Merrifield - Magical Marxism

Magical Marxism

Marxism and Culture

Series Editors:

Esther Leslie (Professor in Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London) and

Mike Wayne (Reader in Film and Television Studies at Brunel University)

Red Planets

Marxism and Science Fiction

Edited by Mark Bould and China Miville

Marxism and the History of Art

From William Morris to the New Left

Edited by Andrew Hemingway

Philosophizing the Everyday

The Philosophy of Praxis and the Fate of Cultural Studies

John Roberts

Dark Matter

Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture

Gregory Sholette

Marxism and Media Studies

Key Concepts and Contemporary Trends

Mike Wayne

First published 2011 by Pluto Press
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Copyright Andy Merrifield 2011

The right of Andy Merrifield to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN 978 0 7453 3060 0 Hardback

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To Corinna and Lili-Rose, and their magic

Give us back our power of wonderment / Im calling upon the magician

Aim Csaire

The act of the imagination is an act of magic

Jean-Paul Sartre

What if the whole edifice is not as hegemonic as it appears? What if we only need a little, perhaps, a lot more imagination, now that economic crisis has twinned with the virtual collapse of legitimacy for much of the political class that signed up to the neo-liberal paradigm? What if the Marxist critique of capitalism is already the common-sense of many activists busily building alternative models to existing society? What if these practical political projects suggest to Marxism that to move from critique to practice, it must rethink means and even some ends? The 1990s spawned a new language of resistance and Andy Merrifields book, the latest in the Marxism and Culture series, reflects that, as well as an impatience with some of the traditional language and concepts of Marxism, especially the ones that block the paths from critique to practice.

Everybody knows (as Leonard Cohen once sang) that the ship is leaking and that the captain lied. Given this, the task might be to move beyond recycling ever more opaque ways of saying pretty much the same thing (the frequent fate of academic Marxism) and get on with the task of fashioning a language fit for intervention and engagement. But intervention and engagement with whom? A small and by no means the most important part of what Magical Marxism offers the reader, is a survey of the many who are already creating practical models of alternative living. In those alternative models lie the seeds of future visions that challenge not only capitalisms logic but some traditional Marxist thinking on the good society as well and how to get there. Marxisms traditional paradox is that to succeed in the long run it must create the conditions that destroy the means by which it at first succeeds in the short run. Party, state and labor are not ends in themselves. At best they can only be the means to begin a journey that must at some point diminish these motors of change if something really new is to emerge. Perhaps, as is argued in this book, the journey cannot begin at all with these motors. Lots of things that augur the genuinely new are in fact to be found outside the traditional terrain of the left.

Integration and intimidation muzzled the traditional political agent of Marxism (the organized workers) after the tumult of the 1960s and 1970sbut resistance is mobile and it simply relocated and mobilized in different forms. The language of liberation is increasingly one of living differently, a rather broader and many would argue a more radical vision than the more narrow workerist focus of Marxisms traditional political imaginary. To live differently requires breaking the ossified husk of the old society and kick-starting the imagination as the creative wellspring from which real change comes. In the traditional Marxist imaginary, workers taking control of the means of productionusually the factorywas the powerful prefigurative projection into the future that served as the springboard for what a different society would look like. But what if the embryonic outlines of a different society are being drawn in many different ways outside the traditional model? A Marxism open to these initiatives would indeed be magical.

The prefigurative dynamic of culture thus looms large here as a resource for a new political imagination, inspired in large part by the culture and politics of Latin America, which has, since the 1990s, been the epicenter for resistance to neo-liberal capitalism. There are many cultures of living, of living cultures, that seed values, perspectives, habits, etc., that are explicitly antithetical to corporate capitalism, state power, and more broadly, institutional life, with its bureaucracies and hierarchies. If the participants of these new ways of living appear in the west to be overwhelmingly white and middle class, this does not in itself torpedo the validity of the politics, not least because similar political themes crop up in the global South where political agency is brown, black, and poor.

A new language of liberation is a risky project and as with everything new, it will make mistakes, go up blind alleys and fall flat on its face once in a while. In this new language, a more orthodox Marxism might with reason wonder where the state is in all this talk of imminent transformation? For perhaps the edifice is not as shaky as it appears? Perhaps the timber is being happily colonized by the woodworm of alternative projects, but the concrete and steel remains sturdy and strong and will not be eaten away from within? And perhaps in many cases, these alternative projects, these alternative ways of living are content to remain autonomous zones, various escape routes that will never converge, never seeking broader social transformation?

Yet for all the difficulty in coming up with answers to such hard political questions, a more orthodox Marxism must let itself be infused by the utopian energies and aspirations, politics, and practical ideas flowing from the movement of movements. It must ask the hard questions to itself as much as to these multiple alternatives flourishing independently of corporate and state surveillance and power (independent for now, but what of tomorrow?). This is so if Marxism does not want to imitate what it seeks to overthrow.