Juan Conatz's blog

If you've been on the radical left for any amount of time, you've probably heard of ‘zines’. A shortening of the word ‘magazine, zines are described by Wikipedia as “most commonly a small circulation self-published work of original or appropriated texts and images usually reproduced via photocopier”. Usually they are the size of what were once, and are now more frequently called, pamphlets.

[i]This was originally written in October 2013, but then I decided not to publish it or even adequately finish it because I thought the immediacy I felt when I wrote it was overblown. Also, putting something out like this before the election would have just made me look like a jerk, which I probably do a good enough job with any way.

The Roots of American Communism; Theodore Draper; Elephant Paperbacks, 1989 (First published in 1957)

A much mentioned fact about the old IWW is the culture within the organization. Members re-appropriated popular songs and hymns for their own use, stuck up stickers like modern day street artists and...had their own specific jargon and slang for their experiences.

This is a repost from the Iowa Radical History blog I maintain. For a little while, it was a main interest of mind to uncover mostly forgotten strikes, organizations and protests in the state and collect the records and recollections of them onto one place.

It has been about a year since I've written anything. This is not by choice. Sure, part of it is a choice, in the same way that anything you don’t do is somewhat of one, but there’s more to it than that. Discovering the reason has been mystifying. People ask “Do you still write?” and when the response is “Well, I haven’t in awhile.”, they inquire “Why not?”.

From The Organizer:

As I previously blogged, canvassers who work for a local nonprofit 'mobile foodshelf' in Minneapolis affiliated with the IWW and went out on strike on March 1st.

Here is their 2-week update

Cleaning out my numerous Google Doc drafts, I found this, which continues the direct unionism debate by taking on most of the responses to the original discussion paper. So I decided to finish it, as most of the written discussion has dropped off.

From the Twin Cities IWW blog:

CONTENTS

The Communist Left in Germany1918-1921 by Gilles Dauvé and Denis Authier

Paul Mattick and Council Communism by Claudio Pozzoli

Council Communism by Mark Shipway

The Councilist Movement in Germany (1914-1935): A History of the AAUD-E Tendency by CICA

Preliminaries on Councils and Councilist Organization by René Riesel

While, for good reason, our branch is focused on workplace activity, education events and having a presence within wider movements, it's important that we know when to take a break as well as support each other.

1) Contemporary political organization in the United States in large part came out of the post-Seattle 1999 resurgence of anarchism and the subsequent disagreements with primitivists, post-leftists, counter-institution types, and insurrectionaries.

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?