I know of two your former countrymen who left Britain and the NHS, as they were essentially being asked to keep a stiff upper lip and die on time. They weren’t worth treating.
Between the two of them after numerous surgeries for cancer which did in the end take them, they nevertheless had 13 years of life more than the NHS was willing to grace them with — in the NHS, their cancers were “untreatable further”. The one set of daughters I know appreciated the five more years they had with Dad.
Sic Semper Socialism.
No one stops people in the UK going for private treatment. The lack of money and of an NHS is certainly a challenge across the pond. Great healthcare… if you can afford it!
Very soon – with the rights obsessed Leftists in power – those kind striking 35% NHS Young Doctors (who went skiing while the sick and suffering died untended at home on 2 year waiting lists) will be on the wards …with lethal injections in their back pockets and a licence to ‘assist’ the dying and to up the bodycount. Good luck meek old grannies with greedy Wolf kin who need that big house!! Good luck otherwise healthy young adults tormented by mental health and depression, you may exit too (see Belgium).. Good luck the very poor and struggling old who fall for warm entreaties to just end it all and stop being a burden (see Canada). I propose that these Killer Docs have skull and cross bones on their lapels so we can see them coming. Hypocratic Oaths and human rights my arse. This is how the Nazis began of course. With T4 & euthanasia (read up,). Smash the old Judeo Christian idea that Life is sacred Protect the NHS too as a bonus. Such are the dark ways of our illberal Progressive State. Watch out.
Those medicos who are not busy killing babies, about a quarter million a year.
But if does save a lot of £, so really, can’t be all bad, right?
Samuel Ross
3 months ago
The NHS is so hallowed, millions of people are streaming to Britain’s shores to partake of its hallowed resources. Too successful advertising by half! 😉 😉 😉
Right-Wing Hippie
3 months ago
Suffice it to say that most of the smartest minds of the interwar period were on the Left.
Ouch. Doesn’t speak very well of the interwar period, does it?
But the whole thrust of the argument is that Anglo-Marxism was a great success and save GB from Russian-style communism?? Not a failure as you suggest!
The trouble is that Communism and Socialism really are actually both very bad. So it’s not a distorted perspective, but a clear headed judgement from history.
You’re not that loathsome Trot and Oik Andrew Fisher by any chance?
If so you should return to selling ‘Socialist Worker’ outside East Croydon Station and muttering “Wot about the workers?”. You are wasting your time here.
What’s wrong with Marx? Do you mean that racist, anti semitic whose “theory” caused the deaths of millions of people under Lenin and Stalin, the Marx who never worked a real job in his life but leeched off his fellow man? That Marx?
Well for one thing, Marx was a hypocrite. He didn’t always pay his housekeeper. He thought his “big ideas” were far more important than wage theft regarding his working class housekeeper.
Yeah – as a GOP reg’d voter i hate trump – he has done to our brand what herr thatchler did to the tories in uk. Hate is never going to help anyone. Sure posh libtards like the unherd staffers will always spray hate at us humans – but hey – they were bullied at school. If i were given the chance to bully the furedinis and sayerse at school again? Course i would!!! they deserve it. But the kids of the desperately poor, the addicts, the mentally unwell?? not so much . Its not so much smart v thick – its more human v not so human – Ecce Homo ? No ecce homo unherd
Quote “i hate trump – he has done to our brand what herr thatchler did to the tories in uk. Hate is never going to help anyone.”
Isn’t there something wrong with this Mike Otter quote?
Not really. But the period of left wing critique of the status quo and the bourgeoisie was culturally rich. Even when it was silly it was interesting and culturally productive. As for now? What is there to say?
Cultural richness of expression in the eyes of a dilettante minority is a very high price to pay for the destruction of whole culture over 3-4 generations ashamed of their own identity.
Doesn’t speak well for the “smartest minds” either. The ‘Left’ has long been the most attractive faith for the intellectual classes. The belief that society can (and should) be reconstructed along more rational lines by its cleverest people has proved to be an irresistible lure to those who need a mission to give purpose to their lives.
But to believe the nonsense they spout they are obviously missing the intellectual faculty needed to be the intellectual classes and we are guilty of letting them get away with the masquerade
The belief that society can (and should) be reconstructed along more rational lines …
Not such a dumb idea prior to the work on self organising systems. And not surprising if many of the cleverest were convinced by it. That stupid people sometimes turn out to be right is little credit to them.
Well, this raises an interesting point about what clever means. I think you could make the case that a certain kind of focussed academic performance, especially in the arts, has a negative correlation with rounded judgement. Consider the finding that the highly intelligent are more prone to groupthink than average citizens.
That was when the Left, ie Labour, was more inspired by Christianity thanMarx and Lenin. Evangelicals, non-conformists, Anglicans and Catholics, formed the backbone of the Party as it came into being at the dawn of the 20th Century . The influence of Marx and its growing influence was brought mostly by academics.
Because in your world Christians must be “shamed” to act. Only Marxist thinking is for the poor? Your posts indicate you may be living in a leftist bubble. Get out more, broaden your thinking, for your own sake. You sound quite bigoted, I’m sure you’re not.
Otto von Bismarck invented the welfare state to prevent the workers from being seduced by Marxism. The real Communist never cared whether the workers were ill fed, ill housed, and ill clad. Gotta break a few eggs, ya know!
The real Communist never cared whether the workers were ill fed, ill housed, and ill clad
Not really. The communists feared that working class people could be bought off with bread and circuses, while in their view they had “a world to gain”. The motives of historical figures are hard to gauge exactly, but certainly welfare state reforms could be sold to the rich on the basis of fear of the alternative.
The communists never gave a fig about the workers. The workers were a tool to enable the “revolutionary vanguard” to seize the power they felt they deserved.
Marxists (including today’s woke brigades) have never been anything except mediocre (or worse) intellectuals who were bitter that the world didn’t bow down before their obvious (to themselves) brilliance.
I think that it’s pushing it a bit to say that he ‘invented’ the welfare state, but the new Germany was certainly the first major implementation of such.
A decent welfare state, and high-wage economy, are certainly the best drivers for capitalism, even if individual capitalists would usually push back in the interest of short-term profits.
I have no idea how such ism’s get into people heads. If you go to a political debate in Edmonton Canada you can still listen to Communist and Marxist-Leninist groups. They stick them at opposite sides of the stage.
Reading their pamphlets is even more interesting.
The Marxist-Leninists have scientific papers on how to solve the economy pricing problem. The Communists have nice posters and firm leadership.
And, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find a glass case with an axhandle inside. In case of Marxism, break glass, on their table.
Juan Manuel Pérez Porrúa
3 months ago
Soviet Communism did not fortify capitalism by forcing non-Communist governments to adopt economic dirigisme (such as in France and Britain) or an extensive welfare state (such as in the United States). On the contrary, by adopting these kinds of economic policies and what is usually called “social democracy” (don’t forget that Social Democratic Party was Lenin’s own party) have destroyed the European economies (and to a lesser extent, that of the United States) and have also destroyed European and North American societies (welfarism, egalitarianism, proletarianism, social-levelling nationalism, secularism, democratism, and all that).
Though welfarism might have been might have once been politically necessary as an ideological weapon in the War on International Communism (meaning International Socialism, it’s the same thing), adopting it has come at such a hefty price, one wonders whether anything was really gained at all at the end, in 1989, or if that had been nothing but a Pyrrhic victory. Perhaps we should all have adopted Bismarck’s second pillar of his anti-Socialist policies, namely prohibiting the Social Democratic Party (and banning the Labour Party and the “Parti Socialiste” and all of those Communist parties in all but name), keep the socialistic policies at a bare minimum, with no rampant trade unionism, none of the insanity that are public pensions, the monstrosity of state provided healthcare, the sacrilege and heresy of state provided education, and the folly of state provided cash transfers, conditional or not, of whatever amount, and thereby contain the economic, social, moral, and religious damage that social democracy has inflicted. I don’t know if that might have worked, but I really don’t know whether now even the United States is too far gone (even if it always was a Protestant country).
Nope, it is warfareism and not welfareism that has ruined the US. Although, greed, hatred and gangsertism also played their part.
US welfarism is well behind European welfarism.
What the UK and US have got is Socialism-lite, which we’re learning has the same end result as full-strength Socialism, it just takes a little more time.
Very cunning of them to employ Tories to do the actual wrecking job. Or are they all really left wing plants taking their orders from …. Well not Moscow, but somewhere.
They’re all–both sides–just politicians who are trying to remain in office–and the best way of doing that, for any of the Parties, is to give their constituents what they want. Arguing Tories versus Liberals and Republicans versus Democrats is just a waste of breath. They’re all complicit.
This article ignores the trends that emerged in the UK during the 19th century, such as the Poor Law Amendment Act, the Factory Acts and the 1870 Education Act which were built upon during the 20th century. The author is guilty of distorting history through a typically Marxist-Leninist lens.
Nevertheless, some interesting points were made around the rise of Communist sympathies in higher academia. Obviously, “romping” through Soviet Russia in the 1930s didn’t include visits to the Lubyanka. The legacy of such unwordly stupidity continues to this day.
Yes. The writer seems to think that there was no tradition either of left wing thought or of state intervention in Britain prior to the Russian revolution.
Gramsci wrote this in 1915, the idea was embraced, seeded, rooted and disseminated by academia: In Gramsci’s own words, he viewed the task thus: “Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity…in the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.”
“Capitalism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity…in the new order, Capitalism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.”
Yeah, let’s overwhelm capitalism and promote socialism because the only mechanism that is actually proven to work for lifting people out of poverty is a terrible thing.
You’re making the common error of confusing modern corporatism with the capitalism that gave autonomy to many millions along with the freedom to be creative and constructive.
Capitalism is an evolved economic system of broadly free exchange. There are varieties. Pure socialism is always a disastrous attempt to have the state control the economy in minute detail.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” sounds wonderful but is completely contrary to human nature, in which we are highly attuned to dessert (deservingness). Do you pay your workmen to have a much deserved holiday in Tenerife when they are working for you, for example?
Capitalism and socialism are therefore not equal and opposite concepts. One basically works, the other dies not.
The actual word for this capturing is ‘Entryism’, a communist strategy – Trot I think, maybe Lenin, where a few radicals infiltrate and use every dirty trick to raise each other to positions of power – and a few extremists can capture a whole system and warp it to their filthy wishes.
If the ‘lower class’ are oppressed and granted little social care, it’s the ruling elite doing what Marxists predicate their argument upon. If, however, the governing parties introduce reforms which bring the majority out of poverty, improve healthcare and lifestyles, it’s making them “easier to control and exploit”.
You can’t have it both ways.
I think we can stop acting like Marxism, which has an end stage of property abolition (Communism) is a conspiracy theory just because Fascism was an inappropriate reaction it. Marxism/Leninism and Fascism are just variations of the same Collectivist Religion. The author describes “E.H. Carr, for example, became a leader writer and deputy editor of The Times, a perch from which he preached the gospel of collectivist planning.”
Marxism is a gospel with prophets; Lenin being the highest saint. But Marxism is inefficient and unproductive. Every Marxist eventually realizes it reduces production and quality of life. But they don’t depart from the gospel, they just reinterpret it.
Marxism didn’t produce the Western labor parties. It correctly pointed out a few kernels of truth and probably temporarily created some balance with wage and work demands. But that balance was quickly outweighed by the inflation it prompted. The welfare state is a product of inflation. So yes, Marxism is responsible for the modern Welfare State…because it’s responsible for rapid inflation.
How is it without substance?Marxism/Leninist policies produce shortages everywhere they’re installed.
Shortages are caused by limited supply of goods. If the supply of something is limited, prices have to rise. If prices become unaffordable for too many people, the Central Planner has to assume control over the means of production. A large centrally planned Welfare State has to be installed whenever scarcity hits a tipping point.
j watson
3 months ago
Certainly a fear of Bolshevism was one factor in some of the welfare state initiatives in first few decades of 20th Century but it wasn’t the only one. There had been an emerging appreciation that trade cycles created great hardship for workers through no fault of their own, and not just in the UK. the biggest rival, Germany, had acted already. It took until Keynes for a better understanding to be crystallised but appreciation that capitalism needed some ameliorations already clear.
The Boer War and then WW1 also surfaced major concerns about the ‘C-3’ Nation where too many were being rejected from the Forces because of poor health.
Richard Calhoun
3 months ago
Marxism seems to have won meanwhile, our big State is mired in debt due to profligate welfarism and our Politics are mired in socialism.
Time for the revolution !! ?
Walter Marvell
3 months ago
Always good to delve into History. But we are living in a dangerous new phase of the Welfare State. The 20 year culture of entitlement and Human Rights propogared by our Progressive Lenin Class has created an unreformed giant welfare state which like their deadly broken proto socialist NHS is sucking us dry. When more people receive handouts from an already bankrupt State which tried Leftist Money Tree Madness than pay in and middle classes depend on tax credits to survive, you are in crisis and Endgame. Politics far from dull when the terrible payback for the failure of the 20 year EU/Blair/Fake Tory progressive revolution comes in.
Douglas H
3 months ago
Not bad. From the headline, I was expecting a swivel-eyed anarchocapitalist rant.
Me too. Perhaps that’s why so many commenters seem disappointed and upset.
Liam O'Mahony
3 months ago
“…Soviet communism unwittingly fortified British capitalism… Anglo-Marxism was to make the Establishment more heedful of working-class interests. The same went for the welfare state. Peace was preserved between the classes. Redistribution took the edge off class conflict”.
Surely the foregoing is all to the good and as such to be celebrated? That being so then surely the more appropriate word in the title is not “haunt” but “inspire”? Otherwise, according to the author himself, Britain would now be a fully communist state!
If the vast majority of Brits are (reasonably) happy with Marxist inspired capitalism Lenin is to be thanked, celebrated and welcomed? Now that it’s bring dismantled as such and replaced by a greedy oligarchy, risking more rebellion maybe a bit more respect for the great men is in order, ie Marx and Lenin.
Now that it’s bring dismantled as such and replaced by a greedy oligarchy …
And not too surprising if the elite starts behaving totally in its own interests if the fear of retribution is removed.
Brendan O'Leary
3 months ago
Yet again, an academic conflating union bosses with “the workers”.
Alex Lekas
3 months ago
It takes quite the disconnect from cause-and-effect to sanctify the welfare state. The classes that presume themselves to be intellectual have been quite adept at pushing for ideas that benefit themselves but otherwise, result in mass misery. In the US, all the bright lights that wanted to battle poverty succeeded largely in destroying the black family since giving money to mothers, but only if the father is not in the home, creates a perverse incentive. Now, we’re doubling down with goodies for migrants at the expense of citizens.
Have you never read about the real ‘mass misery’ extant before there was a welfare state? Try living in Victorian London’s St Giles, or Devil’s Acre! Or the working class hell that existed in Chicago as exposed by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle. Is that want you want back?
mike otter
3 months ago
FFS Anil you can’t equivocate the dysfunction of the UK criminal classes from Attlee via BLiar and bj Boris to Herr Sturmer. You are too thick to understand the flaws of dialectic materialism or any other ideology. Unherd: after 45 years i dumped private eye subscription due their 1930s style “blood and soil” anti-semitism. If you continue to give voice to racists, national socialists and scumbags in general under the fakery of free speech you will lose my £50 pa as of now. Trouble with posh rich kids like unherd inciting hate and violence is this: as soon as you get a kicking cos of your hate against the (mostly) honest, hard working women and men you run off to the pigs… yes the same pigs that run the “postcode gangs” in London and cover for the afpak tribal rape gangs in the north. Well aren’t you just the OGs Sayers and nepa-bebé-doc Furedi? In the words of your proxy craig braan – one dare for one day: dare you to come to Wincheap conos…..
Jae
3 months ago
So we’re all beholden to Communism for our welfare and settled state today. As long as you completely ignore the murderous nature of it of millions of citizens, as this author chose to, it’s all to the good.
I half expected him to say we just aren’t doing Communism right today.
You’ve misread the article I’m afraid. It was the fear of communism that had positive effects. Not it’s implementation.
David Morley
3 months ago
The unintended upshot of Anglo-Marxism was to make the Establishment more heedful of working-class interests.
Ive seen the argument made more strongly that without the threat of communism the elite simply looks after itself and pursues its own ideas and interests. The fall of the Berlin Wall was seen as the end of that threat, and it’s hard to miss the fact that since then the gap between rich and poor has opened up and the elite has lost interest in the “boorish” proletariat – recast as racist brexiteers.
Jae
3 months ago
Yawn, another author who thinks Leftists are intellectually superior. The bigotry of it is appalling, not to mention wrong. But the Left is blind to their faults, they have no ears to hear nor eyes to see their failings that’s very clear now. And it’s quite obvious from this article. Who would take credit for where we are today, unless you’re oblivious to reality.
Having the institutions in thrall to Marxism doesn’t indicate a superior intellect, quite the opposite. But having these Leftist ideologies shoved down our collective throats every day explains the complete mess we’re in.
I’d agree with that. I see being in thrall to Marxism as a form of intellectual disability; that is, an inability to escape the confines of a dogmatic view of the world. How typical of academia.
Shrunken Genepool
3 months ago
And it has been a disaster. In the 1860s we had a choice between a bottom up, communitarian enhancement of families and place-bound communities, home grown friendly societies, cooperatives, DIY care and compassion, charity, …every family having enough of a means of production to get by…or what Pope Leo later codified as ‘distributism’…on the one hand,… or on the other, a top down, bureaucratic, anti-familial, all knowing all powerful welfare state. We chose to accept and accentuate private corporate monopolies and compensate with balancing public collectivist monopolies. As Colin Ward point out, the clearest example was housing. Homes for heroes as maybe – but workers were banned from building their own, banner from the prideful and skillful yeoman sufficiency and herded instead into shoddy council housing, forever to live a life determined by local apparatchiks – even down to the corporation grey colour of the front door. Ordinary people were progressively deprived of every means of production by bylaws and regulations – always framed in terms of public safety (against home slaughter, home dairy, domestic/commercial kitchens, home chickens, home industry of any kind) ….and intended sotto voce to ensure dependency and sustain the monopolistic reach of the corporations. And nothing has changed
Charles Hedges
3 months ago
The author ignores the Poor Laws, suggests he reads G M Trevelyan.
Peter Lee
3 months ago
It may be fair to say that the welfare state has kept generation after generation on welfare.
J. Hale
3 months ago
Regarding the “boorish proletariat,” I recall an episode of the U.S. TV program “60 Minutes” from around 1976. It showed a mob of unionized British factory workers breaking down the gate on a Friday afternoon in order to exit their place of employment TWENTY MINUTES before their shift ended. The narrator asked “Would you buy a product made at this factory?” Needless to say Thatcher was elected three years later.
Mark Melvin
3 months ago
Boy, am I glad I never went to Oxford. So happy to be patronised by one of my betters. Paper hat.
Michael Cavanaugh
3 months ago
As Uncle Joe plays the Cheshire Cat, so too the New Deal and Butskellism fade away, until There Is No Alternative but Mr Reagan & Mrs Thatcher; and a New Gilded Age . . .
Andrew Boughton
3 months ago
Great piece, thank you, perhaps only understating the influence of liberal fascism, understandably, covert as it was.
Andrew Fisher
3 months ago
“Nearly everyone” is united? Can this man be serious? Politics dull? Mass immigration on an unprecedented scale, completely contrary to the wishes of the working class, and indeed the bulk of the population, for starters.
I know of two your former countrymen who left Britain and the NHS, as they were essentially being asked to keep a stiff upper lip and die on time. They weren’t worth treating.
Between the two of them after numerous surgeries for cancer which did in the end take them, they nevertheless had 13 years of life more than the NHS was willing to grace them with — in the NHS, their cancers were “untreatable further”. The one set of daughters I know appreciated the five more years they had with Dad.
Sic Semper Socialism.
No one stops people in the UK going for private treatment. The lack of money and of an NHS is certainly a challenge across the pond. Great healthcare… if you can afford it!
Very soon – with the rights obsessed Leftists in power – those kind striking 35% NHS Young Doctors (who went skiing while the sick and suffering died untended at home on 2 year waiting lists) will be on the wards …with lethal injections in their back pockets and a licence to ‘assist’ the dying and to up the bodycount. Good luck meek old grannies with greedy Wolf kin who need that big house!! Good luck otherwise healthy young adults tormented by mental health and depression, you may exit too (see Belgium).. Good luck the very poor and struggling old who fall for warm entreaties to just end it all and stop being a burden (see Canada). I propose that these Killer Docs have skull and cross bones on their lapels so we can see them coming. Hypocratic Oaths and human rights my arse. This is how the Nazis began of course. With T4 & euthanasia (read up,). Smash the old Judeo Christian idea that Life is sacred Protect the NHS too as a bonus. Such are the dark ways of our illberal Progressive State. Watch out.
Those medicos who are not busy killing babies, about a quarter million a year.
But if does save a lot of £, so really, can’t be all bad, right?
The NHS is so hallowed, millions of people are streaming to Britain’s shores to partake of its hallowed resources. Too successful advertising by half! 😉 😉 😉
Suffice it to say that most of the smartest minds of the interwar period were on the Left.
Ouch. Doesn’t speak very well of the interwar period, does it?
Same as any other period, sport.
Your hero is Donald Trump. Smart ain’t exactly your brand, is it?
How very ironic of you.
Is that why left wing ideas always fail?
But the whole thrust of the argument is that Anglo-Marxism was a great success and save GB from Russian-style communism?? Not a failure as you suggest!
And the threat of communism led to real improvements in ordinary peoples lives.
It depresses me when people on here completely misread an article because they’ve got their commie=bad glasses on.
The trouble is that Communism and Socialism really are actually both very bad. So it’s not a distorted perspective, but a clear headed judgement from history.
You’re not that loathsome Trot and Oik Andrew Fisher by any chance?
If so you should return to selling ‘Socialist Worker’ outside East Croydon Station and muttering “Wot about the workers?”. You are wasting your time here.
Be fair Charlie.. a little balance never did any harm.. no point in everyone strenuously arguing on the same side is there?
Even Corbyn had to sack him!
BTW how is Lusitania?
Balance? Even a bit of nuance would help.
Your hero is Marx. Shut it, squirt.
What’s wrong with Marx? ..and why the appalling rudeness? ..surely you must have better standards than that?
What’s wrong with Marx? Do you mean that racist, anti semitic whose “theory” caused the deaths of millions of people under Lenin and Stalin, the Marx who never worked a real job in his life but leeched off his fellow man? That Marx?
Well for one thing, Marx was a hypocrite. He didn’t always pay his housekeeper. He thought his “big ideas” were far more important than wage theft regarding his working class housekeeper.
Ummm Joe Biden.
The Joe Biden who utterly crushed Trump in 2020?
That one?
Thus proving that the Left has no monopoly on intelligence.
Yeah – as a GOP reg’d voter i hate trump – he has done to our brand what herr thatchler did to the tories in uk. Hate is never going to help anyone. Sure posh libtards like the unherd staffers will always spray hate at us humans – but hey – they were bullied at school. If i were given the chance to bully the furedinis and sayerse at school again? Course i would!!! they deserve it. But the kids of the desperately poor, the addicts, the mentally unwell?? not so much . Its not so much smart v thick – its more human v not so human – Ecce Homo ? No ecce homo unherd
MAGA, and even Ultra MAGA rocks!
Quote “i hate trump – he has done to our brand what herr thatchler did to the tories in uk. Hate is never going to help anyone.”
Isn’t there something wrong with this Mike Otter quote?
Not really. But the period of left wing critique of the status quo and the bourgeoisie was culturally rich. Even when it was silly it was interesting and culturally productive. As for now? What is there to say?
Cultural richness of expression in the eyes of a dilettante minority is a very high price to pay for the destruction of whole culture over 3-4 generations ashamed of their own identity.
Doesn’t speak well for the “smartest minds” either. The ‘Left’ has long been the most attractive faith for the intellectual classes. The belief that society can (and should) be reconstructed along more rational lines by its cleverest people has proved to be an irresistible lure to those who need a mission to give purpose to their lives.
I think you mean the wannabe intellectual classes
Nope, I mean the real ones.
But to believe the nonsense they spout they are obviously missing the intellectual faculty needed to be the intellectual classes and we are guilty of letting them get away with the masquerade
Not such a dumb idea prior to the work on self organising systems. And not surprising if many of the cleverest were convinced by it. That stupid people sometimes turn out to be right is little credit to them.
Well, this raises an interesting point about what clever means. I think you could make the case that a certain kind of focussed academic performance, especially in the arts, has a negative correlation with rounded judgement. Consider the finding that the highly intelligent are more prone to groupthink than average citizens.
I could probably make the case if I felt so inclined.
I very much doubt that you could…
That was when the Left, ie Labour, was more inspired by Christianity thanMarx and Lenin. Evangelicals, non-conformists, Anglicans and Catholics, formed the backbone of the Party as it came into being at the dawn of the 20th Century . The influence of Marx and its growing influence was brought mostly by academics.
Surely it served to shame so called christians into acting like Real Christians? In doing so it was of great benefit to the lower 80%?
Because in your world Christians must be “shamed” to act. Only Marxist thinking is for the poor? Your posts indicate you may be living in a leftist bubble. Get out more, broaden your thinking, for your own sake. You sound quite bigoted, I’m sure you’re not.
No not all. Real Christians had being doing their best to look after the poor for a very long time before the state took over.
I think it’s a little unfair to blame a ‘period’ for the shortcomings of well healed, chinless wonders! I note they’re making a comeback btw!
The Left, always promoting themselves as intellectual superiors. When their idiot ideologies are the bane of society.
Compared to now?
Otto von Bismarck invented the welfare state to prevent the workers from being seduced by Marxism. The real Communist never cared whether the workers were ill fed, ill housed, and ill clad. Gotta break a few eggs, ya know!
Quite. And why do communists assume that everyone likes omelettes?
‘Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.’ (Shaw)
Yes, the Silver Rule.
True. How many workers starved to death due to Stalins collectivisation? Estimated to be 30 million.
What about the “Great Leap Forward “, estimates range from 45-60 million in only 3 years.
Well done Chairman Mao.
Not really. The communists feared that working class people could be bought off with bread and circuses, while in their view they had “a world to gain”. The motives of historical figures are hard to gauge exactly, but certainly welfare state reforms could be sold to the rich on the basis of fear of the alternative.
The communists never gave a fig about the workers. The workers were a tool to enable the “revolutionary vanguard” to seize the power they felt they deserved.
Marxists (including today’s woke brigades) have never been anything except mediocre (or worse) intellectuals who were bitter that the world didn’t bow down before their obvious (to themselves) brilliance.
I think that it’s pushing it a bit to say that he ‘invented’ the welfare state, but the new Germany was certainly the first major implementation of such.
A decent welfare state, and high-wage economy, are certainly the best drivers for capitalism, even if individual capitalists would usually push back in the interest of short-term profits.
I have no idea how such ism’s get into people heads. If you go to a political debate in Edmonton Canada you can still listen to Communist and Marxist-Leninist groups. They stick them at opposite sides of the stage.
Reading their pamphlets is even more interesting.
The Marxist-Leninists have scientific papers on how to solve the economy pricing problem. The Communists have nice posters and firm leadership.
And, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find a glass case with an axhandle inside. In case of Marxism, break glass, on their table.
Soviet Communism did not fortify capitalism by forcing non-Communist governments to adopt economic dirigisme (such as in France and Britain) or an extensive welfare state (such as in the United States). On the contrary, by adopting these kinds of economic policies and what is usually called “social democracy” (don’t forget that Social Democratic Party was Lenin’s own party) have destroyed the European economies (and to a lesser extent, that of the United States) and have also destroyed European and North American societies (welfarism, egalitarianism, proletarianism, social-levelling nationalism, secularism, democratism, and all that).
Though welfarism might have been might have once been politically necessary as an ideological weapon in the War on International Communism (meaning International Socialism, it’s the same thing), adopting it has come at such a hefty price, one wonders whether anything was really gained at all at the end, in 1989, or if that had been nothing but a Pyrrhic victory. Perhaps we should all have adopted Bismarck’s second pillar of his anti-Socialist policies, namely prohibiting the Social Democratic Party (and banning the Labour Party and the “Parti Socialiste” and all of those Communist parties in all but name), keep the socialistic policies at a bare minimum, with no rampant trade unionism, none of the insanity that are public pensions, the monstrosity of state provided healthcare, the sacrilege and heresy of state provided education, and the folly of state provided cash transfers, conditional or not, of whatever amount, and thereby contain the economic, social, moral, and religious damage that social democracy has inflicted. I don’t know if that might have worked, but I really don’t know whether now even the United States is too far gone (even if it always was a Protestant country).
Nope, it is warfareism and not welfareism that has ruined the US. Although, greed, hatred and gangsertism also played their part.
US welfarism is well behind European welfarism.
What the UK and US have got is Socialism-lite, which we’re learning has the same end result as full-strength Socialism, it just takes a little more time.
Very cunning of them to employ Tories to do the actual wrecking job. Or are they all really left wing plants taking their orders from …. Well not Moscow, but somewhere.
They’re all–both sides–just politicians who are trying to remain in office–and the best way of doing that, for any of the Parties, is to give their constituents what they want. Arguing Tories versus Liberals and Republicans versus Democrats is just a waste of breath. They’re all complicit.
Very beautifully and accurately put!
This article ignores the trends that emerged in the UK during the 19th century, such as the Poor Law Amendment Act, the Factory Acts and the 1870 Education Act which were built upon during the 20th century. The author is guilty of distorting history through a typically Marxist-Leninist lens.
Nevertheless, some interesting points were made around the rise of Communist sympathies in higher academia. Obviously, “romping” through Soviet Russia in the 1930s didn’t include visits to the Lubyanka. The legacy of such unwordly stupidity continues to this day.
Yes. The writer seems to think that there was no tradition either of left wing thought or of state intervention in Britain prior to the Russian revolution.
Surprise, surprise.
I think you missed the main thrust of his argument..
Which is what? We should be thankful for a theory that never works but will bring about the deaths of millions of citizens.
“writer” – no it aint – it is a paid satrap from oxford “university”.. only a “writer” in so far as a chimp can mimic a human hitting a keyboard.
Are you as unpleasant in the real world off your keyboard?
As long as he is as interesting……
Well there was William Morris, and then the Webbs. (Two cheers for E P Thompson?)
Gramsci wrote this in 1915, the idea was embraced, seeded, rooted and disseminated by academia: In Gramsci’s own words, he viewed the task thus: “Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity…in the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.”
“Capitalism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity…in the new order, Capitalism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.”
Yeah, let’s overwhelm capitalism and promote socialism because the only mechanism that is actually proven to work for lifting people out of poverty is a terrible thing.
You’re making the common error of confusing modern corporatism with the capitalism that gave autonomy to many millions along with the freedom to be creative and constructive.
Capitalism is an evolved economic system of broadly free exchange. There are varieties. Pure socialism is always a disastrous attempt to have the state control the economy in minute detail.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” sounds wonderful but is completely contrary to human nature, in which we are highly attuned to dessert (deservingness). Do you pay your workmen to have a much deserved holiday in Tenerife when they are working for you, for example?
Capitalism and socialism are therefore not equal and opposite concepts. One basically works, the other dies not.
it has –
The actual word for this capturing is ‘Entryism’, a communist strategy – Trot I think, maybe Lenin, where a few radicals infiltrate and use every dirty trick to raise each other to positions of power – and a few extremists can capture a whole system and warp it to their filthy wishes.
Trot 😉
Surely the point is that it wasn’t ALL bad, was it? It made for a happier lower class, easier to control and exploit..
If the ‘lower class’ are oppressed and granted little social care, it’s the ruling elite doing what Marxists predicate their argument upon. If, however, the governing parties introduce reforms which bring the majority out of poverty, improve healthcare and lifestyles, it’s making them “easier to control and exploit”.
You can’t have it both ways.
And murder.
I think we can stop acting like Marxism, which has an end stage of property abolition (Communism) is a conspiracy theory just because Fascism was an inappropriate reaction it. Marxism/Leninism and Fascism are just variations of the same Collectivist Religion. The author describes “E.H. Carr, for example, became a leader writer and deputy editor of The Times, a perch from which he preached the gospel of collectivist planning.”
Marxism is a gospel with prophets; Lenin being the highest saint. But Marxism is inefficient and unproductive. Every Marxist eventually realizes it reduces production and quality of life. But they don’t depart from the gospel, they just reinterpret it.
Marxism didn’t produce the Western labor parties. It correctly pointed out a few kernels of truth and probably temporarily created some balance with wage and work demands. But that balance was quickly outweighed by the inflation it prompted. The welfare state is a product of inflation. So yes, Marxism is responsible for the modern Welfare State…because it’s responsible for rapid inflation.
That statement “the welfare state is a product of inflation” is produced without substance and is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your argument.
How is it without substance?Marxism/Leninist policies produce shortages everywhere they’re installed.
Shortages are caused by limited supply of goods. If the supply of something is limited, prices have to rise. If prices become unaffordable for too many people, the Central Planner has to assume control over the means of production. A large centrally planned Welfare State has to be installed whenever scarcity hits a tipping point.
Certainly a fear of Bolshevism was one factor in some of the welfare state initiatives in first few decades of 20th Century but it wasn’t the only one. There had been an emerging appreciation that trade cycles created great hardship for workers through no fault of their own, and not just in the UK. the biggest rival, Germany, had acted already. It took until Keynes for a better understanding to be crystallised but appreciation that capitalism needed some ameliorations already clear.
The Boer War and then WW1 also surfaced major concerns about the ‘C-3’ Nation where too many were being rejected from the Forces because of poor health.
Marxism seems to have won meanwhile, our big State is mired in debt due to profligate welfarism and our Politics are mired in socialism.
Time for the revolution !! ?
Always good to delve into History. But we are living in a dangerous new phase of the Welfare State. The 20 year culture of entitlement and Human Rights propogared by our Progressive Lenin Class has created an unreformed giant welfare state which like their deadly broken proto socialist NHS is sucking us dry. When more people receive handouts from an already bankrupt State which tried Leftist Money Tree Madness than pay in and middle classes depend on tax credits to survive, you are in crisis and Endgame. Politics far from dull when the terrible payback for the failure of the 20 year EU/Blair/Fake Tory progressive revolution comes in.
Not bad. From the headline, I was expecting a swivel-eyed anarchocapitalist rant.
Me too. Perhaps that’s why so many commenters seem disappointed and upset.
“…Soviet communism unwittingly fortified British capitalism… Anglo-Marxism was to make the Establishment more heedful of working-class interests. The same went for the welfare state. Peace was preserved between the classes. Redistribution took the edge off class conflict”.
Surely the foregoing is all to the good and as such to be celebrated? That being so then surely the more appropriate word in the title is not “haunt” but “inspire”? Otherwise, according to the author himself, Britain would now be a fully communist state!
If the vast majority of Brits are (reasonably) happy with Marxist inspired capitalism Lenin is to be thanked, celebrated and welcomed? Now that it’s bring dismantled as such and replaced by a greedy oligarchy, risking more rebellion maybe a bit more respect for the great men is in order, ie Marx and Lenin.
And not too surprising if the elite starts behaving totally in its own interests if the fear of retribution is removed.
Yet again, an academic conflating union bosses with “the workers”.
It takes quite the disconnect from cause-and-effect to sanctify the welfare state. The classes that presume themselves to be intellectual have been quite adept at pushing for ideas that benefit themselves but otherwise, result in mass misery. In the US, all the bright lights that wanted to battle poverty succeeded largely in destroying the black family since giving money to mothers, but only if the father is not in the home, creates a perverse incentive. Now, we’re doubling down with goodies for migrants at the expense of citizens.
Have you never read about the real ‘mass misery’ extant before there was a welfare state? Try living in Victorian London’s St Giles, or Devil’s Acre! Or the working class hell that existed in Chicago as exposed by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle. Is that want you want back?
FFS Anil you can’t equivocate the dysfunction of the UK criminal classes from Attlee via BLiar and bj Boris to Herr Sturmer. You are too thick to understand the flaws of dialectic materialism or any other ideology. Unherd: after 45 years i dumped private eye subscription due their 1930s style “blood and soil” anti-semitism. If you continue to give voice to racists, national socialists and scumbags in general under the fakery of free speech you will lose my £50 pa as of now. Trouble with posh rich kids like unherd inciting hate and violence is this: as soon as you get a kicking cos of your hate against the (mostly) honest, hard working women and men you run off to the pigs… yes the same pigs that run the “postcode gangs” in London and cover for the afpak tribal rape gangs in the north. Well aren’t you just the OGs Sayers and nepa-bebé-doc Furedi? In the words of your proxy craig braan – one dare for one day: dare you to come to Wincheap conos…..
So we’re all beholden to Communism for our welfare and settled state today. As long as you completely ignore the murderous nature of it of millions of citizens, as this author chose to, it’s all to the good.
I half expected him to say we just aren’t doing Communism right today.
You’ve misread the article I’m afraid. It was the fear of communism that had positive effects. Not it’s implementation.
Ive seen the argument made more strongly that without the threat of communism the elite simply looks after itself and pursues its own ideas and interests. The fall of the Berlin Wall was seen as the end of that threat, and it’s hard to miss the fact that since then the gap between rich and poor has opened up and the elite has lost interest in the “boorish” proletariat – recast as racist brexiteers.
Yawn, another author who thinks Leftists are intellectually superior. The bigotry of it is appalling, not to mention wrong. But the Left is blind to their faults, they have no ears to hear nor eyes to see their failings that’s very clear now. And it’s quite obvious from this article. Who would take credit for where we are today, unless you’re oblivious to reality.
Having the institutions in thrall to Marxism doesn’t indicate a superior intellect, quite the opposite. But having these Leftist ideologies shoved down our collective throats every day explains the complete mess we’re in.
I’d agree with that. I see being in thrall to Marxism as a form of intellectual disability; that is, an inability to escape the confines of a dogmatic view of the world. How typical of academia.
And it has been a disaster. In the 1860s we had a choice between a bottom up, communitarian enhancement of families and place-bound communities, home grown friendly societies, cooperatives, DIY care and compassion, charity, …every family having enough of a means of production to get by…or what Pope Leo later codified as ‘distributism’…on the one hand,… or on the other, a top down, bureaucratic, anti-familial, all knowing all powerful welfare state. We chose to accept and accentuate private corporate monopolies and compensate with balancing public collectivist monopolies. As Colin Ward point out, the clearest example was housing. Homes for heroes as maybe – but workers were banned from building their own, banner from the prideful and skillful yeoman sufficiency and herded instead into shoddy council housing, forever to live a life determined by local apparatchiks – even down to the corporation grey colour of the front door. Ordinary people were progressively deprived of every means of production by bylaws and regulations – always framed in terms of public safety (against home slaughter, home dairy, domestic/commercial kitchens, home chickens, home industry of any kind) ….and intended sotto voce to ensure dependency and sustain the monopolistic reach of the corporations. And nothing has changed
The author ignores the Poor Laws, suggests he reads G M Trevelyan.
It may be fair to say that the welfare state has kept generation after generation on welfare.
Regarding the “boorish proletariat,” I recall an episode of the U.S. TV program “60 Minutes” from around 1976. It showed a mob of unionized British factory workers breaking down the gate on a Friday afternoon in order to exit their place of employment TWENTY MINUTES before their shift ended. The narrator asked “Would you buy a product made at this factory?” Needless to say Thatcher was elected three years later.
Boy, am I glad I never went to Oxford. So happy to be patronised by one of my betters. Paper hat.
As Uncle Joe plays the Cheshire Cat, so too the New Deal and Butskellism fade away, until There Is No Alternative but Mr Reagan & Mrs Thatcher; and a New Gilded Age . . .
Great piece, thank you, perhaps only understating the influence of liberal fascism, understandably, covert as it was.
“Nearly everyone” is united? Can this man be serious? Politics dull? Mass immigration on an unprecedented scale, completely contrary to the wishes of the working class, and indeed the bulk of the population, for starters.