Letters to the Editor

• Marx, Communism, Marxism, Bolshevism, "Fellow-Travellers," Trotskyites and Liberalism

  [Read the article: A genuine political sea change?]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  It is true that a lot of liberal intellectuals, appalled at the near collapse of free-market capitalism in the late 1920s to the 40s became enamoured of Karl Marx and Communism -- but you cannot comment sensibly without understanding much of what was happening or understanding the difference between the idealistic Communism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and what came to be known as Marxism, Marxist/Leninism and Bolshevism.

  The first thing to understand was the Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, whatever their personal morality (which was deeply suspect and riddled with hypocricies, i.e., Marx the impregnator of servants and Marx and Engels supported from the profits of an industrial mill that was not a pleasant place for its workers), were both fervent belivers in free speach and political freedom. As a child of 12 I read a copy of the Communist Manifesto and it is a very interesting document, quite beguiling, and certainly I think it would have been attractive to people raised as Christians, because in many respect it proposes a type of just society that matches what Christians before the rise of the whacky right in the 50s would have favoured.

  That was in the 1970s, by which stage no one, including my Father, a senior diplomat who many dealings with the Soviets and Warsaw pact, had any doubts about what the Soviet regime stood for, and it was not the Utopia of the Workers Marx had proposed. In fact Marx's utopian vision had not survived the formal development of Marxism as a philosophy, or its hijacking by the Bolsheviks.

  However, in the 1930s, when many of those criticised became communists, it was easy for them to read Marx and discount the rumours and stories coming out of Russia -- they had after all lived through a period when the left, ranging from its promotion of workers rights, through Unions to the vote had been systematically demonised by industrial magnate newspaper proprietors ranging from the slimily Catholic William Martin Murphy of the Irish Independent and sponsor of the 1913 Dublin Lockout, to the Harmsworths who founded the Daily Mail and enthusiastically endorsed Hitler and appeasment (and today is a Neocon organ) or the Yellow Journalism of Joseph Pullitzer and William Randolph Hearst. To be blunt, the press had lied so much before, no one believed it when it spoke of Bolshevik attrocities in Russia, indeed against a former Czarist ruling class that had been a byword for primitive cruelty and thuggery. And even then, some romantically embraced Trotsky, a murderous thug, deluding themselves that he might have been the lost leader, that could have led Soviet Communism into the promised land. Later 1950s and 60s Trots went on to become the progenitors of Neo-Conservatism, switching from one philosophy to one not so different, without a stop to confess their mistakes.

  And this is an important point, the Neo-Cons come from a background of authoritianist error, both on the Right and the Left and have not abandoned their authoritarian and indeed messianic outlook on the world, more they have just changed labels. Whenever I talk to a Neo-Con they remind me deeply of leftwingers who in the 1980s still sported the Marxist-Leninist label (but by then singing Enver Hoxha's praises) or the Trots, and those that vocally backed extremist groups around the world. They have this same tendancy to spout de-humanised theory, all wrapped up in the Suslov's euphemistic language of "legitimate targets," "collateral damage" etc. that enraged me in my teens and 20s. I challenge anyone to compare the lingustic style used by Suslov in propounding MarxistLeninist theory and that of the Neocons and see any difference at all.

  By contrast with the NeoCons, most people on the left recognised the far left for what they were -- the European Social Democrats had started their battle with the Hard-Left before the turn of the century, as had the Democratic party and the AFL-CIO, the British TGWU and Labour party, Wily Brandt and the German Social Democrats, even the French Socialist Party and before Georges Clemenceau. Those on the hard left who moved to the center recanted very publically, most notably George Orwell (in a Homage to Catalonia and most famously Animal Farm -- my father gave me that book at the same time as the Communist Manifesto.) Animal Farm is the best book to understand how so many decent people fount themselves lured into believing the Bolsheviks at first, but also about how they woke up.

  Now if only I could believe in the decency of the NeoCons fellow travellers, but as I watch Conrad Black, Barbary Amiel, and others exposed . . . . it is tough. Certainly before the political right can convincingly clean itself of the Neocon stain it will have to do some public soul seaching rather than a desperate effort to look less foul by making pre-emptive and inaccurate Tu Quoque (You Also/You Too) arguments

  Permalink Sunday, April 29, 2007 05:05 AM