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ROLLING OVERA new millennium dawns and nothing much has changed. Predictions of doom and apocalypse and even (shock! horror!) anarchy didn't eventuate. Society didn't collapse. Electricity and water supplies weren't interrupted. The Y2K bug was a non-event. People stocked up on food and water for no good reason. If only it was so easy for capitalism, patriarchy and the state to collapse overnight. What the new millennium jitters prove is two things. Firstly, how capitalism can turn an event which many people believe will be calamitous into its own profitable event. For example, the Y2K bug was nothing more than a money making scheme. And the new millennium celebrations for many were nothing more than watching a fireworks show - a spectacular capitalist show to be passively consumed, preferably on TV from the safety of your own home. How dare people come out and actually try and overcome their alienation in a mass carnival! (though the new millennium wasn't much to celebrate in the first place - 1000 years of authoritarian, despotic society). Secondly, the millennium jitters show the extent to which we are still embedded in a Christian society. Much of the predictions of doom are part of authoritarian Christian mythology. For many Christians, a new millennium signifies the end of the world as we know it, an apocalyptic disaster whereby "evil" will be wiped out, and then the second coming of Jesus Christ himself (hallelujah!!) who will establish a new 1000 year old messianic regime, a veritable heaven on earth (sounds a bit like Hitler's beliefs, doesn't it?). What is silly about this conception is that we have to look to above, to some supernatural being to come down from the heavens to help us out and change society. As anarchists have always pointed out, it is people themselves who change society. We need to overcome the Christian ideology of waiting for some outside force to miraculously change society. Fydd
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CONTENTS
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AN "INDUSTRIAL ACCIDENT"Christine Clarke died on December 31 1999, a few days after being hit by a car as she stood on a picket line at Lyttelton, near Christchurch. Christine had joined the picket in support of waterfront workers who were upset at the port company's plans to use contract labour to load coal at the port. It's customary when you sit down and write something like this to say lots of good things about the person. I won't bother with that. Christine's friends, family and loved ones cherish her memory. She was a good person. I read somewhere that she was involved in the cause of social justice for nearly thirty years, beginning with the Progressive Youth Movement, the women's movement and later the Labour and Alliance parties. Christine was killed defending the rights of working people. Someone commented that she was the second person killed on a New Zealand picket line, the first being Fred Evans, who was killed at Waihi in 1912. Of course the reality is that working people are murdered every day the world over daring to stand up for themselves. Every year dozens of New Zealand workers are killed, not by the callous actions of individuals but by a system - capitalism - that ruins and destroys people's lives. These are what they call "industrial accidents". And then there are the slow, debilitating deaths caused by chemicals, asbestos and other poisons. But behind the system there are murderers, people who are accountable, people who sit in boardrooms thousands of kilometres away and murder with the stroke of a pen. Forgiveness? We can only really talk about that after we've slung the bastards out. Frank
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