The ASSOCIATION OF MUSICAL MARXISTS (AMM) was founded by Andy Wilson and Ben Watson in December 2010 after enduring a 30m eternity of Bourdieu-style sociology of French rap at the annual conference of Historical Materialism (a self-styled “Marxist” journal). Sick of being treated like party-spoilers, soppy mystics and ‘undertheorised’ unprofitable scum, the devotees of truth in music decided to stand up and make themselves heard! Wilson and Watson believe that honesty about musical response - equivalent to the mental hygiene of recognizing unconscious drives - is the only solid basis for a new politics. Hence Unkant (the AMM’s publishing house, designer: Keith Fisher) is reissuing Ray Challoner’s The Struggle for Hearts and Minds , a Trotskyist exposé of what our ruling classes were actually doing in World War II. We are particularly keen on presenting Challoner’s analysis in Geramny, because we understand how confusion about the role of the Allies 1939-1945 is currently preventing Marxist intellectuals from orienting themselves towards the only gravediggers of capitalism in your country: the German working class (“anti-Deutsch”, “keine Tränen für Dresden” etc etc). The AMM is thrilled to be invited to Hamburg (our first foray out of London!) because of the Hansestadt’s long history of involvement with British pop, rock and counter culture - and because of the irony of three Englishmen arriving to tell German people about Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School (it’s like the Beatles and Stones arriving to tell America about the blues - absurd but necessary!). Keith Fisher joined the Socialist Workers Party in 1982 and left, over a decade later, having unsuccessfully campaigned against Andy Wilson's expulsion. He came to politics as a youth worker in west London involved with the Anti-Nazi League and fondly remembers ferrying battered rioters out of Southall in 1981 during which a famous neo-Nazi pub was burnt to the ground. In 1993 Keith moved to Canada after taking Tony Cliff's [the SWP's founder] warning that "leaving the Party means being in the wilderness" a little too seriously. Upon return to the UK in 2010 Keith helped found Unkant Publishers and contributed to the overall design of their publications. Favourite listening falls in a narrow band between the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and the Beatles' Double White album. Since February 1976, when he contributed “Towards a Political Music” lambasting Prog Rock in the Cambridge Fabian Review, Ben Watson has pursued great music and left politics as antagonistic twins which wither and die in isolation. Involved with Rock Against Racism in Leeds 1979-1982, Ant-Nazi League 1980-1993, Socialist Workers Party 1980-2001, Mad Pride 1999-2003, founder member of the Association of Musical Marxists (2010) which he considers the best thing yet. Author of major works on Frank Zappa and Derek Bailey; contributor to The Wire 1987-2005; interviewer of George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Pierre Boulez, Billy Bang, Robert Wyatt and Ronald Shannon Jackson. Currently researching James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as an anti-militarist, anti-Stalinist response to the horrors of the 1930s, and trying to find out how the world-historic music of Iancu Dumitrescu could have emerged from the chrysalis of Ceasescu’s Stalinist Romania. Favourite listening: Dieterich Buxtehude and Dixie Chicks. Andy Wilson came to political consciousness organising against the fascist National Front in the British Royal Navy. In 1982 when Margaret Thatcher started a war against Argentina (“the Falklands War”) to distract Britain’s working class from her assault on their living standards, Wilson was expelled from the Navy by the Security Services ("We're not saying that you are a security risk - we're saying that we think one day you might be"); with his life in pieces, Throbbing Gristle and the 'Krautrock' of Faust became a new guideline to life and sanity. A full time organizer in Liverpool for the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the 1980s, Wilson was expelled by the party’s founder Tony Cliff (Yigael Gluckstein) for challenging the Central Committee’s adulation of Georg Lukacs’ idealism. Since then, he has built software for a living, and uses the Internet to support Faust and oppose the 'transgressive’ use of Nazi imagery and sympathisers in the Industrial music scene and beyond. His book on Faust, Stretch Out Time 1970-1975 was published in 2006 (it contains a polemic versus Ben Watson’s adulation of Frank Zappa). Wilson is a founder member of the Association of Musical Marxists, and editor of Adorno for Revolutionaries, a collection of Ben Watson’s music writings and Unkant’s first publication. Favourite listening: Frank Zappa.
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