Proto-Fascism.

 

      Well that's that over with. I have never been one for ritual, ceremony, tradition, I've always felt they got in the way of freedom of self expression. I'm not one for things should be done this way at this time of year, and if you don't conform you're some sort of oddity. I'll continue to wear my oddity as a badge of honour.

The goal of neo-liberalism ideology.

       And so for something completely different, not new, but it might help shock the party mood back to reality. Prophesy, or reflection of the present and possible future. 

The same can be said for most countries.

Extract from;

AGAINST THE NEW AUTHORITARIANISM 

by HENRY GIROUX 1-894037-23-5

PROTO-FASCISM.
Page 94/95;

        Neoliberalism is not only an economic policy designed to cut government spending, pursue free trade policies, and liberate market forces from government regulations. It is also a political philosophy and ideology that affects every dimension of social life. Neoliberalism has heralded a radical shift that defines the citizen as consumer, disbands the social contract in the interests of privatized considerations, and separates capital from the context of place.Within this discourse, as Jean and John Comaroff have argued, "the personal is the only politics there is, the only politics with a tangible referent or emotional valence. It is in these privatized terms that action is organised, that the experience of inequity and antagonism takes meaningful shape." Unnder such circumstances, neoliberalism portends the death of politics as we know it, strips the social of its democratic values, and reconstructs agency in terms that are utterly privatized. It provides the conditions for an emerging form of proto-fascism that must be resisted at all costs. Neoliberalism not only enshrines unbridled individualism as a central feature of proto-fascism, as Herbert Marcuse reminds us, it also destroys any vestige of democratic society by undercutting its "moral material and regulatory moorings," and in doing so, offers no language for understanding how the future might be grasped outside the narrow logic of the market. But there is even more at stake here than the obliteration of public concerns, the death of the social, the emergence of a market-based fundamentalism that undercuts our ability to understand how to translate privately experienced misery into collective action, and the elimination of the gains of the welfare state. There is also the growing threat of displacing "political sovereignty with the sovereignty of the market, as if the latter has a mind and morality of its own.'" As democracy becomes a burden under the reign of neoliberalism, civic discourse disappears and the reign of unfetered social Darwnism, with its survival-of-the-slickest philosophy, emerges as the template for a new form of proto-fascism. None of this will happen in the face of sufficient resistance, nor is the increasing move toward proto-fascism inevitable, but the conditions exist for democracy to lose all semblance of meaning----

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Alasdair Gray, Poet, Writer, Artist, Comrade.

     The death of Alasdair Gray on Sunday 29th. December 2019 will be a tremendous loss to the People of Glasgow and much further afield. As well as being a generous man, donating to Spirit of Revolt as well as many other groups, he was a man of compassion, insight and a battler, never afraid to speak out in defence of justice and humanity.
       The following video is from the last event he shared with Spirit of Revolt, “Writers for Miners” held November 2018 in Mono, where, despite the dreadful November weather he turned up and read one of his poems, which he referred to as “A long poem about humanity”. Thanks Bob at City Strolls for the video.

Alasdair Gray reading at, “Writers for Miners” Video

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In Defence Of An Ideal.

       I was recently, reading on Anarchists World Wide, an interview with a defender of the city of Serekaniye in the district of Rojava against the second largest army in NATO and its air-power, the fascist Turkish forces and their co-patriots ISIS fighters. An extremely moving report on what it is like to be involved in the defence of a territory that is more than land but an ideal a vision of a better world for all.
     One passage stood out in my mind about the importance of creating a solid foundation for that ideal that you wish to fight for and defend.

From Anarchists World Wide:

        I think one of the most important things I’ve learned here is the value of commitment. The commitment to really decide to fight the rest of your life. To make a decision that is not easy and to dump all your energies and time in building a base, to do it in the long term and with perspective. Not wanting to do things too quickly, but having perspective of what the revolutionary construction of a territory means, including society, people. I am not saying that in Catalonia there is no commitment, I say that there comes a time when, in the face of oppression, there is no possibility or half measures, it is one thing or another. And sometimes we expected to respond, but if we respond without having built the entire base on a social, ideological and structural level, the response to the attacks will be very short. It will not be long because it will not be ideological, it will not be based on common and shared values.
       And then, of course…how to say it in Catalan? There is much talk here about bawerî, about faith. I believe that at home we have no faith in our own steps, in our structures, in our commitment, also at the vital level. Because if we do not start with ourselves, if we do not fight against our sexist personality, against the competitiveness that exists in us and the capitalist mentality that we have, if we do not learn to live collectively, how can we consider a real change? This is what I have seen here, that life and struggle are the same, that we have to get people to believe again, get organized again and not be afraid of difference, because the difference is what makes community.

Read the full article HERE:

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These Hard Times!!!

 

        So times are hard, it's a struggle to pay rent/mortgage, heating and eating. It's a worry seeing to the needs of the kids. You have a crap precarious job and your pittance of a pay fluctuates, you're never sure how much you'll get in the next pay packet. Or you could be shackled to a job seekers allowance, circumstances that will dominate your life until you are sold to some greedy employer. Like I said, these are hard times, well not for everybody, while you strain and struggle to live a half decent life, there is that other class of citizen. The pampered parasite class, the rich and wealthy that live off your sweat and toil, who prosper by your poverty. The grotesque difference in wealth distribution built into this capitalist system has now reached unimaginable proportions. While you try to sort your affairs in £s, there is that other group who shuffle their income in £-billions, a lot of it to tax havens, so that they don't have to contribute to the running of our society. The cornerstone of the capitalist system, exploit the many for the benefit of the few, syphon all the wealth created up to the few at the top, and let the rest struggle and scramble for an existence as best they can.

    Some new figures on that grotesque unequal distribution of wealth that is held up as a measure of success. We live in a system whose motto is "Greed Is Good".

       This from Huffpost:

 Jeff Bezos, president and CEO of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post.

        The world’s richest 500 people increased their collective wealth by 25% in 2019 – a stark reminder of worsening income inequality.
        The 500 wealthiest people held a collective net worth of $5.9t (£4.5t) – an increase of $1.2t (£917b) over 2019 alone, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Topping the list of richest people were familiar names: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, followed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, French luxury group head Bernard Arnault, Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett and Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
         The richest Briton to appear on the list was Jim Ratcliffe, the UK’s richest man and CEO of chemicals company Ineos – ranking at number 52 on the index with a total net worth of $20.8b (£15.9b). He was one of 16 people from the UK to appear on the 500-strong list. A total of 171 people on the list were from the United States.
         A study earlier this year found that the 400 richest people in the US owned more than the 150 million people in the bottom 60% of the country ― and that since the early 1980s, those 400 richest Americans had tripled their wealth.

        There you have it, these are hard times, well only for the many and for as long as we tolerate this crime against humanity that goes under the flag of capitalism. There is an alternative, just think about it.

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The One-Way Mirror Society.

       We live in a glass bubble that has been constructed around us all by state spying agencies, city council surveillance CCTV and of course our corporate masters. Your mobile phone is a direct link to most of these surveillance groups, your computer is a suction machine for the spying class. Go out and leave you phone at home and your are followed, monitored and profiled by CCTV, facial recognition and car number plate logging. All this data collection is not done with your consent nor is it for your benefit, but for the benefit of the state and the consumer juggernaut that is capitalism.

      You may believe that you lead a private life minding your own business, but your privacy is an illusion and the details of your life are big business. You are the pawn in their vile and secretive constructed glass bubble. Today's society is a one way mirror, and we are at the wrong end. Privacy is not a given, in this society the opposite is the case, it is a privilege for those who have the time and the money. Your privacy is something you have to work at and even then you will not be completely successful in your aim. However there are things you can do to curtail some of the extremities of their prying eyes.

         There are some interesting info which we can all follow to this end in the article from Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Read the report here:  Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Download the report here: Surveillance Report:

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Television, To Be Or Not To Be?.

         A poem for today, and of course tomorrow, or a New Year's resolution. Time to stop that nasty mind numbing screen, spewing sewage on the floor, so thick and putrid that it blocks the door, it fills your mind with a nasty smell, you’d believe you're down a dirty well. It blocks the windows from the sun, makes you forget out there can be such fun.

Television - Poem by Roald Dahl

The most important thing we've learned,
So far as children are concerned,
Is never, NEVER, NEVER let
Them near your television set --
Or better still, just don't install
The idiotic thing at all.
In almost every house we've been,
We've watched them gaping at the screen.
They loll and slop and lounge about,
And stare until their eyes pop out.
(Last week in someone's place we saw
A dozen eyeballs on the floor.)
They sit and stare and stare and sit
Until they're hypnotised by it,
Until they're absolutely drunk
With all that shocking ghastly junk.
Oh yes, we know it keeps them still,
They don't climb out the window sill,
They never fight or kick or punch,
They leave you free to cook the lunch
And wash the dishes in the sink --
But did you ever stop to think,
To wonder just exactly what
This does to your beloved tot?
IT ROTS THE SENSE IN THE HEAD!
IT KILLS IMAGINATION DEAD!
IT CLOGS AND CLUTTERS UP THE MIND!
IT MAKES A CHILD SO DULL AND BLIND
HE CAN NO LONGER UNDERSTAND
A FANTASY, A FAIRYLAND!
HIS BRAIN BECOMES AS SOFT AS CHEESE!
HIS POWERS OF THINKING RUST AND FREEZE!
HE CANNOT THINK -- HE ONLY SEES!
'All right!' you'll cry. 'All right!' you'll say,
'But if we take the set away,
What shall we do to entertain
Our darling children? Please explain!'
We'll answer this by asking you,
'What used the darling ones to do?
'How used they keep themselves contented
Before this monster was invented?'
Have you forgotten? Don't you know?
We'll say it very loud and slow:
THEY ... USED ... TO ... READ! They'd READ and READ,
AND READ and READ, and then proceed
To READ some more. Great Scott! Gadzooks!
One half their lives was reading books!
The nursery shelves held books galore!
Books cluttered up the nursery floor!
And in the bedroom, by the bed,
More books were waiting to be read!
Such wondrous, fine, fantastic tales
Of dragons, gypsies, queens, and whales
And treasure isles, and distant shores
Where smugglers rowed with muffled oars,
And pirates wearing purple pants,
And sailing ships and elephants,
And cannibals crouching 'round the pot,
Stirring away at something hot.
(It smells so good, what can it be?
Good gracious, it's Penelope.)
The younger ones had Beatrix Potter
With Mr. Tod, the dirty rotter,
And Squirrel Nutkin, Pigling Bland,
And Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and-
Just How The Camel Got His Hump,
And How the Monkey Lost His Rump,
And Mr. Toad, and bless my soul,
There's Mr. Rat and Mr. Mole-
Oh, books, what books they used to know,
Those children living long ago!
So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,
Go throw your TV set away,
And in its place you can install
A lovely bookshelf on the wall.
Then fill the shelves with lots of books,
Ignoring all the dirty looks,
The screams and yells, the bites and kicks,
And children hitting you with sticks-
Fear not, because we promise you
That, in about a week or two
Of having nothing else to do,
They'll now begin to feel the need
Of having something to read.
And once they start -- oh boy, oh boy!
You watch the slowly growing joy
That fills their hearts. They'll grow so keen
They'll wonder what they'd ever seen
In that ridiculous machine,
That nauseating, foul, unclean,
Repulsive television screen!
And later, each and every kid
Will love you more for what you did.

Roald Dahl

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A World In Revolt.

 

France. 

      It is obvious that our world is changing and changing rapidly. Unrest and mass protests to open rebellion is there on the streets in country after country. Some  protests suffering violent repression similar to a military attack, but still they go on. Some are prolonged and intense and ask no concession from the state. Due to the violent nature of the state and the gross inequality and injustice of the capitalist system, this unrest will continue to grow. Our question is how do we unify it and create sparks that start the fire in other areas.

 Chile.

  From "Groups for the Diffusion of Disorder"

on athensindymedia, via Act For freedom Now:

        Our lives are flooded with the ultimatums and commandments of the State, capital and civilization.
       In the dens of slave labour where we have to sell our labour power to survive, the bosses’ ultimatums are the voice of capitalist development at any cost. The voice of the neoliberal onslaught, the voice of the murderous intents of the bosses who torture our bodies with intensified working schedules, the abolition of Sunday off, work without insurance, no safety measures, layoffs and blackmailing.
       In our schools and colleges the orders of the State and capital are the voices of discipline to the barbarism of our times, telling the treacherous story of submission to the powerful, they are the voices of nationalism and intolerance, the deletion from our memory of every moment of the social war. Their goal is to create a new generation of disciplined slaves, always eager to enter the capitalist line of production without being conscious of their role.
Without a trace of essential knowledge of the history of struggles and uprisings against States and their power. Having accepted their peaceful coexistence with those responsible for their poverty, starvation, wars. Having accepted that the struggle is futile and capitalism is the winner of history.
        In the neighbourhoods where we live and fight, called Exarchia or not, the ultimatums of the State find us in amphitheatres and squats, demonstrations and conspiracy rendevous. Their ultimatums speak the language of modern totalitarianism, police repression, organized and coordinated State propaganda through the media, of their normality that is full of violence for anyone who doesn’t fit into it.
       Their ultimatums are the other side of State terrorism. They are the police batons that smash heads in Exarchia, are the images of refugees surrounded by cops entering buses to be sent to the hell of concentration camps, are the sexist comments and threats of sexual violence from the riot cops to anyone who doesn’t like them, are the dozens of invasions against squats and centres of struggle, is the military occupation of an entire neighbourhood by the police- cannibals scum, is the police surveillance against comrades with bugs and hidden cameras, is the kidnapping of comrades from their homes, the State’s anti-terror campaign is an essential ingredient for the imposition of the law and order doctrine.
       These and many more are some pieces that indicate the central political strategy of the State to conduct a totalitarian war against the anarchist movement aimed at exterminating it before any social unrest emerges on the street. The authorities know that the anarchist movement has the potential to act as a detonator in social struggles. They see that the flames of rebellion are spreading to every corner of the world. That the social and class inequalities that are essentially the locomotives of capitalism are becoming a choking loop around its neck.
        It is a common assumption now that we are at a critical historical juncture.

Continue reading: 

 Greece.

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Imagine.

      Not a new video, but just imagine!!

        To be honest I don't see Trump as waging any new wars, more as a coup maker, a sanction-wager and a pulveriser of the poor, obviously still surplus to humanities requirements.

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Barcelona 1936-37.

       After Franco stuck is vicious teeth into Spain in 1939, his regime went all out to portray what had been happening in Spain from 1936-39 as an era of brutal violence, of murderous gunmen roaming uncontrolled, terrorising all decent people. Attempting to make sure that the real story should never be told. Though real history tells a different story than that of the Franco regime's distorted version. And now more evidence of the true nature of what was actually going on, especially in Barcelona has emerged.

This from Anarchist News:

From Roar Magazine
     Re-discovered after 80 years, the photographic legacy of the CNT which brings the libertarian revolution in Barcelona back to life, is now exhibited for the first time. This post was originally published by eldiario.es. Text by Pol Pareja. Translation from Spanish by Andrew Hakes.
      It was a Barcelona where taxis were prohibited, waiters and shoe shiners did not accept tips, hats were frowned upon, and the notes of The International rang out from every corner. A city where approximately 70 percent of the businesses were collectivized, with their offices occupied by workers and militiamen. Anarchist Barcelona, a unique libertarian experiment in Europe which had its decisive moment between July 1936 and May 1937, has been the subject of various studies and textbooks. However, the studies and textbooks of this exceptional period have been lacking the graphic history which had been presumed lost.

 Headquarters of the CNT-FAI regional committee, located on the current Via Laietana (then known as Via Durruti). Author unknown

 Posterists of the CNT-FAI in Barcelona. Pérez de Rozas

       The exposition Gràfíca anarquista, fotografia i revolució social (1936-1939) puts to rest this anomaly and offers an interesting testimonial to this period where Barcelona was transformed into the first large city where workers assumed total control of a good part of business and industry.
          The exhibition offers a journey through the photographic collection of the Office of Information and Propaganda, created by the CNT-FAI in Barcelona during the Civil War with the intent of spreading revolutionary ideology in the face of fascism’s advance in Europe. One can see in the exhibition dozens of images of well-known photographers, such as Katy Horna, Pérez de Rozas, Antoni Campañá and David Marco, among others. Also on display are anarchist publications of the era, postcards, credentials and CNT documents like the Militant Manual (Manual del militante).
       Coming from a propaganda office, the images lend to a benevolent vision of the city during those months. In contrast to the wretched image that Francoism tried to establish of to the libertarian revolution — placing emphasis on the burning of churches, summary executions and the existence of gunman roaming the city at their leisure — the exposition shows a more favorable side of anarchism.

 Anarchist militia in Barcelona. Antoni Campañà

There are photos of children playing in the Palace of Pedralbes’ pool, which was converted into a children’s school in 1936. There are also photos of the popular university established in the modernist Casa Golferichs and images of collectivized businesses functioning at full capacity. In many snapshots the primary focus is humble workers posing in the very same offices where only months ago their bosses sat. Portraits of militants and snapshots of bullet-ridden churches and church bells prepared for smelting round-out the exhibition.
      “The exposition tries to dismantle the image of anarchism constructed by the bourgeoisie over the years,” says Andrés Antebi, one of the commissioners of the exposition. “The propaganda office of the CNT focused on dismantling the stigma of anarchism being roaming bandits and irrational violence.” The exhibition, which can be seen in the Arxiu Fotográfic de Barcelona, also offers an interesting vision over the agrarian collectivizations outside of the Catalan capital, photographed by Carlos Pérez de Rozas and his son for the weekly periodical ¡¡Campo!!, demonstrating that the illustrious dynasty of photographers worked for all sides in spite of their conservative ideology.

 Two militia reading the anarchist newspaper “Solidaridad Obrera.” Author unknown

The photos’ long journey through Europe

        The delay in presenting such an exposition in Barcelona was created by — among various factors — the long journey the CNT’s photographic exposition took around Europe. In January 1939, before the eminent arrival of Francoist troops in Barcelona, those in charge of the CNT-FIA’s propaganda placed their section’s graphics in 43 wood boxes designed to transport Mauser rifles. The revolutionaries had signed an accord with the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam that had the Institute promise to preserve the memory of the union. The images were loaded onto a train and sent to the Dutch capital.

 It is estimated that between 70 and 80 percent of the companies in Barcelona were collectivized. Pérez de Rozas

On the way to Amsterdam, the transport halted in Paris. With the threat of a German invasion looming over the Netherlands, the boxes changed course and finally arrived in the United Kingdom. They were first in London (where some archives were lost during the bombings) and later located in Oxford. When the conflict ended, they were finally transferred to Amsterdam. When the collection arrived there, a legal battle erupted between the representatives of the now exiled-CNT and the International Institute of Social History, who did not acknowledge the anarchist union’s representatives outside of Spain.

 The exhibition also shows agricultural collectivizations in other parts of Catalonia. Pérez de Rozas

       The exhibition also shows agricultural collectivizations in other parts of Catalonia. Pérez de Rozas After 80 years, an agreement was reached between the two parties which recognized the CNT as owners of the collection, with the exception that the collection stays in the Netherlands at the International Institute of Social History, given its great importance as the most important institute of workers’ history in the world. The process of cataloging and organizing a large part of the archives started without the lost office of propaganda’s photographic collection. Thirty more years would have to pass before the photos were discovered in 2016. “Until this date they were sealed, they couldn’t be examined and virtually no one knew they existed,” the commissioner said. After a journey of more than 80 years, the photographs have returned to Barcelona.

  Anarchist militia in the Catalan capital. Antoni Campaña

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Far From The Madding Crowd.

 

A view of Ayr.

       My little rant will fall silent for a few days as Stasia and I for a wee break, head to Ayr, a wee town on the Ayrshire cost, Rabbie Burns territory. At this time of year I feel it is always good to get "Far from the madding crowd". See you soon.

Robert Burns Cottage Alloway.

       The surrounding area has changed somewhat since the 1700's, he didn't have a road like that passing his windows.

One of the many and varied portraits of how Burns looked.

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It's Time To Show Your Righteous Anger.

 

     I would say with confidence that our planet has never before seen such violent mass protests, with such prolonged intensity over such a wide area against the established authorities. This is something that we anarchists can take heart from, vast numbers of populations are taking to the streets not on single issues but simply against the established system, they are throwing off the yoke of authority, not asking for more favours from the powers that be.
     Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, Haiti, France, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Sudan, Iraq, Iran, and other areas are seeing the people in their thousands and more on the streets, like I said, not asking for more crumbs, but trying to put an end to this brutal neo-liberal authoritarian nightmare that has held the world in its grip for so long. Now India has joined the fray, the country that carries that phony label of the largest democracy in the world. How long before others take to the streets and display their righteous anger, hatred and disgust of a system of enslavement, poverty, deprivation and wars?

 

      An article by Pankaj Mishra from Bloomberg Opinion:

      India has exploded into protests against a citizenship law that explicitly discriminates against its 200 million-strong Muslim population. Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government has responded with police firing on demonstrators and assaults on university campuses. The global wildfire of street protests, from Sudan to Chile, Lebanon to Hong Kong, has finally reached the country whose 1.3 billion population is mostly below the age of 25. The social, political, and economic implications couldn’t be more serious.
       It was only last month that students on the campus of Hong Kong Polytechnic University were throwing petrol bombs at the police, and fielding, in turn, teargas, rubber bullets and water cannons.
      This violent resistance to an authoritarian state is novel to Hong Kong. The Umbrella Movement that in 2014 first expressed a mass sentiment for greater autonomy from Beijing was strikingly peaceful. The campaigners for democracy in Hong Kong today have also traveled very far away from the Chinese students who occupied Tiananmen Square in 1989, and to whom they have been wrongly compared.
       Those students back in 1989 were deeply respectful of their state: Photographs of student petitioners kneeling on the steps of the Great Hall of the People are no less eloquent than the iconic picture of a protester facing a tank. That acknowledgement of the state’s authority as ultimate arbiter is now rapidly disappearing, in not only Hong Kong, but also India and many other countries. It is being replaced by the conviction that the state has lost its legitimacy through cruel and malign actions.
      Today’s protesters, who are overwhelmingly young, are usefully compared to the French student demonstrators in Paris in 1968. The latter occupied places of work and study, streets and squares. They also met police crackdowns with makeshift barricades and Molotov cocktails.
      Like today’s protesters, the French students erupted into violence amid a global escalation of street-fighting; they claimed to reject an older generation’s values and outlook. And they, too, couldn't be simply classified as left-wing, right-wing or centrists. Indeed, the French radicals confused many people at the time because they loathed the French communist party almost as much as they did the parties of the right. The French communists, in turn, dismissed the protesting students as “anarchist.”
    This commonplace pejorative confuses anarchism with disorganization. It should be remembered that anarchist politics is one of the modern world’s oldest, if little remembered, political and intellectual traditions. Today, it best describes the radical new turn to protests worldwide. Anarchist politics began to emerge from the mid-19th century onward, originally in societies where ruthless autocrats were in power — France, Russia, Italy, Spain, even China — and where hopes of change through the ballot box seemed wholly unrealistic.
     The anarchists — one of whom assassinated U.S. President McKinley in 1901 — sought freedom from what they saw as increasingly exploitative modes of economic production. But, unlike socialist critics of industrial capitalism, they aimed most of their energies at liberation from what they saw as tyrannical forms of collective organization — namely, the state and its bureaucracy, which in their view could be communist as well as capitalist.
      As Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the pioneering thinker of anarchism (and robust critic of Marx), put it, “To be GOVERNED is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so.”
     For many anarchists, the state, the bureaucracy and security forces were the deepest affront to human dignity and liberty. They sought to achieve democratic freedoms by a drastic reduction in the power of the hydra-headed state, and a simultaneous intensification of the power of individuals from below through coordinated action.
       Democracy for the anarchists was not a distant goal, to be reached through vertically integrated political parties, impersonal institutions and long electoral processes. It was an existential experience, instantly available to individuals by jointly defying oppressive authority and hierarchy.
       They saw democracy as a permanent state of revolt against the over-centralized state and its representatives and enforcers, including bureaucrats and the police. Success in this endeavor was measured by the scale and intensity of the revolt, and the strength of solidarity achieved, rather than by any (always unlikely) concession from the despised authorities.
      This is also how protesters today seem to perceive democracy as they struggle, without much hope of any conventional victory, against governments that are as ideologically driven as they are ruthless. Let there be no doubt: More open and unresolvable conflicts between ordinary citizens and authorities are likely to become the global norm rather than the exception. Certainly, militant disaffection today is not only more extensive than it was in the late 1960s. It also connotes a deeper political breakdown.
     Negotiations and compromise between different pressure groups and interests that have defined political society for ages suddenly seem quaint. Old-style political parties and movements are in disarray; societies, more polarized than ever before; and the young have never faced a more uncertain future. As angry, leaderless individuals revolt against increasingly authoritarian states and bureaucracies from Santiago to New Delhi, anarchist politics seems an idea whose time has come.

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

That Thin Illusion Of Democracy.

        Well the "election" is over all the ranting about change has resulted in the system staying the same, did you expect anything else? Now the privileged parasitical political ballerinas can get on with the business of plundering the public purse, and putting the ordinary people in there place, subservient at the bottom of the pile. Perhaps it will have some people scratching their heads and saying, "what was the point" of all that hype and phony hysteria. Let's hope so.

       This little summing up from Acorn Winter Oak:

The capitalist system will not abolish itself.

In fact, it will always do all that it physically can to preserve itself and its control over our lives. While it likes to pretend its structures of domination amount to “democracy”, this is not the case, because it could never leave the door open to the possibility of its own abolition by democratic means. The only changes possible via the fake-democracy of the system are limited reforms, which leave the system very much in place. When we say “limited”, we perhaps mean “extremely limited”, because even the mildest of social-democratic tinkering, undoing some of the worst excesses of contemporary neoliberalism, is beyond the pale for the system.
 

corbyn smear

        However, when the system draws the line too tightly around its preferred outcomes and uses its vast powers of manipulation to prevent these limited reforms, it risks exposing its so-called “democracy” as a sham. A whole new raft of people suddenly become aware of the true nature of the system and its fake-democratic window dressing. Their eyes are opened to the fact that there is no point in playing by the rules devised by the system, no point in walking time and time again into the same traps that it sets for us.
      These moments are risky for the system, because they risk radicalising people who, up to this point, had bought into much of its charade. The UK is currently experiencing one such moment. A vast amount of enthusiasm and hope had been invested – naively, from our perspective – in the possibility of an election victory for Corbyn’s Labour Party. The reforms proposed by Labour were far from fundamental and yet remained unacceptable to the system.
       The unprecedented blatancy of the propaganda assault on Corbyn has left many people, particularly young people, asking themselves some serious questions about the nature of British “democracy” and the approach that is needed if real social change is ever to be brought about.

 And that can’t be a bad thing!

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Christmas Tree Lights Up Exarcheia Square.

      As the Greek state repression grows, so does the resistance. The savagery of the Greek state matches any dictatorship in recent times, but our media is silent on this brutality against its real ideological opponents. The following from Anarchist News:

     Athens, Greece: It's ironic. While the greek government has been terrorizing the neighborhood of Exarcheia since the summer with squat evictions, attacks on people inside coffee shops and bars and brutal beatings and arrests for no reason -especially following the protests on 17 November and 6 December, where an atypical martial was imposed in the area-, few days ago made an attempt to cover up the riot police crimes against the people in the area, by decorating Exarcheia Square with Christmas lights and a Christmas Tree.

        [You can find links to videos documenting some of the police crimes in the area during the last few months r at the end of this]

       To get an idea of what is happening in Athens at the moment a few things have to be noted: The greek government has gone into war with anarchists and anti authoritarians, following the end of a 15 days ultimatum issued by the Ministry of “Public Order”, towards the dozens of political and refugee squats across Greece (some of them more than 30 years old), threatening them with violent evictions by the riot police and police special forces, if they did not evacuate within the deadline. The deadline ended on Thursday night on the 5th of December 2019, a political decision by the greek State aiming to agitate and create an “explosive atmosphere”.

      Following the first wave of attacks and evictions, mainly against squats housing refugees during the fall, the second wave of attacks has just begun, this time against political squats and social centers. Coinciding with the arrest of antifascists and the proposed judicial acquittal of neonazi leaders in the Golden Dawn trial, the right wing greek government and its self proclaimed socialist Minister of Public Order have proceeded with the eviction of “Kouvelou Mansion” Squat in Marousi, Athens on Tuesday 17 December, while another three squats have been evicted today 18 December in Koukaki, Athens, following a massive police operation, that terrorized a whole neighborhood with police brutality, attacking people living in adjoining houses that were no squats. Brutal images of greek SWAT policemen having their boots on people's heads on the ground and a mother bound on the floor of her terrace with a hood on her head, reminiscing of Abu Ghraib torture images, have been circulated in the media.

      As an obvious result at about 22:00 yesterday 18 December, approximately 200 anarchists held a sudden demo around Ermou Street, the most commercial street of Athens and proceeded to attacking several shops and banks near the main square of Athens at Syntagma. At about the same time, several miles away, the christmas tree at Exarcheia Square was set on fire. While the greek government has proclaimed that more than 20 squats, just in Athens, will be violently evicted until the end of 2019, the police attacks seems like the match that will put fire in an already explosive situation during Christmas and New Year's festivities.

      Links from Exarchia under police siege in the last few months:

6 December 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNYU_NBgsVs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEfEjJ_63X4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgz6Qb7b0nk

17 November 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eELKbWnPz8c

7 November 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz_vsjSN3tU

1 September 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS4oh28OK9o

 

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