Cuban Anarchism Reborn – Speaking Tour, From AFed.

More information at Anarchist Federation

Red And Black Telly: Has the big crash finally arrived?

Oink, oink

According to Anthony Beevor, under the Spanish Inquisition’s persecution of Muslims and Jews, many people took to eating pork to divert suspicion. One reason it features so prominently in the Spanish diet. Hundreds of years later, progressive Denmark follows suit.

Mid-Jan round-up: antifascism, undercover cops, prison news and more

Cautiously pessimistic

At time of writing, the junior doctors’ strike planned for the 26-28th is currently suspended, although the action planned for Feb 10th is still provisionally on. At the moment, it’s still too early to tell if the talks have really achieved anything or if this is just the latest in a long line of powerful-seeming strikes being pissed up the wall to no effect.

Next weekend, the big news down south is the return to Dover to oppose the latest fascist march there on the 30th – transport is running from Berkshire/Oxford, Brighton (looks like that’s now full, though), London and Manchester (again, it might be late to book from there, but can’t hurt to ask), as well as from within Kent itself. See here for a longer analysis of the situation from Plan C.

Further North, that weekend the Autonomous Centre of Edinburgh is hosting…

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Iain Duncan Smith and Frank Fucking Field – Two Sides Of The Same Coin

The poverty pimp is back in the news again.

the void

If it looks like a wanker, and sounds like a wanker, it’s probably Frank Field.

Few people in the modern Labour Party are as much of a wanker as Frank Field – and there’s some fierce competition.

Reportedly a Tory in his youth, Field has slithered around the margins of UK politics for decades, always looking for a way in and always fucking it up whenever he is given one.  After the 2010 election he even slimed his way into David Cameron’s affections, being granted the title of Poverty Tsar – a lord of misery with an insincere smile sent out to provide ideological cover for the Tory Government’s vicious social security cuts.

Duirng the previous Labour administration Field was briefly Minister for Welfare Reform – a position now occupied by the equally odious Lord Fraud.  During this period he proposed a breath-takingly complex reform of the entire benefits system…

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Dover – Final Update

Anti-Fascist Network

There’s less than a week to go until our protest in Dover, and antifascists from across the country are finalising travel details, making sure we get maximum numbers on the streets to support Kent Anti-Racism Network and proudly say that while refugees are welcome here, racists and fascists aren’t!

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The hypocrisy of Cameron: pro-Putin Russian oligarchs give millions to Tory Party

They expelled the Libyan embassy on masse for killing a British citizen in London.

Pride's Purge

A foreign state openly sponsoring its agents to run around London killing people with radioactive poison seems to be the very definition of state-sponsored terrorism.

So why is Cameron so keen to allow his party to be funded by pro-Putin Russians?

At a Tory Party fundraising dinner not long before the last election, ultra-wealthy Russians were the most representative foreign nationality at the fundraising event.

According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, here are some of the foreign billionaires who attended the Tory Party party fundraiser in 2014:

• Alexander Temerko (Russia)
• Tatanya Korsakova (Russia)
• Andrei Borodin (Russia)
• Vasily Shestakov (Russia)
• Alexander Kuznetsov (Russia)
• Alex Nekrassov (Russia)
• Andrei Klyamko (Russia)
• Darko Horvat (Slovenia)

And here’s Cameron chatting with Putin allies at a Tory Party fundraiser:

Cameron’s also made it possible for rich Russians, as well as Saudis, to come to the UK without even having to have a normal visa – if they are rich enough of…

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The Corbyn delusion and the double-edged sword of truth – Mal Content.

“I can’t be cool … I read one too many books”

– The Clash: ‘Deny’

As an anarchist I regard the ascension of Jeremy Corbyn to the Leadership of the Opposition as a huge backward step. We were finally getting the message across that the political caste can do nothing for us, being in thrall to some distant, unaccountable people, and arbitrary market forces that no one understands, especially those who are paid fabulous sums to predict their outcome. Social inequality has reached Pharonic proportions, with 62 individuals* wielding more purchasing power than the poorest three and a half billion. Through all the crises of the past five years, their wealth increased by 44%, while everyone else’s fell by a similar amount. The richest 1% is now worth as much as the rest of us put together. No state redistribution scheme is going to make a dent in this mountain of fictitious capital, and there’s simply nothing big enough to invest more than a tiny fraction of it in. In so far as it exists at all, except as a measure of the theoretical status of the socially useless, such wealth resides in tax havens, far from the workers whose needs and abilities it represents. The plutocrats amuse themselves with football clubs, islands and vast swathes of London, and use their newspapers and TV stations to install their lackeys in the institutions their class devised over centuries to keep it in power forever.

* Since this was written, it fell to 8, and by the time you read it …

Our people still don’t know what they want, much less how to get it, on a recent TUC outing it struck me what a confused mess the left has become with all its different agendas. “Fight for every job”, one placard says; “a million green jobs now!” screams another; “NHS not Trident”, “stop tax dodging”, “positive banking!” – really? The GMB supports fracking, Unite sits on the fence over Trident. We aren’t helping much with slogans like “demand the impossible”; demand the bleeding obvious more like. With the Labour Party at last consigned to the dustbin of history, the mirage of political representation would evaporate revealing naked class struggle. The last thing we needed was someone breathing life into this anachronism and giving people false hope; it would be a tragedy if the young and angry spent the next five years campaigning for a Labour government when they could be kicking off, wildcatting and occupying the means of production. Like you, I’ve groaned at the false dichotomy of state-managed socialism versus state-guaranteed capitalism, shuddered at the grim spectre of Old Labour. It burns my arse that I’m sat here writing about party politics, just months after the Syriza fiasco exposed its futility.

As a matter of fact, back in July when the Messiah showed up at Tolpuddle to fill the gap left by Our Tone, I harboured a vain notion that I might have a quiet word with him at some point. He’s a nice geezer who works hard for his constituents. Having respect for his sincerity I would say: “For the sake of our class! Please don’t stand!” In the event, he floated in and out again, smiling beatifically, surrounded by swarms of entranced acolytes in their J.C. T shirts. After slogging away for decades to no good purpose, he’s having his fifteen minutes and loving it – well who can blame him? Had I waded through the selfie apocalypse to express such dissonance, I would have been denounced as a heretic and belaboured with copies of the Morning Star. Anyway, by then I was occupied with fucking off a pro-Israel group.

Corbyn was put up as a joke candidate by the Blairites, who no longer bother to hide their contempt for our class. He was to act as a foil for their argument that Labour had lost the election purely because they had failed to keep up with the Tories’ stampede to the right and were too soft on immigrants and the poor. New Labour had opened their leadership contest to supporters who paid a fee to register. This was mainly to reduce the influence of trade unionists, almost exclusively workers in the beleaguered public sector. This backfired spectacularly as thousands registered to vote for Corbyn. So they resorted to a range of dirty tricks, barred people from voting, even wheeled out the old war-criminal himself – big mistake; as Blair is the left’s most hated figure after Thatcher, perhaps even more so as he conned them into putting him in government. The result was that the 200/1 outsider polled three times as many votes as the next runner-up. Since His election, there have been a few unexpected developments, and some entirely predictable ones.

First there was The Miracle Of The Trots. Every Marxist group that ever there was, SP, CP, SWP, TUSC, LU, AWL, Counterfire – who all hate each other with a vengeance, abandoned their turf war to unite behind Corbyn. The factionalist Alliance for Workers’ Liberty even de-registered as a party so its members could join Labour.

As anticipated, the chattering classes have closed ranks, the corporate press and the state-corporatist BBC whine forlornly at the prospect of having to fight a battle they thought ended with the Miners’ Strike. The parliamentary Labour Party, an uninspiring gang of careerists and time-servers representing no one whatsoever, were oiked out of obscurity and are now on the radio every five minutes. A year ago it would have been inconceivable that anyone would ask Andy Burnham’s opinion on anything.

The message blaring from every speaker is that under the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism, a socialist agenda has no place in a national representative assembly, however many of its subjects may want it. This arrogance from the 24% seems to have galvanised the multitudes who want to wave two fingers at them into joining the Party, more have done so since His election than are in the tory party. Branch meetings are suddenly packed with people who have never belonged to a party in their lives. Who are these people and what do they hope to achieve? A crowd- sourced budget perhaps? I’m imagining the kind of people who follow Another Angry Voice and The Artist Taxi Driver. Green, anticapitalist, for free education and healthcare, open borders and public ownership, if not exactly workers’ control. I suspect most of them want to go a lot further than their leader would dare and don’t give a damn if he wears a poppy or kisses the queen’s ring. So they aren’t too fussed that Corbyn can’t carry a majority in the house, or win an election with all the tabloids and the Beeb against him. Anecdotally a few anarchists are joining in, no names no packdrill, that should give the Daily Mail something to froth about. The tories who were rumoured to have infiltrated Labour to vote for the unelectable Corbyn, are reduced to lamenting the lack of a serious (i.e. neoliberal) opposition being bad for democracy. So maybe the Labour party will become a campaigning network like 38 degrees, which doesn’t suffer from having to have a policy on everything. But why do we need another one?

Those of us who read a bit were also quick to have a pop; we follow ideas not people. Corbyn’s ideas are neither new nor explicitly anticapitalist, and at the present stage of capitalist accumulation, impossible for any government to implement. Some of them are daft and obviously made on the hoof, his idea of building nuclear submarines without warheads smacks of Keynes’ digging holes and filling them in again. His Unite backers would prefer to while away their days building Trident, a mechanism for ending human history and making the planet uninhabitable, than be excluded from waged labour. As for back-door negotiations with deash, that would be a betrayal of the Working Class in both territories, and put Britain in the same sordid position as Turkey and Saudi Arabia – if it isn’t already.

It’s a truism that politicians are out of touch with the people, having never done, been trained for, not had any ambition to do more than govern others. The media have long lamented the young’s lack of engagement with the Westminster circus. In reply they’ve thrown up only reactionary buffoons like Farage and hare-brained misogynist Russell Brand, whose boner melted before Milliband’s legendary charisma. Both are heavily reliant for their livelihood on the status quo. In the media-generated political mirage, the class that must work for wages is only allowed to construe economics in terms of jobs and money; they would have us believe that money has a value, is finite, and must be worked for. Corbyn cannot escape this mythology, so he chats about creating jobs, wealth and economic growth through investment as if these things were desirable. The trouble with Keynesianism, as Hitler and Mussolini knew only too well, is you have to have a war every so often to destroy surplus production. When Billy Bragg sang ‘Between the Wars’ thirty-odd years ago, Britain actually was – if you didn’t count Ireland, and the proxy wars going on in Palestine, Iran/Iraq, Timor etc in which British capital was invested. We are now in a continuous state of war and it will end when capitalism ends.

Capitalism rests on violence; it pervades every aspect of the culture. Children are taught to admire and simulate the taking of life as soon as they are able to grasp the concept of death. There are few computer games related to saving the planet, I tried a Google search and the latest entry was from 2011. On Radio 4’s Question Time recently a panel of liberals and worthies had a solemn debate on whether it was reasonable to lock away a fifteen year old for the rest of their life, for fantasising on the internet about killing strangers in a distant land. They agreed they didn’t have enough information to make that judgement and would leave it to others – a pretty sorry admission from would-be opinion formers. This was followed immediately by a discussion on whether it was irresponsible for a seventy-year old man to say he would never kill strangers in distant lands. The grown up common sense view is that not having a vessel under the sea, carrying more explosive than has ever been detonated, anywhere, would put us at risk – who, exactly is ‘us’?

Here’s the double-edged bit: unlike us Bookfair-goers, the braying toffs and media hacks are not just sneering at some fluffy old lefty and his 20th century politics; they are sneering at the needs and aspirations of our class. Those who aspire to bring their kids into a world that isn’t fitted with a self-destruct button, and is at least prepared to feed and house them. The young who see themselves as more than just creators of surplus-value, while the rich, breeding at our expense on their stolen land, see their own offspring as appropriators and accumulators of that value. The test of a socialist utopia will be whether you’re still getting up in the morning and taking crap off people you don’t respect. Within the drudgery of our lives we find that that the most significant things people do are done neither for reward nor to order but out of the instinct to altruism and goodwill. It’s just that we’ve all grown up in a society where greedy sociopaths rise to the top, are perceived to be successful and held up to be admired.

There are more useful things we could be doing than kicking Corbyn right now, we need to get amongst the disciples a bit sharpish and steer the conversation away from fixing the economy, a hateful thing that exists to maintain the dominance of the few over the many. Our class could break it irrevocably in a heartbeat, but we must abandon the attitudes, and to some extent the desires that sustain it. We work to live, or else we are raw material to the industry that generates its profits from managing our inactivity. In work or out of it we are confined by procedures, forms, assessed and audited by folk who have no idea what they’re doing or why they’re doing it, as are they in turn. We are required to sacrifice our dignity and be pacified with toys and entertainments, endless consumption without satisfaction. It’s bizarre that so many corporate-constructed cultural artifacts are claimed as ‘working class culture’. Capitalism robs children of their childhood and robs adults of opportunities to grow up. The economy makes us sick and trades our ill-health. False hope and desperation are commodities, or no one would ever buy hair restorer. Loving Corbyn is a commodity, so is hating Him; their stocks will rise and fall, the market will care little, and when the party’s over, there’s going to be a fucking great hangover.

What can we salvage from all this? Probably no more or less than from the occupy movement; sitting round the fire listening to tosh about chemtrails and the Bilderberg group, every now and then someone would ask: “seriously, how do we get out of this fucking mess?” Well I’ve a few ideas, but you’re going to have to put yourself out … fancy a pint?

Credit Suisse Research Institute publications, on which the Oxfam report was based

The Global Wealth Databook 2015 pdf

The Global Wealth Report 2015 pdf

Tolpuddle martyrs’ show in Taunton 19 th – 21st January.

A cast of 21 young student actors relive the story of the Tolpuddle martyrs in drama, dance and song .

Tues 19th, Wednesday 20th and Thurs 21st January.  7.30pm – 9.45pm. Licensed bar & cafe, free Parking on site. Union Stands in the theatre foyer pre-show and during interval.

Tickets £6.50 / £5.00 concessions £4.50 students.Box office 01823 414141

The Tacchi – Morris Arts Centre, Monkton Heathfield, Taunton TA2 8PD, 2 mins from junction 25 of M5 or from A358 roundabout (Taunton ).

Slum landlords, how they voted.

Below is a list of landlord M.P.s who voted against the amendment to the Housing and Planning Bill to ensure houses are “fit for human habitation”, whom according to the register of members’ financial interests as of December 2015, had also recorded under Section 6(ii) “Income derived from property: over £10,000 in a calendar year”. That’s on top of nearly 70 grand they get for doing stuff like this. Nearly a third of members and 39% of the tories belong to this clique; those who derive less than 10,000 p.a. are not declared.

You can still be evicted for reporting a leaking roof – and politicians are still taking the piss.

 

1. Nigel Adams
2. Stuart Andrew
3. Victoria Atkins
4. Jake Berry
5. James Berry
6. Bob Blackman
7. Robert Buckland
8. Alun Cairns
9. David Cameron
10. Douglas Carswell
11. Alex Chalk
12. James Cleverley
13. Geoffrey Clifton-Brown
14. Therese Coffey
15. Geoffrey Cox
16. Mims Davies
17. Philip Davies
18. Richard Grosvenor-Plunkett-Ernle-Erle Drax
19. James Duddridge
20. Alan Duncan
21. Philip Dunne
22. Jane Ellison
23. George Eustice
24. Mike Freer
25. Richard Fuller
26. John Glen
27. Robert Goodwill
28. Chris Grayling
29. Dominic Grieve
30. Chris Heaton-Harris
31. Peter Heaton-Jones
32. George Hollingberry
33. Kevin Hollinrake
34. Philip Hollobone
35. Nick Hurd
36. Stewart Jackson
37. Margot James
38. Sajid Javid
39. Joseph Johnson
40. Danny Kinahan
41. Simon Kirby (teller)
42. Greg Knight
43. Brandon Lewis
44. Julian Lewis
45. Craig Mackinlay
46. Tania Mathias
47. Karl McCartney
48. Anne Marie Morris
49. Sheryll Murray
50. Robert Neill
51. Sarah Newton (teller)
52. Jesse Norman
53. David Nuttall
54. Neil Parish
55. Owen Paterson
56. Rebecca Pow
57. Jeremy Quin
58. Jacob Rees-Mogg
59. Laurence Robertson
60. Julian Smith
61. Royston Smith
62. Mark Spencer
63. John Stevenson
64. Desmond Swayne
65. Derek Thomas
66. Anne-Marie Trevelyan
67. Andrew Turner
68. Shailesh Vara
69. Theresa Villiers
70. Ben Wallace
71. David Warburton
72. Craig Whittaker
73. John Whittingdale
74. Nadhim Zahawi

The following landlords abstained, the Scots didn’t get a vote.

1. Rushanara Ali
2. John Baron
3. Richard Benyon
4. Ann Clwyd
5. Glyn Davies
6. George Eustice
7. Liam Fox
8. James Gray
9. Richard Harrington
10. James Heappy
11. Norman Lamb
12. Alasdair McDonnell
13. Andrew Mitchell
14. George Osborne
15. Antionette Sandback
16. Danny Simpson
17. Edward Timpson
18. Keith Vaz

Information from International Business Times.