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Bruce Dancis – “Safety Pins and Class Struggle: Punk Rock and the Left” (1978)

Published January 14, 2013 Counterculture & Punk , Fascism , Marxism Leave a Comment

One of the few articles on punk that appeared in a leftist journal in the 1970s, this insightful and prescient piece by radical cultural critic Bruce Dancis holds up well today. He dissects the tensions between punk’s political potential and its nihilistic streak, and is particularly good about its ambiguous relationship to fascism, violence, and sexism. Also fascinating today is his documentation of the organized British left’s response to punk, beyond just the obligatory mention of Rock Against Racism. About punk he says:

“At its best, punk rock represents not only an energetic aesthetic attack on the dominant trends within popular music, but also a working-class protest against youthful unemployment, poverty, government censorship, authoritarianism, racism, fascism, the record industry, the star system, and the traditional performer/audience relationship. At its worst, punk is a manifestation of cultural despair and decadence, featuring nihilism, sexism, a glorification of violence and fascist imagery, sado-masochism, and musical incompetence.”

Dancis wrote for many years about music and politics, and his articles from In These Times from 1977 to 1981 are available here. This essay is reprinted with his permission.

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Bruce Dancis, “Safety Pins and Class Struggle: Punk Rock and the Left,” Socialist Review #39 (vol. 8, no. 3), May-June, 1978, pp 58-83.

Lou Reed meets the Italian autonomists

Published November 10, 2012 Counterculture & Punk , Marxism 1 Comment

“Relations with manager [Dennis] Katz were crumbling fast, a process that climaxed in Milan on February 13, 1975. Reed was in Italy to launch the first leg of a world tour but took the stage to find the arena on the edge of pitched battle. The Masters of Creative Situations, a Communist action group, chose the gig as the venue for a confrontation with the police, which necessarily spilled over onto the stage.”

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from Dave Thompson, Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell: The Dangerous Glitter of David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Lou Reed (NY: Backbeat Books, 2009), page 241.

RADICAL ARCHIVES NOTE: Googling this group doesn’t turn anything up; I am assuming they are autonomists by their name, which might also be rendered incorrectly. If you know anything about them, please post it in the comments.

Malatesta on Bakunin as “too marxist”

Published June 22, 2012 Anarchism , Marxism , Theory 1 Comment

“Today I find that Bakunin in political economy and in interpretation of history, was too marxist; I find that his philosophy was conducted without possible issue in the contradiction between the mechanical concept of the universe and the faith in will over the fate of mankind.”

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“Though none of us had read Marx, we were still too Marxist.’” [ie in the period of the First International]

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from “Notes for a Biography” in Errico Malatesta’s Life and Ideas, edited by Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 1977), page 209.

Alvin Gouldner – Marxism, independent intellectuals, and the academy (1973)

Published April 27, 2012 Marxism , Theory Leave a Comment

The most profound indication of this development is to be found in the societal re-mapping sought by Maoism which is laying the groundwork for the elimination of the academic intelligentsia. As Robert Guillain remarks in Le Monde, ‘It is no over-simplification of the massive series of reforms [of the ‘Cultural Revolution’]…to say that their key objective—defined by Chairman Mao himself—is the elimination of the ‘academic intellectual.’ As the intensity of the Red Guard movement subsided, it became increasingly evident that the elimination of the academic intelligentsia was one of the most important items on the agenda of the Cultural Revolution. This effort is resonated in the West by the anti-intellectualism of the bureaucratized lumpen intelligentsia and in the self-hatred of certain gauchiste intellectuals.

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Marxism, however, was in the beginning the creation of a library-haunting, bookstore-browsing, museum-loving—and hence leisure-possessing—academic intelligentsia of the very sort that Maoism now seeks to excise. It does not matter, of course, that Engels himself had no university training; and it does not matter that Marx never achieved the professorship that, when young, he had coveted; for both were mandarins at heart. They had both assimilated and embodied the culture of the Western university. Marx was the product and possessor of a high European culture who knew his Goethe by heart; who read Aeschylus in the original; who had a boundless respect for Shakespeare, whom he had his daughters memorize; who took pleasure in reading two or three novels at one time, ranking Balzac and Cervantes before other novelists; who, when disturbed, might take refuge in algebra; and who actually wrote an infinitesimal calculus. In a letter to his daughter Laura in 1868 he describes himself as a ‘…machine condemned to devour books…’. When Marx died, on 14 March 1883, he was where one might expect him—at his desk.

Whatever its ultimate destiny and destination, Marxism was originally a creation of the West. Born of European culture, Marxism is simply unthinkable without the complex of institutions that centre on the university, which trains and provides livings for secular intelligentsia. Marx and Engels, and all the epigones of every nationality that follow after them, are unthinkable without the countless books, journals, newspapers, libraries, bookstores, publishing houses, and even Party schools, whose cadres and culture constitute a dense infrastructure at who centre there is the Western university. No university, no intelligentsia, no Marxism.

The gulf between Maoism and Soviet Marxism derives largely from the fact that Soviet Marxism understands and respects this, while Maoism understands but rejects it. Soviet Marxism and Stalinism sought to control the university and to guarantee the loyalty of intellectuals and scientists to Party precepts and leadership; it never sought to stop the university and to eliminate the self-reproduction of the academic intelligentsia, as Maoism has.

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from Alvin W. Gouldner, For Sociology: Renewal and Critique in Sociology Today (NY: Basic Books, 1973), pp 450-52.

Buck-Morss on Adorno and the Spanish Civil War (1977)

Published March 25, 2012 Marxism , Theory 3 Comments

“Although Sidney Webb lent his name in support of the Frankfurt Institute when it was forced to emigrate, Adorno seems to have had no contact with him or others in the Fabian Society. He never joined the pacifist movements then so strong in English universities, and one searches his writings in vain for even a mention of the Spanish Civil War.”

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from Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977), page 139.

Adorno on reactionary arguments against Western culture (1951)

Published February 22, 2012 Fascism , Marxism , Theory Leave a Comment

“Not the least among the tasks now confronting thought is that of placing all the reactionary arguments against Western culture in the service of progressive enlightenment.”

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Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (New York: Verso, 1951/2005), section 122 (“Monograms”), page 192.

Also of interest in this line of thought is Adorno’s essay “Spengler After the Decline,” which is available in Prisms, an anthology of Adorno’s essays.

Murray Bookchin: anarchism is “simply not a social theory” (2002)

Published December 13, 2011 Anarchism , Marxism , Theory 3 Comments

“By the same token, anarchism – which, I believe, represents in its authentic form a highly individualistic outlook that fosters a radically unfettered lifestyle, often as a substitute for mass action – is far better suited to articulate a Proudhonian single-family peasant and craft world than a modern urban and industrial environment. I myself once used this political label, but further thought has obliged me to conclude that, its often-refreshing aphorisms and insights notwithstanding, it is simply not a social theory. Its foremost theorists celebrate its seeming openness to eclecticism and the liberatory effects of “paradox” or even “contradiction,” to use Proudhonian hyperbole. Accordingly, and without prejudice to the earnestness of many anarchistic practices, a case can made that many of the ideas of social and economic reconstruction that in the past have been advanced in the name of “anarchy” were often drawn from Marxism (including my own concept of “post-scarcity,” which understandably infuriated many anarchists who read my essays on the subject). Regrettably, the use of socialistic terms has often prevented anarchists from telling us or even understanding clearly what they are: individualists whose concepts of autonomy originate in a strong commitment to personal liberty rather than to social freedom, or socialists committed to a structured, institutionalized, and responsible form of social organization. Anarchism’s idea of self-regulation (auto-nomos) led to a radical celebration of Nietzsche’s all-absorbing will. Indeed the history of this “ideology” is peppered with idiosyncratic acts of defiance that verge on the eccentric, which not surprisingly have attracted many young people and aesthetes.

In fact anarchism represents the most extreme formulation of liberalism’s ideology of unfettered autonomy, culminating in a celebration of heroic acts of defiance of the state. Anarchism’s mythos of self-regulation (auto nomos) – the radical assertion of the individual over or even against society and the personalistic absence of responsibility for the collective welfare – leads to a radical affirmation of the all-powerful will so central to Nietzsche’s ideological peregrinations. Some self-professed anarchists have even denounced mass social action as futile and alien to their private concerns and made a fetish of what the Spanish anarchists called grupismo, a small-group mode of action that is highly personal rather than social.”

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from “The Communalist Project” which is available online here, where it indicates that the essay was first published in Communalism: International Journal for a Rational Society, 2 (November 2002).

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RADICAL ARCHIVES NOTE:

Obviously this piece belongs to Bookchin’s post-anarchist Communalist period. Here, as with the works of many politically-engaged intellectuals, one should be sure to untangle the author’s perceptive historical and philosophical insights from their polemics.

Errico Malatesta: nineteenth-century anarchism impregnated with marxism

Published December 11, 2011 Anarchism , Marxism , Theory Leave a Comment

“Almost all the anarchist literature of the nineteenth century was impregnated with Marxism.”

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cited in Daniel Guerin’s “Marxism and Anarchism,” in David Goodway (ed), For Anarchism: History, Theory and Practice (London & NY: Routledge, 1989), p 117.

Henri Lefebvre: I am “a Marxist, of course… so that we can all be anarchists some time in the future.”

Published July 7, 2011 Anarchism , Marxism , Theory Leave a Comment

“In my first meeting with Lefebvre in 1978 I clumsily asked him, ‘Are you an anarchist?’ He responded politely, ‘No. Not now.’ ‘Well then,’ I said, ‘what are you now?’ He smiled, ‘A Marxist, of course…so that we can all be anarchists some time in the future.’”

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from Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-And-Imagined Places (Oxford, UK & Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), page 33 footnote 8.

‘The Origins of Primitivism’ set (1977-1988)

Published September 6, 2010 Anarchism , Marxism , Primitivism , Situationist , Technology , Theory 2 Comments

RADICAL ARCHIVES is happy to finally present our ‘Origins of Primitivism’ set. It consists of 16 documents related to the development of contemporary primitivist thought, which were first printed in Fifth Estate between 1977 and 1988. All of these documents (listed at bottom) are available online for the first time.

Additionally, David Watson has contributed a short introduction and reflection on these texts for the occasion of putting them online; it is available here.

(If you are new to Radical Archives, we recommend you look at the index of texts posted, and the about statement, which describes the site’s topic interests.)

The most important of the these texts is David Watson’s “Against the Megamachine” (originally published in 1981), which outlines his distinct version of primitivism. Watson renounced ideological primitivism with 1997′s “Swamp Fever, Primitivism and the ‘Ideological Vortex’: Farewell to All That”, two years before the demonstrations in Seattle against the WTO. Partly because of Watson’s exit from the discourse, Zerzan’s version (which actually had been developed later) became synonymous with the concept ”anarcho-primitivism”.

Watson’s essay is the only document of this set which was previously in print; it is available as the title essay of the Autonomedia book Against the Megamachine: Essays on Empire and Its Discontents. Prior to this, the other texts were only accessible in specialized archival holdings.

Also of importance is “Confronting the Enemy: A Response on Time”, which is a long critique of Zerzan’s article “Beginning of Time, End of Time” (which was the first of his five “origins” essays). Written under Watson’s pen name “George Bradford”, this much-overlooked critique summarizes what are the basic objections to Zerzan’s view from a sympathetic perspective: that the notion of purely unalienated being (and along with it, the abolition of agriculture) is a misguided – and impossible – approach to these issues. Paralleling many discussions within the Western Marxist and Existentialist milieu (especially regarding Georg Lukács’s early work on reification), Watson argues that separation is something intrinsic to human nature, and cannot be seen as ‘outside’ of our own human existence. To abolish separation is to return to the womb or ascend into heaven.

The third essay of special importance is Bob Brubaker’s “Community, Society and the State”. Brubaker was a Fifth Estate writer who was involved in the magazine’s dialogue as primitivism was developed. Brubaker’s work has been largely forgotten.

The fourth essay of special importance is Fifth Estate‘s 1977 review of Gary Snyder’s The Old Ways, Six Essays. Steve Millett has identified this as the first complete statement of a primitivist perspective to appear in Fifth Estate.

Last, a letter from Marcus Graham, who had edited the anarchist magazine MAN! in the 1930s, shows the issues Fifth Estate was grappling with around technology, organization, etc. had been long-standing discussions in the anarchist milieu, well back into the classical era.

By making these documents available online, hopefully a richer understanding of the different strains of primitivism will result, as well as a constructive and critical dialogue regarding this intellectual and political current. Important questions were asked by the founders of primitivism, including: critiques of political organization, spontaneity and resistance; the role of technology and the question of its autonomy; and basic ontological questions about civilization, alienation and environmental domination. With the partial exception of insurrectionism, these questions have largely been shelved by the post-Seattle anglophone anti-authoritarian milieu.

While Radical Archives is neither “primitivist” nor “anti-civ”, our position is that these questions have not been answered by Murray Bookchin’s brand of social ecology, John Zerzan’s version of primitivism, or any version of ‘green syndicalism’.

It is partly for this reason, and partly out of interest in anarchist intellectual history, that we are returning to the time in which these questions were being actively grappled with in the anti-authoritarian milieu.

Radical Archives would like to thank Steve Millet for pointing out many of these works in his dissertation, as well as to David Watson and Peter Werbe for their help in identifying who wrote many of these articles. We would also like to give special thanks to Dylan Smith for the many hours he spent transcribing all of these works; without his labor, none of this would be possible.

We hope in the near future to make available a number of related works, including works by primitivist John Moore, Sam Dolgoff’s essay on technology, as well as other works of Bob Brubaker.

THE ORIGINS OF PRIMITIVISM SET

Introduction to ‘The Origins of Primitivism’ Set by David Watson (2010)

The First Primitivist Essay: “Gary Snyder Asks: Poetry or Machines? Back to the Stone Age” (1977)

“Technology & the State: An Introduction” (1978)

“FE Criticized and Our Response” (1978)

“On Having Nothing to Say” (1979)

“Searching for the Culprit” (1979)

“Against Civilization: Introduction to Russell Means” (1980)

Introduction to ‘Fifth Estate’ #306 (1981)

“Against the Megamachine” by David Watson (1981-1985/1997)

“Marxism, Anarchism and the Roots of the New Totalitarianism” by George Bradford (1981)

“Community, Primitive Society and the State” by Bob Brubaker (1981)