Who's right can often depend on who's left
It goes back to the French revolution of 1789. At the Revolutionary Convention the most radical of the insurgents decided to seat themselves on the left side. 'Why not on the other side, the right side, the place of rectitude, where law and the higher right resided, when man's best hand could be raised in righteous honour?' wrote Melvin Lasky in Encounter. 'Anyway they went left, and man's political passions have never been the same.'
When Oskar Lafontaine, the German finance minister, broke with chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in the early days of the last Social Democratic government, he explained it was 'because my heart beats on the left'. The right could never say that, even British Conservative Party leader David Cameron. When Humpty Dumpty insisted on his own 'master-meanings' he reassured Alice, 'When I make a word do a lot of work like that, I always pay it extra...'
British leftists sometimes stretch their minds to work out if Prospect is left or right. I tell them that it is hard to tell most of the time, which is how an intellectual magazine should be.
Perhaps if they want to study the ambiguities and contradictions of intellectual leftists they should be informed that once upon a time - 160 years ago - there was a writer, a philosopher, who spent most of his time in the British Museum and who moved his family from Soho to Primrose Hill. He wanted his maturing daughters to have the chance of meeting a better class of men. His wife, too, was pleased because she could now invite ladies to tea. A suitor of one his daughters was given the door as he seemed unstable with his revolutionary opinions. Marx wrote soon after that he thought the 'historical' process had already started to undermine 'bourgeois society'.
One disciple of Marx lived in 1916 as an emigre in Zurich. He lived an exemplary bourgeois life. Each morning he would clean his room in the fastidious Swiss way. In the evening, his writing finished, he refused to listen to classical music, which he liked, lest it excite his emotions. He would complain about the noisy behaviour of emigres who lived down the hall, especially one who constantly smoked and spent much time going to the cinema. These three characters were all ardent leftists, the first Karl Marx, the second V.I. Lenin and the third Julius Martov (the Menshevik leader).
Are political views, whether left or right, influenced by different personality constellations? Marx and Lenin were natural authoritarians. Martov (and we could have added Frederick Engels) was not. So this effort at political classification doesn't work.
Who's left? Who's right? Mao Zedong thought he had solved the problem by unmasking in the Communist Party what he called 'capitalist-roaders'. They were people like fellow Long Marchers and apparent backbones of the party - Liu Shaoqi, the head of state; Lin Biao, the minister of defence; and Deng Xiaoping, a strict Marxist but a later capitalist convert.
Jonathan Power is a London-based journalist
