Coda to Spaghetti Communism

This is a coda to my piece on the Spaghetti Western at Mute, and was largely very kindly provided by Steve Wright (author of Storming Heaven) and Alberto Toscano. I should also mention this piece on violence, politics, and the spaghetti western which Steve drew to my attention.

We can trace the influence of the Spaghetti Western, and its close cousin the Westerns of Sam Peckinpah, directly amongst the militants of the Italian ultra-left in the 1970s. This was, appropriately, a rather fraught and difficult negotiation. Stefano Lepri, a militant from the Roman section of Potere Operaio, recalls that ‘In 1968 we didn't have a lot of time for cinema … Some liked Once Upon a Time in the West, others considered it “escapist,” as the saying then went, and banal’. He goes on to mention various films across successive years, from The Bonnot Gang to Easy Rider and Queimada, and concludes:

But some, led by Rosati and Pace, had the courage to proclaim their preference for adventure films and to exalt Butch Cassidy ... Our favourite, more than anything else, was Vamos a matar, compañeros, the political spaghetti western by Sergio Corbucci, with Tomas Milian made up to look like Che Guevara, and Franco Nero, who many, starting with Morucci, began to imitate.

This ambiguity in taste is shown in a more comic light by an article from Rosso, published in 1975:

The perfect militant FIRMLY HATES western films in general, because they are American, individualistic, involving too many weapons (used outside a correct political line). The films of Sergio Leone are to be avoided in particular, because they are violent, with lots of explosions, and above all because the director does not sign progressive petitions. Peckinpah's films are rejected for similar reasons, because they are gory, they depict petty bourgeois characters and so are ambiguous, and in the last analysis right wing ... (trans. Steve Wright)

So, the irony is that the militants too found a certain discomfort in the populist political violence of the Spaghetti Western…

This is also true of the use of Mucchio Salvaggio (The Wild Bunch), as the name given to the group Primea Linea. In another instance resonant for the question of violence, Toni Negri replied to an article criticising him as a prophet of terrorism published in the New York Review of Books in 2002 by Alexander Stille. In his reply Negri noted:

When Stille cites phrases from my old books they are all butchered and taken out of context. For example, he cites the ominous sentence “No pity for our enemies!” but fails to say that it was clearly in my text an ironic citation from a Sergio Leone spaghetti western film.

Now the Spaghetti Western is used as a defence against the charge of advocating violence.

For Badiou completists

Two quotes, taken from personal letters, and included in Emmanuel Terray's Marxism and "Primitive Societies", trans. Mary Klopper (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972); Le Marxisme devant les societies "primitives" (Maspero, 1969). From the essay 'Morgan and Contemporary Anthropology' (5-92).

'In fact, Morgan's "structuralism," like that of his successors, was based on a positivist conception of science in which, to quote Alain Badiou:

The theory is the model, experimentation consists of isolating the empirical correlate which materializes the model; the experimental apparatus [must allow] for a separating effect exhibiting an approximate realization of the form.

(p.38)'

and

'Alain Badiou believes that Marx, on the contrary, believed that:

It is impossible to set a theoretical conception of history against real history defined by its very complexity - its empirical impurity. In Marxist epistemology the complexity is constructed according to the concepts of a theory. . . . It is the proper task of a theory of history to give an account of the nature of real society.

(p.39)

Obviously, Badiou in his more Althusserian moment, but I'll leave parsing/explanation to the real experts...

The Proletarian and the Poet (or dig your own grave)

'Work is not and never will be glorious. The hole into which the worker sinks is not and never will be but the vain work of taking earth from here to place it there, even if it then means taking it back again: a worthless task whose only price is the universal equivalent, the everyday gold that is exchanged for bread. This is the ordinary cycle of daily descent into a tomb, from which, for simple survival, one is reborn each day. It is the cycle of production and reproduction, of births lapsing into anonymity, into a repetition aping a simple eternity, without fold [repli]; in short, everything that is encapsulated in the very name proletarian, and that strikes with derision any rituals designed for the consecration of work.' (32)

Ranciere, Mallarme: The Politics of the Siren

Le Bateau Ivre

Take a trip

Anti-Marxist Vitalism

Only, when the Socialist Government had begun giving the peasants bits of land, dividing up the big haciendas, Ezequial had been allotted a little piece outside the village. He would go and gather the stones there, and prepare to build a little hut. And he would break the earth with a hoe, his only implement, as far as possible, But he had no blood connection with this square allotment of unnatural earth, and he could not set himself into relations with it. He was fitful and diffident about it. There was no incentive, no urge.
DH Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent


Somewhat ironically I only read this novel due to its footnote mention in Badiou's The Century, but if you want anti-socialist vitalism it's the place to go. Also, don't forget the hilarious dismissal of female orgasm, and the 'man is a column of blood, woman a valley of blood' either...

The Passion for the Real - All the Way Down

Regeneration of man through the red-hot iron. Plow up the old earth, tear down the old structure. Re-create life anew. And in all likelihood perish yourself.

Victor Serge, Conquered City

the art of crisis

trailing through the October questionnaire on 'recessional art' (i.e. art in the wake of the financial crisis) I came across this by Andrew Witt and Nathan Crompton in their reply (Badiousian largely) to October:

'Debt to the situation translates into a sense of "responsibility," like the artist who today finds him/herself in the midst of capitalism in crisis - nothing new there! - and is compelled to make art out of a sense of pathos and guilt rather than affirmation.'

Of course this is, for them, a bad thing. It's not just deliberate perversity, although that may play a part, but what's so wrong about a sense of 'responsibility' (and why the scare quotes?) and making art out of a sense of pathos and guilt? Less in favour of pathos, but guilt would be fine. Also, capitalism in midst of crisis is nothing new, well not in the technical sense but isn't this a slightly larger crisis? (perhaps leave this to Paul Mattick).

Of course I've written at length critically about affirmation, but even if one is affirmative I think the unspoken obviousness that is implied here might need a little more justification. Simply to mention 'responsibility', 'pathos' or, even worse, 'guilt', is supposed to raise post-Nietzschean hackles like an inbuilt-reflex (never made the maudlin pathos of much of Nietzsche and Nietzschean - all heroic strength while complaining about being 'dragged down' by those evil Christian / socialist / anarchist masses...).