>Is there any truth to the oft-repeated claim that this band, especially in
>England, resurrected Anarchism in its current popular mohawked,
>black-enshrouded form?
Anarchism was not dead in England, but there was certainly a generational turnover that Crass expressed.
People like Arthur Moyse and Tony Earnshaw sold the anarchist newspaper Freedom in Leeds in the 1960s with. They were interestingly mannered proletarian-types, who seemed to model themselves on the anarchists of GK Chesterton's witty book, the Man who was Thursday. Moyse was a bus- conducter, who generally wore a brown suit and tie. Like Earnshaw he is an accomplished artist and draughtsman. Organised anarchists did not seem to relate very imaginatively to what would seem to be their natural, sixties counter-culture constituency. Instead Trotskyists like Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn were closer to that generation politically, while the counter-culture was closer to first Sartre and then Situationism. The marvellous free-form Scratch orchestra was led by Maoist Cornelius Cardew of the RCPB (ML), whose death on the roads was denounced as evidently a CIA operation by the party newspaper (Workers' Weekly?) one snowy winter.
By the eighties, Johnny Rotten raised the demand for anarchy, but without any relation to the existing anarchist movement, which was concentrated around the papers Black Flag, Freedom and Peace News, and definitely of a different generation. The punk entrepreneurs Bernie Taupin (manager of the Clash, and closer to the Trotskyist SWP, though with no real commitment) and Malcolm Mclaren (who glommed onto anarchism more in the character of nihilism than a political doctrine) were largely opportunistic.
I did not know it closely, but as I remember the new wave of anarchist groups were a breakaway from Trotskyism, like the group Class War and Red Action (though maybe they are not really anarchist). Crass, though, definitely gave a boost to anarchism. I have a vague recollection of a publication 'Crass' with the 'a' in a circle, anarchist style. In my mind it was linked to Ian Bone's Class War group, though I can't swear to that. At that time many bands who sounded similar were drifting to the far right, like Screwdriver, with their skinhead style, but as I remember it Crass put in a lot of time on the road with a largely unpopular anarchist philosophy. Later, groups like Chumba-Wumba followed, in the ambience of summer festivals, road protests, communes and vegetarianism. Chumba-wumba's Danbert Nobacon gained a brief notoriety by throwing a bucket of water and ice (from his Champagne?) over Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott at some pop-wards, accusing him of being a toff. Nobacon is perhaps too young to know that Prescott was once one of the merchant seamen stewards whose strike in 1966 moved Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson to denounce them as 'a tightly-knit group of politically motivated men' before sending MI5 to break it up. Prescott might be a twat, but he is unlikely to be such a twat as Nobacon.
My sympathies, understandably, are increasingly with the late Ayatollah Khomeini, who is said to have banned popular music altogether. -- Jim heartfield