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Магический марксизм. Субверсивная политика и воображение
Энди Мерифилд вдыхает новую жизнь в марксистскую теорию. Книга представляет марксизм, выходящий за рамки дебатов о классе, роли государства и диктатуре пролетариата. Избегая формалистской критики, Мерифилд выступает за пересмотр марксизма и его потенциала, применяя к марксистскому мышлению ранее неисследованные подходы. Это позволяет открыть новые — жизненно важные — пути развития политического активизма и дебатов. Читателю открывается марксизм XXI века, который впечатляет новыми возможностями для политической деятельности.
280 pages, Paperback
First published February 15, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 12, 2013
In 100 Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote what is probably the defining novel of the magical realist genre with his history of the Buendia family in the South American town of Macondo. With Magical Marxism, Andy Merrifield attempts to juxtapose the philosophy of Marquez’ book to our own political thought and infect it with this magical tint.
At the centre of the book is a frustration with progressive responses to present and past crises of capitalism and a thought that we became too stale in our reactions to events and too bogged down in theory without remembering that Marx once said “the point isn’t to understand the world, it is to change it”. With this in mind Merrifield believes he breaks with the orthodox Marxist canon in his own writing which takes extensively from the egalitarianism of Marquez’ fictional town, but also from Guy Debord and the wonderful pamphlet from 2009, The Coming Insurrection from the Invisible Committee.
There is typical Marxist comment in here such as how leisure time has been colonised by exchange value, how we are connected with distant images while forgetting the all important present, the misinterpretation of crisis by the present ruling class. Where Merrifield breaks from accepted scripture is in his desire to turn normative actions into an imagined reality through positive action rather than negative critique. It is all about riotous proactivity and communal self-determination as opposed to a sulky reactivity and at times it can sink into argument you may expect from an as-yet unjaded youthful anarchist.
That minor criticism aside, if it even is that, there is hope in this book and elements of it can be seen today in progressive movements. Merrifield states that our best weapon against the ruling cliques is our anonymity, and is this not echoed by the Anonymous group of online activists who are proving to be more than a pain in the backside for corporations and their state enablers?
Merrifield supports political violence that is, again, not reactionary and believes, taking from Rosa Luxembourg that we should embrace spontaneity as a subjectivity against objectivism as a moment of truth or great delusion - only one way to find out. Ultimately he believes the negative, albeit correct interpretation of politics that Marxists perceive are a turn-off for potential recruits to the cause of equality, freedom and democracy. In action over theory we will attract more people are remove the time honoured crutch of a hobbled man that is the theory of fetishism and critique of reason/dialectical materialism and so forth. We should not resist capitalism and desire a better world as a result of that, we should demand a better world that will bring about capitalism’s collapse in the process from a new form of militant optimism.
This is an intriguing volume that sometimes strays too close to literary criticism with its fondness for Garcia Marquez’ wonderful novel. It is honest and thought provoking however with no shortage of original thinking though far from being the radical call to arms the author believes it is. It will anger academically purist Marxist philosophers and charm progressives of other shades. A fine, impassioned and fresh look at Marxism today.
At the centre of the book is a frustration with progressive responses to present and past crises of capitalism and a thought that we became too stale in our reactions to events and too bogged down in theory without remembering that Marx once said “the point isn’t to understand the world, it is to change it”. With this in mind Merrifield believes he breaks with the orthodox Marxist canon in his own writing which takes extensively from the egalitarianism of Marquez’ fictional town, but also from Guy Debord and the wonderful pamphlet from 2009, The Coming Insurrection from the Invisible Committee.
There is typical Marxist comment in here such as how leisure time has been colonised by exchange value, how we are connected with distant images while forgetting the all important present, the misinterpretation of crisis by the present ruling class. Where Merrifield breaks from accepted scripture is in his desire to turn normative actions into an imagined reality through positive action rather than negative critique. It is all about riotous proactivity and communal self-determination as opposed to a sulky reactivity and at times it can sink into argument you may expect from an as-yet unjaded youthful anarchist.
That minor criticism aside, if it even is that, there is hope in this book and elements of it can be seen today in progressive movements. Merrifield states that our best weapon against the ruling cliques is our anonymity, and is this not echoed by the Anonymous group of online activists who are proving to be more than a pain in the backside for corporations and their state enablers?
Merrifield supports political violence that is, again, not reactionary and believes, taking from Rosa Luxembourg that we should embrace spontaneity as a subjectivity against objectivism as a moment of truth or great delusion - only one way to find out. Ultimately he believes the negative, albeit correct interpretation of politics that Marxists perceive are a turn-off for potential recruits to the cause of equality, freedom and democracy. In action over theory we will attract more people are remove the time honoured crutch of a hobbled man that is the theory of fetishism and critique of reason/dialectical materialism and so forth. We should not resist capitalism and desire a better world as a result of that, we should demand a better world that will bring about capitalism’s collapse in the process from a new form of militant optimism.
This is an intriguing volume that sometimes strays too close to literary criticism with its fondness for Garcia Marquez’ wonderful novel. It is honest and thought provoking however with no shortage of original thinking though far from being the radical call to arms the author believes it is. It will anger academically purist Marxist philosophers and charm progressives of other shades. A fine, impassioned and fresh look at Marxism today.
July 26, 2016
Towards the end of the 1980s when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down there was an unexpected crisis on the Left. After years of being on the back foot as the Reagan and Thatcher juggernaut, the Ronnie and Maggie Show, rampaged across the economic orthodoxy it should have been the case the collapse of Actually Existing Socialism in Europe should have freed the Left to build new ways of doing and being, but instead, aside from some Marxist sects – mainly Trotskyist and/or small and introspective – the Left seemed to collapse. The Soviet model may not have resembled a thing many of Left might have recognised as socialism, but at least it still appeared to be something other than taken for granted capitalism.
This paradox has puzzled me ever since, and I had concluded that it demonstrated both the power of the imagination and the limitations of the imagination; quite marvellously, in the middle of this stimulating exploration of imagination and Left, Andy Merrifield helps fill in a gap in my doesn’t-quite-hold-together analysis. One of the limitations of the Left, he argues, is not only the importance of the negative (that’s a thing we acquired from Hegel) but also that we’d spent so long ‘resisting’ that we’d lost the sense of fighting for something. Merrifield, then, has set out to explore how we might imagine, or rather the role of the imagination (the definite article is important here) in developing a new Marxist politics of struggle and change.
As is the case with all of us, Merrifield build on what has gone before, but in this case he has chosen three unusual sources as the foundation for his case: Guy Debord’s Situationist classic, The Society of the Spectacle , an unattributed text that has been doing the rounds for the last four years, The Coming Insurrection and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece of magic realism, The Hundred Years of Solitude . Finally, woven throughout the text there is the influence of Henri Lefebvre. By building on these sources Merrifield weaves a poetic vision of politics influenced by the early Marx, a term I use cautiously because I don’t want to get sucked into those obtuse debates about there being ‘different’ Marxs. This notion of the ‘early’ Marx tends to accentuate the visionary aspects of things such as The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts whereas for Merrifield work such as the discussions of the Paris Commune are just as significant; his concern is with the rationalist readings and deployments of Marx (in this he seems to reflect a sensibility similar to the concerns underpinning the Movement Against Utilitarianism in the Social Sciences, although he may not agree), the ones that close down the utopian aspects, the vision of what might be.
Magical Marxism is about stepping beyond the analyses of the ‘crisis’, beyond the limitations of defending what we have (which we never liked anyway) and beyond the constraints imposed by actions within alienation; in classic Marxist terms it is, in part, about working towards what Bertell Ollman calls ‘species being’, in Alienation . I admit that I am reading into Merrifield here, but these ways of work constrain and limit the possibilities of struggle by removing not only the utopian vision – the desirable goals of politics – but also the rationale for building the achievable versions of those desirable goals in the now. The Marxism that accentuates the crisis – and we must analyse these things to know about the world we’re working in – is contrasted to what Merrifield calls ‘warm stream Marxism’ as a kind of militant optimism and permanent subversion while building new social relations, some of which will be intentional communities, some of which will be forms of rejectionism (100 Years plays an important role here), some of which will be models of new social orders and systems (The Coming Insurrection is really important here).
This is, then, less of a manifesto than a poetic suggestion for how we might take the things that are good to think and make them good to do; he is not telling what to do, but challenging us to step beyond the conventional models of Left politics built in a world shaped by modernity and a clearly identifiable working class with a potential to become a class for itself. He is, therefore, part of an approach to politics that recognises the importance of class but does not necessarily assume that all we-who-act necessarily see ourselves in these class terms. It is thoroughly Lefebvrian in its emphasis on autogestion, Lefebvre’s notion of community democratic self-management by all those who live in it – for which his model is Marquez’s Macondo, the town in which 100 Years is set, a town where they don’t need the state’s appointed magistrate because they don’t ‘give orders on paper’ (that is, in an alienated manner). He ends by praising Derrida’s Spectres of Marx not as a book that was right but as one well before its time and worthy of a revisit; I’d say the same for this – not necessarily well before its time, but certainly worthy of revisiting time and again.
This paradox has puzzled me ever since, and I had concluded that it demonstrated both the power of the imagination and the limitations of the imagination; quite marvellously, in the middle of this stimulating exploration of imagination and Left, Andy Merrifield helps fill in a gap in my doesn’t-quite-hold-together analysis. One of the limitations of the Left, he argues, is not only the importance of the negative (that’s a thing we acquired from Hegel) but also that we’d spent so long ‘resisting’ that we’d lost the sense of fighting for something. Merrifield, then, has set out to explore how we might imagine, or rather the role of the imagination (the definite article is important here) in developing a new Marxist politics of struggle and change.
As is the case with all of us, Merrifield build on what has gone before, but in this case he has chosen three unusual sources as the foundation for his case: Guy Debord’s Situationist classic, The Society of the Spectacle , an unattributed text that has been doing the rounds for the last four years, The Coming Insurrection and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece of magic realism, The Hundred Years of Solitude . Finally, woven throughout the text there is the influence of Henri Lefebvre. By building on these sources Merrifield weaves a poetic vision of politics influenced by the early Marx, a term I use cautiously because I don’t want to get sucked into those obtuse debates about there being ‘different’ Marxs. This notion of the ‘early’ Marx tends to accentuate the visionary aspects of things such as The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts whereas for Merrifield work such as the discussions of the Paris Commune are just as significant; his concern is with the rationalist readings and deployments of Marx (in this he seems to reflect a sensibility similar to the concerns underpinning the Movement Against Utilitarianism in the Social Sciences, although he may not agree), the ones that close down the utopian aspects, the vision of what might be.
Magical Marxism is about stepping beyond the analyses of the ‘crisis’, beyond the limitations of defending what we have (which we never liked anyway) and beyond the constraints imposed by actions within alienation; in classic Marxist terms it is, in part, about working towards what Bertell Ollman calls ‘species being’, in Alienation . I admit that I am reading into Merrifield here, but these ways of work constrain and limit the possibilities of struggle by removing not only the utopian vision – the desirable goals of politics – but also the rationale for building the achievable versions of those desirable goals in the now. The Marxism that accentuates the crisis – and we must analyse these things to know about the world we’re working in – is contrasted to what Merrifield calls ‘warm stream Marxism’ as a kind of militant optimism and permanent subversion while building new social relations, some of which will be intentional communities, some of which will be forms of rejectionism (100 Years plays an important role here), some of which will be models of new social orders and systems (The Coming Insurrection is really important here).
This is, then, less of a manifesto than a poetic suggestion for how we might take the things that are good to think and make them good to do; he is not telling what to do, but challenging us to step beyond the conventional models of Left politics built in a world shaped by modernity and a clearly identifiable working class with a potential to become a class for itself. He is, therefore, part of an approach to politics that recognises the importance of class but does not necessarily assume that all we-who-act necessarily see ourselves in these class terms. It is thoroughly Lefebvrian in its emphasis on autogestion, Lefebvre’s notion of community democratic self-management by all those who live in it – for which his model is Marquez’s Macondo, the town in which 100 Years is set, a town where they don’t need the state’s appointed magistrate because they don’t ‘give orders on paper’ (that is, in an alienated manner). He ends by praising Derrida’s Spectres of Marx not as a book that was right but as one well before its time and worthy of a revisit; I’d say the same for this – not necessarily well before its time, but certainly worthy of revisiting time and again.
September 20, 2022
для манифеста недостаточно вдохновляюще, для научной работы слишком восторженно. сама идея мне нравится, но работа показалась похожей скорее на дайджест чем на цельную вещь. и...не очень понятно, причем тут марксизм
August 30, 2011
Merrifield takes Sorel's observation that people are not inspired by dry analysis but by living movements, and attempts to find a Marxist spirit that is both ephemeral and resilient. Politically he draws some of the same conclusions as John Holloway - that liberation can be found in the "cracks" in the system, but he presents them in a way that is life-affirming and non-prescriptive.
He also provides valuable commentary on The Invisible Committee's "The Coming Insurrection", which he regards as our generation's "Society of the Spectacle".
Join the Imaginary Party!
He also provides valuable commentary on The Invisible Committee's "The Coming Insurrection", which he regards as our generation's "Society of the Spectacle".
Join the Imaginary Party!
July 29, 2017
Some sort of loose melange of magical realism, Guy Debord, anarchism, and the politics of the everyday. Unfortunately fails to substantially explore the role of imagination in subversive politics and vice versa. Great book cover and title though.
January 8, 2024
Andy has given a completely different perspective of Marxism , moving away from the transitional ideologies , beyond class and the role of the state . I liked how the book makes one reflect on the desire of reimagining Marxism from traditional debates and embracing the utopian aspects of the ideology.
Great read for someone who would want to critique the theoretical aspects of Marxism and it’s impact in the current day and age .
Great read for someone who would want to critique the theoretical aspects of Marxism and it’s impact in the current day and age .
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews