Strike.

          The media and that gang of Oxbridge/Winchester College prancing wealthy political ballerinas, keep bellowing about a "cost of living crisis", when the ordinary person on the street knows that it is an "exploitation crisis". We are supposed to accept our children go hungry, our elder shiver through the winter, if they make it, while the country is awash with billionaires, companies are recording record profits, CEO are being paid millions in remuneration and billions are being lavished on greedy worthless shareholders. We are meant to grin and bear it to help to keep inflation down, to help the economy to grow.

 

        Well it is becoming blatantly obvious that the the one thing that is growing in this millionaires' paradise is the anger of the ordinary people. Day and daily people are taking to the streets, strikes are growing, that simmering anger is now a glowing flame. There is a realisation that we don't have to accept poverty at the whim of the billionaire class of parasites. We will not be poor to help the "economy", that capitalist gambling casino, spin a few more wheels. There is a determination that we will not be poor anymore. We create all the wealth, we demand and will take control of that wealth to be fairly distributed among all our people. 

       Here are some of the anger that is growing fast, we must all get behind those on strike, join them on the streets, show determination and solidarity. This is our fight for a decent life our kids and grand kids, to free them from the constant crisis of greed driven capitalism. 

 

 

       10 May: 100 refuse collectors in Welwyn Hatfield walked out in protest against a manager accused of sexism, racism and bullying; 11 May: 300 construction workers at a refinery in Hull went on strike because of wage payments being delayed or incomplete; 17 May: over a thousand offshore oil workers in the North Sea walked out across 19 rigs demanding their wages match inflation; 27 July: 100 workers at a food plant in Bury walked out in response to not being allowed proper breaks at work; 3 August: hundreds of Amazon workers at various sites in Tilbury, Rugeley, Coventry, Bristol, Dartford and Coalville have staged walkouts and slowdowns in response to a pay “rise” of only 35p more per hour: 10 August: hundreds of contract workers, including scaffolders and maintenance workers, at refineries, chemical plants and other facilities in Teesside, Grangemouth, Pembroke, Fife, Fawley and Drax walked out in a fight over pay, Sunday 20th August 1,900 members of the Unite union at Felixstowe Docks in Suffolk are walking out for eight days in a dispute over pay. August 22nd. criminal barristers in England and Wales go on all out strike over pay, legal aid funding and working conditions.

 

 Visit ann arky's home at https://spiritofrevolt.info     

Fascism.

         Democracy is a fragile thing, slowly and silently it disappears if we don't exercise the freedoms it offers. That old statement about our world, "use it or lose it" applies to democracy as it does to other things in our life. Today we quietly see democracy being whittled down by an authoritarian cabal who hold sway over our lives, and our anger is just a ripple. The government's new police, crime, sentencing and courts bill is simply an over dose of anaesthetic to our freedoms and any semblance of democracy we might have had, yet still no real anger from the populace. By ignoring the vile authoritarian aspects of this bill we are quietly putting the states handcuffs on ourselves, putting their shackles on our own ankles. Taking these appendages off will be far more difficult than putting them on.

Image courtesy of The Canary.

The following article was written by George Monbiot:

        December 03, 202: Information Clearing House -- "The Guardian" - This is proper police state stuff. The last-minute amendments crowbarred by the government into the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill are a blatant attempt to stifle protest, of the kind you might expect in Russia or Egypt. Priti Patel, the home secretary, shoved 18 extra pages into the bill after it had passed through the Commons, and after the second reading in the House of Lords. It looks like a deliberate ploy to avoid effective parliamentary scrutiny. Yet in most of the media there’s a resounding silence.
       Among the new amendments are measures that would ban protesters from attaching themselves to another person, to an object, or to land. Not only would they make locking on – a crucial tool of protest the world over – illegal, but they are so loosely drafted that they could apply to anyone holding on to anything, on pain of up to 51 weeks’ imprisonment.
       It would also become a criminal offence to obstruct in any way major transport works from being carried out, again with a maximum sentence of 51 weeks. This looks like an attempt to end meaningful protest against road-building and airport expansion. Other amendments would greatly expand police stop and search powers. The police would be entitled to stop and search people or vehicles if they suspect they might be carrying any article that could be used in the newly prohibited protests, presumably including placards, flyers and banners. Other new powers would grant police the right to stop and search people without suspicion, if they believe that protest will occur “in that area”. Anyone who resists being searched could be imprisoned for – you guessed it – up to 51 weeks.
      Existing stop and search powers are used disproportionately against Black and Brown people, who are six times as likely to be stopped as white people. The new powers would create an even greater disincentive for people of colour to protest. Then the media can continue to berate protest movements for being overwhelmingly white and unrepresentative.
      Perhaps most outrageously, the amendments contain new powers to ban named people from protesting. The grounds are extraordinary, in a nation that claims to be democratic. We can be banned if we have previously committed “protest-related offences”. Thanks to the draconian measures in the rest of the bill – many of which pre-date these amendments – it will now be difficult to attend a protest without committing an offence. Or we can be banned if we have attended or “contributed to” a protest that was “likely to result in serious disruption”. Serious disruption, as the bill stands, could mean almost anything, including being noisy. If you post something on social media that encourages people to turn up, you could find yourself on the list. Anyone subject to one of these orders, like a paroled prisoner, might be required to present themselves to the authorities at “particular times on particular days”. You can also be banned from associating with particular people or “using the internet to facilitate or encourage” a “protest-related offence”.
       These are dictators’ powers. The country should be in uproar over them, but we hear barely a squeak. The Kill the Bill protesters have tried valiantly to draw our attention to this tyrant’s gambit, and have been demonised for their pains. Otherwise, you would barely know it was happening.
       Protest is an essential corrective to the mistakes of government. Had it not been for the tactics Patel now seeks to ban, the pointless and destructive road-building programme the government began in the early 1990s would have continued: eventually John Major’s government conceded it was a mistake, and dropped it. Now governments are making the greatest mistake in human history – driving us towards systemic environmental collapse – and Boris Johnson’s administration is seeking to ensure that there is nothing we can do to stop it.
       The government knows the new powers are illegitimate, otherwise it would not have tried to avoid parliamentary scrutiny. These brutal amendments sit alongside Johnson’s other attacks on democracy, such as the proposed requirement for voter ID, which could deter 2 million potential electors, most of whom are poor and marginalised; the planned curtailment of the Electoral Commission; the assault on citizens’ rights to mount legal challenges to government policy; and the proposed “civil orders” that could see journalists treated as spies and banned from meeting certain people and visiting certain places.
       So where is everyone? Why isn’t this all over the front pages? Why aren’t we out on the streets in our millions, protesting while we still can? We use our freedoms or we lose them. And we are very close to losing them.

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Insanity.

 Image courtesy of AEON.

 

         Across the world places called countries are run as states, and sadly vast numbers of ordinary people accept this cruel psychopathic system of insanity. It is deemed normal by so many that it's frightening that humans can accept such drastic failure in running their lives. In the last couple of hundred years this system has produced two world wars and the killing of millions of innocent men women and children and a swath of regional wars killing millions more, plus the aftermath of war and destruction. It has resulted in millions living in poverty and destitution, while a small group live in unimaginable opulence. and today we are seeing an ever growing army of refugees, fleeing everything from persecution, death, war, deprivation and now being added to by those trying to escape the result of the system created climate emergency. All they seek is a decent life for them and their children and yet they are treated as criminals to be stigmatised and receive harsh, brutal and inhumane treatment from those states responsible for their plight. 

 Image courtesy of UNHCR.

 

          The latest report from UNHCR state that there are well over 84 million people displaced by conflict, persecution and climate change disasters. 84 million, that is more than the entire population of the following countries, UK, 67.22 million, Spain, 47.35 million, Italy, 59.55 million and France, 67.39 million. Can you imagine the entire population of the UK being displaced persons and still approximately 15 million more waiting in the queue? That is the size of the problem that this state system has spawned, in complete co-operation with corporate capitalist economics.
         There can be no more appealing to the system to please be fairer, no more marching with colourful banners asking for a better world for all, the system hasn't listened or changed in the last two hundred or more years and shows no sign of listening or changing at the present time. It is going to take our righteous anger organised in solidarity and openly displayed throughout every fibre of this rotten, corrupt, cruel inhumane system until we bring it crashing down and replace it with that better world for all, that we know we can create.

Visit ann arky's home at https://spiritofrevolt.info  

A Crisis.

           To those who observe, it was obvious that capitalism and its minder states were heading for a major crisis in the form of ever increasing rebellion and revolt on the streets. Country after country saw the population take to the streets in anger and determination to change this exploitative, unfair and unjust system. However, whatever you wish to call it, Covid19 hit the planet and governments across the world seized the moment and introduced lockdowns, by some it may have been deemed necessary due to the circumstances, though methods of tackling the pandemic are debatable, but it cleared the streets in many countries and put the population, on the whole, in submissive mode. A situation the states would utilise to the utmost, to regain control over the streets and their rebellious citizens.

  

        However, in country after country the honeymoon is over and anger has once again taken to the streets, the old injustices are still there, the same ecological disasters are still galloping towards us, the same poverty and deprivation still cripples millions, the same wars for gain still kill and maim thousands, and the people are fully aware of this, and realise that it is part and parcel of the capitalist economic system, and to remedy these problems we must tear down the system and replace it with a fairer, sustainable system that sees to the needs of all our people and the planet that we call home, a system freed from the cancer of profit.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk 

Righteous Anger.

        I have always maintained that the anger of the people murmurs just below the surface, and it is a righteous anger. The state and capitalism together are an extremely oppressive system that not only exploits the people but thwarts their hopes of a fair and decent world. The people live day by day watching inequality grow and the ever growing repression to protect that inequality. For how long will that anger simmer below the surface, for how long will the people accept injustice, inequality and a pampered privileged few wallowing in opulence at the people's expense?
       Now and again the anger erupts and floods the streets of cities and towns with the fury of years of pent up frustration at this insane and unjust system. It has happened in the past and been brutally crush by the force of state militarism, but it never dies. Today we are seeing more and more of that pent up fury being unleashed and taking revenge on the symbols of the state/capitalist system and its inherent corruption. The world is on the verge of one final eruption of the people's anger, hopefully this will not be Kronstadt, 1921, Spain 1939, or Paris 1968, but the final elimination of the insanity of capitalism and the brutality of the state. 

 

The Murmur of the Poor.

 

Brokers, bankers, Earls, and Dukes,

callous, mercenary, pirate crew

gasconading through the land

bloated, pampered, privileged few.

 

Striding with selfish arrogance

plundering as you go

grasping at the fruits

the common people sow.

 

Take heed, you swaggering fat-cats

in our world you don't belong,

that murmur you hear is the poor

rehearsing an angry song.

 

The day is fast approaching

when our chorus loud you'll hear,

then all your greed and treachery

will surely cost you dear.

 

A price you'll pay for being blind

to the hungry at your door,

Oh, haste the day our angry chorus

becomes a mighty roar.

 

Solidarity with the people of Columbia: 

 

       In Bogotá on the evening of May 4, 25 neighborhood police stations (CAI) were attacked: “3 burned, 3 others completely destroyed by looting and 19 out of order by vandalism. And the most outrageous one is located in the Aurora neighborhood, where a dozen cops were inside when it burned. This is obviously a fair return of the flame, after the forty or so demonstrators killed by the uniforms, without even mentioning the hundreds of injured (846 officially, of which 22 lost an eye) or the 89 desaparecidxs counted, sometimes abducted in the street by plainclothes cops or the military. It is also worth noting that the Minister of Defense reported 216 shootings against cops in one week, and 579 cops injured in one week, including 25 hospitalized.
        The military has not only been deployed in Cali since last Friday, but also on several highway tolls with armored vehicles to protect them from the attacks of the last few days, to control the movements from one city to another, to maintain a minimal supply of goods which is mainly done by trucks (and to avoid their looting at these stopping points)… and to have a good pretext to strike the spirits with butchers in fatigues who bring an additional level of state terrorism against the revolting people
       In the same vein as the destruction of neighborhood comicos, we can point out the warm initiative of Cali rioters, who managed to flush out the lair of the fierce anti-riot cops (Esmad, Escuadrón Móvil Antidisturbios) recently arrived in the city: the famous La Luna Hotel, near the city center. After six hours of fierce confrontations all day long on May 3, with more injuries and businesses destroyed or looted, demonstrators managed to set fire to the hotel structure that was too hospitable for the assassins, destroying the entire second floor (in addition to the rest).

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk  

Racism.

UK democracy in action.

       So the discussion is now about should Harry and Meghan be stripped of their titles. The establishment love this sort of debate, it lends legitimacy to the subject of privileges and titles, when the whole subject matter of hereditary titles and privileges is unsustainable. Then there is the inquiry into is there racism within the royal household. What a stupid question, the whole edifice of British royalty is built on the racist view that we British are superior to the indigenous peoples that we subjugated and plundered, and had every right to invade and take control of their lands and resources for the greater glory of the crown. If that's not racism on a grand and brutal scale, then the word has no meaning. 

An ordinary day in UK democracy.

 

      British royalty is the pompous edifice to white power and the class system, never will you see an African, Indian or any other member of the so called British Commonwealth sitting on the UK throne, or next in line, that just would not be tolerated by the powers that be. Yet they try to fool everybody by saying they are going to look to see if there is any racism in the royal household and its entourage.

Kneel before your superior.

 

     Royalty is an archaic system from a barbaric past, and has no place in a sane and civilised society. Pomp, privileges,and hereditary power are a bulwark against democracy, it is simply a system of fiefdom and serfdom with a host of appendages to make sure you know your place, when to kneel, when to courtesy, when to touch your forelock.
      Instead of having a debate about the obvious in an attempt to justify injustice, it should invoke anger and disgust, and a desire to rid our society of such injustice and inequality, once and for all. Enjoy the ecstasy of your righteous anger. 

 

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk   

Coiled Spring.

 

       One of our government pundits stated that the economy was like a coiled spring, and would bounce up quickly. I believe that the underlying anger of the people is like a coiled spring, and that as this lockdown and pandemic comes to an end, and unemployment and slashed working conditions start to make their mark, that anger in the coiled spring will be released. In so doing it will bounce up and reverse that submissive attitude that has affected all our actions like a thick gum. Some of the coils are already releasing their energy, all for different aspects of this type of society. Spain, against the arrest of rapper, Pablo Hasél, in India, the largest strike in the world, because of the government pushing its neo-liberal free market policies. There may be different reasons but the anger is there and will thrust itself up like that released coiled spring.

     There will be plenty to vent that anger on, child poverty, homelessness, unemployment, inhumane treatment of migrants, police brutality against public protests, the privatisation of the the NHS and other public assets, and the myriad of population controls introduced during the pandemic, which our lords and masters will attempt to retain. Then of course there will be the anger against the oncoming austerity engineered to pay back the billions handed to their corporate friends, to keep their luxury yachts well stocked. 

       We should never pull back from showing our anger at the injustice and inequality that is the bed rock of the capitalist exploitation system. What we must try to do is link up all this anger with that of other countries, we must organise across borders. Our corporate overlords, are well versed in that cross border organising, in conjunction with the various states. The ordinary people of this world must never recognise borders, we are all in the same struggle against the same state backed corporate juggernaut. Only unity across these imaginary lines will end this world of wars, exploitation, injustice and inequality. Let's release that coiled spring of anger, and in the words of an old Korean saying, "Enjoy the ecstasy of your righteous anger".

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk     

Ten Years.

         The figures mighty be different but probaly worse. I wrote this little piece about ten years ago, not much has changed in those ten years. Except that the anger is still there, but moved to a more demonstrative level in lots of place across the world, but still too many just keep their anger under wraps, why? We have a right to express that anger in a more confrontational manner, after all the system hasn't softened its approach to us the ordinary people, if anything it is now much harsher and getting more so. We all have a right to self defence, and we as a class are being brutally attacked.

    

         The people are angry. The kids are angry because they have nowhere to go in this system, and the adults are angry because nowhere is their existence. Dead-end jobs mixed with broken down schools in this endless competition to see who can end life with the most possessions. It begins with compulsory education, with the idea that indoctrination is the same as education. Feeling trapped in the endless work load, in the endless department stores, surrounded by nothing but millions of people doing the same thing and consuming the same way, there should be no need of explanation why we're angry. It's about the government detaining citizens on nothing more than a hunch. It's about police officers having the malicious control over the life and death of those around them. It's about the richest people in the world getting rich from the work of others. It's about getting kicked out of the park by cops because you deter tourism and you're homeless. It's about travelling four thousand miles around the world so you can fight in a war only to enrich Western capitalism. It's about getting beat up and torn apart, tortured and vivisected, thrown to the gutter after exploitation. And it's about swarms of people doing nothing but going along with it, buying the products that support the rich who bribe the ruling class. It's about.. Consume. Obey. Exist. Consume. Obey. Exist. Consume. Obey. Exist.

THINK!

Commercialism!

 

       "Since the 1970s the US oil company Occidental has been drilling in the Peruvian Amazon area. During that time it is estimated that Occidental has dumped 9 million barrels of toxic waste into the streams, land and rivers of the Achuar people."

UNDERSTAND!

State Power!

        "Since 2003, 4,385 US troops have been killed in Iraq, 1031 in Afghanistan, 179 UK troops have been killed in Iraq, 278 in Afghanistan 650,000 Iraqis have been killed, and they don't seem to count Afghan civilian deaths. All we know is that the number grows each year,

QUESTION!

Religion!

        "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence." -- 1 Timothy 2:12

There are thousands of reasons why we are angry,

pick one and join us.

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It's Time To Show Your Righteous Anger.

 

     I would say with confidence that our planet has never before seen such violent mass protests, with such prolonged intensity over such a wide area against the established authorities. This is something that we anarchists can take heart from, vast numbers of populations are taking to the streets not on single issues but simply against the established system, they are throwing off the yoke of authority, not asking for more favours from the powers that be.
     Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, Haiti, France, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Sudan, Iraq, Iran, and other areas are seeing the people in their thousands and more on the streets, like I said, not asking for more crumbs, but trying to put an end to this brutal neo-liberal authoritarian nightmare that has held the world in its grip for so long. Now India has joined the fray, the country that carries that phony label of the largest democracy in the world. How long before others take to the streets and display their righteous anger, hatred and disgust of a system of enslavement, poverty, deprivation and wars?

 

      An article by Pankaj Mishra from Bloomberg Opinion:

      India has exploded into protests against a citizenship law that explicitly discriminates against its 200 million-strong Muslim population. Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government has responded with police firing on demonstrators and assaults on university campuses. The global wildfire of street protests, from Sudan to Chile, Lebanon to Hong Kong, has finally reached the country whose 1.3 billion population is mostly below the age of 25. The social, political, and economic implications couldn’t be more serious.
       It was only last month that students on the campus of Hong Kong Polytechnic University were throwing petrol bombs at the police, and fielding, in turn, teargas, rubber bullets and water cannons.
      This violent resistance to an authoritarian state is novel to Hong Kong. The Umbrella Movement that in 2014 first expressed a mass sentiment for greater autonomy from Beijing was strikingly peaceful. The campaigners for democracy in Hong Kong today have also traveled very far away from the Chinese students who occupied Tiananmen Square in 1989, and to whom they have been wrongly compared.
       Those students back in 1989 were deeply respectful of their state: Photographs of student petitioners kneeling on the steps of the Great Hall of the People are no less eloquent than the iconic picture of a protester facing a tank. That acknowledgement of the state’s authority as ultimate arbiter is now rapidly disappearing, in not only Hong Kong, but also India and many other countries. It is being replaced by the conviction that the state has lost its legitimacy through cruel and malign actions.
      Today’s protesters, who are overwhelmingly young, are usefully compared to the French student demonstrators in Paris in 1968. The latter occupied places of work and study, streets and squares. They also met police crackdowns with makeshift barricades and Molotov cocktails.
      Like today’s protesters, the French students erupted into violence amid a global escalation of street-fighting; they claimed to reject an older generation’s values and outlook. And they, too, couldn't be simply classified as left-wing, right-wing or centrists. Indeed, the French radicals confused many people at the time because they loathed the French communist party almost as much as they did the parties of the right. The French communists, in turn, dismissed the protesting students as “anarchist.”
    This commonplace pejorative confuses anarchism with disorganization. It should be remembered that anarchist politics is one of the modern world’s oldest, if little remembered, political and intellectual traditions. Today, it best describes the radical new turn to protests worldwide. Anarchist politics began to emerge from the mid-19th century onward, originally in societies where ruthless autocrats were in power — France, Russia, Italy, Spain, even China — and where hopes of change through the ballot box seemed wholly unrealistic.
     The anarchists — one of whom assassinated U.S. President McKinley in 1901 — sought freedom from what they saw as increasingly exploitative modes of economic production. But, unlike socialist critics of industrial capitalism, they aimed most of their energies at liberation from what they saw as tyrannical forms of collective organization — namely, the state and its bureaucracy, which in their view could be communist as well as capitalist.
      As Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the pioneering thinker of anarchism (and robust critic of Marx), put it, “To be GOVERNED is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so.”
     For many anarchists, the state, the bureaucracy and security forces were the deepest affront to human dignity and liberty. They sought to achieve democratic freedoms by a drastic reduction in the power of the hydra-headed state, and a simultaneous intensification of the power of individuals from below through coordinated action.
       Democracy for the anarchists was not a distant goal, to be reached through vertically integrated political parties, impersonal institutions and long electoral processes. It was an existential experience, instantly available to individuals by jointly defying oppressive authority and hierarchy.
       They saw democracy as a permanent state of revolt against the over-centralized state and its representatives and enforcers, including bureaucrats and the police. Success in this endeavor was measured by the scale and intensity of the revolt, and the strength of solidarity achieved, rather than by any (always unlikely) concession from the despised authorities.
      This is also how protesters today seem to perceive democracy as they struggle, without much hope of any conventional victory, against governments that are as ideologically driven as they are ruthless. Let there be no doubt: More open and unresolvable conflicts between ordinary citizens and authorities are likely to become the global norm rather than the exception. Certainly, militant disaffection today is not only more extensive than it was in the late 1960s. It also connotes a deeper political breakdown.
     Negotiations and compromise between different pressure groups and interests that have defined political society for ages suddenly seem quaint. Old-style political parties and movements are in disarray; societies, more polarized than ever before; and the young have never faced a more uncertain future. As angry, leaderless individuals revolt against increasingly authoritarian states and bureaucracies from Santiago to New Delhi, anarchist politics seems an idea whose time has come.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

Between Dignity And Poverty.

A small extract from an article by Chris Hedges:

       Immanuel Kant coined the term “radical evil.” It was the privileging of one’s own interest over that of others, effectively reducing those around you to objects to be manipulated and used for your own ends. But Hannah Arendt, who also used the term “radical evil,” saw that it was worse than merely treating others as objects. Radical evil, she wrote, rendered vast numbers of people superfluous. They possessed no value at all. They were, once they could not be utilized by the powerful, discarded as human refuse.
        We live in an age of radical evil. The architects of this evil are despoiling the earth and driving the human species toward extinction. They are stripping us of our most basic civil liberties and freedoms. They are orchestrating the growing social inequity, concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a cabal of global oligarchs. They are destroying our democratic institutions, turning elected office into a system of legalized bribery, stacking our courts with judges who invert constitutional rights so that unlimited corporate money invested in political campaigns is disguised as the right to petition the government or a form of free speech. Their seizure of power has vomited up demagogues and con artists including Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, each the distortion of a failed democracy. They are turning America’s poor communities into internal militarized colonies where police carry out lethal campaigns of terror and use the blunt instrument of mass incarceration as a tool of social control. They are waging endless wars in the Middle East and diverting half of all discretionary spending to a bloated military. They are placing the rights of the corporation above the rights of the citizen.

      Sometimes I read a phrase, a paragraph, a few words, and they sink in through the dark labyrinth of my ageing mind and out trickles a stream of words. the following is my latest such a trickling.

Between Dignity and Poverty

In this metropolis of wealth with its fountains of opulence
We are the excluded army that walks that tightrope
Between dignity and poverty.
The excluded, the marginalised, the forgotten,
Regulated by mercenaries, some with guns, others with pens.
They know not, we are their brothers and sisters.
Nor do they know,
Our strength is forged in the humiliation of the bread line
Our daily question, will there be bread,
Or will the pangs of hunger stay.
We exist in a system of numbers and balance sheets,
Our lives, dehumanised statistics,
Catalogued and filed by a blind accountant.
When asked to count our dead, do we count the living dead?
Will this tightrope be the inheritance to our children
Or shall our tortured journey lead us from anxiety to revolt
Will the anguish of our children feed our righteous anger
Causing us to tear asunder this fabricated web of injustice.

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For Human Dignity, Capitalism Must Fall.

         Ecuador, like Haiti and many other countries is in open revolt, as more and more people allow their righteous anger at the cruel injustices of this destructive economic system of capitalism, that is rapidly plunging the world into chaos, to flow onto the streets. More and more people are now realising that debating and seeking legislation to protect the poor and curtail the rampant plundering of the public purse, just doesn't work. Across the globe, living standards are falling for the majority, while the opulence of the few grows ever more grotesque. We have had centuries of "representative democracy" but still the gap between the privileged few and the vast majority grows ever wider. We the many are on an ever ending slippery slope to poverty and deprivation, as long as we tolerate this greed drive economic system of capitalism to rule our planet.

       All strength to and support for, all those we stand up and fight to end this system of greed and savage injustice. For human dignity and justice, capitalism must fall.

This from AMW:

      About 50 police officers have been taken hostage and indigenous groups have blocked roads and highways, as protests against the state’s neoliberal economic policies continued in Ecuador.

       On October 3, in Quito, the capital of Ecuador, anarchists, some carrying red and black flags, fought alongside students, setting flaming barricades and throwing rocks at riot police, who they forced to retreat. Anarchists have been on the forefront of the struggle against IMF-imposed “reforms” and against the police-state that is attempting to enforce these “reforms” with brutality.

       Protests began when Ecuador’s corrupt president Lenin Moreno announced the end of fuel subsidies. Moreno’s regime, though nominally left-wing, has strengthened relations with the imperialist United States, launching a joint security effort and intelligence sharing operation.

       President Lenin Moreno says he will not bring back subsidies and has declared a two-month national emergency.

       Some of the protests were organized by transport unions who have since stopped their action. Other sectors are calling for a national strike on Wednesday.

       An umbrella group for indigenous groups in the country, the Confederation of Indigenous Nations in Ecuador (Conaie) said it was declaring a “state of exception” in indigenous areas, where soldiers and police officers would be detained and would face “indigenous justice.”

      Luis Iguamba, leader of the Kayambi people from northern Ecuador, said they would keep up the pressure on the government.

“We are fighting for everyone and we are fighting to foresee the rights we all have and we can’t allow this. So, everyone, be on the lookout and keep up the fight. Let’s radicalise the strike,” he said.

Indigenous-led protests have toppled three presidents in the last few decades.

        Their intervention follows protests on Thursday and Friday that saw roads in the capital Quito and the city of Guayaquil strewn with makeshift barricades and burning tires.

Hundreds of people were arrested, dozens of police officers hurt, several police cars destroyed and a local government building was attacked, the authorities said.

       Ecuador’s government has agreed to cut public spending as part of a loan deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The agreement, signed in March, allows Ecuador to borrow $4.2bn.

Anarchists and indigenous groups are likely to continue resistance against the neoliberal policies of the Moreno regime.

More information from that area: AMW

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We Have A Right To Be Angry.

      As any observer can see all capitalist economies create unimaginable wealth, but the ordinary people are continually mired in poverty, inequality, poor housing, homelessness, poor wages etc.. However, most of the time the people struggle on the best they can, but that underlying anger simmers away, France is no different. For more than twenty weeks now the people of France have been taking to the streets to vent that anger. Though the numbers may have been slightly diminishing during that period, it takes a lot of anger to sustain that level of activity on the streets, for that period of time, in the face of fierce police brutality.

      The recent event in France of the fire and destruction of a vast symbol of religious wealth and power, changed things. This symbol in a few days received almost a billion euros for its restoration. Yes, ordinary people probably threw in some of that money, but the bulk of it came from the rich parasites and the state, the same rich parasites that are responsible for those low wages, crap low paid jobs and the inequality the the people are angry about. Proving once again that to the establishment of this society, the symbol is worth more than human dignity.

       This lavishing almost a billion euros on a symbol of religious wealth and power, was another spark to the fire of anger that fills the people of France. So week 23 of the Yellow Vests protests saw the numbers soar dramatically. With the increase in numbers came an increase in anger. The shear hypocrisy of this society is blatantly laid before the eyes of the struggling poor. You are worth less than a piece of architecture that symbolises religious power. Yes in the eyes of some, a fine looking building, but worth more than your dignity?

     I have always maintained that real change in our society will only come when enough of us get angry enough, to openly vent that anger. A revolution may be based on love, freedom and equality, but can only come to fruition and the back of extreme anger. Anger displayed openly and in large numbers. So to people of France I say, enjoy the ecstasy of your righteous anger, maintain it until you get what you want, and to the rest of Europe, look and learn. In the face of avoidable injustice, misery, poverty, deprivation, homelessness and inequality, we have a right to get angry, and defend ourselves.

      Protestors warned that troops will open fire!!! Another symbol of our so called democracy.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

From Southwark To Seville.

        There are countless ways of putting a spoke in the wheel of this money based system of greed and exploitation. It doesn't always have to  by anger, though we have a right to express our righteous anger. A revolution will not come with roses alone, but we can have a dance on route. Great to see, from Southwark to Seville people stopping the system in their own particular way, whether it is to stop a particular policy/event, as in Southwark or to disrupt their money making machine, as in Seville, more power to their elbow. I'm sure your own area can come up with some form of prevention/disruption. Every minute of disruption costs them money, and they don't like that one little bit. Thanks Loam for the link.

Visit ann arky's home at radicalglasgow.me.uk

Murder By "Legal" Hands.

      The 6th. of December is approaching, a date that should be etched on the memory of every freedom loving individual. It should be a date when the haters of repression and lovers of justice carry forever in their minds. It was on an evening on Saturday, December 6th. 2008, in the district of Exarchia in Athens that the young 15 year old Alexis Grigoropoulos and some friends were out having a coffee, then at point blank range, he was shot dead by a serving policeman. He died on the street in front of his young friends, a cold blooded murder of a youth by a state employee. The state's history is a litany of murder by its bully boys in uniform, we must call out, "enough is enough".

      What followed was the unleashing of pent up hatred of police brutality and state injustice, Greece was gripped by an outpouring of weeks of riots, demonstrations and protests, that went to the very brink, and spread to other countries. The murder of young Alexis Grigoropoulos was the spark that lit a ferocious fire that had been simmering beneath the surface for years. The riots ended but still beneath the surface rumbles the murmur of discontent and anger, that the riots of 2008 did not resolve. The police brutality remains, the state repression goes on, the injustice keeps growing, the poverty and deprivation is endemic. What spark will it take to finally bring this festering cancerous system to an end, how many young Alexis must die before we put an end to the barbarity of capitalism? Let us mark the anniversary of Alexis Grigoropoulos's cold blooded murder with righteous anger. 

From Gatorna, a partial list of murders at the hands of state employees. 

        We call for an international day of action against state terrorism
in rememberance of...
Santiago Maldonado kidnapped and murdered by paramilataries, Argentina 2017
Pellumb Marinkolla thrown out of a police station window, Greece 2016
Remi Fraisse killed by stun grenade, France 2014
Ilia Kareli tortured to death by prison guards, Greece 2014
43 young students kidnapped and murdered by cops, Mexico 2014
Michael Brown shot by cops, Ferguson (USA) 2014
Berkin Elvan shot by teargas canister by riot cops, Istanbul 2013
Mark Duggan shot by cops, UK 2011
Dimitris Kotzaridis killed by teargas, Athens 2011
Lambros Fountas shot by cops, Greece 2010
Stefano Gucci tortured to death by police, Italy 2009
Inigo Cabacas killed by rubber bullet, Basque country 2009
Giuseppe Uva beaten to death in a police station, Italy 2008
Alexis Grigoropoulos shot by cops, Greece 2008
Gabriele Sandri shot by cops, Italy 2007
Oury Jalloh burned alive in his cell by the cops, Germany 2005
Federico Aldrovandi beaten to death by cops, Italy 2005
Carlo Gulliani shot by cops, Italy, 2001
Sole e Baleno led to suicide in prison, Italy 1998
Christophoros Marinos excecuted by cops, Greece 1996
Halim Dener shot by cops, Germany 1994
Conny Wessmann killed by car when chased by cops, Germany 1989
Michalis Kaltezas shot by cops, Greece 1985
Iakovos Koumis beaten to death by riot cops, Greece 1980
Stamatina Kannelopoulou beaten to death by riot cops, Greece 1980
Francesco Lo Russio shot by cops, Italy 1977
Isidoros Isidoropoulos killed by car when chased by cops, Greece 1976
...and of all the unkown and unnamed ones. We don't forgive. We
don't forget. No step back.

Read the article HERE:

Our Inheritance.

Now is the time to arm our desire with anger

time to claim our rightful inheritance.

Inheritance, built by generations of poverty and toil,

river of wealth channelled to financial institutions,

stolen by the power crowned few.

Treasure fearlessly wrestled from angry seas.

Riches, arduously torn from the bowels of the earth.

Bounty laboriously scratched from unforgiving land.

Assets, ours by right of life and limb.

Our toil sent a director's son to Eton.

Our poverty paid his daughter's dowry.

our sweat created the plunderer's sea of plenty.

Our humility gave his crime legality.

Now is the time to arm our desire with anger

time to claim what's ours, with fist and fire.