Marx Returns - Softcover

Barker, Jason

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1785356607 ISBN 13: 9781785356605

Verlag: John Hunt Publishing, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Karl Marx is a revolutionary. He is not alone. It is November 1849 and London is full of them: a bunch of fanatical dreamers trying to change the world. Persecuted by a tyrannical housekeeper and ignored by his sexually liberated wife, Marx immerses himself in his writing, believing that his book on capital is the surest way of ushering in the workers' revolution and his family out of poverty. But when a mysterious figure begins to take an obsessive interest in his work Marx's revolutionary journey takes an unexpected turn... Marx Returns combines historical fiction, psychological mystery, philosophy, differential calculus and extracts from Marx and Engels's collected works to reimagine the life and times of one of history's most exceptional minds, in this next fiction offering from Zero Books.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jason Barker is the writer, director and co-producer of the 2011 documentary Marx Reloaded. He is Professor of English at Kyung Hee University, South Korea and visiting professor of Media Philosophy at the European Graduate School.

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Marx Returns

By Jason Barker

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2017 Jason Barker
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78535-660-5

CHAPTER 1

News from Paris

Neue Rheinische Zeitung, No. 27 June 27, 1848

Cologne, 26 June. The latest news from Paris takes up so much space that we have no choice but to omit all analytical articles.

We accordingly offer our readers only a few briefs. Ledru-Rollin, Lamartine and their Ministers Resign; Cavaignac's Military Dictatorship Transplanted from Algiers to Paris; Marrast, A Dictator in Civilian Clothing; Paris Awash in Blood; Uprising Developing into the Greatest Revolution of All Time, the Proletariat's Revolution against the Bourgeoisie. There is the latest news we have received from Paris. The three days that sufficed for both the July Revolution and the February Revolution will not be enough for this gigantic June Revolution, but the victory of the people is ever more certain. The French bourgeoisie has dared to do what the French Kings never did: it has itself cast the die. With this, the French Revolution's second act, the European tragedy is just beginning.

CHAPTER 2

London, 4 November 1849

On the Upper Lambeth Marsh the air was threatening to induce dizziness in any wayward soul. Not that any soul would ever be so possessed as to visit what Dietz had described as Hell's waiting room. From sulphurous clouds the smouldering armour of the Whig parliament emerged in homage to the Great Fossil Lizard that once roamed the Thames Basin. On the South Bank, chimney stacks blasted out their molten debris in a barrage of volcanic eruptions. In Lambeth, the munitions factories sent projectiles skywards with such ferocity that the clouds seemed to ignite before returning the glowing debris back to earth.

In a democratic understanding of sorts, perhaps the signal achievement of the times, the fiery rain fell on top hats and flat caps in equal measure. For anyone crossing the damp element by Westminster Bridge, the threat of tumbling masonry compounded that of falling debris; which, on occasion, would seal the thanks-offering fate of drunks, college-goers and lunatics. On the narrow stretch offshore, in easy range of the cannonade, steamboats and Thames barges jostled for control of the quays and wharfs. Lighters ferried cargo from the bulkier craft and, as if to complete the aquatic food chain, workers in rowboats hawked beer to the lightermen.

Whether or not the seismic activity of bourgeois industry would one day come to rival the Triassic extinction event in its environmental impact was unclear. For the moment, however, what struck the spectator — the one inclined to doubt the evidence of their own eyes — was not remotely how things had evolved thus, or where they might in future, but whether or not any of 'it' could really be described, at all. What exactly was one looking at?

'Sir! Pay me a penny for my cat, say.'

Marx glanced up from his notebook. A gang of street urchins approached, rehearsed in their own variety of extinction event. The ringleader, genderless and caked in mud, dangled an animal from a cord, more rodent than feline, though not long for this world. He thrust the petrified creature at Marx in plain ignorance of the fact that both animal and tormentor shared a common ancestor.

'I-I-I ...' Marx faltered and the creature responded in kind.

'You-you-you,' replied the tormentor and the apprentice demons cackled.

'Raus mit euch, Ihr Tierquäler!'3 Marx would have declared next, had his English been up to the mark.

The creature was almost human. Its bloodshot eyes and pulsating nostrils might have been those of Marx's landlord on rent day. Indeed, but for the unfortunate mystery of the animal's capture, the break in the organic chain might have been minutely deferred. Of such unpredictable encounters was history woven. (The class struggle could surely be traced back to the dark wood of savagery — if not before — when man was a mere tree-dweller among beasts.)

The animal was more attuned to survival than its tormentor and in a gymnastic effort, it wriggled from the latter's hand and catapulted itself forward in a spasm. Landing in a heap, it righted itself then zigzagged through the melee of baying urchins, finding time to bite the ringleader on the ankle before hurtling through the wrought-iron gates of the factory opposite.

Could this be the place? Marx squinted through his tar-stained handkerchief at the smudged outline of a building — an impression, Engels had called it, 'But you'll recognize the thing once you're there.' Genau. "There" was precisely where Marx was trying to be. But the sketch bore little resemblance to the thing itself, to any discernible landmark, moreover. A map would have served his purposes; though, again, the difficulty lay in locating where he was in the first place.

Marx paced along the mud track that separated the factory wall from the wood panel frontage of Field's Candle Works. At the entrance he paused and peered inside the container of darkness. He tried to imagine the synchronized horrors that lay in store for the proletarians as the day shift filed in and the night shift shuffled out, dazed and dishevelled like a community displaced by war.

He brushed a fresh deposit of volcanic debris from the page on which he had jotted down, at some ungodly hour, his latest attempt to master the differential calculus. On reflection, Engels's sketch had its merits. Was that the solution? The whole difficulty in understanding the differential operation — which repeats the negation of the negation — lays precisely in seeing its results. Charles Bloodworth, 11 Vauxhall Walk, Maudslay's Ironworks. At which point the address collapsed into the derived function and careered off the page. If we divide both a(x1 – x) and the left side of the corresponding equation by the factor x1 – x, we then obtain:

y1 - y/x1 - x = a

Since y is the dependent variable, it cannot carry through any independent motion at all; y1 therefore cannot equal y and y1 – y = 0 without x first having become equal to x. Shouldn't one be able to infer the economic crisis from the incremental changes expressed by the derived function in a manner wholly in keeping with the qualitative law of the dialectic?

Mathematics was no mere measure of matter in motion any more than wages were a measure of factory labour. Equally, the patch of inflamed skin threatening to expand into a pus-filled furuncle at the entrance to Marx's anal passage was no mere indicator of pain: it actually hurt. Mathematics was something and as adept in accounting for it as philosophy was. That was the general gist of it, but he would need to go back and derive the theorems later that day in the pub.

Suddenly a proletarian convoy exited a slow-moving mist, their faces shrouded in shawls like a Bedouin tribe and heading toward the river. Or so it seemed. Marx stumbled, almost falling head first down an escarpment that jutted out of nowhere. Wasn't this supposed to be reclaimed marshland? That's what Dietz had said: eben. Dietz! The man could no more give directions than prepare soothing balms for the treatment of haemorrhoids. The reform of consciousness depends on rudely awakening men from their bedridden slumbers. But how would that be possible if men were not in fact asleep, or even capable of sleep, or even bedridden, owing to their incapacity to lie down?

No sooner had they appeared than the proletarians...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: John Hunt Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1785356607
• ISBN 13: 9781785356605
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland