Message from reclaimed camp in Barcelona

OK, so it's now called the Camp of the Indignant... never mind. The young people of Spain are standing up for their rights, their future, in a stirring and spectacular way. Put simply: Barcelona 06.30 riot police take Plaça de Catalunya Barcelona, use rubber bullets and pepper gas - all morning clashes. 13.20 square re-taken by masses - police run... Fantastic!

An indignant people won’t be moved! Felip Puig must resign!

Today at 7am the Catalan Police surrounded the camp in the Plaça Catalunya, violating our rights in a most flagrant way. Without any warning, with the ridiculous excuse of wanting to clean the square, they have proceeded to destroy all the material created during twelve days of occupation of Plaça Catalunya, dignity square.

Solidarity action with the 400 people sleeping in the centre of the square led to the surrounding area being occupied by a peaceful sit-down. The solidarity of the people of Barcelona has prevented a total clearing out of the camp. The reaction of the Catalan Police (Mossos d'Esquadra) and the Municipal Police has been totally disproportionate, injuring those who were sitting in the road or who were just peacefully demonstrating their rejection of the assault on the camp, resulting in more the 80 people being injured.

The scale of the violence can be seen in the images of police violence that are circulating on the Internet where it is clear the demonstrators were sitting peacefully on the ground and the police charged against them with batons and firing rubber bullets.

The police have acted without any form of identification, as the law requires, and with their faces covered to avoid being recognised in photos, acting with total impunity against those present whose voice has been silenced for so many years. A voice that now speaks clearly and that enjoys widespread support in society, from the neighbourhoods in struggle, from the people also camping in their towns and cities, or from the peoples shouting that they too are indignant!

They no longer suffer alone: we will now construct an alternative to the system together.

The struggle of the indignant will not stop with today’s repression, but continue. We call on you to demonstrate today as always at 19.00 in the Plaça Catalunya to show our indignation, today also against police repression. We are now back in the square, we shall not move, we will go on. We continue and we will continue. And the spark will ignite all the people!

For all that has happened today we demand the resignation of Felip Puig, as the person with maximum political responsibility for the operation of this morning against the camp.

If we said there was no democracy, this is definitive proof. The cuts, unemployment and the general sensation of unease will not be solved with baton blows.

FELIPE PUIG MUST GO!

For someone very special

Cheap at twice the price!

I'm not sure if this picture has been occasioned by this story, but I love it, even if it's not. £12 billion is the price of the Arab spring:

The £12bn ($20bn) figure, although impressive sounding, will have to be examined carefully to see how much represents grants as opposed to loans. The money will predominantly come from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the US and the EU. Both the UK and France have offered bilateral sums: France offered Egypt up to $250m a year in development aid on Thursday and David Cameron set aside £110m over four years for political and economic development.

This is cheap, compared to, say, the annual $1.3 billion of American finance to Egyptian military industry alone. It is also very, very important to note aid and/or loans are rarely anything more than a trap. We must remember the aim of the G8 is to subject this crucial region to the needs of western capital accumulation. Obama is not forging a new path, but trailing behind the Egyptian and Tunisian working class. They are the ones who created this opening to liberty.

But, as the article points out, the old regime is being contested but it still survives. For example, the leader of the dynamic Cairo Bus Workers Union, Ali Fattouh, is still threatened with jail for defying the anti-union laws (Email messages of support for Ali Fattouh to menasolidarity@gmail.com).

Lies and the lying liars who tell them...

Boris Johnson on UK Uncut's March 26th occupation (peaceful) of Fortnum and Masons:

“They did tens of thousands of pounds worth of damage..."

And, as the joke goes, it was because someone knocked over a jar of olives. Asked to back up this assertion Boris said:

“The point that I was making was that the occupation of Fortnum and Mason was pure vandalism … The fact that Fortnum and Mason is owned by a charitable foundation, provides many jobs and pays its taxes was clearly lost on these ‘activists’.”

This charitable foundation was of course only recently exposed in breach of charity regulations for funnelling too much money to the Tory Party (although too much, in my book, is any at all, but hey ho!). No doubt, despite being a lying Tory liar his career will go from strength to strength... wait, what's that, election next year?

UKUncut will be having a day of action on Saturday for the NHS, turn banks into hospitals. Find more details here.

For no raisin

Demonstrating against Jesus

That's what you were doing on March 26th. If you are a member of the PCS, UCU, ATL, NUT, CWU or RMT you'll probably be striking against Jesus on June 30th. Let down by the measly Rally for Destitution and Unemployment, sorry, Rally against Debt (btw, are the few hundred people ralling against debt against tuition fees? I bet they aren't); David Cameron has recruited the highest power there is to his cause:

Mr Cameron told church leaders they would be “absolutely right” to claim Jesus founded the Big Society 2,000 years ago, joking: “I’m not saying we’ve invented some great new idea here.”

Perhaps we should be reassured, the Son of God failed to put in an appearance yesterday. Perhaps Cameron isn't going to rely on him too heavily. But, can tell the difference between mankind's redeemer and the guy who worked at Carlton TV? What about, say, their attitude to the weak and vulnerable? Jesus, we are told, healed the sick. David Cameron, we know, likes to kick their crutches away.

Regarding obscenity

Fifty years after English language authorities began persecuting his work, a Turkish publisher is being prosecuted for translating and publishing William S Burroughs, Soft Machine ("Yumusak Makine"). The ultimate rationale: "the book lacks narrative unity, while it is written in an arbitrary fashion that is devoid of cohesion in meaning". In which case how can it be obscene? Proof, amongst other things, what upsets the reactionary mind most is obscurity, something new that it cannot grasp.

This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed... again

It turns out, however, there was no bomb plot, the men arrested were simply street cleaners... but the damage, of course, will have already been long done. No doubt if you pointed out these things to an average Islamophobe they'd say something like, "you can prove anything with facts", or change the subject to, I don't know, muslamic ray guns.

Our rulers want us to forget. Never forget.

The master race strikes again

See here:

AN English Defence League supporter attacked a police horse, punching it eight times during last month’s demonstration in Blackburn.

Robert Gavin Tromans was one of five people to appear at the town’s magistrate court on Friday in connection with disorder during the rally.

Tromans, 29, of Beverley Road, West Bromwich, attacked the horse as police formed a mounted cordon to control a crowd on Northgate.

He pleaded guilty to using threatening behaviour and was remanded on bail for the preparation of a pre-sentence report with a warning a custodial sentence could not be ruled out.

I am no fan of the prison system, or the police, but I'm no fan of nazis either. Leaving aside the question of what kind of a numpty participates in violent marches for ethnic cleansing; what kind of numpty PUNCHES A HORSE? Perhaps it was a muslamic horse? If this is the way forward may we suggest some other animals/inanimate objects the master race can get frisky with. They can:

Karate chop a python
Nipple pinch polar bear
Drop kick a wild boar
Burp at leopard
Toe punt parked car
Head butt a goalpost
Teabag a chainsaw
Dry hump a jet engine
Wash a toaster
Polish a turd...

The list can go on and on...

Stuff about stuff...

The Arab Revolution is stunning, it is bold and brave, but the men in the factory are old and cunning... etc, it's almost a line of poetry. The revolution is for everybody, even if we haven't felt its waves lapping on our shores just yet. Democracy, true democracy for the middle east will be a tremendous blow against global capitalism. The ruling class is working round the clock top turn the revolution back. In Libya our they are sowing corruption and demoralisation, taking the revolution out of the hands of ordinary Libyans, passing it on to their groomed stooges. In Tunisia there is a different story:

If Tunisia is to successfully address the three main issues – youth unemployment, regional disparities and the lack of a political voice in the face of an unaccountable government – that sparked the revolution, it is going to need considerable assistance from outside agencies. A commitment to inject $1bn into the central budget, announced jointly by the African Development Bank (AfDB) and the World Bank on 3 May, is a welcome first step. The banks have agreed to contribute $500m each in the form of a loan, in addition to which the French Development Agency has pledged to lend the Tunisian government €185m, with a grant for a further €90m coming from the EU.

Be afraid of the World Bank. There's more than one way to turn the revolution back.

Philling space - Irish style

Richard Boyd Barrett shutting a BBC jock right up.

For no raisin

This week, lists and more lists:

Superheroes (if you fancy going into dodgy ubermensch crime fighting mode), these are yet untaken:

Captain Glossy
Horse Boy
The Shuffling Menace
Human Man
The Human Telescope
Captain Forgetful
Captain Smelly
The Chocolate Teapot
Morbid Girl
The Bog Standard Five
The Elusive Mrs Wriggle
Little Miss Gigantic
Mr Nosebleed
The Radioactive Shrew
The Winged Pencilcase
Team Beige
Amphibious Man
The Inexpensive Three
Sgt Faeces
Captain Measurment
Coupon Boy
The Bishop of Doom
Kid Tortoise
Explosive Decompression Man
Glowing Freaks

Bandnames not yet used:

Violent Quiche
Telephone Explosions
Mr and Mrs Pain
Monsters of Socialism
Themes and Situations
Brock Inspector
Beat the Meatles
Shoes of the Future
Spam Hurdles and the Everyday Fish
Noticeably F.A.T.
Glass Bunion
Whose Nose?

Science ahoy!

I have been involved in a rather interesting discussion on Facebook (which you won't get to read, but hey-ho). It was initiated by Lenin's Tomb picking up on the latest episode in the descent of Richard Dawkins. I wandered, slightly provocatively, whether we should still refer to Dawkins as a scientist. This then got people chewing over the kind of role science and scientists should play in public life.

For me it's simple, but then maybe that's just me. The point about defrocking Dawkins is mainly political. He uses his status as a scientist to legitimise bigotry, to polish the racist turd. But also, passing off this impossibly crude graphic as an argument is an insult to reason and science (look, look, it's got arrows pointing at each other, and explosions!).

This reinforces the argument that any scientist, any specialist intellectual, should stick to what they know. Academic division of labour (like the general division of labour) has helped advance humanity greatly in the past, but we should not be blind to its current limitations. Such specialism is precisely what leads to a problem like Richard Dawkins. Unfortunately for human reason facts don't always speak for themselves. There would be no need for science if everything was as it seemed.

For example, between adenine, thyamine, guanine and cytosine, and human behaviour has to come a theory of knowledge. How do we know something imperceptible, like the gene, and what its significance is? In the case of The Selfish Gene, the theory is positive materialism. The evidence for a natural process, such as continental drift can exist for many years, waiting for a leap in theory. Facts do not always speak for themselves.

Not only will sciences be made more fruitful by closer engagement with arts (and vice versa, science seeds future artistic development) but there is something more important at stake. Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, once described physics as having “known sin” through Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From the moment when experiments revealed huge stores of energy the potential was there. There was no one better placed to warn society of the dangers of atomic power than the community of scientists. Whatever they did, they failed in this respect.

We live in an integrated, interdependent world; the radical achievement of capitalism, we intend to build upon it through socialism. If we weren't aware of it before, mass electronic media bring this fact home to us every day. There is no scope for disinterested, abstracted science. It is then quite right people expect scientists to be public figures, to explain and describe the significance of new scientific discoveries as well lead the way on matters other than their immediate scientific discipline. It is a sign that the universal, not to mention democratic, intellectual is on the way.

Expanding Godwin's Law

There is a (broadly) excellent series of article being published on Comment is Free, summarising Marxism and its various aspects. This week we are up to number six of the series. However, underneath, in the comments section, the author points out, we probably need a Marxist equivalent of Godwin's Law, see below:

Godwin's law (also known as Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies or Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies) is a humorous observation made by Mike Godwin in 1990 which has become an Internet adage. It states: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." In other words, Godwin put forth the hyperbolic observation that, given enough time, in any online discussion—regardless of topic or scope—someone inevitably criticizes some point made in the discussion by comparing it to beliefs held by Hitler and the Nazis.

The new law would probably have something to do with the time it takes a troll to go AllMarxistswanttokillmillionsofpeoplelookatNorthKorea/Cuba/Cambodia...

A minute's racket

This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed...

Never forget.

Aim of the war...

The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed... The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.

Tentative gas about Walter Benjamin

I have just finished reading a collection of pieces by Walter Benjamin. He is a very interesting character. Not a Bolshevik, he was an intellectual and jobbing journalist in life, a paid brain. A lot of what he wrote appears fragmentary to a modern reader. There are plenty of bits and pieces generally available, commentaries on Kafka, Baudelaire and somesuch. They are interesting but only really make sense if you have read such novelists, to my shame, I suppose, I haven't.

There is the piece, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. It is an excellent work, worth everyone's while reading; Marxists, artists and art-lovers. It tries to lay down a basis for understanding art today and developing into the foreseeable capitalist future. Understanding art and culture means we can make demands of it, in the same way Marx's Critique of Political Economy did for politics and economics.

Last, and perhaps most interesting, are his theses on history. This is an example of what's often called his unique fusion of Marxism and Judaism. I'm not here to say it is or isn't. I don't think Marxists should fear to wield ideas like “messianic time”. Benjamin may not have been a Bolshevik but, intentionally or not, he was in tune with a powerful aspect of Russian revolutionary culture.

Lenin's model of socialist organisation, his continual struggle for doctrinal clarity, combined with his boundless faith in the capacity of the Russian working class (redeemer of Russian society, destined to triumph over the Tsarist Antichrist) inspired tens of thousands of young Russians, men and women, to risk all to bring the good word to the Russian people. Over the years millions of people round the world responded, and continue to respond Marxist ideas in the same way religious pioneers did in the ancient world. This is sometimes used to deride followers of a materialist philosophy, but if Marxism triumphs in the same way as monotheism has it'll be Marxists who have the last laugh.

The other aspect of messianic time is it's contrast to “homogenous, empty time”. This is a discussion of conceptions of history, progress. Every document of culture is also a document of barbarism. While mankind's mastery of nature has extended we are liable to forget our deepening subjection to man-made forces. Walter Benjamin is great at handling dialectical thought. But the notion of messianic time is useful at grasping the reality of revolution.

Revolution is not the piece by piece addition of this contradiction to that contradiction until, one fine day, they result in a strike, march on parliament, defection of the army, a new dawn for humanity. Revolutions run on messianic time. They alter reality so, what normally would take decades, can be achieved in days, even hours. The Egyptian revolution, so far, is a great example of this. Eighteen days of revolution, culminating in seven days of snowballing mass strikes (the messiah embodied as the Egyptian working class), were enough to blow a hole in thirty years of emergency, dictatorial rule.

Walter Benjamin's ideas may have been a broiling collision of Marxism and Judaism, but their mystical aspect can equally function as metaphor. They need be no more wacky, no more strange than Antonio Gramsci referring to the Modern Prince.