eremy Corbyns supporters should get off Twitter and read a book instead. Or at least thats the somewhat patronising headline accusation that opens the Telegraph deputy editor Allister Heaths polemic against the lefts contestant in the current Labour leadership contest. Its a bit rich for rightwingers to accuse leftwingers of not reading enough books. Surely the stereotype is that we read rather too many of the damn things, supposedly rendering us other-wordly intellectuals who remain congenitally unsuited to the genuine rigour required to run a whelk stall?
Heath can rest assured that many socialists are in possession of formidable private libraries, often including the output of our intellectual critics. Because of that, many of us will readily identify the Hayekian provenance of his arguments. Our interlocutors assertions are chiefly two; that Corbyns manifestation of Labourism is somehow incipiently totalitarian, and that there is no alternative to the economics of the free market right and its political corollaries. Thus the piece starts with an invitation for any gullible youngster
who has fallen for Jeremy Corbyns socialist siren song to read Robert Conquests The Great Terror, which may at least jolt them out of their ideological stupor.
The Corbyn campaign, we are told, is simply reopening a lengthy debate that was closed down when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. We are, in short, treated to just about every accusation in the cliched rightwing playbook, leaving us only one ritual invocation of Pol Pot short of full house. The tone alone as asinine as it is apocalyptic certainly grates. What is being said here?
That Corbyn advocates the institution of a Very British Gulag Archipelago centred on Doncaster, with satellite camps scattered across the vast post-Thatcherite industrial wastelands of the Northern Powerhouse?
That should Corbynism triumph, Britain will have to build an Anti-fascist Defence Wall around the Calais entrance to Eurotunnel, to prevent immigrants getting out?
Perhaps realising how specious such contentions are, Heath then immediately contradicts himself. Needless to say, he writes, Mr Corbyn and his groupies are no Stalinists. Precisely. So why spend a substantial portion of the article warning us that Stalinism is a Very Bad Thing? We kind of knew that already.
Of what fallacies will reading Conquest disabuse gullible youngsters, then? The insidious dangers of rampant Year Zero Scandinavian social democracy? The ugly perils of unleashing German Mitbestimmung? Such deliberate conflation is, in origin, Hayeks rather than Heaths. The Austrian economists most famous book not coincidentally, written on the eve of the electoral triumph of the most radical Labour government in British history made the case that even the least attempt at economic planning is The Road to Serfdom. The problem for defenders of that thesis is that it was verifiably nonsense on stilts; pace Churchills dire warnings, Clem Attlee did not institute a Gestapo regime.
While we are on the subject of infamous rightwing books, Heath even indulges in the obligatory big up for Francis Fukuyamas The End of History and the Last Man, which argued that free markets and liberal democracy were the last word in humanitys economic and political evolution. That is another volume of rightist punditry that has not stood the test of time. Free markets and liberal democracy do not feature highly on the Moscow or Beijing agenda right now, nor find much favour in the Middle East. Moreover, Hayek himself was perfectly prepared to defend murderous military dictatorships, provided only that they upheld economic liberty.
In short, Heaths charge that the lefts ignorance of history, let alone economic theory, is shocking really wont wash.
The second part of the piece comprises a standard panegyric in defence of capitalism, premised on the Hayekian notion of spontaneous order; let the lefties meddle and the whole shooting match comes crashing down. The world economy continues to boom, we are told. Well, there a plenty of pro-capitalist observers, with an eye on the China slowdown and the current stagnation in world trade (£), offering rather more pessimistic assessments.
Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty by the grace of capitalism, Heath insists. But as I have argued elsewhere, this notion is contested. To be sure, it is better to be a few cents over the entirely arbitrary dollar-a-day threshold than a few cents under it, but capitalism still condemns around half the planets population to an unimaginably basic existence.
If we are going to highlight lacunae on peoples reading list, Mr Heath may want to take a look at Thomas Pikettys Capital in the Twenty-First Century and The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. To be blunt, the idea that the advent of a British opposition party led by an advocate of renationalising the railway network and reintroducing student grants would be enough to derail global capitalism, then Hayeks spontaneous order is hardly a robust edifice.
A Corbyn victory on September 12 if it happens wont be the launchpad for permanent revolution. But it would be a key first step towards the extension of democracy in both politics and economics. Anyone would think Mr Heath didnt welcome the prospect.
:roll: