Another voice

Yobs and loonies

Auberon Waugh

T am grateful to Paul Johnson for drawing 1my attention, through an article in the Daily Mail, to an excellent booklet com- piled by Leslie R. Page from the writings of Marx and Engels, called 'The Marxian Legacy: Race, Nationalities, Colonialism and War' (obtainable from the Freedom Association Ltd, 360 Oxford Street, Lon- don WIN OAA). It was a revelation to me, at a time when the Marxist Left somehow manages to shelter under its umbrella the causes of blacks, Irish, anti-colonialists and pacifists, not to mention the Jewish strug- gle against anti-semitism, that both Marx and Engels were so forthright in their disparagement of negroes, Jews and small nationalities, so unequivocal in their sup- port for colonialism and war.

Many of these quotations from Marx and Engels take the form of reasoned argu- ment pointing out the social undesirability of Jews, negroes, etcetera, as in this essay by Marx 'On the Jewish Question' 1844 (from Collected Works Vol. 3 pp. 169-74):

What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money . . . Once society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism — huckstering and its preconditions — the Jew wilt have become impossible.

On other occasions, however, it must be admitted that Marx uses his discovery about Jews and negroes (`the common Negro type is only a degeneration of a much higher one' — Marx to Engels, 7 August 1866) to reinforce • his political arguments with simple vituperation, as against the German social democrat Ferdi- nand Lassalle (1825-1864):

The Jewish Nigger Lassalle . . . fortunately departs at the end of this week . . . It is now completely clear to me that he, as is proved by his cranial formation and (curly) hair, descends from the Negroes who had joined Moses's exodus from Egypt . . . Now this union of Judaism and Germanism with a basic Negro substance must produce a pecul- iar product. The obtrusiveness of the fellow is also nigger-like . . . One of the great discoveries of our Nigger — which he only confides to his 'most trusted friends' — is that the Pelasgians are descended from the Semites. (Marx to Engels, 30 July 1862).

As the evidence mounts, one becomes more and more surprised that any of the Borough Library Committees in the Grea- ter London Council area still permit the works of Marx or Engels on their shelves, especially in Anti-Racism Year. But what really interested me in these pages was Engels's attitude to those fragments of nations, classes and cultures which are overtaken by history. The following piece

appeared in Die Neue Rheinische Zeitung of 13 January 1849, written by Engels and approved by Marx:

These residual fragments of peoples always become fanatical standard bearers of counter-revolution and remain so until their complete extirpation or loss of their national character, just as their whole existence in general is itself a protest against a great historical revolution . . . The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.

Reading this, I had the eerie sensation that Engels was writing about our own genetic residue, as it has been rudely called — the 'traditional working class' of crimin- als, layabouts, drunks and unemployables which is left in large areas of Merseyside, Tyneside, South Yorkshire, Wales and Scotland after generations of emigration by those of superior intelligence. At present, the Left feels that the way to face the problem is to send them more money, encouraging the inhabitants to breed more and more Calibans to feed the yobbish tendency in the Parliamentary Labour Par- ty and occasionally to disrupt proceedings in the House of Commons.

The true Marxist solution — how pathe- tic it was to see Tony Benn mincing around the floor of the House of Commons with the yobs, hoping desperately to be taken for one of them — would be to exterminate them. This could be done either by forced emigration, as Marx suggested on 22 March 1853: 'Society is undergoing a silent revolution, which must be submitted to . . . The classes and the races too weak to master the new conditions of life must give way' — or by war: 'As exposure to the atmosphere reduces all mummies to instant dissolution, so war passes supreme judg- ment upon social organisations that have outlived their vitality.'

That is not our way. We are Christians in this country, - not Marxists. This genetic residue is part of the family of the nation, even if it is a wayward and problematical part. Our solution is to send Archbishop Worlock and Bishop Jenkins up there to torment them instead. If these two under- stand Christianity as well as Mr Scargill understands Marxism, they must be having a wonderful northern dialogue of the deaf and dumb.

But so, as I would claim, is the whole nation. The great error nowadays is to suppose that words like 'Left' or 'Christ- ians' mean anything at all, beyond what the user wishes them to mean at any given moment. When Marxism is invoked to support the doomed struggle of a privileged and reactionary minority to establish hereditary rights for its own offspring, and when Christianity is invoked to support violence and terrorism in an unjust cause, the time has plainly come to change a few labels.

This is not the occasion to examine the plight of Christianity under the manage- ment of Archbishop Worlock and Bishop Jenkins. But the Left seems to have wan- dered off into two separate directions, both dictated by pressure groups, neither having much to do with the doctrines of Karl Marx or the non-conformist traditions of the Labour Party.

For the sake of clarity, I will describe these two main strands on the left as the northern faction and the southern faction, although I am aware that both factions flourish, if not always side by side, at either end of the country. The northern strand Is the faction of what Mr Alan Watkins has memorably described as the yobbish tendency, the resentful growling race of Calibans whose only possible avenue of escape from their sorry condition has been effectively cut off by Mrs Shirley Williams (of the southern faction). They are the people whose jealous defence of their work practices, of overmanning and job de- marcation, whose hatred of their eln" ployers and general unsuitability for ern' ployment of any kind ensure that the areas which they control receive no investment apart from government charity. The southern faction embraces the gaY, lesbian and black power movements of the loony tendency for its active membership, with a sprinkling of 'Marxist' ideologues from the polytechnics, but its support comes from the vast helot population which depends on state and local govern- ment for its employment, housing, educa- tion, health, recreation and everything else. The contradiction in its present post- ure is that whereas it can never live up to the expectations of its supporters in tears of housing or education, let alone law and order or health, it will invariably provoke enormous resentment whenever it rides one of its hobby horses — spending £1 million on a lesbian hostel in Hackney, for instance, or insisting on the employment of paedophiles to teach West Indian arithme- tic in schools.

The southern or loony faction will often be able to win in large cities, just as the northern or yob faction is unbudgeable 10 parts of the north and Wales. Their only meeting place, outside the bogus solidarity of Labour Party conferences, is in the. House of Commons. The great question ot British politics, it seems to me, is whether our interests are best served by keeping the two factions together, and letting the Yobs i discredit Labour in the south, gay WeIndian mathematicians discredit it in tne north; or whether these contradictionst should be emphasised, encouraging a sP11, which would reduce the surviving Labour Party to half its strength.