Marxist Moments

Welcome Back! Apologies for a lengthy absence. For various reasons I’ve had a lot on my mind this year – can’t think why. Am about to settle down to read a later social novel by American Nobel Prizewinning novelist Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), creator of an original literary-social archetype, Babbit, in his first great pseudonymous success (1922). Lewis was up there in the American literary pantheon alongside Hemingway, Fitzgerald and all the rest, and his death was widely reported at the time, though he was well past his peak by the 1950s; today he is almost forgotten in the fashionable sense, but I think he handled the American social scene (and its villains and victims) with greater acuity than those whose literary reputations remains comparatively undimmed. During the height of the Great Depression and the New Deal of Roosevelt, 1935, Lewis – always viewing the American scene with a sharply critical eye – wrote a novel about ‘a vain, outlandish, anti-immigrant, fear-mongering demagogue [who] runs for President of the United States – and wins.’ His name: Buzz Windrip, who ‘promises poor, angry voters that he will make America proud and prosperous once more, but takes the country down a far darker path…’ (I quote from the Penguin blurb.) Strangely prophetic in the light of a real President of today at the time of writing running for a second (disastrous) term, I’m looking forward to Lewis’s fictional crystal ball. Whether at this moment Donald Trump will squeeze through and win again or not, I am at least pinning my hopes on an erosion of the slim Republican majority in the Senate (the House is almost definitely certain to remain in Democratic hands), for at least if a President has both houses of Congress held by his opposition party his hands are fairly tied – especially in an atmosphere so poisonous as that of today. Well, we shall see. Why should I, a Marxist, take this election so seriously? For the same reason that a German Marxist in the early 1930s would have had good reason – in the light of the goose-stepping outcome - to fear the weaknesses in the opposition to the ‘ridiculous’ Hitler in the 1930s. America is, if anything, in an even more volatile state than Germany was then…