greengalloway

Anarcho-hippy-punk art

2012-01-05T08:50:00.004Z

Original art work by Wilf for The Mob's Let the Tribe Increase.

Wonderful review of Wilf's art show from Maximum Rock n Roll.

Read the full text here.

“The Grotty Hand of Wilf” opened at the Octagon Theatre in Yeovil (South West, England) in October 2011 to a great deal of interest. The show was part retrospective and part tribute to late local artist Stephen Wilmott, affectionately known as Wilf. His credits include illustration and design for a number of bands, including many associated with the anarcho-punk movement, such as The Mob and their own independent record label All The Madmen (ATM) which released material by Blyth Power, The Astronauts, DAN, Thatcher On Acid and many others.

From the very beginning, ATM’s existence as a record label and increasing involvement with local and national music scenes helped develop great opportunities for Wilf to collaborate closely with an associate named Steve Batty. During this time they worked under the pseudonym of Cracked Image Graffix to create unique, original and memorable designs using their skills to interpret visual identities for the gritty lyrical content emanating from this new crop of bands. Wilf was based in the sleepy market town of Yeovil in the South West of England. (The city of Bristol is located 45 miles north.) The town’s biggest exports are gloves and helicopters (you might notice these references in some of his artwork, especially if you are familiar with flyers and posters featuring The Mob). The very essence of the anarcho-punk movement was born out of the need to get up and make some changes, however small, like starting a band with a message or supplying informative flyers on a range of subjects relevant to the time period. It was a pocket of positivity that Wilf became part of, especially with his early roots in the hippie subculture, which had ethical values similar to this movement. In fact, Wilf played in the Psycho Daisieswhere he performed and wrote vocals, and he was part of an early incarnation of Bikini Mutants, which featured Debbie Googe who would later be a member of shoegaze pioneers My Bloody Valentine. As an artist it was a perfect creative outlet.....

KLF and Galloway

2011-12-21T13:07:00.003Z

This clip of the Dumfries to Stranraer railway before it was closed in 1965 has scenes from newton Stewart in it. It also has a KLF soundtrack. It is very appropriate sinceBill Drummond of the KLF was brought up in Newton Stewart in the sixties. The full 26 minute film is in the Scottish Screen Archives.

Kenneth Grant sings...

2011-11-28T19:35:00.001Z

Hegel and political economy

2011-11-21T20:15:00.001Z

The Situationists and the Occupation Movements

2011-11-08T07:47:00.004Z

One of the most notable characteristics of the “Occupy” movement is that it is just what it claims to be: leaderless and antihierarchical. Certain people have of course played significant roles in laying the groundwork for Occupy Wall Street and the other occupations, and others may have ended up playing significant roles in dealing with various tasks in committees or in coming up with ideas that are good enough to be adopted by the assemblies. But as far as I can tell, none of these people have claimed that such slightly disproportionate contributions mean that they should have any greater say than anyone else. Certain famous people have rallied to the movement and some of them have been invited to speak to the assemblies, but they have generally been quite aware that the participants are in charge and that nobody is telling them what to do.

From an article by Ken Knabb...read the rest here.

The Rationalised Landscape

2011-10-23T21:06:00.000+01:00

This photograph is of the Carlingwark Canal, now called the Carlingwark Lane (local word for slow flowing stream). It was constructed in 1765 and cuts an arrow straight course across the Carlingwark and Blackpark mosses. It is nearly two miles long.

It goes with the Charles Oppenheimer paintings of concrete dams being built (see previous posts). The canal was built to carry marl (a lime rich clay used as fertiliser) from Carlingwark Loch to farms upstream along the Dee/ Ken river system.

Before the canal was cut this is what the landscape looked like.[Taken from National Library of Scotland online maps- Roy's 1755 military survey of Scotland]

Course of Carlingwark Burn.

Harnessing the power of the Dee.

2011-10-22T22:31:00.000+01:00

This is one of three paintings by Charles Oppenheimer (1875-1961) of dams built on the Galloway Hydro-electric scheme.

Art in Concrete Charles Oppenheimer

2011-10-22T22:28:00.000+01:00

This is one of three paintings by Charles Oppenheimer (1875-1961) of the construction of dams on the Galloway Hydro-electric scheme.

Galloway in Concrete

2011-10-21T18:46:00.001+01:00

Harnessing the Power of the Dee - Charles Oppenheimer, 1933.

This is my letter in response to two letters in response to my original letter about wind-farms...

Dear Sir,
In reply to Delya Wilkinson and Alan Keith’s letters [20 October 2011], it seems there are two main objections to wind farms. One is essentially aesthetic and concerns the visual impact of wind farms. The other is economic and concerns the inefficiency of wind farms as generators of electricity.

Thinking about the aesthetic objection, I remember visiting the first ’Homecoming’ exhibition of paintings by the Kirkcudbright artists in 2000. Most of the paintings were of scenes which captured the tranquillity of the Galloway landscape. But one painting stopped me dead in my tracks. It was by Charles Oppenheimer and showed a brutal mass of stark white concrete, dominating and overpowering the rural landscape.

The painting was one of three (Art in Concrete, Harnessing the Dee and Galloway Dam, Nearing Completion) by Oppenheimer which document in graphic detail the ‘industrial devastation of the landscape’(to use Alan Keith‘s phrase) caused by the construction of dams for the Galloway Hydro-Electric scheme in the 1930s. But outside of an art exhibition, is anyone still shocked by these brutal concrete structures? Of course not. The dams and turbine halls have become unremarkable features of the landscape. Likewise, once the fear of the new gives way to familiarity, wind-turbines will lose their power to trouble and disturb.

Turning to the economic argument against wind-power, the Cruachan Power Station mentioned favourably by Delya Wilkinson is part of a pumped storage hydro-electric system. The same principle could be used here. When the wind blows, electricity generated by wind power could be used to pump water into the higher dams on the Galloway hydro-electric system, storing it for later use. By combining wind and water power, the overall efficiency of the generating system would be improved.

Realistically, since converting the existing hydro-electric scheme to a pumped storage system will require significant investment, it will need a strong local campaign to make the case for such an innovative proposal. However, while finding ways to improve the efficiency of wind-power may answer the economic critics, it will not satisfy those critics who oppose wind-power on aesthetic grounds. The problem here is how best to manage the visual impact of wind farms.

In 1999, widespread concerns over the expansion of forestry in Galloway led to a series of detailed public consultations. Those attending were given maps and asked to indicate where and where not to plant more trees. These maps were then used to create Dumfries and Galloway’s Indicative Forestry Strategy. A similar process of public consultation could be used to manage the location and hence visual impact of wind farms.

Alistair Livingston

Hegel and History

2011-10-18T13:18:00.003+01:00

On the Fetishism of Digital Commodities...

2011-10-12T15:23:00.000+01:00

A found text.

Fetishism of Digital Commodities and Hidden Exploitation: the cases of Amazon and Apple

Posted By Wu Ming On October 10, 2011 @ 4:07 pm In Essays

Italiano ^[1] – Français ^[2]
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[The original version of this essay was published on Giap ^[3] on 26 September 2011, which means several days before Steve Jobs died. The French version was published on Article XI ^[2] on the eve of Jobs' death. The piece had already received a lot of attention, backlinks and comments when the news arrived. However, it obviously sky-rocketed to the status of "crucial" text as soon as the media landscape was filled with iGrief, and it kept attracting people when anonymous cultural activists "displaced" the discussion on iGrief by creating the "Steve Workers ^[4]" persona. The present English translation was done collectively on a Wiki page on Mauro Vanetti ^[5]'s website. Many thanks to Mauro, SandorKrasna and all the guys who gave a hand. This version retains some additional mini-explanations Wu Ming 1 wrote for the French readers. We also inserted a few additional links that weren't in the original text but came up during the discussion.]
.

Last week a Pennsylvanian daily newspaper, The Morning Call, published a long and detailed inquiry – entitled Inside Amazon’s Warehouse ^[6] – on the appalling work conditions at Amazon warehouses in the Lehigh Valley. The article, resulting from months of interviews and direct checks, is being spread around the world and has gotten coverage from the New York Times and other mainstream media. The picture is grim:
- extreme job insecurity, a mood of perpetual blackmailing and lack of rights;
- inhuman work routine, with a pace that can be doubled overnight (from 250 to 500 units per day, with no advance notice), at an internal temperature beyond 40 Celsius that at least in one case reached 45 °C (114 °F);
- disciplinary actions against workers who slow down the pace, or simply faint (a report of the 2nd of June mention the fainting of 15 workers due to heat);
- “exemplary” immediate sacking, with the guilty escorted outside before the eyes of co-workers.
And there is more. Read the whole piece, it is worth it. The key sentence was said by a former Amazon warehouseman: “They’re kiling people mentally and physically“.

Jeff Bezos. INSEGVENDVM AB OPERARIIS FORCONIBVS.

Judging by online comments, many people were taken by surprise, finding out for the first time that Amazon is a mega-corporation andJeff Bezos is a boss who – as bosses customarily do – seeks profits at the expenses of any consideration for dignity, justice, and safety.
As should have been suspected, Amazon’s “miracle” (super-discounts, ultra-quick shipping, “Long Tail”, a seemingly infinite catalogue) is based on the exploitation of workforce under vexatious, dangerous, humiliating conditions. Just like the Walmart “miracle”, Sergio Marchionne’s FIAT “miracle” or any other corporate “miracle” the media have dished up to us in recent years.

What I just wrote should be obvious, but it is not. These revelations are not about a company whatsoever: they are about Amazon, a sort of Big Friendly Giant always portrayed in uncritical, praising and populistic ways —- also in Italy.
The Morning Call broke a charm. Until a few days ago, with a few exceptions, the media (and the customers themselves) took Amazon’s propaganda at face value, without the hint of a doubt. From now on, perhaps there will be more fact-checking, assertions will be properly verified, potential bluffs will be called. With the crisis getting worse and worse, the ranks of skeptics seem to increase.

The problem of multinational corporations being perceived as “less corporate”, “cooler” and ethically — almost spiritually — better than others regards especially companies that are so tightly associated with the Internet, as to be identified with the net itself. Another typical case is Apple.

iPhone, iPad, youDie

Foxconn is a corporation in whose Chinese plants many digital devices are assembled, including iPads, iPhones and iPods. Last year, a wave of suicides among Foxconn workers caused a brief sensation all over the world, before being silenced and covered up. Actually, suicides started in 2007, and the phenomenon is not over (the last confirmed suicide dates to last May; another worker allegedly killed himself in July). On the whole, about twenty employees have committed suicide. Various inquiries and reports cited as likely causes the unbearable work pace, lack of human relationships in the workplace and psychological pressure from the management.
Sometimes things went beyond psychological pressure: on July 16th, 2009, a 25-year-old employee called Sun Danyong ^[7] was beaten up by a company security squad [not an exceptional situation, judging by this video ^[8]] and threw himself from a roof right after. He was suspected of the loss or theft of an iPhone prototype.
What kind of solutions did Foxconn implement to prevent further tragic events? Well, they installed anti-suicide nets ^[9], for example .
[To dig deeper into this subject, I recommend SACOM's report Workers as Machines: Military Management at Foxconn ^[10], the links collected in the Wikipedia page ^[11] and the video Deconstructing Foxconn ^[12]].[1]

Such behind-the-scenes of the Apple world do not receive much attention, compared to news on Steve Jobs’ health, or pseudo-events like the opening on via Rizzoli, downtown Bologna, of the biggest Apple Store in Italy ^[13]. In that circumstance, many people spent the night in front of the store, in order to be admitted among the first into the Temple. Those people ignore the entanglement of work and death lying upstream of the brand they worship. Putting the largest possible distance between upstreamand downstream is the quintessential ideological operation under capitalism.

Fetishism, Subjugation, Liberation

Whenever we talk about the Internet, the “mythological machine” in our discourses — powered by the ideology that we breathe every day, whether we like it or not — reproduces a myth: the idea of technology as an autonomous force, a subject with its own spirit, a reality that evolves on its own, spontaneously and teleologically. Somebody even had the great idea of nominating the internet (which, just like any other infrastructure and network, can be used for every purpose, including war) for the Nobel Prize for Peace.
This rhetoric conceals class, property, and production relations: we can only see their fetishes. Here’s why the pages Karl Marx devoted to commodity fetishism are still useful (my italics):

«There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.»

“Fantastic form of a relation between things”. Like the computers interconnected to form the web. Behind the phantasmagory of the Internet lies a set of definite social relations, and Marx means production relations, exploitation relations.
The net rhetoric hides these relations. It is indeed possible to talk about the Internet for hours, days, months, touching only marginally the issue of who owns it, who is really in control of the nodes, the infrastructure, the hardware. The pyramid of labour — including slave-like labour — incorporated into the devices we use (computers, smartphones, ereaders etc.) and as a consequence into the Internet itself, is even less discussed.
Eveyday, corporations expropriate social wealth on the net, and oppress the working class at each corner of the Earth behind the scenes. Nevertheless, they are considered less “corporate” than others.
Until we realize that Apple is like Monsanto, that Google is like Novartis, that praising a corporation is the most toxic narrative we can choose, whether we are dealing with Google, Fiat, Facebook, Disney or Nestlé—-until we realize all this, we will stay in the net like fish.

[Let me put things clear: I do have a Mac, and I work well with it. I also own an iPod, a smartphone with Android, and a Kindle. My job requires me to know and investigate the ways in which culture is shared and the net is used. As I will explain later, this essay does not focus on the behaviour of the individual consumer -- on which a diverting rhetoric has been built in the latest years -- nor it implies any accusation of moral "incoherence" against him or her. What I am discussing here is the necessity of connecting online activism to the struggles that are taking place upstream, during the material production phase.]

Because of net-fetishism, the spotlight is always on the practices of liberation pervading the Internet — ie the kind of practices we Wu Ming have put time and effort into for twenty years —, which are customarily described as the rule. In this way, people dismiss as exceptions all the practices of subjugation , eg using the net to exploit or underpay intellectual work, to control and arrest people (see what happened after the recent UK riots ^[14]), to impose new idols and fetishes, to spread the dominant ideology, to enforce the same financial capitalism that’s destroying us.
On the net, the practices of subjugation are the rule as much as the others. In fact, if we want to nitpick, we should consider them the rule more than the others, if we take into account the genesis of the internet, which evolved from ARPAnet, a military computer network.

The question is not whether the net produces liberation or subjugation: since its creation, it has always been producing both things. That’s the net’s dialectics, one aspect is always together with the other, because the net is the form capitalism has taken nowadays, and capitalism itself is the contradiction in process. Capitalism developed itself by setting individuals free from the old feudal bonds, and at the same time by imposing new kinds of subjugation (to the controlled time of the factory, to the production of surplus value etc.) Under capitalism, everything works like this: consumption sets free and enslaves, it brings about liberation that is also new subjugation, and the cycle starts over on a higher level.

Heron's Aeolipile

Therefore, the struggle should consist in fostering practices of liberation to be played against the practices of subjugation. This can be done only if we stop considering technology as an autonomous force and realize that it is moulded and driven by property relations, power relations, and production relations.
If technology could develop outside of these relations, thanks only to its being innovative, the steam engine would have been adopted in the 1st century AD, when Heron of Alexandria invented the aeolipile ^[15]—-but the antique mode of production did not need machines, since all the necessary workforce was provided by slaves, and nobody could or wanted to imagine any concrete development of that invention.

By fetishising technology as an autonomous force, we remain trapped within the old conceptual frame “Apocalyptic vs. Integrated”. If you make the slightest critical remark about the net, the “Integrated” will mistake you for an “Apocalyptic”, and will accuse you of incoherence and/or obscurantism. The former accusation resounds in such phrases as: ‘Aren’t you using a computer right now?’, ‘Don’t you buy books on Amazon too?’, ‘You own a smartphone too!’, and so on. The latter is expressed in the form of such useless preaches as: ‘Try to picture a world without the Internet…’
On the other hand, any argument about the positive aspects of the net will be welcomed by the “Apocalyptic” as a piece of servile, “Integrated” propaganda.
Let us always remember Heron of Alexandria. His story teaches us that, whenever we talk about technology (and about the Internet in particular), we are actually talking about something else, ie social relations.

Let us ask again then: who are the bosses of the net? And who are the exploited of the Net, and by the Net?
It is not that difficult to find out: it suffices to read the “Terms of service” of the social media you’re using, read the licenses of the software you keep on your computer, digit“Net Neutrality” ^[16] on a search engine—-and, dulcis in fundo, keep in mind stories like those of Amazon’s warehouses and Foxconn’s factories.
Only in this way, I believe, we will avoid such bullshit as the “Internet for peace” campaign or the horrible, “softly” totalitarian scenario prefigured in Casaleggio & Associati‘s infamous video Gaia: The Future of Politics ^[17].

Let us not deceive ourselves: only violent conflicts will decide whether the evolution of the net will impose the supremacy of the practices of liberation over those of subjugation, or the other way around.

All the (shitty) work embodied in a tablet

Steve Jobs with an iPad

Recently, those who consider Marx’s labour theory of value to be outdated in contemporary capitalism, have been referring to the iPad as an example: the physical work performed by factory workers to assemble a tablet, they explain, is not a big deal, and the tablet’s value depends mainly on the software and apps running on it, therefore on the mental, cognitive work of invention and development. Such work is elusive, unmeasurable in terms hours of work.

This is supposed to question Marx’s idea that — to put it very roughly — the value of a commodity is given by the amount of labour it embodies, or, more accurately, by the work time that is socially necessary to produce it. (By “socially necessary time” Marx means the average time used by the producers of a particular commodity at a given stage of capitalist development).

I’m not a expert of political economy, but they look like two co-existent levels to me. Maybe the labour theory of value is liquidated too hurriedly. I believe that the core of its meaning (its “philosophical” and very concrete kernel) persists even through changing conditions.

Nowadays, work is much more socialised than at Marx’s times and the productive process is far more complex (and capitalism is more conditioned by external, environmental constraints). And yet, those who give this example shorten the cycle and single out the act of assembling an individual iPad. It sounds like a serious methodological mistake to me.
We should take into account the mass of work along the whole productive cycle of an entire batch of tablets (or laptop computers, smartphones, e-readers, whatever). As Tuco correctly said ^[18] in the discussion thread in which this essay started to take shape:

«One of the essential points is that the whole contraption could never be set to motion to produce one hundred iPads. You’ve got to make one hundred million at least. At first glance it could look like the intellectual work needed to develop the iPad software generates value by itself, irrespective of the rest of the productive cycle. But this would imply that the value generated by this intellectual work is independent from the number of iPads being produced. Actually it’s not like that. Were it not part of a cycle that involves the production with Fordist methods of a hundred million iPads, this intellectual work would generate virtually no value at all.»

Once this point is clarified, in considering how much labour gets embodied in a tablet one can:

1. Start from the retrieval of raw materials like lithium. Without lithium there would be no rechargeable batteries in our gadgets. It does not exist in nature in a “pure” form, and the process to derive it is costly and impacts on the environment. (By the way, 70% of the world reserves of lithium is at the bottom of Bolivian salt lakes, and the Bolivian government has no intention to sell it off. Apart from geopolitical issues, even earthquakes contribute to the mess ^[19]. This primary stage of the cycle is bound to get more complicated and require more and more labour);

2. Take into account the work (and the harm suffered) by those who work in the petrochemical industry producing the necessary polymers;

3. Take into account the work lacking any safeguard of the toilers assembling the devices (we’ve mentioned above the work conditions at Foxconn);

4. Finally, take into account the (undignified, noxious, almost inhuman) work of those who “dispose” of the laptop’s or tablet’s carcass in some African dump ^[20]. Being these rapidly obsolescent commodities, and particularly, commodities whose obsolescence is planned, this work is already embodied in them since the beginning of the cycle.

Taking all this into consideration, we will notice that a batch of iPads does indeed embody a large amount of labour (shitty, exploited, underpaid, toxic toil), and a large quantity of working time. Without a doubt, the latter is socially necessary working time: nowadays this is the only way iPads are produced.
Without this work, the applied general intellect that creates and updates software just could not exist. Therefore, it could not produce any value. It takes a tree to make a table, and it takes a factory worker to make a tablet —-and a miner before him, etc. Without factory workers and their labour, no valorisation of digital commodities, no Apple stock quote would be possible. Shareholders and investors trust Apple because it develops, enhances, and sells hardware and gadgets, and sometimes hits big by placing a new cool “jewel” on the market—-and who makes the jewel?

Whether a precise counting in terms of working hours is still possible, I cannot tell. Let me repeat myself: I am not a political economist. What I do know is that when we trash a perfectly working cell phone because a new model can do more things, we’re trashing a good portion of life and toil of a large mass of workers, who are often underpaid and booted in their butt into the bargain.

Collective Intelligence, Invisible Work and Social Media

What I am trying to explain has already been tackled by Marx in the Unpublished Sixth Chapter ^[21] of the Capital. The excerpt is particularly dense, since it was never edited for publication (my italics and underlining):

«The social productive powers of labour, or the productive powers of directly social, socialised (common) labour, are developed through cooperation, through the division of labour within the workshop, the employment of machinery, and in general through the transformation of the production process into a consciousapplication of the natural sciences, mechanics, chemistry, etc., for particular purposes, technology, etc., as well as by working on a large scale, which corresponds to all these advances [...]. This development of the productive power of socialised labour, as opposed to the more or less isolated labour of the individual, etc., and, alongside it, the application of science, that general product of social development, to the direct production process, has the appearance of a productive power of capital, not of labour, or it only appears as a productive power of labour in so far as the latter is identical with capital, and in any case it does not appear as the productive power either of the individual worker or of the workers combined together in the production process.
The mystification which lies in the capital-relation in general is now much more developed than it was, or could be, in the case of the merely formal subsumption of labour under capital.»

In a nutshell, Marx is saying that:

1) the collective, cooperative nature of labour is really subdued (the term is sometimes translated as “subsumed”) under capital—-which means that it’s a specific collective nature that did not exist before capitalism.
The “real submission” of labour under capital is set by Marx against the “formal subsumption”, which was typical of the dawn of capitalism, when the capital used to subdue pre-existent kinds of labour: hand weaving, the processes of agricultural labour, etc.
“Real submission” (or “subsumption”) means that the capital turns into productive force a social cooperation that did not pre-exist it, because workers, salaried labour, machines and new ways of transportation and distribution did not exist before capitalism;

2) the more advanced the productive process (thanks to the application of science and technology), the more mystified the representation of productive cooperation.

Let us look now for some current examples of this formulation: the production of sense and relations on the internet is not considered as productive force of cooperating workers; nor does the dominant ideology allow to recognize the work of a single person. All this production is fraudulently, mythologically attributed to the capital itself, to “entrepreneurial spirit”, to the supposed genius of the capitalist, etc. For instance, it is often said that Facebook exists thanks to Mark Zuckerberg’s “insight” blah blah blah.

Such production of sense is often considered, as Marx says, “productive power of labour in so far as [it] is identical with capital”. Let’s translate and apply this principle: the exploitation is hidden behind the appearance of an autonomous, non-subordinate work that relies on independent entrepreneurship and free agreements — even if a significant chunk of web content is produced by the subordinate piecework of several “ghostwriters”, hired by such companies as Odesk.com ^[22].

Does what Marx called the “Gemeinwesen” – ie the tendency of human beings to cooperate and be part of a community – really exist? Yes, indeed. It is always risky to use such terms, but if there is an “anthropological universal”, it is definitely that. “Companionable animal” (“Compagnevole animale“) is how Dante translates Aristotle’s “zoon politikon” (“Ζῷον πολιτικὸν“)—-and neurosciences are proving that we are wired for the “Gemeinwesen” (the discovery of mirror neurons, etc.).
No mode of production has “subsumed” and “made productive” the human tendency to cooperation with the same strength of capitalism.
The best example of this subdued cooperation — and at the same time of an invisible work that is nor perceived as such — is offered by social media.

Mark Zuckerberg. INSEGVENDVM DEINDE COSPARGENDVM CATRAME PLVMISQUE.

I am going to use Facebook as an example. This does not imply that other social media are “less evil”. The reason I’m focusing on Facebook lies in its being the largest, the most yielding and (as illustrated by the latest wave of new options and add-ons ^[23]) the most enveloping, persuading, and expansionist social networking site on the web. It looks like Facebook wants to engulf the whole net to replace it. It is the social networking site par excellence, and therefore it offers us the clearest example.

Are you one of the 700-and-something million Facebook users? Well, it means that you produce contents for the network every day: any kind of contents, including emotions and relations. You are part of Facebook’s general intellect. To put it short, Facebook exists and works thanks to all the people like you. What is Facebook if not a mass of collective intelligence that is not produced by Zuckerberg & Company, but by users?

In fact, you actually work on Facebook. You do not notice it, but you’re working. You work and do not earn—-others are making money with your work.

What turns out to be useful here is the Marxian concept of “surplus labour”. It is not an abstruse concept: it is the part of work that, albeit producing value, is not converted into salary but in profit for the capitalist, since the latter owns the means of production.
If there is profit, it means that there has been surplus labour. Otherwise, if all the labour were paid according to the value it creates—-well, that would be communism, a society with no classes. It is obvious that the capitalist must pay the workers less than the sum he earns with the sale of commodities. This is what “profit” means—-it means paying workers less than the actual value of their labour.
For several reasons, the capitalist may not be able to sell those commodities and make profits. But this does not mean that the workers have not provided surplus labour. The whole capitalist society is based on surplus value and surplus labour.

Your whole work is surplus work on Facebook, because you are not paid. Everyday Zuckerberg sells your surplus work—-that is to say, he sells your life (your sensitive data, your navigation patterns, etc.) and your relations. He makes several million dollars each day, because he is the owner of the mean of production, and you are not.
Information is a commodity. Knowledge is a commodity. In fact, it is the quintessential commodity in Post-Fordism (or whatever you want to call it). It is a productive force and a commodity at the same time, just like workforce. The Facebook community produces pieces of information (on individual tastes, consumption habits, market trends) that are wrapped up in form of statistics and sold to others and/or used for customising ads and any other kind of offer ^[24].
Moreover, as a representation of the most extended network of relations on the planet, Facebook itself is a commodity. The company is able to sell information only if, at the same time and incessantly, it keeps selling that particular representation of itself. That representation too is generated by users, but Zuckerberg is the one who pockets the cheque.

Of course, the kind of “work” described above is not comparable for toil and exploitation to the labour mentioned in the early paragraphs. In addition, Facebook users do not form a social class. The point is that we must always consider both the toil at the base of hardware production and the continuous, predatory embezzlement of collective intelligence taking place on the internet. As I wrote above, they are two “co-existent levels”. The production of value depends on both activities, and they should be pictured and analysed together.

There is no “Outside” vs. “Inside”

At this point, should somebody ask me, “Do I have to stay outside social media?”, or “Can I solve the problem by using only free software?”, or even “Should I avoid this or that device?”, I would reply that the question is ill-framed.
Of course, it is a good and right idea to create different, grassroots social media running on free software and not based upon the trade of sensitive data and relations—-but so is also holding a critical, informative presence where the majority of people live and communicate, perhaps trying to devise conflictual ways of using the existing networks.
We’ve suffered for too long the hegemony of an apparatus that “individualises” revolts and struggles, focusing mainly on what is or can be done by the single consumer (a subject who is continuously reproduced by specific social technologies): boycott, critical consumption, radical personal choices, and so on.
Personal choices are important, but:

1. Too often this way of thinking brings to a competiton on who is “purer” and more “coherent”. There will always be someone boasting choices that are more radical than mine: the vegan bashes the vegetarian, the raw fruitarian bashes the vegan, etc. Each one claims to be “further outside”, more “independent” from capital —-a picture that is completely delusional;

2. The consumer is the last ring of the distribution chain, and his or her choices are made at the estuary, not at the source. Perhaps we should recommend more often the reading of a “lesser” text by Marx, the Critique of the Gotha Program, in which he criticised the “vulgar socialism” focused on distribution instead of production.

I have being trying for a while ^[25] to explain that, in my opinion, spacial metaphors (such as “Inside” and “Outside”) are inadequate, because if the question is, “Where is the outside?”, the answer — or lack thereof — cannot but be paralysing, since the question itself is already paralysing.
It could be more useful to employ, and reason in terms of, temporal images. Focus on time, not space.

It is a question of understanding how much time of life – how many times and how many lives – is stolen by the Capital (stolen stealthily, given that such theft is represented as “the nature of things”), becoming aware of the various forms of exploitation, and therefore struggling inside the relations of production and power by contesting the proprietary structure and the “naturalization” of expropriation, in order to slow down the pace, break off the exploitation, and regain pieces of life.

There is nothing new in what I’m saying: once it was customarily called “class struggle”. In a nutshell: the worker’s and the employer’s interests are different and irreconcilable. Any ideology (whether corporatist, nationalistic, or racist) concealing this difference must be fought against.
Think of the dawn of the labour movement. Proletarians work 12 to 14 hours per day in brutish conditions, and the same conditions are shared by children who hardly see the sun’s light. What will they do? They will struggle. They will struggle until they wring eight-hour working days, pay for the overtime, health assistance, right of organization and strike, laws against child labour… They’ll take back part of their time and claim their dignity, until these achievements will be questioned again and a new struggle will be needed.

To realize that our relation with things is neither neutral nor innocent, to find ideology therein, to acknowledge commodity fetishism—-these are all achievements in themselves: we may still be injured and insulted, but at least we are not “injured, insulted, and loving it“. The injury is still there, but not the mockery of believing to be free within frameworks whereas we’re actually exploited. We should always find the dispositifs that subjugate us, and describe them while finding ways to put them in crisis.
The digital devices we use incorporate exploitation—-let us realise it. The Internet stands upon gigantic pillars of invisible labour—-let’s show it, and let’s show the struggles and the strikes. Although still little debated in the Western world, there are indeed strikes in China ^[26], and there will be more and more ^[27].
Whenever a loser becomes a tycoon, we should go and check how many heads he stepped on to get where he is, what work he exploited, how much surplus work he did not reward.
When I talk about “defetishising the Net”, I mean the acquisition of this awareness, which is the requirement to stay “inside and against”, inside in a conflictual way.
If we stay “inside and against” the Net, we may find the way to enter into an alliance with those who are exploited upstream. A worldwide alliance between “digital activists”, cognitive workers, and electronic-industry workers would be the most frightening thing for the bosses of the Internet.
The forms of this alliance, of course, are all to be discovered.

Wind turbines will find a place as history turns.

2011-10-06T11:16:00.001+01:00

When I started writing this blog 6 years ago, it was going to be on a theme 'the Greening of Galloway'. So here is something Green and about Galloway. Published in the Galloway news 6 October 2011. Pic is of how the Barcloy Hill wind farm it will look once built

Dear Sir,

Between 1973 and 1976 I used to take the ‘backroad’ bus from Castle Douglas to Kirkcudbright Academy via Gelston. It was a fascinating journey through an ever changing countryside thick with history. The road itself was built around 1800, replacing a tangle of medieval tracks which meandered from farm to farm. The old tracks would have been familiar to John Martin.

Born a cottar’s son in 1710, in May 1724, John Martin joined the Galloway Levellers. He lived at Lochdougan and walked to Bombie Hill to level a dyke. He was caught and fined for possessing a flintlock gun. John Martin died in 1801. In his long life, John witnessed the transformation of the landscape by the enclosures he fought against. Yet as his gravestone shows, John adapted to the new technology of the mechanical age by becoming a clock maker in Kirkcudbright.

Back then though, I was more interested in the future than the past. I had just discovered something called ‘radical technology’ which imagined an eco-friendly future powered by solar panels, windmills and methane digesters. This vision of the future was a response to recent events, when a sudden rise in oil-prices and a miners’ strike led to power cuts and a three-day week in the winter of 1973/4. To save energy, window displays in shops were switched off at night. I remember how dark and gloomy that made King Street in Castle Douglas.

The energy crisis passed and my copy of the Radical Technology Handbook has been gathering dust since 1976, the pages yellow with age. Then last week a glossy flyer for the Barcloy Hill Wind Farm dropped through my letter box., so I dug it out again. The proposed wind farm is just off the Gelston to Kirkcudbright road.

As the history of John Martin shows, the new wind farm will be part of a countryside in which change has been contested in the past. Yet, as his history also shows, such changes create new opportunities and new possibilities. The Galloway Levellers fiercely resisted the enclosure of the countryside, but within John Martin’s lifetime the new dykes and hedges had become an essential part of the ‘improved’ farm landscape.

In time the wind farms being built now will become as much a part of our countryside as the enclosed fields which were so strongly opposed in 1724. Likewise their economic and environmental benefits will gradually become more apparent. So that in the future, it will be as difficult to imagine a countryside without them as it is to imagine the countryside as it was 300 years ago.

Alistair Livingston

Spectacular Times

2011-10-05T18:26:00.002+01:00

Regional Study of Life and Society in Galloway and Dumfries

2011-10-02T22:34:00.002+01:00

LIFE AND SOCIETY IN DUMFRIES AND GALLOWAY: A REGIONAL STUDY

European Ethnological Research Centre, School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh

A major new project to study the changing everyday life of the people of Dumfries and Galloway, over the centuries. This ambitious study, believed to be the first of its kind in the UK, will result in publications in a variety of formats. It seeks to bring together research carried out by D&G inhabitants, academics and others sharing interests in such topics as the family, identity, occupations, farming, land management, fishing and maritime culture, industry, population movement, communications, local administration, sports, customs, place-names, religion, emigration and immigration, language, literature, folklore, art, music and song, and intellectual life.
In short, whatever affected the lives of the folk as described, wherever possible, in their own voice.

The project will be launched at two venues:

The Buccleuch Centre, Langholm Saturday 15 October 2.00pm – 4.00pm

and

The Catstrand, New Galloway Saturday 22 October 2.00pm – 4.00pm

Hegel's logic as an ideal heat engine

2011-09-28T06:56:00.000+01:00

Hegel's Logic as an Ideal Heat Engine

As neoliberal capitalism begins to eat itself, the middle class are about to discover that they too have always been urbanised peasants, confirming the insights of deep Marxism. No doubt shallow Marxists will realise this in due course as well. But could anyone -counterculturalist or Marxist have anticipated this outcome thirty or forty plus years ago? Put another way, did anyone correctly predict the future (our present) back then?

No, since such predictions are impossible. That the post-war consensus was likely to give way to a different socio-economic order could be anticipated but what that it would be replaced by neoliberalism could not be known. If it had been known, opposition to it might have been more focused and effective and prevented its success. So we would now be living in a different present. So a prediction that the future would be neoliberal made then would now turn out to be false.

On the other hand, if members of the counterculture could have developed skills of critical thinking and analysis as it became a culture of resistance, it would/might have become more effective as a source of alternative futures. Would/might have become the mainstream rather than the counter culture.

That thought is why I am writing this book. As an experiment to see if it is possible to work from a counterculture inspired perspective while thinking critically and analytically. Or at least to be as critical and analytic as I can without rejecting a countercultural perspective. Or at least not rejecting the countercultural perspective until I have thought about it critically. Since this is a work in progress, the possibility of such a rejection has to be remain available. At the same time, the possibility that critical thinking is a dead-end must also be available as an outcome. Finally there is action. Or does action precede thought?

In ‘The Problem of Dialectics’ Evald Ilyenkov connected the circularity of Marx’s commodity-money-commodity-money with Hegel’s word-act-word-act circularity. [The Ideal in Human Activity, California, 2009, p. 143-145]

At the risk of appearing rather stupid, these circularities seem similar to the chicken and egg problem. Which did come first? Thanks to Darwin and the palaeontologists, we know that chickens evolved from egg laying creatures- from dinosaurs. So there were eggs before there were chickens. Go even further back and there were living creatures which did not lay eggs. But if eggs are ‘things’, there were things (carbon and other chemicals) before there were any forms of life …

So there were acts before there were words/thought, commodities before there was money and eggs before there were chickens. Taken right the way back, we get the problem of how something emerged out of nothing. Hegel’s answer was that pure being comes before ‘something’ and that pure being is also nothing (or nothing is also pure being).

Pure being and nothing are both featureless with no internal content, continually fading one into the other and back again. Like a perfect heat engine, cycling between compression and expansion, expansion and compression with no output, no work done. A cycle of perpetual motion, which is also impossible so cannot exist.

For something to exist there has to be an additional factor. For Hegel this was ‘becoming’, the movement between pure being and nothing was the process of pure being becoming nothing and then of nothing becoming pure being. This process of becoming gives rise to determinate being- to something which is neither pure being nor pure nothing. With determinate being time and history begin.

Hegel’s Science of Logic was published between 1812 and 1816. In 1813, Peter Ewart’s paper ’On the measure of moving force’ was published in the Memoirs of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, in which Ewart asserted the equivalence of heat and work. This was a key step towards what was to become the new science of thermodynamics. Hegel’s logic can be modelled as a heat engine.

Peter Ewart was employed by Bolton and Watt to sell and erect steam engines in the Manchester region. In 1785/6 Ewart worked as an apprentice on the construction of the steam powered Albion Flour Mill in London. It burnt down in 1791 and its blackened ruins probably inspired William Blake’s poetic image of ‘dark, Satanic mills’.

Wall Street Occupation live

2011-09-25T09:18:00.000+01:00

Watch live streaming video from globalrevolution at livestream.com

Atom Heart Mother

2011-09-16T22:24:00.002+01:00

Hagar the Womb re-release out soon

2011-09-15T18:57:00.000+01:00

hagar the womb is for many, the missing piece of the uk anarcho punk scene. formed in 1981, hagar the womb was not a typical example of that scene, for they refused to conform to the dress codes and dour seriousness of their peers.

what first started as a sextet sporting three female vocalists, soon experienced a healthy bit of turnover. circulating through at least a dozen band members, hagar the womb was often identified by bright coloured artwork and outfits, as well as bringing an original and upbeat sound to an otherwise homogenous scene. a week after their inception, they were sharing a bill with the mob and zounds. hagar the womb would go on to play with the likes of the apostles, poison girls and rubella ballet before breaking up in 1985.

'a brighter shade of black' puts together both of their 12" ep's 'word of the womb' and 'funnery in the nunnery' as well as a common compilation favourite called 'for the ferrymen.' the latter recorded by poison girls sometimes bassist, pete fender in the poison girl's own x-n-trix studios. reissued for the first time and limited to 1000 copies.

Alternative radical technology

2011-09-13T19:36:00.003+01:00

Interview with Dave Elliot.

Could you tell us how you became part of the Lucas Aerospace movement and how the movement developed?

What practically happened, was that the Lucas Shop Stewards Committee emerged - which is a very unusual body, you have to remember. Lucas Aerospace had 17 factories scattered around the country: London, Luton, Birmingham, Burnley - oh, half a dozen others. Big, at least 1,000 - 2,000 - 3,000 people working at each of them. I think there were about 13,000 people altogether, something like that.

And in British trade union history there's always been a tension between craft-based unions, or skill-based unions, and general unions across groups of workers. The radical view has usually been that - well, across trades organisations are more politically important because they provide a collective which is larger than just individual, sectoral interests. And if it's across many plants as well within the same combine of company, that's quite powerful - of course, even more powerful if it's across lots of sectors as well, right.

So although there's been a split between approaches in trade unionism always in this country, the craft unions were sometimes the most militant because they had a knowledge of their own skills and a usually more clear consciousness of their own role in the world. Whereas the general unions were usually more prone to being co-opted and twisted. Some say. But for whatever reason, the Lucas shop stewards decided the only way to organise in the future was across all trades and across the whole combine, all 17 factories. So the white-collar and blue-collar workers' unions sort of grudgingly decided to join together - which, believe me, is no easy thing, because each factory had a long history of separate unionism between engineers and white-collar workers. You know, they wouldn't talk to one another usually. But the Combine Committee managed to get them together on each site and then across the whole thing - hence the words Shop Stewards Combine Committee. And the sort of issues they focused on were collective issues across the whole group, not just ordinary things like wages and conditions - traditional stuff - but first of all health and safety. Remember, this is the early 1970s, and health and safety issues were very big in those days. There wasn't much in the way of legislation. What actually emerged, if you happen to know your history, was the Health & Safety At Work Act 1974 as amended, which now sounds trite and old-fashioned but at the time was the high-watermark of trade union achievement to get a sort of national agreement on. It was no longer possible for management to maim and kill its workforce - it was a real step forward! And many people said that was Wilson's government's height - best thing they ever did. In the same way as people now say that the best thing that Blair did - we all know what the worst thing he did was! - but the best thing he did was the minimum pay. You know, in trade union terms that's probably been the only thing they got out of all that. Anyway, having got their feet on the ground in health and safety issues, they had sort of made contact with a few experts in universities. There were a few characters in various universities. Not so much universities, actually, as polytechnics. North East London Polytechnic, which comes to mind. And people like Charlie Clutterbuck, whose name figures in the history, who helped a lot on technical advice for the Health & Safety campaign against asbestos. And they were quite impressed that there were experts they could call on who were on their side in universities and colleges.

So they got in touch with me at some point and said, 'Well, you know all about products and engineering, and you know about all this energy stuff, don't you.' I said, 'Yes, a little bit, yeah!' They said, 'Well, we're thinking that the company's talking about or looking like it's going to talk about mass redundancies. And we want to resist this.' And I said, 'Well, you just go on strike.' They said, 'Well, no point, really. I mean, that's what they want,' they want to shut the factories down, you know! And at that time there was also this movement of factory work-ins, factory occupations, people taking over factories at the point of when a company was about to close them - which again had its limits, because you were sitting on a failed asset, basically. You could argue very strongly that the assets could be redefined and - but you're in a very weak position, because whoever's funded it initially presumably had withdrawn their support and the capital has run away. All you'd got was the physical building. At various points - I don't know if you know that bit of history - there were tens of thousands of workers occupying factories in 1976/7/8/9, that sort of thing - it was a big movement. Some of them -

In England only?

Just in England - and Scotland! Oh yes! The famous ones were the shipyards up in Glasgow - UCS it was called. But there were dozens. I made a film at the time. We went round there just to film examples. Most of them were thinking, 'Well, the best we could hope for is a co-op.' But us on the left would say, 'Well, yes, co-ops are very nice, but six years down the road you'll have to be competing with the other co-ops. You'll do exactly the same as the capitalist logic says, which is to cut your wages in order to compete. What's the difference? Unless you actually own more than just the capital at this particular plant, you can't control the market. It's the market you're up against, not so much - well, rival bits of capital. You know, co-ops, to our mind, were a bit of a deflection. Given that no one was talking about challenging the status quo, this was not going to be a revolution in which all the capital was seized and the government was taken over by radicals and - you know, this was not a revolution! This was just an advanced form of trade union bargaining, right! In which case we'd do it as an advanced form of trade union bargaining, i.e. you present demands to management as to what products they should be making in order to avoid job loss. The Lucas workers' leaders said 'Job loss is our problem. We're going to lose the jobs. I know you don't care, management doesn't care whether he sacks half its workforce. Presumably it'll start up another factory in Brazil or something, you know! But we do care. And we've got a vested interest in maintaining our jobs.' So what they did was survey the physical assets, what the plants had in terms of tools and machines like that, and what skills they had. And they did a sort of Domesday Book sort of detailed assessment of all the assets. 'Cos the shop stewards on site they know everybody. They're the sort of people that wander round the factory as of right - they can very rapidly build up a picture of the company. And they did a sort of audit of the company.

And then they sent a super-suggestion scheme around all the factories, invited everyone to put in proposals. Has anyone got any pet projects which they'd thought of, which they wanted? And all the little old grey-haired engineers from Burnley who'd come with, you know, a little box file with lots of yellow documents: 'Well, I did this when I was 25. I thought we could -' you know. Hundreds of ideas came out. I mean, some of them were crazy; some of them were not crazy. Some of the younger ones were obviously up to speed. I mean, some of these workers were top-end of the aerospace high-tech front - you know, unions like the draughtsmen's union. These were people as advanced technically as you'd get anywhere! So they asked me and a few other academics that they'd got in touch with also. And we got into various smoke-filled rooms and had big meetings. There's a big old country house up in Yorkshire called Wortley Hall. And we all gathered in this place once every six months or so, and produced all these documents. And I produced a report laying out all the energy things. And I mean, this was really challenging for me, because at that time the sort of things people were talking about was hippyesque stuff, basically: Welsh hill farms, small wind turbines, micro-hydro, bit of solar collected on the roof, and biogas - all really nice cuddly small-scale technology. And the Shop Stewards Committee, you could tell, were not going to be impressed, 'What?!' No, no, no, no!' So I had to dig a bit deeper.

So I started reading up about it, and this forced me to do a lot of work that I wouldn't have done otherwise. And I discovered that in the small print in back files in odd corners in government departments, what was the Department of Energy, had a small team doing this. And I went to one of their conferences and picked up some documents that they'd thrown away, literally from the waste bin!

I had lots and lots of stuff. I put it all together and produced this document, which actually, reading it thirty years later, is very good still, you know, [laughs] putting together all these ideas but retranslated it away from the fringe small-scale stuff. And the Shop Stewards Committee had a look at this and went, 'Yeah, there's some ideas. Some of these - yeah.' Example: Lucas the company had manufactured a small wind turbine, Joseph Lucas, a little thing for outback use, remote sites. The stewards said, 'Oh, we've already got a wind turbine'. On aeroplanes there's a machine that scoops off the wind in a little slot on it - it goes internally; a little turbine inside the aeroplane. This is for auxiliary power, if the aircraft loses battery backup. Most of the electricity in an aircraft comes from the engines, so like a car - there's a dynamo. But as emergency backup they have a little air scoop with a small turbine which provides enough power for the cockpit instrumentation and flight equipment, not like passenger lights and air conditioning! 'Let them rot!' But! But there's a ducted fan wind turbine, which is very advanced, you know. And they built this. And electric vehicles were the sort of thing we'd come up with. And I think it was Joseph Lucas who produced a small battery car. But they'd given up on it. But when you looked in their files, there were lots of ideas. So that the upshot, after about a year they shifted all these things through, laid them on top of a sheet with all the skills on and the plant and equipment and things - there was mapping as well. Burnley's very good on - Burnley did most of the prototyping work. It did one-off of things. It was used to do original projects -perhaps making three in a row and then testing them. They could do a lot of the development work on these. And we came up with quite a detailed plan, which is in about ten volumes - it's about that thick; and was never made public. All they made public was a thing, which you might have seen, which is called The Corporate Plan, which is much less detailed but has most of the rhetoric in there. The leading character in all this was Mike Cooley, who was the top shop steward, convener of stewards and head of combine at the time, who was a very bright man.

So the next thing to do was to put it to the workforce. So they held meetings on site, every site, and they held, you know, meetings and put it to the workforce and said, 'Look, you know we've had meetings before about wage bargaining. You know, we're going to put a 5% wage claim in. Well, there's a new one!' You know what the company says, that the reason for the redundancy problem was the Labour government's decision to throttle back on defence spending - which is a good thing!'

Partly 'cos they were overspent and the IMF had closed in on the UK - do you remember, they'd stepped in and said, 'Britain's got to cut its cost to meet its…' I wish it would happen now, in fact. It may well do. I mean, there's talk about dumping Trident and so on, but very much the same situation, in fact. It's interesting. Our current situation in this country - very similar to what it was in 1975 or '6 or something, isn't it?

So they said, 'Well, this is fine. We support the defence cuts, you know. On the other hand, our jobs are there'. Most of the aerospace jobs - not all - about half would be defence-related. They were also making things for the airbus and civil aircraft. But well over half - it depends how you measure it, but probably the most profitable projects, 'cos they're all cost plus profit-projects anyway, so they're much more lucrative, are defence contracts. Now, the stewards said, 'we always agree with cuts in defence, but obviously we need something to replace it. So these social projects, socially useful projects, you know, are the ones that we're recommending', that 'Are you with us?' sort of thing. And it got overwhelming support. 'Yeah, well, of course, if a union's going to try something, oh well, we'll back it!' 'Well, this may get nasty,' they said, ''cos I mean, management may not accept this stuff, you know. We know they always talk about suggestion schemes - these boxes in a corridor with cobwebs on that you put things in! But we're doing that really now, on large-scale. On the other hand, what we're doing is telling the management what to produce in their factories, and they won't like it!" 'So, they said, "we may have to use industrial muscle to back it up. So would you be prepared to take industrial action on the basis of the plan?' Most people said, 'Yeah, what's the alternative?' 'Well, we're out the door." They said, 'Yeah, okay, we'll do that!' So off they trot to the management. They present it across the two-sided negotiating table, and the management was trying to put round tables in, but they said, 'We want the square table! That's decided!'

So they plant it on the table. The management would say, 'Very interesting! We'll take it away.' And a few months later they produce, the management produces a response, which says basically - how do I put this politely: 'Go away and do something unpleasant to somebody!' It says it in nice terms, but it said basically: 'Lucas is a company based on high-tech products, like aerospace products. We know how to do this. This is our natural market. We have the sales, i.e. we've got government contracts locked in. We don't have to model the market or anything, we just cash government cheques! If there are any other products that are available to us, we would already have done it. Go away. We know what we're doing. Who are you?'

More voluble members of the management team said things like, 'It's management's right to manage. The right to manage. You keep talking about the right to work - fine, well, we'll accept that.' It's a nice dialectic. They said, 'We agree with you, you have this interest in the right to work. Fine! We have the right to manage. And you're not telling us what to make. If we do so, why are we here?' So the shop stewards said, 'We often ask that question ourselves! What do you actually do, apart from sitting in the management canteen and going on big trips around the world? We've never worked out what you actually do; Haven't seen you much on the shopfloor. You know where it is? Down there!' [laughs]

You have to remember the feeling in this country at that time was that shop stewards - this is the peak of the militancy of the shop stewards' movement in the UK - they almost ran the factories. Management wouldn't dare to go on the shopfloor without asking the shop stewards. If they came down, everybody'd just stop: 'What are you doing down here?' 'I've just come down to talk.' 'Oh! If you like, yes, all right, but…' The management would walk around. They weren't running the factories; the shop stewards would control everything! Not always - a lot of this is bravado, but some of it was true, you know. A lot of managers would be very frightened of stirring up anything. They'd just keep well away from the shopfloor.

So the shop stewards felt like they managed the factories anyway, so why didn't they go the whole hog? In sociological terms this is a sort of creeping incremental move towards social control that some syndicalist theorists had sounded off a lot about in the 19th century, you'll remember! But it was sort of happening. And when management… one or two managers quietly… I mean, you have to remember the culture in places like Burnley: there may be a class war going on, but areas like that, they probably all drink together, a bit, still. Even junior managers are probably fairly close to the ordinary workers…

And one or two junior managers would come across in the pub and say to shop stewards, 'There's some very good ideas in there! And if we can help at all, it's our jobs too, you know! And maybe we could find a way round this. If we weren't quite so confrontational about it, maybe we could find a way round this.' And they'd say, 'Yeah, but can you guarantee the jobs?' 'Well, no. We can save a small project as a lifeboat for some of us.' 'No, no, no, no! It's all or nothing.' But one or two quite sensible managers sort of were helping out on the sly, you know. Anyway, this brings us up to 1979 now. The campaign - the stakes are raised by the managements. There's a sort of phoney war period for a while then.

There was a long period of both sides girding their loins for what was an obvious showdown at some point, right. They tried one or two tricks. They had some sort of control over the shop stewards about how many hours they could take off at work. In theory shop stewards got 10 hours a week for union work, going off to do courses and things like that. And these were often on a grace-and-favour basis, especially the course-type things. So they started withdrawing these rights and just ratcheting up a bit of resistance. And they overstepped the mark at one point and precipitated a walkout at one factory, when one shop steward was told he couldn't do corporate plan work on company time. He said, 'But this is company work!' 'Well, that's a matter of definition!' 'I say it's company work! This is to save the company. This is not trade union work; it's company work!' 'No, no, trade union work,' you know! And so those sort of little battles.

And it was reasonably friendly for a while. Then '79 Thatcher gets in, November '79 - date etched on our memories, right. Within months attitudes changed completely. The management felt emboldened. Trade union legislation was put in to tighten up on things. So then they sack all the leading shop stewards - Mike Cooley, Ernie Scarbrow, from each of the sites. They'd pick each site off one by one. The top guy at Burnley, the top at Willesden, the top guys. Ernie Scarbrow was the Secretary of the Committee, the Combine Committee. His wife died during this period. And the day after she was cremated they invited him in for interview and asked him to move from Willsden to Hemel Hemptead many miles away - and he refused what they said was promotion and he retired. And he's a middle aged man, large, red face, sideboards, trade unionist and a lovely man. Solid as they come. He was almost in tears. It was horrible!

Mike Cooley, who's a senior design engineer, got offered a training job well below his skill level. Those sorts of things. They'd say, 'Well, we offered him - it's a bit of reorganisational stuff, you know.' They seemed to be confident now with the Thatcher government behind them that they could fight it out. And the stewards tried to organise a strike - well, they did: they had walkouts. In 1981 this was. And most of the sites came out. But it was - oh, it was lumbering up for the miners' strike of a few years later - '84, you remember the miners' strike? And the trade unions are feeling very exposed suddenly. They knew they'd got a very different situation - they'd got no Labour government. The Labour government during the period before then had not been conspicuously helpful, neither had the National Trade Union movement either. They had been pretty much on their own. But now they realised they were totally on their own! So they couldn't resist. Mike Cooley was sacked.

Why wasn't the trade union movement as a whole sympathetic to this?

I'll go back over that period. I talked earlier about trade union traditions of craft as a general way of organising, right? The TUC was always ambivalent about this. It had supported and been created by the craft unions, you know, the skill-based union. But increasingly its main membership were the big general unions: General Municipal and Boiler Makers, you know, Transport & General Workers' Union. They were all gobbling up the smaller unions. Anyway, so they'd become increasingly multi-union. But this is already unstable enough for them. They realised they had to organise across industries more effectively. So they set up things like the CSEU: Confederation of Shipbuilding & Engineering Unions, which was a confederation that the TUC has. And there are similar confederations in other big sectors. And that's the way they though they'd get it under their control. So it was a sort of syndicalism versus guild socialism! Syndicalist structure - big blocks of branches and the individual unions underneath, right?

Combine committees, bottom/up combine committees, organised by workers themselves across plants, weren't recognised. They were treated as unofficial and actually dangerous, because these members from all different unions - the general secretaries of the unions meeting in Congress House] had no line of control over them, you know! These are anarcho-syndicalistic, evil things! [laughs] And they were really hostile. It didn't help that Mike Cooley had been President of TASS, which was an early version of the Draughtsmen's Union. And TASS had then been taken over by a Communist Party member called Ken Gill, who was very militant, but had a traditional CP in approach. There was a slightly doctrinal debate too. I don't know if you know about English political history, the factional disputes between the various brands of Trotskyites and various - anyway, it got in the way a little bit.

Although the Combine Committee was really not political in that sense at all; it was not led by the Socialist Workers Party or anything like that! It was very much… I mean, Mike Cooley was obviously Marxist-trained and had immaculate credentials as a leftwing theoretician, but he was not heavy with it. He is not a Party card-carrying person. And they were all sort of to the left of the Labour government, obviously, but I wouldn't say any of them were insurrectory Left at all. But the media, of course, called him a Maoist - that was the simplest label they had! [laughs] But the trouble was he tried to go to China! [laughs] And the Chinese wouldn't let him in. It's a joke …! So we ran the headline in the magazine I ran it at the time: 'NO COOLEYS IN CHINA!' Anyway, some anecdotes for you to entertain yourselves with!

But from the TUC's point of view this was just a dangerous movement. So they would not support it. What they suggested, after being pushed a lot… I mean, ordinary trade union members and Labour Party members went to Labour Party Conferences. You know, the issue was raised: 'We have a motion in support of the Lucas workers' brave struggle! Card vote and - would T&G put up its two million vote? No! So I think it failed - it couldn't get through, you see, 'cos they said, 'Well, we can't support an unofficial combine committee." So eventually I think the Labour leadership had a talk to the TUC leadership, 'Look, something's got to be done about this!' They said, 'We'll put it through the CSEU (Confederation of Shipbuilding & Engineering Workers). They should submit their documents to them and we'll go through channels.'

So the Combine Committee rehashed all the document and put it into the CSEU, which then became extremely bureaucratic about it and eventually produced a big fact report, which was about all that happened! It just sat on it, basically, sat on it. And then they said, 'Well, we support this wonderful example of British spontaneity and original thinking and, we support this all the way! We give all support except actual anything credible! So by the time Thatcher got round that was the way it was. Most of the trade unionists in the combine had lost faith in the leaders of the trade union movement. They said, 'You know, look, here we are doing exactly what we're supposed to do, and we get no support whatsoever from them' They went to see Tony Benn, 'cos Tony Benn was allegedly the leftie sort of Minister of MinTech at one time, and then briefly head of the Department of Energy.

And he was massively supportive. You know, this is just the sort of thing he likes. But he said, 'I'm only a Minister and I can only do so much.' The Labour administration at the time had come up with this idea of planning agreements. It was that the trade union sides should be able to get corporate agreements on a tripartite basis. The government had set up this thing called Neddy: National Economic Development Organisation: NEDO. And little Neddies by sector, like the aerospace sector. And they produced planning agreements, i.e. a sort of long-term corporate strategic agreement between government and companies - which was sort of his idea as a sort of government intervention, but with a little bit of TU input too . So maybe you could submit the Lucas plan to that. But who sits on the trade union side? Well, the TUC! [laughs] Absolutely buggered! You're not going to get anywhere there! They weren't having it. Company wasn't having it, Labour Party wasn't having it, Labour government wasn't having it, the trade union movement leadership wasn't having it. So they knew by about 1979 that they were on their own. Mike Cooley said, 'We're on our own, lads.' You know, it was all lads, it was nearly all male.

At about this point I handed over partly to Hilary - Hilary Wainwright, who has since become the leading light on the Left. And the Research Council helped. In those days it was called Social Science Research Council - when there was such a thing as Social Sciences! As Maggie Thatcher said, 'You can't have a social science - it's a contradiction in terms, 'cos (a) there's no such thing as society, and (b) it's not a science.' So now it's called Economic and Social Research Council. They got rid of the word 'Science'! And the good old SSRC coughed up some money for her to spend, whatever it was, three years. So she spent three years working with the combine on a day-to-day basis. And I spent a bit of time - well, I was already involved, but I pulled out a little bit at that time. But I then made a film. We made an OU half-an-hour documentary on it all.

Anyway, so that moves us up to Hilary and I doing the book. Mike Cooley by this time was sacked. Phil Asquith sacked from Burnley. And Scarbrow. I think about twenty-odd altogether got the boot. The thing had collapsed, basically. In the 80's, and leading up to the time of the miners' strike, I think it was, they started sacking people at Lucas. And I didn't follow the story that much, but the company started introducing some of the products [laughs] in desperation! Not very seriously. And Lucas is a spent force these days. I mean, it contracted dramatically - Lucas Aerospace this is. The car side of it, which is the Joseph Lucas & Son, made batteries and electrics for cars. But that's on the skids too.

But when Thatcher came in and then the unions could see, you know, the world was changing and there was big unemployment, did they not then re-evaluate perhaps the value of this kind of initiative? So were there any other attempts: did any of the other unions start to play with these ideas?

The other trade unionists around the country heard the Lucas plan and said, 'This is an interesting new strategy.' But there were limits. 'Cos I mean, Mike Cooley, to the extent that he was a political person, was saying things like, 'Were we actually meaning to win? If you really, really think the company would have given in and let us produce these workers' products?' he said. 'Nah! We're doing it to demonstrate the limits of capitalism. So this is a big educational exercise.' Yeah. People could see reasonable demands being made by reasonable people in a reasonable way, backed up by trade power if necessary, you know. And they can see, 'Why is this? Why can't companies make kidney machines?' or, the energy issue was not that big in those days psychologically, 'cos it was not on the front of people's mind, but you know, some of the socially useful products were sort of dripping in pathos! Mike would go around hospitals and they did sort of see, they said, 'Look, this guy is going to die within six months 'cos they haven't got enough kidney machines.' And he said, 'We could knock one up in half an hour!' you see!

And we went round some housing estates in London and, you know, mould on the roof. Electric ceiling heating - remember electric ceiling? The most appalling idea anyone ever came up with! All the heat disappears, a tiny bit bounced down from the roof. You get mould all the way round, walking up to a thing like this, he'd say: 'This is stupid! We could make things to make this - you know, it's easy! All these problems are - you know, our engineers could solve all these problems overnight!' People hobbling along with canes and walking sticks. 'And with our telecheric systems, we could have a telecheric remote arm/leg system put together! We know how to do this!' So there was a real gut feeling and they had all these skills. 'Yeah, we make fighter bombers and missiles and things, but we could do all this sort of stuff.' I mean, I'd much rather do that, wouldn't you?

A lot of the unionists were - I'm not saying pacifists; no, although some signed up to a sort of CND-esque sort of worldview, but not militantly. But when it - they would say, , if it's my choice, I'd rather be working on things that would help people rather than things that kill people - wouldn't anybody! Some of the peace movement took over the Lucas campaign and tried to present it as 'horny-handed sons of toil demonstrating in favour of pacifism'. They weren't. At the beginning of the Corporate Plan, if you actually read it, it said: 'If the company could guarantee us jobs on aerospace and defence systems, fine.' It said that right at the front, to make it clear.

And then they said, 'But they can't. So we're doing the following.' Other trade unions - or the shops stewards' groups; not so much trade unions - faced with similar sorts of problems, reached the same sort of conclusion. Again, I happened to be involved - as I got more involved with the energy stuff, partly - I mean, I wasn't particularly interested in energy initially; it was just that the Lucas experience had forced me to get on top of all this stuff. And I got quite annoyed too, 'cos I thought… I used to - I happened to have worked in the Atomic Energy Authority and been a nuclear engineer, and my degree is in Nuclear Physics and things, and I'd done energy. But that's all. And the more I looked at this other stuff, 'This stuff's very good! Why don't we hear about it? Why do we hear about all this nuclear stuff all the time?' So the more I thought about it, I thought, 'This is silly! This nuclear stuff is dangerous, expensive' - you know, all these arguments, 'And this other stuff is much, much better. Why, don't we hear anything about this!'

I started going much more pro-renewables. I'm talking to trade unionists in the energy industry - I mean, Lucas was not really into it. By that time it was mostly based in Newcastle: Clarke Chapman, AEI, GEC C.A Parsons, the big engineering firms, who made the big parts of power stations, you know: 200 foot long - steel shafts for the turbines. Vertical jig-borers to build them and that's 40-foot machines! So I went up there to talk to the shop stewards at C.A Parsons, and we had a very nice lunch - liquid lunch! And went back to the shopfloor, a little room, and they said, 'What was it you were thinking we could make instead?' And I said, 'Windmills!' 'Out! There's the door! Sod off! Look at that machine there, look! Look at it! How can we build windmills?' Their idea of windmills was little, tiny! And there were other things. Yeah, combined heat and power. At the moment all the power stations were operating at 30% efficiency, chucking out all the energy into the sky. 'This is pretty silly, isn't it!' 'Well, yeah.' 'Well, you can use it all or, well, half of it and put it down pipes, big pipes, and heat up cities and things.' And other people had been saying the same things in Newcastle particularly, and had set up a campaign for district heating, like they have in Scandinavia.

And the stewards at Parsons were a bit more enamoured of that, although the plants were a bit smaller. But the showdown that occurred then - and this was sort of parallel with the Lucas story, right - was that the forward-ordering programme that the Central Electricity Generating Board has, the CEGB (the nationalised company) had meant that the power industry was on, effectively, cost plus contracts just like the defence industry. Every year someone from the Department of Energy phoned up Parsons and said, 'We'll be needing another power plant this year,' you know. 'Yeah, right' - or the other way round, actually: they were going like, 'We'll need another two gigawatts a year." Every year they built two gigawatts, which is one big, you know, Drax B type. And if you go up the motorway from London to Yorkshire, you just pass them one after another! They're huge.

The Drax hadn't been ordered at that time, but it was on the planning horizon. And the shop stewards at Parsons said, 'Yeah, but we've got Drax B,' you see. And they said, 'Yeah, but that would waste two-thirds of the power.' 'Yeah, I know, but it's on the order books. It's jobs for another five years at least, building it!' And then the government started getting a bit wobbly about it, because it became very clear that after the oil crisis all the UK energy demand fell off rapidly, you know, as everywhere. And the government after a while realised that they didn't need another power plant! So when Parsons and the rest rang up and said, 'All right for another two gigawatts, then?' they said, 'Er, well, no, actually. No, we don't actually need it. 'What? We've got 30,000 people up here waiting to build it!'

And anyway, there was a big trade union campaign emerging, led by the TUC 'cos it was traditional, and the CSEU, for Drax B. And they won. And it was said by Tony Benn at the time, 'We know we don't need it, but…' So we were - in terms of forcing the alternatives on, you know, we were sort of a bit blinded out by this, you see, 'cos they'd get this contract for another five years. And so when we went up again they said, 'Well, thanks for the help, but we don't need it anymore.'

Five years later the industry, effectively, collapsed. 'Cos after Drax B there was nothing else, you see, really. Nothing else. And now they're all gone. But for the next five years they suddenly realised that - and they phoned me up! Rushing up and down saying, 'This CHP stuff you're talking about - oh, and those windmills!' And they set up a campaign, at Parsons. And Clarke Chapman set up their own, so-called Workers Plans. It's the same sort of thing. Much less talked about. Same sort of documents-

Right. But it came from the workers?

Less so than in the case of Lucas. Lucas had a long time, they had plenty of time - it would take to about two years. And it was, as much as anything is, genuinely participative, you know, there really were groups on each site. But when you're talking about the shop stewards meeting and calling a gathering on Tuesday night in the bar, you know, I guess half a dozen people turning up - it's not exactly grass-roots involvement! There was certainly more grass-roots involvement at Lucas than there would be at Clarke Chapman - partly 'cos they were in a rush. And also the idea was now established: you know, they hadn't got to reinvent the wheel. And as they took a lot of stuff from people like me again, though I don't think I had that much effect on it, because when they looked at these things, they looked at my ideas basically and said, 'Mm, yeah, heat pumps and…' The funny thing is, thirty years on or whatever it is now, twenty years on, all this stuff now is front end of the agenda! (Yes, absolutely)

We were ahead of our time! Some work on heat pumps had actually been done at Lucas- as well as on some other projects during the period - when stewards were still partly in control of the factories. They had decided to start producing some of the products anyway. Because the shop stewards pretty much ran the place, they could - they called them 'foreigners' - you could do work in the plant. They just signed it off. I mean, the storeman signs off bits of equipment to each, you know - 40 square foot of whatever, sign it off. Management wouldn't know what was going on anyway. Hours are a bit harder, 'cos they go in timesheets, but they probably wouldn't notice, scribbled changes. But they actually managed to get some company support for the idea of heat pumps at Burnley- since there was a possibility of research funding for it. The heat pump was designed here at the OU. Heat pumps usually use electricity. You know, the fridges, they run like a fridge in reverse. You put the fridge and the heat pipes on the outside and you use electricity to pump heat into the house. You get three times more heat extraction using electricity that way. But that's all using electricity. The idea we came up with was to use gas instead. 'Cos there are gas fridges - there are some, used for caravans. Why not a gas-fired heat pump? It's lost in antiquity now, the advantages of it, but there were some! Ah, not noisy. 'Cos an electric heat pump like a fridge, that's noisy, 'cos the heat pump would run continuously pumping heat into the house, and you'd have a motor running, which is annoying, you know. But there are silent fridges now, most of them. So a gas-fired heat pump, which would have little flames inside boiling ammonia up and would be silent.

So anyway, the shop stewards came down and met the OU researchers. They took the plan up to Burnley. They knocked up the device.

And what did they do with them finally?

It was very much a prototype. I mean, it was very big, for a start, 'cos it was about the size of a telephone box, you know! Bigger, in fact. I've got a photograph of it somewhere. But just basic. We couldn't do it here - we haven't got the resources. But they'd got tools and things like that. Sadly no more cash was forthcoming so I think it was lost.

But another guy, Richard Johnson from a London College, got this idea of a hybrid vehicle which would run on rails and roads as well. It had rubber tyres, but little wheels that come down and sit on the rails, so you could just drive onto the road with your rubber tyres or drive onto the railway and little cams would drop down, and you could drive. When you did the logistics it did make a lot of sense in England. In Germany and lots of continental areas, your trams, the lightweight trams they have, they go into towns and out into the countryside and pick up speed. We can't do that 'cos our cities have all been - they ripped out all the trams a long time ago. But this thing would be a hybrid - you could have it running at high speed in between dedicated rail and between towns, and then off the rail and drive round the town. They built it, got the whole bus and just fitted the kit! Covered it with Lucas Combine stickers and used it for trade union campaigning work! It was wonderful! You didn't realise that? A full-size single-decker bus, you know with Lucas Aerospace shop stewards, socially useful product Mark 1! They built a few other things too. But no one was pretending we could go anywhere far with this.

What happened next after that? Mike Cooley then went on to be recruited by Ken Livingstone to head up a thing called GLEB, Greater London Enterprise Board, part of the Greater London Council, which had £2 million I think a year from the rates; the pre-Community Charge idea that people paid. 2p in the pound went into the local government. And it was meant for building toilets and, you know, public facilities, but actually adds up to quite a lot of money for somewhere like London! I think it was about £20 million for the GLC altogether they had. £2 million of that they gave to GLEB. And the idea Mike had was to do the same. He would go and ask the community what they want in the way of things we can help with. Well, trouble is, what they mostly wanted was decent healthcare, decent public transport and all the other things, you know. Well, that's not our area - you know, social provisions.

So what they set up was a whole series of technology networks. Each polytechnic in London was invited to set up an interface with their local community. South Bank Poly, as it was then, NELP and some of the others, dedicated ideally a room on the street with a plate-glass window, to invite people from the community in. And it happened, it really happened. There were eight, I think it was, eight leading TechNets. I took a year off the OU following the story, went down there to help set up one called the London Energy and Employment Network based at South Bank Poly.

When was this?

This - right up to the point when Maggie Thatcher shut us down, which was - oh, must be about '80s. I'd say '83//4/5/6, something like that, yeah.

And then she goes to the GLC -

They just annulled the election, yeah, of a mayor. Just shut the GLC down. It was amazing! Amazing! Anyway! But we do, we had - again, Mike and the rest, Ken Livingstone and Mike and I, I remember we used to meet at parties and the joke was that they were coming for us! We'll all end up in the White City stadium with guys on the top and - in a football stadium, just like in Chile, 'cos that had just happened in Chile, you know! 'So let's do what we can while we've got the resources!' We had real resources, you see, millions of pounds

And it worked fairly well. The TechNets, there was a lot of enthusiasm. The polytechnic staff would throw their lot in. They'd say, 'Oh, we'll help anybody! You know, we've got really lots of engineering expertise there.' And classic, you know: a cycle shop owner in South London came up with this idea of an electric bike with a hub motor in the wheel. And he sort of built a rough prototype, and brought it up to the TechNet and said, 'I'd like to build some proper prototypes.' And they said, 'Fine. This would be really cheap. We could sell 'em by the thousands. So we set up in a lab, built I think ten of them. It only cost - it cost about £30,000 or something. We took them to Raleigh. And we had the same problem as at Lucas: Mike and I sat around talking about this a lot. 'What are we trying to do?' he said. 'Capitalism doesn't work, right. So we're trying to help it, are we? The problem of risk seems to be their problem. They won't take risks inventing new products, 'cos it's too expensive. And so we babysit them - we take the product to them, we show them that it works, and we "Here's the market! Look, put these two things together. All we want you to do is to use your assets - you seem to have owned them for some reason or another! - to make these things. Isn't it easy! Look, product - market!" Workforce is on our side, we can guarantee the workforce will work, you know. What else do you need?'

So in that case they just didn't want to take the risk? There was a risk issue?

Well, I mean, the GLC were saying, 'What we'll try and do is, our job is to try and protect the conditions of people that live and work in London. And we'll do anything we can to help. We've got the money. We'll put risk capital in,' effectively. 'Should we be doing this? Well, I mean, no one else seems to want to! The capitalist system's meant to take risks - that's the only reason we think it's there, is to take risks!

I mean, you could have a philosophical debate, but some people really thought it could work. And some of the Lucas ideas have sort of taken root - well, they took root in the TechNets until they were closed down. And outside London the Sheffield people set one up in Sheffield called Sceptre. The Birmingham people set one up, a TechNet, in Coventry Poly as it was then, called UDAP: Unit for the Development of Alternative Products. So these were where the shop stewards went - these were all led by shop stewards from the diaspora of Lucas shop stewards around the country, they all set up these TechNets in local authority and Polys working together around the country - all over Newcastle, Birmingham, out of London - until they were all shut down with the shift of the Right.

But just going back to Raleigh. Raleigh weren't interested. I mean, they weren't prepared to take the risk?

They were managers like any others. I think they didn't like being told what to make. And also, well, maybe there's a little bit of the 'not invented here' syndrome. But it may not be as simple as I'm making out, you know. It may be that… We happened to have done a study of - I mean, I'm not a great bike expert, but my colleague down the road is, and happened to have done a study of innovation. And innovation in bikes goes through a clear phase. I mean, I did a lot of work on innovation theory here, right. And if you look at the history of pushbikes in the Edwardian or whatever time, there's this blasting of innovation. 200 different designs. And suddenly they collapsed down within 20 years to one design: the Raleigh of what was - simple, you know. And that's dominating for the next 100 years, until suddenly 1970-something the Moulton appears: a small-wheeled, foldable bike. Suddenly, whoom! And all the bike shops are full of many different bikes -, all these hobby bikes. So suddenly everything changed. But within a few years that stabilises and they just got out of that cycle, they were back into consolidating on their five or six fixed products. They weren't interested in exploring anything new. And there are hidden innovation tramlines like that. There's a lot of theorising about that. This was paradigm innovation, paradigm cycles, things like that. And we'd hit the wrong point. I don't know if we had hit the right point - I mean, like now maybe, the doors need to be opened to some of these ideas again.

Yes, I was going to ask: do you think that given all this concern, at least in terms of what politicians and others say, about climate change and the necessity to have new technologies - that these ideas could be taken up more easily today even by the trade unions and even through official channels?

I don't think that's true, you see. I mean, if there is a radical lesson in Lucas, you do need a lot more organisation and expertise than they realised.

Really? Technological expertise?

Yes. I think - I mean, some of us felt a bit guilty going up there. We'd go to sort of mass meetings, shop stewards groups, and have a chat, you know, 200 of them turn up at a meeting. And say, 'It's all right, lads, we'll just build windmills,' you know. And having now spent the next 30 years … trying to get this to happen for other reasons, it's not easy! And you need organisation. None of us - well, we didn't leave anything behind. That's what worries me. What the old TUC brass, when I used to know some of the nicer ones, who knew about what was going on, really understood. I remember in the lift - I was going basically to the TUC building a lot - someone said, 'You'll come back in 20 years' time and you'll be in this lift, and you'll understand why we're saying all this because the lift will still be here! The TUC building will still be here. What are you going to leave…?'

Well, but you did. You did. Because, as I said, we did interviews with different trade unionists, the official ones and in almost every interview they said 'Lucas Aerospace. Something like that has to happen. Because the idea of transforming production, of doing useful things, that are not damaging for the environment but on the contrary - I mean, that was probably the only time where it got so far, you know, as you told. And that's why people are still talking about it and trying to learn from it, to see what can be learned from it for today. So you left something behind already! Reading through the book, one of the impressions that I got - one of the real strengths was it was obviously bottom/up - it was grounded. And the role of communication with unions, there was a lot of cross-union communication. That's the impression that one gets. And as a consequence of that, there was quite a lot of solidarity. And in fact when that started to break down, then things started to fall apart a bit. But it seems that the notion of unions talking to each other in ways that perhaps they hadn't done before, perhaps don't do now so much, was an essential part of that.

Twitter! Yeah, there was that. It was interesting, the whole meetings thing. I mean, you got manual and clerical all sitting drinking, talking to each other. That was interesting. So you get those sorts of connections between groups that don't meet normally. So that's what was good about the trade union contacts, that breaking out of the particular sectional divisions. There's not enough of that. Not enough of that. Well, all these people were doing OU courses as well and that sort of thing. And I mean, I could see why they want to shut the OU down - it's dangerous.

I had in the back of my mind, if we had these networks, when times get rough you could call on them to help. But when the Lucas thing happened, right, I was very much on my own. Although there were lots of people in the alternative technology movement in the Sixties and Seventies, you know, when I approached them on Lucas and said, 'Look, here's our chance to do something real!' They said, 'Trade unions, workers - what's that got to do with us? We're trying to get away from that sort of thing!' They really didn't want to know. Or they didn't see it, I thought, 'Well, this is a chance to make this stuff - you can make this thing real, you know, not just sort of talk about it or do it in your backyard amateur stuff; this was all big. But they just said 'Oh, don't want to know!'

I got very little help. And the shop stewards said that too. They … mentioned it a few times. They did put out an invitation to help. But maybe, if maybe more outsiders understood what was going on they could have joined in. A little bit what I tried to do since then is build up this thing called NATTA, and that went to energy people, who I hope you can call on when you need them, there are people around. And that's available. It's a pleasant and positive thing to do: going around and arguing for renewables. So that's what this thing called NATTA was; still is. We produce this. It's on the web. That's provided me with an amazing resource, because it forces me to assemble this every other month, so it's really bang up to date! It's grey literature: it's breathless warts-and-all coverage. We'd never get any of this published in a proper journal, 'cos it's all too honest! And it's fairly reliable. I mean, it's accurate and quick. There is nothing else like it. If you're in need of a sort of update on renewables, politics with a sort of fairly radical line, then that's what you need.

There's a hell of a lot of crosscurrents floating from overseas. The big crosscurrent is still the fundamental one about whether you can crack climate change by technical means anyway. A whole lot of the Greenies, serious Greens, would argue that you probably can't and that you need to change, we need to change. Lifestyle stuff and massive reduction in quantity of production.

But even if you can get the technology right, there's still a human interface. And often you find that with the introduction of new technology we don't use it properly. So it's negated.

Well, absolutely, yeah! You certainly can't ignore that. No, I mean, I'd be the last person to say that! Peter Harper, who's my old friend from Undercurrents in the early days, he took off to Wales and set up the - well, he expanded the Centre of Alternative Technology. And he's entirely of the belief that the technology is fine, that's easy. But we also have to get our heads together and change ourselves and our lifestyles.

Grateful Dead 1972

2011-08-28T21:02:00.002+01:00

Infinite vortex

2011-08-20T11:25:00.002+01:00

Bloody revolutions and the price of bread

2011-08-18T15:40:00.000+01:00

Bloody revolutions

August is the cruellest month, setting fires which can’t be put out. So what does it mean, all this chaos and disorder? Perhaps it means nothing. A moment of madness unleashing a frenzy of theft. But if it means nothing, isn’t that more frightening than if it meant something? Is it possible for something to have no meaning, no structure, no cause, no narrative?

Which comes first, law or order? For there to be laws, there must first be some concept or idea of order, of regularity. In a totally random/chaotic situation there would be no regularities, no fixed points from which the idea/ potential/ possibility of laws could be generated/conceived.

The deep structure of reality is probably random and chaotic. Out of this structurlessness a tiny point of coherence randomly emerged- and survived. Out of the sea of infinite possibilities such a possibility may have occurred many times, to be rapidly extinguished. But when one such possibility survived, time and history could begin. An ordered and ordering reality could crystallise out of chaos.

We are the descendants of that initial moment of being/ moment of meaning and of the subsequent and similar emergence of life out of the lesser chaos of physical/chemical/ molecular reality. Only a moment ago- compared with the billions of years the universe and life on earth have existed- did we realise/ recognise/ discover the scientific laws which appear to structure and order reality. Even here there is still some confusion. Could other realities/ other universes exist with different scientific laws?

These are speculative questions, but have relevance to our situation. What is the relationship between the ordering of society and its laws?

For a start it is not very scientific. You can’t break the laws of science. If you do, and can repeat the trick, then the scientific law you have broken will have to be changed. The laws of science are describe what happens, based on lots of observations. The laws of society are based on what the people who make the laws want to happen (or not happen).

Who makes the laws? Once upon a time it was god/ the gods, or the ancestors through traditions. Until writing was invented about 5000 years ago, laws couldn’t be written down so they were passed on from generation to generation through myths and stories. Writing and written laws emerged out of a revolution- the farming revolution which domesticated plants and animals. This allowed people to settle in one place. First in villages, then in towns and cities. Domesticated crops like barley and wheat, rice and maize produced a surplus which could be stored. This allowed a division of labour and the beginnings of hierarchical society, where farmers produced food for people who weren’t farmers to eat.

The earliest known writing are lists of the food stored in a temple in Sumer in what is now Iraq. One of the earliest law codes also comes from Sumer. This gives a sequence in which there is first a new ordering of society - through the farming revolution- which gives rise to writing. Then through writing the ordering of society begins to become fixed in a set of laws.

So the phrase ’law and order’ is the wrong way round. First there is order, then there are laws. Laws on their own cannot create social order. When there is a ’breakdown of law and order’ this really means there has been a breakdown of the social order, a failure in /of society not a failure of the law.

Human beings are sociable animals. Breakdowns of social order are deeply distressing to us so there is an instinctive urge to punish those who threaten the social order. Against this instinct is our awareness or consciousness of history - the sum of knowledge accumulated since the invention of writing.

This form of social awareness/ collective consciousness has taught us that even the most seemingly stable and secure forms of social order can break down permanently. The world is littered with ruins of ancient civilisations and the recent past has added others. Some forms of social structure were overthrown by outside forces, but others collapsed in on themselves.

Internal collapse can take the form of a revolution. Revolutions occur when the cohesion of an existing social structure fails. This is often related to the laws of the existing social structure. A shift occurs when the relationship between social order and the law diverge so that laws are used/ enforced to try and check or hold back changes in the social order.

Revolutions occur when the attempts to hold back social change fail and a period of chaos (often involving a highly destructive civil war) ensues before a new form of social order emerges.

The problem with historical consciousness is that while it can make sense of / construct a meaning for events that have happened, it is not a predictive tool. Some outbreaks of rioting and looting precede/ lead to revolutions, but most do not. A lot seems to depend on the responses of the ruling elite. In Britain, Charles I lost his head and James II/VI lost his throne because they refused to compromise with the forces of social change and lost the confidence of all but their most loyal supporters.

The situation today is more complex and confused. The stresses on the social order are being created by global economic forces, by the neo-liberal form of capitalism. The fires of August were not ‘political’ -they were sparked by a short-circuiting of consumerism..

Since capitalism began in England, in late eighteenth/ early nineteenth century Manchester, that the breakdown of ‘law and order’ focussed on shops rather than political targets is significant. It means that in their moment of excess, those involved refused to be distracted by politics but went straight to the economic heart of the matter.

If actions speak louder than words, then this frenzy for the possession of fetishised commodities has revealed the poverty of politics. Or, as Guy Debord said in 1967 “ As soon as society discovers that it depends on the economy, the economy, in fact, depends on society.”

The laws now so strongly enforced on the looters are not based on the need to maintain social order, but on the need to maintain economic order and reflect the subservience of politics to economics. But, as first Hegel and then Marx explained, this subservience of the political ordering of society to economic ’laws’ is ultimately irrational, increasing rather than decreasing social disorder.

Marx anticipated that the progressive disordering of society would create the conditions for a revolutionary re-ordering. This would have to be a social rather than a political revolution, since simply changing the ruling elite would not alter the economic basis of society.

Until recently, the possibility of such a deep rooted re-ordering of social reality seemed unlikely. The neo-liberal form of capitalism seemed to be able to maintain itself through the production and consumption of an endless stream of fetishised commodities. While the accumulation of such commodities continues, problems with their distribution and consumption are beginning to arise.

Rioting and looting following the threatened closure of a circus can be discounted as just noise. But what if the price of bread continues to rise?

How to create a criminal underclass

2011-08-10T12:43:00.000+01:00

This is a pretty rapid response to the mass outbreak of criminal looting which has occurred in England. I have shoved my conclusion up front.

My conclusion is there is a direct link to the kettling of student protests earlier this year./ late last year. In particular the cutting of the Education Maintenance Allowance was a kick in the teeth to the students and their families who saw education as a way out of inner city gang/ drug culture. The cuts have also alienated middle class community workers, teachers, social workers etc who support the aspirations of such 'respectable' working class students and families.

By kettling/ criminalising legitimate protest, the seeds were sown for a nihilistic outbreak of illegitimate and genuinely criminal protest through mass looting. The mass media coverage of the student protests also informed thousands of young ( and not so young) people about police riot control tactics and how to evade them.

The brightest and the best/ hard working / aspirational of young people were treated like criminal scum a few months ago. Now the kettle has boiled over.

Observations.
1. The initial spark was the breakdown in police/ community communications in Tottenham over the death of Mark Duggan on Thursday 4 August. Duggan was shot dead by the police in circumstances which are not yet clear. The problem seems to have been that the Independent Police Complaints Commission are in charge of the investigation -so the police cannot comment on or discuss what happened. But the IPPCC have been involved in several high profile cases recently and are seen as a toothless body.

On Friday 5 August There was a peaceful protest outside Tottenham police station, but after five hours an attempt was made to disperse the crowd. This went wrong and turned into an angry/ violent confrontation. Usually such events are contained by the police within the immediate area. This did not happen.

2. Why did a minor riot turn into a mass frenzy of looting across London and other parts of England?

In ordinary riots, most of the rioters energy is taken up by attempts to attack the police - the police act as the focus for the rioters anger and aggression. Looting often occurs around the edges of such riots as people who are not interested in fight the police take advantage of the situation to steal what ever they can from nearby shops.

What has happened this time is that a large number of people have jumped straight to the looting. Rather than confront the police, they evade them, jumping straight to any unprotected shops. As soon as the police arrive, they move off somewhere else. In some cases, which is the most worrying/ frightening part, the shops are set on fire.

This pattern of looting with out rioting is new. It is more like what can happen after a natural disaster or a prolonged power blackout than any form of the ’political’ rioting. It is a breakdown of social order on large scale. It is not just a few criminals taking advantage of a temporary situation. Thousands of people have been involved.

3. Why now?

For ’law and order’ to have broken down so swiftly and across such a wide area (not just in inner city areas) there must be some underlying/ structural problem. Even if, as many say, a ‘criminal underclass’ are responsible, why has the behaviour of this underclass suddenly changed? If it is not the work of a criminal underclass, then why have so many ‘ordinary’ people suddenly taken to crime on such a large scale?

My suggestion is that the situation has been building up for a long time. The neo-liberal economic policies which Tory and Labour governments have pursued for the past 30 years have created unequal society. So long as the economy was growing, there was always the hope that individuals could escape (relative) poverty -through education for example. Under Labour, although they did not challenge neo-liberalism, they did make sure that some wealth, through public spending, trickled down to poorer sections of society.

Then came the 2008 economic crisis and the belief that public spending had to be cut. The Conservative/ Lib Dem coalition have pursued this policy vigorously. For the actual ‘criminal underclass’ (Marx’s lumpen proletariat ) such changes are irrelevant. But for the respectable working class and the lower middle class, it suddenly seemed like a door closing on their future. Wage cuts and unemployment loomed.

So long as this group felt they had some stake in the future, their positive values and aspirations offered an alternative to the nihilistic despair of the ‘criminal underclass’. They held in check and contained social disorder in their communities. An image is of control rods in a nuclear reactor.

For this huge outbreak of looting to take place, the respectable working class and lower middle class did not themselves have to do anything - they just had to stop caring, stop trying to keep a lid on things, stop trying to pretend at least some young people in their communities had a future.

A sign of the trouble to come came with the student protests earlier this year/ late last year. In particular the loss of the Education Maintenance Allowance. For motivated but poor school kids and students, this was a life line, a potential escape route from the world of the ‘criminal underclass’.

The heavy handed response to the student protests did not just affect those directly involved. It ‘sent a message’ to parents, teachers, social workers, community workers etc. The message was ‘We don’t care about your aspirations, your hard work, your attempts to help young people escape a life of crime’…

For thirty years the possibility for a better, a different life was a safety valve, releasing just enough pressure to prevent the riots of 1981 returning. By kettling the student protests, by treating the protestors as rioters and criminals, the police and government closed off that safety valve. They treated ordinary young people like ‘scum’ .

Now the lid has blown off the kettle.

Prog rock and the counterculture

2011-08-07T14:38:00.001+01:00

Rocking the Classics English progressive rock and the counterculture

Update - extensive preview on Google books- spotted by Rich Cross.

So what was progressive rock all about then? Edward Macan has the answers.
In Rocking the Classics - English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture (published in 1997) he does a pretty through job of taking prog rock apart to see how it worked.

I started buying records when I was 13 (1971/2) and soon had quite a few prog rock classics- Close to the Edge by Yes, Foxtrot by Genesis- which has Suppers Ready on it

Trilogy by ELP and a Van der Graaf Generator compilation… so I thought I knew all about prog rock. But I didn’t.

Macan is a musicologist and musician. Looking at the origins of prog rock, he finds them amongst the middle class youth of south-east England. As they were growing up in the fifties, future prog rock musicians would have listened to classical music at home- and been familiar with church (of England) music. A few, including Peter Gabriel of Genesis were choirboys.

So when they started to make music in the sixties, it was natural for them to draw on their musical roots, fusing classical and church music with rock. Their privileged background (fee-paying schools) also meant that they were drawn to the spiritual/ religious/mystical/ anti-materialism of the psychedelic counterculture rather than its radical politics. So if they had not invented progressive rock, they might have become dope-smoking trendy vicars…

Macan goes on to point out that even before punk came along to attack the trendy vicars of prog rock, the music had been criticised from its beginnings for its lack of ‘authenticity’ and its use of classical music themes and structures. Macan argues against this trendy sociologists approach to music. He points out that the same critics who said prog rock was ‘too complex, too grandiose, too ambitious’ also hated heavy metal because it was too dumb and stupid… and equally lacking in political consciousness.

So that if punk hadn’t existed, trendy sociologists would have had to invent it … which Ken Gelder [Subcultures Cultural histories and social practices, 2007, p 92-5] pretty much accuses Dick Hebdige of doing with his Subculture-the meaning of style in 1978. [OK Hebdige didn’t invent punk, but he re-constructed it for cultural studies text books.]

To finish up - here are a few quotes/ points from Macan’s book.

for the bulk of its participants the counterculture was ultimately more about spiritual transformation than political revolution. Materialism was seen as the root of all evil, the source of greed, violence, and social inequality...Indeed, the hippies were convinced that the material world was essentially unreal (an attitude that was strongly fostered by their drug use), and believed that attempts to change this exterior world were ultimately useless.(p.76)

Such beliefs in 'inner transformation or spiritual evolution rather than political activity' influenced progressive rock lyrics.

These beliefs also influenced the musical structures of progressive rock, which drew on classical music and

the Anglican liturgical experience made a profound impression on future progressive rock musicians. (p.150)

Classical music and the music of the Church of England was part of the social background of prog rock musicians and their first audiences - who were drawn from the prosperous/ comfortable middle classes of south-east England. The same background is likely to account for the lack of interest in the radical political aspects of the UK counterculture, which emerged (at the same time) out of the squats of west London- but no mention of this is made in the book so Hawkwind and the Pink Fairies [who were west London based]are not mentioned even in passing.

This idea of prog rock as emerging from a post-psychedelic English mysticism makes me think of John Michell's work- his books The Flying Saucer Vision, the Holy Grail Restored (1967), The View over Atlantis (1969) and the City of Revelation (1972) came out as prog rock was emerging - and were books I read while listening to the music. But again they are not mentioned by Macan.

In Albion Dreaming, Andy Roberts does discuss John Michell -and how his books provided the more mystical members of the UK counterculture with an alternative to taking the hippy trial to India - by locating powerful spiritual/ magical landscape in England itself, around Glastonbury and Stonehenge.

But rather than becoming part of the free festival circuit, the prog rock groups found a new audience in the USA. Macan suggests that this popularity came from the ability of progressive rock's English/ British 'nationalism'

provided a a kind of surrogate ethnic identity for to its young white [American] audience at a time when (for the first time in American history) the question of what it means to be a white person in America was coming under scrutiny (p155)

The huge popularity of Led Zeppelin's most prog rock song -Stairway to Heaven [eg no. 1 in a Detroit rock station poll of listener's favourite songs in 1978] is used to illustrate the point.

However by becoming stadium rock groups, the creativity of ELP, Gensis, Yes, Pink Floyd etc was slowly lost, so although their popularity peaked in the later seventies, their most artistically satisfying and 'progressive' albums were recorded between 1970 and 1974. Macan notes that Robert Fripp pulled the plug on King Crimson in 1974. Later Fripp said

The band ceased to exist in September 1974 which is when all English bands in that genre should have ceased to exist. (p.206)

Hegel on Acid part two

2011-07-25T00:01:00.001+01:00

Hegel on Acid part two: Barefoot in the Head.

Barefoot in the Head is a novel by Brian Aldiss published in 1969 and set in a post-war Europe. The war was fought with psychedelic weapons which had blown the minds of the participants. As a result civilisation is slowly collapsing.

Albion Dreaming is a popular history of LSD in Britain by Andy Roberts published in 2008. In Albion Dreaming, Andy discusses the secret experiments with LSD in the 1950s which inspired Brian’s fiction. When soldiers were exposed to LSD, military discipline broke down. However, the unpredictability of acid meant it was never used as a weapon.

Although never used as a weapon, the fear that exposure of the civilian population to LSD might lead to a break down of respect for authority/ discipline and hence of civilisation remained. When it became apparent that LSD was working its way into pop(ular) culture in the early sixties, the drug was banned in 1966.

Unfortunately for the British state, after taking acid some people became convinced that the intense reality it revealed could ‘immanentize the eschaton’- that is bring about an end to original sin and overcome the alienation of humanity from the divine. Eric Voegelin connected this originally religious belief, held by the Gnostics; with the philosophy of Hegel and the politics of Marx- but also threw in Nazism. [See The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 5 -Modernity Without Restraint, 1952/ 2000, 234 and 240-1].

The latter-day acid gnostics were determined to manifest the Absolute and so began producing huge quantities of LSD, which was then distributed through free-festivals. The British State reacted to this threat to obedience its authority by instigating Operation Julie in 1976/7 in an attempt to de-immanentize the eschaton. The doors of perception may have been slammed shut, but the gnostic horse had already bolted.

Voegelin’s anti-gnosticism was constructed in the infancy (crica 1950) of acid so was not originally directed against the pyschedelic prophets. However, as popularised by USA conservative William Buckley, Voegelin’s work later was - thus becoming part of Robert Wilson and Robert Shea’s Illuminatus Trilogy.

That Voegelin’s theories could be applied to the acid inspired counterculture suggests that it had a pre-history. In such a context the acid visionaries become revolutionary mystics- or mystical revolutionaries. Such figures and the movements they inspire tend to emerge in times of crisis- for example during the English (and Scottish and Irish) civil war which unleashed a host of religious and political revolutionaries.

One of Andy Roberts’ themes in Albion Dreaming is the conscious parallels that were made between LSD and the (atom) Bomb. So just as the political crises of the 1640s led some participants to believe they were living through the ’end times’ of biblical prophecy, awareness of a potential nuclear war gave an apocalyptic edge to the acid visionaries gnosis. Aldiss’ Barefoot in the Head neatly reversed this fear, so that the book’s survivors were living through a world suffused with psychedelic rather than nuclear fallout.

If a parallel can be drawn with the 1640s, then there was also a similar movement from revolution to reaction and the suppression of the Levellers and the Diggers- followed by the end of the Republic and the ultimate Restoration of Charles II…followed 28 years later by a further Revolution. But it still took nearly 300 years for the democratic ideals of the Levellers to be achieved.

Will it take that long to realise the creative visions of the acid inspired counterculture? Perhaps. The problem is that, as Hegel explained, ideas have to work themselves out- exhaust all their possibilities- before they can negate themselves.

One way of understanding what has happened and is happening is to interpret recent history as following on from the breakdown of the ‘post-war consensus’. In the UK, the need to fight WW2 as a ‘total war’ -involving the mobilisation of the civilian population- led to the post-war creation of the welfare state, the end of empire and the nationalisation of key industries. The counterculture emerged out of the first generation to grow up in the relative security of the post-war consensus. Their urge was to try to expand the boundaries of the possible, to be optimistic about the future.

Then in the seventies, the advances being made by the counterculture encounter its negation. This negation was neoliberalism, which used the rhetoric of ‘freedom from state control’ to start reversing the ‘socialism’ of the post-war consensus. Almost as soon as they had begun, the advances made by the counterculture were first checked and then slowly reversed. Over the past thirty years of the neoliberal counter-revolution/ reaction, even the preceding advances of the post-war consensus have been negated.

It is only now, as the neoliberal project begins to unravel, that the damage it has inflicted can no longer be denied. The problem is that the social and environmental damage which has been done over the past thirty years is so profound that the optimistic visions of the future embraced by the counterculture seem like delusions. They may have been possible then but they seem impossible now.

Possible. Impossible. Real. Unreal. Finity. Infinity. Understanding. Incomprehension. As with Voegelin and his gnostics, there is always the temptation to look for and find some bold explanatory principle which can make sense out of the otherwise inexplicable. After the immediacy of the experience/ text comes the memory. So with Albion Dreaming acid becomes the bold explanatory principle, inducing gnosis and creating a new wave of gnostics who mistake their visions for reality and thus set in motion a cycle of delusionary events which crash upon the rocks of the world as it really is.

Which is also (see Hegel on acid part one) Marx’s criticism of Hegel. Marx, with the benefit of Engel’s experience of industrial Manchester, could see that material forces - those of steam-powered industrial capitalism- rather than ideas, shaped and were shaping the world. Against the physicality, the solidity of a world hewn out of coal, cast in iron and dripping with the sweat and blood of human labour, the insubstantial poverty of Hegel’s philosophical speculations appeared obvious.

What was obvious then is less so now. The materiality of science has melted the solid world into emptiness and the physical has become the insubstantial play of strong and weak forces fluctuating in a vacuum. Even our conscious awareness of being selves in the world can be questioned. The ‘world’, the reality of space/time/energy has become an afterthought, a mental reconstruction generated by brain activity as a from of waking dream.

From this perspective, the confusions and contradictions of Aldiss’ Barefoot in the Head are a realistic description of the world as it is before it has been processed and interpreted. The psychedelic experience which Aldiss’ text represents is the world as it is. The interplay of Hegel’s pure being and pure nothing.

The randomness of this chaotic reality resolves itself into meaning through memory, through history. The recalled pattern of events assume/become a structure which then builds upon itself, reflects upon itself. It is a necessarily circular and evolutionary process. For the world as universe to exist it must be observed but for the observer to come into being there must be a world as universe. Evolutionary theory is essential since it allows for random fluctuations to achieve relative permanence and become more complex.

Except that evolutionary changes are tested for survival within an already existing environment. So what is being proposed here is the evolution of a universe through hindsight. The only universe we can observe is one in which successive random fluctuations cohere into the conditions suitable for observers to exist.

But if our observations of the world are brain activity which creates a seemingly realistic representation of the world…it all gets very confusing. Is there a point where physicists descriptions of reality will collide with neurologists descriptions of brain activity? My vague expectation is there will be such a collision and that A better understanding of Hegel may emerge/ be required.

In the meantime, since most people don’t worry much about problems with reality and haven’t experienced acid, they/ we accept the world as it appears to be/ is. Which is fine unless, for example, we really are living through a crisis of capitalism and/or are approaching peak oil and/or there is global warming. Even then, they are structural problems which get ignored until/ unless we are directly affected by which time they have become a crisis of survival.

To bring this meander back to Albion Dreaming, one of the practical outcomes of the acid inspired counterculture was the belief ’we are what we eat’- which led onto vegetarianism and organic farming. Related to this were ideas about self-sufficiency and alternative/ radical technologies. The UK magazine Undercurrents which ran from 1974 to 1981 explored these possibilities.

If these possibilities had made the shift from minority to majority acceptance and implementation, the threat of global warming would have been diminished. But it didn’t happen and the unsustainable fossil fuel economy prevailed.

Could there have been a different outcome? It is difficult to see how. Forty years later on, such a profound change still seems a distant prospect. The science of climate change may be solid, but the economic, social and political will is lacking. The status quo has an overpowering inertia such that only once the consequences are so disruptive that the necessity for change becomes overwhelming will a shift happen. But by then it is likely to be too late.

So that even if the counterculture was Hegel on acid, Marx’s materialist critique still remained. Hegel had expected / hoped that the French revolution (the breakthrough of Reason into history) would be the last revolution. Now that history had achieved consciousness/ consciousness had realised itself through history, the bloody nightmare of unconscious historical struggle was over. Guided by an enlightened elite, an era of liberation through peaceful progress was about to begin.

Marx was less optimistic. The French and British (industrial) revolutions had advanced the ‘consciousness of history’, but the bourgeoisie who had emerged as victors were only partly enlightened. They were an elite only interested in progress so far as it liberated them from the feudal past. A further struggle for liberation would be required. This would only be achieved once the bourgeoisie’s revolution had exhausted itself and revealed its limits and contradictions.

Marx assumed that there would be something left for the workers of the world to inherit at the end of this process. That the proletariat would be able to take over a going concern, not a burnt out wasteland. Marx’s assumption was based on his belief that the limits to capitalism would be internal, not external.

From the current (early 21st century) perspective, it seems more likely that it will be external rather than internal limits which will bring capitalism to its end. Marx developed his theories when coal was the main energy source of industrial capitalism. Coal required a large workforce to extract it and miners (at least in the UK) were militant Marxists. The shift to oil came after Marx. Extracting oil does not require a large labour force and so the balance of power shifted from labour to capital. Oil is also a more concentrated energy source than coal.

The twentieth century shift from coal to oil as the power source for industrial capitalism may therefore explain why it is only now - as we approach or are at peak oil- that capitalism is running out of steam. It may also explain the apparent failure of Marx’s analysis. The shift to oil has taken us past the point where the internal contradictions of coal based capitalism would have become critical. Beyond the point where a rational steady state economy and society could have been established.

To conclude with a nice line of wild speculation- about the time that the UK was shifting from a steam powered (trains, homes and industry) to an oil powered (motorways, plastics and jet planes) economy the acid revolution was beginning. Without oil, this would also have been the moment of a Marxist revolution.

Marx plus acid would have created a Hegelian transformation of historical consciousness…and we would all have lived happily ever after in a world without history.

Pinki /Tanith Stonehenge 84

2011-07-23T21:44:00.000+01:00

Hard to tell, but circled person could be Pinki/ Tanith inside Stonehenge Solstice 1984.

BR Standard 2-6-0 76073 at Castle Douglas 1965

2011-07-20T18:06:00.000+01:00

Gaelic in Galloway talk and introduction to learning

2011-07-15T14:12:00.002+01:00

From Gaelic Castle Douglas

Scottish Gaelic Adult Learners Day. Michael Ansell will be giving a talk on Gaelic in Galloway at Castle Douglas Town Hall on Saturday 3 September 2011. The talk will be followed by taster sessions for adult Gaelic learners. The cost for the day 9.30 am to 4.30 pm will be £10.

For more details contact Anndra Wilson via adult.learning@dumgal.gov.uk

Tanith / Pinki in print

2011-07-14T09:43:00.000+01:00

Acid punks and Albion's dreaming.

2011-07-13T20:15:00.000+01:00

Albion’s Dreaming the History of LSD in Britain by Andy Roberts. I got this book after Nic Bullen asked me about the Brew Crew recently.

I first remember experiencing 'Brew Crew'-esque behaviour when we were trapped by police on the road in Wiltshire near Stonehenge in 1985 when a few (maybe 5 or 6) swarmed up and down trying to scrounge anything they could (in a manner which would be called 'aggressive begging' now). I don't remember any of them at the Westbury White Horse festival a couple of days later though...

My interest is in just HOW it developed: how did the 'Peace' dream slip very quickly into the nihilism and 'medieval brigand' mindset of the 'Brew Crew'? Was it something to do with the climate within the 'Peace Convoy' (and environs), or to do with the surrounding political / economic climate?

The Brew Crew don’t get mentioned, but Chapter 12- Coming Down Again , pages 203- 211, covers the period from punk to acid house. There isn’t much on punk directly, apart from a mention of LSD (‘the most unfashionable drug in Britain at the time’) being taken at the Liverpool punk club Eric’s and how Julian Cope / Teardrop Explodes were on acid when they played Top of the Pops in 1981.

Since it is unlikely to surprise readers of KYPP that the UK government really did test acid on ‘volunteers’ (who weren’t told what they were being given) at Porton Down in the fifties, the most interesting aspect of the book is about the social impact of acid. For example (page 134) that acid inspired an upsurge of interest in whole foods/ organics/ vegetarianism. Another impact is connected to the ‘set and setting’ theory that the difference between a good trip and a bad trip depends on expectations and environment. Chapter 10 Bring What You Expect to Find shows how the first free-festivals emerged out of the desire to create spaces /environments which would facilitate good trips.

Night clubs and commercial rock festivals did not appeal to the sensitivities of acid sensitized hippies who were questioning the ideas of profit and control; wanting to be more than just consumers of entertainment industry product. There was a demand for events self-generated by the counter-culture, which would provide hippies with gatherings where they could live out their life-style with like minded people in a spirit of celebration and purpose.

The first such free-festival was Phun City held in 1970. Stonehenge became the most well known and Castlemorton in 1992 was ( I think) pretty much last.

At this point I was going to say that the reason there is not much on punk in the book is because punk was an anti-acid subculture. That punk was a counter-counterculture in which, to quote the Clash, that ‘hate and war’ rather than ‘love and peace’ was the reality/ currency punk had to deal with ‘today’.

I even had a quick look through the index to Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming (1991) and found not a trace of acid nor LSD. But then I realised the index had no entries for any drugs at all. The book then fell open at page 187 … and there was John Lydon talking about going to Louise’s (a Soho lesbian club) in 1976. ‘ We used to take acid at Louise’s. It heightens the enjoyment’ …

So acid was there right at the beginning of punk. Which means that the argument that I was going to make - that it was only after becoming entangled with the acid orientated free-festival/ traveller culture that punk subculture became part of the counterculture- doesn’t work.

On the other hand, the fact that a neat distinction between acid- taking hippies and acid- rejecting punks can’t be made is significant. What Albion Dreaming re-emphasises is that the sixties ‘revolution in the head’ had a profound impact on society. Briefly, it seemed that the imagination really had seized power and that it was realistic to demand the impossible. What drove this revolution was the potential of LSD to radically restructure perceptions of reality. The acid revolutionaries had a vision of a new world in their hearts and minds and were determined to realise their vision in the everyday world. Despite the best attempts by the forces of reactionary conservatism to force the genie back in its bottle, thanks to the acid inspired counter culture we still live in a more open and liberal society.

Albion Dreaming can therefore be read as struggle between open and closed minds. It can also be read as a struggle between idealists and realists. In this reading, punk emerged at/ out of the ‘come down’ from the counterculture’s collective acid trip. Punk’s scepticism towards the hippie counterculture was not a conservative reaction, nor (as the Lydon quote above shows) was it because punks didn’t do acid. Rather, it was a reality check.

Since Albion Dreaming is a history of LSD in Britain rather than a history of the counterculture, it would be wrong to criticise the book for failing to engage with punk. Yet, perhaps because of its scepticism of ’psychedelic dreams’, punk was able to renew and revive the counterculture as a culture of resistance through the eighties - for example the Stop the City protests of 1983/4- and on to the present where ’anarchist punks’ are still the folk devils blamed by the media for sparking trouble at demonstrations.

Or did all the acid at free-festivals turn punks into hippies? Maybe. But compared to the first wave of visionaries who thought acid would start a new religion, the hippies who travelled the free-festival circuit were pretty punk already.

AL Puppy

Hegel on Acid

2011-07-11T13:35:00.002+01:00

So which is it? Does the world as it already is shape and structure our understandings of reality? Or do our understandings of reality shape and structure the world? Karl Marx thought Georg Hegel had got the relationship upside down. Marx said Hegel had said that ideas shape reality. Marx said reality - the material forces of production- shapes ideas. What led Marx to this argument was his analysis of late eighteenth/ early nineteenth century political economy.

Marx was a doctor of philosophy. He wrote his doctoral thesis on The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature with an Appendix in 1841, ten years after Hegel‘s death. [Democritus and Epicurus were ancient Greek philosophers.] So a few years later, after his mate Friedrich Engels had drawn Marx’s attention to the ‘industrial revolution’ in Manchester and its importance, Marx started reading up on the theories of political economy which were supposed to explain this industrial revolution, he was shocked. They explained nothing. All they really did was provide a set of justifications for exploiting the labour of the workers in the new factories. It became obvious to Marx that the theory, the idea of industrial capitalism came after the system was already up and running.

So first came the shift from traditional ( originally medieval style) ways of making things to the modern, steam-powered factory way of making stuff and only then did political economists come up with their theories about how the new way was the only way to organise this form of production. Not only that, but the political economists then made out that this new way of organising and ordering society was natural and inevitable.

Although Hegel had also read up on political economy, but, by the time he died in 1831, the industrial revolution had hardly begun in a still ununited Germany. Hegel, influenced by the French Revolution which broke out when he was 19, saw history as a long struggle through which an idea- reason- would eventually achieve self-consciousness and thus liberate humanity. At the same time, Hegel also believed that the world was rational so the idea of reason was also material and physical. Optimistically, Hegel expected that having broken through into the collective consciousness with the French Revolution, the political, social and economic structures of the post-Revolutionary world would be based on reason and enlightenment.

Instead, the forces of political reaction, social conservatism and (industrial) economic exploitation prevailed. So Marx had to re-structure Hegel’s work to take into account these realities, focusing in particular on the irrationality of rapidly expanding industrial capitalism. To overcome this new form of unreason, Marx realised, would require a further revolution. Capitalism had become the new superstition which only a new enlightenment could banish.

Marx hoped that as it expanded, the internal contradictions, the irrationality of capitalism would become increasingly obvious and socially divisive until the proletariat were forced to organise its overthrow for their own survival. So far, Marx’s restructuring of Hegel has not led to this expected outcome, although the crisis of capital which began in 2008 shows no signs of ending.

While Marx’s revolution may happen corner, its continued delay is a reason to stand Hegel back on his feet again to see what results. This is no easy task. With Hegel we have a ‘foundationless’ or ‘presupposition- less’ account of reality. With Hegel the map is/ becomes the territory and the territory is/ becomes the map. Hegel’s account cannot be summed-up or condensed, it can only be re-presented in slightly different ways which themselves become as dense and complex as Hegel’s account itself. We set out to try and know the world, but to know the world we have to understand the world. To understand the world we have to enter into a relationship with the world. As this relationship unfolds our knowledge and understanding expands to encompass the world, so we become more and more conscious of the world. The end result is that we come to realise ourselves as the consciousness of the world understanding itself - through reason.

This may sound very close to a form of mysticism, but Hegel believed it was the Science of Logic and set out the workings of this science in minute detail over hundreds of densely written pages exploring each stage of the process. In mysticism there is usually a gnostic ‘jump’ to the conclusion- the whole is suddenly realised all at once and in its entirety. There are no such jumps with Hegel, he slows the process down so much that it becomes almost exhausting to read.

Which is a bit of a problem in this age of instant access. So I will take the very un-Hegelian step of jumping forward to Andy Roberts’ book Albion Dreaming - the History of LSD in Britain (London, 2008). The key suggestion I want to focus on is the influence of LSD/ acid on the UK counterculture. One example is that after taking acid, some people became ultra aware of the food they ate - which led to the organic/ whole food movement. Similar experiences stimulated interest in ecology and the environment - and all things Green.

Lumped altogether we get a radical and revolutionary counterculture which challenged/ rejected the structure of capitalism from a perspective closer to Hegel than Marx. The effect of acid was/is to challenge taken for granted preconceptions about the nature of reality in itself (in ourselves). To an extent, the commodification of nature and human labour under capitalism is (as Marx argued) taken for granted and unquestioned, so the acid inspired counterculture was a critique of capitalism and so Marxist…but the countercultural critique went beyond Marx to question -as Hegel did- notions of knowledge, meaning and understanding which had developed since the time of Plato.

This aspect of Hegel’s work, its deep structure, has generally been rejected as ’meaningless’. It is still too revolutionary, too radical to be accepted- since if it was accepted our understandings of ourselves and our world would be turned upside down. After reading Andy Roberts’ book I now wonder if what acid/ psychedelics reveal is a ‘foundationless’ reality similar/ equivalent to that so minutely constructed by Hegel in his Logic. This would also fit with the quantum information theory of reality explored by Vlatko Vedral in Decoding Reality (London, 2010). This connection can be established via Robert Ware’s Hegel The Logic of Self-consciousness and the Legacy of Subjective Freedom (Edinburgh, 1999).

The point of overlap between Ware (1999, pages 52 and 230) and Vedral (2010, page 198) is mathematician John von Neumann’s ’empty set’ theory where - quoting Vedral ‘The mind observes the empty set. It is not difficult to imagine the empty set also containing an empty set within itself. But hold on, now we have an empty set containing an empty set, so does this mean that the original set now contains an element (albeit the element is an empty set)? Yes, the mind has thus generated the number one by producing the empty set containing an empty set…’. Thus something has emerged out of nothing.

In his Logic, Hegel starts with pure being which is also pure nothing and something only emerges after pure being has (immediately) become pure nothing - so pure being precedes or rather becomes von Neumann’s empty set. This allows Hegel to get around the problem that Vlatko’s interpretation of von Neumann presupposes an observing ’mind’.

Although the experiment has never been ( is unlikely ever to have been) performed, engaging with Hegel’s Logic while under the influence of LSD - Hegel on acid- would reveal the revolutionary potential of the Logic. On the other hand, is there any need to carry out such an experiment? As Andy Roberts shows, acid has already had a revolutionary impact on society . And, as the ecological/ environmental impact of global climate change through global warming kicks in, the useful/truthful value of the acid inspired counterculture’s critiques of the dominant culture will become increasingly pertinent. The big problem is that through its attempts to suppress / repress the counterculture, the dominant culture has made it much harder - almost impossible- for alternatives to emerge, evolve and reclaim the future.

Punk as Counterculture

2011-07-08T22:42:00.001+01:00

What would have been the Fourth Windsor Free Festival in 1975

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force… The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar… as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, [they] rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.

Karl Marx 1845 The German Ideology
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm

I thought I’d throw the Marx quote in to illustrate how tricky it could get if I follow Gerard’s suggestion (see his comment on previous post below) that I should write a book. I spent 18 months sweating over a 50 000 word academic thesis on a suitably obscure historical incident and got conditioned to the style and the footnotes and bibliography, sources and references. So a book could end up pretty indigestible.

In the meantime here are some thoughts on punk as counterculture. One starting point is the ongoing global economic crisis. This could be capitalism’s final crisis, sparking a wave of revolutionary actions. Or it could be the beginning of a long recession which will create mass unemployment and force wages down far enough to ensure capital once more prevails over labour…

Complicating this crisis are two new factors. One is global climate change and the other is peak oil. Both are fiercely argued over because of their implications. These are the need for a global to shift to a low/ no growth economy which is not based on burning fossil fuels. The problem with taking any steps in that direction is that capitalism requires continuous growth - usually measured as gross domestic product - at a minimum of 3% per year… every year for ever and ever. Without this continual growth, there is no point in re-investing capital in the economy because over time you would end up with less capital than you started with - due to loss of value through machines wearing out, buildings needing maintenance and such like. For a proper explanation try David Harvey’s book the Enigma of Capital £8.99 from Housmans

So we really could be getting close to the end of the (capitalist) world as we know it. So it would seem sensible and rational to start planning for what will happen next. Lots of people are and have been doing so for a long time. But - so long as the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class - the capitalist class in our era- the ideas cannot get turned into actions. It would mean the ruling class planning their own downfall, making themselves and the whole social/ economic system they rely on for their power, redundant. Which is impossible for them to imagine so nothing new happens or can happen.

Wearing my woolly Green hat, I know that back in the early seventies there was a branch of the counterculture which ’talked about windmills and psychedelic dreams’ [Crass, General Bacardi]. There was more than talk, people tried to built their own wind generators and even attempted to a company- Lucas Aerospace- to adopt such alternative/ radical technologies. For a brief moment, sparked by the 1974 oil crisis the ideas almost became mainstream. [The 1975-78 Good Life tv sit- com was a popular culture response to this.]

Although it was mainly a rural phenomenon, there was an urban dimension which involved the reclaiming and transformation for community use of buildings (through squatting/ housing associations) and also derelict spaces. Meanwhile Gardens, established in 1976, is an example which should be familiar to readers of KYPP. The radical technology movement had a strong DIY ethic, which included how to guides to setting up your own pirate radio station.

There was also a global dimension. For years, until I passed it on to some folk living in a tipi in the back garden of a squat in Lewisham, I had a copy of Victor Papanek’s book Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change. The book included a description of a transistor radio, made from ordinary metal food cans and powered by a burning candle, that was designed to actually be produced cheaply in developing countries. Papanek also came up with an innovative method for dispersing seeds and fertilizer for reforestation in difficult-to-access land. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Papanek

While parts of the Radical Technologists’ vision led on to the Ecology Party, later Green Party, some of the DIY aspects were adopted and adapted by punk. Which is where things get tricky.

A central part of punk’s self-definition was that it marked a distinct and definite break with the immediate past - with the preceding hippy generation. ’I hate Pink Floyd’ as one well-known punk said on his t-shirt. Musically, punk’s short sharp statements could not be confused with prog rock’s 20 minute meanderings. Punk was a revolution, and 1976 was Year Zero.

As a music and style based sub-culture, punk was new and different and nothing like what had happened before. It was also, on the same grounds, dead by the end of 1977, to be replaced by something now called ’post-punk’. Such journalistic definings of punk are the first draft of history. Second and later drafts of history are also available. Just like 1984, history is always being re-written.

But who is writing the history? Usually it is the victors who get to (re)write histories, recuperating the past so it always conforms to the (ruling) ideology of the present. Ah, but what if the ruling ideology is bankrupt and about to be consigned to the dustbin of history? What if all that is seemingly so solid is about to melt into air? Well, then the countercultural historian can reconstruct an other version of what really happened. Not ‘the’ version, just one amongst many other possible versions.

Such a countercultural approach might look for continuities rather than breaks. It might see punk as part of rather than apart from a turbulent undercurrent of idealist/ materialist opposition to the material ideas of the ruling class. This would involve recognising a process of constant/continual challenging and questioning of the ruling ideology, the ruling class. So long as the ruling ideology can keep fracturing and fragmenting and suppressing these challenges, they can never achieve the crucial breakthrough to become the ‘thought’ or ‘consciousness‘, of a revolutionary class.

Through divide and rule -through the Brew Crew strategy- every challenge gets defined as isolated and unique, as a one-off. To get beyond this victor’s version of history, we have to step back and see the bigger picture. [Edward Thompson’s The History of the English Working Class is useful tool for learning how to do this.] Applying this countercultural approach to the history of the counterculture itself - as Ken Goffman did with his Counterculture Through the Ages, 2004 - punk ceases to be an isolated fragment of resistance to the ruling ideas of the age, but becomes a particular instance or moment of the counterculture.

So punk drew on/ defined itself against, the range of oppositional strategies available at the time to create a ’new’ set of oppositional strategies which then became available to/ were recycled back into - the ongoing counterculture.

It may appear that the counterculture has more recently died or otherwise ceased to exist/resist. It hasn’t. Its apparent absence from the present is a sign of the immanent demise of the ruling ideology. So profound is the crisis of the dominant culture that it can no longer effectively function as the ruling ideology - it is now splintering and fragmenting and so can no longer write the history of what is happening right here and right now.

You must be honest to live outside the law.

2011-07-04T18:01:00.000+01:00

Stacia and Hawkwind at Windsor Free Festival 1973

Just woken up at 4 20 am by the early morning light, still close enough to the solstice so not much darkness. Usually I would try to get back to sleep, but Nic asked me a question on Facebook about the Brew Crew which has burrowed its way down into the depths and re-emerged as a dream about people fighting at a gig which has woken me up.

Half- asleep it seemed to make sense but now half-awake in the greyness of dawn mist, it is more difficult. I think the answer to Nic’s question is ‘To live outside the law you must be honest’…Mick (Luggy) came up with it when we - the (Kill Your Pet) Puppy Collective- were looking for vaguely situationist style slogans to print on stickers to stick on bus stops or to send people who wrote in asking for ‘info’.

It is a Bob Dylan quote, but along with Mark (Mob)’s description of anarchy as being about trusting people, it summed up our approach to living outside of society. You could say that put us in the same political space as Margaret Thatcher and her ’there is no such thing as society’- but she then said ’there are only individuals and families’. But what we were trying to do was find an alternative between the (often intolerable/ abusive) constraints of family life and extreme isolation as individuals surviving in a city.

Punk was not an answer. As originally constructed by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm Mclaren, punk was a reaction to and rejection of the collectivist values of the preceding counterculture and its failure to turn dreams of an alternative society into reality. But as punk was propagated as a moral panic and punks became folk-devils, it attracted thousands of alienated teenagers to London. While many soon returned home, for others the enforced individuality of being homeless in a hostile environment led them to squatting. It was a steep learning curve and the pressure of survival forged connections with the pre-existing squatting scene.

Some of these connections -e.g. between the Clash and the big west London squats- had been there from the beginning. Others developed organically as punk squatters had to learn the same skills as hippy squatters.

By the beginning of the eighties squatting had become part of the punk subculture in London. At the same time punk was emerging and developing, the free-festival and travelling subculture was also emerging and developing. The Windsor Free Festivals which began in 1972 and ended, after violent police actions in 1974, were a major influence and inspired the Stonehenge Free Festivals which ended in similar circumstances 11 years later. While rock music festivals influenced Windsor, over in East Anglia folk-music and the tradition of medieval fairs inspired a different type of free-festival, more of a Green gathering than a rock music event.

Although the distinction between a small free-festival and a large fair eventually became blurred, their different origins meant there was always a tension between fairs and free-festivals. While the tensions came to a head in the mid-eighties and involved punk as a scapegoat, they had their origins in the early seventies and divisions within the sixties counterculture. As the optimism of the sixties counterculture began to fade there was a ‘back to the land’ movement’ which involved attempts to set up rural communes and adopt a more self-sufficient and ecologically sustainable lifestyle. The East Anglian fairs came out of this movement, but there were communes and back-to-the landers scattered across the countryside - including Wales and even south-west Scotland where a commune (now a housing co-op) was set up in 1972.

Others within the counterculture stayed in the cities, especially London, and became active squatters and/or engaged with the feminist and gay liberation movements. The Angry Brigade were the most dramatic manifestation of the post-sixties urban counterculture. Apart from the free-festivals, groups like Hawkwind, the Pink Fairies and the Edgar Broughton Band frequently played benefit gigs for political causes and also free gigs underneath the Westway or on Parliament Hill Fields.

John Robb [Punk Rock an Oral History, 2006] quotes Brian James, Rat Scabies, Captain Sensible and Mick Jones as going to and being influenced by these events. International Times, which was started in 1966, revived itself in the seventies and reported on punk. If the 1976 /Year Zero version of punk history is demystified, what emerges is an aspect of punk which was the next-generation of the seventies urban counterculture, urban guerrillas with guitars instead of guns.

According to Brig Oubridge [in George McKay, Senseless Acts of Beauty, 1996], 1976 was also the year the convoy was born- as a means of moving from one site to another from May through to September. Don Aitken lists the festivals and fairs- May Hill in May, Horseshoe Pass, Stonehenge, Ashton Court, Inglestone Common, Cantlin Stone, Deeply Vale, Meigan Fair and various in East Anglia and finally the Psilocybin Fair in Wales in September.

Before 1976, people had started using trucks and old buses to get to and stay in at the Windsor Free Festivals. But it was only once there were enough festivals to go to that the idea of swapping squatting for full time travelling could take off. It was a gradual process and required learning a new set of skills, although previous experience of squatting no doubt helped. Since the idea of travelling round festivals was contemporary with punk, it was first adopted by members of the pre-punk counterculture who had been teenagers in the late sixties and were now in their mid-twenties or older.

Most of the festivals and fairs listed by Don where not very well known, but as Stonehenge festival got bigger, it became a media spectacle, introducing thousands of people to the travelling scene, including punks. These punks confused their elders. ‘When I first saw punks at Stonehenge, I thought they were aliens’ I was once told. But by the time of the last Stonehenge festival in 1984, some of the punks has already become travellers. Looking back in 1989, John Pendragon told me that it was the influx of punks onto the travelling scene which ’destroyed it’.

Yet in 1982, too early for the punks to be blamed, an alternative community newspaper from Waveney in Suffolk was worrying about the impact of the ‘Peace Convoy’ on the fairs of East Anglia and how far the tolerance and openness of such alternative gatherings could be extended. A year later a different reality intruded, with a ’picnic not a fair’ to be held at the Lakenheath Peace Camp. McKay [1996, 42- 44] links the two together, pointing out that to blame the Peace Convoy for the demise of the Albion Fairs is to confuse symptom with cause. Brig Oxbridge’s 1976 convoy became the Peace Convoy when a group [including KYPP’s Tony D] moved from the Stonehenge festival to Greenham Common Peace Camp in June 82. In contrast to 1976, in 1982, ‘ everything vaguely or coherently alternative was more difficult to achieve under Thatcher [and] became more extreme in its response.’

Given the political climate - with mass riots in 1981 and the miners strike, mass arrests at Nostell Priory, eviction of Molesworth peace camp and battle of the Beanfield - even if no punks had become travellers, John Pendragon would still have been affected by the culture of repression.

To get back to Nic’s original question about the Brew Crew. Part of the answer is in George McKay’s summary of the Albion Fairs/ Peace Convoy conflict-

If the Peace Convoy turned up at green fair, its members would intimidate punters out of money, rip other fair goers and organisers off, squat the land a month after everyone else had left and when they did go, leave burnt out cars and piles of rubbish behind…soon the Peace Convoy put people off holding fairs altogether. [1996, 43]

So behaviour attributed to the ‘Convoy’ in 1982 was attributed to the ‘Brew Crew’ a few years later, and (at least by John Pendragon) blamed on the influx of punks to the travelling scene. A few years later again, when there were mass raves similar problems arose.

By way of a conclusion, the Dylan quote is useful. Where ever you have a group of people ‘living outside the law’ the problem of self-policing arises. Where such an alternative society is even vaguely anarchist in its form, there is a real difficulty of adaptation. Without obvious signs of external authority, an attitude of ’I will do what the fuck I want’ can emerge which is often destructive. Given time, so long as there are no underlying mental health difficulties, a form of mutual self-respect emerges - the honesty of the Dylan quote. With honesty comes trust and a sense of solidarity. Which is fine a for relatively small group working/ living together for long enough to become self-organising. But when the there are suddenly thousands of people at a free festival, or hundreds deciding to become anarcho-punks or travellers - it gets much much harder.

In late summer 1985 I was at a gathering to discuss the future of Stonehenge festival. There was a lot of discussion about how the festival could become self-policing, how to create a minimal order out of the chaos. In 1975 the feat was managed with the semi-official Watchfield free festival - see here

But in 1985 there was no way the Conservative government would adopt an idea used by a Labour government ten years earlier. Instead they id their best to make life as hard as possible for ’new age travellers’ and conflicts over Stonehenge became a annual event for many years afterwards.

Finally - in the early nineties there was a re-radicalisation of travelling and squatting through the road-protest movement- with large scale squatting on the M11 protest and ‘new age travellers’ active at Twyford Down. One of the travellers (who called themselves the Donga tribe) was Donga Alex and George McKay quotes her complaining about the protest being plagued by ’young people on dodgy chemicals who leave their rubbish and literally crap everywhere’… At Claremont Road (a row of squatted houses on the route of the M11) the protestors practiced some self-policing - evicting a group of ‘lunch-outs’ from the street…

AL Puppy

The Gaelic clans of Galloway

2011-06-29T12:23:00.000+01:00

Just uploaded ongoing research into the Gaelic clans of Galloway to the Academia website.

It is in two parts - a summary of the findings and the raw details.

Read it here.

Dumfries university campaign Part 2.

2011-06-09T15:44:00.000+01:00

Students seek councillor help for course campaign
Jun 8 2011 by Craig Robertson, Dumfries Standard Wednesday

COUNCILLORS are being urged to step into the row surrounding the scrapping of a university course.

Student campaigners have written to every elected member in the region seeking help in their fight to save the liberal arts course at Glasgow University’s Dumfries campus.
The university’s ruling committee will be advised to scrap the course when they meet on June 22, due to its small uptake. Proposals are in place to replace it with courses in primary education and the environment.
These are seen as more practical than the liberal arts course, which teaches philosophy, literature, history and humanities.
But a student campaign believes it would be a “short sighted” decision.
In a letter to councillors, many of whom backed a Standard-led campaign to save the Dumfries campus when it almost closed in 2007, the student action group state: “While we welcome the setting up of new courses such as the MA in primary education and the MA in environmental stewardship, and understand that teaching cannot stand still, it is difficult to understand how the growth of courses will be successful if the liberal arts MA, which incorporates humanities – courses that have been central to Glasgow University since its foundation in 1451 – and which is certainly essential to the success of the Crichton, is to be reduced to playing a minor role.
“The entire basis of the proposal is also flawed, since it has been stated by management that it is based on the failure of the Liberal Arts to recruit sufficient numbers of students, when actually this course is recruiting very good numbers of students.

“The university has confirmed in writing that this move is not based on financial projections, only on apparently low numbers of first choice applicants, which does not fit with the new strategy of the university.

“However, all but one of the other courses at Dumfries currently have to accept applicants whose first choice was not Dumfries, and the liberal arts course just happens to be the most successful at recruiting through clearing.

“To expect a rural campus to attract the same level of applicants as a large city-based one seems to be massively short-sighted, and to withdraw any course which falls under this category without allowing time to implement promotional strategies which could ease this situation is to doom the campus to failure.”

Current students would be allowed to finish should the cut go ahead.

The Mob play secret gig in Hoxton 4 June 2011

2011-06-05T21:18:00.001+01:00

Or how the Mob almost made the cover of the Daily Mail....

How did this gig come about so suddenly and with no notice to the public? Well, Mark and Leah were contacted by Allison of The Kills two weeks ago. Allison was organising fellow Kill member Jamie Hince’s stag party before he is wed to the Croydon super model Kate Moss. Allison inquired whether Jamie’s favourite ever band and main inspiration in his teenage years could perform at a (then unspecified) venue in London. Mark asked the other band members and it was agreed to perform in London at a free party organised by Allison.

Allison got busy organising a suitable venue whilst Leah, Tess, Steve Corr, Mick Lugworm and Penguin sought out suitable guests to invite. The band had 150 guests to invite and the logistics should have been a nightmare. Happily though almost all the people invited were old Mob followers who jumped at the opportunity to see this band perform for the first time in London since late on in 1983.

All the invited guests were asked to respect the one demand placed on them for entrance to the gig. The guests were asked to remain silent on any blogs, facebook comments and so forth about this gig, after all it was meant to be a surprise for the happy groom to be, and no one wanted to spoil the surprise!

For recording of gig and rest of this story go to Kill Your Pet Puppy

Glasgow University threat to Humanities in Dumfries

2011-06-01T13:07:00.001+01:00

BBC Dumfries/ South Scotland have a report as well.

1 June 2011 Last updated at 10:05
Dumfries University of Glasgow degree battle stepped up
Members of a student action group are stepping up their campaign to save the Liberal Arts degree at the University of Glasgow Crichton Campus in Dumfries.
The humanities course could be axed later this month in favour of environmental management studies.
Student representatives claimed the loss of the Liberal Arts degree would be a blow to Dumfries and Galloway.
However, the university said it was "carefully matching courses to local needs and national trends".
The move to cut the Liberal Arts degree is part of wider cost-reduction plans.
A final decision will be made by the university's court later this month.
Katy Ewing, a mature student on the Dumfries campus, said the course had been a vital educational lifeline for her.
"For me personally, I have a family, I am a mature student - I could not have gone away and studied at degree level anyway," she said.
"This was an amazing opportunity for me to study.
"It has changed my life, it has been really important to me personally."
She said one of the best parts of the degree was its flexibility.
"The humanities subjects are so core and the Liberal Arts degree is so transferable it's not like doing a vocational degree where you are locked into your path," she said.
"You are very employable after doing this degree."
Students have voiced concerns that lecturers could be lost and that people would have to leave the region if they wanted to pursue studies in the discipline.
More than 600 people have already signed a petition by the action group to save the Liberal Arts degree course.
A decision on its fate will be made at a meeting in three weeks' time.
A spokesperson for the University of Glasgow said: "Following an exhaustive and extensive consultation with all stakeholders, the university court will consider the recommendations in the report of the Liberal Arts consultation panel at its meeting on 22 June.
"The proposed changes at Dumfries Campus are in response to changing patterns of recruitment and the importance of carefully matching courses to local needs and national trends."

The Mob to play Brixton 18 November 2011

2011-05-25T20:44:00.000+01:00

All The Madmen Promotions are happy to announce ‘Weird Tales 2011’ at the Brixton Jamm, November 18th, 2011. With The Mob, Zounds, Rubella Ballet, The Astronauts, The Hamsters and Andy T. Tickets will go on sale, through the venue’s online ticketing service, in the next couple of weeks. We won’t be in a position to arrange pre-sales so please be patient and an announcement will follow.

From The Mob's Facebook page

Anarcha and Poppy If it dies we die

2011-05-23T23:04:00.003+01:00

Anarcha and Poppy If it dies we die

2011-05-23T23:04:00.001+01:00

After Bathing at Baxters

2011-05-23T22:43:00.001+01:00

Stonehenge 1988

2011-05-21T21:06:00.002+01:00

A short history of Gaelic in Galloway

2011-05-19T12:27:00.000+01:00

Gaelic in Galloway

Threave castle - built to control Galloway's Gaelic clans .

At the end of the eighteenth century there were 297 823 Gaelic speakers in Scotland. By the beginning of the twenty first century there were only 58 552. Concern over the decline of Gaelic persuaded the Scottish Parliament to pass the Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act in 2005 and to establish Bord na Gaidhlig in 2006. Bord na Gaidhlig’s priority is to increase the number of Gaelic speakers across Scotland, not just in the language’s traditional heartlands in the Highlands and Islands. As part of this nation-wide remit, in November 2010 Bord na Gaidhlig contributed funding of £45 000 to Dumfries and Galloway’s Community Learning and Development Service to support adult Gaelic learning in the region. Anndra Wilson was subsequently appointed as Gaelic Development Worker for Dumfries and Galloway.

For anyone with an interest in the history of and culture of Dumfries and Galloway, this is fascinating development. At the beginning of the twelfth century, Gaelic was spoken across almost the whole of Scotland. However, during the reign of King David I (1124-1153), the shift from Gaelic to Scots as the main language of Scotland began. While his predecessors had been based in Alba -Scotland north of the Forth-Clyde boundary- David’s power-base was in south-east Scotland. South-east Scotland had been part of the Anglian kingdom of Northumbria and the Old English speech of this region evolved into the language we now call Scots. As David and his successors expanded this ‘new’ kingdom of the Scots north and west, so the gradual decline of Gaelic began.

By the end of the fourteenth century most of the population of southern Scotland were speaking Scots, with Gaelic surviving only in Galloway, south Ayrshire and Nithsdale. In these areas, Gaelic was to persist for another 200 years. This survival of Gaelic is reflected in the thousands of Gaelic place names still found in the south-west.

Why did Gaelic survive in south-west Scotland ? The answer lies in the region’s distinctive history. When King David I granted Annandale to Robert de Brus in 1124, large parts of south-west Scotland had yet to become part of David’s kingdom. Nithsdale, Ayrshire, Renfrewshire, Wigtownshire and the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright lay within a vaguely defined region called Galloway. This region took its name from the Gall-Ghàidheil, the ‘foreign Gaels’. The Gall-Ghàidheil spoke Gaelic, but their culture had been strongly influenced by the Vikings or the ‘Gall’ as the Irish called them. In 1124, what is now called Galloway was only a small part of this larger Galloway and was ruled as an independent kingdom by Fergus ‘of Galloway‘. By 1160, Fergus’ rule was over and his kingdom, along with the rest of Galloway had been absorbed into the kingdom of Scotland- at least in theory. In practice, the situation was more complex.

Although the king of Scots was their feudal superior, Fergus’ descendants continued to rule Galloway as if it was an independent kingdom. Even after they settled ‘Norman’ (mainly Cumbrian) knights in Galloway, the real power of Galloway’s lords flowed from the loyalty of the region’s Gaelic kindreds or clans. The last lord of Galloway to rely on this support was Edward Balliol. Edward’s father was King John Balliol whose grandfather was Alan of Galloway (died 1234), the great-grandson of Fergus of Galloway. Between 1332 and 1356, Edward Balliol claimed the Scottish throne, but for most of his reign Balliol had to depend on Edward III of England for support. Balliol could rely on Scottish support in Galloway, but such support drew on the traditional loyalty of Galloway’s Gaelic clans to Balliol as their ‘special lord’ rather his claim to be king of Scots.

In 1356, Edward Balliol had lost even this support and his last toe-holds on Scottish soil - Buittle Castle and Hestan Island- and had to renounce his claim to the Scottish throne. This still left English troops in control of many castles across the south of Scotland. King David II gave Archibald the Grim the task of recovering these castles. Archibald was the illegitimate son of James Douglas, Robert Bruce’s most loyal supporter. In 1369, David II granted Archibald control of the lands ‘between the Nith and Cree’ to which Archibald soon added Wigtownshire, making him Lord of Galloway.

To control Galloway, Archibald had Threave Castle built and it was from Threave that the Douglas Lordship of Galloway was administered for the next eighty years. For nearly 500 years, Gaelic had been the dominant language in Galloway but now the region was ruled by Scots speakers and the social status of Gaelic began to decline. After the fall of the Douglases in 1455, King James II took direct control of Galloway, denying any chance of a Gaelic revival.

From the poetry of Walter Kennedy who lived in south Ayrshire, we know that Gaelic was still spoken in the Carrick district at the beginning of the sixteenth century. On the other hand, entries in the Wigtown Burgh Court Book shows that Scots was already established in the Machars by 1512. This suggests that Scots became the language of the more populous and prosperous lowland parishes of Galloway while Gaelic survived in the more isolated and less populous upland parishes, gradually fading away during the sixteenth century. The final disappearance of Gaelic in Galloway is likely to have been hastened by the Scottish Reformation. The Reformation became deeply rooted in Galloway and was propagated by Scots speaking ministers preaching from English translations of the Bible. By the seventeenth century, when the Covenanters and Conventiclers found refuge in the upland parishes, Scots was the language they spoke and English the language of their defiant declarations. If Gaelic had survived in Galloway, then Andrew Sympson would have recorded this fact in his Large Description of Galloway which he composed in 1682. Sympson notes distinctive features of the local Scots dialect, but makes no mention of the survival or even recent disappearance of Gaelic.

And yet, despite the disappearance of the language, Galloway remains a region named, created and shaped by Gaelic speakers. It was the Gall-Ghàidheil who gave the region its name and it was the Gaelic speaking people of Galloway who provided Fergus and his descendants down to Edward Balliol with their military power. Without their continued loyalty, only historians would recognise ‘Galloway’ as the name of a region.

Tracing the history of Gaelic Galloway is difficult due to the lack of written sources. There are a very few charters from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but these were written for Anglo-Norman land owners. Occasionally these charters reveal the existence of the Gaelic community, but only as witnesses, not as land-owners. The land-holdings of Galloway’s Gaelic ’aristocracy’ were derived from pre-feudal traditional rights and networks of kinship rather than feudal charters. By the time more detailed records of land ownership begin in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Gaelic was extinct. Only in a few places is it possible to reconstruct the likely pattern of Gaelic land ownership. One example comes from the north of Kirkcowan parish.

In 1684, a list of all the inhabitants of Kirkcowan over the age of 12 was drawn up by the parish minister. In the Barony of Sleudinle, which contains the Gaelic place name element sliabh, 54 people were listed living in 14 farms - Barnbrake, Craigary, Alderikallbarichan, Highdirry, Laighdirry, Craigmuddy, Killyallirk, Dirvannany, Munondowy, Dirvaghly, Dirmark, Alderickinair, Netheralderick and Inshanks. Although garbled by later Scots speakers, these are farms which were given their names by Gaelic speakers. The occupants of the farms would still have been Gaelic speakers in 1455 when, as the £10 land of Slewyndonal, the barony was amongst the lordship of Galloway lands forfeited to the Scottish Crown. In 1457 the lands were being used as pasture for King James II’s horses. Around 1590, several of the farms in the barony were surveyed by Timothy Pont and are shown on Joan Blaeu’s map of Galloway published as part of his Atlas of Scotland in 1654. The map can be viewed on the National Library of Scotland’s website.

Similar groupings of farms with Gaelic names, recorded in 1455 amongst the Douglas lands and which survived as small estates into the eighteenth century; can be found in Penninghame, Minnigaff, Kells and Buittle parishes. It is possible that these farms were grouped into small estates by the Douglases, but it is more likely that they simply took over the existing pattern of land-holdings. In 1324, King Robert I granted James Douglas most of the farms in Buittle parish apart from the lands of Patrick McGilbothyn. From analysis of James Douglas’ charter, Patrick McGilbothyn’s lands were located around Orchardton in Buittle. In 1456, King James II granted the £6 land of Arsbutil to John Cairns who had assisted James during the siege of Threave Castle in the summer of 1455. It was Cairns who built the distinctive round tower house at Orchardton and in later records the lands of Orchardton are identified as those formerly called Arsbutil.

What these examples suggest is that through its embodiment in patterns of land ownership, Galloway’s Gaelic culture continued to influence the region’s distinctive history even after Gaelic ceased to be spoken. By the sixteenth century there were hundreds of owner-occupiers of small estates in Galloway. These ’bonnet-lairds’ were supporters of the Scottish Reformation and their descendants were supporters of the National Covenant of 1638 and the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643. In 1641, the Stewartry War-Committee of the Covenant, made up of bonnet-lairds, assisted at the siege of Threave Castle which was held for Charles I. After the castle fell to the Army of the Covenant, William McLellan took stonework from Threave to build his tower house at Barscobe in Balmaclellan. In 1666, William’s son Robert was a leader of the armed uprising against Charles II which began at Dalry and ended in defeat at Rullion Green near Edinburgh. The McLellans were one of Galloway’s medieval Gaelic clans.

The last echo of Galloway’s Gaelic dualchas (heritage) was the uprising of the Galloway Levellers in 1724. This uprising was in response to the clearance of people from the land to make way for cattle farms and involved the demolition of the dry-stane dykes built to hold the cattle. Since the Levellers had armed themselves, troops were brought in to restore order. The Levellers uprising ended at Duchrae in Balmaghie parish in October 1724, when 200 were captured by the troops. Despite this defeat, the Levellers’ actions halted the process of clearance in Galloway. But then, towards the end of the eighteenth century, the physical heritage of Galloway’s Gaelic past was finally swept away. Merchants and traders, who had made their fortunes through trade with India and the Americas, created new estates and began to improve them. Inspired by the Scottish Enlightenment, the result was the neatly ordered landscape of enclosed fields, farms, planned villages and towns that has persisted to the present.

When these later layers are stripped away, an older landscape is revealed in the Gaelic names of places and of farms. This is the landscape of the kingdom and lordship of Galloway. History has preserved the names and the deeds of the rulers of Galloway in charters and annals, but the Gaelic people they ruled left no written records of their lives. Yet, although silent within history, their voices can still be heard everyday in the Gaelic names they gave to the places they lived in and knew. As more people begin to learn Gaelic in Dumfries and Galloway, their knowledge of the language will add a depth of understanding to perceptions of the region’s natural and cultural heritage. At the same time, as the struggle between the Bruces and Balliols shows, Galloway’s Gaelic heritage has also played a significant part in the shaping of Scotland as a nation.

Facebook purge UK dissent

2011-04-29T18:55:00.000+01:00

The following groups appear ( I have only checked a few) had their Facebook pages deleted on 29 April 2011.

Open Birkbeck
UWE Occupation
Chesterfield Stopthecuts
Camberwell AntiCuts
IVA Womensrevolution
Tower Hamlets Greens
No Cuts
ArtsAgainst Cuts
London Student Assembly
Beat’n Streets
Roscoe ‘Manchester’ Occupation
Bristol Bookfair
Newcastle Occupation
Socialist Unity
Whospeaks Forus
Ourland FreeLand
Bristol Ukuncut
Teampalestina Shaf
Notts-Uncut Part-of UKUncut
No Quarter Cutthewar
Claimants Fightback
Ecosocialists Unite
Comrade George Orwell
Jason Derrick
Anarchista Rebellionist
BigSociety Leeds
Slade Occupation
Anti-Cuts Across Wigan
Firstof Mayband
Don’t Break Britain United
Cockneyreject
SWP Cork
Westiminster Trades Council
York Anarchists
Rock War
Sheffield Occupation
Central London SWP
North London Solidarity
Southwark Sos
Save NHS
Rochdale Law Centre
Goldsmiths Fights Back

Poly Styrene 1957-2011

2011-04-26T23:17:00.000+01:00

From the great heaven she set her mind on the great below. From the great heaven the goddess set her mind on the great below. From the great heaven Inana set her mind on the great below. My mistress abandoned heaven, abandoned earth, and descended to the underworld. Inana abandoned heaven, abandoned earth, and descended to the underworld.

Recording of The Mob in Bristol April 2011

2011-04-16T09:31:00.000+01:00

Here is a recording of the Mob playing at the Fleece in Bristol 8 April 2011 plus a review by Andy Ashford and text by Mickey Penguin - on the Kill Your Pet Puppy site.

It is 30 years since the Puppy Collective and the Mob first met up - at a free gig in an adventure playground on Parliament Hill Fields in London.

The Mob No Doves Bristol 8 April

2011-04-11T09:49:00.003+01:00

This follows on from Witch-hunt below.

The Mob Witch-hunt Bristol 8 April

2011-04-11T09:47:00.000+01:00

History of All the Madmen Records

2011-04-08T21:55:00.000+01:00

Just found this on Bristol Archive Records

Includes an interview with me about ATM.

HISTORY OF ALL THE MADMEN RECORDS - 1978 - 1986

All The Madmen started off as a fanzine from Yeovil in Somerset, England, in early 1978. The name 'All The Madmen' was taken from one of the tracks off David Bowie's album from 1972, 'The Man Who Sold The World'. The fanzine was run initially by Geoff in collaboration with Mark, from one of the local bands at the time called The Mob. The fanzine also involved various local friends including Max, Wilf, Christine and Debs.

Towards the end of 1979 after returning from a tour of the UK and Holland supporting Here And Now, The Mob recorded their first studio tracks. Geoff decided to start up the label for the release of 'Crying Again' and 'Youth'. Grant Showbiz, who had been behind the mixing desk during the tour, handled the production on these recordings at the Crypt in Stevenage. This would be the start of a relationship between Grant Showbiz and the various bands on the All The Madmen label which would continue for many years.

MOB01 - The 'Crying Again / Youth' 7" was released in 1980 with the financial help of Max, and was the first record on the All The Madmen label. The local record shop in Yeovil called Acorn agreed to distribute it locally. Other sales went through mail order via the fanzine and at local gigs performed by the band. The address for all correspondence for the fanzine and the new label was Larkhill Road, Yeovil, which was where Geoff was living at the time. The sleeve was done by Wilf, a friend of Marks and Geoff, who would work quite closely with the label from then on. All The Mob's releases on the label featured Wilf's artwork. He also worked on product for other record labels including the artwork for The Mob's 'No Doves Fly Here' 7" released on Crass Records in 1981.

REV01 - 1980 continued with another release on the label by a Clevedon mod band, The Review - 'England's Glory / Greatest Show' 7". The Review was a band that was like the other mod revival bands of the day, but a cheaply recorded one, although the band were still very punchy. This record actually has ALL THE MADMEN printed labels on the disc, as opposed to the plain white labels of the previous All The Madmen release. On the sleeve it name checks The Mob, Wilf, Christine and Debs (Goodge) from Bikini Mutants (Debs was to become a founding member of My Bloody Valentine in the mid 1980's). If anyone gets to hear this record, listen carefully to the intro of ..Greatest Show.. on the B-side, sounds very much like the first few bars of ..Londons Calling.. by The Clash! Bear in mind that there is NO MAD01 catalogue numbers...MOB01 for The Mob and REV01 for The Review.

MAD02 - Later in 1980 the label released the explosive 'Witchhunt / Shuffling Souls' 7" which really got The Mob's name pushed out from their local tight knit community, and into the wider circle of punk bands and fanzine writers in the south of England. On the first pressing, the sleeve has the Larkhill Road, Yeovil address on. On the second pressing, the sleeve has the Seend, Wiltshire address...which takes us nicely to Andy Stratton (later of Null And Void) who shared this address in Seend with The Mob, at the time.

MAD03 - The single by Andy Stratton 'I Don't Know / Evil Minds' 7" came out in 1980. The drummer on this single was Graham, who was still a member of The Mob at the time. The single is an excellent punk pop affair, with the sound and feel of the Pete Fender and The Four Formulas 7" called 'Promises' which was released on Poison Girl's label Xntrix around the same time. Very Buzzcocks influenced. Pete Fender went on to record Andy Stratton's band Null And Void later on in 1982. Mark and Curtis of The Mob decided to move to London late on in 1980, Graham opting to stay in Yeovil, the band tried out various drummers to work with them including Adie from Null And Void. Max and Geoff had also decided to stay West Country bound, so Mark was looking after the record label, loosely, at this time. All went a little quiet for the All The Madmen label for a short while, but the Mob released, in cassette form only, a recording done on a tape recorder in Brougham Road, Hackney with the new drummer Josef Porter from The Entire Cosmos and Zounds, entitled 'Ching' which was basic, but good enough to sell at gigs and through mailorder. Then 'No Doves Fly Here' 7" was released on the Crass label in 1981, to huge acclaim.

MAD04 - This was the most adventurous project to date and was released in 1983. The album 'Let The Tribe Increase' by The Mob which originally came out in an reddish orange cover, with a poster, and displayed 'borrowed' artwork from Alternative TV's second album on the front cover! The Mob had been based in London for a couple of years by now, so the address they were using was c/o Freedom Press bookshop in east London. All the members were living in squats and co-op housing in west and north London, so needed an address they could rely on, in case they were evicted from their homes. The album is absolutely essential listening, and had wonderful reviews from the music biz hacks, and more importantly from the followers and fanzine writers of the day. This album got to number 3 in the indie charts and was featured in all the weekly music papers. Josef played drums on this album, which was recorded at Spaceward studios in Cambridge.

MAD05 - The Astronauts second album (first for All The Madmen) was released in 1983. Their first album on Jon Barnett's Bugle label was already an important product at the time. Jon Barnett was a free spirit who was hanging around with the band Here And Now, and squatting in west London. The Astronauts had played on the 'Weird Tales' tours in 1980, which also had bands like Zounds / The Mob / 012 / Androids Of Mu etc performing. The first Astronauts album 'Peter Pan Hits The Suburbs' was very good with astonishing artwork, but when All The Madmen released 'All Done By Mirrors', the resulting album was much tighter musically and is still probably the pinnacle of their long and varied experiences in the studios.

MAD06 - The Mob 'The Mirror Breaks / Stay' 7" was released mid 1983, and is one of the prettier songs, musically, released by the band. After a European tour in late 1983, The Mob split up and Curtis and Josef immediately carried on playing with their new band Blyth Power, which included Neil from Faction on guitar. Josef had already been playing (a soon to be Blyth Power song) 'Hurling Time' live with The Mob towards the last few shows. Mark was disillusioned with London, and felt no need to continue writing and recording songs for The Mob. He went quietly into the countryside with the peace convoy and in the process started to raise a family.

MAD07 - This was the 12" by Flowers In The Dustbin, which was released in 1984 by Alistair, a contributing writer for 'Kill Your Pet Puppy' fanzine, who was now in charge of the label after Mark had left London. FITD were a very colourful band that shared some similarities with The Mob. The structure of some of the songs, well written personal and conscientious lyrics, and some of the time, a complete shambles live, but in a very colourful and positive way. This five track 12" was a good debut for the band.

MAD08 - Later on in 1984 Alistair was involved in releasing the 'Rape / Thank You' 7" by Zos Kia, a band run by John Gosling who was also with Psychic TV at the time. He had first recorded with Psychic TV on the single 'Roman P' earlier in 1984 which was released on the French Sordide Sentimental label. John stayed with Psychic TV for a couple more years, recording and playing on the sporadic live performances. John was living in the same street as Genesis P-Orridge in Beck Road, Hackney at the time. The All The Madmen label was now based in Brougham Road, Hackney, which was just around the corner to Beck Road. Brougham Road was a street with one side colourful co-op housing, colourful trucks and coaches. The other side of the road was a large housing estate. The tenants on the 'colourful' side had agreed with Hackney Council to live in these broken up houses while paying very little rent. Short term housing that was looked after and improved in time by the tenants, but for a better description just a row of 'legal' squats. Min who voices the Genesis P-Orridge / Alex Ferguson produced track 'Rape' was also involved in the 'Kill Your Pet Puppy' collective at this time. The words for 'Rape' half whispered, half screamed and very stark, was a chilling account of what she experienced being abused in Australia, when she was younger. Min went off to join the peace convoy and was not involved in any further recordings with the band. John Gosling continued with Psychic TV and Zos Kia for a while longer, and Zos Kia had some releases on Psychic TV's own label Temple Records. The single for All The Madmen got decent reviews, and remains to this day, a very emotional track to listen to. It has a completely different sound and feel to the rest of the label's output. Alistair at this point turned over the general running of the company to Rob Challice, a Brougham Road tenant, who used to play bass in the band Faction, and who also contributed to the 'Enigma' fanzine. Rob was generously assisted by Sean 'Gummidge' Forbes, and a little later on, Mickey 'Penguin' who was upgraded to the official All The Madmen Records slave, which was previously Sean's postion!

MAD09 - Rob's first release came out in 1985, the 12" by Blyth Power entitled 'Chevy Chase', which was a success for the band and the label. As a three piece outfit the band had previously released 'A Little Touch Of Harry In The Night' a cassette on Rob's own 96 Tapes label. The tracks on this cassette were recorded in the basement of 96 Brougham Road where All The Madmen had their small office. The 12" though was recorded at Street Level studios with Grant Showbiz engineering. The band had expanded to a five piece a few months before the time of this recording; both new members were backing singers, Andy and Sarah. These singers improved the band's sound immensely, Blyth Power would continue in this line up until the end of 1986. The three piece version of the band was decent enough, but the five piece line up really were very popular at the time, and did very well. The band even got onto Radio One's afternoon drive time show with the single 'Ixion', with an interview on the show with Josef (although by the time the interview was aired and the single released in 1987 the band that actually recorded the track did not exist). Blyth Power gigs at this time were always enthusiastic and sweaty. It seemed that the band was always performing somewhere live every night.

MAD10 - This product released in 1985 by the label, was Clair Obscure's album 'Pilgrims Progress'. The band was a French gothic experimental / performance art band. If you could imagine Chrome partying with The Virgin Prunes while UK Decay mixed the drinks, then that would be a fair description! Not a bad live recording and quite different to the other albums on the label, but sold slowly in the UK, quite a lot of copies went out on export though, mainly to the U.S.A!

MAD11 - This was the third Astronauts album (second for All The Madmen) entitled 'Soon' which came out in 1986. This album was popular. One side there were new tracks (not quite as strong as the previous album's, but still reasonable) and the second side were tracks taken from the early 7" single's previously released on Jon Barnett's Bugle label (The 'Astronauts' and 'Pranksters In Revolt') - These tracks were well out of print by 1986 so there was a fair amount of interest generated on this release, just on the reputation of these tracks on the B-side.

MAD12 - 1986 continued and All The Madmen were back on track with Blyth Power's 'Junction Signal / Bind Their Kings' 7" & 12", another Grant Showbiz production. Both formats sold very well and the band continued to tour all over the place in the UK and Europe. A thousand numbered limited edition 7" were produced along with the four track 12".

MAD13 - Later on in 1986 the 12" reissue of The Mob's first single 'Crying Again' was released. The original and long deleted 7" was still being requested in a lot of the letters being sent to the All The Madmen office, and also by interested gig goers at Blyth Power performances around the country. Because of the success of Blyth Power, and the fact that the Mob's available back catalogue, 'Witchhunt' 7" (in a non foldout cardboard sleeve on these later repress copies), 'Let The Tribe Increase' album (in a blue cover now) and 'Mirror Breaks' 7" were all still shifting units even up to 1986, it was suggested by Rob that this was the right time to re-release these old track's and add some decent live recordings for good measure. The plan was discussed, master tapes found, and Wilf contacted. Wilf completed his last piece of artwork for a Mob release. This release sold out quickly as expected.

MAD14 - The last release of 1986 was a band with the strange name of Thatcher On Acid and the product was the 'Moondance' 12". A decent band hailing from Somerset who were squatting in South London, had a three piece line up, the guitarist with dreadlocks was the singer, more than a couple of Mob comparisons. The band stood up to the Mob 'rip off' tag, and became a very good outfit, which continued until the early 1990's. The 12" that was released was considered a bit flat and dated by the band at the time, but that is probably because the recordings were already about two years old by the time of the released 12". Most of the public thought it was a good release at the time and it sold well. The release also had some great artwork by Wilf and Graeme Coles. The band played all over the place, a lot of shared gigs with Blyth Power and The Astronauts. In April 1987 the band even supported Conflict at Brixton Academy in front of 5000 screaming punkers who went on the rampage in the streets after the main performance by Conflict had finished. All The Madmen had a stall in the venue on that night, got to sell quite a lot of records and shirts. Thatcher On Acid went back to playing to 200 people in pubs and squatted venues after this gig!

The label left Brougham Road late on in 1986 and went to 97 Caledonian Road in Kings Cross, N1. Known as crucial corner, it was graffitied as such; All The Madmen's office was above Better Badges and below Fuck Off records. Over the road was Rough Trade Distribution, which was quite handy, as their distribution network had been carrying and distributing All The Madmen stock since The Mob's 'Let The Tribe Increase' album. Around the same time as the label moved to a new area, Josef from Blyth Power had told Neil and Curtis that their services would not be needed, come the New Year. Andy one of the vocalist's was also leaving on his own accord. Therefore a new line up was found to tread the boards night after night from 1987 onwards. The new line up had Protag from The Instant Automations, and one of the organisers (with Grant Showbiz) of the bi-annual Meanwhile Gardens gigs in Westbourne Park, on bass (and more importantly, van!), old Mob and All The Madmen ally, Steve Corr from Yeovil on guitar, and Sian from The Lost Cherees as duel vocalist with Sarah, who remained from the original five piece line up. An album recorded with the original five piece line up was released after the split, got good reviews and sold well. The final original five piece Blyth Power gig was held at the Sir George Robey in Finsbury Park, London in December 1986 to a very large and emotionally friendly audience.

Brougham Road was eventually evicted from 1987 onwards to make way for 'decent' families as part of Hackney Council's regeneration program. Some tenants just got in their trucks and moved away with the peace convoy, or ended up in Spain. Some others continued squatting in other areas, or found new co-op housing schemes to add there names to.

All The Madmen went on for about a year and a half until the spring of 1988, releasing the following titles: Blyth Power 'Wicked Keepers' album and 'Ixion' 7" and 12" / We are Going To Eat You 'I Wish I Knew' 12" / The Astronauts 'Seedy Side Of' album / Dan 'An Attitude Hits' album / Thatcher On Acid 'Curdled' album / Hysteria Ward 'From Breakfast To Madness' cassette. Also released were a Mob and a Blyth Power pack with printed record envelopes, which held within; one 12" record and two 7" records for the Mob package. Then one 12" record, one 7" record, a t-shirt and badge in the Blyth Power package. These packages were mainly sold to customers abroad, who did not already have the available Mob and Blyth Power catalogue. Blyth Power with the new line up had several albums and 12" records released on the Midnight Music label from late 1987 to 1991. I have only put in information from 1980 until the end of the Brougham Road stay in late 1986...All The Madmen at Caledonian Road would take a lot more time, and I have run out of space on the pics section just going up to the last release on All The Madmen at the Brougham Road address.

If anyone out there wants to cover the latter stages of the All The Madmen label, then get in touch, I will scan a load of stuff and forward it to you. Thanks for reading

Mickey 'Penguin' x

INTERVIEW WITH ALISTAIR LIVINGSTON REGARDING HIS DAYS WITH ALL THE MADMEN RECORDS CONDUCTED BY THE SADLY MISSED LANCE FROM CRINGER

What do you think was so important about The Mob?

The Mob were important for us because they were like a musical version of KYPP. In terms of wider importance it is difficult to say. The Mob were part of the scene and offered a creative alternative to the restrictions imposed by the identification of Crass with 'anarcho-punk'.

Were there other bands as close to the collective as The Mob?

Probably not, but variously Blood And Roses, Hagar The Womb, Brigandage, The Turdburglars, The Barracudas, Zos Kia, Flowers In The Dustbin, Charge, The Associates, Rubella Ballet... it was a shifting mix of relationships between members of the collective and individual members of bands rather than between 'the collective' and 'the groups'.

At the time, did you relate to much of the other anarcho bands?

Thinking about it, and with reference to 10. above, the question misunderstands the situation at the time (1979/ 85). What there was a punk version of the UK/ London late sixties / early seventies counterculture where there were several thousand self-confessed punks, with a concentration in London. Within the counterculture there was no clear boundary between 'audience' and 'performers', between fanzine writers and fanzine readers. I remember this most clearly from gigs when one group stopped playing they would get off the stage and return to the audience whilst the next group to play would step out of the audience and onto the stage (sometimes there wasn't even a stage). The Kill Your Pet Puppy 'collective' were indistinguishable from the 'punk collective'.

How would you describe the Centro Iberico to someone today?

The Centro Iberico was a place where the Do It Yourself ethic of punk prevailed, where anarchist theory was everyday practice. Where there was no boundary between audience and performers. This was challenging - there was no-one in charge so for something to happen (e.g. to build a stage and wire it up) those with enthusiasm to make it happen, had to enthuse enough others to get the job done. There was no 'product of alienated labour', no 'spectacle' to be 'passively consumed'. The biggest challenge was how change attitudes - how to persuade alienated youth not to trash place and get them to realise they 'owned' it. It was a problem punks with a squatting background had faced many times before... The Centro Iberico was about what happens after the revolution. How do we find ways to move from destruction of the old world to the creation of a new one? I remember the experience as exhilarating and liberating - the closest equivalent being the atmosphere on Claremont Road in 1993/4 during the M11 Road Protest Campaign. See http://www.geocities.com/londondestruction/claremont.html for a bit of historic background

How did you get involved with All The Madmen?

My involvement began in the kitchen of Puppy Mansions, Westbere Road, West Hampstead, London in early 1983. Mark Wilson of the Mob was there and he mentioned the idea of the Mob making an album. At the time I was being trained as a 'Project Engineer' by the London Rubber Company (makers of Durex condoms) so I applied a bit of the theory I was learning to the problem - break down a project into small do-able units and cost/ time them. So Mark began scribbling down the costs etc. of making an album on a scrap of paper - cost of studio time, cost of mastering disc, cost of art work, printing costs, pressing costs - which he knew from The Mob producing their own records like Witch Hunt.

Mark then managed to get Rough Trade (who distributed The Mob's singles and knew that their 'No Doves Fly Here' single on Crass' label had been a best seller) interested. Rough Trade told Mark that if he could finance the recording costs, they would cover the other costs in return for a distribution deal.

Mark then got myself and others (Mick Lugworm for example) to contribute to the recording costs and The Mob went into the studio and made the record - Let the Tribe Increase. With the help of Tony D, Mick Mercer and other fanzine writers who were now writing for music papers (NME, Sounds, Melody Maker) and magazines like Zig Zag and Punk Lives, the album got rave reviews and sold well beyond expectations. This meant that by the end of 1983, The Mob had several thousands pounds held in credit by Rough Trade. Mark had the idea of using this money to put out records by other groups on their All The Madmen label and asked me to help manage the project. This I did, though it meant going from being paid ��90 a week at London rubber to getting ��15 a week �Ķ

Unfortunately, after releasing The Mirror Breaks as a single, The Mob then split up. None of the other groups (The Astronauts, Flowers In The Dustbin and Zos Kia) on the label were able to sell more than the 1000 copies of their records to break even�Ķ so the money slowly began to run out. See following questions for next part of this story.

Who were Clair Obscur and how did they wind up on the label?
What was the story with their live LP?

I can't answer these questions, I had parted company with All The Madmen by the time they were on the label.

Who were Zos Kia and how did you know them?

Zos Kia were a Psychic TV spin off group and in their early days crossed over with Coil. Psychic TV (1981) in turn came out of Throbbing Gristle who were contemporary (1976) with punk. Genesis P Orridge of TG / PTV lived in Beck Road in Hackney and there was a strange cross-over between Brougham Road (a squatted street where Mark of the Mob and many others including briefly former Bader-Meinhof gang member Astrid Proll lived and with a link to the original hippy-traveller Ukrainian Mountain Troupe group) and TG / PTV�Ķ

Min was the direct link, she was 'sort of' a KYPP collective member, I first met her at a Mob gig at Parliament Hill Fields / Hampstead Heath in summer 1981- which was also our first encounter with The Mob themselves. Another link was through Mouse, who was briefly a member of PTV and a friend of Coil.

Anyhow, through the various overlaps and connections, Zos Kia put out their single Rape on All The Madmen.

What was the Rape 7" about? I remember it being extremely shocking at the time.

The words of Rape were a graphic description by Min of when she was raped in the Australian outback whilst on a family holiday there. I am not sure how old she was at the time, about 14 I think. It was a traumatic experience. I cannot forget her describing it to me a couple of years before the record came out. She later told me she only listened to the record once. It was a personal exorcism. It is still intense and powerful, far more so than the 'distanced' explorations of extreme realities of other PTV or TG songs. After touring with Zos Kia, Min became a traveller and was at the Beanfield (Stonehenge Peace Convoy) police riot in 1985.

What were your main duties running the label?

I was the only employee / manager so had to do everything.. I did the marketing and promotion, kept the accounts and paid VAT, hung out at recording sessions, replied to fan letters, organised printing and pressing, liaised with Rough Trade / the Cartel ( co-operative distribution network). Boring stuff.

Did you enjoy running the label?

Yes I did. Way back in 1972, long before punk, I became a fan of Hawkwind (after hearing their single Silver Machine and In Search Of Space album). Hawkwind and the Pink Fairies were part of the late sixties/ early seventies UK counterculture and I wanted to be part of that�Ķ but by 76/7 punk was the scene and I wanted to be part of that as well. Running All The Madmen in 1984 and being part of the Puppy Collective seemed to me to be the fulfilment of my teenage dreams�Ķ The Mob were like Hawkwind / Pink Fairies (or the Sex Pistols and Clash) and KYPP was like International Times and OZ or Sniffing Glue.

But then the reality was also a necessary disenchantment / disillusionment. Like the Gertrude Stein said about Los Angeles - 'when you get there, there is no there there'. In theory I was 'there' at the heart of anarcho-punk, of the early eighties 'post' punk counterculture �Ķ but it seemed strangely empty .

How did Rob Challice wind up running ATM? Why did you quit?

I did not quit, I was asked to leave by Joseph (with the support of Curtis) of The Mob who got annoyed when he asked Rough Trade for some Mob money and was told that I was the only person who had access to the funds. Which is fair enough, since no formal agreement about how money earned by The Mob via the deal with Rough Trade should be paid out had been worked out. They left a letter on my desk saying Rob Challice was now in charge of ATM. I took this as a dismissal / redundancy letter. The only thing which annoyed me about this was that it meant that the Anarcha And Poppy record never got released. I thought this was a brilliant piece of music which should have been released�Ķ which it now has been.

Between the KYPP, ATM, Centro Iberico, etc. what do you think was your main interest and your best memories of the times?

My main interest was Kill Your Pet Puppy. I thought it was brilliant then and I still do. I put it up there with sixties counterculture magazines like International Times and OZ. Sod Crass and their idiot ilk, KYPP was the real thing, they were just background noise. KYPP was PUNK. ATM and the Centro Iberico were interesting asides to KYPP and to the evolution of punk and I am proud that I was part of them. But when it comes to punk as revolutionary, as visionary, as creativity, as 'be realistic: demand the impossible' - it was KYPP which demanded the impossible and delivered it as reality.

How do you reflect back on those days?

OH! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!--Oh! times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!

As Wordsworth described the French Revolution. Our Revolution was inspired by the French revolution of May 1968, by the Situationists, by the Surrealists, by the Doors, by the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, by Patti Smith, by David Bowie and Marc Bolan, by the Pink Fairies, by the Sex Pistols, by�Ķ The Mob, Blood And Roses, Charge, by Adam And The Ants, by punk�Ķ but not Crass�Ķ

How do you reflect back on that music scene?

Ooops, think I have answered this above. Zounds, Rubella Ballet, �Ķ Hagar The Womb, Look Mummy Clowns. But we also listened to the Human League and Soft Cell (well I did!) to Killing Joke and the Pop Group, to Siouxsie And The Banshees and the Psychedelic Furs, to Syd Barrett and the Misunderstood, Bow Wow Wow and the Slits, to Joy Division and New Order �Ķ. We were not bound to the constraints of 'anarcho-punk'. We were anarchists, we were punks but the very act of such self-description destroyed the narrow boundaries of 'anarcho-punk' and librated us to create a 'music scene' beyond the puritanical constraints of 'anarcho-punk' as defined by Crass and their clones.

Taken from: http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/The-Mob-All-The-Madmen-Records-official-site/116214235115351

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Increasing the Tribe -Bristol 8 April 2011

2011-04-07T15:09:00.003+01:00

In about 48 hours and 300 miles away the Mob will be taking to the stage at the Fleece in Bristol. Zounds, Rubella Ballet, Insurrection, Andy T and Steve Corr will be playing as well - altogether it will be quite an event for the 300 folk who will be there. It will be the first time the Mob have played in 28 years, even longer since Graham was the drummer.

Over the years I have had a few shots at trying to explain why the Mob were… I was going to say important, but that doesn’t sound right. Maybe interesting and significant is a better way of putting it. Ok then, lets try ‘Why were the Mob so interesting and significant?’.

First up- context. The immediate context was the sheer jolt of first hearing Witchhunt. I first heard the song at [Kill Your Pet] Puppy Mansions in 1981 although it came out in 1980. This was a few months before we (the Puppy Collective) saw the Mob play a free gig in an adventure playground on Parliament Hill Fields. In the midst of an economic crisis brought on by the Tories voodoo economics, the lines about the ‘idle rich knitting the economy without dropping a stitch, destroying anything that doesn’t quite fit’ hit the mark.

Then there was the wave of riots which hit the UK. I remember being round Puppy Mansions one night listening to the radio reporting as city after city went up in flames. KYPP 4 came out in September with a cover using a pic Tinsel had sent us, an editorial which started ‘Buy, buy, the damnation of your soul…’ (from a surrealist text) an interview with Charge, a piece on Gay Punx and a Mob page using cut-ups from Witchhunt… and then came the Wapping Autonomy Centre where the Mob played.

I know that ‘anarcho-punk’ has now become inextricably intertwined with Crass, but at the time it was more about the dozens of other bands that jumped up on the six inch high stage at the Metropolitian Warf in Wapping. Or, even before then, who played at the Parallel Universe (a squatted church, St. James) on Pentonville Road - where I first saw Rubella Ballet. Then after Wapping came the Centro Iberico on Harrow Road in west London where the punk part of the Autonomy Centre relocated in spring 1982. Which was just around the corner from Meanwhile Gardens where the Mob also played.

What also happened then was a blurring of boundaries between audience and performers, between organisers and organised, between bands and fanzines. The result was a colourful and creative chaos utterly at odds with the retrospective construction of anarcho-punk as a bunch of black clad Crass fans. We even have the photographs to prove it!

Out of this creative chaos emerged many things. One was a housing co-operative, the Black Sheep Co-op. The Co-op survived for many years. In 2007, the Islington Archaeology and History Society published a book ‘53 Cross Street Biography of a House’ by Mary Cosh and Martin King. In 1990, Martin King moved into 53 Cross Street and began documenting its history - including (page 34) a door painted by Todd Hanson, one of the original Black Sheep. 103 Grosvenor Avenue was another of the four Co-op houses. Mark and Joseph of the Mob lived there in 1983 and it was there that Tony Drayton wrote the last issue of Kill Your Pet Puppy.

The Mob’s album ‘Let the Tribe Increase’ was another product of the creative chaos, the possibility first floated by Mark Wilson in the kitchen of Puppy Mansions and made practical when Mick Queally offered to help finance the recording and Rough Trade the pressing costs. The unexpected success of the album provide the finance for All the Madmen records and releases by the Astronauts, Zos Kia and Flowers in the Dustbin.

Unexpected success? Yes, it was unexpected.. The exact figures are lost in the mists of time, but the idea was to sell enough copies to break even -say 10 000 copies. But then far more -say 20 000 - were sold creating an unexpected profit which was re-cycled into the other releases. If the Mob had continued rather than calling it a day in 1983, the next album might have sold even more…

But they did not carry on. Through the winter of 1983/4, Mark began making himself a tipi, sitting in the front room of Grosvenor Avenue with yards and yards of cloth and a sewing machine. He also had a truck which converted into a travelling home. The spring came and he was off on his travelling adventures which lasted for many years.

It wasn’t just Mark though. For a while it seemed like the whole tribe formerly known as anarcho-punk had gone on the road. The last issue (number six) of Kill Your Pet Puppy reflected and anticipated this mass migration. While previous issues had been a surrealist/ situationist collage of cut-ups laying out in an almost random confusion of events and musics from glam to goth via anarchy and punk, number six condensed the chaos into a narrative which resolved/ dissolved itself at Stonehenge festival.

Even with the benefit of thirty years worth of hindsight, the creative chaos is still hard to comprehend, yet in the still bright colours of Joly McPhie’s Better Badges printing Adam and the Ants rub shoulders with Crass, Bauhaus with Charge, anarchy centres with a Sid Vicious Memorial March, the Illuminatus trilogy with the Floodgates of Anarchy, gay punks with Donny Osmond…I loved every minute of it.

The Mob were just one colourful thread of the psychedelic tapestry, but they do help make some kind of sense of it all. Their movement through the chaos illustrates a dimension lacking from the big bang version of punk, that somehow the long hot summer of 1976 was a year zero out of which exploded a brand new subculture disconnected from all that had gone before. This version is punk as media spectacle of the filth and the fury as if no group of young people had ever outraged common decency and threatened civilisation before. The moment of shock and awe didn’t last long, but the front page headlines became the stuff of a thousand media studies textbooks and sociology lectures. Punk generated a minor academic industry endlessly repeating year zero, year zero, year zero…if punk hadn’t existed, Greil Marcus would have had to invent it.

But there was no year zero. As several of the first generation of punk bands mentioned to John Robb (in his Punk Rock an oral history), before punk they had already been influenced by groups like the Pink Fairies and events like the Windsor Free Festival (1972-74). Beneath the shimmering banalities of the spectacular society, the UK counterculture survived the Schoolkids OZ trial of 1971 and was still a dynamic and evolving entity before during and after the punk eruption.

Both the Stonehenge Free Festival and the related traveller/ free festival (counter) culture emerged simultaneously with punk. Since Stonehenge was almost on the doorstep (next county) of Somerset, youths like the future members of the Mob found their way there and one of the first Mob gigs was at the festival. Meanwhile, Mark Perry was struggling to prevent the ossification of punk. In 1978, his ATV joined Here and Now on a tour which took in Stonehenge festival. There is a classic photo of their combined forces (including Grant of Fuck-Off Records) posed in front of a traveller bus taken at Stonehenge in June 1978.

In 1979 (or was it 1980?), the Mob were part of a similar travelling (Weird Tales) tour with Here and Now and Zounds and the Androids of Mu. So even before Wapping in 1981/2, two of the bands at the heart of anarcho-punk had already connected punk with the existing UK counterculture. Hegel would have loved it. If punk was the negation of hippy, then anarcho-punk was the negation of the negation…

So what? It is all history now. Except it isn’t. If it was all history all this should be written down somewhere, should have been picked over an analysed and theorised into extinction. As Guy Debord said “what is really lived has no relation to the official irreversible time of society and is in direct opposition to the pseudo-cyclical rhythm of the consumable by-product of this time. This individual experience of separate daily life remains without language, without concept, without critical access to its own past which has been recorded nowhere. It is not communicated. It is not understood and is forgotten to the profit of the false spectacular memory of the unmemorable.”

But since what is really lived defies the manufacture of history, so what is really experienced ‘remains without language’, remains silent between the moments of excess aka the event which will kick off at 8 pm on Friday 8 April 2011 in the Fleece. Then, for the briefest of moments, the false spectacular memory of the unmemorable will be put on hold and life will be really lived -again.

But now is not then. Thirty years ago we were at the beginning of a rightward lurch which only now is ending as (today Portugal) a series of banking crises threaten to unravel a global economy which had seemed so well knitted. Beyond the banks, the consequences of Japan’s reliance on nuclear power are turning a natural disaster into a catastrophe. No-one yet knows when or how it will end. Even as Fukushima melts down we are told with out more nukes in the UK the lights will all go off. Even as the global temperature rises we are told we must keep burning more coal and pumping more petrol to keep the wheels of industry turning and hold back a new dark age/ stone age.

It is difficult not to hear lines from Mob songs echoing the headlines. It is also hard not to recall, as Protag told me did at Heathrow Climate Change Camp, Hawkwind’s song ‘We took the wrong step years ago…’ As the sixties counterculture’s psychedelic dreams crashed against the oil crisis of the seventies, a few of the more thoughtful hippies imagined a future full of windmills and solar power as an alternative to nuclear power and fossil fuels. But as they knew, such alternative technology on its own was not enough. What was needed was a cultural revolution which would make a break with consumer capitalism which needed more and more power to keep churning out the ‘new and improved’ stuff without which life was just not worth living.

The home-made windmills never quite worked, but the idea of a DIY culture did. By demystifying (thanks Zounds!) the means of production, the radical technologists/ alternative engineers started to undermine the fetishism of commodities. I had the theory from reading magazines like Undercurrents in the seventies (‘a journal of radical technology’) but didn’t get the practice until I went with Mark of the Mob down to a record pressing plant off Mare Street in Hackney (?) to collect a 1000 copies of Witchhunt and then spent an evening (2 September 1983 to be precise) with him and Min stuffing 500 of them into their sleeves in the front room at Grovesnor Avenue. That evening a circle was completed. From hearing Witchhunt two years before at Puppy Mansions to reproducing the record for others to hear and (hopefully) be inspired by.

Twenty eight years on and that revolutionary moment of insight still seems relevant.

The Mob reformed practice session

2011-04-01T07:36:00.002+01:00

Normans or Northumbrians?

2011-03-28T01:00:00.005+01:00

Normans or Northumbrians?

It seems simple enough. I found that a place called Irisbutil was not Burned island on Loch Ken but Orchardton in Buittle. So I did some checking and found that a set of 25 place names used to show Anglian / Northumbrian settlements in Galloway (the Stewartry) overlapped with a list of Norman mottes and/ or lands held by Anglo- Normans from Cumbria between 1150 and 1300.

The sources for the Anglian place names are documents, mostly to do with gifts to the Church. The documents were written for the Anglo- Normans. Did the Anglo-Normans take over land first settled by Northumbrians? Perhaps. Alternatively the place names may not be the Old English of the Northumbrians, but the Middle English (aka Older Scots) of the Cumbrian Anglo- Normans.

If so, then instead of the place name evidence pointing to eighth/ ninth widespread settlement in the Stewartry by Northumbrians, it reflects the twelfth/ thirteenth century settlement of Cumbrian Anglo-Normans. The evidence for the later settlements is firm - the mottes and the charter evidence. The evidence for the earlier settlements is not so strong.

So far so good. But then I wanted to know what the Cumbrian Anglo-Normans were doing in the Stewartry. Were they there as colonisers? Were they their to add their military strength to the lords of Galloway’s armies? Or was there another reason?

Since most of the mottes they built do not have baileys (larger, surrounding enclosures where a knight’s troops lived) they were not for colonising. The lords of Galloway’s main military strength was their ability to call up large numbers (1000 +) of foot soldiers or man galleys so the military angle doesn’t seem critical - so, I speculated, perhaps the aim was to introduce new agricultural techniques. That is, oxen drawn wooden ploughs with iron tips.

Problem is trying to find supporting evidence for this theory. Which is what I am now working on. Also trying to work out relationship between the lands of the Anglo-Normans and the lands of the Gaelic clans - which is tricky since no written records of such land holdings, so having to look at where there are Gaelic farm names near the mottes…

So still a work in progress.

Normans or Northumbrians?

2011-03-28T01:00:00.003+01:00

James Steuart and Hegel

2011-02-26T20:42:00.000Z

Expansion and Contraction of Gaelic In Galloway

2011-02-26T08:09:00.001Z

Too long to post here, so here is a link to a first draft of The Expansion and Contraction of Gaelic in Galloway

The Mob, Zounds and friends to play Bristol 8 April

2011-02-21T23:14:00.000Z

The Mob will play Bristol 8 April 2011.

2011-02-18T08:18:00.000Z

The original three members of The Mob that recorded the first two singles ‘Crying Again’ and ‘Witchhunt’ as well as loads of material on the Fuck Off / Weird Tales tape labels are happy to confirm that The Mob, Zounds and Insurrection will be performing at the Fleece in Bristol on Friday 8th April 2011. Other bands to be confirmed. Doors open at 8 o clock and the venue runs until late.

Interview with Michael Moorcock

2011-02-04T18:06:00.000Z

Here is a fascinating interview with Michael Moorcock.

Kenneth Grant 1924-2011

2011-02-01T23:37:00.001Z

From the Starfire website:

Kenneth Grant died on 15th January 2011 after a period of illness. Our condolences go first and foremost to his family, whose privacy is something which we all wish to respect at this difficult time.

Kenneth Grant had an extraordinary life, and his work has a remarkable depth and breadth of magical and mystical insight. In particular, his monumental series of Typhonian Trilogies is creative, innovatory and inspiring, extending across thirty years from the publication of the opening volume The Magical Revival in 1972, to the appearance of the final volume The Ninth Arch in 2002. This is a substantial body of work, constituting a solid foundation for further development, widening and deepening in the years to come; his work will continue.

Michael Staley,

1st February 2011.

The Mob reform for April 2011 gigs

2011-02-01T19:26:00.000Z

Steve Corr has just posted a set of pics of The Mob rehearsing in practice for gigs in London and Bristol in April.

In Search of Space

2011-01-30T23:50:00.002Z

Photos of Hot Blast

2011-01-29T17:54:00.000Z

Nature, culture, reality

2011-01-26T20:42:00.000Z

The Snake Charmer - Rousseau

Inspiration for this blog comes from this text

I am confused. Why am I confused? I am confused by conflicting versions of reality. In particular I am confused by trying to cross-reference the versions of reality described/ proposed by scientists and the versions of reality described/ proposed by philosophers. Lurking in the background is even more confusion since my ideas about reality have been influenced by a fair bit of counter-cultural strangeness -'Do not adjust your mind, the fault is with reality'.

So where/what is the problem? Is there a problem? Realistically, very few people waste much time worrying about reality. It is just what is, something to be lived within rather than questioned. Wander around wondering about reality is a distraction leading to falling off a cliff or being run over by a truck. On the other hand, if some of our ancestors hadn't done some wondering we would never have learnt how to make sharp tools out of flint, extracted metal from rocks or invented computers. Human beings are animals that play with given or physical reality. Playing around with physical reality had an evolutionary impact on our success as a species, creating a feedback loop which encouraged further play leading to further success.

This is where one of the problems kicks in. While we are part of physical reality, our ability to play with reality created knowledge of physical reality. But is this knowledge also part of physical reality? Or is it something different, is it a model of (an abstraction from) physical reality rather than physical reality itself? The tricky part of the problem is that the human brains which have the knowledge in them are themselves part of physical reality and at the atomic/ sub-atomic level cannot be distinguished from any other part of physical reality. At the molecular/ biological level we have the same problem – there is no break in the evolutionary continuum sufficient to distinguish us from any other life form.

What I find interesting is that a few years ago now I decided to be as rational as possible and avoid any lines of thought which could be classified as 'magico-religious' or 'mystical'. Yet when I follow through scientific or philosophical lines of thought (somewhat imperfectly when the language used gets very technical) – it is as if there is a curvature in rational reality. The rational lines of enquiry do not stay parallel, but big to meet at a 'magickal' point just beyond the horizon of reason. To give an example, 20 years ago I wrote a speculative article for Chaos International magazine - 'Culture as Heat'. One of the strands I fed into the article was on a link between information theory/ cybernetics and Claude Levi Strauss' theory of structural anthropology, which is based on sets of binary oppositions -nature: culture,, kinship:marriage, raw: cooked and which Strauss argued lay behind the complex mythologies of pre-modern cultures. Catching up with contemporary information theory, I found an argument that 'information' is the basic stuff of reality and the possibility that we really could be living in a Matrix style simulation of reality...

… so that the 'Rationality Debate' which perplexed social anthropologists in the 1970s (partly sparked by Strauss' work) could not be easily resolved by privileging the solidity of scientific descriptions of reality over the fluidity of mythological narrations of reality. Following the philosophers, I found some of them wrestling with the possibility that there is no rational, conscious self. The problem here comes from the intersection between computer science and neurology which circle around attempts to develop artificial intelligence. The difficulty of creating artificial intelligence stimulated (fact check!) research into how human brains process and organise information which led to the hypothesis that there is no 'central self', no actual 'I' existing like an intelligent homunculus inside our heads. Rather, the sense of self is an 'afterthought' which provides coherence for the pre-conscious actions of a whole range of autonomous sub-self systems. [The image which springs to mind is of the vehicles in the Captain Scarlet tv series which are steered by backward facing drivers looking at a video image of the road ahead.]

One of the philosophical conundrums which arises when the relationship between information and knowledge is explored kicks in when the distant past and far future are discussed. For information to become knowledge it has to be processed. So far, that is in the absence of artificial intelligence, the necessary processing only occurs in living systems, in biological life forms (assuming the absence of artificial life). Even the simplest forms of life process information and convert it into knowledge of the environment, which then influences the life forms' behaviour. Through evolutionary selection, the ability to process information into knowledge has increased, with the human brain as one outcome of this evolutionary strand.

Within very recent time (compared to the time human like creatures have been around on the planet), we have found how to store the information we have processed into knowledge via writing and subsequent developments. But is what we store knowledge or information? There is an argument that what is stored in a book, for example, is information not knowledge. The stored information only becomes knowledge when the book is read and is 'brought back to life', when it becomes part of a living system again. If this is so, then knowledge only ever exists in the present – as the moving/ standing wave of brain activity which is processing information into knowledge NOW... and as the moment of knowledge passes on to the next piece of information, what was knowledge becomes memory, once more becomes stored information.

Of course information stored within the brain is more easily and rapidly accessible than information stored in books or other forms of external memory, so such information can be accessed rapidly enough to create a sense of duration – similar to the way the rapid succession of still photographs can create a sense of movement on a cinema screen. Thus, I suspect, the sense of a duration of knowledge helps create the sense of consciousness, of the self existing through time.

But if knowledge is a biological process, did knowledge exist before there was life? The implication is that it did not. What existed before life began was information. Indeed, it may not even be possible to talk of 'existence' before life began, since there was nothing to create the knowledge of 'existence'. To pursue this speculation further, although the information that the universe is huge and ancient is contained within itself, our knowledge of this huge and ancient universe has only existed for a very short time. Could this mean that scientific knowledge is a new form of knowledge?

If we follow the biological/ evolutionary model, with life as an information- to -knowledge processing system, then human knowledge will be human centred. But scientific knowledge is not human centred. Even though scientific knowledge still only exists within the brain activity of human beings, it describes a universe which -in theory- would exist even if there were no human beings or even any life forms at all. Could science then be the universe's knowledge of itself? Are human beings/ life forms an unnecessary hypothesis in the process of information becoming knowledge?

Probably not – but it is pretty much an impossible question for us to answer, since we would have to imagine our own non-existence And if we did not exist, the problem posed would not exist. An alternative way of looking at the paradox would be that -logically- the information that is the universe contains the potential for life forms to emerge. If it did not, life would not exist and neither would we. Life is therefore part of the information which is the universe. If we accept that life processes information into knowledge, then that potential is also therefore part of the potential contained within the information which is the universe. Once life has begun processing information into knowledge the ultimate potential of scientific knowledge exists. This has begun to be achieved and is a seemingly open ended process, progressively converting more and more of the information which is the universe into knowledge of the universe.

If, as suggested above, the conversion of information into knowledge gives rise to the sensation/ experience of 'consciousness', when our brains are generating 'scientific' knowledge, then the 'consciousness' generated is universal rather than personal.

From the perspective of human centred knowledge, such knowledge is abstract and not immediately valuable. In some cases, scientific knowledge can be dangerous when translated into human knowledge and absorbed into human societies – for example via the construction of heat-engines (which has led to global climate change). Ironically, knowledge of the universe may be short lived, if it has the effect of de-stabilising the human societies within which it has emerged. Although scientific knowledge is rational, present day human societies are irrational. They could collapse and the recently acquired scientific knowledge of the universe could be lost – although the information would remain.

To backtrack for a moment – are human societies irrational? What does that mean? From my present perspective (which may change), it just means that the particular society of which I am a member is failing to respond to the challenge of climate change. The underlying assumption being that a rational society would have recognised and responded to this threat and begun adapting to a low/ no growth, minimal carbon use future. The perspective is ecological and involves the rational acceptance that there cannot be infinite expansion within a finite environment. A difficulty with this perspective is that it appears to run counter to the evidence of recent human history. This evidence points to the liberation which occurred with the Enlightenment, when human Culture was freed by Reason from the bondage of irrational superstition which had tied us (via religion) to a mystical Nature. Through the application of reason, we were able to overcome ignorance and so cure diseases, banish famines and raise millions out of poverty. Thus any attempt to limit or restrict the progress of civilisation through economic growth can be seen as a to regression to barbarism and savagery and 'ecology' as a form of nature mysticism rather than science.

This position, which unites both supporters of capitalism and many Marxists, is a philosophical position which is embedded in the notion that knowledge is a purely human construct. But if all forms of life are engaged in the processing of information into knowledge, then an ecological perspective is also a rational perspective. The ecological environments, the many landscapes of this planet are the cumulative product of such knowledge. They have been shaped and transformed by that knowledge which leaves a landscape of information in its collective wake. The image which spring s to mind is of a coral reef. The living coral is the knowledge, the accumulated reef the information. This information - knowledge - information cycle may also connect with George Dyson's notion of 'evolutionary intelligence' where the cycle increases the quality of the information embodied in landscapes/ environments. If these are dynamic systems, increasing in complexity through time, the knowledge embedded/embodied in them approaches a form of intelligence.

Information is Physical: Actualise the Imagination!

2011-01-12T22:48:00.000Z

In 1867, James Clerk Maxwell devised a thought-experiment which seemed to reverse the arrow of time aka the Second Law of Thermodynamics. He hypothesised a minute entity which could separate high energy from low energy molecules of air.

.. if we conceive of a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can follow every molecule in its course, such a being, whose attributes are as essentially finite as our own, would be able to do what is impossible to us. For we have seen that molecules in a vessel full of air at uniform temperature are moving with velocities by no means uniform, though the mean velocity of any great number of them, arbitrarily selected, is almost exactly uniform. Now let us suppose that such a vessel is divided into two portions, A and B, by a division in which there is a small hole, and that a being, who can see the individual molecules, opens and closes this hole, so as to allow only the swifter molecules to pass from A to B, and only the slower molecules to pass from B to A. He will thus, without expenditure of work, raise the temperature of B and lower that of A, in contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics...

The resolution to Maxwell's paradox necessary to conserve the Second Law of Thermodynamics requires that information is physical. Without an infinite memory, the Maxwell entity must from time to time erase the information on the respective velocities of the molecules it has acquired. But the erasure of the information has a physical 'cost' since erasing information is a thermodynamically irreversible process that increases the entropy of a system. Thus the labour of Maxwell's entity is a Sisyphean task. Having rolled its boulder to the top of the thermodynamic hill, the entity must watch it roll back down again.

However, this resolution of Maxwell's paradox leads to the recognition that information can be converted into energy. See http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v6/n12/full/nphys1821.html and and 'suggests a new fundamental principle of an ‘information-to-heat engine’ that converts information into energy by feedback control.'

If... ; then... :

To continue a previous line of thought... if Vlatko Vedral's Decoding Reality is cut-up [Burroughs/Gysin] with/against Thomas Metzinger's The Ego-Tunnel then : there is an external reality which can be deconstructed back to the emergence of 'information' out of 'no information' which allows the universe of energy/matter //space/time to be re-constructed 'causeless click' by 'causeless click' -where each 'click' is an observation of a random quantum level event. Although each event in itself is random/ causeless/ timeless, once observed it becomes fixed in time/ history/ space and the accumulated evidence of the events provides the substantial/ physical knowledge from which a scientific description of reality can be rationally constructed. Vedral uses the analogy of a sculptor – each observation is a cut made in a shapeless block of stone. The accumulation of observations reveals 'reality' – as observed. But without the act of observation there is no 'reality' – only the emptiness of the uncarved block.

Turn to Metzinger and the emptiness returns. Here there is no 'observer', no fixed self,. Here there is only the seething turmoil of neural activity within the brain in which the world is a lucid, waking dream. Here there is no direct encounter with reality, rather there is a hyper-real representation of reality within which a representation of the body moves and functions. This representation within a representation is the 'self'. But if this is so, then where and what is Vedral's ' scientist as observer'? Does an ultimately non-existent self- observe an ultimately non-existent universe? Within themselves, each model is coherent and logically constructed – so they are rational models- but when brought together they seem to negate each other. Vedral's model requires an observer of reality to make it physical/ actual. Metzinger's model requires a physical reality (neural activity in a brain as the product of biological evolution) to actualise the imagined observer/ self.

This rather crude simplification of two complex theories, both of which are based on substantial science, is a temporary position. A better, more informed, understanding is likely to overturn it. For the present, however, it is sufficient to encourage further engagement and exploration of Georg Hegel's Science of Logic. It is possible that Hegel's presuppositionless approach to 'pure being' may be helpful. To this end, I am reading Stephen Houlgate's The Opening of Hegel's Logic. If the approach via Hegel is fruitful, then a way back into the world as social (cultural, political, economic) reality exists via Hegel's Philosophy of Right and Karl Marx's Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State and A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right.

Time's winged chariot hurries near
Against this lengthy process is the sense of an approaching crisis, driven by the Second Law of Thermodynamics- if information is physical. If information is physical, then the intensification of the accumulation of knowledge over the past 250 +/- years is also an accumulation of entropy as the inverse of knowledge where knowledge is the compression through reason of observations (scientific knowledge). Rational human culture / rational human individuals are in this analogy Maxwell entities/ intelligences. In physical reality they/we have exploited the low entropy energy of fossil fuels to construct a social reality which has become sufficiently rational/ knowledgeable that it can reflect upon itself and discover its own absence... just as the entropy returns via carbon dioxide as heat disrupting the global climate triggering a cascade of disruptive 'events' which eventually consume the global economy and its ability to construct knowledge. The sheer volume of information generated by droughts, floods, famines, freezes, hurricanes and diseases will overload the rationalising mechanisms of the market and the price of the future will approach infinity.

But not yet. It hasn't happened yet. If it had these words would be neither written nor read. There is time still to reflect. To reflect on the seeming contradiction between the 'we' of one branch of science and the 'brain activity' of a different branch. Is there a contradiction, a paradox? Does the 'we' of the physicists conflict with the 'ego-tunnel' of the neuroscientists? If I say 'I don't know', what is it that does not know? Is it 'indeterminate immediacy' – which is Hegel's 'pure being'?

Put another way, is science human knowledge? Or is it universal knowledge? From the 'ego-tunnel' perspective it is impossible to be aware of the brain activity which creates the representation of reality, nor is it possible to be aware of the process of brain activity which creates the representation of the self which exists within the representation of reality. Yet through science 'we' are able to become aware of the 'ego-tunnel', to become aware of the limits and constraints of human knowledge., of the human condition. As such then, scientific knowledge is not 'human knowledge' – it is universal knowledge. It is knowledge which would exist even if humans did not exist. It is knowledge which an intelligent alien species or an advanced artificial intelligence could acquire. However if the universe did not exist, then neither would scientific knowledge. Such knowledge could therefore be described as the universe's knowledge or awareness of its own existence.

Or rather, since awareness of existence is only the beginning of knowledge, scientific knowledge requires that the universe becomes rationally aware of its own existence. But without observations there can be no scientific knowledge, so the universe has to contain the ability to observe itself. Has to contain the potential for observation to exist. Has to contain the potential for human-like entities to exist. To rationally , rather than magically , emerge into existence out of the potentialities of the universe and create scientific knowledge.

The tension is that such knowledge is historically very recent and not necessary for human survival. A collapse of the current society could see the loss of scientific knowledge and a return to magico-religious superstition. A universe would still exist, but it would be that of the ego-tunnel, not that of science.

Does it matter? Perhaps it is just too much of a challenge, too radical a re-structuring of what it means to be human for us to culturally evolve from ego-tunnel awareness to universal awareness via scientific rationality. It is a survival issue, but one affecting consciousness rather than biological survival. A 'we', a human species would still (probably) exist but with diminished rational self-awareness.

And then?

Is a catastrophic future inevitable? That is a tricky one for me since I had absorbed so many catastrophic scenarios in the early seventies (from science fiction and mainstream plus counterculture media hype) that I was surprised it had not all collapsed by 1980... which was the date predicted in the School Kids edition of OZ - 'Rehearsing the Apocalyspe'. Now its -here we go again... On reflection what still annoys me is that failure of what I thought was a sensible railway project. The idea (late-eighties to 2003) was to build a new freight railway, one with the capacity to put lorries on trains. It was designed to run from Liverpool/ Manchester/ Sheffield to London and on to the Channel tunnel. With a bit of prodding from myself and others, an extension to Scotland using the Settle and Carlisle and Carlisle- Dumfries-Kilmarnock-Glasgow routes was added later.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Railway_(United_Kingdom) – but even their web page seems to have gone now. A shift from road back to rail would have allowed a transition to a more sustainable economic system. But it didn't happen. Although it was a private company, it needed state support to be actualised. The 1997 Labour government produced a glossy plan for sustainable / integrated transport but it was just for show. The new Department for Environment, Transport and the Regions shrugged and the idea died – and with it a possible future.

Was it a rational idea? The physics says yes. Moving freight by rail is more energy (frictionally) efficient than moving freight by road. But so long as energy costs are low, economic rationality can discount physics. Since the same period was one when time rather than energy costs where what counted as economic (capitalist) rationality, the 'flexibility' of road freight prevailed. The focus on time is tied into the immediacy of capital circulation. For capital there is no future, only an endless now, 'the frozen moment of bourgeois triumphalism' as the Situationists described it. A now which is sliced up into micro-seconds of profit/loss, deal or no deal. In this hyperreality, there is no space for history, no time for thought and reflection. But can there be rationality without reflection? Can there be rationality without the mutual extension of space into time and time into space?

Rationality cannot exist under such conditions. Rationality is also the real, the actual. What is not rational is not real. Therefore the endless now of capital is not real. It has been maintained by low entropy energy. The low entropy energy has been used to freeze time, to create the information which generates micro-second by micro-second a representation of reality as a commodity (or spectacle). But as the sources of low entropy energy are consumed, so the moment of frozen time must pass over into history. As history becomes real again, so does the future – and so does the potential for rationality.

As yet this potential can only be imagined. To become rational we must actualise the imagination. We must re-member and re-call the past as our history in the present if there is to be a future.

Space is deep...

2011-01-12T07:38:00.000Z

Monopoly Neo-feudalism

2011-01-12T00:00:00.000Z

Kennedy & MCConnel cotton spinning mill, Manchester

I was idly searching on 'Marxism Peak Oil' and found an article about it from which I have cut'n'pasted a section below. One problem I have is with 'feudalism'from a historical perspective.

In the Scottish Enlightenment 'feudalism'was connected to the 'heritable jurisdictions' which were banned after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745/6 - to stop Jacobite chiefs raising 'feudal hosts' to fight for the Stuarts. Getting rid of this reminder of Scotland's barbarous past was then seen as a stage in the progress of humanity from savagery to civilisation -influencing Adam Smith. [From memory.]... and then on via the French Revolution to Marx.

But...in Galloway 'feudalism' ended with the Douglas Lordship of Galloway in 1455. The Scottish Crown then took control of the Douglas lands but gradually sold them off to create / add to the hundreds of owner-occupier farmers who became keen Protestants via the Scottish Reformation and led resistance to the Stuarts through the 17th century. John Kennedy (1769-1855) became a major Manchester cotton spinning mill owner. His family had been owner-occupiers of Knocknalling farm since at least 1540, so by the time John Kennedy became a capitalist manufacturer, his family had been part of a market orientated (agricultural) economic system for 250 years.

As a younger son, John Kennedy was not going to inherit the farm, so, following a well-established local pattern, he was apprenticed to a trade. In his case it was as a carpenter and machine maker in north-west England. Thanks to the Scottish Reformation, Kennedy was well-educated and thanks to the absence of feudalism in Galloway, he was familiar with a market economy. He was not a peasant and was not driven off the land by enclosure/ primitive accumulation. He did become a founder member of Manchester's industrial capitalist class and helped secure its success through involvement in the Liverpool Manchester Railway.

To summarise - industrial capitalism began in Manchester in the late 18th century but it did not emerge directly out of 'feudalism' - feudalism in England and (parts of) Scotland had ended long before. So the collapse of capitalism may not lead to 'neo-feudalism' - it may rather revert us back to the Age of Reason, to the Age of Enlightenment which preceded the age of industrial capitalism.

Now read on...

Marx was wrong about how capitalism, strictly defined, was going to purge all rents and feudal vestiges. Here Marx shared in a misconception endemic to classical economists. What really happens at every point is that true competitive practices are used to vanquish residual feudalism, but then the “competitor”, the moment he becomes strong enough, switches from capitalist mode to oligopoly racketeer mode. He switches from innovation, efficiency-seeking, and customer service to lobbying, cons, bribery, extortion, and every kind of anti-competitive action. He becomes a rent seeker. He reinstates a new feudalism. And so the last 40 years have seen the great switch from the capitalist stage of economic history to the refeudalizing stage. (Of course, the entire capitalist stage was riddled with feudal remnants and neo-feudal restorations. Imperialism, globalization, and financialization have been the main stages for this. And of course natural resources have always been treated as a slave plantation, and never with the slightest semblance of rational planning.)

Marx and the rest of classical economics failed to see or didn’t emphasize this. On the other hand, neoclassicism has been dedicated to the Big Lie that this neo-feudal project, and the law of rent-seeking I just described, don’t exist. Chicago economics simply claims as religious dogma that this is “capitalism”, this is the ”free market”. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” is the core slogan of this Big Lie. The real purport of it is, “It may look to you like the finance sector and other corporate oligopolies are pure parasites who produce nothing and only destroy. But there’s no such thing as a free lunch! So if these actors exist, they have to be important producers, even if you’re having trouble seeing what they produce. If they weren’t producing, they couldn’t exist. Ipso facto.”

So there’s one way in which the Marxian prognostication of the unified proletariat facing the monopoly capitalist has failed to materialize. We face instead monopoly neo-feudalism, so anyone who still wants to use Marxism has to recompute.

Boredom is always counter revolutionary.

2011-01-09T00:20:00.001Z

Just found Samuel Cooper's blog. He is researching the British legacy of the Situationist International since 1967...

Now I am in academia...

2011-01-04T15:52:00.002Z

http://independent.academia.edu/AlistairLivingston

Tom Vague is a genius.

2011-01-03T22:43:00.000Z

I have just been reading through the edited highlights of Vague on Tom's newish website Vaguerants and - what an awesome body of work Tom has produced over the years. From discovering punk at tech college in Salisbury in 1976 and Vague number 1 through to Vague 64 'Anarchy in the UK 1910/11' what a long strange trip it has been. Whoosing through Tom's work, the earlier editions are now part of history and then the later work becomes history.

Reading Tom's take on the Londonisation of the Notting Hill area you really feel the aliveness of the past, there is a vibrancy and immediacy which other 'local' histories never have. Most of the later Vagues are available from Housmans, so don't just take my word for it - read'em yourself.

Reality is really unreal

2011-01-02T23:49:00.000Z

Image of an anti-matter dark star.

Dark star crashes, pouring its light into ashes.
Reason tatters, the forces tear loose from the axis.
Searchlight casting for faults in the clouds of delusion.
Shall we go, you and I while we can
Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds?

I am not a big fan of the Grateful Dead, but I do love their song Dark Star.

I thought of it when thinking of a link to go with the Ego Tunnel book (see below). I am know wondering how the 'internally generated' reality as explored by Thomas Metzinger connects with the quantum information theory of reality as explored by Vlatko Vedral in his book - Decoding Reality.

What Metzinger says is that the reality we experience is a simulation or representation created by brain activity - which at the same time creates the 'virtual self' which experiences the simulation/ representation as 'real'. The simulation/ representation of reality is connected to real reality. If it was not, our ancestors would not have survived and we would be extinct.

But then Vlatko Vedral comes along and argues that real reality is based on information - that matter/ energy arise from information and that information can emerge out of nothing/ no information.

So what you get is a double dissolution of reality - from inside and outside. And now I am slowly reading The Opening of Hegel's Logic which may or may not be helpful.By helpful, I mean that Hegel may have anticipated both Vedral and Metzinger (or rather the science/ philosophy they represent) - and did so before the reality changing impact of industrial capitalism.

As I have tried to express in 'Evoking Maxwell's demon' (see previous posts)we now know that industrial capitalism did not just create the social reality we imagine ourselves as inhabiting, it also changed physical reality - leading to global climate change. Cross-connecting, the result is a multiple crisis.

There is the economic crisis (the debt/banking/finance crisis), the ecological/ climate change crisis, the psychic crisis of the self as a myth and a 'cosmic' crisis where the universe becomes a stream of quantum information... but are the crises related? If so, how?

Well, without low entropy energy from coal and oil, the industrial revolution could not have happened and industrial capitalism could not have developed. So there would have been no global warming. At the same time, industrial capitalism and the industrial revolution stimulated the development of science, technology and knowledge. Without those developments, neither Metzinger nor Vedral's theories/ speculations would have the support of experimental evidence. Furthermore, to the extent that their work is part of science it has a greater weight than it would otherwise.

Yet, as both admit, the implications of their work challenges our understandings of ourselves and our world - calls into question our conceptions of 'reality'. In contrast to their edge-of-science work, the science of climate change is mainstream and can be traced back to the early industrial era emergence of thermodynamics, chemistry and physics. Yet the implications of climate change are vigorously denied by a vocal minority since any attempt to mitigate climate change would have direct economic implications. The no-growth economy implied would spell the end for industrial capitalism. The end of a powerful version of reality.

If Metizinger or Vedral's science ever challenged the economic basis of taken-for-granted reality no doubt they would face similar attempts at denial. Ultimately such denial is the denial of scientific rationality -and the reality it describes. But if 'reality' is in some way a construct, a representation or virtual simulation of the universe, maybe the deniers have a point? In the context of climate change, no they don't. They have no coherent alternative hypothesis for the rise in global temperature. Their alternatives are not rational.

What is really real is rational. What is really rational is real. A Hegel misquotation which allows me to suggest that perhaps science has advanced knowledge to the point where our rationality is creative rather than reflective. That our descriptions of the world have become so fine grained that reason has passed through the 'ego tunnel' into the world as it is - changing it so much that it is feeding back into our virtual model of reality... creating the multiple crisis we are now beginning to experience.

The Ego Tunnel -the myth of the self

2011-01-02T20:42:00.000Z

Just read this - it is excellent, a must read book.

The Origins of Capitalism

2010-12-24T23:37:00.002Z

The thermodynamics of capitalism.

2010-12-22T13:09:00.000Z

Just reading this very useful thesis on heat engines and capitalism.

Crass interview

2010-12-21T18:58:00.000Z

Interview with Crass members from 1989

Evoking maxwell's demon -summary

2010-12-20T11:47:00.001Z

Evoking Maxwell's demon – a summary.

What is the relationship between physical and social reality? Until 250 years ago, social reality was constrained by physical reality. Since then it has appeared that social reality, the reality of human culture (in the social anthropological sense), has freed itself and ourselves from the constraints of physical reality, of nature. Our liberation came from a double revolution. Human though was liberated from the constraints of tradition and superstition by the Enlightenment, the 'Age of Reason', while a parallel industrial revolution created a new economic system based on innovation and expansion.

The double revolution has transformed social reality and our understanding of physical reality – with no limit to either. However, through the greater understanding of physical reality, a problem has emerged which is set to re-establish a physical restraint on social reality. The use of coal and oil as the energy source which has powered the two revolutions has increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere. This is creating a gradual warming of the earth, sufficient to affect the planet's climate. If nothing is done, the resulting instability will re-set social reality back to survival mode, absorbing all surplus production in attempts to overcome increasingly disruptive 'natural disasters' – droughts, floods, hurricanes, snow falls and famines. Yet to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide will require a a major re-structuring of social reality, a transformation no less radical than that brought about by the industrial revolution. The political implications of such a transformation – an age of austerity – are very difficult to 'sell' to voters. The danger is that by the time the disruptive impact of climate change has become undeniably apparent, it will be too late to prevent further and even more disruptive change.

To overcome this 'impossible' problem, the disconnection between social and physical reality must be resolved now – before rather than after it has become actualised. The point where physical reality and social reality connect is our personal -private and individual- reality. But -

The lack of general historical life also means that individual life as yet has no history. The pseudo-events that vie for attention in spectacular dramatizations have not been lived by those who are informed about them; and in any case they are soon forgotten due to their increasingly frenetic replacement at every pulsation of the spectacular machinery. Conversely, what is really lived has no relation to the society’s official version of irreversible time, and conflicts with the pseudocyclical rhythm of that time’s consumable by-products. This individual experience of a disconnected everyday life remains without language, without concepts, and without critical access to its own past, which has nowhere been recorded. Uncommunicated, misunderstood and forgotten, it is smothered by the spectacle’s false memory of the unmemorable. [Society of the Spectacle, para. 157]

Thus the first task is that of re-membering our own history, of achieving historical self- consciousness, of becoming lucid within the fractured and fragmented dreamtime. This process has a parallel in the techniques of magico-religious systems which aim for 'illumination' or 'enlightenment'. It is also possible to use the work of Georg Hegel to achieve a similar state of consciousness, as this quote from Robert Ware [Hegel, Edin burgh 1999, p. 66-7] shows -

I ordinarily conceive of myself as a finite and limited entity because I regularly reflect upon myself as a particular member of the class of objects of which I am conscious. Yet so far as self- consciousness is conceived on the model of self-containment, I am more than this particular object upon which I reflect. I am also that which does the reflecting; which can never be an object of reflection; and which is entirely without determinate attributes. That which does the reflecting from the higher level is subjectivity or Hegelian spirit, and it is this same undifferentiated subjectivity that experiences the rich diversity of the world from each of our mutually exclusive perspectives. In other words it is the same undifferentiated subjectivity which is differentiated in all of us in so far as we are considered as determinate objects at the lower level. When we look into one another's eyes it is the same subjectivity that is viewing itself from each of these differentiated, opposing and mutually exclusive perspectives. Our opposing perspectives may be conceived as reciprocal, and mutually exclusive actualisations of the same indeterminate universality.

It is the 'undifferentiated subjectivity' as 'indeterminate universality' which quantum information theory [see Vlatko Vedral Decoding Reality Oxford 2010] reveals as the source/ generator of physical reality. Through successive stages of reflection upon the self as an object of consciousness, as 'information', our identity with physical reality is revealed. But this identification is also a negation. Without differentiation, the individual self and its personal consciousness vanishes and only the featureless universal remains. The lucid dream is replaced by deep dreamless sleep. Pure being is also pure nothingness, as Hegel acknowledged.

Is this 'mystical' aspect of personal reality therefore an unnecessary digression? No, since it is also part of the rational and scientific path to an understanding of personal reality as rooted in physical reality. It is a necessary realisation if we are not to become lost in the apparent certainties of social reality. As currently constituted, the certainties of social reality deny the possibility of the changes necessary if global warming is to be slowed. [It is probably too late to halt it.]

Current social reality is paradoxical. On one hand, for the past 250 years, it has involved the transformation of the world through human labour, mechanically multiplied by technology. Thus we have been the creators of social reality. On the other hand, our role as creators of social reality is denied – the transformation (it is claimed) has been achieved by an abstraction -the economic system of capitalism- by putting money rather than people to work. Like the flow of heat through a heat engine, the flow of money (capital) through an economic engine (capitalist society) produces the work which transforms physical reality into social reality. This in turn creates free individuals who have been liberated from the constraints of subsistence. Any alternative economic system would return us to the bondage of subsistence, thus diminishing our freedom. Only capitalism, with its necessary requirement of continual economic growth, can (eventually) raise the whole world out of the poverty which would otherwise be the natural state of humanity.

The collapse of communism in eastern Europe and the conversion of China to a form of capitalism would appear to confirm that there is no viable alternative social reality to that of capitalism. However, since its inception in Manchester in the late eighteenth century, industrial capitalism has depended upon energy from fossil fuels for power. This access to fossilised energy has allowed capitalism to evade the consequences of its internal (logical) contradictions as identified by Karl Marx. The contradictions were thus displaced from social reality into physical reality. They now return as global warming – at the same time as they also appear (via a banking/ financial crisis) to be returning within social reality as well.

The place the contradictions ultimately return to is our personal reality. The abstract global crises will sooner or later become personal and individual. They will force themselves upon us. Is it possible to will ourselves into collective self-conscious before we are forced to awaken into history as it becomes a nightmare? The problem is that of rationality.. The rational perspective is that of scientific objectivity, which arises from physical reality. In physical reality, increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has the effect of warming the planet. This will have a destabilising effect on the global climate which will have a disruptive and damaging impact on social reality. To conserve social reality, the output of carbon dioxide will have to be drastically reduced. But any such reduction on the output of carbon dioxide will itself change dramatically social reality. The continual growth of the global economy, a growth which is necessary for capitalism to survive, will have to stop. Thus the ordering of social reality by capitalism will have to end. Thus the seemingly abstract rationality of science has become a revolutionary force, bringing physical reality into 'consciousness'.

This is a stage beyond that of Karl Marx, a movement back to Hegel, a movement from mysticism to materialism. It will be physical reality rather than the proletariat which will bring the capitalist house of cards crashing down. But what will survive the ruin of capital's empire? Can rationality survive?

To conserve rationality, it must become part of the fabric of social reality. To become part of the fabric of social reality, we ourselves must place rationality at the centre of our individual and personal realities. We must evoke Maxwell's demon every day, sifting the flow of disordered information to manifest the Absolute in our lives.

...'truth includes not only the result but the path to it.' But this is a path strewn with obstacles, which consciousness, if it is to progress, must learn to recognize as obstacles of its own devising. 'The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions.' Dream precedes action, for … the dream is a dream of the world itself, participating, with all its ambiguities and confusions, in the movement of emergent consciousness that it merely anticipates: 'Hence, our motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or a political form. It will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it only has to be conscious in order to possess it in reality'. [Kouvelakis p. 282]

The quotations embedded in the above are from a letter written by Marx to Arnold Ruge in 1843. In 1967, Guy Debord recycled them as 'The world already possess the dream of a time, of which it must now possess the consciousness so as to really live it.' [Society of the Spectacle Thesis 167]

Rainbow Village Molesworth

2010-12-19T10:49:00.003Z

Francis Stoner has scanned the whole booklet and put it on his Facebook page.

Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle

2010-12-10T00:04:00.000Z

Just recommended this wonderfully strange book to my old friend Mouse. Andre Breton name chacked the book in the Manifesto of Surrealism -

In homage to Guillaume Apollinaire, who had just died and who, on several occasions, seemed to us to have followed a discipline of this kind, without however having sacrificed to it any mediocre literary means, Soupault and I baptized the new mode of pure expression which we had at our disposal and which we wished to pass on to our friends, by the name of SURREALISM. I believe that there is no point today in dwelling any further on this word and that the meaning we gave it initially has generally prevailed over its Apollinarian sense. To be even fairer, we could probably have taken over the word SUPERNATURALISM employed by Gérard de Nerval in his dedication to the Filles de feu.* (And also by Thomas Carlyle in Sartor Resartus ([Book III] Chapter VIII, “Natural Supernaturalism”), 1833-34.)

Evoking Maxwell's demon.

2010-12-08T14:40:00.002Z

here are 10 000 words on Evoking Maxwell's demon

Student protests in Dumfries

2010-11-27T13:18:00.000Z

Hegel's logic applied to money

2010-11-06T15:02:00.000Z

Hegel and heat engines

2010-10-26T15:50:00.000+01:00

Just before I started writing up some local place names research, I had been reading a history of thermodynamics from Watt to Clausius. As I was reading it I made mental cross-references to a book which covered the same period of history - Philosophy and Revolution from Kant to Marx.

In the first book, the dynamic interplay was between British engineers and French scientists (although Rudolph Clausius was German) and the second between German and French philosophers. Cutting across both was the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Hegel is in the second book but not the first.

One theme from the first book is that before the theories of thermodynamics could be established, older theories on the nature of heat and of mechanical systems (including Newton’s) had to be worked through and overcome. It was a messy process, full of confusion and error. To begin with, theory followed practice as more and more ‘efficient’ steam engines were built but eventually theory caught up and led to the replacement of steam engines with the first internal combustion engines.

With second, the practice which drove the (philosophical) theory was the French Revolution and the outcome was Hegel’s equivalent of the heat engine - the flow of reason through society. But then the analogy breaks down since Karl Marx’s equivalent of the internal combustion engine has yet to be turned into a working model...

The problem was that the instabilities and contradictions of nineteenth century society have so far been sustained by ever increasing inputs of energy from fossil fuels. It is as if rather than try and improve the thermodynamic efficiency (as it later turned out he was doing) of Newcomen’s atmospheric heat engine, James Watt found a way to make cheap oil from Scottish shale to run it on. [There was a Scottish shale oil industry based at Broxburn near Edinburgh in later nineteenth century.]

This has allowed the ‘capture’ of human societies by the irrationality of industrial capitalist development. So long as the flow of fossilised energy can be maintained, the evolution of reason can be denied/thwarted. Thus the movement towards social self-consciousness, towards the actualisation of rationality; has been thwarted and so Hegel has become a footnote to history.

At the same time, and reading the history of thermodynamics book (written 40 years ago), the physical consequences of using fossilised energy to maintain an unstable system have moved from the social to the global. The gradual accumulation of carbon dioxide is altering the thermodynamics of the earth’s climate. This is an extra-ordinary development. It confounds the separation of the ‘natural’ from the ‘social’, or rather reverses the direction of the assumed motion of development from the natural to the social. The notion of industrial society is that technological and scientific progress through rationality has created a culture which is distinct and independent from nature. It is the image of a heat engine in which only the expansive part of the cycle exists.

But heat engines require a temperature difference to function. Once the heat difference is lost, no work can be done. The machine stops. Culture ends and we are returned to a state of nature, but, due to the period of irrationality which has prevailed until now, the state of nature which we return to is not that from which we began. It is a more unstable and chaotic state of nature, one probably inimicable to rational society.

Did Hegel get it wrong then? Not necessarily. He drew his conclusions from a world only just beginning its irrational turn towards fossilised energy. Therefore a society based around non-fossilised sources of energy could become actual - so long as it is rational.

ATV live in Southend 1978

2010-10-23T12:48:00.002+01:00

A film by Guy Debord

2010-10-20T16:04:00.003+01:00

Ripped and Torn vs Style Wars

2010-10-03T09:00:00.001+01:00

Peter, who wrote about punk in 1977 for Harpers and Queen and some of these pieces are in his book Style Wars, gave a picture of punk as middle class kids posturing as a form of art. Even worse his version of punk was that the first wave was the only wave and that soon these kids found another fad, which was New Romanticism, which allowed them to dress up and be pretty.

I gave the continuing story, that 1977 and the emergence of bands such as The Lurkers, 999 and The Ants was when punk really began to mean something; how 1978 was the year of the Ant and the beginning of mass punk squatting; then the galvanisation of Crass and the evolution of anarcho punk through the eighties.

If I hadn’t been there it would have been the Peter York vision that was propounded, as Toby and the Haunch of Venison MC – Mark ? – were from that side of society and comfortable with that revisionist history. Indeed, toward the end the three of them eagerly supported the proposition put to the panel that Thatcher was a punk rocker as she supported the entrepreneur and the ‘little guy’!

If this site/blog hadn’t existed I would have instigated it at that moment.

Made me realise why Puppy is more important than R&T, because what we did at the time – and are doing now – is to show in a positive manner that punk didn’t neatly ‘die’ when New Romantics came along. And no matter how people like Toby Mott show the wider picture – vis a vis the fascist/RAR stuff and materials up to and including Crass covers – punk is still too easily compartmentalized and stored away in Sex Pistol shaped boxes.

The discussion was filmed and it is hoped to have it available on either Youtube or Vimeo in the near future.

At the end a smartly dressed lady came over and introduced herself. It turned out she’d been to gigs at St John’s Church on Pentonville Road at the beginnings of anarcho. Which just goes to show something, she was of the Mayfair set and pally with the Tobys and the Peters yet she knew exactly where I was coming from and congratulated me on saying what I did. She too felt that this part of punk history was unfairly swept under the carpet. Goes to show something, but what I still can’t express.

The story continues. Houseman’s bookshop have been given an evening at the ICA on October 21st and have asked me to do a bit of a talk there about punk and all that. Penguin should be there too. The acclaimed writer Stewart Home will also be on the stage, whether at the same time it’s hard to say. But it should be good.

Airieland and Arkland - airigh farms Stewartry Kirkcudbright

2010-09-15T15:52:00.000+01:00

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