The Common without Copies, the International without Cosmopolitanism: Marx against the Romanticism of Likeness

Abstract

This paper connects a stylistic hallmark of Marx's work—a dramatic antipathy to imitation and copying—to his rejection of the epistemology of likeness or “harmony” in French romantic social Utopian thought. A space of the common without social mimesis—not just representation and imitation but competitive appropriation, likeness-based equality, social unity, cultivated resemblance, and so on—is in some ways paradoxical. But Marx upholds a vision of the common as collision, foreshadowing Althusser's notion of aleatory materialism, through a discourse of the atom. He moves from atheistic Epicurean models of abstract individuality and opposition to false universalism, to Hegelian ideas of the disaggregated atoms of political class activity, to a rejection of Buonarroti's ambition to harness self-seeking atoms in the collectivity, to a championing of real rather than ideal collisions. Acutely aware of social mirroring processes in the paradigm of the fetishism of the commodity, Marx puts the Lucretian “uproarious contest” and “hostile tension” of atoms at the core of the nonromantic sociality of the common.

Keywords:

• Karl Marx
• Mimesis
• Social Romanticism
• Cosmopolitanism
• Atoms
• Common

Notes

¹Marx, identified in this letter to the editor of La Réforme as “Vice-President of the Brussels Democratic Association,” used the term francequillonnerie in a complex manner. French editors of Belgian newspapers dismiss a Belgian revolution, he writes, as “merely an imitation of a francequillonnerie [a scornful expression in Flemish, meaning stupidly copying anything that is French …].” If a Belgian revolution is resisted as an imitation of a copying, the resistance to imitation is ultimately framed as antirevolutionary. Yet Marx simultaneously aligns himself against reactionary opposition to a Belgian revolution, and, through his employment of an anti-French rhetoric, with the injunction against copying what is French.

²Tarde's relationship to other social models of the time is quite provocative with regard to contemporaneous alignments of areas of emerging social science with or against mimetic contagion, as Lynn McDonald shows in The Early Origins of the Social Sciences (1993, 295).

³This quote is the version provided in a contemporaneous French newspaper article that was cited by Marx in “Lamartine and Communism” in Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung on 26 December 1847. In the work of Lamartine, a variation appears in the Cours familier de littérature (Lamartine 1863, 273).

⁴All translations from Proudhon are mine.