°Karl und Carl
Following the recent Long Sunday blogweave on Spivak … wait, there’s more …
Francis Wheen’s biography of Karl Marx begins at his funeral, thus setting the scene for opening remarks on Marx’s legacy. Wheen writes:
The history of the twentieth century is Marx’s legacy. Stalin, Mao, Che, Castro - the icons and monsters of the modern age have all presented themselves as his heirs. Whether he would recognise them as such is quite another matter. Even in his lifetime, the antics of self-styled disciples often drove him to despair. On hearing that a new French party claimed to be Marxist, he replied that in that case ‘I, at least, am not a Marxist’. Nevertheless, within one hundred years of his death half the world’s population was ruled by governments that professed Marxism to be their guiding faith.
And yet, the 20th century came to a close with the declarations of a triumphant liberalism that had, it was said, brought history to an end and, thereby, exhausted the legacy of Marx in that purportedly faithful expression of Marxism as raison d’etat.
In notable cases, this moment was marked by a mourning, a reconsideration of the legacy, of debt, loss, and fidelity. Indeed, some of the recent contributions to Long Sunday’s blogweave on Spivak’s “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value” - which is to say, perhaps those least concerned with recent blogwars over ‘Theory’ - turned around the complex questions of fidelity toward, and deconstruction of, Marx’s legacy and writings, and insofar as Spivak’s essay brings such questions to the fore. Most overtly, but hardly exclusively, the posts by Brett, Carlos and myself.
That said, what would it mean to assemble a conversation not at Marx’s funeral but on his birthday?
For if, by one account, the collapse of the USSR and other states signalled an exhaustion of communism, of Marx’s ‘irrelevance’ and suchlike recourses to the tropes of death, it has also, conversely, been the case that Marx has been enthusiastically ‘reborn’ since. Not only in the prominence of previously minor communisms (see, for instance, the previous symposium on Tronti) in and around the miliuex of anti-summit protests at the beginning of the 21st century, but also in the rather strange event of Marx’s inauguration as the greatest philosopher in a BBC poll.
In other words, what would it mean to render the conversation not, or not simply in, the register of mourning but (also that) of celebration?
It’s with this in mind that this post serves as a rather lengthy preamble for an invitation. It is, of course, Marx’s birthday on May 5th.
And so, even while that date is rather soon and this invitation might come too late for elaborate preparations, I’d like to invite others to contribute a post, however detailed or brief, on Marx, on whatever text or aspect of Marx’s writings they find of interest. (As with the Tronti and Spivak blogweaves, I’ll endeavour to aggregate the posts over at Long Sunday, pending being notified in some way, comments here being the most obvious.)
Which brings me to the topic of Long Sunday symposiums generally, and that Craig is preparing for a symposium on Carl Schmitt in June. If you’re interested in contributing to that discussion, do go drop a comment in at Theoria.
If there’s a thread that connects a quasi-symposium on Marx with a more organised one on Schmitt (as well as harks back to the previous LS blogweaves on Spivak and Tronti), it is that much as one might scour Marx’s writing for a politics, it remains the case that this is almost impossible to discern and that, as Brett intimated in the discussion on Tronti, this is why communist politics - and understandings of solidarity therein - have tended to assume the Schmittian contours of the distinction between friend and enemy.
Finally, and so as to herald future blogweavings, a symposium on ‘America and Democracy’ has been pencilled in for/around July 4th. With some due attention to Tocqueville’s writings. More on this closer to the date.
Some nice discussion looming …
Friends in Rome did a similar Marxfest recently (they have a cute graphic up):
http://www.centroriformastato.it/crs/Testi/interviste/Marx
Augusto Illuminati went so far as to call this the ‘much gossiped about Marx-Renaissance’:
http://aldiqua.blogspot.com/
http://materialiresistenti.blog.dada.net/permalink/232587.html
Brett [April 27, 2006 @ 7:03 pm]
This is a lovely idea. My birthday goodwill wishes will have to be belated (I think Karl will understand), but I’ll definitely do something when I get back into town.
Nate [April 27, 2006 @ 11:15 pm]
I would certainly like to post something. (Has it really been two years since I’ve read anything by Marx?) Since his birthday coincides with Cinco de Mayo and is four days after the day of action in the US, I will undoubtedly weave these things together. I think.
Eric [April 28, 2006 @ 9:21 pm]
I will try to post something on my blog as well.
Steven Shaviro [April 29, 2006 @ 1:13 am]
Excellent!
s0metim3s [April 29, 2006 @ 3:28 am]
I’m in too!
crojas [April 30, 2006 @ 8:31 pm]