Bone Idle: A review of “Bash the Rich”

(This is a republishing of Jacob Winter's article from his personal Medium page. Read the original article here: https://medium.com/@jacobwntr/bone-idle-a-review-of-bash-the-rich-9df72736f9e6)

The greatest irony about Ian Bone’s 2006 autobiography Bash the Rich is that the blurb specifically states that “This is no dry tome destined to gather dust in leftie bookshops.” I found the book in the bargain section of Housmans, with several stacks of the book all being sold for £3, £7 less than it would be to purchase the book at full price. The implication of that is far funnier than any joke I can make here, so moving on.

Stories of the British Left are always very interesting to me. As someone who has a strong preference for British cultural output and has a strange fascination with sectology, Bash the Rich seemed like the perfect book. Promising stories of the Angry Brigade, the Free Wales Army, the 1967 Summer of Love, the 1977 Anarcho-Punks, tales of Grosvenor Square to the Battle of the Beanfield, I was surprised nobody else was buying up this memoir. I quickly came to find exactly why this book that was destined not to gather dust in leftie bookshops would do just that.

First, a little background. Bone is an English anarchist activist, mostly known for his role as the key founder of Class War, an anarchist group whose formation and activities are discussed in the book. In recent years, he’s mostly known for having a go at the children of Jacob Rees Mogg, and Class War has ended up in the news for forming an unofficial society at the London School of Economics and demanding that other societies get abolished.

I’m going to quickly mention what I actually like about the book before I start pointing out how truly mad most of it is. If the book is anything, it is entertaining. Bone’s prose is definitely unique, reading like an anarchist zine or tabloid, and when the jokes do land, they are actually pretty funny. If you’re interested in the history of the British left, it’s worth a read just to see one account of many different groups. The stories of these groups are compelling, if only just, and if you can get the book for £3 it's worth the few hours it’ll take to finish it. If you’re an anarchist, you might wanna read it as well just to get a primer on “how do I be less irritating.”

Now, onto why this book is insane. The first thing you get a clear sense of is that Ian Bone has a very high opinion of himself. I could not tell if it was the greatest satire ever written or if he legitimately is completely mad, but in the intro to the book, it claims that Ian Bone and Class War were the “real opposition” during the 1980s, as well as saying that it was Ian Bone who “linked the inner city rioters of Brixton and Handsworth with the striking miners.” My personal favorite bit is “In the 1980s, Ian Bone was THE anarchist in the UK” as if that is anything to be proud of.

Most of the book is not about anarchists sticking to the man, of the leftwing footsoldiers trying to stop the evils of capitalism and imperialism, its instead mostly about Ian Bone pissing off other lefties, bragging about it, and not realizing he comes off like a massive arsehole. The book is initially complementary of the left wing of Labour, but only when discussing Bone’s father, who was a Labour member. Very quickly it tries to spill the beans on corruption in Swansea Council, out the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament as pacifist cowards, and expose Trotskyism as a poisonous counterrevolutionary force. To make a People’s Front of Judea joke here be beating a dead horse, but just imagine something of that sort here and amuse yourselves.

I do share Bone’s own antipathy towards hippies, and his discontent at the Summer of Love is something I am somewhat sympathetic to but in less than a chapter’s time he moves to “We Gotta Get Rid of the Trots!” in which he accuses all Trotskyist groups in the UK as being led by Oxbridge elites who are too scared to actually bring the fight to the ruling class. The main example of this he mentions is Tariq Ali diverting an anti-Vietnam War march away from the US embassy, instead going to Hyde Park. Not an unreasonable criticism of some rather toothless activism, but their movement is itself defanged by how unfunny their jokes are on the next page (Shouting “Ho Ho Rubbish Bin” instead of “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh” is potentially the worst joke in the entire book). He then ends the chapter by saying “Tariq Ali — You’re a cunt!” which is, again, just a bit needlessly rude.

Speaking of, Bone has a rather liberal usage of swearing in the book, but not in a particularly graceful way. Although he’s somewhat self-aware about it, mentioning it at one point in the book, he swears in the way that Ned Flanders swears (or alternatively, the ladies from the Hellbent Podcast swear). He swears so regularly and in such odd ways that it manages to make his swearing unfunny and weird. “Fucking” does not need to replace every other word. He’s like a teenager who just discovered swear words and is now taking every opportunity to say them.

Anyway, back to his Trot-bashing. Another great part of the book is where he mentions how he read a pamphlet called Kronstadt Commune, which apparently was such a powerful pamphlet it allowed his group to entirely disprove the political tradition of Bolshevism and “wipe the floor with Leninists and Trotskyists in argument.” Apparently, he even managed to have the SWP’s founder Tony Cliff on the backfoot during an argument because of a single pamphlet he read.

During the era of the Miner’s Strike, most of his nasty words are not directed at Thatcher, outside of a few Class War covers such as the one where Thatcher gets her head assaulted with a meat cleaver, but directed at Labour, the CND and several other socialist groups. He seems to have a weird begrudging respect for Thatcher as if he respected someone who was an open class-warrior, but for the opposing side. Instead, he talks about how a Class War member nearly hit Neil Kinnock over the head with a glass bottle, or how they destroyed a CND rally for shits and giggles. In his chapter “Autonomania” he spents most of his time slagging off Class War members who were situationists and autonomists, which by his own admission were a significant part of his tiny London Class War chapter.

The main sense you get from the book is that Bone doesn’t really believe in anything except violence directed towards people that piss him off, primarily rich people and leftists he thinks aren’t “hard” enough. He does talk about his anarchist influences in the penultimate chapter of the book, but it mostly seems as if the Himmler-faced gentleman cares nothing more than to be contrarian, annoying, violent, and an arsehole. It can make the book hilarious to read at times, and at other times painfully frustrating. If you can get the book on sale, it is worth a read, but don’t say you weren’t warned.