
ANGRY BRIGADE 


Introduction

The eight libertarian militants on trial in the Old Bailey in 1972 who were
chosen by the British State to be the `conspirators' of the Angry Brigade, found
themselves facing not only the class enemy with all its instruments of
repression, but also the obtusity and incomprehension -- when not condemnation
-- of the organised left. 

Described as `mad', `terrorists', `adventurists', or at best authors of
`gestures of a worrying desperation', the Angry Brigade were condemned without
any attempt to analyse their actions or to understand what they signified in the
general context of the class struggle in course. The means used to justify this
were simple: by defining the actions of the Angry Brigade as `terrorist', and
equating this with `individualist', the movement organisations -- whose tendency
is to see the relationship between individual and mass as something in contrast
-- neatly excluded them from their concerns. Strangely enough this attitude was
not limited to the broad left but was also prevalent within the anarchist
movement, where still today there is a tendency to ignore the role of the
individual within the mass, and the role of the specific group within the mass
movement. When the question is raised, it is usually in the form of an absolute
condemnation. For example, in an article entitled `Terrorism' (sic) we read: "If
a few people take it upon themselves to engage in 'Armed Struggle', this spells
out for us, besides the usual public hostility, police harassment, arrests and
defence campaigns, the loss of all our political lessons, gains and strengths."
(Class War) 

The problems encountered by the comrades of the Angry Brigade were similar to
those of other groups active at the time who had refused the limits of struggle
delineated by the State -- the so-called limits of legality, beyond which the
repressive mechanism is is unleashed -- and taken as their points of reference
the level of mass struggle. This decision was in defiance of the State's
definition of the struggle's confines. It also defied the limits imposed by the
official workers' movement and the extraparliamentary organisations, including
the anarchist movement. The Symbionese Liberation Army in the US, the RAF in
Germany, the first of the Red Brigades in Italy, were all isolated by the
`revolutionary' organisations, condemned as agitators, provocateurs,
individualist terrorists threatening the growth of the mass movement. 

On the attitude to the SLA, Martin Sostre was to write in America: "The
denunciation of the SLA by the movement press is indistinguishable from that of
the ruling class. Each left organisation seems to be competing with the others
for their legitimacy by denouncing the SLA...Conspicuously absent from the
denunciations is any discussion of the role of armed struggle. Revolutionary
violence is seen as something repulsive that should be shunned. The left
movement press would have one believe that to overthrow the criminal ruling
class we have merely to organise mass movements, demonstrations of protest and
repeat revolutionary slogans." 

One such paper in this country -- the Trotskyist Red Mole -- distinguished
itself by calling for solidarity with the comrades accused in the Angry Brigade
trial. With the following reservation -- "It is no use the organised left
criticising the politics of the Angry Brigade, unless we also recognise why a
lot of potentially very good comrades reject the various leninist organisations,
and indeed resort to bomb-throwing -- until you are caught -- by itself an easy
option that does not deal with the problem of helping to change the political
understanding of millions of people." Understandable enough in view of the
Leninist programme. But from the anarchist perspective? We read on the front
page of a fairly recent issue of Freedom, "Even the bombing campaign carried out
by the Angry Brigade which was technically brilliant...achieved absolutely
nothing because, in direct contradiction with their spoken ideals, they were
trying to act as an elite vanguard leaving ordinary people as passive spectators
of their actions. Far from this resulting in an `awakening' of the masses' it
resulted in a fear of anarchism and anarchist ideas which has significantly
contributed to our current impotence." 

As we can see, the old preoccupation persists: that of protecting the movement
(especially the anarchist one) from the `adventurists'. 

In fact the movement of the exploited is not and never has been one monolithic
mass, all acting together with the same level of awareness. The struggle against
capital has from the beginning been characterised by a dichotomy between the
official workers' movement on the one hand, with its various organisations --
parties, unions, etc, channelling dissent into a manageable form of quantitive
mediation with the bosses. And on the other hand, the often less visible
movement of `uncontrollables' who emerge from time to time in explicit
organisational forms, but who often remain anonymous, responding at individual
level by sabotage, expropriation, attacks on property, etc, in the irrecuperable
logic of insurrection. There is no distinct or fixed dividing line between the
two movements. They often affect each other, the surge from the base obliging
the big official organisations to take a certain direction, or the inverse,
where the latter put a brake on autonomous struggles. Many of those who make up
the mass of union membership, are also extremely active in extra-union (and by
definition extra-legal) forms of struggle. Each side, however, has its own
heritage: on the one a heritage of deals and sell-outs, the great victories that
are real defeats on the workers' backs; on the other, a heritage of direct
action, riots, organised insurrections or individual actions which all together
form part of the future society we all desire, and without which it would be
nothing but a utopian dream. 

A brief look at the development of the struggle in this country shows this
duality quite clearly. The organised anti-capitalist movement as we know it
today began to take shape at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Unlike the
other European capitalist countries developing at the same time, there was only
a minor communist influence both at organisational and ideological level.
Traditional British anti-intellectualism and `common sense' were perhaps
fundamental to a more pragmatic form of organisation which took the form of
trades unions. These unions were from the start reformist, although at times,
through pressure from the base, some knew insurrectional moments. The changes
the unions proposed were however usually intended to come about using non-
violent methods within the constitutional limits. 

The most numerically significant of the early workers' movements was the
Chartist one, which began around 1838. Recognised as the first modern mass
movement, the first Chartist petition had one and a quarter million signatures.
This is clearly not a qualitative assessment of active adherents. Even this
movement was marked by two opposing currents: on the one hand those preaching
non-violence and the constitutional road to universal suffrage as a solution; on
the other, those who spoke of ~and carried out) rebellion and armed direct
action. These were the so- called `moral force' and the `physical force'. They
were linked to the division between the tradesmen and unskilled workers and were
never never reconciled, possibly accounting for the short duration of the
movement. 

During and immediately preceding this period there also existed forms of
autonomous revolt, such as that of the many artisans in the textile industry
who, under threat of losing their jobs or of being reduced to non-specialised
labourers, organised in armed groups. The most significant of these
insurrectional movements was that known as Luddism, which took place between
1810-1820. During this period an immense amount of property was destroyed,
including vast numbers of textile frames redesigned to produce inferior, shoddy
goods. The Luddites, taking the name of Ned Ludd who had taken a sledge hammer
to the frames at hand, organised themselves locally and even federally with
great coordination, and in spite of vast deployments of soldiers especially in
West Riding and Yorkshire where the movement was strongest, generalised
insurrection was approached on more than one occasion. As John Zerzan* points
out, this was not the despairing outburst of workers having no other outlet, as
a long tradition of unionism was in existence among textile workers and others
prior to and during the Luddite uprisings. 

* John Zerzan -- Creation and Its Enemies: "The Revolt Against Work". Mutualist
Books. 

In the early 1830's it was the turn of agricultural workers become casual
labourers to organise in the `army' of Captain Swing, a mythical figure adopted
as a symbol of the farmworkers who burned ricks and barns, threatening their
oppressors -- farmers, vicars, justices of the peace alike -- with the same
fate. Where the Luddites were extremely organised, the Swing men lacked secrecy.
Nineteen of them were hanged (sixteen for arson), 644 jailed, and 481 deported
to Australia. 

Along with the inevitable development in the forces of repression in the form of
police and army, we see the development of the unions as an attempt to instill
order from within the work situation itself. By their division by trades, and by
specialised and non-specialised workers, they had the effect not only of
controlling but also of fragmenting the struggle and diffusing it along these
artificial divisions. By 1910 there were over 50 unions in the engineering
industry alone. The revolutionary movement that subsequently developed began
partly as a destruction of the old forms of organisation. 

Three important movements developed. The evolutionary syndicalist movement under
the French influence; the industrial syndicalists (IWW) from America, and the
shop stewards movement, which was particularly active in the Clydeside in
Scotland. They struggled for the control of industry by the workers and against
the failure of the orthodox trade unions and left parliamentarianism to get any
improvement in working conditions. But these movements, although strong at local
level, and capable of organising important strikes and revolts, never went
beyond the limits of the engineering and transport industries and the mines. 

The war years saw a pact between trade unions and the government. Both combined
to forcibly instill a sense of patriotism in the workers to prepare them for the
great massacre that was to come. Strikes became illegal as a result of this
deal, showing clearly how the borderline between legality and illegality is a
malleable instrument in the hands of power. Not all went willingly to the
slaughter, and the many desertions and mutinies which were savagely put down are
still part of the proletariat's unwritten history. 

The Communist Party, formed in 1920 during the post war depression, was
authoritarian and centralised. Although the party never gained the support that
its continental counterparts did, it nevertheless carried out its role of
policing the struggles in course. For example it entered the struggles of the
unemployed who were organised in local groups expropriating food, squatting,
etc, and channelled them into reformist demands on the State and large
demonstrations such as the Jarrow hunger marches. 

The General Strike was emblematic of the contrast between the mass of workers
and the unions and parties who claimed to represent them. 

However, with the recovery and development of heavy industry, the main energies
of the exploited were concentrated at the workplace, the only place they now
found themselves together. The shop stewards' movement was revived in the
fifties and sixties in the so-called boom years. But, although nearer to the
base of the workers, it broke up the area of struggle even further than the
already single trades orientated unions. The growing division of labour caused
increasing divisions in struggle, with the result that solidarity between the
various sectors was limited, even between workers in the same factory. 

While the unions were working to develop industry along with the bosses, the
base were developing different, uncontrollable forms of struggle such as go-
slows, wildcat strikes, sit-ins, etc. For example, of the 421 strikes in the
docks at the beginning of the sixties, 410 were unofficial. These same workers
had already experienced troops being moved into the docks by a Labour
government, and TGWU officials giving evidence against their own members ten
years before. 

Acceleration in automation, work pace, and alienation, especially in the fast
developing car industry, created struggles which went against the union/
management work ethic. Against bargaining and negotiation, car workers and
dockers in particular were carrying out sabotage on the assembly lines, wildcat
strikes and occupations. At times they succeeded in pushing their `defence'
organisations into situations of attack and across the frontiers of sectionalism
and trades differences into which they had been conscripted. But the economism
of the unions was one of capital's strongest arms. At a time when industrial
riots and even insurrections were spreading all over Europe, each starting from
a minority with its own objectives and spreading to other categories of workers
in the same industry, then beyond, using pickets, workers' committees,
assemblies, etc, the unions were the only organs capable of negotiating with the
management and getting workers to return to work under great slogans of unity. 

This dualism in the workers' movement between elements of the base struggling
directly and spontaneously within a precise economic situation, and the
representatives of the national politics of the official workers' movement
always ready to put a brake on and formalise struggles (e.g. boycotts, strikes
and even `working to rule'), turning them into instruments of negotiation with
the industries, has always existed. But not all the actions of the base can be
instrumentalised, and the thrust towards illegality can never be fully stifled.
At times it might seem so. But even during the relative `lulls', there exists a
perpetual movement of absenteeists, expropriators, and saboteurs. This movement
from below, which emerged in force at the end of the sixties, dispelled the myth
of the passive, stable English working class, just as the image of the
traditional worker changed with the increase in the number of women and
immigrant workers in productive work and the rapidly expanding service
industries. 

At the same time a new movement was growing in the schools and colleges. One of
the main points of reference for this movement was the Vietnam war. In every
college and university various groups were struggling for political space. For a
period there was an attempt to form a unified students movement, the
Revolutionary Students Federation. The most significant groups were of a
Trotskyist tendency, Maoism having little influence in this country. But the
sterile politics of the straight left (Trotskyists and other Leninists) could
not contain the new anti-authoritarian movement that was beginning to develop. 

The politics of everyday life -- organising around one's own oppression, trying
to overcome the division between workers and students, between men and women,
forming groups around precise problems as opposed to under political banners --
was in full development. A vast movement of claimants, squatters, feminists,
etc, emerged expressing not the Right to Work but the Refusal of Work, not
employing the waiting tactics of unionist education but taking, Here and Now,
what was being refused, and refusing what was being offered. A critique of the
nuclear family as a firm bastion of capitalist power led to many experiences of
communal living. This movement in all its complexity, not so much a students
movement, but a widespread one comprising of young workers, students and
unemployed, could be called the libertarian movement of the time. 

This movement was comprised of autonomous groups acting outside the stagnant
atmosphere of the traditional anarchist movement with its own microscopic power
centres which, as Bakunin so astutely pointed out, are just as nefarious as any
other power structure. A parallel can therefore be drawn between the dichotomy
within the workers movement, and that which exists within the anarchist
movement. On the one hand there are the comrades who hold positions of power,
not carrying out any precise activity to contribute to the revolutionary
consciousness of the mass, but who spend their time presiding over meetings and
conferences aimed at influencing younger comrades through the incantation of
abstract principles. These principles are upheld as the only true tenets of
anarchism, and are adhered to by those who, either by laziness or weakness,
accept them acritically. The manifestations of these islands of power usually
take the form of publications that are long standing and repetitive. They have
the external semblance of an `open forum' for the use of the movement as a
whole, but the basic ideology -- that of conservation and stasis -- is filtered
through from behind the flurry of `helpers' carrying out the task of `filling'
and physically producing the publication. These publications are the first to
condemn autonomous actions that take their points of reference from the illegal
movement of the exploited. They are the first to denounce them, accusing them of
bringing police repression down on the anarchist movement. In their reveries
they have forgotten that repression always exists, and that only in its most
sophisticated form creates the peaceful graveyard of acquiescence, where only
ghosts are allowed to tread. Many of the most forceful of recent social
rebellions have been fired and spread by the popular response to police
repression. 

The traditional anarchist movement finds itself threatened therefore by the
other movement of anarchists, the autonomous groups and individuals who base
their actions on a critical appraisal of past methods and up to date theory and
analysis. They too use the traditional instruments of leaflets, newspapers and
other publications, but use them as tools of revolutionary critique and
information, trying always to go towards the mass struggle and contribute to it
personally and methodologically. It is quite coherent -- and necessary if they
are to be active participants in the struggle -- that they also apply the
instruments of direct action and armed struggle. These groups refuse the logic
of the power centre and 'voluntary helpers'. Each individual is responsible for
his or her action which is based on decisions reached through the endless task
of acquiring information and understanding. Some of this can also be gained from

the older or more experienced comrades in the group, but never as something to
be revered and passed down acritically. Just as there are no immovable
boundaries between the two workers' movements, nor are there within the two
anarchist movements. Nor is there a fixed boundary between the latter anarchist
movement and the insurrectionalist workers' movement. When the struggle
heightens these movements come close together and intermingle, the anarchists
however always with the aim of pushing the struggle to a revolutionary
conclusion and offering libertarian methods to prevent its being taken over by
authoritarian structures. The other, traditional, anarchist movement has shown
all too often in the past its willingness to form alliances with structures of
the official workers' movement. 

Given the situation at the end of the sixties and beginning of the seventies,
with its wave of industrial unrest at the level of the base, the students'
struggles in the universities, the struggles of the unemployed, women and so on,
the Angry Brigade emerge both as a product of this reality, and as revolutionary
subjects acting within it. To reject them as some form of social deviance is to
close one's eyes to the reality of the struggle at that time. The fact that
their actions deliberately took place in the field of illegality, soliciting
others to do the same, does not in any way disqualify them from what was in its
very essence an illegal movement. It is possible to see this even in the context
of the bombings alone that took place in these years (although by doing so we do
not intend to reduce the vast and varied instruments of illegality to that of
the bomb): Major Yallop, head of the Laboratories at Woolwich Arsenal, main
witness for the prosecution in the trial of the supposed Angry Brigade, was
forced to admit that in addition to the 25 bombings between 1968 and mid 1971
attributed to them, another 1,075 had come through his laboratory. 

Looking at the bombings claimed by the Angry Brigade, we see that they focus on
two areas of struggle that were highly sensitive at the time. The first was the
struggle in industry: the bombing of the Dept. of Employment and Productivity on
the day of a large demonstration against the Industrial Relations Bill; the
bombing of Carr's house on the day of an even larger demonstration; the bombing
of William Batty's home during a Ford strike at Dagenham; the bombing of John
Davies', Minister of Trade and Industry, during the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders
crisis; the bombing of Bryant's home during a strike at one of his building
works. To complement these attacks, there were the bombs aimed directly at the
repressive apparatus of the State at a time when repression was increasing
heavily in response to the upsurge in all areas of struggle. The bombing of the
home of Commissioner Waldron, head of Scotland Yard. The bombing of the police
computer at Tintagel House; the home of Attorney General Peter Rawlinson, and,
finally, that of a Territorial Army Recruitment Centre just after internment was
introduced in Northern Ireland fall into this category. The bombing of the high
street boutique, Biba's and that of the BBC van the night before the Miss World
contest was an attempt to push further in the direction of destroying the
stereotyping and alienation of the spectacle of consumerism and role playing.
"Sit in the drugstore, look distant, empty, bored, drinking some tasteless
coffee? or perhaps BLOW IT UP OR BURN IT DOWN." (Communique 8)

By their actions the Angry Brigade also became a part of that spectacle, but a
part that took form in order to contribute to its destruction. Their actions as
presented here find a place therefore not as some old commodity to be taken out
and dusted, then put back on the shelf like a relic that belongs to the past.
The work they carried out -- and which five libertarians paid for in heavy
prison sentences -- is a contribution to the ongoing struggle which is changing
form as the strategies of capital change in order for it to restructure and
preserve itself. A critical evaluation of the Angry Brigade must therefore take
place elsewhere than on the sterile pages of this pamphlet. It must take place
in the active considerations of a movement that has a task to fulfil, and that
does not take heed of the condemnation and defamation by those whose ultimate
aim is to protect themselves. Many problems are raised by a rereading of the
actions and experiences of the Angry Brigade -- clandestinity or not, symbolic
action or direct attack, anonymous actions or the use of communiques to be
transmitted by the media -- to name but a few. The pages that follow help to
highlight these questions, whose solution will only be found in the concrete
field of the struggle. 

Jean Weir 


