Bread & Roses Film Festival

As the EC Meeting finished early, 6 of us went from Claph High St to hear  the talk at the bandstand in the middle of Clapham Common. There were a dozen or so others there in the mid-teen temperature (but, thoughtfully, the organisers supplied rugs). Professor John Hutnyk of Goldsmiths spoke for nearly 2 hours but he was very good. His approach was that of the postmodernists who analyse the non-literary texts as literature and he did succeed in bringing out Marx’s analysis of money, the market and the exploitation of the worker as a drama with an underlying plot. He gives free lectures on the subject. See his website.We gave out copies of a back issue of the Socialist Standard on Marx and went for a drink with him and others at the Bread & Roses. Not sure of his political position, but he did emphasise that Marx stood not (just) for higher wages but for the abolition of the wages system. There was however a passing favourable reference to Lenin …