@e_flux wrote:
At the Verso blog, McKenzie Wark close-reads one of the most famous parts of the Communist Manifesto—the passage that begins, "All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned ..." He does this in the service of responding to a perennially urgent question: "Why Marx Now?" Here's an excerpt from the piece:
I have a small confession to make here: my loyalty is more to the working class than to Marx. I was raised in the labor movement, was taught my Marx at party school. Our Marxism was always a little vulgar. Like Alexander Bogdanov, I take the most enduring feature of Marxism to be this: the point of view of the working class. To me, Marxism has no essential method or dogma or theory other than that.
So when asked: ‘Why Marx now?’ I don’t think the answer lies in a return to a philosophy or method or dogma that was current in the small world of even the more cosmopolitan radical thinkers of the middle of the nineteenth century. “All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned,” and surely that includes even the verities of classical Marxism itself.
The Marx of use now is no particular method or dogma or philosophy. The Marx of use now as then is the labor point of view. Or to put it in the robustly vulgar terms in which an old comrade explained it to me: the party sticks to working class like shit to a blanket.
Image: Still from the documentary Karl Marx City (2016) by Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker. Via The Georgia Straight.
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