- Almost 38 years late and several thousand dollars short, apathy and melancholia remain, but funny things keep happening on the way to the cemetery.
o n e
The Slackbastard blog features the political and social musings of Andy, an anarchist living in Melbourne. Slackbastard offers an informed view on political issues that are relevant to Melbourne and also the world at large. ~ OnlyMelbourne
t w o
Honestly, I am going to fucking kill you. I hope it was worth it. ~ “Joel”, December 10, 2007
t h r e e
The one barrier me and my buddies have regarding beating the shit out of you is your anonymity… Give me your name, address, daytime and night time contact phone numbers, and I promise you I will beat the fucking shit out of you and then make a black man take a shit in your face / @ndy you’re a fucking idiot mate and you better watch your back because when me and my mates are out and about, if we see you, ur dead / @ndy im still going to bash you, fukn gooknigger scum ~ “Mark Bastard” (Doug Smith‘s mate) on the totally punk rawking Bombshell site, December 2007
f o u r
…I find it a little strange that someone with as good a theoretical background as you obviously have spends their time focusing on these little side-issues, and only occasionally discusses real resistance, whether it be socialist, anarchist, union-based, whatever.
For example, one question that has been burning me for a while: why do you continue to spend so much time discussing neo-nazis? Obviously that’s a horrible movement, but at the same time we know that we can’t eliminate such tendencies without eliminating capitalism, and so I see THAT as our #1 fight… Spending significant amounts of time attacking a tiny reactionary movement within the system just seems like you’re allowing yourself to be sidetracked. The hours you’ve spent writing blogs about the latest nazi trend results in very little development in revolutionary ideas, movements, or actions. Best-case scenario, your readers are more aware than before that the horrors of fascist ideologies are not finished yet.
I think with your knowledge you have much more you could achieve.
Solidarity. ~ “juancastro”, February 3, 2008
f i v e
Andy from slackbastard is just a loudmouth leftie keyboard warrior and nothing to worry about. ~ Nicole Hanley
s i x
This is the frontpage of the slackbastard archives. Currently the archives are spanning 1,940 posts and 9,728 comments, contained within the meager confines of [20?] categories. Through here, you will be able to move down into the archives by way of time or category. If you are looking for something specific, perhaps you should try the search on the sidebar.
72 posts!
- Filthkick (Legless) : ‘Naive’ / ‘Sonic Reducer’ — punk innit?
Refuse Resist Regroup! — Spartacism is go! For the rebirth of the Fourth International!
Makhno’s back… and he wants yr gas! — Russian and Ukrainian states squabble over oil.
Peace process surges further ahead — The Israeli state edges closer to peace by killing Gazans. Hurrah!
Seattle police kill student in “Nazi” uniform. — What it says. RIP Miles.
We are not moralists but Marxists // “Morrissey? Top bloke. Not a racist bone in his body.” — Morrissey spends $.
Music & Politics — Fine Muzak & Good Politricks.
So Frenchy So Chic — A foreign hack whinges about left-wing social dissent.
Lead Casted — Inspired by Timmeh!, the peace that is war rolls on.
Athens policeman accidentally hit by ricochet — Oops!
[For Dion] More lulz! Racists Post Another Murder Video — Inspired by Perf punk rocker Dion, another hilarious story from Russia about a man with a missing head. (I’m no better!)
University of Melbourne & Victoria Police to boost homeless numbers — SHAC eviction. The Kids thought that Trades Hall would come to the rescue — LOL.
That’s a dirty dozen. 60 more posts on Keef Windschuttle, TISM, dead Gazans, SHAC, squatting, police murder, crazy Maoists, cats, The Heretical Two, Chairman Gonzalo (see crazy Maoists), muzak, crackademics discuss anarchism and/as terrorism, the Tarnac Nine, anarchism ~versus~ God/The Church, anarchism in Australia, moar leftist trainspotting, Jeff Monson, Jew-hatin’ Brendon O’Connell, moar hilarious stories from Russia [For Dion], Barack Hussein O’Bama, “global financial crisis”, Andrew Giles-Peters, Kyle Chapman, rape, Marxism, Aboriginal genocide and resistance, Anastasiya Baburova, the ALP… and nutzis.
51 posts!
- “The simple answer is that you the Jews are real motherf—– bastards” — Silly Billy Maqsood Alshams.
Davos 2009 : Capitalism in Crisis — White men with lots and lots and lots of money; now they got worry. Wail!
Lesbian Vampire Killers! — Lesbian Vampire Killers!
Fuck “intimate and boundary-pushing”. — Destroy All Yuppies!
The Australian Nationalism Information Database is now closed. — Another fly in the ointment for Dr. Jim / “attacking a tiny reactionary movement within the system”.
the professional savage // syringe stick – up mama(s) — Muzak! Go D! And E!
“Six of one, half-dozen of the other”. 45 more posts on the Tarnac Nine, Kerry Bolton 1 University of Waikato 0, (a) kidnapping in Mexico, British Jobs For British Workers, Bill Hicks, child abuse, Paul Innes the Plasterer says PLEase, RCP bizarros, film, Andrew Bolt, Peter Costello & Danny Nalliah & God & Bushfires & Faggots Are to Blame, the ALP, anarchism and the Spanish Revolution, Venezuela for Uncle Hugo, Russia for the Russians, Switzerland for the Swiss, more peace in the Middle East, antifa, crazy Greeks, Durban II, Dear Leader, Brendan Sokaluk, Kenny Glenn, stoopid Greens, stoopid Indian students, Ward Churchill, Joel Kovel, P.J. O’Rourke, Pierre Bourdieu, Society of Jesus, (Defend!) Sue Morphet, muzak… and nutzis.
67 posts!
- 40 New Zealand anarchists still at large; London and Berlin tremble — The World Tour of Destruction continues for these plucky New Zealanders, 20 of whom I know by name!
Some films what I have seen recently — Some films what I saw four months ago or so.
X : ‘Suck Suck’ — For all the suckers.
Three is, um, a crowd. 64 more posts on anarchism in Melbourne, Warwick Capper, Timmeh!, Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution, Queensland state election, “global financial crisis”, police butality, muzak, Peter Costello, Melbourne Dumb Punx, prisons, condoms, Prodos, Michael Jackson and Spartacism, Father Peter Kennedy, Bishop Richard Williamson, Holocaust denial, Dear Leader, fun and games in Russia [For Dion], Varg Vikernes, Van Thanh Rudd, Connex, The Yartz, Emma Goldman, leftist trainspotting, Durban II, G20 London, crazy Greeks, Southern Cross Soldiers, censorship, Fighting Fantasy, Bill White, WPWW, Blood & Honour, bikies, Marie Mason… and nutzis. (And muzak.)
54 posts!
- Why “boneheads”? — nutzi trash.
April Fools — The nutty RCP @ it again.
Two good! 52 more posts on such divers subjects as Kiwis & anarchy in London / G20, strikes, occupations, NATO, Nicole Hanley, Murray Holmes, Perf nutzis, White Australia, racism, nasssty critics, Ian Tomlinson (& Timmeh! & Paola Totaro… & Colin Roach & Liddle Towers & Gurdip Singh Chaggar & Kevin Gately & …), bossnapping, Anarchists Against the Wall, police kick (green) arse, May Day, Jeff Monson, Black Flag: Bulletin of the Anarchist Black Cross, Franklin Rosemont, Leon Trotsky, Cookie Monster, Abel Paz, books, Durban II, David Duke, Uncle Fred (Töben)… and nutzis.
53 posts!
- nutzis are W E I R D : Kyle Chapman. The Mormon. — Wedding bells! Right Wing Resistance! God!
One is the loneliest number. 52 more posts on May Day, stuff, moar crackademics discuss anarchism and/as terrorism, anarchism in Australia (Bob James), work, alcohol, apes, Facebook, free speech, hate speech, racism / Lazy drunken boongs, terrorist Muslims, Asian boat people, avaricious Jews, violent Lebos, AIDS-infested faggots, (crazy) anarchists / anarcholocos, ABCC, John Holland, West Gate Bridge, anarchism &/Or Marxism, Jock Palfreeman, Brendon O’Connell, Lee Lin Chin (the right-wing anarchist), John Kinsella on Neo-Luddism, back problems, KKK, Homage to Catalonia, Mauricio Morales Duarte, Uncle Hugo, punk/muzak, Uncle Fred (Töben), uranium (is ace)… and nutzis. (And muzak.)
78 posts!
Total number of posts January–June, 2009 = 375!
Bonus!
In 1924 a forty-two-year-old North Carolina lawyer named Bascom Lamar Lunsford recorded a traditional ballad called “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground” — how traditional, no one knows. A reference to “the Bend,” a turn-of-the-century Tennessee prison, might fix the piece in a given time and place, but the reference could have been added long after the piece came into being; all that was certain was the measured count of Lunsford’s banjo, the inexorable cadence of his voice. The song, the music said, predated whoever might sing it, and would outlast whoever heard it.
“I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground” wasn’t an animal song, like “Froggy Went A-Courtin”‘ or “The Leatherwing Bat.” It was an account of everyday mysticism, a man dropping his plow, settling onto the ground, pulling off his boots, and summoning wishes he will never fulfill. He lies on his back in the sun:
- Oh, I wish I was a mole in the ground
Yes, I wish I was a mole in the ground
Like a mole in the ground I would root that mountain down
And I wish I was a mole in the ground
Now what the singer wants is obvious, and almost impossible to comprehend. He wants to be delivered from his life and to be changed into a creature insignificant and despised. He wants to see nothing and to be seen by no one. He wants to destroy the world and to survive it. That’s all he wants. The performance is quiet, steady, and the quiet lets you in: you can listen, and you can contemplate what you are listening to. You can lie back and imagine what it would be like to want what the singer wants. It is an almost absolute negation, at the edge of pure nihilism, a demand to prove that the world is nothing, a demand to be next to nothing, and yet it is comforting. ~ Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 1990), pp.15–16.
As the world of the spectacle extends its reign it approaches the climax of its offensive, provoking new resistances everywhere. These resistances are very little known precisely because the reigning spectacle is designed to present an omnipresent hypnotic image of unanimous submission. But they do exist and are spreading.
Everyone talks about the youth rebellion in the advanced industrial countries, though without understanding much about it (see “Unconditional Defense” in issue #6 of this journal). Militant publications such as Socialisme ou Barbarie (Paris) and Correspondence (Detroit) have published well-documented articles on workers’ continual on-the-job resistance to the whole organization of work and on their depoliticization and their disillusionment with the unions, which have become a mechanism for integrating workers into the society and a supplementary weapon in the economic arsenal of bureaucratized capitalism. As the old forms of opposition reveal their ineffectiveness, or more often their complete inversion into complicity with the existing order, an irreducible dissatisfaction spreads subterraneanly, undermining the edifice of the affluent society. The “old mole” that Marx evoked in his “Toast to the Proletarians of Europe” is still digging away; the specter is reappearing in all the nooks and crannies of our televised Elsinore Castle, whose political mists are dissipated as soon as workers councils come into existence and for as long as they continue to reign. ~ ‘The Bad Days Will End’ (the title of a nineteenth-century popular song), SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL, 1962. “Les mauvais jours finiront” originally appeared in Internationale Situationniste #7 (Paris, April 1962). This translation by Ken Knabb is from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.
“In the signs that bewilder the middle class, the aristocracy and the poor prophets of regression, we do recognise our brave friend Robin Goodfellow, the old mole that can work in the earth so fast, that worthy pioneer — the Revolution” (Marx, speech at a dinner celebrating the founding of The People’s Paper, London, 14 April 1856). Cf. “And when it [the revolution] has accomplished the second half of it preliminary work, Europe will leap up from its seat and exult: ‘Well burrowed, old mole!’” (Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, chapter 7). In both places Marx is alluding to Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Act 1, Scene 5): “Well said, old mole! canst work i’ the earth so fast?” Robin Goodfellow is a mischievous prankster in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Elsinore Castle is the haunted locale where Hamlet takes place.
