New Left Review I/189, September-October 1991

Nancy Condee and Vladimir Padunov

Perestroika Suicide: Not By Bred Alone

Milton produced Paradise Lost for the same reason that a silk worm produces silk. It was an activity of his nature. Later he sold the product for five pounds.

Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value (1861–63)

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. [1]

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