The Right is in crisis following the collapse of
the neoliberal economic order and of its neoconservative geopolitics. The Left
is in crisis due to the second collapse of Marxism in as many generations,
namely that of Trotskyism in the form of neoconservatism.
No one seems to know how to address such
questions as the global economic crisis that began in 2008, the prolonged
aftermath of the events of 11th September 2001, the rise of Asia,
the redefinition of the European Union and of the United Kingdom’s relationship
with it, and the redefinition of the United Kingdom and of the identity of each
of its constituent parts.
However, attendance to what were once the largely
ignored and marginalised phenomena of environmentalism, feminism, Third World
liberation movements, the influence of tendencies such as Black Power and Black
Consciousness, and the use of homosexuality as a mark of individual and
collective identity, has opened up the space for attendance to what are largely
ignored and marginalised phenomena today.
Those include the Classical, Biblical, Medieval
and Early Modern heritages that define the traditions deriving from
disaffection with the events of 1688, 1776 and 1789.
Those traditions emphasise the indispensable role
of the State in protecting against the market everything that conservatives
seek to conserve. They offer perennial critiques of individualism, capitalism,
imperialism, militarism, bourgeois triumphalism, and the fallacy of inevitable
historical progress.
They uphold the full compatibility between, on
the one hand, the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and
cultural expansion and development, and, on the other hand, the most active
concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures
bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past.
Among the expressions of those traditions are the
trade union, co-operative and mutual, Radical Liberal, Tory populist, Guild
Socialist, Christian Socialist, Social Catholic and Distributist, and many
other roots of the British, Irish and Commonwealth Labour Movements.
Variously, those roots have been embedded in,
have been fed and watered by, and have grown into economic and wider patriotism
locally and nationally, proud provincialism, worker-intellectualism, and
organic working-class culture and self-organisation in town and country.
This sensibility includes a strong affinity with
the recent historical reality of workers’ self-management and profit-sharing
within a multinational state which included both culturally Christian and culturally
Muslim places and peoples, and which enjoyed vast global influence while
resolutely pursuing peace and eschewing transnational military power blocs.
Opposition to the shameful British role in
destroying that (rather Anglophile) multinational state first began to bring
back together the traditional British Right and the traditional British Left,
each of which found itself excluded from consideration and debate.
“Identity politics”, as if there could ever be
any other kind, are being appropriated, deployed, transformed and transcended
by heterosexual males, by Christians, by the White British ethnic group, by
those who identify specifically as English, and by people of mixed ethnic
heritage.
It is now possible to listen directly to the
voices of all parts of the world. The old have never been so energetic, their
numbers and expectations having increased enormously. The young are as
energetic as ever, and politically more so than in at least a generation,
technology having made them better-organised than ever before, while other
trends have greatly disadvantaged them compared with their recent predecessors.
The mass anti-war movement has also become the
mass anti-cuts movement, both of which are anchored on the Left but reach deep
into Tory Britain on conservative principles of foreign policy realism and the
use of State action to defend organic communities against unbridled capital.
This list is very far from being exhaustive.
The United Kingdom is uniquely well-placed to
host these discussions, being the bridge between Europe and the
English-speaking world, being the heart of the Commonwealth, being the home of
the British Council and of the BBC, and being possessed of the world city.
Our critique of Whiggery predates any
Counterrevolutionary movement on the Continent, because it predates any
Revolution there or in North America. Our Left is itself deeply rooted in the
anti-Whig subcultures.
Predating Marx, it long predates Gramsci in
meeting and transcending his aspirations. Like that of the traditions which
produced it and with which it exists in constant creative tension, our Left’s
very existence is a standing contradiction of economic determinism and of
metaphysical materialism.
By never compromising either the theoretical or
the practical, and by drawing on the fine arts and on the humanities, on the
social sciences and on the natural sciences, on elite culture and on popular
culture, on “religious” material and on “secular” material, engagement with
these and related ontological, epistemological, ethical and aesthetic resources
will help to restore the possibility of an economy and a society, of a common
culture and a polity, of a Right and a Left.
David Lindsay is the Founder, Proprietor,
Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of The Lanchester Review.
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