Kevin Logan Demolishes Turning Point UK’s Sneer about Socialism

This is a very short video – just over two minutes long – by male feminist and anti-Fascist vlogger Kevin Logan. The target of his very well-aimed rebuttal is a tweet from Turning Point UK. You know, the daft British subsidiary of the American Conservative organisation, Turning Point, which was launched over here by Charlie Kirk and Candace Owen. Kirk’s the propagandist, who got terribly upset when Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks asked him how much he made. To which Kirk responded by shouting that he ‘LIVED LIKE A CAPITALIST EVERY SINGLE DAY’ and challenged Uygur to a fight before people calmed him down. A piece of this bit of fine verbal parrying is shown in Logan’s video. And Owen is the Black female Conservative, who at the launch of the Turning Point UK said that Hitler wasn’t a nationalist, but a globalist, and seemed to say that everything he did would have been alright, if he’d just stuck to his own country. For which she was rightly attacked by everyone.

Logan here responds to a sneering tweet from these fine examples of the Conservative intelligentsia, ‘If socialism is so great, then why do people fight tooth and nail to flee socialist countries for free market capitalist countries?’

What’s Logan’s comeback?

‘Well, if free market capitalism is so great, then why do free market capitalist countries have to insist on embargoing, sanctioning, funding coups, invading, and overthrowing socialist nations all the time. I mean, if socialism is so f**king terrible, then surely it’ll fall over on its own. There’s no need for all this f**kery. It’s almost like you’re full of s**t, guys.’ He also points out that by their own pseudo-libertarian definition, free market capitalism hasn’t actually happened either. And the constant messing around with socialist nations means they’re hack bastards.

Quite. And he’s right. The late critic of the American Empire, William Blum, devotes two chapters to the left-wing, socialist regimes which America has attempted to overthrow in his book Democracy: America’s Deadliest Export, and it’s a long, long list. And Logan is probably very well aware of it as he’s a graduate of 20th century history and politics, so he knows his stuff.

This rebuttal counts for 1.12 minutes of the video. These is footage of him in bed having his face hit by his cat’s tail. Because it’s cute and funny.

Here’s the video.

Bakunin’s Advocacy of Worker Co-operatives

The Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin had a strange, contradictory attitude towards co-operatives. In his article ‘On Co-operation’, Bakunin argued that they could actually harm the workers’ movement. He was highly critical of those founded on what he considered to be bourgeois principles for two reasons. Firstly, they could collapse, leaving the workers involved demoralized and poorer than before. And secondly, if they were successful, they elevated a small group of workers to the bourgeoisie while other workers, what he called a fifth estate, were exploited by them. At the same time, he passionately supported co-operatives as a means of empowering the workers and as the beginning of the future socialist society he looked forward to.

In his article ‘Geneva’s Double Strike’ he wrote

Let us organize and enlarge our Association, but at the same time let us not forget to consolidate it so that our solidarity, which is our whole power, may become daily more real. Let us build our solidarity in study, in labour, in public action, and in life. Let us become partners in common ventures to make our life together more bearable and less difficult. Let us form as many cooperatives for consumption, mutual credit, and production as we can, everywhere, for though they may be unable to emancipate us in earnest under present economic conditions, they prepare the precious seedes for the organization of the future and through them the workers become accustomed to organizing their own affairs.

In Robert M. Cutler, ed. and trans., Mikhail Bakunin: From Out of the Dustbin: Bakunin’s Basic Writings 1869-1871 (Ann Arbor: Ardis 1985), p. 148.

And after laying out his criticisms of ‘bourgeois’ cooperatives and their advocates in ‘On Cooperation’, Bakunin then turns to promoting them. He wrote

We want cooperation too. We are even convinced that the cooperative will be the preponderant form of social organization in the future, in every branch of labour and science. But at the same time, we know that it will prosper, developing itself fully and freely, embracing all human industry, only when it is based on equality, when all capital and every instrument of labour, including the soil, belong to the people by right of collective property. Therefore before all else, we consider this demand, the organization of the international strength of the workers of all countries, to be the principal goal of our great International [Working-Men’s] Association.

Once this is acknowledged, we hardly oppose the creation of cooperative associations; we find them necessary in many respects. First, and this appears to us even to be their principal benefit at present, they accustom the workers to organize, pursue and manage their interests themselves, without any interference either by bourgeois capital or by bourgeois control.

It is desirable that when the hour of social liquidation is at hand, it should find many cooperative associations in every country and locality; if they are well organized and above all founded on the principles of solidarity and collectivity rather than on bourgeois exclusivism, then society will pass from its present situation to one of equality and justice without too many great upheavals.

Cutler, Mikhail Bakunin, p. 150.

I don’t believe in a radical transformation of society like Bakunin, who was an ardent revolutionary. But I would like more cooperatives to be founded, and this to become, with various other forms of industrial democracy, the dominant form of industrial organization. Working people should be able to organize and empower themselves so that they can resist the power of big business and Conservatism, which has stripped them of rights at work and even the promise of secure, well-paid jobs. There is a problem in that cooperatives can be less economical than capitalist enterprises, but the success of the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain shows that this is not necessarily the case. And cooperatives and industrial democracy, if done properly, will empower the workers and help break down the current class system and the increasingly oligarchical nature of business and politics.

Alt Right Leader Richard Spencer Follows Manosphere, Says Women Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Vote

Richard Spencer, the founder and leader of the Alt Right, has shown that not only is his outfit racially bigoted, it’s also profoundly misogynist. He has declared that women shouldn’t have the right to vote.

This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The Far Right has always had a very traditional view of women’s role. This was summed up in the Nazi slogan of ‘Kinder, Kirche, Kueche’ – ‘Children, Church and Kitchen’. Mussolini and the Italian Fascists also didn’t believe that women should have the right to vote, and should confine themselves to their traditional domestic role.

In this video, the male feminist Kevin Logan points out that the arch-reactionaries of the manosphere – the Men’s Rights Movements’ – got there before him, and shows excerpts from a range of their websites, such as Return of Kings, where they state that women should be stripped of the right to vote. Those demanding this disenfranchisement of the entire female population include Anne Coulter, the notorious extreme right-wing Republican activist. She’s been saying this rubbish for years. When somebody raised the issue of just how she could believe in this, while writing a series of books attacking liberalism and promoting her form of Republicanism, she simply replied that you could be denied the vote, but still write books. Well yes, you could, but you’d still be politically active, which is what the ban on women voting is designed to curtail.

If you look carefully, you’ll see that in one of the excerpts in the video the writer states that women have to be denied the vote, if you want to have both democracy and real Conservative politics. I’d say that preventing just over one half of the human race – women make up 51 per cent of the population – from possessing the suffrage was profoundly undemocratic. From the Right’s view, it might also be counterproductive. I can remember being taught at College that politically, women tended to be more Conservative than men. Certainly the Tory party over here has tried to appeal to women with promoting Maggie Thatcher and Theresa May to the country’s leadership, and with Dave Cameron trying to claim the Tories were doing more for women, when they were actually making their jobs more uncertain and their wages lower.

But there isn’t anything new about this stance either. I can remember reading Vox Day on his blog making the same argument – that to preserve Conservativism, you have to stop women voting – about a decade or so ago.

Which is Logan’s point. He concludes that the manosphere is more of a danger than the Alt Right, because it has been saying this for years. It has prepared the political ground so that Spencer can make this stupid, misogynist pronouncement.

Warning: Logan is a sweary fellow himself, and so there is some, er, ‘colourful metaphors’ as Spock says about cussing in Star Trek 4. And it ends with someone saying very clear ‘F*** you’, which is how Kev clearly feels about the manosphere and its appalling, reactionary inhabitants.

On the Road to Serfdom with Von Hayek

The ideology of the modern Conservative Party is partly based on the Libertarian ideas of Von Hayek. Von Hayek was a refugee to America Austria after the Nazis’ Anschluss. In his books, such as The Road to Serfdom and the Constitution of Liberty Von Hayek defended ‘the freedom in economic affairs without which personal and economic freedom have never existed’. He was a bitter opponent of the extension of state interference in the economy. He argued that the extension of the welfare state would inevitably lead to the loss of freedom if it permitted no choice. The Road to Serfdom was published in 1944, and reinforced Churchill’s own doubts about post-War reconstruction. His ideas became the major force in Conservative ideology under Margaret Thatcher, who was introduced to them through her mentor, Sir Keith Joseph.

There was a piece on Thatcher’s adoption of Von Hayek about a decade ago in the Financial Times. The article repeated a story about Thatcher’s official promotion of it at a Conservative party meeting. She went to it with the book in her hand. She arrived just when a young man was on the floor making a speech supporting the middle of the road economic consensus. According to the article, it was Thatcher’s turn to speak after him. She slammed the book down on the table with the words ‘This is what we all believe in now’. Or words to that effect. The article then went on to discuss the various ways in which she actually misunderstood von Hayek, such as on the importance of central institutions, such as the monarchy and parliament in Britain. The article suggested that elements of von Hayek’s views could be adopted by a Labour government without crossing the floor.

Well, maybe, though with retrospect the article seems like a subtle piece of propaganda aimed at getting New Labour to continue von Hayek’s Liberalism but under a less extreme, slightly more socialistic guise after public discontent with the Tories increased.

Von Hayek’s influence also explains why Thatcher banged on so much about how the Tories’ represented ‘choice’, despite the contraction of individual liberty implied by her ‘strong state’ policy.

Margaret Jones and Rodney Lowe reproduce an extract from von Hayek’s 1959 work, The Constitution of Liberty, in their collection of documents, From Beveridge to Blair: The First Fifty Years of Britain’s Welfare State 1948-98. This contains the following paragraph attacking the notion of the state provision of welfare:

‘In many fields persuasive arguments based on considerations of efficiency and economy can be advanced in favour of the state’s taking sole charge of a particular service; but when the state does so, the result is usually that those advantages soon appear illusory but that the character of the services becomes entirely different from that which they would have had if they had been provided by competing agencies. If, instead of administering limited resources put under its control for a specific service, government uses its coercive powers to ensure that men are given what some expert thinks they need; if people can thus no longer exercise any choice in some of the most import5ant matters of their lives, such as health, employment, housing and provision for old age, but must accept the decisions made for them by appointed authority on the basis of its evaluation of their need; if certain services become the exclusive domain of the state, and whole professions – be it medicine, education or insurance – come to exist only as unitary bureaucratic hierarchies, it will no longer be competitive experimentation but solely the decisions of authority that will determine what me shall get’.

Now this needs very careful critiquing. More specifically, how well has this argument stood up now that it has been and is continuing to be government policy?

Actually, not very well.

Von Hayek’s assumption, that economic freedom is the basis of personal and political freedom, is flawed. As critics of the Conservative party have pointed out, private property and ideologies of economic freedom existed long before most of the European population had personal or political freedom. It was the basis of late 18th and early 19th century laissez-faire economic liberalism at a time when only the aristocracy and the upper middle class in Britain, for example, had the vote.

It also does not take into account the importance of public opinion in formulating government policy. It assumes that decisions regarding health, social insurance and so on would be taken by a bureaucratic, technocratic elite deciding what it believes the public wants and needs on their behalf. Now this certainly was the case in the former Soviet Union. In England the early Fabians, including Beatrice and Sidney Webb, certainly had this authoritarian mindset and did believe that the new socialist society should be administered by an efficient bureaucracy. It does not, however, envisage the way the public actively tries to influence government policy through public meetings, bureaucratic forums in which the public can state their objections and demands, such as patients’ groups and similar organisations, or the fact that the public can and is frequently actively involved in welfare issues through the simple process of democratic debate. Von Hayek’s simplistic view of state power is only true of monolithic, single party autocracies such as Communism, Nazi Germany and the Fascist dictatorships. It does not consider the state as a means of empowering people and granting them a freedom, which they would otherwise be denied by their economic circumstances. John Steward Mill, in his class formulation of Liberalism in the 19th century, passionately defended personal liberty. However, he was also influenced by contemporary socialist experiments, such as the French Saint-Simonians. As a result, he believed that some freedoms could only be secured through the collective action of the state.

Now let’s examine the claims for freedom made on behalf of the private provision of welfare services. This seems to assume an ideal condition in which such private organisations are able to offer service comparable to those of the state. But as we’ve seen, in recent years the privatised industries such as the railways and privatised hospital administrations are now very heavily subsidised by the state to an extent which far exceeds the amounts they received when they were directly owned and operated by the state. In the case of the railways, the service they provide is actually poorer than in the last days of British Rail.

It also does not accept that private provision may result in a lack of choice. In America, for example, 1/7th of the population cannot afford medical insurance. These people have absolutely no choice regarding their health care. They are forced to use medicare. As for those, who have the benefit of private medical insurance, these are tied very much to the demands of their insurance company. The days when Americans were free to take or leave their doctor’s advice are very much a thing of the past. Not that you’d know that from the polemic coming out of the American Right.

It also does not foresee the way private companies may also close down or alter services without consulting their customers, purely for the benefit of their shareholders. An example of this was the way one of the American firms charged with running GPs’ surgeries in London closed three of them, leaving the patients with no doctor. It does not accept the fact that certain industries are natural monopolies, which can be both more efficiently and more democratically administered by the state in the public interest.

Furthermore, von Hayke ignores the possibility of the use of state coercion to enforce and support private industry at the expense of the liberty of the individual. The use of workfare to compel the unemployed to work in selected retail venues or other industries is a prime example of this.

Von Hayek also makes the statement ‘It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good’. There’s a bitter irony here. The administration of the modern state and party political machines is now highly technocratic and corporative, using experts drawn extensively from industry, to promote the interests of those industries against the public good.