Like the pastry dropped into Proust's tea, this opened up a flood of associations for me. Wasn't the idea of the Roman Empire as powerful for Great Britain as Christianity? Furthermore, if British culture was father to our own, to what extent has the idea of Empire been handed down from Rome to our own like a family heirloom in the Mafia?

It strikes me that the Marxist literature on imperialism does not really address the question of Empire as such. Lenin, Luxemburg, Bukharin, Hilferding, as well as more recent analyses such as the dependency theorists, focuses on relatively narrow economic questions, such as the need to export capital or gain control over resources and cheap labor. What gets left out is the imperial mission which predated the monopoly capital stage by centuries in some cases. During the 18th century, the ideologists of the British Empire held up Rome as an example. Virgil's "Aeneid" was mandatory reading for the children of the upper classes. Our founding fathers rejected British colonial rule, but within a few years were putting together a blueprint for their own. The same themes keep reappearing: the barbarians in outlying regions brought under imperial control, while the only true civilization is that which exists within in the walls of the imperial cities. It seems that these sorts of questions have failed to receive proper attention in Marxist literature.

The notion of one nation imposing its ideas of civilization on barbarians at the point of a sword of a gun is a very powerful one. In Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich's wonderful "Crown of Columbus," there's a scene in which the female lead character is trying to explain to her Native American Studies class at Dartmouth what was different about the European invaders. "European powers had not only the WILL but the belief that it was their right. One god, one family from which all their languages originated, one creation story, one agenda to rule the world. Never underestimate the power of chutzpah and positive thinking. They absolutely believed that the earth was their oyster."

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One of London's top attractions is not mentioned in Frommer's, namely Mark Jones. I had been corresponding with Mark for over 4 years and had found myself on the same side of public debates for about the same length of time so I was anxious to finally meet him in person in his East End neighborhood.

When Mark first appeared on left-wing Internet mailing-lists, he might have reminded some of a familiar character in Victorian literature, possibly a more apocalyptic version of one of the Christmas Carol ghosts. With flowing white hair and a beard grown down to his bellybutton, an angry prophet appears out of nowhere, holds a bony finger in the air and warns of immanent global destruction. Since Mark had lived in the Soviet Union and witnessed its collapse from a superpower into a neo-colonial backwater nearly overnight, he was much less inclined to believe in the possibility of peaceful, gradual capitalist reform than those of us who had gotten used to expanding economies in the West. As it turned out, Mark has been the hard-headed realist on most of the big questions, while his opponents now seem fairly wooly-minded. He predicted economic crisis a year before the Asian economies went belly up. He also predicted oil shortages, long in advance of confirming reports in the bourgeois media.

We spent many hours together discussing the state of the world, in particular trying to take the measure of the Nato war. I also enjoyed time spent with his lovely wife Natalia, who is a descendant of one of Russia's most celebrated aristocratic families which she says can be traced back to the Huns. (Personally, I'd much prefer to be related to Attila than Thomas Jefferson, a real savage.) Notwithstanding her blue blood, she is also a serious communist, intellectual, poet and artist who can recite long passages from Pushkin in Russian and translate them into English on the spot. Xenia, their 22 year old daughter, is an emerging opera star, and a diehard radical like her parents. She not only marched against the war in the week before I arrived in London, but performed in a postmodern version of a Monterverdi opera where a fight between two goddesses was staged in a boxing ring. Attired in satin trunks and a boxing helmet, Xenia belted out one of the opera's most challenging arias. The Jones household is rounded out by their five lovely cats who understand 400 Russian and English words and have a weakness for fried duck.

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My hotel was located in London's East End, a district that has always had a working class character, whose ethnic composition changes with the decades. Once home to many Jews, now it is made up of many East Asian immigrants and provides the backdrop of Hanif Kureishi's "My Beautiful Laundrette". The advantage of staying in the East End is that its attractions are not conventionally tourist in nature, as are most of the high-priced Central London's neighborhoods. Where else would you find a storefront openly proclaiming itself home to the "Mauretanian-Islamic Warfare Association"? Unfortunately, there's a downside to the distinctly local color. It is impossible to find a decent coffee bar in the area and only instant coffee is served in all the local breakfast joints, which lacks the proper jolt. (If you want to know how serious a question this is, I urge you to view Spalding Gray's "Impossible Vacation." This includes a bit about constipated American tourists in one of Moscow's main hotels for whom the hotel's ersatz chicory coffee does not do the trick.)

I visited London's Jewish Museum to find out more about my brethren. The museum is quite small, which is probably attributable to the fact that the Jews were banned from England for nearly a half-millenium. During the initial war hysteria surrounding the Crusades, all of England's 3,000 Jews were "ethnically cleansed," only to be readmitted during the rule of Oliver Cromwell centuries later, who saw commercial advantage in having them readmitted. Their access to capital would help to finance the expansionary plans of the British Empire. Furthermore, Mark and Natalia told me that there is ample evidence that the initial motive for expelling them was economic as well. In their research for a novel on Ghengis Khan, they discovered that a Christian sect called the Nestorians, who believed that Jesus was mortal among other things, had access to trade routes in the Mid East which relieved Western Europe from dependence on the Jews. Once ties to the Nestorians were accomplished, it was possible to go ahead and expel their Jewish rivals from various nations.

Every so often, it is necessary to reaffirm the crude base/superstructure model which has come under attack from various postmodernist and idealist circles in the last half-century. After all, money talks and bullshit walks. What better explanation for the persecution of the Jews than the cash nexus, when you get right down to it. Speaking of unfashionable base/superstructure modes of thought, I was delighted to discover a copy of volume one of Arnold Hauser's "Social History of Art" in the Tate Museum bookstore. First published in 1947, Hauser examines art from the Stone Ages to modern film from a social and economic perspective. All advances in art are related to changes in the mode of production, an idea that sends most of the art world into apoplectic fits. Look for this masterpiece, newly republished by Routledge, in your local bookstores. Volume one, spanning the Stone Ages to the late Gothic Era, is now available with the other three to follow over the next few years.

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I spent several hours in conversation with Paul Flewers and his mate Al Richardson, over beer in a pub near King's Cross station. Paul edits "New Interventions", a magazine that shares many of the presuppositions of the Marxism mailing list. It believes that is important for Marxists, especially independents, to debate in a fraternal manner. The next issue will include 6 articles on Nato's war, including one by myself and one by Andy Austin, that appeared originally on the Marxism mailing-list. The articles run the gamut of openly pro-Serb positions like my own to those that are closer to the views of organized Trotskyism, which tend to vilify Milosevic and call for self-determination for Kosovo.

Flewers, Richardson and I tend to be highly skeptical of that call but do not regard those who disagree with us as Mensheviks or traitors. In general, this mailing list and "New Interventions" are trying to transcend such useless distinctions. The real Mensheviks are the ones who are voting war credits in Great Britain, German and the United States. Richardson, who is the editor of "Revolutionary History", made an interesting observation. He says that many on the left argue that Nato is in the Balkans to ensure "stability". He thought that this was absurd in light of the decade long duration of the war. If anything, the result of western imperialist intervention in the region has been to destabilize it, which seems consistent with the analysis put forward by Marxists during the first outbreak of war in the Balkans, on the eve of World War One.

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