OLD GODS,
NEW ENIGMAS
OLD GODS,
NEW ENIGMAS
Marx’s Lost Theory
MIKE DAVIS
This paperback edition first published by Verso 2020
First published by Verso 2018
© Mike Davis 2018, 2020
Earlier versions of chapters 2, 3, and 4 appeared in New Left Review, published in the following issues: II/90, May–June 2015; II/97, January–February 2016; II/61, January–February 2010
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-217-8
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It is when you have done your work honestly, when you have contributed your share to the common fund, that you begin to live. Then, as Whitman said, you can take out your soul.
Eugene Debs
Contents
Preface: Marx at the Chicken Shack
1. Old Gods, New Enigmas: Notes on Revolutionary Agency
2. Marx’s Lost Theory: The Politics of Nationalism in 1848
3. The Coming Desert: Kropotkin, Mars, and the Pulse of Asia
4. Who Will Build the Ark?
Notes
Index
READ MARX!
Lee Gregovich’s injunction has been rattling around my brain for more than half a century. A good friend of my dad, he was, I suppose, my “red godfather.” His family, like many others from the Dalmatian coast, had emigrated to the copper mines of the American Southwest before the First World War. There they were embroiled in epic labor conflicts. Lee told rousing stories about his days as an IWW paper boy, selling the Industrial Worker in saloons and cathouses, and then watching as his father and 1,300 other striking miners, mostly Mexican and south Slav, were arrested by Phelps-Dodge vigilantes, put in manure-floored cattle cars, and “deported” to a bleak stretch of desert in New Mexico. In the 1930s he became active in the Cooks Union in San Diego and joined the Communist Party. The House Committee on Un-American Activities brought its inquisition to San Diego in 1954 and Lee was subpoenaed and then blacklisted by employers. He finally found a job cooking at the Chicken Shack, an old-style roadhouse near the picturesque mountain town of Julian.
When my father had a catastrophic heart attack in my junior year, I quit high school for a semester to drive a delivery truck for my uncle’s wholesale meat company. The Chicken Shack was our most distant customer and once every week or so, after delivering to country restaurants with names like the Lariat and the Lazy J, I’d scuttle up the long road to Julian. On such days Lee and I had a ritual. After the order had been put in the walk-in, he’d pour me a small glass of red wine, we’d talk briefly about my dad’s health or the Civil Rights movement (he was proud that I had become active in San Diego CORE), then, as I got up to leave, he’d slap me on the back and say, “Read Marx!” (I’ve always liked telling this story and was not surprised when a garbled version of it, insinuating that Lee was a mysterious Soviet agent, appeared in my FBI file.)
Lee himself, like millions of other rank-and-file socialists and communists, had read little or no Marx. Wage, Labor and Capital, perhaps, and certainly some Lenin, whose The Teachings of Karl Marx was a popular substitute for reading the old man himself. Most ordinary readers, however, cowered in face of that Everest of theory, Capital. The few who attempted it usually fell into one of the early crevasses of the first chapter and never returned for a second try. This only added, of course, to the mystique of Marx’s genius and the prestige of party intellectuals who claimed to have reached the summit. A study of workers’ libraries in Wilhelmine Germany found that serious proletarian readers were especially interested in Darwinism and materialist interpretations of natural history, not the critique of political economy. Kautsky’s Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx was “more borrowed than actually read.”2 In 1936, the Menshevik authors of Karl Marx: Man and Fighter—a biography that admirably focused on the thinker as revolutionist—estimated that “perhaps one socialist in a thousand has ever read any of Marx’s economic writings, and of a thousand anti-Marxists not even one.”3
Little had changed when I joined the Southern California Communist Party in 1968 in solidarity with their stand against the Russian suppression of the Prague Spring. I was flabbergasted that new members’ political education consisted solely of reading Julius Fucik’s Notes from the Gallows—the stirring last testament of a young Czech Communist executed in 1943, but hardly an introduction to Marxism. My own knowledge was limited to the Paris Notebooks and bits of The German Ideology, recommended in a popular book that I had read on Marx and alienation. The only member of the L.A. Party, young or old, who seemed to have a serious understanding of Marx, and indeed was reading the Werke in German, was newly recruited Angela Davis, and she was fighting too many important battles to have time to tutor the rest of us.
What made Marx a stranger to Marxist movements, however, was not simply the difficulty of certain key works and passages, but a series of other obstacles. Where to begin, for example? If you began at the beginning with dialectics, you had to endure Hegel scowling at you while you became increasingly befuddled—at least, that was my experience while trying to digest Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution during lunch and supper breaks at work. I was delighted years later to discover an epigram in which the young Marx registered his own frustration with the Master and his interpreters:
“On Hegel”
Words I teach all mixed up into a devilish muddle,
Anyone may think just what he chooses to think;
Each may for himself suck wisdom’s nourishing nectar;
Now you know all, since I’ve said plenty of nothing to you!4
If you gave G. W. F. a detour, you might discover, with the aid of interpretations by the Marxist Humanists then in vogue, the inspiring Marx of the Paris and Brussels years. (The Holy Family [1845], however, never made my reading list since the only person that I’ve ever known who read it was on acid at the time.) But then, once you thought that you had learned