marxism today [prologue] / unnamed (Phil Collins, UK / Germany, 2010)

Archive footage takes us back to the classroom. The lecturer has just finished drawing a chalk diagram on the blackboard expressing one aspect of the Marxist theory of production. A pyramid structure, a hierarchy. At the apex, the company director; at the bottom, the foundation, the workers. And from this pyramid, emerge commodities. Next to the diagram: ‘exploitation’ (with a specific meaning in the German, the exploitation of the class system). This is the German Democratic Republic (GDR/East Germany), before die Wende, the turning point; before Deutsche Einheit, German (re-)unification. So, the lecturer asks: who thinks workers in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, West Germany) are exploited? One student’s reply… my uncle [in the FRG] has a car, a washing machine, he earns a good wage… how is he exploited? The lecturer draws a question mark: ‘exploitation?’ A statement turned interrogative. Let us ask if your uncle is exploited…

marxism today (prologue) is neither paean nor eulogy. Director Phil Collins is neither interested in mourning nor affirming the triumph of capitalism over socialism, ‘West’ over ‘East,’ the ‘end’ of the/a communist experiment. Rather, the film explores a milieu, its passing, and its legacy. Using archive footage and filmed interviews as monologues, Collins wishes to explore theoretical Marxism, its propagation through the East German state, and its material effects in the lives of the people who lived within such an encompassing... In other words, the film describes a specific spatio-temporal geo-political socio-historical situation. The student who found it difficult to understand how his uncle was exploited, modestly rich as he was with all the trappings of the West, is a subject of ideology. Ideology – according to Marx and Engels – needs to be exposed, and the tool for this is materialism. Ideology obscures material being in the world, the actualised economic milieu. The West employs ideological methods, the East exposes and lives the reality. In the classroom, the question mark must be erased – but not before capitalist ideology is exposed. Materialism is a science, not a belief system composed of ideas. Historical materialism is an empirical study of the world, the world in process through its social conditions and relations. The world has passed through many regimes: slave-based societies → feudalism → capitalism. For true socialism to arise the working classes must become conscious of the reality of the world thus laying the conditions for communism.  As Marx famously wrote, philosophy should not simply explain the world, but transform it. Thus the duel between capitalism and socialism. This is theoretical Marxism: realism. And it is the historical coordinates of this duel as experienced before and after die Wende that are explored in marxism today (prologue). Accordingly, Collin’s film is realist cinema.

Realism in the cinema – for Deleuze – is an action-image. The action-image expresses various relations between situations and actions through two reciprocal formula: actions → situation and situation → action. In the first case, the actions of characters throughout the film explore the world and reveal the situation; in the second case, the situation is a given reality lived through the characters. The small form action-image reveals; the large form action-image determines. marxism today (prologue) is of the large form... Deleuze describes the most assured aspect of the large form through the cinematic sign of the milieu. As Deleuze puts it, the milieu is ‘determinate, geographical, historical and social space-times,’ it is the ‘Ambience or the Encompasser,’ it is the ‘situation’ (C1:141)...

To read the full exploration of marxism today (prologue) through the Deleuze's sign of the milieu,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...