Strange Meetings - David Wise

Hi Dave...... and all others,

I enjoyed reading David Black's substack comments on Eric-John Russell's recent re-publication of Jaime Semprun's Precis de Recuperation and an update which I must read and reflect upon1 . Decades ago I remember agreeing with Semprun's withering dismissal of post modernism as represented by so-called thinkers like Michel Foucault, Lyotard, Andre Glucksmann, Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. After 'liberating' (meaning beyond monetization rather than 'thieving') a fair amount of these authors' oeuvre, myself, along with other clued-in mates had had enough. Alongside quips like "Let's have a look and see if Lyotard is wearing leotards" we, were sick of going into the UK's 'nintellectual' bookshops immediately seeing their books stacked up prominently in front of us as if these surface commentators, endlessly watering down the rejuvenating spirit of the May '68 revolution in France, were into real cutting edge subversive critique when in truth the real McCoys couldn't get a look in with English speaking publishers. Although Precis de Recuperation was a breath of fresh air, I was cautious about Semprun's attack and dismissal in the same book of Castoriadis and 'Ratgeb' (Raoul Vaneigem) both of whom had once had meaningful connections with Guy Debord. Sadly, mention of English speaking recuperation was absent as basically this country in comparison to much of Europe and even the USA was backwards 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" more specifically, the "Little Englander Mentality" both right and left wing, never realising 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 this was the final moment of Semprun's hero worship of Debord. After that he took a different radical path as he morphed into the creator of the very influential 'group' cum publisher of L'Encyclopedie des Nuisances ('Nuisances' meaning destructive, dangerous substances). On the simplest of levels, Debord and Semprun were very different characters i.e. Semprun didn't really fall out with people, at least not in the same way and 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 not really liking Debord's final book although somewhat nervous about saying so). Other friends in France, mainly around Os Cangaceiros, clearly noted that Semprun had been 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 Precis de Recuperation 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, though a little 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 sizable detour. The end of the 'glorious' late 1960s was marked somewhat world-wide by a 'collapse' of its protagonists, ourselves -in and among King Mob - 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 nuanced re-think. Some individuals - rapidly or cautiously slow - sold-out, while others destroyed themselves with drink and drugs and then 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 as the streets and work places erupted amidst the ferment in and around the final overthrow of Salazar's / General Caetano's 50 year old fascist dictatorship. Phil's letters transformed overnight becoming absolutely fascinating. (Rather then go into any details here it's best to again search the internet for some kind of outlines as to what happened in Portugal at that time). Moreover, Phil and I had become best mates throughout the late 1960s reinforced by the fact we were from similar backgrounds, had little money and with 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 from the late 1960s 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 invariably young people, 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 implying what steps do we take from here?

The immediate outcome was Phil put together a book in Portuguese and English entitled, Portugal, The Impossible Revolution2 . It was a produced by Solidarity (the Castoriadis rank 'n' file worker off-spring of Socialisme ou Barbarie in the UK) and a book which I funded seeing I was earning real good money as a plasterer on building sites and with no family etc, to support plus existing as a no rent paying squatter. The book captures the warp and woof of the uprising, that unmistakable, "I was there" emphasising at times, its delightfully crazy essence. Little did we know at the time that Jaime Semprun had also put together a book called Social War in Portugal and published by Champ Libre in France, a company owned by Gerard Lebovici, Debord's rich friend until Lebovici 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 with Phil's hands-on unruly passionism and a book that was notable for capturing the emotional euphoria of the uprising...like say the following reminiscences I put down in a notebook at the time....

"Getting off the plane from London Heathrow to Faro on the Algarve - and even then a consumer tourist hotspot which made you weep - an ordinary enough train station was close by as I waited for the express steam train to Lisbon which when it turned up was delightfully and so poetically called "O Vento Suave" (The Soft Wind). I thought the journey would be speedy and comfortably scenic but boring. Instead I was in for one of the most delightful shocks of my life. As the train left the lifeless tourist massacre of the Algarve moving into the Alentejo the train began to slow down considerably. Looking down on the side of the railway I noticed small groups of people were becoming frequent. Then I noticed placards saying all kinds of stimulating things though the persistent theme was "OCCUPIED". And then I noticed one farm after another - big and small - had been taking over by the workers or maybe the half peasant / worker. Suddenly the atmosphere was exhilarating; this was better than any LSD high. Moreover people were invading the track simply not bothering about safety requirements as the train went slower and slower. Going through small railway stations the railway staff along with others (passengers?) on the platforms would bang on the windows, smiling, full of liberating laughter getting ever more raucous as we headed into the mountains. By the time we crossed the Tagus bridge into Lisbon the train was hours late but by then what our motley crew called "fascist clock time" simply didn't matter....This was indeed a glimpse of future mass uprisings and the uprisings we are still waiting for".

"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's 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 although Vitoria should be nuanced as "Victory" in order to realise the punchy title - plus pun - in the original Spanish). 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 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 in the first instance. 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 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 and educationally we were the old notorious 11 Plus failures not worthy of 'proper' education hampered by the fact our English was truly awol, Phil from Dublin ours from Co Durham and Yorkshire. Who could we to turn to: comatose academics who hadn't grasped Lautreamont's pre-Surrealist maxim in and around "The new tremors 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 it was the hoped for inspirational content that mattered mirroring the fact you lived your life in an anti-spectacular, touchy / feely way. Thus our pamphlets were signed out that way. 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 after a 'radical' few months trying to recuperate workers 'control and autonomy was rapidly becoming hell-bent - among other things - 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 because 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 kinda of 'in and out' and mostly - at a distance with Miguel especially regarding his critique of the destructive ultra- commodification of music together with my own pamphlet, The End of Music. Inevitably too, Miguel also 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) then I discovered that Jaime was the son of the Spanish surrealist Jorge Semprun whom I'd had a lot of respect for in mid 1960s Newcastle. Lo and behold in post Franco Spain, Jorge was to to get a top job in the Ministry for Culture! I was horrified and later gratified to find out that his son would have nothing to do with his Dad detesting his membership of the Spanish Communist party and no doubt much else beside .

Yes, I'd become nervous of Debord and subsequent "Our Party" Debordism. After A Summer with a Thousand Julys on the 1981 riots in the UK was translated into French I 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. 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".

But then Jaime Semprun's eco critique was getting really cutting edge the more he acknowledged the profundity of the English language description of that devious con becoming known as "greenwashing" and the substitute for authentic eco involvement. 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 and naïvely, you thought these bodies were on your 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 your 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 which also involved Rene Riesel who had played such a significant part in May '68 in France. Some of this stuff was brilliant so please check it out as there's plenty of internet info. At the time I'd also get a lot of fresh comment from other friends involved mainly again 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 Encylopedie des Nuisances turned up in souped-up militant attire really ready for action against the brutal French police. First though they had to put together a stall which they couldn't do as (it seems) 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 where would the comradely alliances around Earth Uprising and the Sainte-Soline Battle of the Basins of March 2023 have been without this distant history? One more comment haphazardly comes to mind: Michel kind of liked Jaime Semprun though he said to me he didn't like the way he "supported the Unibomber terrorist" in the mid west United States. As for myself, I balked at the terrorist name tag though didn't really approve of the haphazard parcel bombs though liked some of the Unibomber's writings even though leery about innocent dumbfuk casualties.

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 say for what passes contemporary revolutionary critique. As an interesting aside to all this - even though again utterly out of place - take a look at the writings of Alessi Dell' Umbria as they really have edge, even though, as far as I know he also never mentions the situationists. I've been told this guy from Marseilles was a fellow traveller of Os Cangaceiros and has written some really interesting tracts around major social upheaval's in France over the last 20 years or so. It's certainly true that his account of the social upheaval in France -"C'est La Guerre" in the first few months of 2023 is so far the best account of those exhilarating moments. And then I found an excellent tract on the Gilets Jaunes disturbances in Marseilles in 2019. Then 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 is my French or background knowledge up to it? However, it would be excellent if say MIT Press Ltd could publish a selection of Alessi Dell' Umbria's writings in English.

Sadly Jaime Semprun died in 2010 of a cerebral haemorrhage aged only 63. However there's more to it than that as his writings in later years had become a lot more sombre and there's the question of a broken heart the more his radical eco experiments were derailed. In something of a final missive Jaime says that 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 in the Bradford Canal and Shipley's "Industrial Gorge" in West Yorkshire between 2010-17 and an arena which previously had so 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 taken out by council goons. Like the following:

"If destructive growth required an environmental disguise, destruction would have to be presented as the environmental act par excellence"

plus the need to create

"an atmosphere dissidence and desertion in which the historical subject, which is nothing but the anti capitalist community, can be constituted and concentrated in a struggle that is not just rural but aimed also at a return to the city, that is, to the self-governed and de-capitalised space where liberty and history originated".

(In retrospect I think Miguel knew about these slogans and was pleased we had given them prominence). Also our eco interventions over the last 8 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", and basically an ecological concept elucidated by Jaime Semprun. Slogans like "Art is Dead. No to Wilding Aesthetics" / "Occupy Everything / Wild the Cities / Abolish Money". A few months ago I could have directed you the reader to our webs where photos alongside texts explained the concept. Then kaput there was nothing except total wipe-out! The brutal redaction of The Revolt Against Plenty web in spring 2023 meant all of this history has now been liquidated along with so much else beside 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 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 have disappeared yonks ago. Left in a catastrophic dilemma, just what 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.

As for Wildcat Spain Encounters Democracy I have plenty of books left stacked in a cupboard and would be happy to hand them over to the Michel Prigent Commemoration group to do with them what they like, maybe selling them on, etc, to make some dosh for funding further publications. Whatever, whatever?

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

Wildcat Spain encounters democracy, 1976-1978 - libcom.org

Critical assessment of "Wildcat Spain" book | libcom.org

Wildcat Spain encounters democracy, 1976-78

Wildcat Spain Encounters Democracy NOT BORED!

In Spain, where the political poverty of Francoism, with its decomposing but refurbished institutions, coincided with the new political poverty of an opposition ...

(Dave Wise. August / September 2023)

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• 1Libcom note: A Gallery of Recuperation: On the Merits of Slandering Charlatans, Swindlers and Fraud. A review of the new translation of Jaime Semprun's post-Situationist book on intellectuals and the Spectacle by David Black.
• 2Libcom note: https://libcom.org/article/portugal-impossible-revolution-phil-mailer