syndicat
25th April 2007, 17:57
my old friend redstar2000 posted a huge number of messages on this site over a period of several years, and that's sort how I found out about it, but I've only just gotten around to joining.
i've been involved in radical politics since the '60s/'70s era. i belong to Workers Solidarity Alliance, and agree with its libertarian syndicalist politics. Syndicalism, as I interpret it, is a form of prefigurative politics. The idea is that through the development of mass organizations, in workplaces and communities, self-managed by their members, we are prefiguring a new society based on self-management. Self-management means having control over your life, the opposite of being subjugated, oppressed. Self-management is thus a necessary condition of doing away with the class system. But this is not likely to come about spontaneously. The existing system tends to reproduce itself by developing habits of deference or acquiescence in authority in the heads of its victims. The working class can only develop the strength, self-confidence and consciousness to challenge the elite classes through a protracted process, as I see it.
I also tend to agree with participatory economics as a vision of an authentically socialized, self-managing mode of production. I don't interpret it as a "blueprint" but as a sketch of the conditions that need to be met to be successful in liberating the working class and the oppressed from the class system. But I'm not a groupie of Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel.
i've been involved in radical politics since the '60s/'70s era. i belong to Workers Solidarity Alliance, and agree with its libertarian syndicalist politics. Syndicalism, as I interpret it, is a form of prefigurative politics. The idea is that through the development of mass organizations, in workplaces and communities, self-managed by their members, we are prefiguring a new society based on self-management. Self-management means having control over your life, the opposite of being subjugated, oppressed. Self-management is thus a necessary condition of doing away with the class system. But this is not likely to come about spontaneously. The existing system tends to reproduce itself by developing habits of deference or acquiescence in authority in the heads of its victims. The working class can only develop the strength, self-confidence and consciousness to challenge the elite classes through a protracted process, as I see it.
I also tend to agree with participatory economics as a vision of an authentically socialized, self-managing mode of production. I don't interpret it as a "blueprint" but as a sketch of the conditions that need to be met to be successful in liberating the working class and the oppressed from the class system. But I'm not a groupie of Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel.