Mad dogs and Irishmen
A certain excess of Marxist verbiage in recent posts can maybe be explained by the fact that I’ve been reading Leonard Schapiro’s The Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It has to be said, much as I like reading about crazy Leninist shenanigans, it’s not a very good book. Schapiro seems to be something of a neo-con avant la lettre; he has the curious combination of a classical liberal self-confidence (despair at the wilful inability of Russian socialists to realise that bourgeois democracy is the best of all possible political systems) and mildly fascist respect for Lenin’s naked power (despair at the supposed idealism of the Mensheviks and essairs). More subtly, he also exhibits the idealism of the supposed realist, describing the ideological debates of the Social Democrats before 1917 entirely in terms of Lenin’s short-term strategies, as if ideology was merely a matter of the whims of particularly devious individuals. Anyway, here is Schapiro condemned by the crazy Maoists of the PLP, and by his own words at the New York Review of Books.
Another bad book on an interesting topic is the Larousse Encyclopedia of Music (not a patch on their Gastronomique, which I used to wile away lunchtimes reading at school). I hadn’t quite figured out what was wrong with it until I read this article by Tom Paulin on Hazlitt (of course, I read the article in a bad impression of Paulin’s Ulster accent; you needn’t, but I find it impossible to do otherwise). The Larousse is exactly what Hazlitt’s style isn’t; I guess the best word to describe it would be ‘effete’. Consider this sentence, picked almost at random: “Though a lesser figure than Weckmann, Jan Adam Reinken (1623-1722), of Dutch descent, is assured of his place in the history of the German organ school if only because of the admiration for him shown by the young Bach, and admiration warmly reciprocated.� The article on Hazlitt is excellent, anyway, and opened up for me a few ways of thinking about my own, often execrable, prose.
(These two books are currently sharing the sidebar on this page with Isaac Asimov’s Robots and Empire. Never fear, I’ll have something to say about that too, shortly).
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Lies, damn lies and concrete universals
Marx says we should understand the past in terms of the present: “human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape,� and likewise a continuing process of abstraction in material processes gives us increasingly abstract categories (from the present) in which to understand the past.
I wonder if we shouldn’t take Marx’s approach one step further, and understand the present in terms of the future. You may object that the future doesn’t exist – but that is precisely where revolutionary activity comes in. Bat020 is quite right to suggest that my uncritical enthusiasm for lying, below, is a reactionary nihilism. Instead, what we should be doing is fabricating futures.
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Insert something clever about Agamben here
An interesting article from the BBC that immediately made me think of Agamben, particularly this statement of the problem:
“He’s basically never been in ‘the system’,â€? said Adrian Spalding, administrator of the 999 Club which has been trying to help Jim.
“From the moment he was born he has had no paper work attached to him.�
And the DWP’s creepy response:
“He has basically not been contributing anything for his entire working life. He has effectively been working for the black economy.�
Meanwhile Felix Guattari’s science-fiction story becomes literally true, as my participation in capitalism is regulated by the little RFID chip that opens the air-lock doors at work (it was perhaps even worse at a place I used to work, where the same card that allowed you to enter and leave the building also recorded and administered the ‘flexitime’ system). Definitely time to take action.
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Tony Blair blows goats. I have proof
It’s good to see politicians getting interested in Theory, but I’d rather Bush and Blair had choosen to read someone other than Baudrillard. That being said, the pro-war party’s increasingly stark rejection of any distinction between truth and fiction is at least amusing. Consider, for example, Jack Straw on the Today programme yesterday, complaining about the Iraqi resistance who are apparently shooting British and American troops in order to prevent the end of the occupation. See also Tony Blair’s speech a couple of days back about how the people demanding elections in Iraq are enemies of democracy.
It’s a clever trick, I suppose: as people get more pissed off that the war in Iraq was sold to them on a load of lies, the liars respond by effectively saying “if you didn’t like those lies, here are some bigger and better ones.� So, it seems, exposing lies is no longer an effective political tool (if it ever was…). All is not lost, though; we just need to change tactics. If the homicide bombers in government have embraced the hyper-real, let’s bring the battle to that terrain. This actually plays into our hands, because we can now choose to confront Bush, Blair and Berlusconi on any issue that takes our fancy. Let’s start manufacturing sex scandals, dark rumours of corrupt business practices, revelations of past drug use, mafia connections, and so on. A systematic campaign of lies directed against the ruling class. Why not?
The whole point of ideology is that they get to control what’s true. By saying that Iraq has not been liberated or that capitalism is not the only possible social and economic system, we are by definition lying. So we always change the world by lying; let’s go with that, and start making up as much shit as possible.
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All very John Peel
There was a benefit gig for Cambridge IndyMedia last night, where we made a million pounds, or something, so we should be able to buy some equipment, which will be very useful (although it would be more useful if there was more stuff going on to be independently reported). We also got to hear the cream of the Cambridge music scene (well, except for the Broken Family Band, who were originally lined up to play, but couldn’t make the date in the end). The first band on were Kassa, playing a marimba, some kind of gourd thing, four bongos; I’m sure you can imagine it. They were alright, I guess, although they only played two tunes. Next up was Dave Crowbar, who I vaguely know; in fact, I think I first met him while being pushed by a line of police at the DSEI arms fair. As you might guess from that, he’s an old-school political singer-songwriter (he performed in an orange boiler suit in solidarity with the Guantanamo detainees), but he’s pretty good.
The nominal top draw, I guess, was Um who is moderately big on the Cambridge scene. He sings along to crazy lo-fi sort of dancey backing tapes. It ends up sounding like Solex, played more obviously for laughs, and it’s pretty entertaining. However, not as entertaining as the headliners, Bandinistas. The started off by playing ‘Guantanamera’ on cornet and ukelele, and just got better and better. ‘Duelling Banjos’ played on the talking drum? A trumpet player in a fez? ‘Ode to joy’ with extra German shouting? All present and correct. As a band to bring on at the end of the night to get everyone dancing, they’re second only to Scottish soukous stars La Boum. Actually, Cafe Afrika generally reminds me of the Bongo Club (where I first encountered La Boum); and there can’t be much higher praise than that.
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“Negri goes mad�
That’s how a South African autonomist of my (vague) acquaintance, describes this article in neo-liberal house organ Global Agenda, and it’s difficult to disagree with him. The idea of a global Magna Carta is not a bad one in itself of course. And perhaps the article can be located somewhere in the tradition of operaismo. Negri has always focussed on the current struggle, aware of the ever-present ability of capitalism to come to a new accommodation with the multitude’s desires (although autonomia is usually connected with the Grundrisse and bits of Capital, it did occour to me that maybe you could get to it from the 1844 Manuscripts, too. Imagine an analysis of recuperation, if Adorno had been insanely optimistic…). Because of this, Negri doesn’t think in terms of The Revolution, but of infinite micro-revolutions (if I read Empire correctly, Negri thinks the global proleterian revolution has been going on and off since about 1300). So it’s essential to keep an eye on what the next partly stable point in capital’s eternal mutation might be. But presenting yourself as an advisor to capitalism, as Hardt and Negri seem to do in this article, is quite another thing. We know we will be temporarily defeated in our current struggle; but Hardt and Negri seem to have moved from cheerfully accepting this defeat (in the knowledge that it is temporary), to actually telling capital how to defeat us. Isn’t that precisely what reformism is: in the final analysis siding with capital against workers’ struggle (and it doesn’t matter that the defeat will always be, at least partially, on the workers’ terms – it’s still a defeat).
I can’t even begin to think what Hardt and Negri’s purpose is in this article. Perhaps enlightenment will come from the Aut-op-sy mailing list is filled with filled with interesting comments on the issue (unfortunately, they have the worst archives in the world, so the posts on this issue are scattered between other posts, many of them very interesting too – see, for example, the class composition analysis of football hooliganism).
Meanwhile, Paul Dunne will doubtless be pleased to learn that he is the top Google result for ‘adorno’ and ‘recuperated’, and another result for the same search suggests that Schmitt and Benjamin might be useful in understanding the BBC’s relaunch of TOTP.
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Is it wrong
To suddenly find a woman much more attractive when she tells you that last night, she had a dream about Trotsky?
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Marx and Nietzsche vs. the world
It seems to me there are two options: amor fati or voluntarism. Evidence: the pro-war side in this squabble (in particular, the comment from Harry about “the curious post 1960’s liberal left�). I may explain more tomorrow.
Well, in particular, I was thinking of the complaints about the failure of the post-60s left, as if the SWP et al were to blame for the lack of a revolution. This is voluntarism, and idealism, and otherwise A Bad Thing… continued
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In favour of universal suffrage
Channel 4 News has just had an item on lowering the voting age to 16. All well and good – but is there any principled argument for having any restriction on voting age at all? We already have a system in place to allow those who, for example, can’t read, to be assisted in the voting booth. I don’t see why that couldn’t be extended to babies – and you’ld get much prettier spoiled ballots.
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