what happened to all the 90s political scenes?

[xslavearcx]

listening to earth crisis just now

"Reject the anthropocentric falsehood that maintains the oppressive hierarchy of mankind over the animals. It's time to set them free"

I used to love using that word anthropocentric. think im gonna bring that back into the vocabulary...

​

 

[seventh bullet]

oh fuck me

yeah mine was like teenage anti-fascist bollocks, then leftist-ish zionism (lol) then george galloway-type anti-imperialist stuff and then joining the Socialist Party. Now no idea where im headed politically, dotty will be annoyed but also laugh if it's dogs on string and bakunin lol

My mum was a half-arsed Stalinist, so a different influence than mongrel-owning smelly people swigging from tinnies.

Probably played a part in my developing an interest in not only dead Russians but M-L movements/governments in other countries.

 

[Lorca]

that derek jensen/dr doolittle bloke's a bit of a tool innit. i read one of his books once, he was like taaalking with the wolves maaaan

 

[ska invita]

Oh god clown activism... wtf was that all about lol!!!

Wasn't this originally a "dont beat the fuck out of us plod, we're just clowns" tactic?

 

[butchersapron]

Wasn't this originally a "dont beat the fuck out of us plod, we're just clowns" tactic?

No, it was a give us money liberal idiots thing.

 

[ska invita]

Give us money? Who pays for the pleasure?

 

[butchersapron]

Liberal funding groups. On phone so can't find examples right now, but will look when back later. I think we probably exposed some of them on here at the time.

 

[ska invita]

thats funny - everyones got make a living i guess

 

[chilango]

FWIW if my memory isnt playing tricks on me, I'm pretty sure we turned down offers of funding for the Earth First! Action Update (roughly around the time of Scnews getting stuff off the Levellers) because of the dangers inherent in being funded.

 

[el-ahrairah]

I am interested in hearing about the road protests and reading a bit more about them, because they sound like they were both a lot of fun and really politicised a lot of people. The only memories I have of it are like hearing about "swampy" and so on on the news. There seems like a lot of direct action was around then too, when I was a kid I loved animals and the idea of Hunt Sabs and how they would stop fox hunts. I would still have loved to have been around when all that was going on

i was. it was alright, but basically the same nonsense that goes on today, just disseminated by zines and word of mouth rather than on the internet. and no matter how good you felt about it, some prick would ruin it somehow.

 

[el-ahrairah]

That George McKay book is pretty good. The other one he did is pretty good as well.

Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance by George McKay

some of my 'work' is photographed in that

 

[frogwoman]

Don't tread on my childhood image of superhero-type people saving cute foxes from certain death

 

[el-ahrairah]

http://libcom.org/library/m11-anti-road-aufheben

from that link:

"4. Beyond the M11
Claremont Road was evicted at the end of 1994. The eviction saw the end of the No M11 campaign in its form as an existence of thoroughgoing struggle."

This is simply not true. The campaign continued on for another two years, albeit smaller, but no less an existence of struggle. the author has completely dismissed the hard work of dozens of campaigners who continued a full-time life of fighting in the courts, trees, and squats. evictions, bulldozings, camps, actions, all kept on going in other places

 

[butchersapron]

from that link:

"4. Beyond the M11
Claremont Road was evicted at the end of 1994. The eviction saw the end of the No M11 campaign in its form as an existence of thoroughgoing struggle."

This is simply not true. The campaign continued on for another two years, albeit smaller, but no less an existence of struggle. the author has completely dismissed the hard work of dozens of campaigners who continued a full-time life of fighting in the courts, trees, and squats. evictions, bulldozings, camps, actions, all kept on going in other places

Long long time since I read that piece, nearly 20 years. I think their argument wasn't that these later struggles didn't happen (and I know they know they did as the authors participated in them, as they had also done up to that point ) but that after that point they became inward focused defensive struggles as opposed to the previous expansive ones.

(Hope that i've recalled right, should do as I spent ages putting it online for the first aufheben site)

 

[el-ahrairah]

oh, i see, ta i had a sudden attack of being-written-out-of-history and got all sad.

 

[chilango]

i was. it was alright, but basically the same nonsense that goes on today, just disseminated by zines and word of mouth rather than on the internet. and no matter how good you felt about it, some prick would ruin it somehow.

Nah. It was better than that.

 

[Kizmet]

Claremont Road was quite influential in the area... and for long after.

 

[ViolentPanda]

my first thought on seeing this thread title was to find a longterm graph of videogame sales, but I can't on 30sec googling so you'll have to imagine one.

second thought is that the 90s were a fairly dull period when the level of youth rebellion was rather low. Compared to the 80s and particularly the 70s when me and my mates were up to all the things we could get up to. That was real, it mattered, we meant it, we were trying to change the world and although we got battered and bruised into submission our attempts would stand as a beacon to be built on. The 90s just kindof rolled through without much to motivate me, just a bunch of kids with marginal ideas messing around. I spent most of the 90s (not to mention noughties and tensies) poised and ready for them, the kids, to click, to become politicised, to rebel, to express a real identity and commitment to change. Still I wait....

Frankly though, what message do you think that a majority of kids in the '80s took with them into the '90s and beyond? From what I can make out from younger siblings and relatives and their friends, what many of them took from it was "keep your head down and don't stand up for yourself against 'the system' unless you want to be smacked down".
I'd argue kids have been indoctrinated to that in the same way our generations were indoctrinated to the Protestant fucking Work Ethic.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Thats what i would really like to know...

Everything from still being "on the road" to "working for the man" as administrators, academics and assistant mangaers.

 

[ViolentPanda]

my impression of that was that it acted something like a training camp, that taught direct action skills to an increasingly hardened core group who then went on to do all kinds of other activism. Could say it was an equivalent of revolutionaries who in the 60s and 70s went off to other countries to learn guerrilla warfare. The people ive known who were involved with Roads were the most hardy activists after the fact. Is that fair to say?

Should also say there were committed activists throughout the 80s who also had an important role in handing down skills. Your point about dole and student grants is an interesting one - it definitely feels more unafordable to drop out and do full time activism than it did. (not that i ever did)

Are spectacular situationist stunts/Temporary Autonomous Zones a rejected tactic now (whether consciously or not)?

I think in the 90s there was pretty deep anti-party politics feeling, and although that has deepened even further and spread further into the wider population my impression is that theres more interest in getting 'organised' in some shape or form now, though a healthy fear of hierarchy and general commitment to horitzontalism has made that process more.... fragmented perhaps, and less visibly successful than it might otherwise be. I think its brewing though

TAZs are still tainted by the behaviour of their main theoriser and proponent. Mention a TAZ and some people shout "nonce cahhhnt!!!" still, I'm afraid.

 

[ViolentPanda]

There were a lot of often contradictory ideas floating around and influencing people. Green liberalism, trottery, old school anarchopunk, pacifism. Class struggle anarchism, Autonomism, situationism, nationalism and regionalism, and anti-civ/primitivism.

Fell for the primmo stuff myself briefly.

Until you realised that eating your food after it had been cooked tasted better.

 

[ska invita]

TAZs are still tainted by the behaviour of their main theoriser and proponent. Mention a TAZ and some people shout "nonce cahhhnt!!!" still, I'm afraid.

Hakim Bey aside though I guess Occupy was sort of a TAZ, all the square occupations around the world have TAZ elements to them - perhaps the difference being that they are less temporary. So yeah, not sure if the TAZ thing has gone away or not... perhaps still there but in a different form to those of Reclaim The Streets (?).

Its a real shame that with Hakim Bey - I enjoy his writing on the whole.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Hakim Bey aside though I guess Occupy was sort of a TAZ, all the square occupations around the world have TAZ elements to them - perhaps the difference being that they are less temporary. So yeah, not sure if the TAZ thing has gone away or not... perhaps still there but in a different form to those of Reclaim The Streets (?).

Its a real shame that with Hakim Bey - I enjoy his writing on the whole.

His political stuff, fine. His poetic praise for catamites, not so much.

 

[where to]

Capitalism is much faster at coopting youth culture these days.

 

[frogwoman]

how do you mean, like with che-t-shirts etc? lol

 

[where to]

how do you mean, like with che-t-shirts etc? lol

Anything new, basically. Wasn't thinking about che t's, no

 

[Dillinger4]

some of my 'work' is photographed in that

 

[kenny g]

His political stuff, fine. His poetic praise for catamites, not so much.

The argument made by some is that his politics is clouded by the revelling in abuse of children. I can't take the political writings seriously anymore. Keep just want to scream, "what about the children!". The guy is a complete fake.

It's like Allen Ginsberg- for all the weasel words he was a supporter of NAMBLA and I look at him with his fucking tamborine and shitty dress sense as just another sick man on the prowl.

 

[Coolfonz]

At the start of this thread Sweetpea said she was kind of distanced by all the folks who start going on about post-this or that ism this or that writer this or that group and in seven pages people are just going on about exactly this kind of thing.
Can you explain your politics to the crowd at say...i dunno...a racecourse, a channel ferry, Adsa, an aiport? And take most of them with you? That's the trick...

The demos in the 90s and early 00s were big, especially Genoa - and we were right about modern economics - but we didn't tell Adsa.

 

[xslavearcx]

But is Taz something dreamed up by mr pedo or is it something that happened generally in practice taht he just theorised about after the event?