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.
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.
