Even Karl Marx respected the rich more than Rachel Reeves

Telegraph

18-05-2025

Labour owes more to Methodism than Marxism. Or so its general secretary from 1944 to 1962, Morgan Phillips, famously postulated.
The Welsh ex-miner himself was not a paragon of Wesleyan virtues. Alongside his Labour colleagues, Nye Bevan and Richard Crossman, he sued The Spectator for libel in 1957 for suggesting that the threesome exhibited an insatiable capacity for downing whisky while attending a socialist conference in Venice.
The Labour men won, and the magazine only narrowly avoided closure – Crossman's posthumously published diaries revealed The Spectator's claims were true.
Nevertheless, a moralising streak has long been at the vanguard of Labour thinking, and the party's attacks on the rich ever since it first came to power have been at least as much motivated by the notion that accumulating great wealth is just wrong than by socialist ideology. Today's Labour Party is far removed from the muscular Christianity of the chapel.
But its attitude to wealth and the rich displays a closer affinity to the moral judgments of stern church elders than to the strictures of Karl Marx. A secularised, bastardised version of Christian morality holds sway in the party, and indeed the wider Left. It sees riches as sinful, a moral failing that requires earthly retribution, or rather redistribution.
But the quest for immodest terrestrial riches has arguably been the greatest engine of progress in human history. And one does not have to be a starry eyed pro-market zealot to believe this. It is something the 19th century German sage well understood.
Surprising as it may sound, Marx and Friedrich Engels' The Communist Manifesto, published in London in 1848, contains one of the finest paeans to the achievements of the capitalist class ever penned: 'The bourgeoisie... has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals...
'The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.
'Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground – what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?'
Ayn Rand, the author of the cult pro-capitalist novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, could have proudly put those words into one of her heroes speeches. Why was the very font of anti-capitalist thought championing capitalists?
Marx's condemnation of the bourgeoisie was predominantly not a moral one. For our Karl, history is very much not just a tale of one damn thing after another. He had inculcated the pre-existing nostrum that history has a predestined direction and is shaped not by individual choices, but by vast impersonal forces.
And capitalism is one of the essential stages, an unavoidable prerequisite, leading to the eventual communist nirvana.
Marx believed that capitalism's overthrow would come about through its own success. The market – and this is where old Charlie got it spectacularly wrong – would eventually satiate all bourgeois demand. Overproduction, and counter-intuitively mechanisation (he was also quite wrong about this), would reduce the capitalists' profits.
Marx's adoption of the labour theory of value – the idea that the worth of any good is determined by the amount of work put into it, a nostrum that was already losing its lustre during the lifetime of socialism's founding father – meant that the bourgeoisie would only have one option to maintain their riches.
And that is scalping a larger share of what the workers' labour has produced. The eventual result of the proletariat's consequent immiseration would be world revolution.
For many Marxists, the big question for the last 180 years has been, when will this crisis of capitalism come? Every downturn and every slump, the communists among us hope, may finally be corroboration of their apostle's creed. But somehow the markets always bounce back. The demise of the bourgeoisie has been endlessly foretold – and endlessly delayed.
When some of those Labour figures most deeply pickled in Marxist dogma, people like Ken Livingstone, the former London mayor, state that socialism has not failed, but is yet to come, this is what they mean.
It is not just a hopeful refrain that true socialism will make a comeback. It is a profound belief that Marx's grand schema is still working through its modes and history has not played its last hand yet.
The Marxist Left – or at least some of them, communists as a breed are more schismatic than any Christian denomination – understand what capitalism has achieved. The most enlightened of them even appreciate that capitalists may still have a good long run left in them.
But instead of this understanding, for today's Labour Party, the accumulation of wealth is a morality tale, or rather a saga of immorality. Those who become rich must somehow be perfidious and squalid.
And thus wealth taxes, non-dom crackdowns, and VAT on school are the least that they deserve. The fact that such taxes make society poorer as a whole can safely be ignored as sinners must be punished.
When Peter Mandelson proclaimed that he was 'intensely relaxed about people getting filthy stinking rich', he wasn't actually speaking out of turn. That sentiment has a very good Left-wing pedigree, Marx would certainly have agreed.