Politics.

Quote:

      “The worst illiterate is the political illiterate, he doesn’t hear, doesn’t speak, nor participates in the political events. He doesn’t know the cost of life, the price of the bean, of the fish, of the flour, of the rent, of the shoes and of the medicine, all depends on political decisions. The political illiterate is so stupid that he is proud and swells his chest saying that he hates politics. The imbecile doesn’t know that, from his political ignorance is born the prostitute, the abandoned child, and the worst thieves of all, the bad politician, corrupted and flunky of the national and multinational companies.”
― Bertolt Brecht

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

THE VARIED VARIANT.

       Just out, the latest issue of Variant, a free, independent, arts magazine, published in Glasgow. This excellent free magazine gives in depth coverage in the context of a broader social, political and cultural issues. You can read the complete issue on line, or down load it as a PDF.

Subjects covered in this issue, as usual, are wide, varied and interesting;

The Recent Future ofScottish Art.

The Economy ofAbolition/Abolition of Economy.

Language is NeverNeutral.

Boredom in the CharnalHouse.
Art of Protest.
Tales from a Riverbank.
Disposable Women.
Anarchism and Sexuality.

        Like all free enterprises in a capitalist society, to survive it depends on the effort and ingenuity of those involved plus that all important substance, money. Variant needs you support and any donation would go a long way to keeping the magazine going and free.

http://www.variant.org.uk/donate.html

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CAPITALISM, PARTY POLITICS, CUTS, UNEMPLOYMENT AND POVERTY.

The Tory cronies plans for you and I have been spouted at the recent Tory conference. One Tory millionaire, man of the people, actually stated that cutting your benefit will improve your quality of life. Another stated that we are too generous because some families receive benefit that is more than the minimum wage. If benefit is the minimum that the government thinks you can live on, where does that leave the minimum wage? Shouldn’t they be talking about raising the minimum wage? Other ideas they have to help us all, is to make you work longer before you get your miserly pension and when you do get it, it will be less. Then of course there is the plan for the sick on incapacity benefit, they will all be tested to see if some bureaucrat thinks your sick enough to resist their coercion to get you into some crap job with even more crappy wages.

Of course Labour are no different, they just plan different cuts, and while the Tories catch phrase is “We are all in this together” Labour keep saying “To encourage growth”. The reason for all these “necessary” cuts is the massive debt “we” have. What debt you might ask, why the billions we gave to the banks and other large businesses. Having saved “them” and their greed driven shareholders, we now have to pay the price with wage cuts, wage freezes, massive unemployment, and cuts in social services. Why wait until the pain really hurts before asking, “Was it worth it?”. We all know it was not worth it to us the ordinary people, all we have done is save a lot of very wealth parasites from going down the tubes. We have hawked ourselves up to our necks, so the really wealthy can continue to milk us.

In any sane society based on social justice this would never arise. Production would be based on the needs of those in that society, not on the greed of sweaty handed shareholders, there would be no profit driven large corporations riding roughshod over the planet and its people. Capitalism is not an inevitable natural structure, it is a greed driven man made system that benefits the very few at the expense of the many. It is no more than a social system that can be destroyed and sent to the dustbin of history. We have the ability and the resources to create a new system, one based on the needs of the people and sustainability. The longer the delay in the change from the destructive capitalist system to a sustainable social system the greater the risk to all life and the planet itself.

 

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Is technology making us stupid?

Although I am against any form of pariamentary politics and against the party system I believe the following article from the SPGB is worth debating

"Do you ever wonder whether the smarter technology becomes, the dumber and lazier we become? At one level, of course, this can’t be true. Literacy rates in almost all countries are in the high nineties, and the information revolution can scarcely be said to have rendered people more ignorant than they were hundreds of years ago. Advanced capitalism needs workers skilled in the ‘knowledge economy’, and can scarcely afford for its school indoctrination centres to turn out workers who aren’t up to the job. But still, when you try to have a conversation in a pub with a group of people who are simultaneously writing phone texts, checking their email, Facebook, Twitter accounts and RSS feeds, and looking over your shoulder at the cricket scores on the giant TV screen, while humming along to the rock tune on the in-house speakers, you might be forgiven for thinking that less is sometimes more. It seems as if people don’t discuss, think, concentrate, criticise, evaluate. All they’re doing is time-slicing in a perpetual multi-tasking environment. What you are dealing with is, arguably, a case of social attention deficit hyperactive disorder. An entire society in need of ritalin. The world is drowning in an ocean of data, but data is not information and information is not knowledge. Data consists of bytes or small packets, which must be compiled into some kind of order so as to provide meaningful information. Thus the words ‘lion’, ‘fish’ and ‘eats’ are data, while ‘lion eats fish’ or ‘fish eats lion’ or ‘lionfish eats’ are alternative forms of information. There is a similar difference between ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’. For knowledge to exist, small pieces of information must be collected and processed into some meaningful agglomeration, like molecules building into more complex organic systems. Knowledge is thus a construct which it takes time, patience, communication and experience to build. In the Dark Ages, knowledge was a treasure locked up behind monastic walls. In the Middle Ages, it was still the preserve of princes. With the dissolution of the monasteries in Britain knowledge began to be secularised, and the invention of printing revolutionised its spread. The information revolution which began with printing and has lately accelerated geometrically with the internet has certainly involved a knowledge revolution but the two are not the same and the one does not necessarily entail the other. From a world subdued in ignorance modern workers now face a perpetual storm of information from which it is perhaps becoming harder, not easier, to extract meaningful knowledge. It is not only the speed and intensity of this ‘data rain’ which swamps the mind. It is the fact that it is being broken down into smaller and smaller packets, knowledge being deconstructed, digitised, quantised and miniaturised for faster transmission. And to cope with this onslaught, the mind becomes less reflective and more selective, picking and choosing what it will process according to its preset value judgments, making it less rather than more likely that new ideas will be adopted. Time too is at a premium, and technology is taking knowledge away from the library and the desktop towards the e-reader and the smartphone, from email to Twitter, from debate to mere chat. Some futurists, like Ray Kursweil, have been predicting the advent of the Singularity, a technological point beyond which it is not possible to make any predictions at all. The nature of the Singularity is popularly supposed to be the development or evolution of true machine intelligence, but could it be that instead of machine intelligence rising to meet us, we simply sink until we pass it on the way down? Some say it’s Google making us ga-ga, others that it’s screen-burn to the brain. But where most such concerns are merely the same old bourgeois snootiness against youth or the lower orders, socialists have got legitimate reason to worry, because this could all play into the hands of capitalism. The ruling class loves to  infantilise us, making us think we’re too dumb and childlike to take responsibility for ourselves without their ‘guiding’ authority. It would be scary to think that this might come to be true. Our best hope is for a political Singularity, something no techie is predicting. The Zeitgeist Movement appears to be making huge strides in popularising non-market production for use, and another group is calling for a World Strike against money in 2012. These might grow or they might fizzle out, like the anti-capitalist movement. But for such a post-capitalist society to succeed it cannot be imposed from above or gifted to the world by one or two visionaries. Facebook, Twitter and the blogosphere  are all useful means of communicating ideas, but they’re not oriented towards what is also necessary: focussed reflection and critical debate. It’s not that people are incapable of these abilities, but if they are not accustomed to them they may try to avoid them. The danger is the spread of soundbite socialism at the expense of depth."

http://tinyurl.com/ybdxzrq

Feedback, however critical, will be appreciated.
Yours for a world without wages (money, poverty and war),

Robert Stafford

Internet Department

www.worldsocialism.org/spgb

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THE CRIME OF HOMELESSNESS!!

With the recent economic crisis unemployment is rising rapidly and with this comes repossessions and an increase in homeless. Even before the present economic disaster the number of homeless in Scotland has been steadily increasing for the 7 consecutive years to 2007. During this period the number of homeless related cases handled by the Citizens Advice Bureau has double to 8,000 for 2007. In Scotland at this moment in time there are 40,000 listed officially as homeless, what will the total be by next year? Approximately 50% of the 40,000 official homeless are young people aged 16-24, and this figure does not include those who are not listed as they find a bed by moving around their friends. Add to this the fact that “social” housing is at its lowest level for ten years. While waiting lists for rented housing is rising steadily.

Glasgow is by far the worst in the homeless league with 7,310 officially listed, Edinburgh 2nd. with 4,912 and North Lanarshire 3rd. with 2,653. This with thousands of skilled building workers being paid off in the last 12 months.

What kind of society have we allowed to fester under our noses where the most basic necessity of civilised life, a home, is denied. Only by creating a society freed from the corporate greed for profit and based on the needs of the people will we see an end to this crime. The marriage of state and the corporate world is war and poverty for the many and luxury for the parasites.

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“RIOTS IN THE STREET”??

A recent statement by Brendan Barber, the General Secretary of the TUC, that that public sector job cuts could raise unemployment to four million and lead to “riots on the streets”, is correct in so much as unemployment will rise dramatically in the coming year and four million or more is on the cards. However what we don’t want to see is “riots in the streets” as that would dissipate the energy of the working class and allow them to be vilified by the media and clobbered by the state forces. What we want to see is mass occupation of work places and workers taking control of their own affairs. We can of course open up soup kitchens and wait for the corporate world to offer us more boring jobs at crap wages, or we can fight back and take control of our work places for the benefit of all in society. There are always choices, it is up to us, their way or our way.

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ANOTHER 9/11??

September 11 1973 saw the death of the first democratically elected Marxist socialist president of Chile, elected in Nov 1970, he was also the first elected Marxist socialist president of any of the Americas. History states that he died by his own hand during a US backed military coup by General Pinochet, who went on to be military dictator and ruled Chile with a brutal iron fist until 1990.

General Pinochet’s rule was noted for the savage repression and the number of disappearances of any who dared to oppose his brutal dictatorial regime. Working class organisations were viciously eliminated where possible.

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SCOTTISH UNEMPLOYMENT.

Those who still hold the illusion that capitalism brings prosperity to all should perhaps look at the unemployment figures for Scotland. In a written answer in the Scottish Parliament Jim Mathers wrote that the figure for those 18 to 25 years old in the Eastend of Glasgow who were unemployed and not in education or training in 2008 was 32%. The figure for Shettleston and Baillieston for the same year was 37.4%.

For those unemployed, not in education or training between 16 and 19 in the 15% most deprived areas of Scotland in 2008 it was a staggering 24.6%. The 2008 figure for Scotland as a whole for those 16 to 19 it comes in at 11.9%. For the Scottish population as a whole it is approximately 6%.

With those in employment struggling, and in some cases in poverty, we can be assured that each percentage point in these unemployment figures represents real poverty. Real poverty in the midst of arrogant flaunted wealth of the “elite” parasites that infest our society, and this will continue as long as we follow meekly the party political system and the corporate greed mongers. What the system has in store for us as it tries to “fix it” is higher unemployment and savage cuts to the social services, while they weave the illusion that happiness can be purchased in the high street and the only way to save the world is to feed the consumer machine.