Sabotage by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

During the Swedish general strike these workers who belonged to the unions and were operating the papers rebelled against printing lies against their fellow strikers. They sent an ultimatum to the newspaper managers: “Either you print the truth or you’ll print no papers at all.” The newspaper owners decided they would rather print no paper at all than tell the truth. Most of them would probably so decide in this country, too. The men went on strike and the paper came out a little bit of a sheet, two by four, until eventually they realized that the printers had them by the throat, that they could not print any papers without the printers. They sent for them to come back and told them, “So much of the paper will belong to the strikers and they can print what they please in it.”

– Sabotage: The Conscious Withdrawal of the Workers’ Industrial Efficiency by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 1916

Assignment for readers: In the comments, compare and contrast the printers’ action in the context of 1916 with possibilities for workers achieving similar results in the context of mass media communications moving more and more to the internet in 2010.

My original plan (after setting aside the absurd proposition of trying to turn the Slovak state against one of its own agents) for how to respond to my beatings at the hands of the Slovak police was to:

1. Leave the country
2. Publish the story online
3. Attempt to make a media story of the incident

I’ve done numbers 1 and 2 already. The question is now: should I do number 3?

I have the media and other contacts I need already, I think. If any of them chose to actually make a story of it is another question.

Possible outcomes include:

• Nobody touches the story
• It’s published, and yields some good
• It’s published, and my life gets even more difficult

A big part of me wants to strike back at these monsters. Another part recognizes that the first and third possibilities are the more likely ones.

As context to all of this, Bratislava is still home to me. I’d like to go back there and try to resume my life at some point.

What do you think?

If you’re an anarchist blogger and you’re somehow not yet resyndicated by anarchistblogs.org, you really should be. Pretty please, with sugar on top. Confusing, isn’t it? Like, duh, you’re an anarchist and a blogger, and anarchoblogs.org doesn’t re-feed you? Why? Please, tell me in the comments.

If you feel you are not properly sedated, call 348-844 immediately. Failure to do so may result in prosecution for criminal drug evasion.

That is all. Return to your homes. Further instructions will come to you through your telescreen.

The original question regards approaching wealthy potential donors who may be interested in funding voluntaryist/anarchist causes.

In my own rather limited experience with activist fundraising, I do know that the key questions these folks are going to ask you is: How much do you need? How are you going to spend it? and How can I measure the value of my investment?

Inasmuch as we are a movement, we are a polycentric one. Each of us may have very different answers to those questions, and each of us would frame the discussion with such prospective donors differently.

The “How are you going to spend it?” question, though, is one which can be reframed a bit, as, “What sorts of activities and organizations do or could donors fund, which could be beneficial vehicles for us?”

I offer here a list of possibilities, in no particular order:

• think tanks
• publications (journals, magazines, newspapers, newsletters)
• academic endowments (dubious)
• political parties, candidates and campaigns (distasteful, at best, to many of us)
• grant-making foundations
• public advocacy groups
• conventions and other mass public events
• political action committees
• media awareness projects
• charity organizations with compatible ideological orientation
• businesses to compete with government service provision (agora!)
• seminar series
• roundtable groups

If you can bite down on one of those — or anything else — and create a project or business plan for it, then you will have answered the questions you are likely to get from any serious donor prospect, and will be ready to go out and make the pitch.

If you were never a listener of US daily news radio between, oh, about the 1950s and early 2009, you won’t really understand. Folks of my generation remember Paul Harvey as a voice they began to hear, powerful and distinguished, in their early years.

Paul Harvey, 4 September 1918 – 28 February 2009

Paul Harvey was an institution. He was an icon, in a sense. He was one of the Last Great Upstanding Men of Journalism, trivial though that may seem in today’s world. But his voice and his thoughts were known to tens of millions daily and hundreds of millions by influence. He was part of the underlying infrastructure of American life for more than half a century. No matter what horrors might transpire in the world, Paul Harvey was always there, five days a week, to tell you the rest of the story and bid you good day at the end.

His segments were not always enlightening, yet often were. He was not always the most brilliant commentator, but thoughtful always. He rarely broke news, at least in the years I knew his voice, preferring instead to add perspective to the stories already on the airwaves. Sometimes his segments were rather trivial human interest pieces which, despite their lack of deep philosophical significance managed to captivate the listener’s ear by simple virtue of the man’s talent for delivery. Still, what Paul Harvey did with his voice and with his words was monumental. He reflected a culture — a flawed, broken culture, yes — and aimed to reflect the best of it. He remained a gentleman where gentility had passed out of fashion, and occasionally was a subtle (and, less often, not so subtle) firebrand where those making the news deserved derision in the reporting of it. At his best, he poked sticks in the eyes of the boobs in the highest offices. At his worst, he was a flawed human being just like those around him. And he emerged from the same, now nearly entirely extinct, tradition of quality broadcasting that brought such radio voices as Garrison Keillor and Walter Cronkite to well-deserved fame, defining entire genres of reporting, commentary and humor, while transcending and redefining them in the process.

Thanks, Paul Harvey. You done good.

Good night, Paul Harvey, and good day.