Marx and Art by Alizadeh Ali;

Author:Alizadeh, Ali;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)
Published: 2012-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Here, as with his and Engels’s earlier condemnation of sterile German socialists who were mere literary men, a publication is seen to lose its power when it becomes a mere collection of literary contributions. But this comment should not necessarily be seen as a criticism of literature – although the deleterious involvement of so many highly esteemed literary figures such as Hugo, Lamartine and Chateaubriand (whom Marx referred to, in a letter to Engels, as ‘this foolish fop’[6] ) in French politics had disappointed and angered many a genuine revolutionary such as Marx – nor should this be seen as a naïve celebration of the efficacy of journalism and the righteousness of public opinion. The key insight here concerns the renunciation of a system that reduces writing to the level of advertisement. When a writer can be published solely because of the wealth and clout of the publisher who can bear the cost of paying the caution money, and when, at the same time, he or she is transformed (or, perhaps, deformed) from an organ of the people into a literary individual, then he or she is quite literally devalued. According to Marx’s fascinating analogy, such a writer no longer represents public opinion as representative paper money represents a claim on a commodity such as gold – that is, as representative of intrinsic fiscal value – but becomes something like fiat money, bills whose nonintrinsic, imaginary worth depends entirely on their endorsement by a political power (and an instrument of the financial bourgeoisie) such as a central bank. Such a writer, in other words, possesses no real, in-itself value, but only the kind of assumed value that is served by modern banknotes as things with no intrinsic value (i.e., the paper of the notes itself is worthless) purely an instrument of exchange and commercial activity.

During the 1850s, Marx came to believe that the defeats of the revolutionary upheavals of the 1840s – seen most emblematically in the ascendancy of the opportunistic and authoritarian Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, first as the president of the new French republic and then as the country’s self-proclaimed emperor à la his uncle, the first Napoléon – resulted from economic factors. And central to the power, demands and resilience of capitalism and the capitalist bourgeoisie were the features, origins and qualities of the bourgeoisie’s financial wealth or capital itself – capital as investment, as power over the means of production, and as that which is procured from the exploitation of the working class, or what Marx came to describe as the extraction of surplus-value. Far from finding an immediate answer to the riddle of capital’s resources and consequences, however, Marx found himself overwhelmed – and also obsessed – by the immensity of his task, by the huge volume of economic theories and industrial records and data kept at London’s research libraries, as well as the grandeur of his project’s ambition, the desire to produce the definitive account of the modern world’s material reality, and, by so doing, equip

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