Born in Bradford

Born in bradford
by Kenan Malik

It was February 1989. I was in Bradford, a few weeks after the demonstration on which a copy of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses had been burnt. I had gone there to interview Sher Azam, president of the Bradford Council of Mosques, and the man who had torched the book. Waiting in the drab building that housed the Bradford Council of Mosques, I heard a familiar voice.
'Hello Kenan, what are you doing here?'
It was Hassan, a friend from London, whom I had not seen for a couple of years. 'Good to see you Hassan. I'm doing some interviews about Rushdie', I said. 'What are you doing in this God-forsaken place?'
'Trying to make it less God forsaken', said Hassan. 'I've been up here a few months, helping in the campaign to silence the blasphemer.'
'You what?'
'No need to look so shocked. I've had it with the white left. I'd lost my sense of who I am and where I came from. So I came back to Bradford to rediscover it. We need to defend our dignity as Muslims, to defend our values and beliefs, and not allow anyone - racist or Rushdie - to trample over them.'

I was astonished. The Hassan I knew in London had been a member of the Socialist Workers party (as I had been for a while). Apart from Trotskyism his other indulgences were sex, Southern Comfort and watching Arsenal. We had marched together, chucked bricks together at the National Front, been arrested together. I had never detected a religious bone in his body. But here he was in Bradford, an errand boy to the mullahs, inspired by book-burners.

Time to 'dump' Multiculturalism

by Joe Reilly

Reproduced from RA Bulletin Volume 4, Issue 12, July/Aug ’01
 

Currently there is much discussion on how the rise of the far right can be halted. The truthful answer, says Joe Reilly, is that an anti-fascism joined at the hip with multiculturalism cannot do so.

Britain ‘has the highest number of interracial relationships in the world’ according to the Institute for Social and Economic Research. This supremely natural and healthy state of affairs, is however, not due to multiculturalism but in spite of it. For multiculturalist ideology, which believes that ‘culture makes man’ rather than the other way round, sets its face firmly against miscegenation, integration and assimilation – on principle.
“Multiculturalism actually promotes racism. It engenders confusion, resentment and bullying and prevents people developing a shared British identity. This idea should have been dumped long since”, claimed Minette Marrin in a Guardian article on May 29.

Though evidence to support her claim is legion, in the same paper on the same day, Vivek Chaudry a Guardian journalist rather underlined her point, by inverting the Norman Tebbitt ‘cricket test’. He castigated England captain Nasser Hussain for bemoaning the fact that people with origins in the Indian subcontinent continue to support teams from that part of the world rather than England. “My message to Hussain is this. You need to get in touch with your brown side” Chaudrey advised.

Behind Maori Nationalism

Behind Maori nationalism
by Phil Duncan and Grant Cronin

THIS ARTICLE begins an analysis which situates the rise of Maori sovereignty politics within the context of the protracted economic slump and the decline of traditional class-based organisations. It argues that rather than representing a radical challenge to the status quo, Maori sovereignty politics are a sign of the weakness of radicalism in a society that is coming apart.

For 30 years after the Second World War, growing economic prosperity, coupled with the ideologies of anti-communism and New Zealand nationalism, held society here together. Racial integration was official policy, and the postwar boom, which brought most Maori out of poorer rural areas and into industry in the cities, seemed to hold out the prospect of equality in wages, job opportunity and living conditions. Widespread intermarriage also created a society in which Maori and pakeha (white) were largely relative terms rather than distinct and separate categories.

But since 1973, New Zealand, like the rest of the capitalist world, has been hit by long-term slump. This country’s historic dependence on agricultural exports to Britain meant that the crisis here took a particularly sharp form, the end of the boom coinciding with Britain joining the European Community and reducing its imports from New Zealand.

As capitalism restructured and New Zealand was transformed from the most regulated capitalist economy in the world into the most open one, New Zealand nationalist ideology was undermined. The end of the Cold War dealt another blow to anti-communism and kiwi nationalism as the ideological cements holding society together. What it meant to be a New Zealander became a question of debate.

Multiculturalism and the ruling elite - Daniel Brandt

Multiculturalism and the Ruling Elite

by Daniel Brandt From NameBase NewsLine, No. 3, October-December 1993

Opportunity is rapidly vanishing, poorly masked by an institutionalized preference for diversity. Leftist academics in ivory towers are hooked on designer victimology but fail to notice the real victims -- the entire next generation. Meanwhile the rich get richer. Have a nice New World Order.

Anyone who follows today's academic debates on multiculturalism, and by happenstance is also familiar with the power-structure research that engaged students in the sixties and early seventies, is struck by that old truism: the only thing history teaches us is that no one learns from history. By now it's even embarrassing, perhaps because of our soundbite culture. Not only must each generation painstakingly relearn, by trial and error, everything learned by the previous generation, but it's beginning to appear that we have to relearn ourselves that which we knew a scant twenty years earlier.

The debate over diversity is one example of this. Researchers in the sixties discovered that the ruling elites of the West mastered the techniques of multiculturalism at the onset of the Cold War, and employed them time and again to counter the perceived threat from communism. The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was funded first by the CIA and then, after this was exposed in 1967, by the Ford Foundation. CCF created magazines, published books, and conducted conferences throughout the world, in an effort to wean intellectuals to democratic liberalism.[1]

The process of multiculturalism

The growth of Multiculturalism as a state sponsored ideology has been one of the key changes over the last thirty years in world politics alongside the re-emergence of neo-liberalism, the fall of 'communism and the rise of political Islam. The word can of course mean different things; multiculturalism (with a small m) just describes how people of different cultures live together and get on with each other or not. Multiculturalism (with a capital M) describes how various states have adopted it as an ideology that separates groups of people on the basis of ethnicity.

The following four posts on the blog, from very different perspectives, analyse the effects of Multiculturalism in a variety of countries. The first, by Daniel Brandt from 1996, looks at the growth of the ideology in the USA in the1960s and 1970. The second, by Phil Duncan and Grant Cronin examines the rise of Maori nationalism in New Zealand in the years since 1984. Joe Reilly's article from 2001 focuses on Britain. The fourth, and final article by Kenan Malik traces the emergence of Multiculturalism to the 1960s but in a different way to Brandt. There's a couple of other pieces I want to post as well but can't find at the moment, including one by myself from the 1990s.

By the way, I don't necessarily agree with everything written in the four articles.

View from a darkened room (i)

Dangerously deluded

 Old habits die hard. A couple of days ago I saw a link to a political event in Britain called 'Dangerous ideas for dangerous times'. My immediate reaction is that calling something 'dangerous' almost certainly means it isn't. I was right. 

John Rees

Lenin

 

Sponsored by a variety of organisations such as trade unions, the publisher Verso and the SWP spin-off Counterfire, the 2 day festival this weekend trots out the usual speakers including long time old frauds such as Tony Benn and Tariq Ali.

Counterfire is the bastard love child of John Rees and Lindsey German, the Ron and Nancy of the left. Apparently a growing organisation, it is populated by students, academics and cafe owners. Countrrfire has continued the SWP's tradition of popular fronts as in Respect Stop the War and countless others. Their other current product s the People's Assembly.

Magic 101 for Marxists-Chaos Marxism

In the absence of there being enough time for me to write much at the moment, I thought I'd post this article from 2006 from the excellent Chaos Marxism blog; the title of which should be self-explanatory. I think the writing on the CM blog is interesting and is an admirable attempt to grapple with the creativity that is latent in 'marxism'. This is something that I want to move on to at some point in the future.

Magic 101 for Marxists

Okay. I think in the last two posts (here and here)I gave a comprehensible account of how Marxists see the interaction between the "infosphere", people's ideas, and the physical world. Now I'm going to have a go at it from the point of view of occultists, magic(k)ians, "metaprogrammers", or whatever else they might call themselves. I do note for the benefit of all my occultist readers that I am simplifying and generalising to an incredible degree for those who are utter n00bs to the subject - your corrections and additions are welcomed.

Perhaps the central tenet of the magical worldview is the Hermetic formula - as above, so below. To put it another way, the microcosm is the same as the macrocosm; to put it a third way, symbolic changes can cause physical changes, if the symbol is "powerful" enough; or a fourth way, that perception is to a large degree reality. (This last might be recognized as also the central tenet of modern public relations and politics.)

War over - Repression continues

War over, repression continues

From Redline

 

by Philip Ferguson
The new political dispensation in the north of Ireland, we are told, means an end to the bad old days of discrimination against the catholic and nationalist population in jobs, housing and voting and the armed conflict that resulted from the discrimination. The “peace dividend” has, supposedly, also brought an end to the repression meted out by the British state to republican communities and republican activists. A number of recent cases of imprisonment, including several without charges or trials, suggest the reality is somewhat different.
Take the case of Newry political activist Stephen Murney. Stephen is the local spokesperson for the socialist-republican organisation éirígí. He has been to the fore in opposing, exposing and organising against the heavy policing i

n this working class, largely nationalist city. This, and the broader activities of eirigi in fighting for workers’ rights and against the continuing British presence and partition of Ireland, made Stephen a target for the cops. (As part of the new-look six counties the much-hated Royal Ulster Constabulary has been transformed into the Police Service of Northern Ireland.)

Ben Watson: Sedgwick, Psycho-Politics and Poiesis (via Daleks, Dialectics and the SWP)

Another repost from Ben Watson and the AMM, This is an excellent article that is nominally about Peter Sedgwick's Psycho Politics but as is usual with Watson ranges far and wide in both time and space. Whilst I share his enthusiasm for Sedgwick's book and Theodor Adorno, I don't share his enthusiasm for Tony Cliff. Starting off with Mad Pride and mental illness and honing on Sedgwick's work via surrealism etc, this is a powerful and important article.

 

Ben Watson: Sedgwick, Psycho-Politics and Poiesis (via Daleks, Dialectics and the SWP)

Ben Watson writes about Peter Sedgwick's book Psycho Politics, and reflects on his own thirty years in the SWP, an organisation Watson left in 2009. This article was originally published in Newhaven Journeyman #1, ed. Alastair Kemp, Eleusinian Press ('Where Music, Madness and Politics Meet') >>

Have you ever gone mad? It's not really a question you can ask a stranger. That is its power - and its attraction. When Pete Shaughnessy, Rob Dellar, Simon Barnet and Mark Roberts started Mad Pride in 1999, they did so because they wanted to stop New Labour's imminent legislation concerning the mentally ill, which was a charter for the pharmaceutical industry: solve the mental-health 'problem' by prescribing drugs. During the course of the year 2000, Mad Pride (with their knack for punk-style publicity) helped prevent the government's amendments to the Mental Health Act going through parliament. But Mad Pride weren't just about mental health. They also resurrected something the organised Left had forgotten during the 80s: how 'alienation' is not just Marxist jargon, it's real, and it hurts. Keeping up a rational front to this crazy, unfair, competitive world keeps us apart and frustrates our species being, our animal instincts. We daren't share our inner thoughts with others in case they think them unworthy or greedy or silly or sentimental or… mad.

Editorial policy

Whatever I like.

A very interesting analysis of the 1978/79 'Winter of discontent' in Britain which has become a bête noire for both the right and the far left. In the case of the latter, this period was very much seen as an inferior version of the strike wave in the early to mid 1970s, The combined article comes from a variety of sources and gives an insightful view of the last period of sustained struggle over a number of industries as opposed to the Miners Strike of 1984/85. I don't necessarily agree with all of the conclusions but is well worth reading and reflecting upon.

"To delightful measures changed..." - Reflections on the 1978-79 Winter of Discontent

An analysis of a major 1970s highpoint of class struggle in the UK; its character, implications and consequences.

Discontents

Preamble and Introduction:
History & Class Consciousness in the UK: Now Is The Winter Of Our Discontent

1: Preparing the fire: The period up to the Winter of Discontent
2: The spark that lit the prairie fire: The Ford Strike (Autumn 1978)
3: The Fire Spreads: The Lorry Drivers Strike (Dec.'78 – Feb.'79)
4: Creeping flames: The strikes of the low-paid (Winter, Spring and Summer 1979)
5: Trying to extinguish the flames: the response of the Government, press and others and the contradictions of workers’ organisational forms
6: Class struggle across the pond: The Winter of Discontent in Ireland
7: Changing the fire brigade: The economic outcome of The Winter of Discontent and the Labour Government’s experiment with monetarism
8: Damage Assessment: The Labour/Capital Relationship of Force at the end of the 70s

* * *

HISTORY & CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE U.K.
NOW IS THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT

We have published this text because we feel it important to understand that the generally low level of struggle since the 1980s and today's vicious management policies weren't always the norm, but are a result of the ruling class's repression of a once very high level of class struggle in the UK. The bosses' savage manipulative practices of today would have been unthinkable in the 1970s - when the culture of working class struggle was preventing the ruling class even attempting such things.

 

"Social amnesia - memory driven out of mind by the social and economic dynamic of this society... The intensification of the drive for surplus value and profit accelerates the rate at which past goods are liquidated to make way for new goods; planned obsolescence is everywhere, from consumer goods to thinking to sexuality. Built-in obsolescence exempts neither thought nor humans. What is heralded as young or new in things, thoughts or people masks the constant: this society...Exactly because the past is forgotten, it rules unchallenged...Social amnesia is society’s repression of remembrance - society’s own past." (Russell Jacoby — Social Amnesia).

 

The Winter of Discontent, forgotten and repressed as it may be(1), nevertheless still haunts the memory of this society. The only time the politicians and media can bring themselves to mention it is as their ultimate horror scenario that must never be allowed to happen again. The occasions it is mentioned it’s usually accompanied by images of mile-high piles of rubbish in Leicester Square, crawling with rats(2). In this way, it serves as a warning of the destructive consequences and futility of any threatened strikes, blockades etc. After all, the ruling class won – not in the Winter of Discontent itself, which was partly a defeat for them, but in the few years after when it ultimately turned around this proletarian offensive and defeated it. But they defeated the offensive and that’s all they want us to remember.

 

We have concentrated especially on ‘The Winter of Discontent’ for four interconnecting reasons:
1. Most people know very little about it and yet it was the last great mass success of the class struggle for the employed section of the working class in this country (although it has to be said, that many of those who struck in ’79 won very little, particularly the lowest paid).
2. It was the most decisive defeat for a Labour Government at the hands of the class struggle ever, and it marked the beginning of the new epoch - the Thatcherite counter-revolution, a decisive change of strategy for British capital.
3. It shows many of the historical reasons why trade unionism is so embedded in what remains of the rebellious sector of the British working class. In fact the very success of the strike wave, a success which never broke with Trade Unionist ideology (even though it very often subverted the capitalist function of trade unions as a tool for integrating workers into the structures of exploitation) and the whole decade of discontent before it, is in a way one of the most important reasons for the subsequent failure of the struggles of the employed working class in the Thatcher era. What, at that time, was a sufficient – if limited – framework for workers to express themselves autonomously rapidly became an obstacle to autonomy.
4. It shows how "New Labour" is not at all a ‘new’ aberration. In fact the Labour Callaghan government that Thatcher replaced (and Wilson's earlier, to some degree) were considering some of the same significant policies that Thatcher later established; such as sales of council houses and curbs on strikes and picketting. But these policies and other structural adjustments were more easily achieved at the time for British capital by a Tory government than a Labour one. The traditional core Labour vote and the Party's closer personal, ideological and financial relationships with the unions would always be greater obstacles to reform. Since these reforms were achieved it's perhaps unsurprising that the differences between Labour and Tory policies have narrowed further to a general broad consensus of how to manage capital and the working class.

Alan Moore interview on psychogeography

This is an interview with Alan Moore taken from Reasons I don't dance. Psychogeography

What exactly, in your not unlimited understanding, is Psychogeography?

In its simplest form I understand psychogeography to be a straightforward acknowledgement that we, as human beings, embed aspects of our psyche...memories, associations, myth and folklore...in the landscape that surrounds us. On a deeper level, given that we do not have direct awareness of an objective reality but, rather, only have awareness of our own perceptions, it would seem to me that psychogeography is possibly the only kind of geography that we can actually inhabit.

Not Just Capital and Class: Marx on Non-Western Societies, Nationalism and Ethnicity by Kevin B. Anderson

This article by Kevin B. Anderson covers some of the same ground as his excellent book, Marx at the margins which focused on Marx's writings about non-metropolitan areas and their importance in his writing as a whole. It targets the allegation that Marx pursued a unilinear model of development. Any serious and in depth analysis of Marx would show that this isn't true. As does Anderson.

Not Just Capital and Class: Marx on Non-Western Societies, Nationalism and Ethnicity

Socialism and Democracy

Kevin B. Anderson

 

Despite the revival of interest in Marx since the economic crisis hit, some important ideological and conceptual barriers continue to block what would be a very positive step, returning to Marx as the primary source of leftist critique of capitalist modernity as a whole, and as providing the theoretical ground for its overcoming [Aufhebung].
In recent decades, Marx’s critics have fallen into two large groups, sometimes overlapping of course. In neoliberal ideology, Marx is considered a dead dog because he tried to take us beyond capitalism, to which there is supposedly no alternative. Along similar lines, it is also claimed the Soviet collapse invalidates empirically Marx’s allegedly impractical and utopian schemes.
In left and progressive academic circles, however, the critique of Marx has usually taken a different direction. In these quarters it is often said that the problem with Marx is not that he was too radical, as the neoliberals say, but that he was not radical enough. Some add that the truly radical thinkers are people like Foucault, Deleuze, even Nietzsche. These critics – most famously Edward Said – attack Marx for adopting what they see as a unilinear model of development in the modernist mode. (Postmodernists term this a grand narrative.) Here, much of the debate has revolved around Marx’s 1853 articles on India and a passage in the Communist Manifesto (1848) on China. At a more general level, it is said even more often among progressives that Marx informs us on class and economic structures but that his theoretical model does not incorporate race, ethnicity, gender, or nationalism at all, or at least not very much.
I think responding to these critiques – especially the ones from the progressive left – is as important as the earlier effort to separate Marx’s original vision from Stalinism and totalitarianism, an effort that still remains necessary today. That link of Marx to Stalinism – although in my view invalid – is part of what has fostered the growth anarchism among so many younger radicals today.
In this article, I will respond to the kinds of criticisms of Marx that have been coming from parts of the progressive left and which center on charges of unilinearism and grand narrative, ethnocentrism, and lack of concern with race, ethnicity, gender, and nationalism[1]. At the outset, it should be noted that Marx himself lived at the margins, where his thought is still relegated to this day. The deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida captures well Marx’s marginality as a political refugee in Victorian London, linking it to his equally marginal position within the Western intellectual tradition: “Marx remains an immigrant among us, a glorious, sacred, accursed but still clandestine immigrant as he was all his life” (1994: 174).

Culling the Lama

Culling the Lama



 

Lama



Author



 

I’ve never had any time for the Dalai Lama and not just because of his terrible dress sense. The only religious leader acceptable to the liberal middles is a former slave owner and onetime spiritual figurehead of a brutal, feudal regime, who in the past has received millions of US Dollars from the peace loving CIA. That the Lama is more a brand than anything else was shown by him receiving the Nobel peace prize for nothing in particular; a bit like that given to Barak Obama.

The Term Conspiracy Theory is Officially Dead Language, Let’s Move On to Mind Control Facts. by Thad McKraken

This is an interesting article taken from the Disinformation website and covers some of the ground in my conspiracy piece but in greater depth. The disinfo site carries an eclectic mix of material that is also worth looking at.

The Term Conspiracy Theory is Officially Dead Language, Let’s Move On to Mind Control Facts

By Thad McKraken on May 16, 2013 in News 0

Let’s face it. Magick does in fact have a lot to do with the manipulation of linguistics and how those manipulations transform internal states of consciousness, at least how I practice it (friend me on Facebook for updates). It is funny though because in this day and age I sometimes feel almost dated as a writer, and admittedly that’s why I also create in a lot of other mediums. With the increasing intricacy of video game enchantments, mobile synthetic telepathy, and easily accessible drugs, sitting down and reading a book can seem sort of old school truthfully. Then I remember how nearly all of my thoughts are derivatively running through the operating system of the English language and the importance feels more profound than ever. When you get down to it a lot of meditational practices, like say transcendental meditation (which I still do near daily) involve little more than intentionally forcing your mind to redirect its traditional infrastructure or moreover, not thinking in words. That’s really all it is and it works quite well which is rather astonishing. On a similar note, anytime I’m struggling to get to sleep, I basically try and think in guitar riffs or keyboard ambience and I’ll start to fade. Not always easy to do.
Wait, where was I going with that? Oh yeah, I’ve been saying this for years, but the term “conspiracy theory” is officially over. Here’s the problem. A long time ago, because of a quite coordinated campaign by monolithic mainstream media conglomerates, they slandered it to mean batshit. You see a lot of the word “tin foil hat” bandied about in the coverage. Then there was that movie with Mel Gibson. That should have killed it, but unlike say “alternative” in rock music, it refused to die. Regardless of what it might mean, or have meant to you, which in a lot of cases is just questioning the media’s official position on things, it now means paranoid gun hoarding shut in to most people. Get used to it. They’re very good at what they do. I can’t stand the word paranormal either just for the record.

Ben Watson: Address to Spring Conference in Manchester

Ben Watson is one of my favourite Marxist writers; he writes with an explosive honesty that tears apart both bourgeois and 'marxist' mythology and conventions. His relatively recent book, Adorno for Revolutionaries just crackles with a dialectic urgency that is infectious. The first book I read by him was 1998's Art, Class and Cleavage: Quantulumcunque Concerning Materialist Esthetix which on each page is a combination of extremely funny, savage, life changing and thoroughly annoying; qualities that inhabit all his writing. Watson is a member of the Association of Musical Marxists who have published some excellent books via Unkant Publishing. This speech is lifted from the Unkant website.

 

Ben Watson: Address to Spring Conference in Manchester

 11 May 2013

This was the pre-written paper I took to Manchester. In the event, an improvised preamble about how the economic crisis has made Marx's ideas visible again but failed to rehabilitate Freud, took up my entire ten minutes (given that sexual scandal has become so central to left politics, the need for a scientific, materialist approach to sexuality seems quite urgent). I've also left out some remarks about Dunayevskaya on Quality and Quantity in Hegel's Science of Logic because they have already appeared here.

Andy Wilson of the AMM  posted a quote from C.L.R. James's Notes on Dialectics on Facebook recently. It said that Stalin's 'Leninism' was a fraud, a cynical justification for ruthless realpolitik and the establishment of a bureaucratic-centralist ruling class. In contrast, Trotsky's Leninism was sincere, but it nevertheless held him back, distorting his view of where he was and how the world was. It prevented him from understanding that the USSR hadn't just gone slightly off the rails, it was now state capitalist, i.e. the opposite of genuine communism: a counter-revolutionary threat to progressive developments all across the globe. I liked Andy's post because it rattles the cage of anyone secure in the belief that if you line up the profiles of the 'correct' grand old men — Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky rather than Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, say, or Marx, Engels, Lenin and Lukacs — you can't go wrong. But as the recent crisis in the SWP proved, you can line up the profiles and still go very wrong indeed.
I had one skirmish with the SWP Central Committee which involved visiting the Centre. I was writing an article on the novelist Iain Sinclair for International Socialism Journal, and went in to speak to John Rees. He thought, with some changes he'd suggested, we could get the article past Chris Harman, who didn't like it at all. Harman thought comrades should be reading Jack London and B. Traven, not Sinclair; abstruse language was a block to communication, an evasion. What I was unprepared for was John Rees's absolute conviction that, as a CC member of the SWP, he was the advanced consciousness of the working class, rather than one voice in an organisation attempting to influence the class. He also criticised my essay as 'eclectic' because I didn't only cite the 'classical' Marxists — Marx, Engels, Lenin and Lukacs — but also Freud, Reich and Adorno. I later found out 'eclectic' was Lenin's term in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism for those who mixed up their Marxism with Kantianism, and were therefore semi-idealist. Since the whole article on Sinclair was an anti-Kantian, materialist diatribe, calling it 'eclectic' was a bit of bare-faced cheek. What Rees meant was that I used writers from outside the select few endorsed as 'correct' by the party.

 

The all seeing eye

Tiny cracks (Part two) Conspiracies (and theories about them)[

Tiny cracks (Part two)

Conspiracies (and theories about them)[1]



Assassinated President

Apart from performing bodily functions in public, few things are as guaranteed to upset as many people from all political walks of life, than using the word, conspiracy. It is one of those words that immediately sets off the alarm bells amongst a certain type of person.

 

The man who benefited from the assassination

I was once talking to a friend, a hardline Trotskyist, about Libra, Don DeLillo’s novel about the Kennedy Assassination. I made the very basic point that all the evidence in the case suggested that it wasn’t Lee Harvey Oswald who was the killer. She immediately countered with, “So you’re a conspiracy theorist now”?


Needless to say, I gave up the conversation at that point, as to her it was a sign of my continuing political degeneracy..

 

Scientology in the Novels of William S. Burroughs

A new book by David S. Wills, Scientologist!: William S. Burroughs and the 'Weird Cult' goes into considerable detail about William Burroughs' relationship with Scientology and the effect it had on its writing. The book is excellent and provides real insight into the man and his writing. The article below which is essentially an overview of the book was written for the excellent William Burroughs web site, Reality Studio

Scientology in the Novels of William S. Burroughs

by David S. Wills

William S. Burroughs at the Saint Hill Scientology Bookstore, 1968

In Ted Morgan’s biography, Literary Outlaw, he says that in 1968, Scientology was a “new obsession” for William S. Burroughs, and Barry Miles’ El Hombre Invisible claims that Burroughs’ interest came about in 1967 — the year Miles mistakenly has Burroughs studying at Scientology’s sprawling training center, Saint Hill. James Grauerholz, in his editorial comments throughout Word Virus, also understates the importance of Scientology in Burroughs’ work and life, saying that he “became interested” only after writing an essay for Mayfair in 1967, and there is no mention of it in A Man Within or Commissioner of Sewers, the two documentaries about his life. 
The evidence is there, in the two volumes of his collected letters, in small press publications from the sixties, and in his archives. But little commentary exists that doesn’t just focus on the fallout, citing the material published in Ali’s Smile / Naked Scientology. 

The Remaking of the American Working Class - Loren Goldner

Loren Goldner is an American Marxist who has written some excellent material over the last forty years. This long detailed article, available on his website, was first written in 1980/81 and then revised in 1999. Despite the length of time since it was written, it is still a valuable piece which sets out some of the key events and changes in the American, and global, economy and its effect on the working class. Whilst quite technical in places, The Remaking of the American working class is worth making an effort to read, as it dwarves most of what passes for a Marxist critique on the rest of the left. On Goldner's website are a number of interesting replies to, and critiques of, the article.

The Remaking of the American Working Class: The Restructuring of Global Capital and the Recomposition of Class Terrain.
by Loren Goldner

The Restructuring of Global Capital and the Recomposition of Class Terrain

Preface to the 1999 Edition
The following text was written more than 18 years ago, and has circulated in manuscript form, in English and in French, since then. I am planning a complete rewrite and update, and in the meantime, I am posting it on the web to solicit comments which might help me in doing so. While much has happened since 1981, the current manuscript strikes me as 80% up to date. One polemical edge of the text, the critique of the "monopoly capital" school and of the shop-floor militants influenced by it, will mainly evoke a smile today. Even in 1981, it had a vaguely "owl of Minerva" quality, dissecting a corpse that was quickly turning cold. Its immediate context was the coming to power of Reagan and Thatcher in 1979-1980, and one major objective was to write the obituary for the "left wing of devalorization", Keynesian welfare-statism on a world scale, as well as what might be called the "far left of devalorization", the 1960's and 1970's currents which persisted in setting themselves up as the left (but mainly loyal) opposition to the official left, its political parties and trade unions. With Clinton, Blair, Jospin, Schroeder and D'Alema all in power to further the agenda established by Reagan and Thatcher, the post-1981 evolution of the "left wing of devalorization" (with assists from Mitterand, Gonzalez, and Papandreou) is one "prediction" of the text which was right on the mark.

Anarchy in the UK

No Comment should be necessary here. I remember watching this as if it was yesterday.

The Sex Pistols playing Anarchy in the UK on So it goes in 1976.

The Conspiracy of Equals and the birth of communism

The Conspiracy of Equals and the birth of communism

by Jean Léger.

 

Introduction

As well as publishing my own writing, I want to reprint material that I find interesting and useful. The following article was written in 1949 for the French 'Marxist' journal Socialisme ou barbarie. The journal and the group around it attempted to construct a critical version of Marxism that was relevant for the post-war period and came to reject both Leninism and Trotskyism. The leading figure in the group, Cornelius Castoriadis, later rejected Marxism as well and the group fell apart in the mid 1960s.

 

My reason for reprinting the article is twofold. Babeuf is still a fairly unknown figure despite his role in the French revolution and because of this alone, the article is worth reprinting. More than though, Leger has produced a piece that examines the nascent working class and how Babeuf's politics pushed at the boundaries of what were possible in such an historical situation. This version is taken from the website LibCom but was originally translated by David Broder for the Commune.

 

 

The Conspiracy of Equals and the birth of communism

 

 

Babeuf was the first example of a militant formulating a coherent socialist doctrine, struggling for a “plebeian” socialist revolution, in his view indispensible for the reorganisation of the economy and society as a whole. These attempts at the first communist party and doctrine are of great importance to us: they allow us to understand how revolutionary thought has developed. They moreover offer the opportunity for a concrete analysis of the link between the revolutionary militant and the working class in a given historical period [1].
Before looking into historical questions it is necessary to explain our basic method. It is clear enough that we cannot consider the ideology of a class as a simple reflection of its material living conditions. Nor can we consider the relation between material conditions and ideology as a series of actions and reactions between these two poles. We believe that the class struggle is a unity: that there is a deep identity between classes’ ideologies and their material conditions. Ideology expresses – at a distinct level and in its own terms – the class’s position in economic relations. That is why we have decided to outline the characteristic traits of the working class at the end of the 18th century. The need to examine the doctrine of the Equals in detail has led us to separate this analysis from its ideology: but the fact that the first chapter is so developed, and the constant allusions made to it in the second, help us attain a fuller understanding of the state of the exploited classes at the dawn of capitalism.

Tiny Cracks (Part one)
Visions of Paranoia

In March and April 1974, Philip K. Dick began receiving strange messages and streams of data as if they were being downloaded to his brain. Though he allowed for the possibility that they were the product of his prodigious use of speed and/or a symptom of mental illness, he began to believe that they were from an entity called VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System). Wherever they came from, they had a profound effect on his work and life; it completely altered how he looked at the world and his perception of what reality was.

Even a cursory glance at ‘The exegesis of Philip K. Dick’ reveals a world that is so different from that with which we are familiar. A deeper reading of the book, though it can be difficult to plough your way through it, is definitely worth it. You don’t have to believe in the existence of Valis or a similar entity to appreciate Dick’s examination of our perceptions of what we call ‘reality’. The same themes present in the exegesis are covered in his novels, especially his later ones.

Robert Anton Wilson had similar experiences with what he saw as a form of magical entity and concluded that though they were real ‘enough’, they weren’t as ‘real as the IRS’, but ‘easier to get rid of’. Again this experience affected the rest of his life and work, though of course, he had already broken with what could be called a ‘consensus view’ of reality. In particular, his ‘Çosmic Trigger’ trilogy gives the standard complacent view of reality a severe savaging in a very entertaining way, as well supplying one of my favourite quotes, ‘belief is the death of intelligence’.

Wilson’s concept of ‘Maybe logic’, best summed up as never completely believing or denying any particular group or religion’s version of reality, is a useful approach to the world around us. As is his linked irritation against the ‘either-or’ Aristotelian logic which has been the mainstay of western thought for a few thousand years or so. When you think along the lines he suggests, it makes sense; for example, day slowly becomes night and vice versa. Day doesn’t just stop and become night. Likewise, the seasons change in the same way; there is no neat division between them.

When I was a teenager at school, I remember getting quite annoyed by the black and white manner in which everything was taught and by the way in which each subject was isolated from another as if there was no connection. So when I came across both Dick and Wilson (The only thing I didn’t quite get about Wilson was his interest in Timothy Leary who I have always seen as a complete charlatan), and a third writer, William S. Burroughs, it was a revelation that there were people out there who looked at the world in a similar way to me but even more strangely.

It was Burroughs who was the most shocking writer of all; Naked Lunch was even more weird and unreadable than Joyce’s Ulysses at first AND it was also the most depraved thing I had ever read. If there is one, over-arching theme that covers all three writers, it is a loosely based anti-authoritarianism against elements of control but there’s also the acceptance that the consensus view of reality doesn’t reflect the world we live in. To a certain extent, they could all be said to have had an occult view of reality, Dick lesser so.

 

In my view, this helps to cut through some of the nonsense and pre-conceived ideas that is offered to as reality. Whilst I probably won’t be writing much about the Illuminati, pink laser beams of light or giant centipedes, some of my way of looking at the world is definitely influenced by the above writers. All of which is a highly convoluted way of introducing the blog, in which I want to look through the tiny cracks in the surface of the world at what lies below.

To be continued…