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Monday, October 31, 2016

October, 2016

And so the first of October blows in with Sturm und Drang. The Doggies win the Premiership. The Swans are plucked. Julia Gillard is happy in her bourgeois nest and the world has a few more beers preferably not those brewed by scabs hired by capitalists on the make for a higher rate of profit. Still you have those who do not mind if capitalists run their businesses as long as they pay an adequate share of taxes. Confusion on the wage system remains mired in the liberalism of the day. The planes fly over residential areas of Perth at 2 am and nobody thinks anyone can do anything about it anyway. And so it goes as methane leaks from unfreezing parts of ocean floors. Trump seals his fate with misogynist tweets. The bourgeoisie feels safer from the monster of its own kind its own creation. The dumb turds supporting his blurts because they reflect their own thinking prepare their rifles to fight big gov'mint while watching reality on TV or some screen of screaming conspiracy theorists. Oh yes we know what's really going on. And in the Middle East the factions of Allah combat each other to the death supported by their big buddies in the ruling classes of East and West. All is well in the world of bikinis and burquinies. Love conquers all in cartoons. Bourgeois democrats in the House of Lords attempt to stop the left movement of the disgruntled workers in the Great Britain by tempting them with stability and justice for all. Yes you can have your NHS just don't go voting Labour. Remember that wage-slavery is freedom and we'll all be on the same page. Treat other people like you want to be treated. Even though I'm not a believer in the supernatural or an afterlife there are some notions within religious teaching which have helped civilise the human species. I'm happy about that. Do you want to be treated like a servant. Do you know anyone who does want to play or even be a slave. Quite possibly you do. I don't. Most people would rather own their own business than be a wage-slave. And there's the moral rub. How does one treat others as subalterns while maintaining a belief in doing to others as you would have them do unto you. Why carry on with the inequality of political power between humans. That's my challenge to those who base so much of their conscious time focused on their faith. Marriage has a lot to do with faith. One has to have faith that the other will remain sexually in tune with them throughout the marriage. This is a major problem with monogamy. Libertarian communism makes sense when you socially own and democratically manage the means of production. Before that it is a good idea. In the meantime we have class interests to deal with. As we produce the wealth with the exception of natural resources we have an interest in enjoying the social product of our labour. We even have an interest in enjoying the wealth which is embodied in natural resources. Why can't we have trees old growth forests clean air and water. Are we not clever. Are we not capable. Are we fettered by a system whose media amplified voices proclaim goals of higher population for the world to be able to pay for the retirement of the old wealth producing class. What the hell is going on when the powers that be cannot seem to act to stop greenhouse gas emissions and climate change driven extreme weather events.

From "The Perverse Economy" by Michael Perleman:

The Tragedy of the Commons

The market figures prominently in two competing explanations for
environmental disasters, including extinctions such as that of the
passenger pigeon. According to the earlier sections of this chapter,
markets pose an environmental danger. I described how market forces give people an incentive to use resources with abandon because they take little or no account of the future costs to society of wasteful practices.

A competing theory proposes that markets offer the best possible
approach to providing environmental protection. Garrett Hardin, a
conservative biologist, wrote the classic statement of this
proposition during the salad days of the environmental movement in an article entitled, "The Tragedy of the Commons" (Hardin 1968). The "Commons" in the title referred to the land that traditional English villagers shared for grazing their animals.

With no evidence whatsoever, except for an obscure nineteenth century pamphlet, Hardin insisted that the absence of property rights in the English common lands inevitably led to an environmental disaster. Based on his limited understanding of traditional English land use patterns, Hardin declared that without private property, each individual would selfishly attempt to graze as many animals as possible on a finite area of land, putting excessive stress on the environment.

Hardin's story has been so widely circulated that it has become
commonly believed. Even serious environmental books frequently
reprinted the article. Experts in British rural history dismiss
Hardin's account. Specialists who have done extensive research about contemporary collective ownership also dispute Hardin's contention that such an arrangement will necessarily cause excessive use of the environment. They distinguish between open access systems where anybody is free to take all that they want and a commons, in which people work out rules for sharing a resource. These scholars have found that traditional societies frequently developed effective ethical codes to ensure both sustainable aggregate harvests and a relatively equitable distribution of access to resources. They report that traditional societies have created arrangements that are "far more binding on individual conscience than any government regulations could ever be" (Sethi and Somanathan 1996, p. 766). Rather than belabor the details of this subject, I would direct the reader to Elinor Ostrum's excellent introduction to the literature that she prepared for economists (see Ostrum 2000).

Of course, the power of Hardin's article had less to do with its
historical veracity than its comforting message for those who wish to
nurture faith in the market. The evidence that Hardin mustered was
little stronger than an urban myth. No matter that he was wrong; no
matter that these villages had institutions that actually prevented
the overuse of the commons Hardin's article continues to be
read. The intended lesson is supposed to be that no reasonable
alternatives to the market exist.

We are in bondage. We cannot seem to emancipate ourselves from wage slavery and change domination and control over the social product of our labour back to where it belongs to ourselves the ones who produce it. Maybe then we could live in a society where a man such as myself could be one of the six other fellows married to an intelligent attractive young woman. Ah the incentives for trashing the dictates of class society. Especially if the same man could be married to another woman. Polyandry is rarely spoken of in the approving ways gay monogamous marriage is these days. I fear the planned obsolescence of my life. Sitting outside in my backyard reading DHARMA BUMS next to the little stone Buddha my father got in Japan. He etched, "Ballard" on the bottom with the date "4/13/49". I'm finally old enough to appreciate this novel.  Beats morphing into Freaks. The 60s are coming on. You can feel them in Kerouac's 1958 classic. A mind revolt against the grey flannel suits and obedience to the dominant ideas of the ruling class especially those connected with the importance of buying and selling. Jack's novel reminds of my friends and the way we used to relate and still would would that we lived near each other. As it is we are spread across our planet. But I have friends now who are very similar and times too are similar. Smoking mbanje. Drinking good ale. Making fine coffee. Simple nutritious food. Sex every once in awhile. Love all the time. Good music galore. Long friendly meaningful conversations. The ocean forest and desert. I contemplate the relation between poverty and freedom. There is a unity of opposites working toward freedom there. The question of needs needs to be addressed in a communist society. How much is enough will relate directly to how much of our collective time is necessary to produce it after we abolish the wage system. 


Movement through the Moments

Life is change
Death is change
Matter is the content of form
Form is empty without matter
Matter can neither be created nor destroyed
You are One with the Universe whether you like it or not


The voting public won't be ready for open borders until they are ready to abolish the political State. For the immense majority theory remains at the level of aphorism dogmas to be memorised from religions or lessons learned from parents' praise and spankings. Horkheimer and Adorno had time. Most of us are too busy producing surplus value for our masters to have the free-time necessary to develop theory and we suspect those who do of plotting our domination. Lots of truth in this wariness as most ideologists do have political agenda to rule. Over my life I have found most communists and Communists alike have never read CAPITAL. They are in love with an Idea as their reality slips through time. Socialists do the same and in fact as I've pointed out time and again Marx and Engels used the terms communism and socialism interchangeably. But then most socialists and communists never advocate for changing the mode of producing and distributing wealth while the anarchists talk about establishing an equality of wages and small decentralised enterprises trading commodities fairly after the political State is abolished. Develop patience through realising that material reality will never meet your expectations of perfection even though beauty in so many ways surrounds you.  Perhaps I should keep that in mind as my blood pressure rises yet again. As spring gets underway we have four sandgropers singing in our backyard. That's three more than last year. Cold weather's passing. Men who are not turned on by sexy naked women are either homosexual psychologically repressed by puritanist ideology of one sort or another or they are dead. If sex is evil then life is evil. Lots of girls used to wear sweaters. No more. I remember a time in the backseat of a Cadillac fondling my girlfriend. She had a white fuzzy kind of tight fitting sweater on. Her parents were in the front seat driving the car from Bucknell to Harford. But that was then and now I read Kent Haruf's PLAINSONG. Being a pensioner is great. Freedom to spend one's time as one wishes should be enjoyed by more. Problem is the bourgeoisie don't want to share the wealth in their possession. So they have their media amplified talking heads turn the retired working class into an object a fiscal burden on the economy. They sit around all day drinking beer and speaking loudly sometimes making what are perceived by most to be lewd remarks. Well the men anyway. The women drink secretly behind closed doors. Some read romance novels. The Internet makes sex watchable 24/7. Viruses abound in and out of computers. Sexual repression and more or less instant gratification lead a largely parallel existence. Moralists who connect sex with sin condemn the porn industry but not because sex has become commodified. They don't oppose capital's insatiable desire to commodify everything. They want the individual to suppress sexual desire and lead the life set in the example of a nun or a monk unless one is attempting to produce new offspring. The objectification of females and to a certain extent males has to do with both perceived sin and patriarchal dominance. The material roots of patriarchal dominance lie in the marketplace for commodities for the deal is the first born son of the patriarch gets the wealth the father has accumulated after the father dies. Of course this relationship to property has been undermined over the years. But it is not entirely absent.  Not by a longshot. You'll never make a saint of me.   Why not make life into a work of art. The ruling class don't want you to see the free-time possible. Look at all those people employed for wages who produce no saleable good or service for their employers. That time is largely wasted on maintaining the wage-system. In communist society this political apparatus would not be needed.  Just strive for a fair go in the marketplace of commodities and your employers will be happy. Celibacy is such a difficult practice. Sex is driven by desire pleasure and the instinct for survival. It is natural. Abstention from sex is unnatural. Most men find it extremely undesirable. I don't presume to speak for women in that arena. Celibacy doesn't belong to life. Sexual abstention belongs to class rule's death culture. On the other hand I don't want to have sex with a woman who doesn't want to enjoy sex with me for whatever reason she has. I think that should be a generalised attitude between all men and women. Do we want a freer society or do we just want a better job. Tactics should be consistent with the strategic goal of the movement for more freedom. Dominance and submission are the leitmotif of unequal political power between all men and women. The supervisor's role is to make sure the worker produces the desired result of the employer. With what Marx called productive workers this result manifests itself as an accumulation of saleable goods or services. Unproductive workers are employed to serve the needs of the bourgeoisie in the political State the household and prisons to name but a few. Of course the military is included amongst the unproductive. They perform a service for the ruling class but they produce no surplus value and the production of surplus value is what turns a servant into a valued worker.  Just keep the price of labour power down and things will be hunky-dory. The economy depends on us acceding to the need of the employing class for higher rates of profit. Besides higher rates of profit are proof of efficiency. We all believe that don't we. As some bourgeois said back in the 50s what's good for business is good for the country. By the same token what is not good for business is bad for the country. We all know this now. Malcolm Turnbull tells us this everyday. We must cut taxes for the companies and by extension those who own them. We must privatise public assets and services to make them efficient. What he doesn't say is efficient for the bourgeoisie not the working class. Class interest is a dirty concept never to be pushed in the pro-capitalist media or out of the mouths of pro-capitalist politicians. Market solutions are best. This is the mantra. Wouldn't want to suggest a command economy of State ownership as being useful for much of anything other than sneering ridicule.  I don't suggest State capitalism is oh so superior to libertarian capitalist social relations although I don't buy the line that public ownership of the means of producing goods and services is inherently inefficient either. You are responsible for your boredom. There's plenty to do and to enjoy. Spring rolls on. The prescribed burns begin. Smoke gets in your eyes. The child next door cries. The mother is not sympathetic. Get over it she shouts. The child stops crying. And the beat goes on. Trains echo in the distance. Doves coo. Black parrots fly east. Good beer is ready at hand. Mbanje exists to be enjoyed. It travels the world on waves of enhanced sensual pleasure. Opium masks the pain of the world. That is its pleasure. Some would say that beer works the same way and in ways it does. But as every wise alcoholic will tell you beer doesn't make you forget. It's only a temporary mask for the memory. I suppose this is part of its attraction to some folks. Not to me though. Real ale tastes good. A temporary loss of the rules imposed by bourgeois mindfulness is good thing in my book. Hurting others or hurting yourself is allowing the blues to use you as opposed to you tuning into blues music done well and realising that the reason you're miserable is that miserable is the norm in the class ruled societies that we live in. When workers in Palestine take hold and operate the means of producing wealth they will have emancipated themselves. They created capital. They deserve to socially own what they socially produce. Nationalism is the ideology which proclaims that the workers and the capitalists have material interests in common. Wealth producers used to believe that they had material interests in common with the monarchy and its aristocrats. Nationalism is an Idealism an abstraction one allows to be put in charge of one's life. One loses control. Alienation results from reification. This should be ABC for the materialist. It's not. Meaning can only come about through one actively engaging in understanding another. Celibacy sucks dead donkeys' dicks. But the wage system and whole lot other matters suck e.g. racism, patriarchal norms of power etc. but these are all leaves on the death culture's tree. We won't get much of anywhere until we realise that we the immense majority must uproot the tree of Capital. And we do that by consciously abolishing the wage system. Once common ownership and democratic control over the collective product of labour is established by the majority history as we consciously make it can begin. Classes disappear immediately. Patriarchal norms take a longer time. A lot of that transitional time will be taken within the battle of ideas as the material basis for maintaining patriarchal norms is abolished with the abolition of private property in the means of production and reproduction. Racism should go within a generation or at most two. After all you cannot have racism if you acknowledge in all public discourse that we're all the same species and that race is a pseudo-scientific concept which has been used by ruling classes to justify their assumption of political power and wealth accumulation based of course on merit. Let the ruling classes tremble as this giant this immense majority becomes conscious of its power to produce wealth and political power in a word of its merit as a class. The critique of narcissism is the latest realisation of the psychological manifestation of cultural political and social domination of bourgeois ideology in public intercourse. And then I watch "Three Sisters" on a warm sunny spring afternoon.  Hilarious empty members of the ruling class talking romantic nonsense and about how nice it must be to be a worker. After all they are so civilised. They no long have torture or public executions. Makes one want to shout The Bolsheviks are coming. The Bolsheviks are coming. The peasants are hopelessly benighted committed to their religion interpreted as dogma. After all isn't that what platonic Idealism is all about. You see and sense a similar thing when you watch Bertolucci's "1900". Indeed if you just use a little of your imagination you can envision bourgeois cretins making similar vacuous observations about life today. The ruling class has free-time. It just doesn't know what to do with it. Sensuous existence seems to be composed of Bunuel's  "That Obscure Object of Desire". They are the boring complaining of being bored as their minds lay immersed in empty abstractions. Their ideals remain in the empty realm of perfection in their minds. Hopkins is his usual Pierre Bezukhov hesitating self. Wonderfully played. Derek Jacobi is excellent too. The whole acting cast is superb. Smile. That's what Chekhov wanted you to do. He wanted to raise a sardonic smile. Also perhaps to recognise a little of that old bourgeois societal emptiness in your own life. Enjoy some black humour. Recover. Move on as you say to yourself nothing's happening or as Beckett would have his characters put it nothing to be done. Then watch another play by Anton and think of the rise of those workers councils (soviets) which began to emerge amongst the women workers of Ivanovo in 1905. See the leitmotif. Repression is the death culture. Change the leitmotif. Joie de vivre is the way you spend your increased free-time. Through mutual pleasure not pain. Yes those two are incompatible. Powerful individuals meeting without scheming to dominate one another. Power is equalised. Nobody is boss when everyone is. Desire determines the economy. Wealth is no longer commodified. It is no longer cajoled through advertising. There is nothing to sell. Anyone can take from the social store of goods and services as much as s/he has put in in terms of socially necessary labour time. Those who cannot put in time because they are sick or are children or are otherwise unable have their needs met. What's socially necessary to produce is what the the society decides. This quantity is measured by what is taken from the shelves so to speak. The producer and the object being produced are connected through social ownership and democratic control. The commodity has ceased to exist. Wealth has become demystified. It takes a total of so and so much time to construct a bicycle and the producer can own it when s/he puts in an equivalent amount of time to doing some socially necessary task. The appreciation of art is up to the individual as much as the sexual attraction between individuals is. One can think this is a great piece of music while the same piece doesn't turn another individual on at all or at least not as much. The same is true for painting or fiction. And there is a similar attraction repulsion dynamic going on in the minds of those who are or are not sexually attracted to each other. I'm not always interested in speaking with other people. I like time away from human company. I also like time with human company. Give me some good dancing blues real ale and a toke and I'll make a fool of myself on the dancefloor. But sometimes I just want to be alone in nature observing the bees and the birds and the lizards and the snails and the flowers all purple yellow and orange sacred Ibis flying overhead as Ravens caw their long drawn out cawing complaint. In the mornings the Magpies twirl their long tunes around the darkness just before dawn and the Kookaburras laugh like Hyenas as the Sun sets. I fear screen culture is driving us further away from the natural world. If you don't know what I'm writing about here try to read THE DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT by Horkheimer and Adorno. Screen culture may intensify the drive away from realising how dependent we are on maintaining even expanding the health of the ecosphere. All of which makes it easier for sellers of capitalist snake oil that the real important matters are all about making the business community healthy wealthy and ruling. Of course this wisdom is promoted by pro-capitalist polytrickters of the right and left in one way shape or form. I have never met a woman yet who loved my level of lustfulness. Sooner or later they get tired of my desires. Yay feminism. They can be who they want now without men telling them what to do because they essentially own them. Fuck all that private property shit. I will always gravitate toward the libido and away from the death culture. In a way that makes me more like the Marquis de Sade than Nietzsche or any of the other sensual denialist. Of course the divine Marquis was immersed in the consciousness of private property and all its power possessive realities. The celebration of cruelty is part and parcel of a society shot through with sadistic power relations which reproduce themselves in varying form over the history of humankind's existence under class rule. The worker next door listens to angry ghetto kids rapping to repetitious rhythmic rhyme. The kid is always happier when he's home. The mom too. Fights and crying bouts still occur. All part of the daily lives of the modern family. Every once in awhile Rasta man beat comes on. No marijuana is smoked. No books are read. The family goes on reproducing itself as it has for what seems is forever now. What the Aboriginal cultures can teach us about the necessity of our unity with nature is worthy of our attention. As Marx so many times observed we have become increasingly alienated from the Earth and the objects we produce including our social relations. In PLAINSONG there is a level of honest conversation which we would all do well to celebrate. The McPheron brothers, Guthrie, Maggie Jones and Victoria Roubideaux, Ike and Bobby. On the other hand, we have the Beckmans. PLAINSONG reads as smoothly and clearly as Harper Lee's TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Haruf embodies his characters with the material truth of everyday small town life in a time not so long ago when high school teachers were still lighting up cigarettes while waiting to put their stencils on the mimeograph machine. It was a time in America before anyone had heard of sexism animal rights vegan diets or mobile phones. It was a time when 10 year old kids would ride feed and stable their horses without supervision. It was a time before the birth control pill. It was another time one we should all visit or revisit as the case may be. To be sure it was vulgar. To be sure there were fewer ideological masks for humans to hide behind. To be sure the commodification of human relations had not taken as great a toll on time. I don't want a boat. I don't want a plane. I don't want a business. I don't want to be someone's boss. I don't want to live on a dead planet. I don't want to be Prime Minister or King or Emperor or prophet. I don't want a mansion. I don't want a Maserati. I don't want to be rich. I don't want to be poor. I don't want to get sick. I don't want to be addicted. I don't want to be a servant. I don't want to be a wage-slave. I don't want to be fat. I don't want to be thin. I don't want to die. I don't want to give up sex. I don't want a baby. I don't want a boss. I don't want plastic surgery. I don't want a tattoo. I don't want a prostitute. I don't want another ad. I don't want more plastic. I don't want more bombs to be produced. I don't want to rape. I don't want to be raped. I don't want cancer. I don't want freezing temperatures. I don't want climate change. I don't want coal. I don't want nukes. I don't want war. I don't want there to be refugees. I don't want to believe. I don't want any commandments. I don't want to submit. I don't want a landlord. I don't want a blimp. I don't want an ocean cruise. I don't want alienation. I don't want to own anybody. I don't want to owe anybody. I don't want an asbestos fence. I don't want to be white. I don't want to be black. I don't want to be yellow. I don't want to be a coward. I don't want to be a hero. I don't want fascism. I don't want a dogma. I don't want a bird. I don't want a new flag. I don't want an old flag. I don't want to be a master or a slave. To make the U.S. election clearer for Australians, think of it as a contest between Julia Gillard and Clive Palmer. If Jill Stein could become POTUS, we'd have a government which would be more attuned to the class interests of the producers. I have no doubt about that if we had ham we'd have ham and eggs if we had eggs. I also have no doubt she'll lose. That's the way elections are structured in the USA--first past the post. The fact is that the working class are doing it tough and they will continue to do so until they can get themselves together politically as a class. It's beginning to happen. Occupy Wall Street movements and the flow on to the Bernie Sanders campaign revealed the level of consciously awakening discontent with capitalist system in the USA. Bourgeois individualism denies that social forces influence his or her strong personality political decisions and history. The more history changes the more it remains the same. This is the mantra. Face reality. Your sexual desires will fall on deaf or falsely responding ears in this day and age. Sexual emancipation began with the birth control pill. A really total erotic liberation cannot occur as long as the commodification of human relations remains. The weather is perfect on some days during our Perthian October. This afternoon is 80F with sunny blue skies. Comrades of the Keg continue to meet. Various opinions exist on varied matters political and industrial. This is how working class dialogue should be. Having a different opinion should not be confused with having hurtful intent. Differences are to be expected amongst sovereign individuals. The dialogues and friendships continue with the flow of life in Comrades of the Keg. For a brief moment in time Objective Spirit makes an appearance. This happens when friends can speak frankly with each other and remain comrades. I need time to do things. When I'm rushed I tend to make more errors. School tests are based on this principle. They are designed to separate the quick from the average. The quick don't always succeed with fulfillment although they are promised to do so by the the dominant ideology as they are a grade better than the average. Many are now contributing to the income flow of those who sell psychiatric advice. Professionals can be such merchants. Imperialism is just class rule projecting power. To rid the world of imperialism we'd need to establish classless democratic ownership of the collective product of labour. Of course this is not what nationalists want to hear or recognise. "The more things change, the more they remain the same." This is the mantra of the conservative and the a historical ultra-hip cynic. There were no elections under absolutism. Monarchists would love to go back to that era. After all "Plus les choses changent plus elles restent les mêmes" right. Labour power is the only commodity which continues to create more real wealth after it is purchased. Real GDP is going up in Australia. The top 10% and the companies they own continue to have their taxes cut even as they have their reps in Parliament argue for cutting the social wage in order to put the government budget back into surplus. Beware right-wing nationalist unionism. That sort of notion is essentially fascist. The unity of classes in the cause of the strengthening the power projections of the nationalist State under the rule of Capital is fascism in action. The old "human nature" argument. You can't have social ownership and democratic control over the collective product of labour because the workers who produce the collective product of labour would turn on each other in a war of each against all. Hobbes made that argument to support the continuation of monarchist rule. What does this mean in a practical sense. It means that we should just put our shoulders to the wheel and take our marching orders from the employing class because it's human nature to follow orders from people who are hiring you to produce wealth for them to sell. Here's how to stay as healthy as you can. Remember that being angry is mostly a waste of time unless you can effectively change circumstances. Workers will emancipate themselves from the wage system or continue to be politically oppressed and economically exploited. Use it or lose it the universal principle for living well. Harmonise. Live within your biorhythms. Do fifty or more push ups first thing in the morning. Ten deep knee bends while the coffee is dripping keeps the legs strong. Lift your 9 kilo weights every afternoon. Jog for five kilometres or so on the beach a couple times a week. Don't eat animals. Eat nutritional food. Don't clean up your plate. Try to lower your calorie intake to 1,500 for four or five days in a row each month. Take a small aspirin at least five days a week. God is an idea which humans create. When humans die their gods die with them except for those humans who live on and continue to have faith that gods exist. As far as we know other animals don't do this type of thinking. The political State is the murder weapon of the ruling class. The State is designed to repress resistance to class rule. Lawbreakers are supposed to be convicted and sent to prison. Armed humans are hired to enforce the laws of the ruling class. Workers are employed in the military the police and the prison system which is organised by the ruling class to maintain order amongst the citizenry based on the rule of laws made by the bourgeoisie. In a classless democracy we'd have to figure out how to organise public force against those who would physically hurt others. I can see a scenario where a big person might attempt to vamp on a person of smaller physical stature. The urge for freedom which we all have should never be perverted into an urge to hurt another. That's the way it works under class rule one person's freedom is dependent on putting another person in a worse position of personal power up to and including death. The working class has not been willing to establish its legitimate claim to the collective product of its labour. There have been many attempts to get the workers to join together as a class for itself since the mid 19th century. Literally millions of SLP leaflets alone have been passed out to the wage-slaves of the U.S.A. .  The response should have been greater than it was to both the SLP's leaflets and the information readily available in public libraries, not to mention news stands and other largely fruitless efforts. Writing letters to the editor made some difference in terms of the public dialogue but it didn't mean the SLP or other revolutionary organisations urging workers to organise as a class to abolish the wage system continued to swell with more active members. The message was there. As the 20th century rolled on the medium of public communication became more and more homogenised as one would expect with the accumulation of capital due to the victory of economies of scale. A blow occurred as the result of a couple of important movements. One was the workers and students who were involved in promoting the Civil Rights Movement and the other was the quickening pace of communication especially with the advent of the Internet. The existence of the Internet has led to an explosion of communication between workers of the world. In its wake this wave of public speech has resulted in undermining the authority of the bourgeoisie who once upon a time could rely on their broadcasting networks and newspaper publishing houses to dictate the parameters of acceptable public debate. Now though most of the old stand up on your hind legs abolish the wage system left is either dead or close to it. Even so the workers are not ready to put their labour time into organising as a class to eventually establish common ownership and democratic control over the collective product of their labour. Some Nobel Prize winning song writer once sang something like let us not talk falsely now the hour's getting late. Already 80% of the reef above Lizard Island is dead. As the Ferengi say a good lie is easier for humans to believe than the truth. There are a lot of psychological casualties out there in left-land who know that they can get the attention they never got from mommy and daddy by showing how hurt they are by the actions of their fellow grouplet members. Purge the uncleanly thinkers. Castrate the bastards and clitorechtemies for the rest. The libido must be smashed along with all the hurtful speech because it is sinful to harm the sacred abstraction of the other. Let them prey for the workers divided will always be defeated. Long live the bourgeois democratic political State. We cannot go on. We will not go on. We go on. Smoking marijuana and drinking real ale is still possible away from the maddening crowd. Spring is here. I'll think I'll have another beer. Fulfillment is just around the corner. Enjoy the moment while you can. There are lots of people in the world who can't. Wars between ruling classes continue to be fought by their followers in the immense majority. Refugees spill over the borders of political States. Children who have no idea why are driven to sadness despair and a life without play all under the stern rule of those in charge of bringing them up to serve the class ruled State with an honourable life or death. If this is not immiseration I don't know what the concept means. The modern ruling class lives in comfort as all this is happening. They are bourgeois in most places but some are still part of the old feudal order and call themselves aristocrats. Theocrats fall into this historical category as well. The alliance of church and State goes back to the beginnings of class rule in Sumeria. Relatively faint echoes continue today in the Jewish State the Vatican State and the Islamic States. Scarcity is dependent on the two sources of wealth labour and nature. We have more than enough labour to produce the technology necessary to make a human life full of free-time. Of course we cannot democratically decide to do that because the immense majority do not socially control nor collectively own what they produce. Nature is more complicated. World population should be compatible with our being able to live in harmony with the ecosphere. Right now under the wage system the sustainable population limits are being exceeded. The Ibis flies overhead giving off a long drawn out duck quack. One can hear it between the jets and the child who cries loudly next door when it comes time for an afternoon nap. I prefer Chekhov to Ibsen. His aristocrats are even more absurdly Idealist than Henrik's bourgeois all of which makes his plays funnier. Ibsen's eye is largely focussed on the difference between reality and the bourgeois Idealist's conception of how the world should be. In the wake of Idealism's force in life many a social relation is ruined. Hatred for those who do not conform to Form becomes toxic to free social intercourse. The urge to dominate is connected to the urge for survival. This urge manifests itself in different ways depending on the historical moment. Today the worker must sell labour power in order to survive. Yesterday the peasant had to give over a certain portion of peasant labour. Slaves had to give everything. To the degree that women have been able to free themselves from being another contribution to the wealth owned by the man humans have achieved a more equal political power amongst themselves.