"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in"
(Leonard Cohen)
(Leonard Cohen)
"Ignore all proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say"
(Michael Moorcock)
(Michael Moorcock)
"Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings."
(Andre Gide)
(Andre Gide)
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20210730142237im_/http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-j5VpdMjVl_g/UFm2Dz9tdaI/AAAAAAAAE2c/MEjZ8OZxsv4/s1600/Me%2B96%2B%2528Bigger%2BBlog%2BSize%2529.jpg)
"I want my place, my own place, my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my life-time."
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
(Franz Kafka)
(Franz Kafka)
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated"
(John Donne)
(John Donne)
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
(Robert J. Hanlon)
(Robert J. Hanlon)
"Life is beautiful, but the world is hell"
(Harold Pinter)
(Harold Pinter)
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Funny is not the Opposite of Seriousness
Terry Pratchett: humour used for savage criticism |
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Tuesday, March 17, 2015
Nationalist Shock Waves
Voting SNP: logical for anyone wanting separation |
This was always a delusion, no matter how worthy - as we now see. Yes, of course, the class struggle is still happening in Scotland, but it is taking place in a deflected form - certainly not on the basis, as some doubtlessly imagined, of a 1970s-style wave of militant strikes, working class demonstrations, etc. In any case, such an approach was thoroughly economistic, as it downplayed the fight for democracy and high politics: ie, we must vote ‘no’ in order to get the national question out of the way and then return to ‘normal’ working class actions like fighting the cuts, and so on. But a ‘no’ vote was never going to magically deliver working class unity, especially if the vote was relatively close. What these economistic arguments fail to understand is that we first need the conditions for working class unity, which were obviously lacking, otherwise there would not have been a referendum in the first place.
Monday, March 16, 2015
Jihadists and Spooks
Mohammed Emwazi, aka Jihadi John |
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Thursday, March 05, 2015
Austerity in the Colours of Syriza
Golden Dawn: on the march |
What Syriza should have done, if it had being any sort of a genuine Marxist party, is resist the temptation of government (‘taking power’) - let the pro-memorandum parties take responsibility for the shit they created. It should have concentrated instead on building up its own forces and digging deeper roots in society, to the point where it became genuinely hegemonic within Greece. Most importantly of all, it should have aimed to develop and deepen its European connections and contacts, with the eventual aim of taking power on a continent-wide basis alongside other working class parties.
Tuesday, March 03, 2015
Dodgy Bankers, Dodgy Clients
Greedy for money |
Yes, naturally, both Tories and New Labour said the non-doms rules benefited the country - incentivising them to spend extremely large amounts of hard-earned cash on houses, servants, cleaners, Rolls Royces, millionaire meals, etc. Watch the wealth trickle down. OK, sure, Ed Miliband has talked fairly passionately about cracking down on tax havens abroad (Cayman Islands, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, etc). There is no particular reason to doubt his sincerity, especially given that he is more reliant on union funds than either Tony Blair or Gordon Brown. But the main point is that Britain itself has become one vast tax haven, where the wealthy, rich and well-connected get to enjoy an obscenely privileged existence. One law for the rich, another law for us. Even more crucially, both the Tories and New Labour shamelessly sold their souls - assuming they ever possessed such a thing in the first place - to multi-millionaires and newspaper proprietors.
Thursday, February 19, 2015
Did Free Speech Allow the Nazis to Come to Power?
It wasn't UAF that did for the BNP |
Yes, we in the CPGB are perfectly prepared to use the no-platform tactic under certain circumstances, but we oppose the traditional far-left approach, which boils everything down to often pointless displays of physical force or, in the shape of UAF, a liberalistic, ‘something must be done’ howl. But it is a profound mistake to elevate no-platform into a principle.
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
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