The Urban Gorilla Comes East

Any strategy for the coming civil war has to abandon the assumptions of the old revolutionary movement, which has engendered such monsters. It has to find the weak links in the chain of modern repression, and fight the temptation to rejoin battle at the traditional points of confrontation: ideology and economic infrastructure. Capitalism’s most intractable crisis in the advanced industrial states is the crisis of socialisation.

The attempt to mediate family and school encounters and aggravates contradictions which must be exploited by an urban youth guerilla, It must also aim to occupy the hiatus which separates the individual's emergence from the family - school complex and his reintegration into organised society via forced labour. The first task is to build up a comprehensive network of AntiSocial Services, designed to combat the system’s efforts to conceal its structural weaknesses by means of a unified ideology and practice of Welfare.

Why do schizophrenia and delinquency have a key role to play in the subversion of the reasonable society?

How does language determine the dialectic of consciousness, so that the failure te understand its pivotal function has prevented the development of a Marxist theory of class?

Why and How must the “revolutionary” intellectual commit suicide? What are the Bands of Hope and Glory, the Family Court, the Genital Strike and the School Aversion Programme?

Why is King Kong the most heavily guarded animal in the Children’s Zoo? Why is he asleep?

CATCH-22 is already trying to answer these questions — in the East End, where one in three people between 15 & 25 is labelled delinquent, and one in eight defined as mental. Abstractly, these two forms of social negation are in the same position vis--vis society; substantially, they appear as radically opposed. We believe there are lines of communication to be opened up between them, both theoretically and practically.

Which is why we want to meet people, with a view to mobilising resistance, who have either

a) experienced — as teachers, social workers or therapists — the contradictions of institutionalised forms of social violence

or b) researched on the effects of these contradictions within specific groups: delinquents, problem families, young schizophrenics, school dropouts... Some have done research from the point of view of their own experience as victims — as do-madders or do-badders. Others, from the sidelines of academic concern.

Write to Dave Barbu, BCM/CATCH-22, LONDON WC1