David Aaronovitch: Once A Marxist

According to David Aaronovitch, downward mobility is now practically impossible, and that is a bad thing. He thinks that lawyers are in the middle, but then fabulously remunerated and well-placed "opinion formers" almost always do think that. Why wouldn't they?

The main point is that this man, an old Communist Party hand and key figure in British neoconservatism, still thinks that the poor can only be enriched by impoverishing whoever he thinks is in the middle. In true neocon fashion, he argues that we stopped the working class from looking after its children, so we should stop the real bourgeoisie (rather than one stripped, as neocons wish, of all the best bourgeois characteristics while retaining all the worst) from doing the same thing.

British Marxism has always been parasitic on a Labour Movement not only unconnected, but fundamentally hostile, to it. This is as true of neoconservatism as ever it was of Aaronovitch's (former?) Stalinism or of Trotskyism. We urgently need a new political movement, committed to social democracy precisely because it understands what needs to be conserved thereby (and conserved from what).

And that movement will have to be on its guard againt all forms of Marxism to an extent which Labour, despite valiant efforts, never really managed, until Marxism in its neoconervative form eventually destroyed the Labour Movement itself.