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White working class areas in Birmingham feel 'alienated'

Anonymous | 28.11.2011 11:11 | Anti-racism | Public sector cuts | Social Struggles | Birmingham

According to research just published white working class white communities in Birmingham feel alienated, disenfranchised and last in line for resources such as social housing, felt disconnected from the political process and that their voices were not heard.



A report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has concluded that white working class people in Birmingham, Coventry and London feel they are a forgotten group disconnected from policy and politics. Many residents felt they were a forgotten community and had been ignored by policy-makers at local or national level. “They felt that the government had not listened to them in the past, nor showed any signs of doing so in future. The language used in their discussions appeared to be racist. Yet many residents would be upset by this suggestion. Racialised opinions should be seen in the context of people feeling the effects of neighbourhood loss, political disconnection and competition for scarce resources.”


It’s very easy for activists to end up in their own activist bubble where they only mix with other activists and have little connection with the working class world. As this report shows the working class people who took part in the report have clearly no faith in the government, so for this reason activists, especially those of us involved in the anti-cuts / anti-capitalist movement need to be thinking how we can engage with and work with these communities more. The dangers of not doing are that groups on the far right will exploit the situation and we see the rise of widespread fascism.

Anonymous

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The concept of 99% turned itself into the mass of tended-to-be-represented folks

28.11.2011 12:07

The concept of 99% turned itself into the mass of tended-to-be-represented folks not different from former 100%-ers represented in “we are all humans” system - usually named as bourgeois democracy.

We are outside from 100% of statistics based paneconomism which is deeply racist at its core.

We’re against oppression by plutocratic 1%-ers or that established by manipulative majority.

We are unmanageable multitude of selforganised zeros.

 http://antisystemic.org/SW/SituationistWorker-0%25.pdf


On the June 30th strike we joined with the Dead Workers Union to attack the Freemasonic Lodge in London and expand the union action beyond the limits of the freemasonic structure of the union movement.
On November 30th we will make the first action of a reproductive workers union and join the Occupy LSX at St. Pauls. As reproductive workers we constitute the unpaid workers who continually create life . our unionisation is the intersection of everyday life and political organisation.

We also echo the eviction of the Bishop of London on the occasion of the false Jubilee in 2002. The church was indeed demolished and a hollow edifice now stands in its place. We will complete this destruction in 2012 with the General Strike across all space, time and class.

We add our solidarity to the occupation in order to expand this strike action beyond the limits of a public sector pension strike and towards a general strike of psychic workers. The occupation at St.Pauls is for us indeed a workers strike – a strike of those producers and consumers of psychic space, occupying a space of psychic production and consumption and distribution.

We support the positions outlined in the “de-occupy glasgow” blogpost and the DisOccupy blog challenging sexism and racism in the occupy movements – and our position is that these things can only be dealt with through the self organisation of the working class - ie a movement that is conscious of itself as proletarian.

The Occupations have proved unable to re-connect to the so-called Arab Spring which were a starting point for the camps in Spain. While the internationalism of this influence is a revolutionary move, we must reject this term Arab Spring - firstly we prefer the translation of الثورات as Revolution rather than Spring. Secopndly the racialising of the countries in the north of Africa as Arab is as a nationalistic and racist maneuver and reveals the structural spacial and temporal limits that psychic workers must resist. It is no coincidence that the most successful occupations have been in the UK, USA and Australia. These places are all part of the Former British Empire – but unlike African and Indian ex-colonies they are controlled by those who still bear European names and family ties.

In resisting the capitalist atomisation of social and community life, we must not let ourselves be pushed back into a reactionary position of defending the family as this will only strengthen the national and aristocratic groups that this organisational form derives from. We must refuse the bourgeois choice of marriage or prostitution and push forwards towards proletarian workers organisation. This is why we have come together as a lovers union.

In the Capitalist era and nations of advanced Capitalism, this nationalism has taken on an industrial structure – countries are now divided by industrial production –it is no coincidence that the occupy countries are those focussed on capital intensive production while the countries of the “Arab Revolution” are geared towards land and labour intensive production. It is also no coincidence that whilke the so-called “Arab” revolution have matured into armed struggle and have met with heavy and violent state repression from the outset, the Occupations have chosen so-called non violent protest and have met with less direct or covert state repression. The internalisation of industrial identity has lead to a Peace Police set up with in the Occupy camp , at the Oakland Occupations joining of the General Strike last month , to physically repress Black Bloc and Anarchist groups. Despite our criticisms of black bloc as a tactic and anarchism as political position, we find this unnaceptable as attacking buildings (capital or land) can never be compared to attacking people (labour). It is in this regard that the riots and looting in London this summer were of a more politically revolutionary nature than the occupations—in a practical negation of the commodity and of capital . The choice of targets in the future will depend on the drawing of picket lines by revolutionary workers unions and groups. Attacking of the police as self defense is a revolutionary act and is as inevitable as the confrontation with any worker who crosses the picket line. This will need discussion in the very near future.
Our immediate concern however is the attacks on the people of the occupation from outside the camp and the failure of the commune to protect them. The publicised rapes in the US and UK occupations have lead to attacks from the right, the state and also criticism from within the movement. It is vital we reject out of hand any criticism from the right or the state and foster and encourage the criticism from within and from those who seek to join the occupation on its declared terms. So while we reject Mayor Nutter calling for the Philly occupation to close after a rape there, we support the Black-Out by Black workers who boycotted the occupation after the racism experienced there could not be combatted effectively within the camp. We also support the Glasgow Womens Activist Forum who criticised the Glasgow occupations handling of the rape that happened in their camp.

For the empowerment of reproductive workers we look to to Sylvia Pankhurst and Workers Dreadnought’s Constitution of British Soviets where the Household Soviets were to be put under the control of all women members of households over 20 years old. However we wish to go further in internationalising the union. We must look towards reproductive workers lead by women in other countries where organisation is so weak that reproduction is failing and mortality is higher than it is here.

Traditional unions and even revolutionary unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World , who we split from after they refused to recognise the renegade psychic workers IU 007/700, have proved incapable of going beyond national industrialism. The only way to do so is to unionise across all time as well as space and class – across tribal and feudal as well as the capitalist era. Those families who are from outside of England and Europe must be given power in this strike action. A simple way we can do this is by empowering their relatives who are in our locality.

Without these basic foundations the occupations as a movement will be one of imperialistic occupations and not of workers occupations!

 http://antisystemic.org/SW/SituationistWorker-0%25.pdf

The concept of 99% turned itself into the mass of tended-to-be-represented folks


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