A life devoted to the service of dangerous belief is more interesting than one confined to waiting piously for some sacks of flour.
Imagine a Marxism that’s not just critical analysis, that’s liberated from debates about class and the role of the state, about the dictatorship of the proletariat. Imagine a Marxism that no longer calls itself “scientific” and has given up on the distinction between form and content, between appearance and essence. Imagine a Marxism that stakes out the contours of a new dream-like reality, a materialist fantasy, a fantastic materialism, a Marxism that utters sighs of disenchantment with the present yet affirms the most tenacious nostalgia for dreams of the future. Imagine a Marxism that doesn’t so much abandon materialism as move on from it, shifting gear to advocate a more free-floating and ethereal political vision, a more phantasmal radicalism. Imagine a Marxism that opens up the horizons of the affirmative and reaches out beyond the dour realism of critical negativity.
In imagining all that, a lot of people would doubtless no longer be imagining Marxism. I think these people would be wrong, however, and in this book I will try to illustrate why. I want to show how Marxism can become more magical, how with imagination it can break out of a formalist straightjacket, how it can draft a more raw, more positive conception of life that ups the ante of mere critique and analysis, of yet another study showing how messed up our world is, how exploitative and degenerative its ruling class, how grotesque its economic system. All this can surely be taken as given nowadays, all that gloom and oppression smart people know to be characteristic of our society; they don’t need highfalutin theory to tell them what they live out and work with each day. Magical Marxism demands something more of Marxism, something more interesting, perhaps even something more radical.
Long before the spectacular collapse of the Soviet Bloc, people invoked the horrors of that system to dismiss the Marxist tradition tout court; for a while after the fall of the Berlin Wall Marxism’s ideological credibility was below rock bottom. Moscow State University quickly erased Marxist-Leninist philosophy from its curriculum, and professors still teaching Marx in the Anglophone world were slim pickings; those few who did were easily sidelined as aging dinosaurs. Thinking people—even people thinking critically—suddenly reduced Marx’s complex thought to a series of caricatures; a hammer and sickle going-out-of-business-sale was in motion and increasingly Marx was being dispatched to the dustbin of history.
But then, bit by bit, from the late 1990s onwards, around the time of the East Asian and Latin American crises, the big freeze began to thaw somewhat. Marx’s bad rap gave way to a fresh reincarnation, to a revisionism in which his thought is taken to be more relevant than ever before: wrong, needless to say, about the revolutionary hopes of the working class, whose ranks are fast disappearing anyway and whose dreams of revolution tumbled down along with those giant statues of Lenin; yet right about the perils and crises of capitalism. Condé Nast’s glossy New Yorker magazine embraced this kind of reasoning back in 1997, hailing “The Return of Karl Marx.” Marx, the article claimed, lives on as a savvy “student of capitalism, and that is how he should be judged.”1
These days, it’s this sort of residual Marxism that prevails, if it prevails at all, a Marxism reduced to a rather effete framework for analyzing bourgeois political economy—a Marxism that helps keep World Bank and assorted financial bigwigs on their toes. To a certain degree, this is the Marxism that continues to be peddled by skeptics and believers alike. Even those who invoke Marxism as a theory of social change adopt a mode of thinking that pivots on the notion of critique, on a critical analysis that is often overly economic and technical, frequently rendered wooden by arcane debates amongst its aficionados. The net result is a Marxism that’s systematic yet sterile, rigorous yet stilted, a Marxism much too boring to appeal to younger people, to a post-Seattle generation of radicals—even a post-post-Seattle generation who still want to change the world. Instead, Magical Marxism will be more fresh-faced and inquisitive, perhaps even more naive; it will be leaky not seamless, seeing possibilities and posing questions afterwards, mobilizing around instinct as much as intellect. It comes without a gray bushy beard. Many young people have no difficulty grasping why workers get ripped off and how capital accumulates in the hands of the wealthy. They know capitalism rarely lives up to its promises, to its supposed potential. Yet knowing this already means that they want more, want more from Marxism for inspiring their activism.
What’s interesting about my generation of Marxists—forty-something Marxists—is how few of us there are. Prominent Marxists today seem to be a lot older, ex-hippies and Yippies and SDSers, those who came of age during the 1960s. Younger folk, younger left-leaning scholars and activists a generation down from me, perhaps even two generations down, are, on the other hand, often fazed by Marxism. If they’re into critical theory, it’s to Foucault, Derrida, and other “post-Marxist” thinkers they’ll turn. If they’re active, they’ll likely be apart of a new-New Left—an array of disparate autonomous organizations like Global Exchange, the Ruckus Society, Critical Mass, and Reclaim the Streets, comprising young footloose campaigners against the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization; then there are environmentalists with Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and Rainforest Action Network; and still more battle against genetically modified foods and struggle for local organic food systems, fight for the preservation of indigenous rights and peasant democracy movements, or are black-masked anarchists and free-spirit rebels with a cause; all these people, however, are much more likely to root for Che or the Zapatistas than for Karl Marx.
The generational rift between the “used” New Left and the new-New Left is apparent, as are their organizational platforms and ideological bases. Marrying Marxism with this new school of post-Seattle activism remains very challenging, especially for sustaining resistance to neo-liberalism and against the corporatization of everyday life. Interestingly, my generation’s Marxism is a tale of two Marxisms, because we’re both young and old enough to have our feet in both camps: we understand the need to read Capital as well as the desire to put bricks through Starbucks’ windows; we forty-somethings understand the political purchase of sober critique and slightly mad destructive acts.
I was eight years old in 1968. I was a product of the 1970s and inherited the ’60s generation’s failings more than its successes. Growing up in drab, working-class Liverpool, I came of age with punk rock and in 1976 left school with barely enough qualifications to allow me access to a series of dead-end and deadening clerical jobs down at Liverpool’s docks. It was an era when things were falling apart, when people were leaving the city, when companies were folding. I suppose I was lucky to be in work. I remember entering the labor market just as a new band cut a record, “Anarchy in the UK,” which sounded fun, sounded good, seemed the right path to follow. Besides, the band’s lead singer, Johnny Rotten, was practically the same age as me. He said he didn’t know what he wanted, but knew what to do: “I wanna destroy, what’s the point!” The refrain struck not just as a line from a song; it was more a political anthem, something I endorsed, perhaps even personified. The 1970s was a decade of lostness and crises and breakdowns, and when the Sex Pistols said there’s NO FUTURE! NO FUTURE FOR YOU! I sort of believed them.
This anarchic spirit of dissatisfaction, of plague-on-your-house radicalism, has never really left me; I’m sure I’m not alone, that my generational peers feel it too. It was an impulse that actually brought me to Marxism, got tempered by Marxism, was softened by Marxism, a decade after I’d heard the Sex Pistols’ NO FUTURE clarion call; and it was reading Marx during the UK miners’ strike, and during Militant’s grip over Liverpool’s municipal politics,2 that I began to believe there could be a future, that spontaneous destruction didn’t have to be self-destruction, that it could be channeled intelligently, used to dramatize sensitive Marxist thought and activism.
One of the first Marxist texts I remember trying to read, trying to grapple with, was a 1960s classic: One Dimensional Man by the German émigré Herbert Marcuse, whose Hegelian-Freudian-Marxism saw a sinister “Total Administration” possessing the body and minds of everyday people, pacifying dissent, and instilling in them a delusional “happy consciousness.”3 Back in 1964, Marcuse claimed that the Total Administration permeated all reality; it didn’t. But it almost did in the 1980s and certainly does now, circa 2010: it exists in defense laboratories, in executive offices, in governments, in machines, among timekeepers, managers, and efficiency experts, in mass communications, in publicity agencies, in multinational corporations and supranational organizations, in schools and universities. Via these consenting means, said Marcuse, all opposition is liquidated or else absorbed; all potential for sublimation, for converting sexual energies into political energies (and vice versa) is repressed and desublimated. The Reality Principle vanquishes the Pleasure Principle, convincing people that Reality is the only principle.
The other staple read from those long lost days was Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, from 1967, discovered quite by chance on a very dull wet day in Liverpool’s “News from Nowhere” cooperative bookstore.4 And even though I didn’t get it all at first, bit by bit, thesis by thesis, I devoured it, and it devoured me, helping me learn why, exactly, I felt so ill suited for a normal life; the lesson would never be forgotten. What I loved about Debord back then is something I still love: his completely uncompromising radicalism—as well as his lyric poetry.
It was several years later that I got hooked on Marx himself, because then I was at college as a second-chance student, a “mature student,” taking a class on Marx’s Capital given by the eminent Marxist geographer David Harvey. Discovering Marx also revealed to me a passion for studying I never knew I had, one which hadn’t been encouraged at school, a passion for learning and for reading theory. Harvey was (and still is) a master theoretician, and went through volume one of Marx’s great book with a fine toothcomb, meticulously line-by-line, chapter-by-chapter, explaining its dense method of inquiry and complex mode of presentation probably better than Marx himself could have explained.5
Ten years on again, in 1999, just as Seattle’s streets smoldered during demos against a World Trade Organization meeting, when not a few windows of Starbucks were reduced to shards, I taught my own class on Marx’s Capital at Clark University in the United States, to a small group of impatient radical students, to those who’d inherited my generation’s failings.6 On the front page of the “syllabus” I reproduced an enlarged version of a postcard of Marx, his great gray mane superimposed onto a famous shot of Marlon Brando from The Wild One, of Johnny clad in biker’s leather jacket. Karl, whattya rebelling against? Whaddya got? Very few partaking students had read Marx before, and fewer still had seen Brando’s film from the early 1950s. But everybody in class soon agreed that Marx’s analysis was brilliantly expressed and ominously familiar. The participants knew how those smug prophets of globalization closely follow Marx’s prognosis, forever exerting their despotism over labor at the workplace at the same time as they champion, in daily life, the anarchy of unregulated markets. The entire globe seems to dance to the demands and caprices of capital, while “it converts the worker into a crippled monstrosity through the suppression of a whole world of productive drives and inclinations ... The individual himself is divided up, transformed into the automatic motor of a detail operation.”7 You only have to ask any bank-teller, factory worker, clerk, hamburger-flipper or hired hand how this detailed operation feels, and what this despotism and market anarchy really means.
Students were looking at Marx with both fresh eyes and a healthy disdain for free-market mystification. They were also practically energized, inspired by the participation that seemed to be gathering steam back then; people were joining hands again, and direct action was alive and apparently quite well; not only in Seattle, but in Washington, in Genoa, and in Quebec City, especially as the batons flailed and the tear gas swirled. The streets were getting politicized, radicalized, filling in the void left by institutional politics; a more militant form of contestation was taking hold, mixing disciplined high-tech organizing with rambunctious carnivalesque spontaneity.
It was, that is, until September 11, 2001, when two planes sailed into the World Trade Center and 2,800 people lost their lives in a spectacular act of insanity, a tragic loss, and a disaster for New York, but a gift-horse for the Bush administration. Suddenly, bombs rained down on Afghanistan, later on Iraq; and then a new round of neo-conservative revanchist politics took hold against a backdrop of “get Osama Bin Laden”; almost overnight it dowsed post-Seattle political passions. In fact, a “new imperialism” was taking hold, characterized by what David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession,” a giant jamboree of looting and fraud, force and finagling, putting a twenty-first-century Bushian spin on Marx’s theory of “primitive accumulation.”8
Too many examples abound to doubt Harvey’s thesis, each with their own place-specific particularities, yet signaling everywhere fresh terrains for profitable speculation and market expansion: asset-stripping through mergers and acquisitions, corporate fraud, credit and stock manipulation, raiding of pension funds, biopiracy, massive “corporatization and privatization of hitherto public assets, to say nothing of the wave of privatization of water and public utilities that has swept the world.”9 Meanwhile, the
rolling back of regulatory frameworks designed to protect labor and the environment from degradation has entailed the loss of rights. The reversion of common property rights won through years of hard class struggle to the private domain has been one of the most egregious of all policies of dispossession pursued in the name of neo-liberal orthodoxy.10
What has likewise been inaugurated is “the death of politics,” the death of politics as we once knew it, just when it seemed to be getting going, just when political subjects were voicing their discontent out on the streets, arguing and shouting in the public agora. Dissent and malcontent henceforth have no agora in which to be heard; the agora is walled off, privatized, managed by a private security company, subcontracted at the behest of some faceless corporation. Now, there’s no place left where people can discuss realities that concern them, no place where they can be free of the crushing presence of mass media. Now, too, state and economy have congealed into an indistinguishable unity, managed by spin-doctors, spin-doctored by managers. Technocrats placate through anodyne consensus and broker disagreement—if there is anything still resembling disagreement. Now everybody is at the mercy of the expert or the specialist, and the most useful expert is the one who best serves his master.
With consummate skill, ruling elites have manufactured consent, organized ignorance of what is about to happen, and, immediately afterwards, the forgetting of whatever has been understood. The present is all that matters. In fashion, in music, everything has come to a halt: you must forget what came before, or else reinvent it as merchandise. Meanwhile, it’s no longer acceptable to believe in the future. All usurpers, as Guy Debord says in his Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, usually have a common aim: “to make us forget that they have only just arrived.”11 And, seemingly above all else,
our perfect democracy constructs its own inconceivable foe: terrorism. Its wish is to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results. The history of terrorism is written by the state; it is therefore instructive. People can certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to persuade them that, compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.12
With barely half a century behind it, Debord says in Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, “spectacular” society—spectacular for all the wrong reasons—has become even more powerful, perfecting its media extravaganzas, raising a whole generation who know nothing else and who are molded by its laws. In different circumstances, he’d have considered himself altogether satisfied with his first work on this subject from 1967, and left others to consider future developments. But, Debord claimed, in the present situation, in which his darkest prognostications have been outstripped, it seemed unlikely anyone else would do it.
More than ever do we need not only a new politics but a new politics that has a touch of the magical, that brews up some new radical moonshine, a new potion for stirring up our critical concepts, for making us practically intoxicated, that dreams the unimaginable, that goes beyond merely what is, beyond all accepted rules and logic, a politics that plays by its own rules, rules that have little to do with rationality or economic reason. In García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Macondo’s patriarch, José Arcadio Buendia, says he doesn’t understand the sense of a political contest in which adversaries agree upon the rules.13 I’m inclined to concur: agreeing upon the rules necessarily means engagement on their terms, which predictably means cooptation, institutionalization, defeat; moderation means losing even before you’ve begun to get going. As The Coming Insurrection recently voiced: “The specter of political representation has come to a close. From left to right, it’s the same nothingness striking the pose of an emperor or a savior ... We’re beginning to suspect that it’s only against voting itself that people continue to vote.”14 So why not aim higher, why not reach for the stars, think vaster, and engineer something wilder? Perhaps the gulf between the professional world of politics and “the political” can be bridged magically, by a wilder, more magical activism? Perhaps this can prevent us from freefalling into the vacuous political chasm widening before us? Or perhaps down in this chasm, we magical mischief makers can rise up together?
In The Book of Embraces, another Latin American scribe, Eduardo Galeano, celebrates “continual rebirth.”15 The book is a suggestive parable for progressives, because through it Galeano keeps hope alive, within the pages, within the heart; he drinks another round of rum with Miguel Mármol to commemorate, or corummerate, the fiftieth anniversary of the latter’s execution by fascist forces. Miguel, you see, has undergone eleven deaths and eleven resurrections during the course of his combative life; he says that now, each morning, he’s in the habit of getting up before dawn, and, as soon as his eyes are open, “sings and dances and hops around, which neighbors below don’t like one bit.” As the rum flows, they both propose a new venture: why not, they say, found “Magical Marxism: one half reason, one half passion, and a third half mystery”? “Not a bad idea,” says Miguel.16
Not a bad idea indeed: Magical Marxism will try to turn these three halves into a whole, emphasizing the passionate and mysterious halves of a reality pushed beyond all reason—or nearly beyond. Magical Marxism explicitly reaches out towards the utopian, towards an affective politics of hope, at the same time as it delves into the heady subcontinent of dream, of latent desire; it will take to flight and fight like a latter-day Colonel Aureliano Buendia—who, remember, asserted to the death, with a fiery passion, a magical liberal cause. Marxism and Marxists have little choice these days but to do as the colonel did: to sneak about though narrow trails of permanent subversion, trails that reveal themselves in both theory and practice. Yet there are some pistes of magical possibility and mystery we can map out anew, conjure up and conceive in our imagination and then struggle to make real.
Marxism has a prodigious magical power to invent, to create its own values and ethics—an ethics higher, better and more durable than the hollow values that insist upon the sacrosanctity of free-market individualism. Marxism, in short, has at its disposal the power of struggle, of struggling to invent what Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire deemed a new “poetry of the future.”17 The social revolution of the twenty-first century, paraphrasing one of Marx’s most vital political insights, “cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future.” Those who partake in revolution, Marx cautions, must criticize themselves constantly, come back to what has already been accomplished in order to begin afresh, “deriding with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies of their earlier attempts,” until, he says, “the situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible.”18
The double determination of poetry and the future is legion in Magical Marxism. Not least because it’s best adherents are perhaps lyric poets, people who don’t necessarily write poetry but who somehow lead poetic lives, who literally become-poets, who become-intense, as Deleuze might have said, who internalize powerful feelings and poetic values, spontaneous values with no holds bared. The key point here is that Marxists make life a poem, adopt a creative as well as critical attitude towards living.19 Walter Benjamin, for one, saw nothing so magical for finding an exit to a one-way street as the “profane illumination,” as thinking about a new ideal, as dreaming in an ecstatically sober state; a “dialectical fairytale,” Benjamin called it, something which disrupts “sclerotic ideals of freedom” and pushes the poetic life to its utmost limits of possibility—which is to say, towards a poetic politics. Subcomandante Marcos, in the jungle of Mexico’s Chiapas, likewise advocates a poetic politics; ditto French and Caribbean surrealists during the 1940s, intellectuals like André Breton and Benjamin Péret but equally the Martinique Marxist poet Aimé Césaire, who, in the pages of journal Tropiques, claimed that “true civilizations” are “poetic shocks: the shock of the stars, of the sun, the plant, the animal, the shock of the round globe, of the rain, of the light, the shock of life, the shock of death.”20 Politics should be like poetry: something hot, the voice of hotness from the margins, libertine excess, anti-science, red-hot bubbling altermarxisme.
Poetry, accordingly, becomes something ontological for Magical Marxists, a state of Being- and Becoming-in-the-world, the invention of life and the shrugging off of tyrannical forces that are wielded over that life. Poetic lives destabilize accepted notions of order and respectability, of cool rationality and restraint. Magical Marxism shows little restraint to the status quo, and proclaims what André Breton and the surrealists proclaimed in the 1920s: the power of absolute nonconformity and marvelous unreality. It’s a credo that helps propel Magical Marxism into the future, a future invented out of a spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling, of dragging present reality along with it, of leaping across the ontological gap between the here and the there, between the now and the time to come.
Plato, that ancient Greek ideologue, was the first to recognize the danger of dreamy poets in our midst, disrupting the dignified harmony of a “naturally ordered” society. In Book Ten of The Republic, he rightly reminds us how poets arouse the part of the spirit that destroys good reason, implanting an “evil constitution in the soul of each individual,” terribly debilitating if it reaches audiences in the public square, since there it can incite mass disorder and civic disobedience. What are basic ingredients for Magical Marxists—desire, dream, and pleasure—thus have no place in any Platonic republic: “If you receive the pleasure-seasoned Muse of song and epic, pleasure and pain will be kings in your city instead of law.”21
Magical Marxism will attempt to mimic the fantasy world of Magical Realism and will posit an intellectual and political project in which resistance entails a poetic transformation of reality, in which power isn’t so much taken as neutralized, in which society isn’t so much overthrown as reinvented. Magical Realism has as its muse actual reality, yet converts this often stark reality into fantasy, into fantastic and phantasmal subjective visions that become more real than objective reality itself. These visions are like little fibs that bizarrely tell the truth, that invent new truths or lay bare truths we somehow relate to, almost instinctively, almost without being able to see them. Indeed, few Magical Realist truths are measurable or quantifiable. Who could believe, as readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude are asked to believe, that people are born with tails or are followed around by dainty yellow butterflies? And who levitates up to heaven or habitually lives to well over a hundred?
The insomnia plague that afflicts the inhabitants of Macondo is another weird, magical realist construct in One Hundred Years of Solitude. The insomnia plague meant not only that nobody could sleep, but also, when it struck, that nobody ever needed to sleep. At first, everyone is happy in this jetlagged, hallucinogenic state and no one is alarmed because there is always so much work to do and barely enough time to do it. “If we don’t ever sleep again, so much the better,” José Arcadio Buendia says. “That way we can get more out of life” (p. 43). But soon people traipse about busying themselves with all sorts of inane activity and converse endlessly with each other, fidgeting around and telling the same old jokes over and over again, jokes that nobody seems to remember having already been told before, sometimes just minutes ago. So it goes for a while, until there are a few in Macondo who slowly begin to yearn for sleep again. Not so much because they need sleep, nor out of fatigue: more out of a desperate nostalgia for dreams. And yet, with the insomnia plague, very slowly, ever so progressively and subtly, the insomniac forgets about dreaming and, in the end, loses their memory entirely. All that now persists is an eternal present, a contaminated present, a repressive situation accepted as a perfectly natural reality, as the only reality.
In Macondo, the insomnia plague was transmitted by mouth, by contaminated food and drink, and there’s a sense in which processed food is doing the same today, deadening our ability to remember where anything comes from, offering us instant salty and sugary stimulation that maintains us in a state of soporific wakefulness. Meanwhile, mass media disinformation has us sink almost irrevocably into a quicksand of forgetfulness, rendering us decrepit well before we’ve grown old, turning us into people who no longer remember even the recent past or have any capacity to see beyond what immediately is, what exists right in front of our noses, often on some banal, two-dimensional high-tech screen. Our bodies don’t feel fatigue even as our minds switch off. We’re exhilarated by the dizzy delights of endless work, of being permanently online, of talking endlessly on portable telephones, of perpetual TV with hundreds of channels, of endless news and endless sound-bites, endless stores that never close, endless commodities along endless supermarket aisles, of throwaway “serial dreams” we know are there, there at a price. Our dreams are cold wide-awake realities created by somebody else, at our expense.
Of course, we’ve always had our Colonel Aureliano Buendias who, inspired by strange gypsies, have been hell bent on staving off the insomnia plague, who’ve upheld the power of dreams, dreams of a new future, of new Macondos arising out of damp swampland. Notwithstanding them, the insomnia plague has been persistent and recalcitrant and perhaps it’s only now, only quite recently, in this crisis-ridden age, that the plague is beginning to wear off, that we’re prepared to fight against our memory loss, against our inability to dream of the future. Perhaps our contaminated present is giving way at last, and we’re on the cusp of a new era in which people might even dream again, and which maybe, just maybe, might become a magical one?
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud says things are always better “slept on.”22 I want to use this metaphor to emphasize the power of dreams, of dream-works and political wish-fulfillment. For Freud, the mental forces contesting “the reality principle” operate in the unconscious, in a non-repressive realm where fantasy and desire retain a high degree of freedom. Needless to say, the reality principle tries to bring this free will into line, because, like all ruling powers, it insists that fantasy and pleasure are both useless and untrue. Reality obeys only the laws of reason never the language of dream. Yet imagine a Marxism scripted by the language of dream, a Marxism that valorizes tabooed images of freedom. Imagine a Magical Marxist pleasure principle.
To what extent, though, can anything like this be true, actually be real? Well, that depends upon what you dream up, what your dream-thought and dream-content bestows upon wide-awake reality, how it re-appropriates that reality. And that depends upon your imagination: whether you see in order to believe, or whether you believe in order to see. It’s incredible, for instance, how much of the bourgeois order is based upon fantasy, upon a dream world in which ruling fantasies become true because those who rule really believe they’re true, because they make these fantasies come true. Through active will and not a little force, the bourgeoisie turns its economic pleasure principle into a political reality principle, and vice versa.
Take the greatest bourgeois fantasy of all, the world’s biggest pipedream we all know is somehow true: the stock market. How much of that is predicated on fantasy and wishful-images of the future, on hope and desire, on the capacity of rampant imagination to create a purely fictitious looking-glass realm of riches? Here, participants recognize such a reality because they believe in it, because they see what they believe. Moreover, they do so despite linguistic differences and national frontiers; they speak a “standard language” everybody understands, have a common convergence, without forsaking their own native tongues, often never relinquishing their specific currencies. What an amazing human utopia this is, what an effective transnational localism! What a pity the left can’t dream up its own equivalent fictitious life-form and then make it real.
True, this financial system is a reality necessary for the functioning of capitalist society, for collapsing temporal and spatial barriers to accumulation, for lubricating the free flow of capital between different spheres of production and exchange, for financing costly “fixed capital” assets (like factories, warehouses, offices, and infrastructural developments); true, too, this fantasy world of predicting financial futures and creating imaginary stock ahead of actual commodity production is very risky. And for sure the system periodically comes unstuck—has to come unstuck—and crises prevail for a while. Optimism with regard to ever-rising stock values becomes what Marx calls “the fountainhead of all manner of insane forms.”23 Marx knows that if all connection with the actual expansion process of capital is “completely lost,” then “the conception of capital as something with automatic self-expansion properties is thereby strengthened.” At that point, he says, “the accumulation of debts appears as an accumulation of capital.” At that point, “everything is doubled and trebled and transformed into a mere phantom of the imagination”;24 and at “the height of this distortion,” without any solidity other than massive amounts of credit money and fictitious capital circulating in the economy, the bourgeois edifice crumbles, revealed as “wholly illusory.”25
But let’s face it, this phantasmal system comes unstuck a lot less frequently than it should, and much less often than its critics would expect, or hope for. And even when it does come unstuck it has a handy habit of picking itself up, getting itself bailed out, usually by the state or through greater exploitation of labor. The reasons why it breaks down so relatively infrequently relate perhaps to Marx’s buzzwords “mere” and “wholly”: if the system becomes merely phantasmal or wholly illusory, then sooner or later it brushes up against a hardnosed reality principle, just as the realist element always conditions the magical imagination of somebody like García Márquez.
I say all this, however, as our financial system continues to stretch its credibility, and our credulity, to the limit: fictitious capital now sets the tone for real capital, pioneers the utopian frontiers of the possible, of future capital accumulation. Now it’s as if the fictitious realm drags along the real realm. Isn’t this a magnificent model for any Magical Marxism? Wouldn’t the magical side of Marxism operate in much the same way as fictitious capital operates for the bourgeoisie? “Real” materialism would be dragged along by the will (and hope) of “fictitious” idealism, inventing a new basis for a more advanced, higher realism, raising the glass ceiling of the possible, of the believable, of real reality.
Revolt, too, can (and does) circulate like fictitious money capital: almost illusory, passing across frontiers and drifting through global space, often through cyberspace, exchanging itself, getting converted into other denominations of place-specific radicalism. Thus the materiality of revolt has an immaterial quality: it’s a feeling, a structure of feeling, a distant solidarity, a “scream” (as John Holloway puts it), a faint wish, a weak hope that inspires, stimulates, and angers, that makes people want to organize and act where they are, any way they can. It’s the rumor of the Zapatistas’ struggle in the bush inspiring faraway movements in urban wildernesses; that’s how fictitious revolt gets valorized, how its circulation from one moment to another can become a material future position, a grounded synthesis of the totality of particular moments. Specific campaigns here need to circulate in the overall process of global revolt the way capital circulates for Marx, as described in his introduction to the Grundrisse: as unique moments in a general unity of process, as dialectical movements undergoing continuous “quantity-quality” change. This image gives new meaning to the notion that capital is in fact labor, that labor is capital, production is consumption, consumption is production, etc. The circulation of immaterial revolt is a factor of production in concrete subversion.
If you look closely at Marx’s analysis of the credit system, or at any discussion of today’s financial system in the bourgeois press, much of the terminology resembles that of Ernst Bloch, our greatest utopian Marxist. Everywhere you encounter notions of “future positions,” everything is anticipated, estimated, projected and promised, everything is future revenue, future exchange, all is intangible and nominal. In this system, we locate, from the other side of the political spectrum, our most creative and indefatigable political impulse: the principle of hope. In the 1930s, as Nazi flames engulfed continental Europe, Bloch undertook a mammoth study of what the Magical Marxist spirit might be. In our own war-torn times, he bequeaths us “wishful images” of the future, and a lot of what he wrote sounds like a great Homeric epic poem, a delirious siesta in a Márquezian hammock, full of Eldorados and Edens, of Münchhausen Macondos from a distant planet we call the earth-to-come, the one we’ve never yet seen. (Bloch loved to juggle with utopian ideas of the “Not-Yet-Conscious.”) Bloch’s magical mystery tour emphasizes invention, riding the sorceress’s broomstick, engineering new concepts rather than discovering them, inventing a new world in which the “anticipatory element” guarantees its eventual realization—just like the world’s financial markets.
It’s in our magical wish-images and dream-thoughts that Marxists might valorize the principle of hope, in the realm of the Not-Yet-Conscious. All of which suggests that we “Not Get Real.” By “not getting real,” I mean a refusal, a denial, of the “real world,” of the reality imposed upon people across the globe. As such, Magical Marxism, as I’ll construe it here, is no longer a Marxist “science,” a science of exposing real truth hiding behind false appearance; it’s rather about inventing other truths, about expanding the horizons of possibility, about showing how people can turn a project of life into a life-project that blooms. In a nutshell, the thesis I want to explore in this book is that Magical Marxism is about invention not discovery, about irrationality not rationality. There’s no fetishism anymore, no absolute truth hidden behind innumerable fictions and false images of the world: Magical Marxism means creating another fantasy in light of the ruling fantasy; its critical power doesn’t come from criticism but from an ability to disrupt and reinvent, to create desire and inspire hope. Here the Marxist earth spirit voyages beyond science, beyond the state, beyond debates about the “working class,” into the realm of the inauthentic, into a paradise we know can only prevail as a paradise lost.
Magical Marxism airbrushes the role of the working class in social change, and, as I hope to show, does so for a good reason. Suffice it to say here that Marx set himself the task of probing the possibilities of overthrowing the economic and political system we call “capitalism.” Downgrading the “historical mission” of the working class is not, then, to downgrade the historical mission of Marxism: it’s to suggest that, above all else, Marxism is a theory and practice of how to live beyond capitalism, of how to undermine capitalism, of how social solidarity is forged between assorted people, irrespective of whether they belong to the “working class” or not. Activists around the world, as André Gorz has forcefully argued, don’t necessarily identify themselves with “work” anymore, nor with others in the act of work. Neither do these people want to empower themselves in work, seize control of work. Rather, they want to free themselves from work itself, to reject the nature, content and (non-) meaning of work, as well as the traditional strategies and organizational forms of the workers’ movement.26 Once upon a time, labor movement rank and filers discovered one another in the factory; nowadays, solidarity and battle lines have opened out on a global scale, out into the totality of social space, while cutting deeper into everyday life. Now, the struggle is about taking back and redefining non-work life, about everyday anti-capitalism and post-capitalist communality.
“Magic plays an immense role in everyday life,” the Marxist visionary of everyday life, Henri Lefebvre, claimed back in 1947, “be it in emotional identification and participation with other people or in the thousand little rituals and gestures used by every person, every family, every group.”27 For Lefebvre, everyday life is, on the one hand, the realm colonized by the commodity, undermined by all kinds of alienation; yet, at the same time, it’s the primal arena for meaningful social change—the only arena—“the inevitable starting point for the realization of the possible.” “The most extraordinary things are also the most everyday,” says Lefebvre, bringing the two domains together, teasing out the radical dialectical force of “the magical” and “the everyday.” So when, in November 2008, the French DST secret police invaded Tarnac, a sleepy village nestled in Limousin’s Millevaches plateau, cracking down on a group of young “subversives” who’d transformed a moribund locality into a vibrant community, re-energizing communal life, giving it a convivial atmosphere of resistance, one can ask: is the state’s fear not so much of “terrorism” as of people’s desire to transform everyday life, to live differently, beyond institutional strictures, beyond a capitalism as we know it? Is it the re-conquest of everyday territory, superimposed upon the state’s cartography, that gives Tarnac’s activism its edge, its threatening logic, its potential magic?
Lefebvre knows plenty about the magical everyday; so do the surrealists, who spotted the poetic force of everyday objects, of everyday encounters. Yet for the surrealists, “the marvelous” is frequently found in hallucinogenic moments, often beyond (and below) everyday life, in umbrellas and lobsters, in sewing machines and on dissecting tables. Indeed, as Alejo Carpentier, a pioneering magical realist and founder member of the Cuban Communist Party, once said: such is a “poverty of the imagination.”28 What’s more unsettling, more imaginative, Carpentier thinks, is when the magical isn’t fabricated, isn’t self-consciously exaggerated, but instead is pursued in reality itself, in the strangely commonplace. “The marvelous begins to be unmistakably marvelous,” Carpentier says, “when it arises from an unexpected alteration of reality.”29 We find magic in
the unexpected richness of reality or in an amplification of the scale and categories of reality, perceived with particular intensity by virtue of an exaltation of the spirit that leads it to a kind of extreme state. The phenomenon of the marvelous presupposes faith. Those who do not believe in saints cannot cure themselves with the miracles of saints, nor can those who are not Don Quixotes enter, body, soul, and possessions, into the world of Amadís of Gaul or Tirant le Blanc.30
This passage from Carpentier is important for the construction of Magical Marxism because it emphasizes the concreteness of the magical state, an idealism that isn’t hyper-idealism, a transformative politics that isn’t just a politics of occultism: the realm of the magical is a raw, latent, and omnipresent reality before one’s own eyes, awaiting exalted alteration, there for believers to take. It’s curious, for example, how practically all the magical realism of One Hundred Years of Solitude occurs within the four walls of Ursula Buendia’s house. Everything flows through this building: all the extravagant binges and pernicious wars, all the inventions and amorous affairs, all the alchemy and magic, all Colombian history and geography. (Earlier drafts of One Hundred Years of Solitude actually bore the title The House.) That’s presumably why García Márquez always reckoned his appetite for fantasy and magic was only ever whetted by ordinary daily life. We Magical Marxists can take stuff from this: for us, it’s everyday life that’s the stake and staging of Magical Marxist politics; everyday life is the realm of decommodification and remagification, the new twenty-first-century dialectic of enlightenment.
One of the unfortunate things about contemporary capitalist society is how work life clashes with everyday life, how the former scuffs up against the latter, dislocates wide-awake time as it creates dislocations within the self. For the bulk of the world’s population, working life is dead life, a meaningless waste of time, the realm of alienation and watching the clock, of yearning for weekends, for a vacation, for retirement. You work so you can afford to stay in work, afford the expenses that work entails, afford to be located near to (or far from) work. As it self-perpetuates its own nothingness, work is the realm of anti-magic, a nightmare that weighs heavily on the brain of the living, in which one assumes one’s role in the detailed division of labor, when one obediently fulfils one’s duty as abstract labor, as labor in general, as labor that’s quantifiable, measurable, indifferent to content, indifferent to the nature and capacities of concrete people.
Magic is concrete: its arena is real life. Magic is an imaginary representation of one’s real conditions of life. It breeds outside the tumult of capitalist modernity, beyond its cacophony of screeching automobiles and gridlocked traffic, of alarms and buzzers, of ringing and technological gadgets that get in your face, that gnaw away inside your brain, that stifle your imagination and prevent you from dreaming. Magic flourishes when everyday life is free life, time off work, time of anti-work, or of work in its non-money-form. As the young Marx voiced in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts:
[a] worker does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. Hence the worker feels himself only when he is not working; when he is working he does not feel himself. He is at home when he is not working, and not at home when he is working.31
And yet, neither are workers really at home even when they’re not working, given that work and home, production and reproduction—the totality of daily life—have been subsumed, colonized and invaded by exchange value. In leisure time, workers become consumers, mere bearers of money; private life thereby becomes the domain of the advertisement, of fashion, of convenience and processed foods, of pop stars and soap operas, of dishwashers and tumble dryers. Boundaries between economic, political, and private life have pretty much dissolved. All consumable time and space are raw material for new products, for new commodities, for extended money relations.
By contrast, the realm of magic isn’t the kingdom of homo economicus or homo industrialis, but of homo ludens, of man and woman the player, an idea so dear to Henri Lefebvre’s ludic concept of what everyday life ought to be. Everyday politics, too, necessitates fun, means creating a stir and kicking up a fuss; play nourishes politics just as political people should be themselves homo ludens. The idea harks back to Johan Huizinga, whose 1938 text bearing the same stamp affirmed the vitality of the “play element” in human culture. There’s a primordial quality about play, Huizinga said, something radically at odds with seriousness. Play is both in and beyond “real” life, steps out of everyday life from within everyday life, and enters an ephemeral sphere of activity, where it takes on its own magical character and often expresses freedom and joy.
Play subserves our culture, Huizinga thought, satisfying emotional and psychological needs, fostering “play-communities” and “play-grounds,” maintaining aesthetic balance and reproductive interests. At the same time, it also subverts culture, operates beyond its “normal” limits, within a circumscribed world, a hallowed realm that can undermine the seriousness of everyday life, and the earnestness of working life. “In this sphere of sacred play,” said Huizinga, “the child and the poet are at home with the savage.”32 Despite all this, Huizinga nonetheless wondered: “To what extent does the civilization we live in still develop in play-forms? How far does the play-spirit dominate the lives of those who share that civilization? The 19th century had lost many of the play-elements so characteristic of former ages. Has this leeway been made up or has it increased?”33 The answer, Huizinga knew, was unequivocal: it has surely increased. “More and more,” Huizinga lamented, “the sad conclusion forces itself upon us that the play-element in culture has been on the wane ever since the 18th century, when it was in full flower. Civilization today is no longer played, and even where it still seems to play it is false play—I had almost said, it plays false, so that it becomes increasingly difficult to tell where play ends and non-play begins.”34 To lose the play-element, however, is to lose a part of ourselves, to limit ourselves somehow, to diminish our imagination, to wish away magic, to reduce its scope. “To be a social culture-creating force,” Huizinga insisted, “this play-element must be pure,” that is to say, purely magical.35
Magical Marxism, as we’ll see in the chapters to come, lodges itself somewhere within the interstices of a liberated time and liberated space, between the right to free time and the right to free space, a space of self-affirmation and “self-unfolding,” a space-time of autonomous activity, of intellectual, artistic, and practical endeavor. The political stakes are different today; a new radical Marxist politics must be invented, re-imagined, willy-nilly, by actors of many diverse stripes, by people who join hands, make friends, and who organize themselves around changing life. The extinction of political economy, Marx’s time-honored goal, is no longer a workplace affair: it’s a question of reclaiming the totality of everyday life—of work life and daily life, of filling it with joy and magic, with play and collective struggle, with dream and imagination, with a poetry of the future.
Might Marxism ever create in real life the magical everyday of that delirious utopia of Macondo? Returning to the utopian question years later, in 1982, at his Nobel lecture, García Márquez had this to say to those of us who assume our solitude is preordained and forever:
we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of a new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where peoples condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.36
As our second millennia insomnia plague begins to dissipate, this is one everyday dream-state I’ll happily toast and cradle in my sleep—in a hammock, somewhere warm and sunny, amid the yellow butterflies and little gold fishes...