Comments Elsewhere

Hidden Author: There are literally billions of people who are poorer than the vast majority of Americans. Do you think there's room for all of them?

If you're going to claim that the decision to move is being motivated strictly by economic calculations, then of course the answer is that "room" for people to live in is not a fixed quantity (you can't find out the answer to your question by dividing the spatial volume of the United States by the number of people who could be physically packed into it). It's a good which is subject to adjustable expectations and which is produced and sold on the market. If a lot of people all want some room to live in a given place, then either (a) they can all get it at the going rates (supply is already abundant), or (b) they can all get it because their demand will encourage increased production of places to live (demand will be met through entrepreneurship), or (c) some can get it but not all because the increased demand leads to increased housing costs (demand drops to meet available supply), or, I guess, (d) some can get it but not all because some use coercive means to lock others out., or (e) everybody scrambles for it and use coercive means to fight over who gets there first, or who gets to stay.

You seem to be fixated on option (d) or option (e) as the only available options. I'm not sure why, although I guess that it's probably connected to your decision to look at a question like, "Who might opt to move to the U.S. if they were somehow transported magically for free without any consideration of housing, work opportunities or transport costs? Then, once they were magically transported, where would they go to?" rather than actually looking at this as an economic question subject to ordinary economic considerations like the law of demand. Now there are of course many obstacles besides borders to the functioning of peaceful market dynamics in land and housing right now, but as anarchists we would destroy those obstacles as readily as we would destroy borders. And even with those obstacles in place, people make do as best they can. If constraints on housing markets remained in place but "literally billions of people" were all looking to move to places in the US at roughly the same time, then what would immediately happen is that housing markets would become extremely tight, until there were no longer billions of people who considered it a feasible plan anymore.
My recent post Anarchist Communications: Ask an Anarchist! comes to Oklahoma

true anarchy', defined as 'free citizens cooperating without a government' is always subject to breaking down the way Somalia has . . .

. . . Maybe so. In this world hopes sometimes fail and things fall apart. But I notice that Somalia had a government immediately before things "broke down" into civil war, and that the present conditions of the civil war seem to have a lot to do with the concerted actions of several different governments, including at least one directly claiming the right to rule Somalia. So why is Somalia an illustration of the propensity of anarchy to break down into civil war? It seems rather like an illustration of the propensity of government to break down into civil war, since that is, you know, what happened, and what sustains conditions as they are.

. . . "Forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old" is actually a phrase from the [Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World](http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml), with the "structure" in question mainly supposed to refer to rank-and-file-run radical industrial unionism. So whatever it ultimately means, it's something that syndicalists of all sorts are very often committed to, and also not something that's supposed to be "rather than" radical unionization. To further complicate things, the predominant ideas in the IWW are not mutualist, but many mutualists are members (including myself). So if the IWW is taken as a representative of syndicalist ideas (which I think is fair, at least as rough guide) there are many of us who think that syndicalist ideas about strategy (focusing on industrial unionization, radical solidarity, and developing capacity to withhold labor power and exercise worker control at the point of production) are not necessarily contradictory with mutualist ideals about what a worker-owned free society might look like.

. . . "Forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old" is actually a phrase from the Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World, with the "structure" in question mainly supposed to refer to rank-and-file-run radical industrial unionism. So whatever it ultimately means, it’s something that syndicalists of all sorts are very often committed to, and also not something that’s supposed to be "rather than" radical unionization. To further complicate things, the predominant ideas in the IWW are not mutualist, but many mutualists are members (including myself). So if the IWW is taken as a representative of syndicalist ideas (which I think is fair, at least as rough guide) there are many of us who think that syndicalist ideas about strategy (focusing on industrial unionization, radical solidarity, and developing capacity to withhold labor power and exercise worker control at the point of production) are not necessarily contradictory with mutualist ideals about what a worker-owned free society might look like.

There are four links after the libcom news update, not two, and a fifth link to El Libertario's website, which has several years of back issues (unfortunately mostly locked up in big PDF blobs). I'm sorry you have trouble reading them; I agree that the formatting is a problem, and while I wish that El Libertario would post translations of everything and that it would all be formatted beautifully in HTML, they are busy people and we're not their primary audience. If you want to put in the time to learn more about the situation for yourself, then I've tried to give you some starting points regarding how social movements, and anarchists in particular have actually been treated in Chavez's Venezuela. (Starting with Anarchist comrades who have lived through Chavez's Venezuela, such as El Libertario and CNA.) If you can't make use of that citation, then it sucks that we're stuck in that situation for the moment, but I do have the sources, and it's the best I can do for you in the absence of more comprehensive translation efforts. I'll let rechelon speak for himself as to what he intended to imply, or not to imply. But when it comes to "Anarchists get arrested during protests everywhere," I will say, for myself, that I never claimed Chavez's government was categorically more brutal to Anarchists than, say, the United States government has been to comrades in Seattle, Philadelphia, Miami, St. Paul, etc. What I will say is that they are in almost every way *exactly the same* when it comes to locking up Anarchists. And that's a damning indictment of Chavez's government.

Here are some basic starting points on the Venezuelan government's repression of social protest, including the jailing of anarchists, dissident unionists and human rights observers. http://libcom.org/news/venezuela-43-arrests-union-march-maracay-12032010 http://www.nodo50.org/ellibertario/english/Why%20popular%20protest-ingles.txt http://www.nodo50.org/ellibertario/english/jails%20bars%202010.txt http://www.nodo50.org/ellibertario/english/campaignsocialprotest-2009.txt http://www.nodo50.org/ellibertario/english/On%20infiltration.txt I picked these out because they are what I found very quickly that was available in English. If you can read Spanish I would suggest picking up literally any issue of [El Libertario](http://www.nodo50.org/ellibertario/), which almost always includes columns and news updates about imprisoned comrades, prison support campaigns, etc., carried a regular feature on prisoners by the Cruz Negra Anarquista de Venezuela back when the latter was more active, etc.