Left well alone

Marx versus the nostalgists
Marx thought that inequality was the tool by which humanity would pull itself up by its bootstraps and in this way, eventually, escape the "realm of necessity"; only then would human history really begin—ie a history in which we would be able to break out of the stultifying "predestination" of the class system. But class inequality was the harness by which freedom would be earned.

Looking about, it is possible to spot potential new economic forms growing in embryo in the womb of the old society (eg open-source software development, where status among one's peers, rather than profit, seems to be the strongest motive for innovation). However, the old social relations are clearly still "forms of development" of productive power—which will have to be at an extremely high level if socialism is not to be maintained by force, if it is to be "stateless"—rather than its fetters.

Andrew Murray's kind of left, on the other hand—looking back for inspiration to the stark semi-poverty of the Soviet Union, with its bread queues and drab uniformity, the built-in "excess macroeconomic demand" or "sellers' market" that was the lot of your average Soviet citizen (in the good years, that is)—often seems to me to be one of the possible fetters, or brakes, on the broad trend towards progressive social change and worldwide material improvement.

Why so? How did this extraordinary situation come about? Is it not one of the most puzzling conundrums of the day?

Certainly, there are many things wrong with today's mainstream left, and Mr Murray's political praxis, I would argue, has as good a claim as anyone's to exemplify some of its least attractive features.

And yet I think that, despite itself, this nostalgic, slightly provincial, slightly chauvinist left may still serve a useful role—in as much as a thoroughgoing critique of its positions is likely to suggest what a useful left might look like, by way of contrast. Engels calls this "the power of the negative".

Instrumental anti-racism. Sometimes this school portrays free speech as merely a devious bourgeois device to protect the expression of racism. This seems to me an error of historic proportions, for when you give an inch to the state or to the dominant civic culture, it is more often than not the weaker social elements who get it in the neck, and to whom the restrictions or "protections" are thenceforth applied. Plus Mill's point applies: the more ideas, the more likely we are to come to good conclusions. Bad ideas had best be let out into the open, there to be hunted down. If only Mill had been able to put this dialectically, or, better still, in the unnecessarily complicated manner of modern French philosophy, I believe that it might have better caught on with this brand of radical conformism. In fact, far from opposing racism, of late, this left has teamed up with far-right racists, whose aim it is to impose their highly restrictive values on other Muslims.

Smash the machines! This strand of the left typically decries potentially poverty-reducing globalisation, instead of proposing an alternative kind of globalisation—one in which the undeniable benefits of international trade are more equally distributed. (By "exporting" good working conditions, for example.)

Down with this sort of thing! This leads me on to the chief failing of this clique: they have no plausible and appealing alternative to the "neo-liberalism" that they despise, but which they can't be bothered to understand—hence the disastrous faith-based appeals to "more of the same", the posthumous rehabilitations of the Soviet Union (and, by the way, the official Soviet policy of the equality of the races and sexes bore a similar relation to reality as the 1936 "Stalin" constitution to the everyday practice of Soviet democracy), and of the 1970s ("when unions was king"), the starry-eyed adulation of General Chávez, because "anything but this".

And yet, even with its unconscionable level of inequality, and the relatively harsh restraints it places on all-round human development—chiefly, perhaps, by the length of the working day—this society now, here in the West, is the best, economically and politically, the richest and the freest, that there has ever been in the 6,000 years since someone put up a clock tower in Uruk and said to themselves, "I think I might stick around"; which only shows what a long way there is to go and that we are probably living in an early stage of human history.

Two faces are better than one. Finally, the leftist of the kind I am thinking of tends to shed crocodile tears over the small successes of fascist parties at home, while carrying out extensive PR campaigns for similar or much worse ones abroad—by playing up the crimes of the imperialists, and playing down or skating over the crimes of the resistance death squads in Iraq, for instance. Hence my suspicion that anti-imperialism itself, at least in its current manifestation, is perhaps one of the most serious barriers to the development of some kind of humane and productive socialism in the future.

Frankly, I'd be very afraid of any kind of socialism in which this left had too much of a hand, as it has appallingly low standards for what a society based on the free association of the producers might be like, and it is usually quite prepared to trade off a bit more bread for a bit less freedom, whereas it seems likely that more of one leads to more of the other, and vice-versa.