Marx at 200: 63 Faces of the Man and His -ism

Him, them, us.

“All that is solid melts into air.”

People wary of modernity, artists, cynics, defenders of the poetic and the pastoral, believers in guns and violence… and communists themselves, of course — everyone loves this line.

The beguiling line comes from the celebrated Communist Manifesto.

It carries a whiff of literature and a whiff of revolutionary nerve, like that famous portrait of Che Guevara — the political icon, upright and unflinching, gazing into the distance. Who wouldn't like that? People mine the line for inspiration, existential or artistic, and for the strength and the reasons to act.

Cool.

Today Karl Marx turns 200 — if he were still alive.

1818: “All That Is Solid Melts Into Air”

Retelling the intellectual achievements and political legacy of Marx【1】 is, perhaps, an old story by now. Nobody was better placed to sum up his life than Engels【2】, and nothing Engels wrote is better known in China than the speech he gave at Marx's graveside.

“The law of development of human history” — historical materialism, yes; the “modern capitalist mode of production” and the special laws of motion of bourgeois society, yes; original discoveries in field after field, mathematics reportedly among them, yes.

But is that all?

As Marx's contemporary, Engels could not foresee how later generations would understand Marx: how, like blind men groping an elephant, each would seize one side of him and then use it sincerely, misuse it stubbornly, or appropriate it slyly. Those scattered, overlapping projections would become the public's main source of knowledge about Marx.

Some read in The Communist Manifesto the inevitable death of capitalism, and demanded that politics deliver it; some read in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 the “alienation” of man, and built from it a humanist aesthetics and social theory; some read in Capital a kind of economic determinism, after which culture no longer mattered, and neither did the spirit…

In 2017, at a lecture in London, the Marx scholar Jonathan Wolff asked his audience to look at the date The Communist Manifesto was published. Everyone knows it was 1848; some know about the armed revolutions that broke out across Europe that year. What interested Wolff was this: Paddington station opened in 1838; Waterloo in 1848; King's Cross in 1852…

Which meant that people could now move in great numbers, and that society could now change violently. Baudelaire【3】, a poet born three years after Marx, caught this modern condition in literature: flux, the fleeting, the accidental. This was the horizon Marx saw.

We can see that horizon too.

Now the line at the top of this article may be easier to understand. One official translation gives the fuller passage:

“Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

Among the critiques we have of modern society, this passage still holds an important place — that society has not ended, and criticizing a world driven and shaped by industrial capitalism still means something. It certainly reads as more concrete than “a specter is haunting Europe.”

Wander Europe today and you will not find the legendary footprints worn into the floor of the British Library, but you can see the house Marx lived in on Dean Street, in London's Soho. He moved there to save on rent; today it is one of London's liveliest districts: bars, strip clubs, expensive restaurants…

The phrase “class struggle” has drifted off these streets. Left-wing young people passing through may sigh about “alienation” — which also comes from Marx…

All right. Our curtain is up.

What follows is a crowd of familiar faces — all of them, it turns out, stamped by the world's most famous bearded, curly-haired man. Some called themselves Marxists and were doubted for it; some never admitted any link to Marx yet kept running into the questions he had set; some are barely known, quietly guarding and extending his legacy.

We think that showing this “constellation” — Benjamin's【4】 word — lit up by Marx and lighting us up in turn offers a way of looking at Marx that the mainstream account does not. Following Marx's many “avatars,” we watch 200 years of modern history, and watch people submit, resist, and think again inside the modern world.

Sometimes, of course, we also see our own shadow.

“The best and most ideal thing that could happen would be for the landlady to throw me out of the house. Then at least I would be spared paying twenty-two pounds. But such generosity is hardly to be counted on. Then there are the baker, the milkman, the tea merchant, the greengrocer, and the old bill at the butcher's. How am I ever to clear all these damned debts?” Marx complained in a letter to Engels in September 1852.

Engels read it and sent money at once.

People often cast Engels as a revolutionary who betrayed his own class. In popular culture his main job seems to have been exactly what we just saw: sending Marx money. But several important works of Marxism are his alone: Anti-Dühring, Dialectics of Nature, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State…

No wonder Marx wrote to him in another letter:

“Frankly speaking, my conscience is often weighed down as though by a nightmare, at the thought that it is mainly on my account you have let your fine energies rust and become stunted in commerce.”

In fact, if you taught a course on the origins of feminist thought, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State would sit at the top of the reading list. In it Engels supplies anthropological evidence for the birth and growth of patriarchy. He looks at the division of labor, and gender is the most basic division of labor there is.

This was “the world-historic defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children,” Engels wrote.

Marx's second daughter, Laura, married Paul Lafargue【5】, a left-wing organizer born in Cuba. Marx was not altogether happy with some of what his son-in-law said and did. Shortly before his death he said something harsh about Lafargue and another leader of the French labor movement, Jules Guesde【6】: “What I do know is that if they are Marxists, then I am not a Marxist.”

The disagreement that angered him was a fine one. Guesde saw no prospect of winning reforms from the bourgeoisie, and thought that part of the program he had earlier agreed on with Marx did nothing for the class struggle and would serve instead as bait the bourgeoisie could use to buy workers' support. He and Lafargue, it appears, were more radical than Marx.

In an article from 1883, Lafargue mocked officialdom for using the clergy to soothe a suffering population. Then he changed tack and proposed a workers' “right to be lazy.” It sounds like a joke, but it carries a real insight: socialists must attack not only the institutions of the bourgeoisie but the morality behind those institutions.

Today people seem more and more at ease with “corporate culture” in all its forms.

Seen from later on, that small quarrel between Marx and Lafargue foreshadowed the left's habit of splitting. From Lafargue to Bernstein to Kautsky, from radical change to reform to reformism, people fought bitterly over who represented “orthodox” Marxism. The fight ran on through the 20th century, and eventually ran between states.

In 1883, Marx died at 65.

Two economists were born that year: Keynes【7】 and Schumpeter. Half a century later they would be theoretical opponents, but neither could think outside the terms Marx had set. This was the horizon they saw.

A year on, a group called the Fabian Society was founded in London. It would draw in some important socialists, among them H.G. Wells【8】, author of The Time Machine, and India's prime minister, Nehru【9】. At the founding, a young man with little schooling took part. Few people had yet heard the name George Bernard Shaw.

For Shaw【10】, joining the Fabians turned his thinking around. He had read Capital for the first time two years earlier; among the Fabians his enthusiasm for communism shifted toward a more English reformism. At an international congress in 1896 he brought a “Report on Fabian Policy,” declaring that the outdated parts of Marxism should be treated critically and that social progress should come through compromise in a democratic society.

That line of thought reaches as far as George Orwell【11】. Labeled an “anti-totalitarian,” Orwell was in fact a writer of the left. His hatred of social injustice and of authority came from his poor background and his years in the colonies; the infighting he saw on the left in the Spanish Civil War left him deeply wary of the Soviet model.

In the customer reviews for Homage to Catalonia on Amazon UK, one reader wrote: “I have been a socialist all my life and this book perfectly sums up how the left is more effective at destroying itself than any enemy ever could. I have to quote it every time the left turns on itself (which is always). ‘My cause is more important than yours!’ That's always how it goes on the left. Seventy years on, and it's still the same.”

Let's remember that passage.

1917: “The World Clock Changed Its Ways”

“From this moment — 3:10 — the world clock changed its ways.”

Ten years after the fact, in 1927, the writer Stefan Zweig would describe the departure of a train in those words. It started in Zurich and ended in Petrograd. By Zweig's account, Lenin【12】 stood on a tank there and gave his first speech to the people.

Many people were not ready for events like the October Revolution and the founding of the Soviet Union. Just look at Lenin's own lieutenants — before long many of them would be at each other's throats, Stalin【13】 and Trotsky【14】 above all.

Inside the Soviet Union and outside it, Lenin could not convince everyone.

Lenin's central idea was a “vanguard party” of intellectuals that would train the proletariat into a disciplined revolutionary army. He agreed with Karl Kautsky【15】 that the proletariat could not build a “modern socialist consciousness” on its own, because it lacked “profound scientific knowledge.”

To put it as a metaphor: the working class, the masses, were the body, and the vanguard party was the “brain” that gave the body orders. Lenin used another one too — the vanguard party stood to the revolutionary masses as the engineer who designs a factory stands to the bricklayers who build it.

Lenin, it seems, did not much believe the masses could start and organize a revolution by themselves. Other Marxists believed exactly the opposite.

Lenin's German contemporary Rosa Luxemburg【16】 held that the creativity of the masses was abundant and impossible to predict. Directing the revolution of the masses with “the dictatorial force of a foreman,” Lenin could only strangle that creativity:

“Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution… Public life gradually falls asleep…”

So Luxemburg wrote.

The other critic of “vanguard party” theory was also a woman. Alexandra Kollontai【17】, head of the Women's Department in the Secretariat of the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee, was the voice of the party's “Workers' Opposition” faction in 1920. This left-wing faction objected to experts and officials who did no frontline work telling production what to do, and demanded an All-Russian Congress of Producers, elected by the trade unions, to direct production instead.

“Communism cannot be put in place by decree. It can only be created through a process of practical research, through mistakes — perhaps only through the creative power of the working class itself. Experts and officials play an important supporting role, but only those tied directly to industry can give it living invention.”

Kollontai, incidentally, was the world's first officially accredited woman ambassador.

For intellectuals and artists, this was an age of chaos braided with hope.

“-ism” became the most productive word in the language, and yet almost no two people could fully agree on what any given -ism contained; even within a single person you could watch contradiction and self-betrayal at work. Prokofiev【18】, who wrote modernist music, and Eisenstein【19】, who overhauled the theory of montage in film, both felt the vertigo that comes over people standing before power.

Between art, politics, and thought, they sometimes went looking for their own place, and sometimes took the place they were given.

Hannes Meyer【20】, the second director of the Bauhaus school of architecture. Radically left-wing in politics, he had barely taken office before he added courses in advertising and sociology; his view of what architecture was for was just as radical — meet social needs, and demand no aesthetic standard at all.

As the political weather in Weimar Germany grew tense, Meyer stepped down in 1930 and left for the Soviet Union, where he did not get the trust he had expected.

Here is Meyer's 1928 summary of his architectural philosophy:

“1. sex life; 2. sleeping habits; 3. pets; 4. gardening; 5. personal hygiene; 6. protection against bad weather; 7. hygiene in the home; 8. car maintenance; 9. cooking; 10. heating; 11. daylight; 12. service — these are the only things we should think about when building a house.”

The place that pulled hardest on artists was still Paris.

If, as in a Woody Allen film, you traveled back to the Paris of the 1920s and '30s, you could meet avant-garde artists like Picasso and Buñuel. Many of them joined the Communist Party.

Comrade André Breton【21】, party member from 1927. Writer, founder of Surrealism. In the “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art”, published jointly with Diego Rivera (many believe the real co-author was Trotsky), he quoted words said to be Marx's: the writer should treat his work as an end and not a means, and should, if he must, sacrifice his own existence for the existence of the work.

Comrade Pablo Picasso【22】, party member from 1945. Painter, founder of Cubism. In 1945 he published a piece in the press explaining why he had joined:

“Joining the Communist Party is the logical outcome of my whole life, my whole body of work, and the condition that gives them meaning. Through design and color I have tried to go deeper into the knowledge of the world and of man, and to find liberation in that knowledge… But oppression and unrest have made me feel this is not enough. Now I must fight not only with painting, but with my whole being.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson【23】 — not yet a comrade. Photographer; he read Marx as a young man. Before the French elections of 1936 he and some friends made a campaign film for the French Communist Party, La Vie est à nous (Life Belongs to Us). One section indicts wealth and class privilege by presenting 200 families — Cartier-Bresson's own family among them.

In 1948 and 1949, as China moved toward Communist Party rule, Cartier-Bresson “happened” to be there. Curators are still reading the politics in his pictures today, hoping to recover the figure of “Comrade Cartier-Bresson.”

Comrade Luis Buñuel【24】, party member from 1931. Director. He thought little of Dalí, his partner on Un Chien Andalou, and said Dalí had “gone off to the world of money.” His own films kept working to expose the absurdities of capitalist society — though sometimes reality was surreal enough on its own.

He was the kind of director who would go into the slums for a film. In the documentary Land Without Bread, he holds a close-up on a slum child chalking four words on a blackboard: “Respect private property.” The image says everything.

Few people could mock the “bourgeois” as precisely as Buñuel. Below are the titles of the first ten scenes in the screenplay of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (following Fu Yuchen's translation). The film runs 102 minutes and tells the story of a meal that never gets eaten.

1. A misunderstanding over timing, and a wake held at the restaurant, leave the dinner unfinished
2. Drug dealing and unease
3. A couple's lovemaking makes them late for lunch
4. The film's protagonists walk aimlessly along the highway for the first time
5. Tea and coffee run out; the afternoon snack never happens
6. The ambassador's failed tryst with Madame Thevenot
7. A military exercise breaks up the dinner party
8. Dinner at the colonel's falls through, followed by a stage performance
9. The film's main characters walk aimlessly along the highway a second time
10. At the Sénéchals', dinner falls through because of police interference, and other things happen too

Wind the clock back to just before the Soviet Union was founded. In 1921 Antonio Gramsci【25】 founded the Italian Communist Party; Mussolini later put him in prison. It was in prison that Gramsci worked out his far-reaching theory of cultural hegemony.

Put simply, cultural hegemony means using religion and education to plant your own ideology across a whole society, and so keep your hold on it. Fascist Italy under Mussolini was Gramsci's best example.

And hardly the only one. Any government pushing social change on a large scale leans on a powerful social machine. In the 1980s, as neoliberal movements spread around the world, laid-off workers were sold to the public as a price society had to pay to develop. When family planning was first rolled out in China, the slogans painted on wall after village wall — “To get rich, build a road first; have fewer children, plant more trees” — were cultural hegemony in its contemporary form.

Like Gramsci, Lukács was both scholar and politician. He opened a new current inside Western Marxism.

The year the First World War ended, the 33-year-old Lukács【26】 joined the Hungarian Communist Party. His friends were baffled: until then he had looked like a literary young man and critic who liked publishing theater reviews in the papers.

Five years later Lukács gathered his essays on Marxism into a book. History and Class Consciousness became his best-known work, and is taken as the founding text of Western Marxism.

He believed Marxism was not fixed for all time: “Orthodox Marxism refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth, and that this method can only be developed, expanded, and deepened along the lines its founders laid down.”

For Lukács, deepening Marxism meant developing “commodity fetishism.” He used the word “reification” for the ordinary condition of the individual in a market economy: “Man's activity becomes wholly estranged from himself. All human activity turns into a commodity, subject to the rules of the market economy, becoming, like any other consumer good, independent of the existence of man.”

The idea has not gone stale. Picture someone putting on a streetwear label like Supreme and believing this has made them cool. Lukács would say it is an illusion — you paid money for a piece of clothing, and nothing about you changed.

Apart from commodity value, human worth seemed to have lost every other measure — a worry that would return again and again in the social criticism of the 20th century.

The year History and Class Consciousness came out, the University of Frankfurt founded an Institute for Social Research. In 1930 the sociologist Max Horkheimer【27】 became its second director, and under him the institute grew into the famous Frankfurt School. They joined Marxism to critical theory and examined every corner of society.

Theodor Adorno【28】, philosopher, sociologist — and, in a role few people know about, composer. The avant-garde music he wrote did not suit most people's ears, which may have been exactly the point: to challenge the culture industry's training of the human ear.

The culture industry names a form of discipline that capitalist society imposes on culture. To traditional Marxists, culture was where human creativity — that is, humanity itself — could best be exercised. Under the culture industry, cultural goods are put through the same process as industrial goods: standardized, commodified, mass-produced. Their function is to supply capitalist society with cultural legitimacy and to fold human life into capitalism's running order.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno had his own case against the film industry. Genre films, he argued, take away the possibility of thinking; cartoons repeat, over and over, the victory of technical reason over the real; detective films take away the wish to work out the answer for yourself.

Think of the frame of mind you bring to a Marvel superhero film — whatever happens, you already know good will beat evil. That is probably what Adorno would least want to see: you have lost the ability to use reason on your own.

After all, not everyone is Žižek【29】, thinking about “revolution and love” during La La Land.

On the surface, Benjamin's view of popular culture looks nothing like Adorno's. He believed that with the age of mechanical reproduction — photography above all — enjoying and making art stopped being the privilege of the few. Film handed the proletariat a tool for showing itself and pushed society toward democracy — an optimism people were still repeating in the YouTube era.

But alongside the optimism, Benjamin knew perfectly well that the entertainment factories, Hollywood at their head, were manufacturing new idols and killing off film's democratic promise. More important was his pessimism about history: the angel that stands for hope always seems to be dragged back into the past by the storm, leaving wreckage behind. In Theses on the Philosophy of History he wrote a famous line: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

Read it and you think of art kept as a pet by power, of today's dream factories, of war and racism — barbarism in the dress of civilization.

That is exactly where Benjamin's appeal lies. His optimism about popular culture was no crude technological determinism; it grew out of a belief that history's endless repetition could be broken and a messianic moment reached. As a Jew, he fused “redemption” with “liberation,” and believed the moment might already be here, in the present.

That moment, unfortunately, was not his.

On September 26, 1940, Benjamin, in flight, was held at the French-Spanish border over a small procedural problem, and killed himself.

1945: “Are You Still a Marxist?”

When the ambitions of the Third Reich were put out in 1945, world history arrived at a straight contest between two ideologies. Nowhere was the turn clearer than in France. In 1946 the French Communist Party came out of the general election as the largest party in parliament; a year later, trouble at home and abroad split the governing coalition of Communists and Socialists. In May 1947 the Socialist prime minister, Paul Ramadier, threw every Communist out of the cabinet. That December the United States agreed to send $40 million in aid to France, Austria, China, and Italy.

After the 1970s the French Communist Party dropped “Marxism-Leninism” from its charter. The radical left never again won the more than 20% of the vote it once had — not until Mélenchon in 2016.

Jean-Paul Sartre【30】, a Marxist, never joined the French Communist Party. He wanted Europe to be a culture of its own, apart from the United States and the Soviet Union. And he managed something that looks nearly impossible: to hold together existentialism, which puts the individual first, and Marxism, which puts class first.

In Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre argued that society can be traced back to the class, family, nationality, ethnicity, even the body the individual inhabits. The individual lives inside all that and takes part in it, and grows along with society.

Sartre thus offered a story of history different from Marx's. In Marx's history there is no individual; history advances by twists and turns through class struggle, first slaves against slaveholders, later workers against capitalists. Sartre put the individual's capacity back in, and so escaped the charge of “historical determinism” leveled at Marx.

Sartre's partner, Simone de Beauvoir【31】, likewise put existentialism and Marxism together, and built from them a theory that could make sense of women's position in modern society.

Beauvoir saw that the oppression women suffer comes out of structures — social, economic, cultural. Under that oppression women fall into an unhappiness produced by self-deception, because they cannot make the large decisions, because they cannot answer for their own lives.

In the conclusion of The Second Sex, Beauvoir wrote: “Both sexes are the victims of one another and also of themselves.” Equality between the sexes, in other words, is not a bargain in which one side gives and the other gains.

Two things happened in 1949. The first needs no explaining — to the considerable surprise of both the United States and the Soviet Union, a second great power with Marxism-Leninism as its official ideology appeared in Asia. The second is barely known. Paul Sweezy【32】, an economist, founded a Marxist magazine in Manhattan: Monthly Review.

Born into a banking family, Sweezy met almost no obstacle on his way into the elite. He took both his bachelor's and his doctorate at Harvard. From the late 1930s into the early 1940s he did economic research there, working alongside Schumpeter, a champion of free-market capitalism.

But as early as his year as a visiting student at the London School of Economics, straight out of his undergraduate degree, Sweezy had begun to steep himself in Marxist economics. He recalled later: “I became convinced that the mainstream economics Harvard taught me was of no help in understanding the major events and trends of the twentieth century.” An unregulated market economy, he believed, would end in stagnation and would feed oligopoly across one industry after another.

One article stood out in the first issue of Monthly Review: “Why Socialism?” It ends this way:

“I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals… The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.”

It was signed Albert Einstein【33】.

As a scientist, Einstein held that “science cannot create ends” and “can only supply the means” to reach them. An economic science that served the present state of things, he thought, could not overcome or get past a stage of development marked by plunder, hostility, and war — which is why experts from outside any one field had to join the argument about social questions.

Today we would call Einstein a “public intellectual.” His thinking carried a worry shared across the left: standing in the rubble of the Great Depression and two world wars, could humanity find a road that avoided the next catastrophe? That was what Monthly Review was for — in Einstein's words, to break the taboo and discuss these problems “freely and without any hampering conventions.”

Before long the taboo swept over America harder than ever.

In 1952 the comedian Charlie Chaplin【34】 left the United States under pressure from McCarthyism. His career on screen made the case for the political force of humor as well as anything has: in Modern Times, Charlie the assembly-line worker repeats the same mechanical motions hour after hour, watched even in the toilet by a boss protecting the factory's efficiency; laid off, he is jailed as a supposed leader of the labor movement, and takes to prison life so happily that he refuses to go back to the “freedom” he has been promised.

When “Charlie” reflexively pulls out his wrench to tighten every nut-shaped object he meets, when he works away tirelessly among the giant gears, any viewer with the faintest knowledge of Marx thinks of the famous critique of “alienated labor.”

Perhaps the strongest answer to the Red Scare of a decade before came from Chaplin himself in a 1960 interview: “I remain just one thing, and one thing only, and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician.”

Doubt about existing political systems applied to the once-romanticized Soviet Union as well.

In “Why Socialism?” Einstein had already given a warning: “A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening?”

Beyond the Great Purge under Stalin, Eastern Europe after the start of the Cold War bore his fears out.

In 1956 the 71-year-old Lukács became a government minister once more. That year students in Budapest pulled down the statue of Stalin in the square and demanded an end to the Soviet system, a reformist government under Imre Nagy, and a turn toward openness.

Lukács largely played go-between. He was still a senior party official, but he argued that the ruling party had to win back the people's trust. The Soviet Union would not wait. Facing a satellite state about to slip its grip, it sent tanks into Hungary, brought down the Nagy government, and installed the moderate, careful János Kádár. At the end of the year Hungary met the Soviet Union in the water polo at the Melbourne Olympics; carrying a whole country's honor and shame, the Hungarian team won that “blood in the water” match 4-0 and took the gold.

In April 1989, close to death, Kádár publicly apologized for this piece of history, and above all for his own part in the execution of Nagy. Lukács, who had survived by luck, never stopped criticizing the Soviet Union. In an interview shortly before his death he drew the line again between himself and Stalin, and between Stalinism and Marxism.

“Unfortunately, Stalin was not a Marxist,” Lukács said.

The philosopher Ernst Bloch【35】 was another exile like Lukács. When the Berlin Wall began going up in 1961 he happened to be visiting West Germany, and he never went back to the East.

Bloch was known as an “unorthodox Marxist.” The unorthodox part was his fascination with utopia. Revolutionaries who practiced the materialist view of history tended to hold that if they only kept to the line of class struggle they would arrive at communism. Bloch thought instead that every society contains a facet of utopia, and that the job of Marxism is to dig those facets out and make them real in the society we have.

For the Bloch scholar Wayne Hudson, his most overlooked contribution was widening the idea of ideology. Marx treated ideology as an instrument of bourgeois rule: it redraws social reality so that the oppressed proletariat quietly accepts the circumstances it is in. Bloch held that ideology lives not only in morality, economics, and education but in daily life — “advertising, clothing, sport, entertainment,” all of it.

Think of recent reality shows like Idol Producer and Produce 101: they break the manufacture of an idol into pieces and lay them out for you, drumming into the audience what an idol ought to be, while nobody stops to think that an idol may be alienation carried to its limit.

For many “Western Marxists,” a red line was drawn straight across their lives, cutting them into a before and an after, each half told selectively. Hardly anyone can picture Milan Kundera【36】 — revered today by petty-bourgeois young readers as a symbol of the ethics of freedom — as a party member of more than twenty years' standing before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

“Are you still a Marxist?” asks Jean-Louis, a Catholic, in a café in Clermont, France.

Vidal, a university professor, answers: “Still am. For the Communist Party, Pascal's wager still holds today.”

Pascal was a 17th-century French philosopher who felt the fragility of Christian faith, and who found his confidence in the wager.

“Against the winnings, if there is no certainty of losing, do not hesitate — bet everything.”

Vidal, a French Marxist of the 1960s, reasons the same way:

“For myself, I ask what meaning history really has. Hypothesis A: society and politics have no meaning. Hypothesis B: history has meaning. Say B is only 10% true, and A is 80% true. Even so, I have no choice but to pick B. Because only the hypothesis that ‘history has meaning’ lets me go on living. I have to choose B to make sense of my life and my actions. There is an 80% chance I am wrong, and that is all right.

“Maybe it was Gorky, or Lenin, or Mayakovsky who said, of the Russian Revolution, that reality forced them to take one chance in a thousand — because if you take that one chance, hope becomes infinite. Better than not choosing at all.”

So it goes: “the odds are low, but the possible gain may be infinite.” The Catholic and the Marxist reach a kind of understanding. Afterward they go to church for Mass, and the priest's words rhyme with Marx's — he says what we are waiting for is a fresh, present-day happiness, that we will be born again, and that the point is to keep hold of hope.

The scene comes from My Night at Maud's, a film by the French New Wave director Éric Rohmer【37】. The year before it was released, Paris had just been through May '68. Rohmer said in a later interview that the dialogue set out clearly a Rohmer-style Marxism and a Rohmer-style Catholicism — not the standard kind of either.

Rohmer really was not standard, at least compared with another New Wave director of his time, Jean-Luc Godard【38】. In 1963 Rohmer fell out with the more radical, left-wing critics and left Cahiers du Cinéma, which they had edited together. Rohmer admired American cinema; My Night at Maud's even took Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Foreign Language Film. Godard, in those years, truly hated Hollywood.

Godard was the more radical. He disliked the bourgeois way of life and attacked France's social institutions; and back on the subject of film, he accused Hollywood of using cinema to manufacture an illusion of life. Documentary, and new ways of shooting and telling a story, could recover real history, he believed — the history that had been passed over.

He made some very good, very fresh films: Breathless, Band of Outsiders. He made others too, such as La Chinoise, in which a group of French young people recite the French edition of Quotations from Chairman Mao.

Educated young Europeans had found their next totem.

1968: “For Marx”

In 1959 Fidel Castro【39】 paid a visit to the Lincoln Memorial. He had led a successful revolution, and the grip he and his brother Raúl held on power in Cuba would last until 2018. But the man who better caught the spirit of the age may have been his central bank governor and minister of industry: Che Guevara【40】.

Che Guevara had the most idealistic revolutionary temperament of them all. In 1965 he gave up his high office in the Cuban government, left his family in the state's care, and went alone to the Congo and then Bolivia, where he was finally put to death. His farewell letter to Castro shows that idealism in a quiet form: “Now everything is less dramatic, because we are more mature, but the facts repeat themselves.”

A Cuba “after the revolution,” it seems, was no longer the best place for him to create a new human being for the 21st century.

That charismatic image was soon absorbed by popular culture. “The image of Che — simply as an icon, not for anything he did — stands for what we want: revolution, radical change.” So said a snowboard dealer in New York.

And when the well-known left-wing publisher Verso worked up publicity for Che's youthful diaries, it deliberately picked a softer picture: a revolutionary licking an ice-cream cone. A line ran across the cover: “Das Kapital meets Easy Rider” — a nod to the motorcycle journey across South America the diaries describe.

Che's motorcycle journey would not have struck Allen Ginsberg【41】 as strange. The American poet, a leading figure of the Beats, turns up in the first chapter of Jack Kerouac's On the Road under the nickname “Carlo Marx.”

His suspected communist leanings put a strain on the friendship between Ginsberg and Kerouac. Ginsberg's relations with actual communists were no less awkward. He admired what Castro had changed in Cuba, but once he set foot on Cuban soil — and especially once he called Raúl Castro【42】 gay and Che Guevara “cute” — a gay man could no longer keep his seat of honor. In Prague, dissident students crowned him King of May, and a communist government expelled him again.

The revolutionaries of those countries were not ready to live with a poet. But the young people of the capitalist countries were getting ready to welcome revolutionaries.

We don't want to take on any responsibility, we don't need anything, we want to seize, we want

to occupy — use your mouth, not your fists!

My desire is fact, because I believe in the reality of my desire

Charge, comrade, the old world is behind you Move fast!

The passage is taken from the “May '68” of James Miller, Foucault's biographer. In May 1968 a group of left-wing students first occupied the Latin Quarter in Paris; then more students came into the streets against the government and against “the social institutions of the modern world.” When the workers joined, matters grew more confused still. Universities and factories, those ancient social organizations, looked as though they might blow apart in the heat.

Among those who came into the streets and stood with the students was Sartre, long since a banner of the left.

Still, to a later onlooker, “May '68” produced as much confusion as shock. Many treated Chairman Mao as an idol, though almost nobody in the columns read Chinese or had been to the real China. A protester who called himself a Maoist recalled afterward: “If someone had asked me calmly at the time what exactly we wanted, honestly, I could not have answered. I can't say I didn't even know who these comrades were, and I can't say I was demonstrating for the sake of demonstrating.”

More absurd still: when the many students of the philosopher Althusser【43】 rushed into the streets, they could not find their teacher.

Althusser was in a nursing home, in the grip of a psychiatric episode. The “mental illness” was very likely not an excuse — fourteen years later Althusser strangled his own wife, and escaped prosecution on grounds of insanity.

There was good reason to expect him at the barricades. In the 1960s he had published two heavyweight books, For Marx and Reading Capital, and counted as the man in France who understood Marx best. In the first of them he set out to resist a dangerous temptation: splitting the early Marx from the late one and dwelling one-sidedly on the “humanism” of the early work — which is what many left-wing intellectuals were doing, and which state propaganda machines then used as a philosophical “discovery” with which to attack the Soviet Union.

Althusser used the idea of an “epistemological break” to explain the difference between the early and the late Marx. He found evidence that Marx and Engels themselves set more store by the later historical materialism, and that the young Marx's writing sat closer to ideology. Stress the late Marx, back more radical social change: it looked, by any measure, like the natural conclusion.

But Althusser let his students down. He went on to support the French Communist Party's position and dismissed “May '68” as anarchism. Some fine young thinkers left him over it, Jacques Rancière【44】 among them. Years later he made a public self-criticism of his conduct in those months.

1968 cannot be repeated, but we can look in books for the ideas that fired the young.

In 1964 Marcuse【45】 published One-Dimensional Man. Oppression, he argued, no longer needs to appear as violence or authority, so long as it can get people used to one-dimensional thinking. When people watch the same television program, they take themselves for one and the same people. In politics, a phrase like “the American dream” blurs the enormous differences between one life and another, and lets people believe they are living inside the dream.

More one-dimensionality arrives through consumption. Advanced industrial society manufactures false needs and draws people deeper into capitalism's system of production and consumption. Mass media, advertising — the blanket message tells people that they simply have not worked hard enough, and they lose any wish to change the system they are in.

The philosopher who fled to the United States in 1934 and eventually took citizenship there does not seem to have thought much of the place.

Besides Marcuse, Erich Fromm also introduced Marxism to American readers. He drew on Marx and Freud together, taking up questions like loving and being loved, and self-realization, at the level of the individual.

While young people with the Little Red Book in hand occupied the streets of Paris, a British rock band was busy traveling abroad, sitting for publicity photographs and, most important, recording a new album. In May, the record later known as “The White Album” went into a studio on Abbey Road in London. Its cover carried nothing at all except the band's name: The Beatles.

The Beatles' singer John Lennon【46】 never claimed to be a Marxist. Search anyway for “was Lennon a Marxist” and you will find plenty of argument. The case rests on “Imagine,” from his later years, in which Lennon paints a world without hell, without countries, without religion, without possessions — not far from the communist society Marx imagined. He once admitted the song was “virtually the Communist Manifesto,” though later critics prefer to hear a plain humanist song.

People always squabble over the credit for good things.

British scholars at home found more in the music. In Liverpool, the Beatles' city, and elsewhere, they noticed the children of the working class taking up youth subcultures of every kind — which gave a new angle on Marx's classic category, class. The angle was cultural studies.

In 1964 an institution called the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) was founded at the University of Birmingham. Its first director was the sociologist and literary critic Richard Hoggart【47】; the second was Stuart Hall【48】, later a standard-bearer of the New Left. They challenged Adorno's fairly static split between “production” and “consumption,” and turned instead to the flesh-and-blood people mass culture was mobilizing.

In their landmark Resistance Through Rituals, they read youth subcultures as resistance to the mainstream, and as a way for the working class to build community and feel solidarity. They heard anger in rock and in punk, and an attempt to escape into a freer, happier, less money-minded world. But they granted that the attempt was fragile: these young people were far too easy to absorb, and their once-revolutionary rituals turned into objects of consumption.

Reality seems to have proved the second point. “Resistance through rituals,” it turns out, is still dancing in chains.

Some Americans — Black Americans, to be exact — wanted to answer Marx's ideas in a more radical form. One young man named Malcolm【49】 decided to drop his surname, “Little,” a lowly name “forced on his ancestors by white slave owners,” and replace it with a single letter: X.

Malcolm X's politics were a strange combination. In his early years he practiced nationalism, held that Black people were superior to white people, and thought the only difference between white liberals and white conservatives was that the first were “more deceptive.” He attacked capitalism; asked what he thought of socialism, he asked in return whether the system was good for Black people, and on being told it appeared to be, said: “Then I'm for it.”

He was also a Muslim. Years later a Chinese writer who had been a Red Guard and then became a Muslim wrote a romantic account of the Black Muslim movement: the claim that “Black is noble,” he wrote, “had to be spoken through the mouth of God — and Islam was the one chosen.” The writer's name is Zhang Chengzhi【50】.

In 1965, as he had predicted himself, Malcolm X was assassinated. A year later a Black self-defense organization built on his political program was founded. American history has seen few movements like the Black Panther Party, waging armed struggle for a racial minority and the working class.

The Panthers were taken to be believers in both Maoism and Marxism: the first moved them to throw themselves into revolution, the second taught them to criticize the capitalist economy and to help workers take back the means of production. In 1968 they sold Chairman Mao's【51】 Little Red Book on campuses and spent the proceeds on guns.

The security services set about crushing this organization that preached violence. Beyond organized assassinations, the FBI worked to split the group from inside and manufacture hostility. The solidarity the Panthers called for did not hold. In the 1980s the group's central figure, Huey P. Newton【52】, became addicted to drugs, and was finally killed in a dispute over drugs.

His end turned an article Panthers published in 1970 into a prophecy: “Capitalism plus dope equals genocide.”

Half a century on, looking back over the intellectual and political history since 1945, the Marxist historian Perry Anderson【53】 repeated a judgment he had made in the mid-1970s: “Europe would never again see revolutionary upheavals to compare with the past — not even failed ones… For the first time, most Marxist thinkers began pitching camp inside the universities. They produced an astonishing volume of intellectual work, but that work was inevitably shaped by the gap of the time between Marxist theory and mass practice of every kind, and by the structural separation of intellectual life from political life.”

The closing of the CCCS in the early 2000s, the deaths of the Black Panthers — all of it seems to bear Anderson out. The double identity of thinker and revolutionary, the one Lenin and Luxemburg defined, was gone for good.

“Can the Subaltern Still Speak?”

Back to the 1960s.

In 1969 the BBC put out a color documentary series, Civilisation — yes, the original of the Civilisations now on television. For its presenter, Kenneth Clark【54】, the series took a position: with student revolt sweeping the West, he chose to restate the value of the great artists, much as he had insisted on staging concerts under the shadow of the Blitz during the war.

Three years later, in another BBC documentary, Ways of Seeing, a young art historian attacked Clark's position. John Berger【55】, a Marxist art critic, whose name is now inseparable from that series and that phrase.

Where Clark praised great artists, Berger looked at the power behind the artwork and the ideology it carries. Take the nudes of European oil painting: most of them, Berger argued, are not portraits of real women but projections of male desire; and in our own time, with the help of color photography, advertising manufactures myth after myth about desire, pushing the viewer from looking to buying.

After the 1970s Berger settled in a French village, and died in 2017. Against his hopes — and against Benjamin's belief in the revolutionary promise of photography in ordinary hands — the explosion of images has followed the logic of capital more and more closely. Meanwhile art's capacity to intervene in society has looked more and more doubtful. The graffiti artist Banksy【56】 drew art's absurd position like this: a young man dressed for the street writes “Workers of the world, unite!” on a wall while a cleaner waits beside him, ready to scrub the paint off and keep the city tidy.

Artists kept looking for ways to reconnect with the public.

Visitors to the Hamburger Bahnhof museum of contemporary art in Berlin today will not miss the large holding of work by Joseph Beuys【57】. The last piece — also the largest — Capital Space (1970–1977) sits in an enormous hall at the end of the exhibition. Nearly 40 years ago Beuys wrote out in chalk, on these movable blackboards, his idea of the economic relations of human society to come, arguing that the creative potential of human beings belongs at the center of economic thought.

A former pilot for Nazi Germany, Beuys had an unusual artistic career that can be read as an act of redemption. He regarded teaching as his greatest work and fought the existing system of art education fiercely. In the 1970s he insisted on taking in more students than the Düsseldorf Art Academy allowed, was dismissed for it, and was reinstated after a public outcry. In class he taught philosophy with great heat — including, of course, Marx's Capital.

These extraordinary acts pointed to what Beuys ultimately wanted: to break down the line between art and society. In Theory of Social Sculpture, published in 1979, he wrote:

“Social sculpture — how we mould and shape the world in which we live. Sculpture, here, is an evolutionary process; everyone is an artist.”

The way the British avant-garde musician Cornelius Cardew【58】 joined art to politics went past what most people could imagine.

In 1974 Cardew released an album with tracks titled “Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman,” “The East Is Red,” and “Long Live Chairman Mao.” Earlier he had translated the shapes and sounds of the characters of The Great Learning into a score. A colleague at QDaily reports: “Not very easy to listen to.”

Through methods of composition built on chance, Cardew meant to rethink how musical organization relates to social and political change, and his thinking kept moving. His turn in the 1970s toward music with a plainer political meaning came out of exactly that self-examination: work in the manner of The Great Learning, he decided, only let capitalist oppression rot on undisturbed. He went as far as founding a party — in 1979 he helped found the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), and this past May Day the party was still calling on its website for a fight for an alternative.

In 1981 Cardew was killed by a hit-and-run driver. Conspiracy theories about the crash circulate to this day. Six years before it, another artist and former Communist Party member had died under the wheels of a car — or, to be exact, had been murdered.

Like his films, Pasolini's【59】 death had a shocking “visual effect.” He was beaten with clubs, then run over by a car, and his body was defiled. Police soon arrested a 17-year-old male prostitute who had accepted the famous director's invitation the night before to go for a drive. In 2005 the man retracted his confession and accused three others of killing Pasolini — calling him “queer” and a “dirty communist.”

Born in Italy in 1922, Pasolini was shaped by Catholicism and Marxism at once. He announced in the newspapers that only communism could supply a new culture, and, as an atheist, put The Gospel According to St. Matthew on screen. Shortly before he was murdered he left a famous line in an interview: “Consumerism, in my view, is a worse form of fascism than the classical kind.”

When The Guardian remembered him in 2014, readers found that Pasolini's prophecy about what runaway materialism does to a culture no longer applied only to Italy. The manipulation of politics by the media that he feared has become fact in some places. Unlike the Italian young of 1968, whom he dismissed as acting out a petty-bourgeois complex, Pasolini's own response seems to have been films like Salò — a provocation aimed at civilization itself.

“The body is always revolutionary, because it stands for what cannot be written into a code.” The line may sum up both Pasolini's aesthetics and his death.

If the age has a petty-bourgeois idol, no one fits the part better than Haruki Murakami【60】 — and yet Dance Dance Dance, published in 1988, uncovers where he comes from: under the lush prose runs a bass line of social criticism that the Western Marxists had laid down long before.

Dance Dance Dance is about a man who lives on “expenses.” The phrase “advanced capitalist society” recurs through the book. When the narrator mutters that “we live in an advanced capitalist society, where waste is the greatest virtue; politicians call it expanding domestic demand, people like me call it squandering — it is only a difference in how you look at it,” the reader hears a helpless resistance to consumerism.

And when the narrator holds forth — “People worship the vitality of capital, worship its mythic quality, worship Tokyo land prices, worship the gleaming badge on a Mercedes. Beyond that, there are no myths left in this world” — the reader cannot help thinking of Marx's famous critique of capitalism: commodity fetishism.

Murakami has said he began reading the collected works of Marx and Engels at 15. Through Japan's economic surge and the signing of the Plaza Accord, the comfortable people in his books never manage to feel safe in their society, and can only drift among words, alcohol, sex, rock music, and the city.

A postmodern parable.

In 1989 a magazine died.

Four years earlier the writer Chen Yingzhen【61】, called “the last Marxist in Taiwan,” had founded it. His writing was shaped by Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Lu Xun, and it was that left-wing coloring that got him sentenced to ten years in 1968 and held in the prison on Green Island.

In the opening editorial of Ren Jian (《人间》, the human world), Chen declared his aim: to “make strangers familiar to one another again; make a cold society care again.” Standing on the “left-unificationist” side of Taiwanese politics, Ren Jian tried to be “a magazine that broke through the fissure of its time,” covering subjects still contentious today — homosexuality, industrial pollution — and shaping a generation of reporters with its forceful reportage.

But Chen seems to have been a man out of season. Run in his “socialist” style, Ren Jian eventually folded over money. When his later political positions angered intellectuals on the island, he looked for kindred spirits on the mainland — and when he stood at a mainland academic conference and laid out his fears for the future in complete sincerity, the mainland scholar who spoke next called for foreign investment and treated pollution as a necessary price of leaving poverty behind.

In 2016 Chen Yingzhen died of illness in Beijing. Being out of season left a sharp question behind: can those at the bottom still speak?

The question goes back further, to a 1985 essay by the Indian scholar Gayatri C. Spivak【62】: “Can the Subaltern Speak?” The “subaltern” she writes about is first of all the women at the bottom, long colonized and long crushed by orders of rank. When the poststructuralists, Foucault at their head, pinned their hopes for resistance on the biopolitics of the individual, Spivak wanted to ask whether that individualist solution fits the “backward” East.

The answer is no.

Which brings us back to where Marx started. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte he had already argued that smallholding peasants cannot speak; they must be represented — and it was they who put Napoleon III on the throne. For Spivak this is the real political condition of the Third World, where struggle has to give up romanticizing individual will and take place at the level of law and the international division of labor.

The Chinese scholar Wang Hui【63】 says plainly that he shares Spivak's concern, but thinks raising the question is not enough. In one interview he almost repeats Perry Anderson's verdict on the European intelligentsia: today's intellectuals have mostly lost their connection to progressive politics as they became professionals, and have even become an obstacle to social progress.

What is the relation between “us,” the ones asking, and “those at the bottom”? Wang Hui presses on.

Marx stopped having to think about any of this long ago.

Another 135 years have passed since his death. Which brings us to today.

After him, as we have just seen:

Then came Lenin, holding the banner high, turning the world over.

Then came the Great Depression, capitalism's self-destroying side, perhaps worse than anything Marx had imagined.

Then came a world war, and a second world war. Everyone may have been thinking the same practical thought: Marx may not be right, but the world is certainly wrong.

Then came the third-way experiments in Sweden and the Nordic countries, while organizations with real weight in Europe — the French Socialist Party, the British Labour Party — descend from the Second International that Bernstein and Kautsky once led.

Then the private property and the capitalism he attacked changed shape, and for a long stretch looked like the outright winner, so much so that Francis Fukuyama announced the end of history.

And so on, all the way to today. The curtain that Marx, a modern man, pulled back has never come down.

This is the first article marking the 200th anniversary of Marx's birth. A second, on “the specter of Marx haunting the world beyond Europe and America,” will be published soon.

Appendix: The People Connected to Marx Mentioned Here

【1】 Karl Marx: philosopher, economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, journalist, socialist.

【2】 Friedrich Engels: philosopher, social scientist, journalist, businessman, Marx's old partner.

【3】 Charles Baudelaire: poet, essayist, critic of art and literature, the earliest writer on “modernity.”

【4】 Walter Benjamin: philosopher, cultural critic, essayist, a figure on the edge of the Frankfurt School.

【5】 Paul Lafargue: journalist, literary critic, leader in the labor movement, Marx's son-in-law.

【6】 Jules Guesde: leader of the French labor movement and the Second International.

【7】 John Maynard Keynes: economist.

【8】 H.G. Wells: writer, known for science fiction.

【9】 Jawaharlal Nehru: India's first prime minister.

【10】 George Bernard Shaw: Irish playwright, political activist.

【11】 George Orwell: British writer.

【12】 Lenin: founding leader of the Soviet Union, political theorist.

【13】 Joseph Stalin: leader of the Soviet Union.

【14】 Trotsky: revolutionary, theorist. Assassinated by Stalin's government.

【15】 Karl Kautsky: leader of the German Social Democratic Party and the Second International.

【16】 Rosa Luxemburg: revolutionary, theorist.

【17】 Alexandra Kollontai: head of the Women's Department in the Secretariat of the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee.

【18】 Sergei Prokofiev: Soviet composer and pianist.

【19】 Dmitri Shostakovich: the most influential Soviet composer of the 20th century.

【20】 Hannes Meyer: second director of the Bauhaus school of architecture.

【21】 André Breton: poet, one of the founders of Surrealism.

【22】 Pablo Picasso: painter, sculptor.

【23】 Henri Cartier-Bresson: one of the most important photographers there has been.

【24】 Luis Buñuel: director; his relationship with Dalí was a strange one.

【25】 Antonio Gramsci: philosopher, founder of the Italian Communist Party.

【26】 György Lukács: philosopher, aesthetician, critic, one of the leaders of the Hungarian Communist Party.

【27】 Max Horkheimer: philosopher, sociologist, principal founder of the Frankfurt School.

【28】 Theodor Adorno: philosopher, sociologist, sometime composer. Horkheimer's colleague.

【29】 Slavoj Žižek: Slovenian philosopher and writer, fond of writing about films.

【30】 Jean-Paul Sartre: philosopher, leading figure of existentialism, Beauvoir's partner.

【31】 Simone de Beauvoir: philosopher, leading figure of feminism.

【32】 Paul Sweezy: economist, founder of Monthly Review.

【33】 Albert Einstein: physicist.

【34】 Charlie Chaplin: actor, director.

【35】 Ernst Bloch: philosopher.

【36】 Milan Kundera: writer; took French citizenship, naturally enough.

【37】 Éric Rohmer: director, a leading figure of the New Wave.

【38】 Jean-Luc Godard: director, screenwriter, film critic, a leading figure of the New Wave.

【39】 Fidel Castro: leader of the Cuban revolution.

【40】 Che Guevara: revolutionary leader.

【41】 Allen Ginsberg: poet, philosopher, writer, a leading figure of the Beat Generation.

【42】 Raúl Castro: leader of the Cuban revolution, Fidel's younger brother.

【43】 Louis Althusser: philosopher, structuralist.

【44】 Jacques Rancière: philosopher.

【45】 Herbert Marcuse: philosopher, sociologist, a leading figure of the Frankfurt School.

【46】 John Lennon: rock musician, social activist.

【47】 Richard Hoggart: sociologist, literary critic, one of the founders of the Birmingham School.

【48】 Stuart Hall: Jamaican-born cultural theorist, a leading figure of the Birmingham School and of the New Left.

【49】 Malcolm X: leader of the Black civil rights movement.

【50】 Zhang Chengzhi: Muslim writer, the man who coined the name “Red Guard.”

【51】 Mao Zedong: founding leader of the People's Republic of China.

【52】 Huey P. Newton: central figure of the Black Panther Party.

【53】 Perry Anderson: historian, a leading figure of the New Left, Benedict Anderson's younger brother.

【54】 Kenneth Clark: art historian.

【55】 John Berger: art critic, novelist, painter, poet.

【56】 Banksy: graffiti artist.

【57】 Joseph Beuys: Fluxus artist, performance artist, sculptor, installation artist, art theorist, teacher.

【58】 Cornelius Cardew: avant-garde musician who wanted to connect music, writing, and image.

【59】 Pier Paolo Pasolini: director, poet, a director of Italy's post-Neorealist period.

【60】 Haruki Murakami: writer; likes running and likes talking about running.

【61】 Chen Yingzhen: writer, founder of Ren Jian magazine, active on the Chinese mainland from the 1990s on.

【62】 Gayatri C. Spivak: Indian scholar, literary theorist, feminist critic.

【63】 Wang Hui: Chinese scholar.

Cover image from: boardingarea.com

Long cover image from: Cai Yineng / QDaily