King Mob: A Revolutionary Anti-Art Criminal Community (1968–1970)

Abstract

Summary King Mob was a British avant-garde born from the dissolution of the English section of the Situationist International. Having inherited the latter’s revolutionary, heterodox Marxism, King Mob approached the relationship between aesthetics and politics as one which fundamentally alluded to the creation of a new society. Instead of such a task being left to the proletariat, King Mob theorized the activation and emergence of the lumpenproletariat as the new subject of history, and thus configured their collective as the vanguard of a new kind of revolution. Thus, they saw in an aestheticization of criminal activity the correct political path towards liberation, attempting to create a community centerd on the disruption of capitalist processes as much as on the destruction of conventional understandings of art. This essay will overview the collective’s origins in the Situationist International and its development into King Mob, studying how its discourse was made concrete in the images and texts of its magazine, King Mob Echo, which was meant for mass distribution.