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RE: Bill Vincent’s anti-SUBAT harangue below:
Hello Bill,
We spoke last week, though you never replied until this post. I have to say it saddens me to see a fellow union sympathizer act in what I can only think is a self-interested and defamatory way, against the good of the many and for the gain of the one, yourself. I understand that you want to promote your own small auction venue, which I visited last week, but I don’t believe it could possibly serve the needs of all the former-eBay users who need a new venue, catering as it states to lower-end items. If we want to defeat the eBay Inc. monopoly and save our e-businesses, it will take a massive collective action, not just another small for-profit competing venue. The ownership base must be as broad as the user base, else it will be open to take-over by eBay, Inc., as is happening now to the fee-free Craigslist, 25% bought out by eBay already. Bill, you are willing to take our money now to list, just as parasite eBay does, but why should anyone trust you, if you did succeed in gaining eBay-comparable traffic, to not sell us out? How long would it be before eBay Inc.’s buckets of money influenced you? I wonder.
To address the charges of “scam,” that seems to me vaguely hilarious and can only indicate that you have not read and understood the basic function of this Point site. It is to aid collective action by people who cannot, who do not have the resources, to act alone. Our only power comes through our numbers and through a diffuse organization that doesn’t allow any head or leader-owner to emerge (to be swiftly sued by eBay Inc., of course, at the first sign of successful unionization or seller-organization of any kind). Only if there are enough supporters on board to make a project viable, only then, when the base is very broad, does any action proceed, when the project is known to be truly viable. If the tipping points are never reached, nothing ever happens.
In advance of those tipping points being reached, all is tentative, anonymous, and loosely federated with -obviously- no money changing hands. If we can reach 20,000 people who want to make a free people’s ‘WeBay’ site, only then will we have cause to begin determination of a suitable bank with escrow service, etc., to receive and hold our individual $5 contributions in a collective pot. For that to happen we will indeed need to charter the union officially and legally with all being made as transparent as possible. Reading the material on the SUBAT page makes this plain. If you would like to aid in that chartering, it could only help to have more oldtime union brothers involved — so long as no interested leadership structure is allowed to emerge to redirect the organization away from its founding goal of user-equality and democratic organizational principles. The founding aim of the WeBay alternative is a free and open common public marketplace, more like a web utility than a company capable of becoming another parasite on it users.
For now the SUBAT is an e-union, a collection of frustrated sellers and buyers connected through the internet and united in our common opposition to eBay Inc. monopoly control of on-line auction commerce. It rose directly out of our rage against the corporate hijacking of the eBay Community, as announced by eBay Management just this month. All that unites us is a common commitment to make a change and plan together for a future without eBay, Inc.
You mentioned the AFL-CIO and we have indeed contacted their headquarters asking for aid, along with the global headquarters of the IWW. If any other extant unions can lend support or guidance to the fledgling SUBAT, we are thankful for it and invite it wholeheartedly. There is often resistance to imagining small eBay-business owners might need a union-like organization, but the very fact that 430,000 Americans now depend on eBay sales for all or a significant part of their income argues otherwise.
We believe an auction venue for and of the people is possible, if we can put aside the distrust that eBay, Inc. has deliberately fostered among us over these past 10 years, and recall back to the 1990s, when eBay was called “person-to-person trading” and trust in the basic goodness of the majority of people was not immediately seen as a scam or a crackpot idea. It is that belief that created the first eBay and it’s that kind of hope we believe can create the people’s ‘WeBay’ as well. Bill is welcome into the SUBAT, too, as we asked for his input last week, but were ignored. (The charge that anyone asked him to “close [his] auction site” is a bald-faced lie and I will stand before anyone to testify to that, as I sent him the e-mail asking for his input, which mail I have retained.) We believe there should be no petty division and no self-interested factions within the sellers’ movement for change. Because it is only by working together that the small individual can ever stand against the tyrant eBay, Inc. has become. The only reason we small fry might be able to win this time: we built behemoth eBay up from a small fry in the first place. To recreate that massive site, but without the company that now feeds on us as a parasite sucks blood, all we really must do is unite, coordinate, and leave as a group, which is the purpose of SUBAT, to help make that kind of collective coordination possible.
We invite comments or replies on the SUBAT campaign page for the greater WeBay , also on this Point site.
Thank you,
Julia Wolper
eBay ID: fellow-travelers
