Marxist Moments

MODERATION IN ALL THINGS?

 

If hypothetically you had been a moderate in Germany and aware of the Nazi Holocaust, where would you have stood on the issue?

Let’s see. Well, social stability at all costs, but perhaps only 3 million instead of 6 million Jews and others might have been killed? Or: conditions in the concentration camps could have been more humane, while calling them something like ‘rest resorts’ or ‘temporary accommodation centres’ might have been pleasanter.

Plot to overthrow the Nazi government? Assassinate Hitler? Hide Jewish strangers? Be active in a secret underground to subvert the system? All these would be extremism!

Look the other way perhaps, but don’t get involved!

Ironically, perhaps, it is moderates who exist to give support to genuine extremism.

‘Moderate’ Republicans in the US Congress abhor Trump to be sure, but they are neoliberals down to the last politician, and wish to see free medical care stripped from twenty million Americans, as well as turning the directing of America over to Wall Street and the Pentagon – sane, rational entities unlike that blustering buffoon in the White House.

Socialism and human equality? Extremism!

Even hostility towards further military adventures to end the 16-year Afghan war?  Extremism!

Being against doing the same thing over and over again even if it doesn’t work (Einstein’s definition of insanity)? Extremism!

Long ago King Solomon (knowing the likely outcome) proposed a moderate solution to the custody battle over a baby child between two women: cut the child in half and give half the child to each. So: cut Afghanistan in half? Partitioning countries has always been a great moderate solution.

Black Lives Matter? What about: half of black lives matter? Or better still: ‘Black lives matter except in certain circumstances’?

The anti-Marxist Karl Popper moderately proposed ‘piecemeal social engineering’ to improve society as against what he considered to be rabble-rousing, fanatical, Marx-inspired revolution. Unwittingly – and oddly for such an eminent intellect - Sir Karl thus tacitly acknowledged the powerful forces of the establishment right: that is, he bowed to the existence of a class war that he never openly acknowledged as being with us.  Hence the moderation of ‘piecemeal’, moving very cautiously and almost invisibly towards progress if any progress was to occur at all. But why ‘piecemeal’ if the strategy was not to defend the power of the controlling upper class? Why not ‘all-out’? And how inevitable was it that ‘piecemeal’ would be broken down into ever-tinier pieces when the class war intensified? Never mind. Just keep doing piecemeal – insanity.

Erich Fromm wrote a book in the 1950s called The Sane Society. I suggest a slight adjustment to that title to describe the moderate one we live in today.

Jeremy Corbyn has been under constant, sustained attack by ‘moderates’ in the Labour Party, but at least Owen Jones in the Guardian (17.8.17) in an article headlined ‘Centrists attack the left, but they are the true extremists’, has seen the light. As Jones concludes:

It is my own view that centrism has no answers, and that if the left fails, the vacuum will be filled by a populist, hateful right. It was the extremism of the economic order that centrists defended – not its moderation – that left Britain here. Centrists will dispute this, and find it almost inconceivable that they have been thrust into the political wilderness once inhabited by the left. But until they come to terms with their own failures, they will surely never rule again.

 

Or perhaps they are already going mad in Einstein’s sense.