03.08.2011

Comrade Williams and the world of things

This paper champions genuine Marxism, states Mark Fischer

Since I penned last week’s column, we have had a good seven days in our annual fundraising drive, the Summer Offensive. New money now in comes to £2,395, taking our running total to £16,061. With over two weeks to go before the end of the campaign - including the eight days of Communist University, our annual school - it’s looking good for the £25k overall target by August 20.

The campaign that runs within the SO this year - to raise an extra £300 a month in standing orders to support this paper - also saw an increase, thanks to new regular donations from YM, JM and NJ. The running total now stands at £224 extra promised every month (despite an unfortunate downwards adjustment, a result of one comrade having second thoughts).

Around £360 was added to the pot this week by the party comrades who staffed some of the booze, book and second-hand clothes stalls at the Hackney WickED arts festival over the (extended) weekend of July 29-31. They report an exhausting, but fun time amongst the 20,000-30,000 attendees at the successful event - indeed, such a success that rumours abounded this year of a corporate take over by Red Bull, the manufacturer of the aggressively marketed energy drink that tastes like a Tizer/cough medicine cocktail ... in this writer’s opinion (he added hurriedly, for legal reasons ...).

That said, my attention was drawn this week to a possible donor to this year’s campaign who one might regard as being thoroughly saturated in the same crass corporate world of officially sponsored arts and media. Yes, comrades, Robbie Williams - once part of the hugely successful boy band, Take That - has, according to a Canadian website, used his blog to out himself as a communist: “Capitalistic conspiracy? I’m with you. The system is destined to explode and I think it’s sooner rather than later ... If we could get communism to work without corruption ... I’m in. The Rolls Royce Phantom is the ultimate symbol (for me any way) of our desire for ‘stuff’ and it’s all ‘stuff’... Bullshit when you break it down. Consume, consume, consume ... we’re at the tipping point, my friends” (www.winnipegfreepress.com).

In the same posting, our comrade Williams goes on to confess his pain over this “Rolls Royce Phantom” temptation of his, as it would be a “vulgar display of wealth” - the (admittedly beautiful) machine costs £490,000 and he asks his blog readers to vote on whether he treats himself to it or not.

Now, it’s easy to be dismissive about this and make cynical, but facile points about the guilt pangs of the rich, how verbal radicalism of this sort might win you a ‘shock-horror!’ headline or two if you have a new album to promote. (I have no idea whether the bloke has or not - and, please, if you’re a fan, don’t write in ...). That is not a Marxist approach, however.

This paper has been criticised by the crasser elements of the revolutionary left for its nuanced approach to the death of Diana, princess of Wales, for instance. Also, in a perceptive article, Eddie Ford commented on the “not entirely dissimilar ... wave of anguish generated by the equally sudden, shock death of Diana Spencer” that marked the demise of that pop Peter Pan, Michael Jackson. As an individual, Jackson was “a sad masterclass in alienation and estrangement”, comrade Ford wrote. Indeed, “rather than an enviable superstar in charge of his own destiny, Jackson was more a slave to celebrity culture and its addictive, gaudy trappings. Hence his crazily self-indulgent spending patterns, akin to a decadent monarch or aristocrat of old” (Weekly Worker July 2 2009).

As Marx wrote in his Economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844, “the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion to the devaluation of the world of men” - ie, the reduction of human beings and their intrinsic human capacity to produce stuff of use - whether that happens to be a widget or a pop song - to a thing, a commodity, something that can be bought and sold in an alienated form.

All of which is a long-winded manner of urging Robbie Williams - as an aspiring communist - to turn his back on his ‘phantoms’, forego that thing, his lusted-after Rolls Royce - and donate the near half million he would squander on it to this year’s SO. (I’m sure one of our comrades was advertising a Ford Cortina for sale a little while ago - I’ll pass on the details if Robbie feels he really needs a set of wheels ...).

This paper champions genuine Marxism. This is a politics that has viable answers to a generalised crisis that grips us as a species; it is not the revenge project of one particular class on the rest of society. Our readers (there were 11,386 of them online last week) - many of whom are still in the ranks of other left groups rather than our own - recognise that about us and that is who we appeal to in this fight to support our paper and our annual fund drive.

It would be nice to be able to report a substantial cheque from a ‘comrade RW’ next week that took us over the £25k target - or even way beyond it. But the actual comrades we are relying on are reading us now; working class partisans and militants who form the backbone of our common movement.

Just over two weeks, comrades - £9,000 to go!