[matilda] Matilda logos...

[gavin at cyber-rights.net]

I like the logos... nice acronym.

I'll warn you now, I'm about to go a bit theory. But bear with me, 
okay?

I've had this wacky idea that 'Matilda' would be a friendly looking 
mole, and maybe I'll just try and paint this on one of the internal 
walls or something but...there's this image Marx uses of 'the old 
mole,' which lots of anti-authoritarians in (what became) the 
global justice movement pick up on. Negri explains it better than I 
could in 'Empire':

"Marx tried to understand the continuity of the cycle of 
proletarian struggles that were emerging in nineteenth-century 
Europe in terms of a mole and its subterranean tunnels. Marx's mole 
would surface in times of open class conflict and then retreat 
underground again-not to hibernate passively but to burrow its 
tunnels, moving along with the times, pushing forward with history 
so that when the time was right (1830, 1848, 1870), it would spring 
to the surface again. "Well grubbed old mole."

Lots of people pick up on this image of the mole. in the 1930s 
George Bataille in writing some (very)proto-Situationist stuff uses 
this image of the mole to draw his Surrealist-influenced picture of 
an autonomous revolt from below (in his essay "The Old Mole and The 
Prefix Sur in the words Surhomme and Surrealist"), and in the early 
70s Sergio Bologna explains the new networks and movements of 
resistance in the 1970s Italian Autonomia movement in terms of new 
kind of organising without heirachy, in his article, "A Tribe of 
Moles." In fact, approproiately enough for our Matilda, he's trying 
to explain in that article the appearance of the phenomenon of 
squatted social centres which started with Autonomy in Italy.

So, yeah, France 1968, Genoa, Seattle, Prague, J18...They're all 
eruptions of the old mole. And I kind of think of the Sheffield G8 
actions as an appearance of the old mole, too. Where a lot of 
disparate threads have come together and worked really well, and 
the Matilda is the fruit of that. So I think the mole thing is 
really appropriate, and ties us nicely in to this historical image 
of revolt and our way of organising. A sort of 'subterranean' anti-
authoritarian lineage, if you'll pardon the pun.

I was thinking at least a nice painted mural of a mole and a few 
brief quotes from Marx, Bataille, Bologna etc to explain the image 
might be a nice touch to the place, anyway. Maybe just on a wall 
somewhere if people think having a mole in the logo is a bit too 
weird.



Get your free encrypted email at http://www.cyber-rights.net