THERE AREN’T many places where Marxism still wins you elections. North Korea and Zimbabwe keep the flame of revolution alive, but they are not particularly good at doing the same for their citizens. Kim Jong Il and Robert Mugabe certainly know how to target uncommitted voters — with terror, famine and violence. But it would probably be erring on the side of generosity to describe either as popular darlings.
There is, however, one place where Marxism is storming to victory in an open ballot. On Radio 4.
One of the station’s finest programmes, In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg, is running a poll to find the nation’s favourite philosopher. Borrowing some of the techniques, although none of the razzmatazz , of BBC television’s quest for the nation’s greatest Briton, Radio 4 has asked a variety of advocates to put the case for great thinkers, from Socrates to Heidegger. Whereas BBC One had Jeremy Clarkson putting the case for Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Rosie Boycott arguing for Diana, Princess of Wales, as our greatest Briton, Radio 4 has Richard Sorabji standing up for Aristotle,and Robert Kaplan leading the cheering for René Descartes. As one can see,we are talking intellectuals here. Which is why, troubling as it may be for some of us, it shouldn’t be too surprising that the philosopher running away with the race at the moment is Karl Marx.
The author of The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital may be the godfather of more misery, death and criminality than any other figure from the last 200 years. But he speaks, across the decades, and over a mountain of corpses, to an eternal yearning on the part of intellectuals. Marxism appeals to the thwarted dignity of the intellectual, flattering the academically inclined by playing to their sense that the world does not value them as it should.
Karl Marx has the answer to the central question that most troubles contemporary intellectuals. Not, “what is the meaning of life?” but “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”. For all those who form our intellectual classes, the readers of the New Statesman and the London Review of Books, the lecturers in sociology and cultural studies, the Arts Council England administrators and LEA curriculum advisers, life is plagued with a nagging injustice. They possess what they believe to be superior insights to the majority, a more cultivated mind, a more refined sensibility, a broader intellectual range. And yet they don’t enjoy the worldly success, or esteem, of those coarser souls who devote themselves to the grubby business of commerce and exchange. How can this injustice be explained? There must be something deeply, systemically, wrong with the way society is organised.
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And Uncle Karl provides just such an over-arching, deeply satisfying, all-encompassing explanation. The system is wrong. Capitalism is not just unjust, but inherently illogical and destructive of the true, transcendant value of things. In Marx’s own words, it “has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.” And a pretty poor wage at that.
Marxism offers much more, however, than just an explanation of the injustice that leads money to become the principal scale of value, and the intellectual to be valued at a level well below his true worth. It also privileges the intellectual with a leading role in the organisation and leadership of society. Marxism presents a world which can only really be made intelligible by theory, and thus only properly understood, and shaped, by the theoretically literate. The workers, poor dears, are in a state of “false consciousness”, unware of the reality of their exploitation. History proceeds through a dialectic between forces which only intellectuals can effectively discern. And progress is brought about by a vanguard enlightened enough to have freed themselves from illusions and skilled enough to see the hidden meanings behind events.
Marxism can have a myriad applications. There are Marxist literary critics, such as Terry Eagleton, who can see the hidden truths in texts which eluded not just previous readers but the author himself. There are contemporary Marxist polemicists, such as Noam Chomsky or John Pilger, who can work out the real, and diabolical, motivation behind the actions of George W. Bush even though the President himself is too stupid to realise what he’s up to. But what unites the Marxist approach to every issue is the privileging of the intellectual’s elite status as society’s natural guide.
The persistence of Marxism’s appeal among intellectuals isn’t just apparent in the success of Karl in Radio 4’s poll. It is visible in the fêting of Marxist apologists from Eric Hobsbawm to George Galloway; it is audible in the cries of the anti-globalist movement; it is discernible in the hostility towards America and Israel, nations that have survived years of Marxist- inspired assault, and it is also detectable in the enthusiasm some intellectuals still feel for the European project, another construct of elites built on dubious notions of historical inevita- bility.
For some of us, history remains a better guide to human action than theory. And history teaches us where the Marxist celebration of intellectual leadership and theoretical purity leads — to the gulag, the mass grave and the crushing of the human spirit. But Radio 4 is, not yet, giving us the chance to vote for Gibbon, Macaulay, Thucydides or Robert Conquest. And if we must therefore celebrate a philosopher, let us at least choose one whom history vindicates.
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After all the horrors we have witnessed in the 20th century, success for Karl Marx in any poll would suggest we have learnt nothing.
It would be far better if the thinker who predicted where Marxism would lead, the proper sceptic and champion of Anglo-Saxon empiricism, Karl Popper, were to triumph in Radio 4’s contest. Much more than Marxism, the insights of the philosopher who championed the open society, and took on its enemies, are genuinely appropriate in our time.
michael.gove@thetimes.co.uk