Everyone was an anarchist

Metropolitan Warf, Wapping- home to the Autonomy Centre 1981-2

On 3 January 1979, in the middle of the so-called ‘Winter of Discontent’ I arrived at the London Rubber Company’s east London factory  to start a new job as a trainee draughtsman. I had started working for the company in one their factories in Gloucestershire in 1977. The year before, while I was briefly a student, I had joined an anarchist group at Stirling University and started buying Black Flag. I had also signed up to Stuart Christie’s Ceinfeugos Press  paying £2 a month to receive copies of the books they published.

A few months after arriving in London I was invited to a Black Flag/ Ceinfeugos readers meeting above a pub on the Kings Road. This turned out to be a support group meeting for the defendants in the Persons Unknown Anarchist Conspiracy Trial which was to begin in September, so as well as Stuart Christie and Albert Meltzer I met Iris Mills and Ronan B and I think Dave Morris of later McLibel Trial was also there.

Iris and Ronan were acquitted and after the acquittal, Ronan had the idea of setting up an anarchist social centre in London. To raise funds for this social centre, the notionally anarchist punk  groups Crass and the Poison Girls were approached to make a benefit record for the centre, which was released in 1980.  As a result of this connection, at one of the planning meetings in early December 1979 I met a group of punks.

The meeting was held in the Conway Hall in Red Lion Square and after the meeting we all went to the nearest pub where I  got into conversation with them and found that they  produced a punk fanzine  called ‘Kill Your Pet Puppy’. Tony Drayton of the Puppy Collective as they called themselves had started his first fanzine, called ’Ripped and Torn’ back in 1976. This was a very well-known punk fanzine. We had a lengthy conversation and when I got back to my bedsit in Ilford I bashed out a letter to Tony inspired by our conversation.  At the next  planning meeting in January, Tony gave me a copy of Kill Your Puppy number 2  which had  my letter in it. I was impressed! I then started visiting the Puppy Collective at weekends and became a regular contributor to the fanzine as AL Puppy.

To backtrack a little before moving on, Tony had started ‘Ripped and Torn’ while he was living in Glasgow. He then moved to London in early 1977 and lived in various squat in west London which later that year declared  themselves the Independent Republic of Frestonia. In one of the squats, which had been a bookshop Tony found a collection of underground magazines- issues of OZ, Frendz and International Times from the late sixties and early seventies. At the time, most punk fanzines were photocopied in black and white, but, when Kill Your Pet Puppy was being planned Tony was able to do a deal with Joly McPhie of Better Badges to use their colour photocopiers to print the new mag. Joly had been part of the late sixties, early seventies west London counterculture and encouraged Tony to make Kill Your Pet Puppy into a punk version of OZ or International Times.

1978 79 also saw a skinhead revival and the skinheads began attacking punk squats and disrupting punk gigs, including Crass ones.  Rock Against racism was very big in 1978 and overlapped with the Anti-Nazi League which was a Socialist Worker Party organisation. The National Front tried to counter this by setting up Rock Against Communism gigs which were popular with skinheads. In an attempt to  distance themselves from  what they saw as the politicisation of punk, Crass decided that they would become anarchists. This new stance was reflected in the lyrics of ‘White Punks on Hope’ written in early 1979.

Pogo on a Nazi, spit upon a Jew
Vicious mindless violence that offers nothing new
Left wing violence, right wing violence all seems much the same
Bully boys out fighting, it's just the same old game
Boring fucking politics that'll get us all shot
Left wing, right wing, you can stuff the lot
Keep your petty prejudice, i don't see the point
Anarchy and freedom is what i want

This did not solve the problem of violence at their gigs. This led Leigh Kendall, an Australian anarchist and punk  to write a short article in Kill Your Pet Puppy number one, titled ‘Peaceful Pro- Crass- tination- a critical look at Crass peaceful anarchy stance ’ commitment to peaceful anarchism in relation to violence at their gigs’.  Crass then invited Leigh and Tony Drayton to discuss the problem- which they did. It turmed out that Crass had very little knowledge of anarchism. Penny Rimbaud  of Crass was later to say [in The Story of Crass by George Berger]

In all honesty I wasn’t aware of anarchism until about year one into Crass …We had got a peace banner to tell people we weren’t interested in kicking shit, and we had put up the circled A banner as something to get the left and right off our backs. It was then that we started getting people asking what we meant by that. I realised that outside of my own libertarian stance , I didn’t know what the fuck it was about. It was then I started looking at what it actually meant in terms of its history. I hadn’t had much interest in it and I can’t say I have now to be honest.

In 1984, Andy Palmer of Crass told Radio Free France

There were both left wing and right wing influences who were trying to co-opt what we were trying saying, which is largely why we adopted the anarchy symbol. Then we came up against the established anarchists, and their establishment idea of what anarchy meant, and as far as we could see, putting anarchy and peace together was a complete contradiction to the idea of what they had of what anarchy was, which was chaos and no government, general violent revolution, which was the opposite of what we were trying to say. So we put the peace banner  together with anarchy banner.

Crass’ symbolic appropriation of ‘anarchy’ was already present at the very beginning of punk as Jon Savage explained several years later.

There was a lot of talk about anarchy in the summer of 1976. John Lydon was working on a set of lyrics to one of Glen’s tunes which became ‘Anarchy in the UK’. Vivienne set about making a parallel item of clothing. The resulting ‘Anarchy’ shirt was a masterpiece. Taking a second-hand sixties shirt, Westwood would dye it in stripes, black, red, or brown., before stencilling on a slogan such as ‘Only Anarchist Are Pretty’ . The next stage was to stitch on more slogans, hand painted on rectangles of silk or muslin.. These made explicit references to Anarchist heroes and to the events of 1968 : ’Prenez vos desirs pour la realite’, ‘A bas le Coca Cola’.
The final touches were the most controversial. Small rectangular portraits of Karl Marx (from Chinatown) were placed on the side of the chest, and on the other, above the pocket or on the collar, was placed an (often inverted) swastika from the Second World War. To ensure that the message was received, the whole shirt was finished off with an armband which simply read ‘Chaos’. The intention was the group should not be politically explicit, but instead should be an explosion of contradictory, highly charged signs.

The Sex Pistols single ‘Anarchy in the UK’ was released in November 1976. The Crass and Poison Girls benefit single for what was to become the Wapping Autonomy Centre was released in May 1980 and raised £10 000 . The money was used to convert a space in a Victorian warehouse beside the Thames at Wapping into a social centre. After discussion the more neutral ‘Autonomy Centre’ was chosen over ‘Anarchist Centre’ as its name. It opened in early 1981 but was a rented space without an entertainment licence or a drinks licence. The rent was £680 a quarter and by November 1981 the lack of committed support from  the traditional anarchist community  had created a financial crisis.

To bring in some cash, it was agreed to put on punk gigs on Sunday nights at the Autonomy Centre. Over the next three month these brought in £700 but as Albert Meltzer sadly observed

With the punks' money came the punks, and in the first week they had ripped up every single piece of furniture carefully bought, planned and fitted, down to the lavatory fittings that had been installed by Ronan Bennett from scratch, and defaced our own and everyone else's wall for blocks around. In the excitement of the first gigs where they could do as they liked, they did as they liked and wrecked the place. Loss of club, loss of money, loss of effort. End of story.   

The problem was that the majority of the punks who came to the Sunday night gigs were teenagers, some as young as 13. For many of the audience and groups, the Autonomy Cemtre gigs were a continuation of  gigs that had been put on in a squatted, derelict church on the Pentonville Road through 1980 and 81.These stopped after one of the homeless alcoholics who also used the church accidentally set fire to it.

While the end of the Wapping Autonomy Centre in February 1982 marked the end of one connection between anarchists and punks, a different connection soon emerged. The new connection was with a group of Spanish anarchists who had squatted an abandoned school on the Harrow Road called the  Centro Iberico. The Spanish anarchists lived in the classrooms upstairs and allowed us to convert a former assembly room downstairs into a performance space. A stage was built using old cookers from the kitchens covered with carpet retrieved from skips. Although the Centro was evicted  at the end of 1982, for a few month during the spring and summer it  was used once a week for anarchist punk gigs. After that a series of ’Anarchy Centres’ were squatted in north London over the next few years, one of which evolved into Molly’s Café on Upper Street in Islington.

A spin-off from these activities was the setting up of the Black Sheep Housing Co-op in Islington in 1982, which by 1983 had been given four derelict houses to convert by Islington Council. After the failure of a building co-op to convert the houses, we had to do the conversion work ourselves. This venture provided an alternative to squatting for co-op members over the next ten years, although many of the original Black Sheep went on to become ‘new age travellers’. I moved into one of the Black Sheep houses in 1983 while I was still working for London Rubber. Mark Wilson of the Mob, a well known anarcho-punk group lived in the same house and in 1984 Mark asked me to take over the Mob’s record company called All the Madmen which I ran for the next couple of years and which I am still involved with 30 years on.

Politically, the most interesting actions that took place in in 1983/4 were the Stop the City actions. Unfortunately,  my partner Pinki who was involved in the planning and organisation of these protests died in 1996, but while we lived together she did pass on various snippets of information  which I will now try to piece together.  As soon as she was 16 in 1978, Pinki left home to become a punk Squatter in London. Then in 1980 she returned home to Gloucestershire and became involved with Stroud CND. In late 1981, Stroud CND visited the newly established peace camp at Greenham Common. The othes went home but Pinki stayed at Greenham on and off for the next 3 years. In 1982 she took part in a protest against the Fallklands Victory Parade in London, which was organised by London Greenpeace.

In early 1983 Pinki  was involved in the planning of  the first Stop the City protest also organised by London Greenpeace where she was arrested and swiftly released since she was nine months pregnant. Her son Sky was born  four days later. The full story of the Stop the City actions has yet to be written, but last year Rich Cross wrote about them for Freedom in September 2013.

The full story of the Stop the City actions has yet to be written, but last year Rich Cross wrote about them for Freedom in September 2013.

Called on 29 September 1983, to coincide with the quarterly calculation of the City’s profits, protestors were encouraged to take part in a ‘carnival against war’ and deliver ‘a day of reckoning’ for the warmongers and racketeers of the Square Mile. Around 1500 anarchists, libertarians, punks and radical peace activists descended on the City to occupy buildings, block roads, stage actions and swarm through the streets.
Cumulatively these efforts were designed to snarl up the operation of the capital’s financial hub. In an analogue era, long before the City’s ‘Big Bang’, when files and paperwork still had to be physically couriered between companies, the impact of mobs of unruly demonstrators filling the City’s narrow streets could be dramatic. Estimates differed, but the occupation of corporate space interrupted scores of monetary transactions, and drove down the day’s profits. The cost to those demonstrating was significant too: more than 200 arrests at the first STC; nearly 400 at the March 1984 event; and close to 500 in September 1984.
Support for STC came from two principal directions: from elements within the radical wing of the nuclear disarmament movement (which had been looking for ways to generalise and extend action beyond military bases) and from within the ranks of anarcho-punk (a sub-culture eager to test out its collective political muscle). But the audacity of STC struck a chord with activists and militants from many other movements and campaigns.

Pinki was arrested on the first Stop the City but released since she was 9 months pregnant. Her son Sky was born 4 days later.  She was arrested again at the second Stop the City  and held over night. A creche had been arranged and fortunately Dave Morris took Sky home with him after it closed. Pinki was arrested again on the third Stop the City, but this time she we were in a relationship so she arranged that I would look after Sky  for the day. Over the next 12 years, apart from 1990 when I almost stood for election as an anti-Poll tax Green Party councillor in Hackney, Pinki was the activist of the family while I kept the home fire burning. Pinki’s last and 26th  arrest and was in June 1994 at a road protest in Bath.

Compared  with the Stop the City actions, the Poll Tax riot on 31 March 1990 in Trafalgar Square was a mega-event. We weren’t there but myself and Pinki had been present  when an anti-Poll tax protest in Hackney turned into a minor riot a few weeks earlier.

Recently, while working on a talk for the Dunfries and Galloway branch of the  Scottish Radical Independence Campaign I jotted down my memories of  the Poll tax in Hackney.

On a wet day in January 1990 the Livingston family  set off from Hackney  to Blackheath in south London. We were going to the launch of the English Anti-Poll Tax Campaign. Blackheath was chosen because of its link to the 1381 Poll Tax Uprising. The revolting Kentish peasants camped on Blackheath on 12 June 1381 that peasants before joining with the Essex crew  to occupy London the next day.

I don’t recall it being a very impressive event. There were a few banners, a few hundred political activists trying to sell each other their revolutionary tracts and perhaps some stalls. It did not seem much better organised than Stonehenge Campaign events we had attended a few years earlier.

We did pick up an anti-Poll Tax  Green Party leaflet which inspired us to join the Party. I started going to meetings of the local Stoke Newington and Hackney North branch and put myself forward as candidate for the local elections due to be held later that year. Our ward was mainly made up of the huge Nightingale Estate plus our Estate and few surrounding streets. I went to hackney library and checked the stats from the previous election- turnout on our ward was very low, less than 20%. I worked out that I only had to persuaded a couple of hundred people who hadn’t bothered to vote before to vote for me as an anti-Poll tax candidate to win.

It seemed do-able, but just to make sure, I got in touch with the Hackney Tenants and Residents Association, based in the old Shoreditch Town Hall to see about setting up a local branch. The local community centre was on Brooke Road and was where our children went to playgroup. I went along one day to see about hiring a room in the community centre for a first meeting and to get some flyers printed.  In a slightly surreal co-incidence the new community worker there was Ian Bone. Ian was very enthusiastic about the tenants group, but quickly headed me off before I started discussing politics by saying ’Of course, I am an old Labour Party man, myself’. This puzzled me at first, but then I realised that the rather thin partition walls in the community centre meant that our conversations would be public rather than private…

As it turned out, the Green Party decided to lead their local election campaign on the dangers of irradiated food rather than the Poll Tax and at the two  tenants meetings I organised  the problem of how to get rid of some squatters from our estate and how to get Hackney Council to carry out a long list of essential repairs were the main subjects discussed. No-one at the time seemed very bothered about the Poll Tax.

Meanwhile, Hackney Council had set 8 March 1990 as the date when they would vote on what level to set the Poll Tax. As a Labour controlled council, it was unlikely (impossible)  that they would refuse to impose the tax. Even if they did, I found that central government would then appoint an Auditor to set a Poll Tax rate for Hackney anyway. As the date grew closer, and as people in England started to catch up with Scotland, where the tax had been brought in the year before, things got more interesting.

I went to an anti-poll tax meeting on Southwold Estate, but although it had been organised by one of the tenants - a young woman- she was flanked by four non-local Militant members. This annoyed me, since it looked as if they were trying to take over our Hackney campaign. I asked if Militant were working with the Socialist Workers Party who were blitzing Hackney with posters saying ‘HACKNEY POLL TAX £475’. This caused consternation and the muffled reply ‘No we aren’t’ but fortunately for the Militants, one of the Southwold tenants then accused me of trying to split the campaign by asking the question…

Then came the day...  On 8 March the council met to set the poll tax rate for Hackney in a boarded up town hall surrounded by a wall of police confronting an increasingly agitated 1000 strong crowd. Three days earlier, Harringey had set their rate and there had been a minor riot. Now everyone was expecting a riot in Hackney. The whole scene was unreal. It didn’t look or feel like everyday Hackney at all. I half expected helicopters to come in and rescue the councillors like  what happened when Saigon finally fell to the Vietcong in 1974.

I had, rather naively, planned to give an election speech to the crowd so was wearing my wedding suit. There was a BBC London film crew there and I was chatting to them when they suddenly got busy, anticipating trouble. So I  moved  on to the steps in front of the town hall to get my speech in before the trouble started. I managed to say ‘If you want to get rid of the Poll Tax, don’t get mad get even and vote Green’ before the police suddenly moved forward from behind me to push the crowd away from the town hall. The only response I had from my election speech was a young punk woman in the crowd shouting back at me ‘It is too late for that now’.

I then went home then but my wife stayed on to report later that a riot had broken out. McDonalds burger bar was smashed up and  Paddy  Ashdown, who had been giving a speech in the Assembly Rooms behind the town hall, had his car attacked by the crowd and 38 people were arrested. One of our punk friends told us later that he had got close enough to Paddy Ashdown to give him a punch…

Compared with the major Poll tax riot which took place in and around Trafalgar Square on the 31 March when there were 350 arrests what happened in Hackney was a minor affair. However, not wanting to be arrested for giving my speech in Hackney, before hand I had contacted the local police, the council, several UK and foreign journalists and even Paddy Ashdown’s office. All the people I spoke to realised that there was going to be trouble, but seemed helpless before the rapid movement of events. That the massive 31 March Poll Tax rally would lead to a major riot now seemed a certainty. An unexpected outcome of the Trafalgar Square riot was the enforced resignation of Margaret Thatcher in November 1990.

My enduring memory is of the few moments that I was stood between the police and the protestors, trying to give my political speech. The sheer intensity of the anger of the crowd was like a physical force, their rage, built up over 11 years of Thatcher governments waging class war was like a blazing furnace. It was not what I had expected at all. Like the young punk woman said, it was too late for my ‘vote Green’ pitch. Way too late. The only coherent thought I can recall from the experience was ‘Fucking hell, there is going to be a revolution’.

But as I noted in my Radical Independence Campaign talk, reflecting on the dramatic events of 1990, it is possible to see in the very different reactions to the Poll Tax north and south of the Border the first signs that Scotland and the rest of the UK were beginning to move apart politically. In Scotland the economic hammer blows of Thatcherism reforged a powerful sense of Scotland as a civil society. Across most of England, the same hammer blows fractured the post-war consensus and fragmented civil society. In Scotland, the Poll Tax gave rise to a popular movement of collective resistance which also focused Scottish civil society on the need for constitutional change. This led to the creation of a devolved Scottish Parliament in 1999. In England the Poll Tax led to riots.

A key theme of the Scottish Enlightenment was the idea  of a ‘civil society’ existing between individuals and families and the state. If there had still been a Scottish state with Edinburgh as its political centre, this idea might not have arisen. Scottish intellectuals would, as members of a privileged elite, have been part of this Scottish state. But with the new Union state of Great Britain centred on London, the dispossessed Scottish professors, lawyers and ministers had to re-invent themselves as members of their own stateless civil society.

Since they viewed the new Union state as a continuation of the English state English intellectuals did not face this problem so had little interest in ‘Scotch philosophy’. The Scottish Enlightenment was more favourably received in France and Germany. Immanuel Kant claimed that David Hume ‘roused me from my dogmatic slumber’. Georg Hegel was another German philosopher who was influenced by Scottish Enlightenment thought. Hegel, however, developed his political ‘Philosophy of Right’, published in 1821, after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. In Hegel’s version, civil society emerged out the disintegration of the family as the focus of ethical life and in turn a rational state  will emerge out of civil society as the ‘actuality of the ethical idea’.

What Hegel hoped was that Prussia would be able to modernise and become a rational state without having to undergo a bloody revolution. But by the time he wrote an essay on the English (that is British) Reform Bill just before his death in 1831, Hegel was less optimistic. He feared that the forces unleashed by industrial capitalism would lead to revolution rather than reform in Britain.

Hegel’s fear reminds me of a question Tony Drayton asked one of the veteran Spanish anarchists at the Centro Iberico in 1982. Tony asked him ‘How did you manage to have an anarchist  revolution in 1936?’. The reply was ‘Everyone was an anarchist’. Hegel also once said that what is rational becomes real and what is real becomes rational. It is forty years since I  became a ‘self-confessed anarchist’. Over those years  I have had plenty of time to change my mind. But  I still believe that of all the varieties of political theories and practices, anarchism is the most rational and hence most real and so I look forward to the day when everyone is an anarchist.

Demanding the Impossible

When the Kill Your Et Puppy Collective met The Mob

Midnight. One more night without sleeping. Spent some time today in a surreal exchange on facebook about the pic below when Viv Albertine defaced a  punk exhibition at the British Library for ignoring women.
"After seeing female punk bands erased from an exhibition celebrating the genre, The Slits guitarist decided to take things into her own hands..."

Apparently, more women were involved in country and western music than punk so Viv should have scrawled 'What about Dolly Parton?' instead.

I did something similar myself once. Reading a book which highlighted the importance of Crass in anarcho-punk, I scrawled 'What about The Mob' on the page and wrote to the author....who didn't know anything about them. So it goes...That was 20 years ago. Not much has changed since then. Crass still define anarcho-punk in the same way the Pistols still define punk.

Eleven years ago I started this blog. Here is the first post. 'In the beginning there was punk' about the summer of 1976. Mark Wilson of The Mob saw it and rated it, which was encouraging. And here is the third 'Subway surfing anarcho-goths' Among other things it connects the Parliament Hill Fields Mob gig with the St James Church flyer above and the gay punx page from Kill Your Pet Puppy 4 (September 1981) below.

Pinki, who is mentioned in the gay punx piece is in this 1978 photo in pink and black. So is Lisa (later singer  with Blood and Roses) and Phil and Cory. Cory is also in the gay punx piece. I think it is Evelyn half cut off on the left. It is a bit hard to read the gay punx article, but if you can mange to, it is a shocking powerful description of what life was like back then in 1979/81.

Next up is Kill Your Pet Puppy Communique 2. 29 February 1980. I have been trying to work out the original sources for this. So far I have found one is a surrealist document from 1925 (see below)  and other is the Communist Manifesto from 1848. This is the original quote from the Communist Manifesto "The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. " See if you can spot where it pops up in the KYPP Communique. (Hint, second page)

I have underlined in red the surrealist quote used in the KYPP communique. It is on page one. 

What is quite amusing about the use of version of surrealist and communist quotes in the KYPP Communique is that Guy Debord  did something similar in 'The Society of the Spectacle'  Example:

Thesis 1

"All of life in the societies in which modern conditions of production reign presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles."

Marx, Capital: "The richness of the societies in which the mode of capitalist production reigns presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities."

For more see this greengalloway post 'Sources used in The Society of the Spectacle' 

In other words, when Tony Drayton was writing the communique he was using the same situationist techniques as Guy Debord. Impressive, huh? And since Tony had started 'Ripped and Torn' in Glasgow back in November 1976 and carried the zine on through 17 editions ( Ripped and Torn 18 was edited by Vermillion) before starting Kill Your Pet Puppy in 1979, his punk credentials are beyond question...

What is your point, caller?

My point is that for all the millions of words written about punk and more recently about 'anarcho-punk' the particular reality/experience of punk which found an expression in Kill Your Pet Puppy remains unknown. Sure, the zines exist, the music of The Mob, Brigandage, Blood and Roses, Hagar the Womb and Flowers in the Dustbin also exists as do hundreds of photos buried away in the KYPP archives.

But the actuality of our lives and our world remains forgotten.

Society of the Spectacle Thesis 157

Another side of the deficiency of general historical life is that individual life as yet has no history. The pseudo-events which rush by in spectacular dramatizations have not been lived by those informed of them; moreover they are lost in the inflation of their hurried replacement at every throb of the spectacular machinery. Furthermore, 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. 

|Maybe it is a compliment. That what is actually/truly subversive will always be excluded from history, will always be too complicated and confusing and dangerous to be fitted into narratives of recuperation. That we were and still are realists who demand that which  remains impossible 

 the revolution of everyday life.

Kill Your Pet Puppy Lives Again!

Tony D. has just told me that the Kill Your Pet Puppy website is now live.

Here is the link:

http://www.killyourpetpuppy.co.uk/

Here is what Tony says About KYPP:

KYPP was started by Tony D as a reaction to the way the original punk movement had been sucked into the hated Record Industry establishment.

Tony D was the founder and publisher of Ripped & Torn. When Thatcher was elected as prime minsister Tony moved to Europe and lived a bohemian lifestyle. Tony returned in September of that year and began work on a new publication that reflected punk life as it was under the Thatcher cosh: squatting, skinhead BNP attacks, speed being replaced by tuinol and scraping a rainbow life from the hell of reality.

This new publication became a reality after Joly of Better Badges agreed to print the new publication (then title unknown) in as many crazy colours as Tony wanted. Both wanted to experiment.

A name was born in the puppy collective hell of one room squatted by eight people with no bathroom or running water. Kill Your Pet Puppy was the chosen moniker.

The first issue was finished in time for the Ants new years eve concert at the Electric Ballroom Dec 79/Jan 80.

500 copies were finished and taken to the event. 500 copies were sold that night.

Nothing was to be the same again.

Kill Your Pet Puppy was alive.

the end of alienation and the revolution of everyday life

 the end of alienation and the revolution of everyday life

Recently I was interviewed for 90 minutes for a research project on punk. The focus was on what influence my engagement with punk /anarcho-punk has had over the past 30 + years. As I was answering the questions I realised that punk/anarcho-punk had not directly influenced my political views. By 1976 I was already a self-confessed anarchist. Although I then, through 1977/8, became fascinated by punk, that interest would probably have faded if I had not met up with the Kill Your Pet Puppy collective at an anarchist [Persons Unknown] meeting in late 1979.

But, as even a brief flick through the pages of Kill Your Pet Puppy shows, KYPP stands apart from both Crass inspired fanzines and straight anarchism. The inspiration for KYPP was derived from the revolutionary aspirations of the surrealists and situationists, mixed with hints of gothic occultism. Looking back, KYPP was /is a potent record our lives and histories against ‘the false spectacular memory of the unmemorable’.

Another side of the deficiency of general historical life is that individual life as yet has no history. The pseudo-events which rush by in spectacular dramatizations have not been lived by those informed of them; moreover they are lost in the inflation of their hurried replacement at every throb of the spectacular machinery. Furthermore, 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. [Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord, 1967, #157]

What we were resisting was our alienation. What we were celebrating were our utopian desires which we took for reality because we believed in the reality of those desires.

Fast forwarding to the present, I was reminded of the situationists when I found this passage in David Harvey’s new book  ‘Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism’.

The traditional Marxist approach to the revolutionary transfor mation to socialism/communism has been to focus on the contra diction between productive forces (technology) and social (class) relations. In the lore of traditional communist parties, the transi tion was seen as a scientific and technical rather than a subjective, psychological and political question. Alienation was excluded from consideration since it was a non-scientific concept that smacked of the humanism and utopian desire articulated in the young Marx of The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 rather than through the objective science of Capital.
This scientistic stance failed to capture the political imagination of viable alternatives in spite of the passionate beliefs of adherents to the communist cause. Nor did it provide any spiritually compelling and subjective (rather than scien tifically necessary and objective) reason to mobilise arms in a sea of anti-capitalist struggle. It could not even confront the madness of the prevailing economic and political reason (in part because scien tific communism embraced much of this economic reason and its fetish attachment to production for production’s sake). It failed in fact to fully unmask the fetishisms and fictions peddled in the name of the ruling classes to protect themselves from harm. The tradi tional communist movement was, therefore, in perpetual danger of unwittingly replicating these fictions and fetishisms. [Harvey, 2014, p. 269]

The situationists’ ‘spectacle’ is our alienation from society, from ourselves. Instead of actively participating in the construction of our own lives, in the making of history, we have become observers and spectators, watching our unlived lives pass before us. Punk- or at least the version I found via Kill Your Pet Puppy- was the negation of alienation. In this version of punk the DIY ethic was applied not just to the making of music or fanzines, but to the lives of the participants. To become a punk was to reinvent yourself as an actor rather than a spectator.

What the Harvey quote implies is that this process was and is ‘revolutionary’ even if traditional Marxists -and anarchists- do not recognise it as such.

Coming back to the present, the political struggle I am engaged with now is one which, unlike punk, is unambiguously  a history making struggle. On 18 September 2014, voters in Scotland have the chance to create a new nation-state. What is interesting about the Scottish independence referendum is the contrast between the Yes and No campaigns.

The No campaign is a top-down campaign. To get its negative message across it relies on newspapers and broadcast media. In contrast, the Yes campaign is relying on thousands of local activists who are organising meetings, canvassing and leafleting in their communities to get its positive message across- supported by hundreds of internet sites. If the Yes campaign wins in September, it will have done so by overcoming voters’ alienation from the political process. If a new Scotland is born on 18 September, it will be a DIY Scotland, a Scotland created by its citizens.

In their attempt to overcome alienation, radical punks turned first to squatting and then to travelling. These moves extended the brief experience of liberation achieved through collective participation at punk gigs.  Through squatting punk became a continuously lived experience, something closer to a counterculture than a music based subculture. Within the ‘underground’ network of squats which extended across London and other cities, participants were able to reinvent themselves as full time rather than part time punks. This movement echoed  that of the pre-punk  radical counterculture.

 In the early seventies, the pre-punk radical counterculture gave rise to the first free festivals. As the number of free festivals increased, by 1976 it became possible to spend the whole summer travelling from festival to festival. By the early eighties, many punks began to adopt travelling as an alternative to squatting. Kill Your Pet Puppy 6, published in June 1983 documented the transition as it described a journey from a punk squat in London to Stonehenge free festival. KYPP was successor to punk fanzine Ripped and Torn which was first published in October 1976.

However, the mass arrest of 500 travellers en route to Stonehenge on 1 June 1985 , along with other events from that year- the eviction of Molesworth peace camp in February and the crushing of the Miners’ Strike- revealed the limits of  the alternatives to alienation. As Margaret Thatcher had proclaimed ‘There is no alternative’. For what David Harvey now call the neoliberal counter-revolution  demanded the forcible re-imposition of alienation.

This is an important point. While the Miners’ Strike fits within a class struggle narrative and the eviction of Molesworth peace camp was part of the Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union, the attack on the free festivals and the travellers suggests that the neoliberal counter-revolution was also a cultural counter-revolution, one which was continued through into the nineties when the focus was on acid house raves and road-protestors. So while traditional Marxists may have neglected the importance of alienation [see Harvey quote above], the neoliberals did not. They understood that the hegemony of capitalism depended on eliminating the (by now) punk infused counterculture and its Situationist inspired efforts to negate alienation.

The pre-punk counterculture relied on a combination of  alternative media, including music and its own underground newspapers and magazines, to reproduce itself- with  some help from LSD/acid. The punk and post-punk counterculture likewise was able to reproduce itself  by similar means. Within these countercultures, the alternative media were more trusted than the hegemonic media which demonised the countercultures via a repetitive stream of ‘folk devil / moral panic’ news stories.

It is interesting/ significant that a similar situation has emerged in the context of the Scottish independence referendum. As James Foley and Pete Ramand spell out in their book ‘Yes- The Case for Radical Scottish Independence’ [Pluto, 2014],the driving force behind the campaign for Scottish independence is not nationalism but opposition to the neoliberal counter-revolution. At the same time, while support for independence is strongest among poorer Scots/ people living in Scotland, it is more than a straightforward class struggle campaign. Many non-working class people living in Scotland are also alienated from a UK political structure which is moving further and further to the right. If this group could vote for a UK level form of north European/ Scandinavia social democracy, they would do so. But since the Labour party have become a neoliberal party, this option is not available. Therefore the option of voting Yes to the Scottish National Party’s version of social democracy within an independent Scotland is appealing.

At the same time such potential (former Labour) Yes voters are being turned off by the unremitting negativity of the No campaign. Fortunately the Yes campaign is able to reproduce itself via social media, the internet and thousands of small scale / community level public meetings. The No campaign are unable to match this grassroots ‘countercultural’ movement. What the No campaign can and are doing, through their complete control of the media, is radicalise  the Yes campaign. As the No campaign reveals itself to be a front for the neoliberal State, the Yes campaign is having to confront the everyday reality of alienation.

As the countercultures discovered, the act of self-creation is the negation of alienation. The difference is that what is being created in Scotland is not a large group of empowered individuals, but a new nation. In a talk I gave to Radical Independence Dumfries and Galloway, I argued that the Yes campaign represented Scotland’s civil society which was in the process of creating a rational state as ‘the actuality of the ethical idea’. The phrase is Georg Hegel’s, taken from his ’Philosophy of Right’ (1821). Hegel had borrowed the idea of civil society from the Scottish Enlightenment. Civil society was held to exist between the private realm of individuals and families and the political realm of government and the state. Civil society was also the realm of economic activity.

The idea of civil society emerged out of the alienation of Scottish thinkers from the shift in political power which followed the Union of 1707. Without a Scottish state centred on a parliament in Edinburgh, most of Scotland’s former elite- including its intellectuals- were physically separated from  the new centre of power in London. Without the French Revolution, the Scottish Enlightenment may have eventually nudged the UK state towards a rational form. Unfortunately, reactions to the French Revolution and the later struggle against Napoleonic France saw the rationality of the Scottish Enlightenment as dangerously subversive. Then came the Industrial Revolution which established capitalism as the dominant power, rooted in economic alienation.

In Scotland the impact of industrialisation was immense. For over 100 years, iron and coal were mined to feed the furnaces which produced the iron and steel which  were made into ships and locomotives. These industries are virtually all gone now but,  until very recently, their legacy survived in support for the Labour party. What Scottish voters expected from the Labour party was progress towards a rational state exercising democratic control over the economy. By aligning itself with the neoliberal UK state  as part of the No campaign, a crisis of legitimacy has overwhelmed the Labour party in Scotland. The Labour party in Scotland have been revealed as a conservative organisation, holding back and suppressing aspirations for the democratic control of the economy. Without the deadweight of the Labour party, via the grassroots yes campaign, civil society in Scotland is rediscovering its radical, even revolutionary, traditions.

But is a rational state anything more than an ideal? The way I look at this question is shaped by the problem of climate change. Our knowledge of climate change is scientific knowledge, which is a form of rational knowledge. It should be promoting rational debate about how best to make the transition from economies based on  energy from fossil fuels to economies based on energy from renewable sources. This debate had the potential to begin in the 1970s when advocates of ‘radical’ or ‘alternative’ technology proposed a shift towards renewable energy sources. These proposals were understood to be part of the radical restructuring of society imagined by the counterculture.

The problem then and now is that such a restructuring of society would require an economic system focused on minimal or zero growth- which would make existing models of capitalism, which depend on ‘infinite economic’ growth, impossible. In the 1970s, climate change was an obscure theoretical possibility and was brushed aside during the neoliberal counter-revolution. Now climate change is a reality which challenges neoliberalism. The reaction to this challenge has been an attack on science and rationality. What the attack on the science of climate change shows is that the neoliberal project is an irrational project and that neoliberal dominated states like the UK and the USA are irrational states. Such states, in order to continue ‘business-as -usual’ are prepared to sacrifice the interests, the future, of their citizens for the short term profitability of the corporate elites which have captured these states.

What has obscured the irrationality of the neoliberal/ capitalist world order in the past has been the lack of any absolute choices between the world as it is and the world as it must become. Climate change is an absolute. Global temperatures are rising, the oceans are warming and the polar ice caps are melting. Working back from this absolute, we can re-understand  the radical counterculture (including punk) as a rational response to the absence of a future. However, following Hegel, we can also now see the consequences of the counterculture’s failure to recognise the necessity of rationalising the state. The persistence of irrational states which fail to impose democratic control over capital now threatens not only the heat death of modern civilisation but also the liquidation of capitalism in a drowned world.

On the other hand in all my years as a keen countercultural I never came across the idea of the/ a rational state. Or mentions of Hegel. My discovery of Hegel came via stray mention that he had  read and been influenced by Scottish Enlightenment political economists and social theorists. I have been reading up on Hegel’s political theories about a rational state because part of the discussions about Scottish independence involve a plan to create a written Constitution for the new state. Which conflicts with the more anarchist aspects of the counterculture and also with the ‘independence as a class struggle‘ aspects of the radical independence campaign.

Is it possible to embed social and economic justice with a written constitution so strongly that the new Scotland becomes a rational state rather than an ‘external state’ (Hegel’s term) or neoliberal state?  That a written Scottish Constitution would be full of fine words but the reality of economic power in the new nation would prevail (realpolitik). There are proposals to crowd-source  the Constitution, to involve civil society via a continuation of the Yes campaign in its formation, but unless such participation can be maintained over time, the interpretation and actualisation of the Constitution will revert to ‘experts’, to lawyers and other members of the professional class. Thus the people or citizens of the new state will once more become alienated from  their/our nation. The Scottish state would still be an external state rather than a rational state.

To end, for now, on a positive note, it does seem that the unremitting negativity of the No campaign and its full spectrum projection is pushing the Yes campaign to towards Hegelian ‘[collective] self-consciousness’. This is potentially a revolutionary development which picks-up from the frozen moment of modernity when conservative reaction to the French Revolution stopped the Scottish Enlightenment in its tracks.

I guess that is my next job. I need to write up my research on the Scottish Enlightenment and show the links to Hegel and then on to the present/ near future. I have already covered some of the ground in my talks at Radical Independence Dumfries and Galloway meetings. Quite a challenge to make it relevant though.



.

Kill Your Pet Puppy 6 (1983) - Stonehenge issue

Kill Your Pet Puppy 6 - June 1983 A Quest of Faith through a World of Illusion

Quality control note - this cover scanned in from first print run which was ‘gestetnered’ at Bus Stop place in Islington in 1983. There was a higher quality re-print but can’t find my copy.

Today we trek to a crypt most unholy
And isn’t it hard when your heart says go
The great beast lies dormant and waiting
Hungry for spiritual debauchery and shamanic revelation
The corpse stirs once more
The villagers hurl more logs on the fire


KYPP 6 was written in June 1983. It is a story which begins with the above note

It was scrawled on the back of an old copy of Kill Your pet Puppy, postmarked Westbourne Park.
Westbourne Park, that name summons memories, those cider-tainted days at the old A centre [Centro Iberico], located towards the dilapidated end of Harrow Road. We had fun last year, and of course that was the last we saw of KYPP; being political with Conflict, colourful with Rubella Ballet, magical with blood and Roses or just leaping around shambolically with the Mob.

Coming back from Stonehenge the dreams had shifted, the reality had collapsed - you could say it had died.
There was no spirit anymore.


The story is a journey. There are encounters with fellow punks [a couple described vividly but whose names elude me], a hypnotic experience brought on by listening to Alien Sex Fiend, a Mob/ Youth in Asia/ Hagar the Womb gig at Chats Palace in Hackney, a meeting with Southern Death Cult who emerge out of the pages of Vague and hold forth on tribal culture which leads into the arrival of ’Old Man Hubris of the Hills’ - a ‘indigenous’ rather than native American shaman - who reveals the cryptic message concerns Stonehenge.

Mark Mob (for it is he) then enters the story and persuades the narrator that Stonehenge is more than ‘the place hippies go each year to die a little more…’

CUT TO

Stonehenge festival . Here the narrator encounters a shadowy female presence sitting on a burial mound, listening to a tape of the Cramps whilst burning old copies of the NME and Punk Lives to keep warm.

She is the ‘spirit’ who could not be found in London anymore, but rather than reveal any great mysteries she seems bored.. Bored with what punk had become, and looking forward to what was next.

The story concludes with a poem ’Lord Spit’ by Josef which the Spirit recites

“One day all Mob songs will be like that,” she laughed as she finished reciting it and it seemed as if a great firey glow had risen from the festival fields itself. “Lets get going , there’s bands to see, stories to write, vices to be sated and virtue yet to corrupt….”

And so it ends. Pretty prophetic stuff really, especially if you remember KYPP 6 of June 1983 was the last in a series which had begun with Ripped and Torn 1 in October 1976. It was time to move on.

Which we did.

Rehearsing the Apocalypse-Counterculture and Climate Change

One day in 1974 I was on the back-road [Castle Douglas to Kirkcudbright Academy via Gelston and Whinnieligget] bus to school when I heard a lot of giggling and guffawing. The source turned out to be a copy of the infamous ‘School Kids’ issue of OZ magazine, published in 1970 and condemned as obscene after a trial at the Old Bailey in 1971. I bought the magazine for 50 pence. About 15 years later I loaned it to Tom Vague, who probably still has it. Over time, my memory of most of the mag has faded, but the image/ text of  ‘Rehearsing the Apocalypse’ has endured. Nowadays the complete run of OZ is online


Two years later, the summer of 1976 was scorching, blazing hot. Every bit of moisture was sucked out of the soil by the sun and heath fires burned uncontrollably. I spent a few days in London and came back with some underground magazines. There was a Frendz with a piece about Hawkwind in it, a few more issues of OZ, a recent  issue of the still surviving International Times and a copy of Undercurrents.

While the other magazines  were products of the sixties counterculture, Undercurrents had begun in 1972. Its focus was on how to build a new world amongst the (OZ anticipated) ruins of the old. So alongside articles on ley-lines and similar themes, it also featured articles on co-operatives and worker control of industry next to practical advice on  how to build your own wind generator. It lasted until 1981, when it merged with the more ‘new age’ Resurgence magazine. By then I was a part of the punk underground, busily involved with the Kill Your Pet Puppy collective, helping to write, illustrate  and produce our own version of Frendz, OZ, International Times and Undercurrents.

Kill Your Pet Puppy (1979-1983) had been preceded by Ripped and Torn (1976-1979), both being edited by Tony D. The environment was not a big issue for punks- the apocalypse we expected was nuclear war- but Ripped and Torn 17 (March 1979) did include a plea for zero population growth

and Kill Your Pet Puppy 5 (1982) sampled an Ecology Party (which became the Green Party in 1985) leaflet ‘Where the Wasteland Ends’

And now? An increase in the extent of the summer melting of Arctic sea ice is happening faster than predicted by climate change models. [ 24 August 2012] This is very bad news, since it means the damaging impact of climate change (eg on food production) could happen more quickly than previously thought. On the other hand, the stronger the climate change signal, the harder it becomes to deny its reality. But, by the time it has become undeniable, it will be too late to halt further changes. This is due to the time lag between the release of carbon dioxide and its warming impact. The loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic is down to greenhouse gases emitted in the seventies and eighties of the twentieth century.

Shrinking Arctic sea ice- summer 2012

In 1976, Undercurrents [in their book ‘Radical Technology‘, p 8] summarised their theory and practice-

A theory of technology and society which insists that we can control technology, but if we don’t it will control us.
Recognition of physical and biological constraints on human activity.
Social  structure emphasising  group autonomy and control from the bottom up.
A bias towards simplicity and frugality in life and technology where ever possible.
Preference for direct gratification in production rather than through the medium of consumption.
Willingness to learn from unlikely sources such as ‘primitive’ cultures and technologies, ‘mystical’ experiences or abilities and even liberal social theory. 

Amongst the ideas  they were working towards was-:Planning for transition to a low-energy society…

I have looked through ‘Radical Technology’ for any references to global warming/climate change. There are none. But the direction of travel advocated by Undercurrents and  the proto-Green counterculture would have seen a reduction in fossil fuel consumption and a reduction in the production of greenhouse gases.  If the ‘revolution’ advocated by the counterculture had been carried through, it would have been a social revolution as profound as the industrial revolution. So what went wrong?

That is a hard question to answer.  There are too many variables to take into account. The simplest  explanation is set out in Radical Technology [page 8, see quote below]  -because the counterculture was part of the ‘anarcho-utopian tradition’, it was opposed not just by the dominant structure of capitalism, but also by the mainstream of Marxism.

[Marx and Engels] understood that the expansion of  the productive forces brought about by capitalism was  a necessary condition for the ultimate goal of human emancipation because without it  there will be neither  a working class to seize power  from the capitalists nor a sufficient level of material resources to feed, clothe, house or educate the world’s population. It was also an insufficient  condition, because unless the working class was conscious and organized it would not success in achieving its revolutionary potential.  But the objective situation (the existence of capitalism) precedes the subjective (the conscious mobilization of the social classes that capitalism has brought into being ) and the former required the bourgeois revolution. [Neil Davidson ‘How Revolutionary Were  the Bourgeois Revolutions?’ Chicago, 2012 p.180]

The tension between Marxist-realism and anarchist utopianism was already recognised in 1976.

Right from the beginning we were all socialists of one kind or another. We didn’t need any persuading that capitalism had to go. And yet, many of the things we felt were most wrong in capitalist society were heartily approved of by many others who called themselves socialists. We began to realise that there are two great streams of socialist thought.
One, represented by Marxists and social democrats, however deep its disagreement with capitalism, at least shared its rational, materialist values of Progress, Science, Efficiency, Specialisation, Growth, Centralised Power, and fascination with the numbing achievements of smart-ass technology like Apollo and Concorde. And this was not all. They seemed to have a model of social development similar in many respects to the ideology of corporate liberalism.: that society should be organised for maximum production, with the products themselves being the principle rewards, offered as a compensation for the inevitable alienations of life and work in an industrial economy. 

Of course under these tough-and-realistic forms of socialism, distribution would be fairer, work safer, products more rational, and public services much  better. This was not in question. But the basic separation of production and consumption, the assumption of alienation-with-compensation, and technocratic criteria for social-priorities, was broadly the same as liberal capitalism. Provided we all worked hard and behaved ourselves, eventually a state would arrive (’post-industrial society’, ’communism’ ) in which machines would take over most of the work and we could all go out and play.

But the other great stream of socialist thought, represented by the anarchists and the utopians, looked at things quite differently. At first one could hardly take them seriously. They seemed to believe that subtle human satisfactions should be given priority over production requirements; that life should be satisfying in all its aspects; that power should flow from below; that the action is not all in the city; that production and consumption need not be segregated in the factory and the home, but could be fused in the community; that revolutions are born of hope not despair.
It is probably true that in the nineteenth century  all this was hopelessly impractical- premature  as they say-  but later examples of local or regional economies run by anarchist collectives although short-lived for external reasons, encouraged us a great deal. It became obvious that there were no technical or economic reasons why decentralised, participatory producer- and consumer- controlled production systems  could not be set up which would be  quite ‘efficient’ enough to provide all the necessities and a good deal more.  

The main obstacle to realising it maybe that people hardly dare believe it could be true. It became clear that part of our task was to persuade them that it was. What to do while waiting for the revolution? We let our imaginations off the leash and  get on with building parts of the post-revolutionary society where ever and whenever we can. [Radical Technology, 1976 p.8]

Although attempts have been made to construct a Marxist theory of ecology [ eg John Bellamy Foster ‘Marx‘s Ecology - materialism and nature‘, New York, 2000], suggestions that there may be limits to growth and environmental constraints on development are alien to mainstream Marxism. As a result, while the right attacked the  counterculture’s radical utopianism on moral grounds as a threat to ‘civilised values’, the attack from left focused on it as a form of counter-revolutionary self-indulgence, as a distraction from the real struggle.

Now that, to borrow Hegel’s phrase,  Minerva’s owl takes flight as night falls on industrial civilisation, a re-assessment is required. For all its failings, the counterculture’s objectives of a transition to a low-energy economy with a bias towards simplicity and frugality in life and technology and preference for direct gratification in production rather than through the medium of consumption were the right objectives.

Hell this is difficult. The melting of Artic sea ice is deeply troubling, since it suggest that climate change may be proceeding faster than anticipated. This should be creating  a wave of change leading to rapid reduction of  carbon dioxide emissions. But the inertia of industrial civilization is such that very little is being done. The trajectory remains towards a twenty first century ‘collapse’ as anticipated by ‘Limits to Growth’ in 1972.

Still struggling to work out what it is I am trying to say and how best to say it. An image which comes to mind is of spaceship earth approaching a black hole. The black hole represents irreversible climate change. Soon (but how soon?) on our present trajectory the gravitational pull of the black hole will become too strong  and it will become impossible to change course to avoid it. But that image is probably too apocalyptic. It is possible that as climate change increases, leading to greater extremes of floods and droughts, the complex economic networks which sustain industrial civilisation will become disrupted, drastically/ dramatically reducing outputs of greenhouse gases. This would be an externally imposed change of course.

Such an  externally imposed change of course would be apocalyptic/ catastrophic.  As an optimistic anarcho-utopian, my hope is that as it becomes clearer that climate change is a reality, more and more people will begin to question the ‘we must continue business as usual’ mind-set. I am thinking here about the threat of nuclear war. One of the big fears of the UK and other states in the Cold War was that in the run-up to a nuclear war, the people would start calling for peace (‘surrender’) rather than risk being vapourised. Looking back at the early eighties, when the threat of nuclear war grew, there was a huge upsurge in popular support for CND and the peace camps, of which Greenham was on only one of many.

A present day equivalent would be the rise of a popular movement in support of a low-energy economy- a revival of the radical technology aspect of the counterculture. This analogy has  historical  parallels. CND grew (from its origins in the fifties)  in the early sixties in response to the Cuban missile crisis, then declined to grow again twenty years later as the threat of nuclear war increased, only to fade away again as the threat  receded following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The destructive potential of nuclear war remained constant, but support for CND ebbed and flowed depending on popular perceptions of its likelihood. Climate is not weather, but an increase in extreme weather events resulting from climate change is a strong prediction of the  science- as is the loss of Artic sea ice in the summer. Correlation may not be causation, but if the loss of Arctic sea ice this summer is matched by an increase in extreme weather events this could become the equivalent to the role Cruise missiles played in dramatising the reality of nuclear war.

As with the massive road building programme of the early nineties, the response to the Cruise missile threat breathed new life into the alternative value system of the anarcho-utopian counterculture. Significantly, as George McKay noted in ‘Senseless Acts of Beauty’  [1996, p.183]  the youthful participants in the nineties road-protests lacked historical awareness of the counterculture  and so imagined they had invented (for example) direct action. Sixteen years on from McKay’s book and who, other than the participants, remembers the road-protest movement?

Claremont Road, east London road protest 1994

The strength of the counterculture has been its powerful immediacy. Its weakness has been its lack of historical consciousness. Could this be about to change? It all depends…if (see above) within a year or two the Arctic ocean is ice free in the summer it will be much harder to sustain the denial of climate change. If the denial of climate change cannot be sustained, the pressure to take action to limit further climate change will grow. This will involve/ require a major cultural shift towards the value system of the radical counterculture which will be re-discovered/ re-invented. What was once dismissed as impossible will become common-place and taken for granted - for example a ‘preference for direct gratification in production rather than through the medium of consumption’. Alternatively, the survival skills gained through squatting, travelling and protest camps will come in handy.

A cultural revolution could have other effects. Fifteen years ago I enthusiastically supported a railway revival project. The idea was to re-use sections of the former Great Central railway as a freight railway, carrying road trucks on trains between north-west England and the Channel tunnel and on into Europe. I suggested that the scheme could be extended to Scotland. My hope was that a branch could then be extended to Stranraer to carry road trucks from Ireland.  By removing thousands of lorries from the roads  the project would have been very environmentally friendly, reducing congestion and carbon dioxide emissions. At the same time there was a plan to rebuild a railway ( which had been closed in 1969)  between Edinburgh and Carlisle.  The only project which has gone ahead is the partial re-opening of  the Edinburgh- Carlisle railway. Even here, work has only just begun.

A cultural shift towards a low-energy economy should prioritise rail over road transport. Unfortunately large chunks of the UK rail network have been lost and been replaced by motorways and other  improved roads. In urban areas, once extensive networks of tramways have also been lost. This means we are locked into road transport- unless a truly radical structural decision is made to stop spending money on building, improving and maintaining roads and spend the money on new railways and tramlines instead. But it will take an economic/political/social earthquake to cause such a shift. This leads on to my final point.

Alternative rationalities.

Making a rational choice between two or more possibilities  involves trying to weigh-up and take into account likely outcomes. This can mean trying to select the best outcome or the least worst. This in turn involves an initial selection of which are the relevant factors to be weighed-up/taken into account. At present, ‘avoiding apocalyptic climate change’ is not usually considered as a relevant factor in rational decision making. If it has been considered at all, it has been given a low-weighting as long-term and/ or low probability threat. Only if it becomes a near-future and/or high probability threat will it be factored in to rational decision making.

What this means is that what may once have seemed  quite ‘rational’ decisions - for example to cut back the rail network and expand the road network - can, from a future perspective, seem to be less rational/ irrational. At the same time, the radical counterculture’s fear of a future  eco-apocalypse, which may have seemed less rational/ irrational 40 years ago, becomes (with hindsight) more rational. This leads to what can be called ‘retroactive rationality’.

Conclusion

The future apocalypse which  the 1970 School Kids OZ  expected to kick in by 1980 has not yet happened. However the radical counterculture did take the logical impossibility of unlimited growth on a finite planet seriously and responded by proposing a mix of  alternative technological, economic and socio-political strategies. If these strategies had been widely adopted in the seventies, the threat of climate change would have been diminished. Unfortunately, rather than being adopted, the strategies were dismissed as ‘utopian’ and/or ‘subversive’. The counterculture was sidelined n favour of an intensification of ‘business as usual’. As a result, outputs of carbon dioxide and other greenhouses gases have increased leading to global warming and climate change. It now appears, as shown by the rapid de-icing of the Arctic, that the timescale for significant climate change may have been underestimated. An eco-apocalypse is now a possibility.

At the same time, a complex economic crisis of the form predicted by Karl Marx is unfolding and shows no signs of ending. If the crisis continues, it could lead to a Marxist style revolution. However, Marx did not develop an ecological theory to match his economic critique of capitalism. Marx anticipated that after the revolution the factories would continue to produce, but under new ownership. That even the post-revolutionary process of production itself might still be environmentally damaging was not considered.. Marx was also scathing about anarcho-utopians….

What will happen next? No-one knows. But amongst the possibilities is that  there will be a re-discovery  and re-assessment of the radical counterculture which  began arguing  40 years ago for the transition to a low-energy economy, with a matching set of ecologically friendly social and political values. The arguments are now even more valid then they were then -and will become even more so in the near future.
 

The Festivalization of Punk

The Festivalization of Punk: Punking up the Festivals

1981-when the Puppy Collective met The Mob

"Now we will see real class war" 10 June 1983.
Margaret Thatcher had just got re-elected on a wave of imperial nostalgia. As dawn broke and the horror hit us, Tony Drayton and myself grabbed a tin of paint and wrote those words on a wall overlooking the North London Railway. A few days later the Kill Your Pet Puppy Collective plus The Mob set off for Stonehenge free festival. I stayed to feed the cats and go to work at London Rubber.

I wrote Encyclopaedia of Ecstasy Volume One then and later some pages for Kill Your Pet Puppy Number Six. It was to be the last KYPP. The Mob played their last (until 2012) gig in November 1983. Fast forward to 24 June 2016 and the results of the EU referendum came through. It was a similar shock, as if the ghost of Margaret Thatcher had risen from the grave...

I started this- third- review of a book 'Festivalized'- before 23 June. It was difficult to finish, the future overshadowing the past. To make a connection between now and then, I have taken an old greengalloway post and interlaced new text between the pages of KYPP 6.

Warning- this book will blow your mind! It is called Festivalized and it is about the music, politics and alternative culture of the free-festival movement. It is 320 pages long but I read it in a day. The day was the 1 June, the 31st anniversary of the Battle of the Beanfield. Two weeks later and the memories and connections the book sparked off are still haunting me.

What makes the book so fascinating is the way it weaves together ‘music, politics and alternative culture’ through 40+ personal accounts to build up a dynamic picture of the free-festival movement. Steve Lake of Zounds is one of the people interviewed for the book. Steve mentions how Zounds met The Mob -‘a punk band who were travelling with Here and Now’- at a free-festival. [Page 108] In August 1981 the Kill Your Pet Puppy collective met up with The Mob at mini free-festival. It was a very creatively fruitful encounter. I remember discussing  how to finance what was to become ‘Let the Tribe Increase’ with Mark Wilson in the kitchen of Puppy Mansions in 1982 and in 1983 the theme of KYPP 6 was a  Mob inspired journey to Stonehenge free festival.

This intertwining of punk and the free-festival movement which ‘Festivalized’ documents was touched on but not developed by Jon Savage in his account of punk’s immediate  (1975) origins in ’England’s Dreaming’ (1991, pp 111-112).

[Squatting] was a harsher version of the hippie dream, with a sound track by the group Hawkwind, but it was none the less potent. With the dole, squatting made living in central London accessible and affordable. This access allowed the rapid city-transits of the Punk period.





The first free-festivals were held in Windsor Great Park 1972-74, followed by the first Stonehenge festival in 1974. The bizarre state sponsored Watchfield free festival took place in August 1975. The first Sex Pistols gig took place in November 1975. When punk band ATV played at Stonehenge in 1978, there were only about 4000 people there. By 1983 there were about 40 000. It was only in 1976 that there were enough free-festivals for people to travel from one to another rather than returning home in between.

In other words the free-festivals grew and developed in parallel with punk and were in their own way a response and reaction to the recuperation of the 60s cultural revolution by the music business and mainstream media.

The 60s cultural revolution was inspired by acid, H-bombs and automation. Automation was the technology of a future without work where computers and robots would create a world of abundance rather than scarcity. It would be the fulfilment through capitalism of Marx’s vision of  a communist society

where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. [German Ideology, 1845]

Adding acid to the mix immanentized the eschaton [see http://illuminatus.wikia.com/wiki/Immanentizing_the_Eschaton ]

What is to come tomorrow
Let it come today
What is to come today
Let it come right now
Say not, now and then
Oh lord white as jasmine
[Mahadevi]

We want the world
And we want it
We want the world
And we want it…
…Now
[Jim Morrison]

Automation didn’t deliver and the H-bombs never fell. But as the sixties gave way to the seventies the acid inspired visions of UBut thanks to the H-bomb this potential future was at any moment liable to be vapourised. bi Dwyer and Wally Hope (Phil Russell) drove the psychedelic revolution forward into confrontation with the British state.

Dwyer organised three free festivals held in Windsor Great Park between 1972 and 1974. Windsor is a Royal Park, close to Windsor castle#, one of the many official residences of the UK royal; family. Holding a free festival at Windsor, squatting the Queen’s back garden, was a politically symbolic act and the British state responded by violently evicting the psychedelic  squatters in 1974.

The first Stonehenge free festival was held in June 1974 but attracted only two or three hundred people. Its location was as symbolic as Windsor, but at a different deeper level. Stonehenge is older than England and its kings and queens. It is older than Glastonbury with its myths of the Holy Grail and which had been attracting mystically inclined hippies since the late 1960s.

In 1978, when ATV, Here and Now and The Mob played, the festival only attracted about 5 or 6000 people. By 1984, the last year it was held, numbers had grown to between 40 and 60 000. If it had continued numbers attending could easily have reached 100 000. For comparison the highest recorded attendance at Glastonbury unfree festival was 153 000 in 2005.

One of the most fascinating things about ‘Festivalized’ is the way the multiple accounts of the participants highlights the crucial difference between unfree festivals like Glastonbury and the free festivals. Unlike  unfree festivals, at free festivals the music was only part of what was going on. The main appeal of free festivals was the discovery by those who went that the festivals were not manufactured products to passively consume but collectively constructed situations to be actively experienced.

No doubt the acid helped, but in ‘Senseless Acts of Beauty’ (1996, pp 19-21) George McKay gives an account of his experience of Stonehenge free festival 1984 and how he changed from feeling an alienated outsider to an integrated insider ‘comfortable and at ease’ with the festival. As part of the punk generation, McKay was also struck by the blurring of difference between hippies and punks in the eight years since the year zero of 1976.

What is interesting about Anthony Barnett’s discussion of Englishness and Britishness is that he sees a separation between the two as emerging since 1999 when Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland but not England gained powers devolved from the UK parliament. Many voters in England are annoyed because they feel that England is missing out through not having its own devolved parliament.

But if such a parliament was created, it would diminish the power of the British/ UK parliament and lead to a Disunited Kingdom. Who would be more powerful -the First Minister of an English parliament? Or the Prime Minister of the Westminster/ UK parliament?

To avoid this situation neither Tory nor Labour have supported moves towards setting up an English parliament. Barnett argues that this has led to a displacement of English resentment from a focus on the Westminster parliament onto the EU, which Ukip and anti-EU Tories have exploited.

But if a section of English society were at least uncomfortable and at most outraged by Margaret Thatcher’s Falklands era British/English nationalism, the separation of British from English identity had begun long before devolution in 1999. And one of the first signs of this disaffection is the ’Union Jack with Smiley Face’ flag used by Wally Hope/Phil Russell and the Wallies at Stonehenge in 1974.

While Jamie Reid stuck a defaced queen on the union jack for the Sex Pistols, the Wally flag reduces the flag and all its stands for to inanity. Like watching the Trooping of the Colours or the State Opening of Parliament on acid when the whole monstrous solemnity of the events flips over into a spectacle of side-splitting hilarity, the Wally flag mocks the pretensions of the past.






Even before the Sex Pistols, the alternative culture saw no future in England’s endless imperial dreaming. It dreamt of William Blake’s Albion and of a time at once before and after Empire.

The golden age of the future comes
That which was dreamed of in the past
Where freedom reigns on minds at peace
Minds rich in wisdom to the last
We are the children of the sun
And this is our inheritance
No longer chaos and confusion
But love and laughter, song and dance
[Hawkwind ‘Children of the Sun’, on ‘In Search of Space’, 1971]

That the reality of free festivals, even in the early days, could be chaos, confusion and violence is documented in ‘Festivalized’. But the vision of an alternative England they represented became increasingly attractive as the patriotic frenzy unleashed by the Falklands War sent shock-waves through the fabric of English society.

The economic policies of the Thatcher government had already torn the heart out of manufacturing industry, creating a reserve army of the unemployed which fatally weakened the trade unions and organised labour. What the Falklands War allowed was an intensification of this class war. As the miners were to discover, if the Argentineans were the ‘enemy without’ then they could be classified as the ‘enemy within’.

The revival of the Cold War added to the sense of crisis. Plans to allocate the UK nuclear Cruise missiles saw a rapid rise in CND membership and the establishment of dozens of peace camps at nuclear bases around the country.

The cumulative effect then was to increase the pool of people who were attracted to the Stonehenge free festival as an actually existing alternative to Thatcher’s England. Unlike other free festivals, the Henge, through its proximity to the Stones, was able to tap into a mythical version of Englishness which could be counterpoised to Maggie’s manic vision.

But was it ‘Englishness’? I think so. No equivalent of the Stonehenge festival emerged in Scotland or Wales. It was unique in its size and its connection to a powerful symbol of an ‘England before England’, a deep dreamtine in which all of England’s history could be dissolved and recombined in an endless kaleidoscope of other Englands. Brian Aldiss’ 1969 psychedelic sf novel ‘Barefoot in the Head’ reads like documentary of the time.


Aldiss's story begins in the aftermath of a new World War, during
which bombs filled with hallucinogenics fell on many European cities. Peace now reigns, but social norms and institutions have collapsed as citizens struggle to distinguish between reality and drug-induced fantasy. Building are intact, but the minds of the citizenry have been pharmaceuticalized…

Was the attempt to create an alternative England really a threat to the British state?  An inconvenience no doubt, but a threat? Hardly. Yet great efforts were made to stop the Stonehenge festival and break up the related travelling culture.

If there was a threat it lay in the subversive appeal of refusal. A refusal of the neoliberal consensus which has become even more dominant since the Thatcher era. But although the Thatcher era is associated the rise of neoliberalism, there is nothing particularly English about neoliberalism, it is just the latest version of global capitalism. Indeed there is a contradiction in here. Neoliberalism is destructive of historic local (national) identities because they resist the free flow of capital, of commodities and labour. Marx and Engels noted this in 1848.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

It is quite confusing. I have just been reading ‘The Englishness of English Punk: Sex Pistols, Subcultures and Nostalgia’ by Ruth Adams (2008) suggested by Matthew Worley. A quote…

The Pistols, then, might be regarded as unlikely guardians of English Heritage, albeit expressing a history which stressed the popular cultural and the radical dissenting pamphleteering elements of that heritage rather than the more conventional (pro)monarchical and aristocratic aspects.

But there was more to punk than the Pistols and by the time Kill Your Pet Puppy 6 came out the Pistols had been over for five years- although it seemed more like 50 due to the intensity of the Thatcher years.

Unlike previous KYPPs or Ripped and Torns before them (R & T started in late 1976), KYPP 6 was a narrative, the story of a journey from the punks squats of London to a free festival at Stonehenge. The shift in perspective was influenced by Mark Wilson and The Mob who -as mentioned above - we met at a micro-free festival on Parliament Hills in August 1981. By 1983 Mark and Josef (ex-Zounds, then drummer with The Mob, later of Blithe Power) were living in the same Black Sheep Housing Co-op as the Puppy Collective.

It is quite confusing. I have just been reading ‘The Englishness of English Punk: Sex Pistols, Subcultures and Nostalgia’ by Ruth Adams (2008) suggested by Matthew Worley. A quote…

The Pistols, then, might be regarded as unlikely guardians of English Heritage, albeit expressing a history which stressed the popular cultural and the radical dissenting pamphleteering elements of that heritage rather than the more conventional (pro)monarchical and aristocratic aspects.

But there was more to punk than the Pistols and by the time Kill Your Pet Puppy 6 came out the Pistols had been over for five years- although it seemed more like 50 due to the intensity of the Thatcher years.

Unlike previous KYPPs or Ripped and Torns before them (R & T started in late 1976), KYPP 6 was a narrative, the story of a journey from the punks squats of London to a free festival at Stonehenge. The shift in perspective was influenced by Mark Wilson and The Mob who -as mentioned above - we met at a micro-free festival on Parliament Hills in August 1981. By 1983 Mark and Josef (ex-Zounds, then drummer with The Mob, later of Blithe Power) were living in the same Black Sheep Housing Co-op as the Puppy Collective.

The Mob had played at Stonehenge in 1978 at later festivals. The Mob connection inspired not just KYPP 6 but actual trips to Stonehenge in 1982, 83 and 84.  As ‘Festivalized’ shows, this was part of a wider crossover between punk and the free festivals.

But was this all part of the construction of an alternative Englishness rather an alternative Britishness? I have been living back in Scotland for 19 years and from that perspective, especially from the intense two years of the Scottish independence referendum campaign and its aftermath, it does seem more English than British. If it had been British, then the free-festival/ punk intersection would have had  an impact in Scotland. Punk certainly did, but not the later, 1980s, developments. Those developments simply did not register in Scotland  and the whole era is unknown. Viewed from Scotland, alternative England as it was and is, is invisible.

But then, even within England, unless you were part of the alternative culture it is also invisible. Instead, reactionary Englishness, the Englishness which saw the Falklands War as a ‘Nazi invasion of Ambridge’, of Nigel Farage and Ukip, of the ‘take our country back’ Leave campaign appears to prevail

If it was easy to define as percentage vote based on the EU referendum, then 53.4 % of England is reactionary and 46.6%  of England is radical. Nothing is ever that straightforward though, but on a best guess using social media interactions, alternative England voted remain. Not through love of the EU, but because of the Leave campaign represented precisely that England the alternative culture  was an alternative to.

To take England back to a time before the EU is to take the country back to the late sixties /early seventies when the alternative culture emerged and  to the intertwined origins of the free festivals and punk in 1974 when the Labour government elected in October promised to hold the first EU (EEC/ Common Market then) referendum…

1974. For future punks it was the year of the Diamond Dogs and for pot-head pixies the year Gong released You. The year of the last Windsor free festival and the first Stonehenge one.

And then here we are now, these words tucked away between the pages of Kill Your Pet Puppy Six, written in 1983, so close to 1984, so far from here in 2016.

Were the words and images, which surround these words and images, part of an alternative England? Of an alternative future? The soundtrack to KYPP 6 is 'Let the Tribe Increase' by The Mob. There is not much escapism in the songs, they are angry and punk as fuck.They are also defiant.We had no illusions about the future, we knew that it was going to be hard. Yet there was also a determination that we would not give up, that we would carry on and continue. That, as George McKay was to put it later, that ours was a culture of resistance.

It was, it still is a culture of hope and celebration. Mob gigs were not gloomy events, they were joyful, colourful, uplifting events. There was a powerful sense of solidarity which has endured. More the 30 years on the friendships and connections made then are still there.



Idealism tempered by realism. Realism inspired by idealism.


Yeah, that sounds about right.