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Writings of Jack Common; a biographical note & various articles of this radical Tyneside worker. Although little known in comparison to his contemporary George Orwell, Common's general critical take on modern capitalism pertaining largely to Britain was of a much higher order as he wrestled continuously with his own take on 'new' things unfolding beneath his eyes. Sometimes bordering on a near incoherence, at his best Common is like an English pre-Situationist before such a concept had seen the light of day. Critique of Class War - 2 texts: "Death of a Paper Tiger... Reflections on Class War" - from Aufheben no. 6, UK,1997 & "Publicity of the Organisation and the Organisation Of Publicity" - a reply to the reply to the previous article. (Excerpts). This text was updated in 2000. On the level of appearances, which was always their main form of existence, Class war was essentially a marketing concept of the 1980s - a kind of anarcho-Saatchi and Saatchi. "Om Sweet Om" - a cautionary tale of Stonedhenge, Convoys, Mutoids etc from "No Reservations - Housing, Space and Class Struggle"; News From Everywhere & Campaign For Real Life, London, 1989. "The free festivals on rural squatted land in the 1970's were largely an extension of the London mass squatting movement of that time...these events were an extension of a lifestyle organised around resistance to work and living outside the confines of the isolated family structure." "Notes on the Winter of Discontent 1979/80." This is a composite of various texts on that event and is at times repetitive. The last text published here - on the Snow & Strikes page - was written by one of us during the early spring of 1980 when that glorious movement was on its last legs. At the time it was merely photocopied and handed out to a few people. In the last few years one intention was to combine this text with Henri Simon's very different overview of the same uprising in the hope of producing a greater synthesis. Spurred by this website this project was finally completed in early March 3003 and is a combination of our earlier one, Simon's, and a fresh look at that significant historical uprising. "The Winter of Discontent, forgotten and repressed as it may be, nevertheless still haunts the memory of this society. The only time the politicians and media can bring themselves to mention it is as their ultimate horror scenario that must never be allowed to happen again". "The Lump." This was written at the behest of German Wildcat in 1997. Later the intention was to use this text (obviously meant for another country) as a basis for a critique of "the buildings" within a greater totality which apart from a mass of scattered notes hasn't concretely progressed beyond a lengthy new introduction going into much greater detail about the rank 'n' file "Building Worker group" in Britain. Moreover, it is an introduction in progress particularly regarding the need to wrestle more clearly with the purpose of a rank 'n' file group. Is there any point in these bodies having any aims other than constant harassment of the many-headed authorities as any programme quickly becomes ludicrous? "1969: Revolution As Personal And As Theatre" - personal account of someone's initial development in a revolutionary direction in 1969, with a particular focus on political theatre. "Like A Summers With a Thousand Julys" - An account of the huge uprising of dispossessed youth in the cities and towns of England during 1981. From the vantage of the present it is obviously a period piece though having quite an influence at the time of its publication. Some of the more general theoretical elaborations still remain useful though in need of making more relevant. A concluding sentence remains prescient: "The need is especially urgent in Britain considering how close the country is to a gigantic explosion, or, catastrophe if things don't turn out right. If the employed working class doesn't in the near future respond in a revolutionary manner, a death's head psychosis could lie in wait on every street corner. If fresh headway is not continually being made the floodtide of rioting could get jammed up and start to flow in the other way." Unfortunately, that is exactly what was to happen as defeat and destruction of community turned into the pandemic of fuckhead culture. "Once Upon A Time There Was A Place Called Nothing Hill Gate" - An historical, critical account - with a pronounced anti art bias - of the Notting Hill area of west London emphasising its alternative ambience and largely Afro-Caribbean riots that marked its existence up until its gentrified demise in the late 1980s as it became England's Hollywood. "Nothing Hill" is nothing like the Richard Curtis film - with broadly the same title - produced some years later! "Miner Conflicts-Major Contradictions". On the 1984-5 miners' strike in the UK. A new and probably quite long introduction has yet to be completed. This text should be read in conjunction with "A Destroyed Miner" - a harrowing account of the slow-motion suicide of one of thousands of many fine individual miner's whose spine was broken in the aftermath of the strike. "Miiiiinnnners....Ah Hum". An account of what is left of the coal mining areas. Cultural and educational recuperation and those who just couldn't adapt. The historical significance of the miners' defeat as springboard for rampant free market totalitarianism. "Arts & Other Social Diseases". --- was found in pamphlet form in Housman's Bookshop, London, in the early 1990's. It seems to have had an extremely small distribution - our copy is the only one we have seen, no one else we know has seen or heard of other copies and it didn't appear to have been on sale in other likely shops. The author(s) would seem to be disillusioned ex-art students who give us a penetrating critique of their own rejected role and the illusions it is based on. We found it unusually thoughtful, self-reflective, useful and amusing on the subject in hand. It is followed by another short text - MUSIC NOTES: Reservoir of poses - on the failure of radical music Read on... "Samia the Nutter": Reflections on the sometimes lucid 'sanity' of madness. "On the formation of King Mob: Icteric & the Newcastle Experience from the early to late 1960s" Something of the unknown and viciously suppressed story of what happened in a northern city. How silence and the vanquishing of the real protagonists - the unmentionables - nonetheless facilitated a vast still unfolding recuperation on Tyneside. (The real story is still in preparation). Should be read in conjunction with the following................. "Land Art, Icteric and William Wordsworth": An overview of today's Land Art monstrosities with an evaluation of its origins in the Newcastle Icteric experiment during the mid 1960s. Plus a refreshing rescue of william Wordsworth...... "Lost ones around King Mob" Some texts around the King Mob axis that almost certainly would have been lost forever. An introduction was deemed necessary explaining some of the background to these still relevant leaflets and small pamphlets. "A Hidden King Mob" - It would have been better perhaps if this had never been written because it still remains utterly incomplete. Unfortunately a bad heart condition plus attack by gun-toting crack heads meant it was produced in haste as death seemed immanent...One cooler day and maybe it will be completed. 1968: Wreckage and Bric-A-Brac The following
webs are additions, trajectories even developments related to "A Hidden History of King Mob". Obviously none of us will be contributing
to the ridiculous bash at London's Conway Hall celebrating 1968 forty years
on. Best leave that to the stupid idiots already making their mark or rather, no
mark: The Maclarens, the John Hoylands, the Tariq Ali's and so on who
have no merit whatsoever. Thinking they'd be bad we didn't expect the
abysmal with no renewed, helpful critical insight. No doubt the initial
diarrhoea will turn into a veritable river of the brown stuff...... Some of the following webs at times are somewhat repetitious regarding details though set within differing contexts and with slightly different interpretations. New
Introduction to Spanish King Mob:
New Introduction for a
Spanish Book on Black Mask & the Motherfuckers: Land
art and Icteric plus
Wordsworthian environmental emotions:
Nietzsche, Revolutionary subversion and
the contemporary attack on music:
For Vicki:
On what happened at Selfridges in 1968:
A drift on Germaine Greer, feminism and modern day shameless
Ranterism: Comparisons:
From Mass Observation to King Mob:
BM
BIS, BM BLOB, riot and post modernist recuperation:
Alex Trocchi's hour upon the stage:
For Vicki on Ralph
Rumney:
Hidden connections, ruminations and rambling parentheses:
Alex Trocchi's hour upon the stage:
For Vicki on Ralph
Rumney:
Hidden connections, ruminations and rambling parentheses: On
Bryan Ferry:
"Ferry Across The Tyne"
On Georges Bataille: The Accursed Share versus
sado-masochistic
aestheticism and shock marketing:
Bio-economy
or Bio-Industrialisation? ***************** "The Redirection of Production. The Lucas Aerospace Plan" - Today Latin American companeros go on about the Lucas Aerospace Plan of the mid-1970s. What we'd forgotten was that three of us had put together a piece on the subject which, as usual - and for one reason or another - was never published. But there it lay moulding away in a mice-infested cupboard! "A Summers Postscript" - This is a postscript written in 1985 for the German edition of "A Summers with a Thousand Julys" (see elsewhere on the web) and published by Wildcat, the German ultra-leftist organisation. It is followed by an auto-critique written in January 2008. "The Destruction of Toytown UK: The London Poll Tax riot of 1990" - BM Blob's pamphlet on the great London poll tax riot of march 31st 1990 emphasising the simple pleasures to be found in ransacking the UK's central consumer emporium. Also containing a general theoretical analysis on the historical conflict between industrial and financial capital in Britain leading to the outright victory today of fictitious capital where the role of speculator has become the new King and Queen. "Hot Time: Summer on the Estates: On the 1992 urban riots" - The final conclusion to Blob's account of the unparalleled phenomena of riot in Britain from the great spontaneous insurrection of July 1981 through to this chaotic uproar on the estates in 1991-2 where all former hopes were slowly becoming mired in something a lot more ugly reflecting the victory of neoliberalism and a gang structured primitive capitalisation.
GLOBAL The New After Word - for the 1993 Pelagian Press edition of BAD - the Autobiography of James Carr. "BAD is one of many books written by prisoners who have been radicalised in American jails..it stands out from a lot of the others because it avoids portraying the prisoner as a passive victim of social injustice - and also refuses the martyr role that liberals and leftists try to impose on convicts as a vehicle for their own fantasies and careers". The Occupation of Art and Gentrification - an article from No Reservations - Housing, Space and Class Struggle; News From Everywhere & Campaign For Real Life, London,1989. "Art as state-manipulated as in the Lower East Side (of Manhattan), and Art as a fresh base for accumulation in areas ravaged by the decline of industry". "And Yet It Moves" - an updated version of Phil Mailer's critical history of science first written in the late 1980s and revised for book publication by Campo Abierto in Spain in 2002. "From the End of Empire to the Empire of the End" - an excellent critique of culture written by Julio Henriques in the long aftermath of the failed Portuguese revolution on the 1970s. The facts may be dated but the broad thrust still retains a powerful cutting edge. "The Bankruptcy of Syndicalism & Anarchism" In the 1970s with the help of people around the Portuguese ultra-leftist group, Combate, a book was produced in London titled "Wildcat Spain Encounters Democracy" written by Spanish, Situationist influenced individuals. The "Bankruptcy" was one of their last productions. The publication in English by BM BLOB created fury among the anarchist milieu. "What 'Appen to South Africa" - New intro plus original text on social struggles in South Africa from their inspiring beginning to their present woeful condition. Today's impasse was already inherent in the origins of the revolt against apartheid. "Italy in 1977" - By way of an introduction to the following three webs on the Italian explosion of 1977. It is to some degree an explanation of what happened in the Italian crucible that produced the first bare outlines of the future of counter-revolution that so colonises the world today: Terrorism, increasing state repression plus the occupation of our everyday lives by an overt cultural commodification. "PUZZ in Mid-1970s Italy" -This essentially unknown though often profound theoretical/comix mag was to the forefront of the experimentation leading up to the Metropolitan Indian explosion in 1977. Some examples of the comix are reproduced here. "Memoirs of a Metropolitan Indian" - By far the most interesting account possibly written of the evolution and development of the Metropolitan Indian movement in Rome. It is followed by a "Slice of an Assembly" which is some hack of a journalist's interesting account of an episode with a number of Metropolitan Indians in the same city. "Critique of Italy '77" - Contains two documents: "Eulogising Madness" and "Additional Note on the use of Culture and the Spectacle in an Accelerating Decomposition". These are really searching texts with the latter emphasising the role of culture in the moment of defeat on the streets. Still highly relevant. "Os Cangaceiros" - Contains a sympathetic but critical text written by one of the Os Cangaceiros protagonists after the demise of the group in the late 1980s together with a limited account of the groups activities in Britain at the time.
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