Marx for the 21st Century

I’m lucky enough to get to a fair few academic gatherings, with prestigious speakers, panels and intelligent audiences. Eric Hobsbawn and Jaques Attali at Jewish Book Week, surpassed pretty much anything – and that’s before I get on to the speakers. I mean the audience was amazing – every question seemed to be prefaced by “I’m a Czech PhD student focussing on Marxist dialectic reasoning between 1862 and 1874” or “I’m general secretary of the French Trotskyite Party” and then each question itself was an eloquently crafted, insightful and challenging and delivered (it seemed) with the continental European lilt which always seems more appropriate for discussing Marxism than “North Londonese”. In fact it seemed as though we were nearly through the questions before the locals braved the intellectual cut and thrust of the q & a; it was en extraordinary advert for the diversity and intellectual calibre of the audiences that JBW attracts.

The main event was pretty good to. Why is Marx important? What is the role of Marx in the 21st century, what tools does he give us to help understand the world, where he see us ending up and what would he hope for? Eric Hobsbawn – one of the great historians of the 20th century – and Jaques Attali – a thinker, politician, activist of astonishing breadth – reflected on some of these questions.

Both thought the world today looks a lot like what was predicted by Marx in 1848 – Hobsbawn called it ‘uncanny’ (a strange choice of adjective for an eminent historian let alone an eminent Marxist historian) Of course its not uncanny – the nature of national and global economies has changed but the division between rich and poor and the inequalities of income distribution remain extremely wide. As Attali pointed out, 3 billion people in the world today live on under $2 per day.

Both were at pains to point out that the Marxist regimes that we have seen in the 20th century did not represent the vision of Marx. Attali argued that Marx was totally against the idea of socialism in one country and capitalism in others and saw capitalism and as a necessary step for the global economy before socialism could be reached – “Socialism is…beyond capitalism not instead of it”. Secondly Marx always argued that two principles are absolutely vital in a society – freedom of press and freedom of justice – obviously characteristics not found in Marxist societies.

On the future pessimism was rife – both saw a calamitous 21st century ahead, maybe with some good at the other end. Attali replied to a question as to whether he saw catastrophe ahead as much as Hobsbawn, saying “the most probable is yes because we have never seen in mankind the birth of something new without the death of something old”, which is an profound way of saying that you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs.


Jason Strelitz