Marx, Metals and McDonnell
Isn't it about time Marx got some sympathy? For, apparently, to tag anyone 'Marxist', is to condemn them to the outer regions of hell. Daniel Finkelstein writing in The Times appears to prove this: ‘Marxist McDonnell is no laughing matter’.
In 18th Century Britain, children were told to be good and go to sleep in case Napoleon got them. Imagine now the terror if the threat was Marxist McDonnell.
The problem with Marx is his name provides today's ultimate bogeyman tag – to be attached to any person or subject to the left of centre. You do not need to be a Marxist to be disturbed by this. Marx, as if foreseeing this problem, said that if his ideas were ever put into practice he certainly wouldn’t like to be called a Marxist. In other words, he did not want to be his own bogeyman!
But, who was the real Marx and why was he such an influence?
When I was at University, it was quite usual to be studying with fellow students who might have a Marxist view of the world. On the English course it might mean being a follower of Terry Eagleton's or Raymond Williams’ interpretation of 19th Century English Literature. If you wanted to carry your interest a little further you might go to an Left Caucus meeting in a college basement, campaign for 'Troops Out of Northern Ireland’, or carry a poster and go on a march against the latest loan to Wadham College by the Shah of Iran’s sister. The left in practice, at student politics level, was all around us; and politics was as important as the degree. Our young minds were exercised by what we thought was injustice.
Perhaps I am stretching a point, but to me what 'Marxist’ meant was someone either interested in the ideas of Karl Marx, or intrigued by the man himself. I was certainly both; interested in the writer who struggled in penury in 19th Century Soho to bring forth his great analytical work, Capital - the rent man for ever at the door, his children dying of consumption, while his furniture was removed by the bailiffs. He fascinated me as the towering political influence of the modern era, a great thinker who wrestled as no one before about how to unpick the simple malign influence of money (capital).
Marx was writing in London because he thought industrial Britain was ripest for revolution. He was convinced it would take place in the dockyards of the Clyde, where shipbuilders were tough and exploited and certainly did not own the means of production. But it was an error that illuminates what is so interesting about Marx, and how his thought became transmuted into the bogeyman politics known as Marxism.
I remember reading The Communist Manifesto for the first time in my teens and then later, and on each occasion thinking to myself ‘This? This document started it all?’ For me reading about the ‘hobgoblin’ slouching towards us, this was nothing more than polemic, argument, dissertation, dialectic. What it was not, was a blueprint for a new society. It was what we were at university for - to marshal argument and be disputatious, to argue for argument’s sake, such as I am indulging in now. Because, through argument, might come reason.
The real puzzle is to ponder why The Communist Manifesto, and Capital, were adopted as blueprints for a new society, and why was it that Russia became its first incarnation?
My theory for this, which is partly based on my Eastern European travel, is the simple observation that the Slavic people are more communal by nature. It was the very communality of old Slavic society, beneath Tsarist oppression, which was the fertile ground that allowed Marx’s theorising to be adopted in so macabre a manner, as if it was a guide to the London Underground. Even today, in my interactions with older Russians or Poles, brought up under the communist system, a residual belief in communality pertains, an idea of what communism could have been, and these same people feel cheated by its embodiment in the hands of Bolshevists and Stalinists who used Marxism as their hymn book with such dreadful consequences.
Marx’s basic principle – and it needs airing as much today as then – was that communality was the means to allow groups to share the fruits of their labour for the profit of the community rather than the individual.
Now, however naïve this ideal might sound today, after it was hijacked by apparatchiks, embittered Lenin, psychopathic Stalin, and lead booted human systems; however much Marx’s ideas were turned into a religion without a god, to a mechanism with which to condemn vast numbers of people in the Slavic world to perverted dictatorship; however Marx’s writing became a guide book for intolerance and the tool of despots – still, when I read parts of his writing I can feel sympathy with the anger that he felt at a capitalist system that so exploited the weak.
So it is that Daniel Finkelstein, in his Times column may sneer at McDonnell and cite Marx’s largely unread tomes as an epithet with which to disparage a politician who dares to raise issues with regard the imperfections of capitalism.
But, dear reader, read just a few lines of Marx’s descriptions of 19th Century industrial working life, where children are taken from their beds, white and pasty at three in the morning, to be sent down the coal mines and you will realise you are in the presence of a writer almost as great as Dickens; one who was motivated and sickened by the same injustices. They both wrote in anger, and their contemporaneous writings are, to me, the most humungous exercises in anger management in history.
In Dickens’ case, it was transmuted into the vast gallery of all life and characters who became part of stories that pitted the young against the sickening stench of capitalism in its rawest forms. Who, having read Dickens, cannot have been revolted by the system at work – undiluted capitalism – that could give us characters such as the snarling, snide and sneering Quilp, the obsequious, sycophantic Uriah Heep, and miserly, exploitative Fagin, the pompous certainties of a Gradgrind – always characters set in power over the weak – orphan children, young women, at the mercy of a world that would use a child or young woman’s work for monetary gain.
You might think that quoting those two near contemporaries, Marx and Dickens, is an abstruse way to defend Mr McDonnell. But just how far in our modern world do we need to travel to find the same issues that exercised Dickens and Marx?
It turns out that if you are in copper, tin, gold or tantalite – not so far at all. In fact, I would ask, who among our number of metal merchants, miners, LME speculators, is not in some way or other standing on the shoulders of the weak – those in developing countries, still on wages and in conditions that both Dickens and Marx would recognise.
You think I am exaggerating? Well then let me ask specifically how many of you reading this article are connected in some way to the disaster that is the Un-Democratic Republic of Congo, the poorest, most lawless, country in the world, where the warlord and the artisanal child miner are handcuffed together by poverty.
The anger management of Dickens resulted in the cornucopia of story and prose, the same anger kept Marx writing in his cell in Soho, with his personal life in tatters and his body collapsing into ill-health, in an heroic attempt to reform society’s ways, invent a new system, try to redress the baronial power of….Capital.
Modern supporters of capitalism would perhaps defend it by stating that it is the one true way in which to unleash the human spirit of enterprise. Could Google or Microsoft or Apple ever have been created in The Soviet Union, you might ask? But as societies rattle around in the 21st Century in a rather disturbed state, it might not be unwise to look back to Marx to find some answers, or at least some questions.
The one thing that every defender of capitalism will tell you is that every exploitative trick is OK, every rapacious need to succeed in business is fine because in the end your success will be shared – via tax. But what happens, then, when that half of the equation is not as efficient as it could be. In other words, what happens when large corporations find it only too easy not to pay tax.
For me much of what is wrong in our society, as much as the metal trade, comes down to this issue of tax – what we put in the pot for the common good – the roads, schools and hospitals. Right now, we know how easy it is for large corporations to site business in low tax regions and route electronic orders away from high tax jurisdictions. In our metal trade, all too many of our number reside in such locations, whether it be Zug or Singapore, from which it is possible to make largely unaccountable forays into developing countries, transferring wealth from poor to rich, while allowing work to take place in 19th century conditions.
So, when McDonnell and others are motivated to talk about bringing in money from global corporations who are not paying their dues he has my entire support. If he likes to describe himself as a Marxist in this endeavour it is just fine by me. And, interestingly, he is not so far apart from Theresa May who has described global companies as ‘being everywhere but resident nowhere’. Those avoiding tax today are the most corrosive element in our society for they reduce the pot for the common good.
Call McDonnell a Marxist but if capitalism is to survive it needs to be made much more accountable to the law. In 2012, at Dickens’ bicentenary, one of his heirs, Lucinda Dickens Hawksley, wrote:
‘The essence of almost all Dickens’ writing was the belief that those with money, power and influence need to take responsibility for those who are disenfranchised.
Imagine how different our societies could be today if this belief was genuinely put into practice.’
Published May 10th 2017 on www.lord-copper.com