Month: August 2012

insilence-iobserve:

“Weariness has settled in my bones

Death rattles on my tongue

You stay beneath Yggdrasil’s leaves

Looking hale and young

My heart beats heavy in my chest

My blood has run its course

You stand there solemn, waiting

The mother of my horse

My eyes close in Death’s embrace

I hear you softly cry

And in the dreams of Life I find

The reason why I die

You wait beside the hanging Tree

The vigil long, it lasts

Into Gap and darkened reach

The Runes I find at last

My ever-sweet companion

My brother in the blood

My lover who waits beneath my feet

Within the puddling mud

I lose you for a moment

Forever and an age

My soul crying out across the Worlds

I cannot see your face

Then as sudden as I left

My eyes open wide

Yet only one sees your face

The one that’s left behind

Life comes to me in sudden haste

You help me off the Yew

You bind my wounds and tend my ills

Beloved and renewed

Sacrifice to he

Who held his vigil long

Who loves in spit of all I’ve said

In spite of all I’ve done.”

-Loki, Sarenth Odinsson

Solidarity Unionism, Occupy, and the moral right of the working class to control the workplace

Solidarity Unionism, Occupy, and the moral right of the working class to control the workplace

elfboi:

bwansen:

elfboi:

amodernmanifesto:

On November 2, 2011 Occupy Oakland successfully shut down the ports in Oakland along with the approval and aid of the union, ILWU Local 10, which has a contract with the port’s legal owners. This event was a tremendous leap in consciousness and something the U.S. working class has not done nor attempted in decades. Shortly after, Occupy Oakland passed another resolution for a West Coast port shutdown. Occupy movements in Portland, Long Beach, Seattle, Vancouver, Anchorage, Honolulu and Tokyo responded. On December 12, 2011 the Occupy movements succeeded in shutting down the ports completely or partially in most of those cities. However, this time around Occupy did not have the full support of the unions involved.

This action has sparked debate between Occupy and the traditional labor movement encompassed in the AFL-CIO. The unions’ argument is that Occupy did not have the right to shut down the workplaces (ports) where they did not work and that this needed to be decided democratically within the bureaucracy of the ILWU.

What happens when there is no more workplace? Most of the physical work is already done by machines, and most of the non-physical work can be done from anywhere as long as there is electricity and Internet access. In a few years, all kinds of jobs that don’t require physical presence at the workplace will be done from workers’ homes, and in many cases, they won’t even be living on the same continent as the corporations they’re working for. They won’t even be employed, but freelance work will become the norm, everybody competing with all the people on the entire planet qualified to do the job, and whoever does it cheapest gets to do it.

I don’t like the competetive part, but yeah, that’s the overall direction we’re heading.

I don’t really like it at all. It could be a great thing if we could just cut out the corporations and do our projects without them.