'is the new world rising from the shambles of the old?'

'man is born free and is everywhere in chains'  jean-jacques rousseau.

there that should give people pause for thought right from the start. 

horsemouth would tend to agree with this (except he doesn't believe there is an antecedent free state that we are born into, he instead places freedom at the end of a long process called revolution (but enough of his fantasies)). 

'man is born free and is everywhere in chains, sheep are born woolly and everywhere are shorn' 

horsemouth (somewhat sarcastically) remarks. sheep are (of course) bred and formed for the purpose of giving wool just as modern humans are bred and formed for the purpose of paying taxes and working. there have been times (marx notes) when the ruling class have preferred sheep to their fellow humans (correctly regarding them as more profitable). we should not develop an over-inflated notion of our value to our rulers on the basis of a putative common humanity. 

irredentism and revanchism - these political terms seem to be somewhat confused - but the idea seems to be that there is some physical land that goes with our flock  and that we should seize it back (and maybe a bit more for revenge's sake). 

and then, to quote pink floyd, 'the lines on the map moved from side to side'. 

horsemouth is not interested in the imagined communities of states. he is not interested in their flags. he regards it as medieval set-dressing left over from an earlier production (in the states of the third world as it used to be called he supposes that it is colonial or anti-colonial set-dressing).  that kind of shit can only be contemplated when it is harmless. 

horsemouth is of the opinion that the workers of the world have no country. he is interested in how the value of peoples work is assigned and distributed and in how much say they have in their own lives. 

at a minimum he is interested in workers' share of GDP - how much of the value of workers' production  is allocated back to them to enable them to feed clothe and house themselves and to enable them to show up at the factory gates on monday morning able to work. horsemouth would be aiming for something close to 100%. 

horsemouth would be aiming for something like a free association of people who can decide for themselves how to divide up the work that must be done. 

'is the new world rising from the shambles of the old?' 

probably not. the new world is certainly there as a possibility within global capitalism. it is necessary to argue for a better world and to argue against the murderous bullshit of the old world.  

'if we can just join hands' 

over on facebook horsemouth has published a photo of himself demonstrating the wonders of nature but it is in fact a cut down version of an earlier photo (he's such a joker). yesterday he returned from walthamstow and went out for a wander with TG.  he tried to watch the remake of rabid but found it so bad as to be unwatchable. he retreated to blake's 7 - a guerrilla army, a terrorist cell.