The Circled A and its Parasites

To me it looked like the sort of rant you might have about the anarchist movement when really pissed off and pissed. WhIcH iS pRobAblY Why IT waS iN a RealLY WiERd Font.

Don't remember it saying anything constructive though, so i just thought it was a waste of time.

Not sure they were saying they'd personally be willing or able to do anything.

It's self-satisfied and bitter but there's a very good point in there (I saw a little too much of me in it for a start ) that middle classers simply can't run around telling people from working class backgrounds what's what. It's patronising and it alienates the very people Anarchism should be reaching.

I'm not saying the middle class types can't help out, but in the end it isn't our fight, and it isn't our world except in the most theoretical of ways. Not sure how helpful/practical that is to the movement, but I'll certainly be keeping my mouth shut a bit more often at conferences.

The Circle A & its parasite's has been causing waves since it was written and will do for years to come, it offended a lot of people in some quarters as they didn't want to be exposed as what they really were, sad middle class people who just wanted to belong to something.

After putting so much effort and years into something, only to find that you are being played like a pawn in a chess game there is bound to be a lot of frustration built up......... This was simply their release.

And that is the crux of the problem. If all 'anarchists' think like this then are we truely anarchists at all?

Not that I'm having a personal dig celtic67, far from it. Only honest discussion will help us come up with any kind of answers.

okay ive been thinking about the whole concept of working class/ middle class for a while now, infact i've been theorising about writing an article on it (hows that for substitutionism ). Okay this is just me typing out alot of unstrucured thoughts so bear with me, though it certainly ain't gonna be no Grundisse.

my personal background is working class, my da has no academic qualifications at all and has spent most of his working life doin semi skilled or skilled manual jobs, he is a fitter by trade. my mum also left school with no qualifiactionsand has worked a series of miminum wage jobs, tho she is now on the lofty heights of 5.50 an hour (nodoubt the brothers Anderson would have her in the "aristocracy of labour"!! ).

*note*this personal background is in no way meant to bestow upon me some natural superior class conciousness than say someone whos parents were teachers or qualified nurses or god forbid managers etc etc if im talking shit im talking shit if a teachers kid has a better class analysis, then they have have a better class analysis, our backgrounds shouldn't be the judge, otherwise we'd all read John Major instead of Charlie Marx or

Mickey Bakunin .*

Okay having asserted my working class street cred. Actually its a sad state of affairs that this seems to be a necessary requisite nowadays, reflecting more a poor grasp of class struggle more than anythingelse. Truly the anarchist movement must be politically bankrupt if it is necessary to know the persons background in order to workout if their ideas are of any value to the class struggle. Are we so thick that our definition of a good class analysis is based more on the persons accent, clothing, or suppoused working class character traits (actually often crude caricatures!). Fuck knows what Openly classist would have made of Marx or Bakunin?? would they have sided with Proudhon simply because of his more stereotypical workerist traits (actually Proudhon was a small artisan or petite bourgeois to be a shit ).

Right back to the point! so far so working class however come the age of 11 most of us in Northern Ireland do a little exam called the 11+ which decides wether u go to a Grammar school or a High/ Secondary school, me being the smart lil cookie that i am passed . Now the 11 plus is heavily biaised towards middle class kids (for a number of reasons that i shall not go into here for the sake of space and ur sanity). Now whilst most working class kids do not pass the exam (as do quite a few rich ones, tho mummy and daddies money/connections can still get them into a grammar school) a significant minority do pass it.

This minority are therefore able to go to grammar schools and this generally means there is a high chance ull go to university. Now as one of the ones who passed my parents were chuffed to bits, "u've got a chance we never had", "first one in the family to go to Uni" and all those other working class cliches. However the move from a very working class primary school in which i would have seemed relatively well off to a largely middle class grammar school was a tad unstartling and its here i think i started to become increasingly class concious.

There is a tension now because im at a school which is predominantly middle class or rather which perceives itself as middle class in a keeping up appearances kinda way and so im stuck between my working class environment at home and the pseudo middle class school environment. Whilst realising the class nature of the school and being very self concious about my more plebian background im also really into learning about shit (always been a bit of a wee nerd.. tho in a cool way .. imagine Ice cube in Higher Learnin and u gotta an idea ). what this means is that im becoming further estranged from my typical working class background, i still played football with me old mates from primary school but there was always the tension of them seeing me as a bit of a snob cos i went to a grammar school and was becoming interested in punk and metal instead of crappy happy hardcore or scooter. The fact i was small and girlish didn't exactly help cultivate a traditional macho working class image. Tho im built like this mof now

By the time i was goin to Uni i was one class councious cat, i'd read my Rudolf Rocker, i had milled my Marx and wasted thousands of the IT departments paper printing out obsucre situationist pamphlets.

I'd pissed off my history teachers no end with my historical materialism and been thrown outta RE class for proclaiming "God to be Dead" as well as "Relegion the opium of the masses".

At Uni i went in for politics and philosophy expecting great debates around all the most pressing issues. What i found was completely deflating, the place was full of people as radical and politicised as a Coldplay gig, infact Coldplay are ultra leftists by the standards of the students at my uni! Even when they have read Chomsky or Marx and agreed with it they don't seem to be moved by this they seem to be able to compartmentalise it away for their essays. Now i think that coming from a working class background meant that these books related to me much more. However the issue is not as simple as this...

many working class kids who get to uni flock into business or management degrees, they have no interest in class struggle, they are taking the oppurtunity to grab what their parents never had and by and large who can blame them??

The problem isnt therefore just that the middle class have some sort of a magic hold over the workng class and this is stopping the working class rising up, the problem is a lack of class conciousness in the wider working class. Not that large sections of the working class arent aware that they are working class but rather they view themselves thru the lens of capital, the working class as defined by capital, atomised and competing with each other a class in itself but not a class for itself. Furthermore another large section of the working class has been led to believe it is middle class and jealously guards against any encroachment on this somewhat imagined status.

To me the brothers dim offer nothing to resolve this, they actually narrow the working class down to an outdated caricature, reinforcing the myth that large sections of the proletariat are middleclass. Their class analysis is based on cultural caricatures of manual versus intellectual labour hence they can assert that a plumber (most of which are self employed and therefore technically petite bourgeois) is "obviously" working class whilst a teacher is "obviously" middle class, they even admit themselves that a plumber often earns much more than a teacher but yet they tell us that it is self evident that the teacher is middle class and the plumber working class. They offer no analysis as to why this is the case and instead seem to be relying on tabloidesque notions of class.

As for the illusion that students are all middle class bar a few exceptions, well governmet targets would seem to be making a mockery of that! 50% of young people to be in 3rd level education.. surely they couldnt all be middleclass?? if they are then it seems tony Blair and john major are right we are living in an increasingly classless society.

The Anderson's seem to think alot of cursing and an aversion to rational analysis reinforces their working class credtionals (whilst we all know that cursing is just big and clever! ), what they offer is a caricature of the working class, as a working class person i feel offended by it and would appreciate it if they fucked off and died, ooops!! oh well as they say themselves no point being PC! one down!!

anyway this is rambling and left out lots of points but its late and im tired.

no wonder class struggle anarchism is in a rut its sandwhiched between hippy middleclass tossers on one pole and Pol Pot esque fucking nutters on the other.

also by what model is working for the security services working class whilst working as teacher is middle......

"the enemy is securocrat disnformation!!"

The Enemy Is...

Surfing on the net recently we came across the website of the Openly Classist group (www.openlyclassist.org.uk). Openly Classist are perhaps best known for publishing "The Enemy Is Middle Class" by Andy and Mark Anderson. The late Andy Anderson was a self-confessed former US and British intelligence officer.

In the late 1990s, when we were getting ourselves sorted following the 1997 split, Openly Classist could be found stirring up apathy around the fringes of Class War, and in particular the London and South Yorkshire groups. We did not, it seems, come close to meeting their lofty standards or impeccable working class credentials. Not enough intelligence officers in our ranks clearly.

So what does cut the mustard as far as Openly Classist are concerned? At one point we were told it was the campaign to free Mark Barnsley. Class War members attending events for Mark in 2001 did not spot anyone from Openly Classist, and funds allegedly raised from earlier punk gigs organised by one Openly Classist supporter in London certainly never reached Mark. So who then? Whilst there is no link from Openly Classist's website to www.freemarkbarnsley.com one group they do advertise is the Scottish Separatist Group. The SSG, run by Adam Busby has one of its core aims "The halt and reversal of mass English immigration into Scotland". Quite how this is going to be enforced is not made clear, or whether a Separatist Scotland is willing to take back in return high profile Scots like Gordon Brown, Tony Blair or Robin Cook, who in case the SSG have not noticed, have pretty senior positions in the British ruling class!

The SSG acts as the political wing of the Scottish National Liberation Army. The SSG website is on a Russian Maoist server (the views of Chairman Mao on Scottish Nationalism are not recorded) and the website seeks to make a distinction between the SSG and SNLA rather similar to the division between Sinn Fein and the IRA.

In recent years the SNLA have been linked, in the media, to attempts to poison the water supply and attempts to post anthrax to Prince William. Red Action allege Busby posted them a letter bomb. Despite all this Busby lives a remarkably charmed life as far as the authorities are concerned.

The SSG/SNLA look suspiciously like some intelligence officer's bad joke. That they seem to be one of the few organisations Openly Classist support is certainly raising eyebrows.

taken from London Class War at

http://www.londonclasswar.org/london_calling_2002.htm

Black Economy Books - you seem to have missed my post above where I commented that my experience of people in the old Leeds Class War group was very similar to Terry's. As a working class member of Class War since 1992, I do not feel "exposed" by the "circled A and its parasites" at all. I don't know anybody else who does either.

Instead I just feel oddly curious how its authors feel unable to find any working class people they can work with (is'nt Mark Barnsley working class?) whilst working with the likes of Andy Anderson and praising the Scottish Separatist Group.

If Openly Classist are able to go out and form a genuinely working class organisation, good luck to them. I somehow suspect they will be in the same position now as they have been for the past six or seven years - moaning about everyone else.

Nice one!!!

shit man. that's an exact description of my experience at uni, to the point of scariness.

havent got time to read that article right now, but i will tomorrow...

I share that perception my self - and that's not intended to offend anyone either

i think there is a problem in anarchists (and i include myself in this!) engaging in jargon however i feel that the other danger is of be patronising, as a working class person i'd feel offended if some twatty student tried to simplify a critique down for me to understand it, now the point about the two woman not being able to pronounce capitalism, now thats fair enough but the vast majority of working class people know what it is (tho i think many people of my generation lack even that basic political understanding) and would probably swing at u if u tried to talk down to them about it.

another point is that sometimes things can't be simplified down without losing coherency.

the idea of being ashamed of ur intelligence or knowledge is fucked up. just because most of the working class (and indeed middle class) arent that clued in is no reason for working class anarchists to tune out, in order to "fit in" with the caricature that is presented as working class culture thru shit like the sun. Actually this anti theory tendency in anarchism i think comes from alot of people who are insecure in their own working classness feeling the need to live up to caricatures.

i always thought the point of class struggle was working class self empowerment, about the working class becoming the leading force in society, to me that means working class people educating themselves and each other. if the middle class is self confident and knowledgeable surely the point isn't that working class people reject these trait s but rather we assert them in ourselves, we should be creating a culture of working class knowledge, we should be endeavering to grasp all the knowledge we can, simply because it is the working class who can truly grasp the theory and more importantly make practical use of it. Working class movements from the Chartists to the CNT in 1930's Spain always inspired working class thought and culture they didn't sit and whine about the middle class privileged knowledge, they set about empowering themselves and their class. They didn't lie down and take some sort of pride in the lack of confidence and submissiveness that capitalism engenders, they stood and fought it.

openly classist seem to think that if only the middle class fucked off the working class would become a class for itself in an instant, this is ultra leftism of the most idiotic, the middle class are allowed to dominate anarchist groups because of a lack of class conciousness (actually in the group im in "Organise!", i have to say we don't have anyone from a middle class background unless u think all students are middle class by default) .

There is no doubt we need to make our propaganda more concrete and relative but we have to face the fact that in the absence of real working class militancy a huge amount of working class people will have no interest in what we are saying, the best slogan or leaflet in the world will not cause the working class to cast off the yoke of ruling class ideas it will be the working classes own self activity that will do this and that im afraid is dependent on bigger historical and social forces than us bunch of ballbags .

:red:

There can be far too much interest in 'making' more anarchists. A task that I think is both futile and counter-productive. It's part of seeing ourselves as a minority faced with inert, reactionary masses who just need us to explain it to them.

This misses the point, the experience of people's lives teaches people more than we ever could. Any anarchist you 'convert', particularly w/c ones is probably very likely (as the person in the second article) to say to you 'you articulated what I already knew but couldn't express'. All you've done is given him a label. He already hated cops, politicians and bosses.

Sorry: Again I agree, but that's no reason why we shouldn't try and 'make' as many Anarchists as possible, if for no other reason than to do as the CNT has done and provide a Union/series of co-operative groups to help mitigate the worst of the troubles while apathy remains high. It's as bad to go too far in the other direction and say 'let's not bother to do anything cos it'll all get sorted in the end' as it is to just treat it like an evangelical movement.

oh yeah im assuming by middle class we mean from a middle class background, not that they are managers, bosses or in other occupations that bring them in conflict with the interests of the working class.