Euromayday 2007

precarious, precarity....whatever, sigh.

Hope this disease never makes it out of the M25 & pseudo-intellectual Euro-academic circles were it's broken out, like a pox.

What the fuck does it mean (to me, to someone who's not protested, etc, blah). And for those who can't tell, that's a rhetorical question, ie one that doesn't require an answer. Because I don't give a fuck.

I had a young, genuine 'intellectual Euro-academic' girlfriend once. She asked me to help translate a text on anarchy into English. I only found two mistakes - I told her that her English was great 'but 'precarity and flexicurity aren't really words'. She then had to explain to me what they meant. Doh.

Just recently someone on IM complained 'we don't have the vocabulary to describe what they are doing to us'. Maybe we don't, but someone does, and if no one does, just invent a new word to describe it. Like any weapon, we can arm ourselves with words the way they attack us by limiting our access to words.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precarity

ooh don't like foreign words do we - maybe half the stuff that passes for political dialogue is alien to most people and maybe the words which come from tied old lefties and anarcommie's have lost there meaning.

Inventing language is part of the struggle, its also part of everyday existence in such globalised places like London. I mean have you ever talked to a 14 year teenager? Fucking hell most of the slang is completing mindboggling gibberish. My point, is that language, and the language of struggle should always change, mutate and we shouldn't be stuck in the past. If you want to find out what precarity means and the "precariat" - which itself is a pisstake at the word "proletariat" - then google FFS!

Second, a complaint to whoever wrote the IMC feature. The main content for Mayday in the UK should have been the actual initiatives that were being organised IN the UK. As far as I know there were NONE which had express a wish to be part of EUROMAYDAY - even the Autonomous Bloc organisers DID NOT agree that there should be a link - mainly in part because there is no groups left which are part of the EUROMAYDAY process and therefore to talk about EUROMAYDAY in the UK is false. I feel that the feature was projecting a certain type of politics on the Mayday events in the UK that was not accurate.

However as a EUROMAYDAY feature its ok.

Nice party, nice day, even though the fucking pigs us all the way there, commanding us to "take our feet off the seat", "don't throw your fag end there", "don't go into any licenced premisis", "don't go to the toilets", etc. we ended up taking them on a long walk around town, while shouting abuse at one another, or trying to have an intelegent debate with people who are not capable of thinking for themselves... we got there after like 3 hours, they were really scared we were going to break something, but I think that the only thing that broke that day was their moral, they seemed pretty pissed off at having to follow some assholes around town. felt like nothing was achieved this mayday, but had a good time...
God i hate cops, who the fuck do those arseholes think they are??!? they were clearly given orders aimed at harassing us, as they always do, why don't they take this on day, just one every year, and instead of giving us shit, go and arrest people for corporate crime, or crimes against humanity, or exploitation or whatever. clearly they care more about inforcing the law than about the moral justification which should (at least in theory), be behind the law. I guess property comes above humanity when you wear uniform

"Precarity"? I don't know what was wrong with "precariousness," which was a perfectly good word. Maybe people prefer "precarity" because it's shorter; but at least if you think about it, you can work out what it means.

"Flexicurity" is obviously a bullshit jargon word, and as such probably invented in order to promote somebody's academic career. Does anybody seriously believe that people can solve real problems by introducing ugly made-up words into the language?

Read Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" (1946). He says all there is to say about ugly writing and political dishonesty whether right or left.


"I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."

...
Orwell's six rules of thumb for good writing:

"(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. "

You know what? I used to visit indymedia because it was a good source of non biased, independent news on a range of subjects.

It appears that the site now only serves as a bulletin board / chat area for people with very similar axes to grind.

This site now seems so biased and cliquey that I'm going into reverse and not coming back, and before anyone decides "Good riddance - what have you ever done?" let me tell you that I have been an ACTIVE member of CND, Hunt Sabs and the anti-fascist movement amongst many others. Ever seen the Poll Tax riots on TV? I was there and very nearly got nicked for shoeing a copper on horseback who stampeded two girls and put one of them in hospital. He ended up in the same place. I was one of the first to spot the vanloads of plainclothes police stirring up trouble. I've done a few other bits and pieces too and been nicked on several occasions, but won't go on about them.

I work hard for a living, self employed, to feed my family. I grow my own veg and try to eat make decent choices. I pay as little tax as I can get away with and believe in quiet non-compliance, but this place has simply become overcrowded with calls for revoluion and to smash the system. I'm definitely no fan of the police, i bloody hate them, but none of us would last five minutes without them. I speak from experience, having been to some very nasty lawless places in the past.

So; you've managed to overthrow the government - then what? Are we all going to hold hands and sing "we shall overcome" or are we going to be too busy dodging the bullets from the drug gangs, warlords and militias that appear almost instantly, (don't say it won't happen - it will. Do you really think the gangs in London, Bristol, Manchester etc are going to put the guns away, once the governement disappears?...). What is the Anarchist manifesto for delivering healthcare, water, power, defending us from invasion and making the streets safe for the vulnerable members of society? Or is that not important? Who do i call when my house gets burgled, or am I being a "bourgouis prick" by enjoying the posessions I've dragged myself out of the rat infested 1970's Liverpool city centre I grew up in, to enjoy? Are we really so naieve to think that we'd all get along fine with no one steering the ship?

I have lived in poverty - I've had to beg / steal food, I've spent many a half day picking up dog ends from the streets because i had no money to smoke, we had no electriciy for days on end, as a kid and went to school in threadbare clothes and suffered the derision of my peers for it. I've even been to University - entirely through my own efforts, (and £18,000 pounds in debt because of it...) - and got sick to the back teeth of people from priveleged backgrounds telling me about how the working classes live and struggle and trying to indoctrinate me into some half-arsed uber-liberal school of thought that simply has no realistic foundation and is not based on personal experience - patronising bastards one and all. It's not hard to feel guilty about your parents abundance of everything and a priveleged upbringing. It's really easy to talk about the "struggle", it's a damn sight harder to live it.

Take a look around you. Go on, take a minute to look at where you live, what you eat, how you travel and what you are wearing. Can you honestly say, hand on heart, that you are really living an alternative? Bought stuff from a massive corporation, by any chance? Ever had to seek asistance from the police? You don't shop at a supermarket, do you? (yes; there are alternatives to shopping at Tescos - it just means getting off your arse and looking a bit harder). That girocheque - where did that come from? If you really, really feel that you are capable of tearing yourself away from the tit of the state, sign off and provide for yourself; stand on your own two feet - take control of yourself, first and foremost. Independence starts at home...

the last thing in the world i want to be is "holier than thou"; I'm far too busy trying to make life for my family and me better, but if you really want a system to protest about and really want to stand up and be counted, why not go to Iraq, China, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, North Korea or any amount ofother countries and protest there - goodness knows they have something that desperatley needs changing.

Before anyone talks about dismantling things, please take a reality check and make we / you have something better to take its place and make sure that it would work on every and all fronts. I'm out of here.

your listing of mayday 2007 places Camberwell and it's Mayday activities outside of London. Not sure why this is? Camberwell is in South London. Can we have our London Mayday 2007 efforts placed alongside the Marcha dn Space Hijackers events please

ta

hi black frog, sorry about that - Camberwell had its own place in the alphabetical order because it had it's own call, not because we wanted to place it outside London! We just wanted to list neighbourhoods which organise an event as locations in their own right. It's changed now.

btw, this list is by no means complete, the precarious mayday is a fuzzy thing - some events are not called euromayday although they are listed under euromayday.org, in some places people take the issue of precarity to traditional trade union marches, in Lugano they called their event a street parade, Japan has connected to the "euromayday" label although it isn't really in Europe, there are many connections between the political issues of euromayday and Maydays in the US fore expl etc.

best
thelinkcollector