Thoughts for the brain - brain wax

State capitalism, the permanent arms economy and deflected permanent revolution are the three pillars of our little tradition. Taken together they make an excellent compass to find ones way through the history of the 20^th century.

We are naturally quite proud of the intellectual tradition of the IS, yet there is a mildly demagogic argument that says “if you’re ideas are so great why don’t more people support you”. Such an argument skips over why an idea’s verity should depend on mass acknowledgement and how this is to be realistically achieved in a capitalist society under bourgeois ideological dominance. It also underestimates how popular the ideas actually are. Over the decades tens of thousands of people have been schooled in IS theory, many times more have been exposed to it. No one today seriously equates the former Soviet Union with workers power, even if they might call it socialist. But this gets onto why the notion of Actually Existing Socialism endured.

The Eastern Bloc was a source of hope for many people who aspired to a better society. The history of the old CPGB was paltry next to the French or Greek CP, let alone the Russian or Chinese parties, yet it stands out proud against the meagre achievements of the rest of the pre-war left. To argue against this is to argue against hope. Nonetheless the state capitalist argument appealed to specific groups of people, such as radicalised students or union shop stewards, a large minority who did not want to act out the foreign policy of an unattractive state. Instead of socialism existing somewhere beyond, to be defended by them, IS theories put the job realising socialism back into their hands.

Where is Actually Existing Socialism today? Well, there is Latin America. Though the continent has undergone progress beyond in 1980s, Bolivarianism is hardly the deadly rival Bolshevism was, hence, amongst other things, left-wing governments in South America have not gone through an experience comparable to the Russian Civil War. There is no world-movement of Bolivarianism. In Britain, for example, there is a small, internet cadre who pray to Caracas and use mental gymnastics similar to the old Stalinists in debate, but this is Actually Existing Socialism Lite.

So who do we address such arguments to today? There is the human-nature-will-to-power-Lenin-led-to-Stalin train of thought that rules out all movements for progress. A comic example: I remember in the depths of a comment box underneath a CiF article on Occupy London people berating the camp members to read 1984 and think again: because camping on the steps of a church leads to gulags, you understand? But that can only really be answered negatively. You can’t conclusively disprove that Lenin led to Stalin because it’s impossible to rerun history under different conditions. People you convince over this will already be half-convinced in the first place.

So who is the positive argument with? Who are we pitching a slogan to, such as Neither Washington nor Moscow but international socialism, for them to turn into action?

Like we said, there is no Actually Existing Socialism, no fully-formed alternative route to socialism, complete with state power and prestige. While a perfectly valid set of theories with plenty more to offer, state capitalism is alive and well in the 21^st century, but, for the time being, they are not part of day-to-day agitation.

Fantasy, abstraction and reality...

The age of electronic media has broken down linear, sequential space and, therefore, made linear, sequential thought obsolete. We live in an age of integral consciousness and to live integrally means to live mythically.

That is a rough summation of McLuhan-ism. We need not take it literally to see the value in the statement, value in terms of politics, culture and ideology. To explain:

Politics

The predicament of the bourgeois liberal outlook was summed up quite neatly by the philosopher, one F Mercury:

Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide,
No escape from reality.

Which is not bad, I think. The reality we directly experience is alienated and atomised, a thin sliver of the general context. Yet we cannot understand even that smaller section of reality without access to the greater context. Any attempt to build up a picture of reality piece by piece might seem oh-so objective, but is of course doomed, by the restless changes in social context if by nothing else.

We have to think in terms of archetypes, in terms of abstractions. One of Marx’s most crucial insights was establishing through his critique of political economy the existence of objective points of view within capitalism. There are the bourgeois and proletarian points of view, and there are bourgeois and proletarians with points of view. One is measured against the other, the critical renovation of consciousness described by Gramsci.

Without this abstraction, this ‘myth’, we would lose our link with the greater context; reality becomes a landslide, something which happens to us.

Art ‘n’ stuff

One of the difficulties with direct realism in art is it's partial and one-sided, or else it’s unreal. The non-ideological work is merely the most ideological. Its assumptions are taken as self-evident. Fantasy, magic-realism, elastic reality (as it’s called in The Simpsons) are much more truthful, realistic methods.

Recent interest: the fascination with vampires. Vampires are strongly associated with aristocracy. They are also associated with sexuality. This has become much more pronounced in recent pop culture. Vampires are now pretty much benign. Take Edward Cullen from the Twilight series, or Bill Compton from True Blood: they are a strange combination of potency and rigid self-denial. Pop culture is trying to work out conflicted notions of sexuality through vampirism.

True Blood is an example of elastic reality at work. It is a magical melodrama. As well as vampires it has fairies, shape-shifters, maenads and such like, existing as if normal in the modern United States. This flexible reality is also a means of talking about civil rights, particularly LGBT and ethnic minority movements. It gets to the core of such subjects, I think, much more quickly and easily through fantasy than direct realism.

Minor interest: "self-styled..."

I was browsing through the Wikipedia entry for Tony Cliff yesterday when I came across an alarm bell phrase:

"The SWP is now the largest self-styled revolutionary party in Britain, and the leading group in the International Socialist Tendency".

Alarm bell phrases are ones that trigger suspicion, something's up. In this case I'm not so sure but it's worth dwelling on "self-styled revolutionary" for a moment.

All revolutionaries, in fact all political actors are self-styled. Politics is an art and therefore subjective. Mainstream politics has an aura of objectivity because it is the politics of the state. Neo-liberalism, the current state philosophy, only appears real because in the 70s and 80s certain political actors conspired to make it real. Marxism, which at one point is a political philosophy, also claims to be a science.

In their more sober momements bourgeois advocates acknowledge the scientific aspect of Marxism. How could they not at a time like this? But Marx has to be continually undone. When he died the only mainstream paper to acknowledge the funeral was the London Times. The obituary suggested his system would die with him. How many times now has Marxism been subdued only to come back to life?

Any radical theory brought to life, especially one connected with socialism, is generally described as "self-styled". It can't possibly be objective or practical, it can only be imposed. Have you ever had that argument, "stop trying to impose your views on me"? It actually means, "stop trying to convince me of something using argument backed up by observation and/or fact".

The "self-styled" insinuation is meant to undermine. The most recent example being the self-styled Rory Carroll's reporting from Venezuela. During the last decade the Bolivarian government defied neo-liberal gravity, something clearly wrong in that!