The romantic penumbra that surrounds the dictatorship in Cuba to this day is a good example of the moral leeway still granted to projects that are nominally socialist, or which seek to transform humanity in some way. As Leszek Kołakowski put it, progressive hearts which are “bleeding to death when they hear about any, big or minor (and rightly condemnable) injustice in the US… suddenly become wise historiosophists or cool rationalists when told about worse horrors of the new alternative society”.

But the Soviet Union has been gone for almost 30 years, and today’s Cuba is mainly of kitsch value, its youthful revolutionary heroes preserved as a piece of sixties nostalgie; its diminishing achievements — education (Fidelista indoctrination) and internationalist healthcare (Cuban doctors sent overseas have been likened to indentured labour) — implausibly trotted out to justify over half a century of dictatorship.

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And so a new generation of political “seekers” have turned to China for their ideological sustenance.

Beyond the mere worship of money and power, there is not much to like about the government in Beijing. The programme of socialist modernisation launched four decades ago by Deng Xiaoping has produced an authoritarian state capitalism overseen by a dictatorship which censors the internet, bans independent trade unions and pursues an aggressively imperialist policy in the South China Sea.

What the Chinese regime shares with the Stalinist USSR is contempt for ethnic minorities and civil society. Over recent years China has arrested a million Uyghurs and Kazakhs and placed them in forced labour camps. As Nick Cohen writes for The Observer, evidence of their criminality includes “wearing a veil or headscarf” and the “avoidance of alcohol”.

The esteemed British historian Eric Hobsbawm was asked in an interview for Desert Island Discs in 1995 if communist utopia would have been worth the sacrifice of millions of lives. Yes, the historian replied. The most charitable interpretation of Hobsbawm’s remarks was that it was at least plausible in the 1930s to believe that Stalin’s USSR was the only alternative to a western capitalism which looked increasingly like the handmaiden of fascism. Of course even that is a stretch: there were plenty of individuals at the time who eschewed fascism without embracing Stalinist mass murder.

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But does anyone truly believe that contemporary China is forging an egalitarian new civilisation? Income inequality in China exceeds that of the United States. Moreover, when it is not herding Uighurs into the Gulag, the Chinese Communist Party is busy suppressing young Chinese Marxists who have noticed the gap between official rhetoric and the corrupt and unequal reality.

Yet much like during the Cold War, a roll-call of useful idiots have faithfully stepped forward from deep within the cosseted bosom of western liberal democracy to defend China from criticism. Some, undoubtedly chasing clout on social media, have decided that “Muslims are treated better in Russia/China than in the United States”. This is concerning — the “journalist” in question has sixty six thousand followers — but easy to dismiss as inane online prattle. Still, behind the hot air merchants stand “progressive” organisations that have taken the decision to align themselves with the Chinese state while one of the biggest crimes of the 21st century unfolds.

The Morning Star, long an uncritical mouthpiece for authoritarian communism, describes evidence of Chinese persecution of the Uighurs as “laughably weak”, despite mountains of material from independent human rights organisations demonstrating the veracity of the claims. (The paper has history here: The Morning Star’s predecessor The Daily Worker faithfully toed the Soviet line, defending the pact with Hitler and the murderous show trials in Eastern Europe, while of course never mentioning the millions of people being worked to death in the Gulag). It is shameful that the British Left treat The Morning Star with reverence as an alternative to the capitalist press.

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But The Morning Star is not the only culprit; new organisations are springing up to do Beijing’s dirty work. Today we have the “Progressive International”, launched in 2020 by prominent leftist luminaries including the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, as well as Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein (among others). The Progressive International says it wants to “defeat a rising authoritarian nationalism”, yet it has aligned itself uncritically with the Qiao Collective, a vehicle for the promotion of Chinese imperialism combined with the sort of authoritarian nationalist groups that the Progressive International were ostensibly founded to oppose. The Qiao Collective brooks no criticism of the CCP and either denies the persecution of Uighur Muslims, or portrays their oppression as a function of legitimate “anti-terrorism” policy by Beijing.

Together with denial and obfuscation when it comes to the projection of Chinese power, the Qiao Collective pushes Chinese state media which depicts western nations as in the grip of strife and malfeasance. The Russian television station RT has long deployed a similar tactic. Western audiences are urged to scrutinise their own governments and to “Question More” — until RT turns its attention to Russia, when this critical approach is replaced by the party line from the Kremlin.

This glaring double standard is evident to anyone who isn’t trying to make a name for themselves as an anti-American talking head. Just as the Soviet Union accused the West of “warmongering” (sometimes justifiably, as in Vietnam) while it sent armies to Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa to prop up bloody dictators, the Chinese State and its obsequious mouthpieces extol the virtues of racial justice in the US, while incarcerating a million Muslims in concentration camps.

It is perhaps understandable, although no less egregious for it, that the Chinese state should seek to downplay its misdeeds and calumnies. Stranger is the spectacle of progressive-minded commentators credulously lining up to offer the Chinese state their support.

Depressingly, a permanent feature of politics seems to be a stubborn rump of ideologues whose criticism of their own government co-exists with a need to develop a corresponding loyalty to another unit. Orwell called this phenomenon “transferred nationalism”. For Orwell, transference has an important political function: “It makes it possible for [the transferer] to be much more nationalistic — more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest — than he could ever be on behalf of his native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge.”

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Authoritarian, rapaciously capitalist China is merely the latest “camp” that stands ready to be embraced by those who are temperamentally inclined to transference. “We examined the source data on the claims of millions of Uyghurs in so-called concentration camps,” said Max Blumenthal, the American left-winger and son of a former aide to Bill Clinton, on RT earlier this year. “We haven’t seen the evidence for these massive claims,” he added.

Blumenthal is the founder and editor of the far-Left news site The Grayzone. In the past, The Grayzone has supported grisly dictatorships in Syria and Venezuela for no reason other than the latter’s opposition to western liberal democracy. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokespeople Hua Chunying and Lijian Zhao have both approvingly tweeted a Grayzone article which sought to rubbish claims that China is persecuting its Uighur population.

The Max Blumenthals of the world may be base and cynical (Blumenthal’s politics took a 180 turn following a 2015 trip to the Kremlin), but in this postmodern age, it’s apparent that people still yearn to be part of something bigger than the self. Materialism and solipsistic self-betterment are not enough though. They have limited appeal next to the desire — felt in the days when Wells visited the USSR, and even more strongly felt today — to be part of a world historical struggle between good and evil. Whether or not this quasi-religious impulse is transposed onto an atheistic communist tyranny is largely beside the point. The search for a tyrannical fatherland, a steady ideological pole to cling onto in tumultuous times, continues unabated.

With the emergence of the contemporary pro-China useful idiot in mind, it is worth paraphrasing the dissident Russian revolutionary Victor Serge, himself a believer at one time in the big idea of communism, who noticed: “when there are no more worthwhile banners, people start to march behind worthless ones”.

The Economist was evidently worried by this – unsurprising for a magazine once derided by Lenin as a “journal which speaks for British millionaires”. But the magazine’s staffers aren’t the only ones nervously looking on at politicians such as Jeremy Corbyn and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Kristian Niemietz is too, and he tells us why in his new book, Socialism: The Failed Idea that Never Dies.

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Head of political economy at the free market think tank the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), Niemietz argues that socialism has returned to haunt the political establishment because its doctrines are “strangely impervious to refutation by real-world experience”. Socialists are able to dismiss each of their failed experiments as not ‘real’ socialism, a claim which is always made retrospectively (during the honeymoon period of a revolution almost no one says this).

Niemietz writes that “Contemporary socialists define ‘real’ socialism in terms of the outcomes they would like to see, rather than the institutional setup which is supposed to produce those outcomes”.

For example, socialists celebrate equality yet distance themselves from the army of bureaucrats and secret police required to enforce it. So-called libertarian communists are effectively longing for a dish of fried snowballs. And democratic socialism – “the democratisation of every aspect of society”, as prominent Left-wing columnist Owen Jones has defined it – would in practice be ruled by fanatics with too much time on their hands; typically the over-zealous and the under-sexed.

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Socialism as a term is frustratingly imprecise. Tony Blair and George Orwell have at one time or another defined themselves as socialists, as have Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot.

The difficulty Niemietz faces in defining socialism is largely a result of the word being used as both a synonym for communism and a woolly affectation, an appellation which signals that one cares about worthy causes. Niemietz see socialism as in the ascendance. “Socialism is popular in the UK,” he writes, “and not just among students”. Yet it feels more like communism that Niemietz is railing against.

On the hard-Left, socialism denotes the transition period in which the state grows ever-larger before ‘withering away’ under full communism.[1. As the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin wrote in 1873, while Marx was still alive: “And from the heights of the state they begin to look down upon the whole common world of the workers. From that time on they represent not the people but themselves and their own claims to govern the people.”] In contrast, the variant of socialism which has gained popularity in Britain and the United States in recent times is more plausibly a left-wing strand of social democracy.

This is where Niemietz’s argument – as well as that made by The Economist – breaks down somewhat. It is social democracy that is gaining in popularity, not socialism in any meaningful sense.

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Widespread support in Britain for public ownership of the utilities, for example, is not necessarily synonymous with support for socialism. Some of this is nostalgia for the post-war world, whereas some of it is an expression of nationalism: just a few years ago UKIP supporters were found to be among the keenest to re-nationalise things.

Moreover, that majorities appear to favour rent controls and an interventionist government is unsurprising considering the sorry state of the housing market and the precarious nature of so much contemporary work.

Hyperventilating about the ‘return of socialism’ seems especially overdone when Jeremy Corbyn has been forced to conceal what he really thinks behind a tepid social democratic agenda (see Labour’s 2017 manifesto). Yet because there is no firewall on the Left between its democratic and totalitarian wings – Jeremy Corbyn has surrounded himself with communists such as Andrew Murray and Seumas Milne – many of Niemietz’s broadsides still hit their targets.

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Niemietz’s book could in fact have been titled ‘Useful Idiots’, for much of it recounts the pilgrimages made to the socialist world over the years by the credulous. At one time even North Korea had its western seekers, as did Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. As Niemietz recounts, everyone from the Webbs to Susan Sontag to Owen Jones has gone on one of these socialist excursions.

Academics in particular seem drawn to the vicarious thrill of violent revolutions. On a pilgrimage to North Korea in 1964, the Cambridge economist Joan Robinson gushed that “all the economic miracles of the postwar world are put in the shade by [North Korea’s] achievements”. These achievements were attributed to Kim Il Sung, who “seems to function as a messiah rather than a dictator”.

According to Niemietz, socialist fellow-travelling is a three-stage process. The initial revolutionary euphoria gives way to disillusionment. Whataboutery usually kicks in at this point, and an imaginary army of wreckers and saboteurs are summoned and subsequently blamed for socialism’s failures.

Later on, the pilgrims will pronounce that it does not matter because the experiment was ‘not real socialism’. And they will get away with it. “After Venezuela fell off a cliff,” Niemietz writes, “some of Britain’s most eager Chavistas went on to become some of the most senior political figures in the country”.

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There is something horribly sordid about revolutionary tourism. I am reminded of a remark by the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez about Cuba. A personal friend of Fidel Castro, Garcia Marquez told The New York Times that he personally could never live under the Cuban communist system. “I would miss too many things. I couldn’t live with the lack of information. I am a voracious reader of newspapers and magazines from around the world.” Yet for Cubans, such privations were apparently acceptable.

This willingness to subject other people to grotesque historical experiments represents the apogee of political selfishness. Niemietz is right to focus on it and he is clear that it is not only the Left that projects its fantasies onto foreign lands. There were plenty on the Right who were willing to defend General Pinochet’s murderous regime in Chile on the basis of that country’s supposed ‘economic miracle’. Proponents of the Iraq war similarly believed that hundreds of thousands of lives were expendable in the name of bringing democracy and a market economy to the Middle East.

There are of course material reasons for socialism’s apparent return. Its critique of contemporary capitalism can sound appealing. The thirty-year free market settlement is in a state of morbid decay: work is precarious, towns are hollowed out and homes are both cramped and exorbitantly expensive.

Meritocracy, the ideological foundation of the free market, is mostly deployed nowadays as a post-hoc rationalisation by those who have done well. The myth of the poor and struggling as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” – per Steinbeck – has about as much utility in 2019 as a chocolate teapot.

But the utopianism of the extremes is partly motivated by what Hannah Arendt identified as the urge to locate “a suicidal escape from… reality”. Freedom is a double-edged sword after all: it leaves a person responsible for their own decisions, at least to some extent. This can generate an existential crisis which, as Albert Camus warned, can prompt a frantic search for an escape hatch, either through suicide or submersion into a cause which purports to swap the ambiguity of liberalism for human perfection.

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There is also little to lose in swearing allegiance to exotic-sounding causes, especially when they are being tested on somebody else. “If a false belief is emotionally satisfying, and if there is no cost associated with holding it,” Niemietz writes, “we would expect it to be widely held”.

As such, while orthodox religion is in retreat, the allure of creeds which purport to explain everything persists. In this sense, socialism has become a romantic rather than a material ideology. The ‘scientific’ conception of Marxism has been replaced by what Friedrich Nietzsche depicts as a degenerated form of Christianity. Jeremy Corbyn is a contemporary socialist messiah: his vocabulary is an assortment of uplifting truisms and platitudes: peace not war, equality, the common good, the 99%.

Corbynism has also created meaning. Oscar Wilde famously said that the trouble with socialism was it took up too many evenings. Yet for some this is the attraction. Go to any gathering of British socialists today and you will be told by an erstwhile comrade that Corbyn has given them a ‘reason to get up in the morning’: socialism as a movement lends purpose to otherwise dull lives.

Social democrats must try to gain a better understanding of socialism so that they can more effectively purge communists from their ranks. This book is a lucid articulation of why a firewall between the democratic and the totalitarian Left is necessary. The fact that many on the Left will refuse to read it – because it was written by a pro-free market author – highlights the extent to which contemporary socialism at times resembles a hive-minded surrogate religion.

Just a handful of years ago the Venezuelan government was praised uncritically by much of the Western left. Today it is an embarrassment – every emaciated Venezuelan a testament to the credulity of those who once lauded Hugo Chavez as the leader of a “progressive, populist government that says no to neo-liberalism”.[1. Owen Jones, ‘Hugo Chavez proves you can lead a progressive, popular government that says no to neo-liberalism’, The Guardian, 8 October 2012]

The silence that has descended upon these former revolutionary tourists has been described appositely by Jack Staples-Butler as the “great forgetting”.

The phrase ‘useful idiot’ has long been in circulation to describe naive revolutionary tourists and other ignorant dupes of foreign dictatorships. The term is commonly attributed to Lenin, though there is little evidence he ever actually used it. Instead the expression seems to have originated in the mid-twentieth century to describe social democrats who entered into popular fronts and electoral pacts with Stalinist communist parties.

Why, though, do people become full blown ‘useful idiots’ in the first place? Western admirers of despotic governments are invariably useful to said governments, hence the name. But it is more than mere stupidity that explains why citizens of relatively open societies are willing to offer up glowing appraisals of brutal political systems. The following is a rough sketch of some of the forms that this ‘useful idiocy’ frequently takes.

The Seeker

A commonly heard phrase – that a particular politician or movement has provided a person with ‘something to believe in’ – embodies our post-religious longing for a cause or higher purpose. Indeed, it’s not easy to shake off the framework of system-based thinking even in an avowedly secular age.

In The God That Failed the ex-communist Arthur Koestler wrote of the inner peace and serenity which settled on the mind of the communist when he or she embraced the dialectic: “The whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke”. An embrace of ideology ensures that the answer to every question is available at a stroke, with the newly acquired world view akin to a flashlight in a darkened room.

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The search for meaning in an unpredictable world is probably inevitable up to a point. What is contemptible is the relegation of other human beings to pawns in the supposed historical process. The latter results in people uttering glib phrases about “omelettes not being possible without broken eggs” when bouts of mass killing threaten to undermine a favoured cause. Or ignoring inconvenient stories in countries such as Venezuela. Indeed, the rise and fall Venezuela-mania in certain circles of the Left stands as a tragic rejoinder to those who are inclined to unthinkingly seek out worthy causes overseas.

The Utopian

If history has a purpose, then any crime may be explained away as a necessary evil on the march to utopia. Moreover, teleological thinking of this kind can endow the believer with what Dostoevsky called the “right to dishonour”: the granting of permission to oneself to behave badly in the name of some higher ideal.

The wars unleashed during the twentieth century to prevent the Vietnamese and others from ‘going communist’ – to the point where it “became necessary to destroy the town to save it” as one United States army major famously put it – reflect this attitude. As did the Conservative MP Andrew Rosindell’s declaration in 2012 of his “huge admiration” for Augusto Pinochet on the basis that the Chilean dictator “ousted a communist regime”. Never mind that General Pinochet subsequently tortured and murdered thousands of his own people. Yet Rosindell’s logic is unimpeachable if one accepts the legitimacy of injustice in the present in the service of justice in the distant future.

Utopian thinking – whether it venerates the market or the command economy – is always liable to turn apocalyptic. During the Cuban missile crisis the Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevara called on the Soviet Union to launch a first nuclear strike against the United States in order to“save the blood of more people in the future”.[4. Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, Jon Lee Anderson]

The Power Worshipper

A government which grants foreign journalists privileged access to territory that is off limits to more critical voices does so because it believes they will return to their own countries and make the case for the regime in question. This tends to work because any journalist or politician singled out for such an invitation is typically vain enough to believe that they have been chosen for their fearless scepticism rather than for their credulity.

A notorious example from the twentieth century is that of George Bernard Shaw, a prominent British author and playwright. Shaw was feted by the communist authorities on his journeyings around Russia and granted a two-hour long private audience with Joseph Stalin. In October 1931 Shaw – who made a great deal of his ‘scepticism’ so far as it concerned the actions of his own government – appeared on the BBC to talk of the Soviet Union’s “atmosphere of such hope and security for the poorest as has never before been seen in a civilised country on earth”.

While Shaw was singing the praises of Stalinism the Soviet Union was gripped by a terrible – and entirely avoidable – famine. Yet the spell cast by Stalin’s flattery overpowered any potential concern on Shaw’s part for the starving peasantry.

In more recent times fringe journalists such as Vanessa Beeley have travelled to Syria only to return to Britain toeing the regime line that President Bashar al Assad is engaged in a manichean struggle against the terrorists of the Islamic State. In return for such obsequies, those like Beeley, the daughter of the late British diplomat Sir Harold Beeley, have received access to parts of Syria such as Aleppo usually denied to independent journalists.[2. See Beeley’s website ‘The Wall Will Fall’, accessed 12 June 2018]

In normal circumstances Beeley would be considered a crank. She believes that the deadly attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine in 2015 was a false flag operation and that Al Qaeda was not responsible for 9/11. But Beeley is useful to the Russians and their client state in Syria, and appears regularly on English language Russian State media.

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The willingness of Beeley – as well as other activist-cum-journalists including Neil Clarke and John Pilger – to champion the Kremlin line has the happy side effect (for those in question at least) of opening up large media platforms denied to them by the mainstream, spreading disinformation about Russia’s blood-soaked foreign policy.

The Relativist

The Relativist is a person who expects other people to adhere to rules which they have little intention of abiding by themselves, or who sees no hypocrisy in viewing other people (typically foreigners) as undeserving of the rights one takes for granted for oneself.

One example is the late Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez. A long-time admirer and friend of the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, García Márquez once told The New York Times that although he supported the Cuban revolution he could never live under the communist system himself:

“I would miss too many things. I couldn’t live with the lack of information. I am a voracious reader of newspapers and magazines from around the world.”

Which begs the question: did the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude ever wonder if there were Cubans who felt the same way? Koestler likened such people to peeping toms, peering through a hole in the wall at ‘history’ while not having to experience it themselves.

There are many such people around today. They are bleeding heart moralists when it comes to the actions of the United States but cool rationalists – forever unearthing some mitigating ‘context’ – when informed about the crimes of America’s enemies.

This attitude came to the fore particularly forcefully after the attacks of 9/11. Who can forget the editorial in the New Statesman of 17 September 2001, written by the then editor Peter Wilby, which included the following passage:

“American bond traders [killed in the World Trade Center], you may say, are as innocent and undeserving of terror as Vietnamese and Iraqi peasants. Well, yes and no… They preferred George Bush to Al Gore and Ralph Nader.”

The Stability-Fetishist

Both left-wing ‘anti-imperialism’ and traditional realism can be filed under this category. Each represents a different face of an attitude which views people as mere chess pieces in the great game of international statecraft.

For many left-wing anti-imperialists a murderous regime such as that of Bashar al Assad in Syria ought to be defended on the basis of its hostility to the United States. The latter being the most powerful capitalist – and by extension imperialist – country in the world, this logic runs that any state or movement which points an AK47 in its direction cannot be altogether bad.

A rush to exculpate the Assad regime each time it uses chemical weapons against civilians has thus become a hallmark of the anti-imperialist left,[3. See for example ‘Syria controversy: don’t believe the official narrative’, TruthDig, 23 April 2018] with pundits seeking to cast doubt on any official narrative which draws attention to the brutality of an anti-Western power. Something similar occurred in the aftermath of the Skripal poisoning in Salisbury, with activists of the far-right and far-left quickly out the blocks to cast doubt on the official narrative that the Russian state was responsible.[4. See for example ‘Russian to judgement’, Craig Murray, 13 March 2018]

The ‘realist’ on the other hand is likely to defend the likes of President Assad as a stable bulwark against the ‘chaos’ which could be unleashed along with the Syrian people’s desire for democracy. Left-wing anti-imperialism – with its all-encompassing hostility to ‘regime change’ – is often indistinguishable from this worldly-wise realism.

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The Nostalgist

The appeal of Russia to many in the West is harder to comprehend today than it was during the Soviet era. For while those like Sidney and Beatrice Webb who wrote paeans in the thirties to the ‘New Civilisation’ in Moscow were credulous dupes who ought to have known better, there was at least a degree of progress hanging over the Soviet Union.

Today Russia is an economically stagnant backwater characterised by palm-greasing at home and violent chauvinism abroad. But to some, Russia’s attraction lies in the image of a pure and untainted ‘Russian Bear’ holding out against the decadent and feeble west.

As such, prominent figures from the contemporary ‘alt-right’ can be frequently heard paying tribute to Vladimir Putin who is said to embody traditional masculine virtues; virtues which have been undermined in the West by feminism and homosexuality. “I really believe that Russia is the leader of the free world right now,” the prominent American neo-Nazi Matthew Heimbach told Business Insider in 2016.

***

While this list is by no means exhaustive, most bouts of useful idiocy can be understood with reference to at least one of these roughly drawn ‘types’. Although, of course, many who are susceptible to one category are often also drawn to another.

I suspect many readers will wonder whether any of this matters – isn’t it obvious that such people are foolish and irresponsible? Does it really need pointing out?

The only persuasive answer to this objection is to say that it isn’t as obvious as it ought to be. There are still those left-wing politicians and activists who, to paraphrase Orwell, will flock to anything emitting a whiff of revolution “like bluebottles to a dead cat”.

The Labour leadership will faithfully turn up at a Cuba Solidarity meeting (solidarity with the dictatorship rather than the people of Cuba), while these ‘solidarity’ campaigns are propped up by some of Britain’s largest trade unions. Meanwhile, on the right of politics you are rarely far from someone who will rightly condemn any number of anti-western regimes before suddenly transforming into a cool rationalist when informed about the crimes of Saudi Arabia or the Israeli occupation.

We are probably all guilty of similar double standards from time to time. But only an incorrigible ideologue – or perhaps a congenital fool – would be entirely unconcerned by the tendency on the part of those living in liberal democracies to slip into the malignant state of useful idiocy.

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