Juan Conatz's blog

Today is the 20th Anniversary of the Rodney King riots, which happened in a number of cities, but was most intense in the Los Angeles area. Over the last week, the media has been looking back at hip-hop of that era, interviewing people who were affected by the events or seeing what has changed since then (however superficial this assessment is).

[i]Burnt Bookmobile is a blog out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin run by some people influenced by various anti-authoritarian tendencies, including insurrectionary anarchism, left communism, and nihilism, among others.

By now you’ve probably heard about how in various cities Occupy has called for a general strike on May 1.

2011 was the year 'general strike' reentered the vocaboulary of American social movements. Wisconsin planted the seed, Oakland attempted to pull one off and now large segments of the Occupy movement are organizing for a May 1st general strike. But what is a general strike? What have they looked like in American history? What about in other places?

For a couple years now, I've been making an effort at getting previously non-digital resources of past radical movements online. Living (at the time) in Iowa and becoming involved in antiwar and anarchist groups, I tried to look back at other people's efforts and found there was little available information.

As with the last post I wrote, this one is rooted in a Facebook discussion/argument between members of the Recomposition editorial collective.

Recently, I’ve been halfway baiting Nate Hawthorne into a debate/argument about the issue of whether reform is possible in contemporary capitalism during a financial crisis. The conventional wisdom among various anarchist currents and libertarian communists, seemingly rarely challenged, is that it is not. But is this really true?

Last week, the Wisconsin Supreme Court overruled a lower judge's injunction against the collective bargaining law, allowing it to go into effect at the end of this month. The budget bill also passed the assembly and senate, marking it a twin defeat for the movement here that emerged in February.

Intro & The Early IWW and Contracts

Intro
Recently, an unfinished piece titled 'Direct Unionism: A Discussion Paper' appeared on the internet. It was written by a group of IWWers a couple of years ago and was intended to start a dialogue within the union on contracts and generally how we organize in the workplace.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, a general strike is probably not going to happen in Wisconsin. Maybe it never was, but what is commonly identified as the high point is past and a major demobilization has happened. This high point was when the bill was jammed through and people forced themselves in the capitol. This was also the point when the crowd calls for a general strike were the loudest.

On Monday, February 21st, me and a Wild Rose Collective comrade traveled to Madison to take part in the protests against Governor Scott Walker's plan to basically revoke collective bargaining rights from public workers.

The Class Struggle Anarchist Conference (CSAC) is an event for pro-formal organization anarchists who believe in class struggle, involvement in mass movements, and that revolution is only possible coming from the diverse working people of the world--not an isolated or select minority of radicals.

In December of 2004 a warehouse I was working in through a temp agency was taken over by the company whose products were stored there. Everyone had to reapply for their jobs and due to my previous experience and the fact that two 'leads' recommended me to the company, I was hired on.