Psychedelic Tricksters: Going Underground

2 December 2023. Here is the second part of my Substack serialisation of Chapter Six of Psychedelic Tricksters: A True Secret History of LSD (Amazon. Also on Kindle: HERE) The first part of the serialisation is available HERE. – D.B.

Owsley Fights Prohibition

On January 22 1966 Ken Kesey fled to Mexico to avoid a six-month prison sentence for possession of marijuana. In his absence, the Merry Pranksters were led by Ken Babbs. The California Acid Tests ended in October 1966, when new legislation was enacted. The Drug Abuse Control Act of 1965 passed by the United States Congress empowered the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare to designate LSD as a controlled substance, requiring licensing for sales and distribution.

Although this new federal law allowed possession for personal consumption, the California State Senate clamped down further and made possession of LSD a misdemeanor punishable by a maximum fine of $1,000 or a year in jail, and made manufacture and possession for sale a felony punishable by one to five years in prison. Other states followed with similar legislation. In 1968 the United States Congress made possession a misdemeanour and sale and manufacture a felony throughout the USA.

The Bureau of Drug Abuse Control (BDAC) was formed in February 1966 as a part of the United States Food and Drug Administration. In 1968, the BDAC was merged with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics to form the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), forerunner of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which was established in July 1973.

Owsley/Bear Stanley was undeterred by the New Prohibition, as was his assistant, Time Scully, who wanted more than anything to work with him in making LSD. Scully’s wish was soon granted. In July 1966, Bear and Melissa Cargill set up a laboratory in Point Richmond, California with Scully and Don Douglas. Owsley had got as far as making a very pure crystal LSD, and obtained new equipment for tableting it. This became known as ‘White Lightning’. With Scully he succeeded in creating about 100 grams of LSD which made about 300,000 white lightning 300 μg tablets in addition to some handmade tablet triturates.The laboratory was also used to make DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine), a synthetic version of a resinous South American tree bark with hallucinogenic properties.

Bear, having produced such a large run of LSD, was ready for a break, but Scully was keen to continue the work. Scully collected the material and equipment for a prospective new lab from various companies in the San Francisco area which Bear had recommended. Unknown to Scully however, the Bay Area BDAC had been asking local chemical suppliers to alert them to anyone ordering materials that might be used for LSD production.

On December 8, 1966 Scully called at a Bay Area chemical firm to collect some chemicals he had ordered. The man at the sales-desk helped load the purchases into his truck. Scully then walked home, leaving his colleague, Don Douglas, to drive away the truck. Douglas, as he drove off, noticed that the ‘sales-desk man’ jumped into a car and began following him. Knowing they had a surveillance tail caused some soul-searching, but Scully and Douglas decided that the BDAC agents were unlikely to act unless they were led to a laboratory; and as yet, there wasn’t one. But, shortly before Christmas 1966, Scully rented a house at 4210 East 26th Ave, near Denver City Park, to accommodate his first laboratory. As a cover story, he told the owner of the property that he was doing work in the basement with radio isotopes on a government licence which required special security.

In preparation for getting the Denver lab operational, the two chemists continued to gather equipment and chemicals in California, and did so under the eyes of the BDAC agents, to whom they would cheekily wave at in the street. Finally, on January 19, 1967 the truck was loaded up for the thousand-mile journey to Denver, Colorado. Scully and Douglas, having observed the tailing-techniques of the BDAC for some weeks, implemented a plan to shake off the surveillance. In the side streets of San Jose they succeeded in losing their BDAC tail and drove the truck to Denver.

Once the Denver facilities were in place Scully returned to San Francisco to collect a consignment of Bear Stanley’s lysergic acid. Bear however, had forgotten the false name he used for the Arizona safety deposit box in which he had stashed it. He did not admit his memory lapse; instead he told Scully that, given the heat he and Don Douglas had encountered when gathering chemicals and equipment, his ‘intuition’ told him to leave LSD production aside for the moment. In early 1967, chemist Sasha Shulgin had given Bear Stanley a small sample of STP (STP-2,5-Dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine) and a sketchy outline of the synthesis for making it. Bear insisted that Scully try to work out the process for making STP – which was still legal – from Shulgin’s sketchy notes and paid for the chemicals and equipment.

Nick Sand

Bear, while visiting New York in the fall of 1966, had met Nick Sand, who was cooking DMT there in a lab. Sand was born in 1941, the son of New York communists Clarence Hiskey and Marcia Sand. During World War II, Clarence worked as a chemist on the Manhattan project, but was dismissed in 1944 after army counter-intelligence observed him meeting a known Soviet spy named Arthur Adams. In 1948 Clarence and Marcia were called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, but refused to testify about their friends. They were both cited for contempt, which cost Clarence his job at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. In 1953, Clarence was subpoenaed to testify before a closed session of the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, in which he was interrogated by Senator Joseph McCarthy and Donald Trump’s future lawyer, Roy Cohn. Due to lack of evidence, neither Clarence nor Marcia were prosecuted. Nick didn’t inherit his parents’ politics but he did inherit their rebellious, anti-establishment spirit and his father’s interest in chemistry. Nick enrolled at Brooklyn College night school to study sociology and anthropology in 1962 and graduated in 1966. During this period he taught himself chemistry and founded Bell Perfume Labs as a front for manufacturing DMT.

In 1964, Nick Sand met Richard Alpert at a lecture at Brooklyn College and turned him on to DMT. Alpert in return invited Sand to visit Millbrook and experience his first LSD trip. Alpert also introduced Sand to the writings of the Armenian mystical philosopher, George Gurdjieff, which profoundly influenced his thinking. Sand recruited former UC Berkeley organic chemistry student David Mantell to work at Bell Perfume Lab on purifying DMT and DET (diethyltryptamine). In September of 1966, Timothy Leary ceremoniously ‘appointed’ Sand as alchemist for the League for Spiritual Discovery and signed a document instructing law enforcement officials not to impede his work.

Sand, unlike Scully, treated the venture as a profit-making business. Sand, nonetheless, was an idealist, if also a fanatic. He recalled that during a pioneering trip, ‘… suddenly a voice came through my body that said your job on this planet is to make psychedelics and turn on the world. It was very interesting’. Sand, Scully, Bear Stanley and their psychedelic co-thinkers were deeply concerned with the immediate threat of global thermo-nuclear confrontation war and with the Vietnam War. Scully recalls:

‘When I was working with Bear, he and I took an acid trip with Richard Alpert one day in 1967 where we were planning the strategy of turning on the world, modest as we were, and one of the things we agreed on was that if we just turned on the United States it would be like unilateral disarmament. We really had to make sure that every country in the world got turned on, particularly those behind the Iron Curtain, or else it would be a very bad thing geopolitically. And so we talked to the Brotherhood [his later colleagues, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love – see below] and they made an effort to spread it around the world. And they did get our LSD into Vietnam and behind the Iron Curtain and all over’.

Nick Sand recalled of himself:

‘I was considered as some sort of mad man psychedelic commando because I’d go anywhere, do anything… If we could turn on everyone in the world then maybe we’d have a new world of peace and love. We had the insane desire to risk our freedom and be what we thought were American patriots’.

Tim Scully, for his part, favoured system-change. He was concerned about racial, economic and sexual inequality; laissez-faire capitalism; runaway environmental disasters; overpopulation; and more. He believed that if enough people took LSD they would be gentler with each other and with the environment, and less trusting of large organizations, including governments and large corporations.

Owsley suggested to Nick Sand that he move to California. In February 1967, Sand and David Mantell dismantled Bell Perfume Labs, packed the equipment into a used meat truck, and lit out for California with a plan to install it at a ranch in Cloverdale that Mantell rented. On April 3 their truck was pulled up by the police when Sand failed to stop at a weighing station in Dinosaur, Colorado. As Sand refused to pay a fine to the arresting officer, he and Mantell were jailed. A search of the truck yielded chemicals and laboratory equipment. The local sheriff’s office and BDAC proudly announced they had discovered a ‘mobile laboratory’ with 20 lb. of ‘LSD’, valued initially at $336 million. But as the drug had only been partially processed, the estimate rapidly dropped to $1.5 million. Also, as the search had been carried out without a warrant it was later ruled to have been unlawful; charges were dropped and the truck’s contents were returned to Sand two years later.

In a tragic accident which seems to have occurred just after Sand and Mantell left New York, Alan Bell of the Bell Perfume Lab died sleeping in an attic in New York when a candle fell over and ignited some decorative fabric hangings. Finally Sand and Mantell arrived in San Francisco. Bear introduced Sand to Scully and asked Scully to tell Sand everything he had learned about making STP. Sand had lost his chemicals and lab equipment in the bust in Colorado, but he still had a good supply of Bear’s White Lightning LSD stashed in New York, which he would sell during the 1967 Summer of Love.

According to Tendler and May’s book, The Brotherhood, at least some of this was distributed by the Hell’s Angels in batches worth sales of $50,000 in exchange for $40,000. Sand used the money he made from selling White Lightning to establish his D&H Custom Research lab in San Francisco, where he and Mantell made STP. To make STP he initially used small-scale table top glassware but soon scaled up his production so by early 1968 he was cooking larger batches of STP in a surplus 200-gallon stainless steel soup kettle. Scully’s Denver laboratory produced at least 2 lbs of STP before Bear finally remembered the name he had used for the safe deposit box containing his stash of lysergic acid. In the early autumn of 1967, production of LSD resumed. As distributors, Bear used the Oakland Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang, who he had met through Ken Kesey.

Profits from Bear’s productions accumulated rapidly. On a trip to Millbrook, Bear was stopped near the estate by police who found a safe-deposit key for his money-stash in New York which was regularly topped by Melissa Cargill. Timothy Leary suggested to Bear that he turn to banker Billy Hitchcock for help. Hitchcock called Bill Sayad, a banker at Fiduciary Trust at Nassau in the Bahamas. Sayad flew to Manhattan to pick up the money and open the account for Bear, under the name ‘Robin Goodfellow’. Tendler and May say that by winter of 1967 Bear had ‘$320,000 in safe deposit boxes around San Francisco’ as well as $225,000 ‘moved abroad, courtesy of Billy Hitchcock’.

In late September or early October 1967, Scully closed his first Denver lab. The BDAC never discovered it. Bear, having paid for all the raw material for the several hundred grams of acid produced there, stashed the whole product. He now wanted to get the LSD tableted and withdraw from LSD production. In October 1967, he told Scully, who was looking to establish another LSD lab, ‘You’re on your own’. Unfortunately for Bear, the BDAC tracked a dealer who did tableting for him back to his tableting facility in Orinda, California.

On December 21 1967, six BDAC agents broke down Bear’s door. Five people, including Bear and Melissa Cargill, were arrested. The agents seized 67.58 grams of LSD, and 161 grams of STP (which was still legal), plus laboratory equipment. The police were less than thorough in their search, and Bear got some of his Hell’s Angels contacts to go in and recover items the police had missed. He also sold the Hell’s Angels some of the LSD he had stashed well away from his Orinda facility. Bear resumed working for the Grateful Dead as their sound engineer until the case came to court in September 1969, and the Orinda defendants were convicted and given three consecutive one-year sentences. Bear Stanley would be confined to a federal prison from 1970 to 1972.

Scully needed investment money to obtain enough raw materials to set up another lab. Bear suggested he try Billy Hitchcock, newly ensconced at a retreat in Sausalito, California. The authors of both Acid Dreams and The Brotherhood claim that Hitchcock only agreed to loan Scully the money to restart LSD production on condition that he dropped a plan to give the product away free. It is true that in October 1967 Scully asked Hitchcock to finance the production and free distribution of enough LSD (about 200kg) for everyone in the world who wanted it to try it. Hitchcock did not feel able to finance the plan, because he didn’t have enough cash to do so (much of his money was tied up in a trust); and because he believed that people would not value something they didn’t have to pay for. Scully recalls ‘he did loan me a small amount of money ($11,000) at 300% interest to help finance the next lab. But he was in no way “Mr. Big” and he didn’t dictate any terms to me or anyone else for making LSD’.

The British Connection

Nick Sand and Tim Scully searched for European sources of lysergic acid and ergot alkaloids. During the years in which it was still legal to do so, Englishman Michael Druce had supplied the Millbrook fraternity with LSD by mail-order through Michael O’Dwyer Ltd, a small chemical company based in Hampshire, England, in which he held a majority share.

After the Swiss Sandoz company restricted sales to the U.S. in 1962, Druce imported LSD from the Czechoslovakian state-owned pharmaceutical firm, Chemapol, via its export wing, Exico. The Czechs, no longer bothered by the expired Sandoz patent, were producing LSD in 1 milligram vials for small orders or in 100-milligram ampoules of powder for bulk purchases. During this period, Druce’s future partner, Ronald Craze, was handling Exico’s business in London. After use of LSD was made illegal in Britain, Druce stopped exporting it. But, his prospective American customers wondered, would he be prepared to procure and export raw materials and specialist lab equipment for LSD production, if the end-users were beyond British jurisdiction? Hitchcock suggested to Tim Scully that Druce might be amenable to such an idea. As it turned out, he was. Druce and Craze were established commodity brokers and traders, storing merchandise against price rises until it could be sold on at a profit. Specialising in chemicals, they could – unlike Sand and Scully – approach producers direct. Scully, with Donald Munson, an expert organiser of smuggling operations, arranged to get the chemicals to the United States.

Scully, with the money supplied by Billy Hitchcock, was able to make his first purchases from Druce in late January 1968. Scully paid Druce $9,000 for 2.8 kilos of ergotamine tartrate, which was sent to the United States, mis-labelled as ‘CQ equipment for gas chromatography’ to fool the customs, and picked up at a chemical firm in South Carolina, by someone on behalf of ‘Tim Philips’, the name Scully used in London.* At same time Druce supplied Scully with 250 grams of lysergic acid. This was sent to the US via a courier, Ayman de Sales, who smuggled it to Montréal and then to New York. However, when Scully tried to use the lysergic acid to make LSD he found it was bogus – about as useful as talcum powder. Scully appealed to Druce for a replacement. A few weeks later Druce managed to locate a kilo of the real thing real and offered it to Scully for the cost of three quarters of a kilo. As Scully didn’t have the money to pay for it he shared the kilo with Nick Sand. Sand who bought 500 grams and Scully got a good deal in paying for 250 grams and getting 500. When Sand and Scully went to collect the kilo of lysergic acid from Druce in England, Scully brought along for good measure a melting point tester which could verify that the product was sound. Some of the consignment was stashed in a Zürich safe deposit box; and some was concealed in a teddy bear which Scully mailed to his mother’s address in the US.

Scully Feels the Heat

In February 1968 Tim Scully, with assistants Rory Condon and Ruth Pahkala, opened a second Denver lab at 1050 South Elmira Street. The house was rented by Condon under an alias. In the LSD purification process, Scully was able to demonstrate a phenomenon known as ‘piezoluminescence’, which had been worked out by Owsley on a small-scale. In piezoluminescence, LSD crystals are so pure that they give off flashes of light when shaken, stirred or crushed. In the spring of 1968, Scully, using the ergotamine tartrate he had bought from Druce, made about 20 grams of LSD in his second Denver lab and made an arrangement with Sand to have it tableted. Scully believes that Sand sold some of it to the Brotherhood of Eternal Love for distribution.

In June, Scully took a trip from Denver to San Francisco. Unfortunately, while he was gone the grass on his lawn began to turn dry yellow. The house, being in a suburb where city water was not yet available, had its own well and septic tank; but the well pump failed and the grass couldn’t be watered. The neighbours, who liked everyone in the street to keep up appearances with nice green lawns, were becoming restless and curious. Scully’s two assistants flew to San Francisco to report the problem. Scully told them to return and get the pump fixed. But before they got back their landlord, a Mr Chance, was out and about looking over the various properties he owned in the neighbourhood when he noticed that the lawn had turned brown. Mr Chance walked round the empty property and noticed a very bad smell, which he feared was emanating from a dead body. He called the police, who broke in and traced the smell to spilt chemicals in the basement.

The next day, police scientists identified small samples of very high-quality LSD left there. In San Francisco, Scully, after hearing nothing from his assistants about the problem with the lawn, telephoned his Denver lab. When a voice answered ‘Scully residence’, he knew immediately it had been raided, because he could only have been identified from documents lying around bearing his real name. As Scully didn’t know where his assistants were he couldn’t warn them to stay away, although he hoped reports of the raid in the local press might have alerted them. But four days after the laboratory had been discovered, Condon and Pakhula returned, blissfully unaware of what had happened, and were arrested. Scully, having escaped arrest, lost all his lab equipment. However, the raw materials he and Nick Sand had bought from Druce and Craze were not captured in the bust; and Scully still had some chemicals he had ordered through Nick’s company, D&H Custom Research. Nick Sand eventually agreed to finance setting up a new lab for making LSD in return for Tim Scully teaching him the process he had learned from Owsley Stanley.

Next up: (continuing this chapter) The LSD chemists team up with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.

Psychedelic Tricksters: LSD, Owsley and the Grateful Dead

Poster 1966

2 December 2023. Over the next month or so I’ll be serialising a chapter from Psychedelic Tricksters: A True Secret History of LSD. (Amazon. Also on Kindle: HERE), published in 2022. For this chapter I am especially indebted to Tim Scully’s extensive and generous correspondence with me between September 2019 and May 2020. – D.B.

Chapter Six – The New Prohibition in the USA versus the Acid Underground

‘To live is to be hunted.’ Philip K Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

Psychedelic Alchemy

Between the early 1960s and early 1970s at least 10 million Americans took LSD. They were supplied by scores of underground LSD laboratories, which sprouted up in various parts of the United States between 1963 and 1973. About fifty of these labs are known about; some of them were in operation for just a few months, others for years. Apart from the ‘known’ labs (which are usually only known about because of prosecutions), there must have been many others, which made large quantities of LSD, but were never discovered. For the purposes of this book I would emphasize that the LSD chemists who feature in the following pages by no means produced most of LSD in the USA; they were just the ones unfortunate enough to become ‘famous’ (or ‘infamous) for their work. As a general rule, manufacturers of illegal substances, not wanting to end up in court, avoid publicity. One of them in particular, achieved ‘legendary’ status as ‘Mr LSD’ without ever wanting it.

He was born August Owsley Stanley III (1935-2011), grandson of a US senator from Kentucky, and is more commonly known as ‘Owsley’, or to his friends, as ‘Bear Stanley’. In 1964 Owsley took LSD for the first time in the form of a somewhat impure green goo, made by Douglas George, an amateur chemist who distributed it free in Berkeley. Later that same year, Owsley tried a full-dose Sandoz LSD capsule and was so impressed that he sought out all of the published material he could find on LSD manufacture.

Owsley studied a book on alchemy, entitled The Kybalion. Published in 1908, its authors (the pseudonymous ‘Three Initiates’) claimed it was based on the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus, the semi-mythical Egyptian (some say Greek) sage. What impressed Owsley was the book’s thesis that the alchemic ‘transformation of substances’ was purely allegorical. In Owsley’s interpretation, ‘The lead and the gold is the lead of the primitive nature into the gold of the enlightened man. Alchemy didn’t talk about lead into gold until it had to deal with the church in the early Middle Ages’. The Kybalion ‘was perfect because it put into total context all the things I had experienced on acid. The universe is a creation entirely within a being that is outside time and space, and dreaming what we are. Everything is connected, because it’s all being created by this one consciousness. And we are tiny reflections of the mind that is creating the universe. That’s what alchemy says’.

Between the years of 1950 and 1965, over 1,000 scientific papers on the potential therapeutic effects of LSD and other hallucinogens were turned out by researchers. During the same period some 40,000 patients were treated with LSD therapy as treatment for mental illnesses. But in 1962, the U.S. Congress passed new drug safety regulations and the Food and Drug Administration began to clamp down on research into the effects of LSD as well as its manufacture and distribution. Owsley however, was not deterred. In the winter of 1964 Owsley bought 40 grams of lysergic acid from the Sigma chemical company and made his first batch of LSD at the Green Factory in Berkeley. In February 1965 the Green Factory was raided by the authorities and Owsley Stanley moved his lab equipment to the basement of a friend’s house in Los Angeles.

So far, Owsley’s LSD hadn’t been pure enough to crystallize, but he soon solved this problem by mastering chromatography – a technique for separating out a mixture of chemicals. With his partner, Melissa Cargill, he set up another LSD lab at a rented a house on Lafler Road, Los Angeles, near California State University. He bought lysergic acid from the Cyclo chemical company and made several grams of pure crystalline LSD amounting to at least 30,000 doses. These were put into gelatin capsules and sold by mail order. The method of putting LSD into capsules had its drawbacks. It was difficult to get equal-sized doses into the capsules because they had to be filled by pressing the dry powder into them on a flat surface, such as a mirror; but the amount of powder that got into each capsule could vary significantly, depending on how the pressing was done. Also, unscrupulous wholesalers could remove the content of the capsule, dilute or counterfeit it, and put it into a larger number of capsules.

Owsley, in his determination to market a standard dose of 300 μg (micrograms) with a solid promise of purity, switched from capsules to tablets, which were far more accurate and consistent in dose size. Owsley obtained triturate boards to produce uniform dose sizes in a tablet form which would be very difficult to counterfeit. There remained however, the problem that in the final drying process the active ingredient in the moisture tended to migrate to the surface of the tablet, where it could be undermined by sweat from handling or exposure to UV light. He solved this problem by dispersing the LSD content in tribasic calcium phosphate, a chemical which could adhere itself to the LSD strongly enough to prevent any migration to the surface of the tablet during the evaporation of the solvent. The phosphate accounted for 10 per cent of the total weight of the tablet; the remaining 90 per cent was made up with lactose.

The Los Angeles drug squad soon learned about Owsley Stanley’s activities after he sold a gram of LSD to the guitarist, Perry Lederman. After Lederman told everyone he sold it to that Owsley Stanley had made it, the drug squad put Owsley under surveillance. They went through his trash, where they found letters from his mail-order customers, and also obtained copies of his orders for lysergic acid from the Cyclo company. Owsley and the Grateful Dead On December 11th, 1965, Owsley attended a Grateful Dead ‘Acid Test’ gig at Muir Beach, Marin County. Tripping heavily, he found the Dead to be ‘magic personified’, and ‘the most amazing group ever’. On January 29, Owsley attended another Dead performance and Acid Test at Sound City, a San Francisco radio studio. The band members, impressed by Owsley’s enthusiasm and resourcefulness, suggested he become their manager. Owsley insisted he would be of more use as their sound engineer. The Dead, like most other rock bands of the time, were using equipment which made unwanted noises and produced a poorly balanced overall sound. After the Dead took up his offer, Owsley introduced state-of-the art equipment such as high-quality cables and connections which minimized hum and hiss from the instruments, and big hi-fi ‘Voice of the Theater’ speakers for the PA system. At the Sound City Acid Test Owsley, having met Tim Scully a few weeks earlier, offered him and his friend Don Douglas a chance to travel with him and the Grateful Dead to Los Angeles and work with him doing electronics and roadie work for the band.

Owsley had experience of engineering in radio and television, but he didn’t have enough knowledge of electronic circuit design to implement his ideas for customised equipment. Scully had the technical know-how; and he also wanted to make LSD with Owsley. Scully, born 1944 in Berkeley, California, had studied math and physics at the University of California until 1963. From 1963 to 1965 he was employed by Atomic Laboratories Inc. as an electronics design consultant. In 1965 he took evening classes at University of California in advanced calculus and atomic physics. On April 15, 1965, he took LSD for the first time. In late-1965 advertisements began to appear in California posing the question, ‘Can you pass the acid test?’ Properly defined, the ‘Acid Tests’, were events with music played by the Grateful Dead, LSD supplied by Owsley, organized by the Merry Pranksters, a group of Californian pagans gathered together by Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion.

Kesey and the Pranksters traversed the country in an old school bus, repainted in psychedelic colours with the words, ‘Caution! Weird Load’, inscribed on the back. Neal Cassady, former road-buddy of Jack Kerouac, went along as driver. The Pranksters’ stated mission was to re-experience America as a ‘trip’ and to ‘prank’ its citizens out of their conformist conditioning by means of noisy, rude, but colourful behaviour and LSD tripping. As it turned out, even non-conformists, like the Millbrook community in Poughkeepsie found the Pranksters too wild; especially after Kesey ‘adopted’ a chapter of the Hell’s Angels as his bus-escort. According to Richard Alpert, when the Pranksters’ visited Millbrook it felt like being in ‘a pastoral Indian village invaded by a whooping cowboy band of Wild West saloon carousers’. The Pranksters’ events featured Owsley’s acid disguised as a vat of Orange Kool-Aid bearing the warning label, ‘Electric’. Owsley had serious doubts about what the Pranksters were up to. He thought the Pranksters’ practice of ‘Magic’ had its dangers:

‘Kesey was playing with something he did not understand. I said to him, “You guys are fucking around with something that people have known about forever. It’s sometimes called witchcraft, and it’s extremely dangerous. You’re dealing with part of the unconscious mind that they used to define as angels and devils. You have to be very careful, because there are all these warnings. All the occult literature about ceremonial magic warns about being very careful when you start exploring these areas in the mind.” And they laughed at me’.

Tim Scully, in a memoir of his time with Owsley and the Grateful Dead, describes one of the early Acid-Tests in California:

‘Everyone paid admission: all the people in the acid test, all the members of the Grateful Dead, and anyone who was seduced off the street. It was all very democratic. And also potentially problematic. At the Watts acid test, for example, folks who had never heard of LSD came in, drank some Kool-Aid, and started getting high. If you were surrounded by strobe lights, with Pranksters doing things with their sound systems – all designed to disorient –the experience could be really fun, if that’s what youwere into. But it could be terrifying if you didn’t knowwhat to expect’.

Scully installed transformers to reduce the impedance of the signals being transmitted through long cables, which otherwise picked up excessive 60 cycle hum from nearby power lines. He designed and built a mixing desk to receive the modified signals and output them into both the PA and the tape recorder. From January to July 1966 Scully lived and worked with Grateful Dead and their entourage, designing and installing numerous other technical innovations as well as taking on roadie responsibilities. In March 1966 in Los Angeles a group of hippies were sitting in a Cantor’s cafe known as ‘Capsule Corner’, amiably chatting to photo-journalist Lawrence Schiller of Life magazine, who was working with correspondent Gerald Moore for an article on the new hippie sub-culture. The mood darkened however, when a young woman came in brandishing a peanut jar full of LSD tablets and triumphantly announced, ‘Look what I just bought from Owsley’. Bob Hamilton, a friend of Scully’s, rushed to a phone-box and called Owsley, telling him he should clean up his premises. On March 25 1966, Life’s front cover appeared with headline, ‘The Exploding Effect of the Mind Drug that got Out of Control: LSD’. The coverage in Life set off a hysterical reaction in the rest of the media.

By the end of July 1966, Owsley (now calling himself ‘Bear Stanley’) had run out of both money and LSD. He decided to set up another lab. But he had earlier agreed with the Grateful Dead that he would not work in a lab while traveling or living with them. Also, by then the band had reluctantly decided that the new improved electronic gear he had supplied them with had become a ‘logistical nightmare’ in terms of setting up and dismantling at every gig. Owsley sold the new equipment, bought the band new Fender amps and speakers, and then went off to work in his lab in Point Richmond.

Next up: (continuing this chapter) Owsley feels the heat and withdraws from LSD production and withdraws. His apprentice, Tim Scully, goes underground, Nick Sand moves west and teams up with him.

1965: The Birth of the British ‘Underground’

David Black

11 October 2023

In September 1965 Timothy Leary sent Michael Hollingshead, the Englishman who introduced him to LSD during the Harvard psychedelics project, on a mission. Hollingshead flew into London with 5000 trips of LSD and a list of things to do. Firstly, Hollingshead was to rent the Albert Hall for a psychedelic jamboree with rock bands and poets, with Leary himself hosting the event in his role as the High Priest of LSD. This plan never came off, because of Leary’s bust for marijuana possession in the US at the end of 1965.

Another part of the mission was set up a centre for running LSD sessions and promoting psychedelia in the arts. Hollingshead, with help from old-Etonians, Desmond O’Brien and Joey Mellen, turned a Belgravia flat into the ‘World Psychedelic Centre’. For their LSD sessions, they used the new Leary/Alpert/Metzner book, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, as a guide. Hollingshead thought ‘that London would indeed become the centre for a world psychedelic movement’. According to Hollingshead, the World Psychedelic Centre clientele,

…represented perhaps the seminal non-conformism of England’s mid-sixties intelligentsia – not the evangelical non-conformism of such as the Millbrook sect, but an intellectualized form of psychedelic enlightenment, of which popularised Learyism was largely a culmination – that freed so many of England’s educated people from the rigidity of social and class and cultural patterns which had outwardly been solidifying into right-wing Toryism. Their rebellion was typical of this period; the Establishment was the enemy…

One of the reasons Michael Hollingshead gave for coming to London in 1965 was the tendency of the London acid heads – such as those around Alex Trocchi — to politicise, rather than spiritualise, the psychedelic experience. As he put it in The Man Who Turned On the World:

From what I had heard in letters and conversations, the psychedelic movement in England was small and badly informed. It appeared that those who took LSD did so as a consciously defiant anti-authoritarian gesture. The spiritual content of the psychedelic experience was being overlooked.

Hollingshead had been sending shipments of LSD to Trocchi, who distributed it to his contacts in what was to become the London cultural ‘Underground’. Trocchi, born in Glasgow in 1925, had moved to Paris in 1952, where he edited Merlin, an English-language literary magazine. In its pages, Merlin featured contributions from avant-guard writers such as Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Becket — who, at the time, were unable to get their work published anywhere else in English. Trocchi himself, surrounded by young expatriate American writers, such as Terry Southern and George Plimpton, was, in the words of Greil Marcus, ‘seen as a man of towering literary genius, fated to cut a swath through the world’.

Whatever his differences with Trocchi, Hollingshead certainly arrived in London at the right time for a ‘revolution in consciousness’. As Charles Radcliffe wrote in his memoirs:

“The possibility of real change no longer seemed remote. Towards the end of 1965, there was a definite, almost tangible quickening of the generational pulse, ever widening interests and excitement in myself and everyone I knew. Every day there were more of us to know… Many former ‘politicos’ sensed that ‘politics’ wasn’t over but was simply one of many items on the burner. More and more people were talking about LSD, the mind-expanding drug lysergic acid diethylamide 25 [as]… a serious inward voyage of discovery, not to be taken lightly… LSD was legal but for how long? And how could I get some?”

(Charles Radcliffe, Don’t Start Me Talking: Subculture, Situationism and the Sixties)

The British Underground achieved critical mass in June 1965 with the International Poetry Congress at Albert Hall, which drew 5,000 people. The event was hosted by Alex Trocchi who, having been expelled by Guy Debord from Situationist International, had launched a project called Sigma, which aimed to build

‘a new decentralised organisation of writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers, physicists, bio-chemists, philosophers, neurologists, engineers, and whatnots, of every race and nationality’.

To co-oordinate a ‘catalogue of such a reservoir of talent, intelligence and power’ would be ‘of itself a spur to our imagination’. For London he planned to found a

‘living-gallery-workshop-auditorium-happening situation where conferences and encounters are to be undertaken… It will be our window on the metropolis, a sigma-centre… an experimental situation in which what is happening cannot be described in terms of conventional categories (which it transcends)… Certain hallucinatory properties of drugs make them central and urgently relevant to any imaginable enquiry into the mystery of the human mind. Unfortunately, ignorance, hysteria and sensationalism have contributed to making this largely a police matter’.

Trocchi believed that psychiatrist RD Laing’s ideas on the usefulness of LSD in treating schizophrenia were ‘entirely in line with those proposed by Sigma’. Trocchi planned to produce a book titled ‘Drugs of the Mind’ with Laing and Willam Burroughs; but like so many of Trocchi’s projects, it was never carried through. This was partly because Trocchi was distracted by his heroin habit, and proved incapable of keeping Sigma’s finances separate from his own. In 1965, Trocchi did, however. pull off the Albert Hall readings, which gave birth to the term, ‘Underground’. The event was filmed by Peter Whitehead, who entitled his 33-minute documentary Wholly Communion. It featured, in order of appearance (all men; such were the times): Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael Horovitz, Gregory Corso, Harry Fainlight, Adrian Mitchell, Christopher Logue, Alexander Trocchi, Ernst Jandl, and Allen Ginsberg. It can be seen on YouTube HERE

Harry Fainlight

See David Black, Psychedelic Tricksters: A True Secret History of LSD (London: 2022]

Memories of Revolution: King Mob, the Situationists and Beyond

David Wise

Editor’s note: In response to my review of Eric-John Russell’s translation of Jaime Semprún’s book, A Gallery of Recuperation: On the Merits of Slandering Charlatans, Swindlers and Frauds (first published in 1976 as Précis de récupération: illustre de nombreux exemples tires de l’histoire recente) David Wise, co-founder of King Mob, the English radical group of the late 1960s/early ‘70s, which was connected to Guy Debord and the Situationist International., has contributed the following.

FROM LONDON TO LISBON

I enjoyed reading David Black’s Substack comments on Eric-John Russell’s recent translation and re-publication of Jaime Semprún’s Précis de récupération. Decades ago I found myself in agreement with Semprún’s withering dismissal of post-modernism as represented by so-called thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Andre Glucksmann, Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. After ‘liberating’ (meaning going beyond monetization rather than ‘thieving’) a fair amount of these authors’ oeuvre from the UK’s ‘nintellectual’ bookshops, I myself, along with other clued-in mates, had had enough of seeing their books stacked up prominently in front of us. These surface commentators, with their endless watering down of the rejuvenating spirit of the May ’68 revolution in France, were being presented as real cutting edge subversive critique; when in truth, the real McCoys couldn’t get a look in with English language publishers.

Although I welcomed Précis de récupération as a breath of fresh air, I was cautious about Semprún’s attacks on Cornelius Castoriadis and ‘Ratgeb’ (Raoul Vaneigem), both of whom once had  meaningful connections with Guy Debord. Sadly, mention of English speaking recuperation was absent, as basically the UK, in comparison with much of Europe and even the USA, was backward regarding the explosions of the late 1960s – so much so that the majority of ‘thinkers’ here wouldn’t know what the fek you were talking about. Hardly surprising then that our merry band was defined by our hatred of the “right little/tight little island” Little Englander mentality of both right and left wing (although we never realised that these tendencies were going to have such an abominable outcome decades later, what with Brexit and the like).

In retrospect and on a general level,  I think Précis de récupération marked the final moment of Semprún’s hero worship of Debord. After that, Semprún took a different radical path as he morphed into the creator of the very influential ‘group’ cum publisher of Éditions de l’Encyclopédie des Nuisances (‘Nuisances‘ meaning destructive, dangerous substances). On the simplest of levels, Debord and Semprún were very different characters, i.e. Semprún didn’t really fall out with people (at least not in the same way Debord did). I don’t think Guy ever forgave him for walking away, causing Guy to henceforth endlessly obsess about this ‘scally’; finally denouncing him as a ‘mediatique’ in his last ‘book’ Cette Mauvais Reputation. (I remember Michel Prigent – the publisher of Chronos Press and Principia Dialectica in London – not really liking Debord’s final book, although he was somewhat nervous about saying so). Other friends, in France, mainly around Os Cangaceiros, clearly noted that Semprún had been unfairly rubbished as he wasn’t involved with the media and had even gotten rid of films he’d produced and acted in when a youngster.

Around the same time as Précis de récupération was published,Jaime was also involved with radical social struggles erupting in Portugal and then Spain after the death of the fascist dictator General Franco. Practically,  he did so in a somewhat clandestine way, in and around a group – if one can call it that – aptly named Los Incontrolados (The Uncontrollables). 

First though. something of a detour. The end of the ‘glorious’ late 1960s was somewhat marked world-wide by a ‘collapse’ of its protagonists, ourselves included. Dazed and depressed, overcome with a sense of failure, we were floundering, desperate again to reignite our fiery passions, as well as desperately searching for a wide-ranging and nuanced re-think. Some individuals – rapidly or cautiously but slowly – sold-out, while others destroyed themselves with drink and drugs. Also, there were the suicides, which were really hard to bear as it was often the finest individuals who decided to end it all.

Others fled to other countries. Ex-King Mobber, Phil Meyler, was one such person. After a tumultuous, exhilarating time in the late 60s/early 1970s, journeying between London, Ireland and the USA, Phil seemed to abandon everything and, after sometime desolately moping around in east London, he suddenly upped-sticks and disappeared to Portugal where he found casual paid work teaching English as a foreign language. His first letters to me in London from Lisbon were desolate and harrowing… then, then, then on the 25th of April 1974 the ‘Revolution of the Carnations’ broke out and the streets and work places erupted amidst the ferment in and around the final overthrow of Salazar’s/Caetano’s 50 year old fascist dictatorship. Phil’s letters transformed overnight; becoming absolutely fascinating. Moreover, Phil and I had been best mates throughout the late 1960s; reinforced by the fact we were from similar working class backgrounds, had little money and no prospect of inherited wealth coming our way. Now, whoosh, here was a rejuvenated Phil sending me one stunning letter after another about what was going down on the Iberian Peninsula. In response, I just wanted to get this information out there in the English speaking parts of the globe.

In the following months, frequent visits to Portugal became essential; the country having become a hub for all kinds of radical tendencies, with many rebels from different European countries enthusiastically proclaiming Situationist ideas – amongst other persuasions. Described at the time as ‘revolutionary tourism’, (as against the typically banal, often hated, mass consumer tourism) it was a 24/7 fascinating mix of thought, action, love and alcohol. Already there was an emerging tendency beginning to put an emphasis on the need to update Marx’s critique of value, etc, with clued-in individuals saying the Situationists had missed out on this essential factor, thus implicitly raising the question: ‘what steps do we take from here?’. 

The immediate outcome was that Phil put together a book in Portuguese and English entitled, Portugal, The Impossible Revolution. It was a producedby Solidarity (the Castoriadis-inspired off-spring in the UK of Socialisme ou Barbarie). I was able to fund it, as I was earning really good money as a plasterer on building sites, had no family to support and as a squatter I had a rent-free place to live. The book captured the warp and woof of the uprising, that unmistakable, ‘I was there’ dimension, emphasising at times its delightfully crazy essence. Little did we know at the time that Jaime Semprún had also put together a book called La sociale guerre au Portugal, published by Champ Libre in France (the company owned by Debord’s rich friend, Gérard Lebovici (who was murdered in complicated circumstances which I won’t go into here). The book was immediately proclaimed as the finest critique and evaluation of the Portuguese uprising, though to my mind it was touch and go in comparison with Phil’s hands-on unruly passionism, which captured the emotional euphoria of the uprising. As I put down in a notebook at the time:

“I certainly had a memorable New Year in Lisbon in 1976-7. A crowd of us got drunk in a workers’ tasca  which ended up with a conga winding through the adjacent streets. It was nearly dawn before the cavorting ceased and then some of us decided to go to the local zoo for some reason even though we knew it would be closed. We went with some vague notice of liberating wild nature as happened during the Paris Commune of 1871. Climbing the fences into the zoo we were in a mood to fraternise directly with the animals on display and proceeded to do so. Although we couldn’t get into the tigers den we certainly were able to stroke the creatures a little as we could the giraffes, etc. But then it was easy to get into the hippopotamuses enclave. A big hippo with such friendly, benign eyes opened its mouth wide and laughingly the assembled drunks dared “the mad Englishman”(Me) to put his head in the hippo’s mouth. Well I did and everybody gasped. BUT THAT WAS IT,OVER AND OUT. Armed police had been called and they immediately came for us and later, we were banned from ever going again into a Portuguese zoo. But the incident had gotten out and about on the alternative grapevine and years later people were still sending me tiny toy hippos with their mouths open. Evidently – in reality – hippos instantly bite heads off……. but how was I supposed to know that???”

More importantly, the atmosphere in Portugal started overlapping with what was happening in Spain after the death of General Franco and the impending demise of the fascist dictatorship. Shortly after returning to London, Phil sent me through the post a small Spanish pamphlet which had knocked him out. It was named, “Manuscrito encontrado en Vitoria”  (A Manuscript found in Vitoria). Like Phil, I also thought the pamphlet was terrific.Then he ‘found’ another pamphlet and then another- all with different titles and all anonymous!  All we had to go on was the name: Los Incontrolados…. and for the life of us, for what seemed like ages, we simply couldn’t find out the names of the individuals who’d written them. One by one Phil forwarded these pamphlets to me in London and we then decided to translate and publish them. Needless to say our command of the Spanish language wasn’t that good and my twin bro’ Stuart Wise – who did most of the translation – also  wasn’t that much better. There again, there was no one around to help us: educationally we were the old notorious 11-Plus failures, not worthy of ‘proper’ education and hampered by the fact our “English” was truly awol (Phil being from Dublin and us from County Durham and Yorkshire). Who could we to turn to? Comatose academics who hadn’t grasped Lautreamont’s pre-Surrealist maxim: ‘The new tremors are running through the atmosphere and all you need is the courage to face them’? Thus, in consequence the book with all its somewhat gobbledygook translatese, Wildcat Spain Encounters Democracy was kind of stillborn! 

It’s worth saying here that ‘revolutionary anonymity’ in the mid to late 1970s rapidly seemed to acquire quite a profile, or rather, anti-profile. In a way it had become a principled gesture against the horrendous groundswell of stardom and names in lights which was taking off like never before, as post modernism and its academic parade imbibed the accoutrements of pop culture with the gradual eclipse of the revolutionary spirit of 1968. It was all for the sake of money and more money, preparing the way for today’s kleptocratic rule.  For all like us, a name didn’t matter and any pseudonym was just as good as another. It was the hoped-for inspirational content that mattered, mirroring the fact you lived your life in an anti-spectacular, non-touchy/feely way. Thus, that’s how our pamphlets were signed. As for Phil there was another pressing reason; he slightly altered his last name from Meyler to Mailer – a la Norman Mailer the famous contemporary American hipster writer – as the Portuguese state was rapidly becoming hell-bent on getting rid of subversive foreign undesirables.

The town of Vitoria (Victory) in the Spanish Basque country became a brilliant hot spot in the mid-to late 1970s as home to an autonomous worker revolt which was quite astounding in its breadth, hence the nuanced ‘victory’ pun in the subsequent A4 pamphlet by Los Incontrolados. As a consequence, a few years later we discovered that the principal authors of Los Incontrolados were Jaime Semprun and Miguel Amoros. Subsequently, Semprun’s post situationist radical eco-orientation was to have a profound influence on us although contact was kind of ‘in and out ‘and mostly – at a distance. Miguel’s critique of the destructive ultra- commodification of music was contemporaneous with my own pamphlet, The End of Music. Inevitably, Miguel lamented our inadequate Spanish translations. Unbeknown to us, at the same time Miguel Amoros was slowly writing a really fascinating account of their differences with Debord, etc, (much of which has ended up in the web pages of Libcom.org). And finally (for me) I discovered that Jaime was the son of the Spanish/French novelist, Jorge Semprun, whose dissident-communist writings I’d had a lot of respect for in mid 1960s Newcastle. Lo and behold in post- Franco Spain, Jorge, who had been expelled by the underground Spanish Communist Party, had become a literary celebrity, and was set to become Spanish Minister of Culture (!). I was horrified and later gratified to find out that Jaime would have nothing to do with his Dad, having always detested his membership of the Communist Party and no doubt much else besides.

And yes, I’d become nervous of Debord and subsequent “Our Party” Debordism. After our pamphlet on the 1981 riots in the UK, A Summer with a Thousand Julys, was translated into French I was subsequently was invited by Guy Debord to visit him in Champot in the remote French countryside where he was then living. I’d be accompanied by Michel Prigent. But I had to turn the invite down as I knew I’d completely fek-up, especially when I’d hit the booze to calm my nerves. I knew individual sentences in the pamphlet would be picked on and obsessed over (as was the regular pattern) and I didn’t have the character armour to resist  this interrogation thus, ‘[a sadder and a wiser man (David Wise) rose the following morn.’

ECO-ACTIVISM V. GREENWASHING

By the late-1980s, Jaime Semprún’s eco critique was getting really cutting edge the more he acknowledged the profundity of the English language description of that devious con and substitute for authentic eco involvement becoming known as  ‘greenwashing’. Jaime was also one of the first individuals to call out the duplicitous horrors of a double dealing ‘Nature Bureaucracy’, made up of all the species protection societies and the like. Initially we naïvely thought these bodies were on our side when engaging in actions to genuinely increase and enrich biodiversity, only to find out they were some of the nastiest – forever calling the police on our activities. The realisation of such a truth was shattering both for Jaime and ourselves. 

What  followed somewhat later for Jaime and Co was radical eco-action on the Larzac Plateau in south west France in the mid-1990s. This also involved the former-Situationist International member, René Riesel, who had played such a significant part in May ’68 in France. At the time I was also getting a lot of fresh comment from other friends involved, again mainly from Os Cangaceiros. Suffice to mention here one amusing incident. There was some kind of festive eco get together in a small town on the Larzac Plateau and stalls were erected. Stalwarts of Éditions de l’Encyclopédie des Nuisances in souped-up militant attire turned up really ready for action against the brutal French police. First though, they had to put together a stall. Most of the activists couldn’t do it as (it seemed) none of them had ever used a hammer or screwdriver (they were so ‘middle class’, or at least ‘middle class’ in practical disposition). In exasperation, Riesel (who by then had become a neo-peasant farmer) jumped in and assembled a stall made up of wooden planks within minutes. Everybody present had a good laugh….. Nonetheless, Nuisances was quickly to acquire a huge influence especially regarding the future French ZADS (Zones a Defendre). And subsequently we might ask: how could the comradely alliances around Earth Uprising and the Sainte-Soline Battle of the Basins of March 2023 have come about without this ‘distant’ history?

One more comment haphazardly comes to mind. Michel Prigent kind of liked Jaime Semprún, though he said to me he didn’t like the way he ‘supported the Unabomber terrorist’ (Ted Kaczynski) in the mid-west United States. As for myself, I balked at the terrorist name tag. Though I didn’t approve of the haphazard parcel bombs and was leery about innocent casualties, I liked some of the Unabomber’s writings.

Ah, but then, slowly but surely on a more general, historical level, a morphing Situationist perspective was disappearing quite rapidly after say, 2015. What was happening? Miguel Amoros was of the opinion that a dreadful counter-revolution was finally taking place especially in English speaking countries. Yes, it certainly feels like that as today you can’t find traces anywhere of the Situationist experience in what now passes contemporary revolutionary critique. As an interesting aside to all this – even though again utterly out of place – the writings of Alèssi Dell’ Umbria really have edge, even though, as far as I know he, also, never mentions the Situationists. I’ve been told this guy, who is from Marseilles, was a fellow traveller of Os Cangaceiros and has written some really interesting tracts around major social upheavals in France over the last 20 years or so. It’s certainly true that his C’est La Guerre. written in the first few months of 2023 is so far the best account of those exhilarating moments. And there is also an excellent tract on the Gilets Jaunes disturbances in Marseilles in 2019. I was asked by Jack-de-Montreuil if I could translate into English Alessi’s recent major theoretical contribution named Antimatrix. I rapidly found out that It was certainly a dense and very interesting text and by my reckoning a relevant update to The Society of the Spectacle without ever mentioning the latter’s existence… But I wonder if my French and background knowledge are really up to it. Whatever, it would be excellent if say, MIT Press Ltd could publish a selection of Dell’Umbria’s writings in English.   

Sadly, Jaime Semprún died in 2010 of a cerebral haemorrhage, aged 63. His death was untimely, but in truth his writings in later years had become a lot more sombre and it may be that he found the derailing of his radical eco experiments heart breaking. In something of a final missive Jaime said all he could do now was cultivate his own back garden. We indeed felt something of the same, re broken hearts, even though we had no back  – or front – garden to cultivate as we lived in sub-standard social housing. We, on the contrary, had turned our attention to scruffy, gloriously weed-ridden public space with the intention of vastly increasing their inherent bio-diversity. We never asked permission of the powers that be  – usually town councils – because we knew we’d be told to fuck off for not possessing requisite qualifications, etc. Constantly under attack from officialdom and the police we nevertheless over the years produced some remarkable spaces which even moronic bureaucrats had to grudgingly admit was the case.  

This was especially true of our eco intervention between 2010-17 in the Bradford Canal and Shipley’s ‘Industrial Gorge’ in West Yorkshire – an arena which had obsessed John Ruskin in the late 19th century. That encounter, regarding greenwashing, was a brutal eye opener, as the authorities came for us with no holes barred, deploying thuggery and threats of jail regarding our eco interventions. We also sprayed up on various stone walls in the gorge some relatively recent lucid quotes from Miguel Amoros on the subject of greenwashing, only to find them jet sprayed out a few days later by council goons.(In retrospect I think Miguel knew about these slogans and was pleased we had given them prominence). Also our eco interventions over the last few years on Wormwood Scrubs in West London were somewhat simultaneously explained by ourselves through placards, bird boxes and the like hung high up in trees – many around the subject of ‘suicide capitalism’, which was basically an ecological concept elucidated by Jaime Semprun. A few months ago I could have directed you the reader to our website, The Revolt Against Plenty, where photos alongside texts explained the concept. Then kaput: there was nothing except total wipe-out! The brutal redaction of thewebsite in spring 2023 meant all of this history has now been liquidated along with so much else besides and now can only be accessed via The Wayback Machine archives. Why wasn’t a reason given for such brutal action? Why did absolute silence reign? Finally, I came to the conclusion that basically, it’s a sign of the brutal reaction which is today spreading throughout the world. And if you aren’t rich enough to hire a good lawyer the attitude is you can just fuck off as we can do what we like with you; not forgetting that law centres for those surviving at the sharp end disappeared yonks ago. Left in a catastrophic dilemma, just what is there to do about such fiendish acts when reaction is becoming so omnipotent everywhere and all emancipating hope is rapidly dwindling? It’s beyond heart-breaking. 

Dave Wise (together with the inseparable shadow of my twin bro’ Stu’ Wise who is forever and forever by my side).

Review: Jaime Semprun’s ‘Gallery of Recuperation’

By David Black

A Gallery of Recuperation: On the Merits of Slandering Charlatans, Swindlers and Fraud. By Jaime Semprún.  Translated and with an Introduction by Eric-John Russell (MIT:2023)

Jaime Semprún (1947-2010), though never a member of the Situationist International (1957-1972), became closely associated with the SI’s founder, Guy Debord; so much so that when A Gallery of Recuperation was published in 1976, some reviewers thought Debord had written it. The central question addressed by Semprún’s book, appearing as it did several years after the revolt of students and workers in France, May 1968, is, as Eric-John Russell puts it in his 110-page introduction,

‘What happens to revolutionary critique in the hands of those who interests align with the preservation of a society divided into classes, mediated by exchange, and subordinated to the principle of capital accumulation?’

Of the entries in A Gallery of Recuperation, the majority are philosophers, namely: Cornelius Castoriadis, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Andr é Glucksmann, Jean Franklin, Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The others are François Mitterand’s economic guru, Jaques Attali; the writer and film-maker, Gérard Guégan; and former Situationist Raoul Vaneigem.

In this short book, Semprún make no attempt to summarize the oeuvres of his gallery of recuperators (even less so with Deleuze and Guattari, who are dismissed in one sentence as being ‘dumber’ than each other). Russell’s introduction provides very useful historical contextualisation. But the only knowledge of the entrants in his Gallery Semprún expects from his readers is having heard or read about them. He has no wish to encourage his readers to spend any time studying their books.

In the case of Castoriadis, Semprún’s ideal reader in 1976 would know that this erstwhile exponent of workers self-management (autogestion) in the Fordist economy of the late-1950s, attracted the brief interest of Debord and the Situationist International. As Debord soon discovered, Castoriadis’s practical politics were positivist, with a Marxist gloss. It came as no surprise that when Castoriadis’s vision of rationalised council communism came to naught, he rejected Marx as the last of the ‘metaphysical’ dialecticians (after Plato, Aristotle and Hegel). Semprún comments, ‘the tragedy of Castoriadis is that his past remains even newer than his intellectual present’ and he is left ‘grappling with the ghost of his own thought, which arrives to pull him out his Freudian sleep, as he comically struggles in his prefaces [to his earlier revolutionary writings] to sabotage anything of real importance… while miring himself in a catch-22 situation by repeating “It is not that simple”.’

Jean-François Lyotard was, until 1963, a member of the group Castoriadis founded, Socialisme ou Barbarie. He left, according to Semprún, because he found Castoriadis’s  liquidation of Marxism ‘insufficiently liquidating’. For Lyotard, the acclaimed inventor of the terms ‘postmodernism’ and ‘libidinal economy’, it was necessary to ‘completely abandon critique’ in order to embrace the alienated relations of capital as a ‘machinery of delight’. One had ‘neither to judge causes nor isolate effects, energies pass through us and we have to suffer them’. Lyotard, says Semprún,

‘learned from Freud that human beings, however dispossessed, lididinally invest in their very dispossession in order to come to terms with it… all activity, or passivity is libidinal, workers go to work for pleasure. Lyotard gets off on cutting-edge cultural consumption and keeps coming back for more.

Foucault, the philosopher-criminologist, concluded from his study of the 19th century bourgeois murderer, Lacenaire, that (in Semprún’s interpretation) ‘coarser criminals are needed, illiteracy may even be required as a stamp of authenticity, or at least criminals who provide him with opportunity to peddle his exegetical contortions and tics. Fall into line everyone!’

The other personifications in the gallery get similar treatment. In the case of Glucksmann, the repentant Maoist, turned nouvelle philosophe of the New Right:

‘Accomplishing the daring feat of appearing more moronic than he actually is, he pretends to have suddenly realized, upon reading the works of Solzhenitsyn, that there was a police terror inseparable from ideological absolutism.’

Jacques Attili, Mitterand’s techo-futurologist and economic guru is exposed as a plagiarist and recuperator of various radical (including Situationist) strands of ideas. Attali’s later career as founder of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which was responsible for restructuring and privatising the economies of post-communist Europe in the 1990s would have come as no surprise to Semprún.

The most surprising entry in the Gallery is Raoul Vaneigem, who is chiefly famous for his book, The Revolution of Everyday Life. But he is also famous, for having taken a booked holiday in the Mediterranean during the height of the street-fighting in Paris in May 1968, a faux pas neither Semprún or Debord forgive or forget. Vaneigem is portrayed as typical of

‘All those who speak of self-managment and workers’ councils, or even about (you must be joking) transparency and subversive play without referring explicitly to the concrete conditions of contemporary class struggle and to the possibilities and necessities they contain. Such people have corpse in their mouth: the corpse of the Situationist International.’

Irony, Eric-John Russell notes in his introduction, is a medium ‘endangered by the dissolution of the difference between surface and depth.’ Russell, after explicating the relation between Situationist praxis and the historic moment of May 68, turns to the years ‘between 1973 and 1977’ when ‘les annees soixante-huit came to an end’. As J Bourg, quoted by Russell, puts it, ‘The twentieth century began with Vladimir Lenin’s observation that making an omelette means breaking eggs; it ended with the assertion of the rights of chickens.’

In part as a reaction against the dogmatism of the French Communist Party and the exhaustion of existentialism of phenomenology, from the early 1960s, ‘Parisian cynicism proceeded from an anti-humanist detachment and turned towards the sciences of linguistics, structural anthropology, psychoanalysis and literary theory.’ This erosion of any stable subjectivity was inherited from the naive scientism of 19th century French posivitism. The loss of objectivity is related to a modernised Nominalism , presented as a ‘metaphysics of desire‘, in which ‘erotic spontaneity’ supposedly unleashed the energies of madness and fantasy.

‘In this way, the concept of recuperation is integral  to that of the spectacle’ in which the differences pivot on ‘unbridled reconcialation’. The spectacle’s ‘postulate of equivalence’ derives from exchange relations; ‘The bark of accommodated critique will always be worse than its bite’.

Russell maintains that ‘the counterrevolutionary forces earlier in the decade [the 1970s] were part of a larger process of the restructuring of capital, itself a defeat for the workers movement that would culminate in the early 1980s.’  This led to the deregulation of financial markets, ‘for which capital expands without investing in productive activity’. For the worker (including the ‘intellectual’ worker) this has led to an employment regime of increasing precarity.

What makes Semprún’s book relevant to this day is its critique of the dominant ‘ethos of liberation and continuous transgression of the desirants’ which has its ‘truth’ in ‘the eternally new of a perpetual present’. The recuperators, having inherited the tricks of the town market charlatan, ‘are in no short supply, with every online opinion strong-arming every other to dominate likes and retweets in an algorithmic orgy of con artists and grifters’.

In this new high-tech world of instant communication and thirst for instant gratification, the status of intellectuals is downgraded; to present them as ‘imputing class consciousness or having any real grasp over present catastrophes, cannot but come off as a bad joke… Look closely at any radical academic and you will find a publicist, if not a used car salesperson’.

Russell, striking a rare note of optimism, suggests that Gallery of Recuperation at least reminds us that the ‘wretched methods’ of the intellectuals might some day be looked on – after Hegel’s Owl of Minerva has spread its wings – as having, in Marx’s words, ‘wrung the neck of their own purpose.’

The passages from Semprún, as quoted above, provide only a taste of the torrent of insult and invective. His prose is largely free of clichés and ill-informed bad faith. Ad hominen critique is or course taboo in academia and in mainstream (or would-be mainstream) media. But the book leaves this reader wishing there was more of it today, in the face of the what is on offer from Guardian and Novara commentators.

Jaime Semprun

Finnegans Wake vs. Theory

Ben Watson writes about Finnegans Wake, the “incomprehensible” final book by James Joyce which he’s been poring over for five decades …

Ben Watson writes about Finnegans Wake, the “incomprehensible” final book by James Joyce which he’s been poring over for five decades …

Finnegans Wake is an experience, it’s not something “difficult” to be decoded by better brains than yours. I don’t read it with any more “comprehension” today than I did age 14, when I took it off the school library shelf and had a look. An older brother had been disparaging my precocity by saying “He’ll be reading James Joyce next”. I asked my mum who this James Joyce was: “Oh, a very difficult writer, also rather obscene”. Naturally, the very next day I ran to the school library at break, and looked up Joyce in the card index. Finnegans Wake was the first volume that came to hand. I read the first page, skipped through and loved it straight away! It resembled other things I loved – Lewis Carroll, The Beano, Molesworth, Afferbeck Lauder’s Fraffly – an explosion of rule-breaking craziness, naughtiness, anti-decorum. Sure, there are lines where I can now “explain” some pun or reference, but these have nothing to do with the book’s main pleasure: an outpouring of verbal energy which thunders and farts like a human body, like an emergent bewebbed cosmos, like a throbbing itching brain. You must suspend the quick flattery of your left hemisphere granted you by smart cultural products, and groove to the archaic and natural rhythms of the rhetoric – a flow never broken, unbrookable – which always adheres enough to the cadences and etymologies of the English language, whether derived from tavern or sewer, study, bedroom or church, to be read aloud with conviction. We might not know what’s it’s saying, but we know what these sounds mean. I never met a musical person who couldn’t enjoy a sentence of the Wake.

This sentence should be sprayed on the wall in letters of gold for all Wake readers:

“No man can live the moral part of his psychical (soul) life on the truth of another any more than he can live his physical (body) life on the meals of another. Every one must have his own truths, even as he must have his own meals.” Bishop William Montgomery Brown, Communism and Christianism: Analysed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View (self-published in Galion, Ohio from 1920 to the Bishop’s death in 1937; 14th edition, 1932, pp. 46-47; copies rare because they are seized and burned by the Church of America).

“Incomprehensible”, yes. But each time you look at Finnegans Wake, you discover something … On this occasion, it was the absolute bankruptcy of post-structuralist Theory as it is known and taught in the Humanities today. Proof that Theory has clouded the minds of a generation of intellectuals, no longer able to look at what is immediately in front of them. You can’t “read” (=skim) the Wake, you have to slow down … and look. There is no ideological preparation that can help, and the text confirms no “theoretical” positions. It is anti-religion in active manifestation!

I was excited with a paragraph on pages 123-124, because I’d been thinking about scores, records and music. The weird way a spatial construct on a page or on a piece of revolving plastic can dictate a piece of time. A passage in the Wake connected this space-time relationship to the oldest known “writing” we know, Mesopotamian clay tablets …

Lot 52B: PHOTO: Mesopotamian Cuneiform Clay Tablet. Translated: $1,200 – $1,800 Sold: Artemis Gallery,Jan 18, 2017 Louisville, CO, US

Here’s the passage. Folks, slow down, peer at this thing. It’s ART. It requires your attention and it rewards your attention … as no published prose in English since the King James Bible, Milton, Blake or Capital. And of course, it’s talking about itself, as it ceaselessly does:

Lot: OTLXL5: Pseudo-Mesopotamian Hieroglyphic (Untranslated, As Yet) Est: $00 – $00. Unsold: Taigue-ze-piste Gallery Aug 5, 2023 Somers Town, London, UK

The original document was in what is known as Hanno O’Nonhanno’s unbrookable script, that is to say, it showed no signs of punctuation of any sort. Yet on holding the verso against a lit rush this new book of Morses responded most remarkably to the silent query of our world’s oldest light and its recto let out the piquant fact that it was but pierced butnot punctured (in the university sense of the term) by numerous stabs and foliated gashes made by a pronged instrument. These paper wounds, four in type, were gradually and correctly understood to mean stop, please stop, do please stop, and O do please stop respectively, and following up their one true clue, the circumflexuous wall of a singleminded men’s asylum, accentuated by bi tso fb rok engl a ssan dspl itch ina, — Yard inquiries pointed out – that they ad bîn “provoked” ay ˄ fork, of à grave Brofèsor; àth é’s Brèak — fast — table;   ; acùtely profèššionally piquéd, to=introdùce a notion of time [ùpon à plane (?) sù ’ ’ fàç’e’] by pùnct! ingh oles (sic) in iSpace?! James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1922-1939, pp. 123-124).

What so many commentaries on the Wake miss (I except Len Platt’s wonderful introduction to the cheap paperback published by Wordsworth Editions) is how scurrilous, parodic and angry so much of it is. This is a portrait of ridiculous over-educated buffoon – a Slavoj Zizek – stabbing his toast with a fork in order to explain Space-Time. It evinces the same scepticism about world pictures which activated Frank Zappa and Philip K. Dick. Finnegans Wake is not High Art in the vein of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, it’s lowdown smut, an explosion of ribaldry versus privilege, as countercultural as R. Crumb – and similarly grotesque, obscene and hilarious.

And here’s a detail that escaped my attention for fifty years: just dig the way “fact” becomes a misprint of “fart” in Joyce’s composition: “Yet on holding the verso against a lit rush … its recto let out the piquant fact …“. This low view of “fact” chimes with Joyce’s attack on the closed minds of contemporary science graduates in the talk on William Blake he delivered in Trieste. The Wake adheres to the art politics of Blake in his preface to Milton: will everyone please stop serving the rich!

Rouze up O Young Men of the New Age! Set your foreheads against 

lo the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court, & 

the University: who would if they could for ever depress Mental & prolong 

Corporeal War. Painters! on you I call. Sculptors! Architects! Suffer not the fashionable Fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works or the expensive advertizing boasts that they make of such works.

Joyce’s sexual politics may be a little out of date, since we now have plenty of female “Brofèsors”, yet the accusation of spiritual miscomprehension by those who are paid to look at the letter remains. Joyce’s charge that there is a gender component in the replacement of wisdom by competitive pedantry (the “singleminded men’s asylum“) compares to Sabine Hossenfelder’s magnificent YouTube tirades against “Theory of Everything” tyros like Eric Weinstein. The revolution in Paris of May ’68 began as a protest against the segregation of the sexes; Joyce was well aware that oppressive gender roles suit life-denying scientism.

But the really devastating outcome of looking at these lines arrived for me when, after I circulated them, a friend Googled the passage, and sent me a link to a post-structuralist commentary. Here were readers totally unaware that that it’s they who are under attack in these lines!

When she was thinking for herself, my friend supplied me with a real insight: the “bi tso fb rok engl a ssan dspl itch ina” atop the wall which surrounds the “singleminded men’s asylum” is something she remembered from her childhood in Lusaka, Zambia, and reminded me of my own childhood sighting of broken glass atop brick walls. Forget Lacan’s mirror stage – a theoretical figure which no-one actually remembers – this sight broke us out of the protected bubble of childhood, and we realised how cruel the world can be, especially when protecting private property. Do they really want to cut me up for wanting to see what’s on the other side? Burglars must be really desperate to risk climbing over that!

But to the reason for this Substack item: the abolute bankruptcy of the post-structuralist tradition for explaining anything, especially revolutionary art. Viz: Lydia H. Liu’s The Probability of Sense in the Hypermnesiac Machine (Presses Universitaires de Paris Nanterre, 2017). The Internet promises access to all knowledge, but can quickly become a Bible of readymade answers which block creative thought, which invariably stems from personal attention to specifics. Darwin could never have devised the theory of evolution if all those nineteenth-century vicars hadn’t been collecting fossils on the beach as examples of God’s handywork.

“The Hypermnesiac Machine” is Lydia Liu’s coinage to describe the Standard English and computerization via information theory which accompanied technological breakthroughs in the Anglo-American war effort 1939-1945, and which kept up its pace in the following decades due to the USA’s perceived need to battle Communism, drugs, Islam, terrorism etc. Like Derrida and Lacan, the two post-structuralists she uses to gloss the Wake, Liu fails to see that Joyce was writing against capitalism, war and its “scientific” alienations. She uses “bi tso fb rok engl a ssan dsp itch ina” as a synecdoche of the whole book and Joyce’s method, comparing it to Claude Shannon’s conceptualization of the space as the 27th letter in the alphabet, which allowed development of the ASCII code and use of words in computing. Impressive sounding enough. But I can’t think of anywhere else in Finnegans Wake where a conventional piece of English is dismembered in this particular way! The outburst of diacritics in the same paragraph, taken by Liu as exemplary, is also unique. As a critic of the book, Liu is talking nonsense.

As usual, Derrida presides over this inability to respond to what’s there, this raid on the material to supply grist to Theory.  Liu uses Derrida to generalize/moralise Joyce’s method into the gruesomely predictable postmodern sermon – difference is good, disruption is necessary, linear thought is wicked, we must all be pious liberals “subverting power” in our art – whereas, like Marx, Joyce found ideas in the materials he dealt with, he was not applying a preconceived method or ideology. Every time I look at the Wake, I get new ideas. Every time I read the Wake to someone, or get them to read a passage, I discover new things. Joyce breaks up the words of “bits of broken glass and split china”, not in order to point out that parsing words is dependent on the spaces between them (one can examine his hundred-letter “thunder” words and still make out words inside them), but so that his row of letters resembles shards of glass and china set in cement.

Liu quotes Derrida saying: “This Anglo-Saxon commerce, these exchanges of a piece of merchandise (ware) in two languages, must pass through acts of writing. The event is linked to the spacing of its archive and would not take place without it, without being put into letters and pages. Erase the typeface, mute the graphic percussion, subordinate the spacing, that is, the divisibility of the letter, and you would again reappropriate Finnegans Wake into a monolingualism, or at least subjugate it to the hegemony of a single language.” (Derrida 1984, 147)”

Derrida’s vaunting of the written word makes him a household god for those make a living by interpreting words. Joyce used to read the Wake aloud, but this is interdit in the Derridean ideology, because making the page invisible reduces it to a monologue. Not so! If you read the Wake out loud it does NOT become Standard English, it’s a new tongue … like an English-speaker hearing Cambrian dialect today, we seem to be hearing from some prenational hinterland. Alexandre Kojève defused Hegel’s “German” dialectic for France’s Cartesian establishment. Likewise, Derrida’s insistence on the written rather than the spoken bespeaks a reactionary politics: the complexity of written French compared to spoken French is all about honouring grammatical relations which are inaudible today – i.e. dead – so only available to the schooled, a badge of distinction. It is the very opposite of Valentin Volosinov’s Marxist linguistics, which begin with the spoken, the living, the “concrete utterance”.

Liu asserts: “By manipulating typefaces, graphic forms, spacing, and an exhaustive variety of written signs, Joyce constructs a vast network of writing that interlinks up to allegedly 40 languages and stores numerous historical archives.” This is Jorge Luis Borges – a vision of an impossible total library – not the Wake, which stimulates the tongue to activity.

Liu makes simple blunders: “Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky” verse in the novel Through the Looking-Glass (1871). is one of the best-known nonsense poems written in the English language, relying predominantly on the play of sounds.” Only the first and last verses! “Jabberwocky” is a monster-slaying hero tale.

“Joyce’s nonsense word “iSpace”—coined long before the invention of the iPhone and the iPad—anticipated Shannon’s development of Printed English by assuming a radical rupture between writing and speech. It matters little if one can spell or pronounce this nonsense word, for our speech cannot reproduce the ideographic image of iSpace in sound nor can it assign a linguistic meaning to it.”

This is “the French Joyce”, a raid on the Wake to buttress post-structuralist preconceptions. There are pointed “unpronounceable”/visual elements in the Wake, sure, but no “radical rupture” with speech. The thing invites performance! Also, because of the iPhone and iPad, you can read out “iSpace” now, and most people will have a clear idea of what word you’re reading, even down to the camel case. The Derridean effect – like Slavoj Zizek finding the “objet petit a” in every movie he sees – is to reduce everything to the same, to blot out specifics, to hide reality, to mask exploitation, to fend off critique and politics. To deny me here, you there. Post-structuralism blinds people to what’s actually there. Like a Zizek YouTube, the “Brofèsor; àth é’s Brèak — fast — table” is funny, but only because he’s patently an idiot.

Liu then turns to Jacques Lacan on the Wake. Of course! The next tainted saint in the Canon. Opportunist vultures ripping up the corpse of a modernism designed for REVOLUTION! My better half berates me for going on too long about the evils of post-structuralism and postmodernism (“everyone in academia has forgotten about it now, it’s just your personal trauma, a fashion that denied you – neanderthal Marxist – a job in the Humanities in the 80s”), but if you Google my favourite things today – the Wake, Dada, Free Improvisation, sound poetry – that’s what you find. It’s like looking for Jesus … and all you can find is the Roman Catholic Church!

More Liu: “‘The real’, Lacan wrote elsewhere, ‘is completely denuded of sens [meaning]. We can be satisfied, we can be sure that we are dealing with something of the réel [the real] only when it no longer has any sens whatsoever. It has no sens because it is not with mots [words] that we write the réel. It is with petites lettres [little letters].’ (my emphasis)”

This is hard (stupid?) Cartesianism – duality between spirit and matter – and utterly in opposition to Joyce’s dialectical holism. What a doleful effect this hopeless doctrine has had on a generation of intellectuals! A smug nihilism about practical action, a Platonic contempt for the lowly artisan. The precise opposite of Hegel’s translation of Christian values into a progressive secular rationality, Marx’s discovery of the working class, Bishop Brown and Martin Luther King’s ideas of popular resistance …

As usual in this zone, a profound-sounding “conclusion” which is actually utterly inconclusive, inert, equivocal and predictable, an “I looked into something and discovered what I already knew, i.e. what has been canonised as the thought of my time.” Post-structuralism is a New Catholicism, with its own roll-call of saints, its own pious shibboleths … Finnegans Wake was designed by Joyce to undo the “instrumental reason” which produces capitalism, marketing algorithms, automatic stock-broking and war … but for Liu and her authorities, it’s all the same thing. This is how Liu concludes: “At a fundamental level, the communication machine can process nothing—certainly not words, in spite of its word-processing reputation—but the petites lettres of Printed English. That which gets processed guarantees no more—and no less—sense than does the ‘iSpace’ of Finnegans Wake.”

On the contrary, Joyce’s “iSpace” puts us back in space – just where Newton and Einstein (and cluster bombs sold to Ukraine for purposes of profit) deny our subjectivity and the naive empathy of our species being! Like Free Improvisation, the Wake challenges authority, and asks listeners to supply their own interpretation, unleashing our personal memories and associations like a psychoanalysis or a Rorschach blot (but not costing us a fortune). It’s a bustling market, a busting farrago, a verbal storm, a rush, a dream … it works. Unlike, say, Gertrude Stein, who also ticks the postmodern boxes, but has next to no content and – like orchestral Minimalism or Evan Parker’s circular-breathing turn – stuns the mind rather than causing it to pay attention to what’s there.

Out To Lunch, Somers Town 17-viii-2023

PS If you wish to follow up OTL’s polemic, find Geert Lernout’s The French Joyce (University of Michigan Press, 1992) comparable in polemical power to the Sokal/Bricmont hoax in revealing the Kojève/Derrida/Lacan/Foucault/Deleuze lineage as woeful intellectual charlatanism.

(Ben Watson presents Late Lunch with Out to Lunch weekly on ResonanceFM 104.4 )

(This article has been corrected to say that Lusaka is the capital of Zambia, NOT Gambia as first stated)

Manson and Trump: Object Lessons in How to Build a Death Cult

As regards Trump and Manson it would seem that, unfortunately, the American Psyche has room for both of them.

David Black

9 August 2023

The late Charles Manson is back in the news with the controversial parole of his former ‘Family’ member, Lesley Van Houten, who was convicted 53 years ago of murdering on his behalf. A new Netflix true crime series, How to Become a Cult Leader, features Manson in the first episode. Manson is portrayed as a sharp gaolbird, who learned to convince his 100 or so cult followers that he was god-like.

After more than 50 years the curse of Charles Manson maintains its grip.  ‘Edgy’ ironists have his image tattooed on their skin; there is a roaring trade in Manson T-shirts and other merchandise (especially his songs, which have been covered by over 70 recording artists); and an endless output of film and television productions. He has become so much part of the culture that the mythology built around him and his disciples has largely buried whatever ‘truth’ is still ‘out there’. What How to Become a Cult Leader does not explain is how Manson got his gentle hippie followers to become vicious drug-addled murderers. Nor does it examine the role of law enforcement agencies in protecting him from justice and enabling him to commit heinous crimes.

Manson built a cult which deeply impacted American culture. Donald Trump built a larger cult – MAGA- which took over the US government for four years and to this day threatens the very survival of the democratic state (current indictments not withstanding). Experts in authoritarianism and fascism perceive the threat quite clearly. New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat says “I see Trump as a cult leader. So [his followers] are cult followers, personality cult followers.”

In the future, presidential historians and researchers of new media mind-control techniques and state spookery will no doubt unearth many dark secrets about the Trump Years. In the meantime, one might ask: What does Donald Trump have in common with the late Charles Manson? There is certainly a stark contrast between their respective family backgrounds: Trump born rich and privileged; Manson born poor, to an alcoholic mother and an absent father. The similarities, however, are noticeable and many:

  • Toxic family relationships.
  • Delusions of being god-like.
  • Messianic/apocalyptic dogma
  • Pathological narcissism.
  • Inflated sense of entitlement and victimhood.
  • A taste for inflicting harm.
  • Sexual abuse. Rape.
  • Weaponization of racism.
  • Endlessly repeated lies and false promises.
  • Friends and protectors in high places (especially the secret state).
  • An ability to get indoctrinated followers to commit violent crimes –and do time for it, pending future absolution (or presidential pardon in Trump’s case).
  • Careers in the entertainment industry.
  • Determination to fulfil the cult’s ‘mission’ even from a prison cell.
  • Plotting insurrection and civil war.

Charles Manson’s ‘Family’ – A Case Study in Violent Cultism

Four years ago, Tom O’Neill’s book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties tore a few strips off the ‘official version’ propounded in the book Helter Skelter by the corrupt Manson Trial prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi.

The story begins in March 1967 – around the time Donald Trump was lying to the draft board about his bone spurs. 32-year-old Charles Manson was released from prison on parole after serving 7 years for check forgery. His parole supervisor, Roger Smith, who was researching gang violence and drug use, had the bright idea of sending drug-abuser and gangster Manson to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, just as the summer of love was getting underway.

In San Francisco, Manson, the guitar-strumming sugar-daddy, slid into his new career as a cult builder. Many of his recruits were under-age girls, whom he sent out to prostitute themselves, deal drugs and steal. In July 1967, Manson was sentenced to three years probation for obstructing a police officer who arrested a 14-year old girl he had recruited. But this didn’t prevent Smith from filing a report in which he claimed that ‘Mr Manson has made excellent progress’ in becoming a respectable citizen. In fact his whole cult was granted respectability. In O’Neill’s words, ‘The law afforded special privileges to everyone in Manson’s orbits.’

Roger Smith ran an Amphetamine Research Project at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, which had been founded by his namesake, David Smith. The two Smiths jointly wrote a study of the Manson Family for the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, entitled ‘The Group Marriage Commune’, based on ‘participant-observer’ research at the Family ranch. The Smiths’ research was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which was later found to have been used by the CIA as a front for the agency’s MK-Ultra ‘mind control’ project.

Dr Jolyon West, later exposed for his role in the CIA’s ‘mind control’ project, was provided with an office at the Haight-Ashbury Clinic to recruit subjects for ‘LSD research’. After West died in 1999, O’Neill found crucial correspondence between West and Sidney Gottlieb, head of MK-Ultra. In a letter dated 11 June 1953, West wrote to Gottlieb outlining proposals for a project to use hypnosis and drugs to extract information from unwilling subjects, to induce amnesia of the interrogation, and alter ‘the subject’s recollection of the information he formerly knew’.

West added that the experiments ‘must eventually be put to test in practical trials in the field’. O’Neill comments ‘All these were the goals of MK-Ultra and they bore a striking resemblance to Manson’s accomplishments with his followers more than a decade later.’ When O’Neill asked psychology professor Alan Scheflin if the Manson murders might have been an MK-Ultra experiment gone wrong, the professor replied, ‘No. An MK-Ultra experiment gone right.’ This was informed speculation, but necessarily so, given that the CIA operational files on MK-Ultra had been destroyed by Gottlieb in 1973.

The Manson Murders

In late 1968, Charles Manson and his ‘Family’ moved to the Spahn ranch, a 55-acre spread in Los Angeles County, California, which had previously been used as a set for filming westerns.

On 1 July 1969 a Black man named Bernard Crowe visited the Spahn ranch to complain about being ripped off by Family member Tex Watson in a marijuana deal. Days later, Manson went to Crowe’s Hollywood apartment, shot him in the stomach and left him for dead. (Unknown to Manson, Crowe survived and would eventually testify against him in court.) Manson told his followers that Crowe was a member of the Black Panther Party (he wasn’t) and that the Beatles White Album song, ‘Helter Skelter’, was a ‘prophecy’ of full-scale race war.

On 25 July, Manson and several accomplices invaded the home of Gary Hinman, a musician associate of Tex Watson. After two days of brutal torture, Manson realised there was no money to be had and ordered Bobby Beausoleil to kill him. Beausoleil stabbed Hinman to death and wrote ‘Political Piggy’ on the wall in blood. Hinman’s body was discovered by friends on 31 July. Beausoleil was arrested on 6 August for theft of Hindman’s station wagon, in which police found the murder weapon. Beausoleil concocted a story that Hinman had been killed by two Black Panther militants.

On the night of 8 August 1969, Manson sent four members of the Family – Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle, Linda Kasabian and Tex Watson – to the mansion home of Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski on Cielo Drive, Benedict Canyon. On entering the property, Watson shot and stabbed to death 18-year old Steven Parent, who had been visiting the caretaker and was sitting in his car. In the house the gang found Voytek Frykowski, an aspiring Polish filmmaker; Abigail Folger, his girlfriend; Jay Sebring, a hairstylist; and the pregnant Sharon Tate (Polanski was away, making a film in Paris). All four of them were tied up, then knifed to death as they begged for mercy. Susan Atkins soaked a towel in Sharon Tate’s blood and used it to write ‘Pig’ on the wall.

The following night the four killers teamed up with other members of the Family: Clem Grogan, Leslie Van Houten and Charles Manson himself. They piled into a camper van and drove around the suburbs of Los Angeles, looking for another target. Manson entered the home of chain store entrepreneur Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary, and tied them up at gunpoint. Manson then returned to the van and ordered Watson, Van Houten and Krenwinkle to go in and stab the couple to death. After killing the couple, Watson carved the word ‘War’ on Leno’s stomach. On the walls, the killers wrote ‘Rise’, ‘Death to pigs’ and ‘Healter [sic] Skelter’ in their victims’ blood.

The LA police were now investigating three killing sprees which had in common the reference to ‘pigs’ written on the walls in blood. But despite the arrest of Beausoleil in connection with Hindman’s murder they chose to ignore the signs that the residents of the Spahn ranch might be involved. This was especially strange as they had been secretly watching comings and goings at the ranch for weeks.

On 16 August – a week after the Cielo Drive murders – the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office (LASO) mobilised dozens of officers and a SWAT team in a raid on the Spahn ranch. The raid had nothing to do with murders; they were looking for firearms, drugs and stolen property, which they found aplenty. Given that Manson and several of his followers were also in clear violation of their parole terms, they could have all been jailed there and then. But all were released without charges three days later. They were thus free to carry on killing. And they did. On 26 August Hollywood stuntman Donald Shea was killed because Manson thought he had provided the police with information that led to the 16 August raid (his body was eventually discovered in an excavation at the ranch in 1977).

Rock and Roll

Like Trump, Manson was determined to carve out a name for himself in the entertainment industry.

During the four months it took the Los Angeles police to connect Manson with the murders, the media speculated that somehow the hedonists of Hollywood, with their sex-and-drugs lifestyles, had brought disaster onto themselves. Manson was more plugged into Hollywood than anyone cared to admit. The Cielo Drive mansion had previously been occupied by record producer Terry Melcher, who had auditioned Manson in May 1969 for a record deal. Melcher had been introduced to Manson by Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys. Melcher, Wilson and songwriter Gregg Jacobson – nicknamed the ‘Golden Penetrators’ – were welcoming to the Family, who took over Wilson’s house for the summer, supplying drugs and sexual favours while running up massive bills for food, clothes, car repairs and gonorrhoea treatment. Dennis Wilson told Rave magazine,

‘Sometimes the Wizard frightens me. The Wizard is Charlie Manson, who is a friend of mine, who thinks he is God and the devil. He sings, plays and writes poetry and may be another artist for Brother Records [the Beach Boys’ label].’

Bobby Beausoleil later claimed that Melcher promised to pay Manson $5,000 for his song ‘Cease to Exist’ (which the Beach Boys recorded as ‘Cease to Resist’) but then reneged on the deal. In August 1968 Wilson moved house and Manson moved the Family into the Spahn ranch.

Dennis Wilson and Greg Jakobson knew that Manson had previously shot Bernard Crowe. When O’Neill managed to get an interview with Melcher decades later he was met by evasions, denials, and threats to sue him and his publisher, Premiere magazine.

According to ex-LASO detective Preston Guillory, the police didn’t go after Manson ‘because our department thought he was going to attack the Black Panthers after intelligence had revealed Manson’s shooting of Bernard Crowe. Guillory told O’Neill: ‘I believe there was something bigger Manson was working on. Cause a stir. Blame it on the Panthers . . . Maybe a witting player in someone else’s game.’ Another interviewee, former assistant District Attorney Lewis Watnick, made the ‘educated guess’ that ‘Manson was an informant’.

COINTELPRO

Two of most notorious secret-state campaigns to infiltrate, disrupt and discredit the American Left were the CIA’s CHAOS, an illegal domestic surveillance program, and the FBI’s COINTELPRO. Both of them targeted the Black Panthers. In the summer of 1969, COINTELPRO activities were at their most murderous (such as arranging assassinations of Panthers by cops or by rivals such as the United Slaves Organisation). In August 1967, J Edgar Hoover reanimated COINTELPRO ‘to prevent militant Black Nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability’. The Tate-Polanski house on Cielo Drive had become a gathering place for ‘liberal Hollywood’ figures such as Mama Cass, Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda – all of whom were reportedly under FBI surveillance. Abigail Folger, one of the Cielo victims, was an outspoken civil rights activist. Hoover’s memo says,

‘An anonymous letter is being prepared for Bureau approval to be sent to a leader of the PFP [Peace and Freedom Party] in which it is set forth that the BPP [Black Panther Party] has made statements in closed meetings that when armed rebellion comes the whites in the PFP will be lined up against the wall with the rest of the whites.’

As O’Neill points out, ‘Less than a year after this memo was written, Manson’s followers lined up four denizens of liberal Hollywood in Roman Polanski’s home and cut them to pieces, leaving slogans in blood to implicate the Black Panthers.’

Two of a Kind?

In today’s MAGA world, for Black Panthers read Black Lives Matter; for Anti-War movement read ‘Antifa’.

As regards Trump and Manson it would seem that, unfortunately, the American Psyche has room for both of them.

(‘Beyond Bugliosi: the Manson murders revisited’, my full review of CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill (with Dan Piepenbring), appeared in Lobster magazine Issue 80 (Winter 2020)

 

(This article first appeared on SUBSTACK https://blackd.substack.com SUBSCRIPTION IS FREE)

Channel Four: Dumbed Down and Dumbing

Earlier this year, in yet another government U-turn, a plan to privatise Channel Four was quietly dropped. But considering how much the content has been dumbed down since its ‘golden age’, should anyone have cared? No and yes.

A warning from television history

David Black

9 August 2023

Earlier this year, in yet another government U-turn, a plan to privatise Channel Four was quietly dropped. But considering how much the content has been dumbed down since its ‘golden age’, should anyone have cared? No and yes.

Channel 4 was launched in 1982. Its first chief executive was Sir Jeremy Isaacs, a ground-breaking maker of television documentaries, such as the award-winning World at War series. With a strong team of commissioning editors, Isaacs encouraged upcoming talent to produce documentaries, arts programmes, and dramas.  And so they did.

If you could time-travel back 40 years to spend three evenings watching Channel Four from 25-27 July 1983, you could watch the following:

Communes and Windups. Self-sufficiency series visits communes in Wales and Scotland.

The Best of CLR James. Veteran Caribbean Marxist historian affirms the legacy of Marx and Lenin and argues –contrary to the practice of the Soviet Union – socialism means democracy.

A Veiled Revolution. On the regression of the status of women in Egypt under the rise of Political Islamism.

For What it’s Worth. Exposure of consumer rip-offs by Penny Junor and Which? magazine.

Brookside. Scouse, leftish, working class soap opera, which had 9 million viewers at its peak.

Eastern Eye. Asian-oriented magazine programme tackling the controversy over arranged marriages.

Ulster Landscape. Exploration of ruined castles and settlements in Northern Ireland.

Opinions. Jonathan Steinberg, banker turned Cambridge academic on the current economic crisis.

Letters Home. A 90-minute drama about the life, poetry and suicide of Sylvia Plath.

Mozart. Piano concerto number 24 in C minor at the Helmsley Festival.

Bake Off. Munchy hour.

Now compare with the output for 25-27 July 2023:

Sky Coppers. Police PR.

999: On the Frontline. Ditto.

First Dates. Cringe Porn.

George Clarke’s Old House. Renovating your way up the property ladder.

Britain’s Most Expensive Housing. Mansion porn.

The Girl from Plainville. Crime drama mini-series. US import.

Gogglebox. Celebrity couch-potatoes discussing bad TV programmes.

Dog Academy. Therapy/training for dogs and their owners.

Supervet. Tearjerker for animal lovers with ‘cutting edge’ surgeon Noel Fitzpatrick.

Sun, Sea and Selling Houses. Rain-soaked post-Brexit Brits expating to sunny Spain.

Get the picture? In 1983 C4 was a “public service broadcaster”. What is it now?

According to the Daily Mail’s Stephen Glover:

“I’m afraid the rot began with the appointment of Michael Grade as his successor. Jeremy Isaacs is said to have wept when he heard that Lord Grade (as he now is) was to replace him…. Michael Grade plunged Channel 4 downmarket, sanctioning tacky programmes such as The Word magazine show (featuring viewers eating worms or bathing in pig’s urine), Eurotrash (nudity and transvestism) and Dyke TV.”

Glover, in this screed written back in 2011, seemed to see the changes as stemming from moral degeneracy and “pornography” (a present-day Daily Mail hack would no doubt complain about “wokery”). However, Glover also noted, “Only a few months earlier, Isaacs had criticised him [Grade] for his obsession with ratings while he was BBC director of programmes.”  So it was all about driving ratings-determined revenue. It still is; only more so.

Recently, Phil Redmond, creator and producer of Brookside, told the Daily Telegraph (28 October 2022) that in the 1980s,

“What we had then was this British ingenuity, creating something out of nothing … And it was good. It was great for a while. Then telly folk got involved. The ’90s became a time where people just wanted to be ‘in telly’.”

As regards Channel 4’s current bosses, Alex Mahon and Ian Katz, Redmond says, “I think they really don’t understand what Channel 4 is about any more.”

Have they lost sight of the original remit?

“Absolutely. It’s gone completely. I’d characterise it now as a privileged clique, making programmes for a particular audience but actually not contributing enough to the public service debate.”

Also, the ratings are down. Deadline (5 June2023) reports that for May this year Channel 4’s UK reach stood at 35.8M, down 3.5M on May last year; and its UK network audience share was down to 4.48% – the worst four-week period in its 40-year history. This isn’t just a problem for C4. With the inexorable rise of non-linear outlets such as You Tube and Tik Tok, linear TV viewing has dropped across all age groups, but has fallen 23% year-on-year among 16 to 24-year-olds, who now watch a third less than they did in 2010, preferring instead to watch online.

if there is good reason for keeping the channel as public-service broadcasting it has to be Channel Four News, which retains a sense of independence of the Tory/Blue Labour establishment which effectively calls the tune for the  BBC’s Newsnight. C4News still has moments to savour: like when anchor Krishnan Guru-Murthy had a hot mic moment after a “robust” interview with Northern Ireland minister, Steve Baker. Thinking he was off-air Guru-Murthy quipped to a colleague, “What a cunt.” Guru-Murthy apologised for this lapse in professional conduct (if not accurate judgement) and got the very light sentence from the C4 bosses of a week’s banishment. The BBC would likely have sacked him.

(This article first appeared on SUBSTACK https://blackd.substack.com SUBSCRIPTION IS FREE)

The Communist Manifesto and the Strange Case of the Frightful Hobgoblin

David Black

21 July 2023

Terry Eagleton, writes in his review of Marx’s Literary Style by Ludovico Silva (London Review of Books, 29 June 2023): “The Communist Manifesto is rife with arresting imagery from the moment of its celebrated opening: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe.’” In Marx’s writings, “the categories that spring to his mind are comedy, tragedy, farce, bathos, epic, parody, spectacle and so on. If drama is latently political, politics is inescapably theatrical.”

In response, David Ireland writes in a letter to the LRB:

 “Helen Macfarlane, the Scottish Chartist who in 1850 issued the first English language translation of the Manifesto, is widely derided for her rendering of ‘ein Gespenst’ [a spectre’] as ‘a frightful hobgoblin.’ It was at least a variation on the spectre.”

As the author of a prospective biography of Helen Macfarlane – described by Karl Marx as a “rara avis” with uniquely “original ideas” -, I question the derision. Today ‘hobgoblin’ is associated with the comedy cartoon figure on the label of Hobgoblin beer; or by the minor Marvel Comics super-villain. In 1850, however, ‘hobgoblin’ had other associations and was well-established literary currency.

According to historian, Peter Linebaugh:

‘“Hob” was the name of a country labourer, ‘goblin’ a mischievous sprite. Thus communism manifested itself in the Manifesto in the discourse of the agrarian commons; the substrate of the language revealing the imprint of the clouted shoon in the sixteenth century who fought to have all things in common. The trajectory from commons to communism can be cast as passage from past to future’.

Fascinating as Linebaugh’s idea of hobgoblins as belonging to the historical imaginary of the daily world of peasant communing is, it is hard to validate according to the historical sources.

Although Macfarlane renders Gespenst as ‘hobgoblin’ in the opening lines, she uses ‘bugbear’ for the same word a few lines later, referring to “silly fables about ‘the bugbear of Communism’”. In Scottish folklore, according to the Dictionary of the Older Scots Tongue, the ‘Bogle’ is ‘A supernatural being of an ugly or terrifying aspect; a bugbear’.

That ‘Hobgoblin’ is interchangeable with ‘bugbear’ is indicated in a 1593 statement from a government informer about 1593 concerning playwright Christopher Marlowe, shortly before he was stabbed to death in a Deptford ale-house: ‘into every Company he [Marlowe] Cometh he persuades men to Atheism willing them not to be afeard of bugbeares and hobgoblins, and utterly scorning both god and his ministers’.

As this statement was only discovered in the early 20th century there is no way Helen Macfarlane would have known about it. But clearly her translation of hobgoblin and bugbear as the spectre of communism expresses a same ‘spirit’ as Marlowe on atheism.

In 1684 John Bunyan’s ‘Who Would True Valour See’, in The Pilgrim’s Progress, has ‘Hobgoblin, nor foul Fiend/Can daunt his Spirit/He knows, he at the end/Shall Life Inherit’. In Jeremy Bentham’s chapter in the Book of Fallacies (published in 1824), entitled ‘The Hobgoblin Argument, or, No Innovation’:

‘The hobgoblin, the eventual appearance of which is denounced by this argument, is anarchy, which tremendous spectre has for its forerunner innovation… Of a similar nature and productive of similar effects is the political device here exposed to view…’

In the 1846 essay, ‘Self-Reliance’, by the American Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson  the device reappears:

‘In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines’. 

As Helen Macfarlane quotes Emerson in her own writings, it is likely, if not evident, that Emerson’s use of ‘hobgoblin’ influenced her translation of the Communist Manifesto.

(Red Republican: the Complete Annotated Works of Helen Macfarlane, edited and introduced by David Black, was published by Unkant in 2014)

The ‘Sapient Mr Boz’: Charles Dickens versus the Red Republicans

David Black

21 July 2023

On 30 March 1850, Charles Dickens, having established himself as Britain’s most popular novelist, launched Household Words: A Weekly Journal. In an editorial, headed ‘A Preliminary Word’, he promised his readers that: ‘No mere utilitarian spirit, no iron binding of the mind to grim realities, will give a harsh tone to our Household Words‘.

At this time there was, however, one potential rival he hoped his paper would ‘displace’:

‘Some tillers of the field into which we now come, have been before us, and some are here whose high usefulness we readily acknowledge, and whose company it is an honour to join. But, there are others here –  Bastards of the Mountain, bedraggled fringe on the Red Cap, Panders to the basest passions of the lowest natures –  whose existence is a national reproach. And these, we should consider it our highest service to displace.’

Although he didn’t care to name it, there is no doubt that he was referring to the Red Republican, a Chartist weekly, edited by George Julian Harney. Dickens’ attack did not go unnoticed by the Red’s most prolific contributor: Helen Macfarlane, Scottish anti-slavery campaigner, feminist, socialist Christian, Hegelian philosopher and friend of Karl Marx.

What Helen Macfarlane thought of Dickens’s fiction is not known, but she certainly didn’t like his politics (or lack of) as can be seem from the following.

 ‘The Red Flag in 1850’, Red Republican, 13 July 1850:

We, the English Socialist-democrats, may be “the ragged fringe on the Red Republican cap, the bastard of the Mountain” as the sapient Mr. Boz has been pleased to denominate us, but we are something more than that. Chartism and Red Republicanism must henceforward be considered as synonymous terms… And what is Chartism? … it would appear that Chartism is something very much resembling the hope and aspiration of a majority of the working men of England’.

‘Fine Words (Household or Otherwise) Butter No Parsnips’, Red Republican, 20 July 1850):

The above moral reflection occurred to me on reading an article in the last monthly edition of Dickens’ Household Words, wherein two poor little starving children, who stole a loaf of bread, and were sentenced by a Bow-street magistrate, (“a Daniel come to judgment”) to be whipped for this “awful crime against society, property, and order”. Further, the writer relates divers particulars concerning the ragged schools in Westminster, tending to show that persons belonging to the offscourings of society—persons who, from their infancy, had been brought up in every kind of vice, are reclaimable with a little trouble, but that the first condition of that reformation is to give them the means of earning their living in an honest way. In the cases mentioned by this writer [Dickens], this was done by sending the subjects of the experiment to Australia, where, by last accounts, they “were doing well”.

I daresay they “were doing well”, in a country where the poor are not altogether thrust from the banquet of life by the rich; where the land, the common gift of God to all mankind, is not altogether monopolized by one land-owning class; where the honest man who only has his strength and skill to aid him in the struggle for existence, does not altogether become the prey of bourgeois profit-mongers, whose grand problem is—to get a maximum of work done for a minimum of wages. No doubt, any one, willing to work, would “do well” in a place like this. The remedy proposed by the above writer for the state of things he describes is—National Education! “If a son asks bread from any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone?”A spelling-book as a cure for hunger, was an amount of humanabsurdity, which evidently had not crossed the imagination of the Nazarean Teacher. Words are the panacea of the Whig Quacks and rosewater political sentimentalists of the Boz school. Education will do much, and a fit subject for its beneficent influences would have been the brutal, well-fed Dogberry who sentenced these starving children to be whipped; but Education will not satisfy the animal wants of man; the rule of three will not feed the hungry, or the Penny Magazine clothe the naked. How are the people of this country to be fed? That is the question. Not, how are the starving, homeless, hopeless wretches, dying by inches of cold and hunger, to be taught “reading, writing and arithmetic”. Your lessons in morality will do much for men who must either starve or steal, for women who must go on the streets and drive a hideous traffic in their own bodies, to get a meal for their starving children! Rose-coloured political sentimentalists!…

Transport the lazy drones who eat up the honey; transport the landowners and the thimble-riggers of the Stock Exchange, and there would be bread enough and room enough then, for all “our surplus population”. How are the people of this country to be fed? That is the problem for solution. The Protectionists did not solve it. The Free-traders are not solving it. Rosewater, self-sawdering, sentimental Whigs talk of National Education. Meanwhile, the producers die of inches of hunger—pauperism, and its attendant—crime—are on the increase. The condition of “moral England, the envy of surrounding nations”, is in a fair way of becoming very unenviable under the Upas-tree of a “glorious British Constitution and time-honoured Institutions of our ancestors”. It is well Time honours them, for I think nobody else does, and time must be in his dotage if he does anything of the kind.

In our own times, when charity has become an industry and, all too often, a racket serving the interests of the rich and powerful, Helen Macfarlane’s contempt for it still hits the spot:

‘The Democratic and Social Republic’, Red Republican, 12 October 1850)

We feel humiliated and pained when a beggar stretches out his hand to us for “charity”—that insult and indignity offered to human nature; that word invented by tyrants and slavedrivers—an infamous word, which we desire to see erased from the language of every civilised people… We believe, that unless God be a fiction, justice a chimera, truth a lie—it is possible to find social arrangements in virtue of which all the inhabitants of a given country could obtain a fair share, not only of the necessities, but of the comforts and luxuries of life—in exchange for the honest labour oftheir own hands… That is our dream, that is our Utopia; it is the democratic and social republic.’

A Sign in The Times

Dickens’s anathema against the Red Republican was echoed in a Times leader of 2 September 1851 entitled ‘Literature For The Poor’. Like Dickens, the Times chose not to name the paper – ‘we are not anxious to give it circulation by naming its writers or the works to which it is composed’ – but did extract some of Helen Macfarlane’s translation of the Communist Manifesto, as serialized in the paper. The selection included this passage as an example of outrageous cheek:

‘Your Middle-class gentry are not satisfied with having the wives and daughters of their Wages-slaves at their disposal, –  not to mention the innumerable public prostitutes –  but they take a particular pleasure in seducing each other’s wives. Middle-class marriage is in reality a community of wives’.

The Times found in the Communist Manifesto an alarming appeal to those people in the lower orders who form a sort of secret society, which is ‘close to our own’ but speaks ‘another language’:

‘… only now and then when some startling fact is bought before us do we entertain even the suspicion that there is a society close to our own, and with which we are in the habits of daily intercourse, of which we are as completely ignorant as if it dwelt in another land, of another language in which we never conversed, which in fact we never saw’.

(In 2014, I edited Red Republican: The Complete Annotated Works of Helen Macfarlane, for Unkant (Britain’s most radical publisher of that time, which unfortunately went out of business a couple of years later). It needs to be republished in a new edition.)