Police lines coming between fascists and anti-fascists
We’ve previously covered the run-up to last weekend’s English Defence League march in Bradford. Despite a successful campaign to have the government ban the march, it was always clear that the EDL would come anyway. The “official” anti-fascist movement made no plans to take direct action to try and stop the EDL from being able to take the streets, while a smaller number took action like we’ve done up here with the Scottish Anti-Fascist Alliance.
Daniel Randall is a member of Workers’ Liberty and a supporter of the Stop Racism & Fascism Network who has participated in mobilisations against the EDL in Bradford, Nottingham and London. The following is a guest post giving his impressions of what went on last Saturday in Bradford.
August 28 in Bradford will rightly be remembered by many of the activists involved as the day we defied the police, the local establishment, and, significantly, both poles of mainstream anti-fascism (and their supporters in the left and labour movement) to physically confront the EDL (which, as I’m sure SSYers will be pleased to know, resulted in the EDL getting a good kicking).
The background and build-up to the day is complex and is fundamentally a reflection of the political divisions within the anti-fascist movement in Britain (I understand the situation in Scotland is largely similar to ours in England).
The Hope Not Hate/Searchlight campaign, the anti-fascist formation of choice for large sections of the trade union bureaucracy, focused on collecting signatures for a petition calling on the (Tory) Home Secretary to ban the EDL’s march.
When such a ban was secured, HnH began organising “Be Bradford – Peaceful Together”, a “multicultural festival” (music, face-painting, bouncy castles… precisely the sort of stuff that were key weapons for the anti-fascist militias in Spain in 1936/7) at a location a couple of miles away from where the EDL (now reduced to a static protest) would be gathering. Their event secured the backing of various local religious institutions, the local trade union bureaucracy and indeed local government.
The SWP-run Unite Against Fascism, frequently politically indistinguishable from HnH (same “unite with anyone – and we mean anyone – against fascism” approach, same celebrity fetish, same slavish deference to trade union bureaucrats and religious leaders, same faith in the state to sort things out by banning fascist parties or organisations), called their own “We Are Bradford” event in the city centre, close to where the EDL would be amassed. The list of initial supporters for the event was a chemically-pure mini-popular front, including everyone from trade union leaders to Lib Dem MPs to religious zealots.
However, they were at great pains to ensure everyone that the event WASN’T a counter protest. Oh no. Nothing as radical or confrontational as that; just a “peaceful multicultural celebration of Bradford”. Undoubtedly the EDL were quaking in their boots.
Local supporters of the Stop Racism & Fascism Network called for a genuine counter-mobilisation to confront the EDL from the start.. SRFN doesn’t have a fraction of the resources that either HnH or UAF have so we were sanguine about our prospects. Nevertheless, SRFN supporters spent the build-up to the event leafleting local working-class estates, particularly in Asian areas, calling on people to mobilise on the day to confront the EDL rather than spending the day at HnH’s limp “festival” or at UAF’s non-protest. SRFN called on people to meet at separate location, Centenary Square, near to the EDL’s rally point.
The other key element in the picture, which would ultimately prove decisive, was local Muslim youth. Unfortunately the left has no real implantation amongst those communities and before the event it was unclear to us whether they would mobilise independently in any significant numbers or follow the advice of community “leaders” to either stay at home or attend the HnH or UAF events.
The experience of previous anti-EDL mobilisations told us that policing would be pretty tight, and we weren’t disappointed. On the day, the cops were out in force. SRFN supporters who attempted to remain outside of police cordons and leaflet members of the public were told to move on and disperse, under threat of arrest. However, in spite of almost every organised element in the equation militating against it, a crowd of several hundred of us managed to gather across the street from the EDL’s rally point, almost literally within spitting distance of the enormous pen the police had constructed to contain the racists. The crowd was made up of SRFN supporters and other independent anti-fascists along with hundreds of Muslim youth, and police soon mobilised to make sure we didn’t get any closer to the EDL.
I think a lot of us were preparing to dig in for a day of fairly typical anti-fascist activism; shouting at a group of nearby racists plus a bit of low-level scuffling with the cops as they try and push us back and we try and get a bit closer. Even if that had been the end-result, it would have represented a significant improvement on UAF or HnH’s strategy; at least the EDL would’ve encountered some visible, vocal opposition (even if it was from the other side of a fenced-off pen and a few lines of cops) rather than having every anti-fascist in town neatly swept off into either the UAF or HnH distractions where they were visible only to other anti-fascists and maybe a few passers-by who took the time to find out what was going on.
As it turned out, we were able to do rather more than just shout at the EDL. They were obviously just as agitated as we were about being held in one place and made several attempts to break out of their pen. At one point, a small group made it onto the pavement and lobbed a few bottles and rocks in our direction. Then, a few hours later, around a 100 EDLers managed to escape and headed off; we could only assume their intention was to cause a bit of (probably-violent) havoc in town. We figured that trying to head off and confront that group was a more useful thing for us to do than spending the rest of the day shouting ourselves hoarse and shoving the cops, so a group of maybe three hundred of us turned back up the street we were on and ran to find them.
We tracked the EDLers down to a roundabout by a retail park and managed to bloody a few noses before police stepped in to break us up and quickly herded the EDLers into Forster Square train station and out of town.
We shouldn’t overstate what we achieved; the EDLers we confronted represented maybe 1/8th of their entire forces on the day. We should also take care not to fall into a crude idealisation of physical-confrontation anti-fascism; it’s a form of activism that excludes those less-able to take part in it and is only one aspect of the anti-fascist strategy we need to develop.
But we did prove that with a bit of tactical dexterity, the EDL can be confronted. We challenged their right to bring their racist bile onto the streets of our cities without encountering any visible opposition. We challenged the pro-state, popular-frontist perspective of mainstream anti-fascism that asserts that calls for state bans or polite rallies are sufficient responses. A lot of us didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when we received reports that leading SWPers had led chants of “whose streets? Our streets!” from the platform of the UAF rally while we were actually doing the work of defending the streets from the EDL hundreds of yards away.
Darth Vader and pals move in
Beneath the practical unity built on the day between Muslim youth and independent anti-fascists, there are some politics that need unpicking; during the lulls between scraps with the cops, we chanted “unemployment and inflation are not caused by immigration; bullshit, come off the enemy is profit” while many of them chanted “Allahu akhbar!” Some of them also chanted “the EDL are faggots!” and hurled sexist abuse at women police officers.
The point is that practical unity in confronting fascist organisation is the best framework from within which to challenge the religious, homophobic and sexist politics that some Muslim youth hold. The left must break from the essentially racist assumption that working-class Muslims can only be related to on the basis of religious communalism and can only be engaged with through the religious establishment and community “leadership”. At one point the self-same community “leaders” who had backed the HnH and UAF events turned up on the frontlines of our confrontation with the police to plead with local kids to go home. Fortunately, their pleas were ignored.
The English Defence League promised us a summer of mass mobilisations intended to cause havoc in some of England’s key centres of Asian, and specifically Muslim, population. They crowed about mobilising up to 5,000 to come to Bradford. Those claims have come to nothing; they were not strong enough to meaningfully impose themselves on the streets of Bradford on August 28, and when a few of them did manage to defy the police they were sent packing by our hastily-convened anti-fascist rapid response unit.
Hopefully, the dismal and disgraceful role of HnH and UAF on the day will help break the stranglehold that these groups hold on anti-fascist politics in the organised workers’ movement. One battering isn’t going to make the EDL go away and the social problems leading many white working-class people into the arms of the EDL and, beyond them, the BNP haven’t gone away either.
We still need to build a national anti-fascist movement that combines a direct-action approach with ongoing campaigning on issues like jobs, homes and services so we can provide anti-capitalist, anti-racist answers to the legitimate grievances which the far-right attempts to exploit. Young working-class people from every community will be at the centre of that; the ruling-class figures and popular-frontist ideas that existing mainstream anti-fascism looks to will be no part of it at all.
Glenn Beck is someone we’ve written about here before. For those that haven’t been lucky enough to check him out on youtube, he is one of the most prominent figures of the American right media, with 3 hours of radio and 1 hour of telly EVERY DAY to push his extreme agenda on to the public in the US. Some of his views make the Daily Mail look like a left wing propaganda sheet.
He’s also a relentlessly self promoting narcissist, who has raked in millions of dollars from his shows and books. He frequently fakes crying on air to try and give some fake sincerity to his constant verbal diarrhea of incoherent threats and garbage. He’s a convert to Mormonism (dum dum dum dum dum), mainly, by his own admission, so he could have sex with the woman who is now his wife (who btw he constantly insults, mocks and belittles in his show.)
Beck’s latest money making scheme is another book, ‘The Plan’, which apparently will detail his “100 year plan to restore our great country,” along with the upcoming paperback edition of his previous hit ‘Arguing with Idiots’ (takes one to know one.)
To promote these books, he’d planned a massive launch in Washington DC. That was, until he came up with an even better idea -- get a charity to pay for it so it doesn’t cost him anything! Although the event this weekend was originally billed straight up as what it was, a book launch designed to generate more cash for the Beck empire, it’s now being described as the “Restoring Honour” rally. Quite what the message of this event will be is pretty hard to work out, apart from a vague focus on the American military being great.
The event is supposed to be raising money for the charity Special Operations Warrior Foundation. This group provides counselling and support to the families of those killed on US military Special Ops missions around the world, including college education scholarships for their children. Let’s leave aside for a minute that a lot of these dead soldiers weren’t “heroes” but in fact scumbags sent to other people’s countries to kill, kidnap and terrorise in the name of American imperialism; that’s not the fault of their families and so some support for them is probably OK.
But all the money raised for the charity will first have to go for paying for the rally, featuring keynote speakers Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. So, these two self-promoting far right lunatics are getting a gigantic national platform provided to them FOR FREE. The estimated $1 million cost of organising the event will be met entirely by SOWF, allowing Beck to get in all the news and sell a whole lot more books.
Because it’s organised by a charity, the event can’t be “political” according to tax rules. But what that specifically means is that the speakers can’t endorse a particular political party or candidate; apart from that, they can rant away about their far out views as much as they like. The fact that the rally is also being sponsored by groups like the National Rifle Association and FreedomWorks, a right wing organisation behind many of the Tea Party protests, shows how much of a joke the idea of the rally as “non political” is.
However, the promotional stuff that Beck has put out for the event is a bit toned down, which in fact makes it even harder to watch. At least when this guy is ranting like a crazy person he can be entertaining to watch, like a car crash. But I challenge you to watch either of these two ads and not feel your last meal start inexorably rising towards your mouth.
“You see, I learned something today.”
But it gets worse! It turns out the date that Beck has picked for a gigantic celebration of himself is in fact the 47th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington at which Dr Martin Luther King Jnr made his ‘I have a dream’ speech.
Given that the event is inextricably linked with the racist Tea Party movement, dedicated to a far right politics of attacking the working class and motivated by a hatred of the first black president, understandably the surviving members of the 60s civil rights movement are a bit pissed off about this. Glenn Beck’s reaction? To claim that he and his supporters are “the inheritors of the civil rights movement”!! You couldn’t make this shit up. Check out what he says in the clips below on the subject, along with the Rev. Al Sharpton, who was a close collaborator of King’s in the civil rights movement, slamming comeback.
Beck’s insulting claim to have any right to the legacy of the civil rights movement is based on pissing on the legacy of what he actually stood for. Beck claims that the left has lied about what King. He tries to claim that King was in fact an individualist or even a conservative. In hijacking the memory of the 1963 march on Washington he wants us to forget it was actually called the March for Jobs and Freedom, and was organised by Socialist and trade unionist A Phillip Randolph to demand federal investment in new jobs.
Martin Luther King might not have gone as far left in his politics as we in SSY do, but at root he was a left wing figure. Around him in the civil rights movement were a host of socialists and communists who saw the fight for racial equality and desegregation as inextricably linked from the fight against capitalism. King himself recognised that the battle against racism was in fact a battle against the socio-economic foundations of American society, saying:
“We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing’-oriented society to a “person”-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
As the 60s went on, King became more and more radicalised by events. Whereas before he had seen the way forward as appealing to the Democratic Party and the “moral conscience” of white liberals, after riots in Watts and seeing the horrors of the war in Vietnam, he increasingly saw the importance of appealing to the working class. In the last weeks before he was assassinated, he was in Memphis showing solidarity with striking black bin workers, some of the lowest paid in the US.
He also developed an uncompromising opposition to the war in Vietnam and US imperialism, denouncing the war as clearly linked with poverty and oppression at home. This drew the condemnation of many of his former liberal supporters, who found that messing with US geopolitical interests was a step too far.
Dr Martin Luther King wasn’t a full on socialist as we would understand it, but he was a social democrat who wanted to see an end to racism and imperialism, massive redistribution of wealth and huge government investment programme to provide decent, well paid jobs for the poor. He’d recognised the need to organise outside of the two-party system, and was preparing for the possibility of an independent run for President on a ticket of Peace and Justice.
For Glenn Beck to try and deny the legacy of King’s left wing ideas, and to claim that his racist mob of pro-capitalist crazies has any continuity with the civil rights movement would be hilarious if it wasn’t so insulting. His far right movement wants to undo everything achieved for the oppressed in the US during the revolutionary moment of the 60s, and he must be fought every step of the way.
“The dispossessed of this country — the poor, the white and Negro — live in a cruelly unjust society. they must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty.” Martin Luther King.
Dangerous Minds is a blog I have a lot of time for, which generally features stuff about music, funny videos, and general not-that-political fun. They do have a political agenda though, particularly chiming with SSY’s views about drug prohibition.
Each week they do an interview with an interesting person, usually someone who has a new book out or something. This week they’ve spoken to Prof. Michael Lebowitz, who has just published ‘The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development.’ I’ve not had the chance to get hold of a copy yet, but his previous one ‘Build it Now: Socialism in the 21st Century,’ was absolutely brilliant.
Prof. Lebowitz has done a lot of work as part of the ongoing revolution in Venezuela, and a major focus of his work is recapturing the idea of socialism as a society that would allow everyone to develop their maximum potential. He sees socialism as a direct democratic system that allows people to take control of their own lives and gives them the freedom to determine their own future, much like we do. He writes about the need in workplaces to have real worker control by breaking down the division between those who think and those who do, so that everyone is deciding together about the way forward, and then making it happen together. His work is really worth a look, and to give you a flavour I’ve embedded the interview with him above. Some of the questions are a bit North America-centric, but it’s still worth a watch.
Your riot cops are no match for our RHINO SIEGE ENGINE
I’ve just returned from 5 days of occupying the land of the Royal Bank of Scotland, a piece of direct action that yesterday successfully achieved its objective of shutting down RBS’ headquarters. On Monday when we looked across at the building we could see there was nobody working there apart from cops and security guards.
Context
A quick recap: for the past few days hundreds of activists affiliated with Climate Camp have targetted the Royal Bank of Scotland. Having previously taken direct action against projects like Kingsnorth coal fired power station and the (now cancelled) third runway at Heathrow, they’ve moved on to a target that’s slightly less obvious.
But for people concerned about climate change, RBS is in fact at the heart of the problem. As a financial institution, they are the biggest UK investors in fossil fuels, styling themselves “the oil and gas bank.” In an economy that is now kept firmly in the stranglehold of financial capitalism, banks and other investors must be held responsible for their leadership role in a socio-economic system that is destroying the ecological basis for civilisation.
This system is now in the early stages of falling apart at the seams, due to the interrelated crises of the environment, the economy and social collapse. In the UK, RBS is at the heart of this process.
The current economic crisis was caused by the fact that the dominant financial institutions, like RBS, had used debt and self-delusion to try and keep the economy going. This bubble lasted for a while, until the myths that underpinned it began to unravel. The UK government then gave RBS and other massive banks huge injections of our money. RBS is now 84% owned by the British state. However, they refused to take any control over the banks in return for this money, leaving RBS under the command of its previous owners.
The people that run RBS have one priority: finding ways to invest their money (which you and I gave them) that will generate them more profits and then more money to invest. That’s what they exist to do as an institution. One of the main ways they can do that is to put our money into energy projects. As the world’s supplies of fossil fuels dwindle, the ones that remain will become more profitable to extract, at least for a while.
So RBS has poured our money into projects and companies like the Alberta Tar Sands, ConocoPhilips who are destroying the Amazon rainforest, and E.ON, the energy corporation looking to cover Europe with new coal fired power stations. They do this not because they’re evil, but because they are designed as an institution to do a specific job, and they’re doing that job.
As it is currently structured, it would be impossible to make RBS act otherwise, which is why we should demand that instead of being controlled by private capitalists the wealth of RBS is used collectively and socially to solve problems in the world, instead of being used to create huge problems that will make the world a less habitable place for humanity in the coming decades.
This is all the more appalling when you remember that the working class is about to face one of the greatest austerity blitzkriegs of all time, after the government chose to facilitate RBS and its chums taking the money that should have been spent on public services, jobs and wages for the people who actually keep our society running – public sector workers. In this context, it’s clearly time for radical action against an institution which is poisoning our society.
A few of us SSYers are about to head over to head over to Edinburgh to take part in the camp for climate action. If you’re reading this and can make it, get there! The camp took their site last night, at Gogar Station Road, right next to the Royal Bank of Scotland global headquarters!
Information for those of us outside just now is limited, but we’ll be trying to bring you updates during the day as we find out more. SSY will be part of the swoop today, from 12 a group will be heading from St Andrews square (where the bus station is) to the site. Come along and join us. If you can’t make it, just get to the site whenever you can. See the map on the climate camp site for where to go.
UPDATE: Me, Liam T and Liam M are at the camp now, and it’s fantastic! There’s a couple of hundred folk, and more arriving all the time. Tonight and tomorrow we’ll just be setting up the site, as much help as possible is needed. The grounds of the RBS complex are actually really nice, and it’s a great place to hang out.
Yet another leading medical expert has come out to call for the decriminalisation of personal drug use.
Sir Ian Gilmore is the outgoing head of the Royal College of Physicians, a professional body which represents 20,000 medical professionals in the UK. He has a long standing interest in drugs policy stemming from his background as a liver specialist. In an email to all members, he wrote:
“I personally back the chairman of the UK Bar Council, Nicholas Green QC, when he calls for drug laws to be reconsidered with a view to decriminalising illicit drugs use. This could drastically reduce crime and improve health.”
The report he refers to was produced for lawyers, and also argues for an end to prohibition, estimating its cost to the economy at £13 billion a year. Sir Ian also endorsed an article published in the British Medical Journal by Steve Rolles of Transform Drugs Policy which called for a regulated drugs market.
He said:
“Everyone who has looked at this in a serious and sustained way concludes that the present policy of prohibition is not a success. There are really strong arguments to look again. Every day in our hospital wards we see drug addicts with infections from dirty needles, we see heroin addicts with complications from contaminated drugs.”
He went on to argue that this was a result not of heroin itself, but of the prohibition policy which forces addicts on to a black market of dirty heroin.
What this news tells us is that, despite the crazy propaganda from the likes of the Daily Mail and The Sun, SSY’s position on drugs is a mainstream view shared by health professionals, scientists and anyone who has made any kind of serious inquiry into drugs policy. Prohibition has done untold harm, and caused far more people to use dangerous drugs and suffer serious health problems or die than otherwise would have done. Health professionals can see that.
Perhaps it’s time for a major broad campaign that brings together all those who want to see an end to prohibition, and is capable of demonstrating just how much support there is for the idea amongst those who know what they’re talking about.
It's a damned impertenince that you unwashed socialist chaps should put a fellow of my standing on your website!
Lord Pearson of Rannoch, a man who talks like he’s a character in Jeeves and Wooster stories, has stood down as leader of UKIP. The main reason he’s given for doing this is his own raging poshboy incompetence.
The aristocratic Pearson, a would-be even-more-crap Oswald Mosley, took over from fellow toff Nigel Farrage last year. Since then he’s made a name for himself as a blundering idiot who makes a fool of himself on telly and doesn’t even know what’s in his own manifesto. His performances displayed all the arrogance of a traditional British aristocrat furious at being challenged by upstart journalists of no good breeding stock.
The video below has been doing the rounds today after his announcement, in which his performance was dubbed “the worst campaign interview ever” by his natural friends in the right wing press, who were forced to admit one of their own was a bit of an embarrassment.
To be fair to the old fool, he fully acknowledges that he’s a throwback to an era where the ruling class stayed in power in Britain by birth alone, and didn’t have to try and make themselves look good on telly. His resignation statement makes clear that he knows he’s “not much good at party politics.”
He says he’s going to concentrate on his other interests. Predictably enough for someone as upper class as he is, one of the main ones is slaughtering animals for his own pleasure, as he’s the chair of the deerstalking committee of the Countryside Alliance.
Although we're glad to see him go, Pearson's resignation may turn out to be bad news for Muslims and deer
He’s also going to be able to devote more time to his racism, a great hobby of his. As UKIP leader, Pearson famously invited rightwing anti Muslim racist politician Geert Wilders to the UK, which may turn out to have been one of the early stages of the growing alliance between the (largely working class) street thugs of the EDL and their aristocratic would-be leadership among the racist toffs of UKIP.
But now he’s resigned he can focus on “the [non existent fantasy] threat from Islamism.” Apparently one of his interests includes “the relationship between good and evil,” so we can probably expect him to be seen leading the crusade to save Britain from an imaginary threat over the coming years.
Although it’s always good to see the post-fascists of UKIP in trouble, we shouldn’t get too excited about today’s announcement. As UKIP themselves are quick to point out, the last election did see them increase their vote, and although they remain a fringe party staffed by lunatics (hi Kris!), their potential as the seedbed of a growing extreme right mainstream movement in the UK is worrying. The continued antics of UKIP just point to the need for anti-fascists and anti-racists to widen their understanding of the threat we face from the far right, to include post-fascists and official racists, both in UKIP and the mainstream parties of government.
Pearson: resigning to spend more time fighting fantasy evil that doesn't really exist
Check this out: artist Blake Fall-Conroy has designed a machine to help people understand the reality of exploitation in a mimimum wage job.
The box is full of (American) pennies, and you have to crank the handle hard in order to get out a penny every 5.04 seconds, which adds up to $7.15 (about £4.50) an hour, the minimum wage in the state of New York. If you stop turning the handle, you stop getting paid.
The artist says in his statement that he wants his projects to be “socially conscious”, “easy to understand,” and that he’s “more interested in communicating ideas than making art.”
This project is great at communicating the reality of what minimum wage labour is, drudgery for a pitiful reward. If you imagine that a boss was deriving some other benefit from you cranking the handle (generating energy say), and you only get paid every 5.04 seconds, then you come to realise that all the times you crank the handle for no reward you are basically a slave, receiving no compensation for your labour. This is where the money that makes rich people rich comes from: all the work you do that they don’t pay you for.
(Thanks very much to LydiaTeapot for being first to spot this and show it to me.)
It’s taken a few days for those of us who were lucky enough to be at Camp Secret Squirrel 2010 to get ourselves together enough to write about it. SSY’s annual summer camp this year was a huge success, and hopefully those of you who couldn’t make it this year will see from our photos that you need to clear your schedule for next August NOW so you don’t miss out again.
Politics-wise, we had workshops on issues such as football and the impact of capitalism on the game; what is fascism; as well as the struggle for Scottish independence.
The opening workshop was really interesting, as we tried out a role playing exercise where those taking part were divided into two groups, representing two different companies, and then divided into workers and bosses. The bosses then had to make their workers work as hard as possible for as little as possible (their companies owned paper plane making factories). The bosses received an initial amount of capital in the form of the imaginary currency of squirrels, and then had to maximise the production of their workers in order to make enough to pay them and make a profit.
The workers meanwhile went on strike to demand better wages, in both factories. However, without needing to be told by the workshop organisers, they realised that only by uniting the two groups of workers could they win, and so I’m sure you’ll be delighted to learn that the paper plane workers led a victorious revolution, overthrew their oppressive bosses (notorious capitalists such as James N) and established socialism!
We were particularly honoured to have with us four comrades from the Basque pro-independence left. They are part of the Basque internationalist group Askapena, and are on a brigade to Scotland to learn more about our struggle for an independent socialist Scotland, and to forge stronger links between us and the Basque country.
The Basque comrades spoke to the whole camp about the tremendous repression they face at the hands of the Spanish and French states, and the politics they use to try and defeat it. We were really pleased to have about 40 folk at CSS, but were put to shame to learn that an equivalent event organised by the Basque youth movement can attract 20,000! As we’ve reported before, the youth movement in the Basque country is illegal, and the organisers of these camps are in prison.
Another important aspect of the weekend was that SSY reaffirmed its commitment to the self-organisation for liberation of young women. The SSY women’s group held a meeting to discuss feminist ideas in a women’s only space (maybe someone who was at it can comment more on how it went), whilst the men held a workshop where we discussed points from the male privilege checklist as a way of stimulating discussion about the ways patriarchal society gives men systematic advantages over women that often we don’t even realise are there. As one participant put it: “This has been really great for me, because I’ve never really had the chance to talk with guys about how these things affect us, it can be difficult to bring it up, so the workshop is really important.”
SWIMMING!
The site where we were was fantastic, and we’d like to thank the folk that run the place for all their help and letting us use their lovely space. We cooked tasty, healthy meals over an open fire, swam in a pond, enjoyed beautiful sunshine, and were privileged to be able to see the Perseids meteor shower in some of the clearest skies anywhere in Scotland. The place where were is a piece of pristine ground where life is much as it would have been throughout Scotland just after the last ice age, before humans transformed the landscape through agriculture and towns, and we met all kinds of wildlife, from rare butterflies to frogs, toads and fish, to the most immense and terrifying (but cool) wasp like thing you will ever see in your life.
Each night we also collectively provided music that managed to keep people on their feet to the small hours, and a diverse mix that was suitable for all tastes.
We’d also like to send a shout out to the cops for bowling up randomly on Sunday to “check we’re all ok”, i.e. let us know that they know about us. I suppose it means we must be doing something right if the police feel the need to regularly check our site and keep tabs on us. To the cop whose job it is to read this article: how’s it going?
We hope this has made the people who couldn’t make it this year even more green with envy, if you feel like you missed out now you know there’s only one solution: BE THERE NEXT YEAR!
Don't look now: Shortly before we discovered the SSY organiser is a murderous dwarf
Sarah and Jack prove that being SSY organiser is a surefire way TO BECOME COOL
The Royal Society for the Arts has been recording talks given by important public intellectuals and adding animation to make them a bit more accessible. Three of the talks so far have been by leading Marxists, and they’re really worth a watch.
If you’re friends with a lefty person on Facebook, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the first of these two videos, it was doing the rounds a couple of weeks ago, but it’s worth putting up for those that haven’t seen it. David Harvey is Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York, and one of the world’s leading figures in geography and the social sciences. He’s also a Marxist, and his work has done a lot to put Marxism back on the academic map. Here’s his take on the current global economic crisis:
Barbara Ehrenreich is one of the leading feminist and socialist authors in the US. She regularly writes important pieces of journalism, and is the author of 22 books. Her latest one is about how positive thinking has undermined society, especially in the US, and the sinister side to the self-help industry that encourages you to have “a good attitude.”
The newest in the RSAnimate series is a talk by Slavoj Zizek, a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology at Ljubljana Uni, Slovenia. He’s one of the world’s most important philosophers and critical theorists. His talk is about how modern capitalism turns people’s worries about the impact of consumerism in the world into a way of making money. Paying a higher price for organic or fair trade food might make you feel good, but in fact it upholds the idea that we can solve the ecological and social crises facing the world through our existing society, which is pish.
The animations are a great idea, and there’s more from other people here (although I didn’t agree with absolutely everything in it, I thought the one by Jeremy Rifkin was also great.)
Obviously the talks are ultimately aimed at an academic audience, but I think there still pretty accessible and make a lot of interesting points. Any language or concepts that you don’t quite get or aren’t familiar with yet, make a note of it and then ask in the comments. Collectively we can educate ourselves.
The Royal Society for the Arts has been recording talks given by important public intellectuals and adding animation to make them a bit more accessible. Three of the talks so far have been by leading Marxists, and they’re really worth a watch.
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