Bruce Anderson: I too was once a deluded Marxist revolutionary

'We believed there was a connection between late-night conversations and the future of the world'

One wonders about the wisdom of the Metropolitan Police's tactics in advertising its plans to deal with tomorrow's May Day protests. Admittedly, it did succeed in shaming Ken Livingstone, who has condemned the prospective tide of anarchy rather than siding with it. But it has also put the demonstrators on their mettle. They may now feel honour-bound to start a riot or two in order to live up to expectations.

If so, they will have missed an opportunity. There is a much bigger potential market for Utopian anti-capitalism than anarchist rioters will ever be able to exploit. This is a problem that the ultra-Left has never been able to resolve. In theory, it should be trying to offer mankind a better future. In practice, it seems more enthusiastic about expressing its hatred for existing societies, and for their members.

At this stage, I have a confession to make. In the late Sixties, I was a student revolutionary. Although I now regard this as a useful stage in my political education, I still shudder when I think back to the nonsense I talked ­ and believed.

It was a curious period. Until the late Sixties, Marxism, so influential on the Continent, had minimal impact on British intellectual life. Raymond Williams, the most original post-war British socialist thinker, had evolved a kind of home-brew Marxism, but until about 1967 he was more of a left-wing Leavisite than a Marxist. His later works, more explicitly Marxist, were also less interesting.

So the universities were unprepared for the eruption of undergraduate Marxists, who had chosen a propitious moment to disconcert their elders. The moral failures of the Wilson government were manifest (Harold Wilson never found the right spin doctors). As a consequence of this, Croslandite social democracy appeared discredited. Social democrats had lost their intellectual self-confidence and were vulnerable to Marxist scorn.

As were many dons, uneasily aware that there was an important intellectual movement of which they knew little or nothing. The dons suffered a disadvantage vis-à-vis their pupils. Their intellectual standards were higher. The young were happy to call themselves Marxists because they had read the Communist Manifesto, were halfway through The 1844 Manuscripts and had bought a copy of Das Kapital. The old, who felt obliged to complete a comprehensive intellectual engagement before pronouncing on the matter, were therefore at the mercy of their pupils' certainties.

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive." The fervour of youth combined with the sense of being part of an intellectual vanguard makes a heady mixture. France in 1968, the anti-war movement in America, ferment in German and Italian universities; for a moment, it was possible to believe that there was a connection between late-night conversations in student bedrooms and the future of the world (we were very young).

We were also endlessly credulous about faraway countries of which we knew nothing. Few of us had any illusions about Russia; the invasion of Czechoslovakia took care of that. But there was a willingness to trust in Castro, or even in Mao. I never subscribed to the Cultural Revolution, but I had friends who did. I engaged in many an amicable conversation on the subject, the moral equivalent of a friendly chat with someone who was trying to justify the Holocaust. The ignorance and naïveté of the 20th-century Left: its endless willingness to construct political fantasies out of mass suffering and bloodshed. These are under-chronicled subjects.

We were convinced that somewhere in the world they were trying to build socialism, and we were so certain of the purity of socialist intentions that we were quite happy to overlook the methods. As it was self-evident that socialism would lead to the universalisation of freedom, what did it matter if there were a few short-term restrictions? The agents of capitalism and imperialism had to be dealt with. No doubt Bukharin rationalised the beginnings of Lenin's terror in similar terms.

One should have known better. I knew about Bukharin's fate ­ and his country's ­ and I had read Burke's Reflections, Dostoyevsky's Devils and, indeed, Animal Farm, which told one everything one needed to know about the likely success of Marxist projects. But arguments from past mistakes weigh little with the idealistic young; they always know that they can do better.

Ulster convinced me of the contrary. I am sure that I would have outgrown Marxism anyway; adolescent religious phases rarely last for long. But the British Left's response to Ulster opened my eyes. Though I was involved in the early Civil Rights Movement, I could never see the connnection between civil rights and Irish Republicanism. Yet many members of the British Left were as naïve about the IRA as their forebears had been about Stalin.

I knew a bit about Ireland, and I knew that they were wrong. Moreover, Ireland was easy to visit and to read about; they had no excuse for being in error. But if these people whom I had formerly respected were so wrong about Ulster, just across the sea, why should anyone take them seriously about Cuba or Cambodia or Guatemala?

I think that I might have become a Tory even sooner but for Ted Heath. This was nothing to do with his enthusiasm for Europe or incomes policies; I cannot claim to have been a proto-Thatcherite. But in the early Seventies, a magnificent painting came on the market: Velazquez's portrait of Juan de Pareja. Only a little over £2m would have secured it for the National Gallery, but that swinish, curmudgeonly Grocer would not stump up (I once heard him have the nerve to accuse Margaret Thatcher of philistinism), so it is in New York. Indeed, the Heath government kept the National Gallery so starved of funds that it was not able to find £300,000 to buy that Bellotto view of Verona which is now on loan in Edinburgh. Heath has personal cultural interests; so does Chris Smith. They rival each other for governmental neglect of the arts.

Ted Heath merely slowed my journey away from the Left, and others were making a similar transition. Marxism has had much less impact on British politics than most people would have predicted in 1970. But I am surprised that one argument has disappeared from view. The early Marx was eloquent on the subject of alienated labour, and as advanced societies grow even richer, one would have thought that this might become more of an issue. The right to enjoy one's work could be a powerful political slogan, as could the folly of the fetishism of commodities: "Getting and spending we lay waste our powers, little we see in nature that is ours".

Tuesday's demonstrators will know little about Wordsworth and will be keener on breaking windows than on making cases. But I would predict that at some stage over the coming century, Marx's 1844 Manuscripts will be re-rediscovered, and the prophet of proletarian revolution will be re-invented as an exponent of more leisure time for a satiated bourgeoisie.