I’m sure few people are bothered by my silence on this blog but merely to say it’s not just down to laziness, to dull sloth. Ever since Malcolm Ball’s premature death I’ve been trying to write something worth saying about the ‘pandemic’ and its consequences. I’ve countless pages of scribble, Each time I walk, run or cycle I concoct in my head persuasive arguments that might perchance sweep you away with their eloquence. All of this thinking remains hot air floating hither and thither yet forever stalling.

However it’s Steve Waterhouse’s birthday and perhaps remembering him will prompt me to finish my Covid meanderings.

In the meantime I posted this on Facebook.

Today is the birthday of my much missed and loved friend and comrade, Steve Waterhouse. I don’t think he ever knew the extent to which his anarchism influenced my continuing, contradictory, often puny political effort to resist the capitalist class, the oligarchs, the technocrats, their servants et al.

I think we’d agree there’s something deeply worrying about a Left, which suggests that a concern for civil liberty and freedom is a form of selfish individualism. These individual rights have been collectively won over the centuries by, amongst others, dissident religious groups and working class organisations. They are our collective heritage won from below. To defend them is our duty.

We decide what constitutes the common good in concert with one another, not a deceitful and corrupt government, not a cabal of misanthropic behavioural psychologists, not an exploitative and oppressive State. You might well think I exaggerate but we seem to be sleepwalking into a society of unrelenting surveillance.

‘People have only as much liberty as they have the consciousness to want and the courage to take’ – Emma Goldman

The struggle continues!

La Lutta Continua!

Ο αγώνας συνεχίζεται!