What's Socialist about State Ownership? Beats Me
Is State Ownership Socialist? Why? What is the logic that leads people to believe this?
One of the things I have striven hard to do is to destroy the lazy view that the left is in some way wedded to state ownership, while it is in some way conservative to want the winds of the free market to whistle and howl, unobstructed, across the landscape.
The left’s real interests are moral, cultural, sexual and social. They lead to a powerful state. This not because they actively set out to achieve one. many leftists fondly imagine they are rebels against authority, and liberators of mankind. It is because the left’s ideas – by their nature – undermine conscience, self-restraint, deferred gratification, lifelong marriage and strong, indivisible families headed by authoritative fathers. Without these things, society becomes anarchic, chaotic, lustful and violent – unless it is very heavily policed and supervised.
Left-wingers are also convinced of their own goodness and rightness, and so do not object to acquiring the strong centralised powers, and the freedom to pry into the lives of others, which such an arrangement gives them. Far from it.
I sought for years for a clear statement of the ideas which motivate the modern left, especially the 1960s New Left, which marched alongside sex, drugs and rock and roll, and which later came to embrace the various sexual revolutions of our time, and what is called political correctness.
But I came to the conclusion, in the end, that it was a negative force, not a positive one. It was based above all on the angry rejection of the ideas of Protestant Christianity. This is what distinguished it from the modest and often Christian-based reform movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries, on whose shoulders the modern left perches and squawks. It arose not out of any great desire, but out of the slow but relentless decline, now a collapse, of Christianity as a moral and intellectual power in Britain.
The shape of atheism in each modern society is a mirror of the religion which has previously dominated that society. There is, I think, such a thing as a Protestant atheist, as distinct from a Roman Catholic or an Orthodox atheist. There are even Anglican atheists (such as my late brother Christopher, Professor Richard Dawkins and the author, Philip Pullman).
Much of their thinking is simply oppositional. The nation state is opposed because it was a conservative force. The monoculture is opposed because it, too, was religious and conservative. (This leads, paradoxically, to th ecouragement or at least the appeasement of Islam). Rigorous, authoritative education is opposed, at the moment, because it is (or was) the education of the conservative enemy. That is why Oxford and Cambridge Universities are doomed to be comprehensivised, and so ruined, even though they are valuable national assets. Likewise the grammar schools had to be smashed, because they reinforced the middle class, and encouraged individual liberation from poverty. The left wanted to liberate people, but only if they could be told exactly how they would be liberated, and by whom, and in what way - and if they could be persuaded to think they owed their liberation to the left. Grammar schools were the opposite of that. Why, their products might thtink they had freed themselves.
If the British revolution ever ends, it will probably become quite stern about school discipline, and very strong on a sort of crude ‘law and order’ with heavy-handed policing, ASBOs, parents made responsible for the misdeeds of their children (while simultaneously having been rendered powerless to discipline them) . Something of this kind, a sort of social counter-revolution, did take place in Stalin’s USSR in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Even the policy on abortion was reversed (to the shock of foreign radicals, who had admired the slaughter of innocents from afar, and longed to emulate it here) , because Stalin foresaw an urgent need for cannon-fodder in the near future. The social radicals who had been powerful immediately after the revolution were pushed to one side, and in fact never fully recovered their position, as the USSR became the chief nation of a warlike and authoritarian empire, whose reactionary, chauvinistic nationalism –in the end – outdid that of 19th century Prussia.
Nationalisation of industry has never had much to do with radical leftism. Whyever should it? (something similar could be said of the all-encompassing welfare state, pioneered by Otto von Bismarck in Imperial Germany, to try to checkmate Social Democracy, and also by enlightened business men such as the Rowntrees and Lord Leverhulme).
Most continental countries nationalised railways as a matter of course, as they saw them as strategic assets which could not be left to the caprice of the market. Even the most laissez-faire countries have tended to nationalise railways in fact, if not in name, during wartime. I simply cannot see what is socialist or radical about this. As I have pointed out before here, Charles II nationalised the British post office, Neville Chamberlain nationalised electricity generation and supply, Eisenhower nationalised American Interstate Highways (on the absurd pretext that their main purpose was as evacuation routes in a nuclear war). Margaret Thatcher nationalised local government. Michael Gove is currently nationalising English and Welsh schools, though the ‘academy’ scheme. Roy Jenkins nationalised the police, through compulsory force mergers and the creation of central bodies which selected and trained chief officers, and gave the Home Office more or less total operational power over them. Successive labour and Tory governments have been nationalising the magistrates courts, replacing local JPs with centrally-appointed ‘District Judges’, and closing small and convenient local courthouses.
Many of these measures (though not officially described as nationalisation) are far more intrusive in the lives of individuals, and more potent menaces to freedom , than the nationalisation of the 8.45 from Guildford to London Waterloo. Yet Telegraph-reading persons get far more worked up about state-owned trains than they do about a central state police, or by state interference between parents and children. Why? Because they don’t think, that’s why.
The left in Britain lost interest in nationalisation after the 1945-51 government. It did not produce the utopia that the trades unions had hoped for – there were often severe conflicts between the unions and the nationalised industries. Meanwhile the Soviet experiment which had seemed in the days of Yuri Gagarin to have something to offer, had turned out in the end to be an unproductive mess (though in my experience the Soviet railways were quite good, an d could be a pleasure to travel on, as were those of several of the Warsaw Pact countries. The old Czech dining cars were particularly enjoyable, as were the Mitropa restaurant cars that ran between Hanover and Berlin, but I digress).
The point is that the connection between the left and nationalisation was a brief marriage of convenience, mainly driven by the temporary dominance of the unions, which ended long ago. The danger now comes from a completely different direction, as Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland made clear long ago. The problem with British political conservatism is that it is largely thought-free, never had any ideas of its own and so cannot understand the ideas or aims of its enemies. That is why, as Al Johnson rightly pointed out in Birmingham this week, the main function of Tory governments is to clear up (or try to clear up, it’s like the Augean stables now) the economic mess made by Labour. Al failed to add that, once they have finished, Labour then comes back to continue making a mess of the economy. But that’s not Labour’s main purpose. New Labour’s main purpose is the creation of the post-Christian society its leaders yearn for. It could end up having privatised railways, just as long as it had nationalised private life.
People really should learn to distinguish between propaganda and truth, and to penetrate the disguises in which history advances itself.