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”History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” – Ulysses’ Stephen Dedalus

”Always historicize!” – Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious

Jameson’s program essay in Postmodernism says what we need to take from Marx, which is also what the best modernists have done: “We are somehow to lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst.”

Marxism and Modernism

• Proviso: Marx’s views on art often dependent on modernist-unfriendly ideas of traditional authority through his insistence on art’s organic relationship to the whole of society
  • Eugene Lunn’s Marxism and Modernism (1982) suggests that instead of looking at Marx talking about actual aesthetic works, one should proceed from his social theory and extrapolate into the aesthetic realm
• The basic gambit: Modernism’s main theme is the alienation of man under capitalism. They celebrate capitalism’s overthrow of feudalism and ancient moralities such as religion (that is, the creation of personal behavioral freedoms), but they suffer from the fragmentation that results from the destruction of the old social institutions, and they hate the vulgarity that capitalism encourages (ie, the “it’s all about cash” attitude).
• Marx and modernists both describe an atmosphere of crisis, destruction, struggle, fragmentation and uncertainty. Some (Brecht) react with revolutionary fervor, but others (Woolf) seem to retreat to the individual psychological experience.
  • Some critics (Cooper) overestimate his morose hatred for capitalism and accuse him of not being able to see the light that the modernists (like Joyce’s goods in Ulysses and Bloomsbury’s own productions) could (moralizing mode of Ruskin and Carlyle, he claims 82)
• Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air (1983)
  • “Marx lays out the polarities that will shape and animate the culture of Modernism in the century to come: the theme of insatiable desires and drives, permanent revolution, infinite development, perpetual creation and renewal in every sphere of life, and its radical antithesis, the theme of nihilism, insatiable destruction, a shattering and swallowing up of life, the heart of darkness, the horror.” (102)
  • Just like the ambivalence of modernists toward modernity, Marx’s style and imagery reflect the chaos and fragmentation of modernity, as well as its irresistible lure (you can’t help but become excited by modernity’s freedom and technologies)
  • Both capitalism and modernism rely on the constant need for novelty and revision: innovation is crucial both to entrepreneurs and modernist authors making it new
  • Modernism and modernization share a dialectical relationship (of critique, response, and synthesis), so Berman and Marx share the dialectic as method
• Terry Eagleton, review of Eugene Lunn (1984)
  • Contrary to Lukacs’ belief, philosophical materialism does not necessarily entail literary realism
  • Modernists’ understanding of text as a physical object parallels materialism’s rejection of Platonic essences or idealism
  • Modernists’ uses of shock tactics, irony, perspectivism, and self-reflectiveness do indeed reflect the experience of capitalist modernity (so that Marx’s mission of critique – the revelation of actual relations rather than ideological fantasies – is carried out by modernists)

The German Ideology

• Position
  • Written in Brussels, 1845-7; published Moscow 1932
    • after their publisher abandoned it they left it “to the gnawing critique of the mice” (Rockmore 78)
    • Not a part of the initial creation of “Marxism”
  • “Transitional” writing (Rockmore) along with Grundrisse and Poverty of Philosophy (after dissertation and 1844 Manuscripts; before mature Manifesto and Capital)
    • Even Engels has suggested that it marks this turning point
    • Althusser: uses Gaston Bachelard’s idea of the epistemological break to describe this change in Marx, when he “left philosophy behind” in favor of “Marxist science” (Rockwell 79)
  • At a turning point: he now grows up!
• Structure
  • Expansion upon the “Thesis on Feuerbach” (written in Spring 1845, published 1888)
    • Although it did go further: Between Theses and Ideology, “Ideas are no longer mediated by social structures: they directly reflect those structures.” (Dupre 225) (ie, social creates ideas, not “affects” them) (thus 226: Marx can’t rely on ideas to help change social structures)
  • Two parts:
    • Part one: “Critique of German Modern Philosophy,” against Feuerbach, Bauer, and Stirner
      • “aim of uncloaking these sheep, who take themselves and are taken for wolves; of showing that their bleating merely imitates in philosophic form the conceptions of the German middle class” (Marx’s GI Preface)
      • Part 1A: Critique of Feuerbach, really just an occasion for him to dilate upon his theory of historical materialism
      • Part 1B: “The Leipzig Council,” Send-ups of Bauer and Stirner
        • Often left out of editions of GI (odd b/c it ruins the self-reflexive nature of the text which consistently realizes its ideas in a specific material context…. Rockmore notes how “odd” it is that Marx used a lengthy study to prove the “unimportance” of somebody (78), but he doesn’t get the performativity of the text)
        • Leipzig Council: Leipzig where they had all their works published; council because “council” is the name for a meeting of the church heads to determine policy; church because they believe in absolutes still
        • Leipzig Council, explanation 2: Marx and Engels are making Bruno and Stirner out to be a parody of the Inquisition: the “systematic procedure in the Catholic and Protestant Churches to prosecute alleged heretics” (wikipedia), in this case Feuerbach, Marx, and Engels
        • Bauer: he lives in a world of pure imagination, head in clouds, believing that you wave your philosophical sword and real people are slain
        • St. Max: takes 600 pages to prove that he is, in fact, himself
        • they forget the social character of knowledge, which makes them ridiculous (ie, “In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven”)
    • Part two: “Critique of German Socialism, According to its Various Prophets”
      • Traces the fate of ideas of French and English socialism inside Germany’s borders (a historiography, he calls it) by comparing texts
      • Root of the problem: trying to marry English and French homegrown socialism with the completely different German philosophical tradition
      • People say that “German science” will save poor, misguided French and English socialism, even though Germany has a totally different history than the others
      • GI shows that even Hegel saw history as a drama of state leaders and ideologies (pointed out by Wilson 202n) (Hegel as a stooge in the Philosophy of Right)
• The other image (the Leipzig Council was the first): Don Quixote, that farce on the romance genre
  • Begins to rewrite Don Quixote and placing Bauer and Stirner in the roles of Don and Sancho
  • Like Don Quixote, Bauer and Stirner are living in a fictional world, one that’s outdated, already past (their abstract, idealist history is outmoded)
  • Like Cervantes, Marx and Engels want to expose the “romanticism” of Bauer and Stirner by representing their ideas in a farce form
  • Sancho “fighting the predicates” (fighting the windmills, fighting something that doesn’t exist) refers to Feuerbach’s subject-predicate analysis of religion
• Why does it matter?
  • Written in 1845-7 with Engels in Brussels, but not published until 1932
  • First of his mature, philosophically independent works
    • First to address economics as such, not just as yet another branch of social development (Engels and Hess showed him the way, and now he takes it)
      • Social history as economic history
      • Even 1844 Manuscripts were just about social forms in general, not about economic forms
    • Beyond Hegelian politics
      • Not just a revision of Hegel’s faith in the modern state as a reflection of the spirit of the age
      • Tosses off a whole apparatus intended to mediate between general and universal will (like modernists)
      • Looks beyond the modern State formation
    • More than just a spin-off of Feuerbach
      • Realizes that F underestimates the role of sensuous life and practical activity on human life and consciousness
    • Different from the long line of socialist critiques of the modern state and commercial society (like Proudhon, Owen, and Saint-Simon) because it doesn’t rely on Christian morality
  • Its content cannibalized for the Manifesto (1848)
  • Presents the longest, most sustained explanation of Marx’s “materialist conception of history”
• Materialism: opposed to idealism; belief that “external world exists independently of consciousness and is primary, and that consciousness is dependent, derivative.” (Gollobin 59)
  • Yet Marx is an essentialist
    • Still believes that there is truth out there that you can find
    • Materialism doesn’t mean the opposite of essentialism: Williams (93) argues that Marx is an essentialist because he locates the non-accidental in humans to be labor
    • Marx is not a universalist: conditions of man are so unique that they basically have nothing in common with each other right now
  • Contra, for example, Comte who in 1853 said “ideas govern the world” (Gollobin 77) (other subjective idealists, who believe individual consciousness is really truth, phenomenology, Kierkegaard, William James) (idealism: thought is the ultimate seat of reality) (this is the most productive way for us to understand it: idealism as starting with Kant, privileging of consciousness)
• Historical materialism: “the true natural history of man,” the history of modes of production
  • Historical materialism (“material conception of history,” according to Marx; “dialectical materialism” is what people have made of it since Marx) is a theory of the progress of history driven by changes in the mode of production. The mode of production consists of two parts: the forces (or means) of production—labor plus machines plus natural forces such as air wind and steam—plus the relations of production, which are the social relations put into place to organize the forces of production, such as classes, poverty, and property. All of history, tangible and intangible, including politics, religion, and philosophy, proceed from the state of the mode of production. Consciousness is developed as a result of material relations, rather than ideas themselves somehow driving history (ie, no “spirit of the age”). This is what is referred to as Marx’s turning Hegel on head: Marx says that Hegel stands on his head when he assumes that consciousness and ideas drive material experiences, so Marx “turns Hegel on his head” by putting history right-side-up again. Existence precedes essence, and, as the Manifesto opens, “all history is the history of class struggle.”
  • History is a history of class struggle: history examines the development of modes of production, as dominant classes are gradually displaced by upward-moving classes representing the next mode of production
  • “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”
    • This is what “turning Hegelianism on its head” means, and it’s what comprises the “material” portion of the theory
  • Trace human development through how society collectively accomplishes the means to live (how it provides food, shelter, etc) through the division of labor
    • Productive forces (what you use to produce, ie human labor, tools, land) plus relations of production (how individuals and classes are organized, ie private property and classes) equals mode of production (what we must study)
      • As new productive forces come into being, new relations also develop
  • According to Marx, it’s a guideline to historical research, limited and conditioned
    • Not a master-key or a grand narrative, he insists, although people have used it for such
    • Marx and Engels know it doesn’t explain everything: sometimes the same factors will result in different results because of different contexts, and ideology (superstructure) can act upon the base
    • Marx used to write that he was not a Marxist because of this misunderstanding
    • Research must be deadly stultifying, so minute and careful, specific to the particular culture, before you can find general laws
  • History moves by the development of modes of production
  • Influenced by Smith and Ricardo
    • Uses Smith’s ideas about the division of labor
      • Unequal division of labor is what creates property
      • Division of labor is not voluntary, so it alienates worker
      • Division of labor allows chance to reign over humanity in the form of supply and demand
    • Narratives of society: from their idea of foraging, agriculture, commercial society, Marx develops his own:Tribal society, ancient society, feudalism, capitalism (which stresses the accumulation of capital), and eventually communism (which is course is Marx’s real contribution to the narrative)
• Marx’s Communist Stage: idea of a society beyond private property and division of labor
  • Influenced by the ideas of the German Historical School
    • Rebublican arguments against the private ownership of land fed by new historical discoveries
    • 1790s, research on Roman Law, influenced by recent translation of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88) reveals existence of communal land
    • During 19th century, other German historians begin to “find” a rich history of communal land ownership
    • If the past had communal ownership, if the past wasn’t organized around private property, why not the future? muses Marx
  • Communist vision of GI
    • “Real community:” instead of a state, you have “individuals obtaining|? their freedom in and through their association”
      • Like modernists, he dreams of genuine interpersonal relations, not fragmented and alienated
    • Like modernism itself, international: “universal development” of the same modes of production across the globe destroy national differences
    • Labor turns into “self-activity”
      • Not involuntary, but self-directed
      • Not specialized into one discipline or vocation, but flitting back and forth from one activity to the next as you please
      • “makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic.”
      • He later realizes that this is a little too optimistic

• What wrong with the German ideologists?
  • They’re not really looking beyond religion
  • Has ignored material surroundings (ie, Feuerbach ignored history)
  • Doesn’t understand how ideas also have material background

• Stirner
  • A Young Hegelian member, involved in their sub-group, the “Free,” a very outspoken group of atheists (some early YH thinkers did not initially reject Christianity wholesale)
  • Stirner objects to Feuerbach’s humanism
    • F: Religion gives positive human attributes to God, but we need to reverse this tendency and give them back to humans
      • Human subjects will then receive their “predicates” (wisdom, love, etc) back
    • S: That’s not enough; you haven’t destroyed the whole religious structure
      • You still believe in an alienated essence
      • Referring to the “essence of man” is still an alienated structure, replacing God with “essence of man”
      • F’s “essence of man” (his elevated humanism) is the new Protestant God
  • Stirner’s critique makes Marx dissociate himself from any lurking form of religion
  • Stirner’s critique of Feuerbach makes Marx unable to see some type of utopian vision of essential Man not yet tainted by alienated labor (nothing about “natural man”)
    • Had to say that capitalism (alienation and private property) was a phase we had to go through
    • Earlier rejection of later Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Marx rejects Hegel on legitimacy of current State formations, saying that Hegel’s idea of civil society, the institutions of bureaucracy and representation, needed to be destroyed) yields to acceptance of younger Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel on development of consciousness)
    • Instead of Man as essence, he develops Man as a result of a labor narrative: humans create Man as “the outcome of Man’s own labor,” but only after we have passed beyond the necessary stage of alienation (estrangement)
    • To recognize that man creates himself through labor, you have to understand externalized labor: that is, to see the products of labor: that is, private property
    • Historically, labor has always been alienated, but only under capitalism does the situation become drastic and unfair enough (that is, you have the antithesis dramatically different from the thesis) to come to a head and ask for a synthesis
    • Only capital gives “a new potentiality of mutual swindling and mutual plundering”
  • Stirner makes Marx recognize a fuller idea of humanity: not just as the small “spirit,” but as a sensuous, practical person (in “Theses on Feuerbach)
    • 339: Stirner talks about Hegel and Feuerbach sharing a conception of humanity that’s too abstract; even if they admit that one requires senses, they don’t understand the role of the sensuous in creating the unique self, and they only allow that senses play a role once thought’s mediation has taken the “raw” sense to task and made it “better”
  • Stirner ruins the atmosphere of crisis around end of religion
    • Marx was positive that now that religion was overturned, all relations like it will be abolished (“the criticism of religion ends with the teaching that Man is the highest being for Man, hence with the categorical imperative to overtrhow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being”)
    • But Stirner says that the “Man highest for Man” is just another way of debasing actual man: “to the egoist only his history has value because he wants to develop himself, not the mankind-idea” (323)
    • Stirner says that Marx’s ideas about communism are just another instantiation of religion, not a change from it: the same old thing, not a revolution
    • Thus, Marx had to rethink the place of his philosophy in world history
  • Stirner’s critique takes out any of Marx’s “ghostly,” idea- and philosophy-centric ideas and makes him look at practical affairs
    • S: I am not a tool of a movement, but a tool of my own ideas
    • Marx no longer believes that philosophy can play an integral role in revolution: it is tainted by a nearly-religious humanism that forces its ideas downward (which isn’t the ideal Man to Man relationship)
      • “Theses on F” idea that “philosophers have only interpreted the world, but the point is to change it” reflects this idea
      • Communism is less about an idea or a state of affairs to be achieved. “Communism is a movement which abolishes the present state of things,” so it is not about these ideas (which sound to Stirner like a quasi-religious move), but instead that communists “express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle.”
    • German Ideology: “Communism is not for us a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality (will) have to adjust itself. We call Communism the movement which abolishes the present state of things.”
      • Communism is now the practical action, the movement, not the idea.
    • Communists express the class struggle, rather than “create” it.
    • GI: Religion, metaphysics, all ideology “no longer retain their independence. They have no history, no development.”
  • Stirner’s critique of Feuerbach leads him to develop historical materialism in this book
  • The real idea under attack: mediation (read: alienation), which underpins Hegel’s thought on the state
    • How do you get from the individual will to the general will? That’s what mediation does, through the institutions of bureaucracy, representation, and corporations
    • Hegel thinks these organs of mediation, the basis of what he called civil society, allow the state to embody reason, freedom, and progress.
  • Back to the Feuerbach-Stirner debate:
    • Feuerbach on religion (The Essence of Christianity, 1841): Religion is an alienated form of human emotion. It replaces man’s “species being”—his communal, social nature—with a mediated relationship, through which man understands man via a detour through God, instead of just having actual social relations
  • Marx takes this critique of mediation and turns it from an attack on religion to an attack on economic relations: private property “stands between” the relationship of man to man.
    • Private property is what’s actually behind all the rhetoric about the state and freedom and reason
      • What is private property? The means by which some people live by the labor of others
    • The modern state is a compromise, doesn’t represent the highest form of government
      • Historical materialism suggests that any government is merely the enforcer of a mode of production, an arm of the dominant class
    • It instead is based upon egotism and the rights of the bourgeoisie: “the war of all against all,” “not on the association of Man with Man, but on the separation of Man from Man”
      • Individuality itself is a problem! It is an after-effect of the division between civil society and politics; in true politics, the individual is already a part of the universal (universal is a mere aggregate of the individuals)
    • We must return to a politics of immediacy, not of mediation: must remove those mediating institutions
      • From Saint-Simon: “the government of men would be replaced by the administration of things”
• Critique of Stirner
  • Stirner a Young Hegelian who turned against its leaders, Feuerbach and Bauer
• Young Hegelians: A radical republican, bohemian drinking group founded in Berlin in 1837, a result of the fallout surrounding David Strauss’ 1835 Life of Jesus critically examined, it critiqued Hegel’s religious bent (it, the belief in “absolute spirit”), his idea of progress (um, things aren’t getting better, thank you), and his affection for private property (it is the beginning of individuality) but used his dialectical method to critique contemporary religious and political debates (particularly the “Christian state” of Prussia)
  • Marx’s idea of ideology critique really comes from the Young Hegelians. As Arnold Ruge said, “the historical process is the relating of theory to the historical existences of the spirit; this relationship is critique.”

Mediation

• Hegel on mediation
  • Mediation: externalization, the understanding of one topic through another
    • necessary for learning and for understanding oneself
  • Example 1: Thinking: thought (immediate idea), reflection (maybe I’m wrong moment), then synthesis (new idea)
    • Eventually leads to you understanding yourself as a thinking being
  • Example 2: Bridge: man’s interaction with nature makes him realize what man is
    • Man stands there in front of a river. He wants to get across
    • He makes a bridge and crosses it
    • He looks at this external object and thinks, “I’m cool. Look what I did. I am that which acts on nature.”
  • Example 3: Wordsworth’s daffodils
    • Looking at imagery of daffodils
    • Eventually about understanding of his own sadness
  • So, you have to understand something in terms of something that’s outside of it so you can eventually understand the nature of the first object
    • Sure, you have mediation, but you eventually get back to the topic at hand, albeit in a different method than superficial “knowing”
    • Mediation also works on the state level
      • Institutions like corporations, bureaucracies, and representational bodies also help the individual will get in touch with the general will
      • ie, state institutions are mediations make sure that the general will is expressed in government
• Critique: Um, no, that’s alienation
  • You can’t understand X in terms of Y: that’s not true to X
  • Feuerbach: Religion does this; it’s alienating man from himself
  • Stirner: Feuerbach, you’re still accepting religion’s structure of alienation, just instead of God, it’s the “species being”
  • Marx: Commodity fetishism is the result of equivalent expression of value, money, mediating our understanding of the social substance of labor
    • Commodities are mediations: their objective substance (object itself has value) masks the labor behind the object, which is determined by (unfair) social relations
• Marx’s adjustment to Stirner
  • Stirner’s critique of Feuerbach deflated Marx’s hope that with F’s critique of religion, all forms of human servitude and inequality would come tumbling down, quick
    • Without F’s destruction of religion, this “crisis” and revolution won’t happen soon, so he retreated into historical patterns for alternate proof for a far-in-the-future revolution
  • Stirner makes him realize that his ideas of philosophical intervention (the power of the intellectual) are just another form of mediation
    • Had to back away from idea that critique could help spark a revolution
  • Replaced this voluntarist movement with sheer historical movement
    • Leads back to Hegel and mediation
  • Capitalism as the necessary stage to socialism

German Ideology’s effects

• Written 1845-7 with Engels, not published until 1932
• Gave the world a “new” Marx
  • In 1932, they “were thought to have uncovered a profound existential truth about the nature of work under modern capitalism…long-buried evidence of another Marx capable of voicing a more nuanced, humane, or even tragic sense of Man,” a new young Marx unrelated to Stalinism or any “socialism” in place at the time (126, Gareth Stedman Jones)
• Along with publication of the 1844 Manuscripts, its publication influenced the Frankfurt School
  • Now recognizes debt to Hegel
  • In general, Marxism gives the Frankfurt school the emphasis on revolution, labor relations, and struggle, as well as its method, ideology critique.

Some Famous Marxist Literary Thinkers

• Adorno and Horkheimer
  • Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944): Shares a critique of modern society familiar to the modernists, in which the quantification of everything ignores what really matters: relations and subjective consciousness.
  • Modernist art acts as a critique to modern society through its experimentation. Its supposed aloofness from pop culture saves it from becoming just another commodity.
• Walter Benjamin
  • Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936): The loss of the art object’s “aura” in the capitalist world of alienation and commodities releases art from pseudo-sacred immortality into the world of current political struggle.
• Bertolt Brecht
  • Art should not reflect social conditions, but instead change them by forcing people to think about them and therefore overcome false consciousness. Marxist art (in particular, the modernist avant-garde) is therefore a political intervention.
  • Belief in effectiveness of populist art disagrees with Adorno’s elitism and pessimism
• Georg Lukacs
  • “The Ideology of Modernism” (1957): Unlike realism, which takes into account the sociohistorical background of its narrative, modernism, with its emphasis on the stark Protagonist, is the “negation of history,” inherently anti-Marxist because it rejects historical modes of understanding the world.
  • Modernists are decadent and subjectivist, indulgent rather than revolutionary
• Fredric Jameson
  • Jameson solves the following problem in investigating the affinity between Marxism and modernism: the insistence of many modernists upon their radical separation from contemporary society and sociohistorical milieu (“pure” art).
  • The Political Unconscious (1981): Marx’s hatred of mediation shows Jameson the way to understanding the place that forms of abstraction, particularly the tricks of aesthetic form, play in hiding the real (read: social, historical) relations that make the book tick. Criticism is therefore a “translation” effort that turns abstract form into Marxist-political content.
  • A Singular Modernity (2002): Modernism’s supposed anti-historical traits (the lack of realist background, the emphasis on word-craft, the focus on individual consciousnesses) actually form a concerted effort to conceal the very historical progress they seem to deny. (It’s Marxist because this “historical process” Jameson refers to is the progress of capitalism.)

Marx influenced by

• German philosophy
  • Hegel
  • Kant
• French politics
  • French Revolution(s)
  • Jacobins
• English economics
  • Adam Smith
  • David Ricardo
  • Thomas Carlyle
• Young Hegelians
  • Friedrich Engels
  • Bruno Bauer
  • Ludwig Feuerbach
  • Moses Hess
  • Max Stirner
• Early Socialists
  • J J Rousseau
  • Saint-Simon
  • J P Proudhon
  • Robert Owen
  • Charles Fourier

Influenced by Marx

• Communists
  • Lenin
  • Mao
• The Big Four
  • Georg Lukacs
  • Theodor Adorno
  • Walter Benjamin
  • Bertolt Brecht
• Western Marxists
  • Antonio Gramsci
  • George Lukacs
  • Ernst Bloch
  • J P Sartre
  • Henri Lefebvre
  • Frankfurt School
    • Adorno and Horkheimer
    • Jurgen Habermas
    • Herbert Marcuse
• Modernist Socialists
  • William Morris
  • George Gissing
  • H G Wells
    • George Orwell’s critique
  • George Bernard Shaw
  • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• Freudo-Marxists
  • Herbert Marcuse
  • Wilhelm Reich
  • Louis Althusser and Structural Marxists
  • Deleuze and Guattari
• Marxist Sociology
  • Max Weber
  • Georg Simmel
  • Emile Durkheim
• Critical Theory
  • Terry Eagleton and … Marxism
  • Hardt and Negri and Autonomous Marxism
  • E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and British Marxism
  • Raymond Williams and Cultural Materialism
  • Fredric Jameson and His Dissertants
• Post-Marxists
  • Alain Badiou
  • Slavoj Zizek
  • Laclau and Mouffe
• Marxist Feminists
  • Margaret Benson
  • Peggy Morton
  • Lise Vogel
  • Chandra Mohanty
  • Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
  • Rosemary Hennessy
• Two Important Books
  • Marshall Berman’s All That is Solid Melts into Air (1982)
  • Eugene Lunn’s Marxism and Modernism (1982)

Bertrand Russell on Marx in A History of Western Philosophy

• “In one|? respect, he is an outcome….of the Philosophical Radicals, continuing their rationalism and their opposition to romanticism. In another, he is a revivifier of materialism…. In another aspect, he is the last of the great systems-builders, the successor of Hegel, a believer, like him, in a rational formula summing up the evolution of mankind.”
• qtd. in Rockmore

Timeline

• 1831: Hegel dies in a cholera epidemic
• 1835: David Strauss’ Life of Jesus critically examined
• 1837: Formation of Young Hegelians
• 1843: Marx’s newspaper shut down by Prussian state censors
• 1844: Marx and Engels begin collaborating in Paris
• 1845-7: Marx and Engels work on The German Ideology
• 1847: Engels writes first drafts of Communist Manifesto
• 1848: Marx rewrites Manifesto, which appears amid multiple European revolutions
• 1850: First English translation (Helen Mc Farlane?)
• 1850-70: Marx virtually ignored
• 1872: /Manifesto// reprinted as evidence against alleged traitors Liebknecht and Bebel, Social-Democratic leaders
  • after 1872: Translations and editions multiply, reputation secured
  • 1870s: people start calling themselves “Marxists”
• 1914-7: Revs up the Bolsheviks
• 1932: 1844 Manuscripts and The German Ideology published for the first time
• 1936: “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin
• 1944: Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer
• 1962: “The Ideology of Modernism,” Lukacs

Solid Melts

Bibliography

Bathrick, David. Rev. of All that is Solid Melts into Air, by Marshall Berman. New German Critique 33 (1984): 207-17.

Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts into Air. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982.

Cooper, John. Modernism and the Culture of Market Society. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.

Dupre, Louis. Marx’s Social Critique of Culture. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983.

Eagleton, Terry. Rev. of Marxism and Modernism, by Eugene Lunn. Journal of Modern History 56 (1984): 124-25.

Kaufman, Robert. “Red Kant, or the Persistence of the ‘Third’ Critique in Adorno and Jameson.” Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 682-724.

Gollobin, Ira. Dialectical Materialism: Its Laws, Categories, Practice. New York: Petras Press, 1986.

Ingle, Stephen. Narratives of British Socialism. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1991.

Jones, Gareth Stedman. Introduction. Communist Manifesto. By Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. New York: Penguin, 2002. 3-187.

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• —. The German Ideology. New York: Prometheus Books, 1998.

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