Debating the CPGB on "alternative culture" (blog on Lidtke's book)

[Die Neue Zeit]

Just because I already have a political position doesn't mean I won't reproduce a somewhat contrarian viewpoint, such as on alternative culture:

http://rottenelements.blogspot.com/2011/10/whats-in-it-for-us-alternative-culture.html

What's in it for us? The 'alternative culture' of German social democracy and the forward march of The Rotten Elements (I)

I regard myself basically as neutral and commercial. Take a pair of pliers, you can make it unpleasant for anybody. It's how I was bought up...

From small acorns. Back in December 2008, Ben Lewis of the CPGB interviewed Lars T Lih in the Weekly Worker. Lih made the following statement: 'A classic study of the SPD is The alternative culture by Vernon Lidtke. The book describes how the SPD used everything from an extensive party press to choral singing societies in order to inculcate the proper socialist outlook. In many ways, the Soviet Union is the SPD writ large, and Lidtke’s title could be used for a study of the Soviet era.' I would contend that if you listen to CPGB members at meetings and informal gatherings, that this idea of the 'alternative culture', presented in a largely positive and uncritical form, has become the operative one when CPGB members confront issues of cultural production.

Such judgements have a more explicit political underpinning. The 'alternative culture' is, of course, a product of the centre tendency in the SPD, and thus the centre tendency in the Second International, which is critically lauded (for good reason, in some cases) by Mike Macnair's Revolutionary strategy book. This may (or may not) explain why Lars T Lih's positive assertion has been left unchecked and left to the whiles of mere circulation. Surely, it's worthwhile to dig into the Lidtke work and explore what exactly using this history as a positive model to be emulated might entail?

The CPGB, like the vast majority of the far left, has a history of sharing a basically Stalinist attitude to cultural production. In classical mechanical materialist stylee, artifacts were abused, manipulated to wrench out whatever narrowly political point the organisation felt was pressing down on it at that particular moment. When this came under attack (from groups such as The Rotten Elements), leading CPGB members flipped over into vague metaphysical ponderings on genius, beauty and the like, which left 'safe' artistic 'fellow-travellers' fawned over and the process of art unexplainable. Popular Frontism lives! Don't mention Kant...

I'm glad to say that we weren't without influence in this sphere but only really to the extent of pushing the above attitudes underground (not surprising, in that we have been told that, in darker moments, the CPGB leadership has viewed us as an 'anti-party' grouping). There is, of course, the Red Mist venture, which does seem to have worked out that the ideological ram raids of the past are counter-productive (literally, in this case) but has obviously reached an easy accommodation with the organisation that spawned it (approving mentions in the WW). Rather, it is the duty of these comrades to declare out-and-out war on shit ideas (and to listen to 'Subhuman' by Throbbing Gristle every day for a year until cured).

The point (I think) behind these meanderings is to suggest that when this notion of the 'alternative culture' got dumped, seemingly uncritically, on top of the wreckage of these other 'ideas' and attitudes, it made me nervous. In the second exciting instalment, I will be raising up this 'alternative culture' through Lidtke and exploring its actual meaning. I will also recount to readers an erotic dream I had about Unity Mitford and antique bed linen. Say what ye like, John, but it's never dull...

[Die Neue Zeit]

http://rottenelements.blogspot.com/2011/10/whats-in-it-for-us-alternative-culture_16.html

What's in it for us? The 'alternative culture' of German social democracy and the forward march of The Rotten Elements (II)

Semolina séances in the remains of the day. I slunk out in backstreets with a machine that I, like, invented. It run on clicks (click, click, click) and synchronised random menstrual cycles. Beware that my dad thinks a click is something that took over Hook Norton Cricket Club circa 1995...

All quotes below are from Vernon Lidtke The alternative culture: socialist labour in imperial Germany Oxford University Press, 1985

What is the meaning of this 'alternative culture' of the German SPD in the era of the Second International that, as previously argued, has become such a touchstone for CPGB members? Lidtke defines this broadly as 'an alternative culture in which organised workers could fulfill their needs for companionship, sociability, recreation, learning and aesthetic satisfaction' (p3). Lidtke rightly rejects the instrumentalist practices of assessing this movement by its formal absorption of this or that Marxist principles or through the prism of the SPD's ignominious collapse of 1914.

The author rejects the idea of seeing this 'culture' as a 'subculture', arguing that imprinting it with this label cannot do justice to the 'alternative' culture's interaction with the dominant culture of imperial Germany, arguing that 'the border lines between the two realms were at some point scarcely discernible' (p4). Nevertheless, Lidtke does believe the socialist movement was 'creating a world of its own' (p9) and that it did represent a genuine threat to imperial Germany.

What was interesting to me (and a surprise, because I thought the precise opposite would be the case) is the attitude shown by the 'alternative' culture's practitioners toward existing working class culture: 'Social Democrats did not believe, for the most part, that there was much of value in what workers already had. Socialists glorified the proletariat unceasingly, but in practice they did not recommend that a future socialist culture should take over the mores, customs, behaviours and cultural values as they existed in the way of life contemporary workers... Social Democrats did not seek to draw on the existing working class culture ... as a source for the cultural endeavours of the labour movement... (p19). Rather, Lidtke argues, the working class brought their existing culture into socialist festivals and so on. I think there's a slight theoretical problem here of situating 'Social Democratic' and 'worker' culture at arm's length. But, nevertheless, this is quite a striking state of affairs, given that the current Marxist left is saturated with the opposite idea i.e. that you abstract a lowest common denominator of what exists and concentrate this back onto your interaction with 'the class', meaning that your 'practice' thus becomes perceived as a form of oppression.

So far, so good, but in practice these good intentions only created something much more contradictory and diffuse (and I'm reading this from Lidtke's sympathetic account). In his summation of the 'alternative culture' he argues: 'As participants in those secular rituals, members of the party, trade unions, singing societies, and gymnastic clubs, to name only the most obvious, generated togetherness on a massive scale' (p199). Lidtke says further on: 'The genius of this alternative culture lay in its capacity to synthesise the particular interests and needs of proletarians with principles of universal humanitarianism' (p201). To be blunt, this seems like lauding nothingness. It is not the job of Marxists to simply reproduce the proletariat (in whatever oppositional guise) to make some kind of cultural gluepot that can be rode roughshod by future bureaucrats. That 'Marxists' have spent much of the last century on this project of realising the proletariat, and seemingly not to abolish it (i.e the communist project), is a particular ignominy. And synthesising the 'needs of proletarians' with 'humanitarianism' seems like some ghastly prequel of Popular Frontism.

CPGB members need to think very carefully before attempting to trade this political currency of the 'alternative culture'. Yes, it would be good if an approximate culture existed among the contemporary left (fat chance of that) but it can't be merely adopted. This message will be mercilessly hammered home in the next exciting instalment, which will look at Lidtke's examination of the SPD's literary and theatrical culture.

[RED DAVE]

One more weird-ass DNZ thread.

Why is it when you mention the virtues of the culture of the SPD that you fail to mention that this party, with all its fucking "alternative culture," perpetuated one of the greatest betrayals in the history of the Left: capitulation to the German government over German entry into WWI.

The bureaucratic nature of the party, with all its choruses, gymnastic clubs, shooting clubs, etc., was related to this sell-out. All that gemutlichkeit led to 22 million people being killed and the torpedoing of the German Revolution.

RED DAVE

[Tim Finnegan]

I think that it's possible to meaningfully distinguish between the alternative culture and the party and trade union structures with which it was assocaited. The left-wing of the German workers' movement were located within this cultural milieu as much as the right were, after all; all that the right's treachery tells us is that it constitutes no magic formula, not that it is entirely without value. That seems to me a far more complex question.

[RED DAVE]

I think that it's possible to meaningfully distinguish between the alternative culture and the party and trade union structures with which it was assocaited.Maybe so. But I am profoundly suspicious of all this. I can't help but suspect that all the schwarmerei of the "alternative culture" was an "alternative" to revolution, so when the shit hit the fan in 1914, the rank-and-file of the party, politically education of "bread and circuses" didn't have a clue. I remember some stuff written by some Bolshevik leader about the poor quality of the SPD members who were taken as POWs prior to Brest-Litovsk: it was virtually impossible to get them to accept the notion of being fed back into Bermany as revolutionaries. The were too used to taking orders.


The left-wing of the German workers' movement were located within this cultural milieu as much as the right were, after all; all that the right's treachery tells us is that it constitutes no magic formula, not that it is entirely without value. That seems to me a far more complex question.It's a very complex question. Paul Buhle, in his research on Marxist groups in the US found immigrant left-wing groups that survived into the 1970s on their own "alternative culture." However, these groups ceased to be active decades before they disappeared.

My point in all this exchange is that DNZ is constantly touting the "party-movement" of the SPD as an ideal to be followed. He is in complete denial that there was any causal relationship between the "alternative culture" and the massive tragic betrayal of 1914.

RED DAVE

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Ignoring DNZs obvious confusion (he bleats on about the party-movement idea in one thread, and a peasant-based cult of personality dictatorship in another), there is a serious point that Tim Finnegan has unearthed here.

It has struck me that the most recent radical events, such as the Arab Spring, student protests in the UK and the 'we are the 99%' movement and its offsprings, have been leaderless movements, as opposed to union- or party-led cadres. This does mean that the question of alternative culture takes on more prominence; if we are to abandon the top-down Leninist revolutionary formulation of the vanguard party taking power on behalf of the working class, then what direction - culturally, socially, politically - should a more anarchic, mass movement take on? It seems as though attempts by political sects to 'take over' protest movements have failed in recent years and may be confined to the dustbin of history, in the Leninist sense of the vanguard.

Rather, if the former 'vanguard' party is to be merely in the middle of the revolutionary class, educating it, agitating amongst it and helping it to self-organise, then is there not a case that alternative culture, in a modified form - in protest to Capitalism - could be a key to progress and to keeping people in the movement who might otherwise have drifted?

[Die Neue Zeit]

The bureaucratic nature of the party, with all its choruses, gymnastic clubs, shooting clubs, etc., was related to this sell-out. All that gemutlichkeit led to 22 million people being killed and the torpedoing of the German Revolution.

Shooting clubs? Now that's something I have to look into more, a superior prelude to workers militias than mere picket militias. :p

Oh, and for its pro-WWI stance the SPD's membership dropped significantly from about a million to only a couple hundred thousand. That's collapse for reformist BS, and that led to the "outstanding role model for Left politics today" that was the USPD.


so when the shit hit the fan in 1914, the rank-and-file of the party, politically education of "bread and circuses" didn't have a clue

They did have a clue. They left the party long before the likes of Hugo Haase and Rosa Luxemburg did.


My point in all this exchange is that DNZ is constantly touting the "party-movement" of the SPD as an ideal to be followed. He is in complete denial that there was any causal relationship between the "alternative culture" and the massive tragic betrayal of 1914.

You really need to look into the USPD.


It has struck me that the most recent radical events, such as the Arab Spring, student protests in the UK and the 'we are the 99%' movement and its offsprings, have been leaderless movements, as opposed to union- or party-led cadres. This does mean that the question of alternative culture takes on more prominence; if we are to abandon the top-down Leninist revolutionary formulation of the vanguard party taking power on behalf of the working class, then what direction - culturally, socially, politically - should a more anarchic, mass movement take on?

Except that your usage of the word "Leninist" and "vanguard" is somewhat questionable. Lars Lih stated that the pre-war SPD was a vanguard party (and, by extension, the USPD also).

[RED DAVE]

[T]he "outstanding role model for Left politics today" that was the USPD.Where did you get the idea that the USPD was such a model?

RED DAVE

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ http://www.revleft.com/vb/unabhaengige-sozialdemokratische-partei-t95038/index.html

http://www.revleft.com/vb/uspd-vs-kpd-t103415/index.html

[Tim Finnegan]

On the USDP, should its emergence be taken as a redemption of the "alternative culture" of the German social democratic movement, or should the fact that its emergence was so delayed be taken as a mark against it? Or, perhaps, elements of both? It's certainly true that there was both a significant level of grass-roots opposition to the war, but also that it failed to mobilise itself effectively against the war until it was altogether too late. (I'm not touching the 1919 Revolution with a ten-foot barge pole, given that even those participating couldn't agree as to whether they should have been doing so in the first place.)

[Comrade-Z]

Also, to make clear, the January 1919 Spartacist Uprising was supported by only a small portion of the USPD and was farther to the left of the average USPD member. So while the USPD was farther to the left of the remaining "Majority Socialists" (SPD), I'm not so sure that the USPD was far enough to the left to totally redeem the SPD model.

[Die Neue Zeit]

On the USDP, should its emergence be taken as a redemption of the "alternative culture" of the German social democratic movement, or should the fact that its emergence was so delayed be taken as a mark against it? Or, perhaps, elements of both? It's certainly true that there was both a significant level of grass-roots opposition to the war, but also that it failed to mobilise itself effectively against the war until it was altogether too late. (I'm not touching the 1919 Revolution with a ten-foot barge pole, given that even those participating couldn't agree as to whether they should have been doing so in the first place.)

Despite emerging so late, comrade, I see it as a redemption. Just look at the other side: the disaster that was the ultra-left formation of the KPD. The KPD, steeped in "action," didn't manage to split the left-of-MSPD alternative culture like the USPD did with the whole class movement's alternative culture.

[RED DAVE]

DNZ, only in your fantasies were the SPD or the USPD the "outstanding role model for Left politics today." I don't know what your model is, but I guarantee you that modern Leftists, at least in the USA, are not poring over documents of the SPD or the USPD for guidance.

I suggest that you need involved in party building before you start touting some examples. So how many years have you been involved in the organized Left and what groups have you helped to build?

RED DAVE

[Die Neue Zeit]

DNZ, only in your fantasies were the SPD or the USPD the "outstanding role model for Left politics today."

I quoted Die Linke's former general secretary Dietmar Bartsch (IIRC). :confused:

[RED DAVE]

DNZ, only in your fantasies were the SPD or the USPD the "outstanding role model for Left politics today."
I quoted Die Linke's former general secretary Dietmar Bartsch (IIRC). :confused:Why would you use such an individual as a source for such a universal statement? An official of Die Linke is hardly a good authority for party building.

By that way, which party or parties have you helped to build and for what period of time? If you are going to get into a discussion of party building, it would help if you had some actual experience.

RED DAVE

[Die Neue Zeit]

An official of Die Linke is hardly a good authority for party building.

The USPD, unlike the ultra-left, sectarian, nutterish, and minoritarian KPD, was "a uniform mass party which paid attention to the daily demands and needs of workers without yielding its claim to revolutionary, anti-capitalist politics."

[RED DAVE]

The USPD, unlike the ultra-left, sectarian, nutterish, and minoritarian KPD, was "a uniform mass party which paid attention to the daily demands and needs of workers without yielding its claim to revolutionary, anti-capitalist politics."According to who? An official of Die Linke?

RED DAVE

[Искра]

Die Linke? The successor of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany(the ruling party of East Germany until 1989)? Do you mean on that party which supported boss of Babylon-Mitte cinema who exploited hiw workers and against who FAU Belin fought until state forbid them to call themselves a union?

Oh yeah, and what about KAPD? They are probably even more "sectarian" to you.

[Tim Finnegan]

Despite emerging so late, comrade, I see it as a redemption. Just look at the other side: the disaster that was the ultra-left formation of the KPD. The KPD, steeped in "action," didn't manage to split the left-of-MSPD alternative culture like the USPD did with the whole class movement's alternative culture.
I was given to understsand that the KPD was formed under pressure from Moscow? Can that really be described as "ultra-left" in the traditional, Guy-Aldred-and-his-wacky-antics sense?


Die Linke? The successor of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany(the ruling party of East Germany until 1989)?
In all fairness, the Communist Platform is an tiny, largely irrelevent faction within the party- something like 1-2% of the membership at the last count, I think. Most Die Linkers them are just your typical well-meaning-but-ineffective socdems; calling them the "successors" of the SED would be like calling the post-war Labour Party a CPGB front.

[Die Neue Zeit]

I was given to understsand that the KPD was formed under pressure from Moscow? Can that really be described as "ultra-left" in the traditional, Guy-Aldred-and-his-wacky-antics sense?

The Comintern wasn't formed yet.


In all fairness, the Communist Platform is an tiny, largely irrelevent faction within the party- something like 1-2% of the membership at the last count, I think. Most Die Linkers them are just your typical well-meaning-but-ineffective socdems; calling them the "successors" of the SED would be like calling the post-war Labour Party a CPGB front.

What about the other left tendencies in the party, like the Socialist, Anti-Capitalist, and Emancipatory Lefts?

[Crux]

So, DNZ, do you have any practical experience of party building?

[Die Neue Zeit]

http://rottenelements.blogspot.com/2011/10/whats-in-it-for-us-alternative-culture_25.html

What's in it for us? The 'alternative culture' of German social democracy and the forward march of The Rotten Elements (III)

This afternoon I listened to a Channel 5 documentary about Fred West and fantasised about his voice imploding onto a deep house track. I settled for an evening quietly writing up me notes about The New Communist Party in the British Library. Speed, speed, ecstasy...

Mike Macnair says that the centre tendency of the Second International did not lack a grasp of the dialectic. (http://www.revleft.com/vb/group.php?do=discuss&group=&discussionid=2489) Of course, I realise that Macnair is setting up a general argument in which the exceptions, presumably, prove the rule. But this dialectical lapse is precisely one that Lidtke draws out in relation to the 'alternative culture' of German social democracy, in particular to literary and theatrical production.

This lapse was a theoretical and practical one. In theory: 'Social Democratic intellectuals and social commentators, with few exceptions, had absorbed their aesthetic principles directly from the German culture of which they otherwise so deeply critical, and yet they showed little or no uneasiness about this ironic situation. In failing to develop a special set of socialist or Marxist aesthetic principles, they passed up an opportunity to clarify their relationship to all the arts (pp142-143).'

This spread down in to practice with the 1884 poetry anthologies of Rudolf Lavant giving precedence to political propaganda purposes over aesthetic considerations, under the rubric of 'worker poetry'. 'To put the matter as succinctly as possible... [socialist] poets [such as] Hasenclever were to be used but not studied; poets [such as] Goethe were to be studied but seldom could be used.' Similarly, organisations such as the Freie Volksbühne rarely performed plays by socialist authors as the writing did not meet the (bourgeois) aesthetic standards of the movement (pp148-149). 'Franz Mehring, for many years a leading light of the Freie Volksbühne in Berlin, prepared socialist commentaries on forthcoming plays which were distributed to subscribers. Except for these and for the fact that audiences were entirely from the labour movement... such events were indistinguishable from the regular productions of the professional stage (p150).'

What this 'culture' actually ended up with was a crude, undialectical redrawing of the division of labour between art and politics, and thus between artists/theorists and activists. 'The upshot was that Social Democratic theorists on culture were more likely to be discouraging than encouraging with respect to the efforts of amateur musicians, artists, and writers within the labour movement (p157).' So the positive moments of what I commented favourably on in the last instalment, i.e. a relative dismissal of workers' culture as a product of capitalism (or what workers 'had') got worked over into this alien and bureaucratic construct.

So what were are left with is a cultural example that strongly resonates with our present situation in the most negative of senses. The descriptions above could be taken from any contemporary left organisation (including the CPGB), albeit at much lower organised level. In contrast, while writers, artists and theorists in the 'official' communist movement were generally embattled, this was a movement that did produce writers and did raise up a distinct set of Marxist aesthetic principles.

I'm beginning to wonder exactly what can be salvaged from the rubble of this 'alternative culture'... answers on a postcard....

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ I'm think that the blogger is beginning to go off-tangent, missing the point more and more.

[Crux]

^^^ I'm think that the blogger is beginning to go off-tangent, missing the point more and more.
pot, kettle.

[Tim Finnegan]

The Comintern wasn't formed yet.
That doesn't mean that the Bolsheviks were unable to put pressure on socialists in other countries, simply that they were not able to do so through their pet institutions. Obviously we're still talking about something a good deal more voluntary than the obligatory programmatic convulsions of the late 20s through to the 50s, but I was not given to understand that the KPD leadership were as one-dimensionally "ultra-left" as some of the anarchist groups, or, if you're feeling more criticial, groups like the CP-BSTI or the short-lived Scottish Communist Party (hoping that my provincial examples may be fogiven).


What about the other left tendencies in the party, like the Socialist, Anti-Capitalist, and Emancipatory Lefts?
What about them? I was specifically adressing the claim that they were an SED successor-party.

[Die Neue Zeit]

bviously we're still talking about something a good deal more voluntary than the obligatory programmatic convulsions of the late 20s through to the 50s, but I was not given to understand that the KPD leadership were as one-dimensionally "ultra-left" as some of the anarchist groups, or, if you're feeling more criticial, groups like the CP-BSTI or the short-lived Scottish Communist Party (hoping that my provincial examples may be fogiven).

Programmatically the KPD wasn't ultra-left. Even the USPD eventually adopted a councils-oriented political program (despite not learning from the experiences in the Arbeiterrate). It was the very act of formation that was ultra-left. The KPD should not have been formed in the first place.

[Die Neue Zeit]

From another thread:


And you still, with all your histroical gobbledy-gook, can't get away from the fact that the USPD majority voted to join the SPD.

You're twisting words, Red Dave. Obviously the right wing became a majority once the left wing majority made the wrong decision at the Halle Congress. :glare:


So, one more time, you are letting us know that your concept of socialism is bureaucratic and not democratic.

The two are not mutually exclusive.

[RED DAVE]

And you still, with all your histroical gobbledy-gook, can't get away from the fact that the USPD majority voted to join the SPD.
You're twisting words, Red Dave. Obviously the right wing became a majority once the left wing majority made the wrong decision at the Halle Congress. So what you are doing is, again, is divorcing a party from its own practice and idealizing it. That is not, in general, the method of historical materialism.


So, one more time, you are letting us know that your concept of socialism is bureaucratic and not democratic.
The two are not mutually exclusiveYes they are, which goes to show that your concept of socialism is rooted in social democracy and stalinism and is not socialism at all

Why don't you do the right thing and start posting in OI where you belong?

RED DAVE

[Die Neue Zeit]

So what you are doing is, again, is divorcing a party from its own practice and idealizing it. That is not, in general, the method of historical materialism.

Au contraire, I'm not divorcing the party from its history at all. You're just giving cover for the excuse to bolt the party when you've got an organizational majority.

There's a nasty word for that: liquidationism.

[RED DAVE]

So what you are doing is, again, is divorcing a party from its own practice and idealizing it. That is not, in general, the method of historical materialism.
Au contraireWOW! French.


I'm not divorcing the party from its history at all. You're just giving cover for the excuse to bolt the party when you've got an organizational majority.You have stated elsewhere that the USPD is your ideal party. I called it a post-war sell-out (as opposed to your other fave party, the SPD, which sold out at the beginning of WWI). You asked me when the USPD sold out post-WWI, and I pointed to its decision to rejoin the SPD.

Now, rejoining the SPD was part of the practice of the USPD, and if you're going to raise up the USPD to an ideal, you have to, in addition, include this sell-out. You, au contraire (:D), want to exclude this sell-out, which was basically the death of the USPD, from its history.

Now, as usual, like my cat, your trying to kick up dirt behind you to cover up your historical inanity by coming up with some new crap about "bolt[ing] the party" and "liquidationism."

Your two ideal parties are both sell-outs. One at the start of WWI, and the other after it. You can't cover up this historical truth.

RED DAVE