The Manifesto

Right, this is the idea: I am 24 years old. A brief sixth-form flirtation with socialism aside, I have always been apolitical. Resolutely so, in fact. To illustrate - a brief resumé:

WHEN GEO HUNG OUT WITH THE TORIES:
At university I spent most of my time hanging out with other-worldly would be academics who sported tweed jackets sans irony and were conservative without having to think about it. Thinking about it, 'hanging out' might be too strong a phrase. During this period in my life, I was known as 'the ill-informed but well meaning Guardian reading one'. This appelation is still more or less accurate...


WHEN GEO MOVED TO SHEFFIELD:
...but has been attenuated by the fact that I now live in Sheffield, where it is mandatory that you want Thatcher dead and were arrested during the miner's strike. This even holds for people who are undergraduates here. Generally speaking, the character of the city is slightly to the left of Trotsky.

WHEN GEO HUNG OUT WITH THE TROTS:
When I first moved, I shared a house with two members of a Marxist organisation called the Allianc for Worker's Liberty. I went to their meetings occasionally until one of their members told me that he'd advised the organiser of the branch against attempting to recruit me because he had 'met more left-wing policemen.' Also, I accidentally slept with this guy's mate, and then I felt a bit embarrassed. Anyway, after that:

WHEN GEO WENT GREEN AND BASICALLY SLEPT IN A PLANT:
I kind of fell in with this crowd of unbelievably beautiful eco-hipsters who ate paté out of bins a lot and introduced me to the idea of Temporary Autonomous Zones and allotments. About this time, I started to neurote about turning the heating on and eating sea-food. I still did it, though. In fact, my only concessions to the political convictions of my social circle that I've made thus far are a) that I now feel self-conscious consuming diet-coke in company and b) I bought a bike. So anyway, that pretty much brings me up to around last October...

WHEN GEO STARTED SLEEPING WITH AN ANARCHIST:
Does what it says on the tin, really. I started seeing this guy who's an anarchist. Only it wasn't just that I started seeing the guy: I actually started listening to him. And now I'm going to reading groups and can make cracks about doctrinaire Marxists without having to surreptitiously check the terminology that I've written on the back of my hand first. I'm not going to vote in the coming election, and I've even worked out why.

EVERYTHING IS CHANGING:
Essentially, EVERYTHING IS CHANGING. And I'm not entirely sure I like it. Sure, I was a wooly, ill-informed, Guardian-reading liberal before, but at least I was my wooly, ill-informed, Guardian-reading liberal. So this is what this blog is here to do, really: a sort of ebb and flow chart of my thoughts about what I've heard, said and read over the past six months, and what I will be reading, hearing, saying and thinking in the future. This will almost certainly be sloppy, ill-thought out and badly researched half of the time, if not more - I'm only a beginner at this game, remember. But it represents my attempt - long delayed but I guess necessary - to work out what I think is wrong with the Way that Things Are Currently Organised - and to try and decide what, realistically, I can do about it. I'm not on here to proselytise or even particularly to justify my apathy - because I am apathetic a great deal of the time, I know - but because I find those blank white MS Word documents desperately daunting and I think that putting my thoughts into a public forum might help me to keep thinking them. I'd like to hear about the conclusions that other people have come to: whether you're an embittered old bastard with a gin problem and only a handful of rusty red star badges and a divorce to show for twenty year's devotion to the cause, or a fully-fledged eco-anarchist with twenty-six partners who's recently given birth to a tree. Tell me what you've been reading, and what you thought about it. Tell me how many fights you've been in recently. Tell me about this really great forgotten post-punk outfit who've developed the knack of neatly constructing damning critiques of 20th century consumer capitalism in two and a half minutes, complete with glitteringly jangling guitars. Fuck it, man. I'm ready. Bring it on.

And, on that note: I might go and read about anarchy for a little while. Laters.