Leaflets?

            Visited Paisley yesterday, Saturday January 28th. To give a wee bit of support to the "Support the Strikers" Demo. Though not a vast number, it was good to see such diverse groups out to give their support to the strikers. A good array of flags and banners. After a few impassioned speeches, the demo moved on and marched through the main street in Paisley to Gilmour Street Station and ended there with a few more very impassioned speeches.
           Who are the strikers? they are not some alien group from some other place. They are your neighbours, they live up the street from you, you meet them in the pub, supermarket, on the bus and you stand next to them at the football matches. Your kids play with their kids, they are us. This is not a struggle between a group of workers and their employer, this is a struggle for a decent life for us all. For generations we have struggled and sweated to try to have a decent life for our families, and we have seen the rich get richer while we continue to get poorer. We have seen the social fabric of our society being shredded to appease the financial markets, we have seen the rich get bigger yachts, bigger mansions and more luxurious private jets. While we on the other hand struggle to heat our homes, struggle to put food on the table. So it is with enthusiasm that we greet the strikes and we must support them with determined solidarity, join them on the picket line in the streets, shouting loud and clear, Enough is Enough

Some photos from Paisley.

 

          If I have one criticism of the event it was what to me was missed opportunities. We must always realise that the aim of these demos is not to speak to the converted, but to reach out the those not yet involved, the passers-by. Where the demo gather at first, there were leaflets and papers being handed out to those passers-by. However when they marched off down the main street they seem to forget that they were walking with lots of people moving up and down the street on both sides, all potential supporters, if we can hand them a leaflet or some literature. There should have been individuals on the edge of the march pushing leaflets and papers into the hands of those casual passers-by. The same criticism can be said when the passed the open air market, people gathered there, the march should have stopped and made sure as many as possible had a leaflet of some sort, then continued their march to the station. If we don't reach that great silent majority, we are going nowhere. Leaflets and papers are our broadcasting system.

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My God!

         To day around the world there are glaringly obvious, brutally glaringly obvious, examples of why we should never allow religious groups to hold power. In Afghanistan we have the Taliban who enforce savage punishment on all and sundry from removing a persons hand to forbidding women to be educated. In Iran we have the Mullahs who preside of a regime that can accept young women being beaten to death for not covering their hair in the Mullah's desired fashion and kills and executes those who dare to oppose this insanity of religious dogma. Then there is Israel, with this insane belief that about 2,000 years or so ago, God gave them all the land that was Palestine and they have that god given right to take it all back no matter how much suffering or how many deaths this takes. In this country, the UK, the state still pays homage to the religious dictators that hold sway over millions of ordinary people trying to channel the public's thoughts along the strict dictate of their chosen God. All religions claim to be followers of a loving God of peace, but all religions have blood soak history they all have killed and will again, they'll kill those who dare to oppose them. The world is soaked in blood from religious wars, and it still divides the people of the world. Freedom, peace and justice cannot coexists with religion.
          The UK state hands 26 seats in the House of Lords to bishops of the Church of England. These planted members can and do vote on legislation, make interventions, but also they lead prayers at the beginning of each day's sessions. This puts UK on a par with the Islamic Republic of Iran, as the only two states on the planet that give clerics of the established religion automatic seats in the legislatures, where they can vote and shape legislation.

         Some of the religious conflicts that have soaked our planet in blood, taken from Andrew Holt, Ph.D.'s article, "Religion and the 100 Worst Atrocities in History"

"Taiping Rebellion- 20,000,000 Deaths (Rank- 6th)
Thirty Years War- 7,500,000 Deaths (Rank 17th)
Madhi Revolt- 5,500,000 (Rank 21st)
Crusades (in the East)- 3,000,000 Deaths (Rank- 30th)
French Wars of Religion- 3,000,000 Deaths (Rank 30th)
War in the Sudan- 2,600,000 (Rank 35th)
Albigensian Crusade- 1,000,000 Deaths (Rank- 46th)
Panthay Rebellion- 1,000,000 Deaths (Rank 46th)
Hui Rebellion- 640,000 Deaths (Rank 66th)
Partition of India- 500,000 (Rank 70th)
Cromwell’s Invasion of Ireland- 400,000 Deaths (Rank 81st)"

         So it should be obvious that this is a very toxic mix, capitalism, state and religion, none of these entities offer freedom of thought or action, all of them are authoritarian and will always stand against the free expression of thoughts and deeds. To hold onto their power they need obedience from the "flock". Do we wish to be a "flock", do we need a shepherd. If we desire freedom and justice for all we have to smash these authoritarian establishments, whose foundations are power, privilege and a subservient population, and their aim is to hold on to those, privileges and that power and enhance their wealth.

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Paper.

          I have often spouted about getting our message on the streets, and the need for greater leaflets, pamphlets, poster to proliferate on the streets and workplaces. They are our broadcasting system, our quiet teacher spreading our ideas and hopes. The anarchist movement owes a lot to those back allay, back shop, underground and open printing places. those dedicated individuals who spent hours printing and distributing our message, our hopes, our ideas. The printed word is as valuable as the meetings, street demonstrations and protests etc.. The printed word can quietly find its way into homes, workplaces and communities. It is difficult to imagine where we would be without those little presses churning out leaflets, periodicals, posters and pamphlets.
           So I am delighted that someone has brought together a history of those printing presses and the important part they played in getting those anarchists, ideas, hopes and visions to an ever increasing public. I for one will be ordering the book when it comes out.

 

London's anarchist HQ, 127 Ossulston Street, 1894-1927

Image courtesy of Libcom.

Article taken from Anarchist News.

From University of Hawai'i News

            Anarchist letterpress printers and presses from the late 1800s through the 1940s is the focus of a new book by a University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Department of Political Science and Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies faculty member.
          Professor Kathy Ferguson’s work Letterpress Revolution: The Politics of Anarchist Print Culture, details the importance of printed materials that galvanized anarchist movements across the U.S. and Great Britain. The book will be released on February 24, and is published by Duke University Press.
          Anarchism is a political movement that is skeptical of all justifications for authority and holds all forms of governmental authority to be unnecessary. Ferguson shows how printers arranged text, ink, images, graphic markers and blank space within the design of a page. Their extensive correspondence with fellow anarchists and publishing their radical ideas brought the decentralized anarchist movements together. By diving deeper into the practices of anarchist print culture, Ferguson points to possible methods for cultivating contemporary political resistance.

 

Professor Kathy Ferguson.

               “The anarchists organized a remarkable political movement largely through their print culture: writing, printing, distributing, reading, and archiving their publications brought them together. Their success suggests that the act of making things together generates political energy,” Ferguson said.
              Ferguson is the author of several books, including Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets, which is about a central figure in the anarchist movement. She is working on another book on women in the anarchist movement whose contributions have been underrated or lost. Ferguson’s goal when writing these two books is to bring women more fully into anarchism, and at the same time to bring anarchism more fully into feminism. She hopes to bring these radical histories to light to make our understanding of them more robust so that we can use them better today.
            The Department of Political Science and Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies are housed in the Mānoa College of Social Sciences.

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Why Not?

  Well, why not?

Why Not?

I see hungry children crying beside warehouses of food

I see the elderly cold hungry alone in an ocean of plenty

I feel anger when caskets draped in that coloured rag

carried home with military pomp weeping families

another causality of greed privilege power

Day and daily I see greed praised as success

rich as celebrities poor as failures

I swim in a sea of fabricated illusions where privilege is progress

where truth dies a lonely death somewhere in a corner of our heart

Yet within my heart I have millions of seeds of love

I know I must plant and let grow

So why shouldn’t I be an anarchist?

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A swamp

Image courtesy of Ray Davies. 

          Looking at today’s politicians is a bit like looking at the lives of charlatans. Across the Atlantic we have the Trump saga of corruption and delusions, the Biden affair of having classified documents lying hither and thither about his home and various offices. Over here at our end of the swamp we have in that chamber of pomp and privilege, the House of Lords, one of their members, millionaire Michelle Mone, faces accusations that her husband has been linked to at least three tax avoidance schemes by HMRC, so she takes “leave of absence” from her place in the house of ermine, which means of course that she doesn’t have to disclose her financial affairs. Down among the millionaires in that misnomer, The House of Commons, when in fact it is a house of millionaires, we have ex Chancellor of the Exchequer Nadhim Zahawi being fined by HMRC for a reported sum of over a million pounds for avoiding having paid a reported sum of over £3 million in tax. According to him and his cronies, it was an oversight and not deliberate. This is a man who is reputed to have a personal wealth of £100 million. Now one would imagine that a shrewd business millionaire would have the sense to employ a shit hot accountant to make sure his tax affairs were in order, just to keep his “good” name. Will we hear of an accountant being dismissed? Knee deep in wealth, failing to pay over £3million in tax in a tax avoidance scheme, just an oversight, yes and the moon is made of cheese. Of course we know that one Boris Johnson is never far removed for scandal, lying and bluster, well true to form another little piece of skulduggery has surfaced. It appears the Boris was strapped for cash and needed a guarantor for an £800,000 loan, and according to a report in The Sunday Times, a meeting was arranged between Canadian business man Sam Blyth, Mr Sharp and Boris with the idea of Mr. Sharp being a guarantor for Boris’s loan. Mr Sharp was later appointed as chairman of the BBC, an appointment that is made by the Prime Minister and Culture Secretary. Are you reaching for your mask to try and avoid the stink coming from the sewer that is politics today. When will we wise up and bring this festering sewer of a swamp to an end, can’t you hear them laughing at us. We struggle to heat our homes, put food on the table and are told how to live our lives by multi-millionaires who see £3+ million tax avoidance as an oversight. Do we really think this is the way to organise our lives? Is this the society that we want for future generations?

Image courtesy of Global Witness.

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

Quiet.

           Though we have millions of people who take their anger on to the streets and show it in other very visible means, direct action etc., we should not forget that quiet multitude. Their silence does not equate with acceptance of this unjust capitalist system. They are aware that their lives are not what they could be, they are aware of the inequality. These are the people we have to convince that we can build a better world for all, without that quiet majority we are going nowhere. They want a better world, we have to raise their anger, so that they will join us on the streets, in strikes, in solidarity with all those in open struggle against this festering greed driven capitalist system. 

                                             Image courtesy of Kids Creative Chaos.

Another wee gem of a poem from the Chinese poet Xu Lizhi.

"Conflict"

They all say
I'm a child of few words
This I don't deny
But actually
Whether I speak or not
With this society I'll still
Conflict

 

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A Con.

 

          Our lives are plagued by spivs and conmen who prance about in expensive clothes and sit in the corridors of power. One such spiv, a boss of an energy company, has just stated that high energy prices are here to stay, this is after the energy companies have made billions in profit. What these spivs and conmen don't mention is that wholesale gas prices have plummeted. The reason energy prices sky rocketed  in the first place was the imperialist blood bath in Ukraine and Europe stopped buy Russian gas. At that point in time the price of wholesale gas jumped to around 800p per therm. There little secret is that it has now dropped to 150p per therm, below what it was before the Ukraine affair. Have you noticed this in you energy bills? No you haven't, the reason being the statement made by that energy boss, high energy prices are here to stay. They don't want to see those billions in profits shrink, they're on a bonanza and loving it. How does it feel to be continually ripped-off by a bunch of very rich and greedy spivs and conmen. Like I said before, they are laughing at us, what are we going to do about this continuous plundering of the ordinary people, to fatten the bank accounts of the parasite class of spivs and conmen and furnish them with more expensive yachts, private jets and gas guzzling limousines?

Image courtesy of Catalyst Commercial

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Everywhere.

        An extract from an article in Enough is Enough. In truth, we are everywhere, we are everybody. I think well worth a read, a very interesting read and food for thought.

           We are post, we are autonomous, we are anarchists, we are communists, we provide humanitarian aid in Ukraine, we chase the uprisings, we are brutal feminists and we look after each other, searching for truth and yet disoriented, we fight in our neighborhoods and look for every opportunity to throw a stone. We come from the solidarity movement with Latin America, from the housing struggles of the 80s, from the fading Antifa of the 2000s, from the anti-globalization movement, and finally from today, which does not yet have a name. We want everything and nothing

 

         The world is decaying. The Greens, in their compulsive good face game, try to stop or heal this decay with aloe vera. The fascists try to breathe new life into the decaying world with their necromancy of family, fatherland and Christianity. The old capitalists just continue as before. And the left, in its unsurpassed wisdom of the both-as-also dialectic, also tries its hand at the necromancy of concepts from the 19th and 20th centuries, also adding a pinch of aloe vera to the alleged magic potion that gives them the feeling of moving forward. Even the disciples of Andreas Malm pay homage to a despondent Leninism that trivializes the seizure of power in questions of militancy and pressure to act. Gramsci and Lenin would turn in their graves.
         We stand stunned before what nowadays calls itself revolutionary politics, and yet is only a pile of rubble of left-wing social-democratic politics, which pounces resentfully on the FDP, still has not gotten over the betrayal of the SPD of 1914, and does not realize that the Greens have taken these “Punch and Judy” parties to their side as welcome idiots, in order to comfortably consolidate their project of Green Capitalism without causing a stir:

 

Continue reading HERE. 

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Anarchy.

 

       For January, 2023, “Read of the Month” we at Spirit of Revolt bring you three for one, three copies of Practical Anarchy from early 1982. Apart from the interesting information contained in the pamphlets, it let’s us know that the struggles of today are part and parcel of the struggles of yesterday. It is one long continuous struggle for peace, justice and freedom for all, that is yet to be won. Why not have a browse through our website of thousands of interesting pamphlets, posters, banners, videos, photographs, periodicals, letters and much much more all to do with anarchist and libertarian socialist history and actions, an Aladdin's cave  of the history  of the struggles of the ordinary people. Probably the largest anarchist archive in Scotland, and still growing.  

READ ON LINE.

 

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Illusions.

          A lot of people live under the illusion that we should rely on our MPs to sort out the fossil fuel use and move to green energy sources, in an attempt to avoid a climate and humanitarian crisis of unimaginable proportions, the very survival of humanity. However, a wee glance at the connections of some of our leading MPs and members of the House of Lords gives an insight to the interests and money sources of some of those in power, should make you think again, as I keep saying, they are laughing at us, for how long will we tolerate this danger to our survival?

This from The Mirror.       

Dozens of members of the House of Lords have investments worth millions of pounds and senior roles in oil and gas companies, prompting accusations of unethical conflicts of interest.They total 43 in all, including 33 who have shares worth a minimum of £50,000 in 19 oil and gas companies, and 10 who chair, direct or advise 15 fossil fuel firms.
       Research shows 23 are Conservatives, three are Labour and 17 are without political affiliations. Two peers with shares in Shell – Conservative Baroness Noakes and crossbencher Lord Burns – sit on the House of Lords’ Industry and Regulators Committee, which heard evidence on net zero climate policies last month. The figures were uncovered by investigative news website The Ferret using the official registers of interests. A trawl of MPs’ interests shows donations and gifts from fossil fuel firms and climate contrarians

This from the Guardian.

 

Oil companies, petrostates and climate contrarian thinktanks, businessmen and unions have given at least £5m to MPs over the past 10 years in the form of donations, expenses-paid trips, salaries and gifts. A trawl through parliament’s register of interests suggests Conservative politicians are far more likely to accept support from such sources. The Guardian is not suggesting MPs were paid for their votes, which is forbidden by law, but the scorecards highlight the legitimate lobbying activities of outside organisations who have most to lose from action to stop global heating.

        Nadhim Zahawi, the Conservative MP for Stratford-on-Avon, received more than £1m from fossil fuel companies, all of it declared and legitimate. Zahawi spent much of his parliamentary career working as chief strategy officer for Gulf Keystone Petroleum, which paid him £52,325 in backpay in October 2015 and a monthly salary of £20,000 from October 2015, rising to almost £30,000 a month in August 2017, and some £330,000 in bonus payments. He stopped working for the company on becoming a government minister in 2018 (at which time he received a final payment of £116,000). He also declared shareholdings in Genel Energy, an Anglo-Turkish oil and gas exploration and production company, and a donation from Amjad Bseisu, the chief executive of the UK-based oil company EnQuest. Until August 2015 the former oil exploration company Afren and the former Canadian oil company Talisman, which was a major producer from the Alberta tar sands, were clients of Zahawi & Zahawi, a business advisory service. The Guardian contacted Zahawi’s office for comment, but received no reply.
        Alan Duncan, a former Foreign Office minister, also has close ties to the petroleum industry. After leaving a post in the international development ministry, Duncan, while still an MP, registered as a non-executive chairman of Fujairah Refining in the United Arab Emirates, for which he received £8,000 a month for a job involving three weekend meetings a year. Along with a severance package, payments totalled £90,000. The majority owner of that refinery is the energy company Vitol, owned by the UK businessman Ian Taylor.
        Duncan formerly headed the Conservative Middle East Council, which arranges trips for Tory MPs with funding from businessmen with ties to Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region. He has made multiple trips to Oman and Saudi Arabia as a guest of the host government or its supporters, and has received gifts of a watch or cufflinks on a number of occasions from the sultanate of Oman.
        A former employee of Royal Dutch Shell, prior to 2009 Duncan declared incomes from Arawak Energy (an undisclosed amount), a company involved in oil exploration and production, and Harcourt Consultants, a firm he established to advise clients on the oil and gas industry.
         Alistair Burt, whose 2015 register includes £5,000 income for work as a non-executive director of the oil exploration company President Energy; John Hayes, Conservative MP for South Holland and The Deepings, who has declared an expected £50,000-a-year salary from an oil firm, BB Energy; and Conor Burns, a trade minister, who has declared £10,000 per quarter since 2011 for 10 hours’ work for Trant Engineering, an oil and gas engineering firm, totalling more than £300,000.

       

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the House of Commons, has ignored the Conservative whip on more than 120 occasions, mostly on issues related to Europe, but he has generally followed the party line in voting 10 times against measures that would bring emissions down. He has cast doubt on the reliability of scientific forecasts and blamed “alarmism” for high energy prices.
       There are few direct donations from fossil fuel firms. Michael Gove, the current chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and former environment minister, received £10,000 from Tullow Oil in 2010.

        Do you think they want to cut out their very lucrative pocket money they grab over and above their MPs salary, which we pay? I will repeat, they are laughing at us.     

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