The Isocracy Network

Presentation to the Isocracy Network Annual General Meeting, 13 August 2014

The subject of this forum is peace with justice in Israel and Palestine. It's a subject over which many people who understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict far better than myself have written a great deal.

I'm not even going to try to come up with my own plan to come up with a prediction or a plan of how to achieve peace and justice in Palestine because I do not consider myself qualified to do so. What I intend to do this evening is outline what I see as the main obstacles to peace with justice.

"Many readers will remember Tom Barker, one time of Auckland," reported the Maoriland Worker in 1921:

who, under the pen-name of "Spanwire", used to write Auckland notes for this paper. Since Tom gave up punching tickets and collecting fares on the trams of the Queen City, he has had enough of adventure to satisfy a dozen men... Incidentally he mentions that he is writing a book, "An Industrial Handbook on the Marine Transport Industry".

I discovered the existence of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or 'Wobbly') pamphlet The Story of the Sea: Marine Transport Workers' Handbook almost by accident, during a keyword search in the Australian National Library. I was looking for background on early 20th century marine transport workers, and their participation in the IWW. It was one of those serendipitous discoveries that often happen in the obscure and under-researched field of radical working-class history. The author of the pamphlet was not identified, but once I checked the US IWW monthly publications from this era, where the pamphlet was originally published as a series of articles, the pieces fell into place. For the author was none other than the legendary Antipodean Wobbly, Tom Barker.

"Many readers will remember Tom Barker, one time of Auckland," reported the Maoriland Worker in 1921:

who, under the pen-name of "Spanwire", used to write Auckland notes for this paper. Since Tom gave up punching tickets and collecting fares on the trams of the Queen City, he has had enough of adventure to satisfy a dozen men... Incidentally he mentions that he is writing a book, "An Industrial Handbook on the Marine Transport Industry".

I discovered the existence of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or 'Wobbly') pamphlet The Story of the Sea: Marine Transport Workers' Handbook almost by accident, during a keyword search in the Australian National Library. I was looking for background on early 20th century marine transport workers, and their participation in the IWW. It was one of those serendipitous discoveries that often happen in the obscure and under-researched field of radical working-class history. The author of the pamphlet was not identified, but once I checked the US IWW monthly publications from this era, where the pamphlet was originally published as a series of articles, the pieces fell into place. For the author was none other than the legendary Antipodean Wobbly, Tom Barker.

It's been argued that contemporary mutualism is largely an Internet based movement and has lacked any relevance since the mid-19th century. However, it is worth remembering that if it wasn't for Mutualism, there would be no worker unions or co-operative federations.

To begin with, in 1857, Eugene Varlin founded a bookbinders' mutual aid society, becoming the nucleus of a bookbinders' trade union + he founded the bookbinders' mutual savings and credit association, organised along Proudhonist lines. Believing in sexual equality, he promoted the anarchist feminist Nathalie Lemel within the credit union. The Workers' Mutual Help Association was formed in Bologna, 1860 to safeguard employment, education, right to strike and universal suffrage. The International Workingmen’s Association was established by the Proudhonist Henri Tolain in July 1863, of which Varlin was a member.

Varlin organised the very first strike of the Parisian bookbinders in 1864 which was a success. In 1867 he and Nathalie Lemel started a co-operative La Ménagère. In 1868 Varlin and Lemel co-founded the co-operative restaurant La Marmite, which remained in business until after the Paris Commune. Varlin believed that trade unions should overcome their professional, local and national sectarianism to form a united international labour movement, dedicated, "to the constant improvement of the conditions of existence of ... the workers of all professions and all countries and to [bringing] workers into possession of the instruments of their labour", as the statutes of his bookbinders' union put it.

Presentation to the Isocracy Network on Friday April 19, 2014 at Trades Hall. PDF slides of the presentation are also available.

What I'm going to try and do tonight is do more than simply discuss how terrible the human rights situation is in North Korea. I will speak about that, but what I think will be far more useful will be to explain how things got to where they are, and what I believe the possibilities for progress are. To do this we first must go back in time, and while giving some general background I will touch on a few things that tend to get overlooked in mainstream accounts that I think are very important for understanding North Korea. Now, to tell the history of North Korea is to tell the history of Kim Il-sung, as perhaps more than any other state in history, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea or DPRK was, and continues to be, shaped by the character of its founder and leader for almost 50 years.

North Korea has been described by former Australian justice Michael Kirby, in a report to the United Nations Human Rights Councils, as committing crimes against humanity. The report accused the regime of mass killings and torture and said responsible officials should face the International Criminal Court.