The title is borrowed from Lenin’s brochure, where the last word was ‘communism’, here appropriately replaced with ‘capitalism’.
For the same contagion has been passed on to the West in general and Britain in particular, which is worrying. Especially when the aetiology of the disease is masked by the triumphant shrieks accompanying Labour’s loss of another parliamentary seat.
Serious commentators are opining that the Labour party is finished as a viable political force, and they may well be right. But that’s uninteresting if true.
All that Labour’s troubles signify is that one political machine has perhaps become obsolete. But for as long as its design principles persevere, it’ll simply be traded in for a new model. Former Labour voters will drift towards other left-wing parties, such as the Greens, the LibDems or some new contrivance.
And many of them will happily cast their lot with the Tories, detecting in them a slightly diluted version of the same thing, a glass of socialism with a splash of water. In fact, all our mainstream parties are socialist, and the differences among them are only those of degree.
Divesting socialism of its share-care-be-aware sloganeering, it’s best defined as an accelerating transfer of power from the individual to the state. That’s exactly what’s happening throughout the West and certainly in Britain: the state is getting bigger and stronger, while the individual’s muscles are atrophying at an alarming rate.
As has been the case for the past 100 years or so, the tone is being set by the US, where Biden has announced plans to increase public spending by $4 trillion. Gone are the times olden, when President Eisenhower had to apologise to the nation for running a $3 billion deficit. Today’s American state has developed a socialist appetite and a concomitant knack for thinking big, in trillions, not paltry billions.
Our national debt is also measured in trillions, two of them as of last count, but the count is soaring. That means the government is consistently spending more than it earns, and the curve is climbing steeply. The problem is dire, and it’s not just about money.
For the more the state spends, the more power it acquires – mainly by claiming a greater proportion of the nation’s income and increasing the number of people dependent on it. The form of dependence may differ, but its essence remains the same.
It could be direct handouts responsible for much or all of an individual’s livelihood. It could be giant construction projects, with the state throwing money on what Marx used to call ‘labour armies’. It could be the state employing more bureaucrats, as the need increases to manage, or rather mismanage, the growing pile of public money. It could be burgeoning grants to organisations that loyally do the state’s bidding. It could be any old thing, but whatever it is, state power grows with every pound spent.
Another symptom of the eponymous infantile disease is a sustained attack on the culture, traditions and institutions of Western civility. This follows the blueprint drawn by the crypto-communist Frankfurt School, whose objective was to take over the West gradually, without having to resort to violent, revolutionary upheavals.
One doesn’t detect in our currently triumphant Conservative Party any resolve to roll back the bossy woke onslaught undermining the subsiding foundations of our civilisation: religion, family, morality, decency, tolerance, civil liberties.
All one sees is a slightly less strident effort to do the Labour work without the Labour Party. Less strident is better than more strident, which is why the Tories are to be congratulated on winning the Hartlepool parliamentary constituency and over 600 seats on the local councils.
But it would be a mistake to think that these victories are a sign of the infantile disease receding. It’s not. It’s merely progressing at a slightly slower, but ultimately as deadly, pace.
Quite so, Mr Boot. But what is history if not a long defeat? I threw my lot in with the Cons on Thursday. I know they’re largely useless, but I’ve never voted for anyone else, I’m no party shill, it’s simply that there has been no viable alternative in my lifetime.
What exactly did Lenin mean by that title? Was it a jab at useful idiots who refused to dirty their hands?
Quite the opposite, actually. He was hectoring European, mainly German, communists on how to grab power by following Russia’s example. Some of them he thought were too far on the left, unwilling to compromise tactically. As to our situation, I voted Tory myself. Many years ago, I proposed a campaign slogan for them that was better than anything they had: We Are the Lesser Evil. They really are, which is why I vote for them.
Same with the Republicans here. No courage to roll back the state and its spending and no thrist to confront Frankfurt School types in Washington. We might win back the House and Senate in 2022, but that is cold comfort.
Alas, the same here in Oz, where nominal “Conservative” Morrison would have been considered far left twenty years ago and puts up no fight to defend Western civ at any level.
The Tories have always been ‘patrician’ capitalists, which is why they got rid of Thatcher – she was far too vulgar in allowing the hoi polloi the chance to grab their share of wealth and ownership.
The ‘genius’ of the Blair/ Clinton third way was in its use of unfettered capitalism (corporatism) to achieve marxist aims – politicising big business and creating an ‘elite’ of the wealthy, powerful and influential – straight out of the communist playbook, but in a way that appealed to those patrician Tories.
Voting for these people, as the least worse option, only serves to confer legitimacy and is a major factor in why politics in the anglosphere is so utterly broken.
“Gone are the times olden, when President Eisenhower had to apologise to the nation for running a $3 billion deficit.”
Used to pass by this large billboard that asked: “do you know the national deficit is $1 trillion USD?”. But for the old days.