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’m thinking mainly of the way in the last decade we’ve lost so many of our traditional liberties — perhaps more of them in one go than in any era since the days of Cromwell or the Norman terror. By exploiting fashionable concerns like ecological correctness, equality and the dreaded health ’n’ safety, the state now feels it has a right to interfere with almost everything we do: what we eat and drink, whether we smoke, what we get up to in our bedrooms, how fast we drive on empty roads, how many bedrooms we have and with how nice a view, how many cheap flights we can afford, what our children’s view is to be on climate change, whether our kids get to learn anything useful, whether or not we can hunt.
If opposing the tyranny of the state, upholding the rights of the individual and standing up for scientific rigour, rationalism and empiricism makes me a Marxist, then a Marxist is what I am. Now can all those of my Tory MP friends who’ve been nervous about defending these things please pull their finger out? They’re universal values, not exclusively right-wing ones.
James Delingpole’s How To Be Right is published by Headline Review at £7.99.
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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).