Redtek

Do you trust me? Statistics would suggest you don’t. Poll after poll reveals deep levels of distrust. On this trajectory, we are on our way to blinking out of existence. “Our future selves will never be born” is not a euphemism; our generation of this movement threatens to be the last. All this beauty and bravery that exploded in the dormant fields and factories that promised unity and community, to spread love, has become just one hedonistic hobby consumed alone to give each atomised existence the requisite number of “experiences.” *went to rave in an abandoned Tesco! was mental!* > post to your feed > scroll > glance up at another screen > check likes > scroll And who would blame us for not trying? The other thing the stats tell us is that danger is everywhere. We don’t need to experience it - we know we hate each other. It’s there on the feed. And then our lived experience confirms it. Assume the worst and then you won’t be surprised when the worst happens. It’s easier to think of all the terrible things that could happen if we trust. How vulnerable we are if we trust. Why waste your one precious life on the risk of trusting others when you can live alone, enjoy a life of measured safety, experiences, or at least creature comforts. Netflix, gaming, romantasy, OnlyFans, streaming, scrolling, the occasional nights out (to remind you why it’s not worth it), casual sex once a year (to remind you why it’s not worth it), pets, snacks, cannabis, takeaways, Xanax, frozen meals for one. But this thing we have built together over decades, on the backs of centuries, does not fit in the microwave, cannot be crammed into the air fryer. It is a great hall set for a banquet, with many seats. But at its head, only two. If they remain empty, all this will have been for nought. Those who stand in your way are powerful. They have their claws in you, deep in you, and there is poison in the wound. Push them aside. Rip out the wires. This place was set for you. Because we don’t live one life. We live all the lives before us and after us. In fear we live once and die once. With trust we are immortal. So I ask you again: Do you trust me?

We are once again continuing our mobile campaign, returning to the North West alongside comrades both old and new. We call on you this time with a greater urgency than perhaps ever before. At the risk of seeming ridiculous, the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. But today, that feeling is comprehensively under assault. The very device you are reading this on seeks to divide us, alienate us from one another, leave us jealous, bitter and alone. The seizure of what were meant to be great networks of communication by free market capitalists has had concrete, devastating results. Since 2012, the proportion of teenagers regularly socialising in person has collapsed by a third. Today, fewer than half of working-class 25-34 year olds in Britain and America are in a couple – a number that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. The happiness crash that has followed has hit hardest precisely where it always does: the least educated, the lowest paid, the unmarried and the alone. Our social life takes on new urgency: everyone coming out is someone not staying in – indoors, alone, being drip-fed poison. Make your free time truly free. Make it matter. Make your weekends dress rehearsals for great adventures, collective action, guerrilla campaigns. And think of those you know who are fading, or who never quite made it into social life at all, and bring them out, out from under the crushing weight of overstimulated boredom. Take them somewhere real and unmediated. Demand of them not subscription fees or screen time but comradeship, friendship, and yes, love. Let us not be held back by the austerity of cool. Let us not perform indifference when what we feel is longing. The apps have taught us that need is embarrassing, is cringe. It isn’t. Never seeking love is. Look around. Who is missing? Not just those who exist, but those who should. This is, in a very real sense, a question not just of our joy but of our survival: if we don’t fight back, our future selves will never be born. Tomorrow will be too late. >> IF YOU'RE LOOKING TO TRAVEL TO THIS EVENT, MESSAGE US - WE'LL LINK YOU WITH OTHERS. LET'S GET ORGANISED! >>

LONDON CALLING 2 We salute everyone, every raver, everyone running stalls and welfare, every DJ, visual artists, rig collectives and organisers: you have shown what we are capable of. New levels of cooperation and collaboration and deeper reserves of ambition than anything seen for at least a decade were needed for this massive event. Lumpen elements, scared by the idea that we might one day take responsibility for our own lives and jealous of what we had created, tried to destroy the event with cheap gangsterism - but failed, apprehended by dedicated security and eventually being ejected by the mass action of the throng. This is not to gloss over the problems, which we, as a movement, must address, and come up with better answers than hollow libertarian slogans about autonomy that have no answer to these degenerate footsoldiers of a sick system: we must think and do better. But that discussion is for another time. For now let it be clear: the atmosphere was unaffected. The clarity of our feelings of unity, cohesion and possibility were as clear as lasers. This was an experience money could not buy, and indeed, will never buy: this was an expression of our latent desires to have a social space and a city that is ours, shaped by our hands, unperverted by the profit motive. We did this for ourselves. We did it for each other. FROM HERE WE BUILD

Things are moving fast - and the reasons are clear. As our pubs, clubs, football grounds, theatres, community centres, libraries, music venues and cinemas disappear because they are “not economically viable,” our movement, which was never economically viable by a conscious, political choice at its foundation, becomes uniquely positioned as a space for recruitment to resistance against this process of capitalist liquidation. Our time is now.

There was a fundamental difference between us and those who once worked in the defunct foundry where we met that weekend. Many of us still work tough, dirty, jobs - as labourers, carpenters, highway maintenance, stagehands, the railways - where we still have camaraderies, nicknames, the solidarity that comes with sweat, danger and relying on your workmates. But we maintain and rearrange. They produced. Not just knives and forks: Sheffield steel made tools, gears, shafts, machine parts, mining drill rods. Highly precise, these spread the industrial revolution worldwide from where it began: the North of England. Today Britain produces 7m tonnes of crude steel, from nearly 25m tonnes in the 1970s, and our final three blast furnaces hang in the balance, these once nationalised industries reliant on sale to Indian or Chinese companies. The means to supply the foundries of Sheffield are almost gone, and almost gone too is the ability to make the components of the future - wind turbines, maglev trains, space shuttles - from British steel. Whilst we mourn this, we should have no desire to return to the exact past. We should no more want to pour molten metal inches from our faces again than we’d want to deliver mail by horse and cart. The production of the future will be automated. But the power must - somehow, in part - return to our hands. With power comes hope; with hope come plans, dreams and visions of a future worth fighting for. With power, we realised standing between those soot-clad walls, came pride. And at its end, sorrow. Cast in metal, we held a plaque, a tombstone. The last thing they ever poured, the workers had left behind a weighty epitaph to those who had manned the furnace for almost a century and a half. “2022 THE FINAL MELT.” It had no holes to be fastened to a wall; it would be left in the charred sand, buried along with an industry, a class, a nation. We must overcome their sorrow but regain their pride. We must find new ways to express the power they had and finish the processes they put in place. Let the requiem we played for the past that weekend be also an anthem for the future - one where the furnaces burn bright again.

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Last week we set out from our base in the capital to support new friends and allies in Somerset who had reached out to us. They wanted to unleash a celebration of people’s culture, unmediated by the profit system, in protest against the rapid encroachment of the forces of corporate hegemony on their town. Or as it is commonly known in proletarian parlance: a rave. We didn't need to be asked twice. On the night, although the youth and community of the area and supporters from far and wide heard the call, and did indeed mobilise in large number, after a few precious hours together, the side with the drones, shields and armour stormed the event, retaking the empty factory so capitalists can leave it empty yet again. But across the town, our people gathered in groups, forging new connections and comradeships, continuing the party in the streets, vans, fields and houses in the area. We salute the local crews, namely Kovert, Safe n Sound, Ripple Effect, Greyhoon, and Bassquake. We say to our new friends: you have inspired us. We return to London energised and excited. All donations taken on the night have been given to the local crews who organised the suicide stack. Our only hope is that they do it all again soon! We salute all who danced and held out to the end, then danced again nearby. We salute all those who will continue to embrace creative forms of meaningful resistance that empower and inspire. We ask you, our comrades-to-be: after Sheffield and Somerset, could this be your town next? Redtek is yours, it is ours - it is ready. GET IN TOUCH TODAY.

Redtek will be continuing our mobile campaign, answering the call of comrades who have reached out to us to join the fight against capitalist desolation. In the face of social cleansing and violently bland corporate globalism erasing our future and our past, raise the red flag and celebrate proletarian culture! Refuse to live in a world of greed and profit. Take a stand, get organised and resist, before there's nothing left to save. Retake our high streets, Retake our landscapes, Retake your town! MORE INFORMATION COMING SOON. BE READY.

Along with an update, here are some more images from Sheffield, where we were hosted by our friends Northern City Tekno, one of a series of events we’ve called on outside of the capital in recent years. And in the years to come we have no doubt Redteks will spring up everywhere - anywhere. Holding “a Redtek” isn’t just about filling dead warehouses with lights and speakers. It’s about taking back every inch of space the capitalists have stolen from us. Under the motorway bridges that take us to the modern-day workhouse, in boarded-up pubs where our parents once drank and sang, in the retail graveyards of our gutted high streets - wherever they’ve left destruction in their wake, we’ll plant our red flag together, with you. And why stop at parties? Every form of culture belongs to us - we can screen films, stage gigs, launch mobile protests, put on lectures and training, seize back whole blocks or simply have a picnic and dance around a maypole. “A Redtek” is any event where we take back what’s ours from the grip of profit. Any space where we prove that culture doesn’t need their permission to exist. Since our last post, messages have come from comrades ready to spread this message of hope and defiance. We’ve been inundated with messages from people keen to spread Redtek to every corner of the world. This has always been our ambition and we encourage anyone who shares our vision to come forward with ideas. Let them try to wall us out of culture, to price us out of gathering, to criminalise our very existence. Where they build fences, we’ll climb. Where they lock doors, we’ll find windows. Where they hoard empty buildings, we’ll create new worlds. Everything they’ve stolen, everything they’ve destroyed, everything they’ve locked away behind price tags and property laws - it all belongs to us. The factories, the fields, the forests, the future. And we’re coming to take it all back. This is Redtek, and it’s everywhere. In every act of defiance, every moment of collective joy snatched from their misery machine. We are Redtek, you are Redtek - and together we’re building something they can't comprehend and won't be able to stop. PLAY YOUR PART - GET IN TOUCH!

#RedtekPartyLine - “Do a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” “You don’t hate Mondays, you hate capitalism.” Both these maxims are true. Work under capitalism is something we hate, not because of its form but because of its content: we hate not what we do for work, but why we do it. When we slave for the rich instead of serving all of society, every second drags. But worse than that: each moment working for capitalist profit isn’t just a moment of your short life wasted, but a bar put up in this prison we call work, that will hold us all in captivity. We can’t knuckle down, commit to the grind, and fight each other for the top bunk in the cell. We have to escape. Read more above ⤴️

On November 23rd we worked with our comrades in Northern City Tekno for a night of proletarian culture in a space self-organised by the masses in Sheffield, a once mighty manufacturing powerhouse now littered with the carcasses of dead industry. But do not mistake us - raving in empty factories, dancing in the ruins, is not the way we think things should be. We stand in total opposition to the idea that rave culture is the harbinger of a new take on a prehistoric lifestyle made up of wandering foragers, making some impossible break with technology. No, we must go forwards. In 50 years’ time, we want to see the factories roaring once more, under the control of the workers, producing sustainably, for need not profit, and our culture and music celebrated proudly in Halls of the People, owned by us, the people. But until then… if your town too bares the scars of deindustrialisation, if you would like to help us to help you bring life to the shuttered workshops, desolate offices and increasingly, haunted retail units of our nation blighted by the deliberate ‘managed decline’ wrought by the parasite class… Get in touch.

#RedtekPartyLine - Throughout the history of the left, class enemies, like millionaire UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, have faced justice - but does it make sense to try and attempt this before a people's state, with people's courts and new socialist laws values, has been established? Can it be justified to take matters into our own hands proactively, or is it just encouraging chaos that our enemies will use against us - and alienating potential supporters? Or can it be part of inspiring people to join the left, showing that we can all make a difference and the enemy is always vulnerable? The answer is not a simple yes or no; read on to join a discussion about how and when to use militance that has been part of the debate since the earliest days of revolutionary communism.