a brief, nasty case of Very Serious Syndrome

Boy, Jacobin's Margaret Thatcher obituary from today is hot fucking garbage. It's incredible to me that a magazine that has been founded on explicit class antagonism is laying wreaths on the grave of one of the most enthusiastic defenders of privilege and the upper class in recent memory. Margaret Thatcher was a woman who not only materially defended the needs of the upper classes (some of them literal nobility!) against the lower classes, she was a constant voice for the cultural and social superiority of the upper classes against the low. The obituary makes that plain enough. "Thatcher thought of herself as a product of this superior form of society." Indeed. And the way to respond to this class pride from above is not with anodyne neutrality.

But, okay. They wanted to publish something restrained. I think that's a mistake, but I guess I get it. I don't get writing an obituary of Margaret Thatcher for a left-wing publication that fails to mention her support for Pinochet of Chile, for Suharto in Indonesia, or for the explicitly racist white government of 1980s South Africa. (Pinochet, in particular, she supported for years and years after all of his crimes had become public knowledge.) If a magazine with that title doesn't see fit to point out a world leader's consistent and forceful opposition to resistance and liberation movements, something has gone badly wrong.

But it's on the subject of the Poll Tax that the piece is most infuriating.

With her Community Charge — better known as the Poll Tax — she planned to restore responsibility to local electorates. The tax burden would be basically equalised for each individual voter, encouraging a sense of responsibility and due regard for sober economy in the polling booth. 

Logical in theory, the Poll Tax demonstrated Thatcher’s departure from her previous sure touch for popular opinion.

I would make fun of this if it appeared in The New Republic, let alone a Marxist magazine. If it isn't abundantly clear: "equalizing the tax burden" in a system of great inequality is regressive. The essential logic of all flattening of tax burdens is inherently regressive. That's why a reactionary politician like Margaret Thatcher called for it. This logic was not lost on the people of the UK, who virulently opposed the Poll Tax. They identified it, correctly, as a massive transfer away from the lower classes and towards the rich. Because the focus was on number of persons instead of amount of resources or property, rich people with small families paid proportionally less than poor people with big families. As the Independent put it, "In practice, critics pointed out, that meant a millionaire living alone in a mansion would pay less than the average family."

Hey, you know who eventually admitted that the Poll Tax was anything but "logical in theory"? Margaret Fucking Thatcher:

Speculation that the tax would change was heightened after a report in The Economist in which the magazine quoted senior members of the Government as saying that at a private meeting Mrs. Thatcher ''agreed that the poll tax was unfair'' and that ''she cited, as an example, the amount she herself would have to pay and the saving she would make.''

To represent this baldly regressive tax scheme as a good idea that merely failed politically is conservative and wrong.

The left's pathologies are different from those of the right, but are no less disqualifying. This obituary epitomizes two of the worst of them: the refusal to fight with the same ferocity as the right wing does, and the learned helplessness that compels the left wing to say, hey, what can we do? For the former, there's this continued bizarre notion that restraining yourself artificially in a fight somehow improves your position, the fetish for seriousness that mistakes appeals to the David Broder in people for a winning political strategy. Badgers don't fight fair, Bubba, and she was a badger, an ornery and vicious warrior for her class and its interests. That's exactly why the right loves her, because of her willingness to get dirty. Nothing suits the Iron Lady better than having iron in your criticisms of her. For the latter, you've got the unsupported claims within the piece that Thatcherism was some sort of historical inevitability. "The social and economic consequences of de-industrialization... would have taken place in one form or other without her" is the kind of sentiment that excuses the left from having to achieve real change and that defensively protects against the possibility of failure. It's also ignores counterexamples, given the ability that countries like the Scandinavian social democracies demonstrated to transition into a new economy without gutting labor or undertaking ugly cultural war. It's a counterrevolutionary attitude and I have no patience for it.

I can't and don't hang the magazine on the weaknesses of one article. (I much preferred Bhaskar Sunkara's obit.) I instead present you with two texts. The first is this obituary. The second is the video that follows, which demonstrates how actual working class British people reacted to the Poll Tax. Which, do you suppose, better fits the ethos of a magazine that puts the guillotine on its cover?