Magical Marxism

Subversive Politics and the Imagination

Andy Merrifield

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2011
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781783710904
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

*Shortlisted for the Bread and Roses Prize, 2012* Andy Merrifield breathes new life into the Marxist tradition. Magical Marxism demands something more of orthodox Marxism - something more interesting and liberating. It asks that we imagine a Marxism that moves beyond debates about class, the role of the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat. In escaping the formalist straitjacket of typical Marxist critique, Merrifield argues for a reconsideration of Marxism and its potential, applying previously unexplored approaches to Marxist thinking that will reveal vital new modes of political activism and debate. This book will provoke and inspire in equal measure. It gives us a Marxism for the 21st century, which offers dramatic new possibilities for political engagement.

1

LIVING AN ILLUSION: BEYOND THE REALITY OF REALISM

Our life is a voyage—In winter and in the night—We seek our passage ... There is the fatigue and cold of morning in this well traveled labyrinth, like an enigma we have to resolve. It is a reality of illusions through which we have to discover the possible richness of reality.

Guy Debord

Real nature being lost, all becomes nature.

Pascal

No carnivorous plants grow, no toucans fly, nor do you find cyclones in The Discourse on Method.

Alejo Carpentier

I’m much closer to Rabelais’ craziness than to Descartes’ discipline.

Gabriel García Márquez

Between Spectacle and Solitude

On the face of it, 1967 is a forgotten year, disappearing into relative insignificance alongside the heady 365 days that followed it—1968, the year everybody remembers as the most remarkable of that decade. Yet some pretty noteworthy things happened in 1967: the “Be-ins” at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and the psychedelic “Summer of Love”; Che was captured and executed in Bolivia and Detroit erupted with some of America’s worst race riots; Jim Morrison of The Doors sang “We want the world and we want it NOW!” and Jimi Hendrix wondered “Are You Experienced?”; The Beatles, too, released what many believe their best album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Allen Ginsberg levitated the Pentagon in a giant medieval carnival protesting the Vietnam War.

But perhaps the highlight of 1967 was something apparently more minor: the publication of two books, one ostensibly fact, the other a magical sort of fiction. People still talk about these books and with their spellbinding brilliance they continue to inspire (one still sells bundles, too). Although these books are both radical, and each radically different from the other—appearing on different continents and in different languages—they both have something important in common, and it’s perhaps no coincidence that they should appear concurrently beside Sgt. Pepper’s and Jimi Hendrix. Indeed, each succeeds in changing our perceptions about reality and about ourselves; each somehow turns the world we thought we knew upside down as well as inside out, and each, in turn, proceeds to put that world back together again, right side up. These two books are The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.

Few people would probably think of Debord, the prophet of spectacular capitalism, as a magical realist, just as fewer again would likely see García Márquez, the prophet of magical realism, as a theorist of the society of the spectacle. And yet, it’s possible to conceive both men in this guise and to posit their respective masterpieces as works of art that push reality somehow beyond realism.¹ In what follows, I want to bring these two texts together into dialogue—a strange dialogue that will help initially map out the ontological contours of Magical Marxism. Perhaps we can say that the four decades since the publication of these two books has been marked by both solitude and spectacle, by a spectacular solitude, and in saying this it’s true that The Society of the Spectacle and One Hundred Years of Solitude remain two darkly pessimistic texts. In a way, they pinpoint the ’68 generation’s shortcomings as much as embody its utopian desires. Here, Colonel Aureliano Buendia, a ’60s-style anarchist, an altermondialiste avant la lettre, sets the brooding tone: organizing 32 armed uprisings in the name of a radical liberal cause, he lost every one of them.

On the other hand, with their almost supernatural lucidity, their dazzling erudition and phantasmal and mystical ideas, The Society of the Spectacle and One Hundred Years of Solitude also transmit a strange sort of optimism, a backdoor sense of hope, and offer another take on what our lives might be. In consequence, each book shows us how reality can be represented differently, how more acute (and astute) forms of subjectivity can create a more advanced sense of realism, a different type of objectivity, a more radical and active one. Each text, in a nutshell, equips progressives with the imaginative tools for staking out new trails of permanent subversion; narrow ones, of course...

Reality Détourned

It’s not clear exactly when Debord began writing his political prose poem, his exposé of the modern form of the commodity. In a letter to Danish artist Asger Jorn, dated January 13, 1964, Debord said: “in the book I am presently preparing I hope that one will see, more clearly than in other preceding works, that the Situationist International worked at the center of problems modern society poses.”² At the end of 1964, Debord told another friend that his book “will not appear before the following year.”³ In fact, The Society of the Spectacle eventually hit Parisian bookstores in November 1967 when working-class grievances festered and when post-war capitalism was entering a new more economically prodigious and ideologically devious phase. With its 221 short, intriguing theses, aphoristic in style and peppered with irony, The Society of the Spectacle is quirkily Marxian, uniting a left-wing Hegel with a materialist Feuerbach, a bellicose Machiavelli with a utopian Karl Korsch, a military Clausewitz with a romantic Georg Lukács. In so doing, Debord gives us stirring crescendos of literary power, compelling evocations of a world in which unity spells division and truth spells falsity. It is, Debord says, a topsy-turvy world where everything and everybody partakes in a perverse paradox, a world in which “the true” really is “a moment of the false.”⁴

Debord wanted to détourn the reality of this non-reality, this world where ugliness signifies beauty, dishonesty honesty, and stupidity intelligence. He wanted to subject it to his own dialectical inversion, inverting the inversion, flipping it with his own spirit of negation, and in the process wrote a unique work of political art, utterly without precedent. Détournement is a key motif in Debord’s political and literary arsenal: it pillories and negates existing reality in the name of a higher reality, in the name of a reality-invented; détournement is a new state of reinvented consciousness that rocks people out of their slumbering torpor, out of their modern passivity, monkey-wrenching received meaning in bourgeois reality, reveling in collective feats of resistance and acts of lampooning, sometimes outrageously crude and abusive, other times stylishly nuanced and daring. Squatting and occupying buildings and streets are classic examples of détournement, as are graffiti and free associative art. Détournement twists everything around, recreates meaning out of nonsense and nonsense out of meaning, highlights absurdity through the creation of a different sort of epic absurdity.

Each thesis of The Society of the Spectacle is itself an explosive charge, a sequence of détournement, likely drafted at night, when tipsy, and honed by day, when sober. There’s a lucidity and madness here only the schizophrenia of the day and night can induce: “The spectacle says nothing more than ‘that which appears is good, and that which is good appears’” (Thesis #12); “the spectacle is the new map of the world, a map which exactly covers its territory” (Thesis #31); “the spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image” (Thesis #34, original emphasis); “the real consumer becomes a consumer of illusions. The commodity is this factually real illusion, and the spectacle is its general manifestation” (Thesis #47). The surrealist undertow of The Society of the Spectacle conjures up the realm of dream, releases unconscious yearnings and sublimates deep political desire. At times, the tone reincarnates Compte de Lautréamont, the true inventor of détournement, whose Maldoror (1869) expressed similar incandescent chants, similar mental derangements. Maldoror, who curses God and hails the “old ocean,” is a bandit, Lautréamont says, “perhaps seven leagues away from this land” or “maybe only a few steps from you.”⁵ Lautréamont wrote only at night, always at night, seated at a piano, drinking absinthe, hammering out words at the same time as he hammered out notes. Maldoror is infamous for deliberately opaque similes that became touchstones of Surrealism: “the chance meeting on a dissection table of a sewing machine and an umbrella”; “beautiful like the law of arrested development in the chest of adults whose propensity for growth isn’t in rapport with the quantity of molecules that their organism assimilates.”⁶

Following Lautréamont, chance meetings of disparate elements and their dialectical inversions give birth to terrible beauties, and to haunting magical truths, like “the epic poem” of the spectacle, “which cannot be concluded by the fall of any Troy”; like the way the spectacle “doesn’t sing the praises of men and their weapons, but of commodities and their passions,” and “every commodity, pursuing its passion, unconsciously realizes something higher: the becoming-world of the commodity, which is also the becoming-commodity of the world” (Thesis #66). And like the chance meeting of a boy with a crate of frozen mullet, and the ice he’d discover with his cherished grandfather, and how the whole of One Hundred Years of Solitude begins with this one image, gets détourned from this one image of wonderment and dazzling invention, so it was years later, in May 1967, a month before Sgt. Pepper’s unleashed itself in record stores across the globe, that One Hundred Years of Solitude went on sale in Buenos Aires, opening with García Márquez’s re-imagined childhood memory: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice” (p. 9).

Reality as Fantasy

Legend has it that García Márquez and wife Mercedes were driving with their two sons to Acapulco for a family vacation, when the novel deemed a Latin American Don Quixote suddenly came to him in an epiphany, beginning with the chance encounter that distant afternoon when Gabriel’s grandfather took him to see the ice. Turning the car around, García Márquez returned to Mexico City and for the next 18 months tapped away on his Olivetti electric typewriter a story that had been in his head for 18 years. “All I wanted to do,” he recounted, years afterwards, “was to leave a literary picture of the world of my childhood which was spent in a large, very sad house with a sister who ate earth, a grandmother who prophesized the future, and countless relatives of the same name who never made much distinction between happiness and insanity.”⁷

Yet the bizarre saga of the Buendias in the village of Macondo, hacked out of the middle of damp Colombian jungle, not far from a barnacle-encrusted Spanish galleon, takes on a reality way beyond a quaint family romance: it’s a tale of paradise found and lost, an everyday saga of a magnificent and miserable humanity, a mad dream of a host of damaged characters whose only goal in life was to live to the full a wonderful human adventure. And they rarely let facts get in their way of their own stories, of the emergencies of their own passions. García Márquez always claimed that the Caribbean world of magic and drama, of mythological societies and fabulous plants, of pre-Colombian cults and slavery, of crumbling colonial empires, provided a taste for fantasy that was only barely exaggerated historical reality, oral memory as conveyed through the loosely grounded realism of his grandmother and grandfather.

An adolescent penchant for bad Latin American poetry and Marxist texts (lent to him on the sly by his history teacher), together with a revelatory reading of A Thousand and One Nights and Kafka’s Metamorphosis—when Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning transformed into a gigantic insect—convinced García Márquez he wanted to be a writer, that he could be a writer; “I opened it [A Thousand and One Nights], and I read that there was a guy who opened up a bottle and out flew a genie in a puff of smoke, and I said, ‘Wow, this is amazing!’ This was more fascinating to me than anything else that had happened in my life up to that point.” All that, too, convinced García Márquez that writing should be a poetic transformation of reality, that the source of creation is always reality, always somehow embedded in reality, yet a reality in which imagination is an instrument in its production and re-creation. The discovery was “like tearing off a chastity belt,” García Márquez said; “you can throw away the fig leaf of rationalism,” provided “you don’t then descend into total chaos and irrationality.”⁸ From this standpoint, imagination is one moment in the production of reality, a rhetorical re-description of reality, an aspect of hidden joinery in the edifice of social creation. Which itself isn’t so unMarxist: Marx recognized how imagination is a force of production, a dynamic element in any labor process: “A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labor process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally.”⁹

Against this methodological backdrop, One Hundred Years of Solitude was typed out, poetically reviving childhood memories, kick-starting a new literary genre bearing the name “Magical Realism,” guided by an ever so wafer-thin line separating reality from fantasy, and fantasy from reality. Magical Realism draws artistic sustenance from reality, yet converts this reality into a reality détourned, into a reality of illusions. And somehow, as readers, as narrative appropriators, we live out this illusory reality ourselves, make our way through its labyrinth, believe it and believe in it, relate to it somehow, and end up joining in, wanting to participate in its folly, in its mad inventions and alchemy, in its outrageous endeavors and voracious binges, in its tenderness and compassion, in its rage. Therein, all power goes to the imagination; “things have a life of their own,” Melquiades, the gypsy magician reminded José Arcadio Buendia, Macondo’s patriarch. “It’s simply a matter of waking up their souls” (p. 9). José Arcadio hardly needs reminding: the patriarch’s “unbridled imagination always went beyond the genius of nature and even beyond miracles and magic.” He taught his two wayward sons, José Arcadio and Aureliano, the wild man who’d eventually run off with the gypsies and the withdrawn child who’d become one of the nation’s most fabled warriors, to read and write and do sums; “and he spoke to them about the magical wonders of the world, not only where his learning had extended, but forcing the limits of his imagination to extremes” (p. 20).

Reality Forgotten, Reality as (Non-)Separation

One of the most bizarre Magical Realist episodes in One Hundred Years of Solitude is Macondo’s insomnia plague. As the sickness takes hold, the insomniac is in a permanent state of vigil, and soon “the recollection of their childhood began to be erased from their memory, then the name and notion of things, and finally the identity of people and even the awareness of their own being, until the person sank into a kind of idiocy that had no past” (p. 43). The expert insomniac eventually forgets about dreams entirely, and about the act of dreaming. And even though nobody sleeps a wink, the following day people feel so rested that they forget about the bad night they’ve had.

What’s so curious about García Márquez’s notion of the insomnia plague is how it captures an equally bizarre reality we ourselves have been living out for four decades now, a reality Debord labeled “the society of the spectacle,” a reality where “the sun never sets on the Empire of modern passivity” (Thesis #13). Debord says that the society of the spectacle is founded on “the production of isolation” (Thesis #28), a condition that reinforces the idea of a “lonely crowd,” of people bound, on the one hand, by a common economic and political system, yet, on the other hand, brought together in a “unity of separation,” as spectators lost in an agglomeration of “solitudes without illusions” (Thesis #70). Spectacular media and technology, Debord says, “are the technical realization of the exile of human powers into a beyond; it is separation perfected within the interior of man” (Thesis #20). The spectacle is the “nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep” (Thesis #21). But we can no longer sleep, of course, because of our insomnia plague, because the spectacle “is the guardian of sleep,” and because our rulers profit from a plague that keeps us simultaneously asleep and awake, that deadens our imagination through its “permanent opium war” (Thesis #44).

This spectacular insomnia nourishes a “unity of misery.” Behind the thrill of hallucinated lucidity are but different manifestations of alienation, bundled together into intensive and extensive forms of domination, two forms of spectacle “depending on the necessities of the particular stage of misery which it denies and supports” (Thesis #64). The former, intensive variety, Debord calls the “concentrated” spectacle; the latter, “diffuse.” Both deny and support each other. Together, they signify two rival and successive forms of spectacular power. The concentrated spectacle functions through cult of personality, through dictatorship and totalitarianism, through brute military repression; the diffuse is more ideological, and represents “the Americanization of the world,” a process that simultaneously frightens and successfully seduces countries where traditional forms of bourgeois democracy once prevailed. The diffuse spectacle guarantees freedom and affluence, dishwashers and Big Macs. When the spectacle is concentrated, the greater part of society escapes it; when diffuse, only a small part.

The concentrated spectacle, Debord says, “belongs essentially to bureaucratic capitalism, even though it may be imported as a technique of state power in more backward mixed economies, or in certain moments of crisis in advanced capitalism” (Thesis #64). Bureaucratic dictatorship ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Epigraph page
• Contents
• Series Preface
• Preface
• Introduction: The Circulation of Revolt—Real and Fictitious Marxism
• 1 Living an Illusion: Beyond the Reality of Realism
• 2 Subscribing to the Imaginary Party: Notes on a Politics of Neo-Communism
• 3 Spontaneous Overflow of Powerful Feeling: Activism and Immateriality
• 4 Militant Optimism and the Great Escape from Capitalism
• 5 Macondo of the Mind: Imagination Seizes Power
• 6 Butterflies, Owls, and Little Gold Fishes: Conjuring up Revolutionary Magic
• Notes
• Name Index
• Subject Index