'this is the theory anyway. (with me it hasn't quite worked out like that).'

horsemouth is up. he has his coffee. it is the 7am that is 8am. 

'art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it's in the process of imitating the voices of others that one comes to learn the sound of one's own.'  - alan bennett, writing home. 

bennett cannot resist adding a 'this is the theory anyway.' and then a 'with me it hasn't quite worked out like that.'

'what am I doing in book reviews but 'trying to speak properly'? what is writing sketches but 'putting it on?' he says earlier. 

ah the north versus the south, the working class versus the middle class, and how this plays into notions of identity (or even who we actually are) all this is very familiar material to horsemouth (from his dad, from his friends).

alan bennett's art is not great art because he only has to confront the small things like death and the british class system, not 'war, pestilence, famine and death' death but ordinary death, death at home, death in the hospital, with everything else firmly in place. and he sees it, indeed this is one of his complaints 'it's not called martyrdom in england, it's called 'going too far'.(diaries, 11th november 1990, a young man has set himself on fire at the cenotaph). it's all on the scale of a comedy of manners. . 

horsemouth enjoyed the ash sarkar interview above. it's not her best interview but the guy has done something genuinely interesting, he has pointed to the toolkit of activist tactics that people have been using since occupy and the fact that it doesn't always work (at least not in the way intended). 

if you create a power vacuum in the streets then what comes out to fill it? and how does the media report it? the scruffy anarcho-trotskyite rabble of sao paulo start an anti-bus fare rises/ cost of living  campaign, pretty soon they are occupying the centre of town. and then, the strangest thing, the media adopt them as symptomatic of a good thing.  but the people who come out to 'support' this thing (at least the way the media have reported it with patriotic brazillian flag facepaint) are the future supporters of jair bolsanaro.  the leftists are ejected from their own movement. 

this is less 'why the left keeps failing'  and more 'we succeeded and it was awful'. 

horsemouth remembers watching a documentary round ze's on a non-violent direct action think tank that devoted itself to spreading this tactic and providing a toolkit for spreading revolution this way. it cited the orange revolution in ukraine as its greatest achievement (but look at ukraine now - it's actually a warzone). look at the outcome of the arab spring (warzones or authoritarian dictatorships). 

the guy focuses on the occupy toolkit. he comes back at the end to the tyranny of structurelessness, it is the fault of the trotskyetists and anarchists for not having a plan for the day after, for not having built the correct kind of organisation to take it on. the guy takes against the demonstration as in hoc to the media, at the mercy of how they want to portray it. he advocates instead the boycott and the strike. 

horsemouth is reminded of milan kundera fulminating against the march. 

horsemouth thinks of revolution as open-heart surgery on the body politic. it is not so much that the patient could die but that the patient could end up crippled (syria, libya, ukraine (probably)). these basket-case states (let's add iraq and afghanistan to that list) show what happens when the west either intervenes or only kind-of  intervenes (depending on its long-term interests or just on a random balance of power in the halls of power at that particular moment). 

but these basket case states can still be in the west's interest - the oil can still be pumped from libya, the minerals can be mined, and if nothing else it serves to remind people not to fuck with the programme, to stay off the streets because something worse could always come. 

 elsewhere in the world (while horsemouth sits up comfortably in bed with his morning cup of coffee) 'war, pestilence, famine and death' death. it will be on the news that horsemouth watches at 10pm and in the items he will skip over on the radio news. indeed syria, libya, ukraine, iraq, afghanistan, sudan will all have dropped off the news to make way for israel/ palestine. we fondly like to forget the condition of lebanon, egypt, yemen.