Marxism strikes again

Next week Britain will be paralysed by class warriors, this time fronted by the Marxist RMT, the transport union.

It called for a three-day strike, and 40,000 RMT members jumped up and saluted. Mick Lynch, RMT boss, explained that the strike isn’t just any old labour dispute.

Addressing a rally attended by Angela Rayner, Labour’s Deputy Leader, Comrade Lynch spoke in the idiom borrowed from Das Kapital, which he probably hasn’t read, and The Communist Manifesto, which he probably knows by heart.

“The Tories are butchering the working class,” he shouted. And the working class must start butchering back: “The campaign is on. The fight is on. The struggle is on. Who’s with us? The working people are with us. We are the working people of this country. Together we are unstoppable. Get up and fight or live on your knees.”

Lovely. I especially liked the idea of fighting as the only alternative to living on one’s knees. That was a reference to the phrase “better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”

The fiery aphorism was first uttered by a fiery man, the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, who then set off a series of cultural appropriations. The adage was repeated by FDR, but it probably reached Comrade Lynch via the Spanish communist Dolores Ibárruri, a key figure in the Spanish Civil War.

She was nicknamed la Pasionaria, the badge of honour she earned for having bitten through a priest’s jugular vein, thereby establishing her impeccable atheist credentials. The lady missed her true calling. She could have made a top-notch wolfhound.

As far as I know, Lynch hasn’t so far expressed his innermost convictions dentally. But his oration came right out of Ibárruri’s legacy: “The struggle is on. Bring it on. This is the fight of our lives. Stand up and fight. Victory to the RMT!”

The temperature of the occasion should leave no one in any doubt. This isn’t just a haggle about an extra couple of quid in wages. This is a declaration of class war, which actually is superfluous.

For class war has been going on for the better part of two centuries, which doesn’t mean non-stop fighting. It’s more like the Hundred Years’ War, a series of battles and skirmishes separated by years of relative peace.

The fires of this war might not have been started by Marx and his jolly friends, but they certainly fanned them in the nineteenth century – and have been doing that ever since.

Marxism can’t withstand five minutes of rational debate on any level: social, economic, political, philosophical, you name it. It was intellectually defunct even at the time its founder was still burrowing through the British Library in the 1860s.

Marx was describing industrial conditions that were already obsolete at the time of writing, which is why he juggled facts with the dexterity of a cardsharp.

For example, the first edition of Das Kapital gives most statistics up to 1865 or 1866, except those for the changes in wages, which stop in 1850. The second edition brings all other statistics up to date, but the movement of wages again stops in 1850, to mask their rapid growth.

But Marxism isn’t about rational debate. It’s about envy and hatred, two dormant qualities residing in every man’s breast. The point of Marxism is to act as an alarm clock. When it rings loudly enough, envy and hatred wake up with a jolt and begin to destroy.

That is the essence of Marxism: destruction. It doesn’t destroy to achieve some worthy goal. Destruction is the goal, however dense the smokescreen behind which it hides.

It’s no wonder that history’s worst massacres have been perpetrated either by unapologetic Marxists or by the likes of Hitler, who merely acknowledged their debt to Marx.

As the West grew richer and richer, it became clear to unbiased observers that the relationship between prosperity and Marxism could only ever be inverse. But again, Marxism isn’t about improving the lot of the poor. It’s about wreaking enough havoc to make sure everyone is equally destitute and equally oppressed by the Marxists.

The average salary of a British train driver is £48,000 a year, £18,000 higher than the UK’s average. On that basis it’s hard to argue that RMT is defending an oppressed group. Yet arguments don’t fit on the banners of class war. Only slogans do.

However, the readers of this space expect not slogans but arguments. So here’s mine.

Trade unions used to serve a useful purpose, but they have outlived it. They are an Industrial Revolution anachronism, completely out of step with modern economies.

In the past, manufacturing reigned supreme, and mass production was making its first tentative steps. Most labour was unqualified, which made workers interchangeable and easily replaceable.

That’s why individual workers had no clout to negotiate with the management on equal terms. The balance of power swung too far to one end and needed to be redressed. Collective bargaining, and trade unions as its facilitators, thus had a role to play.

One could argue that, even before unionism, workers’ conditions were improving. And as mass production became more sophisticated, farsighted manufacturers saw a clear benefit in keeping their workers happy.

Even in Russia, one of the country’s top industrialists, Savva Morozov (d. 1905), introduced the kind of social provisions for his workers that hardly existed even in the West at the time – or in Russia now. And in the US, Henry Ford didn’t need to be coerced by strikers to pay a decent wage. He turned his workers also into his consumers by paying them a princely $5 a day.

Still, unions were important in the industries that were slow on the uptake – even though unionist methods were often violent. Factory owners responded to violence by violence. They hired thugs as strike-breakers, and many industrial sites were turned into battlefields.

This created troubled waters in which both Marxists and organised crime could profitably fish. Union bosses learned their ideology and methods from those sources, and in due course most unions became Marxist in thought and Mafioso in deed.

Like both Marxists and Mafiosi, they care little about the plight of the people in whose name they supposedly act. Like the former, they strive to destroy. Like the latter, they strive to extort.

Since Marxism has pervaded every pore of Western societies, we all have to go along with the unions. When their extortionate demands make whole countries less competitive, we grin and bear it. When they paralyse whole countries (remember Britain in the 1970s?), we regret their methods and selfishness.

However, it doesn’t occur to anybody to question their usefulness and indeed their right to exist. Yet if we gave ourselves a moment to stop and think, we’d realise that the unions represent a clash of troglodyte philosophy with modern economies.

Much of our mass production is outsourced to places where workers, often including children, toil round the clock for coolie wages. We could discuss the morality of this practice some other time, but meanwhile let’s just look at our own back yard.

A modern Western economy is sustained mostly by qualified labour. Workers – and I don’t just mean industrial proletariat – no longer have just their muscle to sell, but also their training and skills. Unlike muscular strength, these vary within a broad range from individual to individual.

Hence collective bargaining has become not just counterproductive but also unjust. Qualified employees should be in a position to strike individual deals with their employers, and the higher their qualification, the better the deals.

Companies, it must be remembered, compete not only for markets, but also for labour. They can’t afford to lose people to their rivals, which teaches them to treat their employees decently. No Mafia-style extortion is needed.

The unions have become a parallel government cum parallel criminal structure capable of bringing a great country to her knees. They should be disbanded – and would be, if it were possible at least to argue in favour of such a measure.

But it isn’t. Even politicians who know all this also know that trade unions are a sacred cow. It can be milked, but it can’t be slaughtered. Unions are like the NHS in that both sit at the top of a totem pole, too high for reason to reach.

That’s why the RMT will win next week’s battle, especially since there’s no Margaret Thatcher in sight. If only one side dares to fight, there’s only one winner.