A gentle nudge from my sitemeter and the latest post from Louis Proyect's blog reminded me of this old post from the blog.
That's not what's important. What's important is that you take time out to read the article/interview, “With the hard disk full of socialism”, linked to in the original post.
I'm truly humbled that there are such brave people in the world.
Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (101)
Dear Friends,
Welcome to the 101st of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.
We now have 1511 friends!
Recent blogs:
A simpler way of doing things Positively socialism Euroelections: the case for the SPGB
Quote for the week:
"It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle ... There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for . . . " George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938).
Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!
Robert and Piers
Never let it be said that this blog misses out in the opportunity in signposting Noam Chomsky appearing in a cartoon strip.
No jokes about the real life Chomsky being a cartoon character, please. That gibe is for the self-satisfied over at Harry's Place.
I just like to spot *cough* public intellectuals in the most unlikeliest of places. It also takes me back to the good old days of avidly reading Roy and the Rovers every week, and the genuine thrill of that storyline where A J Ayer turned up in the pages of the comic face to face with Roy Race. Something about Ayer being the leader of a Spurs hooligan gang who decided to invade the pitch in a FA Cup sixth round replay to try and get the game abandoned after Melchester Rovers went 3-1 up with five minutes to go. I can't remember how it resolved itself - mind, it was a storyline from 30 years ago - but I suspect that 'Blackie' Gray despatched Ayer with a kick to the nether regions and the rest of the Spurs hooligan crew melted back into the terraces. That's how those cliffhangers usually got wrapped up if memory serves me right. If you see the particular issue on eBay, drop me a line. I'd like to read it again
The Chomsky cartoon? From the pen of Mitch Clem. His cartoon strips aren't really that political which it makes it all the funnier when Chomsky pops in from an alternate universe to make a guest appearance as this week's curmudgeon.
The return of a long forgotten series on the blog.
A fool has one of those 'D'oh moments':
The setting is a Brooklyn apartment on a sunny Sunday afternoon.
Kara - [Reading BBC Sports News.] US have just scored. They're winning one to zero.
Me - I honestly can't be bothered going next door to watch it. It's a Mickey Mouse game. People are only interested in the tournament 'cos there's no other football on the tv at the moment.
One for the kindle lovers amongst you:
"A World Torn Apart is a collection of forty articles on diverse topics written from a world-socialist perspective by Stephen Shenfield (Stefan). Organized in nine sections entitled: profits versus needs; working to survive; politics in various countries (U.S., South Africa, Israel/Palestine, China); popular culture; international relations; war and peace; non-military global threats; historical reflections; thinking about socialism. Includes analysis of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Georgia, Congo, and Gaza and discussion of such issues as patent law, disaster management (Hurricane Katrina), paying for air, advertising, U.S. presidential elections, children's TV, national sovereignty and globalization, exploitation of Arctic and lunar resources, naval confrontation in the South China Sea, humanitarian intervention, nuclear disarmament, 9/11 and the "war against terror," Iran, global warming, pig/bird/human flu, the Neolithic Revolution, religion, literary utopias, technocracy, and free access."
You can already access some of the articles from the e-book over here. Get scribd.
Via Slackbastard blog:
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?"
Help me out here: is that an old joke that just gets updated every time someone looks at a police officer in a disgruntled manner somewhere in the world? I could have sworn I heard that joke years ago but I can't remember where.
PS - It doesn't detract from the joke itself. Most of my jokes go through the spin cycle again and again and again.
From the short story 'Baby on a String'.
SPGB Public Meeting:
Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (100)
Dear Friends,
Welcome to the 100th(!!) of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.
We now have 1508 friends!
Recent blogs:
Whose news? Let's make a real socialist revolution Global Warming: Is it (or will it soon be) too late?
Advanced notice:
The Socialist Party of Great Britain holds its annual Summer School 26 - 28 June 2009 at Harbourne Hall, Birmingham. Members and friends from across Britain and beyond will gather to exchange ideas and experiences in all aspects of socialist activity and thought. The theme this year is "Revolution: The Theories, The Past, The Future".
Quote for the week:
"In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic." Marx, German Ideology (1845).
Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!
Robert and Piers
Socialist Party of Great BritainAnd you thought Bono would always be the biggest wanker in U2. Looks like Larry Mullen Junior is giving him a run for his money.
I make it out of hiding across the road to the park one Saturday because there is a festival being held there, it is organised by CND and I feel I should support it on principle besides I wanted to see the bands and I suppose that in amongst all these thousands of people I'll be safe-enough.
So I wander over and the park is absolutely full of millions of young people all not minding too much that the weather is threatening to wash us away and taking advantage of the occasion to show off their new hair colours to everyone including the police with binoculars high above on the surrounding rooftops.
The festival is fun with foodstalls and badges and kiddie entertainments and old clothes and books and small political parties and everything would seem not too bad were it not for the fact that all those young people make me feel old, I'm sure some of them are laughing quietly as I go by.
I keep my head rotating as if constantly looking for someone so no one can focus on my wrinkles and when the DJ plays old records from my childhood I pretend convincingly to myself that I've never heard them before, in fact I deliberately look puzzled as each record comes on so people will see I don't know what it is.
'The petrol gauge has always been knackered, you know that,' grumbled Finn as they rolled to a stop on a dirt garage yard outside a small bar. 'You've got to keep track of the mileage - I've warned you before.'
'But it never seems quite so crucial down Deptford High School, does it?' They'd glared at each other in the orange neon of the bar sign. 'OK' it flickered on and off uncertainly. Finn was unforgiving.
Striding across a yard littered with crashed cars, Pearl headed for the bar to find the owner. This is what she hated about foreign travel, she decided: this loss of balance, the confusion between the grateful smile and the come-on. A line so clearly visible in South London and so blurred here. She could be letting herself in for anything, just by being there. And smiling. Smiling was dangerous, but how else was she going to charm the guy into opening up his petrol station.
You can keep your big budget glossy vidoes. Nothing beats the scratchy, cheap looking performance videos from the late seventies and the early eighties. The more amateurish the better.
One of my favourite singles from the post-punk era. If this song isn't on your post-punk compilation then you have to send that rar file back to rapidshare.
File this video next to Josef K's 'Sorry For Laughing', Orange Juice's 'Rip It Up' , and The Jam's 'Going Underground'.
PS - have to be polite and cut and paste the blurb from YouTube:
RARE - possibly unique! Shot in the primitive studio at the London College of Printing in 1979 - with Ian H at the video colourizer controls... All I have left is this dodgy quality VHS - so, with apologies for that, sit back and enjoy one of the most under-rated bands of the 80s... All hail the Mo-Dettes... Remember - No girl likes to love a wimp..."
Fascinating bit of gossip from the Vaux Populi blog.
I wonder how much truth there is to the suggestion that Scargill's Socialist Labour Party was going to join the No2EU electoral front but pulled out at the last moment because of Scargill's insistence that he take the top berth in the London region?
On the one hand there is an air of plausibility to the story because of Scargill's colossal ego - with Arthur insisting, in the third person, that he be the top candidate in London. On the other hand, the story didn't first appear in the Weekly Worker, which is the usual messageboard for such rumours on the left.
The lash up would have made sense. Anyone who watched both the SLP's and the No2EU's election broadcasts back to back would have seen two film crews working from the same rough script. Would such an arrangement have received more votes? Totally dependent on what they would have decided to call themselves. Yep, it's a shallow as that.
What's the deal with the link to the Stop The War website? Very strange business, indeed. (And I haven't just put in the wrong URL. Check it out yourself by cut and pasting http://www.stopwar.org.uk/.
I would delve deeper but I have to investigate the new link further to see if it's got that Stephen Doyle bootleg from School Assembly 1986.
In place of a post.
A pic from yesteryear. One dead Tory MP and one Celtic legend.
The pic was snaffled from this blog.
You've got to love this picture.
It's from an IK Brage game (sorry, I don't know the team playing in the black) and, as my Swedish is a bit rusty at the moment, I can't work out if it's an attempt at a Guinness World Record for how many footballers you can fit onto a penalty spot at any one time or if it's the result from last season's Swedish Spot The Ball competition.
195 Elvis Costello tracks on iTunes and shuffle still insists that I should be listening to early Faust!.
I had a similar experience back in 1996 when I popped into Housmans to buy a copy of Radical Chains.
Anyway, shouldn't that guy be paying Ben Stiller royalties? And what are they selling again?
Hat tip to Exile On Moan Street.
In 1985, the year before I became an official band member, one of Newell's regular mail-order clients in Germany took the cassette version of a collection of songs called Under Wartime Conditions, pressed it up as a vinyl album and distributed it to the stores. Newell was jubilant. This was, he reckoned, a real anarchist's triumph, a giant petrol bomb through the record companies' corporate windows. An album of songs made in his house in his spare time, using only a raddled guitar, an old piano with drawing pins in its hammers, a bass which was a barely modified plank, and a rusty xylophone, had gone down the system's blindside and made it right into the shops. 'And', he said victoriously, 'no one with a pony-tail and stupid plastic glasses came anywhere near it.'
So this was the Martin Newell whom I joined full-time in the Cleaners from Venus: an angered pop guerrilla with his own agenda, a one-man music-biz resistance unit.
Main Entry: men·di·can·cy
Pronunciation: \ˈmen-di-kən(t)-sē\
Function: noun
Date: 1711
1 : the condition of being a beggar
2 : the practice of begging
Remember it for later on. It may be important.
Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (99)
Dear Friends,
Welcome to the 99th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.
We now have 1498 friends!
Recent blogs:
Flying pigs and the Euro elections Orwell's nightmare The Class Struggle
Quote for the week:
"Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is." Mahatma Gandhi, 1869-1948.
Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!
Robert and Piers
Via the Vaux Populi blog:
The SPGB caught between a rock and haringey place.
As the Vaux Populi poster says, it's all very well for friend and foe alike to politely enquire of the SPGB, 'but aren't you lot really just parliamentary anarchists?' but maybe said friend and foe can also taken the time out to forward that particular memo to the anarchists?
