Greece: Anti-Fascist meeting. Nottingham, November 14

There will be a public meeting entitled
Anti-Fascist Resistance in Greece Today: Golden Dawn and Lessons for the UK
on
Thursday 14th November at 7.30 p.m.
in the
Chase Community Centre
Robin Hood Chase (off St Ann’s Well Road)

Nottingham

Maria Nikolakaki will talk about the rise in Greece of the far-right organisation Golden Dawn, which has been involved in brutal attacks e.g. on ethnic minorities and migrants. She will discuss recent developments following the murder of anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas, as well as Golden Dawn’s links with the government, police and intelligence services.

Maria will also debate the anti-fascist resistance to Golden Dawn, and what lessons can be learnt for anti-fascists in the UK fighting the EDL, UKIP and the increase in anti-immigrant and xenophobic rhetoric by all the main political parties.

Maria is an Associate Professor of Education at the University of the Peloponnese in Greece, and also an activist and trade unionist. She is a member of "Sispirosis", the biggest left coalition union of academics in Greece, and is currently involved in anti-fascist education work with secondary school students, a group that Golden Dawn is trying to recruit.

Free event
Refreshments provided

Please see the leaflet attached or on Notts Indymedia:
http://nottingham.indymedia.org/system/file_upload/2013/10/28/211/meeting_with_activist_against_golden_dawn.pdf

 
See also

http://www.thesparrowsnest.org.uk/index.php/14-news-and-events/85-antifa-greece-meeting

Next RaHN meeting: updated notice

Public Meeting
NORTH EAST LONDON’S WATERWAYS
A people’s history of campaigning for access to drinking water, recreation water and navigation systems

Wednesday November 13th
7.30pm, Wood Green Social Club
3 Stuart Crescent, N22 5NJ (off the High Rd, near Wood Green tube)

We hope to have speakers discussing struggles over navigation on the River Lea, the New River's relationship to capitalism and how it was subverted and challenged by Londoners, and discuss other NE London streams too. But anyone else with tales of waterways and the issues around them us are of course welcome...

For discussion, see past tense post.
 
Radical History Network of N.E. London
Celebrate our history, avoid repeating our mistakes, & get inspiration to help create a better society for the future
http://radicalhistorynetwork.blogspot.co.uk
radicalhistorynetwork@gmail.com

RaHN: New general leaflet just out

available here
Free to forward, put on websites, print out (2 sided and 3 way folded!), and distribute at any events, venues and mailing lists...
Text as below (not necessarily in that order).

We’re associated with...

Haringey Independent Cinema
West Green Learning Centre, Park View Academy, West Green Road, N15. Show alternative films on the last Thursday of every month at 7pm
www.haringey.org.uk/hic

Haringey Solidarity Group
PO Box 2474, N8. Radical network of activists engaged in community campaigns. www.haringey.org.uk/content

London Anarchist Bookfair
Over 3,000 people attend every October and we usually have a stall and/or meeting.
http://anarchistbookfair.org.uk

Bruce Castle Museum
Lordship Lane, N17. Haringey’s local history archives are based there, and there’s an annual Haringey Local History Fair every February.
www.haringey.gov.uk/brucecastlemuseum

Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road, N1. ‘London’s premier radical bookshop’. They hold regular meetings on topical subjects or to launch a new book etc.
http://www.housmans.com

Radical History groups
We also link up with other Radical History groups across London including Hackney Radical History Network and Past Tense.

RaHN meetings
Meetings are normally held on a Wednesday, and currently occur every three months or so. We meet at 7.30pm at Wood Green Social Club, 3 Stuart Crescent, N22 - normally in room 1. The club is just opposite the Civic Centre on the High Road, at the start of White Hart Lane, 50yds from the main road (100yds walk from the bus stop at Wood Green tube station).

Blog
We have a very popular blog and archive which we add to regularly.
http://radicalhistorynetwork.blogspot.co.uk

Get involved

Please contact us to be added to our email list to receive updates about RaHN and radical history news. You can also get actively involved in our work. 

Contact us
radicalhistorynetwork@gmail.com

Graphic   Gert Arntz, whose woodcut is featured on the front of this leaflet, was a ‘council communist’, who decided the pictogram as a means of communication for the non literate. 

[picture of duplicator] Gert Arntz, Krise, 1931

Radical
History Network
of North East London

Celebrate our history, avoid making the same mistakes - and get inspiration to help create a better society for the future

http://radicalhistorynetwork.blogspot.co.uk

Past meetings have included...

·         Community Empowerment in Parks and Open Green Spaces (in Haringey, north East London and beyond...)

·         ‘Everywhere and Nowhere’: General Strikes, Solidarity Strikes and Industrial Solidarity

·         The Past, Present and Future of Radical Pamphleteering. (Organised in commemoration of the life and work of Alan Woodward)

·         The Housing of the Working Class in Haringey

·         The London Support Committee for the Liverpool Dockers Strike

·         The Fight Against the Poll Tax in Haringey 1988-90

·         The Old Age Pension from 1908 to the Present

·         London Chartism and the 1839 Insurrection

·         The Spanish Revolution 1936 – 1939

75^th anniversary meeting

·         The NHS is 60

·         Ford Motor Company versus the Workers - a short history of the conflict

Details of next meeting usually enclosed

Alan Woodward & his archives
Alan Woodward, former co-convenor of the Network, died on 20 October 2012. Alan left an extensive personal archive of radical reading matter behind him collected over a lifetime of radical working-class activity and campaigning. He wanted this material to be maintained as a local archive, open for people to use, research and read, under the administration of a libertarian group. In the long term this should be used as the basis of a local radical history library.

There are currently discussions about short, medium and long term housing of the archive. We are particularly interested in finding a Haringey-based venue, so if you have any suggestions please get in contact.

Bookstall
We have a bookstall which we take to various local and London wide events. We distribute small books and pamphlets produced by the group or members of the network - for free, or for sale, or for small donation.

Aims & Procedures
Our aim is to look at subjects that are local, topical, radical or of special interest. Most of our contributors are local people with specialist knowledge or experiences – and everyone is encouraged to chip in with their own views. The aim is to learn about past struggles and campaigns and relate them to present day events and movements.

We usually prepare an A4 information sheet for those attending in order to summarise the details, allow pre-reading and emphasise the importance of the subject.

Each meeting is scheduled to last 1½ hours with ample chance for discussion + up to date local reports and coming events. A facilitator is elected for each session.

Meetings are currently running every three months or so, and tend to be agreed at the one before to allow time to organise the next.

We publish documents as and when required.

 Our intention
To bring people together and spread awareness of our collective struggles in the past in order to celebrate our history, avoid making the same mistakes, and get inspiration to help create a better society for the future

[printer logo]

LONDON ANARCHIST BOOKFAIR 2013 RADICAL HISTORY AREA

Saturday 19th October 11.00 - 7.00

Room 315,
3rd Floor,
Frances Bancroft Building,
Queen Mary & Westfield University,
Mile End Road,
London
E1 4NS.

This year's London Anarchist Bookfair will host something new - a Radical History Area. Inspired by the successful Radical History Zone that has featured at the Bristol Anarchist Bookfair over recent years, some individuals from Bristol Radical History Group and Past Tense, among others, are attempting to kick start something similar.

Programme avvailable here

Radical History? Oh no, we hear you cry, not a serious terminally dull academic debates about dusty and irrelevant events hundreds of years ago...!
No... at least we hope not...
We have put together a series of talks which we hope people will find interesting, but also useful. We don't see 'history' as a dry 'subject'; it isn't separate from our own experiences and the struggles, and situations we are part of now, and the ideas and movements we hope can help build a freer future. Our own stories are also history; but reversing that, history is made up of experiences, battles, events, individuals and mass movements - linked to ours by both resistance to the hierarchical and unequal social relations they faced, and the desires, ideas and dreams of life could be, and how to get there.
We also think that history isn't just about reading, texts, lectures – we have always tried to put on events, actions, to commemorate and inspire ourselves and others with humour and theatre. Next year we hope to expand and bring in other ideas and ways of discussing and remembering our subversive past.

We are also putting on two exhibitions, which will be displayed on the walls in the History Area.

We hope that the meetings and exhibitions we are putting on make some contributing to linking, past, present and future. We know not everyone will be interested, and others will think we should have put on talks about other issues...!
However we see this idea as becoming a regular feature of future Bookfairs, if this one works out; if anyone is interested in helping plan future Radical History Areas, please get in touch. This could be just the beginning...

This Area has been put together by individuals from Bristol Radical History Group and Past Tense, and other interested individuals.

Bristol Radical History Group - email brh@brh.org.uk
http://www.brh.org.uk

Past tense - email: pasttense@alphabetthreat.co.uk
http://www.past-tense.org.uk

TALKS/DISCUSSIONS

11.00 - 12.00 - Solidarity: Martial Law - Capitalism in Poland, 1980-1989

Speaker: Marcin Wawrzyn

The black and white picture of the struggle of Polish anti-communist opposition, with its flagship Solidarity trade union, against the Moscow-backed regime, is just another official version of history that the victorious write in the school books of our children. But what if Solidarity was just a major scam of Pierestrojka that span out of control, and what if communists didn't believe in communism, but what they did believe in was simply money and power?

12.00 - 1.00 - Running down Whitehall with a black flag: memories of anarchism in the 1960s

Speaker: Di Parkin

Di Parkin was a revolutionary activist from the early 1960s to the 1980s.
This talk focusses on her personal memories as an anarcho-syndicalist in the 1960s and on interviews with members of the Syndicalist Workers' Federation and its links to the Spanish CNT in exile.

1.0 - 2.00 - Anarchist Visual Art, Then and Now?

Speakers: Kev Caplicki and Gee Vaucher

This striking montage of history and political art is a one-off chance to catch comrades from the celebrated JustSeeds Collective, sharing a space with Gee Vaucher, from legendary punk band Crass.

Kevin Caplicki is a socially engaged printmaker, member of Justseeds Artists Cooperative & DIY archivist at Interference Archive, in Brooklyn, NY, which explores the relationship between cultural production and social movements.
http://secure-web.cisco.com/auth=11iE3dZZ5fnexyEnaSBM8h7wwQ2VZD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fjustseeds.org%2F

Gee produced what are surely the most familiar and influential images of anarcho-punk artwork. She continues to experiment and push boundaries as an artist using whatever it takes to say it.
http://www.exitstencilpress.com

JustSeeds and Gee are also exhibiting some of their work in the Radical History Area (see below).

2.00 - 3.30 - Occupying is Good for your Health?

Speakers: Rosanne and Myk, hospital occupiers from the 1980s and 1990s.

In the 1970s, '80s and '90s, many UK workers and patients occupied hospitals under threat of closure. Currently the NHS is under threat of closures again. How is the situation different now? Are tales of previous occupations relevant? The NHS, useful as it is, has never really been under our control - are occupations a step in that direction? Or is calling for occupations just empty radical-sounding sloganising?

3.30 - 5.00 - British armed forces' strikes and mutinies in 1918-19:

a radical history project for the anniversary of World War I

Speakers: Roger Ball, Neil Transpontine.

Bristol Radical History Group and Neil Transpotine will outline the conveniently forgotten history of British armed forces' post WWI strikes and mutinies revealing  how the mass refusal of troops across Europe included expressions of  militant dissent in Britain. Such widespread revolt led to the collapse  of the Allied invasion of Soviet Russia. The second part of the meeting  will discuss what we can do to disrupt attempts by Cameron and the Tories to spin the 100th anniversary of the War's outbreak next year. Never mind their flagging credentials; radical historians can start the resistance right here!


EXHIBITIONS:

We are also hosting two exhibitions, on show all day, in the meeting room, and on the Second Floor landing.

Inside Room 315: Just Seeds and Gee Vaucher.

Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative is a network of artists, working in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, committed to making print and design work that reflects a radical social, environmental, and political stance. They produce collective portfolios, contribute graphics to grassroots struggles for justice, build large sculptural installations in galleries, and wheatpaste on the streets...

Gee Vaucher’s surreal, always challenging, artworks and collages have graphically depicted a commitment to radical social change for decades, ranging from her work with Crass to more recent international multi-media shows and exhibitions, and publishing through Exitstencil Press.

Second Floor Landing:

Been hearing about 1834 recently? Does the phrase "New Poor Law" weirdly make you think of now? The Anarchist Time Travellers’ Association have splashed some soundbites on the walls; come and see if you can tell the 1830s from the 2010s! (we would have made it into a proper quiz but couldn't afford the prizes...)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Please publicise the Radical History Area in every way you can... And don't hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions...

For blogs/websites: you can link to http://www.past-tense.org.uk, the
index page has info on the Radical History Area...

NEW PUBLICATION FROM PAST TENSE: FREE LIKE CONDUIT WATER

[Update from New River Festival post]

past tense have just published 'Free Like Conduit Water', an updated and expanded version of our old pamphlet on the New River. It discusses the moral economy of water distribution in medieval London, how the New River altered this in the interests of embryonic capitalism, and how the River became contested between the Company and the people who lived near its banks, who subverted it for their own uses... It also includes a long walk down the River's length in London, and relates it to the radical history and present of some of the areas it passes through.

'Free Like Conduit Water' is available for £5 plus £1.50 P&P from
past tense, c/o 56a Info Shop, 56 Crampton Street, London SE17 3AE,
(cheques payable to 'past tense publications'),

or from the publications page on our website:
http://www.past-tense.org.uk

LET'S DIG UP THE NEW RIVER

North London's New River is four hundred years old. For much of its length it is buried beneath our streets and parks...


LET’S DIG IT UP!

For centuries people swam, bathed and played in the River...
Think of the fun we could have! Boating from Wood Green to Angel...
Sunbathing on the banks in Green Lanes...
Skinny-dipping in Palmers Green...?

North London’s New River was opened in 1613, in an attempt to alleviate, but also to cash in on, the shortage of water in the City of London. The New River Company, a private enterprise, had the river dug, selling shares and making a profit from the supply of water to the growing City of London. This was one of the first capitalist ventures into both the creation of infrastructure, and the providing of staples like water for profit.

One of the first PFIs you might say.

The Company was an important fore-runner of huge corporations that today dominate the global economy, not only selling the earth’s resources to us, and wrecking the planet in the process, but also robbing us of the fruits of our daily labours... There are numberless statues and roads remembering Hugh Myddelton, the entrepreneur who organised the financing of the New River - but hard-working navvies dug the New River: who remembers them?

Water, like all the riches of the earth and the fruits of our labour, should be shared freely by all, for need and joy, not profit and loss. As a token towards the abolition of all wage slavery, profits, fences, borders and corporations, we demand: the immediate opening up of the New River as a waterway and pleasure park!

FREE LIKE CONDUIT WATER?

Since the nineteenth century, large sections of the New River have gradually been re-routed underground, covered over by the growth of suburban streets. Much of its length is still open, more was opened up in the last few decades by pressure, and can be walked. Much more flows through pipes, or even runs above ground but is fenced off. In some places the River runs beneath a green pathway down the middle of wide streets, or dives and resurfaces, flitting between secrets conduits and a landscaped narrow green promenades... Some sections are now cut off from the stream entirely, sterile or stagnant ponds.

Thames Water, successor to the New River Company, a huge enterprise, extorting an unhealthy dividend from what should be free to all; they allow us to walk some sections of the path, not as a right of way, but as a PR gesture. When we know that all paths, like water and all other necessities, belong to us all.

Capitalism, a powerful engine driving England’s developing industrial society, played a big part in the development of the New River. Without a doubt the risks taken by capitalists objectively allowed some of London’s most important and useful features to be built. Others were built despite capital and property interests, pushed through by enlightened or foresighted local authorities, or philanthropists and private charitable institutions. Undeniable social progress, over the last few centuries, came about for a myriad web of reasons, including the drive for profit, genuine ideologies of humanitarianism and compassion, or of political conviction of the rights of working people, or a fear of the potential of the poor rising in revolt.

But capital’s needs, the drive for profit, can only produce social progress as long as it’s profitable, as long as it coincides with hard cash... It’s also easy to see how we have benefitted from some developments, long term; but for the people who lived through the actual progressing sometimes it made their lives rapidly worse. London’s water bearers were gradually force out of existence by the New River; but on a wider scale, the industrial Revolution in England was instrumental in the destruction of myriad ways of life, forced people into factories, or workhouses, drove down life expectancy for decades, and robbed working people of security and all the fruits of their labour bar a pittance. Progress in Britain also came at the expense of mass slavery for Africans, pillage and plunder of resources all over the world, the near-destruction of whole races and species of animals.

We have to go beyond ‘progress’ based on wealth and profits, to a world where all of us have free access to resources, more than just to survive, but to flourish and prosper. For centuries, people have opposed the rise of we broadly call capitalism, this way of life where our only relations are supposed to be mediated by cash, the selling of our time, our bodies, our minds, in return for enough to live on, or a bit more, if times are booming... Many opposed the digging of the New River, at the time, because they felt that water shouldn’t be controlled by private companies. Early medieval Londoners had a saying - “free as conduit water: necessities should be open to all. For two hundred years the poor of London couldn’t even afford the New River water.

Despite all attempts to reduce us to just counters in a cold cash economy, we refuse. In every era, people constantly break the banks, subvert restrictions, and create connections with each other, based on human relations and shared pleasure, not greed and barriers. Since its opening, people undermined the New River’s control of water, tapping the river illegally for free, fishing, swimming and washing themselves and clothes, and making merry by its banks.

In the current climate of ‘austerity’, disillusion is widespread, cynicism about the possibility of a freer way of life pretty general, and hope for the future thin on the ground. As belts get tightened (mostly around the necks of those with little or nothing), some of us are, however, still afloat and battling the rapids. We have long fought the forces that push all of us towards dealing only with each other through money, competition, getting ahead, the forces that rob us of our time and pay us a grudging fraction of what we earn for them... Against that we build human relations, the needs of people, our creativity, the potential we have to live totally differently to the daily grind.

But a change in society to us doesn’t just mean a bland change in economic relations; we also dream of altering the physical space around us – for use, yes, but also for beauty. The places we live, the space we inhabit, the environments around us where we work and play, are there to transform. We love to walk the banks of the canal from Limehouse to Brentford, the banks of the smaller streams that feed the Thames, the Thames banks themselves. For decades we’ve watched these banks change, to some extent opened for all to wander, but lined also with the increasing developments designed overwhelmingly for the rich. We walk the Thames now, yes, from Deptford to London Bridge, but at the sufferance and under the eye of the yuppie towers and ever-multiplying high-rise penthouse playgrounds. It seems a city increasingly beyond our control, rented to us part-time at extortionate rates - because they need us to run the place, make it work; but more and more they see us like the rats that carried the plague.

All this we want to change - all of existence should be free, creative, shared and open to all... Not hipster bars by trendy New Riversides, fake edge for rich kids playing at living in Hackney (until they can turn it into another reprint of whatever suburb they crawled out of)... but a freely running stream for freely dancing folk. All of life "free as conduit water."

It’s not just landscaped paths we want... wildness is being bred out of the city, green spaces being built on unless they’re protected, or fought for... But the half-wildernesses and empty spaces, demolished buildings left to tumble, the Bricklayers Arms or Beckton after they were knocked down, and before the new estates, were claimed by people and opened up as unofficial playgrounds... In some ways this made for wilder and more fun spaces. The banks of South London’s Wandle, for instance, were more fun to wander when the path was half-wild, half overgrown factories falling down, part-reclaimed by weeds, parts where you had to scramble and trespass. The ordered council walks are probably better for baby-buggies though, and open space is a playground for dodgier elements too, who have to co-exist with kids... So it’s a toss-up, always, a negotiation about who gets to use space, who it’s for... It’s hard to consensus use of space.

We would like to see the New River open throughout its length, not only dug up, but navigable. We want to drift by dinghy or home made raft, from Wood Green to Angel, stop off and picnic drink by its banks, go skinny-dipping where the River crosses Salmons Brook. Obviously for this to happen would means the re-instating of the River at points where roads now run... In some places where gardens or allotments grow... Some people living and working, growing there might object. Perhaps the New New River we foresee would only some about in a radically different North London, where roads and cars would be less important, in a social system where work could be transformed too, where time wasn’t driving us always to some other place for the purposes of earning enough to get by...

We have wandered almost every mile of the rivers of London, those on the surface and those stretches lost or buried. For some reason waters and waterways call to us, pull us along their ever-onward meandering. Maybe its cause we’re two-thirds water ourselves; though ways that are lost always have a special urge for some humans. For years a vision of a new London, teeming with canals and opened up lost rivers, new waterways and other paths, has haunted us. Snatches of the New River have been part of the inspiration for this - the stretch from St Paul’s Road to Canonbury Road, or round the Stoke Newington Reservoirs. You can walk there, and think: London should be filled with paths like this, in every area there should be hidden paths and secret ways, dark water and willows barely weeping, kids fishing for the one fat carp that has ate the rest. They are in some ways an answer and a rebuttal of the ever-growing M25ising of the city, as interesting and alternative space is ironed out, everything that is not for profit is slowly dried out and drained of its moisture. We have fought that process for years, a war that continues. Currently we’re losing.

Beyond that, we have stood on Holborn Viaduct and day-dreamt a Fleet river estuary re-flooded, with boats wandering up as far as the Apple tree pub, to share a pint with some Mount Pleasant postal-workers. Or going further - the streets of the City flooded for ever, with the banks and transnational corporations long fled, new canals linking their abandoned sky-scrapers, squatted and turned into vertical playgrounds for kids (whole floors hollowed out for adventure slides and zip-wires), allotments on the 33rd floor of the Gherkin, open to the wind and weather. All of London one vast waterway, not even as stinking as Venice in the Summer (OK, so we’ll have some gong-ferming to do). The new waterways in fact could be the arteries and veins of new social networks.

But if this vision seems a long way off, remember the thousands who always reclaimed the New River in defiance of the Company. Who says we can’t dig up the hidden stretches ourselves, even if no great social change seems like it’s round the corner? Gates are there to be opened and fences climbed.

past tense, September 2013