Emotional communist

[imomus]

Whatever I am politically, emotionally I'm a communist. I respond deeply to communist imagery and communist sentiment. Perhaps it's genetic: we have staunch non-conformist radical Hebridean teachers on one side of my family and austere Calvinists on the other. But it permeates most of my ideas of the good and the beautiful. My mother has kept a little pamphlet I wrote aged 6. It's called "The Dive Of Wealth", and rages against the immorality of the rich. We take it out and laugh at it sometimes: part of the joke is that I really haven't changed.



Picture me, back in 1980, as your typical radicalised student, dressed in my quasi-uniform (grey shirt, black tie, Doc Martens, a padded Chinese army coat my mother brought back from her 1979 trip to the People's Republic), working as a volunteer in left wing bookshops, a volume of Brecht's poetry sticking out of my pocket. Imagine me in an austere standard-issue room in a hall of residence on a hill to the north of a dour, working-class city (Aberdeen), bathing in public baths at the Student Union (shades of my later delight in sentos there), singing along with the Brecht, Weill, Eisler and Dessau songs on my Robyn Archer records. My education is paid for by the still-somewhat-socialist British state, as is my medical care. I abhor Thatcher, and write letters to Radio Moscow suggesting ways they might improve their propaganda broadcasts to the West. On the walls of my room I've affixed pictures of Chinese workers' farms. Under the standard-issue orange duvet-cover I lose my virginity to a radical Politics student (she now lectures in African Development Studies). My best friend is a Greek communist studying Sociology (he now works as a transport advisor in Greece, engineering the downfall of the private car). In 1980 he's reading Stalin's biography. He admires Stalin's ruthlessness and tells me that, come the revolution, if it becomes necessary he won't hesitate to have me shot. He's decided not to make love to his French girlfriend because he believes, with some of the more radical feminists, that all acts of penetration are a form of imperialism. Later, when we all move to London, his girlfriend gets sick of the non-intervention and becomes mine instead.



Today, the perception that I'm some sort of jet-setting yuppie is a laughable misapprehension. I'm very poor. And that's okay; I seem to have designed a "low-calorie lifestyle" for myself. I may call it "superflatness" these days, but I'm still very much a communist at heart. I own, basically, nothing. I've never had -- or wanted -- my own private car or house. I hate glitzy capitalist imagery of the kind I discussed the other day (the Louis Vuitton poster of Uma Thurman in Seoul). Berlin, the city I live in, is the most "emotionally communist" city I know, and that's one of the reasons I enjoy being here. Communist sentiment abounds: I see it daily in the ex-Soviet sector of the city. Today, walking on the Kastanienallee, I saw a stars and stripes hung upside down from the window of a squat, with "Against America" printed on it; yesterday, near my house, posters of George W Bush with "Wanted For Murder" written on them. Such is the intellectual climate of the city I live in. Like me, it's emotionally communist. When I went to Moscow last year I couldn't bear the capitalist "triumph" apparent. Sure, there were statues of Mayakovsky on the streets and busts of Marx in the subway (a palace for the workers of yesteryear). But everywhere I saw casinos and dollar signs, advertising hoardings and car salesrooms. It was a relief to get back to the German capital, a city which lovingly restores its communist murals rather than tearing them down.

Berlin's emotional tenderness for its communist past matches mine. On Saturday I bought a record of readings and songs celebrating Lenin on my favourite defunct East German label, Litera. On Sunday I was at the Boxhagener Platz market sifting through glamourous tech-junk from the socialist era (I ended up buying a Korean microwave for 8 euros, which I suppose wasn't terribly communist, although it was cheap). On Monday I took a tram with Hisae out to the Allee der Kosmonauten and we shopped at the Meeraner Strasse Asiahandlung, one of Berlin's best-kept secrets, a North Vietnamese wholesale village. I bought the Vietnamese schoolbooks illustrated on this page. The most beautiful things I saw there were cheap and simple: the pink plastic crates used for spices in the Vietnamese grocery, an orange plastic bead curtain, some aubergines in a box, a sack of rice, fluorescent lights, a blue and white plastic tablecloth.



The number 8 tram out from Karl-Marx-Allee (where I rent an apartment) to the Allee der Kosmonauten traverses a monumental landscape still massively marked by its recent socialist past. There are Russian supermarkets with cyrillic writing on them, the famously brutalist plattenbauten of Marzahn (huge residential towerblocks of socialist design), monumental hospitals and factories. Even the tramline itself is socialist; trams don't run in the Western parts of Berlin. On a sunny day, the vast spaces and industrial ugliness of the Allee der Kosmonauten have something deeply stirring and romantic about them, at least to someone like me. It's great to be amongst the Vietnamese, invited to East Germany during the communist period to escape the imperialist war that failed to prevent their nation becoming The People's Republic of Vietnam. In a bookstore I buy the textbooks pictured, overwhelmed by the beauty of their covers and charmed by the propagandist optimism of the pictures inside, which show cheerful communist children walking through fields rich with harvest, or clustered with glowing faces around their sage, Ho Chi Minh. A little Vietnamese girl explains to me in German, as her mother wraps the books, that I must use the printed books for the lessons, and the jotter for handwriting exercises.



Perhaps I'll use the jotter for Friendly Album lyrics. Even the concept of The Friendly Album is communistic. Friendliness, for me, is close to comradeship; a profoundly horizontal civic virtue. I want the songs to celebrate collectivism and social connectedness. I want to make songs like Brecht's poem To Be Friendly. The record will be propaganda for "emotional communism". I am already preparing for it, marching around the house (Hisae will tell you) singing along with Hans Eisler's rousing Solidarity Song:

Onwards, without forgetting where our strength can be now seen to be!
Onwards, without forgetting our SO-LI-DA-RI-TY!

(Here's a video of Robyn Archer singing the Brecht-Eisler composion In The Flower Garden. The film of the 1953 workers' uprising was shot on the street where I now live, then known as the Stalinallee.)

Comments

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

Beautiful. Please write more stuff like that and less boring wank about wonderful Japan is ;-P

[robotar.livejournal.com]

Heavens, we're comrades-in-arms!
Though my postmodern streak disallows me from believing in communism full-heartedly, emotionally I could probably be no more communist. Thank you for this entry; I have to say it meant something to me.

[robotar.livejournal.com]

Actually, now that I think about it, I have a conservative friend who has told me several times that were there a revolution he would be on the capitalist side and would shoot me.

The irony of it all is that his firearm is a Chinese assault rifle.
And mine is a WWII American GI rifle.

[intergalactim.livejournal.com]

get over to www.ubu.com for some great socialist songs by Cornelius Cardew (non-captialist mp3 download).

[sparkligbeatnic.livejournal.com]

I've got some great old Chinese propaganda-manga which I found at a street market in Mandalay a few years ago.

Will try to get some picts up one day.

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

There is a lot of this under the shelves of trinket shops in San Francisco's Chinatown as well.

[porandojin.livejournal.com]

ooohhh, momus .... i remeber communism ... we just wanted colourful stuff from west ... we wanted colours- all was so grey and faded and dusted ...

[intergalactim.livejournal.com]

also, field-recordings of vietnamese folk songs, made during the vietnam war.

http://www.ubu.com/ethno/soundings/vietnam.html

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Not sure it's so different--those 100 million are still dead.

[lukeii.livejournal.com]

Emotional Communism seems to be fairly widespread. If you look deep enough inside any human being, you'll find someone who just wants to be looked after by something bigger than themselves.

Was the Cultural Revolution an attempt to usurp God?

(Did you know Warren Ellis mentioned you in his LJ Feed?)

[robotar.livejournal.com]

I thought the ultimate goal of communism was not for something "bigger" to look out for each other, but for individuals to look out for themselves-- creative expression-- and for each other-- collective identity. I also thought the goal of a socialist government was not necessarily to "look out" for the people, but instead enable the kind of world where cooperation and mutual aid is the basis of society and economy. I also thought the Cultural revolution was more about overthrowing class-enemies (oy, that term shouldn't be so vague), the growing bureaucracy, and Confucian values.

[northernlights.livejournal.com]

althought i'm a little too young to talk of memories of communism, i do relate so much with what you've written, which is really all there is to this comment. there is something i'll always dislike about capitalism, and how it sets us apart by competition. but i could never reconcile my acceptance of it as a system, and my intense dislike for its attitude. so...hurray for emotional communism.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

Whatever the politics involved, I can sympathize with that feeling of energy. There is nothing quite like a place you just know is in synch with your paradigm. Seems that whole cities can indeed have that sort of je ne sais quoi.

Being about as bourgeois as they come and certainly not what you'd call left-wing (indeed, I could be called an anticommunist), I might not find that in a city like Berlin. But I'm pretty sure it would still be a city. Cities, for me, have more life, more energy, more differences, more chaos, and are in general more life-affirming to me than the uncommercial, collectivistic, conservative, dreary, unfree countryside. They have more languages, more ethnicities, more colour, more culture, and a Hare Krishna on every corner.

I'm exaggerating the difference a bit, of course, but for me self-expression is connected with what might be called the urban experience, and I think it's very much related to what you're communicating here.

[mckibillo.livejournal.com]

I had the pleasure of visiting East Berlin before the wall came down. It was scary, fascinating, bizzaro-world odd, grey and very romantic. My guide was my West Berlin girlfriend at the time. We had a great time marvelling at the odd inversion of the place and the looming menace. It was a great place to visit, but we were really glad to cross back over to the West at Checkpoint Charlie. Actually, West Berlin back then was an incredible place, very exciting, it felt trapped, tense and very creative.

I'm hoping to be able to make it to North Korea for a peek inside the "Hermit Kingdom". It's just a short hop (or missile flight) from Japan.

Actually, I was surprised by the content of your post. For someone who posits consumerism (the Japanese model) and glamor as the path towards global salvation, warm fuzzy feelings for communism seemed incongruous.

Have a bug on me--if you can find one.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

"Hermit Kingdom" sounds quaint enough, but since when are man-made famines a tourist draw?

W

[(Anonymous)]

モーマスはベトナム語を勉強してますか？すごいですね。Tiếng Việtは声調が大変ムズカシイ！

最近５年間に、日本共産党は脈拍が段々弱くなってました。それは残念です。北朝鮮のせいだと思う。
もし、志位和夫さんの代わりにモーマス先生が日本共産党の会長になったら ．．．

赤プチ

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Hi Akapuchi, I'd be happy to take over as Beloved Leader of the Japanese Communist Party! Shall we start Monday?

[kementari2.livejournal.com]

Those pictures certainly are endearing, and you have a point.

But the first thing that always pops into my mind when thinking about communist Vietnam is the fact that an acquaintance of mine was thrown into prisons and work camps and tortured for years for being a Christian.

[(Anonymous)]

I am wondering, if you are that poor, how are you saving? How are you going to live once you're too old to hear the click track? Speaking as a dreamy druid in the pop racket, even I know the importance of a nest egg. No pension, no kids to care for you, to boot -- are you not worried about the future, Momus?

Drools.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Do kids care for their parents where you live, Drools? Where is that, Bhutan?

As for funds in my old age, I'm hoping my pop music column for Berlin Horse and Hound (Incorporating Turf Tips) will cover my living expenses (one sack of rice from the Vietnamese wholesale village per month, DSL subscription, an aubergine).

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

It is strange how, every time anyone evinces a sympathy for the cultural arifacts of and ideological principles of communism, there is always, immediately a knee-jerk listing of Stalin's crimes. Grim though the total is I think the body count has more to do with human nature than a particular ideology. I'm reminded of that Woody Allen line about how the it isn't the holocaust that is surprising, rather that, given human nature, it's surprising it hasn't happened more often.

Perhaps we should apply this principle in all circumstances: every time, for instance, a christian minister delivers a Sunday sermon we should rise up and shout 'Well what about the Inquisition then?'

The list of causes/ideologies/national alleigances that have sponsored a trail of corpses (including that 'enlightened' concept America) is a depressingly long one.

Of course I'm conscious of Great Britain's range of complicities too.

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

I agree, it is a key point that holocausts are going on constantly around the world. Twas ever thus.

[nina-blomquist.livejournal.com]

yes, "Vorwaerts, und nicht vergessen!
Die Solidaritaet!"

you bring tears to my eyes!

[(Anonymous)]

thanks nick, for the wonderful post and the quite colorful (or rather grey) picture of yourself as a young student.
although i know that you cultivate a quite decent lifestyle (i remember you once described mario and you cruising around berlin on your rickety bikes because you had no money to go to the cinema... although this nearly moved me to tears it's also a quite effective way to avoid post-thirty-something-boredom) it was good to correct that image of the jet-setting, gadget-enthusiastic, consumer-friendly bohemian that got revived especially during the VICE discussions i guess. and it also reminds me of my own schizophrenic situation being at least a "salon-marxist" by heart while i earn my living in the ultra-capitalistic television business... and still being poor anyway.

the German capital, a city which lovingly restores its communist murals rather than tearing them down

unfortunately that's not true. at least on the level of the executive politics of the city. quite the contrary it seems the berlin senate tries to get rid of as many examples, architectural monuments and buildings of the post-war "DDR-Moderne". testimonials of the socialistic east-german vision of modernism and democratic urban development like e.g. the folded concrete shell of the "Ahornblatt" (www.aujourd-hui.de/html/initiativen/ahornblatt_abriss.html) by legendary architect Ulrich Muether (http://deu.archinform.net/arch/21347.htm?ID=VeRFMLGhkacZr7XY), inventor of a unique and economical method of concrete shell structures, in favor for faceless glass, steel and sandstone slab-constructions that try to imitate historical urbanity and accommodate offices, hotels and shopping-centers all over the world.
like Rem Koolhas has pointed out in an interview with Der Spiegel on the topic of the disappearance of east germany's buildings: " ... when germany was unified, in my opinion the tremendous potential of showing respect for the different cultural and social projects on both sides was thrown away. i am still very upset by the way that east german buildings are aggressively erased, especially when this happens in the name of history. It's absurd to eliminate the historical in the name of history."
you can read some more excerpts and also some interesting thoughts on the phenomenon of "Ostalgie" here: www.hemmungen.com/archives/cat_eastgerman.html (i guess someone finally has to tell me how to make proper links instead of quoting the urls...).
another current example for a building in the prevailing east-german style of the 60s/70s with bronze-mirrored windows that will get demolished this year is the "Palast der Republik" on the bank of the river spree (). it served as the parliament building of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik but also accommodated a lot of public utilities like restaurants, bars, a bowling alley, an ice-skating rink etc...
it seems like we are going to witness another example for the erasement of a part of the (german) history that the officials like to ignore. that in mind it's even more important to carry on the emotional communistic flame...

sorry if i went a bit berserk concerning the length of this reply and excuse my clumsy english.
nick, the direction that the new album might take sounds very promising. and i am especially curious how your voice and the narrative aspect will integrate.

haveafriendlyday
eRiC from bErLiN

links, :)

[filoillogico.livejournal.com]

how to (http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=67)

Seriously?

[(Anonymous)]

Reminisce about Nazism and you're a supremacist wacko, reminisce about Communism and you're a romantic? The posters and monuments maybe kitsch, but they are all symbols of a system of government that killed people. As someone who grew up in Communist Poland I have no love for that system or the people that put it in place. They were butchers of people and of minds. From growing up within it and from researching a good deal about it, what few illusions I had about the dream of Communism are all thankfully gone. Lenin hated the poor, considered them intellectually inferior and if millions had to die in the name of advancement of the state, so be it. This is not hyperbole, Lenin was responsible for millions of deaths before he died including a state instigated famine in Ukraine. Trotsky was the head of the Red Army and it was he, not Stalin who came up with idea of positioning machine gun units behind the lines to shoot deserting/retreating forces and anyone, anyone who holds Stalin in any position of ideal is frankly, a moron. He created a country that became a meat grinder for human beings, churning through tens of millions before his death. China is no different, and regardless of where it was planted, what country, what people, Communism always became a state dictatorship which censored media, imprisoned people for their ideologies and eviscerated personal freedoms. If Hitler, Goering and Himmler became synonymous with the Holocaust and their names vilified everywhere, then Lenin, Stalin and Mao must also be synonymous with their millions of dead, yet it absolutely stupefies me that educated, reasonable people will condemn Nazism as if second nature, but write about Communism as a romantic time of political and social naivete. 100 Million are dead, Russia, China, Africa, and South America are full of their bodies. Please explain how images and symbols of that system are in any way endearing? And why we don't hate Stalin/Mao/Lenin the way we hate Hitler?

-wookosh

closetkickboxer.blogspot.com

Re: Seriously?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The posters and monuments maybe kitsch, but they are all symbols of a system of government that killed people.

Alas, every system of government seems to kill people. Also, Nature itself kills every one of us in the end, if nothing else has killed us first. Do we conclude that government, or nature, are "as evil as the Nazis"?

I won't defend my friend for admiring Stalin -- that was a low point in our relationship and I exacted my revenge by stealing his girlfriend!

I'm not sure which part of the North Vietnamese resistance against imperialism you object to, or which poems of Bertolt Brecht you find obnoxious, or what you find inherently soothing about America's current war-mongering, but an analysis which seeks to portray all communist ideas as bad and all capitalist ideas as good is not a particularly subtle one, and history has not yet "ended", as Francis Fukuyama somewhat prematurely declared.

[(Anonymous)]

i wish momus world was 3-D.
follow your heart momus

[freesurfboards.livejournal.com]

other humans are fuzzy and warm
evidence suggests that suicidal tendences occur when you don't feel like you're useful to the larger group
communism played those instincts like a sugary pop song

[chemistry.livejournal.com]

It always seems to me, that the people who express love for the idea of Communism are the people who would've fared most harshly under any Communist regime. Your history, Momus I fear would've turned out quite differently and not in any way you would be happy about.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Nonsense, they would have signed me to the Melodiya label and pressed up a million copies of my Ode To The Brave Cosmonauts whether anyone wanted it or not!

dear 'Seriously'

[(Anonymous)]

dear 'Seriously',
look, momus is in openly in love with the IDEA of communism, but in denial of the reality. i wish he had read "gulag, a history" by anne applebaum. or actually, i hope he never DOES read it. otherwise, he'll stop writing such effulgent essays on the subject. we'll have none of that! of course, it is interesting to compare/contrast this to the reality of non-post-capitalism (i.e. america) which he openly berates, but the IDEA of which he is secrety in love with. ah, there seems to be truely no rest for the...wicker.
best,
r.
p.s. honey 1, vinegar 0!
http://glitchslaptko.blogspot.com/

Re: dear 'Seriously'

[imomus.livejournal.com]

look, momus is in openly in love with the IDEA of communism, but in denial of the reality.

Marxism is an ideology, so it's hardly inappropriate to judge it as an idea. And as an idea, it's a good one which deserves a better implementation than it's had in the less than 100 years since the Russian Revolution. Nowhere in Das Kapital does Marx say "It would be really great to have gulags and send millions of people there to die slowly in the snow." Instead he talks about the problems and injustices of capitalism, alienation, reification, the division of labour, class consciousness, religion, and a thousand other things. He does this very intelligently, and in ways which we still ought to pay attention to today.

"the solution"

[georgesdelatour.livejournal.com]

Do you know Brecht's poem "the solution"? The lines "Would it not be easier/In that case for the government/To dissolve the people/And elect another?" suggest he had become disenchanted with the reality of the east German system.

Re: "the solution"

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Of course I know that poem! In fact, the Brecht song I link at the end of today's piece is on a similar theme. Brecht was disillusioned with the reality of the East German state. The garden he's sitting in is "so wisely planted with flowers that from March till October it's in bloom". That's his vision of communism -- a wisely-planned society always in bloom, its resources and beauty spread across the year. (There's another poem from the same period, "Sprinkling The Garden", which uses the metaphor of giving water to all the plants that need it.) And the poem ends with a kind of sigh, as Brecht wishes things could be so well laid-out, so fair in both senses of the word, outside the walls of the garden.

patience

[(Anonymous)]

Enjoyed your piece. I like to think of the feeling as patient communism; in that I believe capitalism has internal contradictions and an improved social system is inevitable. In the meantime, I am being patient.

At any rate, I recommend Kruschev's memoirs.

Ciao,
-DN

[(Anonymous)]

This news story seemed somehow relevant.

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/03/23/russia.bolshoi/index.html

[imomus.livejournal.com]

And this one:

http://www.alligator.org/pt2/050323freedom.php