John McDonnell or Theresa May: will the real Marxist please stand up? | Ellie Mae O’Hagan

Claims that there's anything 'Marxist' about the prime minister's plan for a cap on energy bills are a sign we are living in an intellectual dead zone

Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to clutch your privately owned pearls, for the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, has had the audacity to acknowledge - live on TV, no less - that there is a lot to learn from Karl Marx. Judging by the horrified reaction McDonnell's comments unleashed, you'd think he had ridden into BBC studios on a Soviet tank, shouting "Death to the bourgeoisie!"

It doesn't end with McDonnell, of course. When Jeremy Corbyn was asked whether he was influenced by Marx's ideas, he said that "all great economists influence all of our thinking". And, of course, when Ed Miliband was leader of the Labour party, an intrepid reporter from the Daily Mail went into full reds-under-the-bed mode, by printing the ideas of the Marxist academic Ralph Miliband (Ed's father) that are already publicly available in books. No word from the Pulitzer prize board yet, but it's surely only a matter of time.

Related: Yanis Varoufakis: How I became an erratic Marxist

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