Andrew Kenny: Proof that the left despises the working class - Biznews

Andrew Kenny argues that those identifying with the political left consistently display contempt for the working classes. Citing historical and contemporary examples, he contends that leftist leaders, from Marx to present-day figures like Blade Nzimande, prioritize power and personal luxury over the welfare of labourers, contrasting their rhetoric with actions that perpetuate social and economic disparities.

Andrew Kenny

I never know what the political terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ stand for and nobody has ever explained them to me, although they are used all the time. But there is one consistent attitude in all people who call themselves ‘left’: they all despise the working classes. 

They show this in their political actions and their personal behaviour. From Karl Marx in the 19th Century to Blade Nzimande today, left-leaning people look down their noses at the workers and want to have as little to do with them as possible. If they are in a position to persecute them, as were Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim Jong Un and Fidel Castro, they do. Recent events in South Africa, including further revelations about the VBS last week, demonstrate the utter contempt in which left-leaning political leaders here hold the black working classes.

The first Marxists in power, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, were only interested in power and glory. They were not interested in their own material well-being and lived austere lives (somewhat like Hitler). Those that followed them were different, and very interested in luxuries and expensive goodies from the capitalist West, which they enjoyed while condemning the working classes to socialist squalor. African Marxists followed their example to an extreme degree – bloated with capitalist luxuries, shunning the working classes and chanting Marxist slogans.

By the “working classes” I mean labourers, servants, artisans and other non-professional people who work with their hands. (Surgeons also work with their hands but are professionals.) By the “bourgeoisie” I mean those who are not working-class or aristocratic: the middle-classes. Marx, who himself was bourgeois, used the term in another sense, to mean capitalists. Teachers, academics, professionals, administrators, businessmen, activists and merchants all belong to the bourgeoisie. All revolutionaries come from the bourgeoisie. Lenin and Trotsky were bourgeois to their boots.

Apart from this, I don’t know what ‘left’ and ‘right’ stand for. I ask people about Fidel Castro. He was a rich, bourgeois white man; he took over Cuba by force, ruled by terror, ended all democracy, persecuted homosexuals, turned Cuba from one of the richest countries in Latin America to one of the poorest while making himself extremely wealthy, and caused hundreds of thousands of working-class people to flee Cuba. Was Castro left-wing or right-wing? If you want to ban same-sex unions and homosexual activity, as do Hamas and Iran, are you more left-wing or more-right wing than Israel, which permits them? Is Islam more right-wing than Christianity? Considering their views on women’s rights, abortion, African immigrants and the death penalty, are black labourers in South Africa more right-wing than white sociology professors? 

Karl Marx, born 1818, became famous by saying that history was only driven by economics and that it progressed inevitably through ascending stages of progress, from primitive beginnings to feudalism to capitalism to working-class utopia. He contradicted himself all the time, in his theories and even more in his personal behaviour. 

Economics does influence history greatly, as Adam Smith in the 18th Century pointed out far more accurately than Marx, but not entirely. Marx in his personal life was hardly driven by economics at all, except to avoid bankruptcy, since he was hopeless with money. He was driven by a gigantic ego, the lust for fame, and a seething, romantic hatred. Lenin was much the same. 

The working-classes that Marx described in his writing were not real people at all, but a theoretical abstraction. Real workers he despised and avoided like the plague. He never worked in a factory, probably never entered a factory and never showed any interest in doing so. He spent his life not among steam engines and steelworks, but sitting on a chair in the British library reading factory reports written by the inspectors of capitalist Britain. He selected only those reports that showed bad conditions for workers and ignored the ones that showed good conditions. Even more, he ignored the continual improvement in the well-being of workers. Often, he lied outright. 

Lenin similarly had never worked in a factory in his life and hadn’t a clue what went on in factories. He lived his life before 1917 entirely among bourgeois revolutionaries such as himself. He regarded the working-classes with patronising contempt. He would never have come to power but for the First World War and the stupid policies of the revolutionary government that overthrew the Tzar in February 1917. 

In October 1917, this weak government had all but given up, and Lenin seized the moment and took over Russia with a small band of activists led by Trotsky. Lenin immediately set up a reign of terror, crushing all democracy and dissent, and plunged Russia into civil war and famine. When Lenin died in 1924, the Russian working-classes were far worse off than they had been under the Tzars. Stalin continued his ruinous communist policies and killed millions of workers and peasants in his famines in the 1930s. Lenin is a hero to the “left leaning” bourgeoisie around the world, including South Africa. The EFF is proud to describe itself as “Marxist-Leninist”.

Julius Malema, the EFF leader, is proud to own two Range Rovers, a Mercedes C63, a Mercedes Viano, an Aston Martin and other luxury cars. He travels in these, while the black working classes travel in public transport. He is also proud to disport himself in Armani, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Lacoste and other items of revolutionary splendour. He sends his children to private schools with white teachers and uses private medicine, while the black working classes go to state schools with black teachers and use state hospitals. The revolutionary, progressive, left-leaning, socialist leaders in the SA Communist Party, the ANC and MK behave in the same way.

When the results of the May election came in and it was announced that the DA and others were going to join the ANC in a GNU, there was an immediate clamour from left-leaning people that the ANC had sold out to the “neo-liberal”, “right-wing”, “anti-worker”, “counter revolutionary” DA. What were they talking about? Black working-class people for a long time have been fleeing from regions ruled by the ANC, such as the Eastern Cape, to regions ruled by the DA, such as the Western Cape. The black working classes obviously think the ‘right-wing, counter-revolutionary DA’ treats them better than the left-wing, revolutionary ANC. Some of the left-leaning commentators wondered why the ANC hadn’t gone into coalition or GNU with left-leaning parties such as the EFF or MK. There was also a warning that the DA might end the “gains of the working classes” under 30 years of ANC. Pardon?

What gains might these be? 42% unemployment? Black working-class children suffering permanent brain damage through lack of food? A disastrous state education system for working-class black children? Under progressive ministers of education such as Dr Naledi Pandor, the ANC has produced some of the worst educational outcomes in the world, worse than in many poorer countries in Africa. Working-class children in South Africa have some of the lowest results anywhere for literacy, maths and science. Most of them cannot read for meaning. But of course, the progressive, revolutionary, left-leaning ANC ministers all send their children to private or semi-private schools. They would shudder at the thought of their children sitting next to working-class children.

The scandal around the Venda Building Society (VBS) erupted again last week. The VBS in Limpopo took money from poor rural workers, who put their life savings into it. It was systematically looted. It collapsed, ruining black workers. The EFF was heavily implicated, including Brian Shivambu, brother of Floyd Shivambu, deputy president of the EFF. The rumours were that the luxury cars and lavish lifestyles of the EFF leaders had been funded by VBS corruption – in other words, from the pockets of poor black workers in Limpopo. Last week, the disgraced head of the VBS, Tshifhiwa Matodzi, said that he had given R16.1 million to Julius Malema and Floyd Shivambu as a “donation”. They then proceeded to spend this huge amount of money on expensive upgrades to their luxury houses and a restaurant in Soweto.

Did the revolutionary EFF leaders, Malema and Shivambu, sit down and ponder: “Hmmm, we’ve now been given R16.1 million from the VBS. Should we spend this money on food for starving black working-class children or should we spend it on even more luxuries for ourselves.” I don’t think so. I don’t think they even gave a thought to starving working class children. In fact, I don’t think they ever think of real working-class people at all. They automatically spent the loot on luxuries for themselves, secure in the knowledge that whatever they do, an influential sector of our mass media will always regard them as left-leaning and revolutionary as long as they chant Marxist slogans and tell us how much they hate the ‘racist, imperialist, capitalist, right-wing West’, and its ‘counter-revolutionary’ allies here, such as the DA and Helen Zille.

Andrew Kenny is a writer, an engineer and a classical liberal

https://www.biznews.com/thought-leaders/2024/07/21/andrew-kenny-left-despises-working-class

This article was first published on the Daily Friend.