The Dark Dim Knight & Other Middle Class Militants

“Poverty hasn't been made history but is instead coming home to us. A response – albeit harsh – to those affected by the credit crunch is 'welcome to the majority world'.9 0% of the world’s population don’t go through consumer goods as if they fell out of a corn flakes packet, so why should we in Britain? ”

This attitude is typical of middle class 'activists'; they see the working class as somehow responsible for climate change and consumerism. Even if the working class were a glut on world resources – the real statistics show a different story where the oh so fucking eco middle class hog the wealth and use more resources than anyone else – we would only be doing what was expected of us under a system designed and controlled by the middle class. The same issue of Schnews ( http://www.schnews.org.uk/archive/news670.htm) goes on to quote Duritti...

“We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth, there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world, here, in our hearts. That world is growing this minute”. - Bienventura Durruti - 1936

But Spain in 1936 had already witnessed practical, grass-roots anarchism in it's towns and villages. People had learnt first hand that they could change the world around them and, as working class people, they had the skills to do so. The modern middle class militant living in their Brighton enclave has no idea how to even interact with working class communities, let alone fucking inspire them to create a new world in the corpse of the old.

So what do the militant middle class have to offer us. Apparently Anthropology Lecturers can tie a noose if the posturing of Chris Knight is anything to go by. Some of them are good at planting flowers, many of them are web designers and they all write darn good letters to their MPs. But when it comes to the shit work of cleaning their sewers (or digging their humanure pits) and picking their organic crops, we know full well that we'll be back to square one in no time at all.

Who are the MPs? Who are the bankers? Who are the businessmen? Who are the parasites? They are none other than the middle class. Despite their claims to radicalism they maintain a position of privilege and, as the writer of the Schnews article has shown all too clearly, they cannot disguise their contempt of the working class.

None of this is new, it is all too familiar in the history of working class struggle. As my namesake, Jack Common, wrote many years ago...

“One of the distressing things about the socialist movement is the remarkable number of twisters and crooks it turns out. Not even borstal apparently produces so many ornaments of a piratical society as the movement which discovered the piracy. The biography of almost any Socialist leader is apt to be the story
of a falling rocket.”

The militant middle class are overwhelmingly composed of 'twisters' and 'crooks'; working class people are all too aware of this, but middle class activists – with typical arrogance – see our unwillingness to indulge their fantasies as a lack of political understanding or class consciousness. But we're savvy enough to know our enemy and we also know that a middle class media circus like the G20 protest will never help to improve conditions in working class communities. Again, Jack knew what was needed...

Socialism must be built in the working-class, by the creation of nerve-centres throughout that class which provide cultural contacts and prepare the new world-feeling which is the basis of the new order. We will have inevitably parties of the class-war. What we need is communities in which classlessness is a virtue and is understood in all its forms.

Yours in working class solidarity,
Jack Common/underclassrising