>>9006Mysticism says ‘everything that lives is holy’, so don’t walk on the grass and above all don’t harm a hair on the head of an imperialist.
It omits to mention that the cells on our bodies are dying daily, that life cannot flourish without death, that holiness disintegrates and vanishes with no trace when it is profaned, and that imperialism has to die so that the people can live.
Well, that’s about all I wish to say about Refrain.
To go into it in greater detail would simply invest the work with an importance that it doesn’t have.
No, my job is not to ‘sell’ you Refrain. I see my job as raising the level of consciousness in regard to cultural affairs.
At the outset I said Refrain is part of the cultural superstructure of imperialism.
These terms: ‘superstructure’, ‘imperialism’, require some explanation if the level of consciousness with regard to cultural affairs is to be raised, if we want to grasp the deeper roots of such surface phenomena as avant garde music.
These terms are essential to Marxism, and yet a lot of people seem to regard them as some sort of jargon or mumbo-jumbo.
The truth is that in an imperialist country like Britain it would be a miracle indeed to find Marxism being taught in schools, since Marxism is directed towards the overthrow of imperialism, whereas the education system of an imperialist country must be directed towards maintaining imperialism.
It is as well to bear this hard fact in mind.
In Marx’s analysis, society consists of an economic base, and rising above this foundation, and determined by it, a super-structure of laws, politics, ideas and customs.
The following quotation is to be found in Lenin’s pamphlet entitled Karl Marx, which I have found the most concise and useful introduction to Marxism.
Marx writes: ‘In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces.
The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general.
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or - what is but a legal expression for the same thing - with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto.
From being forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution.
With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense super-structure is more or less rapidly transformed.
In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic - in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.’
Marx lived in the age of the development of capitalism.
He describes the development towards monopoly capitalism, which he calls ‘the immanent law of capitalistic production itself, the centralisation of capital’.
He says: ‘One capitalist always kills many.
Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime.
Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.
The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it.
Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder.’
Marx, who died in 1883, did not live to see the imperialist wars of this century.
It fell to Lenin to describe the development of imperialism in his pamphlet Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism which he wrote in 1917.
Here is what he says, with some omissions for the sake of brevity: ‘Imperialism emerged as the development and direct continuation of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism in general.
But capitalism only became capitalist imperialism at a definite and very high stage of its development, when certain of its fundamental characteristics began to change into their opposites …
Free competition is the fundamental characteristic of capitalism, and of commodity production generally; monopoly is the exact opposite of free competition, but we have seen the latter being transformed into monopoly before our eyes …
At the same time, the monopolies, which have grown out of free competition, do not eliminate the latter, but exist over it and alongside it, and thereby give rise to a number of very acute, intense antagonisms, frictions and conflicts.
Monopoly is the transition from capitalism to a higher system . . .
Imperialism is capitalism in that stage of development in which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital has established itself; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun; in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.’