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121: A BRIEF PERSONAL TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE. (Oh no I've got to walk down Railton Road again.) 121Railton Road: South London's world famous radical squatted house/anarchist bookshop/autonomous social centre/free community space survived for a record breaking 18 years before being evicted. Some people claim the place was haunted, by the ghost of euro punk perhaps. 121 was certainly haunted by Jack Frost as you nearly always felt cold inside the building (even when it was warm outside!). The number of meetings and events there one sat through with shivering limbs and chattering teeth, we all deserve medals just for passing the test of physical endurance involved in going to the place. It is the comradeship and community, the social movement and historic struggles that the place was connected to that actually matter. On the long run the building itself was always expendable. And let's face it folks the building itself was a bit knackered from day one. Maybe, if they could have got away with it, it would have been better had the people who first squatted it demolished it there and then and started building some folk art Watts towers or Gaudi cathedral like fantasy house to live in. So many hours of maintenance work and decorating on the building and its famous anarcho squat centre toilet from hell but to little avail. It felt only slightly more cosy in the early years when the ground floor dividing wall was still up and the bookshop was in the front with the latest "Black Flag" and "Crowbar" hot off the presses wafting printing ink thinners out the door. But maybe it only felt that way because we were younger then. There would be real agitated ANARCHIST meetings in the back room with young punks, ageing Spanish veterans, anarcho-nerd bookworms, romantic insurrectionaries, hardcore squatters, urban saboteurs... (today's "anarchist" meetings just don't have that same authentic feel). It was the last days of the cold war, Thatcher was in power, there was open mass unemployment, there were inner city riots, big industrial battles like the miners and the printworkers yet to be fought. Life was so much politically simpler in those days, the revolutionary vision appeared much clearer, insurrection seemed just round the corner. In those days you could get easy student grants and loaf around for several years, you could sign on for years with a minimum of hassle, the giros felt bigger and silkier. The queues in the dole office were more chatty and friendly. Tell that to the young whippersnappers in R.T.S. today and they won't believe you. I remember my first conversation in the bookshop when I first visited 121 in 1981; I sat down with a cup of tea and chatted about summer riots, squatting, secret police and whether the room was stuffed with bugging devices or not. This was still in the days when the arguments between Black Flag and Freedom actually mattered to anyone so it was fun to pop into Angel Alley, Whitechapel, and then travel down to Brixton to catch up on the latest exchange of the political raspberry blowing. Not satisfied with smalltown anarchism in the early eighties I used to catch the train up to London at weekends in search of the hardstuff. A typical friday routine for me circa early eighties: Travel to Brixton, meal at 121 in the cafe upstairs, then downstairs for an anarko meeting, wander off for a little "direct action" or flyposting, crash at somebody's squat, then saturday morning maybe a paper sale and meeting in a pub in Ladbroke Grove (Class War had just started coming out as a paper) or a demo in central London. The quality of 121 cafe food was not universally awful but it often got pretty close. Yellow broccoli in squat food is a political issue. I miraculously escaped food poisoning in all 18 years eating there although I believe several victims are still convalescing in a London infirmary to this day. Was the good meal in '92 or '93 ? I can't remember. The 121 toilet: The architects and designers model of the ultimate in grungy, dingy and dire squat toilets. There is a full size mock up of it in police training college. And what of more recent years; the nineties for instance? I didn't get there quite so much. The postmodernists tried to redesign the place into the "121 Centre" but it just wasn't going to happen without a cappucino machine. There were several changeovers in personnel in the collective, sometimes it looked like it was dying, but then it would come back to life a bit for a few months as a bit of new enthusiasm was put into the place. And then video and discussion evenings and anarcho theme cafes, the sex cafe, dead by dawn raves, exhibitions, music events in the opened up basement.... I popped down to some of these events and even, shock horror, enjoyed myself once in a while. But still the temperature, the building, the toilet!!! Otherwise I would only be down there for the occasional London ABC (prisoner support) meeting in one of the upstairs rooms, so cold the biro would freeze up. And all those bundles of unsold udistributable unsellable copies of every anarko paper and leaflet piled up in a strategic reserve/political text mountain. In politico speak piles of unwanted tatty old newspaper are referred to as an "archive". The old logbooks/daybooks from 121 make a good read, I believe they were rescued with other stuff before the eviction and still exist. During the Brixton riot in '81, while pitched battles were going on in the street outside, book sales listed for that saturday included "Towards a Citizens Militia" by Cienfuegos press and "Mutual Aid" by Kropotkin, this is true!). As for since the eviction and the future? Well let's be honest; half the comrades today are earning so much money in white collar professional jobs they're almost rich enough to buy the place if they wanted. Paul P. Autumn 2000. |
PAUL PETARD Cartoons & Rantings ppetard@hotmail.com |
More stuff coming soon. ("soon" might mean a long time!) |
More of Paul's pictures are at; and also at, For more articles on some recent radical political history try; |
RESIST THE WAR ECONOMY SHARE THE WEALTH CREATE GLOBAL FREE COMMUNISM. Against nationalism, religion, capital and state, bosses, wage labour and commodities... we seek to assert the internationalism and equal communal solidarity of workers, unemployed, housewives, pensioners, skoolkids,... for abundance and universal free access to the land and resources and necessities of life. Call me an "Evolutionary Libertarian Communist " and you'd be more or less right. (Are we utopian?... You bet! marxist methodology just got chucked out the window) |
COMMUNISM, LIBERTY AND FREEDOM It is part of the paradox of "bourgeois" liberty that it enables its own critique to come into being and flourish. A widespread conscious questioning of all the material conditions and social relations inherent in "bourgeois" liberty has become possible because of bourgeois liberty itself. Rather than being hostile and phobic of liberty and freedom, communists should be, like their old friends the anarchists, enthusiastically in favour of them. If it wasn't for "bourgeois" liberty then there wouldn't have been any historic development of modern socialist, communist or anarchist thought, there wouldn't be any marxism for instance. Nor would there be much of a modern socialist movement or workers movement. Once the growth and development of bourgeois economic conditions over the years has let loose the ideas of liberty and freedom like a genie out of a bottle then there is no shoving them back in. The workers and dispossessed, once they come under the spell of this genie, start to develop their own notions of liberty and freedom and turn them in opposition to the bourgeoisie. It is funny how leninists, for example, are quite happy to embrace the idea of a "dictatorship of the proletariat" and a "workers state" because this happens to be a convenient cloak for their own bureaucratic and state capitalist aspirations, but they wouldn't dare entertain the notion of a "workers liberty" being turned into the antithesis of bourgeois liberty. Here the prejudiced attitude of the vulgar marxist that liberty is inherently "bourgeois" leads them to an infantile level of argument, not much different to that which they accuse the anarchists of in regard to the anarchists' attitude to the state. Obviously in a mainly bourgeois society atomised individual "liberty" and "freedom" start off hand in hand with property, exploitation and the state. "Workers liberty" under capital and the bosses begins with the mere rights of workers to be wage slaves and small consumers. But the radical detournement of liberty and freedom by workers, dispossessed and radically disenchanted, means reinventing them and turning them into something quite different, to serve our interests rather than those of the bourgeoisie. Whether serving the bourgeois or not the "state" has always shown itself to be bureaucratic and despotic, although in utopian hypothesis, the "state" could be reduced to mean merely the general social administration of things without necessarily implying domination or exploitation. The ideal of "democracy", meaning the "rule of the voter citizen People" appears more inherently tied to bourgeois society, forms and conditions. "Workers democracy" seems more of a contradiction than "workers liberty" because "The People", involving a populist collectivist cross class amalgam, is already not the same as the community of struggle of workers, dispossessed, radically disenchanted,... Although the term "workers democracy" has on occasions been adopted in wildcat and social revolts. But "liberty" and "freedom" come in the end to mean the emancipation of workers and dispossessed from their very dispossession, their liberty of association, and their universal freedom of access to the land and resources.. The most powerful weapon of bourgeois political economy is not the state in itself. The most powerful weapon of bourgeois political economy is the liberty and freedom of its money and commodities and capital and wage labour to move and exchange and be bought and sold and circulate and grow. Bourgeois liberty and freedom are inherent in the bourgeois state, but they also start to break free and end up opposing this state. When leftists morally condemn the "anarchy of the market" they deride "anarchy" and suggest that planning and bureaucratic organisation is the solution to the problems caused by the bourgeois economy. But it is precisely the "anarchy" of the market that makes the market strong and powerful in the first place. One of the objective lessons to be learnt from the history of the soviet union is that in the modern industrial world over-centralised planned bureaucratic command systems just can't sustain themselves on the long run. They can only be sustained a little longer by massive military and police despotism. But in the end they economically stagnate and implode anyway. This is the case whether there is "imperialist encirclement" or not. (And today we are a million miles removed from ancient agricultural societies with central despotic overlords, like ancient egypt, that in any case remained static and failed to develop any further). Even today with "smart" weapons and "smart" technology it is debateable whether such a system could be made to work in a sustainable way. Although this doesn't stop various factions of the ruling class from periodically attempting to impose such a system. Perhaps the U.S. government's "war on terror" is the beginning of such an attempt. One Russian woman who came to the U.K. after living under the soviet union for many years commented on life so heavily run by bureacratic planning; "Imagine the whole of society being run by the gas board". "Anarchy"; self organising, self regulating, free moving, non-hierarchical, autonomous grouping and networking, is on the long run a more clever and successful way of organising (whether bourgeois organising or non-bourgeois organising). Imagine if the movement of information on the internet were organised by a central committee, it would take ten weeks to send an e-mail. The internet consists of self routing packets of information moving freely around a self buiding and self expanding network not dependent on one single server. Even the big corporations who own most of the servers can't fully monopolise control of it. "Petit bourgeois!!!" will come the predictable jibe from the miserablist bolshevists and leftists in knee jerk reaction to such heresy. The accusation of "petit bourgeois" is the favourite insult thrown around by the petit bureaucrat who aspires to become the big bureaucrat. And meanwhile, you have to give a little bit of credit to the real petit bourgeois, they have survived successfully as long as any other class, and even today, despite predictions of their demise, some of them continue to survive well enough. The mass "fordist" industrial proletariat, and the bureaucratic and democratic centralism that were supposed to go with it, have gone to the dogs. With the decentralised "dispersed fordist" production environment today more and more of us are now atomised individualised workers. This has become a material reality. The trick is not to waste all one's time moaning and whingeing about the bad side of atomisation, or feeling nostalgic about the romanticised communities of yesterday which weren't so rosy in reality, but instead to discover what is refreshingly mutually useful about our mutual atomisms and subvert them in the process. Real communism is not the squalid totalitarian collectivism where we all have to be crushed up together and smell each others armpits and slave and subsist in the same bureaucrat commanded gulag dustbin. Communism is more likely to come out of liberty rather than despotism. So "libertarian communism" is my preferred individual choice. Paul 2002 |