Notes · from · Hell's · Bathroom

Karl Heinrich Marx, rabble rouser and agent of history was born on this day in 1818.  Ordinarily, I feel a bit absurd celebrating someone’s birthday who is no longer with us, but if there ever was a figure whose posthumous life has outstripped his organic life, it was surely our friend Karl.  In fact, many of his followers seem to take a kind of perverse pleasure in describing to the last detail just how utterly abject and destitute he was during his time on earth—how he and Jenny were so poverty-stricken, when their oldest child died, they had to borrow from friends in order to be able to afford the coffin; how eleven people were in attendance at Marx’s funeral, etc.—almost as if the wretched condition in which he existed in life were, in fact, the necessary obverse of the illustrious place among the great cultural luminaries he was to assume after his death.  It is as though the former were the sign of the latter; as though his miserable status in life were itself a kind of negative evocation of the greatness to come; as if the mortification of his literal, physical form were the necessary price to pay for the almost metaphysical degree of immaterial, cultural, and political influence he was to exercise later on.  His own well-being, after all, mattered little when compared with advent of Marx-ism as a force for emancipatory politics.  What all of this amounts to is that, in effect, Karl Marx suffered for your sins.  His poverty was a small price to pay to redeem humanity from the scourge of industrial capitalism!  Let’s just hope Mel Gibson never gets a hold of his story. 

One way to honor Marx on his birthday is to learn more about him via the Mark Steel lectures:

1.       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEBz_ZfZzmU

2.       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShcL1gYKhLE&feature=related

3.       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPWrJNhMeBI&feature=related

4.       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wbWdzDiuF8&feature=related

5.       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHSb9j4TnDw&feature=related

(they’re absolutely hilarious, surprisingly informative, and virtually unknown in the US). 

Another way, I suppose, would be to bring about the liberation of working class.  It’s quite surprising how often we lose sight of the poor devils, preoccupied as many of Marx’s followers tend to be, with formalist aesthetic criticism and avant-garde art.  I often think that Jameson and his ilk would prefer a piece of authentically “Utopian” art to a world revolution.  “What is a revolutionary movement,” so the reasoning goes, “compared to Van Gogh’s peasant shoes?”  I imagine them all glancing out of their windows as the shots are being fired, and the infrastructure of global capital is crumbling and declaring, “Yes, that’s all very well…but back to the negative dialectics of Schönberg’s atonal scale…” or something to that effect.  Granted, Marx himself did have a propensity for this kind of thinking.  When he first heard about the Paris Commune in 1871, he was initially distressed because he had not yet finished with Capital.  “What’s the matter with them?” he wrote to Engels (I’m paraphrasing), “Couldn’t they wait?”  Yet, we should also remember that Marx was not just a theoretician; he founded the International Workingmen’s Association and was active in it until the end of his life.  In fact, the idea that theory ought to be divorced from practice within movements of social transformation is actually a relatively recent one.  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even local trade unions had all kinds of radical (and often elaborate) ideas about the structure society ought to adopt.  It was widely understood among the members of these unions that their struggle was only one step in a much broader political struggle.  This was simply because they understood that, as Chomsky once said, paraphrasing the newsletter of a women garment workers’ union from New England, “It’s not enough to make the autocracy less brutal; the point is to get rid of it.”  Wouldn’t it be remarkable if contemporary unions operated according to this insight?  Instead, the liberal ethos of reformism has replaced that of radical transformation in politics just as, in the field of psychology, the New Age-derived ethos of endless self-discovery has replaced the psychoanalytic ethos of self-overcoming.  Both Freud and Marx are routinely reviled for their harshness: Freud for his model of the analyst as the cold clinician who hands down his “dictatorial” diagnosis from his position behind the patient, refusing even to look him in face (where’s the empathy?); Marx for his part, is accused even by people as astute as Hannah Arendt of being “inherently totalitarian,” and so forth, in his advocacy of the revolutionary overthrow of the middle class.  And I often wonder if the (academic)reduction of Marx to nothing more than an aesthete—the Wilde-ization of Marx—isn’t simply another branch of the movement to vitiate him, to gentrify him, to have Marxism without the alluring and yet terrifying traumatic core that is the specter of revolutionary violence, to have, in essence, Marxism without Marxism.  If you really want to appreciate the genius of Marx, you’ve got to appreciate all of him and his ideas, including those that might occasionally appear dark, dirty, or undesirable.  A very useful corrective to the photographic image of Marx, which resembles nothing so much as Santa Claus, would be an image of something disturbing or unpleasant associated with Marx—perhaps a picture of the carbuncles on his ass. 

Current Mood:	contemplative
Current Book:	Sennett- The Corrosion of Character