Labour’s leaders refuse to give up on Karl Marx

How can Labour’s leaders be in thrall to Marx?

By Daniel Hannan

• Marx has a pretty good claim to have caused more suffering than any other human being
• Every prediction Marx made – every single one – turned out to be false
• How disturbing that a group of Marxists should have captured a major British party

Shall I tell you the most extraordinary thing about the clique who have commandeered the Labour Party? It’s not their fantastical spending plans, or their flirtations with the IRA, or their sheer, bumbling ineptitude. It’s something far scarier. Deep down, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell and their Momentum supporters regret the outcome of the Cold War. Even now, when the full horror of his legacy is known, they refuse to give up on Karl Marx.

Just think about what that implies. Marx has a pretty good claim to have caused more suffering than any other human being. No one else murdered so many with his pen. In Marx’s name, men and women were arrested at night and dragged off to torture chambers, shot into mass graves, starved as deliberate policy.

And yet, incredibly, the Labour leader won’t condemn the old monster, his Shadow Chancellor praises him, and his chief spokesman and election strategist both continued to take the Soviet line even after the USSR disintegrated.

Any normal election campaign would have been blown apart when John McDonnell appeared on Andrew Marr’s programme last month. Asked whether he was a Marxist, the Shadow Chancellor made an indistinct noise somewhere between “yes” and “no” and then quickly said, “I believe there’s a lot to learn from reading Kapital, yes of course there is.” Speaking to Labour activists recently, he was a lot less coy, describing himself as an “unapologetic Marxist”.

Let’s just remind ourselves of what Marxists did during the twentieth century. They carried out a mass slaughter a scale never previously known. Perhaps 10 million people died in the Atlantic slave trade. The Nazis murdered 17 million. But the Communists killed 100 million.

.....

Read more: capx.co