On your Marx!

I am often asked if I am a Marxist. As you will know if you read this blog I am not any kind of ist. I am asked this because I do not rubbish Marx and often cite him, and of course, in modern Britain if you read Marx and actually say you agree with some of his works, you are a dangerous subversive, a potential terrorist in the same way if you simply happen to be a Muslim. The majority of British people are allergic to anything that is even slightly associated with the name Marx which is a result of persistent propaganda and demonization of a thinker who criticised and condemned the dominant ideological structures that support an exploitative class system. A person by the way, who can rightly be described as a genius. Thus, genius is dismissed because it is associated with a threat to the dominant class system. Most people haven't a clue what Marxism is and simply think that it is communism. Not the communism that Marx advocated, but the communism of the Soviet Union as defined by Lenin and Stalin who transformed a nascent communist state into something else under a fascist type leadership. I am sharing this with you because I had a discussion with someone whom I thought ought to know better and who looked at me in puzzlement when I was discussing free market economics and Westminster pigsty public policy and said "but that's Marxism" when I was speaking about Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall. I was showing how Smith and Marshall argued for raising workers wages and lowering their hours of work, for regulating the financial system to avoid the type of abuses that have brought our system to its knees and how Marshall had argued that "increased prosperity has made us rich and strong enough to impose new restraints on free enterprise; some temporary material loss being submitted to for the sake of a higher and ultimate greater gain".
 
There is a serious problem in our society when you cannot discuss restraining greed and exploitation and redistributing wealth without people reacting in horror because they are convinced you are advocating a soviet style revolution. It is both an intellectual and ideological problem. It's impossible to understand the modern world if you don't understand Marx. You don't have to agree with him, but you have to at least consider him. You cannot properly understand politics if you don't understand Marx. As a result, Marx is not an option, he is a necessary. If you want to know what is wrong with modern society, contemplate our political elite who would never dream of consulting Marx on anything. Look at the state of our economic and political life and the fact that no-one has any real clue how to solve some of our most pressing problems. Because people not only no longer consult Marx, they don't read or consult Adam Smith or Marshall either. When Marx tells us that classes emerge when the relations of production involve a differentiated division of labour that allows for the accumulation of surplus value by a minority grouping that therefore stands in an exploitative relationship with the mass of society, he is simply telling us the reality of life in a capitalist society. There is nothing 'Marxist' or revolutionary about that he is simply articulating a fact. It is an inconvenient fact for most people however and so they don't want to know that. Marx's description of base and superstructure is so demonstrable it is difficult to believe that anyone would challenge it, and his theory of alienation is genius. If you dismiss such insights, then you are indeed a poor soul, and accepting them does not make you a Marxist or a communist, it demonstrates you have a degree of intelligence.

This brings us back to how I describe our elites as schooled but not educated. It is testimony to the state of British education that none of our highest seats of learning, Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, and the rest of our so-called schools of excellence teach either Smith, Marshall or Marx in their economics courses. That is why I tell you that they are not teaching economics, they are teaching something else. The British elite are well schooled but very poorly educated. Do not be like them. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat