Reject the bankrupt logic of submission and domination.
Saturday Free Pictures 21 Albany Square London W11
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Shoeless, I wandered down into Notting Hill. The streets were lined with decaying mansion houses, peeling and sooty, with rubbish piled up in their once-elegant porches. Here and there West Indian men sat out on the steps enjoying the weather, talking or slamming down dominoes. Gangs of wild children ran between the parked cars. On some streets, half the houses were empty, their boarded-up windows like sightless eyes. I sat in a pub for much of that afternoon, listening to the sounds of the street market winding down outside. The public bar was populated by old boys who sat silently smoking and watching their pints fall inch by inch in their glasses. The fruit machine chirruped the fake promise of money. I was backing Britain. We were all backing Britain. The good times were coming our way. If I didn’t leave immediately, I knew I’d end up another lost soul, my arse moistening the leatherette forever.
Out in the world, it was getting late. The light had softened and Portobello Road was carpeted with rotting vegetables. I wandered northward, ignoring the people who called out at me or stared at my bare feet. In side streets, music filtered out of upstairs windows and young white girls talked to black men in smart cars. In a quiet square I found myself outside a disused cinema, a shabby deco façade tacked on to a redbrick building that had probably once been a church meeting hall. The doors were covered with sheets of corrugated iron and a sign warned of dire penalties for trespassers. From the pavement the place
looked deserted. On the unlit marquee, the word FREE had been spelled out in red letters.
Clutching the flyer, I banged on the sheeting. There was no answer. I banged some more. Eventually, a voice on the other side asked who I was.
“My name’s Chris,” I said. “Is there a — a happening here?”
The person on the other side did something with bolts and padlocks. The door opened a crack and I stepped into a darkened foyer smelling of cigarettes and stale beer.
All I could see was a silhouette. Jacket. Curly hair sprouting from the sides of a peaked usher’s cap. “Who do you know?” he asked. “No one, really. This is it, right? Free Pictures?”
He thought for a while, examined me. “You’d better come in. Everyone’s on the roof. Watch your step, there are holes. Also rats.”
Underfoot the carpet was sticky. The usher, who’d completed his outfit with army boots and what looked like an old-fashioned floral skirt, shambled ahead of me into the auditorium, a murky, cryptlike space. The air was tinged with damp. From the ceiling, just visible in the gloom, hung an unlit chandelier, an ominous mass festooned with cobwebs, like a prop from a horror movie. The electricity was obviously borrowed from elsewhere; just above head height sagged runs of cable, looping round sconces, draped over the plaster cherubs on the little balcony. Here and there light fittings had been wired up, bare bulbs hanging down to brighten little circles of moth-eaten red plush. The usher took me behind the screen, where a narrow staircase led into a dusty gallery. From there we climbed a ladder out onto the flat roof.
In the afternoon sunlight, a young woman was reading from a typescript to a crowd of about thirty people, who lounged around on rugs and broken plush seats. She spoke with a seriousness accentuated by her extreme pallor and by her clothes, a shapeless man’s sweater and a headscarf that dragged her hair severely back from her scalp. It was an appearance that suggested a punishing lack of self-regard. “More,” she was saying, “is not the issue. We
have more cars and fridges, more summer holidays in Fascist Spain. In fact, we have more of everything except life and freedom.” She spoke about the pressure to compete, how it was destroying basic social formations. Atomized workers were convenient for capital, free of attachments to each other, to place, even to time.
As she spoke it dawned on me gradually that I recognized her. Eventually I was certain she was the girl I’d seen throwing the stone at Grosvenor Square. She looked haunted, as if she hadn’t slept for days. I thought she was beautiful. She sat down and was immediately succeeded by a guy with a messy Afro and a German accent, who told us it was no good to talk theoretically, or to make a politics on the basis of a theory — any theory whatsoever. That would just mean swapping one set of masters for another. It was time to throw everything up in the air, to live in a radically different way. Out of that would come a politics based on material conditions.
Someone handed me a joint. I found a place to sit where I could rest my back against the parapet wall and check out the girl, who was sitting with a group of friends, nervously jigging one foot up and down and smoking a cigarette. These people were wilder and more ragged-looking than student crowds, where you’d still see sports jackets, combed hair. Most political meetings I’d attended happened against a background of whispering and poorly masked boredom. This had a different atmosphere, intense and anxious. “Freedom begins with the self,” called out a woman from the floor, and the freedom she was speaking about seemed to be present up there on the cinema roof, a fierce astringent energy, a flensing away of the past.
A man got to his feet and started stabbing a finger at the speakers. “Bullshit!” he snarled. “Total bullshit! Everything you said is stupid and naïve. You’re fools if you imagine revolution is going to happen in the way you just described — like some kind of light show. Blobs joining together to make bigger blobs? It’s just crap!”
He was a menacing presence, piratically bearded, listing to starboard, a lit cigarette stuck to his bottom lip. From behind me
someone called out to him not to be insulting. He turned round, spreading his arms. “Why not? If you talk shit you deserve to be insulted. It’s not about the self. The self is reactionary crap. It’s about mass mobilization.” Someone else yelled out in agreement and suddenly the thing was a free-for-all. A bespectacled guy in a sort of shapeless smock was shouted down when he accused everyone else of being repressed. The ascetic young woman told the pirate his mass line was boring. The pirate told her to grow up. Revolution wasn’t going to happen without someone seizing power. It was going to take struggle. It was going to be violent. The woman shook her head vehemently. She was opposed to all forms of violence. It made no sense to her to employ violence to end violence. The pirate, unusually for a pirate, quoted Mao: “We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war. But war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun, it is necessary to take up the gun.” There were cheers. He seemed exasperated. “Just use your heads!” he spat. “As soon as the workers’ state becomes even a distant possibility, they’ll try to crush it. What do you imagine? That they’ll let your amorphous liberated blobs incorporate factories and army barracks?”
The ascetic woman called him a casuist. “Get back in the kitchen!” shouted a male voice. “Leave the revolution to people who understand politics!” That caused a proper row. An avenger threw some sort of liquid over the misogynist, a skinny, shirtless boy who had to be restrained from throwing punches. The fight disturbed the transvestite usher, who disappeared downstairs. Meanwhile the verbal tanks rolled back and forth. Look at the Soviet Union. But that’s not Communism. Immediate union with the working class! War on the nuclear family! Gradually the light failed and people started to slip off, as the hard core wrapped themselves in coats and blankets against the chill.
Seize power, abolish power. Which did I want? I spoke only once, to make some kind of call for immediate action. I don’t remember what I said, just what I felt as I said it. There was an energy up on that roof, an urgency I didn’t understand at the time.