NATURAL BORN REBEL by Justin Gowers

STEWART HOME, autodidactic skinhead, art terrorist, plagiarist, pulp fiction writer (who name-checks Hegel, Marx, Hobbes et al), self-publicist and media prankster. Iain Sinclair described Home as 'the Beaverbrook of the counterculture'. Home is the editor of the forthcoming Mind Invaders: A reader in psychic warfare, cultural sabotage and semiotic terrorism (Serpent's Tail), a paranoiac collection which includes material by The Campaign to Abolish complete Works of William Shakespeare, International Gravediggers and London Psychogeographical Association.

Why did you rebel? In the existing order, where things take the place of people, any label is compromising. In contesting commodity culture, I am not rebelling against society in the name of some abstract right, but fighting for a world freed from the irrationality of capitalist social relations. In doing this, I explicitly reject the romantic individualism that has created the role of the rebel. Reality will destroy the utopian abstractions of rebels.

Do you come from a rebellious background? I know very little about my background. I have never met my biological parents. I understand that my grandparents were Catholic and that my mother came to London as a teenager in order to escape the constraints of this religion.

Who has inspired you? Karl Marx detested social intercourse upon equal terms. He only cared to clink glasses with those who praised and admired him. He took refuge in cynicism from any profounder manifestation of feeling. One cannot admire Marx as an individual, but only an ideologue or an imbecile would claim that there is nothing to be learnt from his texts.

Are you optimistic about the future of the country? This country has no future. I am one of its gravediggers. Patriotism is worse than religion, it is the mental equivalent of halitosis. The epoch of the nation state is over. Forward to a world without frontiers!

What books have influenced you? Although I enjoyed Hegel's Phenomenology Of Mind, I disliked his Philosophy Of Right. Bakunin's Statism And Anarchy is one of the most abominable books I have ever read, it nevertheless helped me clarify my objections to the pseudo-universalism of the anarchist creed.

Which rebels do you admire? None. However, I loved Tony Hancock's demolition of heroic individualism in his film The Rebel. It provides a perfect illustration of the way in which satire dissolves character and thus undermines possessive individualism.

First published in Red Pepper June 1997.

Interview with Stewart Home by Alexander Laurence

Interviews