Mr Wu no longer has a laundry … by Mal Content.

Pondering the controversy over ‘patriotic’ songs:

‘Land of hope and glory’ is an awful dirge and anyone who claims this as part of their culture is a bit of a muppet. ‘Rule Brittania’ is only slightly more interesting, part of a long-forgotten opera about King Alfred the great, who founded the British navy. Its political message is against Scottish secession, as one who thinks Wessex should never have gone into England, I disagree.

Some years ago, for reasons that escape me now, the BBC invited the public to nominate tunes that summed up “Englishness”, or may be it was “Britishness”, I forget. My submission was ‘Mr Wu’s a Window Cleaner Now’ by the late George Formby. Formby’s irrepressible character sums up the values commonly espoused by the English Working Class: irreverent, gregarious, hard-working, resourceful, he’s never going to give up. He also represents the diverse ethnic make up of our class, even in Formby’s day.

There is a sub-text that illuminates the dark side of Englishness. Aggressively Working Class entertainer Formby, who managed to get himself deported from South Africa for defying racial segregation (it was actually Beryl Formby who told the National Party leader to “piss off”) nevertheless manages to reproduce the racial stereotypes of his day. The cheeky, womanising Mr Wu is simultaneously “one of us” and “the other”.

A real-life Mr Wu would have lived through the ‘yellow peril’ era of the early Twentieth Century, like his Jewish and Irish neighbours in the East End he would have had to take care of himself extremely well just to hold his ground. He’s still in Limehouse in 1942, when he crops up as an air-raid warden, so undoubtedly he would have fought at Cable Street in 1936, against the cops, against the law. By 1944 he’s a fighter pilot.

Maybe he went to Spain?

“He used to iron jackets,

now he’s shooting fascists,

cos’ Mr Wu’s a Brigadista now”

Or something. Next time you’re feeling ‘patriotic’ big up Mr Wu, East End Working Class hero.

Red and Black Telly roundup.

Corona comment number five, from the South of England: Snake oil and tinfoil, by Mal Content.

Clockwise from left: Buttar supports Trump, Buttar supports the military, Icke talks crap about BLM, Kate Shemirani on ‘sons of liberty’, Sherri Tenpenny and Alex Jones, Senator Jensen on ‘Go Right’ a ‘gays for trump’ channel.

The corona virus has thrown the ruling class into disarray. Their sales pitch, that their institutional and economic hegemony is capable of managing the infrastructure to the benefit of all, fell at the first hurdle, as the economy was effectively pitted against itself.

Meanwhile yet another fault line has opened in the anarchist movement, and what for the sake of argument we can call the libertarian left (social democrats and Bolsheviks need not apply). Part of it has embraced Benthamism, sacrificing individual judgement to someone else’s (invariably the ruling class’) statistical aggregate of the greater good. Some find finger-pointing and curtain-twitching a worthwhile use of their time. In promoting his Panopticon prison design, Bentham commented: “As the watchmen cannot be seen, they need not be on duty at all times, effectively leaving the watching to the watched.” In fact that principle has informed all more-or-less totalitarian states ever since. As a utilitarian, materialist, libertarian socialist I reject Bentham’s definition of utility and there are many well-known thought experiments that reduce it to the absurd.

At the other end of the scale ‘professional contrarians’ come across like petulant teenagers answering back to their dads. People who’ve spent years masked up for nefarious purposes will demonstrate without them now they are officially sanctioned – of all the things they could protest about! How hard we tried to get the ‘peaceful protesters’ to hide their faces as cover for the ones prepared to kick off. We dreamed of a world where face coverings were worn as a matter of course and we could blend into the mass.

I’ve already given my opinion that masks are a placebo. Can you smell smoke through your mask, even outside from six feet away? Ever smoked a chillum through a rag? The largest smoke particles are like boulders compared with corona viruses, the smallest are comparable and both are within the colloidal range, in other words they are capable of being indefinitely suspended in air by Brownian motion. So do it or don’t do it as you please, and if a fellow worker hands me a book and asks me to write down a name and address it’s no hardship. It won’t be mine of course and I suspect they know that. I don’t ever recall debating with a copper my right to use marijuana, I’d just say I didn’t have any and hoped I’d hidden it well enough.

We’ve had a lot of fun ridiculing the floundering politicians’ arbitrary “guidance” and the middle-class dupes who rationalise it. We caution against taking anything on trust in an untrustworthy world, but some anti-authoritarians have chosen to rub shoulders with even less trustworthy and more authoritarian tendencies. We have taken issue with our long-standing comrades at The Acorn/Winter Oak over their promotion of a rally by stand up x, a motley collection of flat-earthers who postulate as always a liberal elite – led by George Soros no doubt, denying them their right to live in the fourteenth century. On the net you’re only ever three clicks from David Icke, except the stand up x facebook page, then it’s one click, and they’ve booked him for the 29^th August. It’s all there, guy Fawkes masks, butchers’ aprons, fox news, NWO, secret paedophile rings. The anti-malaria drug being pushed by Bolsonaro is manufactured by the Brazilian military for obvious reasons, it wouldn’t surprise me if Derek Guff had his finger in that particular pie also.

What is their protest intended to achieve; business as usual or just business? Protest always smacks of supplication and this was never more likely to fall on deaf ears, if you want to “stand up to the system” withdraw your labour, occupy the means of production or expropriate property.

On the platform:

• Dolores Cahill, Irish freedom party – big on law and order, except hate crime which is just free speech.
• Dr Zac Cox, a ‘homeopathic dentist’.
• Dr Adil, who claims SARS CoV2 isn’t a virus at all.
• Dr Eric Nepute, purveyor of vitamin products who does think it’s a virus, and has been warned off by the Federal Trade Commission for selling quack cures for it, uses words like “bazillion” on his website – clever bloke.
• Dr Scott Jensen, Republican senator for Minnesota, who features on breitbart and ‘Go Right’, a Bush Fellow and god-botherer.
• Dr Mikael Norway – sorry, no idea who they are.
• Dr Sherry Tenpenny, another quack, author of ‘Saying no to Vaccines.’
• Kate Shemirani, who sells mistletoe injections for cancer and expensive “beauty products”, appears on the ‘sons of liberty’: “Re-shaping America by redirecting future generations to our Judeo Christian heritage through education and media.”
• Dr Andrew Kaufmann, whose website has a massive disclaimer that it doesn’t offer any medical advice, though he will give you a consultation for a fee.
• Dr Kevin Corbett, an artist with a PhD in social sciences.
• Rashid Buttar, a struck-off doctor, conspiracy theorist, anti-vaccine proponent, and youtuber. He has twice been reprimanded by the North Carolina Board of Medical Examiners for unprofessional conduct and cited by the FDA for illegal marketing of unapproved and adulterated drugs. He variously claims 5g and chemtrails cause Covid, or that it is a biological weapon of the Chinese state.
• Piers Corbyn, climate change denier and general-purpose nutcase.

You wouldn’t want to be seen with these wankers, unless you’re stood on the Minnesota senator’s neck.

The anarchist response to pandemic is the same as to any other situation. Do as much research as you feel necessary, apply your judgement and experience, consult whoever you trust then make up your mind and do as you see fit. Whether to visit your grandmother on her deathbed is a personal decision to be taken on its merits. You may find yourself balancing actual harm with hypothetical harm and wish to weight those two factors differently. I won’t be lectured on “protecting the NHS” by those who have spent forty years trying to abolish it, or the ones who sat back on their arses while we were picketing things and getting arrested. Petitions don’t count.

The NHS for all its benefits is a capitalist employer and an arm of the corporate state. The people who run it do so not for the benefit of its workers or patients but for their investors and for “UK-PLC” which requires that at least some of us are fit to augment their capital. Science is not to be used as propaganda; it is simply an enquiry into the nature of things informed by empiricism and logic. Faulty logic and badly designed experiments will give you duff gen. Disagreement is to be welcomed and should help us see the wood for the trees, there are no sides to this, if you like to stand in lines shouting at each other, crack on, it does nothing for me.

Morality must be balanced with utility, like strategy and tactics neither is any use on its own. We can all do that without getting into bed with the lunatic fringe of the American religious right. Any movement devoid of class analysis is worthless to us. We recall the awful mess Occupy got into with ‘freemen on the land’ and all that bollocks about the Magna Carta. There are people out there who believe fluoridation makes you gay, vaccination is a conspiracy to stupefy us, and 5g is about mind control. They would sell you bogus medicines for cancer or tell you to pray it away. Unlike the kind of street fascist who really does benefit from a Totector in the face, our best weapon against these cranks is ridicule, but we’ll make an exception for Senator Jensen.

Workers are every day having to decide between unsafe environments and starvation or homelessness. These are not decisions toff politicians ever have to make, nor will they help you do so. The latest tory decree on “shielding” has just given the bosses an excuse to shed workers with chronic health conditions that were protected characteristics under EA10. I’m reminded of the story of the potato farmer who lived by Chernobyl. When the evacuees started to return they found the old man had never left. The potatoes that came up the first year after the fire looked a bit odd, he admitted, but you could eat them. A man had come from the government, “don’t you know those potatoes can kill you?” “Not as fast as no potatoes!” was the response.

Why are we still having these silly arguments? Partly because we are not deeply enough rooted in the class, we are peripheral to it. Before the politicians even took an interest in corona the anarchist movement stopped what it was doing to organise community support and mutual aid, but it lacked the clout to shut down the economy; that requires mass direct action. We have become reactive, so many of our Class are hostages to the market that we have shifted our focus from dismantling the hateful death machine to mitigating its effects on the most vulnerable. A look at our history will reveal that it is often the most vulnerable who stop the wheels. To put it crudely, if you’ve got a rock and one good arm you can throw it, better do that than lament the shortage of rocks. Don’t allow your perceived privileges to immobilise you!

If you can’t think for yourself who’s going to do it for you? Not the bungling fraudsters in Westminster, who obtained their jobs under false pretences. Not their politically-appointed experts, who like David Knutt will get fired for publishing science that contradicts their policy. Not internet con-artists who make a living flogging crap. Not flag-waving, god-bothering numbskulls. Not tinfoil-hatted keyboard worriers. The Working Class must decide what is good for it and that requires us to collectivise each issue, the bigger it is, the more collective our response must be.

We’re just going to have to sort this one out ourselves.

PURA ACRACIA

More thoughts on this subject here:
https://wp.me/P24izD-37F

pura acracia

What follows is a series of anti-political arguments against the police, politics y más.

Politics itself is the policing of freedom & unfreedom.Freedom, as we are taught in American schools, is not freedom itself.
It is a doctored variation sold to us. It helps maintainthe assumption that the perpetuation of American politics is itself tied to perpetuation of freedom. (“Vote or don’t complain!”)

Nothing could be further from the truth.

View original post 710 more words

Red and Black Telly roundup.

Lobbing a spanner into the workings of the new (ab)normal

The South Essex Heckler - Archive

The new (ab)normal where we’re treated like walking bio-hazards, where we’re cajoled into regarding our fellow humans with fear and face an increasing level of invasive tracking and monitoring will only work if we let it. A growing number of us want a future where we can live a full life and interact with each other without fear or censure. How do we get there?

Next Saturday (29.8) will see a protest in London’s Trafalgar Square against the new (ab)normal. The point about large scale protests is that they’re an easy target to vilify and discredit. Next Saturday’s protest is already being vilified and that will grow over the coming week.

We’ve been round the block as activists over the decades and if we’re being honest, with a few notable exceptions, we’re not entirely sure what can be achieved by a large scale protest in a hostile climate where the…

View original post 1,211 more words

Octavio Alberola says goodbye to Stuart Christie

Octavio Alberola at Kate Sharpley Library.

Octavio Alberola, who was in charge of Defensa Interior and was a close friend of Stuart’s has left us this farewell message to his friend.

Stuart Christie, comrade and friend

The news of Stuart Christie’s death arrived by phone halfway through yesterday afternoon from comrade René after he asked if I had heard the bad news and after I quizzed him brusquely: Who’s dead? I could tell from his tone of voice that it must have been somebody close who had passed away.

René’s answer stopped me in my tracks, because even though Stuart had told me a week before that the cancer had left him still hoarse and that the findings of his medical tests were none too encouraging, it never at any moment occurred to me that he would be taken so quickly. I am surrounded by several male and female comrades – more or less of my own age – who are in none too rude health and at my age (due to turn 93 shortly) the thought that one’s days are numbered is just “normal”.

But in Stuart’s case, how could this be when he was eighteen years my junior? Besides, we had both been working on joint projects and both had been determined to plough ahead with our battles with the world of authority and exploitation.

To me, his death represents not just the loss of a comrade and friend but an end to long years collaborating on joint actions and initiatives designed to expose the injustices of the world in which we live and the fight for a fairer, freer world. A world that is possible for all of us who have not given up on wishing and trying to work towards a consistent practice of active, internationalist revolutionary solidarity.

We have known many years of brotherly relations ever since our first meeting back in August 1964 and up until 2020, without interruption. Half a century of our lives in tandem, one way or another, working on behalf of a common cause, heedless of borders. That struggle, though centred on the Spanish people’s political and social vagaries, initially under the Franco dictatorship and later under this phoney democracy spawned by the Transition/Transaction, has at all times carried the imprint of an internationalist revolutionary outlook.

The evidence of that, in Stuart’s case, was the time he spent behind bars in Spain and England, and in the case of Brenda his partner, in Germany and, in the cases of Ariane and myself, in Belgium and France. Experiences that bear witness to struggles that knew no borders as we knew that a characteristic of freedom is that it is the right of every man and woman.

So how could I not feel impelled to remember it now that our fraternization with Stuart has ended with his death? As well as with the death just a few days ago of the German comrade Doris Ensinger, the partner of Luis Andrés Edo, with whom Stuart shared some of his prison experiences and with whom he rubbed shoulders in their struggles; obviously, speaking for myself, the loss of Doris in a way represented the final ending of my fraternization-in-struggle with Luis. A finale that started some years back with Luis’s own death.

The fact is that in the case of Doris’s death too I was stopped in my tracks, startled by the news of her demise communicated to me by Manel, as barely a week earlier she had sent Tomás and me an email to let us know that she had been abruptly recalled to the hospital and undergone a transplant operation … But was now back home and feeling well …

Meaning that yet again I am brought face to face with the tenuousness of our existence and the need to preserve the memory of what we strove to be and do, to the very death.

Perpignan, 17 August 2020

Octavio Alberola

From RojoyNegro_Digital el Mar, 18/08/20; 15:02 http://rojoynegro.info/articulo/memoria/octavio-alberola-se-despide-stuart-christie

Translated by: Paul Sharkey.

Obituary: Stuart Christie (1946-2020)

Anarchist Communist Group.

We mourn the loss of our anarchist comrade Stuart Christie who died on August 15th. It was thanks to people like Stuart Christie and Albert Meltzer that British anarchism began to break with the liberal, quietist, gradualist and “non-violent” outlook that had pervaded it since the end of the Second World War. They sought to return it to its radical roots, back to a revolutionary working class anarchism that had first emerged with the First International.

Joining the Anarchist Federation in Glasgow in 1962, Stuart became involved in the anti- nuclear bombs movement, at first with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and then with the more radical direct-actionist wing of the anti-bomb movement, the Direct Action Committee and its successor the Committee of 100.

Stuart made contact with the action groups of the exiled Spanish anarchist movement, organised around Internal Defence (DI) and involving militants of long standing like Octavio Alberola and Luis Andres Edo. As such he was arrested in Spain in 1964 and charged with the possession of explosives. These were intended for an attempt on Franco’s life and he was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment. Thanks to a continuing international campaign he was freed after 3 years.

Returning to Britain he re-founded the Anarchist Black Cross with Albert Meltzer, which acted as a support organisation for prisoners internationally. Its bulletin transformed itself into Black Flag, a paper advocating revolutionary class struggle anarchism.

Stuart Christie co-wrote The Floodgates of Anarchy with Meltzer in 1970, which further popularised class struggle anarchism. He strongly believed in the power of the printed word and founded Cienfuegos Press and Cienfuegos Press Review. He was also involved in the setting up in the Centro Iberica and International Libertarian Centre in London with the Spanish militant Miguel Garcia.

In 1972 he and other defendants were acquitted in the Angry Brigade trial. In 1974 he moved to Orkney and edited a local radical paper there, the Free-Winged Eagle. In 1981 he moved to Hastings and set up the Anarchist Film Channel in 2006. He also produced a three-volume autobiography which was then condensed into a bestselling paperback Granny Made Me an Anarchist in 2004. In addition, Stuart brought out his history of the Federacion Anarquista Iberica, We, The Anarchists! And re-published Jose Peirats’ three volume history of the Spanish anarchist movement, continuing his publication and distribution of books and films through his Christie Books.

Stuart did much to popularise class struggle anarchism, and his importance to the movement in Britain cannot be underestimated. He was definitely “on the side of the angels”. However, it would be false to say that there were no differences with the current in British anarchism which has culminated in the Anarchist Communist Group. He was suspicious of specific anarchist organisations, preferring an approach of ad hoc organisation and networks of affinity groups. As a result, he was to characterise the Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists as “semi-Trotskyist”. Similarly, he gained entrance for the Franco-German militant Daniel Cohn-Bendit, with whom he shared similar organisational views, to the congress in Carrara in Italy of the International of Anarchist Federations. Cohn-Bendit promptly denounced the Cuban anarchists present as agents of the CIA for daring to criticise the Castro regime. As Stuart was to write himself: “He had no proof whatsoever for this accusation…” Well, now Cohn-Bendit is a reformist politician, which speaks for itself. Stuart thought that the existing anarchist federations were sclerotic, oligarchic and bureaucratic and indeed there was some truth in this, with people like Federica Montseny and Germinal Esgleas of the exiled CNT-FAI, always opposed to militant direct action, carrying out bureaucratic manoeuvres at the congress. However, there were also present many long-term anarchist communist militants like Alfonso Failla, Mario Mantovani and Umberto Marzocchi. Was it the right decision to abandon the Congress and set up an informal one at the beach nearby as Stuart and others did? The Congress represented a clash between different generations, but it also represented a clash between spontaneism and organisation. Certainly, one of the positive things that came out of the informal congress was the idea to set up Anarchist Black Crosses in different countries, but looking back was it not a good idea to develop better relations with the best of the militants of previous generations?

Despite these fraternal criticisms, we appreciate the many beneficial influences that Stuart had on British anarchism, not least the creation of the ABC, Black Flag, and his consistent publishing efforts. Stuart was a comrade of great charm, warmth, humour and a wide and expansive culture. He will be sorely missed. We extend our condolences to his daughter and granddaughters.

Message from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Southampton – protest tomorrow.

Dear All

I hope you are well and not wilting in the heat. Thank you to everyone who supported Glyn, Jon and Sally on their Big Ride for Palestine. They raised £300 for the Middle East Children’s Alliance and the money will be targeted for children’s Play equipment in Gaza.

Stop Arming Israel Campaign -HSBC Bank Town Centre- 22nd August

Southampton PSC will be Campaigning outside HSBC Bank in the town centre, Above Bar Street on 22nd August from 10.30 am -12.30. Please come and add your voice. We will be asking people to sign a petition asking the UK Government to place a two way arms embargo on Israel.

According to the Campaign against the Arms Trade, between 2014-2018 the UK provided export licenses for the export of military equipment to Israel worth £364 million.

HSBC bank invests in and provides financial services to, companies such as BAE Systems and Raytheon that provide arms to Israel.HSBC also invests in Caterpillar, a company that provides armed bulldozers that Israel uses to destroy Palestinian homes.

Please come and get involved in this campaign.

We will have flags and placards. We will be respecting social distancing guidelines and we advise that you wear a face covering.

We look forward to seeing you.

Warm Regards Cathryn Spiller (Secretary Southampton PSC)

Remember to follow us on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/southamptonpsc

This was bound to happen