Commie Spotting

I’m sure you’re aware of cultural Marxism. The movement that places emphasis on continuing the “struggle” in the realm of culture rather than what we tend to think of the direct traditional Marxist realms of economics/labour and outright physical revolution and seizing control of the means of production. Between the wars the Frankfurt School in Germany and then America, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and others, advocated and developed this gradualist approach in what has been called “the long march through the institutions”. It’s possible to overemphasise the organised nature of this phenomenon, but it is there, subtle, slow, pervasive, and increasingly effective. It can be seen behind BLM and the whole “climate crisis” pantomime.

The movement itself is highly nebulous and its effects are far more visible than the people pushing it. Like fungi they penetrate unseen, with only the occasional mushroom breaking the surface. It is interesting to study these toxic toadstools when they do appear. Here is an ecxellent example.

Martin Jacques is a British journalist, editor, academic, political commentator and author. If you’ve watched and read much about the People’s Republic of China and east Asian affairs recently you may have come across him. He wrote the best-selling book When China Rules the World, published in 2009. He is often trotted out as a China expert, and no doubt thousands have taken him at face value, an intelligent, thoughtful Englishman with a deep knowledge of Chinses culture and history. Appearances on TV news programmes, articles in the press and TED talks, you name it, he’s doing it. Always with the same steady drum beat of the inevitability of the eclipse of Western power by the PRC and how this is actually a good thing.  

Indeed, Dr Jacques is all of the things I described above, but he does not approach his studies from an entirely neutral position. From 1977 to 1991 Dr Jacques was the editor of the British magazine Marxism Today, the theoretical publication of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Both of his parents were members of the CPGB, which he himself joined at the age of 18. He was a member of the CPGB’s Executive Committee from 1967 to 1991. It was in the latter year that he wound up Marxism Today, note the significant date. No doubt the cheques from Moscow had dried up.

In 1993 Jacques started to take an interest in east Asia and since then has steadily re-invented himself as a China expert. His work is far from insignificant. The Chinese sholar Xian Lanxin has argued that When China Rules the World laid the foundations for the advent of “Wolf Warrior diplomacy”. Isn’t it nice there was another bloated Marxist tyranny for Jacques to latch onto?

So, if you come across him you can assure any folk being taken in by his toxic defeatism that he as much a mouthpiece of the PRC and Marxism in general as the Chinese Communist party’s press office.

I have come to think Dr Jacques as playing Salacious Crumb to Xi Jingping’s Jabba the Hut.