Marx – The Barbarism of Pure Culture

New Book from BPC – The Phantasmagoria of Capital

0 March 2025

B.P.C. books announce the publication of a new book

The Phantasmagoria of Capital

A Short History of the Commodity, the Spectacle and its DiscontentsDavid Black

CONTENTS

Part One

Origins

Tragedy, Philosophy and Money = A Warning from Greek Antiquity

Cults, Myths and Money – Dionysus, Orpheus and Us

Part Two

‘New Passions’ Post-Feudalism

Anarchism and Aristotle – Old but Good and Vice-Versa

‘Another Language’ – Walt Whitman, Karl Marx and the British, 1850-56

Marx and the Narodniks = The Lost Russian Road to ‘de-growth’ communism

Part Three

Commodity Culture

Lukacs on Journalism as Prostitution= (And the Renegade Trump Appeasers)

Culture Wars in the Spiritual Animal Kingdom – On the Barbarism of Pure Insight

Culture (Before the World) Wars = Simmel, Lukacs and Bloch and the ‘Tragedy of Spirit’

History, Capital and Phantasmagoria = Divine Heresies

Melancholy, Allegory and Tyranny = Reading the Ruins with Walter Benjamin

Surrealism’s 100 Years – Hegel, Freud and Breton

Strolls in Dialectical Fairyland = Walter Benjamin’s Surrealism

Part Four

Spectacle

‘Go home Mr. Chaplin’. – The Letterist Assault on Cinema

Post-Surrealism

‘Extremist Innovations’ for Beginners = How the Situationists took on the culture industry

Spectacular Integration = What Guy Debord Saw Coming

The Spectacle of Ressentiment = T.J. Clark on Why art still can’t kill the Situationist International

PART FIVE

Anti-Spectacle

Cities of the Dreadful Future = Psychogeography, Urbanism and the Dérive in London and Paris

Gillian Rose = Beyond the Holy MiddleSpectacle Paradiso

‘Materialist Realism’

Alternatives to Vanguardism = CLR James, Cornelius Castoriadis, Guy Debord, Raya Dunayevskaya

B.P.C. Publications

Email:

BPC101radpub@gmail.com

Publisher’s Website: http://thebarbarismofpureculture.co.uk/wp

History, Capital and Phantasmagoria

Gillian Rose: Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Verso, London: 2024

After the Hungarian Soviet Republic succumbed to the Rumanian invaders in August 1919, George Lukács escaped into exile and moved to Vienna. In between walks around the city with a revolver under his coat, he studied the section in Marx’s Capital entitled ‘The Fetish Character of Commodities – and the Secret it Entails’.

The ‘secret’ is how commodity relations produce what Lukács terms a ‘reified consciousness’ which is unique to capitalism.

Lukács identifies reification in Kantian terms as the antinomy between the subjective idea of what ‘ought’ to be and the ‘objective evolution of society’ which just ‘is’. In Marxian terms. reification subjugates the attitudes and consciousness of people to the forms in which it finds expression:‘As labor is increasingly rationalized and mechanized, this subjugation is reinforced by the fact that people’s activity becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative.’

Marx writes that the social relations between individuals ‘assume the phantasmagoric form of relation between things.’ He is referencing the magic lantern spectacle: a confused group of real or imagined images of person and things that change quickly, one following the other as in a dream’.

According to Lukács’ ‘Reification’ essay in History and Class Consciousness, ‘the structure of the commodity relations yield[s] a model of all the objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the subjective forms corresponding to them’. As well as Marx’s Capital, Lukács is influenced here by George Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, which highlights how subjective creations assume a life of their own in objective culture. Lukacs, in his 1920 article, ‘The Old Culture and the New Culture’, warns that the relative autonomy of culture, which first blossomed in medieval classicism, and now held out as ‘realism’, was being destroyed as cultural products became commodities. Furthermore, creative work processes and ‘traditional’ skills were under threat from mechanisation and division of labour.

The contradictory, contemplative ‘activity’ is experienced as immediacy; the individual’s experience of reification lacks the mediations which could reveal it in its totality and point the way towards a ‘solution’.

Ernst Bloch, reviewing Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness in 1924 reflects on the defeats of the German workers movement: ‘Every putsch in Germany goes under, while every idea shoots beyond reality, without influence, almost without meaning’. But now, Bloch’s great friend Lukács ‘had liberated thought, brought it into the historical process of becoming, where it is no longer mere observation, but the most deeply informed expression of that very process itself.’

Against the bourgeois’ ‘isolated, quantified concepts of reflections of things, as reified, self-contained systems’ Lukács had restored the notion of totality, writing:

‘we must… discover the practical significance of these different possible relations between the objective economic totality, imputed class consciousness, and the real psychological thoughts of men about their lives’.

Thus far, Lukács and Bloch were in agreement, but Lukács’s book criticises Bloch’s position that the social revolution required a religious as well as an economic dimension. Bloch, for his part argues that Lukács was being over-rationalistic. His thesis needed to be supplemented nothing less than ‘a metaphysics of dream-interpretation, of the conjuring up of the divine.’

The ‘divine’ in this sense does not mean heavenly intervention; it refers to a world-shattering historical event which is unmediated by any existing institution. The peasant uprisings in post-Reformation Germany, for example, weren’t called by any political party.

Both Lukács and Bloch were enamoured with Marx’s letter to Ruge in 1843 on ‘realising the thoughts of the past’:

‘Hence, our motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or a political form. It will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality. It will become evident that it is not a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and future, but of realising the thoughts of the past. Lastly, it will become evident that mankind is not beginning a new work, but is consciously carrying into effect its old work.’

Bloch, activated by this reflection on realising the thought of the past, wrote Thomas Müntzer as the Theologian of Revolution (1924). Following Luther’s Protestant Reformation of 1517, the divine heretic Müntzer justified armed rebellion by the down-trodden German peasants with biblical citations, especially Omnia sunt communia. (everything should belong to everyone). Luther, having made his peace with the German nobility, issued his pamphlet, Against the Thieving, Murderous Hordes of Peasants. In 1523 Müntzer’s peasant army was defeated and executed by the nobles.

Bloch, almost sounding like a Kantian reincarnation of Müntzer, writes In Spirit and Utopia that ‘it is necessary to oppose established power with appropriat power like a categorical imperative with a revolver in your fist’. As Bloch explained to Michael Lowy in interview 55 years later:

‘Jesus said long ago: “I have not come to bring peace, but have come to cast fire upon the earth.” Besides, in 1914-18, the fire was already burning.’ The Sermon on the Mount preaches tolerance when I am affected, but when my brother is the victim, I cannot tolerate injustice, persecution, murder. The Sermon on the Mount is not a pacifist tract. Thomas Müntzer wasn’t a pacifist either, and he was a better Christian than Lukács.’

(Metropolis by Fritz Lang)

Were the novels of Walter Scott and Tolstoy ‘better’ than those of Kafka and James Joyce? According to Lukacs they were. Lukács claims that art was opposed to myth; Bloch claims that art was secularized myth. Lukács associated expressionism and modernism generally with all forms of irrationalism in bourgeois culture – especially fascism. Bloch rejected Lukács’ characterisation of the times as a homogeneous and linear road to decadence. Lukács’ idea of art was classical and realist. For him immediate experience had to be related to the totality of social development. Bloch, in contrast, saw new forms of social experience as requiring new forms of artistic expression. In Gillian Rose’s interpretation of Bloch’s critique, ‘Lukács, in short, assumes a closed and integrated totality. He does not see that expressionism has tried to challenge that totality.’

Ironically, it turned out that the Nazis were as opposed to expressionism and all other modernism as the Stalinists. The Nazis, after removing 20,000 works of modern art from state-owned museums, held an exhibition of ‘Degenerate Art’ in Berlin, with 650 works, including those of Georg Grosz, Ernst Kirchner, Paul Klee, Otto Dix and Kurt Schwitters.

In paying close attention to the subjective dimensions of political experience Bloch drew on Nietzsche’s distinction between the Apollonian principle, which Bloch regards as cold and rigid reification, and the Dionysian principle, which expresses dreams, fantasies and ideologies.

Rose writes on the differences:

‘Unlike Lukács [Bloch] does not project the ideal society onto the historical future, he stresses instead the moment of decision, that revolution is a qualitative leap, not a gradual or a guided achievement. Existing class consciousness, according to Bloch, is not working towards ideal class consciousness, but already possesses it in art, in fantasies, on ideologies…. different pasts live in the present and may still be realised in it.’

Rose points out that Bloch’s analysis proceeds from the point of view of the artist; whereas Lukács’ concern is about the reception, effect and social function of the artwork. Both of them, however, overlook how the processes which come between production and reception may ‘distort their original significance’. Bloch thinks that art (and politics) ‘can, and should, and must draw on and appeal to the emotional and irrational’. But, Rose comments, ‘what counts as emotional or subjective in a society is produced and reproduced by the social structure’. Lukács is ‘wrong for the same reason, for he saw what is realistic or what is rational as universal, pre-given and fixed’. Both Lukács and Bloch saw bourgeois society as in a process of disintegration; and both were wrong, in that capitalism, especially in the post-World War Two periods, was consolidating itself with new forms of cultural and political domination.

At this point in her narrative, Rose turns to the cultural analysis of the Frankfurt School proper, namely Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.

TO BE CONTINUED

Culture (Before the World) Wars – Simmel, Lukács and Bloch

Forms of culture (art, law, religion, technology) are created in historical time, but often attain an independent validity which may render them inaccessible to their creators

By David Black

Forms of culture (art, law, religion, technology) are created in historical time, but often attain an independent validity which may render them inaccessible to their creators, e.g. a work of art such as a painting may, when first exhibited in a gallery, may be acclaimed as profound, original and daring; yet might get labelled as kitsch when it is mass reproduced to hang in suburban parlors.

This phenomenon was already taking hold in the late 19th century when the German sociologist, George Simmel (1858-1918) began to correlate cultural developments with the increasing fragmentation of the work process as described by Karl Marx. Subjectively, the individual ‘spirit’ feels alienated from an ‘objective life’ (work) dominated by exchange value and money. By the same token (literally) money cam provide the means to establish a private realm of relative cultural freedom, separated off from the grind of alienated and quantified objectification.

The theorists of the Second International (1889-1916) based their formulations on the base-superstructure model, resulting in a sociological Marxism ‘without aesthetics’. Marx’s doctrine was reduced to economics and politics, with its philosophical essence reduced to positivist sociology. Artists and all other cultural personifications were thought to produce their works as simple reflections of the economic base, according to their class position within the epiphenomena of institutional and ideological formations.

To correct this shortcoming, Simmel, in The Philosophy of Money, aims to

‘construct a new storey beneath historical materialism such that the explanatory value of the incorporation of economic life into the causes of intellectual culture is preserved, while these economic forms themselves are recognized as the result of more profound valuations and currents of psychological or even metaphysical preconditions.’

To establish this philosophically, Simmel, who was schooled in the Neo-Kantian school of sociology, utilises what Kant had expressly ruled out as a source of validity: Plato’s ‘realm of the forms’.

‘The ordinary idea is: here is the natural world, there the transcendental, we belong to one of the two. No, we belong to a third, inexpressible realm, of which both the natural and the transcendental are reflections, projections, falsifications, interpretations.’

For Simmel, this underivable, value-creating reason lies beyond the distinction of subject and object; beyond the alienation of the human subject from the ‘everyday’ world of production, distribution and exchange. Simmel says it is a ‘typical tragedy of spirit to reside in the opposition between the realm of ideas and reality.’

In Kant’s Aesthetics, objective judgements, apart from those of ‘common sense’, don’t apply to works of art. The ‘taste’ of the individual may or may not be shared by other individuals. In all cases the judgement is subjective. Developments in artistic technique, form and content are assigned to the natural ‘genius’, whose talents cannot be accounted for objectively. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the unifying of formal reason for the scientific investigation of objective reality is determined exclusively by the individual observer. But, in Simmel’s version of Neo-Kantianism, Kant’s a priori forms – the ‘essence of our intellect’ – are seen as ‘calling forth nature itself’. The unity of society is not then determined by the abstractions of the individual observer, but is social: ‘directly realized by its own elements because these elements are themselves conscious and synthesizing units.’ Hence the consciousness of constituting with others a unity is ‘actually all there is . . . to this unity.’

George Lukács (1885-1971) and Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) were students of Simmel in Heidelberg, during the years preceding the First World War.

Lukács, in his History of Modern Drama (1909). which is influenced by Simmel, addresses ‘the tendency to depersonalization and reduction of quality to quantity in bourgeois society’, and ‘the desire to reduce everything to figures and formulae’. The modern world had negated the Romanticist dream of an authentic world based on aesthetics and ethics rather than economics and nihilistic growth. Society had become the arena of tragedy, reflected in dramas about the conflict between the aspiration of personal fulfilment and reified reality. Lukács, as an unahamed classicist, saw Marxian socialism as presenting a synthesizing unity which, however, in the conditions of the time (the pre-1914 Belle Époque and the high tide of militarism and imperialism) seemed unattainable short of a ‘miracle’. Such a ‘miracle’ had occurred with the advent of medieval Catholicism. When the time came to give the Marxian synthesis its artistic expression, this would ‘necessarily take a form as severe as rigorous of the genuine art of the Middle Ages (Giotto, Dante), and not the purely individual art, pushing individualism to the extreme, which is produced by our own times.’

In Soul and Form (1911) Lukács considers Keirkegaard’s grappling with the threefold fragmentation in the Protestant world of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. As there was no prospect any social force bridging the division between the three spheres, the only ‘genuine’ solution to Keirkegaard’s mind was a ‘leap of faith’. In his case this meant the ‘gesture’ towards God of sacrificing his relationship with Regina Olsen, the love of his life. Lukács saw Keirkegaard’s critique of the antinomies of bourgeois society as profound, but judged the gesture in-itself to be empty and futile. Lukács argued that to be possessed by ‘goodness’ requires a Meister Eckhardt-inspired ‘poverty of spirit’ as way of ‘preparing oneself for virtue.’

‘Do you remember Sonia, Prince Myshkin. Alexei Karamazov. In Dostoevsky? You asked me if there any good humans and here they are. And you see, even their goodness is fruitless confusing and without result… Whom did Prince Myshkin help, Didn’t he actually bring tragedy wherever he went? Goodness is no guarantee of being able to help; it is however, the safeguard of the absolute and perceptive desire to help.’

Bloch was asked in 1974 by Michael Lowy: why did Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy have so much an influence on Western Europe?

‘Bloch: A new culture begins with them, and it has now reached only its Merovingian stage. I myself participated in this general feeling when I wrote in Geist der Utopie [Spirit of Utopia] that the Russian Revolution was the act of a new Praetorian Guard “who enthroned Christ as Emperor for the first time.” This was still the mythical Russia. With Christ as Emperor!… For us, this was Russian Christianity, the spiritual universe of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Why did all of Western Europe see only this imaginary Russia? It was an impulse which was religious as well as moral, and it elicited this passion for the “Russian soul” – you understand that I’m consciously using the kitsch term for it-for something that we made glimmer in front of our eyes and that didn’t exist in reality.’

Of his intellectual friendship with Lukcács, Bloch recalled:

‘When we had been separated for several months and met again, we discovered that we had both worked in exactly the same direction. I could continue where he had left off, and he continue where I had left off. We were like communicating vessels; he was always at the same level…. There are parts and ideas in [Lukacs’] History and Class Consciousness which are expressions of a common point of view and which really came from me, just as parts of Geist der Utopie and aspects of its contents originated in conversations with Lukacs, to the point that both of us found it hard to say, “This is my idea, this is yours.” We were really in profound agreement.’

According to Bloch, also under Simmel’s influence, Marxism had identified the fundamental contradiction in capitalism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Bloch termed this the ‘contemporaneous [or synchronous] contradiction’. But, there is a secondary network of non-synchronous contradictions inherited from earlier societies but which survive into capitalism, and which may be incorporated, left alone, or destroyed, according to the ‘progress’ of capitalist development. These social forms, he believed, could not be ignored.

As Bloch prepared to publish The Spirit of Utopia, Lukács took a momentous ‘leap of faith’ of joining the Communist Party. He became Minister of Culture in the Hungarian Soviet Republic, which lasted for six months in 1919.

TO BE CONTINUED

Gillian Rose Against the Holy Middle

Remembering Britain’s Greatest Post-War Philosopher

By David Black

Maya Krishnan, in an article for The Point (‘The Risk of the Universal’, 3 June 2024). has contributed a substantial and readable introduction the writings of Gillian Rose (1947-1995).

Gillian Rose said that the collapse of state-socialism couldn’t kill Marxism, because ‘all the antinomies of modern state and society addressed since Hobbes, Smith and Rousseau, have been reopened.’ Furthermore, the antinomies raised the question of the ‘connection’ between liberalism and fascism, which might have seemed otiose in the 1990s, but certainly doesn’t now.

Rose recalls the words of the young Marx, writing in On the Jewish Question,

‘,,,the perfection of the idealism of the state is at the same time the perfection of the materialism of civil society. The shaking-off of the political yoke was at the same time the shaking-off of the bonds which had held in check the egoistic spirit of civil society. Political emancipation was, at the same time, the emancipation of civil society from politics, from even the appearance of a universal content.’

In Rose’s interpretation, Marx here exposes the ‘breaking of the middle’. In the pre-capitalist world, the guilds, statuses and privileges which determined the rights and duties of individuals, formed the legal estate in the ‘middle’ of the old feudal order. With the sweeping away of these institutions, the post-feudal individual is ‘naturalized as “egoism” and allegorized as “ethical”.’

Following the post-Hegelian ‘disasters of modernity’ – stalinism, nazi-ism and imperialism – we see the post-modern attempt to bypass the dichotomies by dismissing the whole Enlightenment project – and rational critique generally – as implicated in power relations.

Foucault’s monolithic concept of ‘power’ conflates actual power and knowledge in a way that ‘underwrites the Nietzschian drive toward a nihilist abandonment of reason itself’. Philosophic truth-claims are seen as ‘mere by-products of the will-to-power vested in figural language.’ In the ‘linguistic turn’ of post-modernism, rhetoric is privileged over reason: concepts and categories are entirely determined by the various signifying codes and systems that make up a given ‘discourse’. In Krishnan’s view, Rose’s critique of post-structuralism, in The Dialectic of Nihilism exposes ‘a kind of tantrum in which thinkers misdirect their anger over an irrational society by lashing out at rationality itself.’

As Krishnan suggests, the problem with the ‘Peoples of the Book’ – Jews, Moslems and Christians – isn’t so much that they have to negotiate between their ethics and the ‘voice of authority’ which issued the ‘god-given’ order: ‘go and smite Amalek’:

‘Where we go wrong, on Rose’s view, is not by accepting the wrong kind of authority; it’s rather by demanding the wrong kind of security. The risk of becoming a perpetrator of violence isn’t special to traditional authority. Rather, it is the risk of politics itself.’

What Rose calls the ‘fantasy of mending the world’ is the realm of the ‘Holy Middle’, in which it is imagined that following a set of principles will guarantee security. In the Middle discourse and principles displace political action of the universalist kind, because the latter has had violent consequences. Hence, post-politics is imagined to be risk-free, not just as regards personal safety, but also from the guilt of complicity in the violence of the system.

The political implications are summed up by Krishnan as follows:

‘None, then, are without sin. But the Rosean leftist traditionalist can say more than that. A capacity to appreciate forms of value caught up in compromised histories has particular relevance to the leftist, whose uniquely demanding vision of a transformed world is susceptible to giving way to a uniquely dispirited outlook. Living with disappointment over the political history of one’s ideals is a key aspect of Rose’s account of the “broken middle” and of her philosophy of mourning, which is not a counsel of resignation but rather its opposite. By giving up faulty conceptions of our ability to distance ourselves from risk and violence, Rose thinks we regain the political aspirations that the “nihilist” abandons.’

Rose takes off from Hegel’s understanding of modernity not as factor of unification, but of diremption, or division. According to Rose in Hegel Contra Sociology, ‘Hegel’s philosophy has no social import if the Absolute cannot be thought.’ Inasmuch as Marx’s philosophy does have social import – i.e. if the new society (the absolute) is immanent in the actuality of everyday life – it must also be thought. However, Rose continues,

‘A society’s relation to nature, to transformative activity determines its political and property relations, its concept of law, and its subjective or natural consciousness… as long as these relations and law prevails the absolute can only be thought by an abstract consciousness…’

The domination of abstract consciousness in commodity production is underwritten by the predominance of abstract labour. The problem of inversion is tackled in Marx’s Capital:

‘The theory of commodity fetishism is the most speculative moment in Marx’s exposition of capital. It comes nearest to demonstrating in the historically specific case of commodity-producing society how substance is (mis-)represented as subject, how necessary illusion arises out of productive activity.’

In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the history of reason’s determinations and self-(mis)understandings, begins with natural consciousness. Eventually, reason recognises that all along reason has been trying to know itself, rather than an external object. In modernity what Rose calls ‘aberrated mourning’ is the failure to recognise that what we have been mourning is our own fantasies of mending the world. What Rose calls ‘inaugurated mourning’ would recognise the potential for challenging the abstract rationalism of bourgeois society, for which any traditional social forms either have to be destroyed or taken over (or recuperated) to render them relatively harmless. I say relatively, because traditional forms harbour their own fantasies of mending the world, and their own denials and evasions of the past.

Krishnan points out that Alisdair MacIntyre (another British philosopher) sees ‘tradition’ similarly to Rose. For MacIntyre,

‘… there is no such thing as a nontraditional form of life: everyone winds up embracing at least one tradition, whether they realize it or not. Even the modern liberal who self-defines against “the tyranny of tradition” has in fact merely given themselves over to one more tradition, with its own historically transmitted and locally specific forms of activity, its own canon, its own “contingency and particularity.” Tradition is the ground on which everyone stands, Marxist and monk alike. The concomitant risk of complicity in tradition’s tyrannies is therefore everyone’s problem.’

‘I may die before my time’, wrote Rose in one of her last lectures before she died, aged 47 in 1995 from ovarian cancer. Maya Krishnan summarizes:

‘In her writing on what is at once broken and bountiful, she wrote for an age whose difficulty might finally prepare readers to receive her intensities. Rose knew that she would die before her time; she also knew that her time would come.’

Penguin Classics have published a new edition of Love’s Work, an unfinished illness narrative which contains Gillian Rose’s reflections on life, death and personal relationships, all delivered with wry humour combined with deadly seriousness. Later this year, Verso will bring out a perviously unpublished a transcription of Rose’s lectures from 1979 entitled Marxist Modernism.

The Communist Manifesto and the Strange Case of the Frightful Hobgoblin

David Black

21 July 2023

Terry Eagleton, writes in his review of Marx’s Literary Style by Ludovico Silva (London Review of Books, 29 June 2023): “The Communist Manifesto is rife with arresting imagery from the moment of its celebrated opening: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe.’” In Marx’s writings, “the categories that spring to his mind are comedy, tragedy, farce, bathos, epic, parody, spectacle and so on. If drama is latently political, politics is inescapably theatrical.”

In response, David Ireland writes in a letter to the LRB:

“Helen Macfarlane, the Scottish Chartist who in 1850 issued the first English language translation of the Manifesto, is widely derided for her rendering of ‘ein Gespenst’ [a spectre’] as ‘a frightful hobgoblin.’ It was at least a variation on the spectre.”

As the author of a prospective biography of Helen Macfarlane – described by Karl Marx as a “rara avis” with uniquely “original ideas” -, I question the derision. Today ‘hobgoblin’ is associated with the comedy cartoon figure on the label of Hobgoblin beer; or by the minor Marvel Comics super-villain. In 1850, however, ‘hobgoblin’ had other associations and was well-established literary currency.

According to historian, Peter Linebaugh:

‘“Hob” was the name of a country labourer, ‘goblin’ a mischievous sprite. Thus communism manifested itself in the Manifesto in the discourse of the agrarian commons; the substrate of the language revealing the imprint of the clouted shoon in the sixteenth century who fought to have all things in common. The trajectory from commons to communism can be cast as passage from past to future’.

Fascinating as Linebaugh’s idea of hobgoblins as belonging to the historical imaginary of the daily world of peasant communing is, it is hard to validate according to the historical sources.

Although Macfarlane renders Gespenst as ‘hobgoblin’ in the opening lines, she uses ‘bugbear’ for the same word a few lines later, referring to “silly fables about ‘the bugbear of Communism’”. In Scottish folklore, according to the Dictionary of the Older Scots Tongue, the ‘Bogle’ is ‘A supernatural being of an ugly or terrifying aspect; a bugbear’.

That ‘Hobgoblin’ is interchangeable with ‘bugbear’ is indicated in a 1593 statement from a government informer about 1593 concerning playwright Christopher Marlowe, shortly before he was stabbed to death in a Deptford ale-house: ‘into every Company he [Marlowe] Cometh he persuades men to Atheism willing them not to be afeard of bugbeares and hobgoblins, and utterly scorning both god and his ministers’.

As this statement was only discovered in the early 20^th century there is no way Helen Macfarlane would have known about it. But clearly her translation of hobgoblin and bugbear as the spectre of communism expresses a same ‘spirit’ as Marlowe on atheism.

In 1684 John Bunyan’s ‘Who Would True Valour See’, in The Pilgrim’s Progress, has ‘Hobgoblin, nor foul Fiend/Can daunt his Spirit/He knows, he at the end/Shall Life Inherit’. In Jeremy Bentham’s chapter in the Book of Fallacies (published in 1824), entitled ‘The Hobgoblin Argument, or, No Innovation’:

‘The hobgoblin, the eventual appearance of which is denounced by this argument, is anarchy, which tremendous spectre has for its forerunner innovation… Of a similar nature and productive of similar effects is the political device here exposed to view…’

In the 1846 essay, ‘Self-Reliance’, by the American Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson the device reappears:

‘In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines’.

As Helen Macfarlane quotes Emerson in her own writings, it is likely, if not evident, that Emerson’s use of ‘hobgoblin’ influenced her translation of the Communist Manifesto.

(Red Republican: the Complete Annotated Works of Helen Macfarlane, edited and introduced by David Black, was published by Unkant in 2014)

Reification 2.0: Lukács on Journalism as Prostitution

By David Black

100 years of ‘History and Class Consciousness’

History and Class Consciousness, by the Hungarian communist philosopher, Georg Lukács, was published in 1923. The book drew a hostile reaction from the ideologists of the 1920s Comintern. That it did is ironic, given today Lukács is blamed by the Far Right for originating ‘cultural Marxism’, ‘critical race theory’ and other alleged wokenesses. Certainly Lukács’s book influenced the Frankfurt School, the Situationists, and other cultural folk-devils, but I am unaware of any conspiracy theorist who appears to have understood a word of it.

Lukács highlighted a central insight by Marx which appeared to have been forgotten by most post-Marx Marxism: that advanced capitalism doesn’t just ‘rob’ the worker through extracting quantities of surplus-value; it also appropriates living labour in a qualitative inversion of the ‘relation of subject and object’. Marx refers to this development as ‘a personification of the thing and a reification of the person’

Lukács takes up Marx’s theory of ‘metabolism’, which addresses how the transhistorical, interactive relation of humans with the rest of nature undergoes a ‘metabolic rift’ which is historically specific to capitalism. The rift is an effect of the systematised ‘robbery’ of nature’s resources and the social oppression that enforces it. Lukács analyzes how in capitalism, work, as a social-metabolic process, is reified and fragmented in a way that makes people incapable of recognizing the world beyond their own particular tasks as being of their own making. People are rendered passive and contemplative, no matter how ‘busy’ they are. The expert (or ‘virtuoso’) ‘lapses into a contemplative attitude vis-à-vis the workings of his own objectified and reified faculties’:

‘This phenomenon can be seen at its most grotesque in journalism. Here it is precisely subjectivity itself, knowledge, temperament and powers of expression that are reduced to an abstract mechanism functioning autonomously and divorced both from the personality of their “owner” and from the material and concrete nature of the subject matter in hand. The journalist’s “lack of convictions”, the prostitution of his experiences and beliefs is comprehensible only as the apogee of capitalist reification.’

As Guy Debord puts it in Comments of the Society of the Spectacle (1988): ‘For every imbecility presented by the spectacle, there are only the media’s professionals to give an answer, with a few respectful rectifications or remonstrations…’ Debord adds that these journalists are often in the precarious position of having to serve a range of interests they depend on for remuneration and the flow of information they rely on: that of the newspaper proprietor, broadcaster, political party, corporation, church, university, security agency, etc:

‘It must not be forgotten that every media professional is bound by wages and other rewards and recompenses to a master, and sometimes to several; and that every one of them knows he is dispensable.’

The ‘lack of conviction’ can acquire the optics of loss of conviction, as evidenced by lurches in political loyalties from Left to Right or (less often, it has to be said) vice-versa. This unedifying move is tempting for the hack who is running out of things to say and stories to tell, because switching sides opens up a whole new spectrum to roam in.

Reification Analytica

In a recent essay, Christian Fuchs argues that Lukács’s critique of ideology and reified consciousness ‘remains highly topical in the age of digital capitalism and big data.. [It] allows us to critically analyse how social media, big data and various other Internet technologies are used as tools of reification.’

Big date analytics embodies the latest tendency towards quantification of everything in society. Algorithms and mathematical analysis are applied to the data that is scraped and hoovered-up from the internet. By identifying patterns, relations and correlations it can predict human behaviour for purposes of surveillance, management and control. Fuchs quotes the former editor of the Wired magazine, Chris Anderson, as a representative of the uncritical fetishism of developments in big data. Anderson claims the new developments will bring about the ‘end of theory’: ‘With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves […] [When] faced with massive data, this [traditional] approach to science – hypothesize, model, test – is becoming obsolete.’

What applies to scientific research may also apply to journalism and may constitute the same dangers. Fuchs argues that the positivism about quantitative methodology disregards ‘ethics, morals, critique, theory, emotions, affects, motivations, worldviews, interpretations, political assessments, power, social struggles, or contradictions’. As the social sciences and humanities are colonised by computer science and business studies, critical theory and critical thinking generally are effectively rooted out.

On the other hand…

Whilst recognising that the new technologies are deeply embedded into the structure of capitalist domination, Fuchs sees alternative potentials and forces at work in the realm of digital technologies:

‘Lukács opposed deterministic analyses, which implies that although exploitation and domination are ubiquitous in capitalism, there is always the possibility for critical consciousness and critical action (praxis)… modern technology has created new potentials for co-operation and socialisation.’

The logic of the corporate digital giants is the subjection of the atomised individual to privacy violations, intransparent algorithms, targeted advertising and the like as a design principle. Socialist design would make social media truly social: based on collective production, co-operation and creative commons. It would protect privacy and promote transparency and the openness of algorithms as design principles.

(Christian Fuchs’s essay, ‘History and Class Consciousness 2.0: Georg Lukács in the Age of Digital Capitalism and Big Data’, is published in the journal Communication and Society, 2020)

Whatever Happened to Left Populism and ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’?

David Black

June 26 2023

Project of an orbital colony Stanford torus, painted by Donald E. Davis. Public domain image.

The Limits of Politics in the Anthropocene

In recent years Left Populism has lost momentum; seemingly eclipsed by the paranoid nativism of the Far Right, or recuperated by zombified social democracy. ‘We’ may still be the ‘99 per cent’, but the implied one per cent are still in charge, and, according to Greta Thunberg, the planet is burning amid ‘fairy tales of eternal growth’. So, whatever happened?

The rise of Left Populism took place in the aftermath of the Crash of 2008. Those years saw the emergence of the Occupy! movement in the USA, which powered up the Bernie Sanders campaign, and the Indignados movement in Spain which did likewise for the Podemos party. In Greece, the populist upsurge led to the formation of the Syriza coalition, which became the government in 2015. Populism had traction all over Europe, including Britain – where it took the form of a revival of the Labour Party Left, led by Jeremy Corbyn – and in various parts of South America.

According to Pablo Iglesias, general secretary of the Podemos party, ‘the key to success is to establish a certain identity between your analysis and what the majority feels’. One of the key sources of populist synthesis was the book On Populist Reason (2005) by Argentine political theorist, Ernst Laclau. Populism, according to Laclau, is ‘the political act par excellence’ which constructs the concept of the ‘people’. Politics is not reducible to traditional Leftist representations of classes or social forces, e.g., workers, peasants, racial or sexual minorities. Rather, the political is about discourse — language.

Swedish Marxist, Carl Cassegard, says Laclau’s book is

‘a theoretization of populism as a way in which the political is constituted as an least seemingly autonomous realm, independent of social forces in an almost quasi-transcendental way.’

Outside of the world of political discourse there is nothing to constitute a changeable process of social reality. In terms of Ferdinand Saussure’s linguistics theory, the relation is between the signifier (the political stirrings of the ‘plebs’ and the ‘underdogs’ against the unaccountable alien power of the ‘elite’) and the thing signified (the ‘power of the people’). Drawing on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, Laclau denotes the idea of the ‘people’ as the imaginary subject’s unattainable object of desire. Laclau’s concept of the ‘people’ is also homologous with the noumenal world in which Kant confines freedom and morality—for Kant there is nothing outside of the categories of the understanding that can constitute any sort of transcendence. Hegel describes Kant’s noumenal thing-in-itself as a bit like Hamlet’s father’s ghost: you can’t grasp it or make even make ‘sense’ of it, yet it is real in that it exercises moral power over Hamlet’s actions.

The New Left Utopians

Theorists of 21^st century Populism believe they are on the ‘right side of history’ because of the possibilities afforded by technology. Aaron Bastani’s book, Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto (Verso: 2019), was widely reviewed in mainstream media. During the Lockdown, millions of white-collar workers found that the abundance of technology in their homes made the daily commute and the management office both seem anachronistic. Andy Kessler, in the Wall Street Journal (17 May 2021) saw a connection between this phenomenon and Bastani’s book:

‘At first I thought it was a joke. I still do… Cue rainbow-belching unicorns, The Atlantic wrote that “the vision is compelling.” The New York Times helped promote it. And it sure feels like the Biden administration is trying to implement it. Naturally, it’s complete baloney.’

Like other hostiles, Kessler didn’t get to Bastani’s main pitch, which was an attempt to rebrand Marxism by re-interpreting Marx’s insights in the light of 21^st century technology. Here, Bastani is in the company of Paul Mason (in Postcapitalism: A Guide To Our Future), Ash Sarkar (his colleague at Novara Media) and various ‘technological utopians’ and ‘left accelerationists’. They all draw their theoretical framework from the concept of the ‘General Intellect’ which Marx sets out in a text known as the ‘Fragment on Machines’ in his Grundrisse (which lay unpublished for 100 years). Marx conducts a thought experiment. Assuming a society consisting only of workers and capitalists, market competition compels capitalists to introduce new machines and thus acquire extra surplus. The capitalist innovators in productive technology increase their profits and drive their slower-moving competitors out of business. However, unless the scale of production expands more rapidly than the rate of increase in productivity, less workers will be employed. The increasing investment in fixed capital is accompanied by the lessening of value produced by workers in society as a whole.

‘General Intellect’ denotes the accumulated knowledge of this society. The intellect becomes generalised to such an extent that the dominance of mental over mental labour – what Alfred Sohn-Rethel terms the ‘autonomous intellect’, based on the Kantian transcendental subject – reaches the point where the division itself is universally seen as anachronistic. So, as the development of social collaboration and free knowledge destabilizes the market mechanism and the system of private property, the capitalist mode of production breaks down. Marx writes:

‘Forces of production and social relations – two different sides of the development of the social individual – appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky high.’ (145)

The idea of the General Intellect has resonated in some unexpected places. Samuel McIlhagga in Foreign Policy (May 28, 2023) writes: ‘Marx shares an optimism with Silicon Valley about the potential for rapid technological change but is also far more skeptical about the short-term uncontrolled effects machines will have on human beings.’ The problem McIlhagga sees with Marxists of the Boomer and Millennial generations is that they have relied too much of Marx’s Capital:

‘It’s not that Marx can’t help the new post-COVID-19 generation understand its own forms of accelerating social, economic, and natural dislocation. But Generation Z would be wise to trade Marx’s Das Kapital for his long-neglected Grundrisse.’

The Productive Forces of Capital

The idea of the General Intellect and capitalist breakdown did not make it into Marx’s Capital Volume 1 or into the never completed volumes II and III. The reason for this, according to Kohei Saito in his book, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, is because there was a decisive shift in Marx’s conception of history, which occurred sometime between 1863 and 1866. This is shown in a draft from that period, entitled ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’. Here, the ‘two sides’ of production – relations and forces of production are subsumed as the ‘productive forces of capital’. This is closely tied to two other concepts: ‘cooperation’ and ‘real subsumption of labour under capital’. What it shows is not how capitalism breaks down — to our benefit – but how breaks loose — to our cost.

Industry, in the shift from manufacture to machinofacture, introduces new technology and develops new ways of organising distribution and production. This revolutionising of relations between workers and capitalists is theorised as the shift from ‘formal subsumption’ of labour to ‘real subsumption’. Real subsumption reduces the price of labour power by increasing productivity. The independent labour of the individual is nullified. The capitalist, who now commands the means of production (objectified labour), employs living labour in an inversion of the ‘relation of subject and object’. Marx refers to this inversion as ‘a personification of the thing and a reification of the person’. Cooperation, in revolutionising and extending the division of labour, is enforced across whole industries and society as a whole:

‘To the extent that the worker creates wealth, living labour becomes a power of capital; similarly, all development of the productive forces of labour is development of the productive forces of capital’.

Marx’s theory of ‘Metabolism’ addresses how the transhistorical, interactive relation of humans with the rest of nature undergoes a ‘metabolic rift’ which is historically specific to productivist capitalism. The rift is an effect of the systematised ‘robbery’ of nature’s resources and the social oppression that enforces it. The ‘automation utopians’ avoid the problem of productivism and technological determinism by focussing on populist electoral politics, and constructing a new ‘political subjectivity’ of forces for social change.

Saito warns that this concentration on the purely political concedes to capital the option of reacting to metabolic rifts by means of metabolic shifts, such as introducing geo-engineering ‘in the name of stewardship of the earth… to manage the entire ecological system at the cost of enslaving people – especially in the Global South through the metabolic shift – to heteronomous regulation by technologies’. Capital is able to deal with problems by simply shifting them elsewhere. It can do so spatially, by transferring the metabolic robbery system to places in world beyond democratic oversight; and temporally, by leaving the problems and the human costs to be solved and paid for by succeeding generations.Saito writes: ‘…politics alone is not able to change society because the extension of democracy to the economic realm will face an insurmountable limit when it comes to challenging and undermining the power of capital.’ Populist electoralism has a tendency to be hijacked by the right or recuperated by the centre. Cassegard writes:

‘Populism isn’t necessarily radical. Examples of the extension and unification of equivalential chains in the name of the people abound in institutionalized politics. That, after all, is how most mainstream political parties in modern liberal democracies work.’

Getting Real

Bastani highlights a quote from Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program of 1875, which envisions the ‘higher phase of communist society’ as where

‘labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want … and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly… From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!’

Ecosocialists have expressed reservations about this statement because it appears to be ‘productivist’; i.e. an argument for the exploitation of natural resources as if they were infinite. Bastani doesn’t regard this as too much of a problem as he thinks that high-tech can make production more eco-friendly if it is organised rationally and democratically:

‘So as information, labour, energy and resources become permanently cheaper – and work and the limits of the old world are left behind – it turns out we don’t just satisfy all of our needs, but dissolve any boundary between the useful and the beautiful. Communism is luxurious – or it isn’t communism.’

Saito, addressing the concerns about ‘productivism’, suggests that development of productive forces Marx envisages in the Critique is not equivalent to merely quantitative increases in production of the same commodities as under capitalism. For Saito, communism would have a ‘stationary state’ economy for satisfying real human needs, and would actually make it less productive, where necessary:

’This reorganization of the labour process may decrease productivity by abolishing the excessive division of labour and making labour more democratic and attractive, but it nonetheless counts as the “development” of productive forces of social labour because it ensures the free and autonomous activity of individual workers.’

Saito gives five reasons why de-growth communism would increase the chance of repairing the metabolic rift.

Firstly, whereas capital, in its drive for unlimited growth and profit, is bound to make and sell non-essential and harmful products, the abolition of the law of value would allow the reallocation of resources to essentials such as care and real luxuries such a art, sport and travel.

Secondly, unnecessary labour, especially energy and resource-consuming ‘bullshit jobs’ would be eliminated..

Thirdly, de-growth communism would transform the remaining realm of necessity to make the content of work more attractive.

Fourthly, the abolition of market competition for profits would de-accelerate the economy and ease pressure on the biosphere.

Finally, ‘Through collective decision-making processes, workers have more room to reflect upon the necessity of their products, egalitarian relations of class, gender and race, and environmental impacts.’

Saito’s case for a de-growth Marx is at the same time an argument for humanist communism. Anti-humanism, faced with the Anthropocene, takes such forms as technological determinism, deep-green catastrophism, Bible-prophesies and ‘hidden hand’ of libertarian economics. But an existential problem does not have a political/ideological solution. Political promises are usually lies; and ideologies serve to rationalise capital’s personification of things and reification of persons. We need materialism, not as a secular religion of pseudo-scientific rationalism, but as a method for dealing with material problems.

References

Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto. Verso: 2019

Carl Cassegard, ‘Laclau and the return of the people’ (https://carlcassegard.blogspot.com/2014/06/laclau-and-return-of-people.html)

Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program. Translated by Karel Ludenhoff • Introduction by Peter Hudis • Foreword by Peter Linebaugh. PM Press/Spectre: 2022

‘Another Language’ – How Walt Whitman’s Poetry Came to England

(January 2022)

How Walt Whitman’s Poetry Came to England

By David Black

Suddenly, out of its stale and drowsy air, the air of slaves,
Like lightning Europe le’pt forth,
Sombre, superb and terrible,
As Ahimoth, brother of Death.
God, ‘twas delicious!
That brief, tight, glorious grip
Upon the throats of kings.

Something entirely missed by biographers of Walt Whitman (1819-92) and poetry scholars generally is how his poetry found its first readership in England. His poem, ‘Resurgemus’, appeared in the 3 August 1850 edition of the Red Republican, a weekly paper of the English Chartists edited in London by George Julian Harney (1817-97).

Harney was a close associate of Karl Marx (1818-83) and Friedrich Engels (1820-95), who as political exiles had moved from Germany to London and Manchester respectively. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto , first published in German in 1848, was translated by Helen Macfarlane (1818-1861), whose own writings for Harney’s paper were influenced by the German Idealism of GWF Hegel (1770-1831), the Unitarianism of Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) and the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882).

The Red Republican was denounced by leading ‘opinion formers’ such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle and the Times newspaper for its articulation of ‘dangerous’ ideas. The first-ever reaction by the Victorian ruling class to what became known as ‘Marxism’ is to be found in a Times leader of 2 September 1851 entitled ‘Literature For The Poor’. The Times found in the Communist Manifesto an alarming appeal to those people in the lower orders who form a sort of secret society, which is ‘close to our own’ but speaks ‘another language’:

‘… only now and then when some startling fact is bought before us do we entertain even the suspicion that there is a society close to our own, and with which we are in the habits of daily intercourse, of which we are as completely ignorant as if it dwelt in another land, of another language in which we never conversed, which in fact we never saw’.

The Times chose not to name the paper – ‘we are not anxious to give it circulation by naming its writers or the works to which it is composed’ – but did extract some of Helen Macfarlane’s translation of the Communist Manifesto, as serialized in the paper. The selection included this passage as an example of outrageous cheek:

‘Your Middle-class gentry are not satisfied with having the wives and daughters of their Wages-slaves at their disposal, – not to mention the innumerable public prostitutes – but they take a particular pleasure in seducing each other’s wives. Middle-class marriage is in reality a community of wives’.

The Leader, the weekly paper of Christian-socialism and ‘moderate’ Chartism, founded in 1850 by George Henry Lewes and Thornton Leigh Hunt, referred to the writers of Harney’s paper as ‘violent’ and ‘audacious’. Helen Macfarlane, writing under the pseudonym,‘Howard Morton’, responded in a Red Republican article,

‘It has lately been said by the Leader that the writers in the Red Republican are “violent, audacious and wrathfully earnest”… I should think we are. Just about as much in earnest as our precursor, “the Sansculotte Jesus” was when He scourged the usurers and money-lenders, and thimble-rigging stockbrokers of Jerusalem out of that temple they “had made a den of thieves”’.

How then did Whitman’s poetry come to make its first European appearance in Harney’s Red Republican? In 1848, Whitman moved to New Orleans to edit the Crescent newspaper. As there was considerable interest there in the politics of France, Whitman took a deep interest in the Revolution that began in Paris in February 1848 with the overthrow of King Louis Phillipe. The revolutionary tide swept across Europe, overthrowing the despotic monarchies of Austria, Italy, and various German states. But by 1850 the old orders had been restored. According to Jennifer J. Stein,

‘Although the revolutions were fairly quickly squelched, Whitman had gained a taste of the revolutionary spirit. His development from newspaper journalist to democracy-proclaiming poet occurred most dramatically in the years between the mid 1840s and mid 1850s, and although some point to Whitman’s work against slavery as his motivation for becoming freedom’s poetic leader, others point to the revolutions of Europe as his inspiration. In direct response to the revolutions, Whitman wrote “Resurgemus,” a poem printed in the New York Daily Tribune on 21 June 1850… The nature imagery used throughout “Resurgemus” is an important artistic step for Whitman, since he clearly uses it to link the replenishing power of nature to the rejuvenation of revolution and liberation. This poem was among those chosen for inclusion in the first (1855) Leaves of Grass, and it continued to resurface in various forms throughout his later editions.’

‘Resurgemus’, like the Communist Manifesto and the writings of Helen Macfarlane, represented what the Times called ‘another language in which we never conversed, which in fact we never saw’. The New York Tribune was read in London by George Julian Harney, who lifted Whitman’s Resurgemus from its pages and republished it in the Red Republican on 3 August 1850.

Mike Sanders points out that Harney had a ‘continuing desire to raise the literary standard of Chartist poetic production’. To achieve this, Harney rejected a lot of poetry submissions from readers; his reasoning being that bad poetry couldn’t express good politics: ‘Put simply, Chartists argued that the capacity of the working classes both to recognise and produce good poetry demonstrated their fitness for the franchise’. Clearly, Harney regarded Resurgemus as exemplary.

RESURGEMUS.

Turn back unto this day, and make yourselves afresh. ¶
You liars paid to defile the People,
Mark you now:
Not for numberless agonies, murders, lusts,
For court thieving in its manifold mean forms,
Worming from his simplicity the poor man’s wages;
For many a promise sworn by royal lips
And broken, and laughed at in the breaking;
Then, in their power, not for all these,
Did a blow fall in personal revenge,
Or a hair draggle in blood:
The People scorned the ferocity of kings.
But the sweetness of mercy brewed bitter destruction,
And frightened rulers come back:
Each comes in state, with his train,
Hangman, priest, and tax-gatherer,
Soldier, lawyer, and sycophant;
An appalling procession of locusts,
And the king struts grandly again.
Yet behind all, lo, a Shape
Vague as the night, draped interminably,
Head, front and form, in scarlet folds;
Whose face and eyes none may see,
Out of its robes only this,
The red robes, lifted by the arm,
One finger pointed high over the top,
Like the head of a snake appears.
Meanwhile, corpses lie in new-made graves,
Bloody corpses of young men;
The rope of the gibbet hangs heavily,
The bullets of tyrants are flying,
The creatures of power laugh aloud:
And all these things bear fruits, and they are good.
Those corpses of young men,
Those martyrs that hang from the gibbets,
Those hearts pierced by the grey lead,
Cold and motionless as they seem,
Live elsewhere with undying vitality;
They live in other young men, O, kings,
They live in brothers, again ready to defy you;
They were purified by death,
They were taught and exalted.
Not a grave of those slaughtered ones,
But is growing its seed of freedom,
In its turn to bear seed,
Which the winds shall carry afar and resow,
And the rain nourish.
Not a disembodied spirit
Can the weapon of tyrants let loose,
But it shall stalk invisibly over the earth,
Whispering, counseling, cautioning.
Liberty, let others despair of thee,
But I will never despair of thee:
Is the house shut? Is the master away?
Nevertheless, be ready, be not weary of watching,
He will surely return; his messengers come anon.

WALTER WHITMAN.

References

‘The Revolutions of 1848’, Jennifer J. Stein, in J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings, eds., Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998).

Mike Sanders, ‘The Poetry of Chartism, Aesthetics, Politics’, History (CUP: 2009), p77.

David Black, Helen Macfarlane: A Feminist, Revolutionary Journalist, and Philosopher in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England. Lexington Books: Lanham, Maryland (2004).

Helen Macfarlane: Red Republican. Essays, articles and her translation of the Communist Manifesto. Edited and annotated by David Black. Unkant Publishers, London 2014.

A.R. Schoyen, The Chartist Challenge: A Portrait of George Julian Harney.
Heinemann: London (1958).