Discussing the question of when the Russian Revolution changed from revolution to counter-revolution, a friend of mine gave, I think, the only unassailable answer: in 1920, when Trotsky stopped fighting the civil war by traveling around on a train with a brass band.
I was reminded of this when &catherine posted something about the tATu best of, which I wasn’t aware of but which is pretty good. Apart from most of the tracks from Dangerous and Moving, the album includes the closest tATu have yet come to dubstep, a pleasingly eerie remix of “Cosmos,” and a “Bollywood” version of “Craving.” Which works surprisingly well, but more importantly served to remind me of a great film I saw a while back (with, coincidentally, the same friend who so wisely analyzed the Russian Revolution), Bhagam Bhag. Read more↴
Actually surprisingly good article by Bob Avakian in this week’s Revolutionary Worker:
At any given time, while in an overall and ultimate sense consistently and systematically applying the communist world outlook and method, in the best possible way, enables you, ultimately and in a fundamental and all-around sense, to get more deeply to the truth than any other world outlook and methodology—qualitatively so—this doesn’t mean that at any given time you necessarily have the truth about something. That’s a contradiction we have to learn to handle much more correctly than it has been handled in the past of our movement, and in the history of the socialist countries.
And reading articles like this does tempt me to join the RCP.
The sound film, far surpassing the theater of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise detail without losing the thread of the story.… [Sound films] are so designed that quickness, powers of observation, and experience are undeniably needed to apprehend them at all; yet sustained thought is out of the question if the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts.
— Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 126
It seems like a bit of a cheap shot to characterize Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis of the culture industry as the complaints of old men bewildered by modern culture. But I think there’s something to that, not just in the culture industry theory, but in the Frankfurt school’s theory more generally. Read more↴
The curious thing about communism is how blandly realistic it is. It’s a straightforward reformist demand: “yes, go ahead and reform capitalism, but the only conceivable change at this point is towards communism.” Consider the demands for a social wage: it’s the only form of payment that makes any kind of sense given the contemporary structure of capitalism. Capitalism needs some form of wage to carry on exploiting labor; but the more socially-dispersed production is, the more socialized the wage has to be. And yet, if you look at neoliberalism, becase of its need for control, it can’t possibly allow a living social wage (hence welfare reform doesn’t quite eliminate support, but tries to substitute as much of the social wage as possible with more direct forms of control).
It’s odd that people like Negri know this, but always present the reformist side of the social wage, forgetting to mention that this reform will destroy capitalism (and we will have to do that destroying). Negri could have written Empire in the same style he wrote Domination and Sabotage (“every time I pull on the ski-mask, I feel envelopped in the intergalactic Zapatista community,” or whatever it is); aside from not wanting to go back to prison, one wonders why he didn’t.
I take my duties as a bitter ultra-left sectarian very seriously, so I’m always annoyed when sub-standard arguments from the purported ultra-left force me to say nice things about, for example, the SWP. But recent criticism of RESPECT for “substituting race for class” or being based on “cross class alliances” is representative of a trend which is kind of interesting to look at. As the RESPECT people like to say, the claim that they have “rejected socialism” or given up on the working class in favor of Islam assumes that no-one could be muslim and working class and socialist. But the mistake is actually more fundamental than this; the soi disant leftist critics of RESPECT seem to assume that if a group does not label itself as working class, it can’t possibly be working class—the mistake is the classic idealist one of mistaking the name for the thing. The supposed leftist tut-tutting that the SWP have rejected class for “identity politics” gets things precisely the wrong way round: it is those who ignore the material reality of racism in favor of an appeal to a reified “working class” who are rejecting Marxism and embracing an identity politics of class. Read more↴