Support Antifascists.

       Fascists raise their vile brainless shit heads from time to time, it seems as if the powers that be whistle these dogs in whenever there is a hint of anger and unrest among the population. Invariable it is those who resist the fascist scum that get treated to the harshest treatment from the forces of "law and order", that gives you a fair idea where their real support comes from.

A call for solidarity and support from Sweden:

        For a few years Gothenburg was one of the focal points of neo-nazi activity in Sweden. The bombings of a leftist book cafe and two refugee camps in 2016 were followed by a period of intense pursuits at establishing the so called Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM) on the streets of our city. The NRM is a violent pro-Hitler sect consisting of racist maniacs threatening, attacking and in some cases even killing its opponents. No one in their right mind wants them around.

Originally published by Anarchist Black Cross Gothenburg.

       Their efforts reached its climax with the attempt to arrange a big nazi march in the autumn of 2017. But they underestimated the collective rage and resistance of everyday people. Almost 20,000 people claimed the streets, stepped over public order fences or took some part in blocking every chance for the march to succeed. Since then, their presence is limited to night time actions and short visits to nearby towns. We halted the establishment of a local nazi movement, but it has not stopped.

      In 2018 a group of nazis, some belonging to the NRM, tried to break into a syndicalist may day-celebration. They were efficiently stopped by people in the demonstration, and one of our comrades is now awaiting trial for an alleged assault.
     In 2019 the NRM held a demonstration on the first of may in our neighbouring town Kungälv, hoping every left leaning antifascist would be busy. But thousands of people, local and traveling from Gothenburg, made their day a miserable failure. They have since announced they will not come back to Kungälv this year. At least one comrade from Gothenburg is however awaiting trial for allegedly resisting the police, and more accusations may likely come following what was described as a riot.

      With trials coming up, and assuming that the confrontations above will likely not be the last, we ask for your support. A series of support parties in Gothenburg have already begun, but knowing that the Swedish state is happy to set an example with antifascists, we suspect this will be expensive.
        Every euro raised will be used to first pay for fines and second to cover the costs associated with prison sentences. Should there be money left over, it will be used to help cover similar cases in the future.

Crowdfunding campaign:

https://www.firefund.net/gothenburgafa
Anarchist Black Cross Gothenburg

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

Open Savage Insanity.

       Apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide, call it what you will, the Zionist state of Israel's treatment of the people of Palestine doesn't contain any shred of humanity. It defies all human decency, it is a vicious psychotic policy built on the insane belief that approximately 2,000 years ago, an invisible man in the sky gave these lands to them and them alone. Based on this insane illusion a nation state and its supporters are quite prepare plunder, brutalise, dispossess and murder all those none Jews that live on those lands. Sadly it is the people of Palestine that are standing in the way of this psychotic nation from realising its insane fantasy dream. All this takes place in full view of the rest of the world, and the other nation states either look the other way, or openly applaud and support this psychotic nation's fantasies. This is usually done for power and profit, no other reason, humanity doesn't appear on their to do list. When will the revulsion of the ordinary people rise up in righteous anger, and put a stop to this psychotic inhuman brutality.

This from PressTV: 

Israel approves 1,800 settler units as elections near

      Israeli forces have injured dozens of Palestinians during clashes with protesters across the occupied West Bank. Israeli forces on Friday stormed al-Arma Mountain in a village in Nablus, where dozens of Palestinians had been staging a sit-in since last night in protest against settlers’ plans to seize the area.

      The Palestinian Red Crescent Society reported that 134 people were injured during the clashes in the village of Baita near Nablus. Most of the wounded either suffered suffocation due to inhaling tear gas fired by the Israeli forces or were hit with rubber bullets. According to the report, one of the wounded was a teenage boy who was hit in his back with a live bullet.

     Palestinian media reports said the clashes were ongoing and the Israeli regime declared the area a “closed military zone” until Friday night. Israeli forces also attacked an anti-settlement rally in the village of Kafr Qaddum in Qalqilya, leaving tens of Palestinians injured. Murad Eshtewi, the head of the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee in Kafr Qaddum, said clashes erupted after the Israeli soldiers dispersed a weekly rally by using live and rubber bullets as well as tear gas. One of the injured was hit with a live bullet, while six others were wounded by rubber bullets. Moreover, 33 Palestinians suffered suffocation due to inhaling tear gas.

      The West Bank sees weekly rallies in the lands that the Israeli regime has decided to seize to build settlements on. 

       More than 600,000 Israelis live in over 230 settlements built since the 1967 Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem al-Quds.

      Emboldened by US President Donald Trump, Israel has stepped up its settlement construction activities in defiance of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, which pronounced settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem al-Quds “a flagrant violation under international law.”

      Israeli troops also dispersed another rally in the center of the city of al-Khalil (Hebron), which had been staged to commemorate the 26th anniversary of the Ibrahimi Mosque Massacre and to condemn the Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people.

      On February 25, 1994, an Israeli settler randomly opened fire at Muslims observing the dawn prayers at the Ibrahimi Mosque in the holy fasting month of Ramadan, killing 29 worshipers and injuring 150 others. Later in the day, Israeli forces killed an additional 21 Palestinians who took to the streets across the occupied lands to protest the al-Khalil bloodshed.

      Thousands took part in the Friday’s rally, which also called for an end to the Israeli occupation and condemned Trumps’ Middle East plan. The Israeli forces used sound bombs and rubber bullets against the protesters. They also physically assaulted them.

     Trump unveiled his plan on January 28. The so-called deal would have, among other contentious things, enshrined Jerusalem al-Quds as “Israel’s undivided capital” and allowed the regime to annex settlements in the occupied West Bank and the Jordan Valley.

All Palestinian groups have unanimously rejected the plan.

Laugh In Their Face.

       Despite the unbridled brutal repression from the Greek state's minders, against autonomous spaces, migrants, squats and self organising communities, the people of Exarcheia, and further afield, are determined to hold on to these features of their lives and are resisting and fighting back. In the face of the authoritarian, repressive state they are showing it the two fingers. Their struggle and determination should be an inspiration to us all to stand up and resist the ever encroaching tentacles of the state. 

This from Act For Freedom Now:

 

      On Saturday 29/2 at Exarchia Square we will burn our own “cop-carnival-dummy”. We come with our friends, our children, our nephews, our grandmothers and grandfathers, and take back the square from the occupation forces and all those trying to make repression a permanent reality in our neighborhood. We bring our drinks, our masks, our music instruments and all of our toys for a frantic carnival from two in the noon until late in the afternoon!
         Oust the fear, the streets will win!
     Open assembly of squats, collectives,internationalists, migrants and solidarians

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

The Perennial Question.

The Warmth Of A Dream.

He lay in a dark doorway, dreamed of home,

night frost locked his joints

morning rain chilled the marrow of his bone.

In the dream there was a sister,

a pram in a garden, a crowd of youngsters

who called him "mister", a time of little pain.

Are these youngsters the same young men, who

now laugh at him, throw beer cans,

piss on him as he lies dunk in some dark lane?

When was that first step down this slippery slope,

when was that first step to no forgiveness.

No will to rise to beg for food,

numbness kills the pain.

The dream brings a warmth that feels good,

dark fog shades out consciousness,

an ambulance carries off a body washed in rain.

       Homelessness is back in the news again, with our new bunch of pampered, privileged parasitical government ministers in control spouting how they are going to resolve this problem and the money they will throw at it. At the tender young age of 85, 86 next month, I wish I could remember how many governments I have heard spew out this mantra, but the problem still remains. It is the same with child poverty, each new bunch of political ballerinas pledges how they will end the scourge of child poverty, alas-alack, it is still with us. 

      It is now being stated that the official figures for homeless are inaccurate and a gross under estimate, as if we didn't know. The truth being that the true number of homeless in this country as away far beyond "shocking", it is a criminal indictment against the system. Homelessness is a rather tame word, it belies the underlying world contained in that simple word. The true meaning of homelessness is, a miserable existence, a life of anxiety, a blighted life, a damaged health, a stunted potential, and in many cases an early death.

      As long as wealth governs quality of life, there will be those with no quality of life, such a system breeds and fosters homelessness. Glasgow is no stranger to this avoidable punishment inflicted on some unfortunate individuals and families.  

      This from Glasgow Live:

 

       New figures have revealed an increase in the number of homeless deaths in Glasgow.
     Statistics published today by the National Records of Scotland show there were 100.5 estimated deaths per million population in Glasgow in 2018, considerably more than any other city in Scotland. This compares to 63.5 estimated deaths per million in Glasgow in 2017.
     Aberdeen was second behind our city in terms of the 2018 stats, with 67.8 estimated deaths per million. The Scottish average was found to be 35.9. East Renfrewshire was the only council area with no homeless deaths in either year.
    Meanwhile, there were an estimated 195 deaths of people experiencing homelessness across the country in 2018, an increase from the 2017 figure of 164. Scotland had the highest rate of homeless deaths of all GB countries in 2018, with a rate of 35.9 per million population compared to 16.8 in England and 14.5 in Wales.

   Should I see another 85 years and we are still persisting with the same economic system, then I will still be hearing how our lords and master are going to get rid of child poverty and end homelessness. Surely by now anyone with a shred of intelligence and a slight grasp of our history would come to the conclusion that this present economic capitalist system can't solve our problems and has to be demolished once and for all.

The Homeless. 

Tenebrous spectres, they exist,   out there,

on the crumbling edge of chaos.

A father, a son, a brother,

a daughter, a sister, a mother.

Fragments of some shattered family structure;

waste products

from a society being driven to destruction

by a hurricane of greed

living a life that wears out life,

dying,

the devious death of exhaustion from existence.  

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

The Long Struggle.

Photo courtesy of Telesur

        The people of Haiti have been in struggle since and before they proclaimed the island as a republic. A slave population that took control of their own lives and freed themselves from French imperialism. Well not quite, France forced the people of Haiti to pay reparations to the slave owners for the loss of their slaves, or face military destruction. Those payments went on until 1947 continually dragging the economy of the island down and enforcing poverty on the people.

        Now the continuing struggle of the people has taken a new twist as the police fight the military on the streets of Port-au-Prince. Only the people can determine how this stage of their battle will resolve itself. These are a people dragged from their homes and families in Africa, sold into slavery on the other side of the world, battled and struggled to be free, and still their struggle goes on. Imperialism doesn't loosen its grip freely or quickly, it will do its damnedest to squeeze the last drop of blood from its conquests. 

        Which ever way this stage of their struggle goes, the people of Haiti deserve our fullest and continuous solidarity and support.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

Crime And Punishment.

     It may seem an odd question, "Should criminals be allowed to punish those who expose their crimes?", but in this crazy corporate/state world we live in, that is the question that is being debated. Another excellent article from Caitlin Johnstone, certainly well worth the time spent reading it in full.

      We’re Asking One Question In Assange’s Case: Should Journalists Be Punished For Exposing War Crimes?

By Caitlin Johnstone 

       This is a speech I gave yesterday at a demonstration for Assange with the Socialist Equality Party Australia.

      Tomorrow in the UK a judge will start the process of answering a very important question. It’s a question that many of us knew was the heart of this debate back in 2010, ten years ago, when this all started. It’s a question that they have been obfuscating, bloviating, huffily denying, smearing, gaslighting, and distracting from–basically doing anything they can to hide it from view. It’s a question that they don’t want the public to know that we are answering. A question that goes to the heart of democracy, and to the heart of the role of the fourth estate, journalism. And that question is this:
      Should journalists and publishers be punished for exposing US war crimes? And, ancillary to that question: should we allow them to be punished by the very people who committed those war crimes? Is that something that we want for our world, ongoing? Because our answer to this question is going to shape our society, our civilization, for generations to come. There is no coming back from this for a very long time should the answer be, “Yes! Yes, it’s fine, war criminals should go ahead and punish journalists for publishing true facts about their war crimes.”
      If we allow the answer to be yes, then we’re stuck with the endless stupid wars that everyone wants done with, from Melbourne to Kabul, from Sydney to Syria–right across the world people are done with these stupid wars for profit. Even the people like us who are very insulated from the effects of war want them over with, let alone the children of Pakistan who fear a sunny day because drones only fly in a blue sky, or the children of Syria whose country is being terrorized by “moderate rebels” armed and funded by the US war machine, or the starving children of Yemen who are being bombed constantly by munitions made in the good ol’ U S of A.
      No one wants war except those who make big bucks from it. It’s the most evil thing that humans are capable of. It is murder. It is theft. It is rape. It targets and traumatizes and displaces our planet’s most vulnerable populations. It destroys the environment. It leaves behind cancer-causing waste. It’s like as if the worst serial killer is going on the worst killing spree while dumping planet-killing chemicals behind him, but instead of running from the cops, he’s been given a trillion-dollar budget and immunity from prosecution. This is already happening. This is the world we have currently. The question that is being posed in Assange’s case is, should we be allowed to question this? Should we be allowed to expose it? Should we be allowed to stop it?
       Julian Assange’s case is a nexus point of where to next.
      I was thinking on the way over here what I would most like to say to Julian if I had the chance. If I could tell him anything right now it would be, “Rest now, mate. You’ve done all you can. We’ve got you. Let us take it from here.” Assange acted as a kind of lightning rod for all this bullshit for all those years, and through what they did to him, we saw their true face. We saw their true evil. We know what they are now, and we know how they do it, we’ve seen enough to know how they operate. And in the end it’s never about one man, it’s always about the movement. It’s our job now to stand up now and say as one “We do not consent”, and carry him out of there ourselves if we have to. This is where we’re at. We need to decide, do we evolve, or devolve? Do we pivot towards utopia, or dystopia?
      The persecution of Assange is so blatantly, obviously wrong that the only thing stopping people from seeing it is empire propaganda. You don’t have to be well-read. You don’t even have to be smart. You just have to have to have eyes that are unfiltered by narrative manipulation. Anyone with common sense and a beating heart in their chest can see this is wrong. Should journalists be tortured and imprisoned for life when they expose war crimes? The answer is not complicated. It’s obvious to anyone who hasn’t been propagandized out of their own clarity.
      Assange’s plight only looks complicated when you add on layers of narrative and verbiage. “Ah but Sweden stinky, stink man, hacker not a journalist! Mueller sexist Trump poop on the walls, Nazi Putin!” Without all the spin it’s very obvious he’s being torturously, unjustly persecuted. It really is an “emperor has no clothes” thing. The court propagandists fill our ears with fancy words about what a bad man Assange is, and why he must be dealt with, they’re trying to tell you that the emperor’s clothes are invisible to those aren’t educated. But the unpropagandized just yell “Hey! Why is the emperor ass-dick naked? Dude, I can see him! I can see his willy! ”
     This is why there are no counter protests here today. There are no regular, every day citizens taking to the streets with signs saying “Jail all the journalists! Endless war for all!” Some people still have strong feelings about Assange, but they’re just feelings, and you’ll find that it’s usually about only one or two of the smears, and if they turn and try to find evidence for the particular smears that have snagged them, they find nothing. That’s why Nils Melzer, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on torture, is such a courageous figure to me. When people first approached him to look in to Assange’s case, he was reluctant because he too had been affected by the smears. When he turned to the evidence though, he found no substance there.
       Because of his honorability, though, he felt through the embarrassment of being duped, and being wrong, he swallowed his pride and he changed course. And he very quickly became one of our most powerful allies in the fight to expose war crimes, expose propaganda, expose the modern-day mobbing and torture tactics used against Assange, and expose the precedent that Assange’s prosecution will set for journalists and publishers world wide. And you know what? I think the power behind his testimony comes from the fact that he realized that he had been duped, and if he, a very intelligent, well read, worldly, informed and educated person could be duped, then anyone can be.
      No one is immune. Human minds are hackable. We’re all very busy with our lives. We’re all kept busy by capitalism, and very few of us have the time to do what he did and sit down and take a look at the facts and assess them. And even if they did that, even fewer of them have had the courage of their convictions to put up with the social consequences of changing course. Being manipulated isn’t immoral, being a manipulator is. People feel ashamed when they’ve been conned, but it’s not their fault; it’s always the fault of the con man. That’s why fraud is the crime, and being defrauded is being a victim of that crime.
       In order for people to see this question that we’re asking ourselves–the question of whether journalists should be punished for exposing war crimes–clearly they have to admit that they have been victims of propaganda. It’s not their fault, but they will be embarrassed to admit it. This shame underpins a lot of reluctance to join us here today, so I think it’s important to outline. So when you’re talking to your friends and family, keep in mind that they’re hurting. They’re afraid of feeling the shame of having been duped, because in our crazy, ass-backwards culture, being duped is considered shameful while duping people just makes you a productive member of society.
     Be gentle with them. Reassure them that it’s not going to be the end of the world if they change their mind. In fact, it may be the end of the world if they don’t. That’s why I find Nils Melzer’s testimony to be so powerful: because it exposes the abusive nature of propaganda, and he modeled how to act when we find ourselves on the wrong side of the debate. His very existence gives me hope because it means that there are others like him waking up all over the world. Actually, I’ve seen it already myself. There’s a huge movement in Germany gaining traction supporting Assange. It was the prisoners of Belmarsh who organized three separate petitions and got Julian out of solitary (how’s that for grassroots activism?). Just on Friday Alan Jones posted a poll on Facebook that posed the question “should the Australian government do more to help Julian Assange and bring him home?”. Thousands of people answered and there was a 75 percent “Yes! Yes we should bring him home.” Underneath the poll there were hundreds of comments in support of Assange.
      So the tide is changing. Is it enough? I reckon it might be. But we have to keep pushing on it like our lives depend on it, because they do.

Viva Assange!      Thank you.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk 

Savagry Of Patriarchy.

         In Mexico city, on Friday February 14th. 2020, president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, while inside the National Palace, giving his morning press conference, probably thought all would be quiet. What he didn’t expect was a group of brave and very angry women attacking the palace doors. This attack was in response to the brutal killing of 25 year old Ingrid Escamilla, who was murdered in the north of Mexico. Suffering the brutal death didn’t seem to be enough for the media, the Mexican newspaper La Prensa published photos of Ingrid’s mutilated body.
      In Mexico around ten women are are killed every day, over the last four decades, femicide has increased exponentially, patriarchy is very much alive in Mexico. However patriarchy’s tentacles slither through the fissures in every country in the world, its distorted value structure, quietly accepting the dominance of one section of our species over another. The deep ingrained protocols continuing the dominance of male over female. and all the injustices that follow from this irrational man made value structure.
      The attacks by these brave women on the national palace were just a part of the much larger day of protests, showing their solidarity with Ingrid and all other women who have suffered the brutality and death of a male dominated society.
     In Mexico city, women from all over took to the streets and filled metro stations to display their rage at a society that looks the other way when it comes to the brutal treatment and death of women. Part of the women’s anger was seen widely when they set fire to a La Prensa truck outside the newspaper's offices. These protests are not an isolated incident but part of series of ongoing strikes and protest at several university campuses across the city. The women's anger is at the macho violence and against the state and universities ignoring this endemic savagery.
       It is suggested that you watch Mexico City as International Women’s Day, March 8th. nears, and support these women who are taking direct action in the face of brutal state repression, to carry on this fight for justice, and against the rampant patriarchy and savage state violence. They deserve our full solidarity and support. 

 

 

 

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

I Want To Believe.

      Wrote this little piece in 2017, film is informative, and my feelings expressed in the print are still the same.

Deep In Our Hearts:

        I have always maintained that we are all born anarchists, but the society we grow up in bids us bury those feelings and desires somewhere deep in our hearts. However we do carry them with us through out our lives, they are there ready to sprout and grow if we can create the right circumstances. These occasions rise in all parts of the world, sometimes in small groups that grow and then some fade under pressure from without. Other times it is a mass movement that can only be crushed by the military might of an authoritarian regime. No matter what, we should always remember deep in all our hearts there is a desire to live, with each other, in peace, in caring, sharing communities.

I Want to Believe!

I want to believe

All that is good is out there

Sleeping in hearts that live in dark valleys,

About to blossom like some magic woodland,

In spite of war, in spite of greed

The essence that is humanity struggling to be free.

All around death arrives in many guises,

Silent as the frost poverty kills,

The ruthless march of war

With every drum beat seeks God’s blessing,

While the God fearing kill the God fearing,

Slaughter in the name of the greater good.

I want to believe

All that is good is out there

Sleeping in the hearts that live in dark valleys

About to blossom like some magic woodland,

Not just as the dream of poets.

 

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk 

A Method Of Control.

     The state, any state, will do all that is necessary, "legal", by their own written laws, or "illegal" by their own written laws, to protect its power and the wealth and privileges of those who hold the power. Each state points to other states for useing torture to achieve their aims, but none are immune from this inhuman tactic. The British imperialists were pass-masters at it, controlling vast swaths of the planet by subtle and dubious means or open callous brutality to control populations. They have never lost that acquired ability. We can point to Russia, China and other states for their, so called "abuse of power" and "illegal" methods of controlling their populations, but the British state's hands are ever deep in the sewer of this inhuman method of repression to guard their power and privileges and maintain the status-quo. We can and do fight the open and known injustices inherent in the state system, but we must always be alive to the their many and varied, more underhand, hidden, callous methodology they use to try to create that subservient population. First they came for the anarchists----.

This from Act For Freedom Now:

       On Saturday the 22nd of February there was a protest held outside the Russian embassy in Dublin, Ireland in solidarity with anarchists and anti-fascists being persecuted by the Russian state.
       On the 10th of February, as part of “The Network” show trials and ongoing repression since 2017, seven anarchists were convicted on fabricated lies created by the Federal Security Services (FSB) the successors and continuity of KGB.
       Dimitry Pchelintsev received 18 years, Ilya Shakursky 16 years, Arman Sagynbaev 6 years, Andrei Chernov 14 years, Vasily Kuksov 9 years, Mikhail Kulkov 10 years and Maxim Ivankin 13 years imprisonment.
      The main “evidence” used against the seven were:
    1) “Confessions” that were tortured out of the accused. Torture, which includes beatings, sleep deprivation and what could only be described as sexual assault from electric shocks to bodily parts.
     2) Materials planted in the homes of the accused.
From the very start of the trial and throughout, the defence for the accused attempted to have the “confessions” thrown out of the trial as evidence. The court refused. Its clear the state had them guilty before they were even arrested!
       At the Russian embassy in Dublin the police were there before our arrival. Throughout the protest embassy staff continuously came out to take pictures of us. The repression and tactics used by the Russian state are nothing new. Throughout the world, states fabricate “evidence” to remove anyone deemed as a danger to the power of the state.
     In Ireland this can be seen in recent years with the case of the Craigavon 2, who the British state blamed on killing a cop in Craigavon, Armagh. The only evidence the state used against the two was a statement made by an individual whos father came out publicly calling his son a liar and in the trial the same witness contradicted himself. The rest of the evidence was circumstantial. The British intelligence service even had a tracking device on the car of one of the accused on the night of the shooting, which the data on the device mysteriously went missing. The Craigavon Two are still in jail doing life.
      Also in Ireland in the last few days a republican Paul McIntyre was arrested and charged with the murder of journalist Lyra Mckee who was shot dead in Derry during a riot that erupted after a series of police raids on homes. The police have publicly said they have no evidence linking Paul McIntyre to the killing other than picking up shell casings. This is yet a new case of repression by the British state against their political enemy.
       We send our solidarity to our comrades in Russia as well as across the world and to all those fighting oppression and being persecuted.
YOUR TORTURE WILL NOT KILL OUR IDEAS

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk 

Eliminate The Collective.

 

      What some people still don't seem to understand is that the present economic system is hell-bent on eliminating any form of public or community entities. The drive is to make everything and anything that can generate profit to be in the hands of the corporate world. To create a population of individuals with no stake in the world they live in except there labour power, which they will sell to the highest bidder in competition with all the other dispossessed. Then when you are no longer suitable for hire, you can survive as best you can on charity. You should be quite clear in your mind, that in this economic system you are seen as units of production, nothing more and nothing less. If you can't produce for them, you are useless. Welcome to the corporate world's dream, or don't, but instead fight against that corporate dream, which is your worst nightmare.

 This from Roar Magazine:

        Last month, the French philosopher Jacques Rancière addressed a general assembly of striking railway workers at the Montparnasse train station in Paris.

       If I am here today, it is, of course, to affirm my total support for an exemplary struggle, but also to say in a few words why it seems to me to be exemplary.
       I have spent a number of years of my life studying the history of the workers’ movement and it has shown me one essential thing: what we call social benefits is much more than benefits acquired by particular groups — it was the organization of a collective world governed by solidarity.
      What is this special benefits scheme for railway workers that is presented to us as an archaic privilege? It was part of an organization of a common world where the things essential to everyone’s life were supposed to be everyone’s property. The railroads, for example, belonged to the community. And this collective ownership was also managed by a collective of workers who felt committed to that community; workers for whom the retirement of each one was the product of the solidarity of a concrete collective.

Demolish piece by piece

      It is this concrete reality of the collective, united in solidarity, that the powerful of our world no longer want. It is this edifice that they have undertaken to demolish piece by piece. What they want is for there to be no more collective property, no more workers’ collectives, no more solidarity from below. They want there to be only individuals left, possessing their labor power like a small capital that can be made to bear fruit by renting it out to bigger people. Individuals who, by selling themselves day after day, accumulate points for themselves and only for themselves, in anticipation of a future in which pensions will no longer be based on labor but on capital, that is to say on exploitation and self-exploitation.
       That is why pension reform is so decisive for them, why it is much more than a concrete question of financing. It is a question of principle. Retirement is how working time produces living time and how each of us is linked to a collective world. The whole question is to know what makes this link: solidarity or private interest.
      Demolishing the pension system founded on collective struggle and solidarity organization is the decisive victory for our rulers. Twice already they have thrown all their forces into this battle and they have lost. We must do everything possible today to ensure that they lose a third time and that this loss helps them lose their taste for this battle once and for all.

       This text was originally published in French by Le Monde. English translation for ROAR by Joshua Richeson.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

Inspiration And Solidarity.

       In  this exploitative economic system with its state backed callous repression, two things we need much more off, inspiration and solidarity. Below is an example of each, both from Anarchists Worldwide.

Inspiration:

Koukaki fell heavy on them.

 

 

        Since 2017, the Koukaki Squat Community (Matrozou 45, Panaitoliou 21, Arvali 3) set up adifferent competitive example of communal life in the center of Athens. Through horizontal procedures, collective work and persistence, it set up open and social projects of communal housing, public bath and laundry, clothes sharing, spaces for public events and a multilingual library. Operating in an area which has been transforming from residential neighborhood to first-class tourist resort, the Koukaki Squat Community raised an embankment against the repressive and economic policies of the state and the bosses, against fascism, racism, and patriarchy. A living hearth of resistance, it also actively supported and connected with other struggles, political projects and public assemblies [1].
      Such an active community of equality and solidarity could not go unnoticed. As many other squats and political projects in Athens, the squats in Koukaki were targeted multiple times by the state, both by syriza and nea dimokratia governments, as well as through fascist attacks [2]. Facing evacuations and repression, the comrades resisted and defended their community by retaking the houses and through dynamic interventions. Their strong resistance came to become a central political issue on 18/12/2019, when the police evacuated all three squats, and on 11/1/2020, with the spectacular police operations to evict the houses of Matrozou 45 and Panaitoliou 21, both of which had been retaken by comrades earlier that day.

Read the full article HERE:
Solidarity:

Berlin, Germany: 

Reflections on the Occupation of the Greek Consulate on 23.12.2019.

       On 23.12.2019, we tried to interrupt the normal operation with a symbolic occupation of the Greek consulate in Berlin, After several, also brutal, evacuations of occupations in Greece, we decided to set a sign of solidarity on this way. Even though the action was successful, we decided to publish our collective reflections here to give the chance to follow the whole action and our thoughts about it.
      We entered the building at 11 a.m. with 17 people and calmly asked the staff to stop working for the day. The aim was to disturb the smooth running of the procedure, but without causing further damage. The consulate is located on the 4th floor of an apartment building in Möhrenstraße 17 in Berlin-Mitte. As soon as we entered the rooms, we covered the cameras, explained our reason of the occupation to the staff, hung a banner with the words “Solidarity with the Squats” out of the window and threw out flyers. We made no demands whatsoever, but took the room to spread our ideas and show our solidarity.
     The supporters down the street distributed flyers and our statement to the pedestrians. As soon as the rooms were occupied, we sent our text (https://en.squat.net/2019/12/23/berlin-greek-consulate-occupied-solidari…) to all ministries in Greece via fax and e-mail and also to some of the mass-media, because we discussed beforehand if we want to use the media to propagate our action and decided to send the text to some of them.
       In the first minutes of the occupation several visitors came to the consulate, almost all were asked to leave and come back another day, the reactions were different. One visitor refused to leave the premises and remained alone in the visiting room all day.

Read the full article HERE: 

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Our Green Future.

        A green plan is the only way to save the planet, and of course those who have destroyed the planet, the corporate capitalists, rush forward to state that only they can be the saviour of the planet, all they need is more taxpayers money. Their propaganda machine goes into overdrive to convince us that our interests and their interests are the same, and we can trust the corporate beast to be our knight in shining armour and herald in the new beautiful green world. Of course this bullshit, sadly, is swallowed by many.

      The following article from Acorn, with lots of links to follow for further information, may help to shovel the bullshit out of our path.

Gaetano Salvemini.

        “The world nowadays teems with people who have fits of enthusiasm whenever they hear of state intervention, planned economy, five-year plans, and the end of laissez-faire. They do not care to ask who are the social groups in whose interests the state, ie. bureaucracy and the party in power, is to intervene and plan. “Yet the first question which should be asked when invoking the end of laissez-faire is precisely this: in the interests of whom should such abolition take place?”
      When Gaetano Salvemini wrote these words, he wasn’t referring to the 2020s, but he might as well have been. There are plenty of anti-capitalist comrades out there, who, even when they oppose the limited content of a Green New Deal or a New Deal for Nature, are tempted to give such schemes the benefit of the doubt in that they appear to be a step in the right direction, away from the unchecked market forces of “laissez-faire” capitalism.
      But, as Salvemini points out, we need to look carefully at who exactly is pushing these economic plans and whose interests they are designed to serve. Here, the hard work has already been done for us by investigative journalist Cory Morningstar and other writers featured on our Climate Capitalists page of links. 

     The briefest dip beneath the fake green surface of this contemporary political pond reveals it to be less a source of environmental and social hope than a rancid cesspit of private interests. We find ourselves deep within a massive global network of organisations and initiatives with names like the World Resources Institute, The B-Team, We Mean Business, Tomorrow’s Capitalism, The Natural Capital Coalition and Corporate Impact X. Here we can have the pleasure of meeting a former CEO of Unilever, the daughter of a CIA-backed Latin American president, the powerful founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum or a Silicon Valley billionaire hoping to get even richer through a “Fourth Industrial Revolution”. In this strange upside-down world, in which Big Business is going to “save the planet”, we come across brave “solo” campaigners supported and promoted every inch of the way by international PR professionals, youth movements described as “grassroots” which are in fact funded and steered from above, high-profile activist “rebellions” cheered on by venture capitalists.
        We hear talk of “exponential opportunities“, “the investment of trillions of dollars“, and a “transformation unlike anything humankind has experienced before... a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres”.
      In short, as Morningstar explains, the so-called Green New Deal is being promoted “as the catalyst to unlock the 100 trillion dollars required to unleash the ‘fourth industrial revolution’. This project, of unparalleled magnitude, is the vehicle to save the failing global capitalist economic system and bring in the financialization of nature”. Having found the answer to the question recommended by Salvemini, we might reflect that it is not exactly surprising to find capitalism manoeuvring to incite state support for its money-making activities.
      It was in 1469 that the banker Lorenzo Medici observed: “Things can go badly for the rich if they don’t run the state”. It is a big mistake to fall for the capitalist lie that their world of “market forces” somehow operates independently of the existence of states. We perhaps might expect that naivety from advocates of the oxymoronic absurdity known as “anarcho-capitalism”, but it is strange to witness anti-capitalists likewise imagining that the involvement of state machineries in capitalist activities will inevitably act as some kind of brake on profiteering.
      Capitalism has always depended on the existence of a state in order to impose and enforce its domination. Indeed, we would argue that the state only exists in the first place as a tool of the wealthy elite. Its role has always been to rubber-stamp, with its self-proclaimed “authority”, the theft from the majority carried out by a greedy and self-interested minority. It is the state that announces that “property” is sacred and lawful and that any attempt to take it back amounts to “crime”. It is the state that physically protects the property and wealth of the rich by employing gangs of thugs to intimidate, attack or imprison anyone who threatens to confiscate it, by whatever means.
      It is the state that legitimises and enforces the expulsion of people from their land, that cuts them off from subsistence, from communal autonomy, and forces them into the waiting jaws of capitalist wage slavery. It is the state that raises armies and navies to conquer foreign lands so that its capitalists can plunder, cheat and exploit still further afield. It is the state that taxes the population, ostensibly in “our” interest, only to divert vast amounts of collective wealth into the pockets of capitalists, whether via their highly lucrative construction schemes (needed for “our” infrastructure), via their profitable arms dealing (needed for “our” defence) or, today, via their pseudo-green technologies (needed to save “our” planet).
      When state and capital work together in a more visible way, as with the planned “Green New Deal” and “New Deal for Nature”, this does not mean that capitalism is on the retreat. It just means that, in order to get through a period of crisis, capitalists are, once again, pretending that their interests are “our” interests, that we are all facing an “emergency situation”, that “our” future is at risk and that, therefore, trillions of dollars of public money should be stuffed, by the state, into the pockets of our capitalist saviours.
      Gaetano Salvemini book Those who persist in seeing a state-intervention version of capitalism as necessarily a step in the right direction, would do well to heed Salvemini’s study of one particular “limited planned economy deferential to capitalism”, which just happened to be the Fascist regime in Italy.
      He wrote: “Italy has never seen anything similar to the type of planning exhibited by the government of Soviet Russia. When an important branch of the banking system, or a large-scale industry which could be confused with ‘the higher interests of the nation’, has threatened to collapse, the government has stepped into the breach and prevented the breakdown by emergency measures.
      “The policies of the Italian dictatorship during these years of world crisis have been no different in their aims, methods, and results from the policies of all the governments of the capitalistic countries. The Charter of Labour says that private enterprise is responsible to the state. In actual fact, it is the state, i.e. the taxpayer, who has become responsible to private enterprise. When the depression came, the government added the loss to the taxpayer’s burden. Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social”.
       Salvemini summed up the overall impact of Fascist state intervention in the dealings of “laissez-faire” capitalism, by concluding: “The intervention of government has invariably favoured big business”. (3)
     Why would we expect things to be any different today?

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Anti-Prison Week.

         Prisons are symbols that we live in an authoritarian society, prisons are totally unacceptable in a free and democratic society. Locking people in cages can never be seen as an acceptable answer to any problem when we live in that free and democratic society. Today prisons are not the monopoly of the state, though the state holds the sole right to send you there, it has handed the running of prisons over to money seeking shareholders. They in turn will seek to expand the prison system and to increase its capacity, all in the drive for more profit. A typical capitalist profit making entity from dehumanising people. Freedom can only grow from the ashes of the prison system, only when the last prison lies in ruins can we say, we are truly on the road to freedom.

This from Act For Freedom Now:

 

     The anti-prison week is in less than a month! It will happen from 2 to 8 march 2020 in the old train station of Luméville, close to Bure, place of a struggle against a project of a center for burrying nuclear waste.
       The idea is to take time to meet, between people and groups from different countries, have formal and informal times of discussions, workshops, movie screenings, readings. You can come to the week with your own proposals, with or without telling us in advance. Zine distros are also very welcome.
     We received criticisms regarding the lack of topics related to racism in prison and state racism in the program of the week, considering the key role that racism play in penitentiary systems. We would like to make more space for these topics, so if you think you have something to contribute on these topics, please contact us.

Program

      We are currently contacting the groups that will take part in the week to know when each workshop or discussion will happen. This section will be updated regularly between now and the beginning of the week.

Monday
An update on the struggle in Bure, the Cigéo project, the events of the last few years.
More info soon.

Tuesday : repression and anti-repression
More info soon.

Wednesday : (No) Borders
More info soon.

Thursday : gender issues, LGBTQ+, women’s prisons
More info soon.

Friday : about being “on the run”
More info soon.

Saturday : anarchist views on justice, law, crime / how to get out of a punitive system
More info soon.

Sunday
More info soon.

Practical informations

Coming to the place of the event

       The old train station of Luméville is located in Meuse, France, close to the village of Luméville-en-Ornois, on the left of the road leading to the village of Mandres-en-Barrois. You can enter it by car. We will put up signs so you can’t miss the entry ways.



Food

        There will be vegan food from sunday 1st in the evening to monday 9th in the morning. We will provide the food and cooking equipment but cooking will be participatory and rely on self-organization. You will be able to put money in a free price box to help us cover the expenses of the week.

Sleeping

       There will be sleeping places in a building on the place of the event, but not enough for everyone. There will also be sleeping places in other collective houses in villages around (at maximum 8km). There is a lot of space on the place of the event if you can come with a tent, a camper or a truck (bring blankets if you can!).
      If you need sleeping places in the building on the place of the event, please tell us in advance how many places you need so we can organize.

Translations

     Translations will be provided as much as possible in french, english, german and italian. If you plan to come to the week and are able and motivated to do translations during discussions, you can tell us in advance when you would come and from which to which language you can translate.

Legal information

       We published an article about legal information and police controls in the context of the week. You can read it here.

See you in march!

 The Anarchist Bure Cross

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk