Larvatus Prodeo

In today’s Australian, the Labor speech writer and author of Orwell’s Australia, Dennis Glover has played right into the hands of the very cultural warriors he so eloquently rips apart in that great little book.

In a column titled “Marxism in the unlikliest places”, Dennis argues, with some light-hearted qualifiers, that the true home of Marxism today is the Liberal Party. His argument, which is true as far as it goes, is that the conservatives are now the “true heirs of the power-obsessed psychology that once belonged to the Left”.

The evidence begins with the unstartling fact that many of the current crop of neo-con darlings are former supporters of the left in some form or another. I didn’t know that PP McGuiness once worked for the Soviet money-launderer the Moscow-Narodny Bank, but Peter Coleman and Keith Windschuttle both have form.

I don’t have any issue at all with Glover’s thesis that the Liberals and their fellow-travellers in all the right think tanks have set about trashing some of Australia’s democratic institutions (weak as they are), that they have a blatant disregard for human rights, or that they are indeed “market zealots”. However, where Dennis goes off the rails in my view is that he makes the same ideological mistake as the neo-cons when he equates Marxism with the legacy of Stalinism.

Continue reading ‘Confusing Marx and Stalin’