"Walk into Highgate cemetery, where a nineteenth-century Marx and Spencer – Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer – are buried, curiously enough within sight of each other’s grave. When both were alive, Herbert was the acknowledged Aristotle of the age, Karl a guy who lived on the lower slopes of Hampstead on his friend’s money. Today nobody even knows Spencer is there, while elderly pilgrims from Japan and India visit Karl Marx’s grave and exiled Iranian and Iraqi communists insist on being buried in his shade. The era of communist regimes and mass communist parties came to an end with the fall of the USSR, for even where they survive, as in China and in India, in practice they have abandoned the old project of Leninist Marxism. And when it did,Karl Marx found himself once again in no-man’s land. Communism had claimed to be his only true heir, and his ideas had been largely identified with it. For even the dissident Marxist or Marxist-Leninist tendencies that established a few footholds here and there after Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956 were almost certainly ex-communist breakaways. So, for most of the first twenty years after the centenary of his death, he became strictly yesterday’s man and no longer worth bothering about. Some journalist has even suggested that this discussion tonight is trying to rescue him from ‘the dustbins of history’. Yet today Marx is, once again, very much a thinker for the twenty-first century. I don’t think too much should be made of a BBC poll that showed British radio listeners voting him the greatest of all philosophers, but if you type his name into Google he remains the largest of the great intellectual presences, exceeded only by Darwin and Einstein, but well ahead of Adam Smith and Freud." [page 4-5: How to Change the World-Reflections on Marx and Marxism : Eric_Hobsbawm ]
Posted on: Sun, 21 Jul 2013 12:33:58 +0000
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