Manifestos


The ASSOCIATION OF MUSICAL MARXISTS was founded by Andy Wilson and Ben Watson after being subjected to a thirty-minute eternity of Bourdieu-style ‘objective’ sociology of music at the recent Historical Materialism conference.

Sick of being treated like party-spoilers, soppy mystics and ‘undertheorised’ unprofitable scum, the devotees of truth in music have decided to stand up and make themselves heard. 

WE are no longer going to sit on our hands and bite our tongues

WE are going to proclaim our proclivities as the cosmo-biologico-social necessity they truly are

WE are no longer prepared to tolerate boring music and lying hacks 'for the good of the cause'

WE shall embrace great music regardless of genre as the pattern for reshaping humanity and the key to the dialectic

For US, music is a test of you and everything about you, and if you fail that test YOU ARE THE ENEMY!!!

We are no longer prepared to be herded in a shtetl marked Art or Noise or Avant-garde: we are talking about music, the last location of 'soul' in modern man, the royal road to a satisfied subject and an engaged species being. Our first requirement for anything we take on board is that it's REVOLUTIONARY.

Hence, we loved to hear Tony Cliff harangue the throng; and we love to read Society of the Spectacle - however 'contradictory' that sounds to the accountants of political reason. But how come Cliff professed himself 'deaf' to music? Worse, why did Guy Debord never make public his enthusiasm for the music of John Coltrane and Archie Shepp? For us, late ‘Trane is a PLAN OF ACTION, A PRINCIPLE OF LIFE and a CRITICISM OF BUSINESS AS USUAL. We leave the candyass professionals of music commentary to stew in their own duplicitous juices: we shall take the burning zeal instigated in us by Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram and use it to revive a tired Marxism, make new friends, create disorder on the streets and bring down the ConDem government. Come and talk to us where you see the AMM banner.

xi-2010
info@ammarxists.org

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Written 18 October 2011 i.e. Chuck Berry's birthday

The mistake of all hitherto-existing revolutionary lefts was that they believed in theory and practice without poiesis - Dadaist unrespected and disrespectful punkrock-improv productivity i.e. the free exchange of everything happening in our everyday lives and experimental reworking of all tokens. Using the counterculture for what it gives us vs. verdammte ‘heritage’ culture.

We want to liberate the ideas of Karl Marx from their institutional shells and load them in our pea-shooters so we can DEEPEN THE CURRENT WAVE OF UNREST. Something more than a moral stand. Who's that talking about ‘redistribution of resources’? We gotta change the WHOLE MODE OF PRODUCTION, the way we work and the way we walk. We want to run the lot, and sod the ruling class. If we don't, we just create more red tape, like the New Labour drones sitting on the councils.

THE AMM TAKES IDEAS SERIOUSLY - the ideas in the mouths of our comrades and the people around us. But when it comes to the Postones and Balibars and Poulantzsasses and Zizeks, we don't take their ideas seriously at all. We don’t believe it's worth combatting them by writing yet another book of ‘theory’, another would-be Bible for a new bunch of left-wing robots. We mock celebrity intellectuals just as Adorno mocked Heidegger and Jaspers. Capital and Finnegans Wake and Negative Dialectics are only ‘unreadable’ from the perspective of police reality. That's because they invite a new interpretation every time they're looked at. Like Frank Zappa, they're fecund: they make us examine, not the concepts and authority of the author, but the real world we live in WITH EYES WIDE AND ALERT. Like Stewart Home's anti-novels, these books make us laugh and ACT.

If Marxist activists are not living themselves they can't talk to anyone, least of all to people intoxicated by the discovery of how collective action breaks the spell of capitalist calculation, isolation and misery. The ‘war of all against all’ instituted by capitalist competition, only works for the rich. Solidarity is only available for those who declare war on the rich, and wage it. A rapid collectivising of subjectivity will involve barricades, riots and self-definition via antagonism to those who police capitalist business-as-usual, the only reality known to those in charge of ‘the news’.

THE AMM CAN RELATE TO EVERYONE (EXCEPT SECTARIANS)! Our corpuscular esemplasm is the first bid to change the word since the Situationists.

HERE COMES EVERYBODY!

x-2011