Had a punk magic marx chaos poetic moment tonight. pasted below two paragraphs of attempted explanation.
AL
I have a book I want to review for www.killyourpetpuppy.co.uk It is called ‘Rebel Alliances’ by Ben Franks {AK Press: 2006] and is a lengthy history and review of contemporary British anarchism. There is not much in it on punk/ anarcho-punk since the main focus is on ‘class-struggle anarchism’ and Ben does not reckon punks contributed much to this. It is a hefty book (470 pages) and through with it so hard to do more than question a few parts from an anarchist punk point of view. But yesterday I found ‘Adventures in Marxism’ by Marshall Berman [Verso: 1999] which has a 60 page chunk in it – All that is Solid Melts into Air – and a reference to the Sex Pistols/ No Future…
Part of what Berman says is that the same disruptive/ chaotic forces which drive capitalism/modernity, forces which keep breaking down all ‘fixed’ social relationships also fragment opposition to capitalism, including class struggle revolutionary groups. No such group, however coherent its theory or direct its practice is immune to this fact of life under capitalism. British anarchism may have had its roots in late 19th century workers struggles – Jewish/ Russian refugees in east end of London. But the ceaseless turmoil of capitalism swept those foundations away. The process continues – the two factories I worked in 1977-1984 have been swept away, as havebeen whole industries – coal-mining, steel-making, ship-building… so that the basis for class struggle anarchism in the solidarity of the industrial working class is destroyed by capitalism’s drive to ‘modernise‘. Not just the factories are destroyed, the communities built around them are as well.
In which case – why not punk as a response to this process? The nihilism of punk as nothing to the nihilism of the social destruction of modernist capitalism… The half- formed thought sparked these words.
Spell bound. We art entranced , naked in the freezing night, a whirlwind with no end, silent flashes of light no thunder heard here in the eye of the storm where all roads meet, pavements cracked and the asphalt and concrete fractured, fragmented into a black sharp dust picked up by the wind and hurled against our naked flesh. So cold here, in the maelstrom of the present when all solidity is gone gone gone gone and a voice now a roar and now a whisper lost in the hurricane echoes a refrain no…. future…. No… future… a sigh a howl, a moan, a cry. Anguish, despair. What remains? Nothing, no one, nowhere, no now, no then, no past no present, no future.
Bank notes and coins , like a blizzard of mingled snow and hail rain down and we drown, the cash nexus like a whirlpool sucking us down down, under the sea, an endless sea of useless currency. Miners hacking at the foundations of great towers so they crash down in rubble picked over by builders already constructing the next tower. We cannot speak, but wordless point at each commodity, each thing made and re-made out of our alienated flesh and blood, flesh and blood become metal and steel, become concrete and glass, become plastic and wire, wheel upon wheel, the mechanisms of industry grind and crush us bodily fluids the grease and oil reducing the friction which would otherwise bind the gears solid.
But as soon as the image forms, becomes solidified it is already being melted down, all that is certain is the frozen air which the blasts of furnace heat whip into this perfect storm, caress yourself my urchin one, we are the dead dancing here entranced by the noise of the machines, the feedback whine cut with staccato pulses , discordant rhythm da. Da . datta. The sound of the thunder breaks at last through the cacophony of the whirlwind. Lightning flickering strobe like light illuminates a nuclear flash which conceals in shadows the forms of our bodies as they dance compulsively a sequence of movements broken into moments.
Can there be recall? Can we re-member one moment? Or is all forgetting, all lost, all profaned? The moments flicker past so fast .. But see this shadow cast, caught and not yet erased. And there, there another lies. Was a life lived between these shadowed moments? Did time elapse? A sunrise. A sunset. A day. A life. A life lived in this here that is no where, in this city that is no city, in this world that is no world. From a past that is not past to a future that is not yet consumed, commodified, bought and sold and sold and bought.
Seize a scrap of paper from out of the whirlwind , over written with an account of profit and loss, lines of figures – hold it up to the light that is no light and there discern the faintest of scripts, a jumble of symbols which resolve their chaos into a string of words, of images. The wind from nowhere howls, pulling at the scrap of paper, trying to snatch it, and cast it once more into the abyss, into the furnace flames. But fingers clench it tight. Now there is a hand, an arm, a torso, a body, a being stands amidst the mighty ruins.
Re-membering with a scream of rage and pain. ‘Pay it all back. Pay it all back. Every bit you have stolen.’ There is a moment of stillness in the chaos. A moment in which a world is seen, is known. A world of time and duration, a world of everyday lives. The world familiar? Perhaps.
It is hard to grasp – that the world we experience through lives lived as relationships in time and space, a world which has a history, as our lives have our histories as memories and which seems so solid and substantial is continually ‘melting into air’- as Karl Marx put it in The Communist Manifesto. Marx was describing a vision of the world of industrial developments driven by the profit motive which is constantly breaking down and tearing apart the physical and social places/ spaces we actually inhabit. For Marx, this vision was so destructive and chaotic he assumed it could not last. But it has.
