Most, but not all of this bulletin is using material that was intended for a free paper to be handed out on an anti-lockdown protest taking place in London on October 30. There are a few extra bits at the end. For strategic and tactical reasons, it’s been decided that we won’t be attending the protest. A lot of that is down to all of the issues we have to deal with here in Thurrock and Basildon plus the ongoing clusterf**k we’re all facing. There’s no point in over-stretching ourselves.
The aim is to get a bulletin out once a month. This is a bit of an experiment in presenting content in a punchier way without going down the route of a downloadable PDF of a newsletter which was too much like hard work when we did it before!
1. Something to think about
2. Is the tide turning?
3. Stop believing in leaders
4. Has technology gone too far?
5. Readings: Dystopian futures
6. Friends & Allies
7. Don’t let the divide and rule merchants win
8. Prefigurative action
1. Something to think about
“People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.”
― Emma Goldman
“Anarchism has but one infallible, unchangeable motto, “Freedom.” Freedom to discover any truth, freedom to develop, to live naturally and fully.” — Lucy Parsons”
― Lucy Parsons, Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality & Solidarity – Writings & Speeches, 1878-1937
“Anarchists have a ‘bad name’ in the media, not because they can point to one indiscriminate massacre by anarchists–there have been none–but because the one thing holders of power fear is that they personally should be held responsible for their own actions.”
― Stuart Christie
2. Is the tide turning?
The last thing we want to do is raise false hopes only for them to be dashed by harsh reality further down the line. However, we’re getting a sense that the tide may be slowly turning in our favour. While we’re definitely not back to where we were two years ago in 2019, more people than ever are getting out and about and living as full a life as possible under the circumstances. It feels like the populace has made the decision for itself that it’s over rather than waiting for the word from the government.
That’s because the government will never offer those words of release. They’re too tied up with their corporate chums in imposing the fourth industrial revolution upon us to back down now. That’s why they’re desperately pushing the vaccine passports as hard as they can because they’re the gateway to the digital identity they want to impose upon us.
They’re getting desperate because they know resistance is growing. That’s not just from the unvaccinated – we know a fair few double jabbed people who are point blank refusing to have a vaccine passport, particularly a digital one on their smartphone. They see this is leading towards a digital identity. They can also sense the dangers of the accelerated drive towards a cashless society. By the way, now they’ve wised up, they won’t be getting the booster jabs either.
The resistance to what’s being done to us in the name of the fourth industrial revolution is a very broad, diverse and to be honest, a fragile coalition. While the broadness is something to be celebrated, it also makes us vulnerable to the authorities using divide and rule tactics to divide and fragment us. Given that the tide is slowly starting to turn in our favour, we can expect them to ratchet up the attempts to divide the resistance – that’s if we let them.
The rest of the autumn and the coming winter going into next spring are critical for us in the resistance. There’s everything to play for and everything to lose. Remember, history is written by the winners – let’s make sure we’re the ones writing it!
Marches are great for meeting up with like minded people to network and plot the resistance with. They’re pretty good for boosting morale. Because the mainstream media are continuing to ignore us, they’re not so good at getting the message across that a growing number of people do no want vaccine passports that will eventually lead to mandatory digital identity.
The rallies where people have stood and listened to a range of speakers that the media have jumped upon to demonise, have been an own goal. We don’t need egos telling us what we already know alongside stuff that is questionable to say the least. We definitely don’t need these people defining what resistance to the coming great reset will look like. That’s down to us, the wide and diverse range of people turning up protests.
Resistance has to be decentralised. It already is as there’s a growing level of local activity against what’s being done to us. It’s all too easy for the authorities, aided and abetted by their friends in the media, to target the large protests and what may appear to be a leadership with denigration and inevitably, some kind of forceful crackdown. It’s a lot harder for them to target thousands upon thousands of people acting autonomously in small cells and staying under the radar.
We’re starting to become an army of shadows deploying a wide range of tactics from flash protests through to boycotts and non compliance. Alongside of this, we need to start developing mutual aid networks for those of us who will need support to survive as society increasingly shuts us out. That’s our chance to build the world we want for the future we deserve:)
4. Has technology gone too far?
In an ideal world, technology was supposed to make our lives easier, taking care of the drudge while we got on with the important things in life. It was supposed to help us communicate more effectively with each other. Instead it has replaced meaningful face to face interactions with screen based ones. We all know that screen based communications can easily be misinterpreted and end up in toxic rows that divide us!
Look, we’re not complete Luddites – this publication was written and laid out using a laptop. That’s one example of how design and print technology can democratise the way we communicate our ideas. The Net was supposed to have done that but as pretty much everyone on this protest can tell you, the unholy alliance of government and the tech corporations are working together to censor what we want to say online.
It’s legitimate to question who controls technology and who benefits from it. It sure as heck isn’t us! From online censorship through to digital vaccine passports, digital identity and the acceleration of the move towards a cashless society, technology is being weaponised against us. QR codes were originally devised to make stock control of items in a warehouse more efficient. That’s fine if that’s as far as it goes…
We’re at a point where if we don’t win this fight, we’ll be obliged to rely on having the right QR code to access colleges, schools, hospitals, supermarkets, sports stadia, entertainment venues, restaurants, pubs…the list goes on. We’ll end up being controlled like items of stock. That’s how the corporations and governments see us – as mere items of stock that can be discarded if we get too difficult. This is the dehumanising future these bastards have in store for us as part of their coveted ‘fourth industrial revolution’ – if we let them that is. We won’t let them though, will we?
5. Readings: Dystopian futures
Welcome to fully automated luxury gnosticism – Mary Harrington | Unherd | September 23, 2021
Is in-person human contact now a luxury good? You might be forgiven for this impression, at least in elite coastal America, after seeing the photos from New York’s $30,000-a-ticket Met Gala last week. In one already-notorious image Carolyn Maloney, a Democratic representative for New York City, sports a gown that trailed multiple banners bearing the legend EQUAL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN. Maloney smiles, unmasked, at the camera. Behind her stand serried ranks of female serving staff, dressed in black and wearing identical black Covid masks.
Conspiracy theories aside, there is something fishy about the Great Reset – Ivan Wecke | Open Democracy | August 16, 2021
Intrigued by the palaver around last year’s summit, I decided to find out what the WEF’s Great Reset plan was really about. At the heart of conspiracy theories are supposed secret agendas and malicious intent. While these may be absent from the WEF’s Great Reset initiative, what I found was something almost as sinister hiding in plain sight. In fact, more sinister because it’s real and it’s happening now. And it involves things as fundamental as our food, our data and our vaccines.
6. Friends & Allies
https://winteroak.org.uk/acorn/
Here are a couple of articles from the forthcoming printed Alternative Estuary ‘zine which will be available from early November onwards.
7. Don’t let the divide and rule merchants win
Alternative Estuary is about supporting genuine grassroots projects that will bring people together in activities benefiting the whole community. This is hard enough to achieve in normal times as the time pressures many people have to deal with leave them unable to devote the hours and energy needed to make a success of a community project. Although as we’ve always said, getting stuck into a grassroots project is a first step in not just self and community transformation, but also in bringing about the new world we want.
You don’t need us to tell you that the experience of the 2020/21 with the coronavirus crisis and the subsequent lockdowns and tiered restrictions has been anything but normal. It has sadly taken its toll on some grassroots projects. On the other hand, it’s provided the impetus for the emergence of new projects whose scope ranges from community gardening through to mutual aid initiatives. A key part of the success of any new grasroots initiative is building a sense of solidarity that can bring people together for the good of the community.
In these troubled and increasingly divisive times, building and maintaining that solidarity has become more challenging. At every turn, the authorities and the mainstream media are fostering dangerous divisions. Vaxxers vs anti-vaxxers, maskers vs anti-maskers, Brexit supporters vs Remainers – the list goes on and on. There are elements on both sides of these divides who seem only too happy to perpetuate these toxic divisions. The so called ‘journalists’ fostering this really need to take a long hard look at themselves because they’re complicit in the government’s strategy of divide and rule. The thing is, it’s lousy for our communities. Who wants to live in a tense, divided community? We certainly don’t.
The last thing the state and their corporate backers want is grassroots solidarity arising from a project that brings a diverse range of people together and also, gives us the start of some degree of independence. The authorities want us frightened, divided and totally dependent on them – that way, we’re easier to control. If we let them get away with it that is. Now, more than ever, we need to reject the divide and rule tactics that are being used to divide and weaken us. If we can do that, we’ve made a move towards building the new world we want on our terms…
8. Prefigurative action
Building a new world in the shell of the old
Prefigurative politics are the modes of organization and social relationships that strive to reflect the future society being sought by the group. According to Carl Boggs, who coined the term, the desire is to embody “within the ongoing political practice of a movement […] those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal”.[1] Prefigurativism is the attempt to enact prefigurative politics.
Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefigurative_politics
With the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill further restricting the right to protest and the threat of vaccine passports that eventually, could shut people out of many aspects of life, things are looking pretty grim at the moment. That’s if we continue to play the game under the rules set by the authorities. We could choose a different path…
Resistance takes many forms. It’s about a lot more than protests on the streets. While protests may be a way of letting off steam, more often than not, they don’t contribute towards building the new world we desire. In part, resistance is about flying under the radar of the authorities. It’s about starting to build the new world we want to see inside the shell of the increasingly dystopian one we’re currently forced to endure.
Marching is great for bonding with like minded people, making links and building networks, but if a protest gets scant coverage, was it worth the effort of mobilising for it and the risk of getting arrested? Or worse, assaulted by the cops…
Being against the system doesn’t just mean engaging in reactive activity to events. It’s also about showing the kind of world we want to move towards and fight for. It’s about building the social and community structures we need, so that when revolution does come, we have the foundations ready for the new world we want. It’s about the kind of prefigurative action we can engage in to bring this about. It’s not separate from revolution – it’s an integral part of the process of revolution.
It’s not just about the physical stuff such as community gardens, community kitchens, food banks, clothing banks and the like. It’s about learning to work with each other in a collective, non-hierarchical way. It’s about finding and developing ways of working and learning that enables people to grow and develop.
It’s offering a positive glimpse of what the future will be. Most people don’t tend to react well to images of street confrontations. We know that’s largely down to the negative and very often false stereotypes that the media put on us. Most people will however, be a lot more receptive to grassroots initiatives that are starting to make a positive difference in the communities where they’re based.
Obviously, there’s only so far a grassroots initiative can go before hitting the constraints imposed by the system we have to live in. Experiencing the impact of those limits and understanding why they’re there is a way for people to understand why radical change is needed and why existing power structures have to be swept away.
People will understandably want to see examples of grassroots projects that have an intention of bringing about real change. The thing to bear in mind is that no two grassroots projects will be the same. Each one will have evolved to deal with a specific set of circumstances in their neighbourhood. For sure, generalities can be made when it comes to why a neighbourhood needs a foodbank or a community garden. But, there will always be specifics, not least regarding the people involved in the project.
The links on the Alternative Estuary https://alternativeestuary.home.blog/ show a range of groups who, each in their own way, are trying to make the world a better place. Whether they would define what they do as prefigurative let alone anarchist is possibly open to debate. Regarding that, we’ll leave you with this quote and link:
The anarchist conclusion is that every kind of human activity should begin from what from what is local and immediate, should link in a network with no centre and no directing agency, hiving off new cells as the original grows.
Colin Ward – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Ward
thestirrer.net 