[Translated from french by Jean Weir from the introduction of Angry Brigade : Elements de la critique anarchiste armée en Angleterre, Ravage Editions, July 2012.]
On the night of January 12, 1971, coverage in the Times is explicit: “Two bombs devastate Carr’s house on day of protest.” Robert Carr was then Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity in the newly elected conservative Heath government. He was responsible for the proposal for the Industrial Relations Act earlier in the day, leading to many workers’ demonstrations. This direct attack is claimed by a group named “the Angry Brigade” in a context of widespread social tension such as England has not experienced since at a time when all over Europe and on all the continents many groups were organizing themselves to physically attack the structures of capital and a certain moral order that the times of 68 had not succeeded in dissipating.
Waves of massive protests appear more or less everywhere, youth disillusioned with a system that continues to develop ever more effective means for crushing individuals and burying people’s dreams of another world, but a youth excited by the prospect of a radical transformation of the existent. Some take the path of urban unrest on specific themes or against the old world in general, others specialize in revolutionary theory, others specialize in clandestine or semi-clandestine agitation, others still navigate between these various methods in consistent roundtrips.
The Uncontrollable Ones 