"But the concept of Black power can, in its search for 'ideology',
go in an opposite direction - it may ignore or reject an historical and
class consciousness and may see "black" as pigmentation per se,
rather than in the context of white racist civilisation, and that would
be tragic: for a "Nigger" is a nigger first and black second."
Black Mask #10, May 1968
In Subversion
#20 the editors mentioned our leaflet In
Defense of Revolutionary Organisation as "Continuing the attack
on the ICC. A good Read." However they failed to even mention
that the text made substantial criticisms of Subversion themselves, far
less respond to these criticisms. These revolved around two points. I shall
leave, for a moment, how their criticism of the Bolshevik practice of the
ICC as Stalinist serves as an apologetics for bolshevism. Rather
I intend to deal more fully with Subversion's defence of a 'common sense'
notion of reality.
Subversion
have recently adorned their magazine with headlines including references
to madness - "If you're not miserable then you must be mad" (#20),
"Class Struggle hits the road ... Motorway Madness" (#17) and
conclude their article 'Visit to the Planet ICC' (#18) with the remark
that "Analysis of the ICC has moved out of the realm of polemic
and into the realm of psychopathology". It would seem that they see
incipient madness behind a whole range of phenomena, but yet have failed
to seriously address the issue of 'madness' itself.
The key to understanding psycho-pathology is to see it is as a discipline
dominated by political economy. The mental patient is to a greater or lesser
extent denied bourgeois subjectivity. In this they constitute a kind of
psycho-niggertariat. At the depths of the mental illness system, the victim
is denied any social existence and may be enslaved by the medical profession.
At a less severe level, the mental patient is like a 'free black' in the
ante-bellum U.S. south. Subject to enslavement at the will of the sane,
should they offend, particularly if the use physical force to defend themselves.
Survival often requires the cultivation of friendly sanes, who are prepared
to vouch for the mental patient in times of crisis.
I must stress that I am not using the term psycho-niggertariat simply as
a metaphor. I used to work in Prestwich Hospital, Manchester in the seventies,
where the patients were subjected to slave labour. Deep within the bowels
of the hospital was the Annexe where long-term patients were obliged to
close the plastic lids of washing-up bottles under the guise of "occupational
therapy". Their benefits were drawn 'on their behalf' by the hospital,
which accumulated thousands of pounds. Occasionally some of this money would
be spent for some luxury, such as a colour TV on the wards, but these would
often mysteriously disappear. These patients were completely at the mercy
of the hospital administration and most would never have any visitors.
Aside from this direct exploitation of labour, their bodies are used for
countless experiments. Those familiar with the film 2001, may recall when
the astronaut removes the memory banks of Hal, the computer. The mechanical
voice is reciting a nursery rhyme until it grinds to a halt. Would that
this were just consigned to a work of fiction. However, the world famous
psychiatrist Ewen Cameron performed just such an operation on a conscious
mental patient, scraping away the parts of the brain responsible for speech
with a scalpel whilst she recited a nursery rhyme. (See Journey into
Madness: Medical Torturers and the Mind Controllers by Gordon Thomas,
London & New York 1988) Apparently this greatly advanced 'our' understanding
of how the brain works! This is perhaps the most vile example of experimentation
on mental patients, but the abuse is widespread.
Statistical studies reveal that groups traditional denied bourgeois subjectivity
- e.g. Black people and women - are substantially more likely to be diagnosed
as mentally ill. The dominant 'common sense' follows traditional patterns
of racial and sexual domination. Resistance to such domination often remains
inarticulate and as such is vulnerable to such classification.
Nevertheless mental patients have a long history of resistance. rather than
cataloguing countless examples, I would like to procede with a discussion
of the Socialist Patients' Collective (SPK) a book about whom
was published last year (SPK: Krankheit im Recht, English translation
published by AK Press). This group was active in Heidelberg in the
seventies. Unfortunately it is often known simply as being a source for
Red Army Fraction recruits. In fact the RAF dismissed those
remaining in the SPK as crazies.
However they theorised "sickness as at the same time the prerequisite
and the result of the capitalist process of producing production surplus
value" . . . "Unlike the unemployed, it is not easy for the sick
person to realise a causal connection between the misery which has stricken
him as an individual, so it seems, and the process of exploitation under
capitalism". They also presented a critique democratic centralism,
called Multi-Focal Expansionism.
As I pointed out in In Defense of
Revolutionary Organisation
Subversion
end up defending a 'common sense' notion of 'reality", as if such
a thing ostensibly existing outside the realm of human discourse could be
faithfully rendered within any discourse. That the ICC seek to dissociate
themselves from any consensual reality should be recognised as the first
step for any group aiming to become revolutionary, as all the dominant discourses
are the discourses of the ruling class. Our counter-discourses seek to disrupt
these discourses metered out to the rhythm of one jackboot clapping down
upon us. Subversion
fail to understand either how dominant discourses are structured, or how
the ICC's ritualised behaviour at their meetings is appropriate to
a group whose understanding of counter-discourse consists of constructing
a competing paradigm.
When groups like the SPK have set out to tackle the construction
and manipulation of modern individuality (a work which the Luther Blissett
multiple name project is extending), it is shameful that Subversion
simply uses words like 'mad' and 'madness' in a completely derogatory and
unscientific manner. It is all very well for Subversion
to plaster slogans like 'Building Claimants' Counter Power' across #19.
Do Subversion
not realise that the mental patients they despise constitute a major section
of claimants? In the leaflet Screen of the Bosses, Not the Claimants
(reprinted in Subversion
#20), the CPSA is quite properly criticised for setting Employment
Service workers and Claimants against each other. Subversion
must now be criticised for trying to erect political screens to partition
off the mentally ill.
The other side of the politicised resistance of mental patients, is the
dismissal of socialists and revolutionaries as insane. (Indeed when I launched
the London Psychogeographical Association,
there were even some idle prattlers who circulated rumours that I had myself
gone mad.) Here, however, I would like to spend a little time dealing with
the recent revival of attacks on the sanity of John Maclean which have been
spearheaded by R.Pitt in his hateful pamphlet John Maclean and the CPGB.
Maclean had been imprisoned during the first world war for his opposition
to militarism. During his second spell inside (1916-17) Maclean complained
that his and other prisoners were being administered drugs in their food.
The top quack in the prison service, Dr James Devon, described these as
"insane delusions of persecutions" (p7). Maclean might have been
wrong, but it is very clear that he was being persecuted. Pitt claims that
"there is no question" that Maclean was deluded, even though they
admit Maclean suffered diarrhoea and constipation alternatively. This is
naïve in the extreme. Is it surprising that Maclean could find no proof
that he was poisoned? Does Pitt also want us to believe that Colin Roach
shot himself? Maclean may have been wrong but that's another matter.
Dr. Devon and Dr Watson attempted to undermine Maclean's savage indictment
of capitalism during his trial of May 1918 by denouncing Maclean as insane,
and attempted to have him certified. That two prison doctors should use
insanity as a pretext for removing a revolutionary from circulation should
come as no surprise, but this refrain was taken up by Bolshevik loyalists
when Maclean resisted the policy of affiliating the evolving British communist
party to the Labour Party. In 1920 Maclean also denounced Lieutenant-Colonel
L'Estrange Malone as a government spy. Malone was an MP who had been deeply
involved in anti-Bolshevik propaganda, denouncing Maclean by name. He visited
the Soviet Union in 1919, where he chummed up with Trotsky. He then popped
up as a leading Bolshevik apologist, until after a spell in jail he moved
to the right of the Labour Party. Again Maclean might have been wrong, but
it is clear that Malone was a shit attracted to the Bolsheviks for precisely
the reasons that communist revolutionaries like Otto Rühle denounced
them. This professional soldier stood in a review of the Red Army, shoulder
to shoulder with Trotsky, soon to become the butcher of the Kronstadt revolutionaries.
Maclean remained a prominent member of the Scottish Communist Left, who
resisted parliamentarianism, affiliation to the Labour Party, and was active
in showing solidarity with Cockney Communist Left, when representatives
of Poplar Councillors who had called the cops on the Unemployed Workers
Organisation, tried to pass themselves off as friends of the unemployed.
He also rejected the policy of the Hands Off Russia call for strike action
to force withdrawal of British troops by arguing that it was through developing
the revolution in Britain which would save Russia.
New Interventions, an otherwise tedious Leftist rag ran a review
of Pitt's pamphlet (Vol 7. No.1) by Paul B. Smith, who writes:
"The author [i.e. Pitt] is worried that as a consequence of the recent
disintegration of the Soviet Union, workers and intellectuals might be attracted
to the ultra-left sectarianism of Maclean, Sylvia Pankhurst and Guy Aldred.
These worries inform his defence of the orthodox Communist Party line that
Maclean's isolation from the party was the cause of his mental illness.
The pamphlet is a powerful warning of the personal consequences of 'ultra-leftism':
isolation and madness. The reader is left wondering whether Maclean was
an exception or whether Pitt thinks that all forms of 'ultra-leftism' are
symptoms of insanity."
Without sanctioning Smith's various Trotskyite illusions (he is involved
with Critique, who have been dealt with in Swamp Thing , Summer
1994, which is available from me for 2 First Class Stamps), his response
to Pitt reveals how Subversion
's combined use of the critique of Stalinism and madness, actually work
together in defending a diffuse form of leftism whereby the door is being
held open to rag-bag of refugees emerging from the collapse of Trotskyism.
Thus Subversion
headlines an article 'Reclaim the Future', the name used by the more populist
split from the Trotskyist Workers Revolutionary Party. Subversion
is keeping its cards close to its chest here, as it prepares to launch
its recruitment drive. Far from heralding a new social movement, the collaboration
between Reclaim the Streets and the Liverpool Dockers is another
stage in the degeneration of leftism. In no way do such developments indicate
the green shoots of recovery for the class struggle. Compared to the French
lorry drivers strike, it's nothing.
In the final analysis, it was not isolation from 'the party' which Maclean
suffered from, but, alongside the rest of the workers' movement, the defeat
of the revolution. However, he did not jump on the leftist bandwagon, and
stood out against the reconstruction of reformism. Looking again at Maclean's
The War After the War (written in late 1917 when he was allegedly
'mad'), I noticed that he warns "that the government intends to use
the workshop movement in the interests of the capitalist class" through
the increase in the intensity of exploitation, i.e. through the transition
from formal to real domination of capital, as predicted by Marx in Capital.
In Britain, where the class struggle had not developed to the same extent
as Germany, the Scottish Left, Cockney Left and Welsh Left remained dispersed
(which is why I use these terms) and did not develop the same clarity as
arose in Germany. Once again it is the level of the class struggle which
is the barometer, rather than how this or that individual gyrates around
this or that organisation.
The problem which revolutionaries of those days had to face was that the
Bolshevik regime was more concerned with developing a new phase of capitalism
rather than in spurring on world revolution. It was hard for them to face
this fact as it meant that the prospect of revolution has receded for the
foreseeable future. After all they had suffered, for some this was simply
too much to bare. Even the strongest revolutionary groups, such as the German
General Workers Union (AAUD) were soon to collapse. Maclean may have been
wrong about the poisoning and whether Malone and others were conscious tools
of the state, and he was certainly wrong to spread his accusations without
offering any evidence. But this weakness should not simply be laid at the
door of a proletarian fighter whose health had been undermined by prison.
What has to be challenged is the way workers put up with a sleaze bag like
Malone for two minutes. It would be as if Teddy Taylor responded to an increase
of class struggle by dismissing his career in the Tory party, polished up
the working class credentials of growing up in the Gorbals, and was accepted
as a leader.
"The demise of the Soviet Union has meant that leftists have become
more critical of Leninism - not because they suddenly saw Bolshevism as
a counter-revolutionary weapon against the working class, but because the
'Soviet' Union failed to provide a 'material basis' for their arrogance
and elitism." (Swamp Thing) Both Subversion
and the ICC hope to attract these elements, but in different ways,
Subversion
offering the fellowship of the broad church, the ICC the doctrinal
certainties of the ideologically elect. Subversion
refuse to resolve contradictions, but on the contrary promote the tensions
these create as evidence of political life within their organisation. Contrariwise,
the ICC seek to resolve such contradictions, but at purely idealist
level - resulting in them caving in on themselves within ever decreasing
circles.
Our leaflet was what it said it was, In
Defense of Revolutionary Organisation , was what it said it was:
as much a critique of Subversion
as an attack on the ICC, and in no way a 'continuation' of Subversion
s attack on the ICC, anymore than the ICC's formulation of
their reified notion of 'parasitism' is a continuation of our critique of
Trotskyists as parasites (Swamp Thing). We used the term to specifically
refer to "counter-revolutionaries who directly collaborated in the
Imperialist war effort during the second world war - smashing strikes and
grassing up revolutionaries (for execution)." We did not use the term
to simply attack anyone who criticises us.
Luther Blissett, December 1996
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