Friday, 19 September 2008

WTBLS, appendix 2: Talk to Frank

This is an attempt to think through one of the strangest political entities presently in existence, in Britain or anywhere else - I refer to the tightly-knit group of operatives that once were the Revolutionary Communist Party, and now publish a website called Spiked! and run a think-tank called the Institute of Ideas. A little history is probably worthwhile - the RCP split, along with the mad-Stalinists-to-be around David Yaffe, from the International Socialists (today's lovely Swipes) in 1975 on issues that remain obscure to all concerned. They abandoned Yaffe when he began his spiral into open apologism for sundry bourgeois nationalists in the Third World, taking as their leader the piscine sociologist Frank Furedi (sometime cadre name Richards - he really does look exactly like a fish!).

Their political character was basically ultra-leftist - they believed that the Left had become hopelessly compromised by its support for reformist organisations, no matter how guarded, and exhibited a lofty disdain for the existing left. The latter, for its part, never quite knew how to take them - while the spikiness and rigour of some of their theory was respected, their sectarian attitude to struggles deemed 'reformist' (in particular the Miners Strike of 1984-5), along with occasional tactical-strategic turns that can only be called loopy (Furedi's contention that the RCP could overtake Labour in the 1987 elections) kept them in splendid isolation...which of course reinforced their snottiness about other militants.

After the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, the RCP produced a prognosis for the labour movement that was far more pessimistic than most. It is also the prognosis from that period that most matches up to what has really happened since. Their response was a 'turn to the suburbs', an orientation towards academia and the media, which fully flowered around 1997-8, their magazine Living Marxism having contracted to the enigmatic LM, and the party as such being finally wound up. There have been shifts in the nature of their concrete activity since, but the politics has retained a stark consistency since the days of LM - a libertarianism that scorns all attempts to knock down "expectations", and demands the return of a humanity that strives to extend its powers.

Responses to the phenomenon fall in to broadly two categories. The first is a sort of hysterical red-baiting alarmism, in which their anti-green and quasi-libertarian polemics are 'discovered' to be part of some astonishing plot to sneak communism up on the world, and is common among bourgeois greens in particular. The second is the common Marxist/left view, which is that they have committed some final apostasy or another, and are basically a new version of some historical precedent or another - the Eurocommunists, the Legal Marxists...I believe that the first, hysterical reaction is actually closer to the truth, which we'll get to later.

The reason the latter folks (includoing this very blog - see Episode V) are wrong is simple. Eurocommunism was an incredible unstable formation (particularly in Britain). After the collapse of the official Communist parties, it almost immediately disappeared, and its militants became scattered along the right-wing of social democracy. The Legal Marxists, likewise, abandoned their own premises to become orthodox liberals, and ultimately Peter Struve and the like aligned with the Whites in the Russian Civil War. The reason these trends were so spectacularly harmful was that they moved right, and kept moving.

The RCP/LM/Spiked formation, however, has not done this. Its positions, if anything, have edged slightly to the left in the last decade; and their move to the 'right' was not one recognizable from many historical precedents (the two we have noted headed straight into the political mainstream, as did the 'CIA socialist' Max Shachtman). Formally, their move is more similar to that of Mussolini - but the difference in political content here renders comparisons predictively useless.

So, what is their political project? The fundamental axiom of the Spiked critique is that after the defeats of the labour movement and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, socialism has been buried alive by the bourgeoisie; and with it has gone agency as such. Humanity no longer even has the basic consciousness that allows it to authentically rebel against the attacks of the rulers. What has emerged is a 'culture of low expectations', where individuals are expected to meekly limit their consumption, their creative activity and also their grandest political aims, and instead keep on keeping on.

What, then, to do? Spiked believes that it is necessary to 'rebuild agency', to recreate humanity as aspirational to things currently beyond its reach. It is necessary to conduct ideological struggle against all who attempt to hold back humanity's spirit of adventure, so to speak. These people, needless to say, are not necessarily the ruling class - the capitalists, according to spiked, have entirely lost faith and confidence in their system, and are tied down by self-denial and angst. Their enemies include those who wish to ban smoking, the cynics who whip up 'paedo panics' and the like (but also the liberals who condemn 'mob' actions), and environmentalists.

Environmentalism is a good thing to prod Spiked with, since they have gathered such a degree of infamy over it (which, they no doubt imagine, proves them right about everything). The green movement is the most toxic element of this assemblage of all. Masquerading in the most apocalyptic rhetoric, the message is fundamentally no different from that of elites to their subjects down the ages: the capitalists who preached 'abstinence' to the workers in the 19th Century, the nuns who taught Spiked editor Brendan O'Neill at his Catholic school...That message is: your habits are dangerous and disgusting - stop that now! O'Neill and cohorts can now just about be forced to admit that climate change is at least partially anthropogenic (the same has not always been true). However, for them, the green movement is a far greater threat to humanity's future than their opponents, because the greens are part of the 'culture of low expectations' and the others are not.

At first glance, this seems simply mad - OK, so a motley bunch of hippies and lobbyists are more dangerous than the Apocalypse? But for Spiked, it makes perfect sense - if the human race were able to regain some of its spunk, it would be far better placed to avert the apocalypse through a renewal of capital-p Progress, and the misanthropic messages coming from Greens are antithetical to this, point in exactly the opposite direction (downsize, 'reduce your carbon footprint', etc).

To solve our riddle, this is not a position given to liquidation, precisely because its immediate enemy has become broadly hegemonic among the ruling class and particularly its various deputies and the like. They have all been forced to accept that climate change is occurring, and the only palatable 'solution' for them is of the 'if we all do our bit' type. The Legal Marxists' and Eurocommunists' immediate enemies were their rivals on the left, and their allies were drawn almost exclusively from the mainstream bourgeois establishment (even if, in the case of the Legal Marxists, the bourgeois establishment was subordinate in society itself). They cannot tack to the right until the bourgeoisie ditches all manifestations of their 'culture of low expectations' - they can only enact, should they desire, another lurching shift.

I have tried to outline their positions sympathetically, precisely because (along with a general trend on the Left - and Right, but they would, wouldn't they? - for intellectually lazy polemics) the responses to them have generally been impressionistic vulgarizations that fail to grasp both their problematic as a whole and, necessarily, the fundamental flaws in it. For Marxists, it seems, the almost-disappearance of any direct reference to class struggle, revolution and the like (it is all veiled in euphemistic terms that appear as a kind of kitsch pastiche of the censor-dodging in Gramsci's Prison Notebooks) is quite enough. It is, as far as establishing whether or not Spiked operates Marxist politics - but its abandonment of the public use of these kind of terms puts it no further from Marxism than the SWP.

It doesn't help that overt references to Marxism haven't simply disappeared, either. Leading RCPer Mick Hume's thumbnail profile for his Times column calls him "Britain's only self-confessed libertarian Marxist newspaper columnist" (very "Legal Marxist", it has to be said). Recent articles by spiked! editor Brendan O'Neill include "this Marxist isn't laughing" and "Starbucks and the socialism of fools", which both dig out Karl & Freddy to bash the liberal left with.

The real difficulty with approaching political questions in this way is that their attacks are confined exclusively to the domain of ideology. Beneath political demands for increased taxes on air travel, for example, they find contempt for the unwashed masses; behind multiculturalist PC outrage they find a "politics of victimhood" (which is really an ideology of victimhood - it enacts/interpellates the subject as a perpetual victim).

It is here that one finds that Furedi's "libertarian humanism" - the nutshell phrase he now self-describes as - is, like so many humanisms of Marxist extraction, also an historicism (a view that sees particular historical moments as reflecting an essence more or less evenly throughout). Concretely for spiked, the fundamental principle of the age is the battle between misanthropy and humanism, cowed submission and rebelliousness, fear and ambition - which are, really (the logic goes), three ways of saying the same thing. To be human is to build, to reach out, to rebel; a misanthrope fears his own nature and welcomes repression.

But ideology just doesn't work like that. Its constituent elements - utterances, actions, discourses - take place necessarily in a concrete social formation, which is necessarily internally contradictory as long as classes exist.When the British (and Australian) state endorsed the ITF/ITUC demonstrations in Iran, was it defending the principle of free trade unions or its meddling in the Middle East? Well, both. The latter was almost certainly the dominant influence, of course - but the official stance needed to ride on the back of the union movement. No doubt a few more wavering individuals were confirmed on the imperialists' side through this gambit - but it was not "free money", but a devil's bargain with a working class ideology.

Back to spiked: an article by Andrew Orlowski finds intolerably 'misanthropic' internet piracy, thinking it a snub to the very act of creation. But it is not hard to take the exact opposite view, using perfectly orthodox spiked! logic: the pirates are great humanists, wishing only to indulge in the fruits of human culture; the RIAA, MPAA and so on are "misanthropic" for regulating access to these products, to say nothing of the utterly fearful reaction they displayed to peer-to-peer software. Which is right? Well...both! My description of the record industry's actions is perfectly accurate...but they were right to be afraid, because the infinite reproducibility enabled by p2p is an advance in the productive forces that reduces the value of their product Every penny the music industry makes from recordings is today extorted, by ideological appeals and by state action. At the same time, if the companies go, so does the possibility of being a career musician. There simply isn't enough money in touring. The pirate's contempt for artists' interests is simultaneously a contempt for the record industry's philistinism (itself a contempt for the artists). This is not a problem bourgeois society can solve.

In assuming that ideological forms and content are coherent, spiked! utterly blunts its attack. It attacks forces repeatedly that on some level support those very attacks; instead of drawing out the endlessly dividing and recombining currents of subjectivity and consciousness, the tendencies and countertendencies at work, it obscures them under the crushing girth of its great battle for humanity's self-respect. As a result, it is locked in a loop - apart from curious far-leftists, its readership consists of a kind of self-hating section of the very liberal "chattering classes" that sit at the bottom of its esteem. Furedi, Hume and Claire Fox, perhaps, owe salaries to the RCP heritage, but penetration of its ideas into the populace at large is minimal. The greens are winning. Their infamous consistency is ultimately inconsistent - how could it be otherwise? - and so it cannot function as a real pole of attraction, even within the limits of bourgeois civil society.

There is a related philosophical problem. The late-RCP/spiked! mission is to rebuild the basic level of consciousness that Marxism requires in order to gain a foothold. But it is not a new idea to say that consciousness is inseparable from action - it appears in the philosophies of Althusser (interpellation), Gramsci (praxis), Marx (primacy of being over thought)...way back to Aristotle (a philosopher Marx held in high regard), who declared that you learn music by playing music, and you learn virtue by acting virtuously. 90% of spiked! articles are not stricto sensu interventions in the political struggles on which they comment, but excoriations of the liberal leftist ideology behind them. If the pale Green plan to save the world through the blood sacrifice of Ryanair customers is wrong, then spiked! need to tell the world what does need to be done, now that it can admit something needs to be done at all, and what forces will be able to achieve that. If George Clooney isn't going to solve the Darfur crisis, then what could?

These are questions that would not have troubled an organisation which still adhered to (any version of) Marxist politics. That is because Marxism has the one thing that the RCP left behind - the working class, the class to end all classes. By abandoning an explicit class position, the RCP abandoned any hope of picking its way through a tumultuous period for world capitalism, even if the tumult did not until recently reach the imperialist heartlands. It is not simply a matter of apostasy - this turn in their theory, though an understandable consequence of a clear-headed and correct pessimism, has been a disaster by its own standards, and has left spiked! as little more than a minor adjunct of the very culture it seeks to destroy.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

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