DEMISE OF A CROOKED CREED
forward to the end of Marxist influence in the press
ONE of the most fundamental but subtle changes which will occur in the media during the 1990s will be the gradual dis- appearance of Marxism. It will take most of the decade but we ought to be free of it by the beginning of the new century. Unlike Nazism, the Marxist-Leninist state. is going out not with a bang but a whimper. There will be agonised whines from the dying beast for a few more years, especially in Russia itself; but then, in the end, a merciful silence. Marxism in the West will not long survive its Soviet patron and exemplar. It will probably cling on longest in the universities, that traditional home of lost causes. There was a huge influx of Marxist dons in the 1960s expansion, all With tenure, and many are still there; more were getting in as late as the mid-1970s, though often with shorter contracts. It will be some time before they all retire, and it will take even longer for the large number of Marxist-inspired academic textbooks, many published by highly respectable firms, to become obsolete and be replaced.
Marxist penetration of the British media has always been patchy. The Marxists controlled what was then the most influen- tial British publishing house, Gollancz, through most of the 1930s. They have had some success on Channel 4. For decades they and their allies controlled key review- ing areas in the Times Literary Supplement and it often strikes me as remarkable that the TLS, now owned by Rupert Murdoch, Still uses Marxist academics. But the Marx- ists' chief success in the British media has always been their ability to influence con- cepts and attitudes rather than exert direct authority. This paid good dividends on the Guardian, for many years on the Times, on the Observer and, perhaps most of all, in the BBC from its early years right down to the present. Marxists have also done well on ITV and, from the start, they have been able to score innumerable propaganda Points in the subsidised theatre.
What the remaining Marxists will now seek to do is to distance Marxism itself from the total failure of its realisation in Eastern Europe. Indeed this strategy has already been employed by Martin Jacques, editor of Marxism Today, writing in the
Financial Times. The line is the old one, developed by G. K. Chesterton in defend- ing Christianity: `Christianity has not failed — it has never been tried' etc. But this defence will not work, for the simple reason that it ignores how vulnerable Marx himself is to every kind of attack. I thought it odd that the Review section of the new Sunday independent, in a reverential inter- view with E. J. Hobsbawm, described as 'Britain's leading Marxist historian, still in full creative flow', did not raise the ques- tion of Marx's own intellectual dishonesty, which really lies at the root of the failure. In many ways Marx, as a writer, cuts an even more contemptible figure than similar 19th century dogmatists like Saint-Simon or Auguste Comte, who found secular religions which flourished for a time. They were both pretty dotty but they were not also, like Marx, vicious.
The really impudent claim Marx made for himself was that his method was 'scien- tific'. It would be hard to imagine a less scientific writer. I read recently an attempt by Robert Harris, a left-wing columnist in the Sunday Times, to differentiate morally between Nazism and communism, arguing that at least communist theory was free of the supreme sin of racism. Not true: Marxism sprang directly from anti-semitic conspiracy theory. Marx's essays on the way in which the 'money-Jew' and his 'huksterism' had corrupted society, written in 1843-44 and published in the Deutsch- Franzasische Jahrbacher, were the im- mediate precursors to the emergence of his mature political philosophy in the years 1844-46. In effect Marx decided that the evil element in society, the agents of the money-power which revolted him, were
. . and a Perrier with a twist of natural benzine.' not just the Jews but the bourgeois class as a whole: he simply extended his anti- semitic conspiracy theory to take in the entire capitalist class. But he remained strongly anti-semitic too.
Hence Marxism is, in origin, as irrational and racist as Hitlerism, and like all con- spiracy theory it has to be 'proved' by the twisting and invention of evidence. Marx's teaming-up with Engels was an alliance of intellectual rogues. Engels, unlike Marx, actually knew a little about how at least some sectors of industry worked; but he was in no sense a scientific writer and his handling of evidence is thoroughly dishon- est. In 1958 two exact scholars, W. 0. Henderson and W. H. Challoner, pub- lished a retranslated and re-edited text of Engels's Condition of the Working Class in England, which involved re-examining his sources and the original text of all his quotations. The effect of their analysis was to destroy the objective historical value of the book almost entirely and to demote it to mere polemic. The dishonesty and distortions they discovered were legion. Doubts on the probity of the book had been expressed, in great detail, as early as 1848 by the German economist Bruno Hildebrand and Marx must have known of these well-founded criticisms. Yet he made the Condition almost his only source for all his early historical analysis of British indus- try in Capital. For the period since the publication of the Condition, he himself systematically misquoted, distorted and twisted evidence presented in official gov- ernment Blue Books in order to bolster his theories. This egregious dishonesty was exposed as long ago as 1885 by two Cambridge scholars, J. R. Tanner and F. S. Carey, in a paper entitled 'Comments on the Use of the Blue Books made by Karl Marx in Chapter XV of Le Capital', published by the Cambridge Economic Club. (They used the French edition of the work.) The truth is Marx was an intellec- tual crook. He was so far from being a scientific writer that absolutely everything he wrote which relies on 'factual' data has to be treated with scepticism. He can never be trusted. The whole of the key Chapter Eight of Capital is a deliberate falsification to prove a thesis which an objective ex- amination of the facts showed was unten- able. Plainly, as Marx's general theory is based on a wholesale dishonest use of evidence, it is not surprising it is nonsense and it is even less surprising that attempts to create societies founded on it have ended in total failure and appalling human misery. What is surprising, in the Britain of the 1990s, is that the intellectual followers of this dangerous charlatan should still have an influential voice in our press, on our air waves and in our academia. We would not permit such licence to exponents of Nazi race-theory. Marxism is mortally wounded, but there is no reason it should enjoy the luxury of a prolonged death-bed scene.
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