Talk notes for Taipei conference on Time and Possibility, circa December 2009

More notes not written up, not fit for filing ‘cept in the rapt that is WordPress.

Marx Trot 2013 – July 7

All welcome. A day of revolutionary dawdling, pints, and ending up awash somewhere on Tottenham Court Rd… The annual Marx trot this year will be on July 7. Lal Salaam!

We will again be leaving from Archway tube 2:30 pm, then to Highgate Cemetery Marx’s Grave about 3pm – heading across the Heath to the Lord Southhampton pub which was the old man’s local on Grafton Terrace – then onwards to Engels’ house, then to the pub where the Manifesto was adopted by the Communist League, – now a crappy cocktail bar – and more… All welcome (kids could surely come for the first couple of hours – but warning, its a longish walk across the heath between Highgate and the Grafton Terrace HouseBYO libations for the first part.

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Last year’s trot = 
http://hutnyk.wordpress.com/2012/07/03/marx-trot-2012-july-7-2/

(and links to previous) here: 
http://hutnyk.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/marx-trot-29-5-2011/

Pics of the houses: 
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/photo/london/index.htm

Other links:

http://www.alphabetthreat.co.uk/pasttense/pdf/communistclub.pdf

The Great Windmill Street venue is where Liebknecht says the Manifesto was adopted by the League of the Just/German Workers Educational Association/Communist League – but some say it was at the White Hart in Dury Lane. In any case Marx lectures on Capital at Great Windmill Street, but see here:
http://www.alphabetthreat.co.uk/pasttense/pdf/communistclub.pdf

For Leninists – a diversion on the trot might take in Charing Cross station, and areas near Kings Cross and Pentonville:
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/01/16/russians-in-london-lenin/

Dancing the first international! 
http://history-is-made-at-night.blogspot.co.uk/2009_10_01_archive.html

A pub crawl with Karl 
http://www.mytimemachine.co.uk/pubcrawl.htm

Capital in Manga

Marx’s own copy of Kapital, page one

195 trinketization

DPA

“Four shades of red: To honor Karl Marx’ 195th birthday, artist Ottmar Hörl set 500 of these sculptures up throughout the philosopher’s hometown of Trier, a city in western Germany near the border with Luxembourg. The different shades are reportedly meant to suggest that Marxism can be interpreted in more than one way.

Political artist Ottmar Hörl captured headlines from away from his hometown of Nuremberg in 2009 when he created garden gnomes performing Nazi salutes. And now he’s back to making what he hopes will be another controversial statement.

Each miniature sculpture, which stands less than a meter (3.3 feet) tall, portrays Marx in the exact same pose, but in different shades of red. “I want to inspire pedestrians to think about Karl Marx in a different way,” Hörl explains while his installation is being set up next to Trier’s historic Roman city gate, Porta Nigra, adding that the German philosopher has often been misinterpreted.”

HT Karen, – from:  Philosopher as Farce: Artist Immortalizes Marx as Garden Gnome  Sebastian Hammelehle

Happy 195th Old Beardo.

Marxism for Beginners

Why when I look for trinkets for the kids can’t I find the things I assume would be best sellers in a certain bourgie corner of London?

For example, a set of building blocks with pictures of Marx, Engels, Mao…?

 

 

 

Update: And Giles is first with a design, though I had to get him to swap M.N Roy for his inclusion of Gandhi

http://bookleteer.com/publication.html?id=2808

On the Courtyard, talk at Tate from January

On 26 Jan 2013, a talk at Tate Modern on the Sharjah Art Foundation Biennale proposed theme of New Cultural Cartographies. My views, given late in the day, reliant on Gayatri Spivak’s hugely influential work, and following talks by the excellent Sarat Maharaj, Yuko Hasegawa and Wael Shawky (interviewed). Slightly combative  and with a slip in putting the Danes in Chandenaggor, it is the talk I wish I could have parsed for Princeton – but that was not recorded, even though some people asked for it (thanks Anisha, Saleh, Ben). Click the picture to get to the Tate link.

Karl Marx 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883

Asked to write a few paragraphs on Marx’s death anniversary for The People’s Daily (China)… (who knows if it will get in):

Karl Marx 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883

130 years after Marx passed away his words are still relevant. His critical perspective and his depth of thought remain something from which we can learn. To teach Marx today, as we do at Goldsmiths, requires careful reading of his inspired, always interesting and yet often difficult and changing work. It is not enough to know just a few of the slogans of Marx and Engels, the reader must work to understand what his life’s effort was trying to achieve – a critique of political economy and a complete transformation of the social and economic exploitation of a brutal capitalism and emergent colonialism. So the reader must read Marx in his context then and in the reader’s context now – this of course changes the reader, as Marx also knew. Marx himself read widely, and wrote with humour, learning and passion. His texts remain essential for anyone who would grasp history, or know the current economic turmoil of our present world.

To remember Marx today is not only to memorialise an historical figure. Marx changed the way the world thinks. He is arguably the most important social scientist who ever lived, and yet his works can be reread anew and be found useful, in different ways, by each generation that follows. Marx changes with the times because his thought is rich, and his dialectical method is able to bend in ways that reveal the underpinnings of each fluctuation of political fortune. To read Marx thoroughly is an all-important formative moment for every scholar. There are other authors – Freud, Darwin, de Bouvoir – but who has really changed the world?

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In recent years another Marx emerges from the archives. More of his writing is translated and published (it is not all out even yet) and a more careful assessment of his concepts of subsumption, original accumulation, labour theory of value and composition of capital becomes possible. His work on credit, banks and fictitious money can help us understand the global crisis, and his notion of cycles and time of capital provides a welcome wider perspective. In Europe, as with elsewhere across our planet, political upheavals bring readers back again and again to Marx, as always because the books of Marx are not answers, but tools for making those answers. For the unity of the workers of the world, for the ‘ruthless criticism of everything that exists’ and for the redistribution of the surplus of production in a planned way to each according to their need. It would be a smart student who picked up the book of Capital of the first time, and joined with others in reading groups, seminars or college classes, to work out what all that fuss was about. Read Marx again, you have nothing to lose but your chains.

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- Professor John Hutnyk teaches the course Capitalism and Cultural Studies – a lecture course on Marx’s Capital – at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

The Communist Horizon: Talk by author Jodi Dean 7pm 19.3.2013

A book talk by Jodi Dean, author.

The Communist Horizon charts the re-emergence of communism as a magnet for political energy following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the stalling of the Occupy movement.

Jodi Dean will introduce the book – 45 minutes approx – then answer questions from the audience, followed by wine reception and book signing. Lal salaam.

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Event Information

Location: rm309, 3rd floor, Richard Hoggart Building
Cost: free
Department: Centre For Cultural Studies
Time: 19 March 2013, 19:00 – 21:00

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For Further Details

E-mail: john.hutnyk

- See more at: http://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=6283#sthash.ly0s3RBo.dpuf

Talk at Princeton in April

“‘The East as a Career’ – How Disraeli, Marx, Charnok and Clive met in India”

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I want to think about some specific small scenes from Marx’s writings on India, mostly from his journalism and notes, that address the East India Company sending assessors to Bengal and dates like 1690, 1757, 1857, so as to suggest a necessary remap of socio-political contact and the ways concepts like exchange, the social, politics, tolerance, trade and custom might need renovation today, for studies of the past and the present. Charnok, Suraj-ud-Dualla, Clive, Knox feature…

-JH

Gradgrind – for Girl No 20

note to self: on the origins of Mr Gradgrind

 

Where’s Friday?

I have started to gather my notes for the next lecture on Marx tomorrow. Here is what I had last year on Robinson. To which I hope to add some more this evening…

Spivak uses the occasion of Derrida saying ‘hello to Marx’ (Spivak 1995:78) to make some key points about women in the contemporary condition of financialised capitalism, and offer a reading of Assia Djebar’s Far From Medina and the ghosts of many women that must be retrieved from this text on Islam. I am not able to engage with Fatima, like Spivak I am ‘no Islamic scholar’, and anyway you must read both Spivak and Djebar. I also consider Spivak more interesting on finacialisation and women than anyone else writing on this. It is curious that few Marxists take this up, as class conscious ‘future socialists’ we cannot ignore the need to work through such questions, as we shall. Spivak insists:

‘According, then, to the strictest Marxian sense, the reproductive body of woman has now been “socialized” – computed into average abstract labor and thus released into what I call the spectrality of reason – a specter that haunts the merely empirical, dislocating it from itself. According to Marx, this is the specter that must haunt the daily life of the class-conscious worker, the future socialist, so that she can dislocate him herself into the counterintuitive average part-subject (agent) of labor, recognize that, in the everyday, es spukt. It is only then that the fetish character of labor-power as commodity can be grasped and can become the pivot that wrenches capitalism into socialism’ (Spivak 1995:67-8)

In Capital, the tale of Robinson is used to show that the operations of use-value are not somehow prior or isolated from exchange as relations of production. Even alone, Robinson calculates. It is not an innate nature, but a social condition (that can be changed).

‘The first example is Robinson Crusoe, to demonstrate that the relations of production can be known even in a situation of “pure” use-value’ (Spivak 1995:76)

Immediately before this, in search of Ghosts, Derrida finds that the translation occludes the literal ghost in referring to the ‘magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour so long as they take the form of commodities’ (Marx 1867/1970:76 L&W Pen-169, Derrida 1993/1994:164). Necromancy substitutes for spuk and Derrida wants to stress the apparition, that the ghost is something like Marx’s familiar, that he wants to exorcise and retain.

But Spivak notes that Derrida ‘goofs a bit’ here:

‘the passage quoted on page 164 [by Derrida] does not directly refer to the socialist future, as Derrida seems to think. Marx’s point is that simply to see the relations of production clearly is no big deal’ (Spivak 1995:76)

It may be worth thinking through whyo the charaters are here, and who appears on stage and who not – remember Hamlet’s father saying ‘I am dead’? Well, what of Robinson, and indeed Friday? Why is it important that Friday not be mentined? Clearly that Marx wants to say that even the isolated Robinson on his Island makes his objects according to a social code, not as an isolated individual. We are all social, even when it seems not. This is a key to anthropology isn’t it? But more, Pawler shows that Marx works this story up more and more over time. He explains that it is the bourgeois isolated individual that Marx has in mind, writing of ‘Robinsonades’ in The Poverty of Philosophyand again in the Grundrisse, the allegory in Capital is more developed than its first appearance, where ‘every man is a hermit and produces only for himself’ (Prawler1978:134). By the time of the Grundrisse ‘Robinsonaden’ offer ‘not the image of some primitive social organization, but as so clear a view of tendencies inherent in English society of the eighteenth century that they can serve as a symbolic adumbration of that society’s future. On closer examination the loneliness of Robinson Crusoe becomes a symbol for social alienation in the ‘civil society’ of the nineteenth century” (Pawler 1978:275-6). By the time of Capital Robinson is keeping a set of books, listing his possessions, and working out the sums of his own labour time, and presumably that of the unfortunate Friday. Here Pawler suggests Marx has found in Robinson the ‘character-type of “economic planners” in general and the “true-born Englishman” in particular … [and] … affords a simple model of economic activities in a setting in which the value of an object can be directly proportional to the quantity of labour expended upon it, undistorted by market considerations’ (Pawler 1978:335). Friday is not mentioned, yet would no doubt fit well and has often been recalled by postcolonial revision

The discussion of Robinson on his Island, as an English book-keeper, is Marx having his fun. The next moment we are to ‘transport ourselves from Robinson’s island, bathed in light to the European middle ages shrouded in Darkness’ where the hierarchy of serf and lord, compulsory labour, services, payments in kind, entails a society where the social relations are personal, and ‘not disguised under the social relations between the products of labour’ (Marx 1867/1970:77L&W). We need not go back to examine the different forms of common property, though Marx shows he has the scholarship to do this, but we can see the distribution of the work and consumption of produce in the peasant family is not one organized by commodities, but subject to arrangements of age, sex, the seasons, a spontaneously developed division of labour, etc.

Then, suggesting something different, but not yet the only possible difference, Marx asks us to ‘picture to ourselves, for a change, a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common’ (Marx, 1867/1970:78 L&W), social labour-power and social product, planned distribution, surplus consumed according to – in this, again not the only possible assumption – and distributed according to input of labour-time.

‘The social relations of the individual producers, with regard to both their labour and their products, are in this case perfectly simple and intelligible, and with regard not only to production but also to distribution’ (Marx 1867/1970:79 L&W)

There may be different forms in which this distribution is organized, according to the level of development of the productive forces, and a future communism would not assume distribution according to labour time but rather to each according to need, yet this scenario where production has stripped off its ‘mystical veil’ [this veil stuff is from Schiller’s The Bell, as Prawler shows, 1978:322) and is ‘consciously regulated’ in ‘accordance with a settled plan’ comes only at the expense of ‘a long and painful process’ (Marx 1867/1970:80 L&W). Marx’s point in the next pages is to show that the commodity as bourgeois form has everything reversed – like Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing who things ‘reading and writing come by nature’ (Marx 1867/1970:83 L&W Pen.177, D.98).

Also want to read Ian Watt ‘Robinson Crusoe as Myth’ Essays in Criticism 1 1951 95-119…

Cotton – money – Bible – money – Brandy

by far and away the best response to lecture three ever….

Marx’s letter to Abe.

The International Workingmen’s Association 1864

Address of the International Working Men’s Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America

Presented to U.S. Ambassador Charles Francis Adams
January 28, 1865 ^[A]

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Written: by Marx between November 22 & 29, 1864
First Published: The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 169, November 7, 1865;
Transcription/Markup: Zodiac/Brian Baggins;
Online Version: Marx & Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000.

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Sir:

We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.

From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?

When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, “slavery” on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding “the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution”, and maintained slavery to be “a beneficent institution”, indeed, the old solution of the great problem of “the relation of capital to labor”, and cynically proclaimed property in man “the cornerstone of the new edifice” — then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders’ rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the proslavery intervention of their betters — and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.

While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.

The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world. ^[B]

Signed on behalf of the International Workingmen’s Association, the Central Council:

Longmaid, Worley, Whitlock, Fox, Blackmore, Hartwell, Pidgeon, Lucraft, Weston, Dell, Nieass, Shaw, Lake, Buckley, Osbourne, Howell, Carter, Wheeler, Stainsby, Morgan, Grossmith, Dick, Denoual, Jourdain, Morrissot, Leroux, Bordage, Bocquet, Talandier, Dupont, L.Wolff, Aldovrandi, Lama, Solustri, Nusperli, Eccarius, Wolff, Lessner, Pfander, Lochner, Kaub, Bolleter, Rybczinski, Hansen, Schantzenbach, Smales, Cornelius, Petersen, Otto, Bagnagatti, Setacci;

George Odger, President of the Council; P.V. Lubez, Corresponding Secretary for France; Karl Marx, Corresponding Secretary for Germany; G.P. Fontana, Corresponding Secretary for Italy; J.E. Holtorp, Corresponding Secretary for Poland; H.F. Jung, Corresponding Secretary for Switzerland; William R. Cremer, Honorary General Secretary.

18 Greek Street, Soho.

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^[A] From the minutes of the Central (General) Council of the International — November 19, 1864:

“Dr. Marx then brought up the report of the subcommittee, also a draft of the address which had been drawn up for presentation to the people of America congratulating them on their having re-elected Abraham Lincoln as President. The address is as follows and was unanimously agreed to.”

^[B] The minutes of the meeting continue:

“A long discussion then took place as to the mode of presenting the address and the propriety of having a M.P. with the deputation; this was strongly opposed by many members, who said workingmen should rely on themselves and not seek for extraneous aid…. It was then proposed… and carried unanimously. The secretary correspond with the United States Minister asking to appoint a time for receiving the deputation, such deputation to consist of the members of the Central Council.”

Course Guide for lectures on Marx’s Capital 2013

Lecture course on Marx’s “Capital” at Goldsmiths: everybody is welcome

Capitalism and Cultural Studies – Prof John Hutnyk:

tuesday evenings from january 8, 2013 – 5pm-8pm Goldsmiths Room RHB 309. Free – all welcome.

No fee (unless, sorry, you are doing this for award - and that, friends, is Willetts’ fault – though the Labour Party have a share of the blame too).

****** weekly course reading guide is here: Cap and cult studs outline013********

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This course involves a close reading of Karl Marx’s Capital (Volume One).

90 minute lectures, 60 minutes discussion

The connections between cultural studies and critiques of capitalism are considered in an interdisciplinary context (cinema studies, anthropology, musicology, international relations, and philosophy) which reaches from Marx through to Film Studies, from ethnographic approaches to Heidegger, from anarchism and surrealism to German critical theory and poststructuralism/post-colonialism/post-early-for-christmas. Topics covered include: alienation, commodification, production, technology, education, subsumption, anti-imperialism, anti-war movement and complicity. Using a series of illustrative films (documentary and fiction) and key theoretical texts (read alongside the text of Capital), we examine contemporary capitalism as it shifts, changes, lurches through its very late 20th and early 21st century manifestations – we will look at how cultural studies copes with (or does not cope with) class struggle, anti-colonialism, new subjectivities, cultural politics, media, virtual and corporate worlds.

****** weekly course reading guide is here: Cap and cult studs outline013********

The lectures/seminars begin on Tuesday 8th January 2011 between 5 and 8pm and will run for 11 weeks (with a week off in the middle) in the Richard Hoggart Building (Room 309), Goldsmiths College. You are required to bring their own copy of the Penguin, International Publishers/Progress Press or German editions of Karl Marx Capital Vol I. We are reading about 100 pages a week. (Please don’t get tricked into buying the abridged English edition/nonsense!)

Spivak on Hope in 2009 at Whitechapel

Heartfield

One hundred and fifty years ago, on 1 December 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Proclamation that Emancipated America’s slaves, in the middle of the war between the Union and the slaveholding Confederacy.

 

One hundred and fifty years ago the British government made plans to wage war against Lincoln and support Jefferson’s Davis’ Slaveholders’ rebellion.

The British workers stopped Prime Minister Palmerston in his tracks.

Though their employers rallied to the cause of the slaveholders, and tried to win the weavers over too, Lancashire opposed secession.Though the weavers of Lancashire were suffering from the war, they rallied to support Lincoln and the Union.

British socialists launched the Union Emancipation Society that led the opposition to the war, rallying monster meetings across the county and the country to support Lincoln and emancipation. Karl Marx, John Bright and Manchester’s trade unionists joined in a struggle for freedom in America.

Back then, everyone knew that it was the working class that had stopped the British plutocracy from joining the confederate cause.

President Lincoln thanked the Lancashire workers for their great sacrifice. Gladstone owned up to having been taught a lesson by the labouring class that had earned its right to speak. Karl Marx credited the workers with changing the course of history.

Since then, scholars have baulked at the terrible truth that freedom in America had been helped by Karl Marx and the British working class. Revisionist historians worked hard to cover up the real record. Instead, we were told, the Lancashire weavers were supporters of secession!

But new research shows that the Lancashire workers were indeed overwhelmingly opposed to secession, and rallied in support of the Union. Drawn from the archives of the Union Emancipation Society and contemporary reports British Workers & the US Civil War explains how Karl Marx and the Lancashire weavers joined Abraham Lincoln’s fight against slavery, 150 years ago.

You can buy British Workers & the US Civil War direct, for just £4, post free in the UK (outside, add £2).

Send your name, address, and a cheque payable to James Heartfield, at 17 Giesbach Road, London, N19 3DA, or pay by paypal at www.heartfield.org

 

Perspective Society: Marx, Ford, Jobs

An outline for a block course as part of “Theories of Modern Society” at Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen in Feb-April 2013:

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Perspective Society : Marx, Ford, Jobs.

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This 3-part discussion takes Theories of Modern Society as a research problem in the tradition of workplace Inquiries. In part one, by examining the Blue Books and Factory Inspector reports that Marx used for the Working Day chapter of Capital Volume one, we will look at the Industrial Revolution in the mid 18th Century. In part two we will consider Fordist Production systems and the global advent of assembly work through to finance capital and just-in-time delivery/Toyota-ism, then in part three the co-research tradition of Autonomist Marxism and Kolinko permits us to look at processed work and the alienations and precarity of net-life, internship and service work – the problem of ‘immaterial’ labour and the general intellect/education system. Each of the sections coheres around ideas of workplace or social inquiry and co-research. Each section will also include some topical film analysis and discussion (eg: Hard Times for mid 1800s, Tucker and Modern Times for 1920s, perhaps Wall Street for the 1970s and The Social Network for processed work for late 20th early 21st Century). Assessment will be your own inquiry into your own conditions of work, broadly defined.

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Feb 8-9 Read ‘The Working Day’ chapter of Marx’s Das Kapital (chapter 8) or in English as Capital (chapter 10). This is about 90 pages. (you may of course read the earlier chapters if you wish, but these are not compulsory, though they will be referred to in class, alongside illustrative films for discussion).

March 1-2 Read ‘Machinery and Modern Industry’ in Marx’s Capital (chapter 13 in the German or 15 in the English). Again there will be films, discussion and additional reading in class. Links to the English translation – here http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm

April 26-27 Read ‘The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation’ chapter 25 of Capital (23 German edn) and ‘Hotlines’. Available online in English and German: http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/kolinko/lebuk/e_lebuk.htm

The class will be in English, but reading can be German or English. Additional resources on the blog http://hutnyk.wordpress.com

All welcome.

Professor John Hutnyk

Goldsmiths College,University of London

Marx Trot 2012 – July 7

The Marx Trot… this year will be on July 7. Hurrah! Leaving from Archway tube 2:30 pm, then to Highgate Cemetery Marx’s Grave about 3pm – heading across the Heath to the old man’s local on Grafton Terrace – and onwards to Engels’ house, then to the pub – now crappy cocktail bar – where the Manifesto was adopted by the Communist League, and much more… All welcome.

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Last year’s trot (and links to previous) here: 
http://hutnyk.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/marx-trot-29-5-2011/

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Pics of the houses: 
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/photo/london/index.htm