Jameson, that is. He introduces his new book on Capital (in that period of your 70s when you get out all the stuff you should have produced earlier, much of which is based on his lectures over the years at Dook). And I put to rest that furphy about Marxism being secularised Jewish or Christian eschatology – it’s a load of crap and simply doesn’t hold up with a close analysis of Marx and Engels’s work. It’s all in Mediations: Journal of The Marxist Literary Group.
MARX, POLITICS… AND PUNK
Volume 25, No. 1Fall 2010
Editors’ Note
Contributors
Fredric Jameson: A New Reading of Capital
Is Capital about labor, or unemployment? Does Marxism have a theory of the political, or is it better off without one? Fredric Jameson previews the argument of his forthcoming book, Representing Capital.
Anna Kornbluh: On Marx’s Victorian Novel
As out of place as Marx himself might have been in Victorian England, Capital is less out of place than one might have thought among Victorian novels. But this does not have to mean that its mode of truth is literary. Anna Kornbluh explores the tropes that propelCapital in order to establish the novel relationship Marx produces between world and text.
Roland Boer: Marxism and Eschatology Reconsidered
The variations on the thesis of Marxism’s messianism are too many to count. But is it plausible to imagine that Marx or Engels took up Jewish or Christian eschatology, in any substantial form, into their thought? Roland Boer weighs the evidence.
Reiichi Miura: What Kind of Revolution Do You Want?
Punk, the Contemporary Left, and Singularity
What does punk have to do with Empire? What does singularity have to do with identity? What does the logic of rock ‘n’ roll aesthetics have to do with a politics of representation? What does the concept of the multitude have to do with neoliberalism? The answer to all these questions, argues Reiichi Miura, is a lot more than you might think.
Alexei Penzin: The Soviets of the Multitude: On Collectivity and Collective Work:
An Interview with Paolo Virno
One of the principle conundrums that confronts the theorization of the multitude is the relationship it entails between individual and collective. Alexei Penzin, of the collective Chto Delat / What Is To Be Done?, interviews Paolo Virno.
BOOK REVIEWS
Nataša Kovačević: New Money in the Old World:
On Europe’s Neoliberal Disenchantment
What is left of the promise that was Europe? Does anything Utopian remain of the European project, or is it destined to become just another neoliberal power? Nataša Kovačević reviews Perry Anderson’s The New Old World.
Kevin Floyd: Queer Principles of Hope
In the “marketplace of ideas,” Marxism and queer studies are often presumed to be divergent and even opposed discourses. Contemporary work in both fields makes the case for a convergence. Kevin Floyd reviews José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utoptia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.
Madeleine Monson-Rosen: Under a Pink Flag
Is there a feminine relation to copyright in the contemporary period? Madeleine Monson-Rosen reviews Caren Irr’s Pink Pirates: Contemporary Women Writers and Copyright.
3 March, 2011 at 10:17 am
So you reckon old Bruno–with his ueber-supersessionist, apocalyptic, revolutionary split of Christianity from Judaism ideas, mixed in with his left Hegelian politics–was telling Marx nothing about revolution?
Not even a little bit?
3 March, 2011 at 12:19 pm
Actually, Bruno and Karl both were opposed to the apocalyptic tone of communism at the time – through the likes of Wilhelm Weitling and Moses Hess. And Bauer soon saw Christianity and Judaism as both participating in the same false particularism. Further, you are guilty of a sleight of hand here, Deane, since revolution has no necessary connection with eschatology.
Basically, the oft-repeated criticism of Marxism as secularised Jewish-Christian eschatology was initially made without any analysis of texts by M&E; when you do study the texts closely, the argument doesn’t hold up.
3 March, 2011 at 3:55 pm
I’m still yet to be persuaded that the ‘Marxism learnt nothing about eschatology from Bauer’ is better than ‘Marxism is just a secularized eschatology’. But, how can I argue with the assured results of your historical criticism?
5 March, 2011 at 9:58 am
Well done. The “Marxism being secularised Jewish or Christian eschatology” trope always reminds me of David Lampert’s (1996) claim that the hammer and sickle can be seen as a permutation of the Russian Orthodox two-barred cross.
10 August, 2011 at 9:20 pm
[...] have had a go at answering this one at the level of Marx’s texts in an article in Mediations. The short answer here is that Marx and Engels set themselves against the dominantly eschatological [...]