What is wrong with the cropheads? In this fucked up society everyone loves to categorise people, before it was long haired louts, now it is these stupid cropheads. IT, OZ and Black Dwarf and all left wingers seem to think you must have long hair, wear their clothes, like their THESIC or else you're not part of the Revolution. What happens when a crophead goes into a place full of hips say in Hampstead somewhere, he is immediately shunned by all chicks and blokes, he may want to take part in their scene. This is what happens when a hippie goes into an old boys Conservative Club, he is naturally shunned, and we talk about the society before us and yet we are doing the fucking same things. Did Karl Marx say all revolutionaries must have long hair, dress different? No, what he really wanted was to smash Capitalism and this is where the British Left should take a peg from the Irish Socialist, it was a great sight to see long hair, cropped hair all fighting together to smash the same thing. So British Left Wing cop on before it is too late, the working-class (a great percentage are cropheads) need us, don't stamp them down because they dress the way they like, after all ve are supposed to be atter complete freedom in the Socialist Republic, needom for censorship, rules and regulations and free for everyone to do their thing. On with the real revolution.
David Bucke, (Member of the Dublin Young Socialists) Sutton High Street, Surrey.
Dear Commrades:
John Hoyland ["The Skinheads: A Youth Group for the National Front?" Dwarf August 30] is not alone in noting the emergence of new movement in working-class youth. Gerry Stimsley recently managed to construct a much less misleading picture of the Skinheads in Rolling Stone. It is paradoxical that Stimsley, although writing for what Hoyland would consider a Trendy and presumably bourgeois journal, felt no need to launch into an unreflective attack on working-class youth.
Hoyland, writing for Dwarf, is concerned to isolate the Skinheads from the rest of working-class youth, and to offer as an alternative to Skinhead "mystique" the "excitement" of the "May Events". that, Hoyland is concerned to warn the Left that it may have to defend itself against "these charming little thugs", Hoyland's sources are impeccable: one quotation from a Further Education class and another from a Walthamstow Youth Club Leader! His values are even cosier: defend the free concerts and "see the Skinheads as the nasty, thick little louts they really are". All this dense Marxist' analysis leads Hoyland to envisage an immediate, and apparently inevitable, link between the Skinheads and the cadres of the National Front. He does not even care to question the reportage given the Leeds Race Riot by the bourgeois press: of course it is in their interests to lay the responsibility "nasty, thick, little louts". They are as concerned as Hoyland appears to be to avoid a socialist analysis of the first race riot in Yorkshire.
Hoyland's observations and prescriptions just will not do. To isolate (and smash?) the section of the working-class that is being most stringently hit by the constraints of incomes policy, by the class-determined limitations on education and life-chances and by the bourgeoisie's domination of the mass media, is not to 'smash fascism'. Rather it is to leave that section open to fascist ideas and action. Presumably we would not want to leave the Smithfield porters and London Dockers to the tender mercies of the National Front because a few of them marched for Powell?
Black Dwarf has been pushing the need for consistent socialist theory in its pages. Hoyland offers up a few gratuitous insults ("louts"), a sprinkling of psychologisms ("easily manipulated", "mystique" etc.) and a strain of elitism (he says we should concentrate on the "positive and constructive" element in working-class youth - and seems to prefer those at. college). - Hardly the most consistent Marxist analysis produced in Dwarf recently.
The fact is that the Skinheads represent the vanguard of a relatively militant resistance to bourgeois society. If nothing else, the magistrates recognise this quite clearly. Soccer requirement that yourself. The middle-class student, for example, has a life-style and uniform, aiding communication and identification. It is no accident that students have formed more of a collective identification in recent years: a social group under siege will assert a collective identity of a kind. It does not mean that the group (in this case students) is a class. It may simply represent the temporary (historically-specific) achievement of a collective consciousness within a group.
Skinheads don't occupy the same structural positions as students. That is, their structural relationship to the powerful is rather different.
The Administration, the capitalist Employers and of course the Government are not SO immediately visible (as they are to students).
The Skinheads are destined for the production line, educated on the football terraces and socialised in the street-corner pub. For all Hoyland's exhortations, they are not likely to be interested in Further Education as it stands.
This offers no real alternative to the lifechances our society has mapped out for them.
And if Hoyland thinks that Further Education colleges are the place for communicating the revolutionary elan of May 1968, he hasn't seen too many of them. "Education" within the walls of capitalism's training schools is of a certain kind: to think of these institutions as revolutionary bases it to deceive. The expansion of Further Education in recent years was not intended as an illumination of the contradictions of capitalism. If Hoyland is emphasising this kind "education "positive and constructive", he mistaking individual advancement within the system for revolutionary ardour.
Hoyland needs to be careful in deciding on the "louts" capitalist system. Black Dwarf needs to be careful in obtaining its "Insights" from the posh Sundays. Socialists in general should be careful not to write off signs of working-class resistance as pathological or as "naive... and unconscious' Most importantly, we need to say that just because the Skinheads do not come to us is not to argue that we should not go to them. Hoyland invokes the history of fascism. Examination of the downfall of the Weimar Republic certainly reveals the need to smash fascism "physically if and when it has claimed to consciousness of class. It also tells us that there is no within the class, and that if the Left ignores class resistance in favour of its own elitism and received ideologies it is likely then to abdicate the class. History does not tell us that working-class resistance to bourgeois-rule is made-tomeasure socialism. Neither does it demonstrate a precedent for the Skinheads as an inevitable cadre for a future Hitler Youth.
Fraternally, Ian Taylor, Glasgow I.S 20 St. Vincent Crescent, Glasgow C.3.
Dear Black Dwarf, John Hoyland really ought to know better than to generalize in so rash and unsubstantiated a fashion, about "Skinheads' or anybody else. The 'Daily Mail' the other day had an article about these youths couched in almost identical terms, except that the writer did not end up with boy-scoutish recommendations to his readers to get moving and 'organize' the nasty thick little louts'. (I've met a few nasty thick little Revolutionary Students on my travels lately - but so what?) Under-privileged adolescents have been a nuisance in the streets for very many years and I do not think that the present generation is any more or less likely to enlist en masse under the fascist banner than their fathers the "teds' or their grandfathers who used to waylay me on the streets of Barnsley in the early thirties and chase me home from school because my mother had not equipped me with hob-nailed boots (quite a fashion in those days, too.
Last year I was concerned in the production of a play about Nelson at the Roundhouse. The actors were professionals supplemented by a large number of non-professionals drawn from all over the shop, among them a group of Chalk Farm 'Skinheads' who (a) asked to be in the play, (b) attended every rehearsal with unfailing regularity, (c) entered into their roles with great excitement - they were cast as members of a Dress-gang and demanded that no-one else "sacredness' - which can extend from dressingrooms etc. to the very person of the noble actor at all hours of the day - then the theatre might not be quite so reactionary as it is. It is also fair to add that the 'Skinheads' did at times give off various racialist and other intolerant opinions. I know of no area of British society in which such views may not, on occasion, be heard...
It is also fair to add that when a very big row blew up between the authors and directors of the play — on the one hand - and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (our financial backers) on the other - most of the professional actors chickened out and ruptured themselves (by trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, change horses in midstream, sit on the fence, and other gymnastic feats, all at the same time) the 'Skinheads' came out to us in great anger and said that we had only to give the word and they would go down the Mall and do and I had made no attempt to 'organize' those boys. But I had taken seriously their interest in the work they were helping me to do: and my annoyance at some of their wilder behaviour behind the scenes had not tempted me into sweeping denunciations of their entire class and working-class boys were beating up Pakistan in Leeds, but the fact is that workers sometim do become active racialists even if racialis itself is not caused by workers. I wonder ho many blacks would look so kindly on th particular form of "resistance" as lan Tayk does.
Comrade Taylor's theory of "visible con petitors" is an interesting one. Along wit points 1 made myself about the relative privileged situation of students and hippies, may help to explain why these particul *visible competitors" also targets jo attacks by some of the skinheads. We ca understand why the skinheads respond in th way - we can go to them and argue with ther about it as lan Taylor proposes but this totally different from greeting their response a evidence of vanguard militancy.
We must reject this uncritical idolisation o Michael Kustow' for us. Now I am not a Fascist the working-class whićh fails to see tha sections of the working-class can at times pla an objectively reactionary role even whe attempting to struggle against their own aliena tion. No two skinheads are the same (just lik anyone else and their attitudes as a group ar contradictory; but we can say that in as muc as they are attempting to escape from thei class-situation by carving a hierarchical nich are opting for a capitalist and false solution. I we are to describe this as the activity of vanguard, we might just as well say that the Kray brothers were running a guerilla foco ir the East End.
Far from being evidence of militancy attacks on hippies and blacks are dangerous diversions from militancy. It is true that in America some of the Chicago street-gangs have taken up an overtly revolutionary position, and this is a possibility in relation to the skinheads if we take into account their defiance and anti authoritarianism. But it unfortunately remain much more likely that if they go anywhere a all (and particularly if there is a worsening racial situation in Britain) they will go to the right. We need not be alarmist about this. The skinheads are young, small in nunbers, and by no means intractable. But neither should we imagine we are helping them "resist bourgeois society" if we encourage them in behaviour which is both self-destructive and against the Finally, we are not abandoning the casualties of the system or showing elitist preferences if we offer the maximum possible support for the young workers who are ready to resist the system. In fact nothing will help the downmisunderstanding of my article and his absurd trodden sections of the class more than militant action by their own comrades.
John Arden is correct in his hostility towards the idea of one lot of people going around organising other lots of people. (Apar from anything else it doesn't usually work.) What is more important is that working-class youths should start organising themselves. Many young workers (for example, large sections of the apprentices) are potentially extremely militant, and will soon develop their own methods of struggle. But at the moment they lack confidence, and in many cases they have been confused by years of successive brainwashing both in and out of school. This is where socialists can help - through argument and example, through political work, through showing more awareness of youg workers problems, What is important is that comrades like lan Taylor should not fall into the trap of assuming that working-class people are necessarily inarticulate and incapable of a socialist response to their situation. This is tantamount to saying that they must remain eternally trapped within the confines of capitalist ideology. It is more correct to view the workers as the potential masters of their own destinies that they can and will become.
Anthony Barnett, Vinay Chand, Clive Goodwin, Fred Halliday, John Hoyland, Adrian Mitchell, Sheila Rowbotham, Bob Rowthorne.
Mike Newton, Ruth Prentice, Agitprop Publicity Group