In the centre of the room an expansive table. On it hundreds of Marx and Marxist books in multiples of each title. Order seemingly random, though a conversation overheard the other day revealed that a design underlies the arrangement.
This is The Marx Lounge by Alfredo Jaar, an installation commissioned by the Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art 2010.
Today sat down with a few titles: Guy Debord's Panegyric and Ralph Miliband's Marxism and Politics. The Miliband title apt given that hours earlier I'd bestowed on both his sons my first two preference votes in the leadership election of the Labour Party. I wonder what Miliband the father would make of it all - not The Marx Lounge but the contest, his sons' versions of socialism. There's a thought: let loose the Miliband sons on the table and see what titles they select. Can't imagine either of them would go for Debord, although I could be wrong.
All of this on the day Vince Cable made a speech at the Liberal Democrat Conference down the road by the River Mersey, making noise about protecting Royal Mail and converting it into a John Lewis-style mutual in which each member of the habitually fractious workforce would be given 10% of company profits at year end. The news also made noise, converting Cable's speech into a flippant 'news event', asking whether he and Marx were separated at birth. Like with the looney-tuned Tea Party activists and a great swathe of capital-worshiping United States Americans, in Britain Marxism seems to be a dirty word. Nevertheless, I wonder what the postal workers make of Cable in the context of the local sorting office up the road, soon to be vacated, possibly demolished (like so much else in Liverpool), operations moved wholesale to another county altogether. Not sure how many people will lose their jobs, but you have to think also of the collateral damage such decisions cause in the local area, not to mention the continuing viability of that employment for the existing workers.
A security guard stands at one end of The Marx Lounge. He is professional enough to make his presence known without being invasive, but even so the very fact of his presence sparks off a number of ironies and related thoughts. What is he guarding? The books (to make sure we don't steal them) or the ideas (so that we're reminded they must not be put into practice)? Since the security guard has a distinctly working-class Scouse accent, I can't help thinking what he makes of the books. Has he glanced at them during his rounds of the table/room? Did any titles jump out at him? Did any of them remind him of family members, past and/or present, vociferous socialists, perhaps even those of the Militant Tendency? Surely a number of his family were dockers, and so therefore remembers The Strike. Is he aware that the books and the Dockers' Strike are related? I am not being judgemental about this man: I am constructing a character and situation out of the barest of evidence. And to be honest, since these days the working-class is politically apathetic, it is not completely outlandish to assume that the security guard is little acquainted with the Marxist books arrayed before him.
I wanted to know his thoughts. I wanted to chat with him about how all of the books consider in many ways the history and future of his social class (and mine). It is not unreasonable to assume that the conversation Alfredo Jaar's installation intends to generate around Marx and Marxism will, it has to be said, not take place within the very milieu most affected by parlous economic decision-making such as the forthcoming brutal cuts. Perhaps Liverpool's working-class does not need The Marx Lounge. On Sunday 19 September, a huge crowd descended on the Liberal Democrat Conference to express in no uncertain terms what it thought of the proposed budget cuts and the Liberal Democrat Party in general. Whilst not particularly constituted by working-class people, those present in the crowd who were working-class will have been compellingly passionate in the protection of their communities and of the future of their families. The working-class needs practice, ideas in action, not ideas in books. This is not to rail against the centrality of ideas and books to the formation of social life. Rather, Marxism is talk-sick, talking itself out of chaotic and terrible history for which it has been held responsible, justifying its economic thinking in the face of its aggressive neoliberal nemesis. Marx on the couch. But any working-class person would say Marx needs to get up off his arse.
Some might say the working-class should rise up off its posterior and embrace internationalism in the form of the works of Karl Marx. F^^k nationalism. Really.
Embrace internationalism.
Tall orders.
