endangeredphoenix
Collective influenced by Marxism, Anarchism, the Situationists and other elements of anti-statist communistic tendencies in theory and practice - writing about a collection of issues faced by the working class in modern day capitalism.
South Africa: Now and Then
A collection of texts beginning with the post-apartheid class struggle up till February 2005, but going back to texts on the movements of the 70s and 80s written at that time, which critique the ANC, the Black Consciousness Movement and other organisational forms.
[center] 3 texts on aspects of the South African Revolution 1976 - 1985:
"South Africa 1985: The organisation of power in black and white" (Aug. 1985)
The movement in 1980: extract from "The Poverty Of Berkeley Life" (May 1983)
"Reflections On The Black Consciousness Movement and the South African Revolution" (Aug. 1979)
plus a long INTRODUCTION on the situation up until February 2005
The University, the car factory and the working class
An excellent text on class conflict in Oxford and the Blackbird Leys riots of the early 90s.
AN (UN)FRESHER’S GUIDE TO OXFORD’S CLASS WAR
Soaps Get In Your Eyes
A look at soap operas as a form of vicarious community in an epoch when the repression of subversive communities has been greatly repressed.
[center][i]"Crossroads is about real life...yet for many it’s more important than their own real life"
"But what is ‘real life’?"
"Aaah...yes...well...blah blah "(mumbles of general confused questioning)
-Radio discussion, 12/7/82.
****************************
The End Of Music As We Know It
Brief leaflet from the 1980s.
"There isn't much difference between rock 'n' roll and teaching, mind you. It's the same job. You're entertaining delinquents for an hour."
- Sting, ex-teacher.
When The Police disguise themselves as pleasurable, and are accepted as such, then the State's overt cops in blue or in the classroom can retreat into the background.
The Arts and other Social Diseases
Art arrives abstracted and objectified into a poor substitute for real human presence, even in the presence of humans. The arts are a freakish sideshow. It’s a tonic for the troops that detracts from the barren terrain of everyday life. Students of the arts are the only masturbators to act as carriers of social disease.
The author would like to thank the Institute of Comparative Boredom for hot meals and counselling.
First published by Pentagon, 1992.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this pamphlet are not necessarily those of the ICB or the author.
Acknowledgements
I would especially like to thank Rebecca Gadd, Benjamin Franks and Alexis Lacheze-Beer for their support and ideas.
Om Sweet Om
The free festivals on rural squatted land in the 1970's were largely an extension of the London mass squatting movement of that time. The initial participants being mainly rural hippies and London squatters, these events were an extension of a lifestyle organised around resistance to work and living outside the confines of the isolated family structure.
An article from "No Reservations - Housing, Space and Class Struggle", News From Everywhere and Campaign For Real Life, London, 1989.
- A cautionary tale of Stonedhenge, Convoys, Mutoids etc.
- A cautionary tale of Stonedhenge, Convoys, Mutoids etc.
Escape from Alcatraz
In the cinema the audience is as disunited and dim as the guests of an opium den. All those parted lips and staring eyes express no convivial enjoyment, they are lulled out of life, journeying along the moonlit paths of dreamland.
Introductory Notes To The Cinema
" It is the audience who makes the art.... What an audience! Whoever wants to look the twentieth century in the face cannot do better than stand behind the screen in a big cinema…
Moore is Less: a critique of Fahrenheit 9/11
Almost all movies so far, along with their creators, are part of the problem and not part of the solution: they produce a message or a story which is just a commodity to be bought - the audience remains passive, happy to be entertained or to consume the ideology. This is a critique of just one movie - "Fahrenheit 9/11".
At a meeting in Cannes a guy got up to heckle Michael Moore, asking him why he paid his workers such lousy wages. Moore had him thrown out.
The Closed Window Onto Another Life - endangeredphoenix
Culture is the commodity that sells the whole of the commodity economy. But a critique of art and of culture is virtually absent amongst the revolutionary milieu in the UK, an absence we try to make up for here.
A prisoner who cannot see the sky from his cell window may paint on his wall a scene of birds flying amongst clouds against a blue haze of space. Outside in the wider society art plays a similar role; what is denied and seems unreachable, but possible and desirable, is represented via the window of the picture frame or TV screen.
Hope, faith, charity, lottery
Written a few years ago when the UK Lottery was only recently introduced; reflections on The Lottery and the hope invested in its promise by the consumer.
Outside of mass struggle – and nowadays that seems to be almost all the time - we are constantly niggled with an anxious envy, constantly confronted with forces which compare our lot with those who are better off.
