[This is Chapter Fifteen of Murphey’s book Socialist Thought.]
Chapter 15
THE COLLECTIVIST PERSPECTIVE
A socialist, regardless of what kind
of socialist he is, will hardly admit that he does not want to take the
individual's interests into account. Rather,
he will believe that what he wants is for society to serve those interests
"in the best long-term sense, without dropping the social context and
understanding the individual's interests as mixed inextricably with those of
the group."
This perspective was well-stated by
the British socialist R. H. Tawney when he wrote in The
Acquisitive Society that "to say that the end of social institutions
is happiness, is to say that they have no common end at all. For happiness is
individual, and to make happiness the object of society is to resolve society
itself into the ambitions of numberless individuals, each directed towards the
attainment of some personal purpose."l
This
outlook is markedly different from the classical liberal’s, whose efforts
toward creating a social and institutional framework are geared toward
establishing a setting for the widest possible range of individual choice. With
him, the goal is to allow the individual to pursue his own "personal
purposes.” This is the objective even
though many civilizing constraints are needed as social cements to make it a functioning system.
The collectivist, group-oriented
perspective has both affirmative and negative sides. It affirms the value of the group; it also
denies the workability or value of a market system based on individual
interaction.
This latter point appears
consistently in socialist writing of all types. Thus George Mosse
could observe about the Nazi leader Goebbels that to
him the term "bourgeois" is "not a class term, but rather a
label for the older generation still imprisoned by liberalism and held
enthralled by the lure of Mammon." Goebbels
himself wrote that
"I hate
Mammon. It breeds sloth and satiated rest.
It poisons our values and subjects us to the service of low and base
instincts... In its deepest sense, liberalism is the philosophy of money. Liberalism means: I believe in Mammon. Socialism means: I believe in work."2
This is, of course, a thorough-going
repudiation of the market economy and of the individual autonomy it
expresses. The same thing is reflected
in Frederick Engels' statement that "this
isolation of the individual, this narrow self-seeking is the fundamental
principle of our society everywhere."3 In his utopian novel Looking Backward,
the late-nineteenth century American socialist Edward Bellamy wrote that in the
socialist society of the future "buying and selling is considered
absolutely inconsistent with the mutual benevolence and disinterestedness which
should prevail between citizens."4 These examples appear
constantly in socialist writing.
In place of individual autonomy, the
socialist wants each person to find his destiny within the cohesive unity of
the constituency -- nation, class, race or whatever -- that the particular
socialist predicates as the basis for the society he prefers. Werner Sombart
quoted with favor the Nazi party motto, "Common
interest precedes self-interest."
He explained that German professors "had long ago (produced) a
formula in construing Socialism as a 'social principle.'" This was "that the community shall be
the highest aim, the individual serving only as a means to its ends." He contrasted this with the "individual
principle" which holds "that the individual should be the highest
aim, the social organization serving as a means to his end." Sombart quoted
Wilhelm Fanderl to the effect that "Socialism
was and is for the German National Socialist Party clearly and unequivocally
the doctrine of the popular community, of comradeship, of the union of all, of
the willingness and readiness of each individual to stake all for the
cornmunity."5
This is a fundamental socialist
conception. In his City of the Sun,
the seventeenth century utopian author Campanella
wrote that "when we have taken away self-love, there remains only love for
the state."6
Hegel was able to speak of "the individual, whose supreme
duty is to be a member of the state."
He said that "since the state is mind objectified, it is only as
one of its members that the individual himself has objectivity, genuine
individuality, and an ethical life... The individual's destiny is the living of
a universal life."7 This was in keeping
with Rousseau's dictum in The Social Contract: "Each of us places
in common his person and all his power under the supreme direction of the
general will; and as one body we all receive each member as an indivisible part
of the whole."8 In an
article on "Marx’s Ideal of Man," Polish professor
Marek Fritzhand as written
that Marx's "model-man... prizes his freedom and autonomy -- not a freedom
and autonomy outside society, outside the human community, but with
people."9
The larger community requires
direction, however; and here we see still other parts of the collectivist
perspective. The intellectual quite sincerely and without self-consciousness
that he is advocating something that is not completely normal and useful wants
to substitute his judgment for the judgments of the individuals within the
society. He wants to
"rationalize" the processes of
the society, to render them the subjects of scientific control. This involves shuffling the pieces from place
to place and determining the goals toward which all the pieces are to
move. To the socialist, this is no more
than a sensible application of reason to society. Anything less seems to him nonsensical, a
waste, a forfeiture of worthwhile mental control. To the classical liberal, on the other hand,
it demonstrates an utter lack of humility on the part of the planner, who
posits that the mass of mankind is basically inert but that he himself is
fitted to "play God" in the directing of society. This is the way Frederic Bastiat
characterized the socialists of his day.
He wrote that they "assume that people are inert matter, passive
particles, motionless atoms... They assume that people are susceptible to being
shaped into an infinite variety of forms, more or less symmetrical, artistic
and perfected."10 From the point of view of the Burkean conservative, the planner's mentality is a
manifestation of the "hubris" of secular man, who presumes through
various forms of "gnosticism" to attain
salvation during this life.
The perspective of the comprehensive
planner is so commonplace today that it seems arbitrary to illustrate it by
referring to specific authors. Certainly one source that will give a good feel for it is George
Bernard Shaw’s book The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and
Capitalism. The whole methodology used by Shaw, and
pressed upon his readers by him as though questioning it would be
unthinkable, was one of re-ordering things at will. It was as though all the productivity of the
country were his own to parcel out in whatever way he considered best:
"Everybody knows now that Socialism is a proposal to divide-up the income
of the country in a new way... (You should) make up your mind how you would
like to see the income in your country divided... up day to day."11
Many
democratic socialists (and liberals in the twentieth-century American usage of
that term) have opted to allow considerable market processes to continue. They then seek to gain their social
objectives by acting upon the market in pivotal ways, channelling its allocation of resources and
redistributing its output. Necessarily
there is a substantial "gray area" in which it is difficult to draw the line between
measures that are consistent with a classical liberal’s desire to "establish the framework for a healthy market" and socialist measures that go beyond that. Rick Rolman,
writing in Dissent, has mentioned "'market socialism' (which combines) socialized ownership of
large business organizations with extensive use of market mechanisms, under
government regulation."12
The
planner’s perspective is natural to anyone who is not warned away from it by a
fear of government and by a reverence for natural processes. Without those ingredients, the application of
foresight to social processes is virtually taken for granted as
worthwhile. This helps explain the hold
such as orientation has had upon the imagination of social scientists, teachers
and other thoughtful people within our society in the twentieth century.