Days Of War, Nights Of Love.

 

             Something to think about, Days Of War, Nights Of Love, an old article from Crimethinc:

              Whatever medical science may profess, there is a difference between Life and survival. There is more to being alive than just having a heartbeat and brain activity. Being alive, really alive, is something much subtler and more magnificent. Their instruments measure blood pressure and temperature, but overlook joy, passion, love, all the things that make life really matter. To make our lives matter again, to really get the most out of them, we will have to redefine life itself. We have to dispense with their merely clinical definitions, in favor of ones which have more to do with what we actually feel.

          As it stands, how much living do we have in our lives? How many mornings do you wake up feeling truly free, thrilled to be alive, breathlessly anticipating the experiences of a new day? How many nights do you fall asleep feeling fulfilled, going over the events of the past day with satisfaction? Most of us feel as though everything has already been decided without us, as if living is not a creative activity but rather something that happens to us. That’s not being alive, that’s just surviving: being undead. We have undertakers, but their services are not usually required; we have morgues, but we spend most of our time in office cubicles and video arcades, in shopping malls, in front of televisions. Of course suburban housewives and petty executives are terrified of risk and change; they can’t imagine that there is anything more valuable than physical safety. Their hearts may be beating, but they no longer believe in their dreams, let alone chase after them.

             But this is how the revolution begins: a few of us start chasing our dreams, breaking our old patterns, embracing what we love (and in the process discovering what we hate), daydreaming, questioning, acting outside the boundaries of routine and regularity. Others see us doing this, see people daring to be more creative and more adventurous, more generous and more ambitious than they had imagined possible, and join us one by one. Once enough people embrace this new way of living, a point of critical mass is finally reached, and society itself begins to change. From that moment, the world will start to undergo a transformation: from the frightening, alien place that it is, into a place ripe with possibility, where our lives are in our own hands and any dream can come true.

           So do what you want with your life, whatever it is! But to be sure you do get what you want, think carefully about what it really is, first, and how to go about getting it. Analyze the world around you, so you’ll know which people and forces are working against your desires, and which ones are on your side… and how you can work together with us. We’re out here, living life to the fullest, waiting for you—hopping trains across the United States, organizing political protests in French public schools, writing beautiful letters at sunrise in Bangkok. We just finished making love in the corporate washroom a minute before you walked in on your half hour lunch break. And Life is waiting for you with us, on the peaks of unclimbed mountains, in the smoke of campfires and burning buildings, in the arms of lovers who will turn your world upside down. Come join us!

Published 2000-09-11

• Days of War, Nights of Love

 

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

It's Just Over The Wall!!!

      Everything is normal, well at first. The Glasgow slum, Garngad, where I was born, like all slums, was an unhealthy bog of deprivation, but not to me as a child, it was normal, it was all I knew. It was only when we look over the wall that we see, there is another world, and its different. Modern slavery is just like Garngad, it's the world we are born into, it is what we are trained to accept, it is “normal”. The “normal” doesn't equate with freedom. By our quiet acquiescence to institutions, traditions and the power of authority, we are enslaved, we accept the confines of our “slum”. There are those who have looked over the wall and seen a different world, a better world. Lets do to our modern slavery what we have done to our slums, knock them down and build that better world we can see over the wall.

An interesting article by Jason McQinn:

        Thus the whole set of modern institutions of enslavement (hiding behind these abstractions) have become the primary contemporary incarnation of traditionally rich and powerful bullies. This is the central fact of modern civilization, the paradigm upon which the entire social world rests: a system of enslaving institutions, in which people have been trained from birth to participate and identify, while also being trained to call the various forms of this slavery “freedom.”
       Especially amongst the most depraved slaves to modern bullies – those who sing their praises the most strongly, continuously and publicly, the people who make up the modern mass media, one cannot possibly count the times that identifications with these bullies are repeated over and over and over. For those who haven’t already gotten the message through exposure to parental submission and humiliation, or private and public schooling, the mass media (including social media) insist on telling us ad nauseam that we are beholden to “our government,” “our military,” “our businesses,” “our police,” “our laws” and on and on….
       In a world of modern slavery in which slavery is invisible because liberty has been largely reduced to following laws and orders issued, not (for the most part at least) by particular persons, but ever increasingly by abstractions (incarnated by institutions), is modern slavery still slavery when there are fewer and fewer people left able and willing to point it out? That remains to be decided. Where do you stand?
       We can each refuse idenfication with our enslavement by rebelling against it here and now at every opportunity. By refusing to let ourselves be encompassed in the silent consent implied whenever “we” or “our” includes the abstractions or institutions of modern slavery. It’s “their” system, not “ours” or “mine.” It’s the system of those who continue to believe in it, not of those who genuinely fight it. If you identify with it, you’re a part of it. The more you refuse identification with it the more its power is reduced by each and every one of us whenever we act on this refusal.

Read the full article HERE:

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

Whose Justice??

       Capitalist "justice" is a contradiction of the meaning of the word. As well as an excellent critique of this repressive capitalist system, this is a call for solidarity for all those enslaved in the cages of the state, and to those caught in the straight jacket of capitalist economic insanity. It is a call from those shackled in heart of the European Financial Mafia's latest experiment, the Greek economy, from those feeling the full force of capitals pulverising of our social structures, to enhance its overflowing coffers.

From Contra Info:

      We remain simply on this: Justice as an institution of capitalist democracy can never be objective. It serves the perpetuation and reproduction of the system of inequalities that define it “unmediated” in solving the production of these inequalities. A step further, its autonomy has nothing to do with cutting the umbilical cord from the centres of authority, Media and capital. On the contrary: through their unification, prosecutors and judges, besides not losing the money they get for the shameful job they do, work for the interests of the bosses before they even get orders. A recent example is the moaning for the increasing conservatization of the new correctional legislation (a legislation you would not call progressive, unless you compare everything with the fascists of New Democracy).

       We are not speaking in anyone’s name. The prisoners, those who mainly experience the tragic consequences of the system and justice in their lives but also all those excluded in the cities-prisons, should realize their position, organize and fight for liberation from relations from the walls that divide them today. But above all for complete liberation through the revolution itself and the destruction of State and capital.

      Let’s act in order to live our lives freely without States and borders, without prisons and psychiatric clinics, without businesses and the exploitation of nature and people.

Read the full article HERE:

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

Awe Ri Best.

      To all those folks who follow this blog and also to the casual passers by, wishing you a great new year. May your goodwill be infectious and swell the happiness of humanity, Let's work harder to bring about that better world that lives in our hearts, let's realise the dream. Tomorrow belongs to us.

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

Still Going On About May Day.

      I know May Day has come and gone, but in this country, the difference between what it has been, what it could be, and what it has become, is striking. The powers that be have taken this wonderful day of celebration and struggle and turned it into a quiet walk, waving a few banners, and a theatrical style audience and performers event, as the various bigwigs do their speech thing. We the ordinary people, the ones who do the every day struggling, become the quiet audience, while the egos sing their songs, and that's your May Day "celebration". Is that what we want? Is that the way it has to be? Well I suppose it is up to us!!

Solidarity Means Attack! from the stimulator on Vimeo.

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

MORE THOUGHT FOR THE DAY.

Taken from "The Anarchist Library":  The Indefinite Strike.

           One never locates oneself simply within a movement, but always in relation to it, facing it, perhaps even in opposition to it. Opposing all of that which is incoherent or flimsy, the reflux of despair, where it flows back into emptiness. It's a question of attacking the material and affective conditions that bind us to this world. The return to normality must be rendered not only impossible, but undesirable. To establish a cartography of everything which holds us: flows, forces, affective states, logistics, and supplies. To acquire, across the conspiring weave of our friendships, the insurrectional know-how to rout this world. We've learned the opening letters of the alphabet of sedition: blockading the refineries, the oil depots, the ports. Allowing the streets to fill with garbage and transforming the latter into barricades. Smashing the shop-windows that reflect our absence. The question put to us might just as easily be: how to shut off, definitively, the nuclear reactors? How to turn the strike into desertion? How to care for, nourish, and love one another without leaving this world in peace?

Read the whole piece.

ann arky's home.

WE ARE AWARE.

           October 15 may have come and gone, but the anger of the people is still there. The corruption and exploitation is still there, the parasites are still filling there over sized bellies with the wealth of the people. What is more the anger is spreading, the people are joining hands across borders. A message to the army of parasites that inhabit the world of the financial Mafia and to the corporate fascist, we are aware. We are aware of your lies and you corruption, we are aware of your greed and money making tricks such as war, we are aware of your plundering our public assets. Also we are aware of a better world, we are aware of your vulnerability and we are aware of our strength. Change is coming, the people will make that change.

 

ann arky's home.

CRACK CAPITALISM - JOHN HOLLOWAY.

John Holloway

Thursday 19th May 2011  18:00-20:30

The Free Hetherington

13 University Gardens

GlasgowUniversity

G12 8QH       (NearByres Road/ Hillhead Underground Station)

      The author of Crack Capitalism (2010), and Change the World Without Taking Power (2002) will be visiting the free Hetherington on its 109th day in occupation. As usual, there will be free tea and coffee served at visitor’s own instigation, and an evening meal.

Google Map: http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=the+free+hetherington

Facebook Event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=223559130993733

      “Crack Capitalism, argues that radical change can only come about through the creation, expansion and multiplication of ‘cracks’ in the capitalist system. These cracks are ordinary moments or spaces of rebellion in which we assert a different type of doing.”

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Crack-Capitalism-John-Holloway/dp/0745330088

The full text of Change the World Without Taking Power (2002) is available online here (free): http://libcom.org/library/change-world-without-taking-power-john-holloway

    John’s talk and the subsequent discussions will focus on ‘The Force of Negativity and the Rage Against the Rule of Money’. (see below)

The Force of Negativity and the Rage Against the Rule of Money

    “We can only try to emancipate ourselves, to move outwards, negatively, critically, from where we are. It is not because we are maladjusted that we criticize, it is not because we want to be difficult. It is just that the negative situation in which we exist leaves us no option: to live, to think, is to negate in whatever way we can the negativeness of our existence” (Holloway, 2002, p.5)

ann arky's home.

TEAPOT INTRODUCTION TO ANARCHY - PAGE 9.

     And so to page 9 of the wonderful wee book, The Teapot Collective Introduction to Anarchy. It is something worthwhile to read on this holiday Friday. Page 8 can be found HERE.

      Propaganda by the deed experienced a revival in the 1970s with an equally notorious urban guerrilla movement in Europe and the US (many groups of which were more Marxist-orientated than anarchist) A strong pacifist anarchist movement has also always existed alongside this, from Tolstoy and christian Utopian anarchists to parts of the peace movement of this century.

     On the question of violence, it's probably fair to say that most anarchists believe in the importance of self-defence and militantly defending whatever autonomy we achieve, at least where it's tactically sensible. The idea and history of the insurrection, of pissed-off people reclaiming their power by showing their strength in attacks on symbols of the state and capitalism, is also quite inspiring to many anarchists.

     More recently, women's liberation has emerged a force attacking our systemic oppression as women in a society based on power over each other. A society which needs to oppress some people so the elite can prosper. 

ann arky's home.

LET'S MAKE THAT STAND.

    

       In 1945 the Atlee government came to power in spite of the dire warnings of the doom and disaster brigade of the privileged Churchill pack of parasites. In taking power his government set about carrying out its promises of laying the foundations for a society based on needs based services. It was not perfect, but it was a massive step to a better society for the ordinary people. Over the years it has changed and grown, modified in many ways, but the underlying structure was the same, we look after those that can't look after themselves, we give to those who are in need.

        This bunch of millionaire parasites that have cobbled together a coalition of millionaires to grasp power is a grouping of dogmatic free-marketeers and they are on a mission. That mission is to dismantle the very principles and structures of our welfare state. This is not an “on the hoof” idea, it is a vicious well planned idealogical attack on the ideas of sharing and mutual aid at the base of any civilised society, the very principles that underpin our welfare state. Everything will be supplied by the private sector. There will be no such thing as public assets, no public space.

       To do this they need the help of the public, so they set about using the tried and tested policy of scaremongering, the same tactics used by the last government in their “war-on-terror” as they chipped away at our civil liberties.

       This millionaire cabal of free-marketeers will attempt to scare you into believing that any other policy will have catastrophic effects on us all. Along with their scaremongering, they will of course come up with their chosen scapegoats. They will set about demonising the unemployed, making out that they are living a life of luxury at our expense. A life of luxury on £65 a week job seekers allowance. They will claim that it is their own fault they are unemployed, ignoring the fact that, in this country there is over 2.5 million unemployed and only 500,000 job vacancies. They will persist in this lying and smoke and mirrors illusion even as the unemployment is set to rise dramatically. 

       Their vision of society is one that everything we do and everything we want will generate profit for their shareholders. Everything, health, education, pensions, prison services and all other social services will be provided by the corporate world over which we will have no control what so ever. If it can't generate profit the price will be increased or it will be closed down, no matter the need.

       Those who cannot provide some profit for them will be left to fend for themselves or appeal to some charity or other. This is the return of the Victorian era of wealth and privilege swaggering over abject poverty, where the poor are punished for being poor.

      They can't do it without your quiet consent, if this is the world you want for you kids and grand-kids then remain silent and let them suffer. If on the other hand you want a better world for your kids and grand-kids then stop being silent, stop giving consent by your apathy. Stand up and stop being silent, they are prepared for a fight but hoping you won't bother. Let us prepare for a fight, a fight for the right to a decent life without being in bondage to the corporate world. Your kids and grand-kids are depending on you. Communicate, organise, resist.

LET’S MAKE THAT STAND.

Come rise with me

here, take my hand

it’s time my brothers

to make that stand,

we’ve bought this world

with blood and tears

shed by our kin

through countless years.

Put an end to war

it’s time for pace

man killing man

has to cease.

No more poverty

in a sea of wealth

all men equal

in a new commonwealth.

Let’s never again kneel

let’s stand up tall

claim what’s ours

justice for all.

ann arky's home.