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.

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.