Sunday, October 03, 2021

Who reads Karl Marx these days?

A famous musician, who recently ended a relationship with one of the richest men in the world, was photographed reading a copy of the Communist Manifesto. A few hours later, following a flurry of media commentary, she announced that this was all a joke.


I have no idea (and don't particularly care) whether it was always intended as a joke, or whether she improvised this explanation retrospectively in order to distance herself from some of the other possible interpretations of her action. What does interest me is the range of stories that people tell themselves about reading and literacy, based on her perceived actions.

Some stories are based on what we know about the musician and her relationship history. So perhaps this should be interpreted as a pointed message to her former partner and his extreme wealth.

Some people appear to believe that those who read the Communist Manifesto are necessarily committed to the redistribution of wealth and/or the overthrow of the capitalist system. So if she was reading the book properly, she must be planning (or at least considering) to redistribute any money she receives from her former partner. Or perhaps to throw herself into a struggle for a fairer society.

However, some people read socialist literature with exactly the opposite motivation - to understand and defuse potential threats to the capitalist system, and to refute socialist arguments. Geoff Shullenberger has drawn our attention to the perhaps surprising familiarity of right-wing figures (such as Andrew Breitbart and Peter Thiel) with the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse) and with French postmodernism (Derrida, Foucault).

Or perhaps you don't need a pre-existing political motive to read Marx, simply a curiosity about the history of ideas, and a desire to be aware of one of the most important texts of its time.



Geoff Shullenberger, Theorycels in Trumpworld (Outsider Theory, 5 January 2021)

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