Date: Sat, 28 Mar 1998 15:17:52 -0500
Subject: M-I: World Manifesto destiny - a slick '90s look for Marx's 
From: farmelantj-AT-juno.com (James Farmelant)



   The Boston Globe Online Boston.com Boston Globe Online / Nation |
   World Manifesto destiny - a slick '90s look for Marx's book
   
   By Fred Kaplan, Globe Staff, 03/27/98
   
   The new hardcover, 150th-anniversary edition of 'The Communist
   Manifesto.' The new hardcover, 150th- anniversary edition of 'The
   Communist Manifesto.'
   
   
   
   [IMAGE] EW YORK - Somebody should go check out Karl Marx's grave in
   Highgate Cemetery, North London, because the occupant may have been
   spinning in it lately.
   
   
   
   History's most potent critic of capitalism - the father of communism,
   the bearded radical whose writings inspired a century of revolutions
   and rebellions - now lies reduced to a chic boy toy of the
   bourgeoisie.
   
   
   
   The emblems of ''commie kitsch'' have become commonplace. Two
   fashionable Manhattan bars are called Pravda and KGB. On a huge mural
   in SoHo, the image of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Marx's most successful
   disciple, adorns a vodka ad.
   
   
   
   And coming this May Day is a new hardcover, 150th-anniversary edition
   of Marx's most influential work, ''The Communist Manifesto,'' which
   its publisher, Verso Inc., plans to market as an ''upscale'' product
   in fancy furniture and clothing stores.
   
   
   
   For a while, the creative director at Barney's, New York, was going to
   feature the thin volume in a window display, with mannequins in bright
   red lipstick and red dresses toting it rather than Prada purses.
   (Management has nixed the notion.)
   
   
   
   Borders bookstore at the World Trade Center, the epicenter of global
   capitalism, will display the book prominently - perhaps even surround
   it with red banners - figuring that its lunch-hour horde of
   bond-traders might buy it as a gag gift for fellow exploiters of the
   proletariat.
   
   
   
   Colin Robinson, head of Verso, one of the most respectable leftist
   publishing houses, makes no bones about this marketeering drive.
   ''I've sent a letter to the Royalton Hotel,'' he said. ''They have
   these bellhops who look like Maoist guards from the Cultural
   Revolution. I'm suggesting it might be nice to put `The Communist
   Manifesto' in the bedside tables instead of Gideon's Bible.''
   
   
   
   His reasoning is properly dialectical. ''There are these supremely
   confident people running the media - running the world, really - who
   feel that it's quite good fun to incorporate icons of the left into
   what they're doing,'' he said. ''But that's not all bad. It creates a
   double-edged situation for those of us interested in winning over
   someone.''
   
   
   
   With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent ascent of
   American-style capitalism, Marxism has lost its power to frighten. It
   has become so safe that its most sacred symbols can be appropriated as
   tokens of high camp. Che Guevara's face decorates wristwatches like
   some hip, grown-up Mickey Mouse. The commercialization of Marx and his
   followers, in general, stands as Exhibit A in the case for
   capitalism's ultimate triumph.
   
   
   
   ''One thing Marx was right about was how capitalism converts
   everything into a commodity,'' said Todd Gitlin, professor of
   sociology at New York University. The commodification of Marx himself
   shows ''that if even the baddest of bad boys can be converted to
   commercial use, then anything can.''
   
   
   
   But for others, the believers, the situation opens up a possibility
   that Marx - now stripped of his Cold War associations - might once
   again be read as a trenchant social critic and a utopian visionary.
   
   
   
   ''There suddenly is space for leftist books that did not exist
   before,'' Robinson said. ''And I'm absolutely determined to exploit
   it.
   
   
   
   ''I feel there might be an audience for this book among a middle class
   that, despite the fact that the stock market is rising week after
   week, has a distinct sense of unease that this can't go on forever.
   It's no surprise that `Titanic' is the bi
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ggest hit of 1998. It's the
   perfect metaphor for the mood we're in - spending gobs of money on
   champagne and caviar but terrifyingly aware of the icy waters and not
   enough lifeboats just ahead.''
   
   
   
   Some leftists are less sure. Alexander Cockburn, a self-described
   ''Marxish'' columnist who has written books for Verso, said he finds
   the high style of the Manifesto's new edition ''a bit depressing ...
   You don't get the impression that people are going to read this, and
   then go out and make revolution.
   
   
   
   ''The old copy you could tuck in your pocket. This one, it's not even
   a coffee-table book, it's an espresso-table book, or maybe a
   latte-table book.''
   
   
   
   ''It is a funny thing,'' he added. ''When there seems to be absolutely
   no danger of revolution, people are wild to read `The Communist
   Manifesto.' Then again,'' he said, mentioning the French
   historian,''maybe we can take Braudel's line that the tastes of the
   upper classes eventually trickle down. Style will become substance.
   You can look at it dialectically, I suppose.''
   
   
   
   The artist Alexander Melamid, a Russian emigre, has a different take
   on the situation. The book's cover - a rippling red flag set against a
   bold black backdrop - is a reprint of a massive 6-by-9 foot painting
   that he and Vitaly Komar created back in the USSR in the mid-'80s.
   
   
   
   Komar and Melamid, who now live in New York, were scandalously funny
   figures in the Soviet Union's dissident underground-art movement.
   ''Red Flag'' was part of what they called their ''Nostalgic Socialist
   Realism series'' - paintings that punctured the pomposity of Stalin
   and the whole Soviet regime but also captured the childlike awe that
   its rituals and imagery evoked.
   
   
   
   ''This, we didn't expect,'' Melamid said, with the giggle that engulfs
   nearly all his sentences, when asked how he felt seeing his art on the
   cover of communism's bible. ''But that's what - oh, not Marx, but the
   one before him, Hegel, said: History repeats itself, first as tragedy,
   then as farce. We're in the farce stage of history now. It's the
   better part of history.''
   
   
   
   This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 03/27/98.
   © Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.
   
   

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