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Introduction: Marxism, Communism, and History: A Reintroduction
DOI link for Introduction: Marxism, Communism, and History: A Reintroduction
Introduction: Marxism, Communism, and History: A Reintroduction book
Introduction: Marxism, Communism, and History: A Reintroduction
DOI link for Introduction: Marxism, Communism, and History: A Reintroduction
Introduction: Marxism, Communism, and History: A Reintroduction book
ABSTRACT
WE OPEN THE INTRODUCTION to this late-twentieth-century collection of essays on Marxism with an epigraph taken from a visionary poem written at the height of the first industrial revolution in the early nineteenth century. And we do so in keeping with the spirit of Blake's visionary project-which was not to return to some idealized pre-capitalist society, but rather to insist on the possibility and indeed the urgent necessity of imagining alternatives to what announced itself from its very beginnings as a tendentially global world-system: the All, the total, the only, the universal-in short, that historical project whose completion would seemingly involve nothing less than the so-called "end of history" of which we have heard so much in recent years. For the "intricate wheels" of the dark Satanic mills of early industrial capitalism, binding their victims to labors in ever-repeated cycles of uniform time measured by
the hours of the working-day, represented for Blake not only a system of material and economic debasement and exploitation, but above all a seemingly irresistible totality that sought to deny any alternatives to itself. And yet to conform to the "necessities" and "realities" imposed by this system could amount to nothing less than madness and folly for Blake (who, strangely enough, was in his own time thought of as a crank and an oddity, if not a potentially dangerous lunatic). It was as against this machinic system that he struggled-" Striving with Systems to deliver Individuals from those Systems"l-to imagine not a counter-system but rather an end to all systems; that is, nothing less than the potential unchaining from the realm of necessity of all human creative energies and desires.