I Sat Down With a Communist

Recently I spent some time in the company of a friend of a friend in the north of England. I’ll call her Sally, which isn’t her real name. We had one especially interesting conversation, which I will relate here in a hideously biased way (I’m kidding - I’ll try to be fair).

We started by talking about relationships we’d previously had, and I gave her a few details of my past love life. Unfortunately this led her to the blunt conclusion that I was ‘shallow, sexist and misogynistic’. Which was a shame. I contended that I don’t hate women, I love them, but she told me I was the product of an evil white capitalist patriarchal society.

Sally believes that women are better at everything than men, and there is historical proof of matriarchal societies that were extremely successful. I said I’d be surprised if matriarchal societies existed in the past if only because the superior physical strength of men ensured they got their way. I recommended the book A Billion Years Of Sex Differences to her. She thinks that there still aren’t nearly enough women in the likes of politics or business.

She then came out with the line “I’m a communist!”, Ash Sarkar style. I think she’d been looking forward to saying that, like vegans do when they tell you they’re a vegan around four and a half minutes after you meet them.

This surprised me. Sally lives in a house worth nearly half a million pounds, containing stunning furnishings and all kinds of luxurious products and gadgets that in total must be worth half that again. She employs a cleaner and a gardener. Perhaps none of this should have surprised me.

She explained to me why Soviet communism was so great, at least in its early stages. “It raised millions out of poverty,” she told me. Hmm, did it?

“Was Stalin a good man?” I interjected.

“Yes,” she replied.

“What about the Ukrainian famines in which millions died?” I asked. I can’t remember what her answer to that was, although her answers were generally along the lines of: you have been lied to by the capitalist patriarchs, and the truth is known by academics who can prove that things were different through verifiable data.

“Have you read Animal Farm?” I asked, name-checking one of my favourite books by one of my favourite writers. (Later, I discovered that she does indeed own it, along with 1984 and Homage To Catalonia.)

She retorted that Orwell had changed the end of the book under CIA orders, did I know that. I said I didn’t. But even if he did, I’m not sure it makes any difference to the book’s greatness. (I’ve just looked up that allegation, and it appears that it was the 1954 animated film adaptation’s ending that was altered under CIA influence, after Orwell’s death.)

She made mention of the ‘global south’, which is the first time I’ve heard that phrase in normal conversation. I made some very mildly disparaging remark about the industry and talent in that part of the world and she said, “Oh, are we going to have to add ‘r*cism’ to your sexism and misogyny?”

I said I hoped not and gave her my view that for almost the entirety of humanity, people lived in dirt poor conditions until capitalism came along to lift millions out of penury, and is still doing so every single day. I really must point her towards humanprogress.org.

The word ‘fascism’ came out of her mouth almost as many times as ‘communism’, with her telling me that Stalin was determined to protect the USSR against fascism. It seems clear to me that dictators like him and Putin invent or exaggerate an external threat so they can carry out their terror at home.

Sally believes that Soviet Russia fell apart because of what the West was doing to threaten and undermine it, rather than what was actually happening inside Russia. I asked her whether she’d be willing to visit the many communist museums in liberated Eastern Europe that I have visited, such as the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia in Riga, and she said she might, but she was less trusting of people’s ‘opinions’ than what she deemed ‘facts’.

I found it difficult to penetrate her ideological shell, which was fortified by constant reference to academic studies I was unfamiliar with, and a devotion to concepts rather than human behaviour. My points like ‘when the Berlin Wall fell, people only ran in one direction’ failed to land with her.

I tried to move us away a little from the nitty-gritty of politics and asked her whether any of what she wanted could really be achieved, and whether she felt communism was making her happier than she otherwise would be. She insisted that it was, that it gave her some solidity in her mind after being troubled for many years before. I observed that the way she was talking about communism, it made it sound like a religion, but she disputed my analysis.

(Incidentally, Sally is also into witchcraft. She believes she has cast spells that have helped her in the past. I don’t bring this up to mock her, because I like her very much (she has many wonderful qualities I haven’t mentioned in this article!), but to highlight my confusion resulting from her statement that she examines life from a purely logical standpoint.)

She also gave hymns of praise to investigative journalists, whom she sees as the real truth-tellers. I noticed a book by John Pilger on her shelf, near her Free Palestine mug. I mused that some investigative journalists would not be her cup of herbal tea; I wouldn’t imagine she’s much of an Andy Ngo fan, for instance, who I think is brilliant.

What I took away from our conversation - which never got heated or noisy, largely because I want to go to bed with her - was that a form of Sally’s views are subtly embedded in national and international institutions. People who think like her are all over academia, charities, NGOs, media etc, and they have enormous influence. We ordinary people may believe the world’s gone mad, but it’s the hard Left’s world now and their complaint is that the globe isn’t anywhere near as Left-wing as it should be.

I’ll finish on a (sort of) hopeful note. A little later I had a browse of a magazine of hers that was lying around, Workers, the journal of the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) - and I agreed with most of what was in there! There were anti-EU articles, anti-mass immigration articles, anti-Net Zero articles. It was like this Substack except it costs £1 a copy. Now I understand more about where the Spiked lot are coming from.

So perhaps I can find more common ground with Sally the next time we meet. That’d be nice. Love, peace and harmony and all that.

Russell David is the author of the Mad World Substack.