A change is in the air…. Continue reading An interesting insight into Dual Power
The fight against the Poll tax
I have a booked coming out next year with Pluto on the history of the Anti-Poll Tax movement and how it beat Thatcher.
Here are some materials that I have found along the way. Some are from the archives, other from the Anti-Poll tax Campaign 1987-1991 Facebook group.
NME from 1978 on the Anti Nazi League
Great music-fighting Nazis cross over straight out of New Musical Express in 1978. Cover price? 18p Continue reading NME from 1978 on the Anti Nazi League
Momentum’s radical motions – some analysis
I’ve been thinking about Momentum’s radical motions and from a socialist perspective I have some points to make.
Will this make me popular? No. Should I have done it? Most likely yes. Continue reading Momentum’s radical motions – some analysis
Hill-Stone was content [Poem]
Hill-stone was content
To be cut, to be carted
And fixed in its new place.
It let itself be conscripted Into mills.
And it stayed in position
Defending this slavery against all.
It forgot is wild roots Its earth song
In cement and the drum song of looms.
From Hill-Stone Was Content by Ted Hughes
Socialism and parliamentarianism – two different approaches
Is social democracy a step on the road to socialism?
Continue reading Socialism and parliamentarianism – two different approaches
Lee Miller in Hitler’s bath tub
Lee Miller was an ex-model who turned war correspondent for the British edition of Vogue magazine.
In 1945 as Berlin fell, Lee Miller found herself in Hitler’s apartment along with a fellow photographer David Scherman and some US GIs. She carefully staged the photograph, the photo of Hitler to the left, the nude statue to the right. Her dirty boots placed in front of the bath, covered in mud from Dachau, where she had been earlier that day.
Trampling the mud of Dachau around Hitler’s flat, held a joyous significance. Dachau was the first concentration camp, opened in 1933 to initially house political opponents – Communists, Socialists and trade unionists alongside other undesirables of the regime like Jewish people, until it was expanded to be part of the network of death. Hideous medical experiments were carried out there by Nazi ‘scientists’ so-called doctors. The Nazis who ran the camp killed over 40,000 people.
Then history unfolds, battles are fought and wars are won. By the end of it, Lee Miller enjoying a bath, washing away the mud, washing away the horrors, luxuriating in the very same bath that Hitler had used before he committed suicide amidst the ruins of his death-cult Third Reich.
