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(Not Quite) In the Zone
Editorial content | Submitted by mute on Thursday, 8 January, 2009 - 16:48
Ben Watson With Mastaneh Shah-Shuja's recent book Zones of Proletarian Development, the anti-capitalist movement has finally found its political theorist. But, asks Ben Watson, can the lessons she gleans from the movement of movement's successes compete with the organisational and motivational power of the party?
Whatever happened to anti-capitalism? Now that, post-credit-crunch, governments worldwide are reconsidering the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, it's hard to recall the time when the free market and untrammeled capitalism reigned supreme. Yet this was so for nigh on two decades, from Ronald Reagan's defeat of the air-traffic controllers in August 1981 to the advent of anti-capitalism with a large, lively and well-publicised demonstration outside Liverpool Street station in June 1999 (‘J18'). Anti-capitalism scored further hits with the teamsters-and-turtle-kids' Battle of Seattle versus the World Trade Organisation in November 1999 (‘N30'), plus two unmissable May Days in London (2000, 2001). Until 9/11, it seemed as if anti-capitalism had a monopoly on catchy date-names, driven like stakes into Francis Fukuyama's ‘end of history'. Then in 2001, a spectacular stunt (and/or mistake) by the incestuous terrorist/security forces made everything the left had achieved pale into insignificance: 9/11 eclipsed both J18 and N30 in the mass-media memory bank. This restoration was in turn rocked by the worldwide anti-war demonstrations on 15 February 2003 (‘Don't Attack Iraq'), and by the ‘credit crunch' of September 2008, which initiated the Keynesian response mentioned above. Politics was now globalised. In the '60s and '70s, the ‘balance of payments' was the bogeyman, the value of Pound Sterling blazoned at the close of every TV news broadcast; now we watch the various share-price indices. In so far as we are thoughtful or rational (i.e. in so far as we watch the news), we're all capitalists now, so nationalism is no longer needed to make us (and our trade unions) ‘tighten our belts'; anxiety about the international system (and world ecology) has replaced ‘the national interest'. Obama and Brown are experts keeping the whole thing running, and we must trust their decisions, or we're doomed. Apparently.
In other words, the establishment doesn't dream up policy in a vacuum. It's in dialogue with its critics, with mass opposition and protest. Anti-capitalism helped get us where we are today. It changed things. As a music journalist in the '80s and '90s, words I depended on for a Marxist analysis (‘bourgeois', ‘capitalism', ‘class') were routinely excised by editors (‘in the interest of not alienating your readers'). After J18, they were allowed again. The abseilers who unrolled the banner proclaiming ‘anti-capitalism' down a City office block did more for my freedom of expression than two decades of avant garde poetry or left paper-selling. After the demonstrations in February 2003, I could even use the menacing word ‘imperialism' in print.
Anti-capitalism worked, but so far has not been honoured with a political theory. Its effectiveness caused much soul searching on the traditional left, organisational dilemmas some call a crisis. Mastaneh Shah-Shuja's book is therefore timely: it attempts to learn the lessons of anti-capitalist protest and develop a theory of political practice. So can we now jettison Lenin and become Shah-Shujaites? An independent researcher from an Afghan-Iraqi background, Shah-Shuja sees all Leninist worker parties as identical and identically malign: projects to contain revolution and steer society back towards capitalism. The failure of the Russian Revolution is inscribed in every attempt at working-class organisation. Shah-Shuja is critical of anarchism too, but adopts its pre-knowledge of the sins of the Bolsheviks: there are no indications that even the popular accounts of the Russian Revolution by E.H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher or Victor Serge have been scanned. Zones of Proletarian Development is a contribution to Social Studies: historical scholarship is a non-issue. Instead, in assessing Bolshevism, Shah-Shuja applies a farrago of prejudice, rumour and blind assertion, accepting much of the libel of the right. If Lenin was simply a tyrant, one wants to know why researchers with no political axe to grind (editors of V.I. Vernadsky's book on the biosphere, for example, or Martin Miller's study of psychoanalysis in Bolshevik Russia) discover progressive legislation on ecology and sex no other state regime has ever countenanced. Political thinkers of the stature of Engels are condemned by digging out single statements at variance with today's liberal shibboleths, with no regard for intent or context. If I were a professor, I'd give Shah-Shuja hell at the viva. This idealist view of politics parties shape the world according to their ideas, so an imperialist Russia with gulags and the H-Bomb must have been Lenin's intent at the start cannot deal with historical actualities. But this isn't a history book. It's a political polemic based on anti-capitalism, arguing that boring politics won't win. On this, Shah-Shuja does have a point.
This 354 page book comes armed with a 33 page bibliography. It reads like a PhD thesis, with numbered paragraphs and that academic habit of announcing what you're going to say, saying it and then summarising again, as if repetition achieves clarity rather than irritation and boredom. Truly dialectical discourse recognises that exposition changes both writer and reader: a genuine ‘summary' breaks into something new (if not, it's like listening to an inarticulate dimbo with a Power Point presentation and bullet points: insufferable). This explains why ‘analytical' philosophers find Marx so frustrating: he never repeats a formulation (‘never sticks to his definitions').
Shah-Shuja claims to be ‘study-extending the class struggle' by deriving a ‘conceptual tool-kit' from Vygotsky, Volosinov, Bakhtin and Activity Theory. These impressive names are raided for the usual postmodern list of preferences (flexibility over rigidity, equality over hierarchy, democracy over oppression, dialogue over monologue, creativity over mechanicism etc. etc.), but without understanding how class analysis (i.e. Marx's theory) was the crucial insight for these thinkers. The ‘proletarian' in Shah-Shuja's title confers a certain shock. It revives a term deleted from the postmodern/liberal lexicon (a shock first exploited when Stewart Home coined the phrase ‘proletarian postmodernism'). However, here, ‘proletarian' designates anyone who choses to attend anti-capitalist protests. This is strange because such a temporary combination of people has no determinate relationship to capital. The Stop the War Coalition is excoriated for ‘containing' protest on 15 February 2003, as if most people on the demonstration arrived tooled-up for insurrection. This is the subjectivist vision of a few fired-up souls.
Shah-Shuja thinks otherwise, but after 15 February, the left did try to move for strike protests against the attack on Iraq. Unfortunately, it discovered that most protestors, however morally outraged by Bush and Blair, were not organised in class positions antagonistic to capitalism. In other words, the demonstration was not ‘proletarian'. Therefore, despite the numbers, it did not have the political impact of the Poll Tax Riot of 1990. Anti-war mobilisations after 15 February became smaller and smaller, demoralising those who attended. Shah-Shuja attacks the left who want routine marches in order to buzz up contacts and recruit them, but it's hard to see in the absence of mass strikes and occupations what other route serious revolutionaries should take. For Shah-Shuja, only practical transgressions of bourgeois law educate us in revolution. But, as we learned at Welling in 1993, if we declare we are going to take the law into our own hands and burn down a fascist headquarters, the state has no qualms about cracking hundreds of heads plus jail sentences for demonstrators caught on video to demonstrate who is really in charge. As the Bolsheviks showed, a successful revolution depends upon political organisation and strategic planning.
According to Shah-Shuja, ‘zones of proletarian development' derives from Vygotsky's ‘zones of proximate development', but the immediate resonance is the ‘temporary autonomous zones' of Hakim Bey (unfairly vilified). It's hard to see what is really added to a TAZ except the frisson of ‘proletarian': what's described is equally general, unrooted in any determinate social milieu. It's all very well to list the ‘good' aspects of anti-capitalist protests the unpredictability, the mutual exchange of ideas, the lack of hierarchy but to what end? This kind of politics always reduces to a list of desirable adjectives. It's unable to explain either why people do things or what we should do. When the National Front announced it was going to trash a pub in Somers Town because the IRA once met there, the local left and Irish defended the pub. The Reclaim the Streets meeting advertised there that night ‘relocated to Hampstead'. No doubt they were ‘fluid/nomadic' and we were ‘rigid/sedentary', but for me keeping the fascists out of my locality was more important than postmodern style options (or should that be ‘ethics'?). Like Hakim Bey's TAZs, Shah-Shuja's ‘zones' feel like leisure spaces, they lack political urgency. We haven't yet encountered Hegel's dialectical Aufhebung of Kant's antinomy between freedom and necessity (the dialectical Aufhebung behind the Communist Manifesto).
Marxism has long wrestled with the paradox of hatching a philosophy devoted to changing the world rather than describing it. The institution of the party was designed to mediate between theory and practice. Shah-Shuja will have none of the party. Despite the fact that this anti-Leninism is political prejudice, devoid of any investigation into Russian history, Shah-Shuja's reaction to party members and literature is far from unique. Anarchists, liberals and conservatives all say the same thing: the revolutionary left are robots, they cannot think for themselves. In defence, individual paper-sellers may not carry a brilliant response to every criticism wherever they go. However, a party has systems for the discussion of ideas, and positions are worked out through discussion and debate. You can find a more or less intelligent answer to most questions once you follow the paper trail. Shah-Shuja's situationist-style loathing for the organised left has something drunk about it: a regressive tantrum that I am not the centre of the world you're talking about.
This is not to say that a left discourse which leaves people alienated is sufficient. Far from it. The need to reorient subjectivity in a system which denies it is pressing and real. Alcohol would not be such an effective and necessary drug if it didn't address pertinent social tensions. To tackle such issues, thought would need to rise above Activity Theory to the heights of Adorno or Debord i.e. burst the bounds of Social Studies and show how philosophical issues are concrete. The mind/body problem is not an issue in philosophy, it's what we're all having to live through right now! Capitalist commerce and media have no room for the development of individual subjectivity, reducing us to consumers measured in spending power. The proliferation of specialised niche markets down to the ‘everyone their own Hello magazine' of myspace has not diminished the motivic thrust of the operation: the accumulation of abstract social power, or money. This produces alienation and misery, miraculously cured by the infantilism induced by alcohol. The drunk is suddenly the centre of the world again, just like a baby in its mother's arms. The problem with attaining this state through alcohol is that the drunk has difficulties engaging with anyone else's rational practice, demanding instead physical and sexual contact. Since mental health is dependent on a continuous and subtle interplay between the registers of mind and body (sexual advances by a drunk are an insult to the higher faculties, even if the drunk is desired), drink is a solution which creates problems rather than results. Nevertheless, it articulates a longing for centredness and de-alienation which cannot be wished away without changing social relations. The moralisers can repeat their injunctions until their tongues rot in their mouths, but the question of drink is social, not individual. The routine rationalism of commodity capitalism denies a necessity for our species being: a social mediation between the realms of dream and consciousness. Addressing this is the task of revolutionary art (that this mediation is increasingly addressed by religion is one of the grotesque features of our times).
Given the way academia has Balkanised knowledge, the lessons of Adorno and Debord are everywhere unlearned. Speaking about capitalism and alcohol in the same breath is beyond academic capability. Can Shah-Shuja do it? Unfortunately, the realm of art where subjectivity is defined according to objective works which may be scientifically scrutinised is not accessible from the world of Social Studies this book is aimed at, for whom a subject is already a social agent. Marx saw proletarian revolution as the solution to this object/subject split . The problem with Shah-Shuja's attack on moribund left organisation (of which there is plenty; take your pick ...), is that it doesn't mobilise this central idea, but instead provides a list of ‘shoulds' about communication. As John Michael Roberts pointed out in his review in Radical Philosophy (#153), to damn workers' parties and trade unions as ‘reactionary' and then use Lave and Wenger's notion of ‘communities of practice' brings us on to the terrain of management theory, not revolution. Shah-Shuja's injunctions about democracy are reminiscent of the educational programmes designed by consultants for Camden Council, where young people are brought together to ‘express themselves', and wind up making pop videos telling us that the key to life is to remain drug-free and not drop litter.
Vygotsky was of course correct to see revolutionary theory as a product of people coming together to make revolution. But I don't see how excluding those who've thought about it most (the party people) is going to improve the level of discussion. My own experience of the European Social Forum (according to Shah-Shuja, a bourgeois charade orchestrated by the hideous SWP) was of tepid circles of bleating liberals bemoaning their lot, with any revolutionary fires long ago doused. If anyone cited Marx or Lenin, it was as if booze had been smuggled into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Indeed, it was an object-lesson in how the ‘openness' Shah-Shuja calls for dissipates proletarian consciousness.
When Shah-Shuja ‘theorises' Iranian football riots with a Bakhtinian ‘celebration' of the repressed body, the reprise of a hoary cult-studs theme is the opposite of riotous. It reads like the work of a slightly dim but hardworking student with aspirations for tenure, not revolution. Llikewise the paean to pirates at the end; fashions look so tawdry in retrospect: Linebaugh, Westwood, Acker, Depp, oh dear. Of course, there are many inspiring left writers who rely on academia to pay the bills, but they also need independence of mind and a dialectical relationship with their subject. The Iranian football rioters are never going to hear what Shah-Shuja says about them, they are there as an exotic citation of virtue for pious citation by Activity Theory pundits. Shah-Shuja believes in ‘dialogue' but there's none happening here: at least when Alex Callinicos says what he thinks about the last TUC Conference in Socialist Worker he knows that informed trade-unionists are going to read him. The party disciplines intellectuals, and that is a good thing from a proletarian point of view.
Shah-Shuja's inspiration for the book was two brief analyses of the May Day riots issued by a group calling itself the Melancholic Troglodytes. These are both funny and incisive. They are reproduced in appendices and have precisly the urgency of address which the main text lacks. It is not so much Shah-Shuja's academic pretentions that are at fault, but the uncritical way sources are cited. Marxist polemic puts all writing before the tribunal of life-as-lived; this kind of writing displays its reading as if all texts are solid gold. This positivism is abetted by use of the Harvard method for references, which has Humanities authors referring to published texts in the way scientists reference the results of experiments: by author and date (the full reference appears in the bibliography at the end of the volume). Empirical science works in a completely different way to social theory. When I say ‘Crystals form in the third layer (Thompson, 1998)' I am referencing an empirical result produced under laboratory conditions, one of the building blocks of scientific knowledge. When I say ‘gestures help create a sense of shared social, symbolic, physical, and mental space (McCafferty, 2002)', I am probably citing a piece of dubious, pompous gibberish in order to obtain a tick in the margin from someone who has also wasted their life reading dubious, pompous gibberish. The terms are so open and depend so much on the individual author's line of argument that the citation itself cannot bear sceptical scrutiny. Of course, entire discipines have been made out of this kind of pseudo-science, where the uncritical piling up of references in refereed journals is ‘scholarship', but it's not a game for anyone claiming to be a revolutionary. Shah-Shuja, how could you?
This academic tone is mildly offset by photographs with speech bubbles which appear situationist, but which are usually silly rather than cutting, allowing Shah-Shuja's political prejudices full rein. Low dots per inch resolution means some of the text in these are indecipherable. Further annoyances: Globalize Resistance is excoriated for ‘leading' May Day 2001 into the siege of Oxford Street (p. 69), while the much-praised Melancholic Troglodytes argue that there was no other option (p. 318); ‘counter-revolutionary Leninists' like Raya Dunayesvskaya and John Parrington are cited positively (p. 173, p. 167) without remarking on the contradiction. For political reasons, Shah-Shuja's intellectual debts can't be admitted. ‘Dialogue' is the great cry but there is no dialogue with other revolutionaries, they're all bastards, the left wing of capital. Written to impress social theory academics rather than activists, the book accepts anti-revolutionary principles at the level of expression and format.
Shah-Shuja does say at the beginning that the stand-off between Leninism and anarchism is not 'black and white', but the bile directed at the organised left becomes hysterical and silly. As with racism, one feels such paranoia must stem from a complete lack of contact with the hated object. It does, however, articulate the horror of the lonely bohemian intellectual for organisations which freeze thought long enough for non-intellectuals to join them. The intellectual can only see the arrest of his/her life activity; but for the trade unionist or activist, that is where life might start a clear aim in view, something to act on. All these disputes, intellectual versus worker, spontaneity versus organisation, subject versus object, are really regression from a total criticism of capitalism to a squabble between character types. To solve this, we need to recall the writings of one of Marx's inspirations, Charles Fourier. Charles Fourier envisaged socialism as the full indulgence of specific proclivities. He bitterly mocked and satirised social programmes, Christian or ‘ethical', based upon denying human nature. He devised systems of social interaction (‘phalanxes') in which the different types of humanity could fulfill their desires in ways that did not come into conflict with the desires of other human types, but could work with them. Gossips should read the news, anal retentives design postage stamps, foot fetishists work in shoe shops (I love this idea, it's so unPC). An image for this kind of cooperation might be the relationship of the animal to the plant world, where the ‘waste' product of one realm of living beings provides the necessary environment for the other realm (we depend upon the oxygen given off by plant photosynthesis; plants thrive on minerals provided by animal faeces). Anyone who has been involved in revolutionary moments of political endeavour, where propagandistic ‘politics' breaks into a substantive attack on capitalist relations, will tell you about marvellous moments where ‘each according to their means' suddenly makes sense: where the ability to use a word processor, engage in fisticuffs, play a guitar or drive a bulldozer suddenly becomes something to unite us rather than set us apart. By denying the role of the party (‘the memory of the class'), Shah-Shuja denies knowledge, scholarship and publication a place in the spectrum of revolutionary endeavour. In its turn, revolutionary ardour becomes a priceless thing-in-itself (rather like animal species in radical animal liberation theory): something to be protected and praised, but not argued with by the researcher. Shah-Shuja is all for ‘dialogue', but has no way of setting up a dialogue between intellectuals and protestors. Instead we hear calls for ‘sensitivity' (p. 84. p. 87, p. 300).
Where is the man who will stand up and say ‘let's NOT save the children'? Sensitivity, spontaneity, freedom are all such good things. Obviously. But how do we foment these desirable attributes? How do we get out of here, where capitalist interests and motives appear to proceed unchecked? Couldn't ‘totally revolutionary' critique of day-to-day socialist activism and organisation be ideal camouflage for conformism and careerism within a repellent system? The guy who proclaims situationist hatred for left parties and trade unions, writes for Adbusters and then winds up organising a conference on ‘guerilla tactics' for publicising clothing brands? One wishes the whole of Zones of Proletarian Development had been written by Melancholic Troglodytes, i.e. with the satirical freedom and venom which comes from being a Marxist intellectual with no comrades to offend. Such was Trotsky before 1917. In 1917, he appreciated the work Lenin had done in building a party that could prevent Kornilov's counter-revolution, (which would have perpetrated a bloodbath on a Nazi scale), from joining and helping to lead the Bolsheviks. One wonders if Shah-Shuja could be that ‘flexible'? The prospect of a Department of Anti-Capitalist Activity Theory headed by Shah-Shuja, with undergraduates repeating ZPD formulae without having to test its ideas in practice (one stupidity avoided by the despised party form), is uninspiring compared to the fact that minds as witty and anti-authoritarian as the Melancholic Troglodytes can still find issues to write about in the twenty-first century: an oasis of intelligence and revolutionary wit in a movement drowning in whole-world NGO-reformist moralism. And we should also celebrate the fact that an aspirant academic should dare to base a book on two of their leaflets.
Ben Watson <irritant AT esemplasm.co.uk> has written books on Frank Zappa and Derek Bailey; he is currently researching Herman Samuel Reimarus on the art instincts of animals and Giambattista Vico on myth in order to combat the implacable Cartesianism of fashionable French theory. He is also co-founder of www.militantesthetix.co.uk
Info Mastaneh Shah-Shuja, Zones of Proletarian Development, OpenMute, 2008
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Degeneration
We previously said; Of mice and strawmen!
First I would like to thank Ben Watson for his review of my book and also Jennifer for her enthusiastic support. I was going to hold back until more people have had a chance to comment but decided to intervene now in order to ensure a civil debate. I am sure regardless of our background we can talk with each other rather than shout across the internet. If this is going to be a productive debate then certain misconceptions need to be cleared up straight away.
Truth is I do not recognise my own book from Ben Watson’s description. I want to deal with a number of strawmen he has constructed below, especially for the benefit of those who haven’t seen the book.
Strawman no. 1: Watson writes: “The failure of the Russian revolution is inscribed in every attempt at working class organisation”. But this is not my position. I am for working class people coming together and organising- however, I am against the notion of a Bolshevik Party. The Russian Revolution failed for a number of complex internal and external reasons (including the counter-revolutionary role played by the Bolsheviks) and not because of working class organising!!!
Strawman no. 2: Watson writes: “Zones of Proletarian Development is a contribution to Social Studies”. Not so. My book is, amongst other things, a critique of social studies and academic learning in general. I have made that abundantly clear throughout.
Strawman no. 3: Watson writes: “If Lenin was simply a tyrant…”. But hang on- I have never made such a claim. I have said Lenin was a petty bourgeois who became a grand bourgeois and presided over capitalist USSR. He might have been manipulative and authoritarian but not a tyrant. Stalin was a tyrant, not Lenin. Between 1917-24 the preconditions for a tyrant to centralise all power and govern through fear and bribery were not present. There were too many semi-independent power bases both inside and outside the Bolshevik Party to allow the emergence of a tyrant.
Strawman no. 4: Watson sarcastically ascribes the following position to me: “… so an imperialist Russia with gulags and the H-Bomb must have been Lenin’s intent at the start…”. I have never said that and this is not my position. I do not even mention H-Bombs and gulags in the book! Is it possible Watson is unintentionally fighting past battles with other people?
Strawman no. 5: Watson claims: “These impressive names [Vygotsky, Volosinov, Bakhtin and Activity Theory] are raided for the usual postmodern list of preference”. But hang on; I am neither a modernist nor a postmodernist. I have tried to go beyond these categories and express capitalism through a vocabulary in line with working class interests. How can this not be clear to Mr. Watson? I do not understand.
Strawman no. 6: Watson accuses me of using the term ‘proletarian’ for its shock value and of defining it uncritically: “…proletarian [is designated by Shah-Shuja as] anyone who chooses to attend the anti-capitalist protests”. I have been using terms like proletarian since I was 12 years old, not to shock but because using them makes sense! In the book I have made great efforts not only to provide a useful definition of proletarian but to encourage a debate about class. Also I have made it patently clear a crowd usually consists of other classes and one of our tasks should be to understand our relationship to petty bourgeois and lumpenproletarian protestors in order to ensure their support. Watson’s accusations are beginning to look suspiciously like a hatchet job!
Strawman no. 7: Watson writes: “For Shah-Shuja, only practical transgressions of bourgeois law educate us in revolution”. Nonsense! Again this is a caricature. Please read the book again Mr. Watson (unless you have burnt it already!). I watched a movie called Stalin recently starring Robert Duvall and based on the biography of Stalin’s daughter. It wasn’t exactly a revolutionary transgression of bourgeois law but nonetheless very ‘educational’!!
Strawman no. 8: Mr. Watson then goes at a tangent and discusses his heroic role in defending a pub against the National Front when according to him Reclaim the Streets legged it to another pub! I was not there and will have to take Watson’s account on trust. But the question is, what has any of this got to do with me? I am not a member of Reclaim the Streets. Why am I being put on trial through guilt by (non) association?
Strawman no. 9: Watson keeps calling me a democrat (well besides other insults): “Shah-Shuja’s injunctions about democracy are reminiscent of the educational programmes designed by consultants …”. ‘Democracy’ is one of those loaded terms with a complicated genealogy which is precisely why I tried to avoid it. I think the only time it is mentioned is in relation to Bordiga’s critique of it. I may have mentioned it critically in the Camatte section too. So what injunctions about democracy is Watson talking about? Educational programmes and consultancy?? What??? Even a hatchet job should be performed with a modicum of finesse, Mr Watson; you wield yours far too amateurishly!
Strawman no. 10: Watson then writes: “… the European Social Forum (according to Shah-Shuja, a bourgeois charade orchestrated by the hideous SWP)…”. Another caricature! I have criticised the ESF in chapter 5 on a number of issues but I do not believe the SWP has the nous to organise an entire front on its own. However, it is absolutely true that I find the SWP ‘hideous’.
Strawman no. 11: Watson complains: “For political reasons, Shah-Shuja’s intellectual debt can’t be admitted”. This is incredibly dishonest of you Mr Watson. I have bent over backwards to clarify my political position regarding just about anyone mentioned in the book. And I have been flexible enough to use arguments from individual modernists, postmodernists, Leninists, Anarchists, Autonomists and Situationists whenever they have made sense even though I am against all these trends. Just because I am anti-Leninist does not mean I feel obliged to disagree with everything Raya Dunayevskaya ever wrote!!! In fact, I am currently reading her book Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution and enjoying it immensely. Mr Watson, your criticisms are kindergarten stuff. Please! I am sure you can do better.
Strawman no. 12: Watson then goes beyond the bounds of decency by comparing me with a racist!!! Having accused me of being ‘hysterical and silly’ (a form of denunciating troublesome women that sadly comes too easily to some men!) he writes: “As with racism, one feels such paranoia must stem from a complete lack of contact with the hated object [i.e., Leninists]”. All my life, whether in the ‘Middle East’ or in the ‘West’, I have been surrounded by liberals, fascists, religious reactionaries and Leninists, including SWP leaders. I have come across Tony Cliff, Chris Harman, Alex Callinicos, John Rees and Lindsey German. I can assure you my distrust and dislike of them comes from direct first hand experience and is not due to ‘lack of contact’!
Strawman no. 13: The review then stoops to personal attacks by calling me “a lonely, bohemian intellectual”. Mr Watson I have never been a bohemian or an intellectual. I am a wage-slave (lonely but not alone as with billions of other wage-slaves).
Strawman no. 14: Again Watson sets up an imaginary scene in order to compare me with a sell-out: “The guy who proclaims situationist hatred for parties and trade unions, writes for Adbusters and then winds up organising a conference on ‘guerilla tactics’ for publicising clothing brand”. For the final time, I am not a situationist and do not write for Adbusters. I do not have the energy to organise conferences on ‘guerilla tactics’. Your accusations are neither accurate not witty, they are merely rhetorical, put forward for the purpose of point scoring!
Strawman no. 15: Watson accuses me throughout of being an academic and of careerism! In fact at present I am surviving as a translator, sandwich-maker and occasional writer! But he has given me a way out of the poverty trap. He writes: “The prospect of a Department of Anti-Capitalist Activity Theory headed by Shah-Shuja, with undergraduates repeating ZPD formulae … is uninspiring”. On the contrary- it is a wonderful idea! Inspired! It can totally turn my life around. Thanks for the career advice Mr Watson!
****** I think I will stop here even though there are many more inaccuracies and fabrications in Mr Watson’s ‘review’. Mr Watson, if you wish to pursue this debate further please stick to what I have said and not what you think/wish I’d said! And please wield your Bolsheviki hatchet a bit more carefully lest you accidently injure yourself! Your ‘review’ has two major aims: to defend the SWP and to put people off reading Zones of Proletarian Development. Mr Bolsheviki, YOU WILL FAIL!
Mastaneh Shah-Shuja
Pictures and images
Thanks for all those clarifications, Mastaneh. Watson’s ‘review’ is even worse than I thought. But I just read another review of your book, this one in Radical Philosophy, no. 153, by John Michael Roberts. Watson actually cites Roberts and gives the impression Roberts is also negative about your book. Far from it- Roberts’s review is very positive. (Unfortunately it does not seem to be available online but those with access to the printed version can verify this for themselves). Just to illustrate my point, I’ll give one example. All the wonderful drawings, images and figures in the book are dismissed by Watson as ‘silly’. It is his prerogative to think so, of course. But this is a more thoughtful reviewer on the same subject (I have abbreviated the quote): ‘Zones of Proletarian Development is peppered throughout with drawings, cartoons, (reformatted) photographs and diagrams that illustrate the arguments put forward … [this style] visually grabs the attention of the reader. For example many of the reformatted photographs are very funny and momentarily shift attention from just reading the main text. Images are conjured up that relate the words on the page with the real word. This provides an innovative way of drawing in the reader’s attention and also gives a constant reminder of the link between theory and practice. The various drawings and other images similarly add to the clarity of the link between theory and practice.’ (Roberts, 2009, Radical Philosophy, page 59). ZPD seems to be like marmite- you either love it or hate it! I loved it because it made me think afresh about a lot of issues. Ben Watson hates it because he feels his beloved Bolshevism and SWP under threat. I suspect this feeling of insecurity has been aggravated due to SWP’s recent internal blood feud and factional fighting. Insecurity breeds resentment and prejudice! Mastaneh you should consider yourself lucky that Watson used only sexist put downs (‘silly’, ‘hysterical’, ‘paranoid’, etc). He could have got really aristocratic and called you ‘paki’, ‘raghead’ or ‘sooty’!!! ZPD!
The Melancholic Troglodytes have been dragged into this debate kicking and screaming! We have three misgivings regarding our undertaking: first, internet discussion has always proved soul destroying in our experience. There is something inherently alienating about this disembodied mode of communication which is why we avoid it whenever we can. Second, only three members of our group have read Zones of Proletarian Development and we haven’t had a full discussion about it. And third, we don’t know that much about Activity Theory and Bakhtin (to our shame none of us has fully read Bakhtin’s Dialogic Imagination). So with the proviso that we may change our mind once all members have familiarised themselves with ZPD, here are some provisional thoughts: 1) A big thanks to Ben Watson for the nice things he has said about us. We didn’t even realise SWP members read our rag. In fact his kind compliments have encouraged us to go ahead and publish a collection of our articles in a book format. On the back cover of this book, pride of place will go to Ben’s description, ‘…minds as witty and anti-authoritarian as the Melancholic Troglodytes can still find issues to write about in the twenty-first century: an oasis of intelligence and revolutionary wit in a movement drowning in whole-world NGO-reformist moralism.’ Wow, we are blushing and purring with self-satisfaction. 2) Now regarding Ben and Mastaneh: Ben we have never met. He seems like an interesting character and better read than the average SWP theoretician. Mastaneh, we have met only twice. She struck us as supremely intelligent and completely genuine. In fact we have already suggested collaborating with her on a couple of projects and we are pleased to say she has agreed. We simply cannot accept Ben’s description of her as ‘careerist and conformist’. Here is a radical who has denounced liberalism, social democracy, fascism, god, religion, academia, modernism, postmodernism, bolshevism as well as rejecting huge chunks of anarchism, left communism, autonomism and situationism. She criticises institutions like Indymedia, ESF, NGO’s, middle class anti-globalisers, CND, etc. She has quite deliberately left herself no allies other than unnamed proletarians out there. How can this be conformist or careerist? We feel Ben should reconsider his position. 3) Ben describes the Bakhtinian analysis of Iranian football rioters (chapter 3) as ‘slightly dim’. He is entitled to his opinion of course but we liked it. It forced us to look at things differently. We just hope it has the same impact in the Middle East. Incidentally, Stewart Home also liked it because he has used it extensively in his talk at Tate Modern. Stewart does something very simple and quite brilliant. He juxtaposes Debord on the Watts riots with Mastaneh on the Iranian riots. We found the comparison fascinating. You can find it at <http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/level2/war.htm> 4) Ben claims Mastaneh’s ZPD are the same as Hakim Bey’s TAZ with a ‘frisson of proletarian’. Ouch! That must have hurt. To us they seem a world apart. Mastaneh’s critique of Bey hits the mark. It is not an ‘unfair vilification’ at all. 5) Ben castigates the book for just ‘listing’ the good aspects of the anti-capitalist protests. This is not our reading. We feel what Mastaneh is doing is showing ways of doing revolution- ways of doing revolution that can be adapted to everyday activities, strikes, future demos, etc. She demonstrates the processes that have escalated the class struggle successfully in a wide set of historical and contemporary examples. 6) There is a curious sentence half way through the review regarding Ben’s friend, Alex Callinicos. Ben writes, ‘Shah-Shuja believes in dialogue but there is none happening [between her and Iranian workers]: at least when Alex Callinicos says what he thinks about the last TUC Conference in Socialist Worker he knows that informed trade-unionists are going to read him. The party disciplines the intellectuals, and that is a good thing from a proletarian point of view’. Emmmmmm, a strange comment on many fronts. First how does Ben know whether Iranian workers are going to read Mastaneh or not? Surely this is a job for Nostradamus! Also, if Ben is saying Callinicos is a big man, an important man, then we must all agree. And if he is saying Callinicos is listened to by other big, important men in the TUC, then we are sure that is the case. If Ben is implying that by comparison Mastaneh labours in wilderness, then again we would agree (as we’re sure Mastaneh would too). But does this mean everyone not as big and important as Callinicos should kindly shut up? Does this include Melancholic Troglodytes since frankly no one important has ever listened to us (the last issue of Mel Trogs sold 7 copies – half of them purchased by family members!!!)? Should we shut up too and let Callinicos talk for us from now on? Actually we have talked enough for now. We are shutting up. Melancholic Troglodytes Proletarian sectarianism now!
Why is Mute publishing Bolshevik party apologetics like Watson's guff? It's less a review of the book in question, more a rejoinder to those aspects of the book's political critique that the 'reviewer' is uncomfortable with. I.e., a poor excuse for yet another restatement of the SWP line. The value and quality of the best content Mute publishes is precisely that it is part of a radical theoretical current that rejected Bolshevism and its anti-working class role back in the early 20th century (if not before). The rest is mostly leftist crap or the death throes of the search for artistic 'meaning'. But presumably Mute want to be a big tent/broad church and be accommodating enough to make an impartial equivalent of all radical-sounding intellectual products. Sod that. Standing with one foot in art, one in journalism, one in academia and one in radical theory is a recipe for little more than recuperation. The SWP - one of the most shamelessly opportunist of leftist rackets - have their own press, why indulge them - unless you feel in alliance with/sympathetic to them theoretically (or impressed by the staus of one of their 'big names')? If that's the case, then you're badly missing the point and the logic behind the historical/theoretical development of the decent stuff you publish. If one wants to measure theory according to its 'sophistication' and aesthetic style and language one can easily make a groovy equivalent of leftist, arty, recuperative and radical theory alike - on the basis they contain some of the same trendy name-droppings and buzzwords and are all vaguely 'oppositional' to something. If one wants to evaluate theory according to its subversive usefulness and potential application in struggle then one must begin to be partisan. More principled partisanship and sectarianism, please. review
 another review here: http://uo.twenteenthcentury.com/index.php/Zones_of_Proletarian_Development
Radio gagaaaaaaaaa!
Every time I revisit Ben Watson’s review I discover more anomalies. I think there are three interrelated issues here: first, Watson is superficial (he is after all a music journalist- that is his level) whereas Shah-Shuja actually knows what she is talking about; second, Watson is a middle-class Leninist (SWP to be precise) whereas Shah-Shuja is a working class communist (so there is a great deal of class antagonism there); and third, Watson is elitist. Let me give some examples. First issue: The superficiality of Watson is there for all to see in the opening paragraphs. He doesn’t understand the complex relationship between (neo)liberalism and (neo)Keynesianism. He thinks J. M. Keynes is only being reconsidered post credit-crunch. This is nonsense. Both before and after August 2008 most sections of the world ruling class used a mixture of neo-liberalism and neo-Keynesianism to regulate society and accumulate capital. The main thing that has changed in recent months is the ratio of these two ideologies. Robert Wade (New Left Review, 53) shows how the bourgeoisie was employing ‘covert Keynesian policies’ to subsidize corporations and stabilize the economy even before the ‘crisis’. Ronald Reagan for instance nationalised Bank Illinois and initiated ‘military Keynesianism’. The advanced western states have always used ‘targeted protection’ in order to promote development. The ‘free market’ is a myth which only the very, very naive fall for. John Barker also argues along the same lines (Variant, 32) when he says ‘the irony is that the neoliberal model depends on a cocktail of Keynesianism, military asset, and personal indebtedness, which might also be called privatized Keynesianism’. Two other writers (Anwar Shaikh and Paul Mattick, Jnr.) have also enhanced our understanding of this complex tension between neo-liberalism and neo-Keynesianism. So the situation is far more complicated than Watson’s hackneyed narrative. Another example of superficiality is Watson’s insistence on giving ‘anti-capitalism’ a precise calendar date. Just like a journalist would I guess! He writes ‘the advent of anti-capitalism with a large, lively […] demonstration outside Liverpool Street in June 1999’. Yes J18 was important; no it was not the ‘advent of anti-capitalism’. Second issue: the class antagonism is key to understanding the tone of Watson’s diatribe. The book’s working class communist ideology is obviously a threat to Watson and all middle class Leninists. The Left is schooled in rebuffing criticisms from liberal and fascist quarters but when proletarian revolutionaries denounce the Left for being reactionary, their response becomes confused. Watson throws a great deal of mud at Shah-Shuja in the hope that at least some of it sticks (so Shah-Shuja is accused of being postmodernist, liberal and anarchist, etc.). When Watson in classic middle class, puritanical style denounces alcohol as infantile his contempt for the ‘other’ becomes flagrant. He asserts, ‘drink is a solution which creates problems rather than results’. This is the kind of dogmatic, Eurocentric nonsense I have come to expect from the likes of Watson. As the book tries to explain it is the context within which alcohol, drugs, music and sex are taken up by proletarians that determines whether they are being used to subvert or buttress capitalism. One cannot make absolutist, dogmatic assertions for all times and cultures. Third issue: Watson simply does not understand why so many radicals detest and despise the SWP. Listen to your own words, Watson, and you may begin to understand. Watson believes SWP bigwigs are superior to all other anti-capitalists. He writes, ‘I don’t see how excluding those who’ve thought about [revolutionary theory] most (the party people) is going to improve the level of discussion’!!!!! What arrogance! Or if that is not bad enough listen to this line by Watson, ‘By denying the role of the party (‘the memory of the class’), Shah-Shuja denies knowledge’!!!!!!! In other words it is the party that gathers up, distils, purifies and represents the actions of us plebs. The party is our memory banks because we are too fucking stupid to have a collective memory of our own. Presumably if it wasn’t for the party our collective memory would just vanish into the ether!! It is precisely this kind of anti-working class elitism that makes so many of us hate the SWP. In fact what the party does is to deny or misrepresent those proletarian ideas it disagrees with and to reinforce those that validate the party and its petty bureaucrats. I think there is a concerted effort to undermine Zones of Proletarian Development. A recent discussion on Resonance Radio hosted by Ben Watson is proof of this. The interviewee is an ‘Iranian’ with little understanding of the class struggle who has been invited to the studio in order to make Watson sound clever- the way BBC, ITV and Channel 4 have been interviewing a myriad of reactionaries for various programmes about the 30th anniversary of the 'Iranian revolution'. Naturally the interviewee has not even read the book!!!!! Watson and all party-builders have always preferred monologue to dialogue. It is so much easier to score points and sound clever when the interviewee has not even read the book under discussion. That would be game, set and match to the genius SWP interviewer. Good show Mr. Watson!! Good show! Try interviewing a card-board next time, you are sure to score even more points J Jennifer Ryan
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I am extremely proud to have been one of the earliest reviewers of Zones of Proletarian Development (ZPD) because I think it is going to be a path-breaking book. My review is very short, to the point and positive and therefore the perfect counterpoint to Ben Watson’s piece. I strongly recommend Mute readers to check it out at <http://libcom.org/library/a-brief-review-zones-proletarian-development-jennifer-ryan>.
I find Watson’s piece very puzzling: is it really a review of ZPD or an ode to Lenin, Trotsky and the Socialist Workers’ Party? (Watson forgets to mention he has been a party functionary of the SWP for many years).
Watson doesn’t inform the would-be reader about the book or any of its many novel aspects. I am surprised Mute editors published it at all. Frankly it is the kind of piece one would expect from Spiked magazine! Also it is extremely misleading. For example, it insists the book is a contribution to the Social Studies but Shah-Shuja is at pains to explain her book is against Social Studies (page 1-2).
Maybe Watson wanted to review a book about Russia but this is not a book about Russia- it is about contemporary class struggle outside the deadening alienation of Bolshevik stupor. When Watson deals with the actual content of the book he does not seem to be able to follow Shah-Shuja’s arguments. He accuses ZPD of being liberal (!), then of being conservative (!!), then of being Anarchist (!!!). Shah-Shuja explains her politics very clearly but Watson’s understanding of tendencies like Anarchism, Left Communism, Autonomism, Situationism, Libertarian Socialism, etc seems confused and clichéd. I recommend he spends a few months carefully studying the many wonderful texts on the libcom website.
Watson accuses the ZPD of being no more than ‘leisurely spaces’- this after Shah-Shuja has spent many pages describing the violence, dynamism and unpredictability involved in the anti-poll tax riot, the Iranian football riots and some of the May Day London demos!! Watson also accuses the ZPD of being an updated version of Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zones. But on pp. 234-239 Bey’s stupid concept of TAZ is totally demolished! What is going on here?!
Instead of a serious, intelligent critical review of a seminal book we get insults, lies and distortions. Why did Mute ask someone so ill-informed and ill-equipped to review ZPD? Don’t these party hacks have their own printing press?
Finally, Watson asks, ‘So can we now jettison Lenin and become Shah-Shujaites?’ Well, politically conscious workers jettisoned Lenin decades ago and since we don’t believe in cults of personality we are not going to embrace an alternative leader no matter how brilliant she is. Anyway ‘Shah-Shujaites’ is too much of a mouthful. Perhaps a truncated version? How about, ‘Shujai(s)? My Middle Eastern boyfriend tells me it means ‘Braveheart(s)’. So can the SWP now jettison Lenin and become Shujais? Well, why the hell not? It would be an improvement. J