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.