Total Propaganda: Basic Marxist Brainwashing for the Angry and the Young

by Helen Razer

Overview

A cheeky introduction to Marxism and socialism for everyone fed up with their capitalist woes.

Millennials have it bad. They face the problems of underemployment, unaffordable housing, and economists who write crap columns telling them it’s their fault for taking an Uber to brunch. Today the future’s so dark we need night vision goggles, not a few liberal guys shining a torch on a sandwich. Maybe today we could use the light of Karl Marx.

Marx may not have had much to say about brunch in the twenty-first century, but he sure had some powerful thoughts about where the system of capitalism would land us. Over time, it would produce a series of crises, he said, before pushing the wealth so decisively up that the top-heavy system would come crashing down with a push.

Pushy old communist Helen Razer offers an introduction to the thought of Marx for Millennials and anyone else tired of wage stagnation, growing global poverty, and economists writing desperate columns saying everything would work better if only we stopped eating avocado toast.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781459747739
Publisher:	Dundurn Press
Publication date:	09/29/2020
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	1,125,052
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Helen Razer has been broadcasting and writing her way into disagreements of various scales for over two decades in Australia. She is the author of several previous books of humorous non-fiction and has contributed to the Age, the Australian, Crikey, and the Saturday Paper.

Read an Excerpt

KARL MARX IS A SUPER COOL ‘BRO’ AND TOTALLY RELEVANT FOR TODAY’S ‘CELL PHONE’ CRAZY YOUNGSTER!

Karl Marx was a white European bloke from the nineteenth century who drank too much and probably got the cleaning lady up the duff. He was often in a very bad mood. If we saw him on a TED talk of the present, we might ask, ‘Can’t that crusty old dribbler break out a smile once in a while, or possibly a comb?’ before switching to another speaker. Perhaps one with tidier hair and a more optimistic topic than This Is How The World Got Into A State Of Total Shit.
Such was the unpleasant labour of a sometimes-unpleasant man: exploring the shit of the world in some detail. This short book will not be a guide to the life of Marx, which may or may not have involved a weekend of nobbing with a German cleaning lady called Helene. It will be a basic introduction to the revolutionary project of shit-sorting, begun in earnest by Marx. One that has enjoyed a recent revival.

You may have heard the old term ‘socialism’ getting about a bit lately. You must have, otherwise you’d hardly have picked up a book that promises to explain Marx’s marvellous variety of it. I should tell you then, from the outset, that the Marx kind of ‘socialism’, which I’ll now stop stuffing inside scare quotes, is largely a tool for understanding capitalism. And capitalism is understood by the Marxist to negatively affect many parts of everyday life, not just the bits with money in it.

Yes. Not just the economy! This news may be a relief for you, because it means we’ll discuss things a bit more thrilling than profit, commodities and labour. We will talk about a world in which we might all flourish. We will even talk about our feelings. Our feelings are not, when truly examined, unimportant when it comes to diagnosing all the disorders of capitalism. And Marx was in the business of diagnosis. It’s now up to us to find a cure, a task you may find, as I do, both thrilling and fucking exhausting.

Just in time for the centenary of its most famous revolutionary expression, the Russian October Uprising of 1917, this socialism word can again be heard. You may have heard it used by the United States presidential candidate Bernie Sanders during his popular campaign. If you were listening in to the 2017 French Presidential election, you would have heard the word truly and more traditionally used by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. You may have heard it used by the United Kingdom Labour politician Jeremy Corbyn and the supporters who joined him, making his party the largest, and the youngest, in Europe. If you ever joined me and my relatives at a table, you would have heard it then too. As in, there goes the socialist again, banging on about seizing the means of production while totally covered in gravy. I am delighted to find a more agreeable place and time than Christmas dinner in which to address the topic.

For various reasons, which you can be sure I will start boring you with in Chapter 1, talk of socialism — which can also be called ‘communism’ by some, or, just to mess with your shit, ‘the material Left’ — has lately become more frequent and public. It’s not just for the festive family table or nineteenth-century white men anymore! No. Apparently, many inquisitive youngsters of the West have decided they don’t mind the sound of this thing at all, this form of socialism written down by Marx in the mean little rooms of a long-ago Europe.

You, whether old or young or a midlife husk like me, have not become curious about something like socialism on a whim. To take real interest in any ‘ism’ is a time-sucking pain, especially when that ism has endured decades of bad press. And it has had such bad press. Everyone is always calling someone a ‘Marxist’ as though this is a slur; as though they even understand what Marxism means in an era where it is no longer truly taught at universities.

You might have heard people say that Marxism is too idealistic, too lazy, or about as helpful to the present day as an open-cut coalmine. Such people — often old enough to remember the Cold War and usually rich enough to own a bit of property — have many ways of dismissing Marx’s socialism without ever bothering to read it. These include, ‘There’s no difference between Left and Right anymore. That rot went in the bin with my iPhone 2.’

Well, you know, bollocks to them. If we truly understand what Marxism is—a strong and unflinching criticism of capitalism; the necessary shadow of a behemoth that imposes itself on every person on the planet, no matter their cultural identity — then plainly, there’s a bunch of Western people, largely young, now reasserting their need to do this.

Editorial Reviews

Razer’s description of the economics of her life is engaging and educational, and she toggles neatly between personal example and the larger crisis.

Weekend Australian

For a generation experiencing the morbid symptoms of the free-market in crisis, this is just the book.

Sydney Morning Herald

2020-07-07
Acerbic exegesis of Marx’s relevance as “capitalism’s constant shadow,” directed toward younger readers.

Australian journalist and radio presenter Razer takes the unapologetically Marxist perspective that capitalism’s self-destructive tendencies are fueling social chaos. “If you want to learn about a capitalist’s morals, follow his money,” writes the author. “If you want to learn about the inevitable decline of capitalism, and the morals that sustain it, read Marx.” Calling her book “a basic introduction to the revolutionary project of sorting shit out, begun in earnest by Marx,” Razer encourages young people to “become what you…call ‘woke,’ or what we old Marxists call ‘class conscious.’ ” By focusing on the interplay between material needs and the superstructures imposed by capitalist society, she forcefully argues for Marxism’s renewed relevance, and she uses this flexible, updated approach as a lens for subtopics including gender, intersectionality, labor, and automation. Razer delves into the language developed by Marx and related thinkers like Walter Benjamin, and she connects her discussion to such ugly crisis markers as the rise of Donald Trump and White nationalism. “Trump was not, regrettably, too stupid to intuit one basic tenet of Marxism: changed material conditions force a change in political opinion,” she writes. “If you listen to some of Trump’s campaign speeches, you’ll see that he echoed, albeit quite feebly, the anti–big bank sentiments of Bernie Sanders.” Razer constructs a bleak panorama of late-stage capitalism’s failings, ranging from Uber’s planned move toward driverless cars to Bill Gates’ self-interested philanthropy. The author finds cause for hope in Sanders’ movement, seeing “rallies and political parties full of kids united by one crucial understanding: capitalism cannot be trusted to determine our future.” Razer provides a reassuringly irascible presence, energetic, humorous, and cheerfully vulgar (“this is some heavy shit”), even if her colloquial overtures to young readers are sometimes forced.

A relevant, approachable guide to socialism’s continued value as “largely a tool for understanding capitalism.

Kirkus Reviews