Socialist Faces In High Places.

     Elections come and go, new saviours of the people arise and fall, somehow the people never learn. Next time round a new face, a new personality takes centre stage, suddenly the promised land is is sight, only once again to fade in the mist of state bureaucracy, wheeling and dealing with the corporate world and the financial Mafia. White-knight saviours of the people fall from grace like leaves in autumn and their fabricated party of the people crumbles into the dust of antiquity.

      No matter the "principles" of the party, no matter the vision of the leader, the state can never be a vehicle for freedom, equality and justice. Surely by now we have seen it all, from Ramsay MacDonald to Obama, from Blair to Tsipras, they arrive on their white horse with a sack full of promises, and deliver the same pitiful rubbish, nothing for the people. 

     We have to stop letting the state and its smoke and mirror illusions of elections, set the agenda. To keep doing the same thing expecting a different outcome, is one sign of madness. Freedom and justice lie outside the state, outside authority, we can only create these qualities in our own communities, by ourselves. Let's leave the leaders, messiahs, and saviours to the deluded. We can create a world of mutual aid and co-operation, a world that sees to the needs of all our people, without the need to follow the "great leader" nor do we need to weigh ourselves down with all the useless baggage of the one true party.

       We have the power and the imagination, we have the resources and the skills, we have the numbers, all we require is the will, the will of the ordinary people to bring crashing down, this unjust, unequal, brutal system of exploitation.

This from Libcom:

        As various segments of the US radical left begin planting their flags in the electoral arena, Syriza’s recent fall from grace should serve as a stark reminder of the unfulfilled promise of the electoral road to socialism.
         Syriza’s rise to power elicited widespread praise from the left internationally, inspiring renewed enthusiasm for the possibilities and promise of “mass left” party building in and outside the United States. At a rally celebrating Syriza’s electoral victory in Spain, Pablo Iglesias, secretary general of the Spanish anti-austerity party Podemos, declared that“the sun of hope rose over Greece.”
      Yet “the sun of hope” began to set on Greece almost as quickly as it rose. Shortly after taking office, Syriza, the “Coalition of the Radical Left,” formed a coalition government with the right-wing, anti-immigrant Independent Greeks (ANEL) party, followed only months later by the predictable surrender of the government to a new round of harsh austerity imposed by Greece’s creditors.

Read the full article HERE:

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

Turkish Miners Underground Protest.

    My father was a miner all his life, and he had a venomous hatred of mine owners. In his early days we lived in a room and kitchen in Garngad, a slum in the north side of Glasgow, he would come home covered in coal dust and mud. He would come home to no running hot water and no bath, my mother would have prepared a zinc bath in in front of the fire having boiled pots of water on the fire, to fill the bath. Each one of his fingers had a bend at the top, all caused at different times with being crushed by rock falls, he was buried twice and came out alive. Just before he retired he was hit by a fall that hit his head crushed his teeth and knocked him unconscious. A few weeks after he retired there was a fire in the local mine, Auchengeich, and 47 of his friends and former workmates died. I understand the miners plight.

    Photo from Healey Hero.

     Mining has always been a very dangerous job and what ever concessions the miners won over the years from the mine owners, was hard fought for, and no where near their worth. It may never be made a completely safe job, but there are ways and means of safeguarding the life and wellbeing of the miners, but sadly that costs money, and mine owners like all capitalists, (state or otherwise) find human life cheaper than implementing a safe environment.

     My heart and solidarity goes out to the Turkish miners who in desperate protest at their unnecessary dangerous conditions, have locked themselves underground. Their cause is our cause, nobody should have to face such conditions just to earn their bread. Please support them, and spread the word of the their fight.

This from libcom:

    300 miners across two shifts at a mine in the Black Sea area of Zonguldak have barricaded themselves underground in protest at atrocious health and safety. Turkey has the worst mine safety record across all of Europe, with 2,554 miners losing their lives since 1991. They have vowed to continue their protest until the demands have been met.

Read the full article HERE:

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

YOU KNOW IT IS CLASS WAR.

      Their class know it is all out war and act on it, when does our class accept that it is all out war and act on it?

This from Libcom:

Quote:

When this country was at war in the 40s, Whitehall underwent a revolution. Normal rules were circumvented. Convention was thrown out. As one historian put it, everything was thrown at the overriding purpose of beating Hitler.
Well, this country is in the economic equivalent of war today - and we need the same spirit.
We need to forget about crossing every ‘t’ and dotting every ‘i’ and we need to throw everything we’ve got at winning in this global race.

     On the face of it, this is pretty odd. The economic war footing Britain actually had during the second world war involved a command economy, with a union general secretary becoming minister of labour. Neither of these things are likely to be what Cameron meant.
But the rhetoric of a war footing, and therefore the analogy that opponents of austerity are fifth columnists is likely to become more common. It is part of the ideological cover that is overlaying the most significant attack on working class living standards since WW2.

Read the full article HERE:

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ONE DIMENSIONAL ELITIST RESPONSE.

      

      As the political class make their usual one dimensional responses to the events in England of the last fews days, it is good to be able to read something with a little more depth. I always maintain that our over lords and masters, the political and corporate class, know nothing of the society that you and I  inhabit. Our millionaire elitists that sit and pontificate in marble halls, somehow believe that they know the answers to our problems when in fact they don't even know the problems. They are in fact the biggest part of our problems. They enforce a system that creates inequality, and continually widens that gap. They legislate to protect their wealth and privileges and when people object to this unjust, immoral situation, they jump up and shout "crimminality" "thug" "full force of the law" and other meaningless crap.  Those who are shouting loudest are part of a band that fiddled their expenses, get into bed with bankers that laughingly take tax payers money and then pay themselves bonuses that to the ordinary guy, are monopoly money figures. What is more they don't understand why when they talk of respect, most people just get angry.

      The following is a short extract from an article on Libcom and is well worth a read. 

Writer and poet William Wall explores the link between neoliberalism and the UK riots.

            One of the many things that we hear repeated ad nauseam in the context of the present rioting in London is that the rioters are ‘feral’, ‘yobs’, ‘thugs’ or more generously ‘disaffected youth’. All the talk from Cameron and his cohorts is of crime and punishment and ‘the full force of the law’ - as if these young people did not encounter the full force of the law on a daily basis. We are told variously that there is no political context, no political motive, no political enemy – it is ‘criminality pure and simple’. This is because violence against the police (and therefore the state) is not considered in itself to be political. It is because the envy of, the desire for and the acquisition of luxury goods such as plasma TVs and jewellery is not considered political. The political class and the commentariat cannot conceive of themselves as enemies of the people who live in areas like Tottenham where Tory cuts are closing youth centres, which suffer massive unemployment even while the City is booming, and which are the objects of legislation designed to disadvantage them even further.

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