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St David's Day - COUNTER DEMO

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Udo Erasmus

Well-Known Member
As we know over the last few years the nationalists have stepped up their attempts to impose conformity and their bigotted ideology on our locale, they will be using St David's Day to impose the idea that Wales is a nation cosily united - rich and poor - against English oppression and waving their flags. They will be attempting to construct a 'welsh identity' that never existed and various other ideas that mystify social reality, class division and block the forming of genuine grassroots culture based on solidarity and diy principles.

It's time to organise a class war counter parade stating clearly -

No nations! No borders!
Internationalism and solidarity!
The working class has no country!
Somebody welsh on the minimum wage has more in common with an english or polish worker than a welsh millionaire!
We will create our own culture from below that is fluid and dynamic not have some fake culture based on nationalism, patriotism and other authoritarian and servile crap forced upon us.
 
Sorry but I'll be getting happily drunk at the Offline St David's special in Brixton.

I don't think you're going to get very far with your campaign, to be honest. After years of being made to feel second class citizens in a third rate country, most Welsh people I know rather like Wales' new-found confidence.
 
editor said:
I don't think you're going to get very far with your campaign, to be honest. After years of being made to feel second class citizens in a third rate country, most Welsh people I know rather like Wales' new-found confidence.
Click to expand...

Editor highlights very well how nationalism is an opiate, something that dopes us into a herd mentality and coheres us around a group identity in a somewhat fascistic way rather than liberating people and empowering them to take control of their lives and form genuine communities of solidarity from below.

Child poverty is massive in Wales - think how many families fall apart because of this pressure, how many life opportunities denied. Actually as workers, we are all second rate citizens and no amount of nationalist crap giving us some mystical bullshit is going to compensate for this. Isn't this the function of nationalism - to dope people from changing the world and seeing things as they are?

Karl Marx's description of the nexus of racism and nationalism as an anti-working class ideology is apt. Nationalism gives people a "psychological wage". Unfortunately unlike real wages this psychological wage only exists between your ears.

Nationalism comforts people, it makes them feel more secure, it makes welsh poor people to think that they are part of a common group that includes everybody from the millionaire in the penthouse in Cardiff Bay to the estate on Ely rather than looking squarely at the facts that there is a basic antagonism in our society between those of us who work and create the wealth of society and the elite who skim the cream off our wealth and leave us the crumbs from the table. In this sense, the creation of an illusion of a common group actually is an obstacle to creating a genuine common group and society where everyone can be equal and participate.

To paraphrase Marx: To call on people to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of nationalism is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears [the poverty of everyday life that most working people experience] of which nationalism is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of nationalism disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. . .

Nationalism? No thanks!
Class War? Yes please!
 
Fair play. But to be honest if you want to organise against borders there are more pressing cases and more important things than shouting at a bunch of over excitable romantics.

Like the regular pickets of the home office building on Newport road (there was one today).

You really like using anarchist slogans though don't you Udo? Typical Leninist tactic...

No Borders, No Nations, indeed...
 
Udo Erasmus said:
Editor highlights very well how nationalism is an opiate, something that dopes us into a herd mentality and coheres us around a group identity in a somewhat fascistic way rather than liberating people and empowering them to take control of their lives and form genuine communities of solidarity from below.
Click to expand...
Oh, I dunno. I rather like singing along to the rugby. Something tells me an awful lot of Welsh people feel the same too, but maybe they're all on opiates.

Will you be taking photos at this demo?
 
I quite like the rugby, but there have been times when I would have coped better with the performances I have endured had I got some opiates inside me...
 
Dic Penderyn said:
I quite like the rugby, but there have been times when I would have coped better with the performances I have endured had I got some opiates inside me...
Click to expand...

sport is one of the biggest capitalist rackets on the planet and at school was based on national socialist ideas of the body and fitness.
When Mao wanted to get fit he didn't run around with a ball he swam the yangtze river and went on a long march
 
Dic Penderyn said:
You really like using anarchist slogans though don't you Udo? Typical Leninist tactic...

No Borders, No Nations, indeed...
Click to expand...

Wasn't aware that no borders was a specifically anarchist slogan, a more general anti-capitalist one I think. While I remain faithful to the event of October 1917, I don't define myself as a Leninist, more of a libertarian marxist.
 
Udo Erasmus said:
sport is one of the biggest capitalist rackets on the planet and at school was based on national socialist ideas of the body and fitness.
Click to expand...

Ah, now we're getting to the bottom of this, he was rubbish at sports at school, a true social outcast.

Tis nice to be told that I'm a biggot for feeling Welsh.

Tell you what, the slogan of 'One World, One Nation (or what ever you;ll be calling it' really freaks me out. Does diversity not agree with you then?
 
Tell me Udo, is there anything in your life that you do not view through political glasses? I cannot envisage a life so obsessed that everything in it becomes politicised, and that is the impression you give me by your posts. I am sure I could find one somehwere which was not political but I doubt it would be easy.

Mind you atleast you have some replies to this thread of yours which is somewhat unusual.
 
Well that's fucking great innit. In Udo's socialist utopia we can't have rugby. And your a nazi if you disagree. That's fucking wonderful, no wonder people are flocking to your cause.

Will crap wanky arty poetry bollocks be compulsory?

Libertarian my arse! your no such thing!
 
Dic Penderyn said:
Well that's fucking great innit. In Udo's socialist utopia we can't have rugby. And your a nazi if you disagree. That's fucking wonderful, no wonder people are flocking to your cause.

Will crap wanky arty poetry bollocks be compulsory?

Libertarian my arse! your no such thing!
Click to expand...

You said it so much more eloquently than I could have managed!:D
 
Udo Erasmus said:
As we know over the last few years the nationalists have stepped up their attempts to impose conformity and their bigotted ideology on our locale, they will be using St David's Day to impose the idea that Wales is a nation cosily united - rich and poor - against English oppression and waving their flags. They will be attempting to construct a 'welsh identity' that never existed and various other ideas that mystify social reality, class division and block the forming of genuine grassroots culture based on solidarity and diy principles.

It's time to organise a class war counter parade stating clearly -

No nations! No borders!
Internationalism and solidarity!
The working class has no country!
Somebody welsh on the minimum wage has more in common with an english or polish worker than a welsh millionaire!
We will create our own culture from below that is fluid and dynamic not have some fake culture based on nationalism, patriotism and other authoritarian and servile crap forced upon us.
Click to expand...

Thing is Udo I dont see anybody imposing any Welshness on me. I drink in the pub where the organising committee have their meetings in the bar, but not once have they tried to impose anything on me, they haven't even told me about the parade! If you want to see what the people of Wales want in terms of welshness just be in a ny pub a week on saturday, or two weeks after that. The pubs would have given you a fair idea the last two saturdays too. The people of Wales actually enjoy getting together waving their daffodils, leeks and wearing their red shirts with their faces painted with dragons. I hardly think this is invented welshness that never existed and as for mystifying social reality, you sir seem to be the only person mystified! This is our culture and their is nothing fake about it, by stating that it being forced upon us you rather insult the intelligence of the populus in deciding for itself what it wants to believe in, which is plainly not the politics which you believe in and would wish to impose upon the rest of us!
 
Much as I detest the St David's Day parade's vacuous flag-waving, I'm tempted to organise a counter-demo to the counter-demo...
Slogans: "No to Brit left social imperialism, for a Welsh workers' alternative" and "26-19 - who beat the English?" :p
 
Udo, i've heard you described in much cruder terms than 'libertarian Marxist', but there you go.

This is a pointless argument. Wales exists as a nation because millions of people believe it exists. It isn't a topic up for political debate it is a fact of life and as far as i'm aware we like it that way. What's so bad about the history, dragons, myths etc? Keep the dream alive.
 
Is he a freegan marxer?

Marxers should be aware of what marx said about ideas becomong material forces when they grasp the masses.
 
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