It is perhaps easy to be harsh on late 80s anarchist poptimism. It is perhaps easy to be harsh on parody that bears seemingly no relationship to the original it mimics. And it is certainly easy to be harsh on attempts at radical art for being overly didactic. All that said, it is hard to avoid these critiques when reading Attack International’s 1989 publication Breaking Free.
Hypothetically, Breaking Free is a parody or ‘détournement’[1] of Hergé’s popular Tintin cartoons, in which instead of being a journalist uncovering strange and often comical conspiracies, Tintin participates in a grassroots trade union strike that escalates into mass action against the British government. Yes, Tintin is English in this, apparently - some of his first lines in the text are “Well, things ain’t that hot to tell the truth… You see, they cut me dole last week!” Though early reviewers apparently admired Daniels’ painstaking imitation of original Hergé panels for each page of his own work,[2] the visual homage seems to be where the Tintin references end. The titular character has no shared features or life history with that of the original series. The only other character taken from Hergé is Captain Haddock, who in Daniels’ text, works on a construction site - but is still addressed by everyone as ‘the Captain’!
To be charitable, let’s set aside comparison with the original for the moment. The narrative is.. well, it’s mercifully short. It opens with a depiction of life on a council estate, badly maintained, barely any work and that which is going is badly paid and dangerous; and the area is facing rapid gentrification, as vividly depicted in the pricey new wine bar that Tintin and his friends trash on their way home from a football match. After one of their coworkers is killed in a workplace accident caused by managements’ lack of concern for basic safety regulations, Tintin and the Captain help call for a strike. Despite attempts by trade union representatives to calm the dispute and get people back to work, the construction workers remember previous strikes when the union sold them out for easy concessions. So instead of allowing the union rep to ‘handle’ the matter, they look for new ways to organise themselves, appealing to wider working class residents in the area for support, and building independent mass strike coordination committees.
The book denies having a key message - “This book isn’t about how to make a revolution, because there are no right answers” - but of course, it does, and that is, “united we stand, divided we fall.” This phrase or variants on it appear again and again as the strikers and estate-residents discuss strategy, tactics, the basic questions they face as they attempt to make a real difference to their lives. To give the book its full credit, the real collective aspirations of the project does articulate itself through the panels beautifully; on any one page you might see at least half a dozen or more characters talking about their experiences or concerns or opinions (something that would not be possible in a more classic Tintin adventure). Yet it does feel a lightly hollow collectivism when they all appear to land on the same truisms.
In particular, my concern is that the book’s prioritisation of unity as the key necessity for a contemporary working class movement is how this represents other kinds of political concern that have been historically marginalised by even working class movements on these islands. For example, close to the end of the book, the strikers and estate residents start to arm themselves in preparation for an eventual confrontation with the central state. Yet maybe just ten pages or so earlier, we have seen arguments between strikers over shouting “you Black bastards!” at police officers, or the presence of gay and lesbian demonstrators at solidarity demos. In text, these arguments are nicely settled up by an appeal to their basic unity against the state and the bosses.
But out here in the real world, i think most people who take racism and homophobia seriously would have serious concerns about arming workers who were openly harassing Black and gay comrades the day before (the events of Breaking Free take place on a scale of weeks, or at most months, rather than years). Daniels seems completely oblivious to frequent critiques of various left movements in britain from the 50s onwards that they had little room for autonomous organisation and mobilisation from the position of Black Power, Gay Liberation, the Women’s Movement (as it was then called), and others. Whilst Breaking Free purports to be cynical about the organisations of the left, it seems determined to repeat the same patterns without an organisational apparatus, rather than suggesting anything genuinely new.
In fact it is hard to see how it even escapes the organisational question. towards the end of the book, the question of how this growing movement of workers might ‘actually run this country’. Of course, they’re very determined not to “end up like Russia or Cuba” (emphasis original), but their plans are to organise armed patrols, to coordinate key industries under central workers control. The word ‘state’ is not used but you get the sense that’s just because they’ve not thought about it very hard. They’ll have a standing army, nationalised industries, under a united ‘people’… The dismissal of the left turns out as more of a dismissal of any serious attempt to address the questions facing the movement it attempts to describe.
It’s been 30 years, hindsight sees in 20/20, and it is, at the end of the day, a Tintin parody. Maybe this is all slightly harsh. But it’s hard to see what else you could say. Breaking Free jettisons the (already reactionary) charm of Hergé’s distinct literary style in favour of a new message. When that message itself is rather weak, well, it’s hard to see what else you could say.
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[1] ‘Détournement’ is a phrase coined by the Letterist International, later adopted by the Situationists (of course, some of these were the same people) meaning ‘hacking’ or ‘rerouting’, that is, using existing artistic productions for new means as a method of propaganda.
[2] Daniels’ is a pseudonym. Attack International was attached to Class War, an influential anarchist grouping of the time that has since collapsed, though its key actor, Ian Bone, is still active.
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