Martin Jacques (born 1945) is a British academic, journalist, political commentator and writer. He first came to prominence as the editor of Marxism Today, which under his leadership from 1977 to 1991 became an influential forum for political debate on the British left. He later co-founded the think tank Demos in 1993 and has written extensively as a columnist for major British newspapers including The Times, The Sunday Times, The Independent, The Observer, The Guardian, and the New Statesman. Jacques is also known internationally for his 2009 book When China Rules the World, in which he argues that China's rise will reshape the global order and end Western hegemony over international affairs.
Early life and education Jacques was born in October 1945 in the city of Coventry, then in Warwickshire, now in the West Midlands, the son of Dennis Jacques and Dorothy Preston, a mathematics undergraduate at Royal Holloway College, University of London in the late 1930s. Both parents worked in an aircraft factory during the war and during this period joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. They subsequently both became school teachers. He was brought up in Coventry.
Jacques was educated at King Henry VIII School, a direct grant grammar school in Coventry,Martin Jacques Publisher: King Henry VIII School, Coventry. Retrieved: 23 February 2013. followed by the University of Manchester, where he graduated with a first-class Honours degree in economics in 1967 and stayed on to take an MA (Econ) in 1968. He then went on to King's College, Cambridge, where he studied for a PhD on 'The emergence of "responsible" trade unionism, a study of the "new direction" in TUC policy, 1926–1935', accepted in 1977.
Early career
Jacques joined the Communist Party of Great Britain at eighteen, and at both Manchester and Cambridge universities was very active in student politics. In 1966 he was one of the prime movers behind the Radical Student Alliance, a left-of-centre cross-party organisation of around 400 students from 108 universities and colleges which sought to build a students' movement 'able to take collective action on matters of general social concern'. At Cambridge he was instrumental in the formation of the Cambridge University Students' Union.
By 1967 he was a member of the Communist Party's executive committee, "probably the youngest member ever at about twenty-two",Martin Jacques interview Publisher: Alan Macfarlane. Interview date: 20 September 2011. Retrieved: 25 September 2016; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5OltQ_UWyg. and he remained a member until 1991. Profoundly affected by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the May events in Paris in 1968, which he described as his 'political birth', he was one of the early leaders of the Eurocommunist or reformist wing of the party, particularly influenced by the work of Antonio Gramsci.
Between 1969 and 1971 Jacques tutored undergraduates in economic history and economics at King's College, Cambridge. From 1971 to 1977 he was a lecturer in social and economic history at the University of Bristol.
In 1976, in a report to the executive committee of the Communist Party, he argued that 'class struggle is not confined to economic struggle ... but is also ideological and cultural'.
Later in 1976, he was chosen, with the traditionalist George Matthews, to finalise an updated version of The British Road to Socialism, the Communist Party's programme, to present to the Party's 35th National Congress in 1977. He later described the process as a 'Mexican stand-off', but the influence of Gramscian ideas was evident in the final draft, which called for a 'broad democratic alliance' and asserted that the progressive movement needed 'not only ... to be an association of class forces ... but of other important forces in society which emerge from areas of oppression not always directly connected with the relations of production'.
Marxism Today
In 1977 Jacques was chosen to succeed James Klugmann as editor of Marxism Today, the theoretical magazine of the Communist Party, to which he had contributed for a number of years. He remained editor until its closure in 1991.
As editor of Marxism Today, Jacques presided over the golden age of the magazine, when its articles received national attention and helped to shape many debates on politics. In a long feature article in the Financial Times in November 1982, its chief political commentator Malcolm Rutherford reported that 'One of the most interesting developments in current British politics is taking place in the Communist Party or, more particularly, in the pages of Marxism Today .... The issue at stake is whether the British Left will continue to disintegrate or whether, partly through Marxism Today, it can re-establish itself on a new basis'.
The well-known right-wing columnist Peregrine Worsthorne commented in The Sunday Telegraph seven years later that Jacques had 'transformed Marxism Today into a publication which has appeal outside the narrow, coffin-like, confines of the party': he increased the readership from 3,500 to 15,600, at the same time as the membership of the Communist Party declined from 26,000 to 7,500. Neal Ascherson described the magazine as 'the most serious single focus for political discussion' in the late 1970s and 1980s, adding that 'Few read it, but a whole generation chewed over its ideas'. John Birt characterised it as 'open-minded and curious, and respectful of ideas, wherever they have been encountered'. For Ralf Dahrendorf it was 'one of the few forums of intellectual debate at a time at which there is a great silence in many other places'.
The transformation of Marxism Today under Jacques's leadership did not please everyone in the Communist Party, and in September 1982 Mick Costello, the party's industrial organiser, attacked Marxism Today in the pages of the party's daily newspaper, The Morning Star, after Marxism Today had carried an article by Tony Lane which was critical of some shop stewards. Kevin Halpin, another senior party figure, declared that 'The conclusion that I draw is that Martin Jacques is not a fit person to be the editor (of Marxism Today) and I shall so move'.
Jacques survived censure by the party's executive committee but many have seen this episode as triggering the process which led to the eventual split in the Communist Party between hardliners and reformists. The enmity lasted, and in 1987 Tony Chater, editor of the, by then struggling, Morning Star, dismissed Marxism Today as 'pure, revisionist, right-wing gimmickry', adding that 'Real Communists can't stomach Marxism Today'.
Two of Jacques's closest collaborators were Eric Hobsbawm and Stuart Hall. It was in Marxism Today that Hobsbawm published his article on 'The Forward March of Labour Halted' (Marxism Today, September 1978, pp. 279–286) and that Hall published his on 'The Great Moving Right Show' (Marxism Today, January 1979, pp. 14–20). Through these and other articles, including his own editorials, Jacques and Marxism Today were influential voices in critiquing the failures of the Labour Party and of postwar UK corporatist politics, and in understanding the rise of 'Thatcherism', a term which Marxism Today defined and helped to shape – though it did not coin the term – at a time when most analysts regarded Thatcher as no different from previous Conservative prime ministers.
In 1981, with Francis Mulhern, Jacques edited The Forward March of Labour Halted?, a collection of essays analysing the crisis on the left, and in 1983 Jacques extended the analysis in a book co-edited with Stuart Hall, The Politics of Thatcherism (1983). In the same year, Jacques conceived the idea of a 'People's March for Jobs', which took place in May–June 1981 (and was repeated in April–June 1983). At around this time Tony Benn noted in his diary that Jacques 'came to collect my corrected proofs .... He's one of the new young thoughtful communists, and he certainly has made a great success of Marxism Today – very imaginative.
Under Jacques's editorship, Marxism Today organised a series of influential events and conferences including three weekend-long conferences in London, 'The Great Moving Right Show' (October 1982), 'Left Alive' (November 1984), and 'Left Unlimited' (October 1986), attended by 1700, 2500, and nearly 4000 participants respectively.
Marxism Today became known for its innovative designs and marketing strategies, which included the introduction of advertisements, and even a line of branded goods such as mugs, t-shirts, and boxer shorts. In 1982 Malcolm Rutherford noted that 'you can buy it at W.H. Smith .... It is well-written, well-edited and brightly presented', and characterised by an 'attractive lay-out'. In 1987 the American journalist James M. Perry identified a new fashion trend in London: 'Call them "yummies" – young, upwardly mobile Marxists. Their favourite magazine is Marxism Today, slick and sharply written .... In the current issue, crammed with goodies for these yummies, readers are urged to send in their "hard-earned kopeks" to buy "the latest consumer indulgences" .... This month's special is a quilt cover "exclusively designed for Marxism Today by a leading fabric designer".' It was perhaps inevitable that Jacques himself should be described as 'the couturier of designer Marxism'.
In October 1988, through the pages of Marxism Today, Jacques launched the 'New Times' project, which sought to understand a post-Fordist and increasingly globalised world. This again resulted in a book co-edited with Stuart Hall, New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s (1989).
Jacques moved the authorship as well as the readership of Marxism Today way beyond the shrinking confines of the Communist Party, and among those who wrote for the magazine were Gordon Brown, and Tony Blair, and it even featured interviews with Conservative Party politicians Chris Patten, Michael Heseltine and Edwina Currie. Regarding Blair, Jacques recalled, 'He rang me one day ... He said, "I'd like to write for Marxism Today – would that be possible?" I worked on what he wrote with him; it went through several drafts. What's the lightest boxing division? Featherweight, It was lighter than that'. The article was entitled 'Forging a New Agenda', and published in Marxism Today in October 1991.
Among the journalists who cut their teeth at the magazine were Bea Campbell and Suzanne Moore. Throughout Jacques's editorship, contributors were not paid for their articles, and Jacques himself, like other employees, only received the 'party wage'.
Jacques decided to close the magazine at the end of 1991, when it was still riding high. By then he had negotiated the financial independence of the magazine from the Communist Party, but declared that 'I have always hated institutions that don't know when to call it a day'.
In April 1997, Jacques and Stuart Hall analysed the Blair phenomenon, of which they were deeply critical, arguing that the 'fundamental point of departure [of New Labour] is that the last 18 years of Conservative government constitute the new natural law'. A subsequent article for the New Statesman further underlined the extent to which Blair had merely accepted rather than challenged the Thatcherite response to post-Fordism and globalisation.
In November 1998, Marxism Today returned for a one-off special issue edited by Jacques which extended this critique, with contributions by Eric Hobsbawm, Stuart Hall, Will Hutton, Richard Wilkinson, Suzie Orbach, Tom Nairn, Suzanne Moore, Anatole Kaletsky and others. Its cover featured a picture of Tony Blair, with the single headline, 'Wrong'. With sales of over 30,000, it proved to be the best-selling issue ever.
Demos