I left you at the end of the last blog promising never to think leftie thoughts again. You may like to look on it as a political promise, or more explicitly one which I don't intend to keep and never did. In other words basic manifesto fodder.
In between tearing what little of my hair I have left out at the roots and ringing my ISP to try and sort out my woes I have had time to ponder on why the epithet leftie is used so pejoratively and why here is no real equivalent for those on the extreme right, other than fascist, which has such extreme overtones that it is easy for those accused of it to dismiss it.
Last night Mrs Green and I watched the first episode of The Secret Agent, a dramatisation of the book by Joseph Conrad, and it brought home to me how long a tradition what might broadly be called the left have of taking actions which they hope will bring about the downfall of the State and indeed society as a whole, leaving the way clear for the establishment of a proletariat state of some sort or another. It strikes me that much like the Brexiteers the anarchists of that time had no real plan, but they saw injustice and wanted to do something about it.
The novel is set in 1886 and was written in 1907, well before the second successful proletarian revolution of modern times. The first of course was the French Revolution of a hundred years earlier, which ultimately ended in Napoleon declaring himself Emperor, which is hardly the stuff or proletarian dreams. There was of course a great deal of unpleasantness between the start and the end, a fact which is easily exploitable by those with a vested interest in keeping the status quo as a reason for revolution not being the way to bring about change. Even so the French are still regarded as a bit flakey by many Brits and I think the folk memory is long. Now the French content themselves with setting up new republics rather than beheading the elite. They are currently on their fifth.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 can be regarded as the first successful overthrow of the ruling classes. I know the cold war is over, although Putin the Obnoxious, the current mouthpiece of the people seems to think it might be a good idea to cool it down again. Communism has been discredited and we can all look forward to future of capitalist bliss, driven by enlightened market forces, with hardly any government intervention, unless you happen to be a bank, of course.
In China too, although it remains a one party state, state control has been relaxed allowing a large middle class to emerge, most of whom you can see in Bowness on Windermere almost any time between May and October.
I am not a communist and I have no desire to live in a communist state, but claims that communism and by inference, socialism have been discredited do not stand up to close scrutiny. For a start there is room for much debate as to whether what happened in Russia and China and North Korea or Vietnam was indeed communism. Certainly in both Russia and China you had a huge un-educated peasant class, including many million who were in fact slaves for whom no opportunity had existed before and for whom life probably didn't change all that much after the revolution There were commissars instead of aristocrats, but really 'Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.' The difference was that the government were now ostensibly governing in the 'name of the people'.
Governments in the West saw what was happening and decided that the communist was the bogeyman. What he really was was the enemy. During the Second World War governments in West decided that fascism was now the greater threat and lo and behold the communist and good old Uncle Joe became our best friend.
Once the Nazis were dealt with the only other obvious enemy were the Russians, or more correctly the Soviet Union, and so there began a witch hunt against anybody who professed to have communist or even socialist leanings. In America so successful was this witch hunt that it was not until Bernie Sanders decided to run for the Democratic nomination that I ever heard the term socialist used in a non-pejorative way in American politics.
Why this antipathy towards the Left? Well, the Right is in charge. Throughout history we in these islands have been governed from the top down. This is essentially right wing doctrine, although it is interesting to note that all the discredited attempts at communism which I mentioned have been based on a personality cult: Lenin, Mao, Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh. Government was for the people (allegedly), but not actually by many of the people. It is here that Fascism and Communism become in many ways indistinguishable. How is North Korea not a fascist state? I suppose for much the same reason that I am called Tim and not Edward. It was decided at my birth.
What western capitalist governments are really afraid of is totalitarianism, hence their mistrust of Putin, despite him nominally not being a communist, and Russia no longer being a communist state.
The sad thing is they use these fears to create an society in which the man in the street is suspicious of the left, without actually realising what the left is in a western democracy. I'm sure there are Maoists and Stalinists amongst their ranks but nobody really wants to live in a totalitarian state, and those that say they do only want to if they can be in charge. Their enthusiasm for Stalinism might diminish if they thought it might be them in the gulags rather than someone else.
What the left represents, at least to me, is a desire for a change to the system, not by revolution, but by democratic means, so that it becomes less top-down and takes account of the ordinary person, by providing a society in which we all can live safely and comfortably. I stress the word 'all'.
The current difficulties in the Labour Party, which I fear are not going to be solved by this or any other leadership election, are caused, I feel by a disagreement as to how this change be achieved. The group of anarchists who meet at Mr Verloc's shop in Soho are all agreed on the need for change but are totally at odds as to the method for achieving it, espousing everything from extreme violence to pamphleteering, and all points in between. It has always been thus on the left.
I saw a comment on a Facebook post today which attacked liberal lefties. What, I asked, did the poster dislike so much about the liberal left. But answer came there none. I assume this chap uses the NHS to cite one example of what the liberal left have given us, yet it is still a term of abuse amongst the ignorant. By all means write disparaging comments about extremism and its attendant acolytes, but what has the world come to when being called a liberal leftie by someone who doesn't even know what one is is considered to be an insult.
If this is the level of political debate bring on Donald Trump. Now there's a man who talks sense.
Until the next time
Love Tim xx
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