Reply in the affirmative to the efficacious use of technical language

Some thoughts thoughts for the brain on this. 

A metaphor is a means by which a perhaps complicated idea or set of ideas is compacted down into a single phrase or even word. Take the phrase “all the world is a stage”[1] from Jacques soliloquy in As You Like It. The world is not a stage, but people do act out their lives, as it were, in roles thrust upon them. Karl Marx, a Shakespeare aficionado, put it differently: men make history but not in circumstances of their own choosing. If metaphor is a way of transporting meaning all language is in a sense a metaphor.

Jargon[2] is a form of specific metaphor that applies to defined groups. Jargon is a way for members of such groups to communicate with speed and ease. The danger is quite obvious. Jargon can be esoteric. Esoteric language is exclusive[3].

There are two problems with trying to simplify or clarify language. First of all it makes communication more difficult. If you wanted to discuss, say, watermelons, conversation would grind to a halt if instead of saying watermelon you had to describe it[4]. The second problem is it skirts some very reactionary ideas.

One of which is language superiority. No one has ever said “my language is backward, inexpressive and difficult to learn”. English is the closest thing there is to a global lingua franca, not because it’s an innately superior language, but because it has been spread by the British and American empires. The other reactionary danger is it can serve to drive out refined thought from public life. Socialism is about helping raise the great mass of people up intellectually.

An example: in the early 40s George Orwell was a supporter of Basic English[5]. Most people don’t notice the shift between his celebrated essay, Politics and the English Language, a plea for simple English, and 1984, with its concept of Newspeak. Truncating language, removing all ambiguity, nuance and idiom, was shown as a means of control. Nothing as dramatic has occurred in history so far[6]. Nonetheless attempts to police language have always been reactionary, attempt to transcend it have so far foundered.

There is no clear solution for us, except to say language is a site of struggle. We must be critical at all times. Rather than ask is this jargon we should be asking does this word work? If we are discussing the implications of democratic centralism then we really ought to use the term, instead of inventing a one or a pleasant metaphor, which actually serves to confuse matters. Tom’s argument is actually an esoteric one. Unless you were present at the first national meeting of the IS or received a substantially accurate account of said meeting you are not part of the initiated. You don’t really have a means by which to judge the argument.

We should also be quite rigorous. We have all heard people make clumsy statements. We’ve all probably made clumsy statements. I once heard someone say “we need to be in touch with concrete people on the ground”, which made me think of SWP members swooping about the sky. Has anyone really said anything as lumpen as “comrades will launch a disciplined intervention into the campaign with our propaganda in order to recruit”?

---

[1] Happily plundered from the top of the Wikipedia article describing metaphors, follow it, if you like, with “and all men and women merely players”.

[2] Which I didn’t know until now derives from the Old French for birdsong.

[3] That said, there is no universal language, all metaphors are to some degree exclusive. You either understand them or you don’t

[4] Could you please pass me the pass me the large, round fruit with green, waxy skin, pink flesh and black seeds? How much is this large, round fruit with green, waxy skin, pink flesh and black seeds? Does the large, round fruit with green, waxy skin, pink flesh and black seeds taste alright to you?

[5] An English-based language devised by the linguist CK Ogden, consisting of 850 ‘essential’ words, to be used as a lingua franca and an aid to teaching English as a second language.

[6] Although it occurs something drastic might have happened to Korean after six decades of isolation in the North.

Thoughts for the brain...

I am, I hope, about to have something of mine (a rewrite of the recent Another Green World post) put up on the IS Network blog. The point of the piece will be there is something to be said for socialists incorporating environmentalist politics in a non-utopian way.

Part of the difficulty of green politics is who is expected to put on the agenda, let alone into action. The piece ends with a set of suggestions, possible demands that can link improving quality of life to curbing greenhouse gas emissions to tangible action in the here and now.

The other problem with green politics is the scale of climate change. There is no plausible environmentalism-in-one-country. We’ve commented before on the potential risks and rewards geo-engineering, particularly the scheme for carbon dioxide removal via iron fertilisation of the oceans.

Another solution proposed is solar radiation management, the most realistic idea being spraying the atmosphere with particulates that reflect sunlight. It’s a very costly outlay but it’s familiar from nature. Very large volcanic eruptions have cooled the global climate many times. But the knock on effects can be drastic. Two African droughts in the twentieth century have been linked to eruptions in the northern hemisphere. 

Geo-engineering is no substitute for reducing greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere, but, given the late hour we will need some measures to ameliorate climate change. An environmental movement linked to the workers movement can bridge the gap between the huge ends and currently inadequate means. 

More thoughts for the brain

Asteroids and comets are almost the functional equivalent of nuclear war today. They are a function of alienation in Marxism and the uncanny is Psychoanalysis. Despite the persistence (within the human context) of capitalist civilisation we know in our marrow that it is unsustainable. 

Despite various adventures, we always seem to be back where we began, like we’re in an ongoing sitcom. Ecocide and revolution are difficult to imagine. Only the prospect of existential cosmic calamity it seems can erase that. We rightly fear such an event, yet we do not sublimate or banish it from our minds, as often happens with climate change. The only difference between this and nuclear war is you can check the news every now and then - phew another asteroid will miss us.

A staffed mission to an asteroid is a good idea. We need to start working out how to defend civilisation from the threat of cosmic debris.

Another green world - some ideas

There will of course be lots more refined ideas out there, but these are some suggestions that can act as both demands and an means to get people active:

Housing:
There should be an urgent house building programme, linked firstly to available brownfield sites and secondly to a plan for redistributing work around the country. All building materials to be locally sourced where possible. Priority should be given to key workers, then to workers in nearby industries, thus reducing the need and length of communing, reducing emissions and costs. New houses to be owned by an elected local government commissioner and administered by Tennants and Residents associations. Rent control to be administered

All houses, new and old, are to be properly insulated and supplied with solar panels where appropriate. Where possible houses to be redesigned to make them energy efficient more generally.

Controlled flooding should be carried out in vulnerable areas. The new land should be used either for recreation or as a wildlife reserve.

Transport:

The centre of all towns and cities with populations over 100,000 (or whatever appropriate figure) are to be pedestrianised, with vehicle access given only to residents and business access. This will reduce both emissions and lower accident numbers. This measure (combined with the reduction in commuting) will lower particulate levels, leading to a decrease in asthma, bronchitis and other lung diseases.

Food:

Brownfield sites not converted into new housing or parkland should be turned into city farms, all city farms should be twinned with local primary and secondary schools. All local shops and supermarkets should be sourced primarily by local  farms, with incentives given to farmers to use organic rather than artificial inputs. The cumulative effect would be to reduce both emissions and costs.

Thoughts for the Brain

What is Marxism? It is historical materialism as a means to progressively change the world. Why does Marxism as a political movement centre on the working class? Because of its position firstly as in independent class with its own aims, second because of its essential role in creating wealth, third because it owns no property in the means of production when it assumes power it has no other group to oppress or exploit, therefore workers power can be used as a means to escape to a classless society.

When we define working class we must insist on wage labour being the key determinant and not things like education or dress or personal consumption. Useful though this may be it is paper abstraction . There is no one who is simply a wage worker. People who insist we are working class and working class only get nowhere. Such an idea can pander to various prejudices, i.e. by suggesting women workers, ethnic or religious minority workers, LGBT workers etc must get over their petty oppression and deal with 'real' working class issues.

What defines wage labour? I remember thinking through why socialists advocate class analysis rather than patriarchy theory. The answer being the former relates to economics while the latter relates to ideology and of course men as a whole do not exploit women as a whole (exploit being the key word, rather than oppress). The former is more immediately economic than the latter but we would be abandoning historical materialism to insist there is an ideology without a basis. Wage labour is in part determined by women's oppression, as it is by racism, homophobia or any other systematic prejudice you can name.

So long as we're clear exploitation is the foundation of capitalism there is nothing wrong with trying to incorporate aspects patriarchy theory into Marxism.

The deadly lure of esoterica...

“Since the revolutionary party cannot have interests apart from the class, all the party’s issues of policy are those of the class, and they should therefore be thrashed out in the open, in its presence. The freedom of discussion which exists in the factory meeting, which aims at unity of action after decisions are taken, should apply to the revolutionary party. This means that all discussions on basic issues of policy should be discussed in the light of day: in the open press. Let the mass of the workers take part in the discussion, put pressure on the party, its apparatus and leadership.”--Tony Cliff, Trotsky on Substitutionism.

This is not an absolute statement and we should always be wary of authority by quotation, nonetheless suggests there is a socialist epistemology, or theory of knowledge.

Socialism and fascism are opposite ends of the political spectrum (as generally understood). The BNP operates on levels of membership, the highest being gold membership. The SWP on the other hand has, or claims to have an understanding that “all members are gold dust”. Esoteric knowledge, secret understanding that can only be accessed through ritual, limited to a small group is what holds fascist organisations together (the core of the Nazi party was the Thule Society). It is a logical extension of the capitalist understanding, of a world and its people graded, ranked and talked to on a need to know basis, people presented with the inflexible judgment of ministers, executives and experts, none of whom you can ever meaningfully access. Esoteric practice is deadly to socialist organizations.

Though the SWP is home to thousands of great socialists, and has been home to thousands more in its time, it has become fatally top-heavy. Access to the little Vaticanon Thames is a mysterious practice that takes place via email or an occasional phone call or (if you’re really lucky) a personal audience; the point being you don’t ever go there and start poking round. Despite a formal ban on secret or permanent factions there are dozens of them, petitions are passed out, letters are passed around the great and good demanding X resign from Y position. The CC meets every week. No one except the CC is party to its discussions. The only secret factions uncovered are the ones that aren’t actually factions. The only crime is getting caught.

While we must admit the pressures of the capitalist world are very difficult to resist, to acknowledge them is halfway to successfully combating them. There is no sign that the current SWP leadership even understands what the SWP is meant to be doing and how it is supposed to relate to the wider world. It is merely self-perpetuating  and this is a large aspect of what’s killing the SWP.

Thoughts for the Brain... Geology vs Iain Duncan Smith

Here are a couple of stories to talk about. Firstly Geologists Erupt After Iain Duncan-Smith Shelf-Stacking Jibe. If nothing else the headline is a nice little pun. When Mr Bowel-Syndrome compares geology to shelf-stacking he is of course having a go at Cait Reilly, a geology graduate who quite rightly argued that stacking shelves for free in Poundland was a waste of time when she was already volunteering in a museum and searching for work herself. IBS really is a wretch. He is far too thin skinned to be in politics if he feels the need to denigrate a woman in her twenties looking for work. He most likely kicks puppies, squashes ants and breaks the wings off butterfly to pass the time between insults and hare-brained schemes.

But it is also indicative of a ruling class mindset that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Geology doesn’t make immediate profit for people with shares in retail but, as one of the secretaries of the Geology Society of London pointed out:

Geologists are a vital part of the [food] supply chain: mining the minerals essential for fertilisers, obtaining metal ores, discovering the fuel which transports produce to the store…

Furthermore geologists work in tough conditions, from oil rigs to mines, and in all weathers. Manual labour is part of what they do.

Meanwhile the government is proposing 40-year deals for new nuclear reactors to be built. It’s worth pointing out firstly that the estimated price of generation is just below £100 per gigawatt hour, currently double the market price of electricity. The pricing system for wholesale power is byzantine and reflects firstly the practical monopoly that private companies effectively have, there is no meaningful electricity market, but also the essential role it has in the wider economy. Since the formation of the UKAEA in 1954 nuclear power has been tightly bound to the state.

But the other thing to note is if new power stations were built tomorrow on 40 year contracts that would not mean they are done and dusted by 2053. I grew up near a nuclear power station that was closed down well over twenty years ago. It is still being dismantled and the site being decontaminated today and that will still be going on in another twenty years. This government is setting problems that our grandchildren will have to deal with.

Thoughts for the Brain - Sherlock

Apropos of nothing, except perhaps finding out the new series of Sherlock goes into production next month I decided to scan various online theories about the Final Problem, the Reichenbach Fall and how Sherlock escaped death. It also helps because it means after this little blurb comes a list… great.

The mechanics of Sherlock’s faked fall are still unclear, but there is a wonderful section in the middle of this post, which very convincingly unpicks the Final Problem and the origins of Jim Moriarty. It’s not spoiling much (because it’s really excellent detail) to say the headline is Jim Moriarty is the fake identity while Richard Brook is real. It also explains why Moriarty/Brook, a man with very high self-regard, ends up committing suicide on St Bart’s roof.

It’s worth emphasising that show like Sherlock would not have been made 15-20 years ago. It is a product of internet culture, the now instant pooling of popular expertise, and the DVD. Sherlock rewards repeated, detailed viewing and lateral thinking. Video cassettes could not offer the same level of viewer scrutiny. In McLuhanite terms, Sherlock is the medium of television warming up (we are talking here of the dialogue and visual tableau), changing from broad effect to fine detail. Nothing can be taken simply as random. The narrative however cools everything down. We see at the end Sherlock died yet is clearly alive (Schrodinger’s Detective).

The audience is invited to peer deeply at the detail of the show, the norm under modern mass culture, yet is compelled to fill in key narrative details as the story is left unexplained. In a whimsical way it is an example of the mass critical intellectualism engendered by capitalist culture. Whether they write about Sherlock or Doctor Who or David Bowie  or whatever, people are out there examining whole topics, illuminating subjects and doing it for free. The barriers between manual and intellectual labour have long since been removed. There is one enormous obstacle left, namely private property.

  

1. There are two SherlocksWe were all a bit confused when that little girl went mental upon seeing Sherlock in Sunday’s finale. Some people are suggesting that she was actually one of Moriarty’s youngest employees, or that she had been threatened with dire consequences like the jury before her, but some of you are convinced that Sherlock has a doppelganger. The fact that this lookalike apparently co-operated with Moriarty’s plans makes him even more of a mystery, yet it is possible that Holmes talked him round and persuaded him to commit suicide on his behalf.
Likelihood – 2/10 

2. A Sherlock Mask on Moriarty’s Body.
This theory fits in nicely with the idea that the name Rich Brook (Moriarty’s alias) is loosely German for Reichenback and as such the title of the episode falls into place, yet there are plenty of unanswered questions. Most theories hold the delay between Dr Watson seeing Sherlock fall and him reaching the body as crucial, but this one utilises the gap between the point when the Napoleon of crime shot himself and Watson arrived upon the scene. The bus that drove past after Cumberbatch threw down his phone could have been the point when Holmes pushed his dead adversary over in his place, yet it doesn’t explain why the person falling seemed to be alive on the way down.This theory fits in nicely with the idea that the name Rich Brook (Moriarty’s alias) is loosely German for Reichenback and as such the title of the episode falls into place, yet there are plenty of unanswered questions. Most theories hold the delay between Dr Watson seeing Sherlock fall and him reaching the body as crucial, but this one utilises the gap between the point when the Napoleon of crime shot himself and Watson arrived upon the scene. The bus that drove past after Cumberbatch threw down his phone could have been the point when Holmes pushed his dead adversary over in his place, yet it doesn’t explain why the person falling seemed to be alive on the way down.
Likelihood – 5/10 

3. Mycroft Was In On It
Mycroft Holmes is certainly a cold fish, but we thought the reaction to his brother’s demise was dislocated even by his standards. He even looked a bit bored during the scene in which he read about Sherlock’s death in the newspaper. If you also consider the way he completely sold his brother out to his most deadly enemy, something doesn’t quite fit. Maybe Sherlock realised that his death would be inevitable as the scandal rose and enlisted Mycroft to help him out by planting an idea in Moriarty’s mind. But what? And how?Mycroft Holmes is certainly a cold fish, but we thought the reaction to his brother’s demise was dislocated even by his standards. He even looked a bit bored during the scene in which he read about Sherlock’s death in the newspaper. If you also consider the way he completely sold his brother out to his most deadly enemy, something doesn’t quite fit. Maybe Sherlock realised that his death would be inevitable as the scandal rose and enlisted Mycroft to help him out by planting an idea in Moriarty’s mind. But what? And how?
Likelihood – 7/10

4. MollyBy far the most popular theory is that the often-sidelined Molly helped Sherlock fake his own death. There are two cast iron pieces of evidence for this. First of all, she had a stack of corpses at her disposal and could have fixed any autopsy. Secondly, Sherlock called her back and told her that she was important just before his death. The second part of that conversation should explain everything when it’s revealed. Also she fancied his pants off and would have done anything for him. That’s actually four reasons now we think about it..
Likelihood – 9/10 

5. Sherlock was the bloke on the bike.How exactly this would work is unclear, but a large proportion of the internet community are determined that Holmes was actually the bloke on the bike who bumped into Watson, delaying him from getting to the body. The question of how he got down from the roof break-neck speed (you know what we mean) is another puzzler. Hmm..
Likelihood – 2/10 

6. Dummy from their roomIf you watch the episode again, there are countless references that appear for mere seconds, but could be crucial in the final mystery and one such prop is the mannequin hanging from a noose in Sherlock’s flat. When you remember that it was Holmes who suggested that he and Moriarty meet on the roof of St Barts, it becomes clear that he could have prepared the location in advance with all manner of tools to kid us. Much is also being made of the rubbish truck which was seen hanging around just before his fall and the fact that Sherlock wanted Doctor Watson to “stay exactly where he was!” Obviously his location was vital if he was to believe that Holmes was dead. Maybe Sherlock dropped into the rubbish truck as the bus passed and then Watson saw the dummy falling. Sherlock then swapped places with the dummy as the bike hit Watson. Yet if Sherlock jumped before the dummy – who pushed it off the roof?
Likelihood – 6/10

7. All people on the pavement – including cyclist – were Sherlock’s peopleIf any body-swap/de-masking/dummy-replacement took place then Holmes would almost certainly have needed help from those pedestrians, who could have aided him while delaying Watson from getting to the scene. Why would he trust a load of people and not Dr Watson though? Possibly because he knew that if the Doctor believed him dead then everyone else would as well. Some boffins have also pointed to the squash ball that Homes was playing with and suggested that he could have used the ‘Squash ball in the Armpit’ trick to disguise his pulse from Watson. Points for cleverness.
Likelihood – 7/10 

8. Baskerville Drug administered to WatsonThis theory suggests that Holmes administered the drug from the previous episode to Watson and put the idea of him killing himself in his head. As such Watson was hallucinating when he saw Sherlock fall. Plausible, but it doesn’t take into account the fact that Moffat, Gattiss & Co would consider it the height of laziness to use the same ploy in two separate episodes. For that reason, probably a non-starter.
Likelihood – 1/10 

9. ScotomaScotoma essentially refers to the power of suggestion and the affect it can have over what a person thinks they have seen. Related to the previous theory, many have suggested that when the Beeb give us the big reveal in 2013, it will actually transpire that someone completely different was standing on top of St Barts and we mis-saw him. There are two ways of doing this; with skillful filming and clever editing or by simply showing us the correct thing and then telling us we were mistaken at a later date.
Likelihood – 6/10 

10. Moriarty Is Not DeadWe really hope this one’s true – how good was Andrew Scott? Anyone who has read the books will know that the idea of one of Holmes or Moriarty striking such a winning blow (ie. killing the other) was unlikely to happen, as Conan-Doyle emphasised how closely matched they were. Essentially they were both struggling for an edge, so if Holmes can return from beyond the grave, why not his arch-enemy?
Likelihood – 5/10

Thoughts for the Brain - the measure of time

We live in time, whether we realise it or not. Time is ultimately the product of entropy. The universe is a closed system travelling from perfect order to perfect disorder. The unevenness of the universe at its earliest known moments is what produced history, we have galaxies, stars, planets and people. The Earth itself is an open system so, within this small context, we experience counter-tendencies, such as the origin of species or the rise of human civilisation.

The experience of time is relative, either to entropy or counter-entropy. In the case of humanity it seems scientists are homing in on a theory of time based on the repetition of actions against the activity of oscillator cells in the brain. A well-developed mind is actually very good at estimating time, at least in certain contexts say catching a ball, playing a piece of music, driving a car and so on. 

The idea that time is relative is less interesting than the suggestion that the estimation of time is based upon practical activity: the role of labour in the development of time. Although it must be said there is a conflict between the relative nature of time and the capitalist prerogative to homogenise and quantify time. The meaning of time changes through different epochs, changes with the application of new technology. Perhaps mostly importantly the perception of time is different for different classes; different classes are different sets of relationships within the world of work.

Generally speaking instant communication has decentralised work. Some (not exhaustive) observations:

1)    The difficulty of commuting between home and work has led to the rise of flexitime. This combined with mobile communication has eroded the traditional sense of time.

2)    The laptop allows much white-collar work to be done on the move.

3)    Manufacturing, especially high-end manufacturing, often takes place in (spatially) long chains. Firms save money by improving freight and communication at the expense of stockpiling, in other words by using just in time delivery.

4)    This does not overcome the labour/capital antagonism, it just reorganises it. While under late capitalism whole swathes of our society are no longer dominated by large factories (the traditionally recognised concentrations of workers), this means, from our point of view, different and sometimes new sections of the working class have sectional strength. In this case communication, freight, IT and so on. Small sections of workers in the chain of production can also have an impact, as can workers in primary input industries.

To round it off!

Yellow Submarine



The best Beatles film, the one true masterpiece, and they weren't in it. The Beatles were immortalised in cartoon in 1965 for American TV, the show took the band's public personas, established by the film A Hard Day's Night, and made them even broader. The film Yellow Submarine was somewhat of a correction. The new, pepper-fied personas were the Far-Out one (check out John's opening, chemical transformation), the Debonair One, the Mystical One (it's all in the mind) and the Downbeat One...

OK so Ringo didn't change that much. It's worth noting that John first rejected the Showbiz Beatles then he rejected the Psychedelic Beatles as equally potent fictions, before finally idea of The Beatles itself. They were variations of the bourgeois conventions of the entertainment industry. His first gesture was of course the nude cover of Two Virgins, literally stripping away everything. Whether he achieved sincere reality in art is another matter.

The song Yellow Submarine is a gem. Paul wrote it as a children's song and a feature for Ringo in 1966. By 1967 it was already being included in songbooks, alongside music hall, nursery rhyme and folk song classics. The lyric was written in a similar manner to Eleanor Rigby, starting with Paul and ending with a committee. Instead of achieving clarity it got cloudier as it went along: an early sign, perhaps, of the slackening that would later overtake The Beatles lyrics.

Z... Zed... Uh, Zebra Crossing



We made it, just... Don't applaud then, sheesh! There are no Beatles songs beginning with Z. Z of course marks the end of the alphabet. Abbey Road was the final album recorded by The Beatles, ending with a song called The End. It also featured a cover showing the zebra crossing outside Abbey Road. So, here, enjoy one of The Beatles finest achievements, the bittersweet end to their career. The Abbey Road medley.

Mo Beatles...

Within You and Without You

This is practically the same song as Tomorrow Never Knows. They have a similar lyrical subject, a similar musical foundation1, similar structure (verse/chorus followed by an apparently free section before returning to the verse/chorus) and they are almost in the same key. No surprise then that a mash-up (eww – hate that phrase) was eventually made from the two songs.

Within You… does not have raw excitement of Tomorrow Never Knows. It is emphatically not a rock song. Calling the lyric didactic would be like calling the Sun hot. The true beauty is in the middle section, the musical dialogue first between the sitar and the dilruba, then between the Indian and Western classical instruments together. It is beautiful music made for stereo, hi-fi sound.

Xmas records

Another tough crowbar, but it’s worth it. The Beatles management set up a fan club for the band. The club was soon overwhelmed by correspondence. The tradition of the Beatles Christmas Flexi-Disc was established in 1963 as a way to reach all the fans personally.

The records were quite informal affairs. To begin with they were a mixture of seasons greetings, carols and Christmas songs. As the years went by the band started introducing poems, short comedy songs and skits. 1967’s fan club record was a mock-radio play. It also featured a complete song, Christmas Time Is Here Again. Not a masterpiece, a deserved rarity.

An offshoot of the Christmas albums was a bootleg called A Laugh with The Beatles, which also featured outtakes from the Christmas records and other sessions that are inchoate, risqué but often hilarious.

1. The tambura, a stringed instrument, similar to a lute, used in Indian classical music. It is played with open strings and produces an overtone rich sound by intermittent contact with a wide, arched bridge.

Let's start wrapping this shit up...

Sie Liebt Dich

Ooh, leftfield. While on tour in January 1964 The Beatles carried out the first of only two recording sessions abroad1. They recorded German language versions of I Want to Hold Your Hand and She Loves You, as well as the basic track for Can’t Buy Me Love. They were reluctant to do this, despite it being then music industry standard practice. There were no more lyric translations. In their own way The Beatles probably did as much to promote English around the world as Hollywood and the British empire.

Twist and Shout

This is another of The Beatles master-covers. The song was first made a hit by the Isley Brothers. On that occasion it was recorded with a loose, Latin swing. The Beatles transformed it into another hysterical blockbuster. They used it to close many shows. It was the last song recorded for the album Please, Please Me. John’s voice was on the point of giving out. The tension and energy is palpable throughout, and the sense of triumph at the end audible, Paul shouts “hey!”

USSR, Back in the

Could this have been Paul’s response to John’s Revolution? The John Birch Society thought so. It’s more generally considered to be a joke, albeit one at the expense of the Cold War itself3. Artists such as The Beach Boys and Chuck Berry lauded America, its localities, culture, traditions etc in song. Why wouldn’t a Soviet rock star do the same? Back in the USSR is an affectionate parody of California Girls. The point being a young man’s enthusiasms were the same either side of the Iron Curtain.

But there were no Soviet rock stars. The Beatles music was officially proscribed in Russia. But there was a thriving underground in Beatle (and other rock and roll) recordings, passed around on tape and, quite ingeniously, adapted x-ray plates.

Void, The AKA Tomorrow Never Knows2

The most spectacular piece of music they ever produced. The lead instrument on this occasion is the drums, lashing away over an insistent drone and lazy, lobbing melody. Nothing is spared in terms of aural trickery and for once the CGI serves to enhance the plot. The lyrics are an adaption of passages of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert’s The Psychedelic Experience, a book intended as a socio-spiritual guide to LSD, which the authors saw as a modern sacrament and a mode of revolution.

The theory of psychedelic revolution is based upon Freudian theory of the personality. Put simply the basis of each personality is inner desire, the id, outward repression, the superego and the point where these meet, the ego or outward personality4. LSD dissolves the subject’s ego, their sense of self. By releasing the id and countering the superego, psychedelics affect an inner revolution of liberty against repression.

Even before dealing with the internal logic of an argument that treats liberated desire as unconditionally good, there are difficulties with such a model. Psychedelics demand time and energy, they are very difficult to absorb into everyday life. The demand to Turn On, Tune In and Drop Out is in the end elitist, those who drop out are those who can afford to. Revolutions do indeed change the way people perceive the world and themselves, but they do this because they change the way people relate to the world and each other. They overturn social relations, objective social relations.

1. The second wasn’t quite a Beatles session. George Harrison recruited a group of Indian musicians to perform on his Wonderwall Music soundtrack. It was the first Beatles solo album. An off-cut instrumental became the basis of the song The Inner Light, the first George Harrison to make a single.
2. We give the working title along with the published title in order to fill out the letter V.
3. There is another story, relating to a whacky legend, that The Beatles played a secret gig (at some point, choose your own date) in Russia for the Nomenklatura and that the song is a reference to that occasion.
4. Of course, censorship is internalised as self-censorship, personal ethics and so on, desire is often manufactured, people made to want things they would otherwise not desire.

More derivative Beatles stuff

Quinn the Eskimo

When I said almost this is the proof. There is nothing out there remotely related to The Beatles in any way beginning with the letter Q. This is it, a fragment of a song from rehearsals in January 1969 for the abandoned concert.

The song was written by Bob Dylan, originally recorded with The Band in what became The Basement Tapes. The Tapes… are an odd collection. The album was released eight years after the songs were recorded. They were laid down in the informal setting of The Big Pink, a country house in upstate New York. The recording was primitive too. Sometimes just a single microphone was hung out to catch the music going on, the music which seemed reflect a return to roots.

Though he seemed to be abandoning the scene just as the counterculture was taking a beating on the streets, Dylan was ahead of the game in some respects in retiring to Woodstock. The fall out from the ruling class assault on the counterculture led some into cultism, some into terrorism, and some into a back-to-the-land rural communism, though these elements were often jumbled up. To American musicians a rootsy, laid-back sound suggested an attempt to connect with tradition as well as heartland culture. In Britain perhaps it suggested a less hectic, more soulful alternative to urban pop and psychedelia1.

The Basement Tapes were passed around the rock elite as a bootleg. George Harrison in particular was a fan, though The Basement Tapes clearly helped form the idea that the band should get back to some kind of simplicity after recording long and complex albums.

Despite being fairly well wrung out The Beatles recording and touring career still yields a fair few bootleg records. Of course there were hours of music recorded during the Get Back/Let It Be. Most of it like the music above, stray fragments. There are plenty of live recordings and new studio outtakes still occasionally appear, like Revolution (take 20), the missing link between the original Revolution and Revolution 9 (more of which next).

The glittering prize is a genuine version of Carnival of Light; an audio freak out The Beatles recorded and gave to an early hippie gathering, The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream April 1967 in Alexandra Palace. One copy exists with Paul McCartney, another was reckoned to be somewhere in the United States. There have been numerous fakes made, based on a written description by a writer who was allowed a listen to the master tape. They may well be superior (if you like audio collages) to the original.

Revolution (1, 9, 20 and unnumbered)

The worldwide youth counterculture, such as it existed, was already under attack in 1966. January of that year western governments began proscribing LSD. There were battles in numerous American cities, where the state tried to close young people’s clubs and drive them off the street. Britain experienced its own mini-counterculture clampdown in 1967, with a peppering of high-profile drug raids. The International Times, which had been set up as the paper of the UK underground was raided2 (The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream was a benefit to pay for IT’s legal costs). The Beatles were MBE inoculated. The raid on the Rolling Stones that saw Mick Jagger and Keith Richards jailed has to wait several hours for members of The Beatles to leave the premises.

This was going through John’s mind as he sat in Rishikesh writing songs. Despite the undoubted turn toward confrontation, John Lennon would have had to have been positively psychic to have written a commentary on 1968, the year of revolution, in January of that year.

To start with an obvious point, while it’s not the Internationale, Revolution is not an anti-revolutionary lyric. It is a dialogue with the left (as Lennon saw it) and it starts with a gesture of solidarity, “we all want to change the world”. The first two verses are understood to have been written in India, the final verse back in Britain.

The first verse is Lennon the hippy idealist. He wants peaceful change. The second verse is a mixture of Lennon the skeptic and Lennon the realist: “we all want to see the plan”. The last verse is the pay off. Lennon, the rich counterculture figure is being bugged by young Maoists pleading with him for support. Lennon acknowledges them but distrusts them at the same time.

The song may have been a “lamentable cry of petty-bourgeois fear” as the Black Dwarf described it, but we know being determines consciousness. John was temperamentally a socialist but an artistic intellectual. He was neither practically or politically capable, and therefore not cut out for political struggle. By 1968 he was a very rich man with almost incalculable mechanical royalties. As acute as he may have been Lennon could not have predicted how profound and potent the word “revolution” would become that year. He was proud of the song and wanted it to be an A-side. Having deferred to McCartney during Sgt Pepper Lennon had come awake in 68. By not backing down he painted himself in a corner. His commitment to peace and a series of clownish stunts to promote it began here.

None the less as the band was laying down the backing track on the night of May 30^th-31^stParis was still a cauldron3 and British students were beginning a wave of their own occupations. After one particular take The Beatles settled into a two chord groove and just kept playing, lashed on by orgasmic rasps from John. The track was now over ten minutes long.

Excited by the result John and his new partner Yoko Ono worked on the song, adding layers of effects and vocalisations, trying to create what he felt to be the sound of revolution. This version lay buried until Take 20 appeared on Youtube three years ago.

The luxury of second thoughts led John to excise the anarchic groove and rerecord the original portion of the song at a faster tempo, which became the single version.

The anarchic groove, as I’ve now called it, ended up as the basis of Revolution 9.

Revolution 9 is far from a chaotic mess or worthy but grim piece of art it is often taken for. It is not chaotic but built round a tonal axis of Bb/Eb. It has a number of repeated motifs, the most obvious being “number 9”. It even has published lyrics. The revolution it suggests is the Revolution in the Head, the countercultural/Freudian theory of emancipation, the potential lying dormant in each individual, a potent mixture of memory, sexuality and creativity, waiting to be unleashed. We can pass over whether this was a realistic model of revolution and, if so, whether Beatles records were an appropriate agency. The White Album has sold tens of millions of copies over the years. Even if they only listened to it once millions people were exposed to avant-guard symphonic music and the ideas associated with it they might otherwise never have come across.

Revolution 9 is perhaps the most significant cultural act ever carried out by The Beatles.

1. It was also just about this time rock stars started buying up country mansions, mobile studios and whatnot.
2. An interesting story (at least I find it interesting) there was a retaliation raid by the New Left paper, the Black Dwarf. Wikipedia describes how: “The paper… published a detailed floor-by-floor guide to Scotland Yard, complete with diagrams, descriptions of locks on particular doors and snippets of overheard conversation in the offices of Special Branch. The anonymous author, or "blue dwarf," as he styled himself, described how he perused police files, and even claimed to have sampled named brands of whisky in the Commissioner's office. A day or two later the Daily Telegraph announced that the "raid" had forced the police to withdraw and re-issue all security passes”. How cool is that? Anyone who genuinely knows more about this please get in touch.
3. Though the French right, which had been in hiding for two weeks during the general strike, had literally just got back on the streets. The revolution in France, such as it was, was on the wane, even if no one realised it at the time.

More derivative, unnecessary guff

Ob La Di Ob La Da



Paul's approximation of Blue Beat, Ob La Di Ob La Da was one of the first things to sour the White Album sessions. With Brian Epstein dead and George Martin withdrawing from his former role Paul stepped up as an all-purpose leader. The band were moving apart in terms of taste, lifestyle and personal priorities (and just plain growing up). Paul  was not the authority figure who could dragoon through the usual routine, he was just too close to the rest of the Beatles. No wonder the sessions rambled over seven months.

It's also an example of Paul's very different sexism to John. Of course to criticise The Beatles for being sexist is to criticise society for being sexist. Nonetheless John's muse was a woman and his attitude toward women was conflicted and often nasty, which made his art frequently compelling if sometimes queasy. When Paul wrote about women in general1 he was positively foursquare. This is the original song that says "if you like it then you should put a ring on it".

This of course changed with time.The Beatles went through the sixties and encountered the women's liberation movement. A shift perhaps in Paul's writing, Lady Madonna, a song that celebrates, perhaps even sentimentalises, but nonetheless acknowledges the relentless drudgery of working class motherhood, the genius of the mother who somehow makes ends meet.

Penny Lane



What would The Beatles projected album about Liverpool have sounded like or said? It's a fascinating prospect. Penny Lane is of course obliquely about James Penny, slave trader, anti-abolitionist and city father who had an area of the city named after him. Would a Beatles album about Liverpool touched on the source of the city's wealth?

But instead we have a prime piece of psychedelia. Penny Lane is every bit as far out as it's companion Strawberry Fields. As Revolution in the Head so clearly points out, in the lyric it's simultaneously summer and winter, rainy and shiny. The music is built on massed crotchet pianos, whose tone shifts relentlessly: listen next time.

1. His songs about Jane Asher were quite different and quite Lennonish, We Can Work It Out being a prime example.

Further pretentiousness

Happiness is a Warm Gun

Is a textbook example of just what John Lennon’s genius was. For a great musician he wasn’t actually that great at music. Amongst other things he was a rhythm guitarist with a poor sense of rhythm. His talent, in terms of composition, was being able to capitalise on his lack of fluency leading him to original ideas that would not occur to more proficient musicians. The Times music journalists famously complimented Lennon on his use of Aeolian cadences, John hadn’t a clue what they were.

Working with Paul McCartney and to a lesser extent with George Martin this tendency was harnessed. As time passed Lennon and McCartney depended less each other1, John’s compositions were offered up metrically dishevelled. He began composing on piano to surprise himself. He started working from words rather than an initial musical phrase. Phrases spilled over bars, sections expanded and contracted when needed (e.g. Revolution – “we-e-ell you know”, an extra two beats latched onto a 12-bar blues). What is Happiness is a Warm Gun? Is it a suite? There’s certainly no verse-chorus structure to it. Try counting the beats at various points. It’s utterly mad and yet the song rings true.

I Want to Hold Your Hand

The blockbuster Beatles single, the vertiginous peak of a chain starting with Love Me Do. Much can be made of how early Lennon/McCartney songs were written to generate white-hot hysteria. There is a contrary undertow in several of their early lyrics.

Please, Please Me is of course about John’s passion for oral sex. Despite being palpably more manic, I Want to Hold Your Hand is lyrically chaste. Can’t By Me Love went one step further in having the singer address object of their affection as “my friend”. These are not necessarily disparate elements. There is of course a cool aspect to sexual liberation, specifically casual sex, disengaged passion. This was almost certainly not considered by John and Paul, whose lyrics at the time were place fillers.

Julia

It’s well established that Julia Lennon was her son’s muse. She was a physical embodiment of the concept of anima, Lennon’s personality reflected back in female form, a role later embodied by Yoko Ono. If you accept that theory you can see Julia cropping up time and again in John’s lyrics, as the former lover, possibly dead in Yes It Is, the symbol of bondage and suffering in Girl, the girl with kaleidoscope eyes in Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, possibly the source of rapture in Across the Universe. There are numerous Lennon-penned songs about betrayal and departure. Lennon’s grief mixed with anger at her loss. All his closest relationships were tinged with violence to some degree2.

This is John’s final song to Julia while in The Beatles. Despite being something of an exorcism, judging by the Plastic Ono Band album it clearly failed.

1. And on George Martin, who began withdrawing from production duties after Sergeant Pepper.

2. For instance it’s reasonable to speculate (while admitting there’s no definitive proof) there was at least a sexual element to John’s relationship with Stuart Sutcliffe and that John felt a degree of guilt over his death from a brain haemorrhage, having had a violent brawl with Sutcliffe years earlier.

Thought's for the Brain - why're you talking to me like that?

Have you ever had somebody walk up to you at work, grinning away manically, and you just think “what do you want from me?” I have been pondering some concurrent phenomena, modern management techniques and systemic infantilsation.

It is a shame, in a way, that there are so many socialists who become teachers or lecturers. Not because the teaching profession shouldn’t be organised or that socialist teachers can’t open minds or make a difference in young people’s lives. Unfortunately the primary product of the education system is not knowledge (if it is tell me all you remember of trigonometry or irregular French verbs – these are just examples). The primary product is habit and deference, and these things are instilled despite the best intentions of the best teachers. That’s why we have an education system.

Why do managers who want to coerce a single individual shut them away in a small room? Why do managers who want to railroad a self-conscious group of workers gather the workers together and present their plans in a faux-democratic manner, called consultation? These are techniques used on people from the age of five.

Hierarchical authority relies on dependence and passivity. It relies on the inner child. Even at the best of times it is very hard to shake your formative education. This is a key aspect in why during revolutions without even realising it people given back what they have won. They cannot imagine a world without managers, bureaucrats, elected politicians, police officers etc, who in normal times they rely on.

It’s is the commonly considered theory that human beings evolved because they were neotenic apes, they preserved juvenile features into maturity. If social management depends infantilisation there is now a worrying trend of preserving social aspects of childhood into adulthood; middle youth, helicopter parenting. They're impressionistic examples, not to cast aspersions on anybody. We are not seeing a moral breakdown so much as describing facts. Here is an article written on the eve of the great crash weighing up the work prospects of Generation Y, who according to this are needy, moralistic, tech-dependent and crave formal structure and personal affirmation. With declining workforce numbers the author advises managers to get with Generation Y’s programme. Of course with mass youth unemployment these days bosses don’t have worry anymore. Young people, especially those on the government’s work programme (3.5% overall ‘success’ rate  ), are even more dependent on the graces of the rich and powerful. 

More pretentious fun...

Get Back

If I get my brain on enough I’ll jam together some trite observations about the Get Back/Let It Be disaster, musical composition, roots music and suchlike, but for now I want make trite observations about The Beatles and Race. 

The Beatles were very, very lucky people. They found a manager, possibly the only in Britain, who did not want to ruthlessly exploit them for short term gain. They also found the only producer who could cultivate and discipline their talent with tact and grace (practically everything they in terms of song writing and recording was unselfconsciously original – example, they insisted on calling the middle sections of their songs “middle eights” regardless of whether they had eight bars in them or not, George Martin went with it).

They were a curious and open minded group. When they moved to London at the beginning of their fame they were by chance they found themselves slap bang in most culturally rarefied part of Britain. Everything (and everyone) they encountered was soon radiated out to Western Youth through their records, and be it African-American rock and rollers, Indian sitar players or Nigerian percussionists, it was hail-fellow-well-met.

I think the American Dream had a concurrent meaning for African-Americans and British youth. Chuck Berry was a witty and perceptive lyricist who appealed to the thoughts and feelings of young, white Americans as a way to sell records. It was a life he could only write about from the outside. Though the circumstances were vastly different, the same was true of young Britons like Lennon and McCartney. All four of The Beatles had no truck with racism; they had heroes who were black, they played with black musicians, they refused to play to segregated audiences in America.

There is also another dimension. Whether it was the case or not, the cultural change perceived in the middle of the Twentieth Century was away from rigid and plotted forms to liberated, sprawling forms, e.g. in dance it meant the waltz was superseded by the twist. Rightly or wrongly this was attributed to increasing ethnic minority participation in cultural life. Black culture was seen as young, vital and alive, traditional white culture old, ossified and stale.

Enoch Powell’s (rightly) infamous Rivers of Blood speech was a watershed in racism. Before it racism was understood as white supremacy. What Powell sniffed out was a change, thanks to post-colonialism, racist ideology was changing into a defensive white nationalism. If we’re talking culture we must acknowledge that love of black music does not preclude racism toward black people, just ask Eric Clapton.

Get Back, one of The Beatles most successful late-era singles, began as a satire on Enoch Powell. This is what we’re given to believe about the Commonwealth Song. The ironic intent in lyrics about not digging Pakistanis taking jobs was not sufficiently clear, and the lyric was wisely dropped. There were two other occasions where The Beatles possibly let themselves down over this issue.

The first lay buried in archives and bootlegs for thirty years. What’s the New Mary Jane, John Lennon’s anarchic masterpiece that wasn’t, is sung in a ‘comic’ broken English and a mild Indian accent. There is no great malicious intent behind it, though the lyric is a veiled attack on someone in The Beatles immediate circles. It goes to show that prejudice can manifest itself in unexpected ways, even amongst the best of us.

The other, far more blatant, example is the film Help. Their second film was a pleasant enough comic adventure. We get to see the boys in colour this time too. Help is marred by an outstandingly racist parody of an eastern sacrificial cult (portrayed by British actors using unrealistic Indian accents) that drives the main plot. Of course it’s not desperately malicious (though that isn’t a reason not to object) and The Beatles did not write the film, and yes it can probably be put down to ‘the times’, but surely someone the band knew in 1965 could have flagged it up. Who knows?

Anyway, this, I think, is the last version of Get Back they performed at their rooftop concert, i.e. the last thing The Beatles ever performed live:

Thoughts for the Brain - bespoke reality

Every moral philosophy presupposes a sociology, so said Alasdair MacIntyre. I’ve never read him but there’s no doubt this is true. In order to appraise anything in our society you have to understand what this society is and what point you are appraising it from. Even if you don’t accept the results of Marx’s study of political economy you have to accept he was on the right track.

We are lucky in Britain. Even at this eleventh hour we still have politics and public life constructed around the class point of view. There has been some talk about whether the recent presidential elections signal a return to reality in American public life; this is an example. The American ruling class has successfully prevented public life so far from forming on a class basis. This has not just involved fraud but an awful lot of force. Pre-World War Two class struggle was exceptionally bloody.

No ruling class is ever able to completely insulate itself. Despite the fantasies encouraged by skyscrapers, gated communities and industrial peonage that survives even today, 40 years after the Civil Rights movement, the American ruling class continues to ideologically organise the classes below it. America is a country where the right-wing mobilises, over issues such as tax and land values, against desegregation, reproductive rights, LGBT equality and immigration… and this is before we get into the true conspiracist fringe, and the pro-war rallies, yes, pro-war rallies, rallies for the powerful while they’re still in power, get a brain morans.

So often America has been described as undergoing a French Revolution in reverse, where the sans-culottes restore the ancient regime. The Republicans are like Jacobins in the negative sense, fanatics devoted to hammering reality into the shape of ideology. Remove any objective basis from politics and it will be dominated by lurid fantasies: Obama is a Muslim, general relativity is a liberal plot, gays caused Hurricane Sandy... one could go on. The sense of relief, not just with the presidential election, is understandable. Maybe the tide has turned. But we are dealing with the Democrats, who are perfectly happy not to capitalise on the current liberal shift in America.

We must beware of what the current Tory onslaught releases. We have no end of free-market fanatics, there are oil enriched climate change deniers in the cabinet, anti-abortionists on the benches, an ‘anti-wind farm agenda’ of all things in the Tory party and creationism in Gove’s ‘free’ schools. Part of the ruling class strategy of austerity is the struggle to remove class from the political equation. In this sense Blue Labour is prescient, though it shows the party admitting defeat before the battle has even really been engaged. The Labour party dare not appeal to its base to support the things it was founded to achieve.

We must head all this off before it comes to pass. Class must stay central to public life.

Tuppence for the war

It's hard to know what to say about the Israeli onslaught in Gaza that hasn't already been said. This is the fourth such assault the Israeli state has carried out on its neighbours I think in ten years. Lenin's Tomb is of course doing a bang up job. Shabogan Graffiti has some excellent posts on the barbaric propaganda coming out of the BBC. 

At a surface level it's an utter paradox why the right would hate such a consistent and successful establishment propaganda tool. We forget sometimes that the ruling class (with its competing empires) is not homogeneous. It needs a state in part to make fractions of the class, such as the network of power round News International, knuckle under for the greater bourgeois good. It needs accepted 'neutral' ideological outlets. The BBC is neutral when it comes to intra ruling class conflicts. It is though fiercely partisan when it comes to class on class conflict, state on state conflict.

Only six or so weeks ago he Israeli leader Binyamin Netanyahu was in the United Nations shilling for war on Iran. It seems he'll have to make do with kicking the Palestinians, again. He'll get all the help he could ask from the BBC.

This is also a test for the Arab Spring, especially the Egyptians. This is the Egyptian IS statement on the war:

“Today the Zionist enemy is preparing a ground attack on Gaza. But Egyptian gas still flows to Israel, the Rafah border crossing is still closed—and the Camp David agreement remains in force. 

“Why are Morsi, his advisers, ministers and organisation waiting? They should put in practice what they always preached before coming to power—cutting all ties with the Zionist enemy, abolishing the Camp David agreement, deploying the Egyptian army in Sinai and permanently reopening the Rafah crossing.”

X all the Y!

Dorian Lynskey is a very good culture writer, partly because, although left-leaning he’s scrupulously fair in a world full of NME-style, Hunter S Thompson impersonators. Careful liberal doubt works much better in culture than it does in politics. He’s also very good because he gets it about right when it comes to how important culture is.

Culture is an essential frippery. No one lives or dies on its progress and yet it informs everything we do, especially when you regard culture in its broadest forms, language, manners etc.

Lack of access to culture is a good indicator of poverty. The link here is an illustration (a small illustration) of the frustrating paradox of our society. We live in a world of such plenty, yet so often so many people are not able to access it. In the case of the author, who is firmly middle-class, it is poverty of time, so many books to read but little opportunity read them.

No one wants to end up fretting over first-world problems (like becoming a parent who has mistaken themselves for a film studies undergraduate) but it's worth asking, who are these cultural riches for?

The X number of things to Y before you die phenomenon is a class assertion, people with the time and the money (33 Revolutions Per Minute by Dorian Lynskey, recommended retail price £17.99 - cheap for some, I guess) to enjoy the legacy of 6,000 years of human endeavour. The end extreme is How to Spend It- the Financial Times “website of worldly pleasures”, for people presumably who people who’re so rich who’ve been through consumerism and come out the other side… How to spend it, indeed!

All this is without even getting to the question of whether a society that defines itself by the consumption of artifacts is a healthy society. Modern day hipsters are not creative by and large but 'creative' consumers.