Luckily, there is more to the revival of Marx and his thought than clumsy attempts to commodify his image. Marx was not simply a historical identity. He was, first and foremost, a complex, challenging, and prolific philosopher, and the recent revival of Marxism has been led, in part, by some of today’s most important philosophers, such as Slavoj Žižek. Žižek is one of the co-authors of Reading Marx, which self-consciously evokes the title of a seminal publication from an earlier era of Marx scholarship. But whereas Louis Althusser and his students’ Reading Capital (1965) was, simply put, an attempt to recover the scientific kernel of Marx’s thought by returning to the letter of his most important publication, Žižek and his two younger European collaborators are interested in the ‘unexpected encounters’ between Marx’s philosophy and that of a number of earlier and later thinkers.

Žižek, Frank Ruda, and Agon Hamza declare in the book’s introduction that a narrow focus on the text of Marx’s key works has led to false assumptions among contemporary Marxists, such as the view that, by destroying their own political and economic hegemony via unavoidable and catastrophic economic, social, and environmental crises, today’s ruling classes are becoming their ‘own gravediggers’; and paving the way for communists of the future. Žižek, Ruda, and Hamza insist that, should today’s world collapse in such a way, the substitute for a dying capitalism will be, far from a classless and egalitarian communist utopia, a horrifying ‘barbarism: the utter destruction of natural and social substance’.

To avoid such a nihilistic understanding of Marx, the authors of Reading Marx set out to clarify and update his ideas. In his contribution, Žižek addresses the question of the proletariat, the class which Marx predicted would play the crucial role in the eventual transition from capitalism to communism. While showing that many of today’s progressive perspectives are inept – and that ‘the entire vision of creative differences, of particular identities’ and the fetishism of ‘the minorities’ is a bourgeois ideology that ‘is to be rejected in its entirety’ – Žižek argues that to develop a properly radical understanding of the working class we must subject Marx’s thought to the falsehood of ideals such as ‘identity politics’. Only then may we discover that, unlike a racial, gendered, or sexual identity, the true revolutionary subject ‘exists only in acting, and not in substance’.

Slavoj Žižek (Photo by Live from the NYPL)

Ruda, too, sets out to dispel the misunderstandings around a key Marxian notion. He subjects Marx’s concept of ideology to Plato’s famous allegory of the cave. Ruda argues that the modern salary earner, analogous to the slave in Plato’s allegory, is dehumanised – or, in Marx’s words, he or she ‘becomes an abstract activity and a stomach’. To resist ideological shadows in the cave of capitalism, one cannot simply turn one’s gaze from the shadows to the source of light – as a traditional Marxist may wish to seek the truth in the actual, (supposedly) non-ideological sphere of material reality – but to rehumanise oneself, to assert one’s subjectivity as a being with not only a stomach but also with a brain, and to ‘operate with the shadows’.

Hamza turns to one of the most intricate topics in Marxism, the labour theory of value, and he does so by returning to the earlier German philosopher Hegel. Many a reader of Capital would agree that the capitalist mode of production is premised on the transformation of the worker’s labour from ‘concrete labour’ to ‘abstract labour’, from the kind of work that one does to meet one’s own needs, to a kind of work that one must do to meet the demands set by one’s bosses or clients. While Hamza seems in agreement with this division, he rejects the idealistic perception that there may ever exist anything like ‘harmony between the creator and his creation’. Hamza suggests, à la Hegel, that we should understand all kinds of work as a matter of fulfilling the desires of a real or imaginary ‘alien’ ‘master’, a figure akin to an artist’s muse; and that, to make work meaningful and pleasurable – or to ‘articulate the concept of “non-capitalist” labor’ – we must accept and even embrace the foundational alienation of any kind of labour.

Karl Marx (Wiki Commons)Hamza’s celebration of alienation brings to mind similar views put forward by the Frankfurt School Marxists of the twentieth century, and some of the other views proposed in this book also resonate with previous perspectives. But Reading Marx is always fascinating and often challenging. What does it mean, finally, to ‘operate with the shadows’ of capitalism, as Ruda suggests, or to ‘think of alienation as a right’, as Hamza would have it? While I may not agree with everything these three contemporary philosophers tell us, I’m grateful for their publication. Any attempt to present a more complex, more compelling understanding of Marx and of his philosophy is most welcome in both countering the banality of his contemporary cultural depictions, and in also enabling us to better understand our current conditions and the ways in which we may yet fundamentally change them.