Saturday 1 June 2019

Beware the Friendly Pat On The Shoulder.

       When you look across the planet and see the injustice, inequality, poverty, deprivation, death and destruction, all exacerbated by deliberately engineered brutal wars, and you see the ecological disaster foisted on us all by unbridled corporate planet plundering, it is difficult to sum it all up. You feel to detail the mess that we find ourselves in would take a massive volume of unreadable proportions.
       Yet on analysis it is relatively simple, our economic system of capitalism is the root cause of practically all our problems. It spawns inequality, it breeds poverty, it engineers those avoidable wars, it legitimises the destruction of our planet, yet the vast majority of the population still run to the ballot box to vote for more of the same. We listen to the managers of the system telling us blatant lies, that by now we should recognise as propaganda to safeguard their wealth, power and privileges.
       As long as we tolerate a system that is designed to allow the few to amass vast fortunes at the expense of the many, we will stay mired in the mess that we find ourselves in at present, or worse, our extinction.
        I'm sure it is not beyond our imagination to devise a sustainable system of fairness, a system based on co-operation, mutual aid and respect for each other, a system that would see to the needs of all our people. I am also sure that such a system is a desire deep in the hearts of all peoples across the planet. What's stopping us? All it requires is for us all, in solidarity with each other, to act on those desires, the tool to get us there is of course anarchism.
    A paragraph that I think sums up what our attitude to this society should be is one stated by Jean Paul Marat:


       "Don't be deceived when they tell you things are better now. Even if there's no poverty to be seen because the poverty's been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much, that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you. Don't be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there's no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they'll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces":
Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk
 

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