Little more than a poor excuse for a party. Nothing wrong with that of course but let's not pretend that Anarchism has any realistic solutions for modern life. The bookfair will attract the usual losers it always has but like the EDL they are not representitive of a viewpoint that has any mainstream support whatsoever.

Noam Chomsky to start with...Reggie you must be a sad lonely individual,in a cold shed sucking on your thumb somewhere.
Oh!and stop smelling yer fingers!!

"Little more than a poor excuse for a party. Nothing wrong with that of course but let's not pretend that Anarchism has any realistic solutions for modern life. The bookfair will attract the usual losers it always has but like the EDL they are not representitive of a viewpoint that has any mainstream support whatsoever."

On the contrary, the main three political parties are currently presiding over some of the worst membership figures seen in their collective histories. It wasn't that long ago the Conservatives could pack some of the largest conference centres out in the UK, their last but one conference was held in a shopping centre! The Conservatives like Labour and the Lib Dems are politically deficit now. They have a real problem with being able to isolate and act on any great political idea these days. The big political projects of the past are all over with. So all we have remaining now is a loose confederation of "centrists" all battling over who owns the populist ground. In reality they are all populists but they have this language like "centre ground", "middle way" and "centrism" to describe what they are doing, as though they are not populists. When all political options are competing for support using the politics of populism, you know something has gone wrong politically and ideologically. You know that there is a political deficit. Political deficits are always a bad idea. There is nothing that perturbs the people more than having the same stock message being communicated to them through a range of apparently competing voices.

This political deficit works for Anarchism because where there is a political deficit, people perceive that political choice is the antidote, and Anarchism is all about choice. You seem to see this in terms of one idea competing against another idea, but it is the deficit of one idea, which naturally leads to another.

We have to get away from this nonsense about political competition, that is the language used by the mainstream political parties. Their language is all based on competition and conflict and if you have any familiarity with political narrative in the UK you will be well familiar with the words that are used. When political battles are described by the mainstream media, it is always coached in the language of military logic - so you hear "shot across the bows", "holed below the waterline", "robust response", "torpedoed" and on and on. The logic of the mainstream political parties is that they are endlessly at war. That is bound to take a "toll" if it goes on for long enough.

And it has. We are all sick of it.

Anarchism and the economic theory that underlines it is often used to illustrate to second year economics students how an idea that looks sensible and viable at initial analysis is fundamentally flawed following deeper study.

Milton Friedman said that there were two groups of people who supported Anarchism, "those who know it doesn't work but don't want to admit it and those who are not clever enough to understand why it doesn't"

why at qmc? why not open air?