Zéro de conduite (1933)

Bash the Rich: True Life Confessions of an Anarchist in the UK by Ian Bone (Tangent Books 2006)

In fact, most anarchists kept their private lives completely divorced from their anarchist activities and would have been horrified if their neighbours had known about their hobby!

More to the point, I thought not talking to the media was missing out on major opportunities to spread our ideas. Yes of course we'd been misrepresented . . . blah blah . . . but still, however deformed, our ideas and existence would be read about by far more people in the News of the World (circulation 5,000,000) than a piece in Class War (circulation 15,000). After all, I'd first found out about anarchism in Punch. So when Andrew Tyler contacted us about doing a piece in Time Out about Class War in May 1985, me and Martin Wright decided to brave the cries of 'sell-out!' and go for it. If we were going to be exposed anyway, we might at least get a few good quotes in.

The Time Out piece was better than we could have dreamed of. Tyler had grasped the difference between us and the stultifying torpor that was British anarchism and written a coruscating piece that gave Class War an electrifying jolt. The oxygen of publicity resulted in a packed Class War conference two weeks later. The predicted criticism of our sell-out in Time Out came early in the day. 'Yes, I am sorry we appeared in Time Out,' I grovelled, 'I'm sorry it wasn't on the front page of the News of the World'. Tumultuous applause (well so it seems 20 years later). The case for talking to the press was won and has always been vindicated in my view. I was subsequently exposed in the Sunday Mirror, Today and the News of the World ('Dangerous lunatics who want to kill the entire cast of Eastenders' - don't ask!) and despite the vilification we got, our post bag was always rammed full the following week with people who'd never heard of us before but wanted o get involved now.

In particular, the quotation from the Living Legends lyric God Bless You Queen Mum appearing in the Sunday Mirror and wishing her an early death was especially popular. The key, of course, is not to believe your own publicity and the oxygen certainly went to my head in those intoxicating months in 1985. At the conference I had argued for '500 people with sledgehammers attacking the bridge at Henley.' By the time of that year's anarchist bookfair in Conway Hall, I was well away. Having sold shit loads of Class Wars with Martin I took the stage at the end of the day. Well, actually, there was already someone on the stage so I had to push him off it first. Unfortunately, that person was Donald Rooum - a veteran comrade I have a lot of respect for going back to his framing by the police for intending to throw a brick at the queen of Greece in the 1960s. However, it wasn't really Donald I was shoving off the stage but the old anarchist movement. Drunk as fuck I declared:

'You liberals and pacifists have had our movement for too long, now it's our turn. If we haven't reduced the place to ruins in five years you can have it back!'

Quite why I wanted to reduce the venerable Conway Hall to ruins was unclear. But what the fuck. I might have paraphrased Durrutti, but the point was clear. We were on a fucking roll.

'To Hell with Culture': Anarchism in Twentieth Century British Literature edited by H.Gustav Klaus and Stephen Knight (University of Wales Press 2005)

Anarchism, Litvinoff recalls, in his lovely East End picaresque autobiography Journey Through a Small Planet, was in his blood, was of the very atmosphere in the streets where he lived, in the whole quarter. He never forgot childhood stories of anarchist leaflet campaigns against the imperialist First World War, of followers of Tolstoy and Kropotkin chasing army recruiters away from Bloom’s corner at the end of Brick Lane – men who met to argue about the wisdom of political bombing at the Jubilee Street Arbeter Fraint house, the socialist/anarchist club for Jewish immigrants. In his autobiography he would go on to write marvellous, nostalgic stories about his childhood among Yiddish-speaking immigrant leftists in the broad church of radical East End politics (people like Mendel Shaffer’s atheist father, who joined the Anarchists and the Communists and the Buddhists and the Socialist Zionists); stories of his own youthful scuffles with Oswald Mosley’s fascists on their incursions into the East End in the early Thirties; and about his craving for the ‘female nood’ which took him to the art classes at the Bethnal Green Men’s Institute, in company with his vegetarian friend Morry Spitzer, who worked in his his father’s kosher butcher shop (an aesthetic pursuit, says Litvinoff, that was all part of being a ‘boisterous guerilla’), and about his profound distress over the unwanted pregnancy of Fanya Ziegelbaum, lovely seamstress, whom he kissed under the Whitechapel railway arches (dark place of dybbuk talk and rumours about Jack the Ripper): Fanny Ziegelbaum, deserted by Herschel Rosenheim of the New York Yiddish Theatre, who was playing Hamlet at the Whitechapel Pavilion – Rosenheim, red-haired, Chicago-gangster-voiced, his Yiddish Hamlet a far cry from that of Mr Parker, Litvinoff’s English teacher.

From Valentine Cunningham's 'Litvinoff’s Room: East End Anarchism'.

"The Road to Socialism - Kropotkin, Morris & Marx"

A transcript of an old talk from one of the speakers which may be of some interest to those interested in the subject of the debate:

What Marx should have said to Kropotkin

Freaks, Geeks and Class Struggle Anarchists

There's an (intentionally) hilarious thread going on over at Urban 75 at the moment on the subject of the *cough* rich tapestry of life that makes up the British anarchist movement. ('bam' for short.)

I'm not providing a direct link to the nostaligathon, as you can find it yourself if you're that interested in the subject. (Go on - sign up to Urban 75. There's enough left trainspotting anecdotes piled up in that thread to see you through the next 101 branch meetings.).

And anyway, despite my previously expressed irritation at the lifestyle ghetto of a lot of anarcho-types, none of us on the political fringes are in that secure a position to get on a high horse about such matters. You could swap 'Anarchist' for 'Trot' or 'Left Communist' or 'SPGBer', and come up with an equally hilarious thread . . . . intentional or otherwise. None of us are immune from such 'You're a bit fucking strange, mate,' finger pointing . . . and I include myself personally in that sweeping generalisation. You OK at the back? My words haven't offended you too much? Good.

On the subject of freaks, geeks and class struggle anarchists, I couldn't help but notice the striking resemblance between Ian Bone (in the '68 vintage photo on the left) and 'Harris Trinsky' from the seminal American comedy-drama series Freaks and Geeks.

Granted they part their hair on different sides but the dopplegangerish aspect of the two images is uncanny.

And when you consider the celebrity elder statesman status of Ian Bone within the anarchist movement - christ, I remember reading about him in the pages of the Sunday tabloid press when as a young teen my interest in politics stretched to nothing more than a hatred of Thatcher, the SWP and the External Fraction of the ICC - it does seem to overlap snugly with the role that Trinsky plays in relation to the younger geeks in the show.

Trinsky has the elevated status of the older geek whose been there, done that, got the wedgie up his arse in the school locker room from the 'jocks', and is now in a position to offer the sagacious advice to the others in between games of D & D.

The similarities definitely lock into place with this particularly memorable quote of Trinsky's, "Bodies are merely a shell which conceal our heavenly souls." Christ, that could have been lifted lock, stock and barrel from Class War's 'Heavy Stuff'

Now, if I could only find a picture of that Class War/Anarchist Federation bloke whose the spitting image - SPITTING IMAGE - of Boris Johnson, I'd be quids in. The bloke's either gone to ground through sheer embarrassment at the hand that fate has dealt him or he's quids in himself, doing the lookalike circuit. I hope it's the latter.

November Spawned A Roster

Same deal as the last post, so I'll spare you the schtick this one time. Some articles and other sundry stuff of note from November 2006 on the Socialist Standard MySpace page:

From the November 2006 Socialist Standard, a review of Benjamin Franks's 'Rebel Alliances': Anarchism in Britain Today

Centenery editorial from the September 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard: The Challenge of a Better Future

From the October 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard: Jack Common and Working Class Writing

Selected passages from "Philoren's" 1943 pamphlet, 'Money Must Go': Money Must Go

Film Review from the December 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard: An Inconvenient Truth

From the Socialism Or Your Money Back blog: Rendition To Torture

Check out the link for 17 other pieces from that month.

When Chomsky met Hitchens

Via Postmodern Haircut

Also check out:

The Chomsky/Nader smackdown.

The future's so bright, Noam has to wear his bifocals.

Chomsky uses Wordpress.

Chomsky moonlighting.

Chomsky is board with the struggle.

Mixing Pop and Politics - outakes

What goes around gets reposted . . . eventually

Anarcho-punk blog/fanzine, 'Kill Your Pet Puppy', has been kind enough to post a link to Ian Walker's old New Society article on 'Anarchy in the UK' that I previously posted on the blog.

I'd love to repost some more Ian Walker articles on the blog but unfortunately my copy of 'The Other Side of Britain' is still on the other side of the Atlantic.

On the subject of mixing anarchism and politics (Crass is heavily featured in the Walker piece), interesting to see Kanye West's endorsement of anarchism on last night's Grammys.

It's been that long since the last Chumbawamba album that it's nice to see someone else picking up the black flag.