Riccardo Balli, however obscure and enigmatic he might appear in his writing and featured on his picture discs, has shown that he can be highly lucid and brilliantly persuasive in expounding his ideas when he is provoked to defend himself by attacks, such as the one Toby Reynolds, the literary critic of Datacide, launched against him on Reddit in the summer of 2018.
In reviewing ‘Frankenstein, Or The 8-Bit Prometheus’, Reynolds warned his readers of the danger that Balli might become the messiah of the enemies of realism. “Here at last was a self-proclaimed advocate of anti-writing: explicitly anti-realist and by implication anti-reality as well. Here was a writer ready to declare that words were meaningless and that all communication between human beings was impossible. Reynolds conceded that Balli presented a valid personal vision, but “the peril arises when it is held up for general emulation as the gateway to writing or music of the future, that bleak new world from which the humanist heresies of faith in logic and belief in man will forever be banished.’ Balli was moving away from realism, with “characters and events [that] have traceable roots in life” – from the writing of Paul Virilio, Stewart Home, Bill Drummond, Mark Manning, Lester Bangs, Brecht and Sartre.1
Reynolds’ attack opened one of the most interesting discussions on this subject ever conducted in public. Balli replied that he certainly did not see himself as a messiah,
Så
länge som det funnits en tanke på universell befrielse genom
kommunistisk revolution, har detta projekt rymt en spänning mellan
två tillvägagångssätt – två motsatta positioner, bland
människor som, ytligt betraktat, strävar efter samma slutmål.
Å
ena sidan finner vi ett synsätt som kan sammanfattas med dessa ord:
Endast revolutionen kommer att öppna för ett verkligt lustfyllt
liv, och för att nå dit måste vi agera som asketiska kadrer.
Den
motsatta sidan menar: Bara genom att utveckla våra lust och följa
våra begär kommer revolutionen att öppna sig som en möjlighet.
Om
vi blickar tillbaka på det gångna seklets två stora faser av
revolutionära kamper (den första kring 1917–23, den andra kring
1967–77, med geografiska variationer), så finner vi genast att det
för många revolutionärer varit grundläggande och självklart att
hedonism och revolution måste gå hand i hand.
Frågan
är nära kopplad till synen på arbete. “Frihetens rike börjar
i själva verket först där det arbete som är bestämt av nödtvång
och yttre ändamålsenlighet upphör”, skriver Marx i det tredje
bandet av Kapitalet.
Han lämnar inga tvivel om att frihetens rike alltid måste bygga på
nödvändighetens rike, men heller inte om att människans mål måste
vara att uppnå största möjliga frihet. Och detta måste inbegripa
lönearbetets avskaffande.
Book review: No borders, no fatherland! France – What’s New for the Left?
(Ni patrie ni frontières, Paris 2017, 454p., no ISBN)
I first came across the journal Ni patrie ni frontières (subtitled: Ni États, ni Eglises – Ni “races”, ni ethnies – Traductions et débats) around 2003/2004 when they published a collection of texts in English by the Dutch group De Fabel van de illegaal, titled Nationalism, Anti-Semitism and the Anti-globalisation Movement (1998-2003). At a time when things were going seriously wrong in the radical Left and especially the wider “anti-globalisation” movement, the brochure was a welcome signal that there were critical voices that were sensitive to the growing overlap of far right and far left anti-imperialist positions, often manifesting themselves as “anti-Zionist”.
I started picking up copies of Ni patrie ni frontières whenever I could find them. The French journal was started in 2002 by Yves Coleman and a fair number of issues appeared in quick succession. Initially published in the form of photocopied and staple-bound A4 editions, they switched to printed softcovers in 2007 with issue 21/22.
The journal presents a wide range of historical texts and contemporary analysis of the pressing questions of the “revolutionary” Left, with views from a spectrum of radical writers and groups ranging from Left Communism to anarchism and Third Camp Trotskyism. Among the writers are Loren Goldner (Insurgent Notes), and the groups the Alliance for Worker’s Liberty, (the German) Wildcat publication, Temps critiques, Movement Communiste, the Worker-Communist Parties of Iran and Iraq, as well as anarchist and left communist classics.
A review article of ‘Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump’ by Gary Lachman, 2018
Friday 13th July 2018 – The US President is on a visit to Britain and on the streets of London one of the biggest week day demonstrations in living memory is taking place, with as many as 250,000 people marching to Trafalgar Square to oppose Donald Trump. There is a wide range of banners, portable sound systems, marching bands (including ‘Trumpets Against Trump’) and home made placards weird and wonderful. It seems that every contemporary cultural reference point is being mobilised. A group of women in red are dressed as characters from the Handmaid’s Tale with a sign declaring ‘Gilead steals our babies too’ alluding to the caging of children of migrants caught crossing the Mexican border. Trump is satirised as a baby, as the devil (a placard pictures him with the caption ‘Not today Satan’) and as an evil dementor from the Harry Potter tales with the words ‘Expecto Patronum’ – the magic charm used by Potter to raise a spirit guardian to defend against the dark forces of Voldemort. )
But supposing occult forces really are at work in the Trump aeon? That is the thesis of Gary Lachman’s ‘Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump’ (2018), which sets out to explore the ‘new incursion of far-right occultism into the contemporary political landscape’ both in the USA and in Putin’s Russia.
c/o Disconnect Store Berlin, Finowstr. 25, 10247 Berlin-Friedrichshain
Vortrag und Diskussion von und mit Daniel Kulla
Revolution in Deutschland 1918-23
Die Novemberrevolution 1918 hat es gerade so ins landläufige Geschichtsbild geschafft, zumindest unter Linken geht sie noch bis Januar 1919 weiter. Der Höhepunkt der revolutionären Bewegung im Februar und März 1919 ist hingegen unter den diversen historischen Siegererzählungen fast verschwunden, was auch die Rückschau auf die weiteren Massenstreiks, Sozialisierungen und Erhebungen bis 1923 sowie die Folgegeschichte prägt. (Nazis redeten nicht gern genauer darüber, wen sie da zusammengeschossen hatten und für wen; die SPD redete gar nicht gern darüber, auf wen sie die ersten Nazis so alles hat schießen lassen; die KPD redete nicht ganz so gern darüber, auf wen geschossen wurde, wenn es nicht ihre Leute waren oder sich zumindest als solche reklamieren ließen.)
So ist das wichtigste revolutionäre Vorbild in der deutschen Geschichte genau deshalb fast vergessen, weil es in so hohem Maß selbstorganisiert war und damit nicht in die übliche nationale wie antinationale Vorstellung vom Deutschen passt, sich weder für Vereinnahmung noch als Schreckbild anbietet. Gleichermaßen in Vergessenheit geraten sind die Konsequenzen: Sowohl der Aufstieg des Nationalsozialismus als auch sein konkretes Erscheinungsbild – mehr als bei jedem anderen Faschismus eine Verkleidung als Arbeitskräfterevolution – erscheinen ohne diese Vorgeschichte kaum begreiflich. Kulla schlägt vor, die kommenden fünf Jahre der revolutionären 100. Jahrestage ab November 2018 dazu zu nutzen, diese Geschichte so sichtbar wie möglich zu machen.
