![]() (ii) Sorry Madam but the Computer is down (ii) The Science of Power and the Power of Science Such poetry starts off in struggle and community, it is the collective poem and the collective struggle which takes its validity and creativity, not the individual careers of would-be-do gooders but out of the real needs of real people. What is important here it is the new ideal of anti-capitalism, which starts from a collective spirit of what is wrong, which everywhere exists in spirit but is nowhere actual. The defeats of former generations is the food for thought of the new generations the ideal of Communism is not only Stalinism or what might exist in one country, election politics is a sham in a world of false choices and trust in the spectacular lyrics of a song-writer or trade-union or political-leader is merely the lie which digs our own graves. They are still valid concepts even if they have been misused in the past. If some people find an emphasis on abstract ideas, like history and theory, boring stuff maybe, it is only to help provide these movements of direct action with a theoretical base in which to proceed. If, at times, the concepts used here (proletariat, class struggle) may seem outdated to some, I make no apology. There is a new protest movement in the making, which has not had this much scope since the Margaret Thatcher's defeat of the Miners' Strikes in Britain in the 1980s. Over the past few years, since Seattle, passing through the various riots of Washington, London, Milan, Melbourne Seoul, Prague or Nice, tens of thousands of a younger generation of anti-capitalist youth throughout the globe have denounced, criticised and attacked "capitalist globalisation", "racism", "genetically modified foods" as well as so-called "third-world sweat-shops" and probably, if all were known, much else besides. It is still one of the most potent and damning critiques of capitalism around and if I still use these concepts it is because I believe that no modern critique of capitalism can succeed without taking it on board, by using and surpassing it, and not because of any sectarian loyalty to some cult of ideas. The original writing of the booklet was influenced heavily by the work of the Situationist International, (1957-72) whose work attempted to bring together various disparate critiques of modern life, from radical politics, through Art, Psychoanalysis and a critique of everyday life into a coherent analysis of the conditions of modern capitalism. There has been a growing distrust of genetically modified foods and this has led to multifarious direct action. In the interim there has been an explosion in technological consumerism, the internet has taken off in a way which would have been difficult to predict at that time, while the growth of Frankenstein food and the manipulation of genes and cloning have provoked intense argument amongst scientists and in the media. It was pointed out that the emerging openness of the then developing computer communication and the availability of data pointed to a weakness in the Soviet and Chinese monopoly of information. However, the central thesis is still valid. Much of what was written was prophetic, though much has been dated by events. ![]() It was written because at the time I felt that we were at the beginning of a Second Scientific Revolution and that science and technology was governing all of our culture and that the left, as it then existed, had hardly debated the issues around it. Preface: This small booklet was written in the 1980s just before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union and its Stalinist influence throughout Eastern Europe.
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