The reason might have had nothing to do with religion, particularly as Christians were often the ones most affected by these changing attitudes, which were typified by Thatcher, Reagan and Blair, all supposedly believers. It might have been the failure of the “secular god” of socialism. Socialists and communists have a clear morality, but no one is so deprived of morality as socialists and communists who cease to be socialists and communists, with the usual proviso on notable exceptions.
I conclude this summary with my principal argument, and one that I assert with unusual confidence: religion is a private matter that the state should not interfere with, and equally it is not a matter that should divide anyone – not even atheist and believer. There is only one division that is fundamental to our lives, and that was one I examined in the previous essay.
What Was Wrong with the Left?
Essay titles that start with a question threaten to be didactic, and my choice was influenced by the typical approach of the left when it goes in for a little self-criticism, which generally turns out to be self-justification. For instance, What Is Left? by Nick Cohen, whom I first read as a combative, investigative journalist for the New Statesman endowed with a good sense of humour, suggests the game is over and all that’s left is a shared past, a cultural museum. The book was published before the economic crisis, and it was generally thought that capitalism had more or less solved the problem of human want and the only remaining problem was a group of intransigent Islamists who were intent upon dragging this new paradise back into the Middle Ages or the Middle Ages as they are currently conceived. Of course, this belief required not only prejudice but also a rank ignorance of what Mike Davis has called a “planet of slums” and of “deprivation” much closer to home. During the nineties, an interviewer in the New Statesman stated that his interviewee, Perry Anderson, was not one of those stupid leftists who don’t accept that the right has won all the economic arguments. At the other extreme, a few people feel that nothing was wrong with the left in the past, and all they had to do was shout their message even louder than before.
It has seemed to me throughout this crisis of the left, which now goes back a long time, that there was something fundamentally wrong with the left but it was about how we did things and not about policy. I cannot and probably should not provide a detailed solution to these problems. That is because I don’t have the knowledge and political experience to do so, but if I identify the problems, others perhaps could think about the solutions – which on the whole should emerge from some kind of collective experience. The important question is how much these are problems inherent to the left and how much these were cultural features of twentieth-century society as a whole. Some social phenomena, particularly in the thirties, were common to left-wing, right-wing and “democratic” societies. Equally the problems I list below are problems that concern all sections of the left or supposed left, although paradoxically they particularly affect Leninist parties and the new parties of the reformed left, such as New Labour and the Democratic Party in Italy, which I would define as right-of-centre parties. Both have their reasons for not listening to their membership and in particular for not listening to reality.
The first significant problem is that the left has always identified itself with modernity. There were many reasons for this, not least that history appeared to be on its side. The ethos of the left had filtered out into many circles where its presence would have been unthinkable before the Second World War. The resulting self-confidence meant that the left felt it could compete with capitalism on productivity. It is true that left-wing policies regenerated the capitalist economies after the War and the more social-democratic they were, the quicker the recovery. The Liberal ministers who ran the Italian economy after the War allowed Mattei to maintain the small state corporations set up under Fascism, because they considered them to be an irrelevance, but these organisations grew into monstrous industrial complexes with activities in a great number of sectors. The times were on their side.
However, regional contingent factors should not lead us to ignore some basic problems for the left. If the left means anything, it has to mean the protection and advancement of the less well-off sections of society. It therefore can never have the flexibility of an extreme free-market economy, which can happily close down factories and possibly transfer them elsewhere, even if the savings on the whole operation are minuscule. I recently heard an interesting dictum, which has no doubt been doing the rounds of business schools and think tanks for a long time: “Turnover is vanity; profit is sanity.” This must be true for an individual company within a capitalist society, but it is not sanity for a whole economy, even a capitalist one. Profit is what ensures the survival of the company, but the turnover, particularly if there’s a large workforce, is what keeps that economy functioning and creates demand so that other companies can also survive. This is a fundamental weakness in capitalist society, but why should socialist societies emulate them?
When Mao Zedong came up with his insane idea of getting peasants to produce steel, he was trying to compete with capitalist societies without considering the effects on those peasants. He accepted the capitalist idea that high productivity is the greatest social good, even though it usually turns work into misery, and he forgot about why people wanted a socialist society in the first place. He applied the same ruthlessness of the corporation when it came to moving “human resources” around and putting them to work. In other words, he treated humans as a means, with little certainty over what the end was, other than a powerful desire to overtake the capitalist competitors and overtake them quickly. He didn’t intend to starve the peasants to death, but neither did he give much consideration to them, their needs and indeed their opinions. He moved them around as a general deploys his troops.
The time has come for the left to think about whether GDP or any other measure of productivity should be guiding political decision-making. Not all goods, products and outcomes are equally necessary. Food, housing, education, health, leisure, safe working conditions and fulfilling work are all necessities. Great mountains of ugly and rarely used plastic toys in every house with a child are not. In a polluted world, society has to think about its resources and its priorities. Soviet economies may have been overly centralised, but some degree of central planning is required, and is in fact in place in our societies, where it works in the interests of capital and not people.
The second problem is how we impose discipline. The left is about equality and the right about hierarchy, so the right has no inner conflict in establishing a chain of command. It is often the case that in setting out to do something, we end up doing exactly the opposite, sometimes without ever realising it. It is not surprising that militants after the world wars voluntarily subjected themselves to rigid discipline within a long chain of command all in the name of ending war and class divisions. They were horrified by the wars they had been forced to participate in, but those wars had also taught them to accept harsh discipline. They transferred some of the behavioural patterns of the imperialist war they detested to their war against empire and war. There was something heroic in this. Victor Serge’s novels show how people realised that there was something wrong in Soviet society, but they felt that their generation had to make a huge sacrifice for future generations. In such chains of command, it is by no means the best and the most talented who rise to the top, and the men who control authoritarian power of the left start to behave like those who in other regimes control authoritarian power of the right, just as authoritarian power of the right adopts the mass language of authoritarian power of the left. In the bitter struggle of mutual hatred, everyone starts to resemble the other side, although some important differences remain. The equivalence of all authoritarian regimes was invented in the post-war period to smear the left which enjoyed a degree of cultural influence even in capitalist countries. This influence took several decades to dissipate.
Both Stalin and Blair detested the rank and file of their own o
rganisations. This has made some people believe that Stalin must have been a police spy who, following the collapse of the regime he supposedly worked for, found himself in a position of authority within an organisation dedicated to a cause with which he had an ambiguous relationship. If he had been a spy, he would have been a man used to intrigue and playing his cards close to his chest in a position of total isolation, and he would therefore have been well placed to take over the reins of power, which come most easily to those who are utterly ruthless. This might also explain his strange obsession with Bulgakov’s The White Guard. And I might even find this argument a little convincing, if it were not for the fact that so many other Stalins followed in his wake. No sane person would believe that Mao had been a police spy, but the behavioural patterns were very similar. It is much more likely that the combination of a powerful political position and an absolute belief in human reason, which so easily translates into an absolute belief in one’s own reasoning, leads to a psychosis whereby the revolution and the self become entirely identified the one with the other, not only in mass propaganda but in the dictator’s own mind.
The third problem is that political movements in general are intolerant of dissent. Lenin started a particularly restrictive tradition when he forced the break between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. This is the stuff of politics and goes much further back than the existence of the left. There are two reasons why the left should be particularly careful about proper internal democracy. Firstly they claim to want a more democratic society with the involvement of as many people as possible. Secondly good decisions come out of open debate. A question of values and a question of practicalities. I was a member of a small Trotskyist organisation in the seventies – it doesn’t matter which. The guru for this group was Ernest Mandel, a stern, humourless, besuited man who sat on podiums and moulded the truth like a blacksmith hammers hot iron. You’re not quite sure what point he’s trying to make so emphatically but eventually some kind of shape does appear. But is it of any use? We were summoned to a cadre school, which was actually a kind of rally. He was sitting up there with some other important individuals and they were denouncing Pabloism, because someone had decided that we had to be informed about this particular heresy and guarded against its dangerous allurements. For me this was like going to the dentist, because they had omitted to tell us what Pabloism was. It was assumed that everyone knew, but why then did we have to discuss it? Mandel gave us the whole watertight case against poor old Pablo. Then other people came up on the platform to briefly add their outrage at his unspeakable behaviour. But what had he done? I was probably stupider than your average Trotskyist, but I was still not grasping the point. Then something exciting happened. An old man with an American accent clambered up onto the stage. He mumbled that he wanted more than the statutory two minutes (this was a tactical mistake on his part). He said that the other side of the story needed to be heard. Now the panel looked quite alarmed. Then he did it. He announced that he was a Pabloite! Mayhem ensued. He was manhandled off the stage very quickly and where he went and what happened to him I do not know. Some of us at the back shouted, “Let him speak!” The crowed turned – this was worrying too – they were angry and they told us to be quiet. I sensed the sturdiness of the crowd, and you knew that nothing could be done. I felt helpless and a few months later I left the organisation. I looked around for another organisation before I did, but I was to discover that it was no different and stayed a very short time. There was an inherent problem, and we need to ask why.
People in left-wing organisations often make considerable sacrifices and so it’s quite difficult for them to accept that they have been making sacrifices for a flawed organisation. Maybe. Or perhaps it is just the crowd – any crowd.
There was an old man of Whitehaven
Who danced a quadrille with a raven;
They said, “How absurd
To encourage the bird,”
So they smashed the old man of Whitehaven.
I don’t know who was responsible for that particular limerick which was quoted by an English teacher at school and stuck fast in my brain. It explains the phenomenon quite well. The history of the left (and the right, for that matter) is studded with the excesses of moralistic verve, which are very similar to acts by Christian crowds and invaders. The Cultural Revolution was an example on a terrifyingly large scale. One of the BBC’s greatest series was People’s Century, and there was a chilling interview with a by then middle-aged woman, who explained the terrible humiliations she and her fellow college students heaped upon their headmaster. The interviewer asked if he was a particularly oppressive man, and she replied in surprise, Oh no, he was a lovely man. He was always at the gates in the morning to welcome us in. It was just that everyone was doing this at the time.
The left has to admit that it has a problem if it is going to avoid repeating it in the future, and we’re not just talking about the revolutionary left here. Decades later I was to see a similar incident at a Labour Party conference, when Wolfgang, a lifelong party member and keen supporter of CND was heckling Jack Straw. Two stewards manhandled him out of the conference hall in front of the BBC cameras, and the news editor that night correctly decided to run this episode as the first item. When I saw it on TV, I recognised the incident, although it was slightly different. A party that cannot have an open and well-ordered debate is not worthy of support, however bitter and significant the differences may be.
I don’t want anyone as ignorant as I was to be left in a state of suspense, so I will explain Pabloism as it was explained to me many years later. Having been involved in the Algerian national liberation movement, he became a minister in the first Algerian government with the FLN, a coalition of “bourgeois parties”. It doesn’t seem that bad. In fact it sounds the sort of pragmatic act we should approve of. Purism! Purism and the need to be purer than everyone else is a probable cause of this intolerance.
Ernest Mandel wrote a book called rather optimistically, Late Capitalism. He also said that Russia could never revert to capitalism. Revolutions in reverse are a historical impossibility. He laughed at the absurdity of it, but lived long enough to see that he was wrong. The left attracts too many people who think they have a handle on history. They believe in political predestination.
Fourthly, my generation was alone in developing a tendency on the left towards what can only be called bad manners. This was not so much the politics of equality as a holiday from reality in which anyone who interfered with the fantasy was shouted at. Everybody wanted to prove that they were actually more left-wing than everyone else, and moral outrage was the de rigueur fashion accessory of the time. This unmannerly left was not the whole left in the seventies; it belonged to the youthful left, and particularly the youthful, middle-class left (Bradbury’s History Man comes to mind). The right suffered from ill-mannered youth in the eighties, but we’re not talking about the right here, and if this unmannerliness were simply a feature of the seventies and no more, it would be of little importance. The problem is that the phenomenon has left its trace in the left – a kind of seediness, a lack of moral direction. We must be careful about this word, “moral”; it is central to any political debate, but slips so easily into the “moralistic”.
There is still a tendency on the left (no more than that) to consider the act of belonging to the left to confer such moral rectitude that left-wingers rise above morality and have no need to apply it to themselves. Strangely, New Labour, which is a fundamentalist Thatcherite credo, is the part of the “left” that is most imbued with this thinking – one of the few aspects of the seventies left that they have clung to. After them comes the “revolutionary” left, which still contains the good, the bad and the mad, which it probably always has done since Bolshevik times, though the proportions might differ. The trouble is that the organised left between those extremes seems to be very thin on the ground, although I believe it to be a huge constituency out there in the electorate, but one no politician wishes
to tap – or represent.
The roots of this phenomenon are in the hedonism of the late sixties and early seventies. The revolution of the ego against the super-ego. There is the wonderful scene of a group of “revolutionaries” holed up in a requisitioned hotel in the centre of Paris, which now lies at their feet. The chief of police rings them and asks for instructions. The president is packing his bags and preparing to leave the country. The deposed powers haven’t yet realised that the “revolutionaries” have no plans. This is not so much “the ends justify the means” as “the means are all the fun we need”.
This was a social revolution that had the rhetoric of a political revolution.
There were in fact two revolutions, a youth social revolution and a working-class political revolution. This was much more evident in Italy, where the latter was dominant and continued for a decade, bringing enormous political and economic changes, and considerable political instability, while never actually changing the government. There was a tacit agreement that the Americans wouldn’t allow it.
It was not that the social revolution was bad and the political revolution good. It was more complicated than that. The tiny group I joined in Italy belonged primarily to the social revolution, but both trends were there and the age gap coincided with that division. The older members had been in the Italian Communist Party, as had been entryists like the Militant Group in the Labour Party. They were in effect still communists. The organisation came out of the Communist Party too late, because it had been so snug inside, and the independent thinkers had already left to set up another organisation which became huge and eventually published a daily paper. I was with the rump. And I was in the rump because I just happened to end up living in a group of flats mainly populated by students and drifters, all of whom belonged to this rump organisation. I made no considered choice, and fell in with the crowd. My neighbours were the young ones and new recruits who had never been in the Communist Party. In my dopiness, I never sensed the depth of the rift between the youngsters and the oldies. After I went back to Britain, they split: the oldies continued to meet every month and predict that inevitable collapse of capitalism and the youngsters went off to have fun. They opened a literary restaurant called Stazione di Zima, after the long poem by Yevtushenko, and for a time it became a hub for cultural activities. The rift was total, but I liked both sides for different reasons – as human beings and for their political ideals – but both were out of touch with reality. That was how I got into the British sister organisation, and had to listen to Ernest Mandel, whose name had never been mentioned in Italy, even though he was the head of the same umbrella organisation, which very probably still exists. The movement seemed saner in Italy, perhaps because the whole society was affected one way or another, although the movement would soon disappear as quickly as it had emerged. Something we have seen elsewhere, most recently in Egypt and sadly over an even shorter period.
Things Written Randomly in Doubt Page 24