The Virtual Stoa

A Gibbon-o-Matic!

[Via Brad DeLong]

Possibly by coincidence, or maybe just because I like this kind of thing, the three pieces of music I heard in 2003 which made the biggest impact were all farewells of one kind or another. None were recorded in 2003; only one was released in that year. But this is when I first heard them, and that�s what matters, to me at least.

The first was a 1982 live recording of Emmylou Harris performing “I�m Movin’ On”, backed by the Hot Band going at full blast for three exceptional minutes. Excellent solos on fiddle, keyboards and guitar break up six verses of heroic singing, all of which transforms Hank Snow’s country classic into something quite different, far more exhilarating, and altogether less smug.

The other two records are more poignant.

The second song was from an even older recording, but I hadn�t caught up with it before: Kathleen Ferrier’s legendary recording of Mahler’s “Der Abschied” [The Farewell] from the end of “Das Lied von der Erde”. There’s a fine appraisal of this record by Derek Lim here which does a good job of explaining what’s so good about it. For me it’s been a way of rediscovering what has been one of my favourite pieces of music for over a decade now, with “Der Abschied” a sort of musical equivalent to the epic final pages of Finnegans Wake as the Liffey flows out to the sea. Thanks, then, to my musicologist friend Aidan Thompson, who gave me the recommendation when I told him I needed to replace my existing CD of this piece.

Finally — and I admit that this isn’t in the same league as these other two records, but still very interesting, and actually from a 2003 release (though it must have been recorded earlier) — the late Joe Strummer singing Bob Marley�s “Redemption Song” on his recent and posthumous album, Streetcore. It�s a song I associate with endings as there�s a well-known recording of it from Marley�s final concert in Pittsburgh in September 1980, shortly before he too died young. (My friend Raj tells me, by the way, that the first words spoken in newly-independent Zimbabwe just after the British flag was taken down were: �Ladies and Gentlemen — Bob Marley and the Wailers!� Those were happier times.) I�m told also that my two Favourite Recently-Dead Musicians, Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer, sing the song together on the new Unearthed box, which gives me yet another reason for wanting to go out and buy it, even though on the whole the post-1994 Johnny Cash records don�t thrill me as much as other people seem to like them.

Chris Lightfoot does a nice comparative analysis of Michael Howard vs John D. Rockefeller, Jr. on the matter of what they said they believed in 2004 and 1941 respectively.

Newspapers are saying that Howard’s statement is “an almost exact replica” of Rockefeller’s, but, as Chris shows, that’s patently bollocks.

There’s a bit of interesting bloggerage coming out of this Jackie Ashley article in the Guardian. First, Marcus at Harry’s Place wrote a bit about why he likes Gramsci and Italy, and that prompted a bit of discussion in the comments box; and then Socialism in an Age of Waiting weighed in with some of useful observations about the history of all of this.

Richard Bayley asked Marcus in the comments to Harry’s why he’s turning to Gramsci rather than Hegel for a theorisation of civil society. Marcus said he didn’t know much about Hegel, and that’s why he didn’t mention him, but an even better reason as to why Marcus was right not to mention Hegel was that his argument has nothing to do with Hegel’s conception of civil society. For Hegel, civil society was (i) the market economy and what flowed from that, (ii) a system of law enforcement and policing and (iii) a bunch of professional associations, which aren’t quite analagous to either mediaeval guilds or modern unions. And I don’t think anyone reading Marcus’s original post would say that he was talking about that kind of thing at all.

Marcus does, however, give a very one-sided account of Gramsci on civil society, and, in fact, makes Gramsci sound far more like Tocqueville and other nineteenth century liberals than anything else. By playing up the role of “voluntary associations” in civil society and claiming that strong local associations and strong local government by the local communists conduces to flourishing modern communities in which half-dressed girls don’t throw up in public so often (his example), he hitches his bandwagon to Robert Putnam and the neo-Tocquevillians, who think that the trouble with modern life is that we’re bowling alone and don’t belong to enough organisations (and, yes, in his earlier book on Italy, Making Democracy Work he also argued that local government being run by communists made for more efficient government, other things being equal, etc.). Now there’s a lot wrong with the Putnam thesis (my stepfather-in-law explains why here), but the crucial point here is a simple one: it’s got very little to do with the socialist tradition, and quite a lot to do with a certain conception of liberal civil society. That conception might be an attractive one, for lots of reasons, but it’s not a distinctively leftist conception, let alone a socialist one, and to invoke the name of Gramsci in support of that vision rather than, say, Tocqueville or Putnam helps to disguise that fact.

What’s missing in Marcus’s description of Gramsci’s civil society is Gramsci’s communism. The point of emphasising the nature of civil society was a part of getting revolutionary political strategy right, and the political strategy Gramsci recommended in Italy — the “war of position” — was one of the democratically centralised and extremely disciplined communist party struggling to transform the institutions of civil society in its image as a constituent part of its campaign against the state and the owners of the means of production. (As I recall — I don’t have my copy of Gramsci with me right now — Gramsci used military metaphors a great deal, denied that he was advocating non-violent forms of political struggle, and suggested that the “war of position” would turn out to be a bloodier affair than the quick coup d’état that the Bolsheviks managed in Russia.) The postwar Italian Communists adapted to the postwar Italian state form, and in certain respects did quite well out of that adaptation (depends on your perspective, I suppose: for some older comments on mine on this kind of thing, go here). But they weren’t being terribly Gramscian, though they said that they were.

Socialism in an Age of Waiting (hey — can I call you Patrick, or do you prefer to be spelled out in full? I can�t quite bring myself to call you SIAW) goes on to say some useful things about the Webbs. (Does this make this the first real Webblog?) And the general point lurking in the background here which can’t be stressed enough is that whereas socialist theories have been with us for almost two hundred years (more than two hundred if we count the Babouvists, and even longer than that if we rather anachronistically include older radical societies and popular movements which taught utopianism and egalitarianism), statist socialism really isn’t that much older than the Fabians or the Webbs (and it’s not an accident in this regard that Fabianism began as a movement within the British Liberal Party). The nineteenth century nation-state wasn’t big or powerful enough to organise economic life, so socialists looked to exploring other mechanisms and building other institutions; and it was only when the ruling classes themselves built powerful, bureaucratic states which gobbled up big chunks of GDP and organised economic production in order to wage their wars — especially the First World War — that the Left came face to face with these very large capitalist nation-states and began devising strategies for taking them over and using the state machinery to pursue some of their own goals, rather than merely furthering the interests of the bourgeois politicians and officials who created them in the first place.

So the link between socialism and the large state is a contingent one, and it’s good to be able intellectually to break that link. But it does need to be broken in the right kind of way — and rewriting the history of socialist theory to make the Italian communists and Alexis de Tocqueville sing from the same hymnsheet seems to me to be a far better strategy for burying than for praising.

I’m the subject of today’s Normblog profile.

UPDATE [3.1.2004]: In the profile I said I’d been reading Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide: if you’ve read this book, or if you think you’re at all interested on what it might have to say about anything, do look at Joseph Nevins’s excellent, detailed review of this book in The Nation, which does a terrific job of explaining what is good and what is not so good about its argument.

While on the subject of The Nation, I’m happy to report a sighting of a new article by my old friend Sasha Abramsky, this time on the current round of redistricting that’s going on in the US.

Here’s the list I sent in to the Normblog Best Movies poll, ordered by date, though the first is also the best:

Napoléon vu par Abel Gance (1927)
A Night at the Opera (1935)
Casablanca (1942)
Ladri di biciclette [Bicycle Thieves] (1948)
The Third Man (1949)
High Noon (1952)
Kumonosu jo [Throne of Blood] (1957)
Il Gattopardo [The Leopard] (1963)
La Battaglia di Algeri [The Battle of Algiers] (1965)
C’era una volta il West [Once Upon a Time in the West] (1968)

I’m pleased to see just how important good music is to most of these films: Napoléon requires an orchestra to perform properly, A Night at the Opera is all about music (and even has bearable musical interludes!), the Marseillaise scene from Casablanca is right at the heart of the film�s drama, two of these films have fine Ennio Morricone scores, one (High Noon) has the greatest title song ever (which I�ve blogged about before), another (The Third Man) has everyone’s favourite zither music.Other random thoughts: it’s a very conservative list: all of these films are generally reckoned to be masterpieces, and there�s nothing especially quirky or idiosyncratic here. It’s also a very male list, too: there are very few really interesting parts for women in any of these films (and I’m not counting Margaret Dumont in A Night at the Opera here), several of which centre — as so many films do — around the antagonistic relationships between the male principals. I’m surprised that there’s nothing French on this list apart from Napoléon (I remember enjoying La règle du jeu, but it�s too long since I saw it to have a strong memory of why it was so good, so it doesn�t make it onto this list). There’s nothing Russian. Nothing by several directors whose work I generally like quite a lot: Alfred Hitchcock, Satyajit Ray, Woody Allen. Most obviously of all, there�s nothing at all recent either, which seems odd, because I don’t usually think of myself as being the kind of person who thinks that the only really good films are the really old ones. (Last year’s City of God was splendid.) But there’s nothing here since Once Upon a Time in the West, and all of these films fit into a forty year period or so, 1927-1968, which is a striking distribution for an artform which has been around now for more than a century. Hmm.

There’s more about garum on the internet than I thought there would be.

From the BBC:

Four Italians have dived into the River Tiber in Rome from a height of more than 50 feet (17 metres).The event is a New Year tradition dating back to 1946, when a stuntman trying to find work leapt into the water from the Cavour Bridge. Since then, it has caught on as an annual event.

“I’m dedicating this to peace in the world and to the hope that these terrorist attacks stop - these attacks that make humanity live in terror,” said one diver, Aldo Corrieri…

“The height is pretty important, especially if compared to the river depth which is very little,” said Mr Corrieri’s nephew, 20-year old Riccardo Russi.

“Freezing weather and dirt increase the risk, together with the fact that they do not allow us to prepare ourselves, undress properly and warm up.

Final quote from Riccardo Russi: “But this is an important tradition which we try to carry on year after year, especially my uncle who’s done it for 32 years. We try not to let this tradition die…”

Over at Socialism in an Age of Waiting, I learn that today is not only the tenth anniversary of the Zapatista rebellion but also and even more interestingly the 200th anniversary of Haiti’s Declaration of Independence — which reminds me that I really do need to read The Black Jacobins before too long.

My brother Michael now gets paid to write about films all day, which is a Good Thing, and he’s usefully sent me a list of leftist film people currently included in the whopping great screenonline project on the history of British cinema that he’s caught up in.

So just in case anyone else is interested, here goes: Jim Allen, the Amber Collective, Lindsay Anderson, Anthony Asquith, Ralph Bond, Alan Clarke, Sidney Cole, Bill Douglas, Cy Endfield, Karl Francis, Kenneth Griffith, Michael Grigsby, Glenda Jackson, Humphrey Jennings, Roland Joffé, Ken Loach, Joseph Losey, Kay Mander, Ivor Montagu, Harold Pinter, Vanessa Redgrave, Paul Robeson, John Taylor and Peter Watkins.

Today’s the tenth anniversary of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico.

It’s been official for a while now that W. is unelectable. The Santorum effort has now reached #4 and, I think, is rising fast. It’s not clear yet whether Howard Dean is optimistic. Give it a few weeks, though, and he probably will be.

Louis-Auguste Blanqui, 8 February 1805 - 1 January 1881. More information here and here, with some original texts handily archived here.

Mrs Tilton’s blog, The Sixth International, has begun to appear after too many months away, and makes a triumphant return to the sidebar.

(Boring old Gregorian new year, that is: it’s 22 Nivôse, too, which isn’t the new year at all). With luck, as promised, I’ll start posting again in this space shortly.

If you’ve got any new year thoughts of the “what I’d like to see more [or less] of at the Virtual Stoa…”, please scribble them in the comments section.

(Or not, as the case may be.)