Progressivism is dead. Long live the conservative left!
By: Sev. K
Tags: Marxism, Socialism, Christian Socialism, The Left, Conservatism

The aftermath of the 2019 UK general election was undoubtedly a traumatic blow to the left — not least the British left — one that threw it into its most severe identity crisis for many years. Of course, one could be forgiven for pointing to this single calamitous moment of failure, but that would be terribly reductive. In reality, the left has actually experienced a decade of failure. In the days since the 2008 global financial crash, we have been consistently losing ground to the right in an era where the conditions for revolutionary change are once again emerging, and this is because we are seen, whether wrongly or rightly, as out of touch with the working class.

It is easy to see how they are right. In the time we should have spent building a working class movement, we have instead gone out of our way to alienate the working class, catering primarily to the students and the professional middle class instead. We have also wasted valuable time and resources on manufactured liberal causes such as the climate strikes (which will achieve nothing except empowering the green energy industry), remaining in the EU despite the public voting against that, attacking the cultural traditions cherished by workers, and policing the behaviours of the working class through political correctness and “unconscious bias training”. Taking the developments of the past decade into consideration, Labour’s catastrophic election defeat is merely the culmination of a decade of failure that many of us are only now beginning to see the gravity of. Since then, Bernie Sanders would go on to surrender the primaries to President-elect Joe Biden, in the vain hope that he and his progressive allies can push him leftward on policy.

So then, in order to find a way out of failure one must first ask the following question: why have we failed? There are of course many questions, although many have sought a single answer that they can combat with a readymade solution. The reality is that we had many problems. For one, many of us did not grasp that we are a movement first and foremost for the working class, and so there was a habit being made of refusing to engage with the working class in any way other than “vote for us, and if you don’t, then you must be a racist/sexist/homophobe/Islamophobe” and all the rest.

In terms of cultural politics, and this will be a major subject of this essay, many of us were all too eager to side with metropolitan bourgeois liberals on a great deal of issues, convinced that the traditional social values that many working class still hold dear are simply mould that must be scraped away to clear the way to progress. In one of the bitterest of ironies, they found themselves in agreement with the capitalist class, which, I must remind you are very much culturally liberal. One need only casually observe the proliferation of woke advertising, the embrace of intersectional politics by corporations (what intersectionalists call “rainbow capitalism”), the near constant promotion of feminism by bourgeois outlets, who portray it as an egalitarian movement even though it is actually female supremacism, and their promotion of previously fringe ultra-liberal positions such as open borders and fully legalised abortion. In addition to all this, they portray any sort of criticism of what I have just listed, even from a left-wing perspective, as reactionary and therefore suspect. This, of course, is a sentiment much of the left has bought into in its dismissal of the anti-identitarian/anti-woke left.

Related to the left’s failed cultural politics, their overall vision is a utopia in which there is no conflict and because of that there is no war and no need for weapons, let alone nuclear weapons. There are no rules or expectations that one must follow, no nations and consequently no borders, and all previous traditions are abandoned (after all, it’s just peer pressure from the dead ain’t it?). You don’t have to be offended by anything at all, especially not criticism of your behaviour by other people who, otherwise, have a live and let live attitude. We while away our days pursuing every impulse that happens to take over our senses, and work itself has been abolished, along with marriage and the family. Imagine living in a society permanently racked with Peter Pan syndrome and you should have an idea of what I am describing.

Their vision amounts to little more than the extrapolation of John Lennon’s Imagine into a political philosophy. Unsurprisingly, this vision has failed to win over the working class and has instead been co-opted and recuperated by a ruling class that has gradually liberalised in the five decades since that song was first recorded and pressed onto vinyl. The working class was entirely right to rebuke Labour and the left in its current state. They helped build the Labour Party and make it the fighting force that it was, and for their trouble the party spat in their eyes, and the left at large has done the same.

It also exposed, or rather reaffirmed, an uncomfortable truth for those of us in the class-first camp of leftism — that although economic conditions prevail over people’s lives, many people don’t vote based on economics alone. In other words, the slogan “it’s the economy, stupid” had been discredited here in Britain. People will also vote based on cultural politics rather than simply economics. The problem is that the left had sided unfailingly with metropolitan middle class liberals on culture against their working class base, and nowhere was this more pronounced than on the issues of Brexit and immigration. The left became the movement of Twitter, and after they lost, many failed to own up to the fact that Labour had lost because of its own failings. Instead they blamed the media, ascribing truly awesome powers of mind control to it, or they accused the vote of being rigged, or they simply blamed the public for being racists, the standard progressive canard to be deployed in the event of failure.

Progressivism and its Opposition

This leads us to my prognosis. In my view, cultural progressivism has been responsible for much of the lefts ills, for it is the ideological force that has commanded a powerful influence over the left for the past five decades. It commands such sway over left parties that it can bend those who wish to lead them to submission. Jeremy Corbyn was once a Eurosceptic until he became leader of the Labour Party, after which point the pull of progressivism was such that he suddenly felt the need to switch sides. Until his first campaign for the Presidency, Bernie Sanders used to be much more moderate on social issues, having supported gun rights in the 1990s and openly stated in the 1980s that class matters more than race or gender. Flash forward to 2020 and by now his views on social issues have fallen into line with Democratic Party orthodoxy, supporting gun control and endorsing Black Lives Matter, a movement whose sole function is to frame the issue of police brutality as proof of a conspiracy by white people to systematically murder black people so as to justify the neoliberal aim of remaking culture itself in their image.

It has also become painfully clear that progressivism, especially as exemplified by the New Left, is nothing more than a tool to legitimate bourgeois class rule, and this has been hardwired into its very ideological being from the beginning. Their whole ideology comprises of the destruction of traditional mores for no real reason other than they deem them “oppressive”, often on no basis other than the fact that they prevent them from gratifying every random desire they may have at the flash of a pan. To justify this aim, they have developed a framework of grievance politics wherein because the country itself is irredeemably racist, sexist, homophobic or what have you, you have no obligation to the wider community in which you are situated. You owe nothing to it, and your very conscience compels you to repudiate it. We have been seeing this mentality in the New Left since the 1960s, where it proliferated in the black power movement. As Christopher Lasch wrote poignantly in The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy:

Black militants encouraged racial polarization and demanded a new politics of “collective grievance and entitlement”. They insisted that black people, as victims of “white racism”, could not be held to the same educational or civic standards as whites. Such standards were themselves racist, having no other purpose than to keep blacks in their place.

When looking at the excuses people have made in defending the wholesale destruction of communities and businesses during the George Floyd riots, one cannot help but detect precisely this sort of attitude. It’s society’s fault that they’re rioting because society is racist, so the corollary goes. This is the framework that social progressives since the 1960s have used to justify their various provocations, disregard for and attacks on traditional values and mores, and wanton acts of destruction.

Whatever the purpose it was conceived for, this framework has proven itself to be a godsend to the bourgeoisie. Think about it for a moment. If society does not conform to your values, if it is racist, sexist, homophobic or whatever, and as such you believe not only that you have no obligations to it but also that your very conscience demands that you repudiate it, that is the perfect rationale for a ruling class that seeks freedom from any sort of allegiance to the rest of society. Rationally speaking it makes perfect sense that the people in charge, regardless of which party, have no loyalty to their country or the people who elected them, because they have already decided that they are morally lower than scum for their “outdated” or “repressive” attitudes. This sort of logic has freed them from any sort of internal accountability and enable them to rule with apathy, contempt, cruelty, and all the while in unparalleled decadence and depravity, an inevitable consequence of abolishing in your mind any concept of shared morality, which the new generation of bourgeois has conveniently deemed “oppressive”.

Because they also subscribe to this worldview, the progressives make for natural allies of the ruling class, and often they work in tandem in legitimising various neoliberal policies using identity politics. Think of the many times you’ve heard a progressive say you’re racist for criticising mass open border policies, or that you’re a misogynist because you believe a foetus has a right to live, or that it’s worth destroying the economy with a draconian lockdown restrictions because black and brown people are more at risk of dying from COVID-19. The point is that progressives make for the best defenders of neoliberal capitalism because progressivism not only leaves them defenceless against such co-option, but also primes them to not have an iota of concern for the wider society.

Invariably, once progressives gain political power they end up acting exactly like their neoliberal masters, which brings us to perhaps the best evidence that progressivism serves only to legitimate the establishment: the “great unmasking” of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and “the squad”. Despite running on a platform of universal healthcare, when she heard the call to abstain in her vote for Speaker of the House in order to pressure Nancy Pelosi into holding a House vote on the policy, she refused, and to this day she repeatedly makes excuses for her refusal to live up to her campaign promises, with the rest of her progressive colleagues notably silent. The election is due in a few weeks, but already her decision poses a mortal threat to the credibility of progressivism. If she votes for Pelosi (for a second time no less) she will have killed it for good. Even if she decides to listen to her left-wing critics, the damage has already been done, and indeed increasing numbers of people are growing wise to how the progressives turn out to be neoliberal stooges. This trend will be accelerated by the treachery and cowardice of the congressional progressives.

Against this there have been many groups trying to oppose the woke, progressive left. First there was the “anti-SJW community”, but unfortunately they fell prey to internal divisions and subversion by the right. Then there was anti-idpol left: that is to say the part of the left that opposed identity politics. But many of them never seriously opposed the progressive worldview as I laid out, and so most of them ended up defaulting to the prevailing progressive current while trying to divorce it from identity politics. These leftists often uncritically supported Labour under Corbyn, even though by the time of the election they had become the bastion of the woke left in British politics, ignoring the identity politics, the Europhilia, and the anti-semitism which had been allowed to run rampant (they often denied it even existed despite evidence to the contrary). Those that didn’t either jumped ship to the woke left or sank into extreme reaction, often in the form of unironic National Bolshevism, or perhaps one of the other assorted fascisms in red garb.

The rise of crypto-reactionary tendencies in the online left, such as National Bolshevism, Dengism, Juche or the accelerationists, can be at least partly explained by the fact that these people were at some point leftists who despised the cultural progressivism rampant in the left, but still bought into that distinctly progressive notion that they owe nothing to their community because they hold that society itself is still guilty of some kind of sin. If they cannot stand the thought of associating with liberal progressives and their left enablers, but neither can they abandon this nihilistic framework wherein they can freely dismiss society itself as illegitimate, the only available route for these erstwhile radicals was always going to be the path of esoteric reaction, because it is precisely this path that allows them to remain free from any sort of attachment to the society around them, or even any kind of common morality. It enables them to preserve their detachment from the common man, with the added bonus that now their amorality is subject neither to progressive nor conservative standards. Thus it is no surprise when we find out that behind closed doors, they turn out to be many magnitudes more depraved than the progressive libertines they posture against. Scratch a reactionary of any kind and you almost always find a degenerate.

Today, we are now seeing a new development, the rise of a socially conservative left, which represents the next phase in the opposition to the woke left. In Britain, there are two manifestations of this tendency that are emerging to prominence: the Workers Party of Britain, founded by the BXP-supporting opportunist George Galloway, and Blue Labour, a pressure group within the Labour Party which, sadly, is mostly either utopian socialists or simply social democrats with culturally conservative views. While I prefer Blue Labour to the Labour Party proper and the WPB (which, given Galloway’s appointment of Joti Brar to deputy, seems to be a Stalinist front organisation), I think what the left needs is a new social vision beyond the Labour Party, and the aim of this essay is to outline a real, independent alternative to the hackneyed and tired visions of old.

I call it Conservative Marxism, so named because it is concerned with the maintenance and survival of our human community and its values for future generations, but remains true to the economic and philosophical ideas of Marxism. It is also communitarian in spirit because it recognises both the individual and the collective, emphasises the link between them and pursues the unity of both. It is humanist because it believes as one of its core values in the dignity and agency of mankind. Because it holds communitarian solidarity as one of its highest values, it rejects attempts to split the working class. We see this emphasis on individual group identity — what we call identity politics — as an attack on solidarity, an attempt to distract the working class from uniting against its true enemies, the capitalists who exploit them.

We are social conservatives because we seek the preservation of values and traditional forms of solidarity and values that have held communities together and shielded us from the myriad social ills plaguing us today, but more importantly, we are socialists because we understand that it is capitalism which is the greatest threat to these values and to our society, and view socialism as the only effective means by which to save that which we value.

Conservatism or Reaction?

Since “conservatism” tends to be a very charged term with varying implications, the first task of this essay is to define what is meant by conservatism. Most people, especially Americans, when they think of left and right, believe that the two poles represent both economics and social views at the same time. Thus to them leftism is a package of economic interventionism and cultural progressivism, while rightism similarly is a package of free market capitalism and cultural conservatism.

This is of course false. The left and right poles solely represent diametrically opposite economic positions, especially pertaining to property relations, with the left representing social or joint ownership of the means of production and the right representing private ownership of the means of production. This is not a definition that I have plucked from the sky. It is in fact the accepted mainstream position throughout Western Europe, the part of the world where I live. As noted in The Government and Politics of France by Andrew Knapp and Vincent Wright:

The politics of class is the single most common factor dividing Left from Right in West European political systems, with the former seeking social justice through redistributive social and economic intervention by the State, and the latter committed to defending capitalism and private property (and, it would argue, prosperity) against the threats thus posed.

One can be left-wing and also hold socially conservative views, just as one can be right-wing and also hold socially progressive views. In fact, anarcho-capitalists stand as proof of this, being hardline rightists as far as economics is concerned, while also being ultraliberal where culture is concerned.

Next, one must delineate between a conservative and a reactionary. A conservative in the strictest sense is one who is, for any given reason, skeptical of or averse to change. They wish to preserve existing values and institutions in their current state, and therefore oppose attempts to change them. Above all else, the conservative values social stability and the preservation of that which currently exists, but what one wishes to conserve depends on the type of conservative you ask. In fact, I would argue that the desire to preserve democracy, equality, liberty, human rights etc., all these things that liberals say they cherish, is by definition conservative, in the sense that you want to preserve these for future generations.

This is incidentally how I define my formulation of leftist conservatism, but I am not alone in this left-wing conception of conservatism. In 2008, political philosopher Gerald Cohen gave a lecture entitled Rescuing Conservatism, in which he argued that the preservation of things we may cherish will require some kind of radical change.

Note further that wanting to conserve the valuable, even wanting to keep things that have increased in value as a result of tradition, is not wanting to keep things as they are as such, where that means wanting to preserve the status quo, an existing social and political situation. That’s too undiscriminating a characterisation to be named the proper object of conservative concern, and in order to preserve valuable things in the status quo we might have to revolutionise our situation. To keep the pictures safe we might have to tear down the charming but damp and draughty old museum and build a new one.

Of all people Noam Chomsky, a libertarian socialist, argued that there is a sort of conservative spirit to the radical left insofar as they wish to preserve the values of the Enlightenment from the ravages of capitalism.

The term conservative used to mean something like ‘classical liberal’, the conservative believed in classical liberal values, values of the Enlightenment, the values of Adam Smith, David Hume and others. I think there’s a lot, I mean I don’t agree with them on everything but I think there’s a lot of value in those views, in the Enlightenment conception, and in fact I think in many ways a lot of the anarchist movements, including the anarcho-syndicalist wing of it, grew out of these classical liberal ideas. That’s not my original view incidentally, one of the leading anarcho-syndicalist thinkers Rudolf Rocker pointed out I think with some plausibility that, as he put it, classical liberalism was destroyed when it was dashed against the rocks of capitalism, which undermined it, and anarchism is a natural outcome of that, which tries to capture the fundamental ideals and realise them in a modern society.

While I am certainly not an anarchist of any variety, I very much relate to this vision. In my view one of the core goals of the Marxist left has always been to realise the aims of the Enlightenment that could not be fully realised under capitalism. In fact, Marx and Engels saw themselves as building on the achievements of the Enlightenment, arguing in The Holy Family that the materialist current of the French enlightenment lead directly to socialism and communism:

Just as Cartesian materialism passes into natural science proper, the other trend of French materialism leads directly to socialism and communism. There is no need for any great penetration to see from the teaching of materialism on the original- goodness and equal intellectual endowment of men, the omnipotence of experience, habit and education, and the influence of environment on man, the great significance of industry, the justification of enjoyment, etc., how necessarily materialism is connected with communism and socialism. If man draws all his knowledge, sensation, etc., from the world of the senses and the experience gained in it, then what has to be done is to arrange the empirical world in such a way that man experiences and becomes accustomed to what is truly human in it and that he becomes aware of himself as man. If correctly understood interest is the principle of all morality, man’s private interest must be made to coincide with the interest of humanity.

Lenin also provides us with a case for preserving aspects of the previous culture in the formation of the new one, and in The Tasks of the Youth League he reminds socialists that:

Proletarian culture must be the logical development of the store of knowledge mankind has accumulated under the yoke of capitalist, landowner and bureaucratic society. All these roads have been leading, and will continue to lead up to proletarian culture, in the same way as political economy, as reshaped by Marx, has shown us what human society must arrive at, shown us the passage to the class struggle, to the beginning of the proletarian revolution.

That covers the conservative mindset. The reactionary, meanwhile, is something quite different. The reactionary attitude towards social change is not mere skepticism, but antipathy and hostility towards it. They believe in a prelapsarian vision of society based on what it was supposedly like in the past (whether it really was that way or not does not bother them), and they despise the fact that society as it currently exists does not match this vision. Hence, the reactionary seeks to upend the existing social order and transform it into one that matches their fantasy, and to that end they seek to reverse the gains made by progressive movements engaged in democratic struggle, and they would remove any laws and institutions that serve to uphold and maintain the society they so despise.

There is no one type of reactionary either. Many right-libertarians (including anarcho-capitalists) may be very liberal in terms of social issues, but even if they aren’t, what matters to them is that they want to minimise or even abolish state intervention on the economy. They are reactionary because they wish to return to a time when there were few if any labour laws, or safety regulations, or competition laws. What they want is a return to 19th century Britain, for want of a better example, when we were one of the least regulated countries on Earth. If the right-libertarian kind of reactionary was a principally economic one, the right-authoritarian kind is primarily a social one. They might not care so much about the question of how much regulation the market should be subjected to, for what they want is a nation that adheres strictly to a certain set of prescribed values. What is most important to them is nation, family, sometimes God, and sometimes also race, and so they seek to roll back all the gains made in terms of civil rights, sexual freedom, religious freedom and so forth.

Some of these reactionaries may be inclined to attack neoliberal capitalism itself because they have realised that an unfettered free market is not exactly an ally of their cause. Many of these reactionaries want a return to before the 1960s, but some of them would prefer to go back to medieval feudalism, a time where class-based exploitation was still rampant, most people were illiterate, and where most people didn’t live past 40, but I’m told none of that matters because you had the church, strong parochial communities, and at least you didn’t have to deal with whiny woke liberals on a daily basis, and also something something “consoomers”.

One thing I find thoroughly ironic is that both conservatives and reactionaries often claim to defend traditional values while supporting an economic system whose own perpetuation depends on destroying them precisely because they impose some limits on the personal accumulation and global penetration of capital. It is because they are reconciled to defending capitalism and its values that for the longest time they had consigned themselves to the values of the capitalist, namely the rugged individualism supposedly attributable to the pioneer spirit. In the 1980s, Christopher Lasch had caught on to precisely this contradiction in mainstream conservative thought, which was in his time and remains today based in neoliberal market fundamentalism. As he wrote in What’s Wrong With the Right?:

Not only do conservatives have no understanding of modern capitalism, they have a distorted understanding of the “traditional values” they claim to defend. The virtues they want to revive are the pioneer virtues: rugged individualism, boosterism, rapacity, a sentimental deference to women, and a willingness to resort to force. These values are “traditional” only in the sense that they are celebrated in the traditional myth of the Wild West and embodied in the Western hero, the prototypical American lurking in the background, often in the very foreground, of conservative ideology. In their implications and inner meaning, these individualist values are themselves profoundly anti-traditional. They are the values of the man on the make, in flight from his ancestors, from the family claim, from everything that ties him down and limits his freedom of movement. What is traditional about the rejection of tradition, continuity, and rootedness? A conservatism that sides with the forces of restless mobility is a false conservatism. So is the conservatism false that puts on a smiling face, denounces “doom sayers,” and refuses to worry about the future.

In this light we can conclude that conservative values, just as with Enlightenment values, can only truly be realised with the help of socialism, and that is the purpose of conservative Marxism.

What’s Worth Conserving Anyway?

Now that I have ably demonstrated the difference between a conservative and a reactionary, the next task is to demonstrate the conservative character of my particular vision of the left, and why it is neither threatening nor contradictory to the leftist world outlook. For starters, I wish to preserve the following:

Liberty : I believe that one of mankind’s greatest needs is the freedom to think, speak and live their lives free from oppression and exploitation.

: I believe that one of mankind’s greatest needs is the freedom to think, speak and live their lives free from oppression and exploitation. Democracy : I believe that the political destiny of a country and its people must be in the hands of the people themselves, and their will should be respected by those who rule them, whose power democracy is to keep in check.

: I believe that the political destiny of a country and its people must be in the hands of the people themselves, and their will should be respected by those who rule them, whose power democracy is to keep in check. Egalitarianism : I believe that everyone should be considered an equal first and foremost by the law, but also in the eyes of others.

: I believe that everyone should be considered an equal first and foremost by the law, but also in the eyes of others. Reason : I believe that the way mankind arrives at the truth by thought based on new or extant information and practical facts, and that such a world outlook is essential if we wish to avoid sliding into paranoia and barbarism.

: I believe that the way mankind arrives at the truth by thought based on new or extant information and practical facts, and that such a world outlook is essential if we wish to avoid sliding into paranoia and barbarism. Secularism : Although I am a Christian socialist, I believe that the state should allow religious pluralism, and that separation of church and state is essential for the prevention of theocratic dominion.

: Although I am a Christian socialist, I believe that the state should allow religious pluralism, and that separation of church and state is essential for the prevention of theocratic dominion. Community : I do not believe that humans can live their lives atomised and alienated from their fellow man, at least not without going through the horrible experience of isolation. Human beings need communitarian solidarity, be it the family, local community, or the national community, or the international community.

: I do not believe that humans can live their lives atomised and alienated from their fellow man, at least not without going through the horrible experience of isolation. Human beings need communitarian solidarity, be it the family, local community, or the national community, or the international community. The rule of law : I believe that all members of society, from the bottom 99% to the top 1%, are bound by the same laws and statues that govern society, without exception.

: I believe that all members of society, from the bottom 99% to the top 1%, are bound by the same laws and statues that govern society, without exception. Humanity: I have faith in the ability of mankind to change the world around it for the better, that it is capable of mastering the forces of nature for our benefit while also protecting our natural world. Their role in this regard must not be challenged by machines. Furthermore I believe that a socialist society must meet not just the economic needs of man, but their political and spiritual interests as well.

The central message I am putting forward to those who genuinely care about these values is that these values will always be under threat so long as capitalism remains the prevailing economic system. Under capitalism our civil liberties are continuing to be eroded in the name of “national security” or fighting “hate speech”, and democracy continues to be subordinated to the interests of capital. Under capitalism we still live in a profoundly unequal society, primarily in the sense of wealth inequality, but also in the sense that minorities are still widely mistreated, and antipathy towards the very idea of egalitarianism is being fomented in the name of identity politics. Capitalism will always threaten reason with its promotion of idealist theories and encouraging of pseudo-science, and the social breakdown that capitalism has presided over has led to the rise of increasingly fantastical conspiracy theories proliferating among the masses desperate for an explanation for their very real problems.

Because it is willing to use reactionary religious forces to preserve itself, it cannot be trusted with the defence of secularism. Because capitalism attacks the very things needed for the functioning of whole communities and atomises us from our fellow humans by all available means, as well as attacking the family, it will always be the enemy of community. Because capitalism is a system designed by the bourgeoisie for bourgeois interests, there will continue to be people who are exempt from the law even though we are told it applies to everyone.

Finally, capitalism devalues humanity itself by reducing human beings to expendable commodities and production units, and is actively seeking to do away with us entirely with the advance of automation and AI. It also threatens the very survival of humanity as a species with its continued use of the environment as a sceptic tank for the waste produced by its constant production of goods for profit. Only socialism can change this horrid state of affairs, and it is only through the revolutionising of the economy that socialism offers that all that I believe should be preserved can be preserved, in much the same way Gerald Cohen outlined.

My issue with much of the left is that depending on who you turn too, much of the left has little appreciation for these values. Intersectionalists rubbish the idea of genuine egalitarianism, deeming it bigoted nonsense because it supposedly ignores women and minorities. Many in the intersectional left are quite happy to turn a blind eye to corporate violations of free speech under the delusion that only right-wing and reactionary voices will be marginalised, and there are plenty of self-identified Marxists (especially Stalinists) who have nothing but contempt for the concept of liberty, democracy and reason, often viewing them as bourgeois fantasies. Don’t even try talking to the anarchists about community or rule of law, for to them that’s just fascist claptrap. A few leftists even dismiss the idea of secularism because they associate it with new atheists who have turned reactionary, and many leftists oppose humanism entirely, probably because it imposes certain constraints on their authoritarian impulses. They might, however, appreciate my Christian socialism if they’re familiar with Liberation Theology.

The philosophy that I expound here is an alternative to these modes of leftist politics that I find to be unserviceable for the interests of humankind because they are indifferent to some of its greatest achievements. It offers a new outlook, one that seeks to conserve the values that I believe most people still cherish, or at least value enough that they do not want to see them disappear.

It is also not an economistic vision either. Although it recognises that class and economics drive the very fabric of society, and therefore solidly takes the class-first approach, it does not follow that we ignore the other issues, and nor it does it presume the fanciful notion that if we only change the economy then we will automatically arrive at a land of peace and freedom, for history has shown that to be a delusion. If my more socially progressive critics are correct on one thing it’s that a movement seeking to change the world cannot solely focus on one aspect of life. Indeed, in his essay The Present Human Condition, Erich Fromm demonstrates precisely where focusing only on changing one aspect of the human experience went wrong.

But any attempt to change only one section of life, the human or the spiritual, is doomed to failure. In fact, progress that takes place in only one sphere is destructive of progress in all spheres. The Gospel concerned only with spiritual salvation led to the establishment of the Roman Catholic Church; the French Revolution, with its concern exclusively with political reform, led to Robespierre and Napoleon; socialism, inasmuch as it was concerned only with economic change, led to Stalinism.

The point here is that the economics of a society is not the only thing we should seek to change. You can have a society in which the economic needs of the people are largely met, and yet if the people do not enjoy political freedom then in a broad sense we cannot say their needs are being fully met. At the same time, just as man cannot live under the yoke of an iron fist, nor can they live in a condition of depravity and moral decline, such as what we experience today. What we want to change is not just an economy in which the working class are alienated from the fruits of their labour, but also a condition in which the political freedoms we enjoy are increasingly curtailed, and a culture of narcissism that sacrifices communitarian solidarity and meaningful relationships on the altar of hedonism and grievance. If we are to defend the values laid out earlier, then we must build and preserve a society that is capable of preserving them, and that cannot be found in totalitarianism or anarchy, nor in puritanism or hedonism.

What I am talking about is a different kind of politics, one that genuinely cares about the things conservatives profess to be in the interest of preserving, and can be a real alternative to not only the decadence of the culturally progressive left, but also the nihilism of the crypto-reactionaries posing as leftists, the fossilised remains of Stalinism, and fascist reaction.

What Does This Vision Entail?

The exact policy details I have in mind are, unfortunately, beyond the scope of this particular essay, and will have to be covered separately. Instead, I intend to give you a brief outline of my particular vision on given issues.

Regarding economics, I believe we need an economy which has worker ownership of the means of production as its primary goal and also seeks to maximise human freedom. The ideal examples in my view would be the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia with its system of self-management, East Germany with its incorporation workers councils into a planned economy model (I refer to the New Economic System), the “goulash communism” of Kadar’s Hungary , and Chavist Venezuela with its aim of achieving the communal state (and when I say Chavist, I do not refer to Maduro because he has by and large abandoned socialism at this point). However, my aim is not to copy them exactly, and I believe some of my fellow conservative socialists have other economic ideas that they would like to contribute. My point is that our socialism should build on these ideas in order to realise a socialism for today’s world, and part of that requires shedding old dogmas of the market. The market is neither a God nor a Satan, but rather a tool for facilitating exchange. What capitalism does is elevate it to a false idol to whom grotesque sacrifices may be made to appease it. What we want is to put this tool in the hands of the working class. It should also entail the expansion of democracy into the workplace, so as to give workers real power in their daily lives.

Whilst I maintain that I desire a secular government, I reject the old-fashioned leftist view that religion itself should be scrapped. In fact I have come to realise that religion gives people’s lives meaning beyond the here and now and hope in times of darkness, and the failure of attempts by communist governments to stamp it out shows that this need will assert itself long after capitalism is overthrown. Religion provides a moral code that serves as a bulwark against the worst impulses of the capitalist, and throughout history has shown itself to strengthen communal ties. This is the reason capitalism has been so fervent in attacking it, because religion stands in the way of capitalist profit-chasing, and offers a meaning to life other than consumption and acquisition.

In a country such as Britain, where we have historically had a Christian culture, the best choice is to draw on that, but what also makes Christianity the ideal choice is that the story of Christ is ultimately the story of the son of man rejecting the hallucinations of the established power and authority, and in this son of Man becoming God it gives man hope that they can redeem themselves (and indeed I subscribe to Debs’ view in Jesus, the Supreme Leader that the source of Jesus’ divinity is that he is “supremely human”). That Jesus Christ has survived two millennia of disfigurement and emasculation by the powerful stands as proof that Christ is the greatest revolutionary of all time, and indeed the Bible itself even contains numerous passages condemning the lusts of the capitalists and affirming socialist politics. For example in Acts you get a picture of the ideal society according to the early Christians, in which “all the believers were together and had everything in common.” (Acts 2:44), and this is later reiterated “all the believers were on in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had” (Acts 4:32).

Our acceptance of reason and science must not give way to scientism, the view that scientists are infallible and that we should define normative values based on their judgment. We must reject the mentality of accepting things as morally acceptable just because a scientist or an “expert” says so. Remember that there was once a time in which scientists and experts believed sincerely that black people were the equivalent of apes, or that mercury was safe and could be used as a cure for syphilis, or that eugenics is morally acceptable.

Being that I am a Christian socialist, I subscribe to the consistent life ethic, which entails opposition to abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty, and wars which are fought without a just cause, in keeping with the sixth commandment: thou shall not kill (Exodus 20:13). We do not believe as the capitalists do that human life is expendable, and nor should the state have the power to kill.

For the high crime of opposing open borders, I have in the past been slandered as a racist, a fascist or a white nationalist by people who have absolutely no idea what my personal politics are. In reality I have never advocated for closed borders except during the emergency case of a global pandemic where it becomes absolutely necessary, and merely want the borders to actually be enforced in a fair and humane way. I have also opposed of racism and bigotry, and hold that just as “there is neither Jew nor Greek” (Galatians 3:28). I believe that we must treat immigrants with compassion and as part of that we should help them acclimate to the host country they wish to live in and to become full citizens. Rather than continue mass immigration policies as presently implemented, we should seek to make the various refugees and asylum seekers’ countries of origin safe for them to return to. Only once that has been accomplished can we consider returning them to their countries of origin. That is why we must seek an end to the militarist foreign policy of the neoliberal era, which destroys and destabilises nations in pursuit of profit, and demonises their victims.

Relatedly, I oppose the selfish politics nationalism, which seeks to blame foreigners for the poor lot of native workers, and therefore entirely well-suited as a defence of capitalism. At the same time, we should not encourage hatred for one’s own country, or the notion that our country is uniquely evil. Instead we must promote socialist patriotism, which entails loyalty not on the basis of race but on the basis of a shared socialist vision. This patriotism is also internationalist in character because the socialist patriot also aspires to deliver socialism to all the peoples of the world, and recognises that it is in our country’s interest to seek fraternal relations between the countries of the world where possible. As Erich Fromm put it in The Sane Society:

Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.

I believe, just as Lasch, Horkheimer and Hegel did, that the family unit is a bulwark against the dehumanising effects of monopoly capitalism and a zone of resistance against totalitarianism, as well as imparting necessary ethical lessons and tools of emotional independence that only the child’s parents can give them. For this reason capitalism attacks it, whether by weaponising progressive politics, trumpeting the authority of social science “experts”, or if that doesn’t convince you through the force of welfare bureaucracy and the education system, which capitalism has turned into glorified day-care with the purpose of incubating a new generation of woke neoliberal marshmallows.

The role of technology in our society shall be questioned, and we view the techno-utopian idea that every one of life’s problems can be solved through technology (in our time especially in reference to big tech) as erreoneous and dangerous. Its consequences are the mass displacement of human labour with machines, the expansion of the surveillance state (often in tandem with the rise of AI), social media addiction, the epidemic of deepfakes, and the development of a culture where man is totally dependent on technology to live, and thus has no conception of what it is to live without it. Our solution, however, is not primitivism (the total rejection of technological progress), but a sceptical attitude towards technology — rational technoscepticism — in which we accept that technology will always be with us and can be useful but do not have such faith in it that we let it take control of our lives, and in which we do not allow destructive things such as transhumanism/posthumanism and true learning AI to emerge. We want to reign in the development of technology so that it does not pose a threat to the human species, and we want to, as Fromm said, “put man back in the saddle of things”.

While keeping concerns of production in mind, we must take great care of our planet and fight the environmental degradation that capitalism has unleashed. In keeping with the Christian concept of stewardship (see Genesis 2:15), I believe that mankind has the responsibility to look after the natural world over which he has become master, and broadly speaking we have failed this, having allowed ourselves to be seduced by false promises that the destruction of our environment will produce untold economic prosperity. We should also strive to end the mass killing of animals by replacing real meat with cultured meat. We must also encourage self-sufficiency so as to prevent or minimise the impact of food shortages.

We must reject the cult of progress — that is to say this unyielding teleological faith in the inevitable triumph of that which we call social progress — which Dobrica Ćosić described as “that most cunning form of conformism” and warned that it “must be abandoned to the ideologues and the hedonists, if it is wished to sustain hope in socialism as a possible society of freedom and justice, reason and conscience”. I reject it on the basis that it is utopian and devoid of real meaning, and this vacuum of meaning is naturally filled by the advancement of whatever desires the progressive has. As it has manifested in the new left, the cult of progress has proven to be a powerful legitimator of neoliberal capitalism, which has naturally taken progress to mean the elimination of all moral, philosophical and practical obstacles to global capital accumulation and penetration.

Because of my opposition to identity politics and embrace of cultural conservatism, some mistakenly worry that I am an enemy of minority rights and an enabler of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and what have you. I can assure you that I am if anything an enemy of all bigotry, the promotion of which is antithetical to Christian values and poisonous to communitarian solidarity. It is my view that conservative leftists should vigorously oppose any ideology which asserts that you cannot be a part of the human community on the basis of being black, gay, trans and so forth and the supposed inferiority or defectiveness of said groups.

Indeed it is because I genuinely care about securing civil rights for the marginalised that I must express strongly my discontent with the people claiming to represent them and the tactics they have been using since the 1960s. Not only are they hopelessly ineffective, but they turn the public against them and reinforce bigoted and reactionary attitudes towards the affected groups, as well as inviting state persecution. Instead those whose concern for minority rights is genuine should learn from the tactics of the civil rights movement of the 1950s, whose enemy was the inconsistent application of the country’s supposed values and standards rather than the values and standards themselves. They avoided deliberate provocation tactics such as what is commonplace today, and made every conceivable effort to ensure that the public sees people who are being treated unfairly despite fitting in with standards and obligations of society at large. The result of this approach, as Lasch observed, was that:

Those who feared or resented black people found themselves disarmed by the moral heroism, self-discipline and patriotism of the civil rights movement. Participants in the movement, by their willingness to go to jail when they broke the law, proved the depth of their loyalty to the country whose racial etiquette they refused to accept. The movement validated black people’s claim to be better Americans than those who defended segregation as the American way.

The success of these tactics is the reason that struggles for minority rights have come as far as they have, and it was after the civil rights movement became the property of black nationalists and separatists that they deviated from this and met with failure. Today’s strugglers for minority rights are making the same mistakes as the New Left during the 1960s, choosing the tactics of antagonistic provocation, identitarian separatism and culture war as the means by which to achieve their aims. The result we are seeing now is entirely predictable, with public opinion increasingly turning on them and reactionaries ascending to power, after which yet more persecution follows. They are the true danger to minority rights, not I who seeks to defend them.

Finally, I reject both the anarchist view of the state as something inherently evil and the Bolshevik view of the state as merely a tool for certain ends that can be discarded at will. The state is not merely a tool for the execution of power, but an essential function for the continuation of society, whose task is to protect the rights of citizens and ensure their well-being, and in so doing working for the common good. Even if you got rid of the current bourgeois form of the state, it shall inevitably be replaced by a newer form of political organisation that serves the same necessary function.

Acceptance of this view will come with it acceptance of certain responsibilities and obligations to which the state shall be held to. A responsible state has no right to abuse its citizens, to deny them basic rights and freedoms, or to interfere in their private lives. A state that genuinely worked for the common good would not subject the public to three successive lockdowns, which do nothing to stop the virus and only destroy lives and communities. I believe that someday the thesis that the government can just direct people at will is going to be discredited not only by the repeated disobedience of the public, but by the consequences of lockdown itself.

The power of the state must be limited to the extent that it cannot needlessly condemn people to lockdown again, and all legislation designed to oppress people’s rights in the name of “counterterrorism” should either be stricken down or have the most egregious aspects removed. Section 127 of the Communications Act of 2003, the law under which you can be prosecuted for jokes, should be abolished, along with all legislation under which you can be arrested for “hate speech”. The ability of the state to spy on private citizens should be drastically curtailed, and legislation such as the PATRIOT Act in the US and the Investigatory Powers Act in Britain should be repealed.

To strengthen the power of the people against the state, democracy should be expanded, and measures should be implemented to ensure that politicians are much more accountable. The first-past-the-post system should be abolished and replaced with proportional representation and ranked-choice voting. The public should also be given a binding vote on issues of national importance, especially on controversial issues that would be definitively settled by the outcome of such referenda. There must also be term limits for parliamentarians, and MPs caught breaking the law who refuse to resign should be forced out of Parliament, with a by-election scheduled no later than thirty days after their expulsion. The salary of parliamentarians should also be drastically reduced and come with no special benefits so that less people will run for office for the sake of a cushy job.

Closing Remarks

The urgency of this vision cannot be overstated. The left is in a crisis concerning its relevance and its very identity. Despite the contradictions of capitalism unravelling to a breaking point in 2020, we are laughed at, despised and scorned by the people who we are supposed to represent and whose support we need to deliver any sort of political change. The promised left-wing tide did not occur, and instead we are at a point where if the right-wingers aren’t winning, then the liberals are reasserting themselves as we see in America.

In the face of this crisis are varying factions seeking supremacy in the left. The established radical liberal progressives, their time soon to pass, seek to maintain their hold because they aim to use the left as a vehicle for the normalisation of their various fetishes and impulses. The old-fashioned Marxist-Leninists are hoping to win out so they can have the same old debates over who was less revisionist on a grander scale because that’s the only thing they can do, and the crypto-reactionaries want to be able to turn the left towards fascism so that it can be of service to their heinous ends. They will all oppose what I have laid out either because it is too conservative, or maybe because it’s not conservative enough, or because it somehow isn’t Marxist enough. The old MLs will have no response except the lazy canard of “revisionism”, meanwhile they condone the actual betrayal of socialism by countries such as China and Venezuela.

What actually disturbs them about a vision such as this is that it shakes the foundations of everything they ever believed in and provides an alternative to their various excesses, and that if it actually took of it would make their own tendencies irrelevant, for they have little to offer the people except abject failure and insanity.

The opportunity for a new vision could not be greater, but it will require a willingness to reinvent ourselves if we are to meet the pressing challenges of the 21st century. To rescue the left from its grave situation requires that we tear it down and build it anew, and the collapsing credibility and authority of progressivism provides us with the chance of a lifetime if we are willing to seize it.

The age of progressivism is dead. Long live the era of the conservative left!