EAST 'N' ROLL

"Capitalism tends to destroy its two sources of wealth: Nature and Human Beings"

THERE'S A WAY TO BYPASS THE COMMISSION AND PEOPLE ARE ALREADY WORKING ON IT

You need to eat some vegetables in your diet or you will become a lich.

You have to wear a life jacket or you will literally drown and die.

You need to be able to exist in public spaces with children.

Mural in Dartford, UK commemorating the Spanish Revolution which broke out 90 years ago, on 19 July 1936, in response to a military coup, the workers and peasants of Spain rose up, launching a general strike. By acting quickly, they defeated the military in most major cities.

But they didn’t stop at putting down the coup. Roughly two million workers kicked out their bosses and took control of the economy.

It was a social revolution. Decisions were made by assemblies of workers in their workplaces and executed by committees elected from the shopfloor.

Mansions were turned into communal dining halls, schools, warehouses, and free medical centres. Thousands of useless capitalist jobs were abolished. Unemployed workers helped share the workload in necessary industries. In some cases, this meant the work day could be shortened.

In 1939, Franco’s army won and established a dictatorship. When he died, Spain transitioned back to an ordinary parliamentary system.

But the Spanish Revolution wasn’t defeated because ‘communism doesn’t work’. It was destroyed by international isolation and counter-revolutionary politics. The moderate socialists opposed revolution and capitalists around the world preferred fascism to anarchism. This scared CNT leaders into convincing workers to stop the revolution half way, leaving some power in the hands of the old capitalists and government.

Meanwhile, the Liberals and the Stalinists sabotaged the revolution. They centralised control, arrested and murdered anarchists, and then lost the war after taking power.

The anarchists had been well organised industrially. But they needed better political organisation to keep the movement on a revolutionary path. They also needed to support anti-colonial struggles in Morocco, where Franco was getting troops.

Anniversary of APOLLO 11 MOON LANDING

On July 20, 1969, 109 hours and 42 minutes after launch, Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin entered the lunar lander ‘Eagle’, made a final check, and the Eagle undocked from the lunar orbiter ‘Columbia’, where the third member of the crew Michael Collins, stayed in orbit around the moon. Partially manually piloted by Armstrong, the Eagle landed 0 degrees, 41 minutes, 15 seconds north moon latitude and 23 degrees, 26 minutes east moon longitude. Armstrong stepped out, and Aldrin followed 20 minutes later: human beings stepped on the moon for the first time. The two men spent 21 hours and 26 minutes on its surface. One of the astounding aspects of the mission was the seeming simplicity of the technology used to get man to the moon. According to Oliver Gassmann, professor of Technology Management, the mobile phone in your pocket has one million times more memory than the Apollo 11’s computer. Same about the procesor: the latest phones typically have more than 100,000 times the processing power of the computer that landed man on the moon 50 years ago.

“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.” –Neil Armstrong