Right-wing sectarianism

Sectarianism is bemoaned on the left. Too many socialist parties not enough socialists. Everyone's sectarian, except me. You get the picture?

It's interesting, actually, but there is a proliferation of groups on the right as well, much less commented on. The breakdown of the Tories popular base is well documented. The decline of Toryism is covered, for now, by the convergence of the mainstream parties. The Lib Dems support the current government and the Labour party doesn't really oppose it. The general logjam in our society stems from the fact all significant civil society groups are, in some way, tied up with the mainstream parties.

The breakdown is also occurring on the right. There is the UKIP which currently has around 10% support in opinion polls. It will take many hard Tory votes but unless something very odd happens it won't win any seats at the next general election however. There is the NF, the BNP and the British Freedom party on the fascist right, the BFP is a splinter from the BNP, which in was a split from the NF. In street fighting of course the Infidels have are a split from the EDL. From the sublime to the ridiculous, former Sun editor Kelvin McKenzie has suggested forming a Southern Party to represent, well, people like him living in and around London.

The continual breakdown of political formations possibly lends credence to the idea of petty caesarism as the dominant force in modern politics. 

All the hegemony you can eat

Lenin’s key political innovation was never the vanguard party. Look at the Communist Manifesto, it’s there already. Gramsci is correct in attributing hegemony over and over in the notebooks to ‘Illich’. Hegemony is the capacity to lead. It bridges the gap between a party that fights its cause and by extension the cause of the class it represents and the party that leads the whole of society.

One should take care applying the concept too squarely onto our society. In Gramsci’s time hegemony at the level of statecraft meant a particular class leading a multitude of other classes, each with distinct political aims. There are not coinciding revolutions any more, like there were in 1917.

It reminds me, though I’m not sure this is a perfect analogy, of the observation that socialists should be the best fighters for reforms. They should, but I have also seen the times when this has been acknowledged in the sense of “thanks for being the best fighters, don’t let the door hit you on the way out”. Leading in struggle in itself is not enough.

Similarly, there is the idea that theory serves practice, in particular that a good book or pamphlet provides an overview for activists. It is very difficult for most people to be politically active, at least as as they need to be. Tailoring theory to current activists carries the danger of reducing party culture to a narrow section of society. Theory is liable to be degraded and the party becomes in danger of talking only to itself. This is perhaps how we got to the stage where words such as ‘feminism’ and ‘autonomism’ no longer refer to political credos but make do as refined abuse.

Wider society is also left unprepared should, for example, an unexpected section of the population take up struggle. This is less that the section lose because of lack of clarity – people are often very clear about what it is they’re fighting for and how they expect to get it – but more to do with other groups who might have a secondary interest not rallying to the cause. What was the meaning of Occupy? What is the meaning of modern feminism? Why do disability rights matter? Gramsci described revolutionary activity as the critical renovation of consciousness. Questions like these must be explained.

Marxism and McLuhan - pt 1 The Medium is the Message

Start with a quote:

It is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic, or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.

It is not exactly an aphorism, but it is a neat segment of Marx’s Preface to the Critique of Political Economy with an important implication. Ideology is reasonably defined as a collection of ideas based around a distinct point of view. The argument here suggests ideology is the medium of class consciousness.

In the clash between forces and relations of production, the basis of class struggle, people can achieve things which are contrary to the ideas they hold. This was something Antonio Gramsci dwelt upon in his Prison Notebooks repeatedly. The achievements of the Biennio Rosso were not capitalised upon because there was not sufficient critical renovation of ideas; long story short, the workers rebellion was not translated into a workers state.

Ideology is the medium of class consciousness and, as we know, the medium is the message. The key benefit of Marshall McLuhan’s media studies was the spotlight he shone on the media themselves, media as physical objects, and the effects they have. For example, (in this case David Sarnoff, pioneer American broadcaster) people often advise that the “products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way that they are used that determines their value”.

Suppose we were to say, “Apple Pie is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way that it is used that determines its value”. Or “the Smallpox Virus is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way that it is used that determines its value”. Again, “Firearms are in themselves neither good nor bad; it is the way that they are used that determines their value”.

A useful point for consideration, the ideology of Protestantism helped found capitalism. Not because of some supposed work-ethic, plenty of harsh toil had been carried before anyone pondered the nature of a personal god, but because its dispute with Catholicism over humanity’s relationship to the divine was in effect an argument over the individual’s relationship to authority. “No King But Jesus” is a roundabout call for a republic.

But why does this matter? One of the crucial points about ideology, specific ideologies, is why do they arise when they do. As Frederick Engels pointed out, early socialism was utopian because:

What was wanted was the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who understands the truth. That he has now arisen, that the truth has now been clearly understood, is not an inevitable event, following of necessity in the chains of historical development, but a mere happy accident. He might just as well have been born 500 years earlier, and might then have spared humanity 500 years of error, strife, and suffering.

So, Protestantism didn’t just happen to rise up during the feudal era to attack it, it arose out of the feudal era, part of it but against it (and eventually to be supplanted by more advanced articulations of bourgeois ideology). There is no debate about a personal versus an impersonal god without print technology and the beginnings of mass literacy. There are no ideas apart from the means of articulating them.

We exist in a state of media saturation, to the point where we do not regard the effects such media have upon us. We live in the medium of Earth’s atmosphere. We do not notice it because our bodies are evolved to live at around sea-level pressure; we live at the very bottom of an ocean of air. You can only get a handle on this when you climb a large mountain, get into a submarine or a spacecraft.

We tend not to notice the dominant ideology, the collection of ideas based around the point of view of the dominant class in our society. It is only when we are outside that medium that we see it for what it is. The recent public sector general strike in Britain, baby step thought it might have been, was amongst other things an important blow struck against the prevailing ideology, a temporary exodus transporting millions of people (not just the strikers) out of neo-liberalism, austerity and atomisation.

McLuhan’s strength is that he looks at the effect of technology on consciousness. It is easy to accept that electronic media creates almost instant global communication, and thereby bridges the gap between cause and effect, core and perhipery in the public mind. You can extrapolate from this. We have lived through a period of growing gated bourgeois communities, increasingly militarised policing, the enclosure of more and more public space, and so forth. The mass media batters away, the poor are dangerous, deracinated and, look, they're living among us. It’s all very logical.

But there is one clear problem with techno-determinism. Take something like the Canary Wharf Complex in East London. To the bourgeois Londoner it is a sleek monument to their power. The working class Londoner would be forgiven if they found it a cold, bewildering and unwelcome place (built upon the ruins of a former trade union stronghold let’s not forget). Technology, mass media live inside the greater medium of class society; that is the message they carry to us, everywhere, all the time.