22.05.1997

Puerile psycho-babble

Mark Fischer reviews Marx: a clear guide by Edward Reiss (Pluto Press 1996, pp180)

This is a truly awful book. Apparently Reiss has been mis-educating students at the University of Bradford for many years and now - based on the humbug he has been befuddling these young minds with - he gives us what he optimistically dubs in the introduction “a very clear introduction to Marx” (p1).

In fact, what the man has churned out is a hotchpotch of puerile sociological prejudice and bourgeois slander of Marx: the man and his life’s work. It is incredible to me that Reiss actually makes a living of some sort out of penning such inane pap. For example, when I read the following gem a few months ago, I was - in a sense - in awe of its towering stupidity:

“What the worker produces, Marx claims, becomes an ‘alien power’ ... This assertion is easy to understand in some cases, like a worker in a police state who makes electronic stun truncheons or tear gas. This is less easy to understand how if someone makes toothpaste, this object later confronts them as ‘something hostile and alien’” (p19).

And so it goes on. Thumb-nail sketches (more like caricatures) of Marx’s views are liberally interspersed with numerous observations of this calibre (and some even worse). For example, Reiss concludes a chapter on ‘Marx and gender’ with this disgustingly patronising claptrap:

“Marx and his followers spurned the language for exploring doubt, insecurity, vulnerability. This entails a loss of openness and a diminished capacity to learn from errors, to listen to criticism and to grow. Marxism hardened into a narrowly masculine mind-set: political belligerence and intellectual cock-sureness, masking deeper insecurity. The need to be right and to put others in the wrong precipitates destructive in-fighting and faction-forming, periodic purges and regular accusations of foul play, along with vicious denunciations of supposed traitors. Marxism lacks the necessary perspectives to make sense of this” (p122).

Even more damning of Marx, we are told that he

“writes almost nothing about how to improve individual relationships with others, or how to help in an immediate practical way ... Marxists do not learn how to sort themselves out in the here-and-now and be happy, independent of the revolution” (p140).

Thus the ‘insights’ of radical psycho-babble and the practice of damaged-ego self-help groups are mobilised against the scientific, truly humanist theory of Marxism. No contest, Mr Reiss.

No doubt the author will attribute the tone of this review to my raging testosterone levels and ‘unsorted’ personality disorders. The truth is simpler. Outside of straight bourgeois attacks on the man, I really cannot think of a worse introduction to Marx. There is certainly a gap in the market for a clear, concise introduction to Marxism. This certainly isn’t it.

Nevertheless, run - don’t walk - to your local bookshop. Buy this “clear guide”. Then give it to someone in the workers’ movement you really don’t like. Short of that, it has no practical use for Marxists whatsoever.

Mark Fischer