The spectre still haunting us

0:00I thought that maybe what we could start with today is something that I've been puzzling over in my own mind and I'm hoping that you can sort of help me reconcile this Nina. When the left accused their opponents on the right of being fascists, I tend to roll my eyes because that has been, maybe it's because it's been overused or because it just doesn't seem to really describe say Donald Trump. I feel like fascism describes something quite specific. You have to not just be mildly nationalist or whatever, you have to be expansionist, you have to be very explicitly racist. I feel like there's a list of things. You have to criteria, you have to meet in order to be accurately described as fascist and the term is regularly used for people who don't hit any of those criteria.

1:05I don't, though, have the same response when people on the right describe people on the left say Soran Mandani or other other examples as being communist or being communist adjacent. In fact, I have dished it out myself and I've been wondering is that because, is that just me being partisan because you could potentially apply the same criticism, you could say, look communism is not just a belief in egalitarianism or something, it's quite a specific political system. Should we therefore be very cautious about applying that label? That's the thing I've been wondering about and I know Nina, you've just written a long review of a book about communism by Paul Mason and so I thought you would be the person to talk about it with. Interesting question. You've also been called fascist loads of times. I mean, who hasn't? Sure, sure. I mean, it's, it's, it is absurd. Of course, there are no existing fascist parties if one were going to be accurate.

2:07Sure, I mean, it is a, a word and idea that has been thrown around. I mean, it used to, I think, be more of a joke on the left. Like, if someone was being rather, uh, officials or overorganised or something or not flaky, would, you know, jokingly call them a fascist. I mean, there's lots of comedy that plays off of this, like the young ones, you know, this sort of student is constantly calling everything fascist. But yeah, I mean, it started to become, I don't know, it's a, like, a word of power in some contexts and did have real effects, damaging effects. Well, I think there's several things going on. So your second question really was, second point is that, well, whilst this is in accurate generally, and I've always wondered why it's always far right, right? Are there not lots of people that are just a bit right wing or centre right, you know, but the left will just call everyone far right, as if everyone is some sort of extremist the moment they, they think that sex is real or whatever the current, for boating.

3:11It's reminded me. I remember Stephen Bush saying a little while ago when he was working at the New States and then on reporting on Bush politics that it was really difficult to find terms to describe the left, which would not make people cross as well. So what he'd settled on was talking about the centre left of the Labour Party and the left of the Labour Party. And everyone was kind of okay with that, which I thought was quite interesting. But again, for the far left, people don't self-identify as being on the far left, whereas far right, as you say, is often used inside BBC reporting or something like that. I mean, I think there's a very deep question here, which is about the sort of worldly and what people are actually after, what they're actually doing and so on. I think you've mentioned before that you think that communism is a recognisable impulse that maybe has different characters in different places. We can talk about Islamogoshism. This is a term that the French use. Perhaps it's a kind of impulse towards something like an abstraction, which is equality,

4:14but it's a kind of equality that is worldly. It's like, how do we bring about equality in the world? By any means necessary, and there might be lots of different permutations for doing this. I think it's Mason's book just to mention that briefly. I think it's interesting because, I mean, the telegraph pitched it as if, oh, Mason is with the title at least. Mason is sort of admitting the horrors of communism and he's sort of come around. But I think if we put this in the context of work one, right, this sort of recent discussion about, oh, are they putting away work? I mean, you see various pundits and politicians now sort of say, oh, that was crazy. You know, AOC said, oh, that was a bit crazy, wasn't it? And you see other kind of leftists, media groups like Navara and so on, sort of trying to distance themselves from the excesses as they sort of pretend to see them. But I don't think they're excesses. I think they're inherent in this impulse. And I think it is an impulse that a lot of people share or adopt at a particular point.

5:16Part of it is Coltie. Part of it is in Groupie. It's a kind of us them thing, right? So the moment you question any of the tenants, you're immediately Hitler, you know, which is, which is absurd, but this is how Colts work. Yeah, so there's a social belonging aspect, but I think the deeper abstraction, it's like, what does the communist want, right? The communist communism is fundamentally an impulse or an inclination towards something being unfair, right? Something is wrong in the world. It's kind of nostec, maybe a little bit like the world is evil. The world is evil because of capitalists. It could be great, but there's something in the way, right? There's, I don't know, unfair distribution of wealth. There's perhaps natural inequality. I mean, you see some people on the ultra-levdo parts of the left, particularly theoretical left, talking about, well, if nature is unfair, a bullish nature, or if we just get rid of prisons and the police, or, you know, it's kind of like arcons in the interest, you

6:18know, if we can just get rid of bad people, right? People who have the wrong idea, we don't convince them anymore, we just kind of get rid of them. And I think this has been the direction of travel as Mason does indicate in all of these programs that ostensibly have noble aims, right? We want to make life fair, we want to stop oppression, we want to stop exploitation, we want to redistribute wealth and so on and so forth. And they all end up in horrific bloodbaths, either of their own people or in terms of waging war. And it is certainly true that since World War II, communism has remained sort of acceptable, even right down to you can still buy communist memorabilia, but it's very, you know, you cannot adopt the insignia, even in a playful way of the right of fascism and Nazism. And there are communist parties as well that stand, but they're openly under that label, yeah. Absolutely. And we're not talking about socialist parties or democratic parties, we're talking about,

7:19yeah, as you say, I mean, in Europe there are still lots of communist parties, there are communist parties in Britain, very small, but they exist. So yes, I mean, so the post-war war II settlement has definitely decided that the ultimate evil, the thing that must be defeated is the far right. I mean, there's also discussions about the extent to which fascism and fascism fall into that, whatever that would mean, but we would associate Nazism with the shower, the eugenics, kind of thing in the added sex stream, which are obviously horrific, but both fascism and communism are worldly campaigns, right? These are not political movements that adopt to nature or the accept nature or that have a higher purpose, right? They're both secular expressions of a political will, right? We can change the world. Yeah, well, I mean, they're atheistic, again, and maybe definitionally, I don't know, but

8:20my understanding of fascism, at least in the German context, is that they did do this creation of a mythos, which was quite strange, and actually the way that the German fascism is often characterized as being highly scientific, isn't quite right. I mean, yes, in terms of their military capabilities, obviously based on scientific advancement, but their sense of their intellectual lineage and stuff was very strange in anti-scientific in many ways. I guess the reason that my eyebrows slash hackles raise when people go around describing their political opponents as fascists is that it's just such a potent word, I mean, Naz even more so, because the post-war narrative is that Hitler is the stand-in for Satan and Nazism and Fascism function as satanic ideologies in our minds, and therefore to describe someone

9:21in that way is just so obviously to describe them as a moral outcast, rather than to make a serious point about their political ideology. Oh, for sure, but I suppose it's like the deeper impulse. I mean, if we have the separation of church and state, Christianity is not like Islam in this sense, right? And I think what that separation of church and state then sort of ultimately led to was something like, well, we need a worldly politics, a politics that is only worldly, Marxism and communism are obviously atheistic, right? They regard religion as a form of control of the masses, ideology and nothing more. But I think if we're thinking about the kind of worship of abstractions, because I think this is what human beings always do, they are all, we are religious, we are cultic. Fundamentally, so if you replace the abstraction of God with the abstraction of equality and you sort of think by any means necessary, right? This, you know, you can do anything you like, right?

10:21You can kill your enemies, you can, whatever. But this impulse comes from a place of a recognition of injustice. I wonder if Mason's book is actually part of an attempt really to re-brand socialism, which I think is what a lot of people are up to at the moment. As in, well, if we put work one away, okay, we're just going to, it went a bit far, perhaps. Ooh, people didn't like that. We're going to re-brand it. We're going to re-brand it as abundant socialism, or we're going to, you know, with sort of green characteristics or whatever, right? And I think some people obviously engaged in that. They'll try to sort of re-democratise it and make it more palatable. Which means distancing themselves from communism? Potentially. I mean, the role of China, I think, in Mason's book is interesting. He's very, very critical of China, current China, I should say, also, of Mao. But to say, look, this isn't, this is authoritarian, right?

11:23We don't want this kind of communism. We want a nice pluralistic thing that is okay with using energy and is sort of tolerant. And, you know, it's a sort of light, socialism light, in a certain sense. But I think fundamentally, this is still a claim about the reality of the world. Of course it is. All politics makes a sort of claim about what the world is really like. The conservative, I think the starting point of the conservative is there are natural inequalities. And this is just the way it is. You know, some people will be able to make money. Life is unfair. People are more attractive than others. Nature can be cruel. It's a sort of more realistic recognition, I think, of reality. Christianity, obviously, has an idea that everybody is equal before God, but not on Earth. But that doesn't mean that people can't be good, if you say what I mean. Whereas I think the communist position is to say that no, equality is the only good in

12:29a certain sense. It's not explicitly not trying to be a moral claim, although of course it really is, or it manifests itself in a moral way. And I think the progressivism or woke one or whatever we want to call it was a reintroduction of morality in a certain horrible way. It was a sort of reinvention of morality from first principles because it abandoned the wisdom of Christianity and the West. You know, you're a bad person if there's an age gap in your relationship or whatever that a myriad rules were about being a bad person. So the desire for goodness is still there. It's just highly sort of contorted and so on. Whereas I think the accusation of fascism is to also impute a kind of mystery, like there's something sort of indescribably awful about you, you know, because evil is sort

13:30of unknown and unnerbable and scary and you can make people seem really, really scary if you use this, this way, this word against them. I guess there were periods where communism, communist had almost the same power. I'm thinking of the red scare. There clearly have been times when that's been as potent an accusation as to describe someone now as fascist, which maybe suggests that we should be very cautious about throwing around the word communist. The problem is that like when Maldini is doing things like setting up government, run grocery stores in New York, that isn't just a gesture to award to egalitarianism. That's quite a specific claim around how an economic system should be at scale. You know, he's starting a project at a small scale and he doesn't have the much power he's only the mayor. But that seems like a more substantive move towards affecting an ideology which has never gone away because as you say, they remain communist parties.

14:32People will quite openly describe themselves as communist. He doesn't carry anything like the stigma right now that hasn't always been true. Right now that fascism does and it therefore seems to me like more of a live possibility. Or indeed, I remember, say Terry Eagleton's book, why I can't what's it described? What's the title again? Something like why communism has never been properly tried or whatever or the case. Anyway, these kind of books, you know, they get Terry Eagleton is a very respectable academic thinker and he can quite openly endorse this ideology. So that seems to me to be an asymmetry. Whether it's a sufficient asymmetry to justify my instinct towards the use of the two words, I'm not sure. Yeah, I think that's right. It doesn't have nearly the sort of same stigma or horror. And yeah, I mean, are people offended if you call them communist? I mean, I think it is recognizable. I think, well, I agree we should be precise. Right. I think we're describing someone's ideology and or what they seem to be presenting.

15:37I mean, I'm not sure if these terms are sort of necessarily that helpful in many ways. Certainly calling something fascist or Nazi when it isn't isn't very helpful. I mean, calling, you know, your average conservative or Nazi is nonsensical. And yet they would do this. I'm seeing you. I mean, yeah. The reason I suppose that one might want to use the word communist, even if people don't describe themselves that way. I mean, I generally think that you should only use terms, ideological terms, that people would accept themselves. So that's what I would normally say progressive rather than woke, for instance. And there are other examples. You can perfectly easily find terms to describe people that they will accept. And that's fine. It just means that there's more clarity. The only reason I think to potentially use your word communist to describe people who don't use it themselves is that I think you're identifying a political lineage there, which is continuous and concerning because of the crimes that communism has historically rigged. I've been reading in tandem recently.

16:39Both she left its Patrick's book of history every day, Stalinism, which is about the sort of social experience, specifically of living in urban Stalinist Russia in the 1930s, which is all about the discomfort and the fear and discomfort, but particularly the discomfort. People never being able to get enough food, people being forced to live in these really cramped, squall of conditions, whatever. She's very, very detailed in talking about people's personal accounts of this. And then I've also been rereading 1984, which actually wasn't, I didn't set out to speak at the same time. It was kind of coincidental, but it made me realize actually 1984 is obviously about communism. It gets described off and now as, unfortunately, it's so famous and influential that it's cliché to talk about it, but it gets described now as a book in general about authoritarianism in general about the horrors of the 20th century. But I think actually it all was really specific. I mean, not only in talking about the social conditions that he describes, people in 1984

17:42experiencing, are identical to the ones that Fitzpatrick describes in Stalinist Russia. And also he talks for instance about big brother is like a handsome man with a big moustache, which yes, could be Hitler, except that also there's this trotsky figure who's been trotskyed from the party. It seems to me like he's obviously talking about communism and all were was really anticomalus and also very critical famously of English socialism. And also Ingsoc, right, is the name of the party. It's really clear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I just think it's, but it's interesting, therefore, that that's not really how it's popularly understood and is that because we haven't really had a decommunistification of the culture. I mean, I think it's worth speculating on the extent to which communist ideas are in power, you know, at the risk of doing the thing. Yeah, right. This is, yes, this is the eye of the storm, right? Or what we're talking about here. Is it okay to say that?

18:44I think so. I mean, if in the first place we define what we think is the impulse, what we, you know, if we say, well, what are people after? I mean, what is the Labour Party after when it releases prist, dangerous prisoners? What is Labour after when it engages in mass immigration that has negative effects on the native population? What are the judges after when they give people incredibly low sentences for certain crimes and very high sentences for others? You know, I think it's fair to be, to ask about this kind of underlying impulse, right? Because I, again, I think it is, it is a deep question about how one perceives reality and what one thinks one is going to do about it, if anything. That's the end of this bonus episode clip. You can find the full episode by going to the home of the Made Mother Nature Up podcast at the Weasperry.sauce.com. I record bonus episodes like this every week, co-hosted by other substakers, including

19:44Mary Harrington, Nina Power, Ed West, Robinson, Megan Murphy and more. If you'd like to listen to those episodes, as well as to the ad-free versions of all of the other MM episodes, you can send it for a paid subscription, which costs either eight US dollars a month or 79 US dollars a year. I really wouldn't be able to produce the podcast without the financial support of my paid subscribers. So if you like MM, if you think what I'm doing is valuable, then this is the key way in which you can support me and support the show. Thank you.