The Kantian Cosmopolis

According to E.H. Carr’s What is History? R.G. Collingwood (1889-1943) was, “the only British thinker of the present century who has made a serious contribution to the philosophy of history.” In this respect one can say, from the vantage point of the present, that Collingwood’s contribution has never been topped, if only because no one writes philosophies of history any more; and any one in academia who tried to would be labelled - along with Collingwood - as an “idealist.”

Collingwood’s book, The Idea of History, takes issue with Immanuel Kant who, in the “true style of the Enlightenment… regards past history as spectacle of human irrationality and looks forward to a utopia of rational life.” Kant’s contemporary David Hume similarly dismissed idle chronicling of the “spectacle” of historical events “passing in review”.

Collingwood points out that by definition a spectacle is not a “rational” phenomenon; therefore Enlightenment thinkers could not see history as anything other than the irrational follies and misdeeds of the past. Of Kant’s downgrading of history Collingwood writes:

“...if history is a spectacle it is a phenomenon; if a phenomenon, it is nature, because nature, for Kant, is an epistemological term and means things are seen as a spectacle...

However,

“…history is not a spectacle. The events of history do not pass ‘in review’ before the historian. They have finished happening before he starts thinking about them. He has to create them inside his own mind, re-enacting for himself so much of the experience of the men who took part in them as he wishes to understand.” [my emphases]

Enlightenment thinkers reduced history to nature, and subjected history to the same objective strictures as other sciences. Kant, however, found a place for a “metaphysical” approach in the realm of ethics. As Collingwood understands this, it is “an attempt to discuss mind not in its phenomenal aspect as a kind of nature, but as a thing-in-itself.” Kant identifies the essence of mind as “freedom,” by which he doesn’t mean freedom to do whatever makes us happy; but rather to exercise our autonomous power to become moral agents - i.e. dutiful citizens living under the law of the land (without bothering themselves about the violent means by which feudal rulers acquired their wealth and power in the first place).

Kant’s “moral individual” confronts an unsympathetic empirical world of mechanical laws. History becomes a process which binds individuals together in exploitative relationships. But exploitation contradicts Kant’s categorical imperative that no individual should treat another as a means to his or her own ends. Moral wisdom thus persists as a reproach to “the realm of brute nature.”

Kant’s 1784 essay, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, considers the possibility of universal human freedom “beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence,” but wilIed nonetheless by nature. Kant’s radicalism seems to prefigure Marx’s Communist Manifesto when he says,

“…the means employed by nature to bring about the development of all the capacities of men is their antagonism in society… the unsocial sociability, i.e. their propensity to enter into society, bound together with a mutual opposition, which constantly threatens to break up society.”

Kant postulates an eventual “perpetual peace” on a global scale. This is based on his expectation that, as traffic, trade and industry spread throughout the world, the leading nations would need to collectively manage the available natural and human resources, otherwise the selfish and increasingly destructive behaviour of competing trading powers would become self-defeating. A perpetual peace between states would not require everybody to live according to the moral law, only that civil law be extended to international relations.

Climbing the Tower of Babal

Capitalists might well favour international arrangements based on moral consensus which would validate the extraction of value from workers and nature “in peace”. However, for Peter Thiel and his creation J.D. Vance, “peace” doesn’t mean the absence of war. They are reinterpreting Girard’s insights insights into the phenomenon of scapegoating. Girard (1923-2009) speculates in his anthropological origin studies on “the process of hominization: the fascinating passage from animality to humanity that occurred thousands of years ago.”

In sum, for Girard, the Bible, great literature and anthropology show how communal violence is inflicted on sacrificial victims - chosen arbitrarily - as a means of containing conflict within the tribe. In Girard’s theory of “mimetic desire”, humans don’t desire the things possessed by the “others” as much as the others ability to dominate and possess.

To take a case in point “wokery” is perceived by the Right as projection of moralising victimhood which they - the Right - lay claim to themselves: the response to the Left’s attacks on statues of slave-owners is for example “answered” by banning books in libraries which are seen as undermining “traditional” values as embodied in the history of slavery and the myth of the Confederate “Lost Cause”.

Peter Thiel has long attempted to make Political Islam the main scapegoat and is disappointed in the Vatican’s reluctance to relaunch the Crusades with US-Israeli support. Neither Thiel or Vance would agree with Kant’s maxim that “No State Shall by Force Interfere with the Constitution or Government of Another State.” For them “peace”does not negate the “right” of the strong-and-willing to invade countries whom they regard as lacking “legitimate” “civil societies” and can be portrayed as a “threat.”

More recently Thiel has equated a coming apocalypse with war, by trade and other means, between China and the”West”. Thiel has adopted and distorted for his own purposes, the Girard’s founding hypothesis concerning mimesis:

“Because humans imitate one another, they have had to find a means of dealing with contagious similarity, which could lead to the pure and simple disappearance of their society. The mechanism by which they have done that is sacrifice, which reintroduces difference into a situation in which everyone has come to resemble everyone else.”

For Girard, who died in 2009, the prospect of a US-China War was truly terrifying:

“Violence is a terrible adversary, since it always wins. Desiring war can thus become a spiritual attitude… More than ever, I am convinced that history has meaning, and that its meaning is terrifying.” René Girard, On War and Apocalypse, 2009.

“Everyone now knows that the looming conflict between the US and China, for example, has nothing to do with a ‘clash of civilisations’, despite what some might try to tell us. We always try to see differences where in fact there are none. In fact, the dispute is between two forms of capitalism that are becoming more and more similar.”

Vance, through Thiel, has absorbed Girard’s scapegoat theory enough to weaponise it by means of well-placed lies. Truth is the first casualty of war, especially culture war. In September 2024, when running for election as Trump’s Vice-President, Vance claimed that Haitian immigrants were eating neighbours’ pets. The lie was necessary for a story which would “the media pay attention to the suffering of the American people.”

In 2023 the centenary of Girard’s birth brought “innovators and thought leaders” to a conference in Washington DC “to bring together three metaphorical cities”: Athens (reason), Jerusalem (Christian/Zionist “faith traditions”), and Silicon Valley (innovators in business and beyond).” Thiel gave a keynote address titled ‘Nihilism is Not Enough’.

One does not need to be a Catholic to see through this scenario: 1) Athens/Reason is the universities and schools purged of “wokeness” DEI and critical thought, 2) Jerusalem is the realm of the new Knights Templar (pending the purging of the Vatican of “modernists” and the destruction of the European Union by Christian nationalists, 3. “Silicon Valley” is a global network of data bases for building Thiel and Co’s Tower of Babel.

Pope Leo XIV, who is not one to miss a heresy when he sees one, writes in a encyclical, entitled ‘Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.’

“Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”

A Faustian Left?

Where does this leave the Left - and the Left’s own history?

Post-Collingwood, “spectacle”, as formulated by Guy Debord (1931-94), no longer refers to the irrationality of the pre-Enlightenment eras, but to the new “integrated spectacle” of universalised commodification:

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be re-established.

An essay by the late Rumanian-Hungarian Marxist, Gáspár Miklós Tamás, in the Socialist Register, ‘Telling the Truth About Class’, charts the history of the Left as the retreat “from Hegel and Marx to Kant,” as well as “the retreat from socialism to egalitarianism, from Marx to Rousseau, the retreat from critical theory to ahistorical moral critique.” Tamás argues that with the collapse of traditional Lassallean/Rousseauian socialist, (and Stalinist) parties, along with their sect-like social and political cultures, we can now see that their historical role – in which they upstaged the liberal bourgeoisie – was to clear the way for a class-bound capitalism proper, by removing the historical obstacles: feudalism, fascism and eventually, the statist Rousseauian socialism they themselves had created.

Tamás highlights for critical attention Edward P. Thompson’s masterpiece, The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson, covering the period 1780 to 1832, shows how the working class formed and defined itself as morally and culturally independent of the bourgeoisie, thus enabling it to form its first national organisation – Chartism – in the late-1830s. Tamás, however, sees Thompson’s approach, along with Gramsci’s perspective for working class “hegemony,” as Rousseauian Marxism: “Whereas Marx and Marxism aim at the abolition of the proletariat, Thompson aims at the apotheosis and triumphant survival of the proletariat.” Unlike Rousseau, Marx is the poet of “Faustian demonism,” in which capitalism is the “final revelation” that can only be reached by “wading through the muck of estrangement.” Marx “does not oppose capitalism ideologically; but Rousseau does. For Marx, it is history; for Rousseau, it is evil.”

Bowes Park is an estate of Edwardian houses, politely described in a late 20th century London guide book as “an area of shabby gentility.” The high street, Myddleton Road, took its name from Thomas Myddleton (1550-1631), architect of the New River which flows across and under it. The New River was dug to follow the contour line from Hertfordshire and supply London with much-needed fresh water. In the 1850s the winding, snake-like river was straightened to speed up the flow.

When I re-located there (also in the late 20th century) it was evidently an area in decline. Apart from the usual high street shops - butcher, baker, chemist, newsagent, chip shop, Chinese takeway, etc - none of which made it into the 21st century, the most notable features of Myddleton Road, now also gone, were:

• The Vrisaki restaurant, which served the best takeaway kebabs in north London. It closed (arguably) after the council introduced LTN (Low Traffic Neighbourhood) regulations which made access and parking difficult for customers.

• The timber yard and the headquarters of the Furniture and Allied Trades union.

• A branch of Lloyds Bank, which closed after an armed robbery, and pushed up insurance prices for the entire street to eye-watering rates. The building is now a day-nursery.

• Henleys bar, a small Irish pub which hosted late-night lock-ins at weekends; its “Wild West” atmosphere heightened when the lights in the pub were switched off every time a police patrol car passed outside. It later reopened, renamed as The Step, an event venue and community pub.

• The George Moore menswear shop next door to Henleys.

Regarding the last of this list, back in the 1990s what intrigued me about Mr Moore’s shop was that the window display hadn’t been changed for decades. I only once ventured into the shop. I can’t remember what I wanted to buy, though I do remember that he didn’t have it. Mr Moore, who lived in the flat above the shop, seemed to have long given up trying to run it as a viable business. The inside of the shop smelled of dog piss.

The shop window was an homage to Terylene. For me this prompted reflection on Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s insights on the “real abstraction” of commodity production:

“…in the market-place and in shop windows, things stand still... A commodity marked out at a definite price, for instance, is looked upon as being frozen to absolute immutability... time is emptied of the material realities that form its contents in the sphere of use.” Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology

As in…

But look at it thirty years later…

(A Google of “Terylene” indicates “several disadvantages, including poor moisture absorbency, susceptibility to static electricity, sensitivity to heat, non-biodegradability, and limited breathability. These factors can impact comfort and environmental sustainability.”)

As Mr Moore was a popular local character the state of his shopfront was tolerated by other shopkeepers. Gentrifiers, however, saw it as an affront to modernity and a woeful representation of Myddleton Road’s reputation as a “ghost street.” Exorcism was called for.

When, around 2012, Mr Moore passed on, the shop was sold, and after much wrangling between community activists and developers has become a privately-owned community space hosting “a range of activities, classes, workshops, meetings and events… at competitive rates.”

And in a gesture towards Myddleton Road’s Edwardian heritage origins, the renovated shop has been renamed - as it was in the early 20th century - “Walt Green & Co”.

A hundred years ago Bowes Park residents used to do all their Saturday shopping on Myddleton Road rather than Tesco’s or online Ocado. Surprisingly, in 2016 Myddleton Road received the London “High Street of the Year” award despite having lost its shops. Efforts to preserve its newly acquired Hub status have been have been kept up by the local community association, who with the support of the (Labour) council and the Thames Water landowners, have established green community spaces down by the river.

A street market operates every first Sunday of the month, selling food, bric-à-brac, and such worthy items of garden mini-huts for hedgehogs (almost extinct thanks to the urban foxes). And the Summer Festival is coming up. Enjoy!

THE BARBARISM OF PURE CULTURE - Books, etc. Website

Ten years ago The Philosophical Roots of Anti-Capitalism: Essays on History, Culture, and Dialectical Thought by David Black was published in paperback by Lexington Books (the hardback was published in 2014).

Peter McLaren’s blurb:

‘The well-respected historian of philosophy, David Black, has shown himself to be a consummate philosopher, so much so that he has produced a work that will stand the test of time as a major contribution to the Marxist tradition of philosophical works. His new work is a major achievement, and one that speaks directly to the historical times that we unhappily inhabit. This work is more than a feast for academics, it is necessary fuel for revolution, a revolution that is in the making and that will benefit greatly from this work. Should the coming socialist revolution begin to turn into its opposite, this is the work that we will need to read—again and again—to get back on track.’

Out To Lunch’s review of The Philosophical Roots of Anti-Capitalism in Militant Esthetics (2014)

Glancing at the cover of this serious-looking, grey-blue volume and seeing the endorsement by “Peter McLaren of the University of Auckland” on the back, you might be forgiven for thinking it’s another contribution to the closed world of academic Marxology, something without relevance to your everyday life. Think again. This book simply bristles with relevance, and will speak to you (and spike you!) when you least expect it.

Author Dave Black has an interesting CV. He acted in Roland Muldoon’s Cartoon Archetypical Slogan Theatre (CAST), the legendary Agit-Prop troupe celebrated by Jeff Nuttal in Bomb Culture (as I write this in Somers Town, I can see housing built on the site of the Unity Theatre, where Derek Bailey and other ‘60s Improvisers staged gigs, a Muldoon stronghold). Black also contributed to Lobster, Robin Ramsay’s journal of “conspiracy theory” which got so close to real politics it created a scandal by revealing that the MI5 worked to destabilize Harold Wilson’s Labour government (Tony Benn was energy secretary). In 2005, such researches into the secret state resulted in Black’s Acid: The Secret History of LSD, documenting CIA-backed manufacture and distribution of psychedelic drugs (Frank Zappa made noises about this in his 70s music-press interviews, but no-one believed him). Tiring of conspiracy-theory journalism, feeling he’d been reduced to supplying a hot commodity to passive consumers, Black turned to thinkers who could help left activists understand the world, and got deep into Marx and Marxism.

When I attempted to interest London Review of Books in Unkant publications (Unkant is the print wing of the Association of Musical Marxists), I was told that their intrinsic quality is not the point: books are only reviewed if they address already-established “subjects of interest”. Dave Black has (with Chris Ford) published an Unkant volume — 1839: the Chartist Insurrection, recounting a revolutionary episode in British labour history ignored by historians wedded to reformist politics — and The Philosophical Roots of Anti-Capitalism reads like something on our imprint: it’s personal, charged, urgent, partisan — succinct. The author doesn’t believe political convictions diminish authority; doesn’t believe that being boring is the main road to pre-eminence in a discipline. Like Esther Leslie’s Unkant book (Derelicts), it’s a weird but compulsive read, where you’d be pushed to explain to the LRB what its “subject” actually is. New connections are sewn through official “subjects of interest”, and you end up grateful for being along for the ride, for being in the company of someone who’s prepared to think outside the usual game-plans and stage-sets.

So we zigzag from Harry McShane (1891-1988), Red Clydesider and Glaswegian trade unionist, to Alfred Sohn-Rethel (1899-1990), Berlin employers’ bureaucrat who switched sides when the Nazis took over and wrote on the philosophical implications of money; from Greek tragedy and Aristotle to Hegel and Lenin; from Raya Dunayevskaya and the Surrealists to G20, anti-capitalism and postmodernist theory; from Gillian Rose, charismatic teacher at Sussex University, to fellow theorists in the International Marxist-Humanist Organisation. The imp driving Black is a conviction that ideas matter: there are truths which, if missed, lead to error and inertia for the Left. He deals with Hegelian subject/object dialectics and Marxist value theory, and he doesn’t spare the reader their intricacies, but his discussions surmount complex argument to view new vistas in a strange, different light. Black thinks left activism without philosophy is pointless, and his book will actively offend readers who think these two aspects of life can be divided. There are tough patches, sure, but (in common with Marx’s Capital), the writing is internally consistent, there is no “special training” (except maybe wage slavery and a healthy disregard for it) required to understand it. He is not wasting your time.

In his introduction, Black describes the book’s genesis. From a working-class, trade-unionist background in Newcastle, he enrolled at Middlesex Polytechnic in the mid-70s and was touched by its student radicalism. He enrolled in a course on Trade Union studies, feeling that the turbulent years before World War I would have lessons for today. He was advised to read Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom, and found it a revelation. He was encouraged that it was prefaced by Harry McShane of Glasgow Trades Council, the Red Clydesider who was active pre-1914 and still around (Black met up with him: “physically and mentally the fittest octogenarian I have ever known”). Black doesn’t view things from the Londoncentric perspective of MPs, TV and press (his latest project is rediscovering original translator of the Communist Manifesto and top Chartist journalist, Helen Macfarlane … no surprise she’s Scottish too). I studied modern history at Cambridge University in the mid-70s, and everything was given a parliamentary frame: we began with 1832, the Great Reform Act. Black begins with 1839, the Chartist insurrection. History was so tedious at Cambridge, I swapped to English Literature. Now, reading Black, I see why revolutionaries call themselves historical materialists. History matters; it brings constant surprises.

History writing in Britain has been dominated by authors from the Communist Party, and the philistinism, pragmatism and positivism of that politics diminishes their work: history becomes a record of who won, told increasingly from the side of the victors. Acknowledged as the most eminent historian today, Eric Hobsbawm is at best a chronicler of “the facts”, which means history which points ineluctably to present powers. E.P. Thompson gradually escaped the snares of CP positivism, spawned the great Peter Linebaugh, and ended his life with a study of William Blake. In 1934, Karl Radek opened the Soviet Writers’ Congress — the conference which launched Socialist Realism and the suppression of Modernism in the USSR — by condemning Jakob Boehme (whom both Marx and Lenin honoured as an important dialectician) as a “bourgeois mystic”. Writing a book on Blake was a sharp retort to such CP dogma. However, it’s still rare to find historians who make the past come alive, who don’t write as if actors in history operate with the historian’s knowledge of what came after (an exception is John Keegan, the military historian who taught at Sandhurst and wrote for the Telegraph; since military tactics are a practical thing, dialectics is suddenly a useful tool for the bourgeoisie).

It’s rare to find historians who inject what Hegel called “possibility” back into the historical corpse, and allow us to see it in movement, as it really was and felt for those acting in it. Black does that. That’s why he cannot stick to an already-established “subject of interest”. In actuality, despite the separate disciplines of the academy, everything is connected to everything else: philosophy to history to science to culture to politics. The most concentrated statement of Black’s anti-disciplinary position occurs on page x of the introduction. It might seem like a technical point in left history but is in fact the linchpin of the book. Black credits Raya Dunayevskaya with

the philosophical insight that German social democracy’s capitulation to militarism in 1914 had been a dialectical transformation into its opposite from within (p. x)

This sentence is simultaneously history and philosophy; it proposes that we cannot think one without the other. Dividing them prevents us understanding the present. It is this blindness which makes our mass media useless for making judgements about right and wrong, justice and crime, war and peace — the crucial judgements for a life not lived passively, at the side of history, but in activism.

So social democracy is not simply a political phenomenon, a lineage of political thinking (”socialism”) which has informed politicians from Harold Wilson to Tony Benn and Tony Blair: it is a point of view which implies judgements about history, religion, culture and personal relations. Dunayevskaya’s thought hinges on Lenin’s response to 1914 and the news that the largest “socialist” organisation in the world, the German SPD, had voted for war bonds, had joined the war party, had capitulated to nationalism and the bourgeoisie. He re-read Hegel’s Logic and discovered that, whilst they honoured Marx and marched under his banner, none of the SPD socialists had understood Capital. They had been reading it with minds shaped by Kant’s philosophy, and woefully misunderstood it: not just a partial misapprehension, but a complete reversal.

Politics is not a battle of disembodied “ideas” but of real social forces making use of ideas. How, for example, to make sense of Christianity, the revolutionary religion of slaves which became (after Emperor Constantine’s conversion in 311CE) the official religion of a slave-owners’ empire? Assessments of Christianity which fail to reflect on the social situation of the believers are worthless. When Marxists call themselves “historical materialists”, they are not proposing that we turn our backs on the present and only study the past: they are saying that conceiving of politics as a battle between timeless concepts like Good and Evil (or non-violence and violence; or society versus the individual) is to act blindly. When Tony Blair created New Labour and bombed Iraq under the rubric of “socialism”, he was following a tradition; if you can’t see how ideas can turn into their opposite, you are hamstrung — in politics, and in pretty much everything.

Black is a historian in the sense that, with him, everything’s pervaded by time; time is an inescapable aspect of reality. But where do ideas of eternity come from? Black uses Alfred Sohn-Rethel to explain that money gives us the illusion that reality is timeless. Outside social crises and revolutions, when the world of the capitalist collapses and money becomes worthless, capital rules our lives. Its need to expand and increase value becomes a “law” like gravity: to oppose it is to be unrealistic, utopian, mad: “There is no other way”. So for Black, being a worker is not simply “unfair”, an unjust situation we must seek to rectify by union and party “work”, it’s a philosophical problem. If you engage with it, try and work out why the timeless “reality” of capital outweighs our immediate human needs and aspirations, you develop a whole understanding of philosophy and history. Philosophy is not an “option”, a personal religious conviction, to be tolerated (and forgotten) in the cause of socialist solidarity and “working together” — it’s the very joy and motor of socialism, what brings us together in the first place: our desperate need to understand the world.

Philosophy is of course an extraordinary thing. You can pick up a dialogue by Plato from the Fourth Century BC and read it for entertainment: guys drinking wine, cracking jokes and discussing cosmic truths. All “philosophy”, from St Paul to Slavoy Žižek, returns to Plato and the Ancient Greeks. Thoth and Thor, in contrast, are the stuff of fairy tales. Why does it seem so natural to talk about a Oneness underlying everything, of the unchanging nature of the truths of maths and geometry? Following Sohn-Rethel and the present day classicist Richard Seaford, Black posits money as the explanation. As the universal equivalent, money gives us the idea of a Oneness beyond material things.

The fact that for the capitalist and stock-broker (although not the worker!) money keeps its value through its different forms (cash or bank account or share) gives them the idea that time and mortality is only an issue for losers and fools (workers); for them, the “real” world of value is timeless. Black’s argument is subversive workerism indeed. It questions justifications for hierarchical society at the very root, connecting to scurrilous suspicions which break out all over popular culture. Suddenly you understand why the KLF burned a million quid: money is unreal, an oppressive relation between people disguised as “objectivity”.

The unrealness of money is what emerges in strikes and riots, when suddenly it’s the food parcel or the petrol bomb in the hand that matters. Black’s kind of Marxism, hinging on the failure of “respectable” Marxism in 1914, can shed light on these moments. Marxism is not a way of dealing “more intelligently” with money issues, as many cleverdicks believe, it involves complete contestation of the money principle: the concept of a world and philosophy beyond money. Slavoy Žižek cannot think beyond Plato and St Paul. We can!

Black’s Marxism speaks to those of us who have been touched by Dada and James Joyce and Punk — the insight that “respectability” is a deadly trap for revolutionaries, that “culture” will not save us, that random features of proletarian existence are more interesting than any pseudo-classical monument. The Lukacsian “Marxism” of Rees and German (Counterfire) and the SWP rump may call itself “Leninist” (thus poisoning Lenin for a generation), but because they lack Dunayevskaya’s insight that social democracy became its opposite, they cannot understand the KLF or Free Improvisation: culture made in polemical disregard for money and heritage culture. This makes them incredibly stupid.

Black’s commitment to history allows him to solve theoretical issues which fox the philosophers. Sohn-Rethel’s argument has always struck me as dubious because it implies that, since it’s derived from money, the idea of the One must always be a product of alienation from material reality, an idealist imposition of social power on things and people. This would fit with the liberal slur that Marxist ideas of the One — the Totality — produced the “totalitarian” regimes of Stalin and Mao.

Since many of the most convincing refutations of reactionary ideas come from insistence on the totality (e.g. eco-political considerations of the environmental cost of production for profit); Adorno’s considerations of the psychological cost of fan worship etc), abandoning the One made me uneasy. Black provides an answer, not by invoking “theory”, but by looking further into history. He follows Seaford into the pre-history of the Greeks and the origins of money, and finds it in primitive communism, in the equitable distribution of sacrificial meat to the collective (the obol, a coin of low value, is named after a spit; the drachma, a coin of high value, is named after a set of spits — Greek kebab culture goes way back). Tyranny and exploitation arose from the use of money, but its origin in sharing shows that there is another side to the concept of the One: the needs of the collective and the necessity of equal shares. So a revolution versus monetary “rationality” would not necessarily mean regression to peasant isolation; it could recover the social unity of primitive communism at a higher level.

Seaford says of Plato: “Thought autonomously acting on thought is imagined in a way that resembles money producing interest in likeness to itself” (p. 16). Thus capitalism is not simply exploitative and oppressive, it conceals extraction of surplus value from workers. In common with Eugene Gogol and Peter Hudis (other Dunayevskaya followers), Black quotes a passage from Marx which declares that until work is done by “freely associated” people, i.e. for the pleasure and interest of it, then this illusion that money makes money will prevail (Capital Vol 1, p.173). Such “deep” Marxism unites political and artistic rebels against capitalism, since the very definition of an activity done for its own sake is Art. Black shows independence of mind in going from Dunayevskaya to the Surrealists, rarely discussed together (the former belongs to “politics” and the latter to “art”). He reveals that the Parisian journal Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution was publishing Lenin’s notes on Hegel in 1933. Like Dunayevskaya, preface-writer André Thirion was electrified:

‘The effect produced on each of us by reading these texts has led us to recognise in them the greatest power to shock on all those who aspire to disentangle the laws of the evolution of all material and intellectual objects. (p. 46)’

One is hard put to say whether to describe this riposte to Stalinist philistinism as “artistic” or “political”; the divide suddenly seems like a fence erected by lesser minds in order to make us suppress our own thoughts and follow tedious orders. The Parisian art scene 1933-69 has provided rich pickings for publishers and academics. Because he is not writing from the point of view of middle-class inertia (motivated by the desire for a lucrative podium), but from the point of view of a revolutionary seeking ways to comprehend and overturn capitalism, Black writes some of the best pages you can read on Surrealists, Lettrists and Situationists.

Black notes that by reviving attention to commodity fetishism, the psychic illusions created by money and capital as outlined in the opening chapters of Capital, Lukács “threw a polemical brick through the window” of traditional, Social-Democratic Marxism (since Engels, Kautsky and even Lenin never mentioned it). Of course, “commodity fetishism” is now a cliché in academic and art “theory”, where you feel no-one has read Capital to the end (where Marx deals with such present day realities as the declining rate of profit, economic crisis and proletarian revolution). However, Black will not allow aspects of Marx’s analysis to be hi-jacked by people ignorant of the totality of problems facing us as wage-labourers. Have you ever wondered why French theory remains so fashionable among academics? Black quotes C.L.R. James on the French Communist Party, explaining how it made Marxism safe for non-activists:

It substitutes “thought,” “education,” “information,” for the only means of self-education, action. It is the main ideological source for the stifling of the proletariat. These publications, their organization and publication, still further widen the social milieu for the new petty bourgeoisie of all types to carry on an essentially bourgeois function. (p. 97)

Black wants to revive Marxism as an integral philosophy of revolt which can address psychic as well as economic phenomena, refusing the “expertise” of those who talk undialectically and without reference to our total situation. For this I can forgive him much, even a passing reference to Josef Dietzgen as a “crude materialist” (p. 99), where his pursuit of Hegel into perfumed philosophical heights appears to have blinded him to the great power of the “cobblers” Dietzgen (a tanner by trade) wrote on dialectics for his son Eugen (the AMM [Association of Musical Marxists]) has long called for a Dietzgen Revival; his books were a staple of independent working-class education in the 1930s). Black’s book is a “hard”, read in the best sense: like pemmican, you need to chew on it for a long while, but it is packed with nourishment. Academics, forced to skim through a dozen books a week to keep up with developments in their “field”, will doubtless hate it (honourable exception: Peter McLaren of the University of Auckland); activists and autodidacts, on the other hand, should pore over every page.#

Other Reviews:

Marx and Philosophy Review of Books published a review of the hardback edition in 2014 by Phil Walden followed by lively comment and debate.

Criticism &c. ‘Tracing the Contours of Anti-Capitalism’, April, 2014.

See also:

The Phantasmagoria of Capital: A Short History of the Commodity, the Spectacle and its Discontents by David Black

B.P.C.Website

Ben Morea (1940-2026) died at his home in Colorado on 2^nd May.

‘Ben was not simply an old revolutionary from another era, nor a nostalgic remnant of the American counterculture. He was one of those rare human beings who attempted to transform rebellion into a total form of life — to erase the borders between self and other, poetry and insurrection, art and survival, to bring global social revolution to the streets of the metropolis.’ - Crimethink

In the BPC book, King Mob: the Negation and Transcendence of Art, David and Stuart Wise recall their involvement with Morea’s Black Mask group.

In the mid-1960s the Wise twins, as students at Newcastle University School of Art, helped publish Icteric , a Surrealist-inspired magazine which called for ‘the fusion of art and life’. Icteric was the brainchild of Ronald Hunt, the librarian at the school’s Department of Fine Art. Hunt acquainted Donald Nicholson-Smith with the Paris journal, Internationale Situationniste (Nicholson-Smith went on to co-found the English Section of the Situationist International). Hunt also learned of the activities of Ben Morea and the Black Mask group in New York, such as their intervention at a meeting in a plush art gallery shouting, ‘burn the museums baby’, ‘art is dead’, ‘Museum closed’ etc. Hunt thought (rightly) that the Wises might find common cause with Black Mask. Dave Wise recalls ‘Soon letters were sent out to New York and we got replies immediately: “Brothers/sisters come and join us!”’

From Dave and Stuart Wise, King Mob: The Negation and Transcendence of Art: Malevich, Schwitters, Hirst, Banksy, Mayakovsky, Situationists, Tatlin, Fluxus, Black Mask, BPC.

So two of us (Dave Wise and Anne Ryder) went from Newcastle to New York via London, and in the summer of 1967 engaged in some of the activities of Black Mask... It proved to be an eye-opener and quite an experience, which changed our lives forever.

During the British General Strike of 1926, the bourgeoisie in Newcastle armed themselves against the workers more than in any other comparable city in the country. As we learnt to our cost, reaction always packed a punch in Newcastle and an air of suppressed violence was a constant feature of Newcastle life. So in a sense going to New York in 1967 was like home from home; and I can remember sitting on a side walk one unbearably hot summer night and being more or less unfazed by a youth who passed by, casually smashing windows to either side of us as he did so. Just like Newcastle I thought to myself.

Ben Morea was impressed by my relaxed attitude. I then explained to him something of the Newcastle area’s history. Yes, we fitted in just fine and dandy with Ron, Janice, Yvonne, Ben and co on the Lower East Side in New York. There was also a profound social connection. We instantly recognised each other as having come from the lower end of the shit heap. We were quite spontaneously maladjusted with nonetheless sufficient clued-in ‘middle class’ knowledge to get the authorities sufficiently disturbed whenever they were in our presence.

Looking back, Black Mask was, in many respects, more precise and rigorous than the Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers group they were associated with, as the latter tended to fall into super-militancy with a strong overlay of active mysticism as the hippie transformed itself into yippie. Yet many of the Black Mask interventions were indeed excellent. A leaflet from my time in New York in 1967 called Freedom is not a gift from Captain Fink was one of the best Black Mask flyers ever put out on the streets. It’s never been reproduced anywhere simply because it was lost and I only found it recently in a pile of mucky papers in my bedroom. (Actually most of the BM/Motherfucker material published in English came from similar piles in my London flat and not from New York - much to the amusement of some Americans). Fresh out of Newcastle, I actually had a small hand in composing the Captain Fink flyer while sitting around a big old wooden table in Ben’s very sparsely furnished, not to say austere, apartment on the Lower East Side. Captain Fink was the new top cop of the local precinct and in a way represented the changing face of policing in strife-torn America.

Fink opted for a more manipulative approach rather than deploy the usual heavy-handed tactics of shoot first and ask questions afterwards. It was this more sophisticated, controlling approach that the flyer condemned. All well and good but actually it was a different story when four or five of us handed the leaflet out in the streets. I remember attending a large Black Power meeting on the Lower East Side to listen to H. Rap Brown speaking inside a large building which was already full to overflowing. So many people had turned up that the streets around the building were jam packed mainly with Afro-Caribbeans, though there were a few palefaces amongst the throng. On the flat roofs of the surrounding high 19th century brownstone buildings there were occasional machine gun posts (courtesy of Captain Fink?) manned by police units, with the barrels of the machine guns pointing directly down into the crowds (remember this was just after the huge urban riots in Newark and Detroit).

With my heart in my mouth I started handing out the Captain Fink leaflet together with other Black Mask stuff. Suddenly two cops jumped me, one thrusting a gun in my ribs whilst the other shoved the barrel of his gun against my forehead. They seized what I was carrying and slyly pilfered personal belongings, though they stopped short of doing anything else. At the same moment another cop sidled up to Anne, who was wearing a mini-skirt (English mini-skirts were still much shorter than their American counterparts), kissing her full on the lips. Obviously I was shaken as previous run-ins with police in the north of England had been nothing like this. I was certain at the very least I’d be immediately deported back to England but the cops didn’t seem interested and perhaps assumed I was American. The personal humiliation was enough and once over with they laid off. The Black guys around me looked on quizzically and, if anything, were a wee bit flummoxed as if not knowing what to make of it all. Ben Morea though, had witnessed the whole incident and came running up just as the cops were moving on. He shook his head and said; ‘Dave, you shouldn’t have let them take the leaflets!’ It was then the difference between Newcastle and New York really struck home.

Our meeting with Black Mask in New York in 1967 was to have big repercussions vis-à-vis the last days of Icteric in Newcastle. Our encounter was to prove crucial in the break-up of the English section of the Situationist International. In New York, Ben Morea, having by then heard of the Situationists, gave us the personal addresses and telephone numbers of Situ sympathisers who resided in London. We duly contacted on them on our return to England. They were the people around the magazine Heatwave, some of whom initially formed the English section of the Situationist International. Heatwave was the first magazine of all to put the new revolt of youth into some kind of perspective, with specific reference to Mods and Rockers, Beats and the like; affirming their vandalistic acts of destruction as something which could have ‘real future consequences.’

Initially, what resulted was a ‘meeting - if you like – between north and south’: between the Wise twins and friends, and the English section of the Situationists, consisting of, Chris Gray, Donald Nicholson Smith, Tim (TJ) Clark and Charles Radcliffe. In this new grouping the ideas of the Situationists and their predecessors were discussed in depth, ...finding out by word of mouth - from the horse’s mouth if you like - all the unknown history of post-Second World War cultural and political subversion and how we could no longer separate the two as they inevitably tended more and more to enmesh.

At that time a magazine was being put together containing new, original polemical texts, most of which – due to ‘unforeseen circumstances’ - have unfortunately been lost as the proposed magazine never saw the light of day. We saved the only known one: The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution put together by Chris Gray and Don with occasional help from Tim Clark... In that text there are references to Black Mask couched in a comradely critical way.

And then came Raoul Vaneigem’s bombshell communication after his meeting with Black Mask in New York in late 1967. Principally, Vaneigem, a Belgian representing the Paris Situationists objected to Alan Hoffman, a kind of mystical but political acidhead who’d started to show an interest in Black Mask... Also, Ben Morea had a serious liver complaint and he couldn’t touch alcohol, thus acid went down very nicely... Ben was inevitably very upset about Vaneigem and started raving on in letters about the man-of-letters disposition Vaneigem put across, accusing him of not knowing anything about those at the bottom of the pile and street life in general.

This created quite a dilemma in London as Chris Gray and Don N Smith in particular wanted to keep all the newfound friendships here alive and kicking. Knowing our friendliness with Ben Morea, they didn’t want to cause too many upsets before things had really kicked in in terms of doing something together. Presumably because of their prevarication, they were excluded from the Situationists and the rest, as they say, is history...

Ben Morea has recently ‘returned’ to visiting New York on a regular basis from the wilds of New Mexico and now, after all these years of absence, writes a blog via E-Blast. Typically Ben, the style tends to the pert and epigrammatic, though perhaps too restricted to politics and not enough about society at large. On the other hand a recent interview explains just how acute his analysis of the late 1960s is. He calls one of us ‘a great guy’ (thanks but we don’t need it) having forgotten the name (DW) and in response we reckon he is still a ‘stand-up guy’ as the Americans say.

So what happened to Ben? (We were even asked the same question by sympathetic Yanks in the 1970s but we hadn’t a clue). It seems after the Motherfuckers, Ben and Janice spent a long-time in the wilderness of the American south-west living the life style of latter-day indigenous Americans (ye old Indians) avoiding police detection before Ben became a lumberjack and was somewhat invalided by a chainsaw accident. But the myths which arose once he’d disappeared from the rebel ‘spotlights’ went similarly wild ranging from horse breeder/trader to rich businessman. DW 2007

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In 1989, Francis Fukuyama, working at the Rand Corporation, wrote a policy paper for the US State Department entitled ‘The End of History?’ Published in National Interest magazine, it soon became a talking point amongst celebrants of the collapse of communism and was expanded into a best-selling book, The End of History and the Last Man (1992).

Fukuyama’s thesis was that liberal democracy and its market economy was, to use Hegel’s term, ‘an idea whose time had come’. Fukuyama argued that if there was to be any future for Civilisation, this was it - there was no alternative and it didn’t matter what ‘strange thoughts’ might occur to those who still thought there might be one.

Fukuyama, 35 years later, knows that History didn’t end in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Resistance to (neo)liberal ideals has prevailed: amongst History’s discontents as well as authoritarian regimes. In the latter case, he insists that ‘illiberal’ societies – particularly Russia and China – are inherently vulnerable. Reliance on a single leader or clique tends to make governance ineffective, incompetent and corrupt. The absence of a free press and public participation in decision-making processes means that support for incumbent leaders can turn volatile. Fukuyama suggests that the USA - for centuries the beacon of liberty - has taken a decidedly illiberal turn:

‘Donald Trump is fundamentally a bully who wants to dominate everyone around him. Trying to placate him with concessions is a fool’s errand: he despises weakness and those who display it. Last spring, the EU cut a trade deal with him that accepted a 15 percent tariff on all European goods with no retaliation against American products. This was a bad decision…What makes any European think that conceding Greenland will mollify Trump? He will simply come back for more, later…

Fukuyama hopes the neoliberal centrism of European Union leaders will prevail and overcome ethnonationalism.

One of Fukuyama’s most important influences has been the philosophy of Alexandre Kojève. In May 1968 Kojève died in Brussels whilst negotiating with representatives of the European Economic Community in Brussels on behalf of the French government.

Kojève saw the failure of the fascist assault in World War Two as the final battle of the ‘anti-Jacobin’ wars. Hegel had prematurely projected the ‘End of History’ following Napoleon’s victory at the Battle of Jena in 1807'; hailing it as a ‘World-Historical Event’ which saw the republican citizen-soldiers of France dealing a the fatal blow to the ‘lordship and bondage’ of feudalism. Kojève saw in the French Revolution the emergence of a new synthesis of war and industry in a ‘universal homogeneous state’

Until 1933, Russian-born Kojève lived in Germany where he lectured on Hegel, Heidegger and Marx. When the Nazis took over he decamped to Paris. There he met the American philosopher Leo Strauss, who thought of him as a genius. In his lectures on Hegel’s phenomenology of self-consciousness, published in 1947, Kojève suggested that modern society’s rationalisation of nature was actualised by the dialectic of Desire and Satisfaction in a universal homogeneous state. Hegel’s concept ‘Absolute Knowledge’ implied that although there might not be practical solutions for all of the problems in society, whatever political solutions were needed could be known in advance, without further need for nationalist ideology or conflict between capital and labour.

Kojève regarded Stalin as a potential ‘philosopher king’ and even offered his services to the dictator as court philosophe. Leo Strauss told Kojève that he was choosing the wrong side, pointing out that although the USSR had triumphed at Stalingrad, the Western Allies victory in Normandy had opened up a new and more promising future for Europe. Kojève, in response, reminded Strauss of the exemplary relation between Aristotle and Alexander, and that all the really important philosophical enterprises in history had been guided by philosophical conceptions. The tyrant could only ever triumph over the political idea by transforming the abstraction into reality. Kojève regarded Heidegger’s attempt to become the philosopher king of Hitler’s Nazi Revolution as a catastrophic miscalculation. Kojève read Heidegger’s Being and Time as a failed attempt to ‘correct’ Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit with an anthropology of biological being which offered scarce insight into the relation of Dasein (Being-in-the-World) to action and political struggle in history.

Although wars, revolutions and class conflict drive history, for Hegel the ‘Cunning of Reason’ ensured that the particular purposes of the individual could be made to serve the true Substance: the will of the ‘World Spirit’. Once the objective of the ‘World Historical Individuals’ is attained they ‘fall off like empty husks from the kernel. They die early like Alexander, they are murdered like Caesar, transported to Saint Helena like Napoleon.’ Stalin’s Soviet Union imitated the universal-homogeneous state of Napoleon (‘who was an imitator of Caesar, who was also an imitator’).

The Cold War and the Anti-Colonial revolutions enforced a sort of structural adjustment on the Jacobin/Communist/Socialist Left to the rise of the European Union. Kojève believed that if Western capitalism divided itself into nationalisms it would lose. But if a Third Empire could emerge in Europe based on the Universal Homogeneous State with a ‘social charter’ supported by both Communists and Catholics, then the USSR would lose the Cold War.

In 1999 Le Monde revealed that from 1938 to 1968 Kojève had been working with Soviet secret intelligence, passing on information that might enlighten Stalin and his successors as to where ‘Europe’ at was really going. Enlightenment to what? one might ask - if not their own unviability.

The claim that Hegel’s ‘Absolute Idea’ includes a notion of the ‘End of History seems to have originated with Engels’ essay, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of German Classical Philosophy (written post-Marx in 1886). Engels argued that the real ‘absolute truth’ to be discerned in the Hegelian dialectic was that it was philosophy, not history, which had come to an end. Hegel’s achievement was to have ‘unconsciously’ shown the way to a ‘real positive cognition of the world.’

However, as Perry Anderson points out, Hegel did not actually use the term, ‘End of history’. Hegel’s concept of universal history in owes much to Kant, who had ridiculed the Christian dogma of the ‘Last Judgement at the End of Time’ and put forward his own concept of history as a purposeful, yet never-ending human progress towards a state of moral good and growing prosperity. In Hegel’s philosophy, nature and history were two sides of self-mediating spirit. Acting through nature, spirit unconsciously produced tribal and family relationships which grew into the state and began working its modes through history consciously. The reconciliation between nature and history, between the bourgeois and the citizen, would not end in an enclosed and frozen ontology but in freedom, as a living process of becoming in a ‘concrete totality’.

George Lukács , in The Young Hegel, saw Hegel’s explication of Absolute Knowledge as an idealist projection of the ‘End of History’ which amounted to its ‘self-annulment’. Hegel’s absolute knowledge involves an internalising of recollection as summation of the past, whereas Lukács rejected this as ‘something which is internal, which is nothing other than the supercession of the forms of objective reality so created and their reintegration into the subject.’

For Lukács, the dialectic of alienation and externalization defined Hegel’s analysis of the post-revolutionary bourgeois world but Hegel’s only ‘alternative’ was a utopian vision of a Napoleonic Germany’, ‘lacking in content’. Hegel’s ‘positive’ achievement was to have seen that,

‘The enlightenment, capitalism and the French Revolution formed the climax of the journey towards the abolition of every sort of natural immediacy and the realisation of “externalisation” [of human imaginative powers],in which “objective society” becomes the real substance “on behalf of the subject.” Only by estranging [alienating] itself can the subject recognise itself in theory and practice to be identical with substance’.

Lukács was opposed to the ‘idealist' project of realising of a goal inherent in the subject, prefigured in its beginning. Instead Lukács saw the history-making spirit as the emerging ‘actual driving force, the motor of history’. In Lukács view, Hegel annuls the subject’s theoretical and practical objectivity, and blocks what would would otherwise be a smooth road via Feuerbach to Engelsian ‘dialectical materialism.'

Gillian Rose in Hegel Contra Sociology (1981) disagreed with Lukács’ pronouncement that ‘alienated spirit’ could be productively expressed as ‘externalisation’. Rather, alienated spirit was specific to the pre-capitalist world; it did not characterise capitalism. Surprisingly perhaps, many latter day Marxists who follow in Kojève’s footsteps, apply Hegel’s Lord-Bondsman dialectic - mark the name - to the issue of ‘recognition’ in modern-day class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat.

According to Rose’s Hegelian-Marxist analysis, the newly-discovered moral autonomy in post-(French) revolutionary consciousness ‘misunderstands the conditioned law now prevalent, the accident of private possession formalised as property, to be an absolutely unconditioned law of freedom, which is found as an inexplicable fact of reason’. This abstraction of freedom is objective in serving the bourgeois order, which Hegel represents as the ‘spiritual animal kingdom’: ‘Spiritual’ because of the apparent harmony of universal and individual as expressed in political economy; ’animal’ because in reality the rule of abstract property relations serves the particular ends of individuals and not the whole society. That, according to Kojève, was something to look forward to in the Universal Homogeneous State of the European Union..

REFERENCES

Perry Anderson, Zones, pp. 315-16.

Kevin B Anderson, Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism” (University of Illinois Press: 1995), pp. 12-15.

Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 186.

George Lukács, Young Hegel, part IV, section 4 (“Entäusserung (‘externalization’) as the central philosophical concept of The Phenomenology of Mind.”).

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press: 1980) 162-3.

GWF Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, (Baillie trans), p. 808.

Heger Weslati, ^‘Kojève’s Letter to Stalin’, Radical Philosophy, #184, Spring 2014

In a hearing of the Senate of France in 2022, billionaire global capitalist Vincent Bolloré denied political and racist motivations for his drive to dominate French media, claiming his cultural interventions were purely financial and aimed at promoting French soft power.

Bolloré owns the telecommunications giant Canal+, TV channel CNews and the Sunday paper Le Journal du Dimanche. In 2023 Bolloré’s vast conglomerate Vivendi acquired ownership of Hachette Livre, the biggest publisher and book distributor in France. Hachette owns more than 200 publishing imprints worldwide. Hachette UK, having taken over Hodder & Stoughton, is the second biggest publishing operation in Britain. In the US Hachette is third.

Bolloré has sacked Sophie de Closets, the long-serving editor of Fayard, one of France’s oldest publishing houses. He is replacing her with Lise Boëll, who has previously been punting books by far rightists, including Éric Zemmour.

Now 170 writers have quit Grasset, another Hachette historic publishing house, in protest against the new regime. The protest was sparked by the forced departure of Grasset CEO Olivier Nora, who had run the imprint for 26 years and was seen by writers as the last rampart against reactionary ideas. Nora has been replaced by a Jean-Christophe Thiery, a loyal and long-serving baron of the Bolloré empire.

Their letter says: ‘We refuse to be hostages in an ideological war that seeks to impose authoritarianism everywhere in culture and the media.We don’t want our ideas, our work, to be his property.’

Writer David Dufresne tore up his Grasset contract on a TV chatshow, saying: ‘Bolloré is trading in commerce and ideology, not literature or essays.’

Bolloré says ‘Grasset will continue, and those who are leaving will allow new authors to be published, promoted, recognized and appreciated.’

Bolloré dismisses the dissidents ‘a small caste that believes itself above everything and everyone, and that co-opts and supports itself.’

Leftist webzine Lundi Matin argues that ‘one does not desert Bolloré only with a tribune, but by disarming his empire wherever it grows’.

Lundi Matin welcomes the awakening of these leading figures of the left literati to the threat but adds that defending ‘freedom of expression’ or ‘democracy’ will require more than incantatory formulas.

Lundi Matin proposes that the problem is not that Bolloré owns Hachette but that something like Hachette exists:

‘To go to another major editorial group is always to risk being in the same untenable position. Or even get (again) bought by Bolloré...Where do we go when we desert?... Independent publishing has its flaws and lack of money, but has the merit of attempting to forge a different path… and it must be amplified. There is a whole mesh of people and places who want to make the texts live outside the yoke of the economy. Rejoignez-le! We are available to manufacture these desertion sectors together.’

To really resist Bolloré is to explode the barrier of the text, the notability that it produces and join the living community of all those who fight foot by foot from their place of life or work. And from these places, create and circulate many other words.

We need you and your literary skills…

To be at the side of the little authors.ices, first-time writers, those who have not yet “made a name for themselves”. Of those who sell their labour power, the invisibles of the chain of the book, the small hands: manufacturer, modellers, printers, compressors.ices, translator.ices, employees of distribution warehouses, employees of distribution, booksellers, and so many others, even beyond our “world of the book”. For all those people for whom taking a position often amounts to risking their employment and with, their material conditions of existence. With your notoriety, you can help them desert… ‘

Good news for book lovers who hate Amazon.

Eleven BPC titles published since 2022 are available from Amazon as paperback and ebook. Amazon KDP doesn’t allow publishers who sign up to sell their books at online stores other than Amazon. However, Amazon has now made an exception for libraries. Publishers can make their books available to anyone with library card in 240,000 libraries worldwide. As the freebie ISBNs which KDP provides are not accepted by libraries publishers have to buy separate ISBNs to access the service. BPC has now purchased ISBNs and made arrangements with PublishDrive to get our ebook titles into the library network. Ebook ISBNs available for libraries are given below.

The Phantasmagoria of Capital: A Short History of the Commodity, the Spectacle and its Discontents, by David Black

Ebook ISBN for libraries: 9781919342573

1839: The Chartist Insurrection and the Newport Rising, by David Black and Chris Ford, with an Introduction by John McDonnell M.P. (new edition of the book published by Unkant in 2012)

ISBN-for libraries - : 9781919342597

From Reviews of the First Edition

Dan La Botz, New Politics ‘Black and Ford have written a fast-paced, narrative history of the 1839 Insurrection, filled with thumbnail sketches of the Chartist movement’s major figures, descriptions of the most important Chartist organizations and their politics in brief, excerpts from contemporary speeches, and parliamentary debates, and wonderful descriptions of the movement’s rise, growth, and spread throughout Britain. All of this is based on the most masterful command of the sources: newspapers, parliamentary records, memoirs, private papers, and all of the secondary literature. They tell their story in the most straightforward way but at a breathtaking clip that contributes to the sense of the excitement of the movement and its culmination in the insurrection.’

Stephen Roberts, People’s Charter ‘I read this book in one sitting as I sheltered from the pouring rain at Bodnant Gardens in North Wales. Based on a wide range of secondary sources and easy to read, it provided a welcome way of spending a few hours whilst waiting for the weather to clear (it didn’t!). The authors tell the story of a year when they assert the conditions for a working class revolution existed... For the authors a hero of the Chartist story emerges... George Julian Harney. And rightly so: Harney should be a hero to us all.’

Red Antigone: The Life and World of Helen Macfarlane 1818-60, by David Black

Ebook ISBN for libraries: 9781919342566

WiseBooks Series

Dialectical Butterflies: Ecocide, Extinction Rebellion, Green and Rewilding the Commons - an Illustrated Derive, by Dave and Stuart Wise.

Ebook via Libraries: ISBN: 9781919342535

King Mob: the Negation and Transcendence of Art, by Dave and Stuart Wise

Ebook ISBN for libraries: 9781919342528

Lawton Browning, Fifth Estate, Vol. 60. No.1 Spring 2025 “New York City, 1967. Roaming the streets in debate on the merits of the then-peak vogue art movement, Abstract Expressionism, are Ben Morea, part of a local affinity group, Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, and David Wise and Anne Ryder of the English group of cultural subversives known as King Mob. It was perhaps on a matter of time before representatives of these two groups would cross paths. Both King Mob and the Motherfuckers (as they were colloquially known) emerged from the political tumult of 1967 under similar formative influences: a Marxist critique of capitalism, the international art movement known as Surrealism and, in the case of King Mob, as expelled members of the French critical theory group, the Situationist International.”

A Newcastle Dunciad: Memories of Music and Recuperation, by Dave and Stuart Wise

Ebook ISBN for libraries: 9781919342542

Building For Babylon: Construction, Collectives and Craic, by Dave and Stuart Wise

Psychedelic History

Psychedelic Tricksters: A True Secret History of LSD, by David Black

Ebook ISBN for libraries: 6610001082307

“I recommend this book; it is more historically accurate than earlier books on this subject.” – Tim Scully, underground chemist of the 1960s who produced “Orange Sunshine” LSD.

LSD Underground: Operation Julie, the Microdot Gang and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, by David Black

Ebook ISBN for libraries: 9781919342580

Ellenore Clementine Kruger, Goodreads: “Good background on old politics. Every now and then a chill blows in the wind and pushes us backwards in time and as i write this war is on the brink but certainly these old hippies were against war and represented an indigenous purity to be desired … a type of inner magic at peace with anarchy and due to the medical war on mortality there is just too much taboo… so this does have specific years and strains and gangs and names and locations which show a cool world but sadly the author mentioned David Solomon who he wasn’t as big as other authors and I fear the biblical term of losing salt is like … pretty much the issue here: so yeah its a spiritual war but resting on material laurels like crystals and dots could definitely attract evil eye.”

In 1938, Dr.Albert Hofmann of the Basel pharmaceutical company Sandoz synthesised lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) from the alkaloids of ergot, a fungus that grows on rye.

He discovered LSD’s hallucinogenic effects as a drug five years later. On April 19, 1943, he ingested a doze of it and had a very wobbly bicycle ride home. He described his trip as an ‘amazing and beautiful’ experience, consisting of hallucinations, disturbances in perception, and acceleration of thinking.

Hofmann and his colleague, Dr. Werner Stoll, had LSD tested in mental hospitals for its effects on both ‘normal and abnormal subjects’. Their initial findings were published in 1947 in the Schweizer Archiv fur Neurologie und Psychiatrie.

In November 1948 a top-secret report on the Sandoz discovery was sent to the Biological and Chemical Warfare Centre in Maryland. In it, Dr. John P Clay, US Army consultant in Heidelberg, Germany, reported on a new ‘powerful hallucinatory agent’ named lysergic acid diethylamide-25. Clay had learned from a ‘closely held’ CIA source inside the Sandoz laboratories that research had yielded ‘promising’ results which ‘could be beneficial to psychological warfare themes’.

Neurophysicist and CIA consultant Max Rinkel contacted Sandoz and arranged to have a consignment of LSD shipped to the Boston Institute. It seems that the first person to try the drug on American soil was number two man at the institute, Robert Hyde. The trip made him feel paranoid and act, out of character, in a ‘less than pleasant’ manner. 

Rinkel and Hyde went on to test LSD on a hundred volunteers at the Boston institute and determined that it could induce a ‘transitory psychotic disturbance’ in ‘sane’ people. For the CIA at this time, any psychosis-inducing substance was potentially a weapon of war. In 1950 the CIA launched an operation, code-named ‘Bluebird’, to investigate how LSD might be used in extracting information from unwitting subjects.

At the biological warfare facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland, Sidney Gottlieb headed the Chemicals Division of CIA Technical Services. In 1951, he took LSD for the first time. His trip – the first of many — was supervised by Dr Harold Abramson, a CIA consultant employed at New York Psychiatric Institute. In 1952, CIA project ‘Artichoke’ was set up to assess experiments carried out by secret teams in various parts of the world to induce amnesia in unwitting test subjects, using LSD and hypnosis.

For the CIA, the issue was, ‘Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws [like] self preservation?’ and ‘Can a person under hypnosis be forced to commit murder?’ There were, it should be said, dissenting voices, such as the unnamed Artichoke committee member who asked:

‘What in God’s name are we proposing here? Does it not strike anyone but a few that these projects may be immoral and unethical and that they may fly in the face of international laws. What are we really trying to accomplish? Where does respect for life and human dignity come into play?’

But such rare voices of protest went unheard. According to John Marks, the CIA developed a ‘phobia’ about Sandoz after US military intelligence reported that the Swiss company had 10 kilos – enough for hundreds of millions of trips – for sale on the open market. But, as revealed in a CIA report de-classified in 1975, the U.S. military attaché in Switzerland had confused milligrams (1/1,000 of a gram) with kilograms (1,000 grams) – which threw his calculations off by a factor of 1,000,000. But as the report was taken seriously at the time by the CIA, Pentagon officials recommended that the Agency put up $240,000 to buy up all the LSD Sandoz had produced, lest the Russians buy it first.

Two CIA representatives were duly dispatched to Basel where they were assured by Sandoz executives that they had only ever been able to produce a total of 40 grams of LSD, because they didn’t have the facilities to grow enough ergot to produce LSD by the kilo. A deal was brokered, ‘in the very strictest confidence’, by which Sandoz would supply the U.S. Government with 100 grams of LSD a week for an indefinite period. Sandoz also agreed to pass on information about who else was buying it, especially East Europeans.

In 1953, scientists at the American Eli Lilly Company got round the Sandoz patent on LSD by finding different synthetic routes, through the ‘Garbrecht’ and ‘Pioch’ methods. For the duration of the 1950s there was a plentiful supply of LSD for use by the US military, CIA and ‘approved’ scientists, doctors and researchers.

MK-Ultra and the other CIA ‘mind control’ projects remained the deepest of secrets until 1975 when their existence was revealed by the Rockefeller Report to the President. Admiral Stansfield Turner, presenting the findings, said:

‘The drug program was part of a much larger CIA program to study possible means for controlling human behaviour. Other studies explored the effects of radiation, electric shock, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and harassment principles.’

By this time, investigative journalists were on the case, and victims of LSD ‘experiments’ were initiating legal actions against hospitals, prisons and the US Armed Forces. Unfortunately, Sidney Gottlieb had already launched a devilish pre-emptive strike against the campaigns for disclosure: in 1973 he had persuaded the outgoing CIA Director, Richard Helms, to order the illegal destruction of all the operational files for the mind-control projects, including MK-Ultra.

Continued in David Black, Psychedelic Tricksters: A True Secret History of LSD

One of the leading characters in my non-fiction book Psychedelic Tricksters: A True Secret History of LSD is Ronald Stark (1938-1984), a leading manufacturer of LSD who was also heavily involved in cannabis smuggling out of Lebanon during the first half of the 1970s.

According to his former colleague, LSD chemist Tim Scully, ‘Ron’s primary contact in Lebanon was Niaf Al Masri’s family and he spent a fair amount of time visiting with Niaf between 1972 and 1975.’ Niaf’s father, Mulhim Qasim Al Masri, was something of a local legend, having been a freedom fighter, first against the Ottoman occupiers of Lebanon, then against the French colonial forces.

Scully says:

‘Stark was very interested in the more powerful THC derivatives such as the dimethyl heptyl and he and his chemist (Tord Svenson) had decided by 1972 that the best raw material for making those derivatives was hash oil. I’m convinced that Ron’s connection with the El-Masri family was motivated by his interest in making powerful THC derivatives and failing that in smuggling hash and/or hash oil for fun and profit and that any political connections were relatively incidental.’

A confidential report by the UN, in 1972, described the North Bekaa hemp field of 2,500 square kilometres as an ‘island of isolation’ which served as ‘a refuge area for outlaws’: ‘The political leaders protected growers from prosecution or destruction of crops in return for a hefty one-third of the harvest’.

Arrested in 1975 in Bologna, Stark was imprisoned of drugs offences until 1979, when he was released on appeal, having convinced the judge that he had been working all along with US intelligence (I investigate this claim in my book - no spoilers here).

Italian police accessed Ronald Stark’s safe-deposit box and found correspondence in which he purported to be the business representative of Lebanese Iman Musa Al-Sadr. Summarising a report in Panorama magazine in 1978, Martin Lee in his book Acid Dreams writes:

‘Stark’s antics took him far afield. Occasionally he travelled to the Baalbek region of Lebanon, where he negotiated with a Shiite Muslim sect for shiploads of hashish. Stark claimed to be a business representative of Iman Moussa Sadr, a powerful Shiite warlord who controlled vast hashish plantations and a private army of 6,000 men. The area under his dominion was said to include training camps used by the Palestinian Liberation Organization and other terrorist groups.’

There are two problems with this statement. Firstly, Sadr was certainly powerful, having founded the Amal militia in 1975 to resist invasion by Israel’s IDF, but he did not control ‘vast hashish plantations’ with a ‘private army’. Secondly, weeks before the Panorama article was published Sadr had disappeared in mysterious circumstances involving a trip to Libya to meet Muammar Gadaffi and was thus ‘unavailable’ for comment - or denial of the smear.

Musa Al-Sadr was an Iranian born cleric with Lebanese ancestry claiming descent from the tribe of The Prophet Mohammed. In January 1968 a brutal snowstorm hit the Lebanese south, leaving the Shia inhabitants freezing and starving. As the Lebanese government took no action to help them, Sadr took up their plight, famously walking through six miles in six feet of snow in the Bekaa Valley to draw world attention. It is not an exaggeration to say that he was inspired by Martin Luther King and the US Civil Rights movement.

By 1975 Al-Sadr had become the leading advocate for the rights of the Shia citizens of Lebanon. The organisation he led, the Movement of the Disinherited, formed a military wing named the Amal Militia (Battalions of the Lebanese Resistance). In June 1976, President Hafez Al-Assad of Syria sent his army into Lebanon to save the Maronite regime from being overthrown by Palestinian guerrilla factions and their Leftist allies. Assad found a temporary ally in Moussa Al-Sadr, who became the architect of the alliance between the Iranian Shia and the ruling Alawites of Syria.

On 25 August 1978, Moussa Al-Sadr and two companions, Sheikh Muhammad Yaacoub and journalist Abbas Badreddine, travelled to Libya for talks at the invitation of President Muammar Gaddafi. The three were last seen on 31 August, and were never heard from again. Crucially, Sadr had been due to address an upcoming conference in Germany on October 8 to promote a united front against the Shah of Iran, whose regime was facing collapse in the face of the growing Islamic Revolution.

There are various theories about Sadr’s murder: the Shia leaders of both Lebanon and Iran’s denounced his interpretation of the Koran as saying that Muslims could co-exist with other faiths. Sadr had denounced Gaddafi’s interpretation of the Koran as a sectarian heresy; Palestinian factions saw his alliance with Syria as an attempt to hijack their cause. So, apart from the Gadaffi regime there were many forces operating in the region who wanted Sadr discredited, dead and forgotten.

The consensus amongst Middle East scholars – friend and foe alike – is that had Musa Al-Sadr survived to hail the Iranian Revolution in 1979, he would have become a major figure in Middle East politics.

In a recent BBC TV documentary The Mystery of Musa al-Sadr journalist Moe Shreif reveals how, in 2011, a secret morgue in Tripoli was located containing a corpse he had been told was that of Musa al-Sadr. The forensic evidence Shreif presents suggest precisely that. Shreif was told by a former high-ranking official in the Libyan government, that Gadaffi had forged travel documents to make it look like Sadr and his companions flew to Italy in early September 1978.

In 2023, the BBC team travelled to Libya to investigate further. They planned to film there the next day, but that night they were told their filming permits had been revoked. Intelligence officers (old-guard Gadaffi loyalists who appear to be back in charge) seized the BBC team and kept them under interrogation in solitary confinement for six days, after which they were deported.

AMAL, the movement Sadr founded, is today the most important Shia political party in the Beirut parliament, with more deputies than Hezbollah. But leaders of Amal, who deify Sadr as the Lost Iman, refuse to accept Shreif’s findings because they still expect him to return, even though if he was still alive today he would be 97 years old.

The last word should be given to Sadr’s grand-daughter Sab Al-Sadr. She recounts that Musa preached in Beirut’s Christian Carpuchin Church against religious sectarianism, saying: ‘Religion was made in the service of man; not the other way round. And it is due to the corruption of religion that we see these fractions form in present day society’.

David Black, Psychedelic Tricksters: A True Secret History of LSD (New Edition).

“Welcome to a strange paradise. But where are you? Is this a new Margaret Atwood novel, Philip K Dick’s unpublished sequel to Blade Runner or Donald Trump on acid? No. It is the Persian Gulf city-state of Dubai in 2010… the planet’s biggest building site: an emerging dreamworld of conspicuous consumption and what the locals boast as ‘supreme lifestyles’.” — Mike Davis, Fear and Money in Dubai:

Sixteen years on, In the current missiles-versus-interceptors war, it must seem even stranger. I say “must” because the spectacle has gone dark. There are so many fake/AI videos from all sides appearing on social media that it’s almost impossible to see what is going on; made all the more impossible by the Emirati security police’s invasion of areas stricken by Iranian missiles to check the locals’ cell-phones for war-footage. “Locals” of course includes the influencers, drug-lords, arms dealers, tax-exiles and the like who have chosen to live under the protection of despotic Gulf monarchies.

The rule of the sheiks is fuelled by petrodollars, money-laundering and crypto. But is enforced by mercenaries. The United Arab Emirates has in recent years recruited some 30,000 US-trained/US-armed mercenaries for its bloody “Foreign Legion” operations in Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Syria and Lebanon.

A former mercenary told Four Corners: “When you privatize war, anything goes…suddenly laws of supply and demand replace laws of armed conflict. Ideology, patriotism, national security; it’s only as good as you can afford.”

A chapter in Machiavelli’s Discourses, written in 1515, addresses this issue.

Niccòlo Machiavelli

The Discourses, Book Two, Chapter Ten, 1515

Money is not the Sinews of War, as it is commonly supposed to be

Since it is open to anyone having the requisite authority to begin a war but not to end it, a ruler before committing himself to such an undertaking should calculate what forces he has at his disposal and act accordingly.

Moreover, he should also take good care not to make any mistake about such forces, as he will do every time he bases his calculations on money or on the terrain or on the goodwill of men, but, on the other hand, lacks troops of his own.

For though such things undoubtedly add to your strength, they certainly do not provide you with it; and, as such, are nought and of no avail without faithful troops.

For, without these no amount of money will suffice you: the natural strength of the country will not help you; nor will the goodwill of men last, since they cannot remain faithful to you unless you are able to protect them. Every mountain, every lake, every inaccessible fastness, becomes but as a plain, when strong defenders are lacking.

Money, too, not only affords you no protection, but makes you the sooner fall a prey. Nor can any opinion be more false than that which asserts that money is the sinews of war. This view was advocated by [Roman historian] Quintus Curtius in connection with the war which took place between Antipater, the Macedonian, and the king of Sparta; where he tells how, for want of money, the king of Sparta of necessity had to join battle, and was beaten; whereas, had he postponed the battle for a few days, he would have had news from Greece of the death of Alexander, and so would have remained the victor without putting up a fight. But, since he was without funds and feared lest for lack of them his army might desert, he was forced to try his luck in battle. On which ground Quintus Curtius maintains that money is the sinews of war.

The view adopted by Quintus Curtius is put forward daily, and is followed by rulers whose prudence is not up to the mark. Taking this as their basic principle, they think they can defend themselves if they have a well-filled treasury, and do not consider that, if treasures guaranteed victory, Darius would have conquered Alexander, the Greeks would have conquered the Romans, in our day Duke Charles would have conquered the Swiss; nor yet, but a few days ago, would the combined forces of the Pope and the Florentines have had any difficulty in overcoming Francesco Maria, the nephew of Julius II, in the war of Urbino.

Yet all those mentioned were overcome by those who held that the sinews of war lay not in money, but in good soldiers. Among the other things that Croesus, king of Lydia, showed to Solon, the Athenian, was a treasure too great to count. Solon was then asked what opinion he had formed of the king’s power, to which he replied that he did not think him more powerful on this account, for war is made with steel, not with gold, and if anyone came along who had more steel than he had, he could deprive him of his power.

Alan Whicker (1921-2013) was probably the most popular and respected TV journalist of his time, which kicked off with his contributions to BBC Tonight programme. His TV career flourished through the ‘60 and ‘70s, with his globe-trotting reportage on the good, the bad, the glamorous and the sordid. Watched by millions, Whicker was such a national institution that it was pointless to wonder which side of the political fence he sat on. You just knew he wasn’t feeding you shit.

As a true-Brit officer, in January 1944, he landed on Anzio Beach, survived the slaughter and went on to supervise the Army Film Unit as the Allies pushed towards Rome and points north. Sixty years later (2005) octogenarian Whicker returned to Italy, revisited the war sites, including the square in Milan, where he filmed what was left of Mussolini after the communist partisans summarily executed him. Whicker, didn’t hold back in criticising American and British generals whose outdated tactics delayed victory over the Nazis and cost countless lives. Whicker’s War (2005), which tells the story, is on Youtube.

As is an episode of Whicker’s World from 1971: Devil’s Island - the Dry Guillotine. If you want to know what television was once capable of, it’s compelling. Just off the coast of Guiana, the French ran a penal colony on the island from 1852 to 1952. Twenty years after its closure there is Whicker, impeccably sporting a light grey suit and black tie, standing under the Cayenne palm trees, overlooking a picaresque looking island out in the ocean. Speaking directly to camera, Whicker says there are a few places in the world whose names have such impact that they just have to be spoken to conjure up an instant image. Some places - Hollywood for instance - suggest a way of life. He then points out to sea: “and that little palm-covered rock is one of those; that rock suggests a way of life and a way of death, a symbol of horror that can still haunt our imagination, and that is Devil’s Island”. And that’s it; you, as 1971 telly-addict, were intrigued and hooked.

Whicker, having ignored the disapproval and obstructions of the French colonial bureaucrats who would have preferred to forget about this French Death Camp (not to mention inmate Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer framed by proto-fascists in1895),smuggles himself and his crew across the water to poke around the festering ruins rapidly being reclaimed by the tropical jungle, and interview surviving former inmates who chose not to return to France. And he does so without messing up his suit.

Britain, once known as “Workshop of the World,” was eulogised by Labour Party socialist Nye Bevan as an “island of coal surrounded by fish.” His point was that we had the material means to build universal prosperity, to which the only obstacle was our greedy, incompetent capitalist class.

In 1926 the island of coal had a million miners facing a 40 percent wage cut. When the Miners Federation resisted, the coal owners imposed a nationwide lockout of the pits. A General Strike was called in solidarity with the miners. After nine days the Trades Union Council called it off. The miners were starved back to work.

One of the most dramatic events was the derailment of the Flying Scotsman express by miners at Cramlington, Northumberland on 10 May 1926. Eight miners were sentenced to up to eight years penal servitude for their parts in the incident.

Arthur Wilson, one of those imprisoned, said nearly fifty years later,

‘We had to do some thing similar to what we did do, for to let people see what we were getting. I would say we were slaves. We were getting starvation wages.’

Wilson’s account was featured in The Cramlington Train Wreckers, a 30-minute BBC documentary broadcast in 1970 as part of the Yesterday’ Witness series. North-East playwright, Ed Waugh, and historian, Marie Dooley, secured rights to the film and screened it on 20 July 2023 at the Community Hub at Cramlington Manor, courtesy of Waugh’s company, Wisecrack Productions. It’s now on Youtube at the link above.

Ed Waugh poses the question:

“Were the Cramlington Train Wreckers terrorists or workers trying to defend their livelihoods, family and community against an economic onslaught that actually took place after the General Strike ended?“

Waugh’s play,The Cramlington Train Wreckers has been touring theatres in the North. There are two important performances coming up:
The Glasshouse, Gateshead on 4 May 2026 and Newcastle Theatre Royal July 12, 2026

Further details HERE

A short video, which I produced in 2019, features footage and images to tell the story of Cramlington Train Wreckers to the tune of the traditional song, The Blackleg Miner.

BPC Publishing

http://thebarbarismofpureculture.co.uk/wp

Walter Benjamin’s essay, ‘The Task of the Translator’, alludes to Dante’s Divine Comedy: “Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark / For the straightforward pathway had been lost”:

“The task of the translator consists in finding the particular intention toward the target language which produces in that language the echo of the original… Unlike a work of literature, translation finds itself not in the centre of the language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work in the alien one.”

Helen Macfarlane, the Scottish Chartist who in 1850 issued the first English language translation of the Communist Manifesto, is widely derided for her rendering of “ein Gespenst” as “a frightful hobgoblin,” rather than “spectre” as in the 1888 translation by Moore and Engels.

“A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe. We are haunted by a ghost, the ghost of Communism. All the Powers of the Past have joined in a holy crusade to lay this ghost to rest...”

At the time, ‘hobgoblin’ was sound literary currency. In Jeremy Bentham’s Book of Fallacies (1824), “The hobgoblin, the eventual appearance of which is denounced by this argument, is anarchy, which tremendous spectre has for its forerunner the monster innovation.” Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance (which Macfarlane makes reference to in her own writings for the Red Republican) says: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines’.”

In my book of 2004 book, Helen Macfarlane: A Feminist, Revolutionary Journalist, and Philosopher, I wrote that Macfarlane offers a double meaning for “Ein Gespenst”: It is not just the ghostly apparition that haunts the castles of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Hamlet, foretelling doom and retribution for the incumbents. It is also the scary sprite that country folks tell their children lurks in the woods, in order to discourage them from wandering off on their own. Taking off from this Manuel Yang writes:

“Indeed hobgoblins, which belong to the historical imaginary of the Scottish fairyland, are creatures that inhabit the daily world of peasant communing. This world had ready access to demotic curses, often expressed in such fairytales and premised on customary laws that were intended to protect traditional popular rights from the cupidity of self-interest, the central tenet of bourgeois rationality, whose bloody acts of exorcism took the form of enclosures, privatization, imperialism.”

Yang quotes from Henderson and Cowan’s Scottish Fairy Belief (2001):

“Fairies were firmly connected to the landscape and deeply rooted in the soil. The importance of respecting the land which they frequented was widely recognized. It was bad luck to interfere with, or try to remove, trees, bushes, stones, ancient buildings or anything else believed to have fairy associations. Misfortune, illness, or even death might result from tampering with fairy property.”

Yang gives this a Hegelian-Marxist twist:

“If ‘spectre’ is a more philosophically mediated, reified form, divorced from the earthly spirits that directly haunt the peasant imagination, its Hegelian origin nonetheless lay in the commons, as Marx recognized with genuine surprise twenty years after composing the Manifesto: ‘But what would old Hegel say in the next world if he heard that the general, [Allgemaine], in German and Norse means but the common land [Gemeinland], and the particular, [Sundre, Besondere], nothing but the separate property divided off from the common land?’”

From another neck of the woods, Peter Linebaugh writes:

“‘Hob’ was the name of a country labourer, ‘goblin’ a mischievous sprite. Thus communism manifested itself in the Manifesto in the discourse of the agrarian commons. The substrate of the language revealing the imprint of the clouted shoon in the sixteenth century who fought to have all things in common. The trajectory from commons to communism can be cast as passage from past to future. For Marx personally it corresponded to his intellectual progress. The criminalization of the woodland of the Mosselle Valley peasantry provided him with his first experience with economic questions…”

Although the idea of hobgoblins as belonging to the historical imaginary of the “daily world of peasant communing”, is tantalizing, it lacks any firm grounding in historical, empirically based sources, i.e. there is no evidence to connect Scottish fairy belief with any actual struggles against bourgeois encroachment on common land. Nonetheless, Linebaugh does not appear completely off beam if we consider the single liberty Macfarlane takes with her translation. The original praises ”that literature which, in every great modern revolution, has always given voice to the demands of the proletariat, such as the writings of Babeuf and others.” Macfarlane adds to these writings the English “leveller pamphleteers” of the 17th century; thus placing them as forerunners to the (French) “writings of Babeuf and others”.

Reverberating the “alien” is not restricted to translation.

Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Zero Books, 2014) adopts Derrida’s formulation in Spectres of Marx of “hauntology” — of presenting capitalism as the “weird”. “eerie” and “uncanny.” The uncanny, according to Fisher, puts the “strange within the familiar” and “operates by always processing the outside through the gaps and impasses of the inside.” What is weird and the eerie on the outside allows us “to see the inside from the perspective of the outside.”

Roger Luckhurst, reviewing Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie in the Los Angeles Review of Books (11 March 2017) writes:

“The core insight reveals the eerie as the trace of an impenetrable agency without, or some unnerving non-subjective drive that compels our behaviours incomprehensibly from within. It makes sense of these quieter emotional ranges of creeping dread or inevitable doom...”

Like Marx, Fisher draws from occult literary themes to illustrate the abstract domination of commodity production:

“Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” ― Karl Marx, Capital

“Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“Modern middle-class society… resembles the wizard who evoked the powers of darkness, but could neither master them, nor yet get rid of them when they had come at his bidding.” [Communist Manifesto, Macfarlane translation]

Luckhurst observes that Fisher extends H.P. Lovecraft’s “steady dethronement of anthropocentric models… where things escape routine imprisonment inside the implicit hierarchy of the subject/object binary.”

“The eerie, however, is Fisher’s original extension of this idea. He takes the eerie from lazy, everyday usage and gives it conceptual rigor: places are eerie; empty landscapes are eerie; abandoned structures and ruins are eerie. Something moves in these apparently empty or vacated sites that exists independently of the human subject, an agency that is cloaked or obscure.”

In post-war British television culture the “eerie” emerges in the adventures of Professor Quatermass, scripted by Nigel Kneale. In the 1959 BBC series, Quatermass and the Pit (later a Hammer film of the same name), excavations of a London Tube station unearth our genocidal Martian ancestors and unleash them on the world. The tube station is called “Hobbs Lane”, the name of which originated in an almost forgotten mediaeval legend of a local hobgoblin terrrorising the neighbourhood.

NOTES

David Black: Red Antigone: The Life and World of Helen Macfarlane1818-60 - Chartist Journalist, Feminist Revolutionary and Translator of the Communist Manifesto Kindle Edition

The Communist Manifesto and the Strange Case of the Frightful Hobgoblin- a Literary Excavation

Manuel Yang, Yoshimoto Taka’aki, Communal Illusion and the Japanese New Left, MA dissertation, University of Toledo, 2005;

Peter Linebaugh, ‘Karl Marx, the Theft of Wood, Working Class Composition’, Crime and Social Justice 6, Autumn–Winter 1976.

Thanks to Pete Baxter — currently archiving and drumming in Australia - for the following reflections on my post of 20 February The Machine Doesn’t Stop.

“No one confessed the Machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence. The better a man knew his own duties upon it, the less he understood the duties of his neighbour, and in all the world there was not one who understood the monster as a whole. Those master brains had perished.”― E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops

How do you counter the reality and the aspiration of the owners of the unstoppable machine? Is the cessation of the machine possible? Systems seek enclosure, but the human hard drive knows nonsense and love. Get on up.

As a teenager I wrote a song inspired by E.M. Forster’s 1909 novella, The Machine Stops:

Stuck inside our tin machine,
Close to death, we cannot breathe,
[something, something, something] we have seen,
Strangled in the garments we did weave.

It didn’t go down well with my bandmates in The Lemon Revolution. I prefer to think it lacked commercial potential, but our differences were musical and aspirational. I was into techno, D.I.Y. and cheap, sweaty fun in basements. And the other members were up for well-lit stadiums and golden-oldie repetitions.

Rereading it now, what strikes me is that homelessness is salvation. Expulsion from the Machine-Life is framed as punishment. Banishment from the central business district to the underground becomes lifesaving. The Machine brings everything, as smartphones do now. Older machines — blimps — become superfluous and relics.

Between May 1917 and May 1918, more than 300,000 people sheltered in the London Underground from German airships — double the number regularly sheltering there during the height of the Blitz in September 1940, according to the Imperial War Museum and the London Transport Museum. It was homelessness in the Underground that saved them from the fish-shaped fossils of the sky.

I am writing this from Canberra, Australia, knee-deep in bureaucratic cablegrams. Documents from the past have been brought to the surface for re-examination. It’s when I leave the archive and walk the city’s geometric alignment of national monuments — the architect’s, Griffin, democracy in concrete and turf made uncanny — I keep wondering what was here before. Land and stars? Were previous inhabitants forcibly removed? The city feels hollow because it was built to be looked at rather than lived through. Monumental planning and infrastructure falters in adverse weather. Sumps slump as storm water finds its old waterways. The Australian War Memorial, however, sits immaculate, like a well-kept stain.

My home in Clerkenwell, London, by contrast, has its accreted pubs, libraries, post boxes, cobbles, churches, Spa Fields, the old well, the House of Detention now luxury flats, the Old Sessions House now offices, the real Gryphons of Holborn Viaduct, and, of course, our band AMMAS live at the Betsey Trotwood pub — culture as sediment of use, need, oppression, commerce, toil, repair and not geometry imposed.

What moves me most in Canberra is the homeless chap at the bus interchange asleep in a different doorway each morning, and the others gathering on a patch of grass to socialise. Living transmission. Living appropriation. However antisocial urban development is, humans gather in the same places. Progress cannot prevent congregation, which swoons and swells in the wake of every human smile and wave, shifting the hard shoulder, jamming the metaphor congestion, in the land of lost socks, ad infinitum.

The desire for a colonial continuum amid memorials to phoney pharaohs and sight beyond sight technology is also a desire to be legible and profitable before material conditions blow foundations sky high. They must know. The bunkers they build are their last refuge of reassurance. The relationship to the world before them required no tech. There was presence, cosmology, and belonging. The land and stars did not need way-finding devices and plaques. I suspect people gathered on the same patches of grass.

In the Western Cape I met a museum worker raising money so children displaced inland — their ancestors forcibly removed from the coast for “whites only” real estate — might learn to swim or reconnect with the sea. It is not desultory to connect denial of the sea with the Grenfell Tower’s afterlives, with Gaza’s space and mud tactics, with mapped deportations and centralised data systems. The Machine renders life searchable, governable, profitable. We converted ourselves into something administratively useful and economically extractable. Forster was correct, we strangled ourselves with the garments we have woven.

How do you counter that? Reform the machine? Refuse it? Accept a certain homelessness and recalibrate after the blow?

The Machine threatens totality.

But people still gather.

They always gather.

Gather.

Gather.

Gather.

Hannah Spencer’s victory for the Green Party in the Manchester parliamentary by-election marks an historic revival of left populism. The vote, however, also indicates a strong challenge from the right populism of Reform UK, who eclipsed the Conservatives. Labour was beaten into third place and the Liberal and Conservative vote was negligible. Centrism is being stretched.

Jude Wanga, in ‘The centre shrinks’, London Review of Books, 5 January 2026, writes,

“Centrism in Britain is less a set of principles than a style: a preference for triangulation over truth, ‘responsibility’ over morality, ‘electability’ over leadership. It treats politics as a stress test of optics rather than a contest of values. It confuses the avoidance of conflict with coherence.”

Centrism presents drift as stability.

l... the deeper problem with centrism: it wants the prestige of professing values without the cost of acting on them. It’s allergic to taking moral risks…”

The struggle between the ‘elite’ and the ‘people’ is waged with a weaponry of words and phrases that appear to have become dislodged from their meanings. From Starmer’s centre, strategy is projected with abstract nouns (“stability”. “security”, “change”); tactics from middle-England focus groups. In the latest by-election contest Starmer thought Reform UK could be seen off by Labour itself performing anti-immigration, law’n’order dog-whistles, whilst appealing to patriotic anti-fascism. But Peter Mandelson’s “rule” that working-class Labour voters could always be taken for granted (having “nowhere else to go”) doesn’t hold when there are “practical solutions” on offer from the snake-oilers and crypto-pushers of the Far Right.

Starmer doesn’t seem capable of landing a punch on a British Far Right the US President wants to see replacing him in Downing Street. In Wanga’s words,

“And it creates a vacuum, an absence of moral clarity, that the far right is delighted to fill… Fascists thrive on the collapse of shared standards. They feed on the public recognition that rules are selective, that principles are mere branding, that justice is transactional”

Secondly, Starmer has dismissed the Greens as too extreme to be argued with. For him this may be true. Spencer says that working people are being “bled dry” in a country that works to “line the pockets of billionaires. I don’t think it’s extreme or radical to think that working hard should get you a nice life.”

In making sense of the current debate on Artificial Intelligence ii might be useful to take another look at the concept of the ‘General Intellect’ which Marx sets out in a text known as the ‘Fragment on Machines’ in his Grundrisse of 1858 (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 value. The innovators increase their profits and drive their slower-moving or under-resourced competitors out of business. 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 it approaches the point where the division of mental and manual labour is universally seen as anachronistic. The development of social collaboration and free exchange of knowledge destabilises the market mechanism and the system of private property. 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.’

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.’
Dario Amodei, boss of Anthropic, outlines the risks that might arise from powerful AI systems which would be “much more capable than any Nobel Prize winner, statesman or technologist”. Among those risks is the potential for individuals to develop biological weapons: “in the worst case even destroying all life on Earth… A disturbed loner [who] can perpetrate a school shooting, but probably can’t build a nuclear weapon or release a plague . . . will now be elevated to the capability level of the PhD virologist.”

Amodei also raises the potential of AI to “go rogue and overpower humanity” or to empower authoritarians and other bad actors, leading to “a global totalitarian dictatorship”. Anthropic, the chief rival to ChatGPT maker OpenAI, has clashed with David Sacks, Trump’s AI and crypto tsar, over the direction of US regulation. (Financial Times, 27 Jan 2026).

Anthropic’s artificial-intelligence tool Claude was used in the U.S. military’s deadly operation to abduct Venezuelan President Maduro and test new weaponry and bombs on several sites in Caracas. The deployment of Claude occurred through Anthropic’s partnership with data company Palantir Technologies. Anthropic’s usage guidelines actually prohibit Claude from being used to facilitate violence, develop weapons or conduct surveillance. However, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has cast “woke” tech companies as a liability and treats any restrictions as an impediment to military effectiveness, is reviewing its partnership with Anthropic: the Pentagon wont “employ AI models that won’t allow you to fight wars.” (Wall Street Journal, 15 Feb 2026).

On 12 December 2025 Trump signed an executive order, aimed at blocking states from enforcing their own AI regulations. This a big win for the technology giants who see individual states’ efforts to regulate AI as “onerous”: throwing up barriers to US tech’s drive to dominate AI in the face of competition from China.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation warned last year about the danger of the Trump administration consolidating all of the government’s information into a single searchable, AI-driven interface powered by Palantir. Now, says EFF

“Palantir is working on a tool for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a ‘confidence score’ on the person’s current address… This revelation comes as ICE – which has gone on a surveillance technology shopping spree – floods Minneapolis with agents, violently running roughshod over the civil rights of immigrants and U.S. citizens alike; President Trump has threatened to use the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy military troops against protestors there. Other localities are preparing for the possibility of similar surges.”

In the latest drop of Epstein files Palantir founder Peter Thiel is revealed to having maintained a business relationship with Epstein - joint ownership of a venture capital firm - from 2014 to Epstein’s final arrest in 2019.

In Britain revelations of Peter Mandelson’s relationship to Jeffrey Epstein have drawn attention to Palantir’s employment of Mandelson’s lobbying company, Global Counsel. Before he was sacked, Mandelson took Keir Starmer to meet Palantir’s chief executive, Alex Karp, at its Washington showroom. Palantir currently holds UK government contracts worth £670m, with its data-scraping software being installed in hospital trusts across the country as a centralised data management system. Palantir’s public sector deals, which also include a £240m contract with the Ministry of Defence and with several police forces.

In the wake of the 2017 election, Paul Mason, sitting on a panel at a conference organised by the Blairite Progress faction, told the audience:

‘Right now our leader is addressing a 200,000 strong crowd at Glastonbury who are singing his name… The question for people in this room is: it is now a left-wing Labour party… Do you want to be part of it or not? Because there is an alternative. There could be a British Macron [boos from the audience] Yeah, go on, keep going. There could be a British Macron, you could have a British end Brexit second referendum party – run with it. It could do much better than the Lib Dems did. Now’s the time.’

Although Mason stressed that Blairites were ‘all welcome’ to stay in the Labour Party, he added:

‘If you want a centrist party this is not going to be it for the next ten years. If it’s really important to you to have a pro-Remain party that’s in favour of illegal war, in favour of privatisation, form your own party and get on with it!’

After Labour under Ed Miliband was trashed in the 2015 General Election, Jeremy Corbyn had been elected Labour Party leader after hundreds of thousands of young people joined, hoping to swing the party to the left. In the 2017 General Election, Labour under Corbyn narrowly lost but reversed the party’s decline, getting 40 per cent of the vote, 30 extra MPs and 12,877,918 votes in all. The Mandelson-trained centrists, who had hoped for a total collapse of the Labour vote, allowing them to shout ‘we told you so’ and reclaim ‘their’ party, were disappointed. Not that it stopped them. (See The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy by Paul Holden.)

Today, despite the Mandelson-McSweeney-Epstein-Palantir scandal, Paul Mason is a loyal Starmerite.

What happened?

Back in 2020, Paul Mason contributed to the book Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism (editors: Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin, Heather A Brown; published by Palgrave in 2020) alongside essays by a dozen writers, including myself. Mason’s two chapters were ‘Why Marx is More Relevant Than Ever in the Age of Automation’ (which first appeared in the New Statesman in 2018); and ‘Why Twenty-First Century Marxism Has to Be Humanist’.

Since the 1980s, Mason’s politics have gone from Trotskyism to Left Populism to Corbynist left social democracy to loyal Labourism, with a commitment to ‘growth’ and ‘green jobs’ stimulated by the arms economy and a revamped, fully tooled-up NATO.

Since the Russian invasion of the Ukraine in 2022, Mason has decided that ‘we’, i.e. democracies, are already fighting a hybrid-war with Russian imperialism: on the Dark Web, social media, cyberspace, etc; all to be fought under the popular front ideology of fighting ‘fascism’, as represented by the likes of Farage, Le Pen and Putin. Mason, like all antifascists, is no doubt a Trump-hater. Keir Starmer, Mason’s man of the hour, probably is too, but like most of the European centrists he is still playing the humiliating role of Trump-whisperer.

What follows is a shortened version of an article I wrote for International Marxist-Humanist in May, 2018. Mason gave it a nice recommendation on his Twitter page, although he never responded to the actual content.

Looking back, I would note, firstly, that his interpretation of Marx’s ‘Fragment on Machines’ bestowed an apparent faith in technology which prefigured his current hostility to the Green Party. Secondly, in the closing section ‘Where is Mason Going?’, I wrote that his co-option of Marx’s Capital ‘raises as many questions as it answers, but that is precisely what makes it so interesting.’ I am not sure that that is the case now - either way. Mason’s next book is a 600-pager, entitled Reds: The History of Communism from the Neolithic to Xi’s China ( Head of Zeus, forthcoming, 2026). I still find his output ‘interesting’ enough to want to review it when it is published.

An ‘Impulse Towards Freedom’: On Paul Mason’s call for a Marxist-Humanist Challenge to Capitalist Automation.

May 2018

Paul Mason’s essay, ‘Why Marx is more relevant than ever in the age of automation’, published in the New Statesman (7 May 2018), highlights Raya Dunayevskaya’s contribution to Marxism:

‘As Dunayevskaya understood, the impulse towards freedom is created by more than just exploitation: it is triggered by alienation, the suppression of desire, the humiliation experienced by people on the receiving end of systemic racism, sexism and homophobia. Everywhere capitalism follows anti-human priorities it stirs revolt – and it’s all around us. In the coming century, just as Marx predicted, it is likely that automation coupled with the socialisation of knowledge will present us with the opportunity to liberate ourselves from work. That, as he said, will blow capitalism “sky high”. The economic system that replaces it will have to be shaped around the goal he outlined in 1844: ending alienation and liberating the individual.’

Mason’s arguments for humanism are hardly likely to endear him to ‘traditional’ Leftist ‘materialists’, as when he argues, for example, that the first ‘reinterpretation’ which Marx’s ideas ‘suffered’ came from Marx’s collaborator, Friedrich Engels, who ‘tried to systematise Marx’s ideas into a theory of everything in the universe, encompassing no longer just history but physics, astronomy and ethnography’. One common accusation coming from Left critics of Mason is that he is overly ‘subjective’ and ‘individualist’, and therefore, ‘liberal’. Mason, for his part, sees no future for ‘traditional’ leftist formulations on organisation and class-consciousness or for the faux collectivism of ‘democratic centralism’:

‘That impulse towards individual liberation? It’s already there in Marx, just waiting to be discovered. So paint what you want, love whom you want. Fuck the vanguard party. The revolutionary subject is the self.’

Marx’s ‘Fragment on Machines’

Mason has cleared the field for a timely debate on automation, which makes the correspondence in the early 1960s between Raya Dunayevskaya and Herbert Marcuse on this issue worth revisiting. In 1960, Dunayevskaya directed Marcuse’s attention to a debate within her organisation (News and Letters Committees) between two workers, Angela Terrano and Charles Denby.

Terrano, an electrical worker, rejected capitalist automation altogether, arguing that work in the new society would be ‘something completely new, not just to get money to buy food and things… it will have to be completely tied up with life’.

Denby, a Black auto-worker in Detroit, argued on the other hand (as summarised by Kevin Anderson and Russell Rockwell), ‘that workers control of production plus a shorter work-day, in the context of the abolition of capitalism, would be needed to realise the potentials of automation’. Marcuse, for his part, could see no theoretical or practical connection between the intense daily struggles in Denby’s auto-plant and the abolition of capitalism. As for Terrano’s position. Marcuse thought that anything ‘completely new’ would be underpinned by automation.

In the correspondence, Dunayevskaya reminds Marcuse of the argument in his preface to her book, Marxism and Freedom, that the the labouring classes had transformed’ from a force of negation of capitalism to one of acquiescence (if not actual affirmation). On this point she questions whether he ‘had not fallen into the trap of viewing Marxian socialism as if it were a distributive philosophy’. Marcuse, rising to the bait, takes his argument further, suggesting that only ‘genuine [ie universal] automation’ would ‘explode’ the capitalist system. Objectively, sections of both the capitalist class and the proletariat were united in resisting automation. Capitalists had cause to worry about the decline in the rate of profit; workers were worried about ‘technological unemployment’. As for Angela Terrano’s position, Marcuse writes:

‘Re Angela T: you should really tell her about all that humanization of labor, its connection with life, etc. – that this is possible only through complete automation, because such humanization is correctly relegated by Marx to the realm of freedom beyond the realm of necessity, i.e. beyond the entire realm of socially necessary labor in the material production. Total dehumanization of the latter is the prerequisite.’

For Marcuse, the question is just how total does the dehumanization have to be as prerequisite to exploding the capitalist system. Capital has a ‘tendency’ to ever-increasingly replace living labour (workers) with dead labour (machines made by living labourers). This rise in the organic ‘composition of capital’ (the predominance of fixed capital over wage labour) depresses the only source of profits: living labour as transformed into its abstraction, labour power, which is sold to the capitalist. The value of the labour power is measured by the socially necessary labour time imposed by the market, or the state.

The ‘last piece of the puzzle?

Mason writes on Marx’s 1858 ‘Fragment of Machines’ in the Grundrisse:

‘When researchers eventually discovered and published Marx’s “Fragment on Machines” in the late 1960s, Dunayevskaya understood it was the last piece of the puzzle. This was not an account of capitalist economic breakdown due to the falling profit rate, it was a theory of technological liberation. Freed from work by the advance of automation, Marx had foreseen how humanity would use its leisure time: for the “free development of the individual”, not some collectivist utopia.’

The first half of the first sentence is factually wrong, unless Mason is referring only to English translations. The Grundrisse was first published in German in Moscow in 1939, and then in Berlin in 1953. That Dunayevskaya was familiar with it much earlier than the ‘late-1960s’ is evident from her dialogue with Herbert Marcuse in the years 1958-60.

To say, as Mason does, that Dunayevskaya understood the 1858 Fragment on Machines as ‘the last piece of the puzzle’ is contestable. Comparing what she sees as the shortcomings of the Grundrisse (in 1858) to more developed insights of Capital (in 1867), Dunayevskaya writes on the role of the ‘General Intellect’ of capitalist production in its totality:

‘Thus, as against the emphasis on machinery as a “monster” that the workers will overcome, there is too much emphasis in the Grundrisse on machinery as providing the material basis for the dissolution of capital as the workers standing alongside of production as their “regulator”.’ [Philosophy and Revolution]

Because the Grundrisse still stresses the material conditions for the struggle for socialism rather than class struggle itself, the general contradiction of value-production and the tendency of the falling rate of profit are not made as integral to the lot of the worker as they are in Capital.

The threat to present-day capitalism is social revolution by unemployed workers who are cast aside as capitalism becomes increasingly productive. However, as Peter Hudis argues, ‘capitalism responds to the risk that its actions will ‘produce a revolution’ by increasing the employment of nonproductive workers even as it reduces, absolutely as well as relatively, the number of value-creating productive workers at the point of production:

‘Yet, since capitalism is continuously driven to reduce the proportion of living labour to dead labour, over time even the relative over-employment of non-productive workers comes under attack by capital. This is the situation that the West faces at the start of the twenty-first century, as seen in the concerted effort to reduce the number as well as the wages and benefits of public-service workers through austerity-measures.’

The ‘unemployed workers’ therefore do not just include the youth of the ‘underclass’; we are also talking about skilled, ‘professional’ people whose skills are going to be made increasingly redundant by automation/AI/robotisation.

Where is Mason Going?

It would of course hardly be adequate to dismiss Mason’s position on automation as simply a (presumably) unconscious repetition of the techno-utopianism of Herbert Marcuse. When Mason writes, ‘Everywhere capitalism follows anti-human priorities it stirs revolt – and it’s all around us’, he sounds decidedly un-Marcusean. Mason’s vision of the socialist future isn’t some accelerationist dream of a life of ‘play’, all watched over by machines of loving grace. What he says is that automation might provide ‘the opportunity to liberate ourselves from work’. Also his view, ‘If we are to defend human rights against authoritarian populism we must have a concept of humanity to defend – as we must if we insist that human beings should have the power to limit and suppress the activities of thinking machines’, is explicitly based on Dunayevskaya’s ideas, not Marcuse’s.

Mason is not a theoretician; he is not interested in ideas that do not speak directly to modern times and struggles. As a journalist investigating globalised capitalism, Mason has poked his camera and microphone into numerous places and struggles around the world where lesser journalists wouldn’t fain to tread (the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, European Left-populism, the threat of fascism, the Gaza war, the Greek crisis, Corbyn’s Labour Party – you name it, he’s covered it). In his New Statesman essay, Mason has a story to tell based on his own experiences and readings of history: of how the 20th century Left disastrously lost the plot, and how the humanism of Marx and Dunayevskaya could point the way forward to redemption. It is certainly the case that his 3,000-word offering raises as many questions as it answers, but that is precisely what makes it so interesting.

Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom: from 1776 until today. Preface by Herbert Marcuse (1958)/

The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm- Correspondence 1954-1978 (Eds. Kevin Anderson and Russell Rockwell.

Peter Hudis, Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, p132.

Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism (editors: Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin, Heather A Brown; published by Palgrave in 2020

Whatever Happened to Left Populism and ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’?

B.P.C. BOOKS

Following last week’s post on the activities of the Everything is Free Now art project in Brooklyn, New York, this second part discusses art, ideology and spectacle in a period during which the gallery museum system helped to establish a less violent but more tempting enclosure, to fold art inwards and to use it as a farm system of ‘creatives’.

The very conception of art, image and object alike, is bound by ideology. It toes the line of a rule structure set by current institutions, which in turn are bound and shaped by the evolving programming of capital. Be it an oil painting on a white wall or a viral video with ideas beyond its station, there are formats and expectations to be followed, expectations determined by existing or developing superstructures. This is medium as massage at a level of Geist, the spectacle as incorporated into an individual mindset which goes well beyond supporting superstructures, but to the construction and maintenance of what we call the self.

Formal concerns today do not stop at the edge of a canvas or the boundary of the screen. None of this is news, or a concern for most, as long as instantaneous choice is on offer as continuous activity, reflection forever pushed down the road. Artist and audience alike are mostly aware that fine art institutions have transformed into autonomous zones where capital to sets the aesthetic terms and aids financial extraction beyond the legality of nations (see duty free art, Hito Steyerl).

Side note regarding a willingness to participate in our current system: I was talking to an acquaintance about his small but growing career at a mid-tier gallery in New York. He was unaware of much of the Freeport system that Steyerl documents. After a brief summary including how states use the flow of liquidity unleashed by freeports and museum incorporation to finance state violence/terror, his initial reaction to this zooming out of perspective was, “I am excited to be a part of it.” This quote is not quite fair to the individual in our totalizing structure, and anecdotal to be sure, but this reality has clearly not put any meaningful moral block towards contemporary success in terms of MFAs (Master of Fine Arts) (its own superstructure now) lining up to participate. This is not surprising, or a cast of moral indignation on my part, as there is transhistorical precedent to institutions setting the terms for the individual, specific ideology aside. It’s important to bring up in order to make the case for the power of systemic power, and the ideology that drives it.

Commercial success at any level is the primary goal now, no worries of selling out anymore, replaced by an understandable anxiety about missing out. Moments of rupture, where we get a glimpse of the extent that this financialized totality has been naturalized in our psyches, have not become the wakeup people like Bresson and Brecht hoped would create solidarity. It is just more currency to be developed, another business idea, critique well beyond crisis. A market of dissatisfaction sold back to us at wholesale prices. This is culture now for what I can only believe used to contain an avant-garde. Irony weaponized as self-defense against nihilism. We have a shared recognition of our cultural, even human limits and a paralysis that has set in due to this recognition.

If a clear deformation has set in, and I argue that the above described is deformation, could a more sustainable rupture be possible? One that exposes something substantial underneath and becomes another activity, perhaps a fatal strategy towards the state of things that leads us out of capture and servitude. No mere slave morality reacting but an emerging morality with a fluid genealogy.

What prevents a shift of this sort seems in large part a problem of superstructures. As scientific institutions are in many ways captured by the same overriding societal ethos that shapes our imaginations and the changing conception of our individual selves. Science is now something to be “believed in” not discussed, only quoted by brand ambassadors like Degrasse Tyson, Fauci and the reciprocal folks like Joe Rogan and Malone. A secular religion of sorts for some and a tool of domination for others, where everyone has lost agency and input. Worldviews, art included, are defined by one’s immediate opposition and much seems to be lazy agitprop. See Barbera Kruger’s work go from an enlightening reveal of advertising ideology, to being “anti” Trump on a magazine cover.

If science, along with art, has in fact been recuperated and partially subsumed, could art instead become a terrain of inquiry? Not as science traditionally functioned to gain a logic of knowledge but as a process to stake a claim in the ever decreasing commons. Culture’s dialectical nature under modernism has been largely abandoned in whatever we call this contemporary terrain. An aesthetic inquiry could reappear, not as a conservative past reanimated, but activity conceived of as a shared daily pursuit. One that builds on itself with accessible and repeatable daily activity. An activity that compounds, if only engaged with. The super-egoic forces, aka ideology, that keep us in a holding pattern would need to be shown transparently by any process for this reenchantment to happen.

Current forces that stand in for this activity function in one part as a scolding and guilty morality that can never undo what has been done. Nor can it shift the future trajectories of a radical system like capital for the current hegemony, for it enacts its quite paternal discipline post facto. A system that feeds vampirelike on the whatever counter that could render it obsolete. An example here would be 70s graffiti that actually staked the commons as a counter ideology. Together with oppressive state apparatus per Althusser, the gallery museum system helped to establish a less violent but more tempting enclosure, to fold art inwards and to use it as a farm system of sorts. A pressure valve that forever prevents any shift. Here, we can only attempt to build micro empires as expression, and hyper individual brands (yes this future was probably built into graffiti from the outset as its inherent risk and attack on norms prevents a more mass participation).

Lessons could be learned here, a collective effort done by proper bourgeois individuals, not kids looking to make a name, could avoid the previous traps. Individuals who consciously nullify the current conceptions of what makes us individuals. Identity as bourgeois that refuses the limits of that identity and moves to nullify it. To go with Marx, this is only materially possible as worker labor, but our imaginations have taken such a hit, have been so captured, constrained, enclosed, that culture could be a powerful tool to begin some sustained rupture. One that would make such material solidarity a visible one.

B.P.C. BOOKS

David Gitt, Brooklyn art graduate and retired New York firefighter, drew my attention to a promising ‘post-situationist’ project that he and other artists are organising. The following text comes courtesy of their website EVERYTHING IS FREE NOW. EIFN organises a dérive every couple of weeks. Check the site for upcoming (post-freeze) events.

PART ONE

This work is part of an ongoing collaborative project involving several artists who make paintings for display in outdoor public spaces.

We are pursuing a means of making, exhibiting and distributing art that is non-hierarchical, context-specific and accessible to people in their everyday lives.

We eschew the gallery system, and other established institutions of art in favor of a more pedestrian experience of painting, inviting others - both artists and viewers - to participate in a project that does not involve the gatekeepers of the market, academy, museum or press.

The work is made in the studio, and then displayed outdoors on public infrastructure using a removable adhesive backing, which allows people to take the paintings home with them. The paintings are always free, and are not intended to be an advertisement for something else that is for sale; there is a generosity inherent to the work and its distribution that we hope is contagious. Aesthetic decisions are informed by existing visual information on the ground, and the work is almost always designed with a particular location in mind, so the paintings have a destination that is immediate, near-at-hand, and highly visible. We look for opportunities to use painting to converse with the preexisting urban palimpsest. Layers of stickers, pealing advertisements and paint, hand-drawn graffiti, and haphazard attempts to remove or paint over graffiti are some contexts where the work is particularly at home.

Simply walking around the city is the main component of both the preparation for, and also the eventual display of the work. During our walks we follow meandering paths, talk, look, and install paintings. Thus, the work is a visual record of our somewhat aimless travels in an increasingly instrumentalized and privatized urban environment. And while we regard this project as an open-ended endeavor with no predefined form in mind, we are generally guided by a steadfast desire to challenge the commodification of the art object/form, to assert our autonomy outside of the market, and to resist the very real currents of authoritarianism, coercion and domination running through all aspects of late capitalist society.

The walk starts when I recognize my friend from across the street, usually near a subway exit/entrance. We smile and greet each other, the day fully upon us. Previous hours have been spent finishing up objects at our disposal, taping and sanding. Only now does the active synthesis begin. Immediately we start to survey the landscape, scanning but focusing on details at the same time. The light, colors and textures of street lamps and their bases. Fire dept call boxes that are in various states of functionality. Their paint is either fresh or flaking, uniform or multihued. Everywhere we look is fair game, walls designated for us, prepped platforms all around, our application has been accepted, the grant has finally come though!

The city is ours and the installed objects, yours. Each object is system specific, not site specific. The palette is influenced by what we have seen over the last few years, but not exactly matched, textures that influence but not completely replicated. The things we hold in our hands are not bourgeois art objects, but not their antithesis either. There is a foot in art history and an arm simultaneously grabbing a street pillar. Then there is the consideration of how these things are to live in the world. Are they to remain up if possible, perhaps “landmarked” by fresh paint applied by a city worker? or are they to be taken down quickly by some basic recognition of aesthetic interest, resulting in an individual possession of this recognition?

As we walk we see commercial possession and private property everywhere. Signs that denote boundaries and people in various states of perception. Our activity goes either unnoticed or is met with confusion. The gaze matters especially in this realm. To install an object is to put it in another world, to transform it from a personal object to a public one. The installer is temporarily at the mercy of the onlookers gaze, back turned and vulnerable. A friend can serve as a buffer to this, as a lookout for enforcers of legality, or to meet the gaze of a curious or perplexed passerby, disarming it by competing with it.

The partner can also give perspective to the aesthetics that arise in each installation, is it level, does it blend too much? Once a passerby intervened as we both discussed the task at hand, “too similar” she said. Point taken. It’s a group project after all and criticism will find its way to us. Another day an observer wondered what we were up to, why were we looking at concrete pillars and electrical boxes? Our suggestion of an art project was met with hostile confusion and requests to do it in our “own neighborhood”. Assuring him that we did in fact do that and that one of us had previously lived close to the area in question did little to convince him, a hostile gaze was projected at us, along with the more impersonal digital lens of documentation.

Speaking of the digital, we use ours to depict the offered objects that are introduced to the landscape. It’s a practice that sits somewhat uneasily. Should we be contributing to the spectacle by adding to a world of shouting images, or is it an acceptable compromise, a justifiable entry point? Rhetorical questions aside, participation with the status quo is of course unavoidable. What is possible as an entry point to a different daily activity? One that can be done despite dominant norms and power structures?

So we walk, for at least a few miles, gathering information and dispersing physical objects, building the momentum of another ethos and talking about all that comes up.

After a few hours, exhaustion creeps in and we stop for food and drink. So much to critique and process, mental notes to make and aesthetic problems/solutions to come up.

Second part next week:

‘Culture’s dialectical nature under modernism has been largely abandoned in whatever we call this contemporary terrain. An aesthetic inquiry could reappear, not as a conservative past reanimated, but activity conceived of as a shared daily pursuit.’

B.P.C. BOOKS

Karl Marx described Helen Macfarlane as a ‘rara avis’, who expressed ‘original ideas’ in her journalism. The following is a chapter from my biography, Red Antigone.

The ‘Key to all Mythologies’

In George Eliot’s novel, Middlemarch, the Reverend Edward Casaubon, husband of the heroine, Dorothea Brooke, is an Anglican scholar in search of the “key to all mythologies”. His ambition is to write an encyclopaedia of non-Christian and pre-Christian myths, which will show a common origin and prove “that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed” in the Book of Genesis. Casaubon imagines that he will one day be recognised by his mother church as her theological savant. Eliot comments that Casaubon’s theory “was not likely to bruise itself unawares against discoveries: it floated among flexible conjectures . . .”

The discoveries were coming thick and fast from the “Bible criticism school” of radical German theologians influenced by Kant and Hegel. The fanciful tales and myths set down in church histories of the Saints, and even in the Gospels themselves, were seen as obscuring the historical facts. George Eliot absorbed the new thinking and declared that the “system of doctrines” upheld by the Church of England was “dishonourable to God and most pernicious in its influence on individual and social happiness.”

In 1846, George Eliot (then still calling herself Mary Ann Evans) translated David Strauss’s book of 1835, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, into English. According to Strauss:

“It is humanity that dies, rises and ascends to heaven, for from the negation of its phenomenal life there ever proceeds a higher spiritual life. The legacy of the Christian mythos of resurrection is that: from the kindling within him of the idea of humanity the individual man participates in the divine life of the species.”

Thus, the Christian absolute of the incarnation was contradictory because, restricted as it was to one individual (Jesus), it lacked the inclusivity of a real absolute. Evans’ translation scandalised the Church establishment. It was described by the Earl of Shaftesbury as “the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell.”

At the very time - 1850- Macfarlane began writing for George Julian Harney’s Chartist periodicals (the weekly Red Republican and monthly Democratic Review), Evans/Eliot had begun her association with George Henry Lewes’ weekly paper, the Leader, which represented Christian-socialism and ‘moderate’ Chartism. There is no evidence that Macfarlane and Evans ever met, but they were clearly gleaning the same field of ideas. Evans was about to translate another post-Hegelian take-down of traditional religion: Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity. Macfarlane for her part had translated a little bit of Hegel for her working class readership and was translating the ‘post-Hegelian’ Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.

Scottish Enlightenment

Helen Macfarlane’s own writings represent a continuation of the philosophical ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment, which were influenced by – and had an influence on — German Idealism. Before the Enlightenment in Europe, medieval metaphysics had upheld the idea, borrowed from the philosophers of Greek Antiquity, of a “Great Chain of Being.” According to this idea, the universe was constituted by a divine, hierarchical order: from the lowliest type of existence, such as plants, up through animals and humans to God as the perfect, eternal and immutable One. God, being self-sufficient, was free of all envy and had therefore created a world full of diversity and the natural plenitude of nature. The Enlightenment of the 18^th century shook the idea of the Great Chain of Being to its core. As the Scottish philosopher David Hume scornfully wrote in An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding,

“If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

Immanuel Kant, confessing that Hume’s critique of metaphysics had shaken him from his “slumbers,” accepted that it was impossible for true metaphysical knowledge to be drawn from sensuous experience. But Kant then turned the table on the Humean empiricists with his argument that universal forms (time and space) are innate in consciousness and that categories of understanding (such as cause and effect) are a priori to sensuous experience. As summarised by Heinrich Heine – who was a major influence on Macfarlane:

“Once upon a time Reason, like a sun, circled around the world of appearances, and sought to illuminate it; but Kant bade Reason to stand still and now the world of appearance revolves around and is illumined by it…”

Sir William Hamilton, the leading Germanophile intellectual of the late Scottish Enlightenment, accepted Kant’s argument that any real knowledge of the world had to be based on reason; and that whatever remained outside the reach of reason was the dark realm of the “thing-in-itelf”: the province of irrational faith, dogma and even evil. In Hamilton’s natural realism, the Kantian notion of eternal moral truths based on the a priori categories of reason is compounded with Thomas Reid’s idea of sensus communis, i.e. that universal truths or values are based on social experience, rather than dictates from heaven or metaphysical logic.

Hamilton’s Philosophy of the Unconditioned (1829) develops the Kantian principle that the human mind has an innate tendency to believe in an infinite or absolute power that is the cause of everything. This, however, deprives faith of its object: a concept of God which makes God unknowable. Hamilton falls back on an analogy based on Kantian faith: the mind is to the body as the unconditioned Absolute is to conditioned natural phenomena.

Hegel

Hegel seeks to show that whatever is divine in human history cannot be banished to the dark realm of the thing-in-self: “The Idea [of Freedom] is not so feeble as merely to have a right or obligation to exist without actually existing.” Only if “natural consciousness” goes further than immediate perceptions of phenomena can it comprehend how the mediations in human society work themselves out. This process takes place within what Hegel calls a “concrete totality” of historical development. As he puts it in the Phenomenology of Spirit,

“The truth is the whole. The whole, however, is merely the essential nature reaching its completeness through the process of its own development.”

History had shown that selfish, impulsive desires served as more effective “springs of action” than “benevolence” of a “liberal or universal kind.” Hegel rejects as “vain” all attempts “to solve the enigmas of Providence,” or to explain the evil, vice and ruin that marks world history as purely “the work of mere Nature” without taking into account the distinctly human factor. For “the Human Will — a moral embitterment — a revolt of the Good Spirit (if it have a place within us) may well be the result of our reflections.”

Pantheism

Twenty years after Hegel’s death, Helen Macfarlane sees the concept of the Christian community and its organisation as needing to be concretised: politically as the idea of democratic socialism/communism, and philosophically, as a new ‘Pantheism’. Macfarlane defines Pantheism as,

“…the sublime and cheering doctrine of man’s infinity - as the oak lies folded up in the acorn... the divine nature (or at least in a manifestation of it which is found only in man) is common to us all... we are bound to do to others, as we would they should do to us. This rule is universally valid, without distinction of birth, age, rank, sex, country, colour, cultivation, or the like.”

These lines represent Macfarlane’s Pantheistic reinterpretation of passages by Hegel, which she translates and quotes in her first published essay, ‘Democracy – Remarks on the Times apropos of certain passages in no. 1 of Thomas Carlyle’s “latter-day” pamphlet’, as serialised in Harney’s Democratic Review.

In Hegel, Macfarlane discerns a new knowledge of human nature and innate freedom as the philosophic expression of the Democratic Idea which had always been implicit in Christianity: “In the history of civilisation there is not a trace of the idea of democracy and equality to be found, until the appearance of the Nazarean.” This being the case, she adds, might we not reasonably expect that the forms assumed by modern civilisation would be essentially different from those assumed by the antique culture?

“Vain expectation! ‘The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and majesty of the soul’, says an American writer. We are haunted by the ghosts of the old dead nations and cultures…”

The American writer is Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), leader of the American Transcendentalist movement, and influential opponent of slavery. He is frequently quoted in Macfarlane’s writings, though never named. Emerson’s appeal for a Hegelian Pantheist like Macfarlane is captured in Lewis Mumford’s The Golden Day:

“For Emerson matter and spirit were not enemies in conflict: they were phases of man’s experience: spirit passed into matter and gave it a form; and symbols and forms were essences through which man lived and fulfilled his proper being.”

For Macfarlane the “new religion, that of unlimited spiritual freedom” preaches and practices class struggle:

“It will bring in its train corresponding institutions and social forms. It will assume the outward form of a republic such as the world has never yet seen. “A republic without helots;” without poor; without classes; without hereditary hewers of wood and drawers of water; without slaves, whether chattel or wages slaves. “For if I treat all men as divine, how can there be for me such a thing as a slave?” A society, such indeed as the world has never yet seen,—not only of free men, but of free women; a society of equally holy, equally blessed gods.”

The phrase, “A Republic without helots,” comes from a speech by the then imprisoned French socialist, August Blanqui. “A society of equally holy, equally blessed gods” is borrowed from a essay by Heinrich Heine on the ‘New Pantheism’:

“The political revolution which is based on the principles of French materialism will find no enemies in the pantheists, but rather allies who derive their convictions from a deeper source, from a religious synthesis... [The] divinity of man manifests itself also in his body. Human misery destroys or abases the body, which is the image of God... We do not wish to be sans-culottes, or frugal citizens, or economical presidents. We establish a democracy of equally glorious, equally holy and equally happy gods. You ask for simple dress, austere manners and unseasoned joys. We, on the other hand, demand nectar and ambrosia, purple raiments, costly perfumes, luxury and splendour, dances of laughing nymphs, music and comedy. Oh, do not be angry, virtuous republicans! To your censorious reproaches, we say with the fool in Shakespeare, “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”... We have, in fact outgrown deism. We are free and do not need a tyrant with thunder. We have come of age and do not need paternal supervision. We are not the bungled handiwork of a great mechanic. Deism is a religion for slaves, children, Genevans and watchmakers.”

Helen Macfarlane links the “Holy Spirit of Truth” with “the golden age, sung by the poets and prophets of all times and nations, from Hesiod and Isaiah, to Cervantes and Shelley; the ‘Paradise’, which was never lost, for it lives - not backwards, in the infancy and youth of humanity - but in the future...”

Red Antigone: The Life and World of Helen Macfarlane1818-60 - Chartist Journalist, Feminist Revolutionary and Translator of the Communist Manifesto is available as an ebook on Amazon HERE and paperback HERE

OR, if you don’t like doing business with Jeff, get it via Libraries (e.g. Bibliotheca) using ISBN: 9781919342566

See also: Red Chartist: Helen Macfarlane 1818-60 The Complete Annotated Writings and her Translation Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto (Red Antigone Series No.2) In paperback HERE

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