Visual Assembly of Hospital Workers and Users: Reimagining the Hospital

We are inviting health workers, patients, service users – especially those employed and served by the NHS to reimagine the health care spaces they work in, live in, heal in. We welcome all workers, from cleaners, porters, café staff, cooks, to nurses, doctors and managers as well as any patients.

Session 1: Planning meeting:

6pm, Thursday 18th June 2020 :

Zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/74314758176

(Meeting ID: 743 1475 8176 ) Password: CARE

Session 2: Visual Assembly at Our NHS Deserves Better: NHS Anniversary weekend:

Morning time tbc Saturday 4th July 2020 : Zoom link to follow

What: WHAT IF WE COULD OCCUPY THE HOSPITAL AND TURN IT INTO A MODEL HEALING SPACE? (a visual assembly exercise).

Planning session:

This is an invitation to plan the first part of a Visual Assembly, which is itself rather a new concept which we would like to explain. But first: Many complain that while the NHS is a vital part of everyday life of all of us, its current form is underfunded and over stretched and requires major reforms. We also know that the privatization and automation of the NHS continue apace, and will only speed up under new post-pandemic conditions. We know resources are not invested primarily in people, but in different forms of control and bureaucratization.

The visual assembly project is an attempt to steer the process in the opposite direction; to ask: How could a democratic process of healthcare, on any level, function in practice? How would wards be organized? What would be the role of the doctor? What kind of resources will we need? Who will cook, and what will the canteens look like? Who will clean the wards and the building? All these are familiar questions which many of those reading this will have no doubt been asking, in one form or another, for years. Books and films have been published, theoretical works written and debates and conferences held. But for most people on earth, the very idea of democratic, user- and worker-led hospitals remains strange and surprising.

We feel the pandemic both compels us to and provides us an opportunity to take a fresh approach. Some of us have a lot more free time of late (thanks to quarantine). Online chats are a free space, at least in the sense of nothing we say there is (yet) controlled or censored. But most of us are also frustrated by endlessly listening to each other only in the form of online heads. A Visual Assembly, in contrast, being both online and offline, will be both a direct action, and an opportunity of discussion, at the same time. It involves the collective creation of an artwork by online participants as a way of brainstorming utopian possibilities; a work of art that will not only physically exist as a continual point of reference during the discussion, but will remain after the event disappears into the virtual archive. The idea would be start with an initial image: say, the floor-plan of a hospital, drawn on a real physical floor. This image is just a framework, though, for a larger conversation; gradually, as participants make decisions about the details of how the hospital will be run. The artists will translate those decisions into further details literally on the ground. It is crucial though the artists occupying the actual space are mere mediators for decisions being made collectively, by consensus, by everyone taking part. This process will hopefully provide one model for the very kind of collective management that conventional healthcare kills off, and which alternative
and holistic healthcare models seek to enable.

We’ve already carried out a brief test run of the concept in London, using prepared stencils at Portobello Market, with help from members of Extinction Rebellion, Art Strike, and other activists. Here is a video comments/explanation https://youtu.be/NTODvXht-2c

Here’s how we hope the initial planning section might run. We would open the discussion with a 3 short 10 min presentations from our friends from different countries and backgrounds. (we are talking to a different people right now – feel free to contact us with suggestions)

We are inviting you to this initial planning session because you have particular experience in these institutions or interest in developing it.

During session we will:

# Create a list of questions to discuss

# Decide on methods of facilitation

# Decide on a physical locale: we think it’s important to try to find a place where the visual framework of our Assembly can remain afterward, as a permanent public artwork.[1]

# Write a list of specific stencils: (like: medical equipment, vehicles and means of communication, different types of care, unexpected (perhaps not existing in a modern hospital) rooms, procedures and ways of care and engagement?)

We are very much looking forward to your comments and any participation: all this is new and unexpected (even to us). But it’s exciting. We really believe that what is starting to come together here is a new tool for practical utopianism that could be used in any number of different ways. We are hoping you’d like, at the very least, to take part in the next Assembly; even better, to be part of the team that makes it happen.

Please extend this invitation to anyone who you think should be involved.

Who are we?

Nika Dubrovsky spent a lot of time with kids, so she learned to come up with projects involved many in needs to be happy with each other.

David Graeber is professor of Anthropology at the LSE and author of several books, that he wrote to change the world and maybe he even (partly) succeeded.

Tae Ateh is a transnational, transsexual, transhuman, collective phantom., It is a multiple use name used by the members of DAMTP, the international art strike and psychic/reproductive/destructive workers union. taeateh@psychogeography.org

REMOVE THE RACIST SCULPTURE FROM INNER TEMPLE GARDENS, CITY OF LONDON

Following the removal from public display of offensive statues of the slave traders Edward Colston (in Bristol) and Robert Milligan (on the Isle of Dogs), our mayor Sadiq Khan has said London’s landmarks – including street names, the names of public buildings and plaques – will be reviewed by a commission to ensure they reflect the capital’s diversity.

In Cripplegate the fact that the landmark Cromwell Tower is named after a man who oversaw mass murder in Ireland offends many. We trust the name will be changed very soon. There are many other names and monuments in the City of London that should be looked into and with this post we will highlight a handful of them. One piece of public art that should be speedily removed and put into storage is an early eighteenth-century statue of a crouching young black man holding up a sundial in the Inner Temple Gardens. We don’t want to reproduce this work but anyone who wishes to do so can see a photograph here by scrolling down the page for its Inner Temple Kings Bench Walk entry, or else look at a nineteenth-century drawing of it by W. R. Lethaby here. The Inner Temple is one of the four Inns of Court, the professional associations for barristers in England and Wales. All barristers must belong to one of them. They have supervisory and disciplinary functions over their members. It is therefore quite extraordinary that two different Inner Temple websites make it clear that those caring for the gardens and the sculpture ought to know it is racist:

“After Clement’s Inn was destroyed, a kneeling leaden blackamoor by Van Ost was transferred from its gardens to those of the Inner Temple.” https://web.archive.org/web/20191104150008/https://www.innertemplelibrary.org.uk/inner-temple/history/the-gardens/

‘…the decorated iron gates date from c1730, as does the statue of a kneeling blackamore by Van Ost.” https://web.archive.org/web/20200609133606/https://www.innertemple.org.uk/estate-garden/the-inner-temple-garden/history-of-the-garden/

A wikipedia entry explains the art genre terminology used on both these Inner Temple websites:

“Blackamoor is a European art style from the Early Modern period depicting highly stylized figures, usually African males but sometimes other non-European peoples, in subservient or exoticized form. Blackamoor is often found in sculpture, jewelry, furniture, and decorative art… The term Blackamoor is now viewed by some as racist and culturally insensitive.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackamoor_(decorative_arts)

Yesterday a new Wikipedia page was created to list works implicated as problematic in light of London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s review of public art and monuments, although the Inner Temple Gardens Van Ost (AKA John Nost) sculpture had yet to appear on it at the time we posted this blog:

In June 2020 the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, established the Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm to “review and improve diversity across London’s public realm to ensure the capital’s landmarks suitably reflect London’s achievements and diversity”. Khan said “When you look at the public realm – street names, street squares, murals – not only are there some of slavers that I think should be taken down, and the commission will advise us on that, but actually we don’t have enough representation of people of colour, black people, women, those from the LGBT community.”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_statues_of_individuals_linked_to_the_Atlantic_slave_trade

At the time of writing, Wikipedia’s partial list of slave trade related London statues included a number commemorating English monarchs whose investments and governorship in the Royal African Company implicate them in the black holocaust; a company Edward Colston – whose statue has just been removed from public view in Bristol – also used for slave trading. At least two of the royals on the Wikipedia list at the time of writing are featured in public art currently visible in the City of London. Before we posted this, the Wikipedia piece listed the statue of Queen Anne in St Paul’s Churchyard but not the statue of the same monarch on the Public Records Office (now the Maughan Library of King’s College, London) in Chancery Lane. Both these City of London situated statues of Queen Anne should be removed. For a picture of Public Records Office Queen Anne statue and more details about it see: https://www.londonremembers.com/memorials/public-record-office-queen-anne

The Wikipedia entry on problematic monuments lists statues of Charles II in Soho Square and Chelsea but not – at the time of writing – the effigy of him on the Temple Bar Gate where Fleet Street meets The Strand, or if you prefer the City of London meets Westminster. In light of Khan’s diversity programme, the best thing to do with the Temple Bar Gate – which includes the statue of Charles II – is to mothball it; and with this the nearly thousand year history of exceptionalism as regards the relationship of the City of London to the rest of England, dating back to the treaty this municipality made with William I in 1066. Obviously we don’t just wish to see the City’s many problematic monuments mothballed, we want to see its undemocratic business vote abolished too!

Moving from slavery to the broader issue of the colonialism and the colonial exploitation of which slavery was a part, the memorial to Admiral Arthur Phillip in Cannon Street Gardens is clearly problematic. As is the statue of Captain John Smith in the City’s Bow Churchyard. Edward Colston whose statue in Bristol was pulled down by Black Lives Matter activists was a member of the Mercers Company, the premier livery company of the City of London. The way in which all the older livery companies and many of their members appear to have benefitted financially from slavery requires examination, and in our opinion the best thing we could do with the liveries is to abolish them alongside the business vote.

Finally, another useful resource we came across yesterday was the website Topple the Racists: Take down statues and monuments in the UK that celebrate slavery and racism. At the time of posting, Topple the Racists featured none of the public art we mention above. The only monument it highlighted in the City was the following one, which unsurprisingly is to be found at the Guildhall, where the feudal and monumentally undemocratic City of London council meets:

William Beckford (1709–1770), Basinghall St, London , EC2V 7HH. MP for Shaftesbury 1747–54 and for City of London 1754–1770. 1755 Sheriff of London. 1761 MP for City of London. Lord Mayor of London 1762, 1769 and 1770. Inherited sole interest in 13 sugar plantations in Jamaica and owned approximately 3,000 enslaved Africans; served in Jamaican National Assembly before returning to England in 1744. https://www.toppletheracists.org

We trust both Topple the Racists and the Wikipedia List of public statues of individuals linked to the Atlantic slave trade, will be updated soon to include many more monuments that require removal from both the City of London and beyond – including, of course, those mentioned here that they don’t yet feature.

TowerHamletsMilligan

The header shows the east side of Inner Temple Gardens, Inner Temple, the Inns of Court, London. Photograph, formatting, and caption by George P. Landow. Taken from here: http://www.victorianweb.org/art/architecture/legal/1c.html

ÐعŲM委п #21 OUT NOW

DAMTP 21: ÐعŲM委п #21
New Year Edition, 14 PC (2020AD)

combinepdf-3

Thanks to all whose work is featured here
If we have not credited you please get in touch


Texts taken from:


Do we get to rest? by Eshe Kiame Zura

How Pakistan’s Terrible COVID-19 Response Forced Doctors Onto a Hunger Strike by Ammar Ali Jan https://jacobinmag.com/2020/05/pakistan-coronavirus-doctors-protests-hunger-strike-coronavirus

Mutual Aid, Money and Shame by D Hunter https://www.theclassworkproject.com

On contradictions by Miko Lipinski

7,500 COVID 19 PPE RING DONUTS FOR BORIS JOHNSON & NHS HEROES by Stewart Home https://stewart-home.blogspot.com/2020/04/7500-covid-19-ppe-ring-donuts-for-boris.htm

Mutual Aid, Social Distancing, and Dual Power in the State of Emergency
by the Woodbine Collective

THIS ISN’T A VIRUS, IT’S A TIME MACHINE by Benedict Seymour https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/isnt-virus-its-time-machine

Methods of Dissent & Collective Action Under COVID – A Crowdsourced List by various https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/179hz-OKrfcAr3O0xi_Bfz9yQcK917fbLz-USxPZ3o_4/

The Bankruptcy of National-Corporatism taken from Self-Organization in Times of Pandemic: How the Masses are Reconstructing Society (PART 1) by various https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XPWk6naNYyMC1K479xz-Y4e3guSbTggffkLjN2bBXg8/edit#

Austerity 2.0 Kills by Fabian Tompsett

And thanks also to Bruces Vain, Phil Bradley, Tae Ateh and the Plagiarist International

Images

Fashion is Fake slogans
by Samia Malik

Selfies by Sumz, Eshe, Jade, Leonce, Ann, Diaz, Jury, Sophie, Stewart, Howard, Asim and a.n.non

Portrait of an NHS Worker No 8 by Nicolas Baldion

No Capitalist Re Boot
by Andrew Cooper

DPAC Banners by Vince Law

Memes, banners and graffiti taken from facebook groups inc. Lockdown Banners and Radical Graffiti

21st edition of the newspaper of ÐعŲM委п – The industrial union and workers council of non-productive workers – psychic workers, reproductive workers and destructive workers united in industrial actin against the bourgeoisie.

ÐعŲM委п has no dues and no membership list – it is composed of mainly one person unions and multiple use named members union with dead workers

ÐعŲM委п is entirely self funded by worker members, Contact us for paper copies. Donations of all kinds and new members always welcome. To get involved in any way – production, planning, distribution, finance etc please contact us dx (at) antisystemic.org and damtp (at) lists.aktivix.org
or write to: CLASS, Arjuna, 12 Mill Road, Cambridge CB1 2AD, England, UK or call 00 44 7947 734 736

City of Care – London

City of Care is a collaborative experimental situation in which the artists , armed with paint and stencils, are on the streets being directed by collaborators over the internet.

The aim of the experiments is to create graphical representations of dream cities – cities transformed through radical and insurgent reimaginations of their possibilities by groups of marginalised people. Used with children originally these experiments with adults are to see what other possibilities lie within this method.

The gramatology and vocabulary of the representations is very fluid incorporating images, texts and structural graphy from the whole range of ideography available to participants, eg from networking diagrams or comics.

As such the maps produced are as much hypergraph as metagraph and the centre of an overall situgraph as delineated by the street, phones, machines and internet infrastructure surrounding it. I would like to see further developments of this taking in a much wider area of the city – like the 90s phenomenon of “war chalking” where people would chalk signs on pavements and buildings to denote the availability of a wireless network – or Asim Butt’s eject graffiti which was used by the Peoples Resistence Group as part of the resistence against the military dictatorship in Pakistan, in 2007 (see https://teeth.com.pk/blog/2010/01/16/the-graffiti-activist-asim-butt-1978-2010/)

More sessions are planned for the near future so get in touch if you would like to take part!

Open Call to Psychogeographers from the proletariAn inStitute of comparatIve vandalisM

The ultimate aim of constructing situations – of overturning spectacles – of unitary urbanism and the continuous drift, of situography and psychogeography – can only be what the state defines as terrorism: actions that intend to “intimidate and target civilians with the aim of political change” – whether as psychic reproductive or destructive workers self organising – or even as interactive and collaborative public sound and visual art installations and performances around the city.

The psychogeographer (and all psychic workers) indeed must declare themself a terrorist. You, white, European and British psychogeographers of learning, academia, elevated culture, fine art, ruling class ideology etc. Not because you are murderous and illegitimate but because you want change and you want to confront people with the truth. Even within your dead bourgeois ideas is that of the bourgeois revolution and of “the terror” that engendered it. Terrorism, as you know it, does not exist outside of ideology and reification. It is wholly a state fabrication – a racist white supremacist and patriarchal fabrication used in order to delegitimise organised resistance to capitalism patriarchy and white supremacism. And so the only option for you now is to take on this mantle for yourself.

Because its use in the UK today, as an Islamophobic construct, applied immediately to any brown or black peoples who engage in general criminal activity especially national liberation struggle is not so different from how it was used against Irish people in the UK previously. And indeed against South American liberation fighters by the USA. As an Islamophobic construct today it is wielded not just by UK USA NATO – but also by other imperialist and capitalist powers eg Russia (Chechneya) Israel (Palestine) China (Uigur) India (Kashmir)

its success as a construct depends on its vagueness – defined as the use of violence by a non state actor to bring about change in state policy – it can easily include most forms of peaceful protest and democratic processes. Indeed the prevent framework has already criminalised various left wing political groups who advocate NVDA – non violent direct action – and therefore the definition of violence is not just spurious and controversial but antithetical to opposing political perspectives.

The avant-garde had realised this back in the 80s – before the war on terror began – and so there had begun a kind of “negative reclamation” by the avant-garde, ie radical and self organised left, Anarchist and Communist, art movements in the west – Hakim Bey’s “Poetic Terrorism” (1985), Heath Buntings “Cultural Terrorist Agency” (1999) or Stewart Homes “Mind Invaders: A Reader in Psychic Warfare, Cultural Sabotage and Semiotic Terrorism” (1997) show how this was a conceptual tool with a wide range of applications in terms of performance art, interventionist art and activism, by which the contemporary avant garde was formulating its opposition to culture.

Like many parts of society, after 9-11 and the start of the “war against terror” buy the USA, this position for the avant garde became increasingly tenuous and the arrest of various artists under terror charges. Its no surprise that it was a defender of bourgeois art like Stockhausen who claimed 9-11 as a triumphant “work of art” itself. This in itself is nothing new for avant-garde debates about modernity and art but it is evident that the use of “shock” in the media by Stockhausen was used ot instrumentalise prejudice against art workers. The most known immediate target was Streve Kurtz, arrested in the USA along with other members of the Critical Art Ensemble in 2001. Heath Bunting, who was also researching into genetic and biological art, was also arrested during this period and was banned for life from the USA.

Some other groups also continued with a radical and direct avant-garde political and cultural confrontation of the state myth of terrorism, such as Space Hijackers (for example buying a tank to bring to the arms fair protests in 2005), c6.org (with their bombsoho, bomblondon graffiti campaigns in 2002-3). More recently the Asemic International released their “Terrorist Manifesto of Asemic Writers” which the psychic workers union DAMTP published as a provocation at Kassel in 2017. There are of course many many examples continuing around the world – and the so-called Post-Soviet Actionist movement has been one of the main fronts of this kind of work during the period of very high handed state control in the west. Artists such as Oleg Senstov (arrested under terror charges in 2015, Ukraine) and of course Pyotr Pavlensky continue to be censored by the state using terrorist legislation as their tool.

The only option we see for you in this situation is to take on the mantle of terrorist. And thus renounce the possibility of its spurious application to others.

Asemic institute of comparative vandaliSm, actionism and poetIc, semiotic and cultural terrorisM

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzoMDlFagCBbfF1eLgC0T4Q/

SOLSTICE MUMMERS SMASH TRINITY ROYAL ARCH FACE

On the Winter Solstice 2019 AD (12PC) a small group of Mummers visited Trinity College in Cambridge England and beheaded the statue of Henry VIIIth that sits in judgement over their gates. we have done this in an act of Class War. The college has refused to open its gates to the Proletariat, the colonised, the Workers and so as Mummers we are forced to strike its gates with Proletarian Class War Majik in order to precede an out right assault and bring this institution of power under the dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Reproductive Workers Councils of the World. We suspect that Trinity have already replaced the head with a paper-mache hollow head but this fools no one.

The fact that the British establishment routinely destroys and defaces the planet and all who live here on a daily basis, they are very vociferous in their defence of their stone carvings of bourgeois patriarchs such as Rhodes. Their defence consists also of a defence of history and truth. Lol. It is long clear to everyone how distorted, in their own image, this version of truth and history really is. In 2020 the British colonial government in Australia is celebrating the invasion of Australia by lieutenant Cooke and the Endeavour by reconstructing it and sailing it around Australia even though Cockface himself never circumnavigated the continent. thus the colonial capitalist powers are re-staging history in order to glorify their barbaric invasion and subsequent genocidal culture which continues today. So those who defend the statues of murderers rapists such as henry Tudor or James cooke or indeed Rhodes himself as he has at Oxfords oriel college argue that they defend history this is a wholly undialectical and monolithic view of history. because within history is always in fact the history of history. and there is no history of history of history of history of history as they would argue 0 since dialectically these are already present also as the history of (history of history) or (history of history ) of history. colonialism and decolonialism as dialectical moments are as yet unresolved,. in this arc also is the Shoah which continues with the creation of South Germany in 1948, the moment of this foul synthesis!

So the millions spent on the 250 anniversary of the cookes invasion besides the rebuilding of the Endeavour and a proposed statue of the whiteman coloniser capitalist has also funded the return of Aboriginal artefacts (not a return to Aboriginal people in fact but a transfer of colonial and capitalist ownership but a geographical spatial return partially) from Manchester. these artefacts do not include a single Cooke artefact. those are still owned by the British museum  and Trinity college (displayed at the MAA). the MAA are pledging that the Gweagal spear will be sent to Australia but one of the 3 spears is being retained. In order to keep it activated yet frozen. The dialectic of history is really a triolectic – past, present, future. Indeed the present is a synthesis of the dialectic of past and future. And the future that the capitalists have planned in a more triumphant colonialism. However the future of Revolution , of a classless society creates a synthesis where all that is solid melts into thin air. The very power of the patriarch vanishes like magic. The Australian authorities plan to keep the spears in Brisbane in April 2020 so that they are not in Sydney to greet the Endeavour when it re-stages its invasion. However we must ensure it is at Byron bay in Aboriginal hands. The colonial moment is still active since the decolonial moment is also still active. They can only be overcome by Revolution. Aboriginal victory at Byron bay and the synthesis of these historical moments in Revolution and classless society. Indeed a society without space and time.

The riddle of the chair leg is thus clearly revealed – the leg is in fact a proxy for the 3rd spear itself – it is irrelevant whether Trinity freemasons replace the chair leg for the spear in order to enact their genocidal capitalist ceremonies. in response we have beheaded the be-header. the fake paper mache model it has been replaced with is no proxy for a severed head, however good the artists paint it out to be. The bourgeois efforts of all artists and activists and other types of freemasons are mere shadows of the Revolutionary activities of the Reproductive Psychic and anti Destructive Workers of the world.

MUMMER FUCKERS DEMAND FOOD AND GROG

MUMMER FUCKERS

DEMAND FOOD AND GROG

RETURN OF THE
WUDU DHOL

Every week thousands of poundsworth of food is illegally thrown away by each othe cambridge university colleges. this food should be given to the poor and homeless of cambridge. some of who are the very people who work for these very colleges in underpaid and overworked capacities. others are victims of the uinvieristies despotic control of land and land prices in cambridge and england. food banks and homelessness are a rising feature of this city and country and we demand that
those who have the power wealth privelidge to make change and who indeed benefit MUST PAY

we demand the university provide a venue where food be made available daily

we are wudu sufi mummers – foreign yet local, known yet guised, tradition yet innovation
– we are well aware of the role played by cambridge in the supression of the mummers plays of norfolk and suffolk and
we demand the release of these plays from the secret vaults at trinity

we counter the colonial racist mummers of the british colonies like usa and australia
and those reactionary mummers who incororate blackface and other racist actions into their rituals :
in the contrary direction we call on diasporic and international cultural workers and psychic and reproductive workers to join us

Today we face the reconsolidation of european imperialism with the USA UK and EU each squirming bombing and killing their way for their share of world power in the face of abosolute victory of the Communist Party of China. whoever wins the election it is clear that the working class of the world will need to continue to resist both the control and domination of capital on one hand and the state on the other.

We invoke the Vudu Loa and Igbo spirit PAPA OGOU or OGUN to our aid. Ogou was the Loa of Dessalines the fearsome leader of the Haitian revolution.

We also invoke Jhule Laal the Hindu river God and Sufi Islamic saint Lal Qalander to form along with the mummers, and the Gweagal clan calling for the return of the Gweagal Spear which is held by Trinity, we will produce a powerful psychic reproductive and anti destructive attack againt the forces of reaction, imperialism and capitalism!

Beyond the Öcalanian nation


We call for the immediate release of Abdullah Öcalan and present our critique of his recent texts including “Democratic Nation” and “Democratic Confederalism”. Öcalan’s ideas of the democratic nation vs the nation state, rather than clarify a basis for action, only serve to hide the real military objectives being played out. His thought creates a double dialectic between the national state thesis of a common language and culture vs a national democracy of a free willed association of people. The resulting matrix of syntheses collapses as soon as the free willed European communists move to join the PKK, travelling out the most fortified border of fortress Europe, at the same time as thousands of bodies of those those fleeing in the opposite direction, begin to fill the Mediterranean sea once more

Öcalan says that the democratic nation is the opposite of national democracy,. That the nation based on language and culture is the same as the nation state. – And opposed to this form of nation, is the democratic nation of the free willed association of peoples. This dialectic can of course only result in the synthesis of economically interdependent people who constitute a number of nationalities. This, rather that Öcalan’s undialectical definition, is the future concept of nation. It is based on a linguistic base: that of the letter, but rather than historically and ontologically independent, it is defined through interdependencies that are constantly changing but historically contingent i.e. dialectical.

The failure of the Öcalanian national dialectic the instability of their own concept of nation in the question of national politics in Europe is demonstrated by the communists and anarchists from Europe who have travelled to Kurdish regions to support the PKK. Öcalan who in his considerations of democratic federalism in the region doesn’t even mention Europe or the EU – only Arab, Persian, Kurdish and Turkish “nations”. so for those European – including British – communists travelling to Kurd regions, it is essential to note that they are travelling in the reverse direction to the mass movement of people into Europe. This “free association” of people has been historically and is currently opposed by most of these communists and indeed the labour party under Corbyn that they support.

Here in England, as various communists at least show some awareness and reject the national construct of Britishness, these same communists now are confronted with an Öcalanian national idea – an England that is not linguisticly based state but a democratic and free association of people. This they have rejected in the case of Shamima Begum who attempted to exercise freedom of association but was denied by the British government – and not only her but her baby also. The labour party or any other party has been unable to say that the English nation would be a free association of people regardless of linguistic or cultural contingency. The Öcalanian nation would therefore be Europe – but also conceivably the “white nation” – rather than the British state, with English or Germanic nations as constituent ethnicities. In our own context, the conceit of the Öcalanian nation is clear.

The reality of both the Öcalanian nation and the English nazbol communists as well as the corbynist labour is that of a national socialism that is more “authentically” socialist and also more “authentically” nationalist. In exactly the same Heidegerian sense of authenticity whereby the Nazis themselves were not authentic enough according to the architect of existential authenticity. The failure of both Öcalan and the left in the west to fully deconstruct European nationalism is what has lead to the mass idiocy over Brexit and the inability of the radical and revolutionary movement to amount a self defence let alone an attack on the far right at this time. After the end of the last world (war), Germany split into two – north and south, with the southern state carrying the main ideological and psychical power i.e. cultural capital. This state is now the only authentic nation and state. That of Israel. It was established in 1949, just a few months before the establishment of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat:  Peoples Republic of China.

The traditional form of nation, that Öcalan is correct in saying must be overcome, therefore became separated from land i.e. from space and time, as well as the body, individual and community. As The case of Ethiopian and other non European Jews shows very clearly, the basis of the nation of Israel is not Judaism but European lineage, in the first instance, and a performed and voluntary submission to national i.e. cultural criteria. This is the real and empirical use of the word nation – in relation to both language and individual / community identity – a classification or grouping of people on a common cultural basis that can be re/defined. This definition would include various other superindividualist and community constructs including gender and race.

If as Öcalan points out, the “one flag” of the nation state is vital to its health – this is the Isouan Letterist or Hurufi semiotic base of the nation – the Letter. These letters exist also for gender: ♂, ♀, ☿  , races are denoted by colours and light itself, so these are basic even before nations. we can also look at other linguistic bases for national or nation like constructs: industrial productions: similarly  ☪, ☫, ☬, ☭, ☮ or ☯ can invoke a (super-spacial/temporal) national state but it is their interrelation that must be based on directly democratic forms – the Confederalism of Öcalan is thus potentially just as oppressive as the state mechanisms it seeks to obliterate.

Just like the totalitarian current in the Situationists was revealed in their manifesto aims of taking over the UN, so is Öcalan’s with his position of replacing the UN with a confederation of democratic nations.
Severing the democratic nation from a fixed spacial and temporal location also explodes the question of dual or multiple membership of nations. Under the Öcalanian version, ethnicities, races (i.e. sub nations or proto Marxist sub classes) etc. would be recuperated under one democratic nation and dual membership of any democratic nation could not occur. This reductive and specacularisation is no less oppressive than the nation state in that the domination of spacial and geographical politics over economic or class politics is still apparent.

Öcalan then falls into the same Leninist and Bogdanovist positions of the right and left of Bolshevism. Political or cultural organisation (psychic work), armed (destructive work) self defence, womens liberation (reproductive work) all are distinctly and strictly separated from the economic organisation of the working class (productive work) that is organised through the unions and soviets. All this is, as argued above, down to this outdated notion of nation that Öcalan fails to overcome.

Call for DAMTP ÐعŲM委п

Fellow reproductive, psychic and destructive workers,

We are preparing for the summer activities of DAMTP including the Asemic International, REproductiVe wOrkers and LaboUrs indusTrial unION, ABRACADABRA, CLASS, the London Psychogeographical Association and others. Please contact me directly or reply to this list for more info and discussion. Dx at antisystemic.org

 

1. Printing of DAMTP ÐعŲM委п #18 and #19 + Mayday Monstration
==============================================
Location: Lahore, Pakistan
Date: April/May 2019
==============================================

SEND IMAGES, TEXTS, ANYTHING FOR INCLUSION ASAP

We will print the next newspaper in Pakistan in early April so the
deadline for any images, graphics, drawings, texts in any language etc –
is the end of March.

We will also conduct a Monstration in Lahore for Mayday

Please send me mailing address if you want copies posted to you or
anywhere else in the world

2. Drift between Botosani and Alinja
==============================================
Locations: Various across Romania, Turkey and Azerbaijan
Dates: August 2019
==============================================

We will journey around the Black Sea in eastern Europe/ western Asia in
August

Please let us know if you would like to join us at these locations:

A full map of locations is here:

1. August 12th – Botosani, Romania (bIRTHPLACE OF iSDIDORE iSOU)

2. August 13th – Vasluj, Romania

3. August 14th – Venus, Romania (embodying into a dream of Howard
McCalebb to arrange Venus project and Venus biennial in abandoned
megalomatic villa of former romanian dictator Ceausescu).

4. August 15th – Varna, Bulgaria (the place Benas Šarka – the one who
introduced clay as a class war tool to alytus psychic strike biennial
attendees in 2015 – wanted to attend there to meet Ivan Yotov the
promoter of cheapest kind of medicine of clay – the proletarian medicine –
and one of the founders of clay clinique on Crimea during the soviet union
times)

5. August 16th-17th – Psychogeography in Edirne and Istambul (also
the place for somebody to join or for leaving out) and (possibly) Orgon
extraction event at the point were Europe and Asia have their supposed
intercourse… and some more…

6. August 18th – 21st – passing through Northern Anatolia, Turkey.

7. August 22-23rd – Nakhichevan (the possible point to leave from the
airport) and Əlincə (mind blowing practices in Caucasus mountains: D.I.Y.
sound event and/or URS and/or 3SF at the SHRINE OF FAZLALLAH HURUFI).

20 years of the London Institute of Comparative Vandalism

Workshop and open meeting of the Institute

at Raven Row Gallery, City of London

Summer Solstice weekend 9PC (2019)

20 years since J18 1999 We will look at various instances of comparative vandalism across London and beyond. Examples we will be discussing include Mayday protests in London, DSEI protests against the arms trade, Rhodes Must Fall, as well as Banksy and c6.org’s early 2000s Bomblondon.com campaign.

Add your own examples below and join us on the day to discuss past present and future actions

comparativevandalism @ gmail.com http://www.ravenrow.org/

See full screen