This article was originally a talk given under the title 'Why Marx Matters To Artists' at the Kings College Society for the Study of Marxism on 14 March 2004 at the invitation of Kitty Spathia and Dan DiPaolo

Many on the Left, including professed Marxists, believe literature and art are irrelevant to class struggle and the emancipation of the working class. Both the bourgeois press and its socialist opposition tend to push 'culture' towards the back of their publications, a kind of shadow to the bright light of political relevance. However, this betrays a superficial understanding of Marx, and - worse - a definition of politics which conforms to the conventions of bourgeois journalism and to the rules of class society. In fact, the revolutionary social developments outlined by Marx actually do away with the distinction between art and politics, or between individual subjectivity and the socially 'objective'. Recognising this is electric for artists, just as it is for anyone exploited and oppressed by capitalism.
At the pulsing heart of Marx's writing is a poet's scorn for bourgeois politicians - those 'experts' who believe that regulating the capitalist economy and the relationship between nation states is the whole of politics. Nor did he subscribe to the traditional distinction between 'necessary' science and 'ornamental' literature - or to the Victorian sexual division of labour which underlies the distinction between hard science (business) and soft culture (domesticity). Capital uses Goethe and Shakespeare as primary sources for a scientific analysis of the money form, and one has only to read Yvonne Kapp's biography of Eleanor Marx, Marx's daughter, to realise how love of literature pervaded the Marx household. Eleanor Marx acted in Shakespeare and Ibsen plays and was a friend of George Bernard Shaw's. Eleanor was renowned as a public speaker at mass meetings of workers, and her theatrical training dovetailed completely.
Marx's refusal of conventional, commonsense dualisms - the traditional roles of men and women, the individual and society, subject and object, philosophy and economics, politics and science, writing and action, work and creativity - is endlessly productive. His thinking creates a kind of turbulence at the level of the concept. Suddenly nothing can be taken for granted. Marxism is hence the opposite of what is taken to be politics at the Oxford Union or the Houses of Parliament, where the game is to outwit opponents by using concepts which are sacrosanct - the national interest, economic progress, democracy, liberty, the sanctity of childhood. In Marxism nothing is sacred because, as he says, all critical thinking begins with the criticism of religion , and the 'sacred' is a religious concept. This conceptual turbulence can make his writing appear inaccessible. However, when people start reading Marx for themselves, something explosive happens. This conceptual explosion is just as useful for artists as for those who define themselves as political thinkers or activists. Indeed, some socalled Marxism seems to be a way of defusing this potential - of reducing his subversive texts to a banal ideology, or system - rather than amplifying it, or communicating its subversive think-for-yourself contagion.
In 1999, Francis Wheen's biography Karl Marx described a literary Marx. As a free-lance writer himself, Wheen saw Marx as a writer before anything else. For anyone introduced to Marx in the 1970s or 1980s, when Louis Althusser's structuralism was considered the essential introduction, this new Marx was most refreshing. Wheen revealed that as a 19-year-old, Marx was so impressed with the comic novel Tristram Shandy (written in 1759 by Laurence Sterne), that he began his own emulation, Scorpio and Felix. Wheen shows that the young Marx's comical effects - which follow Sterne in debunking the perceptual philosophies of Locke and Hume, developing instead a kind of scurrilous, irreverent, profane, indecent, body-based materialism - anticipate some of the mature Marx's most celebrated remarks. Wheen's biography was published widely reviewed in the broadsheets. It's difficult to imagine it being written and published in the 1980s, when postmodernism had made Marx distinctly unfashionable. The collapse of the Communist Bloc meant that Marx was no longer perceived as a threat to liberal democracy. Liberals who wanted to criticise the New World Order initiated by George Bush Senior in the First Gulf War (1991) were beginning to find Marx useful. The establishment of Marxism-Leninism as a Russian state ideology by Stalin in the early 1930s casts a long shadow over Marx's legacy.
There is much disagreement over the young Marx's writings - at which point was he Hegelian, idealist, materialist, humanist and so on. Unable to appreciate intellectual development in its moving and real form, and seeking the safety of a correct dogma, some commentary on Marx breaks the revolutionary thrust of his thinking, and then distributes the fragments into various dry-as-dust 'isms', as inert and boring as funeral urns. The 'epistemological break' Althusser found in Marx's philosophical evolution is merely the most famous of these analytical travesties. This approach assumes the 'ism' - some pat philosophical position like realism or idealism or materialism - is more real than the thinking subject: a kind of academic idealism or depersonalisation which Marx opposed as vehemently as any poet. The observations which follow are an attempt to situate Marxist thought in actual people.
Last Saturday at Conway Hall in London WC1, a memorial meeting was held for Al Richardson. Al Richardson was an indefatigable Marxist intellectual who died suddenly this year aged 61. Having been involved with the International Marxist Group and the Revolutionary Communist League in the 60s and 70s - he was part of the uprising in Paris in May '68 - Al observed that twentieth-century Marxism lacked a decent historical record. His definition of Marxism was a theory of working-class emancipation, and he had little time for academic versions. He founded the journal Revolutionary History in order to record the history of genuine Marxist political struggle all over the globe since the Russian Revolution. By 'genuine', I mean the politics which starts out from the proposition that the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class, that revolution means the seizure of the means of production by the working class, and that corralling socialism in single countries is a recipe for disater - as Stalin's 'socialism in one country' was for the Russian working class. Revolutionary History has now issued 12 volumes about revolutionary struggle in countries all over the world, and its standards of scholarship and the originality of its material - translations from French, German, Spanish, Greek and Vietnamese - put most academic labour studies to shame.
There were over a hundred people at Al Richardson's memorial meeting, but I wished more people knew about it and had attended. It was also a fantastic crashcourse in Marxism. Anyone who thought that Marxism was about Stalin, Mao and Ho Chi Minh standing at the head of triumphant red armies and reorganising society at the barrel of a gun would receive a shock. For all the people gathered in Conway Hall (except maybe Bob Pitt), after Trotsky's Left Opposition had been defeated in Russia in 1927, official Communism was transformed into an ideology for a new ruling class. In the Communist movement, genuine Marxist analysis and investigation was suppressed in favour of diktats from above, censorship and threats - while 'fellow travellers' used Stalinism to buttress their bourgeois ideas. One of the most graphic ways of understanding this transformation is David King's photo book The Commissar Vanishes (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1997). It shows how Stalin's elimination of the entire central committee of the Bolshevik Party which had achieved the Russian Revolution in 1917 was accompanied by a distortion of the historical record that beggars belief. King shows how a famous, widely-printed photograph of Lenin making a speech to troops outside the Bolshoi theatre in 1920 was cropped and then retouched to remove Trotsky. Even Hitler, with his grotesque fantasies about the world Jewish conspiracy, did not have to systematically obliterate and destroy so much historical evidence. Since Trotsky was the most vocal opponent of Stalin's counter-revolution, 'Trotskyism' is a handy name for that brand of Marxism which insists on historical truth, and which will have nothing to do with Marxism as an expedient ideology for state power and the re-emergence of class society with its mass armies, nuclear weapons, eco-devastation and social inequality.
However, as was said a couple of times at Al Richardson's memorial meeting, if Trotskyism is pre-eminently a critique of Stalinism, then the demise of Stalinism threatens Trotskyism itself. Actually, the cult of names has something unMarxist about it. Marx said several times he was no Marxist , and Lenin strenuously opposed the personality cult. He even wanted monuments to the revolution of 1917 in the streets of Moscow to be temporary. The literal embalming of Lenin - and the Lenin cult, the notion of 'Marxism-Leninsm' as a state ideology - was a creation of Stalin's. It was Stalin in the 30s who inaugurated the practise of parading the portraits of the 'fathers of socialism' - Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin - on the 1 May in Red Square in Moscow. Quite how a country aiming atomic bombs at other countries could banner the slogan 'workers of the world unite!' was a paradox only the cynical manoeuvres of bourgeois Real Politik could justify.
My own personal introduction to Marxism was via the writings of the Situationist International. I'd seen people selling socialist papers at town centres in the early 70s, but accepted the Labour Party's argument that if Harold Wilson's wage controls were broken by miners and car-workers, then the British economy would be wrecked. The only result of economic chaos I could envisage was the victory of fascist parties like the National Front. I therefore wouldn't buy a newspaper which said 'Pay the car workers!'. My complete ignorance of the history of fascism - the disastrous directions given German, Spanish and Chinese Communists by Stalin, the censorship of Trotsky's genuine Marxist analysis - only started to recede when I joined the Anti-Nazi League a year later, and began attending Socialist Workers Party meetings. However, it was reading Christopher Gray's Leaving the Twentieth Century, a selection of writings from Internationale Situationniste, which gave me my first experience of Marxist prose, of Marxims as a literary experience.
Internationale Situationniste was published in Paris between 1958 and 1969 and emerged from an art milieu - the Parisian avantgarde with its manifestos and scandals - rather than any strand of Trotskyism. Indeed, the Situationists adopted the anarchist position that the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion by the new Bolshevik regime in March 1921 showed that Trotsky valued state power over social revolution. Christopher Gray's collection was illustrated by Jamie Reid, who later provided graphics for the Sex Pistols. It came from a similar place: the pressing need for something relevant to the British situation, a communicative revolutionary style untrammelled by the old dogmas and fetishes which seemed to keep the left inaccessible, boring and split into endlessly warring factions.
Revolutions are a kind of chromotography in which abstract political positions, by being put into action, are writ large and can be examined. However, the endless wrangling of anarchist and revolutionary groups over the details of the Russian Revolution sometimes suggests that action can only be taken by experts and historians. This is daft, because RMT members or Brixton inhabitants or anti-war students are not going to ask Al Richardson's permission before going on strike or rioting or demonstrating. Certainly, historical materialism is fully part of the Marxist method, and projects like Al Richardson's Revolutionary History are useful, perhaps essential, but Marx never took the position that establishing the historical record is enough. Or rather, he insisted that a true historical record is only possible if we understand the historical nature of the categories we use to think about the past. This means informing them with the most radical experience of our own times, which is that of the working class.
Marx's revolutionary idea was that the emancipation of humanity from wage labour isn't just one beneficial reform among others, but a social transformation which could change the way we think. The political developments he was interested in were glimpses of the future in the present, and revolutionary theory could translate these glimpses into a total vision. My experiences in the Anti-Nazi League proved to me that Trotsky had the right ideas - his argument that uniting working-class people to fight fascism is the only effective answer, that fascism needs to be fought by democratic methods that do not rely on either bourgeoius law or anarchist conspiracies. However, my disagreement with the Situationists over Trotsky don't prevent me appreciating the way they revived the philosophical fire of Marxism. The first years I spent in the SWP involved Rock Against Racism, a grass-roots campaign against fascism which promoted punk bands and reggae sound systems. It was for me a practical way of combinging my Trotskyist and Situationist politics. Meanwhile, the (Trotskyist) Workers Revolutionary Party denounced punk as 'fascist', and the Situationist ex-art students who sat at the back of the pub said Rock Against Racism was a 'spectacular diversion' and that 'real life was elsewhere': for me such purists miss the point. Frozen by dogma, they couldn't reach people desperately in need of leftwing and anti-fascist ideas. In the same way, I currently think it's important for Marxists to relate to anti-capitalism, the anti-war movement and the electoral party Respect. Marx's insistence on the working class should give one's politics an orientation in the real world, not an excuse to ignore it.
However, part of that orientation is insisting on Marxism as something more than taking correct positions on 'political' issues as perceived by the bourgeois mass media. It is about contesting the narrow bourgeois idea of politics as a specialised activity. Although I'm looking forawrd to marching on it, there's something a little strange about the Stop the War Coalition demonstration next Saturday (20 March 2004), with its protest that we've been subjected to a 'year of lies' from Tony Blair. I've enjoyed the poetical-kabbalist twist of dyslexifying 'Blair' into 'Bliar!', and it's a good way of mobilising that significant part of the British population which opposed the attack on Iraq, but unfortunately bourgeois politicians do not think of lying as immoral, they think of it as 'statecraft'.
The phrase 'perfidious Albion' came about in the seventeeth century because, due to its new reliance on mercantile rather than purely feudal interests, the British state was developing a new method of diplomacy. In the middle ages, international relations were achieved via dynastic marriages. By physically sending one of their number to become part of a rival's family, the ruling classes of mediaeval and early-modern Europe became a criss-crossing network of loyalties. These were fragmentary and bizarre, very different from the rationalised territory of the modern nation state, but they could not be abandonned at will: these relations weren't simply contracts which could be tossed the fire, they were ensconced in flesh-and-blood persons of great personal prestige and power. Under massive economic and social pressures such flesh-and-blood ties could be severed, which is why Henry VIII went through so many wives - but as bourgeois social relations won out, they freed up national politicians from feudal loyalties, allowing the intrigue, trickery and swift changes of loyalty which got England named 'perfidious'. Now every state in the world behaves this way. World leaders don't think it's immoral to lie, in fact they think it's their moral duty to lie to their enemies - a term which covers leaders of every competing nation state and, when elections loom, their own populations. With enemies conceived on such a broad basis, lying becomes pretty much a general practice, although as you can see from any political biography, lying to colleagues is not considered quite so honourable.
However, although Blair thinks it's his moral duty to lie, bomb and even assassinate when the 'national interest' is at risk, he cannot say that to the population at large. This is because the 'national interest' is a cover for the interests for his class - the bourgeois ruling class - and the vast majority of people in England do not have to lie for a living. Of course, as you ascend the ladder of business and media and academia, you encounter more and more people convinced of the necessity of lies, although they call it 'spin', 'rebranding' and 'image assessment'. These are the people who think demonstrating against 'a year of lies' is naive and idealistic. It would be, if there wasn't a whole class of people who do not need to lie to each other to pursue their workaday lives. The socialist revolution is nothing less than such people taking power.
'Telling the truth' was made unfashionable by postmodernist philosophy. Jean Baudrillard's 'simulacrum' is simply Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle with the moment of truth - the proletariat - removed from it. However, only the idea of truth break down the division between subject and object, individual and society, art and politics. The historical materialism of Revolutionary History can look dry-as-dust, but because it records genuine attempts to abolish the misery of capitalism - its alienation, hypocrisy and lies, its corralling of intelligence in a hopeless, self-hating class called the intelligentsia - it actually connects with immediate and explosive events in people's lives like love affairs, punk rock and hip hop, the experience of poetry or strikes or riots. This is not truth perceived as a top-down, positivist survey of the subaltern facts by a higher consciousness (which for positivists, however much they rail against the concept, always turns out to be God). This is truth as scurrilous, irreverent, profane, materialist, indecent and body-based - i.e. truth as lived, not contemplated. This brings us to what Goethe and Marx called der Pudels Kern, the core of the poodle, or the crux of the biscuit (always remembering that in bar-room skittles in Hamburg, a 'no score' is also called ein Pudel: for a dialectician, ultimate truths are always provisory, so anything metaphysical and ultra-profound must necessarily be both non-existent and absurd).
From his training in Tristram Shandy, Marx sensed something inhuman about the logic of a money economy (Hobbes likened reason to accountancy), and Capital is streaked with passages of savage laughter so often lacking in his systematic disciples. Bertolt Brecht once said that he'd never found anyone without a sense of hunour who could understand dialectics, and this laughter provides an essential democratic and humanist corrective to the difficulty of Marx's economic reasoning: it's laughter of recognition, where you recognise what's being said as true from your own experience, rather than from having accepted the premisses of logical deduction. Since logical deduction - from Plato's dialogues through to the theses of Thomas Aquinas and the mysteries of post-structuralism - is mainly concerned to prove the holy separation of logic (or the 'spirit') from the low processes of base matter (or 'us' as it were), it must remain humourless, since it cannot accept that its house of cards collapses with each material development.

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