The Marx effect

Karl Marx is alive and well, so can he sort the bankers?
Masked protesters are seen at the Occupy London anti-corporate protest tent camp outside St Paul's Cathedral, in central London
23 April 2012

As Karl Marx almost put it, a spectre is haunting Britain — the spectre of Marxist retro. That, at least, is Verso’s hope in publishing a new edition of Marx’s classic, The Communist Manifesto, with a splendidly lucid introduction by the grand old man of British Marxism, historian Eric Hobsbawm.

Surveying Westminster’s desiccated Dave-and-Ed show, it might seem a fond hope. Yet something odd is happening to this ideology that the Right so triumphantly pronounced dead.

The biggest political bestseller of 2011, according to The Bookseller, was Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, an unashamedly Left-wing call to arms by young writer Owen Jones. Jones agrees that it caught a mood: “If the book had come out four years ago, I don’t think it would have had anything like the impact.”

Likewise Jason Barker’s documentary Marx Reloaded played to sell-out audiences earlier this year. The Financial Times interviewed him under the headline, “Can Marx save capitalism?”.

Meanwhile, Labour MP and historian Tristram Hunt, author of a well-received recent biography of Friedrich Engels, says that his Queen Mary course on Marxism is oversubscribed. And BBC economics correspondent Stephanie Flanders is reportedly filming a TV series that will include a programme devoted to the great radical.

The surge of interest is driven by bafflement and anger over the economic crisis. Since we elected a Tory-led government in 2010, class has returned with a vengeance — after years of us being told “we’re all middle class now”.

It hobbles the likes of David Cameron and George Osborne. And it undergirds a fierce public anger towards bankers that shows little sign of abating.

Such rage sparked Britain’s highest-profile radical movement in years, Occupy. Despite critical media coverage, the St Paul’s camp touched a chord. Last autumn an ICM poll found more than half respondents agreed that “The protesters are right to want to call time on a system that puts profit before people”.

To the barricades? Perhaps not yet. Hunt points out that “people like the Marx who is the chronicler of global capitalism, not the historian or political philosopher. It’s very compelling.”

John Lanchester, author of much-praised financial-crisis explainer, Whoops!, agrees. As he said in a sell-out lecture at the British Museum last month, what remains impressive is Marx’s “astonishing insight into the nature and trajectory of capitalism” — not the political solutions that have flowed from it.

What’s more, with the trade unions and Labour Party weakened, it’s hard to see how movements like Occupy will get far. The student fees protests fizzled. Jones, who is speaking at the Socialist Workers Party’s annual Marxism festival in July, concedes: “You have to be an optimist as a socialist in the current climate.”

Yet these are strange times: it still doesn’t feel like we’re far from the moment in 2008 when the cash machines were hours from shutting down. We have built a system that seems to have a self-destructive will of its own: we are, as Marx says in the Manifesto, “like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up”. Highgate cemetery’s most famous resident may have some of the answers yet.

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