Exclusive: ‘The woke left has inherited the Stalinists’ hatred of freedom,’ warns British columnist
According to Wikipedia, you used to be a Marxist, a libertarian Marxist. That’s how you are described there, as a libertarian Marxist…
Yes, there was a time when I liked to call myself that because I found that it annoyed all the right people on both sides of the debate. The libertarians hated it, and the left hated it. But I do not have a political label that I can attach to myself these days. I think one of the problems with politics is we’re stuck with 20th-century language – left, right, conservative, Marxist… – and politics has changed. We just don’t have the right language.
Still, you considered yourself a Marxist then, didn’t you?
Yes, most certainly. I was the launch editor of the Living Marxism magazine in the 1980s, when I was in my 20s.
And you were a figure in Britain’s Revolutionary Communist Party.
Yes.
Many people think that what is happening in the West with free speech, freedom of opinion, and what we call woke ideology, which includes all this LGBT and gender stuff, is Cultural Marxism. As a former Marxist, do you agree with that?
No, I don’t think it’s helpful to call it Cultural Marxism. It’s a bit like the generals at the beginning of the First World War who were trying to fight the last war, were trying to fight yesterday’s enemy rather than realizing that the machine gun had been invented and the world had changed.
I think calling it Cultural Marxism is kind of trying to find something in the past. It’s actually something new happening. I would rather describe it as my friend Frank Furedi describes it, as a combination of technocracy, ideology-free management politics, merged with identity politics.
Identity woke politics gives the technocrats a political language in which they can justify their authority when they don’t have an ideology of their own. It is a new phenomenon. You can call it what you like, but that’s what it is.
So you probably disagree with Victor Orbán when he once said – while on a state visit to the UK, by the way – that there is a parental link between the elites coming from the 1968 revolution in the West and the former communist regimes of Eastern Europe…
Oh no, I do agree with that. All I’m saying is that if we try to find a label of the past to describe what is happening today, we’re kind of missing the point. There’s something new happening. We’re not fighting yesterday’s battle. We’ve got to fight today’s battle. But I agree with that convergence point. The woke left have inherited the Stalinists’ hatred of freedom.
When I was a young man, I thought I was left-wing because I believed that free speech and democracy, the two principles that I’ve always cared about in my life, were left-wing causes. Historically, they were.
Today, however, the left is the enemy of both of those things. And even when I was left, I was never part of that left. So my friends and I were the only people on the left who, even in the 1980s, were against the “no platform” policy of censoring fascists, censoring conservatives, saying people should be banned.
That was starting then, and from the first, we were always against that and for freedom of speech. So my principles are the same, not just in politics.
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