The conventional idea of ‘having a political position’ is to occupy a point on a straight line between left and right, with the various ideologies - liberal, social-democratic, communist, anarchist, conservative, fascist - marked on it, like centimetres marked on a ruler.
Now, I've made pictures of these clichés because they are examples of what Hegel called ‘picture thinking’: the basis of conventional newspaper and TV wisdom. They are not really thinking at all. Rather, they are a schema which prevents investigation of both historical fact and present day atrocity. Both Lineal and Circle clichés are used by people who would rather not talk politics - if talking about politics means taking a position yourself - and who would prefer to gossip about what other people are doing. For them, the less you're involved in something, the more ‘objective’ your view of it. Unfeeling alienation is somehow equated with science.
But I have begun with generalities, whereas I promised Susann that the AMM starts from the contingent, the particular, the personal and the idiosyncratic. In this sense, we are as much Dadaists as we are Leninists. We do not begin with abstractions. They are boring! If we do begin with abstractions, it is to make fun of them. As James Joyce did in Finnegans Wake:
As we there are where are we are we there from tomtittot to teetootomtotalitarian. Tea tea too oo.1This is how the ‘schoolroom’ chapter begins, in which the children respond to the sum total of human knowledge by climbing all over it, using and abusing its names and terms to voice their own needs and desires and sense of life. The schoolroom chapter is also a guide to the mother's vagina (what Frank Zappa called ‘The Chrome-Plated Megaphone of Destiny’ referring to the little squeak outlet found between the legs of dolls manufactured in the 1950s, a peculiar device the 50s child, curious about where they've come from and where they are going to go, discovers when they pull off the doll's knickers). On top of that, Finnegans Wake is also a manual of dialectical materialism. No, really! If a Communist organisation could accept that fact, it might get real.
James Joyce's dadaistic play on the word ‘totalitarian’ releases the lips to perform the kind of infantile dance which political and cultural dictators despise - because anyone can do it (and everyone did as infants). Refusing to recognise the specifics of history which made Nazism and Stalinism so very different as obstacles to human freedom, the word ‘totalitarian’ is like ‘evil’ - a blanket word for everything other than the regular buying and selling which should constitute a decent Christian life.
But I do not think that boring abstractions can be entirely defeated by infantile wordplay. Though it helps. Finnegans Wake is actually a cogently argued reply to the abuse Karl Radek - at the time a loyal henchman of Stalin - hurled against James Joyce's Ulysses at the Soviet Writers' Congress in 1934. Radek said Ulysses was a garbage heap crawling with maggots filmed by a microscope. Finnegans Wake is quite deliberately a close-up of linguistic detritus swarming with preconceptual life - or animal noise, or ‘music’. Now I promised Susann I'd start from the contingent, the particular, the personal and the idiosyncratic, so - having entertained you with insults directed at conventional political wisdom - here's my personal story, or...
... Why it Was Necessary For Me and Andy to Invent the AMM
We're Only in it for the Money is the Mothers of Invention album with the pisstake of Sgt. Pepper on the cover (and also with the track ‘The Chrome-Plated Megaphone of Destiny’). It contains a song Zappa wrote about two teenagers who spend their vacant hours spreading their nose-pickings on a windowpane. This emphasis on personal habit and obscene body play is what initially attracted me to Zappa. It still attracts me. He remains loyal to the creative, investigating infant, which a bourgeois education - actually an education in anti-social competition - is designed to eliminate. It's what Freud is fighting for in his Case History of Little Hans - our primary drives and desires and pleasures and fears which are crushed by the ‘oughts’ of morality and religion and politics. Now, this text I'm reading was originally written in English, and Susann translated it into German. When I use an unusual or ambiguous word in English, I tried to help her by looking up the German for her. Now, of course, ‘nose-picking’ isn't in my German-English dictionary. Or ‘snot’! Or even ‘mucous’!! It's this namby-pamby goody-goody squeaky-clean attitude that makes learning foreign languages so boring. All the direct, raw, living parts of language have been excised: "Wearing her new hat, Heike meets Johannes at the railway station and they go uptown for a cup of coffee". They never drink or vomit or go hitchhiking or masturbate. I don't know, they're … Christians, or classical musicians or something, not real people. Anyway, James Joyce and Frank Zappa and the Sex Pistols convinced me that the road to mass enlightenment must begin, not with my personal success and celebrity and market penetration, my ‘will to power’, but with thorough fulfilment of my need for lowdown entertainment and my taste for filthy reality. That way I could reach a common ground.
This is in fact Adorno's Negative Dialectic, although most readers of Adorno are so hypnotized by his abstract language they can't relate it to anything so basic. The reason that I polemically alternate between Zappa and Adorno is to show that they are both echoes of the 60s social revolution, that the mass movement which spurred them to say what they said is more important than their individual star trajectories, or the different ‘levels’ of society they're assumed to occupy. And like them, I don't stop at ‘filthy reality’. I am not Georges Bataille. And I am certainly not Gilles Deleuze. I follow Zappa in thinking that an honest recognition of one's own drives and those of other people could be the basis for a musical culture, an attitude and finally a whole social and political programme. I don't subscribe to all his political views, but I'm inspired by his lack of fear. He is not intimidated by academia or expertise or political-class moralism. Zappa is extreme, but he merely pushes to a polemical spike something that pervades the counterculture. Art isn't a commodity here, it's a call to arms. Maybe that's why Marxist art theory can't face it: it doesn't conform to their facile, stuck-in-the-groove ‘critiques’. Random example of counterculture attitude: Napalm Death posing round the slogan "CHANGE YOUR LIFE", a slab of the Berlin Wall covered in graffiti now on display outside London's Imperial War Museum. Now, during the years of Rock Against Racism (1977 to the mid-80s), it was perfectly possible to combine these countercultural attitudes (and personnel) with left politics. The English Left had to, in fact, or it was going to be kicked off the streets by the National Front, England's very own Nazis.
This is in fact Adorno's Negative Dialectic, although most readers of Adorno are so hypnotized by his abstract language they can't relate it to anything so basic. The reason that I polemically alternate between Zappa and Adorno is to show that they are both echoes of the 60s social revolution, that the mass movement which spurred them to say what they said is more important than their individual star trajectories, or the different ‘levels’ of society they're assumed to occupy. And like them, I don't stop at ‘filthy reality’. I am not Georges Bataille. And I am certainly not Gilles Deleuze. I follow Zappa in thinking that an honest recognition of one's own drives and those of other people could be the basis for a musical culture, an attitude and finally a whole social and political programme. I don't subscribe to all his political views, but I'm inspired by his lack of fear. He is not intimidated by academia or expertise or political-class moralism. Zappa is extreme, but he merely pushes to a polemical spike something that pervades the counterculture. Art isn't a commodity here, it's a call to arms. Maybe that's why Marxist art theory can't face it: it doesn't conform to their facile, stuck-in-the-groove ‘critiques’. Random example of counterculture attitude: Napalm Death posing round the slogan "CHANGE YOUR LIFE", a slab of the Berlin Wall covered in graffiti now on display outside London's Imperial War Museum. Now, during the years of Rock Against Racism (1977 to the mid-80s), it was perfectly possible to combine these countercultural attitudes (and personnel) with left politics. The English Left had to, in fact, or it was going to be kicked off the streets by the National Front, England's very own Nazis.
But in the 1980s, things changed. The Left suffered the attacks of Ronald Reagan in America and Margaret Thatcher in the UK. Even the Revolutionary Left fell behind the bourgeois pop stars who capitalised on the street-level work of Rock Against Racism. The Labour Party instituted ‘Red Wedge’ - post-punk musicians working to get Labour MPs elected - and a top-down ‘anti-racism’ became mandatory in both advertising and local government. The working class viewed as an ignorant child that must be bullied out of its slovenly, primitive habits. This was the era of ‘political correctness’, when identity politics (the bureaucratic residue of various liberation movements) allowed all kinds of rank careerists to slap down revolutionists for being ‘male’ or ‘white’ or ‘elitist’ or ‘straight’ or ‘able-bodied’ - or preferably all five. In those days it was hard to be a Zappa fan and still claim left credentials. The liberated, laughing listener he envisaged had been removed from view. The whole universe was to be remade in the image of Annie Lennox. There's a popular t-shirt in England at the moment: ‘I STILL HATE MARGARET THATCHER’. I want one that says ‘I STILL HATE THE 80s’.
Two punk gigs - Killing Joke and Spear of Destiny - convinced me punk was over. I didn't meet anyone. Nothing happened. Just pay the money, see the set, pay for drinks, go home. In a venue in a shopping mall! I went with the reactionary flow. I retrained to work in computers. I grew a ponytail. I started writing for The Wire, magazine of ‘the jazz revival’, all about suits and upward mobility. But I was allowed to write about the Termite Club in Leeds, the Free Improvising club. Then, upstairs in a Leeds pub - The Fenton - I heard musicians who changed my life: Paul Hession, Paul Buckton and Alan Wilkinson. Playing into a silence so tense you could use it to garrotte Richard Branson and hang him from a lamppost. Twings and twongs, small sounds, scrapes, then torrents of sound. All organised into a hard, modernist, unforgiving abstractions that reminded me of how Mondrian and Malevich impressed me as a teenager. But none of the bourgeois compromise and rich-person flattery which had enveloped the art scene. Working-class musicians playing upstairs in a pub. They seemed to have no concept of ‘success’, just how good the music was. Here and now. In front of your nose.
It took me a long time to work out where they were coming from. It turned out that Paul Buckton was completely inspired by Derek Bailey. He played guitar like him, he networked like him, he pursued musicians Derek discovered. So I chased Derek Bailey and wrote his biography, a co-operative endeavour with a lot of in-person interviews. Then I discovered that Derek Bailey had taught me a politics; through his music, not through his conversation (in which he remained a stalwart supporter of Soviet Communism, despite my regaling him with Trotsky; for him the Russian economic disaster after 1989 just proved him right). The idea that musicians do not need to follow orders to produce the best music, they just need to play and respond and invent discursively. Derek believes that the working musician can be intelligent. This is a musical version of Marx's discovery of the working class. Proletarian modernism! What the postmoderns told us was impossible!
Now, Andy Wilson is here in this room, and he can speak for himself. But he's the other strand which went into the AMM, and you need to understand this background. Andy was a full-timer for the SWP (Socialist Workers Party) - the same organisation I was in. Unlike me, Andy was expelled for refusing to shut up about cultural politics. Tony Cliff believed that Andy was opening up disagreements which would wreck the party. The German band Faust had been important for Andy's political awakening (he'd previously been in the British Navy), and he loathed the SWP's attitude towards culture, which was that comrades needed to be educated in the ‘classics’. In fact, despite being a Trotskyist, anti-Stalinist organisation, by the end of the 80s pundits in the SWP - mocking the avant garde, insisting on the salutary greatness of Shakespeare and Balzac - would have gone down well at the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers. If Wilson or Watson mentioned Adorno's observation that a Beethoven symphony heard on the radio or record - therefore lacking the drama and erotics of the concert-hall moment - is incomprehensible musically, and therefore devoid of anything except snob appeal, we were vilified for ‘Proletkult’ tendencies. Is this the first and only time that Adorno has been dissed as a prole?
Two punk gigs - Killing Joke and Spear of Destiny - convinced me punk was over. I didn't meet anyone. Nothing happened. Just pay the money, see the set, pay for drinks, go home. In a venue in a shopping mall! I went with the reactionary flow. I retrained to work in computers. I grew a ponytail. I started writing for The Wire, magazine of ‘the jazz revival’, all about suits and upward mobility. But I was allowed to write about the Termite Club in Leeds, the Free Improvising club. Then, upstairs in a Leeds pub - The Fenton - I heard musicians who changed my life: Paul Hession, Paul Buckton and Alan Wilkinson. Playing into a silence so tense you could use it to garrotte Richard Branson and hang him from a lamppost. Twings and twongs, small sounds, scrapes, then torrents of sound. All organised into a hard, modernist, unforgiving abstractions that reminded me of how Mondrian and Malevich impressed me as a teenager. But none of the bourgeois compromise and rich-person flattery which had enveloped the art scene. Working-class musicians playing upstairs in a pub. They seemed to have no concept of ‘success’, just how good the music was. Here and now. In front of your nose.
It took me a long time to work out where they were coming from. It turned out that Paul Buckton was completely inspired by Derek Bailey. He played guitar like him, he networked like him, he pursued musicians Derek discovered. So I chased Derek Bailey and wrote his biography, a co-operative endeavour with a lot of in-person interviews. Then I discovered that Derek Bailey had taught me a politics; through his music, not through his conversation (in which he remained a stalwart supporter of Soviet Communism, despite my regaling him with Trotsky; for him the Russian economic disaster after 1989 just proved him right). The idea that musicians do not need to follow orders to produce the best music, they just need to play and respond and invent discursively. Derek believes that the working musician can be intelligent. This is a musical version of Marx's discovery of the working class. Proletarian modernism! What the postmoderns told us was impossible!
Now, Andy Wilson is here in this room, and he can speak for himself. But he's the other strand which went into the AMM, and you need to understand this background. Andy was a full-timer for the SWP (Socialist Workers Party) - the same organisation I was in. Unlike me, Andy was expelled for refusing to shut up about cultural politics. Tony Cliff believed that Andy was opening up disagreements which would wreck the party. The German band Faust had been important for Andy's political awakening (he'd previously been in the British Navy), and he loathed the SWP's attitude towards culture, which was that comrades needed to be educated in the ‘classics’. In fact, despite being a Trotskyist, anti-Stalinist organisation, by the end of the 80s pundits in the SWP - mocking the avant garde, insisting on the salutary greatness of Shakespeare and Balzac - would have gone down well at the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers. If Wilson or Watson mentioned Adorno's observation that a Beethoven symphony heard on the radio or record - therefore lacking the drama and erotics of the concert-hall moment - is incomprehensible musically, and therefore devoid of anything except snob appeal, we were vilified for ‘Proletkult’ tendencies. Is this the first and only time that Adorno has been dissed as a prole?
Our mistake - and it's a big mistake, as it postponed the formation of the AMM by over twenty years - was our reliance on ‘theory’ as a way of revealing enemies and making friends. Andy had launched his attack on the Central Committee of the SWP by attacking the cultural conservatism and political record of Georg Lukacs (History and Class Consciousness was honoured in the SWP as the ‘best book’ since Capital, almost as if Lukacs' profile had simply replaced that of Stalin in one of those odious Stalinst ‘line of great socialist thinkers’ hoardings). Andy sent his the manuscript of his book on political theory to me in Leeds, and I disagreed with it. I thought he was infected with structuralism and its claims to ‘objective science’. I thought it wasn't dialectical. Now, if I'd discussed practical political matters with Andy, we'd probably have bonded. He'd have taught me about the earlier, libertarian SWP - when even Tony Cliff (leader of the SWP) preferred Rosa Luxemburg to Lenin - and the ‘workers' opposition’ to the ‘middle-class cadre’ Cliff drafted in from the LSE to enable him to win faction fights over the party's direction. I was noticing that though we all ‘sold the paper’ (a requirement for SWP membership) in Leeds, the paper was frequently very poor, but it didn't matter. The SWP was really the local people in it. What was printed in the paper wasn't crucial. Andy could've explained to me things I only learned from him last week! What went wrong with the SWP was a large sum of money given it by someone who sold their big old house, which allowed the party to set up a commercial printshop with a workforce of devoted comrades who were underpaid and overworked. Like selling weapons to a third world dictator, their bequest allowed the Central Committee (CC, the daily decision-making body of the SWP) to punch over its weight. The ‘centre’ became a prize sought by party careerists. Hence the utterly different atmosphere of the SWP in London from that of the provinces (I learned both music and politics in upstairs pub rooms in Leeds 1978-1993, a large industrial city in the north of England. Leeds is twinned with Dortmund. That should give you an idea of the city). In London, SWP loyalists [Parteisoldaten] were threatened by brilliant minds rather than inspired and taught by them. Funnily enough, in 1988 Derek Bailey said the same thing about music! Improvisation was better in the provinces, he declared. In London it was strangled by competition for the glittering prizes, by commercial calculation, by the anticipations of spectacular success. Veteran American free improvisor Jack Wright says the same thing today: Manhattan is finished as a place to hear creative jazz, find somewhere shabby where someone who runs a bar will let musicians do what they like. That's where you'll hear good music.
We might now seem to be a long way from Marx and class struggle and revolution. But I needed to explain the AMM's principle of emergent socialism and for that Derek Bailey's concept of Free Improvisation is incredibly helpful. We want a politics that arrives out of our own members' spontaneity and rage, not some tick-the-box list of ‘activities’ handed to us by some full-timer obeying orders from a CC intellectual whose brainpower intimidates him. Now, admittedly, the SWP is only like that at its worst. In times of heightened class struggle it can improve, although with the deaths of Tony Cliff and Chris Harman it lost two of its most keen and exciting minds. Andy and I learned our politics from the SWP (maybe Andy will say something to you about Tony Cliff's ‘state-capitalist’ analysis of Soviet Russia in a moment). We're not sectarian against the party, and we'll work with SWP members on just about anything. However, when I'm phoned up and asked to give money to a ‘fighting fund’, I'm afraid I'm NOT sympathetic. A socialist party funded by well-meaning - but inactive and guilty - middle-class individuals is not in a healthy situation. Money gives apparatchiks and bureaucrats too much clout, and also explains why most of the party's publications are agonisingly boring. They are there because they can be there, not because these texts must be written and circulated. Trotsky called money an anti-social, coercive power. A socialist organisation should have the same attitude that free improvisors and poets have towards money and success in the bourgeois spectacle: derision.
As I hope you've seen from this talk The AMM would rather organise according to the pleasure principle - the pleasure of discussion, the pleasure of divining truth, the pleasure of watching capitalist finance and ethics break down in front of our eyes. The pleasure of meeting new people at all these new anti-capitalist protests, and telling them what we've learned about organisation and socialist politics and money during our lives. The pleasure of finding out what they're reading and thinking. People who think they're ‘radical’ because they've discovered the world is full of suffering and horror haven't got beyond the Christian Church. As Frank Zappa put it in the midst of his song ‘Call Any Vegetable’ live in 1971, asserting the fact that existential materialism that isn't sexual is a dead letter: "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”. If you can hold this thought in your brain whilst reading Adorno, then you're a revolutionary. Because the spark in your brain as you see the horror in its truth IS the gateway to utopia.
We might now seem to be a long way from Marx and class struggle and revolution. But I needed to explain the AMM's principle of emergent socialism and for that Derek Bailey's concept of Free Improvisation is incredibly helpful. We want a politics that arrives out of our own members' spontaneity and rage, not some tick-the-box list of ‘activities’ handed to us by some full-timer obeying orders from a CC intellectual whose brainpower intimidates him. Now, admittedly, the SWP is only like that at its worst. In times of heightened class struggle it can improve, although with the deaths of Tony Cliff and Chris Harman it lost two of its most keen and exciting minds. Andy and I learned our politics from the SWP (maybe Andy will say something to you about Tony Cliff's ‘state-capitalist’ analysis of Soviet Russia in a moment). We're not sectarian against the party, and we'll work with SWP members on just about anything. However, when I'm phoned up and asked to give money to a ‘fighting fund’, I'm afraid I'm NOT sympathetic. A socialist party funded by well-meaning - but inactive and guilty - middle-class individuals is not in a healthy situation. Money gives apparatchiks and bureaucrats too much clout, and also explains why most of the party's publications are agonisingly boring. They are there because they can be there, not because these texts must be written and circulated. Trotsky called money an anti-social, coercive power. A socialist organisation should have the same attitude that free improvisors and poets have towards money and success in the bourgeois spectacle: derision.
As I hope you've seen from this talk The AMM would rather organise according to the pleasure principle - the pleasure of discussion, the pleasure of divining truth, the pleasure of watching capitalist finance and ethics break down in front of our eyes. The pleasure of meeting new people at all these new anti-capitalist protests, and telling them what we've learned about organisation and socialist politics and money during our lives. The pleasure of finding out what they're reading and thinking. People who think they're ‘radical’ because they've discovered the world is full of suffering and horror haven't got beyond the Christian Church. As Frank Zappa put it in the midst of his song ‘Call Any Vegetable’ live in 1971, asserting the fact that existential materialism that isn't sexual is a dead letter: "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”. If you can hold this thought in your brain whilst reading Adorno, then you're a revolutionary. Because the spark in your brain as you see the horror in its truth IS the gateway to utopia.
Ben Watson / OTL
Hamburg, 2011-xi-03
1. James Joyce, Finnegans
Wake, p. 260.
" "[sic]
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