This Week's Show •

Marx at 200

A specter is haunting human affairs these days: it’s the thought that Karl Marx (on his 200th birthday this week) may have been more right than wrong about rich-get-richer bourgeois economics.  He may have been ...

A specter is haunting human affairs these days: it’s the thought that Karl Marx (on his 200th birthday this week) may have been more right than wrong about rich-get-richer bourgeois economics.  He may have been righter still anticipating our anxious digital / global finance capitalism of 2018 than he was at describing his own unruly time in Europe in the 1840s, 50s, and 60s. For advocating communist revolution all his life, Karl Marx became a scarecrow in the garden of money and power.  He was the “best-hated man of his time,” said his friend Engels in a funeral oration. But the Times of London headline in 2008 was “He’s back,” when Wall Street melted down. Marx is back, too, in reading lists on campus and rebel dreams around the world.

“Working men of all countries, unite!” wrote the brash young philosopher/journalist Karl Marx, 29 years old, almost penniless, on the run from German and French police, new to London in 1848.  “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” And so the mythic monster, a man and his ‘ism,’ found first, full voice in a manifesto of aphorisms that can sound Shakespearean to some modern ears, almost scriptural in authority, chilling or challenging to others.


Karl Marx and his daughter Jenny, 1869

Karl Marx’s 200th birthday is the “hook,” as they say in the news game.  What hooks us, though, is the “glaring relevance,” as Luke Menand put it in The New Yorker, of Marx’s working world and our own.  It’s as if, in the din of the industrial revolution in Europe, Marx was noting down the roots of our own digital transformation today: his precarious labor is our full-blown precariat; his maldistribution of goodies is more extreme, and global.  Fragility, uncertainty, arbitrary unfairness are main marks of a genie economy out of the bottle, out of the sorcerer’s control.

Also this hour, we’ll get to Marx the gentle genius at home in a bourgeois family, the obsessive scholar trying to dope out a science of society at the same moment Charles Darwin was mapping a new science of biological nature.  And Marxism today — in the toolkit of black politics and feminism.

The omni-critic Terry Eagleton gets us started. Prolific Englishman with Irish Republican roots, he was shaped by Marxism and Catholicism.  In his politics and his religion, Terry Eagleton says he not vastly different from himself as a 16-year-old altar boy. After the 2008 economic crisis, Terry Eagleton’s book was “Why Marx was Right,” under 10 main headings, like class, violence, and utopia.

At Karl Marx’s two-century mark.  Marxism early on became a cottage industry among white men parsing words and doctrine – no matter that the burden of the system they studying fell on women, and black and brown workers out of all proportion.  The American biographer Mary Gabriel breaks the mold, on an ancient theory that the way to take the measure of a great man is to follow him home. What she found was a trove of family letters about an ostensibly conventional home: wife and daughters who worshipped the obsessive, often contrary man of the house. He makes rich, complex, deeply sad life blighted by two, some-say three suicides among the daughters who would have done anything for him.

Robin D. G. Kelley is an influential cultural historian, based now at UCLA. He’s a student of 20th Century black struggle; a biographer who broke through the mystery of jazz genius Thelonious Monk, and all the while an unorthodox Marxist in motion – in the direction of Surrealism, he says now.  He’s the authority we wanted to hear on why activism of all stripes keeps turning to the peculiar language of Marxism. Great names of black struggle from W. E. B. Dubois to Paul Robeson to Huey Newton and Rap Brown have called themselves Marxists, sometimes Maoists, sometimes Communists.

 

 

Podcast • November 4, 2008

The Hunter’s Evidence: Carlo Ginzburg

In Carlo Ginzburg’s beautifully extended metaphor, the original public intellectual was the Stone Age hunter: Man has been a hunter for thousands of years. In the course of countless chases he learned to reconstruct the ...

In Carlo Ginzburg’s beautifully extended metaphor, the original public intellectual was the Stone Age hunter:

Man has been a hunter for thousands of years. In the course of countless chases he learned to reconstruct the shapes and movements of his invisible prey from tracks on the ground, broken branches, excrement, tufts of hair, entangled feathers, stagnating odors. He learned to sniff out, record, interpret, and classify such infinitesimal traces as trails of spittle. He learned how to execute complex mental operations with lightning speed, in the depth of a forest or in a prairie with its hidden dangers…

The hunter would have been the first ‘to tell a story’ because he alone was able to read, in the silent, nearly imperceptible tracks left by his prey, a coherent sequence of events…

What may be the oldest act in the intellectual history of the human race [is] the hunter squatting on the ground, studying the tracks of his quarry.

Carlo Ginzburg, in an essay “Clues,” in Myths, Emblems, Clues, 1990.
Carlo Ginzburg: historian as card shark

Carlo Ginzburg: historian as card shark

This is an extra-credit conversation — for me a teasing introduction to the father of “micro-history,” Carlo Ginzburg, on a visit to Brown, and one of his gifted disciples, David Kertzer, the Brown provost. They write village-level history about people you never heard of. The micro-historian’s view of the world and their craft is not just bottom-up in the spirit of modern social history, representing the untitled, often unlettered peasantry, the poor and the powerless. They also aim, with the discipline of anthropology and the imagination of novelists and poets, “to see a world in a grain of sand,” in Blake’s line — to recreate a vast social and spiritual panorama from, say, the recovered or newly liberated transcript of a trial.

Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre (1983) is a classic text that became a film, a revelation of married life in 16th Century France. Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre (1984) unfolded the uprising in a Paris printer’s shop in the 1730s. The inspirational head of the stream was Carlo Ginzburg’s magical The Cheese and the Worms (1976). Told from archives of the Inquisition, it is the tale of a voluble miller, dubbed Menocchio, who was burned at the stake in 1599 for his imaginative (i.e. heretical) speculations about the stuff of the universe (like cheese somehow) and its penetration by angels and spirit (pictured as worms). In Ginzburg’s hands it is the story of early-modern man against authority; of the fusion of Menocchio’s little book learning, at the dawn of printing, with the zeal of the Reformation; and most memorably of a teeming, half-pagan popular religious culture in the rural precincts of Catholic Italy. David Kertzer’s new book this year is Amalia’s Tale, the story from trial transcripts of a wet-nurse from a village near Bologna who contracted syphillis from a farmed-out child of a foundling home. Kertzer’s canvas becomes a chronicle of disease and medicine, law and power, privilege and enterprising resistance, church rules and the meaning of motherhood, and much more.

The triptych of saints over the altar of micro-history, as Carlo Ginzburg recounts, represent Sherlock Holmes, Sigmund Freud and Giovanni Morelli, the 19th Century art historian and sleuth. The trick, as Freud put it, is to divine “secret and concealed things from unconsidered or unnoticed details, from the rubbish heap, as it were, of our observations.” The skill required (Ginzburg’s words again) is “the flexible and rigorous insight of a lover or a horse trader or a card shark.”

What they would teach us is a way of looking at the world right around us. This is, as we say, the short course.

Podcast • July 3, 2008

What would Roger Williams say… and do?

Roger Williams In celebration of the Fourth of July, despite everything… Martha Nussbaum revives a dreamy vision of religious freedom. Jeff Sharlet paints the real bathos of our adapted political piety. I join them both ...
roger williams

Roger Williams

In celebration of the Fourth of July, despite everything… Martha Nussbaum revives a dreamy vision of religious freedom. Jeff Sharlet paints the real bathos of our adapted political piety. I join them both in the pleasure of rediscovering Roger Williams (1603 – 1683) as a neglected American model of real religion, real freedom, real tolerance. As Martha Nussbaum reminds us, Roger Williams was English-born, a friend and contemporary of John Milton. He came to America — and from Massachusetts to the colony he founded in Providence, Rhode Island — in flight from meddlesome Puritans. His affinity for the Narragansett Indians, and his sense of the injustice that the settlers were inflicting on Indian property and humanity, sharpened his educated understanding of the rights of the individual spirit.

And so he developed a view of conscience – which I think is really attractive – which is that every human being has within themselves something very precious which he called conscience, which is a capacity to seek for the ultimate meaning of life in your own way. And the thought is that we all have this equally; whether we’re using it right or wrong, it ought to be respected. And respecting it means giving it lots of space to pursue its own way and not establishing an orthodoxy that squeezes it. He had two really neat images for religious intolerance. One of them was imprisonment, as consciences were imprisoned all over the world. And the other, even more striking one was rape. Consciences were being raped. He called it “soule rape” when somebody sets up a religious orthodoxy and denies a space to others to find their own way.

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum of Liberty of Conscience in conversation with Jeff Sharlet and Chris Lydon, July 1, 2008.
Jeff Sharlet

Jeff Sharlet

We’ve gone irreparably too far. I don’t like the word theocracy; I

don’t think we ever will be a theocracy, but we have severe establishment and we will have establishment of a religion that’s very comfortable with the status quo. It’s a religion of what is, and it’s a religion that shuts down dissent and it’s a religion that shuts down prophetic voices as well. Yes, I think we’ve gone irreparably too far in the United States, but that doesn’t mean that we stop speaking and living and dissenting – and for those of us who feel religious, speaking in prophetic terms, and for those of us who don’t, speaking in political terms. Hope is something that you have when you have a situation that reason doesn’t quite support, so we have to be hopeful. We have irreparably established a certain kind of religion in American life so there’s no going back. I think there’s only moving forward until we get to a country that Roger Williams would like to live in.

Journalist Jeff Sharlet of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power and The Revealer in conversation with Martha Nussbaum and Chris Lydon, July 1, 2008.