From: Christopher Arthur (arthurcj@WAITROSE.COM)
Date: Mon May 01 2006 - 09:12:53 EDT
On 25 Apr 2006, at 01:06, Rakesh Bhandari wrote: > > At any rate, has anyone read Neocleous' book on the monstrous in Marx > and > Burke? > > > Rakesh I have. Here is a review to appear in Studies in Marxism Chris A Mark Neocleous The Monstrous and the Dead: Burke, Marx, Fascism University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 2005, pp.152. ISBN 0-7083-1904-1 (hb.£45); 0-7083-19903-3 (pb. £17.99) Reviewed by Chris Arthur This is an original book on an interesting and unusual topic. It explores the political power of the monstrous and the dead in the traditions mentioned in the title. As is predictable, the monster in the Marx chapter on ‘Marx: the political economy of the dead’ is the famous vampire of capital, of which much has been written. But Neocleous is right that the real heart of the matter is not explicated in the usual discussions of bloodsucking and alien others. Marx says: ‘Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’ As Neocleous stresses, this choice of metaphor is philosophically and politically important because through it Marx aims to make a substantive point about the social world. What Marx really gives us is ‘the political economy of the undead.’ While it may be true that the substance of commodities, and of money, is dead labour, capital itself is an active social agent. Accumulated labour can exercise power over living labour because it refuses to stay dead, but like the vampire returns to drain the living energy of the workers. The domination of capital over labour is nothing less than the rule of undead labour. In the second part of the Marx chapter Neocleous turns to a central tension in Marx’s revolutionary politics: on the one hand the revolution must draw its poetry from the future and ‘let the dead bury their dead’ (a favourite trope of Marx’s); but on the other hand the revolution is not a bolt from the blue but liberates a potential with which the present is already ‘pregnant’ (again, the obstetric metaphor is a favourite of Marx and Engels). Moreover many fall in the struggle for liberation. Following Benjamin and Adorno, Neocleous calls for a Marxist politics of remembrance. Adorno once commented that ‘one of the basic human rights possessed by those who pick up the tab for the progress of civilisation is the right to be remembered.’ Neocleous develops this idea persuasively through the Benjaminian category of redemption, in which liberation is completed in the name of the ancestors. But isn’t Benjaminian talk of a secret agreement of generations the stock in trade of conservatism? Neocleous is indeed trying the wrest the dead from the hands of the enemy. Here he ingeniously collates the separate chapters of the book with a differentiating formula: Burke sought a reconciliation with the dead, fascism sought a resurrection of the dead, Benjaminian Marxism strives for the redemption of past suffering. Thus ‘redemption and conservatism are understood in political opposition: the task to be accomplished is not the conservation of the past, but rather the redemption of the hopes of the past’. Neocleous is good on both fascist fears of monsters (e.g. an anti-semitic reading of vampires) and its cult of death. In particular he argues that central to fascist ideology was the immortality of the fallen. In sum the book demonstrates that the struggle over the dead is live political terrain. It is supported by a wealth of detail that cannot be resumed in a short review. However, I offer here a little detail of my own. One of the central cases covered in the chapter on fascism is the cult of Schlageter, a German nationalist executed in May 1923 by the French forces occupying the Ruhr. What is also interesting is that in response to this event the KPD adopted the so-called ‘Schlageter line’ following an electrifying speech given by Radek in June, in which he declared: ‘This martyr of German nationalism ... has much to teach us.... We believe that the great majority of the masses who are stirred by nationalist feelings belong not in the camp of capital but in that of labour.... We shall do everything to ensure that men who. like Schlageter, were ready to give their life for a common cause, will ... shed their blood ... in the cause of the great working people of Germany.’ (quoted in The German Revolution 1917-23, P. Broué, Brill, Leiden, 2005 p. 727)
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