1992 Reports

Perestroika Suicide: Not By Bred Alone

Condee, Nancy; Padunov, Vladimir

In this citation from Theories of Surplus Value, Marx tries by his very punctuation to keep cultural production separate from the marketplace. One hundred years later, his Soviet misinterpreters were still doggedly maintaining that separation. One hundred and thirty years later, Marx’s organicist notion of creative work reads like a utopian tract from an ancient—that is to say, pre-Marxist—civilization. It makes more sense that Milton, the poet, might write these lines about Marx than that Marx, the debunked political economist of Communism, could write these lines about Milton.