to volunteer there. Downtown Baltimore was like it always is late on a Sunday: inactive, very few cars on the road, very few people mingling on the sidewalks. The city seems to feel a lot smaller than it actually is.
I picked out two books while at Red Emma's: one on prison abolition (for my ethics paper which is due in three days) and Graeber's Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value (for the 40 page thesis I have to write next semester). About an hour after the store closed for the day about ten of the worker-owners came in to start the meeting. Everyone was very welcoming towards myself and Melissa (the other "new edition" who told me she's a women studies PhD at College Park); no one was pretentious or condescending at all. Just that sense of togetherness which I haven't felt in a long time, not even at Occupy Wall St. Their meeting was also very organized, must be proof of spontaneous order. The mediator (whose name I forget) passed around some of the new books the store just received. One, which I was told had just been released that week, was on the Occupy Movement. The other was a revised edition of a book entitled America Beyond Capitalism by Gar Alperovitz which goes into great length about a new form of economic organization emerging in the US. It turns out the mediator also works for the author as his "day job" down near DC (he told us Alperovitz self-published his book in the area). From what he described, the image of this "new American economy" that Alperovitz gives sounds very similar to Proudhon's mutualism (minus all the anti-statism of course) with more working people who find themselves disenfranchised by the capitalist system moving to worker cooperatives and dissing their usury-banks for credit unions. It would be quite amusing if mutualism does end up being the system that replaces capitalism; perhaps the state-socialists should take notice and give up on vanguardism to get with the times. Though nothing was officially scheduled, I'm going to start training once I come back to Baltimore after winter break. It's going to be fun getting reacquainted with infoshopkeeper and book-shelving.
When I came back to my dorm I Emailed the C4SS group about Alperovitz's book, saying that I intend on reading it and writing a review. I was told that I should try and interview him about the concepts he talks about. If that does happen, I said, it won't be for a while. I'm set to leave the Mid-Atlantic this Saturday.
2 comments:
Don't see how our post could be anything BUT! on topic, toots, if you entitle your blog 'PropagandaLalaland' --- Nevertheless, what reeeeelly matters, friend, is OUR Divine Judgment; everything depends on what Jesus proclaims after. Not the ongoing battle between the L and the R; not how much moolah you made last year; not how much wealth them filthy billionaires stole from U.S. for their BlackOps programs. Our Divine Judgment... in which one-outta-one must croak. Think. Know. Grow-up. No, not in maturity, that, too, but in 'lifting-thy-head' above the clouds. Lemme wanna give you a parable on my finite extistence --- My sis is a hardcore Democrat: she calls me qweer for going to church, yet, she has queer friends (she doesn’t realize, however, all of mortal humanity is being played like a game by the NWO). Scary what the stanky, worldly BO thinks that sinfull mortal can become - we're all gonna croak, puppet BO, controlled by the billionaire, fat-cats-who-think-they-can-outsmart-Jesus. What #@!! morons. If he gits another term, fulla outsourcing our jobs, whorizontal abortion like babies are subhuman, outNout homosexuality, open-borders with white-trash-TexMex's, and 'posse comitatus' with FEMA, we've completely lost - lil we can do when God's outta-the-picture in BOs immature atheism. God, help U.S. Help us poor, mortal souls on earth who wanna Wiseabove.blogspot and go beyond to Heaven. Puh-leeze. Thanx for lissen'n, brudda. God blessa youse -Fr. Sarducci, ol SNL -PS- Is it any wonder then why our Mother (the Mother of God) said recently only ¼ of humanity wood enter Heaven?
Dude, I believe in the NWO and I know for a fact that there's a global elite trying to enslave and butcher humanity. Those elite are called CAPITALISTS, as in Walmart, Bank of America, Goldman-Sachs, General Electric, Microsoft, Apple, McDonalds, Citigroup, Monsanto, Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola (look up "Killer Coke" if you want a harsh glimpse of reality), and everyone else featured in the Fortune 500s.
The state is just the arm of the ultra-wealthy and functions to serve their interests. That's why we need to abolish the capitalist system and the state at the same time. You either believe in liberty or you believe in authority; there's few gray areas as far as I'm concerned. I also support denouncing organized religion since it too is a form of social control which enslaves our spirituality.
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