Editorial note: If you have not yet read our Mission Statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

20 February 2018

Antigone1984 is aiming to relaunch. This attempt may or not be successful. We shall have to wait and see. However, in order to avoid any misunderstanding, we want to re-emphasize a number of points ( a fuller picture of our aims and beliefs is contained in our Mission Statement above):

1. This is a committed left-wing (in US English, “liberal”) blog.
2. It is intended, therefore, to promote an exclusively left-wing viewpoint. Antigone1984 is not a journal of record aimed at presenting a balance of left-wing and right-wing views. It is a polemical tract intended to promote the left. We leave it to conventional commentators, of which there are legions, to root for the right.
3. Within the spectrum of left-wing opinion, the blog has three unconditional standpoints.

      It supports:

1. human rights (first and foremost being the right to life and hence repudiation in all circumstances of the death penalty and, more broadly, war).
2. political, economic and cultural cooperation instead of competition. A natural corollary is our outright opposition to the market economy: we are unreservedly anti-capitalist.
3. universal participative democracy (as opposed to so-called “representative” democracy, whereby the fate of human beings is stealthily micro-managed by tight-knit hierarchically-organised political parties composed of elites of principle-free self-seeking opportunists [check out our article below on “Partitocracy v. Democracy” for further information].

With the above in mind, we have a favour to ask of internauts who happen upon the blog. If you disagree with the three standpoints mentioned above, then please switch off immediately: this blog is not for you. The blog is aimed at readers who are already committed left-wingers as well as at those who still have an open mind on the principles we have sketched out above.

Finally, we would ask readers to have some patience with us till we get back into our stride. We published the blog almost daily for around five years (from 2011 to 2015). Then in July 2015 the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tspras, leader of the previously vociferous left-wing Syriza Party, took only a week flatly to disregard the results of a national referendum rejecting the imposition of economic austerity by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. At that point Antigone1984 threw in the towel. The postwar history of Europe is littered with erstwhile left-wing parties who have sold out comprehensively to the right. Tsipras set a new standard: never has a leftwing party on this Continent sold out so quickly and so comprehensively to the forces of reaction. In such bleak circumstances, what was the point, we thought, of continuing. The blog sputtered into lethargic decline and largely ceased publication.

That was then, however, and now is now. After Winter cometh the Spring…the green shoots of hope push once again through the damp soil… LA LUTTE CONTINUE!

—–

 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)
2. Partitocracy v. Democracy (20 July 2012)
3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)
4. Capitalism in practice (4 July 2012)
5. Ladder  (21 June 2012)
6. A tale of two cities (1) (6 June 2012)
7. A tale of two cities (2) (7 June 2012)
8. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——-