Bing 'em all

Women; Step Up!

2011-10-27T09:04:00.000-07:00

The struggle for women’s rightsis a dominant strand in the wider struggle for social change. It is with thisgeneral struggle in mind that I will make some comments trying to show thatFeminism, in as broad an understanding of that term possible, is not only stillrelevant, but may be a – if not the -key concept that helps our organisations and institutions develop into thenecessary tools we need to achieve our goals.

We should perhaps realise thatone of the reasons our institutions aren’t as effective as they need to be (inthe year 2011 we are still talking about Sexism, Racism, Class…) is that theyreplicate the incumbent social relationships; men still tend to dominate even‘Left’ organisations. If we are trying to create institutions that resemble aslittle as possible those institutions we oppose, it is plain enough that womenmust not only be involved, but should take the lead in our institutions.

This is not to say that men mustaccept domination and subservience, but we have to rethink the way weparticipate in our institutions – which may be easier said than done!

With this in mind, some of theactivism I have undertaken with the Socialist Party (Englandand Wales) and otherpolitical groups in Rotherham, South Yorkshirehas been instructive in opening my eyes to the real problem of femaleparticipation in revolutionary activism for social change.

For around 2 years now I havedone at least a stall a week – and more recently at least 2 a week – in Rotherham town centre. A stall is where a group ofactivists set up a pasting table, tape a load of placards to it, cover it inliterature (petitions, leaflets, newspapers, magazines). The purpose of thesestalls is to create and strengthen the ‘Left’ presence in Rotherham, to get folkto attend meetings and try to engage politically with people who tend to bepoor; we act as a soundboard for their anger and a signpost away from racismand despair (common themes in Rotherham andplaces like it).

What is noteworthy here is thatit is mainly women that approach the stalls, sign the petitions, give donationsand take the papers. Admittedly it is usually older women, with those under 30generally walking by without a second glance, but it is surely significantthat, for the most part, the response from men is usually derision! (The issueof the ‘apoliticism’of youth is a topic for discussion elsewhere).

On the other hand however, thepeople who attend the meetings tend to be men. It is true that we haverecruited roughly the same number of men as women in the past year, but for onereason or another it is predominantly men who regularly attend meetings andcarry out the activism.

Another source of information hasbeen the creation of the ‘Rotherham Againstthe Cuts’ (RAC) group. While the group is still very young and comprised of agroup of activists not used to working together, it is noticeable that themeetings are dominated by men. It is my belief that the effectiveness of thisgroup is hindered by the traditional roles that men assume in these groups –verbosity, holding the floor, speaking out of a desire to compete. If womencould be encouraged (by whom and how I don’t pretend to know) to participatemore in the group – thus suppressing the males’ tendencies – it would yield afar more effective campaigning group, simply by providing a basis for thesincere concern and awareness and energy that we find on every stall fromwomen.

In conclusion, it is noticeableto me – a male activist on the streets of Rotherham- that it is mostly women who demonstrate concern about the current state ofsociety and the need for social change, but it is men who are more likely toorganise and participate in activism.

As times get harder, the need foreffective campaigning organisations will become even more decisive than theyalready are. If we are to achieve any kind of significant and revolutionarychanges, these organisations (parties, movements etc) must be quite differentto those that have come before – women must not be simply ‘involved’, they mustassume roles that significantly change and revolutionise the way organisationsfunction.

Use it or Lose it...

2010-09-28T06:46:00.000-07:00

In the coming struggle against the cuts - cuts that are aimed, laser-guided and with industrial precision at those on the bottom of the economic and social pile - it is important not to single out a single service for protection above others… that being said, I want to talk here about Libraries.

For the sake of transparency, I must divulge that I have worked in 2 libraries – a community library and a University library – and have been, and am actively seeking to get another position in a library… there is also a darker side to my involvement with libraries; I consistently fail to return books on time, and have even lost books. So I’m not perfect… and what is worse, I’m not even a big reader…

I’m not sure what cuts libraries will have to face, and I’m not sure where to look to find out the figures, but given that I have been looking for work in libraries, and my interest in preserving and improving public services, I can report the following;

I recently went back to the library, intending to pay a huge outstanding fine and thus renew my account. To my shame, I had neglected the debt for so long that the library had simply cancelled my account, meaning that a) I had got away with not paying a fine that would have probably been way over £50 and b) the local community was deprived of several books and the funds to replace those books. I gave them the £15 pounds in my pocket and accepted my new library card.

I then asked the library worker - who haltingly accepted my ‘donation’ as we agreed to call it – whether the council were looking to employ new library staff. She told me that retiring staff were not being replaced, and so certainly no new staff would be recruited. I then asked if ‘they were treating you all okay?’ whilst making a ‘them upstairs’ gesture… she said they were… I suppose you never can tell who is a ‘mystery shopper’…

Fresh new card in hand, I took myself upstairs to the politics section. I may relate that there is clearly a radical at work in Rotherham Central library for as I approached the shelves it was plain from 10 metres that someone had collected a good number of Chomsky books together and displayed them next to each other for all to see. Awesome.

Now that I was a bona fide library user, and not the debt-encumbered scuttler I had been but moments before, I decided I would take my time and have a good peruse of the shelves; happily, my suspicions about the incumbent Radical Library Activist (not me-swear on the Chomster’s bonce) were confirmed when I noticed ‘Chomsky on Anarchism’ (2 copies) and Rudolf Rocker’s ‘Anarcho-syndicalism; Theory and Practice’…

I picked up the short Rocker work and a recent Chomsky book and bounded merrily to the check-out desk, lest the obvious administrative cock-up were detected and the offending literature and tossed into a memory-hole.

The importance of libraries - as repositories of knowledge; yes, but also as general cultural centres - is becoming obscured by the rise, and alleged superiority of the internet. The internet, fantastic and exciting as it surely is, is only a tool and cannot offer, nor compete with, the hundreds of ancillary functions a library quietly plays. This fallacy may be used in the coming period to justify horrific cuts to cultural services, like libraries, that would amount to a lobotomy for vegetative communities, like Rotherham, comatose from the shock of decades of neglect.

Join your library = good. Use your library = vital. Oppose the cuts = vital

A good propagandist can rationalise owt...

2010-08-11T04:01:00.001-07:00

B, mate...

Fuck I need a holiday...

I’ve been back in Roth for under 18 months and it’s not goin’ well... I got distracted from my middle-class, white-boy mission to enlighten the working people of Roth by the re-emergence of my perennial ruinous delusion; my ‘dream’; ‘Rockstardom’...

The thing is (and ain’t there always a thing), after everything and despite everything, I still want to be in a band... except there is a change in the reasons. All those reasons I professed as my own – aspirations of wealth; adulation of millions; abundance of blowjobs – I had, in fact, absorbed from reading too many Metallica, Def Leppard and Iron Maiden biographies... and all of them, now, have been replaced by a much more mundane, though still plagiarised, reason.

I don’t rate Henry Rollins very highly as a philosopher, social commentator or musical icon – a bit wishy-washy in my estimation – but one of the several things I do find admirable and inspiring in him is his constant and honest self-analysis. In nearly all his spoken word performances (I’ve listened to plenty, many times) and in some of his written work, he expresses the idea that being ‘on the road’ – tiring, shit, depressing though it may be – is, nevertheless, where he feels he 'should be’.

Now this idea of how things should be appeals to the latent disciplinarian that abides within me, though unconvincingly suppressed by cooperative and non-hierarchical principles that have been crow-barred and stuffed into my pig-headed bonce (much like Rollins’ relationship with literature), and I think I have the same ‘aspiration’ about what I should be doin'.

I have tried to convince myself that I have renounced my claim to unattainable ‘dreams’ for the prepubescent reverie handed down from unknown power-structures that they are, and instead, I know wish to claim the right to exercise my one true asset, my labour, and to engage it in a such a way as to rehumanise myself... and that means being in a touring band.

This is still an unattainable ‘career goal’ but at least it is no longer a ‘dream’. It means, instead of wanting the whole Bill ‘n’ Ted ‘World Domination’ bit, I want to work hard at something I’m good-ish at, has cultural-value, making sure it has some semblance of relevance and meaning to someone other than myself, to entertain and inspire (like all good performers should).

I want to work hard. And I think I’d be good in a touring band that works hard... I am a born show-off, so perhaps a touring band ain't necessarily where I'll end up (see Rollins again). But having relinquished the struggle for 'achievement', and for all the above reasons and some other, more personal, ‘rolling stones gather no moss’ kinda reasons, I think should be on the road... somehow...

Even my in-built, instinctive tendency to run away like a good Monty Python K-niget, is testament to this...

Pussy.

b!x

Rights

2010-01-09T09:32:00.000-08:00

This new years’ eve I arrived home in the wee hours, obviously battered, to find that there was no power, no electric: no lights, no telly, no laptop, no stereo, no heating… nothing…

I woke up the next day, tender, and plopped down the stairs ready for a new years’ coffee and bacon sandwich, to the sound of some new years’ tunes, warmed by the heating system… but there was still no power…

I minced about my home for a while… I got cold… I put on some more clothes… after a while I started to get pissed off… ‘How could this happen?’ thought I, ‘in this day and age… and on this day, of all days!’

Point is that for those few hours, until the power was restored at about midday, I was utterly lost… I had no idea what to do with myself; pretty much everything I do requires the use of electricity, a realisation not necessarily that profound, but startlingly disturbing when so practically demonstrated!

But the real shock was the indignation, the anger that I had felt. My emotions were riled because I thought that, on some level, somehow, my Rights had been violated… I have a Right to power, to warmth, to the internet and telly…

…after a while, a coffee and a pie, I sat there a-thinking… isn’t this how we all feel, everyday about everything we have? Some of us may be grateful for the things we have, but lots of us feel we have a Right to the things we have…

…we feel we have a Right to cars, to fuel, to food – lots of it, to fashion, to warmth, to have children in hospitals…

But is it the case that these are Rights? Take just about anything that I mentioned above (or nearly any other aspect of Western industrialised life), think about where they come from, how we came to enjoy them, and it is quite clear that instead of Rights, we have an abundance of ‘luxuries’… or at least, we have potential access to this abundance…

While the Christmas Number 1 battle was being decided by everyone’s Facebook status updates, something else was happening that roused not one single ‘like’ or ‘comment’… COP15… or to me and you, the Copenhagen Climate Summit.

Far from being a meeting of hippies and tree-huggers (who were there, kicking ass on our behalf) bleating about unimportant issues like mass extinction of hundreds of species, the decimation of habitat and other ‘soft’ issues, the COP15’s main theme was climate justice…

…because of the steady work of activists, journalists, scholars, scientists and the pissed-off populace of just about everywhere (but mostly the ‘over there’ countries… usually where brown people live) climate justice is the clumsy catch-all phrase that I use to refer to the convergence of many different threads of activism that have found a common, uniting principle and come together…

…climate justice is, roughly, the idea that while we ‘Westerners’ have grown so accustomed to our ‘luxuries’ that we now believe them to be our Right, we never acknowledge the fact – THE FACT – that for the most part, they are the product of stolen resources…

…it is the wasteful exhaustion of these resources that is causing the major changes in the environment, and as we gorge ourselves into fat-camps, ferrying ourselves about in our needlessly wasteful personal transport, burping and farting whilst our thumb expends the only energy we burn through exercise as it taps on a remote control, millions of people are physically losing their countries beneath the waves, countries still reeling from the rapacious violation of European Colonialism…

…another aspect of the way we think about ‘our’ Rights is who ‘We’ think we are… or perhaps a better way to put it is ‘when’ we think ‘we’ are…

…lots of people have children and they would have you believe that they ‘Love’ their children, and tell you as much, usually with an added tagline like, ‘I would do anything for my kids’ or something other bloated, unconsidered half-truth…

…I would never confront a parent with these ideas, because it would probably be unintelligible to them, but if we explore the ‘parental love’ idea we soon run into some murky and troublesome areas… to boil it down into its simplest formulation; for how long do you love your child?
Do you love them for all of their life? Does that means that you love them after you are dead? And if so, presumably, you have an interest in what kind of life they will have after you are gone? On the other hand, perhaps you only love them until you die? But does that mean that you only have a child because you want something to ‘love’, something to do with your life? And then, perhaps, this means that once you are dead… well… fuck ‘em?

These are important question, because the answers you get from them show you just how disgraceful an attitude to Life, Human Rights and Environmental and Social Responsibility people can have…

We are always so quick to defend our ‘luxuries’ as Rights… but if we actually take some time to actually think, actually spend some time to chip away at our soothing isolation tanks of anti-intellectualism, we would soon realise that we never chose this way of existence… and not long after that, we’d soon see that the Rights we should be using (never mind defending) to abolish hierarchy, propaganda and wealth are the true achievements of our ancestors who loved us without every knowing our names…

Sustainability

2009-11-23T07:40:00.000-08:00

I find that quite often the 'environmental issue' (which includes climate change, global warming, peak oil, renewable energy and animal – or non-human rights) is often disregarded as a bit of a side issue apparently concerning only hippies and people crazy about bunny wabbits and perdy flowers.

But that it is understood thus by people who claim to be politically conscious and concerned with class struggle in general is a demonstration of how little thought is dedicated to the problem and, more generally, how well propaganda systems are able to trivialise matters of crucial importance.

To really get a good grip on the issue, one needn’t immediately concern oneself with rising sea levels, rainforest habitat destruction and the mass extinction of the worlds’ species... No; a good place to start is at home… Rotherham will do… a bit of sniffing around you own back yard will reveal parallels…

First, let’s see what the government says about a few relevant points.

The UK is signed up to the EU Renewable Energy Directive[1] which includes a “legally-binding target to ensure 15% of our energy comes from renewable sources by 2020”[2]. This target will be achieved by exploiting many forms of renewable energy sources, including energy derived from recycling and Biomass (“this includes sewage sludge, animal manure, waste wood from construction, and food waste that would otherwise be disposed of in landfill”[3]) but both on and off shore wind energy is to be the main source of renewable energy for the UK as “UK has the largest potential wind energy resource in Europe”[4].

In Rotherham we have two developments that are contributing to this goal. First we have a proposal, from the Banks group, for a wind farm[5] and secondly we have a major Sterecycle recycling plant.

The UK’s ability to produce wind power has been crippled thanks to the closure of the Vestas plant on the Isle of Wight[6] but of more significance to Rotherham, the towers that the turbines stand on are made of steel[7], steel that could have kept over a thousand steel workers at Corus in jobs.

A major problem facing Wind Farm development is NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard)… an acronym that is explicitly classist. The prime on-shore sites for wind are, quite obviously, where there is a lot of wind, where many rich folk also happen to have lovely houses and estates whose vistas would be ruined by unsightly wind turbines; and so they complain and the wind farms stays on paper. But compare this to proposals for open cast mines that will end metres (as close as 36m) away from working class peoples’ homes[8].

Sterecycle is a privately owned recycling plant that is “processing "black-bag" waste from 3 local authorities under a contract for up to 10 years: Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council, Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council and Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council”[9]. This means that one private company is responsible for providing the recycling needs for a massive area and as such is able to charge 3 local authorities whatever amount it desires, amounts which the authorities will have to pay to keep in line with renewable and recycling targets[10].

In light of the evidence above and its implications, we must ask ourselves what the government means when it states that it estimates that “up to half a million additional jobs might be generated in the UK renewables sector and its supply chains”[11] and we MUST realise that the environmental, sustainability, climate change topic is a key class issue that embodies the core problems of working class struggle and whose moral impetus is the rights of future generations. We must fight and conclusively win battles today so others may continue a fight for a better world without having to resolve conflicts we choose to belittle or ignore.

[1] [external Link] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/JOHtml.do?uri=OJ:L:2009:140:SOM:EN:HTML
[2] UK Renewable Energy Strategy 2009 - Pg 8 http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/what_we_do/uk_supply/energy_mix/renewable/res/res.aspx
[3] Ibid – Pg103
[4] Ibid – Pg 27
[5]http://www.banksdevelopments.com/energy/sites/renewable/midlands_and_yorkshire/penny_hill
[6] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/aug/18/vestas-manufacturing-china-us/print
[7] http://www.bwea.com/ref/faq.html#madeof
[8] http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/10/09/the-new-coal-age/
[9] http://www.sterecycle.com/
[10] Pg 13 – DEFRA Waste Strategy Annual Progress Report 2008/09 http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/waste/strategy/documents/waste-strategy-report-08-09.pdf
[11] Pg 27 – UK Renewable Energy Strategy 2009 http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/what_we_do/uk_supply/energy_mix/renewable/res/res.aspx

The Spirit of Resistance...

2009-10-20T05:25:00.000-07:00

If you are one of those folks who cannot sit through TV news (BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky – take your pick) without being thrown into convulsions because you feel that, firstly, the stories that are run are handled in an extremely irresponsible way, and secondly, that the selections of stories covered presents a picture of the world that is so ‘comic-strip’ that it simply cannot correlate to reality, here is a bit of information for you…

www.zmag.org/znet

ZNet is a place where anyone can go and read news, opinion and analysis that will not be found in the mainstream media outlets. Now, it is not a place like www.infowars.com for example, which (not without some justification) takes a highly ‘conspiratorial’ view of events as its basis for analysis. It is a place where you will find honest and serious discussion of events by expert voices –voices too honest and too serious to be allowed into the highly ideologically biased mainstream sources.

We get the big hitters of course, folk who even the likes of me had heard of; Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Arundhati Roy, John Pilger. But there are also the other voices to discover and learn from; Michael Albert (ZCom founder), Cynthia Peters, Slavoj Zizek, David Harvey, Norman Finkelstein…

And if that doesn’t tickle you, well, you ever see the 2007 film “Shooter”? Yeah? No? Well, the bit where Mark Wahlberg is in his ranch in the middle of nowhere and he is at a laptop and says something like “Let’s see what lies they’re telling us today?”, as you will see on the screen, it is ZNet that he is looking at…[1]

The project is bigger than I can explain. It is also not the only non-mainstream source of news. So why am I writing about it? Well, it’s not doin’ well… it needs our help… it needs – as depressing as it is – our filthy, filthy cash!

It is a sad irony that the pages on which the injustices and hypocrisy of the ‘financial crisis’ are documented, explained and challenged are being threatened by the self-same phenomenon. The required amount of money is hardly massive, but if it ain’t gathered access to crucial information will be lost.

Information itself doesn’t tell you how to think or what to do, but when all you have is the mainstream news your own ability to form opinions is eroded. And it is eroded in two ways; first, mainstream media does not, and cannot, provide enough detail (in terms of historical context, breadth of analysis and diversity of witness sourcing). Second, by constricting the spectrum of analysis and debate, any divergent opinion is framed as ridiculous, amateurish, reactionary, which has the effect of stifling the inclination audience (if not the ability) to explore news stories themselves.

We really need Zmag… we need it to exist in the States, so that we can then got one of our own in the UK!

Send money… and, if like me you have none to give, tell people who do to send some for you…

B!x

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_Communications

...I'm Still Young...

2009-10-09T03:27:00.000-07:00

It’s a Tuesday and I’ve been 29 for about 6 weeks. Me and my two best friends are stood on the upper tier at the driving range, inventing ever more elaborate strings of curses with each swing. Tonight we will go to the pub, like we do every Tuesday and drink. I’ll have a strong lager because I don’t see the point in drinking piss and my mates will drink weak lager because they don’t see the point in paying 50 pence more for piss.

As my ball flies at a right angle to my desired direction, I comment to my buddies that it is both a good and a bad thing that we can, at 29, go and get pissed on a Tuesday night without consequence. We all laugh and agree that it’s awesome, but none of us are that convincing…

I’m on the dole, but keep myself on house arrest most of the week so as to be able to have this wee Tuesday night ritual. One of my mates, Baz, is also on the dole, but is still cruising on what remains of his redundancy pay-out, and is a divorcee without the funds to divorce; the other mate, Bond, is minted, as he is a guitar technician, but he’s lost, an alcoholic and an insufferable misogynist – he cannot talk to women without falling in love; I, at least, have the decency to have relationships with women without them having the least knowledge of my existence.

We swing our last shot and we all get dropped off and agree to reconvene at the pub at 8pm. By 10.30pm we are twisting Bond’s arm to come back to my folks’ house to help polish off a bottle of delicious vodka that has been chilling in my folks’ freezer for about 6 weeks. By midnight we are shooting… half an hour in to the new day I receive a text message from my sister, who is back from Uni for a few days, telling me that we are being too loud and to shut the fuck up…

I sign-on on Thursday. Sitting there, in the dole-office, is quite funny… it’s not like it used to be 10 years ago, when I last signed on. It looks like an Ikea showroom today; all wood floors, plastic moulded chairs and halogen spotlighting… no carpet oozing the smell of overfed, under-washed people, no filthy hessian settee… I shruggingly walk up to one of the touch-screen computer terminals to look at jobs I will not apply for: Sales/Retail/Recruitment.

I print one off – admin assistant for the Citizens Advice Bureau – and shuffle off to a corner to wait for the pointless, humiliating, semi-harangue that may come when my name is called… it’s a bit like a raffle; you never know which of the disinterested ‘advisors’ you will get. After a few months you’ve worked your way through most of them, so you know who will break your balls, but there’s nothing you can do about it… This week my luck is out… I get a grim-faced, overweight, middle-aged woman. She asks if my ‘situation’ has changed… I tell her no. She asks to see what I have printed off, and I hand it to her, puzzled… she inspects the paper – seems like it’s grease-proof now that I look - then taps on the keyboard and scowls at the computer screen… what have I done to look for work, she asks me, and I run off a pre-prepared semi-fictional list of actions… she doesn’t listen, shuffles some papers, taps some more…

Bond is back - he just did a Jools Holland thing… we’ve decided that this weekend we are going ‘hunting’… we are pathetic single men with no hope (and less inclination) of successfully seducing women, and so we have put ourselves on a programme, a ‘crash and burn’ programme… the trick is to just treat women like idiots, and to under no circumstances pay any heed to the inevitable and potentially devastating rejections… we reason that there is plenty of evidence to suggest that this is a ‘high-yield’ technique and while we may be shit at it, it is only a technique and can be learned.

…of course, the planned excursion will only be undertaken if one of our parents’ houses has no parents in it for the weekend…

Wishful Unthinking

2009-10-09T03:25:00.000-07:00

On a stall in the town centre the other day, a young Pakistani fellah came up to sign a petition demanding the renationalisation of the steel industry and proclaiming support for the sacked Corus workers. After a bit of banter, he said the following;

“…you know what the problem with this country is mate” (a familiar preface to what will invariable be something ridiculously unenlightening)… “…what it is, yeah, is all these Afghanis and Kosovans… coming over here, yeah, not working, just claiming benefit… “

On another stall, a young East Asian fellah came up to us… he came up to and gave us a piece of his mind, admonishing us for our opposition to freedom of speech… he did have a point, in a way; we had anti-BNP slogans on a placard and were gathering signatures on an anti-BNP petition… I personally hate doing things even mention BNP because the mainstream media gives them enough coverage without me helping out too…

…but this guy’s beef was simple enough… he was saying that it was shocking how the indigenous, white population were not having their concerns listened to because they were considered racist… every voice should be heard and if real grievances should be addressed…

In a presentation on the cooperative movement, the merits of multi-skilled workers and balanced job complexes were outlined as means of increasing worker participation by distributing mundane and empowering tasks equally amongst the workforce…

In the discussion that followed a middle aged steel worker outlined his opposition to the idea that workers should be multi-skilled on the grounds that a modern theme amongst employers today was to make individual employees ‘multi-task’ by carrying out the duties of several employees thereby allowing the company to shed workers… streamlining…

I was once watching TV News with a couple of mates and that story that pops up now and then was rolled out: Prisoners have it so good in jail that many choose to commit offences once released because being inside is preferable to freedom…

…of course me being the ‘right-on’ truthsayer that I am said something obscene to the TV screen, by way of opposition to the story. My friends, however, then said that I was wrong… that prison is a place where criminals, those bad guys in society, are placed as punishment and conditions and access to facilities should reflect that…

It is all too easy to be depressed about these wee tales… Good people hold these opinions… opposition to social change (in the widest terms possible) have roots in the most unlikely of places… and a common retort I hear, and I have been guilty of uttering myself in the past, is that the world is fucked because human nature dictates that people are apathetic just shitty to each other at best… that all attempts to ‘do anything’ is hopeless… nothing changes…

But I think it suits (educated, non-racist, law-abiding) people to think like this… it is nice to think that jobs are scarce and becoming scarcer because companies are 'struggling' in the current 'economic climate', that anyone who says something racist is ignorant, that criminals are depraved hooligans, that terrorists are deluded nihilists, that work is only what we are paid to do... It is nice because there is nothing that can be done about these problems and so fuck the world...

…Women can vote, homosexuals can do what they want with their cocks, education is free until the age of 16, if you hurt yourself an ambulance will take you to hospital where doctors and nurses will work to heal you for free, if your home catches fires a fire engine will come to limit the damage and not a penny will change hands…

Yeah… nothing changes…

… if fucking only…

It’s my birthday on Friday and I know exactly how I’m gonna spend it…

2009-08-26T09:06:00.001-07:00

Since I was about 13 I have been convinced that I was destined for great things and as such I have held fast to two career goals, which may be inter-related, exclusive or mutually attainable; I want to be a Rock God/Metal Overlord and I want to save the world. Quite modest and utterly realistic…

Being a Rock God is easy… all you have to do is kiss some ass, write half-decent, not totally-limp tunes that have the slightest of whiffs of anti-everything about them, but no more, and you are sorted… I was very able to do this, but I was not prepared to be pooned in the ass for the sake of Metal (a prerequisite to success in the ’business’, given that it is a ‘business’)… no way… so I have resorted to hiding my glorious, hatred-for-the-system awesomeness in a dodgy-looking warehouse in the dangerous end of Sheffield… and could only be happier if I could convince someone to pay me to do that… £50 a week and I’d be a rich man…

The second goal – saving the world – is even easier than the first… To begin with you have to actually believe in messages that the Propaganda system defangs… “You can change the world”, “challenge authority”, “Peace on Earth”… all that lot… then you have to do a wee bit of work to find voices to back up your instinctual suspicions that your life was ruined by massive corporate power before you were born and become emboldened to take up the challenge… simple… and lastly, the most straightforward part of all, get up in everyone’s face and tell them to do the same until your are blue in the face, utterly deflated, friendless, hated by yourself and totally confident in an alternative way of organising the world…

…so back to my birthday then… I have to say, that although the second goal is incredibly easy, its advent is long in the manifesting, and thus the world-changer may, now and then, suffer from bouts of doubt and despair… if these bouts are not acknowledged and addressed, they could, like all ignored psychological refuse, become malignant and give one the crazy idea that you are pissing into the wind…

Therefore, for my 29th birthday, this Friday, I will rise early and make my way to the nearest offy and buy two 2 litre bottles of cheap, strong, ‘contains sulphates’ cider, go to the local park and shout slogans – offensive if possible – of despair and reproach to all who pass… by the end of the day I hope to be incoherent and broken-nosed…

Everyone needs a day off…

B!x

Racism, Defiance and Deference

2009-08-25T05:54:00.000-07:00

One of the most shameful moments of my life was when, at a party, I was recounting being in a car crash and was describing the ensuing altercation with the driver and passengers of the other car… they were, as I described them, “Paki Bastards”… bad enough… but on top of that, a Pakistani friend of mine was stood at the other side of the room and looked me dead in the eye, and cursed me, as I uttered the slur…

Racism has always been a strange phenomenon to me… I was born in Argentina. I am white and speak with a thick-ish Yorkshire accent… but I am proud of my family and my roots and have always worn my multi-cultural identity on my sleeve… and I have paid for it… I have had people remind me that ‘we (Brits) beat you (Argies)’ and at school I was bullied for being Argentinean…

I am not entirely sure what racism is… who suffers it and who perpetrates it. At a recent public meeting a speaker made the comment that racism is not acceptable anymore… and though he said it quite authoritatively, I was not so sure…

On Fridays I usually do a stall in the middle of Rotherham, just outside the Market. I hand out flyers, try to sell papers, solicit petition signatures and try and get folk talking about stuff… political stuff like – their problems and concerns; their opinions… and I have to report that Rotheramites are not shy… some of them will just tell you that they are racists… others just stick to slogans… no bashfulness about them…

In the recent EU elections few people would tell you who they were voting for… the ones who would, however, were the BNP voters… and they wouldn’t whisper it, guiltily… no; they would TELL you… and then tell you were to go; “commie scum – off our streets”…

It’s not that people aren’t thinking though, it’s not that they are stupid bigots… Rotherham is an impoverished town… half the shops are shut and jobs are disappearing… and next to this, people cannot see anything good in their future… in the recent campaigning to save jobs at the Corus steel works and to renationalise the steel industry many folk will approach and tell me how familiar it all sounds… these people saw their lives dismantled 30 years ago… they fought, actually fought, to save their futures… and they lost… and they have paid dearly…

What seems to be happening, as I see it on the street, is that as the Establishment proscribes and lays down acceptable parameters of opinion, people who find their views divergent at worst, sidelined and belittled at best, simply look at the situation and say to themselves; ‘if they say I am a Racist, then fuck ‘em: I AM… if they say not to vote BNP, the fuck ‘em: I WILL’…

But there is another side… I recently went for a meeting at a national organisation (I shan’t name names) with an older Asian friend of mine, with loads of experience in several fields that were of use to the organisation… during the meeting it became clear that the gathered folk there listened and responded to every word I had to say, but spoke over my friend every time he raised his voice…

Afterwards, my friend and I shared comments about their meeting; he suggested that the organisation seemed a bit ‘cliquey’… I suggested they were racist… he thanked me and said he was glad I had said it and not him as he didn’t want to appear ‘sensitive’…

It would be nice to say I am against racists and for that to be that… but good people I know could be called racists, for the things they say, but who are probably not… and some good people who would proclaim their non-racist-ness and have a ‘no-platform-sharing’ policy towards racists probably are the most racist people about…

Racism, as it used and manipulated by the Establishment, seems to me to be just another party line… with politicians telling us that we should be sickened and disgusted by the voting in of the BNP in Rotherham and the English Democrat Mayor in Doncaster, we have a nice little set of hate figures we can boo at while never exploring our own prejudices and biases… and can keep laughing at the stupid, ignorant oiks who vote for the BNP, people who have to deal with real fucking problems, while we put up nice, big fences to keep ALL undesirables out of our definitely-not-racist communities…

Fuck.

2009-08-19T08:12:00.001-07:00

…bit of weird mood of late Bing… sort of, like, no wind in the sails…

Firstly, wi writing and all that toss… well I’ve been contributing to theblogpaper.co.uk… which is cool, you know, been getting some nice little ratings and some kind comments and looks like I’ll have some of my scribbling in an actual printed paper in London soon… thing is though; I’ve found myself acting in a very gay way… see; ever since I got a decent rating and my pieces started to appear in the ‘highest rated article’ bit I’ve kinda been trying to write stuff for ratings…

… what a tosser… all that’s happened is that I’ve stopped writing! It all seems a little contrived… like I know what I’m doing when it comes to writing or something!

I can remember exactly how it happened as well… my first article that did well, that is, that got a decent rating, I looked at again and tried to figure out what it was that did it… and then I copied that! Even more shocking, Bing, even more disgusting is that the piece was written explicitly for submissions to ‘proper’ newspapers… one of my mates put me in touch with the newsdesk or (whatever the fuck) at some newspaper and they said, essentially, ‘send something in and we’ll be sure to ignore it’… so like a good little graduate I wrote a piece that looked and sounded just like a newspaper piece would, summoning up all my white, middle-class, subordinated scummery and submitted the duly ignored piece…

…the cats on theblogpaper.co.uk snaffled that shit up like the turd it is… the fact that it has really important points in it is by the by… in fact, the ‘proper’ piece is actually a bastardised version of 2 previous pieces which were a lot more brutal and honest… good shit, like… the fact that I edited myself and left out the crucial bits about warmongery and tacit Rotherham involvement in mass murder shows me up to be the coward and Power pant-sniffer that I am!

…I’d do myself in but I couldn’t live wi the guilt of making my mum upset…

…fuck…

Had it out wi the the dole office ‘n’ all… Jesus… When the fuck wil I learn that your mouth should be shut at all times if you want to get on... turns out that looking for work means applying for ‘realistic’ jobs… sales, recruitment, retail… I don’t really get angry anymore… the best way I can describe it is; you know when you are about to get punched in the face and have the shit kicked out of you for nothing… like, a bit sick and utterly dismayed at the injustice, coupled with the out and out tidal wave of self-loathing that drags you under and toys with you in its rip current…
…pack of bastards…

By way of remedy, I have written this, and will write more childish shit… also I have joined a proper metal band as the singer and am going to scream my fucking nips off and when we finally do a show my ego, I swear, will be unleashed like neverafore…

Fuck.

B!x

Bomb Anniversaire...

2009-08-12T07:36:00.000-07:00

64 years ago the USA used atomic devices as weapons for the first time[1] and notions of World Peace moved into a new and previously unimaginable sphere of terrible possibility. In an epoch that saw our species develop technology to nigh on fantastical heights, hundreds of millions… hundreds of millions were destroyed[2] (counting just the victims from our own species) making it the most shameful, savage and barbarous passage in our specific history…

42 years ago, Desmond Morris’ book ‘The Naked Ape’[3] was first published. In the chapter on aggression he makes some comments on World Peace and offers 5 solutions to what he calls the ‘dilemma’;

1) Disarmament – an ‘impossible extreme’
2) Depatriotisation – which ‘works against a fundamental biological feature of our species’
3) Harmless, symbolic substitutes for War – but ‘group territorial defence’ and ‘group territorial expansion’ cannot be solved by any amount of ‘boisterous international football’.
4) Intellectual control over aggression – ‘unreliable’.

…and fifth, the most gruesome, most defeatist and idle comment:

5) “The only sound biological solution to the dilemma [of lasting Peace] is massive depopulation”.

These comments and ‘solutions’ are potentially true only if we accept ‘the rule of the jungle’ and the notion of ‘scarcity’; they are only of use if it is true that in order to survive we must be aggressive to defend what we have because there is little of some resource or other.

Such a deterministic and simplistic view about human social relations and affairs, a branch of knowledge so superficially understood that any statements can amount to little more than decent guesses and hopes, is doubly crippling given that it comes from such a lauded personage and as such carries more weight than it should… and in turn, these bleak insights find footing in the common consciousness…

…for example;

106 years ago the WEA came into existence[4] and about 24 hours ago I was talking to a woman who worked there. After a while she admitted that I had managed to depress her with my comments about social atomisation, unemployment and debasement of art, and the idea of socially necessary work competing against profit; there seemed to her that there was no alternative to the way things were running and what was worse, as she saw it, people were apathetic… nothing will change…

…in 1928 women got the vote[5]… 100 years ago this woman would probably not have been sat at a desk in an office…

2009…

… 25 years since the Battle of Orgreave and the Miners’ strike[6]; 40 years since Woodstock[7]; 40 years since the Bogside Riots and the ‘start’ of the troubles in Northern Ireland[8]… and numberless other forgotten anniversaries, dates not in our diaries, not reminding us of what we could be and of what we could be doing…

… I wonder what Peace will mean when I die…

[1] http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2009/8/10
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties + http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
[3] http://paliyath.googlepages.com/DesmondMorris-TheNakedApe.pdf
[4] http://www.wea.org.uk/aboutus/index.htm
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_the_United_Kingdom
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Orgreave
[7] http://www.woodstock.com/1969-festival/ + http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodstock_Festival

[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Bogside

Hey Joe... why ain't you goin' with a gun in your hand?

2009-07-30T07:19:00.000-07:00

It is forgivable to think that the only problem with the war in Afghanistan is that British troops are getting killed. Apparently ‘we’ have suffered the highest number of casualties this month since 2001[1] and there is a right old kerfuffle about compensation of ‘our boys’ who have had their legs and faces and arms and guts mutilated, primarily because ‘our’ government didn’t pay for adequate equipment for ‘our’ armed forces to ‘do the job’.

But, despite our ‘heavy toll[2]’, things are going well[3]…

…of course, there is more to it than this. Joe Glenton, a Yorkshire lad, has a thing or two to say about the war. He reckons that the “commitment and dedication of British troops [is] being ‘misused’” and claims “that the war in Afghanistan [is] being fought in the interests of the United States' foreign policy.”[4]

Only… Joe happens to be Lance Corporal Joe Glenton of the Royal Logistics Corps who is handing a letter in to Downing Street informing Gordon Brown that he is refusing to return to Afghanistan and has been going round saying things like “I don't believe our cause is just. I think it's adversely affecting the Afghan people as well as the British Army and their families” and “I know that the Afghan people are very resilient. I can't see us getting much further”[5]… oops… doesn’t sound like one of ‘ours’ that…

In a recent study[6] the question “how well, if at all, do you understand the aims and objectives of Britain's involvement in Afghanistan?” was asked to around 1,000 people; 57% of people said they understood well… I wonder what if the question was then asked of those people, “and do you agree with those objectives?” And it’s probably best not to mention the fact that 42% didn’t really know what ‘we’ were doing over there… let alone that about half of the people wanted all the troops out within 6 months… doesn’t really sound like and opinion ‘we’ would have…

Lance Corporal Joe knows he is ‘in a lot of trouble’[7] but he is proof of the point that there is more than one voice, more than one set of considerations about this war. ‘We’, whoever we are, have a lot of different ideas about this stuff… not all of us agree that ‘we’ need to be in Afghanistan at all, quite a lot of us think it is out and out wrong… Some of ‘us’ care about the fact that, because of the war, civilians have been and are being killed directly by weapons and soldiers (both sides), more have died and are dying because of the collapse in infrastructure, and goodness alone knows how many more will die… and ‘we’ aren’t making this up[8]…

But why should we care about that? ‘We’ are being ‘successful’ in achieving our goals… so say our politicians…

But, then… since when did we EVER believe them and look to them for an honest and reliable opinion?

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8175991.stm
[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8169789.stm
[3] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/8170432.stm
[4] http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/Soldiers-protest-at-Afghan-mission.5508545.jp
[5] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/north_yorkshire/8175658.stm
[6] http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/poll.aspx?oItemId=2414&view=wide
[7] http://www.manchesterstopwar.org/urgent-action/522-urgent-serving-soldier-refusing-to-return-to-afghanistan-faces-court-martial.html
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_of_the_War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80%93present)

Art 'work'

2009-07-29T07:17:00.001-07:00

I often ask myself what the role of Art is. By Art I mean, Music, Drawing, Writing, Dance… and all the other ones I left out. That art has, or at least can have, a role as social commentary is, I would say, widely recognised and has been for a good while; Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro has strong subversive messages and caused a stir in the pre-revolutionary years in Europe[1]. But this is an abstract application of Art; imagine that tomorrow we awoke in a sort of utopia, would art need to be subversive or have a function as social commentary?

To narrow the question; is art a product? Does it have value? I think you have to look at the process, at how art is made, to start thinking about this…

All Art starts with an idea in somebody’s head. But the idea, good or bad, only becomes art when the idea is communicated. If a person, anybody, has a great idea and does nothing with it, they produces nothing… except perhaps a smile at their own cleverness… or whatever…

The moment that person ‘puts pen to paper’ the artist is no different to the artisan in that a product – a song, a sculpture, a sonnet - is created… the problem is whether or not the artistic product is ‘socially valuable’, meaning, is the commodity produced using socially necessary labour time… [2]The work of an Artisan, say a shoe-maker, cook or carpenter, is more easily assessable in terms of its value, because shoes, food and tables are all socially necessary commodities… but is a poem or (even more ephemeral) a dance socially necessary?

My friend is a postie; this is what he gets paid for and so is his ‘work’. What he doesn’t get paid for is his Art… accordingly he doesn’t see his Art as work… Work, as me and my friend the Postie understand the concept, is only those activities that somebody gets paid to do… but, if that’s true, what is the other stuff we spend time on… My friend has folder upon folder of his, well, work… I have many albums and have played many songs… and remember that these things are just the finished product, the commodity… what are we to make of the hundreds and thousands of hours of preparation, experimentation and development that occur prior to the production of any completed, final commodity?

We can understand that Art is work only if we accept that ‘work’ is not the bastardised concept of paid labour. Art is work because it is socially valuable, and it socially valuable because, as I mentioned earlier, the second an Artist puts an idea into a medium whereby that idea is transferred to another mind, the artist implicitly assigns a level of value to the idea, they implicitly deem that idea to be socially valuable because they have not just left the idea to dissipate within the confines of their own skull…

More importantly, the socially valuable commodity may not in itself be just the final piece of Art… the process of developing ‘artistic’ skills in itself may be valuable because it can encourage the development of personality traits which are crucially valuable to society… it is implicitly assumed that people are born with this or that personality, but it is not controversial to suggest that many factors affect personalities and thus their involvement and participation in society… similarly, it is not controversial to suggest that Art enriches personalities, encourages plurality of voice and diversity of expression, which have all sorts of valuable applications within society…

So, role of Art as ‘work’ is clear, as it has the socially valuable productive capacity to produce politically participative and socially engaged personalities; and as George Orwell noted, “The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.”[3]

[1] http://www.marxist.com/figaro-french-revolution-mozart.htm
[2] http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-47456667828483188&ei=2d1uStuGGpSt-AachoFM&q=david+harvey+capital&hl=en-GB

[3] http://www.george-orwell.org/Why_I_Write/0.html

What fun are festivals?

2009-07-22T08:09:00.000-07:00

My sister came back from the Latitude festival the other night and tried to tell me all about it knowing full well that I am opposed to ‘Fun’ in general (being an anti-fun activist) and have a special place in my seething for festivals.

To my mind there is nothing so bastardised and depraved as the vulgar obscenity that is the modern festival… a slight exaggeration perhaps, but my point I clear enough…

‘But it’s just about having a good time,’ says my sister – who is great, for the record.

Shuddering I try and explain what I cannot; it is bastardised because it is removed from its origins in rebellion against establishment music norms and its celebration of the ‘alternative’ and the maligned ‘Other’.

And it is depraved because the ‘fun’ comes at a price that we don’t know that we are paying… or to better describe this depravity, I’ll steal Zizek’s analysis of Donald Rumsfeld theory of Knowledge… Rumsfeld is famous for his 3 points of intelligence:

1)There are the things we know we know…

2)There are the things we know we don’t know…

3) There are the things we don’t know that we don’t know…

Slavoj Zizek points out that there is a missing fourth point… the things we don’t know that we know… and these things are the basis, he says, for ideology.

So, the ‘fun’ we have at a festival comes at a great price… the highest of which is a price we don’t know we pay… or rather we don’t know that we know it… all those unspoken prejudices we most definitely have…

The wealth accumulated from centuries of colonial tyranny allows us to pay for the portaloos and the plastic cups, burger vans and their generators… not to mention the mass squandering of energy to pump decibels, by the thousand, of meaningless, dull, safe noise into the universe… and for anyone to suggest that it is all for any other reason than corporate profit is to explicitly demonstrate their own ideological conditioning…

The unthinking acceptance of an experience handed out, doled out for common consumption in turn silently reinforces and consolidates the insane sociological construct that festivals are without consequence… the unknown awareness that by congregating in groups of thousands and thousands, participating in a crazy orgy of consumption, we are all good people, having fun, doing no harm…

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am the most disgraceful of hypocrits… I am a musician and have played some small festivals. It’s just a bit a sad to see how we, youthful and potent, can so readily let the wool fall, slip over our eyes… no pulling needed…

Pickets Please!

2009-07-20T04:32:00.000-07:00

On the 10th of July the Drivers of the ‘First’ bus company in South Yorkshire (Rotherham, Sheffield and Doncaster) held a 24 hour strike, which was superficially based on the pay freeze policy of the First company. A pay freeze is not as tame as it sounds; in the face of rising costs of fuels and food, a pay freeze is a pay cut.

But that is by the by…

It was early; well, 0730. The buses were off, so to get down to the picket line I was peddling my mates bike that I had liberated from his back room a couple of week earlier. It took me about 15 minutes to get to the Rotherham Bus Depot, and as I wheeled round the corner, I saw between 50 and 100 folks gathered at the entrance of the depot, a few banners up and a gaggle of Hi-Viz. types here and there.

Dismounting, I walked up to a group sat on the damp grass. Smiling, I said hello, that I was here to ‘help out’ if they didn’t mind. Frowning, they said I could help myself and dismissed me. My middle class ideas about working class solidarity somewhat wobbling, I pushed my mates bike to a little corner under an overgrown elderberry bush spewing from within the depot. I had a minute to regroup and then decided I’d go and have a word with the official looking types…

I walked up to the small group of Hi Viz-ers, seated, joking and clutching warm flasks. I greeted them, said hello, that I was here in solidarity and support of their cause, and, if they didn’t mind awfully, I’d join in and be sat over there… Looking about as unimpressed as politeness would allow, one asked;

“You’re not an agitator are you?”

Despite having no idea what an agitator was, nor why I would be one, I laughed a ‘of course I’m not’ laugh and walked away with as much conviction as I could pretend to have…

I stood in my corner and watched supply vans stop at the picket line, chat with the union representatives and turn round and drive off. I watched cars go by honking in support… and I watched the drivers watching me, suspicious and intrigued… it took them about an hour to send one of the younger drivers over to sound me out… a cagey lot, bus Drivers…

I stood in my corner for about 2 and a half hours. By the end I had new mates. They told me about their jobs, about their cars. They told me about their bosses. They told me about a dude who had been a driver for 36 years and after returning 2 minutes early on a round, was sacked. They told me about the manager caught screwing on duty; about how certain conductors would clock in late and clock out early, and the intimidation of junior employees when they threatened to report the conduct of the conductors…

…this strike, I found out, was about much more than wages… as strikes usually are, when you bother to ignore the corporatist line about profit, recession and cut backs, and spend time to find out about what the people on strike are talking about… there have been loads of strikes this year, across the worker spectrum… there’ll be more…

...remember to bring flasks and raincoats…

The unemployed and unemployability...

2009-07-13T05:21:00.000-07:00

Being unemployed I have that horrific process constantly looming overhead… the process that makes you subjugate what you probably are and could be, ultimately leading to cash at the expense of work… I am looking for a job… I am a job seeker… this is what I am…

I applied for a job; there was a place, essentially a receptionist, at an R&B radio station in London – 20 to 22 grand a year… so I done sent ‘em a CV and an application and all… I thought I had a good enough chance; I’ve worked at a music academy, I am a musician – kind of, and I’ve used a phone in my life… fair dos…

Suffice to say I didn’t get the job, which was not much of a surprise – can’t say I was banking on it like… what was unexpected was that when I mention that I didn’t even get shortlisted for the job, there is always someone ready with the phrase; “Ah well, you see, you’re too qualified…” I have an average degree…

Anyway… a few days later I get a letter from the dole office:
“Dear National Insurance Number,
To assist you in your search for work and improve your prospects of finding a job, I am directing you to take the action stated below:
To attend a Back to Work session…”
…Perhaps I’m not as ‘over-qualified’ as other might have you think…

The last time I crawled into the Job centre my ‘signing officer’ or whatever-you-call-em said: “Oh, Mr. B. sez here on your profile that you’re interested in Bar Work”. I suggested that ‘interested’ may be a little too strong a word for my exact feeling, but the sentiment was close enough…
“Well Mr B. the computer sez that there’s a job in a pub just near your house…” – Well you print that sucker off, says I… now, this ‘job’ turned out to be, well, not really a job… on the dole I get around 64 squids a week. This ‘job’ was a 10 hour a week effort at £5.80 an hour… etc…

I was speaking to a fellah, 24, kid, car, flat, missus… he was a forklift truck driver, which ain’t the most skilled in the world, but you can’t just hop on one of those babies and just get on with it… you need training and a licence… well my man, he had these things… but no job. He explained to me that this suited him fine; as things stood, he could claim for financial assistance for rent, child care and the dole… as things stood, he could feed his kid, sleep at night in his own bed and get on well enough…

…as we were talking a lass came up to us and told us how much she hated dole-scroungers… My man then explained that if he was ‘lucky’ enough to get a job he would be significantly poorer… he would have to pay rent, he would have to pay for child care, he would have to pay all his utility bills… which, he went on, would be one thing; but explaining to his son that eating was a bit of luxury tended not to go down well with the hungry belly of a child…

I have heard many times recently that there are no jobs… that there is no work… but these phrases need translating. Job. Work. These words, as they are used within the doctrinal establishment, mean only those things you get paid for and as such, therefore, work and jobs are only things that other people are willing to pay for…

But mentally restore and reinvigorate the ideas of ‘Jobs’ and of ‘Work’ for yourself, then take one look outside your window… is it true that there is no ‘work’ that needs doing? Is it the case that are there no jobs that need carrying out?

Auntie knows best...

2009-07-02T06:11:00.000-07:00

Last night’s BBC Newsnight programme[1] aired a report and discussion of Iranian news broadcaster Press TV[2] announcing that Press TV was being investigated by OFCOM[3] to discover whether the channel “had broken the rules which expect a fair degree of accuracy and impartiality” over reporting of the Iranian elections.

The report explained that Press TV, the “Iran[ian] state funded international television service”, “the voice of the Tehran regime” was “set up to challenge western media outlets” naming no names of course. It noted that the Gaza Massacre – which the BBC chose to describe as a war and a conflict – “drew viewers to emerging media outlets in the UK including Press TV because of perceptions of bias among some more established sources” again, naming no names.

Press TV had recruited a “menagerie of presenters” and “motormouthed British broadcasters” including “Andrew ‘sexed-up’ Gilligan” and “colourful politicians” Derek Conway and George Galloway, who work from a “somewhat non-descript office block” “near the North Circular road in West London” and not, surprisingly, from a Mosque or some secret mountain lair…

These mysterious “western media outlets” and these “more established sources”, like Press TV, were not able to cover “the post election unrest” satisfactorily. Thankfully the events were reported “by the BBC and other media… [pause] though earlier [Press TV] coverage had been reasonably fair”; all this without a sense of humility that only the night before Newsnight had run a feature on the coverage of the Iran elections and “post-election unrest” by Twitter.com and Youtube.com, filtered by the likes of the Huffington Post, asking whether we were seeing the end of ‘professional journalism’ and the ‘coming of age of citizen journalism’

But who are the “many, or perhaps several viewers” of Press TV who dared to venture elsewhere for news… Of course, they were those Muslims… in an interview with Ahmed Versi , the editor of The Muslim News, Muslims are cynical of mainstream news reporting, especially regarding the recent Gaza Massacre. And when asked whether it was only a few Muslims who felt thus, the shocking reply was that “No, it’s a mainstream view in the Muslims community”. Good job no white, no Muslims Brits have the heretical idea that the BBC was guilty of bias… not one…

From Paxman’s – who, it should by now be acknowledged, must be ousted for being the reactionary bozo he is – sneering belittlements, the arrogant comments about Press TV’s “several” viewers, to the outrageous claim that the BBC had “reported” on the “post election unrest” and the exclusive remarks about “western media sources” it will take a really educated and decent citizen to ignore the sheer weight of bias and vitriol displayed here. The BBC actually quoted the “OFCOM BROADCASTING CODE – To ensure that news, in whatever form, is reported with due accuracy and presented with due impartiality…”

…to quote Bill Hicks – “Jesus! What Balls!”

Concerning the recurring topic of the Israeli-Palestinian ‘conflict’, studies carried out by Glasgow University Media[4] group show public perception of the situation is heavily distorted by mainstream news broadcasters, prominently including the BBC. The BBC recently refused to broadcast an appeal for humanitarian support for Gaza, during the massacre; it took a defiant Tony Benn[5] to force the issue upon the airwaves.

Now, I watch Press TV, and it carries stories that the BBC wouldn’t dare carry; challenging reports on the Af-Pak war; debates featuring the likes of Norman Finkelstein[6] and Phylis Bennis[7]; programmes covering the hugely important Hope Fleet – Free Gaza movement[8] [9], which featured Yvonne Ridley[10], as well as extensive coverage on Latin American Indians, Native North Americans, Africa and the nigh on obliterated Australian Aborigines…

It isn’t the best, least biased, most professional, most impartial and accurate news broadcaster in the world… but the BBC isn’t either, by a LONG way, and would do well to drop the enraging, racist, imperialist pretence… The report suggested that journalists working for Press TV “should consider their positions”… and what about BBC reporters?

[1] http://bbc.co.uk/i/lj68p/?t=34m44s
[2] http://www.presstv.ir/
[3] http://www.ofcom.org.uk/
[4] http://www.gla.ac.uk/centres/mediagroup/
[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E21MdXe3BOQ
[6] http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/
[7] http://www.zmag.org/zspace/phyllisbennis
[8] www.freegaza.org – don’t be surprised if this site is down…
[9] http://twitter.com/freegazaorg - follow the progress of the detained activists
[10] http://www.yvonneridley.org/

...the popular front? he's over there...Splitter!!!

2009-06-30T06:07:00.000-07:00

According to that utterly infallible catacomb of knowledge, Wikipedia, the ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ wings are understood thus:

Firstly these terms come from the French Revolution; people with similar political ideas gathering on the corresponding side of the French Parliament chamber

...the ‘Left’ is considered to be those“positions that focus on changing traditional social orders and creating a more egalitarian distribution of wealth and privilege” and “is usually associated with change, equality, collectivism and the common ownership of the resources.”[1]

…the ‘Right’ is considered to be those “positions that focus on preserving traditional or cultural values and customs and maintaining some form of social hierarchy” and is associated “with tradition, individualism, liberty and free enterprise.”[2]

…Now that’s all cleared up, let’s begin…

In the past couple of months or so I’ve been getting my politics on and I have found myself to be on the Left of things; I am disgusted by the idea that I should have to work to earn money to live, don’t think that bosses are all that legitimate and that more gay men should get off with each other in public…

But, things are not going swimmingly… the biggest problem seems to be one of organisation… The matter of organisation is an important one because whilst we, the Left, debate whether or not we should give each other orders, the Right cracks on, organises, radicalises and makes progress, for the very simple reason that the Right is inherently sympathetic to hierarchy and leaders.

... remember the recent Euro elections where Right wing parties made gains everywhere?... how? For a start, hardly anyone voted,[3] but it was mentioned a few times[4] that it was because of the Right parties ‘sounding’ Left-ist… can you imagine anyone ‘sounding’ Right-ist in the middle of a global recession getting a single vote?

…a ruthless use of tactics, no more no less…

…several things have popped up that have brought these questions into my consciousness… first - the question of joining a political party; should a person do it?

… I have been working with, but haven’t joined, the Socialist Party[5]; I have not joined because I don’t know if I want to be affiliated with any one Party… I don’t like the idea of having a ‘party line’; I haven’t put in a great deal of thought, it’s just a gut thing… but on the other hand, it would probably serve my own cause better to fully affiliate with this group who I already participate with, and get a more consolidated platform with more support…

Secondly, I have joined the Project for a Participatory Society – UK (PPSUK)[6], and started a Rotherham chapter… It’s not a big group, with around 200 members, of whom only about half, it is estimated, actually contributing and active… however, already within this movement, that is described by one of its chief proponents, Michael Albert, as “basically an anarchistic economic vision that eliminates fixed hierarchy and delivers self-management”[7], there are discussions about setting up some kind of national decision making body…

…and there is even talk elsewhere of the Left considering a World Government![8]

I’m not saying the Left should not organise itelf, but how do you do that? Like, how are you supposed to organise something, which has inherent sympathy with non-organisational and anti-hierarchical notions …

So here’s what I think!

Seems to me that the role of Leftist organisations is to provide encouragement for popular activism and localised action; be it how to set up a credit union or what-not-to-do when getting arrested for civil disobedience…

…tactics… information… examples of successfully implemented ideas… errr… information on tax resistance… how to make hold a public meeting… support for strikers… and of course, pictures of gay dudes going for it…

What I think I’m getting at, albeit rather in a disfigured, semi-literate way, is that where the Right tells people what to do, the Left should show people that what they want is theirs for the taking and provide resources, information and encouraging examples to that end…

…and the more gay men the better… Muslim gays if possible… from Poland…

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_wing
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_wing
[3] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8088309.stm
[4] Heard it on the news at the time, but can’t find any references… help would be appreciated…
[5] http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/
[6] http://www.ppsuk.org.uk/
[7] http://www.zmag.org/zparecon/pareconlac.htm - chapter 19; Individuals/Society
[8] http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/21796 - see comment.

What you already know...

2009-06-29T07:32:00.000-07:00

Who knows? Recession… Crinancial Fisis… Is it getting better? Are we going to die? How many pints will a dole cheque buy next month? Who… Fucking… Knows… it’s all so complicated and oooooh scary isn’t it?

I went to a bit of a meeting in Sheffield last week where we had a bit of a discussion about this here… err, bailout/recession thing… What happened was one of us gave a bit of a talk about it, saying words like ‘inflation’, ‘deficit’ and ‘interest rates’ – words which I nodded at, like I knew what they meant – and then we all had a bit of a chance to talk about it and ask questions…

…and I had a few…

Apparently, ‘deficit’ means the amount of money the government – which means the people who live in the UK – owe… the size of government debt… now, I had to ask, who do we/the government owe money to? Why do we have to borrow money for things we need? How can it be, thought I, that there is this pan-galactic, universe collapsing cash flow issue, but there are still people to borrow money off?

More to the point… where does all this money come from?

Turns out, governments can borrow money from anything… people, businesses, other governments… basically, if someone has got a piece of paper that say they ‘own’ lots of things, a piece of paper that say they have sole access to certain resources, they can choose to allow others to have a go one their resources, so long as they pay…

…so; the government/we owe money to people/things who have money to lend… but these people/things don’t have big piles of gold that they sit on… no… people/things with ‘money’ are people/things with bits of paper that say that whosoever has hold of said bits of a paper are allowed to divvy up the world’s resources… it’s that simple… and I think this is a bit mental… cos we are at the mercy of these fuckers!

Second question; We are borrowing billions of money, from ‘them’, and are giving it to banks because we’ll die if we don’t… okay… but why don’t we give money to people who are getting booted out of their homes because they can’t afford payments to bank? Why don’t they give me a load of cash?

I mean, it sounds silly, but think about it… let’s use a number… err… 500 billions pounds[1]… sound about right[2]… and let’ say that there are 61 million of us in the UK[3] and that we all got a equal share of that cash, we’d all be about £8,196.72p better off… I think…

…that’s how much money we are talking about…

So why not just give it to people who need it? There are, it is reckoned, about 65,000 homes that will have their families, workers, lovers, eaters and sleepers[4] kicked out THIS YEAR… there are loads of folk losing jobs[5]… Why not give them poor fuckers some cash, I asked? My mate is in a bit of debt, but he’s dropped on recently and went to his debtors and asked him if he could pay off his credit card… they told him, no…

The reason my mate still has debt, the reason why money isn’t going to people who are having their homes repossessed is because if that happen, ‘they’ (the super rich, corporatist elite – the ones with the bits of paper) wouldn’t have us by the balls… we’ll owe them nothing, we’ll be considerably freer to run our own affairs…

…then how on earth do you suppose ‘they’ make money then?

So; this ‘crisis’ is not so complicated after all… and we all know it…

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_(word) … I’m going to use 'short scale'; so 500 billion is 500,000,000,000
[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/08/marketturmoil.creditcrunch
[3] http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?ID=6
[4] http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssFinancialServicesAndRealEstateNews/idUSLM41800420090622
[5] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8118584.stm

Principessa

2009-06-26T07:38:00.000-07:00

…he lay across his bed, a loose sheet of lined paper, ringed with tea, crinkled and crumpled, flat on a music theory for beginners book… he was making a list of things he needed to do the next day. He was agitated… he had a feeling like he was being watched…

…three days…

…had passed since he had spent the day with her… she told him that she loved him and he told her that he loved her…

…three days…

- Write story
- Sign on
- No Spliff!!!

… three exclamation marks… it was serious…

He had stopped drinking; he needed a clear head. He looked at the piece of paper, his eyes saw the 10-bullet-point list of things he knew he would shirk…his pencil, poked at the paper, started scratching… little tiny hoops… threading round each other… the pencil stated to dash marks suggesting eyes, nose and mouth…the loops began to look more like hair… the image had been spontaneously created…

…in a few seconds he had drawn a face… her face…

In a few tiny centimetres of paper he had her with him, looking at him…

…quickly, he erased the little face… but still, he felt like he was being watched…

- for SKR