The late Huw Wheldon of the BBC once described to me a series, made in the early days of radio, about celebrated exiles who had lived in London. At one stage, this had involved tracking down an ancient retiree who had toiled in the British Museum’s reading room during the Victorian epoch. Asked if he could remember a certain Karl Marx, the wheezing old pensioner at first came up empty. But when primed with different prompts about the once-diligent attendee (monopolizing the same seat number, always there between opening and closing time, heavily bearded, suffering from carbuncles, tending to lunch in the Museum Tavern, very much interested in works on political economy), he let the fount of memory be unsealed. “Oh Mr. Marx, yes, to be sure. Gave us a lot of work ’e did, with all ’is calls for books and papers …” His interviewers craned forward eagerly, to hear the man say: “And then one day ’e just stopped coming. And you know what’s a funny fing, sir?” A pregnant pause. “Nobody’s ever ’eard of ’im since!” This, clearly, was one of those stubborn proletarians for the alleviation of whose false consciousness Marx had labored in vain.There's more at the link.
Until comparatively recently, with the slight exception perhaps of certain pockets within the academy, it was a general tendency among educated people as well, even those of radical temper, to put their old volumes of Marx up on the shelf reserved for the phlogiston theory. Would we again need to consult Critique of the Gotha Program, or the celebrated attacks on Dühring and Lassalle? A few of us kept a bit of powder dry, just in case the times should turn dialectical again. One or two writers predicted that Marx’s relevance would be rediscovered: John Cassidy was arguably the most surprising of these in that one hardly expected, in the fall of 1997, an essay from the economic specialist of The New Yorker announcing that the co-author of the 1848 Communist Manifesto could turn out to be “the next” significant intellectual for those whose job it was to study the markets. James Ledbetter, himself an accomplished business journalist, has since produced an admirable Penguin edition of Marx’s journalism (most of the best, which was very good indeed, having been produced for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune). And Francis Wheen, who wrote a notable biography of Marx in 1999, has now published an anatomy of Capital (as I shall henceforth call it), which concludes with the opinion that Marx “could yet become the most influential thinker of the twenty-first century.”
Here's Francis Wheen's, Marx's Das Kapital: A Biography.
We're seeing some twenty-first century Marxism in action this week. See, In Defense of Marxism, "Marching against the G20 summit in London." And, "G20 thugs impersonate police, break into bank."
2 comments:
Marxism isn’t dead even in this day of Green Hysteria. The twentieth century should have been evidence enough to bury collectivism but people need a worldview.
I was thinking about this yesterday when Jeffrey Friedman mentioned how those most knowledge about current events tend to be ideological in orientation (on both the left and right). This isn’t a new point for Friedman but he mentioned again in passing in a recent issue of his journal.
It’s related to a point that Rand and other Objectivists used to stress. One needs an integrated worldview to grasp, remember, and deal with the vast details of history and current affairs. Friedman has come to this thesis empirically.
Without Marx, Gramsci or some other substitute the left has no framework. It’s overwhelmed and adrift in a sea of vast concretes. The left needs its religion, too.
Gramsci is, I believe, more the fellow who gave the book of instructions to the modern media on how to suborn any and all sources of authority, with an emphasis on traditional authority. The mass media today insistently, even with so-called "conservative" producers like Jerry Bruckheimer, turns out story lines where corporate and top-level governmental authorities are conspiring and forming cabals.
This then is a convenient template to insert a revolutionary [or "revolting," in the Victorian use of the term!] theme in virtually every other narrative on TV or in motion pictures.
And the theme of the success of Anglo-Saxons being solely due to suppression and subjection of "colonial" and slave populations is a subset of the Gramsci/Marxist line infecting virtually every media fiction and non-fiction book on the NYT book review, which I read every Sunday in the spirit of "Know Thine Enemy." [The Book Review doesn't review many non-fiction books which don't fit the Gramscian model.]
One of the wonderful things I discovered in my several [more than half-dozen] trips to India was the lack of widespread anger toward the former colonial Raj. The Indians were on the whole intelligent enough to understand the broader contexts, and Manohman Singh, perhaps the most intelligent world leader at the G-20, is ignored because he is/was a huge fan of George W. Bush.
I think the Indians are just smarter, on the whole, and have a broader, more comprehensive culture in some ways, than the ethnocentric Euros or obsessive Far Easterners.
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