Universities!!

         Universities, seats of learning, places where you go to develop  your ability to be rational and critical, to allow your imagination and intelligence to flower, for the greater good of humanity, ah, the dream. In fact universities have become factories for turning out the nuts and bolts to further the corporate world, nuts and bolts in the shape of conditioned human beings. What is more, universities make money from these nuts and bolts, universities have become part and parcel of the corporate world, they are now just another factory supplying the needs of the profit driven capitalist system. They are dependent on corporate money, they are an integral part of this economic system of insanity.

        The hope is that the students grasp this and decide it is not what they want, and decide they don't want to be programmed to be profit making units for the rich and powerful corporations. Let's hope they decide to take control of the universities and shape them into those desired seats of learning for the benefit of all humanity.  Encouragingly, some are already going down this path, and deserve our full support and solidarity.

The following extract from It's Going Down: 

 

          Statement from group of students occupying the arts building at McGill University in Montreal. 

 

          For the past week, students have been occupying the arts building at McGill University in Montreal. Dozens of tents block the corridor and the atmosphere is festive. These different people occupying the building are clear in their position: they are not asking for anything, they are building, independently, the democratization of their university. We share here their manifesto.
        We are tired of demanding change from those who never intended on listening. We will no longer be deceived. We will prefigure a democratically-led university for ourselves.
       We are occupying McGill to create a festive, autonomous space for learning. A space which belongs to all rather than to the corporate elite. At present, McGill University, as controlled by the Board of Governors, serves capitalist, white-supremacist, settler-colonial and imperialist structures of power.
       When we say McGill is capitalist we mean that it upholds the market’s senseless production, consumption, and environmental exploitation. Under this inflexible model, students, staff, and faculty suffer from exhaustion and mental health issues. Just this semester, in pursuit of profit, McGill prioritized a return to in-person classes over the safety of community members, forcing many to go on strike or to unionize.
       This negligence is not surprising; Capitalist McGill is busy with other things:
It is a high-cost, exploitative landlord, charging many students over $1500 for a one-bedroom.
       It is a stockholder, managing an investment pool of $1.4 billion across the military industrial complex, banking sector, and fossil fuel industry
       We, as students, pay this private entity, the university, to train us for professions that serve human and environmental exploitation. Any other purpose for the university has been deliberately rendered unimaginable. The continuity of corporations relies on the commodification of knowledge, wherin education becomes an instrument of profit.
       McGill is controlled by Senior executives from the Bank of Montreal (BMO), Power Corporation of Canada, the National Bank of Canada, Metro Inc., HSBC Bank Canada, and Redbourne Properties Inc. They all sit on the Board of Governors and represent its single largest voting bloc.
       The university’s structure mirrors the exploitative and hierarchical logic of corporations. By forming an industrial complex of grants, research, public relations campaigns, and donations, McGill has become University Incorporated.
       When we say this structure is also white-supremacist, we mean that, in a white supremacist society that thrives on the exploitation of racialized communities and entire nations, McGill’s education is not revolutionary but reformist and complacent.
       For two years, White-Supremacist McGill has refused to #TakeJamesDown as demanded by Black and Indigenous students, faculty and staff, choosing instead to protect the university’s slave-owning founder and his public statue. Scholarships, prizes, and buildings continue to bear the name of James McGill and the legacy of slavery. University administrators have also failed to meet the Black Student Network’s demands regarding the funding of Black History Month and a Black Canadian Studies Department staffed by Black scholars.
       Financed by James McGill’s colonial enterprises, the university was founded on, and continues to operate on, the unceded, traditional lands of the Kahnistensera from the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. The land acknowledgements that Settler-Colonial McGill boasts on its brochures and at its public events are empty words as it refuses to meaningfully engage with the Kahnistensera and their demands. The university demonstrates no comittment to upholding Indigneous soveignty. McGill finances colonial projects like the Coastal GasLink pipeline trespassing on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory and refuses to repay the money it received from the Six Nations Trust Fund in 1850, totalling $1.7 billion today.

Read the full article HERE: 

 

Visit ann arky's home at https://spiritofrevolt.info     

Mutual Aid.

       A little more on self-organising and mutual aid. It's not a new invention, it has been the backbone of human development since we started to walk the earth. However we do need to refine it to suit the disaster that we seem to have created on this same earth we walked all those generations ago. 

      Communities across the planet are more and more turning to this human resource of mutual aid, experimenting, refining and developing as they grow. We can all learn from one and other, that's the basis of mutual aid, mutual co-operation.

      The following extract is from an article taken from Open Democracy: 

   Dance festival as part of the month-long program, called “Celebration of Life”: members of a Zapatista community are enacting life after 1994. Signs say “Education,” “Health,” and “Collective Work.” | Photo: Anya Briy

       As the COVID-19 pandemic has undermined healthcare systems and economies of even the most advanced nations, mutual networks and self-organizing efforts have sprung up across the world in a show of pandemic solidarity. With the police murder of George Floyd, the U.S. has seen further spread of self-organizing: from bond and mutual aid funds for protesters to citizen patrols in Minneapolis and a police-free autonomous zone in Seattle. As the first attempt to abolish police and replace it with community-based, transformative justice are underway in the U.S., we may want to look at the communities that have been experimenting with self-organization without recourse to the states that oppress or dispossess them, such as Rojava in North East Syria, Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi and Zapatistas in Chiapas. Zapatistas, in particular, have spent the last 26 years organizing their communities autonomously from the state across all spheres of life—from police and justice system to health care, economy and education. As we witness the limits of the imaginable being radically shifted, the Zapatista experience is more relevant than ever.

Read the full article HERE:

Thanks Loam for the link.

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

We Can Do It Ourselves.

     Who said people can't manage to look after themselves, that they need a hierarchical structure with the leader at the top? Time an time again in tragic circumstances, emergencies, and disasters, the ordinary people prove, they are very capable and willing to get things sorted out. So let's grasp that fact and start to take control of our society, which at present is a disaster for the ordinary people, much like a sinking ship, and sort things out to the benefit of all our people. Thanks Loam for the video link.

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

Red And Black Song Club.

        There's a new voice in town, at the moment I believe it is just a whisper, but has the potential to become a roar. When I say  a "new voice", well really it's an old voice, it's a voice of struggle, a voice of people's desire for freedom and equality, a desire for justice. It is in fact the Red and Black Song Club, they will be trying to fill your hearts with tales of past struggles, with hope, with solidarity and camaraderie. So pop along and have a listen, or better still, lend your voice, join in.

      You'll find them every, 1st. and 3rd. Thursday of the month, at 7pm. in the Glasgow Autonomous Space, Kilbirnie Street, (near West Street subway).

         The Red and Black Song Club is exactly what it sounds like- a song club for the radical left. We meet up on the 1st and 3rd Thursday of every month to sing, celebrate and keep alive radical left-wing music from the past and present.
       You don't need any musical experience- just a love of radical songs of working class struggle, anti-fascism and solidarity.
        Other musical instruments are more than welcome too!

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

The State Will Not Tolerate Self Organising By The People.

 A refugee inside the detention centre with a message concerning his detention.

This from Act For freedom Now: 

 The Refugee Accommodation Space, City Plaza’s statement:

            Repression will not put an end to the squat movement
The evacuation of Villa Zografou and the Alkiviadou squat by police is an act of extreme state authoritarianism. The SYRIZA-ANEL government quickly aligned itself with far-right voices screaming for more repression. While refugees are crammed inside terrible camps, while enormous sums of money are being wasted, while the city is suffocating from the lack of free, non-commercial spaces, the government is opting for a policy of police violence and social suffocation.
          Yet they are mistaken if they believe they can crush the squat movement with riot police and district attorneys. The struggle for solidarity and dignity will continue unabated. It is a Social need, it is a political choice.

            Syriza, in Greece, is living proof that "left-wing" governments are no less authoritarian than any other form of government. As the people of Greece struggle with day to day problems of survival in a capitalist created nightmare, this "left-wing" government vomits out repression over any attempt by ordinary people to self organise for the improvement of their lives. Squats are part of the social struggle of people attempting to create living spaces of community, self help in time of need, a helping hand to others in need, but to any state, this is unacceptable. Syriza, like all governments in the developed world is all about control of the civil population, and obedience to their masters the financial Mafia. All spaces must be under state control or in the hands of their festering bed fellow, corporate capitalism. To this end they will bring down the full force of their brutal enforcement apparatus.
        So be warned all you who run to the ballot box the next time a new "left-wing" messiah steps up to take the reins of some "radical left-wing " political party. Once in power, they will, like obedient slaves, follow the dictate of their masters, the financial Mafia.

 

Self-Organized occupied space of refugees in Alkiviadou and Acharnon

 

Statement from Void Network:

         Two Social Centers In Athens Under Attack / Solidarity Announcement
       The repression of social liberation movement and the destruction of the occupied spaces of refugees and immigrants will not be left unanswered. The Greek Left government chose at the dawn of 13/03/2017 to listen to the commands of the conservative right and the neo-liberal Media of Mass Manipulation and attack two occupations of the broader social movement in Athens, Greece. Police raids are an ideal example of the policy imposed by the domination during our era: when we sleep the State continues working against all of us.
       The occupation at the beginning of Acharnon Street, very near to the old Villa Amalias squat in the center of Athens was – with the joys and sorrows of the past year-, a real school for all the local solidarity activists that took part in the titanic struggle offering assistance to refugees outside the mechanisms of the regime, as humans to humans over the last years. The occupation of Acharnon was the first example of direct, autonomous and unmediated self-organization of refugees without the presence and participation of local activists. It was a self-organized space of immigrants and refugees by themselves for themselves and this is why it was hit directly by the state.
        The occupied park and castle of Villa Zografou in the Zografou area was an important social center of the neighborhood and with a very strong involvement in the uprising of 2008 and the movements that followed until the final uprising of February 12, 2012. At a time of recession for the movements and of the general inaction of society, the State comes to get back every corner conquered by the social movements at a time when they tried to give answers to the capitalist, predatory raids misleadingly named by our oppressors as “CRISIS”.
        The fraud of the representation of popular interests in parliament by ridiculous politicians and sold out parties already ended at Syntagma Square in the summer of 2011. The massive illusion of the desperate majority that Syriza wouls “save us” has ended long ago. This attack on the social centers is yet more proof that the left government is nothing more than another form of antisocial “social democracy” in front of us. Syriza is a zombie of PASOK, and while it is dying it continues to grasp at the defense of its own power, and every minute that passes the future of this society is mortgaged away.
        The parliament stinks of the plague and those who want to support it with their backs and to irrigate it with their blood have to know that they live at the expense of their children and that they CHILDREN WILL GIVE THEIR ANSWERS. The Future will defend its rights and THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THOSE WHO ARE STRUGGLING.
        Re-occupation of all occupations hit by the State – Create squats and social centers across the country in all possible and unlikely places – Liberation of everyday life from all stupid social responsibilities and conventions – Refuse the dominant culture – Recruitment towards the social movements of our time – Support of the movement’s for the spaces with our daily participation

SYMBIOSIS / EQUALITY / TOTAL FREEDOM

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

Chat, Songs And Poetry, Happy May Day.

        Yea, I know, I keep going on about the May Day picnic on The Green, but it was a great wee self organised event. So here is a wee video of the event thanks to Bob at City Strolls.



And the more sedate and sanitised official May Day march and rally.

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