Chasing revolution: drifting through time, space and Eastern Europe (part one)

Introduction

Drifting: 3. To move leisurely or sporadically from place to place, especially without purpose or regular employment: a day laborer, drifting from town to town.

Oxford English Dictionary

 

Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. [...] For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have in the moment of recollection. This strange form—it may be called fleeting or eternal—is in neither case the stuff that life is made of.
Benjamin, Walter. A Berlin Chronicle. 1932.

 

Bulgaria 1989

Setting the scene

It’s probably a contradiction in terms but I’ve always been good at drifting. Not in a sophisticated Guy Debord, Derive way, nor in a Clint Eastwood High Plains Drifter style and not even in a Jack Black[1] hobo manner. Instead, my drifting was just an antidote to making any hard decisions and is probably part of my DNA. I drifted through school from one thing to another, then from job to job, then to university and, decades later, even 11,000 km across the world.  And through my aptitude for drifting is how I came to travel around Eastern Europe for 6 months with my then girlfriend, Sheela.[2]

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.