Mutt on the (Incomplete) Black Autonomy Reader
This week, you’ll hear my conversation with Mutt, editor of a new and incomplete Black Autonomy Reader, contributor to Muntjac Magazine, Organise! Magazine and Seditionist Distro. We speak about Black Anarchism, intellectual property, community self-defense in response to the racist riots that spread around the UK in August of 2024 as well as other topics. And keep an ear out for an interview on the ItsGoingDown podcast with Mutt as well.
- Transcript
- PDF (Unimposed) – pending
- Zine (Imposed PDF) – pending
A benefit for Anti-Raids network.
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Featured Track:
- No Agreement by Fela Kuti and Africa 70 from No Agreement
Transcription
Mutt: Hi. My name (at least the one I use for this project online) is Mutt. My pronouns are he and they. I’m a blended roots Barbadian and Scottish. Third generation immigrant. Lived in Scotland and England my whole life. I write for Organise! magazine and Muntjac. I’m part of Seditionist distribution, which is an anti-profit distribution publication, design, facilitation and print network.
TFSR: Cool, that’s great. I want to hear about all those, all those projects. Organise!, for instance, I know has been around for a while, but I’m not really all that familiar with it. I’ve seen print copies when I’ve been in the UK but can you talk a bit about that project? The aims and distribution of it and what sort of stories it tells?
Mutt: Yeah, of course. So Organise! is a project with the Anarchist Federation, of which I’m not actually a member, which is quite funny. It’s been their magazine since the ‘90s. The Organise! ran under a different name back when the Anarchist Federation of Great Britain was called the ACF. The AF, who run it now, are part of the IFA, which is the International Federation of Anarchists in Europe. There’s one branch in Argentina. There’s one branch somewhere else.
TFSR: Brazil, maybe?
Mutt: Brazil. Yeah, that’s it. It’s changed format and frequency loads of times. At one point it was quarterly. At one point they had the quarterly magazine and then a printed bulletin, but now it’s transitioned from like a bi-annual magazine to an annual, just because of costs constantly rising. The editorships have changed. The people who run it have changed, obviously. People have dropped out of the org. The org split a few times, but I think it’s nice to be part of something that is the longest running (besides Freedom) anarchist publication in Britain. Which is like, kind of cool.
Mutt: At the same time, although they only make two issues a year, it (according to the thing that they brag about) is the widest circulation anarchist print magazine in the UK. Which is cool. Now that Direct Action by SolFed is now gone, it is probably the only one that represents an organization, besides just being a journal of a place. Freedom is just about the bookstore and I can’t remember who else even exists anymore. I should know this much being in the industry.
Mutt: Unfortunately, with the transition to online stuff, a lot of magazines, including Freedom, have gone all online. There’s Dope Magazine, which is (I think) bi-annual. That’s distributed by people who are financially disadvantaged, like homeless people, or people who have insecure housing and insecure work. So they sell it like a big issue. Big issue is not a thing in the United States. You wouldn’t have heard of that. The magazine gets printed by a collective called Dog Section Press, although they have transferred ownership of it recently.
TFSR: Yeah. So now it’s a workers collective of some sort.
Mutt: Yeah, different groups have taken over it. Basically, they pay the money to print them, and then the vendors sell them on the street, and they make all the money themselves. Which is great, but that just goes to show the way people consume media has changed fundamentally. Anarchist papers- there used to be five or six in this country. There’s now two? Three? So the way media is consumed is very different. That’s got benefits. Obviously the print cost and the environmental cost of magazines changed, but also it means people read less. That affects how we learn and how we engage with things. That’s besides the point.
Organise! mainly, has covered, the British anarchist movement and its European, American and Latin American peers, largely. It gets theory and analysis stuff coming in, book reviews, reviews of video games. I wrote a current events column in one issue, but it’s varied a lot. What I like about it is, its intention is to be a community resource that anyone can just write in. There’s no like requirement you’re academic. There’s no requirement you have to have you know this Oxford citation filled trieste on some topic. You can just write in something you’ve experienced and want to share. So that’s why I like it.
Mutt: Organise! magazine, that’s the one. The second one I mentioned was Muntjac, which is hasn’t really started yet, but it’s some comrades of mine and my attempt to start a magazine that focuses on the writings and experiences of people in the British Isles from the diaspora immigrant communities here. So for example, the Caribbean diaspora, where I come from, or people who’ve moved here from Asia, people who moved here from Africa. The problem with a lot of the media that people see is they don’t really see it being focused on issues that affect them. And while I understand that you could write to Organise! or to Freedom about race issues, and they would print it- it would not only be nice, but it would be autonomous, and it wouldn’t require getting filtered by what is really a mostly white editorial board for all these magazines.
I think as much as we’ve had a lot of people saying “Why do you use the term third and fourth world rather than saying a Black or Asian?” It was a really long conversation, but it’s this idea of trying to decolonize the language we’re using. And while the term third world is invented by a white person, it is this radical reclamation of identity, being beyond something that’s skin deep. The fourth world is part of the definition that they use, meaning people that are racialized, but they also reject whiteness. It isn’t just like, “Oh, I happen to be Black.” You’re Black and you refuse white supremacy, you refuse the ingrained problems with this rather shit center of the empire we will live in.”
TFSR: That’s interesting, because I do want to talk a bit about the terminology and language that you use, or that your milieu is using, your journals are using, for different experiences of racialization. But fourth world is interesting. I haven’t heard that term used in a very long time- not in the last, like 20 years- but it does posit a specific relation to cores of power, a peripheral relationship in some ways, but also the rejection. Under white supremacy in the United States, in the mainstream dialog, the liberal conceptualization of race in this country, a lot of it is about “Oh, but everybody becomes incorporated into the wider civic nationalist identity of what it is to be a United States-ian” or whatever. But what they mean is white. Fourth world, the way that you’re describing it, sounds like, (and maybe we can go into this a little bit later) adjacent to an Afro-Pessimist perspective. A perspective that recognizes that, A: that category sucks, because it’s based on exclusion, and B: someone is always going to be excluded from it, so why don’t we organize from a position that is in opposition to it in the first place.
Mutt: It’s funny you bring up Afro-Pessimism. I’m not Afro-Pessimist, but Afro-Pessimism is incredibly popular amongst anarchists that aren’t white in this country. It’s really popular, the way that, Frank B. Wilderson III and Saidiya Hartman have engaged with looking at not only white social movements, but Black ones as well, and how they relate to race. It’s really popular. Saidiya Hartman’s essay The Anarchy of Colored Girls, it’s really popular as a zine, but also the full book (Wayward Lives). It’s really popular, and the way it engages with looking at people’s way of living and how they’re otherized and how they’re treated. The argument she makes is it’s just as dangerous to civilization and to capitalism that the organized anarchist movement is. it’s a really good conversation starter, and it’s a great jumping off point to where you can engage with something more.
I think Afro-pessimism is quite an academic genre. I’m not sure how agreeable that would be, but I think it’s a great jumping off point if you if you’re going from the Marxist left, and then slowly engaging with anarchism. A lot of people came from that. A lot of people came from the ex-Communist Party, ex-Troskyist parties, and they engage with this sort of thing, and then they can get more into what really is a sort of zine-based culture in Black anarchism. It’s a beneficial thing for accessibility, but it also means that in the academic space, it has less legitimacy, because the primary thing you recommend is a series of zines. And while that’s economically great-I can go to an event and bring 200 copies of a really great text, and great text and hand them out for free- it also means that people be will like, “Oh, all you guys do is make zines.”
TFSR: I mean, whatever. Academics- all they do is write papers that are going to be paywalled or published by Routledge, or whatever, and it’s a $40 hardback forever.
Mutt: So many times… Like with the recent lawsuit against archive.org, I really am worried how much stuff I’m gonna lose access to whenever that changes archive.org library of material you can just access by making an account and pressing request. It’s scary…
But speaking of archiving, I guess I should move on to the next thing, which is Seditionist Distribution. They’re a network of designers, printers and archivists. It’s trying to create an anarchist resource that people can just engage with without having to be affiliated with us. Lots of groups don’t have a website, they don’t want to use their real bank accounts when they sell their materials, they don’t want to have to store their goods in one of their houses. What if someone leaves the org? That’s happened to me a couple times where I’ve been in organizations, someone who has all the gear quits, then it’s all in their house, and you can’t really break in and get it. Because it’s a registered business, we have access to the business rates that people would pay to get stuff made by the corporate printing services, or the corporate flag making, etc. So we provide that. We also do design.
I think what’s great about it is because it is a broad network, people hit us up from anywhere, and they’re saying “Oh, can you, can you print off 300 posters for this event we’re doing in Leeds next week?” And a corporate place wouldn’t really care about the urgency of you have to get this to a demonstration, but we can do that, and it’s nice. Seditionist have been around for quite a while, but because of the things we’ve engaged in, there’s not a massive portfolio I could easily roll out and show you. But the more stuff we do, the more people can engage with it. So yeah, I think it’s really fun.
TFSR: Thank you for rolling through all those. Combining the last two answers that you gave, I guess you’re the main archivist behind the Black Autonomy Reader. Is that right?
Mutt: Yes. So I edited the whole thing. My friends at Seditionist just did the typefacing. I can’t really do typefacing, so they did that for me. But, yeah, it’s my project. I did the editing for it. It is just them who, well, pointed out some of my typos.
TFSR: Can you talk a bit about the definition of Black anarchism or Black autonomy that you’re working with, in choosing the pieces for this reader, and who some of the thinkers are that listeners may be familiar with in this genealogy?
Mutt: Okay. So the definition I’ve been using myself is, I really like Ashanti Alston’s one. It’s part of why I shoved it in the front of the book. The way he points out that Black culture has always been oppositional and is always trying to find new, creative ways to resist oppression. When he talks about Black anarchism, he’s not tying it to his race, because he’s a Black man. He’s talking about how he behaves with who he is as a person. I really like that. I really like the idea of a Black anarchism that isn’t just anarchists who happen to be Black. It’s to do with anarchists who are consciously Black, and they’re choosing to take on racial politics. A lot of my time as an activist, I refused to talk about race. I feel strange to admit this on recording, but for a lot of the time I was kind of anxious that I’d upset people, that I’d have really uncomfortable conversations through that, that I’d end up dominating space by being really loud, vocal, you know, like disrupting the sort of very white ecosystem I was involved with.
TFSR: The angry Black person trope?
Mutt: That’s literally it. And that’s the thing. I was involved in a very short lived Black anarchist project and the way it came to be was this awkward hostile takeover of a Facebook group. Which was kind of embarrassing. At the same time it’s a thing where, because of how de-racialized British anarchist politics can be, people are often scared to critique people who are different races than them, or to engage with their politics at all. You can notice it. I’ve noticed things where I’ve mentioned something about race and all my white friends, just stop talking and look at me funny. And I’m like “Guys, you’re allowed to have opinions.” It is really odd, and I think it stems from both people’s fear of stepping on toes and offending people, but also people’s unwillingness to engage with their own whiteness, and engage with the world around them. We’re all acting in solidarity with refugees and immigrants, most of whom aren’t white and the idea that we can’t talk about race is very strange. It means that a lot of people who do talk about these things, get the added pressure of having to become the representative voice of their entire culture. I’ve been to post-demonstration debriefings, and I’ve been personally asked “Why didn’t BLM turn up?” as if I’d have the answer. It’s awkward. A lot of people, because of that, they drop out, or they just stop talking race completely, which is what I did for a long time.
So to go back to the actual question, the definition I use is Ashanti’s, talking about consciously Black, consciously anti-authoritarian, consciously anti-patriarchal. That’s what I’ve used to help me guide myself into which text to pick. I obviously included the really early anarchists who happened to be Black in the anarchist scene in the 1800’s and 1900’s because it is a historical curio that’s worth holding on to. Like Lucy Parsons denied being a Black woman. She had a complicated relationship with her race. We don’t know her personally. We never will, so we kind of just guess what she was thinking at the time. There’s also people like Domingos Passos, who didn’t write anything, so we don’t really know what he said. There’s countless people. Because of the nature of what printing service we use, I couldn’t include photographs. There’s pictures you can find in the 1910’s, of Black anarchists at a commune in London. They didn’t sit there and write Anarchism and the Black Revolution, 1910 edition, because either they didn’t want to, or couldn’t be asked or just never engaged with it. It is strange how diverse of a country Britain is, for example, and how little content there is about Black anarchism. I felt like it’s important to at least try and make something, even if it was half-baked, which I somewhat think it is. But it felt to me that, “if I don’t make it, who will?” I think there’s people out there. There’s Beauty Dhlamini, Lisa Insana, Nsambu Za Suekama, JoNina Ervin. There’s people making the content, but it is so seldom shared that I may as well use my privileges as a well connected guy in the print industry to make a book.
TFSR: No, it’s awesome. I think you described it as a wrist breaker…
Mutt: Yeah, it’s a wrist breaker.
TFSR: No, it’s not when I’m reading it on like an e-reader, but still, if it’s like 475 or whatever pages… And to go back to the Lucy Parsons reference that you made, I really appreciated the Black Anarchism and the Black Radical Tradition short book by Atticus Bagby-Williams and Nsambu Za Suekama wrote. The points that they make in there about their reading on Lucy Parsons relationship to Blackness and the way that, what we might call in a weird way Anglo-American anarchism, how that seemed to sort of shape in a different way than a lot of European iterations of anarchism. I don’t know where I’m going with this exactly, but it’s a really good essay, if people haven’t read it.
Mutt: No, you’re right. It is a really good essay. I think part of the problem, a big part of why I made the book, is that you can’t get that book here. You have to pay 30 British pounds to import it and maybe you get charged import tax. Then the bookstores obviously won’t stock it because who’s gonna pay 15, 16 pounds for an 80 page book? That’s where a lot of my frustrations have always lied. I’ll be honest with you, the reason why the book exists is because I had a drunken argument that my friend, a friend of mine, in a nightclub in Wales. That’s a huge reason why I stopped refusing to make a book ever. I was like “I’ll make a book!” It was this thing where we were both awkwardly pointing out, there really isn’t much in Britain where someone could go to a shop and buy a collection of Black anarchist stuff that isn’t incredibly expensive, super academically obscure, or like 30 pages long. So I was like “Fuck it, I’ll do it!”
There’s so much great knowledge out there. People just have to either be a bookworm like me and read a hundred zines a week (well, not really) or they have to pirate it, which is still not easy. You have to know where to look for one, and you have to spend all that time downloading stuff. It’s not easy. I really love the idea of people making things like this. I want to see someone sit down and make a Southeast Asian anarchism reader, I want to see someone make Latin American anarchism reader. Things that you could just get for cheap. Because these conversations will happen. The more informed we all are, the better outcomes we’re going to get when we engage with the fact that we live in a deeply racist society, and the way, even people who are opposed to racism and opposed to fascism can still- either consciously or unconsciously- engage in racism. It’s this whole thing. It’s important to have something you can look at for free, so you can start thinking about it. I’ve seen in real time, people engage with this- organizations start reading groups about anarchism, referencing the book in conversations about Anarchism Isn’t White. It’s been nice.
TFSR: You mentioned in the introduction, the fact that there are some resources out there, like the PDFs that are available- the Black Rose, Black Anarchism Reader– but some of the shortcomings of that. Can you talk a bit about what the reader is like? Is it available (you mentioned that it’s available in physical form) and how it differentiates from things like the Black Rose Reader?
Mutt: The Black Rose reader was really hard to get here. Everyone when it came out was like “Oh, sick!” But the organization didn’t have a website you could just go click and order one. You couldn’t order 30 and have it shipped to your house. I think people were making their own versions of it also. I think as well, because it was just Black anarchism. It was also limited by Black Rose’s politics because Black Rose are a Platformist organization, part of the anarchism network. They have a sort of ideological focus on like Platformism, on Especificismo as well. So that meant that a lot of the massive amount of lack insurrectionary anarchism stuff- they only had one thing mentioning it, which was the essay “The Impossible Black Anarchist Position.” Which is really good one, and one of my favorites, but it is the only one they featured. But there is tons, tons of these essays, and they’re all really good. They also included the entirety of Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin’s book, which is weird because it’s a reader. We’ve got an entire book in there. Yeah, the books in print. Like you say, the book’s very much always in print, which is great. I saw that, and I’ve always said to myself “Oh, someone should make an updated one” and I saw Black Rose would, but they haven’t. So I was like,” Okay, I’ll do it.” I didn’t want to use everything they had in it, because that would be weird. So I kind of picked and choose the ones I liked out of it and then made my own thing.
TFSR: I didn’t even know that there were physical copies available. When we would table stuff over the years, when I had a good printer hookup, I would print off copies of the book and then buy a little binder and stick it in there and stick it on the table for five bucks, or whatever the cost was. But I didn’t know that they had printed actual physical copies. That’s kind of cool.
Mutt: Yeah, a comrade of mine, in Ireland showed me that there was at one point, a place you could buy them from, and they were nice, debossed cover. It’s cool, genuinely cool. But I think maybe it was a case of they maybe they were out too much cash to print it, and then it wasn’t profitable.
TFSR: Well then there’s also the difference in the sort of voices that you’re including in the collection, right? A little bit less of a focus specifically on voices from the US context of Black anarchists, and more from the wider African or African diasporic communities. Is that right?
Mutt: Yeah. I think as well, it’s growing because I’ve also included things that weren’t anarchist at all. There’s stuff in there by Black Situationists. There’s like a history of the squatting movement in Brixton in the ‘70s through the eyes of a Black Marxist- through the eyes of Oliver Morris, who was not an anarchist at all. You’ll see it in the next volume. There’s a history I’m putting together of Black squatters movement in London that referenced her a ton, but they were anarchists. There is one essay by these people- it’s like a pamphlet- and it’s published under the name Your Local Black Queers. It’s a guide on how to shoplift, avoid train fares and break into electricity meters. They handed that out to some white anarchists in an envelope, and they just all ran off afterwards. Which is quite cool. I was there at the time and someone said, “Hey, someone dropped this off. I think you should have one.” And I was like, “Oh, this is cool. Where’d they go?” They just ran off and I’m like, okay. Very mysterious, and I’m all for it. The group was called House of Shango. But they’re long, long gone now. Well, long gone offline. Now they don’t have a name. They still do the thing, they just don’t post it anywhere. In the buildings they’ve squatted, they spray paint “Squatting: It was good enough for Olive Morris. It’s good enough for us.” I’m like, brother.
There is a real disconnect sometimes between the Black movement and the anarchist movement, and it is really frustrating because I remember meeting them when they were active, and I was like, “Oh, have you guys heard of Kuwasi Balagoon?” And they went “No.” I’m like, “Ashanti Alston?” “No.” “Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin?” “No.”And they were anarchist. At the time, the people who I met at this tabling event at the bookfair, had never engaged with the classical Black anarchist stuff. It’s so cool. You’re already doing it completely organically. And it’s it’s fun.
TFSR: That’s really awesome. When I hear about interactions like that, it makes me wonder “Cool, who were your inspirations?” Was it just someone in your personal life, like an auntie or something like that, or was it some person’s writing that I’ve never heard of before that would totally blow my mind.
Mutt: I kind of love how mysterious that groups now become because they’re still doing it. Just you can’t trace them. You can’t talk to them unless you know them directly. It means there’s this completely different tradition separate from what a lot of anarchists have engaged with. But it’s still the same conclusion. Like you say, it’s really inspiring that anarchists principles, anarchist ways of organizing are so valuable that people are inventing them themselves all the time. I love that. I really love that.
TFSR: The collection begins and ends with the statement, “Anarchism isn’t white.” Stylistically, this reminds me of of the assertion of a thesis in an essay, but it feels a little like a mantra, or magical, like closing thoughts on a meditation and begin an opening with the meditation. Can you talk about this assertion that anarchism isn’t white and the implications that you hope to communicate with it?
Mutt: Yeah. So for me, anarchism stopped being white a long time ago. This affirmation, like you say, it comes from my constant frustrations with Black authoritarians who will tell me like, “Oh, anarchism is some white shit” and white liberals and white Marxists who are like, “Oh, anarchism is just for Europeans who do ketamine and go to nightclubs”. It’s this very reductive and, frankly racist assumption that anarchism has only ever existed in Europe in the 1930s in Spain or something. And there’s never been anyone outside of these cultures engaged with anarchism, ignoring the unique anarchist politics from China, or from Japan, from the Philippines, from Indonesia- ignoring anarchism from indigenous cultures in the US, who’ve created their own interpretation of anarchism. The fact that there was writers like Klee Benally, rest in peace and Gord Hill, who’ve written about anarchism with focus on decolonial politics. It’s just not true anymore. Anarchism isn’t white, you know? I find it really egregious that people try and tell me this stuff. I’ve had people come up to me before at demonstrations, “Oh, you know anarchists are just a bunch of fucking white people. Fuck them” and I’m like, “I’m one of them and some of my friends here are also anarchists.” It’s this really strange conversation, especially online, it’s obviously worse. Everything’s worse online. The fact that people make these posts, even these articles being like, “Oh, anarchism is a white bourgeois politics, blah, blah”. you know, like, no sense of revolution. It’s just bullshit.
Anarchism may have a historical root in Europe, and a lot of its early theory featured problematized anthropologization of indigenous peoples and peoples in the colonial world. But that was 200 years ago. Anarchism has changed, like, just just a little bit over 200 years. Just a tiny bit. It makes me, no end of frustrated whenever people come up to me and they’re like, “Oh, anarchism has nothing to with Black people”, despite the fact that the two biggest forms of Black rebellion are insurrection and maroonage, which take on a distinctly anarchistic and anti-authoritarian character. It’s just a falsehood. That’s why I did it. I wanted to drive it home, because so often in conversations I wanted to have a 500 page book I could just hit some over the head with and be like “Read this. Just look at the book open. Read the first 10 pages”.
TFSR: Yeah, that makes sense. And as you say, even using the term anarchistic- I don’t know of that many people that identify with anarchist traditions, or anarchistic modes of organizing that are freaked out by the swapping out that word for autonomist, or swapping out that word for anarchistic. As you said, there are life ways that that tons of communities have, through human history and through current day, have developed ways of relating to each other, in ways that don’t centralize power and authority, and that don’t put a primacy on private property relationships, that fit under this generalized umbrella of anarchistic. The idea that it’s only this formalized ideology that Europeans have engaged in, and everybody else needs State formations to be able to survive day to day is just just ridiculous. It just doesn’t show true.
Mutt: Exactly. It’s a ludicrous assumption based on propaganda and lies. What makes it even more strange is these people will say this to people who are Black anarchists or Asian anarchists, and they’ll say it to their faces like, “Oh, you know that’s white shit?” And it’s like, you’re looking at someone who’s literally doing it. Strange. Pretty strange.
TFSR: Would you want to switch to the recent events in the UK?
Mutt: Sure, I’d love to talk about that.
TFSR: There were recently racist, Islamophobic and anti-immigrant riots across cities in the UK, following disinformation surrounding the tragic attack on children, at a youth dance studio in Southport. I wonder if you have any experiences of the mayhem that you’d care to share, or any experience of what opposition looked like, and what lessons could be taken from these events.
Mutt: The best thing I can share is, what really impressed me about the resistance to it all. There was a real sluggish response from the formal anti-fascist groups and the left, like the Communist parties and the Trotskyist groups who were desperate to turn up with all their placards. It was very sluggish. Initially there was almost no response in some places, or the response would be so small they’d get swamped out and leave really early. What was really impressive is how the communities that were getting targeted themselves, particularly the Muslim communities, they were more militant than we were to an amazing degree. 50-60, anti-fascists turn up at something, and that they’re there, they’re up against the police kettle, and what’s engaging more physically with the fascists is the 30-40 Muslim brothers who turn up in black bloc themselves. Nothing to do with us. They just turn up on their own, and they pre-understood the nature of surveillance, and they’ve understood the nature of police repression, and they just engaged with the fascists and the police themselves. It was quite overwhelming. I think we failed. We being like the anarchist, anti-fascists, failed in supporting them enough. I think we should have been there giving out face masks and doing more to support what was really the resistance. And it was them.
There were obviously times when anti-fascists formally did things. For example, in Bristol, anti-fascists got to a hotel that was housing refugees before the police and the fascists turned up to it, and they defended it from the fascists who were just going to try and torch the place like they did in some other parts of the country. They completely failed, and the police came along and kettled everybody. That’s what I found very impressive. On top of that, as well, beyond the militant stuff, it was also the little group chats and check-in calls that people would send in for each other. People would sacrifice their time and their petrol money to pick up people from work and buss them back and forth. For me, anti-fascism, I take after JoNina Ervin’s way of looking at it, where she says, I’ve got the quote written here: “Anti-fascism has to deal with the impact of State authoritarianism on people’s everyday lives. It can’t be centered around just going out on a particular day to counter-demonstrate against the neo-Nazis or the Klan. You have to have an ongoing program to deal with the impact of this kind of authoritarian control on people’s lives, and in terms of police terror and State repression.” I think she’s spitting facts as always, because it can’t just be the day we turn up with the placards and do the chanting or whatever. It has to be anti-fascist food programs. It has to be anti-fascist child care. We have to have our own resource that people can call on in times like this. You’re not just bodies to turn up to demonstration. It has to be our whisper networks that can say, “Oh, X or Y person is hanging around X or Y mosque.” It’s a challenge that I think people are ready to take on, but it requires this real critical look at how we did and despite most demonstrations being nothing burgers, where the fascists would get into the police kettle, chant for five hours and go home to the pub. It has to be more than that because all the time the real danger is these guys getting more and more radicalized and getting more and more emboldened by having peers feel the same way. It’s the day to day hate crimes.
There’s also the incredibly overzealous police response. The police tested out new technologies they have access to. They’ve got drones now in, I want to say York, maybe I’m wrong. They had a drone that was playing a message saying, “Take off your face mask” as you went up to the demo. I did the 1984 thing. There has been hundreds and hundreds of arrests. The current Prime Ministers, what’s his name, Keir Starmer. He’s the guy who ran the 24 hour courts after the 2011 riots, after the murder of Mark Duggan. He was prosecuting guys for stealing 99p bags of basmati rice. This guy loves prison. The police were desperate to get masks off. That’s who they were going for at the demos. If anyone masked up, they’d follow you around, they’d film you, they ‘d try and film your shoes. There’s even now they have on the local police websites, they have, “We’re looking for these people at this demonstration.” There’s a bunch of faces, all lined up, person A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and it’s scary. The police state here is very real, and the security state’s really, really real. It’s not just CCTV cameras. It’s citizen journalists, sovereign citizen conspiracy theorists, guys with cameras being like, “Oh, these are all cultural oppositions. They aren’t real”, and they’re filming your faces and trying to get you to get aggressive with them for their clickbait articles. It is this very camera-centric experience, demonstrations here.
TFSR: The sovereign citizens in the UK are called like the Freemen? Because all the actual records of free people were destroyed in the Great London Fire or something? And since then, everyone is a strawman or something?
Mutt: That sounds so off the rails it probably is correct. They all think the Magna Carta is something to do. They keep trying to steal it. There’s a thing in Glasgow where somebody’s gonna try to steal the Magna Carta, because it’s like a document.
TFSR: Nicholas Cage?
Mutt: Literally. It’s an article written by a bunch of landlords who were like, “We want more rights as landlords.” And they’re like, “Oh, that’s so me”. Even celebrities like Russell Brand and these other conspiracy theorists who who drink their own urine as a political statement. It’s strange. So yeah, Britain’s anti-fascist thing. The one of the biggest problems is the security State and policing and how ready they are to arrest and target anti-fascists. And how social media also enables it. People posting riot porn is a huge key problem for me. People are desperate to get that cool photograph. There’s a great zine called “In Defense of Smashing Cameras”. I love that one because it points out how the camera is a weapon and when you’re photographing activists and big pictures of them in high definition, it’s not only harming the person you’re photographing. It harms everyone around them as well. You may be doing this because you want to point out, “Oh, look at how my community turned out to defend themselves” but what you’re really creating is evidence. And that doesn’t help anybody.
TFSR: Even if your plan is to run it through some filters, at some point that picture, before you’ve blurred it out, if your phone gets taken by the cops, they’re going to use that as evidence, or go onto your computer and find old versions of it, or it’s in the cloud.
Mutt: It’s it’s really scary as well, because people at demonstrations, film themselves doing things. You are writing your own warrant, essentially by filming on your phone attacking somebody, it’s dangerous. It’s something anarchist really should run home, and we should get vocal about it, like, “Put your phones away.” Placards down, phones turned off.
TFSR: This wasn’t in the list of questions, but you’ve talked about the ways that people showed up from the communities that were most impacted by the violence that was occurring, and how other like folks in solidarity, against fascism- which is a danger to all of us- showed up and sometimes did well, sometimes have stuff to to improve or to learn.
Besides using a big term like imperialism, white supremacy, on the day to day, what do you think is creating the situations that people thought that white people thought (for the most part, I’m sure) that it was all right to go out and do these things. They were just sitting on a hair trigger, just waiting for the words to come out and would believe immediately, this disinformation that the far right put out, that this unnamed youth happened to be an immigrant, or was an immigrant, or that this was some sort of Daesh attack or something. They were just assuming that this was going to be the case, so that when somebody said it, it fulfilled the answer in their head, and they just went out to the streets and did a bunch of racist shit.
What is it in British society, or UK’s white society, that you can see that allows for this sort of thing to happen, and where are anarchists and anti-fascists generally failing that we’re not countering this effectively, where this could happen. Especially within a year of a very, very, very similar thing happening in Ireland, of disinformation going out around words of violent attack and then pogroms against non-white or immigrant communities. Does that make sense?
Mutt: Yeah that makes sense. Some of the main things that fuel this and where anti-fascists need to try and engage in some kind of way to break this cycle up- it’s poverty and propaganda. Now, I’m not saying that the writers are working class as a whole. That is the opposite of the truth. A lot of people are middle class. The papers will put out “Aww this roofer got arrested at the protest trying to fight for his community.” He’s actually owns a roofing company and has eight employees. People who feel marginalized, who feel disenfranchised, they go on the internet, and there’s a huge wealth of right wing propaganda you can access. You can make a Twitter account today, follow three people, and you’ll scroll down your feed and, like, eight posts down, it’s wojak. It’s really quick and easy to get propagandized to. On top of that as well, a big thing that fed inside the more violent protest was football hooliganism, which is really a machismo lashing out. These people get drunk and high off of cocaine and they want to just fight someone. In Bristol that day, it was, Oh, anti-fascists and refugees, let’s go fight them.” There was two football games that day, and then people who left the football games go “Ahh, I’m gonna go join the demo”, and they fought with the police and smashed up pubs and got chased by police horses, and a bunch of them are now in prison. It’s these people aren’t often members of these organizations. They just find that any kind of outlet for their wanton frustration, that they somehow pick the people who are the most marginalized in society, rather than their actual oppressors.
It is strange. But at the same time, these people aren’t always children, although there are children. And these children are getting convicted, and these children are getting criminalized, and they’re gonna go to juvenile prison or actual prison, and end up coming out far right to the nth degree. They’re going to meet neo-Nazis in prison. A lot of people have said there’s nothing anti-fascist about celebrating people getting nicked, because it just means they’re going to go away for a few years and come back even more pissed off and even more unwilling to ever engage with how they behave. It’s scary. There’s 300 odd people have been arrested from this whole thing, and probably more now. It’s quite scary, because it means that people inside prison as well, are gonna be subject to more violent prisoners as well. They can’t go anywhere, they can’t move, they can’t call a demo. They’re in prison.
I think the two main things anti-fascist anarchist should engage with, is how impoverished people are susceptible to this kind of propaganda. I don’t think just white people either. In Britain I’ve seen it myself. A lot of the content getting made by Black podcasters who happen to be men. It’s this hotep, very anti-women, misogynistic, this very machismo way of looking at the world. Phrenology is back. Talking about what kind of bone structure you got in your jaw, and drugs making you feminized and stuff. The amount of pseudo-scientific, either quasi or actually racist content out there for young people to engage with is terrifying. Having our own media that isn’t that shit is really important. What voices there already are out there should be getting amplified by us to the point where people might stumble upon a video about their local community garden, rather than “Oh, here’s how ethnic group three actually ruined your life.”
TFSR: As you say, people feel disempowered in our society because they are. Not to say that everyone experiences that in in the same ways, but everyone has the knowledge that they’re going to be working a shit job. They’re going to, like, have the cops wandering around, even if they’re not the primary target of the police. Speaking as a white male in a white supremacist society, the expectation that I would have, like, dominance over my partner, that I would be making more than my parents, and that it would be succeeding in these certain ways- capitalism’s not gonna allow me to do that, that’s. That’s always been a lie. And so I have seen a lot of relations and friends, or acquaintances, or coworkers, or whatever over the years, see that and say, “Well, we we share this common dream that everyone is going to get ahead if they work hard enough. If we’re not getting ahead, then someone’s standing in our way. What is the reason for that?” I see your point and I guess it makes sense. We both work in the propaganda business. We both believe in changing people’s minds and engaging them in ideas, because we think that it’s, it’s important to give people other answers than “It’s that person over there who’s standing in your way” or “That woman is taking your job” or, “the immigrants” or whatever, whatever.
Mutt: You make a really good point that it is a thing where, despite, in some cases, them not being the people that the police are looking for, the police will always criminalize poverty. They’ll always criminalize any kind of like hanging around that doesn’t involve purchasing things. It’s these kids who have nothing to do at all that isn’t just buying something, going to a shop, or staying at home and being on their computer. The youth center’s are getting closed down, even libraries here. I know it’s news in America as well, but there’s news here as well. A bunch of libraries are getting shut, and it’s like, where are people gonna go? Where people gonna go? It just means they’re gonna be on the internet watching Andrew Tate or Elon Musk talk about something. It’s just an exhausting prospect.
As well in Britain, the fascists are really, really transphobic. Then again, it’s not just fascist that are transphobic here, it’s also the communists. That’s a whole different can of worms. Transphobia and queerphobia here is so rife. It’s become this talking point that politicians will use to juggle votes and juggle engagement. If they’re having a slow news day they’ll be like, “Oh, lets talk about trans people.” It’s playing people’s lives. It’s this intrinsically uncaring politic. I think that’s why, not only are a lot of young people uninterested in politics at all- like political politics, like party politics- but they’re also disappointed. The party who’s in power now, Labor, for the longest time it was, “Oh, if only we had labor, it wouldn’t be so shit”. And labor are in and they’re deporting, well, they’re housing refugees on what’s essentially prison barges, criminalizing all kinds of protests, letting people drown at sea, who are trying to get to the UK for asylum. It’s a farce and I think because of how farcical the British left are, it’s going to have people asking questions. Hopefully the answer these questions is anarchism, because if not, it’s going to be more bullshit for many years to come.
TFSR: I want to go back to one thing that we didn’t talk about yet. When you were talking about positive ways that communities were organizing themselves in reaction to the pogroms that were going on recently. I wonder if you could talk a bit about Anti Raids Networks, how they operate, and what inspiration you you get from that sort of activity.
Mutt: The Anti Raids Network, it about almost a decade old now. That was formed by a collective of anarchists, trade unionists and other groups, who got together and decided to start a series of local organizations that started in London. They wanted to monitor immigration police and how they acted in their communities, not only in grades, but also when they’re out with their facial recognition technology, when they’re questioning employers, when they’re profiling delivery- well being the American equivalent…
TFSR: Delivery drivers?
Mutt: Uber Eats. The people who ride motorcycles for them, the police have a habit of targeting them for immigration raids. It’s really common that they’ll funnel all these bikes into an alleyway and then search them all. If they they can’t prove their British, they get detained until they can prove the British. It’s this very horrendous use of police violence to coerce people. Because Britain doesn’t have ID cards. That got beat decades ago. But if you’re Black or brown, you better have yours. It’s egregious. It really is egregious. But Anti Raids, like, what I love about it so much is how effective it’s been. There’s countless examples. There’s famous ones from Glasgow, famous ones in Lewisham and Harrow and elsewhere in the country where there’s been a call by the community, like, “Oh, there’s immigration raid going on. Someone’s already in the van”. And people use a mix of tactics, whether that be blocking the vehicle or whether that be engaging with the police, so the police can’t drive away, or attaching themselves to the person they’re trying to arrest and then using classic non-violent direct action tactics- which is very popular here because of the overwhelming amount of pacifists.
At the same time, the police are cracking down on the Anti Raids Network. There’s a bunch of people who were arrested a few months ago, trying to resist people getting moved to prison barges. Most of them have got trials coming up pretty soon. So I’ll give you a link for that. It’s a fundraiser for them. I’ll message you a link about that. I think what’s great about it is, it is an affirmation of the value of anarchist tactics, in how well they work, but also in how attractive and how community based they can be. People can come away from an Anti Raids group, and they won’t have to worry about joining a political party. They’re not obliged to do anything. It is this thing where they become more aware of the power they have as individual people and as a community as a whole. It’s really positive, and I love it.
TFSR: That’s awesome. I’ve definitely seen immigration solidarity organizing happen in different communities and in different parts of the US, where some group will have a network, basically a phone tree setup. This is before mass text was something that people could do but even in the early days of mass text, people communicating “Hey, there’s cops down the block. Let other people know.” I remember seeing footage from the 1970’s and 1980’s in Northern Ireland where communities would start banging on pans, on the ground when military would come around the corner, just to warn everyone in the neighborhood. That’s decentralized. It’s hard to pinpoint leadership. That opacity, that sort of like Blackness, if you will, really helps to protect everyone in the community and also tie people together in a sort of really awesome criminality.
Mutt: There’s also Cop Watch Network, which is quite similar. Similar origins and similar tactics as well. Rather than just immigration police, it’s all the police. If there’s police officers in a city center with the van with facial recognition technology, someone will photograph it and say, “Hey, the police are sat here. Don’t come here if you don’t want to get searched or etc.” And they’ll point out “Oh, please harass people this train station.” A really common thing to do is reporting which trains, like the Underground trains in London, have ticket inspectors on them. So if you’re fare evading, you want to know where the inspectors are. People will say, “Oh, just saw they’re going to get on at Stratford, and they’re going to get off at Liverpool Street”. And you know, these stops you can’t go to and you can avoid it. It’s great. Like you say, there’s no one they could ever individually arrest and end it. There’s no way they could get one guy and be like, “Yep, this is over” because everyone has this culture to report the locations of the police to each other. Which is great, because that’s what police are doing to us.
TFSR: Like a “no face, no case” network?
It’s kind of crazy for me, and I’m sure there’s like bad implications for it, but the software, mobile phone software that runs off GPS for mapping your transit from one place to another- at least the Google stuff- people will report that there’s a police speed trap up ahead, and ask you “Is the speed trap still there?” I don’t know if it gives you enough notice that you could actually avoid it, per se, but it will give you like, “Hey, just so you know, around the corner, slow down real quick, and then you can speed up again after you’re out of vision of them.”
Mutt: That sounds really useful. I mean, that’s the thing. Any opportunity to prevent yourself getting a stupid fine or getting a caution or a ticket, etc, it’s really helpful. It’s a similar thing where people will take the time to figure out where police usually sit and do searches. They’ll point this out like, “Oh, they usually search people on this day of the week at this place. Avoid this.” There are also things like photographing the plate numbers of unmarked police cars as well. That’s becoming more of a thing over time. Although they obviously can change the numbers, and there’s dozens of unmarked police cars they can access. It is the beginning of something really, really useful that people could use in any context to just protect themselves from the police.
TFSR: I remember back in California seeing this example. On one of the roads in the town that I was living in for a number of years, one of the roads in the mostly like Latina/Latinx part of town, multi-agency police forces would would set up checkpoints. And I started seeing people go set up down the street in the same direction of transit and just hold up signs in Spanish or in English, just saying, “Hey, there’s a cop roadblock up ahead, you can turn here to avoid it.”
Mutt: Wow. That’s great. That’s great. I love that.
TFSR: I could see them getting messed with for that but it’s still helping a lot of people avoid those kind of interactions they might want to avoid. I was gonna ask about where people can get a hold of The Black Autonomy Reader, if they would like. Are there physical copies actually available? Are there PDFs? How do we get these?
Mutt: There’s PDF version. It’s free. It’s on Seditionist’s website. It’s on archive.org till it goes down. It’s on libcom as well. The printed books available in a few bookshops in England, but there’s not many copies. I think a lot of them have sold, but you can get them from the publisher at seditionist.uk/distro/readables/books/a-black-autonomy-reader-incomplete. It’s nine pound 50. It ships everywhere but obviously, being in Britain to America, it will cost a pretty penny to get out there.
TFSR: Besides editing this text and doing all this work around ideas and words and such, I know that you write essays also that don’t just show up in here. You’ve got a blog, social media presences, and you also do collage work. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?
Mutt: I find collage arts is a very therapeutic way of making art. So I’ve always recommended it people who are stressed or want to make art without paying somebody. Because you just get images from somewhere, like an old book or the internet, and then do whatever you want. I love it. It’s a very anarchistic way of making art. It’s like the old anarchist idiom of making a new in the shell of the old. It’s great. I remember trying calligraphy and in school I did painting with watercolors. Hated it, but collage is great. It’s just no effort. You can make something fun in 10 minutes. Other things I’m working on- obviously the second volume of this book.
Also I want to talk about Muntjac really quickly as well, because that’s my other main thing at the minute. So we’ve got a call for submissions, like articles on at the minute, and that ends on the 30th this month , and it’s for anybody who has something they want to write or they want to be interviewed about both. The primary thing we’re looking for is people talking about the resistance that’s gone on in this country against fascism and the State, both recently and in in our histories. Ever since people that immigrating here since the ‘60s and ‘70s, from the British colonies, we’ve had to face the National Front. We’ve had to face sus laws. We’ve had to face getting hate crimed, getting murdered, and what’s really helped us hasn’t been the political organization it’s been radical community self-defense. It’s people sticking up for themselves and not just calling the police and reporting a hate crime. It’s engaging with these things directly that’s made us safe and made us, for at least various points, unfuckwithable. And that’s what we want to see more of. Obviously even if it’s like a different topic, that’s obviously welcome too. There is a limit of about four pages of A4 worth of writing. Beyond that we’ll print it separately as a zine because it’s probably good. The magazine itself will be available for free at radical book shops in London and elsewhere. You can order it from us on the website once it’s out. But you can also print it yourself, because it’s gonna be A5. It’s basically gonna be a giant zine.
TFSR: That’s super helpful. Just going back to the collage work. I realized when I was reading through the reader, I had come across your blog at one point with this one big piece that you’ve got about Ojore Lutalo that I hadn’t seen. I hadn’t heard of him before. Just the videos that you’ve got on there about his experience in prison, his processing through it with his artwork and about his political perspectives. I just thought was brilliant. So yeah, thanks for amplifying some of these voices, because I’ve found some new favorite writers.
Mutt: Great. I’m really glad to hear that. Ojore particularly, his collage work, it’s so vibrant, so political. The fact that he made so much of it in solitary confinement, it’s amazing, it’s great.
TFSR: It’s been a real pleasure getting a chat with you and if, if I’m ever in the UK, or you’re ever on the side of the ocean, please say ‘hi’.
Mutt: Very much long time listener, first time caller. I think I followed this show for maybe like… I remember first coming across it like, “Oh, let’s be on the show one day.” Then around four years later, I’m actually, on it. It’s funny. It is very funny. I was like, “Oh, I should email them.”
TFSR: Glad you got in touch. And also I feel really proud that two interviews, the one about the CHOP, and then also an interview with Modibo Kadalie made it into the book. That’s that’s cool. I’m glad you used the resource that’s there.
Mutt: The show is an amazing resource. A friend of mine and I have been collaborating- well, it isn’t going to come out for a long time- on an indigenous anarchism reader. I’ve been helping them do some of the research for it and they’ve been writing about it. And you’re great. This shows an amazing primary source for that as well. You’ve interviewed so many people whose only real presence on the Internet that you can find now is this this interview on this show. So it’s great. No, keep it up. The zines are popular as well. I take the zines you make of the of the show anywhere I go. They always just disappear. It’s great.
TFSR: I’m so glad to hear that. Sometimes we get a little bit ahead on the transcription stuff. If there’s any back episodes that aren’t transcribed that you think would be good to have out there as a text, then hit me up and let me know the title and we can put it onto that list. I’ve started thinking through like, “Oh, it’d be cool to have that Kristian Williams interview” or whoever. But totally open to that.
Mutt: Yeah, I’ll definitely message you. There’s a few that I have in mind already that aren’t. We don’t have this kind of podcast that has an archive here. It’s great to just see. So, yeah, thanks,
TFSR: It edifies me that there are a few. I’ve looked up occasionally the podcasts and there’s no page for the podcast on Wikipedia. But if you look up “anarchism in Cuba”, or “anarchism in El Salvador” or “anarchism in Ethiopia”, some of the interviews will be in there and quoted in parts to fill out and give the start of a conversation on those topics, so that that stuff makes me super happy.
Mutt: No, honestly, it’s a great legacy that it’s gonna have, because hopefully somebody else is obsessed with transcribing, will start their own one. Then some of the weight will come off your back. I can see it being a really arduous task for a small crew to do something like this. So it’s great that you’re doing it.
TFSR: Well, we we pay people. Some of the Patreon money goes to pay for the transcription cleanups and hosting the podcast itself.
Well, it’s been a pleasure talking to you. And keep in touch please.
Mutt: Yeah likewise.
TFSR: One thing I didn’t ask. One thing about the reader is, this is a very inexpensive collection. The PDF is available online. I wonder if you could talk about the copyright issues. I know that some people, in particular under capitalist white supremacy, there’s concerns about paying, for instance, Black intellectuals and Black writers for the work that they do. Can you talk about copyrights and how that works into the either the collage or the reader?
Mutt: The cover of the book are collages from Black Autonomy, the magazine that people like Greg Jackson, JoNina Ervin, Lorenzo Ervin, were involved in. As people have uploaded those scans, I’ve printed off the magazines and made them into new collages as the cover. And in the back are some anarchists in Sudan in 2021. People have asked me this, like “Oh, would you not have rather donated X amount of money to each one of these authors?” But it’s 50 authors, and that would have meant the thing would have cost like thousands to produce, and that means no one gets to access these things. I think, especially as anarchists, we should reject this rather like, liberal approach where everyone gets paid for their work type thing. Nobody in the process of this book gets paid. I don’t make a penny off of it. Seditionist, the distribution group, all their money goes to a mutual aid fund, and then the group itself to pay for more things to print. If you see us in person, you can get the book for free.
We’re very deliberately anti-profit. For me part of what’s frustrated me for a long time was lots of content that I want to share, you have to pay loads of money to access. As well as this. Most of the content in the book is zines, and they’re already online for free. It’s kind of like an unwritten rule that nobody owns a zine. You make something like, it’s like 24 pages and the PDFs on the anarchist library. It belongs to everyone at that point. For me, I’d rather not get paid for my work. When I make a second volume of this, people were saying, “Oh, do you want to get a cut commission wise?? I’m like, nope. I don’t want any money for this stuff. Power corrupts and money does the same thing. If I got to the point where I’m gatekeeping my work behind someone having to owe me X amount of money, It’d be ridiculous. I would love to see another group print this book again and then not credit us. That’s fine. I want this stuff to be out there. Regardless of if it’s owned by somebody in some abstract way.
TFSR: Yeah. Maybe it’s mental gymnastics but the collective profit versus the individual profit, right? You want these ideas to be out there and people to be working off of them and improving on them. Just like language or just like ideas generally work in the world, you know?
Mutt: I really think knowledge should be something everybody owns and everyone’s responsible for. When you publish something, in my opinion, you’re kind of giving it away. Obviously, you know, your DMs to your friends shouldn’t get leaked to the internet. The things you deliberately don’t post online and don’t post on your blog, they belong to you, but once it goes in the public domain, that’s where it should stay. Copyright is this all encompassing, like, frankly fucking counter-insurgency force. It’s this thing where so many radical histories are locked behind, 30, 40 dollar books you can’t purchase. It’s this incredibly frustrating experience where someone’s like, “Oh, this is a great article. It only costs $8 to access” or something like that. It drives me to no end.
I wouldn’t want to work with publishers that do copyright. Like people say, “Oh, why don’t you pitch this to AK Press or PM Press?” I generally said “I’m not going to work with anybody who copyrights their work”. That’s just me. I would never want to work with anybody who did that. I can understand the motivation behind it. I get that they pay their authors, and I respect that. People who work with them, good for you. Get get your bag. I don’t respect copyright at all.
The physical books, I understand charging money for them. We live in capitalism and things cost money, but PDFs are a byproduct of making a book. It’s not extra work making a PDF. It’s the opposite. You make a PDF, they turn into a book. If I was demanding people give me, I don’t know, retina scans of themselves, this completely different thing, you know, but when you make a piece of printed media, the byproduct is its digital version, and you should just put that up free in my opinion.
TFSR: Also worth noting, there’s a playlist in the reader for folks that are interested. Which I haven’t listened to, but I’m very excited to check out some of the tracks.
Mutt: Yeah, it’s a mix of classical, jazz and African High Life, which is Nigerian and West African pop music. One band’s Coro Coro, they’re a London revivalist Afrobeat group. I can’t read without music, so I wanted to put it in so people could just enjoy. It’s like, you know those hipster vinyl collections you can get where it’ll come with a cocktail recommendation or something? It’s called Vinyl Me, Please or something.
TFSR: No, I’ve never heard of that before.
Mutt: It’s awful. You could buy a $29 MF Doom reissue, and it comes with a cocktail recommendation that makes it worth it. I’m like, what? Make the record cheaper. It’s been out for 10 years. Decreased the price. A Sade record, and it comes with cranberries. “Leave her alone!”
I got into anarchism for the punk scene, and I ran record labels for years. I used to work seven days a week at supermarkets so I could pay to get records pressed and I’d give them away. I was always like, “Oh, you can’t afford the $10 price? Just take the record and go home. It’s fine.” Copyright’s always is my biggest enemy. Always. Even working with artists, they’d be like, “Oh, well, I didn’t want you to press 8,000 copies. Any more, I’ll sue you. Like, all right. It’s punks, but, yeah.
TFSR: I’ve definitely known some small distros that made their money off of bootleg t-shirts and stuff like that.
Mutt: I love it. Love it. Some people in Seditionist that’s their background- the punk scene and making bootleg stuff. It’s a big thing because once you put something out like a record or a logo, it’s everybody’s at that point.
TFSR: Did you hear that Crass?
Mutt: Yeah, that’s it literally Crass. They’re so crass about it, the fact that they wrote these albums that are deliberately played badly, and they made the music that they said that they didn’t put any effort into.
TFSR: And collage all over the place.
Mutt: Yeah! Huge influence on my art style. The people from Crass did the record covers, and thpse massive jackets. They’re really cool. But then they reissued the records, and they take them off of YouTube, and then they charge $30 for them. When it came out it was $3. Like, three pounds. I’m like, what? What are you guys doing?
TFSR: Retired.
Mutt: That’s the thing. Washed up punks. Gotta watch out for them. They’ll come get you. I’m sure when I’m 90, I’ll be on the virtual version of The Final Straw, being like, “I’m gonna get the rights back to my PDFs.”
TFSR: Yeah, all that stuff that I stole, I’m stealing it back.
Mutt: I’m gonna go people’s houses, like “Give me my book back. You didn’t pay enough for at the time.” Oh yeah. Down with copyright,
TFSR: All right. Well, it’s been a pleasure chatting.
Mutt: Likewise.