Marx for today •
Sir: Though now a suburban Tory, I found that David McLellan's re- view of Althusser's Reading 'Capi- tal' (23 January) brought back memories of my student Marxism of twenty years ago. 'Humanism' was scarcely the word to describe the Marx seen through Leninist eyes. Marx would surely have con- sidered Women's Liberation and all the Black Panthers and pot- smokers and Gay Liberators as lionpenproletariat outside of the processes of history. If one is to find value for our times in Marx one must first re- cognise that his economic doc- trines (surplus-value, the inevitable impoverishment of the working class) caves in before the evidence. The condition of the working class in England in 1971 is quite pros- perous, thank you. The few truly poor are generally lumpenproletar- iat or petty-bourgeoisie. If one starts in dialectical fsh- ion by doing to Marx what Marx did to Hegel, 'stand him on his head', by recognising modern capi- talism as the true harmonisation of the productive process, then one can make sense of much that goes on today, for we are seeing the emergence, in California, of a soci- ety in which the incomes of all classes are so high that their mem- bers are freed from intimate con- cerns that involve politics and the state. The state is kept from 'wither- ing away' only by conflicts that are exogenous to class. Witness the New York construction workers supporting the police against petty- bourgeois radical students.
Hegel said,''Freedom is the rec- ognition of necessity'. This can be interpreted in the Marxist material- ist sense as borne out by Califor- nian society where the worker and
the bourgeois are virtually equally free to 'develop the manifold cap- acities of each . individual'. We
should not be overly diverted by the physical growth of states wel- fare or otherwise. These are a pass- ing phenomenon. The worker who
can get an £8 a week increase in basic wages has no serious interest in the welfare state. This is part of the underlying political strength of Enoch Powell, who represents a passionless political professional- ism in tune with the real feelings of the people of all classes who are too busy with their materially- based freedoms (especially physical mobility) to get excited about politics.
This also explains the hopelessly artificial attempt of the young petty-bourgeois to find passion in politics. The Cambridge students terrorising hotel dinner guests rep- resent a senile radicalism analo- gous to the jaded Baron de Charlus trying to arouse sexual passion by having himself whipped. The fires of political passion are growing cold for lack of fuel:
We in the West are now entering the stage of realisation of the dreams of materialists like Marx and Engels. Some people may not like that but they shouldn't imply that Karl Marx would have been other than delighted to see that the dialectical spiral has avoided the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat; sorry that his teach- ings have been associated with the crude. mercantilist and feudal throwbacks that now rule the East; and disgusted that the luntpenpro- letariat, for whom he always ex- pressed such contempt, are trying to associate .themselves with his teachings.
L. Albert 126 Green Lane, Northwood, Middlesex
Previous page
