During the seventies, Ferrari Bravo worked in the University of Padova's Institute of Political Science, where Negri had assembled an impressive array of workerist intellectuals. One of them, Alisa del Re, recalls a certain intellectual elitism within the Institute, that drew its sustenance as much from familiarity with the experience of worker militants at Venice's petrochemical plants as it did from close attention to the Grundrisse and Capital. In her words:
the most evident form of this was the phrase "frankly, comrade, I don't understand you", which actually meant "you're a fuckwit"
An Iranian man waves a final good-bye to his relatives before being hanged, in Teheran, Aug. 2, 2007. Two men were hanged for murdering a judge in 2005. This was the first time Iran had implemented hanging in public since 2002.
Iran ranks fourth in the world in terms of state-judiciary sanctioned murder, pipped to the post only by: China, Sudan, and U.S. America.
Lilian Akoth Juma, 27, who has wide cheekbones, short braids and eyes wearied by seven hard years of widowhood, said she did not want to have more babies after learning she had HIV in 2004.
"I wanted to be done," Juma recalled as she sat in her dark, dirt-floored hut while infant son Javan suckled and his twin brother napped nearby. With their birth in April, Juma now has six children, not an unusual number in western Kenya, where many women live in deeply traditional villages nestled in the hills rising from the rocky shores of Lake Victoria.
Juma's attempts at family planning were frustrated by a combination of poverty, limited access to birth control and medical problems that made it unsafe for her to use contraceptive pills or injections, she said.
The man who, in accordance with local tradition, inherited her after her husband died refused to use condoms, she said. And she lacked the means and the knowledge, she said, to travel to a regional hospital where she might have found access to IUDs, contraceptive implants or surgical sterilization
Ξ December 15th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Words |
There was a man I know who used to write a lot. He wrote some rather tragic tasting humor for those who know better than to laugh out loud. He also wrote some of the strangest sounding poetry this side of the International Line of Sobriety. In between all these things he wrote almost completely true stories based on his own wide and varied experiences in Big Silly Business.
But that's when he had his muse. Then he lost his muse. He went silent for a very long time. He hated his own silence. But there was nothing he could do about it. So he simply worked night and day on remaining silent until he perfected it almost to the point of nonexistence.
He became a nonexistentialist. Perhaps one of the very first.
Sometimes, if you're in his neighborhood, you can hold your breath so that even the uncontrollable action of your lungs won't disturb the still air of nothingness and you can almost hear the sadness crawling by your feet. But most people can't.
Ξ December 15th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Misc |
The StumbleUpon UID of the beast.
"We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state and our education system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."
- Charles Bukowski
Ξ December 15th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Misc |
Stumbleupon Review of :
10 PRINT "Holy Chao!"
20 PRINT "It's the"
30 GOTO 10
RUN
Ξ December 14th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Misc |
Stumbleupon Review of :
I remember,
Kicking a ball against a wall
Hour slipping: easily (and unnoticed), after hour
Into the long evening.
Ξ December 13th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Misc |
Frances Moore Lappe finds a cooperative approach to living that actually enhances human dignity
A market economy and capitalism are synonymous --- or at least joined at the hip. That's what most Americans grow up assuming. But it is not necessarily so. Capitalism -- control by those supplying the capital in order to return wealth to shareholders -- is only one way to drive a market.
Granted, it is hard to imagine another possibility for how an economy could work in the abstract. It helps to have a real-life example.
And now I do.
In May I spent five days in Emilia Romagna, a region of four million people in northern central Italy. There, over the last 150 years, a network of consumer, farmer and worker-driven cooperatives has come to generate 30 percent to 40 percent of the region's GDP. Two of every three people in Emilia Romagna are members of co-ops.
The region, whose hub city is Bologna, is home to 8,000 co-ops, producing everything from ceramics to fashion to specialty cheese. Their industriousness is woven into networks based on what cooperative leaders like to call "reciprocity." All co-ops return 3 percent of profits to a national fund for cooperative development, and the movement supports centers providing help in finance, marketing, research and technical expertise.
The presumption is that by aiding each other, all gain. And they have. Per person income is 50 percent higher in Emilia Romagna than the national average.
The roots of Emilia Romagna's co-op movement are deep -- and varied.
Here in the United States, many assume that Catholicism and socialism are irreconcilable. In Italy, it's different. Socialist theorist Antonio Gramsci critiques of capitalism were a major influence on Italy's post-war Left. Although he was imprisoned by Mussolini in 1926 and died still under guard 11 years later at age 46, Gramsci's ideas took hold. Simultaneously, the Church came to appreciate the role of cooperatives in strengthening family and community -- as spelled out by Pope John XXIII's 1961 encyclical.
The shared values of the two traditions -- honoring labor, fairness and cooperation -- made them partners in standing up for co-op friendly public policies and in creating co-op support services.
Of the three main national cooperative alliances, the two largest in Emilia Romagna are the Left's Legacoop, with a million members, and Confcooperative, the Catholic alliance with more than a quarter of a million members.
During the 1920s, the fascists destroyed both the cooperative and the union movements. But after World War II, the movements regrouped to rebuild war-torn Italy. Farmer and worker cooperatives put people back to work. Retail cooperatives helped consumers and housing co-ops build new dwellings. Since 1945, the housing cooperatives affiliated with Legacoop alone have built 50,000 units in Emilia Romagna.
"Labor is an occasion for self-realization, not a mere factor of production," Zamagni, an economist, writes. Cooperation offers a way beyond the dehumanization of capitalism that fully uses the advantages of the market.
Another surprising feature of the culture is that, beginning in 1991, responsibility for social services in Emilia Romagna and other regions was transferred almost entirely to "social cooperatives." For those providing services such as job placement, 30 percent of the staff must come from the population served and, if possible, be members of the co-op. Certain tax benefits are provided to these "social co-ops."
The approach seemed another smart way to enhance human dignity, breaking down degrading divisions between the helper and the helped.
[ Black Sails - Chuck Gordon ]
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
-- Mark Twain
