Arrested for Attempted Street Theatre - High antics at the Royal Wedding 2011
Two nationally-published perspectives from lunarchist arrestees
Weekly Worker - Getting the message across
Chris Knight of the Radical Anthropology Group was among several people arrested for attempting a street theatre performance to coincide with the royal wedding. They were accused of ‘conspiracy to cause a public nuisance’ and detained for more than 24 hours. Comrade Knight spoke to Peter Manson
I’ve been saying all along that, despite what they claim about this being a private wedding, the fact is that it was taxpayers who paid for this party - the security costs were by far the highest component. So it was our party and we had every right to be part of the proceedings.
Not everyone in the country is a monarchist. Some of us are socialists, republicans, anarchists … but all of us should have been able to participate in this joyful occasion, in whatever ways made us feel comfortable. Personally, I only felt comfortable with a guillotine. To cut through all the royalist media propaganda we needed a striking image, something the cameras could pick up. I can’t think of anything more likely to do that than our very large guillotine, something that looks as though it might be quite efficient at doing the job.
We were going to go along as royals - to be honest, if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for us. Why can’t we be princes and princesses and put various baubles and crowns on our heads? As an anthropologist, I admire hunter-gatherers. When some Kalahari Bushmen were once asked, ‘Who is your king?’, the answer came back: ‘Well, actually, all of us.’ When everyone is king, no-one is king. I’ve always admired that logic of levelling up rather than levelling down. I’ve never felt particularly inspired by campaigns for a bourgeois republic: swapping royalist fancy dress for the fancy dress of a president’s suit and tie.
So let’s have really good fancy dress. We had the costumes and were going to be out in our finery. It was a wedding, so why not be sexy? And it was just before May Day - when in this country we used to have traditional erections, Maypoles and so on, with associated fertility rites. So some of us felt quite happy to be part of all that.
But probably the majority of us were going to be zombies. We had this idea - Dead for a Day. I had my megaphone and I was going to play around with the idea: who are the zombies? Is it all these people waving union jacks, being mesmerised by the state? Mesmerised so as not to notice the very real cruel and unusual punishment being meted out at that very moment? All the lollipop ladies and ambulance drivers among half a million public service workers being sacked? So we were going to have a zombie march, meeting in Soho Square. If we hadn’t all been arrested, with raids on squats all round London, I imagine we would have had a good showing of several hundred. It would have been a most uplifting spectacle.
We were going to guillotine one particular royal. I’m one of those people aiming to keep the whole country together. I don’t want to be divisive on such occasions, so we had a poll to find out which of the royals was the best candidate to unite the entire country in celebrating a beheading. It was obvious that the odious Andrew was the people’s choice. If you read the American tabloids, he’s apparently wanted by the FBI for his close association with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. There’s a photograph of Andrew with his arm round one of the under-age prostitutes that Epstein introduced him to. Then there is his apparent advocacy of bribery on behalf of BAE Systems, as revealed by Wikileaks. We’re talking about BAE systems, weapons supplier of choice to the Saudi royals who’ve recently invaded Bahrain, whose Crown Prince (among those invited to the wedding) started firing live rounds against pro-democracy demonstrators. And, of course, there is Andrew’s intimate friendship with president Aliyev of Azerbaijan and various other central Asian despots, dictators and torturers.
I happen to know that quite a number of her majesty’s prison officers, soldiers and security personnel are incandescent with rage at the queen for conferring on her favourite son the highest possible honour - the Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order. She awarded this to Andrew on March 26, the very day a million of us were marching through Central London. She had decided to do this back in February, one day after the tabloids splashed the latest Andrew scandal involving Jeffrey Epstein. Soldiers who had served in the Falklands or Afghanistan and who used to be monarchists felt insulted by what the Daily Mail referred to as ‘the tarnished medal’.
So guillotining an effigy of prince Andrew would have been a popular move. You have to start somewhere, after all. And not everyone in the land would have thought it appropriate to guillotine Wills and Kate on the very day of their wedding.
Wedding plans
There were two things happening on that day. The first was a wedding. I’ve got no problem at all with a couple displaying their affection and commitment to each other in public. A wedding is a joyful event. But there was another thing happening. This was a regime baring its teeth, reminding us who’s in charge. And the problem I have is with the regime. I’m not bitter and twisted or a killjoy. I was asked a few times, do I wish the couple well? My answer was always yes, the same as for any other couple getting married. But this particular couple had quite enough well-wishers already, so I’m obviously not going to go out of my way to join in. Of course, the regime was having to go all out to justify the provocative extravaganza of a royal wedding at that time - a time when supposedly we can’t even afford lollipop ladies to make sure kids don’t get run over on their way to school.
Anyway, we were going to have our wedding breakfast in Soho Square and then we were going to have a zombie procession to Eros in Piccadilly Circus, where we would have continued the street theatre with a fertility rite. Zombies do find it a bit difficult to have sex, mind you - crucial bits of their anatomy keep falling off. But you can always put them back on. After that, the plan was to make our way towards Westminster Abbey, where heads would roll. But, of course, we recognised that the police might possibly have noticed a rather large guillotine making its way towards the Abbey, so we didn’t expect to get all that far.
So the plan was to do a U-turn whenever we got stopped and make our way to the ‘official republican’ bourgeois street party in Red Lion Square, where the execution of Andrew would have been carried out.
The guillotine is absolutely magnificent. Unfortunately the whole wooden contraption was arrested and is still in custody. It is 12 foot high, with a shimmering blade and pulleys and ropes that look as though they might work. There’s a big communist red flag on the top, alongside a black-and-red anarchist flag, and arching over all that a legend reading “Some cuts are necessary”, a quote from Ed Miliband.
Well, it was a shame we couldn’t take it to Red Lion Square. It would have been a prominent component of the festivities, triggering hilarity and celebration. But the arrest of the guillotine, and of the street theatre group, and of all those very courageous zombies, including parents with their kids (some severely intimidated for engaging in a bit of face-painting), actually meant that the message of resistance got out. It got out at least as widely, if not more so, than could have happened through any actual performance. There’s been a widespread feeling of revulsion at what amounted to a display of absolute monarchy on the day.
I’ve been asked several times, “Chris, what have you got against the monarchy?” Or “Isn’t the monarchy irrelevant?” Well, the idea that the state is irrelevant is stupid. You can’t say, ‘I’m against capitalism, but the state’s OK.’ And the monarchy is the state in Britain. People kept saying, ‘Come on, just for one day, let the whole nation come together without protests.’ But there are two answers to that. First of all, I don’t even do protest: I do street theatre. I find protest very boring. What’s the point of going round saying, ‘I protest’? Where does that get you? But secondly I think it would be very dangerous to have absolute monarchy, even for one day.
But, in the event, the monarchy did assert that it was absolute. It completely zapped any hint of dissent through those mass arrests. On our part, the idea was to explore those boundaries, to see how far we could get. We wanted to make sure there was at least some signal of resistance. Everyone else seemed to have got cold feet. For example, Freedom Press, calling themselves the ‘legitimate anarchists’, announced that anarchists don’t care about such irrelevant things as monarchy. I’m apparently too bureaucratic to be rubber-stamped as a legitimate anarchist, but, as you know, I’m not an anarchist in any case: I’m a Marxist. More precisely, I think every anarchist should be a communist and every communist an anarchist. Anyway, it was remarkable the way these folk were almost shouting to the police, ‘Not me, guv, we’re not doing anything. We don’t even care about the monarchy. We’re not having any protests or anything like that - we’re just gonna be in the pub all day.’ I’m not sure whether that’s politics or whether it’s just people bottling out.
Very understandable, if that’s the case, but it seems to me that if we’re revolutionaries of any stripe we have to do what our comrades have been doing across the Arab world. In Britain we’re not faced at the moment by the kind of terror and violence that our comrades in Syria, for example, are experiencing, but even here we do have to take courage and cross that barrier of fear. We can’t allow the regime to successfully intimidate us.
So it seemed important to do something - preferably something enjoyable, something comical, and in a way part of the celebrations. Celebrating a nice bank holiday in the run-up to May Day in a way that republicans could feel comfortable with.
Arrest
We had just completed the magnificent guillotine. We’d varnished it and attached the flags and we’d also made the comical effigy of prince Andrew, complete with long neck (easier to chop through). We had pinned onto him the Knight Grand Cross bauble his mum had given him and we had a ‘Government of the Dead’ banner and a lot of cardboard cut-out silhouettes of the various dictators the royals invited to the wedding.
All this had been packed away in our van, but we were so ahead of time that all 10 or 12 of us decided to go for a drink, including the two members of the Channel 4 camera crew who had been filming us for several days. After half an hour or so we were coming back to the van and we noticed this guy, who turned out to be a plain-clothes cop. I was just getting my keys out ready to drive off, when we were suddenly swooped on by around 25 uniformed officers in five vehicles.
A woman police officer immediately approached me and said: “You are under arrest, accused of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.” They accused Charlie Veitch in Cambridge of the same thing - he just goes round with a megaphone trying to hug coppers. And the people arrested in Soho Square - there were two or three dozen detained or generally intimidated - were taken to Belgravia police station for the same reason. It was difficult to believe that they would be willing to be made fools of in that way - it was so obviously street theatre. But Camilla Power, Patrick Macroidan, the ‘executioner’ in fancy dress, and myself were all arrested and hauled off to the royal dungeons in Lewisham. For some reason they thought Camilla needed to be handcuffed, whereas Patrick and I didn’t.
They couldn’t charge us with anything, because there was no evidence. They searched my home three times during the night and the subsequent day looking for something incriminating. They also rummaged through my car and couldn’t find anything there either.
Many of your readers probably don’t need to be told what it’s like to be in a police cell - a lot of people are quite familiar with the experience. I’ve been in one a few times, although never for quite so long. Twenty-five hours is a lot longer than it sounds to be in a white tiled cell, with nothing in it except a ledge to sleep on and a latrine without any lid. No windows, no daylight. You have no idea what time it is - they take away your watch, your phone and so on, so it could be four in the morning or it could be midday.
Every half-hour they noisily flip open the little aperture and stare at you to make sure you haven’t hanged yourself. There’s a CCTV watching you all the time, including when you’re having a crap. You have to ask for everything, including toilet paper - you have to beg to be allowed to have a crap. If you ask for water they give you a tiny little bit. As for the food, it’s inedible.
I don’t want to make too much of an issue out of it. But it does remind you of the fact that so many people - in the Arab world in particular, but everywhere, I suppose - are kept in worse conditions: for months, years, decades … It’s enough to drive you round the bend. But we were in good spirits. I was thinking all the time that it’s almost a gift that they’ve chosen to do this. It’s such a sign of weakness that the regime can’t even allow the threat posed by a bit of street theatre. It doesn’t make them look good.
No comment
They interviewed me once for about an hour during the time I was held. But my solicitor stomped on my temptation to give as good as I got. He instructed me absolutely categorically just to say, ‘No comment’. As soon as you say anything at all, you inevitably admit to elements of the police story. He said, ‘Why not make them work?’ I did say one thing at the beginning: “I am a member of a street theatre group, the Government of the Dead. As with Punch and Judy, you can argue against it on health and safety grounds since it’s a bit violent. But that’s the point: you need a sense of humour.”
From then on, every time they asked questions like, “How can you say it’s non-violent to execute prince Andrew with a guillotine?” I would just say, “I refer you to my initial statement about street theatre. Otherwise no comment.” They asked, “How could you have possibly called upon students to hang Nick Clegg?” So once again I replied, “It’s street theatre and you do need to have a sense of humour. Otherwise no comment.”
But it’s so interesting that no regime, no state, no functionary, no police officer can possibly have a sense of humour. It’s the one thing they can’t allow. As an anthropologist I’m very interested in the whole issue of laughter - one of the most important things that distinguishes Homo sapiens from all other animals. Laughter is a potent weapon, in the face of which no regime can survive. Every single word for the regime has to be taken solemnly and literally. Nothing can be playful, nothing humorous.
Now and again during the interview they would say, “Come on, Chris, we know your solicitor’s advised you to say ‘No comment’, but this is your opportunity to tell the world. It’s all being recorded! Who are you? What’s the Government of the Dead about? What’s your message?” I just said, “Sorry, but I’ve every confidence in the professional competence of my solicitor and the answer is … ‘No comment’.” They said, “It’s not going to look good to a jury. It looks like you’ve got something to hide.” It was difficult not to rise to the bait - I felt they were making complete fools of themselves - and they were doing their utmost to get a bit more out of me. But every time I hinted that I might say something, my solicitor quickly made his views clear.
At one point they said, “What have you got against authority?” I found it very difficult not to say, ‘Well, I do have some problems with what you call “the authorities”, but as for the authority of a proletarian revolution across planet Earth, I’d have absolutely no problem with that putting you lot in your place!’
Camilla and Patrick got the same sort of treatment, and they gave as good as they got, of course. But we had all agreed to abide by the solicitor’s advice and say, ‘No comment’. Camilla was interviewed by Channel 4 as she came out and was absolutely brilliant. Her description of being thrown into a right royal dungeon provided a mirror image of the glorious nuptials of the lovely pair. Like all of us she came out in very good spirits - and trying hard not to laugh. At the same time I feel humbled by the courage of the teenagers and in some cases even children, who came to Soho Square with their face paint and found themselves threatened or arrested. Very unpleasant. So, while there is an element of laughter, there is also an element of deep outrage.
In the end, they couldn’t lay charges. I’ve got to return to Lewisham police station, as have the other two, on June 10. In the meantime, absolutely savage bail conditions have been imposed. I’m not allowed to attend any march, demonstration or rally for that six-week period. The bail notification I was given was signed by a counter-terrorism officer - in their book, I’m a terrorist apparently. I’m told by my solicitor that the bail conditions can’t possibly hold - there’s no way that’s compatible with European human rights legislation. The police asked me, have I understood this? I said, “Well, I do hear what you’re saying, but it’s totally unacceptable. You can’t possibly stop me attending rallies and demonstrations.” But that’s what they’re saying.
After six weeks we will then see if they’re going to press charges. If there’s a trial, it will probably be later in the year. If they managed to find a jury that would convict, it would involve a severe sentence. You can get a lengthy prison sentence for conspiracy. I don’t especially want that, obviously, but I would have thought we could win any court case. The temptation would be to do a Leon Trotsky - “I stand here not as the accused, but as the accuser”. But I don’t think they would be so stupid.
Ritual and dissent
One important point. All this demonstrates the centrality of ritual. We have a state and, as Engels points out, the state consists of armed bodies of men. But if they were just armed bodies of men they would have to do what Assad is doing in Syria: use live rounds and fire shells into people’s houses. It does help the state if it can use ‘magic’ - if it can mesmerise people with pageantry.
But, when there is pageantry, like a royal wedding, there’s no way the state can tolerate so much as a hint of dissent or pluralism. The smallest element of choice as to which ritual performance the populace might follow would mean the whole thing might unravel. So I can see why absolute monarchy appeared necessary on the day. They couldn’t allow a republican, humorous, engaging, infectious parade counterposed to the fancy dress of the royals in case anyone though our ceremony was a lot more sexy and enjoyable than theirs. Ritual pageantry - state ritual - is by nature utterly intolerant of opposition. I understand that a regimental black horse on April 29 acted like an anarchist - it reared up and cantered off along Whitehall. It’s always embarrassing to a regime when something thing like that happens. And that was just an animal! So what if humans had successfully staged an alternative to the pageantry and ritual?
I think they are much more frightened of street theatre than they are of the odd window being smashed. Obviously if as part of a revolution you smashed doors or windows to get into an important building in large numbers, that would be very significant. But, in terms of symbolic acts, I always think the state and the media love anything that will enable them to depict republicans, socialists, communists or anarchists as violent thugs. But humour and music and fancy dress is something else. If they’re scared of those kind of things, there must be a reason and it seems to me we should do more of it.
Though I wasn’t banking on it, I did think there was a chance the regime might be a bit more intelligent. While clamping down on, say, anarchists attacking a bank, why not allow professor Knight and his street theatre troupe to stage their clowning performance, just to make it look like the authorities are really quite tolerant? Perhaps I wouldn’t have felt too comfortable with that! In the event, in every interview I expressed solidarity with whatever anarchists wanted to do and it’s quite clear we chose the right motifs, symbols and effigies. There was no way they could afford to let our message come across on that day.
Especially the “Some cuts are necessary” message. Every time when I was interviewed and asked, “What’s your message?” I would say, “Well, we need a crackdown on crime in high places - financial crime, war crime, eco-crime. Some of the royals are involved in it and, if you want to crack down on crime, start at the top. And, if you want cuts, you can start there as well.” That’s a subversive, powerful message - and it’s got out. As far as the results of this clampdown are concerned, there has been a fantastic sense of everyone coming together.
On the left there are so many faction fights and mutual suspicion, but this really has unified us massively. Those who had been complaining so loudly about the street theatre side of things have certainly gone very quiet. If you ask the most prominent ‘legitimate’, so-called ‘authorised’ anarchists about some of the ‘official statements’ they were publishing in denunciation of us not so long ago - well, each and every one now denies any knowledge or responsibility. So who really did write those statements remains something of a mystery. Does anyone want to own up?
Exploit the media
A major debate within anarchist/direct action circles is ‘Do you talk to the media?’ One line is you never do. You mask up and when you’re asked a question you don’t say anything. I’ve been on the television quite a lot since March 26, when we had our big Trojan horse, and local people in the pub have said to me, “Chris, nobody else explained like you did why you lot were attacking those banks.” I had said on television that the banks are criminal outfits. We bail them out, they belong to us and yet the bankers are still occupying the buildings that don’t belong to them and they’re stuffing their pockets with bonuses. People appreciated my explanation of the logic behind cosmetically redecorating some of those banks on March 26.
To me it’s a no-brainer. Imagine the revolutionaries in Cairo saying, ‘We’re not going to talk to Al Jazeera.’ Of course you have to engage with the media. Of course you have to take advantage of the fact that many journalists belong to trade unions, are on our side and in many cases are revolutionaries. Obviously you have to be aware of the dangers. I take for granted that the tabloids can’t publish anything we say without reminding their readers that we’re ‘evil, anarchist thugs’. But the idea that you therefore retreat into your bunker and go speechless - I just don’t understand it.
What I’m saying is, as a result of March 26 and the magnificent Trojan Horse, combined, of course, with the UK Uncut stuff and Black Bloc stuff (and I’ve got no problem with people smashing a window if it makes the point) and the street theatre, I think we’re winning the argument. We do speak in a language that the media can relate to. We try to exploit contradictions in the bourgeois media in order to get our message out to the masses. If you don’t do that, you’re just talking to your own little ghetto bubble or Facebook group. Too many anarchists, socialists and communists these days just spend the whole time looking at a computer screen, living in virtual reality. It’s so important to get your message out to the wider working class. I think we’ve been increasingly successful in that, and this is just the start. An example is the links and contacts we’ve very recently made with comrades in the media that I’d describe as revolutionaries.
And the timing has been important. This wedding could be the last moment when the regime will have anything to celebrate. With the reality of the cuts, with the reality of the coalition crisis, the Eurozone crisis, the faltering econnomy, the whole population is going to come down with a cruel bump - if they haven’t done so already. There are going to be huge demonstrations in a few months time, as far as I can work out. There will be big strikes in the late summer and autumn, possibly approaching a general strike - massive, industrial, social and political unrest.
I think these relatively minor performances by the Government of the Dead have helped set the stage for those events. They have helped equip us in getting our message across in a sexy, powerful, attractive, simple way - as opposed to long, boring, theoretical tracts. Long columns of text are all right if you happen to be in one Marxist faction or another, but the working class aren’t too bothered with all that stuff. They want a voice they can hear and recognise as their own - one that’s saying things loud, clear and simple about how to fight the regime, how to fight the system and how to win.
Chris Knight of the Radical Anthropology Group was among several people arrested for attempting a street theatre performance to coincide with the royal wedding. They were accused of ‘conspiracy to cause a public nuisance’ and detained for more than 24 hours. Comrade Knight spoke to Peter Manson
I’ve been saying all along that, despite what they claim about this being a private wedding, the fact is that it was taxpayers who paid for this party - the security costs were by far the highest component. So it was our party and we had every right to be part of the proceedings.
Not everyone in the country is a monarchist. Some of us are socialists, republicans, anarchists … but all of us should have been able to participate in this joyful occasion, in whatever ways made us feel comfortable. Personally, I only felt comfortable with a guillotine. To cut through all the royalist media propaganda we needed a striking image, something the cameras could pick up. I can’t think of anything more likely to do that than our very large guillotine, something that looks as though it might be quite efficient at doing the job.
We were going to go along as royals - to be honest, if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for us. Why can’t we be princes and princesses and put various baubles and crowns on our heads? As an anthropologist, I admire hunter-gatherers. When some Kalahari Bushmen were once asked, ‘Who is your king?’, the answer came back: ‘Well, actually, all of us.’ When everyone is king, no-one is king. I’ve always admired that logic of levelling up rather than levelling down. I’ve never felt particularly inspired by campaigns for a bourgeois republic: swapping royalist fancy dress for the fancy dress of a president’s suit and tie.
So let’s have really good fancy dress. We had the costumes and were going to be out in our finery. It was a wedding, so why not be sexy? And it was just before May Day - when in this country we used to have traditional erections, Maypoles and so on, with associated fertility rites. So some of us felt quite happy to be part of all that.
But probably the majority of us were going to be zombies. We had this idea - Dead for a Day. I had my megaphone and I was going to play around with the idea: who are the zombies? Is it all these people waving union jacks, being mesmerised by the state? Mesmerised so as not to notice the very real cruel and unusual punishment being meted out at that very moment? All the lollipop ladies and ambulance drivers among half a million public service workers being sacked? So we were going to have a zombie march, meeting in Soho Square. If we hadn’t all been arrested, with raids on squats all round London, I imagine we would have had a good showing of several hundred. It would have been a most uplifting spectacle.
We were going to guillotine one particular royal. I’m one of those people aiming to keep the whole country together. I don’t want to be divisive on such occasions, so we had a poll to find out which of the royals was the best candidate to unite the entire country in celebrating a beheading. It was obvious that the odious Andrew was the people’s choice. If you read the American tabloids, he’s apparently wanted by the FBI for his close association with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. There’s a photograph of Andrew with his arm round one of the under-age prostitutes that Epstein introduced him to. Then there is his apparent advocacy of bribery on behalf of BAE Systems, as revealed by Wikileaks. We’re talking about BAE systems, weapons supplier of choice to the Saudi royals who’ve recently invaded Bahrain, whose Crown Prince (among those invited to the wedding) started firing live rounds against pro-democracy demonstrators. And, of course, there is Andrew’s intimate friendship with president Aliyev of Azerbaijan and various other central Asian despots, dictators and torturers.
I happen to know that quite a number of her majesty’s prison officers, soldiers and security personnel are incandescent with rage at the queen for conferring on her favourite son the highest possible honour - the Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order. She awarded this to Andrew on March 26, the very day a million of us were marching through Central London. She had decided to do this back in February, one day after the tabloids splashed the latest Andrew scandal involving Jeffrey Epstein. Soldiers who had served in the Falklands or Afghanistan and who used to be monarchists felt insulted by what the Daily Mail referred to as ‘the tarnished medal’.
So guillotining an effigy of prince Andrew would have been a popular move. You have to start somewhere, after all. And not everyone in the land would have thought it appropriate to guillotine Wills and Kate on the very day of their wedding.
Wedding plans
There were two things happening on that day. The first was a wedding. I’ve got no problem at all with a couple displaying their affection and commitment to each other in public. A wedding is a joyful event. But there was another thing happening. This was a regime baring its teeth, reminding us who’s in charge. And the problem I have is with the regime. I’m not bitter and twisted or a killjoy. I was asked a few times, do I wish the couple well? My answer was always yes, the same as for any other couple getting married. But this particular couple had quite enough well-wishers already, so I’m obviously not going to go out of my way to join in. Of course, the regime was having to go all out to justify the provocative extravaganza of a royal wedding at that time - a time when supposedly we can’t even afford lollipop ladies to make sure kids don’t get run over on their way to school.
Anyway, we were going to have our wedding breakfast in Soho Square and then we were going to have a zombie procession to Eros in Piccadilly Circus, where we would have continued the street theatre with a fertility rite. Zombies do find it a bit difficult to have sex, mind you - crucial bits of their anatomy keep falling off. But you can always put them back on. After that, the plan was to make our way towards Westminster Abbey, where heads would roll. But, of course, we recognised that the police might possibly have noticed a rather large guillotine making its way towards the Abbey, so we didn’t expect to get all that far.
So the plan was to do a U-turn whenever we got stopped and make our way to the ‘official republican’ bourgeois street party in Red Lion Square, where the execution of Andrew would have been carried out.
The guillotine is absolutely magnificent. Unfortunately the whole wooden contraption was arrested and is still in custody. It is 12 foot high, with a shimmering blade and pulleys and ropes that look as though they might work. There’s a big communist red flag on the top, alongside a black-and-red anarchist flag, and arching over all that a legend reading “Some cuts are necessary”, a quote from Ed Miliband.
Well, it was a shame we couldn’t take it to Red Lion Square. It would have been a prominent component of the festivities, triggering hilarity and celebration. But the arrest of the guillotine, and of the street theatre group, and of all those very courageous zombies, including parents with their kids (some severely intimidated for engaging in a bit of face-painting), actually meant that the message of resistance got out. It got out at least as widely, if not more so, than could have happened through any actual performance. There’s been a widespread feeling of revulsion at what amounted to a display of absolute monarchy on the day.
I’ve been asked several times, “Chris, what have you got against the monarchy?” Or “Isn’t the monarchy irrelevant?” Well, the idea that the state is irrelevant is stupid. You can’t say, ‘I’m against capitalism, but the state’s OK.’ And the monarchy is the state in Britain. People kept saying, ‘Come on, just for one day, let the whole nation come together without protests.’ But there are two answers to that. First of all, I don’t even do protest: I do street theatre. I find protest very boring. What’s the point of going round saying, ‘I protest’? Where does that get you? But secondly I think it would be very dangerous to have absolute monarchy, even for one day.
But, in the event, the monarchy did assert that it was absolute. It completely zapped any hint of dissent through those mass arrests. On our part, the idea was to explore those boundaries, to see how far we could get. We wanted to make sure there was at least some signal of resistance. Everyone else seemed to have got cold feet. For example, Freedom Press, calling themselves the ‘legitimate anarchists’, announced that anarchists don’t care about such irrelevant things as monarchy. I’m apparently too bureaucratic to be rubber-stamped as a legitimate anarchist, but, as you know, I’m not an anarchist in any case: I’m a Marxist. More precisely, I think every anarchist should be a communist and every communist an anarchist. Anyway, it was remarkable the way these folk were almost shouting to the police, ‘Not me, guv, we’re not doing anything. We don’t even care about the monarchy. We’re not having any protests or anything like that - we’re just gonna be in the pub all day.’ I’m not sure whether that’s politics or whether it’s just people bottling out.
Very understandable, if that’s the case, but it seems to me that if we’re revolutionaries of any stripe we have to do what our comrades have been doing across the Arab world. In Britain we’re not faced at the moment by the kind of terror and violence that our comrades in Syria, for example, are experiencing, but even here we do have to take courage and cross that barrier of fear. We can’t allow the regime to successfully intimidate us.
So it seemed important to do something - preferably something enjoyable, something comical, and in a way part of the celebrations. Celebrating a nice bank holiday in the run-up to May Day in a way that republicans could feel comfortable with.
Arrest
We had just completed the magnificent guillotine. We’d varnished it and attached the flags and we’d also made the comical effigy of prince Andrew, complete with long neck (easier to chop through). We had pinned onto him the Knight Grand Cross bauble his mum had given him and we had a ‘Government of the Dead’ banner and a lot of cardboard cut-out silhouettes of the various dictators the royals invited to the wedding.
All this had been packed away in our van, but we were so ahead of time that all 10 or 12 of us decided to go for a drink, including the two members of the Channel 4 camera crew who had been filming us for several days. After half an hour or so we were coming back to the van and we noticed this guy, who turned out to be a plain-clothes cop. I was just getting my keys out ready to drive off, when we were suddenly swooped on by around 25 uniformed officers in five vehicles.
A woman police officer immediately approached me and said: “You are under arrest, accused of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.” They accused Charlie Veitch in Cambridge of the same thing - he just goes round with a megaphone trying to hug coppers. And the people arrested in Soho Square - there were two or three dozen detained or generally intimidated - were taken to Belgravia police station for the same reason. It was difficult to believe that they would be willing to be made fools of in that way - it was so obviously street theatre. But Camilla Power, Patrick Macroidan, the ‘executioner’ in fancy dress, and myself were all arrested and hauled off to the royal dungeons in Lewisham. For some reason they thought Camilla needed to be handcuffed, whereas Patrick and I didn’t.
They couldn’t charge us with anything, because there was no evidence. They searched my home three times during the night and the subsequent day looking for something incriminating. They also rummaged through my car and couldn’t find anything there either.
Many of your readers probably don’t need to be told what it’s like to be in a police cell - a lot of people are quite familiar with the experience. I’ve been in one a few times, although never for quite so long. Twenty-five hours is a lot longer than it sounds to be in a white tiled cell, with nothing in it except a ledge to sleep on and a latrine without any lid. No windows, no daylight. You have no idea what time it is - they take away your watch, your phone and so on, so it could be four in the morning or it could be midday.
Every half-hour they noisily flip open the little aperture and stare at you to make sure you haven’t hanged yourself. There’s a CCTV watching you all the time, including when you’re having a crap. You have to ask for everything, including toilet paper - you have to beg to be allowed to have a crap. If you ask for water they give you a tiny little bit. As for the food, it’s inedible.
I don’t want to make too much of an issue out of it. But it does remind you of the fact that so many people - in the Arab world in particular, but everywhere, I suppose - are kept in worse conditions: for months, years, decades … It’s enough to drive you round the bend. But we were in good spirits. I was thinking all the time that it’s almost a gift that they’ve chosen to do this. It’s such a sign of weakness that the regime can’t even allow the threat posed by a bit of street theatre. It doesn’t make them look good.
No comment
They interviewed me once for about an hour during the time I was held. But my solicitor stomped on my temptation to give as good as I got. He instructed me absolutely categorically just to say, ‘No comment’. As soon as you say anything at all, you inevitably admit to elements of the police story. He said, ‘Why not make them work?’ I did say one thing at the beginning: “I am a member of a street theatre group, the Government of the Dead. As with Punch and Judy, you can argue against it on health and safety grounds since it’s a bit violent. But that’s the point: you need a sense of humour.”
From then on, every time they asked questions like, “How can you say it’s non-violent to execute prince Andrew with a guillotine?” I would just say, “I refer you to my initial statement about street theatre. Otherwise no comment.” They asked, “How could you have possibly called upon students to hang Nick Clegg?” So once again I replied, “It’s street theatre and you do need to have a sense of humour. Otherwise no comment.”
But it’s so interesting that no regime, no state, no functionary, no police officer can possibly have a sense of humour. It’s the one thing they can’t allow. As an anthropologist I’m very interested in the whole issue of laughter - one of the most important things that distinguishes Homo sapiens from all other animals. Laughter is a potent weapon, in the face of which no regime can survive. Every single word for the regime has to be taken solemnly and literally. Nothing can be playful, nothing humorous.
Now and again during the interview they would say, “Come on, Chris, we know your solicitor’s advised you to say ‘No comment’, but this is your opportunity to tell the world. It’s all being recorded! Who are you? What’s the Government of the Dead about? What’s your message?” I just said, “Sorry, but I’ve every confidence in the professional competence of my solicitor and the answer is … ‘No comment’.” They said, “It’s not going to look good to a jury. It looks like you’ve got something to hide.” It was difficult not to rise to the bait - I felt they were making complete fools of themselves - and they were doing their utmost to get a bit more out of me. But every time I hinted that I might say something, my solicitor quickly made his views clear.
At one point they said, “What have you got against authority?” I found it very difficult not to say, ‘Well, I do have some problems with what you call “the authorities”, but as for the authority of a proletarian revolution across planet Earth, I’d have absolutely no problem with that putting you lot in your place!’
Camilla and Patrick got the same sort of treatment, and they gave as good as they got, of course. But we had all agreed to abide by the solicitor’s advice and say, ‘No comment’. Camilla was interviewed by Channel 4 as she came out and was absolutely brilliant. Her description of being thrown into a right royal dungeon provided a mirror image of the glorious nuptials of the lovely pair. Like all of us she came out in very good spirits - and trying hard not to laugh. At the same time I feel humbled by the courage of the teenagers and in some cases even children, who came to Soho Square with their face paint and found themselves threatened or arrested. Very unpleasant. So, while there is an element of laughter, there is also an element of deep outrage.
In the end, they couldn’t lay charges. I’ve got to return to Lewisham police station, as have the other two, on June 10. In the meantime, absolutely savage bail conditions have been imposed. I’m not allowed to attend any march, demonstration or rally for that six-week period. The bail notification I was given was signed by a counter-terrorism officer - in their book, I’m a terrorist apparently. I’m told by my solicitor that the bail conditions can’t possibly hold - there’s no way that’s compatible with European human rights legislation. The police asked me, have I understood this? I said, “Well, I do hear what you’re saying, but it’s totally unacceptable. You can’t possibly stop me attending rallies and demonstrations.” But that’s what they’re saying.
After six weeks we will then see if they’re going to press charges. If there’s a trial, it will probably be later in the year. If they managed to find a jury that would convict, it would involve a severe sentence. You can get a lengthy prison sentence for conspiracy. I don’t especially want that, obviously, but I would have thought we could win any court case. The temptation would be to do a Leon Trotsky - “I stand here not as the accused, but as the accuser”. But I don’t think they would be so stupid.
Ritual and dissent
One important point. All this demonstrates the centrality of ritual. We have a state and, as Engels points out, the state consists of armed bodies of men. But if they were just armed bodies of men they would have to do what Assad is doing in Syria: use live rounds and fire shells into people’s houses. It does help the state if it can use ‘magic’ - if it can mesmerise people with pageantry.
But, when there is pageantry, like a royal wedding, there’s no way the state can tolerate so much as a hint of dissent or pluralism. The smallest element of choice as to which ritual performance the populace might follow would mean the whole thing might unravel. So I can see why absolute monarchy appeared necessary on the day. They couldn’t allow a republican, humorous, engaging, infectious parade counterposed to the fancy dress of the royals in case anyone though our ceremony was a lot more sexy and enjoyable than theirs. Ritual pageantry - state ritual - is by nature utterly intolerant of opposition. I understand that a regimental black horse on April 29 acted like an anarchist - it reared up and cantered off along Whitehall. It’s always embarrassing to a regime when something thing like that happens. And that was just an animal! So what if humans had successfully staged an alternative to the pageantry and ritual?
I think they are much more frightened of street theatre than they are of the odd window being smashed. Obviously if as part of a revolution you smashed doors or windows to get into an important building in large numbers, that would be very significant. But, in terms of symbolic acts, I always think the state and the media love anything that will enable them to depict republicans, socialists, communists or anarchists as violent thugs. But humour and music and fancy dress is something else. If they’re scared of those kind of things, there must be a reason and it seems to me we should do more of it.
Though I wasn’t banking on it, I did think there was a chance the regime might be a bit more intelligent. While clamping down on, say, anarchists attacking a bank, why not allow professor Knight and his street theatre troupe to stage their clowning performance, just to make it look like the authorities are really quite tolerant? Perhaps I wouldn’t have felt too comfortable with that! In the event, in every interview I expressed solidarity with whatever anarchists wanted to do and it’s quite clear we chose the right motifs, symbols and effigies. There was no way they could afford to let our message come across on that day.
Especially the “Some cuts are necessary” message. Every time when I was interviewed and asked, “What’s your message?” I would say, “Well, we need a crackdown on crime in high places - financial crime, war crime, eco-crime. Some of the royals are involved in it and, if you want to crack down on crime, start at the top. And, if you want cuts, you can start there as well.” That’s a subversive, powerful message - and it’s got out. As far as the results of this clampdown are concerned, there has been a fantastic sense of everyone coming together.
On the left there are so many faction fights and mutual suspicion, but this really has unified us massively. Those who had been complaining so loudly about the street theatre side of things have certainly gone very quiet. If you ask the most prominent ‘legitimate’, so-called ‘authorised’ anarchists about some of the ‘official statements’ they were publishing in denunciation of us not so long ago - well, each and every one now denies any knowledge or responsibility. So who really did write those statements remains something of a mystery. Does anyone want to own up?
Exploit the media
A major debate within anarchist/direct action circles is ‘Do you talk to the media?’ One line is you never do. You mask up and when you’re asked a question you don’t say anything. I’ve been on the television quite a lot since March 26, when we had our big Trojan horse, and local people in the pub have said to me, “Chris, nobody else explained like you did why you lot were attacking those banks.” I had said on television that the banks are criminal outfits. We bail them out, they belong to us and yet the bankers are still occupying the buildings that don’t belong to them and they’re stuffing their pockets with bonuses. People appreciated my explanation of the logic behind cosmetically redecorating some of those banks on March 26.
To me it’s a no-brainer. Imagine the revolutionaries in Cairo saying, ‘We’re not going to talk to Al Jazeera.’ Of course you have to engage with the media. Of course you have to take advantage of the fact that many journalists belong to trade unions, are on our side and in many cases are revolutionaries. Obviously you have to be aware of the dangers. I take for granted that the tabloids can’t publish anything we say without reminding their readers that we’re ‘evil, anarchist thugs’. But the idea that you therefore retreat into your bunker and go speechless - I just don’t understand it.
What I’m saying is, as a result of March 26 and the magnificent Trojan Horse, combined, of course, with the UK Uncut stuff and Black Bloc stuff (and I’ve got no problem with people smashing a window if it makes the point) and the street theatre, I think we’re winning the argument. We do speak in a language that the media can relate to. We try to exploit contradictions in the bourgeois media in order to get our message out to the masses. If you don’t do that, you’re just talking to your own little ghetto bubble or Facebook group. Too many anarchists, socialists and communists these days just spend the whole time looking at a computer screen, living in virtual reality. It’s so important to get your message out to the wider working class. I think we’ve been increasingly successful in that, and this is just the start. An example is the links and contacts we’ve very recently made with comrades in the media that I’d describe as revolutionaries.
And the timing has been important. This wedding could be the last moment when the regime will have anything to celebrate. With the reality of the cuts, with the reality of the coalition crisis, the Eurozone crisis, the faltering econnomy, the whole population is going to come down with a cruel bump - if they haven’t done so already. There are going to be huge demonstrations in a few months time, as far as I can work out. There will be big strikes in the late summer and autumn, possibly approaching a general strike - massive, industrial, social and political unrest.
I think these relatively minor performances by the Government of the Dead have helped set the stage for those events. They have helped equip us in getting our message across in a sexy, powerful, attractive, simple way - as opposed to long, boring, theoretical tracts. Long columns of text are all right if you happen to be in one Marxist faction or another, but the working class aren’t too bothered with all that stuff. They want a voice they can hear and recognise as their own - one that’s saying things loud, clear and simple about how to fight the regime, how to fight the system and how to win.
Times Higher Education Supplement.
Arrest for attempted street theatre: In defence of the human right to rite!
It is a beautiful Mayday morning, and I am wondering whether to head down to Clerkenwell Green to join the festive gathering on the day when pagan, anarchist and socialist hope springs eternal. If I step onto the Green, I am liable to arrest under bail conditions imposed after 25 hours detention in Lewisham Police Station from around 6pm on the eve of the royal wedding.
How close could I get? Where is the boundary of the ritual gathering? Can I sit down in a café or a pub to talk to my friends, or would I get collared? There are many ways in and out of the Green, which I picture as a glowing tapestry of banners and red-and-black flags under the trees and the church. Surely I can slip in under their noses. My human instinct to defy is strong, but if I’m rearrested, charged and banged up, my students will miss this week’s final revision classes and essay preparations. And I won’t be able to write this. Tricky decision.
So what did I do to be banished from the sacred Mayday space? Nothing… yet. I was picked up in one of last week’s preemptive raids during what’s become known in ‘activist’ circles as the Great Royal Wedding Purge. The police have begun to arrest people whom they suspect of thinking of doing something.
These arrests have been written about in terms of democratic rights to free speech. From my perspective, it’s about the human right to ritual participation. My scientific work as an anthropologist combines Darwinian and Durkheimian models on the evolution of ritual as the necessary condition for language. Performative deeds precede and provide the necessary scaffolding for speech. In activist mode, I put the theories to empirical test, joining in the creation of ritual street theatre to move into and around politically contested spaces, at ritually charged ‘cracks’ in time, establishing symbolic presence. As part of a motley crew known as the Government of the Dead, I’ve worn silly costumes, devised ways to hang and decapitate effigies, spilt fake body fluids, committed cannibalism, cast spells, bodypainted, sung and danced badly.
On Thursday evening last, several cars and a van load of police – maybe twenty odd officers of the law – swooped on a south London street corner to round up a theatrical troupe. Suddenly I was in the midst of the most extraordinary street theatre yet; what’s so exciting is you never know who is going to turn up and take part. The police were the ones in costume, apart from the detective and shifty undercover surveillance; we were distinctly underdressed. We’d been moving theatrical props – some quite heavy. And the police knew the drill of the choreography, stringing themselves into a line between us and the suburban street, backing us steadily against the London brick walls behind. Slyly, they ringed around a white van which they suspected we were walking towards. We just waited expectantly to be auditioned while the detective in the suit flashed his badge and pointed to some of us, denying others – ‘no, he’s alright’ – as if he were casting us for roles. The only one who happened to be wearing some fancy dress got picked on; as did my close friend and colleague Chris Knight, a Professor of anthropology – best known for his top hat, dark glasses and vampire blood Baron Samedi look – but now in a motheaten jumper. By a stroke of fortune, a Channel 4 documentary team and an independent filmmaker were on hand to film the whole episode. A friend pointed out later, more police officers were needed to arrest us than for the Krays!
I was astonished, rivetted and sensed something delicious and ridiculous about the scene. I intimated I’d never been in a police swoop before, since I was a law-abiding citizen who had never ever committed any crime. I look like it too, a middle-aged bespectacled academic, though I was pretty scruffy. An officer told me I was being arrested on suspicion of conspiring to cause a public nuisance. But what had I done? No ritual had yet been performed! It was my ‘conduct’ at fault. Wow! I hadn’t been ticked off for bad conduct since I was at convent school. And then it was by a nun.
What the police suspected – and I’m not admitting to anything – is that on the morning of the wedding I might dress up as Queen Marie Antoinette with pompadour wig and zombie make-up neckwound, attempting unlawfully to hand out ‘tombstone’ cake to a gathering of zombies on Soho Square all the while haunting the precincts of a 12-foot wooden guillotine in some urban guerrilla parody of the divine kingship ritual of Nemi grove. Well they didn’t quite put it like that, even though some of the officers of the Masonic persuasion might have leafed through a copy of The Golden Bough. Their main focus was on my relationship to the superbly crafted guillotine, decked with red and red-and-black flags either side of the legend ‘Some Cuts Are Necessary’ and louchely associated with a cariacature dummy Prince Andrew, adorned with a cardboard cutout Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order. This august decoration was in fact pinned onto the flesh and blood Andrew by his mum in an investiture on March 26, the day perhaps a million of us took to the streets of London. As several tax evading and banking outfits got some exterior decorating free of charge, no one noticed the goings on at Court. Some royal rituals are best kept under wraps, it seems.
After the ritual drama on the street, the procedural boredom of the booking in, and then, the royal dungeon: perpetual fluourescent glare which never acknowledges circadian rhythm, the hard and sticky plastic mattress, steel loo, ‘cushion’ on the ledge which can never be angled right to rest your neck comfortably…you do best to drift into a numb state, interrupted by random clatters of checks through the cell door aperture and callouts for inedible meals. The demeaning requirement to ask humbly for every petty comfort. We’ve all read our Foucault, yet this had a special character of intermingling Monarchical and Disciplinary Punishment.
As Victor Turner tells of such a liminal state of sensory deprivation, you enter ‘the realm of primitive hypothesis’, where you have power to juggle with factors of existence, take apart and put together the world as you know it in novel combinations. Could it be…my jubilation started to mount, could it be that the Royal Household, amid all the Kate/Wills mania, images plastered ubiquitous as maoist icons of young love, felt challenged? Could they be sufficiently challenged in their pageantry by our cardboard cutout, straw-stuffed constructions held together with cable ties and gaffer tape that they let fall to their inner cabal, they would not be amused by any rival rebellious spectacle? The police, smarting from the anarchist poke breaching Charles and Camilla’s body politic, would have scrambled into action. Surely not, this must be right under their radar, but then, the building of the guillotine by a pair of subversive old age pensioners had featured on numerous international channels and been subject of discussions on ITV’s main breakfast show.
The Government of the Dead is versed in lowdown miraculous tricks for transforming corpses into the stuff of feasts. It regularly rehearses a Rabelaisian carnival of bloodshed and dismemberment, ruthless slaughter ‘transformed into a merry banquet’, as Bakhtin puts it: ‘bloodshed, dismemberment, burning, death, beatings, blows, curses and abuses – all these elements are steeped in “merry time”, time which kills and gives birth’. A mummer’s play reproduction of life, death and resurrection is what you need to mobilise ritual power, this, as Agents of the Government of the Dead, we know. EAT THE BANKERS was the slogan under which top-hatted Chris Knight/Mister Mayhem zombie-walked, urging fellow zombies to ‘snack on bankers’ brains’ at the April 1 Financial Fools Day G20 Banquet at the Bank.
The Government of the Dead’s fearsome Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse first galloped clattering onto the streets at Canary Wharf, Hallowe’en 2008 on the pavement outside Lehman Brothers. Bankers and financiers scuttled home out of the way for the afternoon. While a new moon set over the Canary Wharf dock, witches cast an opening ceremony amid a circle of pumpkin candles, summoning the Horsemen from four directions to gyrate wildly in the dark to a samba band – Dancing on the Grave of Capitalism. But capitalism keeps rising from the grave and we have to bury it in a lunar infinity of revolutions.
Mardi Gras 2009, again dark moon, zombies went for a window-shopping spree down Oxford Street in a New Orleans-style funeral jazz procession to Hang a Banker at Tyburn Tree/Marble Arch. Being indigenous London zombies, they also tossed bankers’ brains in frying pans in the Zombie Pancake Race. The shadowy dead stalked amid the bright lights past bemused, then amused shoppers’ faces. This street ritual became pant-wettingly funny as the zombies, who, let’s face it, don’t have very good hand-eye coordination, kept trying and failing to haul the shop-dummy, bowler-hatted banker up onto Marble Arch. Police egged the zombies on, ‘ner, do it properly!’ they cried. Their good humour on this occasion starkly contrasts with the cruel persecution of the zombie kids who turned up on Soho Square looking for breakfast. A meticulous account of what the police – uniformed and undercover – did to the Zombie Starbucks Five can be found on Hannah Chutzpah’s blog. Hannah notes how the zombies’ release from their cells was coordinated with the movements of the royal couple driving off in their wedding car – a ritual shadow world reflection. Bravely, they rejected dismissive police suggestions to wash their faces and go home by doing a final zombie walk performance outside Belgravia police station.
Last Mayday, 2010, the Saturday before a sham election where we had a choice between the Red, Blue and Orange Property parties, all equally in the pockets of casino bankers, the righteous justice of the Government of the Dead was visited on the party leaders. Brought up from pasture, the Four Horsemen led processions from each Party HQ to occupy Parliament Square. Cameron and Clegg were hanged, presciently side by side, from a sturdy gallows, while Brown was decapitated on an executioner’s block, his blood spurting onto the lenses of press cameras. The longest fourth procession came all the way from Clerkenwell; black bloc anarchists escorted a pint-sized Nick Griffin to be hung, drawn and quartered, then hurled to the crowd and torn to pieces. After Death, the miraculous Life, a Maypole was erected on Parliament Square and we danced in a wild whirl. The heavens opened. Two, three, five, ten tents were hurriedly pitched for cover and suddenly a camp mushroomed. This became Democracy Village, a tented conurbation of eco-villagers, peace activists, rainbow folk, bolsheviks, anarchists, ex-squaddies and the homeless, which held the ground of Parliament Square until forcibly evicted on July 20. The image of this grassroots people’s assembly, right on the lawn under the corrupt and venal Houses of Parliament, beamed across the world not least by Al Jazeera, just might have helped a tiny bit inspire similar such occupations of central public space in the revolutions of the Arab spring. But in the High Courts of the land last summer, Democracy Village was classified a public nuisance, and had to go – spilling onto the pavement where it resolutely remains, untidied away before the wedding. Grim metal harris fences went up around the Square, where people previously had been able to walk freely; these were subsequently put to use by students shielding themselves from riot cop attack on Dec 9.
Through Democracy Village, the Government of the Dead had its initial brush with royal power. After much speculation, the police decided to leave us in place, though subject to searches and a very stern eye, for the State Opening of Parliament on May 25. As the Queen’s carriage rolled by, the Government of the Dead posted the Four Horsemen round a lurid pink faux Louis Quinze throne whereon were seated Queen Tracy and her consort King Tarquin. A homeless woman of regal bearing, dressed in Elizabethan costume, Tracy delivered an Alternative Queen’s Speech, drowned out by the tolling of Westminster Abbey’s bells. She and her husband, local to the Westminster/ Vauxhall turf, were indeed autochthonous inhabitants of Democracy Village. There from day one, they stayed on even after the eviction. Despite substance abuse issues, they took part in assemblies (sometimes raucously) and involved themselves in non-violent direct actions such as sit downs and road blocks.
This was truly a ‘world turned upside down’ with those lying in the gutter looking at the stars. The critical ritual function of royalty has been to channel cosmic alignment between heaven and earth, ensuring that the periodicity visible in the skies is marked on earth, that monarch and people move in step through cycles and seasons to keep the cosmos turning, bring the rains, and make the kingdom fertile. Cosmologic spectacle has been the jealously guarded monopoly of royalty. According to Max Gluckman’s thesis on rituals of rebellion in traditional sacred systems, where the system itself is not in dispute, dramas of rebellion and role reversal turn the world upside down only to return it right back to where it was before. The implication is that if the rebellious ritual is not tolerated, as ours wasn’t, the system does not at all feel sure of itself. The medieval lower strata of grotesque revelry mirrored and symbolically destroyed the authority of officialdom, yet each world affirmed the existence of the other in the ebbing and flowing, toing and froing of carnival time. Carnival licence evaporated in the periods of the English and French revolutions: with real royal blood on the streets, what need of theatrical tricks? This expresses the antithetical relation between ritual theatre and actual violence.
But the ritual shadow world demands its fair share of power. The Government of the Dead as Rabelaisian agitprop asserts its rights (and rites) in polarity to the rigid ceremonial of royal protocol. The slogan of the Government of the Dead – ‘the only good government is a dead government’ – sounds fundamentally anarchist. Yet it derives from an idea common to many cultures across the world. Those who live in the world, eating, drinking, having sex, are necessarily corrupt mortals, and must be susceptible to the temptations of the flesh; only once dead, as ancestors, can they be trusted. To join the Government, you must be dead. We agitators are mere agents, our comings and goings governed by lunar time and tide. Like Falstaff, autochthonous genius of English kingship, we are ‘minions of the moon; and let men say we be men of good government, being governed, as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal’. The Government of the Dead seeks to restore lunarchy – rule by the Moon – to humanity, with ritual, sexual and economic exchange switching by lunar phase. Let the shadow world Government take the power for one phase, say waxing moon, the official world in waning.
When the Government was informed of the date set for William Wales and Catherine Middleton’s marriage, it was aghast. The last dying days of the moon of April prior to Mayday was cosmologically catastrophic, with potential dire consequences! This bourgeois apology of a Saxe Coburg royal house had really lost its ritual marbles. No young couple can marry successfully, fruitfully except at full moon, the honeymoon time. Dark moon conjures menstrual blood, kinship, witchcraft – all antithetical to marriage. Further, Mayday is the necessary time of popular fertility rite, not sex between newly weds, but group sex of the lads and lasses in the woods and fields. The Government realized it had a cosmic duty to supply the necessary erotic elements to overcome this threat to fecundity. Already back in November when the wedding date was announced in the heady aftermath of the trashing of Millbank Tory HQ, we found the ritual formula: Royal Wedding + Mayday holiday = Right Royal Orgy. How this was to be achieved, the agents weren’t certain, but it had compelling logic. In the event, the Zombie Group Wedding, Queer Resistance Flashmob and fertility rites around the statue of Eros promised a solution.
Except the event was prevented; the agents of zombie orgy chucked in a dungeon; the guillotine impounded under counter-terrorism laws. The Government of the Dead is now gravely displeased. The chimney sweep is banished, the smirch of ash on the wedding dress hygienically cleaned, all is whiteness, whiteness, blinding whiteness. The moon cannot be full all of the time, as the Earth cannot endure 24/7 turbocapitalism without cessation.
Can the body politic recover? The thirteenth fairy has been turned away from the feast. While we were rounded up and incarcerated, certain Middle Eastern princes and dictators’ envoys had been cordially invited, though it seems they were too busy to attend. They had their hands full, their rogue police firing live rounds into crowds of pro-democracy protestors. Perhaps after all, some blood does bespatter the hem of that dress.
Meanwhile, our friendly British bobbies searched Chris’ house and car three times, but missed the most crucial, incriminating evidence – the annotated copy of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World, holy scripture of the Government of the Dead.
Arrest for attempted street theatre: In defence of the human right to rite!
It is a beautiful Mayday morning, and I am wondering whether to head down to Clerkenwell Green to join the festive gathering on the day when pagan, anarchist and socialist hope springs eternal. If I step onto the Green, I am liable to arrest under bail conditions imposed after 25 hours detention in Lewisham Police Station from around 6pm on the eve of the royal wedding.
How close could I get? Where is the boundary of the ritual gathering? Can I sit down in a café or a pub to talk to my friends, or would I get collared? There are many ways in and out of the Green, which I picture as a glowing tapestry of banners and red-and-black flags under the trees and the church. Surely I can slip in under their noses. My human instinct to defy is strong, but if I’m rearrested, charged and banged up, my students will miss this week’s final revision classes and essay preparations. And I won’t be able to write this. Tricky decision.
So what did I do to be banished from the sacred Mayday space? Nothing… yet. I was picked up in one of last week’s preemptive raids during what’s become known in ‘activist’ circles as the Great Royal Wedding Purge. The police have begun to arrest people whom they suspect of thinking of doing something.
These arrests have been written about in terms of democratic rights to free speech. From my perspective, it’s about the human right to ritual participation. My scientific work as an anthropologist combines Darwinian and Durkheimian models on the evolution of ritual as the necessary condition for language. Performative deeds precede and provide the necessary scaffolding for speech. In activist mode, I put the theories to empirical test, joining in the creation of ritual street theatre to move into and around politically contested spaces, at ritually charged ‘cracks’ in time, establishing symbolic presence. As part of a motley crew known as the Government of the Dead, I’ve worn silly costumes, devised ways to hang and decapitate effigies, spilt fake body fluids, committed cannibalism, cast spells, bodypainted, sung and danced badly.
On Thursday evening last, several cars and a van load of police – maybe twenty odd officers of the law – swooped on a south London street corner to round up a theatrical troupe. Suddenly I was in the midst of the most extraordinary street theatre yet; what’s so exciting is you never know who is going to turn up and take part. The police were the ones in costume, apart from the detective and shifty undercover surveillance; we were distinctly underdressed. We’d been moving theatrical props – some quite heavy. And the police knew the drill of the choreography, stringing themselves into a line between us and the suburban street, backing us steadily against the London brick walls behind. Slyly, they ringed around a white van which they suspected we were walking towards. We just waited expectantly to be auditioned while the detective in the suit flashed his badge and pointed to some of us, denying others – ‘no, he’s alright’ – as if he were casting us for roles. The only one who happened to be wearing some fancy dress got picked on; as did my close friend and colleague Chris Knight, a Professor of anthropology – best known for his top hat, dark glasses and vampire blood Baron Samedi look – but now in a motheaten jumper. By a stroke of fortune, a Channel 4 documentary team and an independent filmmaker were on hand to film the whole episode. A friend pointed out later, more police officers were needed to arrest us than for the Krays!
I was astonished, rivetted and sensed something delicious and ridiculous about the scene. I intimated I’d never been in a police swoop before, since I was a law-abiding citizen who had never ever committed any crime. I look like it too, a middle-aged bespectacled academic, though I was pretty scruffy. An officer told me I was being arrested on suspicion of conspiring to cause a public nuisance. But what had I done? No ritual had yet been performed! It was my ‘conduct’ at fault. Wow! I hadn’t been ticked off for bad conduct since I was at convent school. And then it was by a nun.
What the police suspected – and I’m not admitting to anything – is that on the morning of the wedding I might dress up as Queen Marie Antoinette with pompadour wig and zombie make-up neckwound, attempting unlawfully to hand out ‘tombstone’ cake to a gathering of zombies on Soho Square all the while haunting the precincts of a 12-foot wooden guillotine in some urban guerrilla parody of the divine kingship ritual of Nemi grove. Well they didn’t quite put it like that, even though some of the officers of the Masonic persuasion might have leafed through a copy of The Golden Bough. Their main focus was on my relationship to the superbly crafted guillotine, decked with red and red-and-black flags either side of the legend ‘Some Cuts Are Necessary’ and louchely associated with a cariacature dummy Prince Andrew, adorned with a cardboard cutout Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order. This august decoration was in fact pinned onto the flesh and blood Andrew by his mum in an investiture on March 26, the day perhaps a million of us took to the streets of London. As several tax evading and banking outfits got some exterior decorating free of charge, no one noticed the goings on at Court. Some royal rituals are best kept under wraps, it seems.
After the ritual drama on the street, the procedural boredom of the booking in, and then, the royal dungeon: perpetual fluourescent glare which never acknowledges circadian rhythm, the hard and sticky plastic mattress, steel loo, ‘cushion’ on the ledge which can never be angled right to rest your neck comfortably…you do best to drift into a numb state, interrupted by random clatters of checks through the cell door aperture and callouts for inedible meals. The demeaning requirement to ask humbly for every petty comfort. We’ve all read our Foucault, yet this had a special character of intermingling Monarchical and Disciplinary Punishment.
As Victor Turner tells of such a liminal state of sensory deprivation, you enter ‘the realm of primitive hypothesis’, where you have power to juggle with factors of existence, take apart and put together the world as you know it in novel combinations. Could it be…my jubilation started to mount, could it be that the Royal Household, amid all the Kate/Wills mania, images plastered ubiquitous as maoist icons of young love, felt challenged? Could they be sufficiently challenged in their pageantry by our cardboard cutout, straw-stuffed constructions held together with cable ties and gaffer tape that they let fall to their inner cabal, they would not be amused by any rival rebellious spectacle? The police, smarting from the anarchist poke breaching Charles and Camilla’s body politic, would have scrambled into action. Surely not, this must be right under their radar, but then, the building of the guillotine by a pair of subversive old age pensioners had featured on numerous international channels and been subject of discussions on ITV’s main breakfast show.
The Government of the Dead is versed in lowdown miraculous tricks for transforming corpses into the stuff of feasts. It regularly rehearses a Rabelaisian carnival of bloodshed and dismemberment, ruthless slaughter ‘transformed into a merry banquet’, as Bakhtin puts it: ‘bloodshed, dismemberment, burning, death, beatings, blows, curses and abuses – all these elements are steeped in “merry time”, time which kills and gives birth’. A mummer’s play reproduction of life, death and resurrection is what you need to mobilise ritual power, this, as Agents of the Government of the Dead, we know. EAT THE BANKERS was the slogan under which top-hatted Chris Knight/Mister Mayhem zombie-walked, urging fellow zombies to ‘snack on bankers’ brains’ at the April 1 Financial Fools Day G20 Banquet at the Bank.
The Government of the Dead’s fearsome Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse first galloped clattering onto the streets at Canary Wharf, Hallowe’en 2008 on the pavement outside Lehman Brothers. Bankers and financiers scuttled home out of the way for the afternoon. While a new moon set over the Canary Wharf dock, witches cast an opening ceremony amid a circle of pumpkin candles, summoning the Horsemen from four directions to gyrate wildly in the dark to a samba band – Dancing on the Grave of Capitalism. But capitalism keeps rising from the grave and we have to bury it in a lunar infinity of revolutions.
Mardi Gras 2009, again dark moon, zombies went for a window-shopping spree down Oxford Street in a New Orleans-style funeral jazz procession to Hang a Banker at Tyburn Tree/Marble Arch. Being indigenous London zombies, they also tossed bankers’ brains in frying pans in the Zombie Pancake Race. The shadowy dead stalked amid the bright lights past bemused, then amused shoppers’ faces. This street ritual became pant-wettingly funny as the zombies, who, let’s face it, don’t have very good hand-eye coordination, kept trying and failing to haul the shop-dummy, bowler-hatted banker up onto Marble Arch. Police egged the zombies on, ‘ner, do it properly!’ they cried. Their good humour on this occasion starkly contrasts with the cruel persecution of the zombie kids who turned up on Soho Square looking for breakfast. A meticulous account of what the police – uniformed and undercover – did to the Zombie Starbucks Five can be found on Hannah Chutzpah’s blog. Hannah notes how the zombies’ release from their cells was coordinated with the movements of the royal couple driving off in their wedding car – a ritual shadow world reflection. Bravely, they rejected dismissive police suggestions to wash their faces and go home by doing a final zombie walk performance outside Belgravia police station.
Last Mayday, 2010, the Saturday before a sham election where we had a choice between the Red, Blue and Orange Property parties, all equally in the pockets of casino bankers, the righteous justice of the Government of the Dead was visited on the party leaders. Brought up from pasture, the Four Horsemen led processions from each Party HQ to occupy Parliament Square. Cameron and Clegg were hanged, presciently side by side, from a sturdy gallows, while Brown was decapitated on an executioner’s block, his blood spurting onto the lenses of press cameras. The longest fourth procession came all the way from Clerkenwell; black bloc anarchists escorted a pint-sized Nick Griffin to be hung, drawn and quartered, then hurled to the crowd and torn to pieces. After Death, the miraculous Life, a Maypole was erected on Parliament Square and we danced in a wild whirl. The heavens opened. Two, three, five, ten tents were hurriedly pitched for cover and suddenly a camp mushroomed. This became Democracy Village, a tented conurbation of eco-villagers, peace activists, rainbow folk, bolsheviks, anarchists, ex-squaddies and the homeless, which held the ground of Parliament Square until forcibly evicted on July 20. The image of this grassroots people’s assembly, right on the lawn under the corrupt and venal Houses of Parliament, beamed across the world not least by Al Jazeera, just might have helped a tiny bit inspire similar such occupations of central public space in the revolutions of the Arab spring. But in the High Courts of the land last summer, Democracy Village was classified a public nuisance, and had to go – spilling onto the pavement where it resolutely remains, untidied away before the wedding. Grim metal harris fences went up around the Square, where people previously had been able to walk freely; these were subsequently put to use by students shielding themselves from riot cop attack on Dec 9.
Through Democracy Village, the Government of the Dead had its initial brush with royal power. After much speculation, the police decided to leave us in place, though subject to searches and a very stern eye, for the State Opening of Parliament on May 25. As the Queen’s carriage rolled by, the Government of the Dead posted the Four Horsemen round a lurid pink faux Louis Quinze throne whereon were seated Queen Tracy and her consort King Tarquin. A homeless woman of regal bearing, dressed in Elizabethan costume, Tracy delivered an Alternative Queen’s Speech, drowned out by the tolling of Westminster Abbey’s bells. She and her husband, local to the Westminster/ Vauxhall turf, were indeed autochthonous inhabitants of Democracy Village. There from day one, they stayed on even after the eviction. Despite substance abuse issues, they took part in assemblies (sometimes raucously) and involved themselves in non-violent direct actions such as sit downs and road blocks.
This was truly a ‘world turned upside down’ with those lying in the gutter looking at the stars. The critical ritual function of royalty has been to channel cosmic alignment between heaven and earth, ensuring that the periodicity visible in the skies is marked on earth, that monarch and people move in step through cycles and seasons to keep the cosmos turning, bring the rains, and make the kingdom fertile. Cosmologic spectacle has been the jealously guarded monopoly of royalty. According to Max Gluckman’s thesis on rituals of rebellion in traditional sacred systems, where the system itself is not in dispute, dramas of rebellion and role reversal turn the world upside down only to return it right back to where it was before. The implication is that if the rebellious ritual is not tolerated, as ours wasn’t, the system does not at all feel sure of itself. The medieval lower strata of grotesque revelry mirrored and symbolically destroyed the authority of officialdom, yet each world affirmed the existence of the other in the ebbing and flowing, toing and froing of carnival time. Carnival licence evaporated in the periods of the English and French revolutions: with real royal blood on the streets, what need of theatrical tricks? This expresses the antithetical relation between ritual theatre and actual violence.
But the ritual shadow world demands its fair share of power. The Government of the Dead as Rabelaisian agitprop asserts its rights (and rites) in polarity to the rigid ceremonial of royal protocol. The slogan of the Government of the Dead – ‘the only good government is a dead government’ – sounds fundamentally anarchist. Yet it derives from an idea common to many cultures across the world. Those who live in the world, eating, drinking, having sex, are necessarily corrupt mortals, and must be susceptible to the temptations of the flesh; only once dead, as ancestors, can they be trusted. To join the Government, you must be dead. We agitators are mere agents, our comings and goings governed by lunar time and tide. Like Falstaff, autochthonous genius of English kingship, we are ‘minions of the moon; and let men say we be men of good government, being governed, as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal’. The Government of the Dead seeks to restore lunarchy – rule by the Moon – to humanity, with ritual, sexual and economic exchange switching by lunar phase. Let the shadow world Government take the power for one phase, say waxing moon, the official world in waning.
When the Government was informed of the date set for William Wales and Catherine Middleton’s marriage, it was aghast. The last dying days of the moon of April prior to Mayday was cosmologically catastrophic, with potential dire consequences! This bourgeois apology of a Saxe Coburg royal house had really lost its ritual marbles. No young couple can marry successfully, fruitfully except at full moon, the honeymoon time. Dark moon conjures menstrual blood, kinship, witchcraft – all antithetical to marriage. Further, Mayday is the necessary time of popular fertility rite, not sex between newly weds, but group sex of the lads and lasses in the woods and fields. The Government realized it had a cosmic duty to supply the necessary erotic elements to overcome this threat to fecundity. Already back in November when the wedding date was announced in the heady aftermath of the trashing of Millbank Tory HQ, we found the ritual formula: Royal Wedding + Mayday holiday = Right Royal Orgy. How this was to be achieved, the agents weren’t certain, but it had compelling logic. In the event, the Zombie Group Wedding, Queer Resistance Flashmob and fertility rites around the statue of Eros promised a solution.
Except the event was prevented; the agents of zombie orgy chucked in a dungeon; the guillotine impounded under counter-terrorism laws. The Government of the Dead is now gravely displeased. The chimney sweep is banished, the smirch of ash on the wedding dress hygienically cleaned, all is whiteness, whiteness, blinding whiteness. The moon cannot be full all of the time, as the Earth cannot endure 24/7 turbocapitalism without cessation.
Can the body politic recover? The thirteenth fairy has been turned away from the feast. While we were rounded up and incarcerated, certain Middle Eastern princes and dictators’ envoys had been cordially invited, though it seems they were too busy to attend. They had their hands full, their rogue police firing live rounds into crowds of pro-democracy protestors. Perhaps after all, some blood does bespatter the hem of that dress.
Meanwhile, our friendly British bobbies searched Chris’ house and car three times, but missed the most crucial, incriminating evidence – the annotated copy of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World, holy scripture of the Government of the Dead.
