http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2006/12/358959.html
Hilarious, and about as accurate as a lie detector!

Blair takes "Class War" to a new meaning with his
planned "help",costing 800 million quid, to the top
10% "brightest" secondary school pupils.

Even NASA are "helping" apparently.

But if thse kids are so smart, why can't they teach
themsleves? The state shouldn't have to pay for them at
all if institutions like NASA and Universities are involved.
Surely these institutions are quite capable of spotting
bright individuals (not groups) and taking care of their
education and making the most of their potential, I hate
to say it, but privately.

Blair's statism seems to have come up with the worst of
all possible worlds: not full socialisation and equalisation
of education or complete privatisation either
but another subsidy to the filthy rich, and another middle finger
to struggling families and children with special needs!

Educashun, educashun, indoctrination!

Saddam, but not Negroponte, Albright, Clinton, Bush Snr and jnr,

Rumsfeld, Mugabe etc

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2006/12/358982.html

-Indymedia article basically sums up the whos, whys and wherefores.

May his soul not rest in peace, but saying that I am saddened

that he was executed, for at least two reasons directly and

many others indirectly due to the rank hypocrises of our

"peace loving" leaders.


1.The state has no more moral right than any individual,

to kill anyone for any reason.

2.Saddam commited worse crimes and should

have gone to trial for those as well. 660 Palestinians

were killed this year, Israel would say that was self-defence.

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2006/12/358964.html

Also, how many people can you justify killing in self-defence?

Saddam would (probably) argue that the 100-odd

executions were a form of self-defence (the argument

is used in a similar fashion to defend the death penalty

as a deterrence). Similarly, what if the troops occupying

Iraq and Afganistan were "forced" to kill, say, 400K insurgents?


I think Jack Straw et al are hypocrites for gloating over

Saddam's execution. They have as much moral authority

as I would if, for example, I dug up Ronald "Railgun"

Reagan's corpse and removed his rotting heart from

his body!Or, for example, stealing the body for ransom

of a relative of a ginea pig farm.


Of course, maybe Jack Straw's being brutally honest.

Maybe he's right about the veil, for example?

But what would people think if one day he said

"I've got a new joke: What does 50 Cent

listen to music on? His PIMP3 player."

Being brutally honest again, all those men who go to

see films with Keira Knightley (for example) in them

"must" be peadophiles as she's got the body

of someone who's still of the age where,

to put it politely

naked from the waist up and from behind, you can't

specify their gender!

These opinions really should be kept for private

discussion. Politicians, and state priests in general

have a habit of dictating morality. People listen to

them because they are in a position of authority.

Happy Solstice (belated), Yule, Chrimbo, Hannukha, Eid and Happy New Year. Chiapa/EZLN 13 years day after tomorrow!

Typical: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6182125.stm
It is eternally the role of people with power to chummy up to other people with power.
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2006/12/358351.html

Not much to say today, other than Happy Yule and I'm going to Faslane!
http://www.faslane365.org/
http://www.faslane365.org/en/staffordshire_and_stoke
See y'all on the other side!

Democracy and Tyranny? Which is Which: Representative Democracy or Dictatorship? Civil liberties or mob rule?

By definition, a Dictatorship is absolute rule by a specific individual or clearly identified group. In a modern State, a Leader requires a whole army of civil servants, police spies and informants, thugs, sycophants as well as an Armed Force. It is often assumed that, generally speaking, the People acquiesce to this. What is more realistic is that most, say 80-90% of a population will generally support, if only mostly passively, a system as long as it does not directly interfere with their well-being as individuals. The system is ultimately able to perpetuate itself so long as its active supporters outnumber, in actuality or in terms of abilities, its dissenters.

Take an example of Representative Democracy. One nation has elections, which are contested by three main parties. They each receive 40, 35 and 25 % of the votes cast so the party that received 40% takes power. But 60% of those willing to vote are now, presumably, against the government, but possibly not the system. Over 25% of those eligible to vote do not, presumably they are against both the government and the system but there is no empirical way to tell. In a Representative Democracy, voting is only a passive expression of “People Power”.

In the example of the Dictatorship, the passivity of the majority keeps the government in power, so long as its active supporters outnumber dissenters. In the example of the Democracy, a majority “acting” against the (future) government cannot always remove its possibility. Without more information, the “Dictatorship” is a sort of Mob Rule, with the “Democracy” having the very possibility of being a Tyranny by a significant minority.

"Power is not given it is created and sustained through action"-
Hannah Arendt

In theory, then, all that separates a Dictatorship from a Democracy, in terms of actually representing the will of the populace, is that the Democracy will be more likely to respect Human Rights. Realistically, the State in any case will do whatever it can get away with, especially if it can count on disadvantaged members of society, who are unlikely to care about abstractions such as human rights or the environment when they have more immediate issues to deal with (like everyday survival), for support.

In this case, Democracy can only be realised if it has the support of the Poor, as there is no real guarantee in any case that whoever wins an election will have the best interests of the poorest at heart.

Tyranny by whom? According to Alasdair ManIntyre, politics is “Civil War by other means.” Similarly, for Michael Bakunin, Britain is not a proper State, but is more like a “federation of moneyed interests”. Looked at in this cynical way, the stability of a nation depends on its ruling classes or the richest members of society having common interest: “It doesn’t matter who you vote for, the government always wins.”

In this fashion, Democracy is, as Aristotle defined it, Rule (or Tyranny) by the Poor, as opposed to Oligarchy (Rule by the Rich: “If voting changed anything, they’d abolish it!”)

By definition then, Democracy is rule by the Poor, but would not necessarily be a Free Society. Similarly a Free Society would provide free emergency health care, equal access to credit in a Market economy and free help for the insane and mentally ill/ disturbed, but to be a Democracy there would have to be no privileged groups or castes, in other word Rule By the Poor*.

*Not quite the same as “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, as specified in “Libertarian Marxism?”

Pinochet is dead! 2-1 for the class war 2006!

(quoted from Indymedia:)

The coup that brought Pinochet to power was launched on September 11, 1973. It saw Chilean Air Force combat planes bomb the La Moneda Palace, Chile’s White House, where Allende died. The military junta headed by Pinochet disbanded Congress, banned political parties and trade unions and abolished freedom of speech and the right of habeas corpus. Popular Unity’s disarming of the working class The coup was facilitated by the policies of Allende’s popular front government itself, and particularly those of the Chilean Communist Party, which supported Allende. The Stalinist Communist Party worked to subordinate the intense revolutionary ferment within the Chilean working class to the popular front government. Allende and the Stalinists rejected demands to arm the workers and sought to break the wave of militancy that gave rise to factory occupations and land seizures. The Stalinists and the Popular Unity government promoted unfounded and ultimately fatal illusions in Chilean parliamentary democracy, with the Stalinists describing the Chilean army as “the people in uniform.” It was Allende himself who brought generals into his cabinet and named Pinochet commander in chief of the Chilean armed forces, a position that Pinochet utilized to prepare and execute the coup that ended the Socialist Party president’s life. In the days that followed the coup, tens of thousands were rounded up, many of them herded into Santiago’s football stadium, where most were beaten and tortured and many were executed. Among those murdered were two US citizens, Frank Teruggi and Charles Horman. Subsequent evidence has indicated that senior US officials not only worked to cover up the crime, but were complicit in these killings. The coup itself enjoyed the full sponsorship of the administration of President Richard Nixon. Millions of dollars were covertly sent into Chile by the CIA to finance employers’ strikes and fund fascist groups seeking Allende’s overthrow. Nixon’s explicit order to the CIA was to “make the economy scream” in order to bring down the government. The plans of the military coup plotters were shared and coordinated fully with both the CIA and the Pentagon. Henry Kissinger, then Richard Nixon’s national security advisor—and today a key advisor to the Bush administration—was the principal American architect of the coup in Chile. In 1970, when Allende’s Popular Unity government was first elected, Kissinger commented, “I don’t see why we need to stand idly by and let a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” The US government subsequently set out to reverse the results of this popular election by means of covert subversion, terror and military force. While Pinochet is dead, Kissinger still lives and is liable for criminal prosecution for his role in fomenting a coup that claimed the lives of thousands. Nor is he the only US official complicit in the crimes of the Pinochet dictatorship. George H.W. Bush, the former US president and current president’s father, was CIA director during the period in which Pinochet’s regime served as the axis for “Operation Condor,” a coordinated campaign of murder and repression carried out by military regimes throughout Latin America against left-wing opponents. Declassified US documents have proven that the CIA was kept fully informed of this operation, in which hundreds if not thousands were murdered or illegally imprisoned and tortured. Part of the operation included what was at the time the worst act of international terrorism ever carried out on US soil. On September 21, 1976, a car bomb took the life of Orlando Letelier, Allende’s former foreign minister and a prominent opponent of the Pinochet regime, as well as that of his American aide, Ronni Moffit, as they were riding through the streets of Washington, DC. The CIA, under Bush senior’s leadership, worked to cover up the Pinochet regime’s responsibility for these murders. The killers themselves were subsequently placed under US protection and given new identities and financial support under the federal witness protection program. Vice President Dick Cheney and outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are likewise implicated in Washington’s support for the Pinochet dictatorship during this period. Cheney was the White House chief of staff and Rumsfeld was also defense secretary then, overseeing US ties to the Latin American military as Operation Condor was unfolding. Pinochet’s ability to escape prosecution until his death at the ripe old age of 91—more than 16 years after surrendering power—is testimony to the fact that the horrors his regime unleashed against the workers of Chile were carried out to defend the interests of the ruling elite both in that country and internationally, which continued to protect him. This protection also constitutes a serious warning. The brutal methods of mass murder, torture and dictatorship that will forever be associated with the name of Augusto Pinochet remain the ultimate recourse of capitalism in crisis.
Bill Van Auken Homepage: http://wsws.org/articles/2006/dec2006/pino-d11.shtml

They beheaded a Dutchman for burning down the Reichstag

A Catholic was burned before he had the chance to blow up Parliament
They say 90 days if you even think about it
So don’t even think about it
Don’t mention the war
Even the war in my mind
A morbid sense of humour
A love of life
(sometimes)
For that he was disembowelled
Make the punishment fit the crime
How do you punish thought crimes?
Emotion wrenching?
Your emotions make you a monster
(18.11.2005)

Know your rights

You have the right to speak
But not when spoken to
You have the right to breathe, air is free
But you haven’t the right to regulate air pollution
You have the right to walk on the pavement
Unless you’re in the way of some chav on a motorbike
You have the right to an education
As long as you are taught that there are always winners and losers
You have the right to privacy
Unless it’s in the public interest to invade that privacy
You can criticize the government
Just as long as it isn’t this one
You have the right not to starve
Just as long as you do what we say and tick the right boxes
You have the right not to die of thirst
Just don’t demand clean water, we’re not a charity
You have the right to work
Because you’ll always be a slave
You have the right to happiness
As long as we’re happier
You have the right to medical treatment
As long as you’re enslaved by medication
You have the right to political asylum
Just as long as we can put you in a cage when we feel like it
You have the right to a fair trial
As long as the sentence is decided beforehand
You have the right to vote
For candidates we’ve chosen for you
You have the right to live in a democracy
It’s our democracy we can call it what we like
(updated 30.11.2006)

Armistice Day

Today, or on this day, there was no war
The war was over, for some
The war is over, but it did not end war
If the war is the result of a lack of communication,
Today, did they start talking?
Many wars happened since The War,
Being good for business, of course
Now, they say, we are in a war with
No objectives, borders or sides
Except Us and Them
But how much like Them are Us?
(11.11.2005)

Libertarianism versus Libertarianism

Could a minimal state be possible? Would it automatically involve a central banking system or would worker’s co-operatives produce their own money and credit would be cheap enough for the unemployed to live off or set up their own businesses?

A libertarian critique of the State itself is that it would automatically involve some control over the economy, even if it professes to be a Minimal one.
According to Hayek (although hardly a libertarian) society should not be one large organisation. However, it is difficult to think of a stable society that isn’t a large organisation: Hayek didn’t seem to realise that we live in a world of states. It is also difficult to separate the State from the surplus that Capitalism provides to fund it.

A minimal conception of the state could possibly only involve a central government over a free federation of local municipalities. There is no unifying state as such, and it is up to each municipality to decide whether to enact laws passed by the government; they cannot be forced to do so. To be consistent, there are no corporations operating over more than one municipality either. Each municipality may also be free to produce its own currency (this was starting to sound like the EU!) Even so, centralising will always be at the backs of the minds of ministers and representatives, and the Free Association will likely act as a unified State towards foreign powers (The Culture, anyone?) Being doubtful that each municipality will be large enough to be economically self-sufficient, there will be pressure from the central government for national projects like dams and nuclear power stations over regional objections.

Strictly applying Libertarian/ Free Market ideas, central banks as we know them could not exist. By giving higher credit to certain individuals that are perceived to be better able to pay back and denying others any credit at all, current banks and banking systems operate a kind of “command economy”. In a Free Market, individuals should have equal opportunity to invest in enterprises that may or may not succeed, so equal credit should be given to anyone who isn’t a minor or insane. To be consistently “libertarian”, this should apply throughout a “Free Society.”

Also, any kind of health insurance, especially with regards to emergency or mental health care, could be perceived to be totalitarian, or be perceived as totalitarian to demand it from someone in immediate need of assistance (an argument Libertarians would probably use on Anarcho-Syndicalists). In this sense, emergency and mental health care at the very least should be a public good, free at the point of use in the Free Association.

So: Health insurance, central banks and national police and armed forces are Totalitarian. In a Free Association the first two would be non-compulsory at best while the last would be abolished entirely as “smothering the spontaneous ordering process of society by placing it in the hands of authority”. Of course, modern “Libertarians” are too obsessed with Capitalism to actually agree with any of this!

Assuming that this actually could be done and isn’t some libertarian pipe dream, each municipality would probably have an economy similar to that of Tucker’s or Hogskin’s. As stated, cheap credit and/or or maybe a municipality-provided free overdraft would provide relief for the unemployed with a generous pension at 65 and provision for those unable to work or in study. Of course, there would be some taxes, direct or indirect. Despite all this, there would always be some pressure from the central government for activities that would disrupt communities, international relations and the ecosystem.

If there is Government over Community, it will eventually intervene in the Economy of the Commnity.

So, libertarian: pensions or the environment? Or is communalism too totalitarian?

Anarchy is realism, anything else is Utopian.

State of Warfare

"Whoever says regulation says limitation: now conceive of limiting privilege before it existed?
... It would be an effect without a cause" and so "regulation was a
corrective to privilege" and not vice versa. [P-J Proudhon, _System of Economic Contradictions_, p. 371]

This quote shows the fallacious nature of the Original Position hypothesis or a State of Nature whereby the populace voluntarily surrendered to authoritarian rule, politically and economically.
The role of the state is to increase the wealth of the rich wherever possible while making it appear to be the result of “popular will”.

If there were no such thing as poverty, then there would be no need for government. Poverty is the raison d’etre of government’s existence; it could never allow a “levelling down”, and this is why states and corporations employ thousands of intellectuals to justify not spending money on social justice programmes. Central co-ordination is “totalitarian” when applied to social welfare programmes, but keep that money coming in to build more bombs and prisons while we turn a blind eye. Who would bite the hand that feeds them?

"Government cannot
want society to break up, for it would mean that it and the dominant class
would be deprived of sources of exploitation; nor can it leave society to
maintain itself without official intervention, for then people would
soon realise that government serves only to defend property owners. . .
and they would hasten to rid themselves of both." [Errico Malatesta,
_Anarchy_, p. 22]

“In the nineteenth century, states only turned to laissez-faire once they
could benefit from it and had a strong enough economy to survive it…

“The reason for the return of protectionist legislation was the Depression
of 1873-86, which marked the end of the first experiment with pure
economic liberalism. Paradoxically, then, the attempt to liberalise the
markets led to more regulation. In light of our previous analysis, this
is not surprising. Neither the owners of the country nor the politicians
desired to see society destroyed, the result to which unhindered
laissez-faire leads” Anarchist FAQ

"The practical evidence [is] that whatever
governments do is always motivated by the desire to dominate, and is
always geared to defending, extending and perpetuating its privileges
and those of the class of which it is both the representative and
defender." [Malatesta]


“Contrary to conventional wisdom, state intervention will always
be associated with capitalism due to:
(1) its authoritarian nature;
(2) its inability to prevent the anti-social results of the competitive market;
(3) its fallacious assumption that society should be "an accessory to
the economic system";
(4) the class interests of the ruling elite; and
(5) the need to impose its authoritarian social relationships upon an
unwilling population in the first place.

State intervention is as natural to capitalism as wage labour.” The FAQ


The social organisation, by the presence of violent coercion, is the dictator or instigator, of the economical situation.
This view is probably best explained by considering State Police/Armed forces. By any definition, presumably, members of the security forces are somewhat outside normal economic activity. However, in actually being paid for serving the Government, they are engaged in economic activity. In having a wage set by the State, the State is in effect determining that a soldier’s labour is worth a determined percentage of that of an ordinary worker. In repressive regimes, special police forces are paid several times the wage of the average worker in order to maintain loyalty to the State. Also, in certain Third World countries, members of the armed forces are little more than “legally armed bandits”, robbing or in some cases raping the poor (with the tacit consent of the males) to compensate for missing or inadequate wages.
In this fashion, all governments impose some form of Command Economy in order to subjugate the Poor.
By actually employing paid security forces all states directly affect the market they all pretend to worship by creating an artificial one.


“To expect that a community would remain indifferent to the scourge of
unemployment, dangerous working conditions, 16-hour working days, the
shifting of industries and occupations, and the moral and psychological
disruption accompanying them -- merely because economic effects, in the
long run, might be better -- is an absurdity. Similarly, for workers to
remain indifferent to, for example, poor working conditions, peacefully
waiting for a new boss to offer them better conditions, or for citizens
to wait passively for capitalists to start voluntarily acting responsibly
toward the environment, is to assume a servile and apathetic role
for humanity. Luckily, labour refuses to be a commodity and citizens
refuse to stand idly by while the planet's ecosystems are destroyed.

Therefore state intervention occurs as a form of protection against the
workings of the market. As capitalism is based on atomising society in
the name of "freedom" on the competitive market, it is hardly surprising that
defence against the anti-social workings of the market should take
statist forms -- there being few other structures capable of providing
such defence (as such social institutions have been undermined, if not
crushed, by the rise of capitalism in the first place). Thus, ironically,
"individualism" produces a "collectivist" tendency within society as
capitalism destroys communal forms of social organisation in favour of
ones based on abstract individualism, authority, and hierarchy -- all
qualities embodied in the state. In a free (i.e. communal) society,
social self-defence would not be statist but would be similar in nature
to trade unionism and co-operatives -- individuals working together in
voluntary associations to ensure a free and just society….

“In the case of Britain and a host of other countries (and more recently in
the cases of Japan and the Newly Industrialising Countries of the Far
East, like Korea) state intervention was, funnily enough, the key to
development and success in the "free market." In other "developing"
countries which have had the misfortune to be subjected to "free-market
reforms" (e.g. neo-liberal Structural Adjustment Programs) rather
than following the interventionist Japanese and Korean models, the
results have been devastating for the vast majority, with drastic
increases in poverty, homelessness, malnutrition, etc. (for the elite,the results are somewhat different of course).” The FAQ

Municipalism and Beaurocracy

Following from some brief comments about libertarian communism and municipalism, I would have to state that it is the form of social organisation that determines the economic relations. Any kind of governental relationship would be over and above any kind of co-operative economic relationship.

In the kind of municipalism Murray Bookchin expounded, if the co-operative economy is capable of running itself independently, then the Polis, so to speak, can only assign specific roles to be undertaken individually.

In this case, the municipal system has a very limited role in a non-hierarchical society, unless, of course, co-operative ventures require the existence of managers and specific technical staff on occaision. This creates a new "hierarchy of labour", with a minority either labouring less or profiting more than others.

Of course, if it were possible to completely automate industry or have an economy that did not require co-operative labour than there is some scope for municipalism in the context of a anarchical society.

Municipalism can only redeem itself by integrating itself with a more democratic form of capitalism, in the context of locally regulated economies.

Hey, happy December everybody!

Reading, among others, a book on Hayek. Very strange guy. If society is a "spontaneous order" that would be "totalitarian" to alter, how can you support institutions as artificial as Police Forces or standing armies? Apparently society is not One Big organisation, but if this is so, how can you reconcile a free society with the State?