… when just as we came to the top of a rising ground, down a long glade of the wood on my right I caught sight of a stately building whose outline was familiar to me, and I cried out, “Westminster Abbey!”
“Yes,” said Dick, “Westminster Abbey—what there is left of it.”
“Why, what have you done with it?” quoth I in terror.
“What have we done with it?” said he; “nothing much, save clean it. But you know the whole outside was spoiled centuries ago: as to the inside, that remains in its beauty after the great clearance, which took place over a hundred years ago, of the beastly monuments to fools and knaves, which once blocked it up, as great-grandfather says.”
We went on a little further, and I looked to the right again, and said, in rather a doubtful tone of voice, “Why, there are the Houses of Parliament! Do you still use them?”
He burst out laughing, and was some time before he could control himself; then he clapped me on the back and said:
“I take you, neighbour; you may well wonder at our keeping them standing, and I know something about that, and my old kinsman has given me books to read about the strange game that they played there. Use them! Well, yes, they are used for a sort of subsidiary market, and a storage place for manure, and they are handy for that, being on the waterside. I believe it was intended to pull them down quite at the beginning of our days; but there was, I am told, a queer antiquarian society, which had done some service in past times, and which straightway set up its pipe against their destruction, as it has done with many other buildings, which most people looked upon as worthless, and public nuisances; and it was so energetic, and had such good reasons to give, that it generally gained its point; and I must say that when all is said I am glad of it: because you know at the worst these silly old buildings serve as a kind of foil to the beautiful ones which we build now.“
William Morris, News from Nowhere
In an effort to decrypt and understand the framer’s uprising in France, we share two texts below (in translation): A reading of events by the Groupe Révolutionnaire Charlatan and the last part of a position statement from Les soulèvements de la terre.
We have also provided links to further, suggested reading.
The left, progress and the peasant
“Partisans in the metropolis: touch grass!”
Groupe Révolutionnaire Charlatan (lundimatin #413, 29/01/2023)
In recent days [in France], we have seen [police] prefectures covered in dung and set on fire, mutual insurance companies set on fire, “foreign” trucks turned over by tractors and their food distributed to the Restos du Cœur or burned on the road, and there are calls to to surround Paris, others to rename the Élysée “Le Lisier” [“The Dung House”], and a government particularly keen not to add fuel to the fire. A pre-cooked and media narrative coordinated both by political representatives and by representatives of the FNSEA [Fédération nationale des syndicats d’exploitants agricoles] , pushes us to understand this movement from their sole point of view, that is to say their interests: the agri-industry has set out on a conflict with the State to recover a little money and put pressure against ecological regulations which are cutting into their profit margins and all of this mixed with a brown, reactionary and conservative background. Good. The Groupe Révolutionnaire Charlatan [the Charlatan Revolutionary Group] has sent us this text which intends to take up the question from a completely different axiom: trying to understand the revolt from its historical and ethical coordinates.
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Sri Lanka: When the peasants rebelled
With the French farmer’s protest in the background, the lundi matin collective has drawn out comparisons with the Sri Lankan, largely peasant uprising – “The Country to Colombo!” -, known as Aragalaya, “the struggle”, of 2022 against the government of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
In this effort, they recently video recorded an interview (in English) with a Sri Lankan activist involved in the uprising. The interview, simultaneously eloquent and penetrating, is a brilliant and moving testimonial of rebellion. If it is clichéd to say that there is much to learn from her words, then let the cliché stand.
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