Feeling kind so i moved it to History from thought, but this looks more likes it should be in libcommunity.
admin - moved to libcommunity because it's fiction
some encounters with English Wildcat and ultralefty teachers, 1980s
I said:
Quote:
But he wasn't that cop was most concerned about.
I meant "it wasn't that cop that I was most concerned about", i.e. it wasn't the cop who'd called me a 'nigger bitch' who was the most danger to me at that time. It was his pal.
How have you been 'kind', rkn? Above my head, that one. I put it in 'thought' because I didn't notice the absence of a comma between 'philosophy' and 'discussion'. Ultralefties usually mean 'the past' when they say 'history' (just as they were taught in school), but even leaving that aside, here is as good as anywhere.
yelt
it doesn't sound like the Wildcat I knew. I don't think any Wildcat members were teachers. And those of us who weren't in it, but were teachers and were in Careless Talk certainly wouldn't have shied away from the after meeting sessions. Sorry Yelt, but your version of reality doesn't gell with mine.
knightrose wrote:
it doesn't sound like the Wildcat I knew. I don't think any Wildcat members were teachers. And those of us who weren't in it, but were teachers and were in Careless Talk certainly wouldn't have shied away from the after meeting sessions. Sorry Yelt, but your version of reality doesn't gell with mine.
So just because you were there you think you know more? This attempt to form an informal hierarchy based on actually witnessing events might be something you can use when you're destroying children but not here knightrose, not while yelt is around.
Another juicy fact I should add about Wildcat. It was originally set up by one guy with an acid-freak SPGB Solidarity background and another who was a failed-scissionist leader in the 'I see sea'. The former was the local-council housing bureaucrat I mentioned. Must have been on about 3 times the average male salary, I suppose, and of course he'd never suffered any 'social insecurity', as far as I'm aware. Had rich parents in Golders Green, north London. I'm sure you'll know who I'm talking about.
Anyway the other one of the two was probably the highest-caste of all members of the group. His dad was a high-up professor at London University, and between them his parents - who had separated - owned 3-4 valuable properties. He'd never had to worry about money in his life. Naturally he always took the leading role in any meeting he attended. Not by shooting his mouth off, but by quietly controlling the pace of things and 'assuming' himself to be the focus and the ultimate decider. Anyone who thinks there's no link between his background and his role would be living in cloud cuckoo land. Of course, he later fucked off out of anything to do with the proletariat, as might have been expected. (There's a piece on the web by 'revolt against plenty' that describes some similar sorts of lines-of-development in the Eng-situ scene some time before).
He opposed the battles going on at Wapping, ostensibly because he hated what was printed in the 'Sun' (curiously, the bosses won but they didn't shut it down), but probably really because he didn't like the violence.
My spies in the English coalfields tell me he didn't know how to speak to the miners either. Some of the best lads whom he met there, who happened to have some crap in their heads about the IRA, he viewed as 'IRA thugs', which was plain insulting and very stupid and wrong. One of them incidentally showed me photos of his back after he'd taken a severe beating at the police station after a riot in his village. It was very ritualised, a row of spaced-out wounds, made by a truncheon or similar, down both sides of his upper body. His brother (the miner's brother, that is!) is now a Labour councillor, but Christ, I'd be amazed if he wasn't out there in his balaclava again if ever there's another struggle like there was in 1984-85. I would prefer to be with him in any trouble, rather than with the ex-ultralefty ecologist or with one of you pro-schoolteacher ultralefties, tired after a day shitting on working class kids in the classroom, any day of the week!
Which is not to say that this guy's activity in the Labour Party isn't shit. Of course it is total and utter shit. Working class lives are full of contradictions, see, except that I've never met a 'revolutionary' in Britain from a middle-class background who has the dialectical sense to get his head round that sort of stuff. Have met a few in France and Spain though.
And before someone calls me a hypocrite, I was very clear with these guys where I stood on the IRA, which has never been anything other than a militaristic fascist organisation. We kind of liked to concentrate on what we had in common - i.e. involvement in the struggle we were in. Must have caused the Coal Board and the state losses going into the hundreds of thousands.
You're wrong, knightrose. There were teachers in Wildcat. More of them before the Careless Talk people joined than after, I grant you. But probably more of them in the scene around Wildcat than actually members.
I have taken a decision not to mention actual names, but I recall how my Notty friend (who had been in Careless Talk) always used to refer to one of them as "[Monosyllabic First Name Deleted By Me] Soft Cop". I say Notty but he actually came from Derby I think, although for most of the time I knew him he was in Notty. Say what you like about him, but he always had school-teachers down as exactly what they are.
He used to be a bit more respectful about you, though - assuming I have identified you properly, but I'm pretty sure I have. This was mainly because you had been kind to him in his year or two as a young university student. He walked about, but went back to another college years later to do art, so I'm told. His first stint at university was when he was a 'Stokie'. Were you a lecturer there? I can't remember.
yelt
'guydebordisdead' - you call yourself 'guydebord is dead', and you slag me off for name-dropping Debord? Surely some mistake? That piece called 'Guy Debord is Really Dead' is really appalling bad. The line about it all being to do with 'situations', as though that were elite knowledge, is a hoot.
jef costello - I witnessed events too, you twit, unless you're calling me a liar?
knightrose - just for the record, and as I'm sure you will confirm, there weren't any teachers left in Careless Talk at the time when the Stokies joined Wildcat.
yelt
yelt wrote:
jef costello - I witnessed events too, you twit, unless you're calling me a liar?
I didn't call you a liar but I did imply that your stories contain fantasy elements. I wouldn't be surprised if you were 'on the scene' as it were, but I'd be surprised if half the stuff you have said is true.
Quote:
it doesn't sound like the Wildcat I knew. I don't think any Wildcat members were teachers. And those of us who weren't in it, but were teachers and were in Careless Talk certainly wouldn't have shied away from the after meeting sessions. Sorry Yelt, but your version of reality doesn't gell with mine.
Nor mine. It's all very weird and Alice in Wonderland-ish.
Another juicy fact about Wildcat (and Careless Talk, as it happens) concerns one of the members. He was a gay guy who grew up in a forces family but changed his first name after he left home - those around the scene will remember him. Known for being unable to talk when very stoned. His mother was a bigwig at the BBC in Bristol and his father was an even bigger bigwig on the military scene. For a time he was head of the royal aeronautical college in Abu Dhabi. I think it was Abu Dhabi - it's just possible it was Dubai or Kuwait. He got the job through his connections with the princely family of that state. Between them they must have been pulling in maybe 20 times the average worker's take-home pay. Do you care to deny any of this, knightrose, serge forward, etc.?
guydebordisdead - Guy Debord didn't fit into the category of 'middle class revolutionary' - or not so neatly as maybe you think - and I wasn't huge mates with him. But I don't deny it - in the past I was at times friends with a few middle class revolutionaries (and indeed with some upper-middle class ones) - I thought that would be clear from what I was saying - and especially from what I said at the beginning of my 'personal info'. I certainly wouldn't be now, though. I've reflected upon and learnt from my experiences. Some of the things I learnt only dawned on me years later. I don't know how old you are, but if you don't know this experience, I hope you get to. Why not stop naming yourself after a ridiculous reactive piece of writing referring to someone else's death, for starters? As for when you say 'read your history' about the IRA, why don't you just make a case for whatever it is you're saying? What do you think Jacqueline de Jong is, by the way - a horny-handed daughter of toil? 
Or perhaps xx Clark, formerly a member of the Situationist International but still the brother of Labour politician Charles Clarke? At least he doesn't speak with such a posh accent as drug smuggler xxxxxx! There, some more names that you might wish to pick up, if not to name yourself after.
Admin - posting any more real names will get you banned
So I'm insane for lem, a spoofer for guydebordisdead, an on-off fantasist for jef costello, a stupid idiot for many of the 'what-he-said' follow-the-leader pro-schoolteacher types, and someone with a different memory of reality from knightrose's. That's when I'm not manipulatively ticking all the oppression boxes. I know knightrose is a teacher, and will have to go up against the wall unless he does some big-time repentance, but at least he has displayed better manners than many others in the pro-schoolteacher contingent here.
yelt
Quote:
Do you care to deny any of this, knightrose, serge forward, etc.?
You obviously know much more than I do because I don't actually know who you're talking about. Yes, I was in CT in the early 80s but had already left by the time the miners' strike started. You seem to have some painful issues that you want to share with us about your connections with Wildcat and CT. You're talking about stuff from over 20 years ago which obviously had a big impact on you. Was it really so traumatic?
No Serge, it's true.
Alf - I am not endangering anyone. Sure, some will be able to identify who I mean, but to say that Wildcat members included:
- council bureaucrat X, who had rich parents in Golders Green;
- ex 'I see sea'-er (a founder of Wildcat) Y, who had a rich father who was a high-up university professor; and
- Z, who had a rich father who was head of a royal aeronautical college in the Gulf and a rich mother in a senior job at the BBC?
Why do you want this information hushed up and taken out of the public sphere where, anyway, I've already put it?
So some middle-class types can continue in their fantasy world wherein they're veterans of the working class struggle?
I don't have any 'issues'. I just kept detailed diaries and I have an extremely powerful memory, and I thought some of these beans could be usefully spilled here. After all, at least three people here have the sense to suss that school-teachers aren't in the working class!
yelt
Quote:
I don't have any 'issues'. I just kept detailed diaries and I have an extremely powerful memory, and I thought some of these beans could be usefully spilled here.
Why is it useful? Useful to what purpose? Who are the middle class types in their fantasy world? Then again, who actually cares?
Seriously, I don't know who you're talking about, Yelt. I don't know whether some of the Wildcat/CT members had rich parents or not... but then, I'm not really into all this 'sins of the fathers' shit - it's far too biblical for me. Whether someone went on to become a council bureaucrat (whatever you mean by this, for all I know, it could be someone who answers the town hall switchboard)... well big fucking deal. Not many people active over 20 years ago have stayed active. Some have probably gone on to do all sorts of things, some 'cred' some not so 'cred'. Who gives a fuck anyway? They did their bit and now they're gone from the scene. What did you contribute, Yelt?
I notice you're new on Libcom, Yelt. It's sad that all you've contributed so far is gossip and romancing for no very good reason, while banging on about schoolteachers and pointing the finger at anyone who has the audacity to see teachers as working class.
So you've been around a long time... what have you learnt apart from the ability to talk utter shite?
Just some stuff on Wildcat and teachers. Doesn't belong in the Fred Vermorel thread.
OK, some further observations on Wildcat and some of the related scene...
I was never a member but I used to hang out a bit with two guys who were close to it in Stoke and then Nottingham.
My own 'affiliation' was with some dudes in Paris and the south of France, where I first hit Europe after leaving Australia, where I'd lived since moving there from proletarian south London. I drank a great deal with Guy Debord and his mates around 1983, but fell out with him because his wife Alice basically stole 4000 francs from me. She was very rich, and I'm not surprised that she's pulling all this 'literary widow' crap, 'denying people the right' to publish some of his personal letters. She isn't anything like anyone a sensible person would call revolutionary. She hated the priesthood, but some of her talk was about how broad-minded and Gypsy-influenced the Spanish aristocracy were compared to the French bourgeoisie.
Guy wasn't like that, but he backed her up with regard to the 4000 francs, so I told him to fuck off and damaged one of his wife's very expensive chairs. Imagine how much I could get if I did a Reid-style collage about that one!
Any gallerists reading this...want to offer me a commission maybe? 
We - me and some of the people from France around Guy, in his 'entourage' as some people would put it, including him - took part in a violent way in both the Warrington print battle and the much more prolonged miners' strike, in county Durham and elsewhere. I'll have to leave those stories for another time.
For a year or so I was a girlfriend of one of the guys in Nottingham, and was well up on the internal papers and info fom Wildcat. I'm making that sound underhanded, but it was always OK for members to show internal papers to their mates and comrades - it was never taboo, as it was in some less well-sussed politico groups. Our own (smaller) scene, I should add, was much much more security-conscious, and there were things we never ever discussed with outsiders, but we weren't a politico/agitational group, and the two positions are very very different. Half of us had cops looking for us on an international level half the time, so being a wuss where security was concerned would mean one thing only. And several years of it too.
The guy from Nottingham/Stoke was the best shot with a brick I have ever seen. I've seen people use more vicious weapons, including heavy-duty caterpults and handguns, in various places including Belgium and Spain, but this guy could (and did) knock helmeted riot cops off their horses from 50 metres, and whacked three in one night so they were stretchered off. Wonderful. That was at Wapping in London.
(I think that was the last time I was ever in or near the East End. I went to Freedom once, but never again - the place stank of manipulative bullshit, and I wasn't surprised to hear one of the bigwig anarchists from upstairs refer to the 'girls in the office', whom he paid a pittance to do his typing for him).
I remember nearly getting the shit beaten out of me by two cops (I clearly remember their leather-clad fists for some reason), after I'd gone to defend someone getting a kicking on the ground, who I thought was 50-50 likely to be the Notty guy, but when I got up close it wasn't him.
I also recall one of the cops screamed at me that I was a 'nigger bitch'. I'm a half-cast - my father was an Australian aborigine, my mother a white Cockney - but I didn't bother educating the filth on the difference between negroid and australoid. (Incidentally, my father was tortured by officials of the fascist regime in Queensland, and degraded over a long period of time, but he after the age of about 15 he was always a cunt, so I have no illusions that suffering necessarily makes someone a great person - it certainly doesn't. I'm sure there were some cunts among the prisoners at Auschwitz too).
But he wasn't that cop was most concerned about. It was his pal who I sensed was on the point of smashing me in the face (I had my arms held but later escaped). I let a third one grope my tits to make 'em all think I was putty in their hands, but having noticed that one of them wasn't wearing shin guards (the idiot probably didn't realise why he was supposed to), I used some of my light-duty combat knowledge with success, and got away.
The Notty guy sometimes said the Manchester Wildcat people were racist (or some of them anyway), but I never found them so. Unless you count the guy who was a well-paid housing official, who once shook my hand with both of his in a very patronising way, as if to say 'how lovely to welcome someone of your ethnicity to our circles'. But I would not call him racist at all, and if you didn't know about his job, you'd say he was a nice guy, although a bit slow intellectually where things like the critique of democracy were concerned. If he hadn't met an abbo before, and was a bit nervy, I don't hold it against him in the slightest. That is not racism. He wasn't a revolutionary - he didn't ever risk anything, and let's recall that in the early 1980s the level of working class struggle, although quite low, was CONSIDERABLY higher than it is now - but he wasn't racist either.
I knew three guys in Wildcat in London too. One was a stuck-up arsehole, actually from a working class background in Glasgow but with a whole Lenin thing going on (or was it Hitler?), probably better suited to the Tory party. I wouldn't be surprised if he's on the far right now. The others were more mates with each other than they were with him. One was a big coward whenever there was trouble. The other I met a few times in Paris as well as in the English midlands but he didn't seem very into Wildcat and I don't know why he was in it. They were all British as far as I can recall.
The teacher issue was a big thing for my mate from Notty. The teachers didn't socialise with the rest of us in the heavy dope-smoking sessions that went on (not something I'd engage in now, but I did then). These sessions happened both after meetings (which I didn't go to), and when people used to meet up from different towns. They couldn't even be called friends of most of the comrades they were supposed to be 'organising' stuff with. They only met my mates at meetings, never socially, and never to do anything in the class struggle, never to go to meet strikers or rioters, or carry out acts of sabotage etc. I doubt they ever did any of these things anyway. They seemed like people of the past even then.
I told him he shouldn't bother so much. I said they didn't matter. In a revolution, they'd shoot you and you'd shoot them. But we're not in a revolution. More likely anyway, they'd run off and hide. Fuck 'em. He once wanted to slash the tires of one of them, 'anonymously', but at my urging we slashed the tires of some Moss Slide petty slumlord instead. Nice one! (Bloody good thing we didn't end up shot).
Don't let the politico stuff be so important to you anyway, was what I told him. Best thing is to leave the group. He did, although to be honest I don't think he did much good afterwards, becoming an artist of some kind. So the people in Paris told me. Occasionally he used to doss at their places for a bit of kudos, well into the 1990s so I'm told.
OK that was enjoyable.I'm off to do some gardening now, and don't expect to be back here for some time, except to count up the results of the poll on "Are school-teachers in the working class?"
yelt