ANALYZING THE Italian municipal elections in the spring of 1999, longtime Italian political analyst Ernesto Galli della Loggia explained in the Milanese daily Corriere della Sera that voters were defying journalistic expectations. The working class was not voting for the Left in the numbers that had been predicted, whereas the Communists and other leftist parties were attracting a constituency consisting of gay, ecological, multicultural, and feminist activists and, more generally, of unmarried professionals.We are led to conclude that both “unconventional lifestyles” and distaste for an older European morality were characteristic of the changing Italian Left.
Is there such a thing as human nature? In Marxism and Human Nature, Sean Sayers defends the controversial theory that human nature is a historical phenomenon. Those who disagree with this theory counter that it leads to forms of scepticism and relativism which are at odds with morality; Sayers argues that this need not be the case. Drawing on the work of Marx and Hegel, he develops a historical account of human needs and powers which provides the basis for a distinctive form of Marxist humanism.
Does Marxism have a future? It seems quixotic even to ask this question at a time when it hardly has a present. Everyone these days knows that Marxism is finished; that whatever was right in Marx’s thinking was long ago assimilated into the mainstream intellectual culture, and that everything else has been proven wrong beyond a reasonable doubt. Marxism’s demise was precipitous. But, by all accounts, it was decisive and irreversible. Therefore, Marx and the ism identified with his name are of historical interest only. Anyone who thinks otherwise is blind to the obvious. What follows here challenges this consensus view.
Karl Marx probably had more influence on the political course of the last century than any other social thinker. There are many different kinds of Marxism, and the twentieth century saw two huge Marxist states in total opposition to one another. In the West, Marxism has never presented a revolutionary threat to the established order, though it has taken root as the major theoretical critique of capitalist society in intellectual circles, and new interpretations of Marx’s thought appear each year.
The failure of more than a handful of writers to explore the links between Orwell and the communists is not difficult to explain. The most obvious reason is that Orwell’s political identity prevents us from appreciating the full scope of his intellectual interests. Because he was a passionate anti-Stalinist, one of the doughtiest opponents not merely of the USSR but of the world communist movement as a whole, we tend to believe that he cannot have been influenced – except negatively – by the things which communists said or wrote.
