A 3+1 for Marx@200

A 3+1 for Marx@200 rnmalabed A 3+1 for Marx@200* Our freedom is the truth that must be proved On the occasion of Marx’s birthdate, China gifted an 18-foot statue of the revolutionary to his city of birth—its newly minted forever leader promising that China and its communist party will forever remain guardians and practitioners of Marxism. This reminds us of Duterte’s solemn claim, not too long ago, of being a socialist. We know that the question in our minds is unreasonable but we are still curious: What would Marx say in response? In his stead let us answer, sort of, in a roundabout way: 1. The Communist Manifesto laid out Marx’s nascent critique of capitalism put into context by his mature historical materialism. This rationalizes and predicts a proletarian revolution that must capture the state, strengthen and deploy it for the purposes of proletarian interest and revolutionary goals until such time when new social arrangements within a classless society will ensure that “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” Immediate events drove Marx into producing his fully developed critique of political economy, recognizing that the revolution will take place only when it arises and successfully commands widespread social unrest brought about by a scientifically comprehended economic crises. The Paris Commune that ended in May 1871 impelled Marx into new realizations set in the general council address to the First International, his Civil War in France, and later in a new foreword to the 1872 edition of the Manifesto. Proletarian revolution is not the simple capture and control of existing state apparatuses. The Paris Commune has shown that revolution must destroy the state, its standing army, its police, its bureaucracy, and supplant it with proletarian self-government in new forms of autonomous and non-hierarchical organizations that decide and practice higher forms of production and community. And Marx defends the Commune as such. 1 A 3+1 for Marx@200 rnmalabed Has not another event of May, this time in Paris 1968, also founds this truth? The student protests and wildcat strikes were precisely independent of national unions and the communist party, which sought to negotiate with the Gaullist state to contain the uprising. Closer to our time and place, EDSA Tres in May 2001, culminates a series of uprisings beyond the wanting grasp of our many versions of the left. And gitnang uring pantasya, the resulting EDSA ideology—expressed economically as hopeful precarious consumption and politically as imagined lost agency, brought us into our present reality of a fascistic state on a killing spree. 2. The critical theorist most affected and who most engaged fascism is, of course, Walter Benjamin. In his Concept of History, an attempt to compose Marxist materialist theory in a world of catastrophe, he rebukes the German social democratic party and the Stalinist communist parties that ruled half of Europe for failing to stop fascism. They were guilty of the uncritical traditional thinking that believes in inevitable progress, emergency as exception, and history as objective unfolding towards a desired better future that is constantly deferred. These traditions and beliefs, it turned out, were easily and readily appropriated by the Nazis. Does not Duterte appropriate so effectively the cherished symbols of the left, making us complicit in our version of vicious catastrophe? For Benjamin it is urgent that we must break free from this mode of thinking through the truths of historical materialism that are waiting to be lived. Trapped in a Spanish border town, which was also the edge of an approaching holocaust, Benjamin ended his life in September 1940. 3. But is this not what is required of us in this, our time of danger? A political suicide, a withdrawal of our communist politics from the political domain of the state—a politics of subtraction in Alain Badiou’s sense, in which we live the truths of the events of our age. Here, we are talking of our politics that must be free from the state while recognizing that our materiality is immanent within an increasingly authoritarian capitalist world. Thus our politics of subtraction must have its obscene double: a social-economic engagement of sabotage. We must destroy what binds us and what diminishes us to incessantly surveilled commodities. 2 A 3+1 for Marx@200 rnmalabed +1. And thus, we return to Marx. In one of his earlier texts, the Theses on Feuerbach, he criticizes all existing materialism for mistaking reality as the object of contemplation, and “not as human sensuous activity…not subjectively.” Further, he dismisses objective truth and instead asserts that we “must prove truth, that is, the reality and power, the thissidedness of [our] thinking in practice.” Finally, he declares “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” Does not this world reek of, among others, China and Duterte? * Read as reaction for the symposiun Marx@200, NCAS Auditorium, University of the Philippines - Los Banos 3