Declaring class war
An extraordinary document has appeared from a group at the London School of Economics calling itself “LSE Class War.” It puts forward a series of “demands” which reveal a totally misguided view of what the world is actually like.
Number one on their list is the installation of a David Graeber lecture series to honour the memory of a left-wing and anarchist activist who died last September aged 59. He seems to have been more of a political activist than an academic, helping to establish the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, and enthusiastically supporting Jeremy Corbyn in the 2019 election, despite being a US, rather than a UK citizen.
This gesture to honour him is coupled with a demand to cease honouring the ex-LSE Nobel Laureate economist and philosopher, Friedrich Hayek. They want the LSE Hayek Society dissolved “because it promotes free market fundamentalist views which outwardly call for the oppression of working class people.” This is, of course, a total travesty. Hayek’s views have done more to elevate the condition of working classes throughout the world than virtually anyone else’s. Global free markets have lifted billions of people out of poverty, subsistence and starvation.
Oblivious to this, LSE Class Wars wants discussion of his ideas silenced, together with the dissolution of other societies that promote similar views. Presumably this would include the Economics Society and the Conservative Association amongst others. It does not want their ideas simply opposed; it wants them silenced, together with any discussion of them.
They also want the LSE “decolonized,” calling for BAME quotas for the hiring of academics. Lecturers and professors are not to be appointed on academic merit or scholarship, but on skin colour and ethnic background. It’s doubtful whether their idol, David Graeber, would have been appointed under this policy, since it’s unlikely that they include Jews as an oppressed minority.
Their other “demands” include banning people who attended private schools from studying at the LSE. This would certainly alter the ethnic balance there, since most foreign, non-white students were privately educated. It would also alter the LSE’s finance sheet, since without their fees it would probably go bankrupt in short order.
They oppose social mobility, and want the words deleted from the title of the student union’s “working class and social mobility officer.” They say that social mobility means that “only a few of the working class can transcend their class position,” and instead want “all working-class people to rise together.” It seems to have escaped their notice that by attending universities such as the LSE, most people from working-class backgrounds can gain access to middle-class employment. In the real world they would concentrate on removing barriers to social mobility so that more could rise, but in their fantasy class-struggle world they want to prevent that until, in the words of Lewis Carroll’s dodo, “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”
It would be easy to dismiss them as a tiny, deranged group of fanatics. But the Bolsheviks and the Nazis started as similar groups and went on to stamp out freedom and slaughter millions. The LSE Class War group deserve attention because the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Their document is well worth reading. It is a fascinating study in psychopathology.