The Revolution Has Already Been Televised.

You mean you weren't watching?

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve written about some of the intellectual and moral deficiencies of our international ruling class, including their lack of traditional societal virtues and their abstract, aesthetic approach to real problems. This week, I want to look at one other curious factor: their intellectual rigidity and their absolute intolerance of heterodox views.

Back in my student days of long hair and long guitar solos by loud progressive rock groups, there was a short-lived fashion for postcards with sick or ironic slogans on them, which people would display in their rooms. My favourite was “Who will Take Care of the World When I’m Gone?”, but the most memorable was a simple red card with SMASH VIOLENCE! written on it in large black letters. Nothing better encapsulated the moral and intellectual confusion of the time, when people would quite seriously tell you things like “I’m a pacifist, I support the Viet Cong.”

That is the generation which has been in charge of the world for the last couple of decades, and is only now departing. (I disclaim any responsibility for the current state of the world, by the way, I was never sufficiently important to have had any influence.) The English writer Cyril Connolly, talking about an earlier generation, coined what he called the Theory of Permanent Adolescence, arguing that the personal and emotional experiences undergone by children of the ruling class at English public (ie private) schools were so profound as to dictate the course of the rest of their lives. Which certainly provides an interesting way of looking at the career of someone like say, Tony Blair. Most of the world’s ruling class didn’t go to English public schools, but I want to make a similar argument, only this time about the influence of the ideas of and patterns of thought at a particular time (roughly from 1968-75) in student politics at Universities around the world. These dates are only approximate ones, since there were already some precursor signs in the early 1960s, and anyone at University until, say, the early 1980s would have been affected by the backwash. And many habits of thought and behaviour (if not of ideology, necessarily) have survived in Universities to the present day.

Anyone coming to University around then would have been potentially subject to a hurricane of new and exciting ideas: Marxism, of course, in all its manifestations, but also the works of Marcuse and the Frankfurt School, Eric Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, Sartre, various liberation theorists, writers like Franz Fanon with his exaltation of violence, the structuralists, the post-modernists and many others. Now of course not everybody chose to be exposed to such influences, some preferring more traditional pursuits, such as drinking, playing rugby (or talking about doing so) and listening to loud music. But it was virtually impossible to escape such influences entirely, and for many students these ideas fulfilled a deep psychological need: to identify with new, exciting and heterodox causes, even if they were not entirely clear about the detail. As it happened, much of the ideology of the time, in posh newspapers as much as in student debates, was totally incoherent. But in a sense that didn’t matter, because it was the frisson of danger and the emotional satisfaction from adopting the ideology that counted.

Amidst all the confusion, some organised groups began to coalesce around exotic variants of vulgar Marxist theory. I put it that way because there was little appetite for close study of the mass of Marxist texts: those that were influential tended to be from Marx’s earlier period anyway. (I never met anyone who had got very far with Das Kapital.) Rather, Marxism was an exciting new quasi-religion, unpopular with the Establishment, full of difficult terms (often bad translations from the German) and recondite knowledge which explained what was really going on in the world, and which could be used to batter down the resistance of your friends and family. Those of us with a belief in old-fashioned class-based Socialism tended just to sigh and walk away.

The number of competing Marxist sects at the time proliferated almost beyond computation (jokes about annual conferences in telephone boxes were already common) but one organisation that notably didn’t benefit was the official British Communist Party, universally dismissed as “Stalinist” in the bitter ideological controversies that made up the daily lives of most of these groups. Rather, there was a profusion of “independent” Marxist groups that took their inspiration from the New Left of the 1960s and 70s, with its rejection of traditional class-based struggles, and its incorporation of such ideas as environmentalism, feminism and anti-colonialism, which were then starting to become fashionable.

These parties and tendencies did, however, have two observable common characteristics. One was an absolute and utter certainty about the rightness of their ideology, which was not subject to empirical analysis or proof, because there was no need. Here, bulked large the influence of the French Marxist and wife strangler Louis Althusser, who famously proposed  that Marxism had no more need of empirical proof than pure mathematics did, arguing that “It has been possible to apply Marx’s theory with success because it is true; it is not true because it has been applied with success.” This was heady stuff, but also powerful, because it disposed of the need to show that what you were proposing was empirically true (Althusser, indeed, was read, and not entirely unfairly, as arguing that only theory really mattered in the end: facts were irrelevant.) Thus anyone who disagreed with you was by definition wrong, and might well, indeed, be part of the repressive apparatus itself. The other characteristic, as a consequence, was an almost exclusive dedication to theory at the expense of practical political activity (or as Marxists would say, Praxis.) Purely performative acts like going on demonstrations or even standing on picket-lines could be countenanced, but the real work was intellectual and theoretical

This led, of course, to relationships between groups and individuals that were often poisonously bad, as well as to heresies and splits within the movements themselves. Expulsion of dissidents was one of the first acts of many of these parties, unless the dissidents were prepared to recant their theoretical errors. For that matter, many of the left-wing terrorist groups of the 1970s, like the German Red Army Faction, began their careers by executing dissidents and “traitors” within their own ranks.  Concepts of persuasion, reasoned argument and flexibility were ruled out from the start.

Now this might seem a difficulty for a political movement that wants to gain power. After all, not many people will be inclined to vote for you if you hector, threaten and abuse them. But all of these parties were elitist groups, which could broadly be described as Vanguard movements. The concept of the Vanguard movement is particularly associated with Lenin, in his 1902 tract, What is to be Done? although he wasn’t the originator of the idea. Lenin’s argument was that attempts to bring about change by mass political activity based around trades unions were foredoomed to failure. The only chance of success was to form small, disciplined parties of professional revolutionaries who would act as guides and mentors, leading the working class to an eventual seizure of power. This was pretty much the mentality of the Marxist groups of the 60s and 70s, with the difference that, unlike Lenin, they saw the Vanguard being made up not of the educated working class, but of middle-class intellectuals like themselves. Mass membership was irrelevant, if not actually dangerous for a party, since it made discipline and ideological conformity more difficult. It’s likely that these Marxist groups knew about Lenin’s pamphlet, even if they never read it, and, if they got as far as page one, they would have seen the epigraph from a letter of Lassalle to Marx of 1852: “the greatest proof of a party’s weakness is its diffuseness and the blurring of clear demarcations; a party becomes stronger by purging itself...” One wonders whether Mr Starmer and the current Labour Party leadership were introduced to such ideas when they were students.

The other indirect intellectual influence, again more discussed than read, was Herbert Marcuse, whose 1964 book One-Dimensional Man, argued, with a surpassing bleakness of vision that could have been read as an incitement to suicide, that any kind of revolution was impossible, since the modern western working class was drugged into insensitivity by the developing consumer society and the total control of the media by the capitalist system. Somehow (and to the astonishment of Marcuse himself), this vision of terminal despair was taken up by mediatised figures of the American New Left like Angela Davis, and recycled as a call to violent revolution. More importantly, perhaps, what comes out of the book (and indeed the whole tradition it originated from) is a contempt for the stupidity of ordinary people, and a complete dismissal even of the principle of the utility of democratic politics. This, of course, was what the radicals wanted to hear, and explains their lack of interest in fighting elections, rather than each other. Ideological purity and discipline were the only guarantees of final success. The Revolution would come, not from knocking on doors and collecting votes, but from heroic direct action, led by themselves. The details could be worked out later.

Now, at this point it may legitimately be objected that, interesting as that episode may be, it belongs to the past, and now the fairly distant past, at that. There never was a Revolution, the young radicals became older moderates or even, in some cases, older reactionaries, such as the Nouveaux philosophes, former Maoists who turned sharply to the Right. So does any of this matter?

Well, yes, if you accept my Theory of Permanent Undergraduate Mentalities, which holds that these habits of thought, (notably, unbending rigidity, complete intellectual certainty, a fetish for discipline and punishment and a fundamental lack of faith in ordinary people and in democracy), once acquired at an impressionable age, are not easily given up. If you think about it, these habits are actually pretty close to those of today’s ruling class, and help to explain a number of things that are otherwise puzzling.  Although it wasn’t much noticed at the time, the doctrines of Marxism popular in the 60s and 70s amounted almost to a re-inversion of Hegel once more, since only ideas that were important. If you followed Althusser (or at least had read about him) you would have gone away with the idea that Marx’s ideas were inherently justified and true, and that, since empirical knowledge was unreliable at best, what really mattered was theory. And a theory that was true could, by definition, never be disproved. The details of these theories, if ever mastered, were rapidly forgotten, the more so since they were for the most part pure theory, and had no empirical content at all. But if we draw a distinction between content (quickly forgotten) and the form (acquired at an impressionable age and retained thereafter) we begin to see why the Professional and Managerial Class clings to its ideology with such fervour, and spends a great deal of its time combating and purging dissidence. (Visualise by comparison a Central Banker in his sixties, lovingly unwrapping his brand-new copy of a digitally remastered vinyl version of Blows Again the Empire by Jefferson Starship.)

Take the case of economics, for example. The Market can be seen as a Hegelian Absolute: an all-embracing, all-defining, total concept. Once certain postulates about it are taken as true, any number of clever games can be played by economists who are also indifferent mathematicians, not to “prove” anything (since empirical facts are generally excluded from modern economic analysis anyway), but to derive further “truths.” Thus, a pundit today might modify Althusser slightly, and write that “it has been possible to apply market-based theories with success because they are true; they are not true because they have been applied with success,” and many people would nod in sympathy. Equally, all competing theories, such as Modern Monetary Theory, have to be dismissed, not because they are alleged to be empirically flawed, but because they are not the truth. (If this sounds quasi-religious, it is: it comes from the intellectual tradition known as apophasis that says that there is nothing useful that can be said about the Divine Being, we just have to accept it all.)

A consequence of the belief that only ideas matter, is that the only really significant battles are over ideas, which is to say abstractions. That is why the history of this kind of thinking is so full of “struggles” against ideological deviations of all types, sometimes attached to names or organised tendencies, sometimes completely abstract. The same is true today in the causes which the PMC wants people to fight for, and the targets that are selected for attacks. The problem is, of course, that you cannot fight ideas, you can only fight those who express them, or, more typically, those who you believe secretly harbour them. (I’ve argued for twenty years now that “fighting terrorism” is conceptually as dumb as “fighting sarcasm” and about as effective.)

The classic target, a constant since the 1930s, has been Fascism. Now at least it could be argued that there really were fascist states in the 1930s, and there were fascist movements in many European countries. But that’s not what “fighting Fascism” has actually meant. Fascism as an ideology is very simple, and can be said to consist of three points:

• Life is a struggle.

• Might is Right.

• That’s it.

So how do you “struggle” against that? Now in theory, you might present people who might be tempted to support fascist ideas with a better and more attractive set of principles instead. (The official Communist Parties of Europe did at least try to do this in the 1930s.) But in practice “fighting” Fascism seems to mean attacking and vilifying those you believe to have “fascist” views, and trying to drive them out of public life, the media, or whatever. Often (Freud’s Narcissism of Minor Differences strikes again) these will be people from your own side. Meanwhile parties  you dismiss as “fascist” continue to make actual political progress in terms of votes and seats.

More recently, “racist” has undergone the same adventures. Once upon a time there was a thing called “racialism," which argued that humanity was divided into distinct biological “races," as animals and plants were, and these differences mattered in terms of behaviour. So a hundred years ago, it was normal to say that Italians were racially excitable, Hungarians were racially prone to depression and so forth. Such views were pretty much universally held, around the world, until quite recently. They have been “fought” partly through advances in scientific understanding (DNA for example) and partly because the horrible consequences of their application in the Second World War discredited them in most parts of the world. There was also “racial discrimination” which was formal or informal differences in the treatment of identified “races," some more favourably than others. That was “fought” mainly through legislation and institutional reform.

But these days the talk is of “racism” which is an entirely abstract concept, empty of any empirical content, as one would expect. Inasmuch as it has a meaning, it seems to be that of expressing, or even holding heterodox opinions on the subject of “race,” whatever that is. And so “fighting” it seems to mean attacking and vilifying those you believe to have “racist” views, and trying to drive them out of public life, the media or whatever. Meanwhile parties you dismiss as “racist” continue to make actual political progress in terms of votes and seats. Examples of this sort could be multiplied.

Now by any standards of traditional democratic politics, this is madness. Why deliberately alienate a large section of the voting population? Why write articles furiously condemning entire population groups in countries like Hungary or Sweden, and advocating some form of collective punishment ? Well, recall that the revolutionaries of the 60s and 70s never confused taking power with winning elections. For them, “bourgeois democracy” was a fraud, and elections were irrelevant. The Revolution would come from the streets, led by people like themselves.

Fundamentally the same attitudes exist today among the international ruling class and the PMC. The key to understanding their behaviour, is to realise that in their view, The Revolution has already happened. They consider that they have already taken power, and democratic elections are a sham, albeit for different reasons than they believed in the 1960s. (There were, of course, elections in the Soviet Union.) If you doubt this, consider when was the last time that an actual election successfully threatened the current international political and economic system. Rather, there is a large international ruling class/PMC, which is not entirely unified, which has internal splits, jealousies and hatreds, and practices ritual shaming, explosions and purges, but remains a coherent body nonetheless, around a common set of interests.

If we date the effective seizure of power from about 2010, it is entirely understandable that in recent years internal struggles and purges have started to happen. So in the vocabulary of the trials of the 1930s, for example, Jeremy Corbyn would have been accused of “left deviationism," while Viktor Orban would be accused of “right deviationism.” The first has been successfully purged: efforts continue to purge the second. Various “ideological deviations” and “internal enemies” are identified, and those who are believed (or at least asserted) to be sympathetic to them are to be driven out. Different factions, of course, make use of this condemnatory vocabulary for their now purposes. The equivalent of Party Schools exist to train young cadres in correct thinking, to carry on the inheritance into the future.

Now, it is important not to confuse this situation either with conspiracy theories (“B*** G**** and co run the world”!), or with some kind of hidden dictatorship. The truth is simpler. Whilst accepting reigning norms and ideologies is not compulsory, and you can perfectly well live, function and make a career without doing so, entry to international elites and the higher reaches of the PMC is generally contingent upon accepting these norms and ideologies. In this sense, the international ruling class resembles any one-party state anywhere, in that access to power and influence requires joining the Party and accepting the rules.

One of the most important features of the Party in George Orwell’s 1984 is that it has no ideology. It pretends to have an ideology of course, as a justification for the power it wields, and as a way of ideologically controlling its members. But the whole point of its alleged ideology is that it is random, and can change at any moment. What matters is not belief in an ideology, but a willingness to believe whatever the Party says is true at a given moment. It is much the same in the real world today: there is an ideology of sorts, in the sense of a set of ideas which benefit the wealthy and powerful, but it can and does change quite abruptly in detail as circumstances change. Indeed, a ruling elite without a genuine ideology finds life much easier, because there are many fewer genuine internal conflicts. Rather, it is the instinct for control and discipline, the distrust of ordinary people, the contempt for the democratic process and the internal struggles for power, which have persisted, even as the content of the ideology of the 60s disappeared long ago. The existence of a formal ideology is useful for disciplining and excluding political opponents, but the fact that the ideology is so incoherent is actually an advantage rather than a weakness, because it means that Party members have to follow its every twist and turn, permanently frightened of missing something.

All of these essays have argued that, ultimately, structures and processes are more important than ideology: a materialist view of politics, if you will. I’d add here that mentalities (which are very different from ideologies) can also be important, in determining the methods for gaining and holding power. The originators of the French and American Revolutions had been brought up on the Classics: they were familiar with the idea of long, complex speeches and debates leading to votes and laws. The Bolsheviks, like many revolutionaries since, had grown up in authoritarian states, and conspired in conditions of secrecy and paranoia, where no-one could be fully trusted. Cyril Connolly’s public schoolboys had absorbed ideas of fair play and sportsmanship that they applied to government and politics. Today’s ruling class lived through, or has inherited, an intellectual climate of arrogance, certainty and intolerance, and an utter lack of interest in ordinary people. I suppose it could be said that if these people were especially able, or even competent, then the situation wouldn’t be as bad. But in the combination of elitist arrogance and practical incompetence, it’s hard to imagine that any ruling class could be less prepared for the problems of the immediate future.