Dominic Lawson: You can blame it all on Karl Marx
Tuesday, 20 February 2007
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"We know of no spectacle so ridiculous" said the Whig historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, "as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality." Despite that, I can't resist joining in the latest such fit, occasioned by the coincidence of the targeted murder of a schoolboy in south London and the publication of a report which purported to demonstrate that British children are the most wretched in the world.
Naturally, Mr Blair is right when he insists that the juvenile drugs war in a small area of London is not representative of the state of the country as a whole. Naturally, Mr Cameron is guilty of exaggeration when he claims that "society is broken": even Peckham is not Baghdad. Yet the Tory leader has more faithfully interpreted the national mood, which is best encapsulated by the words traditionally uttered by bewildered parents when one of their children has done something dreadful: "Where did we go wrong?"
It's interesting that in what is sometimes rather condescendingly described as "the black community", the absence of money - either private or public - is not put forward as the reason for the malaise. Instead, the collapse of the traditional family and of organised religion is held to be largely responsible.
Thus Tony Sewell, the head of Generating Genius, a charity which takes under its wing talented black teenagers, declared last week that "black boys with guns on the street can be brought back in line. But only if the liberal orthodoxy that has done so much damage is discarded - and old-fashioned values such as family stability, discipline and an aspiration to lead fulfilled lives are reinstated."
Thus Nims Obunge, the head of the Peace Alliance, writes that: "The Black community must be empowered to restore moral values, working with vulnerable parents and young people. Through initiatives such as street pastors and our regular Sunday schools and youth clubs, many young people have been given alternative choices to a life of violence. The church should be at the forefront of this campaign."
The views of men such as Tony Sewell and Nims Obunge are anathema to the reigning orthodoxy within the social services and their mentors in the sociology departments of our universities. It is one of the great paradoxes of modern history that while Marxism as an ideology of government became completely discredited, that philosophy continued to hold in thrall those who in other countries than our own would be called "intellectuals".
The Marxian loathing for organised religion is more widely appreciated, partly because it was faithfully practised by avowedly socialist governments right up to their collapse at the tail end of the last century. It was not just that Christianity represented an alternative source of belief. That alone would not have made it so subversive. It was that at the heart of Christianity is individual salvation based on the notion of personal responsibility for one's actions. Karl Marx's view was that we are all mere creatures of economic determinism. What we do and what we think have nothing to do with personal autonomy. We are simply cogs in a class-war machine.
It is slightly less well known that Marx believed that the traditional family was itself an instrument of oppression, designed by the bourgeoisie to oppress both women and children: "The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production ... The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed correlation between parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting."
Strangely, Karl Marx was an exemplar of the hypocrisies of the Victorian father: intermittently devoted to his many children, leaving the exhausting business of home-keeping to his long-suffering wife, while keeping a mistress on the side - the family servant, Helena Demuth.
In the early years of the Soviet Union, there was a genuine attempt, best described in Ferdinand Mount's The Subversive Family, to apply Marxist thinking on the family. Lunacharski, the Commissar of Education, declared that "Our problem now is to do away with the household and to free women from the care of children ... the terms 'my parents', 'our children' will gradually fall out of usage, being replaced by such conceptions as 'old people', 'children' and 'infants.'
This, claimed Lunacharski, would enable the transition to "that broad public society which will replace the domestic hearth, yes, that stagnant family unit which separates itself off from society. A genuine Communist would avoid such a permanent pairing marriage and would seek to satisfy his needs by a freedom of mutual relations ... so that you can't tell who is related to whom and how closely. That is social construction."
The consequences of this policy were exactly as they have been in the "social construction" we now see in parts of our own inner cities: social chaos, abandoned children and a rapid rise in venereal diseases. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union soon began to abandon the Marxist approach to family life. New laws were introduced to compel divorced parents, not the state, to contribute towards the maintenance of their children. Divorce itself was made more difficult and expensive.
Trotsky, who had been in the forefront of the anti-family experiment, became a scapegoat in this as in other matters. Now he was denounced as "an enemy of the people, who with his followers covered the family in the USSR with filth, spreading the counter-revolutionary 'theory' of the dying out of the family, or disorderly sexual cohabitation, in order to discredit the Soviet land."
The Soviet communists had realised that a society in which the bonds of family life were stigmatised and undermined led inexorably to an ungovernable state of social breakdown - and they were the governors now. It is unsurprising that the social scientists on Britain's campuses - and indeed American ones - have not universally embraced the revisionism which saved the Russians from complete social breakdown. The people running such departments are very unlikely ever to be called upon to teach the worst human results of their theories.
For those, such as Tony Sewell and Nims Obunge, who are engaged in dealing with the consequences of a long-standing and powerful ideological contempt for organised religion and the family, this is not a matter for intellectual self-gratification. It really is a matter of life and death. To describe their outbursts merely as a fit of morality would be to underestimate them - and the problems they face.
