oday the London Metropolitan Police has reputation for institutional corruption and abuse of powers. I was ever thus. As William Lovett put it in 1839, “the institution of a police force is an infringement on the constitution and liberties possessed by our ancestors.”
An extract from the book, 1839: the Chartist Insurrection by David Black and Chris Ford.
Illustration from 1839: the Chartist Insurrection by David Black and Chris Ford. A cartoon Penny Satirist22 Aug 1840 on government plan to establish county police forces. Shows police raiding a pub, stealing chickens and pigs, and demanding to see a man’s passport.
The dialogue reads (picture on the left):
First Policeman: I can see a light inside. I swear.
Second Policeman: I can see summut moving
Third Policeman – I can hear someone moving – Let us demand an entrance – And know whether spalpeens have got their licence – And if they won’t let us in by fair means, we’ll break open the door – And swear they interrupted us in the execution of our duty – the beak will be sure to believe us.
Fourth Policeman – Here Larry, take hold of this here porker. I’ve knocked him on the head to prevent him squeaking – Oh, but we’ll bag the pigs and the fowls – And then in the mornin’ we’ll pretend to look after the thieves.
(picture on the right:
Holloa! Where are you going to this time o’ night?
I be going home Sir. From my labour.
I dare say that’s a lie. Show us y’er passport!
Passport? What be that, Sir?
Ho, ho! Then you haven’t got one, eh? – Then I’m sure you’re out for no good –so you are my prisoner – Come along.
The County Police Act 1839, also known as the Rural Police Act, enabled Justices of the Peace in England and Wales to establish police forces in their counties. The move to expand the police was not welcomed by everyone. Radicals, who had experienced the brutality of the London Metropolitan Police during the Chartists agitation of 1839, saw the new police forces as a threat to free speech and right of assembly.
Richard Doyle’s depiction shows police and dragoons attacking a Chartist rally in Birmingham’s Bull Ring on July 4th 1839. A large squad of London Metropolitan Police (wearing‘Peeler’ tophats and swallow-tailed uniforms) had been sent to Birmingham for ‘special duties’. [Image: Library of Congress]
Today the London Metropolitan Police has reputation for institutional corruption and abuse of powers. I was ever thus. As William Lovett put it in 1839, “the institution of a police force is an infringement on the constitution and liberties possessed by our ancestors.”
William Lovett
As described in our book, 1839:
As the House of Commons in London was about to debate the Chartist petition for Universal Male Suffrage, the Chartist National Convention – reconvened in Birmingham .
Days later, on 4 July, Birmingham magistrate Dr. Boothe rode into the Bull Ring, a triangular commercial area of the town centre, where an illegal meeting was taking place. His mission was to “ascertain the state of the town,” which he soon did when the large crowd greeted him with shouts of “Spy” and threw stones at him. Rashly, the police tried to snatch the speaker by wading into the crowd and wielding their batons, until they were beaten back by the angry crowd. Dr. Boothe rode off and soon returned with a company of cavalry. He placed himself under the Nelson Monument and read the Riot Act. The dragoons drew their sabres and moved into the Bull Ring. The crowd withdrew but remained on the streets until after midnight, some armed with clubs and iron railings torn from churches, chanting “Fall Tyrants Fall!”
Reporter John Hampden wrote in The Planet:
“Wanton outrages were perpetrated by the police sent down by Lord J. Russell, at the instigation of the Birmingham magistrates, not only upon the Chartists assembled in the Bull Ring, but also upon harmless and unoffending people in the streets… who ought to have been protected, instead of being maltreated. Arms-breaking and head-breaking, however, seem to have been practiced by way of diversion; it was, no doubt, fine fun to see a fellow go off with a fractured limb, and an exceedingly good joke to hear a woman beaten by the police ruffians, cry out against the brutality… it mattered little whether they were man, woman or child… Are not these circumstances calculated to rouse up all that is manly – all that is English – in our countrymen and produce a universal shout of execration against such tyranny and injustice?”
The Convention met the next day in Lawrence Street and, on London delegate William Lovett’s initiative, issued a proclamation condemning the magistrates and police for the previous night’s action. Although all delegates were prepared to sign the proclamation, Lovett, in an act of heroic proportions, insisted that he alone would sign because, he declared, “the Convention cannot spare victims.” The proclamation was placarded all over Birmingham, and the authorities responded by arresting Lovett as signatory, and Birmingham delegate John Collins as publisher, of the document. At the court hearing, the Birmingham Recorder asked Lovett, “Were you aware that certain members of the police force were wounded dangerously by weapons?” Lovett replied,
“I heard that several of them were wounded, and at the same time thought that the people were justified in repelling such despotic and bloodthirsty power by any and every means at their disposal, because I believe that the institution of a police force is an infringement on the constitution and liberties possessed by our ancestors; for if the people submit to one injustice after another, which self-constituted authorities impose upon them, they may be eventually ground to dust, without the means of any resistance.”
Collins pointed out that one of the magistrates facing him was in fact Mr. Muntz, a leader of the Birmingham Political Union. Muntz, a moderate, ‘Moral Force’ Chartist, had been elected to the Convention in August 1838, but had never taken his seat.
Bail was granted to both accused.
From: 1839: the Chartist Insurrection by David Black and Chris Ford (Unkant, London: 2012)
Decade after decade of Labour movement historiography have overlaid the Chartist story with the concept of an overwhelmingly, conservative British working class and a solely reformist British Labour Movement. The message has been consistently drilled into us that revolution was and is futile.
This book offers another perspective. Revolution in Britain in 1839 was closer than we have been previously taught.
1839: The Chartist Insurrection by David Black and Chris Ford(with a foreword by John McDonnell MP) was published in 2012, during a time of intensifying social crisis. Ben Watson’s blurb on the back cover captured our intention to write an account of a rebellion from long ago which would inform and inspire readers in the present: ‘In retrieving the suppressed history of the Chartist Insurrection, David Black and Chris Ford have produced a revolutionary handbook.’
During the aftermath of the 2008 Crash the slogan, ‘We are the 99 per cent’, echoed around the world and frightened the rich and powerful. In the Middle East the Arab Spring overthew, or seriously threatened, well-entrenched dictatorships, and throughout Western Europe, anti-capitalist populism was gaining ground. In Greece, the Left, united in the Syriza Coalition, were heading for state power.
In Britain in 2012, David Cameron’s Conservative government was imposing drastic austerity measures. The apparent cancelation of the future along with the immiseration of the present faced no serious challenge from the leadership of the Labour Party, whose dearth of ideas, vision, energy and courage was evident to a new generation of malcontents, especially those radicalised by the massive student protests of 2011. This alienation from Labour’s deadbeat centrism formed the impetus for the unexpected revival of the party’s Left under Jeremy Corbyn. Following the rout of Labour under Ed Miliband in the 2014 General Election, John McDonnell became shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer under Jeremy Corbyn’s new leadership.
Participants in contemporary political events often turn to examining past events for enlightenment. Other ignore or distort them. As Paul Mattick once put it, ‘What one generation learns, a later generation forgets.’ Fifty years after the Chartist uprising of 1839, Sidney and Beatrice Webb of the Fabian Society published a ‘lessons from history’ handbook for a new party of moderate progress within the limits of the law, entitled The History of Trade Unionism. Looking back at the Chartist movement, the Webbs wrote:
‘A general despair of constitutional reform led to the growing supremacy of the “Physical Force” section of the Chartists, and to the insurrectionism of 1839-42. Made respectable by sincerity, devotion, and even heroism in the rank and file, it was disgraced by the fustian of many of its orators and the political and economic quackery of its pretentious and incompetent leaders whose jealousies and intrigues, by successively excluding all the nobler elements, finally brought it to nought.’
The Webbs’ version of the ‘Whig Theory of History’ set the ‘standard’ for writing about Chartism by ‘Labour Historians’ in the 20th century. In contrast, we argue that the ‘excluding all the nobler elements’ was rather their own self-exclusion from the practical problem of a working class that was unfranchised, over-taxed, starved into workhouses, and exploited by landowning aristocrats and industrial capitalists. In researching how the working class radicals and their allies acted after the betrayal of their estwhile Liberal allies we found that many of physical-force leaders had a grasp of intellectual ideas which they attempted to put into practice for the edification of the masses. The Jacobin-inspired propensity for ‘physical force’ – to the point of armed stuggle – was by no means restricted to a few ‘extremists’ and enemies of liberal ‘progress’. George Julian Harney, one the ‘physical force’ leaders in 1839, recalled in later life:
‘When I look back upon the past, when I remember the wrongs and sufferings of the working classes, far from being able to reproach myself with “violence”, I am astonished at my moderation; considering as I do that the wrongs referred to would have satisfied a degree of “violence” far beyond anything my recollection enables me to charge for my own account.’
Unkant Publishing went out of business in 2016, leaving the book homeless and out-of-print (although it can still be obtained from some online booksellers). One of the aims of this blog is to help the book find a new publisher. Over the summer I’ll be posting a few sample chapters. This post features the Foreword contributed by Labour Member of Parliament, John McDonnell MP, who was to become Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party.
Foreword by John McDonnell MP to 1839: The Chartist Insurrection by David Black and Chris Ford,Unkant Publishing (London:2012)
There is a school of Labour movement historiography that emulates the old Whig theory of British constitutional history. Just as the Whig Theory of History views a succession of constitutional changes over centuries simply as a series of small steps in a linear progression to the perfection of the liberal democratic state (claimed by some as the “end of history”), there have been fellow travellers in Labour History writing, who have seen the individual struggles of groups of peasants and working people over recent centuries as merely the stepping stones on the path to the ultimate goal of the founding of the Labour Party, the TUC and the modern day trade unions.
Those elements or key events in Labour movement history that have not conformed to the theory of the ineluctable, evolution of the movement into a party committed to peaceful, constitutional reform have been either written out of history altogether or relegated to mere historical footnotes. Often they are portrayed as deviations at best irrelevant to or, worse still, hindering the progress of effective working class political representation.
Those historical actors or movements that in Britain explored or attempted out on other routes to political change are generally considered condescendingly as primitives or patronisingly as naïve as soon as they ventured down the path of physical force or large scale resistance associated with Revolution rather than Reform.
Consequently in most histories of the British Labour movement the story of the Chartists has focussed on the large scale mobilisations of petitioners, the development of mass-circulation radical newspapers for working people and the promulgation of the tactic of the general strike, “the sacred month or big holiday.”
The Newport Uprising and other attempts to use physical as against moral force have been, if not hidden from history, then at least pretty heavily disguised.
With its meticulous attention to detailed sources, its comprehensive scope and its exacting research, this book doesn’t just address the neglect of this important and interesting episode in Labour movement history but more importantly it also challenges us to think again about the revolutionary potential of the British Labour movement.
Black and Ford evidence in a way others have failed to do, the scale of the threat to the British establishment in 1839. Less than two centuries after an unlikely coalition of small landholders, Puritans, Ranters and Diggers had severed the head of an English king, this equally broad new alliance of Free Traders, Republicans, early Trade Unionists, proto socialists and working people oppressed by poverty and the Poor Law raised again the standard of rebellion.
Just as in 1648 the intransigence of Charles 1st forces his opponents to explore other means to bring about change, as the events of the year 1839 unfold, the failure of the nineteenth century state to budge on any of the basic demands of the Chartists produces a mounting frustration that inevitably leads to the exploration of other means of forcing change. The seemingly endless and at times frustratingly, meandering debates of the Chartist Convention on the options for action reflect the class forces, differing life experiences and different ideological stances represented within the early Chartist coalition. This work depicts so well the debates and debaters, warts and all.
Of course, as this book demonstrates, contingency always plays a part in any historical sequence of events. We witness the political manoeuvrings of the different factions within the Convention, the role of its leaders, with their strengths and weaknesses; the determination of some and the loss of nerve and lack of judgement of others.
However the discussions on strategy prefigure many of the future debates and controversies in the Labour movement both here and across Europe. The use of the general strike in the form of the “sacred month” foreshadows the advocacy by Rosa Luxembourg of the general strike weapon and her emphasis on the spontaneity of mass action, which has an echo of the swift mobilisations of mass protests by the Chartists. The divisions in the Convention between those adhering to moral force and those advocating physical force, if only in extremis, are repeated time and again in many major class struggles over the following century from Czarist Russia to Paris 1968.
In most accounts of the course of the Chartists campaigns it seems preposterous to compare the uprisings of 1839 with the revolutions that were to follow in many European states, Russia and China over the next century. Thanks in part to the spin within the contemporary media and the received wisdom replicated in subsequent historical accounts, the Chartist revolutionaries are looked upon largely as incompetent blunderers or fantasists.
Certainly, it is evident that many of the Convention leaders, such as John Frost of Newport, were out of their depth when it came to organising a revolution and many were orators rather than street fighters. However this book makes clear that all the evidence points to an extremely fragile British state that was unprepared for a rebellion on any serious scale and indeed was stretched to its near limits in containing protest let alone armed insurrection.
At the same time despite the exaggerated claims of some of the Chartist leaders and Convention representatives of the level of support for armed revolt in their areas, it is obvious from this research that there was sufficient combustible material amongst the working class in 1839, particularly in the industrial areas of Wales and the North, to catch the fire of revolt.
Black and Ford describe how this spark failed to light the fire of revolution but also show how close an alternative revolutionary route nearly opened up for the forward march of Labour in Britain. Decade after decade of Labour movement historiography have overlaid the Chartist story with the concept of an overwhelmingly, conservative British working class and a solely reformist British Labour Movement. The message has been consistently drilled into us that revolution was and is futile.
This book offers another perspective. Revolution in Britain in 1839 was closer than we have been previously taught. There is nothing inherently conservative in the British working class as generation after generation have mobilised to prove. What may be missing however is the learning of the lessons of each revolt and each mobilisation for change. By challenging the prevailing hegemony relating to the events and significance of 1839, this book assists us greatly in understanding the potential for future challenges to the system.
Danish painter and sculptor Asger Oluf Jorn died fifty years ago (1 May 1973), aged 59. He was a founding member of the avant-garde movement COBRA and the Situationist International.
JORN, Asgar, 1963,
Jorn’s work and legacy are not appreciated by everyone in his homeland. Indeed, a report in ArtForum, May 02, 2022, indicates there are some things rotten in the State of Denmark:
‘Danish Situationist Asger Jorn’s iconic 1959 work The Disquieting Duckling was vandalized on April 29 in an attack that was livestreamed by right-wing Facebook page Patrioterne Går Live, which has historically posted anti-Muslim screeds and videos. The widely circulated video seems to show Danish artist Ibi-Pippi Orup Hedegaard affixing his own likeness to the painting, which was on display at the Museum Jorn in Silkeborg, Denmark, and then signing his name on the canvas in black permanent marker. “If you’re around,” he wrote on Facebook, “you can go and admire my new work.”’
No thanks. This nutter went beyond such relatively harmless gestures, such as throwing soup at a glass screen. He did irreparable to the painting itself, with glue and a black felt-tip.
Détourned Painting
In an essay entitled Détourned Painting, published in the Exhibition Catalogue of the Galerie Rive Gauche, Namur, in May, 1959, Jorn wrote,
‘Intended for the general public. Reads effortlessly.
Be modern,
collectors, museums.
If you have old paintings,
do not despair.
Retain your memories
but détourn them
so that they correspond with your era.
Why reject the old
if one can modernize it
with a few strokes of the brush?
This casts a bit of contemporaneity
on your old culture.
Be up to date,
and distinguished
at the same time.
Painting is over.
You might as well finish it off.
Détourn.
Long live painting.’
Asger Jorn, ‘The Disquieting Duckling’ 1959
Jorn added a section entitled ‘Intended for connoisseurs. Requires limited attention’:
‘The object, reality, or presence takes on value only as an agent of becoming. But it is impossible to establish a future without a past. The future is made through relinquishing or sacrificing the past. He who possesses the past of a phenomenon also possesses the sources of its becoming. Europe will continue to be the source of modern development. Here, the only problem is to know who should have the right to the sacrifices and to the relinquishments of this past, that is, who will inherit the futurist power. I want to rejuvenate European culture. I begin with art. Our past is full of becoming. One needs only to crack open the shells. Détournement is a game born out of the capacity for devalorization. Only he who is able to devalorize can create new values. And only when there is something to devalorize, that is, an already established value, can one engage in devalorization. It is up to us to devalorize or to be devalorized according to our ability to reinvest in our own culture. There remain only two possibilities for us in Europe: to be sacrificed or to sacrifice. It is up to you to choose between the historical monument and the act that merits it.’
Angelus Dubiosus
Now consider William Blake (1757-1827).
The Good and Evil Angels 1795-?c. 1805 William Blake 1757-1827 Presented by W. Graham Robertson 1939 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N05057
In Apocalypse and Recuperation: Blake and the Maw of Commerce (English Literary History, Spring, 1985, Vol. 52, No. 1), Paul Mann writes:
‘Everything ever published about Blake is true. Not, perhaps, informed, masterful, judicious, cogent, interesting or even necessarily true about Blake, but always true to the material conditions of writing about Blake, always somehow negotiable within the actual economy of that “industry” known as Blake criticism, or criticism, or discourse. The industry’s avowed task of representing” Blake’s truth, often indeed of agreeing with and advocating that truth, is thus mitigated or even undermined by the industry’s concomitant need to maintain itself in existence. The consensually validated revelation of Blake’s truth would put the industry out of business. Blake’s”truth” becomes a currency, a fluctuating exchange value in an economy whose survival depends not only on agreement but on disagreement, discord, dismissals, departures, the continual destruction and reconstruction of each appearance of that truth.’
The following original artwork, a collage détournement of Blake’s Good and Evil Angels, has been presented to The Barbarism of Pure Culture for publication. The artist does not wish to be credited.
Blake After Jorn (Tusche 4). Anonymous
FURTHER READING
David Black, The Philosophical Roots of Anti-Capitalism: Essays on History, Culture and Dialectical Thought, Part Two ‘Critique of the Situationist Dialectic: Art, Class-Consciousness and Reification’, Lexington Books 2013.
Polemic, politics, mouth jazz and spontaneous music with Ben Watson. Today: music played last Friday at the Betsey Trotwood, London, to launch Dave Black’s latest book on the Barbarism of Pure Culture imprint, LSD Underground: Operation Julie, the Microdot Gang and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Featuring Graham Davis on synth, Nick Lubran on acoustic guitar and flute, Dave Black on acoustic guitar and Out To Lunch on wooden spoons and Yamaha keyboards.
Unitary urbanism expressed a vision of city planning based on aesthetic and technological innovations in architecture, but freed from subordination to the needs of corporate developers and the endless expansion of private car ownership. Such pleasurable activity as the Dérive had yet to be impoverished by the pollution and noise of traffic jams, and the vandalism of planners and developers. Chtcheglev could still write of a future in which city dwellers would reclaim the streets: “we will construct cities for drifting… but with light retouching, one can utilize certain zones which already exist. One can utilize certain persons who already exist.”v
By David Black
9 January 2023
The British Dérive
Alex Trocchi, Scottish novelist, Francophile and one-time Situationist, once reminisced about his friendship with Guy Debord in the 1950s:
“I remember long, wonderful psycho-geographical walks in London with Guy. He took me to places in London I didn’t know, that he sensed, that I’d never have been to if it hadn’t been with him. He was a man who could discover a city… He had a magical quality… Distances didn’t seem to matter to the man. Walking in London, in the daytime, at night, he’d bring me to a spot he’d found, and the place would begin to live. Some old forgotten part of London. Then he’d reach back for a story, for a piece of history, as if he’d been there. He’d quote from Marx, or Treasure Island, or De Quincey.”[ Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces, p.388.
Alex Trochhi
“Psychogeography” was formulated by Debord and his colleagues as “the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviours of individuals.” The practice of Psychogeography involved the Dérive: a form of daydreaming during excursions on foot through the urban environment, defined as “a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances.”
Psychogeography has, directly or indirectly, influenced a number of British writers. In Michael Moorcock’s novel of 1988, Mother London, the space-time of the city is explored through the fragmented voices of mental patients in the Thatcherite 1980s, whose traumas are traced back to the mythology and reality of the Blitz. As a lead character says, “All great old cities possess their special myths. Amongst London’s is the story of the Blitz, of our endurance.” Indeed, the primary cause for the fate of modern London was the Second World War, in which the Luftwaffe’s bomber squadrons, doodlebug missiles and V2 rockets killed 30,000 Londoners and destroyed 70,000 buildings. Ironically, the damage to the city empowered post-war planners, architects and property developers to impose further environmental disaster by bulldozing much of Georgian and Victorian London under the banner of ‘modernization’ — although, by way of recompense, money-making ‘heritage’ spots were saved for tourism, and the facades of many iconic buildings were preserved to cover up the gutting of the interiors.
In the 21st century, as the British economy sinks into the North Sea under the mists of Brexiternity, the London skyline continues its upward trajectory of dystopian skyscrapers; all of which appear to give-the-finger to rest of the city as a Psychogeographical “fuck you” from the non-doms, oligarchs, banksters and money-launderers who run the British economy through their tropical tax havens. The once sweet River Thames, regularly polluted with waste by the Thames Water company (that flagship of Thatcher’s privatisations), now flows softly only for tourists, millionaire party-goers on pleasure boats, and the tenants of the new yuppie-hutches which screen the river off from the Londoners who once enjoyed walking its banks.
In Britain, psychogeography, in the hands of academics, journalists, novelists and visual artists has become an inventive technique for exploring cities. Novelist, Will Self, an admirer of Guy Debord’s Situationist writings, teaches psychogeography at London Brunel University. One of Self’s nonfiction books, Psychogeography (2007), features accounts of his Dérives, walking the streets of London and other cities. By consciously suppressing the usual concerns of time and destination, Self finds for himself a more autonomous actualisation of subjective experience, capable of “dissolving the mechanised matrix which compresses the space-time continuum.” Karen O’Rourke writes in Psychogeography: A Purposeful Drift Through the City (2021), “If geographers ‘carve’, ‘draw’, or ‘write’ the earth, psychogeographers add a zest of soul to the mix, linking earth, mind and foot.” Psychogeography, “[i]n its diverse forms.. embodies the desire to renew language, social life, and oneself. For contemporary psychogeographers, the drift is purposeful; it can reveal the city’s underlying structure.” Sonia Overall, in Heavy Time (2021), drifts along the old pilgrim roads from Canterbury to London and takes in her home town of Ely and a landscape of ancient chapels, ruined farms and suburban follies, Overall, in her secular Dérive, seeks out “thin places”, which constitute a sort of membrane where past and the present seem to collide and suggest “where new ways of living might begin.”
Iain Sinclair, in his novels and poems from the 1970s onwards, has utilised psychogeographic techniques without paying much attention to their Situationist origins. His ’Lights Out for Territory, 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London (1997) inaugurated a twenty-year cycle of mainly non-fiction books on the unravelling of the city’s social and historical fabric, culminating in The Last London: True Fictions from an Unreal City (2017). The pragmatic nihilism which has “renewed” the London landscape has negated the Dérive as meaningful activity and has even changed the meaning of words to cover up old adages such as “never apologise, never explain”:
“So: the last London. It has to be said with a climbing inflection at the end. Every statement is provisional here. Nothing is fixed or grounded. Come back tomorrow and the British Museum will be an ice rink, a boutique hotel, a fashion hub. The familiar streets outside will have vanished into walls of curved glass and progressive holes in the ground. The darkened showroom of the Brick Lane monumental mason with the Jewish headstones will be an art gallery. So?…That insignificant ‘so’ has moved with the times… Now it’s a signifier, a warning bleep letting the recipient know that nothing that follows has any billable consequence. The speaker, the spokesperson, the hireling expert, is not accountable.”
Having charted the social-cleansing of the poorer parts of London by means of development projects and gentrification, Sinclair declared: “I don’t think there is any more that can be said. The topic has outlived its usefulness and become a brand.”
An especially banal example which illustrates this branding is a promotional piece by Frank Jacobs in the Big Think for the 2022 London Circle Walk. He advises,
“Don’t look up ‘psychogeography’. Again and again, you’ll come across Guy Debord, the Marxist theorist who coined the term in 1955… Persist in your research, and you’ll fall down a rabbit hole of mid-century French social, political, and philosophical theory, from which it is safe to say no one escapes entirely unscathed. Rather, think of it simply as what the term itself promises: the crossroads of psychology and geography… It’s unclear whether that would still be in keeping with the tenets of psychogeography as defined by Debord and practiced by the Situationists. But it does sound like a lot more fun than one of their meetings.”
If Jacobs was a bit more familiar with what he writing about, he might recognise himself as a “recuperator.” One of the key tenets of Situationist thought is the concept of recuperation, which describes the process of how subversive elements are contained,co-opted or neutralised by assimilation into the Spectacle as consumable commodities. As for “fun”, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “boisterous joviality or merrymaking”, there was, as we shall see, plenty of that, but a lot more.
Down the Rabbit Hole: How it Began
After Liberation from the Nazis, post-war revolutionaries in Paris dedicated to new ways of living began to challenge the dominance of Surrealism within the avant-garde. As Debord articulated it 20 years later in Society of the Spectacle:
“Dadaism and surrealism are the two currents which mark the end of modern art. They are contemporaries, though only in a relatively conscious manner, of the last great assault of the revolutionary proletarian movement; and the defeat of this movement, which left them imprisoned in the same artistic field whose decrepitude they had announced… Dadaism wanted to suppress art without realizing it; surrealism wanted to realize art without suppressing it.”
In 1947 a major Paris publishing house issued a book by the 20-year-old Romanian exile, Isidore Isou, entitled Introduction d’une nouvelle poésie et d’une nouvelle musique. Isou analyzed poetic language as having gone through an “amplification” process in the romantic period, followed by a “chiseling” process under Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarme, until Dada finally destroyed it. For Isou, once the chisel of history had done its work, the truth and beauty of poetic language was no longer to be found in words, but in letters, representing figures and sounds. Isou’s “Letterists” (or “Lettrists”) experimented in paintings made up of letters, and sound-poems. They also challenged the separation between art and life. In a manifesto for a “Youth Front” Isou hailed the youth of France as a sort of sub-proletariat: alienated by the educational system, excluded from consumerism by low pay or unemployment, and oppressed by the archaic French Penal Code. The first act of the Youth Front was a riotous assualt on the staff at a brutal Catholic orphanage, which ended in arrest and imprisonment for some of the attackers. In a similar spirit, in 1950, a group of Letterists led by Michel Mourre, disguised as a Dominican monk, disrupted Easter Mass at Notre Dame by announcing “God is Dead,” and reading out an anti-religious poem. They were attacked with swords by the Swiss guards and almost lynched by the congregation before the police came to the rescue and arrested them. On the cultural front, venerable Surrealists, regarded by Isou as conformist and bourgeois, found their exhibitions and poetry readings disrupted by Letterists shouting ‘”surrealism is dead!”
Isou extended the “chiseling” concept to cinema with his Traite de bave et d”eternite (Slime and Eternity) which, when “premiered” at the Cannes Film Festival, caused a near riot (not least because Isou hadn’t finished it, so that for last 90 minutes the audience was subjected to the soundtrack in total darkness). In 1952 Isou recruited two other film-makers: Guy Debord and Gil Wolman.
Left to right: Wolman, Dahou, Debord, Chtcheglov
In 1952, at the Paris premiere of Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight, Debord and Wolman handed out a statement which ended with the words: “the footlights have melted the make-up of the supposedly brilliant mime. All we can see now is a lugubrious and mercenary old man. Go home Mister Chaplin.” As Chaplin had been barred from the United States for suspected “communist” sympathies, the French Left was deeply offended by the action. The attack was probably motivated at least in part by a statement of support for Chaplin put out by leading Surrealists. The Chaplin “disruption” was too much for Isou, who first praised it, but then backtracked and denied all responsibility. Debord and Wolman, along with writer Michele Bernstein, took this as their cue to break with Isou and form a rival “Letterist International.”
Guy Debord and friends in the film: On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time
The members and fellow-travelers of the Letterist International were young; nearly all of them in their teens or early twenties. These “lost children” (les enfants perdus) were of the generation that had grown up during the Nazi occupation (some of their parents had been Jewish deportees or Maquisards), but had been too young to fight in the resistance. As political radicals, they felt betrayed by the re-imposition, post-Liberation, of a “traditional” conservatism which kept intact the authoritarian penal code and a Gendarmarie which had in large part collaborated with the Nazi occupiers. They also felt betrayed by the bureaucratic, class-collaborationist French Communist Party, the ineffective and dogmatic Trotskyists, and the recuperated Surrealist avant-garde. Also, they did their best to resist conscription for France’s imperialist wars in Indo-China and Algeria.
The headquarters of the new international was a bar in the Arab quarter of Paris’s Left Bank. According to one of the regulars, Elaine Papai (who married Jean-Louis Brau, the Letterist poet):
“The life of the Situationist International cannot be disentangled from Saint-German-des-Prés and the climate that once reigned in that neighbourhood. The Letterist International had set up its headquarters at Moineau’s, a low dive in Rue du Four where the letterists were joined by hitherto unaffiliated young revolutionaries. Drugs, alcohol, and girls (especially underage ones) were part of the folklore of the Letterist International, as revealed in certain slogans of that time which, curiously enough, reappeared on the walls of Paris in May 1968. ‘Never Work!’ ‘Ether is freely available,’ or ‘Let us live!’”
(Quoted in Vincent Kaufmann, Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry)
Another young woman of the group, the Australian artist, Vali Myers, recalls,
“They were the rootless children from every corner of Europe. Many had no home, no parents, no papers. For the cops, their legal status was “vagrant.” Which is why they all ended up sooner or later in La Santé [prison].We lived in the streets, in the cafes, like a pack of mongrel dogs. We had our hierarchy, our own codes. Students and people with jobs were kept out. As for the few tourists who came around to gawk at “existentialists,” it was all right to con them. We always managed to have rough wine and hash from Algeria. We shared everything.”
Unlike the rest of the avant-garde, the Letterist International refused to be “answerable” to the court of art criticism and the gaze of the “other,” refused to seek fame, and declined to market anything they produced. The LI’s mimeographed journal Potlatch, which appeared in twenty issues between June 1954 and November 1957, had an eventual print run of five hundred copies. It was always given away free to friends of the group, or mailed to people who expressed an interest. The Letterist International’s theory of “unitary urbanism” was first formulated by the nineteen-year-old Ivan Chtcheglev:
“Darkness and obscurity are banished by artificial lighting, and the seasons by air conditioning. Night and summer are losing their charm and dawn is disappearing. The urban population think they have escaped from cosmic reality, but there is no corresponding expansion of their dream life. The reason is clear: dreams spring from reality and are realized in it. The latest technological developments would make possible the individual’s unbroken contact with cosmic reality while eliminating its disagreeable aspects. Stars and rain can be seen through glass ceilings. The mobile house turns with the sun. Its sliding walls enable vegetation to invade life. Mounted on tracks, it can go down to the sea in the morning and return to the forest in the evening… The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space.”
‘Unitary Urbanism’. International Situationists Issue !
Unitary urbanism expressed a vision of city planning based on aesthetic and technological innovations in architecture, but freed from subordination to the needs of corporate developers and the endless expansion of private car ownership. Such pleasurable activity as the Dérive had yet to be impoverished by the pollution and noise of traffic jams, and the vandalism of planners and developers. Chtcheglev could still write of a future in which city dwellers would reclaim the streets: “we will construct cities for drifting… but with light retouching, one can utilize certain zones which already exist. One can utilize certain persons who already exist.”v
In 1957 the Letterist International, the Movement for Imaginist Bauhaus, and the former-surrealists of CoBrA (Copenhagen-Brussels-Amsterdam) led by the Danish painter Asger Jorn, came together to found the Situationist International (1957-72). Within a few months other groups from Italy and West Germany affiliated to the SI, thus inaugurating a stormy fifteen-year process of fusions, schisms and expulsions, and an equally stormy spread across the globe of Situationist ideas, which were themselves by no means immune to ideological and cultural “recuperation.” The concept of détournement, in the hands of practitioners throughout the world, was to give rise to numerous innovations, such as the subversive use of comic books and pirate radio, the defacing of advertisements with additional images and words. But détournement. first conceived as a counter-measure against recuperation, was further developed by the Situationists into a more general concept of spontaneous rebellion against the technology of consumption.
By 1968, when the streets of the Paris were once again fought over, the city of the Letterists had disappeared and its utopian urbanist potential had already been destroyed by urban development and tourism..Debord observed in Society of the Spectacle (1967):
“Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption, a by-product of the circulation of commodities, is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal. The economic organization of visits to different places is already in itself the guarantee of their equivalence. The same modernization that removed time from the voyage also removed from it the reality of space… Urbanism is capitalism’s seizure of the natural and human environment; developing logically into absolute domination, capitalism can and must now remake the totality of space into its own setting. ”
How it Ends
In 1988, Debord reflected that in the two decades since he wrote Society of the Spectacle, capitalist modernization had led to the stage of the “integrated spectacle”, characterized by incessant technological renewal; fusion of State and economy; generalized secrecy; forgeries without reply; and a perpetual present which “wants to forget the past and no longer seems to believe in a future.” His analysis foresaw the feed-back loop now perfected by electronic social media, “achieved by the ceaseless circular passage of information, always returning to the same short list of trivialities, passionately proclaimed as major discoveries.” Meanwhile, he continued, “news of what is genuinely important, of what is actually changing, comes rarely, and then in fits and starts. It always concerns this world’s apparent condemnation of its own existence, the stages in its programmed self-destruction.”
The “cancellation of the Future” – or rather of any positive “visions” of it – has been silently accepted by the pragmatists of the political class. Labour Party leader, Kier Starmer, having viciously suppressed Jeremy Corbyn’s mass following, blurts out meaningless abstractions about “security” and “stability” for a “dynamic, agile, strong and, above all, focused” nation, “driven by clear, measurable objectives”. As Adam Curtis suggested in a recent podcast, the future is seen by politicians as a dark and dangerous thing-in-itself, which the fearful and obedient masses supposedly rely of politicians to protect them from. The politicians pretend that they know what they are doing. The public knows they are pretending. And the politicians know that the public knows they are pretending. And yet, any talk of actually doing something about the problems in the here and now is regarded as a dangerous and “unhelpful” heresy which our current Tory regime seems well on the way to making a criminal offence. I would suggest, by way of conclusion, that the Letterist and Situationist “extremists” had, as well as a sense of history, much more of a grasp of strategy and activist practice than today’s environmental campaigners have.
Rochdale’s Jack Hilton (1900-83) was hailed in the 1930s as a great novelist by George Orwell and WH Auden, but died modestly and unacclaimed. For 80 years his novels have been virtually impossible to get hold of after they went out of print, the ownership of the publishing rights being unknown. Now, Hilton’s works are getting back into print, thanks to the literary detective work of Jack Chadwick, a 28-year-old bartender and aspiring writer who discovered Caliban Shrieks while visiting Salford’s Working Class Movement Library last year.
“Caliban Shrieks has this unique quality that I hadn’t come across before and I found it so compelling,” Chadwick told the Independent.
“It’s so raw, it feels like it’s coming to you from across the pub table.”
As BPC couldn’t find George Orwell’s review of Caliban Shrieks online, we did a paper-search and transcribed it.
Adelphi magazine, March 1935.
Caliban Shrieks by Jack Hilton
Reviewed by George Orwell
This witty and unusual book may be described as an autobiography without narrative. Mr Hilton lets us know, briefly and in passing, that he is a cotton operative who has been in and out of work for years past, that he served in France during the latter part of the war, and that he has also been on the road, been in prison, etc etc; but he wastes little time in explanations and none in description. In effect his book is a series of comments on life as it appears when one’s income is two pounds a week or less. Here, for instance, is Mr Hilton’s account of his own marriage:
Despite the obvious recognition of marriage’s disabilities, the bally thing took place. With it came, not the entrancing mysteries of the bedroom, nor the passionate soul-stirring of two sugar-candied Darby and Joans, but the practised resolve that, come what may, be the furnishers’ dues met or no, the rent paid or spent, we – the wife and I – would commemorate our marriage by having, every Sunday morn, ham and eggs, So it was we got one over on the poet, with his madness of love, the little dove birds, etc.
There are obvious disadvantages in this manner of writing — in particular, it assumes a width of experience which many readers would not possess. On the other hand, the book has a quality which the objective, descriptive kind of book almost invariably misses. It deals with its subject from the inside, and consequently it gives one, instead of a catalogue of facts relating to poverty, a vivid notion of what it feels like to be poor. All the time that one reads one seems to hear Mr Hilton’s voice, and what is more, one seems to hear the voices of the innumerable industrial workers whom he typifies. The humorous courage, the fearful realism and the utter imperviousness to middle-class ideals, which characterise the best type of industrial worker, are all implicit in Mr Hilton’s way of talking. This is one of those books that succeed in conveying a frame of mind, and that takes more doing than the’ mere telling of a story.
Books like this, which come from genuine workers and present a genuinely working-class outlook, are exceedingly rare and correspondingly important. They are the voices of a normally silent multitude. All over England, in every industrial town, there are men by scores of thousands whose attitude to life, if only they could express it, would be very much what Mr Hilton’s is. If all of them could get their thoughts on to paper they would change the whole consciousness of our race. Some of them try to do so, of course; but in almost every case, inevitably, what a mess they make of it! I knew a tramp once who was writing his autobiography. He was quite young, but he had had a most interesting life which included, among other things, a jail-escape in America, and he could talk about it entrancingly. But as soon as he took a pen in his hand he became not only boring beyond measure but utterly unintelligible. His prose style was modelled upon Peg’s Paper (“With a wild cry I sank in a stricken heap” etc), and his ineptitude with words was so great that after wading through two pages of laboured description you could not even be certain what he was attempting to describe. Looking back upon that autobiography and number of similar documents that I have seen, I realise what a considerable literary gift must have gone into the making of Mr Hilton’s book.
As to the sociological information that Mr Hilton provides, I have only one fault to find. He has evidently not been in the Casual Ward since the years just after the war, and he seems to have been taken in by the lie, widely published during the last few years, to the effect that casual paupers are now given a “warm meal” at midday. I could a tale unfold about those “warm meals”. Otherwise, all his facts are entirely accurate so far as I am able to judge, and his remarks on prison life, delivered with an extraordinary absence of malice, are some of the most interesting that I have read.
“We need history, but not in the same way a loafer in the garden of knowledge needs it.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
In March 1977 the first national police operation in history, codenamed Operation Julie, carried out what the media hailed as the “biggest drugs raid in British history”. The drug was LSD, made by one gang in London and another in Carno, mid-Wales. In March 1978, at Bristol Crown Court, 29 defendants were handed down prison sentences totalling 170 years.
One of them – who got 13 years – was Richard Kemp, the brilliant chemist who had founded the illicit LSD enterprise back in 1968 with American Beat writer David Solomon (who got 10 years). As suggested by the six-part BBC podcast, Acid Dream, (October/November 2022), Kemp was also something a Green prophet. To a certain extent I think he was, but I fear that there is a myth in the making of what is otherwise sound history.
Acid Dream concentrates on the illegal goings in mid-Wales in 1976-7. Participants include LSD distributor, Alston Hughes; former undercover cop, Stephen Bentley; Kemp’s partner, the late Christine Bott (words spoken by an actor) and Kate Hayes, who knew Christine in her later years and published her memoirs in 2020.
What is certain is that Kemp, while on remand in prison wrote an 8,000-word statement which he intended to present at the trial in 1978, but he was dissuaded from doing so by his lawyers, who thought it to be too political and insufficiently repentant. A week after the Julie trial ended, parts of the document were published in the Cambrian News. Journalist Patrick O’Brien introduced it as ‘Microdoctrine – the beliefs behind Kemp’s LSD,’ and summarised Kemp’s views on ecology:
“On ecology and conservation Kemp believes it is obvious we are living on the world’s capital rather than its income. He says that to achieve a level of consumption that is reasonable, taking into account the Earth’s limited and dwindling resources, two things are necessary. People will have accept a lower stand of living by being content with having things which are necessary for survival, and luxuries will have to kept to minimum. Secondly these goods which are supplied will have to be built to have the longest possible lifespan, at the end of which they must be capable of being recycled… In common with expert scientific opinion he was convinced that, if Earth’s raw materials were to be conserved and pollution reduced to a tolerable level, there would have to be a revolution in people’s attitude. And he believed LSD could spark changes in outlook and put the world on the road to survival.”
Richard Kemp wrote in his own words:
“It has been my experience and that of many of those I know, that LSD helps to make one realise that happiness is a state of mind and not a state of ownership.”
And,
“Insofar as LSD can catalyze such a change in members of the public, it can contribute to this end… I have never believed that LSD is the substitute for the hard work required to change oneself. One might say it is a signpost pointing a way to self-discovery.”
In the final episode of Acid Dream, Richard Kemp – now 79 years old – breaks his 45-year silence. Kate Hayes travelled beyond these shores to his home (which he keeps secret) and interviewed him. He is no longer the idealist he was. Sadly, he has lost hope of a rational ecological solution to impending doom, but recognizes that Kate, as a mother, has to live in hope and fight on. In the taped interview with Kate, Kemp admits making money was a serious motivation for making acid, but adds,
“I think my motivation was to change the course of human history. You can’t have a much higher motivation than that. The Earth’s resources are finite. And they are being used up, and when they’re used up they’re gone. We’re changing the ecology of the planet in a way we’ll be able to feed fewer and fewer people at the same time that population is continuing to grow. So for me it was like I was never quite sure what my purpose in life was to be, and then it was as if suddenly ‘now I know why I’ve been born and now I know what I’ve got to do’. I didn’t ask myself whether I was completely sure about this for very long. I just thought I’m the right man, the right person at the right time, with the right skills and right temperament. Everything about it said ‘do it man, do it, go for it’”.
Hayes interjects to say that the late Christine Bott (who got a vicious 9 years prison sentence for being Kemp’s partner) didn’t actually regret any of it. Did he?
“I regret getting caught, I regret the fact that she got dragged down with me. If I could have got her out of it I would have done.”
Hayes suggests. “The mistake it seems was having to do the tableting at the farmhouse.” Kemp responds,
“Yeah. Well I made plenty of mistakes. No doubt about that. And it was during that period when I had the [motor] accident and the poor vicars wife died as a result of that. That’s something that I’ve got on my conscience for the rest of my life.”
Finally, actor Rhys Ifans reads Kemp’s “words, taken from his Microdoctrine written 45 years ago”:
“Before too long our planet will be facing untold challenges. Maybe not in our lifetimes, but certainly in the ones of those who come directly after us. The earth does not have inexhaustible resources and we are living on its capital, not its income. We consume and consume and consume, and bear no thoughts for what we’re doing for the path it’s putting us on. Temperatures will soar, see levels will rise, animals will perish, natural resources will evaporate before our eyes – before we have a chance to come up with a Plan B.
We will no longer be able to live off the land because the land will no longer want us. And that, that is when things will get really ugly. People will starve, be dispossessed of the places they called home. And we’ll begin to fight over the last barrel of oil, the last drop of water, the last ear of corn. Wars will be waged, bombs will be dropped, the world will become about the haves and the have nots. And eventually the rift between the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor will become unassailable because the world will have been looking the wrong way.
Politicians, businessmen, moguls – they will step on the throats of their own people to save their billions while the earth is crumbling apart beneath their feet. Then you’ll get anarchy , the word you like to band about like it’s a walk in the park. Then you’ll see what real anarchy is like. We need a revolution in people’s minds. We need a spark to put the world on a road to survival. We are living on the worlds capital, not the world’s income. And when the capital runs out I dread to think what will happen next.”
Movingly read by Ifans, the text is beautiful and terrifying; the spell binding words of an eco-prophet in fact. But it should not be quoted by the BBC as a statement from Microdoctrine in 1978; because it isn’t. True, a few memorable sentences are Kemp’s (eg “We are living on the worlds capital, not the world’s income”) but the overall passage bears as much resemblance to Kemp’s political insights in 1978, as does Tacitus’s ‘creative’ first century account of Caledonian chieftain Calgacus’s speech denouncing Roman Imperialism (“To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace”).
Questions arise. Does an authentic copy of the 8,000 word document Kemp passed to the Cambrian Times in 1978 still exist? If so, who has it and what plans are there to publish it in full? The supposed extract from Microdoctrine features in Theatr na nÓg’s production of Operation Julie – the Rock Opera, which (desrvedly) was a huge hit touring Wales in the summer of 2022. The show was written by Geinor Styles, and the passage in question found its way into the theatre program as an extract from Microdoctrine, Could it be somewhere along the way to Acid Dream writer, Tim Price, the text somehow lost its warning label: “dramatic license”? Adopting (or distorting) historical facts to suit myth-making may be great for entertainment (never let the facts get in the way of a good story, as they say). But rewriting history is politically evil and manipulative as a contribution towards saving the ecosphere from disaster. In our perilous “post-truth” world of an unstable and volatile social media facts really are sacred.
Postscript
22 February 2023 — The ending of the final episode, of the BBC Radio podcast, Acid Dream, ‘The Microdoctrine’, has been re-edited since it was originally broadcast on 22 November 2022. In this new version, the Microdoctrine “extract” has been cut, as has the statement that it consisted of Richard Kemp’s “words, taken from his Microdoctrine written 45 years ago.” The statement has been replaced by a segment featuring actors reading extracts from the dramatisation of Kemp’s views in 1978 written by Geinor Styles for Theatr na nÓg’s production of Operation Julie – the Rock Opera. There has been no explanation offered from the BBC regarding the change, or acknowledgement that it was this blog that pointed it out the error (after all it’s only a blog, right?). Still, The Barbarism of Pure Culture welcomes the BBC’s public-spirited rewriting of what was previously an unfortunate rewriting of history. The six-part podcast, Acid Dream, is on the BBC website for the rest of 2023.
A new, expanded edition of Psychedelic Trickers: A True Secret History of LSD has just been published. In the closing years of World War Two, the mind-bending power of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) was discovered at the same time as atomic energy and computerised artificial intelligence. During the post-war years, various ‘tricksters’ sought to use LSD and other psychedelic drugs for changing consciousness: some for fighting the secret Cold War; others for saving humanity from Armageddon; and some just for personal gain or megalomania. This book fully explores the exploits of this colourful, at times sinister, cast of characters on both sides of the ‘divide’ – from Sidney Gottlieb (the ‘CIA’s Poisoner-in-Chief’) to Timothy Leary (the ‘high-priest of LSD’); from the ‘Operation Julie’ police to the British ‘Microdot Gang’.
