This book attempts to make mischief with Marxism, tries to subvert and refresh it, tries to shake it up from within. It pits a fantastical, dreaming Marxism in comradely opposition to scientific and staid versions of Marxism, doing so as it denounces the criminality of bourgeois society. It’s a book that will doubtless fall between two stools, appalling the purists for its revisionist meanderings, turning off others with its Marxist pretensions, because it remains too Marxist. Yet what’s on offer here isn’t a deeper, more profound Marxism so much as a broader, more versatile one, a more supple Marxism that happily falls between these two stools because it bounces right back up again; and, besides, down there, in the space in between, between the stools, lurks a great big shady world of other mischief makers, young radical people, and maybe a few older ones, too, all of whom fall between two stools themselves. This book hopes to find its audience in this shady world of the unaffiliated, suggesting that they’re actually more Marxist than they might think, and that we who call ourselves Marxists might become less Marxist than we think while still remaining good communists, while still keeping the red flag flying. Together, we might be able to do dangerous subversive things, mischievous things. What this book puts before its readers, then, isn’t perhaps a “bad Marxism,” as John Hutnyk might have it,1 but a “mad” Marxism, a mad magical Marxism that calls upon the magician, that invokes a magical madness as the necessary nemesis of the chaos of our crazy times.
The book has arisen out of a double dissatisfaction: an obvious dissatisfaction with the world and a more delicate dissatisfaction with actually existing Marxism, out of a belief that the two are intimately related, that the understandable pessimism of the era has equally contaminated Marxism itself, has turned it inward and defensive, made it safe and cautious because it justifiably feels under threat, because it fears itself crumbling into dust like the Berlin wall. Here, though, I want to propose a corrective to Marxism’s serial pessimism, to its perennial bad faith. Here, too, my dissatisfaction also embraces certain Marxist journals and scholarly publications, which, for a long time now, have seemed unreadable to me, too dry and predictable, too exclusive to insiders. Perhaps I’m not alone in thinking this? The many long, detailed articles and analyses of crises and disasters, of capitalist catastrophes, never seem to excite or inspire me, even when they are almost always right: as Marx said of the bourgeoisie, they all appear to be happy in their alienation, or at least happy in their assessments of capitalist alienation, reveling in the one-way streets they’ve consecrated, in the dead-ends and no exits their portrayals have built around themselves.
For years and years, I’ve been content to call myself “amongst other things” a Marxist,2 even in the United States where it was sometimes awkward, and even though I’ve never found a Marxist party or organization to subscribe to, any mouthpiece I felt I could really associate myself with or could wholeheartedly endorse. I’ve always felt like a fellow-traveler somehow, like Sartre’s Mathieu in The Age of Reason who, despite Brunet’s constant urgings, never could quite commit himself “institutionally” to the cause, never could sign up “officially” to any Marxism—not that anybody has ever asked me to officially sign up. Nor was this necessarily because I feared relinquishing my freedom; more because in refusing, in not participating institutionally, I could cling onto my membership card of the Imaginary Party, the one I knew existed out there, somewhere, the one I knew had to exist out there, and whose ranks are swelling. The present book is really written for this imaginary constituency, for those card-carriers I know really exist. To that degree, Magical Marxism will, I hope, appeal to all those stray, non-aligned mischief makers who want to do something radical, who want to invent another world because they know this one sucks. I have the distinct feeling—an inkling, really—that there are a lot of us about, a lot of people sneaking about between two stools, plotting and waiting for news of what’s going on above ground.
*
Prefaces are frequently the last thing authors pen to their books and this effort is no exception. It’s in doing so that a writer can retrace his or her steps through their book, figure out what it might be, why it came about, now that the heat is off, now that the work itself has been done. One can reflect with a certain peace of mind, and then re-present the text as if it had been an a priori construct all along. In writing this preface, retrospectively, there are three key factors that now strike me as important in the book’s genesis. The first was the decision I made back in 2003 to quit my life as an academic and go off to live in rural France, burying myself away initially in the Haute-Savoie, in the mountains, and then, a couple of years later, in an upland hideaway in the Massif Central, in the Auvergne, one of France’s poorest regions. In fleeing urban life (New York), as well as the world of steady paid work, I wasn’t sure if I was affirming my frustrated Marxist spirit or running away from it. I’d hitherto thought that radical Marxism meant engagement from within, from inside places of power like big cities, not opting out, downing tools and running to the outside, to some shadowy marginal world far away from urban life. Ironically, my choice of refuge was largely inspired by another Marxist, and a former metropolitan one, Guy Debord, who had himself tried to flee the spectacle during the 1970s—the “repugnant seventies” as he called them—and bivouacked in this self-same Auvergne, in a farmhouse behind a high stone wall. The house, he was fond of saying, “opened directly onto the Milky Way.”3
It turned out that this house became, after Clausewitz, a sort of post-’68 fortress for Debord, a block of ice in the course of river whose torrential current was either tossing people aside or forcing you to go with its flow. Clausewitz said that the effectiveness of defense—the effectiveness of any fortress—hinged on two distinct elements, one passive, the other active. The latter, he said, can’t be imagined without the former. Passive fortresses act as “real barriers,” like barricades: they block roads, immobilize movement, dam rivers. Accordingly, they become “oases in the desert,” “shields against enemy attack,” “buttresses for a whole system of defense.”4 Passive fortresses try to prevent an enemy’s advance, making it both difficult and hazardous: from there you can launch an active attack and dispatch garrisons to intercept or seek out any enemy.
Not long after I’d arrived in the Auvergne, I realized that Debord’s ghost lived on: not only in its physical proximity, but also in its political reincarnation. All around me, often hidden away in small hamlets and tiny communities, were and are groups of people who’ve constructed active and passive fortresses for themselves, and who are creating whole new collective defense systems against spectacular society and its culture of consumption. And from these outposts, from these “new undergrounds,” these “new reserves,” they’re sometimes launching frontal attacks on this degenerative system. The idea of a “new underground” or “new reserve” is the mystical surrealist André Gregory’s idea, from Louis Malle’s film My Dinner With André: people are coming together, Gregory said, presciently, in their desire to create new practical concepts about how to live and function in our neo-Dark Age. We’re glimpsing, he said, “new islands of safety where history can be remembered and the human being can continue to dream and function.”5 And these islands are cropping up not only in my adoptive Haute-Loire but also in neighboring départements like Lozère, Aveyron and Corrèze, to name just a few, where people are struggling to affirm terra novas and new magical geographies of the imagination, new islands of safety inspired by dream, by the normative desire to do something more autonomous, something more meaningful in our own neo-Dark Age.
Against all odds, they’re seeking out a more “authentic life” than contemporary capitalism, with its fast food and supermarkets, its labor markets and world market, can offer. Against an erstwhile deadening of the spirit at work, and a pollution of the mind at home, these people in their new communes, in their assorted ways, with their different links and survival systems, now farm organically, make honey and bake bread, raise goats and fabricate cheese, do small-scale, ostensibly trivial things that hang together as something larger, as a social movement in the making, one that has political awareness as well as practical savvy and technical know-how, one that doesn’t necessarily think of itself as class-based, yet knows all-too-well where it stands within the global system of capital accumulation. These people are forming collective micro-movements against the totalitarian mega-machine, disparate groups who often ally themselves with struggles worldwide, with the Conféderation Paysanne and Via Campesina, with global landless struggles, fair trade issues, and food sovereignty in defiance of neo-liberal orthodoxies. The list is almost endless. It’s as if they’ve read what the young Marx wrote in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, as if they’re trying to shrug off alienating forces, trying simply to be themselves, trying to liberate themselves in their external, objective world at the same time as they free themselves in their internal, subjective worlds. Their authenticity is thus an authenticity of action and consciousness, something both real and ideal, a positive energy that creates pockets of light—“pockets of resistance,” to use Subcomandante Marcos’s term—pockets of affirmation. “Pockets of resistance are multiplying,” says Marcos. “Each has its own history, its specificities, its similarities, its demands, its struggles, its successes. If humanity wants to survive and improve, its only hope resides in these pockets made up of the excluded, of the left-for-dead, of the disposable.”6
And so what at first seemed to me an escape from politics, I’ve since come to consider as a reframing of politics; and its testing ground has been right before me, in my own everyday life. What I’ve seen emerge, and what is still emerging, still taking shape ever so steadily, and what I’ll explore further in this book, is a new brand of Marxism that has at its core a neo-communist impulse: more and more people are electing themselves into office, subscribing to a new Imaginary Party, to the degree that now, rather than involve a fleeing to the outside, to the margins of society, this activism has transformed itself into a sufficiently large critical mass of people to be edging its way back inside society. And it’s assaulting society as it strengthens its rank-and-file. At least I think it is, hope it is, have to hope that it is...
The idea for a book called specifically magical Marxism came in a strange, unforeseen place, in a flash, and in somewhat bizarre circumstances: in a hammock in the Portuguese colonial coastal town of Paraty, mid-way between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, along Brazil’s “Green Coast.” There, amid a tropical downpour, listening to the rain dance off the palm trees, for about a week solid I read One Hundred Years of Solitude and began to believe, believe in another reality, in another possible world, in a magical one. It’s not that I didn’t believe before, of course; it’s just that the surreality of where I found myself somehow let me glimpse another aspect of everyday life, a fantastical one. I should say re-read One Hundred Years of Solitude, because for several years I had tried in vain to grapple with Gabriel García Márquez’s epic saga of the Buendias, of Ursula and José Arcadio and their many, many offspring in the village of Macondo, hacked out of the middle of the damp jungle, not far from a sunken Spanish galleon. But I’d always been distracted by something, interrupted along the way, overwhelmed by the array of characters all bearing more or less the same name; I was never really able to get beyond the opening sequences with the gypsy magician Melquiades’ mad inventions. Yet in Paraty, at the pousada “Caminho do Ouro,” surrounded by fabulous plants, exotic flowers and little hummingbirds, all next to a gushing river, I was dazzled by García Márquez’s vision of the world, by the vivacity of his human spirit, by our obsession with offsetting death, by life’s emptiness without love, by our never-ending quest for adventure, for magic, for fantasy—for true fantastic reality.
Soon, after having the chance to spend a year in Brazil—to spend a whole year thinking about, conceiving and writing this book—I had a burning desire to enter into García Márquez’s magical world myself, to let us all enter into his magical world, all those mischief makers out there, to become one his protagonists, to be Colonel Aureliano Buendia, One Hundred Years of Solitude’s principal character, to spend time like him “sneaking about through narrow trails of permanent subversion.”7 But I needed some point of entry, some trail to sneak through, and before long realized that “the political” offered this entry point, realized too that the magical was also urgently needed in politics itself. Accordingly, Magical Marxism is an invitation to a voyage, an invitation to enter a magical realm, to learn how to take a looking-glass perspective on life and politics. The book asks would-be readers to sneak about in this magical world with me, a world many readers actually know better than the author himself, because they’ve already broken out of ordinary daily life, because, through their own active volition, they’ve entered into another everyday life, one where everything is possible, where all is permitted for people with imagination. As such, this magical world is already real, if we look hard enough around us; it’s just a question of changing one’s perception about what reality is, about what politics is, about what it can be, ought to be, and about how we can follow the white rabbit down a hole into another political realm, and how we can do so while still staying solid Marxists.
This leads directly on to the third factor in the book’s genesis: the magical dialogue that unfolds here is really a dialogue between Marxism as realism and Marxism as romantic dreaming, where the latter’s ontological basis differs significantly to the former’s. It is a dialogue that explores the respective efficacy of each camp for trying to transform the world, and for trying to transform Marxism. Hugely influential in this regard is the film—or rather anti-film—My Dinner with André, and the strange encounter between the skeptical realist “Wally,” who worries about making the next rent check, and the loose-cannon romantic dreamer André, who’s searching for new philosophical principles, for a new meaning to life.8 Everybody believes André has cracked up and gone mad, and Wally presents him as a cranky freak. The dialogue starts off lightly, even whimsically, but steadily the intensity and gravity gets ratcheted-up, until it is André’s existential voyage that dominates; he could talk all day and night if need be.
André bemoans the modern world’s incapacity to feel anymore, overwhelmed as it is by electric blankets, central heating and air-conditioning. People no longer have time to think, no longer want to think—are no longer allowed to think. At one point, André even sounds like a young Situationist: “We’re bored, we’re all bored; we’ve turned into robots.” “But has it ever occurred to you, Wally,” he confronts his incredulous friend, “that the process which creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating unconscious form of brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money?” “Somebody who is bored is asleep,” André follows up, “and somebody who’s asleep will not say no!”9 As far as he’s concerned, the 1960s were “the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished. And that this is the beginning of the rest of the future ... and that from now on there will simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. And there will be almost nothing left to remind them that there once was a species called a human being, with feelings and thoughts.”10
But as darkness closes in, and as peoples’ lives become dominated by neo-liberalism’s society of spectacle—“the guardian of sleep”—there will be others, like André, like millions of people the world over, who’ll see things differently, who’ll try to reconstruct a new future for the planet, who’ll invent “new pockets of light,” as André calls them. They’ll resist by “creating a new kind of school or a new kind of monastery,” a new kind of “‘reserve’—islands of safety where history can be remembered and the human being can continue to function, in order to maintain the species through a Dark Age. In other words,” André insists, “we’re talking about an underground, which did exist during the Dark Ages in a different way ... And the purpose of this underground is to find out how to preserve the culture. How to keep things living.”11
Perhaps above all else, then, this book is an attempt to explore the development of this new underground—Marxist style. It’s a book that tries to dialogue and empathize with all progressives who, like André, are out on the road of life, wandering, believing in where they’re headed, even if their exact destination is nowhere yet in sight, who are unable to turn back, and who honestly believe that the shortest distance between two points—between capitalism and communism—just may not be a straight line.
For that reason, this book isn’t only dedicated to the magic of my loving wife and angel of a young daughter; it’s equally dedicated to all twisted people everywhere, to those who yearn to do magic, who don’t live the world of the straight and narrow, but who wend and weft their way forwards and sideways, and who conjure up, in their own special ways, their own revolutionary magic. Collectively, you’re ensuring that this fragile little planet of ours becomes ever so slightly a better place to be in.
Andy Merrifield
São Paulo, Brazil
April 2010