Random briefs…

the anarcho-syndicalist federation / international workers’ association got a new website.

afterg20.org is a site i just stumbled upon. it looks neat. it also tells me that this friday august 31 there will be a rally outside the melbourne magistrates’ court (233 william street, city) demanding that charges against x number of people be dropped.

vents is the name of a hip hop artist from adelaide. he’s got a debut album out on obese records, and the two tracks available on his myspace kick arse. no really; it’s a soundtrack to twenty-first century class war. (only downer is he’s skipping melbourne on the national tour to promote his album. bummer!)

in the us, some people have been talking about hip hop culture and its role in promoting + change. according to a reporter, those assembled — including members of the universal zulu nation and hey! you! the rock steady crew — used “language [that] was colorful, occasionally profane and tinged with conspiracy-theory rhetoric. some of it was anarchist, anti-establishment, anti-capitalism, and even [gasp!] critical of commercial rap broadcast on radio station airwaves.”

anarchia has some thoughts on anarchist organisation in aotearoa (written as a contribution to the upcoming @ conference in auckland september 7–9) and titled ‘what is to be done?’. as anarchia correctly observes, lenin — otherwise known as vlad the impaler — wrote a tract with the same title. in addition to being one of his most notoriously elitist programmatical statements (duh workers need duh intellectuals to show dem what needs to be done), it’s title is also a rip-off — nikolai chernyshevsky (1828–1889) wrote a novel titled what is to be done? (Что делать) in 1863.

news on the two anarchists from st petersburg russian police are attempting to frame for a train bombing: andrei kalyonov has been on hunger strike for 10 days, and his jailers may have already tried to force feed him. both andrei and the other anarchist arrested, denis zelenyuk, are in jail in novgorod. both have lawyers, but the legal process is expensive, and could cost up to 3000 euro. a collective of anarchists concerned with the case has recently formed and named itself the anarchist black cross of st. petersburg. for more info on @ in russia, see avtonom.

according to your abc, “two-hundred prisoners will be allowed to sleep in their own beds over the apec long weekend of september 7-9 to free up jail cells in preparation for the mass arrest of protesters. federal and state police have asked the new south wales gub’mint to make space for up to 500 who might be arrested during the summit in sydney.” soon to be ex-pm and george ii’s deputy sheriff john hoWARd — the cheeky bugger (and former lover of pru goward) — blames you for all the trouble the gathering is bound to cause.

in germany, neo-nazis have assaulted and seriously wounded two africans in mainz. typically, the fascists outnumbered their victims three-to-one. further, “a 36-year-old iraqi man was the victim of a racially-motivated attack in the eastern city of magdeburg, also in the early hours of saturday. magdeburg police said an unidentified man beat the iraqi with a baseball bat and set a dog on him before fleeing.”

german authorities have responded to the rising tide of fascist violence by picking on a number of brainworkers, alleged members of the ‘militant gruppe‘ what the bka reckons “has been responsible for around two dozen attacks on property, including arson attacks on private and police vehicles” ‘cos they wanna “smash the structure of society and establish a communist world order”. (well, it’s better than bottling it up.) among many other amazing facts and figures about the case, the crazy commies @ the wsws report that one person what-thinks-too-much, “andrej h. is also alleged to have used phrases in his scientific writings that were also used by the mg. from this fact, the investigators at the federal prosecutor’s office jump to the conclusion that andrej h. must have indeed been the original author of the mg texts. in particular the word “gentrification” was singled out. “gentrification,” however, is a widely used term in sociological studies of cities. a search of the keyword “gentrification” on sociological abstracts, the international sociological essay database, returns 452 entries by 174 academics. amazon lists 64 [or possibly 48?] titles on the theme. the new york times has used the term 1,770 times in the last several years.” a search on slackbastard returns three: i surrender!

finally — and speaking of neo-nazis — melbourne antifa have been in training in order to better disrupt the upcoming isd gig on october 13 — as well as in anticipation of the invitation to a dance-off. here’s some exclusive footage (courtesy of the spandex school of contemporary interpretive dance):