Re-inventing Revolution

by Christoph Fringeli

There are more or less fruitful periods in musical development, periods of innovation, of experimentation, when someone, or technology, or new distribution systems push doors open and previously inaccessible areas transform themselves into playgrounds, and new manifestations of crazy obsessions find their ways into the bedrooms and DJ-bags. These periods seem to alternate with duller times, when even innovation seems a mere ploy by the spectacle, rebellion is a pose for advertising and almost everybody is flogging dead horses with a forced positivity.

These dull periods are by no means devoid of struggles, as we can see of the current phase, a dullness we have set out to shake up, the cultural management of which needs to be sabotaged at every opportunity. Innovation is by no means the key to this - capitalism constantly needs innovation - the key is liberation of cultural fields, the emergence of a collective cultural practice to replace corporate control over the economy of ideas.

We are indeed in a particularly poor period if we look at pop culture, while there is a kind of festering creativity in the “underground”, what’s happening in the mainstream (the kind of culture that is produced for money and featured in mass-circulation papers, magazines, radio and television) has simply no content, meaning, passion or message apart from the desire to shift units.

“No fascist centralism has managed what the centralism of consumer society has achieved. Fascism propagated a reactionary and monumental model, but it remained on paper. Various sub-cultures (the peasants, the sub-proletarians, the workers) unerringly oriented themselves towards their traditional models. Repression limited itself to demanding a verbal consensus. Today however the consensus with the dominant models demanded by the centre is without conditions and total.”

Pier Paolo Pasolini (whose film Salo - 120 Days of Sodom is the subject of a major article in the new - sixth -issue of datacide) wrote this is 1973 (notably talking about Italian fascism), and proceeds to say: “You could therefore claim that the ideology of hedonistic ‘tolerance’ wanted by the new system of domination is the worst type of repression in human history.”

Every aspect of life is to be commercialized, everything that was once directly lived has been moved into representation; stolen from you to be sold back to you, including your desire to “smash the system”. Take the recent inflationary use of the word ‘Revolution’ in advertising and pop culture - at least here in England. Virgin Airlines proposed a ‘Leninist/Maoist’ version of this with massive billboards showing a Chinese bearing a red flag proclaiming “Revolution in the Air”, followed by a poster campaign saying ‘Join the Party’, even naming the day of the ‘revolution’ (22nd may...). Apple Computers, in the same month, proclaimed “Another Year, another revolution.”, launching their ‘reinvented’ Power Macintosh G3, promising their “most powerful, expandable and revolutionary” computer. One ‘Macworld’ columnist got so excited that he subtitled his text: “If Che Guevara was alive he’d use a Mac - the only revolutionary friendly platform”. The budget airline EasyJet launched - all in the same month! - their EasyEverything internet services, and again it’s Che who graces the huge red/orange billboards in the London Underground. In the “pop” arena Atari Teenage Riot demanded “Revolution Action” on their 12”, also released this month, just the latest in a string of attempts at recuperation by the spectacle (released through Elektra, a Time-Warner company in the US).

The focus of resistance has recently shifted from more issue based campaigns to a critique and action against the capitalist economic system itself, a system that has gone through enough minor periodic collapses in the last 25 years - and increasingly - to prompt market guru and financial speculator George Soros to state: “The collapse of the global marketplace would be a traumatic event with unimaginable consequences. Yet I find it easier to imagine than the continuation of the present regime.” Remember the “Global Gloom” panic last autumn? The next crisis, with some help from the Millennium Bug, is just around the corner, and likely to be much more severe.

Coinciding with the meeting of the G8 (the eight most powerful industrial nations) an international day of carnival in the financial centres took place to bring the issues involved to the fore. It would be healthy for everybody to think about what to do when the bubble of current finance capitalism bursts (or are you just content to live under martial law when it does?), and even better to consider and start building alternative modes of communal organisation that don’t depend on state or capital. This is only possible to a limited degree as long as the values and mechanisms of capital dominate our lives, but more and more people are realising that freedom is only to be found outside of a system that is producing inequality and destroys the environment while creating wealth for very few people and multinational corporations.

On June 18th - the date of the meeting of the G8 (Group of Eight) leaders of the most powerful nations actions of resistance took place in over 40 countries. The City of London was brought to a virtual standstill by a militant street party that turned into a riot, after police was outmanoevered and lost their nerves. The City of London is the main international financial trading place and one of the best guarded areas in the world by a special police force and their “Ring of Steel”-checkpoints. Of course the press was full of distortions about “savages” and “drunken anarchists”, “thugs” and the like going on a gratuitious rampage, but it can no longer be overlooked how much they fear the power of global resistance. We may be a long way from escaping the current stranglehold, but there are many more activities than are visible or reported by the media, people organising themselves, taking control of their lives and culture, combatting the mind control of the official media.

A strong force in British youth culture of the Nineties is the Free Party scene where parties are organised in squatted warehouses or in the open air for free or a donation, where groups of people who have sound systems set them up and DJ’s play records that are mainly made by people more or less involved with the scene and distibuted through networks of small distributors, underground dealers and only a few specialist shops. While we don’t want to idealise the free party scene - it has its own economic mechanisms that not always work in favor of everybody - it still represents a direct contravening of some of the principles that have turned late 20th C culture into a mere shopping mall. And this is also why the response of the authorities have been somewhat between tolerance and repression. Tolerance as long as it only involves small numbers of “fringe” people, repression as soon as more people(especially middle class youth who are supposed to be obedient consumers - they can be “radical” as long as they buy their “riot” from the megastore) are getting involved, and even more so if different groups of people from different backgrounds start getting together - a fear of class consciousness developing. Repression is always coupled with recuperation - in the case of the Teknival scene in France for example the nowstate-sponsored Techno-Parade.

It would be wrong to assume that the Teknival/Free Party scene is automatically explicitely political - it certainly is implicitely so, and in a libertairian, communistic direction, often in an uneasy combination with a sort of anarcho-capitalism. Despite its downfalls, which includes the fact that a large percentage of the music played is chronically braindead techno-trance, it has prompted authorities to react with new legislation (like the anti-rave sections in the 1994 Criminal Justice Act) or the police reaction that ranges - if they don’t decide to tolerate the event - from confiscations to vandalism. Also it wouldbe wrong to assume thatthe hardest, the most experimental orthe most out there music would auto-matically be subversive; there are defi-nitely different strains of development,a heterogenous web with positivelychaotic interactions. However, certainpre-millennial tensions have not onlycaused the government to issue yetanother warning concerning ‘the bug’-and the industry to try and nip any realrevolutionary forces in the bud – theyalso seem to lead to a state of dimin-ished responsibility in some areas ofthe cultural sector. This is best exem-plified with Matthew Hardern of Harder!Faster! Louder! - a now defunct club inLondon - stating to Spin: “ I don’t flirtwith fascism, I embrace it”. The spectrehas been raised once more, if just forcheap shock tactics - it should still betaken serious. The recurring image offascism in hard electronic music willhave to be the topic of a separate arti-cle which will examine the function offascism as an agent to save capitalism.For the moment we have to drawattention to the extremely dubious‘Nazi-chic’that’s only one step from theirresponsible (or stupid, but stupidity ishardly a redeeming feature) ideologicalchannel-hopping some would-be intel-lectual music writers have concoctedby juxtaposing quotes from, say,Wyndham Lewis and Raoul Vaneigem(see “Mediation - Noise, Politics andthe Media” in datacide 5). We have tolower tolerance levels, and becomemore rigorous - if clarification nowcould divide, then it will only be worth itin the longer run, to find the right alliesfor swarming the morose structures ofthe spectacle, to re-invent revolution.

datacide for deadly type