Thatcher's legacy part 3

A friend asked me yesterday what socialism had ever done for me, given that the past 37 years of my life have been lived under conservative right-wing parties, which of course include Mad Tony’s and Daphne Broon’s New Labour. If I may digress for a minute, I have been asked about my reference to our past glorious Prime Minister Gordon Brown as Daphne Broon. A Scottish newspaper, the Sunday Post, has a comic strip that began in 1936 called the Broons (the Browns). The Broons are a family that live in a tenement in a town called Auchenshoogle that is a metaphor for Glasgow. One of the family is a spinster called Daphne who, in my opinion, bears a striking relationship to the incompetent oaf who  unfortunately became Prime Minister of this sorry country. I am in fact doing poor Daphne a disservice as she is a kind and harmless person, unlike the spiteful and nasty New Labour clown aforementioned. The only thing they really have in common is that they are both Scots.

I told this friend, who is a self-confessed extreme rightist, that it would take too long to explain, and that it would be pointless attempting to explain given he simply wouldn’t listen because, in truth, he was not interested in logic and facts. He has his theories, and that is the problem with people who ‘know’ the truth; they will never let facts spoil a good theory. This brings me to the discussion of what socialism is, because most people use this term without having the faintest idea what they are talking about. I have mentioned before, I find it quite incredible when I hear people calling Barack Obama a socialist. That is the height of stupidity and ignorance, because rightists, but particularly Americans, utilise socialism coterminous with Marxist and Communist.  As I have mentioned in my last two posts, the west, particularly Britain and the USA, have been rendered seriously brain damaged by the cult of individualism. Any reference to anything collective is regarded as socialist, smelling of Marxism, something unclean. That therefore places people like Adam Smith, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, John Locke etc. within the framework of socialism, and that highlights how debased the political narrative in the west has become because all these people were united in their description of the human being as a social being. All these people also regarded society as an empirical fact, imposing a definite and defining imprint on each and every individual. As John Donne told us ‘no man is an island’. As a result, I never use the term socialist because it has no meaningful explanation in today’s world of debased and immature debate. Indeed, what do the Vatican and Karl Marx have in common? Their description of the human being as a social being.  As the Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes tells us “The human person is by its innermost nature, a social being,” whilst Marx tells us that “The human being is in the most literal sense a zoon politikon, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society”.

However, if I had to reply to my friend, I could do it quite easily, even within the parameters of what he regards as socialist. For such people the state is what Karl Popper referred to as a necessary evil, but that is quite spectacularly wrong. The state is not a ‘thing’ with an existence outwith the personnel who comprise the essence of the state and is neither good, nor evil, but essentially reflects the policies and behaviour of the personnel in charge of it at any given point in history. The state is not independent of human activity and behaviour; it is an interdependent set of human institutions, an administrative concept for the regulation and administration of any given political entity. People can be evil and can utilise the agencies of the state for evil purposes, but equally, people can be altruistic and concerned for the welfare of others and can therefore utilise the agencies of the state for good. The state can be large, small, intrusive or liberating; it can be whatever the people directing its activities desire it to be. Two of the most dangerous Marxists writing for the state control of such things as public works and education were Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall. Well by today’s standards they must be considered Marxists, even though Smith was writing 100 years before Marx. So, what has socialism as defined by my friend done for me?

Well it has constructed, maintained and refined public works such as roads, bridges, schools, and social security benefits, as argued for by Smith and Marshall. In addition, it brought good sturdy and affordable council housing for working people, even though most of the council houses built in Britain were constructed by that most dangerous of communist parties, the pre-Thatcherite Conservatives. It has brought public health initiatives such as sewerage and sanitation, the necessity for clean water supply, and most importantly the National Health Service. It provided me and countless others with student maintenance grants, opened up further and higher education for all who wished to access it, provided apprenticeships, regulated working conditions, including hours of work, holidays, pensions, works canteens, and health and safety legislation. As is obvious, I could write a book about the benefits of state intervention in people’s lives and how the state has frequently been harnessed for good. Since Thatcher the state has indeed been harnessed for evil, but that does not make the state as a collectivity of institutions essentially good or bad, it is simply a reflection of the people in control. In addition, it is simply stupid and factually incorrect to label the above state benefits as socialist. Such benefits are indeed the result of collective social action, but were considered as beneficial and necessary at different times by people who were indeed socialist, but also by people who were, like Harold McMillan or David Lloyd George, conservatives and liberals.    

So, Thatcher's influence has been far-reaching and long-lasting, but is now beginning to run out of steam because it is founded on a fraud and riddled with contradictions. However, in its struggle to remain dominant it is descending into fascism and its whole rationale is now founded on hatred, of immigrants, foreigners in general, the poor etc. It offers no hope, only continuing misery. The neoliberal narrative is one of desperation and is manifest in the Brexit campaign, in Donald Trump and the many right-wing neo-fascist movements springing up all over the world. I ask you again as I did in a previous post, how can the Americans even contemplate electing a person who openly advocates torture? The answer my friend is written on the wind as a great man once said, and that is the real legacy of the Blessed Margaret. You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat.