The word Socialism and the “left” have been so overused that the words are so vague as to mean whatever the speaker wants to convey. The terms are used casually to mean anything from Stalin to Ed Miliband and Tony Blair. The words are used to group together such diverse societies as the Soviet Union or the Nordic countries. Depending on if you’re going to attack or defend them.

By the dictionary definition, Socialism is not any of the above. The Nordic countries are Capitalist with extended welfare programs, New Labour were at best Social Democrats and the Soviet Union ran society via the state priesthood. The “left” doesn’t even have a defined dictionary definition. For this reason its usage can lead to difficulties as when two people use the word they can mean entirely different concepts.

This vagueness has led to the words being used by the elites and corporations to push their own neo-liberal agendas under the disguise of anti-racism, women’s rights and diversity. Although none of those concepts are under the definition of Socialism, they could be considered left. Many of the elite may be genuinely anti-rascist and for women’s rights and diversity. It is important to note however, that how these agendas are pushed and why they are pushed will differ from that of a Socialist. The end goal is the same but how to achieve them and why they’re needed will differ immensely. They’re used by the elites to cover up and divert from larger social injustices and the root causes which underlie them.

As an example let’s look at how corporations tackle abortion, which is often promoted as a left end goal but do it for elite and corporate financial interests and at the same time show their hypocrisy.

Nearly 200 CEOs signed a letter opposing laws that restrict access to abortion saying they are “bad for business.”

They said:

We, the undersigned, employ more than 129,000 workers and stand against policies that hinder people’s health, independence and ability to fully succeed in the workplace.

If these corporations really did care about the health of their employees then we should see them also advocating for the rights of their workers to receive more equal pay in comparison to the CEOs and the promotion of income equality. As the inequality.org pages state:

In 2017, nations with the smallest income gaps between households at the 90th and 10th percentiles had significantly fewer infant deaths than other nations. A household at the 90th percentile has more income than 90 percent of households. The United States is at the extreme end among other industrialized countries, with the largest gap between the rich and the rest of the population and by far the worst infant mortality rate, at 5.7 per 1,000 live births, compared to just 1.6 per 1,000 in Iceland.

They then go on to say:

….threatens the health, independence and economic stability of our employees and customers.

We know that the health part is pure hypocrisy as otherwise they would focus on other areas like the pay gap which also affects health. However, when you scratch the surface, all of the so called left agendas they push only provide more benefits for themselves. They’re not interested in the larger social structural issues but only what is “bad for business” and in their own words what they want is to “not threaten the economic stability of the employees and customers.”

Going beyond just the corporations, the main reason statistics give for the need to get an abortion in the first place is

Early results indicated that women who carry unwanted pregnancies to term are more likely to live in poverty, while 40% surveyed said they had sought abortions for financial reasons.

If we take this as true then abortion and poverty are linked and this is not just the reason given in the U.K. Abortion is worldwide sold as a way for women to get out of poverty but why are they in poverty in the first place and why can’t they get out of poverty in other ways, like via improving equality or by reducing state Capitalism?

Rachael Orr, Oxfam’s Head of UK Programmes, said: “This research shows that trying to tackle poverty without taking measures to reduce inequality, is like entering a fight with one hand tied behind your back. It explodes the myth that, for those who care about tackling poverty, the gap between rich and poor doesn’t matter.

We see the research done over decades suggest that abortion reduces crime:

The cumulative impact of legalized abortion on crime is roughly 45%, accounting for a very substantial portion of the roughly 50–55% overall decline from the peak of crime in the early 1990s.

Further more, the USA decriminalized abortion nationwide in 1973, just one year earlier in 1972 the Rockerfeller Commission on “Population and the American Future” quoted a 1966 Swedish study, which stated:

There was one study in Sweden in which a sample of children born to women whose applications for abortion were denied, was compared over a 20-year period with a control group of other children born at the same time in the same hospital. They turned out to have been registered more often with psychiatric services, engaged in more antisocial and criminal behavior, and have been more dependent on public assistance.

The UK legalised abortion in 1967, one year after the Swedish study. It seems from the studies that one other possible reason for the promotion of abortion is to just act as a quick fix to reduce the working poor and associated crime that comes with it. Of course the elites can’t just come out and say they back abortion for economic reasons as that will cause too much controversy, instead they promote it for health and rights which seems inconsistent with their overall behaviour. Just like a farmer gives health care to his cattle purely for his own benefit, it’s true that the cattle remain healthy and this is good, we must remember that the farmer does not have the cattle’s interest in mind only a profit motive and the health of the animal is framed around that. We have to take into account the larger social model in which we live and fix it. The end goal is only part of the story, the motives and hows need to be explored too.

This commercialisation of the left has led to some other extraordinary claims. As an example, billionaire George Soros’ Open Borders group is considered by many to be pushing a left wing ideology, not just in the U.K but globally. The idea of billionaires and the elites being left wing is quite far reaching.

The Daily Mail wrote:

Left-wing billionaire’s think-tank aims to use migrant crisis to influence immigration policies worldwide: Plans of George Soros’s think-tank are revealed in leaked memo

It can very well be that George Soros is pushing for open borders but none of them are policies of Socialism and as explained, “the right” and “the left” can have the same end goals but for different reasons and achieve them by different means. It just depends on how you define “the left” and how the policies themselves will be implemented. The dictionary states that socialism is

various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods

As far as I am aware, George Soros does not push that agenda or even come close to it. Never mind corporate tax and corporate subsidies, let’s discuss how awful racism is, open borders! Pure diversion.

Karl Marx himself noted in 1870

But the English bourgeoisie has also much more important interests in the present economy of Ireland. Owing to the constantly increasing concentration of leaseholds, Ireland constantly sends her own surplus to the English labour market, and thus forces down wages and lowers the material and moral position of the English working class. England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this.

Bringing us up to more modern times, The Guardian wrote: “Labour has slipped rightwards on immigration” when Jeremy Corbyn said:

wholesale importation of underpaid workers from central Europe in order to destroy conditions, particularly in the construction industry

The Guardian then went on to correctly write:

Here Corbyn overemphasised marginal and unrepresentative instances, obscuring the fact that it is neoliberalism, not immigration, that pushes down wages and tears up worker protections.

And here the Guardian are missing the key issues. Why can’t immigration be a tool of neo-liberalism? That is the point both Marx, Corbyn and I make, or maybe the Guardian are Guardians of elite doublespeak. Immigration can be a good thing when managed correctly and when the media is not used to drive divisions but we should also recognize that it can be a tool for “hardworking” labour, the Times writes

Britain’s lazy workers are being shamed by an army of highly motivated East European immigrants willing to work long hours, according to a report published by the Home Office.

We see again some word play. They say hard working due to long hours, I say exploited due to less free and family time. People are not tools to be used purely for industry and profit. Immigration is used to cover for the education deficiencies and a divide and conquer elite rule strategy. The right and left both claim to do it for “anti-racism” but the how and the why differ immensely under socialism.

Ed West of the Spectator writes:

In fact, instead of being costly to big business as socialism would be, social justice actually profits them, the most prominent example being mass immigration, which big business is universally in favour of, supported by many Conservatives for economic reasons; even though, from a Burkean point of view, mass immigration makes absolutely no sense — short-term prosperity over posterity.

The Bank of England wrote regarding the impact of immigration that

10% rise in immigration lowers average wages by just under 1% the biggest effect is in the semi/unskilled services sector, where a 10 percentage point rise in the proportion of immigrants is associated with a 2 percent reduction in pay.

A 2% reduction may not seem much but if you take into account that the average British person on a low wage earns 15,840 pounds per year, that 2% is 316 pounds per year or almost 1 weeks wages. Here we see that although immigration does not massively harm wages, it certainly does them no good.

What the pseudo elite left want is exploited/hard working labour and to plug the areas where education and public spending cuts have left a hole for needed skilled workers. Immigration has nothing to do with helping people, it’s all about profit. If we look at the data for refugees, the number of asylum seekers to the UK is very low and in almost all cases the majority have their applications refused. Compared with the majority of economic immigrants, the statistics tell a different story.The source of migrants from the top ten countries are coming from non-war torn countries and this leads me to the conclusion they’re used to plug a skills gap or to be used as exploited/hard-working labour. Like in the case for abortion, the fundamental critique of the Capitalist system is not raised. Diversions and quick patches are applied.

Why does the NHS need so many foreign nationals?

The guardian writes:

The NHS is beset by acute shortages of nurses and paramedics and is facing a skills drain, with staff quitting because of pressurised jobs and poor pay, health service chiefs have said.

Would we not expect the foreign nationals willing to work long hours to be welcomed by the elites or to fill jobs where the UK education system is lacking?

The telegraph even admitted that improvement in education is one answer:

Even if schools began the necessary steps of producing suitably qualified young people today, the holy grail of more IT experts, manufacturing experts, scientists and doctors would still be more than a decade away. So for the foreseeable future, the choice is unfilled vacancies or migration.

The Capitalist need for skilled labour and docile voters is very much late-stage Capitalism. Those arguments are framed too on purely what is best for industry, what about the social context, like house prices and open spaces?

Socialism is not just welfare programs either, again they’re just a lick of paint over a mouldy house. Just because Capitalist societies have tax based education and healthcare programs that doesn’t make them Socialists at all. Again, both the Socialists and the Capitalists want free education but we need to probe the why and the how. Under Capitalism, mass education was designed to make workers “be punctual, docile, and sober”.

According to the economist Joel Mokyr

Much of this education, however, was not technical in nature but social and moral. Workers who had always spent their working days in a domestic setting, had to be taught to follow orders, to respect the space and property rights of others, be punctual, docile, and sober. The early industrial capitalists spent a great deal of effort and time in the social conditioning of their labor force, especially in Sunday schools which were designed to inculcate middle class values and attitudes, so as to make the workers more susceptible to the incentives that the factory needed.

It is also worth noting that it was the Capitalists and elite that supported the Elementary Education Act of 1870 so that people would “vote wisely” after the Reform Act 1867 and to improve the British competitive status. Although these educational reforms were good first steps, we must note too that the interests of the elite and Capitalists is what drove these proposals, not the need to create a well educated and free thinking individual.

As an example,after the student uprising of the 1960s in the West a report was made by the trilateral commission called the “crisis of democracy” in which they wrote:

In most of the Trilateral countries in the past decade there has been a decline in the confidence and trust which the people have in government, in their leaders, and, less clearly but most importantly, in each other. Authority has been challenged not only in government, but in trade unions, business enterprises, schools and universities, professional associations, churches, and civic groups. In the past, those institutions which have played the major role in the indoctrination of the young in their rights and obligations as members of society have been the family, the church, the school, and the army. The effectiveness of all these institutions as a means of socialization has declined severely. The stress has been increasingly on individuals and their rights, interests, and needs, and not on the community and its rights, interests, and needs. These attitudes have been particularly prevalent in the young, but they have also appeared in other age groups, especially among those who have achieved professional, white-collar, and middle-class status. The success of the existing structures of authority in incorporating large elements of the population into the middle class, paradoxically, strengthens precisely those groups which are disposed to challenge the existing structures of authority.

The fact that schools are used for the indoctrination of the young in their rights and obligations is pretty much openly admitted. Now bear in mind the context in which they speak. They’re talking about “the crisis of democracy” in which they write

The European political systems are overloaded with participants and demands, and they have increasing difficulty in mastering the very complexity which is the natural result of their economic growth and political development.

While the Capitalist and the Socialist would see value in education, the socialist system would define the value part differently and depend on participants and demands while the Capitalist one sees to limit them as a crisis of democracy. This need for indoctrination of education is ironically the very reason which leads for the need of mass migration. Hence why a Socialist would advocate education and how that would be implemented would be radically different and lead to different social outcomes. The Socialist, Noam Chomsky writes:

….. the “highest goal in life is to inquire and create. The purpose of education from that point of view is just to help people to learn on their own. It’s you the learner who is going to achieve in the course of education and it’s really up to you to determine how you’re going to master and use it.” An essential part of this kind of education is fostering the impulse to challenge authority, think critically, and create alternatives to well-worn models. This is the pedagogy I ended up adopting, and as a college instructor in the humanities, it’s one I rarely have to justify.

As the elite own the means of communication, we must ensure that our thoughts don’t become too framed in what is good for industry under the alleged end goals of equality, rights and diversity. The Capitalist system will have these injustices built in as the examples above show. The solutions put forward are quick fixes and the underlying problems in society which cause these injustices are never framed. We must look beyond the facade of the Capitalists solutions and call out their hypocrisy. Their solutions only benefit a small percentage of the population and they know it. By wrapping up their proposals in left wing ideology they are hoping to take the moral high ground and denounce anyone who opposes them as racist or with misogyny. They’re also diversions to break a unified working class.We must scratch the surface and understand the underlying economic reasons for the social injustices the majority face and how and why we arrived at the situation we see today. When we start asking those questions as opposed to the ones framed by the media, we may start changing society.

Check out similar thoughts on my Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/MrTweedyDocumentaries