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
Is social democracy a step on the road to socialism?
Continue reading Socialism and parliamentarianism – two different approaches
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.
There is a nationalist sickness in our movement… Continue reading Our movement has opposed racism and nationalism – why Paul Embery is wrong
On 29 March Momentum and People & Planet organised around 40 protests across the country targetting Barclay’s banks. The campaign needs to be radical and ambitious.In the 1996 BBC TV series Our Friends in the North, Christopher Ecclestone played Nicky Hutchinson, disillusioned with mainstream politics, sickened by the stench of corruption in local government, he turns to a radical anarchist group for solutions. Continue reading Christopher Ecclestone as an anarchist revolutionary
