Get You Back Home
Ben Watson's Address to Spring Conference in Manchester
11 May 2013
This was the pre-written paper I took to Manchester. In the event, an improvised preamble about how the economic crisis has made Marx's ideas visible again but failed to rehabilitate Freud, took up my entire ten minutes (given that sexual scandal has become so central to left politics, the need for a scientific, materialist approach to sexuality seems quite urgent). I've also left out some remarks about Dunayevskaya on Quality and Quantity in Hegel's Science of Logic because they have already appeared here.
Andy Wilson of the AMM posted a quote from C.L.R. James's Notes on Dialectics on Facebook recently. It said that Stalin's "Leninism" was a fraud, a cynical justification for ruthless Real Politik and the establishment of a bureaucratic-centralist ruling class. In contrast, Trotsky's Leninism was sincere, but it nevertheless held him back, distorting his view of where he was and how the world was. It prevented him from understanding that the USSR hadn't just gone slightly off the rails, it was now state capitalist, i.e. the opposite of genuine communism: a counter-revolutionary threat to progressive developments all across the globe. I liked Andy's post because it rattles the cage of anyone secure in the belief that if you line up the profiles of the "correct" grand old men — Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky rather than Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, say, or Marx, Engels, Lenin and Lucaks — you can't go wrong. But as the recent crisis in the SWP proved, you can line up the profiles and still go very wrong indeed.
I had one skirmish with the SWP Central Committee which involved visiting the Centre. I was writing an article on the novelist Iain Sinclair for International Socialism Journal, and went in to speak to John Rees. He thought, with some changes he'd suggested, we could get the article past Chris Harman, who didn't like it at all. Harman thought comrades should be reading Jack London and B. Traven, not Sinclair; abstruse language was a block to communication, an evasion. What I was unprepared for was John Rees's absolute conviction that, as a CC member of the SWP, he was the advanced consciousness of the working class, rather than one voice in an organisation attempting to influence the class. He also criticised my essay as "eclectic" because I didn't only cite the "classical" Marxists — Marx, Engels, Lenin and Lukacs — but also Freud, Reich and Adorno. I later found out "eclectic" was Lenin's term in Materialism and Empirio-Croticism for those who mixed up their Marxism with Kantianism, and were therefore semi-idealist. Since the whole article on Sinclair was an anti-Kantian, materialist diatribe, calling it "eclectic" was a bit of bare-faced cheek. What Rees meant was that I used writers from outside the select few endorsed as "correct" by the party.
Andy's post is the opposite of this kind of book-based socialism. It makes it impossible for its readers, by commitment to a few names plucked from history, to already know what they think. Maybe Leninism and Stalinism and Trotskyism actually refer to positions with their own internal contradictions. Maybe we need to stand up and say what we think, rather than hide behind a row of classic profiles. In fact, maybe the Association of Musical Marxists should be "eclectic" enough to put George Herriman's Ignatz the Mouse on our banner … But that's not simply a rejection of the Marxist tradition, rather it's to point to what mass consciousness and movements-from-below achieved in the 1920s — and how this intelligence emerged in the funny papers as much as in the serious ones, if not more so.
C.L.R. James shows how Trotsky's Leninism became a trap. But Lenin can also provide a way out of pessimism and hopelessness. That's how Lenin was used by Theodor Adorno in a dialogue with Max Horkheimer which was transcribed by Gretel Adorno in 1956, translated by Rodney Livingstone and published by Verso two years ago (Towards a New Manifesto). Flying in the face of Stalinist myth, a myth swallowed by the right wing and Communist Party fellow-travellers alike, that Lenin was the "hard man" of politics, who trampled on bourgeois shibboleths like "soul" and "feeling" to achieve his revolution, Adorno concludes the dialogue by claiming that what Lenin added to Marxism was an understanding of subjectivity. Marx, he says, "would have dismissed as a milieu theory the idea that people are products of society down to the innermost fibre of their being. Lenin was the first to articulate such a theory." (p.112) This is the penultimate thesis of the book, and it's no aberration.
The ground was prepared by Adorno responding to Horkheimer's "appeal for the re-establishment of a socialist party" by saying what they needed was "a strictly Leninist manifesto" (p. 94). He also says that there's an aspect of Marx and Engels which prepares for the Stalinist dismissal of culture as rubbish, and that what he'd always wanted to do was "develop a theory that remains faithful to Marx, Engels and Lenin, while keeping up with culture at its most advanced". (p. 103)
In his introduction to the volume Rodney Livingstone discusses Horkheimer's gradual drift to the right, claiming that he ended up with a political position close to Alexandre Kojève, the Stalinist whose lectures on Hegel guaranteed that trendy French philosophy would talk rubbish for the next eighty years. Livingstone says "Adorno, more aesthetically-minded, emerges paradoxically as the more radical" (p. x). This is only a "paradox" if you accept the English middle-class myth that aesthetic truth is a bastion of upper-class privilege. If, on the other hand, you proceed from the opposite idea — one completely familiar to fans of William Blake and Gospel music and Blues and Punk — that only the oppressed can speak the truth in a way that makes sense to our non-conceptual, sensual, animal selves, then aesthetic suss is not "paradoxically" aligned to radical politics, it's the sine qua non of getting beyond Nina Simone. Sorry, that was a pun to illustrate the unconscious way Latin tags work on our brains; what I meant to say is that what gets dignified by terms like "aesthetics" and "phenomenology" is actually finding out where we feel comfortable to be ourselves, which for most of us means avoiding the logic of monetary relations. A logic being dinned into us by the Con-Dem assault; apparently in Somers Town, we must loose some of our open space on Polygon Road and Purchese Street because there's no central government funding for Edith Neville Primary School, and the only option is to sell park land for yuppie flats. Refusing this "logic" means trusting our instincts, our aesthetic reactions. The reason Marxism upsets snobs who define themselves as "aesthetes" is because it makes the whole issue a matter of grubby politics.
To discover that Lenin could be a trap for Trotsky but an escape hatch for Adorno confounds assumptions about art and politics — self and society, subject and object — in a way that restores their intimate revolutionary dialectic, and saves us from the blahs at both their poles. Lenin's realisation that we are "social to the innermost fibre of our being" led to Valentin Volosinov's formulation that even inner speech is social through and through. This doctrine enabled Adorno to articulate, in his writings about music, the finest nuances of subjective response. But to leave his observations there, and like a sleevenote on a Deutsche Grammmophon release of music by Helmut Lachenmann, merely let them revolve around the remnants of the culture he wrote about, betrays the gigantic ambition of his work, which was to remain faithful to "Marx, Engels and Lenin". In other words, to tackle head-on the travesty of Communism which misled the world, East and West, for sixty-two years — and find a way out of the misery and alienation of capitalism.
The Association of Musical Marxists takes Adorno's Lenin and pops it from the silken pod which gave it birth, but we are not going to abandon the practice of finding in the smallest aesthetic details sparks which can illuminate the whole. For us, this is like taking the conversation with any unimportant person as seriously as a dialogue with a big cheese. The AMM believes that taking aesthetic observations as facts rather than opinions is the key to unlocking the problem of world politics. Let's try it out …
How is it that Adorno, facing utterly different levels of culture and organisation from Trotsky, managed to develop Leninism, while Trotsky was impaired by it? Why was it correct for C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya and Tony Cliff to break with Trotsky and call the USSR "state-capitalist"? I'm aware that Andy thinks that, since 1989, the whole "state capitalist shtik" is redundant as an organising principle, of no interest to new anti-capitalists and occupyers and student protestors, but I differ from him. That's because I blame Stalinism and Kojève for the elitism, idealism and class-positivism which have characterised the academic Humanities since the advent of "theory", and prevent even the best of the new generation from making the subject/object twist — the revolutionary politics, in other words — I so crave. But I can't talk about this "twist" without perpetrating one myself. No, I'm not going to dance, I'm going to talk about a free improvisor who's played Dictaphone under the name T.H.F. Drenching for the last fifteen years.
The very fact of playing a made-up instrument like the Dictaphone means that T.H.F. Drenching has an oblique relationship to any tradition. He plays on the buttons and cups his hands round it and a microphone like a re-run of Little Walter transforming the harmonica into an electric R&B instrument of such unheralded force. But despite being involved in the outer end of experimental Noise/DIY Free Improvisation, Drenching spends time listening to straight-ahead jazz saxophonists Eddie "Lockjaw" Davies and Joe Henderson. This strikes me as the correct, creative attitude towards the tradition: respectful, interested, fascinated, even obsessed — but not seeking to strut in borrowed clothes. Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire is famous for its scorching satire of politicians borrowing postures from the past, but that hasn't stopped many self-professed "revolutionary organisations" from being historical-reenactment societies. But rather than simply joining in the mockery, which can quickly become the bourgeois hipster's self-assurance that his or hers is the best possible of all ethical carbon-neutral ways-to-live in the modern world, Adorno whips Lenin into another dimension: an ally of his militant subjectivism, a social way of understanding the tremour of tears at a long-held tutti in a Mahler symphony.
I'm convinced Adorno is right. Without his cross-roads between Lenin and Freud, politics and music, sociology and self, everything we know will become a concrete apron delineated by small-brained experts. Nothing will be allowed to live and grow. I want everything judged by tribunals of self-elected revolutionaries who really stop the traffic on the street, all knowledge and morals reassessed by the active person, only referring to the expert as one would to Wikipedia, a source of data. No deference to "knowledge" because no-one needs to teach us about twenty-first-century capitalism, we're fucking living it — or we die. And Adorno is alive also because he can be wrong. When Raya Dunayevskaya denounces his equation of absolute negativity with Auschwitz instead of with our own need to "revolutionize the universe" (to quote Sam Phillips arguing with Jerry Lee Lewis), I agree.
Would it be "too confusing" to invent a popular politics based on disagreement and mind-changing and counter-argument? No, because that's what popular politics really is. It's where I go because I feel it and I need it, and I'll meet my friends and lovers and ex-lovers, and this matters to me beyond any "logical" argument. The idea that this zone could and should have a heated dialogue with the higher reaches of empirical research and theoretical speculation is a fantasy of Karl Marx, that slumming Hegelian philosopher, but it's also a fantasy of anyone who wants to live as a whole person and refuses the partial niches offered us — none of which ever contain us for more than the specified hours it takes for Capital to squeeze something out of us.
Two examples of the right attitude at the moment: (1) David Hann's Physical Resistance (Zero Books), which documents the practical and necesary anti-sectarianism of anti-fascists in Britain over the last hundred years. (2) A recent Facebook comment on whether you're SWP, Counterfire or Left Unity: "I don't care what feckin' t-shirt you are wearing, just get on the anti-bedroom tax demo."
Of course, you can outflank any good idea by calling it an "idea" and refering back to the hard grey world it's "nothing" against. But that "hard grey world" you're invoking is actually just another idea: "Not a single progressive idea has begun with a ‘mass’ base, otherwise it would not have been a progressive idea. It is only in the last stage that the idea finds its masses." (Trotsky in Partisan Review 18-vi-1938). Making the ointment omnipotent, exacting magic, following Daphne Lawless into Chaos Marxism, revolutionary left politics combined with lesbian S&M and leftfield aesthetics. The only limits are concrete and practical; and require immediate attention. As Iggy Pop put it, "Where are you going to go tonight?".
Like one's musical predilections, one's politics are the result of a specific set of experiences. I've never met anyone whose musical taste or politics are identical. What's special about Marxism, because it seeks to understand the social basis of ideas, is that disagreements are not simply logical battles — the rhetoric of the debating club — but investigations into society and history. We compare notes and try and find out why we are singing different tunes. Frequently, when discussing music, we have to ask how old someone is and what their background was when they began listening, because this explains what music was available to them when they formed their musical identity. This identity is hardened by commercialism into a kind of bigotry, but new musical experiences can bend and warp it. In the same way a real musical experience changes a group of people, so should our politics. It's something we invent and which changes others along with ourselves. Mad Pride was like that for me, as a stand-off between anarchists and revolutionary marxists was slowly dissolved, and we all emerged the better for it. That's my model for how we can fight austerity and war and racism and fascism. A real socialist politics which remains sceptical and irreverent about "leaders" who seek to manage our dissent — but is also willing and able to appreciate articulations of our thought and feeling from whatever surprising zone these may emerge from.
I'll stop.
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