Ben Watson Why Marx Matters To Artists This article was originally a talk given under the title

'Why Marx Matters To Artists' at the Kings College Society for the Study of Marxism on 14 March 2004 at the invitation of Kitty Spathia and Dan DiPaolo Many on the Left, including professed Marxists, believe literature and art are irrelevant to class struggle and the emancipation of the working class. Both the bourgeois press and its socialist opposition tend to push 'culture' towards the back of their publications, a kind of shadow to the bright light of political relevance. However, this betrays a superficial understanding of Marx, and - worse - a definition of politics which conforms to the conventions of bourgeois journalism and to the rules of class society. In fact, the revolutionary social developments outlined by Marx actually do away with the distinction between art and politics, or between individual subjectivity and the socially 'objective'. Recognising this is electric for artists, just as it is for anyone exploited and oppressed by capitalism. At the pulsing heart of Marx's writing is a poet's scorn for bourgeois politicians - those 'experts' who believe that regulating the capitalist economy and the relationship between nation states is the whole of politics. Nor did he subscribe to the traditional distinction between 'necessary' science and 'ornamental' literature - or to the Victorian sexual division of labour which underlies the distinction between hard science (business) and soft culture (domesticity). Capital uses Goethe and Shakespeare as primary sources for a scientific analysis of the money form, and one has only to read Yvonne Kapp's biography of Eleanor Marx, Marx's daughter, to realise how love of literature pervaded the Marx household. Eleanor Marx acted in Shakespeare and Ibsen plays and was a friend of George Bernard Shaw's. Eleanor was renowned as a public speaker at mass meetings of workers, and her theatrical training dovetailed completely. Marx's refusal of conventional, commonsense dualisms - the traditional roles of men and women, the individual and society, subject and object, philosophy and economics, politics and science, writing and action, work and creativity - is endlessly productive. His thinking creates a kind of turbulence at the level of the concept. Suddenly nothing can be taken for granted. Marxism is hence the opposite of what is taken to be politics at the Oxford Union or the Houses of Parliament, where the game is to outwit opponents by using concepts which are sacrosanct - the national interest, economic progress, democracy, liberty, the sanctity of childhood. In Marxism nothing is sacred because, as he says, all critical thinking begins with the criticism of religion , and the 'sacred' is a religious concept. This conceptual turbulence can make his writing appear inaccessible. However, when people start reading Marx for themselves, something explosive happens. This conceptual explosion is just as useful for artists as for those who define themselves as political thinkers or activists. Indeed, some socalled Marxism seems to be a way of defusing this potential - of reducing his subversive texts to a banal ideology, or system - rather than amplifying it, or communicating its subversive think-for-yourself contagion. In 1999, Francis Wheen's biography Karl Marx described a literary Marx. As a free-lance writer himself, Wheen saw Marx as a writer before anything else. For anyone introduced to Marx in the 1970s or 1980s, when Louis Althusser's structuralism was considered the essential introduction, this new Marx was most refreshing. Wheen revealed that as a 19year-old, Marx was so impressed with the comic novel Tristram Shandy (written in 1759 by Laurence Sterne), that he began his own emulation, Scorpio and Felix. Wheen shows that the young Marx's comical effects - which follow Sterne in debunking the perceptual philosophies of Locke and Hume, developing instead a kind of scurrilous, irreverent, profane, indecent, body-based materialism - anticipate some of the mature Marx's most celebrated remarks. Wheen's biography was published widely reviewed in the broadsheets. It's difficult to imagine it being written and published in the 1980s, when postmodernism had made Marx distinctly unfashionable. The collapse of the Communist Bloc meant that Marx was no longer perceived as a threat to liberal democracy. Liberals who wanted to criticise the New World Order initiated by George Bush Senior in the First Gulf War (1991) were beginning to find Marx useful. The establishment of MarxismLeninism as a Russian state ideology by Stalin in the early 1930s casts a long shadow over Marx's legacy. There is much disagreement over the young Marx's writings - at which point was he Hegelian, idealist, materialist, humanist and so on. Unable to appreciate intellectual development in its moving and real form, and seeking the safety of a correct dogma, some commentary on Marx breaks the revolutionary thrust of his thinking, and then distributes the fragments into various dry-as-dust 'isms', as inert and boring as funeral urns. The 'epistemological break' Althusser found in Marx's philosophical evolution is merely the most famous of these analytical travesties. This approach assumes the

'ism' - some pat philosophical position like realism or idealism or materialism - is more real than the thinking subject: a kind of academic idealism or depersonalisation which Marx opposed as vehemently as any poet. The observations which follow are an attempt to situate Marxist thought in actual people. Last Saturday at Conway Hall in London WC1, a memorial meeting was held for Al Richardson. Al Richardson was an indefatigable Marxist intellectual who died suddenly this year aged 61. Having been involved with the International Marxist Group and the Revolutionary Communist League in the 60s and 70s - he was part of the uprising in Paris in May '68 - Al observed that twentieth-century Marxism lacked a decent historical record. His definition of Marxism was a theory of working-class emancipation, and he had little time for academic versions. He founded the journal Revolutionary History in order to record the history of genuine Marxist political struggle all over the globe since the Russian Revolution. By 'genuine', I mean the politics which starts out from the proposition that the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class, that revolution means the seizure of the means of production by the working class, and that corralling socialism in single countries is a recipe for disater - as Stalin's 'socialism in one country' was for the Russian working class. Revolutionary History has now issued 12 volumes about revolutionary struggle in countries all over the world, and its standards of scholarship and the originality of its material - translations from French, German, Spanish, Greek and Vietnamese put most academic labour studies to shame. There were over a hundred people at Al Richardson's memorial meeting, but I wished more people knew about it and had attended. It was also a fantastic crashcourse in Marxism. Anyone who thought that Marxism was about Stalin, Mao and Ho Chi Minh standing at the head of triumphant red armies and reorganising society at the barrel of a gun would receive a shock. For all the people gathered in Conway Hall (except maybe Bob Pitt), after Trotsky's Left Opposition had been defeated in Russia in 1927, official Communism was transformed into an ideology for a new ruling class. In the Communist movement, genuine Marxist analysis and investigation was suppressed in favour of diktats from above, censorship and threats - while 'fellow travellers' used Stalinism to buttress their bourgeois ideas. One of the most graphic ways of understanding this transformation is David King's photo book The Commissar Vanishes (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1997). It shows how Stalin's elimination of the entire central committee of the Bolshevik Party which had achieved the Russian Revolution in 1917 was accompanied by a distortion of the historical record that beggars belief. King shows how a famous, widely-printed photograph of Lenin making a speech to troops outside the Bolshoi theatre in 1920 was cropped and then retouched to remove Trotsky. Even Hitler, with his grotesque fantasies about the world Jewish conspiracy, did not have to systematically obliterate and destroy so much historical evidence. Since Trotsky was the most vocal opponent of Stalin's counter-revolution, 'Trotskyism' is a handy name for that brand of Marxism which insists on historical truth, and which will have nothing to do with Marxism as an expedient ideology for state power and the re-emergence of class society with its mass armies, nuclear weapons, eco-devastation and social inequality. However, as was said a couple of times at Al Richardson's memorial meeting, if Trotskyism is pre-eminently a critique of Stalinism, then the demise of Stalinism threatens Trotskyism itself. Actually, the cult of names has something unMarxist about it. Marx said several times he was no Marxist , and Lenin strenuously opposed the personality cult. He even wanted monuments to the revolution of 1917 in the streets of Moscow to be temporary. The literal embalming of Lenin - and the Lenin cult, the notion of 'Marxism-Leninsm' as a state ideology - was a creation of Stalin's. It was Stalin in the 30s who inaugurated the practise of parading the portraits of the 'fathers of socialism' - Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin - on the 1 May in Red Square in Moscow. Quite how a country aiming atomic bombs at other countries could banner the slogan 'workers of the world unite!' was a paradox only the cynical manoeuvres of bourgeois Real Politik could justify. My own personal introduction to Marxism was via the writings of the Situationist International. I'd seen people selling socialist papers at town centres in the early 70s, but accepted the Labour Party's argument that if Harold Wilson's wage controls were broken by miners and car-workers, then the British economy would be wrecked. The only result of economic chaos I could envisage was the victory of fascist parties like the National Front. I therefore wouldn't buy a newspaper which said 'Pay the car workers!'. My complete ignorance of the history of fascism - the disastrous directions given German, Spanish and Chinese Communists by Stalin, the censorship of Trotsky's genuine Marxist analysis - only started to recede when I joined the Anti-Nazi League a year later, and began attending Socialist Workers Party meetings. However, it was reading Christopher Gray's Leaving the Twentieth Century, a selection of writings from Internationale Situationniste, which gave me my first experience of Marxist prose, of Marxims as a literary experience. Internationale Situationniste was published in Paris between 1958 and 1969 and emerged from an art milieu - the Parisian avantgarde with its manifestos and scandals - rather than any strand of Trotskyism. Indeed, the Situationists adopted the

anarchist position that the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion by the new Bolshevik regime in March 1921 showed that Trotsky valued state power over social revolution. Christopher Gray's collection was illustrated by Jamie Reid, who later provided graphics for the Sex Pistols. It came from a similar place: the pressing need for something relevant to the British situation, a communicative revolutionary style untrammelled by the old dogmas and fetishes which seemed to keep the left inaccessible, boring and split into endlessly warring factions. Revolutions are a kind of chromotography in which abstract political positions, by being put into action, are writ large and can be examined. However, the endless wrangling of anarchist and revolutionary groups over the details of the Russian Revolution sometimes suggests that action can only be taken by experts and historians. This is daft, because RMT members or Brixton inhabitants or anti-war students are not going to ask Al Richardson's permission before going on strike or rioting or demonstrating. Certainly, historical materialism is fully part of the Marxist method, and projects like Al Richardson's Revolutionary History are useful, perhaps essential, but Marx never took the position that establishing the historical record is enough. Or rather, he insisted that a true historical record is only possible if we understand the historical nature of the categories we use to think about the past. This means informing them with the most radical experience of our own times, which is that of the working class. Marx's revolutionary idea was that the emancipation of humanity from wage labour isn't just one beneficial reform among others, but a social transformation which could change the way we think. The political developments he was interested in were glimpses of the future in the present, and revolutionary theory could translate these glimpses into a total vision. My experiences in the Anti-Nazi League proved to me that Trotsky had the right ideas - his argument that uniting workingclass people to fight fascism is the only effective answer, that fascism needs to be fought by democratic methods that do not rely on either bourgeoius law or anarchist conspiracies. However, my disagreement with the Situationists over Trotsky don't prevent me appreciating the way they revived the philosophical fire of Marxism. The first years I spent in the SWP involved Rock Against Racism, a grass-roots campaign against fascism which promoted punk bands and reggae sound systems. It was for me a practical way of combinging my Trotskyist and Situationist politics. Meanwhile, the (Trotskyist) Workers Revolutionary Party denounced punk as 'fascist', and the Situationist ex-art students who sat at the back of the pub said Rock Against Racism was a 'spectacular diversion' and that 'real life was elsewhere': for me such purists miss the point. Frozen by dogma, they couldn't reach people desperately in need of leftwing and anti-fascist ideas. In the same way, I currently think it's important for Marxists to relate to anti-capitalism, the anti-war movement and the electoral party Respect. Marx's insistence on the working class should give one's politics an orientation in the real world, not an excuse to ignore it. However, part of that orientation is insisting on Marxism as something more than taking correct positions on 'political' issues as perceived by the bourgeois mass media. It is about contesting the narrow bourgeois idea of politics as a specialised activity. Although I'm looking forawrd to marching on it, there's something a little strange about the Stop the War Coalition demonstration next Saturday (20 March 2004), with its protest that we've been subjected to a 'year of lies' from Tony Blair. I've enjoyed the poetical-kabbalist twist of dyslexifying 'Blair' into 'Bliar!', and it's a good way of mobilising that significant part of the British population which opposed the attack on Iraq, but unfortunately bourgeois politicians do not think of lying as immoral, they think of it as 'statecraft'. The phrase 'perfidious Albion' came about in the seventeeth century because, due to its new reliance on mercantile rather than purely feudal interests, the British state was developing a new method of diplomacy. In the middle ages, international relations were achieved via dynastic marriages. By physically sending one of their number to become part of a rival's family, the ruling classes of mediaeval and early-modern Europe became a criss-crossing network of loyalties. These were fragmentary and bizarre, very different from the rationalised territory of the modern nation state, but they could not be abandonned at will: these relations weren't simply contracts which could be tossed the fire, they were ensconced in flesh-and-blood persons of great personal prestige and power. Under massive economic and social pressures such fleshand-blood ties could be severed, which is why Henry VIII went through so many wives - but as bourgeois social relations won out, they freed up national politicians from feudal loyalties, allowing the intrigue, trickery and swift changes of loyalty which got England named 'perfidious'. Now every state in the world behaves this way. World leaders don't think it's immoral to lie, in fact they think it's their moral duty to lie to their enemies - a term which covers leaders of every competing nation state and, when elections loom, their own populations. With enemies conceived on such a broad basis, lying becomes pretty much a general practice, although as you can see from any political biography, lying to colleagues is not considered quite so honourable.

However, although Blair thinks it's his moral duty to lie, bomb and even assassinate when the 'national interest' is at risk, he cannot say that to the population at large. This is because the 'national interest' is a cover for the interests for his class - the bourgeois ruling class - and the vast majority of people in England do not have to lie for a living. Of course, as you ascend the ladder of business and media and academia, you encounter more and more people convinced of the necessity of lies, although they call it 'spin', 'rebranding' and 'image assessment'. These are the people who think demonstrating against 'a year of lies' is naive and idealistic. It would be, if there wasn't a whole class of people who do not need to lie to each other to pursue their workaday lives. The socialist revolution is nothing less than such people taking power. 'Telling the truth' was made unfashionable by postmodernist philosophy. Jean Baudrillard's 'simulacrum' is simply Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle with the moment of truth - the proletariat - removed from it. However, only the idea of truth break down the division between subject and object, individual and society, art and politics. The historical materialism of Revolutionary History can look dry-as-dust, but because it records genuine attempts to abolish the misery of capitalism - its alienation, hypocrisy and lies, its corralling of intelligence in a hopeless, self-hating class called the intelligentsia - it actually connects with immediate and explosive events in people's lives like love affairs, punk rock and hip hop, the experience of poetry or strikes or riots. This is not truth perceived as a top-down, positivist survey of the subaltern facts by a higher consciousness (which for positivists, however much they rail against the concept, always turns out to be God). This is truth as scurrilous, irreverent, profane, materialist, indecent and body-based - i.e. truth as lived, not contemplated. This brings us to what Goethe and Marx called der Pudels Kern, the core of the poodle, or the crux of the biscuit (always remembering that in bar-room skittles in Hamburg, a 'no score' is also called ein Pudel: for a dialectician, ultimate truths are always provisory, so anything metaphysical and ultra-profound must necessarily be both non-existent and absurd). From his training in Tristram Shandy, Marx sensed something inhuman about the logic of a money economy (Hobbes likened reason to accountancy), and Capital is streaked with passages of savage laughter so often lacking in his systematic disciples. Bertolt Brecht once said that he'd never found anyone without a sense of hunour who could understand dialectics, and this laughter provides an essential democratic and humanist corrective to the difficulty of Marx's economic reasoning: it's laughter of recognition, where you recognise what's being said as true from your own experience, rather than from having accepted the premisses of logical deduction. Since logical deduction - from Plato's dialogues through to the theses of Thomas Aquinas and the mysteries of post-structuralism - is mainly concerned to prove the holy separation of logic (or the 'spirit') from the low processes of base matter (or 'us' as it were), it must remain humourless, since it cannot accept that its house of cards collapses with each material development. In their attempts to argue that Marx is 'scientific', by which they mean respectable and elevated above the comprehension of ordinary mortals, academic Marxists ignore his frequent use of Charles Fourier, the French utopian theorist and writer of biting satires and crazy proposals. Aged 17 when the French Revolution turned his world on its head, Fourier spent his life expanding on the possibilities thrown up by that momentous event, and excoriating the banality of the bourgeois and mercantile exploitation of its new freedoms. If Fourier has an equivalent today, it's Stewart Home, tireless writer of scurrilous pamphlets and anti-novels consisting of political tirades, jokes and pointed plagiarism. The dialectical method is in its nature humorous, because it senses hierarchy and repression whenever certain abstractions are declared sacrosanct and fixed. Dialectical reflection on concepts becomes so avid - so desirous of ideological fluidity - that it must acknowledge the contingency of the reader's relationship to the text, and so brings to consciousness the historical and temporary nature of the terms being used. This is what brings Marx into the orbit of great literature. In Karl Marx and the Iroquois, a pamphlet currently available at Housmans Bookshop on the Caledonian Road, Franklin Rosemont says: Wasn't it under the sign of poetry, after all, that Marx came to recognise himself as an emnemy of the bourgeois order? Everyone knows the famous 'three components' of Marxism: German philosophy, English economics and French socialism. But what about the poets of the world: Aeschylus and Homer, Shakespeare and Cervantes, Goethe and Shelley? To miss this fourth compenent is to miss a lot of Marx (and indeed, a lot of life). A whole critique of post-Marx Marxism could be based on this calamitous 'oversight'. [Arsenal #4, Black Swan Press, 1989]

In 1844, it is true, Marx gave up his personal literary aspirations and devoted his time to a study of economics. This was because he reckoned a criticism of how capitalism explains itself to itself - political economy - would be more devastating than any volume of poems or comic novel. Yet Rosemont rightly sets Marx's Capital next to Fourier's New Amorous World, the poetry of Isidore Ducasse, and Marcel Duchamp's Green Box as 'works that come down to us with questionmarks blazing like sawn-off shotguns, scattering here, there and everywhere sparks that illuminate our own restless search for answers'. Capital was subtitled 'a critique of political economy', but it was a singular work which blew apart the discipline by the introduction of dialectical philosophy and communist politics; in the preface to the second edition Marx talks about how German philosophers deemed it 'outlandish'. Outlandish indeed: it was the work of a political refugee, or as we say today, an asylum seeker. I'm aware that many serious left politicos will characterise Franklin Rosemont, a Chicago surrealist, as somewhat 'outlandish' himself, but that seems to me to ignore one of the great strengths of Marxism, which is its proposal of a lifetime of reading and study unhampered by the requirements of either academy or commerce. Capital is such an original combination of different intellectual and political traditions, it could never have been written at the behest of any established institution. It's utterly a product of bohemian resistance to class society. To read the work of some academic Marxists, you'd never think Marx polemicised versus official thinking. The learned men by profession, guild or privilege, the doctors and others, the colourless university writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with their stiff pigtails and their distinguished pedantry and their petty hair-splitting dissertations, interposed themselves between the people and the mind, between life and science, between freedom and mankind. It was the unauthorised writers who created our literature. ['Debates on the Freedom of the Press', 1842, Collected Works, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975, Vol. 1, p. 178] The academic division of labour, in which a thinker cannot be taken seriously until he or she 'chooses' a discipline and sticks to it, wreaks havoc on attempts to understand the social and cosmic totality. This is acknowledged by Marxists, but it doesn't prevent them echoing the distinctions between economics and poetry, science and art, which are imposed by the academy. As a surrealist, Rosemont isn't simply trying to aestheticise Marx: he also subscribes to a tradition that is fiercely critical of the role of art under capitalism. In a polemical volume issued in 1956, Pierre Naville, surrealist and one of the founders of the Trotskyist Fourth International, inveighed against Jean-Paul Sartre. Like the Situationists in later years, Naville detested Sartre's vacillations over Stalinism - his role as 'fellow-traveller'. In November 1956, reeling from the fact that the Soviet Union had sent in tanks and troops to suppress the Hungarian workers revolt, probably killing 30,000 people, Sartre was distancing himself from the Communist Party. Naville found this stance hypocritical, since Sartre now seemed to have forgotten that he had once been an enthusiastic supporter of Stalin. He also objected to Sartre's self-definition as a 'communist intellectual', saying: Do you imagine that Marx imagined himself an 'intellectual' communist? No, he called himself a communist, which is something else entirely. The intelligentsia exchanges the right everyone has of using their intelligence for entre to that celestial realm, that of the 'intelligent' class. By so doing, they think they're elevating themselves, and giving themselves a glorious social role, but actually they just betray themselves as Marxists, and become a clique of servile functionaries. (L'Intellectuel Communiste (A propos de Jean-Paul Sartre), Paris: Librairie Marcel Rivire et Cie, 1956, p. 11. This is why Marx matters to artists: he saw through the rewards offered to so-called 'spiritual' or 'intellectual' activity under capitalism, and saw that so-called success is simply an index of serving the system. This explains why creative artistic and intellectual activity in the twentieth-century has been a series of revolts versus what the situationists called 'recuperation': the buying up of artistic labour as a commodity. If artistic activity is only judged in the Charles Saatchi or Sarah Kent sense, as the provision of objects for capital investment, then Marx's radicak critique will appear philistine and anti-cultural. However, Marx believed in a radically democratic aesthetic: a judgment of civilization, not in terms of its architecture or the objects in its art galleries and museums, but in terms of the lives that may be lived in it. His criticism of the money form was that, by reducing everything

to commodities and the rationalised pursuit of profit, it produced global competition and war. Towards the end of his life Marx made extensive notes on Lewis Henry Morgan's anthropological study Ancient Society, noting that the Iroquois had democratic assembles 'where every adult male and female member had a voice upon all questions brought before it'. He noted that it was private property which allowed the emergence of a privileged caste. As Rosemont argues in his essay, it is only the Stalinist travesty of Marxism which makes capitalism an 'inevitable' stage in the history of humanity, and holds we can learn nothing from 'backward people'. Rosemont quotes Marx's extensive notes on tobacco-smoking rituals, showing that his critique of Christianity didn't come from a soulless rationalism, but aversion to its sexist and repressive metaphysics. Marx's profound historical sense meant that he could understand practises his contemporaries dismissed as 'savage' as materialist recognition of natural abundance and solar energy. Marx matters for artists because he can help explain why so much of what they do - in fact the best part of what they do - resists the logic of the commodity, and is regularly criticised as mad, bad and mystical: premonitions of new ways of living beyond commodity illusions. It is frequently the case that criticism of practises or ideas actually stems from the conceptual limitations of the aggressor rather than any fault in what's being criticised. Psychoanalysis has been particularly perceptive about this, for example exposing the latent homsexuality of bigotry towards gays, or the psychotic displays of sex-obsession by campaigners against pornography and paedophilia. The same tic can be seen in criticisms of Marx. If artists are told that Marx might matter to them, a common retort is the conventional one that Marx reduced everything to economics, and therefore has no time for mental or spiritual values. This charge is backed up by vaguely-remembered images of grim barrack-housing for workers in Communist Russia, and the lack of availability of consumer and recreational goods. Actually, the whole of Capital was written to show that the attempt to make 'economics' a mathematical science was doomed to failure: exchanges involving money give an illusion of equal exchange to transactions which are in fact coercions by social power. The end of the postwar boom and the growing inqualities created by global capitalism have proved Marx's theory right: the market doesn't even things out, it produces situations where people end up losing their lives whilst collecting cockles for one pound an hour. But what place does Capital have for artistic production? To begin at the beginning, I want to look at the opening of Capital in order to see how Marx's scurrilous, irreverent, profane, indecent, body-based materialism copes with explaining the production of commodities. Is it actually an attack on 'spiritual values' in favour of 'economics', a macho insistence on 'hard facts' about the means of production versus intangible consumer fantasy? Significantly, far from asserting objective economic fact versus subjective fancy, Capital begins with acknowledgement of the driving role 'fancy' - what he calls Phantasie in the German - plays in economics. A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach (`Magen') or from fancy (`Phantasie'), makes no difference. In order to back up this assertion, Marx cites from Nicholas Barbon's A Discourse on Coining the New Money Lighter, In Answer to Mr Locke's `Considerations' from 1696. The fact that the quality of bourgeois political economy decayed over time, descending from science to apology - William Petty, John Locke, Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus are treated with diminishing respect was part of Marx's polemic. Marx quotes Barbon as saying: Desire implies want; it is the appetite of the mind, and as natural as hunger to the body ... The great number (of things) have their value from supplying the wants of the mind. Saying that the mind, too, has `wants' crosses the wires of soul/body dualism. In Plato and St Paul the soul partakes of the divine, is eternal, and therefore has no 'wants'. Marx's citation of anglo-bourgeois materialism was a calculated affront to Christian residues in German philosophy. Rather than something to which the philosophical mind should remain aloof, the nascent bourgeois economy and its stimulation of artificial needs (`Phantasie') was praised. Barbon gave examples of the `wants of the mind':

Such as all sorts of fine draperies, gold, silver, pearl, diamonds and all sorts of precious stones. They are used to adorn and deck the body. They are badges of riches, and serve to make distinctions of preference amongst men. Marx points out that for commodity production there are no `false' needs: fantasy is just as much grist to the economic mill as bodily needs. As against Descartes, Locke, Hume and Kant, who saw an impermeable barrier between things and ideas, Marx understood human beings as productive, hence he recognised the part that fantasy plays in the creation of commodities. Thus human desire isn't removed from his analysis of capitalism, it's put at its heart. If it's true that capitalism has harnessed our desires to its murderous system, then our desiring natures require transformation as well as the system of distribution which feeds them. Our desiring natures are in fact ourselves as productive human beings. Asger Jorn, the Danish painter who helped found the Situationists, attempted to develop a materialist aesthetics based on Darwin, Marx and Freud, one which could explain a role for art. He said: It is precisely fascinations, their elaboration and interplay, that are the artist's special area. [The Natural Order, Report No 1 of the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism, 1962, p. 63] When Stewart Home initiated the Art Strike between 1990-1993, many people saw it as an absurd piece of self-promotion. In some ways it was. Nevertheless, the blunt way in which Home faced issues which most art critics have become too sophisticated to do more than yawn over - commodification, recuperation, serving the system - generated leaflets, pamphlets and eventually novels which are far above the level of most artworld productions. Home's Marxism has developed as he's found time to read Amadeo Bordiga, Hegel and Marx himself. Home's polemics in artworld debates have been convincing because he speaks from the same position as Pierre Naville - a refusal to credit a celestial realm of culture which is removed from the average needs of the average person. However, there's one need which cannot by assuaged by the commodity system, and one which keeps driving Home into issuing more and more ludicrous texts. That is the need to understand what our desires actually are. His latest Down & Out in Shorditch & Hoxton [London, Do-Not Press, 2004] is a parody of a tart's memoirs which mixes literary criticism, porn and plagiarism of eighteenth-century texts in a manner that's both tantalizing and upsetting. It's a rare example of art which has a Marxist dimension because nothing in it substitutes for the desire for proletarian revolution: in this it resembles Samuel Beckett, but Home's politics is clearer, graphic like punk, there's no existential posturing or 'style'. Or at least the 'style' is so degraded and second-hand, it holds no art glamour. Personally, I can only actively engage in politics if I can do so on the basis of Marxism - I need to be in a revolutionary party because I want genuine democratic dialogue about what's to be done, and for me Marxism provides the only bullshit-free analysis of what capitalism does to us. However, the fact that Marx is difficult to read means that his texts can become the preserve of a political leadership who then pamper a membership with readymade notions. I accept that a degree of this will always be necessary in a party which seeks non-intellectual members. But the struggle for Marxism doesn't stop once you've formed a party, it starts. I think Home's novels - and the disorientation provided by pertinent Modern Art - can help develop a popular Marxism: sceptical, undogmatic, courageous in making judgments. Because Marx is the left's preeminent radical writer, it doesn't mean that he should be the only one whose radicalism is effective in the grain of his texts. In his review of my own novel Shitkicks & Doughballs (London; Spare Change Books, 2003) in Radical Philosophy #124, the poet Ian Patterson praised it by dissing Home's work. He said: The penumbra of self-justifying argument that surrounds Home's glib production of consciously trashy, free-association occult-porno novels of post-punk social critique is marginally more interesting than the actual experience of reading them. I think Patterson read an early book by Home like Defiant Pose (London: Peter Owen, 1989) or Pure Mania (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1989), rather bleak parodies of Richard Allen skinhead novels, made up his mind, and therefore hasn't opened books like 69 Things To Do With a Dead Princess (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2002): or Down & Out in Shoreditch & Hoxton (London: Do-Not Press, 2004) ... or indeed, my way into appreciating Home, the critique of Green Anarchism where by

dint of a wicked need to expose the middleclass nature of anarchist 'extremism', he turned himself into a Marxist. My own mild entertainment, a novelisation of my theory book Art, Class & Cleavage, was designed as an encouragment for revolutionary thinking, but it lacks the utter disdain Home has for middle-class literary values, and the radical laughter opened up by this disdain. When you read Home you're made to feel absurd yourself, which is not quite the same thing as enjoying absurdity. The process is not 'enjoyable' in the commodity sense of having a 'stomach' or 'fantasy' need fulfilled, but you become conscious of these drives: you can feel your consciousness of self - and the activity called reading - grow. You become aware of the limits of a 'good read' or a 'fine novel'. Even though this is 'unpolitical' in the sense that Home is not exhorting you to adopt a particular political option, this method of inculcating reader-consciousness is actually very Marxist. Whereas Booker-Prize novels deflect the reader from their essentially middleclass and trivial worldpictures by allowing the superior reader to feel sorry for certain selected global unfortunates, Home pushes you to revolutionary recognition of the limits of commodified desire. You need to turn to other people for help. Collective consciousness - democratic, open-toargument, unstable, ungrounded - replaces individual gratification. The book is a sawn-off shotgun ablaze with sparks. As Marx wrote to Arnold Ruge in September 1843: We shall not say: Abandon your struggles, they are mere folly; let us provide you with the true campaign slogans. Instead we shall simply show the world why it is struggling, and consciousness of this is a thing it must acquire whether it wishes it or not. This is a programme for revolutionary actions. Whether they should be called 'art' or 'politics', I don't know. I suspect the reason for this indecision is that most of the art and politics we get to see is just another communiqu from the commodity delusion. Notes 'The criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism' ['A Contribution To The Critique Of Hegel's Philosophy Of Right. Introduction', 1844, Deutsch-Franzsische Jahrbcher; translated Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, Early Writings, London: Penguin, 1975, p. 243] See preface to Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution II: the Politics of Social Classes (New York: Monthly Review, 1978). Karl Marx, Capital, 1867, translated Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, NY: Modern Library, 1906, p. 41. Nicholas Barbon, A Discourse On Coining The New Money Lighter, In Answer To Mr Locke's `Considerations About Raising the Value of Money', London: Printed for Richard Chiswell, at the Rose and Crown in St Paul's Church Yard, 1696, p. 3 (quoted in Marx, Op. Cit., p. 42, n. 1). Ibid. Karl Marx, Letter to Arnold Ruge, September 1843; Early Writings, Penguin: London, 1975, pp. 208-9.