THE CONFLICT FRONTMAN WAS ONE OF THE FEW WHO WALKED THE PUNK WALK AS MUCH AS THEY TALKED IT ~ Phil ~ Colin Jerwood, frontman and organiser of legendary anarcho-punk band Conflict, has passed away after a short illness, his family said in a statement released yesterday. The band also released a statement saying “As you can imagine we are struggling to find the words to describe how sad and upset we feel upon hearing of the loss of our band member and dear friend Colin. We extend our deepest condolences to James, Georgia and the rest of Colin’s family and friends. We ask that you respect their wishes and understand that we are all currently grieving a great loss”. Jerwood, who was 63, had led Conflict since their formation in South London in 1981. The band’s first release was the 1982 EP “The House That Man Built” on Crass Records. The next year they started their own label, Mortarhate, which also released music by other artists including Hagar the Womb, Icons of Filth, Lost Cherrees, The Apostles, and Stalag 17. Self-described as the Ungovernable Force, Colin and Conflict were in the thick of the action, whether the agenda was anti-war, animal rights or anti-capitalism. They gained notoriety for acts such as providing addresses of vivisectionists on the inside of their record sleeves, and they financially supported organisations and bust funds. A concert at Brixton Academy in 1987, labelled The Gathering of the 5,000, with Steve Ignorant added to the line up and poet Benjamin Zephaniah enlisted to help out, was violently attacked by the police and ended in a riot that had major consequences for the band. In Colin’s own words: “Three punk bands have been the subject of parliamentary debate, The Sex Pistols, Crass and Conflict. Only one has ever been officially banned from making live appearances by order of a white paper, and that is Conflict”. With Conflict in Los Angeles, 1985. Photo: Luis Castro The band’s latest work, “This Much Remains”, was released only last month, and recently Colin had been working on his memoir, encompassing “Conflict, the movement, and me.” His untimely passing is a major shock for many, and a tribute page has been created where many fans are paying their respects. “Colin and Conflict, Crass, and all the rest of those bands from the early 80s set me on the trajectory of my whole life”, wrote one contributor, “I now work for a trade union as a consequence of those politics and ethics. No compromise with the servants of power! An inspiring life Colin. Thank you”. Another fan wrote: “I remember the day 1983 when the 16 year old me went off to buy the first album. It’s a cliche to say that a record changed your life and the way you think. But inside every cliche there’s a grain of truth. This was mine. Thanks for all the gigs, the music and the sentiment. You will always be missed.” My personal recollection goes back to the summer of 1990, when a 17 year old version of me saw the Stone Roses play in Spike Island. I also saw Conflict play at the Marquee in Charing Cross Road. You can guess which had the bigger impact. A rare gig for Conflict at that time, they hadn’t played for a while and had to play previous gigs secretly under pseudonyms. I had only recently been introduced at school to Crass and Conflict, both bands were before my time and punk had already gone underground. It was a miracle I ever heard of them. I’m so glad I did. The lyrics of these bands opened windows, and actually blew the bloody doors off in my case of how I thought about the world. The blinkers were off. While I found Crass to have more of an individualistic take on things, I warmed to Conflict, their desire to build a movement and their emotional take on politics and humanity. What was very important to me was Colin’s honesty about the scene he saw around him. Performing at T-Chances, 2017. Photo: Del Blyben When I found out yesterday he had suddenly passed away, I was first in disbelief (Conflict have been touring with their new record), and then very, very sad. Colin Jerwood, the man who led a band but never wanted to be a leader (“you never wanted leaders but you treated us as such”), one of the few who walked the punk walk as much as they talked it. He supported human rights, animal rights, class war and anti-fascism, and dealt head-on with police and state violence. There are so many stories that could be written about Colin and so many points of view, lots has been written and I’m sure lots more will be. Recently he featured in the publication Anarcho-Punk: Music and Resistance in London 1977-1988 by David Insurrection. Colin talked about freedom, about anarchism, about hypocrisy and about the power we have and don’t realise. He turned me, a teenage council estate kid, into new ways of thinking and I will be forever grateful.  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Top image: Jerwood at Punks against Cancer 5, Derby, 2017. Photo: Ian Taylor The post Colin Jerwood R.I.P. appeared first on Freedom News.

IN PART 2 OF “ON THE PRACTICES OF RADICAL PUNK” WE MEET ABBIE HOFFMAN AND DISCUSS MAXIMUM ROCK’N’ROLL AND THE USES OF DO-IT YOURSELF CULTURE ~ Alex Ratcharge ~ In the 1960s and 1970s, anarchist Abbie Hoffman was one of the founders of the Youth International Party, whose members called themselves “Yippies”. More than thirty years after his death, the United States and, more generally, those interested in the history of the counterculture, still see him as a symbol of the wind of freedom and protest that blew through American youth in those decades. When Mark Fisher talks about the heyday of the counterculture and says that “What the capitalists were afraid of was that the working class would become hippies on a massive scale”, I like to think he’s thinking of Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies. I suspect he’s not referring to the beatniks we all too often think of today—a bunch of bell-bottomed sex maniacs who smoke pot and make out all day, doing acid highs in the city centre—but to agitators like the Youth International Party (YIP). A libertarian party that emerged from the Free Speech Movement and the anti-war movements of the 1960s, the YIP claims to be more radical than its predecessors. Today, if we want to get a more precise idea of its practices, we can look at the written testimonies of the time, including Steal this book by Abbie Hoffman. The book is divided into two parts: “Survive!” and “Fight!” In “Survive!”, the reader is treated to advice on how to steal, and conspire to get by, so as to depend as little as possible on money. Each sub-part is devoted to ways to get something without paying for it: food, clothing, furniture, transportation, land, housing, medical care, entertainment, all the way to “free money” and “free drugs”, before the catch-all “assorted free stuff”, itself divided into sub-parts—“laundry”, “pets”, “postage”, “veterans’ benefits”, “degrees”, and even “funerals”, where one learns how to “avoid the exorbitant price of death”. The second part, “Fight!”, provides lots of advice on setting up a clandestine printing workshop, launching an underground newspaper, dressing up and causing havoc at a demonstration… Before discussing “popular chemistry” (or how to make stink bombs, smoke bombs, Molotov cocktails, Sterno bombs, aerosol bombs, pipe bombs, etc.), first aid, the use of “peacemakers” (rifles, shotguns, etc.), the “strategy of chaos” and finally “clandestinity” (or how to find false identity papers and go underground). For the twenty-first century reader, what is striking in Steal This Book is the tangibility of the subject. Certainly, one of Hoffman’s particularities was to manipulate a humour that would not have been denied by agitators such as Dada, the surrealists, the situationists or the provos, to name only the most obvious. But it seems to me that it is thanks to his conviction of working for the common good, that is to say against capitalism, that Abbie Hoffman allows himself to manipulate this humour: if the goal is to move towards a more just society and to annihilate what oppresses us, and if this objective seems within reach, we can understand that the author wants to do it with joy, itself conducive to humour, and not with a defeatism that is too often counterproductive. "Here, one learns how to make glue from toothpaste, how to make a shiv from a spoon, and how to establish complex communication networks. It is also here that one learns the only possible rehabilitation: hatred of oppression”. – Abbie Hoffman Steal This Book was not written for posterity: it was a work intended to serve as a combat guide for fans of Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix and the like, in their own present, that of the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States. But then, why mention it today? And above all, nearly fifty years later, why did a French publisher undertake to translate it? One answer is that Steal This Book is a historical document, that of a movement that did not survive the neoliberal counteroffensive of the 1980s. If most of Hoffman’s advice is no longer applicable, the contemporary reader is nonetheless struck by the liveliness of these pages… But also, and above all by their optimism, the same one that Mark Fisher evokes when he writes, in the second half of the 2010s, that “We must rediscover the optimism of the 1970s”. It’s true, Steal This Book runs on the hopes of its generation – that of the Summer of Love, LSD, psychedelic music, Woodstock, but also of the free press, the fight for civil rights, the fight against the Vietnam War. This generation that Mark Fisher considers, in hindsight, to have represented “a serious danger” to the powers that be. Fifty years after its publication, the reader of Steal This Book is struck by the feeling that everything seemed possible at the time, and that nothing prevented anyone from deserting the wage system and organizsing themselves, alone or in affinity groups, to live differently, not tomorrow but here and now, while actively fighting the enemy, namely oppression in all its forms. For me, Steal This Book brought up questions that had remained unanswered after reading Acid Communism. However, they are two very different texts: while Mark Fisher remains in theory, drawing inspiration from what he has read and heard a posteriori about the North American counterculture (as well as Italian autonomy in the 1960s and 1970s), Abbie Hoffman writes in the present tense and draws on his real-time experience, to describe to us what it is like to live the counterculture day by day. In other words, as different as they are, these two texts can also be read as two sides of the same coin: on Hoffman’s side, practice, on Fisher’s side, theory. Personally, these two books reminded me of practices at work here and now, in underground music and autonomy circles. In particular, they remind me of what I have experienced for the past twenty years as a participant in radical punk. So I wonder if these practices are not modest, concrete and accessible illustrations of what Fisher hoped to see reborn at the beginning of the twenty-first century. And this is why I want to describe some of the ways in which radical punk seems to me to be a continuation of the counterculture as Hoffman showed it in Steal This Book , but also, perhaps, a prefiguration of the acid communism as Fisher tried to define it before his death. ON RADICAL PUNK AND DIY “People should resist in whatever way they can. They should cooperate, try to create environments where they can maintain some form of sanity, and have fun doing it. If you feel trapped in that system, do what you can to fix it. Otherwise you will become bitter, and that will be a victory for them”. – Tim Yohannan Before discussing radical punk media using the example of Maximum Rock’n’roll, let me throw a pebble in the pond: punk is not and has never been the opposite of the hippie. These are two figures from the same continuum, that of a counterculture that includes Dada as well as the provos, the surrealists, the lettrists and their situationist offspring, the Zapatistas, radical feminists, gay liberation movements, heretics and witches, armed struggle groups (Weather Underground, Black Panthers, Red Army Faction or Action Directe), homeless people, hobos or vagabonds, rappers, free-jazz and experimental musicians, party-goers, beat generation writers, skinheads and so on… Without forgetting, therefore, the hippie and his “nihilist double” punk. If the mainstream media has always sold us a story opposing punks and hippies, those who take the time to look into it will find that the bridges between the decline of the hippie (from 1969) and the advent of punk (1976/1977) are numerous. The term “punk” was used from the beginning of the 1970s by certain journalists from Creem magazine, including Lester Bangs, to describe garage groups like the Stooges or the MC5. In New York, the Velvet Underground was formed in the mid-1960s and immediately distinguished itself from the hippie movement by the darkness of its music and its message. Not to mention the countless groups now called “proto-punks”, which also blur the boundary between the two periods: electric eels, David Peel & The Lower East Side, The Fugs, some garage bands from the Back From The Grave compilations, and so on. This theory is verified in the world of literature, comics, cinema, “politics” or at the level of  individual testimony. One such individual, Tim Yohannan, was born in the United States in 1945; twenty years later, he was caught in the full force of the psychedelic explosion. A 1968 photo shows him sitting in the desert with long hair, a moustache and sideburns; on Wikipedia, his biography states: “Yohannan was first a leftist of the counterculture of the 1960s, before applying what he had learned from it to the punk scene”. A self-proclaimed Marxist, a harsh critic of the commercialization of music, and a controversial figure due to his radical positions, the man nicknamed “Tim Yo” launched a punk show on the community radio station KPFA in Berkeley, California, in the late 1970s. He called it Maximum Rock’n’roll and surrounded himself with what he called his “gang” of DJs, including Jello Biafra, singer of the Dead Kennedys and future boss of the Alternative Tentacles label. But it was in 1982 that Maximum Rock’n’roll, while continuing to broadcast on KPFA and then on community radio stations throughout the United States, also became a fanzine of the same name, dedicated to the hardcore punk explosion then underway in the United States and around the world. To sum up the state of mind of this punk Stakhanovite, and to understand how his thinking brings him closer to Mark Fisher or Abbie Hoffman, we will refer to his countless mood pieces and columns in Maximum Rock’n’roll, as well as to the interviews he gave before dying of cancer in 1998, at the age of 53: “The major change I’ve seen in the last twenty years, I would say, is the way capitalism has developed, giving more and more power and wealth to a small number of people with the blessing of the media, which has affected the way people think. To me, it’s part of a strategy: bombarding people with so much information and so much bullshit that they don’t know what to think about anything. And it’s been very effective, in the sense that today, with the defeat of any alternative, capitalism reigns – until it destroys the world or destroys itself. I don’t think there’s any effective large-scale resistance that can be organized against the current power… Which is not to say that we shouldn’t fight. In other words, I don’t feel depressed by all this”. From the moment the paper version of Maximum Rock’n’roll was launched, things moved very quickly: a myriad of hardcore punk bands were formed all over the world, and their members discovered, sometimes with amazement, the Marxist, libertarian and internationalist vision of Tim Yo and his gang. The cover of issue 6 (May-June 1983) is a good illustration of this: we see a live photo of The Dicks, these communist, transvestite and homosexual Texan punks, under the big headline “THE DICKS: A COMMIE FAGGOT BAND?!!?” . Knowing that we are in the United States, where the term “communist” is often considered an insult, especially in the middle of the Reagan era, all in a hardcore scene already divided between reactionaries and progressives, the message is clear: choose your side, comrade. The editorial line of “MRR”, as its readers call it, will remain unchanged for the 37 years (!) of publication of the fanzine, which ceased offline publication in 2019. The issues, sent to the printer at a bi-monthly then monthly rate, are all about a hundred pages long, on the cheapest newsprint so that the sale price remains affordable; the content consists of a mix of interviews and hardcore/punk/garage/post-punk columns, advertisements (but not for bands on major labels  and their subdivisions), but also mood pieces (the famous “columns”) and a reader’s letter section where we debate politics and practices. The operation is collective, self-managed, without subsidies; everyone, including Tim Yo, is a volunteer; MRR runs on passion, and covers the punk scene like a new kind of proletariat, fighting against all the reactionaries in the world. In the middle of the Cold War, we find introductions to Eastern European punk, still under the Soviet yoke. This was the time when the radical punk network was being established, and MRR played a leading role in it, to the point of being nicknamed “the CIA” or “the political correctness police” by its detractors. To which the collective of volunteers, who encouraged punks from all over the world to submit articles, letters or interviews, invariably responded: “You don’t like what you read in MRR? Then take matters into your own hands and CONTRIBUTE!” Fast forward, change of scenery. We are in France, nearly 10,000 kilometers from MRR HQ, in the early hours of the twenty-first century, eighteen years after the launch of the fanzine, and two years after the death of Tim Yo. As a testament, the latter wrote a copious guide explaining to his successors how to hold the MRR boat, if possible against all odds, since conflict is life. It is stipulated that the fanzine should never be printed on anything other than newsprint, that it should never be in colour, that bands signed to major labels will never be allowed to appear there… But also that to take on the role of “coordinator”, which had previously fallen to Tim Yo, it is better to favour women, since “in the punk scene, by force of circumstances, they are generally more combative than men.” And that’s how, on a sidewalk in a medium-sized town in France, a young homeless punk barely of age, with a mohawk on his head and a skateboard on his feet, an “A” circled in Tipp-Ex on his backpack, LSD all over his brain and black ink all over his fingers, found himself leafing through for the first time in his life a musical fanzine with a strong feminist tendency, coordinated for two years by a woman named Arwen Curry. You probably understood: this young man was me. While I had just dropped out of school, slammed the door of my parents’ home, thrown my belongings into a backpack and hit the road, my predilection for English allowed me to discover the fanzine that would change my life. I already knew the name, often cited in interviews with punk groups; its creator himself was not completely foreign to me, since I listened to the decadent clowns of NOFX who, a year before Tim Yo’s death, recorded a scathing song mocking his legendary inflexibility. What I don’t know yet is that one of the niches of Tim and his successors is to educate young punks, encouraging them to think for themselves, to challenge all forms of authority and to get their fingers out of their ass to launch musical projects – bands, fanzines, labels, venues, etc. For me, who grew up in a family without political culture, where we never talked about anything, and whose childhood friends were mainly interested in skateboarding and the naiads of Baywatch, the shock is enormous. Very quickly, I send a copy of Black Lung, my own fanzine – twelve A4 sheets written in BIC pen – like a message in a bottle, hoping without really believing that MRR will review it. Two months later, I received a yellow-orange envelope containing the latest issue which, oh joy, oh consecration, recommended my rag printed in 25 copies to French-speaking punks around the world – because MRR was still in its glory days, before the advent of the Internet, when the print run was in the tens of thousands of copies, distributed on press tables from Japan to Finland, from Australia to England, from Poland to France. This contact led to others and, quite quickly, encouraged by the calls for contributions (“Come on, take matters into your own hands and CONTRIBUTE!”), I submitted an interview with a small hardcore punk band from Bordeaux, which was published shortly after. New shock: I was barely 20 years old, I worked in a factory, I only had a degree in the street, and here I was a journalist for a newspaper that Americans could find at their newsagents, and that punks from all over the world called their “bible”. While continuing to write my fanzines, whose editorial lines owed a lot to MRR, I contributed more and more to them, until I joined the collective and was offered a monthly column, which would first be called “Brain Works Slow” then “So Long, Neurons”. The coordinators who took over from Arwen Curry, Layla Gibbon at the head, also encouraged me to submit drawings to them, which always ended up being published, at a time when no one in France ever asked me for them. Little by little, all this helped to give me confidence in my “artistic practice”, me, the shy self-taught guy from the Parisian suburbs. Or to put it another way and use MRR vocabulary, this group of American women whose faces I didn’t even know largely contributed to my empowerment … Until I decided, in the early 2010s, to go and pay them a little visit in San Francisco. More next week… The first part is available here -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- from Audimat via Lundi Matin, corrected machine translation The post The punk scene as a new proletariat appeared first on Freedom News.

FROM SHOWS IN SQUATS TO MILITANT ACTION, PUNK SHOWS THE CONVERGENCE BETWEEN CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS, PSYCHEDELIC CONSCIOUSNESS, AND CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING (1/3) ~ Alex Ratcharge ~ In memory of Marc, aka Papi (1965-2022) “We operate as a kind of clandestine, blundering, haphazard anarchist collective, made up of a group of friends who like to do things together” – Giacomo Stefanini1 For all intents and purposes, let us say that I am neither a theoretician, nor a philosopher, nor a specialist in political matters, but a humble 40-year-old reader, also a fanzine publisher and the author of a novel (Shortcut to Nowhere) exploring the world of punk and autonomous squats in France and Navarre – fictions inspired by my experience since, to quote NOFX, “I’ve been a punk- rocker for most of my life”.2 Or more prosaically: for better or for worse, I am one of the countless cogs in the wheel of what I will call here “radical punk”.3 I use this term in reference to a decentralised global network that its participants have called, over the decades, “DIY punk”, “HC punk DIY”, or “anarcho-punk” — designations that are as porous as they are shifting, none of which seems more appropriate to me. On the one hand, the acronym “DIY” (Do it Yourself) has been emptied of its subversive potential and diverted towards self-entrepreneurship, “creative hobbies”, and this tendency to keep telling us that “doing everything yourself”, in a socio-economic context, would be a guarantee of freedom and not of precariousness. On the other hand, the term “anarcho-punk” seems to me to be too unrepresentative of the different sensibilities, even if they are all very left-wing, at work in radical punk: anarchists, certainly, but also libertarian communists, autonomous, post-situ, “without labels”, even “classic voters” or quasi “apolitical”. Especially since this term has tended, for at least two decades, to become synonymous with ultra-codified sounds and aesthetics, which means that a group that sounds like Crass, will tend to be described as “anarcho-punk” regardless of its practices, while a group of anarchists playing, for example, Oi!, will simply be described as an Oi! group. For these reasons, I have chosen the term “radical punk”, which has the merit of referring to the term “radical left”, of making a distinction with other types of punk and, above all, of allowing us to name it without needing long-winded explanations such as punk-where-we-favor-squats-and-whose-actors-are-feminists–anti-racists–anti-authoritarians–etc. (Reminder: the word “radical”, derived from the Latin radix [“root”], means among other things “Which aims to act on the root cause of the effects that we want to modify.” Knowing that the “effects to modify” here are those of capitalism, patriarchy, etc.). A horizontal movement, radical punk is not supposed to have flagship groups: it is internationalist, plural, and each of its actors is theoretically replaceable. To make my point, here are a few names. In the 1980s, let’s randomly cite Crass, Alternative TV, The Door and The Window, The Desperate Bicycles (United Kingdom), Heimat-los (France) or Minor Threat (United States); in the 1990s, let’s pick Harum-Scarum or Los Crudos in the United States, Sin Dios in Spain, or Seein’ Red in the Netherlands. In the 2000s and 2010s, why not come back to France with Gasmask Terrör, Holy Fuckin’ Shit! (Bordeaux), La Fraction, Nocif (Paris), Zone Infinie, Litige (Lyon), Traitre, Douche Froide (Lille), etc..4 In terms of labels, they are virtually as numerous as the groups (in France, among dozens of others: Panx, Stonehenge, Creepozoïd, Mutant, LADA, Symphony Of Destruction…), and as for the media, besides the infinity of small fanzines, most of which do not exceed two issues, but which play an important role in the liveliness of this movement, I will limit myself to citing important English-language titles which are now defunct: Slug & Lettuce, Profane Existence, Heartattack , Reason To Believe and especially Maximum Rock’n’roll, which we will come back to soon. I cite these names to anchor my point, and not to give some more importance than others. Because one of the general rules of radical punk, home to thousands of bands and other ephemeral collectives, is that all its participants are of equal importance, whether they are musicians, concert and/or tour promoters, label bosses, fanzine editors, squatters and/or “owners” of venues, participants without roles or titles — all these functions being infinitely interchangeable, so that a radical punk can be seen, on the same night, in the role of singer, cook, working on the door of the show, mopping the floor, or simply leaning on the bar counter… This interchangeability of roles being, it seems to me, one of the ways to distinguish radical punk from other types of punks. In short, radical punk is a decentralised global network that aims to establish or maintain a “parallel society” with its music, customs, diet, debates, media, and even its own postal network. Its strength owes much to international tours managed with the means at hand, to its principles of hospitality and reciprocity, to its uninhibited relationship with illegality and/or clandestinity, to its places, its media, as well as to its countless moments of conviviality: meals, drinking sessions, dances, and daily tasks are often practiced in groups. Hoping that all this seems a little clearer to you, let’s move on to the thousand-euro question: how did I come to want to report on the practices of radical punk? It would be difficult to explain it without mentioning the North American agitator Abbie Hoffman (1936-1989) and the British theorist Mark Fisher (1968-2017). What is the connection between Mark Fisher, Abbie Hoffman, the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s and the so-called “DIY” punk network? This is the question around which this article is structured. The article would not have seen the light of day without these four elements. * * * "The idea that 'I don't intend to work and I should stop worrying' was the key element of the counterculture. What the capitalists feared was that the working class would become hippies on a large scale, and that was a serious danger." – Mark Fisher In 2018, the French translation of Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher, published by Entremonde, was an event for some readers, including myself. Philosopher, blogger, music critic, Mark Fisher has devoted a good part of his life to building a body of work whose keystone is precisely this “capitalist realism” – that is, the persistent impression that in times of climate chaos, after four decades of neoliberal rule, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than that of capitalism”.5 Under Fisher’s pen, pop culture reveals its intentions; behind its a-political facade, it would be a site of ideology. From blockbusters to music videos to reality TV, the bulk of mainstream culture of the twenty-first century would thus have the aim, conscious or not, of reinforcing neoliberal hegemony by polluting our imaginations with this notion dear to Margaret Thatcher: there is no alternative. Utopias buried, counterculture defeated, avant-gardes forgotten: for freaks, punks, hippies, left-wing radicals and other revolutionaries, the time would have come to bow down, that is to say, to join the ranks of the great war of all against all, if possible isolated in a cybernetic cocoon based on telework and/or self-exploitation, like in a good old Covid nightmare. For Fisher, whose primary subject of study is music, from the post-punk of The Fall to the dubstep of Burial, this observation explains the endless loop of “retromania”6 in which the fourth art has been mired since the end of the 1990s: if the listener becomes bogged down by revival after revival, rehash after rehash, it is not because everything has already been done or said, but because our imaginations have been colonised, wasted away and then cryogenically frozen by capitalist realism. Neither dead nor alive, our ability to imagine another soundtrack, and as for making other futures, now floats in limbo, like the “spectre of a world that could have been free”7…Or, quite simply, as in one of the oldest punk slogans, the so-often misunderstood “No Future”. Blog post after blog post, conference after conference, Fisher ploughs his furrow. What he fights is neoliberal ideology and the way it infiltrates our bodies, our minds, our workplaces and even our songs, all the while managing to convince us that it is not ideology, but pure pragmatism. According to its advocates, late capitalism would be humanity’s final destination after millennia of wandering; despite its “small flaws”, it would therefore be unconscious to look elsewhere. But here’s the thing: for Mark Fisher, this belief in the inevitability of capitalism would be nothing more than an ideological presupposition that needs to be torn to pieces as a matter of urgency. Whether he’s writing for his blog or in the pages of The Wire, about Tricky or Joy Division, about Kanye West or The Cure, about Scritti Politti or Public Enemy, our man is dedicated to this task. He co-founded the publishing house Zero Books, reworked his blog posts, and published them as books. And then in 2016, after more than a decade of identifying the problem, here he is tackling a new task: formulating a solution. This way out of capitalist realism, Fisher calls “acid communism”.8 A concept that “refers both to real historical developments and to a virtual confluence that has not yet materialised”. He wrote the introduction to an eponymous essay (Postcapitalist Desires) which ends with these words: “the material conditions for a revolution are more present in the 21st century than they were in 1977. But what has changed since then is the existential and emotional atmosphere. People are resigned to the sadness of work, even as they are told that automation will make theirs disappear. We must rediscover the optimism of the 1970s, and we must analyse the machinery that capitalism has deployed to transform our hopes into resignation. Now, the first step in reversing this process of deflation of consciousness is to understand how it works”.9 This seems to announce a program, but no one will know it: on January 13, 2017, Mark Fisher, a notorious depressive who vilified the “privatisation of mental health,” took his own life in his home. A year earlier, during a conference on acid communism, the man who was banking on the plasticity of reality declared that “We are on the threshold of a new wave, on which we can begin to surf towards post-capitalism”. Is it because of Fisher’s suicide and its unfinished aspect that the essay Acidcommunism struck me so much? In part, yes. It must be said that it all seems like a bad joke: after hundreds and hundreds of pages of criticism and definition of the contours of capitalist realism, it is in this text that the theorist finally seems determined to propose a solution, that is to say a possible way out, a liberation from the almost invisible chains by which this ideology suffocates us, depresses us, separates us, destroys our planet, etc. This unfinished text therefore evokes a future corpse on its deathbed, taking its last breath a second before being able to dispense its precious advice. But that’s not all. The second reason for my obsession is that the ideas mentioned in this introduction to Acidcommunism resonated with me, as if some of Fisher’s words had held up a blurry mirror to me, reflecting elements of my own experience, without me dwelling on them carefully enough to put my finger on the reasons for this disorder… At least until someone put a book by another deceased author in my hands: Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman. (More next week…) from Audimat via Lundi Matin, corrected machine translation -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Member of the Italian label and concert organising collective Sentiero Futuro ↩︎ 2. “Theme From A NOFX Album”, on the album Pump up the Valuum (Epitaph, 2000) ↩︎ 3. I think I first came across this term about fifteen years ago, in the fanzines of the Spanish anarchist punk Teodoro Hernández, who wrote it with a “k” in “radikal”. Perhaps it was then a derivative of the term “radical rock” which was attached to Basque punk groups including Eskorbuto, RIP or Delirium Tremens. ↩︎ 4. I only cite Western groups here, but the radical punk network is active all over the world, with groups from Latin America to Japan, via Southeast Asia, Russia, Morocco, Algeria, etc. ↩︎ 5. According to the formula attributed to the Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek. ↩︎ 6. To use the expression dear to his colleague and friend Simon Reynolds. ↩︎ 7. K-Punk, p.753. Repeater Books, 2018. ↩︎ 8. Ibid, p.758. ↩︎ 9. M. Fisher, Postcapitalist Desires, p. 770 (Audimat, 2022) [trans. back from French, refer to original –Ed.) ↩︎ The post On the practices of radical punk appeared first on Freedom News.