Practically Insurgent

our bleak future

2011-03-31T00:43:00.000-07:00

Some of you came away from the demonstration on Saturday all hopeful and that. Then you got home and decided that the anarchists had all ruined it by being all violent and that. You got your denounce and condemnathon on, thus reinforcing the media narrative that the march was marred by ultra-violence and therefore the main problem is how violent all these extremists are.

You're wrong though. In fact, it was you guys that ruined March 26th. That's right, you bastards, peacefully walking around and then listening to Brendan and Ed on the platform, politely applauding, you ruined everything.

Because, you know what's going to happen now? This scumbag government, this bunch of thieving, lying, spiteful evil bastards, they'll get steadily less and less popular over the years. They might have a few high points, if they invade somewhere, or we pull out of the recession, but, eventually, they'll end up being incredibly unpopular. We'll have another election, and guess what, the other bunch of thieving, lying, spiteful evil bastards will win.

And by that time, it'll be too late. They'll have pushed through their latest expropriation of public assets, and they'll be gone. The process of ransacking the country and turning it over to the financial sector will be a bit more advanced. The new government of thieving, lying, spiteful evil bastards won't reverse it. Just like they didn't reverse the damage that Thatcher's thieving, lying, spiteful evil government did. It'll all stay there. It'll be there forever.

Because all three groups of thieving, lying, spiteful evil bastards worship at the same altar of neoliberal capitalism, and it's a dogma, it's a dogma that doesn't suffer heresy. You follow the words to the letter: you liberalise, you cut regulation, you privatise, you cut services, you cut taxes, you take away rights and keep people down. You do it faster or slower depending on the circumstances, but it's a process and they're all signed up.

So that's what'll happen, we'll peacefully march from A to B to various rallies, and in the end, we'll get to where Eddy M wants us to be, so desperate for an end to Tory government that we'll agree to anything to get the neoliberal Labour Party back into power.

Because you're angry. You're angry at the cuts and at the Tories. But you're not angry at the past 30 years of economic policy and you're not angry at the 13 years of Labour government. You're not angry at the whole political class for systematically turning the country - the world - over to high finance. You're certainly not going to demonstrate your anger (as opposed to your disapproval) by resisting (as opposed to demonstrating said disapproval).

And what you will end up with is another neoliberal government, managing the process of neoliberalism.

still not getting it

2011-02-24T13:43:00.000-08:00

How is it that after 13 years, after 13 bloody years, of Labour government, some people still don't get it?

So recently we've had a few rather excitable actions which have brought down a whole heap of condemnation on the more out there bits of the far left (or are one person, put it rhetorically, "enemies of the Labour movement?"); kettling the head of NUS for basically being pro-fees and pro-education cuts, occupying council meetings in protest at Labour councillors cutting services and protesting TUC chief Brendan Barber, apparently for not calling a general strike.

Cue much wailing and moaning about sectarianism, and the "infantile ultra-left". Now, all of these people, Labour loyalists to a man/woman, stood with that Labour government for 13 years (not Porter, too young). You remember that Labour government? The one that introduced PFI to every part of the public sector, that opened the door that the Tories are walking through? The one that presided over widening social inequality, that stood by as it got comfortable with the filthy rich, that left the anti-trade union laws as they were, that sat on its hands as the financial sector took over the country, that enabled massive tax avoidance by the rich, that started the demonisation of the unemployed and the sick, that put together a myriad of plans to victimise, humiliate and attack them. Yeah, THAT Labour Party.

They stood with that Labour Party, and they supported it, they gave it money, and they tried to make all of us vote for it. That Labour Party, the one that to this day, has only one serious gripe with Tory policy, the pace and depth of the cuts. The Labour Party that to this day, has no principled objection to privatisation (how could it?), nor any serious proposal even for reducing the influence of the finance sector over public policy and economic development.

All of these people are bureaucrats in that party. That party that sat down and chose its leaders, and chose its MPs, and returned people who are, undeniably, representatives of the very same class that has brought this country to its present situation, the situation that this country is essentially at the service of international finance.

Now you say, Jack, "representatives of the ruling class", it all sounds a bit sectarian and ultra-left! A bit serious-face, ranty marxist. But until we all get our heads around the fact that our political class, our entire political class, is composed largely of people just waiting for their turn to manage the status quo - that our interests, that any radically different future for us, is off the table - we'll continue to go round and round in demented circles.

There are people essentially pumping out the message that we just need to wait until the Tories are out, and it's "our" turn again. That when Labour get back in, everything will be fine again. That the opposition should be just enough to embarrass the Tories, but not enough to challenge the heavenly capitalist democracy we live under.

And fine, you say, a Labour government is the best we can possibly hope for. It might well be. But there's a difference between a Labour government taking power over a country that's angry, seething and desperate for change, and a Labour government taking their turn after we've all patiently waited.

I don't know if the attacks on Porter, Barber and the Labour councillors were great strategy or not, whether they'll have the effect they were supposed to. But I sure as hell would prefer that Labour Party officials and union bureaucrats knew that there are people out there with expectations, grievances and the will to press them, than not. Whatever the particularities of those actions, these people are "fair game" and centrists should stop being so precious about being challenged on the actual reality of their credentials.

privatisation as a form of insanity

2011-02-21T02:00:00.000-08:00

There's a rather clichéd definition of insanity that runs like this: insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results. I feel like it is completely apt for Cameron's latest public policy pronouncement, in which he basically states that the private sector should be assumed to be better unless proven otherwise.

As anyone who gives enough of a shit to check can tell you, the history of public sector privatisation argues exactly the opposite. So rubbish (for service users and workers) have these policies been that the assumption should be that they will always be terrible unless proven otherwise.

Do I really need to even list the examples? The railways, 50% more expensive than in the rest of Europe (in 2009), still subsidised and the odd (unprecedented) massive accident. The privatisation of utility companies resulted in rising levels of fuel poverty. The outsourcing of various services in our hospitals resulted in higher costs, lower wages and poorer service provision.

It's a really simple concept to get your head round. If you give a private company 100m to run a service, it wants as much of that money as possible to finish up in their shareholders pocket. If you give it to a public institution it spends every penny on the service. For the private company to turn a profit, it has to spend less on the service or charge more for it. Why, logically, would you expect it to give better value for money? Why?

tiki-taka my arse

2011-02-10T00:41:00.000-08:00

The headline in today's "20 minutos" read "victoria sí, tiki-taka no" for Spain's just barely home win over Colombia. Apparently Spain managing to sneak a win without playing well was wholly out-of-character.

Unless of course you actually watched Spain in the world cup without a pair of red and yellow specs, your shirt off and "VILLA MARAVILLA" written in body paint on your stomach. Then, whisper it, but Marquis Vicente del Bosque's Spain are a monumentally boring team to watch.

But Spain are a magnificent passing team, I hear you cry, with Iniesta and Xavi pulling the strings and flair players like Silva, Torres, Villa! The players are certainly there, which is why it beggars belief that Del Bosque's chosen style is a brand of passing football that stylistically is about as impressive as Sam Allardyce's Blackburn.

The mere fact of keeping possession and stringing together passes doesn't make a team exciting, nor attacking. In the case of Spain their addiction to stringing together endless passes in un-threatening areas of the pitch, their abject terror at the prospect of ever doing something that might lose them the ball might make them effective but it certainly doesn't set the pulse racing.

TIKI-TAKA, the ideal that certainly describes Guardiola's Barcelona and described Luís Aragones ' European Champions, has been turned into a monstrously slow way to kill games, as opponents are gradually lulled to sleep by the TIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIK-IIIIIIIIIIII-TAAAAAAAAAAK-AAAAAAAAAA of the world champions.

This was certainly par for the course for "La Furia Roja" (more, "El Pequeño Molesto Roja"), who had a world cup that consisted of struggling to overcome limited opposition, and failing to do so in the event that said opponents scored first and they were expected to chase a game, then game-killing against good teams (their semi and final were dire affairs).

Spain fans awaiting the return of some fictitious attacking, élan and flair filled national teams, will be waiting a long time. It'll feel like even longer as they watch all those pretty passing exchanges on the half-way line.

the right to starve in freedom

2011-02-02T01:11:00.000-08:00

There is a very simple explanation for the uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East. People don't like living under dictatorships and they want political freedom. What they want are liberal democracies on the European model, where they have basic civil liberties like freedom of association, free elections, free speech and freedom of the press.

Except that's a crap explanation, isn't it? People tolerate dictatorships all the time. They spend years and years making totally logical decisions that show they aren't actually that bothered by political freedom, in fact. Not just that they can't mount the force to overthrow the guy in charge, but also that they stay in the country, they get on with their lives. Imagine yourself as a middle class person in a prosperous dictatorship. You go to work, you earn money, you can buy things and you go home and enjoy those things. Like a lot of people all over the world, you're not especially interested in politics, so you get on with your life and keep your nose clean. So, you just get on with your life. In fact, you do what most people in the developed world do when their civil liberties are threatened, which is, essentially ignore it, unless you form part of a the political motivated activist minority. It's this principle that's kept the likes of Mubarak and Ben Ali in power all these years; that 99% of the time the best thing to do personally under a dictatorship is to ignore it.

So, a lack of political freedom is a terrible thing, but if you have to live with it, you live with it. On the other hand, something you absolutely can't live with, is lacking the ability to make a living. That directly affects your ability to get by, to exist, to live in the day to day. It's no coincidence that this is happening during an economic recession. Unemployment rises, prices rise, the value of wages falls, state assistance decreases. People see other people in the same situations, and the see the people running the country continuing to prosper (because they're always prospering!). The lack of freedom, the lack of right to get angry at these bastards starts to pick at you that much more. It overcomes your impulse to keep quiet, to keep your head down, to get on with your life. Then all it takes is the realisation that we have the power to change all this.

So, their might be some people, comfortably off, who are just liberal-minded, who want a democratically elected government that will keep them prosperous. But for the majority, want they want is a change. Now a change in this sense doesn't mean that you leave the country as it is but dismantle the police state. It means that the new government needs to improve the people's lives in a material way, not just give them civil liberties.

People like this guy will tell you that political liberalisation brings economic liberalisation and prosperity for all:

"The street protests in Tunisia and elsewhere in the region are momentous not just for the Arab world but have the potential to foreshadow a brighter economic future for the globe. The protesters' basic message is not to stifle the economic aspirations of the younger gener"ation, especially one as well-educated as Tunisia's. Shackle them at your own peril.
While Arab governments correctly interpret this cry for change as predominantly driven by economic hardship, their responses are unfortunately misdirected. Kuwait is giving its citizens free food rations and a grant of $4,000. Other governments have announced that they, too, plan to allocate millions of dollars to the poor; and Arab leaders are rushing to set up a $2 billion fund to support their economies. These measures won't save them."
So this neoliberal sees Tunisia's revolution as enabling the country to better manage capitalism and create more jobs. It sees the dictatorship as "stifling the economic aspirations of the younger generation".

He goes on to recommend:

"Establish a mechanism to get uncollateralized credit for those small-business owners who, by skill or by luck, have created the most productive job opportunities. That would fuel economic growth and undermine the corrupt old boys' comfortable monopolies. And it would make room for a new generation of entrepreneurs in areas such as food distribution, machining, construction, equipment and parts fabrication, retailing, power distribution, transportation, communications—and, yes, media."

This, obviously, is a fantasy land that offers nothing to the vast majority of people overthrowing governments in developing countries. What this guy is arguing is basically that countries where a very substantial proportion of the population live in abject poverty should retain the economic system that put them there, and strengthen the neo-liberal tendency that leads to widening inequality, that is the tendency that is pushing down wages and living standards in developed countries as we speak. He's asking them to patiently accept their poverty for the time being, promising that economic liberalisation might lead them to prosperity in decades or even generations time. That is, assuming that the corruption among the dominant classes can even be dealt with, without dispossessing the existing capitalist class that enriched itself under Ben Ali. Finally, it merits fairly serious attention that no one from the IMF/World Bank/the US Treasury or the European Commission was going around telling these governments that their economic policies were a problem (the exact opposite in fact), it seems convenient that these countries are apparently too economically illiberal as soon as their government falls over.

If the hopes of liberals come to fruition the peoples of these regions day-to-day problems they will have to live with. The problems that they actually want solved above all else will have to let go, and they will have to accept that the end of the police state is all that democrats should aspire to. It is not a forecast that holds much promise. Developing world countries that have liberated themselves from oppression seldom find themselves joining the rich world as a consequence. As in South Africa, Brazil and in many other countries all over the world, populations find that they can't eat liberal civil society. That they continue to be exploited, to be impoverished, to starve and to die for the same reasons as before.

South Africa in particular serves as a model for what "peaceful transition" means in reality. Before apartheid fell there was a quite strong fear that years of racist oppression and exploitation would result in a fierce backlash by the African community toward the white population. What in fact was negotiated, by ANC political leaders desperate to end years of political repression, was a "peaceful transition" that not only guaranteed the basic civil rights and physical safety of white South Africans, but also that existing property relations would remain essentially untouched, maintaining the economic basis of apartheid.

Sure enough the result was that post-apartheid South Africa retained its social divisions, to the detriment of community relations and any attempt to heal ethnic tension. In fact, as the global economy was now opened up to South African companies, and the government ushered in an era of neo-liberalism, social inequality and poverty actually got worse in post-apartheid South Africa something that should (but doesn't particularly) shame the ANC. As far as the political mainstream is concerned this is the limits of freedom, the right to be poor under an elected government.

Any survey of economic development and poverty over the past 30 years wouldn't particularly illustrate that liberal political institutions are any more conducive to alleviating actual social problems than authoritarian ones (in fact a look at the post-soviet block would actually show you the opposite was true). The reality is that for the working classes, overthrowing a dictator often seems to offer only the right to complain about starving, rather than an end to the starvation itself. You have to wonder if that really is what people in Egypt and Tunisia have given their lives for.

neoliberals, privatisation and magic

2011-01-31T11:13:00.000-08:00

David Cameron: "If you look at the growth of the elderly population, look at the new drugs that are coming on stream, the new treatments, if we keep the system we have now and don't make changes to cut bureaucracy and waste, I think it will become increasingly unaffordable"

Labour, Lib Dems and the Conservatives have spent decades associating privatisation with efficiency, and the public sector with bureaucracy and waste. It is such a well-worn trick that at this point nobody even asks them what the fuck bureaucracy and waste has to do with bringing in the private sector. There's no demand for statistics or proof that the private=efficient, public=wasteful idea is actually true, nor even for some sort of theory as to why it might be. It has become an unchallengeable assumption among the political class that it is true and uncontestable.

But it's a completely counter-intuitive theory if you give it even a moment's thought. Organisations, private or public always have inefficiencies, things that need to be fixed about their management structure, their ways of operating. That's inevitable. There are plenty of large, successful businesses that waste money and time on things that don't fulfil their primary purposes. That's life, we're people, not machines. There's nothing inherent about operating for profit that makes you more efficient at providing a public service for a low cost.

In fact the only difference is that operating for profit really makes is that it changes the goals of your organisation. The goal of a public institution is pretty simple. It is supposed to provide the public with the best possible service, making the best use of the resources available to it. In doing this it should make policy decisions in line with what things that are most important for its service users. So for example, the NHS is not going to spend billions of pounds on deluxe rooms for all its patients that would leave it short of money for important operations.

The goal of a private, for-profit public institution is different. It's aim is to maximise profit. Nothing else. Full stop. Maximise profit. There are no other goals. Now, this does not always result in poor service or high prices, sometimes maximising profit involves attracting clients, which means you have to reduce prices or improve service. But the overall aim of the organisation is that the greatest proportion possible of their income is profit. That is, a private institution will always actively try to take money out of the system, rather than actively trying to spend that money on care.

So, your bet, if you are a privatiser, is that the motivation to make money is so efficient, that not only will it enable the private provider to take as much money out of the system as they possibly can, that competition will make them so much more efficient that this will also reduce the cost of providing the same (or better!) service. It's a gamble that firstly there is so much fixable inefficiency in the system that fixing it will allow the companies to generate a profit, and secondly that the competition for the healthcare market will be so fierce that it will force down costs, without affecting service. Oh, and you also have to hope that healthcare companies won't take the easy way out and just take their cut from workers, patients or by reducing the quality of services.

Now there is not one case of a privatisation of a public service improving service and reducing costs in the history of this country (trains nope, utilities nope). The US system, based on this principle, is much more expensive and much less effective than its European equivalents. So, you'd have to have pretty compelling evidence to present to convince people that there was a case for it here. Which the Tories don't have and aren't bothering to make.

The logical, common-sense thing to do here, if the NHS does have massive institutional problems (also unevidenced by the coalition), would be to fix them in the NHS as it is, without trying to magically find simultaneously both money for profits, money for improvements and efficiency savings all at the same time.

Zeitgeist and other stories

2011-01-31T10:37:00.000-08:00

Re-blogging of something I wrote in 2009 on Zeitgeist / The Venus Project:

A friend of mine recently excitedly pointed me in the direction of Zeitgeist: The Movie, a viral internet phenomenon that has conspiracy-hungry internauts all excited and dropping spam-like links like a little spider-bot army.I missed the first part, which apparently focuses on the fact that the Christian religion is a bunch of lies (fabricated from bits and pieces from preceding religions), and that therefore our current system is also based on lies.

I ended up watching the ´meatier´ Zeitgeist addendum which deals with how the system enslaves us all and what we can do about it. Now, credit to the film-makers, though referencing them, they´ve avoided the major banking conspiracy pitfalls, that is, attributing things to the Jews, the lizards, the illuminati or the Bilderberg Group.Their principal target is the major banking institutions like Citibank and JP Morgan.

It´s good that they´ve avoided this, because the idea that the enslavement of humanity is the result of banks making money out of thin air, putting us all in debt and meaning we all have to work to service debts, is a staple of conspiraloon anti-semite, ufologists. Rather than put on my amateur economists hat, I´ll let other people, just as opposed to capitalism as these Zeitgeist fellas, explain why it´s nonsense:

The booklet explains that US banks are required by law to keep a “fraction” of deposits as “reserves” in its vaults and/or a balance with the Fed, and says:

“For example, if reserves of 20 percent were required, deposits could expand only until they were five times as large as reserves. Reserves of $10 million could support deposits of $50 million” (p. 4).

This is a very misleading way of putting as it could suggest that if banks receive total new deposits of $10 million they can immediately proceed to make loans of four times this. This is not so, and not really what the booklet meant to suggest. What it means is that the banks can immediately lend out only four-fifths of $10 million, or $8 million, and that this circulates throughout the banking system leading in theory to new loans totalling in the end $40 million, bringing total “bank deposits” up to $50 million.

Please note. I´m not citing a pro-capitalist source. These people have no vested interest in the status-quo, nor in preserving the rule of elites. They aren't brainwashed by capitaism, quite the opposite in fact. It's just that they understand economics better than the Zeitgeist people (read it, in full, it´s a really good explanation). Fractional Reserve Banking, far from enslaving is, is simply a limit on the amount of loans that a bank can issue from any given deposits. It's actually a good thing that regulates the banking system.

This is really the crux of the film´s case. From the Federal Reserve fraud conspiracy (a staple of Paulianism too), we move onto IMF loans and coup d´etats in Latin America, and how the secret cabal organised those to maintain control for the bankers (who obviously control the government through campaign contributions). There´s a mixture of the true and the misunderstood in there, which gets us smoothly into the station at SECRET-CABAL-RUNNING-THE-WORLD-UNDER-LYME.

After that we throw in the ´planned-obsolescence´conspiracy that must have been doing the rounds since the beginning of the 20th century at least (coming as the EU bans old-style lightbulbs), and contains the absolutely true idea that we could do more about climate change and scarcity if humanity as a collective actually wanted to, rather than just focusing our efforts on getting by / enriching the minority.

This all ends by advocating utopian technocracy The Venus Project or as they call it a Resource Economy. Then some ideas for joining groups, spreading the word, making converts and boycotting stuff.

Fine. It´s one of the least offensive conspiracy theories I've heard. They've avoided anti-semitism or any of the more ludicrous ideas people have come up with over the years to explain who runs the world.

We are though, still stuck on several points. Firstly, not to the dredge the old man up but, "philosophers have interpreted the world, the point is to change it", it's all very well identifying the evil cabal running the world, but if you´ve no analysis of how social relationships work in society, then you're no closer to breaking them. Your research isn't (as Harry Cleaver says) putting a weapon in people's hands.

Secondly, even if the monetarist conspiracy was true (which it's not), it doesn't explain the historical presence of hierarchy and domination in human society that predates the existence of the banking firms. Feudal domination was a social relationship, just as early capitalism was, and, in reality, modern capitalism is. It's not a trick devised by a small cabal, but how our lives interact with each other, the contested relationships of power between us. Imagine we shut down the federal reserve (and I presume, though the film doesn't make it explicit, the equivalent institutions around the world). What would change? If the principle of private property persisted, we would still be divided into classes. The people who own the things we need to produce, and the ways in which you distribute them, would still be in charge. So, I would still wake up, needing to earn money to survive, which I could only obtain by working for a capitalist.

The trouble with conspiracy theories is that they're all rendered pointless by one fundamental, unarguable element of capitalism. That it is, whatever else you have to say about, positive or negative, a system of elites. It has elitism coded into it´s DNA, from the smallest company, to the largest multinational, from the political system to the culture. It's purpose is to promote elites. It does this legitimately within the logic of the system. It does this publicly, lording super-capitalists like Bill Gates or even for a time, Enron boss Ken Lay. It lays its theories of elitism out for all to see, in policy projects, in university research, through political theorists.

It has no interest in secret cabals, or conspiracies. It has no need for them. It is a system openly, and publicly, run by elites. They might go home at night and secretly dine with their illuminati, lizard-jew, Bilderberg Group friends, and laugh about how they've taken over the world. It doesn't matter to me or you whether they do or not. They are the elite, and we can see who they are and how they live their lives. People know that we live in a system of elites, that acts in its own interests, according to the logic of the society they dominate. Everyone who looks around know this. We don't need internet documentaries to tell us that we're dominated, we just need to go to work, or walk through a posh neighbourhood or have a run-in with any politicians, big businessman or even a celebrity to know that. What we need are weapons, ways of challenging that domination, so maybe we don't have to live under it forever.

All In This Together

2011-01-04T05:37:00.000-08:00

We are all in this together (WAAITT) must be the words that come back to haunt George Osborne. They should be THE slogan on the lips of every activist for the duration of this economic crisis and this government (probably the latter will end first). They are just the perfect soundbite for any movement against the pure injustice that the Condems are about to dish out.

They are perfect because WAAITT states perfectly what a fair government would do. A government that wasn't a naked expression of privilege and entitlement would make those words a reality. They would state quite clearly that nobody should be in a position to take advantage of the British people whilst we work together to achieve economic recover. That the pain of paying off this debt should be felt equally by all of us. No, more than that, the people with the most resources should take as much of the strain as they can, to shield the vulnerable from the worst of it.

After all, a recession hurts the people at the bottom of the pile more. Those with the worst jobs, are those with the most precarious jobs, so they are more likely to find themselves unemployed. They are the ones with the least savings so they are the most likely to find themselves dependent on state assistance should the worst happen. They are the ones with the least qualifications so the most likely to find themselves out of work for the longest period (whatever their efforts).

So, a fair government would say WAAITT, and they would act on it. They would place the burden of the crisis on those best able to carry it.

This government, on the other hand, has shown that it is determined to do precisely the opposite. It is not a fair government. It will not act on the principles of WAAITT. The burden of the crisis will not fall on those best able to carry it. It will fall, almost universally, on those with the least capacity.

Their cuts to public services will affect the social groups that use them most, that is, the people with the most need of state assistance. Their cuts to benefits and attacks on claimants will effect those with the least income. Their tax rises will be based on the most regressive of principles, indirect taxation. They will claim the money they need back through VAT, a tax that falls disproportionately on the poor. Whilst having the audacity to actually lower corporation tax. They will make no effort to close the tax loopholes that the ultrarich take advantage of, as they take advantage of them themselves.

They will do everything in their power to prevent finance capital from paying for the crisis it caused. Everything it does will expose WAAITT as a lie.

And every time they do, someone should be there to expose that lie. WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER. We, the 90% of ordinary citizens whose profits don't grow in a recession. Who don't generate those profits speculating on which country's economy will collapse next. We, are all in this together.

anarchism: autonomy, pluralism and de-centralisation

2011-01-03T03:36:00.000-08:00

20th Century anarchism, the majority of it anyway, drew principally on one main source for its ideas about organising. That source, surprisingly, was not any of its most famous adherents. As a rule whilst the likes of Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Mikhail Bakhunin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon had a lot to say about how society was at the time, and how they wanted it to be, they didn't have very much specific to say about how an actual anarchist organisation should be. There's no Lenin or Trotsky to go back to and say: "this is the role of the party", "this is how we should make decisions", "this is what a united front is for" "this is how we act in the trade unions".

No, when anarchists organised the ideas on how to do it came out of working class experience. The most significant things that anarchists have ever done came not out of applying works of theory, but on generalising activities that were already happening and developing them. The main current of 20th Century anarchism was anarcho-syndicalism. Anarcho-syndicalism as a form grew out of French trade unionism at the turn of the century. In an earlier life modern Stalinist monolith the CGT (Confederation Generale du Travail) was the model for most of last centuries anarchism. (If you want to know more about the history read this article I wrote a long time ago)

The ideas behind syndicalism were simple. Form a trade union that mirrored the structure of the society that you wanted to create. The early version CGT had several main features:

1 - It was industrial and regional - unlike earlier trade unions which organised workers based on what they did, the syndicates organised them on where they worked and in what industry they were part of. The Bourses de Travail (Labour Offices) then organised them regionally.

2. They were federal and decentralised - Modern trade unions elect a permanent leadership to make formal policy and decide on union strategy. After creating the network outlined above, the CGT made sure that every group was autonomous, controlling their own funds, and that what formal policy that existed came from the bottom upwards.

3. They had mandated delegates and direct democracy - to overcome the difficulty of operating a direct democracy among half a million workers, the CGT invented a system of mandated delegates, in which workplace groups elected people to represent them in regional, industrial and national forums. Crucially, they didn't just elect people, they discussed and agreed upon (in advance) the decisions they were going to take and the things they would argue for. Finally they had the right to withdraw a delegate at any time, if they strayed from their mandate.

4. They were unaffiliated - despite electing a succession of anarchist General Secretaries, the CGT did not have a specific ideology, and did not support a political party. Each political current was free to organise within their ranks, and argue their particular ideals and policy. Directly supporting electoral candidates and political parties was outlawed in their constitutions. This was an organisation for the entire working class.

5. They made decisions - although the CGT was a pluralist, de-centralised organisation of hundreds of thousands of people, it had a functioning decision-making structure. At a workplace level it was able to agree through majority voting on the policy that individual syndicates wanted to follow. Through the system of mandated delegates they were able to create a coherent national policy that derived from the base of the organisation and could not function outside of their wishes. It wasn't a case of everybody wander off and do whatever they like, but of an organised democratic system of solidarity and mutual aid. People were free to hold whatever political views they liked, and knew they had a forum to express those views, both in their workplace and higher up the chain.

These groups used democratic and anarchist methods of organising to empower all of the members to form and act on their needs and desires. They used robust forms of decision making because their working lives were often precarious (job security? living wage? Pah!) and their class struggle brutal (kettling? Try live fire and saber charges!).

These forms of organising, taken directly from what workers did anyway, were adopted in various forms across Europe (famously in the Spanish CNT). I mention them now, not because I think they should be held up as a model for anyone to follow, (they grew up, as any form does, in particular historical circumstances) but because they outline what hard-headed organisers our anarchist predecessors were. They didn't let anything and everything go so as not to tread on anyone's toes, they made an organisation that was fit for purpose. It was non-sectarian because it's basis for unity was strong. It was autonomous and anarchist because it gave its component parts the ability to take their own decisions and direct their own resources. It was democratic because it had adequate structures for people to express their democratic opinions in an open forum. It was organised because it had mechanisms to make decisions and then stand up for them.

It was an organisation that had a clear idea of how to organise people and what for. Which is something that all organisations eventually have to do. You have to decide: is your group a social movement? Is it something aimed at organising a particular constituency and expressing as directly as possible their needs and desires? Does it have the structures to do this? Is it fit for this purpose? Or is a publicity campaign aimed at spreading a certain message? If so, is the message it spreads a coherent one? How do you come to decide what that message is and continue to hold your adherents together?

20th Century Anarchist organising was about the abolition of hierarchy and authority, it was not about the abolition of organisation, coherence or formal decision-making. Anarchy, as they said, was the highest form of organisation. It never meant, nor should it mean now, a complete free-for-all.

austere things that have nothing to do with debt

2010-12-21T00:25:00.000-08:00

One of things that European governments are in the process of doing is presenting austerity packages as being an objective necessity in the current climate. We must cut, they say, as the national debt problem has got out of control. Even if you buy this, and many people,don't. It's interesting that only a certain range of policies has been deemed viable by European governments. The most obvious of these being "cuts". Sneaking in, barely noticed has been a rise in VAT.

Now, if you weren't aware, VAT rises are a bad thing for the poor and most vulnerable. At the flip of a switch they raise the price of everything they need to buy. Poor families spend a much higher proportion of their income in VAT rises than they do on other types of tax. It's a "regressive tax" in that makes no attempt to ensure that the wealthiest contribute more of their income than the poor do.

Notice at the same time that governments around the world have ruled out putting up taxation on income or profits. But the VAT rise indicates that they do want to raise more money through taxes. So why choose one over the other? Particularly in the teeth of cuts in public services that disproportionately affect low-income families who are more likely to be service users. Rather rubbing salt in the wounds, isn't it? Raising the prices of everything they buy, whilst simultaneously reducing their access to resources.

Is there any economic benefit to a VAT rise as opposed to raising income or corporation tax? VAT raises prices, depresses spending/demand and could be argued to be detrimental to economic growth. Income tax on the other hand places the burden on people who ordinarily spend a smaller proportion of their money on goods and services, in effect putting money back into the economy that might otherwise be left in savings accounts. A corporation tax might have a slight negative effect on foreign investment (but wouldn't if it were co-ordinated continent wide by international lending institutions), but would in any case be taking money of corporations that aren't currently investing it anyway (as growth figures show they're hoarding it).

So, why a VAT rise? Well today's news from the OECD might give us a hint. Returning to their favourite theme, "let's bully weak Eurozone countries into doing what we say", they combine a stern warning to Spain about their deficit with a statement from Moody's rating agency saying they might downgrade Spain's banks' debt ratings. Do as we say or the bear (the small banks like Caja Madrid in Spain's banking system: see pic) gets it. Let's have a little look at what they've already done:

The moves include plans to sell off a 30 percent stake in the government-owned national lottery, the partial privatization of airports, cutbacks to a key jobless benefit, tax cuts for small businesses and an increase in the tobacco tax.

So privatisation, benefit cutbacks, tax cuts (!) for businesses, indirect taxes. What do they want now?

The government says that next month it will approve a highly contested plan to raise the retirement age gradually from 65 to 67, part of a drive to shore up public finances.
But the OECD said in a report that Spain should consider raising the retirement age even further by indexing the age to life expectancy increases.
The government is considering extending the period of a person's working life used to calculate retirement pensions — it is now the last 15 years. The OECD says people's entire working life should be used in the calculation, a move that would reduce the average monthly pension.

A rise in the retirement age and a decrease in payouts might help Spain's financial situation in the longer term, but it's not going to do much to sort out the immediate debt problems.

Measures passed in recent months make it easier and cheaper for companies to lay off workers, doing away with a system that provided some of the most generous severance payments in Europe.
The Paris-based OECD said that if these do not manage to boost hiring, the government should consider broader measures to make the labor market more flexible.

The idea that making it easier to fire people will increase levels of employment is a novel one. This despite the fact that there are already various methods to hire people on a temporary, precarious basis, if business were in fact looking to take on staff. The likelihood is that cheap firing, will in fact, lead to the more obvious rise in unemployment, when companies use it to, err, fire people cheaply.

Finally this:

The OECD said that if Spain's deficit-reduction measures fail to meet targets the government should consider raising VAT taxes on some goods and services.

If "stimulating the labour market" and cutting public services doesn't work, the next step is raising VAT on the shrinking amount of consumption.

So the collective voice of the rich, capitalist nations essentially has one piece of advice: do what right wing neoliberal ideologues argue for even when there isn't an economic crisis, conveniently using the debt as leverage.

Most of these measures have very little to do with paying down debt, beyond the vague economic theory of their advocates. They are very much ideological decisions. If they were simply concerned with debt, why would they touch on things like pension reform, labour market reform and specific types of taxes? Surely ideologically neutral economic advice wouldn't distinguish between the way taxes are raised or the type of services that are cut?

The kind of pressure being put on Spain isn't actually directly related to their debt They could with equal validity decide that the best way to reduce the public deficit was levy new taxes, cut spending on the military, pull out of Afghanistan and end corporate subsidies. It's related to various problems the international financial community have with their labour market and welfare state. They are concerned with the usual neoliberal hobby horses: less rights, less public services, privatisation, less pay for more work for workers and less taxes for business. "Austere" things that have nothing to do with debt.

The crisis of neoliberalism is turning into a massive example of shock therapy for an entire continent, the dismantling of the welfare state on the pretext of resolving a debt problem caused by neoliberal policies.

Jamón Ibérico

2009-09-02T06:39:00.000-07:00

You´ll have to excuse the lack of activity of late, between posting on the wonderful new MATBlog and moving into a new house, I´ve been a bit busy. So here´s a post that appears there too:

Madrid is the roadworks capital of the world. The just keep digging the place up everywhere you go, without distinction between rich neighbourhoods or poor. They just absolutely love opening holes in the ground, producing endless old jokes about digging for treasure. After a six week working trip back home, I got back here to discover they´d changed roads after actually finishing something for once - Jacometrezo Street. After dodging construction teams every day on the way to work for 9 months, there was something weird about the street.

Not that it was finished. Not that I could sit outside at the cafe without an accompaniment of drills and wolf-whistling mustachioed Ecuadorians. But that the street was exactly the same. Same arrangement, same traffic lights, same underground parking. Everything exactly the same. I stood about trying to work out what they´d actually spent 12 months doing. Then it clicked. What they´d done was change it from a flat, pot-hole free, perfectly adequate tarmac road to a brick road. According to the sign the Ministry for Economic Stimulus put up, they´d spent 2 million euros, countless interruptions to residents and business to change the aesthetic of the place.

The more you walk around, the more you can see that the PSOE´s 11bn stimulus has just been thrown in the appropriate directions to keep people working. No attempt to do anything of any actual use with it. Just keeping the construction industry from entirely collapsing. There´s clearly some serious pork going on, something that occasionally gets the PSOE in trouble, like with the general strike it provoked in Lebrija this February. Basically people pissed off in a tiny town near Sevilla were protesting that the state money being distributed through the trade unions was only going to members of the CC.OO and the UGT (the PCE and PSOE´s pet unions respectively).

The weird thing though is that aside from this incident Spain despite suffering a bigger rise in unemployment than all of the other countries in Europe put together, now topping the Eurozone league with 18.1% (a combination of historical high levels in the South, and the complete collapse of the two major industries, auto manufacture and construction), has experienced virtually no significant unrest. A handful of small strikes, some very specific problems in the North (related to the PNV losing the last round of elections there - largely due to extensive gerrymandering), and that aside the government has basically got a pass on the state of the place.

I read an interesting article a little while ago that shed some light on why this was. Spanish people have much bigger social networks that are insulating them from the recession. When people lose their jobs they´ve got a wider safety net based on large interconnected families. Young people especially tend to live with their parents until they´re much older.

But the flipside of this is that it becomes self-defeating circle. Employers continuously abuse the internship/apprenticeship system by hiring people just to fill regular positions, paying salaries that are impossible to live off in urban areas (often 600-700 euros a month), which people accept, because they can, which in turn means they never have any motivation to leave home and demand good housing and decent paying jobs.

Additionally, Spain, a European frontier state these days, has managed to avoid problems related to its large immigrant population (the largest group in Madrid is Ecuadoreans and nationally Moroccans), large numbers of whom came over to work in the burgeoning construction industry. The report put this down to several things. Firstly, the tendency of migrants to pack up and go home when the work dries up (one of the rarely mentioned aspects of the economic migration phenomena is that it´s self-regulating, peak migration tends to coincide with high employment), and secondly Spain´s massive black market.

Far more so than the UK, which has a fringe black market economy, small enough to be mostly contained in small enclaves. Spain has a thriving, publicly unavoidable parallel economic system, which keeps millions of people without recourse to conventional economic means afloat during the recession. Walk through almost any major Spanish city and it´s obvious; movable bazaars dot the street, brothels dot otherwise respectable streets, people wander into bars with lighters, tissues (bizarrely) or a wide variety of flashing tat to sell.

Weirdly enough all of this was supposed to disappear with European integration and modernisation. But the Spanish miracle was based on housing prices, selling land all along that massive and beautiful coast of theirs, the Marbella-zation of the whole country. The export of land got to such a point that whole communities were dominated by ex-pats to the extent that they were electing ex-pat mayors and the DWP now has a big branch in Madrid.

With that market completely collapsing (see the ITV documentary on the subject recently), Spain has fallen back on old habits; patronage, kinships networks and black markets; to keep people´s head above water.

the dog shit politics panacea

2009-08-18T10:37:00.000-07:00

Nazis do it. Greens do it. Even socialists do it sometimes. Every day graft, listening to people, asking them what they want, and putting in the work to try and get it for them.

The dog shit politics of making sure the little things are dealt with, and that groups set achievable targets, winning things that non-activist people are actually interested in. It helps build a rapport between people and political groups, and keeps people grounded in everyday life.

Left-wing or pro-working class groups should be at a natural advantage in this arena. In the first place they´re supposed to have a deeper understanding of the forces that are behind attacks on working class communities, so should have a better understanding of how to fight back. They don´t have the big disadvantage that far right groups do, in that they aren´t trying to peddle racism and they don´t have quite the pariah status that Nazis do.

Groups that have tried taking this approach have had varying degrees of success.

The group that made it the center of its political outlook, the IWCA, had a few early victories. It established bases in two London boroughs, Glasgow and Oxford, producing creditable results in the first three places, and steadily increasing their councillors to a high of four on Oxford city council.

Over time though the number of outposts shrank, as Glasgow withered away, Hackney left the organisation and Islington went quieter (is it still functioning?) and short-lived flurries of activity in Harold Hill and Thurrock seemed to disappear over time.

The IWCA´s trajectory seemed to prove that outposts could be built and people engaged, with good day-to-day community work, but that it was difficult to expand from that kind of base and that small-numbers of activists could become bogged down in electoral work and community campaigning.

The Socialist Party, a bigger, national organisation, has usually orientated itself in its day-to-day work towards the ´dog shit´ end of politics, whether that be in the trade unions or in community work. On the other hand it does have to wear its other hat as part of the Committee for a Workers´ International, being the historical consciousness of the entire international working class and all.

Over the past two decades they built significant local bases in Coventry and Lewisham, as well as picking up the odd councillor as opponents of NHS privatisation. The SP´s approach differs substantially from the IWCA, in that rather than seeing themselves as a sort of political wing of their communities, they have their own very tightly defined ideas on policy and theory, whilst still trying to attract adherents through practical everyday work.

Although the SP have had a degree of success where they´ve applied themselves in this way, the last year or so has seen them increasingly drawn into high-level trade union work in pursuit of the real long-term project - The Campaign for a New Workers Party.

Straight old-fashioned British Trots, the SP want a bigger sea of reformist workers to swim in, in order to win them over to socialism. Yet, as their rubbish attempt to stand in the last election shows, people won´t vote for you just because a workers´ organisation is involved. Their years of community activism, just like their trade union work has been unable to propel their wider ambition, and they remain restricted to historical footholds.

Which probably goes to show that whilst community activism can build a modest platform, it doesn´t expand your organisation dramatically unless you´re actually selling an idea that people want to buy into.

Meanwhile, a handful of anarchistically-inspired groups have also been doing similar sorts of activism, trying to engage people in everyday politics in a way that attracts them to the idea of a radically democratic society. Groups like Haringey Solidarity Group argue that they can make a real difference to people´s lives through campaign work and engage people in a different kind of political action.

I heard that the people behind HSG have maintained some sort of consistent organisation since the old Poll Tax Unions, which in itself is an achivement for a community group. The question is expansion. Community work is an end in itself, and on some level you´d certainly be happy to devoting your time to improving what you can for yourself and your neighbours. But there is still the question of putting yourself in a position to challenge things.

Groups that focus on elections often get sucked into to the constant, exhausting cycle of winning and maintaining representation, to the detriment of other work. However, groups without that focus often seem to spend much of their existence looking for things to get their teeth into. Without something to campaign on, activity can often dwindle and leave the same small group of people keeping the thing ticking over until the next significant issue.

Much of the energy that was going into groups like HSG has re-directed itself into the London Coalition Against Poverty, which with a broader focus and direct action case work to get stuck into, seems to be better at keeping people involved and occupied.

In terms of sustaining a permanent large-scale organisation capable of advancing the big aims though, the municipal anarchism model still seems to have a missing ingredient that prevents it from pushing on to the next level.

Another category of ´dog shit´ activists has emerged out of the disintegration of the Labour Party in the last few years. In Barrow-in-Furness, a 1997 splinter group led by the former constituency party chair stood in a by-election and lost their deposit. Subsequently they´ve taken a number of borough council seats and currently hold four, it might be more if they hadn´t had their own falling out and lost a load of seats to another independent splinter from the group. The all-women shortlists debacle that led most of the Blaenau Gwent CLP to leave, resulted in one MP and a bundle of councillors for People´s Voice candidates in the last elections (though many of them seem to have left for independent status subsequently) and school protesters took Gwynedd council off Plaid Cymru.

In the leftie news reccently were the Community Action Party, a mash-up of various political backgrounds, which until recently held 18 seats on Wigan borough council. They´ve split (obviously) and recently formed a People´s Alliance with the local SP and the Respect Party. George Galloway even came up to shake everyone´s hand.

The trouble these organisations seem to have is that being formed over local issues, they tend to subsequently split over them. They´ve also got very limited horizons, as well as an M.O. and a structure (in most cases semi-clientalist) that limits them in that way. The lack of resources is exposed in the homely, 1997 style websites.

They´ve got a lot of advantages though. Clearly they show up out of a need, and are identified with something that resonates with their electorate. There´s a meaningful and organic connection with the communities that throw them up, rather than trying to manufacture something out of nothing (and the ¨Save our XXX¨ campaign style doesn´t work if you haven´t got the links or the issue spot on - Colchester Save Our Bus Station did abysmally in local elections a few years back for precisely that reason).

But without broadening their appeal nationally, these groups will eventually outlive either their campaign or the particular local political figure that gave them life. Longer-term, only by broadening their appeal and linking with other groups can they sustain themselves.

The groups that are currently profiting out of community campaigning (the BNP and The Green Party) have a few things in common (aside from a shared love of rural idylls :P), firstly they have a significant national organisation that can sustain local groups all year round, stimulate new groups with resources, produce professional campaign material and maintain attractive, well-used and well-updated websites. This gives the outward impression of being permanent and modern organisations. They combine an organisational focus on the ´dog shit´ stuff, with the ability to intervene on national issues and throw out ´dog whistle´ sound-bites and policies to get new people involved and build up new groups. The two things necessarily compliment one another.

No group can have a national impact without both these elements in play, and that is the key to building something meaningful and permanent.

this was cross-posted from the awesome new meanwhile at the bar blog.

What Alan Duncan says about our political class

2009-08-13T10:15:00.000-07:00

Listening to the radio the other day, I heard Tory blogger Iain Dale being interviewed about Alan Duncan's latest gaff. Obviously he agreed that the comments were ill-advised and that perhaps Duncan might have to apologise. But he didn't get to what I thought was the heart of the matter.

Look at these two statements, the first of which was not the headline quotes that the papers ran with the next day. The second of which is Duncan's apology.

"No one who has done anything in the outside world will ever come into this
place ever again, the way we are going."

"The last thing people want to hear is an MP whingeing about his pay and
conditions. My remarks, although meant in jest, were completely uncalled
for."

The papers all lead with 'MP whinges about pay', and quite right too, it's the money shot in terms of bang for your buck outrage. That's what Duncan responded to as well, noting that nobody wants to hear MPs complain about what are comparatively generous pay packages. The phrase 'they don't know they're born' comes to mind.

But I think there's something deeper to this, somewhere buried further inside people like Duncan that contains the real reason why they make comments like this. Look at that first comment again: For people like him the salary he gets wouldn't motivate anyone whose 'done anything' to go to parliament.

What he's saying, and I think this runs fairly deep among the majority of mainstream politicians is essentially anyone who doesn't earn considerably more than an MP (or isn't at least capable of it) isn't really much cop. Basically they can written off as having any skills worthy of bringing to public life.

The problem with that is that he's basically writing off 95% of the population. All the people who actually do all the work round here are basically little worker ants who need governing by clever chaps who can make lots of money. And they only way you bring them in is by greasing the wheels. People of quality are those that are attracted by and can make lots and lots of money. Basically we're all offensively useless because we can't muster the kind of success that they can.

And that was the question that should've been asked about these remarks. How many of our political class essentially regard working people in this country as idiots because they 'can't get on in life' and wish we could have a parliament made up of 'the right stuff?

a lot can happen in forty years

2009-08-08T07:03:00.000-07:00

"The Army's role might evolve, but the whole process might take as long as 30 to 40 years. There is absolutely no chance of NATO pulling out." General Sir David Richards, Head of the British Army, on the occupation of Afghanistan.

Interesting statement that, more for the attitude than the policy. One of the problems with saying that staying they´re for that period of time is that it sees ¨nation-building¨ as being like a treadmill. Put in enough resources and stick it for long enough and you can change the place into what you want it to be.

The trouble with these plans is that it doesn´t cede any say on things to the people that live there. It gives, for instance, 30-40 years of guerrilla warfare to the insurgents. You´d think that over time they might start getting better at it, particularly given that they´ve moved away from the suicide bomber model (which results in your terrorist dying along with your victims, rather than learning from mistakes and passing on experience to others). It doesn´t ask the Afghanis if they want that long an occupation, and whether some of them might be inclined to rebel against a long-term foreign presence.

In fact the whole idea ignores any problematic developments in the political and social life of Afghanistan. Peace is always political. For example, a lot of analysts say that in Iraq the decision to work with Sunni militia against international Islamist extremists was a far bigger part of turning around that quagmire than the surge was.

Beyond the complete disregard for what the population there might actually do or want. I´m always intrigued by the apparent need that international forces have to set up law enforcement agency and armed forces to defend their new little states. It´s weird because usually countries are able to do that sort of thing for themselves. For instance, the Taliban were able to establish an army and a police force that was completely totalitarian, all without a blue-hat in sight. And, obviously they could only possibly be overthrown by being bombed by the Americans, so it must have been pretty robust, right?

New democracies are supposed to have a broader base of support than brutal dictatorships, so why do nations set up by international diktat seem to have so much trouble?

ahhhh elections...

2009-08-06T10:16:00.000-07:00

Now, I'm not out to criticise people trying to do stuff in solidarity with Iranian activists. But daftness is a pet hate of mine, so here goes.

Right so, today I read someone at the beginning of a very moving piece about what people have suffered after the Iranian elections reference Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the loser of the election. I've no problem with saying that per se, but is it not a little ridiculous from the perspective of your average anti-Islamic Republic type? Before the elections we were informed that Iran is a theocracy, a clerical tyranny and in general a totalitarian dictatorship.

People who pointed out that the real situation was more nuanced, with a greater degree of civil society, dissent and disagreement internal to the system were generally derided as being the useful idiots of the Ayatollahs. Now, I've no problem dealing in broad brush-strokes like. But doesn't saying that Ahmadinejad is the loser of this election actually rather endorse the electoral system out there?

On some level it means that the election was a meaningful contest between real alternatives, which was outrageously tampered with to the benefit of certain people within the power structure. Like there had been a coup d'etat to overthrow a relatively well-functioning democracy, that spent the previous 30 years electing rightful presidents. Surely if it follows that the protests are about a rigged election, then the last one Ahmadinejad went off fairly?

That's horse-shit though. Iran's is a managed democracy, where the Ayatollahs pick the acceptable candidates and pretend it's a real contest. There's no more legitimacy in all the old-school reformists lining up behind the green movement, than there is in the Ahmadinejads of this world. In fact, the Islamic Republic is probably going through one of its least brutal phases.

Why give the Islamic Republic the redoubt that they're evidently looking for - that they can just retreat to the old reformism and then we'll start saying it's a real democracy. Even if they'd decided they wanted Moussavi instead of the incumbent, it wouldn't have made any real difference. If people on the streets is a meaningful opportunity to enact real change out there, then more has to be done than insisting that they stick to the logic of legitimacy within their own system.

rubbish bloody football

2009-08-05T09:44:00.000-07:00

Year on year I like football as an industry a little less. Every year it just gets more ridiculous as a sport and seems to be further away from the things I actually like about the game.

To explain why, I´ll have to make a bit of a confession. My football supporting life started in a way that I now find reprehensible. From the safety of the Suffolk countryside I was a miniature Manchester United fan. Now in my defence this was 1992 and I´m sucker for a redemption story. The first football I watched was the last season of the old First Division. A Manchester United side with the likes of Mark Hughes, Bryan Robson and a teenage Ryan Giggs was busy choking its best chance of the title for a quarter of a decade. I have an idea the first football match I ever watched was a 0-0 draw on ITV with West Ham United. I was 8 years old.

By the time the Premier League came around I was throwing my pocket money at United scarves, shirts and mugs. They won the league that year, redemption for 26 years of being rubbish, or sometimes just good and gutless. I remained a red for a while. Even after I watched my first live football match, a 0-0 draw between my local team Ipswich and Coventry City. Weirdly enough it was from the Director´s Box and I remember being bored shitless. The next one was a 3-2 win for Ipswich over Manchester United. It was the year Town went down, so I guess it was 1995. I was 12.

I was changed a bit by that game. Obviously in a season in which they were terrible, beating the current league champions saw them go absolutely nuts. The next time I saw Town, a scrappy 2-1 win over Charlton in a then Division One match and they became us. I´ve subsequently had the misfortune to support them for the past 12-13 years, from season ticket holder to ex-pat. I still miss it.

Not to get too poor man´s Nick Hornby on you, but what really attracted me to watching football live, as opposed to on the telly, was the feeling of standing in the old Portman Road North Stand. Partially it was the feeling of adulthood (mostly derived from standing round a load of adults who were acting as childishly as I was), but probably most of all it was the most exciting thing that happened in a town like Ipswich. You went down, and you stood together with a load of people who cared about the same thing you did. They got outraged when you did, they felt off their heads with joy when you did, they swore when you did, they sang when you did. The genuine feeling of being in a crowd is unsurpassable.

And in truth I liked the glamour of my team being little underdogs, underachieving a little bit and living off a glorious past. I swear it meant more to us when we got promoted or when we did well, because there was just us in Ipswich, a little town that people put in shitty books about shitty towns.

And now that´s completely ruined. We´re owned by a multi-millionaire or billionaire or something, and we spend his money so we can hire Roy Keane and buy big Irish centre forwards off Sunderland or Manchester United reserve teamers. We make out like this really makes us happy, but when it works it has a hollow feeling - like Chelsea fans must be familiar with - that it actually has sod all to do with us. That buying the season tickets, making noise at the appropriate moments, throwing money in the coffers by buying the 2nd away kit or the tracksuit top, paled into comparison with a guy who runs promotion events having the cash to bring Celtic rejects back from the Irish League. If we fail we get bitter, and chase club legends out of the place, forgetting that the bloke gave us the most magical night of my footballing life(play-off semi-final 2nd legal 2000 - Ipswich Town 5 Bolton Wanderers 3).

This is the reality for a wild array of different clubs. Portsmouth fans wait with baited breath for a takeover to solve all their financial problems. Notts County got enough money to pay for Sven Goran Eriksson. Who the fuck even bought Notts County for fuck´s sake. QPR have Briatore, Sunderland are throwing money at bigger clubs' reserve team strikers like water. Manchester City ain´t half of it, most of the football league seems to be somebody's plan to get themselves on telly overlooking a Abramovichesque kingdom.

So, Now I sit, watching my mediocre team, with mediocre players bought from other clubs (with all our own kids shipped out), progressing (or not) toward the premier league nirvana. The shed I used to have a season ticket in made five times the noise, and was five times the fun as the massive 25m GBP monstrosity that they moved us up the other end to build one season. A ticket for one and a half hours ¨entertainment¨ costs me 27 GBP minimum, in an occasion where any natural atmosphere is drowned out in a dreary combination of goal music, pre-game music and a preponderance of supporters who never came to contribute anyway.

Live football is not as fun as it used to be. ¨Used to be¨ being the mid-90s, so we´re not even talking about nostalgia for terraces or hooliganism here. In fact, I´d go as far as to say that it´s not even as fun as watching it on the telly.

In a few years, the people that run football are going to understand that this circus cannot sustain itself. Let's be realistic, football is not intrinsically that interesting a game. If I actually want to watch a fascinating contest of epic proportions then it ain't a patch on Cricket or the Tour de France. People watch football to watch people. To see mental geordies outside St.James' Park when some loser/idiot comes to coach them, to watch people cry when they get relegated and to watch them be unhingedly happy when Burnley win a play-off final. The people watching on the telly are really there to watch us, not the game.

And when we've all gone, everyone will wonder what the fuss is all about.

I can fix America

2009-07-29T11:47:00.000-07:00

Helpful information for Democratic Party politicians interested in meaningful health reform: How hard is it to say the following? America pays significant more for its healthcare than any other country on the planet. Soon it will reach 20% of your entire productive effort. In exchange for this you get a health system which does not provide for a significant minority of people. Those that it does provide for worry constantly that they will keep their healthcare through periods of economic insecurity. Should they be unfortunate enough to fall sick, their insurance company will look for an excuse not to treat them, should they have been lucky enough to have passed the qualification for health insurance in the fist place.

I am a European. My country spends much less than yours does on healthcare. I have never worried about how I´m going to pay for my healthcare for one second. My healthcare is not rationed, I don´t worry about paying it, I don´t have to fill out any forms proving that I´m eligible, what care I receive is decided by my doctor according to need, without reference to how it will effect a company´s profit line. I will not die because of denial of care and my life expectancy is longer than yours.

What´s more, if I want better healthcare, I can, if I want to, pay for it. Private healthcare exists here if you want it. Most people do not feel they need it. Because I live in a capitalist country. Unfortunately, as much as I would like it have done, a state-owned public health system has not lead to the collapse of capitalism.

This situation exists across the developed world. Every single rich country (likes yours) manages to provide healthcare for the entire population without getting over excited that this will herald the beginnings of Stalinism. And they don´t just have a ¨public option¨, the government owns the hospitals, it buys the drugs, it hires and fires the doctors and nurses.

Stop fucking about. Tell the American people the simple unadulterated truth, the insurance company free version of it. Europeans love their healthcare systems, they think yours is barking and inhumane. It´s one of the things that makes us glad not to live in The USA. If you want to get this legislation passed, fuck the health insurance companies and go for it, stop mincing around. Generations of Americans will love you for it. Ask Aneurin Bevan, the founder of our National Health Service, and one to date one of the most popular British politicians of all time.

Honesty in parliament

2009-07-28T12:49:00.000-07:00

I sympathise with the idea of independents standing in opposition to mainstream politicos whose faces have been buried in the public expenses troff. But a word of caution regarding Esther Rantzen´s mooted candidacy ... First off, if the point is that our democracy has been perverted and corrupted by the political class in this country, then surely it would be more to the point to be sending normal people with our values there, rather than politicians on an ego trip. Especially as Martin Bell´s impact on that sewer bit didn´t really go very far.

Secondly, given that the thing being debated is the abuse of public institutions, then perhaps the best choice is not someone who founded a charity that went bust four years ago (and had to be folded into Oxfam) largely as a result of paying exorbitant salaries to a companies that had 13 executive directors on large salaries (up to 90,000 GBP p.a.), despite just having 268 full-time employees (in 2004 wages took up more than half their income from donations). If I remember correctly (though I stand to be corrected) Ms. Rantzen was also on the pay roll in a consultant capacity, despite being a rich celebrity apparently doing work for charity.

Perhaps she can tell us from experience how you stop institutions set up for public benefit from being bled dry by well-meaning people who nevertheless feel the need of handsome renumeration for doing good.

celebrities and us

2009-07-25T15:09:00.000-07:00

Britain has a unique celebrity culture. On the one hand, aside from the Americans, nobody pays as much attention to the private lives of so many individuals in the world of entertainment. Nobody has the array of magazines, tv programmes and newspaper articles devoted to the Jade Goodies of the world that we do.

For Britain, famous people are almost a sort of aristocracy, with all the attendant baggage for us peasants that implies. A friend of mine used to work for a well-known international ticket company, in their Manchester box office. One night before a gig, a local celebrity comes in, an actress off Coronation Street. Her kid's going to see some live show - Bob the Builder or something along those lines. She's shown up with no booking code, no ID, doesn't even know what postcode it's booked under (her P.A. booked it apparently). Now my friend is good at his job and a nice bloke, so he's looking for a way to help her. Not because he knows who she is, but just because. Looking for any way to identify which tickets are hers. But this woman just can't help, she's got nothing she can tell him. So she pulls out the celebrity card, his manager recognises her, and insists that my friend doles out two duplicate tickets, which he dutifully does.

Now, any normal person shows up without anyway to prove that these tickets are theirs, not even booked in their name in fact, you see them for the chancer they are and send them on their way. But no, the celebrity aristocracy, already so blessed, gets little favour after little favour, their droit de seigneur and why not, it's only a few perks. So she stands in the queue, and demands one of the staff holds her place, whilst she takes her little one to the bathroom - a wonderful service, if only they could offer it to everyone. Then walks straight past the bar queue, and gets outraged when a glass collector won't serve her drink, and so on throughout the night. "Oooh, you'll never guess who we had in this evening?"

But the downside of being an aristocrat exists too. You get all this privilege, for little or no work, and people resent you for it. In fact, we really resent them for it. Not the shrink-wrapped, perfect-world US celebrity culture for us. We hate celebrities. Pick up Heat magazine if you don't believe me, or read the gossip column in The Sun. We adore slagging these people off, we love it when they get fat, or too skinny, or make a fool of themselves, or they fail. Half the time we prefer our celebrities to be talentless morons, there to be abused by the system or to make themselves look inadequate. It's almost like the only way we can bear to be the peasants is by engaging in the time honoured tradition of fool's day, where the world gets stood on its head, and we get to laugh at the motherfuckers on top.

Maybe there was a bit of all this in Steven Gerrard's court case. Putting aside the the so-sad-it's-funny nature of the Gerrard defence (as one friend put it, "he stood up after being elbowed in the head by my friend, of course I felt threatened and had to hit him 4 times"), Gerrard admitted that he'd been up to the DJ booth to demand they change the music and couldn't understand why the bloke wouldn't do it. Now, do you and I expect the DJ in a bar to change the music on our request? We might, on occasion, put a request to them, but the general assumption is that most places put the music on that they want to play. If you don't like it, you find somewhere else. This is normal mortal land. Gerrard and his mates first insist that they get control of the music. Then they end up in a fight about it. Even if the fight is six of one, half a dozen of the other, the expectation of these petty favours that come with a modicum of celebrity is pretty common. The refusal is too. Your average self-respecting man (not fanboy) doesn't think you deserve special favours because you're lucky enough to earn a lot of money for playing a game. The world has given you plenty already. If Steven Gerrard asked me to change the music in my house, I'd politely tell him to fuck off.

Whilst the acquittal itself might seem a little weird in some quarters (or typical in more cynical ones), the situation, a member of the celebratocracy throwing their weight around and not even noticing their doing it, is all too common.

different worlds ...

2009-07-24T09:43:00.000-07:00

One of the unexpected side effects of Obama world is that on certain things there´s a disconnect between Obama´s old mates and your run-of-the-mill political/media establishment. The recent controversy with the Harvard professor being belligerent to a cop who´d accused him of breaking into his own home reminded me of an episode of The Boondocks about snitching. Huey Freeman does a retrospective about black people being culturally inclined not to talk the police, with some clips of people shutting doors in the face of various cops. Then they cut to some white people talking about how much they luuuuuuuurve talking to the police, ¨I mean, why wouldn´t you talk to the police? I looooooove talking to the police!¨

The half of the American population that thinks like this reckons that this police officer should get the benefit of the doubt. Well, because he´s the police, and more than that, maybe he technically did everything by the book and rather than do what they would all do, which is smile and nod and laugh along, Professor Gates told him to go fuck himself. In fact, there´s a long history of this in American culture. In some quarters the LA Riots for instance were where ¨a certain part¨ of the population were insisting on their right to behave lawlessly, loot and attack police officers, not responding to an outrageous miscarriage of justice and the kind of mass policing that led to something like 1 in 3 black males being detained by the police in any two year period. The 60s riots were nothing to do with fighting racial prejudice but some shite like black nationalism or anti-white racism.

Now, if I´d been on a long trip and discover my door jammed, I´d be annoyed. I might, had I managed to break into my house and sat down, got a cup of tea, by the time a police officer summoned by my neighbours arrived, it´s possible I would see the funny side of it. I probably wouldn´t maintain my cool if the cop was treating the whole thing too seriously after that. More than that, maybe I wouldn´t find it as funny if I was from a ethnic background that has a history of persecution from the police, and if I was thinking ¨I bet my neighbours wouldn´t call the police if Mr and Mrs. Kennedy from across the road were breaking into their house.¨ And additionally, I imagine if the police were called, and did find Mr and Mrs. Kennedy sat in their house, relaxing after a long trip, they wouldn´t start throwing their weight around and demanding identification.

Now police have rules to follow, but there are following rules and following rules. Now, I would imagine upon entering a room that an easy way to identify a burglar is to see if he runs away from the police. If he´s sat around and making himself at home, he probably isn´t robbing the place. So, even if procedure is to get him out of the house, search him, check his ID and all the rest, if you´re basically aware, through your instincts as a law enforcer, that a robbery is not in progress, you do this in an apologetic way, if at all. ¨I´m sorry, I couldn´t check your ID, you know, just doing my job, sorry.¨ If he tells you to go to hell, you probably leave it. You certainly don´t arrest him.

Now a lot of us understand why this whole thing would have pissed Professor Gates off, and, because we don´t ¨looooooooooove talking to the police¨, think it´s appropriate for him to tell the police officer concerned to fuck off. Well, we might think it was a silly thing to do, but we´d understand, we´d be sympathetic and we´d reckon when the officer arrested him, it was an arsehole thing to do.

Not, in WASP world. In WASP world, everything the police does is fine. We should always be polite and helpful, because the police always have our best interests at heart, and are never just being over-officious tools. And, of course, if we do complain, and tell the police to get to fuck, they have every right to arrest us for being abusive.

To the rest of us, we wouldn´t expect to be arrested for calling a random member of the public a dick, especially if they were behaving like, well ... a dick... Not in WASP world, in WASP land, the police are sensitive creatures who need special treatment, in case their poor wittle ears catch the odd swear word.

And this is where Barack Obama comes in. Now, he´s sooooooo establishment in everything he does. So much so that he´s not been brave enough to pass anything since becoming president. But the difference with establishment African-Americans, like Obama and Gates, is that racial profiling is so prevalent that, unlike poverty, it can´t be avoided even by them. Like the right-wing Atlanticist MP Shahid Malik who got detained and searched for explosives at Dulles Airport. Hence the disconnect, Obama can´t help but instinctively answer that question, because he´s experienced it. No doubt so had Professor Gates prior to being confronted in his own home. Of course, at the time of writing the President of the United States had already apologised ... there are some lines even he isn´t allowed to cross.

aesthetics and the 25 year old male

2009-07-22T09:13:00.000-07:00

It is possible that I am a victim of the 21st century physical aesthetic. Perhaps, I'm supposed to be above this sort of thing. But after nearly 26 years of existence I have to admit to myself that I have a problem: I am vain. Really, really vain. Not in terms of a preening, self-regard, but nevertheless featuring a constant and significant obsession with physical appearance.

I'm an ordinary-looking fella, slightly shorter than average, but re-assuringly taller than Tom Cruise (but not as tall as his wife). I'm reconciled with the height and looks thing. There's not a great deal you can do to change them. No, the things that obsess me, are the things I can change. These are, in order of how much I think about them; weight, hair and clothes. The latter is brilliant, because it's so easy to rectify (possibly the reason that clothes are at the top of the consumerism food chain). You can feel good about yourself purely by purchasing something and putting it together with other things (the tragedy is that you have to keep doing it, not just because of fashion but the good feeling about new stuff fades). The second one is trickier because of the maintenance requirement, as well as the possibility of dodgy haircuts.

The killer though is the first one. Now, achieving your ideal body is impossible without that most impossible of skills; self-discipline. You have two options, the first is curtailing your consumption of bad things, removing one of the main delights in being human - stuffing tasty food and booze down your neck. The second is regular exercise. The problem with regular exercise is that it's usually boring. It involves doing a repetitive task, on your own and takes up a minimum of 30 minutes to an hour every evening. Once you've made the decision to continue eating what the hell you like, you've basically committed yourself to another, entirely voluntary chore. Other chores are necessary. The kitchen must be cleaned or you lack crockery, unwashed clothes eventually start to smell. Fatness you can live with.

The consequences of evading this other chore is that initially you start to get soft around the edges, then bigger, then before you know it you're visiting slim-fast meetings. I'm at that sort of age, 25, where without the kind of metabolism my brother has (bastard) you can either commit to regular exercise, F-O-R-E-V-E-R, or acquiesce to expanding over the coming years and eventually being a fat bastard.

Now, the question is, why should I care? Thing is, I don't know why I should. I just do. Bodily aesthetic is something that pesters you 24-7. Jeans a little uncomfortable? Shit, should go for a run later. In bed at night, bit of belly, should renew that gym membership. And even though no-one around you notices, you can feel when things get slacker and when they get tighter. Every little change is multiplied double in your head. Things improve, suddenly it'll be six-pack central in a few weeks. Gets worse? Slippery slope to Johnny-Vegas-land.

One day I will get over this, and resign myself to the natural body shape for my lifestyle. Until then you shall see running up-and-down a Suffolk hill, getting depressed at how much fitter I used to be...

Footballers I don't get

2009-07-18T16:11:00.001-07:00

It being the Summer, with football teams frantically running around trying to pick up new players. They're always full of players I don't get. People whose value seems to grossly out of proportion to their talent, whose quality is invisible to their supporters, who a bewildering array of managers think are the business. This summer seems to be a busy one for "the inexplicables", particularly with a suspicious number of them being relegated last season.

As of this moment, someone has signed Stewart Downing for 12m, despite already having two ostensibly far better wingers. Another team has signed Emmanuel Adebayor for 25m, despite him being a lazy, arrogant tosser with a terrible first touch, and this team already have 6 other forwards (not only that but the money will go towards strengthening one of the main rivals)! Someone else has signed quick, but positionally rubbish full-back Glen Johnson for 17m, despite positional play actually being the most important thing about a full-back. The disease is not restricted to these shores and someone was mug enough to pay 9m for Didier Zakora and offer Jermaine Pennant a hefty contract. Fraizer Campbell, stand-out terrible on every Premier League appearance to date, apparently trumps the actually rather good Djibril Cisse for another manager.

Who next on the wheel of ridiculous?

Five word meme

2009-07-17T14:29:00.000-07:00

So, a meme. You give people five words that remind you of them and you write a short piece talking about what the words mean to you. Jim Jay gave me these; Spain, Liberty, Teaching, trade unions and protest.

So, in exactly that order, I'll start with Spain. It's strange, when I was a bit younger I was always convinced that I was going to live abroad when I was older. There was a mixture of what was probably a bit of small-town snobbery mixed in with the feeling that the world was just too big to remain in your corner forever. The snobbery is interesting I think; back in the day that escaping the provincial upbringing narrative probably takes you to a big city and eventually to London, but modern communities are so fluid that moving to another part of the country isn't nearly exotic enough.

Despite that feeling, by the time I'd left university I'd left the country a grand total of four times : a family holiday to a French farmhouse that was on the verge of collapse, another to a Portuguese island full of pensioners, one trip to Italy to watch Internazionale v Ipswich Town and finally a short stay with a friend in Vienna.

I think there are three kinds of ex-pats, the first are the classic retirement villa on the Costa del Sol types (there are now so many of these that the DWP has a branch in Spain now, in addition to some towns having British mayors), who are unapologetically there for the weather and to enjoy life and couldn't give a shit about the local culture, people or language. These people have the most fun, worry the least and only have one complaint, the inconvenience of Spain having a native population. They don't worry if walking around in flip-flops in March makes them look like a tourist or about turning pink on the beach. The second are 'authenticos', who want to imagine they are the only foreigner in the entire fucking country who is actually making an effort, that they blend in so perfectly with their understanding of everything that they basically are Spanish. They're unbearably condescending to everyone else they come across and give advice like "try not to go on about differences between the UK and Spain, no-one cares man!" Finally there are all the people in the middle who make a bit of a effort but ultimately acknowledge that they're still foreign, have their own habits and pecadillos and are basically here to enjoy themselves and learn something. The difficulty is that although you'd like to be in the last group, the only way to achieve that is by feeling both the insecurity of the second group and the blunt pink-faced patriotism of the first group.

...

Imagine you were explaining the word democracy to an alien. First give him the standard definition: government of the people, for the people and by the people. Then invite him to examine and comment upon capitalist democracy, even at its best. I think the conversation would go like this...

- Democracy does not exist here

How do you mean, our leaders are chosen in free and fair elections?

- To whom do you refer?

Politicians and governments of course.

- But how are they your leaders?

They control the government.

- And what does the government control?

Everything; foreign policy, education, taxation; everything!

- But do they control what is made, how it is made and how it is distributed and to whom?

Well, no.

- And who does?

The people that own the capitalist companies.

- And they decide who does what, when they do it and what they receive for doing it?

Yes.

- And how are they chosen?

They aren't. They own the things they control.

- How?

They bought it.

- From who?

From the people who owned it before them.

- And how they get it?

The same way.

- And who owned it first?

No-one.

- Oh.

Liberty is meaningless in a society in which one part of society compels the majority to work in order to enrich that minority, in which that part of society holds permanent monopoly of the planet's resources and uses that to give orders to us all.

...

Teaching is something for which I have found I have a mixed bag of talents. I have no natural affinity for inspiring children, but manage to make lessons entertaining enough to hold the attention of adults. It has also revealed to me that any job, no matter what interest it may have at first, will eventually get old if you have to do it five days a week, 12 months a year. I remember when I'd just started, I was in a Summer School, and there was another teacher, "Good Tom" (to be contrasted with "bad Tom", the Director of Studies, so-called by the students, not the other staff). Kids of all ages loved him, he fit strangely with adults, though most of us warmed to him in the end. I envied his natural rapport with younger people, the instinctive relationship he had with them. Some of us (both me and "bad Tom") are stiff, cold and humourless, unremittingly adult and unable to ever feel that bond.

...

I've been in trade unions of various sorts for a while now, but I'm currently a lapsed member of the anarchist CNT. I lasted about a year there, before being finally put off by the cliquey feeling the place gave off (even if the majority of people I met were friendly enough). TEFL-teaching is not a friendly business for building workplace organisations, what with high turnover and as many levels of management as any government department. The thought that I'd ever manage to get enough unity to practise the CNT ideal model of trade unionism (decide everything is big worker assemblies) was enough to make me decide that taking ideological decisions on was what "bureaucratic" and what "revolutionary" was actually a bit of hinderence to doing what needed to be done - using workers' organisations to actually make yourself and the people around you better off and more confident. So I left and I'm putting my name forward for elected workers' rep (for another union, the CGT). If for me liberty means more than letting one class of society own everything, then fighting for that does mean us taking decisions together, democratically. But we don't need a schematic for how to do it, let's see what works.

...

I've never been a big protester, I've been to lots over the years, but I can never muster the requisite enthusiasm. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm a crazy extremist revolutionary type, but if I'm going to strut around waving my red flag I want something tangible to come out of it. Call me a boring bastard, but I want a protest strategy to have some kind of potential victory written into the plan. Take boycotting coca-cola for instance. Now, Coca-cola are arseholes, complicit in all sorts of horrible shit. But I don't think not buying coke on principle is a political response to that. It's a way of making yourself feel better without changing anything. Coke know they aren't going to win back yogurt-weaving hippies with their Palestine-solidarity Mecca Cola and all the rest. They aren't interested in appeasing them, and to be honest people aren't interested in being appeased. Neither I nor anyone else is going to be convinced that coke are nice people, regardless of what they do. So they've no motivation to change. Now. Pick an issue. A winnable issue, call a boycott with a plausible end (say de-segregation of buses) at which point the participants will resume consumption of said product. That's a protest, that's a direct struggle with your opponent to change something. Then I'm a boycotter, then I'm a protester. I don't think anyone should get into this for the badge-wearing opportunities, let alone for the glamour. Because unless you're Swampie, it sure as fuck ain't very exciting.

I don´t want to live in 2009

2009-07-14T09:24:00.000-07:00

Recently, I belatedly got into the BBC drama series, Life on Mars. I´m spending six weeks in the homestead, my parents have it on DVD and I´ve got a lot of time of my hands. On top of that, I rather like John Simms (even if he had a significant hand in the film that launched this prick´s ridiculous career) and given that the show is on Spanish tv (even remaking it as La Chica de Ayer for Antena 3), thought I should get into it.

Anyway, it´s bloody good, cop gets hit by car, goes back to 1973, you don´t know if he´s dead, in a coma, insane or whatever. Lots of cool 70s cars and clothes, as well as one of the best TV characters of all time - Sam Tyler´s boss DCI Gene Hunt. It has an irritating tendency to moralise about 70s police work, as if modern policing was a fluffy politically correct fantasy world, but what can you do?

I really like their vision of 1973. Are people supposed to be nostalgic for times they never lived through? Maybe you can only truly idealise fiction. All I know is that 2009 is a terribly bland time to live through. For me, us naughtians are not only miserable but worse, fatalistic too. Not only to be expect things to be shit, we don´t even have any plan (or desire) to make them less shit. Our national culture is probably the worst off for repackaging whatever bollocks they happen to be selling over the water, or perhaps whatever Simon Fuller and Simon Cowell come up with to put on the telly. We drink mass-produced "Irish" cider with ice, because we saw it on an advert, even though we have a far tastier and authentic english one. There hasn´t been a good new band from these shores in about 10 years, so we just recycle mediocrities and pretend they´re good.

What important thing could really excite you about modern Britain? The coming Conservative government? The "radical reform" of our public services ? A great culture movement that will engage people in a way never seen before? Or maybe just more decades of being lorded over by glorified PR men...

Imperial hubris

2009-07-10T11:11:00.000-07:00

I was just watching the mother of squaddie on Channel 4 News. Furious, she blamed the government for her son´s death, blown up in a lightly armoured vehicle venurable to roadside bombs. Moments later another squaddie expressed his disgust at the coming cuts to the military´s budget, and called the Prime Minister "a disgrace".

The reality is that this government or the next will cut government spending, and if you gave most people a choice, cut spending on the NHS or schools or cut spending on the military, they´d give you the same answer. That doesn´t make it easier for people who lose love ones because we´re waging a war that we can´t afford.

But that´s the point, whatever you think about the rights and wrongs of Afghanistan and its government, why is it that a archipelago just off the coast of mainland Europe should imagine that it needs to use its army and resources to support various governments in far-flung places all over the world. We don´t have the money, and at best these conflicts have a tangental relationship to our security (and most likely are actuallly detrimental to them). There´s no more reason that British troops should be occupying parts of Afghanistan than those of Sweden, Holland or Argentina.

From the soldiers and their families´point of view, they´re professionals asked to do a job, who feel they should be given the appropriate equipment to do it properly. If the British Army does it on the cheap, this is what´ll happen.

But, what if the money isn´t there? Surely the only argument, given that ´on the cheap´ is the only way that they can do it, is not to do it at all. That the British Army has no place supporting the government in Afghanistan, Iraq or any other far-off locale. Let other countries, those with money and pretensions to importance worry about all that shite.

And, if we weren´t busy invading places for a mixture of ideology, geo-politics and greed, what would we need an army for? Couldn´t we just say fuck it and spend the rest of the money on, say, windfarms and other forms of sustainable energy. We waste so much money make ourselves unpopular around the world, to "save people" who don´t want us to "save" them, wouldn´t it be better to spend it on helping people?

say what?

2009-07-07T10:38:00.000-07:00

Switched on the radio today on my way home from work. Radio One Newsbeat it was, talking about a story I´d already heard that morning, about how only 2% of council houses were taken up by people born outside the UK and that it wasn´t true they got preference over indigenous families. (I´m not sure why they needed a survey to illustrate this, when firstly there is not a single council in the whole country for which "being foreign" gets you points for the housing list, and secondly it´s just completely obviously untrue. What, is the country supposed to be full of housing officers who hate white people or something?)

Well anyway, when this news item had finished missing the point that disminished resources inevitably lead to bitterness and resentment amongst affected communities, which fairly commonly is directed at people they perceive themselves to competing with (heaven forfend anyone mention that the real problem is that we have a massive shortage of affordable rentable housing in general, that could be solved by, you know, the state getting some for people), it moved onto a reaction interview from ... Nick Griffin!

Now, I know the BNP picked up a couple of MEPs recently and people threw a bit of hissy fit about it. But Jesus, when did this bloke get accepted by the BBC as THE representative of "indigenous Britain"? You couldn´t find a single other person, other than the head of the Nazi Party to interview about this? Not enough problems with our politicians doing everything in their power to racialise every issue, and set people against each other, the state-funded media station is giving the head of a far-right group a platform as national anti-immigration spokesmen on the drive time news! Someone please tell me this didn´t go on across the network, for god´s sake...

the feel of the place

2009-07-06T11:31:00.000-07:00

You ever feel like this country has a vague sort of malevolence in the air. There's something I can't quite put my finger on, it's just a feeling but it's there nonetheless. I suppose to notice you might have to spend some time away, but there's something angry and bitter about us. Like none of us are really happy, or feel like we have a stake in anything or anyone. I never normally this melancholy in the Summer...

In death we are all equal?

2009-07-03T09:55:00.000-07:00

The front page of the times today carried a picture of Lt Colonel Rupert Thorneloe next to the headline "British commander is killed by taliban bomb". Alongside this, every single bulletin has lead with the story of his death. Mentioned briefly as an afterthought, the simultaneous death of trooper Joshua Hammond.

It surprises even a cynic like me that the press could be so nakedly elitist in its coverage. Any journalist coming across the story must surely have been aware of the pitfalls here. Two men, one an important officer and a commanding officer, the other a regular squaddie die at the same time. They both leave behind grieving relatives and friends, to whom they are equally important. Despite their different lives and statuses they both gave their lives fighting in a war ordered by their political masters.

Yet Lt Colonel Thornoloe gets tributes from the Prince of Wales, front page newspaper coverage, lead articles of the main evening news. The death of a trooper generates just a footnote, an illustration of how littlle our country cares for its soldiers, both living and dead.

(this even before we consider the complete lack of personalisation that ever occurs when an Afghan, civilian or combatant, dies)

NuLabour speak: "RADICAL"

2009-07-02T14:02:00.000-07:00

Ever noticed how government ministers and supporters always use the word "radical" to mean "this really right-wing, I mean, so right-wing you'll wonder what on Earth motivated me to join a supposedly left-wing party in the first place"?

Just a note on this quote:

"It is not taking people's retirement away from them," he said.
"I think this idea that a 25-year-old sits there worrying whether their retirement is 65 or 67 is complete rubbish."

Is it now official public policy that the best way to pass anything is to hope that people aren't paying attention? Is "ah, make 'em work another couple of years, the fuckers won't even notice until it's too late" actually a passable argument for these things nowadays?

And when, after a decade of debating this, will anyone mention the fact that pensions are in fact deferred pay, negotiated as part of our contract, and not, in fact "an unsustainable perk/burden on the tax payer"? A decent pension, quite apart from being a reasonable expectation in a wealthy, developed society, is no more of a perk than anyone else who through high skills levels, good fortune or a good trade union manages to get a good salary and terms and conditions. The question is not "why should I pay for something I don't get myself" but "why aren't my conditions so good?"

coming home

2009-07-01T07:36:00.000-07:00

I´ve six weeks back in England coming, so I thought I´d make a list of things I´ll be glad to see again ...

roast beef and yorkshire pudding, stuffing, gravy, bicycles, pints, ale, bitter, custard, takeaway curry, fish and chips, being offered tea all the time, places that are green and not pale brown, primark, asda, people speaking proper english, Ipswich Town, cricket, the hot dog stand in the town square in Ipswich, The Duke of Marlborough pub, amazon.co.uk, SIM only mobile phone contracts, banks with no standing charges, (mostly) toll-free roads, two-storey houses, more than three flavours of crisps, pies, apple crumble, people arriving on time, food from parts of the world other than the one I´m in, people who are disparaging and cynical about their country, people whiter than I am, being able to walk at a normal pace without obstruction ...

(rosbif y pudding de yorkshire, pan relleno con salvia y cebolla, salsa de carne, bicicletas, pintas, cerveza inglesa/amarga, salsa inglesa, curry para llevar, pescado a la romana y patatas fritas, que ofrecen tazas de té a menudo, lugares que son verdes no marrón claro, primark, asda, gente que habla inglés de verdad, Ipswich Town, cricket, el puesto de perritos calientes en la plaza mayor de Ipswich, el Pub Duque de Marlborough, amazon.co.uk, los contratos de moviles, bancos sin cobras, autopistas sin cobras, casas (no pisos), mas que 3 sabores de patatas fritas, pasteles de carne, crumble de manzana, gente que llega en punto, comida de las partes del mundo que son acá, gente que denigra a su país, gente mas blanco que yo, andar a una velocidad normal sin obstrucción)

things I will miss ... tortilla, nightlife starting at 12am, eating breakfast at 7am after a night out, people being interested in where I come from, regular diversions which involve following people you´ve just met to wherever they happen to be going, learning a new way of expressing myself every day, free food with every beer, botellón/street-drinking, people selling you beers on the street, pretending to run away from the police when they pretend to chase you (see botellón), watching street-sellers doing the same with sheet + strings devices, taking three hours to eat out with friends, spanglish (talking and hearing), sitting in Templo de debod as the sun goes down, being called a guiri, calimuxo, drinking al fresco, boquerones, ham, a mix drink meaning about 100ml of booze, wine costing about a quarter what it does in england, feeling like I should join every overheard conversation in English and patatas bravas...

(tortilla española, comenzar la noche a las 12, desayunar despues, que a la gente le interesa de donde soy, seguir gente que ha acabado de conocer a cualquier sitio que esten yendo, comida gratis con cada caña, botellón!, gente vende cerveza en la calle, fingir huir la poli mientras fingen a perseguirnos (ve botellón), ver callejeros hacen lo mismo con sus productos en sabanas, el spanglish (hablar y oír), sentar en templo de debod durante la puesta de sol, ser llamado un guiri, calimuxo, beber en terrazas, boquerones, jamón!, que una cubata significa 100ml de alcohol, vino barato, sentir como se debe entrar cualquiera conversación en Ingles, patatas bravas y tardar tres horas para cenar con amigos ...).

Ever noticed...

2009-06-29T08:19:00.001-07:00

Ever noticed how the only comments ever published from Latin American contributors on the BBC are incredibly right-wing? Take this selection about the recent coup d´etat in Honduras, which are all busily waffling on about Manuel Zelaya being an evil socialist Chavez-a-like power-crazed megalomaniac for the truly awful crime of "buying votes with food" (well, if you´re gonna buy votes, feeding people in poor countries would seem a relatively harmless way to do it. Sounds like a win-win to me).

At what point do you look at stuff like that as a journalist and conclude that, perhaps, if he won his last election with around 50% of the vote, and was prepared to ask people in a referendum if they wanted to re-elect him, maybe 10 pages of hostile, english-speaking Hondurans with internet access is not exactly a representative sample...

Ban landlords

2009-06-25T07:07:00.000-07:00

I looked up the word for landlord in my English-Spanish dictionary the other day, and staring back at me were the words "hijo de puta". What is it about collecting money for sitting on your fat arse all day that makes people utter pricks?

It´s not like they have to do anything more than a token amount of work for a living. The sum total of repairs affected to the property over the duration of my tenancy was the replacement of one shower head, and the disconnection of one faulty extractor fan. That apart he just comes round to collect the rent (actually, he pays someone to do that, being a busy man).

Such is the case with most landlords, whose entire economic model is based on doing as little as possible, whilst spending the whole duration of the contact plotting to keep the deposit. Buy-to-let is a horrendously easy way to make money, and even then people can´t do it honestly. In all my years of renting, reasonable landlords have been out-numbered about 10 to 1.

But then, the people that disproportionately suffer from arsehole landlords are alternately the poor, and the soon to be comfortably off (students). Yet, the amount of activism around poor quality privately rented housing stock, either from students´unions or from anti-poverty groups is virtually non-existent. The mainstream left seem to restrict themselves to oblique, permanently unanswered demands to start building council housing, rather than any systematic attempt at addressing the system as it is and making real improvements in living conditions. Ah well, I´ll just have to muse that I´ve been taken for a lot worse than the €40 this chump conned me out of, and see if these people want any help...

el orgullo viene antes de la caída

2009-06-25T04:27:00.000-07:00

I wonder if there´s an equivalent in Spanish for the expression "pride comes before a fall"?

I mean forget that most of the world regards the Confederations Cup as a bit a friendly knock-about and most of the teams qualify by the default of being the least shite of truly woeful confederations.

The Spanish media bollock on about "The Red Legend" like La Selección hadn´t been utter dross for decades prior to winning the European Championships. Most of them were already talking about "the final with Brazil" and they´re pretty much certain they´ll walk the world cup. Well, back to Earth with a bump after losing to a side that only sneaked out of their group because Egypt imploded. Should do them good mind, they could do with reminding that no European side has ever won a world cup outside of their home continent...

Iran: More Belarus than Ukraine

2009-06-19T03:24:00.000-07:00

Seeing as comparisons are where it´s at in the world of international politics, can I throw mine in? It´s all very well getting excited about the prospects of the protests in Iran, but does anyone realistically see a threat to the Iranian regime from this movement?

Authoritarian regimes world-over have got to be pretty accustomed to colour revolutions these days, following as they do suspiciously similar patterns the world over. Ahmadinejad looks like his situation is far more Lukashenko than Yanukovych. Like with the former, Ahmadinejad and his supporters rig elections that they´d probably win anyway, just for power hungry control-freakery of it. As a result they´ve both got enough popular support, certainly amongst the police, the army and the establishment, to see off students and liberals camping in parliament square for a bit.

Ahmadinejad will survive, the battered and bruised protesters will go home. Not that their man is much of a threat to the status quo anyway. For what it´s worth my hope is that they´ll succeed, if only because the manner of doing so (street protests) will in itself create openings of democratic space in Iran. I´m not optimistic though.

Internationalism is...

2009-06-17T09:06:00.000-07:00

Making sure that the struggles of every people in every corner of that globe, their liberty and civil rights, all are worth exactly the same thing ... namely... worth criticising George Galloway and the Respect party for.

Maths with Florentino

2009-06-12T05:58:00.001-07:00

Real Madrid´s annual turnover: approximately €350m.
Combined cost of Kaka and CR7 transfers: €155m
Value of CR7´s 6 year contract: €115m
Value of Kaka´s 6 year contract: €60m
So that´s 1 year of their annual turnover on two players.
Necessary increase in revenue to break even: €55m per year. (16% of current turnover)

How did it work out last time?

Europe moves right aka social democracy´s death-throes

2009-06-10T07:38:00.001-07:00

The marquee social democratic parties in Europe are all fucked. The Party of European Socialists lost nearly a quarter of their seats in the last election and they were already a small minority in the European parliament. Look a bit deeper than that and you see that the big guns just fell apart; Labour Party 15.7% Parti Socialiste 16.5% SPD 20.8%.

In the three biggest European economies, all of which have governed their country (more or less) independently in the past, not one could convince in excess of a quarter of the electorate. The party still clinging to power in the UK did the worst, but the PS (in opposition) and the SPD (a junior partner in the governing coalition) did no better.

In fact, almost no PES affiliate Europe-wide actually came out of the Sunday as the largest party in their country (Greece, Malta and Denmark being the only exceptions), and only in a handfull did any of them poll more than 30%.

Now if it were in a few countries, then maybe I might think these had political explanations, just the usual toing and froing between the mainstream parties. But as a Europe-wide trend then it looks like the social democratic centre left could be going extinct.

Beneath the individual afflictions of different parties is their an underlying reason in our society for these parties to be drowning in the sea of history?

What sustained these parties over the course of the 80s and 90s was a mixture of things; the persistence, emotionally if not socially, of their historical base - the mass industrial working class - and the main other one was an ability to appeal to liberal-minded centrists in some sort of opposition to social conservatism and the worst excesses of neoliberalism. They succeeded by being a nicer version of the conservatives and hoping their traditional support didn´t notice.

Eventually of course their traditional support was going to notice that they were doing very little (if anything) in their interest, and either desert them, or (in the case of the younger generation) never turn to them in the first place. And the thing about all those centrists is that they´re fickle as hell, so they wander off as soon as something nicer and shinier comes along, or whenever it looks like this lot aren´t managing capitalism very well.

In the midst of a recession the problem gets exarcebated, because it´s their support that´s suffering, and they´ve nothing to tell them. Once you sign up for neo-liberal consensus there´s not a great deal you can do to support working people in a recession. So when it´s obvious the system isn´t working and you refuse to help people in any significant way, they start to leave you in even greater numbers.

With conservatively-minded people, especially economic, their support stands up even under globalisation and recession, because basically it doesn´t challenge any of their core beliefs. The problem are scrounging shower at the bottom, or, the mass of impoverished people who have now stopped voting. Your support base stays in tact and just asks that you do the same things only harsher. They wait for capitalism to sort itself out.

THE SKY IS FALLING!

2009-06-09T08:15:00.001-07:00

The BNP get two MEPs and the whole political establishment wets itself, and Left starts hysterically throwing blame around for whoever may or may not be responsible.

Let´s get a bit of perspective here. Nobody really gives a shit about European Elections, hence the 34% turnout. It´s an insitution with fuck all power, that´s very far away and that nobody ever pays attention to. Unless it´s doing something we don´t like. Of that 34% turnout, the BNP managed to muster 6.4%, giving them the support of wopping 1 in 40 of those eligible to vote.

And the truth is, no-one who wasn´t a fascist yesterday, became a fascist today. Putting a bit of paper in a box doesn´t fundamentally change who you are. So, there´s no point wailing now about people actually voting Thursday, the views that they held on Wednesday. The problem didn´t happen when people put their hands up and said "you know what, this anti-immigrant/foreigner/asians party is for me", it happened over whatever the hell is wrong with our country.

Nor would swamping it with other ballots change anything. So let´s say that a higher turnout sends someone less nazi to the European parliament. It doesn´t make this country any less racist, it doesn´t mean that we´ve changed even one mind about how our society is or should be. It just means we´ve drowned it out with someone desperately clinging to some establishment party to show how they personally, aren´t racist, or are bothered by racism or something like that.

The sky doesn´t fall in because the BNP have MEPs. It changes nothing, other than re-iterating what people have been saying for years, the real job is making our country less of a breeding ground for those kind of views, and until people take that seriously then they´ll continue making headway.

building sandcastles

2009-06-08T07:26:00.000-07:00

In the midst of a global economic recession and not one left-wing party, Europe-wide, makes a significant breakthrough.

Am I the only one currently thinking that you might be best off just giving up?

ay, que calor

2009-06-05T11:10:00.000-07:00

In four weeks time I´m taking a break from the heat and going back to England. However brilliant thirty degree heat, six months of the year might seem in theory, it´s better for lying on the beach than for attempting to control eleven year olds in a second language.

At the moment I´m wondering if there will still be a Labour Party by the time I get back. Between the Blairites disgruntled by, erm, Gordon Brown being mean to them, the prospect of more trade unions disafiliating and at least one trade union hesitantly moving toward founding a new party, it´s getting pulled apart in a lot of different directions.

I always think though, however much slagging the left in the LP always gets/got for making the party unelectable (or potentially so), for always complaining about the leadership and basically acting like they didn´t actually want Labour to win or like them very much, it´s always the right wing that takes its ball home when they lose. Ramsay MacDonald, the SDP, now the Blairites, it´s always the "populist" right who think that winning elections means activists shutting the fuck up and doing as they´re told, that are prepared to royally shaft the party when it suits them.

Europeos al español

2009-06-04T03:31:00.000-07:00

If it weren´t for the major parties habits of flyposting every available surface, and hanging flags from every tree, then you might struggle to work out that there was an election in two days time. In all my travels around the city I´ve managed to see a grand total of two stalls (one PSOE, one PP) and a van from one of the random "EUROPE´s fantastic, they give us loads of money" parties.

You can´t escape the idea that aside from the Europhile cranks, no-one really gives a shit round here. And if no-one cares here, where the EU is largely credited for making Spain a developed country after years of Franco, then no-one is really going to care anywhere.

As for the results, it´ll be as you were as the PSOE and PP both hold onto their votes, the former because Rajoy is one of the most unpopular opposition leaders in Europe and the PSOE is actually trying to help people through the crisis (being on balance, the most left-wing government in any major Western European country), the latter because Zapatero is, despite all that, a pretty uninspiring human being.

The Izquierda Unida will once again tread water, managing not to deteriorate as badly as their Eurocommie cousins over the water in Italy. Which, with the exception of Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste seems to happening all over Europe. The reality is, for all the wailing and gnashing of teeth in the UK, the Spanish left is taking no more advantage of the crisis than they are.

Though the IU´s high tide was a good deal higher than any UK equivalent (for a variety of reasons, both historical and relating to the two countries electoral systems), the proof of the pudding in the Left-wing alternative pudding is in how its fortunes are changing in the face of the recession. Now, I´ve never said that it logically follows that economic depression equals a swing to the left. In fact often recessions produce a sort of stoic fatalism that makes people wait it out until the next upswing. If the consequences are global enough, local polite elites can avoid blame for them, even, as is the case in Spain, the effects are stronger locally than the global average.

More than that, if the recession really exposes the instability of global capitalism, and reveals how little it serves the general population, you should still expect a better hearing for those with an alternative. But not any old alternative. Preaching old-style social democracy seems to be no more convincing in bad times than it is in good ones. Neither do these parties seem to be able to articulate a fundamentally different vision of the future that appeals to anything more than the usual groups.

For years I´ve wondered whether I would join a functioning left party in the UK, if one existed. Well, the answer in practice seems to be no. The thought of desperately flyering for the bright mixed-economy nationalizations of the future makes me feel a bit queasy...

I declare...

2009-05-20T08:17:00.000-07:00

Manchester United will win the Champions League final. There´s been much pant-wetting over this Barça team over the past few weeks, especially round these parts. But, I´m gonna put my hand up and say something controversial: they´re overrated.

Let´s take a quick look book over the past couple of years, shall we? First off, this season, La Liga has been shite. Valencia. Shit. Sevilla. Shit. Villareal. Shit. Atletico. Shit. All of them, utter garbage. And above all... Real Madrid are shit. And yet, this Real side, that has conceded 12 goals in their last 3 games, that should´ve lost to Getafe at home, if that lot knew how not to take comically awful penalties in the 90th minute of big games, that couldn´t even get near Liverpool, despite announcing beforehand that they´d piss all over them. A team whose best player is Arsenal and Chelsea reject Lassana Diarra. They´re terrible. And you know what? They´ve cantered into second place after a mid-season run that saw them take 55 points out of 57.

And yet, give them a reasonably effective coach, Van Nistelrooy, with Guti and Robben actually playing regularly and well, and they beat this same Barça side (more or less) the title last year.

Barça have had one challenge this season. Beating Chelsea. And they shouldn´t have. They should have been dead and buried, long before Iniesta´s speculative last minute drive. They´ve ropey first-choice defenders, most of whom are injured. They´ve two fantastic midfielder and one great forward. But I don´t think Yaya Toure, the 2009´s Thierry Henry or Samuel "rich man´s Andy Cole" E´too will exactly scare Vidic and Ferdinand.

Manchester United on the other hand have actually won a difficult league, have a midfield that seems adept at suffocating creative types like Iniesta and Xavi, and the best defence in, well, the world. Oh, and the best attacking player on the planet (and a few other good ones). So they´ll win next week.

Disconnected

2009-05-12T02:38:00.000-07:00

Is anyone else struck by how every attempted to explain exactly why MPs need such generous expenses actually makes you feel more annoyed?

The greed of it is unsurprising. It´s when they justify it I start to wonder what planet these people live on. Like if people fronted up and said, "look, it´s an un-monitored expenses accounts. I got carried away and put stuff on it that I really shouldn´t have, I´m sorry". We might understand, we all feel the pressure of money, whether we´ve got a lot of it or not, and if you had such an arrangement you´d sure as fuck be tempted to put everything under the sun on it, government-funded or not.

Then someone turns round and tells you, I need all these housing expenses so my husband can live and work in Southampton, whilst I have a constituency home in Luton and another house in London for attending parliament (to give one example that was cited approvingly by David Aaronivitch) gave us. She needed all these houses to do her job and have a normal family life.

But the thing about the lives that the rest of us live is that they´re full of compromises. If you find a good job in a different city, you have to make choices; are you prepared to change your life for the opportunity? Are you prepared to compromise your family life by commuting or living somewhere else? Or cause a massive upheavel by all moving to the new place and hoping that your partner finds another job? You weigh your options and you make the best choice for yourself and your family.

Being an MP shouldn´t exempt you from life´s difficulties. It shouldn´t be the case that because you are a Member of Parliament all of your problems must be solved at public expense. If you don´t want to away from your husband all the time, don´t take that constituency in Luton, or alternately move your family to Luton. Don´t expect the rest of to the foot the bill for you splitting your life in three places. Her argument isn´t that outrageous, it´s just that it´s her deciding to remove herself from the idea that she should ever have to endure the normal compromises of life. She takes home a salary that is far in excess of her constituents. It´s not an outrageous request that the cost of doing her job should be re-embursed to her. Beyond that, it´s not our problem how she organises her life.

And it´s the impoverished bewailing of the difficulties of their actually rather luxury lifestyles that really grates, more than the actually greediness.

"natural" causes

2009-04-02T03:38:00.000-07:00

I have three questions:

Firstly, if you physically crush a hundred or so people into a small space, forbid them to leave for hours on end, deny them access to food and water, in conditions that any reasonable person would think hazardous to health, how can any death in those circumstances be plausibly described as "natural"? A natural death is having a heart-attack waiting for the bus, or passing peacefully in your sleep. It´s not keeling over whilst being penned in by dozens of armoured, baton-wielding police.

Secondly, are the deaths of 30 year old males (who are apparently healthy enough to consider it sensible to attend potentially physically demanding protests) of "natural causes" unrelated to police brutality and particular police crushing tactics so common, and the deaths of people detained by the police so uncommon, that your first reaction to learning of such an event would be to automatically accept the explanation unquestioningly rather than to smell something fishy and speculate as much?

Thirdly, given the police force´s history of lying about similar incidents, including the Hillsborough disaster, for which one newspaper was forced to apologise for repeating police fabrications without question, and the De Menezes affair, in which the police were caught repeatedly and deliberately distorting the facts to justify the killing of an innocent man, when reporting such a story would you repeat their unlikely claims of protesters throwing bottles at paramedics rushing to help a hurt comrade, failing to provide the police as the source of the information, failing to quote any person at all, simply reporting it as fact or would you treat the accusation with caution; aware that it both sounds false and eminates from an organisation with a long history of lying to cover their mistakes and excesses?

If your answered these questions with (a) easily (b) accept unquestioningly or (c) report it as truth, so undeniable in fact that you needn´t even provide a quote or source; then congratulations, you must be a journalist for either the BBC, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Mail, The Sun or any other major national news outlet.

INCITEMENT!

2009-03-25T09:16:00.000-07:00

From the mid-1990s until last year we apparently lived through a period of prosperity, an economic boom. Apparently the economy was growing, lots of people were getting incredibly rich and average incomes were going up.

But how the hell could anyone tell? For most of us, prosperity meant stagnating real wages, and in the last few years a gentle decline in spending power as inflation accelerated with oil prices. Normal people couldn´t buy houses, couldn´t rent good ones either, they racked up massive debts, their pensions collapsed, they worked harder and longer for the same rewards. Their kids were getting a worse education, their public services were getting cut, packaged, sold-off, then jumping in price. They could see the state of their society deteriorating around them, as whole parts of the country were abandoned to antisocialism.

Meanwhile a small class of super wealthy arseholes systematically enriched themselves. They got the spoils of the ´boom´ and got absurdly, disgustingly rich. And we were told: leave them. Leave them or they´ll leave you. These people are financial heroes, they keep the whole thing from collapsing. If you challenge them, even for a fraction of their enormous wealth, they will give their marvellous bounty to someone else. They will pack up their ball and go home.

Don´t ask them for your wage increases, don´t ask them to pay taxes, don´t demand that their pay packets be within the bounds of basic human decency. For they are the geese that lay the golden egg, and they will take no questions, they will take no interference. Learn to love them, for their are your God.

And we obeyed. We took the paltry pay rises, we let them off their taxes, we stopped our mouths from uttering foul words that might offend the mighty beast.

And now? And now the great God has failed, his world is collapsing around him, and he comes to us to pay the bill. You: on the dole. You: take a pay cut. You: take this cut to health services and that cut to schools. You: slave labour for your dole check. Him: billions of pounds from the Chancellor of the Exchequer so his Empire doesn´t fall flat on its arse.

See, he can´t magic money out of nowhere, he doesn´t create anything. We made all the stuff he´s got, we made it in factories, offices and hospitals. And when it stops working he can only demand that we make it work again. All he does is sit at the top of the pile and accumulate whatever he can.

He had no right to it in the first place, and he´s got no right to it now. If the law says he does, then the law is fucked-up. And if we, the real law of the land, come along and destroy it, fine.

Better yet. While destruction might satisfy our need for revenge, surely taking it back will satisfy more?

arf! obscure foreign policy irony ...

2009-03-23T09:46:00.000-07:00

Sadly, I´ve no longer got the archives to my old site, so I can´t point to the stuff I did about how the US and their allies rigged the Afghan constitutional process. Basically they went through this absurd "consultation process" that was run by their proxy administration and then voted on by the self-same provisional government.

This was the original model for governance in Iraq, get some CIA croney (Chalaba, Allawi, whoever), set them up as provisional president, write a constitution that gave the executive all the power, then make sure they´re the only face on TV and radio, and will thus inevitably triumph in the forthcoming elections.

In the first post-constitution elections in Afghanistan, CIA representative Hamid Karzai had 90% of all the media coverage in the entire elections, on both TV and radio, as well as the entire resources of state on his side (compare that to say Hugo Chavez, who apparently suppresses free speech, by shutting one of the dozen media corporations that are all massively hostile to his government and pump out propaganda 24/7).

And now, guess what, they´ve fallen out with Karzai and are trying to shoe-horn in a Prime Minister role with more power (appointed by them apparently!), so they can undermine him! On account of him being a corrupt fucker who deals with all sorts of dodgy Warlord types. Turns out having a democracy and checks and balances is vital after all...

tragedy and empathy

2009-03-20T10:57:00.001-07:00

My flatmate has a very blunt way of expressing himself. Particularly after a few drinks. Well, more provocative than anything. As he and his drinking buddies woke me from my painfully disturbed night of sleep (I woke Saturdays, the rest of the world does not...), the talked animatedly. By the time half their number had departed and I´d finished showering and drinking my coffee they´d started a full-blown row that had brought an irate neighbour to the door. "Hombre, te aseguro, si podría callarles, lo haría... yo, yo no salí anoche, me he leventado por el trabajo, que comenza en dos horas. Yo preferiera quedar en mi cama..." Enraged neighbour went away more sympathetic than angry.

I settled down to follow their arguments, and turn the tone a little more comradely. Two friends had been talking of the tragic turn of events in Germany, where a seriously disturbed young man had ended the lives of several former schoolmates before taking his own. My flatmate, as he has expressed on a previous occasion to similar effect, had bluntly announced that he didn´t give a fuck about such things, just as the others didn´t care about the people killed everyday around the world, for reasons no purer than those concocted by this maniac.

Outrage ensued as the others castigated him for his callous, uncaring attitude toward the unfortunate dead. As I attempted to cool the temperate I took his side, by way of clarifying his arguments in the reasonable terms of the barrack room lawyer - "we´re not asking for anything unreasonable, sir". When I took his argument up the more reasonable it seemed to me. It´s easy to feel and express sympathy for the victims of arbitrary violence: to declare "we are all Marta" or to put up a poster of Madaleine McCann. After all, what do you actually have to do other than feel it. Marta´s killer is in prison, the police are/were searching for Maddie, however intense your empathy, there was nothing to be done.

My other friend was telling me, "we all know how terrible things are in Africa (sic), but this is different". Maybe it was the cultural proximity, the deliberate nature of the atrocity, but it was definitely different. For me the difference, and the reason why we don´t feel so profoundly for the horrors of everyday life, is the way in which we are responsible. Sometimes regular people carry acts of extreme brutality. No-one need condemn them, they are so obviously horrific that no one could. The authorities are dealing with them, they agree that these are contemptible actions. With the effects of poverty or tyranny, society, at least the power structures of our society are responsible. They will not be punished, things will not change, they will not be pursued, caught, made to pay.

There´s something to do about all that endemic stuff, something to take responsibility for. The thinks that challenge us, weigh more heavily than the things that we can feel strongly about, but that call for us to do nothing. The way society kills people is neglected even when close to home, even if it´s pensioners dying out of the lack of heating in the Winter, or for lack of aircon in the Summer. If the killing of the elderly through neglect had the same emotional impact as Marta´s murder, we´d have been storming parliament long ago.

This functionless empathy (Diana Syndrome you might call it) is a calling card to others in a destructive callous world. We all want to know that we aren´t entirely emotionless, that the tragedies of others still exercise. Safely expressed, without the need to do anything. Demonstrating against terrorism the same. We shall not be bowed by your bombs, as we support the powers that be in dealing with your tiny threat.

It´s understandable, but ultimately worthless, even self-indulgent. Which is why to some of us, the hollowness of it makes us angry.

this crisis is annoying, huh?

2009-03-05T03:52:00.000-08:00

You wait 30 years for a crisis of capitalism, and when it comes you´re still not satisfied. I mean first off, for the most part, certainly the British Left, spent the last couple of decades intently staring at it´s own navel, fighting with each other, worrying about solidarity with villagers in South East Kurdistan, and generally doing anything except building a strong and lasting alternative to the political mainstream.

So, here we are in the midst of a big economic and political crisis and who benefits? The fucking Tories, the arseholes who actually designed the absurd economic system that left the UK so vulnerable. Now they´re getting to turn round and say, ooh, it´s Labour´s poor economic management you see. Of course, it´s no coincidence that the countries hardest hit are the one´s, like ours, that built in the highest degree of dependence on the finance, construction and retail sectors of the economy, and, not to go all shouty: THAT WAS EVERYONE´S IDEA, THE ENTIRE FUCKING POLITICAL CLASS, YOU DON´T GET TO DISOWN IT BECAUSE YOU AREN´T IN POWER.

Furthermore, it´s not badly managed, it´s not being taken advantage of by greedy businessmen (now, convenient hate figures, previously heroic wealth creators), the thing is functioning exactly how it was designed to. If you design a system in a certain way, and claim credit for it when it works, when everything goes wrong, you don´t get to just wash your hands of it.

Outside of the Tories, guess what, just like we warned when everyone was mincing around waving their lollipops about the war, the force that is probably going to explode over the next couple of truly depressing years will be ... fascism. Already the warnings are flooding in about the BNP getting to send off their little shaven-headed white power comrades to the European parliament. More than one anyway. Well, why? Why is it that form of extremism that´s getting play and not some variety of Leftism, or even, maybe, why not both. Because, the BNP have actually been on the streets doing ordinary everyday politics and, come the crisis that´s going to give them a base from which explode. The various groups of our side have spent the years complacently talking about a downturn as some kind of explanation for decline or stagnation, will now pay the price for neglecting the hard yards.

Aside from that, the protests that we´ve had over the past few months; the strikes, the demos, the throwing stuff at union reps. I mean. Nobody likes to say I told you so, but fuck me. Casualisation, agency work, subcontracting, privatisation. We said it made workers more vulnerable, we said it made them easy to fire, that in the end it was going to turn back the clock to Victorian labour relations, where we all go back to being in employment day by day at the employer´s discretion. We said the unions were fucking gash and wouldn´t, couldn´t do anything about this. And, lo, it came to be. Half the workers at Cowley were agency. How the fuck didn´t that get fought before the crisis? Why wait until employers don´t give a shit whether you strike or not? Why organise, why protest, when everything´s so bad that management don´t even care what you do? Why didn´t we do this shit when we actually had the leverage of being in boomtimes?

And bollocks to the boom, when was that? It´s not like we´ve all been living it up the last 15 years. Getting by, throwing a quarter of society on sink estates to rot in longterm unemployment and near destitution, other people watching their real wages slowly deteriorate, their pensions disappear, their rights eroded, their housing become prohibitively expensive, the cost of living steadily rising. Now what? Kicking millions out of work, probably millions more taking cuts or freezes. Everything still seems to cost as much, even though we´ve got less money. More jobless, more homeless, more cuts to the support system, more with less.

The question is: how angry are we, really?

union reps schmunion schmeps

2009-02-12T02:35:00.000-08:00

If you know my views on the world in much depth, you´ll know that first and foremost I think it´s in the little things, in the details that you can change the world. There´s as much value in persuading a colleague of a neighbour to stand up for their rights (collective and individual) as there is in convincing someone that they want to join whatever pseudo-revolutionary sects is taking up your Saturday afternoons these days.

So I bother myself with the little things. I try to convince people they should join trade unions and be active in them, that this or that thing about their working conditions is unjust, that they should try to change the things they object to in their everyday lives. I´m always trying to get people along to meetings, to take an interest in their collective problems. Firstly, because it´s a better way to live life than to just accept everything authority does to you passively - the only way we ever improve things. Secondly, because it´s through realising that we have collective interests, fighting for them and winning them that people change their disposition toward life and the world (rather than recruitment, which is just getting people to put a label on something that they already feel or know).

In truth, sometimes it´s harder to make people care about the trivia than to convince them of the most extreme ideas. Especially TEFL teachers. For the most part they´ve taken the job to see a bit of the world, and they have an interest in the arcane and philosophical. They´ve probably flirted with some obscure spirituality at some point (probably whilst travelling), and they´re up for debates about metaphysical crap. They certainly aren´t usually hanging around long enough to worry too much about having to tolerate things they don´t like at work. So you can usually get people into a discussion about who would deliver the mail in a post-revolutionary society, but you can´t interest them in whether or not it´s reasonable for management to pay their travel time to Villaverde.

This I expected, I was prepared to do my bit banging my head against that particular brick wall. I was not, however, expecting such a graphic illustration of Spain´s specific industrial relations problem; the "Comite de Empresa". In Spain, if a business is a certain size, you all elect a number of workplace delegates to a Works Committee, who negotiates terms and conditions with management on your behalf. Elections are held every five years or so, and in between times the delegates just stay in the role. Of course, anywhere with our kind of turnover five years is a really long time, and instead of our stipulated three, we actually have one and a half, as one rep left and another switched to part-time.

The other element is that the delegate has to be affiliated to one or other recognised trade union to stand in elections, and ours is officially a representative of the communist-influenced Comisiones Obreras (CC.OO). This person does not have the same idea of what workplace organisation that I do. A lovely person, but our ideas on what representing people involves could not be more different.

For instance, my first thought is give people some reasonable ideas around which they can use as a starting point to discuss and organise. Nothing too extreme, just baby steps you understand, things to change that even management might see the point of. The first thing I got in reply was "well I know how management will see that, and what they´ll say". Now for me, the point is not to be a sort of buffer zone between workers and management, but to represent our interests and demands as strongly as you can to the people in charge. We want something, we should try our damnedest to get it.

After we´d gone through the whole, "things that might be nice to have", I moved on to some basic organising. Here we were at a meeting, during the working day, in the workplace, and there were a grand-total of three people, including the rep, in attendance. There were a few things that I had by way of objection. First off, no-one had been consulted about when might be a good time to have a meeting, secondly no-one had been encouraged to attend, nevermind the "drag them in kicking and screaming if you have to approach" that marks out really enthusiastic organisers. Secondly the invite had come via management. It´s a small thing, but I think it´s an important principle that workers´reps should communicate with the rest of the workers through our own channels. It just looks bad when it comes through management, like it´s not really our own organisation, but just a sort of wanky staff consultation, where we suggest things and then they do whatever the hell they like. "But we don´t have people´s emails" says our rep, well why not get them? "I´ll stick a notice on the board, but I´ve done it before and no-one signs up, and anyway they aren´t interested".

Now maybe this is where my troublemaking comes in. I´m of the opinion that it´s good for me and good for them if everyone shows an interest in union matters - this stuff is important for everyone. So you can´t just say we´ll leave them to show interest if they want and leave it at that. You actively push people into giving a shit, and hope that over time the interest will develop into something you don´t have to work so hard to prompt. Don´t stick a sign on the wall and hope people sign up, but go round with a clip board and say "can you put your email on the staff reps list?" If they´re really disinterested and have a great reason to say so, then they´ll say no, otherwise they will and should go along with it.

The point is not to be the passive recipient of whatever individual grievances may spontaneously develop but to be building a strong collective group where people stand up for each other and show one another solidarity. You´re not there to absorb problems, you´re their to make a collective.

Which is the problem with the Comite de Empresas system. It makes you reliant on a rep, rather than on your collective strength. Over time this tends to put the rep in the situation where they sit not among their group (their "electorate") but between them and the bosses. We don´t work together, we don´t make demands, we just make a system that we hope will makes things run smoother.

A history of Spain in stickers (part 2 The Left)

2009-02-05T05:05:00.000-08:00

One of the funny things about Spanish Stalinism (and there are very few funny things about Spanish Stalinism) is how dramatically its experiences affected the rest of its European sister parties. The legacy of its time in government during the Civil War was that the party ended up full of middle-class lefties, who wanted a Republic of order, stability and well, whisper it, capitalism. These people were also the core of the party´s elite in exile, and when they came back they behaved in the same way. Despite brief flirtations with guerrilla expeditions after World War 2 (Tito´s exploits evidently got them over-excited), they generally stuck to pretty moderate stuff when opposing the Generalisimo, even to the extent that their present trade union the CC.OO derives loosely from their infiltration of the old Franquista state-sponsored trade unions. It´s not surprising they invented Stalinism-lite aka Euro-Communism (a sort of social democratic cheerleading squad for third world revolutionaries), which then spread around Western Europe. These days they´re light on street presence, but are the largest component of third biggest party in national elections (Izqueirda Unida). You can still find their wee ones (the Unión de Juventudes Comunistas de España) running around putting up stickers like this one about the Battle of Berlin. Of course when you´re a minority of the government, nothing attracts the otherwise disillusioned kiddies like your "glorious" antifascist past and some nice red flags.

Also unsurprising, that they spawned some "return to real coke" communists (err... anti-revisionists maybe?), who go around being all early 30s sectarian. Welcome to the Partido Comunista de los Pueblos de España (PCPE) and their especially charming youth section the CJC (Colectivos de Jóvenes Comunistas). They´re loving their hammer and sickles too, but not in the Reichstag planting way, but in declaring whole neighbourhoods their territory. This was in Lavapies, the city centre´s most mixed and most proley barrio. It reads Antifascist Workers Neighbourhood. Bolshier and much less mainstream than the PCE/IU, the PCPE was founded back in the 1980s, when everyone registered that the PCE weren´t going to take over, and some people got nostalgic for the idea that Marxist-Leninism might actually mean challenging capitalism. They´ve a few thousand members apparently, but never poll anywhere near six figures nationally. The kiddies website is full of affection for all sorts of noxious third-world dictatorships and other such third worldist crap that gets Rage Against the Machine fans excited.

As a interesting sideline they also seem to fish quite effectively in the pool marked ´antisocial punky squatters who are confused about what they want´, through various ´independentist youth groups´. The fact that Spain is more or less four or five different countries shoe-horned together by historical coincidence, means that some kids get terribly excited by the idea of liberating their socialist homeland. Like these funny Jaleo!!! kids (and yes, the exclamation marks are in the name). Who were busily plastering Cordoba with these smart looking posters for a free and socialist Andalucía. You see the same thing in other cities, youngsters who live in squats and want to break off pieces of Spain (almost every CSO - Occupied Social Centre in Bilbao has a flag of the Basque homeland on it...), and aren´t really sure whether they´re Anarchists, National Liberationists, Guevarists or some unworldly mix of all of the above.

Finally, there´s my lot, who probably on balance who got more material stuck to walls than anyone else in the city. I don´t know if there´s more of us, or just that we love stickers (anarchists looove stickers), but they´re everywhere. It´s a reassuring feeling to know that one of yours has already been past here recently. This one says (I think ... wasn´t sure about the expression, any Spanish speakers want to explain that one?), "Working week of 65 hours? We will see the faces!!", part of the campaign against a proposed sixty five hour working week. The CNT in Madrid these days is a couple of thousand ish I think, they´ve a nice office in Plaza Tirso de Molina (you can´t miss it there´s a big banner on the 2nd floor), which I presume was paid for or given in recompense for, all the stuff that the Francoists took off them. The CNT is apparently in a period of moderate growth after dropping first from the Civil War high of 2-3 million, to the post-Franco opening of maybe as much as 500,000, to a modern union of 10,000 members with a lot more people influenced by it. The split from the 1980s is a bit more moderate and has about six times that ...

Books again

2009-01-30T07:00:00.000-08:00

The final two, putting this slow-burning feature out of its misery...

4 Harry Cleaver - Reading Capital Politically

I´m one of those people who always takes a mountain of books with him every time I travel anywhere, a sub-conscious acknowledgment of how lazy I am whenever nobody expects me to work for a living (a friend recently described my trip to visit them as me having ´experienced the internet of Australia´). One time I was in Vienna, staying with a friend (as a man of limited means, but cosmopolitan acquaintances this is how I take holidays ...), and he was flicking through my books. This man, being one of the most educated men that I know, idly passed comment on each volume, until he came to this diminutive little book.

"Is there another way of reading Capital other than politically?" He asked me, and I mumbled something unintelligent about reading it philosophically, economically, sociologically etc etc. But I didn´t get across Cleaver´s actual meaning of the title which he expresses as follows:

I intend to return to what I believe was Marx's original purpose: he wrote Capital to put a weapon in the hands of workers.

Simply that the purpose of it (and I think every political book) should be to accumulate knowledge for the social war that we´re in the middle of. A simple, powerful sentiment, which Cleaver illustrates by applying aspects of the book to the world he lived, with its contemporary struggles and the world we actually lived in.

It´s much more effective than trying to shoe-horn the world into the prescription of political activists who have long since being dragged off the stage, icepick lodged in cranium. There´s the perceptive application of the theory to the changing face of capitalism in the last 40-50 years, and the effective explanation of how capitalism is forced to transform itself in the face of what we (the working class) do to it (if nothing else I think it inspired the best contemporary book on this topic Beverley Silver´s Forces of Labor). More than that, it´s one of the best practical guides to the bearded one´s work that you´re likely to find. It´s also small enough to fit in your pocket or to read online if you have the time.

5 Jose Peirats - Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution

There´s a possibility that you will see the title of this section and sigh, as another anarchist flags up the profound effect of the Spanish Civil War on his political outlook. Fear not, I´m going to take a slightly controversial line. Obsessing about the Spanish Civil War can be damaging to your political health. In fact, dwelling on that past is possibly the most debilitating aspect of most anarchist groups.

Once you get bogged down on what things worked in the past, how they were organised in the past and what that means for our ideology, you´re finished. You´re a glorified historical recreation society busily trying to promote nostalgia for a revolution that happened over seventy years ago. Yes, if you´re anything like me you´ve a fondness for crying at the end of Land and Freedom, and if you lived in Spain you´ll be trying to convince your friends they want to go and see La Mujer del Anarquista at the weekend.

But modern life is not the same as semi-rural, church-dominated 1930s Spain, we aren´t re-creating the struggles of way back when, we´re existing in a modern world. In every era workers came up with innovative ways of defending themselves under capitalism and even pushing those societies toward revolution. What they came up with suited where and when they lived. Later on new generations invented new structures and organisations that suited what they wanted and how they might set about getting it. But soviets and factory councils weren´t the same as syndicates and collectives, nor were they the same as what developed in any of the revolutionary moments after that. Every time we invent something new, be it in the Hungarian Revolution or May ´68. It doesn´t come off the pamphlet in some anarchist or communist pocket, it comes out of everyday life and experience.

So what did I get out of Jose Peirats´ shorter book (there´s a 3 volume one too!)? Peirats was a member of the CNT all of his life, a historian and educator too. His book isn´t a whitewash, nor is it a hagiography of martyrs. It´s an explanation and a criticism of how he sees that the revolution went wrong. He was a convinced anarchist all his life and he was honest enough to criticise the conduct of his own organisation. It was great when I read this to understand why we don´t make examples out of history, we learn lessons and think about what happens and what´s happening now. We try not to wallow in nostalgia and assess honestly the shortcomings of our own history.

Most of all we understand that everything in history is compromised, not just by the dominant classes but by ourselves and the fact the reality is dirty and is far from Utopian. As I explained to a friend recently, I´m not a Utopian, I´m someone who wants things to better and thinks he has some insight into why they are how they are. I shouldn´t have to judge myself against the criteria of any imaginary world but on the quality and utility of my ideas in real life and in contrast to the ideals of others.

building radical unions

2009-01-29T05:11:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of positive things about having serious, mass-membership revolutionary trade unions. It gives people with analogous views (working or otherwise) somewhere organised and permanent around which to gather, it puts an alternative voice out there for people who don´t believe in the traditional union leaders, it gives people who are being sold out somewhere to go rather than just complain about their existing lot, it allows you to link the immediate and everyday with wider ideas and lastly it puts pressure on everyone else to go the extra mile so they can compete for members. It´s certainly superior to the ´only show in town, everyone pays subs to Labour´approach back home.

There are problems too though. At work I´ve been steadily doing my thing, persuading other people we need to get organised, to stand up for ourselves, find out our rights, get meetings together, maybe even join unions. All going pretty well, getting a good reception for it. And the other day something stopped me in my tracks. Someone asked if it would be worth joining my union.

This set me back a little bit, I´ll be honest. The customary cringe that comes with admitting that you´ve got very ... err... unique views on the world, and that your union reflects that, is difficult to get past. It wasn´t the same problem that I´d had in the past ("come and hang around in the back room of a pub with me and a few middle-aged men, who are powerless beyond handing out leaflets"), I know that the CNT is a great union, that supports its members effectively and provides everything that a big bureaucratic union can and more. This time it was just the realisation that they would rapidly notice from the office, from the leaflets, from the people (even the General Secretary of the Education Union is a punky student type - not that I´ve anything against that, but it gives a certain impression, you know?) that this was an "extremista" organisation.

This got me thinking ... of what possible use is it to be part of union that you aren´t comfortable telling workmates to join? I mean I believe in its ideals, but its a stretch to expect everyone else at work should. Maybe it would be different if it wasn´t an English workplace with English workers accustomed to our trade unions (or none) who pitch themselves only as workplace organisations and mention their politics as a kind of afterthought.

It´s difficult to make the case to relatively apolitical people (ie. normal people) that they should join something that´s so red in tooth and claw, even superficially. What are the other options though? The mainstream trade unions, the ones that don´t proclaim themselves revolutionary organisations, are affiliated to other things that are just pure shite. I don´t see why I should encourage them to throw subs at the UGT and as a consequence at the PSOE, or, even worse, why I should get them to join the Stalinist arseholes that populate the higher reaches of the CC.OO. It just so happens that their politics are mainstream, but it doesn´t make them any more popular.

So what? Encourage them to join the CNT and downplay the revolutionary aspects? Just say the important stuff, that it´s a good union, that fights for its members, provides all the support they ask for, that gives its sections autonomy and has reasonable subscription rates? Get them to pop along on a Thursday when the more regular looking Enseñanza members are there for a teachers and social workers meeting?

Or, suck it up, and tell each and every person why they should join, try and get them involved as possible, and play up the other elements? Or just stick with it myself and tell them they should join something, anything, that gets them some sort of union support, whilst focusing on staff meetings.

Failing that, the slightly tamer anarcho-syndicalists in the CGT?

Above all, what does the hesitation say about my conviction in my politics and whether I think it can really work?

Judge a man by his actions.

2009-01-28T08:26:00.000-08:00

The aforementioned truism should not always be taken to heart. Sometimes a man´s actions pale in comparison to his motivation and his outlook (just as sometimes the best of intentions produce the most horrendous deeds). Ostensibly Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg is a German resistance hero, killed for his attempt to assassinate history´s greatest evil. This act is about to be commemorated in a new hagiography called Valkyrie, with Tom Cruise as the lead. From what I can see, we´re going to go through the existing founding myth of conservative Germany´s innocence in the holocaust, and absolve the Wehrmacht of any responsibility for the War.

This is of course complete horseshit, Stauffenberg and pals were all planning to take over a post-Hitler Germany so they could save the dictatorship and rope the Allies into joining them in going to war with the Soviet Union, whilst mobilising all that nice slave labour from the East and in the concentration camps for the war effort. There were of course thousands of genuine German heroes who gave their lives fighting Nazism, before and during the war, including a variety of assassination attempts and resistance, some detailed here.

Of course, all of those attempts were by various communist and anarchist malcontents, and we couldn´t possibly venerate people who made a genuine and sincere stand against fascism, as opposed to ultra-conservative johnny-come-lateleys who tried to save the skins of some of the worst perpetrators of Nazi brutality.

Anyway, view the alternative antifa trailer with my compliments:

h/t: darren redstar on meanwhileatthebar.org

next on Fox: change ....... Has .......... COME.

2009-01-23T09:38:00.000-08:00

If there´s one thing that Americans don´t worry about too much, it´s ´hubris´. One day in the job and this is The Whitehouse website informing us that ´CHANGE has come to America´. Given that Obama is a declared centrist, with no controversial opinions of anything whatsoever, in the midst of a wholesale crisis of American capitalism and confronted by one of the most entrenched political castes on the planet, all determined to keep their noses in their respective troughs. Perhaps a little humility might be in order at this point. You know, maybe wait a bit for declaring that the world will finally and permanently altered beyond all recognition.

The unwritten laws of Spain

2009-01-23T05:34:00.001-08:00

Spain, being the epicentre of malfunctioning rules, inefficient bureaucracy and generally a culture of disinterested chaos, survives mostly through instituting rules and customs that are essentially unwritten but must be followed at all times. To truly fit in here you must follow the etiquette. Some important things to remember are as follows:

Firstly, during the Winter months, it´s required that you comment on how cold it is constantly. At a minimum this should be done every time you enter or leave a building. On entering the building you must point out how cold it was outside. As you remove your multiple garments - scarves, hats, coats, more coats, jumpers etc - simply make a shuddering gesture, look your companions over, then remark ´ay, que frio, eh?´ This is for the benefit of the people around you. When exiting a building and going out into the cold, you repeat the same routine, only this time you say it to yourself, rather than your companions. Failure to do this will result in the catastrophic effect that no-one know that it is cold, or be informed that the weather is, in fact, appropriate to the season.

Secondly, if you are old and Spanish, especially if you´re are old, Spanish and walk incredibly slowly, more slowly than any human being really should be able to without the universe collapsing in on itself, you MUST walk in the middle of narrow pavements. As you wobble gently from side to side (your bottom half for some reason is considerably wider than you top), you cannot allow other, more rapid, pedestrians, to pass you. You are in fact part of a complex training programme demonstrating the Spanish way of life to interloping foreigners. Without your assistance they will never learn the correct way of walking on Spanish streets (the gentle amble which results in everyone being late for everything) and will forever be laughed at as the sad, inept foreigners that they are. Now, the selfish pensioner, unmoved by these arguements, might ask why they should be expected to shuffle so wearily around the city in this manner, selflessly enlightening the unitiated outsider. But by way of recompense they receive a reward whereby every Sunday young Spanish people are obliged by law to take an old person for a walk. Preferably this should be a relative of some kind, a grandparent if you´re of that age or a parent if you´re a bit older. If not, you should find an unattached one and adopt them. They´ve earned this reward for years of patient wobbling.

Finally, you should look out for "la broma burocracia", a practice that to the outsider might seem infuriating, but should be borne with a phlegmatic shrug, simply being the way things are done. The system works like this: you will be set a reasonable deadline by which to register someone or something (everything must be registered with 15 different agencies, in different parts of the city, none of whom share any information), after dwelling for the regular quantity of time on it, you will decide to make an appointment at whichever of the three million governments departments is in charge of it. This appointment will inevitably be after the deadline. You will have no choice by to take it. Some months later the department that set the deadline (as opposed to the one that fulfils it) will mention that non-compliance with their instructions will incur a hefty fine. When you (not unreasonably) point out that it is their own system that lacks the capacity to carry out their mandates, they will shrug their shoulders and fine you anyway. Then, when you actually go for the appointment, you will discover that didn´t really need one anyway (you just needed a place in the short line) and as the final insult, will be told that you´ve actually already done whatever you needed to do and they could have just sent you the correct piece of paper in the first place.

But like I said, don´t get wound up. It´s just how this place works.

My 5 books Continued...

2009-01-21T08:18:00.001-08:00

I may have inadvertently been telling a little bit of a lie when claiming that none of my books give me reason to look back and cringe. This one does only partially because of the content, but mostly because of the political point in my life that it brought me to.

3 Noam Chomsky - Pirates and Emperors

This probably could´ve been any of Chomsky´s back catalogue, largely because it´s a pretty repetitive sort of canon. The pattern is thus, Noam thoroughly chronicles the attempts of the United States government to overthrow and undermine democracies that try to assert any kind of meaningful independence from Washington directed global capitalism, doing so not on the basis of any spurious conspiracy theories, or with reference to the high standards of some Utopian fantasy land, but on the basis of their own documents and their own declared policy goals.

It´s incredibly effective stuff, and you only have to look at that truly feeble counter-arguments ranged against him to see that. Critiques flit around the edges of his work, making absurd claims as to his support for the Khmer Rouge (this attack involves deliberately misunderstanding the nature of his work) and various other things related to his sometimes naive notion of free speech.

After reading his books as a young adult/older teenager, it gave me a solid rational for my feelings about Empire and all that, which raised me above the previous stage of rebellious teenager.

On the other hand, and I suspect this qualifies as a criticism of the work and not just of my 19 year old self, it did feed into my nascent Stalinism. As a kid I was so fed up of being given the whole ´commies bad, capitalism good´mantra that I developed a knee-jerk reaction that said whatever I was told in official history, must in fact be the opposite. This eventually transformed itself into complex (but quite effective) apologies for Stalinist terror, most drawing on the idea that the Robert Conquest/CIA school of history inflated the figures (this is, in fact, true, though not really an excuse for the millions of people who died nevertheless).

That´s the limitations of Noam´s work as a whole, however much he understands intellectually that as an anarchist he doesn´t support 3rd world nationalism, Stalinism or anything like that, such is the nature of his work, understanding and comprehending the actions of nation states within their own logic, you can´t help emerging with a sneaking sympathy for the Jacobo Arbenz or the Sandinistas or Patrice Lumumba; basically admiration for social democrats with links to various Left-Wing dictatorships. Combined with the natural sympathy that American anarchists and far leftists feel for anyone that opposes their government, it´s not hard to come out the other side tragically drawing a hammer and sickle on all your school books.

So, this one was definitely part of the journey, but thankfully a place from which I have now moved on!

The 5 books...

2009-01-16T06:27:00.000-08:00

An idea shamelessly robbed from Jim Jay, only I´m not going to imagine that anyone has the attention span to get all the way to ten, so you´re stuck with only five. Also, I was never a member of the SWP, so none of them come from their rather questionable back-catalogues.

In fact, seeing as I´m still pretty young, I reckon mine look rather respectable from my current perspective. There´s no looking back and shuddering here, I´d recommend reading each and everyone one of these...

1) Maurice Brinton - For Workers Power

Maurice Brinton, a neurosurgeon, was a member of a group called Solidarity, refugees from various Leninist groups, influenced by some unorthodox French libertarian Marxists (mainly Socialisme ou Barbarie, in particular Paul Cardan/Cornelius Castoriadis). Anyone who spent too much time hanging around Libcom.org, which compliments it´s, err, unique forum, with one of the most extensive left-wing libraries on the net, should be familiar with it. You can find a load of Brinton stuff on there, well worth flicking through. It was important to me because it helped me move beyond the idea that everything worthwhile in a revolutionary sense had to happen more or less like it did in the past, and took me toward the idea that every generation makes these things up as we go along. If you want to read something short, stick to the two short statements As We See It and As We Don´t See it, which are as a good a concise explanation of what it should mean to be a good revolutionary.

Meaningful action, for revolutionaries, is whatever increases the confidence, the autonomy, the initiative, the participation, the solidarity, the equalitarian tendencies and the self -activity of the masses and whatever assists in their demystification. Sterile and harmful action is whatever reinforces the passivity of the masses, their apathy, their cynicism, their differentiation through hierarchy, their alienation, their reliance on others to do things for them and the degree to which they can therefore be manipulated by others - even by those allegedly acting on their behalf.

2. E.P.Thompson - The Making of the Working Class

First off, if you´re interested in British history, this is a fantastic book. It´s well-written enough to be as enjoyable as it is informative (unlike his contemporaries Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm, who I find dull as), it basically invented the idea of social history as we now understand it, and it gives you a great perspective on our past which is far more exciting than the conventional narrative. It traces the development of popular and social movements in England from 18th Century Republicanism to the emerging the early consciously working-class movements of the 19th.

For the political activist, I think the money quotes are all in the preface, particularly those that take apart the idea of someone or some group embodying the historical consciousness of a class:

There is today an ever-present temptation to suppose that class is a thing. This was not Marx's meaning, in his own historical writing, yet the error vitiates much latter-day "Marxist" writing. "It", the working class, is assumed to have a real existence, which can be defined almost mathematically--so many men who stand in a certain relation to the means of production. Once this is assumed it becomes possible to deduce the class-consciousness which "it" ought to have (but seldom does have) if "it" was properly aware of its own position and real interests. There is a cultural superstructure, through which this recognition dawns in inefficient ways. These cultural "lags" and distortions are a nuisance, so that it is easy to pass from this to some theory of substitution: the party, sect, or theorist, who disclose class-consciousness, not as it is, but as it ought to be.

to be continued...

What could you add?

2009-01-15T05:15:00.000-08:00

For the entirity of my 25 years on this planet (and many more), the conflict in Palestine has rumbled on. It is pretty futile to imagine that I might have anything worth adding on the topic, given that I and innumerable others have throw in their tuppence over the years.

Yet those years adding up calls to you, doesn´t it? That´s more than 60 years without a homeland, and more than 60 years in refugee camps. Twice as long as I´ve lived (and too me it feels like forever, and I don´t live in exile, waiting for my right to return).

Traditionally, with every resumed offensive, the media´s memory resets to as limited a timescale as if necessary to absolve the Israeli government of responsibility. When they invaded Lebanon, we´re were supposed to imagine that neither Israel nor Lebanon had any history whatsoever that pre-dated the kidnapping of 3 Israeli soldiers. These days, we´re supposed to think that everything was peachy until one too many rockets wobbled their way over the border, instead of misfirings into some poor Palestinian farmer´s house.

Of course, throughout the ceasefire, as they have done throughout the last 60 years in fact, the Palestinians have been allowed to exist under sufferance, according to the whims of the Israeli state, their current whim being an open-air prison camps for 1.5m Gazans, as collective punishment for their decisions at the ballot box.

The thing is the Israeli ruling class never changes it up. They´ve a persuasive capacity that is all stick, the more we beat them over the head the better they will behave. There´s no carrot for persuading anyone that peaceful co-existence might be nice. The ceasefire saw the number of rockets launched at Israel decline. Even if you still think a lower level of attacks is completely unacceptable, surely, with a genuine desire for peace, you might take this as a good starting point for something better?

No. Best tear it up and create another generation of hate. So your citizens can live a little longer in fear and loathing, so they never question that perhaps their problems don´t only eminent from the enmity of their neighbours.

Fuck '09

2009-01-01T11:00:00.000-08:00

It's only late Afternoon on the 1st and I'm already in a foul fucking mood. So by way of catharsis I thought I'd put down my top 10, "shitty things that will probably happen in 2009" list. So here it is:

(1) Barack Obama will be a war-mongering right-wing shithead. Come on, admit it, he's most of the way there already. He spent his entire campaign shamelessly pandering to AIPAC and the like, as well as promising to invest more in propping up Hamid Karzai's arsehole government in Afghanistan and as we speak he's responding to the killing in Gaza with a giant shrug of his shoulders. Yes, I understand that he operates under the constraints of what is politically possible within the American system. But that's the point isn't it. Why on Earth did everyone get so excited about changing the man who gets to do as he's told by the richest lobbiests and the Washington establishment.

(2) Ipswich Town will continue to be mediocre, despite unprecedented transfer funds for the clueless muppet who manages the club.

(3) Unemployment will expand massively. Pretty safe prediction that one. Call it a hunch, but I don't think the associated misery will result in any upsurge in support for a different kind of society, more likely just produce a wide new variety of obnoxious symptoms, like a rise in crime, anti-social behaviour, racism and fascism.

(4) I will continue to waste my time mimbling about the internet, watching TV and otherwise fucking about rather than putting any of my talents toward any meaningful endeavour that might actually lead to achieving something with my life to be proud of.

(5) Despite the massive upsurge in unemployment, the government will continue with its plan to attack those on various types of benefits, treating people in the most difficult circumstances as thieving scroungers, even though they get by on a income that most politicians would regard as akin to torture if they had to be on it themselves.

(6) There won't be any revolution this year. In fact if this year is anything like the last, the forces of good will not achieve a single notable victory, and everything will continue to go inexorably down the toilet as we approach environmental armageddon and economic apocalypse.

(7) My Spanish will continue to remain so mediocre as to prevent me from expressing myself with any degree of wit, charm and intelligence. This will partially be a result of me not fucking practising enough, and being too cheap to pay for lessons.

(8) All of the world's bastards will continue being simultaneously obscenely rich and obnoxious bitter towards the rest of us who actually make their money.

(9) I will continue eating and drinking too much, whilst not getting enough exercise and will descend inevitably into morbid obesity as I'm getting to that age. I'll probably end up taking up smoking again.

(10) There will be no peace in the Middle East. Obviously.

A brief history of Spain in stickers (part 1: the right)

2008-12-29T22:47:00.000-08:00

Politics geek that I am, whenever I see an interesting bit of graffiti or a sticker knocking about I take a quick snap with my camera phone, so's I can check it a bit later. Having a handful of these I thought I tell youse all a few brief things about the politics and history of Spain through this random collection of snippits.

First up, snapped on Calle de Goya, in the poshest part of the city, a poster for La Falange. It'd be surprising in most countries to see fascists concentrating their propaganda in the rich parts of town. Not, obviously, in Spain, where a lot of the older fortunes round that way were made off Franco's coat-tails. This lot, so I'm told are the 'official' Falange, the direct descendants of Franco's party of government. The picture, suitably enough for the area, is of Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the party, executed by the Republican government in November 1936 (during the Civil War). On the very same road, still prominent (and shiny enough to be being maintained), a plaque adorns the front of a chapel anouncing that this fascist Germanophile was "fallecido por dios y espanya" (killed for God and Spain). This is apparently identical to the thousands that were placed on religious buildings across the country under the Generalisimo. In 1981, Madrid's main thoroughfare (Gran Via) had its original named restored, after 42 years as Avenida Jose Antonio.

The modern day Falange now exists as 3 small squabbling parties, arguing over a legacy. As in other countries, the obsessions of the modern far right have shifted from fear of Bolshevism and International Jewry toward more immediate concerns and La Falange participates on some basis in the broader two year old Frente Nacional, that peppers the same areas of Madrid with obscenely racist anti-immigration posters, such as the one illustrated here. The caption at the top reads 'deduce: who is last?' with an elderly Spanish man pushed to the back by various ethnic caricatures. Concluding with 'if you're Spanish, you (should) always (be) first'.

More weird and not so wonderful things than straight up, old-fashioned, Castilian fascism are to be found when venturing out of Madrid, and wandering round Seville, I found something probably unique in European politics: Carlism. Just when the rest of Europe was beginning to stop arguing about such trite nonsense as which particular line of their unelecting, sponging royalty got to be King, Spain was just getting started on a 19th Century full of revolutions and counter-revolutions aimed at founding Republics, or placing different royal lines on the throne. The hardiest challenger to the 'Alfonsine' line of the House of Bourbon, was Carlism. Carlos, the brother of King Ferdinand VII, was briefly heir to the throne, prior to Ferdinand's death, on grounds of being his closest male heir. He was then stripped of this right when it was decided, instead, that a woman would be able to accede to the throne. What he came to represent though, in a time where Spain veered between liberalism and absolute monarchy was the absolutist of the absolutist, the most interventionist notion of the Spanish throne. Now, you might wonder at this point why anyone gives a shit about this sort of thing in this day and age. After all, I saw this sticker on a electrical box in 2008 Seville. Besides which, the Spanish monarchy are absurdly popular, probably the best-loved royal house in the World.

It goes back I suppose to the great big ideological mess that is Spanish conservatism. Back in the '30s, the ostensibly fascist party in Spain (the aforementioned La Falange) were not that big a force. They did a good line is street fighting with anarchists and socialists, but the major force on the Right in pre-civil war politics was a formation called CEDA, an alliance of traditional conservative groups. It was this sector of society that backed the army in their coup d'etat and came to identify the conservative part of their identity with Franquismo and the crusade against godless Reds. So, even though Franco didn't recognise their monarch (and was fairly ambiguous about the role of the actual monarch), it came to pass that Carlism was the only ideology to really turn-out a mass social movement (Los Requetes) that voluntarily fought for Fascism, mostly landowning small/medium farmers from the Northern region of Navarra, who marched for "Dios, patria, rey" (god, country, king). These days the Comunion Tradicionalista Carlista (not to be confused with the Third Way branch of Carlism that supports national socialism and workers' self-management) pulls between 20-50,000 votes nationwide and spends its time promoting Catholic social doctrine, chiefly through intolerance of gays and abortion. They are currently the only political organisation to recognise Carlos Hugo de Borbon Parma as the rightful King of Spain (he's a university professor who lives in Brussels apparently).

Stay Home

2008-12-29T03:50:00.000-08:00

You know the feeling. Every January we all trot dutifully back to work and feel like shit. In fact most of us are already back by December. It's awful, nothing makes you feel quite so drained, and quite so sick of your working life like coming back to it after a period of leisure. You don't return to it refreshed and raring to go, it simply fares unfavourably in the backdrop of all that holiday freedom.

In a matter of weeks we will approach the most depressing day of the year, the 3rd Tuesday in January, by which time we will all have reached the conclusion that 2009, for the most part will be as bad as 2008, dropped or failed in all our New Year's Resolutions and lost any buzz we got out of writing a different number on everything.

So this year I propose we just don't. Sod this bullshit, let's not go back. Just leave the bastards waiting at the gate on January 2nd, thinking, "where have they all gone?" Take another day of festive cheer, and another, then keep taking them. Let's see how long it takes for the World to fall apart without us.

Our Ridiculous Railways

2008-12-28T04:53:00.000-08:00

Travelling anywhere on the trains these days is a massive, expensive ordeal. A return ticket from Ipswich to Manchester (that's about 250 miles if you didn't know) costs me around 100GBP, if I buy on the day. In addition to this it takes forever, is regularly replaced by a coach service (with no compensation offered), often late, and is generally a load of shit. This we all take as red...

But why oh why, on top of all this bullshit, has the industry decided to take on an airfare style approach to pricing? It's a fucking train for God's sake, I don't want to spend hours working out what particular combination of time and place will save me tenner. I don't want to understand the logic that says if I book the train from Ipswich it will cost me one thing, and if I book it further along the line it'll cost me a tenner more. Under what possible logic does it cost me 14GBP if I book from Leeds, but 30GBP from Manchester. And what a fucking faff to get all the way across the pennines to save three quid. And why is it cheaper on the Saturday than the Sunday?

How about this for a piece of logic? Why not have 2 fare variations - off-peak and peak, advance and on-the-day? Then even out the prices so the big fares are less and the tiny fares and normal. HOW FUCKING HARD IS IT!?

The Road to Nowhere

2008-12-27T18:07:00.000-08:00

In the wake of major bombing raids which killed an estimated 200 people in the Gaza Strip, the Hamas leadership declared its determination to continue with their present course of action. Namely, randomly lobbing rockets into Israel.

Now, let's take the current disposition of the Israel State as a given. They want to preserve their little colony, keeping the best land and resources for themselves. They've no problem with perpetual war, because the security industry is one of their major exports. They'll do almost anything within reason to eject the democratically elected Hamas movement from control over the Gaza Strip, having already effected a coup d'etat to put Fatah back in control of the West Bank.

To be honest, Israel doesn't need the pretext of rocket attacks to do what they like in the region, and they've always more or less behaved however they damn well pleased.

But from the perspective of Hamas. Imagine for a moment that they're a serious political movement that sets achievable aims and draws up plans and strategies by which they might make them reality (and not, as many suspect, a murderous death cult that is happy to glorify in martyrdom in perpetuity). So where does the 'randomly hurling rockets over the border' strategy get them? It's not really an inconvenience to the Israeli State, which can stand to lose the odd civilian now and then without collapsing. In fact, it gives them an indefinite excuse to continue the collective punishment of Gaza (not that they need excuses, or wouldn't manufacture other ones if they did, but no need to make it easy for 'em). In fact I don't really see any positive end game, other than giving Hamas the feeling that they're doing something, anything, to defy the oppressor.

I note today that Hamas leaders have been calling for a new intifada. Well, I wonder what was so effective about the first intifada? Might it have been the spectacle of bare footed children hurling stones at tanks? A whole people rising up to defy a system of occupation? What was politically powerful about that moment was that a whole people was taking direct action, protesting, forming a political movement against domination.

The people of Palestine have power as political entities that they certainly don't seem to able to wield as guerrilla warriors, even on the military scraps they get fed by the Iranians and the Syrians. As the siege goes on, I can't help but wonder if the means to ending it lies out of the scope of Hamas' limited vision, toward a more general mobilisation of the Palestinian people...

bollocks to it!

2008-12-25T14:08:00.000-08:00

There's an old joke among anarchists about the Greeks. It runs roughly like this...

2 Greeks anarchists are making a molotov cocktail. One asks the other "so what are we throwing this at then?" To which the the second one, looking confused, replies "what are you, an intellectual?"

Ok, it's about as funny as most old political jokes, but reflects the confrontational habits of our Greek comrades, who are a commendably throw first, ask questions later sort of bunch.

Aside from being more numerous than most European anarchist movements (maybe the Italians and the Spanish could plausibly claim to be stronger), I think there might be other reasons why they've just found themselves at the head of a two week orgy of youth rebellion, mobilising students, workers, unemployed and migrants in a slightly inchoate uprising against well... pretty much anything they've got.

Yes, there's a few thousand of them, with little strongholds dotted about the country, and there's more than a little long term sympathy in Greek society for this sort of tning.

But why now? What's going on? Why are liberal newspapers muttering darkly about everyone else catching 'Greek syndrome'?

There's a po-faced explanation. There's an economic crisis on and obviously people at the margins of the society are becoming more combative, and people with radical messages are finding greater sympathy for their ideas. Economic and social suffering may find itself expressed as violent street protest.

I'm not really convinced by this, well, I might be, but I don't really like it as an explanation. My preferred idea is this...

We've just been through a very long economic boom ... prior to this year, the UK had gone for quite some time with consistent, if moderate growth. And yet, did anyone really feel like we were living through good times? I mean, we were mostly pretty gloomy throughout weren't we? We spent the entire time complaining that society was falling apart (even those on the right) and that everything was getting worse. If you weren't part of the London financial or media elite, you more or less experienced better times as ... (a) real wages that more or less stayed the same (b) pressure on all the public services you depended on (c) steadily increasing costs for everything necessary (d) racking up massive debts (e) doing as you're told forever more with no prospect of anything changing ever.

It's a long time since we've had anything that resembled social hope round here. So for a while we've had 2 things as a substitute - (a) buying stuff and (b) hoping we might get famous or rich or both. It's hard to remember a boom time that had less to offer people in terms of improving our lives. I mean in the early 20th century a boom might mean economic security, temporarily at the beginning, then more or less permanently by the 1960s.

So, here we are afterwards. They've given us the grand sum of fuck all for a decade or so, and now they're telling us (whilst they give lots of money to the perpetrators) for the next few years there'll be a bundle of people out of work, the rest of us will have to put up with "belt-tightening" (ie. being poorer).

Mind you, if you're just entering the world of work, it's worse than this. New jobs these days are fucking shit. They're just a boring as ever, but they're worse paid and less secure. More than ever you're somebody's little bitch for an increasingly large proportion of your life. That is if you happen to have escaped the fate of people in those communities where there is basically fuck all work and has been throughout the boom times. So if you can get a job, it'll be rubbish, and if you can't you probably wouldn't want to anyway.

So what happens when we get to a recession? What's Greek syndrome really? A riot for fairness? For jobs? For prosperity and social justice? Not in my book. I don't think people are demanding a return to fairer capitalism.

Young people are bored of this shit. We're bored of shitty work and shitty unemployment. We're bored of a lifetime of obedience, bureaucracy and tedium. Of every little thing taking a chunk out of us. It's the street protest equivalent of throwing your hands in the air and yelling "FUCK THIS FUCKING BOLLOCKS. IT'S FUCKING SHIT".

And the Greek anarchos are at the forefront of that kind of rage. More so than their more sensible-sounding red and black flag waving cousins. Still, it might start there. But you wait til the Summer!

Possibly moving

2008-08-25T07:59:00.000-07:00

Increasingly frustrated by my inability to control the software on my website, and the feeling that the whole thing is a waste of money, I'm going to start putting posts on a blogspot account as well. If all goes well I might kill the subscription to the old place and just use this one.