Oaxaca, Saturday, December 28, 2002

Friends,

      You might be interested in an article, "Building the Global Grassroots
Infrastructure: A task both local and global" that I just posted on my
website at:

http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strategy/Infrastructure/

The first three paragraphs follow:

      The focus here is on down-to-earth efforts to create the kind of
world we want for ourselves, our children and our grandchildren. It's part
of an evolving strategy for revolution, not for a violent revolution, but
for a vast variety of constructive efforts aimed at gaining control over our
own lives, the kind of revolution envisioned by Jared James in his essay
Getting Free. We take as our starting point the assumption that all people
are human beings, that all of us experience pain and suffering, and that the
true measure of a civilization is how successful it is in minimizing the
avoidable suffering of each person.

          A second assumption is that humans are not born to be "bad", that
is, we are not a "genetically flawed" species biologically programmed to do
harmful things to one another. This is a basic assumption of anarchism. It
follows, if one accepts this assumption, that the harmful things people
knowingly do to one another are a consequence of social conditioning, i.e.
of the social conditions in which we live.

          Our third major assumption is that the currently dominant system
of capitalism, of global extent, is extremely destructive, both of people
and of the biosphere, and that these bad consequences are inherent in the
system, which cannot be reformed; it must be totally replaced. That is why
we call it a revolution. At the heart of the system we want to construct
must be human values that hold life sacred and that maximize, as much as
possible within communal bounds, individual freedom and autonomy.