I read some Marx (and I liked it) By Richard Seymour On The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, the host asked Shadow chancellor John McDonnell if he is a Marxist. Obligingly, he said “no”—but admitted that he had read Marx and learned from him alongside traditional Labour economists like R H Tawney and G D H Cole. Jeremy Corbyn has since leapt to his colleague’s aid, describing Marx as a “great economist.” In philistine, managerial British politics, McDonnell’s comments felt like a blushing confession: “ I read some Marx and I liked it .” Predictably, senior Tories have in response warned darkly of an “ Islington cabal ” of revolutionaries. But what exactly in McDonnell’s agenda is Marxist? A tax freeze for the 95 per cent doesn’t need the labour theory of value to stand it up. Borrowing only to invest doesn’t depend on Marx’s theory of the commodity form. Renationalising the railway is as close to common sense as it gets in politics. If McDonnell is a Marxist, so is...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51