Dead White Reds
For today’s beleaguered left, it’s tempting to pine over the past. But the lives of two socialist intellectuals remind us that no one should be too nostalgic for the twentieth century.
The tradition of all the dead generations,” Marx wrote 150 years ago, “weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” Today, with our politics trapped in capitalism’s endless fugue state, the nightmare that troubled Marx may seem to contemporary left-wingers like a pleasant dream of days gone by.
At least the dead generations took Marx seriously. At least they had a powerful labor movement and center-left parties that believed in the welfare state. And at least Ralph Miliband, the dead leftist whose son is the living leader of Britain’s Labour Party, would never have answered a question about capitalism with a grudging obeisance to the creative power of BlackBerry.
It’s easy to get nostalgic.
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