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Benjamin’s grim writing on Marseille

Marseilles Walter Benjamin The street . . . the only valid field of experience. – Andre Breton Marseilles-the yellow-studded maw of a seal with salt water running out between the teeth. When this gullet opens to catch the black and brown proletarian bodies thrown to it by ship’s companies according to their timetables, it exhales a stink of […]

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Stand-Up Beer Hall

Stand-Up Beer Hall Walter Benjamin Sailors seldom come ashore ; service on the high seas is a holiday by comparison with the labour in harbours, where loading and unloading must often be done day and night. When a gang is then given a few hours’ shore-leave it is already dark. At best the cathedral looms like a dark promontory […]

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Ghost ships

In the last two weeks, two ships filled to the brim with hundreds of Syrian refugees have been brought in to Italian ports.  The ships seem to have left Eastern Mediterranean, and sailed parallel to the Turkish coast, picking up most passengers from Mersin or other ports in Turkey, and arriving in Greek waters, heading […]

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At sea on an island as a cyclone comes

This book is neither about ports and the labour of dockers nor about shipping and transport.  But I have to write about it because it is one of the most stunning books I have stumbled into during my obsessive reading of books about ships and ports and transport. I picked up Mutiny because of its […]

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Golden Dawn recruited by shipping magnates to break unions

‘[Golden Dawn] created battalions against their political opponents, and then they rented them out, to whoever wanted to rent them,” he told Channel 4 News. In one of the most important cases, a network of businessmen active in the shipping industry allegedly involved Golden Dawn in their continuing struggle against the stubborn unions which wouldn’t accept […]

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The blue banana

Last week, huge protests took place in Brussels, with the trade unions reporting some 130,000-150,000 people showing up; and major clashes with the police.  The protests in fact have been going on for some time now.  And in the April protests, “hundreds of marchers adorned in the orange bibs of the BTB-ABVV docker’s union from Antwerp […]

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Block the Boat

One of the most trenchant points that Deb Cowen makes in her superb book, The Deadly Life of Logistics, is that labour mobilisation is a form of “obstruction” that is securitised by shipping companies and states and crushed, precisely because it becomes a kind of chokepoint for the circulation of goods.  And if the goods cannot […]

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Shipping Containers as Shelters

Shipping containers, as I wrote before, are fascinating things.  Deb Cowen’s superb new book has on its cover an amazing photograph of shipping containers tumbling atop two destroyed cranes in the aftermath of the devastating 2011 earthquake in Japan. Shipping container act as symbols.  When they are empty or abandoned, they speak of declining or […]

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East India Company Routes

Excellent video animating East India Company 1798-1834… http://vimeo.com/43884291

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The Bloody Business of War

I discovered something interesting that somehow I had managed to miss all those years ago about the massacre at Karantina… Years ago, I wrote in my first book (which was based on my PhD research) which also included stories about the Phalange massacres of Palestinians (and others) living in the Karantina area of Beirut.  As […]

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