[D66] Manifesto of The ASSOCIATION OF MUSICAL MARXISTS

[Antid Oto]

http://www.unkant.com/p/manifesto.html

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

xi-2010
info at ammarxists.org


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


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

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

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

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

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

HERE COMES EVERYBODY!

x-2011
info at ammarxists.org