Free Paul Blackledge from Academic Bondage

Ben Watson / OTL on Paul Blackledge's Marxism and Ethics

aka "We're workerists - but not as you know them, John Rees"

Author's Note

This text below was performed by Out To Lunch at the AMM meeting at the Blue Posts on Thursday 6 October 2011. The event launched two new books from Unkant: Ray Challinor's The Struggle for Hearts and Minds and Sean Bonney's Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud. I have to say that delivering this text to a room packed with laughing faces, to constructive and hilarious heckles, was a great experience, and confirmed its thesis that writing should be about enabling new social forces to emerge. The atmosphere was so different from the pain and scandal induced by voicing such opinions in the Rees/German-era SWP, or at academic conferences (or commercial music magazines). All thanks to the AMM comrades for working to create this situation. In the discussion afterwards, John Game pointed out that, far from being a precursor of the execrable ‘ethical turn’ which has swept fashionable theory, Alasdair MacIntyre was fully part of the libertarian-workerist current in the IS which included Challinor (as well as Peter Sedgewick, Jim Higgins, David Widgery and many others), and which the AMM is striving to revive. This may be true in terms of MacIntyre's active politics, but the reader of books has to judge to what extent worthy intent survives on the written page. Perhaps I should read more MacIntyre, although working my way through Engagement with Marxism (I indexed Paul and Neil Davidson's edition) didn't encourage me in that direction. In my talk on Paul, I applied psychoanalysis to bring to the surface readerly experiences which formal political correctitude can't grasp. We need Freud! We need Adorno!! MacIntyre's rewarmed Aristotelianism will never be puissant enough to remedy the SWP's disastrous reliance on reiteration and academic respectability rather than working-class dialectic.


BW 7-x-2011
** Video recordings of the reading can be seen here >>

On Paul Blackledge's Marxism & Ethics

One of the things I do to earn a living is compile indexes. When I tell people that this is what I do, I can't always be sure they know what an index is. I suppose if I'm at a book launch I can trust people will know, at least those who've come here with an interest in Ray Challinor's essays on the Second World War - history books are usually indexed. But I have to say, the mums and dads I meet at drop-ins and nurseries tend not to know what an index is. I suppose that's because mainstream books and novels don't normally come equipped with indexes, you need to have had some kind of brush with organised knowledge. Of course, this issue is embarrassing. No-one likes to talk about different levels of education, because it means talking about class, and class is the great big Verboten around which English life revolves. But I could talk to Frank Zappa about indexes quite easily, because his music quite deliberately explodes the social superiority conferred by higher education.¹

In 1993 I told Frank Zappa I'd try and make my biography ‘accessible’ to his fans by supplying an exhaustive index, he replied that he didn't think most of his fans would know what an index was. Anyway, I compiled an extensive index for my book on Zappa, then I did one for Esther's first book on Walter Benjamin, then I started selling my skills to Verso and Berg. What's an index? According to the OED it's the anatomical name for the forefinger, the one which points.

Increasingly, publishers off-load the expense of paying someone to compile an index onto the cash-strapped authors themselves. This means that I do less indexing, but the books I index tend to be by people I know through politics, which is much better. When I get to index a book by someone whose politics I sympathise with, it's great - I'm being paid to read a book I'd like to read anyway. And the last book I indexed had something of relevance to people gathered together under the flag of the Association of Musical Marxists - it was Marxism & Ethics by Paul Blackledge, in which a leading SWP comrade from Leeds steps forward to tell us why Alasdair MacIntyre matters, and what a return to Aristotelian ethics and the concept of ‘the good life’ can do to improve Marxism. Since the AMM is all about improving Marxism, I thought I'd talk to you about Paul's book.

The publisher making Paul fork out for his own index is the State University of New York Press, or SUNY. The book is a contribution to Paul's discipline, which is Political Theory. It's a book for academics rather than a book for activists. I'll say that again: It's a book for academics rather than a book for activists. I say it twice in order to forestall the inevitable reply to my analysis, which will take the form of, "But Ben it's a book for academics not activists". It retails at $80 a copy whether you get a hardcopy or a download. So it's not a book even academics will buy: it's a book which libraries will have to buy to keep abreast of ‘the field’, an arcane move inside the institutions of knowledge. The weird thing is that Marxism & Ethics is arguing for the need for a party of working class activists, but in a realm they won't access unless they become academics themselves. But I suppose - and here I'm guessing - it will be reviewed in SWP publications, and enhance Paul's status as a theoretician in the party. So we'll get the ‘trickle-down benefits’. Eventually. Of course, we all survive in ways which are hard to justify before the tribunal of total revolution, and I'm not saying Paul is wrong to place his book with SUNY; but that shouldn't stop us from freely commenting on what this choice entails.

Now, as too many people in this room probably know, the SWP has its own concept of intellectual levels: a theoretical journal, a reflective magazine and an agitprop paper. Because of this stratification, the writings of James Joyce or Guy Debord or J.H.Prynne - avant-gardists who deliberately mix up these registers - is quite simply illegible. In some ways Unkant is a reply to the Rebel's Guide series put out by the SWP. We think what activists need is theoretical invention, ripping polemic and revolutionary entertainment rather than watered-down academia or Simple Simon accounts of Great Men. Yes, Paul's book is aimed at the academic market, but it should nevertheless be judged like any other book: what does it tell us about ourselves and where we are? By publishing Challinor's history book and Sean's poetry at the same time, Unkant is making a point: we think genuine revolutionary thought touches everything and unites everything, exploding the specialisms which renders bourgeois thought inscrutable and irrelevant. Those who are devoid of poetry can't write history because they they're insensitive to the medium of words which history is written in. Which is why Sean Bonney's history of Amiri Baraka and the 60s Black-American Revolution is so urgently required. Those who are without fantasy can't write socialist history because they can't understand how different class experiences make entire world pictures out of identical ‘facts’, which is why one Peter Linebaugh is worth a thousand Hobsbawms.

Capital, by the way, is not ‘theory’ and Inaugural Address of the International Working Men's Association is not ‘practice’. They will not fit into your reiteration of the class divide! They are both texts which beg for an audience never envisaged before: workers who want to understand everything. To subsume great literature under readymade categories is to obscure its intent and affect, which are to summon emergent social forces. The ‘real subsumption’ talked about by those who wish to undermine the clarity of Marx's analysis and witter on about ‘immaterial labour’ is already happening: it’s the reduction of Marxism to a set of options within a jargon propagated by Anthony Giddens.

Not that Blackledge is that bad. In a minor way, Blackledge has performed a noble task. He's wrestled Marx out of the ‘turn to ethics’ which swept the humanities once structuralism and postmodernism were exhausted. A ‘turn’ which has been the occasion for more pompous twaddle than practically any other trend in academia. Blackledge explains, contra Callinicos - never one to miss an academic trend - that there is no ‘ethical deficit’ in Marx. Marx's scathing assault on bourgeois morality stems from his realisation - in 1844, when he involved himself with the Silesian weavers and their struggle - that in their opposition to the bourgeoisie, workers explode the Kantian divide between egoism and altruism. This is the tight bourgeois ‘self’ whose dissolution by the Commune Rimbaud found so intoxicating. It's what we feel during the great demos and riots and occupations. ‘Morality’ - a system for managing individuals individually, from the inside - tell us nothing about this wondrous new social development, this amazing possibility. But using the terms given to us by Capital - alienation, exploitation, commodity, capital and surplus value - allows us to indict the injustices of rational capitalism, and pin the target on the real enemies of mankind. They give us the rational means to deal with this overwhelming stuff.

Blackledge is a good enough Marxist to understand his scorn for morals. However, there is a deadness to the would-be rousing conclusions in Marxism & Ethics, as if boringness and the rehearsal of the already-known convey authority. In fact, boringness is actually a sure sign of repression, something lacking, something omitted, something unsaid. Even when they had Marx's portrait up on the office wall in the Stalinist era, bureaucrats detested reading him, because he and Engels never repeated a formula. Like the music of Pierre Boulez and Frank Zappa and Iancu Dumitrescu, their work is a continuous spiral, persistently expanding the perimeters of the germ idea. Like decent improvisors, they remember what they've played and understand how it's changed the environment they're working in. Reiteration can never recapture the first moment of saying. So there's no mantra or prayer or formula that can save us, only immediate response to the new actuality - and knowledge of the past events which created that actuality. However shocking it may appear to comrades who like to parrot back the ‘new line’ at Marxism weekend, reiteration is actually the enemy of revolution.

Blackledge's fear of invention and specificity - the aspect of contingency which Dada foregrounded in the realm of art, and wanted to fuse with Leninist insurgency - also entails suppression of Paul's own viewpoint. Despite his reiterated calls for a dialectic between subject and object, between specific struggles and a universal vision, Paul keeps to the high ground of abstraction. Not the unstable and generative abstractions of Hegel, which are perpetually toppling the smug certainties of unreflective thinking and recombining in an unpredictable revolutionary alchemy, but the high ground of academic Political Theory, which proposes a descriptive vocabulary which can put every historical philosophy in its place. Words like ‘consequentialist’, ‘formalist’, ‘normative’ and ‘functionalist’. A world where no one ever expresses truths burning with urgency, everyone makes a ‘claim’ to be scrutinised by a committee of Oxford logical positivists. This transcendent, supra-historical jargon sits uneasily among the book's Marxist terms, which have themselves been simplified into descriptive generalities. In Marxism & Ethics, Marxism is presented as positive philosophy, as if it's the end of the matter - "that's that comrades, now we (or rather you, since Paul is busy in the library) can go and build the party". Whereas Marx's determinate critiques knock holes in ideology so our real experiences and observations and social being can rush in, so we face with sober senses what we really are. And need to find other people to talk about these discoveries. That's real solidarity. It's an intellectual thing, not simply being a dumb soldier in a class struggle defined by politicos. You can't read Marx without talking about what he's made you think, writing tracts, communicating. Being a revolutionary!

An example from Marxism & Ethics, practically at random: "For Marx our nature evolves in a context of humanity's developing productive powers, and the struggle for democratic control over those powers." Well, who can argue with that? But why does the sentence feel so lifeless, so boring, so unnecessary-to-be-said? Because it's trying to finish with the definition of human nature, and move on. It's not the demolition of a specific error which has been blocking our own thoughts, it's an attempt to monopolize and occupy the conclusion of the thinking process. The at-least-we-can-all-agree-on-this lowest-common-denominator otiosity of a blog by Nina Power. Even though Blackledge says it's ‘evolving’, human nature is not evolving here as I read these lines. But when Ray Challinor, with his finely honed sense of the correct gutterpress phrase, makes me laugh out loud at the rank duplicity of the British ruling class, or Bonney makes my hair stand on end with the bluntness of his observations about life now in London, something in me evolves. For all that it's fighting the good fight to restore a Marxist dialectic, Paul is not really engaging the reader in a dialogue, he's trapping us in a monotonous and static explanation.

In his ‘Ten Theses on the Philosophy of Language’, written against the Logical Positivism he encountered in Oxford after he'd fled Frankfurt in 1930, Theodor Adorno argued that the language used by philosophy was not arbitrary. Each term in philosophy emerges out of distinct social developments, and is imbued with that specificity (he's echoing Hegel on the Begriff). Of course, it's easy to be impressed by the glittering clarity of Greek philosophical thought, but if Marx and Engels had a mission it was to reveal the historical nature of these concepts, and hence their uselessness as terms for criticising the bourgeoisie.

Paul told me that Chris Harman said of his first published work, "I can't hear your voice, Paul". (He also told me on the phone two days ago that his partner thinks Marxism & Ethics is turgid and boring, a judgement with which he concurs - whilst guffawing). But this split between Paul-in-person and Paul-on-paper is part of the repression which makes his books inert - and holds back the possibility of a really dynamic SWP politics. The prose is somehow ‘obedient’, which is totally wrong for a book which purports to be about revolution. In person, Paul is a right laff. I love him! He's a rambunctious scandalmonger and uproarious gossip, a genuine Yorkshire scallywag, a hedonist and a revolutionary. But none of this appears when he writes! He might be Callinicos, or still worse. When Paul's argument ascends to the ‘ultimate truths’ of Marxism, about how the working class must struggle against alienation to achieve freedom, anyone sensitive to the specifics of literature - Trotsky's great advantage over Stalin - must yawn and skim-read (not me, I was indexing, if you remember).

The blurb at SUNY Press sees Marxism & Ethics rather differently. It says Blackledge has "developed an alternative ethical theory for the Marxist tradition", as if we need some extra preparation, otherwise reading Capital will turn us into a crowd of screaming heathens. Blackledge supplies the doily on which to put the Marxist vase. This is Alasdair MacIntyre and his contention that the Aristotelian concept of ‘the good life’ underlies Marx's critique of alienation. As if anyone trying to keep friends or bring up children or live happily with their neighbours doesn't know what the good life is, as if there isn't a common everyday life we actually live, one that Aristotle or Marx might observe, but which exists quite outside philosphical stances or traditions. Our ‘species being’, man! The life which James Joyce celebrated in Ulysses and requires no philosphical ‘permission’ to exist. We don't live in philosophies, we live in real social arrangements cemented by religion. Religions we're continually transgressing (in Ulysses Bloom fries a pork kidney). Philosophy, on the other hand, is the wonderful outsider, the spur to criticism which Marx turned into a politics. Isolated in a Political Theory Department, his one window on the real world supplied by the SWP, Blackledge can't intimate that Marx shattered the distinctions between philosophy and politics, economics and literature, trade unions and bohemia, work and sex.² To gauge the depth and violence of Marx's assault on bourgeois separation, bids for supremacy within a single discipline will never be sufficient.

So what am I saying? That the SWP is at its strongest when its involvement in real struggles weakens the grip of political specialists trained in university departments, and comrades begin to discern the multiple relationship of Marx's 360° critique to every aspect of life under capitalism. This is the submerged libertarian streak inside the original IS - Cliff preferring Luxemburg to Lenin (Marxism & Ethics, p.186), Jim Higgins' horror at Cliff 's "new middle-class cadre from the LSE". It's this tradition the AMM wishes to resuscitate. We're workerists, but not as you know them, John Rees.

A further problem with MacIntyre's return to Aristotle's ethics: as if the problem with Stalinism was not that it inverted Marx's central idea - that workers could throw off exploitation by capital, that international revolution abolishes imperial antagonisms - but that Stalinism wasn't quite ‘ethical’ enough. Granted, Blackledge is more subtle than this in the book. He's careful to distinguish himself from the bourgeois-humanist critics of Stalin who ended up as Cold-War liberals; he celebrates Marx's assault on moralism — but as the blurb shows, that's not how his book will be received among the non-Marxists of Political Theory departments. Of course there are brilliant individual writers among the academics, usually because of intense involvements with something other than academia, what I'm talking about is academic system-builders. Those who turn the humanities into pseudo-science. This effects the very look of the page. The standard academic practice is now ‘Harvard referencing’. You're meant to acknowledge the source of every one of your ideas. If you don't, it's plagiarism. This proceeds from the peculiarly American notion that every idea is copyrighted to an individual. "Ideas belong to those who made them", said William James, "they're branded like cattle". There is no commons. There is no material reality to refer to. Just tidily wrapped ideas handed along like pass-the-parcel. Whereas, actually, the reverse is true. Every idea we can think emerges from a particular social situation, with all its contradictions and tensions intact. In natural science, it makes sense to say "the cell wall has a surface charge of negative ions" (Joplin, 1933) because science proceeds by repeatable experiment, establishing facts; but saying "workers are often unemployed" (Soskins, 1979) or "Marxism is an ethical science" (Callinicos, 1984) doesn't prove anything. It just says somebody wrote something in a book once.

The problem is idealism, basically. The glass-bead game of academia erects a glass wall between ideas and everyday life. Those who are disinclined to smash this wall - according to the careerist adage "those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones" - end up having to fabricate a mirror image of real life on their side of the glass. However detailed and accurate, this image remains static and artificial and inverted, a representation on a screen lacking the multiplicity and unpredictability - the interrupted nature - of contingent reality. Hence, after the collapse of structuralism, the ridiculous project of establishing an ‘ethics’: creating in theory a description of the good life, when it's something people get on with anyway, without the help of professors. It's called "it's fucking great to be alive, and if there's anyone here who doesn't think it's fucking great to be alive, I wish they would go right now because this show will bring them down so much" (Frank Zappa, Just Another Band From L.A., 1971). It's what Marx called our ‘species being’.

Hence the importance of understanding the place of Hermann Samuel Reimarus in the evolution of Marx's thinking. As a young man, Marx read his The Art Instincts of Animals and mentioned enjoying it in a letter to his father. Explicitly attacking Descartes for calling animals ‘machines’ - devoid of that spark of the divine which Christians call a ‘soul’ - Reimarus reviews the entire corpus of literature on animals and notes how universal is the drive - he uses the same word Freud used for instinct, Trieb - to take care of offspring. Animals sacrifice their own comfort to feed and shelter their young, and will even die to protect them. Hence altruism - or ‘the good life’ - is not something we need to be taught by vicars or professors, it's our very instinct. And it's this ‘species being’ which Marx saw needed to be protected from the incursions of bourgeois competition and exploitation and ideology.

Marx's ‘species being’ explains the stakes in the bitter debates around culture we've had in the SWP. Dada and Punk and Free Improvisation trust our instincts. Their method is to cut away the ballast of inherited culture. Those who defend ‘serious’ culture - ‘our heritage’ - proceed from the Christian vision of man as inherently evil, impulses for the good permanently at war with diabolical animal instincts. The party member who thinks Ice T is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace must be chided for philistinism. So I think it's irresponsible for Paul to allow himself to be seen as borrowing an ‘ethics’ from MacIntyre without criticising these Christian residues in ethical thinking.

There's one section of Marxism & Ethics which suggests that a return to Aristotle might have its advantages, but it leads one to considering the place of poetry in politics, which is definitely not Paul's brief. Indeed, the one ‘cultural’ moment in the book comes when Paul cites Callinicos quoting Adorno to say that maybe the shock of abstract reasoning could be like the shock of Schoenberg and Beckett, a salutary dose of salts for bourgeois cosiness. It seems that music and literature can only be mentioned which has a double mark of certification from two star intellectuals. Blackledge would get further towards explaining what thought might do to restore ‘the good life’ by turning on his TV set at random and using terms like capital and commodity and ideology - his quite good Marxism in other words - to explain what that medium is doing to us. But that would admit that Paul is another person knocking about in the mundane world like the rest of us, and destroy the ‘authority’ of his academic opus: but if it helped us to understand capitalism, it would speak to us here in this room.

Um, a personal confession; I've never got on with Aristotle. After the brilliance of Plato's dialogues, his philosophy seemed soggy and his observations banal and his distinctions quaint. So I missed this bit of Aristotle dredged up by MacIntyre and cited by Blackledge. Aristotle distinguished theory and practice - theoria is knowledge of eternal truths, praxis is knowledge aiding human actions. This demonstrates that hacks who give us pat lectures on the ‘dialectic between theory and practice’ are actually Aristotelians, not Marxists. But Aristotle adds a third term - poiesis - or ‘productive activity’. The theory/practice couplet is revealed as an idealist, consumerist fantasy. In his introduction to Adorno for Revolutionaries, Andy Wilson referred to Brecht criticising Lukács, saying he was a bureaucrat and a control freak, and so frightened of literary productivity. Brecht was emphasizing poiesis, the productivity omitted by the theory/practice couplet. As usual, when old ideas are reiterated, a bit gets left out. If we are going to justify the Unkant project in Aristotelian terms, it's going to be: we want to restore the place of poesis - productivity, the root word of our ‘poetry’ - in the schema of theory and practice.

But Paul's lacuna (Good God, I'm talking his language; I'll be accusing him of an ‘aesthetical deficit’ next) is not just the repression of his own singular regional tongue and life experience in favour of spurious academic authority - spurious because Marxism actually demolishes what Trotsky called the ‘bulkheads’ set up by the bourgeoisie between the different spheres of knowledge - his lacuna or omission or ‘blind spot’ is ADORNO. Adorno, apparently, is ‘pessimistic’ and so counter-revolutionary … and yet Paul has been arguing throughout that the Second International's faith in socialist progress was its Achilles' heel. Sure, certain readers do turn Adorno into a repudiation of all organised left politics. However, they usually follow this with a rejection of the Marxism and Lenin-of-1918 which is the substratum of his musicology according to my book Adorno for Revolutionaries. A leading example of the ‘Adorno for Fastidiously Cultivating Your Own Garden’, Simon Jarvis, has joined the Church of England, I hear. If the basis of our socialism has got to be some cosy-rosy, everything's-going-to-be-all-right ‘optimism’, then I don't see it galvanising anyone but retards. What makes The Communist Manifesto and Dialectic of Enlightenment and Society of the Spectacle stand up and shout is the electric urgency of their theoretical revelation of where we actually are, of the human utopia of solidarity and trust and love splintered and crucified by the money principle. What I mean is the sheer pleasure evinced by the market trader on Berwick Street who insisted on giving us an extra bunch of grapes, or the haberdasher three shops along who refused to take any money for the yard of gold ribbon required to make Iris's hearing aid into a pretty Alice band. Both of which happened yesterday, as it happens. The Communist Manifesto and Dialectic of Enlightenment and Society of the Spectacle require huge amounts of work by the sociology and art-world recuperators to defuse, so it's sad to see a purported revolutionary doing the same thing. Paul, put down your MacIntyre. Read some Adorno! Read Adorno For Revolutionaries! You're not just an academic mind. The working class is inside you right now. You've nothing to lose but your fear of self! Use some of the swearwords you use so liberally in speech in the texts you publish!

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1. In 1912 James Joyce dissed "the hurried materialism now in vogue with the happy fatuousness of a recent college graduate in the exact sciences".
2. um, Boltanski.