Too many people Labour under a misapprehension

The Labour election manifesto is unapologetically Marxist, and in fact its authors don’t apologise for it. Not only do they not bother to conceal they’re Marxists, but they’re openly proud of it.

Most of today’s politicians are crypto-socialists – this is an ineluctable outcome of universal franchise, especially if it isn’t checked by competing forms of government.

The Tories are precisely that: crypto-socialists. They realise that there still exist some residual blocs of voters for whom the word ‘socialist’ leaves an acrid taste in the mouth. They don’t mind socialist policies, as long as they’re called something else.

Our Labourites honestly take the crypto- out of crypto-socialism. Moreover, they go their Tory colleagues one better and publicly praise Marx.

Shadow Chancellor McDonnell said – on the record! – that Britain has “a lot to learn” from Marx. Yet his honesty was outdone by his boss Jeremy Corbyn who combined his respect for the didactic potential of Marxism with accurate self-assessment.

When asked if he too learned his economics from Marx, he concurred with his colleague. “I don’t consider myself the world’s greatest intellectual,” said Jeremy with self-deprecating candour, “but you learn from everybody.”

Hitler? Stalin? Pol Pot? You don’t really mean ‘everybody’, do you, Jeremy? But then again, one can’t expect a man to use words precisely if he himself admits he’s no great shakes intellectually.

Yet however cretinous these chaps are, they have enough political nous not to say something that’s guaranteed to reduce the number of their party’s seats to single digits. Hence, even if they thought it, they wouldn’t say Britain has a lot to learn from Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot.

But Marx enjoys a benign press in the West. The general consensus is that Marxism is a good idea that was lamentably perverted by the Soviets. The most obvious reason for this on-going acceptance is that for 70 years the most powerful propaganda machine in history brainwashed the world incessantly.

But the real reason lies deeper. For, as any publicity man will tell you, propaganda succeeds only if it appeals to some intuitive cravings already felt. This explains the success of Marxist propaganda: it activates and expiates the least commendable of human emotions, such as envy.

Marxism neither originated when the Soviet Union appeared nor died when it ‘collapsed’. This pernicious doctrine has been so influential not because it lived in Russia, but because it lives in the dark recesses of the human heart.

That’s why people accept Marxism on faith, without ever bothering to read even The Communist Manifesto. In fact, I’m often tempted to have a pocket edition of Marx and Engels with me whenever attending a gathering where such conversations could ensue. For Marxism demonstrably inspires most modern governments.

The nihilist regimes have brought to fruition Marxist dictates on concentration camps (Engels called them “special guarded places”), slavery (Marx: “Slavery is… an economic category of paramount importance”), mass murder (Marx: “the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries”), anti-Semitism (Marx: “…the Polish Jews… this dirtiest of all races,” “Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew”), genocide (Engels: “All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary holocaust”).

The philistine regimes focus on the less carnivorous legacy of Marxism, singling out its economics as a day-to-day textbook, as do the likes of Corbyn and McDonnell. The destruction they perpetrate is therefore delayed-action, but the bomb is ticking away.

In compiling their own manifesto, Comrades Corbyn and McDonnell were clearly inspired by the original document. Hence their proposals to add billions to the already suicidal social spending, repeal the Trade Union Act and introduce greater and stronger unionisation, reintroduce national pay bargaining, tax the ‘rich’ even more and so forth.

And of course they refuse to make “false promises” on immigration, meaning they won’t limit it in any way. That’s another lesson they learned from Marx who taught that “the workers have no motherland”.

“Abolition of all rights to inheritance” is another dictate from the Manifesto. This worthy goal is very much on the agenda, but it’s hard to achieve all at once without ‘revolutionary terror’, so beloved of Marx. In its absence, the lower-case manifesto promises to lower the threshold of inheritance tax.

Now the experience of every country where such policies have been tried shows that their net effect on public finances is negative. But our visceral Marxists prove that sound reason need not apply where evil emotions are at work.

They’re driven by Marxist envy and resulting hatred, not by accountancy. Their aim is not to cushion failure but to punish success. If this destroys the economy, then so be it. For it’s destruction and not creation that every Marxist sees in his mind’s eye.

Our brainwashed populace is too timid to protest against Marxist prescriptions, such as “a heavy progressive and graduated income tax”.

Yet this abomination violates the most fundamental principle of our polity: equality before the law. Those who make more money obviously must pay a greater amount in tax. However, making them pay up to five times the proportion of their income is unjust, not to speak of economically counterproductive.

Yet our most sacred tenets have no chance when assailed by Marxist envy. The situation would perhaps be slightly better if people actually read Marx. But it wouldn’t be much better: the poison of Marxism has seeped into the bloodstream of the West, and nothing short of a complete transfusion can cure it.

Thanks to people like Corbyn and McDonnell, Marxism lives – so the West may die.