#Blue-Blooded Red Ideologue

I had a laugh with a friend the other day, wondering how many Labour peers there are in the House of Lords. We rather naively assumed there weren’t any. When we checked, we were stunned: the answer is 225 members of the House.

Of course, this is related to the “democratization” of ennoblement since the second half of the 20th century. For instance, Paul McCartney or Elton John were awarded knighthoods for their achievements, not on the basis of their descent. But there’s more than that. Historically, there have been hereditary peers with more than mere sympathies for the Left, some truly obsessed with it or outright Communists.

Also in the UK, even the Communist Party of Great Britain, disbanded in 1991 after the fall of the Iron Curtain, once had a representative in the House of Lords. His name was Wogan Philipps, 2nd Baron Milford, an aristocrat by birth. As a young man, he volunteered for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, before joining the Communist Party, an act that made his father disinherit him. His second wife was Cristina Casati, Viscountess Hastings, previously married to an Earl of Huntingdon; she was also a member of the CPGB.

In 1946, he was elected as a Communist councillor of an urban district, and in 1962, he inherited his father’s title and seat in the House of Lords. In his first speech in the House, he demanded its dissolution. In 1989, when he was 87, the (still) Soviet newspaper ‘Izvestia’ published a laudatory article about him, titled ‘The Comrade Lord’.

It’s worth noting that Petru Groza was a landlord, Piotr Kropotkin was a prince, and John Maynard Keynes was ennobled as a baron; and there are many other such examples.

What is the explanation? Of course, we can psychoanalyze biographically and conclude that extreme Leftist political views among aristocrats are just forms of rebellion against authoritarian fathers, accompanied by a sense of guilt for the inherited estate and privileges, not acquired by merit. But there is probably also a deeper historical and sociological reason.

Indeed, Communist noblemen do not rebel against their own class, but against the bourgeoisie and capitalism. Because their power in the economy and society has been eroded by capitalism, trade and free markets, not by socialism. The democratization of the economy provided greater social mobility, making obsolete the nobiliary privileges inherited by birth. Aristocrats do not rebel against the bourgeoisie because it exploits the proletariat, but because the bourgeoisie has “usurped their power” with the invisible hand of the market.

In this context, it’s worth mentioning that although Marx asserted - in the first chapter of his ‘Communist Manifesto’, the inaugural pamphlet of his socialist movement - that there is an irreconcilable conflict between classes, he could only illustrate this thesis with pre-capitalist examples.

In the Middle Ages, a family could be aristocratic and could own significant estates; a lineage of dukes, marquises, earls or barons could continue for hundreds of years, irrespective of the qualities, talents, character or morality within it.

But in modern capitalist conditions, there is a concept that sociologists call “social mobility.” The active principle of this mobility, according to Italian sociologist and economist Vilfredo Pareto, is the circulation of elites. It’s about the fact that at the top of the social ladder, people are rich and politically important, but these people - the elites - are constantly replaced.

So someone born a serf in the Middle Ages could not escape this status, and was in an irreconcilable conflict with his lord - a fact speculated by Marx, who made it the cornerstone of the socialist movement. But in a capitalist society, there is permanent mobility - the poor get rich, and the descendants of the rich lose their fortunes and become poor.

Article originally published in The Market for Ideas magazine.