Corbyn’s ‘socialism’ dissected. Just how radical is it or is it both counter factual and counter revolutionary?
The world is a messy place these days, methods of ordering society which Karl Marx himself would have called primitive are promoted by the West namely, Saudi Arabia whilst the neurotic adherence to faith which in Marx’s view was put asunder in the 18th century by the growth of capitalism stalks the streets of London and Manchester inflicting death and mayhem on innocent people exercising their long fought for rights to relax and enjoy themselves as individuals free of control by others. This, of course, is precisely what the neurotic Islamists want to destroy. They want to control people by gender, virtue, sexuality, tribe, ethnicity, cast, religion and denomination. There really is no limit to the bubbling primitivism of these groups and their wish to control us and our way of life. It is as though they think the Reformation in the West and what sprang from it namely capitalism and industrialisation should not have happened. This, of course, is also the problem for the British left.
Capitalism did happen and whilst it exploited the worker financially, creating the proletarian, from the bonded serf, it also created economic freedoms which were necessary for capitalism to function. These legal freedoms eventually took on a social character and explain why we have a generally tolerant, democratic and freedom loving mentality. We sum these freedoms up as Contract, Choice and Consent. They have gone from being almost exclusively the rights for the bourgeoisie to trade to being legal rights that we can all enjoy. Now the British left seems to fail to grasp that there are two sides to the capitalist system, its freedoms and its exploitation.To be just you have to be able to work out how to protect freedom whilst tackling what is still seen by them as exploitation. The British left, however, seems oblivious to this binary capitalist character and thus seem willing to ally themselves with those who hate capitalism or the modern variant the ‘free market’ and hate the freedoms it has created too. In fact, sometimes the leaders of the left seem to be so unsure of their Marx that they think it is Ok to criticise what they call capitalist exploitation with violent language or violent struggle, whilst promising as part of their revolution a mean clunking form of parliamentary redistributive socialism. Corbyn seems like a nice guy but the British hard left rank and file now looks and sounds ugly and turns a blind eye to the kind of discrimination that has no place in a once capitalist now free post-industrial society, namely misogyny and antisemitism.
As Marxists, the British hard left are very poor disciples. They are basically Leninists, advocates of bureaucratic central control and state ownership with the freedoms created by capitalism put asunder in the name of a state managed utopian New Jerusalem. To socialists of this stripe, the state itself is everything and the people nothing. These ‘vulgar’ ideas belong somewhere between 1917 and 1973 but please not now we have too much to loose.
