Jackie Danicki

I was delighted this week to receive the full text, in my email, of one of Dr. Sean Gabb’s recent speeches on the British Establishment and how it might be overthrown. Sean is a master of winding people up (including me, oftentimes), but he is very frequently dead right. Even when I disagree with him - which, as I always preface my approving notices of his words, is not uncommon - he does manage to make me laugh. (Check out the Q&A portion that follows Sean’s speech for some very hilarious moments with outraged Conservatives.) But he does know how to make a serious point.

If you want to win the battle for this country, you need to take advice from the Marxists. These are people whose ends were evil where not impossible. But they were experts in the means to their ends. They knew more than we have ever thought about the seizure and retention of power. I therefore say this to you. If you ever do come to power, and if you want to bring about the irreversible transfer of power to ordinary people, you should take to heart what Marx said in 1871, after the failure of the Paris Commune: “The next attempt of the French Revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it, and this is the precondition for every real people’s revolution.”

The meaning of this is that you should not try to work with the Establishment. You should not try to jolly it along. You should not try fighting it on narrow fronts. You must regard it as the enemy, and you must smash it.

…The purpose is to destroy the Establishment before it can destroy you. You must tear up the web of power and personal connections that make these people effective as an opposition to radical change. If you do this, you will face no more clamour than if you moved slowly and half-heartedly.

This is good, too:

There are two ways of doing politics. One is to listen to focus groups and opinion polls, and offer the people what they claim to want. The other is to stand up and tell them what they ought to want, and to keep arguing until the people agree that they want it, or until it is shown not to be worth wanting. I think I know what sort of politicians will run the next Conservative Government. What sort of politicians do you want to be?

Once, when I was very despondent about the state of public opinion in the UK, I asked Sean what people like me could do. His answer: Keep being an extremist. You help to shift the centrist positions closer to what is correct. As he says in an answer to one horrified Conservative:

All debate is perceived as taking place on a spectrum that has a centre and two extremes…Since most people consciously take centrist positions, it is in your interest - regardless of whether I am right - to say what I do. It makes you and your friends moderate in relation to me.

Our mutual friend Brian Micklethwait reports here on Sean’s speech, with commentary worth reading.

Filed under: Life