[Peace-discuss] He who must not be named

[C. G. Estabrook]

     "Up! up! my friend, and quit your books;
     Or surely you'll grow double:
     Up! up! my friend, and clear your looks;
     Why all this toil and trouble?"

[The people who do our thinking for us (they're mostly on television) know that
there's nothing to be gained from old (pre-2001) books, so never mention them.
But here some peculiar academics talk about the current crisis with reference to
a largely-forgotten Victorian Aristotelian.  --CGE]


Martin Jacques: Visiting professor at Renmin University, Beijing; edited Marxism
Today from 1977 until 1991

This crisis shows that capitalism is not only a dynamic system, but one that is
inherently prone to crisis. In that sense, Marx was, and is, right. During each
period of economic growth and prosperity ... this is forgotten, amid boasts that
boom and bust have been banished for ever. This crisis has once more confounded
such boasts. But it is not only Marx who has been validated by this crisis, but
Keynes, too. For 30 years we've been told that the market always knows best and
that the government is at best a necessary evil. In this crisis we see that the
market can result in huge distortions with calamitous results; and that only the
government is big enough and legitimate enough - as the representative of all
the people - to intervene and sort the mess out. It marks the end of the
neo-liberal era and the return of social democracy.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm: Marxist historian

The interest in Marx seems a vindication, as his analysis of capitalism put its
finger on globalisation and periodic crises and instabilities. Over the past few
decades people thought the market would sort everything out, which seemed to me
a statement of theology [hardly fair to theology --CGE] rather than reality.
It's good that people are taking this kind of analysis more seriously than they
have for a long time because it breaks with the conventional analysis that has
dominated most governments and a lot of ideologies over the years. It's fun to
discover that what one has been saying for a long time, and others have been
pooh-poohing, is being taken seriously. But that isn't the important thing; that
is to recognise that a phase of this particular world system has passed and we
must think of another one. It will take a long time for it to settle down, but
there is no way we're going back to where we were in the 1980s and 1990s, and
that's a good thing.

Frank Furedi: Professor of sociology, Kent University, founder of the British
Revolutionary Communist Party in the 1970s (disbanded in 1998)

Marx's fundamental insight into the transient character of society's
arrangements has been pretty well demonstrated by recent events and the shifting
contours of European history. In many respects what he saw was the co-existence
of powerful destructive forces with powerful constructive forces within the
capitalist system. But one must remember that he's a 19th-century thinker who,
along with other important thinkers - Adam Smith among them - provided important
signposts on understanding our society. They're of limited use in the capacity
to find your own way in the world, and younger generations must rethink problems
for themselves. The danger is that people such as Marx provide answers to the
questions that we're all asking, but we shouldn't begin with the answers: we
must begin with the right questions.

Mick Hume: The Times's libertarian Marxist columnist, launched and edited Living
Marxism magazine 20 years ago

Marx was right to identify and analyse the tendency towards crises within
capitalism, but he did not predict the system's “inevitable” collapse. Today too
many people who have never read or understood Marx are trying to turn him into
an anti-capitalist Nostradamus who supposedly predicted it all, a soothsayer
rather than revolutionary social scientist. Marx always emphasised that the
resolution of a crisis would ultimately depend on political factors: that man
makes his own history, although not in circumstances of his own choosing. It is
still the case that there is no alternative, no political contestation about the
future of society. Instead, whether from rightwing Republicans in the US or
Labour [in the UK], we just have state-run managerial politics aiming to
preserve as much of the status quo as possible. The rest of us are reduced to
passive spectators rather than active political agents. Marx would not be
laughing in his grave or dancing on anybody else's as some suggest. If anything
I think he'd a be a bit depressed about missed opportunities. And anybody who
takes pleasure in human misery is an idiot.

John McDonnell: MP for Hayes and Harlington

Das Kapital and Wages, Prices and Profit should be issued to all government
ministers as the definitive guides to the causes of capitalism in crisis; they
will give them an understanding of the inherent exploitative nature and
instability of an economic system that is putting thousands of people on the
dole queue each month and making many homeless. I'd suggest that they then read
Robert Owen's work on co-operatives, Antonio Gramsci's prison writings on
winning the battle of ideas, Ernest Mandel's Late Capitalism and Ralph
Miliband's Socialism for a Sceptical Age.

Claire Fox: Director of the Institute of Ideas

I'm worried about this gleeful pseudo-Marxist critique of the system; there's a
vulgarisation of Marxism going on. It isn't some kind of religion in which you
have divine retribution, with bankers now on the receiving end. People seem to
be refusing to acknowledge that this means a period of enforced austerity for
ordinary people. Owning your house is not a sign of psychological flaw; it could
be deemed aspirational. Marx's most profound statement was about the role of
human agency in change. Society can't change unless you have a clear idea of
politics and ideas, and that requires people to see themselves as
history-makers, to be actively participating, not to be in a period of political
disengagement. So the new interest confirms a passivity in a way, and the idea
of dinner-party Schadenfreude is really sick.

<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article4981065.ece>