[This is Chapter 24 of Murphey's book Socialist Thought.]

 

24

THE ASSUMPTION OF REGULARITY

Any statist form of socialism involves bringing together enormous coercive power.  Even the libertarian versions oppose a society based upon individual interactions within a contractual nexus.  They call into play considerably more coercive potential than exists in an individualistic society.

To a classical liberal, such power presents an obvious danger.  It hardly seems useful to him to weigh the advantages of collectivism against the possible enormities that can issue from it.  Lord Acton's "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely" expressed an idea that had long been basic to classical liberalism.

It is almost a defining characteristic of a socialist, however, for him to feel very little anxiety over possible abuses that can come from the power-system he is advocating.  If he had a deep concern, he wouldn't embrace the system.

This failure manifests, of course, extreme naivete.  Every socialist has persuaded himself that his preferred form of socialism will work, and further that that form is the one that will exist once the process of transition is over.  This is why Joseph Schumpeter observed that "the individual socialist looks upon the advent of socialism, naively but naturally, as synonymous with his advent to power.  Socialization means to him that 'we' are going to take over."¹

Clinton Rossiter applies this to Marxism: "No orthodox Marxist, from Marx himself through the latest apologist for the Soviet state, has ever grasped the implications of the universality of man's desire for power . . . Marx's prescription for the dictatorship of the proletariat, like the dictatorship that has actually emerged in one Communist country after another, is based on the assumption that some men can be trusted to wield absolute power over other men."²

An example appears in Salvador Allende's speeches.  He told the Chilean people “do not be afraid of the word 'state.' The state of the Unidad Popular government means all of you and all of us.”³

The naivete stands out in Hegel’s passage that "the state is the actuality of the ethical idea.  It is ethical mind qua the substantial will manifest and revealed to itself."⁴

I think of this as "the assumption of regularity" or of "continuity" -- that "we" are taking over and that good rather than bad purposes will be served.

The assumption has proved a cruel illusion for many socialists.  After the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin did not embrace the members of the other socialist factions; he eliminated them.  “The Menshevik Party was finally crushed,” Robert Conquest tells us; “the Social Revolutionaries followed, receiving the death blow at a trial of their leaders in 1922.”₅   Feuer says that “the ideologists . . . never foresaw Stalinism”⁶   Leon Trotsky was one of those ideologists, and in his autobiography he tells how disappointed he was with the developments under Stalin: "The general policy became one of a replacement of independent and gifted men by mediocrities who owed their posts entirely to the apparatus.”⁷

This naivete is remarkable in its own right, but what is perhaps even more so is the extent to which so many socialists have refused to learn from the atrocities under Hitler, Stalin and Mao.  Here, for example, is Maurice Cornforth's apologia for Stalinism in which he brushes its enormities aside as an incidental historical cost: "It is natural enough . . . that when Marxist parties make mistakes and get into difficulties their enemies are quick to proclaim that whatever evils ensue are all the fault of Marxism . . . So it was with the abuses of power, which took place in the Soviet Union under Stalin's leadership . . . Outside the Soviet Union we claim the credit that we gave the one socialist country unstinting support . . . even though this involved us in the guilt of injustices, oppressions and violence on our own side.”⁸

Even more significantly, socialist thought has generally refused to admit that Hitler and Mussolini were socialists, thereby avoiding the need for self-examination to see why National Socialism and Fascism led to the enormities that they did. Fried and Sanders' anthology of socialist writing, say, has no entry within its table of contents representing these forms of socialism.  But this is more than a simple omission; it is an article of left-wing faith.  The exclusion of Hitler and Mussolini, by the way, is not due to the atrocities they (or particularly Hitler) committed; otherwise Stalin and Mao would be just as readily excommunicated.  It is due, instead, to the preemption by Marxism of center stage within socialist intellectual culture by the end of the nineteenth century.  Any anti-Marxist socialism championing a race or a nation instead of a class was automatically subject to exclusion.  This process was quite visible in Mussolini's life when he moved from his support for pre-World War I socialism to a militantly nationalist form of syndicalism.

I don't mean to suggest that the naivete has not been eroding among socialists.  It has been.  The loss of elan within socialist thought that we have seen during the past half-century has in large part been due to a series of "shocks" that have occurred within socialist regimes and movements -- among them, the Stalinist purge trials during the 1930s, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Yugoslavian break with the Soviet Union, the Hungarian Revolution, the use of tanks to crush the Dubcek regime in Czechoslovakia, and many others.  The disillusionment is worth watching, since a messianic social religion cannot exist in any true sense after the naivete of its vision has been punctured.

C. A. R. Crosland is a British socialist who has engaged in a realistic agnosticism instead of the usual blind faith: "We cannot assert definitely what would be the effect either on personal contentment, or attitudes to work, or the quality of our society, of a wholesale effort to suppress the motive of personal gain, or to elevate collective at the expense of individual relationships . . . nor can we be sure that even if they were practicable, they might not lead to serious losses in other directions, such as privacy, individuality, personal independence, equality of opportunity, or the standard of living."⁹   If this had been the attitude of socialists generally during the past century, socialism would have become something very different than we have seen during our lives.

NOTES

1. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), p. 205.

2. Article by Clinton Rossiter in John H. M. Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset (ed.s), Failure of a Dream?  Essays in the History of American Socialism (Garden City: Anchor Press, 1974), p. 479.

3. Salvador Allende, Chile's Road to Socialism (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 60.

4. T. M. Knox, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), p. 257.

5. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 22. 

6. Lewis S. Feuer, Marx and the Intellectuals (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1969), p. 133.

7. Leon Trotsky, My Life (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1960), p. 501.

8. Maurice Cornforth, The Open Philosophy and The Open Society (New York: International Publishers, 1968),  pp. 183, 184.

9. Albert Fried and Ronald Sanders (ed.s), Socialist Thought (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1964), pp. 536, 537.