Red And Black Telly: CORONAVIRUS – ISOLATION ( THEM + US )

Red And Black Telly: CORONAVIRUS – POLICE DEPLOYMENT.

The Factories, The Fields, and the Firearms to Defend Them

Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee

“The working class is able, once it so desires, to take control of industry and thus establish a much more efficient and satisfactory society .”

(from the pamphlet: “One Big Union,“ by The Industrial Workers of the World)

You, me and our entire class of society’s underprivileged who produces everything with very little or nothing at all to show for it have – once effectively organized – the potential within us to free ourselves from the stresses that come with the struggle for survival of material needs.

While the study below is based on research conducted in 2020, the final analysis will be found to resonate up to the hour the bell of the social revolution is sounded. It’s of the deepest importance for the masses – the have-nots who’ve been no strangers to struggling since we were born – to firmly grasp the magnificence of our Worth, and our potential and power. Our potential for freeing ourselves from being taken advantage of by the government system is overwhelmingly greater than that of the government system taking advantage of us all!

This has been a very fortunate truth for the less-fortunate of the world ever since societies have allowed governments to exist, and our social contract with the State has proven to be nothing less than a taxing, hostile machine worth defying and reducing to irreparable ashes.

The more the righteous seeds of becoming free from social & economic oppression be planted richly in the minds of the poor and oppressed who are governed, the greater the potential becomes to overthrowing the government with overwhelming resistance; especially when the rational alternative of governing ourselves (exercising autonomy) is given the necessary attention it deserves deep in the roots of our ethical nature.

“The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people, and the few, who make up the employing class have all the good things in life.”

– From the Preamble to The IWW Constitution.

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Initial reactions to corona pandemic, from the south of England, By Mal Content.

The most striking aspect of the corona pandemic has been the inequality of information, which follows naturally from the inequality of everything else. Most Working Class people are too busy flogging their bodies and souls to pursue a balanced education in the ever-accelerating fund of scientific discovery. This belongs to all humanity but is kept the preserve of the few precisely because of the power it conveys. Some will find on the Internet the virtual equivalent of the bloke down the pub. Rumours abound and fact is half-digested.

In the absence of previous experience and relevant theory the ‘citizen’ – elevated from serf in recognition of the agency we suddenly all have – has to rely on experts, really no more than political appointees, for advice, which is then filtered through the politicians with their political agendas.

We recall Professor David Knutt, one of the most accomplished academics who ever worked for a government, being fired simply for writing an article in the Lancet that contradicted the government’s implausible justification for its drugs policy, a cascade of learned folk resigned in disgust. Capitalism cannot provide us with accurate information any more than it can provide us with clean air and water when it is more lucrative to pollute it.

We are left with stark choices: to trust the hapless buffoons who somehow found themselves in government; to scream for them to exert more coercion on our fellows; to follow the herd in an orgy of virtue-signalling, or to inform ourselves, trust our own judgement and work in practical solidarity and mutual aid networks formed of trusted affinity groups. The recent flirtation with Jeremy Corbyn has left many people still harbouring the delusion that politicians can solve problems in the real world, or that any utilitarian solutions could emerge from under the vast burden of capital accumulation and hierarchical power.

The U.K.’s health minister Matt Hancock has no relevant qualifications whatsoever; he’s a disaster going somewhere to happen. An economist at the bank of England in 2005 he was given responsibility for the housing market, two years before the housing market took out the global banking system. Never mind, the wealth of the global elite has increased steadily year on year ever since, as ours has fallen in like measure. His latest task of overseeing the pillage of public health resources having been superseded, he has been elbowed to the sidelines by the grandstanding pfeffle.

Above all we must approach this as a Class for ourselves, social distancing is a control measure aimed at the poor. Don’t be deluded the rich are cooking their own dinner or cleaning their own shithouses, they are well insulated, they don’t have to go to the shops or the factory and they won’t run out of bog roll. They don’t have to sit on public transport for hours to work in districts where they cannot afford to live. Etc. Etc. It was the rich who spread this so fast, with their pointless ‘business travel’, cruises, annual skiing trips and ‘exotic’ holidays in other people’s misery.

They now feign concern for elderly and infirm members of our Class after years of slaughtering them in droves through poverty and neglect, but what they are actually terrified of is the collapse of the power structure, the house of cards on which they perch their idle arses. As of this morning there have been 7 confirmed cases in the whole of Dorset, I’ve been told not to go to my local boozer but must make a thirty-five mile round trip daily to work in a factory in the next county – where there are 87 cases – or I won’t get paid. Adjusted for population that’s at least four times the risk. We hear the World Health Organisation – a failure in terms if ever there was one – praise the Chinese state for its diligence in basically quarantining people at gunpoint. For the life of me I can’t see a qualitative difference between dying of a disease or getting shot by the cops, neither seems healthy to me.

The Agenda of the liberal-bourgeois-military-industrial state is to preserve the status quo, to maintain the hierarchy of power relations hitherto enforced by property, capital and debt. Everything else, including the death toll, is a secondary consideration to the likes of Boris de pfeffle Johnson, whose career as an amusing after-dinner speaker got interrupted by a spell as Prime Minister. Be ruthless in rejecting notions of national unity across the classes. In the long run we’re all dead, as Keynes put it, but that doesn’t mean we have any commonality of interest in the interim. The money economy is not our problem and we’ll not lift a finger to save it. People don’t need jobs or money, they need food, clothes and shelter, care, education, opportunities for recreation and personal growth. All these things are supplied by the Working Class – it’s time to cut out the middle man.

This isn’t a truce in the Class War, it’s a second front. The explicit strategy of disaster capitalism is to exploit every crisis to increase their class’ domination over ours, it is a sad fact that we must meet this challenge head-on, or we will all lose in the long run. It would be a tragedy if nothing good came out of all this misery. The state is very weak now, if we push hard enough it will break, and we will be free. Betrayed by our institutions and abandoned by our rulers, we have nowhere to place our faith but in ourselves and each other. Just like in 1936, we can take on the external threat and the internal one at the same time. We the Working Class are ultimately responsible for everything that ever was or will be. Don’t be afraid of ruins!

COVID-19 and Capitalism

Architects for Social Housing

Capitalism, in basic terms, means that capital is more valuable than the workers who produce the wealth in which it trades. This means that, during the periodic crises that capitalism faces, government resources will be spent on shoring up investments by shareholders, bailing out banks from their speculations, subsidising failing corporations with public funds, introducing laws that maintain the value of commodities above their fallen market value, artificially holding up the strength of a given currency, and all the other measures taken by governments to try to protect capital investments and financial markets from collapse, while workers will be abandoned to unemployment, homelessness and poverty.

This can only be done following the formal declaration by the government of a national or even an international ‘emergency’. At this point, the state interference in markets from which so-called free-market capitalists demand to be freed is equally loudly demanded from them. This means that the state — which is to say, the various apparatus by which the wealth produced by the labour of the workers is extracted as both surplus value in production and in a myriad of taxes on consumption — writes out a blank cheque to capitalists, to be cashed until such time as their losses are fully recuperated, and at whatever the cost to the workers who will pay it.

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Red And Black Telly: CORONAVIRUS – NOW AND THE AFTERMATH.

POSITION OF ARC (Workers Autonomous Confederation of Bulgaria) IN CONNECTION WITH THE GLOBAL PANDEMIA AND INTRODUCTION OF THE EMERGENCY SITUATION IN BULGARIA

The situation is more than serious and should not be underestimated. The spread of the virus will have grave consequences on the Bulgarian people and the economy.

Neoliberal capitalism is a much scarier virus. It destroys social systems, and healthcare. It destroys social ties, promotes individualism, selfishness and consumerism.

Not surprisingly, the contagion came from northwestern Bulgaria, where social devastation drove the population into forced labor migration, in particular in Italy.

Against the background of the chaotic actions of the authorities, the ARC calls for people to stay united, to stand in solidarity with one another, to stand in solidarity with doctors, medical specialists, orderlies and all frontline healthcare professionals.

Show the culture and attitudes of human beings, not the homo neolibericus, which fights for toilet paper on malls and hypermarkets …

We warn the authorities and the entire ruling class that if they use the state of emergency for political purposes or to restrict the rights and freedoms of Bulgarian citizens, they will meet a resistance they did not expect.

Autonomous Workers’ Confederation
2020-03-13