Owl of Minerva: A Memoir by Mary Midgley

Author:Mary Midgley [Midgley, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, General, Philosophers, philosophy
ISBN: 9781134208630
Google: j7B_AgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2007-05-07T00:03:44.619522+00:00

Marxism in decline

In the spring of 1940, the nature of the war changed. Things suddenly began to happen. Just after we took Mods, the Germans invaded Denmark, then Norway, Holland and Belgium and swept on towards France. At the end of May, the British Expeditionary Force had to be evacuated from Dunkirk, and Churchill replaced Chamberlain as Prime Minister. Italy declared war on Britain and France. France fell, and on 14 June the German troops entered Paris.

All this changed many things and along with everything else it transformed undergraduate politics. Until now, the people who ran the Labour Club had stuck to the Marxist position that the war was essentially something negligible, just an attack by the imperialist West on the Soviet Union – a capitalist trick designed to delay the onset of the Revolution that would save the world. This never looked very convincing, but the German invasions in the spring of 1940, coming on top of Russia’s invasion of Finland in November 1939, made its hollowness finally unbearable. The story that Russia was engaged in a noble enterprise to save the oppressed Finns from a dictatorial government was absurd. So a number of Labour Club members, led by Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland, called a protest meeting to demand a change of the club’s policy.

This produced a split, half the members joining the newly formed Democratic Socialist Club at once and many of the rest following soon after. Tony Crosland

chaired the new club, Roy Jenkins was treasurer, and I – having made a fiery speech at the initial meeting – found myself suddenly elected on to the committee. I didn’t stay there long, however, because I quickly found that the nitty-gritty of undergraduate politics wasn’t my thing at all. Not only did it involve far more work that I was prepared to find time for but it also seemed at once to draw me into a world of faction and intrigue which I found disturbing. However, while I stayed I enjoyed the drama of the committee meetings, which always ended in song – often with that slender youth Roy Jenkins performing Frankie and Johnnie to great applause.

Iris, however, naturally moved the other way. She joined the Executive Committee of the Labour Club in April and at once became a leader of those still defending the sinking ship of orthodoxy. During the next year she became Secretary, then Chairman of this surviving remnant, and as its co-treasurer she carried on a Byzantine correspondence with Roy Jenkins about the division of the club’s remaining debts and assets (‘Dear Miss Murdoch’ . . . ‘Dear Comrade Jenkins’ . . .).

But trouble hit her long before this. In that terrifying spring, indignation at the old Labour Club’s pro-Russian – and by implication pro-German – attitude to the invasions was widespread and intense. On May Day, when they tried to hold a march through the city, its leaders were shouted down and pelted with all kinds of (non-lethal) missiles. I met Iris coming

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