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Second Manifesto of the Association of Musical Marxists written 18 October 2011 (i.e. Chuck Berry's birthday)

 

The mistake of all hitherto-existing revolutionary lefts was that they believed in theory and practice but they missed out Aristotle’s third term, i.e. poiesis - Dadaist unrespected and disrespectful punkrock-improv productivity i.e. the free exchange of everything happening in our everyday lives and experimental reworking of all tokens. Using the counterculture for what it gives us vs. verdammte ‘heritage’ culture.

We want to liberate the ideas of Karl Marx from their institutional shells and load them in our pea-shooters so we can DEEPEN THE CURRENT WAVE OF UNREST. Something more than a moral stand. Who's that talking about ‘redistribution of resources’? We gotta change the WHOLE MODE OF PRODUCTION, the way we work and the way we walk. We want to run the lot, and sod the ruling class. If we don't, we just create more red tape, like the New Labour drones sitting on the councils.

THE AMM TAKES IDEAS SERIOUSLY - the ideas in the mouths of our comrades and the people around us. But when it comes to the Postones and Balibars and Poulantzsasses and Zizeks, we don't take their ideas seriously at all. We don’t believe it's worth combatting them by writing yet another book of ‘theory’, another would-be Bible for a new bunch of left-wing robots. We mock today’s celebrity intellectuals just as Adorno mocked Heidegger and Jaspers in the past. Capital and Finnegans Wake and Negative Dialectics are only ‘unreadable’ from the perspective of police reality. That's because they invite a new interpretation every time they're looked at. Like Frank Zappa, they're fecund: they make us examine, not the concepts and authority of the author, but the real world we live in WITH EYES WIDE AND ALERT. Like Stewart Home's anti-novels, these books make us laugh and ACT.

If Marxist activists are not living themselves they can't talk to anyone, least of all to people intoxicated by the discovery of how collective action breaks the spell of capitalist calculation, isolation and misery. The ‘war of all against all’ instituted by capitalist competition only works for the rich. Solidarity is only available for those who declare war on the rich, and wage it. A rapid collectivising of subjectivity will involve barricades, riots and self-definition via antagonism to those who police capitalist business-as-usual, the only reality known to those in charge of ‘the news’.

THE AMM CAN RELATE TO EVERYONE (EXCEPT SECTARIANS)! Our corpuscular esemplasm is the first bid to change the word since the Situationists.

HERE COMES EVERYBODY!

Ben Watson

x-2011

info@ammarxists.org

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