THOSE WERE THE DAYS?

There are some great archive clips here that catch the spizz-energy of the anarchist group Class War in its pomp in the mid-1980s.

I was there at the foundation, believe it or not. Class War started in 1983 after Ian Bone -- one of the two geezers ranting in the clips (the other is Martin Wright, the genius who invented the anarcho class-hatred thing) -- walked out of a meeting of the London Workers Group.

The London Workers Group was the early-1980s forum for class-struggle anarchists, autonomists and council communists that met every week in the upstairs room of the Metropolitan pub in Farringdon Road. I was a regular: the week before Bone came along I'd delivered a talk on the legacy of the council communist tradition at which two ancient militants, as the French call them, had nearly come to blows.

Whatever, Bone arrived in an attempt to recruit us to his new project for an in-your-face tabloid anarchist newspaper, and when he got a lukewarm response he flounced out, denouncing us as a bunch of fucking wankers. Fucking wanker.