Socialism is a 'luxury opinion', a high status consumer good (which is why the London Review of Books is so full of it)

The London Review of Books is an elite publication, a product produces by and for the richest, most powerful and most influential in our society (this is obviously why I'm a subscriber). It is also, far more than the Guardian or the increasingly left wing Financial Times, symbolic of the bien pensant, the folk 'Capel Lofft' on Twitter described as those who "...can no longer distinguish themselves from the working class in material terms, so they do so by adopting 'luxury opinions' (open borders, cosmopolitanism, anti-patriotism, legalising drugs etc etc) and looking down on those working class people who reject those opinions."

It is increasingly evident that a sort of intellectually exclusive "far-leftism" is far more of a problem than the "middle class liberals" that Tweet from Capel Lofft targeted. It is seen as sort of cute and clever for one of the great minds who the LRB gets to write (and boy can some of them write) to expound on awful rich people, terrible capitalism and to present a sort of 'oh-we-are-so-smart-look-at-the-words-we-use' socialism. It's really no surprise to see, as Kristian Niemitz from the IEA reminds his Twitter followers most days, how socialism is hugely popular among those "middle class liberals" - a high status consumer good.

Heres a classic bit of LRB socialism from Eli Zaretsky (who teaches some of those "middle class liberal" graduate students at a high status institution in New York City) about the current virus epidemic:

"Under slavery, the masters had an interest in maintaining the health and even longevity of the slaves, who were their main form of property. After abolition, however, maintaining the health of free workers turned into a burden, especially as the cost of medicine rose. Understanding these simple facts of modern political economy may help explain how the United States, the self-proclaimed ‘greatest country in the world’, ended up with one-third of all Covid-19 cases.The large-scale slaughter now unfolding in America was not set in motion overnight. The herd had to be prepared..."

The article continues in this vein explaining how the "masters" killed all the black people, forced drugs and consumer goodies on an unwilling herd, and made them all "fatter, more submissive and less curious". At the centre of all this is the great lie of socialism, at least as presented by the elites Zaretsky represents, that "the herd" are in some way worse off than they were at the time of emancipation from slavery, servitude and feudalism. We see this from Zaretsky as he describes how the task of "...managing a herd is to destroy all forms of critical thinking, in particular anything that challenges the supremacy of private property".

How dare the plebs and peons, the liberated slaves and emancipated serfs, aspire to property ownership, to a real tangible stake in the society the inhabit. How dare they. And the sage heads of the elite will nod, peer at you down their patrician noses, and explain that it's just a polemic y'know, we don't agree with it obviously (ha ha), but Eli has a point don't you think?

Well I don't think Eli has a point. I think he is wrong and that these ideas, trickled out in elite journals, valorise the persistence of the failed ideology of "the left" - call it Marxism or Socialism or Communism or Communitarianism. The reason we live longer, happier healthier lives with more choice amongst a bewildering range of consumer goods is down to the things these people, mistakenly dubbed 'liberals', try to paint as the tools of oppresion and control.

Liberalism wasn't about the masters, liberalism was about pulling down the masters and their world - it ended slavery, serfdom, the draft and the subjugation of women and it gave to everyone the chance to enjoy the fruits of innovation, choice and opportunity. It's mad to smash this up because you saw someone begging in the street, because some people on the other side of the world have learned how to make cheaper steel or farm cheaper beef. Or worse because you've bought the lie that somehow our wealthy consumer society is simply the same old "masters" carrying on the same old slavery.

In the end, as Tim Worstall puts it, there is a point and it's not hard to grasp:

The aim and point of our having an economy in the first place is so that we humans get more of what we desire. This is the purpose of trying to get richer. What it is that we desire is an individual decision - utility is always personal. It is entirely true that many things are possible the question is instead which of the possible things meets our desires best? 

The problem is that we've become so rich as a society that we have created, as a sort of masochism, a high-status consumer good called "going to a graduate school in New York to learn how to be a socialist". It may be that communists and socialists claim capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, but I'm sure that they didn't think that socialism becoming the plaything of nice, rich middle class kids was that seed.


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Socialism explained (the Friday Fungus version)

From a late Soviet TV show called The Fifth Wheel:

"I have indisputable evidence," he said, "that the October Revolution was the brainchild of people who'd been taking hallucinating mushrooms for years, and in the long run, mushrooms replaced their personalities, and they turned into mushrooms. So, I just want to say that Lenin was a mushroom. Furthermore, he was not just a mushroom, but also a radio wave."

So said Sergei Kurekhin in conversation with Sergei Sholokhov the show's presenter (it was, I hasten to add a satire not a serious argument). And, in this Reason article by Jesse Walker, we find that they weaved an elaborate conspiracy theory - akin to John Allegro's equally bizarre argument that Jesus was a mushroom - involving Mayan temple frescoes, Carlos Castenada and much else besides.

The article comments on how Kurekhin was involved with the National Bolshevik Party which may - or may not - be an elaborate spoof. The Party did pioneer some of the punkier bits of Russian opposition politics and Kurekhin was an early adopter of fake news as a propaganda (or satire - hard to tell sometimes) tool. As Walker concludes:

Either way, Kurekhin doesn't just have a famous piece of fake news under his belt—he was an early adopter of ironic fascism too. The man may be 23 years dead, but this is his world; the rest of us are just mushrooms growing in it.

Very odd.

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Communism is evil - how come its apologists get so much time, attention and space to promote this murderous, coercive faith?

"The second memorial lecture was given in January by the American political theorist Jodi Dean, who is keen to rescue the word 'communist' from its negative - and, she insists, historically inaccurate - associations..."

This is the world we're in - this quotation doesn't come from some obscure spartist website or even from communism's house journal, The Morning Star, but from the London Review of Books. From the lead article in the latest issue of this august journal.

Imagine just for a minute that the LRB's main article was from an avowed fascist arguing that Gentile's actualism and the policies of 1920s Italy were powerful, change-making forces for good and that Fascism is misunderstood and perceived negatively. No, you can't imagine it because you know it would never happen - the repainting of Fascism in bright 21st century colours is simply not something we could countenance. Not so with communism.

Time and time again - on the TV, in magazines, in film and in theatre - the evils of communism are given a different set of teeth, a new smile, a smart set of modern clothes. The millions of dead bodies on which today's communism perches get brushed aside as a detail, explained away as some sort of tragic error or, worst, seen as a necessary collateral in the pursuit of the New Man and true communism.

I understand how people who've arrived at a left-wing - even socialist - perspective might be troubled by the discovery that people who proclaimed the same faith were responsible for genocide, rape, murder, incarceration, torture and oppression. Aren't these the sins of the 'right' - the things the left opposes? So we get revisionism - I remember a bizarre seminar at university where we discussed the bewildering manner in which the number of dead bodies in Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge was parsed according to the ideological position of the calculator. My lecturer took the Noam Chomsky position - there weren't as many dead as claimed and, anyway, it was down to individual actions by bad soldiers and Pol Pot didn't know about what was going on (I paraphrase but this summarises the then academically popular apologia for one of the worst genocides of the 20th century). Portraying this - the consequence of communism in power - as somehow an historical aberration, not real communism, is precisely what Jodi Dean and her fellow travellers want to do. Just so they can carry on promoting a faith that demands coercion and oppression as well as producing, in so many tragic cases, violence, death and starvation.

Communism should not be savable through some sort of historical revisionism, it should be confined to the same place as Nazism and Fascism and its proponents treated with the same opprobrium. So long as elite journals like the LRB can lead with unchallenged communist apologia, we are a long way from seeing the murderous ideas of communism properly confined to the madder corners of obscure websites and batty college pamphleteers.

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The literary elite is cool with apologists for mass murder so long as it's the left sort of mass murder

I've just finished reading a review of Richard Evans book about Eric Hobsbawn in the London Review of Books. It's fair to say I have a problem with it - not the review but the very fact of the review. I appreciate that the LRB is a sort of house journal for lefty London luvvy types but it really amazes me that such reverence is given to a man who, without irony, was an abject apologist for mass murder:

"Evans doesn't sugarcoat the intellectual gymnastics Hobsbawn performed to defend the Stalinist show trials, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, or the Soviet invasion of Finland, but neither does he underplay the vibrant and intellectually heterodox spirit that animated the Communist Party Historians Group..."

It makes me want to throw up when a major journal allows for an essentially hagiographic book about a man who never retracted, let alone apologised for, supporting one of the biggest mass murders in human history - Stalin's Soviet Communism. It's as if the sake of the revolution exonerates Hobsbawn - and those who write about him as anything other than evil - from being treated with the same sort of contumely as we might treat an uncritical book about David Irving.

Communism, in all its forms, up to and including the cool modern version given far too much air time by a lefty London luvvy dominated media, depends entirely on coercion, oppression, violence and, most usually, murder to sustain its power. Like its evil twin, fascism, communism visited on the 20th century more death and destruction than any other ideology. Sadly, while fascism is most of the time beyond the pale, communism remains, as this uncritical review of an 600 plus apologia for Hobsbawn tells us, an idea that intellectuals feel able to embrace and promote without criticism from their peers.

The list of communism's obscenities is long and foul - the rape, the murder, the starvation, the gulags and concentration camps, the summary executions, the lies, the corruption and the silencing of all but laudatory voices. It is an evil creed but we still allow it space to breathe because, like some sort of warped religious cult, its adherents want to believe that next time communism will succeed in perfecting man, in creating the ideal society on top of the skulls of its enemies.

Frankly, the London Review of Books - and all the others who've indulged books like this one about Hobsbawn and given time to people declaring "I'm literally a communist" - should be ashamed. I read the journal because it gives me an insight into how the left's intellectual elite thinks (and is very well written as well) but today I'm reminded that that elite is quite happy to explain away mass murder so long as that mass murder is the left sort of mass murder.

By way of postscript, the same issue of the LRB contains a review of two books on the populism phenomenon in Europe - one by Eric Kaufmann ('Whiteshift') the other by Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin ('National Populism) and not only frames the books as 'racist' but concludes that the writers "...fail to see the danger in what they are proposing." Two considered academic reviews of the reasons for Europe's populism dismissed as, in essence, simplifying racism. What a contrast to the hagiographictreatment of Hobsbawn.

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Not True Communism - the left and Cambodian genocide

It was in 1980 when I first encountered the Western academic response to the Khmer Rouge, Angkar and Pol Pot. This was something of an eye-opener - my spectacularly low opinion of Noam Chomsky was formed at this time - as we considered the still emerging evidence of communist atrocity in Cambodia set alongside the dominant commentary, inspired by the likes of Chomsky, that the refugee tales couldn't be believed and it was just "...a rationally conceived strategy for dealing with the urgent problems that faced postwar Cambodia."

Cambodian academic, Sophal Ear and US researcher, Donald W. Beachler call this the "Standard Total Academic View" - it was pretty much what that part of my South East Asian Politics module taught. Question the reports, challenge the numbers (we had a whole seminar dissecting the numbers who died - downwards and sideways mostly) and argue that the sources of criticism were either 'neo-colonialist', US imperialist or Viet imperialist. Even as we read reports about children killed, their heads smashed against trees, starvation and mass murder using the most basic of implements - shovels, mattocks, axes, our reading list contained stuff like this:

Chomsky invites us to consider historian Ben Kiernan’s hypothesis that the Khmer Rouge leaders never properly established discipline over insubordinate soldiers: “[Kiernan] notes that most of the atrocity stories come from areas of little Khmer Rouge strength, where orders to stop reprisals were disobeyed by soldiers wreaking vengeance, often drawn from the poorest sections of the peasantry.”

This quote comes from a frightening article by Matthew Blackwell describing both the personal tragedy, the scale of death and the manner in which so much of what we'd now call "progressive academia" denied or down-played what was happening. These were heroic socialist liberators, how could they possibly install such a reign of murderous terror? Even today some still deny - here from 2012 in American 'radical' magazine, Counterpunch:

The Pol Pot the Cambodians remember was not a tyrant, but a great patriot and nationalist, a lover of native culture and native way of life. New Cambodia (or Kampuchea, as it was called) under Pol Pot and his comrades was a nightmare for the privileged, for the wealthy and for their retainers; but poor people had enough food and were taught to read and write. As for the mass killings, these are just horror stories, averred my Cambodian interlocuters.

Set against a million dead people, torture and starvation, we have people - academics, commentors, reporters - prepared to spin and prevaricate so as to suggest that, far from the Killing Fields being the direct consequence of a deliberate policy imposed by the Angkar and inspired by the Marxism they'd learned in 1950s Paris, they were some sort of accident or mistake.

This is a pattern for these progressive academics and writers - from G B Shaw's apologia for Stalinism through Chomsky's excusing of Pol Pot to today's left fawning over Chavez's Venezuela and Castro's Cuba. And when the denial of the violent oppression communism requires becomes to painful, our leftists fall back on "that wasn't true communism".

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Murder, starvation, poverty, autocracy...how did communism get to be cool?

It came to a head with an attractive young journalist proclaiming on morning TV: "I'm literally a communist, you idiot". For me this seemed little different from someone popping up and saying; "of course I'm a Fascist, twit face" or "absolutely, you numpty, I'm a Nazi". Yet unlike these latter statements, saying you're a communist doesn't get shock horror reactions, The Guardian won't headline its spluttering indignation at someone being a communist. Indeed the more likely reaction is a sort of "bless, young people care so much about the downtrodden - communism is wrong but their heart's in the right place".

Communism - even in places that really ought to know better like East Berlin - is cool and trendy. Communism is cool despite its track record of economic failure, suppression of democracy, state-sponsored murder, starvation and the incarceration of political opponents. The cruelty of Pol Pot's Cambodia, Mao's 'Cultural Revolution', Stalin's purges and Castro's gay correction camps is set aside because, y'know, communism is cool.

Why is this - seriously, why? Here's a few thoughts with my marketing hat on.

Communism is an ideological brand and people's attachment to it isn't based on much considered analysis but on the belief that (as my Dad said years ago) "socialism just means good". And if you don't believe me, here's a response to me on Twitter following my criticism of communism:

The communist manifesto like any seminal text is not to be taken so very literally but considered and applied to the current socioeconomic climate, taking or leaving as appropriate. This just seems like adult common sense to me.

It's like the Bishop of Durham explaining how, in a very real sense there is a god but he/she/it isn't quite how it says in the bible, that's allegory. So let's explore how communism got to move from being a 19th century piece of political philosophy to a seemingly faith-based creed (despite killing about 100 million people inbetween).

Communism's brand identity has a variety of elements - workers, the people, revolution, anti-establishment - that position it well for those looking to be politically contrary (a common trait in younger people). All of the factors in communism's brand identity are positive - other than the unfortunate fact of, when put into action, its tendency to make people poorer or at least those people it hasn't killed or exiled. But the identity is strong enough to resist these unfortunate historical issues. How come?

Communism's brand associations provide a justification for the "not true communism" response to any criticism citing the Soviet Union ("Stalin wasn't really a communist"), Castro ("Cuban totalitarianism was forced on it by US aggression") or Vietnam (US aggression again). These brand associations - what do you think of when someone says 'communism' - include:

Trendy university lecturers (I recall one lecturer's opening remarks to our 'Geography of South East Asia' module - "I'm a radical Marxist geographer")

Marx and Marxism - not The Communist Manifesto but the degree to which Marx is seen as significant in economics and (especially) sociology. Communism gets academic credibility to match lecturer trendiness

Communist iconography is appealing and rebellious - Che Guevara t-shirts, the hammer and sickle, the colour red.

WW2 - the Russians were our friends and allies (sort of) so communism isn't as bad as that other totalitarianism we don't talk about except when we want to criticise slightly orange US Presidents

All the bad stuff must have been a mistake ("not real communism") because Dr Steve Rogers* is way too trendy to do anything so bad as executing shopkeepers or forcing accounts clerks to work in market gardens. And anyway Marx says (insert trite quote cut and pasted from Good Quotes or Wikipedia). "Do you like my Che t-shirt - only £9.99 down the market?"

The communist brand also has what we can call width - if you thought communism was about economics or sociology think again. Those trendy lecturers crop up everywhere and communism (or "Marxism" but in branding terms there's little difference) has something rebellious - always "challenging orthodoxy" to the point where the challenge becomes the orthodoxy - to say: in the arts, in offshoots of sociology like gender studies and media studies, in literature, language studies and doubtless archaeology.

We can take a step back and observe that communism, from its inception in Marx and Engels' manifesto, has always been predicated on the idea of violent revolution - how else are you going to get hold of the property "for the people"? But this essential violence becomes cool because some of us (especially men) get quite turned on by political violence and the people advocating the violence are rebels, cool dudes fighting for a better world.

Communism's brand is cool because the idea of using violence to remove oppression is cool (watch Star Wars if you doubt this for a second) and the flaws - communism's track record of cruel, hateful oppression - is disregarded because the iconography, identity, story and associations allow for a myth rejecting its failures, most commonly because of the actions of communism's enemy rather than because of its inherent failings. Communism is cool because its brand values allow it to resist an honest assessment of what it has done and what it means.

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One Hundred Years of Socialist Evil

There. I've said it. This doesn't mean that socialists are evil just that they have been seduced by the Marxist nonsense of what Deirdre McCloskey called 'this secular religion'.

Why is it evil? Because from its outset it has desired the forced transformation of man through the action of authority. There is only one socialist truth and this is owned by those who lead the people - there is no democracy here, no recognition or respect for freedom, or for the fabulous idea that we have individual identity and agency. And this - as we approach the 100th Anniversary of socialism's most extensive trial - is what it means:

"Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers," Lenin ordered in 1918. "Publish their names. Take from them all the grain. Designate hostages. Do it in such a way so that for hundreds of versts around people will see, tremble, know, shout: They are strangling, strangling to death the bloodsucker kulaks." (The term "kulak" referred to peasants well-off enough to hire workers.) "It is necessary secretly—and urgently—to prepare the terror," he ordered shortly thereafter.

And this is not an accidental correlation between an evil man and a noble ideology, it is the direct consequence of the hatred that drives socialism. Hatred of individual success. Hatred of enterprise. Hatred of initiative. Hatred of liberalism. Hatred of free thought. Hatred of independence. As another evil man inspired by socialism said - "everything within the state, nothing without the state". You, me, all of us, are but pawns in the state's direction. A control that brooks no opposition.

If you are tempted by socialism examine your conscience. Look at the 100 years since that fateful November day in Moscow and ask whether the experiment has run its course. Look around and consider that the people living under liberal capitalism are healthier, wealthier and happier than those who languish under socialism. I know you care about justice. You want rights protected and enforced. You dislike profiteering and rent-seeking. And you feel too many people still fall through the cracks of our rich society into some form of poverty. But socialism is not the answer to these problems - it is a siren voice tempting you onto the rocks of social collapse, authoritarianism and decline. Tie your self to the mast and sail on into calmer seas where people are free, enterprising, independent, innovative and caring. Reject the evil doctrine of socialism.

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A note on Slovakian planning...

I've written about Slovakian planning before (a niche subject I know) but this is a reminder that when you've few land use planning controls stuff gets built pretty quickly:

Recently, I returned to Slovakia. One day, while driving through the capital of Bratislava, I noticed a brand new suburb that covered a hill that was barren a mere two years before. The sprawling development of modern and beautiful houses came with excellent roads and a large supermarket. It provided a home, privacy, and safety for hundreds of families.

How was it possible for a private company to plan, build, and sell an entire suburb in less than two years, but impossible for a communist central planner to build one small building in almost a decade?

The article's actually a cautionary tale for young people explaining the evils of communism. But for me this paragraph stood out because there's no way that you'd get a new suburb built in the UK within two years from scratch including roads, buses, supermarkets and schools. Perhaps we need to learn some lessons in liberty from the now free Slovaks?

The clue, after all, lies in that word 'planning'. And it's the main reason housing markets don't work properly.

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One little quote that sums up why communists are evil

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They really are and this is why - this is the Official Cuddly University Don version of communism. It is sickening, revolting...and it should both depress and anger you that the main party of Britain's left has been taken over by the disciples of men like Eric Hobsbawm:

Yes folks. It's OK if we kill millions of people to get your 'new world'. There are no good words - other than utterly evil - to describe this. Yet thousands of shiny-faced young people are still sucked in by the corrupting, depraved and evil ideas that created communism.

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The lunatics are definitely in charge at the Guardian!

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Communism wasn't all bad, you know. Forget the mass murder, the suppression of dissent, the imprisoning of opponents, and the impoverishment of millions. There is this:

Havel's anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women's rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.

People at the Guardian still believe this rubbish?

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