Mad Penguins on Tour

2004-04-28T05:31:00.000-07:00

2004-04-23T16:08:00.000-07:00

Mental health & class composition in fictitious counties: the Archers unmasked... a half-assed analysis by Mad Ted.

As many fans of this website are from British bourgeois origins and therefore listen to BBC Radio 4 as a matter of course (a course), I am presuming that a high percentile factor among you will be familiar with what’s currently going on in the Archers, the radio soap opera that began in the early 1950s as a means of getting agricultural information out to the sickle-bearing community in a mildly entertaining format. In more recent times its script editorship was taken up by Vanessa Whitburn, late of Channel 4’s radical-Redmond (Phil, not John) soap Brookside, resulting in storylines based around Combat 18 cells, no-M11 and Twyford Down activity, and the destruction of GM-trial crops. The programme plays for less than 15 minutes at a time, but this is daily so that’s alright: and it even features its very own organic farmers, as well as a comedy lower-class family – the Grundys – who are portrayed as being incompetent and peripherally involved in drugs and crime, not unlike the Dingles in ITV1’s Emmerdale. Inevitably the Grundys are the unwilling recipients of our scorn and derision, and occasionally our sentimentalist pity as well, bolstering the crass bourgeois liberal concept of the undeserving poor, what the Victorians referred to as the laissez-faire doctrine. The Archers is set in a twee village called Ambridge, in the county of Borsetshire and close to the town of Borchester, a nod to the romanticist late nineteenth-century author Anthony Trollope, who was also the inventor of the red British pillar box for the mails; whilst all of these places are entirely fictitious Birmingham in the midlands is frequently referred to, and you get the impression that it’s somewhere around Shropshire or maybe Hereford & Worcester.

The better part of a decade ago John Archer, the scion to Bridge Farm Organics and a playboy figure not unlike his namesake in Massachusetts, died when the fatigue brought on by his juggling of women and the ruthless pursuit of capital led to his being crushed by his own tractor late one dark night, and his mother Pat fell into a long spate of fairly severe depression; if it had been Eddie Grundy who had suffered this lonely and desolate end no doubt it would have been to a whole lot of giggling around the parlours of middle England, but instead much reverence and respect was communicated toward this very engine of rural accumulation; and his mother’s subsequent illness was dealt with in a very understanding fashion, with a whole lot of time, effort and research devoted to it. Well; so far, so good you might think.

But now fast forward to mid-2004, when Pat’s daughter has shacked up with the gamekeeper Greg Turner, a man approaching middle age and with at least one divorce behind him and two estranged children now living in France. When Greg’s ex-wife keeps coming back over the telephone to him for help whenever it suits her, and pressure from the medieval-style estate-owner philandering Brian Aldridge – really the ‘wicked squire’ figure for the serial – gets a bit much for him, the dark clouds beckon for the hapless Greg and the walls begin to close in. Yikes! Some irrational behaviour ensues, occasional fits of misdirected rage alternating with extreme fatalism and apathy, culminating in a refusal to go to work or even to leave the house as far as the average listener can discern. Is there a connection between his behaviour and his de-facto mother-in-law’s memories of her anus horribilis in the turbulent nineties? Can there be a chance now of the building of a bridge between the worn-down Greg and Pat Archer, who never much liked him in the first place? No, a course not, as any penguin would say. Because this isn’t about mental health, it’s about class. Because the well-to-do (as the average Daily Express-reading Archers aficionado would describe them) are allowed to be depressed, because they have legitimate, executive pressures, because their problems are so much greater than ours, as evidenced by the former gamekeeper’s wife Christine Barford who was recently targeted for persecution by the excellent Class Warrior Clive Horrobin, brother of the obnoxious Thatcherite throwback and hilarious hen-pecker Susan Carter. Greg Turner, on the other hand, has a regional accent and must therefore be destroyed. Ambridge Class War, where are you now?

2004-04-11T09:47:00.000-07:00

A hospickle pengwen.

Well, by the time that Penkie the small penguin got out of the hospickle-cum-motel room in Lubbock TX, he was once more raring to go a course; it was nice to get out of the hotel room more than anythink else, there were bullet holes in their solitary grubby window, Penkie & Teddy were staying next to a miserable gas station, and there wasn’t even much on the telly. The only consolation to the place seemed to be that it was reasonably close to the town library and the Lubbock central post office.

The Travelers Brief Respite Motel had only really been chosen by Teddy for a couple nights, for two main reasons a course: the first was, ovvusley, because it was the cheapest joint in town. And the second was that they had arranged to meet Duane, the surgeon who does operations on the side, in the 7-11 right next door to arrange stuff. Duane had asplained to Teddy on his secret phone line the night before that it would be a flat rate of $150 for the whole job if they could do it all in a handy motel room close by, and that way it could all be over in little more than an hour, no questions asked. Penkie quickly nodded his strange bill at Teddy, clutching the sore left side of his small penguin head rather desperately now, and the deal was clinched for 1pm the following lunchtime.

There are a course some uvvantages to living next door to a 24-hour petrol station for a short time. The main one of these if you are a small penguin with a bit of a sweet tooth is the proximity of cakes, and the main one if you are Teddy is the 24-hour hot coffee reservoir a course. And then there is the small matter of fish gland operations. Despite a face-saving political conference cover story, this was the real reason that Penkie & Teddy had travelled 6000 miles to the desolate plains of north-eastern Texas, one of the most backward backwaters in the whole white-settler world a course. Penkie’s trouble was that he had eaten so much of that nasty gunky Spanish fish in Spain that his left fish gland had got completely blocked up. Teddy had phoned up the Homerton hospital and even the arch-liberal Diane Abbott and the ultra-fascist Mad Dave Blunkett, but it appeared that you just couldn’t get that kind of an oppyrayshun for a small penguin on the cheap anywhere in Europe. Desperately cruising the intrynet for solutions late one night, Penkie had happened across www.operationsontheside.tx.com, and it seemed that an end to his suffering was imminent. Teddy e-mailed the site’s webmaster who gave him an e-mail address for one defrocked surgeon, dodgy Duane from Amarillo, a notorious quack who seemed to know his stuff but was banned from his hometwn due to one impropriety or another. Penkie e-mailed him as well, detailing his plight and his general condition, and clutching at the festering offending gland in some acute discomfort as he typed.

Duane marched into the scabby auld motel room quite purposefully, if not entirely in a straight line, and set his doctor’s bag down on the bed. Actually it was a Walgreens carrier bag, but beggars can’t be choosers a course.

“Right so y’all,” Duane drawled. “Lit’s git this here shaw on thah road a course!”

Duane tucked Penkie up tight beneath the starched white bedsheet, probably used for other even more nefarious purposes in times past, and felt around the side of Penkie the small penguin’s round head for the bulge of the infected gland. Finding it quite quickly with his long callused shaking fingers, Duane clamped off the offending area and then he tied an old USB cable around Penkie’s neck to act as some class of a tourniquet or something. I dunno. It’s pretty technical stuff. I would go into more detail here, but I really ought to spare small penguins the acute umbarrassment of broadcasting their most intimate invasions all over the damn intryweb a course. Suffice to say that, if you’ve ever sat through the last 20 gruelling minutes of that Hannibal fillum, that’s some bizarre approximation of what it was like. Yeah, I know; pretty bad innit, uspeshully for a small penguin a course.

So then, Penkie was ready to order a big fish pizza or something as we struggled away from the Travelers Brief Respite Motel on Friday the thirteenth, heading for the Greyhound station at 1313 13th street a course. But where was Terry the Texas Longhorn? Well, that’s another story entirely a course...

2004-04-11T09:44:00.000-07:00

Chunky Penguin, 1812.

Chunky penguin strode down the gangplank and onto the dock, lighting a Ducados as he waddled. It had taken the Lady Penelope fifteen days to sail, or rather to steam, from Los Alamos in Texas to Spanish Cadiz, stopping off for horsefeed and other refreshments in New Orleans along the way. Chunky was knackered. He needed a bed, a good cigar and a bottle of sherry, in that order. Everything else could wait. It was April 1st 1812.

Chunky Penguin was by no means superstitious; he couldn’t afford to be, so he wasn’t particularly bothered about the number of days his journey had taken him, nor about the incongruous date of his arrival. He had been born a penguin slave in El Paso at the turn of the new Century and had been put to work in them damn cotton fields at the age of only two: it was back-breaking work and by the age of three-and-a-half Chunky had indeed acquired a bad back, and had even broken one of his wings twice whilst hoying enormous bales of cotton up onto the top of the stack in Robert E. Lee’s grandpappy’s barn. So, at seven, he had decided to cut his losses and try his luck in fleeing to Mexico. Having been taught the rudimentaries of the written word in a secret hedge school by John Brown’s Great Uncle Dave, Chunky had fair devoured the politics of the new underground radical penguin movement almost every day since, including Charlie Penguin’s classic pamphlets “What are we gonna do anyway?” and “Toward a modren penguin radicalism”, as well as the weekly editorials of the Radical Penguin Gazette.

The trip down to Oaxaca, where he had learned through the radical penguin grapevine that there existed a thriving network of autonomous penguin anarcho-communes, had been a hard one and Chunky had to dress up as a Panda many times in order to work his way through the rugged countryside on mule trains and cattle and pig droves, and sometimes he even had to masquerade as a Toucan as well. He subsisted on pork & beans just like the baby Derek had to years later, but he missed his fish and cakes desperately and he often cried himself unconscious in his sleeping bag on the prairie at nights, dreaming of Chilli Tuna Bagels and biscuits hand-made by penguin nuns. But a little over three months later he really thought that his dream of penguin freedom had been realised as he waddled along the main street of Puerto Pinguino Libre from the bus station to the community centre. The dream, however, differed slightly from the reality. Although - outside of Mexico Distrto Fedrale at least - Mexican penguins were no longer slaves, and in Oaxaca state had managed to successfully organise themselves into a chain of co-operative fisheries, bakeries, and small builders, there was the constant bickering over did controlling the means of production mean ownership of the seas or was this merely a bourgeois conceit, and did the comrades in Regent’s Park Zoo really constitute an autonomous collective; and besides, he didn’t think much of their moustaches and their floppy hats. He stuck out the arguments for six months, keeping his bill to the ground for much of the time, until finally he could stand it no more and he struck out for Spain where he had heard that there might be a serious anarchist-communist social asperiment sometime in the near future.

The dock smelt strongly of coffee beans and sugar, Spain’s principal cash crops from its imperial colonies, and even the smell of this revived Chunky Penguin a little bit and made him want some coffee soup and a nice chocolate brownie. He put his cigarettes away and moved his tan satchel around to the small of his back, just above his penguin ass, and approached one of the dock labourers, a small rockhopper penguin with a pre-punk orange mohawk hair-do.

“Por favor senor, pero sabes donde esta el bar?” Chunky penguin enquired.

The smaller penguin didn’t say anything; he hardly even looked away from his work of sorting an endless series of roasted coffee soup beans from one hessian sack into another before he finally gestured with one poor tired wing across the dock, to beyond an enormous Tate & Lyle warehouse, where there sat a small wooden Cantina nestling between two palm trees.

“Muchas Gracias, Senor” Chunky Penguin told the rockhopper.

“De nada, Bruce” the small punk penguin replied. “Fuckin’ A!”

The cantina was just like something out of an old time Western, complete with swinging stable doors, only it was slightly ahead of its time and also a continent out of place a course. As Chunky put down his satchel on the floor next to the bar, something of a hush descended. Chunky looked around himself, taking in the remainder of its sparse clientele. There was only a couple of culchie cowboy bears playing crazy eights in the corner through a fug of cigar smoke and a green Irish bear in a black shawl at the other end of the bar, muttering away madly into a large tumbler full of Soberano brandy.

“Para beber?” asked the bartender, a giant six-feet tall multi-coloured toucan.

“Cafe solo, por favor” Chunky quickly replied... ‘y, tienes kekes?”

“No senor,” the large toucan replied. “Tenemos solo guisqui aqui!”

It was only then that it dawned on Chunky that he was the only penguin in the bar, and then that he remembered from the Radical Penguin Gazette an article in 1810 detailing the harsh Spanisn Penguin Penal Segregation Laws.

2004-04-11T09:43:00.000-07:00

C L R James on Hegel
Notes on Dialectics: PART II
The Hegelian Logic

ESSENCE IS A MOVEMENT OF NEGATION

I feel guilty as hell. We are now only at p. 80 of Essence. I pass by Ground looking firmly at the other side. Substance, Necessity, Reciprocity, all of them I am going to pass by. I shall make some strictly ad hoc notes on Appearance and Actuality, and then over to Notion. But let us review a little and then look for some help. We are dealing with thought. We learnt to look at the quality of a thing and its dialectical movement into something else. We then saw that when we looked at it, what we saw was not a photograph, an identity. No, we saw difference within identity and identity within difference. We saw too that in our heads was an Idea which enabled us to distinguish the specific differences. We saw the importance of Contradiction, the fundamental relation of good and evil, truth and error, the process of transition. The object does not move into something else; it shows the Other contained in it. We are learning how to examine an object and how to examine thoughts about an object. Is Ground the next transition after Contradiction? Does Appearance arise inevitably out of Existence? I doubt if Hegel would maintain all that in detail. These determinations in Essence are, it must be remembered, Determinations of Reflection. They are creations of thought, but creations which reflect the object, enable us to take it apart and put it together again, and first of all in our heads. We are going to the concept of Notion — the notion of the thing. We worry it as a dog worries a bone. That is what Essence teaches.

But before we take up the concepts of Appearance and Actuality we would do well to see what a remarkable intelligence, trained in the same sphere as we have been trained, made of the Logic, and examine his thinking with this in view. We need a little rest. Essence is the hardest part of the Logic, says Hegel, and we still have a long way to go.

Lenin in 1914 found himself in Zurich, with the world that he had known and his categories breaking to pieces. He did not get excited and start to make the revolution by himself. He had a policy and he fought for it, but he recognised that everything was in a melting pot. He wrote above all Imperialism and State and Revolution. He studied the Phenomenology of Mind, and he worked at Hegelian Logic. He made notes on the Logic. We have extracts and comments. Sidney Hook once told me that there wasn't much to them. Quite right. For him, there wasn't much. The Marxist movement swears by. . . Plekhanov. I remember on my journeys between Missouri and New York stopping at Washington and Rae, calling out an at-sight translation from Lenin's Russian notes and my scribbling them down. I still have the notebook. That they are not published means one thing — contempt for the masses. Yes, precisely. They don't need it, they are not up to it. And therefore the party does not need it. Only when you have respect for the masses do you have respect for the party. There is nothing in these notes for Hook the academician. There is plenty for us in seeing what struck the mind of the great revolutionary as he read, with the years of Russian Bolshevism stored up in his mind and the perspective of world revolution before him. There is space for only a few things. But they stand out.

In reading on Quality in the Doctrine of Being, Lenin writes in very large writing:

LEAP

LEAP

LEAP

LEAP

This obviously hit him hard. He wanted it stuck down in his head, to remember it, always. He makes a note on it as follows:

At the basis of the concept of gradualness of emergence lies the idea that the emerging is already sensuously or really in existence, only on account of its smallness not yet perceptible and likewise with the concept of the gradualness of disappearance.

Let us look up the extract itself:

The gradualness of arising is based upon the ideas that that which arises is already, sensibly or otherwise, actually there, and is imperceptible only on account of its smallness; and the gradualness of vanishing on the idea that Not-being or the Other which is assuming its place equally is there, only is not yet noticeable; there, not in the sense that the Other is contained in the Other which is there in itself, but that it is there as Determinate Being, only unnoticeable. This altogether cancels arising and passing away: or the In-itself, that inner somewhat in which something is before it attains Determinate Being, is transmuted into a smallness of external Determinate Being and the essential or conceptual distinction into a difference external and merely magnitudinal. The procedure which makes arising and passing away conceivable from the gradualness of change is boring in the manner peculiar to tautology; that which arises or passes away is prepared beforehand, and the change is turned into the mere changing of an external distinction; and now it is indeed a mere tautology. The difficulty for such Understanding which attempts to conceive consists in the qualitative transition of something into its Other in general and into its opposite; Understanding prefers to fancy identity and change to be of that indifferent and external kind which applies to the quantitative.

Understanding once more gets the blows. This is a passage of great importance and Lenin has summarised it perfectly with his LEAP LEAP LEAP LEAP. The new thing LEAPS out. You do not look and see it small and growing larger. It is there, but it exists first in thought. Thought knows it is the object. You haven't to see it (though if you know it is there you can see signs and point them out). Hegel is bored to tears at people who keep looking for external signs and “the mere magnitudinal” as proof. Lenin did not fasten on this for nothing. He said: “Turn the Imperialist War into Civil War.” How many sincere opponents of imperialism recoiled in horror. “Too rash, too crude, not now.” (Trotsky was among them). Lenin would not budge. The socialist movement against imperialism would establish itself on the concrete transition — the opposition to the monstrous evil of the war. He didn't have to wait to see anything. That was there. It would LEAP up.

I was particularly struck by this in Lenin. Hegel is very irritating. He sticks to method. He does not shout. But every single one of his transitions involves a leap. He talks very quietly about impulse, etc. But you can go on reading for a long time and not get the true significance of the leap. I did not emphasise it. He held on to it.

On the Doctrine of Essence, Lenin fastens on to precisely the same thing. Look at this remarkable note on Observation 3.

Movement and “self-movement” (NB this. An independent spontaneous, internally necessary movement), “alteration”, “movement and life”, “principle of every self-movement”, “impulse”, (drive) to “movement” and to “activity” — opposite of “dead being” — who would believe that this is the core of “Hegelianism”, of abstract and abstruse (difficult, absurd?) Hegelianism. We must uncover this core, grasp it, “save” unveil, purify it — which Marx and Engels have also accomplished.

That is something vital. Self-movement. Spontaneous activity. We shall meet them again. You wait. This is what we must hold on to, grasp, “unveil, purify”. We can say that we have done some. This movement, activity, spontaneous, internally necessary. The man of organisation knew what moved the world, especially the social world. Hegel could write about thoughts for decades, but this was the drive, and it made LEAPS (four of them at once).

On Observation 3 see notes among other things:

NB 1. The usual perception comprehends the difference and the contradiction but not the transition from one to the other, which however, is the most important.

We shall come back to Lenin again. But let us sit and write in large print on our notes: LEAP, SPONTANEOUS ACTIVITY, SELF-MOVEMENT, etc. etc. Where he wrote it four times, we should write it forty-four. The past point from Lenin is important not only in itself but for us, in this study. And it comes right in here.

These last notes of Lenin that we must take up will be rather lengthy. That is because they have tremendous value for us, (a) in themselves as a review of the past, (b) as teaching the interconnectedness of the various parts of the Logic and the underlying unity of the method at all stages, (c) illuminate the closing parts of the Doctrine of Essence yet to come, (d) show us the Hegelian method of thought and action of Lenin: i.e. of a revolutionary} and (e) prepare us for the last historical stage of this essay: Lenin's own work, for which and from which alone we can jump off and fly for ourselves.

That is a mouthful but every bit of it is juicy. And I hope no one is impatient. Let us see where we are. We did the Doctrine of Essence up to Ground. We discussed the question of how you arrive at Inevitability, the Absolute. We promised to take up only Appearance and Actuality as two further stages of the Notion. We then went into a Leninist interlude and review. We saw Lenin's emphasis on the LEAP (four times); and on constant movement, spontaneous internally necessary self-activity . We noted that the whole Logic itself, the continuous transitions from this Ground to that Ground, to the other Ground to Complete Ground, was just this continuous self-generating, spontaneous activity, though the activity had a certain order which it was the business of thought to organise in accordance with the laws immanent in it, i.e. the laws of its own development. Good. We are now about to take up a note of Lenin's which opened up a formidable perspective of benefits, both for the past review and future developments. Who now is tired can take a rest, and after a nap, can start off afresh. Let's go.

The note itself is very slight. It arises from Section I of the larger Logic on Quality. It says:

The idea of the transformation of the ideal into the real is profound; very important for history. But also in the personal life of a man, it is evident that in this there is much truth. Against vulgar materialism. NB: The difference between idea and material is in any case, not unconditional, not extravagant.

That's all. I looked up the section and glanced through it again. It is some hundred pages long. It is in the Doctrine of Being, mind you, the first section, in fact, the real beginning of the Logic.

Hegel is grappling with words that he always has in mind, finite and infinite. What is the true infinity? “Finite” is a fixed, limited determination or category. The infinite is not simply something that is beyond the finite. That he says is nothing, a bad infinite. (Get your thinking muscles in order. Sit up and take notice). The infinite is not something in general that is beyond what we know as actual. It is the fact that what is beyond the finite comes back, and accomplishes a return to the finite and keeps on doing this, that makes it a true infinity. The beyond, the infinite, is not abstract or indeterminate Being, something we know nothing about, our old monster, Nothing. It, the infinite, the beyond, is self-related Being, because to come into existence at all the infinite is going to have to negate the finite. It is thus a negating force. And whatever negates is something present. If we may here use a metaphor: Infinite is the Other of the finite. But Infinite is not negation in general. It is the bad infinite which negates the existing and puts nothing in its place. That is vague fancy, caprice, and nonsense (or mere reflection). Socialism is not a vague, rosy-coloured picture of infinite beauty and truth and love, something beyond our miserable life. Socialism, the beyond, is the concrete negation of what we have — Stalinism. The overcoming of Stalinism is the next stage of infinity — and for my part the working class today when it overcomes Stalinism, i.e. the “capitalising” of the concept of the proletarian party, that working class, having overcome this, is truly socialistic. For that matter when it overcomes its main enemy, capital, and the brutalities of fascism, inflation, imperialist war, the destructive, the class elements in modern industry, that is socialism — the only infinite that there is. But why does the infinite for some people remain a Beyond, a far distant? And then comes a knock-out blow. That is in the last analysis, “based on the fact that the finite as such is held fast as existent.” That is the mentality which sees socialism in the far distance and is really chained to the idea that what the workers want is a higher standard of living, “a full dinner-pail”, “peace”, “security”, “full employment”. All he has done is to hold fast to the existent, making it tolerable by patching up the holes. That is the next stage of socialism. Shachtman is that type complete. The opposition, the socialism that lies in the struggle and overcoming of Stalinism is beyond him. But that does not exhaust the type. At the other end of its scale is Trotsky. He holds fast to another type of existent, the world of 1917. After twenty-one years of the Russian revolution all he could say was: revive the soviets; revise the plan in the interests of the toilers; free the unions. If Shachtman is Imagination, which thinks only with what is familiar, Trotsky is Understanding, which thinks only with what is familiar to it. To both, the next stage is excluded. Yes, to both of them. And precisely because of that, the present eludes them. Thus early, at the beginning, in Quality, in the Doctrine of Being, Hegel was saying, in general, on a very abstract level, what he will be saying on a more developed level in Essence, and on a still higher level in the Doctrine of the Notion.

Here then is the complete extract. The phrase “progress to infinity” is characteristic of those who do not see the real nature of infinity. They see infinity as a straight line. Hegel says it is a series of circles, each circle, however, including and yet excluding the previous circle, thus:

This infinite is the accomplished return upon itself. As such it is self-relation or Being; but not abstract or indeterminate Being, for it is posited as negating negation; and thus it is also Determinate Being, for it contains negation as such, and, therefore, determinateness. It exists, and exists as a Determinate Being, present and before us. It is only the bad infinite which is the beyond, because it is the negation, and nothing more, of the finite posited as real; it is thus abstract and first negation; it is determined as merely negative, and is without the affirmation implicit in Determinate Being; and if held fast as mere negative it is even supposed to be non-existent and beyond reach. But to be thus beyond reach is not its glory but its shame; which, ultimately, is based on the fact that the finite as such is held fast as existent. That which is untrue is beyond reach; and it is evident that such an infinite is the untrue. The image of the “progress to infinity” is the straight line, the infinite still remaining at its two limits and there only where the line is not; now the line is Determinate Being, which passes on to this its contradictory, that is, into the indeterminate. But as true infinity, turned back upon itself, it has for image the circle, the line which has reached itself, closed and wholly present and having neither beginning nor end.

Now having said this he proceeds to say the most astonishing things, for those who think in terms of common sense. He says, for example, that it is not the finite, the fixed limited, concrete, which is real. It is the Infinite which is real. And I trust no one reading this is so dumb as not to be aware that this is the very point we dug into on Ground where we discussed the Absolute in terms of the Being and Not-Being of the finite. Yet that is Volume II, page 70 about, and this is Volume I, page 162. There are some four hundred pages in between. Isn't this fellow marvellous? And far away in the centre of Volume II he will come back to it again, and end up once more with it in the final section, on methods of inquiry, or the Idea of Cognition. He himself practises the continually enlarging circles.

True infinity thus taken, in general, as Determinate Being opposed affirmatively to abstract negation, is Reality in a higher meaning than is that infinity which before was determined as simple; it has here received concrete content. It is not the finite which is the real, but the infinite; and thus Reality is further determined as Essence, Notion, Idea, and so forth. It is however, superfluous to repeat these earlier and more abstract categories, such as “Reality”, when the more concrete has been reached, and to employ them for determinations more concrete than these are in themselves. A repetition, such as is made when we say that Essence or the Idea is the Real, has its reason in the fact that, to uncultivated thought, the most abstract categories, such as Being, Determinate Being, Reality, and Finitude, are the most familiar.

I leave that to you, and hurry on to the last passage:

Here there is a more definite reason for recalling the category of reality, for the negation to which it stands in the relation of affirmative is here the negation of negation: it is thus itself opposed to this reality, which is finite Determinate Being. Negation is thus determined as ideality; that which partakes of the ideal nature is the finite as it is found in true infinity, as a determination or content, which though distinct does not exist independently, but only as moment. Ideality has this more concrete meaning, which is not fully expressed by negation of finite Determinate Being.

Yes. The real is only a moment, though fixed, limited, finite, in the Ideal. Don't ignore it. It is “distinct”. But it has no independent existence. Identity now has a more concrete meaning, and it is not sufficient to say that the Infinite, the beyond will negate the finite: socialism will do away with all this in general. No, sir. That only means that you have not done away with all this and cannot see the forces that are doing away with it. But there are some people who do not understand this. Hegel continues:

But with relation to reality and ideality the opposition to finite and infinite is taken in this manner, that the finite is taken as real and the infinite as of ideal nature; and such, indeed, and only such, the Notion is later on taken to be; whereas Determinate Being in general is taken as real.

You may try to change the phrasing to help them. You can't. They “remain fixed in the affirmative Determinate Being of the finite. “

That is the aim of the Logic, for the thousandth time: how to keep out of the fixed, limited, finite categories. Hegel is doing just this, in a constantly more concrete manner, page after page. That is all. But what an all! To get out of the clutching hands of fixed categories. It isn't easy. Precisely because we have to get them fixed and precise before we can do anything. We can remain fixed in them when they are grabbed on to by people who are objectively satisfied to remain there.

Worse still, we can remain fixed in them when they no longer exist. The result is complete frustration, and blindness to reality. Within those categories Trotskyism works. Stalinism, however, has found the objective basis for those categories as fixed and static, finite and limited forms. (I have been searching for this for weeks and I have it). Stalinism has found the objective basis for the fixed categories of Leninism. Hence it operates on a material basis. The games it played with Trotsky over socialism in a single country were the concretisation, the stabilising of its ideology- For Stalinism, this was a real ideology. For Trotsky it was in essence a fiction without any reality.

Now we can go ahead and select a few sentences which contain the core of Hegel's Ideality.

The proposition that the finite is of ideal nature constitutes Idealism.

You see here the close connection between the ideal and the real. The real is constantly creating an ideal which tomorrow becomes the real and so on.

Hegel curses those people for whom the ideal is in their own heads and their own caprice. How he hates them.

By that which is “of ideal nature” the form of imagination is meant primarily; and this name is given to whatever is in my imagination in general, or in the concept, in the idea, in the fancy, and so forth; so that it comes to be counted equivalent only to fancies — imaginations which are not only distinct from the real, but are supposed in their essence to be not real.

Hegel has no use for that. The idea for him is in such close connection with the real that you cannot separate them. A genuine ideal today is the real of tomorrow. And that is the way life, and the logic, move.

So we go back to Lenin's modest but pregnant note about Hegel. The transformation of the ideal into the real is profound, very important for history. You remember in Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity I quoted a section from an old article in the New International showing how ideal became real, etc., owing to the aims and objective consolidations and compromises of classes and sections of classes. But this very thing will become in time for us the basis of long overdue theoretical investigation and then concrete practical politics. We have now (a) reviewed the past, (b) seen the interconnection and underlying unity of the parts of the Logic. We promised also to (c) illuminate the closing parts of Essence yet to come — the rest will have to wait. On now to the last parts of the Doctrine of Essence. (After terrible hours of labour, I am feeling pretty good. I think we have got some place, and are on the road to some better places).

2004-04-11T09:40:00.000-07:00

Mutinies [Mad Esther]

A talk delivered at the launch of 'Mutinies', an issue of Revolutionary History. The Lucas Arms, King's Cross, London July 2002

Introduction
I have spoken a couple of times before about this new Revolutionary History issue on Mutinies - of which I was an editor, but on which subject I am by no means an expert. I saw my role as an organising one - trying to get at the people who do know much about questions of mutinies, insubordination in the army, the role of the military and the role of violence in history. I think that I did find some people who were well versed in the themes and were able to offer fascinating articles and analyses. You will judge that. One of the questions that has come up at previous talks on this subject is the question of whether mutinies are a phenomenon of the past, whether the prospect of mutiny is no longer a reality - in particular - in the West, in today's professional armies. To forestall this question - or to raise it before it raises itself, I thought I would pose some questions today about the contemporary situation. But in order to get there I'd like, today, to fill in some details of mutinies and armies in the period after the period dealt with in the volume.

The volume predominantly focuses on the period around the end of the First World War - a kind of golden age of mutinies - indeed that whole period has particular significance for revolutionaries, being the period of the Russian revolution. We might expect then to see class struggle and new political forms of self-governance emerge on ships and amongst army camps, just as they emerge elsewhere. Of course, some of the mutinies described are less about forging new future forms of self-rule for the working classes, and more about weariness, about demobilisation, about re-entering society as it is - they have simply restorative aims. In any case, simply restorative or more challenging to the status quo, this post-First World War moment is an important one for revolutionaries. The war ended with mutinies in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven in Germany - and these became important centres of revolutionary self-organisation. The French invasion of Revolutionary Russia in 1919 and 1920 was hindered by the mutiny of the French fleet in the Black Sea. Amongst the other rebellions across the world, were mutinies among sailors in the British Navy and in the armies of the British empire in Asia, and there were apparently even mutinies among American troops sent to aid the White Army in the Russian Civil War.

The RH volume on mutinies does also address briefly the situation toward s the end of the Second World War, in particular in Egypt, with the British troops frustrated in their situation and posing demands and new forums of discussion and rule. This near Eastern setting is where I'd like to pick up the story today - in order to bring us into the future - through a few themes suggested by a newspaper - and these I hope will allow us to consider the post Second World War world, before we set off on some time-travelling into the future of mutiny.

To begin
The Past
A newspaper that I found. A Newcastle newspaper - The Sunday Sun - from July 23 1944. I acquired it because I found it on an auction site and - because my research is mainly concerned with Germany in the first half of 20th century - was intrigued by the front page headline. It details, through a fog of confusion and ideological bluster - rumours about an army revolt amongst the nazis - clearly this is referring to what later became known as the July Officers' Plot - where a number of generals - of right-wing, authoritarian persuasion plotted to assassinate Hitler - their actions and names are more or less famous: von Stauffenberg, Olbricht, von Trott, von Treschow etc etc. This aristocratic opposition is celebrated in the museum of anti-fascist resistance in Berlin, incidentally in the very building where the ring-leaders were executed.

The July officers' plot to assassinate Hitler, then. The Newcastle newspaper report makes things sound much more dramatic - more widespread - than just a revolt on the part of an elite. It is reported as it happens, and the official story is not yet decided, so something else peeks through, and lets us know about the ways in which history progresses, before ruling alibis are brought to bear. It seems almost like the scene at the end of the First World War - widespread revolt, a crumbling of rule, of law and order, a virtual civil war. Participation in this revolt goes beyond the antifa groups, with their communists and social democrats - there are arsenals seized by the rebels, mutinies in Kiel, Stettin and Norwegian harbours, huge clashes in cities with thousands of arrests. Clashes between the Wehrmacht and SS at Lyons, Besancon and Bourg, and in ten large German cities, while the Luftwaffe bombs revolt centres. The extent of the revolt is substantiated elsewhere. On August 22 1944 alone 5000 former Weimar politicians were sent to the concentration camps. In the last half of 1944 there was a wave of arrests among all oppositional circles. The number of arrests in connection with this attempt has been estimated anywhere between 5,000 and 20,000. In post war histories - including the official West German - 'Questions of German History' that every school child was given - there is nothing on this aspect of an unravelling of Nazi rule through mutiny and civil disobedience. In the allied countries too such a picture does not tally with the heroic picture of unconditional surrender brought about by allied armies against a homogenous population. Had it been acknowledged, then it might also have been necessary to acknowledge that, rather than allied victors, resisters themselves could administer Germany's affairs after the war. The reasons why this aspect is underplayed are presumably clear for anyone who is politically astute.

In fact it is really not part of the popular image of nazi Germany that there should be any resistance at all. But if one searches hard one finds evidence. One of the sources is in fact the US military administration in post-War Germany. The US Office of Strategic Services was very keen to seek out information on the population at the close of the war, in order to mark the cards of the population in their German dominion. According to a report titled 'The Size and Composition of the Anti-Nazi Opposition in Germany'a report on the part of the Morale Division of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSB) of the U.S. Air Force, the opposition comprised the following. (1) In Hamburg, for example, an Antifaschistiches Deutsches Kampf Komittee was established, which included 700 Communists, Social Democrats, and other left wing elements, 200 of whom were organised into armed Hundertschaften (hundreds). The group possessed stolen antiaircraft guns, machine guns, rifles, and pistols. A former leader of the Social Democratic Reichsbanner (the Socialist paramilitary organization) estimated that about 600 former Reichsbanner men continued to meet together in small groups of 3-4. In the Hamburg shipyards and plants there were anti-Nazi cells throughout the period of the war. The same was true of countless other German cities - Lübeck, Halle, Leipzig, Frankfurt, in the Ruhr and so on. In Bremen the Communists had about two hundred activists. This figure was reported both from Gestapo and Communist sources. The Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei had some thirty to forty activists In 1944 a consolidated organization called 'Kampf gegen Fascismus' was formed and after the Allied occupation the KGF claimed a membership of over four thousand in Bremen, mainly of left-wing sympathies. Members of these groups worked on go-slows and carried out acts of sabotage. The Morale Division report notes the following:

Sabotage in its more dramatic forms was not frequent. There are some reports of sabotage of U-boats and other vessels by German Communists in the Hamburg and Bremen shipyards. The Gestapo in Hannover discovered frequent cases of sabotage in armament plants for which Russian workers were primarily responsible. But wherever there were left wing oppositional groups the slogan 'Langsam Arbeiten' was spread. Oppositional activists in positions of administrative responsibility sometimes sabotaged on the job. A woman member of the NKFD [Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland] in Leipzig who was in charge of female labor discipline in the Reichstreuhaender der Arbeit (the agency in charge of foreign workers), administered the minimum penalty, and encouraged some of her colleagues to do the same. Foremen in the Deutsche Werft in Hamburg deliberately wasted steel, and slowed down U-boat production by delaying in the transmission of information as to changes in design.

If the theme of mutiny appears a little lost in all this recollection of resistance and workplace disobedience, I note only of the testimony of Gisevius at the Nuremburg Trials in 1946 when he noted that after 1938 'jeder Streikversuch von Seiten der Linken als Meuterei im Kriege bestraft worden wäre, und ich erinnere Sie an die vielen Todesurteile, die in die Hunderte gingen, die solche Zivilisten unter den Kriegsgesetzen erhielten.' 'every attempt at striking on the part of the Left was treated like a mutiny in wartime, and I remind you of the many death sentences, which went into the hundreds, which such civilians received under the miltary laws.'

Where previously I have referred to mutinies as taking place in concentrated microcosms of society - a ship, an army troop - here the opposite might be seen - in a militarised society, every act of class struggle is a type of mutiny and the punishment as severe. These oppositional groups and individuals, in any case, were never rewarded for their work or endurance - because as we know another war began immediately after the Second World war - the Cold War - or the war against communism - making every leftwing activist a suspect and a threat.

What is interesting in this context is another story on the front page of this newspaper. It is surely not unrelated - though the tone within the newspaper might suggest that the two events are - one is celebrated as the end of a barbaric regime, the other a small factual report:

'Sentences on Mutineers'
Four death sentences were passed by Greek court martial yesterday upon members of the crew of the Greek warship Saktouris, who, along with two other warships, staged a mutiny at Alexandria last April, reports Reuter. Thirteen other sentences were imposed on men of the crew ranging from 20 years to imprisonment for life.

This, as far as I can tell, is a reference to the mutinies staged by Greek sailors at Alexandria, which was attributed to communist agitation.

From what I have managed to find out about it, in early April 1944 a large part of the army, and five ships from the navy, mutinied and struck in favour of republican government. A terrified British ambassador to the Greek government - that was in exile in Cairo - wrote to Churchill, 'What is happening here among the Greeks is nothing less than a revolution'. In suppression of the rebellion, eleven seamen were killed, others wounded, and many subsequently interned. In relation to Greek affairs, official British policy favoured the restoration of King George II, whereas the resistance was overwhelmingly republican - the British pursued this aim through repressive measures against the left in their mutinous disorders in the Middle East. Not that the left was one harmonious camp: Gareth Jenkins observes the following, referring to the EAM, the political wing of ELAS, the Peoples' Liberation Army:

By the end of April the starving mutineers were forced to surrender to the British who arrested the leaders and put 20,000 in prisoner of war cages. Yet the EAM, far from offering support to the mutineers, attacked them. The Greek CP (the KKE) was only a tiny minority in the resistance movement but its prestige ensured that it pressured the EAM into reaching an agreement for a government of Greek unity. As in Italy, the Communists subordinated the idea of social change to victory over the enemy.

In any case, observations on these matters bring us into the period of the Cold War again, for interesting - a former Trotskyist James Burnham turned liberal anti-communist and geo-politician, in his 1946 book The Struggle For The World, opens with this sentence, 'The Third World War began in 1944', and he expands on this with reference to the mutiny by Greek sailors at Alexandria. The British quickly crushed the mutiny, but Burnham thought there was something of general significance in the event. The mutineers were members of the ELAS, the military wing of the Greek Communist Party-controlled EAM. As such there was communist influence - which is to say influence from the USSR - still an ally of Britain at that point. He concluded then that a different war was also in process: 'the armed skirmishes of a new war have started before the old war is finished.' That new war of course is the Cold War, or its pre-skirmish, the battle for political and economic domination ina carved-up Europe.

Burnham's book as a whole announces the US intention to overcome communism, and any other threats to US supremacy, actively promoting a more aggressive strategy - called 'liberation' - to undermine Soviet power. This work found resonance in the highest political quarters. Burnham noted in the first essay in The War We Are In (1967), 'The analysis of communist and Soviet intentions in Part I of The Struggle for the World was originally part of a secret study prepared for the Office of Strategic Services in the spring of 1944 and distributed at that time to the relevant Washington desks.' When Burnham diagnosed what he called a 'sixth period' or Tehran period in Soviet politics, he was not necessarily wrong, of course. My point is that the revolts and mutinies of that period, on the part of ordinary people, are conveniently disregarded or worse made sinister - illegitimate - as part of a Soviet plot. This enables the postwar, Cold War world to come into being as a standoff between regimes. Effectively, in this moment, a certain postwar settlement was being worked on - the parameters of a postwar world, which was explained in terms of ruling class spheres of influence - divided between rulers who rule over people, whether supposedly in the name of democracy or supposedly in the name of the people themselves.

It's not all a disaster for the workers, of course. Inside this same newspaper, is another report of interest to this story of military discipline and consciousness. D.S. Tennant, General secretary of the Navigators and Engineer Officers Union writes a piece with the headline - Merchant Navy and its Futures. Of course, the merchant navy had at this time been pulled into active combat rather than commercial activity right at the start of the war. In 1944 the merchant navy was transporting armies too Europe in preparation for the liberation. Tennant reflects on how the officers are already asking what the future - postwar world - will hold for them. He reminds readers of the lack of gratitude shown by the nation after the First World War - this manifested in reductions in pay, worsening conditions, unemployment and widespread financial misery. Tennant notes that this must not be allowed to happen again and the way around it is international co-operation via an authority that would allocate quotas of tonnage to various countries 'in accord with their economic requirements and their past contribution to maritime enterprise'. Tennant also observes that conditions have been improving in the Merchant Navy through 'collective agreements and negotiated on the National Maritime Board'. He writes:

Pay has been materially increased, new standards of accommodation provided, leave on a more generous basis afforded.

So a meritocratic and planned economy is envisaged, as well as collective representation, against a background of improved conditions. It sounds almost like socialism. Something had to be promised and even delivered, after all this sacrifice and to secure the hearts and minds of those on this side of the line to come. Just a glance at the adverts and features in the newspaper reveals something of the gruelling texture of everyday life: death notices in the Roll of Honours, of soldiers who recently died of wounds in Northern France, and the small ads - for artificial limbs and the Valopio solution for work weary eyes, not to mention C&A ads for fibrene dresses in all of two tones of grey and hints on how to cope with rationing and shortages.

The Present
So the promise of improved conditions - not least in the military after the war. This is important for our topic. Because clearly many of the mutinies of the earlier period - at the end of the First World War no less than ones before stretching back to the 18th century came about as a result of appalling conditions in the strictly hierarchical microcosm of society - the ship or the army camp. Does this improvement in conditions in the military forces of the Western world - coupled of course with the eventual abolition of National Service or the Draft in the UK and USA - mean the end of mutinies here? (2) Of course it is not the end of mutinies per se. A cursory glance through online newspaper archives brings up many references to contemporary mutinies and acts of military disobedience.

There are countless mutinies going on as we speak. These take various forms - in Israel, the officers' refusal to fight in the occupied territories. To date, around 500 Israeli officers and soldiers have declared their refusal to serve in Occupied Palestinian Territory. The Israeli army has said it would jail refusers and in the past few months more than 80 have served time in Israeli military prisons. In Chechnya troops refuse to act as 'cannon fodder'. A newspaper report, from the end of March 2002, states:
Outraged by poor pay, incompetent commanders and antiquated equipment, a growing number of soldiers from specially trained Interior Ministry units are threatening to disobey orders to serve in the rebel republic. In the latest case of open insubordination, members of an elite paramilitary squad from the northern city of Cherepovets have given their superiors until next week to heed their demands. An ultimatum to their commanders, published across a whole page of Komsomolskaya Pravda, a national newspaper, yesterday, ridiculed Moscow bureaucrats for claiming that there is no war under way in Chechnya, just a 'counter-terrorist operation'. Their protest came to light on the same day that Russia released figures showing that 3,220 soldiers have been killed and nearly 9,000 injured in two and a half years of fighting in Chechnya. The Cherepovets soldiers' defiance is only the most recent example of a collapse in morale among Interior Ministry troops - professionals, unlike the conscripts serving in the army - ordered to deploy to the North Caucasus. Units from Syktykvar, Kaliningrad, Murmansk and Vologda, all cities in Russia's north or north west, have all protested at the length and conditions of their tours of duty in Chechnya so far this year. Among their grievances are efforts by their commanders to cut their bonuses for being involved in combat. The Cherepovets ultimatum goes further, heaping scorn on 'Moscow clerks', the officers commanding operations in the region and corrupt pro-Russian Chechen officials. Troops posted to Chechnya had to take their food, water and bedding with them as supplies were 'pitiful', the Cherepovets unit said. Russia maintains an 80,000-strong force in Chechnya to assert its authority over the war zone but a shortage of combat-ready units has put severe strain on the military.

Perhaps this means that the mutiny remains a kind of microcosm - in that the chaos of the wider situation - Russia's economic and social collapse - is reflected back into the military situation. And it is interesting to note here that professional rather than conscript status does not necessarily produce loyalty, if anything the opposite.

Russia's old enemy the USA is not suffering from anything like the same sort of chaos, but still the ruling class has no reason to be complacent there. A subterranean history of conscript anti-officer activity in Vietnam can be pieced together from the work of Kevin Keating and others. Its purpose is to stimulate new revolts amongst the military and civilian population, so one can also find reference to contemporary anxieties on the part of the ruling class in relation to the professional armies currently deployed. A leaflet given out to all the thousands of military personnel involved in Fleet Week, the yearly navy celebration and mock-operation in San Francisco notes the following:

A friend who was in the US military during the Persian Gulf War told me that when George Bush visited the troops in Saudi Arabia before the war, many enlisted men and women in Bush's immediate vicinity had their rifle and pistol ammunition taken away. The bolts were also removed from their rifles. If this was so, it makes it clear that Bush and his corporate handlers may have been afraid of the US enlisted people who Bush would soon be killing in his unsuccessful re-election campaign.
The suppressed history of the Vietnam war shows that the Commander-in-Chief had good reason to fear and distrust the troops. Our rulers want us to forget what happened during the Vietnam war, and they want us to forget what defeated their war effort - and the importance of the resistance to the war by enlisted men and women.
Until 1968 the desertion rate for US troops in Vietnam was lower than in previous wars. But by 1969 the desertion rate had increased fourfold. This wasn't limited to Southeast Asia; desertion rates among GIs were on the increase world-wide. For soldiers in the combat zone, refusing to obey orders became an important part of avoiding horrible injury or death. As early as mid-1969, an entire company of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade sat down on the battlefield. Later that year, a rifle company from the famed 1st Air Cavalry Division flatly refused - on CBS TV - to advance down a dangerous trail. In the following 12 months the 1st Air Cav notched up 35 combat refusals.
From mild forms of political protest and disobedience of war orders, the resistance among the ground troops grew into a massive and widespread 'quasi-mutiny' by 1970 and 1971. Soldiers went on 'search and avoid' missions, intentionally skirting clashes with the Vietnamese and often holding three-day-long pot parties instead of fighting.

On so on it goes, detailing the acts of disobedience - which included hundreds of officer-murders. Thereby it hope to open up the possibility for protest based on reference to a submerged tradition, recorded at the time in around 300 anti-war and anti-military newspapers, with names like G.I. Says, Harass the Brass, All Hands Abandon Ship and Star Spangled Bummer, written by enlisted people. Yet again, those acts of disobedience were fuelled and fuelled in turn wider civil disobedience and a crisis of political legitimation.

Now the story of what happened in Vietnam is well known - how the US got a bloody nose, not only because of the enemy's persistence but also their own people's defection. In military terms a ground war was abandoned in favour of an air war, precisely because of the ineffectiveness of their ground forces - an ineffectiveness that owed something to sabotage, resistance and demoralisation. Incidentally 'air war' only increased the role of the navy - and allowed for more technical sabotage of aircraft carriers and the like.

It is the strategic aspect that I would like to finish with in this brief consideration of the question of mutiny and its possibility today - or in the future. I do not want to end pessimistically - because one thing that looking at the theme of mutiny has taught me, is that as long as there are soldiers and sailors being sent to do dirty work or being confined against their will, there is a possibility of mutiny that can spark off or intensify dissatisfaction and revolt in the wider society. However I want to speculate for a moment on the armies not just of the future, but those already with us and the ways in which revolt is affected by technology.

The Future
At the beginning of February 2002, three men, probably hunting scrap metal on the ground in Afghanistan, are killed on a hillside close to Zhawar Kili by an unmanned aerial vehicle - a pilotless Predator drone. The Pentagon defends the attack, stating that the Predator had watched the three men for several hours before the decision to fire the missile was made. The men were engaged in what the Pentagon called 'suspicious activity'. In fact, the Pentagon has suggested that Bin Laden may have been one of those killed. The Predator Drone plane hangs over a zone for hours, feeding a stream of video to personnel in the US, miles and miles away, where someone who is, in a sense, a pilot and a gunner sits - invulnerable, directly under the command of the highest US authorities in a risk-free war. The Predator can cruise or hover for nearly 24 hours, and it has radar that can operate through cloud cover, as well as infrared sensors that can generate images in dim lighting conditions. Predator video cameras have transmitted live datafeeds to AC-130 gunship crews, thereby making it possible for them to seek and destroy. Predators can fly up to 140 mph at altitudes up to about 25,000 feet. Originally built as reconnaissance planes, they were modified to carry Hellfire heat-seeking missiles. Before 11 September 79 Predators had been bought, at a cost of about $3 million to $4 million per drone. In his latest budget, Bush asked for a $1 billion for remote-controlled aircraft, including 22 new Predators. The next generation planes, the Predator B, will have 50% more destructive materials and be twice as fast. In the case of 4th February when three scrap metal hunters were killed, it transpired that those who have authority to observe and then fire missiles from these intelligent planes are not the army as such but the CIA. 'Intelligence' turns deadly. It has been observed that such a blurring of boundaries - the conferring of a military role to the CIA - has been matched by increasing deployment of the military to quell internal dissent - despite the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. This act bans the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines from participating in arrests, searches, seizure of evidence and other police-type activity on U.S. soil. The Coast Guard and National Guard troops under the control of state governors are excluded from the act. But, clearly, the military have been used recently in the 1992 LA riots and at Seattle in 1999. These deployments might be expected to increase as 'fear of terrorism' grips the establishment and also as an anti-capitalist movement shows the potential to become a rather serious threat in the US today.

If some of the new technologies of killing sound like stuff from sci-fi movies - it is no surprise. Hollywood and the Pentagon have been working together closely lately. There are a number of military-themed shows in preparation - what has been termed militainment, and said to go along with a general militarisation of civilian everyday life. It amounts to a kind of training, the ideological moulding of expectations and perhaps a desensitising to the inflicting of violence on others. The newest shows are called 'AFP: American Fighter Pilot', 'Military Diaries' and 'Profiles from the Front Line'. More striking in terms of changes in the military filed, is the possible future development of the solider, who is certainly not forgotten amongst all this intelligent machinery. The US military are investing millions of dollars to create 'muscle suits for soldiers'. These suits will 'augment human strength' and allow soldiers to 'leap extraordinary heights and distances'. The Pentagon's plans appear to be influenced by the mobile combat suits used to fight alien bugs in the 1997 film Starship Troopers.' (3) It opens an interesting perspective on how the military bosses regard human life - something that can be fused with technology into killing machines. It also indicates that there is a direct line from fantastical Hollywood science fiction to actual military developments - Hollywood prepares the ground ideologically as well as providing a type of R+D.

I suppose that the turn toward automatic and long-distance military technologies relates to the problem of casualties - something which Western armies currently find hard to justify. For us, the interest is in whether such moves make future mutinies impossible. What happens to the possibility of mutiny if the rules of engagement change so much? If soldiers are not in the field of battle and if soldiers do not experience the trauma of killing or being exposed to death, are they less likely to revolt - perhaps - or could it be said that they become more like other worker who operates machinery, or white-collar workers who operate computers - complicit in the system, in various ways sustaining the system as it is, their business being the industrialisation of killing at long range. What I mean is that the soldiers or machine operators might still rebel - as do workers from time to time - but that rebellion could emerge not from the direct horror of the situation, not out of brute necessity and disgust at their circumstance, but rather more politically from a grasping of the whole and a realisation of their part in it.

But we are not really there in this post-physical world and maybe we can't ever really be. There is still much bloodshed, still an economic rationale to setting men against men - they are much cheaper than Predator Drones for a start. However things develop, it will remain the case that the military is not separate from the rest of society - we can count on the fact that when the temperature rises here, it rises there too - whatever the form of fighting, whatever the technologies in the hands of the operators - and that always means that whatever those weapons - if they are made for killing - presumably they can always be turned on the real enemy.

2004-04-11T09:14:00.000-07:00

Well so, I’ve recently returned from a fairly lengthy mad vacation – that’s a holiday for all ye traditional English-speakers out there in the periphery – and so I thought that I’d better report back to yiz all, and let you know if what your impressions are of the recalcitrant colonies from the fillums and the teevee and the faked-up news programmes are accurate at all (there you go, I spelt ‘programmes’ right there didn’t I?) Incidentally, I see that my column – if that’s what it’s becoming – seems to have been written automatically in my absence. So if you’re a copper or a spook reading this, then that wasn’t me what wrote it (if you’re from the DSS, I haven’t been on holiday really neither!) …going on about how nasty capitalism is and how we have to destroy it tomorrow to save both the earth and our collective sanity; I’m sure that the so-called ‘free market’ (with the inevitable corollary of extreme protectionism at its white supremacist core) is quite a nice set-up really, and if there are starving black babies in Africa then I expect it’s nothing the nuns from Carrickmakillen co. Meath can’t handle or something. Anyways, where were we?

Apart from Monument Valley in Arizona/Utah, the best part of my trip was probably the almost-fortnight that I spent travelling alone through rural Texas on the bus. Now this might sound a bit scary to many of yiz, but there’s not much wrong with the blue-collar culchie folks that a nice bloody revolution wouldn’t fix. Some of them may have a false race ideology somewhere in the back of their small heads, but it’s not that different here a course, and at least over there they have the advantage of a culture without a monarchy, and one predicated on a militant rejection of the authority of the English Crown innit. Ahem. Anyways, apart from those pale yellow flatlands (the Panhandle Plains, in technical terms) seen through a grubby window, there was also the unparalleled joy of having a dingy motel room all to myself every night, something that a comrade in New Orleans described as my ‘travelling hermit act’, although I did have to make the term up for him first so that he could repeat it. Greyhound, the famous bus company, used to run the lines all the way down through from Amarillo to San Antonio close to the Gulf of Mexico, but they cut back the hick lines in an austerity drive or something, and a local bus company called the Kerville took them over. Kerville is a small town outside of San Antonio, in the Texas “hill country”, a deliberate misnomer if ever there was one; there are no hills in Texas, and when Kinky Friedman becomes governor in 2006 maybe he’ll induce a little honesty into the region and rename this area the slope scenery or the gradient groundscape or something like that. Some honesty could also be applied to Kerville’s timetables, which tend to make the Central American chicken bus system resemble some class of Mussolingian social engineering project in exactitude; what I really mean a course is, they’re always late. The buses are also old & crap, but the plus is that because of all this decrepitude and decay, it’ll often just be you and the bus driver and his straw-chewing mate, speaking to one another in a kind of a white trash patois about the Washington consensus and yeast mulch subsidies and whatnot, travelling form A to Q. Now I don’t mind this kind of talk at all, but then again I am from Ethnic Somerset where we speak our own linguini and I know that you only mock us because you fear us ahahahahaha, and because you all feel inadequate as Kent rejects a course. Anyways, enough of the 19th-Century nationalism already, what I am trying to say here is that Texas is nothing to worry about, it’s ripe for revolution once they realise that race is a social construct designed by the Democratic party to split working-class consciousness asunder, and they got that Cadillac Ranch there and loadsa Mexican food a course. Plus, they’re all maaaaaad as a shedload a bonkers.

2004-02-08T20:07:00.000-08:00

2004-02-08T20:00:00.000-08:00

A penguin ranch a course.

Teddy and Penkie the small penguin had been on the road for almost four whole weeks before they crossed over into Texas from New Mexico, in search of Duane the surgeon who does a little work on the side. They were due to meet up with him in a Lubbock TX bar during the second week in February, but other than that they were awaiting some instructions, as they say. It was a Sunday morning in the way of the famous Johnny Cash song, and Penkie was sitting up in bed moaning a course.

“Ah gad Teddy, my fish gland what’s gone all bad sure is acting up today dude!” he complained.

“Don’t worry Penkie ya penguin” Teddy replied, sipping at some barely lukewarm coffee soup that he had just made from out of the tap. “Today is very holy and so we can go and look at the Cadillac Ranch which is just west of town alongside the freeway!”

“Whaaat!” said Penkie penguin. “Whaaaaat!! I thought that we were going to meet Duane the surgeon who does oppyrations on the side soon!”

“We’re awaiting some instructions as they say” Teddy replied. “Come on, it’s time to gets up now… the cabbie is coming around at eleven or so and it’s our only chance to see ‘the evolution of the tailfin!’”

“What’s that, Teddy?” Penkie enquired politely. “Are we going to have some fish? Or maybe some shark fin soup with a nice bit a cake afterwards?”

“A course not Penkie ya damn penguin!!” Teddy shouted rudely. Then there a knock on the door and they both got out of bed and dressed hurriedly and got themselves outside, and into the waiting cab.

‘The evolution of the tailfin’ turned out to be the name of the art installation that is the Cadillac Ranch: ten Cadillacs are buried in the earth in a derelict field just outside of Amarillo TX, by the side of Interstate 40, the old Route 66. Entrance is free and visitors are invited to graffiti at will: when the artist finally popped his clogs about a year ago, all of the cars had been painted black but were by now completely graffitied once more. This had all been explained to Teddy and Penkie by their cab driver Doug, who had once been a successful banker and knew the funder behind the venture, but his bank had gone bust when Reaganomics took a nose-dive in the mid-1980s. So he had gotten hisself a dee-vorce, and now he was a cab driver. Other than that, about 25 years previously he had also been a Hollywood photographer. Like is the way in most big American cities, you really need to be able to drive to see a lot of stuff, and so Teddy and Penkie were now sitting in the back of his cab. They pulled up at the side of the field and the driver gave them 20 minutes or so to go pay their homage to the icons and take a bunch a photos.

It was blustery as all hell out there, and 20 minutes was about right: Penkie was rubbing at the left side of his jaw and still moaning as they strode and waddled across the earth to the sacred site and circled around the brightly-spread wreckage a couple of times.

“Is this it then, Teddy?” Penkie the small penguin enquired. “Ooh me fish gland!” Teddy was snapping away at the obsolete autos in a digital fashion.

“It looks that way, Penkie the small penguin” Teddy replied. “But the baby Derek will be very jealous when he hears about it and sees alla the piccatures!”

“Hehehehehehee!!” Penkie the cruel penguin chortled, before decending into a coughing and spluttering fit. It was his own fault for eating all that gunky Spanish fish a course.

Then their uneventful avventure was over for the day, and they skipped (but not really) back to the cab through the desolation of the windswept panhandle plains.

2004-02-08T19:27:00.000-08:00

Well, hullo there everbody, it's me Penkie a course... as a brief introduction to my new multimedia homepage, Teddy has brought me here to Texas via California, Arizona, and New Mexico because I need this rare operation on one of me fish glands innit. We have to meet the surgeon, Duane who works on the side, in some bar in Lubbock TX and I'm quite looking forward to getting it over with because my left-side fish gland had been aching and pulsing for ages; Know what I mean? Anyway, if you want to see some nice piccatures of my avventures thus far, then you oughta follow this link y'all...

http://www.snapfish.com/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=10844725/t_=8726423

See yiz laters, luv Penkie Penguin.xx.

2004-02-05T19:36:00.000-08:00

Testing use for mad penguin adventures...