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[sinessinessines]

The Economic Lysenkoism of Late Capitalist Realism

This is rather a fascinating documentary from local history - from the year I was born in fact. The eventual result was a loss by Benn by a single percentage point. Dennis Healey, a hard-bitten, cynical realist of the Labour right, received 50.5%, while Tony Benn, an idealist whose radical ideas for reforming the Labour Party to include commitments to extra-parliamentary and even revolutionary action in support of the Labour movement, received 49.5%. This was in spite of a ridiculous bloc voting system designed to prevent radicals like Benn from ever winning internal elections that were put to the vote.

This proved to be a turning point. Labour had come dangerously close to allowing a man with revolutionary proclivities into a front bench position, and it would be 30 years before such an opportunity arose again with the last minute inclusion of Jeremy Corbyn onto the leadership ballot to “widen the debate”. 

In this respect, the 1981 Deputy Leadership election in the Labour party was more significant than any General Election would be, since it scared the crap out of those who believed that capitulating to Bennite principles of direct democracy and the promotion of state-owned cooperatives would eventually lead to the collapse of the Labour party as a parliamentary force altogether. Benn himself was transformed from “the most dangerous man in Britain” into a “national treasure”. In other words, he was, to coin a phrase “Mandela-ised”.

Militants were purged from party ranks, becoming scapegoats for what many saw as a problem with widespread entryism into Labour by Trotskyist groups. Neil Kinnock, who became leader after Michael Foot’s disastrous stint “impersonating the leader of the Labour party”, to use his words, obsessed over the issue of how to deal with Militant Tendency, a very small but highly organised and disciplined group who had gained effective control over Liverpool City Council. The Tories, as well as Labour, began to collude in their ideas about transforming the traditions of collectivism within the working classes into a dangerous “enemy within” - a Red menace that had to be marginalised from society and from the Labour party in order to make that party “democratic” and “electable”.

Of course, what this led to was the complete ideological disintegration of the Labour party, and the bitter reality that the world's first real Thatcherite to come to power would be one in charge of the party opposing hers. Thatcher famously said that her greatest political achievement was Tony Blair. She had, in a war of brutal attrition, managed to transform Britain into an effective one party state with no working class representation in the political system or across the media, which had fallen into the hands of a small number of extremely rich right-wingers.

My theory, probably repeated elsewhere, is that the political doctrines espoused by dominant groups and repeated over a generation tend to ossify into political facts, especially among those who are selected to become members of elite establishments. This is particularly true with doctrines like neoliberalism, since one of the goals of neoliberalism was to eradicate the conceptual framework of class as a way of understanding conflicts across a society. Every politician in power from Thatcher onward has espoused more or less the same idea - that the class war is over, that poverty is a decision rather than the result of a lack of opportunity, and that the working class no longer exist as a group.

This doctrine continues to be undermined by the ongoing collapse of the principles held dear by this ruling theocracy - a theocracy that would prefer right-wing populism and xenophobia to any progressive alternative. Corbyn's landslide victory, along with his electoral gains against the Tories, came as a complete shock to everybody in politics and in journalism, who had internalised the logic that nobody was a socialist any more, barring a tiny minority of “unreconstructed” socialists who refused to keep up with modern times.

Since this definitive 1981 election, the mantra within the Labour party gradually came to be this: "we don’t want to, but we have to capitulate to the interests of right-wingers to be electable." This eventually turned into a competition to become as right-wing as it was possible to be without joining the opposition party. Becoming right-wing became synonymous with wanting power.  And power was predicated on accepting the “reality” of life - that people were selfish and stupid. In other words, cynicism became the realism of fools.

This is an example of what Mark Fisher calls "capitalist realism" in his book of the same title. The doctrine is that neoliberalism is factual and real, and that any alternative is for dreamers and ideologues doomed to live on the margins. The fact that this theory, which became reality through Thatcher and Reagan, has now been proven to be completely wrong. The problem is that this will not prevent our political elites from repeating it. They will continue to make ever more absurd claims based on the associated doctrines about human stupidity and selfishness that used to be the best way of achieving positions of power in political systems and in journalism - when you couldn’t be bothered or lacked the time to research anything, assume the worst and people will think that you’re intelligent anyway: now, we see this in the increasingly pathetic-sounding attempts to reassert the old regime: "peak Corbyn" has been reached; if a "moderate" were leading the Labour party, they would have won a historic landslide against the Tories rather than simply erased their majority; Corbyn, a lifelong anti-racism campaigner, is a vicious "unconscious antisemite" and an "existential threat to Judaism", according to the right-wing Jewish press. Such claims were not even levelled at Adolf Hitler. 

What we are really witnessing is a group tantrum by esteemed "realists" whose shtick no longer works. Their “realism” is no longer real, and they have decided that the only course of action in the face of this dissonance is to deny the existence of reality itself. This is Trumpism at its finest. Everything disagreeable is “fake”. Everything can be spun into an delusional affirmation of how great an individual you are.

It feels, to me, like the concluding chapter of a seemingly unending nightmare that began in the year that I was born into. Like all final chapters, it is also the most dangerous one, because loose ends need to be clumsily tied up, and many are looking for simple answers to a very complex and interconnected problem. Slavoj Zizek notes somewhere that fascism is “a desire for capitalism without capitalism” - in other words, fascism is an irrational desire for all of the positive features of capitalism, without any of the antagonisms contained within it, which are all conveniently outsourced onto a token scapegoat. As said repeatedly on Scooby Doo, “We would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you pesky kids.” 

The most dangerous thing to happen among the elites has been to conclude that their failure - catastrophic and repeated failure - to predict future events with any degree of accuracy, using economic theories that they themselves had elevated to the status of an objective science, doesn’t prove their theories are wrong. Indeed, for them, it proves that something is wrong with reality. In short, mainstream economists have ceased to become objective reporters of truth, and are now, even more so than usual, hired propagandists and theologians who are chiefly there to spout doctrinal gibberish, the main point of which is to intimidate the layman from engaging with the issue by offering them a courtier’s reply.

Yanis Zaroufakis, the Greek economics minister during the election of SYRIZA and the negotiations with the European Union, suggests that the complete detachment of EU technocrats from the real world was first expressed in their response to the Greek debt crisis, in which Zaroufakis was centrally situated. For them, reality itself does not matter - only their “realism” does. Their “capitalist realism”. It is a form of economic Lysenkoism, and the next global financial crash, whenever it happens, will further cement this bankruptcy. Since the radical left, in a surprising turn of events, are the only group of people with any realistic idea about how human societies can adequately respond to the demands placed upon us, it is vital that we respond to the next inevitable crisis with a serious, concrete set of proposals, and a narrative that people can relate to.

[sinessinessines]

Suicide bombers are victims too.

If we're going to be consistent, and avoid drawing very ugly, toxic racial and religious lines around bombs going off, we really ought to be including the suicide bomber himself as a victim of the explosions that he inflicts upon others. The sociological imagination demands that we do that. And to not do so is to actually lend validity to the idea that the "murderer", in these cases, are actually going to be lavishly welcomed by Allah and given free virgins for life, or whatever the deal is.

Sorry, but that's unlikely, and demonising the bomber as evil only makes the situation worse, because that is what this so-called "Islamism" wants. The bomber hismelf, a victim of a social milieu so alienating that he plunped for the bad interpretions of the Koran from some sadistic coward unwilling to spend his own life in paradise, needs pity as well.

Otherwise we affirm the very beliefs that this ragtag of mercenaries and imbeciles propose as the "true line" of Islam. I'm no fan of religion, and I don't believe that any morality or judgement or the putting right of the grotesque injustices in this world will occur when we pop our clogs. But to label the suicide bomber a murderer is, in some sense, to suggest that this nutty Islamism has a kernel of truth to it.

You could, of course, suggest that divisions could be made on the grounds of intent. However, if self-destruction is an unambiguous part of that intent, and that person is acting out the genocidal fantasies of others who are perfectly aware that Allah isn't going to turn up and say "Nice one for killing all those people. Here's an eternal hardon and 20,000 virgins."

There is no judgement. The suicide bomber is a victim of freud - a freud that leads to his own death and the deaths of countless others. Why do we insist on dividing the line here? Can we not instead disarm these poisonous ideologies of sacrifice and martyrdom by including mourning of the suicide bombers themselves?

[sinessinessines]

I get so tired of people who say that today isn't worse than yesterday - that it is merely different. It isn't. Something went horribly wrong with our society in the 1980s, and it isn't going to improve because we can't even imagine how it could improve.

The situation is rather like that of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Stuck with Stalin, with dreams of working class revolution (in our case, the Fukayaman idea of "capitalist democracy" - a fusion almost as absurd as "authoritarian communism' or, as Stalin resigned himself to, the achievement of 'socialism in one country'.

Unlike most people (or how most people would like to project themselves when they too are feeling this) I cannot see major differences between different types of control, and I do not believe that we "should be grateful" for what we have. The ability to provide voluntary intellectual labour for Silicon Valley billionaires is not something that I am grateful for. The pathologisation of an entire generation of under 30s as suffering in a state of isolated mental illnesses (because of the extremes of capitalism and the inability to blame capitalist values for mental illness, or to imagine things being any other way.) does not make me feel good inside. I will not be grateful. I will not accept the logic that I should feel better because "somebody else is worse off".

This statement encapsulates so much. First, it is extremely relativistic. Two innates being subjected to torture could either gain some solace from having suffered together. Or, in our world, they could try to imagine their enemy - the other tortured person - as suffering more than they are. This is a pathetic, disempowering, isolating discourse. It is also what identity politics collapses into when it loses it's fundamental basis in class struggle.

Of course, something went horribly wrong when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan decided to retreat from reality and replace people with numbers and figures. And this is where our modern Stalinism emerges - in the corporate world of mass surveillance, of self-policing, of never being able to trust anybody for fear that they may be a superior who will exile them.

The paranoia and privitised stress of the micromanaged, and the flattening of hierarchy into "teams" of superiors and inferiors, where total power is given to a mediocrity who obeys the petty, bureaucratic, pointless laws with greater zeal than somebody who still "luxuriates" in their ability to think. Obviously, the rise of precarious work and of a "flexible" labour market, and the return of a Victorian "residuum" - the myth of a feckless, disposible underclass, which increasingly comprises of the disabled as well as the unemployed, all serves the function of depriving the modern subject of any future. Our comtemporary malaise is the following: "There is no time left to think."

[sinessinessines]

Her Departure Came Sooner Than Expected

She awakens to a live floorboard creaking -

All that is left after that long night. The stash

Of “whatever” - all gone. We get up for nothing

Beside a stab of loss. A stink of clad, burned trash.

We're fit to go full rodent, just as museum faces

Fart into their cellars, coins jangling around meat.

That burning was some bad auger. Carbon-chain ashes

Scurry east, through walls of intestinal streets

Gassed by heat. These car / cannibal hybrids

Squat like cane toads in the sun. Fatal decisions

In transit stay final. Streets are dotted with dead

Beats in dead ends that point in toxic... extinction...

What now? Lives as fad clicks, with some alien dread

Kept as a receipt, and she, last seen somewhere in Asia

Says nothing. She left us all with echoes down a hall

That coarsen crackles of the melting down of data.

The glaciers will remember the last days of coal.

[sinessinessines]

British Prime Ministers

(www.skibbereeneagle.ie)

John Major: "Our society is classless!"

Tony Blair: "The class war is over!"

Gordon Brown: "A class-free society is not a slogan but in Britain can become a reality!"

David Cameron: "I don't believe this is a class-ridden society... I think that is a load of rubbish."

David Cameron went to Eton and was a member of the Bullingdon Club at Oxford. They trash restaurants because their parents can afford to pay for their refurbishment. They also like setting fire to £50 notes in front of homeless people.

Taking the more obviously grotesque to one side, these acts all bear the typical marks of an initiatory rite. This is the type of shit you have to do to become a part of any criminal gang. The reasoning is pretty simple - every person who was formerly a member of the Bullingdon Club has enough shit on every other member to make sure nobody "goes rogue" and starts not burning £50 notes in front of homeless people, for example.

Former members include David Cameron, Gideon Osborne, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and all of the other architects of austerity - that largely pointless exercise in class-based sadism that lasted for the best part of a decade and played a significant role in the suicide of my closest friend.

In spite of being classless, there has never been a working-class Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Of course, the question to ask, as a revolutionary, is whether these are concerted denials - denials built to interpolate the working class individual as somebody without collective history or collective power - or whether they are genuine stupidities built on the ossification of myths about socialism in Britain that have become, thanks to a generation of lax education, historical truths.

Of course, the problem with journalists and politicians is that they all work too hard, hang around with other too much, think the same way, attend the same schools, and generally lack any spirit of dissent whatsoever. Even their rebellion - via the Bullingdon Club, and so on - is undertaken to belong to something. This suggests a dearth of free thought, as well as a dearth of political courage.

Sally Munt (2000, 2) and countless others point out that class has been continually marginalised in the reconstruction of our recent history, while the overdeterminations of class - identities such as race, gender, sexuality and so on - have been prioritised when gathering statistical evidence to "prove" certain correlations.

Of course, the brighter buttons among the ruling classes know full well that, without a structural basis in class, all of these overdeterminations eventually collapse and turn into ineffectual lifestyle choices for the bourgeoisie. Obama, for example, in spite of record levels of Black American incarceration in the Supermax gulag archipelago of the United States, can be seen as a triumph for racial equality. Providing you squint enough and don't look into the hideous details. This is a triumph for liberals, who all too frequently see ends where socialists and anarchists see the merest beginning.

In particular, the division along the lines of 'occupation' suggests an attempt, largely a successful one, to cleave a difference between the wage slave and the dole slave:

"Using occupation as the basis for the categorization works as yet another method of marginalizing the unemployed as irresponsible, undeserving poor; they become, in such a system, classless - discounted and beyond measure."

Of course, the manufacture of hatred along these lines - the strategy of divide and rule - has always played a significant role in maintaining hegemony over huge numbers of people. Unfortunately, what Lenin says about capitalism can also be applied to the proletariat as a whole: the working classes also falter at their weakest link. And, although the rise of Corbyn and a Bennite leftist organisation within Labour shouldn't be entirely dismissed, the prospect of reversing 40 years of one-sided class warfare and civil rights backlash in an increasingly globalised, hypercapitalist, deunionised environment where every conversation is monitored for potential commercial value, remains extremely slim.

Generally speaking, the Corbyn surge is built upon interests as myopic as the UK electorate have always been. If the choice was between saving the NHS and stopping dodgy Saudi arms deals from murdering millions in Yemen in Britain's proxy war in the region, almost everybody in Britain would choose to save the NHS. Of course, that's a hypothetical, but you get my drift about the general lack of internationalism.

One of the stranger things that Corbyn has revealed is the institutional incompetence among the mainstream media. What started as a mere hypothesis - and not a very strong hypothesis either - that the Labour Party lost the elections in the 1980s because they were "too left wing", has clearly transformed into a strange sort of folk truth among the moneyed classes. For the overworked journalist or politician, it is easy to conflate cynicism with intelligence. It saves you reading the YouGov PDF files.

Given the spectacular rise of Corbyn, and the completely and utterly predictable outcome of the recent General Election, given the Brexit referendum, the Scottish independence referendum, the Bernie Sanders phenomenon, the collapse of the "voter ceiling" in regards to Donald Trump, and the broader collapse of the Blairite left across Europe in favour of a more radical socialism, it seemed extraordinary that not one single pundit was willing to back Corbyn or even suggest that the polling data wasn't as secure as it seemed.

Polling data is useful for controlling stock levels of, say, different flavours of crisps in a crisp factory. However, polling data is utterly useless for determining political movement. Marketing-based approaches to politics - treating New Labour as a "brand", for example - caused the "brand" to collapse into utter incoherence, to the extent that Gordon Brown's conferences were directly stealing slogans from the Nazi BNP, and Blair ended up, catastrophically, siding with one of the most right-wing Presidents in the history of the United States.

Thankfully, Corbyn's politics is more courageous than that. It doesn't go nearly far enough, but it never will when the base is so fragmented. The first thing a communist should learn to love is a slap in the face rather than a jackboot in the genitals.

[sinessinessines]

STRAW MEN, STRAW WOMEN, STRAW GENDER-FLUID BODIES, OR STRAW MEN COLONISING FEMALE SPACE BY HAVING THEIR DICKS CUT OFF AND WEARING A DRESS.

I have read a fair bit about feminism and it’s many currents and debates, and I am currently updating myself on these issues, thanks mainly to Susan Watkins’ lengthy and fascinating article on the current state of feminism(s) across the world in the current issue of the New Left Review (109 Jan Feb 2018, pp. 5-80).

Possibly as an expression of a certain male self-loathing common to the besieged, post-ideological working class liberal of the period, I used to describe myself as a feminist sympathiser, rather than as a feminist. This was because I quite fervently believed at the time (some ten years ago) that male feminism was an attempt to breach ontological terrain that was impossible to breach without accumulating a certain amount of bad faith. One could empathise and understand as much as it was possible to empathise and understand, but a male being, born and brought up as male, could never “be” female.

The problem, one that I didn’t identify at the time, was the absence of any male equivalent to this. Men, the generalised enemy, particularly white, male, working class, heterosexual men, put me firmly in the firing line for all types of abuse, misandry and the militarisation of such abuses to underscore bourgeois bigotries.

Having recently declared myself communist, in hindsight it does seem like a peculiar injustice - the injustice of being pilloried for controlling the patriarchal means of production by a millionairess. One person who explains this process, and who was seriously fucked up by this process, was the Austrialian poet Les Murray.

Les Murray was from a piss poor working class peasant background. In the poem Burning Want, from his landmark Subhuman Redneck Poems (Carcanet U.K.), he describes the experience of being forced to inhabit the same school as middle-class Australian women, who would mercilessly attack and bully him as a child. What is being expressed here is a twisted class warfare, expressed by Murray as “erocide”. Unable to articulate that, or to organise his thoughts along those lines, the poet later collapsed into a depression that nearly destroyed him. He believed that nobody could love him - that it was impossible to love a man who had been interpolated as abhorrent in every imaginable way:

all my names were fat-names, at my new town school. Between classes, kids did erocide: destruction of sexual morale. Mass refusal of unasked love; that works. Boys cheered as seventeen- year-old girls came on to me, then ran back whinnying ridicule.

Of course, my assumptions, about the ontological impossibility of male feminism, depended upon certain assumptions about what feminism was. It also depended upon my own desire to ghettoise feminism. It was women’s stuff, and that stuff didn’t impact men. Men and women were categorically different. This seemed uncontroversial.

The white working class male, inhabiting Margaret Thatcher’s newly “classless” society, is faced with a double bind that makes such a subject particularly vulnerable to acts of self-destruction. Alcohol and drug addiction is the symptom of losing trust in humanity. To women the white male subject is a symbol of patriarchal oppression. To middle class men, the white male working class subject is seen as a “loser” for failing to compete in a rigged game where social mobility is stagnant, and where most “tests” are not about aptitude, but about “instinct”. The resultant rejection is thereby levied onto the victim himself, forced to shoulder an unbearable shame, a suicidal depression and a contradictory, shattered identity, split into two mutually contradictory states. On the one hand, the white heterosexual working class male is a symbol of power, whereas, on the other hand, he is a symbol of failure. This stigmatisation is compounded yet further when the temporary relief of such a state involves a bottle of vodka or a needle in the vein.

There is, of course, nobody out there to recognise you - the white, male, heterosexual abhorrence - as a victim. Indeed, the very act of “playing the victim” is, in itself, seen as an abhorrent act. As well as being “responsible” for, and guilty of somehow constructing a patriarchal order that subjugates all women, the white, male, working class subject is also guilty of his own failure to live up to the expectations of that patriarchy. In other words, the subject in question is rendered abject from the very beginning, by not only facing stigmatisation based on a class system that no longer exists, but by being burdened by assuming an “othered” role in a patriarchy where he is seen as the chief instigator for historical crimes against the female.

Since then, the argument has taken a postmodern turn. My viewpoint about female essence has been marginalised by people who argue that gender, and even biological difference, is nothing more than a social construction. A “performative” difference, as Judith Butler argues in her largely incomprehensible book Gender Trouble.

Generally speaking, this flapping around with gender and sex is articulated as “postmodernism gone mad” by people who dislike postmodernism. It is generally seen as the work of “feminazis” by people with a bee in their bonnet about feminism. And, of course, pointing out the presence of essential biological differences that cannot be surgically added or subtracted from the human body, such as possessing a womb and, consequently, having menstrual cycles is seen as “transphobic”. More problematically still, having any uniquely female experience is seen as an expression of “transphobia”.

To take one example, I, along with Richard Seymour, author of this material on the issue, which explores the issue in far more depth and with a far greater sensitivity to the issue than I could ever be bothered to write, were both labelled “transphobic” on a Facebook group by a number of people after I decided to post the article to shed some light on the issue on a so-called “Leftbook” site.

This debate, like so many debates that involve the use of passive-aggressive, and slightly infuriating suffixes such as “-phobia” to describe anybody who contests or even expresses curiosity about the nuances of what is a phenomenally complex philosophical debate about who and what we actually are, has a general capacity to degenerate into an “us” versus “them” contest, where all who think that men and women possess certain, essential biological differences are labelled “transphobic” and are part of a generalised enemy against transgender people. The straw men, and straw women constructed in this argument, ironically enough, are also the very same people who argue vociferously against “non-binary” designations of gender and biological sex.

Perhaps one of the most shameful articulations of this plebiscite, social media generated, mob justice cod-philosophy was expressed in the backlash against the lifelong feminist campaigner Germaine Greer for her perfectly sensible, if rather brash comment about biological sex and essential difference:

“Just because you lop off your dick and then wear a dress doesn’t make you a fucking woman.”

The troubling aspect of this is that the university response to Germaine Greer’s argument - that being a women is more than merely being a castrated male with a dress on - was to zero platform her, therefore putting her in the same category as the far-right fascists and religious bigots who probably want transgender people murdered for being crimes against God and nature.

This, to me, is an expression of precisely what is wrong with the terms of the debate itself. If the choice is between blind acceptance, or being pilloried and labelled “transphobic” for wishing to explore the nuances of this debate, then there is something seriously wrong with the way the debate is being argued.

[sinessinessines]

Poetry Tips

THE RANDOM WORD GENERATOR

One of my weaknesses has always been locating an adjective that precisely fits into a line of poetry. Months, even years have been spent groping for a single missing word that would make a line, a stanza, even an entire poem function as I want it to. One of the very worst things is a cliched adjective. Slightly better, but still bad, is an adjective that sounds profound but doesn’t really make much sense. Maybe the worst thing of all is to ditch the adjective whatsoever.

Adjectives are always a gamble. A lot of erotica can teach you this. Adjectives can turn average writing into awful writing (often unintentionally hilarious, but awful nonetheless). They can also turn something mediocre into something brilliant. 

The problem is that adjectives are awkward things to get right, because they are always approximate, and don’t really “do” anything on their own. For example, in that last sentence, was “awkward” really the right word? If you focus too heavily on this kind of thing, you can be slowly driven mad.

In The Elements Of Style, perhaps the most influential book on “how to write” written in the post-war era, William Strunk Jr. thinks you should just try to avoid the adjective altogether. Following Strunk’s rules, you can write like Stephen King if you so wish. There’s nothing wrong with Stephen King of course, but do we really want everybody to write like him?

Plus, with poetry, things are pretty different. Poetry needs adjectives more than bestselling prose does. Adjectives are often the components of a poem that make them fly. 

Because of my difficulties in this department, I decided to experiment. Using an online random word generator, I created a list of 20,000 words, most of which were adjectives, and I cut and pasted them all into a word processor. I then printed this out in landscape in 8 columns on A4 paper.

With the help of a glue gun, some old packaging, a Stanley knife, a metal ruler and some tape, I made my own book of random words. (If anybody tells you that bookbinding is difficult, they’re either lying or they lack this basic equipment.)

Now, whenever I find myself groping around for an adjective to explain something in a poem, I can always turn to this book for inspiration. I find that anything is better than a blank page to stare at when you can’t find the right word.

My advice? Everybody should go ahead and make one. Creative writing courses should all start with this exercise. About a week in to using my book of random words, I have already found a couple of words that I’ve been struggling with for a very long time.

I am so impressed by the results of this that I intend, using sticky-back plastic and more pages of random words, to cover my desk and every other surface in my study with them.

I am also hoping that this isn’t a sign of insanity.

[sinessinessines]

Britain Is Shit

Britain is a mad old crack whore. She’s pawning everything in sight. All the stuff that’s worth getting up for Is either for sale, or it’s gone to shite.

It’s astounding how shit the trains are And amazing how no-one complains When a return flight to Zanzibar Is cheaper than the airport train.

Britain is shit. It even smells rank But it does have two main saviours: The drug cartels launder through our banks, And we sell guns to mad dictators.

[sinessinessines]

Headstones

Facebook and Tumblr shape their websites like two-dimenstional graveyards. This text is like a virtual engraving.

Here lies me. I will not be forgotten (Oh yes I will!)

Then people leave flowers (hearts, smiles, frowns) at the base depending on how popular I was when that part of me - the part of me called "headstones" was alive..

Maybe that's what we're all doing on social media. We're commemmorating the death of our bodily selves by uploading a part of it to the great information hub in the sky.

Probably because I'm over 30 years old, I don't like the idea of that one teeny bit.

I still don't have a smartphone. I don't want anything to be smart except me and maybe some other humans. I've watched The Terminator. He's a bad dude!

[sinessinessines]

Queer people have a community of our own and we are allowed to use the term ‘queer community’ to talk about it, and if you do not identify as queer then it’s not about you and you have no business sticking your nose into it.

If you don’t identify as queer then you are not a part of the queer community.

If you don’t identify as queen then when queer people talk about the queer community they are not talking about you.

This is not hard to understand.

[sinessinessines]

The Two Types Of People

People who are overrated.

People who are too obscure to have ever been rated.

[sinessinessines]

Anti-Smoking Lobby

HAIKU

They said "smoking kills" but they were wrong about it One thing kills: that's time.

[sinessinessines]

The Optimist Of Auschwitz

The optimist of Auschwitz Wore similar threadbare outfits. His shibboleth: “The smell of death, Masks the stench of armpits.”

Of course, he wasn’t going last. Like most of them, he was gassed. But jokes and rants Gave souls a chance Not to leave long pasts

Orally passed. At least, deprived Now of things that they had connived To kill, redact, Doctor, subtract. He, perhaps, just survived

The post-Krystallnacht silent cry Of guilt that you described. Maybe humour Doused the tumour - In slight hope of a slight kind.

@sinesinessines PS

[sinessinessines]

The Days of Rage were a series of riotous demonstrations and direct actions  over a course of three days in October 1969 in Chicago, and organized by the Weatherman faction of the Students for a Democratic Society.

[sinessinessines]

An introductory rant-poem, to mark the majestic birth of @EitherIsPreferable - a joint blog with polymath poet, musician and fellow arty-farty type Nick Hudson.

Hopefully it will go well. And we'll manage to stay out of prison.

Refuse

London, 3am, Saturday night.

1. DEATH DRIVES

En route, there were mutterings… rumours of a bus service. Irrational urges… not waiting for a train that would get me back sooner. Fuck that.

It’s night bus, 3am: Ghostly, lunar, occluded, red, mystery, oblong thing, that only ever appears when you leave the stop.

This… situation happened because of people. I do everything because of people. It is unbearable.

Brixton to Archway requires change at Oxford Street. The morons bleat. It is no home for leftist intellectuals.

There was wreckage in the zone. The bins had gone over again. People were stumbling along the road shouting at tarmac and sky. The shop fronts glittered empty gestures for people who, when they bought things, felt as powerful as slaveowners did. Only too dumb to locate the source of their guilt. This is their world.

2. THE ADOLESCENTS

The adolescents were pouring out whatever residue of rebellion they had in them. Discovering themselves, their limits, the precise coordinates of their living deaths - a state that mooches into life unannounced, in the early to mid-30s.

But now, now, now, they spew beautiful cocktail vomit across the pavements. It’s like Pollock had the courage, like millions of others did, to incinerate his talent instead of monetising it.

This puking took guts. This attempt to postpone the future because the future is bad.

We all know it. We all sense that this is the end. Humanity’s rope is stretched taut. There’s no room to expand, or bend so all that’s left is this suffocating glitter - excess, grotesque, ulcerated, lacerated, nose-diving, tumescent, jouissance.

It would drive many of them insane like it drove me insane. It would kill many of them stone dead like it killed many of my friends.

This city, for some people is an exposure. It leaves wires bare, raw, naked, eviscerated. Nerve fuel only lasts so long. A twisted leaf in autumn gets brittler And snaps between the mycelium fingers Of the chromium, knowledge phallohubs in a state of infinite bailout like a parasite devouring it’s host. Anti-psychedelic centres of commerce, rotating spiked graphics of reality.

Stalked by SuperStalins and UberHitlers, their machines slice into the ground like diamond-tipped knives into living meat, half-gangrenous, about to drop off the planet As gravity ceases to bind us together and we experience cultural, subatomic fragmentation.

We don’t all make it through alive, and the ones that do, only make it like nails in boards sliding sideways towards some edge we sense like vertigo but can’t see. Imminent, impending catastrophe.

A couple, stumbling, scream abuse London abuse. Cocaine abuse. “Cunt! You are a fucking cunt!” “I fucking hate you, you fucking cunt!”

3. THE COLLECTORS: ARRIVING

humming humming humming

Orange lights, rhythmic flashes dart across this place, now an indoor / outdoor type scene. Dawn is whispering its halitosis over the dead filled council estates full of bad colour incinerated by the rich who doused their homes in their petroleum cladding that made their period invisible to the blood-money tyrants. The oligarchs, thieves, and toffs whose society was indeed, “classless.” As classless as the Reich was Jewless. As classless as the slave metal that fills our tips and landfills – our killing fields.

This decorated, bile strewn farce of a land - the greatest place to be on Earth. If you’re a blind, deaf, dumb, psychopathic moron. Or you’ve learned to smirk it all off with a wincing, ironic smile. Your mouths are cash machines. And you’ve all learned how to twist that knife into the hearts of your Rwandan, Congolese genocide slaves keeping them just alive enough to fill your empty veins with the drug of a latest gadget.

That vital illusion – that what you buy is what you own is what you’ve earned, is what you deserve. We deserve nothing but suffering for our capitulations.

4. THE COLLECTORS: ARRIVED

The collectors had arrived, like Cuban doctors in a warzone, without fanfare, without occasion, to clean up this residuum.

Shattered, shattering, shitted, weeping lives. Trapped in this whirlpool of daggers. Silently, they sweep the edges off the passed-out, the incapacitated, the living-dead, all monsters using pavements as pillows, cradling liquid remains of the ethanol they hope doctors them from the photographic evidence - come the day of judgement.

They betrayed their university beneath the everlasting sunshine Of global capitalism.

The eyes that can never close can never empty, and can never blink… This, the hell of the same. Quantitative easing includes the victims eased into genocide and torture. Forget about it. Forget about it. Forget. The bus is taking an age.

The collectors had arrived to fill trucks with the landfill. Bodybags carried off to suburbia, to disintegrate into the plastic time millennia… that’s the irony of it. The shite we throw away will outlive us. And in our death will judge us.

Objects spring to life, Containing every ounce of labour we tossed aside… The mined, honed, crafted, worked on. The art, the dreams shattered for money which eats everything now that we’re nearly dead.

The collectors had arrived to cleanse this channel of desperation, squalor and blood. To doll it up to the nines like a sad old powdered whore Preparing for another day of dead-eyed fucking.

The pointless scrambling for things we pretend to own, like the animals we own in cages, or the victims of torture we own, as use for chiaroscuro to give us an illusion of an open sky.

5: ARRIVAL

The bus, after perhaps an hour, arrives. I find my face wet with tears I barely noticed as I watched this rhythm of the visible becoming invisible.

The dead carried on the shoulders of stoics into vans. The bins emptied and stood back on their feet. And, with a wipe of the hand, another fucking day to withstand.

@sinessinessines PS

[sinessinessines]

Healthy Paranoia

Nobody is alone, Which is why we're all alone.

Nobody will die Which is why death is inevitable.

Everybody is happy Which is why we're all miserable.

I am not paranoid - Everybody else is making me paranoid.

[sinessinessines]

The Kojasteroid

It was the year 2000. A huge rogue planetoid that looked like Telly Savalas was on a collision course with the planet Earth. No human being on the planet knew about it, apart from one person. Unfortunately, he was a patient locked up inside a psychiatric hospital, so nobody took his premonition seriously.

It didn't matter anyway, because the actual collision was hundreds of years away. By the time the asteroid collision was noticed, Telly Savalas had been completely forgotten about, so nobody made that comparison any more. Apart from one person. But, again, he was locked up inside a psychiatric hospital, so his contribution was seen as minimal.

People had bigger fish to fry. Quite unlike the civilisation of today, one of the main problems the humanoids focussed on was trying to stop this asteroid from colliding with the Earth and destroying all life on the planet. They were not concerned about what celebrity the asteroid looked like. Human beings had evolved somewhat.

Despite valiant efforts, the project to prevent the collision failed in the end. Telly Savalas was just too big to be diverted. All of life on planet Earth was destroyed in a mere instant, and everything that the human race, and indeed every other species on Earth had done or tried to do was swallowed up into the eternal void of nothingness forevermore.

Oh well.