Review: Pabst and Paracelsus

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The Director

Daniel Kehlmann

Riverun, May 2025

Reviewed by David Black

When the Nazis seized power in 1933 the best directors of German Expressionist cinema- Fritz Lang, FW Murnau, Robert Wiene and Georg Wilhelm Pabst – fled into exile. As described, fictionally, in Daniel Kehlmann’s novel, The Director, for Pabst the move doesn’t go well. The studio bosses insist that he direct a no-hoper, entitled A Modern Hero (1934), which duly bombs, all but destroying his marketability in Tinsel Town. Pabst moves next to France, where he directs another flop.

At the outbreak of war in 1939, Pabst finds himself stuck with his family back in the Third Reich. His presence is noticed by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who calls him in, and reminds him that he was (or is) ‘Red Pabst’.

‘But you are sorry?’

‘Pardon me?’

‘You have engaged in communist propaganda, you were an enemy of the German people, you have made common cause with other enemies of the people, and with Jews. Actually. All that is unforgivable…

To gain a little time, Pabst leaned forward…

‘I was never a communist. With all due respect. I have also not engaged in -‘

‘You misjudge the situation. I’m not arguing. If you had just the slightest idea of what could be in store for you, you wouldn’t even try. It is what it is, and I say what it is, and all you say here is: I’m sorry. And you say: now I know better! And: I have recognised my mistakes. And I want to do my part in building a new Germany. Well?’

Pabst capitulates. Goebbels immediately gives him a screenplay to direct: Komödianten, a historical drama.

‘Caraline Neuber , Pabst! The inventor of German theatre. Pabst! Lessing’s patroness, Pabst! The script is by two Weltbühne writers, left-wing riff-raff, people like you who should be in a concentration camp, but who have recognised the truth and seen the light. Entirely apolitical material, Pabst. So it shall remain too. It is meant to be idealistic. Metaphysical. Noble’.

But the Nazis’ ‘historical’ dramas are political, the heroes of the past are celebrated as nationalist precursors of Hitlerism and the Fuhrer-Prinzip.

In 1943, Pabst makes Paracelsus. Set in Basel in 1527, Paracelsus, the official physician of the city, provokes the ire and jealousy of the Scholastic medical establishment, who want rid of him. In the Nazi hagiographies published in 1941 for his 400^th anniversary, Paracelsus is portrayed as a pioneer in Blood-and Soil’ German science. Nietzsche saw him as anticipating Goethe. The philosopher Alexandre Koyré asked:

‘Who was he, this brilliant vagabond? A profound scholar who, in his battle against Aristotelian physics and classical medicine, laid the foundations of modern experimental medicine? A precursor of nineteenth-century rational science? An inspired, erudite physician, or an uneducated charlatan, vendor of superstitious quack medicine, astrologer, magician, inventor of gold, etc.? One of the greatest intellects of the Renaissance, or an old-fashioned heir to the mysticism of the Middle Ages, a ‘Goth’? A pantheistic cabalist, follower of a vague stoical Neoplatonism and natural magic? Or, on the contrary, is he ‘the healer,’ that is to say, the man who by concerning himself with suffering mankind discovered and formulated a new conception of life, of the universe, of man, and of God?’

Such were the questions, but as far as the Nazis were concerned, Paracelsus, as Eric Rentschler says in The Films of G.W. Pabst : an extraterritorial cinema,

‘fully embodies the “Fuhrerprinzip.” He joins a noble line of self-effacing heroes, who, from Frederick II to Bismarck, devoted themselves to the glory of the German people while sacrificing their private life… Paracelsus also experiences the ingratitude and misunderstanding of his contemporaries… in the scholar’s desire to use German rather than Latin, both in his scientific and philosophical writings as well as in his teaching.’

Kehlmann pulls a master stroke in having PG Wodehouse attend the premier of Paracelsus in Salzburg in 1943. The real-life Wodehouse was interned as a POW when he found himself in Germany when war broke out. The Nazis allowed him to stay, at his own expense, in a posh Berlin hotel, with the extra price of having to record some talks for Berlin radio. When re-broadcast to Britain, in between Lord Haw Haw’s rants, he was labelled as a a traitor – even though his talks weren’t political.

For the Paracelsus premier, Wodehouse is provided with evening dress and is accompanied by his propaganda ministry handler, who reminds him of his POW status, and directs him for a celebrity photo-shoot:

‘In front of the cameras please’. I bridled. There had been no suggestion of cameras. ‘It’s not a suggestion.’

Wodehouse meets Pabst, who is friendly, but can hardly speak English. Pabst’s wife, Trude, does speak English and she knows Pabst is heading for trouble. She invites Woodhouse to arrange for an escape of all three of them to Switzerland.

Wodehouse meets Guido Merwetz:

‘Once a feared critic. Now one of our subtlest describers.. describes beginning, middle and end.. what the actors look like.. He’s not allowed to write that an actor is good, for that would be criticism too.. and imply that that an actor could be bad. But how would that be possible? The films are produced by the ministry, so how could they be anything but excellent?’

Wodehouse meets Leni Riefenstahl, who hates Pabst and is comically humourless. ‘She had evil eyes and bared frightfully white teeth. Her skin seemed to be cast from Bakelite’. He meets the Nazi Anglophobe Alfred Karrasch, whose novel is being adopted for Pabst’s next film.

When it comes to Paracelsus the movie Wodehouse is spellbound. When Paracelsus quarantines the city against the plague, the acrobat Fliegenbein, known for his ‘winged feet’, steals into the city and performs in a tavern.

‘The people in the tavern were engrossed in the dance. They tapped their feet, nodded their heads and shrugged along to the music… the first few stood up and mimicked his steps – but then more and more of them joined in, and then none could resist, no one could sit, everyone in the rook was dancing. There was nothing joyful about it, neither mirth nor freedom forward and back and to the left and to the right, they jumped, their bodies twitching and writhing, seemingly unleashed, yet in perfect unison and with desperate faces. No one deviated in the slightest. Paracelsus, entered, a large sword in his hand. He watched them dance with a diagnostic eye, then he gave a nighty shout. All at once the dance came to an end.’

Some see allusion in this to Nazi madness. Paracelsus’s temporary victory over Death is tempered by a ‘death march’ of flagellants into the city, which may or may not have reflected the doom of Nazi hopes after Stalingrad. A peasant rebel song heralds the arrival of the dying Von Hutten who, being a real noble rebel, seems quite un-Hitlerish.

Kehlmann’s PG Wodehouse is then no more historically inaccurate than Pabst’s Paracelsus, which was, after all produced by Goebbels. Pabst did try to atone for his wartime career by going on to make The Last Ten Days, which showed the evil and depravity, of Hitler, Goebbels and co in the bunker.

In sum Kehlmann’s The Director, is meditation on the art of complicity and complicity in art.

King Mob and the Situationist International

A Presentation at Whitechapel Gallery 12 October 2024 for the London Anarchist Bookfair. Plus an interview with the speaker, David Black: Q and A with Thomas Holland.

Good morning. My name is David Black and I run a shoestring publishing operation called BPC, which stands for the Barbarism of Pure Culture, inspired by the words of Theodor Adorno:

‘Whether art is abolished, perishes, or despairingly hangs on, it is not mandated that the content of past art perish. It could survive art in a society that hadfreed itself of the barbarism of its culture.’

BPC as a publisher is interested in historical events and persons whose legacy has been ignored, marginalised or distorted by historians, especially – as regards the case in hand – ‘cultural historians’.

BPC has published:

Red Antigone, the first biography of the Scottish Hegelian, Helen Macfarlane, 1818-60.
Red Chartist, Helen Macfarlane’s a collected works and translation of the Communist Manifesto for the Chartists in 1850.
1839: the Chartist insurrection and the Newport Rising.
Psychedelic Tricksters: A True Secret History of LSD
LSD Underground: Operation Julie, the Microdot Gang and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love
Lost Texts Around King Mob
BPC WiseBooks Series
Dialectical Butterflies: Ecocide, Extinction Rebellion, Greenwash and Rewilding the Commons – an Illustrated Dérive.
King Mob: The Negation and Transcendence of Art: Malevich, Schwitters, Hirst, Banksy, Mayakovsky, Situationists, Tatlin, Fluxus, Black Mask.
A Newcastle Dunciad 1966-2008: Recollections of a Musical and Artistic Avant Garde plus Bryan Ferry and the Newcastle Arts Scene
Building For Babylon: Construction, Collectives and the Craic

Hegelian Dialectic

Twins David and Stuart Wise were born in Jesmond, Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1943. Stuart died in 2021.

In the mid-1960s, as students at Newcastle University School of Art, they were associated with what they later called ‘the often confusedly anti-art magazine’, Icteric. It was at this time that Wises got hold of a volume of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics. The influence of Hegel, who Karl Marx called that ‘mighty thinker’ he was a lifelong ‘disciple’ of, stayed with the Wises. And that’s where I’ll start, with my own ideas on why it might have impressed them as much as they say it did. More recently the Wises, always open to new ideas, have praised Anselm Jappe’s book, Guy Debord, (1999) which says ‘Debord’s theory is in essence the continuation of the work of Marx and Hegel and that its importance inheres for the most part precisely in this fact.’

In ‘essence’, so-to-speak, Hegel, post-French Revolution, argued that in bourgeois civil society the abstract principles of law and economics negate the organic unity of life. German Romanticism of the late-18th century saw the the art of Greek Antiquity as representing the unity of subject and object. But such organic unity had become impossible for a society in which, as Hegel saw it, the ‘lower world’ of economic nature promoted a ‘bestial contempt for all higher values’, tossed all sense of the divine into the world of ‘superstition’ and ‘entertainment’, and reduced the temple to ‘logs and stones’ and ‘the sacred grove to mere timber’.

What then was left for art? Hegel said that ‘as regards its highest vocation, art is and remains for us something past. For us it has lost its genuine truth and vitality; it has been displaced into the realm of ideas…’ Hegel did not doubt that works of art would continue to be produced and that artists would strive for perfection with new imaginative techniques. We are, after all, a species of story tellers, scibblers and makers of sounds.

However, what is aroused in us by art beyond immediate enjoyment is ‘the judgment that submits the content and medium of representation of art to reflective consideration.’ Think of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box (as interpreted by Arthur Danto), made in his New York ‘Factory’ in 1964; only curated as a work of art — as opposed to just a box made in the Brillo factory — because of the art critics’ ‘reflective consideration’.

Black Mask

The purported aim of the Wises’ Icteric magazine in 1966 was the ‘fusion’ of ‘art and life’. It was mainly the brainchild of Ronald Hunt of the Department of Fine Art at Newcastle University, who had been appointed as librarian courtesy of lecturer and pop artist, Richard Hamilton. Hunt was familiar with the more marginal publications of the international art scene. It was he who first acquainted future Situationist member Donald Nicholson-Smith with the theoretical journals of the French Situationists. Hunt also learned of the activities of the Black Mask group in New York, such as their intervention at a meeting in a plush art gallery shouting, ‘burn the museums baby’, ‘art is dead’, ‘Museum closed’ etc. Dave Wise recalls:

‘Soon letters were sent out to New York and we got replies immediately: “brothers/sisters come and join us”! So two of us (Dave Wise and Anne Ryder) went from Newcastle to New York via London, and in the summer of 1967 engaged in some of the activities of Black Mask…

Dave recalls handing out anti-police leaflets with Anne Ryder at the entrance to a Black Power meeting on Lower East Side:

‘With my heart in my mouth I started handing out the Captain Fink leaflet together with other Black Mask stuff. Suddenly two cops jumped me, one thrusting a gun in my ribs whilst the other shoved the barrel of his gun against my forehead. They seized what I was carrying and slyly pilfered personal belongings though they stopped short of doing anything else. At the same moment another cop sidled up to Anne, who was wearing a mini-skirt, (English mini-skirts were still much shorter than their American counterparts) kissing her full on the lips… Ben Morea came running up just as the cops were moving on. He shook his head and said; ‘Dave, you shouldn’t have let them take the leaflets!’ It was then the difference between Newcastle and New York really struck home.

Ben Morea gave them the personal addresses and telephone numbers of Situationist sympathisers who resided in London. We duly contacted on them on our return to England.

The Construction of Situations

The Situationist International was founded in July 1957, at a conference in Cosio d’Arroscia, Italy by Guy Debord and Michèle Bernstein of the Paris-based Letterist International; painter Guiseppe Pinot-Gallizio and fellow Italians, Walter Olmo, music composer, and Piero Simondo and Elena Verrone of the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus. Two other painters attended: Ralph Rumney from England; and Asger Jorn from Denmark.

Debord argued in his Report on the Construction of Situations that ‘the problems of cultural creation can now be solved only in conjunction with a new advance in world revolution.’ In order to combat the passive consumption he saw defining spectacular culture, Debord called for the international to organize collectively towards utilizing all of the means of revolutionizing everyday life, ‘even artistic ones.’

‘We need to construct new ambiances that will be both the products and the instruments of new forms of behaviour. To do this, we must from the beginning make practical use of the everyday processes and cultural forms that now exist, while refusing to acknowledge any inherent value they may claim to have… We should not simply refuse modern culture; we must seize it in order to negate it. No one can claim to be a revolutionary intellectual who does not recognize the cultural revolution we are now facing… What ultimately determines whether or not someone is a bourgeois intellectual is neither his social origin nor his knowledge of a culture (such knowledge may be the basis for a critique of that culture or for some creative work within it), but his role in the production of the historically bourgeois forms of culture. Authors of revolutionary political opinions who find themselves praised by bourgeois literary critics should ask themselves what they’ve done wrong.’

In the world theorized as the ‘Society of the Spectacle-Commodity’, Debord argued that art could no longer be justified as a ‘superior activity’ or as an honorable ‘activity of compensation.’ In the new conditions of the culture industry only ‘extremist innovation’ was ‘historically justified’. The ‘literary and artistic heritage of humanity’ could however, still be used for ‘partisan propaganda’ because its artifacts could be deflected or ‘détourned’ from their ‘intended’ purposes.

The Situationist concept of Unitary Urbanism sought to transform existing buildings and whole neighbourhoods into places for play and enjoyment – rather than what they have now become, deserts of dystopian high rise atrocities inspired by the finest postmodernist educations (don’t look up) and gentrified hubs of alienation now imposed by the developers (welcome to Whitechapel).

On 22 March 1968, students occupied the administration block at Nanterre University, leading to weeks of protests and the closure of the University for two days. The closure spread the protests to the Latin Quarter and the Sorbonne, which was also occupied. In the course of three days in occupation of the Sorbonne, the Situationists sent telegrams to every factory and union they could think of. As confrontations with the Paris police soon developed into large-scale street fighting, on May 11 the unions called for a general strike on the May 13. When, on May 14, workers at the Sud-Aviation plant in Nantes occupied the plant, supporters of the Enragés and the Situationists in Paris formed the Council for Maintaining the Occupations (C.M.D.O.). With its aim to promote autonomous “councilism,” the C.D.M.O. organized the printing of large numbers of pamphlets, such as For the Power of the Workers’ Councils, and posters, many of which were printed by workers at occupied print shops. Naturally, not being vanguardists, they didn’t credit these artefacts as the work of the Situationists, but they did the work anyway, and the rest, so to speak, is history.

Heatwave, the Situationist International and King Mob

As I said rearlier, in 1967, having heard of the Situationists in New York, Ben Morea gave Dave Wise and Ann Ryder the addresses and telephone numbers of Situationist sympathisers in London. They were the people around the magazine Heatwave. Four of them formed the English section of the Situationist International.

Let’s look at who they were (in some cases still are)

TJ Clark, who is today one the world’s leading art critics/historians.
Donald Nicholson-Smith, renowned translator of French literature.
Charles Radcliffe, who after the politics didn’t work out teamed up with Howard Marks and later was busted when customs in Anglesey seized a boat smuggling a vast quantity of hash, which meant Radcliffe spent much of the 1980s in prison. I recommend his autobiography, Don’t Start Me Talkin, which slags off my early efforts to tell the ‘secret history’ of LSD – and he was right, as I told him shortly before he died.
Chris Gray (1942-2009) edited, in 1974m Leaving the 20th Century, the first collection of Situationist writings in English. This was in collaboration with Jamie Reid, who in turn collaborated with Malcolm McLaren’s Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle, i.e. the Sex Pistols. Gray, after a stint with the Orange People sect in India, wrote The Acid Diaries: A Psychonaut’s Guide to the History and Use of LSD (2010).

That’s what became of them, but what drew them towards the SI in the first place was involvement in 1966, with Heatwave, the first magazine to put the new revolt of youth into some kind of perspective, with specific reference to Mods and Rockers, Beats, Dutch Provos and the like by Gray and Radcliffe; affirming their vandalistic acts of destruction as something which could have real future consequences. Bernard Marszalek, and Penelope and Franklin Rosemont sent reports on workers’ struggles in Chicago. There were numerous article on Dadaism, one on Unitary Urbanism by Attila Kotanyi and Raoul Vaneigem of the SI.

Initially, what resulted was a ‘meeting – if you like – between north and south’: between the Wise twins and friends, and the English section of the Situationists. In this new grouping the ideas of the Situationists and their predecessors were discussed in depth. For a year plans were made and collaborators sought out; things seemed promising. Then after SI member Raoul Vaneigem report to Guy Debord on a trip he made to New York in late-1967, the SI expelled the English Section.

The Wises explain that

‘Principally, Vaneigem objected to Alan Hoffman, a kind of mystical but political acidhead who’d started to show an interest in Black Mask… Also, Ben had a serious liver complaint and he couldn’t touch alcohol, thus acid went down very nicely… Ben was inevitably very upset… and started raving on in letters about the man-of-letters disposition Vaneigem put across, accusing him of not knowing anything about those at the bottom of the pile and street life in general. This created quite a dilemma in London as Chris Gray and Don N Smith in particular wanted to keep all the newfound friendships here alive and kicking. Knowing our friendliness with Ben Morea, they didn’t want to cause too many upsets before things could really kick in in terms of doing something together. Presumably because of their prevarication, they were excluded from the Situationists and the rest, so to speak [again], is history… Out of this lacunae and initial disorientation followed by a kind of re-think, King Mob developed.’

The BPC book, Lost Texts around King Mob features some of the writings of this milieu:

Ronald Hunt, art historian, The Arts in Our Time: A Working Definition; The Great Communications Breakdown, (1968)
John Barker, Art+Politics = Revolution in1968, which he wrote just before he became an Angry Brigade urban guerrilla.
Fred Vermorel, music writer who collaborated with Malcolm McClaren in formulating Punk Rock.
Chris Gray and Dave Wise, Balls! – a spoof sociological analysis of radicalism in Notting Hill.
Phil Meyler, Dublin associate of King Mob, publisher of Gurriers magazine (1968) and Notes from the Survivors of the Late King Red (1972); later chronicler of the Revolution in Portugal..

As regards King Mob practice:

‘Bit by bit we hoped through weaving in and out that we’d begin to encounter the forces which could materially realise the dreamt-of real potlatch of destruction as daily we contributed our small offerings to the process of furthering decomposition. Some of us almost on a daily basis kept gate-crashing the offices of the burgeoning underground press slagging them off for their lack of any theoretical grasp as well as their failure to get involved in any form of cutting-edge direct action. It was also hardly surprising that we tried to turn ritualised demonstrations into orgies of generalised destruction. On March the 17th, 1968 we started to turn over cars in Oxford St, getting quickly pushed aside rather heavily by demo stewards. Obviously we were nervous anyway about provoking such a break in England’s recent tradition of peaceful protest and thus connecting again with its distant but deep riotous past! By October of the same year such assaults had become easier to carry out (in the meantime, insurgents had quite magnificently smashed up a lot of cars in France) and we were a lot less fearful as we contributed to violent disorder, smashing showroom windows and trashing the regalia of the rich near the Hilton Hotel in Hyde Park as well as giving many a camera a good seeing to when those stupid idiots within our own ranks of protestors started clicking shutters. (The latter tactic seems much in need of revival when nowadays there are often more cameras than demonstrators on demonstrations).’

Of course it’s gone beyond that now; and indeed, rioting isn’t what it used to be. Consider the fate of the rioters up north this past August; we despise their bullying violence and pity them for falling for social media lies promoted by the fash; but the really sad fact is that they didn’t twig that they were carrying enough damning information on their cell phones to get themselves and their mates banged up by the hundreds in His Majesty’s hellholes.

In fact, the question now is to what extent real direct action has now, short of actual insurrection, become gaol bait for activists, now the reality of surveillance capitalism is beginning to kick in. The recent mass assassinations by Israel demonstrates to the world the sinister and deadly capabilities of coordinated surveillance technology that only comes to light when it is used.

As Guy Debord put it back in 1988, reflecting on new developments in the Spectacle:

‘A GENERAL working rule of the integrated spectacle… is that… everything which can be done, must be done… New machinery everywhere becomes the goal and the driving force of the system… continual technological innovation. This law must also thus apply to the secret services which safeguard domination. When an instrument has been perfected it must be used, and its use will reinforce the very conditions that favour this use. Thus it is that emergency procedures become standard procedures.’

How ‘Integrated’ can the Spectacle get?

To conclude…

As the Wises put it:

‘It could be said that King Mob had created an opening out of nothing in these islands and that is something that adds up to la gloire! Aggressive tactics had split something asunder as basically we were absolute beginners without any immediate reference points to hand. It’s like as though we were forced into the quasi-terrorist address against a back drop of quite terrifying incomprehension. Hardly surprising therefore that it was followed by direct action terrorism in the form of the Angry Brigade even though both were heading clean up the wall. By 1972, we realised we had nothing to fall back onto. Nobody would possibly publish anything we’d done or would even propose to do so.’

After the Tate Modern acquired the archive of King Mob in 2008, Hari Kunzru wrote apiece for the Tate website, entitled condescendingly ‘The Gang who Really shouldn’t be here’, in which he protested:

‘But these posters and magazines are just detritus, the record of past struggles. In the present day, the real action is elsewhere.’

Whatever ‘real action’ consists of, and wherever the ‘elsewhere’ might be, are best left to Kunzru to explain. As for ‘detritus’ of ‘past struggles’, perhaps the detritus has more claim to relevance than what is today claimed in the ‘art world’ (and politics) to be ‘substantial’ (the opposite of detritus is ‘substance’); and perhaps past struggles have more to teach us than present-day capitulations to capital and its culture industry. In the age of culture wars, real or imagined, I recall an old King Mob Echo cover which quotes Antonin Artaud: ‘Question: What is Culture? Answer: Shit’. A proposition in the true Hegelian sense, worthy of discussion as to its validity, now more than ever.

***

Last year (12 October(2024) Thomas Holland (not to be confused with the vampire novelist) attended my presentation at the Whitechapel Gallery for the London Anarchist Bookfair. Thomas suggested he publish the text of my talk along with a Q and A. He put out a nicely illustrated pamphlet entitled The Barbarism of Pure Culture, David Black on King Mob and the Situationist International. Thomas’ output is not available anywhere online.

Interview

Q. Do you think that there are any signs or examples of a revolutionary culture in England?

A. In the course of 19^th century ‘enlightened’ thinkers became concerned about the social consequences of capitalist industrialisation. Matthew Arnold, in Anarchy and Culture, railed against ‘the great Philistine middle-class, the master force in our politics’. He believed that art, like religion, could transubstantiate the profane stuff of everyday life into eternal truth. Terry Eagleton says of Anarchy and Culture:

‘Culture, in the sense of the refined and civilised, was needed to buy off the other half of Matthew Arnold’s title, anarchy. Unless liberal values were disseminated to the masses, the masses might end up sabotaging liberal culture.’

That was the idea, and was fulfilled to some extent when the northern cities opened public libraries, art galleries and museums. But in the the course of the 19th century the ‘eternal truths’ of culture were interwoven with the Romantic mythologies of blood-and-soil nationalism. One of the proles who educated himself reading library books was Jack Hilton, author of Caliban Shrieks. He wrote of his pre-1914 school education:

‘What impartiality we got for history! Stories about little drummer boys’ valour, the minstrel boy and hearts of oak. The horrors of the Black Hole of Calcutta, the glory of Nelson and Drake’s game of tiddlywinks – or was it bowls? … What a fighting chance we were given to understand the happenings of world significance – it was not a dog’s chance. It worked out this way. 1st: Heaps of God; 2nd: England first – the world nowhere; 3rd: Blatant swagger; one good innocent honest Christian blue-eyed English schoolboy equalled twenty infidel Japs (Ju Jitsu being barred of course).’

As regards the the quote by Debord on ‘cultural creation’ and ‘revolution’ it’s important to stress that he wasn’t talking about ‘revolutionary culture’, as culture is an epiphenomenon of the capitalist superstructure and subject to the process of commodification. Debord wasn’t trying to create a counterculture so much as recognizing that culture was a creation of the Commodity Spectacle; hence ‘We should not simply refuse modern culture; we must seize it in order to negate it.’

Q. Do you think that there is a revolutionary consciousness in England in our current moment?

A. No, there isn’t, and you’d have to go back a long way to find it (I’ll come to that later).

Q, You mention the anti-art magazine ‘Icteric’, which the Wise twins were associated with. Was this the incubator for the British Situationist movement? Was it important in propagating Situationist ideas?

A. I’ll expand a bit on what I said in my talk. From 1961 to 1965 Dave and Stuart Wise are art students in Newcastle. After leaving the School of Art they found Icteric and publish articles about Dada and Surrealism. Ronald Hunt, the School of Art librarian, tells Donald Nicholson-Smith about this group in Paris called the Situationist International. Nicholson-Smith and his pal, T.J.Clark, contact the S.I. and become members. Meanwhile, Ronald Hunt tells the Wise twins about Ben Morea’s Black Mask group in New York. Dave Wise and Anne Ryder of Icteric go to New York. Morea tells them about their friends in London, Charlie Radcliffe and Chris Gray, who have been publishing Heatwave magazine and have joined the S.I. So, in 1967, there is a kind of international coalition forming which consists of the Icteric group from Newcastle, Black Mask in New York, the ex-Heatwave S.I. members in London and Phil Meyler who publishes Gurriers magazine in Dublin. All very promising but, as this ‘coalition’ isn’t ‘officially’ part of the S.I., Debord sends Vaneigem to New York to check out Black Mask/Motherfuckers. Vaneigem falls out with them, and the result is that the English comrades in the S.I. are expelled. Some of them co-found the King Mob Echo with the Geordies.

So, in answer to your questions: Was Icteric the incubator for the British Situationist movement? No.Was it important in propagating Situationist ideas? Yes.

Q. Could ‘Icteric’ or the ‘King Mob Echo’ exist today, do you think?

A. In the 1960s there was an arts school counterculture which Icteric came out of. The art schools would accept working class school leavers who had a few grades and could show their skills with paint or whatever. The art schools have been called ‘Schools of Rock’, which is accurate in that so many rock bands came out of them. It’s all different now of course. As regards accessibility to an art education, who can afford it? Not working class youth.

Could King Mob Echo exist today? Well, in the 1980s, Class War was certainly inspired by King Mob (as founder, Ian Bone, will confirm). And don’t forget that Class War had it’s own version of McClaren’s Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle in the form of Chumbawumba who, according to Steven Wells, were Leeds Class War, and were the only band in Britain whose Special Branch file was bigger than their record catalogue. Go ask Alice Nutter!

Q. Can Situationism be resurrected?

A. The Sits and their sympathisers would take serious umbrage at being referred to as any kind of ‘ism’. Debord dissolved the S.I. in 1972 because he recognised that, as the S.I.’s ideas had become so influential globally that there was a danger of the ideas being recuperated. The S.I., whilst approving in principle of revolutionaries organising in autonomous groups, did not want to become yet another political sect claiming to ‘represent’ the forces of revolution.

The Situ legacy persists. The famous slogan ‘Ne Travail, Jamais’ and various Situ ideas have been theorized by influential writers such as Moishe Postone, Robert Kurz, Anselm Jappe, Roswitha Scholz and Tom Bunyard. Unlike other Marxists, these ones reject ‘labour’ as a liberating force. Personally, as a disciple of Raya Dunayevskaya who, back in the 1940s, sussed the implications of ‘value’ and commodity fetishism for class struggle, I am sympathetic inasmuch as they stand for the ending of value-production and the self-abolition of the working class.

Q. In some ways it feels like Debord’s writings already established the argument that Mark Fisher later made with his ‘Slow cancellation of the future’ theory – that we cannot perceive or decipher our present moment, we are too illusioned. Debord wrote in a pre-internet time, Fisher was post…Do you think that the internet has helped or hindered our ability to recognise reality, and should we consider the internet a friend or foe?

A. Mark Fisher’s line about ‘Slow cancellation of the future’ repeats Debord’s pessimistic retrospective on the Spectacle in 1988. Fisher used Derrida’s pomo concept of hauntology for his cultural writings (especially on sci-fi). The internet is both friend and foe. 20 or 30 years ago some of the acid-addled techies were looking forward to an electronic utopia of global communication. Now it’s become (literally) a virtual war zone in which the mega-rich are winning. The disastrous comeback of Trump is (to use Gramsci’s term) a ‘morbid symptom’ of this.

Q. In your talk you ask (the rhetorical question), ‘How ‘Integrated’ can the Spectacle get?’ – I’m wondering what the answer is, it seems like an atmosphere of complete irreality pervades this country and Europe – can it get more ‘integrated’ do you think?

A. It’s becoming more integrated by the day. In a sense the future hasn’t been so much cancelled, as made a taboo subject of conversation. Starmer promises ‘Change’ (to what?) and ‘Strength and Stability’ (for who?).

Q. Also from your talk, I love the lines ‘Obviously we were nervous anyway about provoking such a break in England’s recent tradition of peaceful protest and thus connecting again with its distant but deep riotous past!’ and ‘rioting isn’t what it used to be.’ So much of our past is obscured from us, and we are instructed over and over again that it is bourgeois parliamentarianism that brought us the rights we have – do you think that people believe that our hierarchical society is inevitable and desirable?

A. Yes, but it wasn’t bourgeois parliamentarianism that brought us the rights we have, but people like Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft and countless others who put their lives on the line and inspired millions – and still do.

Q. This year members of Extinction Rebellion received record prison sentences for peaceful protest, one person was prosecuted for simply joining a Zoom conversation…how important is civil disobedience in fighting capital?

A. I think civil disobedience is crucial in fighting capital. But I think if you are going to risk getting incarcerated it should be for doing something effective that will merit public support. Disrupting the motorway with the result that hospital patients to miss their treatments isn’t going to do either. I also think that throwing soup at the glass frames of paintings and red flour paste that looks like paint at walls is bullshit: a case of activists pretending to be vandals, and the media pretending to be outraged. The problem isn’t that people don’t know or care about environmental destruction; it’s more like they don’t know what to do about it. I don’t think Roger Hallam knows either, but I don’t think he and his friends deserve being locked up in the shitty, rat-infested prison system. But who should be?
Q. You have written about Chartism, and your publishing house, The Barbarism of Pure Culture has published books on the Chartists. What do you think the Chartists can teach the Left today?

A. One of myths about ‘progress’ is that radicals are cleverer and morally superior to those of the past. In researching the formation and early history of the Chartists for our book, 1839, Chris Ford and I found this was not the case. The roots of working class radicalism include the campaign against slavery. To pass the 1832 Parliamentary Reform Bill the Liberals mobilised the workers and subsequently betrayed and excluded them. The radical workers fell back on their own resources, and what amazed us was how creative, imaginative and brave they were. For example, they did not have access to the vast reading resources we have now. Feargus O’Connor’s weekly paper, the Northern Star, gained a very large readership and became an organisational tool of the radicals. The paper would be read out loud in clubs and taverns for the benefit of the illiterate. In 1839, we argue, there was a real prospect of armed revolution that has never been repeated.

Q. It was interesting hearing about the origins of British Situationism in Newcastle – meanwhile, the Anarchist book fair took part in London, do you think that counterculture is too London-centric these days? Or is that a misconception?

A. Anarchists up north can and do organise their own book fairs. But London-centricity is real generally. As a chippie northerner I’ve speculated that one day there will be an imperial city (Londonium 2.0) with border controls on the M25.#

New from B.P.C. Publishing 1839: The Chartist Insurrection and the Newport Rising

The upcoming anniversary of the Briish General Strike of 1926 raises once again the question. When did Britain last come close to armed revolution? To help with an answer B.P.C. Publishing is pleased to release our latest paperback/ebook,
!839: The Chartist Insurrection and the Newport Rising. 
by David Black and Chris For (with foreword by John McDonnell M.P. and appendices by George Julian Harney and Edward Aveling). 340 pp. £9.99. ISBN for Libraries: 9798270579333

Amazon Link – https://amzn.to/4ruFsj9

This is a revised and re-edited edition of our book 1839: The Chartist Insurrection, which was published in 2012 by Unkant.

The historical narrative presents a history of the Chartist Insurrection of 1839, from the launching of People’s Charter Campaign for universal male suffrage in late-1838 to the Newport Rising in November 1839 and the ensuing campaign to save John Frost and co-leaders of the Rising from execution.
The story is told through reference to primary as well as secondary sources: the Chartist and radical press of the time, intelligence reports, and military/government correspondence.

John McDonnell’s words in the foreword still ring true, perhaps even more so today.

“Decade after decade of Labour movement historiography has 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.”

Kindle edition:

Paperback Edition: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0FWZNBZSS

And All Good Libraries (by arrangement with PublishDrive) Ebook ISBN-for libraries – : 9781919342597

REVIEWS OF THE FIRST EDITION

Ben Watson’s blurb-on-the-back: ‘In retrieving the suppressed history of the Chartist Insurrection, David Black and Chris Ford have produced a revolutionary handbook.’

Dan La Botz, New Politics

Black and Ford have written a fast-paced, narrative history of the 1839 Insurrection, filled with thumbnail sketches of the Chartist movement’s major figures, descriptions of the most important Chartist organizations and their politics in brief, excerpts from contemporary speeches, and parliamentary debates, and wonderful descriptions of the movement’s rise, growth, and spread throughout Britain. All of this is based on the most masterful command of the sources: newspapers, parliamentary records, memoirs, private papers, and all of the secondary literature. They tell their story in the most straightforward way but at a breathtaking clip that contributes to the sense of the excitement of the movement and its culmination in the insurrection.”

Stephen Roberts, People’s Charter

I read this book in one sitting as I sheltered from the pouring rain at Bodnant Gardens in North Wales. Based on a wide range of secondary sources and easy to read, it provided a welcome way of spending a few hours whilst waiting for the weather to clear (it didn’t!). The authors tell the story of a year when they assert the conditions for a working class revolution existed… For the authors a hero of the Chartist story emerges… George Julian Harney. And rightly so: Harney should be a hero to us all.

Sharon Borthwick, Unkant Blog

This was an exciting time… Dave Black and Chris Ford bring this time alive with this thoroughly researched book which includes many first hand accounts of meetings, battles and the colourful protagonists, many of who fully supported ‘ulterior measures’ in other words arming themselves, should parliament reject the petition for universal male suffrage which really they knew was a foregone conclusion…

James Heartfield, Spiked Online

David Black and Chris Ford’s account of the Chartist uprising of 1839 is also written in part to save these agitators from the condescending judgement of an Althusserian, in this case Gareth Stedman Jones, whose ‘fear of agency’ cannot recognise Chartism’s self-conscious attempt to overthrow ‘old Corruption’… Black and Ford make a good case that, though the technology they worked with was not for the most part industrial, the core of the Chartist movement was much more than an outgrowth of radicalism… Black and Ford do not flatter the Chartists unduly, nor make them into cartoon heroes. All the weaknesses of the organisation are confronted here.

Adam Buick, Socialist Standard

1839 –The Chartist Insurrection, is a compelling read, telling the story of Chartism through the experiences of George Julian Harney and other ‘firebrand’ Chartist leaders such as Dr. John Taylor and examining the ill-fated Newport Rising of 1839. The authors provide a vivid account of the revolutionary potential that had built up in Britain by the late 1830s, culminating in the aborted rising at Newport.

For the complete B.P.C. Publishing Catalogue see HERE

The 1525 Summer of Fire and Blood

Review by David Black

#sponsored Amazon Link

Lyndal Roper’s book, Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War (Basic Books, 2025) is the product of decades of scholarly research, including treks all over Germany to trace the events and places she writes about. Her approach is ‘to understand the world the peasants inhabited through uncovering the rich details of their daily lives, and to reconstruct their beliefs…’

Peasant Life

In 16^th century Germany the woodlands provided timber for house-building; animals and birds for hunting; and acorns, nuts and berries to feed pigs. Meadowlands fed sheep and cattle. Strip-farming yielded new crops. Rivers, streams and lakes teemed with fish to eat, and powered machinery such as flour mills.

Despite these rich natural resources, the world of the German peasants was unfree, impoverished and unjust. In the Holy Roman Empire headed by Charles V, Archduke of Austria, the myriad princedoms of Germany were a decentralising factor: with lords left free to impose on their peasants a heavy burden of ground rents, tithes, taxes, and tolls; as were the monasteries, which stored vast quantities of flax, grain, fruit, oil and cheese. The monasteries were themselves producers of commodities, especially beer and wine, but unlike their secular competitors, paid no tax on them.

The peasants had to perform onerous labour services for the lords and prelates, such as sowing and harvesting, making carts, and even such idiocies as collecting snail shells for courtly women to wind their sewing threads. Peasants were not allowed to hunt, but had to keep and feed the lords’ hunting dogs, and put up with hunts riding over their land and destroying their crops.

Many peasants, especially in the south-west were serfs bound to their lords’ land in such a way that the lords owned the serfs’ bodies and reproductive abilities:

‘…the wide-ranging rules of what counted as incest devised by the church meant it was virtually impossible to find someone owned by the same lord who was not related and of marriageable age.’

Even ‘free’ peasants could be fined for marrying outside of the manor.

Reformation and Revolution

It is impossible, Roper writes, to grasp the possibilities and limits of the Reformation without understanding the Peasant War as ‘the giant trauma at its centre’, and vice-versa.

In 1517 Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg. The Theses attacked the abuse and corruption of the church’s practises – worship of fake relics, Virgin Mary idolatry, sale of indulgences, ‘tickets’ for pilgrimages to sites of alleged miracles, restriction of communion wine to the clergy, etc. His missive implied what many had long thought: that the monasteries, which sucked the wealth of the communities without giving anything back, had no legitimacy and no reason to exist. Furthermore, Luther’s call for Reformation was, at the same time, literally a call to arms, quoting the words of Jesus that he had come not to bring peace, but a sword.

Luther’s theses were immediately translated from Latin to German, printed and distributed in the streets of Nuremberg. His pamphlet of 1520, The Freedom of a Christian, circulated in German, and was aimed, he wrote, at ‘the unlearned – for only them do I serve’.

The new invention of moveable type for printing brought about the first ‘communications revolution’. No longer would reading, writing and education be monopolized by the scribes of the church. The printed word had the potential to make knowledge available to all.

In February 1525 Albrecht, who led the warrior monks of the Teutonic Knights, declared for the Reformation and became a duke, effectively founding Prussia. As Luther was Albrecht’s leading theologian, this event was a triumph for the Reformation. However, the issue for many was how to interpret the concept of justice in the ‘true’ Christian gospel. Luther, in The Freedom of a Christian, stated that on the one hand the Christian believer is a free lord of all things, and on the other hand, a dutiful servant of everyone. Luther later insisted that he meant ‘freedom’ only in the religious sense, and ‘duty’ in the sense of submission to feudal power, no matter how unjust. However, for radical interpreters of the Reformation, being ‘the free lord of all things’ meant the freedom to enjoy the God-given fruits of the earth. In Roper’s interpretation of peasant demands, in the broad sense:

‘Woods must be free, water must free. the animals in the forest and the birds must be free for people to hunt. Here, “free” meant not sovereign, but free for people to use. These demands were not new, but they formed part of a religious vision’.

The Twelve Principles of the peasants’ Christian Union were formulated by Sebastian Lotzer, a former Lutheran theologian who joined the peasants’ bands and became one of their leaders. The Principles called for the freedom of congregations to elect their preacher, the abolition of serfdom, restoration of common land that had been seized by the nobles, and an end to arbitrary justice which rigged in favour of the rich and powerful.

Movement

In the winter of 1524-5, the tythes had been paid to the lords and prelates, the granaries filled, and the animals butchered or brought into the shelter of the barns on the ground floors of houses. Women turned to spinning; men to woodwork.

Since Hans Böhm. the visionary ‘Drummer of Niklashausen’, was executed in 1476 for leading a peasant rebellion, there had been regular outbreaks of dissent. What was different this time was that the peasant mobilisations of the previous year -1524 – had assumed organisational form, of the Bands of Brothers, who took oaths of loyalty to the Words of the Gospel. So, as winter was no time take on the lords, the peasants used the slower pace of life to ‘think, gossip, organise and prepare’.

The preparations for rebellion took the form of a ritual: a peasant band would gather together and swear an oath of loyalty to the Brotherhood; then send an invitation to the next village, announcing ‘We have formed a band of brothers to support the gospel and we invite you to come to us’ and, with a hint of menace, adding ‘and if you will not come to us we will come to you’. The recipient would then summon the community, the Gemeinde, which, as the congregation of church goers, was also the collective of farmers and craftsfolk who managed use of land and protection of livestock.

In early spring the rebellion got underway. Within weeks it spread from the Swiss border in the south, through the Black Forest to Swabia; up the Rhine to Alsace in the west, and through the valleys into Franconia. The peasant bands moved through valleys and forests, looting and destroying hundreds of monasteries, abbeys and castles. They proceeded – unlike the armies of the nobles – largely without stealing from the locals, killing or raping. Lords, monks and nuns were subjected to the humiliations of being sent packing; some were invited to join the rebels, and some did, though many of them claimed later they had been coerced into doing so.

Typically, the occupation of monastery would begin with a Saturnalian revel as the peasants helped themselves to vast stores of food and communion wine, and destroyed saintly statues and painted images. The libraries were sacked; largely because the peasants associated written records with tythes and taxes. The raids on monasteries and castles provided the army with hordes of money, precious objects to be sold, and armaments. Also, as Roper describes the peasants’ actions,

‘This was not mindless vandalism; they intended to destroy the relics of the old religion and its reverence for holy objects, which felt like a giant fraud in light of the truth that Christ himself had bought their freedom.’

Lords and abbots sent out appeals for military assistance but, as the armies of the Swabian League were busy fighting the French in Lombardy, little help was forthcoming. The peasants conquered by sheer force of numbers. Likewise in those towns and cities patrician overlords were overthrown in a ‘wave of anticlericalism and antimonasticism’ which took in support for the peasants – as they were all oppressed by the same class of tyrants.

Holy War

At the height of the War a pamphlet probably written by Sebastian Lotzer. entitled To the Assembly of the German Peasantry, discussed the tyranny of Ancient Rome and warned, ‘Listen, dear brothers, you have embittered the hearts of your lords so greatly with an excess of gall that they will never be sweetened again’. The current rebellion was so far advanced any turning back would end in mass slaughter and a new stage of ‘slavery’.

Roper doesn’t doubt that the peasants could not match the military training, fire-power and armoured cavalry of their enemies, but observes that they were not incompetent. They had arms, including guns, liberated from captured castles.

The ranks of the Peasant army included former mercenaries, who knew tactics. One such was Hans Müller, who led a band known as the Black Foresters. Müller captured Freiburg on 12 May and led a march to Hegau where the army were besieging the Swabian League’s stronghold at Zell. In mid-June, Müller’s fighters were overwhelmed by superior numbers, after which he was captured and executed.

Preacher Jakob Wehe was one of the leaders of a 4,000-strong peasant army which took on the cavalry of the Swabian League at Leipheim. Wehe assured the peasants that ‘by a special providence of God’ they would triumph against a much better armed enemy. He was wrong; the peasants were scattered and slaughtered. 700 were imprisoned in Laupheim, including Wehe, who was executed.

Florian Geyer, a lord who joined the peasants, formed a troop of cavalry which fought many successful battles until June, when Geyer was killed in battle by the forces of the Elector Palatine.

Thomas Müntzer assembled an enormous peasant army on the mountain of Frankenhausen, Thuringia on 15 May 1525 to take on the joint forces of the Lutheran Philip I of Hesse and the Catholic Duke George of Saxony. The defences of the peasant force of 8000 were the high ground, which they held, and the circle of their wagons. The first salvos of enemy artillery panicked and scattered the defenders, who were then cut down in their thousands by charging cavalry. Müntzer was captured, tortured into ‘repentance’ (could repentance ever be extracted under torture?) and executed.

One factor in the Peasant War’s outcome was the failure of the peasants’ evangelisers to persuade the miners to rise, even though many of them had left the mines to join the peasant bands. Roper suggests that a ‘theology of the natural world’, which she assigns to the peasants, may have had ‘less appeal’ the miners. The mining industry was expanding within the first globalisation of capitalism in its mercantile stage. In rural Germany forests were being felled to supply charcoal for smelting; streams supplied the water to clean mined ore and got back fish-killing pollutants. The mines were making a lot of money for the owners, who felt confident enough to grant concessions.

Aftermath

The peasants were defeated before they could ‘put plans for a new future into action’. A hundred thousand peasants were slaughtered during or after the War. Towns which had sided with peasants were retaken and suffered collective punishment. Luther, in his infamous pamphlet, Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants, cheered on the brutality of the nobility.

Due to the peasants’ massive destruction of monasteries and the castles, the power of the abbots and lower nobility never recovered. The lot of the mass of peasants did not improve and many had to endure a ‘Second Serfdom’. The decentralising power of the princes was consolidated further, ensuring that the unification of Germany didn’t happen for another 350 years.

In the aftermath of the Peasant War the halo of the Reformation lay blooded in the dust. Luther’s outlook, writes Roper, shaped ‘insistence on obedience to secular powers, no matter how unjust.’ This legacy, she suggests, may have shaped the Lutheran church’s accords with both National Socialism and the East German regime.

The Anabaptists endorsed Müntzer’s biblical vision of Omnia sunt communia but at the same adopted a pacifist stance. Their principle of adult baptism as affirmation of faith against infant baptism was anathema to Lutheran and Catholic practices. Renouncing violence did not protect the Anabaptists from being imprisoned, burnt at the stake or forced into exile. The preacher Balthasar Hubmaier found common cause with the Anabaptists, but as a Müntzer follower he couldn’t accept pacifism. Hubmaier was burnt at the stake in Moravia by the Austrians.

Marxism and the Peasants

Roper is highly critical of Friedrich Engels’ The Peasant War in Germany and Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, both of which were published in the wake of the 1848-49 Revolutions. Both, she contends, ‘relegate peasants to the sidelines of history’.

Engels, looking back 300 years, found the same forces – revolutionary and counter-revolutionary – which had emerged during the 1848 Revolutions. Luther was a proto-bourgeois liberal: riding to power on a wave of popular protest, then making peace with the forces the people were protesting against. Thomas Müntzer’s ‘All Belongs to All’ movement was the communist forerunner of the ‘proletarian party.’ But this role for Müntzer is a difficult fit. Certainly Müntzer’s apocalyptic prophecies lacked any practical vision of a free society. And (as Engels admits) Müntzer was no military leader. He led his forces to the disaster at Frankenhausen because he had discerned a prophecy of victory in a dream he had.

Roper sees Engels’ Müntzer as ‘trapped like an impotent time-traveller able to articulate “the ideas of which he himself had only a faint notion” but incapable of “transforming society”.’

The difficulty in describing the Peasant War as a putative ‘bourgeois’ revolution with an ‘undeveloped’ proletarian offspring is in explaining the absence among the actual revolutionaries – the peasants – of concepts such as ‘progress’ and ‘democracy’ – and other ideological pillars of bourgeois society. ‘Freedom’ meant something quite different from ‘Liberty’ as espoused by later opponents of feudalism in the name of the ‘individual’. ‘Freedom’ for the German peasants, meant Christian Brotherhood, which implied collective social responsibility – though it meant also upholding patriarchy and side-lining the role of women. Roper speculates that the masculinism which bonded the Brotherhood may have heightened their illusions of martial invincibility.

Turning to Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Roper notes that he compares the mass of small-holding peasants in post-1848 France with a ‘bag of potatoes’. Here, Marx was comparing the small-holding, debt-ridden peasantry of 1850 unfavourably with the ‘flower of the peasant youth’ that had fought in the Revolutionary armies in 1790s.

In Germany in 1850, the peasants were oppressed and impoverished by the nobility (junkers). But Lassalle, the leading German socialist of the time, regarded the peasants, in 1850 as in 1525, as ‘reactionary’. In the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program Marx objected to the Lassallean’s lumping together of peasants, artisans, petit-bourgeoisie and feudal lords as ‘only one reactionary mass’ in relation to the working class; a position which effectively excluded the peasantry from playing any revolutionary role, and abandoned them the rule of the junkers. The Lassalleans’ demand for ‘state aid’ ‘under the democratic control of the working people’ ignored that ‘in the first place, the majority of the “working people” in Germany consists of peasants, not proletarians’.

Marx agreed with Engels on the necessity of a merciless struggle against the feudal masters, writing on 16 August 1856,

‘Everything in Germany will depend upon whether it will be possible to support the proletarian revolution by something like a second edition of the Peasant War. Only then will everything proceed well.’

Roper recognises the ‘radical edge’ of Peasants’ War as ‘the sheer breadth of their ideas, which addressed the environment, human agency and animals’. She adds:

‘These not issues that interested Marx and Engels because they did not point the way forward to the industrialisation of the future. But they are questions that confront us now. Who owns the natural resources, timber, rivers, ponds and common land? Who controls energy sources? How can we till the land sustainably? In a way that is fair to both small and big producers? How can wealth be shared equally?’

Roper’s point is that these questions were posed by the peasants of 1525. And are all still valid. But was Marx himself really a productivist, looking forward ‘to the industrialisation of the future’? Kohei Saito contends in Marx in the Anthropocene that the later Marx was beginning to grasp a non-productivist vision of ‘de-growth’ communism, and even abandoning historical materialism as a program of industrialisation. Saito sees Marx as addressing how the transhistorical, interactive relation of humans with the rest of nature undergoes a ‘metabolic rift’ which is historically specific to capitalism. Marx was studying, Saito writes, ‘…various practices of robbery closely tied to climate change, the exhaustion of natural resources (soil nutrients, fossil fuel and woods) as well as the extinction of species due to the capitalist system of industrial production’.*

As a feminist and environmentalist Roper sees that the modern world can learn from the 16th century peasants: the sense of ‘community’ – with each other and with ‘the fruits of air, land and sea’ – in free ‘spiritual’ expression, but free of intolerance and exclusion by gender, religion or creed. The question of the ownership and control of natural resources, energy, land and wealth confronts us now as then.

*David Black, ‘How Green was Karl Marx: Kohei Saito and the Anthropocene’, 23 June 2023 https://imhojournal.org/articles/how-green-was-karl-marx-on-kohei-saito-and-the-anthropocene

This article first appeared in IMHO Journal

Subversive Books – The B.P.C. Catalogue 2026

B.P.C. Books Catalogue

B.P.C. titles -eleven in all – published to date (2022-2025) as paperback and ebook, available on Amazon.

For readers who don’t use Amazon, most of our titles can be obtained as ebooks at 22,000 libraries around the world, courtesy of PublishDrive. Ebooks ISBNs available for libraries are given below.

1839: The Chartist Insurrection and the Newport Rising, by David Black and Chris Ford, with an Introduction by John McDonnell M.P. (new edition of the book published by Unkant in 2012)

Amazon #paidaffiliate Go to Amazon page

ISBN-for libraries – : 9781919342597

In History Today, January 2022, Katrina Navickas wrote:‘The year most likely to result in a revolutionary moment was 1839.’ David Black and Chris Ford’s book supports this view. First published in 2012 by the late Unkant Books, it is now back in print, both as a BPC paperback and ebook, revised and copy-edited.

From Reviews of the First Edition

Ben Watson’s blurb-on-the-back: ‘In retrieving the suppressed history of the Chartist Insurrection, David Black and Chris Ford have produced a revolutionary handbook.’

Dan La Botz, New Politics ‘Black and Ford have written a fast-paced, narrative history of the 1839 Insurrection, filled with thumbnail sketches of the Chartist movement’s major figures, descriptions of the most important Chartist organizations and their politics in brief, excerpts from contemporary speeches, and parliamentary debates, and wonderful descriptions of the movement’s rise, growth, and spread throughout Britain. All of this is based on the most masterful command of the sources: newspapers, parliamentary records, memoirs, private papers, and all of the secondary literature. They tell their story in the most straightforward way but at a breathtaking clip that contributes to the sense of the excitement of the movement and its culmination in the insurrection.’

Stephen Roberts, People’s Charter ‘I read this book in one sitting as I sheltered from the pouring rain at Bodnant Gardens in North Wales. Based on a wide range of secondary sources and easy to read, it provided a welcome way of spending a few hours whilst waiting for the weather to clear (it didn’t!). The authors tell the story of a year when they assert the conditions for a working class revolution existed… For the authors a hero of the Chartist story emerges… George Julian Harney. And rightly so: Harney should be a hero to us all.’

March 2025

The Phantasmagoria of Capital: A Short History of the Commodity, the Spectacle and its Discontents, by David Black

Amazon Page

Ebook ISBN=for libraries: 9781919342573

WiseBooks Series 1 -5

Lost Texts Around King Mob, by Dave and Stuart Wise. with contributions from John Barker, Chris Gray, Ronald Hunt, Phil Meyler and Fred Vermorel

Amazon Page

Dialectical Butterflies: Ecocide, Extinction Rebellion, Green and Rewilding the Commons – an Illustrated Derive, by Dave and Stuart Wise.

Amazon Page

Ebook via Libraries: ISBN: 9781919342535

King Mob: the Negation and Transcendence of Art, by Dave and Stuart Wise

Amazon Page

Ebook ISBN=for libraries: 9781919342528

Lawton Browning, Fifth Estate, Vol. 60. No.1 Spring 2025 “New York City, 1967. Roaming the streets in debate on the merits of the then-peak vogue art movement, Abstract Expressionism, are Ben Morea, part of a local affinity group, Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, and David Wise and Anne Ryder of the English group of cultural subversives known as King Mob. It was perhaps on a matter of time before representatives of these two groups would cross paths. Both King Mob and the Motherfuckers (as they were colloquially known) emerged from the political tumult of 1967 under similar formative influences: a Marxist critique of capitalism, the international art movement known as Surrealism and, in the case of King Mob, as expelled members of the French critical theory group, the Situationist International.”

A Newcastle Dunciad: Memories of Music and Recuperation, by Dave and Stuart Wise

Amazon Page

Ebook ISBN=for libraries: 9781919342542

Building For Babylon: Construction, Collectives and Craic, by Dave and Stuart Wise

Amazon Page

Helen Macfarlane

Red Chartist: Complete Annotated Writings, and her Translation of the Communist Manifesto, by Helen Macfarlane

Amazon Page

Simon Webb, The Friend, Britain’s Quaker magazine (15 November, 2024) ‘It must occasionally happen that translators would rather not work on a particular passage. Perhaps such a thing happened to the Scottish Chartist Helen Macfarlane when she was translating The Communist Manifesto from its original German. She was a socialist with strong religious beliefs, whereas Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels seem to have regarded religion as a dead end.’ You can read it full on The Friend website

Red Republican: Complete Annotated Works of Helen Macfarlane and Translation of the Communist Manifesto

[Print Replica] Kindle Edition of the book published by Unkant Books in 2014

Red Antigone: The Life and World of Helen Macfarlane 1818-60, by David Black

Amazon Page

Ebook ISBN=for libraries: 9781919342566

Psychedelic History

Psychedelic Tricksters: A True Secret History of LSD, by David Black

Amazon Page

Ebook ISBN=for libraries: 6610001082307

“I recommend this book; it is more historically accurate than earlier books on this subject.” – Tim Scully, underground chemist of the 1960s who produced “Orange Sunshine” LSD.

LSD Underground: Operation Julie, the Microdot Gang and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, by David Black

Amazon Page

Ebook ISBN: for libraries: 9781919342580

Ellenore Clementine Kruger, Goodreads: Good background on old politics. Every now and then a chill blows in the wind and pushes us backwards in time and as i write this war is on the brink but certainly these old hippies were against war and represented an indigenous purity to be desired … a type of inner magic at peace with anarchy and due to the medical war on mortality there is just too much taboo… so this does have specific years and strains and gangs and names and locations which show a cool world but sadly the author mentioned David Solomon who he wasnt as big as other authors and i fear the biblical term of losing salt is like … pretty much the issue here: so yeah its a spiritual war but resting on material laurels like crystals and dots could definitely attract evil eye. *****

Continue reading “Subversive Books – The B.P.C. Catalogue 2026”

The Phantasmagoria of the Commodity Spectacle

The Phantasmagoria of Capital: A Short History of the Commodity, the Spectacle and its Discontents.

David Black

BPC Publishing. Kindle and Paperback.

ISBN for Libraries: 9781919342573

Amazon-Link #sponsored.

Part One. Origins

Tragedy, Philosophy and Money = A Warning from Greek Antiquity; Cults, Myths and Money – Dionysus, Orpheus and Us

Part Two‘New Passions’ Post-Feudalism

Anarchism and Aristotle – Old but Good and Vice-Versa; ‘Another Language’ – Walt Whitman, Karl Marx and the British, 1850-56; Marx and the Narodniks – The Lost Russian Road to ‘de-growth’ communism.

Part Three Commodity Culture

Lukacs on Journalism as Prostitution; Culture Wars in the Spiritual Animal Kingdom – On the Barbarism of Pure Insight; Culture (Before the World) Wars = Simmel, Lukacs and Bloch and the ‘Tragedy of Spirit’; History, Capital and Phantasmagoria – Divine Heresies; Melancholy, Allegory and Tyranny – Reading the Ruins with Walter Benjamin; Surrealism’s 100 Years – Hegel, Freud and Breton; Strolls in Dialectical Fairyland – Walter Benjamin’s Surrealism

Part Four Spectacle

‘Go home Mr. Chaplin’. – The Letterist Assault on Cinema; Post-Surrealism; ‘Extremist Innovations’ for Beginners = How the Situationists took on the culture industry; Spectacular Integration = What Guy Debord Saw Coming; The Spectacle of Ressentiment – T.J. Clark on Why art still can’t kill the Situationist International

Part Five Anti-Spectacle

Cities of the Dreadful Future – Psychogeography, Urbanism and the Dérive in London and Paris; Gillian Rose – Beyond the Holy Middle: Spectacle Paradiso; ‘Materialist Realism’; Alternatives to Vanguardism = CLR James, Cornelius Castoriadis, Guy Debord, Raya Dunayevskaya

B.P.C. Publications

Email: BPC101radpub@gmail.com

Preface to Psychedelic Tricksters: A True Secret History of LSD (New Edition)

Psychedelic Tricksters: A True Secret History of LSD (New Edition)

By David Black

B.P.C. Publishing (London: 2025)

#sponsored AMAZON-LINK

“I recommend this book; it is more historically accurate than earlier books on this subject.” – Tim Scully, underground chemist of the 1960s who produced “Orange Sunshine” LSD.

Preface

Like atomic power and artificial intelligence, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) was discovered in the closing years of World War Two. Since then, atomic bombs and computers have been the constant source of fears that combined they might bring about the destruction of humanity. LSD has aroused similar fears. Albert Hoffman, the Swiss chemist who discovered its effects in 1943, likened the LSD trip to an ‘inner bomb’. He warned that, if improperly used and distributed, LSD might bring about more destruction than an atomic detonation. But it has also been argued that, if properly used and distributed, LSD use might actually change people’s consciousness for the better and help to prevent nuclear war.

Professor David Nutt, who sat on the British Labour government’s Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs until he was sacked in 2009, argues that the study of psychedelics is essential for understanding the nature of consciousness itself: ‘This is core neuroscience. This is about humanity at its deepest level. It is fundamental to understanding ourselves. And the only way to study consciousness is to change it. Psychedelics change consciousness in a way that is unique, powerful, and perpetual – of course we have to study them’.

As is well known, in the 1950s and early ‘60s the US Central Intelligence Agency used LSD, in secret and illegal experiments, on unwitting subjects. The CIA did so according to Cold War logic: if the Russians could work out how to use LSD in bio-chemical warfare — or in ‘brain-washing’, as a ‘truth drug’, or even as a ‘Manchurian Candidate’ — then the USA needed to work it out first. In 1953, the CIA launched a top-secret ‘mind-control’ project, code-named MK-Ultra. The CIA’s assets in the US medical profession ‘officially’ labelled LSD as ‘psychosis- inducing drug’, only of use in psychiatric analysis and research.

Many CIA officers, contractors and assets however, became enthusiastic trippers themselves, in full knowledge that LSD could produce atrocious as well as enchanting hallucinations. Knowing the secrets of LSD, they thought of themselves as a kind of anti-communist spiritual elite who, unlike the US citizenry at large, were ‘in the know’. But by the end of the 1950s, with no sign of the Russians contaminating the water supply with LSD, there were plenty of signs in the United States that the psychedelic experience was escaping its captors.

Some of the researchers in American hospitals – who had little awareness that their work was being secretly sponsored by the CIA — realised that LSD had ‘spiritual’ implications, i.e. for developing an ‘integrative’ enlightened consciousness, conducive to visionary creativity.

These researchers stressed the importance of ‘set and setting’ in properly supervised LSD sessions. The English scholar, Aldous Huxley, who took his first LSD trip in 1955, related in his essay Heaven and Hell the hallucinogenic experience to the visionary works of William Blake: ‘Visionary experience is not the same as mystical experience. Mystical experience is beyond the realm of opposites. Visionary experience is still within that realm. Heaven entails hell, and “going to heaven” is no more liberation than

is the descent into horror. Heaven is merely a vantage point, from which the divine Ground can be more clearly seen than on the level of ordinary individualized existence’. ii Huxley, though an advocate for psychedelic drugs, wanted them strictly controlled. In contrast, Timothy Leary, who first took LSD in December 1961, became the ‘guru’ of psychedelia as LSD ‘escaped’ into the counter-culture of the 1960s. The ‘escape’ has been the subject of conspiracy theories which have been weaponised in today’s so-called Culture Wars.

According to one widely-held view, the entire psychedelic counter-culture of the 1960s was engineered by the CIA as part of a plot by some secret global elite bent on mass mind-control.

For elements of the Right, the psychedelic counter- culture undermined ‘traditional values’ such as patriarchy, nationalism and subservience to authority. On the Left, some see the 1960s hedonism of ‘Sex, Drugs and Rock’n’Roll’ as having been a distraction from politics. The theory, as it has spread, has thrown in extra villains for good measure: satanists, MI6, the psychiatrists of the Tavistock Institute, the Grateful Dead, and Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, etc, etc. In truth, the extent of the CIA’s involvement in the psychedelic counter-culture of the 1960s has always been difficult to determine; not least because Sidney Gottlieb, head of MK- Ultra, illegally destroyed the project’s operational files in 1973.

Nonetheless, some leading figures of the counter-culture, such as Timothy Leary, can hardly be discussed without reference to the CIA – not least because Leary himself had so much to say about it. In the present work, whilst I pay only scant attention to conspiracy theories, I make no apologies for investigating, where necessary, real conspiracies. The underground networks of acid producers and distributors on both sides of the Atlantic were described after their downfall in the nineteen-seventies in such terms as ‘Hippie Mafia’ or ‘Microdot Gang’: so out of their heads that they didn’t know any better; or were ‘only in it for the money’; or were tools of organised crime and/or state agencies.

In an earlier ebook I noted that nearly everyone involved – the psychedelic revolutionaries, the financiers, intelligence and anti-drugs agencies, CIA-sponsored scientists and researchers – operated to a greater or lesser extent outside of accepted standards of ‘legality’, or didn’t even recognise them; hence the title: Acid Outlaws: LSD, Counter-Culture and Counter-Revolution . But although the term ‘outlaw’ certainly fits many of people in this study, it doesn’t fit all of them by any means. Stephen Bentley, ex-undercover police officer and author of Undercover: Operation Julie – The Inside Story, takes exception to my use of the term ‘questionable legality’ regarding of some of the surveillance methods he and his colleagues used: ‘Questionable by who? Illegal – mostly not… Yes, I smoked a lot of hash… and did some cocaine. Technically, that was illegal. Tell me what I was supposed to do given I was undercover. I wasn’t Steve Bentley. I was ‘Steve Jackson’ – wild, carefree, giving all the impression I was a dealer. I’m now 72 years’ old. I don’t care for the historical revisionism applied to Operation Julie recently. It was a highly successful and unique police investigation carried out professionally under difficult circumstances’. On my reference to the ‘ham-acting of drunken undercover officers’, Bentley retorts: ‘Maybe you should try living a lie for the best part of a year; doing things alien to you; becoming a different person. Those who know will scoff at the thought of it being an act. It’s not. You become someone else – believe me’. The point is, I concede that although Stephen Bentley mixed with ‘acid outlaws’ and behaved like one when he was infiltrating them in north Wales in the 1970s, he certainly wasn’t one himself.

Steve Abrams – who inspired me twenty years ago to write about this subject in the first place – wasn’t an outlaw either. He is described in an obituary in Psychedelic Press – quite accurately — as a ‘psychedelic trickster’. Many of the leading players who feature in this tale were certainly outlaws at various times but primarily they were tricksters. In Carl Gustav Jung’s definition of archetypes, the ‘Trickster’ surfaces in many stories in mythology, folklore and religion.

More generally, anthropologists studying indigenous cultures in various parts of the world identify the trickster with cunning crazy-acting animals such as the fox or coyote, shape-shifting gods such as Loki in Norse mythology and rustic pranksters in human form. In the literature of Greek antiquity, Prometheus, the son of a Titan, tricks the gods with his buffoonery and steals fire from heaven for the benefit of human kind, for which he is severely punished by Zeus.

As the historian of religion, Klaus-Peter Koepping, puts it:

‘In European consciousness Prometheus becomes the symbol for man’s never- ceasing, unremitting, and relentless struggle against fate, against the gods, unrepentingly defying the laws of the Olympians, though (and this again shows the continuing absurdity) never being successful in this endeavor, which, however, is necessary for the origin of civilized life (the ultimate paradox of rule breaking as a rule)’.

Like fire, psychedelic drugs can be dangerous as well as beneficial. In various ways the tricksters who feature in this book tended to believe that their antics were beneficial to humanity as well as themselves; and in most cases had to suffer the consequences of their actions. CIA MK-Ultra chief, Sidney Gottlieb, believed that that his immoral and dishonest actions were outweighed by his patriotism and dedication to science, but his reputation has been posthumously trashed (a biography by Stephen Kinzer calls him as ‘the CIA’s Poisoner- in-Chief’).

On the ‘other’ side, the reputation of Timothy Leary, who likewise believed he was acting as a patriot and saviour of civilisation, has shape-shifted from brilliant scientist to mystical guru, wanted criminal, wild-eyed revolutionary, renegade informer and finally self- aggrandising ‘showboater’. I sent a copy of the previous book to Tim Scully, a most significant actor in the events unfolded in this story. Scully is a meticulous researcher (he is compiling a history of LSD production in the US) and, as it turns out, a very reliable witness. Scully, born 1944, was in 1966 taken on as apprentice to the famous LSD chemist Owsley Stanley (AKA Bear Stanley). After Owsley withdrew from LSD production following a bust of his tableting facility in December 1967, Scully was determined to continue. After making LSD in successive laboratories in Denver, Scully began to work with fellow psychedelic chemist, Nick Sand (another trickster).

Their collaboration led to the establishment in November 1968 of a lab in Windsor, California, which ultimately produced well over a kilo (more than four million 300 μg doses) of very pure LSD that became known as Orange Sunshine. Scully, in writing to me, pointed to a number of errors in my writings regarding events in the USA. Generously, he provided me with a lot of very useful information: firstly, on how underground LSD production was organised in the United States in the 1960s; secondly, on the relations between the American LSD producers in the United States, their collaborators in Great Britain, and the ‘Brotherhood of Eternal Love’; and thirdly on the alleged CIA asset, Ronald Stark, whom Scully knew and did business with. With further research and fact- checking I realised that none of the previous books on the subject (including mine) have accurately covered these three issues. I hope – whilst making no claim to have written anything like a comprehensive or definitive history of the LSD underground – that this one does.

Mastodon

The Barbarism of Pure Culture is now on Mastodon

@the barbarismof pureculture@federatedpress

And Bluesky

@pure-culture.bsky.social

Substack

LSD in the Water Supply a ‘Myth’ Shock

‘An entire city stoned on a nightmare drug – that was the crazy ambition of the masterminds behind the world’s biggest LSD factory.’

#LSDUnderground

The Daily Mirror, 1978: ‘An entire city stoned on a nightmare drug – that was the crazy ambition of the masterminds behind the world’s biggest LSD factory.’

The ‘masterminds’ were chemist Richard Kemp and his partner Dr Christine Bott – both jailed in the ‘Operation Julie’ trial days earlier. Kemp got 13 years. As for Bott, chemist Andy Munro, later commented, ‘Bott got nine years for making sandwiches. I got ten years for making acid’.

The Mirror continued:

‘Top chemist Richard Kemp and his mistress… planned to blow a million minds simultaneously by pouring pure LSD into the reservoirs serving Birmingham. Detectives were horrified when they heard what the drug barons had in mind.’

How the ‘acid in the water supply’ nonsense became front page news is one of the things explored in my new book, LSD UNDERGROUND: Operation Julie, the Microdot Gang and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love (available in paperback or ebook at Amazon).

Clue: The story, which was police-sourced, was written by Ed Laxton, the ghost writer for Operation Julie undercover officer Martyn Pritchard’s book, Busted!The Sensational Life-Story of an Undercover Hippie (1978).

The preface to LSD UNDERGROUND can be read on this site HERE

The Director

Hegelian Dialectic

Black Mask

The Construction of Situations

Heatwave, the Situationist International and King Mob

Interview

REVIEWS OF THE FIRST EDITION

B.P.C. Books Catalogue

B.P.C. titles -eleven in all – published to date (2022-2025) as paperback and ebook, available on Amazon.

1839: The Chartist Insurrection and the Newport Rising, by David Black and Chris Ford, with an Introduction by John McDonnell M.P. (new edition of the book published by Unkant in 2012)

From Reviews of the First Edition

March 2025

The Phantasmagoria of Capital: A Short History of the Commodity, the Spectacle and its Discontents, by David Black

WiseBooks Series 1 -5

Lost Texts Around King Mob, by Dave and Stuart Wise. with contributions from John Barker, Chris Gray, Ronald Hunt, Phil Meyler and Fred Vermorel

Dialectical Butterflies: Ecocide, Extinction Rebellion, Green and Rewilding the Commons – an Illustrated Derive, by Dave and Stuart Wise.

King Mob: the Negation and Transcendence of Art, by Dave and Stuart Wise

A Newcastle Dunciad: Memories of Music and Recuperation, by Dave and Stuart Wise

Building For Babylon: Construction, Collectives and Craic, by Dave and Stuart Wise

Helen Macfarlane

Red Chartist: Complete Annotated Writings, and her Translation of the Communist Manifesto, by Helen Macfarlane

Red Republican: Complete Annotated Works of Helen Macfarlane and Translation of the Communist Manifesto

Red Antigone: The Life and World of Helen Macfarlane 1818-60, by David Black

Psychedelic History

Psychedelic Tricksters: A True Secret History of LSD, by David Black

LSD Underground: Operation Julie, the Microdot Gang and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, by David Black

The Phantasmagoria of Capital: A Short History of the Commodity, the Spectacle and its Discontents.

CONTENTS

Psychedelic Tricksters: A True Secret History of LSD (New Edition)

By David Black

Preface