A Gallery of Recuperation: On the Merits of Slandering Charlatans, Swindlers and Fraud. By Jaime Semprún. Translated and with an Introduction by Eric-John Russell (MIT:2023)
Jaime Semprún (1947-2010), though never a member of the Situationist International (1957-1972), became closely associated with the SI’s founder, Guy Debord; so much so that when A Gallery of Recuperation was published in 1976, some reviewers thought Debord had written it. The central question addressed by Semprún’s book, appearing as it did several years after the revolt of students and workers in France, May 1968, is, as Eric-John Russell puts it in his 110-page introduction,
‘What happens to revolutionary critique in the hands of those who interests align with the preservation of a society divided into classes, mediated by exchange, and subordinated to the principle of capital accumulation?’
Of the entries in A Gallery of Recuperation, the majority are philosophers, namely: Cornelius Castoriadis, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Andr é Glucksmann, Jean Franklin, Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The others are François Mitterand’s economic guru, Jaques Attali; the writer and film-maker, Gérard Guégan; and former Situationist Raoul Vaneigem.
In this short book, Semprún make no attempt to summarize the oeuvres of his gallery of recuperators (even less so with Deleuze and Guattari, who are dismissed in one sentence as being ‘dumber’ than each other). Russell’s introduction provides very useful historical contextualisation. But the only knowledge of the entrants in his Gallery Semprún expects from his readers is having heard or read about them. He has no wish to encourage his readers to spend any time studying their books.
In the case of Castoriadis, Semprún’s ideal reader in 1976 would know that this erstwhile exponent of workers self-management (autogestion) in the Fordist economy of the late-1950s, attracted the brief interest of Debord and the Situationist International. As Debord soon discovered, Castoriadis’s practical politics were positivist, with a Marxist gloss. It came as no surprise that when Castoriadis’s vision of rationalised council communism came to naught, he rejected Marx as the last of the ‘metaphysical’ dialecticians (after Plato, Aristotle and Hegel). Semprún comments, ‘the tragedy of Castoriadis is that his past remains even newer than his intellectual present’ and he is left ‘grappling with the ghost of his own thought, which arrives to pull him out his Freudian sleep, as he comically struggles in his prefaces [to his earlier revolutionary writings] to sabotage anything of real importance… while miring himself in a catch-22 situation by repeating “It is not that simple”.’
Jean-François Lyotard was, until 1963, a member of the group Castoriadis founded, Socialisme ou Barbarie. He left, according to Semprún, because he found Castoriadis’s liquidation of Marxism ‘insufficiently liquidating’. For Lyotard, the acclaimed inventor of the terms ‘postmodernism’ and ‘libidinal economy’, it was necessary to ‘completely abandon critique’ in order to embrace the alienated relations of capital as a ‘machinery of delight’. One had ‘neither to judge causes nor isolate effects, energies pass through us and we have to suffer them’. Lyotard, says Semprún,
‘learned from Freud that human beings, however dispossessed, lididinally invest in their very dispossession in order to come to terms with it… all activity, or passivity is libidinal, workers go to work for pleasure. Lyotard gets off on cutting-edge cultural consumption and keeps coming back for more.
Foucault, the philosopher-criminologist, concluded from his study of the 19th century bourgeois murderer, Lacenaire, that (in Semprún’s interpretation) ‘coarser criminals are needed, illiteracy may even be required as a stamp of authenticity, or at least criminals who provide him with opportunity to peddle his exegetical contortions and tics. Fall into line everyone!’
The other personifications in the gallery get similar treatment. In the case of Glucksmann, the repentant Maoist, turned nouvelle philosophe of the New Right:
‘Accomplishing the daring feat of appearing more moronic than he actually is, he pretends to have suddenly realized, upon reading the works of Solzhenitsyn, that there was a police terror inseparable from ideological absolutism.’
Jacques Attili, Mitterand’s techo-futurologist and economic guru is exposed as a plagiarist and recuperator of various radical (including Situationist) strands of ideas. Attali’s later career as founder of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which was responsible for restructuring and privatising the economies of post-communist Europe in the 1990s would have come as no surprise to Semprún.
The most surprising entry in the Gallery is Raoul Vaneigem, who is chiefly famous for his book, The Revolution of Everyday Life. But he is also famous, for having taken a booked holiday in the Mediterranean during the height of the street-fighting in Paris in May 1968, a faux pas neither Semprún or Debord forgive or forget. Vaneigem is portrayed as typical of
‘All those who speak of self-managment and workers’ councils, or even about (you must be joking) transparency and subversive play without referring explicitly to the concrete conditions of contemporary class struggle and to the possibilities and necessities they contain. Such people have corpse in their mouth: the corpse of the Situationist International.’
Irony, Eric-John Russell notes in his introduction, is a medium ‘endangered by the dissolution of the difference between surface and depth.’ Russell, after explicating the relation between Situationist praxis and the historic moment of May 68, turns to the years ‘between 1973 and 1977’ when ‘les annees soixante-huit came to an end’. As J Bourg, quoted by Russell, puts it, ‘The twentieth century began with Vladimir Lenin’s observation that making an omelette means breaking eggs; it ended with the assertion of the rights of chickens.’
In part as a reaction against the dogmatism of the French Communist Party and the exhaustion of existentialism of phenomenology, from the early 1960s, ‘Parisian cynicism proceeded from an anti-humanist detachment and turned towards the sciences of linguistics, structural anthropology, psychoanalysis and literary theory.’ This erosion of any stable subjectivity was inherited from the naive scientism of 19th century French posivitism. The loss of objectivity is related to a modernised Nominalism , presented as a ‘metaphysics of desire‘, in which ‘erotic spontaneity’ supposedly unleashed the energies of madness and fantasy.
‘In this way, the concept of recuperation is integral to that of the spectacle’ in which the differences pivot on ‘unbridled reconcialation’. The spectacle’s ‘postulate of equivalence’ derives from exchange relations; ‘The bark of accommodated critique will always be worse than its bite’.
Russell maintains that ‘the counterrevolutionary forces earlier in the decade [the 1970s] were part of a larger process of the restructuring of capital, itself a defeat for the workers movement that would culminate in the early 1980s.’ This led to the deregulation of financial markets, ‘for which capital expands without investing in productive activity’. For the worker (including the ‘intellectual’ worker) this has led to an employment regime of increasing precarity.
What makes Semprún’s book relevant to this day is its critique of the dominant ‘ethos of liberation and continuous transgression of the desirants’ which has its ‘truth’ in ‘the eternally new of a perpetual present’. The recuperators, having inherited the tricks of the town market charlatan, ‘are in no short supply, with every online opinion strong-arming every other to dominate likes and retweets in an algorithmic orgy of con artists and grifters’.
In this new high-tech world of instant communication and thirst for instant gratification, the status of intellectuals is downgraded; to present them as ‘imputing class consciousness or having any real grasp over present catastrophes, cannot but come off as a bad joke… Look closely at any radical academic and you will find a publicist, if not a used car salesperson’.
Russell, striking a rare note of optimism, suggests that Gallery of Recuperation at least reminds us that the ‘wretched methods’ of the intellectuals might some day be looked on – after Hegel’s Owl of Minerva has spread its wings – as having, in Marx’s words, ‘wrung the neck of their own purpose.’
The passages from Semprún, as quoted above, provide only a taste of the torrent of insult and invective. His prose is largely free of clichés and ill-informed bad faith. Ad hominen critique is or course taboo in academia and in mainstream (or would-be mainstream) media. But the book leaves this reader wishing there was more of it today, in the face of the what is on offer from Guardian and Novara commentators.
Ben Watson writes about Finnegans Wake, the “incomprehensible” final book by James Joyce which he’s been poring over for five decades …
Ben Watson writes about Finnegans Wake, the “incomprehensible” final book by James Joyce which he’s been poring over for five decades …
Finnegans Wake is an experience, it’s not something “difficult” to be decoded by better brains than yours. I don’t read it with any more “comprehension” today than I did age 14, when I took it off the school library shelf and had a look. An older brother had been disparaging my precocity by saying “He’ll be reading James Joyce next”. I asked my mum who this James Joyce was: “Oh, a very difficult writer, also rather obscene”. Naturally, the very next day I ran to the school library at break, and looked up Joyce in the card index. Finnegans Wake was the first volume that came to hand. I read the first page, skipped through and loved it straight away! It resembled other things I loved – Lewis Carroll, The Beano, Molesworth, Afferbeck Lauder’s Fraffly – an explosion of rule-breaking craziness, naughtiness, anti-decorum. Sure, there are lines where I can now “explain” some pun or reference, but these have nothing to do with the book’s main pleasure: an outpouring of verbal energy which thunders and farts like a human body, like an emergent bewebbed cosmos, like a throbbing itching brain. You must suspend the quick flattery of your left hemisphere granted you by smart cultural products, and groove to the archaic and natural rhythms of the rhetoric – a flow never broken, unbrookable – which always adheres enough to the cadences and etymologies of the English language, whether derived from tavern or sewer, study, bedroom or church, to be read aloud with conviction. We might not know what’s it’s saying, but we know what these sounds mean. I never met a musical person who couldn’t enjoy a sentence of the Wake.
This sentence should be sprayed on the wall in letters of gold for all Wake readers:
“No man can live the moral part of his psychical (soul) life on the truth of another any more than he can live his physical (body) life on the meals of another. Every one must have his own truths, even as he must have his own meals.” Bishop William Montgomery Brown, Communism and Christianism: Analysed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View (self-published in Galion, Ohio from 1920 to the Bishop’s death in 1937; 14th edition, 1932, pp. 46-47; copies rare because they are seized and burned by the Church of America).
“Incomprehensible”, yes. But each time you look at Finnegans Wake, you discover something … On this occasion, it was the absolute bankruptcy of post-structuralist Theory as it is known and taught in the Humanities today. Proof that Theory has clouded the minds of a generation of intellectuals, no longer able to look at what is immediately in front of them. You can’t “read” (=skim) the Wake, you have to slow down … and look. There is no ideological preparation that can help, and the text confirms no “theoretical” positions. It is anti-religion in active manifestation!
I was excited with a paragraph on pages 123-124, because I’d been thinking about scores, records and music. The weird way a spatial construct on a page or on a piece of revolving plastic can dictate a piece of time. A passage in the Wake connected this space-time relationship to the oldest known “writing” we know, Mesopotamian clay tablets …
Lot 52B: PHOTO: Mesopotamian Cuneiform Clay Tablet. Translated: $1,200 – $1,800 Sold: Artemis Gallery,Jan 18, 2017 Louisville, CO, US
Here’s the passage. Folks, slow down, peer at this thing. It’s ART. It requires your attention and it rewards your attention … as no published prose in English since the King James Bible, Milton, Blake or Capital. And of course, it’s talking about itself, as it ceaselessly does:
Lot: OTLXL5: Pseudo-Mesopotamian Hieroglyphic (Untranslated, As Yet) Est: $00 – $00. Unsold: Taigue-ze-piste Gallery Aug 5, 2023 Somers Town, London, UK
The original document was in what is known as Hanno O’Nonhanno’s unbrookable script, that is to say, it showed no signs of punctuation of any sort. Yet on holding the verso against a lit rush this new book of Morses responded most remarkably to the silent query of our world’s oldest light and its recto let out the piquant fact that it was but pierced butnot punctured (in the university sense of the term) by numerous stabs and foliated gashes made by a pronged instrument. These paper wounds, four in type, were gradually and correctly understood to mean stop, please stop, do please stop, and O do please stop respectively, and following up their one true clue, the circumflexuous wall of a singleminded men’s asylum, accentuated by bi tso fb rok engl a ssan dspl itch ina, — Yard inquiries pointed out – that they ad bîn “provoked” ay ˄ fork, of à grave Brofèsor; àth é’s Brèak — fast — table; ; acùtely profèššionally piquéd, to=introdùce a notion of time [ùpon à plane (?) sù ’ ’ fàç’e’] by pùnct! ingh oles (sic) in iSpace?! James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1922-1939, pp. 123-124).
What so many commentaries on the Wake miss (I except Len Platt’s wonderful introduction to the cheap paperback published by Wordsworth Editions) is how scurrilous, parodic and angry so much of it is. This is a portrait of ridiculous over-educated buffoon – a Slavoj Zizek – stabbing his toast with a fork in order to explain Space-Time. It evinces the same scepticism about world pictures which activated Frank Zappa and Philip K. Dick. Finnegans Wake is not High Art in the vein of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, it’s lowdown smut, an explosion of ribaldry versus privilege, as countercultural as R. Crumb – and similarly grotesque, obscene and hilarious.
And here’s a detail that escaped my attention for fifty years: just dig the way “fact” becomes a misprint of “fart” in Joyce’s composition: “Yet on holding the verso against a lit rush … its recto let out the piquant fact …“. This low view of “fact” chimes with Joyce’s attack on the closed minds of contemporary science graduates in the talk on William Blake he delivered in Trieste. The Wake adheres to the art politics of Blake in his preface to Milton: will everyone please stop serving the rich!
Rouze up O Young Men of the New Age! Set your foreheads against
lo the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court, &
the University: who would if they could for ever depress Mental & prolong
Corporeal War. Painters! on you I call. Sculptors! Architects! Suffer not the fashionable Fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works or the expensive advertizing boasts that they make of such works.
Joyce’s sexual politics may be a little out of date, since we now have plenty of female “Brofèsors”, yet the accusation of spiritual miscomprehension by those who are paid to look at the letter remains. Joyce’s charge that there is a gender component in the replacement of wisdom by competitive pedantry (the “singleminded men’s asylum“) compares to Sabine Hossenfelder’s magnificent YouTube tirades against “Theory of Everything” tyros like Eric Weinstein. The revolution in Paris of May ’68 began as a protest against the segregation of the sexes; Joyce was well aware that oppressive gender roles suit life-denying scientism.
But the really devastating outcome of looking at these lines arrived for me when, after I circulated them, a friend Googled the passage, and sent me a link to a post-structuralist commentary. Here were readers totally unaware that that it’s they who are under attack in these lines!
When she was thinking for herself, my friend supplied me with a real insight: the “bi tso fb rok engl a ssan dspl itch ina” atop the wall which surrounds the “singleminded men’s asylum” is something she remembered from her childhood in Lusaka, Zambia, and reminded me of my own childhood sighting of broken glass atop brick walls. Forget Lacan’s mirror stage – a theoretical figure which no-one actually remembers – this sight broke us out of the protected bubble of childhood, and we realised how cruel the world can be, especially when protecting private property. Do they really want to cut me up for wanting to see what’s on the other side? Burglars must be really desperate to risk climbing over that!
But to the reason for this Substack item: the abolute bankruptcy of the post-structuralist tradition for explaining anything, especially revolutionary art. Viz: Lydia H. Liu’s The Probability of Sense in the Hypermnesiac Machine (Presses Universitaires de Paris Nanterre, 2017). The Internet promises access to all knowledge, but can quickly become a Bible of readymade answers which block creative thought, which invariably stems from personal attention to specifics. Darwin could never have devised the theory of evolution if all those nineteenth-century vicars hadn’t been collecting fossils on the beach as examples of God’s handywork.
“The Hypermnesiac Machine” is Lydia Liu’s coinage to describe the Standard English and computerization via information theory which accompanied technological breakthroughs in the Anglo-American war effort 1939-1945, and which kept up its pace in the following decades due to the USA’s perceived need to battle Communism, drugs, Islam, terrorism etc. Like Derrida and Lacan, the two post-structuralists she uses to gloss the Wake, Liu fails to see that Joyce was writing against capitalism, war and its “scientific” alienations. She uses “bi tso fb rok engl a ssan dsp itch ina” as a synecdoche of the whole book and Joyce’s method, comparing it to Claude Shannon’s conceptualization of the space as the 27th letter in the alphabet, which allowed development of the ASCII code and use of words in computing. Impressive sounding enough. But I can’t think of anywhere else in Finnegans Wake where a conventional piece of English is dismembered in this particular way! The outburst of diacritics in the same paragraph, taken by Liu as exemplary, is also unique. As a critic of the book, Liu is talking nonsense.
As usual, Derrida presides over this inability to respond to what’s there, this raid on the material to supply grist to Theory. Liu uses Derrida to generalize/moralise Joyce’s method into the gruesomely predictable postmodern sermon – difference is good, disruption is necessary, linear thought is wicked, we must all be pious liberals “subverting power” in our art – whereas, like Marx, Joyce found ideas in the materials he dealt with, he was not applying a preconceived method or ideology. Every time I look at the Wake, I get new ideas. Every time I read the Wake to someone, or get them to read a passage, I discover new things. Joyce breaks up the words of “bits of broken glass and split china”, not in order to point out that parsing words is dependent on the spaces between them (one can examine his hundred-letter “thunder” words and still make out words inside them), but so that his row of letters resembles shards of glass and china set in cement.
Liu quotes Derrida saying: “This Anglo-Saxon commerce, these exchanges of a piece of merchandise (ware) in two languages, must pass through acts of writing. The event is linked to the spacing of its archive and would not take place without it, without being put into letters and pages. Erase the typeface, mute the graphic percussion, subordinate the spacing, that is, the divisibility of the letter, and you would again reappropriate Finnegans Wake into a monolingualism, or at least subjugate it to the hegemony of a single language.” (Derrida 1984, 147)”
Derrida’s vaunting of the written word makes him a household god for those make a living by interpreting words. Joyce used to read the Wake aloud, but this is interdit in the Derridean ideology, because making the page invisible reduces it to a monologue. Not so! If you read the Wake out loud it does NOT become Standard English, it’s a new tongue … like an English-speaker hearing Cambrian dialect today, we seem to be hearing from some prenational hinterland. Alexandre Kojève defused Hegel’s “German” dialectic for France’s Cartesian establishment. Likewise, Derrida’s insistence on the written rather than the spoken bespeaks a reactionary politics: the complexity of written French compared to spoken French is all about honouring grammatical relations which are inaudible today – i.e. dead – so only available to the schooled, a badge of distinction. It is the very opposite of Valentin Volosinov’s Marxist linguistics, which begin with the spoken, the living, the “concrete utterance”.
Liu asserts: “By manipulating typefaces, graphic forms, spacing, and an exhaustive variety of written signs, Joyce constructs a vast network of writing that interlinks up to allegedly 40 languages and stores numerous historical archives.” This is Jorge Luis Borges – a vision of an impossible total library – not the Wake, which stimulates the tongue to activity.
Liu makes simple blunders: “Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky” verse in the novel Through the Looking-Glass (1871). is one of the best-known nonsense poems written in the English language, relying predominantly on the play of sounds.” Only the first and last verses! “Jabberwocky” is a monster-slaying hero tale.
“Joyce’s nonsense word “iSpace”—coined long before the invention of the iPhone and the iPad—anticipated Shannon’s development of Printed English by assuming a radical rupture between writing and speech. It matters little if one can spell or pronounce this nonsense word, for our speech cannot reproduce the ideographic image of iSpace in sound nor can it assign a linguistic meaning to it.”
This is “the French Joyce”, a raid on the Wake to buttress post-structuralist preconceptions. There are pointed “unpronounceable”/visual elements in the Wake, sure, but no “radical rupture” with speech. The thing invites performance! Also, because of the iPhone and iPad, you can read out “iSpace” now, and most people will have a clear idea of what word you’re reading, even down to the camel case. The Derridean effect – like Slavoj Zizek finding the “objet petit a” in every movie he sees – is to reduce everything to the same, to blot out specifics, to hide reality, to mask exploitation, to fend off critique and politics. To deny me here, you there. Post-structuralism blinds people to what’s actually there. Like a Zizek YouTube, the “Brofèsor; àth é’s Brèak — fast — table” is funny, but only because he’s patently an idiot.
Liu then turns to Jacques Lacan on the Wake. Of course! The next tainted saint in the Canon. Opportunist vultures ripping up the corpse of a modernism designed for REVOLUTION! My better half berates me for going on too long about the evils of post-structuralism and postmodernism (“everyone in academia has forgotten about it now, it’s just your personal trauma, a fashion that denied you – neanderthal Marxist – a job in the Humanities in the 80s”), but if you Google my favourite things today – the Wake, Dada, Free Improvisation, sound poetry – that’s what you find. It’s like looking for Jesus … and all you can find is the Roman Catholic Church!
More Liu: “‘The real’, Lacan wrote elsewhere, ‘is completely denuded of sens [meaning]. We can be satisfied, we can be sure that we are dealing with something of the réel [the real] only when it no longer has any sens whatsoever. It has no sens because it is not with mots [words] that we write the réel. It is with petites lettres [little letters].’ (my emphasis)”
This is hard (stupid?) Cartesianism – duality between spirit and matter – and utterly in opposition to Joyce’s dialectical holism. What a doleful effect this hopeless doctrine has had on a generation of intellectuals! A smug nihilism about practical action, a Platonic contempt for the lowly artisan. The precise opposite of Hegel’s translation of Christian values into a progressive secular rationality, Marx’s discovery of the working class, Bishop Brown and Martin Luther King’s ideas of popular resistance …
As usual in this zone, a profound-sounding “conclusion” which is actually utterly inconclusive, inert, equivocal and predictable, an “I looked into something and discovered what I already knew, i.e. what has been canonised as the thought of my time.” Post-structuralism is a New Catholicism, with its own roll-call of saints, its own pious shibboleths … Finnegans Wake was designed by Joyce to undo the “instrumental reason” which produces capitalism, marketing algorithms, automatic stock-broking and war … but for Liu and her authorities, it’s all the same thing. This is how Liu concludes: “At a fundamental level, the communication machine can process nothing—certainly not words, in spite of its word-processing reputation—but the petites lettres of Printed English. That which gets processed guarantees no more—and no less—sense than does the ‘iSpace’ of Finnegans Wake.”
On the contrary, Joyce’s “iSpace” puts us back in space – just where Newton and Einstein (and cluster bombs sold to Ukraine for purposes of profit) deny our subjectivity and the naive empathy of our species being! Like Free Improvisation, the Wake challenges authority, and asks listeners to supply their own interpretation, unleashing our personal memories and associations like a psychoanalysis or a Rorschach blot (but not costing us a fortune). It’s a bustling market, a busting farrago, a verbal storm, a rush, a dream … it works. Unlike, say, Gertrude Stein, who also ticks the postmodern boxes, but has next to no content and – like orchestral Minimalism or Evan Parker’s circular-breathing turn – stuns the mind rather than causing it to pay attention to what’s there.
Out To Lunch, Somers Town 17-viii-2023
PS If you wish to follow up OTL’s polemic, find Geert Lernout’s The French Joyce (University of Michigan Press, 1992) comparable in polemical power to the Sokal/Bricmont hoax in revealing the Kojève/Derrida/Lacan/Foucault/Deleuze lineage as woeful intellectual charlatanism.
(Ben Watson presents Late Lunch with Out to Lunch weekly on ResonanceFM 104.4 )
(This article has been corrected to say that Lusaka is the capital of Zambia, NOT Gambia as first stated)
As regards Trump and Manson it would seem that, unfortunately, the American Psyche has room for both of them.
David Black
9 August 2023
The late Charles Manson is back in the news with the controversial parole of his former ‘Family’ member, Lesley Van Houten, who was convicted 53 years ago of murdering on his behalf. A new Netflix true crime series, How to Become a Cult Leader, features Manson in the first episode. Manson is portrayed as a sharp gaolbird, who learned to convince his 100 or so cult followers that he was god-like.
After more than 50 years the curse of Charles Manson maintains its grip. ‘Edgy’ ironists have his image tattooed on their skin; there is a roaring trade in Manson T-shirts and other merchandise (especially his songs, which have been covered by over 70 recording artists); and an endless output of film and television productions. He has become so much part of the culture that the mythology built around him and his disciples has largely buried whatever ‘truth’ is still ‘out there’. What How to Become a Cult Leader does not explain is how Manson got his gentle hippie followers to become vicious drug-addled murderers. Nor does it examine the role of law enforcement agencies in protecting him from justice and enabling him to commit heinous crimes.
Manson built a cult which deeply impacted American culture. Donald Trump built a larger cult – MAGA- which took over the US government for four years and to this day threatens the very survival of the democratic state (current indictments not withstanding). Experts in authoritarianism and fascism perceive the threat quite clearly. New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat says “I see Trump as a cult leader. So [his followers] are cult followers, personality cult followers.”
In the future, presidential historians and researchers of new media mind-control techniques and state spookery will no doubt unearth many dark secrets about the Trump Years. In the meantime, one might ask: What does Donald Trump have in common with the late Charles Manson? There is certainly a stark contrast between their respective family backgrounds: Trump born rich and privileged; Manson born poor, to an alcoholic mother and an absent father. The similarities, however, are noticeable and many:
Toxic family relationships.
Delusions of being god-like.
Messianic/apocalyptic dogma
Pathological narcissism.
Inflated sense of entitlement and victimhood.
A taste for inflicting harm.
Sexual abuse. Rape.
Weaponization of racism.
Endlessly repeated lies and false promises.
Friends and protectors in high places (especially the secret state).
An ability to get indoctrinated followers to commit violent crimes –and do time for it, pending future absolution (or presidential pardon in Trump’s case).
Careers in the entertainment industry.
Determination to fulfil the cult’s ‘mission’ even from a prison cell.
Plotting insurrection and civil war.
Charles Manson’s ‘Family’ – A Case Study in Violent Cultism
Four years ago, Tom O’Neill’s book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties tore a few strips off the ‘official version’ propounded in the book Helter Skelter by the corrupt Manson Trial prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi.
The story begins in March 1967 – around the time Donald Trump was lying to the draft board about his bone spurs. 32-year-old Charles Manson was released from prison on parole after serving 7 years for check forgery. His parole supervisor, Roger Smith, who was researching gang violence and drug use, had the bright idea of sending drug-abuser and gangster Manson to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, just as the summer of love was getting underway.
In San Francisco, Manson, the guitar-strumming sugar-daddy, slid into his new career as a cult builder. Many of his recruits were under-age girls, whom he sent out to prostitute themselves, deal drugs and steal. In July 1967, Manson was sentenced to three years probation for obstructing a police officer who arrested a 14-year old girl he had recruited. But this didn’t prevent Smith from filing a report in which he claimed that ‘Mr Manson has made excellent progress’ in becoming a respectable citizen. In fact his whole cult was granted respectability. In O’Neill’s words, ‘The law afforded special privileges to everyone in Manson’s orbits.’
Roger Smith ran an Amphetamine Research Project at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, which had been founded by his namesake, David Smith. The two Smiths jointly wrote a study of the Manson Family for the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, entitled ‘The Group Marriage Commune’, based on ‘participant-observer’ research at the Family ranch. The Smiths’ research was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which was later found to have been used by the CIA as a front for the agency’s MK-Ultra ‘mind control’ project.
Dr Jolyon West, later exposed for his role in the CIA’s ‘mind control’ project, was provided with an office at the Haight-Ashbury Clinic to recruit subjects for ‘LSD research’. After West died in 1999, O’Neill found crucial correspondence between West and Sidney Gottlieb, head of MK-Ultra. In a letter dated 11 June 1953, West wrote to Gottlieb outlining proposals for a project to use hypnosis and drugs to extract information from unwilling subjects, to induce amnesia of the interrogation, and alter ‘the subject’s recollection of the information he formerly knew’.
West added that the experiments ‘must eventually be put to test in practical trials in the field’. O’Neill comments ‘All these were the goals of MK-Ultra and they bore a striking resemblance to Manson’s accomplishments with his followers more than a decade later.’ When O’Neill asked psychology professor Alan Scheflin if the Manson murders might have been an MK-Ultra experiment gone wrong, the professor replied, ‘No. An MK-Ultra experiment gone right.’ This was informed speculation, but necessarily so, given that the CIA operational files on MK-Ultra had been destroyed by Gottlieb in 1973.
The Manson Murders
In late 1968, Charles Manson and his ‘Family’ moved to the Spahn ranch, a 55-acre spread in Los Angeles County, California, which had previously been used as a set for filming westerns.
On 1 July 1969 a Black man named Bernard Crowe visited the Spahn ranch to complain about being ripped off by Family member Tex Watson in a marijuana deal. Days later, Manson went to Crowe’s Hollywood apartment, shot him in the stomach and left him for dead. (Unknown to Manson, Crowe survived and would eventually testify against him in court.) Manson told his followers that Crowe was a member of the Black Panther Party (he wasn’t) and that the Beatles White Album song, ‘Helter Skelter’, was a ‘prophecy’ of full-scale race war.
On 25 July, Manson and several accomplices invaded the home of Gary Hinman, a musician associate of Tex Watson. After two days of brutal torture, Manson realised there was no money to be had and ordered Bobby Beausoleil to kill him. Beausoleil stabbed Hinman to death and wrote ‘Political Piggy’ on the wall in blood. Hinman’s body was discovered by friends on 31 July. Beausoleil was arrested on 6 August for theft of Hindman’s station wagon, in which police found the murder weapon. Beausoleil concocted a story that Hinman had been killed by two Black Panther militants.
On the night of 8 August 1969, Manson sent four members of the Family – Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle, Linda Kasabian and Tex Watson – to the mansion home of Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski on Cielo Drive, Benedict Canyon. On entering the property, Watson shot and stabbed to death 18-year old Steven Parent, who had been visiting the caretaker and was sitting in his car. In the house the gang found Voytek Frykowski, an aspiring Polish filmmaker; Abigail Folger, his girlfriend; Jay Sebring, a hairstylist; and the pregnant Sharon Tate (Polanski was away, making a film in Paris). All four of them were tied up, then knifed to death as they begged for mercy. Susan Atkins soaked a towel in Sharon Tate’s blood and used it to write ‘Pig’ on the wall.
The following night the four killers teamed up with other members of the Family: Clem Grogan, Leslie Van Houten and Charles Manson himself. They piled into a camper van and drove around the suburbs of Los Angeles, looking for another target. Manson entered the home of chain store entrepreneur Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary, and tied them up at gunpoint. Manson then returned to the van and ordered Watson, Van Houten and Krenwinkle to go in and stab the couple to death. After killing the couple, Watson carved the word ‘War’ on Leno’s stomach. On the walls, the killers wrote ‘Rise’, ‘Death to pigs’ and ‘Healter [sic] Skelter’ in their victims’ blood.
The LA police were now investigating three killing sprees which had in common the reference to ‘pigs’ written on the walls in blood. But despite the arrest of Beausoleil in connection with Hindman’s murder they chose to ignore the signs that the residents of the Spahn ranch might be involved. This was especially strange as they had been secretly watching comings and goings at the ranch for weeks.
On 16 August – a week after the Cielo Drive murders – the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office (LASO) mobilised dozens of officers and a SWAT team in a raid on the Spahn ranch. The raid had nothing to do with murders; they were looking for firearms, drugs and stolen property, which they found aplenty. Given that Manson and several of his followers were also in clear violation of their parole terms, they could have all been jailed there and then. But all were released without charges three days later. They were thus free to carry on killing. And they did. On 26 August Hollywood stuntman Donald Shea was killed because Manson thought he had provided the police with information that led to the 16 August raid (his body was eventually discovered in an excavation at the ranch in 1977).
Rock and Roll
Like Trump, Manson was determined to carve out a name for himself in the entertainment industry.
During the four months it took the Los Angeles police to connect Manson with the murders, the media speculated that somehow the hedonists of Hollywood, with their sex-and-drugs lifestyles, had brought disaster onto themselves. Manson was more plugged into Hollywood than anyone cared to admit. The Cielo Drive mansion had previously been occupied by record producer Terry Melcher, who had auditioned Manson in May 1969 for a record deal. Melcher had been introduced to Manson by Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys. Melcher, Wilson and songwriter Gregg Jacobson – nicknamed the ‘Golden Penetrators’ – were welcoming to the Family, who took over Wilson’s house for the summer, supplying drugs and sexual favours while running up massive bills for food, clothes, car repairs and gonorrhoea treatment. Dennis Wilson told Rave magazine,
‘Sometimes the Wizard frightens me. The Wizard is Charlie Manson, who is a friend of mine, who thinks he is God and the devil. He sings, plays and writes poetry and may be another artist for Brother Records [the Beach Boys’ label].’
Bobby Beausoleil later claimed that Melcher promised to pay Manson $5,000 for his song ‘Cease to Exist’ (which the Beach Boys recorded as ‘Cease to Resist’) but then reneged on the deal. In August 1968 Wilson moved house and Manson moved the Family into the Spahn ranch.
Dennis Wilson and Greg Jakobson knew that Manson had previously shot Bernard Crowe. When O’Neill managed to get an interview with Melcher decades later he was met by evasions, denials, and threats to sue him and his publisher, Premiere magazine.
According to ex-LASO detective Preston Guillory, the police didn’t go after Manson ‘because our department thought he was going to attack the Black Panthers after intelligence had revealed Manson’s shooting of Bernard Crowe. Guillory told O’Neill: ‘I believe there was something bigger Manson was working on. Cause a stir. Blame it on the Panthers . . . Maybe a witting player in someone else’s game.’ Another interviewee, former assistant District Attorney Lewis Watnick, made the ‘educated guess’ that ‘Manson was an informant’.
COINTELPRO
Two of most notorious secret-state campaigns to infiltrate, disrupt and discredit the American Left were the CIA’s CHAOS, an illegal domestic surveillance program, and the FBI’s COINTELPRO. Both of them targeted the Black Panthers. In the summer of 1969, COINTELPRO activities were at their most murderous (such as arranging assassinations of Panthers by cops or by rivals such as the United Slaves Organisation). In August 1967, J Edgar Hoover reanimated COINTELPRO ‘to prevent militant Black Nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability’. The Tate-Polanski house on Cielo Drive had become a gathering place for ‘liberal Hollywood’ figures such as Mama Cass, Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda – all of whom were reportedly under FBI surveillance. Abigail Folger, one of the Cielo victims, was an outspoken civil rights activist. Hoover’s memo says,
‘An anonymous letter is being prepared for Bureau approval to be sent to a leader of the PFP [Peace and Freedom Party] in which it is set forth that the BPP [Black Panther Party] has made statements in closed meetings that when armed rebellion comes the whites in the PFP will be lined up against the wall with the rest of the whites.’
As O’Neill points out, ‘Less than a year after this memo was written, Manson’s followers lined up four denizens of liberal Hollywood in Roman Polanski’s home and cut them to pieces, leaving slogans in blood to implicate the Black Panthers.’
Two of a Kind?
In today’s MAGA world, for Black Panthers read Black Lives Matter; for Anti-War movement read ‘Antifa’.
As regards Trump and Manson it would seem that, unfortunately, the American Psyche has room for both of them.
(‘Beyond Bugliosi: the Manson murders revisited’, my full review of CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill (with Dan Piepenbring), appeared in Lobster magazine Issue 80 (Winter 2020)
Earlier this year, in yet another government U-turn, a plan to privatise Channel Four was quietly dropped. But considering how much the content has been dumbed down since its ‘golden age’, should anyone have cared? No and yes.
A warning from television history
David Black
9 August 2023
Earlier this year, in yet another government U-turn, a plan to privatise Channel Four was quietly dropped. But considering how much the content has been dumbed down since its ‘golden age’, should anyone have cared? No and yes.
Channel 4 was launched in 1982. Its first chief executive was Sir Jeremy Isaacs, a ground-breaking maker of television documentaries, such as the award-winning World at War series. With a strong team of commissioning editors, Isaacs encouraged upcoming talent to produce documentaries, arts programmes, and dramas. And so they did.
If you could time-travel back 40 years to spend three evenings watching Channel Four from 25-27 July 1983, you could watch the following:
Communes and Windups. Self-sufficiency series visits communes in Wales and Scotland.
The Best of CLR James. Veteran Caribbean Marxist historian affirms the legacy of Marx and Lenin and argues –contrary to the practice of the Soviet Union – socialism means democracy.
A Veiled Revolution. On the regression of the status of women in Egypt under the rise of Political Islamism.
For What it’s Worth. Exposure of consumer rip-offs by Penny Junor and Which? magazine.
Brookside. Scouse, leftish, working class soap opera, which had 9 million viewers at its peak.
Eastern Eye. Asian-oriented magazine programme tackling the controversy over arranged marriages.
Ulster Landscape. Exploration of ruined castles and settlements in Northern Ireland.
Opinions. Jonathan Steinberg, banker turned Cambridge academic on the current economic crisis.
Letters Home. A 90-minute drama about the life, poetry and suicide of Sylvia Plath.
Mozart. Piano concerto number 24 in C minor at the Helmsley Festival.
Bake Off. Munchy hour.
Now compare with the output for 25-27 July 2023:
Sky Coppers. Police PR.
999: On the Frontline. Ditto.
First Dates. Cringe Porn.
George Clarke’s Old House. Renovating your way up the property ladder.
Britain’s Most Expensive Housing. Mansion porn.
The Girl from Plainville. Crime drama mini-series. US import.
Gogglebox. Celebrity couch-potatoes discussing bad TV programmes.
Dog Academy. Therapy/training for dogs and their owners.
Supervet. Tearjerker for animal lovers with ‘cutting edge’ surgeon Noel Fitzpatrick.
Sun, Sea and Selling Houses. Rain-soaked post-Brexit Brits expating to sunny Spain.
Get the picture? In 1983 C4 was a “public service broadcaster”. What is it now?
According to the Daily Mail’s Stephen Glover:
“I’m afraid the rot began with the appointment of Michael Grade as his successor. Jeremy Isaacs is said to have wept when he heard that Lord Grade (as he now is) was to replace him…. Michael Grade plunged Channel 4 downmarket, sanctioning tacky programmes such as The Word magazine show (featuring viewers eating worms or bathing in pig’s urine), Eurotrash (nudity and transvestism) and Dyke TV.”
Glover, in this screed written back in 2011, seemed to see the changes as stemming from moral degeneracy and “pornography” (a present-day Daily Mail hack would no doubt complain about “wokery”). However, Glover also noted, “Only a few months earlier, Isaacs had criticised him [Grade] for his obsession with ratings while he was BBC director of programmes.” So it was all about driving ratings-determined revenue. It still is; only more so.
Recently, Phil Redmond, creator and producer of Brookside, told the Daily Telegraph (28 October 2022) that in the 1980s,
“What we had then was this British ingenuity, creating something out of nothing … And it was good. It was great for a while. Then telly folk got involved. The ’90s became a time where people just wanted to be ‘in telly’.”
As regards Channel 4’s current bosses, Alex Mahon and Ian Katz, Redmond says, “I think they really don’t understand what Channel 4 is about any more.”
Have they lost sight of the original remit?
“Absolutely. It’s gone completely. I’d characterise it now as a privileged clique, making programmes for a particular audience but actually not contributing enough to the public service debate.”
Also, the ratings are down. Deadline (5 June2023) reports that for May this year Channel 4’s UK reach stood at 35.8M, down 3.5M on May last year; and its UK network audience share was down to 4.48% – the worst four-week period in its 40-year history. This isn’t just a problem for C4. With the inexorable rise of non-linear outlets such as You Tube and Tik Tok, linear TV viewing has dropped across all age groups, but has fallen 23% year-on-year among 16 to 24-year-olds, who now watch a third less than they did in 2010, preferring instead to watch online.
if there is good reason for keeping the channel as public-service broadcasting it has to be Channel Four News, which retains a sense of independence of the Tory/Blue Labour establishment which effectively calls the tune for the BBC’s Newsnight. C4News still has moments to savour: like when anchor Krishnan Guru-Murthy had a hot mic moment after a “robust” interview with Northern Ireland minister, Steve Baker. Thinking he was off-air Guru-Murthy quipped to a colleague, “What a cunt.” Guru-Murthy apologised for this lapse in professional conduct (if not accurate judgement) and got the very light sentence from the C4 bosses of a week’s banishment. The BBC would likely have sacked him.
(This article first appeared on SUBSTACK https://blackd.substack.com SUBSCRIPTION IS FREE)
Terry Eagleton, writes in his review of Marx’s Literary Style by Ludovico Silva (London Review of Books, 29 June 2023): “The Communist Manifesto is rife with arresting imagery from the moment of its celebrated opening: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe.’” In Marx’s writings, “the categories that spring to his mind are comedy, tragedy, farce, bathos, epic, parody, spectacle and so on. If drama is latently political, politics is inescapably theatrical.”
In response, David Ireland writes in a letter to the LRB:
“Helen Macfarlane, the Scottish Chartist who in 1850 issued the first English language translation of the Manifesto, is widely derided for her rendering of ‘ein Gespenst’ [a spectre’] as ‘a frightful hobgoblin.’ It was at least a variation on the spectre.”
As the author of a prospective biography of Helen Macfarlane – described by Karl Marx as a “rara avis” with uniquely “original ideas” -, I question the derision. Today ‘hobgoblin’ is associated with the comedy cartoon figure on the label of Hobgoblin beer; or by the minor Marvel Comics super-villain. In 1850, however, ‘hobgoblin’ had other associations and was well-established literary currency.
According to historian, Peter Linebaugh:
‘“Hob” was the name of a country labourer, ‘goblin’ a mischievous sprite. Thus communism manifested itself in the Manifesto in the discourse of the agrarian commons; the substrate of the language revealing the imprint of the clouted shoon in the sixteenth century who fought to have all things in common. The trajectory from commons to communism can be cast as passage from past to future’.
Fascinating as Linebaugh’s idea of hobgoblins as belonging to the historical imaginary of the daily world of peasant communing is, it is hard to validate according to the historical sources.
Although Macfarlane renders Gespenst as ‘hobgoblin’ in the opening lines, she uses ‘bugbear’ for the same word a few lines later, referring to “silly fables about ‘the bugbear of Communism’”. In Scottish folklore, according to the Dictionary of the Older Scots Tongue, the ‘Bogle’ is ‘A supernatural being of an ugly or terrifying aspect; a bugbear’.
That ‘Hobgoblin’ is interchangeable with ‘bugbear’ is indicated in a 1593 statement from a government informer about 1593 concerning playwright Christopher Marlowe, shortly before he was stabbed to death in a Deptford ale-house: ‘into every Company he [Marlowe] Cometh he persuades men to Atheism willing them not to be afeard of bugbeares and hobgoblins, and utterly scorning both god and his ministers’.
As this statement was only discovered in the early 20th century there is no way Helen Macfarlane would have known about it. But clearly her translation of hobgoblin and bugbear as the spectre of communism expresses a same ‘spirit’ as Marlowe on atheism.
In 1684 John Bunyan’s ‘Who Would True Valour See’, in The Pilgrim’s Progress, has ‘Hobgoblin, nor foul Fiend/Can daunt his Spirit/He knows, he at the end/Shall Life Inherit’. In Jeremy Bentham’s chapter in the Book of Fallacies (published in 1824), entitled ‘The Hobgoblin Argument, or, No Innovation’:
‘The hobgoblin, the eventual appearance of which is denounced by this argument, is anarchy, which tremendous spectre has for its forerunner innovation… Of a similar nature and productive of similar effects is the political device here exposed to view…’
In the 1846 essay, ‘Self-Reliance’, by the American Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson the device reappears:
‘In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines’.
As Helen Macfarlane quotes Emerson in her own writings, it is likely, if not evident, that Emerson’s use of ‘hobgoblin’ influenced her translation of the Communist Manifesto.
(Red Republican: the Complete Annotated Works of Helen Macfarlane, edited and introduced by David Black, was published by Unkant in 2014)
On 30 March 1850, Charles Dickens, having established himself as Britain’s most popular novelist, launched Household Words:A Weekly Journal. In an editorial, headed ‘A Preliminary Word’, he promised his readers that: ‘No mere utilitarian spirit, no iron binding of the mind to grim realities, will give a harsh tone to our Household Words‘.
At this time there was, however, one potential rival he hoped his paper would ‘displace’:
‘Some tillers of the field into which we now come, have been before us, and some are here whose high usefulness we readily acknowledge, and whose company it is an honour to join. But, there are others here – Bastards of the Mountain, bedraggled fringe on the Red Cap, Panders to the basest passions of the lowest natures – whose existence is a national reproach. And these, we should consider it our highest service to displace.’
Although he didn’t care to name it, there is no doubt that he was referring to the Red Republican, a Chartist weekly, edited by George Julian Harney. Dickens’ attack did not go unnoticed by the Red’s most prolific contributor: Helen Macfarlane, Scottish anti-slavery campaigner, feminist, socialist Christian, Hegelian philosopher and friend of Karl Marx.
What Helen Macfarlane thought of Dickens’s fiction is not known, but she certainly didn’t like his politics (or lack of) as can be seem from the following.
‘The Red Flag in 1850’, Red Republican, 13 July 1850:
We, the English Socialist-democrats, may be “the ragged fringe on the Red Republican cap, the bastard of the Mountain” as the sapient Mr. Boz has been pleased to denominate us, but we are something more than that. Chartism and Red Republicanism must henceforward be considered as synonymous terms… And what is Chartism? … it would appear that Chartism is something very much resembling the hope and aspiration of a majority of the working men of England’.
‘Fine Words (Household or Otherwise) Butter No Parsnips’, Red Republican, 20 July 1850):
The above moral reflection occurred to me on reading an article in the last monthly edition of Dickens’ HouseholdWords, wherein two poor little starving children, who stole a loaf of bread, and were sentenced by a Bow-street magistrate, (“a Daniel come to judgment”) to be whipped for this “awfulcrime against society, property, and order”. Further, the writer relates divers particulars concerning the ragged schools in Westminster, tending to show that persons belonging to the offscourings of society—persons who, from their infancy, had been brought up in every kind of vice, are reclaimable with a little trouble, but that the first condition of that reformation is to give them the means of earning their living in an honest way. In the cases mentioned by this writer [Dickens], this was done by sending the subjects of the experiment to Australia, where, by last accounts, they “were doing well”.
I daresay they “were doing well”, in a country where the poor are not altogether thrust from the banquet of life by the rich; where the land, the common gift of God to all mankind, is not altogether monopolized by one land-owning class; where the honest man who only has his strength and skill to aid him in the struggle for existence, does not altogether become the prey of bourgeois profit-mongers, whose grand problem is—to get a maximum of work done for a minimum of wages. No doubt, any one, willing to work, would “do well” in a place like this. The remedy proposed by the above writer for the state of things he describes is—National Education! “If a son asks bread from any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone?”A spelling-book as a cure for hunger, was an amount of humanabsurdity, which evidently had not crossed the imagination of the Nazarean Teacher. Words are the panacea of the Whig Quacks and rosewater political sentimentalists of the Boz school. Education will do much, and a fit subject for its beneficent influences would have been the brutal, well-fed Dogberry who sentenced these starving children to be whipped; but Education will not satisfy the animal wants of man; the rule of three will not feed the hungry, or the Penny Magazine clothe the naked. How are the people of this country to be fed? That is the question. Not, how are the starving, homeless, hopeless wretches, dying by inches of cold and hunger, to be taught “reading, writing and arithmetic”. Your lessons in morality will do much for men who must either starve or steal, for women who must go on the streets and drive a hideous traffic in their own bodies, to get a meal for their starving children! Rose-coloured political sentimentalists!…
Transport the lazy drones who eat up the honey; transport the landowners and the thimble-riggers of the Stock Exchange, and there would be bread enough and room enough then, for all “our surplus population”. How are the people of this country to be fed? That is the problem for solution. The Protectionists did not solve it. The Free-traders are not solving it. Rosewater, self-sawdering, sentimental Whigs talk of National Education. Meanwhile, the producers die of inches of hunger—pauperism, and its attendant—crime—are on the increase. The condition of “moral England, the envy of surrounding nations”, is in a fair way of becoming very unenviable under the Upas-tree of a “glorious BritishConstitution and time-honoured Institutions of our ancestors”. It is well Time honours them, for I think nobody else does, and time must be in his dotage if he does anything of the kind.
In our own times, when charity has become an industry and, all too often, a racket serving the interests of the rich and powerful, Helen Macfarlane’s contempt for it still hits the spot:
‘The Democratic and Social Republic’, Red Republican, 12 October 1850)
We feel humiliated and pained when a beggar stretches out his hand to us for “charity”—that insult and indignity offered to human nature; that word invented by tyrants and slavedrivers—an infamous word, which we desire to see erased from the language of every civilised people… We believe, that unless God be a fiction, justice a chimera, truth a lie—it is possible to find social arrangements in virtue of which all the inhabitants of a given country could obtain a fair share, not only of the necessities, but of the comforts and luxuries of life—in exchange for the honest labour oftheir own hands… That is our dream, that is our Utopia; it is the democratic and social republic.’
A Sign in The Times
Dickens’s anathema against the Red Republican was echoed in a Times leader of 2 September 1851 entitled ‘Literature For The Poor’. Like Dickens, the Times chose not to name the paper – ‘we are not anxious to give it circulation by naming its writers or the works to which it is composed’ – but did extract some of Helen Macfarlane’s translation of the CommunistManifesto, as serialized in the paper. The selection included this passage as an example of outrageous cheek:
‘Your Middle-class gentry are not satisfied with having the wives and daughters of their Wages-slaves at their disposal, – not to mention the innumerable public prostitutes – but they take a particular pleasure in seducing each other’s wives. Middle-class marriage is in reality a community of wives’.
The Times found in the Communist Manifesto an alarming appeal to those people in the lower orders who form a sort of secret society, which is ‘close to our own’ but speaks ‘another language’:
‘… only now and then when some startling fact is bought before us do we entertain even the suspicion that there is a society close to our own, and with which we are in the habits of daily intercourse, of which we are as completely ignorant as if it dwelt in another land, of another language in which we never conversed, which in fact we never saw’.
(In 2014, I edited Red Republican: The Complete Annotated Works of Helen Macfarlane, for Unkant (Britain’s most radical publisher of that time, which unfortunately went out of business a couple of years later). It needs to be republished in a new edition.)
History and Class Consciousness, by the Hungarian communist philosopher, Georg Lukács, was published in 1923. The book drew a hostile reaction from the ideologists of the 1920s Comintern. That it did is ironic, given today Lukács is blamed by the Far Right for originating ‘cultural Marxism’, ‘critical race theory’ and other alleged wokenesses. Certainly Lukács’s book influenced the Frankfurt School, the Situationists, and other cultural folk-devils, but I am unaware of any conspiracy theorist who appears to have understood a word of it.
Lukács highlighted a central insight by Marx which appeared to have been forgotten by most post-Marx Marxism: that advanced capitalism doesn’t just ‘rob’ the worker through extracting quantities of surplus-value; it also appropriates living labour in a qualitative inversion of the ‘relation of subject and object’. Marx refers to this development as ‘a personification of the thing and a reification of the person’
Lukács takes up Marx’s theory of ‘metabolism’, which addresses how the transhistorical, interactive relation of humans with the rest of nature undergoes a ‘metabolic rift’ which is historically specific to capitalism. The rift is an effect of the systematised ‘robbery’ of nature’s resources and the social oppression that enforces it. Lukács analyzes how in capitalism, work, as a social-metabolic process, is reified and fragmented in a way that makes people incapable of recognizing the world beyond their own particular tasks as being of their own making. People are rendered passive and contemplative, no matter how ‘busy’ they are. The expert (or ‘virtuoso’) ‘lapses into a contemplative attitude vis-à-vis the workings of his own objectified and reified faculties’:
‘This phenomenon can be seen at its most grotesque in journalism. Here it is precisely subjectivity itself, knowledge, temperament and powers of expression that are reduced to an abstract mechanism functioning autonomously and divorced both from the personality of their “owner” and from the material and concrete nature of the subject matter in hand. The journalist’s “lack of convictions”, the prostitution of his experiences and beliefs is comprehensible only as the apogee of capitalist reification.’
As Guy Debord puts it in Comments of the Society of the Spectacle (1988): ‘For every imbecility presented by the spectacle, there are only the media’s professionals to give an answer, with a few respectful rectifications or remonstrations…’ Debord adds that these journalists are often in the precarious position of having to serve a range of interests they depend on for remuneration and the flow of information they rely on: that of the newspaper proprietor, broadcaster, political party, corporation, church, university, security agency, etc:
‘It must not be forgotten that every media professional is bound by wages and other rewards and recompenses to a master, and sometimes to several; and that every one of them knows he is dispensable.’
The ‘lack of conviction’ can acquire the optics of loss of conviction, as evidenced by lurches in political loyalties from Left to Right or (less often, it has to be said) vice-versa. This unedifying move is tempting for the hack who is running out of things to say and stories to tell, because switching sides opens up a whole new spectrum to roam in.
Reification Analytica
In a recent essay, Christian Fuchs argues that Lukács’s critique of ideology and reified consciousness ‘remains highly topical in the age of digital capitalism and big data.. [It] allows us to critically analyse how social media, big data and various other Internet technologies are used as tools of reification.’
Big date analytics embodies the latest tendency towards quantification of everything in society. Algorithms and mathematical analysis are applied to the data that is scraped and hoovered-up from the internet. By identifying patterns, relations and correlations it can predict human behaviour for purposes of surveillance, management and control. Fuchs quotes the former editor of the Wired magazine, Chris Anderson, as a representative of the uncritical fetishism of developments in big data. Anderson claims the new developments will bring about the ‘end of theory’: ‘With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves […] [When] faced with massive data, this [traditional] approach to science – hypothesize, model, test – is becoming obsolete.’
What applies to scientific research may also apply to journalism and may constitute the same dangers. Fuchs argues that the positivism about quantitative methodology disregards ‘ethics, morals, critique, theory, emotions, affects, motivations, worldviews, interpretations, political assessments, power, social struggles, or contradictions’. As the social sciences and humanities are colonised by computer science and business studies, critical theory and critical thinking generally are effectively rooted out.
On the other hand…
Whilst recognising that the new technologies are deeply embedded into the structure of capitalist domination, Fuchs sees alternative potentials and forces at work in the realm of digital technologies:
‘Lukács opposed deterministic analyses, which implies that although exploitation and domination are ubiquitous in capitalism, there is always the possibility for critical consciousness and critical action (praxis)… modern technology has created new potentials for co-operation and socialisation.’
The logic of the corporate digital giants is the subjection of the atomised individual to privacy violations, intransparent algorithms, targeted advertising and the like as a design principle. Socialist design would make social media truly social: based on collective production, co-operation and creative commons. It would protect privacy and promote transparency and the openness of algorithms as design principles.
(Christian Fuchs’s essay, ‘History and Class Consciousness 2.0: Georg Lukács in the Age of Digital Capitalism and Big Data’, is published in the journal Communication and Society, 2020)
Rise like Lions after slumber — In unvanquishable number — Shake your chains to earth like dew — Which in sleep had fallen on you — Ye are many – they are few. (Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1819)
On 6 January 2021, Donald Trump’s conspiracy to overturn his election defeat made insurrection respectable again – at least among his armed-and-dangerous GOP supporters. The ongoing assaults on liberal democracy – which are by no means restricted to the USA — pose a dilemma for the Left. The alternative, as propounded by the liberal media, is resurgent neoliberalism, even though its representatives seem prepared to dismantle everything liberal democracy is supposed to stand for: freedom of speech, union rights, control of price-fixing monopolies, protection of the environment, social services, etc.
Perhaps it is time to re-evaluate the idea of insurrection from a Left perspective.
The Coming Insurrection, a celebrated tome written by a French collective, pronounced in 2007, ‘Everyone agrees that things can only get worse.’ The ‘Everyone’ certainly now includes the prevailing political parties, who now have only feeblest notion of what might be ‘better’ as opposed to worse. The abjectivity is universal in Western Europe, especially in Britain. An article by Jörg Schindler in Der Spiegel, 18 April, reports:
‘Food shortages, moldy apartments, a lack of medical workers: The United Kingdom is facing a perfect storm of struggle, and millions are sliding into poverty. There is little to suggest that improvement will come anytime soon.’
Schindler quotes a striking nurse he met in Oxford:
‘”There’s something rotten here,” she says. “Nothing is as it used to be.” The longer she speaks, the more it seems she’s actually talking about the entire country. seeking its salvation in the very financial industry that collapsed so spectacularly 15 years ago, creating a situation in which billions were squandered…. And now, it seems as though it has dialed 999 and is waiting in vain for the paramedics to show up.’
The Financial Times of 28 June reported a poll by the New Britain Project which shows that nearly three-fifths of voters say ‘nothing in Britain works anymore’ and four-fifths don’t believe politicians have the ability to solve the UK’s biggest issues.
Kier Starmer’s mantra of ‘stability, order and security’ is chanted over the bonfire of the ‘pledges’ he made to get elected as party leader. In the most glaring example, Starmer, having promised to renationalise the failing, corrupt water utilities that are polluting our rivers and coastline, he has backtracked and promised the ‘market’ that the looters will remain in control.
The call of The Coming Insurrection, which seemed extreme back in 2007, now looks quite reasonable:
‘It’s useless to wait—for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides.’
In the post-2008 Crash period, with the rise of Left populism internationally, the word ‘insurrection’ was in the air; which was why we, in 2012, called our book, 1839: The Chartist Insurrection, Our focus was expressed in Ben Watson’s, blurb: ‘In retrieving the suppressed history of the Chartist Insurrection, David Black and Chris Ford have produced a revolutionary handbook.’
Member of Parliament, John McDonnell, wrote in the Foreword to 1839:
‘Labour movement historiography has overlaid the Chartist story with the concept of an overwhelmingly, conservative British working class and a solely reformist British Labour Movement. The message has been consistently drilled into us that revolution was and is futile. This book offers another perspective. Revolution in Britain in 1839 was closer than we have been previously taught.’
The Chartist National Convention of 1839 discussed various means for furthering the struggle for democracy, one of which was the ‘old constitutional right’ of ‘free men’ to bear arms ‘to defend the laws and constitutional privileges their ancestors bequeathed to them’. Their reasoning was that the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 wouldn’t have happened if the pro-democracy demonstrators had been armed. Of course 200 years later, peaceful protestors are no longer cut to pieces by sabre-wielding gentry-on- horseback. Also, Britain does not a gun-culture. For all intents and purposes, fire arms struggle can be ruled out.
Not so, other ulterior measures. The Chartists discussed and sometimes implemented several measures that today are worth conserving as tactics: withdrawal of money from ‘hostile’ banks; a month-long general strike; torchlight processions; refusal to pay rents, rates, and taxes; boycott of anti-Chartist newspapers; protection of persecuted activists; secret organisation of prohibited political activities, contestation of public spaces, and more. Some of the Chartists’ ulterior measures could rethought for our time. The Citizen’s Advice Bureau, which is hardly revolutionary, offers the following:
‘If you are a domestic (non-business customer), water companies can’t, by law, disconnect or restrict your water supply if you owe them money.’
In 1839, the Chartist masses were fighting for democratic representation as a means to address economic and social grievances. Today it is evident that means and ends cannot be separated.
Unkant Publishing went out of business in 2015, leaving the book ‘homeless’ and out-of-print (although it can still be obtained from some online booksellers). One of the aims of this blog is to help the book find a new publisher.
Review
James Heartfield, Spiked Online
David Black and Chris Ford’s account of the Chartist uprising of 1839 is also written in part to save these agitators from the condescending judgement of an Althusserian, in this case Gareth Stedman-Jones, whose ‘fear of agency’ cannot recognise Chartism’s self-conscious attempt to overthrow ‘old Corruption’. 1839: The Chartist Insurrection is altogether a more rewarding read than Rancière’s for its unapologetic focus on people who are making their own history. Black and Ford make the case that the earlier 1839 uprising came closer to overthrowing the existing order than the later challenge of 1848. They situate the movement in the disappointment of the Reform Act of 1832 that gave the vote to middle- class property owners, but not to the working men who protested alongside them.
Black and Ford make a good case that, though the technology they worked with was not for the most part industrial, the core of the Chartist movement was much more than an outgrowth of radicalism. Of course, it was true that their Charter was a series of democratic demands – adult male suffrage, annual elections, paid Members of Parliament. On the other hand, popular among them was Gracchus Babeuf’s argument that the democratic revolutions in America and France left ‘the institutions of property’ intact as ‘germs of the social evil to ripen in the womb of time’. The common ambition among the Welsh miners that the owners be made to work their own mines tells us that their struggle for democracy was indeed mixed up with a class struggle between owners and hands.
As the authors show, the movement argued hard about how far it should go if its great petition, the Charter, on presentation to parliament, should be refused – as it was. The Chartist Convention, a national organisation with elected delegates, debated the use of ‘Ulterior Measures’ in that case.
George Julian Harney – anticipating modern Sinn Fein’s slogan ‘an armalite in one hand and a ballot paper in the other’ by 150 years – called on his audience to carry ‘a musket in one hand and a petition in the other’. Threatened with prosecution, many in the audience testified that he had in fact said ‘a biscuit in one hand…’. Arguing for the Ulterior Measures, Feargus O’Connor promised that ‘it would be a war of capital against labour, and capitalists would soon find out that labour was the only real capital in the world’.
Still, Black and Ford do not flatter the Chartists unduly, nor make them into cartoon heroes. All the weaknesses of the organisation are confronted here. Throughout the summer of 1839, there were a number of protests in towns across the north of England, notably Newcastle, and in Wales and Scotland, while many smaller groups took up the call to arm themselves. The planned general strike, or sacred month, though, was poorly executed and patchily observed. In some confusion and disarray, the Convention voted to dissolve itself after a number of setbacks.
As it turned out, the leaders’ retreat only opened the floodgates of a movement that was determined to fight on. Black and Ford tell the story of General Napier, who led the militia against the Chartists, though he was himself sympathetic to their cause, if not their methods. On 6 August 1839, Napier wrote: ‘The plot thickens. Meetings increase and are so violent, and arms so abound, I know not what to think. The Duke of Portland tells me that there is no doubt of an intended general rising.’ But Napier’s judgement is compelling: ‘Fools! We have the physical force, not they.’
Black and Ford tell a heartwrenching story of attempted insurrections in Bradford, Newcastle and, most pointedly, in Newport in south Wales, where the movement came to a head. The insurrection was led by the tragic figure of John Frost, who himself was hoping to dampen the movement down, explaining at his trial that ‘so far from leading the working men of south Wales, it was they who led me, they asked me to go with them, and I was not disposed to throw them aside’. Though the Chartists did succeed in taking the streets and the Westgate, their superior numbers were not enough to beat the special constabulary’s better organisation.
All over England, there were risings that failed to meet up, followed by suppression of the movement and a witch-hunt of the organisers. Some escaped, like Devyr, while John Frost was caught and tried – and would have been hanged but that the sentence was commuted to transportation (itself a sign that the authorities feared worse if they killed him). George Julian Harney concluded that ‘organisation is the next thing to be looked into.’
Project of an orbital colony Stanford torus, painted by Donald E. Davis. Public domain image.
The Limits of Politics in the Anthropocene
In recent years Left Populism has lost momentum; seemingly eclipsed by the paranoid nativism of the Far Right, or recuperated by zombified social democracy. ‘We’ may still be the ‘99 per cent’, but the implied one per cent are still in charge, and, according to Greta Thunberg, the planet is burning amid ‘fairy tales of eternal growth’. So, whatever happened?
The rise of Left Populism took place in the aftermath of the Crash of 2008. Those years saw the emergence of the Occupy! movement in the USA, which powered up the Bernie Sanders campaign, and the Indignados movement in Spain which did likewise for the Podemos party. In Greece, the populist upsurge led to the formation of the Syriza coalition, which became the government in 2015. Populism had traction all over Europe, including Britain – where it took the form of a revival of the Labour Party Left, led by Jeremy Corbyn – and in various parts of South America.
According to Pablo Iglesias, general secretary of the Podemos party, ‘the key to success is to establish a certain identity between your analysis and what the majority feels’. One of the key sources of populist synthesis was the book On Populist Reason (2005) by Argentine political theorist, Ernst Laclau. Populism, according to Laclau, is ‘the political act par excellence’ which constructs the concept of the ‘people’. Politics is not reducible to traditional Leftist representations of classes or social forces, e.g., workers, peasants, racial or sexual minorities. Rather, the political is about discourse — language.
Swedish Marxist, Carl Cassegard, says Laclau’s book is
‘a theoretization of populism as a way in which the political is constituted as an least seemingly autonomous realm, independent of social forces in an almost quasi-transcendental way.’
Outside of the world of political discourse there is nothing to constitute a changeable process of social reality. In terms of Ferdinand Saussure’s linguistics theory, the relation is between the signifier (the political stirrings of the ‘plebs’ and the ‘underdogs’ against the unaccountable alien power of the ‘elite’) and the thing signified (the ‘power of the people’). Drawing on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, Laclau denotes the idea of the ‘people’ as the imaginary subject’s unattainable object of desire. Laclau’s concept of the ‘people’ is also homologous with the noumenal world in which Kant confines freedom and morality—for Kant there is nothing outside of the categories of the understanding that can constitute any sort of transcendence. Hegel describes Kant’s noumenal thing-in-itself as a bit like Hamlet’s father’s ghost: you can’t grasp it or make even make ‘sense’ of it, yet it is real in that it exercises moral power over Hamlet’s actions.
The New Left Utopians
Theorists of 21st century Populism believe they are on the ‘right side of history’ because of the possibilities afforded by technology. Aaron Bastani’s book, Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto (Verso: 2019), was widely reviewed in mainstream media. During the Lockdown, millions of white-collar workers found that the abundance of technology in their homes made the daily commute and the management office both seem anachronistic. Andy Kessler, in the Wall Street Journal (17 May 2021) saw a connection between this phenomenon and Bastani’s book:
‘At first I thought it was a joke. I still do… Cue rainbow-belching unicorns, The Atlantic wrote that “the vision is compelling.” The New York Times helped promote it. And it sure feels like the Biden administration is trying to implement it. Naturally, it’s complete baloney.’
Like other hostiles, Kessler didn’t get to Bastani’s main pitch, which was an attempt to rebrand Marxism by re-interpreting Marx’s insights in the light of 21st century technology. Here, Bastani is in the company of Paul Mason (in Postcapitalism: A Guide To Our Future), Ash Sarkar (his colleague at Novara Media) and various ‘technological utopians’ and ‘left accelerationists’. They all draw their theoretical framework from the concept of the ‘General Intellect’ which Marx sets out in a text known as the ‘Fragment on Machines’ in his Grundrisse (which lay unpublished for 100 years). Marx conducts a thought experiment. Assuming a society consisting only of workers and capitalists, market competition compels capitalists to introduce new machines and thus acquire extra surplus. The capitalist innovators in productive technology increase their profits and drive their slower-moving competitors out of business. However, unless the scale of production expands more rapidly than the rate of increase in productivity, less workers will be employed. The increasing investment in fixed capital is accompanied by the lessening of value produced by workers in society as a whole.
‘General Intellect’ denotes the accumulated knowledge of this society. The intellect becomes generalised to such an extent that the dominance of mental over mental labour – what Alfred Sohn-Rethel terms the ‘autonomous intellect’, based on the Kantian transcendental subject – reaches the point where the division itself is universally seen as anachronistic. So, as the development of social collaboration and free knowledge destabilizes the market mechanism and the system of private property, the capitalist mode of production breaks down. Marx writes:
‘Forces of production and social relations – two different sides of the development of the social individual – appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky high.’ (145)
The idea of the General Intellect has resonated in some unexpected places. Samuel McIlhagga in Foreign Policy (May 28, 2023) writes: ‘Marx shares an optimism with Silicon Valley about the potential for rapid technological change but is also far more skeptical about the short-term uncontrolled effects machines will have on human beings.’ The problem McIlhagga sees with Marxists of the Boomer and Millennial generations is that they have relied too much of Marx’s Capital:
‘It’s not that Marx can’t help the new post-COVID-19 generation understand its own forms of accelerating social, economic, and natural dislocation. But Generation Z would be wise to trade Marx’s Das Kapital for his long-neglected Grundrisse.’
The Productive Forces of Capital
The idea of the General Intellect and capitalist breakdown did not make it into Marx’s Capital Volume 1 or into the never completed volumes II and III. The reason for this, according to Kohei Saito in his book, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, is because there was a decisive shift in Marx’s conception of history, which occurred sometime between 1863 and 1866. This is shown in a draft from that period, entitled ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’. Here, the ‘two sides’ of production – relations and forces of production are subsumed as the ‘productive forces of capital’. This is closely tied to two other concepts: ‘cooperation’ and ‘real subsumption of labour under capital’. What it shows is not how capitalism breaks down — to our benefit – but how breaks loose — to our cost.
Industry, in the shift from manufacture to machinofacture, introduces new technology and develops new ways of organising distribution and production. This revolutionising of relations between workers and capitalists is theorised as the shift from ‘formal subsumption’ of labour to ‘real subsumption’. Real subsumption reduces the price of labour power by increasing productivity. The independent labour of the individual is nullified. The capitalist, who now commands the means of production (objectified labour), employs living labour in an inversion of the ‘relation of subject and object’. Marx refers to this inversion as ‘a personification of the thing and a reification of the person’. Cooperation, in revolutionising and extending the division of labour, is enforced across whole industries and society as a whole:
‘To the extent that the worker creates wealth, living labour becomes a power of capital; similarly, all development of the productive forces of labour is development of the productive forces of capital’.
Marx’s theory of ‘Metabolism’ addresses how the transhistorical, interactive relation of humans with the rest of nature undergoes a ‘metabolic rift’ which is historically specific to productivist capitalism. The rift is an effect of the systematised ‘robbery’ of nature’s resources and the social oppression that enforces it. The ‘automation utopians’ avoid the problem of productivism and technological determinism by focussing on populist electoral politics, and constructing a new ‘political subjectivity’ of forces for social change.
Saito warns that this concentration on the purely political concedes to capital the option of reacting to metabolic rifts by means of metabolic shifts, such as introducing geo-engineering ‘in the name of stewardship of the earth… to manage the entire ecological system at the cost of enslaving people – especially in the Global South through the metabolic shift – to heteronomous regulation by technologies’. Capital is able to deal with problems by simply shifting them elsewhere. It can do so spatially, by transferring the metabolic robbery system to places in world beyond democratic oversight; and temporally, by leaving the problems and the human costs to be solved and paid for by succeeding generations.Saito writes: ‘…politics alone is not able to change society because the extension of democracy to the economic realm will face an insurmountable limit when it comes to challenging and undermining the power of capital.’ Populist electoralism has a tendency to be hijacked by the right or recuperated by the centre. Cassegard writes:
‘Populism isn’t necessarily radical. Examples of the extension and unification of equivalential chains in the name of the people abound in institutionalized politics. That, after all, is how most mainstream political parties in modern liberal democracies work.’
Getting Real
Bastani highlights a quote from Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program of 1875, which envisions the ‘higher phase of communist society’ as where
‘labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want … and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly… From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!’
Ecosocialists have expressed reservations about this statement because it appears to be ‘productivist’; i.e. an argument for the exploitation of natural resources as if they were infinite. Bastani doesn’t regard this as too much of a problem as he thinks that high-tech can make production more eco-friendly if it is organised rationally and democratically:
‘So as information, labour, energy and resources become permanently cheaper – and work and the limits of the old world are left behind – it turns out we don’t just satisfy all of our needs, but dissolve any boundary between the useful and the beautiful. Communism is luxurious – or it isn’t communism.’
Saito, addressing the concerns about ‘productivism’, suggests that development of productive forces Marx envisages in the Critique is not equivalent to merely quantitative increases in production of the same commodities as under capitalism. For Saito, communism would have a ‘stationary state’ economy for satisfying real human needs, and would actually make it less productive, where necessary:
’This reorganization of the labour process may decrease productivity by abolishing the excessive division of labour and making labour more democratic and attractive, but it nonetheless counts as the “development” of productive forces of social labour because it ensures the free and autonomous activity of individual workers.’
Saito gives five reasons why de-growth communism would increase the chance of repairing the metabolic rift.
Firstly, whereas capital, in its drive for unlimited growth and profit, is bound to make and sell non-essential and harmful products, the abolition of the law of value would allow the reallocation of resources to essentials such as care and real luxuries such a art, sport and travel.
Secondly, unnecessary labour, especially energy and resource-consuming ‘bullshit jobs’ would be eliminated..
Thirdly, de-growth communism would transform the remaining realm of necessity to make the content of work more attractive.
Fourthly, the abolition of market competition for profits would de-accelerate the economy and ease pressure on the biosphere.
Finally, ‘Through collective decision-making processes, workers have more room to reflect upon the necessity of their products, egalitarian relations of class, gender and race, and environmental impacts.’
Saito’s case for a de-growth Marx is at the same time an argument for humanist communism. Anti-humanism, faced with the Anthropocene, takes such forms as technological determinism, deep-green catastrophism, Bible-prophesies and ‘hidden hand’ of libertarian economics. But an existential problem does not have a political/ideological solution. Political promises are usually lies; and ideologies serve to rationalise capital’s personification of things and reification of persons. We need materialism, not as a secular religion of pseudo-scientific rationalism, but as a method for dealing with material problems.
References
Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto. Verso: 2019
Carl Cassegard, ‘Laclau and the return of the people’ (https://carlcassegard.blogspot.com/2014/06/laclau-and-return-of-people.html)
Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program. Translated by Karel Ludenhoff • Introduction by Peter Hudis • Foreword by Peter Linebaugh. PM Press/Spectre: 2022
oday the London Metropolitan Police has reputation for institutional corruption and abuse of powers. I was ever thus. As William Lovett put it in 1839, “the institution of a police force is an infringement on the constitution and liberties possessed by our ancestors.”
An extract from the book, 1839: the Chartist Insurrection by David Black and Chris Ford.
Illustration from 1839: the Chartist Insurrection by David Black and Chris Ford. A cartoon Penny Satirist22 Aug 1840 on government plan to establish county police forces. Shows police raiding a pub, stealing chickens and pigs, and demanding to see a man’s passport.
The dialogue reads (picture on the left):
First Policeman: I can see a light inside. I swear.
Second Policeman: I can see summut moving
Third Policeman – I can hear someone moving – Let us demand an entrance – And know whether spalpeens have got their licence – And if they won’t let us in by fair means, we’ll break open the door – And swear they interrupted us in the execution of our duty – the beak will be sure to believe us.
Fourth Policeman – Here Larry, take hold of this here porker. I’ve knocked him on the head to prevent him squeaking – Oh, but we’ll bag the pigs and the fowls – And then in the mornin’ we’ll pretend to look after the thieves.
(picture on the right:
Holloa! Where are you going to this time o’ night?
I be going home Sir. From my labour.
I dare say that’s a lie. Show us y’er passport!
Passport? What be that, Sir?
Ho, ho! Then you haven’t got one, eh? – Then I’m sure you’re out for no good –so you are my prisoner – Come along.
The County Police Act 1839, also known as the Rural Police Act, enabled Justices of the Peace in England and Wales to establish police forces in their counties. The move to expand the police was not welcomed by everyone. Radicals, who had experienced the brutality of the London Metropolitan Police during the Chartists agitation of 1839, saw the new police forces as a threat to free speech and right of assembly.
Richard Doyle’s depiction shows police and dragoons attacking a Chartist rally in Birmingham’s Bull Ring on July 4th 1839. A large squad of London Metropolitan Police (wearing‘Peeler’ tophats and swallow-tailed uniforms) had been sent to Birmingham for ‘special duties’. [Image: Library of Congress]
Today the London Metropolitan Police has reputation for institutional corruption and abuse of powers. I was ever thus. As William Lovett put it in 1839, “the institution of a police force is an infringement on the constitution and liberties possessed by our ancestors.”
William Lovett
As described in our book, 1839:
As the House of Commons in London was about to debate the Chartist petition for Universal Male Suffrage, the Chartist National Convention – reconvened in Birmingham .
Days later, on 4 July, Birmingham magistrate Dr. Boothe rode into the Bull Ring, a triangular commercial area of the town centre, where an illegal meeting was taking place. His mission was to “ascertain the state of the town,” which he soon did when the large crowd greeted him with shouts of “Spy” and threw stones at him. Rashly, the police tried to snatch the speaker by wading into the crowd and wielding their batons, until they were beaten back by the angry crowd. Dr. Boothe rode off and soon returned with a company of cavalry. He placed himself under the Nelson Monument and read the Riot Act. The dragoons drew their sabres and moved into the Bull Ring. The crowd withdrew but remained on the streets until after midnight, some armed with clubs and iron railings torn from churches, chanting “Fall Tyrants Fall!”
Reporter John Hampden wrote in The Planet:
“Wanton outrages were perpetrated by the police sent down by Lord J. Russell, at the instigation of the Birmingham magistrates, not only upon the Chartists assembled in the Bull Ring, but also upon harmless and unoffending people in the streets… who ought to have been protected, instead of being maltreated. Arms-breaking and head-breaking, however, seem to have been practiced by way of diversion; it was, no doubt, fine fun to see a fellow go off with a fractured limb, and an exceedingly good joke to hear a woman beaten by the police ruffians, cry out against the brutality… it mattered little whether they were man, woman or child… Are not these circumstances calculated to rouse up all that is manly – all that is English – in our countrymen and produce a universal shout of execration against such tyranny and injustice?”
The Convention met the next day in Lawrence Street and, on London delegate William Lovett’s initiative, issued a proclamation condemning the magistrates and police for the previous night’s action. Although all delegates were prepared to sign the proclamation, Lovett, in an act of heroic proportions, insisted that he alone would sign because, he declared, “the Convention cannot spare victims.” The proclamation was placarded all over Birmingham, and the authorities responded by arresting Lovett as signatory, and Birmingham delegate John Collins as publisher, of the document. At the court hearing, the Birmingham Recorder asked Lovett, “Were you aware that certain members of the police force were wounded dangerously by weapons?” Lovett replied,
“I heard that several of them were wounded, and at the same time thought that the people were justified in repelling such despotic and bloodthirsty power by any and every means at their disposal, because I believe that the institution of a police force is an infringement on the constitution and liberties possessed by our ancestors; for if the people submit to one injustice after another, which self-constituted authorities impose upon them, they may be eventually ground to dust, without the means of any resistance.”
Collins pointed out that one of the magistrates facing him was in fact Mr. Muntz, a leader of the Birmingham Political Union. Muntz, a moderate, ‘Moral Force’ Chartist, had been elected to the Convention in August 1838, but had never taken his seat.
Bail was granted to both accused.
From: 1839: the Chartist Insurrection by David Black and Chris Ford (Unkant, London: 2012)
