Roobin does Blur and Marxism: part 1

So, I actually dipped out on the first day of Marxism to go and see Blur. A very kind friend of mine won tickets to their first Hyde Park gig and invited me to come along. Thank you, thank you, thank you. It was a beautiful day, the only downside was getting stuck behind a line of men taller than me (which is difficult) and having to stand on one of the pathways for most of Blur's set. That and Crystal Castles.

Dribble on the social significance of Blur and musical milieu: The first point about 90s musical culture is the similarity between Grunge and Britpop, headlined by the slogan Bungee Jump Against Racism. Both phenomena were defined by gentle political tints. But this was the age of politics without politics. The triumph of neo-liberalism in politics and economic, post-modernism in culture and thought, led to the almost complete evacuation of meaning and direction in public life.

Blur were always at the most thoughtful end of their music scene. Though Britpop was tinged by nationalism, when put to the test most prominent musicians at the time were lefties of some stripe. The retro obsession with 60s and 70s style was ultimately about connecting with a time with meaning and ideals. It is a short step from the cultural revolution to the social one.

Away to Marxism, I have heard a figure of 7,000 attendees. If true that would be great, the best ever since I started attending. Subjectively it seemed as if there were more new people, on the team, running the event. None of the meetings I went to were sparse.

Impressions: I went to Colin Sparks meeting on Friday. Does the media control ideas, staple title. The meeting actually benefited from Colin's slightly prosaic concentration on newspapers. There is still an argument going on about the value and significance of new media, in particular the internet.

I had a sleepy time in Pat Devine's meeting about his model for a socialist society. It occurred to me in the meeting, in the past numerous intellectuals (formal and Gramscian) have posed models for a future society. One of the great steps forward came when Marx and Engels linked the goal of socialism with the working class movement. The work of the intellectual (in the Gramscian sense, an individual with the means and ability to express the interests of a social group) is better as guiding and shaping the movement against capitalism, rather than realising the mental ideal of what is to be achieved.

Intellectuals don't help when they try to grab the initiative... I have decided your goal, now you realise it. Yet a lot of young, educated left-wing people often want to know specifics about what socialism will be like before they decide to commit. We cannot simply argue the movement is everything.

China Mieville's meeting The Politics of Monsters should have been complimented by an event called The Monsters of Politics, where well known lefties compete in a demolition derby to the strains of thrash metal. Not being the case I skipped to an excellent meeting about Darwin and the Origin of Species.

The Origin of Species was part of a a general intellectual breakthrough. The fundamental thesis of the Middle Ages was that everything in motion has been disturbed, objects exist naturally at rest. Darwin showed, in nature at least, differentiation comes from constant change, evolution by natural selection.

Capitalism is a dynamic system. Modern humans are used to the idea of change. The general contest is over the significance of change. Is change incremental and slow, or does it come suddenly in violent bursts? The analogue of this argument in biology is between traditional Darwinism and the model of Punctuated Equilibrium.