Unexpected marxist connections

Yesterday, one of the hosts of the Marxism Today Podcast mentioned a blog written by Eugene Hirschfeld called “Marxist Theory of Art”.  They spoke of Hirschfeld’s blog so highly that decided to look it up.  After a bit of digging and reading back through Hirschfeld’s archive, I wondered if I hadn’t found a kindred spirit.  All of the posts in 2014 on “Marxist Theory of Art” had to do with a thoughtful and detailed commentary on the Bible, beginning with the Torah and the Nevi’im.  The final post of 2014 is titled “David and Solomon” and ends with this:

The label of ‘anointed one’ or Messiah, previously a comment on the legitimate succession of the Davidic line to the throne in Judah, now changed its meaning. From an imminent historical event, the coming of the Messiah was put off until a vague time in the future: one day, a leader would appear who would realise the divine mission to create a kingdom of the Israelites. This myth became one of the bedrocks of Judaism. 

The Jews are still waiting for their Messiah. Another world religion thinks he has already come: the myth survived into the Roman age and helped to define Jesus of Nazareth. 

Hirschfeld’s 2014 posts amount to the contents of a short book on biblical commentary and criticism.  (I look forward to reading the whole thing.)

The conclusion (quoted above) connects seamlessly with the direction my own reading has taken of late: reading Daniel Bensaïd and his reference to “weak messianism” in Marxism which led me back to Walter Benjamin, specifically his Theses “On the Concept of History” and then Michael Löwy’s Fire Alarm, a commentary on Benjamin’s Theses.  My reading and study of the idea of the Messiah in the context of Marxism is just beginning.  Also, this path of study has reawakened my interest in a project I started twenty years ago which began in a creative reading of the book of Exodus and an extended series of conversations with a friend of mine who was the priest of the little Episcopal church I attended at the time.  (More on this Exodus project later and how the Christian concept of the Kingdom of God fits with a future communist society.)

The real

Reading some of “Marxist Theory of Art” led me to question the definition of the term “blog.”  Eugene Hirschfeld has used a blogging platform to publish what is essentially a book.  Last year, I started an ambitious project which I called Without Observers.  That project was to be a blog about physics.  The subtitle I chose was “notes on quantum theory and condensed matter.”  I wrote a few posts in February 2014 and then realized that blogging about physics while trying to write novels (I finished writing two novels and a novella last spring) didn’t leave much time for sleep or for coaching a soccer team or for running a small craft brewery.  Something had to go.  So I axed the physics blog.

In October, I began modifying my web site to explicitly include a connection to physics.  My plan was to continue the project I’d started in February 2014, but in a slightly different form, this time Without Observers would be a book, but one written in public and posted online in installments.  The starting point for Without Observers is the life and ideas of physicist David Bohm.  For a time, Bohm was a Marxist (though he later distanced himself from Marx) and Bohm fled from the United States because he was subjected to the investigation of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.  Much of this history is covered in Olival Freire Jr’s article, “Science and exile: David Bohm, the hot times of the Cold War, and his struggle for a new interpretation of quantum mechanics” available on the arXiv.  Bohm’s causal interpretation of quantum mechanics became connected with Marxist thinking (in France, of course), though I don’t see any reason to think that Bohm’s theory has any necessary connection to political theory, Marxist or otherwise.

For my purposes, it is sufficient that both J Robert Oppenheimer and David Bohm (one of Oppenheimer’s students) were connected in some way to pre-World War 2 communist movements and were both familiar with Marxism.  I don’t expect to make any strong claims about these historical associations.  What does interest me is that David Bohm’s ideas about how the world is put together are fundamentally realist and materialist.  Put another way, the universe doesn’t need an observer for it to be real.