Anarchic update news all over the world - Part 1 - 3 April 2017 ~ CookingFood.Org

Today's Topics:


1. Greece, Libertarian Thessaloniki Initiative: SUNDAY STRIKE
      9/4 - NEVER WORK ON SUNDAY (gr) [machine translation]
      (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)

2. Greece, Course defense of squatting, the movement's
      structures and our life | Mundo Nuevo By A.P.O. (gr) [machine
      translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)

3. anarkismo.net: Repression and Imprisonment in Cachoeirinha,
      Brazil by Coordenação Anarquista Brasileira (CAB) (pt)
      (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)

4. anarkismo.net: Basic Income & Billionaire preppers by Andrew
      - WSM (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)

5. France, Alternative Libertaire - Public Meeting: The elected
      representatives represent only themselves, direct democracy ! by
      AL Lorient (fr, it, pt) [machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)

6. [Bulgaria] Picadilly supermarket workers strike wild in
      protest over back wages By ANA (pt) [machine translation]
      (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)

7. Greece, THERE WAS ACCIDENT, MURDERED WERE WORKERS
By A.P.O.
      (gr) [machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)

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Message: 1

In July 2013 voted as part of the second memorandum, the polynomoschedio -diakais large
portion of Lust local afentikon- for the opening of shops on Sundays 7, becomes the
starting point for the current cycle of struggles and solidarity of workers in trade. ----
For three years running coordinate action against Sunday work in Thessaloniki and is
present every time the shops open on Sunday. With operations in major shopping centers and
Cosmos One Salonica, to continuously share texts to workers and blockades every Sunday in
commercial shops of the city center, we try to concretely curb the appetites of every boss
who considers the employee expendable. ---- The fight against Sunday work is not a simple
defensive struggle, and neither should be treated only as such. This measure applies in
the context of the intensification of work in times of crisis. Continued consumer flow
creates more work not only to employees in commerce, but also for workers in other
industries such as eg in the food supply. The announcement of new jobs that will bring the
measure is essentially false, since it is essentially a one-day contracts, which is
already done routinely in supermarkets and department stores. Essentially trade is the
starting point of this measure in the future they intend to apply to all sectors, to
Sunday to be a full working day.

At the same time labor rights abolished one behind the other, the black uninsured work is
slowly rule, timetables "elasticized" that suited the interests of the bosses, the
"charitable" work and voucher extended and now we are forced to work as the 67 to go on a
hunger pension, the devaluation of our labor power to the parallel increase in the cost of
living does not say stop. This year's winter was first home auctions and privatization of
water, electricity, public spaces and services, while preparing for the coming months new
bill that industrial relations in which the EU, the ESF ., the IMF, the ESM and the local
chapter (industry associations, traders, businessmen, shipowners) ask, and envisage,
without having special crystal ball, they will manage to diminish even further the minimum
wage be abolished Easter and Christmas gifts, to institutionalize been and extending
part-time work, to free the layoffs, to put a brake on the right to strike.

We can not continue to deceive ourselves, to postpone and to assign the struggles that we
can give ourselves and we know that both cover material and our spiritual needs in a time
of crisis and general transformation of society occurs through action. On this panel we
workers erect stature should unite, to organize, to fight. What you need to know as
employees and workers is that all games won are the ones that existed unity, solidarity
and organization. Unity and solidarity among the workers and organize through unions in
the workplace.

Everyone alone, is doomed to moan, to further ftochopoiisi in defeatism, and the only way
we can fight effectively against the employer terrorism is through the collaborative tools
of organization and struggle that create the the exploited in the field of class struggle
themselves . On April 9, we invite all workers and employees in commerce to support the
collection coordination and exclusions branches to break in practice, to break on the way,
the bill and the appetites of masters for work on Sundays, to fighters defend our need for
leisure.

THE WORKING INTERESTS prepend

NO SUNDAY OPEN THE SHOPS

SUNDAY 9/4
CONCENTRATION
10:30
TSIMISKI WITH ARISTOTELOUS
COURSE
12:00
Coordination against Sunday work and 'liberated' schedules

@ sintonismoskiriakis espiv.net

------------------------------

Message: 2

Defends THE KATALIPSEIS AS CONSTANT project WRESTLING AGAINST STATE & CAPITALISM ----
Monday, March 13 early morning evacuated 2 more roof spaces and race in Athens. The
Hellenic Police intervened to Villa Zografos and occupation immigrants and refugees
Acharnon roof and Alkiviadou 9 evicting and then capturing and / or sending people to
detention centers found inside buildings. The evacuation of these two occupations have
double meaning. Evacuated a documented discourse space and action of the antiauthoritarian
movement and an immigrant hosting structure, a home for those who have been uprooted and
found shelter there, where apart from humans lived the practical solidarity and effort to
build relationships between locals and migrants outside the rails detention centers, the
center of the social fabric of metropolitan Athens.

PRACTICAL SOLIDARITY IN REFUGEES & IMMIGRANTS

The social practical solidarity movement for refugees and migrants was created and
consolidated since the beginning almost the arrival of uprooted appointed as one of the
practices of the occupation of buildings designed to house and connect the kneading of
common struggles. Simultaneously given and an enduring message of resistance, to the
dominant that the movement can impose its will in order to satisfy social needs, housing
here. Refugee housing occupations and immigration raise issues that have several
recipients, especially now that the right to housing, even more hit and no obvious need
for more and more people who stand to lose up to a first home, from the auctioning of banks.

More than a year ago, the government is unable to control the spontaneous movement of the
social movement to establish such structures, occupying more and more buildings, ran an
underground war downgrading their spekoularontas them. At the same time he was making its
first winding movements with double emptying Idomeni, stacking and targeting the most
active of them. In the next year the "left government" felt ready to go to an even greater
and more targeted attack. The evacuation of three squatter housing in Thessaloniki last
summer, with prominent this Orphanage, mapped out the new features of state aggression.
Targeted entered the structures had gone further connection between locals and migrants.
Coexistence anarchist fighters and immigrants / refugees who do not patronize directly
from any religious or institutional authority was modeling a situation that any government
would not want to be confronted with the results.

So the government SYRIZA as easily used by social movements to rise to power, put as
directly attainable target him having all managers of power: to crush the social movements
in order to remove the fault conditions in the modern building totalitarian state and
capital, which is recommended as one way to plebeian layers.

Demolish NEKROTHAFTES ALL OF HOPE

All repressive operations also serve a statutory body, which pleases the government to
Lookout alliances. In this case, under the pretext of "non-conformity" residents of 9
Alkiviadou thrown out, to return the building owned Red Stafroy (the most historic and
well established NGOs in Greece) and to house more refugees approved. (The Orphanage
demolished church was attributed to the Painter in the municipality, the University
Victory in etc.) This time no evacuation basically such sites is a reasonable time not to
anticipate finding rhizomes in neighborhoods They are naturally to be done in the purely
human and political contact being made with the neighbors.

Today, government statements and practices are consistent with the institutional
management of these people just as people do not see them, mapping them, sorting and
finally stacking the decentralized, ajar or completely closed structures. Dozens of people
have died in the deportation centers, the images from the snowy Moria, is very recent, as
well as the dead in Thessaloniki and Athens. When even a question of suitability and
freedom from the solidarity movement, as in Greek, the state does not hesitate to respond
with even worse exclusion of migrants (eg switching Petrou Ralli) exhausting of revenge.
The statement remains clear: immigrant populations belong to the state.

THE ANARCHIST MOVEMENT answers ATTACKS ON STATE-CAPITAL-withheld

The evacuation of Villa Zografos is to follow the standard practice of any government
formation, ie to attack the structures of the anarchist / anti-authoritarian movement. So
while the "left government" breaks all records having already evacuated five squats in a
half by their fellow rightists to blush, statements about Tosca "absolutely justified the
Police 'businesses coming to confer the necessary rationalist coating on social democratic
type suppression of SYRIZA, which confirms our finding that timeless state, and the
smoothness of operation, have continued. We see, then total it as "rational" if you put
the evacuations justifications essentially it is the effort of SYRIZA to retain power, now
that the "anti-memorandum" of rhetoric is exhausted and deprived, addressing the
supporters' legality. " When, therefore, pressures exerted by local authorities, NGOs,
etc., ie bodies that can exercise political influence, applies the traditional state
repression hitting the entire range of internal enemies manufactured: immigrants,
solidarity, anarchists.

This condition, if not vigorously answered by the world of the race will pave the way for
an even wider range attack to those who resist either by it or by subsequent governments
and / or cohabitation (eg ND-SYRIZA). Not go unnoticed, moreover, the apparent
"neutrality" that keeps the current government against fascist formations (see ASE and
joint appearances) is sufficient to maintain a semblance of democracy. In fact the
political leadership flushes neo-Nazis, attempting to restore the frame of democratic
normality. This democracy but simply a shell of the development of modern totalitarianism,
can only exacerbate the exploitation and oppression and this is the objective of every
authoritarian formation.

The unleashing of state finally repression, as developed at this juncture, based on the
aspirations of the political leadership is moving on two levels: on the one hand seeks to
create a new audience but also the respective political alliances that are rallying around
the doctrine of social peace and security secondly the executive bodies entrusted with the
precautionary prevention realize social movements capable of rebutting this Treaty.

SOCIAL counterattack WILL defragmented adamant IN THE BATTLE WITH EVERY POWER

Such social dynamics -is known in power- released from the struggle structures erected in
the occupations and areas of the anarchist movement. And it also hit. But the power
constantly forgets that these structures are not the walls but their people. We choose to
house political, to operate socially and culturally, to live in liberated areas, making
"abstract ideas" such as companionship, solidarity, self-organization lifestyle.
Especially today, when the needs are not found within any State, any public welfare, no
NGOs, the reason for the occupied spaces is more topical than ever, whether the so-called
living needs (eg housing), or expression needs, creativity, multifarious stimuli, called
desires. Of course, it can not, in our minds, these places can not be apart from social
and political, to an umbrella for fermentation, interaction, development of the collective
in speech and action.

For all these reasons, and also for others who can not be captured on paper, they made a
collective experience, and resistance footprint at what dominates our declare consciously
accomplices and complicit in the crime of trying to create a new world, solidarity,
equality, freedom.

SOLIDARITY IN KATALIPSEIS &

IN THOSE FIGHTING & EPAs

demonstration | THIRD April 4 18.00 KAMARAS

New World

(Philip and Siatistis angle)

------------------------------

Message: 3

The Military Brigade used violence to vacate the City Council Chamber of Cachoeirinha this
morning. Rubber bullets and sound-shrapnel grenades were used against the municipal
workers who were in the fourth week of a strike and were occupying the Chamber to protest
austerity measures introduced by the municipal government. About fifteen people were
injured and three workers (two men and one woman) were arrested and taken to the police
station for processing.
Solidarity!
Freedom to those who are imprisoned for political dissent!
To struggle is not a crime!
http://www.anarkismo.net/article/30129

------------------------------

Message: 4

Three futures: Barbarism, UBI Warehousing or Anarchism ---- Our global society is broken.
Donald Trump & Brexit are symptoms along with the rise of the far right elsewhere in
Europe. In an old pattern, fundamental economic crisis often results in society becoming
very much more brutal for most people. In the age of nuclear weapons this current crisis
could be our last. And with a somewhat longer countdown to disaster we are also facing
climate catastrophe. ---- The crisis is fundamental rather than temporary because there
are two underlying factors that are irreversible. The first is the end of the era where
the environmental costs of growth could be mostly discounted in the belief that dilution
would neutralise pollution. For much of the industrial revolution the poisonous effluent
dumped into the ecosystem had only local severe effects with the vast oceans and
atmosphere diluting the pollutants enough that global effects were minor. This is no
longer the case with climate change being the most talked about of several examples where
the pollution generated by growth can no longer be absorbed without serious global
consequences.

[As this is a long read we have also made
the entire piece available on audio,
listen as you are doing the dishes
or you can download a PDF version]

Capitalism depends on constant growth and constant growth generates pollution. The stock
market boom following Trump taking power is a direct effect of him tearing up
environmental protection legislation, profits will increase because business will have to
cover less of the environmental cost. Our children will pay the bill for this short lived
boom for shareholders.

The Abolition of Work, or Employment?

The second fundamental aspect is automation. For much of human history the amount that
could be produced was very closely related to human effort. In a given set of conditions
the only way to produce more was to spend more human hours in production. At times of
empire building this drove incredible cruelty as expansion was dependent on conquest,
robbery and enslavement of populations who were then worked so hard that their death rate
greatly exceeded the reproduction rate.

The wealth that the European powers built the industrial revolution on was generated in
precisely this way, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of millions of people around the
planet as overwork and underfeeding left them vulnerable to disease and starvation. But
the industrial revolution also changed what had been a simple relationship between the
amount produced and the amount of human labour required. New machines started to allow a
single worker to do the work that once would have required 5, 10, 50 or 100. This process
was not independent of the environmental problem above but rather a cause of it as fossil
fuels provided almost all of the replacement muscle that drove the machines.

In today's networked age we are seeing a change that will have a bigger impact than the
industrial revolution on human society. As machines have become smarter the need to have
a worker guiding their actions has shrunk and shrunk. We have reached the stage where
very complex operations like driving a car on a busy road - that humans can only legally
do after a period of intense study - can now be done far better by computers. It will
take a while for production and the legal system to catch up but essentially we are
already at the point where taxi drivers, bus drivers and lorry drivers are hanging on to
those jobs by their fingernails. Retail stores including fast food restaurants are
replacing check out workers with machines. Banks and insurance companies are removing the
ability of customers to call into branches or talk to a humans on the phone, again people
being replaced by machines.

Trump & Brexit were driven by the false idea that it was migrants who were ‘taking jobs.'
Actually it is robots and realistically as smart automation escalates there are very few
jobs that will not be replaced. A tiny number of new jobs will be created but the low and
unskilled workers most affected by automation are locked out of those jobs by lack of
access to education.

Resisting the Machines?

In the early period of the industrial revolution we saw a very, very much weaker version
of this as textile workers found that a machine like the ‘Spinning Jenny' allowed a single
relatively low paid unskilled worker to replace dozens of skilled spinners. They
resisted, with some initial success. There are several lessons from that period.

Perhaps most importantly is that although the replacement workers operating the Spinning
Jenny replaced dozens they were considerably worse off than any worker they replaced. The
combination of deskilling and lack of ownership by the worker of the machines that
produced allowed the extreme ruthlessness of early capitalism that saw children working 12
hour days for pennies in extremely unhealthy conditions that killed many of them. The
capitalist got rich, the replacement worker was poorer than any of the 10 or 20 they
replaced. In fact that's how the capitalist got rich, suddenly they had the same amount
of goods from the labour of one worker that they previously had to pay 20 for.

Secondly skilled workers were aware of exactly what was happening and not only managed to
organise against this but put up a really strong fight. Under the brutal dictatorship
that existed at the time that executed and transported those that resisted they had to be
very secretive. This means we don't know the fine detail of how they organised that
resistance. But we do know that well organised, armed and large groups of workers who we
know as the ‘luddites' mobilised over relatively long periods of time to rise up and smash
the machines. And that it took the deployment of considerable military force over a period
of years to put them down.

This happened in Britain during the Napoleonic wars. Historian Eric Hobsbawm has pointed
out that although that war was a life and death struggle for the British ruling class at
one point they had more troops deployed putting down the luddites than fighting Napoleon.
The luddite movement smashed thousands of machines and was successful in slowing down the
rate at which their wages and conditions were destroyed but over a couple of decades the
employers imposed the new machines and with them the new and brutal working conditions and
low wages.

Machines replaced some skilled workers in Britain bit by bit over decades,the luddite
resistance of the 1810's was followed 20 years later by the Captain Swing riots against
the introduction of agricultural threshing machines. Todays automation is affecting a
very, very much larger percentage of the planet's population over a very much shorter span
of time. Left to ‘market forces' and state repression we can expect something very much
more severe but also involving far more people.

The Crisis is Already with Us

There is in fact a strong argument this is already in progress, the Arab spring of 2011,
Occupy and other moments of resistance are driven in part by mass youth unemployment.
Occupy is a well documented response to the capitalist crisis, in the case of the Arab
Spring Cairo based Dorothea Schmidt of the International Labour Organization looked at the
forces "that brought these mostly young people onto the streets. An extremely high youth
unemployment rate of 23.4 per cent in 2010, is one major but not the only cause for these
popular uprisings"   Rising food prices related to the impact of climate change on
production was also key in the Arab spring. The uprisings that started the revolution in
Algeria and Tunisia were directly caused by rising food prices and riots in response,
elsewhere they were an often mentioned backdrop.

Drought, in part from climate change, was a significant factor in the forces leading to
the Syrian revolution and extremely brutal Civil War that still rages on. Satellite
measurements show that the Tigris-Euphrates basin is losing groundwater at a faster rate
than anywhere else in the world, except Northern India, due to poor rainfall and over
extraction in particular by Turkey which has reduced water flow to Iraq by 80% and Syria
by 40%.

From 2006 the drought in Syria was causing tens of thousands of farmers to abandon their
land and move to the cities, adding to youth unemployment.   One academic study concluded
that this water crisis in Syria "contributed to the displacement of large populations from
rural to urban centers, food insecurity for more than a million people, and increased
unemployment-with subsequent effects on political stability. "

This causal factor has also been mentioned in studies of activists from the region. In
Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War the authors say "The situation was made
worse by the severe drought plaguing much of the country since 2006. Rural areas such as
the Jazeera (in the east) and the Hawran (in the south) were particularly hard-hit. By
2010 the drought had pushed between two and three million Syrians into extreme poverty,
destroying the livelihoods of around 800,000 farmers and herders". The also noted other
familiar causes "neo-liberal reforms were accompanied by the dismantling - by cutting
subsidies - of the economic safety net for the poor. Inequality grew, until 50 per cent of
the country's wealth was concentrated in the hands of 5 per cent of the population. High
unemployment, underemployment and low wages made it harder and harder to make ends meet.
In 2004, just over 30 per cent of the population (5.3 million people) lived in poverty,
rising to 62 per cent in rural areas ... Youth unemployment stood at a staggering 48 per
cent, with young women four times more likely to be unemployed than young men"

Revolution in Rojava, which often takes a sharply different perspective on the Syrian
conflict to Burning Country, also talks about the same causal factors pointing out that
"In 2012-13, long-predicted water shortages became a reality" and points to the difficulty
supplying water now presents to the revolution. "Wheat and cotton are Serekaniye's main
crops. Water for irrigation must be pumped from 200-500 meters below the surface, and the
pumps need to be powered by electricity, which has been cut off"

The World Has Changed

When you are in world changing historic events it's often hard to see that is the case.
Instead things appear disconnected and driven by individuals, group and ideology. Taking
a step back for a moment and we begin to see how climate change and unemployment although
driven from Silicon valley, the Ruhr and Shanghai has first disrupted regions which are
comparatively economically marginal like Syria, Egypt and Iraq. We can see how the tumult
that has spread out from there has then precisely shaped conditions in Silicon valley and
the Ruhr as ‘refugee panic' politics started to shape domestic politics. True the
automation that is most visible in those regions is the automatic mass killing of the
helicopter gunship and the remotely operated or autonomous drone, again linking us back to
the US.   The political shocks are not separate but part of the same crisis and can only
get much worse as the crisis escalates.

There is no going back. We can delay things by smashing the machines as the taxi drivers
of Paris have fought Uber. The experience of the Luddites (and indeed of print workers
and dockers last century) tell us such a fight is not futile. In the short term it can
protect wages and conditions, allowing that generation to raise their children in relative
comfort but those children don't inherit those well paid jobs.

History tells us that the market driven quest for profit will create replacement machines
and will station soldiers to guard them. And today we are at the edge of that moment when
those soldiers will no longer be humans whom we can call on to revolt but will be machines
themselves. The forces the US has deployed over much of the planet still require infantry
but most of the ongoing killing is already being carried out by human-machine hybrids that
were science fiction two decades ago.

Wealth Gap

There is a third factor worth mentioning, this one isn't irreversible or new but rather a
pattern of history. Thomas Piketty's ‘Capital in the 21st Century' may have been too
technical to be completed by many of its readers but it provided a clear illustration that
the wealth gap was rapidly increasing. And more importantly a warning that at a certain
point the effects of that gap on society made it almost impossible to reverse without
major warfare.

One measure of the escalating wealth gap is how many of the super rich hold the same
wealth as the poorest half of the planet's population. A decade back you could fit them
in a big jet plane like a 737, there were about 350 of them. A few years back that number
had shrunk to about 50, a coach-load. A couple of years ago it had shrunk to a small
bus-load. The latest Oxfam figure is that it is now a single car load, if you cram the 8
of them into a SUV.   Half of American adults have seen no increase in real wealth since
1980, for the top 1% wealth tripled in the same period and the increase was much greater
for the top 0.1 and 0.01%.

There are already examples in Mexico and Johannesburg and elsewhere of what happens when
the incredibly rich and the incredibly poor are crammed into the same urban landscapes.
It's an urban landscape of mansions surrounded by high walls, razor wire, CCTV cameras,
attack dogs and ‘shoot to kill' security. Those inside live in constant fear of those
starving outside and as a consequence increasingly brutal regimes of repression and murder
become normalised.

The Corporate Tech Overlords

Apple is now the largest corporation on the planet, a corporation whose business model is
built on removing elements of choice and control from their users in the belief that the
CEOs know best. For an increasing number of us, access to news and communications is
overwhelming filtered through Facebook algorithms. In the last decades a psychological
science of manipulation has developed where the goal has been to influence our unconscious
minds against both rational thought and better instinct.

Trump's idiotic neuro-linguistic programming where everything is fantastic, bad or
fakenews seems to have been enough to reach into the fear centres of a sizeable minority
of the population. The Economist reported that the best single predictor for a Trump
voter was poor health, indeed what other than sickness makes us vulnerable to hucksters
preying on our fears? Increasing insecurity in the workplace and subjecting welfare
payments to various tests adds to creating a constant situation of stress in many people's
lives that makes them vulnerable to the politics of fear and scapegoating.

The tech elite form a tiny, tiny percentage of the world's population but now hold in
their hands an enormous percentage of the world's wealth. The 8 people who own as much
wealth as half the world include Bill Gates (1), Carlos Slim (4), Jeff Bezos(5), Mark
Zuckerberg (6) and Larry Ellison (7). Those five are all rich from the technological
revolution of the last decades.

Gates, the richest of them, has become a sort of benevolent dictator. Having made an
enormous fortune he is now claims to be distributing that pile to those he considers to be
the most deserving poor. This has made him personally responsible for the life and death
of millions of people on the planet, in particular the children he has chosen to save
though funding inoculation programs. The stated goal is to prevent 11 million deaths by 2020.

We can be grateful with regard to Bill that a lucky dice roll meant that this Pharaoh has
chosen a benevolent old age - no doubt with an eye to how he is remembered - but history
is littered with examples of the rich and powerful who were not. How long do we want to
gamble on that dice roll. Larry Ellison for instance spent 130 million on his latest
super yacht and 500 million on buying the island of Lanai.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was named the world's worst boss by the International Trade Union
Confederation in 2014 as representing the "inhumanity of employers who are promoting the
American corporate model" There have been several exposés of the terrible conditions of
poorly paid Amazon warehouse workers, one reminder of the costs of automation, but as a
New York Times article showed conditions for White Collar workers are also terrible in
Amazon's ‘race to the bottom'

A lot of scientists are aware of these crisis. Stephen Hawking for instance has warned
several times of the consequences of automation and the futures which lie before us. But
is there a way out? Are we doomed?

Our methods of political discussion and decision making remain trapped in technologies
that are hundreds of years old because the limits that imposes suits those who have wealth
and power. That is illustrated by the complete ease with which complex cross border
financial transactions can be instantly completed. Yet the parliamentary system alongside
them is still at the equivalent point as when those transactions involved meetings in
particular dockside coffee shops to decide how the risk would be divided on ship voyages
that would take two years to return. The parliamentary system remains as is because a
process that involves the selection of a few to represent the views of millions without
being subject to mandate or recall is a system where those few can be bought.[Read more]

There are Three Futures.

The first future is the default one, what happens if we do nothing and just allow the
invisible hand of the market to rule. It's the process of the last 40 years, unleashed by
the neoliberal bloodletting that started literally with the dictator Pinochet in Chile and
developed under Reagan and Thatcher. Under this future the wealth gap becomes even more
extreme, the powerful become even more fearful of the rest of us and we increasingly fight
each other for the reduced resources that are allowed to trickle down to the jobless
majority. At best we hope for benevolent pharaohs like Gates rather than self obsessed
ones like Bezos or Zuckerberg so that we are at least allowed to survive rather than
starve or die in the resource civil wars. But perhaps there is no hope at all if the worst
climate change models play out and a positive feedback loop results in run-away warming.

Second Future

The second is the one that an increasing number of the elite are turning to because they
also aren't that keen about the world of fear and helicopter gunships that also lies in
their future. Economist Mark Blyth has a nice line on this that "the Hamptons are not a
defensible position". The Hamptons being the super rich zone on the beaches above New York
where billionaire New Yorkers have their weekend mansions. Perhaps in recognition of the
indefensible nature of this strip of land an hour from the millions in New York it has
recently emerged that several tech billionaires have bought large landholdings in New
Zealand where they are building luxury bunkers. New Zealand being sparsely populated and
a long way from anywhere else being judged to be the safest available bolt hole if the
shit really hits the fan as a result of the future they are building.

The New Yorker published a long read on these super wealthy ‘preppers' in which they quote
LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman. What he had to say deserves a lengthy extract he
"recalls telling a friend that he was thinking of visiting New Zealand.
"Oh, are you going to get apocalypse insurance?" the friend asked.
"I'm, like, Huh?" Hoffman told me.
New Zealand, he discovered, is a favored refuge in the event of a cataclysm. Hoffman said,
"Saying you're ‘buying a house in New Zealand' is kind of a wink, wink, say no more. Once
you've done the Masonic handshake, they'll be, like, ‘Oh, you know, I have a broker who
sells old ICBM silos, and they're nuclear-hardened, and they kind of look like they would
be interesting to live in.' "

Hoffman then estimates half of his fellow Silicon Valley billionaires have acquired some
sort of "apocalypse insurance," hideaway in the U.S. or abroad saying "The fears vary, but
many worry that, as artificial intelligence takes away a growing share of jobs, there will
be a backlash against Silicon Valley". "I've heard this theme from a bunch of people,"
Hoffman said. "Is the country going to turn against the wealthy? Is it going to turn
against technological innovation? Is it going to turn into civil disorder?"

It would be a pretty miserable world to live in even if you were one of the wealthy few
gazing out at the chaos from behind electric fences. Evan Osnos, the author of the New
Yorker piece, visited the Survival Condo Project, a fifteen-story luxury apartment
complex built in an underground nuclear missile silo in Kansas and was told ""It's true
relaxation for the ultra-wealthy," he said. "They can come out here, they know there are
armed guards outside. The kids can run around." The apartments, all of which have been
sold, cost 3 million dollars for a full one and come with the assurance that in a crisis
you will be picked up anywhere within 400 miles by an armoured truck to be brought to the
silo. The truck has a heavy machine gun mounted on it just in case the mob gets in the
way. There are also armed guards and a sniper tower protecting the compound although the
view from deep underground has to be provided by LED screens acting as windows that show a
live view of the Prairie above or if the owner prefers a pine forest or even a busy New
York street scene!

That gun-toting fear ridden underground existence sounds a little bit miserable, something
many of the super rich recognise. And how certainly safe is flight anyway? The same New
Yorker piece talked to a ex investment banker Robert H. Dugger who reported on a dinner
party conversation of one such group of billionaire preppers where on hearing of plans to
fly to safety in the event of a mass rebellion a guest asked ‘Are you taking your pilot's
family, too? And what about the maintenance guys? If revolutionaries are kicking in doors,
how many of the people in your life will you have to take with you?' The questioning
continued. In the end, most agreed they couldn't run."

Finally the super rich also have to again consider that Climate Change is such a global
threat that sooner or later it might even get them and their descendants. Of course the
poor will die in their droves first, indeed they already are, but there is a danger of
hitting a positive feedback tipping point where the Earth ends up like Venus, so hot no
one survives.

So it's perhaps not surprising that a section of the super wealthy elite favour reducing
the problem created by the escalating wealth divide, as Dugger says "It's a reason most of
them give money to good causes". This future is the warehousing strategy of introducing a
Universal Basic Income (UBI) for those lucky enough to be born in the already
industrialised zones where most of the super rich live. When the need for our labour ends
rather than leaving us to starve (and perhaps rob them if not revolt) the elite want to
give us enough of an income to survive on. UBI would involve every citizen or resident
(and that distinction is important) being given a regular unconditional sum of money in
addition to any income received from elsewhere. In most forms of UBI this is enough money
to look after essential needs including housing and healthcare.

This warehousing may appear more attractive to some of us but it also moves us inside the
borders of fear. It inevitably involves escalating the slamming of the door on those
trapped outside because of where they happened to be born. Thousands of people have died
trying to cross the EU borders this year without the magic of the right passport. Even as
I type this I've received a new notification that dozens of bodies of the drowned have
just been found along the coast of Libya, another ship must have gone down.

UBI would also do little against the other looming disasters related to growth and
pollution, in particular climate change. It would have some impact as the super wealthy
would be slightly less powerful so environmental protection laws would be stronger but
capitalism and its need for incessant growth would survive and continue to deepen that
crisis. UBI has also become a cover in many countries for the final abolition of the
welfare state as parties say they will fund it by abolishing entitlement to services which
people will then have to buy.

In countries like Ireland where a welfare system exists mainstream parties have started to
talk about UBI as a way of eliminating bureaucracy and introducing market competition. In
practise that translated into eliminating yet more jobs - in the public sector - and
replacing only some of them with what would be much more insecure private sector jobs. UBI
was even favourably put forward - as ‘negative taxation' - by Milton Friedman, the chief
economist promoting neoliberalism who also advised Pinochet on the post-coup destruction
of workers' gains in Chile.

Third Future

The third future requires a leap in social organisation that is at least as big as the
leap that was made between the absolute monarchies of the 1600s and the republican
democracies that spread from the 1780s. That is at a planet wide level we abolish
inequality of access to resources and inequality of power. There will no longer be some
people who own super yachts and entire islands while others watch their children die of
starvation. The full environmental costs of growth will have to be factored into every
new development because we will no longer havr a system where some can use their wealth to
evade the consequences while others are forced to live in the filth generated.

That future has been glimpsed as long as humans have been around. Arguably we spent our
first couple of hundred thousand years in something quite like it. Gather Hunter
societies didn't have a surplus that could be hoarded and that lack of wealth meant there
wasn't much opportunity for power. Biology placed limitations that today we can escape,
for instance child birth often killed women, but in many respects they were quite equal
societies.

It was only with the creation of agriculture that large surpluses of food could be
produced and hoarded. And that meant that humans could fight each other to get control of
the hoard, and perhaps quite quickly that translated into those with control paying a
segment of the stronger and more violent section of the population to keep the rest in
check. We spent the last 10,000 years developing that system to the absolute monarchies
and it's only in the last 200 years we have begun to limit the power of the hoarders
through politics. The danger is that military automation means they are about to escape
those limitations we imposed through mass organisation.

That third future is now more possible than ever before. We can produce enough to ensure
all our needs, globally, are fulfilled and automation rather than being a threat can mean
that we can end work. From the agricultural revolution on most of us have had to work
long hours for the hoarders to survive and perhaps had little control over that work.
Automation could mean that the hard graft of paid work vanishes to be replaced by work for
pleasure. The difference between back breaking work in a field 10 hours a day harvesting
potatoes and spending a few hours a week pottering around in your garden.

Discussion and decision making have also become vastly simpler. Only 40 years ago there
was no way for masses of people to communicate with each other over distances. Discussion
was one-to-many only, via radio and TV or in print media. Today a vast host of online
tools allow such many to many discussions. Issue based voting has also become very much
simpler, even if its major use now is click bait polling by online news sites. And
electronic tallying means that complex polling is now very straightforward, there is no
need to limit decisions to simple yes/no choices when the full range of options can be
polled and counted instantaneously.

The third future is one without the division into order giver and order taker or the
related one into rich and poor. These would not simply be huge economic and political
transformation, the effect of them would also would transform in a very deep way what it
means to be human. Our interactions would no longer be governed by fear and power, our
potential to live fully would be released. The mental and physical labour we performed
would be to enrich all those around us rather than a question of performing repetitive
tasks because that alienation from our own labour is the only way of keeping a roof above
our heads.

We are so close that we can almost reach out and touch the world which earlier people
could only imagine. But the window of opportunity to bring it into being may be short,
indeed for the reasons outlined above it is already closing, We know from history how we
can win: through collective organisation. And today that is easier to do than ever before
in many respects, in particular the access almost all of us have to global mass
communication. The question is are you willing to take the step and start organising with
others to make this dream the future we will step into?

Words: Andrew Flood

Related Link: http://anarchism.pageabode.com/cat/networked-revolution

http://www.anarkismo.net/article/30127

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Message: 5

The opportunity to debate a different way of changing society than the current political
system, what society we want in the long term and now what we can build in our workplaces,
studies and Life as alternatives.

April 6th at 8pm
Cité Allende (association house), 12 rue Colbert in Lorient
audiovisual room

http://www.alternativelibertaire.org/?Les-elus-ne-representent-qu-eux-memes-democratie-directe

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Message: 6

Picadilly workers, one of the largest supermarket chains in Bulgaria, along with
anarcho-syndicalists from the Autonomous Workers' Association (APC) continue the wildcat
strikes across the country. The reason is the theft of wages - workers have not been paid
for months. The owners of the company and the top executives hide and refuse to give any
explanation. The demands of the workers are the immediate payment of wages and all
benefits. Recently they occupied the access of the company's headquarters in Sofia, the
capital of Bulgaria, but were surrounded by private security sent by members of the
management of the company that were hidden inside the building. ---- In Varna, angry
workers blocked the company's largest supermarket in the city. Following that, they
marched to Investbank (the bank that controls the company's assets), requiring the bank to
unlock the payments. Some workers entered the bank while the others stood outside on
strike pickets.

The company is owned by Nikolay Lazarov through an offshore company   based in Luxembourg.

Source, more photos:
http://arsindikat.org/bg/2017/03/21/wildcat-strikes-in-one-of-the-largest-retailers-in-bulgaria/

Translation> Biel Rothaar

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Message: 7

On Thursday, March 2 to 22 years old nteliveras Mikel injured at work. A week later he
left his last breath in the Athens hospital. A few days earlier distributor company
Speedex also killed at work. These two workers dolofonie s joins and another in less than
a month. On Monday March 13 a worker, crane operator in the Metro works in Thessaloniki
Kalamaria, dies when handling the vehicle overturned and crushed him. ---- These facts or
as accidental nor as isolated can be characterized. Understandings and austerity measures
in recent years have been imposed as a result of systemic crisis , and as a component of
growing and increasing in intensity attack the ruling class at the bottom , have led to an
even greater deterioration of the situation of workers and a total of plebeian mattresses
a situation which is constantly worsening , regardless of the respective civilian staff
manages the Greek state keys (coalition Syriza-An.El.), as it comes as goes with extension
the regime "emergency" as it imposed on the social body to meet the needs of power.

The violent ftochopoiisi population, the permanent longer fear unemployment, uncertainty
about the next day, the gradual dismantling of labor relations and to circumvent basic
labor rights - rights that were won by racing times and the blood - make up the framework
within which rewritten the camp of dominance , structuring the further exploitation of
workers in the profits of local and international masters.

A framework in which economic and physical extermination of workers are now routine. The
intensification of work, salaries and wages hunger , the exhausting hours, precarity and
black labor, workers rental (modern slave markets of capitalism, as is in fact the
so-called Temporary Employment Agencies), and the lack of safety measures , are added to
hard labor reality . A reality where the primary purpose of the bosses is that at any cost
increase profitability, without regard for human life . Openly now the rulers admit that
employees and workers are nothing more than numbers in the lists of employers, with the
same address: that of perissefoumenon and consumables.

These deaths, the working murders , multiply and increasingly are becoming a more common
phenomenon. It's characteristic is clear that as the intensity of exploitation is growing,
gaining human brutalization reaching the degree of familiarity with death, as part of
everyday life. She thanatopolitiki responsible for immigrant murders at land and water
borders, not just the Greek state, but at European level is the same as condemning workers
to insecurity, risk, unemployment, "consumability" . Is the gloomy face of modern
totalitarianism as manifested at the expense of the oppressed of this world and in the
interests of the ruling classes.

Do not get used to death! Within these medieval working conditions, only answer the
orchestrated attack the state and capital can become the syllogikopoiisi and organize
resistances through akidemoneftous class, social struggles . Against the bureaucratic and
governmental trade unionism, we strengthen the base unions and employee initiatives . We
fight for humane working conditions, better wages, we claim what belongs to us . We defend
the right to housing and all social goods (water, electricity). Moving the connecting
direction with the other struggling parts of society to create a wide unmediated social,
class movement.

Not forget our dead! Not only recent events in Mikel, the Speedex and the Thessaloniki
Metro and the murder of four workers in HEP and a worker in a hotel Zakynthos summer of
2015, the death of a worker at Everest few months ago and dozens more killings baptized as
accidents.

Struggling LIFE AND DIGNITY

AGAINST STATE, CAPITAL, CAPITALISM

ALL / ALL THE WAY DEFENSE squatting, TAXIKIS OF MEMORY, THE THIRD fascism 4/4 TO 18.00 CHAMBER

Collegiality for social anarchism "Black & Red", a member of the Anarchist
Organization-C.c Policy.

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