Seeing Red

If accusing a politican of being “socialist” is like launching a B-52 Stratofortress-deployed cruise missile, calling him “Marxist” is like rolling up with a horse-drawn ballista—it may be an effective method of attack, but there’s something awfully old-fashioned about it. Reviewing Frederic Jameson for the London Review of Books, Benjamin Kunkel writes that “the U.S. remains a society in which Marxism can be advocated only a little more respectably than pederasty, and lately accusations of socialism erupt from the Republican Party more frequently than since McCarthy’s heyday.” The latter may be true, but I doubt the former is so edgy. Any self-identifying Marxist is likely to be looked on less as a threat than as a curiosity—a sandal-wearing ’60s relic, or a student of philosophy, or a European—at any rate, someone a bit naïve, yet to be initiated into the capitalist wonderland of iPads and Panda Express.

This is no manifesto for Marxism. There’s plenty in it that’s flawed and parts of it that simply fall apart when examined—far too much, in my case, to claim it comfortably as a political system. But it still deserves more than the dismissive brush-off it receives. As a conceptual tool, Marxism remains one of the best theoretical apparatuses for thinking about the modern world. Jameson, in “The Political Unconscious,” calls it the “hermeneutic code that subsumed all others”; Harvard English Professor Stephen J. Greenblatt has said that he is “uneasy with a politics and a literary perspective…untouched by Marxist thought.” Practically, Marxism might not work, but culturally, its resources run deep.

It’s true that “practical” Marxism is currently something of a non-entity in the English-speaking world. This Saturday, May Day—also known as International Workers’ Day—was celebrated in Clerkenwell Green, where a grab bag of causes gathered: Turkish communists blasted “The Internationale” very loudly from very poor speakers, Stalinists and Maoists waved flags and sported shirts silk-screened with their heroes’ faces, firefighters represented their trade union, artists carried a banner with abstract shapes in lieu of a political message, passers-by chatted with a handful of Marxist student groups (astonished to learn they lack U.S. equivalents), Iranians passed out flyers to free New Wave director Jafar Panahi (arrested for “making a film against the regime about the events that followed the election”), and so on and so forth. After the march poured out into Trafalgar Square, a Marxist Day School adjourned in a University of London classroom, where Trotskyite political theorist Alan Woods—his Wikipedia photo showing him buddy-buddy with Chávez—was scheduled to speak on Venezuela and the Fifth International. He was ill, so an organization secretary made the case: “The goal is to expose the class struggle to not just you 25, but the world!” He can’t be accused of asking for too little.

With the students, at least, a kind of self-ironizing quality pervades the activism, a defensive half-smile perpetually pasted on. They understand that the ideology they embrace is commonly considered old, or stodgy, or discredited—some wild-bearded step-brother of socialism; they can rent “La Chinoise” to watch their parents’ generation parody the simultaneous violence and performance of revolution. It’s all quite far from playacting, though. Born around the time the Eastern European experiments were crashing down, they may have a more sober sense of history than Generation Y did, but they’re no less sincere.

Marxists sometimes lament that Marxist theory is taught exclusively at expensive colleges, necessarily breeding armchair socialism; Jameson wrote that “the question about poetry after Auschwitz has been replaced with that of whether you could bear to read Adorno and Horkheimer next to the pool.” And yet—even if this is not in itself a Marxist approach—I think that Marxism has much to offer even those who don’t embrace its active prerogatives. A failure to compass completely what occurs in practice does not translate to a black mark against an approach or a license to disrespect it: As with mathematical models, so too with Marxism.

What can Marxism do? It can teach us how to think in terms of other peoples and classes. It can preserve the ideas of utopia and future potential. And it can encourage the idea of a collective project reaching beyond the present. Since Marx penned the first volume of “Capital” in 1867, holed up in Kentish Town and subsisting largely on monthly £5 checks from Engels, a lot has changed. As a generation, though, we can still come together to define a task for ourselves, to create the way we live rather than experiencing it as a series of events beyond our control.

Part of that means engaging passionately with whatever happens, rather than making jokes about it or laughing it off. Obviously, humor has its place; any society that bans humor loses its internal check (not to mention becomes a great deal less fun to live in). But Marxism is rooted in German idealism. Whatever its practical failures or successes, it teaches how to think on the grand level of history—how to take things seriously.

In the atmosphere of the British election, in which the Labour-Lib Dem-Tory menus seem about equally unappetizing, the opportunity to create a coherent vision for a new and better society is a very tempting one. I, for one, think it worth turning to Marx again to relearn how to think deeply, and without irony, about how our own society can move forward.

Jessica A. Sequeira ’11, a former Crimson associate editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House currently studying abroad at the University of Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.