antipopper

I’ve finally said goodbye to my job, and am basking in delicious bittersweetness, so I’m going to leave a few threads here hanging for a bit. I know you’re still waiting for my alternative to capitalism, Mr Blaze, so the sneakiest and most abstract reply is that Marx was vague about communism for very real reasons. I reckon a tantalising void is preferrable here to a “positive” project, i.e. having a clear blueprint for society. Besides being inevitably linear, ahistorical and closed to the real movements of change in the world, the latter always seems to require strong leaders and creepily willing subjects for implementation. (I’ll never forget someone from the local International Socialist Organisation — the sister organisation of the British SWP and American ISO — telling me that after the revolution, there’d be no Melrose Place. How forward thinking!)

The real “positivity” we need is the flowering and hybridising of already existing creativity and resistance into new, unheard of mutations. And despite the abstract language, this is a practical imperative for organising in the here and now. Rather than waste time on philosophically idealist fantasies of how, say, “the law” will work in the Anarchist Federation of the Future (latent authoritarian wish-fulfilment alert!), how can we productively engage with how people are currently problematising concepts of legality and creating new approaches to techniques of the social? For example, how are women in rural communities collectively dealing with issues surrounding rape? (I’d imagine that’d be far more important, interesting and extensible than any grand alternatives to capitalism that some armchair wanker like myself could theorise.) How can we take those things to different places in partnership with others? How can we connect these instances to form alternative principles to our current social contracts? You see, my policy is to always answer a question with a question. :)

+  +  +

Meanwhile, I’ve been obsessively listening to incredibly white and frosty “troubled AOR”, which I find intoxicating at the moment. Black Box Recorder, Saint Etienne and especially the Pet Shop Boys’ Release. Acoustic guitars with drum machines, disturbingly tasteful bleeps and sad lyrics. Today the Pet Shop Boys’ “London”, with its eminently dignified story of emigration from the former Soviet bloc, had me in tears:

Looking for hard work
or credit card fraud
What do you expect from us?
We come from abroad
To get ourselves a new job
On a building site
They work you so hard but
We trained to fight

We were in London
Let’s do it, let’s break the law
We were in London
Tell it like it is

Not very PC, but it’s precisely this strange “inappropriateness” that makes it really moving, in a way that actually challenges the potential for any imperial or paternalistic condescension. This and Black Box Recorder’s “The Facts of Life” (you may have your way with me, Sarah Nixey!) have gotten me through this time of flux. There’s always thorns amongst the pretty petals. Perhaps this is what people didn’t get about Air’s 10,000Hz Legend — that to enjoy the sweetness of their debut album, one also needed to be sensitive to the spiky, uneasy undercurrent in their aesthetic. Most of the criticisms of 10,000Hz Legend seemed to paper over this, seeking an uncomplicatedly easy-listening experience.

And on another pole, Johnny Marr’s guitars on Release point, in a reversed way, to what makes me not mind Robbie Williams in the slightest. Oh yes. I haven’t really kept tabs on Robbie’s career, but I liked his early solo stuff because it sounded like an unlikely hybrid of the Pet Shop Boys and Oasis. Listen to the first track of his first album: “Lazy Days”. It’s the bridge that makes you realise that Neil Tennant’s cabaret whine and Liam Gallagher’s lumpen sneer are strangely similar. Robbie was a “gay Oasis”, as they used to say. And you know, I don’t mind that at all.