Z replies; GET REAL
The great thing about anarchism is that by sticking together a few keywords into a formula, everything is explained. In fact all this ever says is "anarchy", "anarchy"... Say "revolution" and you think you've explained something deep. Say "smash the state" and what else is there, except to slag off everyone who isn't actually smashing the state.
Back in the real world of experience and life, "revolution" means everything from a "violent and bloody" change of rulers, to a new washing powder, to a major transformation of life in some as yet pretty undefined way. "State" means pretty much fuck all. In the real world we want to change our lives and we're not really that sure how to go about it. Some of us cover up this confusion with words like "revolution", some with cynicism, and most of us just get on with the little things that might make life a bit better till we work it out.
In the anarchist world its all been seen before because it all revolves around these words like revolution and state. Revolution hasn't happened and the state hasn't been smashed and the numerous permutations of these abstraction have been formulated ad nauseam, so its all the same innit?. The real world changes, because we have tried in practice to change things, and because the powers we have fought have responded. They have disrupted the power bases that we worked from, the assembly lines where our power to disrupt meant the power to fight over (against) time, money, control, hierarchy, and the social factory where these struggles were extended to practically every area of life. the "state" has been transformed, with the nation state being bypassed by a globalisation of money and control. Technology has been introduced to help this process, to "save" labour and increase control. We live in a new world, of new possibilities and threats. A world that is both smaller, through communication and transport, and larger because our lives can be far more affected by what happens far away. We are different because the world we create and which creates us is different, and if the words remain the same, the practical content doesn't.
Contraflow is not about political rhetoric and anarchist theories, or about news. It is a small part of an attempt to communicate around this new world, using these new possibilities. To communicate not just with those who think they know it all already, but those for whom changing our lives is a basic, practical, difficult, everyday need. We want to help communicate the practical experiences and ideas that make us feel the power and need we have to change this world, to help us understand the amazing diversity of needs we have developed and the barriers they come up against. Revolution (whoops, that word again) is the breaking of these barriers, the overthrow of a system that turns us into fucked-up, competing, atomised wage-slaves constrained to produce for profit instead of love, to have our needs defined by the poverty of our pay cheques. Revolution is now, it is romance as well as blood, it is about coming together to fight for what we need now, even if we know we have to fight again tomorrow till we get it right. It is about getting into (creating) situations where we might get hurt or nicked through real confrontations with ourselves, each other and the big wide world, and it is about looking inside ourselves so that we can find in more than just a handful of people the needs and desires that make the fight real.
thanks for the fiver.