History and Class Consciousness, by the Hungarian communist philosopher, Georg Lukács, was published in 1923. The book drew a hostile reaction from the ideologists of the 1920s Comintern. That it did is ironic, given today Lukács is blamed by the Far Right for originating ‘cultural Marxism’, ‘critical race theory’ and other alleged wokenesses. Certainly Lukács’s book influenced the Frankfurt School, the Situationists, and other cultural folk-devils, but I am unaware of any conspiracy theorist who appears to have understood a word of it.
Lukács highlighted a central insight by Marx which appeared to have been forgotten by most post-Marx Marxism: that advanced capitalism doesn’t just ‘rob’ the worker through extracting quantities of surplus-value; it also appropriates living labour in a qualitative inversion of the ‘relation of subject and object’. Marx refers to this development as ‘a personification of the thing and a reification of the person’
Lukács takes up Marx’s theory of ‘metabolism’, which addresses how the transhistorical, interactive relation of humans with the rest of nature undergoes a ‘metabolic rift’ which is historically specific to capitalism. The rift is an effect of the systematised ‘robbery’ of nature’s resources and the social oppression that enforces it. Lukács analyzes how in capitalism, work, as a social-metabolic process, is reified and fragmented in a way that makes people incapable of recognizing the world beyond their own particular tasks as being of their own making. People are rendered passive and contemplative, no matter how ‘busy’ they are. The expert (or ‘virtuoso’) ‘lapses into a contemplative attitude vis-à-vis the workings of his own objectified and reified faculties’:
‘This phenomenon can be seen at its most grotesque in journalism. Here it is precisely subjectivity itself, knowledge, temperament and powers of expression that are reduced to an abstract mechanism functioning autonomously and divorced both from the personality of their “owner” and from the material and concrete nature of the subject matter in hand. The journalist’s “lack of convictions”, the prostitution of his experiences and beliefs is comprehensible only as the apogee of capitalist reification.’
As Guy Debord puts it in Comments of the Society of the Spectacle (1988): ‘For every imbecility presented by the spectacle, there are only the media’s professionals to give an answer, with a few respectful rectifications or remonstrations…’ Debord adds that these journalists are often in the precarious position of having to serve a range of interests they depend on for remuneration and the flow of information they rely on: that of the newspaper proprietor, broadcaster, political party, corporation, church, university, security agency, etc:
‘It must not be forgotten that every media professional is bound by wages and other rewards and recompenses to a master, and sometimes to several; and that every one of them knows he is dispensable.’
The ‘lack of conviction’ can acquire the optics of loss of conviction, as evidenced by lurches in political loyalties from Left to Right or (less often, it has to be said) vice-versa. This unedifying move is tempting for the hack who is running out of things to say and stories to tell, because switching sides opens up a whole new spectrum to roam in.
Reification Analytica
In a recent essay, Christian Fuchs argues that Lukács’s critique of ideology and reified consciousness ‘remains highly topical in the age of digital capitalism and big data.. [It] allows us to critically analyse how social media, big data and various other Internet technologies are used as tools of reification.’
Big date analytics embodies the latest tendency towards quantification of everything in society. Algorithms and mathematical analysis are applied to the data that is scraped and hoovered-up from the internet. By identifying patterns, relations and correlations it can predict human behaviour for purposes of surveillance, management and control. Fuchs quotes the former editor of the Wired magazine, Chris Anderson, as a representative of the uncritical fetishism of developments in big data. Anderson claims the new developments will bring about the ‘end of theory’: ‘With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves […] [When] faced with massive data, this [traditional] approach to science – hypothesize, model, test – is becoming obsolete.’
What applies to scientific research may also apply to journalism and may constitute the same dangers. Fuchs argues that the positivism about quantitative methodology disregards ‘ethics, morals, critique, theory, emotions, affects, motivations, worldviews, interpretations, political assessments, power, social struggles, or contradictions’. As the social sciences and humanities are colonised by computer science and business studies, critical theory and critical thinking generally are effectively rooted out.
On the other hand…
Whilst recognising that the new technologies are deeply embedded into the structure of capitalist domination, Fuchs sees alternative potentials and forces at work in the realm of digital technologies:
‘Lukács opposed deterministic analyses, which implies that although exploitation and domination are ubiquitous in capitalism, there is always the possibility for critical consciousness and critical action (praxis)… modern technology has created new potentials for co-operation and socialisation.’
The logic of the corporate digital giants is the subjection of the atomised individual to privacy violations, intransparent algorithms, targeted advertising and the like as a design principle. Socialist design would make social media truly social: based on collective production, co-operation and creative commons. It would protect privacy and promote transparency and the openness of algorithms as design principles.
(Christian Fuchs’s essay, ‘History and Class Consciousness 2.0: Georg Lukács in the Age of Digital Capitalism and Big Data’, is published in the journal Communication and Society, 2020)
Rise like Lions after slumber — In unvanquishable number — Shake your chains to earth like dew — Which in sleep had fallen on you — Ye are many – they are few. (Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1819)
On 6 January 2021, Donald Trump’s conspiracy to overturn his election defeat made insurrection respectable again – at least among his armed-and-dangerous GOP supporters. The ongoing assaults on liberal democracy – which are by no means restricted to the USA — pose a dilemma for the Left. The alternative, as propounded by the liberal media, is resurgent neoliberalism, even though its representatives seem prepared to dismantle everything liberal democracy is supposed to stand for: freedom of speech, union rights, control of price-fixing monopolies, protection of the environment, social services, etc.
Perhaps it is time to re-evaluate the idea of insurrection from a Left perspective.
The Coming Insurrection, a celebrated tome written by a French collective, pronounced in 2007, ‘Everyone agrees that things can only get worse.’ The ‘Everyone’ certainly now includes the prevailing political parties, who now have only feeblest notion of what might be ‘better’ as opposed to worse. The abjectivity is universal in Western Europe, especially in Britain. An article by Jörg Schindler in Der Spiegel, 18 April, reports:
‘Food shortages, moldy apartments, a lack of medical workers: The United Kingdom is facing a perfect storm of struggle, and millions are sliding into poverty. There is little to suggest that improvement will come anytime soon.’
Schindler quotes a striking nurse he met in Oxford:
‘”There’s something rotten here,” she says. “Nothing is as it used to be.” The longer she speaks, the more it seems she’s actually talking about the entire country. seeking its salvation in the very financial industry that collapsed so spectacularly 15 years ago, creating a situation in which billions were squandered…. And now, it seems as though it has dialed 999 and is waiting in vain for the paramedics to show up.’
The Financial Times of 28 June reported a poll by the New Britain Project which shows that nearly three-fifths of voters say ‘nothing in Britain works anymore’ and four-fifths don’t believe politicians have the ability to solve the UK’s biggest issues.
Kier Starmer’s mantra of ‘stability, order and security’ is chanted over the bonfire of the ‘pledges’ he made to get elected as party leader. In the most glaring example, Starmer, having promised to renationalise the failing, corrupt water utilities that are polluting our rivers and coastline, he has backtracked and promised the ‘market’ that the looters will remain in control.
The call of The Coming Insurrection, which seemed extreme back in 2007, now looks quite reasonable:
‘It’s useless to wait—for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides.’
In the post-2008 Crash period, with the rise of Left populism internationally, the word ‘insurrection’ was in the air; which was why we, in 2012, called our book, 1839: The Chartist Insurrection, Our focus was expressed in Ben Watson’s, blurb: ‘In retrieving the suppressed history of the Chartist Insurrection, David Black and Chris Ford have produced a revolutionary handbook.’
Member of Parliament, John McDonnell, wrote in the Foreword to 1839:
‘Labour movement historiography has overlaid the Chartist story with the concept of an overwhelmingly, conservative British working class and a solely reformist British Labour Movement. The message has been consistently drilled into us that revolution was and is futile. This book offers another perspective. Revolution in Britain in 1839 was closer than we have been previously taught.’
The Chartist National Convention of 1839 discussed various means for furthering the struggle for democracy, one of which was the ‘old constitutional right’ of ‘free men’ to bear arms ‘to defend the laws and constitutional privileges their ancestors bequeathed to them’. Their reasoning was that the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 wouldn’t have happened if the pro-democracy demonstrators had been armed. Of course 200 years later, peaceful protestors are no longer cut to pieces by sabre-wielding gentry-on- horseback. Also, Britain does not a gun-culture. For all intents and purposes, fire arms struggle can be ruled out.
Not so, other ulterior measures. The Chartists discussed and sometimes implemented several measures that today are worth conserving as tactics: withdrawal of money from ‘hostile’ banks; a month-long general strike; torchlight processions; refusal to pay rents, rates, and taxes; boycott of anti-Chartist newspapers; protection of persecuted activists; secret organisation of prohibited political activities, contestation of public spaces, and more. Some of the Chartists’ ulterior measures could rethought for our time. The Citizen’s Advice Bureau, which is hardly revolutionary, offers the following:
‘If you are a domestic (non-business customer), water companies can’t, by law, disconnect or restrict your water supply if you owe them money.’
In 1839, the Chartist masses were fighting for democratic representation as a means to address economic and social grievances. Today it is evident that means and ends cannot be separated.
Unkant Publishing went out of business in 2015, leaving the book ‘homeless’ and out-of-print (although it can still be obtained from some online booksellers). One of the aims of this blog is to help the book find a new publisher.
Review
James Heartfield, Spiked Online
David Black and Chris Ford’s account of the Chartist uprising of 1839 is also written in part to save these agitators from the condescending judgement of an Althusserian, in this case Gareth Stedman-Jones, whose ‘fear of agency’ cannot recognise Chartism’s self-conscious attempt to overthrow ‘old Corruption’. 1839: The Chartist Insurrection is altogether a more rewarding read than Rancière’s for its unapologetic focus on people who are making their own history. Black and Ford make the case that the earlier 1839 uprising came closer to overthrowing the existing order than the later challenge of 1848. They situate the movement in the disappointment of the Reform Act of 1832 that gave the vote to middle- class property owners, but not to the working men who protested alongside them.
Black and Ford make a good case that, though the technology they worked with was not for the most part industrial, the core of the Chartist movement was much more than an outgrowth of radicalism. Of course, it was true that their Charter was a series of democratic demands – adult male suffrage, annual elections, paid Members of Parliament. On the other hand, popular among them was Gracchus Babeuf’s argument that the democratic revolutions in America and France left ‘the institutions of property’ intact as ‘germs of the social evil to ripen in the womb of time’. The common ambition among the Welsh miners that the owners be made to work their own mines tells us that their struggle for democracy was indeed mixed up with a class struggle between owners and hands.
As the authors show, the movement argued hard about how far it should go if its great petition, the Charter, on presentation to parliament, should be refused – as it was. The Chartist Convention, a national organisation with elected delegates, debated the use of ‘Ulterior Measures’ in that case.
George Julian Harney – anticipating modern Sinn Fein’s slogan ‘an armalite in one hand and a ballot paper in the other’ by 150 years – called on his audience to carry ‘a musket in one hand and a petition in the other’. Threatened with prosecution, many in the audience testified that he had in fact said ‘a biscuit in one hand…’. Arguing for the Ulterior Measures, Feargus O’Connor promised that ‘it would be a war of capital against labour, and capitalists would soon find out that labour was the only real capital in the world’.
Still, Black and Ford do not flatter the Chartists unduly, nor make them into cartoon heroes. All the weaknesses of the organisation are confronted here. Throughout the summer of 1839, there were a number of protests in towns across the north of England, notably Newcastle, and in Wales and Scotland, while many smaller groups took up the call to arm themselves. The planned general strike, or sacred month, though, was poorly executed and patchily observed. In some confusion and disarray, the Convention voted to dissolve itself after a number of setbacks.
As it turned out, the leaders’ retreat only opened the floodgates of a movement that was determined to fight on. Black and Ford tell the story of General Napier, who led the militia against the Chartists, though he was himself sympathetic to their cause, if not their methods. On 6 August 1839, Napier wrote: ‘The plot thickens. Meetings increase and are so violent, and arms so abound, I know not what to think. The Duke of Portland tells me that there is no doubt of an intended general rising.’ But Napier’s judgement is compelling: ‘Fools! We have the physical force, not they.’
Black and Ford tell a heartwrenching story of attempted insurrections in Bradford, Newcastle and, most pointedly, in Newport in south Wales, where the movement came to a head. The insurrection was led by the tragic figure of John Frost, who himself was hoping to dampen the movement down, explaining at his trial that ‘so far from leading the working men of south Wales, it was they who led me, they asked me to go with them, and I was not disposed to throw them aside’. Though the Chartists did succeed in taking the streets and the Westgate, their superior numbers were not enough to beat the special constabulary’s better organisation.
All over England, there were risings that failed to meet up, followed by suppression of the movement and a witch-hunt of the organisers. Some escaped, like Devyr, while John Frost was caught and tried – and would have been hanged but that the sentence was commuted to transportation (itself a sign that the authorities feared worse if they killed him). George Julian Harney concluded that ‘organisation is the next thing to be looked into.’
Project of an orbital colony Stanford torus, painted by Donald E. Davis. Public domain image.
The Limits of Politics in the Anthropocene
In recent years Left Populism has lost momentum; seemingly eclipsed by the paranoid nativism of the Far Right, or recuperated by zombified social democracy. ‘We’ may still be the ‘99 per cent’, but the implied one per cent are still in charge, and, according to Greta Thunberg, the planet is burning amid ‘fairy tales of eternal growth’. So, whatever happened?
The rise of Left Populism took place in the aftermath of the Crash of 2008. Those years saw the emergence of the Occupy! movement in the USA, which powered up the Bernie Sanders campaign, and the Indignados movement in Spain which did likewise for the Podemos party. In Greece, the populist upsurge led to the formation of the Syriza coalition, which became the government in 2015. Populism had traction all over Europe, including Britain – where it took the form of a revival of the Labour Party Left, led by Jeremy Corbyn – and in various parts of South America.
According to Pablo Iglesias, general secretary of the Podemos party, ‘the key to success is to establish a certain identity between your analysis and what the majority feels’. One of the key sources of populist synthesis was the book On Populist Reason (2005) by Argentine political theorist, Ernst Laclau. Populism, according to Laclau, is ‘the political act par excellence’ which constructs the concept of the ‘people’. Politics is not reducible to traditional Leftist representations of classes or social forces, e.g., workers, peasants, racial or sexual minorities. Rather, the political is about discourse — language.
Swedish Marxist, Carl Cassegard, says Laclau’s book is
‘a theoretization of populism as a way in which the political is constituted as an least seemingly autonomous realm, independent of social forces in an almost quasi-transcendental way.’
Outside of the world of political discourse there is nothing to constitute a changeable process of social reality. In terms of Ferdinand Saussure’s linguistics theory, the relation is between the signifier (the political stirrings of the ‘plebs’ and the ‘underdogs’ against the unaccountable alien power of the ‘elite’) and the thing signified (the ‘power of the people’). Drawing on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, Laclau denotes the idea of the ‘people’ as the imaginary subject’s unattainable object of desire. Laclau’s concept of the ‘people’ is also homologous with the noumenal world in which Kant confines freedom and morality—for Kant there is nothing outside of the categories of the understanding that can constitute any sort of transcendence. Hegel describes Kant’s noumenal thing-in-itself as a bit like Hamlet’s father’s ghost: you can’t grasp it or make even make ‘sense’ of it, yet it is real in that it exercises moral power over Hamlet’s actions.
The New Left Utopians
Theorists of 21st century Populism believe they are on the ‘right side of history’ because of the possibilities afforded by technology. Aaron Bastani’s book, Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto (Verso: 2019), was widely reviewed in mainstream media. During the Lockdown, millions of white-collar workers found that the abundance of technology in their homes made the daily commute and the management office both seem anachronistic. Andy Kessler, in the Wall Street Journal (17 May 2021) saw a connection between this phenomenon and Bastani’s book:
‘At first I thought it was a joke. I still do… Cue rainbow-belching unicorns, The Atlantic wrote that “the vision is compelling.” The New York Times helped promote it. And it sure feels like the Biden administration is trying to implement it. Naturally, it’s complete baloney.’
Like other hostiles, Kessler didn’t get to Bastani’s main pitch, which was an attempt to rebrand Marxism by re-interpreting Marx’s insights in the light of 21st century technology. Here, Bastani is in the company of Paul Mason (in Postcapitalism: A Guide To Our Future), Ash Sarkar (his colleague at Novara Media) and various ‘technological utopians’ and ‘left accelerationists’. They all draw their theoretical framework from the concept of the ‘General Intellect’ which Marx sets out in a text known as the ‘Fragment on Machines’ in his Grundrisse (which lay unpublished for 100 years). Marx conducts a thought experiment. Assuming a society consisting only of workers and capitalists, market competition compels capitalists to introduce new machines and thus acquire extra surplus. The capitalist innovators in productive technology increase their profits and drive their slower-moving competitors out of business. However, unless the scale of production expands more rapidly than the rate of increase in productivity, less workers will be employed. The increasing investment in fixed capital is accompanied by the lessening of value produced by workers in society as a whole.
‘General Intellect’ denotes the accumulated knowledge of this society. The intellect becomes generalised to such an extent that the dominance of mental over mental labour – what Alfred Sohn-Rethel terms the ‘autonomous intellect’, based on the Kantian transcendental subject – reaches the point where the division itself is universally seen as anachronistic. So, as the development of social collaboration and free knowledge destabilizes the market mechanism and the system of private property, the capitalist mode of production breaks down. Marx writes:
‘Forces of production and social relations – two different sides of the development of the social individual – appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky high.’ (145)
The idea of the General Intellect has resonated in some unexpected places. Samuel McIlhagga in Foreign Policy (May 28, 2023) writes: ‘Marx shares an optimism with Silicon Valley about the potential for rapid technological change but is also far more skeptical about the short-term uncontrolled effects machines will have on human beings.’ The problem McIlhagga sees with Marxists of the Boomer and Millennial generations is that they have relied too much of Marx’s Capital:
‘It’s not that Marx can’t help the new post-COVID-19 generation understand its own forms of accelerating social, economic, and natural dislocation. But Generation Z would be wise to trade Marx’s Das Kapital for his long-neglected Grundrisse.’
The Productive Forces of Capital
The idea of the General Intellect and capitalist breakdown did not make it into Marx’s Capital Volume 1 or into the never completed volumes II and III. The reason for this, according to Kohei Saito in his book, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, is because there was a decisive shift in Marx’s conception of history, which occurred sometime between 1863 and 1866. This is shown in a draft from that period, entitled ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’. Here, the ‘two sides’ of production – relations and forces of production are subsumed as the ‘productive forces of capital’. This is closely tied to two other concepts: ‘cooperation’ and ‘real subsumption of labour under capital’. What it shows is not how capitalism breaks down — to our benefit – but how breaks loose — to our cost.
Industry, in the shift from manufacture to machinofacture, introduces new technology and develops new ways of organising distribution and production. This revolutionising of relations between workers and capitalists is theorised as the shift from ‘formal subsumption’ of labour to ‘real subsumption’. Real subsumption reduces the price of labour power by increasing productivity. The independent labour of the individual is nullified. The capitalist, who now commands the means of production (objectified labour), employs living labour in an inversion of the ‘relation of subject and object’. Marx refers to this inversion as ‘a personification of the thing and a reification of the person’. Cooperation, in revolutionising and extending the division of labour, is enforced across whole industries and society as a whole:
‘To the extent that the worker creates wealth, living labour becomes a power of capital; similarly, all development of the productive forces of labour is development of the productive forces of capital’.
Marx’s theory of ‘Metabolism’ addresses how the transhistorical, interactive relation of humans with the rest of nature undergoes a ‘metabolic rift’ which is historically specific to productivist capitalism. The rift is an effect of the systematised ‘robbery’ of nature’s resources and the social oppression that enforces it. The ‘automation utopians’ avoid the problem of productivism and technological determinism by focussing on populist electoral politics, and constructing a new ‘political subjectivity’ of forces for social change.
Saito warns that this concentration on the purely political concedes to capital the option of reacting to metabolic rifts by means of metabolic shifts, such as introducing geo-engineering ‘in the name of stewardship of the earth… to manage the entire ecological system at the cost of enslaving people – especially in the Global South through the metabolic shift – to heteronomous regulation by technologies’. Capital is able to deal with problems by simply shifting them elsewhere. It can do so spatially, by transferring the metabolic robbery system to places in world beyond democratic oversight; and temporally, by leaving the problems and the human costs to be solved and paid for by succeeding generations.Saito writes: ‘…politics alone is not able to change society because the extension of democracy to the economic realm will face an insurmountable limit when it comes to challenging and undermining the power of capital.’ Populist electoralism has a tendency to be hijacked by the right or recuperated by the centre. Cassegard writes:
‘Populism isn’t necessarily radical. Examples of the extension and unification of equivalential chains in the name of the people abound in institutionalized politics. That, after all, is how most mainstream political parties in modern liberal democracies work.’
Getting Real
Bastani highlights a quote from Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program of 1875, which envisions the ‘higher phase of communist society’ as where
‘labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want … and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly… From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!’
Ecosocialists have expressed reservations about this statement because it appears to be ‘productivist’; i.e. an argument for the exploitation of natural resources as if they were infinite. Bastani doesn’t regard this as too much of a problem as he thinks that high-tech can make production more eco-friendly if it is organised rationally and democratically:
‘So as information, labour, energy and resources become permanently cheaper – and work and the limits of the old world are left behind – it turns out we don’t just satisfy all of our needs, but dissolve any boundary between the useful and the beautiful. Communism is luxurious – or it isn’t communism.’
Saito, addressing the concerns about ‘productivism’, suggests that development of productive forces Marx envisages in the Critique is not equivalent to merely quantitative increases in production of the same commodities as under capitalism. For Saito, communism would have a ‘stationary state’ economy for satisfying real human needs, and would actually make it less productive, where necessary:
’This reorganization of the labour process may decrease productivity by abolishing the excessive division of labour and making labour more democratic and attractive, but it nonetheless counts as the “development” of productive forces of social labour because it ensures the free and autonomous activity of individual workers.’
Saito gives five reasons why de-growth communism would increase the chance of repairing the metabolic rift.
Firstly, whereas capital, in its drive for unlimited growth and profit, is bound to make and sell non-essential and harmful products, the abolition of the law of value would allow the reallocation of resources to essentials such as care and real luxuries such a art, sport and travel.
Secondly, unnecessary labour, especially energy and resource-consuming ‘bullshit jobs’ would be eliminated..
Thirdly, de-growth communism would transform the remaining realm of necessity to make the content of work more attractive.
Fourthly, the abolition of market competition for profits would de-accelerate the economy and ease pressure on the biosphere.
Finally, ‘Through collective decision-making processes, workers have more room to reflect upon the necessity of their products, egalitarian relations of class, gender and race, and environmental impacts.’
Saito’s case for a de-growth Marx is at the same time an argument for humanist communism. Anti-humanism, faced with the Anthropocene, takes such forms as technological determinism, deep-green catastrophism, Bible-prophesies and ‘hidden hand’ of libertarian economics. But an existential problem does not have a political/ideological solution. Political promises are usually lies; and ideologies serve to rationalise capital’s personification of things and reification of persons. We need materialism, not as a secular religion of pseudo-scientific rationalism, but as a method for dealing with material problems.
References
Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto. Verso: 2019
Carl Cassegard, ‘Laclau and the return of the people’ (https://carlcassegard.blogspot.com/2014/06/laclau-and-return-of-people.html)
Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program. Translated by Karel Ludenhoff • Introduction by Peter Hudis • Foreword by Peter Linebaugh. PM Press/Spectre: 2022
oday the London Metropolitan Police has reputation for institutional corruption and abuse of powers. I was ever thus. As William Lovett put it in 1839, “the institution of a police force is an infringement on the constitution and liberties possessed by our ancestors.”
An extract from the book, 1839: the Chartist Insurrection by David Black and Chris Ford.
Illustration from 1839: the Chartist Insurrection by David Black and Chris Ford. A cartoon Penny Satirist22 Aug 1840 on government plan to establish county police forces. Shows police raiding a pub, stealing chickens and pigs, and demanding to see a man’s passport.
The dialogue reads (picture on the left):
First Policeman: I can see a light inside. I swear.
Second Policeman: I can see summut moving
Third Policeman – I can hear someone moving – Let us demand an entrance – And know whether spalpeens have got their licence – And if they won’t let us in by fair means, we’ll break open the door – And swear they interrupted us in the execution of our duty – the beak will be sure to believe us.
Fourth Policeman – Here Larry, take hold of this here porker. I’ve knocked him on the head to prevent him squeaking – Oh, but we’ll bag the pigs and the fowls – And then in the mornin’ we’ll pretend to look after the thieves.
(picture on the right:
Holloa! Where are you going to this time o’ night?
I be going home Sir. From my labour.
I dare say that’s a lie. Show us y’er passport!
Passport? What be that, Sir?
Ho, ho! Then you haven’t got one, eh? – Then I’m sure you’re out for no good –so you are my prisoner – Come along.
The County Police Act 1839, also known as the Rural Police Act, enabled Justices of the Peace in England and Wales to establish police forces in their counties. The move to expand the police was not welcomed by everyone. Radicals, who had experienced the brutality of the London Metropolitan Police during the Chartists agitation of 1839, saw the new police forces as a threat to free speech and right of assembly.
Richard Doyle’s depiction shows police and dragoons attacking a Chartist rally in Birmingham’s Bull Ring on July 4th 1839. A large squad of London Metropolitan Police (wearing‘Peeler’ tophats and swallow-tailed uniforms) had been sent to Birmingham for ‘special duties’. [Image: Library of Congress]
Today the London Metropolitan Police has reputation for institutional corruption and abuse of powers. I was ever thus. As William Lovett put it in 1839, “the institution of a police force is an infringement on the constitution and liberties possessed by our ancestors.”
William Lovett
As described in our book, 1839:
As the House of Commons in London was about to debate the Chartist petition for Universal Male Suffrage, the Chartist National Convention – reconvened in Birmingham .
Days later, on 4 July, Birmingham magistrate Dr. Boothe rode into the Bull Ring, a triangular commercial area of the town centre, where an illegal meeting was taking place. His mission was to “ascertain the state of the town,” which he soon did when the large crowd greeted him with shouts of “Spy” and threw stones at him. Rashly, the police tried to snatch the speaker by wading into the crowd and wielding their batons, until they were beaten back by the angry crowd. Dr. Boothe rode off and soon returned with a company of cavalry. He placed himself under the Nelson Monument and read the Riot Act. The dragoons drew their sabres and moved into the Bull Ring. The crowd withdrew but remained on the streets until after midnight, some armed with clubs and iron railings torn from churches, chanting “Fall Tyrants Fall!”
Reporter John Hampden wrote in The Planet:
“Wanton outrages were perpetrated by the police sent down by Lord J. Russell, at the instigation of the Birmingham magistrates, not only upon the Chartists assembled in the Bull Ring, but also upon harmless and unoffending people in the streets… who ought to have been protected, instead of being maltreated. Arms-breaking and head-breaking, however, seem to have been practiced by way of diversion; it was, no doubt, fine fun to see a fellow go off with a fractured limb, and an exceedingly good joke to hear a woman beaten by the police ruffians, cry out against the brutality… it mattered little whether they were man, woman or child… Are not these circumstances calculated to rouse up all that is manly – all that is English – in our countrymen and produce a universal shout of execration against such tyranny and injustice?”
The Convention met the next day in Lawrence Street and, on London delegate William Lovett’s initiative, issued a proclamation condemning the magistrates and police for the previous night’s action. Although all delegates were prepared to sign the proclamation, Lovett, in an act of heroic proportions, insisted that he alone would sign because, he declared, “the Convention cannot spare victims.” The proclamation was placarded all over Birmingham, and the authorities responded by arresting Lovett as signatory, and Birmingham delegate John Collins as publisher, of the document. At the court hearing, the Birmingham Recorder asked Lovett, “Were you aware that certain members of the police force were wounded dangerously by weapons?” Lovett replied,
“I heard that several of them were wounded, and at the same time thought that the people were justified in repelling such despotic and bloodthirsty power by any and every means at their disposal, because I believe that the institution of a police force is an infringement on the constitution and liberties possessed by our ancestors; for if the people submit to one injustice after another, which self-constituted authorities impose upon them, they may be eventually ground to dust, without the means of any resistance.”
Collins pointed out that one of the magistrates facing him was in fact Mr. Muntz, a leader of the Birmingham Political Union. Muntz, a moderate, ‘Moral Force’ Chartist, had been elected to the Convention in August 1838, but had never taken his seat.
Bail was granted to both accused.
From: 1839: the Chartist Insurrection by David Black and Chris Ford (Unkant, London: 2012)
Decade after decade of Labour movement historiography have overlaid the Chartist story with the concept of an overwhelmingly, conservative British working class and a solely reformist British Labour Movement. The message has been consistently drilled into us that revolution was and is futile.
This book offers another perspective. Revolution in Britain in 1839 was closer than we have been previously taught.
1839: The Chartist Insurrection by David Black and Chris Ford(with a foreword by John McDonnell MP) was published in 2012, during a time of intensifying social crisis. Ben Watson’s blurb on the back cover captured our intention to write an account of a rebellion from long ago which would inform and inspire readers in the present: ‘In retrieving the suppressed history of the Chartist Insurrection, David Black and Chris Ford have produced a revolutionary handbook.’
During the aftermath of the 2008 Crash the slogan, ‘We are the 99 per cent’, echoed around the world and frightened the rich and powerful. In the Middle East the Arab Spring overthew, or seriously threatened, well-entrenched dictatorships, and throughout Western Europe, anti-capitalist populism was gaining ground. In Greece, the Left, united in the Syriza Coalition, were heading for state power.
In Britain in 2012, David Cameron’s Conservative government was imposing drastic austerity measures. The apparent cancelation of the future along with the immiseration of the present faced no serious challenge from the leadership of the Labour Party, whose dearth of ideas, vision, energy and courage was evident to a new generation of malcontents, especially those radicalised by the massive student protests of 2011. This alienation from Labour’s deadbeat centrism formed the impetus for the unexpected revival of the party’s Left under Jeremy Corbyn. Following the rout of Labour under Ed Miliband in the 2014 General Election, John McDonnell became shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer under Jeremy Corbyn’s new leadership.
Participants in contemporary political events often turn to examining past events for enlightenment. Other ignore or distort them. As Paul Mattick once put it, ‘What one generation learns, a later generation forgets.’ Fifty years after the Chartist uprising of 1839, Sidney and Beatrice Webb of the Fabian Society published a ‘lessons from history’ handbook for a new party of moderate progress within the limits of the law, entitled The History of Trade Unionism. Looking back at the Chartist movement, the Webbs wrote:
‘A general despair of constitutional reform led to the growing supremacy of the “Physical Force” section of the Chartists, and to the insurrectionism of 1839-42. Made respectable by sincerity, devotion, and even heroism in the rank and file, it was disgraced by the fustian of many of its orators and the political and economic quackery of its pretentious and incompetent leaders whose jealousies and intrigues, by successively excluding all the nobler elements, finally brought it to nought.’
The Webbs’ version of the ‘Whig Theory of History’ set the ‘standard’ for writing about Chartism by ‘Labour Historians’ in the 20th century. In contrast, we argue that the ‘excluding all the nobler elements’ was rather their own self-exclusion from the practical problem of a working class that was unfranchised, over-taxed, starved into workhouses, and exploited by landowning aristocrats and industrial capitalists. In researching how the working class radicals and their allies acted after the betrayal of their estwhile Liberal allies we found that many of physical-force leaders had a grasp of intellectual ideas which they attempted to put into practice for the edification of the masses. The Jacobin-inspired propensity for ‘physical force’ – to the point of armed stuggle – was by no means restricted to a few ‘extremists’ and enemies of liberal ‘progress’. George Julian Harney, one the ‘physical force’ leaders in 1839, recalled in later life:
‘When I look back upon the past, when I remember the wrongs and sufferings of the working classes, far from being able to reproach myself with “violence”, I am astonished at my moderation; considering as I do that the wrongs referred to would have satisfied a degree of “violence” far beyond anything my recollection enables me to charge for my own account.’
Unkant Publishing went out of business in 2016, leaving the book homeless and out-of-print (although it can still be obtained from some online booksellers). One of the aims of this blog is to help the book find a new publisher. Over the summer I’ll be posting a few sample chapters. This post features the Foreword contributed by Labour Member of Parliament, John McDonnell MP, who was to become Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party.
Foreword by John McDonnell MP to 1839: The Chartist Insurrection by David Black and Chris Ford,Unkant Publishing (London:2012)
There is a school of Labour movement historiography that emulates the old Whig theory of British constitutional history. Just as the Whig Theory of History views a succession of constitutional changes over centuries simply as a series of small steps in a linear progression to the perfection of the liberal democratic state (claimed by some as the “end of history”), there have been fellow travellers in Labour History writing, who have seen the individual struggles of groups of peasants and working people over recent centuries as merely the stepping stones on the path to the ultimate goal of the founding of the Labour Party, the TUC and the modern day trade unions.
Those elements or key events in Labour movement history that have not conformed to the theory of the ineluctable, evolution of the movement into a party committed to peaceful, constitutional reform have been either written out of history altogether or relegated to mere historical footnotes. Often they are portrayed as deviations at best irrelevant to or, worse still, hindering the progress of effective working class political representation.
Those historical actors or movements that in Britain explored or attempted out on other routes to political change are generally considered condescendingly as primitives or patronisingly as naïve as soon as they ventured down the path of physical force or large scale resistance associated with Revolution rather than Reform.
Consequently in most histories of the British Labour movement the story of the Chartists has focussed on the large scale mobilisations of petitioners, the development of mass-circulation radical newspapers for working people and the promulgation of the tactic of the general strike, “the sacred month or big holiday.”
The Newport Uprising and other attempts to use physical as against moral force have been, if not hidden from history, then at least pretty heavily disguised.
With its meticulous attention to detailed sources, its comprehensive scope and its exacting research, this book doesn’t just address the neglect of this important and interesting episode in Labour movement history but more importantly it also challenges us to think again about the revolutionary potential of the British Labour movement.
Black and Ford evidence in a way others have failed to do, the scale of the threat to the British establishment in 1839. Less than two centuries after an unlikely coalition of small landholders, Puritans, Ranters and Diggers had severed the head of an English king, this equally broad new alliance of Free Traders, Republicans, early Trade Unionists, proto socialists and working people oppressed by poverty and the Poor Law raised again the standard of rebellion.
Just as in 1648 the intransigence of Charles 1st forces his opponents to explore other means to bring about change, as the events of the year 1839 unfold, the failure of the nineteenth century state to budge on any of the basic demands of the Chartists produces a mounting frustration that inevitably leads to the exploration of other means of forcing change. The seemingly endless and at times frustratingly, meandering debates of the Chartist Convention on the options for action reflect the class forces, differing life experiences and different ideological stances represented within the early Chartist coalition. This work depicts so well the debates and debaters, warts and all.
Of course, as this book demonstrates, contingency always plays a part in any historical sequence of events. We witness the political manoeuvrings of the different factions within the Convention, the role of its leaders, with their strengths and weaknesses; the determination of some and the loss of nerve and lack of judgement of others.
However the discussions on strategy prefigure many of the future debates and controversies in the Labour movement both here and across Europe. The use of the general strike in the form of the “sacred month” foreshadows the advocacy by Rosa Luxembourg of the general strike weapon and her emphasis on the spontaneity of mass action, which has an echo of the swift mobilisations of mass protests by the Chartists. The divisions in the Convention between those adhering to moral force and those advocating physical force, if only in extremis, are repeated time and again in many major class struggles over the following century from Czarist Russia to Paris 1968.
In most accounts of the course of the Chartists campaigns it seems preposterous to compare the uprisings of 1839 with the revolutions that were to follow in many European states, Russia and China over the next century. Thanks in part to the spin within the contemporary media and the received wisdom replicated in subsequent historical accounts, the Chartist revolutionaries are looked upon largely as incompetent blunderers or fantasists.
Certainly, it is evident that many of the Convention leaders, such as John Frost of Newport, were out of their depth when it came to organising a revolution and many were orators rather than street fighters. However this book makes clear that all the evidence points to an extremely fragile British state that was unprepared for a rebellion on any serious scale and indeed was stretched to its near limits in containing protest let alone armed insurrection.
At the same time despite the exaggerated claims of some of the Chartist leaders and Convention representatives of the level of support for armed revolt in their areas, it is obvious from this research that there was sufficient combustible material amongst the working class in 1839, particularly in the industrial areas of Wales and the North, to catch the fire of revolt.
Black and Ford describe how this spark failed to light the fire of revolution but also show how close an alternative revolutionary route nearly opened up for the forward march of Labour in Britain. Decade after decade of Labour movement historiography have overlaid the Chartist story with the concept of an overwhelmingly, conservative British working class and a solely reformist British Labour Movement. The message has been consistently drilled into us that revolution was and is futile.
This book offers another perspective. Revolution in Britain in 1839 was closer than we have been previously taught. There is nothing inherently conservative in the British working class as generation after generation have mobilised to prove. What may be missing however is the learning of the lessons of each revolt and each mobilisation for change. By challenging the prevailing hegemony relating to the events and significance of 1839, this book assists us greatly in understanding the potential for future challenges to the system.
Danish painter and sculptor Asger Oluf Jorn died fifty years ago (1 May 1973), aged 59. He was a founding member of the avant-garde movement COBRA and the Situationist International.
JORN, Asgar, 1963,
Jorn’s work and legacy are not appreciated by everyone in his homeland. Indeed, a report in ArtForum, May 02, 2022, indicates there are some things rotten in the State of Denmark:
‘Danish Situationist Asger Jorn’s iconic 1959 work The Disquieting Duckling was vandalized on April 29 in an attack that was livestreamed by right-wing Facebook page Patrioterne Går Live, which has historically posted anti-Muslim screeds and videos. The widely circulated video seems to show Danish artist Ibi-Pippi Orup Hedegaard affixing his own likeness to the painting, which was on display at the Museum Jorn in Silkeborg, Denmark, and then signing his name on the canvas in black permanent marker. “If you’re around,” he wrote on Facebook, “you can go and admire my new work.”’
No thanks. This nutter went beyond such relatively harmless gestures, such as throwing soup at a glass screen. He did irreparable to the painting itself, with glue and a black felt-tip.
Détourned Painting
In an essay entitled Détourned Painting, published in the Exhibition Catalogue of the Galerie Rive Gauche, Namur, in May, 1959, Jorn wrote,
‘Intended for the general public. Reads effortlessly.
Be modern,
collectors, museums.
If you have old paintings,
do not despair.
Retain your memories
but détourn them
so that they correspond with your era.
Why reject the old
if one can modernize it
with a few strokes of the brush?
This casts a bit of contemporaneity
on your old culture.
Be up to date,
and distinguished
at the same time.
Painting is over.
You might as well finish it off.
Détourn.
Long live painting.’
Asger Jorn, ‘The Disquieting Duckling’ 1959
Jorn added a section entitled ‘Intended for connoisseurs. Requires limited attention’:
‘The object, reality, or presence takes on value only as an agent of becoming. But it is impossible to establish a future without a past. The future is made through relinquishing or sacrificing the past. He who possesses the past of a phenomenon also possesses the sources of its becoming. Europe will continue to be the source of modern development. Here, the only problem is to know who should have the right to the sacrifices and to the relinquishments of this past, that is, who will inherit the futurist power. I want to rejuvenate European culture. I begin with art. Our past is full of becoming. One needs only to crack open the shells. Détournement is a game born out of the capacity for devalorization. Only he who is able to devalorize can create new values. And only when there is something to devalorize, that is, an already established value, can one engage in devalorization. It is up to us to devalorize or to be devalorized according to our ability to reinvest in our own culture. There remain only two possibilities for us in Europe: to be sacrificed or to sacrifice. It is up to you to choose between the historical monument and the act that merits it.’
Angelus Dubiosus
Now consider William Blake (1757-1827).
The Good and Evil Angels 1795-?c. 1805 William Blake 1757-1827 Presented by W. Graham Robertson 1939 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N05057
In Apocalypse and Recuperation: Blake and the Maw of Commerce (English Literary History, Spring, 1985, Vol. 52, No. 1), Paul Mann writes:
‘Everything ever published about Blake is true. Not, perhaps, informed, masterful, judicious, cogent, interesting or even necessarily true about Blake, but always true to the material conditions of writing about Blake, always somehow negotiable within the actual economy of that “industry” known as Blake criticism, or criticism, or discourse. The industry’s avowed task of representing” Blake’s truth, often indeed of agreeing with and advocating that truth, is thus mitigated or even undermined by the industry’s concomitant need to maintain itself in existence. The consensually validated revelation of Blake’s truth would put the industry out of business. Blake’s”truth” becomes a currency, a fluctuating exchange value in an economy whose survival depends not only on agreement but on disagreement, discord, dismissals, departures, the continual destruction and reconstruction of each appearance of that truth.’
The following original artwork, a collage détournement of Blake’s Good and Evil Angels, has been presented to The Barbarism of Pure Culture for publication. The artist does not wish to be credited.
Blake After Jorn (Tusche 4). Anonymous
FURTHER READING
David Black, The Philosophical Roots of Anti-Capitalism: Essays on History, Culture and Dialectical Thought, Part Two ‘Critique of the Situationist Dialectic: Art, Class-Consciousness and Reification’, Lexington Books 2013.
Polemic, politics, mouth jazz and spontaneous music with Ben Watson. Today: music played last Friday at the Betsey Trotwood, London, to launch Dave Black’s latest book on the Barbarism of Pure Culture imprint, LSD Underground: Operation Julie, the Microdot Gang and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Featuring Graham Davis on synth, Nick Lubran on acoustic guitar and flute, Dave Black on acoustic guitar and Out To Lunch on wooden spoons and Yamaha keyboards.
Unitary urbanism expressed a vision of city planning based on aesthetic and technological innovations in architecture, but freed from subordination to the needs of corporate developers and the endless expansion of private car ownership. Such pleasurable activity as the Dérive had yet to be impoverished by the pollution and noise of traffic jams, and the vandalism of planners and developers. Chtcheglev could still write of a future in which city dwellers would reclaim the streets: “we will construct cities for drifting… but with light retouching, one can utilize certain zones which already exist. One can utilize certain persons who already exist.”v
By David Black
9 January 2023
The British Dérive
Alex Trocchi, Scottish novelist, Francophile and one-time Situationist, once reminisced about his friendship with Guy Debord in the 1950s:
“I remember long, wonderful psycho-geographical walks in London with Guy. He took me to places in London I didn’t know, that he sensed, that I’d never have been to if it hadn’t been with him. He was a man who could discover a city… He had a magical quality… Distances didn’t seem to matter to the man. Walking in London, in the daytime, at night, he’d bring me to a spot he’d found, and the place would begin to live. Some old forgotten part of London. Then he’d reach back for a story, for a piece of history, as if he’d been there. He’d quote from Marx, or Treasure Island, or De Quincey.”[ Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces, p.388.
Alex Trochhi
“Psychogeography” was formulated by Debord and his colleagues as “the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviours of individuals.” The practice of Psychogeography involved the Dérive: a form of daydreaming during excursions on foot through the urban environment, defined as “a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances.”
Psychogeography has, directly or indirectly, influenced a number of British writers. In Michael Moorcock’s novel of 1988, Mother London, the space-time of the city is explored through the fragmented voices of mental patients in the Thatcherite 1980s, whose traumas are traced back to the mythology and reality of the Blitz. As a lead character says, “All great old cities possess their special myths. Amongst London’s is the story of the Blitz, of our endurance.” Indeed, the primary cause for the fate of modern London was the Second World War, in which the Luftwaffe’s bomber squadrons, doodlebug missiles and V2 rockets killed 30,000 Londoners and destroyed 70,000 buildings. Ironically, the damage to the city empowered post-war planners, architects and property developers to impose further environmental disaster by bulldozing much of Georgian and Victorian London under the banner of ‘modernization’ — although, by way of recompense, money-making ‘heritage’ spots were saved for tourism, and the facades of many iconic buildings were preserved to cover up the gutting of the interiors.
In the 21st century, as the British economy sinks into the North Sea under the mists of Brexiternity, the London skyline continues its upward trajectory of dystopian skyscrapers; all of which appear to give-the-finger to rest of the city as a Psychogeographical “fuck you” from the non-doms, oligarchs, banksters and money-launderers who run the British economy through their tropical tax havens. The once sweet River Thames, regularly polluted with waste by the Thames Water company (that flagship of Thatcher’s privatisations), now flows softly only for tourists, millionaire party-goers on pleasure boats, and the tenants of the new yuppie-hutches which screen the river off from the Londoners who once enjoyed walking its banks.
In Britain, psychogeography, in the hands of academics, journalists, novelists and visual artists has become an inventive technique for exploring cities. Novelist, Will Self, an admirer of Guy Debord’s Situationist writings, teaches psychogeography at London Brunel University. One of Self’s nonfiction books, Psychogeography (2007), features accounts of his Dérives, walking the streets of London and other cities. By consciously suppressing the usual concerns of time and destination, Self finds for himself a more autonomous actualisation of subjective experience, capable of “dissolving the mechanised matrix which compresses the space-time continuum.” Karen O’Rourke writes in Psychogeography: A Purposeful Drift Through the City (2021), “If geographers ‘carve’, ‘draw’, or ‘write’ the earth, psychogeographers add a zest of soul to the mix, linking earth, mind and foot.” Psychogeography, “[i]n its diverse forms.. embodies the desire to renew language, social life, and oneself. For contemporary psychogeographers, the drift is purposeful; it can reveal the city’s underlying structure.” Sonia Overall, in Heavy Time (2021), drifts along the old pilgrim roads from Canterbury to London and takes in her home town of Ely and a landscape of ancient chapels, ruined farms and suburban follies, Overall, in her secular Dérive, seeks out “thin places”, which constitute a sort of membrane where past and the present seem to collide and suggest “where new ways of living might begin.”
Iain Sinclair, in his novels and poems from the 1970s onwards, has utilised psychogeographic techniques without paying much attention to their Situationist origins. His ’Lights Out for Territory, 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London (1997) inaugurated a twenty-year cycle of mainly non-fiction books on the unravelling of the city’s social and historical fabric, culminating in The Last London: True Fictions from an Unreal City (2017). The pragmatic nihilism which has “renewed” the London landscape has negated the Dérive as meaningful activity and has even changed the meaning of words to cover up old adages such as “never apologise, never explain”:
“So: the last London. It has to be said with a climbing inflection at the end. Every statement is provisional here. Nothing is fixed or grounded. Come back tomorrow and the British Museum will be an ice rink, a boutique hotel, a fashion hub. The familiar streets outside will have vanished into walls of curved glass and progressive holes in the ground. The darkened showroom of the Brick Lane monumental mason with the Jewish headstones will be an art gallery. So?…That insignificant ‘so’ has moved with the times… Now it’s a signifier, a warning bleep letting the recipient know that nothing that follows has any billable consequence. The speaker, the spokesperson, the hireling expert, is not accountable.”
Having charted the social-cleansing of the poorer parts of London by means of development projects and gentrification, Sinclair declared: “I don’t think there is any more that can be said. The topic has outlived its usefulness and become a brand.”
An especially banal example which illustrates this branding is a promotional piece by Frank Jacobs in the Big Think for the 2022 London Circle Walk. He advises,
“Don’t look up ‘psychogeography’. Again and again, you’ll come across Guy Debord, the Marxist theorist who coined the term in 1955… Persist in your research, and you’ll fall down a rabbit hole of mid-century French social, political, and philosophical theory, from which it is safe to say no one escapes entirely unscathed. Rather, think of it simply as what the term itself promises: the crossroads of psychology and geography… It’s unclear whether that would still be in keeping with the tenets of psychogeography as defined by Debord and practiced by the Situationists. But it does sound like a lot more fun than one of their meetings.”
If Jacobs was a bit more familiar with what he writing about, he might recognise himself as a “recuperator.” One of the key tenets of Situationist thought is the concept of recuperation, which describes the process of how subversive elements are contained,co-opted or neutralised by assimilation into the Spectacle as consumable commodities. As for “fun”, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “boisterous joviality or merrymaking”, there was, as we shall see, plenty of that, but a lot more.
Down the Rabbit Hole: How it Began
After Liberation from the Nazis, post-war revolutionaries in Paris dedicated to new ways of living began to challenge the dominance of Surrealism within the avant-garde. As Debord articulated it 20 years later in Society of the Spectacle:
“Dadaism and surrealism are the two currents which mark the end of modern art. They are contemporaries, though only in a relatively conscious manner, of the last great assault of the revolutionary proletarian movement; and the defeat of this movement, which left them imprisoned in the same artistic field whose decrepitude they had announced… Dadaism wanted to suppress art without realizing it; surrealism wanted to realize art without suppressing it.”
In 1947 a major Paris publishing house issued a book by the 20-year-old Romanian exile, Isidore Isou, entitled Introduction d’une nouvelle poésie et d’une nouvelle musique. Isou analyzed poetic language as having gone through an “amplification” process in the romantic period, followed by a “chiseling” process under Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarme, until Dada finally destroyed it. For Isou, once the chisel of history had done its work, the truth and beauty of poetic language was no longer to be found in words, but in letters, representing figures and sounds. Isou’s “Letterists” (or “Lettrists”) experimented in paintings made up of letters, and sound-poems. They also challenged the separation between art and life. In a manifesto for a “Youth Front” Isou hailed the youth of France as a sort of sub-proletariat: alienated by the educational system, excluded from consumerism by low pay or unemployment, and oppressed by the archaic French Penal Code. The first act of the Youth Front was a riotous assualt on the staff at a brutal Catholic orphanage, which ended in arrest and imprisonment for some of the attackers. In a similar spirit, in 1950, a group of Letterists led by Michel Mourre, disguised as a Dominican monk, disrupted Easter Mass at Notre Dame by announcing “God is Dead,” and reading out an anti-religious poem. They were attacked with swords by the Swiss guards and almost lynched by the congregation before the police came to the rescue and arrested them. On the cultural front, venerable Surrealists, regarded by Isou as conformist and bourgeois, found their exhibitions and poetry readings disrupted by Letterists shouting ‘”surrealism is dead!”
Isou extended the “chiseling” concept to cinema with his Traite de bave et d”eternite (Slime and Eternity) which, when “premiered” at the Cannes Film Festival, caused a near riot (not least because Isou hadn’t finished it, so that for last 90 minutes the audience was subjected to the soundtrack in total darkness). In 1952 Isou recruited two other film-makers: Guy Debord and Gil Wolman.
Left to right: Wolman, Dahou, Debord, Chtcheglov
In 1952, at the Paris premiere of Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight, Debord and Wolman handed out a statement which ended with the words: “the footlights have melted the make-up of the supposedly brilliant mime. All we can see now is a lugubrious and mercenary old man. Go home Mister Chaplin.” As Chaplin had been barred from the United States for suspected “communist” sympathies, the French Left was deeply offended by the action. The attack was probably motivated at least in part by a statement of support for Chaplin put out by leading Surrealists. The Chaplin “disruption” was too much for Isou, who first praised it, but then backtracked and denied all responsibility. Debord and Wolman, along with writer Michele Bernstein, took this as their cue to break with Isou and form a rival “Letterist International.”
Guy Debord and friends in the film: On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time
The members and fellow-travelers of the Letterist International were young; nearly all of them in their teens or early twenties. These “lost children” (les enfants perdus) were of the generation that had grown up during the Nazi occupation (some of their parents had been Jewish deportees or Maquisards), but had been too young to fight in the resistance. As political radicals, they felt betrayed by the re-imposition, post-Liberation, of a “traditional” conservatism which kept intact the authoritarian penal code and a Gendarmarie which had in large part collaborated with the Nazi occupiers. They also felt betrayed by the bureaucratic, class-collaborationist French Communist Party, the ineffective and dogmatic Trotskyists, and the recuperated Surrealist avant-garde. Also, they did their best to resist conscription for France’s imperialist wars in Indo-China and Algeria.
The headquarters of the new international was a bar in the Arab quarter of Paris’s Left Bank. According to one of the regulars, Elaine Papai (who married Jean-Louis Brau, the Letterist poet):
“The life of the Situationist International cannot be disentangled from Saint-German-des-Prés and the climate that once reigned in that neighbourhood. The Letterist International had set up its headquarters at Moineau’s, a low dive in Rue du Four where the letterists were joined by hitherto unaffiliated young revolutionaries. Drugs, alcohol, and girls (especially underage ones) were part of the folklore of the Letterist International, as revealed in certain slogans of that time which, curiously enough, reappeared on the walls of Paris in May 1968. ‘Never Work!’ ‘Ether is freely available,’ or ‘Let us live!’”
(Quoted in Vincent Kaufmann, Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry)
Another young woman of the group, the Australian artist, Vali Myers, recalls,
“They were the rootless children from every corner of Europe. Many had no home, no parents, no papers. For the cops, their legal status was “vagrant.” Which is why they all ended up sooner or later in La Santé [prison].We lived in the streets, in the cafes, like a pack of mongrel dogs. We had our hierarchy, our own codes. Students and people with jobs were kept out. As for the few tourists who came around to gawk at “existentialists,” it was all right to con them. We always managed to have rough wine and hash from Algeria. We shared everything.”
Unlike the rest of the avant-garde, the Letterist International refused to be “answerable” to the court of art criticism and the gaze of the “other,” refused to seek fame, and declined to market anything they produced. The LI’s mimeographed journal Potlatch, which appeared in twenty issues between June 1954 and November 1957, had an eventual print run of five hundred copies. It was always given away free to friends of the group, or mailed to people who expressed an interest. The Letterist International’s theory of “unitary urbanism” was first formulated by the nineteen-year-old Ivan Chtcheglev:
“Darkness and obscurity are banished by artificial lighting, and the seasons by air conditioning. Night and summer are losing their charm and dawn is disappearing. The urban population think they have escaped from cosmic reality, but there is no corresponding expansion of their dream life. The reason is clear: dreams spring from reality and are realized in it. The latest technological developments would make possible the individual’s unbroken contact with cosmic reality while eliminating its disagreeable aspects. Stars and rain can be seen through glass ceilings. The mobile house turns with the sun. Its sliding walls enable vegetation to invade life. Mounted on tracks, it can go down to the sea in the morning and return to the forest in the evening… The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space.”
‘Unitary Urbanism’. International Situationists Issue !
Unitary urbanism expressed a vision of city planning based on aesthetic and technological innovations in architecture, but freed from subordination to the needs of corporate developers and the endless expansion of private car ownership. Such pleasurable activity as the Dérive had yet to be impoverished by the pollution and noise of traffic jams, and the vandalism of planners and developers. Chtcheglev could still write of a future in which city dwellers would reclaim the streets: “we will construct cities for drifting… but with light retouching, one can utilize certain zones which already exist. One can utilize certain persons who already exist.”v
In 1957 the Letterist International, the Movement for Imaginist Bauhaus, and the former-surrealists of CoBrA (Copenhagen-Brussels-Amsterdam) led by the Danish painter Asger Jorn, came together to found the Situationist International (1957-72). Within a few months other groups from Italy and West Germany affiliated to the SI, thus inaugurating a stormy fifteen-year process of fusions, schisms and expulsions, and an equally stormy spread across the globe of Situationist ideas, which were themselves by no means immune to ideological and cultural “recuperation.” The concept of détournement, in the hands of practitioners throughout the world, was to give rise to numerous innovations, such as the subversive use of comic books and pirate radio, the defacing of advertisements with additional images and words. But détournement. first conceived as a counter-measure against recuperation, was further developed by the Situationists into a more general concept of spontaneous rebellion against the technology of consumption.
By 1968, when the streets of the Paris were once again fought over, the city of the Letterists had disappeared and its utopian urbanist potential had already been destroyed by urban development and tourism..Debord observed in Society of the Spectacle (1967):
“Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption, a by-product of the circulation of commodities, is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal. The economic organization of visits to different places is already in itself the guarantee of their equivalence. The same modernization that removed time from the voyage also removed from it the reality of space… Urbanism is capitalism’s seizure of the natural and human environment; developing logically into absolute domination, capitalism can and must now remake the totality of space into its own setting. ”
How it Ends
In 1988, Debord reflected that in the two decades since he wrote Society of the Spectacle, capitalist modernization had led to the stage of the “integrated spectacle”, characterized by incessant technological renewal; fusion of State and economy; generalized secrecy; forgeries without reply; and a perpetual present which “wants to forget the past and no longer seems to believe in a future.” His analysis foresaw the feed-back loop now perfected by electronic social media, “achieved by the ceaseless circular passage of information, always returning to the same short list of trivialities, passionately proclaimed as major discoveries.” Meanwhile, he continued, “news of what is genuinely important, of what is actually changing, comes rarely, and then in fits and starts. It always concerns this world’s apparent condemnation of its own existence, the stages in its programmed self-destruction.”
The “cancellation of the Future” – or rather of any positive “visions” of it – has been silently accepted by the pragmatists of the political class. Labour Party leader, Kier Starmer, having viciously suppressed Jeremy Corbyn’s mass following, blurts out meaningless abstractions about “security” and “stability” for a “dynamic, agile, strong and, above all, focused” nation, “driven by clear, measurable objectives”. As Adam Curtis suggested in a recent podcast, the future is seen by politicians as a dark and dangerous thing-in-itself, which the fearful and obedient masses supposedly rely of politicians to protect them from. The politicians pretend that they know what they are doing. The public knows they are pretending. And the politicians know that the public knows they are pretending. And yet, any talk of actually doing something about the problems in the here and now is regarded as a dangerous and “unhelpful” heresy which our current Tory regime seems well on the way to making a criminal offence. I would suggest, by way of conclusion, that the Letterist and Situationist “extremists” had, as well as a sense of history, much more of a grasp of strategy and activist practice than today’s environmental campaigners have.
