[lbo-talk] Re: Nathan's "Fun Tool"

Tom Wetzel tomwetzel at sbcglobal.net
Fri Mar 4 13:22:42 PST 2005


This is in reply to something a couple weeks ago that I only just came across.

John Lacny commenting on the leftist conspiracy list being promoted by David Horowitz:


>The rationale for inclusion here is obviously arbitrary. There are >plenty
of the usual suspects, but also some really obscure >figures (for example, who the hell are Flint Jones and Tom >Wetzel?) for which the site even has photos; most hilariously, >though, people like Henri Barbusse and Theodore
> Dreiser make the list, apparently for their ability to carry out the
> leftist conspiracy from beyond the grave.

I was surprised that i was included but the principle of inclusion is hard to fathom. It's easy for me to trace the source of my inclusion since an article posted on ZNet is the only place I've publically said I was a member of Workers Solidarity Alliance. But WSA, an anarcho-syndicalist political group, which is profiled in the groups section (no doubt due to their following the link to the WSA webpage from my ZNet piece), is a pretty tiny group. At it's height circa 1990 it had about 45 members and four or five branches. I was also coordinator of the magazine ideas & action, which Doug may remember as we had an exchange with LBO.

As Steve Gotzler said in a previous post, I taught philosophy at UWM in Milwaukee for about five years in the late '70s, which is when I met Steve, and then moved back to California, working as a typesetter and then a technical writer, living in San Francisco. These days my main political activity is helping to build a community land trust in San Francisco. David Solnit asked me to write an article that would take the concept of a community land trust as far as it would go, and so that was the origin of my essay "The Capitalist City or the Self-managed City?" in Solnit's anthology, "Globalize Liberation."

Flint Jones may have been included on the list because they wanted to tag someone involved in NEFAC (North-East Federation of Anarchist-Communists). NEFAC is currently the largest class struggle anarchist group outside the IWW in the U.S., I think.

Tom Wetzel



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