There's a meeting.

There's a meeting planned at a bar I don't like much and featuring people I'm unsure about. And so the trepidation begins : who and where are more problematic that a purpose, the gentle breath of the undercover officer and / or informant, the practised and the unpractised, the barricades or the petition.

Maybe I will go, maybe I've been to so many from the early 70's on. The only one that sticks was Solidarity, a libertarian socialist group whose aimed to influence thinking and practise through their publications. Mainly I remember a joke about the Dictatorship of the Proletariat : CP shop steward says "them thick bastards need dictating to". 

Anti bureaucratic / anti Leninist IMG / WRP / CPBM-L / Stalinist. 

And instead, Socialisme et Barbarie  and Castoriadis. 

A brief flip through archives there's the whiff of dusty rooms and smoky light, discussions that stretch and then off into the night. Pen names, noms de guerre, 'telephone box' outfits arguing the toss with the 'bus shelter' organisations but more usually about them. The world I was marginally engaged with, until about 1979. So the idea comes with a shopping trolley full of past.

But what if it actually happened? 

Yes everyone is pissed off by the Tory majority and the damp and folding Labour Party. And the anthem is "Won't Get Fooled Again", which was written in ? 1974/5. 

So apart from the nostalgia of hearing the anthem of failure and resurgence, there may be a different way of responding to the completely unsurprising failure of the [post Blair] Labour Party. 

Some small points as a way of getting into this issue :

• we use the media, but we don't think about what it says.
• "Social media" is a method of getting people to cluster around "stuff", for reading in  bus shelters and forgetting.
• The cluster, the granfalloon, the queue for iPhones is a vacuous construct, the youth club [for troubled teens that accidentally helped John Fahey become a musician]. The Facebook/Twitter world is the outcome of an algorithm. It just seems to be connected to people.
• No one has experience of organisation, we've trimmed in order to survive, we fear conflict [but seethe with irritation] and snort derisively at the anarcho - sellotape groups who try to be democratic - Star and Shadow would have meetings with poor sods at which the outcome was unknown and at which you had to put up your hand to speak. "Team meetings" at work? I refer you to THF Drenching's seminal work.
• NSA / CIA / GCHQ. The same algorithm process. I have had the experience of having the phone tapped. First in 1980, the work phone would ting just after 9AM. Later in the 80's a friend called me about someone who had been arrested under the PTA, I saw her name in the paper. Tings and clicks. Now they can do it wholesale.
• Attention       s   p   a   n.
• Dog - whistle : socialist, communist, politics, working class, organisation, demonstration, confrontation, poverty, fascist, marxist, racist.... A set of definitions have been built up, an ideology of stumbling over what you don't want to be seen as.
• Emotion : something which can be expressed and forgotten simultaneously.
• A sense of History : anything before this year is now mulch.

It’s the dog fight moment : 16/2/10

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It’s the dog fight moment.

Mum told me you were having a bad time in Jallandhar. The pollution, poverty/wealth, noise, family politics and so on.

This is the dog fight moment that I had in K. I’d been there a couple of weeks, long enough to know that very little happened that hadn’t been repeated on a daily basis since the 1920’s. Chatting with old men, chatting with the lads, drinking tea. Then it was the dog fight. And all the repeats and familiar accents stopped dead. Big ugly scarred dogs with muzzles, a 6 piece band and the nice old man from Walsall was drawing a circle and whacking anyone who came into it. The dogs were released and they fought.

That’s the moment when the distance of the life you’re in and the life you’ve left opens like the Red Sea and you gawp into a huge space.

Your photographs of the factory foundry reminded me of the other description of India as like a Fellini film – something strange and very complicated is happening right in front of you but at an impossible distance. India is very complicated and very intrusive : what happens takes place right there.
It must be hard to be stuck in the middle of family warfare, but I suspect that is how it is. And it’s not war, it’s the family being a family. The ‘englishness’ is accidental. The sheer noise in the village was disconcerting; the silence of the English actually the strange part.

So you need to adjust to the life in India – it can’t happen the other way round. It is easy to be overwhelmed, but it is just a very big river passing underneath your bridge.

I’ll send this in bits via Facebook.

Speak tomorrow.

Dad x

And then again, not.

By chance, I found myself at a page which linked to this. As we older folk say "I have no fucking idea how or why". I'm sitting at the computer after a Sunday afternoon at the allotment.

                                       

This is not the allotment; this is a dead weed on a lay by in Northumberland, 2, maybe 3 weeks ago. The allotment is a slice : a sample of the geological strata it occupies, a shallow amphitheatre on the site of a former quarry. And of the people who use it - as an outlet for a specific kind of non-art creativity - the application of knowledge, skill, temperament, a taste for grunt level physical work, the exact experience of time passing.

Today, I did little, slowly and distractedly. Greenhouse, dried chicken shit and volcanic dust. Pulled rhubarb, spinach and wild garlic.

I was there on my own - Jill has sprained her ankle - and I'm really just the helper. The usual backchat about such-and-so was different. We were standing under a warm grey sky in the aftermath of the election. The Tories won through cynical manipulation of 'fear' - Mail headlines claiming Ed Miliband was planning 'class war' and that the SNP were about to invade Godalming. And the use of faulty and deliberately misleading polls, overestimating the Labour vote by 3-4%.This wasn't worked out on the back of an envelope, this is hardcore organised and strategic planning, based on real information and used to scare a jumpy electorate. 

Added to the genuinely hopeless Miliband, and the SNP with almost total support, the Liberal Democrats were punished for their participation in the 'Coalition' - but not their Tory masters. And we all dived in and whooped about a 'hung Parliament' and a Tory defeat. I believed it and joined in and bang! the bastards have a 100 seat majority over Labour, LDs are shot. The SNP will be kept out of English politics - they will have tax raising powers. And that's how it was done : cruel, painful and efficient. Using only the things they found lying around :

News International and Murdoch. 

Ashcroft former Tory vice chair and non-dom and now running a polling company. 

UKIP and the idiot Farridge to cut into the white working class Labour vote.

Labour trying to grab some credibility via Russell Brand - aka the yoof vote.

Polls that say what you want them to say and the same numbers meaning a Labour majority AND the end of civilisation. It worked, not a fluke, not by chance or the skin of anyone's teeth. It worked because the class represented by the Tories - financial capital, outsourcing, banks and communications companies. The burghers of Godalming and Darras Hall will support = vote, but the real stuff is the raw power of capitalism.

We are passed by, overflown, surveilled and obedient. Or maybe we're not.