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"It’s hard to believe but June 2020 is still not over yet. To me, it’s felt like the first time in my adult life that I’m living through history; strangely, even 9/11 and its aftermath didn’t feel quite so portentous, nor the whole Brexit saga.
But the major emotion I feel is one of unreality, not helped by the fact that I’ve met a total of about five adults over the past three months. It feels unreal, and rather like I’m living in one of these medieval periods of crisis when everyone started whipping themselves or spontaneously dancing."
Ed West a few days ago.
I agree with him. This month which ends in a few minutes is the most extraordinary month I can remember and I have followed politics since I was a boy of eight. It is also the most dismaying period I can remember. At least in 1968 the institutions stood up to the crazy leftists.
I just picked up coincidentally a book about the French Revolution and reread AJP Taylor's introduction to the Communist Manifesto, which Marx wrote early in the revolutionary year of 1848. Both books seem remarkably topical.
Reading with the wisdom of my years I find Marx's ideas preposterous, yet they strongly influenced non-Marxist historians when I read history and even more today. Marx's ideas are as misguided as those of racists like Gobineau and HS Chamberlain. Class struggle does not drive history. Lots of things do but class struggle only rarely and when it does it usually involves peasants not manual workers. Nations, ethnicity and religion are much more important than class and yet the Marxist idea that nations are false consciousness is only too widely held.
Lennonism not Leninism.
Class struggle does not drive history. Lots of things do but class struggle only rarely
ReplyDeleteBut what is happening today does look very much like class warfare conducted by the elite classes against the non-elite classes.
The difference, compared to classical Marxist interpretations, is that today the elite class is not the capitalists but several overlapping elite classes - managerial elites, media/academic elites, capitalist elites, technocratic elites.
And rather than a working class proletariat we have several quasi-proletariats - the remnants of the working class, lower middle class office drones, low-level white collar workers, etc. Plus there is definitely still a lumpen proletariat.
But to me the events of the recent past look much more like class warfare, with nations, ethnicity and religion being of very minor importance.
Perhaps what we need is a new Marx to make sense of 21st century class struggle.