Cornelius Cardew in New Cross, and a ballad of East Street

'Cornelius Cardew (1936-81): a life unfinished' by John Tilbury (Copula, 2008) is a monumental biography of the radical composer by one of his closest collaborators. Its 1100 pages document in close detail Cardew's musical and political life, cut short at the age of  45 when he was hit by a car in East London.

Cardew became involved with the musical avant-garde in the late 1950s, working for a while as an assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne. He helped introduce the work of American and other experimental composers into British musical circles. For instance in in July 1963, Cardew was involved in organising a Little Festival of New Music at Goldsmiths in New Cross with performers including John Cale (later of the Velvet Underground), Enid Hartle, Fred Turner, Griffith Rose, Robin Page, Tomas Schmitt and members of the Fluxus group George Macunias and Emmett Williams. Two concerts, one in the afternoon and one in the evening, including pieces by La Monte Young, Nam June Paik and Williams' 'Counting Song', which consisted of him counting the audience.

In 1966 Cardew joined the improvisational group AMM, founded the year before by  Lou Gare, Keith Rowe and Eddie Prévost  (Prévost had been to Addey and Stanhope school in Deptford, and been introduced to percussion in the 19th Bermondsey Boy Scouts marching band).

In 1968 Cardew began an Experimental Music class at Morley College in Lambeth. Many of those attending  'were later to form the nucleus of the Scratch orchestra' including Michael Parsons, Howard Skempton, Carole Finer (a lecturer at London College of Printing and later at Camberwell College of Art) and Psi (Peter) Ellison (who for 'some months... squatted in a clothing shop in Deptford'). The Scratch Orchestra's approach to music was playful and inclusive (see Stefan Szczelkun's participant account) but this was soon to be rejected by Cardew as he came under the influence of the 'Maoist' Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist).

The last ten years of Cardew's life were dominated by his involvement in this group, and musically he turned away from experimentalism towards didactic political song aiming to put across the party's line to the masses through vehicles such as People's Liberation Music. His earlier collaborators were denounced as bourgeois in texts such as Stockhausen Serves Imperialism.

In October 1975, Cardew started an evening class at Goldsmiths, 'Songs for our Society', its participants including 'composer Howard Skempton (occasionally), a homeopathic nurse, a lady on day release from a mental hospital, a young German called Holger, a retired railway worker' and others. Afterward 'the class would adjourn to a nearby pub, usually the Goldsmiths Tavern, occasionally the Marquis of Granby, and there would be a further two hours of intense political discussion'.

One outcome of the class was a gig for prisoners at Brixton Prison Medical Wing in 1976, where a band including Cardew, Eddie Prevost and Keith Rowe treated the audience to songs including Up and Over the Wall and The Ballad of George Jackson - the latter written and sung by a member of the class, Jim Ward, who recalled it as 'rather strong.... with its references to racist pigs and fascists in the prison service'. Later, in June 1981, Cardew organised a concert at Goldsmiths to commemorate the deaths in the New Cross Fire that year, though as Tilbury recalls there some controversy about the event being used to push the party line.

Cardew and his comrades were frequently in conflict with the police - he was arrested in the anti-National Front 'Battle of Lewisham' in August 1977, and in another anti-NF demonstration in Camberwell in 1980. In the latter case, Cardew was already on a suspended sentence following a previous arrest,  and he was jailed for a month in Pentonville after an appearance at Newington Causeway Magistrates Court.

Cardew's song/piano piece 'Four Principles on Ireland' was inspired by another local confrontation. According to Tilbury, it  'related to a demonstration in East Street market in South East London in 1972. The Party comrades who were leafleting were "brutally attacked" by the police and several received prison sentences' - Cardew's subsequent song was based on the leaflet.

For me the devotion of Cardew and others to the tiny maoist sect seems rather tragic. Their sectarian, dogmatic rhetoric had little impact other than contributing to the image of radical leftists as ridiculous fantasists - their grandiose sounding front organisations such as South London Revolutionary Youth and South London People's Front no doubt inspired the 'Tooting Popular Front' of late 1970s sitcom 'Citizen Smith'. One of the more comic touches in Tilbury's book is a reference to Cardew taking part in 1980 in a delegation to Germany as part of the 'Stalin Youth Brigade'- at the time Cardew was 44 years old and the other 'youth' delegates were aged 33 and 'mid twenties'!

While Cardew may have been on the right side of history in fighting against fascists in the 1970s, he was also an apologist for mass murderers like Stalin and Mao, and you have to wonder what atrocities he would have been capable of countenancing if his unlikely fantasy of the party taking power had been realized. No doubt other kinds of radicals - denounced as social fascist  - would have been first against the wall - a 1972 letter talks of  'Revisionism, Trotskyism, Anarchism, Reformism,Terrorism, the Labour Party etc' as lines to be struggled against: 'isolate them and wipe them out, so that we can achieve the necessary unity to go forward'. Those with the wrong musical line would probably also find themselves having to 'work harder with a gun in your back for a bowl of rice a day' (to quote the Dead Kennedys 'Holiday in Cambodia'). In 1977, the party's Progressive Cultural Association published an infamous 'Punk Rock is Fascist' article in its journal Cog and Wheels. I'm sorry but give me The Clash any day over Cardew's late period songs such as “Revisionist Somersaults And The Opportunist Opposition”

Maoists in 1970s South London

Today's revelations about the so-called 'Lambeth Slavery' case have linked those arrested to the remnants of a small Maoist group that operated in Brixton in the 1970s. The central allegation seems to be that  supporters of the group formed a collective that degenerated over time into an abusive scenario where several women felt themselves to be controlled and unable to leave the house of their own free will for many, many years. Two people were arrested in a Lambeth Council flat at Peckford Place, Angell Town in Brixton - with press reports identifying them as Aravindan Balakrishnan and Chanda Balakrishnan, formerly leading members of a group called the Workers' Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought.

Unless and until this case comes to court and all the evidence is out there, it's probably best not to speculate too much about the details. It is pretty clear though that this would be a unique situation arising from very particular circumstances - and certainly no basis on which to generalise about slavery in modern Britain. Clearly there are disparate cases of extreme exploitation, abuse and servitude but maybe Frank Furedi has a point about the inadequacy of the term 'slavery' to describe them.

Tempting too to draw general political conclusions about Marxist-Leninism as Bob from Brockley does. I have some sympathy with this approach, but again we probably can't deduce too much from this pathological case study. Once a political organisation is small enough to fit in one household we are really talking about small group interpersonal dynamics rather than political ideology, even if ideology can justify all kinds of behaviour that most people would find appalling.

But the case has thrown a spotlight on a largely forgotten dead end in twentieth century radical leftist politics - British Maoism. In some parts of Europe, such as Germany, Italy and France, groups inspired by the Chinese revolution and its aftermath formed a large part of the extra-parliamentary left in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Britain, it was never more than a tiny minority current made up of a number of competing sects. 'Maoist' is a term they rarely used to describe themselves, preferring the term 'Marxist-Leninist', but their key distinguishing feature was to believe that Mao's China offered a way forward for world revolution as an alternative to the mainstream pro-Soviet Communist Parties. Whether their beliefs bore any relation to what was actually happening in China, and later Albania, is another matter.

Many of these groups had a presence in South London. A hostile account from the 1970s claimed that Maoist 'influence has been felt in London and in particular in the less prosperous parts in an arc from Camden in the north going eastwards around to Brixton in the south... The decaying Victorian surroundings, the depressed environment, the mixture of peoples and the hostility to the authority encourage a spirit of radicalism and provides the revolutionary with a relatively favourable social milieu and a base for development' (Peter Shipley, Revolutionaries in Modern Britain, 1976).

The Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought  opened its  Mao Zedong Memorial Centre at 140 Acre Lane, Brixton,in October 1976, running evening lectures, study groups and film showings. The Centre also operated as a residential commune: 'The role of the Communist Collective in the Mao Zedong Memorial Centre plays a backbone role in the work of our Institute. Of the thirteen comrades living in the Centre seven of us work in factories, shops and a hospital very near the Centre while six of us are doing full-time revolutionary work'. They published a 'South London Workers Bulletin' and boasted in 1977 that they had 'undertaken the unprecedented task of BUILDING A REVOLUTIONARY STABLE BASE AREA in and around Brixton, a poor and oppressed working-class area in South London'.  In March 1978, the centre was raided twice by the police  - apparently on the basis of drugs allegations - with 14 arrests. Six women were remanded in Holloway Prison for six months awaiting trial as they refused to recognise the courts. Bala (Aravindan Balakrishnan) and Chanda were sentenced to six and three months respectively (though nobody was convicted in relation to drugs). If they already had a fairly paranoid world view which saw fascism at every turn, this experience no doubt accentuated it.

This group had split away from another group, the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist), which relaunched itself as the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) in 1976. Its 'unique selling point' was to side with Albania when it denounced the Chinese Communist Party in the 1970s.  Its best known member was the avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew. They too had a South London base, with a bookshop at 569 Old Kent Road in the early 1970s called Progressive Books. Later, in around 1975,  the bookshop and HQ was moved to 170/172 Wandsworth Road, SW8, where it continues to this day I believe. In the 1970s they stood candidates in a number of elections, including as the South London People's Front in the 1978 Lambeth Central Byelection (they got 38 votes - as Ian Bone observes, that election was also contested by Trotskyist groups the Workers Revolutionary Party, the Socialist Workers Party/Flame and Socialist Unity).

Another grouping was the Marxist Leninist Organisation of Britain. In 1974 their mailing address was 17b Brindley Street, New Cross SE14. Their members led the League of Socialist Artists which ran the Communard Gallery at 18 Camberwell Church Street in the early 1970s.  A Tooting GP and Spanish Civil War veteran, Alex Tudor-Hart, was one of the founders of yet another group: the Working People's Party of England. No doubt there were many more local connections to such groups.

The history of this current ranges from the comic (the absurd pretensions of tiny groups to be the vanguard of 'the people') to the tragic (the support for murderous dictatorships such as North Korea and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia - we could mention here too the case of Malcolm Caldwell, a sometime member of Bexley Labour Party and Khmer Rouge apologist who was killed in unexplained circumstances in Cambodia in 1978).

No doubt many good people sincerely committed to fighting racism, colonialism and inequality passed through these groups, but their practice was generally the opposite of emancipatory, with their personality cults, authoritarianism and closed intellectual worlds where everybody who disagreed with them was a fascist or imperialist lackey.  As Keith Flett says they were mostly harmless - even though you wouldn't have wanted to end up working in a rice field with them in charge. The recent Lambeth news reads like a sad footnote to this late, and not particularly lamented, episode in London political life.