Anti-Traditional

I don't know how to check out your avatar. It's blue and apparently says 'never drink and drive'.

Usually I (and any of my psychogeographical mates) would get drunk or high and see where the night took us. We'd attempt to be open to new experience and not to become slaves to routine. We experimented with altering our body clocks (living on a 25, and then a 30, hour day). We experimented with pantheism - seeing the creative principle in everything. We lived our lives as 'art' - we were our own conscious canvas fusing sculpture and theatre. We tried to reprogramme our own behaviour.

Then we had mental breakdowns and decided to stop.

But I'd fogotten what the term for it was.

I used to do it all the time. But then I used to drink a lot and was for a time quite into phenomenology/psychogeography. I was an existential anarchist for a bit and came under the spell of situationist theory in the 1990s.

I'm not sure we can prefigure the new in the old. Fine, escape from dead time, be authentic; but we can't pretend we're not alienated. All we can do is strive for something more human. Part of that is developing and discussing our apprehension of the world. So I 'reject the rejection' of militancy.

I on't know what it is, sorry. You'll have to explain, and I'll get back to you on it.

When I was a Stalinist (not a hardcore tankie, but a supporter of the Soviet Union at least) I was a child. I knew, vaguely, what communism was about - fairness, internationalism, workers working for everyone not the bosses.

What made me realise Stalinsim wasn't that was looking at geo-politics, and realising if the USSR, Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Yugoslavia, N Korea, China and Vietnam were all 'communist' countries, then they shouldn't exist. The division in competing 'communisms' was an early indicator to me that these states were not what they were supposed to be.

So I was a 'revolutionary socialist' without an ideology and began to look at Anarchism - as it didn't seem to be corrupted by the dross of 'actually existing (not) socialism'.

Yeah, at least for the first couple of weeks. I've done some discussion on the first 5 or 6 chapters or so before, but it sure doesn't hurt to repeat it.

I'm leaving for a trip with school in about two weeks, though, and will be gone for three weeks, then I will probably be busy with other things than the internet until the beginning of June. So if it's okay if I drop out in a few weeks (and then probably/hopefully drop in again), I'm in.

Some time tomorrow I'll start posting reports. Now I have to sleep.

Absolutely. I'm going to bed, been in Traf Square partying with the Anarchists and came back and logged on to find reports. I'm shattered, cold, hungry and damp. Not a good state. Lots of typos. But quite happy I suppose.

G'night!

For Marx it was often about development of capital. He saw the position of Ireland under English domination as being similar to the slave-states of the US - 'the English workers will never be free until Ireland is free' or something. Polish inddependence he supported to free it from tsarist Russia, which could at that point still be reasonably described as 'feudal' (or maybe semi-feudal).

The Left Comm position is that things have changed since Marx's day. Capitalism has no more 'historic tasks' left. production is developed, the world market and international proletariat have been created - all the necessary conditions for socialism are here. We should, therefore, stop re-arranging the furniture and arguing about who gets to be capytain, when the capitalist ship is sinking.

Metaphorically.