Association of Musical Marxists

The Association of Musical Marxists (AMM) was a political and cultural organisation based in London, active between 2010 and 2015. It was founded by former members of the Socialist Workers Party (UK) (SWP), including writer Ben Watson and Andy Wilson, with the aim of uniting revolutionary politics with avant-garde and improvised music.

The AMM challenged the professionalisation of both politics and the arts, advocating instead for creative spontaneity, radical history, and collective pleasure. Its events were communal and combined political discussion, poetry readings, musical improvisation, and drinking, seeking to dissolve boundaries between politics and culture. The AMM manifesto emphasised a commitment to revolutionary art and a rejection of what they perceived as the commodification of culture. They advocated for embracing great music as a pattern for reshaping humanity and as a key to the dialectic.

By combining improvised music with revolutionary politics, the AMM aimed to challenge careerism and affirm the audience's right to an informal good time. Or as one journalist put it, "the AMM believes in both revolutionary art and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and Unkant Books are an attempt to fuse these two explosive concepts." Ultimately, however, political disagreements led to the AMM's demise.

Many people spoke, read or performed at AMM meetings including, Ben Watson ("Out To Lunch"), Andy Wilson, Keith Fisher, Sean Bonney, Oscillatorial Binnage, Helene le Bohec, Nina Power, Ben "Chewing Gum Man" Wilson, Dave Black, Esther Leslie, Robert Dellar, Alastair Kemp, Alternative TV.