"I soon realised that the humanitarian protestations of Marxists were a mask for an urge to domination"

Worth the read -- Memo to Ed Miliband: My Marxist father was wrong, too

Edward Miliband and I have something (not much) in common: we both had Marxist fathers. In my case, however, it turned me against all that my father stood, or pretended to stand, for. I saw that his concern for the fate of humanity in general was inconsistent with his contempt for the actual people by whom he was surrounded, and his inability to support relations of equality with others. I concluded that the humanitarian protestations of Marxists were a mask for an urge to domination.

In addition to the emotional dishonesty of Marxism, I was impressed by its limitless resources of intellectual dishonesty. Having grown up with the Little Lenin Library and (God help us!) the Little Stalin Library, I quickly grasped that the dialectic could prove anything you wanted it to prove, for example, that killing whole categories of people was a requirement of elementary decency.

My father only followed the intellectual fashion of his youth, when the catastrophe of the Great War had been followed by economic problems on a vast scale. That the world urgently needed improvement was obvious. But Marxism was not just an economic doctrine showing the right policy to follow in hard circumstances; it was a religion. The crisis of the Twenties and Thirties was an apocalypse that would finally lead Man, after the revolution, to a heaven on earth, in which all Man’s contradictory desires would be resolved in eternal bliss. No more hatred, no more jostling for position: Man would become selfless as well as permanently contented. Compared with this, the Book of Revelation is pure social realism.

Marxism was also replete with heresies and excommunications that tended to become fatal whenever its adherents reached power. There was a reason for this. Marx said that it is not consciousness that determines being, but being that determines consciousness. In other words, ideas do not have to be argued against in a civilised way, but rather the social and economic position of those who hold them must be analysed. So, disagreement is the same as class enmity – and we all know what should be done with class enemies.