His former friends did not want to defend Saddam passionately in the way that the communists of the Thirties passionately defended the Soviet Union; rather they treated his continued rule with an indifferent nonchalance because the survival of the Baath was against American interests. To their mind, the worst form of government, the power which was responsible for the world’s crimes, was ‘the West’ or liberal democracy or ‘capitalism’ or America. Bubbling underneath, I suspect, was a fear that freedom from tyranny anywhere in the world would lead in the long run to societies rather like the societies they lived in – and that was intolerable.
Makiya’s awkward questions did not go away in the years that followed. What were the leftists of the rich world going to do when confronted by not only Iraqi socialists, but Iranian feminists and Zimbabwean liberals telling them very loudly that there were worse ideas than modern democracy? Betray them? Pretend they didn’t exist?
If they did, they would reveal their emptiness. With the exception of religious fundamentalism and extreme nationalism, political ideas are universal. A believer in the free market has to believe it can work as well in Bahrain as Boston and offer intellectual support to his fellow advocates of capitalism. If a Western feminist were to turn her back on persecuted Afghan women, you could call her a hypocrite. If the majority of Western feminists were to do the same, you could conclude that feminism was not a serious political force. The oppression of women is as wrong in London as Kabul. If Western feminists say it isn’t, then they unwittingly parrot the imperialists of the nineteenth century who believed God gave rights to freeborn Englishmen but not dark-skinned natives. In these circumstances, feminist beliefs wouldn’t be a philosophy but a lifestyle choice or a way of obtaining advantage in the Western job market.
So it was with the Marxists Makiya confronted. If they couldn’t talk to others who called themselves socialists, and who had suffered far more than wealthy intellectuals could imagine, they were in the absurd position of being socialists without comrades.
When that kind of sickness is abroad, the smell that hits your nostrils is not the whiff of hypocrisy but the stench of death.
CHAPTER FOUR Academic Scribblers and a Defunct Economist
ENLIGHTENMENT: Sinister, destructive period of history which had a ‘project’ to dominate nature, prefer reason to superstition and stop people going to church. All a big mistake, but postmodernism will fix it.
Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom, 2004
GOING BACK over the far left’s arguments of the last century felt a fool’s errand. A historian friend dug out yellowing pamphlets from thirty years ago. He collects them as passionately as men with sheds collect model trains, and can talk for hours on the ferocious rivalries and extravagant ambitions of the rival Marxist sects. It is his hobby, but he accepts that general readers can take only so many manifestos for a revolution that never came before their mouths gape and eyelids droop. Why should they care when humanity has waved goodbye to all that?
I said that Kanan Makiya became an intellectual celebrity, and so he was for a while. None the less, most educated people lived through the Nineties without reading him. Palestinians will remember Edward Said’s name, as Iraqis will remember Kanan Makiya’s, but Said’s influence in the West seemed to be confined to the cultural studies departments of the universities where jargon-spouting post-modern theorists perplexed their students – and each other. Like Makiya, he could walk down most streets without being recognized.
Said, Tariq Ali and the Marxists who first backed then abandoned Makiya gathered around New Left Review, the world’s foremost journal of Marxist theory for academic leftists. In 2000, on the journal’s fortieth birthday, its Old Etonian editor Perry Anderson let out a piercing howl of regret for the lost world of his youth. Like Karl Marx, he had expected so much for history, only for history to leave him beached.
When he was a young man in the Sixties, Marxism had seemed a good bet. Communist tyrants ruled one-third of the world from Berlin to Shanghai. Mass Marxist movements in Western Europe and Japan threatened to overturn the status quo. The Red Guards were preparing to terrorize China. In Vietnam and Cambodia, communist guerrillas led by Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot were fighting for power. In Latin America, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro were thrilling him and his comrades with their revolutionary élan. Marxism never got anywhere in Britain where the Left generally meant a Labour Party that true Marxists despised for its boringly ‘reformist’ attempts to make most people’s lives a little bit better. But given the success of Marxism elsewhere, they could dream that a true revolutionary socialist party would supplant Labour.
And forty years on, what was left of his Left? Socialism had vanished in the Eighties. Long before the Berlin Wall came down people had stopped thinking about it or seeing it as a plausible answer to the problems of organizing societies. It wasn’t just that communism was clearly finished. In the free world, trade union membership fell, and all left-wing parties with a chance of winning an election stopped pretending that they could and should nationalize the commanding heights of the economy. All around Anderson, the movements that had given purpose to his life were dying or dead, going or gone.
He cleared his throat with a few words about the ‘enormities of Stalin’s rule’ and ‘the lack of democracy in any of the countries that described themselves as socialist’, then bewailed the loss of his youthful love. The Soviet Union had fallen, China was embracing market economics and American capitalism had ‘resoundingly re-asserted its primacy in all fields – economic, political, military [and] cultural’. No one cared about him and his kind any more. The names of the Marxist philosophers who had inspired him to fight for revolutionary socialism in the lecture halls and drawing rooms of Bloomsbury were as unfamiliar to modern students as ‘a list of Arian bishops’. Neo-liberalism had triumphed and become ‘the most successful ideology in world history’. Like the Roman Catholic Church in pre-Reformation Christendom, it had no credible competitor, no rival creed that might mount a plausible challenge. ‘To say that these changes are enormous would be an under-statement,’ he concluded.
If you can stomach his lament for the passing of the communist slave empires, you must grant that Anderson’s analysis was an honest recognition of defeat.
The political chasm that separates the twenty-first century from the twentieth is that socialism is no longer credible. The loss of Anderson’s Marxism is no loss at all, but the enfeeblement of the humane and generous forces of social democracy in Europe, India and North America has been a disaster. There were plenty of leftists at the millennium, but no radical left with a practical plan to transform society.
James Buchan picked up the sound of the creaking joints in High Latitudes, his 1996 novel about the Britain Margaret Thatcher helped to create. Jane Haddon, his heroine, is an aristocratic banker, who is not only successful, beautiful and rich, but thoughtful and kind with it. She confronts Sean McVie, the leader of the Workers’ Party, whose resemblance to Gerry Healy Buchan makes no effort to disguise. He is everything she is not: ugly, irrelevant and boring beyond measure. McVie’s timid secretary, Sheila, takes Jane to his office. The dirty old man tries to terrify her. For a moment it seems as if she will suffer the same fate as ‘all those girls in charity shop jackets, those extras from the Gaiety, those orphans from Sidon and Beit Jennine; so many girls, so many