Leftwingers who boast that they’d never kiss a Tory don’t seem to realise the flaw it reveals in their own ideology
In the week before this column appeared, the rising young Labour MP Laura Pidcock announced that she could never be friends with a Conservative, because she saw them as the enemy.
Laura Pidcock doesn’t like me. I don’t take it personally because it isn’t personal. I’ve never met her and she’s never met me. But I’m a Conservative and she doesn’t like Tories.
Fair enough. It’s a free country. For the time being. And the new Labour MP for North West Durham is entitled to pick her friends. She’s not alone, anyway. Her attitude – that Tories are ‘the enemy’ and ‘I have absolutely no intention of being friends with any of them’ – is quite prevalent on the left.
Hatred of Conservatives is common currency on social media, and at Labour conferences you can buy mugs with the words ‘Never kissed a Tory’ on them. The Guardian’s deputy opinion editor, Joseph Harker, complained only that Pidcock didn’t go far enough. His aim (tricky for an opinion editor, even of the Guardian, one would have thought) was to avoid Blairites and Liberal Democrats too.
Not unreasonably, many Conservatives are quite hurt. It’s never nice to be thought evil by someone. And the misunderstanding, that Tories are like Mr Burns out of The Simpsons, is quite frustrating. There is also something quite amusing about people who check someone’s position on free schools before they kiss them.
Yet my reaction to Ms Pidcock’s unfriendly (though, it should be acknowledged, civil) comments, and to abusive criticism on Twitter, is somewhat different. I am relaxed about her social attitudes, I don’t agree that they make it hard for her to do her job, and I’m sure (indeed I know) that there are a few Tories with a similarly short-sighted view.
But I think nevertheless that this attitude to Conservatives is of profound importance, and points to a big hole in socialism.
Ever since 1956, when news of Nikita Khrushchev’s so-called secret speech began to leak out to the West, socialists have been trying to find an alternative form of socialism. One that works. One that does not lead to the errors of Stalinism that Khrushchev identified at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Social democratic parties and new liberals had succeeded in reforming capitalism, with a welfare state and progressive tax systems, but after decades of trying still had no model for replacing it. The only attempts that had been made had produced dictatorship, murder and relative economic failure. A new left, the secret speech indicated, was needed.
For more than sixty years since then, this has been the project of socialist intellectuals and politicians from Ralph Miliband to Tony Benn. The new Left has, with progressives and liberals, been involved in important campaigns to end colonialism, to promote gay rights and women’s equality, and to reduce and eventually eliminate racial discrimination. But how successful has it been in identifying and propounding an alternative to capitalism?
Completely unsuccessful. After six decades of thought and political action there remains not a single successful example of a socialist society anywhere in history and anywhere in the world. Most recently they all got very excited about Venezuela. We were told by Jeremy Corbyn that we could honour Hugo Chávez by treating him as an example to us all.
This does not, of course, mean that there haven’t been successful centre-left governments or that there are no alternatives to whatever policy the Tory party puts in its manifesto. I am not equating Yvette Cooper with Mao Zedong. I am simply saying that for all the slogans about the evils of capitalism, nobody has come up with a workable, sensible alternative. Not ways of changing it, you understand. An actual alternative.
Remember the kid with all the badges in class who tried to explain to you what socialism was, and you couldn’t quite understand how it worked? Well we are still basically there, and the failure in comprehension wasn’t yours.
And this is where Laura Pidcock comes into it. Paul Mason, the former BBC journalist and political ally of the Labour leader, recently published a book called Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. It attempts bravely to articulate what modern socialism, operating without central state planning, might look like.
I confess I was hanging on for dear life trying to grasp his scheme, but I think I got there in the end. He sees a future, as did the Occupy movement, as did the authors of New Left Review and the Bennites, in which market exchange is replaced by friendly, voluntary cooperation and free provision. Wikipedia is his model.
Reading his book on the Tube, I was wondering how he might get someone, for instance, to clean station platforms or do an extra shift without being paid. But socialists do have an answer to this of sorts. Amity.
Without the market competition that makes us ruthless and has us jostling for position, we will all muck in. Someone will notice that there is a need for someone to work in the human resources department of the organisation that produces the ink that is used on Twix wrappers, and they will pop in and do it. For nothing.
I am sorry if this sounds preposterous but it’s not my idea, is it? And if I’ve misunderstood how it all works, then answers on a postcard please. But I think you will see where Pidcock fits in. Socialism depends entirely on love and complete trust in the willingness of every person, after capitalism, to cooperate in a spirit of friendship.
So where are you left if there are whole groups of people with whom friendship is impossible, on account of their view of the world? Counter-revolutionary elements who don’t accept their socialist responsibilities. Either these people make socialism impossible, or they have to be eliminated on the grounds of their counter-revolutionary position.
Pidcock would probably laugh at this. She’s just saying she doesn’t want to chum up with Sajid Javid, and here am I suggesting that she wants to obliterate him. And she’s probably right to laugh. But not because socialism wouldn’t require such obliteration. It would. It’s just that socialism is so vague and incomprehensible she probably won’t get anywhere near it.
The other day I was listening to a (really quite shocking) interview that Jeremy Corbyn’s adviser Seumas Milne gave to George Galloway. Have a listen on YouTube. It’s amazing.
In it, Milne regrets the passing of East Germany, really he does. Then he adds that obviously we wouldn’t want the Stasi back. But he misses the point. You can’t have East Germany without the Stasi.