Why the Left Frequently IS Right….And Vice Versa

by Robert Bruce (December 2012)

In Arthur Koestler’s wartime novel Arrival and Departure, there is a striking scene where the author introduces a prototypically modern Nazi diplomat who expounds on the intrinsically modern and revolutionary character of the Third Reich, before descanting on a vision of Europe, in which history and tradition are rendered a junkyard. It is worth quoting at some length as it highlights a feature of the fascist imagination which is rarely explored with any intellectual rigour and consistency.

Feudalism worked in its crude and inequitable fashion until the coming of the Industrial Age. Today the Feudal tradition and its adherents are broken up as a political power and in most cases are ignobly lending their prestige and their abilities to the support of the predatory plutocracy which has gained complete control of the Conservative Party. In modern times the old regime is confronted with two alternatives. The first is to serve the new world in a great attempt to bring order out of chaos and beauty out of squalor. The other alternative is to become flunkeys of the bourgeoise. It is a matter of constant surprise and regret that many of my class have chosen the latter course.⁵

Himself from the kind of minor landed gentry who had adapted the least successfully to the political and economic triumph of the industrial middle class, Mosley’s class instincts alone inclined him to see in the corporatist state the paternalist manorial regime of his ancestors writ large, a reproach incarnate to the laissez faire individualism of the nineteenth century, and the class war of a theoretically daring but politically timid Left.

One of the RAF’s first pilots, Mosley shared Hitler’s obsession with the possibilities of advanced technology harnessed to an archaic pre-modern vision, and in this, their hybrid visions mirrored the schizoid character of the world they tried (with considerable success) to adjust to. As Leon Trotsky noted,

Fascism has opened up the depths of society for politics. Today, not only in peasant homes but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside of the twentieth century the tenth or the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms…….  What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance, and savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet fascism has given them a banner.⁶

This is well put, and if you substitute Taliban for fascist it works just as well.

[2] Conservatives seem unable to grasp this elementary point, which is why their thought gravitates between bland sociological analysis which ran out of useful insights after Burke, and elegy. It has the saving grace that the writing is beautiful. The pre-War ‘Conservative Revolutionary’ movement in Germany is a testament to the self-defeating project of political conservatism.

[3]  It is important to remember that the image of the bourgeoisie as a calculating and utility maximizing egoist stems from an aristocratic critique, which Marx adopted.

[4] ‘Cash nexus’ is one of Marx’s better known loan words from Carlyle. Carlyle incidentally was christened the first National Socialist by William Joyce, perhaps better known as the infamous Lord Haw-Haw.

[5] Letter to the Morning Post in 1928, reprinted from Robert Skidelski’s ‘Oswald Mosley’.

[6] What is National Socialism, 1933

The author is a low ranking and over-credentialled functionary of the British welfare state.

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