Spaghetti Dialectics

Have you heard of a movie called 1900?  If not, it’s a 1976 Italian extravaganza, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci.  I say it’s Italian but the leading parts are mostly taken by an international cast, chiefly American.  Apart from France's Gerald Depardieu – amazingly young and thin looking – there is Robert de Niro – also amazingly young looking -, Donald Sutherland and Burt Lancaster. 

Was this, I wonder, a time when their careers were in the doldrums?  Perhaps they still had to make a name for themselves?  No, no, that can’t be true.  Lancaster was a cinematic veteran at the time.  Well, maybe he just wasn’t getting the parts anymore.  Better to star in spaghetti dialectics rather than nothing at all!

Yes, that’s what we are dealing with, a lengthy Marxist soap opera, tedious if it wasn’t so risibly ridiculous.  I knew Marxists were dim but I had no idea just how dim.  Watch it if you have the time or the inclination.  I did by invitation and I had such a fun time.  

It’s a side-splitting pastiche of Italian history from 1900 – hence the title – to 1945 and beyond.  As I say, the lead parts are mostly taken by foreigners, but the director has managed to dig up some wonderful grotesques to masquerade as the poor suffering peasants.  Looking at them it’s almost as if, Pygmalion-style, he has managed to bring a lot of gargoyles to life!

This, dear readers, is a tale with a moral, an everyday story of proletarian folk.  It begins with the birth of two boys into entirely different strata of society.  Oh, but not at the same time, you understand; for when Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?  First comes the peasant, one Olmo, born into a rather revolting clan known as the Dalcos.  Olmo – eventually to be filled out in adulthood by Depardieu – is destined to be a horny handed son of toil.  Actually, no, he’s destined to be a self-righteous and sanctimonious prig. 

After him into this world is thrown Alfredo Berlinghieri, the grandson of the padrone, the landowner, destined to be padrone himself one day and destined to be Robert de Niro.  1900 is their story, the story of Olmo and Alfredo, a story of an impossible friendship of social unequals, or an impossibly funny friendship.  These two will negotiate in their separate ways through the currents and eddies of twentieth century Italian politics. 

The real excitement comes after the First World War.  Olmo goes to the front, of course, and Alfredo stays behind, of course.  Well, he also serves who only stands and stares.  Into the mix comes a certain Attilia (note the name) Mellanchini, whom Alfredo’s father has employed as a foreman.  Now we have Donald Sutherland measuring up to what must surely be the most bizarre and grotesque part in his whole acting career. 

This Mellanichi, you see, is set to become the community Blackshirt.  Oh, but not just that; he also turns out to be a sadist and a sexual pervert.  Into Marx comes Freud, which I assume is the director’s own particular dialectic, the Bertolucci factor.  The important thing is that he is a bit of an epiphenomena, no more than the creature of the padrone, without a thought or a political instinct of his own.  He is hired, if you like, in 1922 and fired in 1943, hired by the father and discarded by the son, those wicked capitalists who take up fascism when it suits them and discard it when it does not.  Simple!  Oh, I should say that the friendship between Alfredo and Olmo does nothing to stop the former allowing Attila the fascist and his gang giving the latter a good kicking at one point.  You see, it’s the class struggle in action! 

Wait!  I completely forgot to mention Regina (Laura Betti), the poor relation to whom the Berlinghieris extend their condescending charity.  She turns out to be as weird sexually and in every other sense as Attila, with whom she takes up (naturally), proving to one and all that fascism was brought into the world as a vehicle for poor relations and perverts!  Ah, Regina, how I felt for her when Alfredo introduces his glamorous French wife Ada, a touch of exotic chic by Dominique Sanda.  How will she manage, the embittered Regina muses, among the pigs, the shit and the Dalcos?  Yes, well, give me the pigs over the Dalcos any day! 

On we go thesis, antithesis and synthesis, a merry Marxist march.  At this point I’m desperately trying not to identify with the fascists (I’m no sex pervert), especially when Attila and his merry band start shooting peasants for whistling the Italian communist anthem badly out of tune.  Obviously these people are no more than rather sensitive music critics. What a pity Olmo wasn’t around, having previously made good his escape after pelting the unfortunate Attila with horse manure.  Sex pervert, yes; coprophile, no.

He turns up again, unfortunately, in 1945, a partisan and a communist; sorry, he was that all along, a socialist with holes in his pocket.  Now he is back, ready to do justice.  Attila has already been pronged and butchered – serves him right – but not before he shouts to Regina, his wife of some years, that their children will reap what has been sown on this day.  And now I call to mind the recent remark by the Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s comeback kid, that maybe Mussolini wasn’t such a bad chap after all.  A positive saint, I would say, compared with the Dalcos of this life.

Olmo does justice to his old friend the padrone, who is executed...no, not really, only symbolically, by a kangaroo court of peasant grotesques.  Where did the director dig up that munch munch woman – from the local cemetery, perhaps?  The padrone is dead; Alfredo Berlinghieri lives, proving that he is dead.  Confused?  Don’t be, for the padrone is not dead at all.  The struggle goes on, and there is Italy in the last century, after which history came to a full stop, or a Berlusconi, whichever your preference is.  Anything, anything, but a Dalco.   

Incidentally this is not movie review.  I’m just having a spot of fun, Ana’s delicious dialectical dance. :-)

Eric Hobsbawm: Smelly and Orthodox

The day after I left for Tunisia Eric Hobsbawm died.  A former professor at Birkbeck College, he was ‘Britain’s best known Marxist historian’.  I suppose he must have been; it said so in the Guardian, though just how many outside the common rooms and beyond the chattering classes knew of this ghastly old fraud is open to question.  Now you have a flavour of what is to follow.  Read no further if you think it a sin to speak ill of the dead, for I am about to speak ill; Ana’s silver hammer is about to fall upon Hobsbawm’s head! 

For me his passing really does mark the end of a political Cretaceous period.  He was the last Stalinist, the last of the ideological dinosaurs who corrupted intellectual life in this country for so many decades.  I’m rather glad I was away, missing some of the more nauseating tributes, including one from Ed Miliband at the Labour Party conference, where he was described as “an extraordinary historian, a man passionate about his politics and a great friend of my family.”  Hmm, yes, I take this as a measure of the Milibands.  If you do not already know that measure you will before I have finished. 

He was also lauded by the BBC, no surprise there, in that Hobsbawm might be said to have defined a large part of the Corporation’s political and intellectual outlook in much the same way that the creepy Jimmy Savile defined its subterranean sexual morals. 

I was disappointed, though, to note that praise also came from Niall Ferguson, a right-wing historian for whom I hitherto had considerable respect.  He was rash enough to describe Hobsbawm’s cycle of books beginning with The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 as “the best introduction to modern world history in the English language.”  What utter rot!  Has he actually read these awful, badly written ideological apologetics, I have to ask?  Either he has completely failed to understand the falsity here or, like so many others, has descended into abject hypocrisy. 

Let me give you this scenario.  Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party - no friend of the Milibands - has taken part in an in-depth television interview.  In the course of this he was asked one key question – if Hitler had achieved the radiant future he promised would this have justified the murder of six million Jews?  He answers in one word: yes.

Now just imagine the perfect storm that would follow, just imagine the ostracism and the denunciations.  Of course it never happened; it’s a fiction.  It is no fiction that Hobsbawm was asked a similar question by Michael Ignatieff in an 1994 interview, namely, if the “radiant tomorrow” had actually been created in the Soviet Union would the death of 15 or 20 million people have been justified?  Yes, came the reply.  Was there a storm, was he ostracised and denounced?  No; instead Tony Blair made him a Companion of Honour in 1998.

Hobsbawm remained loyal to his murderous political passions all of his life.  He became a Communist at an early age while living in Germany at the beginning of the 1930s.  In another interview, perhaps more revealing than he ever intended, he said he joined the Communist Party partly because he was Jewish - “if I hadn’t been, I might well have become a Nazi in those circumstances.”  In a deeper sense he did: that sense in which both Nazism and Communism have a similar view of the value of human life.

Unfortunately for us he came to Britain before Hitler took power, though he always held this country, its people, its politics and its institutions in contempt.  Fortunately for him he did not go to the Soviet Union, his ideological motherland.  If he had, as a foreigner, an intellectual and a Jew he is unlikely to have survived Stalin’s purges.

Hobsbawm was a traitor in spirit.  A member of the Cambridge Apostles in the 1930s, it may very well be proved at some future point that he was also a traitor in deed.  His treason in word began early.  A supporter of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, he co-authored a pamphlet defending the Soviet attack on Finland, saying that Stalin was merely trying to protect Russia “from an invasion by British imperialists.” 

There is another irony here.  Let’s assume that this defender of the Nazi-Soviet pact had gone to the Soviet Union instead of taking advantage of British liberty, including the liberty to write laughable twaddle.  Let’s say that, by some miracle, he had survived the Great Purge, no doubt by lauding Stalin and denouncing others.  Well, then, that same Pact would almost certainly have finished him.  For Stalin, as a gesture of friendship and goodwill, was delighted to hand German Communist exiles over to the Nazis.

Instead Hobsbawm became the prime example of the idiocy and bad faith of the British left.  He became a prime example of the alienated intellectual who, as George Orwell noted, took their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow.  He became a prime example of the polysyllable-spewing Stalinist that Orwell identified in The Road to Wigan Pier and elsewhere.  The crushing of Hungarian freedom came in 1956; others left the Communist Party; Hobsbawm remained.  The crushing of the Prague Spring came in 1968; others left the Communist Party; Hobsbawm remained.  As Soviet Communism grew senile and sclerotic he grew senile and sclerotic with it.  

Hobsbawm, incidentally, was in the habit of referring to Orwell as the “upper-class Englishman Eric Blair.”  Englishman he certainly was; upper-class he certainly was not.  What marks Orwell out was his decency and his honesty, his contempt for the forms of abject power worship embraced by the likes of Hobsbawm, full of contempt for people while full of love for the Masses.

In the end the Hobsbawm disease is reducible to one thing: the cancer of abstraction.  He remained loyal to the ‘ideals’ of the Russian Revolution, even after those same ‘ideals’ descended to a murderous practice time and time and time again.  But the grand illusion actually goes deeper; it goes as deep as Rousseau and the French Revolution. 

The Soviet Experiment, you see, was for Hobsbawm just the latest expression of 'Enlightenment Values', a belief that it was possible to create the world anew following an abstract blueprint.  Those who are not deluded understand the implications of this – the death of millions.  More human beings have been destroyed by Communism and ‘Enlightenment Values’ than by any other force in history.  And there never was, never could be, a happy outcome, only a mountain of skulls that would have made even Tamerlane blanch.  Not Hobsbawm. 

I have the deepest contempt for this man’s legacy, for the malign impact he has had on the intellectual life of this country, for the way in which his minions and fellow travellers have been allowed to corrupt so much of the media establishment, particularly the BBC, an organisation that has become a national disgrace.  It is indeed a matter of concern, as Michael Burleigh noted in the Telegraph, that such dubious figures have been given licence to dominate the soft culture of the BBC and so many universities. 

I return to George Orwell, specifically to his essay on Charles Dickens, which concludes with the following observation;

When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.

Smelly little orthodoxy never let go of Hobsbawm’s soul.  I, too, see his face in his writing.  There he is, smirking. His eyes show it all.  They show him to be mean-spirited, unimaginative and small-minded. His is the face of a hypocrite and a liar. His is the face of a twentieth century Communist, smelly and orthodox to the end.  He will be forgotten, his dishonest and derivative books unread.  He was bad rubbish.  Good riddance. 

An Alibi for Pigs

Sir Tony Brenton, the former British ambassador to Moscow, writing in the Times on Friday, said that most people under thirty will be ‘blissfully ignorant’ of the nonsense of Marxism, which is apparently undergoing something of a popular and intellectual revival in the fallout from the latest ‘crisis’ of capitalism.

Under thirty I may be but I am assuredly not ‘most people’, having made a particular study of utopian ideologies, of which Marxism is by far the most repellent. It was delivered to the world by a bearded prophet in tablets of stone, grave slabs, really, for the millions done to death in the name of these commandments of perfection.

Marxism really is the road to hell. I’ve never understood why fascism is held in such obloquy, why symbols like the swastika are perceived with revulsion while the communist star is not. I’ve seen the traces of communism, the shadows, and the bones, it left in Cambodia. I see the traces indirectly. Among other things I’m reading Nothing to Envy, Barbara Demick’s account of life in North Korea, which really is nothing to envy. Imagine the life of a termite. No, imagine something worse.

Apparently Das Kapital shot up the best seller lists after the banking crash of 2008. Perhaps you have a copy in your book collection? Have you read it; have you even glanced through its pages? Yes, I know: it really is awful, the dullest book ever written, the prose so turgid and heavy that it won’t rise from the page. I imagine it stands proud in many a trendy household, occupying the commanding heights of the bookcase, accusatory, imperious and forever unread, the ultimate word in superfluous value.

Professor Terry Eagleton, a sort of intellectual lumpen proletarian, a useful idiot of the most idiotic kind, has just published a book called Why Marx was Right, providing further proof, if proof is needed, that he and his kind have learned nothing and understood less.

Yes, markets are not infallible; they will continue to move in cycles, and boom and bust are features of free economies. But Marx was not right; he was bloody well wrong in everything, most of all in the contention that capitalism eats up its own profits and pauperises the working-class. Crisis after crisis we have had since Moses was interred at Highgate in north London, resting under an awful slab of old Eastern European monumentalism, but people are still better off than in the old dog’s day. Even in China, where Marxism coupled with blind dogmatism was responsible for unbelievable levels of suffering, free market capitalism has rescued the people from abject poverty, showing that history does not move in one direction only.

Marxism poisons everything it touches. As Sir Tony says, the civic spirit of Russia has still not recovered after seventy years of communist tyranny, which makes it all the easier for authoritarianism and corruption to flourish almost unchallenged.

Then there is the argument, he continues, that we have never had ‘real’ communism, that the revolution happened in the wrong places, that it will all be better the ‘next time’ around. It’s all fodder for muddle-brains like Eagleton and those who fly under his wing, a fairytale for the unreflective. The Marxist Utopia is predicated on the assumption that the world is a kind of cornucopia, forever pouring out the good things of life, ready to be shared with equality once the parasitical ‘bourgeois’ have been eliminated from the picture of perfection.

Time and again we’ve seen it; time and again we have seen the Lenin-style elites take the good things, always a scarcity, for themselves. People who read Orwell’s Animal Farm and see it as a fable about Stalinism are wrong; it’s a fable about hypocrisy and greed. Remember those wind-fall apples? The corruption did not begin with the triumph of Napoleon over Snowball; it was there from the outset. The revolutionary vanguard are all pigs. Marxism is the alibi of pigs.

Sir Tony’s article concludes with a reference to Hegel’s observation that the only thing we ever learn from history is that no one learns anything from history. Eagleton is a living reminder of this truism. Still, so long as we live in a free society, a capitalist society, we are all better off; he earns royalties from the mugs who take this nonsense seriously; I am under no compulsion to read this meretricious rubbish or contribute to his profits. In Utopia I would have no choice and he would have no income.

Jubilant Jubilee

We do not run away from history. We know what the present crisis of capitalism demands of us...we are in the death-throes of late capitalism, which threatens to inflict even greater violence on mankind than it has done before, we must make our stand with the oppressed, with the movement for liberation throughout the world.

Who do you think wrote that? The content and the tone might give you a clue. Could it possibly be Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, something from The German Ideology or The Communist Manifesto perhaps? It has all the passion of those early works, the eagerness and the anticipation, the determination to surf on history's next big wave.

Actually, it was not the old bearded prophets of communism: it was Archbishop Rowan Williams, the bearded prophet of all sorts of nonsense, from socialism to Sharia. Yes, he co-authored this manifesto in 1974 with one John Seward, a Catholic priest, sitting anticipating the future in an Oxford pub, all dewy of eye and iron of pen. As soon as this pub closes, they sang together, the revolution starts.

Though never published, it was written for the Jubilee Group, a left-wing Christian organisation, which Williams helped found during his student days at Oxford. Alas, the other members, though broadly sympathetic to the view expressed in the Commie Christian Manifesto, declined to accept it, feeling, in the words the Reverend Dr Ken Leech, that it was "a bit of a rant."

Ranting was something Williams did rather well in his distant student days. In the original group manifesto, which was adopted, he said that capitalism "could inflict even greater violence on mankind than it has before". Than it has before what? Perhaps before Jacobinism, socialism and communism came into the world to show how violence was done properly.

Throughout the 1970s and 80s, as the Sunday Telegraph reported yesterday, Williams was a leading member of the Jubilee Group’s executive committee, alongside Tony Benn, now something of a political dinosaur, one Eric Heffer, then an MP, and Reverend Alan Ecclestone, a Communist priest. I'm sure it won't surprise you to learn that the jubilant Jubilees were to be found where the cause needed them, condemning the campaign to free the Falkland Islands from Argentinean generals who were not fascist. No, it was Margaret Thatcher, then prime minister, and the Tory Party who were guilty of "racism and creeping fascism." The Poll Tax was also a big no no, as was the US base at Greenham Common.

Christianity, too, was a bit of a no no, at least as far as the fascist Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan were concerned. In 1989 Williams gave a speech at Edinburgh University, where he talked of the "alarming religiosity of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher." Yes, it must have been absolutely terrifying to hear them talk of God.

Given his subversive activities it's not at all surprising to discover that Little Red Ranting Hood was put on a watch list by the intelligence services. He came to the attention of MI5 soon after the foundation of the Jubilee Group, principally because of his involvement with Marxist, Trotskyite and socialist campaigners of the usual fifty-seven varieties of the loopy left.

The Jubilee Group itself was identified as a "problem" neo-Marxist organisation in intelligence documents drawn up an MI5 officer named Charles Elwell. Elwell, who died in 2008, had a high profile in the intelligence community. Known as the Witchfinder General, he was the man who cracked the Portland spy ring, identifying the traitor in the Royal Navy who was passing secrets to the Soviets. He specifically highlighted the activities of Williams in a 1989 paper called British Briefing, circulated in secret to a panel of leading politicians, including Lady Thatcher. Soon after she was to say that the Jubilee people were "the most subversive group within the religious community in England.” A newspaper at the time referred to them as "a bunch of neo-Marxist trendy clerics."

Perhaps in years to come I shall feel ashamed of some of the things I say and write at this point in my life, my mid-twenties, my late salad days, when I am still green, actually blue, in judgement. It's not fair, perhaps, to hold one hostage to one’s youth. But that's the thing - Williams is still hostage to his youth, to a whole set of risible ideas; he is still the trendy Marxist priest, ready to attack the government at the drop of a manifesto, who now just happens, by the grace of Blair, another trendy of the day, to occupy the most important clerical office in the land. Dr Leech, his old jubilant comrade, recently said of him "I would not want to commit Rowan to the language of 1974, but it does really show the heart of the theological focus of the man and this has not changed."

I'm still torn between treating the Red Archbishop as a bit of a joke or a serious danger. On balance I think him more comic than serious, though his presence in the Church of England may be part of a deeply laid plan to infiltrate moles, thereby undermining it from within. Given the damage being done to the institution under Williams’ guidance his shadowy handlers must be well pleased. I might even go so far as to say that they must be jubilant.

Marionettes

To mark the thirteenth anniversary of the death of Pol Pot, the face of genocide, the Spectator Coffee House Blog recently published an article by Michael Sheridan, which originally appeared in September 1996. In this he maintains that France had a part to play in the formation of the murderous politics of the Khmer Rouge.

The thesis is superficially attractive. A number of the senior apparatchiks of this frightful movement were educated in France, not just Pol Pot, whose real name was Saloth Sar, but Leng Sary, Khjeu Samphan, and Hu Nim. They were all there in the late 1950s, imbibing, according to Sheridan, the politics of the Left-Bank during its unyielding existential period.

They absorbed much of their theory, he continues, from the French Communist Party, a thoroughly Stalinist body, steeped in hatred of the bourgeoisie. The Party’s programme included the collectivisation of agriculture, which the Khmer Rouge carried through with a literal-minded and barbarous rigour after they captured Phnom Penn in 1975, which, so says the author, even Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier at the time, found terrifying.

As I say, it’s superficially attractive…and utterly unconvincing. Unconvincing at least so far as a specifically French dimension is concerned. Why on earth should Zhou Enlai, of all people, have found the Khmer Rouge actions ‘terrifying’? After all this man, no more than the abject dog of Mao Zedong, belonged to a government whose actions were no less horrific in the Great Leap Forward, a more exact model for Pol Pot than any theory he absorbed in France. The French Communist Party may have talked about collectivisation – luckily for France it never got beyond talk – but it was Stalin and the Soviets who carried it into practice, with total disregard of the human consequences.

No, the rot is not in France; it is in Marxism itself, in the different mutations of Marxism, - in Lenin, Stalin and Mao, those three monsters of the twentieth century, the Red Century, the most murderous in human history. I suppose it’s possible, though, to argue that there is a more precise French root to the politics of the Khmer Rouge in the theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the original monster of the idea, who advanced a thesis based on human perfectibility, an abstraction which turns the real world upside down, one that makes dispensable marionettes of us all.

The Prophet Irrelevant

I mentioned last December that I visited the house, now a museum, of Leon Trotsky when I was in Mexico City, his last place of exile (The Artists and the Revolutionary). I walked through the bedroom where the bullet holes from the assassination attempt of May 1940, led by the artist David Siqueiros, can still be seen. And then there is the study where Ramon Mercader lethally assaulted him with an ice pick in August of that same year, a time when the world’s attention was elsewhere. Finally, in the garden, there he is: his grave, with the hammer and sickle carved. The whole thing simply filled me with a sense of melancholy, not readily dispelled by the hot Mexican sun.


I have no sympathy at all for Trotsky as a politician or a thinker. But, my, how could I not be moved by a fate of a man who went from the height to the depths of history in such a short space of time; the hero of 1917 to the exile and outcast of 1940, living constantly in fear of his life. No longer the prophet armed, not even unarmed; simply irrelevant.


Trotsky was the author in so many ways of his own doom. A brilliant organiser, the man who created the Red Army almost single-handed and led it to victory in the Civil War, he was still a very poor judge of people, and quite hopeless when it came to playing the treacherous back-stabbing political game so favoured by the Bolshevik party, which became particularly intense after Lenin went into decline, suffering successive strokes before his death in January, 1924. Above all he misjudged Stalin, his nemesis, describing him as a ‘grey blur’, dismissing him in the most condescending and racist terms in a highly tendentious biography.

There is a tendency to assume that if Trotsky, rather than Stalin, had been the victor in the internecine party struggles of the 1920s things would have been so much better. I see no evidence at all for this. His conduct during the Civil War and after was just as brutal as any other Bolshevik apparatchik. More than that, the Stalinist programme of collectivisation and industrialisation, pursued with such murderous energy after 1928, was earlier the programme of Trotsky and the left opposition. Trotsky as Vohzd may have been less paranoid than Stalin. I do not believe he would have been less murderous, especially given that both men shared the same visceral hatred for the Russian peasantry.

When he died that August all those years ago he had long since been bypassed by the main currents of history, his rag-bag followers organised, if that’s the word, in the so-called Fourth International, another irrelevance. He died the last victim of the Moscow Show Trials, a victim of the relentless malice of Stalin, a victim of his own delusions. My previous assessment of the man still stands;

…one has to reflect that, in his days of power, it was he who denied life to others, who acted in a brutal and oppressive fashion, a fashion that closed so many futures forever. Too much was sacrificed on that abstract alter to which he dedicated his life, the alter of a frightful idol. We all, each and every one of us, only ever live in a perpetual present. It is a terrible thing to destroy others in the name of a bloodless utopia.

Lenin contra Marx

By the late 1890s it was obvious that history was not going to follow the lines predicted by Karl Marx. Capitalism was not impoverishing the working-class; just the reverse. The proletariat was growing richer, not poorer, and thus had much more to lose than 'their chains.' In Germany, home of the largest Marxist party in the world, there were those like Eduard Bernstein who drew the obvious conclusions: that further economic progress would bring socialism of its own accord, without any need for revolution. Capitalism, in other words, was socialising itself. Socialism would thus be attained by evolution, not revolution.

These ideas were taken up in Russia by the likes of S. Prokopovich and E. Kuskova, who put them forward in a pamphlet, which Lenin's sister, Anna, described as the Credo. In this it was argued that the political struggle was a distraction, and the Russian Social Democrat and Labour Party should thus place its greatest emphasis on the economic struggle; the struggle, that is, with employers for the improvement in pay and conditions.

For Lenin these Economists were proposing the worst form of heresy. He insisted on the primacy of the political struggle. But, in support of this position, he looked not to western Marxism but rather into the Russian past, to the likes of Mikhail Bakunin, who argued that people were tyrannised in the first place not by economic systems but by the state and the church. He was effectively turning classical Marxism on its head: for economics, in the Leninist scheme, no longer had primacy. More than that, he began to focus ever more on the corollary of this argument, another reversal of Marxism: that the emancipation of the workers would never be accomplished by the workers themselves. He was now on the high road to Bolshevism, a doctrine that was to owe virtually nothing to Marx, and much to the traditional forms of Russian conspiratorial and nihilist politics.

Engelism

It is to Friedrich Engels that we owe the materialist interpretation of history. Not only did he invent the term, but he refined and, more important, interpreted the work of Karl Marx, handing it down like Moses in tablets of stone to the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the leading left-wing movement of the day. The problem is that Engels, while he tried to be true to the thinking of his mentor, began to act as if it was sacred canon, introducing a degree of rigidity that was not in the original; turning fluid observations into concrete precepts, what he called 'the great law of motion in history.' Marx’s sociology was thus transformed into a kind of deterministic science, comparable, in Engel's view, with the laws of energy.

It was Engels, not Marx, who saw economics as the ultimate foundations of all social and historical structures. He attempted, towards the end of his life, to correct some of the damage done in turning Marxism into a materialist pseudo-science, though by this time it was altogether too late. His earlier interpretations conveyed a simplicity readily understood by those with less subtle intellects, those looking for straightforward dogmatics; people for whom notions of base and superstructure offered a short-cut to understanding. Yes, he might very well be said to have 'invented' Marxism; and, yes, he might also claim the right to be its earliest gravedigger.

Trolly Dollies of the World Unite!

One only has to take a few days of and there is a complete news mountain to climb! I had a super long-weekend in Paris, cutting myself off from the troubles of the world; refusing even to watch CNN. Well, now I'm paying for it, a good part of Monday being spent in catching up, immersing myself in fresh troubles. And, my, what a lot there seem to be. History surely is repeating itself in the dog days of our dreadful Labour government. My mind is immediately drawn to the opening sentence of Karl Marx's "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte";

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.

Spot on, dear Karl; the first time as tragedy the second time as farce: Gordon Brown for Jim Callaghan, Alistair Darling for Dennis Healy; the Spring of Troubles for the Winter of Discontent. And now we have Red Len McCluskey for Jack Jones or any other Communist or crypto-Communist of that time. Len is certainly a man to watch, a source of present troubles, a source of future troubles.

I know he's not exactly a household name, but he represents a new kind of trade union militancy that most thought had been buried by Margaret Thatcher all those years ago. But, in the twilight of this government, Red Len has emerged like Lazarus come from the dead. You may have read about him in The Sunday Telegraph, in the piece by Andrew Gilligan (Rise and rise of Red Len), or you may remember him from last Christmas announcing with a "heavy heart" the planned strike of British Airways cabin crew, not long after he told the results of the ballot to cheering union militants, with a nice big beaming grin on his face.

For those who know nothing of the man, Red Len is the assistant general secretary of Unite, the union behind the present wave of militancy, the union that bankrolls the Labour Party; the union that bankrolls the Labour government. I imagine most of the BA trolley dollies have little idea what Len stands for. Well, he stands for Marxism; he stands for Che Guevara; he stands for Cuba and Venezuela, where dictators and crypto-dictators rule the day. Gilligan reports that he has spoken of "reclaiming the Labour Party for our class". Bad news, then, for Lord Rumba of Rio! I just wonder who "our class" are, what this expression conjures up in the mind of Red Len? Fat union bureacrats, possibly? People like himself, certainly.

Red Len is rather a hero to the people behind The Morning Star, a newspaper- of sorts- that used to be associated with the British Communist Party. My, those corpses just keep coming and coming! Seemingly he told this paper that he would "finance Unite members to take over constituency Labour parties." His political strategy clearly is in harmony with that of Charlie Wheelan, another Unite boss, busy at the moment trying to galvanise union members in marginal constituencies through a massive phone poll.

Yes, as I have said, Len has rather a 'thing' for Che Guevara, as murderous a Marxist apparatchik as one is ever likely to come across. But he was just so handsome, unlike Len, with his lumpy face, dominated by a big shapeless nose. He is never likely to be left-wing poster boy himself. No matter; it's the words that are important, Che's message to the world. Len was to be heard preaching that message last summer at the Durham Miner's Gala (more ghosts!), where he said;

We cannot secure our demands through the present system, based on the dominance of private ownership...Let me just leave you with the words of Che Guevara. When asked how long must the struggle continue, he replied: 'Hasta la victoria siempre' - until the final victory.

So, feed on that, boys and girls!

Yes, indeed, and that reminds me of something else. You see, I suspect the dollies might prove to be something of a disappointment to Che McCluskey. They rather enjoy some distinctly non-proletarian pastimes, guaranteed by their present package of perks. When I was in Havana I saw a group of them by the swimming pool of the five-star Parque Central Hotel, living it up somewhat, not just the dollies and their male equivalents, but also the flight crew. I had to move because the women were a bit too loud and the men a shade too lascivious for my taste; but the poor dears do have a right to let their hair down, a right guaranteed by those who have to lodge in less salubrious hotels!

No, these are not the people of which revolutions are made. They are the people foolish enough to be lead by the likes of Red Len; they are the people who may very well contribute to the death of an airline. Trolley dollies of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but the high life.

What is Marxism?

Let's reduce this question to the most basic terms. What is Marxism? Oh, I know what the standard answer is: it's a synthesis of German idealism, French politics and English economics. But at an even more basic level Marxism is no more than the intellectual process behind this supposed synthesis. Marxism, in other words, is Pallas Athena emerging fully armed from the head of Karl Marx in the shape of a nineteenth century Zeus.

Marx conceived and encompased in one mortal life a doctrine which supposedly explains the whole procees of human history and evolution. In this shape it is as absolute as the most doctrinare of Medieval scholasticism, because it envisiges and embraces the end of history itself. This, in all of its appealing simplicity, is its strength; and this, in all of its ambition and arrogance, is its weakness. For the process of degeneration, or, better still, the process of ossification, begins with the death in 1883 of the prophet himself. You see, while Karl Marx stopped, history did not. Clearly, with the master no longer present, the doctrine required interpretation and adjustment. The canon was safe for a time with Friedrich Engels in the role of Aaron. But with Engels's departure in 1895 there is no sure path left, no way of adjusting Marx to the continuing evolutions of history.

By the turn of the nineteeth century the German Social Democrats, by far the strongest Marxist party in the world, had turned the doctrine into sacred text rather than living practice, something to be visited on high days and holy days, and largely disregarded thereafter. It was Eduard Bernstein who recognised that Marxism, as it stood, was becoming historically obsolete, and was bold enough to suggest that there was a better, more modern way of dealing with the problems the party faced. He was attacked for his challenge to accepted orthodoxy by Karl Kautsky, the guardian of the sacred flame, though, for all his efforts, the theory became steadily more instrumental and less relevant. There was no one left to say, with authority, what Marxism was, and what it was not-at least not until Lenin took it in an entirely different direction from the Social Democrats-and from Karl Marx.

With Lenin Marxism moves in steadily decreasing circles; no longer the doctrine based historical inevitability and the mass party, but a doctrine of political action embraced by a self-selecting and conspiratorial elite. Lenin wins in Russia by a process that in no way corresponds to Marx's historical model; but political victory brings intellectual authority.

Alternative views, like that of Rosa Luxembourg or Julius Martov are disregarded, because Marxism has now become predicated on political success; it becomes, in turns, what Lenin, or Trotsky, or Bukharin or Stalin say it is, with authority always and everywhere derived from power, and power alone. In the end it becomes no more than an intellectual excuse, cynically exploited to justify the power and practice of the Soviet state. And so it continues, fragmenting and dividing, finding homes further and further from its origins, degenerating to ever more oppressive and ever more murderous forms. It is one of history's greatest frauds, a supreme exercise in bad thinking and bad faith; bad as theory, worse as practice.