Ode to Confirmation Bias

Throughout his writings, Marx used a number of terms that have been translated as ‘community’.[1] In Capital, he calls community Gemeinwesen, even using the term when translating English texts in which the word community appears.[2] Gemeinwesen, however, was already an archaic term when Marx used it. And to complicate matters, Marx used the more common Gemeinschaft when referring to non-political forms of association. ‘In general, both Gemeinschaft and Gemeinwesen can be translated as community in English, although Gemeinwesen more nearly conveys the notion of community as used in the political sense’.[3] Ah, the joys of translation: we reach another semantic barrier and can only ‘more nearly’ approach it, rather than overcome it. For we are interested in that gap between ‘more nearly’ and comprehension.

Gazing into the archives, one can quickly find that, in political philosophy, the community has

the kind of position which the space-time continuum occupies in physics - it is that within which political events occur - and the kind of position which life occupies in biology - it is the thing upon which all the political goings-on depend.[4]

Community is both external and internal, peripheral and central. But of this to Marx, let alone to us? The semantic infection of our notion of Community – inherently tied up with freedom of movement, expression and Self – must be clear when viewing the etymological shadows of the term as used by one the most influential thinkers of the nineteenth century. Engels can demonstrate: ‘As soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom, the state as such ceases to exist. We would therefore propose to replace the word "state" everywhere by the word Gemeinwesen’.[5] Without much effort, our improvised Communities can be seen in Marx and Engels’. It is an independent World of free interaction, which, importantly in this register, is stateless and entirely democratic. Moreover, it is self-generating – building itself out of state and itself.[6] Improvisation is an ‘(ideally) emancipative’ Community, built on solidarity of Selves.[7]

But to take the writings of Marx and Engels at face value is a critical mistake too often made. For one thing, we are roughly a century and a half distant from when the pair wrote, let alone wrote together. We do not want to fall into the trap of thoughtlessly panegyrising the duo purely for the ideological weight they wield today. Instead, we act as assured analytical thinkers, carefully repurposing one aspect of theory into a new and (fittingly) revolutionary light while ignoring all evidence that does not coincide with our views.

Thus, let us untangle Marx’s community strand by strand, and place it on new foundations.

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Marx’s community is developed within his writings as a tripartite idea:[8]

I – The community as a primitive form of association[9] 

II – The community as a stateless society, a universal dynamic

III – The community as mode of existence, the only true means of self-actualisation possible for humankind

Strand by strand, we shall begin.

I – The community as a primitive form of association

It is a well-caricatured fact that history for Marx is a machine of progression. To employ a specific example, mankind’s history is the history of individualisation at the hands of industrialisation.

The further we go back into history, the more the individual and, therefore, the producing individual seems to depend on and constitute a part of a larger whole … Man is in the most literal sense of the word a zoon politikon, not only a social animal, but an animal which can develop into an individual only in society[10]

As Oskar Lange puts it ‘Robinson Crusoe, who engaged in production in isolation from human society, is a fiction without counterpart in reality’.[11] Capitalism grew out of primitive community. For Marx, however, primitive communities were necessarily a phenomenon of the past, a simplicity both irrelevant and impossible after capitalism. Why is this? Simply because primitive communities ‘restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies’.[12] Within these primitive communities, man has not yet become an agent of historical teleology. Primitive communities have ‘no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history, is but the history of successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society’.[13] Man has not achieved self-control.

What we see in Marx’s apparent defence of colonialism is what Badiou effectively labels as fidelity to Truth-Event, using similarly primitive terminology. To Badiou, a subject requires an authoritarian Master in order to elevate itself above the ‘human animal’.[14] I will not paraphrase him:

The Master is the one who helps the individual to become subject. That is to say, if one admits that the subject emerges in the tension between the individual and the universality, then it is obvious that the individual needs a mediation, and thereby an authority, in order to progress on this path. One has to renew the position of the master - it is not true that one can do without it, even and especially in the perspective of emancipation[15]

The British in Marx’s analysis of India’s fight for independence personify the paradox of political dynamics, that ‘a Master is needed to pull individuals out of the quagmire of their inertia’.[16] A Master is a structural necessity in the historic development of subjectivisation. Without one, the primitive community could never actualise.

Even disregarding Marx (and Hegel’s) strict view of history as a progression, we here begin to re-apply Marx’s theories. For we now inhabit a post-capitalist age of self-control and subjectivisation, but lacking the primitive ‘superstition’ that Marx believed oppressed the unactualised. It could be seen as damaging for musicians to request a new universal mythology to take the place of capitalism and superstition, in fact.[17] For it is precisely the lack of a universal mythology that allows us to view improvised Community as a wholly free exchange. Community is the primitive community Marx identifies in India, but with the key difference that the participants have self-control and are not weighted down by shared superstition. Improvised Community have a history and do not have the passivity of unresisting external historical narratives. And if each Community is ephemeral and singular, the lack of history no longer means a dominance of superstition, but rather a blankness of interpellation and ideology. It is a Self exploration enabled precisely by the self-control Marx advocates.     

II - The community as a stateless society, a universal dynamic

To Marx, the State was merely a political entity representative of ‘civil society’ and private property, without social force.

If the modem state wants to overcome the impotence of its administration, then it must overcome the present private life. If it wants to overcome the present life, then it must overcome itself, for it exists only in opposition to private life[18]

The state is an instrument of the ruling classes and thus undemocratic and unrepresentative. One can only bring about change by overcoming the political state and ruling ‘civil society’. Marx’s community here is fairly straightforward: it is a new form of association that allows for open and democratic exchange on a universal scale.

We hold no qualms with this aspect of community, other than to say that Communities would exist to Marx only on a micro- level. They are pockets of universal dynamic exchange within a larger, unresolved political state. Certainly, they are democratic and stateless associations, but they are singular and temporary within the superstructure of hegemonic political identity. Through Marx, we can conclude that each improvised Community is therein a point of resistance, a momentary dissolution of ‘civil society’, as it stands encased in its own dogmas. As such, we could bend Marx’s definition of proletariat to coincide with Community, so that improvised Community can be synecdochally personified as one of the proletariat. After all, the proletariat is a class which is ‘in civil society [and…] which is not a class of civil society’.[19] In the midst of the singular improvised event, Community exists (un)categorically outside of civil society. It exists and yet cannot exist simultaneously.

III - The community as mode of existence

Men, not as abstractions, but as real, living, unique individuals are of this (communal) nature … Human nature is the true communal nature of man[20]

Pretty unequivocally, Marx states his case. Coorperation, community and Community are natural states of humankind. A bold claim? In relation to improvisation, perhaps not. Music itself ‘belongs to everybody’ and is ‘as old – and as natural – as the circulation of blood’.[21] ‘Jazz music comes from the soil, where all music has its beginnings’.[22] Whether or not this statement is figurative or metaphorical, the implication is clear: music, and music of improvisation in particular, grows naturally out of humans interacting with their environment. Improvisation, then, the most open of all musical practices, in which professional and amateur stand on equal terms, the natural instinct of making sound together is obvious.[23] We must be careful, however, not to mistakenly begin the praises of ‘natural geniuses’ or those with a ‘natural’ propensity. As an alterity to that ‘civil society’, this aspect of improvisation and Community has often been horrendously racialized.[24] I do not have the boldness to directly apply Marx’s nebulous statements to improvised Communities.

The conditions of Marx’s postulation, however, is applicable. Namely, that ‘Alienation exists when the development of the social forces does not coincide with the development of the individual’.[25] All we can say with certainty is that, from our position within this historical parallax, alienation not only does not occur in Community, but is impossible. What instead opens up is an inter-epistemic exploration of Self, as we will have seen, whose very condition of possibility is its equality.

Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible. In the previous substitutes for the community, in the State, etc., personal freedom has existed only for the individuals who developed within the relationships of the ruling class, and only in so far as they were individuals of this class[26]

Once again, Community is a point of resistance to hegemonic civil society. The idea is developed, however. Because it is a point of resistance to a hegemonic superstructure, Community’s condition of possibility is simultaneously its condition of impossibility. That is, Community can only exist as a (micro-) universal egalitarian World because it is ephemeral. Were it to persist, the paradox would follow through: it would become the hegemonic civil society through which Selves were interpellated, in a firm yet deeply ironic distinction of improvised Community’s relation to the infinite, to no-time and all-time. 

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All this to say that we use the term Community knowingly, manipulating the writings of Marx to apply to the experiential moment as we can access it through improvisation. But we also see Community as a point of resistance in its existence. It is a thin layer added to our reading of Community, but a vital one that took us through Marx.

To jump in time to the early twentieth century: Jazz – and by extension improvisation – was always a rebellion to many white performers, railing against ‘chumps who have to rise and shine each morning, slaves to the alarm clock’; a creative musician was ‘an anarchist with a horn’.[27] For black musicians, on the other hand, musicianship was often a sign of achievement and respectability, music was ‘the cornerstone of black cultural identity’.[28] How to explain this discord between wild abandon and rebellion and a strive toward wider cultural recognition? It is all too easy to racialise the dialogue between white and black musicians here: white musicians attempting to ape the ‘natural’, exciting and primitive sounds of black musicians, who were in turn crudely stereotyped to the extreme; black musicians attempting to gain some level of respect in a brutally racist society. But if we take a step back and view this disjunction through Marx we can understand the dichotomy quite simply: the music offered both groups (speaking crudely I know) a means to escape hegemonic interpellation. For black musicians, that meant music was ‘a particularly effective avenue for escaping the limitations routinely imposed on black talent’ and for whites it meant an escape from the individualised, mechanised routine of capitalist production.[29]

In both respects, the music is a form of Self expression that rails against civil society’s social strata. The white becomes wild, the black becomes civil. Either way, it is a means of dismantling the artificial boundaries established in the early twentieth century. Many critics have written about the racial implications of musical syncretism within this epoch, particularly regarding jazz. But each has often only addressed either the black experience or the white experience.[30] I do not claim to be able to effectively outline the experiential matrices of both groups a century ago, but rather in their relations see a similarity: a discomfort (to put it mildly) with how society automatically placed them within its superficial hierarchies. White or black, rich or poor, man or woman, Communities developed in musical cultures allowed Selves to resist the economic and political superstructure that surrounded them. It allowed for independent Self definition. Whoever engaged in the Community escaped the terms and becomes a deliberate alterity, undermining the structures that attempt to govern them.

you had to discover yourself … We fed off of each other but encouraged each other to do things that were individual[31]

You can’t join the throng ‘til you write your own song[32] 

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