[Marxism] The angry brigade

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

LRB | Vol. 26 No. 24 dated 16 December 2004 | David Edgar

The Angry Brigade: The Cause and the Case by Gordon Carr
ChristieBooks, 168 pp, £34.00

Granny Made Me an Anarchist by Stuart Christie
Scribner, 423 pp, £10.99

(clip)

Originally published in 1975, Gordon Carr?s book is a big-format, 
bite-sized narrative of the Brigade and the trials of its alleged members, 
supplemented by a selective chronology of the ?angry decade? of 1965-75. 
Its protagonists are a group of young student militants, inspired by the 
May Events in Paris in 1968, who had dropped out of Essex and Cambridge 
(two of them ripped up their finals papers), moved into communes in West 
and North-East London and become active in the squatting and claimants? 
movements. During the first year of the 1970-74 Heath government, a series 
of bombs was planted and responsibility claimed by a group called the Angry 
Brigade, the language of whose communiqués (identified by a stamp made from 
a John Bull printing set) led the Met Bomb Squad to Ian Purdie and Jake 
Prescott (the former a left-wing activist, previously convicted for 
throwing a petrol bomb at the Ulster Office during a demonstration; the 
latter a drug-user and small-time criminal who?d met Purdie in prison). 
Having read Purdie and Prescott?s address books, the police went after two 
couples wanted for cheque fraud who were living in a commune in Amhurst 
Road in Stoke Newington. The house was searched and alleged to contain 
guns, explosives and detonators. At the first Angry Brigade trial, Purdie 
and Prescott were charged with conspiring with the others to cause 
explosions, a charge of which Purdie was acquitted and Prescott found 
guilty on the basis of a police cell boast to an informer and his 
handwriting on three envelopes containing communiqués. Six months later, 
the Stoke Newington Four plus another four libertarian and anarchist 
activists entered the dock at the Old Bailey for what was to prove the 
longest criminal trial in Britain. After six months, the original four 
(John Barker, Hilary Creek, Anna Mendelson and Jim Greenfield) were 
convicted by a majority verdict of conspiracy ?with persons unknown? but 
not of causing explosions, and the other four were acquitted on all 
charges. Ascribing their politics to ?a warped understanding of sociology?, 
Mr Justice James sentenced the four to ten years? imprisonment, reducing 
Prescott?s 15-year sentence to match. By this stage, supporters were going 
round London with badges proclaiming ?I am a member of the Angry Brigade,? 
and Time Out was running as front-page headlines ?Now We Are All Angry? (on 
the Prescott/Purdie trial) and, more circumspectly, ?The Verdict of an 
Uneasy Majority? (in the case of the Stoke Newington Eight).

None of the accused has ever admitted to any specific acts, though Jake 
Prescott wrote to one bomb victim, Robert Carr, apologising for the attack 
on him (an apology graciously accepted), and John Barker has stated that 
?the police framed a guilty man.? The convicted Anna Mendelson publishes 
poetry under another name and the acquitted Angela Weir became the director 
of Stonewall and was awarded an OBE. In February 2002, Hilary Creek gave an 
interview to the Observer which implied that she had been involved with the 
Angries, though she didn?t admit to any specific act. One of the acquitted 
wrote that ?some of the people on trial had indeed taken part in Angry 
Brigade actions? while ?some had not.?

This delicately equivocal formulation comes from Stuart Christie, whose 
hugely engaging memoir includes an account of the Angry Brigade trial. 
Granny Made Me an Anarchist describes how, after a short flirtation with 
the flute band of his local Orange lodge in Glasgow, the teenage Christie 
quickly graduated to the militant wing of CND. But his main political 
passion was Spain and the legacy of its Civil War, ?the last purely 
idealistic cause of the 20th century? and anarchism?s finest hour. Appalled 
by the normalisation of relations with the Franco regime after the Second 
World War (a ?25 years of peace? celebration in 1964 was attended by the 
then minister of trade, Edward Heath), the 18-year-old Christie volunteered 
to help the resistance, and found himself transporting plastic explosives 
under a baggy jumper from the Pyrenees to a rendezvous at an American 
Express office in Madrid, outside which he was arrested. Theoretically 
facing a death sentence, he mistook the police photography equipment for 
Franco?s notorious mechanical garotte, and remembers asking himself 
?whether this was the right time to shout something defiant and noble?.

Sentenced not to death but to 20 years? imprisonment, Christie found 
himself getting on with former SS members and a notorious prison guard 
nicknamed Pedro el Cruel (earlier, following a joint appearance on 
television, he had developed an unlikely but long-lasting friendship with 
Malcolm Muggeridge). After he had served three years, a plea from his 
mother to Franco secured his early release. He returned home in 1967 to a 
rapacious press, the transformed world of 1960s London, and, as his 
involvement in anti-war violence increased, the considerable attentions of 
the Metropolitan Police. The day after the Stoke Newington Four were 
arrested in August 1971, Christie stopped by to borrow some money from John 
Barker, was met by the Bomb Squad, and, as he put it, ?walked into a trap 
they didn?t even know they?d set?. (He was charged on the basis of two 
detonators found in his car, though his acquittal implies that this 
evidence was questionable.) Even before his arrest, Christie had been set 
up by the press and by a police force eager to find an organisation with a 
?leader, a membership and fixed plans?. In the absence of such an 
organisation, the police invented one and put it on trial at the Old Bailey.

As Christie points out, the activities that were attributed to the Angry 
Brigade (and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the Wild Bunch, the 
Geronimo Cell, the Moonlighters and a number of other groups) were an 
expression of a new, libertarian socialist movement that had emerged from 
the fragmentation of the left after the revolutionary moment of May 1968. 
That fragmentation occurred along a number of fault lines ? new left v. old 
left, Trotskyite v. Stalinist, Communist v. anarchist, hippy v. politico. 
As an anarchist, Stuart Christie sets himself apart both from the hippies 
(the Vietnam War was ?no way going to be stopped by good vibrations alone?) 
and from the libertarian Marxists of Amhurst Road. The most significant 
fault line, however, was between the anarchists and left libertarians, on 
the one hand, and, on the other, the Communist and emergent Trotskyite left.

Christie emphasises the working-class credentials of the Scottish anarchist 
movement, but although the Angry Brigade?s rhetoric located its politics 
firmly in the context of the class struggle, the day to day activities of 
those convicted of being members were different in several ways from those 
whom John Barker called the ?Bolshevik psychos?. First, like the American 
radicals working in the slums of northern cities in the mid-1960s, the 
Brigade was less concerned with the working class than with what would 
later be called the underclass, the urban homeless and the unemployed. 
Second, again like the Civil Rights and anti-war activists in the United 
States, the libertarian leftists strove to reflect their politics in their 
personal lives, forming communes, prefiguring the kind of society they 
wished to build, aspiring (as Christie puts it) to a new way of living 
rather than ?an abstract view of a remote future?. Third, those involved 
with the Angry Brigade believed that ministers, policemen and other people 
in power should be held personally responsible for their actions (hence the 
bombs planted at their homes). Finally, where the Marxist parties blamed 
the failure of May 1968 on a lack of coherent revolutionary leadership (and 
aspired to provide it), the thinking of the libertarian left was informed 
by the Situationist concept of a consumerist ?spectacle? which distracted, 
confused and bought off the masses (Christie himself downplays the 
importance of the Situationists, not least because Guy Debord was a ?total 
arsehole in his everyday relationships?). In addition to attacking the 
homes of senior politicians and policemen, the Angry Brigade claimed 
responsibility for targeting an outside broadcast van at the 1970 Miss 
World Contest at the Albert Hall (the event was in any case disrupted by 
women?s liberation protesters), and later the Biba shop. In this respect, 
they emulated the Red Army Faction, whose first bombings were directed 
against Frankfurt department stores. The presence of the word ?spectacle? 
in an early communiqué first alerted a well-read Special Branch officer to 
the Situationist influence and pointed him in the direction of the Angries.

There was a problem, however. Britain in the early 1970s provided clear 
evidence that the libertarians were wrong and the traditional Marxists were 
right. Both Christie and Carr note the upsurge of industrial militancy 
which marked the years between the publication of the Industrial Relations 
Bill in 1970 and the 1973-74 miners? strike, but both underestimate the 
support these events gave to revolutionary Marxism, and the challenge they 
posed to the prefigurative politics of the libertarian left (Carr?s 
chronology doesn?t even mention the February 1974 general election, the 
only time in British history that a government has been brought down by a 
strike). In Germany, the failure of the metropolitan masses to act led to 
the grandiose brutality of the Red Army Faction; in America, to the 
self-imposed marginalisation of the Weather Underground and the crazed 
fantasy of the SLA. In Britain, the success of public sector workers in 
bringing the country to a halt persuaded elements of the late 1960s new 
left that the old left had been right all along. Already, as the trial of 
the Angries began in the summer of 1972, it seemed that their politics had 
been overtaken by history.

Thirty years later, the miners? triumph in 1974 looks hubristic, an ironic 
prologue to the tragedy of 1984-85. On the other hand, the libertarian 
socialist critique of consumerism appears surprisingly, if not 
uncomfortably pertinent. This is a world in which challenges to oppression 
have been downgraded into lifestyle choices, the political process has been 
turned into a form of shopping, and (to quote a Situationist slogan) the 
ideology of consumption has become the consumption of ideology. In the 
paranoid atmosphere of the early 1970s, libertarian socialists all too 
easily slid into moral self-righteousness, mutual intimidation and 
witch-hunting. But today?s anti-globalisation protests look a lot more like 
the political theatrics of the libertarian movement than the solemn 
cadre-building of neo-Bolsheviks. Crude though their implementation may 
have been, the anti-racist and devolutionary policies of the 
libertarian-dominated Labour councils of the 1980s are now seen as common 
sense by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. Political anarchism on 
the model of the Spanish POUM may be a dim prospect in a world dominated by 
anarchy of a less benign character, but Christie?s cheerful iconoclasm 
appears not only more durable but also morally more sturdy than the 
Leninism that it sought to supplant. If the Angry Brigade was a left 
heresy, it?s good to be reminded what the orthodoxy was. The shadow of the 
1960s may turn out to be not so insubstantial after all.

full: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n24/edga01_.html

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