Artists and Potboilers. A Chapter on the Incentive of Gain. (1916)

From the August 1916 issue of the Socialist Standard

Let Us Forget !

Little apology is needed for the scanty mention of the European War in this chapter. In the contest every kind of cannon has now been used ; every variety of dismemberment and death been suffered ; the whole thing is now grown monotonous and dull. When the French plains and the Flemish fields, the hills of Russia and the hills of Italy have been sufficiently dunged with rotten death to please the masters, the fighting nations will see that, far from any good coming to them from the bloodshed, it has resulted in a silly national division of the workers, which is not good, nor anywhere near good.

Let people for a moment forget all the ephemeral “Commissions,” “Reports,” “Investigations,” “Leading Articles,” ”Booklets, and “Volumes” that are born of the war, and turn to matters of permanent interest ; let people turn from the Newspapers to the Classic Books, from Cannon to Galleries, and they will see that the old delicate dramas, the fine new stuff, the sweetness of the masters in painting of Spain and France and Italy, the sunny Dutch work, the pallid Japanese, all the singular inspiration of China, the philosophy of Germany, all do, not merely at one time or another, but all times, peace or war, show the harmony of talents and disclose the comradeship of genius. The greatest of all nations are brotherly, and their fraternal work will help to bring peace permanently at last on earth : it will not be done with siege-guns, no matter how massive they be nor what powder they spittle. All Art nourishes the spirit of revolution ; against the shape and cut of a book or chair or house as Morris did ; against the shape or cut of the earth, as in Shelley.

Our masters know this and have in all ages endeavoured to alter the vital secular character of Art into a something vapid and servile ; it must be changed, they said, from the passionate and wayward to the didactic and mechanical : they spoke with tongues of fire and their syllables were prisons. Artists were driven into all kinds of occupations quite alien to them : chiselling ships and barrels of muskets, allegories, chapel-altars. Samaritans, Virgin Man’s, colouring monasteries, till a daring Italian boy of the thirteenth century started dreaming by his flock on the hills of Padua, and in the end found that the sight of his pregnant ewes was quite as inspiring as a pregnant Virgin. A new, self-reliant epoch commenced for Art, and the masters’ fires, prisons, and titles since then have only scared the unsound, bribed the less keen and valuable, and filled the archives Paying of Art with chronicles of sorrow.

Paying the Price.

Whether they be ancient or modern, whether they be Russian novelists, Dutch or French landscapists or English poets, they have prepared, and must prepare, in youth, for a life of affliction and a ceremonious funereal ; must have thought, must now think, that if the funeral ostentation is forgotten or neglected, posterity will, with bronze busts and posthumous marble, compensate them for the dismal doom they suffered and the misery they endured.

Marvellous boys like Chatterton, are not prepared to suffer the fate that the stupid and mercenary arrange ; rather than a piecemeal death they end it all at once with a little acid. They think the worst acid better than the best editor. Some live on and fight. For this crime Dostoievsky is, in Russia, sentenced to death. The sentence is afterwards mitigated ; instead of death he is sent to Siberia (which he named the House of the Dead) for ten years. Out of Norfolk we get a hard instance. Old Crome, “the glory of the English landscape school” as he is now called by preface writers, was set on coach painting in Norwich. In the evenings and on Saturday afternoons, when he was not lining spokes and yellowing wheels, he did, in oils, the moons over Norfolk pastures, over massive scalloped cows ; shipping by the riversides he did after the manner of Hobbema, and Mousehold Heath with its chalk pits, donkeys, characteristic mills, as only Crome could—the lot to be sold for not many shillings. That picture of his in the London National Gallery was once divided in two and the the halves, when separately sold, brought him four guineas. It is very hard when a Preface Writer cannot say an artist’s unhappiness is due to a girl. Gainsborough, too, had to leave his “Market Carts,” his “Stricken Oaks,” his “Pools,” his “Sunsets over Devonshire Moors,” and for his pence, with his oils, flatter the fussy Duchess and the soft Earl.

The Martyrdom of Genius.

Also there was a Dutch painter born in a windmill some few hundreds of years ago Rembrandt van Ryn. He put his hand to the pallette and passed many a terrible day, for he did as his genius dictated. The feudal owners of much of the Dutch wealth did not like his Rabbis and washerwomen and singular mills and did not buy them. He was in the end driven from his Amsterdam shanty ; he took his wife, children, and paints from house to hovel and then along to humbler hovel. His name is now highest on the auction-room price list.

Last century a sad French boy worked a plough in Normandy. Until he was twenty, in his little leisure, he did, with charcoal only, snatches of beautiful country or the raw-boned, decrepit Frenchmen on the neighbouring’ farms. Eventually this mighty ploughman lived in Barbizon, a sad, colourless village jostled by massive, dark woods. He did then, as Rembrandt in Holland, follow where his talent of sorrow led. The Frenchman’s end was similar to the Dutchman’s. If joy isn’t yet, persecution is international. No one for many years would buy his “Dung Spreaders,” his “Peasants Reposing,” his “Potato Diggers”; so his suffering was distinctly hard, even in the catalogue of the hardships of artists. “My wife will be confined next month and there is nothing in the house. I do not know where to get my month’s rent” he wrote to Theodore Rousseau. He was found without fire or food. He was praised a little in the Press, but critics “Charm ache with air and agony with words.” Christy’s and Agnew’s know the man—they have lately sold one of his six-inch by five canvasses, of a “Shepherdess knitting,” for a thousand guineas. He painted “The Gleaners” and “The Angelas”—his name is immortal, Jean Francois Millet.

An Odious Comparison.

Under capitalism the man with colour schemes is no match in the market for the man with financial schemes : it is the nightingale against the vulture.

I could give instance after instance of the sorrow and pain which the talented in an enslaved community must endure if they watch or listen to the loveliness of the earth and then in any way tell it to others. The good men will cross the world, and, while a masterful class holds factory and field, while the democracy is content to be put off with an education, incomplete, suitable for commerce and nothing more, they must go without encouragement from the mass, without money from the opulent ; their telescopes will be broken in two, they will be sent, starved and pale, to their pallettes, and in rags to their violins.

But where in this record does the incentive of gain crop up ? If, as the merry masters say, it is for gain the best and the worst work, why do not the greatest leave their permanent, sincere work (which leaves them lean) and win gold with the transitory, the false, and the easily understood ? To hear our rulers speak one would think the poet sings because he wants butcher’s meat and wholemeal bread. He sings for nothing of the kind. He sings, as he draws breath, naturally, and he would die if he did not. It is idiocy to think he sings because it is hard to live, because engines and lands are privately owned, and would cease to sing to a wider world under Socialism. It is impertinence to say he sings at the bidding of silver and gold magnates and wouldn’t sing to a supreme democracy. As long as skies are blue and hills are green he will compose, whether dividends change or do not, whether money is or is not, whether the world listens or does not.

That, too, is the secret of the strength of the influence of minorities.

One Word about Potboilers.

One word about potboilers : we must never let them take up too much time. The artist is only hard hit when he stands tenaciously by his ideals. Some are, however, forced into apostacy or monotony, endeavour to repeat old masters, not because they are born rogues, not through any natural or youthful desire to emulate what is glorious, but because potboilers pay better. So we have a houseful of Academicians like La Thangue, with his geese, puddles, and red-hot, boozy-looking suns, his grizzly stacks with one star out beside a skinny, stippled moon ; a host of others doing silly, whitish Samaritans on shivering rags in a somewhat English, damp Egypt ; Leader who decorates Devonshire property with honeysuckle, spin and span labourers, Flaxman china, best food, best wives, best children. It will not profit us much to consider the yellow lies and pink apostacy of the other fellows who settle or pervert the national learning or taste in art. I need only say that a literate democracy would not have repetitions of dead masters, being familiar with the originals ; being atheistic, would not care whether the pallid Nazarene was in Egypt or out of it; being intimate with the fields would detest Leader’s landscape puddings. Under Socialism we will with our schools banish ignorance, with our Science banish Paradise, with our Art banish Academy sunsets and in consequence banish Academicians.

The work of the potboilers is made to be understood : it is fitted for dronish intellects ; it prospers under the hand of the aristocrat. On the other hand the work of the artist is always bewildering to the characterless slaves of his own particular generation and becomes the wonderment and delight of a remote posterity. But through illiteracy, which the Board Schools of the masters are instrumental in perpetuating, the worker takes small interest in Art. By cunning he is deprived of intellectual health and liberty, as he is of bodily entertainment and rest ; he is separated from Beethoven and Corot as from his loom and meadow.

It will be seen from the few illustrations I have given that while a few millions master the wonders and riches of the earth, the pictures, like the plough, the beautiful and the useful, will be the property of those who have too much gut to be satisfied with food and too little brain to be edified with Art.

The poem like the engine, the landscape picture like the land, to do good must be freely held by the democracy. To get this we must, by the unity of the workers of the world, destroy the tyranny of those who have not enough intelligence to produce any music nor sufficient diligence to sow wheat. Socialism means the ownership, by the community, of all society’s vital machines and land, and a redistribution, in consequence, of that possession, of books, pencils, and violins. With these things, and the life-long love of comrades, we will become the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon.

H. M. M.

The Downfall of Dictatorship. (1940)

From the April 1940 issue of the Socialist Standard

The followers of Moscow are beginning to cut a rather ridiculous figure; doubt has permeated their ranks; they no longer possess the arrogance of old; they are commencing to reap the harvest they have sown; the tactics of opportunism and compromise caused them to march in a circle in unemployed parades, etc., and now they are either forced to abandon their leader or line up in support of the imperial policy of Stalin and Co.

The late Prince Kropotkin stated at the outset of the Russian revolution : “The Bolsheviks are not what the Western workers think they are.” He was correct. The Western workers thought them to be Socialists; they were mistaken.

Socialism is the noblest cause that ever appealed to the world or to man; the Bolsheviks defamed those who would not accept their leadership and have dragged the working-class movement into the sewers of opportunism and corruption; they used their organisation, the Communist Party, as a means of enabling them to influence the Labour movement of the Western world in the interests of Soviet Russia; the Communist Party became the foreign office of the bureaucracy of the Kremlin, and now, under the dictatorship of Czar Stalin, functions as the ruthless tool of imperialism.

The worker who investigates stands aghast when he discovers what lies behind the purges; he is fast arriving at the conclusion that he has been fooled : “those fellows are not to be trusted.”

The Bolsheviks were more influenced by Bakunin than by Marx; they worked on the principle “the end justifies the means” ; they did not aim at freedom. “Freedom,” said Lenin, “is a bourgeois prejudice.”

He also said, “Socialism is Soviet power plus electricity,” and many other things which indicated he used a Socialist vocabulary in an attempt to gain his imperial ends. Sometimes he spoke the truth; it is on record that he stated he was the logical successor of Peter the Great. “Only by a dictatorship can humanity be brought to happiness,” was the idea held by the leaders of the Russian revolution.

Marx said that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself, but this did not fit in with Bolshevik aspirations; the Bolshevik leaders got themselves free from oppression. Stalin and Co. are now oppressing the proletariat.

Let us look at the foundation of this peculiar mentality. First I will quote E. Preobraschenski, a pupil and follower of Lenin and the founder of Bolshevik ethics: —

“Whereas in a society in which there are no classes, lying is a disadvantage in itself, because it compels the members of the society to use their energy in discovering the truth, the case is quite different in a society based on class. In the struggle of an exploited class against their enemies, lying and deceit are often very important weapons; all the subterranean work of revolutionary organisations actually depends on over-reaching the power of the State. The Workers’ State, surrounded as it is on all sides by hostile capitalist countries, finds lying very necessary and useful in its foreign policy. Therefore the attitude of the working class and the Communist Party of the open recognition of the right to lie is quite different from that of the Western European Socialists, those God-fearing petits bourgeois who are systematically treated as fools by the representatives of capital.”

How a “Socialist” can hope to create a form of society worth living in out of, or by means of, trained liars is a conundrum, but there it is.

Lunacharski, one of the brightest minds the revolution produced, stated, when referring to Fedor Dostoevski, the writer: —

“Russia goes forward on her thorny but glorious way, and behind her stand her great prophets, who bless her on her path. Among them, the most enthralling and splendid of all, rises the figure of Fedor Dostoevski.”

In reading Dostoevski you get the key to the understanding of Bolshevism. Let me quote from one of his novels, “The Possessed” : —

“Since it is absolutely necessary to fix the social order of the future now, at this very moment, since we are at last preparing to act, to avoid future uncertainty, I put forward my own system for a new world order. … I must first point out that my system is not yet completed, not yet entirely worked out. For I have become entangled in my own arguments ; my final conclusion is diametrically opposed to my original idea. Although I started from the notion of unrestricted freedom, I arrived at the end at absolute despotism. I may add, however, that there can be no possible solution but mine. . . .”

The above is a statement by one of the characters, named Shigalev, a member of a secret society. His remarks are commented upon by another member : —

“Mr. Shigalev has devoted himself too conscientiously to his task, and is also much too modest. I know his book. In it he proposes to divide mankind into two unequal parts. Only the smaller part, about a tenth of the whole, will enjoy personal freedom and unrestricted power over the other nine-tenths. These nine-tenths must entirely renounce all personality and become, so to speak, a herd, in order, through absolute obedience, by a series of regenerations, to regain their original innocence, almost like the old Garden of Eden, although, as may be remarked in passing, they will have to work. The measures proposed by the author for depriving nine-tenths of humanity of their personal will and for turning them into a herd by means of a new education during whole generations are uncommonly remarkable and are, in addition, based on the facts of nature and are highly logical. …”

Now we have Peter Verkhovenski speaking to Stavrogiri on Shigalev’s ideas: —

“One thing about his book is good, the idea of espionage. In his idea, every member of the society spies on the others, and is bound to inform against them when necessary. All are slaves and equal in their slavery. . . . First of all, the level of education, science, and innate natural talent, falls. A high intellectual level is possible only to superior talents. Superior talents have always seized power for themselves and led to despotism. Men of talent cannot help becoming despots, they have always done more harm than good; therefore they are driven out or put to death. . . . Slaves must be equal; without despotism there has never yet been freedom or equality; but in the herd all must be equal, that’s Shigalevism. Does that seem extraordinary to you ? I am for Shigalevism. . . . Listen, Stavrogin; to level mountains is a fine idea, not a ridiculous one. Education is not necessary and we have enough science. Even without science we have material enough to last for a thousand years, but first we must enforce obedience. The thirst for education is an aristocratic impulse; with family and love you have the desire for property. We will destroy this desire; we will spread drunkenness, slander, espionage; we’ll spread incredible demoralisation; we’ll murder every genius in infancy. Everything will be reduced to a common denominator, complete equality will be enforced. . . . Only the indispensable is indispensable; henceforth this is to be the motto of the universe. But it needs shocks; we’ll provide for them, we the directors. Slaves must have directors. Complete obedience, complete impersonality; occasionally, however, every thirty years or so, Shigalev will let them have a shock, and then they will begin to suddenly devour each other, of course only up to a certain point, for the sole purpose of preventing boredom. Boredom is an aristocratic feeling; there will be no desires under Shigalevism. Desire and suffering for us, Shigalevism for the slaves.”

The above was written in 1871. The reader will perceive how the ideas of Dostoevski have found expression in Bolshevism; in them you have a forecast of what is developing in the only “Socialist” country in the world.

In 1879 Dostoevski gave us the following, in “The Brothers Karamazov” : —

“Oh, we shall convince them that they cannot be free till they renounce their freedom in our favour and submit to us. … Too well, all too well, will they know the value of submission once and for all! Men will be unhappy till they grasp this. However, the flock will collect again and submit once mere, and then it will be for ever, for ever. We will give them a quiet, modest happiness, the happiness of feeble creatures such as they were created. Oh, we shall convince them at last that they have no right to be proud. . . . Yes, we will force them to work, but in their free time we will make their life like a game, with songs, choruses, and innocent dances. Oh, we will even permit them to sin—for they are weak and feeble—and they will love us like children, because we allow them to sin. We shall permit or forbid them to live with wives or lovers, to have or not to have children—according to whether they have been obedient or disobedient, and they will submit to us gladly and joyfully. . . . And they will all be happy, all the millions, except the hundred thousand who rule over them. For we alone, we who guard the mystery, we alone shall be unhappy. There will be thousands of millions of happy children and only a hundred thousand martyrs, who have taken on themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil.”

Read the Russian writers who influenced the ideas of the revolutionists, study Russian history and you will understand why this Bolshevik religion, for that is what it is, has failed to obtain control of the Western mind; it is alien and foreign and blind to the real aspirations of the modern world.

In order to win freedom we must prove ourselves worthy, we must show that we have developed in the working class the knowledge and the ability to enable society to function on a higher plane. We must appeal to the best that is in the human make-up. Bolshevism appeals to the worst.

The sands of capitalism are running down in the glass : the world may not for long be solidly established upon the economic basis of production for sale.

The common ownership of the means of life and the establishrnent of a system of production for use is the next stage in human development; the war cannot end satisfactorily until the working class carry out their historic mission.

Let them take their stand openly and honourably for Socialism; history is on their side; the emancipation of mankind is involved in the issue.

Charles Lestor

Mixed Media: Heresy (2015)

The Mixed Media column from the February 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Heresy by Tilo Ulbricht, performed at the Tabard theatre in Chiswick, London, last year, is based on The Grand Inquisitor chapter in the Dostoyevsky novel The Brothers Karamazov. Ulbricht’s play is set in sixteenth century Spain ‘during the most terrible time of the Inquisition, when fires were lighted every day throughout the land to the glory of God and in the splendid autos-da-fé wicked heretics were burnt by the Cardinal, the Grand Inquisitor’ (Dostoyevsky).

Catholic philosophy pondered such questions as ‘whether angels have navels?’ or ‘ how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’ Thomas Aquinas’s position on heresy provided the doctrinal basis for the Inquisition: ‘in God’s tribunal, those who return are always received, because God is a searcher of hearts, and knows those who return in sincerity. But the Church cannot imitate God in this, for she presumes that those who relapse after being once received, are not sincere in their return; hence she does not debar them from the way of salvation, but neither does she protect them from the sentence of death’ (Summa Theologica).

Catholic philosophy did not allow the questioning of doctrine. As Bertrand Russell pointed out, Aquinas ‘does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry… before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation’ (A History of Western Philosophy).

The major theme of Heresy is ‘what is Truth?’ but Catholic philosophy can never ascertain what Truth is as there is no such thing as Absolute Truth. Marx identified that ‘the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism… the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics  . . it is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world’ (Introduction to A Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right).

Dostoyevsky in The Grand Inquisitor identified the danger of socialism for religion: ‘humanity will proclaim by the lips of their sages that there is no crime, and therefore no sin; but there are only hungry people. Feed them first, and then demand virtue of them! – that is what they will inscribe on their banner, which they will raise against you, and which will destroy your temple . . . you promised them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread?’ Dostoyevsky later commented ‘by the stones and the loaves of bread, I meant our present social problems. Present-day socialism in Europe sets Christ aside and is first of all concerned about bread. It appeals to science and maintains that the cause of all human misfortune is poverty, the struggle for existence and the wrong kind of environment’ (Philosophy in Literature). In Heresy, Jesus is arrested by ‘the Cardinal himself, the Grand Inquisitor, an old man of nearly ninety, tall and erect, with a shrivelled face and sunken eyes, from which, though, a light like a fiery spark still gleams’ (Dostoyevsky). Peter Saracen delivers a commanding central performance as the Grand Inquisitor in Tilo Ulbricht’s play.

Ludwig Feuerbach argued in his 1841 work, The Essence of Christianity, that it is important for religion that its object should be radically distinct from humanity; and that it was equally necessary that it come down to Earth if it is to be religiously relevant. For this reason, Christianity teaches the Incarnation where God suffers the indignity of birth, the pain of suffering, and the emptiness of death out of love for humankind. With Incarnation, Feuerbach finds the ultimate expression of human self-love and the surest indication that religion is a human projection: in religion humanity has relation only to its own nature, only to itself, the clearest proof of this is ‘the love of God’, i.e. of projected humanity, for humanity, as before, the basis and central point of religion. With Incarnation, Feuerbach argues humans receive back all that they have surrendered to God. By worshipping God, people unconsciously worship themselves as in Spinoza’s ‘homo homini deus’ (Man is a God to Man).

Marx wrote to Feuerbach that he had intentionally or not ‘given Socialism a philosophical foundation’ (Gesammelte Werke, W. Schuffenhauer, Ed.), by exposing the mystified nature of religion, the alienated subject-object relation can be reversed, God brought down to Earth, and humanity made whole, putting social humanity in its rightful place at the centre of things. In 1870 Feuerbach read Marx’s Capital and joined the German Social Democratic Workers’ Party. Engels concluded that the ‘working class movement is the heir to classical German philosophy’ (Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy).

Steve Clayton

Adventures in Marxism

From the From Despair To Where blog:

A couple of years ago, I picked up Marshall Berman's Adventures in Marxism. I couldn't get on with it and chucked it aside. But recently I stumbled across it again, dipped in at random, and have been hooked ever since. It's the first 'unputdownable' book I've read in ages.

For the first time in years, it's made me want to go back to Marx. Berman's genius is to make Marxism seem relevant. When most Marxists try to do that, they just give us a dull lecture on how capitalism has or hasn't changed, the relevance or not of Marx's analysis of capitalism, how he got it right or not about globalisation, and so on. Berman, on the other hand, likes to focus instead on the individual lives of individual workers, what they think about their lives and work, what they think about prospects for the future, their hopes and dreams, whether realised or frustrated. He shows that they are rarely stupid, often intelligent and thoughtful, never as trapped by fetishism and false consciousness as many Marxists would have it. They may be stuck in pointless jobs, but they are also able to construct something meaningful and creative out of their lives. And however trapped ordinary workers may or may not be in their jobs, Berman shows that they're rarely as trapped as Marxist intellectuals are in their own thought. In a brilliant piece on Perry Anderson, Berman says:

"Another reason that I've written so much about ordinary people and everyday life in the street, in the context of this controversy, is that Anderson's vision is so remote from them. He only has eyes for world-historical Revolutions in politics and world-class Masterpieces in culture; he stakes out his claim on heights of metaphysical perfection, and won't deign to notice anything else. This would be all right, I guess, except that he's so clearly miserable over the lack of company up there. It might be more fruitful if, instead of demanding whether modernity can still produce masterpieces and revolutions, we were to ask whether it can generate sources and spaces of meaning, of freedom, dignity, beauty, joy, solidarity. Then we would have to confront the messy actuality in which modern men and women live. The airmight be less pure, but the atmosphere would be a lot more nourishing; we would find, in Gertrude Stein's phrase, a lot morethere there. Who knows – it's impossible to know in advance - we might even find some masterpieces or revolutions in the making."

I think that passage might sum up why I hated the book the first time round, and love it now. First time around, I identified more with the Andersons of this world. But Berman's right: it's lonely and miserable up there. We can't wait for revolution before doing everything we can to fill our lives with joy and freedom.

In another piece in the book, Berman even makes me want to go back to Marx's Capital. And given how much pain and anguish it caused me the first time round, that's no mean feat. Berman's review of it focuses onthe people that talk to us from the pages, the "shopkeepers and sharecroppers, the miners and millowners, poets and publicists, doctors and divines, philosophers and politicians, the world-famous and the anonymous". Marx takes us, argues Berman, "back to the glorious days of the 19th century novel", where some of the "most vivid characters appear for only a moment; [and] others stay with us for long stretches and engage Marx in long and passionate argument; others disappear for hundreds of pages, only to return transformed". But it also looks forward to the modernist masterpieces of Eliot and Joyce, with its "voices from mythology and poetry, sorcery andtheology, from every country and culture under the sun".

Berman again:

"Marx's point in presenting this immense and bizarre chorus is to show capitalism as a maelstrom that sweeps the whole world into its flood, past and present, reality and mythology, East and West: everything and everyone is caught up and whirled in the world market, nothing and no one has the power to hold back. We the readers – along, of course, with the writer – are part of it; we respond, our voices are incorporated into the chorus; the audience finds itself onstage. This may be one reason why, like many great modernist works, Capital never really comes toan end: it reaches out to us in the audience, and challenges us to give the work an ending, by bringing an end to capitalism itself […]

"[Marx's] feeling for contradictions infuses the wholeof Capital with vitality and adventure. An adventureis not an idyll: much of its excitement springs from its risks, from the chance that it could end horribly; but we go on, because we are moving in an ambience of life and hope. The ambience could be a great gift to us today. It is right there, in Capital: the book lies open and open-ended, waiting only for us to give ourselves."

Wonderful stuff. But, says a critic, didn't Marx get it wrong? Berman has the best answer to this we haveyet come across, and I'll finish with just one more quote from him:

"Even when Marx is studied in universities… his thought gets chopped up into various theories to be verified or refuted, and methods to be followed or discarded; what gets left out is what is most alive and exciting, Marx's vision of the world as a whole. A writer's vision of life is less tangible than his politics, economics, religion, ideology; but it goes deeper, and it is what makes his work last long after his causes have won or lost or faded away. Literate people understand this in general: they know that the truth and power in Plato doesn't depend on the validity of his theory of ideas, that Dante can change our lives even if Thomism doesn't, that Dostoevsky's hold on our souls doesn't stand or fall with his claims for the power of the Russian soul. But so many ordinarily sophisticated people become crude when they come to Marx: they observe acidly that workers are often nasty and brutish, or that capitalism hasn't collapsed, or that, in places where it has collapsed, the state hasn't withered away; they note these things, rather impatiently, then slam the book closed and walk away fast without looking back. They forget, or repress, something that they normally know: that it's possible for a writer to be wrong about all sorts of things, and yet to tell the truth about life."

Stuart W.