Letters

Book battles

Despite not wanting to miss anything in the Respect row, I attended the annual anarchist book fare last Saturday. For those who aren’t familiar, it is similar to a decentralised Marxism event with bookstalls, workshops and networking. The left and the anarchists have had a long history of what could only be described as organised mistrust since the First International.

Memories run deep with the anarchists. When I introduced myself as a communist, the ‘remember Kronstadt’ types came out of the woodwork. As the day went on, I was blamed for the defeat of the Republican forces in Spain, of the Hungarian revolt, of the Prague Spring and so on.

Despite the political differences, there were two things that stood out during the day. Firstly, the increasing popularity of platformism, as demonstrated by the Workers’ Socialist Movement. This belongs to the left anarchist tradition that supported Lenin and the communists. According to Victor Serge, Roshchin even tried to work out an “anarchist theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat”. Speaking before a group of Moscow anarchists in 1920, he exhorted his colleagues to cooperate with Lenin’s party. “It is the duty of every anarchist,” he declared, “to work whole-heartedly with the communists, who are the advance guard of the revolution. Leave your theories alone, and do practical work for the reconstruction of Russia. The need is great, and the Bolsheviks welcome you.”

Secondly, the incredible level of sectarianism between the anarchists themselves. In seeking out and threatening those with whom they had had web-based or online differences, some displayed a level of behaviour that in any disciplined organisation would have led to expulsion. There is sadly also a tradition within anarchism of anti-communism, anarcho-futurism and nihilism. With internet and web board-type forums becoming more popular, there needs to be some discussion on the left about internet democracy and a bill of rights for board users.

Book battles

INLA’s past

Mark Kevson, in his original letter, makes the claim that “the Irish National Liberation Army has a history of violence, terrorism, internal feuding and organised crime.” Whilst I will refrain from an attempt to sanitise past actions of the INLA, I feel it necessary a few truths are laid bare.

The INLA does indeed have a history of violence, terrorism and internal feuding - this is not something that can be denied. It is a revolutionary organisation and a product of the conditions prevalent within society at that time. I find it strange that an avid reader of Marxist websites would neglect to mention that the Bolsheviks too were guilty of these three points.

The Irish republican socialist movement collectively have challenged those who claim the INLA are involved in crime, whether drug dealing or otherwise, to provide the evidence. It is 10 years since Irish Republican Socialist Party spokesperson Kevin McQuillan challenged journalists at the burial of a volunteer in Dublin and not one piece of evidence has been forthcoming since from any quarter.

Mark continues: “The IRSP has no standing within the Irish working class and is in fact a minuscule organisation.” Of all leftwing organisations within Ireland of any hue, the IRSP is the only one that has a strong base within nationalist working class areas. It is safe to say the majority of the left in Belfast would be more accustomed to Stranmillis than the Short Strand.

In Mark’s second letter (October 25) he claims “the IRSP do not renounce their past”. This is correct. We do not deny or renounce our past. To do so is entirely dishonest and not based upon Marxist methods. Collectively we have painstakingly analysed our past and drawn strong lessons for the road ahead. I would recommend Mark gives the Ta power document careful consideration.

If Mark is genuinely seeking answers as to the basis for the International Marxist Tendency’s relationship with the IRSP, then I am certain he could arrange to meet the relevant organisations and discuss the matter.

INLA’s past
INLA’s past

‘Innocent’ art

We must be grateful that Gordon Downie’s latest instalment of his credo (September 27) somewhat clarifies his thinking. He reproaches Wieland Hoban with misunderstanding high modernism’s “fundamental aesthetic and political premises”, whose principle is a “non-representational and non-mimetic art”. The “requirement” here is that “the medium should be the bearer of content.”

In other words, no realism - no imitation of life - no simulation of recognisable non-musical human activity. I have no especial quarrel with Downie in the latter regard: in a socialist utopia, encouragement of an infinite spectrum of artistic endeavours and methodologies would be a sine qua non, irrespective of whether there existed a majority or only a tiny minority audience for such creations. In any case, I write as someone who breakfasts off Harrison Birtwistle, lunches off Brian Ferneyhough and looks to George Benjamin for a little light music. I also suffer from a serious addiction to the paintings of Piet Mondrian and Mark Rothko, the pinnacles of ‘subjectless’ art.

It is when we get down to specifics that the dry bones of contention start snapping out of the cupboard. Downie projects himself as a saintly ascetic, or puritanical mystic, who devotes himself to unflinchingly resisting the encroachments of capitalist ‘commodification’. In his musical martyrdom, he is strongly conscious of a spiritual bond between himself and the work of the constructivist artist, Richard Paul Lohse, for whom “the medium is the message”. Is it? Downie chose to have a painting by Lohse reproduced with his article. On first seeing it, it immediately reminded me of a sheet of printed music paper - an item in ordinary life. Downie will, no doubt, claim that my impression is purely arbitrary or subjective. Would he be claiming then that his impression is objective?

Lohse is heavily indebted to the influence of Mondrian and his grid system. The trouble is, after Mondrian’s death his work was embraced by fashion, was grotesquely appropriated by the culture of kitsch, thus ending up as a cliché of poster art and even as a feature of wallpaper design. In other words, it became grist to the mill of the greedy world of ‘commodification’. Can we claim that Lohse was totally unaffected by such commonplace visual experiences? Commodification gets at us in more than obvious ways.

Can there realistically be such a thing as an ‘innocent’ artist or composer under capitalism - ie, someone totally untainted? I doubt it. Not even with subventions from the Welsh Arts Council or the BBC, the soft cultural face of liberal capitalism. If Downie is an ‘innocent’, then he is so only in the sense of his being a Caliban, imprisoned in an island of dreams and yearning for freedom, yet irredeemably spawned by a capitalist Sycorax.

Downie’s claim that his methodology constitutes “a programme with a political foundation” is an attractive sales pitch, but proves ultimately fallacious. Arnold Schoenberg, who knew a thing or two about serialism, having invented it, wrote ‘Is it fair?’ in 1947. Here he angrily denied the charge that serialism had a ‘Bolshevik’ tendency, or any innate political import for that matter. He pointed to the indisputable fact that Paul von Klenau, a German composer of the 1930s, had published an essay arguing that the serial method was a true embodiment of National Socialist principles. Webern, that most fastidious of composers, was, alas, a fervent admirer of Adolf Hitler. In more recent times, Karlheinz Stockhausen, a gauleiter in the Darmstadt school of musical tyranny, shocked Germany with his ravings about the danger of millions of immigrants pouring into the fatherland from eastern Europe.

Downie has a particular aversion to the “manipulative function” of cultural production, whereby “the efficacy of cultural artefacts is measured by their ability to alter and stimulate the affective orientation of the subject”. If he is thinking of the facile radical chic of John Adams’s minimalist operas, then I have difficulty in dissenting from him. But he goes too far when he lays into Wieland Hoban for compositions which are “bulging with idealist content, concern over the human condition and such metaphysical hocus-pocus as the “experiential depth of art”. This would be to condemn Alban Berg’s anti-capitalist masterpieces Wozzeck and Lulu. Downie’s attack here focuses on “a fixed, clichéd array of anecdotal, semi-autobiographical introspection concerning such idealist tommyrot as disillusionment, innocence, self-redemption …”

Presumably Downie would also outlaw ‘melancholy’. Melancholy is a major element in the work of Harrison Birtwistle who has sought in that Tudor-Jacobean mode of affectivity an alternative to 19th century musical sentimentality. Birtwistle, above all others, is the avant-garde composer who is anathema to the Philistine press of bourgeois England. His concert Panic, played on the last night of the Proms in 1997, aroused a hysteria in the Daily Mail and other papers that tells how deeply he threatened the reactionary bourgeois psyche. We would guess that Downie also deplored the “manipulative” skill of the “theatricality” that Birtwistle brings to his music theatre pieces.

Downie is particularly fond of quoting Pierre Boulez when his position needs a crutch. A bastion of the Darmstadt school, Boulez has other opinions that we find worth quoting. In Experiments, ostriches and music he mocks ultra-sectarians who for years “have eaten locusts” and “preached” to their “own reflections in the desert”. In his 1972 ‘Freeing music’ article Boulez explains that his “idea has been breaking down the wall - or rather the series of walls - that separate the artist from the public Dividing life into watertight compartments means certain death ... interpenetration is essential to effectiveness of any kind.” What we would recommend to Downie is rather less locust eating and rather more “interpenetration”!

‘Innocent’ art
‘Innocent’ art

Clear slogans

In his reply to Andrew Murray, Jack Conrad writes: “Hopi has been targeted not because it ‘clouds’ anything.

“On the contrary, Hopi is unmistakably clear. ‘No to imperialist war!’ reads the first demand of its founding statement. Hopi also uncompromisingly calls for the ‘immediate and unconditional withdrawal of US-UK troops from the Gulf region!’”

Lenin, in Leftwing communism: an infantile disorder, reminds us that politics is not merely principles and hatred of the enemy, but an art and a science, in which we should train our politicians to be at least better than bourgeois politicians.

The wording of a slogan is different from principles. To put two (admittedly only apparently) contradictory statements in the one slogan immediately clouds the issue. Slogans are not great political educators and only those suffering from political blindness and stubbornness would refuse to see how the words ‘No to the theocratic regime’ deprioritises the ‘No to imperialism’ sentiment.

Being clear in principle is not the same as conducting a politically clear campaign. The Stop the War Coalition by and large only deserves credit for its ability to mobilise and its leadership tends to do little outside routinism, but expelling people only demobilises a section of the left and does as much harm as an ill thought out slogan.

Turning criticism of a slogan into the charge of defence of the Iranian regime’s political oppression is grossly misleading and it does not take much deduction to see that. It is certainly not unmistakably clear. Defending Iran should begin in emphasising its history of non-aggression, the exposure of the demonisation, such as being a threat to Israel and denying the holocaust. Warmongers fill up the people’s minds with hate. Blind hate.

Those who hate oppression at least have reason to hate and have a good starting point. The Hopi slogan does not serve to distinguish this hatred from the hatred being built up by the warmongers sufficiently to be anywhere near appropriate.

Being attractive to the liberal intelligentsia is not the same as a consistent anti-imperialism that shows skill at targeting our enemies, and which is vigilant at countering the prime propaganda of our own imperialism and shows solidarity in that context.

Clear slogans

It's a shame

It is good to see that James Turley accepts the content of the ‘military bloc’ slogan - to fight on the same side as the Iranian regime if (that should probably be when) it is attacked by Israel and US imperialism, while, of course, maintaining the maximum possible independence of class fighting forces (Letters, October 25).

It is just a shame that James is a member of a youth organisation that, along with its parent group, does not agree with him.

It's a shame

Anti-semitism

What is anti-semitism? According to Tony Greenstein, it is a form of “racist self-hatred” and therefore highly subjective. Modern anti-semitism is typical of Zionists who are vicious towards non-Zionist Jews.

Tony denies that older forms of anti-semitism have an objective character. For example, he seems to think that anti-semitism based on the notion of a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy to dominate the world is a “relic of a bygone age”. Thus he argues that Hamas’s attitude to Jews is racist rather than anti-semitic and that there is no evidence that Hezbollah is anti-semitic. If these political islamist groups are indeed anti-semitic, he does not think this aspect of their politics (including their racism towards Jews) should be condemned.

Tony is right to notice that some Jews have internalised anti-semitism. It is true that some Jews appear to hate Jewishness more than any other religious, ethnic, class or national identification. It is understandable that they might hate the forms that both Zionism and Jewish anti-Zionism have taken in recent history.

However, to suggest, as Tony does, that Jewish self-hatred is now the dominant form of anti-semitism is perverse. The persistence of internalised oppression is parasitic upon the existence of objective oppression and it is clear that Trotsky was right to identify anti-semitism objectively as a form of oppression that grows during periods of economic crisis.

This is partly to do with the history of Jews as a people characterised by their relationship to money. It is also to do with the role many Jews have played as leaders in struggles for human liberation. Nationalists are aware that during economic crises people are more aware of the harmful effects of capital accumulation. Moreover workers may be inspired to take power as a class and abolish capitalism. In order to try to sustain popular support amongst the dispossessed and oppressed, nationalists blame Jews both for capitalism and for the ideas of any democratically planned alternative to it. Thus promotion of the idea of a Jewish conspiracy between financiers and Marxists is a convenient distraction from attempting to explain the nature of economic crises and the possible socialist resolution of them.

A document such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion becomes an important part of the propaganda of nationalists during these periods. Adherence to the truth of the forgery has the power to unite nationalists who differ and are antagonistic in other respects. Targeting Jews as the enemy unites shia with sunni, christian with muslim, atheist with theist, and infidel with true believer. It is at the core of many forms of contemporary nationalism, not just 1930s fascism.

I understand that both Hamas and Hezbollah promote the Protocols as a true document. This forgery is supposed to explain the oppression of Palestinians and Arabs. Anti-semitism unites the two groups despite their having mutually antagonistic sectarian forms of political islam. Members of Hamas may hate shias. Members of Hezbollah might hate sunnis. But both groups can become allies in targeting the Jewish enemy.

If I am right, the role that the Protocols plays in Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s islamic nationalist propaganda shows that both are objectively anti-semitic organisations. This means that Marxists must not only refuse to condone their politics but actively expose and condemn them publicly.

Tony, like some other anti-Zionists, is mistaken to think that Hamas and Hezbollah have a progressive role to play in the liberation of Palestinians and Arabs from Zionist oppression.

Anti-semitism
Anti-semitism