Johnson claims Jeremy Corbyn is a Marxist. What would Marx have said?
Tory leadership contender Johnson in a speech at Exeter has suggested that Jeremy Corbyn is “the leader of a cabal of superannuated Marxists”.
Johnson doesn’t usually know what he is talking about. Is this any different?
I’ve known the Labour leader for the best part of 40 years and while I can plausibly claim to be a Marxist (the Guardian have described me as such after all) I’m not sure it would be uppermost in how the Labour leader sees himself. Socialist and beard wearer might be closer. As with Tony Benn he understands the importance of Marx but he is possibly not the go to person to explain the complexities of the Marxist dialectic (see T A Jackson’s classic volume for that).
I might as a Marxist describe Jeremy Corbyn as a left-wing social democrat. It’s not an insult but at base it covers the point that he places a good deal more emphasis on change coming through Parliament than most Marxists would (after all he has been a Labour MP since 1983). That doesn’t mean that Parliamentary activity is not important but rather that there is also a range of other ways of achieving change in society not least by what is often called now ‘people power’. Of course Corbyn wouldn’t disagree, it’s a matter of emphasis.
In not being a Marxist Jeremy is however in good company, that of Marx himself. The great beard wearer towards the end of his life disagreed with the emphasis on reforms in the 1880 programme of the French Socialists. He believed that the fight for reforms was a genuine one not just a way of popularising the alternative of revolution.
He declared: “ce qu’il y a de certain c’est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste” (“what is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist”).
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm
On that basis perhaps Jeremy Corbyn could claim to be a follower of Marx but not a Marxist. Don’t expect Boris Johnson to comprehend the difference
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