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Many years ago, in the course of a talk about Poets Laureate through the ages, the broadcaster and jazz person Benny Green said: "Four years after Tennyson died, Alfred Austin succeeded him as Poet Laureate. A better idea would have been to dig up Tennyson". In the same spirit I want to suggest that in the circumstances of the crisis of social criticism described in the introduction to this volume, a better idea is to dig up Marx.² I believe there are insights in his writings, still to be extracted, which are useful for social critique. That is bound to seem a perverse suggestion at this historical juncture, but I shall attempt to defend it. In the next section I outline the context of the present malaise. In the following section I describe a form of materialism present in Marx's writings which is incontestable and pertinent to the construction of any social critique. In the final section I suggest that elements of Marx's class theory serve a similar function.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-27445-1_3

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