The Conway Hall ‘May 1968′ jamboree featured some self styled experts keen to pontificate upon the meaning of that exciting month. One of these was one Richard Barbrook, Labour Party member and author of ‘Imaginary Futures.’ whereupon he attempts to explain the links between the ‘new left’ of the 1950s/60s and emergent ‘cyber-yuppies’: the thesis he presents is that radical ideas are quickly recuperated by defenders of the system. Being a card-carrying member of the Go-To-Work Party, this is a subject he may be well qualified to talk about. It’s the new hot-ticket in academia; another young turk singing for his supper from the same hymn sheet is the author of ‘The Pirate’s Dilemma‘, Matt Mason. They remind us of the stockbrokers in the bear-pit: ‘Sell, sell sell!’ Unlike their friends in the Square Mile, however, they don’t sell peasant labour by the yard, they sell lukewarm ideas instead.

One of Barbrooks’ cronies is Fabien Thomsett. Appropriately, Thomsett translated one of the least-best articles ever written by the artist and one-time Situationist Asger Jorn: ‘Open Creation and It’s Enemies.’ In the 1980s Thomsett was mired in mysticism, as he attempted to establish the veracity of ‘ley-lines’. What a cretin. Another of Barbrooks associates is the half-baked mystic-general himself, Stewart Mobile-Home. Home likes to present a radical sheen, so he sprinkles his dirge with references to the Italian ‘communist’ Amadeo Bordiga. Bordiga is famous for equating fascism with democracy. Quite a fitting outlook for Home, as any Red-Brown apologist will tell you. Home likes to describe graphically violent outpourings in his ‘work.’ The literary clique in London swoon over Mobile-Home - they think Home is their connection to the Dickensian underground they covet so desperately. In the 1980s such literary and artistic types filled their bored lives with paper rounds for the Revolutionary Communist Party. Today their loneliness leads them to new feeding frenzies.

A spin-off from Bordiga emerged to some small acclaim in the mid 1980s, after the defeat of the Miner’s Strike. A nonentity by the name of ‘Jean Barrot’ wrote some rubbish called ‘Fascism and Anti-Facsism.’ It was a complete rip-off of Bordiga’s ideas. It opens with this embarrassing piece of complete rubbish: The horrors of fascism were not the first of their kind, nor were they the last. Nor were they the worst, no matter what anyone says. These horrors were no worse than “normal” massacres due to wars, famines, etc.’ Some were spell-bound by this, and went on to have a massive political sulk for the rest of their lives, refusing to help organise unions or strikes, because, they claim ‘unions help to maintain capital.’ And so, like a three legged race in Dantes’ inner circle of Hell; like gravitates towards like.

Not all those that speak of May 1968 should be consigned to the dumpster-bin. Sebastian Hayes’ essay Rimbaud Revisited 1968 — 2006 which appears in his recent book, Arthur Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer, A New Translation with Notes (available online from www.brimstonepress.co.uk) reflects on the relationship between the events of May ‘68 and the libertines of 19th Century poetry. He says how, during that time in Paris 1968 there were always endless earnest discussions going on late into the night about how a ‘revolutionary’ should behave in life, including how he or she should conduct his or her personal relations. ‘La revolution sera une fete ou ne sera pas ‘ is not sufficient and needs to be coupled with the requirement that the ‘revolution’ — supposing the term has any meaning these days — should introduce a new and better form of morality that people really put into practice on a day to day basis.’ We look forward to a time when the concept ‘revolution’ is reclaimed from those who merely use it to sprinkle their arts council grant C.V.s, (replete with worn out, meaningless rhetoric such as ‘class war’ ‘up against the wall, motherfuckers’ and ‘righteous vengeance’) in their desperate attempt to climb to the giddy heights of their respective greasy poles.

               

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 18th, 2008 at 11:10 pm and is filed under Critical Fragments, On Art/Culture/Sport. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.