DID YOU VOTE YESTERDAY?

X-Orcism - The charade has come full circle again. Every four years this sham of democracy bids us to "choose", to take our part in the decision- making process. X marks the spot. Out of respect for those who suffered and died - the Chartists, the Suffragettes - we vote, but as we do so we must push to the backs of our minds the painful reality.

Government, any government, always jumps to the beat of the economic drum. Long gone are the days of Party Principals and Ideology, for all their faults. In these days of "free-markets" and business conglomerates, real control of the economy, and by implication, of society is in the hands of unelected, unaccountable corporations, who only believe in the bottom line. The State, meanwhile, merely act as the mouthpiece for decisions made higher up the power chain, in boardrooms across the globe. This is why it doesn't make any difference we elect today. It's not so much that the State isn't listening; it's more that they have no control over what is happening. However the illusion of democracy is always maintained in order to make us think we have a voice in how our lives are governed. Until there is economic democracy, nothing will fundamentally change in
our lives. Voting never got rid of GM food, the Poll Tax and the road building schemes of the 90's - it was through DIRECT ACTION.

Direct action - organizing together as equals - is the seed from which true freedom grows. Anything else and we only fool ourselves.

start here - www.schnews.org.uk

* This years Mayday being on a Sunday, London activists targeted that bastion of casualisation (or precarity as it's now known), Tescos. A Samba Band led the march into Tescos Hackney while others handed out leaflets to happy shoppers. Police violently ejected the MayDay'ers, with a handful of arrests. See www.indymedia.org.uk for a full run down
on events around the country.

Sometimes it has to be about more than music...

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