Authority magazine

Fozzie

I've mainly uploaded this because I'm curious about the first issue (I think only two were published) but have never managed to track one down...

(Yes, I have been in my loft).

Thanks for doing this.

I actually used to have a copy of Authority #1. No idea it where it went, though. It was before I started scanning stuff. Probably around 2003.

Don't remember all of the content, but I did think it was kind of rubbish. Had some stuff slagging off Albert Meltzer, and some quite bad cartoons depicting anarchist riot police after the anarchist revolution. I seem to recall it having a very anti-organisational vibe…

In a similar vein, I seem to recall a spoof Black Flag in the early 80s called Black Frog. I'm wondering if it was the same people.

Didn't Subversion do a Spoofversion once as well?

Yeah, although I suppose a useful corrective to how it's easy to think of "social media echo chambers" and so on as a newfangled phenomena, nice to be reminded that back in the day there were people putting pen (or at least typewriter) to paper to make jokes as incomprehensible and insular as any of today's memes.
Another one for the "funnier as an idea" file: I'm sure I remember the old US Green Anarchy had a column by Statler and Waldorf, which was a great idea but fatally undermined by the fact that it was in Green Anarchy and so written by people with utterly woeful politics, and a correspondingly warped sense of what is and isn't inherently funny.

From AUTHORITY No.2, summer 1979:

The whole conception of social democracy and equally of revolutionary or anarcho-syndicalism was the more rational management of the economy. The periodic crises of capitalism were to be solved through workers management. The dictatorship of the proletariat was to lead [was to be transformed] to rational management of capitalism, i.e. the dictatorship of capital [reformed]. But for the small groups of revolutionaries within these movements socialism was not the "democratic management of capital" but its complete destruction...

Where the proletariat was able to maintain its autonomy it was crushed by force of arms. (Petrograd, Munich)...

For sixty years now [1979] the autonomous struggle of the proletariat has been nothing but sporadic outbursts with no direction and easily recuperated into capitalism or annihilated. The growing global crisis of capitalism ensures for the communist movement the possibility of revolution.

And,

While christians bleat peace and love as they butcher their opponents, the trotskyists preach class war as they humbly apologise to the bourgeoisie,

Even though their great prophet was murdered by a stalinist agent, they spare no expense praising the stalinist regime, even calling on workers to defend it in the event of war.

Surely this must be some form of christianity resurrected from the feudal past and dressed up in enticing political clothes. It has all the ingredients; militant self-sacrifice attending a dozen boring meetings a week, a heaven no longer in the afterlife but some macabre state-capitalist utopia, (it remains equally unobtainable), sermons are delivered when the congregation masses at a demonstration...

But the most compelling similarity is the spirit of subservience...