jode bloggs

“Un-Fuck My Future”, “No Brex Please, We’re British”, they read. Pictures of Whitney Houston with “I Will Always Love EU”, “Europe Innit” and “I wanna be deep inside EU”. “All EU Need Is Love”, “Fromage not Farage”, “Eton Mess” and, more seriously, “Science Needs EU”. “Hell no, we won’t go!” they shouted, rounding Piccadilly Circus. At the end of the march, in Parliament Square, protesters listened to speakers including Bob Geldof and Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker as well as politicians such as the Labour MP David Lammy, and Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron.

Western states have not given up on regulating their citizens’ sexuality altogether. Since roughly the mid to late sixties, they’ve rebuilt it on new principles. Police surveillance and persecution of homosexuality, usually male, declined before coming to an end by the nineties at the latest. This then allowed a gay subculture to emerge, which back then was all about presenting an alternative to bourgeois sexual morality. It made possible a level of freedom that many veterans of the movement are still nostalgic about. At the same time, it illustrated the fact that bourgeois society tends to generate its own deviations, but also showed how far rebellion and transgression comply with the very conventions they oppose. From the 1970s on, the model gay couple has referred to clichés of bourgeois society. In Western and Northern Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand it was this same subculture which became an important junior partner of the state during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Not just in the struggle for public health, either — it also served as a kind of conveyor belt bringing bourgeois norms to the rest of the gay scene. Today, the remaining gay organizations are a long way off from any criticism of society. On the contrary, they insistently fight for social acceptance of their ways of life and love. Lesbian subculture, on the other hand, developed against the backdrop of the feminist movement, and is as adjusted and maladjusted as the latter. Since the sexual dimension was not foregrounded so much, sex education programs and the healthcare system of the state are less addressed to the lesbian community.

Why was the British slave trade abolished in 1807?

It was about this time that I happened to come across an excellent book by the American Communist, John Reed, called Ten Days That Shook The World. John Reed was describing the days of the Revolution in November, 1917, which he had himself lived through in Petrograd. I was astonished to find that in this book Stalin was never so much as mentioned, while those who were now being described at the trials as spies and agents were presented by John Reed as the leading figures of the Revolution. I then set about comparing the newspapers again with the accounts of the trials. No, I thought, this could not be true! It was quite simply impossible, that the same Communists who had led the October Revolution ... and who had led the Russian workers to victory over the White Guards and the foreign intervention, who had played leading roles in the task of constructing Socialism–it was impossible that they could now turn out to have been Imperialist agents and foreign spies for twenty years.