PWCW 6 (Philipp Felsch)

<p><strong>Philipp Felsch, <em>The Summer of Theory: History of a Rebellion, 1960-1990</em></strong></p> <p>Smash Bourgeois Copyright!</p> <p>On 10 August 1973, Althusser’s tragic end was still far of. He had received bad news from West Berlin and responded with an angry letter to the ‘Gentlemen’—not ‘Comrades’—of the tiny publisher Merve. The unauthorized translation of his essay <em>Freud and Lacan</em>, Althusser wrote, was an ‘act of piracy’ against which he would take legal action unless Merve retroactively offered him an ‘appropriate’ contract: ‘Please understand the word “appropriate” in its fullest sense.’ The publishers must have complied, because three years later they published his essay again in a second edition. And yet purchasing rights generally went against their business model. Anyone who intended to feed the booming market for leftist movement literature with fresh text from abroad could not be overly scrupulous about niceties of copyright—anyone with zero seed capital, that is. Like other leftist publishers of that time, Merve began its existence with a hybrid business plan. There was a mission: to jump-start German Marxism out of its dogmatic standstill with boosts from Italy and France. There was a will: to man the printing press and the sales table in self-exploiting labour. And there was a historic opportunity: to earn the necessary small change with bootleg reprints…</p>