There followed on the birth of mechanisation and modern industry... a violent encroachment like that of an avalanche in its intensity and its extent. All bounds of morals and nature, of age and sex, of day and night, were broken down. Capital celebrated its orgies. -Capital, Volume One.

Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier times. All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their train of venerable ideas and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become obsolete before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face with sober senses the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men. -Marx Engels Reader 475-476.

So let them come, the gay indendiaries with charred fingers! Here they are! Here they are! -Manifesto of the Futurist Painters,1910

The advent of the mass pro duced book allowed scholars to assemble collections on an unprecedented scale. Students had previously been obliged to live nomadically, constantly travellibng to have access to particular texts. Now, they could gather collections in one place, and this implied the capacity also to perform more methodical cross examinations of the accumulated knowledge on any given subject.

This exponential growth in scale imposed another task which had hitherto only been addressed in a piecemeal fashion:classification. Until after the time of the incabula, there remained in use innumerable idiosyncratic methods of organising book collections. Even the alphabetical system, which had been used so loong before in Alexandria, was neuther widely understoodf or utilised. The Swiss botanist and chronicler Gesner was the sixteenth centuryÕs grate pioneer in this regard, assembling great reference volumes whoich listed every book in print with cross references and ecyclop[edic references to th authors contained therien.

Such devel ÿopments allowed writers and scholars to master their materials as never before. The possibility to compare rivalrous claimsl, vying descriptions and contentious opinionms, allowed for a period of synthesis to commence.

This process has received its greatest boost in three hundred years with the transferral of wideseams of culture into digital format. Not only does this form allow the parallel and simultaneous disply of related texts, but perhaps more importanly for critical purposes, it allows the searching of the text body to identify the presence of particular tropes, mtaphors, similes on a stylistic level and claims relating to specific events.

Ò.... an art without personal feelings or social relationships is bound to appear arid and lifeless after a little while.The freedom it confers is the freedom of a bautifully formed, perfectly sealed tomb.Ó Marshall Berman.

ÒWhat makes FaustÕs triumphs feel like traps to him is that up to now they have all been triumphs of inwardness. For years, through both m âeditation and experimentation, through reading books and taking drugs - he is a humanist in the truest sense; nothing human is alien to him - he has done all he could to cultivate his capacity for thought and feeling and vision. And yet the further his mind has expanded, the deeper his sensitivity has grown, the more he has isolated himself, and the more impoverished have become his relationships to life outside - to other people, to nature, even to his own needs and active powers. His culture has developed by detaching itself frm the totality of life.Ó All that is solid.... p.42

ÒIn the city the tanks have been replaced by solitude, but with a similar effect.Ó Paco Taibo p.11 Calling All Heroes.

New York is the balkans of everyday life. No rhythm can develop, only the frenetic rush from one place to the next. Each sphere of our humanity compartmentalised, we hurtle through the city, believing that be covering all bases, assembling all the necessary parts, we may become whole again. Some pleasures are lost forever. Where there was languor, they have placed labour. To be pedestrian is to trip upon a perjorative.Time is ruthlessly atomisd, and then stingily, economically respread. The population of the city pride thmselves on its excitement and decadence, but really they are Spartans, hardened. In speaking too much about so little, they are laconic. Laziness is uncommon, but anomie - a type of active laziness, since you know not why you do - is endemic. Temporality is lost, and time reveals iyts deep tyranny. Every promiscuos pause is born stillborn on the helter skelter highway to nowhere.

The city is an endless horizon of stimulation. The mind races through cresents and troughs, inducing mania, the stable state of everyday life here. Life is endlessly privatised as we creep back into ourselves to take shelter from the incessant tempest. Friendships course only in gbars and restaurants, every social interchange has its total at the cashier, service and tips not included. The home àis forbidden territory: the crib a cradle, the big rock we climb back under. Paradoxically in this town, private space is public, because only there is the relentless pace of commodification stanched. Time is shattered into a thousand fragments, catalogued, logged, realised in statistical consumption, never allowed to wander, allows filed, counted for. Intimacies are small saplinmgs, buffeted in the gales of new york depressions, tied together with string like in my fatjerÕs garden, in a desperate attempt to nurture mutual support. But the branches rarely are protected long enough for them o gain strength, and the twine is weak and easily undone. This is the citadel of dark times past, and the omen of those to come.

ÒAt last I can really the solitude I have been longing for, because nowhere can one be more alone than in a large crowd through which one pushes oneÕs way, a complete stranger.Ó Goethe p.58 Italian Journey 1786-1788

CÕest triste a dire, mais je ne pebse que lÕon p øuisse vaincresans les drapeaus rouges et noirs. Mais il faut detruire - apres. Unfortunately, I donÕt think we can win without the red abd black flags. But they must be detroyed - afterwards.

Not a Republic as in the United States, where the power of the purse has established a new tyranny under the forms of freedom; where, one hundred years after the feet of the last British red-coat polluted the streets of Boston, British landlords and financiers impose upon American citizens a servitude compared with which the tax of pre-Revolution days was a mere trifle.

No! the Republic I would wish our fellow-countrymen to set before them as their ideal should be of such a character that the mere mention of its name would at all times serve as a beacon-light to the oppressed of every land, at all times holding forth promise of freedom and plenteousness as the reward of their effort Ìs on its behalf.

To the tenant farmer, ground between landlordism on the one hand and American competition on the other, as between the upper and the nether millstone; to the wage-workers in the towns, suffering from the exactions of the slave-driving capitalist to the agricultural labourer, toiling away his life for a wage barely sufficient to keep body and soul together; in fact to every one of the toiling millions upon whose misery the outwardly-splendid fabric of our modern civilisation is reared, the Irish Republic might be made a word to conjure with - a rallying point for the disaffected, a haven for the oppressed, a point of departure for the Socialist, enthusiastic in the cause of human freedom.

Socialism and Nationalism Transcribed by The Workers' Web ASCII Pamphlet Project in 1997. From Shan Van Vocht, January