Below is an interview I did for UTNE Reader about FaceLeft. There are various other accounts available online, of course. FaceLeft is a social networking system meant to federate progressive organizations from all over the world, benefitting each materially and of course socially and politically. The first hosts of subsystems are Z - who got the ball rolling - UTNEReader, Syriza (the Greek left party), and Dollars and Sense (an American economic monthly). You can see ZSocial…

  Preface             This is an essay based on a presentation that I recently gave at the Anarchist Bookfair in NYC. I welcome feedback and constructive critique, as I hope to use much of this as a basis for my part in an IOPS panel at the NYC Left Forum on June 7-8, 2013. Much of this information and all the page citations are based on the analysis and history in the book “Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism…

It has come to my attention, with the release of the "Preconditions for the IOPS Founding Convention" polling results, that we have what I would consider an unsatisfactory process. As an example I will reference the first question, "How many online members do we need to have before the founding convention?", to point out the flaw. As it stands, "Less than 5,000" is the top answer and winning option with 189 votes, but a total of 362 votes were tallied for "5,000", "7,500", and "10,000." In this…

Fellow IOPS members, Stephen Roblin and Jason Chrysostomou and I would like to interview three of four members of the Organisation for a Free Society in the upcoming weeks. We've worked on an introduction and come up with some (too many!) questions. If anyone has any suggestions for the interview, please feel free to offer them in the comment section below. Thank you in advance. Preeti Introduction In 2008, several activists and organizers who were heavily involved in the student,…

In a media alert earlier this year, we described our under-resourced challenges of the corporate media as 'jousting with toothpicks'. Although the analogy was light-hearted, the work of Media Lens is serious and would not be possible without your support. Our alerts and books are regularly cited and praised by readers, including journalists, academics and activists; but especially by so-called ordinary people who recognise that the corporate news media keeps the public ignorant about much that is…

Last year, I devised what I called a "ten-year plan" of activism for myself to help build towards participatory economy. I'd like to share that plan here: Step One - Write a blog consistently to chronicle it all. (Status: Done!) :-) Step Two - Devise some database, or simulacrum, or role-playing game of sorts, for a participatory economy. The idea is to show to ourselves (that is, parecon advocates) that the idea, frankly, is worth pursuing. If it's not, we can drop the idea and look for something…

Let me share two quotes:Quote one: Larry Page, one of the co-founders of Google, once gave the commencement address at his (and my) alma mater, the University of Michigan.  He said: "I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams.  I know that sounds completely nuts. But, since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition."  Quote two, but some background first: PHP is a very common programming language that's used for development on the…

  Members of the IOPS Project 'Study Group on the Role of a Revolutionary Organization' have been meeting on-line on Skype since February this year (2013). The texts that we have been reading are outlined below. Members of the Organisation for a Free Society (OFS) join our conversations also. OFS is based on the same ideas as IOPS and is local to New York and Detriot.  Project: http://www.iopsociety.org/projects/study-group-on-the-role-of-a-revolutionary-organization We have collectively…

In this blog, I report on the results of the Preconditions for the IOPS Founding Convention poll, and share my own personal views on the results. A quick resume of the results: In one year – april 2014 – we shall decide where, when and how we will have our international founding convention. This was one of the two clear results we got out of this poll. The other one was that we're enough online members to proceed. So, it's time to prepare we lack, not number of online members. Furthermore,…