Communism. Boo!
That's supposed to be a big, scary word,
which is associated with the horrors of Stalin and the Gulag.
But communism is back, baby.
And it's back because Ash Sarkar,
a prominent activist and journalist, a friend of mine as well,
went on national television with Piers Morgan,
one of the most odious people that has ever existed, and, when accused
of saying Barack Obama is her hero, replied:
He's not my hero. I'm a communist, you idiot.
That went viral. We've got teen magazines talking about it. T-shirts have been made.
It's been discussed on national television. So I want to talk to Ash.
What actually is communism?
Can we disassociate it from the horrors of the 20th century?
And what about the horrors of capitalism as well?
So, if you could put communism in one pithy little sentence,
which you could not quite fit on a t-shirt, or maybe you could if it was quite small letters,
what would it be?
I think it would be two things, so imagine a semicolon in the middle.
Okay. It's doing a lot of work, this semicolon, I can tell.
I'm a literature graduate, I love a semicolon.
Communism is a belief in the power of people,
to organise their lives as individuals, their social lives,
their political and their economic lives without being managed by a state;
and private property is a barrier to the distribution of those resources that
we need to not just survive but thrive, and not a facilitator of it.
That is a very long sentence, but it makes sense. It works.
But it's got a semicolon in it.
There's about three semicolons in that, Ash.
And a hyphen.
So, communism is now all the rage - one of many sentences
over the last three years I never thought I'd say.
You've been interviewed in Teen Vogue about it.
Is this... are you thinking 'Wow, I've helped to kind of bring it back'?
Or is it kind of now just gone a bit commodified?
I mean, it's just incredibly surreal.
So, I got up really early, I thought I was just going to talk about
the Stop Trump protest, and then suddenly I'm having to yell
that I'm literally a communist.
You idiot.
Yeah, and called Piers Morgan an idiot. I'm really, really glad that people have responded
to it mostly positively. And I think it's because Piers Morgan is so odious, that he's
accidentally rehabilitated communism. Which I couldn't have done on purpose.
It's a team effort.
Team effort. Comrade Morgan.
So, a lot of people watching, they're going to be thinking gulags,
queuing a lot, Ukrainian famine, and big statues with big moustaches.
Mao and Stalin were terrible, murdering dictatorships who presided over totalitarian dystopias.
My mum met Mao. Have I ever told you this story?
No! What? No, she didn't.
She did. Scout's honour.
He's debauched.
Flatulent, was what she told me.
So, this was when she was a little kid,
she actually lived in Beijing for a bit because her dad was a diplomat before her parents
split up and she moved back to this country. So she lived in Beijing for a bit and at some
kind of function, she was told to get up and say hello to Mao,
and he let rip with a ginormous fart.
What's wrong with just basic politeness?
I don't know.
To be fair, he was guilty of slightly worse crimes than that.
I know. I mean, look, you interview loads of people.
How many of them have a story of their mum meeting Mao?
A flatulent Mao as well.
Yeah, so you get what you're given.
What is true is the Maoist regime tried to get everyone
to create their own pig iron in their back garden. Agriculture stopped.
Huge numbers died in the terrible famine.
It's not to make an apology for Maoism or Stalinism,
but if you actually apply methodology to capitalism,
I'm thinking about the international slave trade,
I'm thinking about world war one. I'm talking about fascism,
and before anyone says that's socialism,
these were regimes which were helped to power by big business in Italy and Germany,
to liquidate the left, where big businesses profited directly from the Holocaust.
Ten of millions of people died under capitalism, but we don't...
that is not a discussion we have, is it?
I think that the analysis of deaths under communism is
an example of important history done badly.
I'm not saying for one minute that we look
at those aspects of communist history and we simply paper over them with a hashtag
or a t-shirt or a meme. I think it requires really careful engagement.
But we must apply a similar level of engagement
and a similar amount of critique to the conditions under which we presently live.
What does it mean to be a communist in 2018?
The example that I always use is housing.
I think housing lends itself really well to communist structures of de-privatisation.
Making decisions or decisions being led by people who actually use the service,
live in the housing, rather than people who simply own it.
And the other is an orientation towards the future,
because I think that Britain is in the midst of another industrial change
from which there is no going back.
As you get more automation, you've got this contradiction
embedded in capitalism, which is on the one hand you replace workers with fixed capital,
you become more precarious because you can't have... your labour is worth less compared
to this machine that can do it easier, for 24 hours and isn't going to do stuff like
go on strike. But also, it shows you a glimpse of what a world without work and scarcity
can look like. So, if we've got machines doing all the work, it means you can focus on the
things that you feel really passionately about. Whether that's exploring different ways of
living communally or pursuing a craft or an art or dedicating time to your loved ones.
And that is this little promise of utopia
within this thing that is making you more precarious and making you poorer.
And as that tendency towards automation gets sharper –
in the UK, I think it's going to be one in three jobs in the north,
one in five across the country as a whole,
and 40% in Hayes and Harlington –
you either, I think, have a steady creep towards fascism
in terms of increasing the authoritarian and violent management,
that bit of the population which is excluded from the means of survival,
I don't think we'll have enough retraining
or new tech utopia jobs to cope with that.
Or you find new ways to redistribute that abundance
in a way which means that people have to work less and have more.
So, finally,
Corbyn's Labour party is actually offering,
historically speaking, pretty mild social democracy.
Many of its policies are already in place in lots of western Europe.
And in the 1970s, we had a higher tax rate
and more extensive nationalisation than Corbyn's Labour party is proposing.
So what hope is there for the sort of communist society that you aspire to?
Because a lot of people just go, well you're getting all excited about this,
but actually this shows the paucity of your ambition and expectation.
At the moment, we're going to settle for something which,
historically speaking, is not actually that left wing at all.
I'm not one of those vulgar Marxists that says that you've got to have
the red flag flying high and a picture of Lenin across your chest
in order for a political project to be worthwhile.
I think that if you, as a leftist, say it's all or nothing,
you've made your peace with nothing.
And when you look at things like excess deaths under austerity,
when you look at reliance on food banks, when you look at the fact that
half of young mums have to skip meals to feed their kids,
I find the idea of nothing out of ideological purity completely unconscionable.
So I think that if your communism leads you to a politics
of despair or disengagement, you are failing the legacy of Marx.
In my opinion.
Here's to being literally a communist.
Literally a communist.
You idiot.
That's your favourite bit?
It is. I love that bit. High five.
Do you high five? I spud.
Let's do that. I don't think I can get away with that.
So now Ash is brainwashing all into becoming communists, or has she?
That's what I want to hear. What do you think about that?
Are you convinced?
Are you now going to call yourself a communist?
What does communism actually mean?
Can we actually get that stateless, classless society?
Material abundance. Freed from the tyranny of the state,
or are we just going to have to settle for some pretty watered down social democracy.
I want to hear your thoughts, particularly maybe if you're on the right.
Leave your comments.
Some of them will be probably quite angry. I'm in the brace position.
But I also want to hear your thoughts for guests,
people you want me to interview over the summer.
Throw them down in the comments section as well.
As ever, spread the word. Subscribe.
I'll see you next time.