So, in a few short months I had learned a new language, been knowingly suborned by a spy, experienced the underside of one of the world’s greatest cities, until recently largely closed to foreigners, learned how to bribe officials, uprooted myself from the land of my upbringing and education (though not, oddly enough, of my birth) and discovered the absolute falsehood of the USSR’s claims to be an equal society, by being lapped in greater and more exclusive privilege than I have ever known, before or since.
This sort of thing has many effects (there’s much more I could tell, but no time to tell it) but one of the main ones is that it sets your mind free to think for itself in a way that 50 years of living in the same place will not usually do.
But how do I communicate this intensified and enhanced understanding to others, who have not been so blessed? Last night I was in York , haranguing a mainly student audience on the need to destroy the Conservative Party (the York student Tories, to their credit, kindly organised this event, and were extremely hospitable to me).
One of the things I need to explain is that socialists and communists have not stopped thinking. They have not ignored the failures of the 1917 revolution, nor the dead end of Attlee’s nationalisation programme. They have regrouped, re-examined the battlefield, turned to other things. The fact that your opponent is no longer trying to nationalise industry, and the fact that the old Bolshevik-influenced Communist Parties are one with Nineveh and Tyre, does not mean that the revolutionaries have gone away.
It just means that, following Antonio Gramsci or Herbert Marcuse ( or Roy Jenkins and Anthony Crosland) they have learned new ways to the old goal of the utopian society. The union barons are a spent force, a stage army of more use to Tory propagandists than to their own side. The battle has shifted into sex, marriage, morality, comedy, drugs, rock and roll, the abolition of personal responsibility, the spread of egalitarian and diversity dogma in schools, the civil service, the law, universities, publishing, broadcasting and the NHS, the anti-Christian frenzy, and the attack on national sovereignty.
The ‘Internationale’, old anthem of Communism, is now just a sentimental recognition of a revolutionary youth. The real anthem of the new revolution is John Lennon’s ghastly ‘Imagine’ , a version of which I heard this morning leaking out of the loudspeakers in my York hotel, part of the background noise of our age, sneaking into our minds as an ear-worm.
A piece over at the Guardian on sustainability and capitalism -
The future of business: what are the alternatives to capitalism?
Jules Peck asks what the implications of limits to growth are for capitalist theory, the alternatives, and what it means for business
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