Like a summer with a thousand julys

Now into their late 60’s, and still working with the same gang of skilled / unskilled labourers, chippies, sparks and plumbers on the London building sites that they’ve been working on since the late 70’s, key King Mob faces Dave and Stuart Wise reply simply and straightforwardly to a question about coping with the decades long aftermath to the “death of the social revolution” in the late 60’s, a death that left them initially isolated and adrift, two working class insurrectionists and dreamers slowly drowning in a sea of desertion and recuperation : “it’s the crack, 10 of us, all on equal pay, equal status, working together, no tension, getting jobs done, ideas and conversations drifting back and forth between equals. It creates an energy…” Outside of the sites, and long after King Mob had ended, the Wise brothers never stopped the writing, thinking or agitating, and this, a companion volume to last years’ warmly received ‘King Mob : A Critical Hidden History’ pulls together some of the best of their polemics, reflections, and righteous rants from the last thirty years. The subject matters range far and wide, but the gaze remains steady, underpinned by an unwavering ideological perspective that firmly rejects the stasis of the post war ‘revolutionary left’, just as is it recoils in disgust at encroaching Neo Liberal barbarism.