"natural" causes

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.

this crisis is annoying, huh?

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?

bollocks to it!

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!