New Left, Local Control, and Fascism

42
Unfortunately, because of the polluted air of scien- artist must have a fighting attitude and must be
tific empiricism, breathed in by self-proclaimed Marx- prepared to accept the risks and consequences of his
ists as well as other people, to refer to Hegel's contribu- work. All countries must speak in their own language.
tion to the dialectical method, namely his recognition of New forms are good if they integrate with the idiom of
the indeterminacy and the relative falseness of the the people..." he is resorting to a cultural expression of
particular viewed in itself, is regarded by many on the the Popular Front. The role that Palacio assigns to the
Left to be a deliberate obfuscation and a petit-bourgeois artist is the same role that the SWP and CP assign to
flight from the more, sober classical materialism that the revolutionary: that of tailing after the present
they along with Mao are submerged in. Impatiently consciousness of the masses.
brushing aside dialectics, they demonstrate their total
saturation with scientific empiricism by accepting the What we have been discussing until now is music
various fragmented social groupings on the Left, such whose basis of existence is ideology, specifically
as students, blacks, women, as being tantamount to a bourgeois ideology. It was Feuerbach's great contriworking
class organization. Like the scientific empiri- bution to unmask the nature of ideology in general by
cists they believe that you merely add up the parts to unmasking it specifically in religious practice. Not
get the whole, unlike the cultural manifestations we have been discus-
Another way of explaining this particularist world- sing, religion represented symbolically the social relaview
is to use the analogy of language, as Gramsci does tions that appeared to man as being appropriate to his
in the following: "If it is true that any language survival as a species. As Freud pointed out later, it was
contains the elements of a conception of the world and a necessary delusion. While it is false as an explanation
of a culture, it will also be true that the greater or lesser of reality as a whole, it is believed to the extent that it
complexity of a person's conception of the world can be intersects with reality at certain points. So that Rock,
judged from his language. A person who only speaks a which is a caricature of the demonic, a caricature in fact
dialect or who understands the national language in of Nietzsche's earlier caricature of Promethean man,
varying degrees necessarily enjoys a more or less seems to be the appropriate expression of a revolurestricted
and provincial, fossilized and anachronistic tionary force, having taken in isolation merely the
perception of the world in comparison with the great destructive aspect of a creative force and turned it, in
currents of thought which dominate world history. His its own inimically puerile fashion, into a neurotic
interests will be restricted, more or less corporative and distortion. Why its irrationality appeals particularly to
economic, and not universal." students and so-called intellectuals has already been
explained with reference to academic rationality.
In this manner we can regard the various kinds of
music that are sold today under the name of Acid Rock, What is so fascinating to observe in the Left today
Soul, Folk, Protest, Black Nationalist jazz etc., as even among so-called Marxists is the phenomenon of
nothing more than dialects, all of which have a highly schizophrenia. People who very soberly engage in
particularist and thus alienated perception of the world, socialist political practice can seemingly without any
They cannot locate their identity positively with respect difficulty undergo a sudden transformation of personto
their contribution to shaping history because they ality and engage in a cultural manifestation of the most
have no understanding of the class forces which shape hysterical form of religion. Rock is a nominalist music
history. It is no coincidence that these musical dialects of the first order, hysterically reiterating the triad, its
are quickly adopted by equally parochialist political pseudo-tonality, as a substitution for the tonal process
groups such as the black cultural nationalists or the that was an appropriate expression of the 18th and 19th
SWP, which represents the sum total of all parochialist centuries. This vulgar nominalism, in addition to its
social groupings within the conceivable imagination. A Dionysian cult of irrationality, are what make it
music expressing the parochialist outlook of national eminently bourgeois. Despite this evidence that Rock is
self-determination will be the musical expression of a an expression of alientated bourgeois existence, many
false and alienated consciousness from the standpoint leftists will continue to wail "But I like it, I like Dylan
of humanity because it does not take positively into too. Don't you like the Stones?" and will vigorously
account the nations that are not their own. For resist anyone who threatens to take away his right to
example, the protest music that has come out of Latin this fanatical religious belief, suggesting that your
America so far has lacked this self-consciousness and at failure to join him stems from artistic and intellectual
best has been a reiteration of similar sentiments elitism.
expressed by other countries in the Third World. The
fact that a plurality of nations are all expressing the One of the familiar shrieks of pain to emanate from
sentiment of national self-determination does not make one attacked in this manner, such as the phenomenon
it international. Furthermore, it is based on the false of a Zappa fan, is to claim that one form of Rock is a
notion of the Menshevik theory of stages, in this case satire on another, as though this music of miniscule
the idea that each nation must inevitably pass through human self-consciousness is capable of satirizing any
its bourgeois stage before reaching socialism. Thus social phenomenon today let alone its musical brother.
when a musician of Uruguay talks about the meaning of Here it is again useful to return to Marx's Eighteenth
revolutionary art in the following terms, saying "the Brumaire since the distinction between genuine and