Hanns Eisler: Contemporary Music and Fascism (1944)

Taken from Hanns Eisler – Musik und Politik – Schriften 1924-1948, ed. Günter Mayer(1973: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, Leipzig), pp. 489-493. © Stephanie Eisler.

Hanns Eisler was a German Communist, a friend and collaborator of Bertolt Brecht, writing the music for several of his plays. His sister, Ruth Fisher, was one of the leaders of the KPD in the 1920s. Eisler was one of Schoenberg's first pupils, but later dismayed his teacher by writing popular music that drew on jazz and cabaret. After the Nazi rise to power his music was banned and he fled for America, where he continued to be persecuted, being one of the first artists placed on the Hollywood blacklist by the studio heads, and appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The following are his notes for a lecture he gave in 1944.

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Before the war it was not unusual to hear people of many sorts, (particularly of the so-called professional or intellectual type) express their admiration for the successes of fascism or for the personalities of their leaders. Perhaps, they said, fascism has really brought a new idea to the world. They have found a new solution for the social crisis that dominates our time.

Success always has a certain fascination.

Today, the total bankruptcy of fascism is recognized by everyone as the biggest flop in history. German anti-fascists have always declared that fascism had nothing new to offer, neither new ideas nor even the intention to find such ideas — that it was nothing more than good, old-fashioned barbaric reaction — a more forceful and efficient suppression of the people than ever before invented — made more efficient by borrowing and stealing from all sides, digesting and adapting everything to their totalitarian purpose.

We musicians are apt to consider our art as something a little apart from life and its crises. But on the other hand music is extremely sensitive to all social trends. When fascism first touched German music, German musicians found it difficult to understand this contradiction. If Flaubert for instance could write and publish L’éducation sentimentale under Napoleon III¹ why couldn’t a modern German composer continue to write chamber-music under Hitler?

There is a reason: fascism, more organized and brutal than everything Napoleon III could imagine, cannot afford even the slightest dissonance in their artificial harmony — or a breath of opposition even in the most abstract and remote arts and sciences. Everything is controlled. Physics, mathematics, even the art of landscape or still-life painting are observed as being potentially dangerous.

What does fascism require of a musician? Nothing and everything! First of all, preserve the musicial traditions of the past. Good performances of classical music, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart continued. There was even an attempt to continue the Weimar Republic’s programme of `bringing good music to the masses’. On the other hand there was an energetic encouragement of the folk music movements. It was in folk music that they hoped to find an attractive substitute for the dominance of American jazz in the entertainment, field songs, dances, operettas, etc. Perhaps the clearest way to understand all these problems is to imagine yourself as a modern composer trying to survive fascism. What must you do? If you are young you have to find your own way after you have digested the innovations of Arnold Schönberg, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók. But before you begin, fascism stops you. The music of these three modern masters has been labelled as Kultur-Bolschewistisch, degenerate. Their works are forbidden and if you follow them you will find yourself in a dangerous position. What does fascism have against these three masters? And why especially against Schönberg, the most hated of these? Schönberg’s music reflects the complexity and crisis of our times. If I may say so, he expressed long before the invention of the airplane the fear that one experiences in an air-raid shelter under bombardment. Everything fought for by the Nazis — enthusiasm for their imperialistic goals, devotion to their leader, conformity to their way of life — all this is challenged by the work of Schönberg. The loneliness, despair, torment expressed by Schönberg, as modern society confronts him, are unacceptable to the nazis. In 1942 Herr Goebbels reafirmed the rules which the state authorities laid down for the artists:

"No art for art’s sake, no individual choice of subject. The artist should express the newly risen spirit of the Reich, he must avoid psychological problems and depict the Nazi soldier-type, the worker, the city, the industry."

According to such standards modern music became the enemy of fascism.

If you write modern music, you will have to follow certain rules. Go ahead, write it, but if you want it performed and to be supported by the Nazis, you must write an eclectic style, steering cautiously between Richard Strauss and certain moderate moderns. Has a school of modern German music come from this base? I am happy to report — no. And not for lack of talent! The majority of responsible modern German composers living in greater Germany prefer silence, writing and hiding their new works supporting themselves as conducters in provincial operahouses? Teachers, arrangers, etc.

When I was in Prague in 1937 I was visited by a young German composer who had sneaked over the border as a tourist to show me the score of his new opera, based on the events of the Thirty Years War. This extremely gifted work was written in a most advanced style so that aside from the revolutionary tendencies of the subject, the music itself, as Kultur-Bolschevismus, was unacceptable to the Nazis. When I proposed a Brussels performance of the overture alone, he was terrified.

"The Gestapo would ask me how I had not presented my score to the proper art authorities... And they have a most unpleasant manner of asking questions — even of musicians".

So he prefered silence — waiting for better weather.²

Let me tell you another story: A young German refugee composer called Leibowitz was hidden and protected by the French underground during the German occupation of Paris.³ As a gesture of gratitude he rehearsed secretly (with five French musicians) one of the most modern works of Schönberg — the Quintet for Woodwinds.

French musicians were most delighted to do this. All France was tired and disgusted with the endless mass-singing of the German soldiers, bellowing their folk and military songs. This music of Schönberg expressed at least the feeling and suffering of a human being in difficult times. These are not unique cases.

Another aspect of modern music is the so called Gebrauchsmusik — a sort of departure from modernism by those composers who were left unsatisfied writing only for the concert hall, and wanted to bring music closer to real life, even declaring that music is obliged to serve a concrete purpose. In the famous festivals of Donau-Eschingen and Baden Baden, we experimented with the media of theatre, film, radio, music for bands, community singing, schoolchildren, short operas, etc. There were two tendencies in this field. The right wing interpreted their task as purely functional —any function was good enough — dentists’ congresses or folk festivals. The left wing had a more realistic interpretation of this new function in music — the closer relation of music to practical life. The value of this music was to be measured by its usefulness to the people in their struggle. And this struggle was the struggle against reaction and fascism.

This left wing of Gebrauchsmusik was naturally a very specific enemy that had to be annihilated by Hitler. The right-wing, however, with its programme of simplicity in music, flexibility for all purposes, was welcomed and assimilated. But in ten years, all this ideas of functional music boiled down to simple marching songs, so called workers songs and patriotic jingles. The popular composer had his difficulties too. Obviously all German popular music within the past twenty years borrowed or stole from American jazz. Even the grandpa of the Viennese operetta, Léhar, began to swing a little. The statements and decrees of the Nazi authorities, forbidding all jazz music as the product of lower and degenerate races broke like a thunderbolt over the amusement market.⁴ But there were two alternatives. You could color jazz with a fake folklore dress, or, as Hitler was a close friend of Franco and has some friends in the Argentine too, Latin rhythms were permitted. Heaven alone knows how many foxtrots were dressed as tangos and rumbas — no one had told Goebbels about the African origin of the rumba. So American jazz in sheep’s clothing, has survived in the Hitler-Regime.

About folk music itself let me say only that the industrial revolution in Germany ended folk music a hundred and fifty years ago — and its so-called revival under Hitler is a purely artificial and manufactured task and has nothing to do with the real tradition of folk music. This is a museum matter in modern Germany and not the basis for creation of new musical life.

In the field of music Hitler has met defeat as total as at Stalingrad. Not even successful Quislings have appeared in the ranks of modern German composers. It is refreshing, to report that in the years of crime and corruption in Germany, German music remained silent. No Hitler symphonies, no Goering operas, no Goebbels quartets, no Horst Wessel tone poems. Although money and power were offered as never before good music and honest musicians were and always will be arch-enemies of fascism.

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1. Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) completed his L’éducation sentimentale in 1869. Napoleon III (1808-1873), nephew of Napoleon Bonaprte I reigned from 1852.
2. Eisler is most probably referring to Karl Amadeus Hartmann (1905-63) and his chamber opera Des Simplicius Simplicissimus Jugend which was composed in 1934-5 and first performed in Köln in 1949.
3. René Leibowitz (b. Warsaw, 1913) went with his parents to Paris in 1926. He studied composition, first in Berlin with Schönberg from 1930 to 1933, then with Anton Webern in Vienna.
4. At a meeting of radio directors [Radioindentanten] in 1935 it was decided that "Nigger jazz shall as of today be prohibited across the entire German radio network" (evening edition of the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 12 October 1935),

Middle Earth -> Middle Class

From Matthias Gardell's Gods of the Blood, an account of racist and fascist Aryan paganism.

Apart from the idiosyncratic casting of those who had "run their own business" as "the educated working class" when they are clearly middle class this strikes me as a useful corrective to assumptions about the class basis of modern racism and particularly fascism.

"Who is attracted to the Aryan counter-culture? The stereotypical image recycled in the media paints a picture of the generic national socialist or Aryan activit as a barely literate young man from a poor working class family with an absent or alcoholic father and traumatic childhood experiences ... While people fitting this stereotype certainly do exist on the scene there were remarkably few of them in the circles of activists that I encountered.

To undertake a class analysis of the revolutionary white racist milieu it would be beneficial to differentiate between leaders and the rank and file ... A class background typology for the leaders of the Aryan counter-culture ideologues presents a picture at odds with the stereotypical white trash thesis. Most leaders come from unbroken middle class families. A minority was raised in the upper middle class, all sons of affluent businessmen. A smaller minority came from the educated working class most of whom were children to families where the father had run his own business as, say, a radio or TV repairman or a mechanic. The second largest category comprised those who had an agrarian background and were brought up on farms. Another common background was to have been raised in a family in which the father was a small but independent businessman or manager of a small company. Some leaders came from families where the fathers had been university professors or policemen, and the remainder had fathers who worked as physicians, lawyers or pastors. All but a small minority came from non-broken families, and only one had been adopted. Very few of the up-and-coming leaders of the radical white-racist milieu had been raised in a big city. The overwhelming majority had been bought up in small town or rural surroundings, or, to a lesser extent, in suburbia. White-trash backgrounds were virtually non-existent.

When it comes to the rank and file activists, the picture is slightly different. The majority were raised in families in which the father was a military man, policeman, pastor, farmer, businessman or middle- to low-white-collar or skilled worker like an electrician, carpenter, plumber or mechanic; most of these fathers were either self-employed or worked for a small enterprise. Relative to the leaders, the number coming from skilled working-class backgrounds was higher, and the number coming from  families of high-ranking military officers was lower. As with the leaders, few had grown up in a big city ...

While the above characterisation of the typical Aryan activist might be surprising to readers accustomed to the white-trash stereotype, it is probably less astonishing to the historian of fascism. The German NSDAP mobilised strong electoral support among small but independent businessmen. artisans, farmers and military offices — that is exactly the same classes that the Aryan activists are coming from. Interpretations have suggested that these classes felt 'displaced' between big business and the working class of proletarians and have pointed at agrarian resentment against 'degenerate' metropolitan life. A comparable feeling of having been 'declassed' nurtures the emotional state of the Aryan activist."

Matthias Gardell, Gods of the Blood, Duke University Press, Durham and London 2003 pp 328-332.

Ben Watson: Music, Violence, Truth

While Industrial Culture is full of talk of 'noise' and 'noise music', few of those involved seem to realise that there are as many types of noise as there are forms of infinity. The following article was written by Ben Watson for The Wire after the 9/11 attacks. Editor Rob Young refused to publish it (he took the position that the US bombing had created "a happier Afghanistan ... music and song are returning to that devastated land" - editorial, The Wire, no 214, December 2001), causing a feud which led eventually to Watson leaving the magazine. Watson then published the article on the Militant Esthetix site. In 2002 a thousand copies were published as a free pamphlet by The Assassin Press. In it Watson provides a startling and original analysis of the role of noise and violence in music - Strelnikov

After the devastation in Manhattan on 11^th September 2001, what can radical music mean? Einstürzende Neubauten - whose name translates, prophetically, Collapsing New Buildings - earned their avant garde stripes in Britain by applying pneumatic drills to a stress-bearing beam at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. After 11^th September, such transgressions surely pale into insignificance. Indeed, any comparison might seem offensive.

At No Future, an academic conference on Punk held in Wolverhampton in late September 2001, an American delegate announced that after 9-11 the relationship of music to violence and shock needed to be rethought. The whole Punk and Noise ‘transgressive’ aesthetic, one he'd subscribed to throughout his youth, needed revision. Like watching the late Linda Lovelace, born-again and demure, denouncing porn and sex-before-marriage on a TV chat show, such reversals in ideology cannot be taken at face value. These rifts and contradictions indicate a clash of tectonic plates at a more fundamental level, something violently mismatched in the relationship of music to truth and conscience.

Musically, America responded to the pain and loss of 9-11 with a fund-raising telethon which drew on the sombre substratum of hymn-singing which underlies corporate pop, and which unites Country, Soul and Reggae. Music written for church performance - unmediated, involving, communal and local - inevitably became kitsch and false when delivered by top-selling super-stars for international broadcast. These songs are made for internal reflection, not personal adulation. The economics were hypocritical too: the artists may have waived their fees, but as with Live Aid, it's obvious that the global exposure they're achieving is worth more than any fee. However, in such a context of harmonic maturity and low-key sentiment, the concept of ‘audio terrorism’ does appear silly and adolescent. Should the noisy end of the avantgarde shut up, and confess its misdemeanours were all a ruse?

The avant garde registered its own peculiar response to the disaster. Rushing in where angels fear to tread, Karlheinz Stockhausen voiced what some may have felt in the instant, but none dared say. For him, the crashing planes and collapsing towers felt like art: "What happened there is - now you must re-adjust your brain - the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos. Minds achieving in a single act what we in music can only dream of, people rehearsing like mad for ten years, preparing fanatically for a concert, and then dying. You have people who are that focused on a performance and then 5,000 people who are dispatched to the afterlife, in a single moment. I couldn't match it. Against that, we - as composers - are nothing." Surely the guy is crazy? In Stockhausen's defence, he did go on to admit the attack was a crime, because part of the ‘audience’ were ‘not consenting’. This demur didn't soften Gyorgy Ligeti's retort: "Stockhausen should be locked up in a psychiatric hospital".

A comment by one TV reporter - that the image of the planes crashing into the towers "repeated in the memory like a nightmare loop" - was distinctly strange. You didn't need to repeat the images in your head, TV did nothing else for days on end. As usual, the mass media materially create the psychic conditions which they then proceed to moralise. But what should artists do when reality outdoes them? Stay quiet? Admit anti-art destructivism was just a tease? Confess that these tumultous, apocalyptical events we call ‘radical’ were really just conjury with lutes and viols, a luxury product ornamented with frissons of phony danger?

Such evasions smack of the brittle repression of married couples who banish their teenage metal and pop albums to the attic and call their yen for music a ‘passing phase’. For us, giving up on extreme music can't be the answer. Quite the opposite: it's by paying closer attention to the internal structure of radical music - ‘violence’ and all - that its historical and social meaning might be decoded. Stockhausen's equation of art and terror - "this leap from security, from what's ordinary, from life" - may be poor consolation for inhabitants of Manhattan who have lost loved ones, or now feel desperately insecure. However, his weird outburst did touch on something deep. Why is it that, since the modernist revolts of the early twentieth century, composers and improvisors have continually shouted noise, crisis and violence?

The crucial point is that art is an attempt to tell the truth about the world, the whole world, not simply to provide baubles for those in the comfort-zone of privilege. The economic pressures and national conflicts that create world wars and mass starvation and genocide are still in operation. The operations of global capitalism, and its political face-savers, those blue-suited bastards Bush and Blair and Berlusconi, mean that the inhabitants of Burundi, Beirut, Belfast and Baghdad (I use alliteration to limit the list) have long suffered the terror and chaos which the suicide hijackers brought to Manhattan. Edgard Varèse brought the noise of sirens and bombs into music in the 1920s, a response to the terrors of World War I. His Hyperprism predicted the Nazi strategy of the Blitz, when civilian populations first became long-distant targets of military hardware. Unlike his ‘objectivist’ follower Iannis Xenakis, Varèse bent the shapes he heard into organic ovaloids which speak for the suffering ear. This is why, of all the pre-war orchestral composers, only Varèse has a non-salon, yet humanist ruggedness: a realism that moves the blood and shakes the entrails. Sonically, Varèse can stand comparison to Coltrane and Hendrix, who provided lasting testimonials to a different noise: a struggle against racial oppression in America and genocidal war in Vietnam.

Coltrane

These moments of musical truth weren't easy to achieve, nor were they facile, attention-seeking stabs at ugliness or excess. They were not the sound of George Antheil seeking to be a ‘bad boy’ of the avant garde by slamming his fists on the pianoforte keyboard, or of the Japanese Noise artist Merzbow producing fashionably catatonia-inducing, all-enveloping drones (to steal a name from Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau and then recycle the shocks of a degraded surrealism deserves some kind of critique). According to his wife Naima (talking to C.O. Simpkins, his best biographer), John Coltrane systematically studied scales from all over the world, and tried to pack every musical system into his music. If the results sound ugly, that is because you are too wedded to your partial musical identity, to your comfort-blanket of familiar harmony: heavenly universality sounds like hell to closed-in ears. For his part, Hendrix was intensely loyal to classmates who had been drafted and to 101^st Airborne, the regiment he'd served in. Eric Burdon was amazed at his right wing stance on the Vietnamese war when he reached England in 1967. Music journalist Karl Dallas challenged him in print. Reaching an anti-US position was painful and slow, yet by Machine Gun, it happened. Hendrix's rainbows of audio-feedback revelled in spaces which brought pain to the repressed and rigid: in the ears of GIs, they were incitements to immediate pleasure, to disrespect for authority, and to outright mutiny (‘fragging’).

Coltrane and Hendrix did not invent this dialectic between musical shock and political liberation. It had been the major theme for Beethoven and his followers. Romantic music was a call to revolution that now languishes under the idiot term ‘classical’. The exhilarating allegri of the symphony - the hoof beats, the jangling bridles, the crack of loading muskets are not about hunting, as Roger Scruton fondly imagines. They are about bourgeois revolution - "to arms, citizens!" - discovering common aims, seizing the castle keep, liberating the prisoners, letting in the light of reason, sweeping away the cobwebs of feudal reaction. After 1848, when the bourgeois class made its historic pact with state power and landed interests, the excitement turned sour. In March 1871, the French state slaughtered the Communards in tens of thousands, and drove the voice of universal truth and reason underground. In Wagner, massive chromatic transitions invoke myth and fate: surrender to the madness of the stock market as to a natural force. By Mahler, the revolutionary allegri are hollowed-out, febrile, a nostalgic memory that relates to erotics rather than history. But this radical subjectivity had consequences.

By rationalising the brain-bending chromaticism of Wagner and Mahler, Schoenberg and Webern forged a music whose freedom of note combination rejected the respectable, bourgeois world of repression and exchange. Their negation of tonality in Twelve Tone, born through logic, is painful; its parallel in the Blues, itself born through pain, is alluring. These twin attacks on the tempered key system stalked each other through the twentieth-century, fighting, aiding and abetting, fusing and swapping places (see Muhal Abrams, Frank Zappa, James Blood Ulmer, Derek Bailey). The struggle for authentic music resembled political resistance to war and inequality and mass starvation. Its history is likewise fugitive and unofficial: stark glimpses of a different order in a black night of violence and lies. When Mark Sinker, writing in The Wire (#211, September 2001),worried that the offensive volume of rock can be mobilised to confirm conservatism, he needed to pay more attention to the music's economic base. Noise organised for extraction of surplus value isn't noise, but silence at high volume: rock as spectacle blocks its liberating essence, its democratic release and insurrectionary energy (hence the necessity of Punk etc.) As usual in bourgeois thought, idealism links to positivism: Sinker's decibel-counting cannot handle the fact that ‘noise’ in music is an aesthetic fact concerning collective human experience and individual response, not a quantitative measure.

Take the example of Cecil Taylor. In carrying out Zappologist Marco Maurizi's dictum that the dialectic of Modern Art is "mediation criticised by immediacy", Taylor explodes the meaning of the piano - that prime embodiment of bourgeois tonality - from within, seemingly bending notes which the machine was designed to deliver straight and even, transforming pianistic mastery into a battlefield of physical tensions and clashes. Taylor has reduced pianism to lightning rhythmic nuance and bounding sonic volume. Encyclopedic harmonic knowledge is balanced like an inverted pyramid on the nose-tip of the moment, causing a frictive density and horrid power which make lovers of civilised tinkling flee the room.

Why this cataclysm at the heart of musical creativity? Because the reputation of the classical ‘masterpiece’, this civilisation, is the accumulation of the sweated labour of legions of composers, musicians, concert organisers and concert-hall builders, all those who have worked to make these moments possible. Taylor's intent is to inject the spontaneity of the instant - his actual presence at this moment in front of you now in this particular hall - into the frozen monolith, to explode the tempered key system into a million scintillating fragments, to make the process of playing the point of us gathering, and not the congealed kudos of the past. Taylor is the most refined and gentlest of people - to underline the point, he even recites poetry and wears pink fluffy slippers at recitals - yet ears trained by radio and film musics, used to music which fails to address the listener directly, shout "Violence! Violence!! Violence!!!" every time they hear it.

A recent performance at the Barbican (13 May 2002) is a case in point. Invited to write a concert piece for performance by Bang On A Can All-Stars ("a fiercely aggressive group, combining the power and punch of a rock band with the precision and clarity of a chamber ensemble" according to the New York Times, who appear to have swapped genuine music criticism for promotional falafel), Cecil Taylor questioned the fetish of the written masterpiece by appearing in person with the group. His ‘score’ was an A4 photocopy of some derisory doodles containing randomly scattered letters and musical signs. His ‘rehearsal’ consisted of a thirty-minute séance at which the musicians were instructed to make “no sound” while Taylor explored the limits of the auditorium by slowly moving up the aisle (the pianist tinkles some notes and is admonished, leading to a backstage war in which she is finally banished from the performance). Then the musicians were themselves sent into the auditorium to test the space, exhale air and pronounce a word. When they turn this into a clever improvised event, cooing and chirping at each other (as they do ‘downtown’), Taylor upbraids them and tells them to slow the tempo to near silence. Worse even than gagging the All-Stars, he imports drummer Tony Oxley, insisting Oxley is "the best drummer on the planet" (thus bouleversing decades of careful negotiation between Black Nationalism and American patriotic hard sell to make ’Jazz’ a global cultural hegemon).

Cecil Taylor

In their performance, Taylor and Oxley upset any notion of received harmony or rhythm, forcing the three members of Bang On A Can who dared show up to improvise what they are rather than what they know. The improvisation tore spaces in the fabric of ‘community’, and created a genuinely new and unheralded musical construction with the materials to hand. Like a John Cage piece performed in the midst of a set of new minimalist hack- works, Taylor and Oxley proved that all the careful notations by Tan Dun, Hermeto Pascoal and Don Byron (pieces which had occupied the first half) were so much tepid filmscore twaddle, trivial evasions of what playing music in front of people really is.

The rhythmic relationship of Taylor and Oxley brought in something vocal and authentic that was completely lacking in Bang On A Can's finicky reproduction of strategies from Henry Cow, Curlew and the Mike Post Coalition. The fusion of ‘rock power’ and ‘chamber clarity’ promised by the New York Times proved to be ersatz class-reconciliation, a post-modernist sales pitch indicating a consummation devoutly to be wished by harassed arts promoters (ie ‘bums-on-seats’ plus ‘high-class tone’), but nothing at all in terms of musical micro-substance in the hearing. Bang On A Can's clumsy attempts at rock and samba were exceedingly ugly, notes as illustrations of the idea rather than the thing-for-itself, cluttered and awkward. Their performance revealed the absolutely empty character of academic musical values: all the music said was "we can play these dots", there was no motive force, no message to the bowels, no meaning.

For musicians to deliver "the word with its theme intact, the word permeated with confident and categorical social value judgement," they must also provide the next term in V.N. Voloshinov's argument: "the word that really means and takes responsibility for what it says" (these are the closing words of Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 1929). This means developing a personal voice on your instrument which sheds the chameleon- like pseudo-universality of the competent orchestral interpreter - the musical equivalent of the polite dinner-party chatter which pretends to talk freely of anything, but remains scared witless by economic or sexual reality - and risks genuine expression: what Leroi Jones called the ‘stance’ which defines the authentic jazz saxophonist.

Taylor and Oxley provided ‘stance’ in such abundance that their presence felt like a volcanic eruption of directness and immediacy, sending the Bang On A Can musicians into gibbering recall of adolescent Halenesque electric-guitar (the artificiality and fragility of the sexual equality induced by classical training was revealed when the two female members of Bang On A Can failed to show up; this was a punch-up any female free improvisor would have loved, and shone in... fans of trombonist Gail Brand's amazing performance at the V&A Merz Nite riot were reduced to imagining what she could have done in this context).

However, just because musical truth sounds violent and unacceptable to the status quo, it doesn't follow that literal devastation and violence are art. Stockhausen's enthusiasm for the Trade Center attack could just as well be the futurist Filippo-Tommaso Marinetti praising war ("the world's only hygiene"). Stockhausen combines Baader-Meinhof's elitist concept of spectacular political action with neo-Wagnerian megalomania: he doesn't realise that art and revolution are not a physical force, a firestorm (despite the images currently used by halfwits to promote ‘Ecstatic Jazz’), but powers mediated via human intellect and will. In other words, the ‘power’ of great music is its truth content, its proposed relation to the totality of society and the cosmos, not brute force. Music is not real violence, but a discourse of affective states, one that creates opportunities for judgement about feelings. The split between intellect and emotion is transcended. This can't be done with a bludgeon, any more than revolutionary seizure of the state by the proletarian class can be achieved by individual acts of anarchist violence (Trotsky's critique of Narodnik terrorism still stands).

Varèse and his handful of authentic orchestral inheritors - namely James Dillon, Simon H. Fell, Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram - make music which short-circuits merely intellectual appreciation (the tight clean shape of a Haydn Quartet or a pop song), and at moments speaks directly to the body. It maps out the flow of blood, the rustle of nervous synapses, the creak of bone. Yet these musics don't neglect the intellectual thrill of graphing such biological realities, nor twinges of anxiety and guilt. This emotional science steels the brainpan, giving us the resolve to regard the world in its true colours. The political corollary is not aesthetic awe before the actions of suicidal hijackers, but comprehension of the motives that drive global conflict. Not Deleuze & Guttari's facile and rhetorical "surrender to the primordial Other", but Enlightenment: Freud's "Where Id was, Ego shall be".

9-11 was not radical music, but an atrocity inflicted by conspirators trained by the CIA for destabilisation projects in foreign countries. They applied what the CIA had taught them in pursuit of their leader's power struggle with the Bush dynasty concerning the price of oil (Cecil Taylor cites the fact that San Franciso's mayor was warned not to fly on 11^th September, maintaining that Bush organised the attack to consolidate a lost-in-fact election: you can hear Taylor's tough, Burroughs-like disassociation from liberal unctuousness in every note he plays). Even if they inevitably gain the applause of Arab populations suffering under US-backed repression, Al-Qaeda have no plan beyond revenge, using the civil populations of the enemy state as targets (they're like the USSR backed with a ‘people's bomb’ that will wipe out the workers of the world they should be uniting with). Al-Qaeda's actions do not help to create an independent working- class politics which could overthrow capitalism, but instead invoke the logic that led to the bombing of retreating Iraqi troops on the road to Basrah, and deaths in tens of thousands. Al-Qaeda are no more to be supported than Cecil Taylor's alternative ‘axis of evil’(George Bush, Wynton Marsalis and Philip Glass, as if you couldn't guess).

Political violence conceived as conflict between national or religious blocks is a species of psychic repression, akin to conceiving sex in terms of individual gratification, or music in terms of a quantitative measure (‘genius’, ‘outreach’, ‘sales’). It fails to find any agency for saving the human race (isn't it funny how the well- heeled are so prone to political despair?) It reduces history and culture to a spectacle that is no longer carried out by people capable of reason: for example, the myth that the Arab/Israeli conflict is the fruit of thousands of years of difference (one peddled in a recent headline by the supposedly progressive French newspaper, Libération), rather than a US strategy to put pressure on Arab states and keep down the price of oil. Religious and national pseudo-explanations obscure the rational dynamic of capital and its reproduction (mangetouts from Kenya, silicon chips from South Korea and the multi-coloured metropolis are all highly explicable phenomena), naturalising Anglo wealth and Afghan poverty.

Alice Coltrane's millionaire mysticism retains the worst part of John Coltrane's legacy: its living part is its global integration of musical codes, its refusal of religious and national divisions. Free music is the song of the New International. By facing the horrors of an unbalanced world, by making us experience its terror and violence and sorrow, radical music offers the satisfaction of truth rather than the blandishments of comfort. It arms the psyche for reality. This will become increasingly necessary as the weaponry and trade-deals sold by the First and ex- Communist Worlds to the Third send us their refugees, their anger and their despair. The grief-stricken of Manhattan should be allowed to bury their dead in whatever manner they wish, but sombre hymns and TV-studio candles are not the final word: only a courageous assessment of global realities - musical and political - will allow us to shape a future worth hearing.

~ Ben Watson, Militant Esthetix, May 2002

Freud, Fascism and the Death Instinct

Fascism glamorises and obsesses upon death, submission and authority. Many neo-Folk and post-Industrial groups, whether Fascist or not, share these obsessions. Since an understanding of the psychology of Fascism also helps us recognise and deal with it (and maybe because we recently published parts of an interview by 'Lustmord') Muzorewi offers this take on Fascism and the death drive. This should be the first of a number of posts dealing with these issues. It's quite long, and the author originally suggested breaking it into a series of smaller sections, but I think it easily worth treating as a whole - Strelnikov

Introduction

Classical Freudianism can reveal a great deal about the psycho-dynamics of fascism. This is not to claim that only classical Freudianism illumines fascism but simply to say that Freud’s oeuvre provides powerful tools for explaining fascism as a social phenomenon. This post concerns Freud’s theory of the Death instinct (or Thanatos – a term Freud never actually used). Also there is a brief excursus on the libidinal economy of masochism and sadism for the light they throw on the mainsprings of fascism. This post is the first of series whose centrepiece is an analysis of Wilhelm Reich’s pioneering study The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1934).

Firstly, let's lay our cards on the table: Freudianism is, here regarded as part of the broader scientific critique of capitalism and of particular relevance to the formation of the self. So Freudianism is regarded as essential to any enlarged, properly critical, dialectical Marxism. However, rehabilitating Freudian Marxism – fallen into disuse when the global revolt against late capitalism (including the bourgeois family) foundered in the 1970s – certainly overstates our ambition. But it is assumed that those Marxists who attempted a radical alloy of Freud and Marx (whether Reich, Benjamin, Bloch, Fromm, Adorno, Horkheimer or Marcuse), pioneered a critical approach to fascism that is, again, increasingly relevant.

The Scandal of the Death Instinct

Ironically Wilhelm Reich’s ‘affirmative’ conception of psychoanalysis led him to abandon Freud’s gloomy speculative vision of the Death instinct by the early 1930s. Yet where Freud’s most audacious concept was concerned Reich was not alone. In 1934 Reich was expelled from the International Psychoanalytical Association (the year before he had been expelled from the German Communist party – the KPD) but his expulsion was unrelated to a lack of fidelity to the Death instinct¹. Initially the Institute of Social Research – busy arranging a union of Marx and Freud – was sceptical. Horkheimer was witheringly dismissive while Erich Fromm, assigned the role of elaborating the Institute’s position on Freud in the Zeitschrift, also rejected the Death instinct².

Many Freudians within the IPA baulked at Freud’s Death instinct. Originally Freud introduced the notion in Beyond The Pleasure Principle (1920). The germ of the concept went back to Freud’s encounter with Wilhelm Stekel (see below). Freud’s biographer and follower, Ernest Jones, observed that the idea of the Death instinct typified Freud at his most philosophical, speculative and bold whilst BTPP (1920) remained unique in Freud’s canon. BTPP (1920) was also noteworthy for being the work that received little acceptance from Freud’s own followers³ Freud himself presented the Death instincts as a tentative hypothesis and only became convinced of its reality over time.

Theorisation of the Death instinct belonged to Freud’s late period increasingly dominated by speculative reflection on the genesis of civilisation and religion and their relation to character formation. Difficult to observe directly, the existence of the Death instinct was to be inferred metonymically from its effects. As Terry Eagleton noted recently, Freud’s Death drive with its proposition that "human beings unconsciously desire their own destruction" marked the "true scandal of psychoanalysis – not infant sexuality"⁴. The basic proposition was that human beings unconsciously desired their own destruction. Lodged at the core of the self, the immanent telos of the Death instinct was to deliver to struggling life its quietus and return it to the inorganic from which it had emerged. Origin (or Death as Schopenhauer put it) was the goal of life. Naturally, the Ego constantly sought to deflect the Death instinct from its path and this was the basis of the destructive and aggressive instincts of humanity which, ominously, could be directed internally and externally.

It is important to be aware that Freud’s theories have enjoyed many adventures in the course of their absorption by the universal culture. Concerning this afterlife we explore principally, Wilhelm Reich and, tangentially, the so-called Frankfurt School. The reader is warned that Lacanian theory is ignored. You might say, that with Lacan, Freudian theory was liberated from the ballast of Freud’s starting point: the organic and the biological following its vertiginous freefall into the Symbolic Order of language.

Yet at least the Death instinct survived in Lacan as an aspect of the Real which resisted and escaped the Symbolic Order. The post-war years of growth and stability in the heartlands of late capitalism, were hardly congenial to the reception of a theory such as the Death instincts. Post-war neo-Freudianism, especially the influential school of Attachment theory developed by John Bowlby at the Tavistock clinic, explicitly repudiated Freud’s biologism and dismissed Freud’s underlying drive theory as redundant⁵.

The issue of the redundancy of Freud’s Death instinct and his drive theory cannot be addressed for space. But concerning Freud’s biologism we note Herbert Marcuse’s position that Freud’s theory was at its roots historical and that neo-Freudianism revisionism was mistaken in offering a new cultural dimension or trying to shift the theoretical emphasis from the unconscious to the conscious or even allowing the therapeutic goal to obscure the telos of Freud’s life work from: "the development of a theoretical construction which aims, not at curing individual sickness, but diagnosing the general disorder"⁶.

Freudian metapyschology, the topography of the primary and secondary processes rested on a model of the accumulation and discharge of energy that flowed through the organism. Freud’s instinctual drive theory draw on the evolutionary biology of his times shortly before the pivotal watershed of the 1930s-40s when many outstanding issues of evolutionary development were resolved with the synthesis of Darwin and Mendel. Significantly, Freud often underlined the provisional nature of most of his speculative arguments and identified the reason: the many unresolved scientific issues in the natural sciences.

Freud’s Theory of the Death Instinct

The following – for lack of space – concentrates on Freud’s mature metapsychology, the role of Pleasure principle (henceforth Eros), the Death instincts and their role in the self’s formation and the evolution of civilisation, as outlined, primarily, in Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930). This means certain issues are skated over, ignored or telescoped.

Eros and Thanatos

The notion of a Death instinct or drive (trieb) was introduced into the small circle of psychoanalysis by Wilhelm Stekel in 1910. In a study on anxiety Stekel suggested the suppression of the sexual instinct in society paralleled the advance of a Death instinct. Stekel who coined the term Thanatos (death instinct) was also the first to reflect on death symbolism in dream life. Freud had a strong personal aversion to Stekel and was sharply critical of his weak scientific method though he acknowledged Stekel’s intuitive gift for interpreting dream symbolism⁷.

Appropriately Freud first began to reflect on the Death instinct during the First World War and started writing Beyond The Pleasure Principle (1920) in 1918⁸. Essentially, Freud believed the primary mental processes were dominated by Eros whose immediate aim was gratification. Eros was extremely archaic and had probably emerged when organic life arose. If the libidinal drives of Eros represented life instinct the Ego was the seat of self-preservation. However Freud argued that the Ego was not fully autonomous and its boundaries were blurred. The Ego was heteronomous. Where Ego ended and Id began was difficult to determine. Freud’s late metapyschology proposed a tri-partite model of the self: Id, Ego and Super-Ego with the three sets, so to speak, overlapping one another. However, the underlying basis remained dualistic with the self shaped by the dialectic of two poles: Eros and the Reality principle⁹.

Life was shaped by Ananke (necessity), compelled to adapt to its environment to ensure self-preservation and inevitably this struggle demanded the renuniciation or sublimation of the libidinal instincts. The deflection, inhibition and repressive sublimation of Eros sprang from the refractory nature of the Cosmos while the renunciation of the libidinal instincts, of immediate gratification, set in motion the development of civilisation.

Indeed civilisation rested on misery despite the universal striving for happiness. Echoing Schopenhauer, Freud asserted it was nonsensical to attribute a purpose – in the metaphysical sense – to human existence. The striving for genital eroticism or Love was universal but Love had the capacity to render people defenceless and unhappy. Many features of the universal culture such as religion or aesthetic sensibility were sublimated expressions of the libidinal drives. Yet they left suffering untouched because they were either illusory or compensatory. Civilisation generated the demand for global reform but suffering could at best be mitigated and never overthrown. The apparent social sources of unhappiness obscured the intractability of suffering ultimately rooted in humanity’s psychical constitution. Freud’s sour view was remote from the affirmative endorsement of bourgeois civilisation. Freud ventroliquised modernity’s critics who complained that giant strides in mastering nature were accompanied by the continued fission of misery. As Freud observed: "a person becomes neurotic because he cannot tolerate the amount of frustration which society imposes on him in the service of its cultural ideals." Such a view practically rendered the therapeutic goal nugatory¹⁰.

Rather, Freud maintained: "the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle. This principle dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start...yet its programme is at loggerheads with the world" ¹¹. Humanity faced three sources of suffering: (i) physical decay and dissolution, (ii) the external world which "may rage against us", and, (iii) the most gratuitous and painful, other people¹². The instinctual drives of Eros were repressed and displaced toward different goals compatible with maintaining the basis of humanity’s newly emerging social order.

In the extraordinary Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud outlined how he thought the communal foundation of civilisation had arisen from the primal horde. In the patriarchal ‘primitive family’ the brothers had banded together to overthrow their severe Father by killing him¹³. Totemic culture was a result of new taboos (the first laws) regulating inter-personal relations: "The communal life of human beings had, therefore, a two-fold foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity and the power of love which made man unwilling to be deprived of his sexual object – the woman -, and made the woman unwilling to be deprived of the part of herself which had been separated off from her – her child"¹⁴. To begin with, taboos prohibited incest but other restrictions followed. Child sexuality was suppressed while the limitation of the sexual object in maturity to the opposite sex enjoined treating extra-genital sexuality as perversion. Unsurprisingly, the instinctual power of Eros was too strong to be entirely suppressed – occasions for a return of the repressed - so civilisation looked past many transgressions but still left sexual life "extremely impaired"¹⁵. The displaced libidinal instincts manifested themselves in a number of ways. The most important, and crucial to the establishment of civilisation, was work which required a great deal of psychical energy and aim inhibited affection (contra genital eroticism) that fostered ‘friendships’ and the love of family members.

The Origins of Violence and Aggression

In the most arresting remark of C&ID Freud writes: "I know that in sadism and masochism we have always seen before us manifestations of the destructive instinct (directed outwards and inwards), strongly alloyed with eroticism; but I can no longer understand how we can have overlooked the ubiquity of non-erotic aggressivity and destructiveness and can have failed to give it its due place in our interpretation of life"¹⁶.

Freud unflinchingly exposed the barely suppressed aggression woven into the very fabric of society. For Freud, civilisation’s history merely confirmed the truth of the Roman playwright Plautus’s dictum: "Man is a wolf to man." From Genghis Khan, to the Crusades and the First World War, the sombre truth was that civilisation was constantly threatened with dissolution due to chronic aggression. A high level of energy was expended curbing aggressive instincts utilising psychical reaction formations and the aim-inhibited relations of love. Unsurprisingly Freud was sceptical that communism could usher in a new pacific social order because although the abolition of private property would deprive aggression of "one of its instruments", aggression had pre-dated the institution of private property and would surely survive its abolition¹⁷. Similarly the abolition of the family and the ‘liberation’ of Eros were unlikely to spell real inroads into human nature’s most indestructible feature.

Freud’s reflections on the Death instinct began during the First World War when he encountered men suffering traumatic neuroses and was struck by their compulsion to repeat. Freud also noted the conservative nature of this behaviour. The tendency of Eros was to push outward, seek to reproduce and coalesce into larger units but Freud realised there must exist a contrary instinct immanent in organic life that to sought to return to the inertia of the primeval and inorganic.

In BTPP (1920) Freud observed "we cannot escape the suspicion that we have come upon the track of a universal attribute of the instincts...It seems, then, that an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces...the expression of the inertia inherent in organic life"¹⁸. Life moved forward but continually glanced backwards for intimations of what lay ahead when the organic – in essence instinctually conservative – was inorganic. The conservative instinct to self-preservation was closely allied with the Death instinct and ensured the organism followed its own immanent path to its inevitable terminus ad quem¹⁹.

Freud wondered if his vision of a struggle between Eros and the Death instinct was the "secret of organic life itself"²⁰. As Paul Ricoeur adumberated Freud: life’s aim was death (Schopenhauer); the return to origins like the salmon returning to their spawning grounds. Organic life developed and adapted to an ever changing environment but immanently desired repetition (death). Organic life had a covert instinctual analogue to salmon returning to their spawning grounds to spawn and die²¹.

Pursuing Schiller’s aphorism that ‘hunger and love move the world’ Freud pointed to the antithesis between the ego-instincts (self-preservation) and the object-instincts (Eros). To underline the instinctual energy of the object-instincts Freud introduced the term libido (in a 1895 paper). Of the object-instincts one in particular stood out: the sadistic instinct. Remote from love but clearly partially attached to the ego-instincts due to an affinity with mastery they nevertheless clearly belonged to sexual life. But the decisive step for Freud was the introduction of the concept of narcissism in 1914. Here Freud suggested the Ego was cathected with libidinal energy, that the Ego itself was the libido’s original home. The narcissistic libido turned toward object universe became object-libido. The concept of narcissism helped to render traumatic neuroses intelligible. However Freud felt there was a danger that if the ego-instincts were libidinal all instinctual energy could be characterised as libidinal (the solution Jung proposed). Freud resisted this solution and it is here that the existence of conservative instincts revealed by the compulsion to repeat put Freud on the scent of the Death instincts²².

Mutually hostile, Eros and Death embraced and their struggle explained all the phenomena of existence. Eros was manifest but the Death instincts sought dissolution by stealth. In his boldest masterstroke, Freud suggested that elements of the Death instinct were pressed into the service of Eros and directed at the external world where they were revealed as the instincts of destructiveness and aggression. Instead of destroying its host the Death instincts were now intent on destroying the external whether organic or inorganic. Sadism – its sexual component common knowledge – was an alloy of Eros and Death. Masochism was also an alloy of the two opposed instincts albeit directed internally²³.

Freud was not surprised his supposition of the existence of the Death instincts in BTPP encountered resistance and disbelief. Sadism’s co-option of the sexual instinct was evidently its most obvious manifestation. But even where it emerged without any overt sexual purpose its blind destructive fury revealed a high degree of narcissistic enjoyment that illumined the Ego’s most archaic wish for omnipotence. The aggressive instinct was the handmaiden of the Death instinct.

The tendency of Eros was to libidinally tie people together in community. Yet "man’s natural aggressive instincts" were an impediment to civilisation. The question arose: how could civilisation domesticate the aggressive instincts? Freud’s surprising answer was that the aggressive instinct could be introjected or internalised and sent back to the place it had come from – the Ego. There it was taken in hand by a separatist section of the Ego and raised up as Super-Ego (conscience) and aimed as aggressively at the Ego as it had hitherto been orientated toward the external world. Thus, civilisation had succeeded in placing a "garrison in a conquered city" in order to gain mastery over the individual’s aggressive instincts. External authority was internalised with the establishment of the Super-Ego. However unlike external authority, the Ego could not conceal ‘bad intentions’ from the Super-Ego and so the distinction between wishing to do bad and actually doing it, disappeared, and guilt, minatory guardian of the Super-Ego emerged²⁴.

The sense of guilt had two sources: fear of authority and fear of the Super-Ego. Both demanded renunciation but the Super-Ego also demanded severe punishment for an Ego unable to conceal its wish. Phylogenetically, renunciation for fear of aggression from an external authority came before a renunciation of desire for fear of the internal authority – conscience. Yet the renunciation of desire lost some efficacy with the arrival of the Super-Ego. Virtuous continence was no longer rewarded with the love that represented protection against aggression. Anxiety and unhappiness were now universal. Freud proposed the probable phylogenetic logic as it had unfolded: initially conscience was the cause of instinctual renunciation but then the relation was reversed. Renunciation reinforced conscience strengthening its severity and intolerance.

Freud recalls that in T&T he had previously suggested the Oedipus complex had strengthened an already existing sense of guilt. But in C&ID’s Freud proposed that the murder of tyrannical father by his sons was the occasion for the appearance of the Super-Ego. Yet the band of brothers had felt remorse (as distinct from guilt) for killing their father. How? Why? The brothers had ambivalent feelings toward their father – both love and hate. The instinctual hatred was expatiated in killing their father but their act also aroused their love and provoked the Super-Ego’s entrance. Crucially, from the beginning the Super-Ego was identified with patriarchal authority while ambivalent feelings of remorse mirrored the internal psychical conflict between Eros and the Death instincts²⁵.

We noted the omniscience of the Super-Ego meant there was no significant difference between intent and action. This gave rise to a number of effects including the growing inhibition of overt aggressive instincts and the inflation of anxiety. As Marcuse observed, civilisation and the self were shaped by the archaic heritage of the Oedipus complex and distilled in the Super-Ego. This archaic heritage was the link between the self and mass psychology. In a key sense, the individual did not exist for itself because it was a "frozen manifestation" of the repression of humanity. Recoined in Marcuse’s Hegelian Marxism, Reason and self-consciousness had shaped the historical world and made great inroads into the realm of necessity but they had done so repressively. Though the freedoms of the bourgeois revolution were tangible, Reason had also served domination, both of internal and external nature, and of man by man. Freedom had grown from the soil of unfreedom and retained its congenital defects (though Marcuse might have added that that freedom had its own internal limits). Disturbingly for the reigning ideological consensus the ‘autonomous individual’ was shown to be groundless by Freudian metapsychology. Freud demonstrated that the self was the product of pre-individual factors of historical development, more powerful for being unconscious and repressed. As Marcuse summarised the idea "the past defines the present because mankind has not yet mastered its own history"²⁶.

Thus Freud draw the important conclusion "...the price we pay for our advance in civilisation is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt"²⁷. The Super-Ego vis-a-vis the Ego was a strict, ever watchful censor. Anxiety sprang from the Ego’s fear of the Super-Ego and under the latter’s sadistic influence fostered the Ego’s masochism. Indeed an "erotic attachment" grew between the two poles of the self²⁸.

Freud felt the Super-Ego too readily disregarded the instinctual strength of the Id and the happiness of the Ego. So therapy was obliged to expose the Super-Ego and lower its demands. Similarly, what could be called the cultural Super-Ego too readily assumed the Ego enjoyed unlimited command over the instincts. Thus, the cultural Super-Ego’s imperative to ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ lacked realism given the underlying strength of humanity’s aggressive instincts and in a similar vein Freud ventured that ethics – concerned with right life and how to live it – provided little more than a substitute narcissistic gratification.

Finally C&ID ends with Freud speculating whether it is legitimate to ask if civilisation or humanity might be considered ‘neurotic’ as a whole. Despite the methodological obstacles (where is your normative benchmark?), Freud believed such a project was in principle possible. Such a question on Freud’s part fleetingly opened up the vista where his metapyschology stepped out onto the terrain of history.

EXCURSUS: The Economic Problem of Masochism (1924)

The existence of masochism is a mystery given the ascendancy of Eros over psychical life. Masochism implies pain can be an aim and that it is not merely reducible to providing warnings of possible harm. Freud accepted the major principle ruling psychical life was the ‘tendency towards stability’ or what Barbara Low called the Nirvana principle where the psychical structure tried to reduce the level of free flowing energy. On this view, pleasure was derived from lowering stimuli and unpleasure from the increase in stimuli thus increasing tension²⁹.

But Freud realised such a picture could not be entirely accurate. Death’s aim was to relieve life of life. If Eros simply aimed to lower the flow of instinctual energy it would be rendered a servant of the Death instinct. But sexual arousal was only the most obvious example where Eros increased stimuli. So the distinction between pleasure-unpleasure on the basis of the quantity of energy present, could not be the whole picture. Eros and the Nirvana principle should not be treated as one. Freud suggested the three major principles, Eros (libido), Nirvana (as an expression of the Death instincts) and the Reality principle coexisted and, occasionally, conflicted with Eros retaining the dominant role over life³⁰.

Similarly masochism fell under three types, (i) erotogenic – or pleasure in pain. Erotogenic masochism was the basis of the other two types. Typically it involved sexual phantasies of being beaten, bound, humiliated (often theatrically) and so on, and had a strong regressive infantile component. Castration anxiety was also evident with men playing the passive feminine role. A sense of guilt could also be present and functioned as a bridge to moral masochism.

Erotogenic masochism grew out of infantile physiological responses such as sympathetic libidinal excitations that allowed infants to cope with pain. However this could not explain all the phenomena and another derivation for masochism was possible. While part of the Death instinct remained ‘bound’ libidinally within the Ego, the libido diverted another part of the Death instinct towards external reality. This destructive instinct was also an instinct for mastery and power with a strong sexual component. In sadism, Eros and Death – opposed principles were intimately bound together. Unfortunately, Freud does not really discuss sadism further as masochism remains his primary object but its relevance to the subject of the roots of aggression in general and fascist violence in particular, is clear.

However Freud’s further discussion of the roots of masochism is relevant to the conception of the ‘authoritarian personality’ that emerged later in social scientific discussion and research on the mass psychology of fascism in the 1940-50s . Why was the Ego afraid of its ideal, the Super-Ego? The Super-Ego was as much a product of the Id as external reality. As we noted above, the Super-Ego had first arisen through the introjection into the Ego of the first libidinal objects of the Id: the parents. In the usual course of development this relation was deflected as the parents were desexualised. Thus the Oedipus complex was overcome: "The Super-Ego – as conscience at work in the ego – may then become harsh, cruel and inexorable...Kant’s Categorical Imperative is thus the direct heir of the Oedipus Complex"³¹.

The Oedipus complex survived via the Super-Ego as stern patriarchal representative of the external world; source of both the self’s ethical sense and an ideal for the Ego to imitate. Child development usually saw the direct influence of the parents recede though the imagos our parents left behind reinforced our receptivity to figures of authority in adult life (teachers fulfilled a bridging function). Respect for authority and a strong internal ethical sense were the bedrock of moral masochism but in the acutely sensitive conscience the normal extension of morality exercised by a sadistic Super-Ego was taken even further as the Ego’s own masochism demanded punishment. In other words, this character type (in the ideal typical sense) might develop a deferential attitude to figures in authority. Phantasies such as the wish to be beaten by the father (and play the passive feminine sexual role with him) indicated that in moral masochism the Oedipus complex was revived and morality sexualised. Now a non-virtuous cycle might be said to have been established with ‘sinful’ actions followed by sadistic chastisement of the conscience. Crucially, Freud argued the Super-Ego’s sadism occurred where the "cultural suppression" of the instincts prevented the aggressive and destructive instincts from being exercised.

Conclusion

Freud’s portrait of the Death instincts, masochism and sadism, of the ubiquity of aggression and violence rooted in the instinctual realm of human nature, is profound and provocative. Clearly, in light of many millennia of barbarism and class society, the violent rise of capitalism, the ravages of imperialism and the fury of fascism, Freud’s views have the merit of realism. This is perhaps the answer to those instinctively repelled by Freud’s apparently chilly weltanschauung. Certainly, Arthur Schopenhauer, admired by Freud, was a major influence as many Freudian staples – about death and the impossibility of reconciling our desires and civilisation and so on – were anticipated by Schopenhauer. Similarly with Nietzsche – many pointed to the parallels in the thought of the two thinkers, not least Freud’s own students who continuously tried to draw Freud’s attention to Nietzsche. But unlike Schopenhauer, Freud resisted reading Nietzsche chiefly because he wanted to arrive at his scientific insights independently³².

In a thought provoking essay on evil (2010) - the lower case is significant – Terry Eagleton makes the case for the reality of evil - a this worldly, secular and banal evil; an evil that is never less than evil despite the case that Eagleton wishes to make as a Marxist, that evil has social and historical roots, has roots in a psychical constitution intelligible from the standpoint of Freudian theory. Evil, then, is not theological (though theologicians, unsurprisingly, generally have the most interesting things to say about Evil). Such a position does not deny the "terrifying positivity" of evil or diminish the gravity of the Nazi concentration camps. Rather psychoanalytic theory, Eagleton suggests would allow "us to maintain that evil is a kind of deprivation while still acknowledging its formidable power. The power in question...is essentially that of the death drive, turned outward so as to wreak its insatiable spitefulness on a fellow human being. Yet this furious violence involves a kind of lack – an unbearable sense of non-being, which must...be taken out on another"³³.

But perhaps Freud’s metapyschology is not congenial to a perspective orientated on uprooting everything that generates the evils of class society, violence, genocide, fascism? Perhaps Freud is too reductive or too tainted with biologism? We have already noted Marcuse’s conviction that Freud’s metapyschology is, at bottom, inherently historical and social. This conviction was shared by a small group of Marxists in the inter-war years who sought to trace the dialectical mediations between Freud’s incendiary vista of the repressive development of the self with the larger canvass of class society’s genesis outlined by historical materialism.

On the parenthentical issue of Freud’s biologism, it might be thought this belongs to a reactionary essentialism or outmoded idea of human nature. However, Marx himself had a conception of human nature – or philosophical anthropology – that assumed people were embodied, material beings with real need and desires. Indeed, Marx’s constant references to people’s needs would have been incoherent without such an underlying philosophical anthropology that assumed the existence of a relatively ‘enduring’ or defined ‘nature’ that existed by virtue of nature rather than a historically specific form of society. In The German Ideology (1846), Marx asserted that those who ignored the real basis of history and excluded from the historical process "the relation of man to nature" created an "antithesis of nature and history." Marx was not only referring to external nature but also humanity’s internal nature. In The Holy Family (1845), Marx criticised Bruno Bauer for not recognising "any power of human nature distinct from reason"³⁴.

Another related issue concerns Freud’s ‘pessimism’ in relation to any putative synthesis of psychoanalysis and historical materialism. Clearly Freud was highly critical of bourgeois civilisation (Freud was also acutely aware of anti-semitism) – a powerful critical thrust that waned with the retreat of neo-Freudianism from the large issues which had preoccupied its founding father. But as we noted above Freud was sceptical that any alternative social order would be able to put aside repressive sublimation or leave the reigning misery of the social order behind. Marcuse, Reich and Fromm all took Freud to task for his position and posed the possibility of a non-repressive civilisation or concrete utopia that in transcending the horizon of capitalism, destroying global imperialism and uprooting its hierarchical relations of domination and subordination, smashing the bourgeois state would destroy the social conditions that generated war and fascism. Crucially, the chronic aggression and violence that was a global feature of present day class society would be drastically diminished.

Concrete utopia would, by and large, be extremely pacific and would grow even more so in time. Yet it is not hard to imagine a certain level of inter-personal aggression derived from humanity’s instinctual, material make-up, remaining. Again Eagleton is judicious in weighing up the problem: "Virtue depends to some extent on material well-being. You cannot enjoy decent relationships with others when you are starving. The opposite of materialism here is moralism...Radicals do not believe that to transform those surroundings would be to produce a society of saints...[t]here are plenty of reasons, Freudian and otherwise, for believing a fair amount of human nastiness would survive...It belongs to any authentic materialism to be conscious of the limits of the political, which includes an awareness of how things stand with us as a material species. Even so...life could be feasibly much improved for a great many people"³⁵.

Finally, we have said little directly about fascism (further posts will remedy this) but it should hopefully be clear from the foregoing that Freud’s account of the Death instincts is pregnant with many implications for understanding the psycho-dynamics of fascist aggression and violence, the ‘authoritarian personality’ and its cultivation in the psychological soil of late capitalism. However, the existence of fascism as a phenomena is not reducible to the Death instincts, though these instincts certainly nourish fascism. However, we think the Death instincts capture the truth of a specific level or aspect of fascism which married to a critical Marxism, allows a full comprehension of fascism’s danger. That alone is enough to justify the interest in Freud.

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1. For an account of Reich’s expulsion see Myron Sharaf’s Reich biography Fury On Earth (1990) pp175-91.
2. Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality (1984) p.204. Later there was a shift in the appreciation Freud’s Death instinct on the part of Institute members and Fromm’s synthesis was itself attacked.
3. Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1961) p.505.
4. Terry Eagleton, On Evil (2010) p.108.
5. Bowlby was a student of Melanie Klein and his starting point was the Kleinian focus on the child-mother relation. Despite useful insights, Bowlby concluded Klein’s approach was in need of a critical overhaul. Thus, with a number of collaborators, the influential corpus of Attachment theory was developed drawing on ethology, cybernetics, information processing and developmental psychology. Bowlby basically proposed the primacy of attachment relations within the family, especially between child and mother. This position was in sharp contrast to the established psychoanalytic view that libidinal ties between mother and child were established on the basis of need satisfaction (oral stage). Bowlby also rejected other elements of Freud’s account of infant development such as the Oedipus complex.
6. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation (1955) p.25.
7. See Paul Roazen’s account in Freud and His Followers (1975) pp.231-32.
8. Freud had initially been an enthusiastic supporter of Germany and Austria’s war effort.
9. Roazen pp.224-34.
10. C&ID p.275.
11. C&ID p.263.
12. C&ID p.264.
13. Again space precludes examining the basis of Freud’s anthropological speculations about humanity’s prehistory and the survival of its archaic heritage. Marcuse notes the difficulties involved in scientific verification of Freud’s phylogenetic hypothesis but defends their "symbolic value" and the essential truth of the broad vista of the dialectic of domination, repression and civilisation moving together in lock step. See E&C pp.57-58.
14. C&ID p.290.
15. C&ID p.295.
16. C&ID p.311.
17. The proletarian revolution swept across mitteleuropa following the First World War with the defeat of Germany in the war. As soldiers and workers councils sprung up the Kaiser was forced to abdicate. Freud and his family were impoverished by the hyper-inflation of post-war Vienna where the Habsburg empire collapsed. From the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian empire, arose the shortlived Soviet republic in neighbouring Hungary in 1919. Psycholanalysis was courted assiduously by Bela Kun’s government.
18. ‘Beyond The Pleasure Principle’ (1920) in Freud Pelican Library 11: On Metapsychology pp.308-09.
19. BTPP pp.311-13.
20. C&ID p.333.
21. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophical: Essay on Interpretation (1970) pp.289-90.
22. C&ID pp308-09.
23. C&ID p.310.
24. C&ID p.316.
25. C&ID pp324-26.
26. E&C pp.55-56.
27. C&ID p.327.
28. C&ID p.330.
29. ‘Economic Problem of Masochism’ (1924) in Freud Pelican Library 11: On Metapyschology pp413-14.
30. EPoM p.415.
31. EPoM p.422.
32. Though Nietzsche’s notion of the "eternal recurrence of the same" appeared in BTPP.
33. OE p.127.
34. See Norman Geras, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend (1983) pp.61-62)
35. OE p.150.

Robert Paxton: What is Fascism?

From Robert Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism

If we are going to talk about Fascism it would be worth having some idea of what characterises it. Paxton offers a good starting point - Strelnikov

"The moment has come to give fascism a usable short handle, even though we know that it encompasses its subject no better than a snapshot encompasses a person.

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

To be sure, political behavior requires choices, and choices – as my critics hasten to point out – bring us back to underlying ideas. Hitler and Mussolini, scornful of the 'materialism' of socialism and liberalism, insisted on the centrality of ideas to their movements. Not so, retorted many antifascists who refuse to grant them such dignity. “National Socialism’s ideology is constantly shifting”, Franz Neumann observed. “It has certain magical beliefs – leadership adoration, supremacy of the master race – but it is not laid down in a series of categorical and dogmatic pronouncements.” On this point, this book is drawn toward Neumann’s position, and I examined at some length in chapter1 the peculiar relationship of fascism to its ideology – simultaneously proclaimed as central, yet amended or violated as expedient. Nevertheless, fascists knew what they wanted. One cannot banish ideas from the study of fascism, but one can situate them accurately among all the factors that influence this complex phenomenon. One can steer between two extremes: fascism consisted neither of the uncomplicated application of its program, nor of freewheeling opportunism.

I believe that the ideas that underlie fascist actions are best deduced from those actions, for some of them remain unstated and implicit in fascist public language. Many of them belong more to the realm of visceral feeling than to the realm of reasoned propositions. In chapter 2 I called them “mobilizing passions”:

• a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions
• the primacy of the group toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it
• the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external
• dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences
• the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary
• the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny
• the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason
• the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success
• the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.

Fascism according to this definition, as well as behavior in keeping with these feelings, is still visible today. Fascism exists at the level of Stage One ('the creation of movements') within all democratic countries – not excluding the United States. “Giving up free institutions”, especially the freedoms of unpopular groups, is currently attractive to citizens of Western democracies, including some Americans. We know from tracing its path that fascism does not require a spectacular 'march' on some capital to take root; seemingly anodyne decisions to tolerate lawless treatment of national 'enemies' is enough. Something very close to classical fascism has reached Stage Two ('the rooting of fascist movements in the political system') in a few deeply troubled societies. Its further progress is not inevitable, however. Further fascist advances toward power depend in part upon the severity of a crisis, but also very largely upon human choices, especially the choices of those holding economic, social and political power. Determining the appropriate responses to fascist gains is not easy, since its cycle is not likely to repeat itself blindly. We stand a much better chance of responding wisely, however, if we understand how fascism succeeded in the past."

~ Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, Allen Lane (2004), pp.218–220

Susan Sontag on Fascist Aesthetics

Fascist aesthetics... flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry: the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication or replication of things; and the grouping of people/things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader-figure or force. The fascist dramaturgy centers on the orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets, uniformly garbed and shown in ever swelling numbers. Its choreography alternates between ceaseless motion and a congealed, static, 'virile' posing. Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death.
(...)
What is interesting about the relation between politics and art under National Socialism is not that art was subordinated to political needs... but that politics appropriated the rhetoric of art—art in its late romantic phase.< ... Nazi art is both prurient and idealizing. A utopian aesthetics (physical perfection; identity as a biological given) implies an ideal eroticism: sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers. The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a 'spiritual' force, for the benefit of the community. The erotic (that is, women) is always present as a temptation, with the most admirable response being a heroic repression of the sexual impulse... Fascist aesthetics is based on the containment of vital forces; movements are confined, held tight, held in.

(...)

Boyd Rice - the limits
of the sexual imagination

There is a general fantasy about uniforms. They suggest community, order, identity (through ranks, badges, medals, things which declare who the wearer is and what he has done: his worth is recognized), competence, legitimate authority, the legitimate exercise of violence. But... why the SS? Because the SS was the ideal incarnation of fascism's overt assertion of the righteousness of violence, the right to have total power over others and to treat them as absolutely inferior. It was in the SS that this assertion seemed most complete, because they acted it out in a singularly brutal and efficient manner; and because they dramatized it by linking themselves to certain aesthetic standards. The SS was designed as an elite military community that would be not only supremely violent but also supremely beautiful (... The SA, whom the SS replaced, were not known for being any less brutal than their successors, but they have gone down in history as beefy, squat, beerhall types; mere brownshirts.)
(...)
Why has Nazi Germany, which was a sexually repressive society, become erotic? How could a regime which persecuted homosexuals become a gay turn-on?

A clue lies in the predilections of the fascist leaders themselves for sexual metaphors. Like Nietzsche and Wagner, Hitler regarded leadership as sexual mastery of the 'feminine' masses, as rape. (The expression of the crowds in Triumph of the Will is one of ecstasy; the leader makes the crowd come.) Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is 'sexier' than communism (which is not to the Nazis' credit, but rather shows something of the nature and limits of the sexual imagination).

Susan Sontag, Fascinating Fascism , New York Review of Books, February 6, 1975. Republished in Under the Sign of Saturn, (New York, 1980), pp. 73-105.

Peter Webb Investigates

In an earlier post I said of sociologist and Goldsmiths lecturer Peter Webb that "he is either unwilling or unable to do the work required to comprehend his chosen field". I think I owe it to Webb to bear that opinion out by looking more closely at his work. In a section of the book that concerns us, Networked Worlds of Popular Music: Milieu Cultures, he discusses the 'apocalyptic folk, postindustrial, folk-noir, neo-folk' scene through the work of the three core members of the group Death in June - Tony Wakeford, Doug Pearce and Patrick Leagas - who, he tells us, have been "central to the developing British underground and postindustrial/post-Punk milieu"¹. Webb is well aware of the controversy surrounding these musicians due to their use of fascist imagery and symbols², and their promotion of arguments associated with various strands of contemporary esoteric fascist and 'conservative revolutionary' thought derived from Ernst Jünger, Julius Evola, Savitri Devi, Otto and Gregor Strasser and others. He knows that Wakeford was a member of the fascist National Front, and he certainly should know of the fascist connections of some of the group's collaborators, such as Boyd Rice, Albin Julius and Michael Moynihan, since they have been widely publicised. Given this, what is staggering is the extent to which he accepts their excuses and evasions at face value and refuses in any way to critically examine the ideas they promote, or place them in a context that would make sense of them. Instead of challenging any of this he chooses to descend into the gutter with his heroes to join them in condemning the 'fascistic censoriousness' and 'McCarthyism' of the left³. The result is a complete whitewashing of the people concerned, and the corresponding destruction of any credibility Webb might have had as a researcher or commentator.

In his chapter on method ('The Theoretical Development of the Milieu'⁴) Webb says that his concept of 'the milieu' addresses "the networks of interaction, production and influence that music makers and actors in the particular music 'scenes' (are) involved in [and] articulates a set of overlapping levels of meaning, relevance, disposition and understanding"⁵. He argues that "there are three main levels of theoretical abstraction" that must be addressed in order to understand a milieu⁶, encompassing three sets of relations; those internal to the milieu itself, those between different milieus and different orders of milieu (specifically in this case, between the musical milieu and the record industry), and a third level of interaction between the milieu and the surrounding "culture, economy and politics"⁷. Anyone reading the latter might imagine that Webb would therefore want to examine - to pick some minor examples at random - what Patrick Leagas means when he says he has a "sense of being English" despite the fact that "I do not recognise this as England"⁸, or perhaps Doug Pearce's claim to have been part of a "reawakening of... Eurocentrism" in the milieu⁹, or any of the many similar statements that litter the interviews here.

Webb repeatedly mentions the group's interest in 'traditionalism'¹⁰ without bothering to find out if this might refer not to a vague hankering after Morris Dancers and cricket on the village lawn but rather the traditionalism of René Guénon and the 'super-fascist' Julius Evola¹¹ - who's work, after all, has been edited and published by a key collaborator of the group, Michael Moynihan (of Blood Axis), who is mentioned repeatedly in the book¹² and whose connection to Evola is even noted¹³. Similarly you'd expect that he might be interested to know whether the group's interest in "occult influences in the social and cultural order"¹⁴ might possibly be connected with Evola's idea that an occult war is being waged for control of society, in which Jews and Masons work for the "forces of subversion" seeking to overthrow the "forces of order"¹⁵. According to Evola this plan was revealed in The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the infamous anti-Semitic tract for which he wrote an introduction when it was published in Italian in 1937, and the veracity of which he continued to defend long after it had been exposed as a forgery¹⁶ cooked up by the Czarist secret police. Since Evola's arguments on the matter are taken from a book edited and published by Moynihan there is every chance that this is precisely what was intended, but Webb is in no hurry to find out. Indeed, Webb seems not even to be curious about the politics involved: his bibliography lists none of the relevant texts by or about the fascist ideologues who have inspired so many members of this 'scene'.

Despite the constant use by the group of dog-whistle references to ideas from the radical right¹⁷, Webb consistently steers clear of any attempt to find out what the members of Death in June and their friends actually think. In fact, if we are to believe Webb his subjects have few real opinions¹⁸. Instead they seem to suffer from an incurable case of chronic ideological indeterminacy which prevents them from concluding anything at all; they are forever 'exploring' and 'investigating', apparently without arriving at any definite convictions. So, his musicians have "a thirst for esoteric knowledge, and an art of self-questioning and soul searching"¹⁹; they 'deal with' "the traditions of Europe"²⁰ and 'allude to' "paganism, heathenism, Europe, the West"²¹; they have "explored and looked at a variety of philosophies and pagan knowledges"²² and "sought out ideas and ways of understanding"²³; they are "searching for something else"²⁴; they 'take inspiration' "from a wide variety of sources and (show) "their thirst for knowledge and new ways of interpreting things"²⁵; and the neo-folk milieu as a whole has created a space in which "a variety of ideas can be explored and developed"²⁶. But it is impossible to imagine how any idea could be 'developed' if everyone involved in its development refused to say what they thought of it, how they interpreted it, or whether they believed it to be true. But, again, Webb puts his blind eye up to the glass and refuses to see.

To some small extent this dereliction of duty simply reflects Webb's declared methodology. In an early chapter ('A Journey Through Theories of the Intersection of Music and Culture'²⁷) he offers a potted overview of the history of popular culture studies in which, broadly, the (pseudo-) Marxism of Dick Hebdige and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) is given a rap on the knuckles for placing undue emphasis on structure above agency, and a string of post-modernists are wheeled out to make a case for privileging instead "the subjective meanings of subculturalists rather than deriving these from a pre-given totalising theory"²⁸. While I have no interest in the minutia of such debates within the sociology department, it's clear from Webb's arguments that he simply wants to justify his preferred approach, in which he can tell his story from an insider's point of view, as a fan of the genre, its cod philosophy, kitsch aesthetics and atavistic politics. To some extent, then, the problem is that Webb, in his enthusiasm to paint himself as the hippest and most edgy sociologist in town²⁹, has simply 'gone native'. His 'phenomenological' approach is solipsistic, allowing him to seal off his favourite musicians from even the possibility of criticism. This is hinted at in the tendentious example he provides of a 'momentary milieu', in which someone from "a Socialist background", on meeting a Nationalist, may "respond with disdain and contempt", in which case their "momentary exposure to this other political milieu is... fenced off by the rigidity of his or her particular political vision"³⁰.

This relativism is mirrored by a corresponding blurring of moral lines. At one point he considers the lyrics to the Death in June track 'C'est un Reve' (It's a Dream):

Ou est Klaus Barbie?
Il est dans le coeur
Il est dans le coeur noir

Liberté
c'est un reve

Webb concludes that Barbie (an SS captain in occupied France known as 'The Butcher of Lyon', who personally tortured his victims and had as many as 4,000 murdered) is to be found "in the heart" of everyone³¹; a repulsive argument which attempts to capsize the moral distinction to be made between Barbie and his victims³². Webb offers this as an example of "the direction of Death in June's art" which works to "enliven, question, re-examine and provoke a response"³³. Certainly  arguments like this are going to 'provoke a response', if only because they are so repellant, but that hardly justifies the art. If it did then we would have to be similarly grateful to Barbie himself for also 'making us think'.

Another gear in Webb's machinery of obfuscation is his idealist concept of art. For Webb the aesthetic is a privileged domain in which no one needs to say what they think or be held responsible for the results. He claims that the racists and fascists who attend neo-folk concerts have "taken the symbols and references... directly and uncomplicatedly", not understanding that the bands are using them "for artistic purposes"³⁴, as if the re-presentation of an idea in the context of a song somehow means we can ignore its meaning or the intentions of the singer. Of course a song can express opinions on behalf of a character other than the singer, but in the case of Death in June the two may often coincide. If we were to rely on Webb we would never know: he might have tried to find out one way or the other, but instead he uses the idea of 'artistic ambiguity' to avoid the question. Similar feelings about the sublimity of art are common among those postindustrial fans who claim they are interested in 'the aesthetics of fascism' but not the politics, ignoring the fact that, as the anti-fascist critic Walter Benjamin argued, fascism crucially involves precisely the admixing of aesthetics and politics, such that the two cannot be so neatly separated³⁵.

Webb relies extensively on his half-baked notion of 'ambiguity' to provide cover for his pop idols. Of course such ambiguity can be central to the artwork, but it can also provide the perfect cover for supporters of the radical right pursuing a strategy of 'right-wing Gramscianism'. This strategy has been developed by Alain de Benoist and other supporters of the Nouvelle Droite / European New Right (ENR), whose ideas chime neatly not only with the 'third way' faction of the NF that Wakeford mixed with but also with the positions defended by him to this day. As Anton Shekhovtsov has explained, the aim of the strategy is;

"to modify the dominant culture and make it more susceptible to a non-democratic mode of politics... the adherents of the ENR believe that one day the allegedly decadent era of egalitarianism and cosmopolitanism will give way to ‘an entirely new culture based on organic, hierarchical, supra-individual, heroic values’. It is important to emphasize, however, that ‘metapolitical fascism’ focuses... on the battle for hearts and minds rather than for immediate political power. Following Evola’s precepts, the ENR tries to distance itself from both historical and contemporary fascist parties and regimes."³⁶

Webb notes that Death in June "deliberately were ambiguous about any political meaning that they might be conveying"³⁷, but fails to register that if someone dresses up on stage as a fascist and sings songs promoting fascist ideas while waving a fascist flag around, but then denies being a fascist, what they are engaged in is not ambiguity but subterfuge. He notes that "this milieu acts as a source of pathways into a set of... ideas"³⁸ but refuses to consider what those ideas might actually be behind the blabber and smoke.

If that were all there were to it this book would be just another example of the vacuity of academic sociology, the impotence of postmodernism and the dangers of letting a fanboy loose in the academy. But Webb's self-imposed myopia becomes a shade more sinister when you consider the gaping aporias he leaves scattered around his text so that his boys can emerge from it unsullied. For instance, in telling the story of the group's origins he omits to mention that their name commemorates the 'Night of the Long Knives', in June 1934, when the Nazi regime executed the leadership of the Sturmabteilung (SA - The Stormtroopers, or Brownshirts), including Gregor Strasser, a major influence on sections of the National Front with which Tony Wakeford has been associated. This event, in which the Nazi leadership dispatched the left-facing wing of their movement, was also known as Operation Hummingbird, which also happens to be the title of an album the group recorded with Albin Julius, whose band, Der Blutharsch have been banned from playing in Israel and elsewhere because of their stance. Such coincidences are certainly going make the audience think; unless, of course, they are sociologists or phenomenologists from Goldsmiths University.

Webb discusses Crisis at some length, since they were the band Wakeford and Pearce belonged to back in the days when they were, respectively, members of the Socialist Wokers Party (SWP) and International Marxist Group (IMG). Strangely, though, he has nothing to say about the group Wakeford formed on leaving Death in June - Above the Ruins - whose members reputedly (Wakeford will neither confirm nor deny) included Gary Smith, previously of the openly Nazi band No Remorse (who were part of Ian Stuart's Blood and Honor organisation and also, co-incidentally, recorded an album that referred to the Brownshirts; The New Stormtroopers) and Nazi activist Ian Read. The band contributed a track to an a album, No Surrender, which was produced as a fundraiser for the British National Front, and which included a track by Skrewdriver, the first and most notorious White Power band, and their name is presumably derived from the title of Evola's book, 'Men Among the Ruins'. None of this gets a mention from Webb. Perhaps Wakeford himself never mentioned the band or its members to him. This is possible, since Wakeford has admitted lying to and misleading interviewers in the past (on preparing for a particular interview he says "I better dig out my bumper book of fibs"³⁹), but then such evasions could be got around by a little independent research. But it seems that Webb has no interest in doing such research, preferring to base his work entirely on the say-so of his subjects - in the name of 'phenomenology'.

Similarly, when Webb discusses Wakeford's involvement in the online fanzine Flux Europa he tells us that the magazine "discussed postmodernism, art, literature, philosophy, film and music", reassuring us that "the content was diverse". He proves this by mentioning the articles it contained "on Camille Paglia, Jack London and Ezra Pound"⁴⁰. What Webb conspicuously fails to mention is that, as reported by Stewart Home, Flux Europa was an extension of the cultural activities of Transeuropa, which itself emerged from the wreckage of National Front cultural-intellectual group IONA (Islands of the North Atlantic) - both organisations that Wakeford has had some involvement with. And - a tiny detail but one that is highly revealing - while Webb mentions Camille Paglia, Ezra Pound and Jack London as artists about whom Flux Eropa had published articles, what he omits to mention is that they are among a small group of people who are included under the site's 'Personae' section, which is presumably how Webb came to choose them in the first place, and at the time Webb was doing his research that section contained biographies of just two other people; the Vorticist and fascist supporter Wyndham Lewis, and Ernst Jünger, the German Nationalist fanatic who celebrated war, death and pain, and whose Stirnerian concept of the sovereign individual as 'Anarch' has inspired subsequent generations of radical rightists and neo-fascists - including Troy Southgate of the neo-folk band H.E.R.R. In an act of blatant self-censorship, Webb chooses not to mention these names. Of course, if he wanted to exclude all of the fascist supporters on the list then he'd have omitted to mention Ezra Pound too - but that wouldn't have left him with much of a list.

Another curious omission concerns Death in June's album Rose Clouds of Holocaust, which was banned from sale in Germany by the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien (Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young People), who found that the title song cast doubt on the occurrence of the Holocaust on account of lyrics that run "Rose clouds of Holocaust/ Rose clouds of lies/ Rose clouds of bitter/ Bitter, bitter lies"⁴¹. As we have now come to expect, none of this is mentioned by Webb.

Boyd Rice

Webb applies his now familiar uncritical and tendentious attitude to Wakeford's supposed renunciation of his fascist past, hastily posted to the Sol Invictus website when the heat was beginning to be turned up on him, and which is worded so ambiguously as to convince me that he still holds to at least some of the core ideas he learned as a member of the National Front (NF). He says; "I have no connection with, or sympathy for, or interest in [the ideas of the NF], nor have I had for around 20 years"⁴², but then that would be true of other ex-members who also moved on to more diverse forms of radical rightist politics since that party's collapse. When Wakeford adds that "none of the artists I work with hold such views either" you know that he is throwing sand in your face given that he has worked with the likes of Boyd Rice, who is quite happy to promote the white power skinhead party, the American Front, appearing in full Nazi uniform alongside its leader, Bob Heick. Webb, on the other hand, accepts the statement as definitive proof that Wakeford has nothing to answer for. Stranger still, he continues to believe Wakeford's reassurances despite having been shown to have been misled by him. As Stewart Home has argued, Wakeford's attempt at rehabilitating himself falls a long way short of what you would expect from someone who had truly broken with their fascist past.

Apart from covering up for this gaggle of neo-fascists Webb has little or nothing of interest to say about the milieu or its art. His analysis of the music on offer would make even the the most lazy and inept music hack blush. Generally all he can muster is the observation that the music is 'melancholic': so Nico made "intense melancholic music"⁴³; Scott Walker's work combines "simple melody... with the melancholy of the words"⁴⁴; Death in June are attracted to "melancholic poetry"⁴⁵ and their work is pervaded by "a type of melancholia"; neo-folk has added "melancholia" to industrial music⁴⁶, and so on. It never occurs to him to ask what the artists are melancholic about. He doesn't bother to speculate about why folk music, which idealises the pre-capitalist past, should be so appealing to his subjects. His attempts at analysing the use of collage in art are laughable: he  manages to compare Death in June's deliberately evasive and dishonest jumble of fascist iconography with John Heartfield's superbly pointed and polemical anti-Nazi collages⁴⁷, and he thinks that what Death in June do "is like a more structured version of William Burroughs and Brian (sic) Gysin's cut up method" adding "(reference needed here)"⁴⁸. Indeed, a reference is the very least that would be required to make this argument get off the mortuary table - it's like saying that a car maintenance manual 'is like a more structured version' of an exploding library.

Peter Webb has written a book which deals with a milieu that is riddled with neo-fascists and supporters of the radical right. He claims that he wants to explain the milieu by considering the relationship between it and the wider 'culture, economy and politics', and admits that "there are many questions [concerning] the political and cultural implications of a scene such as this", but he finally concludes that "These questions are outside of the remit of this book"⁴⁹. To the rest of us this looks like exactly what it is; an attempt to justify an utterly craven and dishonest book that fails to meet even the most minimal academic or intellectual standards.


NB. Peter Webb subsequently replied to these criticisms in a statement that we have also published - Strelnikov, 11/10/10

---

Evola, Julius. 1953. Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist, (2002: tr. Guido Stucco, ed. Michael Moynihan, Inner Traditions, Rochester NY)
Shekhovtsov, Anton. 2009, Apoliteic Music: Neo-Folk, Martial Industrial and “Metapolitical Fascism"’, in Patterns of Prejudice, Volume 43, Issue 5 (December 2009), pp. 431-457. This excellent essay is also available online.
Sykes, Alan. 2005. The Radical Right in Britain, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.
Webb, Peter. 2007. Exploring the Networked Worlds of Popular Music: Milieu Cultures, Routledge, Abbingdon.


1. Webb, 2007, p65
2. ibid, pp93f
3. ibid, pp94f. In an extraordinary page-long digression from his thesis, he also claims that these 'fascistic tendencies' are also behind the hounding of former members of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), who we must assume are his former comrades since I see no other justification for his dragging in them into the argument at this point.
4. ibid, pp29-38
5. ibid, p30
6. ibid, p37
7. ibid, p38
8. ibid, p96
9. ibid, p97
10. ibid, pp 98, 99, 105
11. Evola, Julius. 'Things Put in Their Proper Place and Some Plain Words', in La Torre, issue #5, April 1930, quoted in H.T.Hansen, 'Introduction', Evola, 2002, p42. Here Evola explains that he is an 'anti-fascist', critical of Mussolini and Hitler, only to the extent that he is a 'super-fascist' and wants to go much further.
12. Webb, 2007, pp 66, 67
13. ibid, p92
14. ibid, p97
15. Evola, 2002, p236
16. ibid, p239f
17. My use of the terms 'fascist', 'revolutionary conservative' and 'the radical right' is sometimes fairly loose since with many of the people concerned it is hard to say exactly where they stand in the spectrum of ultra-right thought. But I follow Alan Sykes in seeing the 'radical right' as a term that encompasses fascism. I also include within this the 'traditionalism' of Evola and others, as well as movements that could be described as 'reactionary modernist', 'radical imperialist' or similar. Sykes, 2005, p2.
18. Although in the case of Patrick Leagas this may well be true, since he admits that "coming to a conclusion about anything at all is beyond me!". Webb, 2007, p81
19. Webb, 2007, p66
20. ibid, p68
21. ibid, p68
22. ibid, p81
23. ibid, p85
24. ibid, p85
25. ibid, p89
26. ibid, p105
27. ibid, pp11-28
28. ibid, p21
29. "This book has been inspired by a love of popular music for over three decades", ibid, p7
30. ibid, p30-31 
31. ibid, p79
32. In April 1944 Barbie ordered the deportation to Auschwitz of a group of 44 Jewish children from an orphanage at Izieu. He was also responsible for a massacre in Rehaupal in September 1944. See Wikipedia.
33. Webb, 2007, p79
34. ibid, p92
35. Walter Benjamin, 'Epilogue', 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'
36. Shekhovtsov, 2009. Apoliteic Music
37. Webb, 2007, p76
38. ibid, p105
39. Wakeford, Sol Invictus profile, Facebook, 26 July 2008
40. Webb, 2007, p89
41. Shekhovtsov, 2009. Apoliteic Music, note #6.
42. Wakeford, 'A Message From Tony', tursa.com 14 Feb 2007
43. Webb, 2007, p61
44. ibid, p62
45. ibid, p98
46. ibid, p105
47. ibid, p93
48. ibid, p78
49. ibid, p105