The State, The Strangulation Of Freedom.

         I often rant about the state, and how it doesn't serve the people, but serves a bunch of over privileged parasites. I spout about how it is at the root of wars, repression, genocide and strangles individual freedom. I go on about its desire for control and standardisation, its lack of humanity, and by its festering marriage with corporate capitalism, how it turns each human into an economic unit, which becomes superfluous if non-productive. No matter how I try, I can't put it as fluently and as eloquently as  anarchist/poet/writer, Jesús Sepúlveda does in his book, The Garden of Peculiarities.  

       This is a short extract, from that book, on the state:

       The State exists because it territorializes itself. It builds itself through colonizing territorial expansion. This expansion comes about through the forced deterritorialization of the original inhabitants from the lands that the state has appropriated. This appropriation implies the mobilization of military force that the state can use to expand or maintain its territory. This has meant wars and genocide. But the state also has its experts to write history; they turn the facts around so as to justify their atrocities and obligate following generations to repeat the meaningless official litanies written by the experts.

       Education, then, is nothing more than the institutionalization of disciplines of training and domestication, a training ground where children and adolescents are taught to perpetuate the dominant system. There they learn to give way to the dominant order and they begin the process of reification. On these parade grounds or schools of social indoctrination, the ideology that legitimates the system is reproduced. New members of society internalize a false consciousness, which inflates in them like a lung until everyone repeats with more or less success the same discourse. Its idea is that everyone says, dreams, and thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds. And if it has its faults, it doesn’t matter because they can be fixed. Thinking anything different is to be part of the anarchistic ranks, to go crazy or to call to insurrection. According to Adorno, standardization obliges the subject to choose between mercantilization or schizophrenia. There is no exit from this binary mold. In this society, preferring the garden to cement is seen with distrust. And depending on the political wind of the moment, this preference can cost one’s life. When the system breaks and sheep escape from the flock, prisons grow with criminal efficiency, as well as coups d’etat, raids, tear gas, repressive measures, war, etc. While all of this is occurring, the state rein forces its propaganda through radio, television and newspapers. And so the state materializes itself in the minds of individuals.

      Nation states assemble their repressive apparati—police and military—to protect the transnationals and expand a lifestyle of standardization based on the reduction of humans into economic units of production and consumption. With this, a new kind of territorialization and labor slavery is produced. The technology and the goods that the global minority, dominant class uses are manufactured in sweatshops that operate with the logic of exploitation. Schools and factories are centers of control imposed by the state. In order to abolish the state, it is necessary to abolish factories and schools. The authoritarianism that the civilized order reproduces in these institutions is responsible for ethnic cleansing, political genocide, and social exploitation. In order to construct a work without hierarchies, jails, propaganda, or coups, it is necessary to sweep, away the state. And it depends on us to wipe it off the face of the earth.

Continue reading HERE:

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No Borders!!!

          No Borders! People tend to see borders as those imaginary lines drawn on the surface of the planet by various power-mongers. However within those “borders” that surround “your” country, there are borders. There are areas of “no-go” territory, places of confinement, prisons are borders, those in can’t get out, those out can’t get in. Schools are borders, again once in, your not supposed to get out until the authorities tell you, you can go. They are all around us, detention centres, military property, places of employment, you can’t just walk in, and once in you can’t just walk out, you need somebody’s authority, or you pay a price. Even the glitzy shopping mall, you may go wandering in and leave, in fact you will be encouraged to come in, and you can just walk out, but the owner controls the right of entry, you can be banned from entering and you can be removed, if you don’t function as “expected”, it is not a public space. 

         Then there are the other type of borders, things you can't have, places that you can't go, barred for financial reasons, these borders are probably the most insidious, they slither through our society, separating the "haves" and the "have-nots", herding the poor into areas of deprivation, and making sure they stay there.

        Borders have become so entrenched in our psyche that there are borders we don’t even recognise, they become part and parcel of our life, an accepted fact of this society. This makes it all the more difficult for people to see the dropping of those imaginary lines that the power-mongers drew on the surface of the planet with our blood, but fall they must. 

 

         We can never claim to be free when we live in the midst of so many lines we cannot cross without a “higher” authority. We have to recognise all the borders within borders, a place of work should not be a place of confinement, but a place of willing creativity, schools should be an integrated part of our society, not a camp for shaping people to suit the needs of a capitalist “economy”. Prisons should be seen as what they are, an abomination and a scar on humanity, a system of repression. 

       Freedom means just that, freedom of movement, but must be linked to freedom to stay, with or without “documentation”. Borders are an anathema to freedom, our love of freedom means they will always need to be enforced, by a "higher" and "powerful" authority.

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

 

The Budget, A Carve Up For The Rich.

         Wednesday sees that familiar episode in our political farce, “the budget”. This is when that millionaire product of the Oxbridge sausage factory, Osborne, tells us how he is going to carve up the nation's wealth. Of course being a multi-millionaire and moving in those circles, he is totally divorced from that place we, the ordinary people call “the real world”. His circle of fiends and associates will all hail from that exclusive little club of over privileged parasites, and no doubt he will take good care of them. 

       Do you think that he will be sitting burning the midnight oil over the statistics that tell us that 28% of children in the UK live in poverty? Do you think it will cause him sleepless nights that this translates into 9 children in every class of 30 go hungry, and that means that a staggering 3.7 million children in the UK will have their life potential stunted because of poverty?
       The Institute for Fiscal Studies states that because of tax and benefit adjustments since 2010, the number of children living in relative poverty will have increased from 3.6 million to 4.3 million by 2020.
         This same chancellor is always bumming about how his bunch of cronies are getting more people into work, but fails to mention that in this type of economic system, work is not the solution to poverty. The facts are that 64%, almost two thirds, of children growing up in poverty live in a household where at least one person works. Also, 60% of families in the bottom end of income can't afford to take the children for one weeks holiday a year. 

         Child poverty is life damaging, shortens life's, in blunts their education, and deprives them from joining activities with their school friends. Regarding achieving in education there is a 28% gap in achieving 5 A-C GCSE grades between those of free school meals and their wealthier friends. 

        At the other end of the scale, Oxfam states that since 2000, the richest 1% of Britons, a cabal made up completely of millionaires, took more than a quarter of the £4 trillion increase of the UK's increase in national wealth. Each parasitic member of this 1%, saw their average wealth grow to a staggering £3.7 million in 2015. By contrast, only 7% of that national wealth increase went to around 30 million people. Today the average wealth of those in the bottom 10% is £1.600.
         The hints coming out from the “budget” is that there are more severe cuts coming the way of us at the bottom half of the income range, while there are talk of tax cuts for the better off. 

         They know there is a class war, and they fight accordingly, they know who their friends are. What about us, do we accept we are in a class war, will we fight accordingly, do we know who our friends are?

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

 

Kick The Military Out Of Our Schools.

Does the kid know that if he joins, he'll be facing the other end of the gun?

According to the Herald: 

MSPs are being urged to hold an inquiry into the presence of the armed forces in Scotland’s schools after an outcry over plans to set up cadet units aimed at the poorest pupils.

 

        Why the outcry for an inquiry? It is really quite simply, there should be an outright ban on the military having any presence in our schools. Whither they call it team building or physical training, or whatever, there can be no connection between the military and education. We all know that children are impressionable, it takes years to come to informed opinions about the world in which we live. Let education, families and communities help our children do so, without the interference of the pompous parasitical imperialist masters. To a child, the military might look all very grand as they parade up and down in their fancy regalia, but they are the state's killing machine. Its only purpose is to defend the wealth and power of our imperialist establishment.

         It is up to all of us in our communities to get the military kicked out of our education system, we have to make it quite clear by determined action, that we will not have our children brainwashed into being canon fodder, to be sacrificed on the bloody altar of imperialism. The military is an anathema to education, education is about helping people act of their own free will after an informed look at the evidence, the military is about doing exactly what your are told, no matter what you think. One, education, should take you down the road to free will, the other, the military, turns you into a robot, waiting for instructions from above, a slave to authority, a unit whose live can be sacrificed at the command of a “higher authority”.

        This is a campaign that epitomises the class structure of our society, these “cadet units” are to be placed in the schools in the most deprived areas. Areas where our callous authoritarian imperial masters, know that the kids have less opportunities, and the military will be sold to them as a wonderful life of travel and training, there will be no mention of the death, trauma, injury, suicide, bullying, brutality and abandoning your own will, to the will of the state's killing machine, in the defence of other's wealth and power, wealth and power that they themselves will never share.

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

The Education Production Factory.

         Modern state education is in fact not education, it is programming children to fit into a capitalist system as a productive unit, the human aspect of the individual is secondary, if considered at all. It is also the state's way of conditioning children to accept authority, an necessary attribute for the survival of the state. Teachers in the modern state education system are the state's soft police. If they fail to shape the child into a subservient subject, then the hard police and the judiciary system will take over and continue the conditioning. The state's final policing authority is of course the military. 

        As children we are taught a false history, a value structure that puts wealth possession above well being, our future success will be measured by how much we can earn, not by what we can contribute, the progress of success is seen as a ladder, you have to climb above others, you have to climb higher. Grades, diplomas, degrees, all badges in the drive to get up that ladder, competition rather than co-operation. I know we can do better than this for our children.
From More Thought:

Wild Children - Domesticated Dreams:  

An Interview with Layla AbdelRahim

       “Schools teach children the principles of death and of suffering. They do not teach them the principles of life, which is diversity, which is being out there in the world. They teach them within closed systems, within closed buildings and walls, separated from the rest of the world. They teach them that violence is legitimate when it is applied from the top to the bottom and that it is illegitimate when it is practised in resistance or defence of diversity and life. They teach children that humanity is alien to this world, that success means pleasing those in authority who will own the products of our flesh, of our effort, of our work, of our love.” - Layla AbdelRahim 

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

A Very Authoritarian Democracy.

      America struts around the world proclaiming itself to be "the land of the free", it bombs the world into democracy, and walks away leaving death, destruction, mayhem and misery in its wake. At home it has the highest number of its citizens locked up in prisons, than any other country on the planet, and it passes some of the most restrictive and authoritarian legislation in the Western world.

       I received this appeal this morning:

     In West Virginia, teaching about "social problems" could become a crime.
    A bill introduced in the West Virgina House of Delegates would charge teachers with a misdemeanor if they teach “social problems, economics, foreign affairs, the United Nations, world government, socialism or communism until basic courses in American state and local geography and history are completed.”
     Teachers would be charged a $10 fine for every week that they taught prohibited subjects, and repeated offenses would get them fired and blacklisted from teaching for one year.

Tell West Virginia lawmakers that teaching is not a crime!

PETITION TO WEST VIRGINIA DELEGATES: TEACHERS ARE NOT CRIMINALS. VOTE NO ON HB 2107!

Click here to sign -- it just takes a second.

Thanks,
-- The folks at Watchdog.net

P.S. If the other links aren't working for you, please go here to sign: http://act.watchdog.net/petitions/4999?n=92043092.riFgxS

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

Little Soldiers.

          Assemble, in neat rows, march forward in straight lines, and so you start a life of obedience at school. The state has always seen schools as a way of controlling people, rather than enlightening them. Militarism in our schools is not a new phenomenon, however, it is on the increase. While condemning "boy soldiers" in foreign lands, we train them here in this country. This government has seized upon the brutal imperialist squabble of 1914/18 as another chance to glorify war and increase militarism in our schools. That product of the Oxbridge sausage making machine, ex-Education Secretary, Michael Gove, was all for military drilling in schools. He had that mix that is common among the upper class parasites, military and religion. while advocating more military style training in schools, he also wanted every school in England to be presented with a King James Bible. After all they want God's blessing before they slaughter our fellow humans.

    The UK Education Secretary's announcement of a £2 million programme to place former service personnel in British schools has been roundly criticised by faith and civic groups and individuals.

    Michael Gove declared: “Every child can benefit from a military ethos. Self-discipline and teamwork are at the heart of what makes our armed forces the best in the world - and are exactly what all young people need to succeed. ”

Read the full article HERE: 

         Of course we should not tolerate any form of militarism in the education of our children, the opposite is surely the way to help to build a society free from the horrors of war. However, sadly it has been the aim of governments across the globe to indoctrinate our children in preparation for the defence of our lords and masters.

     This is what German pacifist Kurt Tucholsky wrote in an article titled “On effective pacifism”, published in 1927. More than 80 years later, the militarists are still sowing. The presence of the military in schools is only the most outrageous example of the sowing and planting of militarist values into the minds of children and soon-to-be soldiers, or supporters of militarism and war. It is the most outrageous, because on the one hand schools should be about learning positive values and knowledge, and not about propaganda, and on the other hand children are most vulnerable to propaganda and indoctrination.

Read the full article HERE:

      This insidious linking of the education of our children with militarism is solely for the protection of the state and the powers that control that state. it will only be stopped when we get rid of the state. In the meantime, we should be exposing this link, and campaigning to have it removed. That indoctrination of our children has always been there, it wanes and rises, to day it is on the rise again.

      Militarism surfaced again in 1930 when [the writer and journalist] John Langdon-Davies commented with disapproval: "In parliament, to which belongs the ultimate authority over education, there has been a significant movement in favour of a definite military training as part of the curriculum." He added: "We must guard against militarism in education because it aims not at the child's good but at the state's good - and that in a very short-sighted way - and because it atrophies individuality by every means in its power."

The same criticism can be levied against governments today...

Read the full article HERE:

Spot the difference?

For More info:

 Militarism in Schools is on the increase world-wide.

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

Unofficially Qualified.

       We all struggle for "freedom" or our own idea of what that "freedom" is likely to be. The usual mantra is get "qualified" seek "higher education" and reap the rewards. I personally have always given the established education system a wide berth, that doesn't mean I haven't read a lot, on a wide range of subjects, but it has always been the subject matter that I wish to pursue, at the rate I wish to travel and to the depth I wish to take it. I long since accepted that the more I engage with the established system of "learning", the less likely I am to be free. Establishment figures putting the stamp of approval on my achievements would seem to saying that I have fitted into the mould in the way that I think. I have done the accepted things,I am now one of them. Hardly sounds like the bugle call to freedom

This from ClubOrlov:

What this means in practice, for me at least, is that as soon as it starts looking like I am heading in the direction of acquiring a specific job title or job description, or getting involved in something that might require registration, certification or licensing, then I need to backtrack or head in a different direction for a bit, until everybody loses interest. In doing so I sometimes forgo some opportunities for an increased income, but that is the price of freedom. 

Read the full article HERE:

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

Police Brutality, Solidarity Is Our Weapon.

 Israeli police pepper spray an arrested injured man.

       Police brutality is everywhere, they are the first line of defence that the state uses to repress attempts to change the system. That is if we ignore the education system, where teachers are the soft police, the real first line of their defence, when that fails, the hard police come in to play. From America, where an Afro-American is killed every 28 hours by a white policeman, to regular incidents across Europe where heavy handed police tactics result in the death of an individual, then there is South Africa, where miners were gunned down en-mass, and Mexico where, recently, 43 students and teachers were abducted and murdered. In this country our babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, always report such events here as an anomaly an unusual event. However, in this country, close to 900 people have died during or following contact with the police since 2004, yet as far as I am aware, not one single police officer has been convicted since 1969.

       Often these deaths are followed by protests, as in Ferguson, in America, and the ongoing protests in Mexico over the disappearance of the 43, and the present protests across France after the death of Remi Raisse from a police stun grenade. However solidarity across borders would have greater effect, the problem is universal, the response should be universal, it is the same system that is killing our people.

 Turkish police rush forward for an opportunity to boot a man on the ground.

This from Contra Info:

       On November 11th, 2014, anarchists symbolically occupied the offices of the AFP (Agence France-Presse) in the affluent neighbourhood of Kolonaki, central Athens, to protest the police murder of Rémi Raisse in the ZAD of Testet, France. Comrades handed out leaflets in Greek and French, reading: “From France to Greece, let us transform the foci of resistance into a signal of rebellion towards the oppressed of the whole earth. Solidarity is our weapon.”

Age is no protection from police brutality.

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

The Cancer Of Profit.

        When the advocates of capitalism spout about its success and the wealth it has created, we should remind them of some undeniable facts. The world is certainly awash with wealth, but the vast majority of the world's population don't experience any of the benefits of that wealth. The figures that follow are from 2008, and we all know that since then, we have seen a massive "austerity" plan implemented on the poorest section of all societies across the planet.
 

        While the number of billionaires grow, at least 80% of the world's population live on less than $10 a day and over three billion live on less than $2.50 a day. As the wealth in the world increases, more than 80% of the world's population lives in countries where the income differentials are widening. That abundance of wealth that sloshes around the world, stays in a very few hands. A mere 5% of the world's income is spread across 40% of the world's population. While at the other end, 75% of the world's income is claimed by the richest 20% of the population. Of course disparity in wealth distribution is not just about “things”, it is about life and death, deprivation and destroyed potential.
 

        Out of sight of the flashing neon lights and fast food outlets, UNICEF estimates that 22,000 children die each day due to poverty. This happens in small villages and towns in remote areas, out of sight of the that babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, so their murder by the system goes unrecorded.
         The catalogue of misery, deprivation and early death across this planet of plenty, is capitalism's legacy, a handful enjoy unimaginable wealth and power, some live comfortably, and the vast majority suffer unacceptable deprivation. It is estimated that approximately 30% of all children in developing countries, are underweight. Under weight and uneducated is a recipe for a life stunted and a potential stolen. 2005 figures also reveal that in the developing world, 72 million children of primary school age were not at school, the biggest half of them, 57%, were girls. As we moved into the 21st century, another of capitalism's crimes was that almost one billion people were unable to read or sign their name. 

       Even if we were insane enough to stay with the capitalist system, we could quite easily remedy all of these failings. If we spent a mere 1% of what the world spends each year on weapons, it would be enough to put every child into school. It won't happen, weapons are much more profitable to shareholders than educating children.

      This is the world of capitalism, a bizarre world of unimaginable wealth, an abundance of food, and millions dying of poverty and deprivation. A world of scientific magic in the midst of millions deprived of education, a world of mass production of luxuries and gadgets, and millions dying for the want of necessities. Sanity demands that we dismantle this insane, unjust and greed driven system, in favour of one based on human needs, mutual aid and co-operation, freed from the cancer of profit.

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