[This is Chapter Five of Murphey’s book Socialist Thought.]

 

 

Chapter 5

 

THE EUROPEAN EXPORTATION OF ALIENATION

 

            Alienation and socia1ist ideology have spread in the twentieth century to all parts of the world.  The Soviet Union, born out of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, arose from it; the Third International was formed in 1919 to carry the Communist faith to the proletariat everywhere; the Chinese Communists established their People’s Republic in 1949 in the world’s most populous country; and there has been Communist activity throughout Asia since World War II.  The American involvement in the Korean and Vietnam wars has simply brought into focus the more overt Communist efforts.

            There has also been continuing Communist activity since the 1950s in Africa and Latin America.  Any enumeration of these efforts – such as in Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Angola, Mozambique, Algeria, Ethiopia, and the like – runs the risk of omitting even the more obvious ones.

            This spread of totalitarian ideology has the most serious consequences.  It establishes the moving force behind the worldwide “protracted conflict” between the non-Communist world and an expansionist Marxism-Leninism.  But in a fuller sense it entails the consequence that the rise of Asia, Africa and Lain America to full participation with European culture in world affairs is warped and discoloured.  It means that an anti-civilizational nihilism, not liberal values, offers the most insistent alternative to the status quo everywhere. The peoples of those continents are in large measure cut off from the alternative, to the extent it exists, of passing gradually and by degrees into the enjoyment of modern development.  Instead, they suffer the agonies of civil and international conflict and often of totalitarian oppression.

            I have mentioned these things, which are rather obvious, because it is important that we consciously appreciate the ramifications of the historic phenomena we have been discussing.

            The spread of socialist ideology, whether militant or gradualistically social democratic, has been the result of the exportation from Europe of the alienation of the intellectual and of the consequent socialist perceptions during the past century and a half.  As seen from the point of view of liberal values, the world’s intellectual culture has absorbed precisely the worst products of European thought.  Every continent has been profoundly touched by the alienated legacy of European intellectuality.

            The exportation of European alienation to the Russian intelligentsia during the nineteen century is the most obvious example of a process that has been repeated many times.  Alexander Herzen is considered “the father of Russian socialism,” and it is significant that Lichtheim tells us that “as a student, Herzen, like his friends, duly underwent the influence of Hegel and the Left Hegelians.”1 Lichtheim says elsewhere that Herzen was one of the aristocrats who took up the doctrines of Fourier.  This influence by both Hegel and Fourier illustrates the generalization Lichtheim makes that during the 1830s both German philosophy and French socialism were absorbed by the intelligentsia in Russia.

            N. G. Chernyshevsky was a leading figure among the later narodniks, the “populists.”  In the Introduction to his What Is to be Done? we are informed that “the Rousseau of  Emile and La Nouvelle Heloise rather than of the Confessions and the Social Contract – were among Chernyshevsky’s early gods.”2 We are told that he watched the European revolutions in 1848 from afar and that they “were the turning point in his life and in his beliefs.”  He, too, was influenced by Fourier.  David Caute says that “Herzen, Chernyshevsky and the other Narodnik writers avidly absorbed… the teachings of the earlier French socialists, particularly Saint-Simon, Fourier and Proudhon.”3 Maximilien Rubel reports that “the Russian Populists… sought (Marx’s) opinion about the chances and perspectives of the peasants’ communes….”4

            This process continued with the later intelligentsia.  Edward Hyams says that Lenin “went back to a thorough re-reading of Hegel.”5 In his autobiography My Life, Leon Trotsky tells of revolutionary intellectuals who were teaching the workers and who “had to snatch from each other in turn the single soiled copy of the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels.”6  Trotsky also says that “for us Russians, the German Social democracy was mother, teacher, and living example.  We idealized it from a distance.  The names of Bebel and Kautsky were pronounced reverently.”

            Hyams adds that even “the syndicalist idea had spread into Russia where, about 1905, it emerged as an underground revolutionary movement spreading rapidly… (T)he syndicalists engaged, like the other revolutionary parties and movements, in terrorism,” since their favourite weapon, the general strike, did not fit Russian conditions.

            In the early twentieth century the leaders of the Chinese Communist revolution went directly to European socialist sources.  Hyams writes that in 1912 Mao Tse-Tung lived for a year “in miserable poverty while he read translations of English and French social philosophers.”  Mao read “Paulsen’s A System of Ethics.  The book made him a politically conscious radical… He read Bakunin, Kropotkin and Tolstoy and conceived an admiration for the anarchist ideal which remained an influence all his life.”

            Hyams also tells us that Chou Enlai received his education at Nanking University and the Sorbonne. “It was in Paris that he had become a Marxist.”  We are told, as well, that Chu Teh, a Communist general who “tried to carry out the Moscow policy of seizing cities,… studied in Europe, became a Marxist.”

            In India, according to Nirmal Kumar Bose, “in 1904 Gandhi was deeply influenced by the thoughts of Tuskin,” the conservative social critic who was so hostile to nineteenth century capitalism.7

            In Latin America it was Rousseauistic Jacobinism, not the example of the United States, that was most influential during the nineteenth century.  Lichtheim says that “Jacobinism for almost a century became the model of radical democratic movements in Continental Europe and Latin America.”  Lichtheim also speaks of the influence of Auguste Comte.  A century after Comte’s death Comte’s philosophy was still “invoked by Latin American military dictatorships officially committed to the Comtean slogan ‘Order and Progress.’”

            Lewis Feuer has given a reason for the extreme militancy of many who have absorbed these ideas.  “The intellectual in the so-called backward areas tends to develop an authoritarianism proportionate to the gap between his ideas and the social environment… The more existence frustrates him, the more aggressive in idea becomes his consciousness.  Both Mill and Marx observed that the intellectuals of materially backward countries adopted the most advanced ideas… Marx remarked that the young Russian intellectuals in Germany and Paris ‘always run after the most extreme that the West can offer.’”8

            After the Bolshevik revolution created the Soviet Union, the flow ran, for a while, the other way.  Until disillusionment gradually tarnished the luster of Soviet Communism in the world intellectual community, many socialists looked eagerly to the Soviet example.  Hyams says that “all working-class Europe (was) responding hopefully to the stimulus of the Russian Revolution.”

            As the twentieth century progressed, both social democratic movements and Soviet-inspired Communism institutionalized their movements to be more effective in proselytizing throughout the world.  Edward Taborsky says the Communists began their thrust within the developing countries in the late 1950s.9  Paterson and Thomas say that “attempts were made by the (Socialist) International in the 1950s to expand in the Far East and Latin America.  An Asian Socialists’ Conference was established, and a Latin American Liaison Bureau.”10

            This coincided with the rapid withdrawal of European colonial power from Africa and Asia.  The Left has sought to fill the ensuing vacuum.  In 1960, Moscow’s Declaration of Eighty-One Communist Parties assigned major significance to “the breakdown of the system of colonial slavery under the impact of the national-liberation movement,” according to Taborsky.  Leopold Senghor says “the intellectuals – often European intellectuals – have awakened… the colonized people(s).”11

            When America turned inward during the 1970s as a result of the national division over Vietnam, the organized Communist parties throughout the world exuded renewed confidence and have increased their activity.  This is clearly evident from the pages of the World Marxist Review.

            This is not to say that the various forms of socialism have thrived since World War II.  Their success has been more attributable to Western weakness.  For its own sake, socialism has received many shocks.  These have almost all been self-imposed and have arisen out of the internal contradictions within socialism itself.  It has been a movement in decay.  That, however, is a subject we will leave to a concluding chapter.

 

NOTES

 

  1. Goerge Lichtheim, A Short History of Socialism (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), pp. 109, 54, 65, 19, 75, 204.
  2. N. G. Chernyshevsky, What Is to be Done? (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), pp. xi, ix, xv.
  3. David Caute, The Left in Europe (Since 1789) (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966), p. 64.
  4. Article by Maximilien Rubel, “Reflections on Utopia and Revolution,” Socialist Humanism, Erich Fromm (ed.) (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1965), p. 214.
  5. Edward Hyams, The Millenium Postponed:  Socialism (New York: New American Library, 1973), pp. 37, 148, 207, 213, 211, 97.
  6. Leon Trotsky, My Life (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1960), p. 109.
  7. Article by Nirmal Kumar Bose, “Gandhi:  Humanist and Socialist,” Socialist Humanism, Erich Fromm (ed.) (Garden City: Anchor books, 1965), p. 100.
  8. Lewis S. Feuer, Marx and the Intellectuals (Garden City: Anchor books, 1969), pp. 64-65.
  9. Edward Taborsky, Communist Penetration of the Third World (New York: Robert Speller & Sons Publishers, Inc., 1973), pp. 112, 2.
  10. William E. Paterson and Alastair H. Thomas (ed.s), Social Democratic Parties in Western Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977), p. 412.
  11. Article by Leopold Senghor, “Socialism is a Humanism,” Socialist Humanism, Erich Fromm (ed.) (Garden City: Anchor books, 1965), pp. 63-64.