I was watching Question Time on television and witnessed the Labour Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell get into a terrible state trying to squirm out of admitting that he had recently told an audience somewhere that he was a Marxist. I am indeed at a loss as to why, in today's modern society, admitting to being a Marxist is somewhere to the negative side of admitting to being a paedophile. Admitting to being a Marxist in today's world is a quite different thing to what it was in the 1960's or '70's when Marxism was quite falsely accused of being the ideology behind the excesses of the Soviet and Maoist regimes. I cannot conceive of any intelligent person today who has an interest in the social sciences and particularly politics and economics who would not consult Marx on a regular basis. I am not a Marxist in that sense, nor a communist, but have no hesitation in admitting that I frequently read Marx, a genius, and a writer who is essential if you wish to understand reality.
No-one familiar with Marx can deny the decisive destruction he delivers to the notion of the atomised individual and of how he forensically demonstrates the social nature of the human being. In common with Adam Smith he demonstrates the foundation that human labour provides for the value of production. It is a myth to say that economists have disproved the labour theory of value, all they have managed to do is to refine it, and in my opinion, not too convincingly. His theories of base and superstructure and alienation are to me almost unanswerable, and are demonstrated daily in our modern post-capitalist societies.
Another well discredited myth today is the Tory narrative that if you promote any form of state intervention and advocate public spending you are promoting socialism or communism. Couple that with the notion that socialism is an ideology of equality and you have the big lie. Marx never ever argued for equality. How any one can interpret from each according to his ability to each according to his needs as promoting equality is simply intellectual barbarism. This is speaking about equity, about fairness and a proper distribution of resources. I cannot think of any serious philosopher who promotes equality, except equality of opportunity. Adam Smith told us that all civilised societies must be founded on law and justice and that the prevalence of injustice must utterly destroy society, he told us that "few men have reflected upon the necessity of justice to the existence of society, how obvious soever that necessity may appear to be." I am one of those few, but towering above all of us in such reflection was Karl Marx whose indignation of such injustice produced a searing analysis of the causes of such injustice. Law and justice require an active and interventionist state; there can be no freedom for those who seek to implement injustice and to promote laws that encourage disorder and injustice. What I ask people to do is to reflect on the towering injustice that prevails in our Western societies, particularly Britain and the United States, in societies where the average CEO of a company earns 160 times that of the average worker in the same company and where a ruling class justifies £44 billion in bonuses where over a million people are daily relying on foodbanks. We have it on record from the students who attend our universities, that neither Smith nor Marx are taught on economics courses. You should all ask yourselves why, and then go read them for yourselves. You will be pleasantly surprised.
Any reasonable solution to the problems facing us today must begin by addressing the obscene inequalities we see today, especially in Britain. There must be a serious redistribution of resources and that can only happen from government led initiatives. There must be serious reform of taxation with the emphasis moving from indirect to direct. Justice demands that business and finance activities are curbed and regulated. You can call that socialism, communism or whatever you want, but I call it a programme for survival and social order. I call it justice and to make it work we will need to utilise the writings of both Smith and Marx because if you read neither Smith nor Marx you are in reality quite ignorant on the subject of economics, and I don't care what level of degree you hold from whatever university. You have been warned
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
No comments:
Post a Comment