ABSTRACT
… as a postgraduate student Marx had become of practical relevance, because when I entered Nuffield the social world was very polarised. And Nuffield – Oxford generally, but Nuffield more than any other college – had very direct links between the academic community and the key decision makers outside… . The first people I became friends with in Nuffield – I was already on the left – were students from the Third World: Trevor Munroe, who a few years later founded the Workers’ Liberation Party in Jamaica …; Athar Hussain, who was one of the collaborators of Ben Brewster and other Althusserians; and another Indian called Patnaik, who went on to a career in India as an academic economist strongly critical of neo-liberalism and became prominent in the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Of course before arriving in Oxford these people were already to some extent organic intellectuals in their own context. What was most important to them were things such as the black power salute that Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave at the 1968 Olympics. We studied the news of the Vietnam war everyday, and what was happening with the Cuban and other revolutions and insurgencies all around the world… . When I started reading Marx seriously, I found the youthful writings and texts … immensely stimulating. It was obviously in Marx that you had a conception of praxis. I began to see my own life, like that of the group, as politicised; so I could no longer be friends in the same way with colleagues on the other side of the political divide.
