Anarchoblogs

CANADIAN ANARCHIST MOVEMENT:
THE HISTORY OF NEFAC IN QUÉBEC (CITY) PART 5:
This is another installment of our translation of an article in the Québecois anarchist magazine 'Ruptures'. As previously mentioned, when the full text is translated it will be collated into a complete article. There is a lot to be learned from the experiences of our Québec comrades for all of us who hope to build an organized and effective anarchist movement. The reader will note the change in the title above. A commentator pointed out that what follows is more of a history of NEFAC in Québec City rather than in the whole of Québec. Duly noted.

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The election of Jean Charest:

On 14 April 2003, Jean Charest won the provincial election. The Liberal Party took this momentum to announce a series of measures designed to "modernize" the state (the famous "re engineering") and make the Québec economy more "competitive". Throughout the fall, we would be on the front lines in the many demonstrations against the government. The culmination of this mobilization would be the day of action on 11 December 2003. That day, tens of thousands of people went out on the streets and paralyzed Québec. We were involved in blocking the Port of Quebec where one of our comrades worked along with the the Canadian Union of Public Employees. Something unexpected was happening before our eyes: as if the labor movement finally woke from its sleep? Unfortunately, the general strike promised after the festival by the union leadership did not materialize, killing in the bud the movement which was radicalizing. However, this upsurge of fighting unionism vividly demonstrated that the working class has the power to undermine the state and the capitalist system .. Of course it wants and decides to act against the advice of its leaders.







Also in December, the 21st issue of the anarchist newspaper "Le Trouble" came out. Produced entirely in Quebec, it was the culmination of a long process that aimed to merge this journal with the NEFAC newspaper. For several months, we wrote texts and distributed the newspaper in Quebec (up to 500 copies per issue). Members of La Nuit were also involved in the editorial committee. A little anecdote: at a demonstration of the popular movement, a "progressive" priest with whom we were discussing on the occasion pulled $50 out of his pocket for so that we could give out copies of Le Trouble to demonstrators ...






The merger process was going to fail for various reasons. There were several people in the " Le Trouble" collective who disagree with the merger. The arrival of a group of former NEFAC activists in collective definitively ended the process. NEFAC needed a newspaper to fulfill a role that Ruptures could not play : making agit-prop on a regular basis. In March of 2004, NEFAC launched its own newspaper, a 4-page publication entitled Cause Commune . The launch of the first issue took place in Quebec in "Le Lieu" gallery on the rue du Pont. We took the opportunity to show a film on the participation of anarchists in the Algerian resistance and anti-colonial struggles. Some forty people were present, including a small group of Maoists from Montreal and some anars from Saint-Georges-de-Beauce who had organized a new NEFAC collective during the summer of 2004. The federation was now present in four cities in Quebec (Montreal, Sherbrooke, St-Georges and Quebec). South of the border, NEFAC developed rapidly, as well as in Ontario. In Quebec, the collective remained the same: the question of our single sex membership(See Molly Note) had remained entirely the same for nearly two years and we failed to break out of this impasse.
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Molly Note:
Occasionally, when doing this sort of translation, I come across a word, local reference or figure of speech that completely mystifies me. This was the case with the word "mixité" in the original French of this article. I'd never heard this word before, and my trusty old Larousse (it's a pocket version) gave me no help. Various online translation services gave either null results or the translations "coeducation" or "mixed". I had to wing it on this one and assume that the term referred to a previous observation that there were no women in NEFAC Québec City at that time. Even so I couldn't find a convenient and succinct English word, or even phrase, that would translate the idea exactly. Hence my rather free translation of the last sentence above. If any francophones could suggest a better alternative, or point out where I have made a mistake, I would be happy to edit the above. Another thing that I have noticed while doing this translation is the writer's habit of using the present tense for events in the past. I presume that this is common usage, but I have taken the liberty of rendering the text using the various English imperfect, preterite and past perfect tenses as was appropriate. No doubt the original is more readable in French, but using the proper tense in English makes it more readable in English.

This interview was published, in Slovak, by Markíza Magazine on 2 July 2009.

The English text here is a loose back-translation of the Slovak text of the published article, which is available at mojacasopis.sk.

This is a translation of a translation of my own interview responses, and a bunch of things inevitably get lost in such a process. In a couple of cases, I’ve footnoted things that I feel I ought to clarify, but, with that, the text:

Verbal Aspect Bothers Me!

Text: Ľuba Kukučková – Photo: Oles Cheresko

Mike Gogulski has a Polish surname, was born an American and today is a citizen of no state. He has worked in the USA and in Belgium. Lately, he’s dropped anchor in Slovakia and has been living in Bratislava for five years.

To the east, he’s been as far as Košice, Guatemala to the south and Vancouver, Canada to the northwest. He doesn’t feel like a globetrotter, and he’s very pleased to be in Bratislava!

Mike’s paternal grandparents emigrated to America at the start of the 1900s. His mother’s ancestors came from Germany. Most of today’s Gogulskis live in the area of Poznań, Poland, but Mike doesn’t know them personally. Like many European emigrants at the beginning of the twentieth century, his ancestors, too, wanted to break their bonds with their motherland and become Americans. They had difficult lives, too, and there remained no time to preserve the Polish language and culture for their children. But now their great-grandchild has come back to Europe after all. He speaks four languages and, thanks to his spontaneous approach to people, has made many friends in Slovakia. In this way, he might be called a true world citizen. Mike Gogulski, however, has no citizenship. He renounced his American citizenship, and for the moment is only considering becoming a Slovak citizen…

School, LSD and Beer

Michael was born on 8 August 1972 in Phoenix, Arizona. His father got a job as an electro-mechanical engineer in Orlando, Florida, and there Mike lived with his family until he was 25 years old. Afterward, he roamed a number of states following jobs, from Minnesota to Connecticut and from California to Wisconsin. Eight years ago, his father died of cancer. His mother, Joan, lives in Florida. Mike’s younger sister, Karen, who works as a nurse, is raising two adorable boys – Cole and Chase – in Orlando with her husband, Billy. Mike sees his nephews only in photos, though. “In 1990 I started studying information technology at a university in Orlando, but then my interest shifted to LSD and beer,” he openly confesses. He quit his studies after the first semester. But he’s found his footing in life quite successfully. He has a ten-year information systems career behind him as a systems administrator, network engineer and IT infrastructure manager. He moved around a large area of the western parts of the US after work.

In 2004, in the wake of many work as well as personal expectations and failures, Mike left America. His girlfriend at the time wanted to teach English in a European country, someplace in the eastern bloc. She sent out inquiries and got a response from right here in Slovakia. They both moved to Bratislava and, though their paths parted later, Mike became fond of Bratislava. Since 2006 he’s begun devoting himself more to language, rather than to computers as in the past. He has become a translator, proofreader and editor.

Slovaks are Quieter

“Bratislava has its good and less-good sides,” the American native muses. “I never lived right in the city in the past, in the US. I thought that I’d hate the city, but that’s not so. I find living here pleasant. I like that Bratislava is small enough to offer a peaceful life while being big enough to have everything you’d expect from a city.” He has friends, lovers, ex-lovers as well as enemies here… He has been to Žilina, Košice, Prešov, Banská Bystrica and Zvolen. He has heard that Slovakia is a beautiful land and looks forward to discovering it over time. Does he sometimes compare Slovaks to Americans? To Mike, good and bad people are found everywhere. As a matter of principle, however, he judges people as individual beings, not as members of some group based on place of birth or the geographical divisions of the world. Mike believes that Slovaks, in general, are quieter than Americans. He’s had some awkward moments, though, with the hazards of Slovak. He’d been in Slovakia barely three months when he approached a group of girls at work with whom he often went to smoke outside the building. He asked: “Would you like to smoke?” And they took this a bit differently… They stopped laughing after a bit and explained the sexual undertone* of the question.

At one time he defended his trouble with the language by saying, “my Slovak is good enough for taxi drivers and waiters,” but since then he’s improved dramatically. He reads well in Slovak, in his humble appraisal, writes like a respectable schoolboy but has trouble, though, understanding responses in conversation. He works as a translator, and so he hasn’t mastered slang; he says his Slovak is more lawyerly. Really understanding a language demands growing up in the country. “I didn’t want to live in some sort of isolated bubble with other Americans and English-speaking people,” Mike says. “I would have felt cut off from reality. Many Slovaks say that Slovak is one of the most difficult languages in the world, but I don’t think so. That doesn’t mean, of course, that it’s easy. I took two years of Latin in school, so Slovak declension didn’t surprise me. Still, I’m not good at recalling when and how I should use the various cases. And the hardest thing for me – and perhaps for many westerners who come to Slavic lands – is verbal aspect. I want a magic key that would make it clear for me when to use the perfective aspect, but no such key exists!”

Mike is “Polyamorous”

Besides working with Slovak, Mike also translates official documents from Czech into English. He has simplified his lifestyle, and so he’s also living off smaller earnings. If he travels to the Czech Republic, he gets by in Slovak, and says the local people there observe him with interest. He once spoke Spanish very well, but has forgotten a lot. He believes, however, that if he traveled for a month to Spain or Mexico he would speak fluently by the third week. Though he behaves like a world citizen, he hasn’t traveled that much more of it. “In the US I moved from city to city every two years. I have been as far east as Košice, as far south as Guatemala, and as far north and west as Vancouver, Canada. I have been satisfied living here in Bratislava, and I don’t have any urge to move someplace else soon.” Mike got married in the US at 23, but the marriage lasted for only six years. From the marriage he has a nine-year-old daughter, Kyra, who lives with her mother in Georgia. Nobody from his family has visited him in Bratislava yet, though maybe they will come when his nephews grow up. Is he sad to be alone? “No. These days I am polyamorous (author’s note: in love with more than one person) and I’m not interested in an everlasting relationship of the marriage type.”**

Why did Mike renounce his American citizenship? “In its political, governmental essence, the USA appears to be a criminal organization. I don’t want to be connected with it in any way. I’m not against supporting society, but I am against taxes, which the state criminally demands of me from birth, and I don’t want to support others’ privileges. For me, ridding myself of citizenship was a way to bring my legal and social status into harmony with my beliefs. Perhaps later I will apply for Slovak citizenship, but that will be only for practical reasons, so that I can travel. I don’t want to have any sort of connection with the criminal organization known as the state. And, perhaps, I will not be a citizen of any country until the end of my life.”

* The Slovak verb fajčiť means, literally, “to consume by smoking”, as by smoking a cigarette. In slang it also means “to perform fellatio”.

** My actual words: “These days I am openly polyamorous, and not interested in a state marriage of any kind.”

Tags: anarchism, Bratislava, information technology, libertarian, marriage, polyamory, renunciation of citizenship, translation

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INTERNATIONAL ANARCHIST MOVEMENT-FRANCE/IRAN:STATEMENT OF THE CNT-AIT ON THE EVENTS IN IRAN:If there is anything that clearly illustrates the “translator’s dilemma” it is the article that follows. The English language article that follows comes from th…

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Dear folks,

First, last week an anonymous donor sent US$250. Thank you *very* much!

Second, I’d like to ask the rest of my readers for some support.

Why?

• Maybe you just like what I’m doing here, and want to encourage more of it.
• Maybe you find my podcasting voice so sexy that it makes you feel dirty not paying for the privilege of hearing it.
• Maybe you’re sympathetic to the fact that earnings in my translation business are down by more than 70% since December with the recession, and that I’m really having trouble making ends meet.
• Maybe you’re thrilled by the fact that I’ve been devoting my now copious free time to being the technical coordinator, chief implementer and blog administrator for the Free Agents Network, and that I’m in the process of taking on similar duties for the Motorhome Diaries as well.
• Or maybe giving just makes you feel good.

Anything you can send would be most welcome. If you click “Support nostate.com” above, you’ll find a variety of methods by which to make a contribution.

Thanks for your patience with my blegging!

Peace,

Mike

Through NoState.com I’ve come to discover Transposh, a new Wordpress plugin that promises to make the task of translating pages of your site to other languages very easy, and to also take reduce the personal effort required to do so by crowd-sourcing the task.And boy does it deliver!

You may have noticed that I occasionally write in other languages, particularly in my native Greek. That doesn’t happen so often because my audience is mainly international now but it still bugged me that my choice of language was in effect making it difficult for my friends and relatives from my birthland to follow and participate. However the task of replicating each post on another language was simply too much to bother.

However Transposh finally gives me an opportunity to fix this. I can much more easily do the task of translating my pages to my native language myself, since it utilizes google translate to get your text changed, transparently. That is, the text will switch to the google translation of the language you want and you can edit and fix it right there and then, without having to go through the dashboard or anything.

Not only that, but the elements of the page which exist in other locations as well, such as the title or the header, once corrected once do not need to be corrected in every other page of your site as well, but rather are intelligently cached and served.

Oh, and did I mention the crowd-sourcing part? This is my favourite bit. Transposh gives the opportunity for the blog author to not only allow other registered users to translate, but also for anonymous as well. This means that all interested parties can help improve your site. This might not be of much use for small fishes such as me, but for larger players with an international audience, it will certainly provide a lot more labour. Of course, there’ always the issue of vandalism, but much like any wiki, some solutions should be possible.

This crowd-sourcing now means that if you find an interesting article in a Transposh-enabled site, you can help translate to the language you wish (of those the author made available) and then send the link to all your friends whos’ foreign language skills are not so good.

For an Alpha version plugin, I’m impressed. Both at the quality of the code but also at the quality of the support. The main developer is lightning quick to respond and help with problems (although that’s bound to change as the plugin becomes more popular I guess). For example, my first and largest problem was that it seemed that the translation of each page was taking forever, sucking all my resources and that caching was not happening. However after some discussion with the developer, I discovered that by simply leaving the first translation to finish, everything became much snappier on subsequent attempts. That is because the general elements are translated once on the first time (which on an element heavy page like mine can take a while) but are cached once this is completed.

Oh, and did I mention that that it can also make nice permalinks for your translated articles that are indexable by google and cacheable by Hyper-Cache? (And I assume WP Super-Cache as well). For example, you can find the Greek translation of this article here.

So if you’re writing a multi-language Wordpress blog or if you have an international audience, I think it’s time you give this plugin a go. Even if you don’t have the time to perform the task, you give the capability for others to read it easily (without having to go to visit google first) or even do the full job of translation themselves for the most interesting stuff.

For the Division by Zer0, I’ve now activated the Greek and German languages since I don’t expect people from other places to visit much. However if you’d like another option, simply let me know and I’ll enable it.

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Other similar posts you might also enjoy: Of Wordpress Caches and Fast PHPs | The fastest caching combo for Wordpress. Am I in a cached Nirvana? | Babelfish

Some of you may have noticed that a little “translation” widget has appeared at the bottom of a sidebar column here.

I’ve installed a WordPress plugin called Transposh, and enabled it for Slovak and Spanish. Transposh segments the page text, pulls machine translations from Google translate and other sources, integrates them into the display of the page and stores them in the database. It then allows users to edit the translated segments of the text in order to improve upon the (almost always faulty) machine translation.

Crowdsourcing translation is a very cool idea, and has a definite “anarcho” appeal to it. Transposh is not a mature program yet, but its developer is active and responsive to bug reports and feature requests, so I’m hopeful that it will be ready for prime time soon.

When it is, I hope to roll it out on the Center for a Stateless Society’s website, where recently I announced a volunteer effort to translate the Center’s publications into as many languages as possible.

Meanwhile, if you’re a Slovak or Spanish speaker, feel free to mess around with Transposh here and let me know what you find.

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I purchased the painting shown in 2000 in Playa del Carmen, Quintana Roo, México, for a hefty sum, as well as several other small pieces by the same author, Ramon Bautísta Cervantes.

The work measured perhaps 80 x 80 cm, and was made of dyed yarn pressed into beeswax spread over a wooden board backing.

The painting appears to me to be an example of the native shamanic art of the Huicholes, an indigenous people of west-central México. I first became aware of the style in the mid-90s as part of my explorations of psychedelics and shamanism. There is a bit of confusion as to origins here, however, as the author writes “arte Tepehuano” (”art of the Tepehuán people”) on the back side. I don’t know how to resolve that disparity.

Before I left the US, I left this painting and a few other objects in the care of my dear friend, Chris Williams, at the home of him and his wife in Silicon Valley, California. Last August, their house burned down. A pet gecko perished in the flames, one cat suffered ear-tip and paw burns, and they lost a great deal of property, including this painting and those other objects. Chris blogs occasionally of the incident and its aftermath at http://www.electricrain.com/~cgw/purplewood/fire/. My sympathy, of course, lies with Chris, his wife and their animals, and finding out that they went through this experience largely unscathed means a lot more to me than having lost some sentimental objects that wouldn’t fit into my luggage.

Some time ago, wanting to see the thing again, I asked Chris to photograph it. He did so, and posted photos of the front back back side at his website. These are now reproduced here, so that this work may continue to be enjoyed for its pattern and form, even though its substance has been destroyed. Thanks, Chris! Thanks, internets!

My own Spanish being somewhat inadequate to the task, and the language used on the back side being somewhat non-standard, I commissioned a translation and correction into “standard” Castillian of the text. This was graciously provided by José Arnoldo Rodríguez Carrington of Ciudad Ayala, Morelos, México. Arnoldo’s work is below. ¡Graciás, Señor!

Original Cuando el sol se crusa con la luna el curandero no puede curar por que no se alibian los enfermos más se agraban porque el sol pierde la fuersa a sia, a la tierra la luna oculta los secretos de la sabiduría la chuparrosa espera la comición que le da, el curandero al dios del agua los curanderos estan atentos dela Crusa del sol, y la luna. arte tepehuano. autor. Ramon Bautísta Cervantes

Castillian “standard” Cuando el sol se cruza con la luna el curandero no puede curar porque no se alivian los enfermos. Más bien se agravan porque el sol pierde la fuerza hacia la tierra. La luna oculta los secretos de la sabiduría. La chuparrosa espera la comisión que le da el curandero al dios del agua. Los curanderos están atentos de la cruza del sol y la luna. arte tepehuano. autor. Ramon Bautísta Cervantes

English translation When the sun crosses the moon, the medicine man cannot heal because sick people do not get well. Instead, they get more ill because the sun loses its strength towards the earth. The moon obscures the secrets of wisdom. The hummingbird expects the commission the medicine man gives the God of Water. The medicine men are heedful of the crossing of the sun and the moon. Tepehuano art Author: Ramon Bautísta Cervantes

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On Monday (16 February 2009) I submitted an application to the Slovak Aliens’ Police bureau for a stateless person’s travel document under the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons. There was much waiting around the office to do, as the staffers there were quite unfamiliar with the process and regulations for folks like [...]

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Fellow agorist blogger FSK late last year explored the question: “Is Participating in the State Economy Immoral?“

The short answer, of course, is an emphatic “no”, unless you’re going to adopt the patently insane position that we’re all criminals for doing so, as Francois Tremblay does in saying “We are all war criminals” — a position which I will contest to my last breath.

In exploring the question, FSK links to my first “Educating for anarchism” post, and elaborates on a theme that I’ve heard before — and rejected.

This post was originally going to be a reply comment to FSK’s post, but since it grew so long and was so long ago, I thought it deserved a post of its own, here:

FSK writes:

I noticed this post by Mike Gogulski, where he refused a job for the State. The fallacy in his reasoning is that *ANY* on-the-books work supports the State via taxes. Suppose I have two choices. I can do $10k of work directly for the State, or $10k of work in a wage slave job. Suppose my income taxation rate is 50%. In the $10k wage slave job, I contribute $5k directly to the State. Similarly, if I accept the $10k job working directly for the State, I pay $5k directly back to the State in taxes. (In some countries, income on State jobs is tax-exempt. I’m ignoring that possibility here.) If I don’t accept the $10k State job, someone else will take it, still getting paid $10k but perhaps doing marginally worse work. However, by refusing the direct State job, I am forced to accept a marginally lower salary. Overall, the net damage to the State by my refusal to work directly for the State is negligible.

“I refuse to work directly for the State” is an attitude that only works when vastly more than 50% of the population has been convinced “The State is evil!” By that time, the State has already lost anyway. Once a vast majority of people have been convinced “The State is evil!”, then it’s already all over for the State. In the meantime, if you refuse to work directly for the State, then someone almost as qualified will gladly take your place.

Hello, FSK! I’m finally circling back on this post, which has been open in a browser tab since, er… last year I’m just gonna reply to the bits that mentioned me.

The fallacy in his [i.e.: my] reasoning is that *ANY* on-the-books work supports the State via taxes.

This is true. However, you overlook something here, though you do kindof address it later — though I have a quibble with that as well.

If I earn $10k making sex toys (something which, as far as I know, no state anywhere actually produces, nor desires), and surrender $5k of my earnings to the state, the state receives a net benefit of $5k, minus collection and enforcement costs, which may be held to be negligible.

If I earn $10k making ICBMs for the state and surrender the same $5k in income tax, the state receives a net benefit of $5k cash PLUS whatever benefit the state assigns to the missiles.

By choosing to make sex toys which do not benefit the state in any way (other than by the taxes imposed upon them) rather than missiles which benefit the state directly, I at least keep my hands off of a transaction which would create greater evil.

I put it to you that by refusing to do the state’s work I am creating a benefit for freedom. Certainly, in the inverse case, you would not praise me for finding a quasi-agorist method of doing work to help provide the state with ICBMs. The object of the work matters as well as the economics.

That was quibble #1. Quibble #2 is this:

[I]f you refuse to work directly for the State, then someone almost as qualified will gladly take your place.

Arguably true, given today’s circumstances. However, in my particular case, there are only a very small number of professional translators who both speak English as their native language and who have a high level of competency in translating the Slovak language. Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that I have a real niche market, and that there are only ten other people in the world, including me, who can deliver the same Slovak-to-English translation job at the same level of quality as I can. My refusal takes me out of the pool of available labor, and thus the state has only 90% of the potential labor force available to it. At any given time, this tends to make getting the state’s work in translating Slovak to English more difficult, as there are fewer resources which can be applied to the task. It might also have the side effect of driving up prices among those other nine translators who are willing to work for the state. At some point, when prices are driven up high enough, the customer stops buying.

However, there is yet another benefit. When I tell one of my agency clients that I do not do any work for directly governments, that I do not do any work on non-governmental company/charity projects that are funded by governments, that I do not do any work for organizations that derive more than X% of their revenues from taxes, that I do not do any work for organizations which engage in certain objectionable statist activities, I am making a contribution toward anarchist education. I have alerted one or more people at that translation agency that there is a moral objection which might be raised against taking certain kinds of work.

In many cases, that message may well fall on deaf ears today. Maybe only 1 in 100 translation agency employees might have their own beliefs modified by coming into contact with mine in this way. But it will be remembered, and perhaps in the future those same people might think over the issue again, or tell a story to a colleague or a friend: “Hey, there’s this Mike guy who says ‘All taxes are theft!’ and ‘I read FSK!’ and won’t take certain kinds of jobs from us, isn’t that funny?” And it can spread from there.

And now, quibble #3:

There is a moral argument for refusing to take jobs and income from the state. All of the state’s money and property is stolen. When we freely accept known stolen property in trade, if we do not become accessories to theft ourselves we at least become facilitators of that theft, in that if we refused to accept unearned wealth in trade and convinced those around us to do the same, then the criminals stealing it would no longer have an incentive to do so, as they could never spend it. I, personally, do not want to be paid out of money stolen from other people through taxation. Recognizing that eliminating this entirely under the statist system may be impossible, I still hold it as my own duty to minimize the occurrence thereof and to encourage others to do the same.

A drop, perhaps, in an ocean of statist shit. But it’s my drop, damnit, and I’d like you to see all sides and all possibilities.

Dixie Flatline of the No Treason blog adds additional commentary, to which FSK replies in An Example of Pointless State Resistance. Your mileage, as always, may vary.

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