Being with the Prophets
For Tonight Only performing at a Defend Atlanta Forest event at the Born Again Labor Museum (BALM) (2022). Photograph by Children of the Rat Temple.
“In part, this answer can be justified by the assertion that Marxism is not in that sense a philosophy at all; it designates itself, with characteristic cumbersomeness, as a ‘unity of theory and practice’ (and if you knew what that was, it would be clear that it shares this peculiar structure with Freudianism). But it may be clearest to say that it can best be thought of as a problematic: that is to say, it can be identified, not by specific positions (whether of a political, economic or philosophical type), but rather by the allegiance to a specific complex of problems, whose formulations are always in movement and in historic rearrangement and restructuration, along with their object of study (capitalism itself ).”1 - Frederic Jameson, “Five Theses on Actually Existing Marxism,” (revised version-2009)
MARXISM IS not a problematic.
Marxism is a specific philosophical method; the theory and practice of working-class self-emancipation. It deals with things that are, of course, problematic, but its purpose is not the disturbance of ideological contradictions or theoretical concepts per se. In his “Five Theses on Actually Existing Marxism,” first published in 1996, later elaborated and republished, Frederic Jameson sketches a number of insightful points. But he misidentifies the core logic (or core dialectic) of Marxism itself, and therefore displaces the Marxist subject. By describing Marxism as a “science of capitalism” or “science of the inherent contradictions of capitalism,” the working-class, oppressed, and subaltern become a secondary concern. They are mentioned, here and there, but the Marxist agent in this schematic becomes the theorist of capitalist contradictions. In cultural matters, because the goal is no longer to meet or make critical working-class subjectivity in art, poetry or film, this approach has the added deficit of displacing artists as subjective actors.2 Artistic intention becomes increasingly irrelevant. True meaning will be divined later. By the professors.
Jameson makes important points about crisis and neoliberal capitalist globalization, but the working-class is not seriously discussed as an actor, nor is class phenomenology addressed: how does the class, or various parts of the class, experience these dynamics and changes?3 In an almost Bernsteinian passage, Jameson seems to argue that we “abandon to iconology everything that suggests that revolution is a punctual moment rather than an elaborate and complex process,”4 disavowing hauntological images of “the Winter Palace” and “Tennis Court Oath.” But these images (and others) were soon to be resurrected by the immiserations and barbarisms of the 21st century. The revolutionaries of our century, looking for a way forward, inevitably dressed themselves in the garments of the past (see the 18th Brumaire). For good or bad.5 The icons come back to life.
Of course, class struggle is a process. But social revolution is a moment in time, an actual transfer of class rule. Jameson seems to minimize this historic lesson because of the (transient -AT) “state of current discursive struggle”6 (emphasis added); the ideological firmament at a moment of seemingly triumphant capitalism (in the 1990s). By eschewing close interactions with class dynamics, he creates an artificially strong gravity towards the discursive (an abstraction that echoes the then accelerating abstraction of globalized capital; as finance memes itself, so does the culture, so does the discourse, so does its Marxism). The new “Marxisms,” he argues, “that emerge from the present system of late capitalism… will necessarily be distinct from those that developed during the modern period…. In contrast to earlier Marxism, [they] appear to be more cultural in character, turning fundamentally on those phenomena hitherto known as commodity reification and consumerism.”7
Not to discount the importance of these matters — and they are certainly important in Marxist cultural production — but Jameson has been proven incorrect.8 The struggles of the 21st century are not that dissimilar from those of the 20th century. In the US? Antiwar struggles (2001-2007), mass immigrant rights protests (2005-2008), Occupy Wall Street (2011-2012), Black Lives Matter (2014-2020, possibly continuing), the long Striketober (2021-present), among others. You could add the self- and community-defense of queer and trans persons, ongoing teacher strikes, etc.. This is not to mention mass immiseration, a plague, the growth of US fascism. All so very 20th century (albeit in new idioms). Globally? Struggles against mass immiseration, national liberation struggles, fights against the growth of fascism (in India and elsewhere), the Arab Spring, the concretization of reform and revolution in the failure of Greece’s SYRIZA, the imperialist competition in Ukraine, a feminist rebellion across Iran (fueled in part by out-of-control inflation), etc. Classic Marxist concerns of class exploitation, economic crisis, oppression, and the state run throughout.
The weakness of these struggles has been the weakness of the left; particularly an overly-discursive and abstract politics, and an increasing willingness to outsource the organization of that discourse to academia and social media.9 In other words, the left overall is guilty of an insufficiency in being-with the Marxist historical subject — in actuality, rhetoric, action, and organization.
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MARXISM IS the theory and practice of proletarian self-emancipation/revolution. The role of Marxist intellectuals, overall, is to use their specific intellectual knowledge in the service of that project. Marxist artists have a similar role but it is mutated by the specific character of that which is called “art.”
To put it crudely, art is both a political and existential activity, having both a social and spiritual function. These dual functions predate capitalism and class society; and predate the creation of the modern category of “art.” As Ernst Fischer argues in The Necessity of Art — his quixotic polemic that aimed to liberalize Eastern Block cultural norms in the 1950s— what became “art” was rooted in the intersection of social and existential limitations on social genius in the evolution of human beings; our species-being capacity for social knowledge outsripped what could be empirically known.10 Egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, having created social knowledge (mastering fire, reproductive cycles, a knowledge of flora and fauna, inventing language and symbolic representation, methods of hunting and fishing, etc.), rebelled against the limits of their own existence. What would later become “art” served social functions (historical and mythological storytelling, ritual productions of cave painting, sculpture, etc.) as well as negotiations with the cosmic limits of said knowledge (creation myths, trickster gods, the contradictions of life and death, love, being other creatures).11 Art is a human necessity, Fischer argues, always political but never reducible to political function. In this, it plays a unique role in the struggle overall, in that it can valorize aspects of proletarian being that cannot be valorized by didactic propaganda. It is limited, however, in that art itself changes nothing. It is the movement of the exploited and oppressed that changes social structures. In contemporary capitalism, art is both ideological contest and existential expression. The latter alone becomes bourgeois and rarefied (or banal and saccharine). The former alone impoverishes the Marxist subject, denying it the full fruits of species being.
Where does this leave us in terms of Marxist cultural strategy? In light of the above, it is not an accident that many of the best Marxist cultural interventions come from an intersection of Marxism and the Romantic/Gothic, either intentionally, or among Romantics moving into Marxism (even as they reject the Romantic),12 imparting a kind of working-class messianism. Because art cannot change the world — only the class can do that — this messianism often takes on a displaced character. Aaron to Moses. John the Baptist to Christ. Bodhisattva to Buddha. Speaking for the prophet who cannot yet speak. Or announcing (and anointing) the prophet to come — thereby enabling the greater prophet to speak. Or facilitating the movement of those better prepared for enlightenment.13 What matters first for the messianic prophet is proximity to the messiah (physical, rhetorical, and active proximity). And this being-with is what tends to be sacrificed in the Stalinist “Marxism” of “really existing socialist states,” by social democratic “Marxism,” by academic “Marxism,” and by the “Marxists” of sects. The central error made by these groups — for different reasons — is the separation of Marxism from its subject, underlining CLR James’ note that “in politics all abstract terms conceal treachery.”14
Starbucks workers union meeting at BALM (2022). Photograph by Adam Turl.
Announcing and enabling the messiah is the central logic of Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness (HCC) (1923). Despite Lukács’ antipathies to Romanticism, as Michael Löwy argues, Lukács’ earlier Romanticism shaped his early Marxism.15 Reification, the central enemy in the narrative of HCC, is the “thingification” of human beings and social relations. As Löwy and Sayre argue, the Romantic rebellion against modernity was a reaction, in part, to the utilitarian attitude encouraged by nascent industrial capitalism; the thingification of the life-world.16 In HCC, the hero who can defeat thingification is the working-class. As the working-class is, to the bourgeois, also a thing, its rebellion is a kind of object-revenge. — see Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’s Monster. Working-class self-emancipation is, in contradiction to vulgar deterministic Marxism, an irrealist, messianic, and even absurdist gesture.
The flattening of the working-class subject into a mere historic function in vulgar Marxism — and its erasure in certain academic and economistic Marxisms — is adaptation to bourgeois ideology, the re-thingification of the working-class. Walter Benjamin inveighed against social democratic positivism that taught the “class [to forget] its hate as much as its spirit of sacrifice. For both nourish themselves on the picture of enslaved forebears, not on the ideal of the emancipated heirs.”17 For Fred Moton, on “the aesthetics of the Black radical tradition,” Black liberation, in the historic context of slavery, is literally (and perversely) object-revenge. This requires giving “expression to … outrages without exacerbating the indifference to suffering that is the consequence of benumbing spectacle.”18 Robin D.G. Kelley notes a similar dynamic in Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, in his emphasis on AfroSurrealist gestures and dreaming.19
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THIS CONTRADICTION is, to some degree, true for all working-class and oppressed persons. This is because object-revenge is inherently an irrealist rejection of common sense and ideology.20 Being-with the Marxist subject and rejecting its enslavement — see Lukács’ dialectic (or aufhebung) of utopianism and opportunism — requires this irrealist rejection of present “realisms.”21 In practical Marxist politics this is the contradiction that necessitates the revolutionary party. The revolutionary party sets no barrier between itself and the class as is and no barrier between the current state of the class and the future of the class (its revolutionary future; an unknowable and sublime differentiated totality).22
The nature of being-with shifts in its specifics as one moves between practical organizing, the unique “art object,” the reproduced art object, the conceptual gesture, written narrative, etc. And the nature of object-revenge also shifts from one worker to the next, one group of workers to the next, one oppressed group to the next.23 For the Marxist cultural producer, all this is shaped by the contradiction of the existential/spiritual and the political/social in the working-class subject in relation to a shifting totality (see Ernst Fischer above). This is the inner-working of proletarian object-revenge. The working-class subject exists at the point of crisis and escaping crisis, constraint and liberation — a collective and/or individual liberation — and imagined or actual negotiations with social and existential terms. In other words, the struggle with and against constrained subjectivity; a struggle into conscious being. This is the aesthetic pathos woven between Marxism and culture. Its variations — in the individual, among varied identities, among oppressed groups — shape specific consciousness, and the different methods of solidarity needed to achieve working-class unity.
Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) illustrates a series of constraints on women (in particular, but also workers in general) in which the social reproduction of labor is privatized in the family. As Nancy Fraser notes, this produces an ongoing and constant crisis in working-class families in which women disproportionately face an impossible series of tasks — taking care of children, the elderly, the sick, doing laundry, cooking — on top of labor outside the home.24 Queer rejectons of gender norms, in this context, become an irrealist solidarity with the impossibility of gendered class existence.
Huey P. Newton’s “Revolutionary Suicide: The Way of Liberation” manifesto/essay, later included in his 1973 autobiography, was begun while he was imprisoned in 1970. The essay counterposes two forms of suicide on the proletarian Black subject, superimposed by racism and capitalism, reactionary vs. revolutionary suicide. Both may lead to the obliteration of the individual subject, but only one has the promise of potential liberation, the other guarantees both death and collaboration with the oppressor. This insight is possible because Newton acknowledges the existential condition explicitly, “we are all—Black and white alike—ill in the same way, mortally ill,” as well as the totalizing intransigence of US imperialism, capitalism, and racism.25 Newton rejects this condition in the irrealist rhetoric of revolutionary suicide.
The older, more conservative, Lukács contradicts the younger Lukács in his debates with Brecht. Brecht, perhaps channeling the younger Lukács, argues in defense of modernism against stultifying realism: “Even those writers who are conscious of the fact that capitalism impoverishes, dehumanizes, mechanizes human beings, and who fight against it, seem to partake of the same process of impoverishment: for they too, in their writing, appear to be less concerned with elevating man, they rush him through events, treat his inner life as a quantité negligeable and so on.”26
Acknowledging the dyad of being-with and object-revenge — or, the younger Lukács dialectic of opportunism and utopianism — does not mean abandoning Marxist cultural strategy; even though it recognizes it to be contingent and provisional. Indeed, Brecht’s alteration between irrealism and realism — the famous alienation effect of Brechtian theater — is part and parcel of such a strategy; to enable both criticality and emotive feeling and expression.27 Imagining soviets in the theater, of course, does not “make” them happen. Our art is an intervention in the evolution of the political unconscious and multiple structures of feeling. It dreams in months and years, not days and hours.
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IN TERMS of “structures of feeling,” Raymond Williams marks a contradiction in consciousness between “official” and “practical consciousness.” This echoes the bifurcation of consciousness in totalitarian societies like the Stalinist USSR (“kitchen table consciousness” and “official consciousness”) and the “double consciousness” described by DuBois.28 Williams counterposes these evolving structures of feeling to the “unconscious” — unnecessarily in my opinion — but rightly argues they have a kind of incipient relationship to public consciousness.29 What Williams describes is a mediated and negotiated mixed-consciousness. What is playing out is the contradiction between capital and labor in the culture, in people’s heads, in relation to the overall struggle. The artifacts of this shifting dynamic are brought out in the concept of the political unconscious more generally, but as Joseph North argues, given a scholastic abstraction in contemporary academia; an undue historicization.30 Over time, the idea of cognitive mapping being used to inform critical action — intervention in the political unconscious — has been lost to mere contextualization. The functions of novels, poems, etc.. — how they are actually produced and read — become secondary to a dry archeology.31 Hard Times becomes an artifact of Victorian England rather than a novel (a narrative intervention in human structures of feeling).32 In a bizarre twist of fate, the “left academic” becomes Thomas Gradgrind — the cruel-practical headmaster in Hard Times who chastises a young girl for loving horses but not “knowing” anything about them.
Carbondale Starbucks workers finding out they won their union vote (2022). Instagram photograph by Adam Turl.
North proposes, against scholastic historicism, a new left aestheticism and critical interventionism. His arguments are complex and I can’t go into all of them here.33 But he is vague about the nature of this new aesthetic, as is pointed out in a critique by Benjamin Kunkel in New Left Review. Kunkel argues for a rehabilitation of historicization as a kind of structure of feeling — which reads like a half-agreement with North plus retreat to more of the same.34 What is partially missing, in both North and Kunkel, is class. It is the class that provides a framework for the reconstruction of a left aesthetics. The class’s unknowable but necessary totality in opposition to capital, the beauty of its organized and unorganized resistance, the social comedies and tragedies conditioned in its existence, its irrealist dreaming against the limits of capital, the way the class moves through this world today. All these things lay the foundation for a new aesthetics (plural, because the nature of the class is multiple). Regardless, North is correct when he implies, channeling Marx, that we have merely mapped the political unconscious, the point is to change it!
It would not follow that history is unimportant. The working-class subject has a gothic-futurist and hauntological relationship to history and time. This may be unpacked further elsewhere. For now, I will note, when we shift our understanding of cultural artifacts from historicization alone and center our aesthetic judgment on the political and phenomenological being of the working-class subject, new life is breathed into that history. No longer bound by positivism, we can read and intervene in culture in a more dynamic manner. See, for example, José Carlos Mariátegui’s approach to the history of religion in Peru and the importance of mythology (borrowing from Georges Sorel), or Silvia Federici’s approach to “mystical enchantment” in the struggle against enclosures and the relationship of witch hunts to the class struggle in Caliban and the Witch.35
My partner, Tish Turl, has elaborated on the notion that tropes against time travel in science fiction are an internalization of bourgeois ideology; they don’t want us to undo the world they made. This is another way of saying, the point is not to historicize but to make (and remake) history. For artists that means enabling the class that makes history. It means mixing history, sampling it like DJs in the Golden Age of Hip Hop sound collage, and dropping it like a bomb. It means building a new aesthetics from and with the life-being of the working-class.
Tish Turl with a protest sign from BALM’s Common Task Agit-Prop Library (2021).
Endnotes
1. Frederic Jameson, “Actually Existing Marxism,” Valences of the Dialectic (New York: Verso, 2009), 372. The earlier version of this essay does not seem to contain the argument that Marxism is a “problematic” per se (the 1996 Monthly Review version that is quoted henceforth).
2. Frederic Jameson, “Five Theses on Actually Existing Marxism” Monthly Review 47(11) (April 1996), 1-3
3. Jameson, 2-5
4. Jameson, 5
5. Jameson, 5
6. Jameson, 6
7. Jameson, 9
8. Moreover, reification, as I will argue, as Lukács argued, is not simply a cultural concern or discursive matter, but an everyday experience for the working-class and oppressed.
9. This is not to say, like a vulgar sectarian Marxist, that culture is not important. It clearly is. And, of course, the struggles of the 21st century are not the same as those of the 20th. It is to argue that Jameson telescoped the scale (and quality) of the change.
10. Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art (New York: Verso, 2010)
11. Ibid.
12. See here Lukács, Benjamin, Brecht, Constructivism, Surrealism, and many others. This is also true of Marx’s approach to writing himself. “A specter is haunting Europe.” etc.
13. Again, this is true of the entirety of Marx’s mature work. It is all an announcement of, and counsel to, a future class-conscious proletariat coming into being. It was also a central practice for the Bolsheviks. Much of pre-revolutionary Pravda was written by workers themselves with a small cadre of educated comrades tirelessly correcting the grammar of self-taught intellectual workers.
14. CLR James, The Black Jacobins (New York: Vintage Books, 1989)
15. Michael Löwy, Georg Lukács - From Romanticism to Bolshevism (New Left Review Books, 1979)
16. Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against The Tide of Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022)
17. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” (1940), Marxists.org, online: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm
18. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Blac Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 2-23
19. Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 156-194
20. I am using “ideology” in the Marxist sense and “common sense” in the Gramscian manner.
21. Michael Löwy, Georg Lukács, 175 and Lukács, 71-70
22. The artist takes a similar approach, but because they produce art it cannot be overdetermined by a political collective, and must be semi-autonomous if it hopes to reflect the complexity of the working-class being.
23. There is no space here to sketch all the various irrealisms of left cultural practice.
24. Nancy Fraser, “Crisis of care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism,” in Tithi Bhattacharya, ed., Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 21-36
25. Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 3
26. Bertolt Brecht, “Against Georg Lukács,” in Aesthetics and Politics (Verso, 2007), 70
27. Bertolt Brecht. “A short Organum for the Theatre,” in J. Willet, ed, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. (Hill and Wang, 1992), 179-205
28. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford University Press, 1977), 130 and Rochelle Spencer, AfroSurrealism: The African Diaspora’s Surrealist Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), 31
29. Raymond Williams, 131
30. Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017)
31. North
32. It is, of course, both.
33. Also a lot of them are “inside baseball” in English literary circles and I come from a visual art and practical organizing background overall. It is quite fascinating but I would need to read about a hundred more literary theory books from 1920-present to understand all of it. And, I am probably not going to do that. Because life. Trees. Art. Joy. Etc.
34. Benjamin Kunkel, “Critic, Historicize Thyself!,” New Left Review 136 (July/August 2022) 83-97
35. See José Carlos Mariátegui, “The Religious Factor,” in Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), 124-150; Silvia Federici, Re-Enacting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (Oakland: PM Press, 2019); and Silvia Federic, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004)
Adam Turl is an artist and writer from southern Illinois — by way of Wisconsin, Chicago, upstate New York and Las Vegas. They are an artist and editor at Locust Review, a quarterly irrealist journal of art and literature, and a member of the Locust Arts and Letters Collective (LALC). They have had solo exhibitions at the Brett Wesley Gallery (Las Vegas), the Cube (Las Vegas), Project 1612 (Peoria, Illinois), and Artspace 304 (Carbondale, Illinois). In 2016 Turl was awarded a fellowship and residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, France. They received their MFA from Washington University in St. Louis at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, and a BFA from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale (SIUC). Turl is working on an evolving conceptual and visual art project, Born Again Labor Museum, with their partner Tish Turl, a writer and fellow LALC member. They host the monthly podcast Locust Radio along with Tish Turl and LALC member Laura Fair-Schulz. They are PhD student in media arts and a graduate assistant at SIUC.
Friends, family, and comrades at BALM (2022). Photograph by Adam Turl.