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Pinarayi Vijayan is Kerala’s ‘Modi in a mundu’

Jyoti Malhotra in The Print

In his home village of Pinarayi in north Kerala’s Kannur district, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan arrived one early April morning to inaugurate a Yoga-cum-Kalaripayattu camp at the local convention centre. He sat right through the exploits of enthusiastic children lining up to show off their skills and awarded long-haired Yoga and Kalari teachers spouting the values of the ancient, Hindu spiritual and martial arts disciplines, raising his hand occasionally to bless them all.

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If there wasn’t a huge red hoarding outside the centre, saying ‘Captain’ picturing Vijayan in his spotless white ‘mundu-veshti’ and red CPI(M) flags and bunting leading towards it, you would be forgiven for thinking that a transformation of the state’s iron-fisted Communist leader was in the offing.

But this is Kerala, dotted with hundreds of temples and churches and mosques and for the first time since 1977, won by a Communist party for the second time running. In the intervening years, the state has always alternated between the Left Democratic Front and the Congress-led United Democratic Front.

This time around, the 75-year-old Pinarayi Vijayan has created history not just by keeping the state, with 99 seats — eight more seats than won by his bete noire in the party, former chief minister V.S. Achuthanandan in 2011 — but by restricting the UDF to 41 seats.

For Kerala, the question of “who is Pinarayi Vijayan” is irrelevant. The state knows him as a strong CPI(M) leader who joined the party the year it split in 1964, became the state president of the Kerala Students Federation, was arrested and tortured during the Emergency, had a public spat with fellow Politburo member V.S. Achuthanandan in 2007 over the latter’s demolition drive against illegal resorts in the Munnar hills — for which both were suspended — and remains unapologetic about the fact that he won’t let much come in the way of building the party organisation.

With this victory, he has proved his worth not just to the party, but also to the national opposition. CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury’s roots in the party are seen to be linked to Bengal, because of his acknowledged proximity to former chief minister Jyoti Basu, although he is also seen as a VS (Achuthanandan) protégé — it was VS who had helped deliver Yechury to the top job at the party congress in 2015.

But the Left has been totally wiped out in Bengal, down to zero from 76 seats in the last election, and it lost Tripura back in 2018. Today, in only one corner of India, it is because of Pinarayi Vijayan that the hammer-and-sickle is still flying.

‘Mundu udutha Modi’

Vijayan’s political strength is magnified by the fact that he has prevented the BJP from winning even one seat — in the outgoing Assembly, the BJP had the Nemom constituency on the outskirts of Thiruvananthapuram in its kitty.

And yet, for someone as seemingly hardline as Vijayan, he has for years been dogged by a pro-corporate image. In 1997, when he was electricity minister, Vijayan converted an MoU with the Canadian firm SNC Lavalin into a fixed price deal for supply of equipment and services to renovate projects for Rs 239.81 crore.

The 2007 spat with VS took place because Vijayan wanted the resorts to stay.

In February 2020, his government signed an MoU with a US-based company, EMCC Global Consortium LCC, for an upgrade and promotion of deep sea fishing in Kerala, provoking Congress leader Ramesh Chennithala to say the LDF government was “cheating the fishers”. Also last year, he allowed the Kerala Infrastructure Investment Board Fund to issue masala bonds at the London Stock Exchange so funds could be raised from the market to fund welfare activities in the state.

Interestingly, Vijayan is widely known across the state as “mundu udutha Modi” or “Modi in a mundu (similar to dhoti or lungi)”, because of the manner in which he has, systematically, finished off his rivals.

There was VS, of course, who wanted to be chief minister in 2016, but even Yechury realised that it was better to give the state to Vijayan than to the warm and fuzzy “Fidel Castro of Kerala”. There is the former industries minister E.P. Jayarajan, a former Vijayan confidant from Kannur who has retired from politics because he was denied a ticket in this election. Kodiyeri Balakrishnan, fellow Politburo member and rival, stepped down because of cases against his son Bineesh. And outgoing finance minister Thomas Isaac, who reinvented KIIFB, was not allowed to contest because of the two-term rule.

In an interview that early April morning, after he was done with the Yoga and Kalari event in Pinarayi village, I asked the chief minister why he was called the Narendra Modi of Kerala. He laughed softly, and said: “I do not know what kind of person Narendra Modi is. The people of Kerala know what kind of person I am for many years. I don’t have to emulate Narendra Modi. I have my own style and methods. Modi might have his own style.”

Certainly, unlike Modi, Pinarayi Vijayan doesn’t pretend to have a vaulting national ambition. Moreover, unlike the former leaders of the former Soviet Union, he understands that it is important to first protect the home turf, and then think of expanding Communism abroad.

‘Communism with Malayali characteristics’

In the interview, he believed it was important for the Opposition to come together to take on the BJP and Modi, and insisted there was no contradiction in the Left fighting against Congress in Kerala and alongside the Congress in West Bengal.

“There is a unique situation in West Bengal. We took a stand keeping in mind this unique situation. This does not mean the Congress has been absolved of its sins,“ he said.

Certainly, multi-religious Kerala’s uniqueness stems from the fact that it was the first democratic state in the world to elect a Communist government in 1957. Cut to 2021, when Pinarayi Vijayan makes history by beating anti-incumbency and bringing a Communist government to power for the second time in a row.

Asked why Kerala continued to choose Communist governments when the Soviet Union broke itself up in 1991, Vijayan told ThePrint that the CPM was able to “correctly analyse and speak out within the party” about what was happening in the Soviet Union…we were able to carefully preserve the CPM. We were able to take the stand that Marxism-Leninism was right. Fact is, in Kerala, the CPM & Communist parties were strong before and continue to be strong.”

In Vijayan’s mind, Marxism-Leninism is about both Marx and market, just another way into the hearts of people. That’s why Yoga camps as well as the London Stock Exchange are par for the course.

As Pinarayi Vijayan takes the reins of Kerala again, this is a description he would be comfortable with.

-----Here's another view

Here's Why Pinarayi Vijayan Can't Be Called a 'Modi in a Mundu'


P Raman in The Wire

The CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front is set to retain power in Kerala, with the trends projecting it as leading or having won at least 94 of the 140 assembly seats.

The LDF victory will curb a four decade-old trend of the state electing communist and Congress-headed governments alternatively.

Two years ago, soon after the Left Front suffered a stunning defeat in the 2019 parliamentary elections, prominent Malayalam daily Mathrubhumi carried a series of edit page articles.

The commentators were in a celebratory mood. One of them gleefully concluded that religion and spiritualism – Sabarimala – had finally triumphed over materialism and Marxism. The commentators concluded that Marxism is archaic, and communists neither change nor learn from past mistakes. Thus, they said, the Left rout in its last sanctuary – they got just one out of 20 Lok Sabha seats – heralded the extinction of communism in Indian peninsula.

I was born and brought up in a communist village in old Malabar. I am familiar with the lifestyles and practices of early communists. To say they have not changed is sheer moonshine. Most early communist workers were scions of landlord families. They left their comforts and moved from village to village, spreading Marxian ideals. They lived on cheap tea without milk and dal vada, like a romanticised proletariat.

Abnegation and monkish life were part of the communist culture. Perhaps it was derived from the Gandhian ethos. Members took the party’s permission even on personal matters like marriage. In early 1960s, I remember Indrajit Gupta, then a young trade unionist, arriving at Calcutta’s 33, Alimuddin Street in a Fiat car with a red flag on it. It was a cultural shock – a trade union worker travelling in a car. It was explained that Gupta found it difficult to reach half dozen trade union functions by travelling in trams. So some richer trade unionists pooled funds and bought an old, creaking Fiat.

Six decades later, I found half a dozen private cars parked at a CPI(M) area committee office in remote Kerala. Even middle level CPI(M) leaders move in their own cars. They have none of the qualms that their 20th century comrades felt.

How can you say the communists never change? Before 1952, the parliamentary route was ‘revisionism’ for communists. The ‘national bourgeoisie’ debate continued for another two decades. For decades, editorial writers attributed the communist success to foreign money. Today’s communists are shorn of all such baggage.

So how has the Left managed to romp back with such a huge majority?

The most simplistic explanation is that the communists have also become another regional party under a charismatic autocrat. Thus, Pinarayi is called a ‘mundututta Modi’ or ‘Modi in a mundu’.

This strongman cult, like Modi’s, has clicked with the people.

Pinarayi Vijayan, who was the general secretary of the Kerala CPI(M) for 17 years, is the party’s senior most leader – barring, of course, the 97-year-old retired veteran V.S. Achuthanandan. Vijayan has a domineering say in the party organisation and the government he heads. But is this enough to call him a ‘Modi in a mundu?’

Is it true that Kerala communists, in their desperate bid to remain, have relevant opted for an authoritarian model?

The first parameter to gauge the degree of authoritarianism in a political party is the level of its internal democracy. In India, CPI(M) and CPI are the only political parties that hold regular elections as per their constitution. For over a decade, all members of the Kerala state committee (as also other elective posts) were chosen by secret ballots at the state party conference. The results with details such as the number of votes each contestant got were released soon after the counting. All this under sharp media glare and endless interpretations.

As per the BJP constitution, its national executive must meet once in every quarter and national council every year. Under the pre-Modi BJP, the two bodies did meet at regular intervals. How many times did the NE and NC met during the seven years under Modi? Elected autocrats – a term used by the Sweden-based V-Dem to describe the Modi regime – never tolerate a lively, functional party organisation.

The other parameter to measure authoritarianism is free internal debates.

For an authoritarian populist, the party must function as his or her appendage. What about the ‘Modi in a mundu?’ In the past two years, AKG Bhawan (the Kerala CPI(M) headquarters) made at least half a dozen interventions. It formally asked the government to reverse many of its decisions. Sections of the media interpreted such interventions as grassroots rumblings. Will any BJP committee – NE, NC or parliamentary party – dare to make such critical remarks about Modi or his actions?

Sample these:

The CPI(M) secretariat on February 20, 2021, attended by Pinarayi Vijayan, directed the latter to initiate minister-level discussions with agitating job-seekers. It said the opposition should not be allowed to take political advantage of the agitation. And Vijayan promptly did.

The CPI(M) state secretariat, after its meeting, observed that the continuing controversy over the gold smuggling has affected the party’s image and that it is a major setback to the party. It asked the chief minister to take corrective measures.

The CPI(M) secretariat on May 25, 2019, asserted that the government’s Sabarimala policy had badly affected the party’s performance in the Lok Sabha elections. It asked the government for a relook. Vijayan obliged.

Following pressure from within the CPI(M), Vijayan (on November 4, 2019) said that the government did not support the police’s move to invoke the UAPA against workers for Maoist links.

A closer look will reveal that AKG Bhawan acted as an alert watchdog and monitor rather than the CMO’s appendage. Will hard-headed ‘elected autocrats’ like Narendra Modi tolerate such interventions?

Pinarayi came closest to the personality cult trap when his image makers began projecting him as ‘Captain Pinarayi’ – for his leadership in tackling the floods and the Nipah outbreak. This came in for sharp criticism within the party and soon the CPI(M) leadership cried a halt to it – first, senior leader Kodiyeri Balakrishnan and then Prakash Karat.

“Pinarayi is our ‘comrade’, not ‘captain’,” Balakrishnan said. Soon Vijayan himself washed his hands off the ‘captain’ epithet, in what was yet another example of the the CPI(M)’s embedded corrective mechanism working.

A Mistaken Critique of Marx

 

Is Marx still relevant 200 years later?

Amartya Sen in The Indian Express







How should we think about Karl Marx on his 200th birthday? His big influence on the politics of the world is universally acknowledged, though people would differ on how good or bad that influence has been. But going beyond that, there can be little doubt that the intellectual world has been transformed by the reflective departures Marx generated, from class analysis as an essential part of social understanding, to the explication of the profound contrast between needs and hard work as conflicting foundations of people’s moral entitlements. Some of the influences have been so pervasive, with such strong impact on the concepts and connection we look for in our day-to-day analysis, that we may not be fully aware where the influences came from. In reading some classic works of Marx, we are often placed in the uncomfortable position of the theatre-goer who loved Hamlet as a play, but wondered why it was so full of quotations.

Marxian analysis remains important today not just because of Marx’s own original work, but also because of the extraordinary contributions made in that tradition by many leading historians, social scientists and creative artists — from Antonio Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg, Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertolt Brecht to Piero Sraffa, Maurice Dobb and Eric Hobsbawm (to mention just a few names). We do not have to be a Marxist to make use of the richness of Marx’s insights — just as one does not have to be an Aristotelian to learn from Aristotle.

There are ideas in Marx’s corpus of work that remain under-explored. I would place among the relatively neglected ideas Marx’s highly original concept of “objective illusion,” and related to that, his discussion of “false consciousness”. An objective illusion may arise from what we can see from our particular position — how things look from there (no matter how misleading). Consider the relative sizes of the sun and the moon, and the fact that from the earth they look to be about the same size (Satyajit Ray offered some interesting conversations on this phenomenon in his film, Agantuk). But to conclude from this observation that the sun and the moon are in fact of the same size in terms of mass or volume would be mistaken, and yet to deny that they do look to be about the same size from the earth would be a mistake too. Marx’s investigation of objective illusion — of “the outer form of things” — is a pioneering contribution to understanding the implications of positional dependence of observations.

The phenomenon of objective illusion helps to explain the widespread tendency of workers in an exploitative society to fail to see that there is any exploitation going on — an example that Marx did much to investigate, in the form of “false consciousness”. The idea can have many applications going beyond Marx’s own use of it. Powerful use can be made of the notion of objective illusion to understand, for example, how women, and indeed men, in strongly sexist societies may not see clearly enough — in the absence of informed political agitation — that there are huge elements of gender inequality in what look like family-oriented just societies, as bastions of role-based fairness.

There is, however, a danger in seeing Marx in narrowly formulaic terms — for example, in seeing him as a “materialist” who allegedly understood the world in terms of the importance of material conditions, denying the significance of ideas and beliefs. This is not only a serious misreading of Marx, who emphasised two-way relations between ideas and material conditions, but also a seriously missed opportunity to see the far-reaching role of ideas on which Marx threw such important light.

Let me illustrate the point with a debate on the discipline of historical explanation that was quite widespread in our own time. In one of Eric Hobsbawm’s lesser known essays, called “Where Are British Historians Going?”, published in the Marxist Quarterly in 1955, he discussed how the Marxist pointer to the two-way relationship between ideas and material conditions offers very different lessons in the contemporary world than it had in the intellectual world that Marx himself saw around him, where the prevailing focus — for example by Hegel and Hegelians — was very much on highlighting the influence of ideas on material conditions.

In contrast, the tendency of dominant schools of history in the mid-twentieth century — Hobsbawm cited here the hugely influential historical works of Lewis Bernstein Namier — had come to embrace a type of materialism that saw human action as being almost entirely motivated by a simple kind of material interest, in particular narrowly defined self-interest. Given this completely different kind of bias (very far removed from the idealist traditions of Hegel and other influential thinkers in Marx’s own time), Hobsbawm argued that a balanced two-way view must demand that analysis in Marxian lines today must particularly emphasise the importance of ideas and their influence on material conditions.

For example, it is crucial to recognise that Edmund Burke’s hugely influential criticism of Warren Hastings’s misbehaviour in India — in the famous Impeachment hearings — was directly related to Burke’s strongly held ideas of justice and fairness, whereas the self-interest-obsessed materialist historians, such as Namier, saw no more in Burke’s discontent than the influence of his [Burke’s] profit-seeking concerns which had suffered because of the policies pursued by Hastings. The overreliance on materialism — in fact of a particularly narrow kind — needed serious correction, argued Hobsbawm: “In the pre-Namier days, Marxists regarded it as one of their chief historical duties to draw attention to the material basis of politics. But since bourgeois historians have adopted what is a particular form of vulgar materialism, Marxists had to remind them that history is the struggle of men for ideas, as well as a reflection of their material environment. Mr Trevor-Roper [a famous right-wing historian] is not merely mistaken in believing that the English Revolution was the reflection of the declining fortunes of country gentlemen, but also in his belief that Puritanism was simply a reflection of their impending bankruptcies.”

To Hobsbawm’s critique, it could be added that the so-called “rational choice theory” (so dominant in recent years in large parts of mainstream economics and political analysis) thrives on a single-minded focus on self-interest as the sole human motivation, thereby missing comprehensively the balance that Marx had argued for. A rational choice theorist can, in fact, learn a great deal from reading Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and The German Ideology. While this would be a very different lesson from what Marx wanted Hegelians to consider, a commitment to doing justice to the two-way relations characterises both parts of Marx’s capacious pedagogy. What has to be avoided is the narrowing of Marx’s thoughts through simple formulas respectfully distributed in his name.

In remembering Marx on his 200th birthday, we not only celebrate a great intellectual, but also one whose critical analyses and investigations have many insights to offer to us today. Paying attention to Marx may be more important than paying him respect.

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Slavoj Zizek in The Independent


There is a delicious old Soviet joke about Radio Yerevan: a listener asks: “Is it true that Rabinovitch won a new car in the lottery?”, and the radio presenter answers: “In principle yes, it’s true, only it wasn’t a new car but an old bicycle, and he didn’t win it but it was stolen from him.”

Does exactly the same not hold for Marx’s legacy today? Let’s ask Radio Yerevan: “Is Marx’s theory still relevant today?” We can guess the answer: in principle yes, he describes wonderfully the mad dance of capitalist dynamics which only reached its peak today, more than a century and a half later, but… Gerald A Cohen enumerated the four features of the classic Marxist notion of the working class: (1) it constitutes the majority of society; (2) it produces the wealth of society; (3) it consists of the exploited members of society; and (4) its members are the needy people in society. When these four features are combined, they generate two further features: (5) the working class has nothing to lose from revolution; and (6) it can and will engage in a revolutionary transformation of society.

None of the first four features applies to today’s working class, which is why features (5) and (6) cannot be generated. Even if some of the features continue to apply to parts of today’s society, they are no longer united in a single agent: the needy people in society are no longer the workers, and so on.

But let’s dig into this question of relevance and appropriateness further. Not only is Marx’s critique of political economy and his outline of the capitalist dynamics still fully relevant, but one could even take a step further and claim that it is only today, with global capitalism, that it is fully relevant.

However, at the moment of triumph is one of defeat. After overcoming external obstacles the new threat comes from within. In other words, Marx was not simply wrong, he was often right – but more literally than he himself expected to be.

For example, Marx couldn’t have imagined that the capitalist dynamics of dissolving all particular identities would translate into ethnic identities as well. Today’s celebration of “minorities” and “marginals” is the predominant majority position – alt-rightists who complain about the terror of “political correctness” take advantage of this by presenting themselves as protectors of an endangered minority, attempting to mirror campaigns on the other side.

And then there’s the case of “commodity fetishism”. Recall the classic joke about a man who believes himself to be a grain of seed and is taken to a mental institution where the doctors do their best to finally convince him that he is not a grain but a man. When he is cured (convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man) and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back trembling. There is a chicken outside the door and he is afraid that it will eat him.

“Dear fellow,” says his doctor, “you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man.”

“Of course I know that,” replies the patient, “but does the chicken know it?”

So how does this apply to the notion of commodity fetishism? Note the very beginning of the subchapter on commodity fetishism in Marx’s Das Kapital: “A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”

Commodity fetishism (our belief that commodities are magic objects, endowed with an inherent metaphysical power) is not located in our mind, in the way we (mis)perceive reality, but in our social reality itself. We may know the truth, but we act as if we don’t know it – in our real life, we act like the chicken from the joke.

Niels Bohr, who already gave the right answer to Einstein’s “God doesn’t play dice“(“Don’t tell God what to do!”), also provided the perfect example of how a fetishist disavowal of belief works. Seeing a horseshoe on his door, a surprised visitor commented that he didn’t think Bohr believed superstitious ideas about horseshoes bringing good luck to people. Bohr snapped back: “I also do not believe in it; I have it there because I was told that it works whether one believes in it or not!”

This is how ideology works in our cynical era: we don’t have to believe in it. Nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware of their corruption, but we practice them – in other words, we display our belief in them – because we assume they work even if we do not believe in them.

With regard to religion, we no longer “really believe”, we just follow (some of the) religious rituals and mores as part of the respect for the “lifestyle” of the community to which we belong (non-believing Jews obeying kosher rules “out of respect for tradition”, for example).

“I do not really believe in it, it is just part of my culture” seems to be the predominant mode of the displaced belief, characteristic of our times. “Culture” is the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without taking them quite seriously.

This is why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as “barbarians” or “primitive”, as anti-cultural, as a threat to culture – they dare to take seriously their beliefs. The cynical era in which we live would have no surprises for Marx.

Marx’s theories are thus not simply alive: Marx is a ghost who continues to haunt us – and the only way to keep him alive is to focus on those of his insights which are today more true than in his own time.

Marx predicted our present crisis – and points the way out

Yanis Varoufakis in The Guardian


For a manifesto to succeed, it must speak to our hearts like a poem while infecting the mind with images and ideas that are dazzlingly new. It needs to open our eyes to the true causes of the bewildering, disturbing, exciting changes occurring around us, exposing the possibilities with which our current reality is pregnant. It should make us feel hopelessly inadequate for not having recognised these truths ourselves, and it must lift the curtain on the unsettling realisation that we have been acting as petty accomplices, reproducing a dead-end past. Lastly, it needs to have the power of a Beethoven symphony, urging us to become agents of a future that ends unnecessary mass suffering and to inspire humanity to realise its potential for authentic freedom. 

No manifesto has better succeeded in doing all this than the one published in February 1848 at 46 Liverpool Street, London. Commissioned by English revolutionaries, The Communist Manifesto (or the Manifesto of the Communist Party, as it was first published) was authored by two young Germans – Karl Marx, a 29-year-old philosopher with a taste for epicurean hedonism and Hegelian rationality, and Friedrich Engels, a 28-year-old heir to a Manchester mill.

As a work of political literature, the manifesto remains unsurpassed. Its most infamous lines, including the opening one (“A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism”), have a Shakespearean quality. Like Hamlet confronted by the ghost of his slain father, the reader is compelled to wonder: “Should I conform to the prevailing order, suffering the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortune bestowed upon me by history’s irresistible forces? Or should I join these forces, taking up arms against the status quo and, by opposing it, usher in a brave new world?”

For Marx and Engels’ immediate readership, this was not an academic dilemma, debated in the salons of Europe. Their manifesto was a call to action, and heeding this spectre’s invocation often meant persecution, or, in some cases, lengthy imprisonment. Today, a similar dilemma faces young people: conform to an established order that is crumbling and incapable of reproducing itself, or oppose it, at considerable personal cost, in search of new ways of working, playing and living together? Even though communist parties have disappeared almost entirely from the political scene, the spirit of communism driving the manifesto is proving hard to silence.
To see beyond the horizon is any manifesto’s ambition. But to succeed as Marx and Engels did in accurately describing an era that would arrive a century-and-a-half in the future, as well as to analyse the contradictions and choices we face today, is truly astounding. In the late 1840s, capitalism was foundering, local, fragmented and timid. And yet Marx and Engels took one long look at it and foresaw our globalised, financialised, iron-clad, all-singing-all-dancing capitalism. This was the creature that came into being after 1991, at the very same moment the establishment was proclaiming the death of Marxism and the end of history.

Of course, the predictive failure of The Communist Manifesto has long been exaggerated. I remember how even leftwing economists in the early 1970s challenged the pivotal manifesto prediction that capital would “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere”. Drawing upon the sad reality of what were then called third world countries, they argued that capital had lost its fizz well before expanding beyond its “metropolis” in Europe, America and Japan.

Empirically they were correct: European, US and Japanese multinational corporations operating in the “peripheries” of Africa, Asia and Latin America were confining themselves to the role of colonial resource extractors and failing to spread capitalism there. Instead of imbuing these countries with capitalist development (drawing “all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation”), they argued that foreign capital was reproducing the development of underdevelopment in the third world. It was as if the manifesto had placed too much faith in capital’s ability to spread into every nook and cranny. Most economists, including those sympathetic to Marx, doubted the manifesto’s prediction that “exploitation of the world-market” would give “a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country”.

As it turned out, the manifesto was right, albeit belatedly. It would take the collapse of the Soviet Union and the insertion of two billion Chinese and Indian workers into the capitalist labour market for its prediction to be vindicated. Indeed, for capital to globalise fully, the regimes that pledged allegiance to the manifesto had first to be torn asunder. Has history ever procured a more delicious irony?

Anyone reading the manifesto today will be surprised to discover a picture of a world much like our own, teetering fearfully on the edge of technological innovation. In the manifesto’s time, it was the steam engine that posed the greatest challenge to the rhythms and routines of feudal life. The peasantry were swept into the cogs and wheels of this machinery and a new class of masters, the factory owners and the merchants, usurped the landed gentry’s control over society. Now, it is artificial intelligence and automation that loom as disruptive threats, promising to sweep away “all fixed, fast-frozen relations”. “Constantly revolutionising … instruments of production,” the manifesto proclaims, transform “the whole relations of society”, bringing about “constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation”.

 

Composite: Guardian Design

For Marx and Engels, however, this disruption is to be celebrated. It acts as a catalyst for the final push humanity needs to do away with our remaining prejudices that underpin the great divide between those who own the machines and those who design, operate and work with them. “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned,” they write in the manifesto of technology’s effect, “and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind”. By ruthlessly vaporising our preconceptions and false certainties, technological change is forcing us, kicking and screaming, to face up to how pathetic our relations with one another are.

Today, we see this reckoning in millions of words, in print and online, used to debate globalisation’s discontents. While celebrating how globalisation has shifted billions from abject poverty to relative poverty, venerable western newspapers, Hollywood personalities, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, bishops and even multibillionaire financiers all lament some of its less desirable ramifications: unbearable inequality, brazen greed, climate change, and the hijacking of our parliamentary democracies by bankers and the ultra-rich.

None of this should surprise a reader of the manifesto. “Society as a whole,” it argues, “is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other.” As production is mechanised, and the profit margin of the machine-owners becomes our civilisation’s driving motive, society splits between non-working shareholders and non-owner wage-workers. As for the middle class, it is the dinosaur in the room, set for extinction.

At the same time, the ultra-rich become guilt-ridden and stressed as they watch everyone else’s lives sink into the precariousness of insecure wage-slavery. Marx and Engels foresaw that this supremely powerful minority would eventually prove “unfit to rule” over such polarised societies, because they would not be in a position to guarantee the wage-slaves a reliable existence. Barricaded in their gated communities, they find themselves consumed by anxiety and incapable of enjoying their riches. Some of them, those smart enough to realise their true long-term self-interest, recognise the welfare state as the best available insurance policy. But alas, explains the manifesto, as a social class, it will be in their nature to skimp on the insurance premium, and they will work tirelessly to avoid paying the requisite taxes.

Is this not what has transpired? The ultra-rich are an insecure, permanently disgruntled clique, constantly in and out of detox clinics, relentlessly seeking solace from psychics, shrinks and entrepreneurial gurus. Meanwhile, everyone else struggles to put food on the table, pay tuition fees, juggle one credit card for another or fight depression. We act as if our lives are carefree, claiming to like what we do and do what we like. Yet in reality, we cry ourselves to sleep.

Do-gooders, establishment politicians and recovering academic economists all respond to this predicament in the same way, issuing fiery condemnations of the symptoms (income inequality) while ignoring the causes (exploitation resulting from the unequal property rights over machines, land, resources). Is it any wonder we are at an impasse, wallowing in hopelessness that only serves the populists seeking to court the worst instincts of the masses?

With the rapid rise of advanced technology, we are brought closer to the moment when we must decide how to relate to each other in a rational, civilised manner. We can no longer hide behind the inevitability of work and the oppressive social norms it necessitates. The manifesto gives its 21st-century reader an opportunity to see through this mess and to recognise what needs to be done so that the majority can escape from discontent into new social arrangements in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”. Even though it contains no roadmap of how to get there, the manifesto remains a source of hope not to be dismissed.

If the manifesto holds the same power to excite, enthuse and shame us that it did in 1848, it is because the struggle between social classes is as old as time itself. Marx and Engels summed this up in 13 audacious words: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

From feudal aristocracies to industrialised empires, the engine of history has always been the conflict between constantly revolutionising technologies and prevailing class conventions. With each disruption of society’s technology, the conflict between us changes form. Old classes die out and eventually only two remain standing: the class that owns everything and the class that owns nothing – the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

This is the predicament in which we find ourselves today. While we owe capitalism for having reduced all class distinctions to the gulf between owners and non-owners, Marx and Engels want us to realise that capitalism is insufficiently evolved to survive the technologies it spawns. It is our duty to tear away at the old notion of privately owned means of production and force a metamorphosis, which must involve the social ownership of machinery, land and resources. Now, when new technologies are unleashed in societies bound by the primitive labour contract, wholesale misery follows. In the manifesto’s unforgettable words: “A society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”

The sorcerer will always imagine that their apps, search engines, robots and genetically engineered seeds will bring wealth and happiness to all. But, once released into societies divided between wage labourers and owners, these technological marvels will push wages and prices to levels that create low profits for most businesses. It is only big tech, big pharma and the few corporations that command exceptionally large political and economic power over us that truly benefit. If we continue to subscribe to labour contracts between employer and employee, then private property rights will govern and drive capital to inhuman ends. Only by abolishing private ownership of the instruments of mass production and replacing it with a new type of common ownership that works in sync with new technologies, will we lessen inequality and find collective happiness.

According to Marx and Engels’ 13-word theory of history, the current stand-off between worker and owner has always been guaranteed. “Equally inevitable,” the manifesto states, is the bourgeoisie’s “fall and the victory of the proletariat”. So far, history has not fulfilled this prediction, but critics forget that the manifesto, like any worthy piece of propaganda, presents hope in the form of certainty. Just as Lord Nelson rallied his troops before the Battle of Trafalgar by announcing that England “expected” them to do their duty (even if he had grave doubts that they would), the manifesto bestows upon the proletariat the expectation that they will do their duty to themselves, inspiring them to unite and liberate one another from the bonds of wage-slavery.

Will they? On current form, it seems unlikely. But, then again, we had to wait for globalisation to appear in the 1990s before the manifesto’s estimation of capital’s potential could be fully vindicated. Might it not be that the new global, increasingly precarious proletariat needs more time before it can play the historic role the manifesto anticipated? While the jury is still out, Marx and Engels tell us that, if we fear the rhetoric of revolution, or try to distract ourselves from our duty to one another, we will find ourselves caught in a vertiginous spiral in which capital saturates and bleaches the human spirit. The only thing we can be certain of, according to the manifesto, is that unless capital is socialised we are in for dystopic developments.

On the topic of dystopia, the sceptical reader will perk up: what of the manifesto’s own complicity in legitimising authoritarian regimes and steeling the spirit of gulag guards? Instead of responding defensively, pointing out that no one blames Adam Smith for the excesses of Wall Street, or the New Testament for the Spanish Inquisition, we can speculate how the authors of the manifesto might have answered this charge. I believe that, with the benefit of hindsight, Marx and Engels would confess to an important error in their analysis: insufficient reflexivity. This is to say that they failed to give sufficient thought, and kept a judicious silence, over the impact their own analysis would have on the world they were analysing.

The manifesto told a powerful story in uncompromising language, intended to stir readers from their apathy. What Marx and Engels failed to foresee was that powerful, prescriptive texts have a tendency to procure disciples, believers – a priesthood, even – and that this faithful might use the power bestowed upon them by the manifesto to their own advantage. With it, they might abuse other comrades, build their own power base, gain positions of influence, bed impressionable students, take control of the politburo and imprison anyone who resists them.

Similarly, Marx and Engels failed to estimate the impact of their writing on capitalism itself. To the extent that the manifesto helped fashion the Soviet Union, its eastern European satellites, Castro’s Cuba, Tito’s Yugoslavia and several social democratic governments in the west, would these developments not cause a chain reaction that would frustrate the manifesto’s predictions and analysis? After the Russian revolution and then the second world war, the fear of communism forced capitalist regimes to embrace pension schemes, national health services, even the idea of making the rich pay for poor and petit bourgeois students to attend purpose-built liberal universities. Meanwhile, rabid hostility to the Soviet Union stirred up paranoia and created a climate of fear that proved particularly fertile for figures such as Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot.

I believe that Marx and Engels would have regretted not anticipating the manifesto’s impact on the communist parties it foreshadowed. They would be kicking themselves that they overlooked the kind of dialectic they loved to analyse: how workers’ states would become increasingly totalitarian in their response to capitalist state aggression, and how, in their response to the fear of communism, these capitalist states would grow increasingly civilised.
Blessed, of course, are the authors whose errors result from the power of their words. Even more blessed are those whose errors are self-correcting. In our present day, the workers’ states inspired by the manifesto are almost gone, and the communist parties disbanded or in disarray. Liberated from competition with regimes inspired by the manifesto, globalised capitalism is behaving as if it is determined to create a world best explained by the manifesto.

What makes the manifesto truly inspiring today is its recommendation for us in the here and now, in a world where our lives are being constantly shaped by what Marx described in his earlier Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts as “a universal energy which breaks every limit and every bond and posits itself as the only policy, the only universality, the only limit and the only bond”. From Uber drivers and finance ministers to banking executives and the wretchedly poor, we can all be excused for feeling overwhelmed by this “energy”. Capitalism’s reach is so pervasive it can sometimes seem impossible to imagine a world without it. It is only a small step from feelings of impotence to falling victim to the assertion there is no alternative. But, astonishingly (claims the manifesto), it is precisely when we are about to succumb to this idea that alternatives abound.

What we don’t need at this juncture are sermons on the injustice of it all, denunciations of rising inequality or vigils for our vanishing democratic sovereignty. Nor should we stomach desperate acts of regressive escapism: the cry to return to some pre-modern, pre-technological state where we can cling to the bosom of nationalism. What the manifesto promotes in moments of doubt and submission is a clear-headed, objective assessment of capitalism and its ills, seen through the cold, hard light of rationality.

 

Composite: Guardian Design

The manifesto argues that the problem with capitalism is not that it produces too much technology, or that it is unfair. Capitalism’s problem is that it is irrational. Capital’s success at spreading its reach via accumulation for accumulation’s sake is causing human workers to work like machines for a pittance, while the robots are programmed to produce stuff that the workers can no longer afford and the robots do not need. Capital fails to make rational use of the brilliant machines it engenders, condemning whole generations to deprivation, a decrepit environment, underemployment and zero real leisure from the pursuit of employment and general survival. Even capitalists are turned into angst-ridden automatons. They live in permanent fear that unless they commodify their fellow humans, they will cease to be capitalists – joining the desolate ranks of the expanding precariat-proletariat.

If capitalism appears unjust it is because it enslaves everyone, rich and poor, wasting human and natural resources. The same “production line” that pumps out untold wealth also produces deep unhappiness and discontent on an industrial scale. So, our first task – according to the manifesto – is to recognise the tendency of this all-conquering “energy” to undermine itself.

When asked by journalists who or what is the greatest threat to capitalism today, I defy their expectations by answering: capital! Of course, this is an idea I have been plagiarising for decades from the manifesto. Given that it is neither possible nor desirable to annul capitalism’s “energy”, the trick is to help speed up capital’s development (so that it burns up like a meteor rushing through the atmosphere) while, on the other hand, resisting (through rational, collective action) its tendency to steamroller our human spirit. In short, the manifesto’s recommendation is that we push capital to its limits while limiting its consequences and preparing for its socialisation.

We need more robots, better solar panels, instant communication and sophisticated green transport networks. But equally, we need to organise politically to defend the weak, empower the many and prepare the ground for reversing the absurdities of capitalism. In practical terms, this means treating the idea that there is no alternative with the contempt it deserves while rejecting all calls for a “return” to a less modernised existence. There was nothing ethical about life under earlier forms of capitalism. TV shows that massively invest in calculated nostalgia, such as Downton Abbey, should make us glad to live when we do. At the same time, they might also encourage us to floor the accelerator of change.

The manifesto is one of those emotive texts that speak to each of us differently at different times, reflecting our own circumstances. Some years ago, I called myself an erratic, libertarian Marxist and I was roundly disparaged by non-Marxists and Marxists alike. Soon after, I found myself thrust into a political position of some prominence, during a period of intense conflict between the then Greek government and some of capitalism’s most powerful agents. Rereading the manifesto for the purposes of writing this introduction has been a little like inviting the ghosts of Marx and Engels to yell a mixture of censure and support in my ear.

Adults in the Room, my memoir of the time I served as Greece’s finance minister in 2015, tells the story of how the Greek spring was crushed via a combination of brute force (on the part of Greece’s creditors) and a divided front within my own government. It is as honest and accurate as I could make it. Seen from the perspective of the manifesto, however, the true historical agents were confined to cameo appearances or to the role of quasi-passive victims. “Where is the proletariat in your story?” I can almost hear Marx and Engels screaming at me now. “Should they not be the ones confronting capitalism’s most powerful, with you supporting from the sidelines?”

Thankfully, rereading the manifesto has offered some solace too, endorsing my view of it as a liberal text – a libertarian one, even. Where the manifesto lambasts bourgeois-liberal virtues, it does so because of its dedication and even love for them. Liberty happiness, autonomy, individuality, spirituality, self-guided development are ideals that Marx and Engels valued above everything else. If they are angry with the bourgeoisie, it is because the bourgeoisie seeks to deny the majority any opportunity to be free. Given Marx and Engels’ adherence to Hegel’s fantastic idea that no one is free as long as one person is in chains, their quarrel with the bourgeoisie is that they sacrifice everybody’s freedom and individuality on capitalism’s altar of accumulation.

Although Marx and Engels were not anarchists, they loathed the state and its potential to be manipulated by one class to suppress another. At best, they saw it as a necessary evil that would live on in the good, post-capitalist future coordinating a classless society. If this reading of the manifesto holds water, the only way of being a communist is to be a libertarian one. Heeding the manifesto’s call to “Unite!” is in fact inconsistent with becoming card-carrying Stalinists or with seeking to remake the world in the image of now-defunct communist regimes.

When everything is said and done, then, what is the bottom line of the manifesto? And why should anyone, especially young people today, care about history, politics and the like?

Marx and Engels based their manifesto on a touchingly simple answer: authentic human happiness and the genuine freedom that must accompany it. For them, these are the only things that truly matter. Their manifesto does not rely on strict Germanic invocations of duty, or appeals to historic responsibilities to inspire us to act. It does not moralise, or point its finger. Marx and Engels attempted to overcome the fixations of German moral philosophy and capitalist profit motives, with a rational, yet rousing appeal to the very basics of our shared human nature.

Key to their analysis is the ever-expanding chasm between those who produce and those who own the instruments of production. The problematic nexus of capital and waged labour stops us from enjoying our work and our artefacts, and turns employers and workers, rich and poor, into mindless, quivering pawns who are being quick-marched towards a pointless existence by forces beyond our control.

But why do we need politics to deal with this? Isn’t politics stultifying, especially socialist politics, which Oscar Wilde once claimed “takes up too many evenings”? Marx and Engels’ answer is: because we cannot end this idiocy individually; because no market can ever emerge that will produce an antidote to this stupidity. Collective, democratic political action is our only chance for freedom and enjoyment. And for this, the long nights seem a small price to pay.

Humanity may succeed in securing social arrangements that allow for “the free development of each” as the “condition for the free development of all”. But, then again, we may end up in the “common ruin” of nuclear war, environmental disaster or agonising discontent. In our present moment, there are no guarantees. We can turn to the manifesto for inspiration, wisdom and energy but, in the end, what prevails is up to us.

The Nature of Money, Modern Money and Bitcoin

Yanis Varoufakis

Video 2 - Political Economy - The Red Pill in Social Sciences

Richard D. Wolff Lecture on Worker Coops: Theory and Practice of 21st Century Socialism

Am I a socialist?

Zoe Williams in The Guardian


Every day millions of internet users ask Google life’s most difficult questions, big and small. Our writers answer some of the commonest queries

 

‘There is nothing unsocialist – indeed, nothing more socialist – than to have been involved in the miners’ strike.’ Photograph: Steve Eason/Getty Images
 

This question has gained extra piquancy this week, with two investigations – one, Dispatches, undercover and rather underhand – into Momentum, the grassroots organisation that sprang up in support of Jeremy Corbyn. The question put, insistently, is: are Corbyn’s supporters real socialists or hard-left entryists? If we accept that some of them are real socialists, are they having their arms twisted by Trotskyists?

I know from the ferocity of the debate that it will be taken for insincerity when I say this, but nevertheless, I mean it: I find it difficult to identify the concrete principles that separate the acceptable socialist from the unacceptable outrider. Often the criteria are quite loose and temporally free range: you are no longer a socialist if you’ve shared a platform with a revolutionary, or been involved with Stop the War (the jury is still out as to whether going on a Stop the War march counts), or ever espoused anything other than parliamentary democracy, even if it was the 90s and you were drunk.

Proxy issues – usually Trident and Palestine – are used as tests of the boundary between socialism and radicalism, even though neither issue could be rationally situated on the left or right, one being fundamentally a techno-military question of what modern warfare will look like, the other a foreign policy matter in which the supposedly “lefter” side has plenty of support among conservatives. There is nothing unsocialist – indeed, nothing more socialist – than to have been involved in the miners’ strike, yet if it put you in contact with the Alliance for Worker’s Liberty, which it probably did, that made you a communist.

  ‘In the early part of this decade, Ed Miliband called himself a socialist.’ Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images

There is a school of thought that says, just as George Osborne would never call himself a free-market fundamentalist, rather, a man of good sense, so a socialist shouldn’t wrestle too much with self-definition. Yet I have the feeling, in the absence of clarity, of a taboo closing in, so that one day soon we will wake up unable to remember whether socialism is an acceptable position at all, or whether it opens you up for some abstruse historical reason to the accusation of “palling around with terrorists”. 

It is helpful to return to the pre-Corbyn consensus, by which I mean, any time up to last September; how could you describe yourself, before you made Andrew Neil even redder, or Evan Davis’s eyebrows shoot up, or in some other way put yourself beyond the pale of common sense?

You were a socialist if you believed in nationalising industries and/or utilities, if you believed in raising wages through collective pay bargaining rather than post-hoc redistribution, if you cleaved to a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work – a living wage. Free healthcare at the point of use is properly understood as a socialist principle, and is described as such by American commentators, but has never counted because British opinion is united in support of it: a tacit understanding of our politics is that once something has majority support, it ceases to be socialistic – it’s an OK position so long as it remains niche, and it is easier to turn a blind eye to the socialism inherent in a popular position than it is to admit that socialism is often popular.

Likewise, a belief in equality has now reached the status of platitude, with politicians from every party espousing it, whereas in fact, it remains socialist rather than capitalist: only a creed that considers equality an actionable goal, rather than a utopian idea you scramble towards by giving extra nursery hours to insufficiently aspirational toddlers, can realistically claim to believe in it.

In the early part of this decade, Ed Miliband called himself a socialist, without much catcalling.

‘If you wanted to sound like a West Wing leftie you would call yourself a liberal egalitarian.’ Photograph: NBCUPhotobank/Rex Features

Those who wanted to signal their discontinuity with the Blair years, while not sounding too radical, would call themselves democratic socialists – that is, they believed in socialism but were happy to trust a sensible, non-socialist majority to democratically overrule them.

If you wanted to sound like a West Wing leftie – like a British leftie, only better looking, wearing cashmere, more likely to win, and even losing, less likely to be a crank – you would call yourself a liberal egalitarian.

There were questions to which Miliband-style socialism had no answers: it was not against private property, indeed, socialism has never been rigid on this point. So if you saw the growth of a landlord class and the return to a rentier society as the inevitable result of housing being priced as an asset (exchange value) rather than a necessity (use value), that would put you in Marxist territory, whereupon you would have to park a perfectly demonstrable economic theory while you quickly apologised for gulags.

It is fascinating, to me at least, to see a younger generation on the left reclaim “communism” – now in the shape of fully-automated luxury communism, which fuses the aims of egalitarianism with the inevitability of a robotised future. Lefties over 40 will never call themselves communists because the inevitable conversation about whether or not Stalin was evil is just too tedious. It is a glimpse of what it feels like to be seen, if a Muslim, as an apologist for Isis, but only a glimpse.

To get to the fundamental distinctions between socialism and communism, without going via Stalin, Mao and Kim Jong-un, it is useful to return to the source of both terms – Paris in the 1830s – when secret political societies sprang up to finish what the revolution had left undone. These groups were mainly discursive, though occasionally spilled out into street protest, dismissed at the time – this will be familiar – as mainly middle-class intellectuals. It’s a bizarre and, even more bizarrely, effective rightwing accusation: “Your movement is stupid because its proponents are too clever.”

It was often hard to disentangle one belief from the other since the words waxed and waned in popularity, were often used interchangeably, and both believed in revolution. However, very broadly, the socialists wanted central direction of industry but weren’t opposed to markets, while communists wanted to see an end of markets and money, with all endeavour freely chosen and paid for by coupon. Socialists weren’t against private property, though they were in favour of the common ownership of goods, and obviously there’s space in there to quibble about what can and can’t be legitimately held in common.

Communists believed in universal free education, and so did some socialists. There were societies fusing socialism and communism that preached class war, on the basis that the aristocracy was a cancer on the body politic and as dangerous to man as was the tiger to other animals; and thought, furthermore, the aristocracy of money was as bad as the aristocracy of blood.

However, by a process of self-sorting and vigorous infighting, the communists ended up the more trenchant on this killing-enemies point, while socialism by the mid-1800s was shot through with a much softer vision, in which science and the best of humanity would unite to create paradise on Earth through peaceful means. The Comtean Positivist Religion of Humanity, resting on the twin blessings of brotherly love and the natural goodness of mankind, was probably what finally did it for the socialists’ allegiance with the communists, who found them saccharine.

‘Karl Marx would roll in his grave.’ Photograph: Popperfoto

To put that in perspective, even by 1846, the first two items on the agenda of the Communist Correspondence Committee were: “1. An examination must be made of the Communist party. 2. This can be achieved by criticising the incompetent and separating them from the sources of money.” If you know you’re a socialist because it takes a lot of evenings, you know you’re communist when you hate the other people at your meeting worse than the devil (this is no longer the case with fully automated luxury communists, FYI).

Just as a new technological context has allowed a generation to re-imagine communism, so the tectonic movements in democracy, energy, climate, land, finance, money and work throw up questions to which the socialism of the 1830s, 1930s or 1980s could not possibly have the answers. How do you reconnect a socialist party to a grassroots movement in the absence of mass trade union membership? How do you bring energy back into common ownership? Is there any point in nationalising fossil fuels, or is the right to a common stake in a viable future more important? (In that case, only renewables are socialist). How do you arrest the concentration of land into the hands of the few, when it’s moving so fast? Is profit un-socialist by definition, or is it the legitimate result of a good decision, so long as the investment is accessible and pro-social? Indeed, is finance inherently capitalistic or can it be democratised and thereby socialised? (Mark Davis at the Bauman Institute releases a report on this on Thursday).

Come to that, now we understand money as a social resource – a marker of trust between people and institutions, with no innate value – should we socialise its creation? How do you build solidarity that doesn’t rely on work or a workplace? Probably the only solid socialist answer to any of these questions is that it’s within the wit of science and the innate goodness of the species to figure them all out. There are certainly no fixed lines, here, no spaces where a classic socialist could not possibly be flexible to the demands of the future, where a would-be socialist finds him or herself confronted with an idée fixe. Marx would roll in his grave.

You could question the value in using old principles to solve new problems: I would counter that those principles – common ownership, equality, fellowship, innovation, a belief that everyone’s welfare is everyone else’s business and that a better future for the next generation is the sine qua non – are universal and need no updating, for all that they don’t point in one obvious direction.

Finally, you could argue about the wisdom of returning to an old term when it risks derailing the quest for new answers. Yet the stigma around it is lifting. In the 90s and noughties, it was a shorthand for a person who didn’t understand modernity and couldn’t find political energy with a canary and a pit helmet. The fact that it’s being reclaimed, with pride, is probably the beginning of a very short answer: if you can ask, “Am I a socialist?” and not mind getting a “Yes”, then you probably are one, or at the very least, know some.

Marxism Today: the forgotten visionaries whose ideas could save Labour

John Harris in The Guardian


In May 1988, a group of around 20 writers and academics spent a weekend at Wortley Hall, a country house north of Sheffield, loudly debating British politics and the state of the world. All drawn from the political left, by that point they were long used to defeat, chiefly at the hands of Margaret Thatcher. Now, they were set on figuring out not just how to reverse the political tide, but something much more ambitious: in essence, how to leave the 20th century.

Over the previous decade, some of these people had shone light on why Britain had moved so far to the right, and why the left had become so weak. But as one of them later put it, they now wanted to focus on “how society was changing, what globalisation was about – where things were moving in a much, much deeper sense”. The conversations were not always easy; there were raised voices, and sometimes awkward silences. Everything was taped, and voluminous notes were taken. A couple of months on, one of the organisers wrote that proceedings had been “part coherent, part incoherent, exciting and frustrating in just about equal measure”.

What emerged from the debates and discussions was an array of amazingly prescient insights, published in a visionary magazine called Marxism Today. In the early 21st century, that title might look comically old-fashioned, but the people clustered around the magazine anticipated the future we now inhabit, and diagnosed how the left could steer it in a more progressive direction. Soon enough, in fact, some of Marxism Today’s inner circle would bring their insights to the Labour party led by Tony Blair, as advisers and policy specialists. But most of their ideas were lost, thanks partly to the frantic realities of power, but also because in important respects, Blair and Gordon Brown – both of whom had written for the magazine when they were shadow ministers – were more old-fashioned politicians than they liked to think.

At the core of Marxism Today’s most prophetic ideas was a brilliant conception of modern capitalism. In contrast to an increasingly dated vision of a world of mass production and standardisation, the magazine’s writers described the changes wrought by a new reality of small economic units, franchising, outsourcing, self-employment and part-time work – most of it driven by companies and corporations with a global reach – which they called “Post-Fordism”. Computers, they pointed out, were now being built from components produced in diverse locations all over the world; iconic companies had stripped down their focus to sales, strategy and what we would now call branding, outsourcing production to an ever-changing array of third parties. As a result, economies were becoming more fragmented and unpredictable, as the bureaucratic, top-down structures that had defined the first two-thirds of the 20th century were pushed aside.

Politics and society reflected all this tumult. The conversations at Wortley Hall touched on the decline of class politics, new conceptions of identity more complex than the hoary category of “worker”, how an insurgent women’s movement had highlighted huge changes to the fabric of everyday life, the rising importance of green politics, the increasing expectation of personal autonomy – and how seemingly unstoppable forces were weakening the traditional nation state. While the right had turned these changes to its advantage, far too much of the left still lived in a world that was fast disintegrating beneath its feet. As one Marxism Today editorial put it, the Labour party and the trade unions were “profoundly wedded to the past, to 1945, to the old social-democratic order … backward-looking, conservative, bereft of new ideas and out of time”.

Union membership was declining fast. By 1988, Labour had lost its third consecutive election to Thatcher’s Conservatives. The party had moved on from the unapologetic old-school socialism that it had presented to voters in 1983 and painstakingly worked on more modern policies and presentation, but in retrospect, its thinking was still largely built around enduring articles of traditional socialist faith. Labour people still believed that Thatcher’s success amounted to a flimsy con-trick – and it was Labour’s job, as their 1980s leader Neil Kinnock put it in one of his impassioned conference speeches, to “deliver the British people from evil”. The means of doing so still revolved around the big, beneficent, centralised state, the promise of stability and security through paid employment, and the idea that people’s identity could usually be boiled down to their lives as workers.

Three decades later, the impact of the economic and social changes that Marxism Today identified is undeniable – and the politics it prescribed are, if anything, more relevant today than ever before. But apart from a few cosmetic updates, today’s Labour party still essentially clings to the same old shibboleths. Indeed, with the election of Jeremy Corbyn, its collective faith in them looks to have been renewed. Just before the last general election, Corbyn assured one interviewer that his was “a class-based socialist party”; throughout the recent leadership campaign, he extolled the wonders of nationalisation and at one point suggested that some British coal mines might be reopened. Meanwhile, centre-left politics all over Europe remains locked in a deep crisis, sidelined by the dominance of the centre-right, and further unsettled by the rise of new populist and nationalist parties from both ends of the political spectrum. In the delirium of Corbynmania and the arrival of tens of thousands of new members, the cold reality of Labour’s predicament has been somewhat forgotten. At the last election, it won its second-lowest share of the vote since 1983.

In leftist circles today, one frequently hears the argument that the world was changed for ever by the crash of 2008. But a much older point has still to be satisfactorily answered: has the left ever really understood the consequences of the economic and political changes that began to reveal themselves in the 1970s, defined the 1980s, and have been hugely accelerating ever since? On the evidence of his pronouncements over the last 30 years and the messages he dispensed during the leadership campaign, Corbyn does not seem to. Even Blair and Brown, who were at pains to stress their understanding of the late 20th century, failed to convincingly remodel their party’s politics for this new age.

Yanis Varoufakis: How I became an erratic Marxist



This is the case for the continued relevance of a magazine that published its last issue in 1991. As this summer’s Labour leadership election showed, there is a need for a modern, radical politics, more ambitious and forward-looking than either reheated New Labour or a revived hard left. But it is nowhere to be seen – and that absence arguably sits at the heart of the Labour party’s ongoing crisis, and the sense that the left, here and across Europe, is all at sea.
***

For most of its life, Marxism Today – founded in 1957 – described itself as “the theoretical and discussion journal of the Communist party”. But in its peak period – from 1977 to 1990 – it was far from what those words suggested. Though published from inside the belly of the Communist party of Great Britain (CPGB), it spoke to a whole swath of the British left, and particularly the Labour party. Moreover, what it said was not academic and abstract, but vivid and urgent.

These were convulsive times. A run of watershed events began with Thatcher’s first election victory in 1979, and the 1980 arrival in the White House of her ideological soulmate, Ronald Reagan. After austerity and recession, the Falklands war came in 1982, ensuring another Thatcher election win a year later. British coal miners began a year-long strike in 1984 and were defeated in 1985; the printworkers who took on Rupert Murdoch began a similarly doomed struggle in 1986. The same year, the Thatcher government abolished England’s Metropolitan County Councils, and the Greater London Council (GLC), and thereby snuffed out a loud municipal revolt led by Labour politicians; a year on, the Conservatives won a third Westminster term. In 1989 came the most seismic change of all: European Communism breathed its last, and the free-market politics championed by Thatcher and Reagan was proclaimed triumphant.

Such were the birth pangs of a new order, as an innovative kind of accelerated capitalism spread across the planet. In the everyday world, this transformation took the form of a turbocharged consumerism, so that as old certainties collapsed, the world was suddenly painted in deep and dazzling colours. Marxism Today captured the mood: I read it avidly as a politics-obsessed teenager, and in my memory, its bold, brazenly modern covers sit in the same place as the 1980s’ iconic record sleeves.

As Britain and the wider world were transformed, the magazine set out on a journey based on three big ideas. One, the work of the renowned historian and lifelong Communist Eric Hobsbawm, was a clear diagnosis of the crisis that had confronted Labour and the trade unions. Another was a prescient analysis of Thatcherism, a term invented by the Jamaican-British thinker Stuart Hall, and used to describe not just a political project, but its embedding in millions of ordinary lives in the form of basic ideas about common sense and everyday life. When the magazine’s thinkers subsequently came up with what they called the “New Times” project, they wrapped up these previous insights in an all-encompassing analysis of profound changes, running much deeper than politics.

Martin Jacques in 1985, during his time as editor of Marxism Today

By the 1970s, the British Communist party was almost irrelevant as an electoral force, but its senior members included high-ranking trade unionists, and its organisation was partly built around a national network of shop stewards. Its offices in Covent Garden were bugged by MI5; its daily paper, the Morning Star, came out each day, buoyed by a Soviet subsidy in the form of up to 15,000 copies bought each day, and flown out to the USSR. The party’s once-rigid orthodoxies had been shaken by the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 – and the latter episode in particular had galvanised a young generation of Communists intent on pushing their politics somewhere new, in defiance of the pro-Soviet diehards known as “tankies”, in honour of the military vehicles that had rolled into Budapest and Prague. One of these activists was Martin Jacques – a native of Coventry, the son of Communist parents, a graduate of Manchester University, and by 1967, a member of the party’s executive committee.

I met Jacques, now 69, in his mansion-block apartment nudging Hampstead Heath, where we sat in his kitchen, talking over the endless gurgle of a fishtank and drinking green tea. He was preparing for one of his regular trips to China, the global power he analysed and explained in his bestselling 2009 book When China Rules the World, but he happily cast his mind back to the passions that had driven him nearly 50 years ago, when his life was changed by the student militancy that spread across Europe in 1968. In Manchester, he and other students were embracing the more political aspects of the 1960s counterculture – but his perspectives were decisively shifted when he spent a week in and around Prague, two months before the Russians arrived. “I know what I thought then. I can remember it vividly. I basically said: ‘Everything is contingent now, and how things relate to my membership of the CP” – he paused – “I don’t know.”

By the mid-1970s, British Communists of Jacques’s ilk had an increasingly clear sense of who they were. Their big theoretical inspiration was Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist who had died in Mussolini’s jails, and left a political legacy built around the concept of “hegemony” – in essence, the means by which capitalism maintains its dominance through culture, social institutions and the everyday stuff of supposed common sense, all of which would have to be turned around by a politics much more creative and outward-looking than the European left had so far managed. Gramsci’s devotees now looked not to the USSR, but Italy, where the national Communist party was blazing a trail for the open, nuanced and self-consciously “Gramscian” politics increasingly known as Eurocommunism.

In the CPGB, Eurocommunism began to amass momentum and influence, and just before the party congress of 1977, Jacques was approached by the party’s general secretary, Gordon McLennan – a representative of what Jacques characterises as the Communist party’s “centre ground”, whose politics were dutiful and dull, rather than sharply ideological. McLennan had an offer: would Jacques give up his life as an academic at Bristol University, start a new working life at the CP’s offices, and edit Marxism Today? He would be paid the “party wage” of around £8,000 a year, and take his place in a small office partly staffed by volunteers.

Jacques recalled how his new job initially worked. “When I started, there was Doris Allison, who was 82, and like this – ” he walked around the table, bent double – “and she was in charge of subscriptions. There was Minnie Bowles, who was my part-time secretary. She was 75: a very sexy woman of 75. She just had something about her. And there was Margaret Smith, who would put in a day or half-day every week, and she was 65. Effectively, I was on my own. And that was the beginning of a new start.”
***

In three months spread across 1978 and 1979, Marxism Today published the two essays that started to set out a new mission for the British left. The Forward March of Labour Halted? [pdf download] appeared in September 1978. The work of Eric Hobsbawm, then in his mid 60s, it was initially delivered as the Communist party’s annual Marx memorial lecture. By modern standards, it was a somewhat pedestrian read, but its message was clear enough: if the Labour party and wider labour movement had understood themselves to be hopefully trudging onwards and upwards, their progress had long since stalled, as class consciousness had waned and Labour’s support had started to dwindle. There had been a superficial increase in union militancy in the 1970s, but most of it had been about increasing wages rather than heightening class consciousness. “It seems to me,” Hobsbawm wrote, “that we are now seeing a growing division of workers into sections and groups, each pursuing its own economic interest at the expense of the rest.”

The growth of white-collar employment and the mass entry of women into paid work were both part of this fracturing; in 1979, a third of the UK’s trade unionists would vote for Thatcher. “The forward march of labour and the labour movement, which Marx predicted,” Hobsbawm told his readers, “appears to have come to a halt in this country about 25 to 30 years ago.”

The second watershed text that Marxism Today published was a piece titled The Great Moving Right Show [pdf download], written by Stuart Hall, the pioneer of cultural studies who would become Marxism Today’s most insightful thinker, and one of Jacques’s closest friends. Written in the somewhat chewy language of cultural and political theory, it was an analysis of what had been quietly happening to politics – and Britain at large – since the 1960s, and which was now being taken to a new level by Thatcher, despite the fact that she was still keeping her brand of zealously free-market economics somewhat hidden.

Stuart Hall, the pioneer of cultural studies who would become Marxism Today’s most insightful writer and thinker. Photograph: BFI

Hall knew that what the Tories were doing was much more ambitious than simply ramping up orthodox Conservatism: he talked about their new use of a “rich repertoire of anti-collectivism”, which fused with “popular elements in the traditional philosophies and practical ideologies of the dominated classes”. Thatcher and her allies, in other words, were living out Gramsci’s ideas about hegemony, by pursuing their politics on the terrain of common sense: kitchen-table economics, the comforts of self-sufficiency, the necessity of property ownership.

As well as coining the word “Thatcherism” six months before Thatcher had even taken power, he wrote about “the doctrines and discourses of social market values – the restoration of competition and personal responsibility for effort and reward, the image of the over-taxed individual, enervated by welfare coddling, his initiative sapped by handouts by the state”. And he identified something at the heart of Thatcherism that would serve the Tories well for the next four decades: “in the image of the welfare ‘scavenger’,” he said, the new Conservatives had hit upon “a well designed folk-devil”.

Hall and Hobsbawm quickly came to define Marxism Today’s intellectual core. According to their old comrades, they were as different as could be: Hobsbawm an imposing, exacting Communist whose debates with others would evoke “the weight of history”; Hall a more open operator who was never a member of the CPGB (“he did have an ego, but he was very willing to let people speak, and listen – he gave people permission to do their thing”). But in some Communist circles – and beyond, in left-wing academia, the Labour party and the trade unions – the pieces they wrote provoked the same controversy. In the New Left Review, the stentorian Marxist academic Ralph Miliband – the father of two sons who would eventually speed to the top of the Labour party – charged them with retreating into “new revisionism”, and contributing “in no small way to the malaise, confusion, loss of confidence and even despair which have so damagingly affected the left in recent years”.

“Thatcherism was widely rejected when we first came up with the idea,” Jacques told me. “Tony Benn said: ‘Nonsense, it’s just the same old Toryism, but tougher.’ There was that cautious, conservative thinking which was unable to respond to change in the real world.” What he said next applied to what happened in the 80s, but he phrased it in the present tense. “One of the biggest problems is, the Labour party can’t think. And it never really has been able to think, of its own accord.”

Hall called the magazine’s detractors “the pessimists”: people who seemed to think “that we mustn’t rock the boat, or demoralise the already dispersed forces of the left”. He responded to them by quoting an injunction from Gramsci: “to address ourselves ‘violently’ towards the present as it is”.

Morning Star opts for youth by appointing Ben Chacko as editor


Beatrix Campbell was another important voice within MT’s pages. A fiercely clever, ideas-hungry Cumbrian and another child of Communist parents, she had come to London to live in a commune, and met and married a musician and journalist called Bobby Campbell. He was a folk violinist and boxing correspondent for the Morning Star, and he encouraged his wife to work for the paper, first as a subeditor and then a reporter. In 1970, she had her first encounter with the women’s liberation movement, at a meeting in Hackney: “I can see the people in the room as if it was now. Being in a room full of women, which was unprecedented … the allure was awesome.” She and other feminist members of the party started a new feminist journal titled Red Rag; when the CPGB leadership insisted they needed official permission, they carried on regardless.

Having been repelled by the loud sexism of some of the Morning Star’s senior staff, Campbell worked first for the London magazine Time Out, and then City Limits, the co-operatively run challenger founded by former Time Out staff after that magazine was forced to abandon its collective model of working. Thanks to her journalism, she became closely acquainted with the “metropolitan radicalism” Ken Livingstone was exploring at the GLC until the Thatcher government abolished it in 1986, and a strand of Labour politics that obviously intersected with what Marxism Today was saying. The GLC had an Industry and Employment unit, which not only involved itself in some of the capital’s businesses, but tracked the kind of economic changes the magazine was interested in. One MT article captured the way the politics of the GLC had taken root beyond the usual structures of the Labour party, in myriad “community papers, women’s groups, trade-union support units, peace groups, legal advice centres … [and] tenants groups”, and said that the council “has tried to see itself as giving strength to … the innumerable groups from which [its politics] sprung”. As Campbell saw it, “the genius of Livingstone was that he read London brilliantly: he saw that class was only one dimension of being a Londoner who was dispossessed. If you only had a class agenda, you didn’t get it.”

Campbell was recruited as a writer by Jacques, and eventually given her own column, titled Bea-Line (for which, after some negotiation, she was paid). Among her commissions was a March 1987 interview with the infamous Tory minister Edwina Currie: “She was up for anything – looser, more open-minded and more connected to popular culture than a lot of Tories would be. And she was shameless. And the thing that was great about that time was saying, ‘You’ve got to talk to Tories, to find out why they’re thinking what they’re thinking.’ The labour movement didn’t do that.”

There was always a tension in Campbell’s relationship with Marxism Today. “The MT boys were not interested in feminism,” she said. “Martin absolutely never got it … Stuart [Hall] didn’t really get it. Hobsbawm didn’t get it.” Nonetheless, the magazine gave space to feminist writers, and as it exploded leftwing orthodoxies, there was a sense of common ground. “For us, the death of socialism was its sexism – that was a catastrophic part of its history. So there was this funny convergence: we were writing about that, and the way that British Labourism produced a politics dedicated to inequalities, at the same time as Hobsbawm delivered The Forward March of Labour Halted? From a different direction, we were addressing the same problem.” The result, she said, was that “I felt like a Marxism Today person. I was terribly proud to be involved in it. It was so engaged, and restless. And thinking, thinking, thinking.”

Marxism Today contributor Eric Hobsbawm. Photograph: Wesley/Getty Images

Throughout the 1980s, Jacques and his writers carried on unsettling the left, in often delicate circumstances. Tempers were frayed by Marxism Today’s occasional habit of giving space to dissenting voices from the eastern bloc. In 1981, a leading British Communist called Monty Johnstone went to Poland, and came back with not only an interview for Marxism Today with the deputy prime minister, but also a smuggled-out cassette on which he had recorded a conversation with Lech Walesa [pdf download] , the leader of the insurgent Solidarity movement (“I am not a good politician. I am first of all a consumer and I want something to consume,” Walesa said – probably not the most welcome words to Communist ears). Twelve months later, Jacques ran an article by the renowned dissident Roy Medvedev, which triggered a letter from the central committee of the Communist party of the Soviet Union – to the more orthodox high-ups at the British party, the equivalent of an intervention from the headmaster – which, Jacques told me, “complained bitterly about it”.

In the same issue, there was an article that took another candid look at the increasingly troubled predicament of the trade unions, and drew fire from the old-school Communists at the Morning Star, who published a piece calling it “a gross slander on the labour movement”. The ensuing controversy gives a good flavour of the grim comedy of 1980s Communist politics: motions decrying Marxism Today were passed by the party’s London district secretariat and East Midlands district committee; the Action Rail trade union ranch complained about “the latest outrage to our class”.

Jacques believes the stink was kicked up at the behest of the Russians. “I think these guys were in cahoots with the Soviets. And for me, that was the beginning of the end. I thought: ‘The CP has had it.’” Soon after, in fact, the Morning Star was effectively captured by his adversaries, moved out of the Communist party’s control, and confirmed for keeps as the voice of a staunchly traditionalist, hard-left, union-based position (which – against not inconsiderable odds – it retains to this day).

Amid these factional battles, Jacques managed to remain focused on the magazine to which he was devoting most of his waking hours. Almost none of Marxism Today’s writers were paid, but he insisted that most pieces were rewritten two or three times – though if that seemed unnecessarily arduous, he could always point to the travails of his own existence. “Basically, my life was lived in a state of permanent emergency. That was what I felt like. It was like camping. No money, working all the hours god sends. I got ill on several occasions. ME-type illness. The first time was ’83, the second time was ’85. The worst was ’87. I was knocked out for a lot of ’87. I was in a state of total exhaustion. Money can buy you a weekend away, or a quick holiday, or a bit of fun, and we didn’t have any. And then there were all these incessant attacks. At the core of it all, there was this total devotion to creating a great magazine, and getting the best writers, and getting the most interesting ideas. That was my life.”

Julian Turner was a Cambridge graduate and CP member who was briefly Marxism Today’s production editor, before he became its business manager, at the new Communist party offices near Smithfield market in London. “It felt very exciting,” he told me. “It was a little island of youth in the CP building. There were about a dozen people permanently there, but that would expand to many more when we needed envelopes to be stuffed, or the magazine to be sent out, or whatever. Then you’d have this army – I don’t want to make out that our motives were anything other than intellectual and political, but usually extremely attractive people would arrive, and end up socialising afterwards, which was definitely part of the attraction.”

“Everybody that was employed on the magazine was on the party wage. The party wage was the same for everybody. It was £8,600 when I started. I think it went up to £9,800 – that may have been the peak. One of the formative experiences of my life was standing up in front of the party congress, and asking them to let me pay the advertising staff commission. How did that fit into their utopia? I had to explain why it was an equitable idea, and why it was pragmatic, and worth doing. We got that through.

“I think a lot of people at the magazine had very mixed feelings about Marxism Today,” he went on, “because they were able to develop themselves professionally to a very high standard, and they grew a lot of their skills. But it was very exploitative, I think. Martin is quite unforgiving: he’s not an easy person to work with. I would spend some time repairing the human damage that was wrought by pursuing a quality standard that we all believed in, but struggled to stick to. We had a lot of people who over-committed; who felt that the demands made on them were unreasonable.”

Suzanne Moore, the Guardian columnist whose journalistic career decisively began when she edited the back section of the magazine, which she renamed “Culture”, echoed these memories when we met in a pub near her north London home. “It was Martin’s magazine, and there wasn’t a word in it that didn’t go through him,” she told me, as she recalled long days spent at MT’s office. “He would phone me up at 4am. It was not a normal job. Because it wasn’t a job to him. It was a way of life.” She lasted six months as a member of staff, before she simply stopped going into the office, and even then was confronted with Jacques’ exacting approach to people-management. “He’d come round to my house on his bike and try and get me out of bed.”
***

By 1988, Marxism Today was attracting huge attention and selling around 20,000 copies a month, partly thanks to the fact that it was stocked by WH Smith. To some extent, it had turned itself into what Jacques called “the intellectual forum for the Labour party – I didn’t approach it like that, but that’s what it became”. A handful of senior Labour figures – Bryan Gould, a former academic who served as Neil Kinnock’s shadow industry secretary and in-house intellectual, was the best example – made a point of appearing on its pages, and the impression that Kinnock was busy modernising the party was boosted by the energy and attention Marxism Today had generated, as well as sympathetic coverage in its pages (in October 1984, one MT cover had simply featured a Kinnock headshot and the words “the face of Labour’s future”).

‘It wasn’t a normal job’ … former Marxism Today writer and current Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

As the magazine’s success increased, there was talk about changing its title. “It was a problem,” Jacques told me. “But, you know, changing the name is quite tricky. And it became a joke: ‘Marxism Today? The only Marxism is in the title.’ Very early on, one of the designers said to me, ‘Why don’t you slowly reduce the size of ‘Marxism’, and increase the size of ‘Today’?” The arrival of the Today newspaper in 1986 killed that suggestion. “Another idea was to call it ‘MT’, but there was another magazine called Marketing Today.”

An altogether bigger concern was to do with the magazine’s momentum. “By this point, I thought we’d run out of steam a bit, really.” Jacques told me. “We were influential, but I thought we needed a fresh impulse. And there had to be fruit on the trees: we needed some new writers.”

So it was that in May 1988, Jacques convened the seminar at Wortley Hall, a sumptuous mansion owned by a collective of trade unions. Among the people who took part were Hobsbawm, Hall, Campbell, and Moore (“I said: ‘Oh, that’s nice – a weekend away in a country house’. They said: ‘It’ll be £180 each’”). Also in attendance were two twentysomethings who were new to the magazine. Charles Leadbeater was a one-time researcher on the ITV current affairs programme Weekend World – where he had worked alongside Peter Mandelson – who had then moved to the Financial Times, and begun enthusiastically writing for Marxism Today, as well as joining the CP. “I said to Martin, ‘How do you get involved in Marxism Today?’” Leadbeater recalled. “He said: ‘Well, you really have to join the Communist party. And I thought: ‘Sod it. Alright, I will.’” Alongside Leadbeater sat Geoff Mulgan – not a CP member, but another new discovery who had begun his post-Oxford career at Livingtone’s GLC, before completing a PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he shared the company of people working on the nascent internet. He would soon start work as an adviser to Gordon Brown.

The weekend’s conversations were sometimes difficult. When Leadbeater presented a paper about the modern expectation of choice and the need for the left to understand individualism, Hobsbawm seemed scandalised. “I went for a walk,” Leadbeater told me, “and after lunch, Eric came back and said: ‘It’s good to come to places like this and have debates, but I think we went a bit far this morning.’” Beatrix Campbell also recalls clashing with Hobsbawm thanks to what she saw as his antediluvian attitude to the women’s movement: “He was terrible on feminism. Awful … he was the kind of person who … will make you feel crap.”

The discussions led to a special issue titled New Times, published that October. “The uptake was fantastic,” Jacques told me. “There were articles in newspapers about it. Extracts were published. This was a major point of departure.” The central idea was “post-Fordism”, a term that captured western societies’ transition from what an opening editorial characterised as “mass production, the mass consumer, the big city, big brother state, the sprawling housing estate, and the nation state” to a new reality of “flexibility, diversity, differentiation, [and] decentralization”.

The term “Fordism” – a reference to that 20th-century kingpin Henry Ford – came from Gramsci, but the concept had been updated in 1970s by a group of French Marxist economists known as the Regulation School. In its British incarnation, the idea of post-Fordism was the work of an economist called Robin Murray – another thinker who had cut his teeth in the tumult of 1968, and who based his thinking in the real world, rather than theoretical abstractions.

Murray had played a key role at Livingstone’s GLC, where he worked as the grandly titled director of industry, and set up the Greater London Enterprise Board, aimed at giving the council an active role in the capital’s economy. At first, he and his colleagues had decided only to work with companies larger than a minimum size, thinking that Thatcherism’s fetishisation of small business was something to oppose. But when they took control of a bankrupt furniture factory in the Lea Valley that had 1,000 workers, they discovered it was being trounced by competitors in Italy – whose businesses were far smaller, did not have huge production lines and often worked co-operatively.

This realisation led them to immerse themselves in a new world of so-called flexible specialisation, and industries increasingly organised along much more agile, fast-moving lines, not least in retailing. When they worked with people from London’s music industry, the upshot was even more obvious: even if Fordism still defined large swaths of the world, in the late-20th century’s leading economies, Henry Ford’s world of vast production lines and standardisation – which had arguably been tested to destruction in the Soviet Union – was clearly on its way out, and this conclusion had huge implications for politics. “The forms of organisation – the Labour party, the trade unions, all these things – had all been formed around the same model as the corporate innovations we’d had in the early part of the century,” Murray told me. “It was all Fordist. So another theme was a critique of those structures, and how you could have much more open, democratic forms.”

Today, Geoff Mulgan – who was a protege of Murray at the GLC – calls his old mentor “the great unrecognised prophet of Britain. People like Hall and Hobsbawm are famous, but in many ways, Robin better understood where the world was going.” Now 75, Murray still brims with enthusiasm and insight: when we spent two hours together in a cafe next to the London School of Economics, he talked with infectious passion not just about the work he did for Marxism Today and the GLC, but his trailblazing efforts in what we now know as fair trade, and the nitty-gritty of environmentalism.

With Jacques’ help, Murray poured his thoughts into an article titled Life After Henry (Ford). As well as the economics of post-Fordism, he wrote about its political manifestations: not least, a new politics of consumption, rather than production (“the effects of food additives … the air we breathe and surroundings we live in, the availability of childcare and community centres, or access to privatised city centres”). He talked about what we would now call the “work-life balance”. He emphasised the need for decentralised public services and structures of government. He pointed out that post-Fordism was widening the gap between the job market’s winners and losers, and that any future Labour government would have to “put a floor under the labour market, and remove the discriminations faced by the low-paid” (it would be another decade before the introduction of a British minimum wage). And he asked profoundly difficult questions to people still attached to the idea of jobs-for-life and the postwar settlement: “How real is a policy of full employment when the speed of technical change destroys jobs as rapidly as growth creates them?”

This was one of the best texts the magazine ever published. Murray had drafted it while on holiday in the Lake District, sporadically discussing it on the phone with Jacques and receiving requests for rewrites via the postman. “We had three weeks away,” he told me. “And I spent the whole time working on it. On the way back, we broke down. The AA had to come. It was two in the morning. And my wife has a picture of me at some service station, sitting on a suitcase, correcting this document.”
***

In late 1989, as communist Europe underwent a series of largely peaceful revolutions, the “tankies” were in abeyance, and the politics of Marxism Today dominated what remained of the CPGB, whose membership was now down to around 7,500. A new party mission statement, titled Manifesto for New Times, was being put together. Here were the ideas of New Times – indeed, the whole project pursued by MT over the previous 12 years – in the form of programmatic politics. The manifesto made the case for proportional representation, a written constitution, a strong emphasis on environmental sustainability, the possibility of an English parliament, a guaranteed citizens’ income, “the potential of information technology to decentralise and strengthen local control”, and the writing-off of developing-world debt – and had a prophetic view of Scotland, where “a new confidence” and “aspiration for self-determination” were emerging.

Jacques explained these ideas as the keynote speaker at the party’s annual congress, but by that point, it was clear that the CPGB was expiring, at speed. As Campbell put it, the new dominance of Marxism Today thinking in the party represented “a triumph over a corpse”. With its characteristic chutzpah, MT commemorated the end of European communism with a cover featuring an iconic portrait of Marx splattered with eggs and tomatoes. And it carried on for another two years, soon negotiating its financial independence from the party.

Having run a brief piece by Gordon Brown [pdf download] about the New Times agenda in late 1989, it then carried an article by the Labour party’s shadow employment spokesman, one Tony Blair. “He rang me one day,” Jacques told me. “He said, ‘I’d like to write for Marxism Today – would that be possible?’ I worked on what he wrote with him; it went through several drafts. What’s the lightest boxing division? Featherweight. It was lighter than that.”

Blair’s piece appeared in October 1991, titled Forging a New Agenda. It suggested he had done a speed-reading of the Marxism Today canon, and then regurgitated it in the form of political nothings: “The notion of a modern view of society as the driving force behind the freedom of the individual is in truth the implicit governing philosophy of today’s Labour party.” In retrospect, it also suggested the magazine was running out of momentum.

  ‘I was exhausted. I’d been worn out by it, and as wonderful as it was, I was feeling trapped’ … Martin Jacques (pictured in 2008). Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian

Two months later, just as the Soviet Union ceased to exist and the CPGB wound itself up, Marxism Today published its last issue. Apart from anything else, Jacques told me, it was finished off by the leaden weight of its associations with communism. “After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the atmosphere was very triumphalist, and if you’d been associated in any way with the 1917 project, or Marxism, you were dead. It was very difficult to escape that. But also, I just wanted to stop. I was exhausted. I’d been worn out by it, and as wonderful as it was, I was feeling trapped.”

There was one last weird twist: in November 1991, the Sunday Times discovered old Soviet papers which revealed that, contrary to its leaders’ claims that the CPGB had struggled through the 1970s with no help from the USSR, at least two secret payments had been made to the party’s former assistant general secretary,Reuben Falber, who had kept some of the money in the loft of his bungalow in Golders Green. Jacques says he instantly resigned his membership; Campbell is not sure there was any party left to leave by this point. “I’d been assured that that in my political lifetime, we’d never taken any money,” said Jacques. “For me, it was an act of betrayal.”

“I still remember the moment when Martin rang me,” Campbell told me. “He said: ‘Are you sitting down?’ And then he told me. It was a scalding shock. Because our raison d’etre in the Communist party was that something in this revolutionary project could be redeemed. And the discovery of this sordid distribution of Soviet money … what it revealed was that what we had tried to do in the 70s and 80s had all been impossible. There’s no way we could have been allowed to win.”

Thatcher had been toppled by a Tory revolt in 1990, but the Labour party went on to lose its fourth consecutive general election in April 1992. Meanwhile, Jacques and Turner spent a year working on a possible successor to Marxism Today. It was to be a monthly magazine with an international focus; the working title was Politics, but it came to nothing. Jacques then helped Geoff Mulgan set up Demos, the thinktank that would attach itself to New Labour and supply it with no end of policy ideas. After a spell spent writing for the Sunday Times, Jacques then became deputy editor of the Independent between 1994 and 1996.

When Tony Blair became the leader of the Labour party in 1994, Jacques initially dispensed warm words. But three weeks before Labour’s great victory at the 1997 election, he and Hall announced in a piece for the Observer that, before the party had even taken power, it had been pushed in completely the wrong direction. “Blair embodies the ultimate pessimism – that there is only one version of modernity, the one elaborated by the Conservatives over the last 18 years,” they wrote. “He represents an historic defeat for the left, the abandonment of any serious notion that the left has something distinctive to offer.” The whole point of New Times, as they saw it, was to understand the new world and then set about challenging its injustices with a fresh kind of left politics. New Labour had attempted the first part, but replaced the second with a doctrine of surrender.

The seeds of this swingeing take had actually been planted nine years earlier – when Hall and Jacques warned in 1988 of the danger that Labour would “produce, in government, a brand of New Times which in practice does not amount to much more than a slightly cleaned-up, humanised version of … the radical right”. All this came to a head in November 1998, when Marxism Today returned with a one-off issue on “the Blair project”, preceded by another two-day seminar. The old typefaces and in-jokes returned; on the cover was a photograph of Tony Blair, and the word “Wrong”.

Marxism Today’s one-off return in 1998. Photograph: Amiel Melburn Trust

Marxism Today had floated policy ideas that New Labour had taken up. Blair and Brown had written for the magazine, and were now being advised by ex-Marxism Today writers. But its writers and thinkers now wanted to kill the idea that the magazine had anything in common what the government was up to. Citing the Asian financial crisis that had begun in 1997, Hobsbawm perhaps got a little ahead of himself, and wrote a piece charging Blair and Brown with “not recognising that the age of neoliberalism is over”. And in a long essay titled The Great Moving Nowhere Show, Hall harked back to the magazine’s peak, arguing that while Blair had touched “the modernising part” of Marxism Today’s ideas, he was “framed by and moving on terrain defined by Thatcherism”.

Mulgan had gone from Demos to a job as the head of Blair’s Downing Street policy unit. He also attended the MT seminar on Blair – and wrote an irate piece published in the one-off issue. “I was really annoyed with them all,” he said. “I thought they were deeply indulgent, and in their comfort zones: tenured academics, pontificating from on high.” At this point, he fell out with Jacques. “I haven’t seen him for years. He thought I’d betrayed him.”

All that apart, Mulgan is now candid about the gap between what people like him had envisaged and what Labour actually did with power. The first article he had written for Marxism Today – published in December 1988 – was titled The Power of the Weak. “Governments,” it said, “remain quintessentially strong power structures, devising policies and programmes at the top and passing them down to through a hierarchical bureaucracy to the people at the bottom.” When we met earlier this month atNesta – the gleamingly futuristic “innovation charity” he runs in London – he agreed that New Labour’s record turned out to be a case in point. “There was the Mandelson view of what a party should be, which was very centralised and top-down: Leninism plus Saatchi-and-Saatchi advertising. One of the things we failed to do was to get a really active debate going about the shape and nature of the state. Tony Blair’s instinct was more, ‘Get some levers and pull them from the top.’”

“One of the dynamics of New Labour was, ‘You’ve got to change, because the world’s changing. If you don’t do it, you’re going to be out of a job,’” said Leadbeater, who worked as a government adviser in the early New Labour period, assisting Mandelson at the Department of Trade and Industry, and writing speeches for Blair. “They used that to get change in the party. But that was combined with two things. One was a notion of branding, and discipline. But also, there was something that developed in the first term.” This, he said, was a mixture of modern management consultancy and “the Brownite big state”, and it amounted to “super-Fordism … very mechanistic, and about setting targets. It didn’t become a bigger story about Britain. It was about delivery.”

“I remember going to an awayday with Blair and his policy team at Chequers, about two years in,” Leadbeater told me, “and saying, ‘The state can’t solve everything. If you think social goods are going to be represented by state spending, you can’t work that way now. You have to imagine how people can create social solutions in a different kind of way, with a different kind of state.’ They were interested. But actually, if you’re there in the middle of government, it becomes about pulling all these levers.”

He then turned his thoughts to more recent developments. “What if when Blair left office, you’d had a new generation of politicians who were capable of taking it all to a different kind of place: reasserting ethical values, being modern, but also embracing a more participative, open, decentralising kind of politics? Why wouldn’t that have been possible?” His face darkened, and he answered his own question. “It wouldn’t have been possible within the New Labour framework … and all that younger generation” – a reference to politicians such as the Miliband brothers, Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham – “were schooled in that way of thinking”.
***

I met Leadbeater in an elegantly shabby cafe on Highbury Corner in Islington, north London, where we spent 90 minutes considering the Marxism Today legacy, and the real-life politics he now saw echoing the ideas MT had explored. “I see it in cities: in London, Manchester, Leeds,” he told me. “I see it in social media politics; in that huge response to the refugee crisis. I see it in the wave of people who want to be social entrepreneurs, and the soul-searching of lots of people involved in capitalism who think it’s in crisis. I see it all over the place. Just not in the Labour party.”

The Corbyn earthquake – how Labour was shaken to its foundations

 A few days later, he sent me an email containing an off-the-cuff text he had written about the rise of Jeremy Corbyn. “At first sight, it might seem strange to think that a politician who has not changed his views since the late 1970s might be an innovator,” Leadbeater wrote. “Yet that is what Jeremy Corbyn has managed to become while appearing blissfully – and, to some, charmingly – uninquisitive about the changing world around him.” He went on: “Corbyn has created what Roberto Unger, the Brazilian political philosopher, calls a ‘high-energy’ politics – tumultuous, passionate, participative, dynamic, unfolding … It’s just possible that some of what Corbyn and his young team might try – open-sourcing questions for PMQs, involving the party in constant rolling debate – might work by being more participative than old-style politics … So the lesson in all of this is perhaps above all not to be sniffy, not to turn our noses up and not to make assumptions, but to learn, and fast, about what Corbyn, the unlikely innovator, is telling us about the world.”

Other Marxism Today alumni were pessimistic. One pointed out that, as a Haringey borough councillor and then London MP, Corbyn – a regular contributor to the Morning Star – was party to the leftwing tumult in the capital that blurred into Marxism Today and the GLC. The new shadow chancellor John McDonnell, indeed, served as the GLC’s deputy leader. But, they said, “the good bits of the GLC were essentially ’68 politics. And the weird thing about McDonnell and Corbyn is that they were almost pre-that: culturally untouched by the 1960s.”

“If Corbyn was a woman of 35 or 40, we’d be in business,” Robin Murray told me. “But he’s missing 100 tricks. I wish he’d speak about the future, not the past.” He gestured at the copies of Marxism Today I’d brought with me. “And I wish he’d take things out of all this. I suppose my hope is that he listens to young people, because he believes in democracy.”

“Corbyn is, in a way, a throwback,” Jacques told me. “But his message seems more relevant than it did then.” For a moment, I got a sense of what it would have been like in one of those Marxism Today seminars, throwing around ideas and arguing for the fun of it – as Campbell put it, thinking, thinking, thinking. “You can’t just extrapolate from the past and think in straight lines: that’s what I learned from Gramsci,” Jacques said. “I thought the Labour party was dying, and I don’t think that’s true now. In some measure, it’s being revived.

“There are ironies there, but I quite like them,” said the man who mapped out the future from inside the doomed British Communist party. “It shows you we’re in a new period.”