Perhaps however, one slogan must be mentioned perhaps above all others not just because it was exquisitely said but because it marked a tendency that was to become all pervasive in this renewed revolutionary impetus and wasn’t by any means always to the good. One night in 1968 we sprayed up a slogan  on the walls of a tiny mews fronting Portobello Road. It was from De Sade - whom we were avidly reading at the time –and said: “Crime is the highest form of sensuality”. It’s implications were to be massive. To be sure it was fine to take this quite literally simply because you do get a buzz or high from shop lifting, phone phreaking and what have you. The trouble is the slogan tended to increasingly reinforce crime as an end in itself. Illegality became a revolutionary must if you wanted to remain within what was rapidly becoming a revolutionary in-crowd. Thus theory – or rather what was there of it – began almost obsessively to applaud virtually all type of crime (like the “ illegal” university in King Mob 2) or trying to work out a form of survival based entirely on crime through kiting cheques and what have you etc. In practise, it could also justify some of the worst and most reprehensible acts of lumpen behaviour like turning your mates over or robbing them of a few pence in “the revolution of dirty little tricks” as we quickly termed it. Some revolutionaries actually did think it was OK behaviour to steal from all and sundry regardless of an individual’s particular property status. (Looking back you can hardly believe there was such shit doing the rounds). In no time for some the emphasis on crime began to move into rather more big time money making and “psychedelic racketeers” was given a new inflection meaning getting in on the act yourself. To be fair though some rather splendid bank heists were imaginatively pulled off! Nobody for a while strayed into hard drugs though that too wasn’t to last. “Crime” despite its revolutionary romantic overtures quickly became the old story, as an obsession with making easy money took over. Only a little of these endeavours were ever used to help fund radical projects and when that did happen, 99% of the time were bullshit. However, it was a road basically paved with good intentions as finally the simple acquisition of money became the be all and end all and no different from the capitalist game itself. The danger was in the process itself. When illegality is gradually pushed to this point contact is increasingly lost with friends not in on the act or simply with other people at the sharp end. No longer can you have relaxed conversations in the pub just shooting the breeze. Inevitably paranoia takes over wondering just who is going to shop you. Illegality like this sets you apart from others the more you become a kind of criminal elite liking the feel of being someone special! Then one day the scams are bust wide open. Ground zero you want to feel part of that cut-above-it feeling again. Perhaps this is the simple reason why so many revolutionary illegalists then fall back onto the dog days of culture – anything to keep up a self-image of floating freely above the mass of working stiffs. Moving from the glamour of heists to the glamour of culture there’s always that  underlying emphasis on glamour. Essentially though, “crime is the highest form of sensuality” wasn’t taken in the fullness of its implication: the “crime” of critical theory, the “crime” involved in subverting State-manipulated propaganda and falsification, or even Rudolf Stirner’s conception of revolution as, “the great crime” etc.      

    In our delirium, we emphasised a different take on things rather than a superficially accepted “reality”. Through this same skewered prism the beginning of the renewed violence in Northern Ireland was taken on board.  Again, the issues hardly mattered vis-à-vis Unionism or Republicanism. It was the pure act in itself. Chris Gray loved the TV footage of a blown up meat vendors van with hundreds and hundreds of sausages strewn all over the streets like some Surrealist exhibition-in-action and no longer stuck in a gallery which a little later was to happen  under the financial auspices of the Saatchi’s cultural emporium. Somehow we needed such incidents everywhere. Well, at least it would maybe help in deranging things sufficiently to  kick start some of the other  reified jams in everyday life!  Catholic nationalism versus the Scots/Irish basis of this conflict (now that the former aristocratic Anglo Irish Ascendancy had been defeated if not the brutality of the British State) was pushed to one side as a more emanciptory take  - if too aesthetic – was imposed across this civil(though not class) war. In fact, truth to tell, some of this emancipatory take was reflected in bemused and imaginative slogans appearing elsewhere on Belfast’s walls like “shop now while shops last”. Behind the barricades of Free Derry in the late 60s, there was also a permanent rent strike and a mass hot wiring of basic gas and electricity utilities. Similarly, young republicans in prison, in no matter how half-assed way could say “down with bourgeois culture and art” though the arguments, of course, were none too lucid and if anything was to come of the situation (which didn’t happen) these arguments would have had to be a lot sharper.         

     Quite quickly the nascent King Mob began to gather a fair amount of attention and individuals started appearing from nowhere to contact a group that didn’t basically exist. If anything it was a kind of personalised, magnetic force of attraction immediately sending waves out over then coming back to source. This arena that was to become King Mob was the first revolt in Britain against the total colonisation of everyday life by capitalism. Therefore any corner of this totality was deemed a fit place for spreading subversion mainly of an unpremeditated, spontaneous daily out-pouring. To be accurate though, the more planned interventions were usually the best and had the most impact in terms of influencing similar actions elsewhere but these were much rarer than the cacophony of just having a go as part and parcel of a general exuberance.  There were constant life-giving and enhancing expressions and acts which had a fresh, spring-like feel to them….well initially (but more about this later). And as befitted the increasingly revolutionary temper of the times, there was always some on-going action proposed or acted upon immediately. It’s a shame but a fair amount of leaflets conjured up fairly spontaneously have been lost or mislaid. Similarly many of the actions went unrecorded and obviously unreported (they usually had no signature or identifying logo) as they were merely part and parcel of an everyday thing, or rather more accurately as part of an attempted leap into a new life style free of capitalism forever and thus of no more importance than say socking a cop. As for the leaflets certainly we didn’t regard them as literature to be a filed away for future museum perusal, though this what they did become. And how!          

     From its inception, what became the King Mob milieu was a pick ‘n’ mix of those youthful middle classes on the lam – those that were more privileged, anomic, unhappy and often desperate about a palpably felt disappearance or flattening out of the essence of life and often working this out with amazing clarity  finding allies from lower down the social scale whom, initially at least, just weren’t as clued-in in terms of general theory. A strangely  inventive pick ‘n’ mix!

        King Mob wanted to recreate life’s passions  now life itself had been called into question and was becoming more and more absent. We readily identified with comments from the past which gave pointers to this historical malaise like Baudelaire’s: “I appeal to every thinking man to show me what remains of life”etc. To find it again meant abandoning all intellectualism even, at one point, theory itself in search of an authenticity that, we perceived dimly, overlapped with that random violence against the commodity and which seemed to manifest itself everywhere. To others outside this flow it must have appeared as insane as we consoled ourselves with Artaud’s comment; “for it is the anonical logic of modern man for never having been able to live, nor think of living except as one possessed.” It could be said that a kind of anti-theoretical philistinism was somewhat distantly but perhaps uncomfortably embraced which encompassed that anti-theoretical persuasion  of these islands social apartheid and, in a similar vein, the new delinquent sub-cultures from mods and rockers to football hooligans. One or two  provocative leaflets were handed out affirming unfolding football hooliganism which, though they emphasised a different take on that wooden concept of violence as put forward by the far left parties at the time (e.g. its OK to fight the police but don’t trash cars, set fire to shops or generally wreck things etc), nonetheless, and in retrospect, fell far short also of what was needed. It was a too simplistic identification (c/f the leaflet from us reproduced in Widgery’s The Left in Britain) which didn’t even begin to acknowledge the limitations of these outpourings nor that we who wrote these leaflets were very different to the average hooligan. At the time though this stance, even though we were lying to ourselves, was effective and necessary in shaking up perceptions and actions.

       And now we enter into some difficulty. In mentioning class here we encounter a major problem which perplexes these islands set adrift from the rest of Europe and which is so peculiar to it. It was as though we were reaching out wanting  to grasp authentic life – a life that surely must be out there and at all costs. It was in this perspective that the embrace of a kind of stupidity in the very first lines of the manifesto of the Black Hand Gang must be placed: “Theory has really had it this time”. It was if the self-destruction of modern poetry and high art met head on and interwove with that distrust of books and academic learning so endemic among the working classes here. Together we could produce a libidinal vandalism and self-consciously delinquent life styles accompanied by incendiary leaflets on some event or other which could create instant adherents and a bewildered, open-mouthed shock among the majority they were handed to. But why this anti-theory and why was there this mistrust of theory among these islands working classes?   E P Thompson, the social historian explained it by relating to the lacunae  between our early, unfinished bourgeois revolution of the 1640s and the new, unprecedented rise of a rebellious industrial working class in the early 19th century. Sheer reaction throughout most of 18th century Britain meant we had a much-reduced radical artisanal sector in any broad sense to act as some kind of link. We had no cobblers like Joseph Dietzgen whom Marx admired or even a Proudhon. True, we had some fine ones –men like William Benbow – but it was as if they had no profile. A “social apartheid” was thus created, more basically referred to as an “us and them” which meant class separation was virtually a deep and fast flowing river with no bridges inter-linking each side. Thus, there just couldn’t be any “recovery through transfer” - in that excellent dialectical comment by Marx previously mentioned – as all books, all written knowledge was to be regarded by the exploited – in a broad, generally conservative, protective and even at times, despotic sweep – as suspect, despite the fact that an infinitesimal fraction of the dispossessed did make attempts at a more general learning (e.g. the Bradford Chartists who using the French tricolour as their flag also read  the early Robert Southey etc). And so it continued right on into and through the 20th century. Jack Common (c/f later) in his book “The Freedom of the Streets” written in the late 30s contains a poignant passage on the difficulties a working class kid had in a school playground whose parents are clued-in, self-educated working class radicals. Later, with post second world war corporatism and the hoped for inclusion of the working classes as a fraction of capital –more particularly through aspects of higher education – there was almost a similar poignant mirroring of Common in a chapter by Richard Hoggart in his Uses of Literacy book called: The Uprooted and the Anxious. The kid, though now a little older, moves around in a far more alienated world cast adrift from a fixed sense of class who doesn’t know whether he or she is coming or going. Despised by your background, looked down as clumsy, gauche and awkward by the traditional middle classes where could you go? Believe us one of the outlets was indulging in a more clued-in than your average yobbo, and often drunken, vandalism.  Despite all these nuances, nonetheless, a simplistic class hatred came into it; a kind of combination of a comment like Bakunin’s: “social hatreds, like religious hatreds, are much more intense, much deeper, than political hatreds” as it was also a breakthrough from that sullen, resentful passivity which Tom Nairn had described at the time as a, “social exclusion felt (even if not intellectually asserted to) as a fact of nature. This was one of the most powerful weapons any conservative regime has ever had in its hands, worth any number of policemen”.  Others have said it but in the student revolt of the late 60s especially in England most of the violence and general destruction inside the colleges was carried out by precisely that class fraction which seemed to combine some enmeshing drift illustrating these two very different quote from Bakunin and Nairn.  As Howard Fraser was a little later to say,  “ they turned the corridors of learning into the very streets they’d  recently left”. It was just some of this mix plus a quick grasp of essential theoretical markers together with that often destructive pattern of play from a recent childhood in industrial towns which found such an expression in some of the King Mob leaflets.

     On reflection, maybe other things can be said. How did all this seamless class-less-ness come about in terms of revolt when their was also this simplistic though nuanced and different class revolt taking place within it to? After the “us and them” revolt of the early 60s ( c/f the history of “Irish” whom emphasised this distinction)and which really did result in some kind of victory for “us” from the mid 60s onwards, “them” changed  and not only chameleon-like – though this came into it too. They, “them” also, for a time, really meant it. Socially and psychologically it was to create a massive confusion particularly among “us”. However, - and not to be cynical – adaptation was always the way of survival for the ideologies of the ruling class when in crises and youthful energies play such a large part in this. But, in this moment they, “Them” also experienced a breach, a lacunae, with their own lineage and they also wanted a completely different future than the one, more or less securely, mapped out for them. They also wanted the thrill of authentic adventure too – even prepared to precipitate one – though alas most never finally followed the adventure through to the bitter end. Once though the impulse falters, the old order sets in and the return to the status quo quickly if very deviously sets in. A bizarre, “knowing one’s place” returned, as those who, necessarily, still remained at the sharp end because of economic circumstances fell in awe of the new revolutionary theoreticians – even  by 1967. It was an awe which was short-lived as a quick back-sliding, usually via inherited wealth, with the verities of an English cultural poise being a very viable asset on the market, meant a final “no your place” gave way to contempt and derision. Just how many of those Situationist influenced individuals in England with their supposed disavowal of a public school they’d never talk about, felt all the cultural pulls of old England; of George Eliot’s, “loves and sanctities of our life” with their “deep immovable roots in memory?”  with the caveat, of course, of a very modernised veneer. How could it be other?

       Perhaps we need to say something more about this theory/ anti-theory thing as it still perplexes. Anti theory – a kind of just do it was prevalent at the time among those who were desperate to have a go and to get rid of the misery of capitalism quickly in the spirit of; “we want it all and we want it now”. It is though a tendency which reoccurs here and inevitably as a side effect, brings on demoralisation in the not too distant future. Unwittingly, also it adds to a vein of conservative empiricism here which is deeply engrained in the psyche despite the onslaughts of a right wing free-market ideology from the late 70s onwards which has torn up root and branch so many traces of British empiricism as it can get hold off. Pity it wasn’t  as simple as that to deal with. It was also an indisputably modern glitch as increasing social alienation made it much more difficult to concentrate for any length of time. It was as though one had willy nilly also become oppressed by the sheer weight of books and by the specific dislocation in the act of writing. For some it was fetishised affirmatively – even as “revolutionary” often knowing it harked back to some of Rimbaud’s final words as he left poetry behind forever: “I cannot write anymore”. Thus an extreme exasperation is turned into a revolutionary “virtue” and a half-recognition becomes a misunderstanding. Then there’s a further nuance to all of this. Henri Simon has written extensively on fully employed workers struggles here and produced one of the only books from an ultra leftist perspective on the miners’ strike in ‘84/’85, though it’s never been translated into English. Simon’s underlying emphasis – that workers consciousness is irrelevant – runs throughout all of these writings. Only the workers’ actions are to be recorded and, increasingly with a minimum of interpretation, despite the fact that the workers actions in this instance have been recorded through the newspapers and cretinous journalists. All intervention moreover is merely some form of  extraneous and irrelevant substitutionism. Whilst having some sympathy with such responses in France where nearly every event seems to merit some often unconnected though charming poetic outpouring packed with revolutionary verities, in these islands, where all attempts at relevant dialectical theory is hounded to extinction, its often woefully wide of the mark. (See the compare/contrast introduction between the two countries in “France Goes Off the Rails” on the 1986 French railway workers, student and public sector workers’ strikes by BM BLob and BM Combustion).

        Back in the late 60s though we weren’t the only ones to fall into this trap. It seemed to spread itself across most of the English speaking world. Similar responses, though perhaps in a different more enlightened (?) way were present in Murray Bookchin’s article for RAT ( Sept/Oct 1968), an American underground magazine of the time, on the previous May ‘68 revolt in France: “There  is no theory, programme or party that has greater significance than the revolution itself”. However, after taking into account all these manifold ambiences surrounding the anti-theoretical, it’s also necessary to note that with such perspectives social revolution can become an almost ineluctable, mechanistic event even courting something mystically transcendental utterly separated from any theoretical take. On the simplest of levels, people taking action do think about what they’re doing even if conditioned by outdated concepts. Theory flows, all depending, in multi-faceted ways. An individual can say something, can have an effect. It happens continually. Admittedly Murray Bookchin did not go as far as the Black Hand Gang and did not dismiss theory out of hand but neither did those around the King Mob scene. There was also the element of a willfully provocative statement. Such iconoclastic statements must also be put into the perspective of the need to shock inherited from the classic days of avant garde art or even considered as an extension of a flaneur Dandy type of verbal provocation which in certain instances can be effective.   

     In the same vein, reading – as a form more than its content – was objected to although, at the same moment, most of us tended to read considerably. It wasn’t quite an embrace of being stupid like that (although laudatory remarks on the delights of being a village idiot were welcomed) more that reading had become one of the main vehicles of torpor, propaganda and passivity. It was in this spirit that “Don’t Read” was sprayed up in huge letters 6ft high on the front wall of the Porchester Hall library and reading room, Queensway, West London. Although nicely outlandish just how many people understood the point behind it? Some will have done but others most likely disturbed by its ambiguities? What the fuck did it mean but do you have to explain everything? One night, about the same time, a foraging party out spray painting slogans stopped in front of a house in Holland Park as Chris Gray, disdainfully, pointed to a bearded Allen Ginsberg look-a-like lying on a bed calmly reading a book. The contempt from everyone in this little party standing in the dark street for this passive, contemplative readist was palpable. It was as though nothing much needed be said about this cameo of society at large: it was all just so obvious. What more can be said about the readist? In a way such a critique is more applicable than ever. Everywhere people are reading yet basically learning nothing. In cafes, on trains, on buses it’s the same. Couples even hold hands reading separate installments of junk. Mostly they are paperback novels packed from cover to cover with complete nonsense. Everywhere people sit and read never talking to the person next to them as isolation and emptiness grows in an essentially privatized space. It’s all words without meaning  and the very antithesis of what once reading implied and the vacuous counterpart of an even more vacuous TV.       

     Reading, school, academic learning, the role of writer, all were rightly scorned. A little later Rimbaud’s lines were sprayed up nearby: “To Lulu Demon and her Incomplete Education”. One could say this was a contradiction in terms - the great poet Rimbaud  - yet scorning reading and writing? For those who knew, had read and had understood there was no such contradiction at all. The history of modern art, or more nearly, the long moment of it’s self destruction was trawled for pointers and relished – knowing we were on the right track. Mallarme’s, “the flesh is sad and I’ve read all the books,” to Tristan Tzara’s comment at the height of Zurich Dada “thought comes from the mouth” to Andre Breton’s “Seeing everything has been said, life rather” etc, etc, etc. Cultural disintegration had to be explained but first of all it had to be dug up and proclaimed in a country with it’s high falutin’, dead duck Eng Lit platitudes and sheer conservatism.  Everything transcendentally posited on the extremes of the greatest moments in the last 150 years of culture was pointing to its demise. From Turner moving into Jack (the dripper) Pollock to Beethoven going out of tune heralding the atonal, to Rimbaud’s rejection of poetry, as well as comprehending the crisis of the former: “great music falls short of our desire” to Mallarme’s empty page in “The Dice Throw” to Malevich’s white square announcing the death of painting, to Jacques Vache’s pistiol leveled at Appolinaire’s theatrical performance, to Lefebvre’s discussion of the oppression of the written word, to Artaud’s “All writing is pigshit”  etc, etc, etc. All were pointing to the absence of life; to our denuded bodies, at this extreme nadir of life where a point’s been reached where there comes about a visceral need to totally re-create life by a practical/critical revolutionary upheaval . Ironically, as suggested previously, to come up with these examples and quotes and to remember them so well, meant an awful lot of reading was taking place – and quotes which would be eagerly communicated to each other along with episodes recounted from great historical upheavals from the Luddites, to the Paris Commune, to Barcelona in 1936 etc as though all were pointing to some goal and all finallycoming together on the same path we were now embarking upon. Newspapers were eagerly read  simply to find out those disturbing accounts and facts  from everywhere illuming the soft underbelly of this grotesque society or to find reports on disturbances throughout the world encouraging our sense of certainty that this impossible society was in its death throws. In the same breadth, it was a reading between the lines equipped beforehand with a greater theoretical take and the journalists who wrote these articles treated with complete disdain.  

     Subconsciously in this unknown but excellent conjunction something of Lautreamont was expressed in the imaginings and practical beginnings of King Mob. It was completely amoral as well as anti-aesthetic holding no truck with any bleeding hearts leftism. It was our own alienation amidst the new poverty’s that was paramount. It wasn’t simply the extension of the English Romantics desire to transform the world but its active re-engagement, sufficiently estranged promising something amazing and unknown. It was nature and the city completely transformed which beckoned. Conservation didn’t come into it. A high rise point block was as equally capable of becoming the foci of a transformed take-off as much as say, The Shambles, a 16th century Elizabethan street, preserved in aspic in the city of York. No sympathy was shown for Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities movement at the same time as William Morris’s utopian “News from Nowhere” was given short shrift for its placid, boy scoutish interplay of people, urban scene and country all serenely gelling together. Something altogether more convulsive and remarkable was called for. And this must be the basis of any consideration of what could in the future find some legitimate inspiration from King Mob with the proviso that the motive behind any actions undertaken must be explained in some kind of accompanying communication –if at all possible – against a background of deepening ecological crisis that could convulse the earth’s crust in any case never mind the convulsive beauty we desired.   

      Although ecological critique played no part in the coming together of King Mob, ironically, Murray Bookchin was a kind of  intermediary between London and New York, between Black Mask and a nascent King Mob. Murray Bookchin, an Anarchist it has to be said was the first modern theorist in a document on chemical industry pollution in Germany to put ecology at the centre of a renewed revolutionary critique and his Institute of Social Ecology predated Rachel Carson’s supposedly seminal “Silent Spring” in the 1950s. In the 1960s though, Murray sought out young people who moving fast were in the process of grasping a relevant theory of modern alienation, which invariably partook of Situationist critique. Inevitably as time went on, blows followed. Murray was roundly criticicised for his emphasis on the New England democratic small town polis as somehow being a relevant organisational base for any modern subversion. Whilst this was right, the balance was lost in not recognising  his ground breaking ecological studies and his claim that “ecology is the only revolutionary science”. Moreover, after really lauding Black Mask, he quickly became critical of the supra-militant activism of the Motherfuckers noting the extent of internal nervous breakdown  engendered.          

    Although most talk in discussing past events and figures had to do with other countries, particularly France, figures were, as we’ve suggested, particularly plucked out from English literature. Regarding the Romantics, the main emphasis was  on De Quincey and Coleridge though not from the revolutionary angle which Hazlitt in the 1830s and Artaud in the 1940s had railed against the traitor Coleridge. Hardly surprising as for our time this had more to do with modern drug taking habits with a sympathetic ear applied to the opium habits of both Coleridge and De Quincey. Not for nothing had the latter made that memorable statement embarking on Saturday night derives through the old urban rookeries east of Tottenham Court Rd swallowing his laudanum alongside workers and artisans: “I identified with the poor not through their miseries but through their pleasures”. Collectively, in early ‘68 we indulged in a spontaneous  opium session during one of our usual nightly witty and brilliant discussions. Nobody got where they wanted to go on the drug! We were hoping for damsels with dulcimers and sunless seas or the walls of this basement flat to fall away revealing a scene reminiscent of some kind of geological apocalypse courtesy of a scene from say, a painting by Mad Martin. The sensation predominating for some was colour everywhere, particularly orange, orange and orange again. These sessions began to enmesh  with a kind of drug reinterpretation of history, which in Chris Gray at times evinced a kind of psychotropic Feuerbachianism. Man is what he eats particularly psychedelic mushrooms, There was discussion about the people who went mad after eating wheat in the churches of the Albergensians and those insurrectionary peasants who felt so transfixed by a moment of revolutionary beauty that they were unable to say anything! In terms of the present though it did encourage an interesting take on drugs. None of us liked that stern moral tone which was applied to our early days recreational drug taking as indeed we thought we were making breakthroughs. Remember, it was before heroin and later crack started wrecking working class communities and therefore out of necessity, became something to fight against. Even so that hip/beat aspect to heroin still had quodos. Hadn’t Art Pepper the great white Californian alto sax player imitated in an amazing musical flow the surge and laid back feel of a fix in “Smack Up”? We listened to the man’s great music not knowing that the whirlwind of heroin was shortly to be blamed by fellow saxophonist, Jackie Mclean, for the death of jazz.                

      In any case, we recognised that it was a drug obsessed society with the urge to consume acres of  trivial commodities being by far the most powerful drug around and if we noted something had gone dreadfully wrong with jazz music it had more to do with dialectics and the historical rise and fall of cultural forms than anything else. Chemical drugs though could play upon real needs and desires, which found no satisfaction in the mundanity of purchasing power. Chris Gray rightfully emphasised the drug high and reckoned we should do things which brought into play that “revolution is something higher than drugs” – its material process and final existence bringing about a higher state of being and pleasure. It was a notion of ecstasy that made former pleasures merely a feeble foretaste.  Although one can appreciate such a take it also had the effect of perceiving revolution as a purely sensory act despite the fact that this aspect must always be emphasised as against the baneful militants who look to a future without repression conceived and facilitated through a militant role. As a newspaper headline said at the time referring to some revolt in West Africa and which we picked up on: “natives go berserk with freedom”. One musn’t forget that drugs in the late 60s had something nebulously subversive about them soon to be lost in the increasing twilight and dusk of the following decades. Naively we thought all kinds of legalisation were coming soon and the marketing of brands no more than months or a couple of years away. Does our naivety really need to be spelt out?         

    We did, of course, take a huge interest in the black revolt in American cities at the time and some of our general theories of a spontaneous, festive potlatch producing a high, greater and more real than any beatific drug rush was all based on that often bloody revolt. It was more than interest it was identification. We desperately wanted something like the same thing here. What was worth preserving?  Hardly anything and the ball of flame engulfing American cities pointed to one of the  answers. Many who’d come to King Mob with upbringings in small towns had been steeped in the blues and jazz since childhood so much so that many an old bluesman’s or jazzman’s death was treated as an occasion for more tragic grieving than that of your own grandah. The blues had become your music as an expression of a keenly felt alienation mediated through the equally felt social apartheid even though it was largely white at the time. We wanted to see Notting Hill go up in flames in 1968 and at times we tried our damndest but of course, spontaneous organic riots don’t happen like this – and such hopes were a reflection too of our own naivete attempting to detonate a confrontation between locals and cops. It was all too crude and quickly  abandoned. In practice though, it also meant developing friendships with some of the more clued in and lippy black guys – though not so much the women (which, at the time, had a kind of exclusion zone around them) in Notting Hill. And for those few who stayed on in the area those friendships became more on going.  As we all now know nothing cataclysmic did happen though later we noted disappointingly that some of these rebel guys  swiftly became bureaucratic representatives in an emerging and abysmal community politics scene. But for those who were lippy, among both black and white alike, the police in Notting Hill were waiting for them and some police sadists took a delight in terrorising the neighbourhood. In a way, they became a grotesque clued-in parody/inversion of the revolutionaries themselves. (see the later piece on ‘Irish’) by way of reply perhaps? After all we’d put up slogans plagiarised from America like “Burn Baby Burn” and the  nihilist declaration of a rioter  in Detroit: “I don’t believe in nothing. I just want to burn down the whole world – just let it burn down baby”. Well, we’d got this quote from a Newsweek article!        

      Although we were constantly affirming the struggles of the blacks in America and not only by the above and other slogans, we also didn’t care to go  too much into the different situations of the blacks (and Asians) in Britain who were at most second generation immigrants – though most were first – and didn’t feel “at home” as it were as much as their “americanised” counterparts. Confidence generally was still lacking notwithstanding a small minority (e.g. in Notting Hill those who’d fought against the racist attacks 10 years previously in that area) and who readily identified with the American revolt. When a huge urban rebellion instigated by black youth did burst into flames in most English towns and cities some 14 years later in 1981 they were largely class riots as there was a far larger white participation than in the American ghettoes of the 60s. Moreover, the mass character of the 1981 riots  mirrored the mass character of the huge strike wave of the Winter of Discontent during 1979.          

      Whether it be drugs, nature, the city, a procession, demonstration or anything else, the whole point was to try and turn it into the pivot for something else to take off that was either aggressive, absurdist or seriously playful (or all three) but would have shock value. Chris Gray proposed hanging up some dreadful looking  skewed up skeleton in a wood which would freak out a gamekeeper or else how about hiring a bed sit for a week to turn into a faked scene of a recent weird, incomprehensible but blood thirsty event which would, or could, shake a landlord rigid. Although he toyed with this idea for sometime it was never carried out. Despite the shock horror headlines, then in their infancy, which probably would have resulted  it was essentially a detourning of a landlord’s bed sit as an active extension of modern art, a provocation  in the spirit of the old avante garde shocking through incomprehensibility. And there’s the rub. Fine as far as it goes but the historical time had now come – we had to make clearer explanations as well as keeping the shadow of the incomprehensible otherwise such bizarre interventions could again be seriously misinterpreted. Developing the idea a little further Chris Grey suggested it might be a good ploy in a local rent strike as there were always more than a few going on at the time. At least it would have the merit of deploying more imaginative tactics unlike the usual leftist poster campaigns and what have you. This made a lot more sense even though there was still no suggestion we should in some way distribute a leaflet after the hoped for furore and publicity had died down in order to provide a coherent explanation. If not these provocations, a lot more than the slogans, would be open to hopeless misinterpretations as the acts of deranged, weird, even psychotic fantasists. As it stood, it was like putting a variation of a Lautreamont juxtaposition into real, active play but with more than a touch of the English neo-gothic horror story  though without making a coherent point, it wasn’t  going to influence others in the desired way. Coherence though can be an easy word and how can it encompass some of the bizarre? There was also a streak in other  King Mobbers too which wanted to actively realise some of that macabre, sinister, grotesque but nonetheless fascinating side of English Romanticism and its fall out that was crystallised  in the novels about Frankenstein, Dracula, and those novels written by Monk Lewis and especially, Walpole’s “Castle of Otranto.” We wanted to put some of this into play without falling into some Hammer Horror film or Hollywood ketchup-like blood bath. At the time, none of this was adequately perceived in anything like the fuller picture it needed in raising the problems you would have with it or, in a sufficiently dispassionate was if you like, for it to be useful as an effective subversive scalpel. It’s probably impossible in any case but some day it may be worthy of another try.     

    Moreover it’s necessary to make things as clear as possible to others, otherwise an event without explanation, can pander to mysticism, obscurity and the irrational when it’s precisely the society of the spectacle which is insane and irrational. By all means play with an absurd insanity simply because it excellently demonstrates the real insanity/inanity of a runaway suicide capitalism but when everything is put into play it must be done with the objective of ever greater clarity. Unfortunately, this was pushed - albeit with complaints - into the background once the rapid disintegration of King Mob set in. There was a tendency to even glory in the obscure, devilish act and not by chance did Chris Gray start suggesting we all should read Charles Fort. As the forward blurb to Fort’s LO reads: “I closed the front door on science and opened up the back door to frogs and periwinkles”. Although King Mob by then had acquired even more ex-scientists than ex-artists, Fort’s writings provided no real critique of science – a critique which is, of course, necessary and which Phil Meyler in the mid 80s attempted in “Yet It Moves.” You have a real problem here as it feels more comfortable reading a scientific book like, for instance “The Floating Egg” by Roger Osborne – a recent  examination of geographical terrain in Yorkshire – than any equivalent book on an artistic topic. Some scientific books feel more honest or at least less mendacious, simply because science (we are meaning in its totality) never has had to confront or point to revolutionary activity until perhaps recently anywhere near the same as art ineluctably had to. Since then everything surrounding art has been engaged in extinguishing and smothering that ineluctable outcome. Science, here and there can still make a contribution  (astro-physics, terrestrial biology etc) but a necessary critique of science per se cannot take a Fortean route. Chris Gray though has the dubious honour of launching that Fortean take on things which individuals in other situ influenced groupuscules flirted with when visibly falling apart. The most notable example is Paul Sieveking of BM Piranha who later was to become the lucrative editor of the best selling, The Fortean Times, for all those dumb-fuck new ageists to purchase and marvel at. Ironically, though an American, Fort surely reinforced something we were trying to put an end to in England; an eccentric, half-mystical, odd take on things which eschews rationality – even formal logic – never mind the horrors of dialectical thought! It was a process, which was to gain the upper hand during the following decades the more the irrationalities of neo-liberal economics were to gain supremacy in England.

Quasi-terrorist posturing. A right little tight little island. Critical re-evaluation of the King Mob magazines. Is there any longer any relevance to “a street gang with an analysis?

        Although all this may sound like a courting of incoherence there was, just to say, an internal lucidity to it, if one can separate the actual King Mob magazines which were in many ways a retarded expression of what was taking place, although it’s these which have obviously remained as evidence and will have to be gone into point by point and our day to day functioning. However, in no way could it be said that this particular focus attempted  - through the back door as it were – to rehabilitate art/anti–art or politics or court initially any cadre status. Thus in no way can it be denigrated by comparing it to the Nashists of the so-called second Situationist International who carried on deploying the remnants of artistic practice or all those people who supposedly anti the system, still thought some useful artistic intervention could be made. Although, to be fair, the decapitation of the bronze mermaid in Copenhagen harbour in 1962, ostensibly by Jorgen Nash, was for the time, not at all bad although today such action would have no relevance when capital itself is actively destroying the past. Be that as it may –and Chris Gray told us with glee about this act - for us, on the contrary, it wasn’t past artistic symbols which mattered, but attacks against all kinds of artistic activity in the here and now which had to be unsparing and heavy. We especially pinpointed the most avante garde of these activities like street theatre and experimental performances, happenings and the hippy arts and crafts entrepreneurial  ventures. As if to make this point, hippy stalls were turned over and  wrecked with earthenware pots and ornaments thrown on the ground. Gradually, the attack on art acquired a quasi-terrorist edge later highlighted in the leaflet celebrating Valerie Solonas’s attempted offing of Andy Warhol in New York. A leaflet was rapidly gestetnered: ”The death of art spells the murder of artists. The real anti artist appears” which rounded off with a death list of mainly English artists playing on and detourning the Bob Dylan lyric; So don’t think twice it’s alright”. Again, leaflet in hand, an intervention was done without sufficient explanation. Sure it helped promote our terrifying image  but not much else. A band of King Mob adherents with masks covering their heads and faces burst into a meeting of students occupying Hornsey College of Art and showered the gathering with leaflets. Insults were traded: “fucking art students without an idea” and inevitably the protagonists were thrown out. To be sure, the level of action and discussion among Hornsey students was fairly abysmal – even stupid – but perhaps there were better ways of getting something essential across than utilising threatening images. Well, maybe because a tiny minority of these art students did pick something up from the King Mob, Solanis leaflet  though we weren’t aware of it at time. Our mock death threats though had been building up over the previous months.  A slogan had been sprayed upon a Notting Hill wall saying  “Kill Miles”, a  small-time entrepeneur who played out a  managerial role on the underground newspaper The International Times and ran Indica gallery where Chris Gray only two and a half years previously had put on a happening. We regarded him as the absolute drippy liberal pits. Finally it must be emphasised that these death threats were nothing more than aggressive image making tactics to purposefully inspire fear as none of us entertained the slightest intentions of offing artists we merely wanted to encourage them on their way pushing them towards the self-destruction of their own artistic roles.        

     However, you can go overboard in being too self-critical. Conservative England still tightly held the minds of students in these islands in the late 60s. Most of us thought it was just a matter of time before a full-blown explosion would materialise on the level of France, Germany or Italy. Even leading - and for the time – interesting “intellectual” theorists in New Left Review particularly Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn were of this opinion and mapped out probing thesis on the almost total control of conservative ideologies over institutions of higher education. True, they were unable to intelligently deal with modern art as such but then we were trying to fill in this alarming vacuum and were getting no where fast. Time and again we tried to explain coolly but accurately the disintegration and possible transcendence of art only to be met with a continuing outright hostility. During the summer of 1968, there was a demonstration of art students , focussed by the Hornsey and Guilford Art College sit-ins, in London’s Trafalgar Square. For the occasion, two leaflets were handed out, one by ourselves, and the other, by Ron Hunt from Newcastle together with a banner proclaiming the death of art. One of us grabbed a loud hailer and from the plinth of Nelson’s Column made an impromptu speech on the failure of rebellious art students to adequately make a critique explaining   the demise of art and the subsequent emptiness which denied all creative merit to any of their artefacts or  those of their teachers. We criticised the ineptitude of students in allowing themselves to be taken up by the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) that had quickly put together an exhibition of their protest work together with posters, banners and what have you. We suggested the ICA should be occupied along with colleges everywhere. All other previous speeches had been applauded but ours was barracked furiously by people saying, “who are you to make such outrageous suggestions”. We replied; “ We’re nobody but nobody” and the loud hailer was brusquely snatched from us.  A bunch of supposedly rebel  students then proceeded to tear up our leaflets. We saw them as nothing other than loyal servants of the status quo. These leaflets then disappeared from view for 30 years before one of them  finally turned up in Tom Vague’s, King Mob Echo, booklets. Three years later we’d already written an auto-critique of the leaflet but which, along with so many other things, was never published. It complained about the plethora of jargon in the tirade of phrases like, “an empty, meaningless, culture of death” placing  too much emphasis on commodity appearances with no analysis of what makes up the basis of appearances, noting that the leaflet was more an expression of profound disgust written in a rather gloomy and nihilistic tone and presented  in a too aggressively apocalyptic way. In fact two people at the demo who really liked the leaflet and the verbal intervention were soon to be part of the Angry Brigade milieu. One was Ian Purdie who three years later was to go to jail for bombing incidents. On his release he was to return to the artistic fold as an art historian though it was to prove a mere dalliance as like so many of us he found it impossible to return to the stifling suffocation of an academic role and Ian has finally  ended up as an ecological brickie with many a wonderful tale to tell about life on the buildings! The leaflet itself, though not quasi-terrorist, bordered on the brink of something like it. Basically, we only saw one way out: a frenzied, relentless, “deranged” destruction obviously harking back to Rimbaud’s; “prolonged and systematic derangement of the senses”. For us though, derangement appealed more than “systematic” or “prolonged” which was passed over with eyes closed, therefore reducing the scope and time scale of its effect. Moreover, though perhaps understandable for the times, the brief and chaotic manifesto was built round a vain glorious hope that the art system couldn’t last much longer: “For the Fine Arts, the game’s up – no possibility of a last minute transfusion”. By late ’71 ( from thoughts from a diary ), we were to retort to ourselves: “How wrong. There’s plenty of room for transfusion. The more Fine Art is pure commodity, the more it is integrated into business, the more it extends to the whole of alienated life”. By then though we were more than dimly aware that a long night of counter revolution was setting in even though the workers here had yet really  to make their play as they were to so magnificently do so from 1972 onwards, up to their final defeat in the late 80s.       

      You can well understand from this distance how you were forced by historical circumstances peculiar to England’s “right little, tight little island” mentality in frustration to adopt a quasi-terrorist posture. Nothing was going on in comparison with western Europe or America.. Generally you were regarded as incomprehensible and just plain nasty. There hadn’t been  much that was relevant here for nigh on 130 years. OK  one-offs but nothing, in a general sense, unraveling. Even those we found ourselves closest too like Solidarity – what would now be called  an autonomous workers  group -  we found ourselves clearly distant from. They had no critique of the totality merely something of a beginning that had a long way to go. Chris Gray regarded Chris Pallas (aka Maurice Brinton) its erstwhile leader, as “philistine”. He wasn’t wrong and in that sense, Brinton was a more than faithful follower of his mentor, Cornelius Castoriadis, theorist-in-chief of Socialisme ou Barbarie in France. Though S.O.B. did make profound breakthroughs in the 1950s vis-à-vis workers autonomy and the need for workers to throw off all party/union shackles, they couldn’t apply the same rigour to their own growing, professional survival status, occasional stardom and integration into the status quo - mainly through academia. Their critique of art was appalling. (In parenthesis one of the reasons we wrote what became known as “The End of Music” was in response to Solidarity’s groveling, even unctuous fawning at the spiked heels of punk rock). When the S.I. had said about S ou B representing; “the furthest left and the most deluded fringe of those managers and mid-functionaries of the Left who want to have a revolutionary theory of their own actual career in society” (S.I. 9/34)  was also true of most of those individuals belonging to Solidarity. Those who haven’t turned out like that – those whom we don’t know – are probably still the best.      

     We weren’t averse ourselves to making some clever clever in-jokes about Socialisme ou Barbarie as a way of pointing out their limitations. Knowing the catch phrase had originally come from the passionate pen of Rosa Luxembourg and had been turned into the group name by among others Castoriadis with his sophisticated critique of modern capitalism which one of it members – Pierre Canjuers -  if his testimony is reliable - had communicated to Guy Debord on many a long absorbing drift through Paris in the early 1960s. For us amidst a lot of laughter we made another choice preferring “barbarism”. But of course by this we didn’t mean a wish to bring about further horrors to a  “capitalism which was is and ever shall be horror without end” as Lenin poignantly described it. (Although we utterly rejected Leninist ideology and its baneful historical outcome we did recognize Lenin’s capacity for trenchant one-liners.) What we wanted to find or re-find was a new spontaneous, wild self – a self (most likely a collective self) - lost in our deepening experience  of increasing alienation. Maybe something of a return to Athens five centuries ago where love according to Nietzche was last really consummated or better, just before that to the time of the “Great God Pan” with a reflection of the intensity of the moment of transition from the hunter gatherers. (c/f some of this flow in the transcript of  “Culture and Revolution” from 1967 in the appendix). Essentially though, we ached for something entirely different – something that historically had never ever seen the light of day - which would combine a sensitivity to a long buried historical, or even pre-historical id together within a new dimension of fulfillment. In no way was the barbarism of fascism or Stalinism intended as example nor, need it be said, was the forthcoming horror of a totalitarian free market society of  pseudo-individualism envisaged. On the two counts then known to us such connections would have horrified us. As for the third – and now the most durable and horrific totalitarianism – sadly enough many ex-68ers were prepared to side with its take-off.       

      Inevitably, the wrath of avant garde artists – by way of reply – was also particularly heavy and they expressed more hatred of  King Mob activities than ever they did of the more sclerotic, fuddy duddy parts of a culture they professed themselves to be in revolt again. That response, like a toughening character armour, was to remain and if anything to intensify. Remember, as previously indicated, a fair amount of those around King Mob had also come from such a background but had moved through it speedily. From acceptance to transgression, as it were, in the space of a year. It’s therefore, true to say, that these protagonists hadn’t started off with the same ludic, gradually evolving lapidary coherence which characterised the development of the Situationists in a more slowly paced time. (It was our luck as it was also  disastrous as we often didn’t grasp things sufficiently coherently – rather like some mantra endlessly repeated). On the contrary, the changing general tempo of the times meant huge changes in oneself were taking place within a few weeks as the subversive character of the times widened and accelerated. Those who couldn’t keep pace or were insensitive to Lautreamont’s maximum written a century previously: “ There are new tremors running through the atmosphere all we need is the courage to face them” (headlines of a poster distributed in Newcastle at the time), quickly found themselves in bitter opposition to the most advanced and were determined to have their guts for garters. They probably rightly sensed that it meant the end of all artistic hangers-on career prospects or any hope of retaining a modicum of artistic privileges: no name or a name-in-waste! 

      However, in our youthful naivety we were quite astonished at the hatred and furious backlash our critique and dismissal of art produced. It was a salutary lesson and that hatred kept on coming year after year. Nothing is likely to fray tempers so much as expounding a critique of art and, almost by default, proving  its  centrality to revolutionary subversion. In fact it’s more centre stage now than ever it was in the late 60s at the same time as its critique has never been so absent! It’s tended to fall into disuse simply because it hasn’t been updated and as such, is one of the pressing tasks of the time. From Portugal, we translated and produced a text in the late 80s which attempted such an update (together with our own introduction concerning such absence)  but, as usual, it didn’t get anywhere. Since the days of King Mob there’s been a number of interventions against art in these islands but they are lost without trace simply because no one seems capable of putting together a half decent text alongside such acts which would help considerably. There was one memorable one during the Notting Hill art festival in 1987 when a number of people made junk out of ‘junk sculptures’ when exhibits were spontaneously re-arranged, together with bits of rubbish brought in from the streets as a means of making nonsense out of nonsense. It was light-hearted stuff and probably didn’t have sufficient cutting edge and those who did it kept getting slung out of the galleries. Well, what can you expect? It was quickly glossed over and forgotten simply because it wasn’t accompanied by any thought provoking and accurate statement announcing themselves and their ideas. We’ll keep insisting on this – especially in these islands – because if you don’t, such actions are usually interpreted as philistinism when it’s those who ideologically commit themselves to art –in a world without art – who are the real philistines. Moreover, these actions which pass without comment, can also be performance art acts in themselves and which are now at the very cutting edge of advertising. As was remarked  lucidly a long time ago: we are on the same path  as our enemies, which is why they have to be so remorselessly attacked. With a grim laugh looking at an internet compilation entitled “Basic Banalities” listing some situ influenced publications, we noted a BLOB  programme on prime time Italian TV which no doubt had been pirated from the various European translations of “A Summer with a Thousand Julys”.       

      In a sense it came as no surprise to be confronted with the obnoxious bile of Stewart Home in the early 1990s initially distilled in his pathetic book The Assault on Culture – a latter day defense of the art/anti-art syndrome with its origins in  Fluxus Happenings. The difference is, Home’s defense of an old order with a face-lift, unlike those of a couple of decades previously, is littered with  knowledge and facts (though both are half-arsed) of the movement he’s attacking being able to trace its origins in Dada, Surrealism, Lettrism etc whilst leaving out all reference to Hegel, Lukacs, the German ultra-left and so on. In any case Home has no intention of ever deserting the cultural plain. The end result is an even more nasty and hysterical tirade  than anything experienced in the late 60s and 70s against those who would theoretically explain and act upon the negation and supercession of art. Yet again we repeat ourselves!

        Most of this can be explained by the character of the times in which all sense of history, movement and any meaningful attempt at dis-alienation has been utterly lost. The colonisation of virtually all space and time in the ever more intensified expansion of the commodity economy has meant that all movement that could lay claim to be historical dialectical movement has been so slowed down that it’s virtually frozen. And the more it is frozen the more it can be instantly capitalized thus prevented from escaping down fruitful paths. “The worst alienation is the blocking up of development” as Henri Lefebvre had said in the early 1960s. Thus as previously suggested, happening, performance art, installation and what have you instead of proffering some possibility of their self-negation and subsequent disappearance see their potentiality in big money spinning promo and/or incorporated immediately into the world of active advertisement ably facilitated by the old power station, Tate Modern, which attracts more visitors than ever the Millenium Dome did in its heyday. Surely, this single fact alone points to the need to re-launch the assault on art? In the mid 60s, trashy neo-dadaist anti-art art works using living, re-arranged nature etc and having no monetary significance (if for no other reason than  the wall of money and commodity wasn’t so in-your-face  at the time) was often rapidly superceded  for the real, thorough going critique of art. Three decades later they are everywhere re-packaged and sold as high price commodities by an ad art promo world of  a Damien Hurst type brand, purveyed most notably by the media dept at Goldsmiths College of Art. The difference is, the neo-Dada/anti-art artefact colonises space everywhere and none of us can escape it as it relentlessly stares down at us. One day we can hope for a potlatch of trashing and destruction of these monuments to (and about) nothingness. It will create fury as this capitalised emptiness must be defended at all costs. Of course, there are schisms and rifts within this. Although Stewart Home bitterly defends generally this emptiness, no doubt he would distance himself from the more mainstream Damien Hurst/Turner Prize ambience. If questioned, he probably would also distance himself from everything sarcastically blaming the protagonists for being such dupes for having such a serious take on things. The climate of nihilism reduces all arguments to equivalents to be (all depending) sneeringly dismissed. In this swamp of a climate and as a substitute for all meaningful historical action, meaningless provocation together with self promotion become a be all and end all.

     For those who would repeat the disintegration of modern art, all these creeps can do is make endless repeats in this era of frozen time of artifacts and gestures superceded during an historical movement now long gone. Somehow their bile cannot be separated from these historical circumstances simply because these moments cannot be recreated in an a-historical way. Hegel in his Philosophy of the Fine Arts was the first to historise the movement of artistic form. At times re-reading this great tract with its undertow that the arts were dying is, with its emphasis on the rise and fall of form, like picking up an earlier version of Lettrist theory. We always have to move on whilst developing ever wider, the subversive momentum of history. Although you cannot doubt the beautiful contribution of Ivan Tcheglov to a wider subversion  in the 1950s, it would seem any repeat when it’s not mere whimsy,  heads straight today into the role of artistic entrepeneur (e.g. the Hacienda Club in Manchester or Irvine Walsh’s list of symbols of  consumer conformity  at the end of  the film Trainspotting), mysticism, the occult and the ley line bollocks of the London Psychogeographical Society which Home connects with. It has absolutely nothing in common with the moment of derive which came into fruition at that intense lacunae between the disappearance of the old city neighbourhoods and there colonisation by  a bureaucratic, traffic-oriented town planning, commodity outlet promo and an arid, financially anchored themeing which uses the ghost and shadow of the past city ambience through the aid of a psychogeographic memory as a means of estate agent hype. In the late 1990s, Hoxton, a bleak and poor area of East London was thus embellished for a rising property market by artists delving into its 20th century past. Looking for their “roots”, artists Rachel Lichtenstein and Ian Sinclair turned up some Jewish, Kurt Schwitters-like figure from the 1940s-50s, by the name of Roditsky (a guy who produced some mildly interesting  collages and montages about Hoxton) and made a book around him called Roditsky’s Room. Basically Roditsky  was used as a means of providing a past aura to hype the gentrification  of Hoxton seeing that Notting Hill had lost its fashionable cutting edge. In passing, its worth trashing, Transgression, that other load of sub-psychogeographical nonsense and academic bilge emanating recently from the Geography Dept at Newcastle University.  Obviously, these hip lecturers know nothing about what took place in Newcastle in the late 60s and early 70s. It’s like a raft of recuperation on recuperation as all memory of authenticity fades from view. Thus Manchester’s Hacienda, itself a rip-off of real experiment becomes a canal-side development purchased by Crosby Homes North West utlilizing its name and shadow as sales pitch.  

               Home’s writings though became somewhat influential in these islands, if not in the States, if only because they gave off an air of learning and knowledge which can pass without comment as to their veracity, simply because this history is unknown. Home has presumed to make himself a specialist and therefore an available source of information for would be academics writing their Phd dissertations with the aim of future publication. Confusion and fudge are handed down everywhere like Simon Sadler’s recent, The Situationist City - the title itself  being a giveaway). In this coffee table book the Situationist critique is quite wretchedly placed alongside that of artists like Richard Hamilton, architects like the early (now Sir) Richard Rogers, critics like Lawrence Alloway and groups like The Independants and Archigram! Sadler never  states there cannot be any comparison  when all the latter simply baulked at revolutionary critique! After all his historical research, translations and factual details about the psycho-geographic times of the 50s, Sadler even ventures the dumb comment that Happenings had a greater impact and were more worthwhile than thoughtfully experiencing  the ambience of  city neighbourhoods! 

         The recent spate of books on the Situationists written in English are rather different from their predecessors. Those by Anselm Jappe and Len Bracken in particular, are much more weighty affairs altogether and most likely mark a shift in making the SI more academically respectable and an object more worthy of university study and not as previously, an intellectual footnote in the pre-history of media studies,  precursors of post-modernism or as part of a cultural studies curriculum  where the Situationists are portrayed as avante garde artists sympathetic to advertising  who spent their time altering  bill boards and hoardings. Even Mclaren in his memoirs was to claim us as “revolutionary artists”(sic) with such characterisations paving the way in England for a King Mob punk group and a King Mob theatrical promotions company hiring Gary Synder and his Merry Pranksters for a nauseating tour of concert hall performances. Falsely consigned to an artistic role meant the venom was drawn and the major practical/theoretical contribution to a relevant contemporary social revolution cast aside. This deliberate falsification has been ably assisted by  art collectors looking for new fields of auctioneering  where the inflated price tags of art gallery originals can now be applied to subversive texts and magazines. In the famous piece about the fetishism of commodities in Capital 1, Marx writes about “the theological capers of the commodity” hinting at  fantastical twists and turns in commodification having endless ramifications. In the light of present times we could fruitfully perhaps alter this. How about “the artistic capers” resembling more Rimbaud’s proclamation in Clearance Sale: “For sale, anarchy for the masses” !

    It wasn’t only the disintegration of modern art which was trawled for insight giving out many an excited illumination when the protagonists around King Mob got together in a heated, euphoric atmosphere as equally   Freud and Marx especially were avidly read. In fact, it was a line from Marx’s “18th Brumaire”; “I am nothing but must become everything” that was placed underneath the photo from a Feuillade film of a menacing masked guy grasping a bottle on the front cover of the first King Mob magazine in Feb 1968. It wasn’t as though the 18th Brumaire had been read rather carefully and reflectively from beginning to end but had merely been dipped into in a somewhat fevered, high-as-a-kite state  culling a profound sentence as a one-liner  that could have been penned in pages marking the disintegration of modern poetry. However it did the job well enough  pointing to a future totality beyond the division of labour and reification.

            Although the first King Mob magazine was to have a big impact, it’s content wasn’t that precise and was certainly a step back from  The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution. Apart from a good translation of part of Vaniegem’s  The Revolution of Daily Life which freely transcribed a few facts more appealing to an English audience which weren’t there in the original French but which nonetheless added  to it, the centre piece was the inclusion of a text by the American psychiatrist Norman O’ Brown playing somewhat gliby with  dialetical curlecules  and written in a form of poetic stanza which  entirely put  the wrongmessage across to people. The last thing needed was a poetically formal presentation of a critique which was rather slickly written, in comparison to Norman O’ Brown’s earlier, soberly assessed and innovative “Life Against Death”. Moreover, Norman O’Brown was a professor at an American university (when 99% of the King Mob protagonists at that time were completely anti the university ). In no time though some around King Mob were calling the Professor  “Dr Normal O’Brown” .It was an accurate enough snide remark.     

     On another though equally worrying level, the project elaborated on the back cover for some kind of intervention amongst  youth in the East End of London had a social work disposition even though possessing a much heavier edge than social work would have dared conceived of at the time with its up beat assessment of “the do badders and do-madders”. It was a project of Phil Cohen’s, which nothing   came of, though certainly, the initial outline probably added impetus to the squatted London Street Commune in central London that Phil Cohen played quite an extreme part in initiating one and a half years later.      

      If the first King Mob had perhaps one common theme running through its pages it was the dialectic of   “madness” – going mad with freedom; of breakdown as breakthrough; of disintegration as prelude to a new unity, or as justification for previous “mad” interventions via the rantings of King Mob and with further actions  coming soon. Also, it was “mad” in terms of the usual leftist or anarchist protest – which often were quite similar in character. In retrospect, this was the one thing  providing a continuum – “madness” in the good up and the long, long, bad down that was to go on for decades. Many of the participants around King Mob were, in no time, “to play some fine tricks on madness” – as  Rimbaud’s,  A Season in Hell put it,  while a few adherents really did  go mad, some committing suicide. It was sadly a familiar story of our times everywhere. Remember though, we also putting emphasis on the tendency of the late 60s with its  psychoanalytical-cum-Artaud quoting researches of R D Laing, the existential psychiatrist who emphasised the important role of the family in the manufacture of schizophrenia. Though we were aware at the time of Laing’s limitations they were certainly better than subsequent searches for  schizophrenic genes, artistic genius genes, etc trumped up by a subsequent banal modern “science” without any understanding of historical movement.     

       As for the other King Mob magazines more has to said. The critique of students didn’t really have a lot to say and was far too simplified and emptily raving, contrasting their  spurious intellectualisms with a Brixton where youths with “sheer speed” wrecked the place every single night – which they didn’t! King Mob 2 and 3 were brought out with the aim of reflection and critical suggestion in a rapidly unfolding situation of increasing activity and both generally were responses to the student revolt and the more consequent drop out/hippy revolt (at least as experienced in America and a lesser extent, in the UK), a revolt which in its essence, was a revolt against most professional roles and  the training that went into  such roles as well as more fundamentally also being a revolt against work as such. We were well aware that this essence was well masked with a whole array of bullshit ideology and it was this carapace which had to be shaken off.         

        In both instances though, King Mob 2 and 3 were well over the top. Some kind of dialectical sober assessment was completely lacking. However, given the increasingly messianic temper of the times this was hardly surprising. In retrospect though, what was really needed was something far more analytical than what was published if only to keep something in prospect which was more on-going and clearer for the future. It would have made more sense as by then, all within the King Mob milieu, had begun to recognise that a social revolution was going to take a lot longer than the sheer exuberance afforded by the apocalyptic tenor of 1968.         

     Although “On Student Power” rightly disparaged the student milieu, King Mob’s proposals were fanciful, criticising and condemning the “Alternative University” along with Alex Trocchi’s cultural jam- sessions for the nonsense they were, the “criminal” activism which was proposed – a kind of chain of ripped-off goodies from higher educational institutions carted down to marginalised areas of  the cities - wasn’t much better. It was as though our lauding of criminal survival means (e.g. shop lifting, fare dodging, scrounging on the dole etc) needed to be more comfortably augmented by flogging-off expensive items of university equipment. If not that, how about dipping into  the pockets of student’s overcoats left  on college clothes racks where you could always find the occasional cheque book handy for kiting. It was reckoned that such practices would help create a kind of permanent network feedback involving more and more people. It was really quite ridiculous and merely nothing more than a fanciful mock guerrilla construct over a stark and mostly mundane reality of growing proletarianisation. Put simply; a lot of students increasingly and for a lot of complex reasons - and not just simplistic materialist ones - weren’t going to arrive at “their” future role in the higher echelons of wage labour. Their future was bleaker, more hum drum and most likely relatively  poorly paid. There’s nothing pretty or romantic to say about that stark fact. By all means try get up to some scam to augment survival as long as it didn’t harm  any fellow voyagers embarked on the same route. Heroic role play a la King Mob  just didn’t come into it!  It was within the wider paradigms of wage labour where the real choice lay: were you to remain poacher or become gamekeeper? And the last thing poacher meant (and still should mean) is arbitrary rip-off. Inevitably, a lot of the more craven were to become gamekeepers and it was no good King Mob vamping this up with literary flourishes about  “hideously dressed” lecturers who’d be some essential link in this criminally conceived survival process. Lecturers would never be able keep up such a front in any case being involved in something far more devious: the  hideous lie! The most they would ever be would be the enfant terribles of fashion and even that but  rarely!      

      As for Tim Clarke’s reply in the second letter what can you say? Pouring cold water on the proposals he didn’t hit the nail on the head neither. Remember by then, the only thing Clarke had nailed down was his first full job as a university lecturer at Essex University placing himself on the first rung of a very high career ladder  he was to exploit to the best of his abilities. In the letter he is defensive in the extreme. Nay worse and none so more than that  execrable line; “the poetic is dead along with poetry”. The poetic is never dead. Wasn’t it rather a comment upon himself  on the threshold of a cadre lifestyle in  fawning denial of everything poetic because his acceptance and submission to a university career was becoming the paramount factor in what he wanted out of life? The last thing he wanted was a new world because the fucking bastard wasn’t prepared to risk anything.       

      By way of prelude to the King Mob, Motherfuckers, pamphlet, it’s worth saying that King Mob didn’t navigate well the moment of the self-destruct of modern art to more clearly (and collectively?) face a future of proletarianisation which wasn’t only about  the destruction of aesthetics. That moment was mentioned, then emphasised and re-emphasied as though the egoism of that moment couldn’t find its way – its way down -  to another socially lower plain. Beyond lay the world of working stiffs and wasn’t it best to conceive them  as “the worker as object”  and quit for safer harbours?         

      In a way though this “hideously dressed college lecturer” phantasy syndrome  perhaps pinpointed something more possible which you had to think more  carefully about. Obviously we all discussed ways of making money even deploying means of cynical self-recuperation. So why not let’s write crap ourselves! Let’s consciously pull our punches and make ourselves  a bit of money providing we don’t put our names to it. After all, hadn’t Michelle Bernstein done this with her imitations of Nouvelle Vague/Robbe Grillet type of novels like  All the Kings Men etc? They sold well and hadn’t the money been used to subsidise real subversion? OK then. We experimented writing a nonsensical spoof about Notting Hill which we called “Balls” (c/f Lost Ones around King Mob elsewhere on this web)) and got paid well for it which came in handy after working for the low wages a casualised agency like Manpower  offered you. In fact “Balls” had been commissioned at the behest of Dan Richter, the Beat poet resident in London who was a distant friend of Chris Gray’s. It wasn’t, therefore an honourable detournement but which one ever is? It was though a missing link we weren’t informed about until later. We embarked on other things setting about doing a book on Berlin Dada and the failed German revolution after 1918. Recently, on reading a few mildewed pages of that aborted book it still retains some relevance acutely picking on comments by Rosa Luxembourg  noting her penchant for traditional forms of art as she herself dabbled  in drawings, paintings and  poetry. We simply asked:  “How far is this relevant today”? Perhaps, more interestingly, we noted  how Lenin and Rosa Luxembourg couldn’t understand how individual workers had no stomach for being reduced to “nought – the better to prepare themselves for becoming all”. Well, negation here, through fruit of bitter experience doesn’t follow through in the same way as dialectics can do in terms of professional specialisms. Obviously in picking this comment up of Rosa’s, we must have had in mind that somewhat related comment by Marx fronting the first issue of King Mob:“ I Am Nothing But I Must Become Everything” which perhaps also brought into play the self-destruction of modern art  which in the here and now when Marx wrote this might even have trawled some unknown musings between the negation of art and the self-negation of the worker? Even in terms of paid recuperation  which never came about apart from “Balls” , we were trying to make some kind of link-up which had never been made as it was left there hanging in mid air.          

     Generally though everything heading towards degree zero fascinated us. For the same proposed book interesting jottings were made on the de-materialisation of the object (how on earth would any recuperative publishing business in England at the time have accepted any of this never mind now?) taking as its cue Breton’s comments in 1936 that “ the hateful reign of common sense is founded on the world of concrete objects” noting that if there’s a revolution, the subsequent change in consciousness would mean that the conventional value of the object freed from the commodity form, would be subservient to the desire of the observer and an “evocative capacity” creating a freer relationship would then ensue. Interestingly too, notes were prepared on De Sade relating his thoughts to present time emphasising “imagination is pleasures spur” and that  inclination towards a love that can set us on fire. To be sure, in attempting recuperation we weren’t playing their game and maybe that was  why nothing came of it? We were simply too serious!        

     The long text on the Motherfuckers was a real advertisers/promo job and the critical content of the text was small beer indeed. In fact the best part of the text described in detail some of Black Mask and early Motherfucker attacks on modern art, including the magnificent attack on the Madison Avenue gallery hosting a retrospective exhibition on Dada, Surrealism and Constructivism in 1968 culminating in a splendid riot. This really did put anti-art on the map in New York as more and more people began to pick up on it which was no mean feat indeed. For example, though the Motherfuckers had immediately produced a leaflet supporting Valerie Soloanis’ SCUM manifesto justifying the shooting of Andy Warhol, they also, it seems, never realised their prior effect upon Valerie! She had obviously imbibed that anti-art disposition spreading across the Lower East Side and that had given her confidence to act  and given head and example in the  Madison Avenue gallery riot. Maybe, it could be said that Valerie Solanas combined that adoration-cum-hate of pop stars, anti-art derived from Dada and that  initial more open and genuine explosion of feminist critique – a critique which was never surpassed in this respect. Subsequently, popademia-feminism was never to mention this critique which surely in its condemnation of fashion and the reduction of everything to the show was very pertinent. Feminism never overcame this retardation.        

    Finally though despite all these activities it  wasn’t enough to point Dada away from an artistic interpretation towards a new though unrealised creative future. Perhaps there was far too much simplistic crudity. Bruce Elwell, of the then American section of the SI noted the “atrocious anti-art manifestoes” Black Mask tended to write. Ben Morea’s anti-art was also oddly mixed in with an acceptance of some aspects of modern art especially a reverence for Jackson Pollock which was mirrored in the new movement everywhere. It was a serious shortcoming. Consider “Guerrilla, the Free Newspaper of the Street” which coming out about the same time republished a manifesto called; “Poetry Demands Unemployment” put out originally by the somewhat Bolshevised titled of, The Central Committee of the Dadaist Revolutionary Council, Berlin 1919. It was set alongside some of Walt Whitman’s poems, together with “guerrilla” poetry by “revolutionary” Nicaraguans. Again this was hardly the point and certainly wasn’t what the best of Berlin Dada would have meant by poetry as for sure the German Dadaists really didn’t want everybody sitting around composing sonnets hither and thither! In his own time, of course, Whitman had been exceptional but to arbitrarily re-print his poems merely gave out the wrong idea – basically that the role of poet was still OK, alive and kicking. What Berlin Dada had in mind by poetry in this manifesto hardly happily co-existed with traditional poetic form in the New York street newspaper.. A far larger picture was envisaged creating a new poetically fulfilled life style for everybody having left behind the sacrifice of wage labour. Surely by 1968 it would have been better if such a trajectory had been stated even more clearly than the Dadaists had put in 1919 rather than needlessly obscuring it. In that sense it fell in line with the silly act by the  nascent Motherfuckers a little later who fired a rifle into the air at a Kenneth Koch Beat poetry reading whilst proclaiming a manifesto entitled: “Poetry is Revolution” when they were merely defending the Black Power poet, Leroi Jones who’d been arrested in the Newark riots. He also provided the name Up against the wall Motherfucker which came from a line from one of his poems. In no way had Leroi Jones ever questioned, never mind abandoned his role as a poet writing poetry and he was no better or worse as a poet than Koch, the Beat guy’s poetry venue which had been disrupted. The same could be said  at the time about Adrian Mitchell or Adrian Henri in England. When all is said and done poetry  can only revolve historically now around the paradigm of an E. Jarvis Thribb’s doggerel in Private Eye. It’s as true today as it was in 1968 even more so.         

     But this was the best part – and a small part – as the rest of the King Mob magazine quickly fell into the completely ridiculous. True, Black Mask had made a few interventions against modern art before the Madison Avenue riot but the King Mob presentation of their activities made it look as though this was happening every other day! This was a lie purely and simply and it didn’t stop there. The Macy’s superstore “mill-in” was exaggerated to the point of becoming ridiculous. It was in fact rather like the Selfridge’s invasion of Oxford St. According to the heavily embellished King Mob blurb all kind of crazy things happened. However, among the bric-a-brac at Macy’s no rabbits were released nor was a vulture set free among the china section. As for other accoutrements e.g. the snake with graffiti all over it – it was pure bullshit. It was Chris Gray’s English gothic fantasy “realised” in reality – an artistic macabre fantasised upon a reality which in an American context, might have appealed to those who had a predilection for what could come out of the novelist H.P. Lovecraft’s  sewers. The same goes for all the various quasi-terrorist attacks in California which were quite gratuitously attributed to the Motherfuckers.. They really had no part in them but making such suggestions and using the Motherfuckers to hang an ideological construct on – the path from the destruction of art through to terrorism – was the real purpose. Whoever blew up the pylons  we certainly had no idea about  though obviously we were sympathetic to their actions. It was on that level of suggestion that had been there in the previous “Student Power” text that was now getting completely out of hand. On receiving the magazine, Ben Morea laughingly dismissed it as “an advertising phantasy” and by then, seeing he was into such militant image making himself, it was quite a derisory comment. His militant reputation really had grown and women swooned. Opportunistically, the Motherfuckers became a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The King Mob pamphlet never criticicised this entryism concentrating on the direct action the Motherfuckers took in the occupation of Columbia University where, in a quite exemplary way, they hung college art treasures on the makeshift barricades, a tactic as previously mentioned, derived from Bakunin in 1848 in order to deter the police from attacking the insurgents. However, when the Motherfuckers burst into some locked up parts of the university, they burnt, it seems, a lot of “priceless documents” as well as prepatory theses by students including one on the French revolution. Well so what as certainly there was no sense of personal gain coming from this pillaging unlike say the pillaging of Baghdad museums in 2003. Obviously they had some real feel for just how destructive and vandalistic real revolutionary ferment is. Unfortunately, it was also becoming flawed the more they conceptualised themselves as some avante garde of militant vandals dominated by something like a pop group image of themselves inevitably projected  upon their somewhat star-struck followers. They were becoming somewhat like the repetitive guitar smashing performances The Who were giving nightly only  more real and exciting. It was becoming ritualised and losing the necessary spontaneity of that real anger preceding destructive riot. There was no waiting or reflection in any of this just at the moment when a lot of people were becoming seriously worried and unsure sensing that things were beginning to go awry. The presentation itself had become part of the problem and as the old saying goes: you cannot attack alienation through alienating means.       

     Perhaps we are being rather harsh here. Is lying too strong a word? Really it was more the case of the legacy of poetic license  absorbed in the mind set of an imaginative novelist of the ilk of a Robert Louis Stevenson. It was hoped this embellishment of reality would encourage and inspire many another to take it all literally even copying at will or perhaps carrying out a pattern of similar, unpredictable and imaginative intervention. (Wasn’t this later to become some of the theory behind the copycat riot and too much media exposure?) This was different because the problem was a form of poetic license that hadn’t left the literary/artistic dimension without arriving at a new kind of factual analysis (an analysis with a poetic/imaginative edge) which passionately told the truth. Therefore, some kind of sympathetically critical appraisal of the  Motherfuckers would have been more to the point than the hopelessly laudatory approach King Mob came out with. Interestingly, as far as we know, no ex-Black Mask or Motherfucker has made such critical  remembrances of things past although, from what we know, in the latter days of the movement, many made the beginnings of such critiques and which  never came to anything. Even the mystic Alain Hoffmann, which Vaneigem had complained about so readily in the Situationist bible, in conversation with one of us in San Francisco in the summer of 1971 said things were becoming  geared towards publicity and an internalised image worship. He said it with a practical sensible confidence even whilst distributing a really absurd mystical A3 sheet of sun/moon/star/ new age tripe during the process of demonstrating his impressive Japanese martial arts skills. A few weeks later he was dead having fallen out of the back of a pick-up truck hitching a lift while lying on the duck boards in his sleeping bag. Giving out the illusion of inner control, externally Alain was exhausted and beat up internally and finally unable to take simple precautions like keeping the truck’s tailboard up and fixed. On the other hand, a much more basic Motherfucker in the latter-days of the group’s really supra-militant style in New York, went screaming down to the Brooklyn Bridge frantically gesticulating that he’d been:“ Consumed and consumed and consumed by the Motherfuckers”. It seems the Motherfuckers had pressured themselves to such an extreme degree that they inevitably turned on themselves, encouraging hatred for each others as well as self- hate as they failed to live up to their self-appointed image. They imploded. The critique of the capitalist mode of production and consumption wasn’t meant to be like this! Don’t make too much out of this though. All of us who were there and meant it went through similar experiences in the very early 70s, as the grim and stark “reality” of one of the worst counter-revolutions  in history began to bite.  As Phil Meyler said  at the time and so poignantly with his short subversive, friendly  laugh, ever inviting comment: “ Be militant, go home and beat yourself up”.          

      In some sense though there was a hidden undertow of polemics in King Mob more or less centered in and against the French Situationists meaning they  weren’t much more than de-classe intellectuals who were brilliant at fighting  paid-up intellectuals but hopeless at a down home punch-up.  It’s certainly a moot point and one that the French indignantly answered by pointing out that Rene Vienet had been a docker in Rouen. Well, perhaps but for how long? It certainly didn’t get in the way of him becoming much later, a friend of Asian bankers! Memorably, Vaneigem said in the re-orientation debate that there’d never been a worker in their ranks. True, but on the other hand the Situationists conducted themselves admirably throughout the explosion of May ’68 and the occupations movement. They did what they could and lucidly. However, here isn’t the occasion for going into all of that. Engagement with the workers – if you like – came more organically and rather later for both Situationist influenced individuals in France and England and many of these people were to be far more principled than the original members of the group.         

    In England – as  we’ve pointed out their was a frenetic desire to break on through farther to become some kind of tough  gang adept at the ways of the street but also possessing a trenchant critique. This kind of ideology was projected onto the Motherfuckers who had moved, it was suggested, “from the Situationist salon to the street”. Of course such a drift  was there in the Motherfuckers but they went over the top  utilizing the street as the arena to parade the militant role. The best interpretation – meaning the overthrow of roles – not only intellectual ones but even the finest theoretical ones and lying well outside the occupation of an intellectual calling in question also the role of revolutionary, wasn’t how it was taken on board. Considering the frenetic tempo of the times, it meant voluntarism in the sense of what you could do to endlessly set an example for others to follow. ‘Revolutionary’ for this new militant milieu, meant piling as much pressure on yourself as you could possibly take though without cracking up! Indicative of that line of thought was an inane introduction written by Chris Whitbread for his translations of two texts by Vaneigem and Rene Riesel, broadly around workers councils, and published in Anarchy in 1972 where he criticised the Situationists for their passivity during 1968. It was almost  in the vein of failing to organise some military putsch a la (perhaps) Blanqui himself or, perhaps, some Maoist ideology had made its fashionable entrance? At the time one felt the shades of Leninism were taking a long time to pass on by. Military problems in such situations – even more so now – are complex and for sure, it’s the last thing one can rush into without a lot of careful consideration.       

    It wasn’t Leninism as such but some kind of cocktail of Durutti in the Ramblas heading a posse of insurrectionary bikers. It seems this idea of some clued-in street gang persisted as it also moved with the times. A recent text from Not Bored in New York locates its beginning in The Revolution of Modern Art and The Modern Art of Revolution redefining itself over the years  and reaching its realisation in the Sex Pistols! – a gang of street lumpens who’d got it! No doubt McLaren will be pleased as the text utterly fails to point out the musical pop star recuperation inherent in Punk from its beginning. It’s as though  our contemporary critiques brought out by us and others in the late 70s were to be set at nought.        

      King  Mob 5 did not exist and was a simplistic invention not unlike that section of Class War  calling itself King Mob  in Cork City in Ireland during the early 1990s. As for King Mob 6, it was mainly written by Ian and Di Clegg with a little distant help from  their low down but  scummily-aware friends from Newcastle! Although parts of the analysis are perceptive and telling particularly the emphasis upon a future of capitalised liesure recuperating Belsen as a Butlin’s holiday camp on Spainish beaches  which McLaren and Punk rock were to take on board there wasn’t that much of interest in the text. These paragraphs were probably the inspiration behind the Punk  slogans like, “Cheap Holidays In Other Peoples Misery” and the  EP, “Belsen was a Gas” The text itself,  we baulked at and wanted certain lines removed removed. To be sure, it welcomed the need for a re-appraisal of the fully employed working class which was beginning to come into focus with opposition to the then Labour Government’s proposed bill, “In Place of Strife” limiting wildcat strikes. Where King Mob 5 went pear-shaped was in referring to the marginals in a virtually Stalinoid way. Consider: “As long as it (capitalism) remains, the rebel youth, the hippies, the long haired squatters are mere parasites”. This really was too much as was the absurd accompanying notion that somehow everything could become free under capitalism with comments like: “Monopoly capitalism will establish the biggest free fair known to mankind”. A likely story which was put even more fancifully a little later: “ As long as capitalism exists, even after work is abolished and everything is free, there will always be one class which is more exploited than the other”. Well for us who were short of money (Oh, the Situtionist shame of it !) and having a real lack of purchasing power, no such perspective and simply felt in the gut, could be endorsed. We blatantly knew money ruled with a vice-like grip and that reality was to slowly triumph, the more everything became subject to a commodification previously unimagined.. That “piratical entrepeneur” which the Cleggs’s regarded as a has-been of capital was on the cusp of making a terrifying and ghastly comeback ably assisted by yippie transmogrifiying into yuppie often embracing the new technology and the stock market at one and the same time. Remember the earlier years of the Microsoft Corporation were to have a very alternative image. By then the reality had become an old, old story. The Clegg's when writing KM 6 had plenty of inherited wealth to comfort themselves with as well as owning properties in London, Sussex and a croft in north east Scotland. It seems that to be able to talk and write about freedom from monetary constraints as an immanent tendency of capital comes much easier for such people than those at the sharp end.

Events in Newcastle in the late 1960s. Street theatre and radical intervention against rock music. Wrecking the English Surrealist festival and subsequent critique of English Surrealism. Newcastle Art School firebombed! Tyneside shipyard workers and a (kind of) Situationist critique. Jack Common and Vis Comics.

             There was much overlap between on-going activity in London and what was happening in Newcastle. At this point it’s worth going into a few details about subsequent events in Newcastle simply because nobody has done so as some of what took place was quite remarkable. The Icteric period had waned and a more direct response was called for. After “closing the Art School forever” Johnny Myers had erupted in a meeting of leftists against the Vietnam war shouting out, “we’ve got to make a Ho Chi Minh Trail out of Northumberland St” (the main drag in Newcastle). It wasn’t that the guy was a leftist, he  merely  wanted to experience a crazy and exhilarating mayhem of unexpected eruption down the city’s main thoroughfare. True, in his shouting it would have been better if Johnny had been more ironic about references to Ho Chi Minh perhaps bringing in something of Bunuel’s L’Age D’or, as that was his intended effect. It never materialised as a mass event but a little later, on a hot sunny midday, Johnny took all his clothes off and walked down Northumberland St. He was arrested, banged up in Durham jail and later sectioned.       

      In response to this new mood, by 1967 many of us were quite willing to throw away many treasured possessions like art books, even  ones you regularly looked at like Goya’s etchings, jazz records – even a revered collection of Charlie Parker among which was “Bird Symbols”, basic craftsman’s tools etc. It was a case of giving them to anybody who might want them. It was an attitude of “let everything slip from your grasp” which possibly might smell of private property. It was however, taking place before a general historical time had been seized when it would be possible for everybody to let go of commodities precisely because commodity relations, the wages system and money would be in the process of self-liquidation.  Coming up with such common sense objections at the time wouldn’t have met with much of a response as truly a force was rising within us and within so many other dispersed and disparate individuals that it was impossible  to resist. We knew we were calling the shots and things must crumble before us…  

       First though it’s worth making a few points here about that process which ultimately leads towards the abolition of money. In the late 19th century and some of the early years of the 20th century it was reasonably common  among a minority of workers, perhaps as a naive afterthought,  to nod in the direction of  the abolition of wage labour. Eventually, it was inscribed on some of the logos of the various union outfits  (e.g. the NUR) and in the statutes of  say, the Irish TGWU. That didn’t mean the object was pursued – quite to the contrary - but it had to be mentioned occasionally as a kind of litany. If anything most of the impetus went into a form of nationalisation whereby many things would then become free particularly bus and  train travel and the health services. Many millions of workers in Britain around the time of the second inter-Imperialist world war subscribed to these illusions about nationalisation so in that sense the notion of a world free from monetary exchange remained a powerful living force, if very misguided, on how it could be achieved. After 20 years of nationalisation by the mid-60s most people knew this hadn’t worked out they way the scriptures had suggested cynically shrugging off the hopes they might have had in following such a path. Such a  lacunae though, almost like nature, abhorred a vacuum. As the shades of darkness fell the owl of Minerva took another course as it flew towards a money-less future. The momentum transposed itself as it became more personal though nonetheless still collective at the same time often presenting itself as just who was into money and who wasn’t. Of course the latter were rated! If you’d come from the well-off it was a matter of spending money generously on others and not saving it, or else using it to fund projects. Essentially just get rid of ! On a more general level there was the  street hippy lingo directed against “bread heads” within their own ranks. It was powerful and  scathing. Though the abolition of money and wage labour wasn’t proclaimed as such as a revolutionary banner it was palpably there in the atmosphere. Some individuals even refused to touch money for a number of years in. Disdaining to sign on the dole, remarkably, they often succeeded. Many people had respect for them. and though always in a tiny minority  they nonetheless were admired for their ideological persistence, even though the emphasis here has to be placed on ideological and in that sense not too dissimilar to the old slogans. All of this had virtually disappeared by the mid 1970s merely lingering on here and there. A true monetary hell then set in when the only need and even eternal verity in society became money itself. True we all know about this but  we didn’t sufficiently grasp  just how out of kilter this ‘new’ mood was with the changing but incessant undertow of the previous 130 years or so. Truly, a concerted reaction was trying harder than ever   to abolish the becoming of history. Today, we have the abolition of money alright but in the sense of   vast teeming millions on the outskirts of  Mexico Cities everywhere plunged into the capitalist nightmare of commodity relations without a peso ever passing through their hands. Certainly, we do need more perceptive, in depth, theorising about the abolition of money – of just how do we get from here to there?                                                   

           Other things weren’t so dramatic but there was a drift here too. The Alfred Street theatre project was set up by Ron Hunt and some friends (shades of Alfred Jarry?) together with the paraphanalia of exaggerated costumes that had characterised this form from Futurism through Dada to the days of agit prop after the Russian Revolution in 1917. The Alfred Street theatre figured fairly prominently in a quite ferocious on-going rent strike in Elswick, a run down suburb flanking river bank heavy industry  in the west end of Newcastle which later, in 1992 became the focus of bitter rioting between youths and police. The Alfred Street theatre like all other street theatre, didn’t leave the terrain of art behind nor did it encapsulate a much more lucid trajectory – the shock tactic – inherited from the best traditions of modern art. Even though taking place in the streets with non professional actors, it relied upon the passive spectator/ performer dichotomy - a dichotomy that had to be vanquished. Later in the 70s, a film company, Z Films, based in Newcastle and following on from this somewhat Meyerhold axis produced some docu-fiction social realist films with a mixture of actors and non-actors on aspects of Tyneside life (Launch etc) which were completely without any consequence. Ron Hunt though in the late 60s was strung out between street theatre and active intervention. He somehow acquired a copy of a super 8 home movie of the Motherfuckers “garbage for garbage” protest when, during a New York street cleaners’ strike, they collected together rubbish from the streets of the Lower East Side and dumped it on the high culture Rockefeller Plaza. Ron really liked this intervention. It was certainly one of the best actions of the Motherfuckers and considerably more to the point than their super-militant histrionics which always invited jail and a far too arbitrary media attention which they hoped would produce a copy-cat effect or would add recruits to their small  but fancied, Durrutti-like, guerrilla image.       

        Some of the same people though who were engaged with Alfred Street theatre also simultaneously took part in some excellent interventions. A Surrealist weekend conference with various speakers held in Durham during the heady year of 1968 was wrecked. One of us pissed all over the stage at the same time wildly proclaiming to a 220 plus audience the failures of Surrealism. Obviously the harangue relied heavily on Situationist critique. In response, Patrick Hughes, the Surrealist painter exploded in outrage later claiming we’d destroyed the Surrealist movement in Britain. If only!  A few years later and Patrick Hughes continued on his way only this time via a TV series that was painful for its dull conformity and no different from the typical English Surrealist product found regularly in the cultural market place from the 1930s onwards. Ron Hunt objected to this disruption saying you had to give people  the chance of finding out about Surrealism, particularly as now, in the shape of the magazine, Transformation a greater emphasis was been placed on its revolutionary kernel. OK but the mag only went as far as praising Cohn-Bendit (“Cohn-Bendit we need you here”) neglecting any deeper critique and was retarded  in comparison to Maurice Brinton’s  fairly commendable effort for Solidarity. In any case, as it transpired even this  emphasis on the revolutionary kernel of Surrealism in England would  be rapidly abandoned.      

       Surrealism in these islands had always been a very tepid affair eschewing the real nitty gritty of the movement – the disruptions, (the Saint Pol Roux banquet et al) the manifestoes, the wild experiment - despite the fact that Surrealism even in France always tended to re-instate art after engaging in  provocative acts. Under the conservative guidance of Roland Penrose, Surrealism in England was always a precious arty movement producing nothing significant. It never remotely broke the hold of a dominating artistic culture powered essentially by an Eng Lit ideology firmly caste in a long gone and once glorious past which could never be repeated. It never questioned the boundaries of art and it’s politics never made any imaginative leap basically inclining towards  leftist social democratic and Communist party sympathies. They stood on the same platform as Clement Atlee, the future post second world war, Labour Party PM extolling Picasso’s Guernica and Ceri Richard’s Surrealist poster campaign supporting the Spainish revolution that never went beyond a No Pasaran popular front stance. Surrealism in England was, unfortunately, merely a means of displaying a wearisome juxtaposition of images – coming from some kind of delving into the subconscious – in order to change a little the subject matter of traditional and outmoded categories like painting, sculpture, novels and poetry. It tended to reinforce a tradition of benign whimsy which was all too common basically unable to shock anything apart from some right wing daily newspapers even then, avidly looking for copy. Surrealism made no impact on Britain precisely because it was already its greatest success story. We mean by this, that cornball and popular concept which sees Surrealism as really nothing more than placing disparate objects side by side to create some kind of frisson, a technique which was about to be taken up with increasing alacrity by advertising.  Nowadays, these same techniques are accelerating ever faster with computer generated digitalised images. Although  English Surrealists met and often struck up on-going friendships with some of the best French Surrealists, you are constantly amazed at how little – if any – of the real meat of Surrealist drift rubbed off on them. Some, like Nancy Cunard, even had close personal and sexual relationships What on earth did they talk about – merely dreams and art? Surely though it proves the profound grip reaction in England had over even its more tempestuous personalities? Even that slightly more interesting part of English Surrealism – say the collaboration between the psychoanalyst Grace Pailthorpe and the painter, Rueben Mednikoff – lent towards the reformist impulse at the Portman Clinic of civilising the criminal or the insane through  changed therapy. It certainly turned out to be instrumental in the now ubiquitous art therapy treatment cum tranquilizers which now fills you with so many predictable groans. Vaneigem’s comment in his book on Surrealism is pertinent: “the contempt which the Surrealists heaped on torturers in white coats did not inoculate them against a temptation to co-opt attitudes usually treated clinically for purely artistic purposes”. In fact John Lyle launched the 60s English Surrealist magazine Transformation with an exhibition of the “art” of the mad in an Exeter art gallery. For those later who were to fall foul of the psychiatric police and who’d developed a critique of art to be forced to paint and draw in the loony bin was quite an insult!  

  Like English Surrealism, English whimsy – of which it was a part – could also never embrace revolutionary violence against culture, ossified rituals, or some aspects of politics like Surrealism had done in France. In England it tended to fit in too neatly with its well-known eccentric image – e.g. the “wild nature crank” picked out for vicious ridicule in Blast – the Vorticist paper around 1913. Although English absurdity and whimsy had brought forth very penetrating and remarkable things particularly in the late 19th century in the humour and profound fantasy of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll it rapidly lost its real cutting edge.. Since then the same vein has kept resurfacing in more and more popular forms from the Goons radio shows to the Monty Python prime time TV shows. Indeed, the leftover English Surrealists in the 1950s commented – perhaps with a certain jealousy upon the mass appeal of the Goons – obviously impressed and wanting similar fame themselves. On a broader level, English Surrealism was more an expression of a current which produced those Heath Robinson whimsical sketches of fantastic machines than any pushing through of artistic negation like happened with the origins of Surrealism in France. At a later date, towards the end of the 60s, Monty Python was able to divert and spectacularise the serious and subversive intent behind a revitalised and more all-rounded concept of play as a weapon against capitalism and the State into up-dated comic relief at peak viewing times. It was clever recuperation. For all its pitching at English foibles – the piss takes on the upper class accent, the army (often the breeding ground for mad cap pranks anyway  and where The Goons were spawned) etc, English absurdity always ends up supporting the status quo and the revolutionary transformation of everyday life is the last thing within its ken. In a sense though some of the British trad jazz scene had prepared the opening via the blues singer George Melly plus the mass market, surrealist packaging of Dick Lester’s films. No wonder Melly, Spike Milligan and John Lennon have been called; “the unofficial trinity of British surrealism”.   

           More than this though -and the real point - which should have been emphasised in the Durham intervention against Surrealism was that  the annals of English Surrealism in the 1930s reads like a litany of almost everybody who was to become part of the main stay of the cultural establishment by the late 1960s – from Henry Moore, to (Sir) Herbert Read, to William Coldstream etc. Those who like Read, became academic cultural critics added nothing of value even though in the 1930s Read’s motto had been: “To hell with culture”. It’s the usual familiar tale of modern times. Latter day Surrealist influenced individuals in France who became academics like Georges Bataille and Henri Lefebrvre really did contribute something in that ever widening momentum of a theory of negative becoming more total in scope. Where would the notion of potlatch be without Bataille; a notion emphasising  riotous, festive destruction and where would the anti-specialism of everyday life – the terrain of total revolution - be without Lefebvre? Instead, we had Herbert Read’s “The Meaning of Art”. A joke indeed if the implications weren’t to be so dismal. It meant in this climate always coming up against a solid brick wall of incomprehension. Nothing much has changed since in that respect………If only some of this had been communicated in a more enduring form at Durham. Interestingly, a guy called Anthony Earnshaw tried to be conciliatory during the bust-up. Indeed we still feel some affection towards him because he was a misfit not working at the time in some cultural capacity but variously employed as crane driver, engineering fitter and lathe turner. He’d evolved his own kind of Surrealist walks in West Yorkshire boarding trains, descending at will and roaming thus for hours. Alas, only to abandon his negativity as slowly but surely he became an Art School lecturer allowing him finally to devote himself full time to art.      

       Other interventions took place. At the time there was this spate of right wing lecturers who seemed to enjoy giving talks at various university venues throughout the country knowing they were going to get disrupted by left wing Dave Sparts ( a Private Eye, lock–jawed, spoof Trotskyist invention) who were going to call them racist, anti working class etc, which of course they were but that was hardly the real point.In Newcastle, the Sparts were shoved out of the heckling limelight against Patrick.Wall by a vociferous cabal hollering “beans, beans, beans” at the top of their voices.(see previous comment on page 15). In short,  it was a playful detourning of an advertising jingle. Nonsense for nonsense if you like and a rather more appropriate way of dealing with right wing ideologues. At least it was enjoyable and a rather more infectious way of sparking off the beginnings of some real communication.      

       Perhaps the most significant intervention though was that against The Mothers of Invention at the City Hall, Newcastle when a bunch of protagonists got up from the audience and shouted “Up against the wall Mothers” to which Frank Zappa replied: “Surely you mean Up Against the Wall Motherfucker”. The response was quickly shouted back: “No, no, no, we mean up against the wall, Mothers”. Both big audience and performing band were perplexed and neither knew what was going. Just exactly what was being said in this intervention? There was also the in-joke side too despite the seriousness of intent. Just who in Newcastle City Hall in this relatively out of the way place, in this, if you like, brusquely un-hip town in the boon docks would have heard of the Motherfuckers apart from Frank Zappa, his band and the protagonists?  Most likely nobody. Those who stood up and shouted from the audience knew Zappa was one of the hippest dudes of the pop spectacle and Up against the wall, Mothers” would probably fall on the audiences deaf, unknowing ears. They were right. Zappa did, after all, have some notion of a crazy negation if probably not much more.  Remember, through his commercial power and influence, Zappa was able to fix it so that Wild Man Fisher, the very amusing paranoid schizophrenic anti-music musician and who couldn’t play a note on that guitar permanently glued to his hand, was given a recording session. Some of this complexity could have been suggested in a leaflet. Often there’s nothing like some simple honesty. And the leaflet could have been scattered throughout the audience in the old time-honoured way. Explanations like this are needed also because people otherwise are left in the dark most likely considering it to be the splutterings of malcontents having some personal grief against this particular pop group. This just wasn’t the case but in the near future it was just such damaged responses which were to become more common spilling over into some kind of psychotic identification like Mark Chapman’s killing of John Lennon in New York City in 1980.  In fact as early as 1972, a “yob” - according to the media - called Billy Howells really hurt Zappa when he was performing at the Finsbury Park Empire in London. The alternatve/libertarian leftist press  still very active at that time, never commented upon the event, even though  Howell’s got six months in jail. The attack wasn’t probably too enlightened but some kind of explanation might have been revealing.  You never know it might have contrasted nicely with a coherent leaflet from the Newcastle intervention and given it an extra dimension in terms of a lucid contrast. Though most people don’t understand such leaflets, one or two do and seeding starts from there and maybe in this dry desert one day, after rain, flowers will bloom. Moreover, such subversive challenges have to be clearly delineated – simply so they don’t get confused with the prevalent, often eroto-maniacal, obsessive assaults on stars - in that combination of adoration-cum-hate. For sure, the latter maybe demonstrates some  damaged kind of praxis but it  lacks the necessary real enlightenment.      

        Obviously what was basically been contested here, like in the other nonsense interventions, was the passive audience/performer relationship particularly as the pop concerts in the 60s were moving on from club venue and City Halls to the giant pop festival and were in this respect, spectacles of gigantic reification we often compared with Chinese Maoist calisthenics. Some of us at the time even felt them to be some what akin to fundamentalist religious revivalist meetings in their role of pacification of rebel activity. Whilst undoubtedly true, it also did mean that we’d unwittingly blocked our ears to the last moments of great popular music from the Doobie Brothers to the sheer magnificence of Jimi Hendrix who as a musician trying to escape the boundaries of music, was quite the equal of Charlie Parker, Bud Powell or Django Rheinhardt.        

      A little later though and we had no real simpatico with the trouble which began to erupt at the huge rock festivals. Sure we thought it was OK but recognised that it failed to address the real problem of spectacular separation. Though welcoming the tearing down of security fences at the Isle of Wight rock festival, we had serious reservations knowing that even if they made the concert a completely free event, the formal focus, the essential reification, had to be the real core of contestion which the Zappa intervention hit squarely on the head. The pop musicians were meant to disintegrate, to commit suicide, to end the music. In essence we preferred that photo from an American Life mag from the riots in Detroit in 1967 where a black guy with his back to the camera is seen walking out of a looted store carrying a double bass. Scribbled underneath, Debord had commented; “ negro carrying a musical instrument after assassinating Mozart”.   

     To be sure the transcendence of art was particularly central to the developing revolutionary critique in Newcastle and was always given a sharp focus and there was a lot of hard headed and by then excellent historical knowledge about its unfolding trajectory particularly throughout the 20th century as the censored pieces of the jig saw were put together. The university art school turned into anti art ferment in response to this call to arms coming from the outside. Finally, sometime later during early 1969 persons unknown firebombed part of the art school at night and most of the Art History dept was gutted. It took some time for firefighters to put out the blaze. Although Newcastle university art school never experienced the sit-ins like  Guildford or Hornsey College of Art in London, it did partake of the most radical critiques-in-action. In short, why occupy a place making mealy-mouthed reformist demands about different course content or inter-disciplinary studies – which always produces  some variant of the same old crap – when you can burn the place down? Though nobody was ever arrested for this exemplary act, we were basically accused as being the instigators. To this of course we still proudly plead guilty! A greater decision was made for us because of this action. There was now little hope of crawling back into safety shot jobs on the fringes of the art scene (i.e. art academia) or “independent scholar” if you like. But it went further than that. The Special Branch had names and blacklists heavily functioned. It wasn’t just employment of a professional nature. One of us was even denied employment cleaning out blast furnaces at a steel mill in Rowley Regis in the west Midlands Black Country, the manager seconded for hiring new hands saying he’d received a report listing trouble making at the London School of Economics! It was no more than what many experienced at the time as both the blacklists and the official denial of their existence mushroomed. As the years went by, you could have groveled to the powers that be and asked for forgiveness - as many did – but think of the self-inflicted humiliation! In any case you’d never be really forgiven so why give them the pleasure of capitulation? We have only to recount the case on a more spectacular level of the Hornsey College of Art agitator Kim Howells, himself influenced by King Mob, who cravenly some years later crawled up the Labour Party hierarchy became a Welsh MP and an ardent adherent of Blairism and free market ideologies yet got nowhere as his past continued to haunt him through  periodic tabloid exposure. In his present position as Minister of Culture Howells plays on his provocative past though by now his critique has lost all semblance of coherence and comes across like some cantankerous fuddy duddy.   

              If we’d had any hesitancy as to where we were headed, there’s nothing like the political police to finally focus negative theory clearly for you. As the radical German play write, George Buchner said in the 1840s; “The Darmstadt police were my muses”! Any immediate hope of making any kind of living in the cultural/educational field had been sealed off in any immediate sense - a survival venue you had messed around with, now and again, on a desultory few hours a week basis. Rarely though are things ever fixed immutably like that. Finally though it was nothing to bleat about as you really didn’t want their fuck-crazy, mind-abusing jobs compromising clear thought in any case. Sure  you could have groveled  but unless you were prepared to eat shit denying everything you’d experienced and the truths ringing in your ears, then yes, baby, you were on the outside. If you’d done what was demanded, asked for forgiveness, ameliorated your words, scrambled your brain, then the world of lies and secure monetary compensation lay at your feet. There’s always a choice to be made. Perhaps there was too much pride, perhaps past insults had been too much but there was finally something irreducible inside which said: NO.        

         What happened in Newcastle though sent shock waves throughout the city but like everywhere else where a revolutionary theory was posited, recuperation was its closest admirer. Two architectural students showed quite an interest only to use a few ill-digested ideas to update the crises in architecture  as they cynically shaped a new architectural style producing the ghastly formal plagiarisms of post modernism. To be sure we’d applauded plagiarism but not in the sense of aesthetic additions and the updating of the role of architect! Nick Grimshaw and Terry Farrell were their names. There’s no need here to say more about these couple of twerps. Sufficient to point out that Farrell two decades later designed the monstrous new M15 secret service building  in Vauxhall, London and Grimshaw designed the Eurostar terminal at Waterloo station. The mini plethora of cartoon hand outs in Newcastle with new bubble-speak lines and captions also became a marketing idea for a new cartoon comic in the shape of VIS with its now well known notorious characters and launching very lucrative careers for its illustrators and producers.         

      Again what is most interesting is something that’s really unknown. Some aspects of the Situationist critique particularly its provocative intervention captured the imaginative of young workers, particularly apprentices in the Tyneside shipyards. In the early 70s, wildcat strikes mushroomed on the Tyne and the situation became barely controllable both for the bosses and union officials alike.  Caught up with the notion of a “Strasbourg of the factories” then current at the time some rather more clued-in individuals decided to concentrate on the waterfront but whether this had any effect or not isn’t clear as what their activities were remain obscure. (What this refers to is the famous anti-student scandal at Strasbourg in 1966 which had such a massive impact in May ’68 in France. In essence it was hoped there could be an even more profound follow-up with some kind of radical intervention in a big factory which would act as a beacon for others to follow) Nonetheless and whatever leaflets written by Tyneside apprentices it seems, appeared in wildcat strikes. They were about clobbering foremen, ignoring local union officials, and extolled wrecking machinery suggesting turning your lathe bench into a comfortable bed complete with extra tips on how to permanently dodge work while still getting paid etc. Finally it resulted in Jimmy Murray, area boss of the Boilermakers or Transport union, exploding on local TyneTees television condemning “irresponsible Slituationlist (sic) leaflets” and waving a selection of them at the cameras whilst reading out choice phrases. Shock horror! In a way though, the Tyneside engineers had a long tradition of libertarian subversion. Jack Common had come from their ranks and his account of The Right to Get Drunk Strike in about 1912 was in a similar vein. Common was a member of the Independent Labour Party - one of the best of the old organisations – and, which had quite a presence in County Durham around that time and among its members were many free-thinking libertarian workers who we remember with great affection from our childhood there. Initially Common had come from an engineering family background on the Tyne and was employed as a clerk. He was made redundant and experienced the harsh realities of the means tested dole in 1930s Newcastle. He then went south and ever after took more menial employment like unskilled assembly line work or caretaker jobs partially because he even felt some shame about whitecollar work he’d previously relied on for survival. Surprisingly, he even refused to become an engineering worker like his father.         

       In a way though revolt was returning to its roots. Had not Jack Common suggested in those excellent scraps of broad theoretical comment before he succumbed to the role of  novelist that the best thing to do in a cinema was to go behind the curtains and look at the audience? Whilst not quite possessing the cutting edge of Vache’s revolver pointed at the actors,  it’s not bad all the same. You cannot help but speculate that there was a subterranean continuity between notions like The Grand National Holiday (as that early form of the General Strike was once called on Tyneside), Jack Common and the events of the very early 70s in the shipyards. It wasn’t only the engineering apprentices but young miners from the west Durham coalfield  who began to turn up at the broad, informal Solidarity/Situationist axis in Newcastle no doubt attracted by the local publicity some of the interventions inevitably acquired and you wonder just what was this relationship between this and the thoughtful early writings of Dave Douglass, who was later, unfortunately to become such a wooden anarcho-syndicalist and TV hogging demagogue? The concrete backdrop to this were  the first shop  floor led  wildcat strikes  beginning to break out in the nearby coalfield. Whatever. It was a fruitful  pot pourri of good old time and modern influences that was also marked by a heavy class bitterness. Miners would turn up in Newcastle on a Saturday night hoping to bed some radical middle class young women and not averse to employing a bit of simplistic class demagoguery in order to achieve their ends.         

      The bug of the social apartheid still dogs Common in relation to George Orwell just like it does that other forgotten, brilliant engineer, Alfred Russell Wallace, the co –founder with Charles Darwin of natural selection. Although we critically commented upon Orwell in the late 60s, the fact is, even those of us who’d hailed from Newcastle hadn’t even heard of Jack Common.  Colin Hutchinson, a guy around the Newcastle agitation was the first to put together a well-produced booklet called Revolt in an Age of Plenty   that was a selection of Common’s critical writings.  Sure we’d made some acid comments about Orwell especially his dumb take on Surrealism though liking many of his essays and thoroughly respecting the excellent Homage to Catalunya though noting his insistence on being termed a writer and his lack of comprehension regarding the decline of artistic form. As Don N Smith acutely said at the time  it was just  as well Orwell died when he did as his inadequacies would have meant he’d probably have ended up becoming a pathetic TV hack like Malcolm Muggeridge. If we’d known about Common at the time it would have been quite a revelation as his attempt to grasp the essence of rising modernity was far in advance of Orwell’s and you can sense in some of his often convoluted expression,  that he’s trying to get into shape a theory which was nigh on Situationist. Be that as it may, in passing we note their dissimilar deaths.  Orwell died in a University College Hospital bed surrounded by so-called literary lions like Stephen Spender, Muggeridge, Anthony Powell and BBC journalists, Common died as a labourer on a building site in Newport Pagnell, Bucks.      

     Jack Common was a different kettle of fish as he defied categorisation and couldn’t be fitted into some neat specialist place on the bookshelves. He wasn’t a Surrealist nor was he a Social Realist, though both left some kind of mark upon him. If he had been a Social Realist he would have been much more acceptable to the polyglot mix of the Establishment here particularly as social realism is acceptable to British leftist conservatism. Social  realism was there well before the “Angry Young Men” writers  which the early Situationists derided in the mid 50s precisely because they were writers and historically ignorant of the revolt against literary form (and which Jack Common had been more than vaguely aware of). Although social realism in the thirties had produced some haunting moments in the films say of Humphrey Jennings etc, as an increasingly denuded style, it was to remain a constant thereafter and to be much embraced by the new medium of television.  In no way though did it disturb all those many time-honoured faceted and funded cultural roles beloved of the hierarchy here. Moreover, it was to serve as educator to all those aspiring cadres with high hopes of position in the new frontier posts of the State, whether as councillors, stress managers, social workers or even newly-fashioned crafty Leninists with their aspirations of leading the working classes. Social realism buttressed the emerging palliative concept of  a basically PC community politics which nonetheless originally had its origins in the pacification programmes of the old British Colonial Office. In Newcastle, it found an expression in “Z Films”, a hip local outfit and previously mentioned, led by a cineaste creep called Murray Martin  whose later claim to fame was a film based on the Meadow Well estate, which  exploded in the early 1990s. He tried  to capitalise on the riot in order to further his career nationally though nothing really came of it.  Moreover, the underlying slant of all these films - itself also indicative of social realism - are within a leftist social democratic framework with  the State as enlightened facilitator. The State, the State, always the State!

        In a sense Jack Common was the epitome and most clearly articulated expression of an open-minded probing which was not un-common on Tyneside and parts of Co Durham. This subversive tendency lurked behind a quite pervasive official cultural yearning it was plainly at odds with. Although it could be said Newcastle Upon Tyne was an out of the way place the city nonetheless strived to achieve a major cultural image. City boss, T. Dan Smith in the 1960s banally wanted the city to be: “A Florence of the north”. To even think you could build a “Florence” just like that and set aside from its essential historical time and place was a priceless piece of philistine and bureaucratic absurdity, though with the demise of that nonsense Newcastle was to achieve a massive post-modernist impact by ironically ditching its grandiose Renaissance project by recuperating  that life-enhancing experiment and more than embryonic subversion and turning it into its opposite. The city drew its sting forcing most of the instigators into exile proceeding to pave the way for a bankrupt modernity by massively promoting ‘end of culture’ culture in the forms of gigantic displays from the sculptor Antony Gormley’s moronic “Angel of the North” to the new waterfront Baltic Exchange Flour Mill, the veritable temple of Saatchi & Saatchi vacuity.

THE FAILURE

    THINGS FALL APART. The Angry Brigade and “the violent reformists of the bomb”. The emerging malaise of issue politics.Putrid academic recuperation – The Sociology of Deviancy and others. Love, breakdown and schizophrenia. The new limbo. Lamenting the lack of radical tradition in these islands! The Irish end-of-culture experience. Thoughts on severe role crises. Down with careerism! Critical look back on the British shop steward movement. Re-birth of the old ultra-left –its value and limitations.

    By  late 1969, all kind of balance began to dissolve quickly. The earlier glorious, well–intentioned though niave enthusiasm had slipped away and a certain weariness was setting in fostering  an initially reluctant cynicism about intentions. Suspicion about motives was clearly gaining impetus. It was fertile ground on the one hand for extreme voluntarism and careerism on the other and there was often some overlap between the two.      

   It’s been said before that  the Angry Brigade was a realisation of King Mob. Well, partially this is true although big differences must be mentioned purely for the sake of accuracy. The terrorism of the word (or the terrifying address King Mob sometimes excelled at) was followed by one of the deed. Angry Brigade communiques testify to these links, e.g. the “Dear Boss” letter, the using of the name of Geronimo (from the Motherfuckers) and more general references to the Spectacle and the attack on the fashion industry (like in the poetically sensitive communique accompanying the bombing of Biba’s boutique)  etc.  All this set the Angry Brigade well aside from the cruder anti-imperialist leftist terrorist groups throughout Europe and America at the time. Undoubtedly, the Angry Brigade was the most advanced and had the best critique of all. Leftism was pushed well to the side though it hovered over some of their milieu  and began to make even more headway as the times became more dire. Moreover, as we’ve mentioned elsewhere, the Angry Brigade wasn’t infiltrated by the State as was the case with most other outfits, most spectacularly within the ranks of the Red Brigades in Italy and even more alarmingly, some of those exemplary autonomous commando groups which appeared in Spain in the late 70s whose plight in Spanish prisons we helped publicise in the earlier 80s (the Segovia prisoners appeal was put out in poster form in colloboration with BM Piranha). At the time of the Angry Brigade though, most military motivated terrorism was specifically and quite rigidly Leninist inspired, anti-Imperialistic (though only as regards the United States) and its only drift, apart from the exquisite knee-capping etc of particularly vicious foremen etc in Italian factories tended towards a kind of schizoid despair-cum-pathological disposition. For instance, the Japanese assassins at Lydda airport in 1972 aimlessly killed anybody like some ultimate Surrealist act or like those individuals who shot people at random – like the guy in the university of Texas in 1966 – which Heatwave had mentioned without  specific comment other than to say this is what modern alienation in extremis can do to you. Yet the diary of one of the  Japanese terrorists reads sensitively like in some paranoid disassociation: “DDT has poisoned the world” and “I love a cherry tree”. We must say that quite categorically none of this disassociation was in the Angry Brigade. They were sane very human principled people.      

   Though  there were  similarities with King Mob what were the differences? The Angry Brigade milieu was also somewhat into the ideology of “serving the people” though not quite with the emphasis the Maoist spontaenists and the other  straighter though disintegrating Leninist groupuscules would have put on it. In that sense they did have some kind of distant identity with the energetic Italian movement of the time  which John Barker explained more clearly in magazine Transgressions  published by some lecturers from the Geography Dept of Newcastle University. Groups like Potere Operio, and we guess Autonomia Operaria must come to mind. These groups were at the time richly critiqued by the Italian Situationists, Ludd and Ceasarano etc but most likely the Angry Brigade milieu were unaware of this. Thus some of the AB cadre did work through the Notting Hill People’s Association that  King Mob had thoroughly disrupted  only a couple of years earlier (see the later note on John Grevelle). Elsewhere, they began to orientate themselves around the arena of an emerging community politics which though it was all fresh-faced and looked really clued-in was basically no more than an updated face lift of the old forms. They got involved in those well-meaning, social democratic campaigns like winter heating for the elderly, schemes to set-up Adventure Playgrounds plus more modern concerns like shelters for the victims of domestic violence. Fair enough but they did throw these concerns at you as though they were subversive. They weren’t funny or relaxed and there was no chance some subversive drift might derail their missionary character. They immediately and uncritically took feminism on board, most clearly exemplified in the bomb against the Miss World TV spectacular. Social workers were tolerated   but only in their new guise as revolutionary social workers and then replete with a new title were more than welcomed. Case Con, “The journal of the revolutionary social worker” was such an example and to some degree, was informally regarded as part of a hoped for extending Angry Brigade network – it’s base as it were. Some of them also went in for day to day participation in the emergent Claimants Unions which had sprung up. However, it must be said only the more unusual CUs particularly the Notting Hill one which hardly surprisingly, considering the recent King Mob activity, contained a strong “never work” profile which  at times resulted in aggressive attacks on dole workers administering government rules behind the office counter. Although this had its merits at times as there were enough dole workers who sadistically enjoyed their petty powers, there were equally enough nervous and shy claimants who just wanted to know their simple rights who often scurried away frightened by the posturing of the Claimants Union. All this helping the people activism was pretty chaotic though and there was enough of it that was part and parcel of a hoped for sensitised and renewed State (the beginnings of political correctness etc). Certainly it was less anti the State than King Mob had been. Inevitably, as previously mentioned, this meant some kind of leftist drift aided  by a more general drift as unofficial action by the fully employed workers was rapidly unfolding taking to the streets against Barbara Castle’s (Minister of Labour in PM Wilson’s Lab government) proposed In Place of Strife legislation against wildcat strikes. Around the time of their inception, some core Angry Brigade participants attended (and probably financially helped out) the launching of the radical newspaper, Big Flame, in Liverpool in 1971. Big Flame in many respects was somewhat similar to the disintegrating Leninism of Lotta Continua in Italy and was a pot pourrri of all sorts of things. It was better than the usual leftist effort but nonetheless still hanging on, initially by its finger tips, to leftism. Thus, it was able to dig up very interesting facts here and there as, for a while at least, many of its adherents threw over the allotted career roles and, as it were, joined the workers for a couple of years or so. Most didn’t stick at it. Some of these facts though, particularly as put together in its more theoretical Red Notes journal, did however prove to be  useful  when put within a clearer more autonomous perspective.       

    Once their activities did really start to take place some ex-King Mob individuals called the Angry Brigade, “violent reformists of the bomb” which was OK as far as it goes but such a description failed to pinpoint essential nuances. The individuals who made up its centre  had been university students mostly studying in and around liberal arts/social studies courses. Included elsewhere on this web is a pretty intelligent text by John Barker published in the Birmingham Radical Arts magazine just prior to forming The Angry Brigade. Though falling short of the lapidary edge of say the, The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution – that good text written at the moment of the demise of the English section of the SI - it did contain some razor sharp lines about culture, particularly pop culture. Apropos of The Who in a text called Art + Politics = Revolution, Barker memorably said: “we contemplate other people destroying the environment we want to destroy”. In many ways it was a quite remarkable acute piece of writing pinpointing all the cultural foibles modern capitalism throws at us plus making an essential connection with the present day vacuity of Eng Lit. Though originally written as a series of footnotes to “A Critique of the Study of English Literature” published in an obscure magazine called Red Texts No 2, it was weak in other ways especially in its justification of street theatre, tepid though the justification  was. Nonetheless, this anti-art stance did figure in the turn to incendiary acts. A disillusioned and freaked out Chris Gray by 1972 was calling The Angry Brigade, “the last bourgeois artists”. Whilst  this coinage wasn’t accurate enough and sounds too disparaging – which wasn’t intended - as two years later he was to praise them for their sincerity even though of the opinion they’d gone “straight up the wall”, it did point to an historical dilemma that hasn’t ever been considered. Art had reached an unbelievable nadir with no place within its orbit whereby any real creativity could unfold and, at the same moment, the proletariat still didn’t possess the steely impulse and vision to creatively transform the world and everyday life. Between this rock and a hard place the Angry Brigade erupted. 

         To be accurate the Angry Brigade weren’t really terrorists at all – in the horrific sense the term has come to mean - but in reality violent saboteurs employing, if you like, whiffs of gun smoke. Remember nobody was killed or even physically hurt by their actions. One of the AB protagonists, Hilary Ann Creek, distancing herself from all that horrific terrorism that nation states world wide use  as a final raison d’etre for their survival, was undoubtedly right when she said 30 years later: “Nobody picked up that it wasn’t the bombs themselves that they were worried about. It was the fact that it exposed the vulnerability of the system… How could someone go and do in the back door of a minister? It wasn’t so much the criminal damage, it was the fact that it made them look stupid.”

     Did the Angry Brigade have an effect elsewhere? Although it’s difficult to say it’s highly likely, as surely their example also lay indistinctly behind a massive wave of small bombings that took place throughout England, Wales and Scotland (leaving N. Ireland aside) in 1971. According to a report in The Guardian newspaper around Dec 3rd 1972, there was something like 14,000 to 16,000 of what were defined as “explosive devices and not incendiary devices like molotov cocktails”. It seems it exceeded in quantity anything England had previously known including the Fenian campaign of the 1870s and ‘80s. What’s amazing though is that none of this massive though dispersed assault of the bomb ever really penetrated the national press (although seeing its England it’s hardly surprising it was given, as it were, the Royal blank). Most likely though mention was made in local newspapers and probably those who carried out such acts got some high from the effect rubbing off on the local media.      

    On the other hand careerism began to reappear and as mentioned there was even some tenuous overlap between this and avante garde terrorism. A recuperation  (via a supposed “explanation”) of criminality as part of a revolutionary becoming became the stock in trade of a new wave of college lecturers supposedly with a lot of bright ideas, who were fashionably daring for a brief moment.  Well “daring” at any rate within the constraints of academia. The most prominent were grouped around the Sociology of Deviancy who wrote accounts about petty criminality (shoplifting and the like) forms of industrial sabotage, accounts of the activities of the Weathermen in America etc. Elsewhere in this book they are mentioned here and there in relation to some obnoxious particulars like their cultivation and trashing - at one and the same time- of certain individuals around King Mob who unwittingly helped set them on the career ladder. For brevity’s sake and giving some kind of idea about  their disposition we’ll mention here something about a book one of this dismal crew wrote.    

     Prof Stan Cohen’s book Psychological Survival is a sociological survey of prisoners’ attitudes to the top security “E” Wing of Durham jail that housed some of the most “dangerous” inmates in the country.  He forsakes criminologists like Becker and Matya and instead purloins revolutionary material particularly Victor Serge’s Men in Prison which is based broadly on the time he was banged up because of his association with the anarchist Bonnot gang prior to the First World War. It is a powerful and moving account and full of life despite an often antiquated literary flourish. It’s obviously so much better than the lifeless writings of professional criminologists. Cohen’s great contribution was to recognise this simple fact! (The sheer daring of the man!) And as for content, Cohen (surprise, surprise) like any run-of-the-mill, knee-bending  academic sociologist doesn’t stray too far in his views on prison reform. Come the crunch he backs off. Serge in his descriptions of the architecture of modern prisons (even in 1914 !) is far more contemporary ending on a sublime, prophetic and utterly partisan note: “Modern prisons are imperfectable, since they are perfect. There is nothing left but to destroy them.”    

   This was too much for our aspiring Prof to fully endorse and like any academic slime ball merely hints at an endorsement of such comments as, after all, he didn’t want to jeopardise his future career. Interestingly, a few years later, John Barker wrote a book on prisons obviously based on his experiences of prison from the sharp end. To this day the book remains unpublished though one or two chapters have been printed here and there in relatively obscure publications. Again that is so typical of an England which always prefers the shadow to the substance. Cohen is acclaimed for writing on such a subject whilst Barker is silenced. When writing Psychological Survival, Cohen taught at Durham University and knew something about the Newcastle agitation. The attempted wrecking of the Durham Surrealist festival left a mark on him and in response, our Stan read Situationist material and included it in his miserable sociological survey and most likely occasionally lectured to some of the “E” wing inmates about their activities especially  May ’68 in France, though prudently he kept such facts out of his publications. In Psychological Survival he recounts how the prisoners enjoyed reading about Dada and Surrealism. For the future though, his greatest success story was  the transformation of John McVicar, one of the great train robbers, into becoming a leading criminologist himself and now an on/off Blairite. If this is the outcome of education for prisoners you can keep it.  

    The aftermath of the late 60s was like some gigantic cave-in when venturing through a cavern where all passages and avenues to the open air had been blocked .We were left stumbling in the dark, without oxygen  really confused and not knowing which way to turn or how to get out. For some and may it be said some of the best, suicide was the choice. There were many – once three friends topped themselves in one week – an act so often finally precipitated by the end of some desperate love affair which had gone bitterly wrong. It was the last straw. Victor Schklovsky’s Zoo: Letters Not About Love  and Mayakovsky’s poem About This was read as a means of consolation and it seemed only too prescient and compelling, though in no way were you an exile from a failed revolution in another country (Russia) living in a Berlin-type situation of the 1920s. It felt like it though. Both guys though had been spurned by the bourgeois sister of his choice producing in desperation printed memories of the death of love within themselves. This time though there could be no exile or escape and no Berlin to rush too as it was the same bitter defeat and more or less on a worldwide scale. We note here two suicides among many: Alain Abelard around Ron Hunt in Newcastle and Spooks, the ex- scientist on the far fringes of the King Mob milieu. Were these suicides wrong? Not really. Finally you come up with the same general reflection  and sad ratification as that which troubled the aging Goethe on the suicidal young man in The Sorrows of Young Werther  he’d written about in his youth whereby “Lotte, a bourgeois woman instinctively holds onto her marriage with a capable and respectable man and draws back in alarm from her own feelings” (George Lukacs). Werther through, “thwarted happiness, hampered activity, ungratified desires” (Conversations with Eckermann) commits suicide because he can be satisfied with nothing less than everything. However, now, for our time, the erotic composition was greater because it also involved the destruction of the “oceanic feelings”(Freud) that could transform the world – a transformation that could have stopped the world flinging itself headlong into a suicidal trajectory. But what to do about the increasing sense of pain you felt inside yourself? For some it was drugs and relief in heroin or mandrax, for others booze or an incessantly mindless fucking  devoid of  feelings. It’s this kind of grim reality and context which Chris Grey’s call for mass therapy at the time must be placed (see appendix). The real truth of the matter though was much more unpalatable. There was no way that personal agony could be abolished short of another revolutionary upheaval more profound than the one you’d been through. In which case why hang around nursing that grim pain for decades? “All length is torture now the torch is out” as Shakespeare’s Mark Anthony had howled on hearing of Cleopatra’s death.  It’s still a moot point. In a sense one was historically traumatised by having a glimpse of an almost palpable freedom of the good life and tantalisingly near enough to be virtually touched.

     At this point and in such confusion and pain it was difficult to put any thing together apart from some passable pastiche mouthing eternal verities which superficially could look very smart  providing the right phrases and words were used: spectacle, play, individual autonomy etc when, as someone said at the time; “surely it would be more appropriate to talk about automated individuality”! Certainly that was beginning to feel more applicable. A little later, in 1974, Howard Fraser  very accurately said: “the revolution is dead meanwhile write good prose” which was also a kind of quip against the belle-lettrisme of Vaneigem. Both quotes however, sum up the sense of jaded passions, sheer hesitancy, questioning and self-questioning which was setting in. Indeed self-questioning  was to prepare the way for the ubiquitous therapy industry which was  gradually taking off. And there was a grim laugh on noticing a more precise wall slogan  reflecting this essentially new anguish: “Is suicide the highest form of self criticism?    

       All such glimpses merely reflected the ghastly pain inside. Thoughts and feeling, intellect and soul, mind and heart did not correspond with each other. Truly it was like Hegel’s “spirit in absolute dismemberment”. All equilibrium had vanished and everything inside was locking into ugly combat. Having no money there was worry upon worry about a simple financial situation rapidly moving towards hyper-inflation. It seemed suddenly cynically rich to talk about the hunt being “on for the last proletarian” as Vaneigem had  naively put it. At the same time there was a desperate desire for some kind of revolutionary love full of compassion and understanding simply to provide a little shelter from a howling storm you felt was turning into a hurricane. A state of frenetic chaos existed inside yourself and quite frequently it was as though knowledge disappeared from the mind with that cursed adrenalin ceaselessly pumping up and down inside the veins and arteries making all sustained concentration impossible. You could write – only very occasionally may it be said -  in a way which had lost all sense of literary merit although in retrospect maybe that was  to the good!        

      In the early 1970s, it seemed there were more than a few genuine revolutionaries dismayed by the renewed onslaught from all sides and dealing with a capsised utopianism, experienced as profound crack-up,  wrote many a page of what Howard Frazer was to call “schizophrenic drivel”. In a way though some of this “drivel” – though mostly unreadable – was perhaps (maybe a big perhaps) trying to reach a greater depth than a pre-schizoid (too strong a word?) “revolutionary” sanity – if you like? Modern history has taught us it can be a prelude to a different even better take on things and one must never forget (again?) Antonin Artaud’s example. His notes and  mostly  ravings from the lunatic asylum at Rodez are, apart from one or two sentences, mostly unreadable. But can we clearly separate these incomprehensible ravings from the profundity of his writings a few years later like his texts on Van Gogh and Coleridge? In one sense “schizophrenic drivel” was also an attempt to get beyond that everyday language we use and deploy trying desperately to encompass ever more nuances even though in that state of “absolute dismemberment”  which the first King Mob had emphasised.. But the trouble is because it’s a language which has lost all sense of an everyday and recognisable connection to others it  hasn’t arrived yet upon The Other Shore as it were and thus impossible to understand. In a way it was another response to a language taking on “a revolutionary air” in early King Mob to be followed through by an avant garde quasi-terrorist, “language of the deed”. In a sense all these responses were passages to a something else never arrived at or rudely cut off. “The language of the whole man will be a whole language: perhaps the end of the old language of words” as Vaneigem was to perceptively put it. Perhaps all we experimentally wrote in this vein did point to the supercession of the written word, maybe of that repression evident within its form which Henri Lefebvre had noted in one of his long discourses? As we’ve mentioned previously, we wanted to get away from writing especially the role of writer as a little later we wanted to get away from the role of revolutionary particularly now that the bonehead militant of everyday life seemed to be everywhere. Maybe this created the broken omelette of “schizophrenic drivel”? And then Nietzche’s  Zarathustra spoke; he did not write. Over 100 years later, Patrick Cheval who painted up so many perceptive wall slogans – not only in Paris, May 68 but long afterwards – right up to his death by drink in the 1990s and who sparingly put down little which was traditionally durable in written form memorably said: “books burn, words remain”.               

      Things seemed to ossify very quickly as new roles reappeared in the most unexpected quarters. That spring-like exuberant, infectious spontaneity which really did communicate congealed into the militant of daily life whereby a kind of milieu oriented, closed-off super-activism ensued which was basically puritanical in relation to the increasing disintegration at the heart of everyday life. Thus, Jim Greenfield (later of The Angry Brigade) could rant on about nobody should be in bed at 10  in the morning when there was so much to do. It became so much empty posturing  like when Jim turned on a young women with sweeping brush in hand cleaning the floor of a squatted building: “What are you doing sweeping up – are you a fucking housewife or something”. Others quickly made their disenchanted comments directed against this unforseen expansion of the traditional militant politicos role into something far more off-putting. The American militant, Yippie type paper Rising Up Angry with its Maoist inclined spontaneaism with a bitter laugh became Rising Up Shattered. In retrospect there's no point in being too harsh on these extremes of daily life critique. We were all into these comments at one time or another - including ourselves. In some ways it marked the urgent apocalpyse of the age and what was to replace these off-the-cuff remarks was to be far, far worse in  bland and usually underhand, viciousness. And need it be said, Jim Greenfield was throughout the years to be one of the nicest guys one could wish to meet talking eloquently about the steel mills and endless walks in the Pennines. It's also true  most of the individuals around the Angry Brigade have throughout the lengthening years remained put in reasonably low profile survival scenes in contrast to some of the high-ups of the King Mob elite.        

      Once the revolution didn’t immediately materialise within two or so years, the whole impetus became clothed in a wish-fulfillment which increasingly had little basis in reality. Everybody was susceptible even willing themselves to have thrown off more past conditioning than they had or were even capable of throwing off given the vague outline of dark skies on the horizon. Increasingly a posture was adopted – a pretense of having cast off career, family, marriage, money-grubbing etc when what was being felt inside was a lot more complicated and contradictory. It became a truth that dared not speak its name. The more the situation began developing a desperate edge, the more an abstract “revolutionary” wish fulfillment – well at least for 2 or 3 years - took over. It became a mask enforced through a “liberated” personal charisma projected by a certain caste of self-appointed revolutionary leaders whom appeared free. Many of these often super-star inclined, self-appointed leaders were so full of themselves they couldn’t see – nor even wanted to see – the look of sheer misery on somebody’s face who’d slunk off from the crowd, gripped with a sense of a new loneliness and a renewed death wish fast disappearing under the slime of slogans and posturings. It was part and parcel of the militant of everyday life syndrome and was so completely out of synch with most people’s gutted everyday life   alienation was merely reinforced. Simply put it meant lying was returning aided and abetted by a complete lack of transparency (remarkably enough in an atmosphere where transparency was encouraged but with the rider, provided it was a right-on transparency). Skeletons in the cupboards were again entering our hoped-for new world! The postscript of Ten Days Which Shook The University emphasised the destructive damage of the lie and The Great Communications Breakdown from the Bash Street Kids in Newcastle (see appendix) had more subtly gone into the essential differences between lying to the State and among yourselves. What this amounted to was that open talk – without moralist censure – was of the utmost importance. Once this essential was lost defeat was looming large.        

       In one sense, Hunter S Thompson’s novel of the time, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was succinct about this come-down and full of a truth about all these, worse than ever, nervous, psychotic states you were experiencing and which, with maybe a little less intensity here and there, were set to continue and continue and continue. Certainly the book emphasised lying. With the disappearance/eclipse of the hoped for new sense of community, the only way out was lying (of course the book on purpose grotesquely over-emphasised this in order to bring out the point). The more self-preservation became uppermost, the bigger and bigger became the lie as you began to con your way through life. Transparency between each other was to become about as transparent as the ugly glass façade of a post modern building together with the rank misery of permanent psychosomatic pain manifested as a pain in the throat that just wouldn’t go away.           

     Looking back, even within the desperation, it certainly would have been worthwhile to have collected together some of these scattered thoughts and insights and put them together and a fair number of individuals did scribble  their reflections down and to judge by the conversations, some seemed pretty good. On a more general level, there were tentative moves to explain more fully the failure of any on-going coherent radicalism to take hold in these islands since the collapse of romanticism. The outlines of a text took shape linking the inadequacies of the workers’ movement here in comparison to Germany, Italy or France which however, in retrospect was rather wooden and councilist  (noting, for example, that the only two significant workers councils to have taken place were in the armed services and in the context of Empire – in Alexandria and somewhere else). Well, it was meant to be provocative! On the other hand, placed side by side with the paucity  of radical cultural breakthroughs it did attempt something. Only the single figure of Lewis Carroll received fulsome praise and the more general movements like Vorticism and Blast and English surrealism were marked by their insipidness. And apropos of the time, the failure of any real Dada movement was emphasised, noting that those who could have made a difference  like that superb, insulting anti-artist Arthur Craven found  more  sympathetic streets in Paris to express their anger.         

      It could be said that King Mob had created an opening out of nothing in these islands. Aggressive tactics had split something asunder as basically we were absolute beginners without any immediate reference points to hand. It’s like as though we were forced into the quasi-terrorist address against a back drop  of quite terrifying incomprehension. Hardly surprising therefore that it was followed by direct action terrorism in the form of The Angry Brigade even though both were heading  clean up the wall. By 1972, we realised we had nothing to fall back onto. Nobody would possibly publish anything we’d done or would even propose to do so. After all translations of radical French books quite acceptable in their own country were turned down by everybody including trendy publishers like Paladin who were quite prepared to publish shits like Jock Young of the Sociology of Deviancy and Richard Neville’s Play Power. By then we also realised we had no Gallimard or De Bonato, no Buchet-Chastel or Feltrinelli. The Situationists had after all access to publishing firms the Surrealists had used years previously. We had nothing to fall back upon and now really knew it! Cape Editions and New Left Books merely proved the point. Howard Frazer rightly said at the time: “We’ll need a revolution in England before we can disseminate revolutionary theory”. Moreover, there was nobody around - most likely much older - on our doorstep we could look to for some kind of bearing or example we could maybe improve upon - maybe a few more clear headed anti-artists or  revolutionary theorists - with at least some take on the totality. As we’ve said elsewhere here, though it’s worth emphasizing again, we didn’t even have an academic we could remotely consider intelligent in the sense of a Bataille or Lefebvre. There wasn’t even a Noam Chomsky or a Marcuse like in the US. Sure there were social historians like EP Thompson and Christopher Hill who were empirically very absorbing   and we read them avidly but that didn’t help in terms of establishing something more rounded giving us some  toe hold on this intolerable society on a day to day level. If anything, in turn, Christopher Hill was to be influenced by ours (and others) “mad” antics regarding further fascinating researches on those wildly imaginative movements like the Ranters unleashed in the English revolution of the 1640s in books like The World Turned Upside Down.  Autonomous academic social historians like Cleaver and Linebaugh had of course yet to appear and then, as in Linebaugh’s case, he was of course an ex-student of Thompson’s. In any case by the time they did appear, no thought of a more generalised merit was issuing from any university in the world. The totalising intellectual was indeed finished and post-modernist posturings made that all too clear. If anything the cretinism we encountered in our youth had intensified over the years the more subversive memory was eliminated. Journalists here - surely the most cretinised in the advanced world - aren’t even capable of making the slightest informed connection. They profess themselves bamboozled by slogans like “Desire Armed” on the walls of Seattle during the WTO riots of 1999. Sometime before, commenting upon the jailing of Florence Rey and Audrey Maupin in Paris - the two revolutionaries jailed for shooting a cop – British journalists could only call upon, in tones of shock horror, the tendential influence of the psycho-film, Natural Born Killers unable to comment upon on the manifesto Maupin and Rey had written which in places was  a straight lift from Vaneigem’s passionism linking-up with the creation of workers councils.

         The simple fact was that the tiny postscript to the Ten Days That Shook The University pamphlet was  the most interesting and profound general commentary upon modern day England at the time  hitting the nail on the head more precisely than any of the New Left Review Trotskyite fellow travelers like Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson were doing around the same time. As the latter were not experiencing defeat in the same devastating way they were able – well, for a short time at least – to continue with a kind of balanced analysis of the peculiarities of a commoditised English everyday life in an almost seamless update of past fixations especially an all pervasive emphasis on a neo-ruralism which had become a world of substitute nature, of “weekend landscapes far more synthetic than the most plastic products of Hollywood” and, apropos of figures like the MP, Enoch Powell, inhabiting, “this Disney-like English world where the Saxon ploughs his fields and the sun sets to strains of Vaughan Williams.” However, these insights were short lived as Nairn was completely incapable of making more relevant points about the real situation unfolding in Britain the more he removed himself from basic everyday struggles falling into various nationlist perspectives and then embracing a modified free market perspective. 

         Perry Anderson, the other notable New Left Review ideologue expressed some of the on-going vacuum we’d grown up in in his notable Components of the National Culture which most of us thought was good if too starchly intellectual and limited in its analysis of how a “white émigré” culture fleeing from revolution in continental Europe settling here and occupying English intellectual life, whilst the “red emigration”, the Frankfurt School, Neumann, Reich and Brecht finally ended up in the USA. To Anderson, these people “did not opt for England, because of a basic cultural and political incompatibility”. Inevitably, we added our own rather more meaningful figures when individual figures like Andre Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Richard Huelsenbeck, escaping the Nazi occupation of mainland Europe again opted for America. We had of course well noted that neither Anderson or Nairn had the ability to understand the self-destruct of modern art, music, poetry and what have you and it was a massive and gaping hole in their critique which otherwise had good insights. We could respond  to comments like Anderson’s: “Throughout this desolate panorama the very notion of totality is banned…..The British Bourgeoisie had learnt to fear the meaning of “general ideas” during the French Revolution: after Burke, it never forgot the lessons”. Although more than sympathetic to such comment, despite our youth we felt this concept of totality remained limited within an academic framework putting far too much emphasis on university learning. This though was the best most of them could accomplish and their cutting edge rapidly blunted.

       Interestingly, within this context, the uniqueness of the Irish experience was finally raised  perhaps a little too late but only to be passed over. This omission hasn’t been rectified or fleshed-out since. For sure it’s an experience which is very difficult to deal with in the way it  needs to be dealt with in Ireland where an attack on the specifics of that distorted accumulation which now makes up the Irish cultural spectacle must surely be one of the starting points of any modern revolutionary critique there as it inevitably crosses the path of  a now retarded nationalism. To be sure, in the beginning of the 20th century the rebellion within Irish culture in the Gaeltaic and the flight to the western coasts of Kerry. Sligo and Connemara did produce movement and experimentation that had long been suffocated in England. More formally inventive than anything in England it was based simply on the recognition of that remarkable story-telling capacity of the extra-ordinary language of the Irish common folk. Nowadays all that once was authentic has become mere pastiche and the role of the Irish writer nothing more than a dollar mark up on a cultural stock exchange. Something of that had always perhaps been there in the 20th century from the moment perhaps the Anglo-American canonising of W B Yeats as the greatest poet of the 20th century was made just at the general moment of poetry’s self-annihilation. We certainly emphasised the superb paradoxical provocations of Oscar Wilde (whilst criticizing him for conforming to the role of playwright) together with some of those formal experiments in the early decades of the 20th century that pointed to the transcendence of art. In passing we point to Synge’s, almost El Lissitsky like, factographs of the people of the Arran Islands which  composed of photographs is written like some diary. Inevitably we couldn’t help reflect on Bram Stoker and his journey in the other direction to the east coast of Yorkshire and Whitby where he encountered as well as invented the legend of Dracula, noting that the first person Dracula fanged was one of the new rail-link tourists to this fishing port of wild tales, legends and drink!  Was this an early critique of consumer leisure? In a way we saw Bram Stoker’s novel as a sexy necrophiliac metaphor about the death orgy of modern capitalism. Most of these insights were developed in conversations with Phil Meyler which themselves were, typically very drunken affairs. Inevitably James Joyce would crop up and his beautiful destruction of the novel as the point we must start from – particularly that fast and musical language which tended to fuse with the multi-leveled flow of “the craic” in drunken flight. Although it’s often said that  Joyce’s final novel, Finnegans Wake is unreadable, it’s recommended  to read some passage if you’ve had more than a few. Just listen to the sense  of musical drift: “ All moanday, tearsday, wailsday, thumpsday, frightday, shatterday till the fear of the Law.” After that  the role of The Irish Writer gradually became a hideous abomination and pathetic imitation of a once glorious past. Examples constantly keep coming on promo-stream from Roddy Doyle, to Angela’s Ashes to…(wait for next years writer commodity). The world of Irish poetry hasn’t been bequeathed to Seamus Heaney but as Phil Meyler said so long ago, has slipped to the drunks in the back of the bar. At least it’s a starting point. As Patrick Campbell rather cynically said somewhere “every generation in Ireland produces an army of poets,” which in his choice of terms, reflects The Irish cultural equation with the nationalist volunteer on “ K. O. Sempatrick’s day and the fenian rising”  as Joyce also  reminded us!     

      The problem is the demolition and realisation of Irish culture – essentially its imaginative, multi-levelled association offering such pundreamed of possibilities has essentially been lost e.g where pornography can mean placing the girlfriend in the piano. Thus, ex-Pogues Sean MaGowan calls out: “Yeats? That old fairy”, which is quite  as bad as Julie Burchill’s/Tony Parson’s insults in the late 1970s about individual musicians being fat or old. Unpleasantness like this does not amount to critique.

          Past revolutionary defeats never really investigated the experience of wipe out. Glimpses were there like the vicious racketeer mentioned by Ciliga in Stalin’s gulag who’d been a Kronstadt mutineer, like Makhno’s alcoholism in Paris or Fergus O’Connor’s “madness” in Notting Hill after the defeat of the northern Chartists, etc. But you had no idea defeat would be so  overwhelming. Perhaps if there been more recognition, more discussion even, of this dreadful feeling inside, perhaps if so many hadn’t immediately cut their losses, thrown in the towel and headed upstairs in such unseemly haste, possibly, just possibly, a lot of that cruel edge could have been blunted. The darkening situation was made a lot worse by a sickening and now, long term, opportunism. The horrible ploys of some of the men are enumerated at greater length elsewhere here but it was almost as bad among a fair proportion of the women. How could so many women with a sure sense of what mattered end up as public school head mistress like Phillippa D’Eath? Cathy Pozzo Di Borgo becoming a high flying journalist hack when in the flush of youth she’d rightly despised journalists? Anne Ryder cutting free in a very nasty way, pouring endless calumny on former close friends in order to pursue a nice little mediocre niche in High Wycombe making sure that hypocritical respectability and money honey was what love was all about. It was even worse. For some, the cut off was so complete and rancorous that if it had been Latin America they would have embraced a Chilean Pinochet-style coup momentarily delighting in the spilt blood of former lovers, friends and associates. Make no mistake about it, the outcome of defeat was as cruelly vengeful even if the practice couldn’t be as savage simply because it was Europe. Instead excessive calumny and abrupt cut off were the tools of wipe-out  treating those who still wanted to continue with the subversive quest as lower than vermin. We weren’t  only air-brushed out of the picture but  reduced to an abandoned anonymityto be placed in some new or updated privatised Gulag.  Responses like these continue to this day. These little Pinochet’s of personal relationships – men and women alike - did what they could to destroy all hope of that love “invented afresh.” which Rimbaud long ago had yearned for.  Certainly, Annie Le Brun, despite her too restricted notion - and perhaps fetishism - of love ( and thus reducing the scope of eros ) makes feminists from Germaine Greer to Sheila Rowbotham look idiotic. Why, like De Sade, is she never translated into English?

        In many ways though this experience couldn’t be compared to past defeats in the earlier years of the 20th century: there was something far more total about it mirroring the fact that something like a total revolution though far less bloody had been posited. Instead of shooting us they tried to force us into suicide. Where could we go? With the defeat of the social revolution between 1917/21, it was possible for those, apres Dada, to gain a greater theoretical coming together of disparate tendencies of thought (Marx and Hegel, Fourier and Freud, Lautreamont and Duchamp, Kronstadt  and Ciliga) which slowly but surely was to coalesce into something a lot more coherent, especially throughout the 50s and early 60s. After that mind-blowing experience of the late 60s, it was as if you couldn’t make major breakthroughs in thought and experience, only make minor additions. What seemed to be needed was its application everywhere and that just wasn’t happening.” Because of that impasse/block, the choices seemed stark: either stepping back into a desperate careerism or surviving through some kind of  hum drum work hoping for some break where you could again speak your mind. More and more though, you were seeing this “breakthrough” coming from the outside more than through anything much you could do yourself and lines like “the critique which goes beyond the spectacle must know how to wait” (Debord) came in handy in this quandary of neo-passivity.  For those who refused the path of careerism, though far more salutary, usually didn’t speak their mind or at least, nowhere  near forcibly enough. Very pissed off they allowed the shit to rise to the top. In that sense we allowed it to happen as we really didn’t give ‘em hell. That cull of insurgents with hardly a shot  fired was also to be a thirty year plus cull of the mind.  Those “left behind” (just look at how reaction appropriated and inverted subversive description!) were “self-destructive ghosts” and “shadows”. To be sure, many of these individuals had cracked up – and often in a not too pleasant a way – but then crack up is never a picnic for anybody concerned even though you generally come through it.       

     Defeat wasn’t a pretty sight. To slightly alter Rimbaud: we smelt of burning that’s for sure – and who wants to be near that smell? As Ron Hunt perceptively said: “From the avante garde of hope we’ve become the avante garde of misery.” It was true. The trouble is there was no way you could escape it and for all those who ran for money and/or recuperation, they merely delayed – and in a pastel agonisingly way – that day when that pushing aside of misery would devastatingly catch up with them again. Always, everyone fears the on-set  of that constantly beckoning nightmare – no matter how much it may be denied.    

     Engels’ comment: “Drink is the quickest way out of Manchester” was scribbled on the wall in a local pub in Notting Hill. Two days later underneath somebody had scrawled: “Suicide is the quickest way out of Birmingham”. If such slogans could be sprayed up in the mid 1970s think how much worse it is now? To return to a diary from those times in an entry from May 12th, 1973: “Drugs and alcohol have become  sheer pain killers for an increasingly, unbearable reality. They’re no longer that much different from sex. To be sure after the 1960s, a kind of free sexuality has continued but the game has altered. Here too, sex  has also become a desperate and immediate pain killer and an explanation for the sport of a promiscuity and the huge amounts of money to be made from pornography. If not that, embedded in the id (?check) people don’t fuck each other any longer, they fuck each others roles: the potential whore, the enlightened critic, the property speculator, the burly shop steward etc”.       

      The immediate reaction; this running away, this forgetting, this even more hideous attempt at self-repression getting ever more dire was, in macrocosm, what was to unfold across the breadth of  society in the decades to  the point where all sense of history and historical memory was to become a virtual crime to be vanquished forever by power. The pain of course didn’t go away even though an alienated society spent billions on eliminating those it regarded as the source of its pain. In such a pursuit money was no object.  Slowly but surely an all conquering depression envelopes  the whole  of human kind –perhaps even some of sentient nature itself – itself, in the process of a capitalist mode of production in suicide formation. And what were we saying about self-destruction ? 

        It’s been said, perhaps most tellingly by the Enclopaedie de Nuisances in 1984, in a text called The History Of The Last Ten Years that in the late 60s we knew how to destroy alright but we didn’t know what to put in its place. Surely though, there wasn’t sufficient of the right kind of subversive destruction  carried out with enough clarity  and sensitivity? After all, everything remained intact even after receiving a remarkable battering and in these islands, at the so-called height of the “destruction” in the late 60s there wasn’t that much of a battering. Violence and physical destruction here was something that was to unfold in the 1970s and particularly the early 1980s, when virtually everywhere else throughout the world had lapsed into silence and unhappy acceptance – a fact which again points to the sheer idiosyncratic turbulence of this unpredictable place. As Hamlet had said centuries before: “I will to England where they are all mad too”. To create that point where no turning back is possible just didn’t happen. Instead other routes directed us back into a new and venomous dark age. What happened was more generally at first, a reform of  the impossible rather than its destruction. It was a reform that fairly rapidly petered out as a hideous nightmare society was reconstructed. Contesting hierarchy on all levels just wasn’t strong enough among the combatants themselves where single issue campaigns, particularly anti-sexism, became a powerful antidote to the total critique of a hierarchy which really did strike at the fundamentals of capitalism. Only a tiny minority of men and women alike took on board the critique of the cadre – refusing and rightly dismissing – the roles of painter, sculptor, architect, writer, teacher, lecturer, musician,  town planner, social worker, psychiatrist and especially (as it turned out to be) revolutionary, as well as the usual leftist targets  such as vicar, cop, business person, lawyer etc. For those who didn’t ineluctably arrive at such a point of no return, critique of role was conceived – nay provided – as therapeutic relief and as a means of altering the same role so as to carry on as before. The therapy necessarily had to increase and increase as the world got darker and darker.           

        For those who couldn’t go back, for those who did burn their boats, role crises with the waning of the late 60s revolutionary was severe.  We mean here roles in the socio-economic sense, those pertaining to your position within society as that’s finally the crux of a role crises. It’s not be any means just some kind of abstract, vaguely intellectual decision involving calmly thought out choices. Your whole being revolts against the role. You feel sick inside – physically throwing up and sweating – if you try and carry on within its stifling scope. Finally, left with no choice you have to abandon the damn thing despite the fear of losing sanity, money and personal relationships. For most of us – for all those who were forced from within themselves to take such a path – and so often wishing they hadn’t had to take it in the face like this it did mean you were sunk. It implied severe proletarianisation  and  a growing bitter hatred of those who felt sufficient equanimity to be able to carry on  with that cancerous role (of course with the necessary facelift)  as of yore. Well, for those of us who were now well and truly stuck at the sharp end you fucking well despised them. This hidden hostility grew and grew as the character of the times became more and more reactionary  with the slow unfolding of the nightmare, neo-liberal free market.        

      For those who refused to compromise right from the beginning of this extra long and increasingly hideous downturn, or refused to apologise for their “ youthful excesses”  it meant a future of pared down survival  engaging in hum drum part time work (manual/clerical or what have you) petty criminality, welfare scrounging or longer periods as a full time worker. There really was no other choice if you wanted to keep your mind clear, incisive and uncluttered. It wasn’t a moral choice nor was it the dreaded ouvrierism as some cadres described it wishing to rubbish such a drastic decision on your life. Glorifying work like that was well out of the frame as in reality we were little more than scoundrels! You were a worker yet not a worker. Though The Real Break In The International (1972) written by Debord and Sanguinetti is rather ludicrous as regards its fantastical hopes for the times, its assessment and attack on the cadre was pointed and excellent  still remaining the relevant and best part of the polemic. Would it were that simple and life has a habit of being more than a fine piece of writing. Over a long period of time it slowly dawned on those who had taken on board the ineluctable, practical logic of the critique of the cadre and  more numerous than one cares to think were, for all their hesitations and mess ups living rather truer lives than most of the original Situationists who had so rapidly abandoned the implications of their fine words. Most fled into the professions in one way or another or in the worst case scenario like Rene Vienet became a business man. The individual who wrote perhaps their most well known provocative text On the Poverty of Student Life, Mustapha Khyati, himself became a lecturer and then a university Professor. Need one say more! Shakespeare’s old maxim comes readily to mind: “lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds”.  The background to all this bullshit was the unfolding of a long winter of economic crises,  the slow erosion of all welfare and the emergence of a two tier health care system etc. It plainly wasn’t that nice and you often yearned for some modicum of economic protection or just some dosh to ease a few pressing problems.           

      Finally you realised the great Guy Debord was taking steps in that direction too as he fell into the role “of the last artist in an age without art”(“Abrege” in Encyclopedie de Nuisances) care of his benevolent patron, the extremely rich cinema entrepeneur, Gerard Lebovici, who handed out to hi by the standards of the time what amounted to big sums of money which were far higher than most university Professors could expect. It seemed like having the money without the role compromise but in practice things didn’t work out like that  They never do. Sure his thought wasn’t compromised like that immediately but it did mean Debord was permanently removed from that raw economic cutting edge invading most people and making everyone, everything and everywhere a lot meaner. Inescapably Debord was cut off from the reality of on-going workers struggles having nothing to say about them after 1982 or thereabouts. You might have expected TJ Clark to have suggested some criticisms in his laudatory homage in the foreword to Anselm Jappe’s book. Of course, his foreword is more forthright than all the deliberate scholastic disinformation that is the stock in trade of all TJ’s art market books but even here, artistic roles must be slyly acclaimed.  Waffling on about being Debord a great writer (“nay, I’d call it great “writing”) TJ knows he must put “writing” in apostrophes to forestall criticism from those who would sharply contest such literary categorisation because you can’t let things like this pass. To be sure, Debord collapsed into the role of writer towards perhaps in the late 70s – most certainly afterwards – but at the high point of the Situationist critique, describing yourself as a writer would have provoked a contemptuous dismissal. Debord’s expression was always eloquent and accurate and that classical elegance was always too, an ever-threatening future artistic role. Does this cautious emphasis surprise coming from a academic who hopes to satisfy everybody?  Although Clark uses commas about an obnoxious role immutably fixed categories are the bread and butter of these creeps with a high ideological job profile. To be sure, the vast majority of people are  all wage labourers now but in itself this abstraction doesn’t mean to much. as putting it baldly, even top executives are on a wage. This simple fact  has produced some interesting apologists.         

     The problem is with these few critiques which look OK on paper mapping out a world colonised on all sides by commodity fetishism and where alienation has reached a degree of objective intensity far greater than ever experienced in the late 60s, we come up against the concept of a classless capitalism and where it becomes dubious to refer to any kind of workers’ movement. After Camatte in the 1970s, we now have the two academics, Kurz and Moishe Postone. Thus the latter’s kind of pupil, Anselm Jappe, berates Debord and the Situationists for falling back on or even considering a workers’ movement as a leftover from past critiques. Workers can only aspire to State Capitalism and are nothing but the object of capital as Postone puts his hopes on the Feminist or Ecology movements without ever mentioning they are also very State Capitalist oriented. Here’s not the place to go into Postone’s theories  though his discussion of Time is quite good.  But do we all fall more or less evenly under the weight of the commodity and do some more actively participate in the reproduction of commodity relations than others? For those who aspire to achieve this usually much better paid collaboration perhaps they do feel the agony of their particular alienation more precisely because they have sold themselves to the commodity regime rather more than the vast majority of others. On the simplest of levels, they cannot speak in a straight forward way to anybody which surely still is the necessary pre-requisite for any collective action? Do we really wait for the great strike of the professors, or the top judges and social workers because they experience alienation so keenly? Just where is the praxis, which comes from all of this? Once it was dropping out with a few of the best making a fanfare farewell to their former roles. Now it’s a lot more difficult to do so seeing capital has plugged it’s defenses with the desiccation of welfare systems. So what’s it to be: early retirement?

        There’s an interesting account by a Belgian guy called Yves Le Manache, which appears to have all the hallmarks of authenticity about it. It’s basically about his fraught and unpleasant encounter with Debord. Yves had been a full time worker in a car factory in the late 1960s and early 1970s and had written considerably about his experiences. He’d slowly, hesitantly and unsurely grasped the relevant core of the Situationist critique and it was proposed to publish some of his writings in Editions Champ Libre, only to be dismissed in a high handed and nasty way by Lebovici and Debord. Stunned and very aggrieved by this experience, Yves Le Manache has continued writing – often increasingly scathingly – about this incident and its implications refusing to be ashamed of describing himself as a worker and despising career Situationists.             

     And that’s where the real break lies: between those cadre Situationists and those who can also talk well about Marx, Debord, Lukacs, Breton and Nietzche etc but who have no position in this untenable society refusing to reproduce the ideology of this insane system as little as possible simply by trying to remain human. They've acquired a simple and forthright hatred for all those cultural specialists in academia/journalism and what have you who cannot write anything officially without putting in obscure but knowing asides harking back to a radical pedigree. The latter, of course, would like to be friendly with those at the sharp end but the sharp end won’t have it as too much murky water has flowed under the bridge since then. In any case you always feel their friendship has a powerful hidden undertow and it’s all about making certain you keep your trap shut.

          How can you when the general solution of the powers that be involving both hard and soft cops, has seen the most ferocious assault strengthening the social apartheid with a chasm of formidable  laws  which the highly developed world has experienced in recent times. That capital in this archaic form was put back in the saddle here and despite all appearances to the contrary like the property owning, share owning democracy con etc was due to our general lack of insight. We allowed this situation to come about by at times, the crassest of responses in simply not sticking together when it was essential. England, in particular, since the late 1960s to the early 1990s was wracked by one of the most profound social conflicts in the world. If these conflicts had gelled together and even had a limited success, we would have seen sparks fly that would have transformed the protagonists themselves and most importantly, transcended the all too dismal limitations of the social apartheid which all too often can be a guilt-sodden springboard for the most contemptible careerism and go-getting. The way such demagoguery was used after the late 60s, was nothing short of disgusting  - probably because it was so effective - because for certain, those radicals from the middle classes who’d admirably refused compromise, didn’t dare for a long time confront this hideous side of the social apartheid. The general atmosphere though was increasingly not conducive to anything which might have stimulated the meagre beginnings of a more general hope whether in some kind of written down memories or even actions (the publicity of anti-publicity perhaps?). Whatever, the real ground of the modern revolution would have had something a darned sight more substantial to stand upon than the ruins we survey and agonisingly experience in these islands. It maybe a world ruin but the set back here hasn’t helped at all.

  The working class revolt in these islands which amazingly followed the defeat of the 1960s (we mean here “working class” in an almost generic sense and not whether you worked or not) certainly compared  favourably to The Great Unrest which preceded the First World War and which continued on its way culminating in the General Strike of 1926. However – and this cannot be said too often – it was also very different. There was no general impetus heralding a greater grasp of abstract revolutionary theorising or even some political or economic education for the working classes as had happened previously in the 20th century with talks given by Marxist teachers like John McLean to eager manual workers (e.g. his lectures  on basic Marxism to Cumbrian miners during their strike in 1912 etc). Theory was also something which was pushed aside and not really bothered with. Facts yes but not a theoretical construct. In a sense, it was also a yearning too for a fulfilled life in the tenour of Rimbaud’s exclamation: “come to me oh absent life!” and like the revolt of the 60s, very much partook of that visceral  anti-theoretical revolt which King Mob had emphasized too crassly. The fact that the insurgent workers neglected theory and failed to see just what was so new and original about what they were doing was also a glaring omission here and one that contributed to a terrible defeat. We noted this omission in a sympathetic though critical way putting it in a longer historical perspective at the end of A Summer With A Thousand Julys published in 1982 and said it may just help in avoiding disaster. In retrospect it was probably already too late….          

     Although the late 60s in these islands were a period of youth revolt it was less marked in its real essence than that in America, West Germany, France or Italy. In the latter two countries the student revolt was immediately followed by a profound workers revolt which contained within it, a considerable degree of independence the like of which had probably never before been experienced in terms of its distance from the machination of workers parties and trade union bureaucrats. Here there were no such obvious lines of flow. Everything was much more haphazard and unpredictable. There was also a feeling that total collapse was immanent and even the Young Tories in the early 1970s wished to rename the Conservative party, “The Movement”! Nonetheless among those who’d genuinely tried to realise a new society, despair and misery were clearly in the air everywhere. Then in 1972, one of the biggest revolts  in working class history in these islands broke out which in a way was the pointer towards the storms which were to follow over the next 20 years. By then though King Mob was truly dead and buried and a big subterranean re-think was in the offing that was taking a long time to come into any focus. In a sense this was all part of the difficulty in trying to get to grips with a society which you thought you knew yet also plainly didn’t know well enough. If we couldn’t make head nor tail of it who the fuck else could?  Somehow this still remains the dilemma  even after all these years.      

    For those leftovers of King Mob who hadn’t disappeared upstairs in some scared, unseemly haste, they were really thrown in more ways than one. And as for the rest of our generation by 1972 instead of thinking about images, pop groups or chasing and changing the sound of pop music, simply one was more concerned about proletarianisation and economic marginality and quite fearful about it. A Marxist theory of economic crises that you had tended to glibly dismiss  four years previously suddenly began to make a lot more sense as it enmeshed with a period of class struggle the intensity of which, these islands hadn’t known since perhaps the English civil war. You ineluctably became immersed in the unfolding revolt simply because it was on virtually every bodies doorstep. It took a number of years to acquire some clearer perspective on what was taking place in front of your eyes – on just what was old hat about it and what was moving towards a more precise perspective which might one day usher in the elusive goal of autonomous revolt. A re-borne though limited traditional ultra left certainly helped  this process on its way despite its limitations but the biggest effect by far was the failed social revolution in Portugal and Spain from 1974 to 1979.

       The Situationists originally had lauded the excellence of the  British shop stewards movement more or less praising their pivotal influence in the increasing number of wildcat strikes which began to break out here from the mid 60s onwards. No doubt this was gleaned from the pages of Solidarity as well as Le Monde and personal friendship with individuals from these islands. The implication was that this movement was a breakthrough suggesting autonomy was just around the corner. In a way this was understandable as from the French perspective where a rigidly disciplinarian Stalinoid CGT union apparatus managed to prevent any independent self-activity, Britain in this respect looked remarkably libertarian. The Situationists rightly applauded the efforts of Solidarity whilst criticising its Cardanite disposition, noting that combative workers made up its core membership and, for sure, some were shop stewards and were undoubtedly acquiring an advanced revolutionary critique. However, this wasn’t the main impetus behind the shop stewards movement as a whole and by the early to mid-70s one was becoming aware all too aware of its woeful inadequacy in controlling and suppressing wildcats as much as instigating them (see the two texts in the written by us and published  by German Wildcat on the Revolt Against Plenty website). In a way it was to the credit of a narrow, though often searching born again ultra left in the early 1970s that they started pointing out the recuperative role of the shop stewards movement though by then in the 1970s it was more a bureaucratic function than a movement. A leaflet handed out by the recently formed World Revolution in the mid 70s on a textile workers strike in Leicester was perceptive in this respect (and, in passing, well before World Revolution ossified into a baneful ultra leftist Leninist party it now is). Certainly this critique of shop stewards did crystallise quite a few things for us as with increased proletarianisation and increased day to day personal contact with shop stewards in work place situations as well as the pub, their limitations and repressive role was often all too obvious. A few years later, we made a very quick translation of Cajo Brendel’s Autonomous Class Struggle in Britain 1945-77 making about 15 photocopies for friends to comment upon. We did it because we thought it was interesting putting the early 70s in particular into some kind of perspective although we thought the analysis wasn’t  rounded enough in the way it down graded the momentum of thought and consciousness – that admittedly difficult process and conumdrum. Unfortunately it was printed without knowledge and the translation hadn’t been subject to the very necessary revision it needed. In other respects, the early 70s threw up small ultra leftists groups like Socialist Reproduction and Workers Voice which decimated a much forgotten theory and history of past workers revolt with some sensitive analysis on workers councils  (particularly in Germany  from 1918 to 1923) and the old ultra left.

       Although this searching analysis by a worker oriented ultra-left was welcome indeed, nonetheless at the time, you were aware of its inadequacies in terms of any attempt at total critique. Admittedly this is something that is extremely difficult to achieve and out of necessity, that critique must always be aware of its febrile existence ever receptive to renewal. However, among this re-borne ultra left, a critique of art was non-existent This really is completely inadequate as the actual shaping, production, promotion, buying, selling and general marketing of commodities in modern capitalism is much dependent on its realisation via advertising and design upon the fall out from modern art, design and poetry.  The surface of modern art was ransacked whilst its inner increasingly subversive essence was utterly excluded the more that it shaped up into a revolutionary critique of modern capitalism. Unfortunately, this glaring omission was to be fatally re-enforced by Jean Barrot in France who missing out on the relationship between the fall out from modern art and the increasingly fetishistic scope of the commodity in the very basic (though marvelous) original analysis of the fetishistic value of the commodity in Chapter 1 of Das Capital, contributed to a limiting of perspectives. In England in particular it tended to reinforce an unimaginative mundane. Thus a pared-down ultra-leftism here periodically brings out Barrot reprints without noting these inadequacies. If only something of this anti-art critique which had been to the forefront in King Mob had been worked out more precisely to deal with such a coming impasse! Instead the essential critique of art fell into a calamitous disuse where now all memory of it has been long forgotten in a period which even some opportunist recuperator like Naomi Klein noted regarding her own personal circumstances as, “having grown up after history ended”.

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Go to : A Hidden History of King Mob (Conclusion)

For other articles on King Mob see the following:

• A Hidden History of King Mob (Posters/Cartoons)
• Lost Ones Around King Mob
• King Mob: Icteric & the Newcastle Experience from the early to late 1960s