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opinion
Brixton rock
Victor
Paul Borg spends a night with some of the people who re-invented
the direct action in the nineties
On commission from High Times, the celebrated American magazine
dedicated to the counterculture and drugs, I called Mass, a club
in central Brixton (London), to invite myself to a warm-up party
in benefit of the Cannabis March and Festival on May 5. My story
would cover the Cannabis Festival (which last year attracted 30,000
in a collective orgy of music and ganja), the counterculture movement
in Brixton, and the state of drugs in Brixton (which is London's
drug den) and where to party. I introduced myself and told the voice
at the other end of the phone my mission, asking, ‘Have you
heard of High Times?'
‘Of course I have,' he said. ‘I'm from Brixton, dude.'
Then he turned away from the phone and said to someone in the same
room: ‘Hey, dude, there is someone from High Times on the line.'
The disembodied voice replied, ‘You kidding me?' When he got
to the phone, this voice, who introduced himself as David Dekafex
(London's hip-hop and drum'n'bass guru), broke into spasms of sniggering,
while I giggled in unison, and when we stopped giggling, he said,
‘Hey dude, I am a great fan of High Times. Come to the party
tonight and bring your troupe, all on the house.'
That night at Mass I hovered around the [English] Green Party's
stand. I met Shane Collins, frontrunner of the Green Party Drugs
Group and the brains and energy behind the Cannabis Festival, and
his fellow Green Party political candidate, Pete Jones. On the makeshift
stand covered with a psychedelic tablecloth, there were stacks of
literature about drugs and extreme-left ideology, including Nicholas
Saunders' Ecstasy Reconsidered, a TV screen airing home-made videos
of direct-action protests, and rows of Ecstasy Testing Kits. A trickle
of punters queued to have their Ecstasies tested: you crumble a
trace of dust from the pill, add a drop of chemical solution, compare
the colour produced on reaction to a colour chart and you get a
rough idea of the MDMA purity contained in that particular Ecstasy.
Shane told me he sells about a dozen Ecstasy Testing Kits a week,
at Lm8 to test forty Ecstasies.
But it was Harris X (name changed to protect identity) who amused
me. A short, muscled guy with a deep tan and deep lines gulleying
his face, Harris has an air of importance and prankster's swagger.
If you are Harris' long lost friend and want to track him down,
you will invariably find him on the frontlines of direct action
protests against economic globalisation or Capitalism or environmental
battles with a video camera in hand, and in the interim period,
he's likely to be drifting along with New Age gypsies who are shooed
away from field to field in the UK, always on the move, relentlessly
persecuted. Harris showed me the videos of the anti-globalisation
riots in Seattle eighteen months ago and in Prague last summer,
and he gets so close to the action you instinctively duck your head
as glass splinters from the shop window of some McDonalds branch
or a garbage bin comes sailing overhead. Sometimes, with his video
camera whirring, he shuffles towards the cordon of Robocop-style
riot police, and as they make a run for him, he turns and sprints
in the last moment – and the unedited footage squiggles as
he runs, and you get unfocused and dashing images of tarmac. He
showed me videos of protestors chained to trees to prevent woods
being bulldozed for roads or houses, videos of gypsies challenging
foul-mouthed middle-class residents in suburbia, and videos of guerrilla-styled
anarchists occupying disused factories. In the end, the credits
in the videos went to Reclaim the Streets, the direct-action movement
that started in London in the mid-nineties and quickly spread across
the world. I told Harris I admired his fearlessness. He beamed proudly.
Now Harris brandished his camera and panned across the packed club
as The Alabama 3, a local band who are minor celebrities in south
London, held people's attention with their live performance. Six
grown up men, half of them dressed in cowboy garb, the rest wearing
the denim they would wear to go to the supermarket on Saturday for
the weekly shopping mission, and their music is a cross between
country and warped electronic sounds. They are dopey, psychedelic
and cheerful, and the crowd crooned and hurrahed and twisted in
a dopey fashion.
The latest strategy in direct action is to target an event and make
it so expensive and frustrating for the state to carry out that
event that eventually the government has to cave in. This strategy
has been a resounding success in the anti-globalisation campaign.
In Seattle and Prague thousands of protestors first tried to block
the delegates for making it to the World Trade Organisation meeting
and then tried to corral them inside the conference hall. So assailed,
delayed, frustrated, disrupted has each meeting of the WTO and IMF
become that the economic globalisation process has been derailed.
This is also the same strategy, for example, employed by German
nuke protestors last week as they cemented themselves to rail tracks,
and now each shipment of uranium waste has to be accompanied by
an army of police, an operation that costs the state billions.
As I watched the footage of riots and rampage, Pete Jones sidled
up to me and said, ‘I don't agree with violence.'
There is heated debate within the direct action movement about the
role of violence. Virtually everyone agrees that violence against
human life, even private property, is a sacred no-go territory.
But what about destruction targeted at faceless corporations? Some
argue that, say, unleashing one's rage at a McDonalds' store or
some financial institution in the London's financial district is
a warranted symbolic action against these icons of Capitalism and
global corporations that are causing so much human and social misery
and environmental destruction around the world.
With Pete I spoke about the ideological hostilities in European
Green Parties. Pete, a political candidate in general elections
for Streatham (London), told me he's fallen out with his former
mentor, the South London Green Member of European Parliament (MEP),
over matters of ideology. He lamented that when candidates are elected
to parliament, their ideology becomes fudged and incoherent, and
as they faced accusations from supporters, they defend their stance
by arguing that in power you have to put ‘pragmatism and practical
aims over ideology.' An example of this is the difficult situation
Oscar Fischer, the German foreign minister, has to grapple with.
In the sixties, Fischer was a radical guerrilla, but last year he
found himself in the impossible situation of having to justify to
his party colleagues NATO's bombing of Serbia (How can you honour
the principle that all violence is unacceptable while you've got
your finger on the trigger?). Pete vowed that he would never bend
his principles and I questioned the wisdom of this: if you don't
compromise, I said, you will be isolated and then you still haven't
achieved an inch of anything.
‘I have my reservations,' I said, ‘about whether ideology
can be enforced top down. Look at Communism, it became an autocracy
and the system eventually collapsed. I think ideology can only be
spread at the grass roots, mouth to mouth, mind to mind, hoping
that ultimately it will filter its way up. That is why I'll never
be a politician, and power dents you because one of your hands is
tied.'
After all, the worldwide hurricane of direct action in the past
five years has galvanised people at the grassroots. So potent has
this movement become that it is considered a threat to the state
by the secret service agencies of every western country, and governments,
scratching their heads in defeated perplexity, are resorting to
desperate measures to foil the movement. In the UK, for example,
the government has two months ago re-engineered the Terrorism Act
in a covert attempt to squash direct action. The powers ushered
in the Terrorism Act are so wide and sweeping (and at pains with
human rights) that wearing a T-shirt with the legend Reclaim the
Streets is illegal, for example. By writing this article, I could
be liable to prosecution under the Terrorism Act because by publicising
direct action I could be deemed part of the subversive plot to sabotage
the state, and if you copy this article and send it to friends,
you are party to my crime.
Victor Paul Borg is a freelance writer based in London and can be
contacted at victor@borg.tf. His column appears here weekly. |
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