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Excellent letters from Adam Buick (2) and Robin Cox (1) in Weekly Worker issues 1491 (AB) and 1493 (RC/AB).
Today is Thursday and there should be a new WW. Let’s hope someone will feel provoked into responding to them.
And here is the ICC’s review of that same Saito book:https://en.internationalism.org/content/17488/critique-saitos-degrowth-communism
Can I look forward to the Keith Scholey talk on the SPGB and the Spanish Civil War being put online?
Recent interview with 87-year-old Israeli anarchist Ilan Shalif:
https://libcom.org/article/interview-israeli-anarchist-ilan-shalif
In case it might be of interest, I see that Vygotsky-enthusiast Andy Blunden last year published a book titled ‘Activity Theory — A critical overview’, the table of contents of which is here:
DJP wrote: ‘It’s a shame Reich re-wrote his early books to incorporate his later theories. I wonder what the first edition of Mass Psychology was like. I don’t think it has been translated into English?’
It seems not, and the original (ie pre-orgone) Mass Psychology of Fascism has only recently become available again (freely, at that) in German: https://www.psychosozial-verlag.de/2940
imposs1904:
Here, Lew recommended a specific, free VPN:https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/topic/bbc-licence-fee-set-to-be-axed/#post-225675
‘German guiltwashing in times of genocide’:https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/2/27/german-guiltwashing-in-times-of-genocide , in which:
‘The message of the guiltwashers is clear: Germany alone is exceptional in its stance against anti-Semitism. Germany alone is fit to judge anti-Semitism. Germany, in opposing the exceptionalism of the Nazi era, is today exceptional once again but, of course, in a different and supposedly progressive way.
The sheer lack of self-awareness would be amusing if it were not so tragic and if its consequences were not so disastrous. Various Jewish authors and scholars have repeatedly pointed out the anti-Semitic nature of this guiltwashing approach.
“We have a form of anti-Semitism … that is not even addressed as anti-Semitism, and it is the collective silencing of Jewish voices that do not abide by the dominant discourse in Germany,” Emilia Roig, a Jewish French scholar and writer, said at a December event in Berlin.
According to Jewish writer and researcher Emily Dische-Becker, a third of those who have been “cancelled” in Germany for alleged anti-Semitism (i.e. expressing solidarity with the Palestinians) have been Jews, including descendents of Holocaust survivors.’
Re Minassian, surplus population, the Gaza War, and that IP leaftet, here, against ‘Minassian’s rantings’, is an article by Council Communists Mark One (ie pro KAPD / anti Ruehle). Decadence-theory also comes in for bad mention.
Internationalist Perspective and other followers of Minassian cum suis
About drone music:
Bret Schneider: ‘Hearing in the Present Tense: On La Monte Young’s Orphic Revolution’ (Feb 2024):
https://caesuramag.org/posts/hearing-in-the-present-tense-bret-schneider
Quickly too high-brow for me, but starts intelligibly enough:
‘In the years between my 2008 essay on drone music & today, little has changed in the art form. As if frozen in time, my argument then stands still—that drone music has not developed as an art form since Young’s Dream Houses, & has mostly been barbarized into a muddy ambience and cheap theatrics. This may come as a surprise to many who’ve witnessed the growth of ambient & experimental music through cottage industries & into the mainstream. And yet, contrary to lazy conflations, ambient music is not drone. In many ways, the innocuous background character of ambient is counter to the clarified, ecstatic, & acute beauty of drone as Young conceived & practiced it, which sharpened instead of convoluted listening perception. Not to mention that the continuation of classical or ancient practices of modal music, north indian raga, & organum that drone’s partly founded upon, is more often than not subject to barbarization instead of fulfillment, as often happens elsewhere in contemporary art’s interpretation of history. With the recent death of Catherine Christer Hennix, there are now scant few musicians in the world who comprehend and can transmit the true conceptual significance of dronal form, let alone its tricky implementation in practice.’
[…]
‘The original idea of drone music in the dream houses—aka “composite sound waveform environments”—was that the listener be exposed to novel harmonies constructed with sine waves that are tangible as physical standing waves. It would serve at least a double purpose—the standing waves create a palpable sensory experience as the listener mixes parts of a massive vertical chord via their own bodily movement through differing wavelengths, while the subjectively evocative musical harmonies prevented it from being merely a science fair experiment. But Young had also stated that in order to achieve a “drone state of mind,” the tonality needed to be constructed with rational number relationships (just intonation) so that the ear has constant reference to truly repeating waveforms that reinforce pitch relationships in a way compatible with auditory perception. While this is potentially the absolute zenith of rationalization of art & reified music—a music constructed on ratios is literally rationalized music—the resulting “paradisiacal” listening experience kept “living music,” and what Adorno called the “wakeful ear” alive, paradoxically pointing beyond the calculated mode of music perfected by e.g. Stockhausen and the mid-century avant-garde, as well as commercially rationalized culture elsewhere.’
‘“Paradisiacal” listening’, eh?
The ‘surplus population’ notion (neither industrial reserve army nor lumpens) plays a role in the controversy Internationalist Perspective is having over its Gaza leaflet: https://internationalistperspective.org/a-debate-on-the-ip-leaflet-on-gaza .
(As for the mentioned Emilio Minassian, here in last month’s Field Notes is the mentioned interview with him: https://brooklynrail.org/2023/12/field-notes/Gaza-An-Extreme-Militarization-of-the-Class-War )
Stirner recommended as’philosophical teacher of the proletariat’, and ‘The Unique and its Property’ [aka The Ego and its Own] as ‘a book that should be in the hand of every thinking worker’.
Recommended by an anarchist? No. By a German social-democrat in 1897:
https://jacobin.com/2024/02/max-stirner-proletariat-philosophy-duncker
