Free Radical - Christopher Hitchens - Interview

Reason, Nov, 2001 by Rhys Southan

Hitchens: I said this quite recently. I'm glad you noticed it. Most of the readers of The Nation seemed not to have noticed it. That was the first time I'd decided it was time I shared my hand. I forget whether I said I was an ex-socialist, or recovering Marxist, or whatever, but that would have been provisional or stylistic. The thing I've often tried to point out to people from the early days of the Thatcher revolution in Britain was that the political consensus had been broken, and from the right. The revolutionary, radical forces in British life were being led by the conservatives. That was something that almost nobody, with the very slight exception of myself, had foreseen.

I'd realized in 1979, the year she won, that though I was a member of the Labour Party, I wasn't going to vote for it. I couldn't bring myself to vote conservative. That's purely visceral. It was nothing to do with my mind, really. I just couldn't physically do it. I'll never get over that, but that's my private problem.

But I did realize that by subtracting my vote from the Labour Party, I was effectively voting for Thatcher to win. That's how I discovered that that's what I secretly hoped would happen. And I'm very glad I did. I wouldn't have been able to say the same about Reagan, I must say. But I don't think he had her intellectual or moral courage. This would be a very long discussion. You wouldn't conceivably be able to get it into a REASON interview.

Marx's original insight about capitalism was that it was the most revolutionary and creative force ever to appear in human history. And though it brought with it enormous attendant dangers, [the revolutionary nature] was the first thing to recognize about it. That is actually what the Manifesto is all about. As far as I know, no better summary of the beauty of capital has ever been written. You sort of know it's true, and yet it can't be, because it doesn't compute in the way we're taught to think. Any more than it computes, for example, that Marx and Engels thought that America was the great country of freedom and revolution and Russia was the great country of tyranny and backwardness.

But that's exactly what they did think, and you can still astonish people at dinner parties by saying that. To me it's as true as knowing my own middle name. Imagine what it is to live in a culture where people's first instinct when you say it is to laugh. Or to look bewildered. But that's the nearest I've come to stating not just what I believe, but everything I ever have believed, all in one girth.