Stealing The Elephant
It's a curious fact that in virtually any older house in my hometown, if you strip back the accumulated layers of wallpaper and paint, the paint on the plaster eventually revealed underneath is usually either battleship grey or a particular shade of green. There's a simple reason for this. For a couple of centuries, the main source of employment here was the naval dockyard – and another, more recently, was the local bus company, which happened to paint its vehicles in a green-and-cream livery.
My maternal grandfather worked at Chatham Dockyard most of his life. He had a shed in his garden, actually an old Nissen hut that the family had used as an air raid shelter during the Second World War. I remember it being jammed full of paint tins and tools (most of which I could never identify a use for). Almost all of it had come from the Dockyard, smuggled out by small batches in my grandfather's bicycle panniers, or slipped into a coat pocket as the siren blew for the end of the day's shift.
He was far from being the only worker who did this. Dockyard workers had a reputation for such pilfering. In 1984, when Chatham Dockyard was closed down by the Thatcher government, I was involved in the collection of oral histories from former Dockyard workers.i Most were quite open (if not necessarily on the record) about the fact that petty thefts from the Yard were more or less regarded as part of the culture there.
Docks, due to their concentration of valuable cargoes and stores, have always been a prime source of workplace thefts, to the extent that in Britain it led to an early form of organised policing in the formation of specific Docks Police forces.
In a report commissioned for BBC Radio Kent in 2014, to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Dockyard's closure, Professor Richard Scase explicitly linked "over-manning, pilfering and wastage", with high levels of unionisation.ii Making that direct connection between unionisation and theft surely betrays political bias more than anything else, as workplace thefts are apparently quite commonplace in non-unionised contexts as well. And they have a long history. Not least in dockyards.
In 1830, for instance, a riot broke out in Sheerness Dockyard when a worker was accused of theft as he was leaving for home. The situation escalated to the point that the military were called in to quell the disturbance, but not before several constables and the Dockyard Commissioner had been bombarded with a hail of stones and bricks. Rather ironically, the accused worker subsequently pleaded guilty to theft at his trial.iii
Generally speaking, though, the occurrence of workplace theft is quieter, and its outcomes less tumultuous. Some years ago, a friend of mine who was studying at university in Brighton took a part-time job at a local shop. It was the sort of place that sells cheap home decor, ornaments and other assorted bric-a-brac, from cheap incense and candles to plastic flowers and equally plastic statuettes of the Buddha. The shifts were long and the pay was low. Unsurprisingly, small thefts from the stock were routine, to the extent that staff actually set one another challenges to see who could smuggle out the largest item from the shop.
The largest item of all was a brass elephant statue, around three feet high, that was often used to prop open the shop door. The challenge was set, inevitably, to steal the elephant. And sure enough, one Saturday after the shop had closed for business, the elephant disappeared.
That sort of theft is at the more extreme end of what might be called the “stationery cupboard tradition”. In any office that has not gone entirely paperless, workers will take home paper, paperclips, pens, elastic bands, glue sticks, string, post-it notes, tape; whatever can be slipped into a pocket or a handbag. When I worked in the Civil Service, years ago, it was rife – everyone in the office did it, just as regularly as we all used up the ten days of sick leave we were permitted to take each year without needing a medical certificate from our doctor.
The latter falls into a category that in the language of “human resources” (an ugly term in itself) is nowadays described as “time theft”. There are articles in journals such as Forbes and in academia discussing means of countering this, driving workers to work harder, work longer, squeezing as much possible profit as can be managed from every possible minute of a worker's life. Free time, toilet breaks, even conversations in the workplace that are unrelated to work, all this is being redefined as another kind of workplace pilfering. And employers feel increasingly prepared to monitor workers' activities more and more closely, exerting greater control over activity not only in the workplace but beyond the bounds of the workplace too.iv
Employers are beginning to regard all this – from gossiping to petty pilfering – as a crime akin to shoplifting and fraud. In essence, though, it's a form of individualised, instinctive resistance to capital's expropriation of labour.
For sure, such resistance can sometimes develop into more extreme forms. The Bonnot Gang, for instance, gained notoriety in France for their short crime spree in 1911-12. As anarchists who embraced the philosophy of “illegalism”, believing that acts of theft were liberatory by nature, they robbed banks and the homes of the bourgeoisie. The Bolsheviks were also known to conduct similar robberies as a means of funding their underground agitation against the Tsarist regime in Russia. The so-called Sidney Street Siege that took place in London was the result of one such botched bank robbery.
Those dramatic acts of expropriation remain exceptional, but there is a continuum that arguably begins with stealing the elephant, or maybe a few paperclips by the less daring. For the overwhelming mass of working-class people, their generally unconscious resistance to the overpowering force of capitalism and the state is mostly limited to small, apparently mundane, acts like workplace pilfering or “throwing a sickie”. So small that taken alone they might appear insignificant. Yet those small acts can build into something more powerful.
I think we can include art brut (also called “raw art”) among such small acts of resistance, too. The urge to create, to brighten and individualise the banality of life under capitalism, of an urban housing estate or of carefully managed and manicured green spaces, is at root a political urge, a desire – however unconscious – to resist the desperate alienation of life under capitalism. There is a song written by the folk musician Leon Rosselson that rather neatly sums up both the spirit of raw art and the societal response to it, Barney's Epic Homer. In the story that the song recounts, Barney reacts to the drudgery of his working life in a sausage factory by building a towering sculpture from the assorted junk he gathers.
And every day he brought home something.
He was nicking things from work.
Picking up what other people threw away.
Cans and kettles, boots and bottles,
All the refuse of the earth he assembled in a giant junk display.
Copper wire, car tyres, plastic pots and broken mops,
Worn out wheels and one old water tank.
What a silly game to play, what a waste of effort.
He’d do better if he went and robbed a bank.v
This kind of creativity might seem to have an absurd quality at first glance, but it's closely related to the creativity it takes to steal a brass elephant from a shop, or to the smaller actions of workplace pilfering and so-called “time theft”. All express a creativity of disruption, a breach in and rebellion against the established ordering of capitalist society.
However, these all remain acts of individual rebellion, acts that capitalism can more or less absorb and render powerless; even, in certain cases, recuperate as in the commodification of art brut, or suppress as in the escalation of workplace surveillance and disciplinary action to counter petty pilfering and “time theft”. The question arises – how to translate such individualistic pecking at the flesh of capital into generalised, politically conscious, revolt?
Revolutionaries in particular have generally privileged issues of economics, and the heightened periods of struggle represented by strike action. While there are good reasons for this, it's a serious error for radicals to underplay the vitality and significance of the cultural sphere and of apparently peripheral acts of resistance. A smarter strategy might recognise the potential of the latter as incoherent expressions of raw class consciousness, and look to develop approaches through which both might be transformed into expressions of a self-aware political consciousness.
One thing I am quite sure of is that encouraging working-class people to shift from individual moments of resistance to class conscious action is rarely, if ever, going to be achieved by requiring people to be a passive audience while being patronised by leaders of a self-appointed “vanguard” of any sort.vi
More immediately, I think we should be explicitly defending the right to pilfer from the boss, the right to "time theft" (sic), the right to resist banality. Not to steal from other working-class people and communities, or to wreak destruction on our environment whether urban or rural, but to rebel against and expropriate from the expropriator on however small a scale.
Going forward, I'd suggest that the spiritual experience of contact with nature, of building relationship and connection with nature, the breakout from urban sprawl and release from the pressure to conform with the twin drives of consumerism and social convention, constitutes a further and crucial element in developing a sense of self and a sense of solidarity both with other humans and with the non-human. I am inspired by the example of those early socialists, descendants of revolutionary Romanticism, who saw no absolute divide between the struggle for a socialist society and contiguous efforts to heal the wound of human alienation from nature.
For those of us who follow a Pagan path alongside our political work, by playing a role in that process of reconnection we can in turn encourage the development and integration of ceremony, ritual and other forms of magical working as direct instruments of activism. The contributions of the Reclaiming Tradition in that field are well established and fairly well known, but there is also precedent in the "political ritual" created by members of the Paganlink Network in Britain during the 1980s; while, in my opinion, other recent works have made valuable contributions to the practice of what we might indeed term political magicvii. I wonder, too, about a cross-fertilisation with the creative practices of Surrealism as an ingredient in this – Surrealism has long drawn on occult traditions alongside the movement's ongoing connection with the revolutionary Left, and the current can run both ways. In that light, perhaps the fictional Barney, from the Rosselson song, might himself be considered a sorcerer and a pioneer.
This might appear to have come a long way from the act of stealing a brass elephant, let alone from a few tins of paint or the contents of a stationery cupboard. There's an analogy within contemporary storytelling that might be usefully adapted to serve in this context, though – the "ladder to the Moon". In essence, each rung on that metaphorical ladder represents the same fundamental energy, but rung by rung we are enabled to climb higher on the ladder towards an ultimate objective. Our task, difficult as it might be in the face of strengthening global authoritarianism, is simply stated; we must try to assist our various communities to climb higher on the ladder, by whatever means are necessary and available to us.
i An oral history project that was organised by the community arts organisation I worked for at the time, Arts in Medway. Some of the collected material was subsequently published in book form as The Last Cast Off (AIM Publications, 1986).
ii The BBC website article covering the report can be found at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-26793760
iii Mentioned in a brief history of Sheerness Docks here: https://sdpt.org.uk/the-dockyard-story-rennie
iv See, for example, https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/time-theft/
v The full original song can be listened to at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h69KQjOiTKE
vi https://thenl.wordpress.com/2022/11/09/putting-left-politics-on-trial/
vii The whole catalogue of books and journals from Gods & Radicals/Ritona contribute to this, of course. Also see, for example: The New Aradia, ed Laura Tempest Zakroff (Revelore Press 2018); The Gorgon's Guide to Magical Resistance, ed Laura Tempest Zakroff (Revelore Press, 2022); Revolutionary Witchcraft, Sarah Lyons (Running Press, 2019); Magic for the Resistance, Michael M Hughes (Llewellyn Worldwide, 2018).
Philip Kane
Philip Kane (by Grace Sanchez)
Philip Kane is an award-winning poet, author, storyteller and artist, living in the south-eastern corner of England. He is an “Old Craft” practitioner, a supporter of Anti-Capitalist Resistance, and a founding member of the London Surrealist Group. Philip's work has been published and exhibited across Europe, in the Middle East and in the USA. He is a contributor to The Gorgon's Guide to Magical Resistance (Revelore Press, 2022).