Folks, they're making the New Soviet Man mistake again

The arrival of New Soviet Man was at first ecstatically predicted, then grimly awaited and finally the non-arrival mourned. For those who devised the socialist system were fully aware that human beings did not in fact act in the ways that would make such a system work. But that’s fine, build the system anyway and await that arrival of the new type of human who would make the wheels turn and the clocks tick.

This is the New Soviet Man mistake. To insist that folks will be, or are, how they need to be for your idea, your system, the plan, to work. Rather than observing how they are and then devising ways to deal with that nature:

The British like to think that they have a uniquely profound understanding of class. In truth, it’s the opposite. The arcane rules of the country’s class system mean we have a deranged understanding of our divisions, one that is informed not by whether someone owns financial assets or capital or employs people, but by their accent, hobbies and choice of supermarket.

That’s exactly the mistake being made there. Man is a purely economic being, we should view relationships between men in those purely economic terms. Thus class must be defined solely in those purely economic terms, capitalist, bourgeois, prole and the one rarely mentioned these days, lumpen. That this is necessary to make Marxism work as a method of understanding society and that we’re using Soviet to describe it is just a coincidence - any manner of describing humans as other than they are is that new man problem.

For we in Britain do not define class in that manner. It is about accent, education, interests, even, as George Mikes pointed out, shaving upon Sundays. The only ones who didn’t in his day were the toffs and the lumpen - everyone else did. Similarly, it’s long been a standing joke that the worst dressed person in the room is the toffest - to the point that a snide about Michael Heseltine was his mistake in getting his hand made suits to actually fit him.

Perhaps it’s even true that we ought to regard class purely through that lens of economic relationships. But we don’t and that’s all there is to it. Plans devised for the British have to deal with us as we are, not as we should be to fit the plan. Anything else is to condemn to that wait for the New Man who isn’t going to turn up.