Carni Afterz MJ-1- [Imposed] Carni Afterz MJ-1 [Screen-Read]
^Now avalible as a zine!
Reposted with permission from; https://inquilab.noblogs.org/post/2024/09/25/carni-afterz/
This peice is by Inquilab and may not reflect the politics of Muntjac collective.
Carni Afterz
On the evening of Sunday 25th August around 400 people gained entry into a massive and beautiful empty building round the back of Sainsbury’s on Camden Road. What then took place, against all the odds, was perhaps the biggest and certainly the best squat party of the summer. Held in collaboration with three different soundsystem crews, the benefit fundraiser ended up turning into a launch party of sorts for Cable Street Beat 2.0
The event was deeply rooted in folk history and held against the backdrop of racist riots and pogroms across Britain and Ireland. Fires started by lost souls, twisted and controlled by misplaced rage, fuelled by the lies of the corporate media, well funded algorithms and the New Labour government were quelled by the love and resistance of the tens of thousands nationwide who took to the streets in defence of our communities and our dreams.
Ravers gathered at the redirection point, Camden Town Station from 10pm and were brought to the building. Within 2 hours of the infoline going out, Around 40 TSG and 20 regular cops mobilised and laid siege to the venue. They quickly attempted to force entry but were unable to gain access, around 400 ravers had already been brought inside and the party continued in full swing.
Around 100 people continued to gather outside and came under attack from truncheons. Yet despite the numbers and brutality of the TSG, people climbed over fences, trees and scaffolds and carried on gaining entry into the venue throughout the night.
For those who made it inside it was a dance of healing and recovery, of the celebration and joy of survival and victory, the tunes and energy played out through massive speakers without concern for licence or legality fuelled strength and unity.
In such moments of collective madness and through the force of our collective will and defiance, the paradigm of the universe shifts a little and the whole world changes.
Out of the original lineup planned only Coby Sey and Nowt made it into the party and onto the decks, holding down rooms one and two through the night. GawdX, Shadobeni, Iyaalu, sadqueersclub, Basura and Jody Simms didn’t cancel, but were unable to get passed the lines of racist pigs and get into the venue. Tash LC & Fat lip weren’t feeling well and couldn’t make it, Mother Nature had other plans for them but we are confident that they will set fire to dubplates at our parties in the future.
DJ Big D from local movements turned up with two USBs in his pocket and was overheard talking about how he’d been looking for an afterparty to DJ at and wished he could play at one like this. It turned out we were in need of a replacement DJ as well, and he ended up headlining on the main rig, playing a legendary set of 90s and Y2K dancehall anthems.
At 2am riot police gained entry into the car park, but it took them another hour to break through multiple levels of barricades and the party carried on. Eventually they made it in and switched the music off leaving the people to party and carry on the celebration in the streets. Police seized half the soundsystem and refused to return it until Tuesday, stating their belief that if they returned the rig we would re-enter the venue and hold another afterparty on Monday night. Their control and repression of our lives and our dreams is slipping away by the day.
Nothing truly belongs to anyone in reality except for our memories and our connections, but in the world of legal fiction and in a time of homelessness crisis, billionaire James Sellar holds claim on paper to own the ghost structure that was taken back as a site of liberation. He also owns the Shard, commonly known by Londoners as Isengard 2.0, previously owned by his deceased dad Irvine Seller. We came across photographic evidence in the building of James and Irvine fraternising with the dead Queen and other cold blooded lizards and billionaire villains. James Sellar intends to knock down the disused dancefloor and build luxury flats and hipster boutique stores as part of the Camden multi-purpose redevelopment initiative. The streets have found better uses for the debris capitalism leaves in its wake. Gentrification tears away at Camden’s character as a refuge for all varieties of subcultures and misfits. Camden’s hipsters are our enemy as much as Camden’s fascists and Camden’s millionaire elite.
Why Carni Afterz?
Kelso Cochrane, a 32 year old carpenter and aspiring lawyer from Antigua was stabbed to death by a gang of racist white youth in Notting Hill in 1959. White gangs known as Teddy Boys ran Notting Hill at the time. They carried out racist attacks while the police sympathised with them and turned a blind eye, as Notting Hill’s Black and Irish populations grew, with many people coming from the Caribbean as part of the Windrush Generation, chasing back the stolen wealth the British Empire was and still is looting from peoples homelands and ancestral lands.
Rhaune Laslett, Claudia Jones and Amy Ashwood Garvey were among the trailblazers who led the establishment of what became the Notting Hill Carnival. They recognised the power of music to bring mass numbers of people together in unity, resistance and celebration. Ultimately the Teddy Boys either started moving to the music and changed their attitude and purpose, or they were run out of the area by the masses the carnival had helped to mobilise.
The mixing of communities and the gathering together of large numbers of Black migrants in particular frightened the establishment, and Notting Hill’s white middle class, and politicians at first declared the carnival to be illegal, sending in riot police who violently tried and failed to shut carnival down. Year after year the people fought back and defended Carnival until eventually the politicians and police were forced to cave in and allow Carnival to happen.
Attempts to take away peoples culture and collective memory by breaking the links of ancestral knowledge passed and sung down from time immemorial, and moulding people’s minds into an inferior image of their masters has always been a central tenant of colonialism. Carnival culture is rooted in the culture of survival and the failure to break peoples spirit, journeys across oceans and journeys of escape, fighting moves hidden into dance moves and ancient stories and knowledge remembered in the position of stars. Lord Shorty first blended Indo-Caribbean folk music with Black calypso to produce Soca, today Soca floats control the road and the movements of people. Static Jamaican Dub soundsystems, rooted in African spirituality smuggled into subverted forms of Christianity blast resistance rhythms and soul healing from strategic locations.
Today Notting Hill Carnival is the biggest street festival in Europe, yet unlike Carnival in Abya Yala and the Caribbean, and the Berlin carnival, Notting Hill Carnival continues to be repressed by the government, who fear the power of people coming together, the strength of global majority cultures and the ability of displaced peoples to take back what’s ours.
Instead of allowing the Carnival Zone to expand north of the Westway and into Kensal Rise and Kilburn, the growing numbers of revellers attending are overcrowded and contained into a limited space not fit for purpose. Under the hot Caribbean sun, carnival is celebrated in the cooler hours of the early morning and the evening. In London, the floats and soundsystems are required to switch off at 7pm, though the soundsystems keep up the tradition of rebellion and play music for a little longer each year.
Disregarding the time limits imposed people continue carnival into the evening by holding after parties. The establishment and police fear the power of resistance and celebration continuing into the shadows of the night. A special squad of TSG and high ranking commanders are sent out every year to shut down after parties as part of the political elite’s strategy of repression. Meeting resistance at the gate, the high ranking commanders left and went to shut down other afterparties before returning to shut down our party last.
Carni Afterz was our response to the racist riots this summer, combining carnival culture and free party culture with anti-fascist and abolitionist strategies for social change. We hope to contribute to the expansion of the strength of carnival, that can only ever be fought for and won.
Why Cable Street Beat?
The original Cable Street Beat was established by Anti-Fascist Action (AFA) in 1988. Original skinhead culture, rooted in Jamaican ska and working class subculture was being appropriated by braindead neo-nazi boneheads. White Noise records, Blood and Honour and Rock Against Communism spewed out oi punk garbage and propaganda music glamourising racist attacks, genocide and violence against women. Boneheads attacked gigs where Black, Irish and socialist bands were playing, taking the fight to Desmond Dekker, The Pogues and Angelic Upstarts.
Militant Anti-Fascists made the decision that this would no longer go on in the open and Cable Street Beat put on and defended gigs by Angelic Upstarts, Blaggers and The Men They Couldn’t Hang. Unity Carnivals attracted tens of thousands, Freedom of Movement put on CSB raves around the M25 and funds raised paid the court fines for antifascists arrested in clashes with the NF, who had tried to lay wreaths for the Nazis at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day.
Shop fronts on Carnaby Street selling far right merchandise were smashed up, nazi tee shirts were ripped off stalls in Camden Market and Blood and Honour Boneheads were famously routed at the Battle of Waterloo, a victory later replicated by Black Power activists in 2020. CSB and AFAs intervention into the political landscape ultimately sent the bonehead subculture underground and rendered it lifeless. The street fighters of AFA have for the most part hung up their gloves and settled down to raise their families. For those of us in our new crew who are born and raised in London, or who have come and made London our home, Cable Street Beat and the Battle of Cable Street are parts of our heritage we will never allow to die, and look to pick up where those who’ve come before us have left off.
The Battle of Cable Street took place on the 4th October 1936. 6000 policemen tried to escort 3000 uniformed blackshirts from the British Union of Fascists, led by Sir Oswald Mosley into London’s East End. Over 100 000 working class East Londoners came and packed out the streets, built barricades and fought against the police, ensuring the fascists did not pass and enter their community. Excrement was thrown out of buckets onto the policemen while marbles were rolled under charging horses and policemen were dragged off their horses. The Communist Party of Great Britain, led by Rajani Palme Dutt, played a central role in mobilising the community. Anarchists, trade unions, dockers, East London’s Jewish and Irish communities and many other migrant communities were well represented.
The Battle of Cable Street was the largest pitched battle in a series of street fights which ended in recurring defeat for the fascist blackshirts and put a stop to the rise of their movement. If it hadn’t been for ordinary people taking direct action and refusing to play by the rules set by the ruling class, the fascists may well have continued to rise to power in Britain, as they did in Germany, and the outcome of World War Two and world history would have been very different.
The Battle of Cable Street is still being fought everyday among our communities, families, workplaces and circles of friends, in the minds we change, the power structures we help tear down, digitally and on the ground and in the physical battles and street fights that continue to take place. The echos of the Battle of Cable Street are still heard in every victory won and when we chant No Pasaran.
Why the fundraiser?
The British state continues to uphold neo-colonial economic robbery carried out by corporations operating out of the city of London. The fight against fascism and the anti-colonial struggle are intrinsically connected. The police and the criminal justice system responded to the pogroms last month not only by arresting some of the racist rioters but also by putting on trial and in some cases already sentencing people who fought back against the racists. Most of those prosecuted come from Muslim and global majority backgrounds, uprooted and placed here out of the violence and inequality of colonialism and targeted precisely because they defended themselves and their communities from racist violence. The British state apparatus, the police and the courts, and the fascists all act in the interests of the establishment.
Abolitionists look to free ourselves from the illusions of false binaries of citizens and outcasts, criminalised and the free and good and bad people. We recognise the perfections and imperfections of those marked as guilty within ourselves. This doesn’t mean things that have happened in the past can simply be ignored, forgotten or swept under the rug. Through opening up conversations and decentralising power, bringing us closer to nature and the natural bonds that connect us and keeping each other safe instead of relying on those with a monopoly on force who are all too often the culprits, we can move towards psychologically healing and making repairs. A harm free world doesn’t exist but we can reduce harm through the process of tearing down power structures and the social structures that atomise and divide us, working to bring back together what’s been broken where we can. At times the whole system of injustice needs to be turned on it’s head, it’s clear to us here that the police and judiciary are the criminals and the incarcerated anti-racists are the heroes.
Waiting for your trial not knowing what the outcome will be, having your name slandered in the media and difficulties getting jobs and renting afterwards, relying on friends and family financially while inside, the threat of homelessness when deprived of your ability to work and pay rent, being prevented from working to support loved ones who depend on you, and shame in the eyes of your loved ones and community are all part of the prison sentence. Until the time comes for us to tear down the prison walls, there are other bits of prison sentences we can abolish.
At Carni Afterz over £4000 was raised in donations. Some of the donations have gone directly to anti-racist prisoners, to cover material needs and rent and abolish the bits of their sentence that we can. Some of the donations have gone to anti-raids defendants, on trial for sitting in the street and blocking a coach in Peckham from transporting asylum seekers to the Bibby Stockholm prison barge.
The definition of a pogrom is a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group. Faced with the full strength of community resistance, the fascists failed to massacre or expel a single one of us. The government is now continuing the pogrom where the street fascists have failed, by launching a wave of kidnappings, deportations and immigration raids. Community networks, direct action and knowledge sharing makes it harder for the police and immigration officers, who barely know the law themselves these days. The rich and powerful will never give back what they’ve taken freely so reparations can’t be asked or begged for, they must be snatched straight out of their hands. CSB stand in full support of the anti-raids resistance.
What we aim to do through our parties is redistribute resources and put abolition into action while while having fun in the process. We can’t just sit around waiting for a revolution or the potential of a better afterlife. Change is needed now and is taking place constantly, we all mould the world in little ways in our own minds image. As the capitalist age of history comes to an end, the beauty and chaos of nature and the cosmos, circles, spectrums and multifaceted shapes through to the music of the spheres replaces narrow minded and linear ways of thinking, square blocks, basic rhythms, 2D false simplifications and forms of social stratification. We believe in a future, yet we don’t need to believe in a future because the revolution is taking place as we speak.
In Sudan the people formed neighbourhood resistance committees and launched civil disobedience campaigns which swelled into an uprising and overthrew the dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019. The military massacred protesters and tried to hold on to power, the transition to civilian democracy began but in 2021 the military seized power again in a coup, alongside the janjaweed militias, so the revolution continues. The Sudanese anarchist gathering emerged from the resistance committees and have been on the frontline of the protests and the fighting. Some of the donations raised have gone to Sudanese anarchist revolutionaries, to show our support and international solidarity.
Constant war remains necessary for the capitalist system to sustain itself through it’s dying breaths. In Palestine the people face genocide but still fight back relentlessly and refuse to allow any more of their land to be stolen. In Kanaky the people riot and burn tyres while they shake off the shackles of the last remnants of French colonialism.
It would be unjust to compare what we’re doing to those who’s material bodies are up against guns and whose spirits are made immortal through the actions their sacrifice inspires. Regardless of the incomparison we can’t watch genocides take place on the news, without recognising the role of the British state, recognising our location in the centre of global capital and recognising our capability to disrupt it. In everyday acts of resistance and disobedience a better world is being created, our present reality is first thought, then spoken or written into existence, then we make it happen. Just like any other binary, Utopia and a total paradise will never exist, it doesn’t need to, rebellion is a state of living taking place in every current moment.