The New Class

"Djilas observed that instead of getting rid of a ruling class, as was supposed to happen, Party members became the ruling class themselves. But it’s not a class analysis in the sense that we generally mean. In Russia you could be a peasant or a worker. You couldn’t be an intellectual because it didn’t count as a class. But if it didn’t count as a class, then why were hundreds of thousands of them persecuted? So it’s rather curious from a Marxist point of view. Marx would almost certainly have disapproved – but then he disapproved of almost anybody. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Of course it is. And China is still relevant when talking about Yugoslavia. Obviously there is a connection between, say, Pyongyang and Marxism, and with the Cambodian terror and so on. You can’t say those regimes can be justified by Marxism , but somehow the connection is there – or at least the regimes thought so, even if it isn’t a rational connection. It’s hard to say. Of course, this list should really include the works of Marx. But The Communist Manifesto doesn’t have much to do with what I thought Marx was, or what anyone else thought Marx was afterwards. It’s just a piece of old-fashioned politics. And Das Kapital is one those books that people claim to have read, but no one has really read it to the end. Still, it accumulated into a creed."