Cults, Myths and Money – Dionysus, Orpheus and Us

By David Black

2 January 2025

‘When we have gone back to Homer, most scholars will think that we have touched the pillars of Hercules, and that we had better not pry into the prehistoric darkness, which the accidents of tradition have left blank. But the problem, why the Greeks believed that the Gods themselves were subject to the moral, yet impersonal and purposeless, ordinance of Destiny, is too fascinating to be abandoned, and lures us to push out into the misty ocean of hypothesis.’ – Frances Cornford

 

 

 

Simone Pignoni, The Rape of Proserpine, 1650.

The idea of a single substance underlying the plurality of sensuous experience is traceable back to pre-religious magic. The articulation of this idea in Greek philosophy is attributed to the development of coined money in the ancient economy.

The primary stuff is constituted by the elements: earth, air, wind and fire. The elements are deified as nature gods by the human community, whose survival and well-being depends on ‘balance’ between the interpenetrating elements (e.g. volcanic fire can devastate the surrounding earth). Circa 500 B.C.E. the pre-Socratic philosophers develop a metaphysics of oppositions from the elements: reality versus appearance, original versus derivative, total versus  partial, etc.

Parmenides (5th century B.C.E.) makes the first attempt in the history of philosophy at a pure, relentless, deductive logic of non-empirical abstractions. Counter-intuitively, he casts aside sensual perceptions of things moving in their multiplicity within space and time, to grasp the reality of the world as united in the One that is nowhere and nowhen. Existence simply is, and non-existence simply is not, whether in being or – what is the same thing – in thought. Everything is immovable, because movement requires empty space, and empty space is nothing and so cannot be. The thought of nothing, because it is a thought and therefore a something, negates the negation that nothing represents. Being is Reason.

Alfred Sohn-Rethel sees Parmenides as the first exponent of “pure thought” to emerge with “a concept fitting the description of the abstract material of money.” Sohn-Rethel pays almost no attention to Heraclitus. But according to Seaford, the opposition between Heraclitus and Parmenides can be seen as expression of the opposition between money as the communal logos of circulation and money as the abstract oneness of value detached from circulation.

Parmenides’ conception of the One as self-sufficient and immovable being, is contested by Heraclitus (also 5th century B.C.E.). In the Heraclitian Logos, being and not-being are mediated by becoming. The gathering of all things and thoughts in totality is the blending of opposite principles that, in the human world, takes place through conflict and contradiction. Heraclitus says, “there would not be attunement without high and low notes, nor any animals without female and male, both of which are opposites.” According to Richard Seaford, in Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Tragedy, and Philosophy:

‘In Heraclitus and sometimes in tragedy the transcendent power of money to unite opposites, to efface all distinctions between things and even between people, converges with the ancient power of mystery cult to unite opposites.’

In the Eleusinian cult, Demeter represents the womb, the grave, earth and its fruits. It she who gives humanity the great gift of grain for agriculture. When her daughter Persephone is taken off to the Underworld, she becomes an ‘angry one’ (erinye) and causes drought on the land. As this deprives the gods of offerings, Zeus is obliged to bring about a compromise which allows Persephone to spend some months of the year in the upper world; and so seasonal fertility of the land is established and the balance of the cosmos is restored in a new order. Persephone is the goddess of another great gift, the pomegranate ‘winter fruit’.

Dionysus is the son of Zeus and his daughter Persephone. Dionysus has special access to the underworld but because of this is hated by the Titans, who attack him after dazzling him with his own reflection in a mirror. After the Titans tear him to pieces and eat him Zeus destroys them. But out of the ashes of the Titans grows the human race, a strange mixture of, on the one hand, light and love, and on the other hand, Titanic malice, darkness and violence.

Orpheus, musical poet and charmer of nature, defies the rule of Hades by attempting to bring back his bride, Eurydice from the dead. After charming the rulers of the underworld Orpheus rescues Eurydice but fails to keep his “Don’t Look Back” agreement and loses her. Orphism, as a cult, becomes a theology without a church, but promoted by a narrative of hymns. As Orphism rapidly spreads across Greece and reaches Italy and Sicily, it becomes part of the Eleusinian mysteries, and is taken up by the natural philosophers. and the Pythagoreans. Orpheus is discussed in the dialogue between Phaedrus and Plato: Did he look back to make sure she wasn’t a phantasm created by daemons? Or was it because he doubted the word of Apollo? Or was he fool enough to think he could get the elixir of immortality from the shades?

In the Eleusinian ritual, the initiate, under the guidance of the hierophantes, is made to experience alternately, light and darkness, and hope and fear. In experiencing a divine intimacy with the Goddesses, he shares their sufferings and partakes of their sublime higher existence. According to the Roman Bishop Hippolytus, the climax of the Eleusinian vision is the initiate being shown an ear of ripe corn, which represents the power of the earth mother. Aristotle says of the cult of Orphism that the initiate ‘was not expected to learn or understand anything, but to feel a certain emotion and get into a certain state of mind, after first becoming fit to experience it.’

Whereas the Olympian gods are daemons of particular localities, the mystery gods, Dionysus and Orpheus, are daemons of human groups. The function of mystery cults is, strictly religious and organised as a secret society into which admission takes place through initiation rites.

The intoxicating spirit of Dionysus is human; the rituals of his worshippers (thiasmos) draw the god into the group and make the individuals lose themselves in the community of the divine and the One. As Cornford puts it,

“Orgiastic ritual ensures that Dionysus, even when his worship was contaminated with Olympian cults, never became fully an Olympian. His ritual, by perpetually renewing the bond of union with his group, prevented him from drifting away from his province, as the Olympians had done, and ascending to a remote and transcendental heaven. Moreover, a mystery religion is necessarily monotheistic or pantheistic.”

For the cult of Dionysus, human existence is the cyclical life of the seasons. The conceptual framework is thus temporal, rather than spatial. In Orphism it is both temporal and spatial, as the wheel of life through the seasons is governed by the circular movement of the stars. The Orphic reformation of the Dionysian religion involves worship of the heavenly bodies – especially the Sun – as measurements of time.

Orpheus, as a cult myth, represents, according to Seaford, ‘the victory of unity over fragmentation in both cosmos and self.’ The oppositions expressed in mystery cult – between limited and unlimited, individual and community, fragmentation and wholeness – may provide, he speculates, a ‘traditional model’ for the oppositions in money, as unconsciously projected by the philosophers.

The idea of experiencing the wholeness of self in the presence of the One through mystic initiation occurs in Plato’s Symposium, where the priestess Diotima says that beauty is revealed to the initiated as distinct from all things that partake of it, and as unchanged by their passing in and out of being.

This may suggest, according to Seaford, that “The mystic notion of a concealed fundamental truth may be adapted to – or even stipulate – the new cosmological idea (however counter-intuitive) of a concealed impersonal reality underlying appearances’; and that ‘the transcendent mystic object is unconsciously fused with the transcendence of monetary value.’

Plato, despite his anti-materialist outlook, approves of money because it renders things homogeneous and commensurable. The Guardians in Plato’s Republic, who have gold and silver in their souls, and are free from ‘the polluting human currency of the majority.’ In this way, Seaford says,

‘Plato’s divine precious metal combines its traditional immortality with the socially constructed, necessarily unchanging, impersonal and invisible value of coined precious metal, located in the soul…’

The absorption of individual things into their ideal unity consists of sublimated monetary value, which becomes the source of ‘being beyond being’. Thought autonomously acting on thought is imagined as in a way which resembles money producing interest in likeness to itself. Aristotle says that interest is an ‘unnatural; mode of acquisition because, as production of like-by-like, it transgresses the ‘natural; role of currency as means for exchange and circulation of wealth. The unlimited monetized power of the tyrants is condemned by Aristotle, who says that the free man ruling over his oikos is only self-sufficient to the extent that he is part of the self-sufficient polis. For unity to prevail in the face of the unlimited power of money and greed the polis must limit itself in terms of its size, population and class inequalities.

Seaford describes how in Greek tragedy the transcendent power of money to efface all customary distinctions converges with the ancient unifying power of mystery cult and communal reciprocity. The struggle between unity and fragmentation can be seen in Euripides’ play The Bacchae. The tyrant Pentheus is hostile to the Dionysian mystery cult and plots to expose its secrets by means of bribery. The god Dionysius, disguised as a man, tricks Pentheus into disguising himself as a woman to spy on the cult and then arranges to have him discovered and torn to pieces by crazed Maenads.

Of the blending and clash of opposites Seaford comments, ‘In Pentheus, as in the vision of Parmenides, the self-sufficiency of the man of money combines with the isolation of the mystic initiand.’

Monetization marginalizes communal reciprocity and actualises the illusory individual autonomy of the tyrant who like, nobles in general, depends in reality on the socially constructed acceptance of the value of money and its power to circulate beyond the control of any individual.

References

Richard Seaford, Money and the early Greek Mind: Homer, Tragedy, and Philosophy (Cambridge, UK; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2004) ISBN 0-521-83228-4

Walter F Otto, “The Meaning of the Eleusinian Mysteries,” The Meaning of the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Frances Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy (Princeton Paperbacks: 1991)

Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology.

History, Capital and Phantasmagoria

Gillian Rose: Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Verso, London: 2024

After the Hungarian Soviet Republic succumbed to the Rumanian invaders in August 1919, George Lukács escaped into exile and moved to Vienna. In between walks around the city with a revolver under his coat, he studied the section in Marx’s Capital entitled ‘The Fetish Character of Commodities – and the Secret it Entails’.

The ‘secret’ is how commodity relations produce what Lukács terms a ‘reified consciousness’ which is unique to capitalism.

Lukács identifies reification in Kantian terms as the antinomy between the subjective idea of what ‘ought’ to be and the ‘objective evolution of society’ which just ‘is’. In Marxian terms. reification subjugates the attitudes and consciousness of people to the forms in which it finds expression:‘As labor is increasingly rationalized and mechanized, this subjugation is reinforced by the fact that people’s activity becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative.’

Marx writes that the social relations between individuals ‘assume the phantasmagoric form of relation between things.’ He is referencing the magic lantern spectacle: a confused group of real or imagined images of person and things that change quickly, one following the other as in a dream’.

According to Lukács’ ‘Reification’ essay in History and Class Consciousness, ‘the structure of the commodity relations yield[s] a model of all the objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the subjective forms corresponding to them’. As well as Marx’s Capital, Lukács is influenced here by George Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, which highlights how subjective creations assume a life of their own in objective culture. Lukacs, in his 1920 article, ‘The Old Culture and the New Culture’, warns that the relative autonomy of culture, which first blossomed in medieval classicism, and now held out as ‘realism’, was being destroyed as cultural products became commodities. Furthermore, creative work processes and ‘traditional’ skills were under threat from mechanisation and division of labour.

The contradictory, contemplative ‘activity’ is experienced as immediacy; the individual’s experience of reification lacks the mediations which could reveal it in its totality and point the way towards a ‘solution’.

Ernst Bloch, reviewing Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness in 1924 reflects on the defeats of the German workers movement: ‘Every putsch in Germany goes under, while every idea shoots beyond reality, without influence, almost without meaning’. But now, Bloch’s great friend Lukács ‘had liberated thought, brought it into the historical process of becoming, where it is no longer mere observation, but the most deeply informed expression of that very process itself.’

Against the bourgeois’ ‘isolated, quantified concepts of reflections of things, as reified, self-contained systems’ Lukács had restored the notion of totality, writing:

‘we must… discover the practical significance of these different possible relations between the objective economic totality, imputed class consciousness, and the real psychological thoughts of men about their lives’.

Thus far, Lukács and Bloch were in agreement, but Lukács’s book criticises Bloch’s position that the social revolution required a religious as well as an economic dimension. Bloch, for his part argues that Lukács was being over-rationalistic. His thesis needed to be supplemented nothing less than ‘a metaphysics of dream-interpretation, of the conjuring up of the divine.’

The ‘divine’ in this sense does not mean heavenly intervention; it refers to a world-shattering historical event which is unmediated by any existing institution. The peasant uprisings in post-Reformation Germany, for example, weren’t called by any political party.

Both Lukács and Bloch were enamoured with Marx’s letter to Ruge in 1843 on ‘realising the thoughts of the past’:

‘Hence, our motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or a political form. It will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality. It will become evident that it is not a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and future, but of realising the thoughts of the past. Lastly, it will become evident that mankind is not beginning a new work, but is consciously carrying into effect its old work.’

Bloch, activated by this reflection on realising the thought of the past, wrote Thomas Müntzer as the Theologian of Revolution (1924). Following Luther’s Protestant Reformation of 1517, the divine heretic Müntzer justified armed rebellion by the down-trodden German peasants with biblical citations, especially Omnia sunt communia. (everything should belong to everyone). Luther, having made his peace with the German nobility, issued his pamphlet, Against the Thieving, Murderous Hordes of Peasants. In 1523 Müntzer’s peasant army was defeated and executed by the nobles.

Bloch, almost sounding like a Kantian reincarnation of Müntzer, writes In Spirit and Utopia that ‘it is necessary to oppose established power with appropriat power like a categorical imperative with a revolver in your fist’. As Bloch explained to Michael Lowy in interview 55 years later:

‘Jesus said long ago: “I have not come to bring peace, but have come to cast fire upon the earth.” Besides, in 1914-18, the fire was already burning.’ The Sermon on the Mount preaches tolerance when I am affected, but when my brother is the victim, I cannot tolerate injustice, persecution, murder. The Sermon on the Mount is not a pacifist tract. Thomas Müntzer wasn’t a pacifist either, and he was a better Christian than Lukács.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Metropolis by Fritz Lang)

Were the novels of Walter Scott and Tolstoy ‘better’ than those of Kafka and James Joyce? According to Lukacs they were. Lukács claims that art was opposed to myth; Bloch claims that art was secularized myth. Lukács associated expressionism and modernism generally with all forms of irrationalism in bourgeois culture – especially fascism. Bloch rejected Lukács’ characterisation of the times as a homogeneous and linear road to decadence. Lukács’ idea of art was classical and realist. For him immediate experience had to be related to the totality of social development. Bloch, in contrast, saw new forms of social experience as requiring new forms of artistic expression. In Gillian Rose’s interpretation of Bloch’s critique, ‘Lukács, in short, assumes a closed and integrated totality. He does not see that expressionism has tried to challenge that totality.’

Ironically, it turned out that the Nazis were as opposed to expressionism and all other modernism as the Stalinists. The Nazis, after removing 20,000 works of modern art from state-owned museums, held an exhibition of ‘Degenerate Art’ in Berlin, with 650 works, including those of Georg Grosz, Ernst Kirchner, Paul Klee, Otto Dix and Kurt Schwitters.

In paying close attention to the subjective dimensions of political experience Bloch drew on Nietzsche’s distinction between the Apollonian principle, which Bloch regards as cold and rigid reification, and the Dionysian principle, which expresses dreams, fantasies and ideologies.

Rose writes on the differences:

‘Unlike Lukács [Bloch] does not project the ideal society onto the historical future, he stresses instead the moment of decision, that revolution is a qualitative leap, not a gradual or a guided achievement. Existing class consciousness, according to Bloch, is not working towards ideal class consciousness, but already possesses it in art, in fantasies, on ideologies…. different pasts live in the present and may still be realised in it.’

Rose points out that Bloch’s analysis proceeds from the point of view of the artist; whereas Lukács’ concern is about the reception, effect and social function of the artwork. Both of them, however, overlook how the processes which come between production and reception may ‘distort their original significance’. Bloch thinks that art (and politics) ‘can, and should, and must draw on and appeal to the emotional and irrational’. But, Rose comments, ‘what counts as emotional or subjective in a society is produced and reproduced by the social structure’. Lukács is ‘wrong for the same reason, for he saw what is realistic or what is rational as universal, pre-given and fixed’. Both Lukács and Bloch saw bourgeois society as in a process of disintegration; and both were wrong, in that capitalism, especially in the post-World War Two periods, was consolidating itself with new forms of cultural and political domination.

At this point in her narrative, Rose turns to the cultural analysis of the Frankfurt School proper, namely Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.

TO BE CONTINUED

 

Annie Le Brun, French Surrealist 1942-2024

Dave Wise pays tribute to Annie Le Brun (15 August 1942 – 29 July 20 French writer, surrealist, poet and literary critic.

Although it could be said that in the 1960s the ideas of the Situationist International on ‘totality’ superseded Surrealism, in practise it didn’t quite work out like that. Although Surrealism had little profile in the near-revolution of May 1968 in France, many latter day surrealists participated in the insurrection with great gusto. They contributed more than a few good slogans, and some ended up in jail for taking to the barricades and other daring provocative acts.

Although by then Surrealism had been eclipsed in France, the movement continued to flourish in Belgium under the influence of Louis Scutenaire, a central figure in the Belgian Surrealist movement, along with René Magritte. Scutenaire also influenced the major Situationist contributor, Raoul Vaneigem and the Chicago Surrealists in the USA. (Sad to say Surrealism in the UK had been pretty lamentable but then gained a bit of latter-day traction in the late 1960s).

Undoubtedly, Surrealism in itself had attained a much greater, more total, coherence. Gone were the days of their in and out relationship with Communist parties – especially the French Communist party – as they honed ‘political’ preferences down to the anarchists who identified with the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39. But it was in the USA that what became known as the Chicago Surrealist Group went beyond ‘classical’ surrealist discourse and emerged as inseparable from the revolts of the late 1960s. The Chicago Surrealists produced a regular baseline mag called Arsenal, Surrealist Subversion, which quickly got their insights out across the globe. Their researches into the labour history and radicalism of earlier 20th century America proved to be original, astounding and brilliantly informed.

The figures of Franklin and Penelope Rosemont were axiomatic in this. Franklin’s huge biography of Joe Hill, The IWW and the Making of a Revolutionary Working Class Counterculture, is a framework for discussing disparate radical tendencies, rather than a traditional biography. Who else could have placed together radical IWW incidents in New York from 1913 with Picabia’s pre Dada contribution to the Armoury exhibition, together with the first exhibition of Duchamp’s urinal in 1917 and the advent of full-on Dada via the assistance of Man Ray? And who could forget the emphasis on the proposed 1000 mile Wobbly picket line running through America and Canada? I remember the joy I got in discussing this radical new historiography with Loren Goldner in my scruffy flat in Notting Hill around 2017. Loren thought it was too OTT, whilst I felt it more a realization of Lautreamont’s maxim of ‘new tremors running through the atmosphere’ rather than sticking to any specific historical fact. At the same time as both of us were leery of contemporary myth-making, fake news, the plethora of conspiracy theories and misinformation presented on social media via the ubiquitous iphone.

I first became aware of the existence of the Chicago Surrealists whilst hanging out in the late 1960s with Ben Morea and the nascent ‘Motherfuckers’ group on the streets of the Lower East Side, New York. Little did I realise that by then Charlie Radcliffe of the English Situationists was already on good terms with Franklin Rosemont, a friendship which remained constant for many a decade to come.

Penelope Rosemont’s Surrealism and Everyday Life is a mesmeric account of Chicago, capturing the soul of the city’s former blues and jazz experience. It’s therefore hardly surprising that Penelope quickly recognised just how good Annie Le Brun was. In 1998, Penelope edited and introduced Surrealist Women: An International Anthology. Translated into English by Guy Ducornet at the University of Texas, Annie Le Brun’s Lachez Tout is included in the volume. Penelope Rosemont was not alone in her admiration for Le Brun. Guy Debord himself had cause to contact Annie towards the late 1970s, never forgetting that years earlier Guy Debord and Andre Breton would pass each other on the streets of the Latin Quarter in Paris, never exchanging a word of greeting, each knowing full well who the other was. Debord most likely contacted Annie Le Brun because of her books on De Sade.

Annie had a very critical take on contemporary feminism, describing it’s general ambiance in Lachez Tout in 1977 as ‘Stalinism in petticoats’ and ‘the brave new Mao-feminist world’ in which ‘Neo-feminism is organised around the abyss of impossible love’. Instead, she was looking for ‘a sumptuous eroticization of revolt against a background of nothingness’. Essentially, she sees in modern day neo-feminism the ‘de-sexualisation of life’, taken over by individuals who haven’t a clue about real contemporary subversion as represented by the likes of Baudelaire, Wilde, the Dadaists, Vache, Cravan, and Stirner, etc. And like the first edition of the King Mob mag she even references Norman Brown and his Love’s Body. In fact, Annie, noting that previously all Dandies were male’, wants to see female Dandies everywhere.. It isn’t an untruth to say it is written in the style of Andre Breton: dense with far ranging allusions and juxtapositions underscored with a distaste for morality and ‘the clerisy’. In in that sense it’s surrealist to the very core. And like the first edition of the King Mob mag we published in the late-1869s, she even references Norman Brown and his Love’s Body. In fact, Annie, noting that previously all Dandies were male’, wants to see female Dandies everywhere.

Instead of praising Simon de Beauvoir and her book, The Second Sex, she pours scorn on it, which reflects her low opinion of the Existentialists who hogged the limelight in the 1950s. Historically, the women she really hones in on are the feminists of the Paris Commune of 1871 like Annie Leclerc, Louis Michel and Flora Tristan (“Delicious Flora”) often coming up with great quotes from them. More than that, Le Brun’s Lachez Tout is full of invented words which makes it virtually impossible to translate with any accuracy. And behind these notable women of the Paris Commune are the hordes of ‘other’ women whom Annie Le Brun praises to the skies which she refers to as ‘Amazons’, in the old-fashioned sense of the word – wild, women warriors – and not, need it be said, as in Bezos’ neo-feudalism.

Also, and hardly hidden from view behind Annie’s unmasking of neo-feminist intellectuals’ adherence to academia, TV, official exhibitions, etc, in ‘sweetly racist France’. She disdains: the way the main protagonists, desperate for literary fame, become ‘bureaucrats of neo-feminist sensibility’, creating ‘a revolution in costume but nothing more’, supporting police and prisons just like your average Communist party member. Annie looks for ‘original’ weapons, like ‘a knife without a blade that lacks the handle’.

Within the last few years a couple of Annie Le Brun’s books, The Reality Overload and A Sudden Abyss have been published in America; and not before time as the latter is the best reflection on De Sade ever written. However her two most important (and controversial) works, Lachez Tout and Vagit Prop have yet to see the light of day in the English-speaking world. Annie Le Brun’s French is itself legacy of wide-ranging symbolist association. It is difficult a difficult read at the best of times, so don’t get too frustrated with it as you will be rewarded by unmasking hidden depths.

It can be said that Annie Le Brun never really broke away from ‘the ball and chain of art’, eternally hanging around gallery culture. Annie simply couldn’t make the jump away from the ever increasing emptiness of the so called ‘creative industries’ which play such a vital role in the endless 24/7 imaging essential for the reproduction of Suicide Capitalism. Nonetheless, there was an ever increasing sharp edge there, as in later years Annie fulminated against the money madness surrounding all art today, as well as contemporary building cum architecture.

I might add that she was somewhat aware of what my brother Stuart and I were up to as Stuart engaged in some kind of distant emailing replying deploying one of his pseudonyms! Was that the famous Ranter, Lawrence Clarkson of the English revolution of the 1640s? One day I must search more through these emails…….

BPC has published four books by Dave and Stuart Wise:

*Lost Texts Around King Mob

*Dialectical Butterflies: Ecocide, Extinction Rebellion, Greenwash and Rewilding the Commons – an Illustrated Dérive.

*King Mob: The Negation and Transcendence of Art: Malevich, Schwitters, Hirst, Banksy, Mayakovsky, Situationists, Tatlin, Fluxus, Black Mask.

*A Newcastle Dunciad 1966-2008: Recollections of a Musical and Artistic Avant Garde plus Bryan Ferry and the Newcastle Arts Scene

For more information see  BPC  – books

Culture (Before the World) Wars – Simmel, Lukács  and Bloch 

Forms of culture (art, law, religion, technology) are created in historical time, but often attain an independent validity which may render them inaccessible to their creators

By David Black

Forms of culture (art, law, religion, technology) are created in historical time, but often attain an independent validity which may render them inaccessible to their creators, e.g. a work of art such as a painting may, when first exhibited in a gallery, may be acclaimed as profound, original and daring; yet might get labelled as kitsch when it is mass reproduced to hang in suburban parlors.

This phenomenon was already taking hold in the late 19th century when the German sociologist, George Simmel (1858-1918) began to correlate cultural developments with the increasing fragmentation of the work process as described by Karl Marx. Subjectively, the individual ‘spirit’ feels alienated from an ‘objective life’ (work) dominated by exchange value and money. By the same token (literally) money cam provide the means to establish a private realm of relative cultural freedom, separated off from the grind of alienated and quantified objectification.

The theorists of the Second International (1889-1916) based their formulations on the base-superstructure model, resulting in a sociological Marxism ‘without aesthetics’. Marx’s doctrine was reduced to economics and politics, with its philosophical essence reduced to positivist sociology. Artists and all other cultural personifications were thought to produce their works as simple reflections of the economic base, according to their class position within the epiphenomena of institutional and ideological formations.

To correct this shortcoming, Simmel, in The Philosophy of Money, aims to

‘construct a new storey beneath historical materialism such that the explanatory value of the incorporation of economic life into the causes of intellectual culture is preserved, while these economic forms themselves are recognized as the result of more profound valuations and currents of psychological or even metaphysical preconditions.’

To establish this philosophically, Simmel, who was schooled in the Neo-Kantian school of sociology, utilises what Kant had expressly ruled out as a source of validity: Plato’s ‘realm of the forms’.

The ordinary idea is: here is the natural world, there the transcendental, we belong to one of the two. No, we belong to a third, inexpressible realm, of which both the natural and the transcendental are reflections, projections, falsifications, interpretations.’

For Simmel, this underivable, value-creating reason lies beyond the distinction of subject and object; beyond the alienation of the human subject from the ‘everyday’ world of production, distribution and exchange. Simmel says it is a ‘typical tragedy of spirit to reside in the opposition between the realm of ideas and reality.’

In Kant’s Aesthetics, objective judgements, apart from those of ‘common sense’, don’t apply to works of art. The ‘taste’ of the individual may or may not be shared by other individuals. In all cases the judgement is subjective. Developments in artistic technique, form and content are assigned to the natural ‘genius’, whose talents cannot be accounted for objectively. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the unifying of formal reason for the scientific investigation of objective reality is determined exclusively by the individual observer. But, in Simmel’s version of Neo-Kantianism, Kant’s a priori forms – the ‘essence of our intellect’ – are seen as ‘calling forth nature itself’. The unity of society is not then determined by the abstractions of the individual observer, but is social: ‘directly realized by its own elements because these elements are themselves conscious and synthesizing units.’ Hence the consciousness of constituting with others a unity is ‘actually all there is . . . to this unity.’

George Lukács (1885-1971) and Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) were students of Simmel in Heidelberg, during the years preceding the First World War.

Lukács, in his History of Modern Drama (1909). which is influenced by Simmel, addresses ‘the tendency to depersonalization and reduction of quality to quantity in bourgeois society’, and ‘the desire to reduce everything to figures and formulae’. The modern world had negated the Romanticist dream of an authentic world based on aesthetics and ethics rather than economics and nihilistic growth. Society had become the arena of tragedy, reflected in dramas about the conflict between the aspiration of personal fulfilment and reified reality. Lukács, as an unahamed classicist, saw Marxian socialism as presenting a synthesizing unity which, however, in the conditions of the time (the pre-1914 Belle Époque and the high tide of militarism and imperialism) seemed unattainable short of a ‘miracle’. Such a ‘miracle’ had occurred with the advent of medieval Catholicism. When the time came to give the Marxian synthesis its artistic expression, this would ‘necessarily take a form as severe as rigorous of the genuine art of the Middle Ages (Giotto, Dante), and not the purely individual art, pushing individualism to the extreme, which is produced by our own times.’

In Soul and Form (1911) Lukács considers Keirkegaard’s grappling with the threefold fragmentation in the Protestant world of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. As there was no prospect any social force bridging the division between the three spheres, the only ‘genuine’ solution to Keirkegaard’s mind was a ‘leap of faith’. In his case this meant the ‘gesture’ towards God of sacrificing his relationship with Regina Olsen, the love of his life. Lukács saw Keirkegaard’s critique of the antinomies of bourgeois society as profound, but judged the gesture in-itself to be empty and futile. Lukács argued that to be possessed by ‘goodness’ requires a Meister Eckhardt-inspired ‘poverty of spirit’ as way of ‘preparing oneself for virtue.’

‘Do you remember Sonia, Prince Myshkin. Alexei Karamazov. In Dostoevsky? You asked me if there any good humans and here they are. And you see, even their goodness is fruitless confusing and without result… Whom did Prince Myshkin help, Didn’t he actually bring tragedy wherever he went? Goodness is no guarantee of being able to help; it is however, the safeguard of the absolute and perceptive desire to help.’

Bloch was asked in 1974 by Michael Lowy: why did Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy have so much an influence on Western Europe?

Bloch: A new culture begins with them, and it has now reached only its Merovingian stage. I myself participated in this general feeling when I wrote in Geist der Utopie [Spirit of Utopia] that the Russian Revolution was the act of a new Praetorian Guard “who enthroned Christ as Emperor for the first time.” This was still the mythical Russia. With Christ as Emperor!… For us, this was Russian Christianity, the spiritual universe of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Why did all of Western Europe see only this imaginary Russia? It was an impulse which was religious as well as moral, and it elicited this passion for the “Russian soul” – you understand that I’m consciously using the kitsch term for it-for something that we made glimmer in front of our eyes and that didn’t exist in reality.’

Of his intellectual friendship with Lukcács, Bloch recalled:

‘When we had been separated for several months and met again, we discovered that we had both worked in exactly the same direction. I could continue where he had left off, and he continue where I had left off. We were like communicating vessels; he was always at the same level…. There are parts and ideas in [Lukacs’] History and Class Consciousness which are expressions of a common point of view and which really came from me, just as parts of Geist der Utopie and aspects of its contents originated in conversations with Lukacs, to the point that both of us found it hard to say, “This is my idea, this is yours.” We were really in profound agreement.’

According to Bloch, also under Simmel’s influence, Marxism had identified the fundamental contradiction in capitalism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Bloch termed this the ‘contemporaneous [or synchronous] contradiction’. But, there is a secondary network of non-synchronous contradictions inherited from earlier societies but which survive into capitalism, and which may be incorporated, left alone, or destroyed, according to the ‘progress’ of capitalist development. These social forms, he believed, could not be ignored.

As Bloch prepared to publish The Spirit of Utopia, Lukács took a momentous ‘leap of faith’ of joining the Communist Party. He became Minister of Culture in the Hungarian Soviet Republic, which lasted for six months in 1919.

TO BE CONTINUED

History of LSD and Psychedelia – BPC Books

From BPC Publishing

Psychedelic Tricksters: A True Secret History of LSD (New Edition) (Psychedelic History) Paperback – 8 Jun. 2022

Timothy Leary, High Priest of LSD, predicted: “‘The next war for control of this planet and beyond has to do with the control of consciousness”.From the late-1940s onwards, the US Central Intelligence Agency secretly attempted to use psychedelic drugs for purposes of social control and psychological warfare. But in the 1960s, LSD escaped its captors as a new generation of rebellious youth on both sides of the Atlantic discovered psychedelics as means for expanding consciousness rather than controlling it. Exploding many of the myths surrounding LSD, the CIA and the counterculture, this book explores the roles and motivations of the ‘Tricksters’ on both sides in this world-changing phenomenon.

LSD UNDERGROUND: Operation Julie, the Microdot Gang and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love (Psychedelic History) Paperback – 21 Mar. 2022

In 1968, an expatriate American Beat writer and two Liverpool chemistry students launched a conspiracy to illegally manufacture LSD. It grew into a global industry, supplying the festival-going youth of the 1970s with tens of millions of trips.
It took the police several years to realise what had been established under their noses: laboratories manufacturing LSD; supply-chains for ingredients; and distribution networks which resembled the structure of terrorist cells. In 1977, ‘Operation Julie’, complete with a team of undercover ‘hippie cops’, carried out the ‘biggest drugs bust in British history’.
The hippies wanted to bring about mass psychedelic enlightenment, but their idealism was compromised by the exigencies of running an organised crime group. Their prosecution was weaponised in a culture war to uphold ‘traditional’ values at the very time Margaret Thatcher was presenting herself as their enforcer.
Based on documented testimony and personal accounts from ‘both’ sides, this book presents for the first time a roller-coaster, blow-by-blow account of the genesis, rise and fall of the LSD Underground.

Four Alternatives to Left Vanguardism

CLR James, Cornelius Castoriadis, Guy Debord, Raya Dunayevskaya

By David Black

1 September 2024

1. CLR James

[Grace Lee Boggs, CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya]

CLR James was born in Trinidad in 1901 and died in London in 1989. In 1932 James left Trinidad and sailed to England to help cricketer Learie Constantine write his autobiography. After working for the Manchester Guardian as a cricket correspondent, James moved to London. He took part in the Pan-African movement, the Independent Labour Party and got involved in Trotskyist politics. James had several books published, including, in 1936, the highly-acclaimed Black Jacobins, the history of Toussaint Louverture and the Slave Revolt of 1791 in the French Caribbean. The first and only successful slave revolt in history, it led to the abolition of slavery by the French revolutionaries in 1794. In 1802, however, slavery was reinstated by Napoleon. Toussaint was betrayed by his comrades and delivered to the Napoleonic regime to die in a French prison in 1803. Toussaint’s historical legacy is that he raised the important question: “are the universal human rights coming out of the Enlightenment and French Revolution truly universal?” – or, just white, male and European?

In early 1939 CLR James relocated to the USA and travelled to visit Trotsky in Mexico. Following the Stalin-Hitler Pact in 1939, Trotsky’s designation of the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state was disputed within the movement. Max Shachtman argued that it was bureaucratic-collectivist. By 1940 James had decided it was state-capitalist. Raya Dunayevskaya (1910-87), formerly Trotsky’s Russian language secretary in Mexico, came up with the same analysis as James, separately but at exactly the same time. Together they founded the Johnson-Forest Tendency within the US Workers Party, which had split from the Socialist Workers Party (US section of the Fourth International) months before Trotsky’s assassination (Joe Johnson was CLR James; Freddie Forest was Raya Dunayevskaya; the third leader of the tendency was Grace Lee – later Grace Lee Boggs, 1915-2015).

In 1947 the JFT rejoined the Socialist Workers Party moved to Detroit, partly because it had become the biggest and most multi-ethnic industrial city of the world, and partly to distance themselves from “petty-bourgeois opportunism” of the intellectuals and the Workers Party leaders in New York. The JFT’s four years in the SWP seems to have consolidated their base amongst miners and auto-workers, but as far as the SWP membership a whole went, their efforts seem to have been a debilitating waste of time. This unhappy relationship ended in 1951. The JFT left the SWP and founded the journal, Correspondence, in Detroit.

Just how far James and his comrades had moved from Trotskyism is evident from the correspondence between the leaders about things well beyond the ken or interest of the unhappy SWP. In 1948 James wrote Notes on Dialectics, a study of Hegel’s Science of Logic. This was a 250 page mimeographed document for internal discussion within the Johnson-Forest Tendency (it was eventually published in book form in Britain in 1980).

Hegel begins his 900-page masterpiece with the movement of philosophical categories: Being, Nothing and Becoming. In James’ interpretation if you determine that you and your experiences are something (like in “I think, therefore I am”), you are also determining that you and your experiences are not something else. Hegel’s Logic tells us – as an inescapable fact of life – that we come from nothing, but we are always trying to become something. This is true for us as individuals, from the day we are born; true for the development of philosophical Logic itself from the Ancient Greeks to the Enlightenment; and true for historical movements. Marx argues that the proletariat is revolutionary or it is nothing; and by negating capitalism it negates itself. It is this historical movement of the proletariat that James is primarily concerned with.

Greek democracy, forgotten under the Roman Empire and feudalism, returns at a new and higher level with the English Revolution of the 17th century. It is defeated, but it comes back: first with the American Revolution of 1776, then with the French Revolution of 1789. The French Revolution also gives birth to the idea of communism (Marx was quick to point that out that it was not he or Enge;s who invented it).

James brilliantly uses Hegel’s argument against Kantianism to expose the fixed determinations and categories of Trotskyism in its failure to understand the class nature of the USSR. The Johnson-Forest group argued that what made Stalinism in 1939 different to the 2nd International betrayers of 1914 could only be grasped by grounding the category of state-capitalism in the dialectic of Labour and Capital, as set out in the categories of Marx’s Capital. No wonder, James said, all of Trotsky’s predictions for World War turned out wrong. On the “Hegelian” aspect of Lenin’s State and Revolution James saw that Lenin propounded a new universal in calling for population “to a man” to run production and the state. As Hegel puts it, no doubt with the French Revolution in mind:

“When external actuality is altered by the activity of the objective notion and its determination therewith sublated, by that very fact the merely phenomenal reality, the external determinability and worthlessness, are removed from that actuality.

In Hegel’s terms the “objective notion” becomes the General Will that the potential of revolutionary change is actually more real thanthe merely phenomenal”. “The fact IS, BEFORE it exists.”

The point CLR James makes in 1948 is that both social democracy and the communist parties had become deadly enemies of the proletariat,  because they were both representations of capital. Social democracy represented a section of the proletariat – the skilled workers – who had been incorporated by monopoly capital; stalinism represented the petite bourgeois, technocratic new class of state capitalism. So, James argues that with the millions of workers organised into unions by European Stalinist parties (or, as in England and America, social democrats), there was nothing left to organise. James therefore counterposes spontaneous class struggle to organisation. The historic task of the workers movement had become how to negate the vanguard party. Spontaneous conscious actions by the masses, already organised in fighting form in their workplaces, would spill over into the surrounding communities and negate all the abstract universals that previous revolutions had thrown up.

After leaving the SWP, the Johnson-Forest Tendency published the journal, Correspondence, in Detroit, but in 1955 Raya Dunayevskaya and Black auto-worker, Charles Denby, broke away to found News and Letters and work on Dunayevskaya’s forthcoming book, Marxism and Freedom.

1958 saw the publication of the pamphlet, Facing Reality: The New Society and How to Bring it Closer, by CLR James and Grace Lee Boggs, with an introduction by Cornelius Castoriadis of the French group, Socialisme ou Barbarie group (see next post). Facing Reality threw out any concept of organized mediation in the world of class struggle:

“the organization will not seek to propagate it [socialism], nor to convince men of it, but to use it so as the more quickly and clearly to recognize how it is concretely expressed in the lives and struggles of the people.” Believing socialism to be “inherent in the masses,” the only role left for revolutionaries was to tell anyone who didn’t know it that this was so.

This perspective raised the question of the organisation’s “historic right” to exist. What was it?

2. Cornelius Castoriadis

[(Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort]

In 1960 Guy Debord joined Socialisme ou Barbarie, while retaining membership of the Situationist International, and remained a member for one year.[i]

Debord argued that the academic specialists had abandoned the “critical truth” of their disciplines to preserve their ideological function. And as, he believed, “real people” were going to come together to challenge the capitalist order, all “real researches” were “converging toward a totality.”[ii] These “real researches” could be found in “militant publications like Socialisme ou Barbarie in Paris and Correspondence in Detroit,” both of which had broken with Trotskyist vanguardism. Both groups had published “well-documented articles on workers’ continued resistance” to “the whole organization of work” and to their depoliticization and disaffection from unions which had become “a mechanism for integrating workers into the society as a supplementary weapon in the economic arsenal of bureaucratized capitalism.”[iii]

Socialisme ou Barbarie, published from 1949 to 1965, was founded by Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort. Correspondence, published from 1951 to 1962. In 1958, Castoriadis, using the pseudonym, “Pierre Chaulieu,” contributed to the book, Facing Reality, alongside  James and Grace Lee Boggs.[iv]

Castoriadis (1922-97) analyzed the implications for radical politics of developments in post-War capitalism. The “crisis” and “immiseration” predicted by “traditional” Marxism now appeared to have been forestalled. With full unemployment and an increasingly affluent workforce, Castoriadis saw the remaining contradictions of the system as the “alienation” of the worker from work and the division between management and the managed (significantly Castoriadis did not, as did Marx, conceptualize the division as between mental and manual labor).

Since Socialisme ou Barbarie believed that workers’ councils would be the organs for transition to a socialist society, there was a reassessment of the earlier “council communism” which had appeared during the German Revolution of 1918-19 and its aftermath. In 1952, the veteran Dutch council communist and astronomer, Anton Pannekoek (1873-1960), wrote to Castoriadis on the issue of workers’ councils and the “revolutionary party”: “While you limit the activity of these councils to the organization of work in the factories after the seizure of power by the workers, we consider them equally as being the means by which the workers will conquer this power.”[v]

Whereas Pannekoek held that the workers would decide for themselves on the organization of the new society once the power of the workers’ councils had been established, Castoriadis had drawn up a veritable blueprint for a new “system” of workers’ councils, with elections at the shop-floor level for a government of councils and a central assembly which would oversee a “planning factory” for coordinating and managing the economy at the national level.[vi]

This looked to Pannakoek like the party-building he was sceptical of. Pannekoek argued that for councilists to retain even the concept of a party – even a non-vanguardist party – was a “knotty contradiction.” Castoriadis, for his part, did not see the role of the revolutionary organization as constituting an external leadership to the working class. He believed revolutionary organization would be necessary to thwart the efforts of “Leninist” parties to “take-over” the autonomous bodies that would be set up by the workers. Castoriadis saw Socialisme ou Barbarie as building the revolutionary organization of the “avant-garde” minority of workers and intellectuals, whose role in the short term would be to protect the immediate interests of the workers. Although this organization would have to be “universal, minority, selective and centralized” -to such an extent that it could be perceived as Leninist – he believed that it could avoid degeneration into a bureaucracy because it would not repeat the fundamental division of management and managed, which the vanguard parties reflected in their theory and practice. The journal carried reports from workers describing the monotony and alienation they felt in their jobs, frequently expressing the view that they, the workers, could self-manage their workplaces much more efficiently and creatively than the existing managers.[vii]

The advent of the Hungarian workers’ councils in the Revolution of 1956 was seen by Castoriadis as an epoch-making anti-capitalist development. Mistakenly, however, he saw Soviet “bureaucratic state-capitalism,” with its highly integrated and centralized bureaucracy, as the “highest” stage of capitalism, and therefore ahead of its Western rivals in the domination of labor by capital – not to mention its ideological hold over workers’ organizations in the West. This position implied that successful revolution might be even more likely in the West, because of the contested democratic space that still existed in bourgeois democracies.

However, the events in Hungary did not develop the revolutionary tendencies of the French working class; rather they just eroded the authority and hegemony of the French Communist Party. The vote in the referendum of 1958 for De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic – ninety per cent in favor – shattered Castoriadis’ faith in the working class as a revolutionary force and led to a significant shift in Socialisme ou Barbarie towards covering struggles against alienation in the “superstructure” – especially in culture and education.[viii] But for the moment, the “industrial” work continued. In 1959 the journal Pouvoir Ouvrier was founded by Socialisme ou Barbarie to propagate the program for workers’ self-management based on the theories of Castoriadis, as well as to publish reports from workers on the shop floor. But the “knotty contradiction” of party-and-class identified by Pannekoek soon manifested itself. Claude Lefort (1924-2010) broke from the group in 1958 over what he saw as “a permanent contradiction between the theoretical character of the journal and its propagandistic claims.” In Lefort’s view, which was shared by Henri Simon (born 1922), Castoriadis’ position concealed a “radical fiction” posing as a conception of non-bureaucratic socialism, which in turn concealed both a “communitarian” desire for homogeneity and the inevitability of articulation by a small circle of intellectuals.[ix]

Another issue was raised by Raya Dunayevskaya in 1955. She admired the input of reports by workers in the journal:

“Heretofore socialists and other radicals have been content with publishing a paper ‘for’ workers rather than by them. The fact that some now pose the latter question, and pose it with the seriousness characteristic of the theoretical journal, is a beginning.”

She added however, that to say, “A workers’ paper, yes, but in that case it must come from the workers themselves, and not from us the theoreticians,” was an evasion of the task at hand: “theoreticians cannot be bystanders to a paper that mirrors the workers’ thoughts and activities as they happen.”[x] In 1961, Eugene Gogol of Dunayevskaya’s News and Letters Committees attended a Socialisme ou Barbarie conference in France as an observer and engaged with Castoriadis in discussion of Marx’s 1844 Philosophic Notebooks, the first English translation of which had been published in Dunayevskaya’s book Marxism and Freedom in 1958 as an appendix. Castoriadis argued that Marx’s 1844 writings had “no bearing on Marxian thought after Marx because they were not published until 1920,” and that their philosophic nature made them irrelevant to the question of alienation in modern production.[xi]

After Debord broke from Castoriadis in 1961, the journal International Situationist warned that Socialisme ou Barbarie ran the risk of “providing an ideological cover for a harmonization of the present production system in the direction of greater efficiency and profitability without at all having called in question the experience of this production or the necessity of this kind of life.”[xii] A few issues later (in 1963), the critique continued:

these groups, rightly opposing the increasingly thorough reification of human labor and its modern corollary, the passive consumption of a leisure activity manipulated by the ruling class, often end up unconsciously harboring a sort of nostalgia for earlier forms of work, for the truly ‘human’ relationships that were able to flourish in the societies of the past or even during the less developed phases of industrial society. As it happens, this attitude fits in quite well with the system’s efforts to obtain a higher yield from existing production by doing away with both the waste and the inhumanity that characterize modern industry.[xiii]

In Socialisme ou Barbarie’s first manifesto of 1949, Castoriadis had insisted that Marxism was “beyond question.” But in the course of the 1950s he developed the view that Marxism was the ideology of an earlier, “market” and “production” stage of capitalism, and that in the modern bureaucratic world, Marx’s Capital, for the most part, was no longer relevant. Castoriadis argued that, with the aid of the state, continual expansion of capitalism could take place unimpeded. In the age of state-capitalism and bureaucracy, a new “ideology” was necessary for the new movement towards a system of workers-self management. Castoriadis himself concluded that Marxism was a “pseudo-scientific” “obfuscation” of nineteenth-century class struggles, which had themselves “allowed the system to function and survive.”[xiv]

By the late 1960s the Situationists were attacking what they saw as Castoriadis’ “unmistakable progress towards revolutionary nothingness, his swallowing of every kind of academic fashion and his ending up becoming indistinguishable from any ordinary sociologist.”[xv]

3. Guy Debord

Anselm Jappe, in his book, Guy Debord, argues that, “Debord’s theory is in essence the continuation of the work of Marx and Hegel and that its importance inheres for the most part precisely in this fact” [emphasis in the original].

According to Hegel, the application of abstract principles in law and economics was a further negation of the organic unity of life he saw as having once existed in Greek Antiquity. The unity of subject and object expressed in the art of Greek Antiquity had become impossible for a society in which, according to Hegel, the “lower world” of economic nature (once vested in the “family” or “household”) promoted a “bestial contempt for all higher values.” All sense of the divine had been tossed into the world of “superstition” and “entertainment,”[i] the temple reduced to “logs and stones” and “the sacred grove to mere timber.”[ii]

What then was left for art? Hegel said that “as regards its highest vocation, art is and remains for us something past. For us it has lost its genuine truth and vitality; it has been displaced into the realm of ideas.”

Hegel did not doubt that works of art would continue to be produced and that artists would strive for perfection with new imaginative techniques. In modernity. however, what is aroused in us by art beyond immediate enjoyment is “the judgment that submits the content and medium of representation of art to reflective consideration… For this reason, the science of art is a far more important requirement in our own age than it was in earlier times when art simply as art could provide complete satisfaction.”[iii]

In 1967, Guy Debord wrote in the Society of the Spectacle that the defeat of the social revolutions following the First World War had left the Surrealists and the Dadaists “imprisoned in the same artistic field whose decrepitude they had denounced.” Furthermore, Surrealism had mistakenly put itself “au service” of a revolution in Russia which had already been lost. Whereas “Dadaism had tried to repress art without realising it; Surrealism wanted to realise art without suppressing it.” What was necessary, in Debord’s view, was to project suppression and realization as “inseparable aspects of a single supersession of art.”[iv]

[Top: Jacques-Louis David. Below Rene Magritte]

In July 1957, at a conference in Cosio d’Arroscia, Italy, the Situationist International was founded. Those attending were: from France, Guy Debord and Michèle Bernstein of the Letterist International; from England, the painter Ralph Rumney; from Denmark, the painter Asger Jorn; and from Italy, Guiseppe Pinot Gallizio, the formulator of “industrial painting,” Walter Olmo, experimental musician, and Piero Simondo and Elena Verrone of the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus.

Debord argued in his Report on the Construction of Situations and the Prerequisites for the Organization and Action of the International Situationist Tendency that “the problems of cultural creation can now be solved only in conjunction with a new advance in world revolution.” In order to combat the passive consumption that defined spectacular culture, Debord called for the international to organize collectively towards utilizing all of the means of revolutionizing everyday life, “even artistic ones.”

We need to construct new ambiances that will be both the products and the instruments of new forms of behavior. To do this, we must from the beginning make practical use of the everyday processes and cultural forms that now exist, while refusing to acknowledge any inherent value they may claim to have… We should not simply refuse modern culture; we must seize it in order to negate it. No one can claim to be a revolutionary intellectual who does not recognize the cultural revolution we are now facing…[v]

Although any genuinely experimental attitude based on critique and supersession of existing conditions was usable, production of artistic forms was seen as a dead end, leading at best to recuperation and commodification within the spectacle:

It must be understood once and for all that something that is only a personal expression within a framework created by others cannot be termed a creation. Creation is not the arrangement of objects and forms, it is the invention of new laws on such arrangement.[vi]

Debord said in 1961 at Henri Lefebvre’s Group for Research on Everyday Life:

the critique and perpetual re-creation of the totality of everyday life, before being carried out naturally by all people, must be undertaken in the present conditions of oppression in order to destroy these conditions. An avant-garde cultural movement, even one with revolutionary sympathies, cannot accomplish this. Neither can a revolutionary party on the traditional model, even if it accords a large place to criticism of culture… The revolutionary transformation… will mark the end of all unilateral artistic expression stocked in the form of commodities, and at the same time the end of all specialized politics.[vii]

Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciouness (1923) saw in the reformism of social democracy a retreat from Hegel and Marx to Kant. Before Hegel and the French Revolution, the rationalists had treated objectivity as independent of, and separate from, the thinking subject; and for Kant, the object was knowable only in how it appeared to the subjective mind, not as the thing-in-itself. In Hegel’s concept of totality this duality in the process of knowledge is resolved by eliminating the autonomy of both the objects and their concepts. The power of the totality is expressed in Lukács’ statement that “the chapter in Marx’s Capital dealing with the fetish character of the commodity contains within itself the whole of historical materialism.”[viii] In Capital Marx shows how the value-form which labor assumes depends on the reduction of the concrete labor to abstract labor, which takes place in the production of commodities through the medium of socially necessary labor time.

The Society of the Spectacle argues that the spectacle does not falsify reality merely in an ideological sense, along the lines of the economic base producing false consciousness in the superstructure; nor does the spectacle constitute itself abstractly as a force external to the concrete social activity of individuals. Rather, the spectacle-commodity and reality each transform themselves into their opposites. The spectacle is a real product of that reality; and “real life,” in its subjective passivity, absorbs its own objectified falsification. Their reciprocal alienation is the ground and essence of spectacular capitalism, in which the world is turned upside down:

The spectacle is able to subject human beings to itself because the economy has already totally subjugated them. It is nothing other than the economy developing for itself. It is at once a faithful reflection of the production of things and a distorting objectification of the producers.[ix]

Where then, does this leave proletarian class consciousness? Lukács, in his 1923 essay, ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, argues that work, as a social-metabolic process, is reified and fragmented in a such a way as to make people incapable of recognizing the world beyond their own particular tasksas being of their own making. People are thus rendered passive and contemplative, no matter how “busy” they are.[x] Against the fragmenting yet totalizing power of the commodity Lukács dialectically juxtaposes the particular commodity that production is based on: labor-power. Since labor-power cannot be separated from the laborer, then any real self-consciousness on the laborer’s part of that relationship can be “ascribed” as revolutionary. Lukács thus postulates a “subject-object identity” constituted by the class that “wakes up” to mass revolutionary consciousness.

Lukács, however, is well aware of the gap between the “ascribed” revolutionary consciousness and the actually existing reformist/false consciousness. Reification, as the “necessary, immediate reality of every person living in capitalist society,” can be overcome only by “constant and constantly renewed efforts to disrupt the reified structure of existence” and by relating the “concretely manifested contradictions” to the totality of development, and becoming conscious of the immanent meanings of these contradictions in their totality.[xi]

Debord, taking up this problem of the passive and contemplative nature of everyday life under capitalism, sees the leisure industry, with its Club Med holidays, mass sports events, television and movies, as much more than mere distraction. In “consumable pseudo-cyclical time” the commodified moments of leisure are explicitly presented as moments in the cyclical return of real life, but all that is really happening is the spectacle reproducing itself at a higher level of intensity: “The moments within cyclical time when members of a community joined together in a luxurious expenditure of life are impossible for a society that lacks both community and luxury.”[xii]

Debord argues that because the spectacle attempts to establish an illusory unity over the fragmentation and separation, any real proletarian subjectivity cannot confine itself to concerns over egalitarian distribution of wealth; it must be total itself. The real social contradiction is between those who are at home in alienation – or at least feel obliged to maintain it – and those who would abolish it. The coming revolution would require a complete break with vanguardism as well as anarcho-councilism.[xiii]

As Debord puts it in Society of the Spectacle, Lukács claimed that the Bolshevik form of organization “was the long sought mediation between theory and practice, in which proletarians are no longer spectators of the events which happen in their organization, but consciously choose and live these events.” The trouble was, “he was actually describing as merits of the Bolshevik party everything that the Bolshevik party was not.”[xiv]

The Situationists’ grasp of the difference between class consciousness in-itself and in-and-for-itself was at the root of their polemical attacks on the bureaucratic practices in the workers’ movement and the fragmented, contemplative ideas of sociologizing intellectuals. Situationist writings suggested that workers could reach revolutionary conclusions among themselves and that the Situationist International saw no responsibility for helping this process along, unless approached by the workers’ councils themselves for assistance.

Debord thought that the French revolt of May/June 1968, soon to be followed by the “Hot Autumn” of Italy in 1969, heralded “the beginning of a new era,”[xv] But he had no intention of building a new political party, either on a national or international basis, that would become, like others past and present, yet another “representation” of the real struggle. The Situationists, as les enfants perdus, had no further missions to fulfill in the organizational form they had upheld for the previous fourteen years, and nowhere to return to. In 1972, after a final round of resignations and expulsions, which left Debord and the Italian, Gianfranco Sanguinetti, as the only two remaining members, the Situationist International was dissolved at Debord’s behest.

Twenty years after the May Events of 1968, in his 1988 Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, Debord identified the dilemma facing the Left well before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the apparent victory of neoliberalism:

the coherence of the society of the spectacle proves revolutionaries right, since it has become clear that one cannot reform the poorest detail without taking the whole thing apart. But, at the same time, this coherence has suppressed every organized revolutionary tendency by suppressing the social terrains where they had more or less expressed themselves: from trade unions to newspapers, towns to books. In the same movement, one has highlighted the incompetence and thoughtlessness of which this tendency was quite naturally the bearer.[xvi]

In 1967, Debord had noted the ever-increasing size of the working class and the impending proletarianization of the entire workforce. But in the Comments of 1988, Debord, as Jappe puts it, “reversed the terms of this proposition”: the conditions of the middle classes had become proletarianized in their separation and lack of power but, as they lacked class consciousness, they had negated the power of the proletariat as a force irreconcilable with capital, by absorbing it. In late-Debord thought, the early-Lukács’ formulation of a structure of reified consciousness evolves into that of the “integrated spectacle.”

Debord’s “pessimistic” Comments of 1988 should be seen in relation to his original theorizing of the spectacle and the forces resisting it. In distancing the Situationists from both the vanguardist and spontaneist positions, the Society of the Spectacle argued the revolution “requires” workers to become dialecticians:

Proletarian revolution depends entirely on the condition that, for the first time, theory as intelligence of human practice be recognized and lived by the masses. It requires workers to become dialecticians and to inscribe their thought into practice. Thus it demands of men without qualification more than the bourgeois revolution demanded of the qualified men which it delegated to carry out its tasks (since the partial ideological consciousness constructed by a part of the bourgeois class was based on the economy, that central part of social life in which this class was already in power). The very development of class society to the stage of spectacular organization of non-life thus leads the revolutionary project to become visibly what it already was essentially.[xvii]

The idea that the organized working class would become “visibly what it already was essentially” bears a similarity to C.L.R. James’ position on the British shop stewards organizations in the 1950s as representing the “future in the present.”[xviii] Debord’s reflections about the importance of theory being lived by the masses and the workers becoming “dialecticians” bears more than a passing resemblance to (if not a subtle détournement of) Dunayevskaya’s portrayal in Marxism and Freedom (1958) of Black civil rights activists, women, rank-and-file workers and youth as a movement from practice which was itself a form of theory, demanding the engagement from intellectuals she saw lacking in Castoriadias:

The task that confronts our age, it appears to this writer, is, first, to recognize that there is a movement from practice — from the actual struggles of the day — to theory; and, second, to work out the method whereby the movement from theory can meet it…. Far from being intellectual abdication, this is the beginning of a new stage of cognition. This new stage in the self-liberation of the intellectual from dogmatism can begin only when, as Hegel put it, the intellectual feels the “compulsion of thought to proceed to… concrete truths.”[xix]

[The above section is an abridged extract from The Philosophical Roots of Anti-Capitalism: Essays on History, Culture and Dialectical Thought by David Black (Lexington 2013)]

4. Raya Dunayevskaya

[Diego Rivera, Raya Dunayevskaya, Leon Trotsky]

In 1914 the parties of the Second International were committed to mobilising the international workers movement to prevent war between rival imperialist powers; ,when the Guns of August sounded, socialist and trade union leaders fell into line. When Lenin, then exiled in Geneva, received a telegram telling him that German Social Democracy had voted in the Reichstag for war credits, his first reaction was to dismiss it as a forgery.

Rosa Luxemburg was not so surprised. The “Pope of Marxism”, Karl Kautsky, had long argued that the German working class should subordinate its autonomy to a reformist strategy in which the centralized bureaucracy of the bourgeois state was to be a conciousnesss-forming tool of “progress”. Kautsky, having ruled out the tacticof the Mass Strike, failed to address how the socialists might educate and assimilate those non-proletarian forces that could be won over. In Germany the failure to do so installed the germ of defeat that later led to counter-revolution and the eventual triumph of fascism.

In Luxemburg’s critique of reformism, Gillian Rose in The Broken Middle sees a notion of transcendence: that the proletariat could only exercise its revolutionary will if it went “outside” and “beyond” the existing society. This wasn’t so much utopianism, as the recognition of an “aporia”: a state of being, caught in the schism between theory and practice, which was resistant to a priori logic and determination – as formulated by Kant – even though it lacked any discernable path of transcendence. In Greek Antiquity, Poros, the god of plenty and resourcefulness meets Penia, the child of poverty and powerlessness; and after drinking too much, is seduced by her. Their child is Eros, who inherits the “nature” of both parents, and lives in a state of aporia. The word aporia is the privative of the word porus, which refers to a ford or ferry crossing point in a river. So aporia is an impasse, in which the navigator may be faced with danger and uncertainty of success. In the concrete terms which Rose assigns to Luxemburg, the resolution of the aporia would require the difficult union of the daily struggle and “the great world transformation”. This new movement would have to grope along the path between the revolutionary Scylla of abandoning the mass character of the social democratic party and the reformist Charybdis of abandoning the goal of socialist transformation.

In the 1960s, the anti-Vietnam War movement, which created a whole new generation of radical youth, had its organisational origins in the civil rights movement. In 1970 a young Left activist corresponded with Raya Dunayevskaya (1910-87) on the question of the counterculture: “The movement is now not primarily in the factory; the consciousness is not there nearly so much as in the rock-drug culture.” Dunayevskaya’s reply points out that the workers didn’t respond well to middle-class leftists telling them what they should do – whether agitation for a “general strike now!” or whatever. And the fact that workers were unipressed by leftist arguments  – did not necessarily mean they were only concerned with “bread and butter” issues and incapable of transcending trade-union consciousness. Although Dunayevskaya doesn’t, as does Gillian Rose, employ the term “aporia”, she appears to recognise it historically in relating the New Left to German Social Democracy:

“Do you know that the Kaiser was the only one who knew something that Lenin did not know, that he need not fear the Second International’s opposition to the first world holocaust he was going to unleash because the socialists were so elitist, lived so much by themselves, had their rituals for everything from marriage as ‘against’ the bourgeois type, to naming of their children by revolutionary instead of biblical names, that they has no contact with the unorganised ‘backward’ masses and this isolation ensured capitulation.”

German Social Democracy was a massive movement, but that didn’t make it the party of the masses. In effect, it became a massive sect, a sort of secular religion, preaching to the masses without actually engaging with them. Of course Germany Social Democracy “favoured” the replacement of the Kaiser’s monarchy with a democratic republic, but when it came to elections what figured were the “bread and butter” issues. Rosa Luxemburg argued that holding on to the call for a republic was a principle that trumped the ephemeral short-termism of persuading monarchists to vote socialist, which would have the dire consequences in eventually unleashing fascism.

Quite separate from the industrial proletariat of the 1960s was the Woodstock “nation.” Dunayevskaya conceded that this counterculture was “certainly a superior phenomenon to the Establishment.” After all, the counterculture bespoke of the duality of the existing society and the “two worlds within the existing structure that undermine it.” But counterculture wasn’t the Revolution. And objectively, self-appointed ‘People’s War’ factions – such as the Weather Underground, and other groups, influenced by Maoism, who believed that power came out the barrel of a gun and that a prairie fire could be started by a single spark – weren’t revolutionary. Against their “violent spouting,” she argued,

“…the forces of the new, the combatants, culturally as well as in a class sense, are lined up for the life and death struggle long before they are ‘armed’. Does that make the ones who are ‘armed’ the revolutionaries? Even though their chaotic acts lead to the tragic blowing up of themselves, and even though it gives the Nixon­Agnew terrorists the excuse to conduct their preventive civil war before the objective situation and the subjective forces have coalesced to assure the victory of the social revolution.”

The problem was philosophical:

“…to think that activity is only ‘doing’, irrespective of the underlying philosophy, is not only as one-sided as the ivory-tower type of thinking, but is precisely what the establishment, the power structure…. are counting on us as doing… We, thereby, prove only one thing. We are as organically part of this society we were supposed to be uprooting as the society itself is, because we are operating within its pragmatic, philosophic structure”

Dunayevskaya was not enthusiastic about the new utopian hippie communes, which were set up in separation from the rest of society. Again, that was “precisely what capitalism does want. That is to say, to break up the various revolutionary forces the revolutionary forces from ever finding each other.” She traced the problem back to the times of the Abolitionists and Transcendentalists.

“So-called communal living is not new in America and is the very opposite of the Paris Commune ‘storming the heavens’… the American intellectuals were inspired by the utopian socialists to build their ‘communes’ at the very moment when the Abolitionists were trying to show them that association with the blacks is the only ‘transcendental’ gesture that meets the challenge of the times. Whether or not you would like to look into that period with Abolitionists’ eyes, or only with eyes of today and as a poet. I would very much like to see a review by you of Hawthorne’s Blithendale Romance.’

Sadly, the review never appeared and I have been unable to trace the identity of Dunayevskaya’s correspondent.

ENDNOTES TO pt 3

[i] Vincent Kaufman, Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry (University of Minnesota Press: 2006) p. 171.

[ii] Debord, “Perspectives for Conscious Alterations in Everyday Life,” International Situationist, No. 6, S.I. Anthology, pp. 68-74.

[iii] “The Bad Days Will End” (editorial), International Situationist, No. 7. S.I. Anthology, p. 82.

[iv] C.L.R. James, Grace C. Lee, and Pierre Chaulieu (Cornelius Castoriadis), Facing Reality: The New Society, Where to Look for It, How to Bring it Closer (Detroit: Bewick, 1974), pp. 34-39; Cornelius Castoriadis, “C.L.R. James and the Fate of Marxism,” in C.L.R. James, His Intellectual Legacies, eds. S.R. Cudjoe and W.E. Cain (Massachusetts University Press: 1995), pp. 277-97. After 1958 there was no further contact between Castoriadis and James. According to Cudjoe and Cain, Castoriadis was angered because “James published ‘Facing Reality’ without fully working out the ideas contained in the pamphlet and without having Castoriadis’ final approval to publish his section in the pamphlet.”

[v] Pannekoek, Anton. “Discussion sur le probleme du parti révolutionnaire,” Socialisme ou Barbarie, July-August 1952. www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1953/socialisme-ou-barbarisme.htm

[vi] Richard Gombin, The Origins of Modern Leftism (London: Penguin 1975), p. 98; P. Chaulieu, “Sur le contenu du socialisme,” in Socialisme ou Barbarie (July-September 1957).

[vii] Gombin, Origins of Modern Leftism, pp. 99-100; P. Chaulieu [Castoriadis],  “Discussion sur le probleme du parti révolutionnaire.” Socialisme ou Barbarie (July-August 1952); P. Chaulieu, “Réponse au camarade Pannekoek,” Socialisme ou Barbarie (April-June 1954).

[viii] Arthur Hirsch , The French Left (Montreal: Black Rose 1982), pp. 108-31.

[ix] Claude Lefort, “Interview.” Telos, No. 30 (1976).

[x] Raya Dunayevskaya, “A Response to Castoriadis’s Socialism or Barbarism” (1955), reprinted in News and Letters, Oct-Nov 2007.

[xi] “Letter from Eugene Gogol,” News and Letters Bulletin, August 1961.

[xii] Debord, “Instructions For Taking Up Arms,” International Situationist, No. 6. S.I. Anthology, p. 64.

[xiii] “Ideologies, Classes and the Domination of Nature,” editorial, International Situationist, No. 8. S.I. Anthology, p. 102.

[xiv] Cornelius Castoriadis, “On the History of the Workers Movement,” Telos, No. 30, 1976.

[xv] “Lire ICO” (editorial), International Situationist, No. 11. S.I. Anthology, p. 372.

 

Gillian Rose Against the Holy Middle

Remembering Britain’s Greatest Post-War Philosopher

By David Black

Maya Krishnan, in an article for The Point (‘The Risk of the Universal’, 3 June 2024). has contributed a substantial and readable introduction the writings of Gillian Rose (1947-1995).

Gillian Rose said that the collapse of state-socialism couldn’t kill Marxism, because ‘all the antinomies of modern state and society addressed since Hobbes, Smith and Rousseau, have been reopened.’ Furthermore, the antinomies raised the question of the ‘connection’ between liberalism and fascism, which might have seemed otiose in the 1990s, but certainly doesn’t now.

Rose recalls the words of the young Marx, writing in On the Jewish Question,

‘,,,the perfection of the idealism of the state is at the same time the perfection of the materialism of civil society. The shaking-off of the political yoke was at the same time the shaking-off of the bonds which had held in check the egoistic spirit of civil society. Political emancipation was, at the same time, the emancipation of civil society from politics, from even the appearance of a universal content.’

In Rose’s interpretation, Marx here exposes the ‘breaking of the middle’. In the pre-capitalist world, the guilds, statuses and privileges which determined the rights and duties of individuals, formed the legal estate in the ‘middle’ of the old feudal order. With the sweeping away of these institutions, the post-feudal individual is ‘naturalized as “egoism” and allegorized as “ethical”.’

Following the post-Hegelian ‘disasters of modernity’ – stalinism, nazi-ism and imperialism – we see the post-modern attempt to bypass the dichotomies by dismissing the whole Enlightenment project – and rational critique generally – as implicated in power relations.

Foucault’s monolithic concept of ‘power’ conflates actual power and knowledge in a way that ‘underwrites the Nietzschian drive toward a nihilist abandonment of reason itself’. Philosophic truth-claims are seen as ‘mere by-products of the will-to-power vested in figural language.’ In the ‘linguistic turn’ of post-modernism, rhetoric is privileged over reason: concepts and categories are entirely determined by the various signifying codes and systems that make up a given ‘discourse’. In Krishnan’s view, Rose’s critique of post-structuralism, in The Dialectic of Nihilism exposes ‘a kind of tantrum in which thinkers misdirect their anger over an irrational society by lashing out at rationality itself.’

As Krishnan suggests, the problem with the ‘Peoples of the Book’ – Jews, Moslems and Christians – isn’t so much that they have to negotiate between their ethics and the ‘voice of authority’ which issued the ‘god-given’ order: ‘go and smite Amalek’:

‘Where we go wrong, on Rose’s view, is not by accepting the wrong kind of authority; it’s rather by demanding the wrong kind of security. The risk of becoming a perpetrator of violence isn’t special to traditional authority. Rather, it is the risk of politics itself.’

What Rose calls the ‘fantasy of mending the world’ is the realm of the ‘Holy Middle’, in which it is imagined that following a set of principles will guarantee security. In the Middle discourse and principles displace political action of the universalist kind, because the latter has had violent consequences. Hence, post-politics is imagined to be risk-free, not just as regards personal safety, but also from the guilt of complicity in the violence of the system.

The political implications are summed up by Krishnan as follows:

‘None, then, are without sin. But the Rosean leftist traditionalist can say more than that. A capacity to appreciate forms of value caught up in compromised histories has particular relevance to the leftist, whose uniquely demanding vision of a transformed world is susceptible to giving way to a uniquely dispirited outlook. Living with disappointment over the political history of one’s ideals is a key aspect of Rose’s account of the “broken middle” and of her philosophy of mourning, which is not a counsel of resignation but rather its opposite. By giving up faulty conceptions of our ability to distance ourselves from risk and violence, Rose thinks we regain the political aspirations that the “nihilist” abandons.’

Rose takes off from Hegel’s understanding of modernity not as factor of unification, but of diremption, or division. According to Rose in Hegel Contra Sociology, ‘Hegel’s philosophy has no social import if the Absolute cannot be thought.’ Inasmuch as Marx’s philosophy does have social import – i.e. if the new society (the absolute) is immanent in the actuality of everyday life – it must also be thought. However, Rose continues,

‘A society’s relation to nature, to transformative activity determines its political and property relations, its concept of law, and its subjective or natural consciousness… as long as these relations and law prevails the absolute can only be thought by an abstract consciousness…’

The domination of abstract consciousness in commodity production is underwritten by the predominance of abstract labour. The problem of inversion is tackled in Marx’s Capital:

‘The theory of commodity fetishism is the most speculative moment in Marx’s exposition of capital. It comes nearest to demonstrating in the historically specific case of commodity-producing society how substance is (mis-)represented as subject, how necessary illusion arises out of productive activity.’

In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the history of reason’s determinations and self-(mis)understandings, begins with natural consciousness. Eventually, reason recognises that all along reason has been trying to know itself, rather than an external object. In modernity what Rose calls ‘aberrated mourning’ is the failure to recognise that what we have been mourning  is our own fantasies of mending the world. What Rose calls ‘inaugurated mourning’ would recognise the potential for challenging the abstract rationalism of bourgeois society, for which any traditional social forms either have to be destroyed or taken over (or recuperated) to render them relatively harmless. I say relatively, because traditional forms harbour their own fantasies of mending the world, and their own denials and evasions of the past.

Krishnan points out that Alisdair MacIntyre (another British philosopher) sees ‘tradition’ similarly to Rose. For MacIntyre,

‘… there is no such thing as a nontraditional form of life: everyone winds up embracing at least one tradition, whether they realize it or not. Even the modern liberal who self-defines against “the tyranny of tradition” has in fact merely given themselves over to one more tradition, with its own historically transmitted and locally specific forms of activity, its own canon, its own “contingency and particularity.” Tradition is the ground on which everyone stands, Marxist and monk alike. The concomitant risk of complicity in tradition’s tyrannies is therefore everyone’s problem.’

‘I may die before my time’, wrote Rose in one of her last lectures before she died, aged 47 in 1995 from ovarian cancer. Maya Krishnan summarizes:

‘In her writing on what is at once broken and bountiful, she wrote for an age whose difficulty might finally prepare readers to receive her intensities. Rose knew that she would die before her time; she also knew that her time would come.’

Penguin Classics have published a new edition of Love’s Work, an unfinished illness narrative which contains Gillian Rose’s reflections on life, death and personal relationships, all delivered with wry humour combined with deadly seriousness. Later this year, Verso will bring out a perviously unpublished a transcription of Rose’s lectures from 1979 entitled Marxist Modernism.

This artcle was first oublished on Substack

 

Tragedy, Philosophy and Money – A Warning from Greek Antiquity

By David Black

Richard Seaford, who died a few months ago, was one of Britain’s most celebrated classicist scholars, specializing in studies of Greek Antiquity.  His most important book – one of several – is Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Tragedy, and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Seaford was not the first Marxist to analyze the relationship between the advent of monetization and Greek philosophy. Alfred Sohn-Rethel (1899-1990) located the objective origin of abstract thought in the social nexus of relations behind the exchange of traded goods. Sohn-Rethel’s co-thinker, George Thomson (1903-87), located this origin in the spread of gold and silver coinage in Greek Antiquity. For the first time in history, the cosmology of pure abstractions (the One, the Many, Being, Becoming, etc.) appears in the pre-Socratic thought of Parmenides (the philosopher of Being, who thought change was an illusion) and Heraclitus (the philosopher of Becoming, for whom change through strife was everything). Sohn-Rethel saw Parmenides as the first exponent of ‘pure thought’ to emerge with ‘a concept fitting the description of the abstract material of money.’

Sohn-Rethel pays almost no attention to Heraclitus. But according to Seaford, the opposition between Heraclitus and Parmenides can be seen as expression of the opposition between money as the communal logos of circulation and money as the abstract oneness of value detached from circulation.

If money produces philosophy, what produces money?

Greek metaphysics developed under the influence, not only of money, but also of the social forms and practices which preceded monetized society; therefore, money can be understood as the diremption and subsumption of the ancient communal principle of (re)distribution.

In the Greeks’ religious sanctuaries – which were the ‘soul’ of the state – animals are sacrificed to the gods. In the feast that follows the ritual the roasted meat is distributed equally, according the principle of Moira, the goddess who presides over the allocations of land within the community. Coined money originates with the accumulation in these religious sanctuaries of metal objects associated with animal sacrifice and feasting, such as iron roasting spits, tripod cauldrons, figurines made of precious metals and bars of bullion. As befitting the temple, eventually the metals are graded according to value (as gold, silver, or base metals), then coined and stamped with the figure of the deity.  Some of the sanctuaries begin to function as banks.

In the philosophy of Aristotle, money is seen as having no value in itself, except as a  convention mediating things that do have value.  However, because of this convention, the metal substance is transformed by the state-approved ensignia into something greater than its intrinsic value.  This was a factor in a conceptual transformation, based on the new collective trust of the polis,(city state).

What is new in Greek philosophy is the idea of the universe as, in Seaford’s words, ’an intelligible order subject to the uniformity of impersonal power’, and  of a single substance underlying the plurality of sensuous experience. For the first time in history an impersonal all-powerful substance enters into the philosopher’s cosmic preconceptions, as when Heraclitus says ‘all things are in exchange for fire and fire for all things like goods for gold  and gold for goods.’

Monetisation, in marginalizing reciprocity and actualizing inequality, allows individual autonomy to appear in the figure of the tyrant. But the tyrant’s individual monetary  power depends on the general , socially constructed acceptance of the value of the money and its ability to circulate beyond his control.

The reason we see Greeks poetry and philosophy as much less alien to us than the culture of Egypt and Mesopotamia is because of the presence of monetization that we share with the Greeks.

In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Clytemnestra plots to kill her husband in revenge for his sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia. When Agamemnon returns from the wars he presents Clytemnestra with some expensive linen, which she urges him to trample on as a measure of his god-like status. Seaford sees the linen as representing the unlimited wealth of the sea trade, which gives Agamemnon the illusion, encouraged by Clytemnestra. that he is a god freed from material needs. Later, wrapped up in his expensive linen, he is murdered by his avenging wife for transgressing ‘family values’.

In Sophocles’ Antigone the tyrant Creon, who regards the polis as his own property, projects the corrupting power of money amongr his enemies.  Creon, however, actually himself projects the world of money, with his individualistic self-sufficency and drive to homogenize everything under his rule. Creon perverts the death-ritual of the ‘old’ world, by denying Antigone’s rebel brother Polyneices a decent burial’ and perverts marriage-rite  by entombing Antigone in what the chorus calls a ‘bridal chamber’. After  Antigone’s death brings about the suicide of Creon’s son Haemon, followed by his Queen, Eurydice, the chorus invokes Dionysus to cleanse the curse from the city.  Seaford develops this hypothesis in relating the illusion of autonomous  self-sufficiency illusion to the crime of incest. In Oedipus Tyrranus when Teiresius tell Oedipus he has committed patricide and incest, the tyrant accuses the seer of having been ‘bought’:  ‘Endogomy in Athens and elsewhere, preserved wealth within the family. In tragedy endogamy is associated with blindness, darkness… ‘.

The new society demands the-circulation  of money and females; the endogenous household of the Theban tyrants hoards money and imprisons its female kin below ground. Moreover, Seaford points out, money, like the female, may reproduce. Payment of interest seems to have developed out of the practice of reciprocating a gift with a more valuable one, except that money seems to produce more of itself.  Aristotle characterizes usury as incest, because interest transgresses the role of currency as a means for exchange, and is thus the most ’ unnatural’ mode of acquisition.

The unlimited monetized power of the tyrants is condemned by Aristotle, who says that the free man ruling over his oikos is only self-sufficient to the extent that he is part of the self-sufficient polis; for unity to prevail, in the face of the unlimited power of money and greed, the polis must limit itself in terms of its size, population and class inequalities. For Aristotle, acquisition of wealth within the oikos (the slave-owning household) was ‘natural’, whereas commerce had to do with ‘production of goods, not in the full sense but through their exchange’. The wealth derived from this latter form of acquisition he saw as “unnatural” and “without limit.” Its unlimited nature did not suit the order of the polis.

The modern era has so much internalized the ‘metaphysics of money’ as to imagine that money, like the weather is a force of nature rather than a social relation. Nevertheless, according to Seaford, it is hard to shake off ‘a lingering sense of arbitrariness of there being something indefinably unsatisfying… about the individual reification of money and injustice and alienation thereby produced. For those with sense, historical understanding of the relative recent (on the scale of human history) transition from premonetary to monetary society may be of particular interest.’

FURTHER READING

David Black,The Philosophical Roots of Anti-Capitalism:Essays on History, Culture and Dialectical Thought(Lexington:2013)

Richard Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy (Cambridge University Press: 2004)

Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology (London: Macmillan, 1976)

George Thomson, The First Philosophers: Studies in Ancient Greek Society (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1955)

Four Books by King Mob (Dave and Stuart Wise) published by BPC

1 October – BPC Publishing has now issued TEN titles, available from Amazon/KDP. Four titles have been issued in the BPC WiseEbooks Series in 2024 as paperback and ebook. In reverse chronological order they are:

A Newcastle Dunciad 1966-2008: Recollections of a Musical and Artistic Avant Garde plus Bryan Ferry and the Newcastle Arts Scene (WiseEbooks Sries No. 4))  – 24 Sept. 2024.

In 1966, King Mob founders Stuart and David Wise were students at Newcastle School of Art, publishing the avant garde magazine Icteric. A Newcastle Dunciad, the latest in the WisEbook Series, recalls the ideas and practices of the Tyneside radicals and how they were ‘recuperated” by the developers for the post-industrial ‘regeneration’ of Tyneside. This volume also has a Situationist critique of their art school contemporary, Bryan Ferry.

King Mob: The Negation and Transcendence of Art: Malevich, Schwitters, Hirst, Banksy, Mayakovsky, Situationists, Tatlin, Fluxus, Black Mask (WiseEbooks Series No. 3– 21 May 2024

Twin brothers David and Stuart Wise, as art students in mid-1960s Newcastle, immersed themselves the radical ideas of Icteric (‘the often confusedly anti-art magazine’). The Wises participated in the saving and restoration of Kurt Schwitters’ Lakeland Merz Barn, and organised a controversial commemoration of the Russian Futurist, Kazimir Malevich. The documents in this book, written over a 50-year period, describe these and subsequent efforts by the Wises to subvert the ‘recuperation’ of ‘art’ into the capitalist culture industry.
In reflection on their engagements with like-minded radicals – the English and French Situationists, New York’s Black Mask collective, the London-based King Mob, and more recent formations – the authors consider how and why the Revolution ‘due to unforeseen circumstances’ did not take place. They also analyze the recuperation of radical aesthetic ideas in the works of latter-day chancers like Damian Hurst and Banksy.

Dialectical Butterflies: Ecocide, Extinction Rebellion, Greenwash and Rewilding the Commons – an Illustrated Dérive (WiseEbooks No. 2 – 12 March 2024)

Beautifully illustrated with original colour photos, Dialectical Butterflies is a psychogeographical exercise in butterfly preservation as part of the environmentalist, anti-capitalist struggle against ecocide, The lifelong fascination of David Wise and his late twin, Stuart, with the ecology of butterflies goes back to their involvement in the mid-1960s surrealist-inspired radical arts scene in Newcastle. From their contact with the Situationist International the Wise brothers adopted the concept of ‘recuperation’ which they see exemplified in today’s ‘greenwashing’ PR exercises. Their latter-day rewilding campaign is effectively a post-situationist Longue Dérive through the relatively forsaken terrains of derelict industrial sites and zones of autonomy in northern England; as well as the contested public space of Wormwood Scrubs in London.

BPC Title: King Mob: The Negation and Transcendence of Art (illustrated).

 

Lost Texts Around King Mob by Dave and Stuart Wise with contributions from Ronald Hunt, John Barker, Fred Vermorel, Chris Gray and Phil Meyler (BPC WisEbooks Series No. 1 – Jan. 2024).

King Mob was initially a coming together in London of members of the English section of the Paris-based Situationist InternationaI and like-minded individuals from Newcastle associated with the anti-art magazine, Icteric, and the Black Hand Gang. Following Guy Debord’s expulsion of the English members from the Situationist InternationaI in December 1967, the King Mob Echo was co-founded in April 1968 by former SI member, Chris Gray and ‘friends from the north’, Dave and Stuart Wise.
The material in this collection by King Mob writers and their associates still has a power to provocatively invigorate and open-up new directions of thought and action emanating from a subversive critique of culture. For the most part, these texts have been forgotten and therefore never archived in the libraries of art history and the ‘popsicle academy’ of media/music studies. Indeed, they had to be rescued from what Marx referred to as “the gnawing criticism of the mice”.

For more books published by BPC see HERE

Culture Wars in the Spiritual Animal Kingdom

By David Black

From Culture to Cultures

Where does culture come from?’ is the question posed by Terry Eagleton in a piece for the London Review of Books (25 April 2024) As Eagleton explains, in trying to make sense of today’s ‘culture wars’:

’One of the original meanings of the word culture is the tending of natural growth, which is to say agriculture, and a cognate word, coulter, means the blade of a plough’.

However, since the Industrial Revolution kicked off in the 18th century, ‘Culture’ has tended to disavow its own origins. For Romanticism, the new art of Goethe, Beethoven and the like was autonomous and self-determining. But, as this ‘culture’ was born of material production in a class-divided society racked by conflict, culture developed a tendency to become ideology useful for legitimizing the social order and resolving endemic conflict.

In pre-modern (feudal) societies the position of ‘cultural workers’, such as ‘court poets, genealogists, licensed fools, painters and architects’ depended on the patronage of princes and the ennobled landed gentry. But with the growth of capitalism and impact of the  French Revolution the floodgate opened for cultural resistance to the old order:

‘This resistance is more likely to occur, curiously enough, once art becomes just another commodity in the marketplace and the artist just another petty commodity producer… in the marketplace your audience becomes anonymous. The world no longer owes the cultural worker a living.’

With commodification, culture becomes truly autonomous: ‘Deprived of its traditional features, it may curve back on itself, taking itself as its own raison d’être in the manner of some modernist art.’ This art of the avant garde finds itself ‘pushed to the margin’; but this process frees art ‘to claim visionary, prophetic, bohemian or subversive status’. Outside of the mechanised workplace ‘values and energies’ are ‘siphoned off into a sphere of their own, which consists of three major sectors: art, sexuality and religion’. The problem for utilitarian capitalism was that ‘A new actor had just appeared on the political scene – the industrial working class – and was threatening to be obstreperous.’

Edmund Burke saw in Revolutionary France an unstable political state of decision, calculation and practical rationality bent on a frenzied destruction of custom and tradition. Britain, in contrast (Burke was actually Irish): was contentedly mired in customs, habits, sentiments, prejudices expressed as spontaneity, gradualism, social improvisation, and a general imperviousness to rational political consciousness.

Matthew Arnold, a Gladstonian Liberal, school-inspector and minor romantic poet, is best remembered for his book, Anarchy and Culture, which upheld ‘culture’ in the face of what he called ‘the great Philistine middle-class, the master force in our politics’.  Culture, of course, had a canon, in which the Arnold, Goethe and Wordsworth were exemplary. In sum, according to Eagleton:

‘Culture, in the sense of the refined and civilised, was needed to buy off the other half of Matthew Arnold’s title, anarchy. Unless liberal values were disseminated to the masses, the masses might end up sabotaging liberal culture.’

And as religion was in crisis and in decline, ‘Culture, then, had to take over from the churches, as artists transubstantiated the profane stuff of everyday life into eternal truth.’

In Europe in the the course of the 19th century the ‘eternal truths’ of culture were interwoven with the Romantic mythologies of blood-and-soil nationalism: ‘With revolutionary nationalism, culture in the sense of language, custom, folklore, history, tradition, religion, ethnicity and so on becomes something people will kill for. Or die for.’

By the end of the 19th century, culture had become an industry churning out kitsch, nationalist propaganda. As Jack Hilton put it in Caliban Shrieks, regarding his pre-1914 school days:

‘What impartiality we got for history! Stories about little drummer boys’ valour, the minstrel boy and hearts of oak. The horrors of the Black Hole of Calcutta, the glory of Nelson and Drake’s game of tiddlywinks – or was it bowls? … What a fighting chance we were given to understand the happenings of world significance – it was not a dog’s chance. It worked out this way. 1st: Heaps of God; 2nd: England first – the world nowhere; 3rd: Blatant swagger; one good innocent honest Christian blue-eyed English schoolboy equalled twenty infidel Japs (Ju Jitsu being barred of course).’

Hegel: Adventures of the Unhappy Consciousness

Eagleton points out that for 18th and 19th century cultural theorists such as Friedrich Schiller and Matthew Arnold, the phrase ‘culture wars’ would have been an oxymoron: ‘Culture in their eyes was the solution to strife, not an example of it.’

From the befuddled perspective of the Far Right, ‘Cultural Marxism’ forms the Left’s intellectual cutting edge of the ‘Culture Wars’, supposedly formulated by German-Jewish intellectuals of the Frankfurt School; all of whom were well versed in the philosophies of German Idealism, especially Hegel’s. In his Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel traces the issue of ‘Culture’ in the development of the ‘Unhappy Consciousness’ under the legal tyranny of the Roman Empire. In this state of unfreedom, moral consciousness (conscience) retreats into spiritual inwardness and the community of Christians.

In the post-Roman world of feudalism there is no longer an abstract law of property distinguishing ‘persons’ (property owners) from ‘things’ (e.g. slaves). Consciousness is formed under the rule of a lawless barbarism in league with a corrupted church which depends on it and takes a share of the plunder.

The ‘Noble Consciousness’ is characterised by ‘virtue’, ‘honour’ and self-sacrificial devotion to the ‘divine’ universal Christian principle embodied by the hereditary monarch. Asserting the ‘Law of the Heart’, virtue fights its way through ‘the way of the world’ and places itself at the service of state-power, but more than that, Hegel writes, ‘it is the conscious essence of universal state-power’. But this power only resembles an actual state when its universality is asserted in times of war with a foreign power.

In war and in peace, the counsel of nobles are in fact vassals of the sovereign monarch, but are left with territorial sovereignty over their own vassals. Because of the nobles’ allegiance to, and dependence on, the monarch, their service degenerates into flattery. The very language of the courtier is inverted as ‘pure culture’.

The inversions of ‘pure culture’ culminate in what Hegel called the ‘last and grandest’ cultures of the Enlightenment: the German Reformation and the French Revolution. The German Enlightenment inaugurated by Luthers rebellion against Catholic corruption expresses itself as abstract spiritualism (culminating in the Kantian unknowable God); the French Enlightenment as abstract materialism based on the primacy of the finite..

Hegel’s Realphilosophie presents the idea of the state as the concrete mediation of interests and classes in civil society within a universal social totality. Marxʼs early essay, On the Jewish Question, is a crtitique of Hegel’s exposition on the state from the point of view of a critical ‘disciple’. The subject in bourgeois society is divided between the role of the private individual of civil society and that of the public citizen. But as the modern state is politically expression of the egoism of self-interest individuals in civil society, there is only an illusory unity of the political community.

The idea of autonomy for the atomised individual stems from the dilemma of the ‘Beautiful Soul’ of Hegel’s Phenomenology: consciousness as a self-willed impotence which utters morality but does not act; speaking a language ‘in which all reciprocally acknowledge each other as acting  conscienciously’. But, as Gillian Rose argues in Hegel Contra Sociology, in this scenario ‘in fact no-one is acting at all’. In the ensuing ‘frenzy of self-deceit’ conscience asserts its particularity as ‘law’:

‘It is opposed to others under the guise of furthering their particular interests as if they could be a universal law… we are left with the realization of the barbarism of our abstract culture, of how we have reproduced that barbarism by denying the ethical, by fixing the illusion that we are absolute or pure moral consciousness in our moral law or in the law of our hearts.’

Hegel does not trust the autonomy of the moral individaul in this sitituation, as its autonomy would exculpate it from what it is actually deeply implicated in: the violences of civil society now appearing as the ‘Spiritual Animal Kingdom’: ‘spiritual’ because of the apparent harmony of universal and individual which is in reality the rule of abstract property relations; ‘animal’ because it serves the particular ends of individuals and not the whole society. In this ‘kingdom’ – which is actually our modern world – society is vulnerable to fascist mob rule, anti-science quackery and authoritarianism – or worse.

Slavoy Žižek writes of an ‘ideological constellation’ in which the modernism of the Enlightenment  is denigrated and downgraded by postmodern ‘culture’. For Žižek the crucial point, which postmodernism seems to ignore, is that culture and barbarism do not exclude each other: the opposite of barbarism is not culture but civilization (designated as imperialist or cosmopolitan according to political stance, i.e. ‘non-civilized’). In fact, according to Žižek, ‘culture in itself, in so far as it is affirmed in its opposition to civilization, sets free an unmistakable barbaric potential. Apropos of Hegel’s description of ‘alienated consciousness’ under feudalism which is exposed as the ‘barbarism of pure culture’ Žižek offers the more modern example of the implementers of Nazi terror enjoying the supreme achievements of German culture such as Beethoven’s string quartets after a hard days work organizing the Final Soloution. In relation to the German Reformation, Žižek writes,

‘The first model of this German Kulturbarbarismus is Luther, whose Protestant refusal of Rome presents a reaction of pure, inner culture against the worldly Catholic civilization, and at the same time, by means of its savage, violent attitude, displays the latent barbarism proper to the German ideology.’

(Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not what They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor)

Terry Eagleton describes how in Britain the liberal ‘vision of culture as common ground’ held until late 1960s, when expanded higher education drew in students from the lower orders. The ‘sixties rebels challenged the liberal consensus and the academic canon, both of which had been compromised by  association with racist ideology and imperialist anthropology.

‘Postmodernism happens not just with the arrival of mass culture but with the aestheticising of social existence, from design and advertising to branding, politics as spectacle, tattoos, purple hair and ridiculously large glasses. Culture, once the antithesis of material production, has now been folded into production.’

Culture, having lost its autonomy from politics, is reduced to the zero-sum round of political demands. Language now becomes the law of framing the demands rather than a way of transcending the political. From being a spiritual solution, the linguistic turn has become part of the problem, as the process has shifted from concerns with culture to cultures. In today’s multicultural society, Eagleton concludes, culture, having become ideology becomes an ism – culturalism.

Eagleton bemoans the fact that from the standpoint of postmodernism, ‘

‘Most such life-forms today are out not to question the framework of modern civilisation but to be included within it. Inclusion, however, isn’t a good in itself, any more than diversity is. One thinks fondly of Samuel Goldwyn’s cry: “Include me out!”’

As Heinrich Heine prophesised a century before the rise of the Nazis, ‘those who burn books will in the end burn people’. Contrary to what elements of both sides in the culture wars seem to think (with both Christian priests and Trans activists gleefully burning Harry Potter books) the struggle for justice should not be about arguing over which books to burn.