by ANTON JAGER
Stuck in American exile in 1941, Karl Korsch surveyed the success of the Blitzkrieg on Greece and tried, heroically, to offer a socialist interpretation. The German offensive, he wrote in a letter to Bertolt Brecht, expressed ‘frustrated left-wing energy’ and a displaced desire for workers’ control. Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt summarized Korsch’s position as follows:
. . . in their civilian life, the majority of the tank crews of the German divisions were car mechanics or engineers (that is, industrial workers with practical experience). Many of them came from the German provinces that had experienced bloody massacres at the hands of the authorities in the Peasant Wars (1524-1526). According to Korsch, they had good reason to avoid direct contact with their superiors. Almost all of them could also vividly remember the positional warfare of 1916, again a result of the actions of their superiors, in whom they had little faith thereafter . . . According to Korsch, it thereby became possible for the troops to invent for themselves the Blitzkrieg spontaneously, out of historical motives at hand.
It is tempting – and consoling – to view the recent riots in Britain through this lens. In regions that were once hotbeds of Luddite agitation and labourite self-organization, the old demand for workers’ control now seems to have been perverted into xenophobic violence, a longing to overthrow the bourgeois regime replaced by an attempt to smash its weakest subjects. One wants to believe, with Korsch, that behind the mask of reaction there is still some potentially emancipatory profile.
In his recent Sidecar article, Richard Seymour ably circumvents this economism. He insists that the unrest should not be understood in terms of wrongly sublimated left-wing libido, but as an expression of late-capitalist rot. Not an insurgency to be redirected, but an impulse to be quashed. The essentials of his diagnosis are inarguable: that the class composition of the rioters was not homogenously proletarian, that they were not responding to events representing any real ‘immigrant threat’, that their actions were incited by both the political class and digital ‘lumpencommentariat’, and that the concatenation owes more to feverish misinformation than to the authentic grievances of the dispossessed.
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