Raids and Reconstructions; Essays in Politics, Crime and Culture, by Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Pluto, £3.30)
Hans Magnus Enzensberger is probably Germany's foremost Marxist cultural critic and poet, and Pluto are to be congratulated for bringing out this volume of his best essays. It is a mixed if fascinating bag, united solely by the writer's ever-present wit, style and perception. Admittedly some essays are less impressive — the two on crime/treason I found repetitive and seemingly banal, going little beyond an analysis of crime/treason as permanently shifting concepts, dependent on changing class interests. But it is true that I spent least time on these two contributions — Enzensberger's cryptic, very dense style often reveals oceans of ideas on subsequent study.
Other essays are tours de force of historical description and analysis, which read like fiction but aren't (though Enzensberger himself points out elsewhere that the modern electronic media have already abolished the distinction between fiction and non-fiction!) The vivid portrait of Rafael Trujillo, the despotic gangster who ruled the Dominican Republic for over thirty years, for example, brutally brings home the depths to which American imperialism will sink, and the type of character it is prepared to rely on in the name of 'freedom'.
His portrait of the 'Dreamers of the Absolute' — the 19th century anarchists and individual, conspiratorial terrorists who preceded Social Democracy in Russia — is affectionate and detailed, generous about their courage, critical of their tactical futility and impotence. But as the necessary precursors to mass, organised politics in the Soviet Union, they are very firmly placed in their historical context.
So too are Fidel Castro and the Cuban Communist Party in 'Portrait of a Party'. This is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the political processes at work in Cuba. Here Enzensberger traces the undeniable pragmatism and opportunism of the 'new' post-revolutionary Cuban vanguard party to its roots, nailing the reasons for its degeneration and virtual inactivity. The analysis is often achieved with great wit and style. Commenting on the evident lack of any theoretical tradition in the Castraite movement, he has this to say: 'Fidel gave his brother a few books by Marx and Lenin. "We read three chapters of Das Capital", Raul repeated laughing. "Then we tossed it aside. I'm sure Fidel hasn't looked at it since." This has a certain charm; there probably is no Communist politician who has read beyond the third chapter; but there certainly isn't one beside Fidel who takes pride in it.'
In 'Tourists of the Revolution', Enzensberger has a valedictory message for those revolutionaries foolish enough to think that 'radical tourism' to workers states will in any way help them understand the general politics of such states: 'In Havana I kept meeting Communists in the hotels for foreigners who had no idea that the energy and water supply in the working quarters had broken down during the afternoon, that bread was rationed, and that the population had to stand two hours in line for a slice of pizza; meanwhile the tourists in their hotel rooms were arguing about Lukacs.'
But undoubtedly the most important contributions in this book, and those worth most study, are the two contributions on the mass media, the later of which was previously published in New [illegible]. These [illegible] new ground in an area where the revolutionary left has been notoriously weak. Both these studies of the media are seminal, suggestive and incomplete. Both need updating in the light of the experiences of Portugal and recently Italy. But in my work in the media I have consistently returned to the later essay, 'Constituents of a Theory of the Media' — each re-reading repays the effort, such a goldmine of ideas does it present.
In the earlier essay, 'The Industrialisation of the Mind', Enzensberger identifies a specifically new element in the age of late capitalism — the 'mind industry', whose job is not essentially to sell commodities, but 'to sell the existing order, to perpetuate the prevailing pattern of man's domination by man.' This qualitative shift he designates by the concept 'immaterial exploitation.' His theses can be seen as a direct, technologically determined corollary of Gramsci's concept of 'ideological hegemony', in a specific form (despite the problems to which this prior concept has given rise in the light of Perry Anderson's recent brilliant analysis of the shifting meanings of the term in Gramsci's work). For Enzensberger in this 1962 essay, it is the job of 'immaterial exploitation' via the media to 'eliminate possible futures'.
But even here the process is not without contradictions — contradictions which he expands on significantly in his later work: 'In order to exploit people's intellectual, moral, and political faculties, you have got to develop them first. This is the basic dilemma... faced by today's media.' And he is already flaying the intellectual's (and the left's) unwillingness to tangle with the new, electronic media: 'To opt out of the mind industry, to refuse any dealings with it, may well turn out to be a reactionary course... Retreat from the media will not even save the intellectual's precious soul from corruption.' The later essay is so replete with ideas that a summary would be impossible (and undesirable — only a reading will suffice).
And there are weaknesses: Enzensberger, in what could be termed an extensive, superstructural excursion into the formation of contemporary capitalist ideology, does at times underplay evidently economic forces. For example, there is indeed an unwillingness and suspicion on the part of the left to take up and exploit the new electronic media — a fixation on the 'Iskra model' of political communication. But economic factors, the high cost of such resources, is a not insignificant factor aiding such a process (admittedly the costs of video, etc. had dipped sharply in the late '60s, prior to the essay being written, but have risen substantially in the recent, critical period). This tendency is also revealed in his analysis of the restriction, via hire, through the Xerox monopoly, of photocopiers. He ascribes a rather conspiratorial political motive to this (which such restriction undoubtedly has in the degenerated workers states), whereas very vulgar economic interests — the ability to keep up rental prices and maintain a monopoly — is a much more convincing explanation. (That Xerox monopoly has since been substantially broken, incidentally.)
There are direct contradictions too, both in relation to his 1962 essay and some of his earlier statements in the same essay. At many points in both he expressly indicates privatised, ideological purposes for which the bourgeoisie wishes to maintain its monopoly hold on the media. Yet in dismissing Marshall McLuhan's 'provocative idiocy' — 'The Medium is the Message' — he has this to say: 'It [the bourgeoisie's] intention to hold on the control of the means of production at any price, while being incapable of making the socially necessary use of them, is here expressed with complete frankness in the superstructure. It wants the media as such and to no purpose' (author's emphasis). A very curious and inexplicable statement, thrust into his general thesis.
Nevertheless this is still one of the most important political works of the last ten years, the implications of which the left has still not grasped in any way. The central tenet can be expressed simply: the forms and potentialities of the new electronic media (unlike previous forms such as the book/theatre) are implicitly democratic and collective. Privatisation and restrictive state control of such media cuts directly across such potentialities. It is within this rupture — such a giant contradiction — that the left must intervene and drive in their wedge. The breakdown of the state monopoly of broadcasting in Italy in the last 18 months, and the possibilities that this has opened up for the left, demonstrate clearly how prophetic and relevant Enzensberger's thesis has now become.