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Out To Lunch writes about Dave Black's new book The Philosophical Roots of Anti-Capitalism (Lexington, 2013) …

 

Glancing at the cover of this serious-looking, grey-blue volume and seeing the endorsement by "Peter McLaren of the University of Auckland" on the back, you might be forgiven for thinking it's another contribution to the closed world of academic Marxology, something without relevance to your everyday life. Think again. This book simply bristles with relevance, and will speak to you (and spike you!) when you least expect it. Author Dave Black has an interesting CV. He acted in Roland Muldoon's Cartoon Archetypical Slogan Theatre (CAST), the legendary Agit-Prop troupe celebrated by Jeff Nuttal in Bomb Culture (as I write this in Somers Town, I can see housing built on the site of the Unity Theatre, where Derek Bailey and other 60s Improvisors staged gigs, a Muldoon stronghold). Black also contributed to Lobster, Robin Ramsay's journal of "conspiracy theory" which got so close to real politics it created a scandal by revealing that the MI5 worked to destabilize Harold Wilson's Labour government (Tony Benn was energy secretary). In 2005, such researches into the secret state resulted in Black's Acid: The Secret History of LSD, documenting CIA-backed manufacture and distribution of psychedelic drugs (Frank Zappa made noises about this in his 70s music-press interviews, but no-one believed him). Tiring of conspiracy-theory journalism, feeling he'd been reduced to supplying a hot commodity to passive consumers, Black turned to thinkers who could help left activists understand the world, and got deep into Marx and Marxism.

When I attempted to interest London Review of Books in Unkant publications (Unkant is the print wing of the Association of Musical Marxists), I was told that their intrinsic quality is not the point: books are only reviewed if they address already-established "subjects of interest". Dave Black has (with Chris Ford) published an Unkant volume — 1839: the Chartist Insurrection, recounting a revolutionary episode in British labour history ignored by historians wedded to reformist politics — and The Philosophical Roots of Anti-Capitalism reads like something on our imprint: it's personal, charged, urgent, partisan — succinct. The author doesn't believe political convictions diminish authority; doesn't believe that being boring is the main road to preeminence in a discipline. Like Esther Leslie's Unkant book (Derelicts), it's a weird but compulsive read, where you'd be pushed to explain to the LRB what its "subject" actually is. New connections are sewn through official "subjects of interest", and you end up grateful for being along for the ride, for being in the company of someone who's prepared to think outside the usual game-plans and stage-sets.

So we zigzag from Harry McShane (1891-1988), Red Clydesider and Glaswegian trade unionist, to Alfred Sohn-Rethel (1899-1990), Berlin employers' bureaucrat who switched sides when the Nazis took over and wrote on the philosophical implications of money; from Greek tragedy and Aristotle to Hegel and Lenin; from Raya Dunayevskaya and the Surrealists to G20, anti-capitalism and postmodernist theory; from Gillian Rose, charismatic teacher at Sussex University, to fellow theorists in the International Marxist-Humanist Organisation. The imp driving Black is a conviction that ideas matter: there are truths which, if missed, lead to error and inertia for the Left. He deals with Hegelian subject/object dialectics and Marxist value theory, and he doesn't spare the reader their intricaies, but his discussions surmount complex argument to view new vistas in a strange, different light. Black thinks left activism without philosophy is pointless, and his book will actively offend readers who think these two aspects of life can be divided. There are tough patches, sure, but (in common with Marx's Capital), the writing is internally consistent, there is no "special training" (except maybe wage slavery and a healthy disregard for it) required to understand it. He is not wasting your time.

In his introduction, Black describes the book's genesis. From a working-class, trade-unionist background in Newcastle, he enrolled at Middlesex Polytechnic in the mid-70s and was touched by its student radicalism. He enrolled in a course on Trade Union studies, feeling that the turbulent years before World War I would have lessons for today. He was advised to read Raya Dunayevskaya's Marxism and Freedom, and found it a revelation. He was encouraged that it was prefaced by Harry McShane of Glasgow Trades Council, the Red Clydesider who was active pre-1914 and still around (Black met up with him: "physically and mentally the fittest octagenarian I have ever known"). Black doesn't view things from the Londoncentric perspective of MPs, TV and press (his latest project is rediscovering original translator of the Communist Manifesto and top Chartist journalist, Helen Macfarlane … no surprise she's Scottish too). I studied modern history at Cambridge University in the mid-70s, and everything was given a parliamentary frame: we began with 1832, the Great Reform Act. Black begins with 1839, the Chartist insurrection. History was so tedious at Cambridge, I swapped to English Literature. Now, reading Black, I see why revolutionaries call themselves historical materialists. History matters; it brings constant surprises.

History writing in Britain has been dominated by authors from the Communist Party, and the philistinism, pragmatism and positivism of that politics diminishes their work: history becomes a record of who won, told increasingly from the side of the victors. Acknowledged as the most eminent historian today, Eric Hobsbawm is at best a chronicler of "the facts", which means history which points inelectably to present powers. E.P. Thompson gradually escaped the snares of CP positivism, spawned the great Peter Linebaugh, and ended his life with a study of William Blake. In 1934, Karl Radek opened the Soviet Writers' Congress — the conference which lauched Socialist Realism and the suppression of Modernism in the USSR — by condemning Jakob Boehme (whom both Marx and Lenin honoured as an important dialectician) as a "bourgeois mystic". Writing a book on Blake was a sharp retort to such CP dogma. However, it's still rare to find historians who make the past come alive, who don't write as if actors in history operate with the historian's knowledge of what came after (an exception is John Keegan, the military historian who taught at Sandhurst and wrote for the Telegraph; since military tactics are a practical thing, dialectics is suddenly a useful tool for the bourgeoisie).

It's rare to find historians who inject what Hegel called "possibility" back into the historical corpse, and allow us to see it in movement, as it really was and felt for those acting in it. Black does that. That's why he cannot stick to an already-established "subject of interest". In actuality, despite the separate disciplines of the academy, everything is connected to everything else: philosophy to history to science to culture to politics. The most concentrated statement of Black's anti-disciplinary position occurs on page x of the introduction. It might seem like a technical point in left history but is in fact the linchpin of the book. Black credits Raya Dunayevskaya with

the philosophical insight that German social democracy's capitulation to militarism in 1914 had been a dialectical transformation into its opposite from within (p. x)

This sentence is simultaneously history and philosophy; it proposes that we cannot think one without the other. Dividing them prevents us understanding the present. It is this blindness which makes our mass media useless for making judgments about right and wrong, justice and crime, war and peace — the crucial judgments for a life not lived passively, at the side of history, but in activism.

So social democracy is not simply a political phenomenon, a lineage of political thinking ("socialism") which has informed politicians from Harold Wilson to Tony Benn and Tony Blair: it is a point of view which implies judgments about history, religion, culture and personal relations. Dunayevskaya's thought hinges on Lenin's response to 1914 and the news that the largest "socialist" organisation in the world, the German SPD, had voted for war bonds, had joined the war party, had capitulated to nationalism and the bourgeoisie. He re-read Hegel's Logic and discovered that, whilst they honoured Marx and marched under his banner, none of the SPD socialists had understood Capital. They had been reading it with minds shaped by Kant's philosophy, and woefully misunderstood it: not just a partial misapprehension, but a complete reversal. Politics is not a battle of disembodied "ideas" but of real social forces making use of ideas. How, for example, to make sense of Christianity, the revolutionary religion of slaves which became (after Emperor Constantine's conversion in 311CE) the official religion of a slave-owners' empire? Assessments of Christianity which fail to reflect on the social situation of the believers are worthless. When Marxists call themselves "historical materialists", they are not proposing that we turn our backs on the present and only study the past: they are saying that conceiving of politics as a battle between timeless concepts like Good and Evil (or non-violence and violence; or society versus the individual) is to act blindly. When Tony Blair created New Labour and bombed Iraq under the rubric of "socialism", he was following a tradition; if you can't see how ideas can turn into their opposite, you are hamstrung — in politics, and in prettymuch everything.

Black is a historian in the sense that, with him, everything's pervaded by time; time is an inescapable aspect of reality. But where do ideas of eternity come from? Black uses Alfred Sohn-Rethel to explain that money gives us the illusion that reality is timeless. Outside social crises and revolutions, when the world of the capitalist collapses and money becomes worthless, capital rules our lives. Its need to expand and increase value becomes a "law" like gravity: to oppose it is to be unrealistic, utopian, mad: "There is no other way". So for Black, being a worker is not simply "unfair", an unjust situation we must seek to rectify by union and party "work", it's a philosophical problem. If you engage with it, try and work out why the timeless "reality" of capital outweighs our immediate human needs and aspirations, you develop a whole understanding of philosophy and history. Philosophy is not an "option", a personal religious conviction, to be tolerated (and forgotten) in the cause of socialist solidarity and "working together" — it's the very joy and motor of socialism, what brings us together in the first place: our desperate need to understand the world.

Philosophy is of course an extraordinary thing. You can pick up a dialogue by Plato from the Fourth Century BC and read it for entertainment: guys drinking wine, cracking jokes and discussing cosmic truths. All "philosophy", from St Paul to Slavoy Zizek, returns to Plato and the Ancient Greeks. Thoth and Thor, in contrast, are the stuff of fairy tales. Why does it seem so natural to talk about a Oneness underlying everything, of the unchanging nature of the truths of maths and geometry? Following Sohn-Rethel and the presentday classicist Richard Seaford, Black posits money as the explanation. As the universal equivalent, money gives us the idea of a Oneness beyond material things. The fact that for the capitalist and stock-broker (although not the worker!) money keeps its value through its different forms (cash or bank account or share) gives them the idea that time and mortality is only an issue for losers and fools (workers); for them, the "real" world of value is timeless. Black's argument is subversive workerism indeed. It questions justifications for hierarchical society at the very root, connecting to scurrilous suspicions which break out all over popular culture. Suddenly you understand why the KLF burned a million quid: money is unreal, an oppressive relation between people disguised as "objectivity". The unrealness of money is what emerges in strikes and riots, when suddenly it's the food parcel or the petrol bomb in the hand that matters. Black's kind of Marxism, hinging on the failure of "respectable" Marxism in 1914, can shed light on these moments. Marxism is not a way of dealing "more intelligently" with money issues, as many cleverdicks believe, it involves complete contestation of the money principle: the concept of a world and philosophy beyond money. Slavoy Zizek cannot think beyond Plato and St Paul. We can!

Black's Marxism speaks to those of us who have been touched by Dada and James Joyce and Punk — the insight that "respectability" is a deadly trap for revolutionaries, that "culture" will not save us, that random features of proletarian existence are more interesting than any pseudo-classical monument. The Lukacsian "Marxism" of Rees and German (Counterfire) and the SWP rump may call itself "Leninist" (thus poisoning Lenin for a generation), but because they lack Dunayevskaya's insight that social democracy became its opposite, they cannot understand the KLF or Free Improvisation: culture made in polemical disregard for money and heritage culture. This makes them incredibly stupid.

Black's commitment to history allows him to solve theoretical issues which fox the philosophers. Sohn-Rethel's argument has always struck me as dubious because it implies that, since it's derived from money, the idea of the One must always be a product of alienation from material reality, an idealist imposition of social power on things and people. This would fit with the liberal slur that Marxist ideas of the One — the Totality — produced the "totalitarian" regimes of Stalin and Mao.

Since many of the most convincing refutations of reactionary ideas come from insistence on the totality (eg eco-political considerations of the environmental cost of production for profit; Adorno's considerations of the psychological cost of fan worship etc), abandoning the One made me uneasy. Black provides an answer, not by invoking "theory", but by looking further into history. He follows Seaford into the pre-history of the Greeks and the origins of money, and finds it in primitive communism, in the equitable distribution of sacrifical meat to the collective (the obol, a coin of low value, is named after a spit; the drachma, a coin of high value, is named after a set of spits — Greek kebab culture goes way back). Tyranny and exploitation arose from the use of money, but its origin in sharing shows that there is another side to the concept of the One: the needs of the collective and the necessity of equal shares. So a revolution versus monetry "rationality" would not necessarily mean regression to peasant isolation; it could recover the social unity of primitive communism at a higher level.

Seaford says of Plato: "Thought autonomously acting on thought is imagined in a way that resembles money producing interest in likeness to itself" (p. 16). Thus capitalism is not simply exploitative and oppressive, it conceals extraction of surplus value from workers. In common with Eugene Gogol and Peter Hudis (other Dunayevskaya followers), Black quotes a passage from Marx which declares that until work is done by "freely associated" people, i.e. for the pleasure and interest of it, then this illusion that money makes money will prevail (Capital Vol 1, p.173). Such "deep" Marxism unites political and artistic rebels against capitalism, since the very definition of an activity done for its own sake is art. Black shows independence of mind in going from Dunayevskaya to the Surrealists, rarely discussed together (the former belongs to "politics" and the latter to "art"). He reveals that the Parisian journal Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution was publishing Lenin's notes on Hegel in 1933. Like Dunayevskaya, preface-writer André Thirion was electrified:

The effect produced on each of us by reading these texts has led us to recognise in them the greatest power to shock on all those who aspire to disentangle the laws of the evolution of all material and intellectual objects. (p. 46)

One is hard put to it whether to describe this riposte to Stalinist philistinism as "artistic" or "political"; the divide suddenly seems like a fence erected by lesser minds in order to make us suppress our own thoughts and follow tedious orders. The Parisian art scene 1933-69 has provided rich pickings for publishers and academics. Because he is not writing from the point of view of middle-class inertia (motivated by the desire for a lucrative podium), but from the point of view of a revolutionary seeking ways to comprehend and overturn capitalism, Black writes some of the best pages you can read on Surrealists, Lettrists and Situationists.

Black notes that by reviving attention to commodity fetishism, the psychic illusions created by money and capital as outlined in the opening chapters of Capital, Lukács "threw a polemical brick through the window" of traditional, Social-Democratic Marxism (since Engels, Kautsky and even Lenin never mentioned it). Of course, "commodity fetishism" is now a cliché in academic and art "theory", where you feel no-one has read Capital to the end (where Marx deals with such presentday realities as the declining rate of profit, economic crisis and proletarian revolution). However, Black will not allow aspects of Marx's analysis to be hi-jacked by people ignorant of the totality of problems facing us as wage-labourers. Have you ever wondered why French theory remains so fashionable among academics? Black quotes C.L.R. James on the French Communist Party, explaining how it made Marxism safe for non-activists:

It substitutes "thought," "education," "information," for the only means of self-education, action. It is the main ideological source for the stifling of the proletariat. These publications, their organization and publication, still further widen the social milieu for the new petty bourgeoisie of all types to carry on an essentially bourgeois function. (p. 97)

Black wants to revive Marxism as an integral philosophy of revolt which can address psychic as well as economic phenomena, refusing the "expertise" of those who talk undialectically and without reference to our total situation. For this I can forgive him much, even a passing reference to Josef Dietzgen as a "crude materialist" (p. 99), where his pursuit of Hegel into perfumed philsophical heights appears to have blinded him to the great power of the "cobblers" Dietzgen (a tanner by trade) wrote on dialectics for his son Eugen (the AMM has long called for a Dietzgen Revival; his books were a staple of independent working-class education in the 1930s). Black's book is a "hard", read in the best sense: like pemmican, you need to chew on it for a long while, but it is packed with nourishment. Academics, forced to skim through a dozen books a week to keep up with developments in their "field", will doubtless hate it (honourable exception: Peter McLaren of the University of Auckland); activists and autodidacts, on the other hand, should pore over every page.

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