For someone deemed so obsolete and irrelevant, Karl Marx has a way
of getting under the skin of liberal intellectuals 193 years after
his birth. For example, John Lanchester—a British novelist and
nonfiction writer born in 1962—spends 6016 words (!) trying to
drive a stake through the heart of Marx’s ideas in an essay titled
Marx at 193 that appears in the left-leaning London Review of Books:
The most obvious mistake in his version of the world is to do
with class. There is something like a classic Marxian proletariat
dispersed through the world. But Marx foresaw that this
proletariat would be an increasingly centralised and organised
force: indeed, this was one of the reasons it would prove so
dangerous to capitalism. By creating the conditions in which
labour would be sure to organise and assemble collectively
capitalism was arranging its own downfall. But there is no
organised global conflict between the classes; there is no
organised global proletariat.
About a month before this article appeared, Crooked Timber—a group
blog hosted by liberal academics also obsessed with burying Karl
Marx—advised its readers that Francis Spufford’s new mixture of
fact and fiction (faction in more senses than one) titled “Red
Plenty” is “a mosaic novel that simultaneously speaks
intelligently to the Soviet calculation debate, and has engaging
characters.” Like Lanchester, two years his senior, Spufford
writes both novels and nonfiction and is British. Since both
Lanchester and Spufford were too young to be part of the sixties
radicalization when socialist revolution had more of a palpable
reality than it does today, one suspects that there might be a
generational thing going on. Or Oedipal, if you are into Freud.
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/british-liberals-versus-karl-marx-marx-wins-by-a-tko/
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