THE Labour Party has an admirable record of realism when it comes to the Russian revolution and the regime that it spawned. From 1918 onwards Labour refused to work with the Communist Party and banned its members from belonging to it. Clement Attlee helped to construct NATO as a bulwark against Soviet expansion and described Russian communism as the “illegitimate child of Karl Marx and Catherine the Great”. Nye Bevan, one of Attlee’s ministers, accused the Russians of establishing “a whole series of Trojan horses in every nation of the Western economy”. Harold Wilson proclaimed that the Labour Party owed more to Methodism than to Marxism.Yet today’s Labour Party high-command contains several people who are more starry-eyed than gimlet-eyed when it comes to the Russian revolution. Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s leader, has remained remarkably silent on revolutionary Russia given the amount of praise he has lathered on Venezuela and Cuba, much of it in the pages of the Morning Star, a newspaper once partially funded by the Soviet Union. The same cannot be said of Seumas Milne, his head of strategy and a man who, according to a statement from Mr Corbyn’s people on his appointment, “shares Jeremy’s worldview almost to the letter…they sing from the same hymn sheet.” Mr Milne got his start in journalism at Straight Left, a magazine that took the “Tankie” side in the argument between Eurocommunists, who were critical of the Soviet regime, and traditionalists, or Tankies, who were critical of the criticism. He then moved to the Guardian by way of The Economist and was a reliable warrior for the hard left. “For all its brutalities and failures,” he once wrote, “communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality.”
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John McDonnell, Labour’s shadow chancellor, has claimed that his worldview has been shaped by “the fundamental Marxist writers of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky”, according to an interview unearthed by the New Statesman. He has also doffed his cap to two troubling Marxist ideas. One is Antonio Gramsci’s notion of “the long march through the institutions”: you work within existing institutions in order to convert them to the revolutionary cause. The other is Leon Trotsky’s notion of a “transitional programme”: you make demands that you know are unachievable, in order to stir up more discontent with the system.
One of Mr Corbyn’s key supporters in the trade-union movement, Andrew Murray, makes both Mr Milne and Mr McDonnell look like right-wing deviationists. He is chief of staff to Len McCluskey, the head of Unite, Britain’s most powerful union, and was seconded by the Labour Party headquarters during the recent election campaign. A long-standing member of the Communist Party before joining Labour last year, Mr Murray had a reputation as not just a Tankie but a super-Tankie, because of his unswerving support for the Soviet Union and Uncle Joe. He once wrote an article for the Morning Star which, while lamenting Stalin’s “harsh measures”, quoted Nikita Khrushchev’s statement that “against imperialists, we are all Stalinists”. On November 4th Mr Murray is due to join Tosh McDonald, the boss of the ASLEF trade union, at a celebration of the Russian centenary.
Does any of this really matter? The Soviet Union died in the late 1980s. International communism has either mutated into autocratic capitalism, as in China, or retreated into a few dysfunctional enclaves, as in Venezuela, North Korea and Cuba. The history of Labour is littered with people who flirted with hard-left ideas only to mellow on coming to power. Denis Healey, one of the Labour Party’s great chancellors, was a Tankie as an undergraduate at Mr Milne’s old Oxford college, Balliol.
Alas, it does matter, and for three reasons. The first is that it provides a measure of just how much conventional wisdom has changed in the past few years. Positions once regarded as cranky or even forbidden are becoming mainstream. The financial crisis shattered people’s faith in the wealth-creating power of capitalism and the crisis-fighting power of technocrats. A survey by Legatum, a think-tank, found that people feel far more positive about socialism than about capitalism. The Iraq war and the election of Donald Trump have supercharged anti-Americanism. Just as striking as the rise of the comrades is the fall of the likes of Tony Blair, who vigorously supported the Washington consensus in economics and American-led intervention in foreign policy.
More powerful than guns
The second reason why it matters is that ideas have consequences, particularly ideas that you have spent your entire adult life repeating. Healey was in his 20s when he flirted with the far left. The comrades are now in their 60s. Mr McDonnell has carefully worked-out plans for nationalising key industries and extending trade-union powers. Mr Corbyn has spent his life campaigning against NATO and American foreign policy. Before becoming leader of Labour he was chairman of Stop the War, a group founded by Mr Murray and others, which has been less assiduous in opposing Vladimir Putin’s wars than wars in general.
The biggest reason why it matters is what it says about the Labour leadership’s mindset. The gravest intellectual malady on the left is its habit of making judgments on the basis of people’s intentions rather than their results. This finds its purest form in the idea that the failures of the Russian revolution can be justified, or partially excused, by the nobleness of the intentions of the people who launched it. This not only applies the wrong metric to judging progress (Adam Smith’s great insight was that economic progress usually proceeds regardless of the intentions of businesspeople). It prepares the way for the pursuit of traitors when noble intentions fail to produce noble results. The Labour Party was on safer ground when it spoke the language of priorities, rather than the language of millenarianism.
― calzino, Saturday, 28 October 2017 14:31 (six years ago) link