‘Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism’ by Mark Steven (ed) reviewed by Anthony Ballas

Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism tracks the ‘native and immanent’ relationship between Marx and modernism through the ‘proliferation’ of Marxist and communist influence in the period of high modernism, roughly from 1880 to the mid-twentieth century, an era of immense social, political, scientific and cultural, some might say, world historical change (2). Not only did this period witness, for instance, the Russian Revolution – the influence of which on socialist and anti-colonial revolutions worldwide cannot be overstated – but also, as Steven reminds us, how ‘after [these] socialist revolutions […] for much of the 20th century nearly four out of every ten people on earth lived under governments that claimed to follow Marx’s idea and aspire toward communism’ (4; emphasis added). Needless to say, Marx’s influence in the long twentieth century was seismic, reshaping not only modern socialism, but political theory as such.

But Marx’s influence was not solely confined to the political, as this volume makes clear. Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism also tracks how Marxism left its fingerprints on cultural production as well: film, art, theatre, architecture, literature, music and so on. Marx and modernism, thus, share an intrinsic conjunction; the former having forged the theory and praxis of modern revolution, and the latter the ushering in of various social forms and aesthetic phase changes, from the construction of the first skyscraper to the advent of cinema, from experiments in poetic style to the form of the novel and beyond. Marx and modernism share revolution as a common ground: the social revolution takes its ‘poetry from the future,’ and ‘make it new!’ is a battle cry that goes beyond the strictly aesthetic.

The volume argues for a Marx that is not only the ‘forefather of modern communism’ but also a ‘herald for modernism,’ a cogently argued notion, especially when we understand modernism to be ‘when art – and literature – attaches itself to forms and forces that do not reconcile into capitalism,’ the era of modernism itself, ‘one last attempt at autonomous world-creation before everything is subsumed into a single (uneven and combined) global market’ (6). Steven cites T.J. Clark, who lucidly articulates the political stakes of modernism, in that ‘there could be no modernism without the practical possibility of an end to capitalism existing’ (10). In the introduction, Steven convincingly demonstrates the exigence of reading Marx and modernism together: both have as their raw material the destructive wake of capitalism, and its destruction tout court. For the authors of this volume, Marx’s writing marks a kind of ‘pre-history of modernist poetics,’ while modernism aesthetically chronicles the contradictions of capital unfolding historically (65), providing a rich bilateral elucidation of the two.

In addition to the formal and conceptual links between Marx and modernism, Steven situates the volume in response to the ‘renewed interest in Marx and Marxism across the English-speaking world,’ citing part of this resurgence having taken place in academic circles (for instance, the Pacific Modern Language Association), as well as the rising interest in leftist journals and magazines over the last decade or so (Jacobin, Endnotes, Tribune and others). The volume foregrounds Marx’s continuing relevance in and out of the academy, rooted not simply in the world of literary criticism and journalism, but in the political imagination following the string of economic crises of recent memory, which are alluded to again and again through the book.

The volume is divided into three parts. Part One is composed of essays covering Marx’s writing, from his early dissertation work, critiques of Hegel and the latter’s Left and Right disciples, to the major works, The Communist Manifesto, Capital, the Grundrisse, as well as posthumous works edited together by Engels and Kautsky. Part Two approaches Marx from the standpoint of modernism, explicating how Marx’s life and thought made their way into modernist forms and various media. The final section of the volume features a ‘Glossary,’ or what Steven describes as a ‘conceptual roadmap.’ The entries in Part Three not only introduce and summarise the major tenets of Marxism, but provide detailed commentaries thereof, serving to both introduce Marx and Marxism to students and researchers of modernism, but also to further Marxist concepts ‘beyond the field of modernist studies,’ as Steven writes (10). As an instructor myself, this reviewer can easily see the practicality of excerpting sections of Part Three for introductory purposes.

Many of the volume’s chapters in fact take on this double role, serving both as introductory case studies of Marx’s writing while providing commentary through close reading and critical analysis. Additionally, the entries in the collection showcase the dialectical method in action, suggesting that perhaps close reading itself does not belong to the apolitical, ahistorical method of New Criticism, but rather to the Marxist tradition – Marx the modernist, as well as Marx the close reader of Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe and so many others.

Through brief, pointed interventions detailing biographical, literary, philosophical and historical elements of Marx’s oeuvre, Part One progresses through his writing in mostly chronological order, beginning with an examination of Marx’s dissertation on Epicurus and the development of his early critique of Hegel. The first chapter demonstrates one of the volume’s many strengths, as many may not be familiar with Marx’s early writings on Greek philosophy, particularly in literary and modernist studies. To begin Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism in this way makes the volume immediately refreshing to readers already familiar with Marx, while for those less familiar, this opening gesture introduces the breadth of Marx’s body of work, reaching back to when Marx was a student, potentially serving to shake off whatever preconceived notions or received ideas of Marx linger in the mind of a newly minted reader of Marx.

Although there are many highlights in the volume, this short review will have to limit itself to only a few. In addition to two brilliant chapters on the gothic style and eldritch ‘rhetorical palette’ of the Manifesto, an ‘unremittingly modernist document’ and ‘foundational modernist text’ as Alex Niven puts it (40), Dominick Knowles’ chapter on the Grundrisse is certainly a high point of Part One. Knowles argues that the Grundrisse is ‘a formally experimental and speculative work of communist literature,’ though its literariness is too often neglected (65). Knowles describes the Grundrisse as a sort of ‘snakeskin left behind by the three volumes of Capital,’ as it is usually characterised as Marx’s planning stage for the critique of political economy in the volumes of Capital (66). Knowles points us toward the ‘unique structural imperfections’ of the work, and how it ‘articulates Marx’s revolutionary message at the level of literary form,’ a clear departure from the usual treatment of the work (65). ‘To take the Grundrisse as merely preparatory,’ argues Knowles, ‘is not only to ignore those qualities unique to it but also to neglect Marx as he thinks through the fundamental arguments that shape the early and mature writings’ (66). Knowles’ close reading is radically inventive, zeroing in on the dialectical, often laconic style of the Grundrisse as ‘a document responding to a pulverised world economy,’ positioning it as ‘firmly in the pre-history of modern literature’ through its vacillating and often vertiginous inversions and use of allegory (67).

The title of Knowles’ chapter is striking as well, ‘Jupiter against the Lightning-Rod,’ a reference to Marx’s staging of a ‘battle in which the gods of Greek art struggle against industrial and finance capital’ from the Grundrisse (67). Even on the ‘surface level’ of Knowles’ title alone, the chapter opens up potentially rich lines of inquiry: a possible encounter between Marx and Melville, specifically ‘Lighting-Rod Man’ from the Piazza Tales, or Mark Twain’s own tale of a manic lightning rod salesman, curiously titled ‘Political Economy.’ In this chapter, Knowles produces an image of Marx actualizing economic commentary through poetic form, masterfully crafted, it should be added, through Knowles’ own poetic prowess.

Later chapters in Part One include readings of the second and third volumes of Capital, which are very often neglected (particularly in literary studies), considered as too technical, without the style and excitement of Volume 1. The chapters provide commentaries on the uneven effects of globalisation, and world literature as a chronicle of these effects; from the circulation of social capital and Benjamin’s diagnosis of ‘disjunctive modernity,’ to neoliberalism and structural adjustment programs in the Global South. Part One, in sum, situates Marx as a leading figure of modernism; the critique of political economy, the articulation of the dialectic in poetic and literary form, the gothic-inflected political style and more are linked to modernism, as Lyell is to geography, Darwin is to biology and Freud is to psychology (104).

In Part Two, ‘Marx in Modernism,’ the volume changes its approach, detailing Marx’s influence in a variety of modernist forms, ‘coiled into the DNA,’ as Steven puts it, of the modernist, novel, cinema, theatre, architecture, music and so forth (10). There are indeed too many works and figures in this section to properly explicate here, but suffice it to say that the gamut of the modernist canon – known and lesser known alike – from every genre and medium appear between its pages. From literature, Joyce, Dos Passos, Platonov and Zola; from poetry, Hughes, Mayakovsky and Oppen; from art, Duchamp, Klee’s (and Benjamin’s) Angelus Novus; from architecture, Loos, Le Corbusier and Tafuri; from music, Haydn and Wagner; and from cinema, Vertov, Eisenstein and special mention of Gettino and Solanas’ trailblazing film manifesto ‘Third Cinema,’ which is too little cited in Marxist literature.

Although written for students and researchers of Modernist Studies in particular, the volume surely ought not to be confined to this discipline alone. As already mentioned, as classroom aids, the chapters in Parts One and Two, and the Glossary section in particular, are readymade. The depth and breadth of Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism reminds us not only of the versatility of the dialectic and the bilateral relationship between Marx and modernism, but also that Marxism is not as a static set of schemas to be rotely applied to the world, but rather, as Steven quotes Walter Rodney, ‘“Marxism”[…] comes to the world as a historical fact, and it comes in a cultural nexus […] loaded with conceptions of the historical development of Europe itself. The challenge, then, is “making sure that Marxism does not simply appear as the summation of other people’s history, but appears as a living force within one’s history”’ (2). Steven makes great effort to edit this volume with fidelity to, and in solidarity with, Rodney’s appraisal; with entries on colonisation, primitive accumulation, commentaries and analyses on petro-fiction, oil, nature and eco-Marxism, the volume does its best to update Marxism for our current situation.

As Steven writes, ‘revolution is the only final chapter worthy of Marx’s name,’ and so it is perhaps then not coincidental that the volume’s final chapter is on ‘Utopia,’ which we might think of as a textual or cognitive surrogate of revolution – not a replacement, but perhaps something of a heuristic. Yes, style, form, poetics and the aesthetic more generally are granted centre stage in the volume, but Steven is quick to remind us how the famous ‘gravediggers’ line from the Manifesto ‘is not entirely a metaphor’ (5). In this way, the collection, much like the modernist drive itself, goes to great lengths to point to something other than itself.

14 January 2023