MARXMAN
Dear Miss Harkness,
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As you know, I have written on the question of women (see my book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State), and while “All About Eve” takes a somewhat more liberal and less materialist view of the condition of women than it should, we nonetheless find ourselves in some agreement with Marxman here. Women should, and no doubt one day will, achieve full social and political equality. In the meantime, however, there is a class struggle to be waged; neither Marx nor myself is prepared at this juncture to bestow secondary status on questions of class, as Marxman do more than once on 33 Revolutions per Minute.
The song “Sad Affair” of course demonstrates the limits of Marxman’s political understanding, bound up as it is in a critique of English imperialism in Ireland that fails to consider the essential class character of colonialism. (This did not prevent the British ruling class, through the organ of the BBC, from banning the song, thus demonstrating the retarded nature of bourgeois political understanding on these islands.) Marxman’s involvement with bourgeois-nationalist leader Gerry Adams (of Sinn Fein) is of course a great disappointment to us.
Friedrich Engels
