Hello, hello, hello, and welcome. I'm Merron Khalili. We are DM 25, a radical political movement for Europe. And this is another live debate with our coordinating team featuring subversive ideas you won't hear anywhere else. And today we're talking about how to make Amazon pay. Amazon is a company that emits more CO2 than three quarters of the world's countries combined. And last year, its emissions actually rose by 18%. It's a company that recently cut its workers' wages in the middle of a cost of living crisis while it made record revenues, $121 billion it made in the second quarter of 2022. It's a company whose warehouse conditions have been condemned by rights groups and workers for years with adjectives like grueling and unsafe. It's a company that actively suppresses workers' efforts to organize for better conditions. It's a company that doesn't contribute. It paid no income tax in Europe last year and instead was given 1 billion euros in tax credits.  So here's that phrase that I often find myself using in these calls. What can we do about it? Well, the good news is that for the third year running, a global coalition of trade unions and political organizations, including us here at DM25, will stand together against Amazon on Black Friday, that's this Friday, three days from now. We're organizing a day of action with strikes and protests around the world to call for an end to Amazon's squeeze on workers, communities, and the planet. So that's the subject of today's call. What have we learned from previous organizing efforts against Amazon and how can we use Amazon's global presence against the company to support these campaigns across borders? And what does the fight against Amazon tell us about our struggle against capitalism more broadly? Our panel, including Daniel Copp, who's our special guest today, who's coordinating the Make Amazon Pay campaign, as well as our own Gannis Spirofrakis and our team of campaigning and policy experts will be weighing in on these questions and you. If you've got thoughts, comments, questions, rants, concerns, things to get off your chest, then please do put them in the YouTube chat and we'll put them to our panel. Let's kick off with Daniel. Over to you. The floor is yours. Thank you so much, Mehran. And thank you for having me on the panel today. And I'm glad to speak to all of you and those who are watching. For those who don't know about the Make Amazon Pay campaign, I think it makes sense to go back around two years to explain a little bit where it's coming from, its motivations, its strategy, and its very ambitious goal of making Amazon Pay. In May 2020, the Progressive International, of which DM is a founding member, was founded with the very lofty ambition of uniting, organizing and mobilizing progressive forces. And already back then it was clear to us that Amazon would be a prime target to sort of fill that lofty ambition with life. Why Amazon? First, it was a particular moment during the pandemic when brick-and-mortar stores were closed and Amazon had this explosive growth. It essentially became an essential service to many people who couldn't go to stores. While at the same time it was treating its workers very badly, they weren't given adequate protective equipment, masks, many of them actually died of COVID during the pandemic. So there was something brewing at the time. So, and obviously Jeff Bezos famously became the richest person during the pandemic. So it was a very symbolic target to test out proper transnational organizing. But then at the same time, we already saw that a lot of organizing was going on in different spheres and in different geographies. So we said, why not bring all of these organizations, whether that's the established trade unions, other workers organizations like Amazon Workers International, climate groups, tax watch dogs, citizens groups that are fighting against the construction of Amazon warehouses in their neighborhoods and consumer organizations together under one umbrella and have them take action on one joint global day of action. So with this in mind, we brought together this coalition. We had them draft a set of common demands that we want to win essentially from Amazon as part of this campaign. And we organized the first global day of action on Black Friday in 2020 to, I think, major success. We had coordinated strikes and actions in 15 countries. We had lots of different people taking action in support of striking Amazon workers. We had a super good digital strategy. Our videos went viral. The make Amazon pay hashtag till this day is used by people to kind of voice their grievances towards Amazon. So I think this was a really good start and showed that the coalition is more than the sum of its parts. A year later, we organized another global day of action. I think what was remarkable about that one was not just that it was geographically more broad. So we had actions in around 20 countries, but also its steps. So we organized all the way down the supply chain, for example, with garment workers in Bangladesh and Cambodia that are supplying Amazon directly and that actually weren't paid during the pandemic. So it gave this whole another dimension to sort of the Amazon struggle. And now this year in three days actually, we'll have our next global day of action and without me being able to give too much away already, I think I can safely say without exaggeration that it's gonna be historic, both in the depth of the transnational organizing and in the breadth of the geography. So we're expecting at least 100 actions in 30 places around the world and 30 countries around the world. Also in countries where we haven't organized before, notably Japan, where Amazon workers have recently founded their first two unions, which was a great success. And so I'm excited for the day and I would ask everyone who's watching this and who's excited about the campaign to check out our website, makeamazonpay.com, where we have all the actions that are happening listed on a map and to join those actions. And if they can't join those actions to organize their own and make some noise on the day. And I'm happy to take this conversation forward with all of you about what will happen on Black Friday, how we can take on Amazon and what our campaign should do in the future. So thanks a lot. Thanks for setting the scene there, Daniel. Janis? Amazon is not just another company and it's not so much size. Of course, size is crucial in terms of its impact on the environment, on the number of workers it exploits, the footprint is large and that matters. But it's not just size. It is, from where I'm standing, from my perspective, it is the beginning of a major apocal historic transformation. Not too dissimilar to what the Dark Satanic Mills, this was Edmund Burke's description of the factories in the late 18th century where for feudalism, the ashering in of capitalism, of a completely different level of excretation, a different process, system for exploiting humans producing enormous wealth and, of course, setting the scene for the climate catastrophe that we are facing today. The reason why I'm saying this about Amazon is this. People make a mistake of thinking of it as a large monopolistic company that has created a marketplace, Amazon.com. It's not strange. To monopolize a market, it means that you take the market over, you're the only seller. So Walmart is another large American company that monopolized local markets. In the United States, town after town were taken over by Walmart. The small shops were closed down and the huge Walmart supermarket replaced them. That was a monopolization of an existing market. Amazon.com is a very different beast. And let me explain why it's very different. The moment you enter Amazon.com, you exit capitalism. Because think about it, you exit the marketplace. Amazon.com is not a marketplace. Things are being sold, they're buyers and they're sellers, but it's not a market. For a market to be a market, you need to have a common space where there's interaction, at least between buyers, even if there is one seller, right? There is interaction between buyers. You walk to a market town, let's say that the market down belongs to one person. Again, you and me were walking down the street, we're seeing the same things, we can comment on what says, we can even stage your consumer boycott.  But the moment you enter Amazon.com, you have no communication with anyone unless the algorithm that belongs to Jeff Bezos brings you together under the circumstances chosen by the algorithm that belongs to Jeff Bezos. So you've got sellers who have no access to you, the buyer directly, but only through the algorithm. You've got buyers, if you and I, if all five, 10 of us, however many we are on this call, if we, as we speak, imagine we were to log on on Amazon.com, I'm not recommending that we do it. This is, you know, imagining.  Each one of us would be directed to a different book, to a different item. It is the equivalent of us walking down a market street side by side, turning our eyes to the same spot and seeing different things. And what we see is determined by the owner of the algorithm or the digital space, the digital fiefdom, because this is not a marketplace. It's a fiefdom. It goes back to a kind of feudalism, where only it is a digital, technologically based feudalism. So we've got three types of exploitation happening within one company. There are the people like Chris Smalls, who organized magnificently the union in New Jersey, Staten Island, right? It's a very small union, but it's a huge success story that he managed to do it. Still, it's only a drop in the ocean of what needs to be done to organize Amazon proletarians, people working in the warehouses. These are the standard proletarians. They're being exploited, like proletarians have been exploited throughout the world. And they're not exploited more than other proletarians. I mean, there are other companies that pay less than Amazon, for instance, and whose conditions in the warehouse or the slaughterhouses are even worse. But what makes Amazon especially evil is this combination of three types of exploitation. I just described one, the proletarians. Those proletarians, each one of them has a gadget on them. It's a little machine connected to the same algorithm that you and I tap into. When we log on to amazon.com, the difference is that in the warehouse, that little device monitors the movements of the worker, makes the worker pick and pack fast, speedily, okay? And it resembles anybody who's seen modern times by Charlie Chaplin, the clocks of the machine that drive the proletarian around until the proletarian is driven insane. Now that is no longer science fiction, it's not Charlie Chaplin movie. It comes in the form of a device with the software of Amazon. That's one. A second type of exploitation. The capitalists, small-scale capitalists, medium-scale capitalists, and some loud capitalists that produce the stuff that are being sold on amazon.com are like vassal capitalists, like the vassals under feudalism. In the sense that they have to pay 30% of any revenues they get to Amazon, to the algorithm, to Jeff Bezos, 30% fixed. So that's rent. They go a lot of ground rent as in feudalism. That's not even capitalism, right? So you have vassal capitalists being exploited and of course the labor, the wage labor that works for those vassal capitalists that produce the stuff that is being sold on amazon.com. You have the proletarians working in the warehouses and the drivers and so on. And then you've got the consumers. Now, I don't know if you are familiar. You've heard, some of you have heard me speak about this before. I don't know whether you're familiar with Alexa, the little device sitting on your desk produced by Amazon which is sold to you as a mechanical slave, a digital slave. And it does lots of things for you. A very capable assistant. Google has its own, Apple has its own, Samsung has its own, Amazon has Alexa. Now, Alexa is connected to that same algorithm, driving the workers in the warehouses, deciding whose vassal capitalists products you will be looking at when you go into amazon.com. It is driving Alexa.  But what it really does, connected to this cloud algorithm, cloud-based capital, I call it, cloud capital, I call it, it trains you to train it to know what you want before you know that you want it and to give you good suggestions for books, for records, for music, for gadgets, for things that surprise you because they're so good. So the next time it recommends something, you are already preconditioned to like the recommendation, okay? And it's the same algorithm that effectively sells this to you and drives the proletarian that picks and packs it for you. That degree of control by one algorithm of three kinds of exploitation of the consumer, of the vassal capitalist and of the proletarian in the warehouse. Operating at the level, as we said right at the beginning and Daniel made this point very well, of the big ecological footprint of destroying the planet. So you've got universal, maximal exploitation of people and planet. That is the Amazon model. Of course, there are other companies that are emulating. There's Alibaba in China, which is a direct copy, carbon copy of Amazon. There are national ones that are springing up, regional ones, regional versions of Amazon. But Amazon is the starting point of all this. This is why I think it's important to target it. And here I'm going to part from the official script of making Amazon pay because I am disappointed by one aspect of make Amazon pay. Even though I've been part of it right from the beginning, I even described the campaign to bring down Amazon in a science fiction novel that I wrote a few years back. Some of you may remember it. I'm disappointed that we're not organizing an effective consumer boycott on Black Friday. And I'm saying this because the left needs to revise our thinking regarding collective action. Before Amazon, before Apple, before Google, before Big Tech, it used to be indeed the case that exploitation took place inside the factory, the office, the workplace during the labor process. It was the exploitation was the process by which capital was produced and reproduced. And organizing the proletarians, the wage laborers who were part and parcel of this process of creating capital and capital accumulation was of course the number one and only priority, really. But since Amazon, we have those two other categories of people who are contributing more to the capital of Amazon than the proletarians and the Chris Smalls of the world. These are the vassal capitalists, the small scale producers producing stuff as capitalists, but vassal capitalists and millions of people out there who write reviews for Amazon, who enter Amazon.com and contribute their own psyche to Alexa, to know and to exploit through hard work. People do a lot of hard work on Amazon.com and don't even realize it. Simply by visiting, by buying, by writing reviews, by reading reviews and so on, they are contributing to the capital of, okay, those people are not on trade unions and they cannot never be unionized because they're me and you watching, entering Amazon.com on their phones, tablets, laptops. They must be organized. And the only way to organize them is to organize a consumer boycott, not generally, just for the one day. Because comrades, let me put it briefly.  It doesn't even register on his radar screen. The needle doesn't shift at all for Jeff Bezos. The only thing that would affect him is a fall in the share price. There will be no fall in the share price, even if a significant proportion of Amazon warehouses don't work well for one day because of the strike. It's important that we have this rolling strike from Vietnam to Bangladesh to Germany to New Jersey to Seattle, this is crucial. What we've done in the last few years is essential but there has to be, I would love to have, you know, 20% reduction in traffic on Amazon.com during that day because that would really piss off Jeff Bezos. That would have a negative impact on the share price. We would be able to say we struck in your warehouses and we struck where it really matters to you in your stock exchange market valuation. Even for one day, that's when he takes notice. That's when we win. Now, trade unions don't like this idea. The reason why we haven't done this is because our trade union comrades have said no to this. Why? Because they're scared. And they're scared because Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan won. Remember, you don't remember, you're all too young to remember. I'm the oldest here. But I remember Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher attacked trade unions. First, the first right that they removed was the right for secondary action. That is for industrial action in support of somebody else. Yeah. And since secondary action was banned in Britain and then the European Union and, of course, the United States, trade unions are afraid that if they're accused of secondary action, of not only striking the warehouse but also supporting a consumer boycott, that they will be taken to court in the United States, in Germany, for sabotaging the company, which is not the same thing as striking against the company. And they are scared. And they distanced themselves from any idea of consumers, of citizens, supporting them during the Make Amazon Pay Day of action through a consumer boycott. And I put it to you, comrades, as long as we are afraid in this way, as long as we are not prepared to break the law, we will lose time and the game. So within the PI, the Progressive International, I happen to be the lone voice who keeps insisting that, yes, let's keep organizing workers to strike, but let's bring together, find a way of combining strikes with consumer boycotts targeted, short-term, one day, to demonstrate to the Jeff basis of the world in a way that they can uniquely understand the collective power of the movement. Thank you. Thank you, Yanis. And I'd love to get to Daniel's perspective a little later on your point about consumer boycotts. I'd just like to read a little bit. Earlier this week, I spoke with a trade unionist from Amazon, a worker in Amazon in Poland. And I just wanted to add a little flesh to the way Yanis described it, like the Charlie Chaplin movie Hard Times that described the working conditions at Amazon. Here's a quote that is something she said to me. They measure our work through scanners and computers. They have total control of us, total control of our speed. And if you slow down, a manager with a smile will come to you and say, here's a disciplinary letter because we noticed you didn't work for eight minutes here, five minutes there. And they accuse you that you made a break that was 40 minutes too long. And then they take your day off because all these minutes add up. It's all made by computers and programs. What a dehumanizing experience that is. And that's straight from the horse's mouth, as it were, of someone that's working at Amazon in a warehouse right now. OK, you did. You did Maya, our IT coordinator, based in Germany. Floor is yours. Thank you, Omechan. I think that Yanis described it very well. The likes of Amazon could never have come about, say, 30 years ago. Probably even 15 years ago. There was nothing comparable to what we are seeing today. If you think about the commerce as it existed before the internet, of course, they were not just the small businesses who had one shop, two shops in two different cities.  But they could not be everywhere. They could not advertise everywhere. This is something that the internet has brought to us, the ability to reach all customers and to accept payment from them electronically through the internet in a click and immediately dispatch. And it just makes things so convenient that very few people will refuse to take part of that. And that is why we have these huge billionaire conglomerations now that basically monopolized this ability, not just on Amazon, of course, primarily on Amazon, but also in the social media sphere, in the sphere of renting movies like Netflix, who still goes to an actual video rental place. Nobody. So everything is becoming centralized in the hands of very few companies. And this is very scary for us, because these companies then have an incredible amount of power also over our democracies, over our politicians. So something that I found encouraging, but also worrying, is that lately, all of these big companies have placed a bad bet. They all bet that, I think it sounds really stupid, but somehow they all bet that our behavior would be the same at the end of the pandemic as it was at the beginning of the pandemic. So at the beginning of the pandemic, they all hired lots of workers. Amazon itself hired 450,000 workers within 10 months. That's a third of their workforce nowadays. They hired within those 10 months. And similarly, all the other tech companies, Netflix, got a huge boost from the pandemic. Facebook, Twitter, everything got a good boost from the pandemic, from everyone being stuck inside and just using their services all day, every day. And somehow they didn't manage to guess that we would change once the pandemic is over, once people go outside again, and we would stop watching as much Netflix. We would stop using as much Facebook and so on. So because of that, their stock prices have been crashing for the past year or so. Facebook lost 2 thirds of their stock value. Netflix is 53% down. Amazon is comparatively less down, I think, 40% less I checked or something, because they also have video rental. But what scares me is that all of these other tech billionaires are kind of imploding because of their bad assumptions, including Twitter now. They're all losing the billions that they hoarded. But Amazon will not, because they actually have a product that they're selling. They're not depending on investors. They're not depending on the stock market. They are making a profit with every item that they sell with every person on their website. And so I believe that we are about to see a future where the circle of billionaires that are able to influence our democracy will be smaller, but even richer. And that, I think, is a more scary place. If Jeff Bezos does not even have competition, even from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and so on. Thank you, Judith. Dushan, can we move towards some solutions? Yes, but first let me point out what pieces mean the most. So yes, we are probably slaves to the technopedilism system. And thanks group, which is Amazon part of. So Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google. They need to pair their fair share. They need to pair their tax in dividends that would result in universal basic dividends. They will easily avoid taxation in profits as they did. And they would even get subsidized. So today we are here to talk about Amazon specifically. And it's not just that Amazon molests their workers. They need to pee in a freaking bottle, you know. But they're also molest common citizens. They molest the planet, animals, and everyone else. So we need to stand up together against this. And I think that both psychology and technology play a vital role. Both of those sciences are neutral, but we can use it in a good way. They're using it in a bad way. They're playing with dopamine and serotonin on one way and on the other way, they're playing with algorithms and using tech. These are stormtroopers of technology and of psychology. We need to make something of our own. Giannis described that in a perfect way in another now, where he talked about, where he brought about targeted boycotts and targeted attacks at certain big monopoly companies. We need to do that. And I, in my own name, call for people that are watching us right now to do that boycott. Maybe Daniel will change my mind, but I strongly believe this is the right idea as well. On the other hand, when we talk about solutions, now I'm speaking to DM members and DM supporters. PI has created this amazing map on May Amazon Pay website. You can see what protests are near you and you can join them or you can create one of your own if you would like to do something else or if there is nothing that matches your interests. So I created a forum thread on this and Metamos thread, both of all of our members know about both of these platforms and they can write to me directly. They need help with ideas, with the structure, with the organizing. So this is a message for our members.  And if this doesn't leave you from your comfortable chair, I'm wondering what will. So please get up and make this effective. And on the other side to those viewers out there who are not our members yet, I don't know what's stopping you. Join us and make Amazon Pay and help us to finally bring down the oligarchy. Please put the link in the chat and we will see you on the streets. Thank you. Thank you, Dushan. dm25.org slash join is the link and you can jump into the forum threads that are available to our members, discuss.dm25.org to take actions. Further, two quick comments from the chat. H.E. says inflation is organizing a Black Friday boycott for a lot of us. Fair enough and a question from KD. Unfortunately, Amazon makes money not just from selling objects, but also from renting servers and infrastructure so that every organization needs Amazon in the end. How do we fight that reference to Amazon web services? I mean, Amazon in many ways is like the backbone of the internet. Please factor that also into your comments. I'd like to bring Daniel back in for his reaction to some of the things he's heard so far. Daniel. Yeah, just on Janus's point, which is very well taken, obviously, I personally would be happy to see a consumer boycott, although I would maybe call it a digital picket line on Black Friday. My question is rather who should call for it if the trade unions can call for it and who would be most effective at calling for it? So for instance, this year, we're working with an organization that is called Gen Z for Change, which is essentially young TikTokers in the US that launched a while ago in solidarity with the Amazon labor union, a pledge called People Over Prime, where they got TikTokers with a combined following of 50 million people who refused to monetize their videos with Amazon content. That was so powerful that the company, it was all around the media and the company had to respond because obviously they're courting influences to sell their products, and Amazon is also becoming one of the biggest advertisers on the internet. So maybe it's not the make Amazon pay campaign as such, maybe it's not the trade unions who should call for it, but those people who have actually the most direct line to consumers, whether that's TikTokers, whether that's Twitch streamers, right? Like Amazon recently bought Twitch and overnight changed its revenue model to its own favor, and so Twitch streamers are also paced. So maybe, it's different type of organizations that can actually organize effectively something like a digital picket line on the day. For the moment, as the make Amazon pay campaign, we're not calling for it, but who knows what the future will bring. Thank you, Daniel. If I could just react to that also, if the goal here is to attack Amazon's share price, there are also other ways. I mean, whistleblower campaigns, hacktivism, you saw what happened with the Eli Lilly's share price just because some enterprising person took advantage of the chaos of Elon Musk's Twitter takeover and tweeted out that insulin was free. Something very small, targeted correctly, can sometimes make a big... I'm sorry, I'm going to have to disagree with this. I'm not against that, but it's not, instead of, the consumer boy is crucial. I like the idea of calling it digital picket line, Daniel. The digital picket line is crucial to organize the masses. Okay, everything else, what you're suggesting, Maren, may be a very good guerrilla tactic that can only involve one person, right? Or two people. But what we really must do is find ways of bringing together the hundreds of millions of people who are exploited in different ways, but by Amazon and to bring them together. So workers, the proletarians strike in the warehouses. The consumers join a digital picket line. Now, if we can have hackers that can do what you suggest, that's a nice thing to have in addition, not instead of the mass organization. As for your question, Daniel, who should organize it? The progressive international. You cannot ask the trade unions to organize the consumer boy could it's illegal. But it's not the trade unions that organize make Amazon pay. It's a progressive international, it's the PI. So the PI can do two things. In association with trade unions, organize the trade unions to strike, which is what we're doing already. And then with the Tik Tokers, with the Facebookers, with people out on the street, I think it's important to have a physical presence, not just a digital presence, of going from neighborhood to neighborhood and distributing leaflets saying, on 25th November, just don't visit amazon.com for a day. Insolidarity for the global movement to make Amazon pay, that's I think my answer. Thank you, Kiernis. Juliana, Juliana Zeta from Germany. How was yours? Thank you, Mechner. Yeah, I want to stick with that point for a minute because I agree that the consumer boycott would be important. And also because when we think now, now Amazon has a lot of workers, but I remember I saw the commentary like three years ago and I don't remember what it was, but essentially it was about how these companies try to have less workers and to replace them with robotics to replace workers much more. So I think at some point, I mean, in the future, and that can be like in a few decades, you might have a company like Amazon that has just the lowest number of workers that they actually need. And that most of things would happen by robots, by, I don't know, flying drones and bring packets. I mean, that sounds like sci-fi at this point, but then still then even more consumers would be kind of the pressure that you could vote against such a company because only, and I agree with that, that this is what they are mostly scared of. And also when you see in reality, when Amazon started, it started like, I think it was a book selling platform. And at the beginning, it was the book shops who called to not buy books at Amazon and to go into your local bookstore. And now we don't have the local bookstores anymore. I mean, I know in the city of Frankfurt, where I grew up, we had a lot of bookstores and now you have like one big like a chain company that has bookstores in every city, but you don't have those local shops anymore. So I think there is also a problem in reality with people not being able to maintain their business anymore.  So I have no motivation to buy at Amazon because it's really not good products, but you know, I think that reality, real life has to fight back against these online companies. And I think it's in the interest of little business owners, it's in the interest of also consumers to also question what they're buying there to do such a boycott. And yeah, that's what I want to add like a little thought to that. Thank you, Juliana. Tushan, we bring it back to you. I just remembered my favorite strategy and my favorite, and in my opinion, most successful campaign that happened, which is Shack, Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty. So what they did is they, not only they pressured the company directly, but they also pressured their partners, sponsors, and so on and calling for them to stop business with that Huntington company. So we can do the same for Amazon. They have a lot of shops that are connected to them. They have the banks, people can write emails, activists can appear in front of the offices or houses with whistles and mega phones and not letting them do the work. And other types of pressure that would eventually lead big sponsors and big partners to leave Amazon in its own space. That's dropped, like Shack campaign, dropped billions and billions in revenue from Huntington. So I think that needs to be replicated and it's one of the most effective tactics section. Thank you. We'll have a link to the Wikipedia entry for the Shack campaign, Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty for you to follow that. Okay, Johannes, Johannes Fair from Germany. Thank you for your views. Thank you. Thank you all for the contributions. And I want to pick on a little more on why actually all of you out there should also be getting involved this Friday into the Make Amazon Pay campaign. I spoke and had an interview with an Amazon worker from Germany, close to Hamburg, which will come out on our German Meta25 YouTube channel on Friday. Subscribe if you understand German. And the most interesting thing he actually said to me was for the most impressive thing and why I also again understood how important it is to organize this campaign globally and transnationally is how also the workforce in Germany, when they were trying to set up a union on the ground in their warehouse, which was quite difficult because of course the company tries everything to prevent that. And they had to actually translate the ballots and the voting papers and information into 17 languages because that was the amount of languages the workers in the warehouse are actually speaking. And I think it will be very important on Friday that we now after this campaign is already running for the third year that we'll make a step forward and become even closer and even closer to the masses that we have been already speaking about in this call. So very concretely, if you're in Germany, for example, in Bremen, we will gather at the main train station at 1.30 PM on Friday. Just as an example, or here in Berlin where I am, we'll gather at the U-Bahnhof Warschauer Strasse at 6 PM on Friday. On the website, you can find many more dates on makeamazonpay.com. And if you're still wondering, it's not only to support actually the workers because we don't only want to make Amazon pay its workers because it's squeezing the workers. We also, and this is from the flyer that the comrades here in Berlin have been sharing with us the Amazon workers that they're actually organizing for the Friday strike and protest. It's also squeezing our communities because it has already been mentioned. It's not paying its taxes. So we also want to make the company pay its fair share of taxes. And it's also squeezing our planet has been mentioning as before. So we want to also make Amazon pay for the climate. So it's not only if you're interested in workers' rights, it's also if you're interested in tax justice in climate transition, all those people should come together in this campaign. I wanted to point this out and hope to see you on the streets. Thank you, Johannes. Julia, Julia Moore from the UK. Hi, thank you. Thank you, Mirren. Hello, everybody. Yes, linking Johannes and what Juliana colleague from Germany, Juliana was talking about, about the impact that these very visible, massive Amazon depots have on our local communities, our local economies, the amount of money that circumvents local economies. This means that there's activism for everyone. And I would urge, as Johannes is urging and Dushan, Daniel is urging activism for Friday, I would urge people to really step up to the plate and use this as a force of activism because there are so many levels for this. And we have a campaign that can fit any of those levels. And as Johannes has just said, the impact on local businesses. And I think taking Johannes's point about the trade unions, we've clearly got some equivocation with trade unions not backing certain forms of action because there's legal constraints. There are massive impacts that happening on local economies and local economies are going to be the mainstay of our general drive of climate change, of keeping things local, carbon footprint, et cetera. So we really would urge people to make connections with local businesses. If our members are local business traders, we would love to get to know you and talk to us and we can work on a campaign for all of us. These Amazon depots are massive buildings on our horizons. I can only speak for the UK. But if you live close to one, you will know the impact that it's had on your local landscape and your local impact. So I would urge people to get in touch with us. You know how to get in touch with us globally, European-wise and certainly for the UK. And we can help you and be involved with your campaign locally. Thanks. Thank you, Julia. Definitely, definitely Delcara, based in France. Go ahead. Thanks. Yeah, just on what Julia said, I mean, just reminding of that, I think it was in Scotland where there was the whistleblower that also showed how the Justin Time model was, like that Amazon was like throwing away tons and tons of unused materials, just how destructive the whole business model is. And I just want to touch up on a very small thing. Janice said, and it's very interesting how as consumers we are expected to put our inputs, like not only as buyers, but as people who feed into the algorithm and write comments. And this is not about Amazon, but I was really shocked the other day when I got an email from Darty under the title of Darty Mutual Aid Society Needs You, where it's actually connecting buyers to each other that buy the same items and they're expecting you to help each other with problems with their things. So it's just a really, like that would be called Mutual Aid and all the, it's very cynical and awful. And this is how why Amazon pay campaigns, I think it's so great as well because I think we were like, you know, consumers king and we have stopped identifying ourselves as laborer citizens, but we're like really consumers in this world. And then it really kind of re-visualizes what it is as a company all around the world and how it exploits and how it operates and just kind of maybe opens up the curtain and like, let us see the horrible entrails, see how the sausage is made if you like. Yeah, so thanks. Thank you, Destiny, for your comments. Amir, what do you think of the policy coordinator? Thanks, Mehran, I'm just, you know, obviously echoing everything was said before and very short intervention regarding, you know, to think about where Amazon is going and what it's trying to do. And only, for example, in 2021 alone, that's the most recent data that we have. Amazon donated to over 660 US state and local candidates, for example. And another 460 US based trade associations and NGOs and social welfare organizations. So you can see that sort of the spreading of the behemoth in that way and ownership over the politicians that quote on quote are representing the public. And of course, there's also expansion of Amazon in other areas of life. Amazon is involved in relief aid, for example, during natural disasters. Amazon is involved in the state building by securing government data of the Ukraine, for example. It's building homes in Washington DC. It has 71 renewable energy projects. It's involved in venture capital. It's involved in education through cloud computing training. It's getting involved in water and sanitation in the third world and so on. And we have to really think about where is Amazon going and how it's getting involved in these other areas of life beyond its, you know, techno feudal market in that sense. And whether this is preparing for the next stage of the Amazon's environmental and global level beyond just its market. Thank you, Amir. Two comments from the chat. Well, one from Salvatore Peligra. He says, let's say that the boycott succeeds and that Amazon shares take a hit. Then what? You might get some better conditions for now, but how long would that last? And Mahdi Tahini says, what's the role of Amazon workers in making Amazon pay? Would unionization of Amazon workers in different regions under the goal of ultimately breaking Amazon into pieces be a viable strategy? Daniel, would you like to weigh in on these questions? Sure, I think for the first question, probably Yanis would have a much more eloquent answer than me, which is just, you know, you organize this once and then you organize it twice and then you organize it three times. And every time it gets bigger and every time it gets more powerful. So I think, you know, we need to test and try strategies essentially and we haven't tested that strategy yet. So let's just try it and see what happens. To the second question, I think, you know, unionization of Amazon workers, which, you know, in many sectors and in many countries and many companies is kind of a given, is still first big step and would be major success. But I think the goal ultimately for all of us, socialists and comrades, wouldn't be to break up Amazon into pieces, but to socialize it, right? I mean, as such, Amazon is a great infrastructure. I mean, we saw this notably during the pandemic, how it provided essential services to everyone who couldn't go to stores and notably vulnerable groups. So I think, you know, we would, the goal would be to have a public utility called Amazon probably would rename it, but you know, a public utility that is able to provide goods and services to people. But I think we're still at the early stages of that struggle. Amazon in Germany, actually, the Amazon struggle in Germany will have its anniversary next year. It's gonna be 10 years in the fight for union and we need to win that union first and that's what we should focus on right now. Thank you for that, Daniel. I love that spirit. Try it and see what happens. Throw things in the wall and see what sticks. I think this is something that often holds activists back. The idea that, well, what if it doesn't succeed? Screw it, experiment, see what happens and then take it further. So wonderful. One last comment here from the chat and more of a recommendation really from Marky Mark. Ethical consumer magazine in the UK has been boycotting Amazon for years apparently and they offer alternatives so it's easy to support small businesses while boycotting Amazon. Okay, we are at the top of the hour so I think we will wrap it up there. I would like to thank all of you on the panel. I'd like to thank you guys out there in cyberspace for your comments and thoughts and feedback. The address to get involved in the Make Amazon Pay campaign is makeamazonpay.com. The address to get involved with DM25, that's us and to join in a couple of seconds is dm25.org slash join and the conversation will continue in the comments. Thank you again for your time and attention. Let's make Amazon Pay and we'll see you back here at the same time, same place, two weeks from now for another.


We're going to hear about an entirely new phenomenon in the history of libertarian education. In the course of his research, George discovered a large body of literature which has been overlooked by most of the professional historians of education, and I suspect with some intent, George is going to tell us about this research, or about what he has discovered in today's paper, which is part of this larger work that I just dropped, George. I'm suffering from a rather bad head cold, so if I sound like I'm talking through a tunnel, please excuse that. I thought rather than cover material that is covered in my paper, I would rather sketch some material that is not presented there in the way of trying to provide a broader perspective about the movement which was called, in the 19th century, the Voluntaryist Movement. That's a rather difficult term to say. They used the Y, they would use voluntary and put the IST on the end of it. I would prefer that they use the term volunteerism, but nonetheless they call themselves Voluntaryists. And I'll explain in a moment in the broadest sense what they meant by that term, who these people were, and how it applied to the education question. But let me say in advance that the Voluntaryists certainly represented a strong and explicitly libertarian movement in the middle of the 19th century in England. In fact, they were the radical cutting edge of the liberal, the classical liberals. Many of the individuals involved in the Voluntaryist Movement are not well known to scholars, let alone delay persons, although some of them are. I'm sure all of you are familiar with Herbert Spencer. Later, Oberon Herbert are both well known 19th century English libertarian figures. Nevertheless, there are many lesser known names that you probably never have heard of at all. Algernon Wells is one who is absolutely brilliant. There were a number of others, and they were relatively minor figures involved in, they were usually congregationalist or Baptist, and they were involved in the various religious organizations in England at the time. But nonetheless, they've been, although they were important at the time, they've been totally overlooked by scholars. Now, in my paper, what I do is I begin with a overview of what is today called revisionism in American education. And we have two distinguished representatives on the panel today of American revisionism. And revisionism, of course, is a term that's applied to a lot of historical disciplines. And it's applied to American education. What it means basically is that body of literature, which beginning in the late 60s, there was revisionist literature before that, but it really made an impact in the late 60s, about 1968, that body of literature which was written by American historians, which is, we could say, extremely critical of the history of American state schooling. Previous to that time, certainly the bulk of American historiography when devoted to education was very eulogistic. L. Wood-Cubberley, the Stanford historian earlier in the century being a notable example of this. If you read the classic history of education texts, you basically get this picture of humanitarian reformers battling for free schools for poor children. They could read and write and battling against selfish capitalist interests. We didn't want to give up money for poor kids. That's kind of the image you get of who was for and who was against. And revisionist historians have totally altered that picture. And they have emphasized that the growth of a government bureaucracy on whatever level for schooling was actually promoted, in most cases, to benefit and further the goals of those who were controlled with bureaucracy. In other words, it's kind of a self-interested theorem as applied to government bureaucracies and specifically to educational bureaucracies. Now, the revisionists come from a wide spectrum of political views. Many of them came from the left politically. And I don't think it's coincidental that revisionism really made an impact during the Vietnam War period with a lot of leftist agitation against the war. Nevertheless, some, such as Joel, for example, are explicitly libertarians. So you get quite a spectrum of political beliefs. But I think the value of revisionism for an education for libertarians is basically the same as the value of the type of revisionism in the New Left historiography, such as Koko, his triumph of conservatism. The type of integration that people like Rothbard have made using that sort of progressive revisionism and applying it to applying a libertarian theory to explain the same sorts of facts that Koko presents. I think that's the main value of the revisionist body of literature for libertarians. Not that we always agree with the interpretation given by the revisionist historians, but rather given their critical attitude they have uncovered an enormous amount of interesting and valuable information for libertarians who can then apply their own theoretical framework to explain that the historians have uncovered. Now the thesis of the paper was that many of the things that revisionists complain about in schools today, lack of diversity, what the leftists might call class dominance or class oppression, many of these aspects were, if not in words, then in substance, were the same things that were predicted in the 19th century by the voluntarists. In other words, the opponents of state education in England were very accurate in what they said would happen if in fact state education was imposed. And that was my, when I used the title 19th century opponents of state education, profits of modern revisionism, that's what I meant. And I think this to a certain extent vindicates the opponents of state education because I think what the revisionists have done is to in effect verify the principles to some extent that the libertarian opponents were operating from. Now with that, let me get more specifically to the movement itself. By the way, the reason I concentrate on England is because although there were scattered opponents of state education in America, there was never a national movement, an organized movement against state education in America as there was in England. And the best libertarian thinkers came out of England rather than America.  Now as I said before, the libertarian opponents, the classical liberal opponents of state education in England have been totally ignored. Not totally, there are a few references to them in the literature. But if not totally ignored, when they have been mentioned, they've been mentioned in extremely disparaging terms. Typically they're represented as defenders of the capitalist class and this sort of rhetoric that you get, especially by historians from the left. If they haven't been represented in those terms, they've typically been castigated as being sectarian bigots because they were in many cases sincerely religious people, primarily congregational and Baptist. And it's commonly argued by historians that they were fighting for narrow sectarian interests against the general welfare. Both of those charges that they were somehow puppets of the capitalist class or that they were sectarian bigots, both of those are grossly untrue. In fact, they were libertarians. Now as I said, the Voluntaryist represent the radical edge of the classical liberal movement. Now the thing you have to understand is that even among those quasi-libertarians of the 19th century that we identify often with classical liberalism, most of the prominent figures were pro-state education. Richard Cobden was avidly in favor of a secular system of state education. He said he wanted the Massachusetts system, he was a great admirer of Horace Mann. Someone like John Bright was a little better on the issue. All of he too eventually came around to favoring some system of state education. Now later on I want to deal a little bit with the conflict in the classical liberal movement itself between Cobden and the Voluntaryist that explained Cobden's reaction to what happened because it really split the liberal movement after the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. I'll deal with that shortly. But in order to understand the background of Voluntaryism you have to understand a little bit about the background of classical liberalism. Well basically, it would be difficult to date when classical liberalism began but certainly I suppose dealing with Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in 1776 would be as good a place to start as any I suppose. All I want to certainly trace it back much further than that to Locke and other philosophers. But that represented the seminal modern work in defending freedom of trade, free market. Now I'm going to pick out one individual named Edward Baines. This is Edward Baines Sr. He was the father of the Edward Baines I talk about in my paper. I'm going to focus on Baines just for a few minutes to give you an idea of around the turn of the century and during the Napoleonic Wars up to around 1815 what the classical liberals were doing, what they were thinking about to give you a kind of a feel for the classical liberal mentality during this period. Now Baines had become proprietor in the early 1800s of the Leeds Mercury which he turned shortly into the most prestigious and influential of the provincial papers in England. And the Leeds Mercury became a very vocal and articulate defender of volunteerism in the following years. Baines came from a descending background as did all of these volunteers, the dissenters in England were technically any Protestant who refused to subscribe with 39 articles of the Anglican Church, the established church in England. Now traditionally you had three denominations in the Protestant descending tradition. They're called the Old Descent. That would be the Congregationalists or sometimes called Independents, the Baptists and the Presbyterians. There was also what was called New Descent, those were the Methodists. Now the Methodists were the result of the Wesleyan Revival as you probably know in the 18th century in England. The Methodists were by far the largest body of dissenters in England including the 19th century but they were never radical politically. They were very conservative and in fact they frustrated many of the radical goals that the other dissenters wanted. This is a controversy in his current English historiography. It was the thesis of the French historian Hallévé that the Methodists in effect provided a real impetus for conservatism in English, early 19th century England, and I won't get into that, but it's quite clear that they were a conservative force. By the 19th century, going into the 19th century, the Presbyterians had more or less transformed into Unitarianism and become very liberal theologically. Many of the Unitarians were active also in fighting for state education. The two hardline sects of the Old dissenters continued to be the Baptists and the Congregationalists. Now one can look all the way back to the Puritan Revolution in the 1640s in England and show a clear connection between the Independent Congregationalists and Baptists and Libertarian ideas. Many of the levelers came out of this sort of religious tradition and the tradition, especially after the restoration in 1660 of Charles II, when the screws were turned on the non-conformists or dissenters, the dissenters had to kind of go underground, especially in their educational institutions because Oxford and Cambridge were barred to them. The active uniformity in 1662 decreed that no dissenter could even teach a child privately. Now these were not always enforced, these sorts of laws, they led to the rise of what were known as dissenting academies, which were very renowned educational institutions, private institutions, and they led to a whole network, an underground network of dissenting education. So the dissenters had behind them a long tradition of non-governmental education. And early in the 19th century they began with the British and Foreign School Society an organization explicitly to provide elementary education to children who could not afford to pay on a charitable basis. And this organization proceeded for many years, was quite successful, it spurred the growth of a competing group by the Anglicans called the National Society, and education, elementary education, went on in England until around 1833 really without any government assistance, whatever. It was in 1833 that the government offered what the volunteers later liked to refer to as a golden bribe. That is to say they started saying, look, we'll give you some money. There's a very modest amount at first, and the volunteers later were saying in the 1840s, they were saying, look, wherever their government money comes, strings are going to follow and regulations are going to follow. Of course, the people in the government at the time usually denied this. They simply said, no, we just want to help you out, help you build your schools and so forth. We're not really interested in controlling them. Of course, that turned out to be totally false later on. Now going back to Baines, when Baines took over the Leeds Mercury, Baines was a great admirer of Charles James Fox, who was kind of a liberal wig in the late 1700s. Fox, as you may know, was really opposed to the wars with France. He was an anti-war type. He was a pretty good classical liberal sort. Baines had very libertarian sentiments. He was opposed to the war. He wasn't really, he obviously was a pro-Napoleon. To give you a few examples of how Baines Sr. argued, and he wrote this shortly after the war, he said, quote, war is the harvest of ministers. It is a period of extensive patronage. But though to ministers it is a time of plenty, a war like the present is a time of famine to merchants to manufacturers of the tradesmen, close quote. He went on to condemn the inflation produced by the war. He condemned the quote, baseless fabric of paper currency, close quote, and called for return of gold standard. Now after the war, Baines called for retrenchment, including drastic cuts in naval and military expenditures. When the Corn Laws came in after the war in 1816, he posed them vigorously and continued to do so throughout his life. I should point out here that the dissenters constituted the bulk of the anti-Corn Lawly and the prominent volunteers were also the prominent people oftentimes in the agitation to the field of Corn Laws. Now the other thing I want to say about Baines is he had a very good perspective on the economic problems after the war. Now there was this thing that you probably know called the Luddite movement, the machine breakers, kind of a redacted reaction to the Industrial Revolution. And of course the controversy goes on today as to whether the Industrial Revolution created economic hardship in England. Baines living through that period argued that there wasn't the economic hardship but that it was a result of the 15 years of war with France. It was not a result of industrialization. And he wrote, quote, if therefore our agriculture trade and finance now feel an unusual degree of depression, the evil is not to be imputed to the country having to soon return to a state of peace but to the necessity no matter how created under which she was placed and so long continuing the war. He went on to say, war which diverted the nation from the Holston state of prosperity in which it was found in the year 1793 and has burdened us with an enormous debt and an impressive taxation is solely to blame for that share of public distress which does at present exist and for all those miseries that may continue to prevail to the country shall again revert back to a period of settled peace and prosperity, close quote. I'm providing this as just background again to show you the liberal, classical liberal attitude to such things as war, taxes, military expenditures. They were quite libertarian in their basic instincts in these areas, as you may already know. Now the thing to understand is that Baines himself, who was later a member of parliament, Baines Sr. again, was not particularly opposed to state education in the early years. Many of the later volunteers were not particularly opposed to it. They weren't really in favor of it, but it was not really a clearly defined issue until 1843. But the voluntary movement as such started previous to 1843. Baines' son, one of his sons, Edward Baines Jr., who took over the late's merchant community for many years and later became a member of parliament as well, was one of the primary figureheads in this whole movement. Now voluntaryism in the general term refers not just to opposition to state education. It was coined originally to refer to those dissenters who called for the total disestablishment of the church, of an Anglican church. In other words they wanted a total and unconditional separation of church and state. Now this radical stand, in other words they used the term the voluntary principle to refer basically to separation of church and state. Later it was applied specifically to the opposition to state schools. This stand really began to surface after many years of agitation against things like church rates and many other sorts of things, that laws that dissenters found very obnoxious to them. And there was open call for rebellion in the sense of not paying church rates and so forth, disobedience, civil disobedience, but I think we can trace the real outburst of the voluntary sentiment. At least I can see the research I've done in this and it's been quite extensive in some of the journals. It starts to appear in a major dissenting journal called The Eclectic Review, which I quote extensively in my paper. There was a character, again very obscure virtually no work has been done on him, but he's a marvelous character from the material I've read of his. His name was Thomas Price. He was a Baptist minister, a good libertarian type. And he took over The Eclectic Review, the editorship in 1837 from Josiah Condor, who was a much more moderate conservative dissenter. And The Eclectic Review immediately took on a radical tone from the moment of its first issue under Price's editorship. In his first issue he said that the guiding principle thereafter of The Eclectic Review would be quote the purely voluntary character of all religion. And he said he would pursue quote, the dissolution of the disgraceful connection between church and state. Now let me explain a little bit what they meant by the voluntary principle so you can see how it later became applied to education. In fact you'll find articles in The Eclectic Review during this period entitled things like the voluntary principle. Price, in an early issue after he took over The Eclectic Review, explained the voluntary principle as follows. He said, by what do we mean the voluntary and compulsory modes of supporting religion? We answered that by the latter, that is the compulsory mode, we mean that the system which throws the supportive religion upon taxation, the system which compels men to contribute to the maintenance of forms of faith and worship to which they may be indifferent or to which they may be conscientiously opposed. By the former we mean the system of appealing for the supportive religion through moral inducement alone with that italicized. The voluntary system consequently will include even endowments so far as they are voluntary. In a word, all the various forms in which money is voluntarily contributed to this purpose. Close quote. Now the voluntariest insisted that the voluntarism was a logical outgrowth of Christian principles. As I, in exchange with Professor Kletner yesterday as I indicated, the voluntariest argued that religious conversion, and by the way, again I want to emphasize these people were evangelical Christians. They were not liberal in their theology for the most part. They were what we would describe today as moderate Calvinist. And a moderate Calvinist in the mid-19th century is a fairly extreme character by today's standards. But they insisted that voluntaryism was true to the spirit of Christianity because any sort of coerced belief was useless for a moral point of view. Conversion itself had to be voluntary to have moral value and they went to apply this principle, the voluntary principle to all areas involving human beliefs and values. Price declared that voluntarism is true to the spirit of Christianity and it, quote, openly declares that a constrained obedience is totally worthless. Close quote. And he spent considerable time trying to prove this. Now another thing of tactical importance that later became important with the voluntariest is that unlike many of the American panel parts, they were not particularly concerned who they allied with politically. They'd rub shoulders very closely with atheists or free thinkers and whoever would support the cause of religious freedom and civil freedom. Price insisted that the love of liberty is compatible with evangelical piety. He said, quote, men we are quite aware may be ardently attached to liberty and yet have no sympathy with true religion. But their love of freedom is not incompatible with their pursuit of evangelical piety which cannot be predicated on the love of oppression. He went on to say that the dissenters pursuit of liberty might lead to an alliance with unbelievers. He said that he welcomed an alliance with any friends of civil liberty. He said, quote, it is incomparably better to be blended with unbelievers in promoting liberty than associated with the highest ecclesiastical dignitaries in forging the change of oppression. Close quote. Now I'm mentioning this because it shows a marked contrast in the attitude of the English pietists with the American pietists who were typically the pro-state people. In other words, the voluntary is the primary value on the cause of human liberty. Now as an example of the reaction to piety I don't want to over stress this, their idea that they were totally libertarian. There were a few of the volunteers who later became mixed up in things like the temperance movement in England. That was always the big weakness of these people, although a number of them did not. But as an example of at least an early attitude towards temperance, let me give you kind of an anecdotal event. After the passage of the beer bill in 1830 and the beer bill permitted anyone to sell beer after purchasing a license at a low price, the English temperance movement really began in earnest. And in 1832 the total abstinence movement was formed, which was backed primarily by churchmen, by Anglicans, who would be really liturgical types, and by Quakers. Now the congregation was failed to participate in this movement, and they were castigated by other religious figures for so failing. And an interesting anecdote occurred when two American congregations, and of course American congregations were hip-deep in the temperance movement in America, they visited the Congregational Union, and that was formed in 1831. And they condemned it, quote, for its free use of stimulating liquors at public meetings, close for. Specifically, they would make a decanter of wine available to the speaker of the Congregational Union. And the American congregationalists were quite upset with this, with their pietistic background. The English congregationalists struck back and would not accept this. They objected to T-totalism, as it was known. They condemned it as, quote, contrary to reason in Scripture, close quote. The congregation officially, official statement of the Congregational Union in England stated, quote, that it was not prepared to submit to censor for the temperate use of that which we regard to be one of the choice blessings of a beneficent creator, close quote. They went on to condemn total abstinence from liquor as, quote, they said it would lead to, quote, monkish austerities, close quote. And they went on to condemn it by saying it was fanatical and absurd. Now, that shows a very interesting contrast and attitude, certainly, between the English pietists and the American pietists. And that's why I think it's a value to point that out. Now, in the time remaining, let me deal a little bit with the conflict that was caused in the classical liberal movement by the voluntarist faction. As I said before, most classical liberals, most well-known classical liberals were pro-state education. This is equally true of the so-called philosophic radicals. That's the term used to apply to the bentomites, the followers of Jeremy Bentham. That would include in the House of Commons individuals like Roebuck who were avidly calling for a system of state secular education. Among the supporters of state education, you had two basic groups. You had the people advocating what was known as the denominational system and you had another group advocating what was called the secular system. The nominationalist system advocates wanted funds to be made available to church groups or to church schools on an impartial basis. The secular proponents wanted funds to be made available only to secular schools. They didn't want government funds to be made available to any school teaching religious doctrines. The voluntarists opposed both proponents. They were totally opposed to any kind of government aid. And as I mentioned in my paper, and it's very interesting to point this out, for many years the congregationalists, they had a voluntary movement, as I mentioned, to provide funds to build their own schools. They refused to provide aid to any school which accepted any government funds. This is how seriously they took it. They refused to associate with any school or aid any school which would influence so far as to accept government funds. Now, the voluntarists saw themselves in the tradition of the liberal Whig tradition. They were typically allied with the Whig party, the liberal branch of the Whig party. They felt they owed some debt of gratitude to the Whigs as a political party because the Whigs had been instrumental not only in the passing of the reform bill in 1832, which the voluntarists supported, but also in getting rid of some of the legal disabilities that were imposed upon the centers. But their alliance with the Whigs became very tenuous as it became clear that even the liberal Whigs were not particularly concerned about promoting voluntarist causes, involving separation of church and state, abolition of church rates, and later preventing state encroachment in the field of education. And with each disappointment, the voluntarists became progressively disillusioned. Now, as in 1843, as I explained in my paper, that the voluntarist movement began in earnest as an organized movement, although individuals such as Herbert Spencer, who was part of this movement, had advocated voluntarism in education before this time. But it was in 1843 that the infamous factories education bill was attempted to be put through the House of Commons. And that would have provided compulsory education for factory children in the, of course, the northern manufacturing districts such as Leeds and Manchester in England. And it would have... Graham, who was Home Secretary in the Field Administration, had set it up in such a way that the Anglican church would have had control of the school system. And, of course, the dissenters reacted violently to this, and they managed in an apparently short time to gather thousands of petitions with a total of over four million signatures for testing this encroachment on their civil and religious liberties. And the bill was dropped as a result. It was a magnificent victory for the voluntarist movement. Now, their successes after that were not as compacted and they became increasingly less frequent after that point. The next big flap occurred in 1847 under... Now, in 1846, the Field Administration, because the field supported the field of corn laws, and the liberal, or the so-called liberal, Lord John Russell came in. And if you read the descending periodicals at the time, they were very suspicious of Russell from his past activities. And when Russell supported what became known as the Minutes of the Educational Council, Educational Committee of the Privy Council... Now, this is kind of complicated, I can't get into this, but earlier there had been set up an Educational Committee in the Privy Council. This is where Sir James K. Shuttleworth worked as Machiavellian schemes, kind of behind the scenes. And what has permitted many of the pro-state education people to do is set up educational schemes without technically going through a vote of parliament. Parliament only voted on the funding. They didn't vote on specific measures. And the senators thought this was a very devious way of getting around parliamentary procedure to get their schemes through. But the Minutes of Council from August and December 1846, which were voted on in 1847, was a very important step in setting in a school system, state school system in England. For one thing, they wanted to set up normal schools, which means by that, training schools for teachers. They wanted to establish pensions for retired teachers that set up a system of certification. It was a very important approach, a very important step. The volunteers, again, got themselves screwed up and opposed this, but the liberal Russell government pushed it through. At this point, the volunteers voted from the liberal movement. They had had it up to here. The Corn Laws had been repealed in 1846. They felt there was no longer anything holding them together like that. So they openly called for the senators to form their own political organization and vote against any politician, whether liberal or not, who would not support voluntary causes. And they were, in the elections of 1847, successful and unseating, for example, Macaulay, who was seated from Edinburgh, who was a very prominent member of the House. They were instrumental in defeating Roebuck for return to the House at that time. They tried to unseat Russell that didn't succeed in that. But they, in effect, declared their independence at this time. Now, as I said before, the thing that held them to the liberal movement was their common opposition to the Corn Laws. And that was really the unifying force that held the liberal movement together until 1846. So let me just deal then in conclusion with how Cobbden reacted to this. And I'm bringing up Cobbden because I want you to see that this tremendous important struggle that went on in the liberal movement over the issue of state education. Now, Richard Cobbden was at once a hero and an irritant to the volunteers. He had been, of course, a leader in the movement for free trade, and he was frequently admired by the many dissenters who participated in the anti-Corn Law League. But his persistent efforts in the half of state education alienated many volunteers who accused him of abandoning his own free trade principles. Now, Cobbden was a moderate Anglican. He really wasn't a very devout religious person, but he was an Anglican. And he was sympathetic somewhat to dissenting causes. But he didn't really have it, he didn't really understand the grievances of the centers, how seriously they took these legal disabilities that they were subjected to. He thought they were rather picky unions in some cases. The volunteers appealed to the rights of conscious, the refusal to compromise even on the smallest issues, their insistence that the power of government should be limited on principle to the protection of life and property. Such views, heavily laden with political ideology, were foreign to Cobbden's way of thinking. As Cobbden's biographer John Morley observed, quote, it is true that Cobbden sometimes slips into the phrases of an older school about the rights of man and natural law, but such lapses into the dialect of a revolutionary philosophy were very rare, and they were accidents. His whole scheme rested, if ever any scheme did so rest, upon the wide positive base of great social expediency. Close quote. Cobbden supported the Graham Factory Education Bill in 1843, much to the displeasure of the centers. He supported the Maynooth Grant, as it was called in 1845, which was an endowment to an Irish Catholic college that the dissenters were incensed by that. He accused them of being anti-Catholic, and they were no such thing. They were just consistently opposed to all state endowment of religion. In fact, the dissenters claimed that the grant represented an attempt to buy off the Irish establishment. And throughout the voluntary's literature, you will find rabid attacks on English imperialism in Ireland and calling for Irish home rule. So they were certainly not in any way anti-Catholic or anti-Irish. Cobbden really didn't understand this, however, and when he supported the Minutes of Council in 1847, the basic of the volunteers had just had it with Cobbden. A leading volunteer is to his prominent in the anti-Cornelaw League, angrily attacked Cobbden for his stand on the Maynooth Grant. He complained of the, quote, alienation and hostility aroused among dissenters by Cobbden's, quote, all together on call for support of the measure. This volunteer is predicted that a split was looming on the horizon in the liberal movement, because dissenters, quote, will now be compelled to rally their strength and vote for their own candidates, close quote. Cobbden, meanwhile, complained that he was, quote, very much persecuted by the fanatics, close quote. As I said, though, he just misread his opposition. He didn't understand his opposition. Now, as I mentioned also, the Cornelaw agitation overshadowed all else during this period, so the predicted split did not occur. With the repeal in 1846, however, the unifying force dissolved, and when Cobbden joined other liberals to support the Minutes of the Educational Committee in 1847, the volunteers resolved to end their support of liberals who ignored the dissenting cause, thus resulting in the defeat of Akali and others. Cobbden went on to play a leading role in the following years in the National Public School Association, the Lancashire Public School Association, which pushed energetically for free secular education supported by local rates. Now, Cobbden's position on education, and more specifically his position on the volunteers, is revealed in a series of letters he wrote to George Combe, who was the Scottish phrenologist and a close friend of Horace Manns, by the way, and an avid supporter of state education. In 1848, Cobbden wrote to Combe as follows and said, you know how cordially I agree with you upon the subject of education, but I confess I see no chance of incorporating in any new movement for an extension of the suffrage. The main strength of any such movement must be in the liberal ranks of the middle class, and they are almost exclusively filled by dissenters. To attempt to raise the question of national education amongst them at the present moment would be Vita throw a bombshell into their ranks and disperse them, close quote. Now, Cobbden knew that he could count on dissenting support in a campaign for suffrage extension, but he also knew that if the campaign were linked to a plan of national education, the dissenters led by the volunteers, the opponents of state education would revolt. He was greatly aggravated by the volunteer campaign against state education. He wrote in another letter, quote, there is no active feeling at present in favor of national education. The dissenters, at least Baines's section, referring to Edward Baines Jr., who had been the only movement party since the League was dissolved, have rather turned popular opinion against it.  I made up my mind on returning from the continent that the best chance I could give to our dissenting friends was to give them time to cool after the excitement of the late opposition to the government major, meaning the 1847 minutes. And therefore, I have avoided throwing the topic in their faces, but I do not intend to preserve my silence much longer. If I take part in a new reform movement, I shall do my best to connect the education question with it, close quote. Now, over two years later, in 1850, Cobden noted that the situation had really not improved as he thought of what he wrote. I thought I had given Mr. Baines and his dissenting friends time to cool down upon the subject, but they appear to be as hot as ever. However, I shall now go straight to the mark and shall neither give nor take quarter. I have made up my mind to go for the Massachusetts system as nearly as we can get it, close quote. Now, in a letter written to Edward Baines in 1848, Cobden warns, quote, against seeking for points of collision among liberals that would cause a split among the liberals. Cobden caution-bained and actually somewhat disingenuous, I might add, quote, to be silent upon the differences one may now see between his own opinions and those of his political allies. And he went on to say that education is the main cause of the split amongst the middle-class liberals. Now, in conclusion, let me just summarize what Cobden himself thought about education. And his views on education emerged clearly in his writing. He favored later in life his secular system of education. He said, as he emphasized repeatedly, that he was, quote, for the American system precisely as it stands. And by the American system, he met the common school system of Massachusetts. He was a great admirer, as I said, of Horace Mann. And I'll just summarize by reading another short passage from Cobden. He said, what I want is to have the same system of education in England that they have in Massachusetts. The same system of education, because I knew there in America it was applied to the satisfaction of those descendants of the nonconformists who have not forgotten their principles and where we know the system works without injury to the rights of conscience of any individual in the country. Of course, he was buying a lot of the propaganda about how the Massachusetts system actually worked. Now, to tie this together, what we're really setting out here is kind of a research program because this has not really been explored. You don't really see an emphasis on this enormous split in the early classical liberal movement over the problem of state education. And by the interpretation I'm giving it here, I am suggesting that contrary to common libertarian belief, Cobden on this issue at least represents anything in the middle of the road position. And the true radical liberals were these unheard of people like Edward Baines Jr., Algernon Wells, and many, many others who might discuss in my paper. So I think that enormous work remains to be done in this area and those libertarians who are interested in history, specifically English history should really take up the issue of volunteerism and look into its literature. It's an enormous literature. I haven't written any of the quotes from the volunteers because there are extensive quotes in my paper and as Joe and I were discussing last night, any of those quotes you could swear could have been written by a modern libertarian. They're explicitly libertarian arguments with rights of conscience and so on and so forth. So it's a marvelous area and we really need to do a lot of work here. Thank you.


I'm over here in Sweden conducting a Baltops 2016 today. I am the machine gun section leader And we're out here conducting Wi-Fi or exercise, which is taking a support by fire position In support of a maneuvering element our Swedish partners. They've come out here and they're running range control and my job as a range safety officer is to make sure The exercise is good all safety regulations both Swedish and Americans Ommet, it's good to see a different terrain profile than what we're accustomed to on Camp Lejeune when we usually run these Exercises, it's quite quite exciting to work with other nations See the difference and the similarities


If not, why not do it today? Subscribe, like, leave a comment, all that jazz. Hey, if you do, I was told, you know, I've been pushing a little bit too much unhealthy food lately with what reigns on you when you subscribe. So today, you can have eggplants smack you in the face because you know that's healthy if you subscribe. Don't worry folks, we didn't forget the Oreos either. We have a new rumor today in regards to Nintendo Switch 2. In fact, the rumor comes from multiple sources. So it's pretty rare that we have a single rumor with multiple places that it's actually coming from. And that's one reason why I really want to talk about this today when it comes to Nintendo Switch 2 because it does make the Nintendo Switch 2 sound like it's coming much sooner than any of us anticipated. It also looks like we might be getting a major Switch 2 blowout coming up this January if the rumors are true. As always, rumors are not facts. So this isn't Nintendo announcing anything. This is for speculation and fun, but also, hey, it's a possibility and we'll just have to wait and see what plays out. So what are we waiting for? Let's dive right in. So this first part comes from a person on Twitter known as Zuby underscore tech. And again, remember, I said there's multiple sources on this so this isn't the only place. Now who is Zuby underscore tech because we've literally never talked about him on our channel before. Well, he's a tech enthusiast, but so am I. So I mean, what does that even mean? I'm a tech enthusiast. Doesn't mean I know what the hell's going on, but he's actually really well known for his coverage of PlayStation. He is not a journalist, nor is he a content creator of any kind, but he is a big PlayStation fan. Now he has said some things over the years that came true. Of course, none of it that's relevant to us because it's always been about PlayStation systems and games and is followed by some prominent folks in the video game industry. Don't believe me. Check out this list. And I only know this because I also follow these people. Genki, Exmuter, Shinobi 602. How about the origin PC CEO, Dreamcast guy? And how about this one? This one really got me. Herman Holst. He is the literal lead of PlayStation Studios. It's a pretty big person to get to follow you. And of course, digital foundry. It's because a lot of this stuff he puts out there tends to come true. I won't go as far as to call him a Nate the hate of PlayStation rumors, but he's known to be reliable in many cases for PlayStation. So what does this actually have to do with Nintendo? Well, he's not put out a new rumor based on things he has heard in regards to Nintendo Switch 2. I do not know how he has contacts that know anything about Nintendo's plans since he is so focused on PlayStation. But again, we have multiple sources here. But he clearly has contacts in the video game industry and maybe this was floated across their desk. I don't know. So let's get to what he put out there in a post. Rumor, Nintendo Switch 2 launching early next year. Nintendo event in January. Now folks, that already sounds really, really interesting. But we need to put out a little context to this one account before we move on to the next source for this rumor. So of course there have been many who have been quick to point out that this guy has publicly trashed the rumored specs of Nintendo Switch 2. And with how the biggest takeaways in a response being that ARM, the CPU, is trashed, of course letting us see his fanboyism for Sony shying through. Since ARM is actually one of the single best mobile CPU architectures in the entire world and there are much better performance than AMD and Intel on lower powered devices. So no, ARM is not factually trashed or people won't keep using it. It doesn't make what he is reporting untrue, just noting that he took a pot shot at rumored specs without seemingly any direct knowledge of what any of those specs actually mean. Just noting this overall. He's a blatant Sony fanboy. If this was all I had, I may not have even made this video because frankly, this could just be one epic troll to attempt to get coverage by people like me just so he can drop a lol's fake tweet later trying to trash Nintendo again. However, we do have an actual second source on this from somebody who seems to be pretty reputable. This comes from ex user Revegenus who does follow semiconductor production and development closely at Samsung and he does do a lot of interesting reports on X on this stuff on his account. And he said the following. It looks like Nintendo Switch 2 will be coming out early next year. There will be a lot worth buying in the coming year. Now keep in mind, he does have a history of leaks and they're typically for the mobile phone side of things and he has proven to be pretty accurate with these leaks in the past in regards to Samsung devices. He has no real reason to out of nowhere dabble in the Nintendo Switch 2 leaks given his audience. But if Samsung is the one manufacturing the chips then it's possible his sources gave him some legit info. This user has shown no ill will unlike the prior one towards other companies and their specs and designs. He's just really into Samsung mobile and seemingly has good sourcing on their upcoming chips in phones and other devices. It's probably a Samsung fanboy if that's even a thing but not someone going out of their way to trash competition like a typical fanboy would. So that's one thing that I'll always clear when it comes to fanboyism is fanboyism often means that not just that you're some mega fan of a company but you're quick to trash everybody else and that's one thing when people call me a fanboy I find completely frustrating because I play games on all platforms and I only offer criticism on other platforms when I deem that criticism as warranted and the company I give the most criticism to is the company I'm claimed to be a mega fanboy of here in Nintendo. So it's a little bit ironic but neither here nor there. The point is these Nintendo switch to rumors are coming from multiple places. One of them seems a bit more reputable. The other one's really really good with PlayStation rumors but is very clearly a Sony fanboy and has no problem taking potshots at things he doesn't understand. So that might sour your take on him a little bit but the whole point is I don't care if people are fanboys. I care about accurate information and again these are just rumors. So obviously as rumors they're unverifiable and questionable in accuracy in the first place. Obviously keep your skepticism put your tinfoil hats on if you want or whatever but these two individuals have proven to be fairly reliable in their separate spaces and now hey they're both saying something about Nintendo Switch 2. Now again when do I think Nintendo Switch 2 is coming? Look I've been beaten the drum on June or September as sort of my two target months for quite a while but if they're saying it's early and they keep saying early early early next year both these people. That doesn't sound like a June release because June is more like middle of 2024. When you hear early you're thinking hey maybe March first three months maybe the first four months of the year you know anywhere in that first third of the year which would be the you know January through April. That just sounds like early you know and obviously we have the one person noting Nintendo is going to do this blowout event in January that would mimic what Nintendo did with Nintendo Switch where while they technically revealed it in October of 2016 in January 2017 when they really had the full blowout event for Nintendo Switch 2. Now maybe they foregoed you know announcing Switch 2 earlier because again you know they still had a semi successful platform selling really really well and they wanted to keep those sales going during the holiday period and then right away in January you get an event out for Switch 2 followed by a quick release a couple of months later. Again this would mimic a lot of what Nintendo did with Nintendo Switch except not having that October reveal which again would make sense not to do it this time because unlike October of 2016 Nintendo actually has a console that are attempting to sell this holiday season the Wii U was discontinued at that point they were trying to sell the NES Classic and I know that Nintendo was worried that a Nintendo Switch reveal was going to gobble sales of a classic one-off system with a select group of games. So anyways it could just be that Nintendo just you know is doing the same timetable just without that announcement. So I'm not going to dismiss this as outright impossible. It would be unheard of for Nintendo Switch to announce and showcase a system in January and release it in March or April that's only two to three months of actual announcement to release hype. There has been some people who have been thinking that we're going to be taking a much shorter announcement to release you know the Nintendo's ever done before. Right now the shortest is the Nintendo Switch where they announced in October and released in March if you do the math. October, November, December, January, February, March it was a little bit over five months between announcement and release. So if you think about that it is entirely possible that Nintendo could conceivably shorten down that a little over five months to a little over three months you know or around three months if that's what they want to do. So again it's unheard of for Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft to announce and release a system that quickly. You know what other companies tend to do this sort of same thing? Well Nintendo's manufacturing partner in Samsung does it with their mobile phones they're announced shortly before you can buy them and then same thing with Apple in the tech industry they announce all their products like literally a few days before you can basically order them. So yeah let's just put it this way a lot of the tech industry works with a very short announcement to release Windows and if Nintendo looks at that and says hey I think we can do the same thing we have a mobile device why don't we announce you know announce something and then release it quickly after maybe they think that's actually something that's going to help them sell a lot more Nintendo Switch 2s instead of sitting there and doing a year of hype and then you know maybe it doesn't turn out as well. It would also explain why Nintendo has no big games announced for next year right now because hey they're going to do this January event and if they did do the January event that still leaves them the February Nintendo Direct so they can literally follow it up with back to back marketing events which could be absolutely insane and a very exciting start for Nintendo fans in 2024. Now again this could also mean that there's a tease at the game awards there could be a full reveal in January a small tease at the game awards you could be setting up a marketing campaign here that would be absolutely insane I don't know again these are just rumors and you know what at least with one of the rumors the one talking about a January event hey we're already in December so you fast forward a month and like a week or two from now and we'll already know if that event is really even a thing and I'm sure it's an event Nintendo would announce ahead of time not like a 24-hour notice thing that might be like hey next week tune in to blah blah blah for the reveal of whatever's next for Nintendo I'm just saying that I don't know that these rumors are true but they're exciting to think about and it's definitely something that has me wondering if Nintendo would be willing to do an even shorter announcement to release than they did with Nintendo Switch you let me know what you think about this down in the comments below it's really interesting that we have multiple sources on and we're just going to sit back and enjoy a hot cup of cocoa in the middle of a cold December as we get ready for the holiday season you know we got Christmas and Hanukkah and all those magical holidays coming up for those that celebrate and I don't know I'm ready for Switch 2 anytime Nintendo


What she is doing is similar to white suffragists is taking a popular convention of the moment and Twisting it to serve her purposes to say that regardless of what you feel about putting the vote in the hands of black people Here's how it will serve your interest. She's speaking the racist language She concludes by saying the ballot wisely used will bring to her the Negro woman the respect and protection She needs it is her weapon of moral defense She has made her point loud and clear and gotten the attention of both white and black readers who then might debate at least the the argument that she has brought to the fore and thereby she's accomplished her aim By putting suffrage smack in the middle of race relations and not just gender relations