Jonathan Bowden’s Suck, Part 1
Anti-Racism & the Left

You can buy Jonathan Bowden’s Pulp Fascism here.

3,987 words

Part 1 of 7

Edited by Greg Johnson and Peter Jacobi

In 1995, Jonathan Bowden self-published his Collected Works in 6 volumes (London: Avant-Garde, 1995), edited by Jürgen Schwartz, one of Bowden’s pen names. The six volumes comprise 27 distinct books, 12 of which had been previously published. Altogether, the Collected Works contain more than 2,600 pages of rare early Bowden.

Suck is the second book in volume 2. It was first published as a distinct book under Bowden’s pen name John Michael McCloughlin (London: Avant-Garde, 1994). We will publish it online in 7 installments. The titles are editorial.

Suck covers a wide range of political and cultural topics, interspersed with fictional narratives that may be loosely based on real people and events.

Eventually, a fully annotated version of Suck will appear at the Jonathan Bowden Archive. It will then be followed by similar editions of the rest of the Collected Works, plus a couple more early volumes that were not included. — Greg Johnson

What do we mean by the term racism; and why does it create such controversy? Moreover, what do the terms ‘anti-racist,’ ‘racialism,’ ‘race relations,’ and so on actually mean—do they mean anything at all or are they just gobbets of left-liberal abuse?

People of a left-liberal or anti-patriotic bias use the term ‘racist’ to stop the mouths of anyone who might disagree with them. Indeed, the word has become an ideological cliché; a form of theoretical catch-as-catch-can; what we might call a liberal blue penciling, whether in the form of censorship or self-censorship. It has become a word which is designed to prevent thought, oppose debate, close minds and denigrate opponents without a fair hearing. As a result it has a semi-totalitarian flavour—the whiff of the left-wing slave-galley about it—or alternatively, the Soviet psychiatric hospital where perfectly sane dissidents were incarcerated. As is evidenced by the National Union of Students (NUS) policy “No Platform for Racists & Fascists” which is a deliberate attempt to prevent right-wingers from speaking at various universities. It is, in short, evidence of a totalitarian mind at work; the closed breaches and barren landscape of the contemporary Left—when we understand the Left to be a patchwork quilt of biases, lacunae, guilty assumptions, and putrescent emotions.

Of course, the Left has many mansions; and one of the most important features of the left is its complete transformation in the last twenty to thirty years. As the Old Left, broadly speaking, the semi-Stalinist and labourist left, made way for a New Left which emerged in several stages. The first New Left, the Old New Left, as it is called, broke away from the Communist Party after the crushing of the Hungarian revolution in 1956. (A similar exodus was to occur after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.) Nevertheless, this Old New Left, as it came to be called, was still enmeshed in the politics of the old communist left. In a sense it had not really broken from its past, merely opened up new possibilities for leftist development. These possibilities for development were to be followed up by the post-sixties Left and what it came to represent. For the first important thing to say about the sixties Left is that it was middle-class—it represented a decisive shift on the Left against working-class representation. What later came to be called “labourism,” even “workerism” in a more radical sense, was actively discouraged—in its stead grew up a trendy, bohemian Left which consisted of long hair, sandals, vegetarianism, free sex, and a general air of rebellion—against parents, lecturers, authority, the family, and (above all) against the old. All of which meant that the New Left had to search out a “rainbow coalition of the minorities” in order to replace the working class. Essentially the middle-class left had displaced the proletariat from its pedestal, deeming it to be a reactionary class (much to the consternation of Trotskyites on the hard left)—a class which was altogether too ‘middle class’, too passé, too ‘straight’; more to the point, too racist, sexist, and homophobic. In a sense the left-liberal middle class found the working class too conservative for its taste.

The New Left emerged in a rather slow and tortuous way from the Old Left during the nineteen fifties, sixties, and seventies. Originally it was a protest against Stalinism on the left, and in particular the behaviour of the Soviet leadership, whether inside Russia or in the satellite states of Eastern Europe. Although the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia brought this feeling to a head, it had existed for a long time—at least since Stalin’s purges in the nineteen thirties. When the murder of Kirov, the Leningrad party boss and a possible rival to Stalin, was the signal for a thoroughgoing purge which swept Soviet society clean of any opponents of the regime. This massive terror which convulsed Soviet society from Kirov’s assassination in 1934 until Stalin’s death in the early 1950s was an attempt to turn the entire Eurasian landmass into a concentration camp. In a sense it was reminiscent of various sections of Plato’s books, such as The Laws, where he speaks of the loneliness of the tyrant—his isolation from the rest of the citizenry—and the process of atomization which occurs among the population of the state. As a result, the Soviet regime attempted to isolate its citizens from one another; to leave them isolated, lonely, and afraid; incapable of acting together and certainly incapable of acting against the regime. For the whole purpose of the exercise was to keep the citizens of the Soviet Union in suspended animation; afraid of everyone and everything, including themselves. It was, in short, an attempt to make people live a lie—to leave them bereft, divorced from reality, shameless, and alone. Ultimately the whole purpose of the exercise was to create an inversion of the socialist dream—less millions of human beings (worker-ants) acting, living, and working as one—than an entire society which consisted of individuals who knew themselves to be alone. This was a collection of individuals who were afraid of the neighbours next door; the stare of a stranger; the callous look of a policeman at an inner-city checkpoint. If you like, it was a complete reversal of the socialist dream; a society which was based not on solidarity but upon fear, blind collective panic. Above all, this was a fear of the secret police whose acronym—whether it was the Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, MBD,^[1] or KGB—changed with time but whose nature always remained the same. This was true to such an extent that the regime and the security apparatus necessary to run it became indistinguishable. It was less that the secret police represented the worst aspects of the state than that they had become the state and vice versa. Indeed, this state of affairs in the Soviet Union was ably chronicled by a series of anti-utopian or dystopian writers, such as Arthur Koestler, Aldous Huxley (to a certain extent), and George Orwell. In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, for instance, a thorough-going demolition of the socialist dream is conducted in a novel which is modelled—to a certain extent—on Dante’s Inferno, in that it contains a Hell, a Heaven, and a Purgatory, although not necessarily in that order. When we remember that the first part of the novel is essentially a purgatory (as Winston wanders aimlessly in the wasteland left by the party); while the second section resembles a form of Heaven (namely the love affair with Julia); the last section of the book is undoubtedly Hell, however, as Winston finds himself alone with O’Brien, the tormentor, in the cellars of the Ministry of Love.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, for its part, is a sort of disillusioned socialist novel. More accurately, it represents a type of socialism which is too real and a type of reality which is of its very nature the degradation of socialism. Orwell meant the novel to be an anti-utopia—a negative utopia, dystopia, or Cacotopia (according to Anthony Burgess)—which was a refutation of Sir Thomas More’s optimism; a type of social redundancy—what we might call the disparagement of a tradition from a perspective at its innermost heart. Although socialist realism itself had been around for a long time, primarily in television drama, above all in the corridors of the BBC—where a motley collection of television dramatists; masters of agitprop, a mixture of simpering liberals and demi-Trotskyists, used to foregather. Socialist realism itself, of course, has essentially two poles, two contrary loci of power, the one a form of neoclassicism or pseudo neoclassicism (as we might say), as heroic workers bring in the harvest with sharpened scythes. While, on the other, socialist realism degenerates into a form of mawkishness; a type of sentimentality concerning the proles; their lives and their absence of prospects. If you like, the first tendency sees the Left as a form of traditionalism, i.e., radical in the genuine sense, concerning the nature of a perfect past which individuals and groups wished to return to—an idea of almost religious intensity, and which dovetailed quite nicely with an elitist view, a romantic view, of society and culture. Whereby the proletariat was introduced to culture; rather than a set of circumstances where culture was degraded to the level of the proletariat. The latter view of socialist realism, such as it is, is deeply rooted in the nihilistic flourish which socialism can never completely escape from. This is its desire to destroy and degrade (as it were), its anarchic side, and one has to remember that anarchism lies to the left of communism, is indeed a dissident libertarian form of communism, while communism lies to the left of socialism. Indeed, one only has to remember the example of the Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin who when passing a mansion in a horse-drawn carriage saw that it was being ransacked and set alight by a group of men. So he sauntered over to one of the men and asked him, “Why are you destroying this house?” and the man answered “Because it’s there!,” so Bakunin, sensing that this was a good enough answer, joined in the destruction. As a consequence, there has always been a wilfully destructive side to socialism; the sort of attitudes which a middle-brow publication, like the Daily Mail, habitually refers to as the “politics of envy.” This is the desire to destroy what one doesn’t possess, on the one hand, and the desire to degrade any form of distinction in the name of egalitarianism, on the other. It is the sort of scenario which L. P. Hartley, a minor English novelist of the nineteen fifties, attempted to portray in his negative utopia Facial Justice. Where personal beauty, or any sense of facial distinction, has to be removed by surgery, in order that a patina of plainness may dominate, so that no-one is left out. It is, in short, a type of physiognomic totalitarianism—whereby any sense of beauty, abstraction, aesthetic, or sensual pleasure has to be reduced to the lowest common denominator, the coarsest and most vulgar residuum of all. Where the term mean is loyal to both of its dictionary definitions, the one a mathematical average and the other a certain stinginess, a lack of generosity, a certain lack of spirituality—what we might call a type of moral inanition. Ultimately the major characters in Hartley’s novel, which is a sort of moral science fiction tale, triumph in adversity, as they were almost expected to do. But the most important thing is the essential idea which the novel represented, in fact the one spark of originality that the book possessed, and which has led to its survival, even in an attenuated form.

Indeed, Hartley’s novel grasped one point of supreme importance, and this is socialism’s hostility to exaltation, to the concept of transgression, let alone the soaring of the spirits—since such a view of the world is hierarchical. It inevitably looks down on others, possibly from a great height. As a result, one is reminded of a discussion which took place on After Dark—a Channel 4 talk-show which allows unexpurgated exchanges between selected individuals to occur in the small hours. This is usually around a particular topic such as “beauty,” and in this case, a relatively legless paraplegic cripple accused people who were beautiful of being “body fascists,” thereby indicating his loyalty to the cause of disabled liberation. Needless to say, the cause of disabled liberation is yet another example of New Leftism at work; of yet another constituent of the “rainbow coalition of the minorities”—all of which indicates a particular form of socialist logic. Whereby, in accordance with the dictates of Judaeo-Christianity, the base must be exalted and the superior put down. In a sense, therefore, ugliness and disability—the catalepsy of the beggar and the idiotic ravings of the cretin—are of equal status when it comes to a consideration of beauty. Particularly when this is a form of beauty which concerns a finely honed, even aristocratic, bone structure in a woman, always a woman—together with a certain sheen to her hair, a languor to her demeanour, a form of silkiness, in relation to the dress, and a bronzed quality, a certain taint or earthiness, perhaps a touch of the French, Spanish, and Italian to the colour of the skin, a skin-colour which may be golden but always remains white.

In this type of logic, we see a po-faced disregard for the normal. For that which is accepted by most people in society; namely, for the bounty of nature. Such attitudes, in short, wish to turn commonsense notions on their head. They wish to deny that so much of reality is inherited from the past. It is a donnée, an unequal quality, a nonesuch, something which cannot be disturbed. As a result, the views that wish to destroy this normalcy, usually originating from the New Left, are regarded as strange and abhorrent by most people. They do not fit into their view of the world, and as a consequence, they are cast forth from it. Nor do such attitudes apply only to beauty, to an understanding of loveliness. They also apply—with equal measure in fact—to intellect, on the one hand, and religiosity or spirituality, on the other. Indeed the New Left has always pursued an aggressive campaign on behalf of minority rights; in other words, a campaign on behalf of the gross, the purblind, the abnormal, neurotic, ugly, and incomplete. In short, all those elements of contemporary reality which tend in the direction of incompleteness, the unhewn and half-finished—what we might call a concern with the dissolute, the fractured, the unwholesome and unhallowed—in fact, a deconstructionists’ delight at the disintegrative rather than the reconstituted. All of which is not to say that a concern with the dissident and the fractured is out of place—as in the case of atonal music, for instance—merely that a concern with dissonance which does not realise that cacophony is meaningless without the tone, the tonality, which gives it form is a redundant form of modernism, a shallow form. Ultimately modernism’s future, if it has a future, is to strike out beyond the residual after-taste of post-modernism, which is a belated and somewhat tired echo of modernity, in the direction of a new and vitiated completeness, an imperfect wholeness—neither Varèse or Bartok—Screwdriver or the arias of Richard Wagner, but a synthesis of these. In the ultimate sense it is a new form of art which integrates nineteenth century meaning with twentieth century form. This is a type of artistic practise which is radical rather than revolutionary; in other words, a radical return to tradition, to at least the conceptualization of a sense of completeness, if not a redundant sense of completeness. It is a return to the neo-classical within modernism, which is not the same as a return to classicism full stop, in the case of Arno Breker, Copeland, and the late Salvador Dalí (excellent though these artists are in their different ways) but a return to representationalism which has been transfigured by modernism. In short, it is a return to the complexity of a Schoenberg score, which hovered on the edge of completeness, before the redundancy of the twelve-tone row had truly set in.

The New Left concern with minority rights, however, runs contrary to any interest in wholeness. As we have said, it is deeply contradistinctive, dubious and lacking in form, if not in form then certainly in taste—since it wishes to exalt ugliness and debility at the expense of coherence and beauty. When it could be argued that the only way to achieve beauty in the modern era is through a radical duplication of forms. This is the radicalization of forms, the transvaluation of all values, to wax Nietzschean, in the direction of some form of value. Especially when we bear in mind that Nietzsche believed ugliness to be a form of beauty, at least for modern man—a form of natural architectonics, as is seen in the study of the nude throughout the ages. In actual fact, if you look at those artists who have dealt with nudity, such as Botticelli, Michelangelo, Rubens, Ingres, Rembrandt, Manet, Goya, Titian, and the modern artist Francis Bacon then you will see a progression through coarseness, sublimity, ugliness, and the psycho-neurotic complex (in the case of Bacon) towards a final resolution of superior form. Whereas the movement for disabled liberation (so called) is essentially a type of cultural imperialism; a type of cultural imperialism which is waged against normalcy—more accurately, a form of reversed cultural imperialism, a type of vanguardism in reverse—whereby an attempt is made to foist cretinism on the majority. As was seen in a drama, a television drama, which starred the cripple—the paraplegic—to whom we have referred. He is an individual who appears to be politically confused, in that he wears both a Leninist button and a Solidarity badge, the icon of the Polish anti-communist movement—although he is not really confused, he is actually engaged in leftwing gesture politics. Where he hopes to gain a certain frisson from the Bolshevik revolution; more accurately, the Bolshevik coup d’état—while at the same time praising Solidarity, as did most communist parties in the West, as a form of Socialist Renewal. When, in actual fact, Solidarity is a religious, anti-socialist, and even quasi-nationalist movement. Nevertheless, these quibbles aside, the man with whom we are dealing is a sort of honorary paraplegic. On the one hand, he is an object, object being the operative word, of sympathy and admiration. While, on the other, he is a legless or relatively legless runt, a cripple, a cretinous mountebank, who spits in the eye of beauty and calls it “body fascism.” This is primarily because he was born a human piece of tissue, a matter of protoplasm—what we might call a case of insolvent tissue, a type of human tripe, a belly with a head minus other extremities, a withered trunk (as Shakespeare calls it in King Lear). In a sense such a brute; a demi-Caucasoid, semi-‘Indo-European,’ and sub-Asiatic runt, armed with a university degree from Sussex, somewhat inevitably in sociology or social psychology, is the last person to appreciate feminine beauty—its necessary curvaceousness and lines of force, if you will. When it is concerned with the surface, with superficiality, together with its inarticulate mining of subterranean depths. It is concerned with the deep, the chthonic, on the one hand, when coupled with its concern with artifice, with a superficial sense of dress and decorum, a matter of tittle-tattle and small-mindedness, on the other. Elements of both qualities can be seen, moreover, in the visage of female beauty, in the face, lustrous and oval in aspect, the face of the latest Miss America, for instance, Carolyn Sapp. When she is young, beautiful, with a fleshy (if controlled) face, perfect teeth, Sybilline lips—at once sculptural and yet finely drawn—lustrous hair, reinforced eye-brows—indicative of a somewhat superficial strength—and eyes which are at once sensual, dim, knowing, easily excited, and yet slightly cold.

As I have said, the fascination with the disabled on parts of the New Left is merely part of a deconstructive process of deconditioning. It is a matter of the incomplete rather than the complete, anti-matter rather than matter. In turn, it goes to the heart of the television drama which I have already described—its redundancy and absence of form. When the central tableaux involves a scene of sexual intercourse, a moment of coitus, between a relatively attractive (if ‘underground’) girl, a female biker as it were, and the cripple—the legless runt with a bird-cage stomach who is incapable of sustaining an erection; although he manages it on this occasion with the assistance of his new ‘girlfriend.’ All of which adds up to an attempt to make disability seem attractive, to eroticise it, to raise one’s level of interest in it. All of which is designed to make another ‘out’ group appear an ‘in’ group, to overcome the alleged alienation of a persecuted minority—when any persecution is primarily in the eye of the beholder. Indeed, a similar set of circumstances can be seen in the treatment of intelligence, of innate ability, by professional anti-elitists—such as those who look after Down’s Syndrome children or Mongols as they used to be called (somewhat more accurately). All of whom declare that Mongols are held back by society’s perception of them, insofar as society does actually have a perception of them, and such people believe that Mongols are disadvantaged because such a high price is placed on intelligence. In other words, it is not the disease, the genetic condition from which Mongols suffer which is responsible for their plight—it is the fact that other people are intelligent in relation to these individuals, these idiots, which is denying them a fair chance. A similar attitude also prevails in relation to mental illness, particularly in relation to radical mental health charities such as MIND. Organizations whose publications tend to discount the fact that individuals actually suffer from mental illness, that conditions such as depression, manic depression, psycho-neurotic complexes, and schizophrenia actually exist. They are merely little local difficulties which people are passing through—to pretend otherwise is to be guilty of moral authoritarianism (if not “fascism”.) It is to stigmatise people unnecessarily, to see them as ‘victims,’ rather than to pursue an ideology of ‘rights’ which is a type of compulsory victimology. It is as if the possession of intellect, skills, athletic ability (to a certain extent), beauty and many other qualities is to be despised. Indeed, to actually admit that different human beings have different qualities, dissimilar goals and levels of achievement; moreover, to admit that some human beings are superior to others is held to be anathema by contemporary liberals. It is completely opposed to their world view. Ultimately these ideas are deeply philistine and anti-intellectual, and they are deeply opposed to any semblance of masculinity, depth, grace, and order. In short, they are dedicated to a radical levelling, a commingling of exalted states with dross, a deep and abiding fear of distinction, an attempt, if only theoretically, to lobotomise the intellect which has made Western civilisation the greatest on earth. All of which reminds me of Diligent Observer (name changed), an individual who has figured in these narratives before, and who is at present employed by an Indian cripple who is a homosexual writer in West Hampstead. He is an individual who is published by both Picador and Bloomsbury, and a man who knows how to turn multiple disability to his advantage in the areas of race, sexuality and the nature of the ‘able-bodied,’ hence his Thatcherite politics, his cashing in on disadvantage.

Note

[1] MVD.