My friend’s father owned a successful mid-size factory in London. That gave him an acute sense of guilt because he was a communist.
The old man must have cursed himself for being a hypocrite. After all, his ideology said that businessmen didn’t just hire workers. They exploited them, sucked their blood.
Yet there he was, committing the sin of enterprise in direct contravention of his innermost beliefs. But in another, alien culture it was possible to repent sins and atone for them.
Taking his cue from his enemies, the man embarked on a lifelong programme of expiation. He regrettably continued to make a handsome income from his factory, but in recompense remained loyal to another tenet of his faith.
He might have been a manufacturer, but at least he wasn’t a capitalist. That is, he refused to invest his money, making it multiply without the use of manual labour. He forswore any securities, such as shares and bonds, or properties for rent. And when his collection of Victorian paintings began to increase in value, he did a Savonarola and lit up his own bonfire of the vanities in the garden.
The old man’s aim was to make sure that his heirs wouldn’t have sizeable legacies after his death, and he succeeded to the best of his abilities. All my friend inherited was an extensive knowledge of Marxist literature and an enduring hatred of Marxism.
I acquired both such knowledge and such sentiments via a different route, having had to study Marxism academically at my Moscow university. Allow me to boast about my erudition: I sat through courses in The History of the Communist Party, Dialectical Materialism, Historical Materialism, Scientific Communism, Scientific Atheism, Marxist Aesthetics and Marxist Political Economics.
That was a schizophrenic experience in that both my professors and I knew that those disciplines had nothing to do with reality. And yet they – and after them I – had to repeat Marxist inanities by rote. Apparently, I didn’t do so with sufficient conviction, which is why I acquired an early reputation as an anti-Soviet vermin.
But on the plus side, I did learn enough about Marxism to understand exactly where Starmer, Reeves, Rayner, Lammy et al. are coming from. They are the ones who took that vile ideology seriously, even though I doubt they studied it in any depth.
Luckily for them – and unluckily for us – no serious study is required. For Marxism has nothing to do with reason and everything to do with viscera, where hatred and envy reside. All Marxism does is channelling it into the conduits of specific targets and policies.
Like my friend’s Marxist father, our rulers detest the very notion of money making money. Along with Marx, they subscribe to the labour theory of value. Marx borrowed it from Smith, but added his own touches. Without going into detail, that theory says that capital must only reflect the amount of labour that has gone into its generation.
Capital produced by any other means is criminal usury. Such illegitimate gains must be confiscated and the money-grubbing fat cats punished, ideally by death but, barring that, repossession and redistribution.
This explains why Starmer struggles so much when asked to define “the working people” who, according to him, won’t suffer higher taxes. He doesn’t really mean “working people”, such as doctors or lawyers putting in 100-hour weeks. He means the working class, defined by Marx as strictly urban proletariat.
Never mind that the term has become anachronistic in our digitised economies. We are talking ideology here, not reality. However, political decorum still prohibits using overtly Marxist terminology and venting characteristic Marxist resentments.
Hence Starmer sweats whenever asked to define the working people. He can’t tell us who they are for fear of being branded a Marxist, still not an election-winning tag. However, he can state unequivocally who they are not: people deriving their income from securities, rental properties or private pensions.
Even though Starmer isn’t an especially bright man, I’m sure he realises that most of those reprobates had to work hard all their lives to make the capital that now gives them some income. But that’s reality, which isn’t the terrain inhabited by ideology. Those people have capital, which makes them capitalists. And Marx taught that all capitalists are bottom-feeding bloodsuckers. QED.
The ghost of my friend’s father came wafting in, but we’ve already established that he was a sinner. While breaking the commandment proscribing ‘unearned’ income, he illogically still indulged in exploitation, which is another deadly sin – and one Starmer is set to stamp out as decisively as he can.
That’s why, while slapping new taxes on capital gains, he is also set to increase the cost of doing business by hiking a whole raft of corporate taxes. It’s no use proving to him, figures in hand, that such policies will backfire on the very ‘working people’ he claims to venerate. He knows all that, and doesn’t care.
The principal dynamic of Marxism isn’t love of the poor but hatred of the rich, however loosely and arbitrarily defined. Love of the poor only ever manifests itself in the Marxists’ wholehearted attempts to increase their number.
That’s why this month alone 1,600 business owners have shut up shop – even before the first Labour budget is announced. And that’s why wealthy people are fleeing Britain in droves, taking their capital with them, along with the jobs the capital produced and the tax revenue it generated.
Again, economists long on fundamental concepts but short on street smarts are crying havoc, but they have no dogs of war or, more to the point, of reason, to let slip. Reason has nothing whatsoever to do with any of this. This Marxist lot are driven by visceral, ideological predisposition, of which hatred is the main component.
Their attitude to capital fleeing the country was neatly encapsulated by Dale Vince, the green energy tycoon who donated five of his millions to Labour. “If people only live here because they pay less tax, they should f*** off,” said Mr Vince, somewhat hypocritically. “This is a brilliant country,” he added. “There’s no way people won’t live here because of a fairer tax system.”
A fairer tax system to this lot is one that acts on Marxist dogma by stealth. Alas, the electorate has been so thoroughly brainwashed and dumbed down that people don’t realise their vote ushers in Marxism through the back door.
And of course Starmer evokes the memory of my friend’s father by making sure ‘the rich’ can’t pass on their ill-gotten gains to their families. Marxism loathes dynastic succession not only in monarchies but also in common families. The dial must be reset in every generation, with a capitalist’s offspring making their living on the conveyor belt.
Hence the steep hikes in inheritance taxes to be announced in the budget. As far as Marxists are concerned, the state is the only legitimate heir to any legacies. My friend’s father is smiling from his grave.
Just three months into the Labour tenure, if another election were held today, they’d lose it. But it won’t be held today, nor for at least the next four years. That’ll give Britons enough time to get the full flavour of Marxism in action.
They’ll find out that in any class war it’s the whole society that becomes collateral damage. And class war is the Marxist dogma our government lives by. My friend’s late father would approve and rejoice.
A business savvy communist? And a conscientious one? You’re friend’s father must have been Jewish!