壊れかかった真っ赤な車に乗って

Gavin McCrea*1 “To celebrate May Day is to remember Marx, who showed us what capitalism is” http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/01/may-day-marx-capitalism-work-class


五月天はとうに過ぎてしまったが。
作家Gavin McCrea氏の「メイ・デイはマルクスの日である(May Day is Marx Day)」という主張;


What May Day does – and maybe it takes a consumer-friendly, barely celebrated non-holiday to do so – is remind us that Marx is still here, alive in our minds. Although communism as a political system is spent, Marx remains a powerful force in our language and in our thinking. To speak today about money, work, class or government is still to activate a language suffused with Marx. Our minds have been disciplined and trained by the system in which we live, and it was Marx who gave us the means to think about this system. It was he who helped us to define capitalism as capitalism, who gave us the tools to examine it and who made us conscious of our roles within it. It was Marx who made us “capitalists”
しかしながら、Gavin McCrea氏はマルクスの〈信者〉ではない。氏によれば、マルクスはあくまでも資本主義*2に対する「分析者」であって、資本主義に対するオルタナティヴを提示する「予言者(visionary)」ではなかった。

Marx – and I’m not saying anything radical here – was a capitalist. He was less interested in imagining possible alternatives to capitalism than he was in examining and explaining capitalism itself. He wasn’t a visionary (or if he was, he was a bad one) but rather an analyst, a critic, a labeller. Throughout his life he remained remarkably vague about what he thought communism might look like, and instead concentrated on the system that he sensed was everywhere, in our thoughts and behaviour as well as in the material world.

The all-pervasiveness of capitalism, its inescapability, was Marx’s greatest observation. Marx understood that to step outside of capitalism was – for the human mind so totally conditioned by capitalism itself – impossible. We cannot choose whether or not to have a relationship with capitalism. (Even those living in the remaining “communist” regimes don’t have that luxury.) All that we can do – and it isn’t insignificant – is consider what kind of relationship we have with it. As capitalists, how do we think? How do we live? How do we treat other capitalists?.

また、カール・マルクスの人格に対する判断;

(…) I judged Marx’s personal life against his theories, and I became enraged by his hypocrisy. Here was a man who lived the very kind of life – bourgeois, money-hungry, status-fixated – which in his writings he despised. Here was a man who said one thing (communism) and did another (capitalism).
ここで指摘されているようなマルクスの俗物性については、例えば的場昭弘マルクスだったらこう考える』*3とか。
マルクスだったらこう考える (光文社新書)

マルクスだったらこう考える (光文社新書)

ところで、タイトルは四人囃子の「カーニバルがやってくるぞ(パリ野郎ジャマイカへ飛ぶ)」*4から。
ゴールデン・ピクニックス

ゴールデン・ピクニックス