Sitcom Tendency*

A new blog for your delectation - so fresh from the oven that you can still feel the heat in its opening post. I'll say heat rather than warmth because From Despair To Where start as they mean to go on with their commitment to asking "Cuntish Questions" (always handy when you can swear and quote dead situationists at the same time**), and though they state: "The trouble is, we think we might have taken Marx's advice to "doubt everything" a bit literally, and gone a bit potty. So the blog is also an attempt to figure out a road from political despair to… where? We're not at all sure . . . " I can't help feeling from past experience that they will still take on the role of intellectual skinheads whilst figuring out that road.

I must declare an interest of sorts with the blog; Stuart and Dave are two ex-members of the SPGB, and I've had many a *cough* heated political debate with both of them down the years. They always have something interesting and stimulating to say in debate, even when we disagree with each other vehemently, and I'm sure that the blog will become a must read. Stuart also blogs at Ready Steady Book, so fingers crossed he will come up with that definitive autodidact marxist review of The Master and Margarita . It's about bloody time.

I'm already learning from their blog, and it's only one post old. I'd never read the Brecht poem cut and pasted below before. Glad that I found it.

Questions From a Worker Who Reads Who built Thebes of the seven gates?

In the books you will find the names of kings.

Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?

And Babylon, many times demolished

Who raised it up so many times? In what houses

of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?

Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished

Did the masons go? Great Rome

Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom

Did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in song

Only palaces for its inhabitants? Even in fabled Atlantis

The night the ocean engulfed it

The drowning still bawled for their slaves.

The young Alexander conquered India.

Was he alone?

Caesar beat the Gauls.

Did he not have even a cook with him?

Philip of Spain wept when his armada

Went down. Was he the only one to weep?

Frederick the Second won the Seven Year's War. Who

Else won it?

Every page a victory.

Who cooked the feast for the victors?

Every ten years a great man?

Who paid the bill?

So many reports.

So many questions.

Bertolt Brecht

* This in-joke will now be retired to the Old Jokes Home.

** It doesn't always work so smoothly. I still remember the big Conference Event in North London, organised by Reclaim the Streets and others, back in either 1999 or 2000. 'Anti-Capitalism' was the new buzzword following J18 and Seattle and, coupled with the press scaremongering about all these strange anarchists and other assorted misfits creating havoc, the place was absolutely jam packed and buzzing with people eager to find out about these ideas and strategies seemingly not tainted by the vanguardism or reformism. Sitting in on a meeting on Situationism where there must have been 400-500 young people in attendance, a terribly nice Scottish guy from Aufheben gave the talk on the subject only at the end to be asked by way of a opening question from the floor: "What exactly is Situationism?" He quoted Debord but didn't storm out, only to leave three quarters of the room mumbling for the next fifteen minutes: "What did he just call us?"