A great week for Marx’s spin doctors: Lenin would have been proud of their team work
Anewly discovered letter which the young Mr Blair wrote has him reading Marx. Several newspapers asked various well-known people what they thought of Marx. Nearly all were favourable, not to Mr Blair but to Marx.
Professor Hobsbawm, our most famous Marxist historian, was quoted as saying that Marx was having a revival, and was ‘an extraordinarily important thinker’. But among those questioned, even non-left-wingers said nothing particularly unfavourable about Marx. As its regular readers know, from its quite frequent mentions of her, this column sees Professor Hobsbawm’s daughter, the public relations practitioner Julia Hobsbawm, as one of Britain’s most influential people. It is clear from this favourable press that she and her firm have been handling Marx’s publicity.
Miss Hobsbawm (addressing the creative team’s first strategy meeting shortly after the firm, in competition with all the industry’s top players, won the Karl Marx account): ‘To start with the most important thing: I should tell you what the client looks like. He’s got a big black beard.’ Feisal Chatterer (creative director, a theorist of ethical PR): ‘Great. So he’s a Muslim, then? Any chance of police brutality, like with those two guys with big black beards in Forest Gate? The public now associate big black beards with the cops knocking down your house in the middle of the night. We could have a good victim story here.’ Miss Hobsbawm: ‘Actually, I think the client was some kind of a German. But a lot of people think he’s Russian, which is helpful — since we’re obviously gonna go out to Germany at the knock-out stage, and Germans will be even more hated than usual. Incidentally, I like the police brutality angle.’ Claudia Longe-Luncher (daughter of the late Tory MP Sir Walter — known as ‘Scoffer’ Longe-Luncher): ‘Daddy always told me that this Marx was quite keen on police brutality himself once the workers were in charge. He was only against it if it was the capitalist police.’ Miss Hobsbawm: ‘Well, my dad always told me that any police brutality was only down to Stalin, and that Karl himself was an absolute sweetie.’ Madsen Surly (the firm’s token Tory, only there in the hope of winning some Central Office stuff): ‘What about Lenin? He went in for a lot of police brutality in his time.’ Mr Chatterer: ‘Len who?’ Miss Hobsbawm: ‘Dad said Lenin only did any rough stuff because the Western imperialists were trying to overthrow him.’ Mr Surly: ‘Like he was trying to overthrow them.’ Miss Hobsbawm: ‘Madsen, stop being negative.’ Miss Longe-Luncher: ‘What’s the client’s wife like? I’m just thinking about the visuals.’ Miss Hobsbawm: ‘She sounds like a toff her name was ‘von’ something or other.’ Miss Longe-Luncher: ‘Great for Tatler.’ Miss Hobsbawm: ‘Go easy. He treated her badly. She thought she’d married a promising young lawyer. Then he took up revolution, and never did a stroke — reduced her to poverty.’ Mr Chatterer: ‘Great for Guardian Women.’ Miss Hobsbawm: ‘Feisal, can I remind you that we’re representing Karl, not his wife? We keep his treatment of his wife out of it.’ Mr Chatterer: ‘That’s it. I’ve no issues with some Kraut philosopher who wanted to murder capitalists. But I’ll not tolerate sexism. I resign.’ Mr Surly: ‘Good riddance.’ Miss Hobsbawm: ‘Feisal, you can’t accuse me of sexism. I am a woman.’ Miss Longe-Luncher: ‘That reminds me. Time for my lunch at the Wolseley with this guy from Channel 4 who says I’ve the face for television.’ Mr Surly: ‘And the brain.’ Miss Hobsbawm: ‘Thank you, team. A very productive meeting.’ Was Marx an ‘extraordinarily important thinker’? About two years before his death, a London magazine included him in a series about ‘Leaders of Modern Thought’. But the British daily press did not report his interment in Highgate cemetery on his death in 1883; apart from a brief Times account from Paris, picked out from the French leftwing press. Though he had published the Communist Manifesto more than 20 years before the 1870–71 Paris Commune, the Communards carried no banners of him. From the Russian Revolution until the 1968 Paris tumults, demonstrators did so the world over.
Here we may have a clue. Perhaps Lenin the first case of the modern intellectual in greater power — is why we think Marx an important thinker. As is the way with intellectuals, it was important to Lenin that philosophers be thought to have influenced him. Marx had. Lenin’s system was called Marxism–Leninism. But others had influenced Lenin too. Possibly Lenin could just as easily have chosen one of them; Marx won a kind of ideological lottery. A non-famous thinker can become famous as a result of a man of action identifying with him, and still be important because of the thought. But Marx? One of last week’s above-mentioned newspaper quotes was from the union leader, Bob Crowe, saying that Marx had shown ‘the mechanism by which bosses extract surplus value from the labour of working people’.
For space reasons, I risk a simplification of Marx’s famous ‘theory of surplus value’: a good’s value derives from the amount of work which went into making it. A good’s value derives, however, not from the work that went into it, but from how much people are prepared to pay for it. A tribesman offers the last supply of water or a jewelled necklace to a parched rich man in a desert, charging for the water all that the rich man has; the water scooped from a well; the necklace the product of much labour. The rich man chooses the water.
Marx argued that the workers who make a product never earn its full value because the employers expropriate too big a share of the profit — the surplus value. He did not explain how the full value and the surplus value are ascertained.
They cannot be. Employers contract to pay wages. They cannot contract to make a profit. That depends on whether they are right that consumers will want to buy the product. Often the employers get it wrong.
Marx, however, did not appeal because his theories were, as claimed, ‘scientific’. He appealed because Lenin made him the philosopher of revolution. Marx only said his theories were scientific because he was of a people who value science: the Germans.
In Das Kapital, Marx suggested that individuals are unimportant compared with the forces that move the masses. His fate refutes that. He is an individual who is important because it suited another individual, Lenin, to say he was.
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