Recently I was reminded of Raoul Peck’s film Young Marx, a slightly ludicrous buddy movie about young Karl and Friedrich groping their way to world revolution. But it must be said that Peck did his homework. There is a powerful opening scene in which wood-gathering German poor folk are ridden down in a forest by a club-wielding posse. Previously, dead wood had been common property and the poor had depended on it to heat their hovels. With the rise of industry, it became a prized fuel for factories and what had customarily been free for the taking was now a guarded private property.
Young Marx protested this commodification, and his protest resonated far back in history to the medieval Forest Charter of 1217 that accompanied the Magna Carta, and forward to our own day when the air to breathe and space to abide in are no longer guaranteed as the common natural possession of all. Nature and our bodies and souls are reduced to commodities to be exploited, exchanged, and degraded. This is a more grounded and devastating form of exploitation than the surplus value of Marx’ Capital, more ancient, universal, and terminal, since the global context of human life vastly overshadows the recent and arbitrary divisions between national entities and their internal class systems. The globe is becoming a single life raft that must accommodate all the shipwrecked passengers of history. This, in my opinion, not the identitarian jostling of left and right, will become the political threshold of justice for this century as the abolition of slavery or the defeat of fascism were for the previous two.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 