In their attempts to argue that Marx is ‘scientific’, by which they mean respectable and elevated above the comprehension of ordinary mortals, academic Marxists ignore his frequent use of Charles Fourier, the French utopian theorist and writer of biting satires and crazy proposals. Aged 17 when the French Revolution turned his world on its head, Fourier spent his life expanding on the possibilities thrown up by that momentous event, and excoriating the banality of the bourgeois and mercantile exploitation of its new freedoms. If Fourier has an equivalent today, it’s Stewart Home, tireless writer of scurrilous pamphlets and anti-novels consisting of political tirades, jokes and pointed plagiarism. The dialectical method is in its nature humorous, because it senses hierarchy and repression whenever certain abstractions are declared sacrosanct and fixed. Dialectical reflection on concepts becomes so avid – so desirous of ideological fluidity – that it must acknowledge the contingency of the reader’s relationship to the text, and so brings to consciousness the historical and temporary nature of the terms being used. This is what brings Marx into the orbit of great literature. In Karl Marx and the Iroquois, a pamphlet currently available at Housmans Bookshop on the Caledonian Road, Franklin Rosemont says:

Wasn’t it under the sign of poetry, after all, that Marx came to recognise himself as an emnemy of the bourgeois order? Everyone knows the famous ‘three components’ of Marxism: German philosophy, English economics and French socialism. But what about the poets of the world: Aeschylus and Homer, Shakespeare and Cervantes, Goethe and Shelley? To miss this fourth compenent is to miss a lot of Marx (and indeed, a lot of life). A whole critique of post-Marx Marxism could be based on this calamitous ‘oversight’. [Arsenal #4, Black Swan Press, 1989]

In 1844, it is true, Marx gave up his personal literary aspirations and devoted his time to a study of economics. This was because he reckoned a criticism of how capitalism explains itself to itself – political economy – would be more devastating than any volume of poems or comic novel. Yet Rosemont rightly sets Marx’s Capital next to Fourier’s New Amorous World, the poetry of Isidore Ducasse, and Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box as ‘works that come down to us with question-marks blazing like sawn-off shotguns, scattering here, there and everywhere sparks that illuminate our own restless search for answers’. Capital was subtitled ‘a critique of political economy’, but it was a singular work which blew apart the discipline by the introduction of dialectical philosophy and communist politics; in the preface to the second edition Marx talks about how German philosophers deemed it ‘outlandish’. Outlandish indeed: it was the work of a political refugee, or as we say today, an asylum seeker.

I’m aware that many serious left politicos will characterise Franklin Rosemont, a Chicago surrealist, as somewhat ‘outlandish’ himself, but that seems to me to ignore one of the great strengths of Marxism, which is its proposal of a lifetime of reading and study unhampered by the requirements of either academy or commerce. Capital is such an original combination of different intellectual and political traditions, it could never have been written at the behest of any established institution. It’s utterly a product of bohemian resistance to class society. To read the work of some academic Marxists, you’d never think Marx polemicised versus official thinking.

The learned men by profession, guild or privilege, the doctors and others, the colourless university writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with their stiff pigtails and their distinguished pedantry and their petty hair-splitting dissertations, interposed themselves between the people and the mind, between life and science, between freedom and mankind. It was the unauthorised writers who created our literature. [‘Debates on the Freedom of the Press’, 1842, Collected Works, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975, Vol. 1, p. 178]

The academic division of labour, in which a thinker cannot be taken seriously until he or she ‘chooses’ a discipline and sticks to it, wreaks havoc on attempts to understand the social and cosmic totality. This is acknowledged by Marxists, but it doesn’t prevent them echoing the distinctions between economics and poetry, science and art, which are imposed by the academy. As a surrealist, Rosemont isn’t simply trying to aestheticise Marx: he also subscribes to a tradition that is fiercely critical of the role of art under capitalism.

In a polemical volume issued in 1956, Pierre Naville, surrealist and one of the founders of the Trotskyist Fourth International, inveighed against Jean-Paul Sartre. Like the Situationists in later years, Naville detested Sartre’s vacillations over Stalinism – his role as ‘fellow-traveller’. In November 1956, reeling from the fact that the Soviet Union had sent in tanks and troops to suppress the Hungarian workers revolt, probably killing 30,000 people, Sartre was distancing himself from the Communist Party. Naville found this stance hypocritical, since Sartre now seemed to have forgotten that he had once been an enthusiastic supporter of Stalin. He also objected to Sartre’s self-definition as a ‘communist intellectual’, saying:

Do you imagine that Marx imagined himself an ‘intellectual’ communist? No, he called himself a communist, which is something else entirely. The intelligentsia exchanges the right everyone has of using their intelligence for entrée to that celestial realm, that of the ‘intelligent’ class. By so doing, they think they’re elevating themselves, and giving themselves a glorious social role, but actually they just betray themselves as Marxists, and become a clique of servile functionaries. (L’Intellectuel Communiste (A propos de Jean-Paul Sartre), Paris: Librairie Marcel Rivière et Cie, 1956, p. 11.

This is why Marx matters to artists: he saw through the rewards offered to so-called ‘spiritual’ or ‘intellectual’ activity under capitalism, and saw that so-called success is simply an index of serving the system. This explains why creative artistic and intellectual activity in the twentieth-century has been a series of revolts versus what the situationists called ‘recuperation’: the buying up of artistic labour as a commodity.

If artistic activity is only judged in the Charles Saatchi or Sarah Kent sense, as the provision of objects for capital investment, then Marx’s radical critique will appear philistine and anti-cultural. However, Marx believed in a radically democratic aesthetic: a judgment of civilization, not in terms of its architecture or the objects in its art galleries and museums, but in terms of the lives that may be lived in it. His criticism of the money form was that, by reducing everything to commodities and the rationalised pursuit of profit, it produced global competition and war. Towards the end of his life Marx made extensive notes on Lewis Henry Morgan’s anthropological study Ancient Society, noting that the Iroquois had democratic assembles ‘where every adult male and female member had a voice upon all questions brought before it’. He noted that it was private property which allowed the emergence of a privileged caste. As Rosemont argues in his essay, it is only the Stalinist travesty of Marxism which makes capitalism an ‘inevitable’ stage in the history of humanity, and holds we can learn nothing from ‘backward people’. Rosemont quotes Marx’s extensive notes on tobacco-smoking rituals, showing that his critique of Christianity didn’t come from a soulless rationalism, but aversion to its sexist and repressive metaphysics. Marx’s profound historical sense meant that he could understand practises his contemporaries dismissed as ‘savage’ as materialist recognition of natural abundance and solar energy. Marx matters for artists because he can help explain why so much of what they do – in fact the best part of what they do – resists the logic of the commodity, and is regularly criticised as mad, bad and mystical: premonitions of new ways of living beyond commodity illusions.

It is frequently the case that criticism of practises or ideas actually stems from the conceptual limitations of the aggressor rather than any fault in what’s being criticised. Psychoanalysis has been particularly perceptive about this, for example exposing the latent homsexuality of bigotry towards gays, or the psychotic displays of sex-obsession by campaigners against pornography and paedophilia. The same tic can be seen in criticisms of Marx. If artists are told that Marx might matter to them, a common retort is the conventional one that Marx reduced everything to economics, and therefore has no time for mental or spiritual values. This charge is backed up by vaguely-remembered images of grim barrack-housing for workers in Communist Russia, and the lack of availability of consumer and recreational goods. Actually, the whole of Capital was written to show that the attempt to make ‘economics’ a mathematical science was doomed to failure: exchanges involving money give an illusion of equal exchange to transactions which are in fact coercions by social power. The end of the postwar boom and the growing inqualities created by global capitalism have proved Marx’s theory right: the market doesn’t even things out, it produces situations where people end up losing their lives whilst collecting cockles for one pound an hour.

But what place does Capital have for artistic production? To begin at the beginning, I want to look at the opening of Capital in order to see how Marx’s scurrilous, irreverent, profane, indecent, body-based materialism copes with explaining the production of commodities. Is it actually an attack on ‘spiritual values’ in favour of ‘economics’, a macho insistence on ‘hard facts’ about the means of production versus intangible consumer fantasy?

Significantly, far from asserting objective economic fact versus subjective fancy, Capital begins with acknowledgement of the driving role ‘fancy’ – what he calls Phantasie in the German – plays in economics.

A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach (‘Magen’) or from fancy (‘Phantasie’), makes no difference.

In order to back up this assertion, Marx cites from Nicholas Barbon’s A Discourse on Coining the New Money Lighter, In Answer to Mr Locke’s ‘Considerations’ from 1696. The fact that the quality of bourgeois political economy decayed over time, descending from science to apology – William Petty, John Locke, Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus are treated with diminishing respect – was part of Marx’s polemic.

Marx quotes Barbon as saying:

Desire implies want; it is the appetite of the mind, and as natural as hunger to the body … The great number (of things) have their value from supplying the wants of the mind.

Saying that the mind, too, has ‘wants’ crosses the wires of soul/body dualism. In Plato and St Paul the soul partakes of the divine, is eternal, and therefore has no ‘wants’. Marx’s citation of anglo-bourgeois materialism was a calculated affront to Christian residues in German philosophy. Rather than something to which the philosophical mind should remain aloof, the nascent bourgeois economy and its stimulation of artificial needs (‘Phantasie’) was praised.

Barbon gave examples of the ‘wants of the mind’:

Such as all sorts of fine draperies, gold, silver, pearl, diamonds and all sorts of precious stones. They are used to adorn and deck the body. They are badges of riches, and serve to make distinctions of preference amongst men.

Marx points out that for commodity production there are no ‘false’ needs: fantasy is just as much grist to the economic mill as bodily needs.

As against Descartes, Locke, Hume and Kant, who saw an impermeable barrier between things and ideas, Marx understood human beings as productive, hence he recognised the part that fantasy plays in the creation of commodities. Thus human desire isn’t removed from his analysis of capitalism, it’s put at its heart. If it’s true that capitalism has harnessed our desires to its murderous system, then our desiring natures require transformation as well as the system of distribution which feeds them. Our desiring natures are in fact ourselves as productive human beings.

Asger Jorn, the Danish painter who helped found the Situationists, attempted to develop a materialist aesthetics based on Darwin, Marx and Freud, one which could explain a role for art. He said:

It is precisely fascinations, their elaboration and interplay, that are the artist’s special area. [The Natural Order, Report No 1 of the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism, 1962, p. 63]

When Stewart Home initiated the Art Strike between 1990-1993, many people saw it as an absurd piece of self-promotion. In some ways it was. Nevertheless, the blunt way in which Home faced issues which most art critics have become too sophisticated to do more than yawn over – commodification, recuperation, serving the system – generated leaflets, pamphlets and eventually novels which are far above the level of most artworld productions. Home’s Marxism has developed as he’s found time to read Amadeo Bordiga, Hegel and Marx himself. Home’s polemics in artworld debates have been convincing because he speaks from the same position as Pierre Naville – a refusal to credit a celestial realm of culture which is removed from the average needs of the average person.

However, there’s one need which cannot by assuaged by the commodity system, and one which keeps driving Home into issuing more and more ludicrous texts. That is the need to understand what our desires actually are. His latest Down & Out in Shorditch & Hoxton [London, Do-Not Press, 2004] is a parody of a tart’s memoirs which mixes literary criticism, porn and plagiarism of eighteenth-century texts in a manner that’s both tantalizing and upsetting. It’s a rare example of art which has a Marxist dimension because nothing in it substitutes for the desire for proletarian revolution: in this it resembles Samuel Beckett, but Home’s politics is clearer, graphic like punk, there’s no existential posturing or ‘style’. Or at least the ‘style’ is so degraded and second-hand, it holds no art glamour.

Personally, I can only actively engage in politics if I can do so on the basis of Marxism – I need to be in a revolutionary party because I want genuine democratic dialogue about what’s to be done, and for me Marxism provides the only bullshit-free analysis of what capitalism does to us. However, the fact that Marx is difficult to read means that his texts can become the preserve of a political leadership who then pamper a membership with readymade notions. I accept that a degree of this will always be necessary in a party which seeks non-intellectual members. But the struggle for Marxism doesn’t stop once you’ve formed a party, it starts. I think Home’s novels – and the disorientation provided by pertinent Modern Art – can help develop a popular Marxism: sceptical, undogmatic, courageous in making judgments. Because Marx is the left’s preeminent radical writer, it doesn’t mean that he should be the only one whose radicalism is effective in the grain of his texts.

In his review of my own novel Shitkicks & Doughballs (London; Spare Change Books, 2003) in Radical Philosophy #124, the poet Ian Patterson praised it by dissing Home’s work. He said:

The penumbra of self-justifying argument that surrounds Home’s glib production of consciously trashy, free-association occult-porno novels of post-punk social critique is marginally more interesting than the actual experience of reading them.

I think Patterson read an early book by Home like Defiant Pose (London: Peter Owen, 1989) or Pure Mania (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1989), rather bleak parodies of Richard Allen skinhead novels, made up his mind, and therefore hasn’t opened books like 69 Things To Do With a Dead Princess (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2002): or Down & Out in Shoreditch & Hoxton (London: Do-Not Press, 2004) ... or indeed, my way into appreciating Home, the critique of Green Anarchism where by dint of a wicked need to expose the middleclass nature of anarchist ‘extremism’, he turned himself into a Marxist. My own mild entertainment, a novelisation of my theory book Art, Class & Cleavage, was designed as an encouragment for revolutionary thinking, but it lacks the utter disdain Home has for middle-class literary values, and the radical laughter opened up by this disdain.

When you read Home you’re made to feel absurd yourself, which is not quite the same thing as enjoying absurdity. The process is not ‘enjoyable’ in the commodity sense of having a ‘stomach’ or ‘fantasy’ need fulfilled, but you become conscious of these drives: you can feel your consciousness of self – and the activity called reading – grow. You become aware of the limits of a ‘good read’ or a ‘fine novel’. Even though this is ‘unpolitical’ in the sense that Home is not exhorting you to adopt a particular political option, this method of inculcating reader-consciousness is actually very Marxist. Whereas Booker-Prize novels deflect the reader from their essentially middleclass and trivial world pictures by allowing the superior reader to feel sorry for certain selected global unfortunates, Home pushes you to revolutionary recognition of the limits of commodified desire. You need to turn to other people for help. Collective consciousness – democratic, open-to-argument, unstable, ungrounded – replaces individual gratification. The book is a sawn-off shotgun ablaze with sparks. As Marx wrote to Arnold Ruge in September 1843:

We shall not say: Abandon your struggles, they are mere folly; let us provide you with the true campaign slogans. Instead we shall simply show the world why it is struggling, and consciousness of this is a thing it must acquire whether it wishes it or not.

This is a programme for revolutionary actions. Whether they should be called ‘art’ or ‘politics’, I don’t know. I suspect the reason for this indecision is that most of the art and politics we get to see is just another communiqué from the commodity delusion.

nakedpunch.com

Notes

‘The criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism’ [‘A Contribution To The Critique Of Hegel’s Philosophy Of Right. Introduction’, 1844, Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher; translated Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, Early Writings, London: Penguin, 1975, p. 243]

See preface to Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution II: the Politics of Social Classes (New York: Monthly Review, 1978).

Karl Marx, Capital, 1867, translated Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, NY: Modern Library, 1906, p. 41.

Nicholas Barbon, A Discourse On Coining The New Money Lighter, In Answer To Mr Locke’s `Considerations About Raising the Value of Money’, London: Printed for Richard Chiswell, at the Rose and Crown in St Paul’s Church Yard, 1696, p. 3 (quoted in Marx, Op. Cit., p. 42, n. 1).
Ibid.

Karl Marx, Letter to Arnold Ruge, September 1843; Early Writings, Penguin: London, 1975, pp. 208-9.