The anger of Marx, betrayed by Brexit voters

by Guido Bolaffi - 2016.07.01

It's rumoured that when the news of Brexit reached the small, quiet cemetery in Highgate, north London, Karl Marx turned in his grave. The reason for his agitation, according to the aforementioned sources, wasn't, as some might think, his concern for the fate of the euro or Cameron's government. Rather, it was his sorrow at the second betrayal by his beloved English working class, on whose behalf he spent a lifetime thinking and – more than 150 years ago, in the library of the British Museum – writing his complete works on the future release from Capital.



But we'll come back to the nature of this latest betrayal in just a moment. What is certain, however, is that English workers, against expectations, have in the past been seduced by capitalism rather than by working-class revolution. This is an event painfully reported by his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels. In a letter sent in 1858, realising that something was not going in the right direction, he wrote: “So long as England has its monopoly over global industry, British workers will take advantage, even if only partially, of its benefits. The result of which, as facts later proved, was that most of them preferred to integrate rather than revolt. Or, to be cynical, they found the pub more attractive than barricades.



So if we jump from history to current events, it's not difficult to imagine why the old man from Treviri would have seen the working class vote for Brexit not only as a betrayal (the second), but one of the worst kinds. Almost like a knife through the heart. “How is it possible,” he must have asked himself in his grave, “that when I urged 'workers of the world unite', their behaviour was the exact opposite?” Believing that globalisation and immigration are the causes of their current economic and social misery, they have chosen to retreat from the world, thinking that this will allow them to retrieve the advantages of a supremacy that has vanished forever?

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