Bob Black

Frank is someone else entirely, in fact he rather hates my guts.

You can't share if you don't participate...

fnbrill:

this is typical of how "anarchists" base what they say on hearsay and rumors.

the piece on the Sandinistas was by Caitlin Manning, a very coherent libertarian Marxist who was one of the main people behind PW. her article wasn't for PW but for "No Middle Ground," a left-libertarian mag about Latin America which WSA was involved in. Caitlin's article was an objective evaluation of the revolution in Nicaragua, based on her actual experience there and talking to people (she is fluent in Spanish). She pointed out that a number of the Sandinista base organizations were advocates of workers management, and were to the left of the official FSLN party. Her article was critical of the comandantes and FSLN party hierarchy. but because she saw positive things in the revolutionary upheaval in Nicaragua, that's why the ultra-left wing nuts went after her (including a person who is now a member of the Insane Dialectical Posse and Kevin Keating).

PW was a magazine oriented to radical office workers and people doing computer work. In its early days we (I was a member) sold the mags on the street in the financial district in downtown S.F. and gained a considerable following among office workers. Later on PW moved away from organizing (out of a misguided belief that organizing is vanguardist) and became more of a cultural mag.

Black was a complete nutcase. He got PW evicted from their first office -- an illegal basement space -- by turning them in to the building department. He put up leaflets physically threatening them in the area where their second office space was (and which was shared by WSA and a living collective). A member of the living collective in that building caught Black pouring gasoline on the building very late one night. Black allegedly fled the city to avoid the police who wanted to talk to him about attempted arson.

Black's main energy was attacking people on the left. Meanwhile he also attended sci-fi conventions where he hung out with right-wing "libertarians" like Samuel Conkin. The reason for Black's attacks on PW derive from a split that took place in the PW collective. Two individuals wrote an alleged critique of PW, from a situationist point of view -- many of the founders of PW were situationists. Frankly, i couldn't understand what they were saying -- it seemed to me just a personal attack on a particular situationist. They then split from PW and Black decided that their critique, whatever it was, justified destroying PW.

As I recall, the article on Nicaragua was also roundly condemned by various Trot factions who were uncritically supportive of the FSLN. If it's the same article I remember, which i think it is, she gave a good bit of favorable mention to a small socialist union federation that violated the FSLN strike ban while still defining itself as Sandinista.

Black is inexcusable in my view

MJ, i wrote a piece on working in Silicon Valley under the pseudonym "doc". I also wrote a piece on my union organizing at the S.F. Bay Guardian weekly, which is available at:

http://www.uncanny.net/~wetzel/sfbg.htm

You confuse Bob Black with Tenacious D? That's hilarious!

nate, mj, "Down in the Valley" is not online anywhere. it wasn't one of my best pieces. i think it was the first time i did a "personal experience" article and it really should have been edited down more. also, i relied too much on cliches.

anyway, it was about working at Tandem Computers -- a large manufacturer of mini-computers. the company no longer exists. its big claim to fame was its "fault tolerant" architecture...e.g. you wouldn't lose your work if there was a crash. they were too slow adapting this technology to PCs. i worked for this company for about 10 years.

i worked in the "customer engineering" department. "customer engineer" is the industry term for the electronic techs who go out to a customer's site to fix complex high tech gear like computers or photocopiers, etc. it's sort of a blue collar skilled trades kind of job. my job was to write the documentation for the field techs, how to install and fix stuff, how the computer system works, etc.

in this early period of computer technical writing you didn't necessarily have to have a college degree to be hired as a tech writer. most of the members of my department had no college degree. they were former blue collar workers, former assemblers (factory workers) and field techs. nowadays the coordinator class credentials game has caught up with tech writing and companies will not hire anyone without a college degree. they'd rather hire someone out of college who knows zilch rather than hire some skilled worker (such as a sys admin or field tech or systems tester) who knows the technology.

while i worked there they "taylorized" the customer engineers...a general trend in the computer industry in the late '80s. they did this by separating off a group of "repair specialists" and keeping them stationary in a "board repair depot" and then they would only train those specialists to the full level of understanding they used to train the field techs to...originally the field techs had to do physical repair onsite...solder in replacement chips on circuit boards, use electronic gear to test systems, etc. after the taylorizing scheme went in, they only trained them minimally to switch out suspect sub-assemblies (whole circuit boards) to find the one that had a problem, and then send it in to the specialists in the board repair depot. one customer engineer who went thru this deskilling told me he felt like he was being treated like a "board swapping monkey". this also meant that I was now asked to "dumb down" the documentation, not go into the sort of details we used to have to do. for example, we no longer provided electronic schematics.

another cost-cutting measure they did in the late '80s was to relocate circuit board manufacturing to a new automated plant located out in a rural area where wages were really low.

one of the events that happened while i worked there was a spontaneous strike by my department against abuse by the managers. we demanded that the company fire the manager -- and they did...and demoted all the supervisors too.

later on the department became very politically divided, due to the hiring of a bunch of right-wing ex-military guys. when the big retrenchment came down in the early '90s the right-wing guys were kept on and those of us with more left-wing views were laid off. it was entirely political. some of those right-wing guys were real slackers.

the only union at the company was among the security guards who worked for a contractor. right around the time i was laid off, when they were desperately retrenching, they broke the union by hiring a non-union security contractor. i found out about this because the president of that union was an anarcho-syndicalist who i knew.

the company had been founded by a populist Texas computer salesman who sometimes said the company was "socialist." by this he meant he used a participatory style of management, and provided, by American standards a generous level of benefits, sort of a private welfare state. this included 6 week sabaticals every 4 years, on top of the ordinary 2 weeks vacation (US standard). also good medical benefits...vision, dental etc. my take on this is that a company with a very high level of average skill in its workforce needs to be attractive so their workforce isn't competed away in a situation of extremely rapid computer industry growth...a situation that no longer exists around here.

the company had a pretty freewheeling internal email system with "third class" mail which was automatically broadcast to everyone. it was intended for things like requests for help on some project, offering your car for sale etc but was sometimes used for political purposes, including by internal company dissidents. it was through that freewheeling mail system that i met my "ex".

eventually the company put in place a more restrictive use policy. the event that triggered this was a conflict over homophobia. some people put out a broadcast email message announcing a meeting of a gay employees group, and someone else then sent out a message threatening to show up and beat them up. that led to a vigorous debate. i met members of the gay group because i put out messages supporting them. i thought it was pretty good that this could be dealt with so openly but the company didn't want that of course, and instituted limits on allowable uses of the mail system. this was all before the internet, really. the email system only was within the company's employees (some thousands). they didn't connect their mail system to the internet til the early '90s.

Very interesting. Thank you.