Laughter and Loathing
On purity, protest, and the politics of eating your own
What is the difference between capitalism and socialism? Under capitalism, man exploits his fellow man. Under socialism, it’s the other way around.
Slavic humour is unmatched in its pessimism. Beleaguered Soviet citizens sharpened black humour to such a serrated edge that the above joke came with a prison sentence. Under the infamous Article 58, joking about the Soviet regime was “counter-revolutionary activity.” Mere accusation sent millions to labour camps. Slipping a cutting remark into the wrong ears spelled decades of black bread and breaking rocks in frozen, desolate outposts. Escape came in an unmarked box.
Russian humour honours the tragedy of Russian history. British humour riots in understatement. The great irony of the humourless British left is its matchless ability to provoke fits of laughter.
This week, the British left’s true believers birthed, strangled at birth, and re-birthed a fresh political party.
As I type, Your Party, the nameless ultra-left creation of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, exists. By the end of this page, it may have dissolved into the ether. By this essay’s end, I expect more deaths and reincarnations than a Hindu saint.
Your Party caters to the millions of enlightened souls who wave any flag except their own and who support any regime, no matter how backwards and murderous, over that of the ‘evil’ West.
The lovechild of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana endured a complicated birth. First of all, Sultana, a leading light of the left, announced the party before Father Jeremy, a veteran left-winger, had signed the venture off. Last week, Sultana launched a membership scheme at a princely £5 a month.
Twenty thousand signed up, only for Fruit (Mr Corbyn) to veto the Nut’s (Sultana) unauthorised gambit. Fruit called the lawyers. Nut claimed she’d been the victim of a right-wing coup. The folly curdled. Fruit, along with four independent MPs all elected on their promise to put Gaza first, turned on the Nut.
Nut dusted off the well-worn conspiracy playbook, claiming: “I’ve been sidelined by a sexist boy’s club!” Ironically, the mean boys sent the Coventry South MP to Coventry. In short, the Fruit has collided with the Nut, and the dung has communed with the fan.
Nut has form. At just 31, she embodies that grubby sphere of the modern left captured by self-pity, resentment, conspiracy theory, and victimhood. They blame a broken shoelace on the far-right or the Jews. Sorry, I mean ‘the Zionists’. Nut has an uncanny facility to cover herself head-to-toe in the victimhood label du jour.
But perhaps she has a point: in many constituencies represented by Corbyn’s independent chums—a cadre of socially conservative Muslim men—political meetings segregate by sex, i.e. the men tell the women to shut up and make the chai.
The problem is baked in. In middle adolescence, both Fruit and Nut read a little Marx. In their hands: the diagnosis and cure to every problem beguiling man since Homer’s time. But the gods have other plans. Any inkling of earthly Utopia provokes them into laughter and loathing.
Teenagers—both the chronological and the political varieties—have two problems. One, they know everything. Two, they know nothing. They’d much prefer, like Corbyn did as Labour leader, to skulk in the cheap seats, wallowing in their unblemished idealism. Whereas social democrats made peace with reality, and put more money in pockets, more bright kids into universities, and improved the lot of most, the hard left made the perfect the sworn enemy of the good.
This folie à deux encapsulates the modern left. Why is Corbyn playing footsie with hardline theocrats? When he was a chronological teenager, the left cared for the man in overalls and the woman at the typewriter. But the Daily Breaders couldn’t decipher the imponderabilia of the left. They weren’t interested in dialectical Marxism. They wanted—and still want—higher wages and lower rents.
And so, we enjoy the lurid spectacle of Corbyn, a man who thinks a necktie symbolises patriarchal brutality, siding with theocrats whose views on gay marriage and what one councillor derided as “the free mixing of the sexes,” would blush the cheeks of an 18th century prosecutor.
How the far left reconciles blue-haired, pronouns-in-bio hyper-liberals, who think men can get pregnant, with ultra-conservatives who think women are reproductive cattle, is not yet apparent. Perhaps Sultana has a point: one half of the party would fly the flag for women’s liberation; the other half would wrap that flag around women’s heads lest their immodesty provoke impure thoughts. Call me a realist, but I cannot see a compromise on the horizon.
And so, the far-left douses itself in petrol, facetimes its ex-girlfriend, and strikes a match. Utopia eats itself. And the gods laugh.
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Silly boy! Ludicrously illogical inconsistency is the mother’s milk of the modern Left! If they can’t scream two impossibilities before breakfast, clearly they’re being oppressed!
excellent as always