Might I be a Marxist?
I am facing up to the fact that I may be a Marxist
It’s astonishing the people you find yourself agreeing with
I think this too, as strongly as Fox does. So I looked her up on Google to see what she was about and discovered that for 20 years she had been a core activist of the Revolutionary Communist Party and once published a magazine called Living Marxism. Marxist is how she still describes herself. ‘Gosh,’ I thought to myself. ‘How can this possibly be?’ I’d always imagined that anyone as far left as Fox would be mad keen, come the revolution, to have people like me put up against the wall and shot. Yet here I was, agreeing with almost every word she said.
Not just about schools either. On Islamism, on eco-fascist hysteria, on multiculturalism (a disaster), on GM crops (the dangers much overrated), and on hunting (rescind the ban) her position is very much what I would have once considered the sound Tory one. My one. In fact, about the only areas I can find where we seriously disagree are immigration, the monarchy and the war on terror. We’ve a lot more politically in common, certainly, than many of the Cameronistas I know.
Does this mean I’m not as right-wing as I thought I was? Well perhaps. Earlier this year I published an ‘Is it me?’ A to Z of anti-PC-culture rants called How To Be Right, and was pleasantly surprised by how many of the lefties I’d set out to offend seemed to agree with me.
‘I have just finished your book and I had to write,’ went my favourite bit of not-made-up-I-promise fan mail. ‘I am a dyed in the wool leftie who specifically seeks out the Guardian on a Wednesday for the Society jobs. Why then did I love your book? You should have stood for the Tory leadership. I might even have voted for you.’
The thing I normally say to people like that is: ‘Well you’re not a real leftie, are you? You’re one of those fashion lefties, like my mate Rod Liddle, who only ever posed as a pinko because he knew it would pull him more girls.’
But actually I don’t think this tells the whole story. Far more important is the way that global capitalism has won the political argument, rendering the old distinction between left and right almost meaningless. Today, the divisions that count are the ones between libertarianism and statism; between the hard-headed empiricism of the Enlightenment and the (currently more fashionable) touchy-feely romanticism of the New Age.
‘Enlightenment values’ is a phrase you hear being used a lot by Claire Fox and her colleagues at the Institute of Ideas. And also by many of her ideological soulmates, among them Mick Hume (the Times columnist), Brendan O’Neill (editor of the online journal Spiked), Frank Furedi (the academic and columnist) and Josie Appleton (founder of the Manifesto Club).
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Suresh Dogra
November 10th, 2007 5:01pmI fully agree with you.I believe that radicals and revolutionaries do very serious damage to society.Great social change and happiness are brought about by those people who do their work quietly and honestly within the space provided to them by society.The discontented lot is always kicking up one row or the other,disturbing society and making normal activity difficult.
CS Ferguson
November 19th, 2007 1:01pm"Why can't all schools belike Eton? Because state education was destroyed by socialism. Why can't the NHS be the most performant in the world? Because the most performing health system was destroyed by the socialist NHS." All schools can't be like Eton because there isn't upwards of £20,000 per pupil available to the state sector, and because it isn't possible to take all pupils out of their family environment and immerse them entirely in an intensive scholastic culture. Moreover, conservatives would be screaming from the rooftops about profligate public spending and state undermining of family life if it were tried. If anyone believes that all schools were like Eton prior to 'socialism', they're living in a fantasy world, unless they propose to go so far back that Eton and its ilk were the only schools that existed and all but a miniscule elite were denied any form of formal education. The NHS isn't the best performing healthcare system in the world because Britain spends a smaller proportion of its GDP on healthcare than any other industrialised nation. Again, that anyone believes that healthcare provision was superior before the establishment of the NHS, where no form of healthcare beyond the most basic variety was available to large sections of the populace. An 'excellent' health or education system may make take many potential forms, but a situation where an excellent service is available to a tiny propotion of the population and where the rest can hang, is not one of them.
Susanne
December 8th, 2007 1:26amTre has never, inmy opinion, been much difference between the Marxist and old school Tory ideologies. This is perhaps why you found you had similar views to Claire Fox.
David Silverman
May 12th, 2008 4:13amYou've neglected to mention most of the basic tenants of Marxism, if you had, you could have hardly sustained an argument that there is no difference between you and a marxist. Just because you can pick out a debate about education or the environment and find common ground, doesn't mean there is no difference between left and right anymore (or that Marxism is irrelevant).