Skull and bones

Class War (CW) or the Class War Federation (CWF) was a small but extremely notorious anarchist (or anarchist-derived) group active in Britain during the 1980's and 1990's. They published a tabloid-format paper, “Class War”, which blended anarchist-inspired politics with crackpot humor in a kind of parody of the British gutter press. The paper was conspicuous, with its multi-colored front pages, screaming headlines and a masthead adorned with a huge skull-and-bones symbol. I admit that I found the paper great fun as a teenager, while a more “politically conscious” friend of mine considered it horrendous. For a while, the British tabloids (the real ones) blamed just about any outbreak of violence and mischief on the Class War crowd. After the 1990 London poll tax riot, the CWF were even mentioned in a Swedish daily and characterized as “Situationists”. The article claimed that CWF and the minuscule Revolutionary Vanguard group had organized the riot!

The CWF also published a theoretical magazine...

This is the first issue of “The Heavy Stuff”, and perhaps the most interesting of the issues on sale at Amazon. It contains several articles explaining Class War's political strategy. An important point is CW's almost complete rejection of the traditional left, both the Marxist groups and the anarchists. While the CW are obviously inspired by anarchism, they nevertheless regard the really existing anarchist “movement” as an irrelevant sub-cultural ghetto often populated by the mentally insane. The more serious anarchists may be well-meaning, but they are trying to resuscitate an equally irrelevant anarcho-syndicalist strategy that is almost a century old. As for Trotskyists and other Marxist groups, they are written off as mostly middle class, authoritarian and irrelevant to the day to day concerns of the workers.

CW's alternative is an orientation and identification with “the working class as a whole”, which is said to form the majority of the British population. Revolutionaries must intervene in the real struggles of the working class, which are usually rooted in the community rather than the workplace. It's also important to emphasize issues which confront workers daily, rather than traditional “leftist” talking points. While not rejecting union struggles, the CW concentrated on community issues such as the poll tax, gentrification, confrontations with the local police, muggings, rape, and harassment of immigrant workers by fascist groups. The strategy is to create “No Go Areas” from which the police, racists and criminals are excluded by the working class through its own elected committees. The only strike emphasized by Class War is the great miners' strike of 1984-85, due to its direct relevance for the working class communities in the mining districts. CW is somewhat ambivalent towards riots. On the one hand, confrontations of a riotous kind clearly form part of their strategy, the violent streak in “Class War” being obvious. On the other hand, riots give the criminal elements free reign, making it imperative to give the confrontations a more positive direction. The heavy emphasis placed on fighting crime through neighborhood watches independent of the police is interesting. One article in this issue of “The Heavy Stuff” recommends an outreach effort to rural workers (who often vote Conservative and don't join unions), something said to be impossible on the basis of “Labour Party Black sections” and other traditional leftist pastimes.

As part of the strategy to orient towards “the working class as a whole”, the CWF consciously modeled “Class War” on the scandal-mongering British tabloids, most notably “The Sun”. CWF propaganda could be described as “populist” in the sense that “Class War” was supposed to reach those workers who usually couldn't care less about a political magazine, rather preferring to read Murdoch papers. International issues, developments inside the Labour Party or heavy leftist theory were covered only occasionally, most of the paper being devoted to riots, weird publicity stunts (including faux candidates in the British elections!) or completely frivolous articles of the National Enquirer type. In hindsight, it's easy to see the limitation of this approach: it simply isn't possible to have an orientation to the working class “as a whole”. I think it's safe to assume that the CW's hilarity and violence-mongering didn't appeal to solid unionists, Labour core voters or immigrants trying to persuade the British people to stand up for, say, Kurdistan or the victims of apartheid. It presumably only attracted a very special kind of ghettoized anarchists! After a few years, the novelty had begun to wear off, “Class War” sounding more and more desperate to provoke, as when they attacked the rest of the left from the right (!), denouncing the calls for a general strike against the Tory government. Even later, the CWF began to support animal rights activists and sexual hedonists, but that was all in the future when this issue of “The Heavy Stuff” was published back in 1987.

I'm not an anarchist, obviously, so in a sense I don't really care, but with the benefit of hindsight, it's really amazing how anyone could take any of this “stuff” seriously. Despite (or rather because of) their anarcho-populist strategy, the CWF remained a small group, dwarfed by the leftist mammoths of the Militant Tendency, the Socialist Workers Party or even Socialist Organiser. Most workers still vote Labour, and I suppose most Kurds still care about Kurdistan...

Not sure how to rate this material, but I think three stars (or three skulls-with-bones) will do.