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A socialist resurgence has revived the radicalism of the German Marxist
thinker. Now the artist Phil Collins is bringing his statue back to the
British city he called home
JULY 14, 2017 by: John Lloyd
The artist Phil Collins wanted to bring Friedrich Engels back to
Manchester where, in the mid-19th century, he had lived for two decades.
The German Marxist thinker established the first great industrial city
in the annals of communist history with his excoriating 1845 polemic The
Condition of the Working Class in England. But in the 171 years since
his death, Manchester forgot about him.
Collins told me his search for Engels was a “dream”. And it came true:
he found him lying face down in the earth, long neglected, behind a
creamery in Mala Pereshchepina, a few hours from the north-eastern
Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. He was a man of two halves, sawn through at
the waist, mouldy, unlovely, cast in concrete.
His sorry condition told a wider story. After the Soviet Union emerged
from the terror-driven idealism of the Stalinist era, party leader
Leonid Brezhnev sought to hold up the USSR as a “developed” socialist
state. Other gods were put into place: Lenin statuary was displayed
everywhere, as were busts of Karl Marx and, less frequently, his friend
and funder Engels. All gazed purposefully into the future. This one had
been erected in 1970 and stood stonily in the village for several
decades, a gentleman of the Victorian era in frock coat and long beard.
Phil Collins at the depository of Soviet-era statues in the Ukrainian
city of Zaporizhia searching for a statue of Engels © Nikiforov Yevgen
The collapse of Soviet communism two decades later saw many come off
their pedestals — a culling that was more or less total in the satellite
states. Some remained in the Russified areas of eastern Ukraine; but in
2015, as the conflict between Russia and Ukraine continued, an
increasingly anti-Russian government decreed that Soviet symbols must be
removed, pro-Soviet speech banned and even the singing of Soviet-era
songs forbidden. So Collins, previously nominated for the Turner Prize
for a video about people whose lives had been ruined by appearing on
reality TV, came upon the object of his search when it was at a literal
low point in its concrete existence.
He and two Russian-speaking aides, Anya Harrison and Olga Borissova, had
begun their search in August last year, sensibly enough, in the city of
Engels, on the Volga. There they found a statue, also concrete, still
standing amid the ruin of the meatpacking plant that had commissioned
it. But the local authority, at first helpful, later proved fearful of
giving the icon to foreigners at a time of east-west tension. It
referred the decision to a court: a decision is still pending.
With time running against them, the searchers moved on to the Belarusian
city of Vitebsk, where they found a triptych statue — an Asian woman, an
African man, with a white young man between them, embracing both,
expressing the theme of brotherhood (and less overtly, Soviet
leadership). Collins was tempted but it, too, was denied a visa.
Finally they came to Mala Pereshchepina, where the local authorities
were only too glad to get rid of what was by now a legally toxic
artefact. In mid-May this year, the two-tonne, near-four-metre-high
cement behemoth was loaded on to a flatbed truck to be trundled across
Europe, to the city of Engels’ epiphany. This Sunday evening, when it is
unveiled outside Home, a big modern arts building in Manchester largely
funded by the city council, Collins’ quest will finally be at an end.
The artist’s timing is impeccable. June’s UK general election saw a
surge of support for the Labour party led by the far-left Jeremy Corbyn.
Like Bernie Sanders in last year’s US Democratic primaries, this ageing
socialist appealed first of all to the young. Marxism, which had been
read the last rites by many, has found new life, reuniting its
long-lonely intellectuals and academic advocates with the masses. The
French economist Thomas Piketty’s 2013 book Capital in the Twenty-First
Century, a self-conscious echo of Marx, was a huge seller. Commentators
on the left are making connections between what Engels wrote and
contemporary society. Writing in the Guardian after the fire at the
Grenfell Tower block of flats in London, Aditya Chakrabortty explicitly
linked the tragedy with The Condition of the Working Class, stating
Britain “remains a country that murders its poor”.
In such narratives, modern despair and marginalisation are laid at the
feet of capitalism. The brutality of regimes working under Marxist rules
— dramatised this week by the death of China’s most prominent dissident
Liu Xiaobo, a few days after his release from long imprisonment — fades
to the background.
Collins believes that Engels is a writer “with whom we can engage today,
with the questions he raises. He isn’t to be confined to his time and
forgotten.”
Engels’ writing shocked the Victorians. In The Condition of the Working
Class he stressed that Britain’s wealth and imperial power (which
impressed him), was built on the degradation and endless labour of
hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, living in “half or
wholly ruined buildings . . . rarely a wooden or stone floor to be seen
in the houses, almost uniformly broken, ill-fitting windows and doors,
and a state of filth!” Karl Marx, whom Engels had known slightly before
he left Germany, was said to have been bewitched by the book.
A villager in Mala Pereshchepina, Ukraine, with the statue of Engels
that eventually came to Manchester © Shady Lane Productions
The brutal world Engels described became a backdrop to some of the era’s
best-known literature. The future prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli,
published Sybil in 1845; Charles Dickens brought out Hard Times in 1854
and Mrs Gaskell North and South in 1855. All expressed horror at the
human cost of industrialism, though with much more sentimentality and
much less detail.
Even now, when — for all the excesses of capitalism — the stark
exploitation Engels evoked has disappeared in the western world, The
Condition of the Working Class is an uncomfortable read. The
homelessness of the rising generation; the precariousness of freelance
work; the feared mass unemployment once artificial replaces human
intelligence; the long, spiky tail of the banking collapse of 2008; the
end of the postwar expectation that children will ascend further and
richer than their parents — these are plausibly presented by the left as
a 21st-century equivalent of the Condition of the Working, and even
Middle Class of England, and the rest of the capitalist world. Looking
out from Home’s café on to the space where Engels will finally rest —
and remain — Sarah Perks, the centre’s artistic director for visual
arts, tells me that discussion points will be created around the
statue’s base to encourage viewers to become participants: “We want to
try to understand what the equivalent hardships to those described by
Engels would be for today’s working class.”
***
Collins intersects with Engels in two ways. Born in the Cheshire port of
Runcorn, he works mainly in Manchester. He also has a home in the North
Rhine-Westphalia city of Wuppertal, where Engels was born to a pious and
wealthy manufacturing family, mainly in the dyestuffs trade (he was
already a fledgling socialist when sent by his despairing father to
Manchester to work at one of his part-owned subsidiaries in the city).
Moving the statue © Shady Lane Productions
More than most contemporary artists on the left, Collins shows a strong
sympathy for the communist era: one of his films, Marxism Today, is
composed of tender interviews with former teachers of Marxism-Leninism
in East Germany who were rendered unemployable by its collapse. “When
the wall fell, there was also a collapse of something which had been
solidarity, co-operative working: individualism flourished,” he says.
First and foremost, though, he is engaged in an ironic, post-modernist
project. He has taken an icon rejected by a recently socialist state as
a sign of imperialist oppression to give it an honoured place in
Manchester, the birthplace of industrial capitalism and of free trade.
He sees Manchester as a city imbued with a kind of generic leftism:
“There’s a Mancunian spirit of radicalism, an interest in politics and
what it can do for people if properly managed.”
He is most interested in “those who have been occluded from society or
history” as Engels was in Manchester, where there is no statue to
commemorate him. He thought it necessary to place him back in the city
which he had described so graphically, to provide a contrast to the
statues of local figures, some of whom — like Richard Cobden and John
Bright, the proponents of free trade — were major national figures. On
the long trip back from Ukraine to Manchester, he found that the huge,
grubby, sundered statue “became a revelation: I felt more connected with
him, he became suddenly real. It’s very alive — its physiognomy changed,
depending on how it was placed, on the ground, or on the truck, or in
the old train depot (its temporary home in Manchester).”
The trip, which Collins filmed, featured a number of organised
setpieces. In Kharkiv, a reception was arranged. “There were
schoolchildren, and a teacher gave a lesson about Marx and Engels,
Manchester and its importance, the Soviet Union, and the process of
de-communisation. Then a girls’ choir, all in white, stood up on the
truck and sang a Soviet-era song called ‘The Jolly Wind’ (presumably in
defiance of the law), as they waved goodbye.”
At Rosa Luxemburg Platz in Berlin (named after the communist activist
murdered in the city in 1919) actors and others — many from the
Volksbühne, or People’s Theatre — put on a show. There were speeches by
academics belonging to the “accelerationist” school — a protean thought
system with left and right branches, whose basis is the desire to speed
up technological change to accelerate social transformation. The trip
and the project display the artist’s ability to draw in myriad
influences and strands, from kitsch through social realism and Soviet
sentimentality for the loss of an authoritarianism they had experienced
as security.
Collins believes that, in the collapse of communism, “Something had been
lost. The usual prism through which we saw, say, the East German
society, was so strong that we didn’t see the ordinary; it frustrated
our ability to see the day-to-day life.” He believes his Engels project
“points to the fact we can have different kinds of statues here. It’s a
found object, not something specially made. It’s transformative. It’s
one kind of history coming back into the forge that created it.”
***
The indifference of Manchester to Engels was noted by the former Labour
MP Tristram Hunt in his fine biography, The Frock-Coated Communist. He
found an Engels House on a council estate, where the residents complain
of damp. In 2014, when the university in neighbouring Salford had the
Engine Arts Theatre Company build a five-metre-high fibreglass Engels
bust in which his vast beard was a climbing frame, one reviewer
described it “as having all the intelligence and subtlety of making a
see-saw shaped like Marx’s bum boils”.
Things are changing, according to Jonathan Schofield, who writes about
the city and conducts tours. Schofield thinks Manchester, along with
other Midlands and northern cities, is shaking off its subaltern
deference to London. “The provincial cities in the 19th century were
more important than London. Now you’re finding a reawakening of civic
pride: coming into their own again,” he says. He does a Marx and Engels
tour that takes in Chetham’s Library, the oldest free library in the UK,
opened in the mid-17th century through the bequest of Humphrey Chetham,
a local merchant. “It’s the only building left where Engels definitely
was. He worked with Marx at a table, still there, with the books they
both used. When I take Chinese visitors to see it, some of them cry.”
For all the mass murders committed in their name, Marx and Engels
continue to loom large today, not just in the consciousness of
lachrymose visitors from China — where they remain on their pedestals.
Their ideas are being revived beyond the lecture room. They represent a
way not taken, a revolution betrayed. And on Sunday evening,
Manchester’s first communist will be unveiled on a capitalist pedestal
at last.
The world premiere of Ceremony by Phil Collins will be at NCP
Bridgewater Hall Car Park, Manchester on Sunday 16 July 2017 at 18:00
presented by the Manchester International Festival in association with
14-18 NOW.
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