A Birthday Crawl
This post will be somewhat disjointed. This is partly because I am not well at the moment. It’s also partly because I didn’t start on it early enough and never quite worked out what I wanted it to be. To be honest, I forgot the anniversary. I am notorious for my bad memory and often forget dates. It’s only Twitter – with its automatic mechanisms for pricking the unpaid contributor to fill it with content, even to the point of scavenging almanacs – which has made me as date-conscious as I am now.
Marx liked his drunken London pub crawls. Think of this as a semi-lucid crawl around the inns (and outs) of my brain on 5th May 2018.
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Today is Marx’s 200th birthday. A piece of information to which many would respond “So what?” And I’m actually sympathetic to this view.
Someone recently asked me when I was going to go and see the Marx exhibition currently at the British Library. They just assumed I would go. But I’m interested in Marx for the ideas.
It’s not that his life is of no interest. Nor is it that you can divide his ideas and work from his life. This is barely true of any thinker, but is perhaps especially untrue of revolutionary thinkers. One of the myths about Marx is that he spent all his time hunched over books, disdaining the fray, withdrawn into a world of ideas. Marx was an activist all his life, passionately involved in almost all the great liberatory struggles of his time – from Chartism to the fight against slavery – even when his personal circumstances, or a downturn in the pace of events, forced him to be involved from afar.
No, I’m just not remotely interested in going to gaze at samples of his handwriting. To the extent that the exhibition would relate facts, they’ll probably be facts I already know (not to sound immodest but Marx is one of a very few things I know quite a lot about) or don’t care about. I’m certainly not interested in hearing the kinds of interpretations of Marx – his ideas or his life – that the British Library is likely to offer. I remember being surprised by the surprise some people showed at the gloss on events offered by the Royal Academy at their exhibition of Russian Revolutionary art last year. Really, what do people expect?
Anniversaries and commemorations tend to be odd affairs, especially when they involve the commemoration of revolutionaries by the mainstream. There’s a rash of this all over the media right now, for obvious reasons. Most of it utter drivel… though it does have certain side benefits, such as annoying certain people (see the image above).
In 1991 the great Marxist journalist Paul Foot wrote about “the old English disease” of “revolutionary necrophilia – the love and worship of revolutionaries long after they are safely dead”. It often involves cringeworthy misunderstanding and/or misappropriation of those revolutionaries. The example we are perhaps most familiar with nowadays is Martin Luther King.…