[This is Chapter Eleven of Murphey’s book Socialist Thought.]
Chapter 11
THE WORLDVIEW OF THE
LEFT:
A PERSPECTIVE FROM DOWN
UNDER
To the Burkean conservative, the depravity of human nature
requires a social system that will absorb the individual, making him part of an
organic whole that will mold him to his duties, maintain his proper
relationship with God, and restrain the wilfulness of his reason and
appetities.
To the
classical liberal, the mixture of good and evil, capability and weakness, in
human nature requires the social cements of law and a ubiquitous ethical code,
but also allows the dynamic productivity and self-fulfilment that results from
the interactions of millions of individuals within a voluntaristic
milieu.
To various
kinds of non-egalitarian socialists, the meaning of life comes from identifying
all human effort with an overarching collective mission, the submergence of
feeble individuality into an historic project of heroic dimensions.
To the Left,
however, 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-not. From this
perspective the central problem in the human condition is that many millions of people are trapped by life, and currently
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 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. In varying degrees, the Left’s
worldview has captured the imagination of the modern mind, dominating the
thinking of the twentieth century.
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 the sine qua non of
liberation. Only when the entrapment and
exploitation have been struck down can the individual be free.
One of the
best expressions of this way of seeing things came from Ferdinand Lassalle:
“The
stronger, abler, richer man exploits the weaker and becomes his master.
“The moral
idea of the working class, on the other hand, is that the unimpeded and free
exercise of individual faculties by the individual is not sufficient, but that
in a morally adjusted community there must be added to it solidarity of
interests, mutual consideration, and mutual helpfulness in development…
“It is the
State which has the office of perfecting this development of freedom, and of
the human race to freedom. The State is
this unity of individuals in a moral composite -- a unity which increases a
million-fold the powers of all individuals…
“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, through this union 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 to attain a standard of education, power, and liberty which
would be utterly impossible for them, one and all, merely as individuals. The object of the State is, accordingly, to
bring the human being to positive and progressive development -- in a word, to
shape human destiny, i.e., the culture of which mankind is capable, into actual
existence.”1
We see it in
a nutshell when Brian Abel-Smith says in a Fabian
Tract that “society has a duty to protect the ‘dependent.’ There has, moreover, been a long history of
exploitation….”2
We will see
many more examples in the next two chapters as we look first into the theories
of exploitation and then into the perception that the individual is trapped
within a deterministic setting. I will
indicate my own view that the Left, in emphasizing these aspects of life, has
several important things to tell us. At
the same time, however, I will express my judgment that, taken as a whole, the
worldview is negativistic and warped.
It is
doubtful whether the concepts of entrapment and exploitation would have
received prominent treatment within modern thought if they had not been central
to an ideology that has developed to serve the purposes of the alliance between
the alienated intellectuals and the have-nots.
1.
The
German Classics
(Albany: J. B. Lyon Company, 1914), Vol. X, pp. 428, 429.
2.
Brain
Abel-Smith, Freedom in the Welfare State (Fabian
Society: Fabian Tract #353, 1965), p. 5.