TRICK OR TROT

Halloween night saw 250 anti-capitalist demonstrators of various stripes converge on Canary Wharf to 'Dance on the grave of capitalism' outside failed finance giant Lehman Brothers. It was to be a street party styled demo, organised by the Radical Anthropologists, with others from London street demo veterans Reclaim The Streets. But while groups such as the Anarchist Federation and Class War turned up, large numbers came from the Socialist Worker Party student group, SWSS.

Politics makes some strange bedfellows, and they don't come stranger than this demo's mutant hybrid of neo-Situationist Radical Anthropologists with a hankering for the good ole' days of RTS and the transit vanguardists of the Socialist Workers Party. But the way it turned out, it seems that the SWP's Trot leadership may be losing its vice-like grip on its members, with many of the Swerpy's young bloods being as up for a ruckus as a brew-crewed Class Warrior.

SchNEWS' roving and raving reporter donned her pointy hat and magic wand to join in the action, saying, "As the sacred circle was cast, marked by carved pumpkins and much drumming, then the Four Horse folk of the Anti-Capitalist Apocalypse - namely Communist, Anarchist, Eco Warrior and Revolution - were invoked. While the fluffy creative types and Radical Anthropologists experimented with civilised disobedience, a group full of SWP students stormed the police line, causing the cops to feel duty bound to reciprocate the gesture. This cleared the field for the Anarchists who broke out into a spontaneous game of pumpkin football with the Eco warriors.

Faced with non-state sanctioned creative chaos the cops got twitchy and the snatch squad swooped in for bodies. One was arrested. The circle was broken and the pumpkins smashed. Copies of Socialist Worker, pronouncing capitalism dead, rolled like tumble weed across the wasteland outside Lehman Brothers.

The plan is to reconvene at the same spot at the next new moon. Up the revelation!"
* See www.graveyard.at