Canberra

So now it has been two months since I have left that City of my birth- Sydney. The city of jacarandas and incessant, impatient traffic.

I have left many of my friends behind, and started anew, in Canberra, in a wonderful sharehouse with two art students.

I now ride a bike to work, and have much better quality of life. This city - our Capital - is made up of geometrically orientated suburbs, with median strips full of trees and wide enough to have picnics in.

I am reading many books, including one by Barack Obama, and I am hoping to start practising 'The Artists Way' soon.

More updates to follow!

Kevin Annett and Canada's genocide

I just watched the film Unrepentant: Kevin Annett and Canada's Genocide, a very important and harrowing documentary about the dispossession of Native people in Canada.

It adds new dimensions to what I already know about North American indigenous frontier history. [when i first heard lyrics of Ani DiFranco's song tis of thee, i was proud that i knew what the reference to small pox blankets was- the two edged sword of charity:

"Above 96th street
they hand out small pox blankets so people don't freeze
and the old dog's got a new trick,
it's called criminalize the symptoms while you spread the disease
I hold on hard to something
between my teeth when i'm sleeping
i wake up and my jaw aches
and the earth is full of earthquakes"]

What i realised is that it was a quite wide practice by church people- (including the missionaries working for the Catholic Church) to do such things, and to treat the Indigenous people as worthless...

OUTLINE:


In the early 1990's - maybe late 1980's- Kevin Annett, a United Church of Christ Minister, attempted to get to the bottom of why native people did not come to his church.

By inviting these people, who made up 30% of the population of his town, and allowing an 'open pulpit' policy- where anyone could speak after the sermon, the long hidden stories of trauma and suffering emerged.

The shocking revelation that various churches -through the residential school system- had willingly and officially pursued the annihilation of Native American civilisation- emerged. The participation of churches in eugenics policies- in forced sterilization, in deliberate infection of people with smallpox and TB through giving contaminated blankets and failing to isolate TB patients was revealed. The story goes on- and shows the lengths to which church officials would go to cover up, to silence him and to do damage control. There were drastic consequences of all these revelations for Arnett's life. He lost his marriage, his career and his future. You should watch it, and think about what it means for us in Australia.

I actually feel quite emotional listening to all the testimonies and the travesty of the different ways the UCC worked to prevent natural justice.

voting and abstention

I was driving back in my shared car-bubble from a mega shopping centre today, (having been to a beautician, and tried on some clothes- how superficial am I!!??) past the blank stares of so many young people. I was thinking about the way that there is a fine line in wearing clothes between being dignified, and in establishing standards of dress that set you apart from others, and hence distance you from others who can't afford or don't have the taste that you have.

I started to think about the post that my friend Simon Reeves wrote on his blog some time before the election- about voting and abstention. Simon is a guy who just radiates warmth and justice- so he's someone i really respect. Simon does not vote.

But I started to think there was something profound in the fact that he doesn't vote. His justification and his action were both profound. In other cases- several anarchists I know, and the case of the Exclusive Bretheren, their abstention slightly annoys me as a signal of their negativity towards our society in general. But in Simon's case, it is clear that he has a lot of love for society - as it is, in its incomplete and imperfect form.

But his statement in not voting says to me that he is not complacent about society and the way it is today. There is something seriously wrong with our current system of structuring public decisionmaking and participation.

By not voting, Simon is making a statement about the need for democratic participation that goes far deeper than writing numbers in boxes. In my opinion, the public must become Pro-active rather that simply Re-active. Simon is making an 'embodied' statement, making a symbolic and actual sacrifice in his democratic participation, saying 'that's not adequate for us'.

If i did similarly, it would force me out of complacency- to make a serious effort to resuscitate our passive political culture until I see real structural results.

I might consider it next time.

The real agenda

Overshadowed by George W Bush, the US Trade Representative is in Sydney today. She is one of the people driving the real agenda.

The agenda of APEC is to implement trade liberalisation- zero trade barriers in the Developed World by 2010, zero trade barriers in the Developing World by 2020. At each APEC meeting, countries must file reports on their progress in corporatising and privatising and deregulating their health, education, knowledge, environments, financial sector etc.

Yet much of this information slips between the cracks and never gets heard.

What we do hear is a distortion of the reality. An article in today's Sydney Morning Herald- from a speech to APEC- is so hypocritical -once you know the real story- it is beyond belief.

Appearing to be supporting the public sector, this article is entitled "Good public sector institutions essential for growth". But upon closer scrutiny, it is actually just a whitewash. It is promoting "well managed, accountable and ethical public institutions".

Yet APEC's policies of privatisation and deregulation, promoted through its acceleration of bilateral and multilateral trade negotiations -has crippled public institutions and their funding bases worldwide.

In this context, the call for ethical and effective practice is a mere platitude.

Here are some photos from the last few weeks:

at the environment collective cake stall at sydney university:

In the SRC:

sooooo... job searching is crap!!
it is sometimes so humiliating to justify oneself to future employers-- especially when you know you have so much to contribute to the world through working on projects that MATTER!!!
anyway. navigating through different treadmills- stepping from one treadmill to the other, and all the while taking on the machine mentality of working for someone else, in their frame of mind...

i guess that's just that simple experience of alienation that all the socialists and the existentialists articulated all those years ago. Oh to have some control over your labour!! and some respect in your workplace!!! and some recognition of your skills and some support from managers!

Here is an excerpt from a Chomsky interview in Le Monde Diplomatique, translated by Harry Forster for Z Magazine. Thankyou to Michael J. lafrate:


DM: Critics tend to lump you together with the anarchists and libertarian socialists. What would be the role of the state in a real democracy?

NC: We are living here and now, not in some imaginary universe. And here and now there are tyrannical organisations - big corporations. They are the closest thing to a totalitarian institution. They are, to all intents and purposes, quite unaccountable to the general public or society as a whole. They behave like predators, preying on other smaller companies. People have only one means of defending themselves and that is the state. Nor is it a very effective shield because it is often closely linked to the predators. But there is a far from negligible difference. General Electric is accountable to no one, whereas the state must occasionally explain its actions to the public.

Once democracy has been enlarged far enough for citizens to control the means of production and trade, and they take part in the overall running and management of the environment in which they live, then the state will gradually be able to disappear. It will be replaced by voluntary associations at our place of work and where we live.

DM: You mean soviets?

NC: The first things that Lenin and Trotsky destroyed, immediately after the October revolution, were the soviets, the workers' councils and all the democratic bodies. In this respect Lenin and Trotsky were the worst enemies of socialism in the 20th century. But as orthodox Marxists they thought that a backward country such as Russia was incapable of achieving socialism immediately, and must first be forcibly industrialised.

In 1989, when the communist system collapsed, I thought this event was, paradoxically, a victory for socialism. My conception of socialism requires, at least, democratic control of production, trade and other aspects of human existence.

However the two main propaganda systems agreed to maintain that the tyrannical system set up by Lenin and Trotsky, subsequently turned into a political monstrosity by Stalin, was socialism. Western leaders could not fail to be enchanted by this outrageous use of the term, which enabled them to cast aspersions on the real thing for decades. With comparable enthusiasm, but working in the opposite direction, the Soviet propaganda system tried to exploit the sympathy and commitment that the true socialist ideal inspired among the working masses.

DM: Isn't it the case that all forms of autonomous organisation based on anarchist principles have ultimately collapsed?

NC: There are no set anarchist principles, no libertarian creed to which we must all swear allegiance. Anarchism - at least as I understand it - is a movement that tries to identify organisations exerting authority and domination, to ask them to justify their actions and, if they are unable to do so, as often happens, to try to supersede them.

Far from collapsing, anarchism and libertarian thought are flourishing. They have given rise to real progress in many fields. Forms of oppression and injustice that were once barely recognised, less still disputed, are no longer allowed. That in itself is a success, a step forward for all humankind, certainly not a failure.