Lawrence Ferlinghetti - Anarchist Tension #2 lyrics

The second tension is between us, as anarchists, or people sympathetic, or clever buggers, cause we are... and ordinary people. The ones. I don't mean racist, nasty people. I mean ordinary people who get up every morning, go to work, watch telly, watch baseball, go to bed. I mean those people. And you know what there's a lot more of them than us. One of the things that's disturbed me lately is that there's a bit of a trend in anarchism to think that ordinary people are sort of f**ing stupid. They're not clever, or really they're the problem. No they're not the problem. Look, every time there's been some type of thing kicking off, starting, some insurrection... it's come from dispossessed, poor, people. Ordinary people. And if we're not there, if we don't know them, if we've got no relationship with them... what are we? Who are we, just somebody else. Our relationship, surely is with ordinary people, how we get to them. If our belief, if our dream, is something that we believe in and live by and suffer by... then we have to go out there, somehow. That tension is a critical one. Y'know I could sit down all night and convince myself that anarchism's tomorrow. But actually anarchism's nothing. It's something up here, anarchism's out there. Let me give you some examples, two examples. Sixteen years ago, in England, there was the most brutal strike there's ever been in the history of the country in many ways. It was a coal strike. One year it took. All of my family as a result of that, now have no jobs. They do not work. Secure, safe communities have become riddled with d**, and riddled with fear, as a result of that huge defeat. But let's look at the problem that we have. Sixteen years ago, you could get up in Armthorpe village, where my family lived, and worked. They were on strike. Mutual aid, not in a f**ing book, but in everyday existence was happening. None of those people had read Kropotkin, they didn't know what it meant, but it was happening. You went out, seven o' clock in the morning "Who's gonna have the wood? It's bitter winter, it's November, who's gonna have the wood?" Well, those people with kids have the wood, and the old people have the wood. That decision's made. That decision's made at a ma** meeting a week before. So if you've got no kids, or you're on your own with your wife or your partner, you don't have the wood. You've agreed on that, you've made that decision. You go through there "Who's gonna get the food?" People, old people, kids. Again, that's voted on. "Who's gonna go on the picket lines today?" "Well I'll tell you who's gonna go on the picket line today" says Render "The women are going on the picket line today because the f**ing metropolitan police are here today and they're out to get the strike leaders. So we'll put the women on the picket line so if they start swinging the truncheons, at least they won't get the men they're looking for. We'll protect them." Now you may disagree with that decision, we all care, I did. That didn't matter. You had it alive, you had it living, you had something actually happening in your hand, yeah? But here's the downside: The tension between ourselves and ordinary people. At that time I was in a group called the Direct Action Movement. It was an anarcho-syndicalist group. We were very lucky. Direct Action Movement had international links, and we were sending miners to Italy, to France, to Greece, to get money to support their people. They respected us, there's lovely stories that have come through, you may have read David Douglas, a lovely anarchist miner, who talks about all the Trotskyist groups and the communist groups; the various picket lines; and as the miners are running past as the police are chasing them, with their great big f**ing great batons. And the old groups are going "Socialist worker? Are you a socialist worker?" and the miners are running through the lines. Not so with the anarchists, respect was given to them. A lot of anarchists did very well. They were superb and courageous in many ways themselves. And a lot of the young miners apprentices from the Yorkshire Coal Field said "Hey? Can I join your group? Can I join the Direct Action Movement?" And all of the sudden they went "f**ing hell. I don't know. I don't know what we're gonna do with like twenty-five young miners from Markham Main Colliery." Because they're not fully formed. They're not full anarchists, they haven't gone through the problems. No, it begs the question why there was an anarchist organization. And so no they never joined, but at the same time, some of those young lads are now h**n addicts, some of those young lads are into drink, and some are in prison. We couldn't provide a platform. We couldn't sort that tension out, between joining an anarchist organization, organizing yourselves, the most critical question of all.