Credit where it’s due. In a publicity coup, a mob called Clitoraid [ClitorAid.org] have launched ‘International Clitoris Awareness Week’ (May 6–May 14), asking the public to donate money to the charity in order for it to conduct reparative surgery on women in Africa who have damaged clitorises. Leaving aside the worthiness of the project — critically discussed by Kudzai Makombe here — I was a little surprised to learn that the originators of the Week and the organisation is the Raelian religious cult. (The ClitorAid website is on the RAEL.ORG server and is registered at the address 6120 W Tropicana Ave #A16-200, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA; this is also the registered address of R.a.e.labs, Inc., the trading name of the Raelians, for which Bridgette Roehr aka Brigitte Boisselier of ClonAid fame serves as President. Note that the same address houses the superbly named STOP KILLING PALESTINIAN JEWS INC.)
Yeah. I thought I might as well throw this up. It’s kinda wEiRd. I mean, who and what is Teh Left? Apparently, “people who like rainbow crossings, petitions at change.org, and People with a Disability”. Liberals, in other words. Has there been some kinda shift in Left thinking? Sorta. But mostly in the sense that leftism has become another form of managerialism, and managerialism doesn’t usually produce too many exciting thinkers…
The Left has lost its way through symbolism and stupidity
Helen Razer
Crikey
May 3, 2013
The Left is dead—hopelessly lost in the minutiae of gestures, rainbow crossings, political correctness and confected outrage about the latest Geoffrey Barker piece. It’s time for the Left to think about material conditions and macroeconomics.
Andrew Bolt is to David Marr as a Kraft Single is to raw milk chèvre. This is to say, these big cheeses long typified the differences between popular Right and Left thinking. Marr was, and remains, an acidic shock whose difficult charms reward the body politic when it takes the time to savour.
And to me, Bolt is just a nasty piece of work.
This has been the usual division: public thinkers of the Left offer us data and difficulty and demand our participation in understanding. Public thinkers of the Right offer us comfort. Eva Cox, for example, has long argued with numbers for tax and labour reform, whereas Piers Akerman draws hilarious crayon pictures of c0ck-and-balls.
But, recognising the traditional split between leftist wankers and conservative yobbos is nothing novel. What is new, however, is the conspicuous stupidity of the Left. If by “Left” we mean people who like rainbow crossings, petitions at change.org, and People with a Disability, then our gestures made in colourful chalk have beg[u]n to rival Akerman’s for numb impermanence.
It is, of course, easy to decry the lack of an emerging Rundle, and rage about the “dumbing down” of the culture and fetishise a golden age of debate. But it is stupid to simply call people stupid and explain the Left’s growing Kraft Single problem in the terms of things being Better in My Day.
Things, however, were certainly less individually sliced and wrapped in my day. Or, rather, they were less wrapped up in the cheesy idea of individuality.
Let me tell you what I mean by taking you through just the last week in the life of the “Left”.
With her budget taste-test speech served on Monday, Gillard had given the old Left food for thought. The Prime Minister told low-to-middle income earners that Keynes would want them to share the burden. By Tuesday, she had announced a levy for the National Disability Insurance Scheme. By lunchtime, News Limited had published this folly which is—to save you the displeasure of bad cheese—a sort of rom-com approach to analysis wherein a young, under-informed man says that HE doesn’t want to give up $300 a year and would rather drink his flavoured coffee, and a young, under-informed lady says that SHE ruddy well does.
But it was this piece by Tory Shepherd that drove the tone of debate on social and news media for much of the week. The NDIS and its revenue model drew wide and uncritical support and this is nice for the ALP this week, but not so good over time. We had a chance, for example, to talk about a government that has been quietly committed to progressive tax reform being pushed by a perverse opposition into serving Clive and Gina. Instead, the “Left” made do with crowing about its deep, deep love for the Disabled and never, for a moment, bothered to discuss, say, the idea of quantitatively easing Twiggy’s arse off the ground to pay for services that any reasonable human agrees are essential.
“It’s nice that you would happily relinquish your Wine of the Month Club subscription to buy a happy cripple but it is also deeply irrelevant …”
The debate, though, comes down not to macroeconomics and not even to the NDIS itself, but to the role of the individual in paying for it. You know, it’s nice that you would happily relinquish your Wine of the Month Club subscription to buy a happy cripple but it is also deeply irrelevant and even, I suggest, damaging.
The personification of this debate continued when Myer CEO Bernie Brookes did what any retail sector CEO would do and complained about the introduction of a new tax. Just like the old Left, Brookes, at least, is able to see that a tax is a tax and not the ethical responsibility of the individual from which it is secured. But, whatever. Let a dozen barely literate tits secure their freelance stipend from Fairfax and the ABC this week as they rage about the injustice of a CEO behaving exactly like a CEO.
That is, of course, if they’re not engaged with the matter of Geoffrey Barker who yesterday suggested female newsreaders should not wear cocktail frocks to work. In an inelegant and contorted act of onanism, Fairfax maintained the “rage” at its women’s interest site and offered an ad hominem attack on a man, its author claimed, some were calling Mr Misogynist.
For contemporary thinkers, this is not a polity but the sum of individual will. Brookes and people who want to drink flavoured coffees are responsible for delays to the NDIS. If Barker has not been charged with responsibility for all rape, he probably will be by the afternoon. Because the “Left”, such as it is, is not able to think about systems; about social and economic class. It has not only borrowed the cheesy stupidity of Andrew Bolt; it has borrowed the idea of his “individual” as well.
The “Left” now hungers for symbols of cultural identity and spurns the idea of class. Or, indeed, of material conditions.
Nowhere, for mine, is this more starkly drawn than in plaintive chalk on sidewalks as queer activism gives up its campaign for mental health reform and supplants it with the symbolic fight for an equality that already exists in law. Nowhere was this in sharper contrast than on the day of Gillard’s misogyny speech wherein many single parents (chiefly women) were consigned to Newstart.
The “Left” loved Sorry Day and, indeed, can’t get ENOUGH of Aboriginal Australia. They’re a very spiritual people, don’t you know. But on the day of the Closing the Gap report, the “Left” was far more interested in misogynists who had dared chasten Chrissie Swan for smoking while pregnant than to give a fuck that the mortality age-range between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians had widened.
But data no longer matters when we have stories about individuals. The economy is irrelevant in the face of cheese. By dividing us into individual slices of stupid, the Left serves up a convenience food from which the Right will profit.
So, you know, keep raging about marriage and newsreaders and “rape culture” and the number of flavoured coffees it would take to buy a cripple. And in September, do enjoy your new treasurer, Joe Hockey, who will borrow Akerman’s crayons to draw a picture of Milton Friedman’s cock-and-balls all over Keynes’ General Theory.
[A post prompted by some disco elsewhere on the Internets…]
May Day in Melbourne this year (2012) was a small affair — tiny even. Perhaps 30 or 40 people (overwhelmingly male) attended the 8 Hour Monument at midday, and sometime around 1pm decided to go on a march. At the same time as this group was meeting at the Monument, another, presumably smaller group gathered at Her Majesty’s Theatre, site of the historical Melbourne Anarchist Club (the first such group to form in this part of the world — on this date, in 1886).
From memory, the largest May Day rally I’ve witnessed took place in 2001, almost eight months after the very large anti-WEF protests in September 2000 (S11), and immediately following an anarchist (and autonomist) conference. The event attracted participation not only from radicals but also a handful of unions — the first time any mass labour organisation had taken part in a May Day rally for many years. Their participation, it seems, was prompted partly by the success of the protests in September (and determination to capitalise on public sentiment in opposition to ‘globalisation’) and a certain internal logic.
Throughout this period, and for many decades prior, the trades union movement has largely confined its celebrations — and certainly its public rallies — to the Sunday immediately following May 1; so too in 2013.
In summary: the fact that the May Day rally was tiny may be explained primarily by way of its obscurity: a product of its long historical neglect, absence of any institutional support, and general passivity. Further, unlike in many other parts of the world, where May Day rallies are often very sizeable, even huge, May Day is not a public holiday in Victoria, and participation by workers obviously rendered very difficult by that fact.
(For a superb account of the tumultuous events in Istanbul, Turkey, seeDave K’s account on his wonderful blog Citizen K.)
Is May Day worth celebrating? I think so. It links past struggles to the present, Melbourne to the world and provides an opportunity for community, reflection and celebration. But if more are to participate in future years, more organisation is going to be required, and the nature of the event itself transformed into something more exciting, inclusive and inspiring. Thankfully, anarchists have a long history of successfully creating such moments, and given the anarchist origins of May Day, doing so would be paying our long-dead comrades a fitting tribute.
[…written in acknowledgement of the efforts of those who contributed to its success.]
If you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labor movement – the movement from which the downtrodden millions, the millions who toil and live in want and misery, the wage slaves, expect salvation — if this is your opinion, then hang us!
Here you will tread upon a spark, but here, and there, and behind you, and in front of you, and everywhere, flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out. The ground is on fire upon which you stand. You can’t understand it. You don’t believe in magical arts, as your grandfathers did, who burned witches at the stake, but you do believe in conspiracies; you believe that all these occurrences of late are the work of conspirators!
You resemble the child that is looking for his picture behind the mirror. What you see, and what you try to grasp is nothing but the deceptive reflex of the stings of your bad conscience.
You want to ‘stamp out the conspirators’ – the ‘agitators’? Ah, stamp out every factory lord who has grown wealthy upon the unpaid labor of his employees. Stamp out every landlord who has amassed fortunes from the rent of overburdened workingmen and farmers. Stamp out every machine that is revolutionizing industry and agriculture, that intensifies the production, ruins the producer, that increases the national wealth, while the creator of all these things stands amidst them tantalized with hunger! Stamp out the railroads, the telegraph, the telephone, steam and yourselves — for everything breathes the revolutionary spirit.
Lest we forget . . . on The Day, ANZAC Day, we remember the beginnings of a disastrous military campaign, and The Black & White Army (extra-parliamentary movement of the oppressed) looks forward to the dismantling of The Bombers (military-industrial-sporting complex):
“Opponents to conscription came from many quarters. Catholics, republicans, the Irish, socialists, unionists and pacifists all had reason to be anti-war and anti-conscription. And they came together as a united force.
Nowhere does the myth as it stands acknowledge that at the time of the Gallipoli landing many Collingwood supporters (and supporters from many of the Catholic inner-city football clubs in Melbourne and Sydney) would have been very strongly against what they saw as the British imperialist war. Nor does the myth reveal the fact that the Australian Imperial Force was largely made up of Protestant soldiers. The embarkation lists in 1914-15 indicate that a small percentage were Catholic. In the three nominal rolls I looked at, about 12 per cent of the initial enlistments were Catholics.”
Footy Fans Against Mass Murder call on all supporters to…
TACKLE GLOBAL POVERTY AND BOOT OUT THE WEF!
END THE CORPORATE CONTROL OF SPORT!
JOIN THE S11 PROTESTS!
SHOW YOUR COLOURS SEPTEMBER 11-13 AT CROWN CASINO!
THE SEASON IS OVER, BUT THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES!
Numbered amongst the multi billionaires and faceless technocrats attending the WEF will be many of the people who have also come to control Australian Rules Football. Clowns and sleazebags like McGuire, Jackson, Gutnick and Elliot. People whose true interest in football stems not from a love of the game itself, but from a hunger for the power and prestige that comes from controlling its future.
The term “globalisation” is just a cover for a process that increases corporate control over our daily lives. The detrimental effects of such control can be seen as much in what has happened to football in recent years as anywhere else. Over the past decade we have seen the smaller leagues and teams bankrupted, relocated or forcibly merged as part
of what we are told is an inevitable evolution towards the “modern” game. Long loved grounds such as Waverly and those belonging to North Melbourne and Collingwood have been phased out in favour of monuments to advertisers like the disastrous Colonial Stadium.
With club managements increasingly reliant on the patronage of big business we have seen stadiums and players renamed on a short and long term basis after sponsors. Collingwood management indicated this year that they would not even be adverse to renaming whole teams. Advertising at grounds is ever present, whether on scoreboards, jumpers, the turf, fan banners, the ball, trainers, little league players, tickets, water bottles, etc. Wherever you may look whilst at a game you cannot escape it.
So where do the fans and members fit into all of this? Only as passive sheep to be sold merchandising and herded into whichever expensive, crap ground the AFL decides is good to make a buck off. Did we at any stage request that our beloved teams and grounds be destroyed? That entrance costs and food and drinks at games become ever more expensive? That our new ground should be more like a TV studio that a footy field? That news about AFL financial double dealing and arguments over TV rights take equal place in the sports pages with that about the actual games and players? That club boards vote themselves ever higher salaries? That the 2000 season be rescheduled to suit the needs of the Olympics and Channel 7? Has the game really improved as a result of all this?
Supporters have not taken all of this lying down, but resistance has largely been passive. The response of the AFL and club managements to declining memberships and game attendances has been predictable- ignore the views of the fans and instead scramble for a bigger share of television royalities and the corporate dollar. The problem for management is that at some point the majority of fans will finally give up and just switch off altogether.
However all is not yet lost. The rare exceptions in which supporters and players have really voiced their anger have seen managements make concessions or back down. This was seen earlier this year when Colonial Stadium was forced to allow general admission to empty seating originally allocated for corporate sponsors and in the Fremantle Dockers opting to retain training at South Fremantle Oval after 1000s demonstrated against a proposed move in 1999.
In the spirit of such protest and in the knowledge that corporate control of our lives, be it over football or the workplace, does no one any good we call on all concerned footy fans to join the S11 protests around the country. Wear your team colours and let your best barracking voice be heard!
For more info and a history of troublemaking within footy check out our website at www.geocities.com/footyfans2000
As leftist trainspotters and ‘revolutionary socialists’ generally would be aware, the Socialist Workers Party‘s poor handling of a rape allegation has had serious ramifications for the party’s public standing: this has included its relations with aligned parties elsewhere in the world (details of the scandal and response can be found on Jim Jepps’ site and the blog established by dissident/former SWP members).
In Australia, the local iSt franchise is Solidarity. In February, the party’s National Committee issued a statement to its members pledging total support to the SWP. This statement, seemingly intended for internal consumption only, was published online and constitutes the only public statement on the matter the group has issued to date.
What with all the excitement over the fabulous redecoration (above) of the Tory Party’s hateful and deceitful billboard about asylum seekers I was naturally drawn to the Billboard Liberation Front website. There I came across the Stella Artois advertisement. Y’know, the one with the pretty thing in it. While new to my eyes, the campaign was apparently launched several years ago on other islands. Advertising Age notes that Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola were responsible for the filmic Thing.
At 11.30am the Wednesday Action Group will be meeting outside Her Majesty’s Theatre, 219 Exhibition Street (once home to the Melbourne Anarchist Club in the 1880s).
At midday there will be a gathering of anarchists and others at the 8 Hour Monument (cnr Victoria and Russell Streets) and another (organised by Australia Asia Worker Links) at 5.30pm at the State Library (328 Swanston Street).
On Sunday May 5 from 1pm the Victorian Trades Hall Council (by way of the Melbourne May Day Committee) is holding a rally and march. (The Committee is organising several other events as well: check their blog for more details.) The Socialist Alliance has also organised a breakfast. With toast.
That afternoon the contemporary Melbourne Anarchist Club (and perhaps even some of the ghosts of Exhibition Street) will be holding a BBQ from 4pm.
Dr Dennis Jensen is a member of the Australian Federal Parliament. Dennis has a doctorate in materials science and physics, but is also adept at history and climatology.
“We are not prepared to consider special category status for certain groups of people serving sentences for crime. Crime is crime is crime, it is not political.”
An innocuous building
for so monumental
a task!
behind iron gates
& anonymous
windows
technicians
in white smocks
toil like
busy
little
bees
investigating
in electromicroscopic
detail
the vinegrated cerebrums
of late soviet luminaries
to determine
what made
their heads
tick
this is
their mission
in its 67th
& final year
long rumored
now uncovered in
Room 19 at the
Brain Institute
of Moscow
former reputed
capital
of Marxism-Leninism
historical materialism
& militant atheism
Row upon row
of bowls of
pickled gray
matter
the cranial
entrails of Lenin
Sergei Eisenstein
Maxim Gorky
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Kirov
Kalinin
the famous Pavlov
but not his celebrated
dog
various generals of
the Red Army &
forgotten members
of the Central
Committee
their noodles
excavated under the
orders of
the boss
of all bosses
Joseph Djugashvili
who tells ‘em
in the cerebellums
the secret to
the data:
mind is matter
ideology is
phrenology
she is no witch
who
tied with rocks
sinks
That’s the theoretical premise
of the Brain Institute
from the organ
itself
its flesh
its cells
can be deduced
the source of
political clarity
artistic creativity
military technique
will &
genius
which if found
could be reproduced
tested &
ingested
thus advancing the
formation of the
new soviet man
by leaps & bounds
especially at the
pinnacle of
collective social life
forgetting
however
Lenin declared
with that
not as yet fully
paralyzed brain
of his still
functioning:
“Stalin
having become
General Secretary
has concentrated
enormous power
in his hands
& I am not sure
that he always
knows how to
use that
power
with sufficient
caution.
I propose to
the comrades
to find a way
to remove Stalin
from that position
& appoint
another man
more loyal
more courteous
& more considerate
to comrades
less capricious, etc”
Or that
the last act
of Mayakovsky’s
tortured noggin
was to
pull its plug
rather than submit to
the muse
of police art
unaware that it would
float in a jar of
the people’s formaldehyde
for six decades
scrutinized under
advanced
detection methods
sibling to
astrology
vitalism
numerology
aka existing socialism
Watch them
bustle & scurry
each night
sealing
the locked doors of
Room 19 & its
vaulted booty
with paraffin
carefully eyed
by dutiful
disciplined
Lydia Malofeyeva
comrade chief deputy
of brainkeeping
no peeking
no sneaking
watch them put chunks
of the tissue into a
block of wax
then sealing off
a patina of brain
with a motorized
razorblade
a veg-o-matic
type device
to finely slice
the subject of slides
hundreds of thousands of
slides
of head cheese
for the big cheese
under the close &
quiet supervision of
the latest & last
incarnation of the
Central Committee
Gensec &
KGB
their ultimate act
of skullduggery
still fresh in
brine
scooped
from Sakharov’s
late pate
(the technicians
unsure which morsel
is his
engage in polemics
simultaneously
piling up shavings
since they are paid
piecework)
30,000 slides
alone of
Lenin’s brain
30,000!
how many cases
of carpal
tunnel
syndrome &
other
repetitive
motion
infirmities
befell
the unionized
workers
at the Brain Institutes
to get Lenin’s
key
organ
reduced to its
physiological essence?
each synapse
individually wrapped
here is what
is to be done
there is state &
revolution & the
right of oppressed
nations to
self-determination
all obviously assimilated
by comrades
as indicated by
recent events
In 67 years
of rigorous
scientific inquiry
the earnest cadres
discovered
they had absolutely
nothing to learn
at all
“They
thought maybe
the political figures
would have some type
of specific
brain structure”
Leonid Khaspekov
vicedirector of the
Brain Institute
says of the commissars
“that their brains
would differ greatly
from those of
other people
but of course
that’s hardly possible”
The narcotic
monotony of
the tasks
the automatic lullaby
of the machine
the routine
exponential
accumulation of cells on
glass
the fixed aroma of
the crypt
measured the
seemingly immutable
atmosphere
its fog
obscuring
the historical
u-turn
the reverse of
the pendulum
the dystrophic
conquests of the
apparently eternal
politbureau & its
perennial catechism:
they thought
that maybe
the political
figures
would have
some type
of specific
brain
structure
that their
brains
would differ
greatly from
other
people
but
of course
that’s hardly
possible
But
of course
that’s
always been
the
whole
point
comrades
Two Greek anarchists are making molotov cocktails. One says to the other: "So who will we throw these at then?" The other replies: "What are you, some kind of fucking intellectual?"
