Socialism, with Particular Emphasis on the Left

 

 

            To the Left,[1] the alliance of the alienated intellectual with the various disaffected and unassimilated members of society has suggested a worldview from "down under" that articulates the outlook, at least as the intellectual conceives it, of the "have-nots."  From this perspective, the central problem in the human condition is that many millions of people are trapped by life (in the modern age, by the bourgeoisie).  This renders them subject to systematic exploitation.  The main issue in society is not the seductions of worldliness, as with the Burkean; or the oppression of individuals by coercion, as with the classical liberal; but the entrapment and exploitation of great masses of people by those who have managed to come out on top.

            From this perspective, the action of the state or of a movement in giving a "helping hand" to those who are trapped and exploited does not constitute a meddlesome interference with the freedom of the individual.  Instead, it is necessary to their liberation.  One of the best expressions of this came from the 19th century German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle:

"The stronger, abler, richer man exploits the weaker and becomes his master...The purpose of the state, then, is not to protect merely the personal liberty of the individual and the property which, according to the idea of the capitalist, he must have before he can participate in the state; the purpose of the state is, rather,...to put individuals in a position to attain objects, to reach a condition of existence which they could never reach as individuals, to empower them...."[2]

            The theories of capitalist exploitation have been central to the Left's worldview.  The British Socialist Union has said that "the starting point of all socialist thought has been the condemnation of capitalist exploitation."[3]

            As I have read socialist writing, I have seen at least three distinguishable ideas in the theory of exploitation: (a) An application of the "labor theory of value" that judges that all of the revenue from the sale of a product should go to the workers who made the product, and that what the businessman takes as profit is a form of theft called "surplus value."  (b) The idea that the bourgeoisie (i.e., the owners of capital) form a monopoly as a class, and that workers who deal with a businessman have no alternatives because all other employers are members of the same class.  (c) The view that transactions between employers and employees are not to be seen as mutually advantageous exchanges, but rather as tainted by an inequality of bargaining power.  A discussion of these views would go beyond the scope of a brief introductory essay.  Chapter 12 of the professor's book Socialist Thought discusses them in detail.

            The view that many individuals are trapped by life leads to a very different moral emphasis than that held by classical liberals.  Their first point of difference is about the amount of energy and self-starting motivation most people bring to life.  Secondly, they disagree about whether each person's social environment should include a socially-impressed moral imperative to act in such a way as to be self-reliant.  And thirdly, they see the context of an individual's life differently: the Left considers a person's environment monolithic, entrapping, overpowering in its compelling sweep.  Classical liberalism sees the individual's environment, especially in advanced civilization, as pluralistic, full of diverse possibilities.  (Chapter 13 of the book just referred to goes into this at length.)

            One result of all this is that the Left is almost universally critical of the classical liberal preference for "equality under the law."  To an egalitarian socialist, this is essentially inhumane.  It involves treating unequals equally, without regard to the effect upon them.  What is needed is to "treat unequals unequally to produce a equal result."  This shifts the focus to equality of outcome.

            The classical liberal concept of liberty as a freedom of people to pursue individual purposes comes under attack.  Frederick Engels wrote: "Fine freedom, where the proletarian has no other choice than that of either accepting the conditions which the bourgeoisie offers him, or of starving...."[4]  Socialist concepts of freedom relate to this context and see freedom as coming from a collective provision of the means of life; the concepts often go beyond that, too, to speak of the fulfillment individuals can find in being part of a social whole larger than themselves.

            Supporters of a market economy often argue that market processes result in an "optimum allocation of resources."  Most socialists have had no difficulty brushing this aside and substituting an allocation based on a collective decision about what is most needed.  In addition, they have seen a difference between "synthetic needs" as stimulated by the marketplace and the "genuine human needs" of a people who live more simply.

 

 

                                                           Varied economic models

 

            Socialists have shared a common hostility to a market economy based on contractual relationships and to what they call "the wage relation."  They have, however, been in wide disagreement about the economic and political model that should be used in place of a market.  (The varied models are discussed in detail in Chapter 21 of the professor's Socialist Thought.)

            Some socialist models involve a virtually total governmental ownership and control of productive enterprise.  (Indeed, this is the characteristic by which many commentators define "socialism.")  In some instances, these entail, too, a delegation of functions to a network of collectives.  A good example is Mussolini's "corporative state" in Italy, where each industry was governed "by representatives of the employers, the workers, the technicians, the Fascist party, and the Government," and the industries in turn were accountable to a National Council.[5]  

            There have been socialists who have favored a powerful center occupying "the commanding heights" of the economy, but who have wanted to leave a system of nominally private property or even a substantial autonomous market.  This has been the direction taken by socialist parties in Europe since World War II.  In the United States, Norman Thomas (several times the Socialist Party nominee for president) wrote that "for the state...to try to own and operate everything, would deprive us of some of the important values of private initiative..."  He did, however, favor government ownership of the steel, coal, iron, copper and oil industries; large forests; public utilities; and "all banks of issue."[6]

            A number of 19th century socialists wanted an economy consisting of collectives, with either no central mechanism or a weak or transitional one.  Marx and Lenin (whose main activity came, of course, in the first quarter of the 20th century) are to be counted among these, since they called for an eventual "withering away of the state" that would leave "the armed workers" in charge of society.  Utopian communities ... Proudhon's "mutualism" ... Fourier's "phalanges" ... the "cooperative movement" ... all are examples of this approach.  To the extent the local collectives were, however, to be linked into a network, the idea of a central state snuck back in.  Left-wing "anarchism," wanted a pooling of effort rather than market competition but at the same time wanting no government, overlaps with this form of socialism.  The counter-culture of the New Left in the United States in the 1960s and '70s embraced much of this viewpoint, harking back to 19th century socialist thought.

             

                                                       Democracy and civil liberties

 

            Socialism in general has, paradoxically, been simultaneously elitist and democratic.  The central role of the intellectual implies an inherent underlay of elitism, but at the same time the alliance with "the have-nots" would hardly work if the so-called "masses" were not brought quickly into participation.

            When German National Socialism championed the German "Volk," or Soviet Communism the "proletariat," or a European social democrat the millions who stood in need of redistribution, each of them was advancing a program "for the many" that the particular socialist could see as representing "democracy" in the most meaningful sense of the word.  This is so even if totalitarian means were used, since the "legitimating principle" for the use of such means was at least ostensibly that they would serve the long-term interests of the many.

            If "democracy" is understood in the more customary sense, however, as involving broad participation and perhaps majority rule, it is no longer possible to see any particular affinity between it and socialism.  Feuer says that "two impulses have always warred within the socialist tradition, an authoritarian and a democratic...."[7]

            F. A. Hayek, a classical liberal, argued in The Road to Serfdom that socialism inevitably leads to totalitarianism, but I am not prepared to say that, since the socialism in any given country will tend to reflect the cultural roots, level of civilization, and historic situation of that country.  There are, however, a number of factors that tend to pull socialism toward totalitarianism: the desire of the intellectuals for power; the tendency for power to be abused; and perhaps, as classical liberals assert, the long-term dependency of "civil liberties" upon economic freedom.

            To some degree this division relates to the disagreement among socialists over the methods that are to be used to effect a transition from capitalism.  In the quarter century that preceded World War I, Karl Kautsky became a leader of an interpretation of Marxism that called for attaining socialism through democracy.  "Democratic socialism" has been strong in western Europe since World War II.  It has not always been clear, though, where the line is to be drawn between those who favor democratic change and those to have called for violence, since some of the former have been indulgent toward violence when it has occurred.  (A concept used by many Marxists has been that any violence must necessarily be attributed not to the proletariat but to the bourgeoisie's efforts to oppose the move into socialism.)  Needless to say, many socialists have been direct exponents of violent change.  It was Louis Blanqui who originated the idea of "the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat"; later socialists have referred to "Blanquist terrorist tactics."  It's worth noting that a dispute has even occurred within those who have favored violence: for many years, the Soviet Union called for revolution throughout the world, but only through disciplined, well-prepared workers' movements; this was at odds with various "Romantic socialist" terrorist groups that the Soviet Union looked upon as loose cannons.  At the same time, proponents of violence have disagreed among themselves about what groups should conduct it: the Soviet Union looked to the industrial proletariat, the Chinese Communists (in revolutionary movements it supported in such places as South America) to the peasants.

 

                                              How, then, is "socialism" to be defined?

 

            Because of the immense variety of "socialisms," a definition that encompasses them all will have to be quite broad.  We can, in effect, say that any movement or viewpoint is "socialist" if it embraces the characteristics that all of these varieties possess in common: a group (i.e., "collectivist") orientation, an opposition to individualistic liberalism, elitism, an appeal to the disaffected, a passion for equality, and an emphasis on change.  Certainly it is not sufficient to define "socialism," as is so often done, as being the "nationalization of industry," which Norman Thomas spoke of as "vulgar socialism."  The American socialist Michael Harrington observed that "the nationalization of industry is a technique of socialism, not its definition."[8] 

 

 

                                                            Bibliographical Notes

 

An excellent history of socialist thought, giving passages from all the main thinkers, is Albert Fried and Ronald Sanders' Socialist Thought: A Documentary History (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1964).  Another good general work is George Lichtheim's A Short History of Socialism (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970).  Thomas Kirkup's History of Socialism (New York: Macmillan Company, 1909), is excellent, but of course with a 1909 publication date can only have covered 19th century socialism.

 

For an early American socialist, see Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (New York: Modern Library, 1942), which is a futuristic novel first published in the late 19th century that looks ahead to a socialist utopia in the United States in the year 2000.  Jack London was, surprisingly to many, an advocate of revolutionary socialism, as exemplified in his novel The Iron Heel.  Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington give 20th century views; their books are cited in the above discussion.

 

For British socialism, see Sidney and Beatrice Webb's Industrial Democracy and Adam Ulam's Philosophical Foundations of English Socialism.  R. H. Tawney's The Acquisitive Society has been highly influential. 

 

Socialism in western Europe after World War II is discussed in William E. Patterson and Ian Campbell's Social Democracy in Post-War Europe.  Of course, Ferdinand Lassalle's writing, footnoted in the above discussion, is an excellent original source.  Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital are so well known that I need hardly mention them.  The latter is, however, virtually entirely an economic critique of capitalism rather than an exposition of how a socialist society might be organized.

 

For Marxism-Leninism, there are a great many works, but the best I know of is Stefan Possony's The Lenin Reader.  Possony is himself anti-Communist, but the volume sets out Lenin's writings at length. 

 

For a cinema masterpiece that is a propaganda classic from the Communist point of view, see the 1925 film The Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein.  It tells the story of a mutiny aboard a Russian ship in 1905.