Weekly Digest

Since I've got a lot of stuff backlogged in the hopper, the next couple weeks' digests will include large amounts of old stuff. I couldn't just delete it all, though, because it's really good.

Ecodema on some 180 closed factories in Argentina, reopened and run by workers. They employ over ten thousand. Also at Ecodema, a link to the international Committee on Workers' Capital, which promotes the democratization of capital.

The future is unwritten links to an anarchist critical of Hugo Chavez from the Left: "Socialism to the Highest Bidder."

The biggest consequence of Chavismo is that it has relegitimized the state and its political class, at the total cost of all gains made in extra-parliamentary struggle over the course of the 90s.... [T]he crisis of the last decade created a situation where only a non-traditional politician using leftist rhetoric could possibly have salvaged the crumbling state.

At Strike the Root, Fred Reed on why universities should be abolished:

To the extent that universities actually try to teach anything... they do little more than inhibit intelligent students of inquiring mind.... The professor’s role is purely disciplinary: By threats of issuing failing grades, he ensures that the student comes to class and reads certain things. But a student who has to be forced to learn should not be in school in the first place. By making a chore of what would otherwise be a pleasure, the professor instills a lifelong loathing of study....

Perhaps once universities had something to do with the mind, the arts, with reflection, with grasping or grasping at man’s place in a curious universe. No longer. Now they are a complex scam of interlocking directorates. They employ professors, usually mediocre, to sell diplomas, usually meaningless, needed to get jobs nobody should want, for the benefit of corporations who want the equivalent of docile assembly-line workers.

I missed Richard Garner's thoughtful criticism of Left-Libertarian or Left-Rothbardian class theory when it first came out. And Walter Block recently published his own critique of the Left-Rothbardians (focusing on Roderick Long and Charles Johnson), along with Hoppe and Rockwell and others on the Right, in defense of his own version of plumb-line libertarianism.

Eric Husman of Grim Reader has a good series on management theory: "The New Workplace"; "Flow"; "Putting Out"; "Federated"; "Communal--emh"; "Peer Groups"; and "Inside Contracting." Of course, everything about kaizen, self-directed teams, lean production, and the like, must be taken with a grain of salt, as I intend to argue in a future post. A lot of it sounds like what might be the seeds of a libertarian, self-managed, decentralized economy, if the structural bulwarks to authoritarianism were removed; but integrated into the existing system of state capitalism, they instead become what Mike Parker and Jane Slaughter call
management-by-stress."

Dave Pollard Roundup. He links to a Wendell Berry article on "the intrinsic wisdom of small, self-sufficient, local intentional communities."

Pollard also writes, in "Creating the Jobs We Want":

If we want meaningful work we are going to have to collaborate with the rest of the world's Disposable Citizens to create it. We are going to have to build a wholly new economy, one that will undermine and then replace (and be fiercely opposed by the beneficiaries of) the existing dysfunctional 'market' economy.

Unfortunately, he adds, the publik skools are designed largely to keep people devoid of initiative and dependent on authority figures, so that nothing like this will happen.

Pollard also posts on information flow within large, top-down organizations and on the information politics within organizations, and advocates a "peer-to-peer expertise finder" that sounds an awful lot like Illich's learning nets.