Free Travesties by Tom Stoppard Page B

absolute Bolshie.
    CECILY : He is working within the bourgeois capitalist system and postponing its destruction. Karl Marx has shown that capitalism is digging its own grave.
    CARR : No, no, no, no, my dear girl – Marx got it wrong. He got it wrong for good reasons but he got it wrong just the same. By bad luck he encountered the capitalist system at its most deceptive period. The industrial revolution had crowded the people into slums and enslaved them in factories, but it had not yet begun to bring them the benefits of an industrialized society. Marx drew the lesson that the wealth of the capitalist had been stolen from the worker in the form of unpaid labour. He thought that was how the whole thing worked. That false premise was itself added to a false assumption. Marx assumed that people would behave according to their class. But they didn’t. In all kinds of ways and for all kinds of reasons, the classes moved closer together instead of further apart. The critical moment never came. It receded. The tide must have turned at about the time when
Das Kapital
after eighteen years of hard labour was finally coming off the press, a moving reminder, Cecily, of the folly of authorship. How sweet you look suddenly – pink as a rose.
    CECILY : That’s because I’m about to puke into your nancy straw hat, you
prig!
– you swanking canting fop, you bourgeois intellectual humbugger, you –
artist!
Marx warned us against the liberals, the philanthropists, the piecemeal reformers – change won’t come from
them
but from a head-on collision,
that’s
how history works! When Lenin was 21 there wasfamine in Russia. The intellectuals organized relief – soup kitchens, seed corn, all kinds of do-gooding with Tolstoy in the lead. Lenin did – nothing. He understood that the famine was a force for the revolution. Twenty-one years old, in Samara, in 1890-91. He was a boy, and he understood that, so don’t talk to me about superior morality, you patronizing Kant-struck prig, all the time you’re talking about the classes you’re trying to imagine how I’d look stripped off to my knickers –
    CARR : That’s a lie!
    (
But apparently it isn’t. As
CECILY
continues to speak we get a partial Carr’s-mind view of her. Coloured lights begin to play over her body, and most of the other light goes except for a bright spot on Carr
.)
(
Faintly from 1974, comes the sound of a big band playing
‘The Stripper’. CARR
is in a trance. The music builds
. CECILY
might perhaps climb on to her desk. The desk may have ‘cabaret lights’ built into it for use at this point
.)
    CECILY : The only way is the way of Marx and of Lenin, the enemy of all revisionism! – of opportunist liberal economism! – of social-chauvinist bourgeois individualism! – quasi-Dadaist paternalism! – pseudo-Wildean aphorism! – sub-Joycean catechism and dogmatism! – cubism! – expressionism! – rheumatism! –
    CARR :
Get ’em off!
    (
The light snaps back to normal
.)
    CECILY : I don’t think you ought to talk to me like that during library hours. However, as the reference section is about to close for lunch I will overlook it. Intellectual curiosity is not so common that one can afford to discourage it. What kind of books were you wanting?
    CARR : Books? What books? What do you mean, Cecily, by books? I have read Mr Lenin’s article and I don’t need to read any more. I have come to tell you that you seem to me to be the visible personification of absolute perfection.
    CECILY : In body or mind?
    CARR : In every way.
    CECILY : Oh, Tristan!
    CARR : You will love me back and tell me all your secrets, won’t you?
    CECILY : You silly boy! Of course! I have waited for you for months.
    CARR (
Amazed
): For months?
    CECILY : Ever since Jack told me he had a younger brother who was a decadent nihilist it has been my girlish dream to reform you