Next time you undertake to print a leaflet that we all worked on for a rally at noon on Sunday would you please actually turn up with the printed copies to distribute at the time advertized.

The leaflet was intended for distribution to the people who would be pissed off at the rally and not bother with the "picnic".

Your smug self-satisfaction at having not even bothered to turn up in time is quite insulting. The few copies you had ready at 11:20am were only able to cover about a third of the (tiny) crowd.

Yes, wasting our efforts like that didn't matter all that much since so many were pissed off by the smug self-satisfaction of the pseudos at the Friday rally that very few missed out on what we had to say about it since very few turned up at all.

Imagine if we didn't behave like this and had actually been ready with a (national) leaflet in .pdf files for the Friday rally in Melbourne and for those in other cities.

How about an apology instead of boasting so that people affected by your behaviour feel motivated to work in advance for the next opportunity rather than resolving to avoid further involvement in any sort of activity with people who can't be relied on unless they are "in the mood".

Howard isn't to blame for your behaviour and it wasn't simply a mistake. You were reminded at 11:20am that the rally was at noon so leaflets had to be delivered immediately and you simply decided not to listen to "boring speeches" (as usual).

Yes, I waited 24 hours before flaming.

No it never even occurred to you that a less virulent complaint about your behaviour should cause you to think about how this sort of behaviour discourages activity by others. Public denunciation is essential because simply telling you that you shouldn't have turned up with the leaflets after the rally was over only confirmed your smug default assumption that criticisms of you from me are just "boring speeches" due to not being sensitive enough and appreciative enough of your contributions.

Keza: Please confirm whether your failure to either apologize for your insulting behaviour or justify your refusal to do so is deliberately intended as a further insult by not deigning to even acknowledge my complaint.

Right now I'm assuming you would have said something if you had noticed it at all and therefore probably did not notice it (perhaps due to not bothering to at least subscribe to topics you initiate when you are unable to keep track of all postings or perhaps due to your excitement at discovering that posting inappropriately in the wrong forum at fightdemback isn't the best way to switch from huddling in a corner away from debate).

But I have to assume you are being deliberately insulting if you continue to simply ignore me.

No I can't force you not to boast about not having bothered to turn up and listen to the boring speeches at a rally - not even when you took responsibility for distributing a leaflet to people pissed off by boring speeches at a previous rally - which you also didn't bother going to despite suggesting we should do a leaflet.

I wrote a first draft of a leaflet and specifically warned that the people at fightdemback have a very clear understanding about suppressing violent fascists and are being lectured I meant to add by pseudos trying to tell them its all about 911 and the war on terror etc but that seems to have got lost in the editing. I couldn't force you to actually click on the link provided, read the posts, read the prominent introduction for newbies and think about how NOT to present yourself as yet another smug self-satisfied lecturer trying to push their own agenda instead of focussing on fighting racism and fascism.

I can't force you to have fun.

Ask Barry to explain that comment about having fun to you. He reminded me a while back about an incident literally decades ago where a group of La Trobe university "maoists" were huddled in a corner at an National Union of Students conference complaining bitterly about having been totally isolated by trots there. I pointed out that is what trots do and that they wouldn't be isolated if they enjoyed being revolutionaries. Since they obviously didn't enjoy it and weren't having fun I asked them why they were doing it. I wasn't isolated there, I was having fun. It stuck in his mind.

Nothing sticks in your mind when you have made it up.

I'm actually having fun discussing issues at fightdemback with people both agreeing and disagreeing with me in another thread, while watching you get yourself so isolated there's a declaration of martial law in the politics forum.

The difference is that I'm discussing how to get results while fighting fascists and racists instead of getting pissed off by pseudo lecturers whereas you are acting like a pseudo lecturer (who happens to have an opposite line from other pseudos) but just as prone to lecturing as the rest.

I'm going to be too busy again for a while anyway, but I certainly won't be taking up Barry's suggestion of "sharing" links to web sites I happen to get involved in case you turn up to make things more difficult.

I certainly won't be wasting my time helping to draft leaflets that you will actively prevent distribution of and then boast about it.

The end of hope

In a topic about Hamas and Egypt which got distracted by keza and me, Steve (owenss) wrote:

PS Arthur Ive always found Kesa to treat people at this site with respect even when sorley tested so I think you could cut her some slack. I understand how frustrating it can be when you set out to do a seemingly simple task like turning up to a demo and distributing a leaflet. Failure is a sign of the low level of organisation rather than a personal failure. Having tried for many years to organise small groups into seemingly simle levels of activity it never failed to amaze me as to how hard this really is.

I'm responding to that here, with cross-links both to the above incorrect topic and to the current main topic for the discussion that has finally broken out on a wide range of issues Socialism in an age of waiting

The low level of organization is indeed a much wider problem that is certainly not primarily caused by keza's personal failure. However she has taken on the responsibility for organization - both for this web site in general and for that leaflet in particular. When somebody takes responsibility they should be held accountable.

What provoked my anger was not the frustrating inability to perform a simple task - but the total obliviousness when I pointed out to her that it was really off putting for our very first attempt at leaflet for literally decades to simply not be distributed after several people summoned up their very minimal dregs of enthusiasm to prepare it.

When that obliviousness reached the level of actually boasting about having turned up too late to distribute the leaflet, ignoring the effort she had put into printing it herself and the effort others had put into drafting it I decided I had had enough. I could either simply withdraw again and watch things continue to meander along going nowhere while feeling too angry to say anything "constructive" or provoke a fight.

Provoking a fight was difficult and time consuming. Keza's response now is to open up a serious discussion of much wider issues that makes it unnecessary and undesirable to focus on this one in particular.

But the impact of the deadening silence from others and keza's previous response of simply trying to ignore me until I either submitted or gave up and went away was eloguently summed up in the animated gif I linked here the end of hope

Please click on that link and compare with keza's subsequent adoption of an alpha powered flying penguin as her logo. Depending on your browser you may need to click again to see the animation of the sad penguin being slapped down again and again in an endless loop. Its the endless loop process of being slapped down by obliviousness that really gets to me so I hope others get that from the animation rather than a single play or worse still a meaningless still picture.

The reason you are amazed about how difficult it is to organize small groups into simple levels of activity is because you still haven't figured out that the underlying reason is always political. People enjoy doing stuff that is worth doing.

For an anarchist take on a problem that is equally familiar to survivors of allegedly "Marxist" groups take a look at Your Politics Are Boring As Fuck

Hi Arthur

I visited your politics are boring as fuck link

I have to say that I think the person who wrote it is from na na land.

They want a joyfull political experience where if its not great then it shouldnt be done

Trouble is politics is a form of voluntary work and alot of it is drudge and cant match the excitement of surfing reading or gambling (and sex if you can get it)

Now you may want to do something relevant and local so you join a campaign to free refugees. Theres a big refugee prison 3 hours drive from where I live. Now to be in the campaign you go to the campaign meetings these are commitee meetings they are boring and not every one who attends is a sintelating conversationalist. Now the commitee plans activities get the message  out like set up a stall at the Uni. This is very hum drum because it's work and some campaigns like Free East Timor seem dead before they take off. When a campaign takes off it can be very exciting but when its a struggle its a struggle. Sometimes your co workers turn out to be complete wankers just like at your other non voluntary work.

It would be great to live in a world where political activity was a constant buzz but if that was so then every one would want to do it wouldnt they.

The idea that politics should be a "great " experience is as bad as the idea that politics should be a self sacrificing chore.

Steve: The "na na land" that author is in includes everyone except the dwindling few still "active" in dreary "political" sects.

The enemies of revolutionary politics naturally want to discourage people from getting involved by telling them over and over again that there's no way they can achieve anything worth fighting for - either because nothing ever changes or because any change will only make things worse or because its going to be just too hard and you could lead a more satisfying life by doing something else, or by repression to make damn sure its really hard and unpleasant.

The enemy within follows exactly the same approach - dressing up each of these reactionary principles in pseudo-left guise. The main difference is that usually the repression takes the form of dull and tedious "activity" calculated to sap anyone's spirit rather than violence (though sometimes they also use violence).

Of course not everything we do can be a buzz and some is bound to be hard and tedious. But that's why we've got to overthrow the bastards keeping things that way, isn't it?

The whole point of communism is that "only working here" for pay is a tedious drudge and voluntary work is the basis on which modern societies have to be reorganized.

Revolutions are "festivals of the oppressed".

Boring committee meetings and the messages they get out are oppressive.

I don't agree with the article that everything has to be directly related to immediate everyday life, or that everything has to be joyous and exciting in itself. I'm also in favor of writing articles insisting on correct use of such terms as "pseudo-left" (or for that matter "anarcho-syndicalist" as mentioned in the article or "socialist" which is also starting to be misused here). That's because theoretical clarity is essential for building anything worthwhile. As barry pointed out, clarifying ideas can be joyous too.

But the main thrust of the article in diagnosing the sort of "politics" most of us fled from by the early 1980s strikes me as an excellent example (incidentally its an example of theoretical analysis rather than anything directly related to immediate everyday life).

I'll leave it there for now and come back to the relevance of this to the discussion under Socialism in the age of waiting on another day. Some of the comments there from both keza and barry make it pretty obvious these issues are relevant to this web site - as does the absence of comments from others.

Ok, practical suggestion time.

One criticism I would make of LS is that people here do not seem to realise just how life-affirming and exciting their general world-view is. Perhaps that world-view is still only vaguely felt, rather than explicitly known and understood, but a group of people who can agree on things like:

 the war in Iraq:  the left has always fought against fascism. We therefore supported the overthrow of the fascist Baath Party in Iraq.  The United States currently  has no choice but to drain the swamps  and support the democratization of the Middle East.  We are glad about that!

or

green politics:  We reject green ideology because it opposes rapid development, fears change and romanticises pre-industrial life.  In practice, "sustainable development"  sustains only poverty, malnutrion and death.

have what it takes to at least come up with a cheap advertising campaign that will excite and attract people. I will take the lead on my first practical suggestion and start a thread that contains any pithy phrases on the site that sum up at least the general direction of thought of people here. I will also trawl through Red Politics, Unemployment and Revolution, Nazi-Zionist Collaboration for a start - do people have any other texts that they think I should look at?

I understand that many of the core members of the site have taken part in the great CP splits in the 60s and 70s. Perhaps progressive ideas are old to them, but I suggest that things that they see as common-place are still not well-known in even the 'vaguely progressive' community at large. I also think that many of these ideas are interesting enough to grab attention and start debate.

For example, the mere idea that Marxists would consider capitalism revolutionary and progressive would, I suspect, be strange and new to most people. The excitement and liberation that I felt once I started to understand that - once I realised that Chinese or Russian police states are not Marxist, and nor is mindless chanting and rock-throwing outside the World Economic Forum - is one of the reasons that I have paid a lot of attention to this site.

Which leads to my second step, which is setting up a way to distribute leaflets. I propose that we try a new type of leaflet with only a couple of sentences at most on them. For instance:

Find out why revolutionary communists support the war against Sadaam Hussein at

www.lastsuperpower.net

(not very catchy, but you get the general idea)

Given the current conflict on the site over leaflet distribution, my idea probably does not seem like a good one at first. But I have been thinking about ways to make sure that failure to complete a task that one has volunteered to do will not mean the whole project is a failure.

My idea is to start on a very small level. I understand that many members of LS live in inner northern or inner western Melbourne. This part of Melbourne must be bursting with interesting coffee shops, hip stores and so on - places that would accept leaflets without reading them too closely.

I suggest that each member of the tank who is willing to take part should go out and crawl their local coffee/shopping strip and look for a tiny number of places - lets say 5 while we are small and not very powerful - and decide to keep them supplied with the sort of leaflets that I talk about above. I am willing to do this in Fortitude Valley in Brisbane.

We'd need to start of by using our own money obviously, so I'd like even $5 of leaflets to go a long way.

While this may seem laughably small and amateurish, I think we need to start small at the moment and get used to even tiny successes. I believe that the feeling of success and power at even small jobs helps to build momentum and energy and the desire to tackle bigger things when you feel ready.

My third point is this: If the leaflets succeed, and we start to attract a regular crowd of new visitors to LS, what do we want to present them with. I agree with arthur that the various themes in the site need to be linked together so that we can present a coherent display of our various points of view to new visitors.

In fact, learning to use hypertext properly, and learning to organise the massive flow of information so that it becomes useful, is one of the current tasks of revolutionary capitalism. If we do this task well we will

a) feel part of the surging-forward of our current society

b) make ourselves more employable

c) make it very easy for people to see what we are on about.

Once again, I am willing to help here - both in designing new pages and link structures that work, and doing the donkey-work of data entry/typing them into the server. Arthur, how advanced are your views and ideas of the correct way to present the sites ideas?

I do think Plone is quite ugly, and it could stand being replaced. But getting the structure of links and pages correct is more important and should happen before any discussion of which forum software to use.

I am still not reliably on-line, but I expect to be in the next four to eight weeks. If anyone knows where I can get an old version of Windows 98 to run on a Pentium II processor at home I would be very greatful.

Cheers David

Halleluja!

loved that phrase:

...have what it takes to at least come up with a chea:p advertising campaign that will excite and attract people.

You say:

Perhaps progressive ideas are old to them, but I suggest that things that they see as common-place are still not well-known in even the "vaguely progressive" community at large. I also think that many of these ideas are interesting enough to grab attention and start debate.

That's dead right, at least for me. I feel quite "jaded" about ideas that strike me as perfectly obvious and somewhat depressed about the fact that most people who would be turned on by them have never even heard of them. Intellectually (and from occasional experience) I totally agree that these ideas are refreshing and will excite interest as new people discover them - but it has to be done by new people (as it always is - that's why the old mole Marx talks about keeps popping up again when it seems to have disappeared).

Now that something is on the move I'll be cutting back a bit for while as I had to drop other things in order to kick this off and they couldn't wait then but I have less excuse for procrastination now. Assume silence or curtness from me currently does not mean disinterest.

Just a couple of quick practical notes for now.

For leaflet distribution capacity we're even smaller than you think. Anita also has some ideas for "stickers". For now I'd postpone physical distribution and focus on the condensation of interesting ideas and aim for eventual corresponding summary slogans with web banners/logos for use in "cheap advertizing campaign" - eg like the purple finger banner from Hak Mao. We should be and remain primarily web oriented aiming for international connections rather than Australian cafe sitters. Then easier to do some .pdf leaflets for national distribution as and when occasions like the Cronulla racism arise as well as regular stickering.

But concentrate on establishing connections to other web sites where people find our ideas of interest. That's where the stickers will be distributed most effectively - whether included as phrases or detailed arguments in comments on items they wrote with links back here or eventually as banners linking sites that agree with each other on a specific point together (like the "purple finger").

Places where people disagree with us strongly enough to want to argue are at least as important as places where they partially agree. Its the debates that attract interest.

Forget about changing from Plone. We're using it "out of the box" with the present "look and feel". The appearance can be customized if anyone wants to make the effort but its got the facilities to enable delegation and participation that we need - those facilities just haven't been used properly.

Read up on plone and think about the way its features can be used to inegrate work on the practical things you are planning to do with the site itself so others can join you in doing it.

eg The "my favorites" buttons can be used to collect links to pages where you find suitable "pithy phrases" and you can setup shared folders yourself to invite people to join in working on a project drafting particular material.

The forum should mainly be used for linking to stuff elsewhere on or off the site and/or for a central "blog" and discussions. It is not supposed to be the dominant aspect of the site and isn't even part of Plone.

See (ignored) draft technical plan for more.

Its really worth downloading and installing Plone on your own PC (even a Win98 PC is ok) so you get a clear idea of what you can do with it. Just a one click install. This fits well with your "brutal" point:

vvvv

In fact, learning to use hypertext properly, and learning to organise the massive flow of information so that it becomes useful, is one of the current tasks of revolutionary capitalism. If we do this task well we will

a) feel part of the surging-forward of our current society

b) make ourselves more employable

c) make it very easy for people to see what we are on about.

^^^^^

Its an unfortunate fact that people who know anything about the left from the sixties tend to be computer illiterate. I'm not and Bill isn't and keza has been seriously learning but part of the problems for others is that they simply aren't as comfortable with the technology as they should be (and in some cases, including keza, think they understand stuff that they don't about how the web and blogosphere work and that important aspects of that like RSS feeds and email lists and folder categories and permissions are just technical details).

Speaking of which keza should be able to find you a Win98 CD but I'd strongly urge planning to get a more modern PC suitable for Win XP and later as you'll just end up wasting time. Meanwhile linux is now quite usable for people that have PCs only capable of Win 98 and fine for browsing etc. You won't be able to learn enough about the technology to help run the site or improve employability if you remain stuck with a literally obsolete operating system and its clear from your request that despite being from a younger generation you are not as familiar with the technology as you should be either.

(Currently I'm not properly setup at all but just using a knoppix CD that boots off any computer without installation to browse from - I really have to get back to other stuff for a while!).