Voltairine de Cleyre.

          I have always enjoyed the poems of Voltairine de Cleyre, (November 17, 1866–June 20, 1912) and admired the woman. What some Glaswegians may not know is that she visited Glasgow and thanks to Glasgow anarchist comrades she got to see some parts of Scotland outside Glasgow, and stated she loved the highlands. Though I think it was mainly around the Loch Lomond area that she visited.
           I particularly like this poem by Voltairine;

 

The Road Builders

(“Who built the beautiful roads?” queried a friend of the present order, as we walked one day along the macadamized driveway of Fairmount Park.)

I saw them toiling in the blistering sun,
Their dull, dark faces leaning toward the stone,
Their knotted fingers grasping the rude tools,
Their rounded shoulders narrowing in their chest,
The sweat dro’s dripping in great painful beads.
I saw one fall, his forehead on the rock,
The helpless hand still cluthcing at the spade,
The slack mouth full of earth.
And he was dead.
His comrades getnly turned his face, until
The fierce sun glittered hard upon his eyes,
Wide open, staring at the cruel sky.
The blood yet ran upon the jagged stone;
But it was ended. He was quite, quite dead:
Driven to death beneath the burning sun,
Driven to death upon the road he built.
He was no “hero”, he; a poor, black man,
Taking “the will of God” and asking naught;
Think of him thus, when next your horse’s feet
Strike out the flint spark from the gleaming road;
Think that for this, this common thing, The Road,
A human creature died; ‘tis a blood gift,
To an o’erreaching world that does not thank.
Ignorant, mean and soulless was he? Well —
Still human; and you drive upon his corpse.

Philadelphia, 24 July 1900

This from Anarchist News: 

Voltairine de Cleyre:

American Radical

        Born in Michigan in 1866, Voltairine de Cleyre was named after Voltaire. By the time she died forty-five years later, she had lived up to the free-thinking and trouble-making reputation of her namesake. The famous activist Emma Goldman called de Cleyre “the most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced.”

De Cleyre wrote:

        The first act of our life was to kick against an unjust decree of our parents, and we have unflinchingly stood for the kicking principle ever since. Now, if the word kicking is in bad repute with you, substitute non-submission, insubordination, rebellion, revolt, revolution, whatever name you please which expresses non-acquiescence to injustice.

       Her own father was a working-class French immigrant who earned his American citizenship fighting in the Civil War. Her mother was the child of abolitionists. Her parents sent young Voltairine to a convent school, where she learned how to be a debater and an atheist. She was writing poetry at six. At nineteen, she was writing and lecturing on Free Thought, the philosophical idea that truth should be based on reason and empiricism rather than authority and dogma.

De Cleyre’s radicalism was above all “a rhetoric of self-decolonization aimed at disrupting the ideological configuration of her readers’ interior lives, freeing them to rearticulate those lives.”

        In her short life, she would publish “hundreds of works—poems, sketches, essays, lectures, pamphlets, translations, and short stories,” writes scholar Eugenia DeLamotte. And yet de Cleyre would be largely excluded from history for the next century because of her radical stance. DeLamotte describes de Cleyre’s radicalism as above all “a rhetoric of self-decolonization aimed at disrupting the ideological configuration of her readers’ interior lives, freeing them to rearticulate those lives” and imagine change.

         De Cleyre made a precarious living in Philadelphia teaching English to the Jewish immigrant community. She also tirelessly wrote, edited, lecture, and organized. The events of the Haymarket Affair in Chicago in 1886—which led to four anarchists being executed after a dubious trial, as part of the struggle for the eight-hour work day—turned her into an anarchist.

        In her essay on de Cleyre, communications scholar Catherine Helen Palczewski explores de Cleyre’s radical critique of the “sex question” in such writings as “The Gates of Freedom,” “Sex Slavery,” “They Who Marry Do Ill,” and “Why I Am an Anarchist.”

According to Palczewski, contemporary reformers like Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, Crystal Eastman, Helen Gurley Flynn, and Louise Bryant likened marriage to prostitution. “De Cleyre, by contrast, developed a general critique of social roles and institutions by rejecting the institution of marriage, arguing that women are raped in marriage, not prostituted by it.” In de Cleyre’s own words, “And that is rape, where a man forces himself sexually upon a woman whether he is licensed by the marriage law to do it or not. And that is the vilest of all tyranny where a man compels the woman he says he loves, to endure the agony of bearing children that she does not want.”

De Cleyre also rejected the social purity movement of the day and the suppression of obscenity that went along with it. Birth control information, for example, was then considered obscene.

       Palczewski calls de Cleyre “an important rhetorical and feminist figure because her anarchist feminism is an early precursor to many of the radical critiques of women’s sexual status that came out of the ‘second wave’ of feminism.”

        Intellectually fierce, de Cleyre had a short and difficult life. She wrote her own epitaph: “I die, as I have lived, a free spirit, an Anarchist, owing no allegiance to rulers, heavenly or earthly.”

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Once Upon A Time------

       Due to various pressures, Spirit of Revolt's   "Read of the Month" has missed a couple of months, but we have managed to get one in for March, just in time. It is from our John Cooper collection-T SOR 3-52-62. It is called Once Upon A Time There Was A Place Called Nothing Hill Gate----.

      It is a fascinating and informative history of the Notting Hill area and the Notting Hill Carnival. Well worth a read. Hopefully we will be back up to speed and get these little gems from our archive up on a regular monthly basis. We have thousands of documents and reports of actions and people already digitised so you can read them on line and we add to this wealth of information on a regular basis. So why not visit our archive regularly and dip into the wealth of documents and writings of historical events, people and their actions for that better world. Our main focus is the Glasgow/Clydeside area, though as you can see by our March "Read of the Month", we do travel much further afield. 

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Feminism, To Be Or Not To Be, That Is The Question!

 

         I'm sure, that within the anarchist groupings this article will annoy some, irritate more, and raise others to fury. I'm also sure that there will be others in the anarchist groupings who will agree wholeheartedly with Anna. All the more reason to share it and and see what transpires.
From 325:

Words from anarchist comrade Anna Beniamino

Anna, Women’s prison of Rebibbia

Degenerations – Between pride and gender victimhood
(An article Degenerazioni – Tra orgoglio e vittimismo di genere
Published in issue 3 of the anarchist paper Vetriolo)

       I am anarchist, I am not feminist because I see feminism as a sectorial and victimist withdrawal, I have never made any gender discrimination although I don’t use gender-friendly linguistic conventions, on the contrary I often use dirty politically incorrect language. I think that the annulment of gender privilege and similar oppression is already contained in the search for anarchy, that is to say in the practice of antiauthoritarian relations, and should be cultivated there. Ah, I forgot, I loathe consciousness-raising in public meetings and I also consider assemblies to be blunt instruments. I understand and also have the will to meet. But I see how all too often the assembly degenerates into sterile self-representation.

        You see nowadays you risk having to start off with such a preamble in order to enter the thicket of clichés on gender and feminism, disentangling yourself in the intricate incapacity to relate to the anarchist galaxy, with a range of behaviours going from hyper-emotiveness to the bureaucratic calculation of what stand (and degree of negotiable compromise) to take in a struggle. I don’t think that authoritarian and sexist behaviour can be fought by trying to spread new linguistic conventions or by cooking up shreds of mainstream indignant rhetoric (among which #nonunadimeno [enough is enough], the feminicide count on TV, pride, red shoes and rainbow ribbons) in an alternative sauce.

          Rather these should be recognized as signs of yet another operation of the deconstruction of real meaning and recuperation in act. Convinced that one is opposing them, in actual fact one is adapting to the very behavioural and normative codes conceded by dominion as ways of releasing tension.

It’s nothing new that economic and political power is tending to swallow up and redigest everything, faster and faster; consider for example the pearls of anti-sexist, antiracist or whatever it might be neo-conservatism and conformism that are being dispensed by the media every day.

          I believe that the first misunderstanding is the inability to put certain kinds of behaviour into context, within what should be a wider critique of relations and communication and interaction between individuals in the antiauthoritarian sense, reducing them to the level of questions of gender.

Gender categorization, in LGBTI (XYZ…) style, should be left to those who need to feel themselves a protected category, in pigeonholes more suited to a Linnaean categorization of individuals than free bodies and minds. Instead, we find such pigeonholes in antiauthoritarian milieus, which should already have internalized their refusal.

         By the way I’m far from believing that so-called liberated spaces really are such, in fact they often become parking lots for various forms of malaise and instead of enhancing the quality of life and relationships they risk lowering it even more. For example it’s not possible to see every inability to interact in a meeting as sexism, authoritarian imposition or gender violence: I read in a pamphlet [1] that was around last year stigmatizing the latent violence in relations between comrades ‘the oldest exercises power over the youngest, those with more experience impose themselves on those who have less, whoever is stronger on the not so strong, mirroring the relations of the existent we say we want subvert.’

      This is supposed to be a critique of authoritarian attitudes in antiauthoritarian milieus and it would be valid, were it not that it banalises and flattens everything: there is a fundamental difference between imposition of strength and the expression of experience. The inability to express oneself or to act is neither authoritarian nor antiauthoritarian, and can only be solved individually… otherwise we come to the idiocy of praising inability and inaction.

The concept of emotive violence or the violation of emotional integrity is even more ephemeral, because it promotes this analytical junk amongst antiauthoritarian individuals who should have far sharper critical weapons and practical capacity of intervention. As well as emptying of meaning the inflicted and brutal violence it is being compared to.

        How can we claim to engage in an unrelenting struggle against authority and dissertate on revolutionary and liberatory violence if we cannot even react individually to some ‘undesired comment in the street’ (by taking it for what it is, and dealing with it accordingly with the person who spat it out) or keep up an animated discussion during a meeting without having recourse to the shield of violated sensitivity? Why do we find ourselves reading the disarming and obvious idiocy that advises making love with a woman in order to avoid an unwanted abortion? [2] Why codify, even in the field of gender, only for “female gangs”, like conquest, self-defence from aggression and harassment? Isn’t this a problem common to all genders among liberated beings?

      Why should we revisit the most outworn products in the wardrobe of 1970s feminism, such as separatist meetings… maybe calling them workshops (a really ugly term that combines work and shop, borrowed from business conventions and unworthy of free discussions)?

       I read the spectre of the same reductive and banalising mechanism in another recent publication, the Italian edition of the Rote Zora claims [3], i.e. the intention to sensitize only a female audience about a group of women who carried out armed struggle in the 1980s and 90s in Germany, insisting on the choice of gender, of very great interest on some feminist topics, as a privileged discriminating factor for taking them out of oblivion… given that one doesn’t want it ‘to belong to official history. It is written by men’ [4]… What?!? Is it not that official historiography tends to not talk about them because they were angry, not angry feminists? Just as it doesn’t deal with – or distorts – the history, actions and writings of so many other angry men and women? The partial vision is not that of Rote Zora who experimented their own path of individual and collective struggle and liberation in the context of wider anti-imperialist and anti-capitalistic action, but of those who try to make a flag out of it in order to give more credibility and specific weight to their own theorizing, to then reduce themselves to looking for ‘paths of self-defence’.

      Why entrench oneself in a ‘feminist and lesbian’ discourse [5]? Why yet another protective cage, rather than develop the beauty and infinity of more advanced ideas of the critique of domination (not only gender), put forward and tested?

        ‘Sisterhood’ has always seemed to me to be a form of allusive alienation of transversal political alliances between oppressed and oppressors, between ‘inter-classist’ as it has become fashionable to say again… adverse parties. I also happened to see a booklet [6] recently containing an Italian feminist’s interviews of some female veterans of the Spanish revolution in 1936, aimed at finding a questionable ‘sisterhood’ between women anarchists engaged on the frontline (and in the background with Mujeres Libres), the POUM and Stalinist women.

       It was quite significant that almost centenarian anarchist revolutionary women were far more lucid and open in their critique about the limitations of feminism than their interviewer imbued with 1970s’ clichés was: in the extreme calm of a life lived to the full, they were able to explain simply the equal relations between male and female comrades, and how they managed to ridicule and neutralize the machismos that emerged among the most retrograde and stupid of their comrades. In short the practices and theoretical contribution of these women are far more advanced along the path of liberation of the individual and the negation of authoritarian dynamics than those of feminists who glean from their experiences, defending simulacra of struggle instead of the struggle itself. The need for auto-da-fé, the ‘deconstruction of one’s male privileges’, the search for separate places for discussions, self-awareness and self-analysis in public seem a little too much like signs of these times of over-exposition and woolly thinking, parading ‘struggles’ by category and interior struggles, to end up not struggling at all.

Anna,
Women’s prison of Rebibbia
October 2018

[1] Violenza di genere in ambienti antiautoritari ed in spazi liberati [Gender violence in antiauthoritarian milieus and in liberated spaces], Italian edition translated from Spanish in 2017

[2] Critica all’aborto [Critique of abortion], Jauria – Trans-feminist publication for animal liberation, issue 1, Summer/Autumn 2015

[3] Rote Zora – guerriglia urbana femminista [Rote Zora – Feminist urban guerrilla], Autoproduzione Femminista, 2018

[4] From the introduction to the same book

[5] Which the Rote Zora women themselves didn’t think relevant. From a 1984 interview with Rote Zora: ‘Some of us have children, many others don’t. Some are lesbian, others love men’, page 51, ibidem

[6] Donne contro [Women against], Isabella Lorusso, ed. CSA editrice, 2013

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Let's Shoot Some Living Animals For Fun!!!!

 

       What a savage and insane world we live in, a world where we can breed animals, then release them into the wild, so that a deranged few can strut around the countryside shooting them. I can understand those who have to hunt to survive, but to go about shooting living creatures and call it sport, well that shifts them into the category of depraved psychopath.

From Unoffensiveanimal:

        After seeing a few reports appear about game birds released from breeding farms, a map has been made public containing some of the breeding farms within the U.K.
        The shooting industry in the U.K. breeds mostly pheasants, partridges and ducks in factory farm conditions, and then they have a whole system of introduction into the wild during the summer to get the birds in place for the shooting season that starts in September.
It isn’t new to see reports of game farms being visited by the ALF with thousands of animals released, and it is no surprise. As a tactic, game farms are at its weakest point right now, when mating season is happening and they need to collect the eggs to incubate them in huge hatcheries . When breeding birds are released into the wild, there is not only a loss of “stock” but also they are unable to breed the birds they need to then distribute them in shoots. Although it is a liberation action, it carries the weight of economic sabotage and finds a solution to the burden of caring for thousands upon thousands of animals in safe homes, as game birds can be simply released into the wild. There is no doubt that many of them will die, but let’s remember that all of them plus their offspring would die during the next shooting season.
        Game farms have mostly two different layouts, either penned up in groups of 100-1000 birds, where the panels of the pen can be easily removed and birds can be herded out, or in battery cages, where a metal or wood flap can be removed allowing the birds to fly.
       Due to the map being made public, some farms might have increased their security and some keepers have warned that they are “shooting foxes every night”. Doing night reccy without any tools is heavily recommended and carrying a camera to film the conditions might be a good idea. Remember that trespassing without intent to commit any illegal activity is NOT a criminal offence. Motion detectors (being to flood light or alarm) are a thing in some farms, but as the area is quite big, it is as simple as finding a safe route. As a rule of thumb, don’t cross gates, make your own path!
        To add to the security measures, remember that no cutting tools should be used more than once and that any clothes snagged on a fence (even half a mile away from the farm) should be burnt. Maybe a visit to the charity shop is a good idea! Also remember to shoplift your shit and if you must pay, to always use cash. Empty your pockets from everything you won’t need and seriously, don’t keep receipts.
       It really is, right now, the best time for ALF cells and whoever other individuals to cripple the shooting industry as the breeding birds are the most important part of the whole business. It is for that reason that we are seeing an increase on this kind of actions right now.
If you are curious about the game farm map, here is the link:
https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1uzyEb2Z8EW7LLByNhU1L5t2Fpv6SjmKf&ll=52.849145085810676%2C-1.600239149999993&z=6
Here there is a few reports from game farms this year:
https://www.unoffensiveanimal.com/hit-report/thousands-of-pheasants-released-from-game-farm/
https://www.unoffensiveanimal.com/hit-report/hundreds-of-breeding-pheasants-released-action-dedicated-to-anna-campbell/
And here there is a report from a huge action from 2018:
http://directaction.info/news_apr17_18.htm
        Please note that the map does not list all farms, and if you have any other places that should be added you can let Stop the Cull know.
All reports can be sent to us using safe methods, those can be found here: https://www.unoffensiveanimal.com/contact-us/

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Your Government Knowingly Damages Your Health.

          The following is a comment by Loam on my recent post, Co-operation Between Oppressors. It once again highlights the every increase repressive nature of the state as it continually adds to its armoury in an attempt to prop up its control over the people. On this occasion it is a technique developed in UK and employed by the Zionist apartheid state of Israel, but now finding its way into the French state's callous repressive tactics. A method that has unknown effects on the health of those exposed to these nano-particles. once again the state shows little regard for the well-being of its own citizens. Thanks Loam for the link. 

     In France, the government uses chemical markers and nanoparticles on protesters.
      Yellow vests and bystanders have become, unwittingly, guinea pigs for the world’s first experiment on human nano-particles and chemical markers whose effect on biological organisms is still poorly known.
      For the French government, these are harmless “coded chemical marking products” that permeate the skin, hair and clothing of targeted people for a period of time varying from several weeks to decades.
       Officially this fuzzy technology has never been used against human beings. However, accurate information gathered from some security professionals indicates that in Act 18 of Yellow Vests (16 March), water cannons and gases containing DNA markers and nano-particles were used. protesters without the latter having been warned beforehand.
        In addition to the chemical markers and nanoparticles, the effects on human health of which are very poorly known, the addition of new psychotropic substances to CS gases is similar to a large scale experimentation with new social control techniques similar to those the worst dystopias of science fiction movies and novels.
        These “DNA weapons” developed in Britain and widely used by Israel contain chemical and biological substances whose harmfulness to human health has been deliberately ignored, especially in Israel where Palestinian detainees claim to have contracted various types of cancer following their DNA labeling or the use of other control techniques involving nano-particles that may have damaged the genetic material of the cells of their organisms.
Read the full article HERE:http://iuvmpress.com/40950

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Solidarity Knows No Borders.

         Ah, a beautiful beach, a magnificent forest, a lovely meadow. However in this greed driven capitalist system, they are useless, they don't make any money. So let's build a sports stadium on the beautiful beach, an open cast coal mine in the magnificent forest, and an airport on the lovely meadow. That way they become useful assets to the vulture financial Mafia and the corporate juggernaut. The ethos of today's society is to turn everything into a profit making entity for that small band of multi billionaires, and to hell with the well-being of the people.

This from 325:

     Andalucia: Two comrades sentenced in Arraijanal (Spain)
         On February 2018, Arraijanal, one of the last parts of natural beach on the coast of Andalucia (Spanish state), was squatted to protect it from the attempt of environmental destruction in order to build a football stadium and sports town on this area. Some centenary trees were cut down and the area was fenced in, but that didn’t stop the activists from establishing a permanent protest camp.
      This protest camp have been evicted several times, but our comrades managed to reoccupy it and keep the struggle during six months, and for now the building works have been stopped.
         On May 24th, two comrades involved in this project got arrested while the police was trying to remove banners and camping material from the occupation. That resulted in a court case in which they are accused of resistance, offense against authority and bodily harm to the cops proceeding this arrest.
        What the public prosecutor was asking for were two years and a half of prison, another year on the matter of a fine, worth 12 euro per day for each one of them and an a compensation to the cops about being injured of 40 euro day if they could work and 60 if they couldn’t. Gotta add that this harm suffered by the cops consists in two between four of them declaring that they couldn’t go to work during a month for being hurt on their pinky finger.
         Today, 5th of March, they got offered an agreement on court that would consist on 720 euro of fine, the compensation mentioned before and 21 months of prison sentence on probation for three years for one of them and 490 euro of fine plus compensation, and 6 months of prison sentence on probation for two years for the other. The money of the compensation still need to be stipulated by the judge but our estimation is that would be of around 4000 euro in total.
        After a lot of pressure from the court, threatening them with a larger prison sentence with no possibility of probation for one of them, they took the agreement.
         So now on, we’re calling for solidarity for facing this case. You can help by spreading this information, or donate money to support the accused with the coming court costs and fines.

https://salvararraijanalya.wixsite.com/absolucion/blog/defending-nature-is-not-a-crime-stop-repression-arraijanal-resists-ecologists-absolution

        Love and rage from the Mediterranean coast. Against environmental destruction, smash capitalism, smash the state.

soli bank account ES34 0049 6589 9123 9513 0424
ANTONIO FERNANDO AGUILERA PARRILLA
Banco Santander

concept SalvarArraijanal

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Co-operation Between Oppressors.

      All states use different weapons to subdue, repress and intimidate the population. Over any act of disobedience hangs the state's tools, incarceration, fines, house arrest, probation and many more. The state continually works at refining and expanding these tools, and they learn from each other. What happens in one state will be tested in another, adding to their armoury of repression to keep the people in line.

 From Crimethinc, An Interview With Nikos Romanos:

Which one is the terrorist?

     After several failed attempts across Europe to frame anarchists and other anti-authoritarians with conspiracy and terrorism charges, the Greek state is at the forefront of developing new legal strategies to attack social movements. Article 187A of the Greek legal penal code has existed since 2004, but last year, Greek officials used it in a new way against Nikos Romanos and several other anarchist prisoners, convicting and sentencing them to many years in prison based on a new interpretation of the article. Regardless of whether these verdicts are overturned in higher courts, the trials indicate a major strategic shift in the policing of social movements in Greece. They offer an important warning sign about the new forms that repression may assume around the world as social conflict intensifies.
        The Greek “anti-terrorism” laws are largely drawn from United Nations and European anti-terrorism guidelines; for the most part, they were drafted in the post-9/11 period. The social-democratic PASOK government introduced the majority of Greek “anti-terrorism” legislation in 2001; at the time, it was primarily aimed at criminal organizations. In 2004, the right-wing government of New Democracy introduced a new charge: “terrorist organization.” The infamous article 187A appeared in this legislative package.
      Article 187A defines the nature and scope of so-called “criminal” and “terrorist organization” and describes the role of an “individual terrorist” within an organization. In both cases, it is not necessary that an actual crime be committed to determine that an individual participated in a coordinated act against the state and should therefore be imprisoned for many years. The article gives the judge free rein to interpret the evidence provided by the police however he or she sees fit. This has already resulted in many arrests and long-term imprisonments, mostly targeting anarchists and anti-authoritarians.
        When Nikos Romanos and several other anarchists faced trial last year, the prosecutor repeatedly emphasized: “They are anarchists, so their actions are terrorist.” This sentence summarizes the message that the Greek state aims to send.

Read the full article HERE:

 Which one is the terrorist?

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It's My Birthday, ---So What??

 

     I never really celebrate my birthdays, to me they are just another day in a long journey. I sometimes say that if there has to be a celebration on that particular day, it should be for my mother, after all she done all the work, I just popped into her life.

     This year was a wee bit different, my partner Stasia and my family, sort of railroaded me into having a get-together in the house, and I have to admit I had a wonderful time.

     So this old grumpy man thanks all those well-wishers who sent greetings, I'm humbled, and a special thanks to Stasia, my two grand kids and family, who made it a very memorable occasion. 

       Fortunately they didn't put the correct number of candles on the cake, as it would probably used up all the oxygen in the room. 

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Dismiss The Capitalist Economic Arguments.

       I post the following article in full, though it is filled with what should be accepted and obvious to any anarchist/libertarian-socialist. It should also be obvious to the public at large, but sadly this is far from the case. It highlights the futility of framing your arguments in the capitalist economics frame. We have to see ourselves as other than economic units profitable or otherwise.

The article written by Panos Theodoropoulos appears in INTERREGNUM:

 

The Thief and the Cash Cow: Twins from a union of enemies

       As the Brexit debacle gets more surreal and confusing by the day, people in the UK are continually bombarded with information and propaganda. Whether or not the Brexit result was ‘about migration’ or, alternatively, was the outcome of a combination of various intertwined grievances, the issue of migration has played a dominant role in both right and left-wing arguments. These arguments shape ideas and create the ‘common sense’ which frames people’s thinking. And it is from these arguments that we can understand, and thereby confront, troubling underlying assumptions that are, most of the time, left unscrutinised precisely because they have already established themselves as an aspect of what their proponents consider ‘common sense’.

       One of these perspectives, which the right wing heavily relies on in its propaganda (an idea that is shared from Tommy Robinson all the way to the Conservative Party), is that the presence of migrant workers in the economy lowers wages and impoverishes working conditions. This is what I will call the ‘Thief Argument’. It forms an important pillar of their wider discourse, enabling them to say that they are not racist; they are simply stating the ‘obvious’, since ‘we have to look out for our own people first’. The left, once again in most of its denominations (from communists to the Labour Party), respond in exasperation, and in what they believe is a defence of migrant workers. They say that migrant workers are ‘good for the economy’ because they passionately work, staff the NHS and other vital services, pay taxes, and are disproportionately not recipients of state benefits. I will call this the ‘Cash Cow Argument’.

       Yet, despite their vehement proclamations of mutual enmity, these two sides are much closer than seems at first glance. In a manner not uncommon in UK political discourse (centuries of colonialism tend to leave their mark in a plethora of ways), both the left and the right tend to view migrants purely in terms of their economic costs or benefits to the host society. It is basically the same way that you view your car: if you think it’s doing a good job, you admire it; if it is underperforming, you want the problem ‘dealt with’. Yet, surprisingly for some, we have not come to these islands simply to work in your warehouses or to benefit from your patronising ‘protection’; we are more than machines. Furthermore, far from being confined to the realm of migration, these twin perspectives betray a wider conception of the human condition under capitalism as such. This article will attempt to very briefly dismantle these ideas, in the hope that we may at some point be able to forge more social movements that fight for the dignity of both locals’ and migrants’ lives.

      The ‘Thief Argument’ is probably my favourite, because of how easy it is to dismantle when you have a drunken conversation at the pub with one of its supporters. Yet it still needs to be confronted because it is strongly established in common discourses and propagated by powerful interests. In all its simplistic glory, the argument states that migrants, either in their quest for jobs and conditions better than the ones they left behind or due to the insecurity of their status, are willing to work for smaller wages and in worst conditions than the locals. This, they claim, creates a race to the bottom which impoverishes British workers. Everybody has heard it. It is propagated by the likes of Nigel Farage, UKIP, Leave Means Leave and sections of the Tory party. Recently it was given an air of credibility by the right-wing, anti-migration think tank Migration Watch UK and by a study conducted by the Bank of England which found that migration ‘impacted wages’ in the ‘semi-skilled/unskilled occupational group’. Its strength is in its simplicity; the argument seems straightforward and ‘obvious’, so much so that it has even polluted some of the Labour party’s ideas, with Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 echoing UKIP in placing the blame with international employment agencies which enable employers to ‘import cheap agency labour to undercut existing pay and conditions in the name of free market orthodoxy’.

        The weakness of this argument is that it ignores the wider social and economic conditions that create our common reality in the UK. To begin with what should be obvious, wages and employment conditions are not set by migrants but by the parliament and bosses. It is true that many migrant workers work in jobs that have low wages and worst labour conditions; yet, as I have analysed elsewhere, they are in these jobs because the UK economic system is designed by default to have them there. This is something that has been going on since the British empire; more recently, the government and employers capitalised on the expansion of the European Union in the early 2000s to provide cheap and insecure labour to many industries that were to profit greatly from it. Indeed, the principle of free movement of the EU is designed, and supported by big business in the UK, almost exclusively for that purpose. Weaker economies are artificially kept in a state of underdevelopment, which pushes migrant workers to the more ‘developed’ economies to serve as workers.

        For example, many warehouses and factories rely on agencies to provide them with temporary labour to fill their short-term needs (try to imagine the chaos in one of Amazon’s warehouses during the Christmas period). Employment legislation passed by the UK government allows insecure, short-term contracts which employment agencies use to essentially ‘rent out’ workers to the employers that require their labour. The agency usually pays the worker something around minimum wage (once again established by the UK government) while receiving a lot more from the employer than what goes in the pockets of the worker. The insecurity of the contract enables the employer to dispose of the worker once there is no need for them (while at the same time not needing to concern themselves with nuisances such as sickness or maternity pay), and the sheer volume of industries enable the agencies to consistently shuffle their workers from one location to the next, making profits all year round. On the other end of the equation, many migrant workers share some characteristics that are used by this government-business complex in order to boost profitability. These include de-skilling (the non-recognition of qualifications gained abroad), language difficulties, lack of information regarding trade unions and general labour rights, as well as an initial preference for a quick job to get settled down as fast as possible.

      As time passes and networks are solidified, occupations become linked with the people performing them, creating a cycle which reproduces itself (think of the ‘Polish plumber’ stereotype). If you have a look at ethnic community groups on Facebook, you will routinely find British employers advertising vacancies. Studies in the US have shown that the extent of employers’ preference to migrant labour is so deep that they have even drawn racialised, biological conclusions as to why certain ethnicities are better for certain jobs; for example, some believe that Mexicans are naturally suited to agricultural labour due to the design of their bodies. It is not the migrant workers that ‘take jobs’; the reality is that the whole economic system is designed to employ migrant workers in those specific conditions, purely to maintain profitability. In a study on the issue of migrant work, Anderson shows that the arguments that ‘migrant workers fill jobs that British people don’t want’ and that ‘migrant workers take jobs’ are equally invalid. Migrant workers simply accept the jobs and conditions that have already been established by the government and by employers, with existing migration controls playing a key role in creating precarious workers that are useful for profitability. The real culprits of the impoverishment of the UK’s working classes are the government and the bosses, and in these classes, migrant and British workers have a lot more in common than their differences.

While the ‘Thief Argument’ is pretty easily confronted through a basic understanding of how the UK’s economy works, the ‘Cash Cow Argument’ is harder to dispel because: 1) it usually comes, paradoxically, from an ideological source which claims to support migrant workers and 2) because it is actually true, but in its very proclamation is directly counterproductive to the purpose its proponents pretend to support. Yes, the UK economy has been designed to employ migrant workers at specific jobs, and as such it would be unrecognisable (and unimaginable) without them as it is currently structured. Yet how pitiful, weak, and dangerous is it to propose a group’s economic benefit to this society as the main argument in support of their value and humanity? While the right and the far-right hide their underlying racism behind economic arguments, the most vocal forces of the left betray, through their own proclamations, that they want migrants to stay in the UK only because of the benefits their exploitation brings to British employers. In doing so, they inadvertently support the wishes of capital more faithfully than their far-right opponents. The far-right wrongfully claims that ‘migrants are bad because they harm the economy’ and the left replies, very factually, that ‘this economy needs migrants’; in so doing, they prop up the very system they claim to be against. What is common in both of these perspectives is an infatuation with the health of the UK’s capitalist economy and a simultaneous conception of the migrant as purely an economic vessel, a thing, something with no value other than the profits it can or cannot produce.

       We need to be aiming for more than this. Anti-racism needs to be much stronger than a call to arms for capitalist exploitation of migrant workers. We need to highlight the common sources of the plight of both British and migrant workers, and foreground the objectives of solidarity, community power, and the overthrow of this economic system as such. The dominant ideological characteristic of neoliberalism is that every individual is no more than their productivity and their capacity to survive in an intensely competitive environment. This perspective has underpinned the state policies that impoverish and exploit British workers just as much as they do migrant workers. It is contradictory and damaging to argue against this system while at the same time proclaiming that migrant workers are welcome precisely because of the role they serve within it.

        It is probably true that the ‘Thief Argument’ and its variants played a significant role in galvanising support for Brexit. However, it is equally true that the European Union is a coalition of capitalist nations, warmongers and bankers. Plagued by diminishing power and resources, and not having set the correct foundations beforehand to challenge the twin assaults of both racism and neoliberalism, the wider left finds itself disjointedly and contradictorily arguing without a coherent ideological and political goal. Supporting the European Union in the name of fighting for the rights of migrant workers is incoherent; the policies of the European Union, in conjunction with the those of the UK’s governments, are directly those which keep our countries of origin in a constant state of underdevelopment and force us to seek work elsewhere. These policies stem from the same sources which both throw British workers under the wheels of austerity and which fortify migrants’ exploitation. As a brief side-note, it is equally incoherent and counter-productive to suddenly jump to support EU workers’ rights while ignoring the struggles of non-EU migrants (a fault that the ‘3  Million Campaign‘ is particularly guilty of), who have borne the brunt of the UK’s racist migration regime for far longer and with much more painful results.

       We need to organise to develop community power from the bottom up, free from political parties and outside of the dominant institutions which exist to give an illusion of freedom amid soaring inequality. We need to fight for ‘no borders’, not ‘better borders’. We need to fight for ‘anti-capitalism’, not ‘better capitalism’. We need to show how borders are part of the same structures which create the inequality and social collapse that anti-migration Brexiteers are raging against. History has shown that solidarity is forged in collective action. Through initiatives such as Living Rent, both migrant and Scottish workers fight in unison to improve their living conditions, targeting problems which equally affect them both. Radical trade unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World and the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain bring both migrant and local precarious workers together in a variety of labour struggles, showing that solidarity is stronger than division.  In the same spirit of solidarity, locals unite with migrants against detention and immigration controls through initiatives such as the Unity Centre. All of these initiatives combine to prove that we as humans, in all of our diversity, are capable of not only resisting the assaults on our living conditions together, but that we are also able to forge new ways of existing, outside and beyond the scope of capital and profit.

      We are much more, and much stronger, than our economic roles attempt to constrain us into being. An essential step, therefore, towards organising for emancipation is to completely and permanently expel any traces of the ‘Cash Cow Argument’ from our rhetoric, while at the same time consistently dismantling and ridiculing the ‘Thief Argument’. This will set the foundations for the development of a relatively coherent (different parts of the left will always have important theoretical variations) anti-capitalist and anti-racist movement. The issue is not whether migrant workers are good for the economy; the issue is the economy itself and the plethora of oppressive mechanisms that maintain and reproduce it.

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

War, A Money Making Machine For The Few.

 

 

      To any rational person it is impossible to look at "war" and find it justifiable. To organise a group of people to go out and kill another group of people, belongs to the realms of insanity. Despite this, war is always an important part of any state's agenda, preparations for war demand a very large slice of the state's wealth. A wealth created by the very people who will be sent out to do the killing.

     In modern warfare the idea of war is even more irrational, with its unimaginable destructive power. Forget all this crap about "smart bombs", when one of our "highly sophisticated" weapons of mass carnage hits a building, we are supposed to believe that everybody in that building and in the surrounding area were "bad people" and deserved to be incinerated at the whim of some foreign power.

    Then there is the environmental cost, modern wars are among the largest culprits of CO2 producers. While we murder our environment there is the human cost, the usual destruction of a country's entire infrastructure and the ensuing deprivation, misery, displacement of people and deaths by the thousands and over time millions of innocent people. 

     If you are a capitalist accountant, you must surely have to scratch your head at the sheer cost of war. Taking America as an example, (since they are the greatest purveyors of war on the planet), the cost to the US taxpayer of that county's wars since 2001, the start of the Afghanistan illegal invasion, (figures from information Clearing House), is an eye-watering $4.76 trillion, yes, $4,760,364,004,134. To put it another way, if you had that sum in your account you could spend $1 million every hour, 24 hours a day, and you would not run out of money  for 411 years. That volume of wealth blown up in smoke, in 18 years by one nation in the pursuit of war.  

     Of course in spite of that vast outpouring of taxpayers money in smoke and death, there are those who make billions from that money burning exercise.  That is the real reason for the existence of wars, the wealthy and powerful 1% who control our lives under this capitalist system, continually grow richer on the back of wars.

      On their shoulders lies the blame for the 1,455,590 Iraqis slaughtered since the US occupation of that country. They carry the blame for the 4,801 US military personnel sacrificed to swell their fat bank balances, and the 3,430 International troops slaughtered in that illegal invasion. All in the pursuit of wealth and power for the few. 

 "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it." - Madeleine K. Albright [In response to a question from Leslie Stahl, "We have heard that a half million children have died (as a result of Clinton's sanctions against Iraq). I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. ... is the price worth it?

Ah, the value structure of capitalism.

 

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

Out Of The Mouths Of Babes!!!

       "Out of the mouths of babes", I think the adult population should hang their heads in shame, at the state of the planet we are handing the next generation. The youth of the world are showing us how it should be done, From one concerned young girl in Sweden, we now have a world wide movement of youngsters taking to the streets against the insanity of our economic destructive system. The cause they are fighting for is one that none of us can escape, it is the survival of the human race. 

    We have to give these young people our unflinching support and take to the streets in solidarity with them. This is not a fun thing with a bunch of kids dodging school, these are intelligent concerned young people who are showing us the way. It is not just a local phenomenon, this is a world wide protest against the rule of our lives by the greedy corporate and financial juggernaut. A call for sanity and a stop to the rape and plunder of our planet just to feed a small cabal of rich and powerful people. What are we doing to our next generation when they can make statements like the one by the young Swedish girl who started this protest, Miss Thunberg,   "I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day." We are handing our youngsters a disintegrating planet and a future of fear. We can still do something about this poisoned legacy we are hand our children and grandchildren. We can join them on the streets across the globe, and take control of our and their future. Of course my own personal view is that the planet is not dying, but the planet is being murdered, and we know who by.

     Glasgow was no exception in this concern for the future, the young people of our city took to the streets on Friday and joined that world wide movement for sanity and a future. The banners that festoon the protest were loud proclamations of the truth that needs to be grasped, "Change the politics not the climate" and the truth that our "lords and Masters" view with blinkers on, "Stop denying our earth is dying", and a blatant truth that we should all grasp,  "If the world were a bank, it would have been saved." Who can deny any of these statements, from the mouths of our youth.

Some photos from Glasgow, thanks Keith.

      Two photos from Glasgow, courtesy of The Herald, (Colin Mearns Newsquest)

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

UK/Ireland Decentralised Anarchist Festival.

        Last year London anarchists held a decentralised anarchist festival in place of the dropped London anarchist bookfair. It was a great success, and at the time I suggested that this idea should be replicated across the country in as many villages, towns and cities as possible right across the country, all on the same weekend. At the time there was some support for the idea but nothing transpired. I can't think of a better way to let people know, we are here, and to raise the profile of our ideas and beliefs. A  decentralised trans-UK/Ireland anarchist festival I'm sure would draw publicity and perhaps those new converts.

       The organisers of last years London anarchist festival have now come up with the idea that we should attempt to make this idea a reality. It is up to us if we really want a country wide publicity event to bring us all together and bring in new faces. Numbers matter.

 Callout for organising the Anarchist Festival 2019

News,
        Following the success of last year’s decentralised anarchist festival, we’re going to do it again, but this time with events not just in London, but across the UK and Ireland.
      The idea is simple: groups and venues put on their own programme of anarchist events, centred around the long weekend of 31st May to the 2nd June 2019. The programme is collated by us on our website and social media.

www.anarchistfestival.wordpress.com
www.facebook.com/anarchistfestival
www.twitter.com/anarchistfest
      Struggling to think about what would be a good thing to put on? You can look at last years listings to see what kind of stuff happened last year., but don’t let that limit you! We welcome events on anarchism, it’s history, ideas and activity; as well as topics of interest to anarchism such as ecology, workplace organising, mental health, feminism etc. We will reject events that are racist, misogynist, transphobic or are otherwise oppressive.
      If your event is in London and you would like it included in the programme please let us know about it by emailing us at anarchistfestival@riseup.net
      If your event is NOT in London (anywhere else in the UK or Ireland) and you would like it included in the programme please let us know about it by emailing us at nationalevents@riseup.net.
      Please also contact us at those email addresses if you have a venue for use, but no events in mind.
      DEADLINE ALERT! Please be sure to submit your event by 1st May 2019 for inclusion in the programme. Any event submitted later than this date will not be included.
      Hope you can get involved – see you on the streets/ in the social centres!

Check out the leaflet below and feel free to print some out to put up in your local library/ university/ bookshop/ community space. If you’d like the PDF please email us and we’ll send it over.

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