Saturday, December 06, 2003

I have never felt totally comfortable with the anti-globalization movement. Obviously I support its aims of stopping the WTO and the IMF in their despicable tracks, but, even before I could read science fiction, I consumed far too much Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, and was filled with ideas of World Government, the UN, and a one-planet utopia. Later my travels, Bucky Fuller, and the clear need to consider a fragile whole-earth reinforced this that we are all one on the spaceship together. Thus aspects of the movement can’t help but strike me, maybe incorrectly, as echoes of counter revolutionary, proletariat chauvinism. It also occurres to me that maybe globalism is the weapon to fight globalism, and there’s been a model around for a century or more that might the reexamined. Yes, my friends, the IWW – International Workers of the World – the Wobblies, one big union. Scoff as you may, they scared the shit out of the plutocrats back at the start of the 20th century. They stuck it to those boys worse than they stuck it to the Black Panthers fifty years later. They killed them. Must have been doing something right.

Wasn't it Ronald Reagan who voiced on radio that he would like to see the world united by an alien invasion. (Of course it was. The Deviants sampled the speech for the start of the tune "Aztec Calendar".

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