A Conversation with Ian Parker

Young: I am more of a dialogue person than I am an interviewer, but I will try to discipline myself. I cast my mind round to discover the Marxists I knew, and everyone I thought of among my immediate acquaintances had turned out to be an ex-Marxists or ex-radical. It seemed that over time they all had accepted jobs from one or another of the power brokers of psychoanalytic academia. Pretty soon the reference to Marxist thinkers and concepts had diminished to the vanishing point in their writings. I may be exaggerating, but that is my impression. To be perfectly honest I once found myself changing the title of a paper of my own, deleting the word ‘Marxism’, vaguely thinking that this was the diplomatic thing to do. Do you think the culture of academic Marxism has diminished?

Parker: When I was registered for my PhD in Southampton, a PhD that included just one chapter on psychoanalysis that the external examiner tactfully did not mention during the viva, the chair of the admissions committee kindly changed the word ‘Marxism’ in my proposal to ‘politics’. He said it would not have got through Faculty otherwise. There has long been a problem of this kind. But today there is an additional problem, I think. Left culture has diminished, and that means that there is less space for Marxist discourse, less space for people to call themselves Marxists, less space for it to make sense to other people. They feel embarrassed about using the term. At least in academia. I would say that while this is happening, and academics are being driven to be more liberal and shy away from Marxism, there has been a growth of interest outside academia. The word ‘socialist’ at least is on the agenda again among the Corbyn supporters - half a million members now of the Labour Party - and in the US in the wake of the Sanders movement, not to mention Latin America where Marxists are prominent in the political field.

Young: The new crowd never was politically practicing Marxists, never affiliated with