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Karl Marx and Capitalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2024

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The propaganda of intellectual Marxism in England is the chief concern of this article. All Marxism is intellectual in the sense of being strictly doctrinal, not sentimental, though it may exploit sentiment; and not merely ‘practical’ in the sense of valuing immediate ameliorations regardless of their relation to a general scheme and a final goal. The Communist Party of Great Britain, recruited though its membership is mainly from very unintellectual unemployed, is extraordinarily doctrinaire in its attitude to the matters on which it has to frame practical policies. This is as evident from the Daily Worker written for the crowd, as from the Labour Monthly, which aims to be philosophical. These two publications officially represent the C.P.G.B. and the Third International, and their Marxian orthodoxy must be taken to be indisputable. The National Council of Labour Colleges is also professedly Marxist, its educational reach is probably wider than that of the official Communist organizations, and if we consider it, as we justly may, as a continuation of the defunct Central Labour College, founded before the War, it is older than the C.P.G.B. and the Third International. It would be absurd for an outsider to attempt to adjudicate on disputed questions of Marxian orthodoxy, yet it can be said that the National Council of Labour Colleges, related as it is to the Labour Party and the trade unions, is not so exclusively Marxist as those bodies that frankly accept the leadership of Moscow.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1934 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Nicholson, The Revvzul of Marxism, p. 13.

2 Ibid., p. 4.

3 Dobb, On Marxism To-day, p. 40.

4 English translation, Swan Sonnenschein edition.

5 Capital, Vol,. I, pp. 144-5.

6 Lindsay, Karl Marx, p. 47.

7 Dobb, On Marxism To-day, p. 24.

8 Lindsay, Karl Marx, p. 47.