Follow the documents, and follow the money trail. Look what happened to Manchester’s legendary Hacienda club, which is now 130 apartments. Fabric was always going to close, drugs deaths notwithstanding. It’s not the police. It’s not drug laws. It’s likely a government that continues to roll back public services and institutions in an ever more calculating attempt to attract foreign money. And no amount of well-meaning drug law debate is going to change that.
“Police patrol these streets every night of the week and we only get to riot every few years,” he said. “They can’t come here laying down the law like they do all year round. People are rioting because the riot is finally here.”
Can the riots really express and explicate our historical moment, serving as the “holographic miniature of an entire situation, a world-picture?” What I want to address here is the overarching principle that governs the composition of the book’s various conceptual elements, and which in the final analysis is Clover’s name for theory: periodization.
Clover argues against the continued viability of industrial strike organizing, suggesting that the time of the strike has passed, and that we now inhabit the time of the riot. But the conceptual and periodizing demarcations that Clover deploys in advancing these claims tend to obscure the actual forms of class struggle that broke forth during the supposed era of the strike – forms of struggle that may yet have something to offer the present.
While Clover’s effort to historically situate and draw our attention to the riot as a form of anti-capitalist struggle outside of the workplace is certainly valuable, his insistence on interpreting its political value primarily through its relationship to the utopian keeps his analysis from accounting for the function and meaning that riots have for most of the people who find themselves actually participating in them, to say nothing of whether or not riot is really best understood through its relationship to consumption and circulation. “Police patrol these streets every night of the week and we only get to riot every few years,” he said. “They can’t come here laying down the law like they do all year round. People are rioting because the riot is finally here.”
The other side of the coin, in terms of why anti-fascism cannot be boiled down to a battle of ideas is that fascism is an ideology rooted in violence. It is hard to reason with those kicking your head in or gunning you down as you run for your life. And of course it is the white, middle class liberal advocating freedom of speech for Nazis who is least likely to be on the receiving end of such attacks.
Bad ideas ought to be challenged, yes, and giving the state a mandate for repression is a bad idea in any case. However, this is not an argument against no platform but one in favour of it.
If this seems counter-intuitive, it is because outside of militant circles the concept of no platform has been boiled down to simply not letting Nazis air their views. To liberals, this means censorship. In practice, however, no platform is so much more – namely, direct action that prevents fascists from gaining a platform to organise.
it’s a term of abuse meaning like ‘traitor’…. back in the day when poor Irish people came to Scotland during the famine the only free welfare provision came from churches, and it was common practice to get the immigrants to renounce their catholicism and join in protestant prayers before getting free soup - hence ‘taking the soup’ became an expression which meant like selling out. It was one of the reasons Celtic FC was founded as a charitable organisation in 1888, to get free food to the hungry Irish without them having to lose their religion/culture etc
posted a picture on fb of me drinking Iron Maiden’s branded beer which happens to feature a union jack on the label and now my pals from home are all piling in calling me a “fucking soup taker” haha
In Sydney for a few days, loving it - first time I’ve felt like I was in a real city since I came to this country. It reminds me of Glasgow in a weird way,in stuff like the state of the roads and pavements, it’s all kind of scruffy and worn and vulgar but fun, you get the feeling that everywhere has it’s stories. There is absolutely zero coherence in the architecture which I also really like, it hasn’t been nicely planned out by anyone it’s all just kind of haphazard. Much better than the “nice” sterile stepford snooze fest I’m used to on the west coast. Could definitely live here.
Anonymous asked: Why do you dislike the billy bragg version of the internationale? I'm probably biased since that was the first one I ever heard, but it's mt favourite by a lot
Billy Bragg’s a left liberal and he wrote left liberal lyrics to the anthem of international communism - “you have nothing if you have no rights”, “respect makes the empires fall”…he even changes the word “internationale” to “international ideal”… sorry but it’s trite liberal crap, and even his rationale for writing new lyrics is just wrong, the original lyrics aren’t hard to understand at all, and they connect people right through history as well as internationally.
The original British lyrics are full of stuff like going on strike, mutinying and shooting your own generals, and he took all that out…he actually removed all reference to class from the internationale. It’s an unnecessary and shameless piece of liberal revisionist historical vandalism.
Acting commander Darryl Gaunt said officers were vastly outnumbered by the crowd, and most of those injured had suffered cuts and abrasions from rocks and bottles being thrown. One had required stitches.
He said all staff and magistrates at the court had been removed to the adjacent police station during the riot, after missiles were thrown at the courthouse.
Five police cars were damaged, as was one local business.
WA cops on the receiving end of some violence for a change
As the sparse protest of about 100 people started to disperse at Hannah Watts Park, a fight broke out between True Blue Crew members and those from anti-Muslim street patrol group the Sons of Odin.
If it could be shown that a single central committee could actually perform the function democratic centralism claims for it, providing unified and effective leadership, drawing together wide ranging struggles under one banner etc - that would be one thing, but why not address the issue of whether this is practically possible before we even get to whether it’s desirable… No matter how in tune with the people this committee is, or how democratic the selection process was, the idea that effective leadership over the complex and heterogeneous terrain of class struggle in 2016 can be exercised by a single committee round a table somewhere just seems like a logistical impossibility.
if you want to say “its human nature to not be able to coordinate effectively to accomplish difficult goals within one organizational unit, at a certain scale” i think you should come out and say what the scale is.
Democratic centralist orgs have people at all levels addressing the complexity and hetrogeneity of issues. intermediate cadres are going to screen and refine and filter the best of these ideas according to principles that are transparent and shared. so the majority of the work is not actually getting done at the level of a central committee. and the central committee doesn’t need to do superhuman feats of management if everyone else is pulling their weight and if they’re not shy about delegating and implementing kinds of federalism. and also its not like the central committee doesn’t get immediate feedback on their decisions.
seeking principled unity and getting shit done is a fucking difficult task whether it happens inside a larger org or whether between a multitude of more or less federated smaller autonomous groups with diverse ideologies. at any rate the bourgeoise seems to be fairly good at coordinating large scale organizations to accomplish its goals.
if you want to say “its human nature to not be able to coordinate effectively to accomplish difficult goals within one organizational unit, at a certain scale”
I don’t want to say that at all, not sure where you’re pulling the “human nature” thing from, I’m talking about the practicality of people being expected to make leadership judgements about struggles they themselves are not directly involved in. I believe in large scale organisation, but I think we need to abandon the organisational forms that aren’t fit for purpose (including anarchist ones)
Democratic centralist orgs have people at all levels addressing the complexity and hetrogeneity of issues.
I’d say evidence for their success on that front is pretty sparse actually, and in my experience of belonging to and observing them the failure to address complex and hetrogeneous manifestations of class struggle often has a lot to do with the limitations inherent in their organisational structure.
the majority of the work is not actually getting done at the level of a central committee. and the central committee doesn’t need to do superhuman feats of management if everyone else is pulling their weight and if they’re not shy about delegating and implementing kinds of federalism
I’m really not talking about “management” here, this is supposed to be a revolutionary strategy. Centralised command structures work just great if your goal is to manage an organisation, yes - and as you say the bourgeoisie use them to great effect. But this particular organisation is supposed to provide effective leadership of a social revolution, their entire raison d’etre is that they can quickly make the big decisions that have to be made in order to grab the revolutionary moment - it’s this imagined competence that I’m calling a logistical impossibility (before we even get into all of the other reasons why it’s a terrible idea)
