The Prison House of Alienation

Murzban Jal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000753240
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

The Prison House of Alienation is an exploration of the humanist theme of alienation that Marx theorized in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. It relates this theme of alienation with the themes of haunting in the Manifesto of the Communist Party and accumulation of capital that he outlined in his magnum opus Capital.

The volume claims that humanity plagued by ghosts is dwelling in a prison house from which there seems no escape. Yet humanity seeks to escape from this prison house. The essays are a consequent journey in dramaturgy where science and art truly meet to create emancipatory politics that goes well beyond the entire discourse of twentieth-century socialism. The volume begins with Hamlet's lament in Shakespeare's tragedy, who, struck by alienation, is haunted by the ghost of his dead father. It then discusses how instead of creating a radical theory for creating a socialist alternative, 'haunting' gave way to interpretation as an estranged hermeneutical act that displaces revolutionary theory and praxis. This displacement of revolutionary praxis in turn gave way to violence. This volume therefore also analyzes violence from Clausewitz to Mao, revealing that a rigorous line must be drawn between Stalinism and Maoism on one side, and authentic Marxism on the other side. It concludes by questioning the very idea of ideology, suggesting that ideology is not merely a false consciousness, but a terrible psychotic act that would devour the entire emancipatory project of Marxism itself.

Placing the human condition at the centre for alternative twenty-first-century politics, The Prison House of Alienation reveals that there can be no science without art and no politics without humanity. It will be of great interest to scholars of philosophy and politics. The essays were originally published in various issues of Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory.

Umweg, or The Detour: On Marx’s Theory of Radical Time

The idea of time since the Iranian Zurvanists has been central to the history of philosophy. Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel and Heidegger, each had a rigorous theory of time. At a surface level it seems Marx too ought to have had a theory of time in his materialist conception of history. Time can only be postulated as diachronic time: the time of the physical world, or the world of nature in general. This is the time inherent in the idea of natural history. When Louis Althusser said that Marx discovered the continent of history, it can also be said that he discovered the multiple ideas of time. For besides diachronic time Marx also talks of frozen time. This frozen time is the manifestation of the socially necessary time taken to produce commodities. It is similar to Freud’s neurotic eternal recurrence of the self-same and Walter Benjamin’s ‘abstract homogeneous time’. It can also be called ‘phantom time’. Just as phantom time is central to Marx, so too is the idea of the phantom or the spectre. One now recalls Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness which put the notion of the reification of consciousness at the centre stage of Marxism and the Freudo-Marxism of the Frankfurt School’s reading of the ideological superstructure as the repressed unconscious so as to bring out the philosophical meanings in Marx’s spectrology. After all one has to understand Marx’s writing of the superstructure as the estranged mind (entfremdete Geist). In the meantime 1991 happened and the Soviet bloc of nations disappeared from the face of the world. Socialism, so the imperialists cried out, is dead. Long live liberal democracy and the clash of civilizations! Now Umweg implies a detour, a detour that has occurred since the early 1990s. This Umweg leads to spectres, the most important, as Derrida highlighted, is the problem of Hamlet’s encounter with the ghost of his murdered father. Now Hamlet (politically speaking) is liberal democracy. And like liberal democracy, Hamlet recalls his earlier incarnation, God itself, the blunderer creator God who after creation feigns ignorance and existential helplessness—‘To be, or not to be … ’. Yet liberal democracy besides being an existentialist Hamlet becomes a prophet who preaches the biblical end of history. Only the spectre of Hamlet is allowed to walk the nights of the capitalist mode of production. But to the great dismay of the imperialists Marx is also noticed walking the same nights. The owl of the revolution is heard hooting in this dark night. ‘Good night sweet prince’, Horatio’s words have turned to, ‘Good morning sweet prince’. Marx murdered by unfortunate fortune was buried. But his spectre has risen up. Like that of Hamlet’s father. And like that of Hamlet. 1991 has given way to 1917.

The time is out of joint, O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Sc. IV.

Time is everything, humanity is nothing; it is at the most, time’s carcase.
Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy.

Death and Transfiguration

Marx returns again, just as Hamlet and his father have returned. This time Hamlet returns not as the as the prince of deconstructionism, not of the international subalterns, but as the New Messiah of New Utopia: liberal democracy. The time is out of joint. But not only is it out of joint, it is also everything, as compared to humanity which is nothing. Not only is the ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father condemned to walk the awful night, but also Hamlet. As also is the ghost of Karl Marx. The ghost of Hamlet’s father walks the nights to avenge the death of monarchy allegedly at the hands of the then young French revolutionaries, that of Hamlet to seek liberal utopia, and that of Marx because the time to realize Marxism was missed. Der Tote packt den Lebenden!—‘The dead have seized the living!’¹—we are seized by strange necromantic forces from the netherworld.

In order to understand the spectres in the underworld we descend into the realm of these ghosts. We meet three immortal characters in the history of these spectres: Hamlet, the ghost of his assassinated father and Marx. The point the later Sartre raised was that it was impossible to transcend Marx because one has not transcended the conditions is pertinent today.

There is no going beyond them (i.e., Descartes, Locke, Kant, Hegel and Marx) so long as man has not gone beyond the historical moment which they express. I have often remarked on the fact that an ‘anti-Marxist’ argument is only an apparent rejuvenation of a pre-Marxist idea. A so-called ‘going beyond’ Marxism will at be the worst only a return to pre-Marxism; at best only the rediscovery of a thought already contained in the philosophy which one believes he has gone beyond.²

The conditions are present, but the solution is stifled, maybe as the global culture industry claims, the solution is dead. Ideology is dead; history is dead, welcome to the graveyard of postmodernism and global capitalism. And it is in this graveyard that the spectres have risen again. Many people, Marxists and anti-Marxists, communists and imperialists, may ignore the spectres. But for one thing Marx would not ignore them.

‘The time is out of joint’—Hamlet and his father are not the only sufferers. Time, i.e., time as history, thus historical time was to deliver some promises. But the promises have been broken. The time is thus out of joint. Those who do not exist have to walk the nights; the ones who are living are tormented. This torment is worse than Hamlet’s ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’. The spectres continuously speak to us. We have to speak back to the spectres. We have to confront the spectres, maybe we have to befriend and love the spectres. Or maybe one will have to exorcise them. ‘Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio’, Marcellus’s words from Hamlet now fall onto our years. We all, it seems, have to become scholars in order to understand why these spectres have emerged again.

There are two spectres that Marx mentions: firstly the spectre of communism (das Gespenst des Kommunismus) in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, where Marx begins with the immortal opening line: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism’ (Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa—das Gespenst des Kommunismus). But this spectre as spectre is a concoction, a ‘nursery tale’ maybe even a ‘horror tale’ (Märchen) made up by the members of the ruling classes. It is not a spectre, but a living reality, but so dreaded are the ruling classes that they are bewitched and terrified by it. Thus all the ‘Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise the spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police spies.’³

The second is a terrible ghost that Marx encounters in Capital. And it unfortunately exists in reality. It emerges from the global capitalist firm Commodity and Commodity Inc. It is the base of all reality, the real ground of history. Its methodology is magic and necromancy. It is the fetish from which all that is glorious and rotten will emerge. From this base of magic and the evoking of the dead an entire ideological superstructure of the politics of the spectacle emerges—a spectacle that takes with itself both the defenders and the critics of capitalism.

Marx the scientist and futurist worked with a telescope, a microscope as well as the reason of scientific abstraction. But he also carried a spade to dig into graves to find out what capitalism civilization is all about. Marx takes us into the graveyard of commodities in order to understand the histories of all hitherto known class societies. He digs deep into the graves. He sees a ‘common “something”’,⁴ between all these rotten corpses. Close examination reveals that the bodily forms have all disappeared. Marx laments: ‘existence as a material thing is put out of sight’.⁵ Even closer examination of these corpses in the graves reveals that there is a ‘residue’ left. Marx sees to his horror that this residue is a ‘ghostly reality’ (gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit).⁶ These ghosts have escaped from their graves and are now haunting the world. They have become ‘independent beings’ (selbständige Gestalten) and as Marx warns the readers, they are now also ‘endowed with life and entering into relation with one another and the human race’.⁷ They are bestowed with terrible alchemical powers. Led by the chief ghost Monsieur Capital, these terrible ghosts now sing the song of globalization. The head of the ghosts Monsieur Capital:

batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ obstinate hatred for foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word it creates a world after its own image.⁸

So what do we now have? Civilized ghosts! Maybe that is why Walter Benjamin said that the history of civilization is at the same time the history of barbarism.⁹ This is the first act of the tragedy, the so-called ‘general act’. The second act, the ‘particular act’ would be even more terrible. This time the ghost will be absolutely uncivilized. And this time at least one spectre from the graveyard of barbarism and commodity production would infiltrate into the revolutionaries and destroy them from within. What was the name of this new ghost? Isuf Vissarionovich Jugashvili, or Josef Stalin as history would remember this disloyal, rude and capricious person, as Lenin warned the Bolsheviks in the early years of the revolution.¹⁰ Lenin’s warning to his comrades that Stalin had to be removed from his post of General Secretary and replaced was ignored even by Leon Trotsky. Stalin was neither removed, nor replaced. In fact there were many other removals and replacements. These removal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction: Ideology or ‘Terror as Freedom’?
• 1 Umweg, or The Detour: On Marx’s Theory of Radical Time
• 2 Interpretation As Phantasmagoria: Variations On A Theme On Marx’s Theses On Feuerbach
• 3 In Defence of Marxism: A Reply to a Neo-Hindu’s Reading of The Seductions of Karl Marx
• 4 Reflections on Violence
• 5 Strangers in the Dark: Neo-liberalism and Maoism in India
• 6 Can Ideology Ever be Revolutionary?
• Index