'Normal People'

I think the key word here is 'ghetto', or to put it another way, whether we aim our propaganda at 'the usual suspcts' or at people so far unconnected with revolutionary politics. I'm for a bit of both.

The term 'normal people' is pants anyway and should be avoided at all costs. Most 'normal people' I know are real weird fuckers in one way or another.

Class War seemed to have a very stylised representation of so called 'ordinary' working class people that actually bore little relation to most working class people's reality. I'd even say that Dick Van Dyke's dodgy cockney accent in Mary Poppins was probably far more authentic than Class War's attempts at 'prolespeak'.

You know these fly on the wall documentaries where they pick the thickest knobend on the estate, follow them around all day, then kind of imply that this is what we plebs are really like? Well, that's Class War, that is.

I'd say that's accurate, yeah.

Precisely. George Orwell, in the 1930s, pointed out that Socialism needed what amounts to a PR offensive, but a positive one, stripping Socialism down to its essentials and selling it as what it is. This was badly needed in the 1980s. Blair did something like that, but ended up with New Labour, which takes the stripping down too far, even making Socialism something contradictory to what it was in the beginning.

When you ask anyone 'normal' 1 about Socialism, they will inevitably come up with ideas of internicene struggle. Worse, they will think of humourless sour-faced sham-proletarian intellectuals, a dangerous sort of manic inefficiency, and the reports the Daily Mail used to come up with reporting on where Labour councils banned the use of the word 'black'. Half of this is propaganda, but it seems that we shall have to set the record straight.

NC

• 1. by which I mean that he is not politically active except for voting at elections - everyone up to and including the average Radio 4 listener

Blair stripped the socialism out to make the party electable, that was the whole point of New Labour. The majority of people in this country will not vote for an avowed socialist party. The problem that the vast majority of peole seem uninterested or hostile to anarchism / communism is one that anarchists / communists have tried to address, largely without success. Firstly, there is a strong reliance on propaganda to make up for a lack of nulbers, however propaganda rarely works, because people do not like it. Secondly most a / c are otside of the mainstream and therefore have trouble in making the kind of connections necessary.
In order to have communism we need to expose large numbers of people to the ideas of resistance to capital, I assume this is in part a reason why so many are involve in education. Although again this leads to the stereotype of the burnt out lefty teacher.
What needs to be done is for people to spread these ideas in their daily life and to set examples. We need to win strikes and we need for workers to know that we are winning strikes. When workers think they will gain from solidarity, when workers self-organise, when different groups of workers begin to make links to share information and experience this is the point at which things may snowball.

It's a discussion board, much quieter than LibCom, especially for the last few months.

It started in late 2004 as the successor to the Killing King Abacus board. Killing King Abacus was a US West Coast insurrectionist magazine which published two issues in 2000-1. One of the people involved in KKA, Wolfi Landstreicher, publishes an ocassional journal called Wilful Disobedience which is also available on the KKA site, the last one seems to have been in mid-2004. The other main person involved in KKA, Sasha K. Villon, set up anti-politics and I think he's a fine comrade.

Most of the regular anti-politics posters are commies and anarchos from the US West Coast and are offline friends like the core group of LibCom. The anarchos tend to be insurrectionists but not so much the infantile ultra-left variety. It's also attracted it's fair share of wingnuts over the years but most of them leave after copping a load of abuse.

If you mean anti-politics as a general concept, a simple definition is that being against the state means being against politics, politics being defined as statecraft.

I hope that helps.

also please see their sister site, tautology.net

haha

hoe is that a tautology? Politics means statecraft here (It's orginal meaning no?)and threfore if you are anti-state...

tau·tol·o·gy (tô-tŏl'ə-jē) pronunciation
n., pl. -gies.

1.
1. Needless repetition of the same sense in different words; redundancy.
2. An instance of such repetition.

not strictly a tautology, but "being against the state means being against politics, politics being defined as statecraft" comes pretty close. throwaway comment anyhow (though i think politics is rather wider than statecraft, and is in fact to do with the deployment of power per se).