The Crowd Is Silent.

      Most of us will remember 2008, the "crash" when the state rushed to bail out the banks with billions, across the world it was trillions. Afterwords there was anger from the public that the state could come up with those wagon loads of cash to help the banks get over their gambling debts and push us into years of austerity.

    Since then all has not been going well for the capitalist system. over the last 4/5 years or so the growth has been creaking to a halt, the bond market has almost died, and relations between the various power blocks has strained to breaking point, and most wise pundits agree, another, much bigger crash looms large. Across the planet people are on the streets in anger at the injustice, inequality, corruption and abject poverty produced by this economic system.  Barely a country doesn't have mass protests flaring up on their patch. 

     Could the states bail out the system with public money again, in such a climate of anger and open protest and rebellion? It would be quite a risk for the powers that be. Quite a problem to be faced.

     I have no idea how covid19 started, or where it came from, and I am no conspiracy theorist, but for our lords and masters it couldn't have come at a better time, and I have no doubt they will exploit it to their advantage to the utmost. With one fell swoop they have shut down the streets, Hong Kong streets are quiet, where are the Yellow Vests, the heat of the Chilean rebellion seems to have gone cool, Prague has lost its mass protests, Extinction Rebellion is extinct. What is more, the public, instead of being angry at another bailout, are demanding that the state pours in billions of pounds into businesses to help save jobs. Yes, companies will go bust, but that 1% in the billionaires club, will gobble up any surplus demand that appears after the dust has settled.

     However you and I will face the same call from the financial Mafia, the country's debt is too high and governments will need to take urgent action to reduce that debt. That means once again, you and I will face the raw teeth of mega austerity, all to save the economy. Which no doubt will plunder its way on until the next crash, or until we finally dismantle this whole plunder charade of the parasite class, and replace it with a society based on mutual aid, co-operation, sustainability and free from the profit motive. A society that sees to the needs of all our people, not just to the pampered privileged 1%.

Champs-Élysées Paris, March 19, 2020. Where are the Yellow Vests?

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Mask Up.

 

      Most people now agree that we are facing unprecedented problems on this planet, and most can be traced back to human activity. Despite the obvious impending disaster, the controllers of the economic system responsible for this situation, still persist in their false and flawed mantra, "It's the only game in town".

     They will adjust and rearrange things as long as it doesn't alter their power, wealth and privileges, no matter the outcome for the rest of us. We are secondary, expendable, to their blind vision for our planet, blind to the fact that they die with us if this system continues.

     While states attempt to stop people wearing masks at protests, they continue to create situations where we will have to wear masks to walk our streets, as pollution poisons the air we breathe. We tolerate this crazy path at our peril, and to the detriment of our children's future.

     It is no longer  a matter of whither we should take what action we can to bring down this suicide mission of the corporate/financial out of control juggernaut, it is an obligation, so that we can give our grandchildren a future. It is also obvious that dialogue and running to a ballot box hasn't done any good  over numerous years. The beast has to be faced head on and destroyed root and branch by the mass of people taking direct action, the time for talking has long since past. Take your righteous anger onto the streets, create the change you wish to see, we change or we die. 

This from Anarchist News:

 One Way or Another, One Day We’ll All Wear Masks

       Wherever we are situated in this society, our future boils down to two options: accepting our fate and trying to reduce the harm to our bodies and the environment on a piecemeal basis—or actively resisting in order to interrupt the disaster and implement our own solutions. If there is anything that scientists, sociologists, military strategists, and day laborers all agree on, it is that we are headed for global collapse.
      Those who hold power seek to take advantage of hurricanes, forest fires, and pandemics to impose more and more invasive forms of control on us. Their responses to crises always prioritize protecting their own privileges and profits while they treat the rest of us as expendable. We can’t trust our survival to their expertise.
      If we resign ourselves to the future implied by catastrophic climate change, widespread pollution, and ecological collapse, sooner or later, the disaster will come for us. In some parts of the world, people are already forced to wear masks when they leave the house just to protect themselves from poisoned air, toxic waste, or infectious conditions.
      If we do not accept the destruction of our lives, our land, our food, and everything that connects us with each other and the biosphere as a whole, we have to fight to regain control over the conditions of our lives and the decisions that determine our survival. In a world of police, prisons, surveillance cameras, we will have to wear masks that conceal who we are so we can fight for what we really want.

Read the full article and poster HERE:

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It's Time To Show Your Righteous Anger.

 

     I would say with confidence that our planet has never before seen such violent mass protests, with such prolonged intensity over such a wide area against the established authorities. This is something that we anarchists can take heart from, vast numbers of populations are taking to the streets not on single issues but simply against the established system, they are throwing off the yoke of authority, not asking for more favours from the powers that be.
     Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, Haiti, France, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Sudan, Iraq, Iran, and other areas are seeing the people in their thousands and more on the streets, like I said, not asking for more crumbs, but trying to put an end to this brutal neo-liberal authoritarian nightmare that has held the world in its grip for so long. Now India has joined the fray, the country that carries that phony label of the largest democracy in the world. How long before others take to the streets and display their righteous anger, hatred and disgust of a system of enslavement, poverty, deprivation and wars?

 

      An article by Pankaj Mishra from Bloomberg Opinion:

      India has exploded into protests against a citizenship law that explicitly discriminates against its 200 million-strong Muslim population. Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government has responded with police firing on demonstrators and assaults on university campuses. The global wildfire of street protests, from Sudan to Chile, Lebanon to Hong Kong, has finally reached the country whose 1.3 billion population is mostly below the age of 25. The social, political, and economic implications couldn’t be more serious.
       It was only last month that students on the campus of Hong Kong Polytechnic University were throwing petrol bombs at the police, and fielding, in turn, teargas, rubber bullets and water cannons.
      This violent resistance to an authoritarian state is novel to Hong Kong. The Umbrella Movement that in 2014 first expressed a mass sentiment for greater autonomy from Beijing was strikingly peaceful. The campaigners for democracy in Hong Kong today have also traveled very far away from the Chinese students who occupied Tiananmen Square in 1989, and to whom they have been wrongly compared.
       Those students back in 1989 were deeply respectful of their state: Photographs of student petitioners kneeling on the steps of the Great Hall of the People are no less eloquent than the iconic picture of a protester facing a tank. That acknowledgement of the state’s authority as ultimate arbiter is now rapidly disappearing, in not only Hong Kong, but also India and many other countries. It is being replaced by the conviction that the state has lost its legitimacy through cruel and malign actions.
      Today’s protesters, who are overwhelmingly young, are usefully compared to the French student demonstrators in Paris in 1968. The latter occupied places of work and study, streets and squares. They also met police crackdowns with makeshift barricades and Molotov cocktails.
      Like today’s protesters, the French students erupted into violence amid a global escalation of street-fighting; they claimed to reject an older generation’s values and outlook. And they, too, couldn't be simply classified as left-wing, right-wing or centrists. Indeed, the French radicals confused many people at the time because they loathed the French communist party almost as much as they did the parties of the right. The French communists, in turn, dismissed the protesting students as “anarchist.”
    This commonplace pejorative confuses anarchism with disorganization. It should be remembered that anarchist politics is one of the modern world’s oldest, if little remembered, political and intellectual traditions. Today, it best describes the radical new turn to protests worldwide. Anarchist politics began to emerge from the mid-19th century onward, originally in societies where ruthless autocrats were in power — France, Russia, Italy, Spain, even China — and where hopes of change through the ballot box seemed wholly unrealistic.
     The anarchists — one of whom assassinated U.S. President McKinley in 1901 — sought freedom from what they saw as increasingly exploitative modes of economic production. But, unlike socialist critics of industrial capitalism, they aimed most of their energies at liberation from what they saw as tyrannical forms of collective organization — namely, the state and its bureaucracy, which in their view could be communist as well as capitalist.
      As Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the pioneering thinker of anarchism (and robust critic of Marx), put it, “To be GOVERNED is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so.”
     For many anarchists, the state, the bureaucracy and security forces were the deepest affront to human dignity and liberty. They sought to achieve democratic freedoms by a drastic reduction in the power of the hydra-headed state, and a simultaneous intensification of the power of individuals from below through coordinated action.
       Democracy for the anarchists was not a distant goal, to be reached through vertically integrated political parties, impersonal institutions and long electoral processes. It was an existential experience, instantly available to individuals by jointly defying oppressive authority and hierarchy.
       They saw democracy as a permanent state of revolt against the over-centralized state and its representatives and enforcers, including bureaucrats and the police. Success in this endeavor was measured by the scale and intensity of the revolt, and the strength of solidarity achieved, rather than by any (always unlikely) concession from the despised authorities.
      This is also how protesters today seem to perceive democracy as they struggle, without much hope of any conventional victory, against governments that are as ideologically driven as they are ruthless. Let there be no doubt: More open and unresolvable conflicts between ordinary citizens and authorities are likely to become the global norm rather than the exception. Certainly, militant disaffection today is not only more extensive than it was in the late 1960s. It also connotes a deeper political breakdown.
     Negotiations and compromise between different pressure groups and interests that have defined political society for ages suddenly seem quaint. Old-style political parties and movements are in disarray; societies, more polarized than ever before; and the young have never faced a more uncertain future. As angry, leaderless individuals revolt against increasingly authoritarian states and bureaucracies from Santiago to New Delhi, anarchist politics seems an idea whose time has come.

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

Millions Die, And We Don't Give A Shit.

      Another excellent and informative video from, "It's The End Of The World As We Know It And I Feel Fine"

         Like the man said, there are literally millions of people on this planet facing a slow agonising death by starvation, while we in the West, throw away and destroy tons of food, though it is the man made system of capitalism that is the root cause, we by our acceptance of that system are complicit and responsible. When do we sort it out, when do we turn our eyes to the starving millions of men women and children, who are slowly starving to death in a world of plenty?

        In this sedition of ITEOTWAWKIAIFF we look at the growing class unrest in Hong Kong that kicked off a massive rebellion in the lunar new year. Also street battles   in Athens, where anarchists and farmers stormed the Greek capital in reaction to Syriza’s structural adjustment policies. On the music break we drop the now classic Dead Prez track: Malcolm Garvey Huey. We continue with an examination on how white supremacy plays a role in the mass starvation of people in the African continent and we wrap things up with Ajamu Nangwaya, an anarchist, educator and writer from Toronto, who spoke to us about black history in so called “Canada,” the similarities of black struggles between peeps down in the US, and the role of celebrities in visibilizing radical politics. Click here to download our entire interview with Ajamu. TRIGGER WARNING: cursing, street fighting, blood, politicians, images of children starving.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Eating Or Heating.

      As you ruminate on your problem of eating or heating, your mate in workfare, your disabled neighbour facing ATOS, and your friend on zero hours contract, perhaps you could spare a thought for Bruce Rockowitz and Coco Lee. This couple got married recently and their wedding is reported to have cost $20 million, yes, $20 million. Bruce, is one of those products of the capitalist system, creating personal wealth from sweatshop exploitation, his 2012 income is reported as almost $7 million, while his bride Coco, a Hong Kong pop star, not short of a bob or two herself, likewise is a product of this system.

 

      This typifies the glaring injustice in the economic system we tolerate, two relatively young people have amassed an unbelievable fortune. One from exploiting desperate vulnerable people, the other by being the subject of media hype. While the most of us put in a full days work all our lives, creating the wealth that they enjoy, and we just about get by. We live amidst an abundance of wealth that we created, yet most live in poverty, is that the best we can do?

 Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk