Today’s anti-capitalist Left only stands for random and dangerous nihilism

At least Communists had a coherent agenda. The infiltrators of 2021 have no discernible end goal

There was a time when I understood the point of political infiltration. As a young Left-wing activist who was encouraged to join any emerging movement for political change or social reform, I got very specific instructions: always point out that the underlying injustice of the capitalist system was the root cause of whatever grievance was at the heart of that campaign. Make use of the fundamental principles of Marxist ideology to educate both those who were participating in the protest action and the general public whose sympathies might be engaged by it. Above all, aim to involve yourself in the most high-profile, newsworthy aspects of the activities. If possible, get appointed (or appoint yourself) as a spokesman.

The whole idea was to propagate the principle, at every possible opportunity, that all society’s discontents and injustices could be traced to the evils of capitalism. Using the dialectical tools that Marxist theory provided, you could demonstrate that radical socialism – the abolition of private ownership and free markets – was the only genuine antidote to whatever human evil or systemic unfairness was under scrutiny.

Those comrades who belonged to the official Communist party agencies were under strict discipline from the Soviet authorities. Those of us of the more fissiparous Trotskyist persuasion (whose organisations always included the word “international” in their names to distinguish them from the Stalinist “socialism in one country” heresy) had a bit more scope for spontaneity, and I believe the Maoists (who called themselves “Marxist-Leninists” for reasons that remain obscure) were pretty much freelancing.

But we all had a fairly clear idea of where this was supposed to be going. The presentation of an anti-capitalist alternative was explicit and, in its own terms, coherent. The object was to replace free markets and private ownership with a command economy run by what would admittedly be, in the first instance at least, a dictatorship – “the temporary dictatorship of the proletariat”. The first step in this process was to persuade the population at large that democracy and the freedoms it seemed to deliver were a sham so long as “the people”, which is to say, the state, did not own and control the levers of the economy.

Needless to say, I changed my mind about all of that – as did most (but not all) of the organised Left in the West. But I can still see that there was a kind of logic in this programme: there was always a precise sense of what the objective was, and what kind of system was being proposed to replace the current one. Which brings me to the quite different wave of anti-capitalist infiltration that is now sweeping through pretty much every publicityworthy protest movement.

For the life of me, I cannot discern what is being proposed as a replacement for free market economics by the neo-anti-capitalist armies who have so triumphantly seized control of campaigns on climate change and anti-racism. Of course it is plausible to claim that the capitalist profit motive induces a kind of rapaciousness that ignores threats to the environment or exploits racial minorities, but those tendencies can be controlled or mitigated by democratic governments providing that they have the consent of their populations. And that consent can be achieved by persuasive argument within the existing political arena – as indeed, it has already done to a considerable extent.

But this is where the diffuse, and quite remarkably ignorant, anticapitalism of today’s infiltrators leaves the old model behind.

What is their ultimate plan? What exactly are they proposing as an alternative social and economic order? So far as I can see, in the case of the more extreme wing of the climate change movement, the only morally acceptable outcome would be a kind of pre-industrial (even pre-agricultural) primitive communism as practised by hunter-gatherer peoples. Do those XR demonstrators who block bridges and obstruct the livelihoods of ordinary people have any idea how nasty, brutal and short life was in that innocent paradise they presumably idealise (or so we must assume, since they haven’t given us any details of other possible models)?

Do they advocate state ownership of the means of production – or not? Do they want all private profit abolished – or not? Do they see any place for entrepreneurial innovation in the control of climate change – or are they in favour, as it would appear, of shutting down industrial production and personal freedoms rather than developing technologies that reduce the damaging effects? Who knows?

All that we see are random, nihilistic outbursts of pointless obstruction that offer nothing other than disruption to what is, for the moment, the essential business of modern life. This is not so much socialist as anarchist: its antecedent is not Lenin arriving at the Finland station but the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which ignited the First World War.

Then there is the tremendously sensitive matter of anti-racism, whose original mission has been turned on its head by Black Lives Matter. The great movement for civil rights, which began in the southern Baptist churches of the United States as a force for integration and tolerance, is now virtually unrecognisable. In truth, that original incarnation was contested long ago by the more militant black power movements. But what is new is the injection of an element that guarantees by its irreconcilable nature that agreement can never be achieved: a historical guilt over the original sin of slavery in which every white person must share, and for which there can never be redemption.

This makes little historical sense in the American context, since the great majority of people now living in the United States are descended from migrants who arrived long after slavery was abolished. But even if you accept the idea of collective inherited guilt, what is the proposed solution? More hate? Entrenched divisiveness? Endless recrimination? And how would the end of capitalism – and the mass prosperity that it enables – help any of us emerge from that?

The great movement for civil rights, which began in the southern Baptist churches of the US as a force for integration and tolerance, is no longer recognisable