The Fuck You, Marcus London Issue :: June 5, 2013
Zero Marx
By Jason Walsh

This past weekend in London a group of radicals met to plot the overthrow of the government, business, patriarchy and just about everything else. How do I know? Alas, dear reader, I didn't find out about it in time, so I wasn't able to infiltrate this shadowy cell of dangerous revolutionaries. Instead I looked at their web site.

The Dangerous Ideas for Dangerous Times festival promised to transform London's Kings Cross as a locus for the discussion of "radical, oppositional ideas amidst the onging economic and social crisis." I suppose it'd make a change from being the place to go to meet street-walking hookers, junkies and mentally ill homeless Irish people.

In fact, not a single dangerous idea was up for discussion, which is hardly surprising when you consider the line-up included such luminaries as former Labour party lawmaker and current old man Tony Benn, current Labour lawmaker Jeremy Corbyn and serial Labour party flack and all- round bore Owen Jones. Lenin was up for discussion, but no-one was within a zek's chance in the gulag of laying claim to be his rightful heir. Even that discussion was bordering on insane, or rather, designed to be self-congratulatory. Was Lenin the "inventor of networks of resistance who would be completely at home with ‘clicktivism’ and online revolutionary publications?” No. No, he wasn't. Please shut-up.

What else? Why doesn't the left "get" sport? Because what's left of the left is mostly a bunch of nerds and snobs. Is the media out of control? No. What's the point of the left? What indeed? And who better to discuss it than a naive newspaper columnist, an irrelevant Trotskyist and a science-fiction author.

And history. Lots and lots of history. After all, when the present era is a disappointment, nothing warms the cockles of a revolutionary's heart faster than a bit of historical reenactment.

The conference's general air of warmed-over 1980s nonsense isn't the worst thing in the world, but it is fairly amusing. Despite the rhetoric of living in dangerous times (we don't – check the data) and a new world "struggling to be born," what is entirely missing is a coherent response to the worst crisis of capitalism since the 1930s. Given that Karl Marx's opus, “Capital,” was a treatise on economics (the title is rather a giveaway), isn't it surprising that people who seek to dig-up his grave don't seem too keen on doing any sums? Well, it shouldn't be.

Marx's zombie bones are rarely to be found strolling the corridors of economics departments, or even of labor unions these days. Which is a shame in a way, because Marx himself (as opposed to most of his followers) had much to say that remains interesting: he supported massive infrastructure development and the ramping-up of industry, for instance. He also sought to marry economic freedom with personal, individual autonomy, stating a person is free when he or she "is free not through the negative power to avoid this or that, but through the positive power to assert his true individuality each man must be given social scope for the vital manifestation of his being". Somehow this stuff, which isn't exactly hidden, never gets much of an airing when the radicals take to the conference halls. Or to the streets.

With the benefit of hindsight it's easy to mock the Occupy movement, especially as it degenerated into a ragtag bunch of people peddling conspiracy theories about chemtrails, so-called "intersectional" identity politics and guerrilla knitting. That's not quite how things looked at the beginning, though. Overnight, both columnists for respected liberal newspapers, such as The Guardian's George Monbiot, and radical waahnarchists and Marxoids adopted the rhetoric of the one percent versus the 99 percent, getting carried away by the febrile atmosphere and first signs of youth activism in over a decade. Even The Economist ran story after story, totaling 33 articles between October 2011 and September 2012. The entire Western world was waiting with bated breath for a left response to the economic crisis. It never arrived.

In fact there was something wrong with Occupy from day one. More a cri de coeur than a coherent political movement.

Prophet and loss

Marx is a specter. When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, august journals of the business class, such as The Financial Times, openly wondered if the old, dead German hadn't been right all along. Putative radicals took this as a vote of confidence – a sign of the forward march of history even – not realizing a few key facts. Firstly, the business press has always been prone to bouts of self-examination, excoriation even, far more in fact than the monotone left-liberal media. That's one reason why the FT and Wall Street Journal are two of the best newspapers in the English-speaking world. The rich are not in the habit of lying to themselves. Secondly, the FT in particular isn't all that conservative. Finally, and most importantly of all, here's a little trade secret: journalists have pages to fill and a bit of heresy never did anyone any harm. Telling financiers, CEOs and accountants that Marx remained solid while capitalism melted into air is just the ticket for tickling a few prejudices, not to mention hitting a few nerves. Even Bloomberg Businessweek got in on the game.

We've been here before. In 1998, Verso Books marked the 150th anniversary of the publication of “The Communist Manifesto” by publishing an overpriced edition of the old pamphlet. The self-same Verso that now sees itself as the vanguard of neo-radical insurrectionism marketed the book, not as a guide to action, nor as what it actually is (the nineteenth-century equivalent of a political campaign advertisement) but as, wait for it, a designer trinket: "something for the sybaritic classes."

Well, times do change and the 2008 invocation of Marx did seem, on the surface at least, a tad more serious than the last re-run a decade previous. They may be soft in the head, but at least this time they seem to believe it. But what is it that they actually believe?

Even Marx's invocation as a prophet is a familiar theme. At around the same time as Verso published its ironic edition of the “Communist Manifesto,” British journalist Francis Wheen was eulogizing Marx as the man who was right about capitalism but wrong about communism. Not long afterward, a BBC poll voted Marx "the millennium's 'greatest thinker’" — take that Einstein, Descartes and Kant! Six years later he was declared, again by BBC listeners, the world's greatest philosopher.

In doing this, though, latter-day socialists strip Marx of his core message, the one neatly summed-up in his nineteenth thesis on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." As Engels wrote after the death of his co-conspirator, Marx was above all "a revolutionist." It's a safe bet, though, that when UBS economist George Magnus – the man who predicted the economic crisis – said in 2011 that Marx was still relevant, he wasn't advocating a workers' republic.

Today's radicals certainly like a good revolution – as long as it's safely distant. Back at home any brain-dead riot that lacks a racist undercurrent is heralded as the coming revolution, but the politics on offer are distinctly un-radical, conservative even.

We have Marxist geographers, anarchist anthropologists and endless supply of cod-left cultural studies academics and "critical theorists," but not a single serious far-left economist. As a result the demands being put forward by the far-left – a bit of deficit spending, higher welfare rates and incoherent complaints about "rape culture" and capitalism holding women back — are actually nothing more than social democratic communitarianism. In fact, chuck in a bit of racism and even the European far-right would find little to disagree with. Maybe this is OK. It's no crime to be a social democrat, but to mistake it for the far-left was once something only conservative talk show bloviators did – and at least they were dissembling on purpose.

Instead radicals have returned to their long-cherished displacement activities: protesting tiny fascist groups that have zero political significance, worshipping Third World insurrections and, sitting rather awkwardly alongside this, mistaking Keynesian economics for socialism.

Revolutions have a tendency to be bloody and to have unintended consequences. As a result, they are usually found in places where people are in genuinely desperate circumstances. Cuts to student grants do not count as desperate. Deep down today's soi-disant radicals know this perfectly well. Swept-away by the romance of street fights in Greece and gun battles in the Middle East, comfortable, if discommoded, kids in Britain and the US are playing revolutionary dress-up while making distinctly un-revolutionary demands. It's the same old story: revolutions for some, papers in scholarly journals for others.

Meanwhile the masses ignore the united liberal arts students of the world, knowing full well that such strident revolutionaries have always ignored ordinary people's desire to have higher standards of living and are more interested in holding meetings and ironically fetishizing a Soviet constructivist aesthetic, not to mention the fact that they know nothing about economics and generally spend their time producing literary journals. Can we really expect people who don't know how wealth comes about and how money works to seriously critique it?

Back at the Dangerous Ideas festival, I'm sure a rousing time was had by all, but if the ideas being expressed are so dangerous, how is it that they result in praise, academic respectability and hob(k)nobbing with the inner circle of the London and New York literary publishing elites? Who but a John Bircher would possibly be bothered in the least by any of the ideas being expressed there? And who expects anyone to take these silly radical conferences seriously? If you express a genuinely dangerous idea you can expect to become a hate figure, not be lauded as Doctor Jerkberg, proletarian hero.

#wow #whoa

discipline posted:

your av really freaks me out bro

jools posted:

it could probably work well enough

sure. why not. let's try it again. keep trying. nothing to lose.

getfiscal posted:

jools posted:

it could probably work well enough

sure. why not. let's try it again. keep trying. nothing to lose.

yes, but literally this, it seems there is nothing to lose considering the continuous demographic spiral downward in eastern bloc countries.

Dusz posted:

elemennop posted:

yes, but literally this, it seems there is nothing to lose considering the continuous demographic spiral downward in eastern bloc countries.

any country with a negative population growht is an inspiration to others, imo

start with yourself imo

HenryKrinkle posted:

This vainglorious ultra-Left shit is so tired.

agreed. let us make peace with the establishment.

jools posted:

this guy owned CK's reading of history http://danielmwolff.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/a-funny-thing-happened-on-way-to-left.html

lol ownage 100%

thirdplace posted:

i think what a lot of people struggle with, and god knows i am one of them (or at least was, before i Got a job and became a liberal Now) is simple doubt. a marxist/socialist view of the world makes sense to me, it parsimoniously explains the world and has great predictive value. I am pretty confident that it is correct. but is "pretty confident" good enough to dedicate one's life in the ways that discipline correctly points out is the only logical conclusion of that ideology?

You sound like someone who wants to cut a board, and you say, "I am pretty confident that this measuring tape is accurate. And its probably better to use it, than to just take a guess about where to cut. But considering that I really don't want to get the length wrong, can I trust this measuring tape alone?" So why don't you figure out what specific doubts you have about marx and post about them so they can be resolved.