The Thunderer #1 (1985)

"What they have done in this video is to produce a vulgarisation of what has already been better said by others, and muddled it up."

From 'A critique of call it sleep to wake you up.'1

Exactly the same can be said about Larry Law's publication Spectacular Times but one must add that Law has also managed to make a vulgar ideologsy out of situationist theory. Instead of trying to criticize, because he is unable to, the parts of books that he does not agree with he ignores them and uses the rest as quotes in his "pocketbook ideology".2

The dedicated followers of this self-made priest (he has made himself a priest more by his bad actions than by his bad intentions}
consume his hotch-potch at all times, for example at the Leeds 'Stop the City’ demonstration last year (1984) a pamphlet appeared called Stop the City Times and in one moment a thousand spiky heads stopped what they were doing (which was nothing) to read what it was thal they were protesting about. What a joke it is and what a first hand example of spectacular
contemplation whicn Law tries so hard to make coherent.

If Law really wants to make a "Situationists for Beginners" why doesn't he contact the marxist-leninists at Writers and Readers? After all someone who fives space to Time Out and City Limits3 may have some standing with these pigs.

Law's confusion is such that he can criticize C.N.D. as a specialized oppression (Skeleton Keys issue) but finds himself, as a man, unable to venice about “Women and the spectacle"4 which is itself a specialised oppression (he might as well have produced a pamphlet called "Black Jewish Homosexuals and the spectacle") but as is says in The Veritable split in the International5 :

"...(The) povecty stricken immigrant benefits too from the planetary exploitation of the producer of jute or copeer in the under developed countries and is no le:s of a proletarian for that."

Law's failure to understand even specialized oppression fully shows how futile his publicaticn is. He does not advance theory because he cannot, and rather than do nothing he perpetuates his misery and that of others making theory static.

All these goons have the British disease of Positivism, typified so well in Brandt's poster on the miners strike "Over? Never!", which makes up for them for their lack of strategy.

As for the Libertarian Alliance they are as libertarian as the F.C.S. and Ronald Bitburg and the black-hatted reformist and humanitarian Gorbachov (it is not by chance that he looks like Al Capone).

This pamphlet will annoy many but please just as many as we are voicing what many already know on both sides of the fence.

This is a taster of a new journal, The Thunderer written somewnere in the "U.K." 3rd May, 1985.

Box 7, The Other Branch,
12 Gloucester Street,
Leaminston Spa,
Warks.

• 1Libcom note: https://libcom.org/article/critique-call-it-sleep-wake-you-1985
• 2Consumerism has come a long way.
• 3These exec magazines don't mind Law in fact they quite like him because he does not threaten them, even Chris Cutler of Henry Cow advertises Spectacular Times in his Recommended Records catalogue, but this is the way with cadres, one hand washes the other.
• 4It is worth noting that Carol Ehrlich and Co's book was published by Routledge and Keagen Paul the very publisher who refused The Society of the Spectacle, they would rather publish second rate books and sweep the really critical material under the carpet. In any case Larry Law finds the Preface to the fourth Italian Edition of The Society of the Spectacle optimistic.
• 5Law, Brandt, Knabb, Chris Gray (ex-King Mob) and various other "situationists" do not like this book, perhaps because they do not understand it, they nave called it; "For situationist archivists" (Brandt), "An attack on Vaneigem" (Law), "Analysis of the post--1968 S.I. crises." (Knabb), “a desperate attempt to come to grips with students inertia." (Gray), or perhaps the reason they don't like the book is because it buries them all, and many other so-called revolutionaries such as World Revolution, Point Blank (who's ramblings about the book were more than ridiculous) and Chris Broad (then a member of the Anarchy collective, who did not get further than thesis 2, where it says that "The Minister of the interior of France and the Federated Anarchists of Italy felt the same anger about it." (the S,I.), before he refused the book.)