[This is Chapter Seventeen of Murphey’s book Socialist
Thought.]
Chapter 17
The concepts that have come to be
fundamental to the ideological superstructure of the Left are, of course,
closely related to the alliance of the alienated intellectuals with the
have-nots and to the Left's central worldview that much of kind is entrapped
and exploited. If we consider the
content the Left has given to such concepts as "equality,"
"freedom," "compassion," and "social justice," we
see it has interpreted each of them consistently as parts of an overall system
of thought.
In this chapter, we will see how
these concepts have been used by socialist authors. We will be able to note
differences among them and to compare the Left's concepts with those of
classical liberalism and Burkean conservatism.
Equality. The Burkean
conservative has not been philosophically committed to a concept of equality at
all, except to the extent that he has embraced the criteria of the Rule of
Law. Burkeans
have believed in the value of a hierarchical social system. Classical liberals, on the other hand, have
militated historically for the abolition of all established class structures,
and have wanted a "free-floating" system in which individuals rise or
fall depending upon their success in the
marketplace. Sir Henry Maine praised
this as a movement from a society based on "status" to one based on
"contract." Here, the concept
of equality is one of "equality under the rules." The same laws are to apply to all citizens,
just as the same basketball rulebook applies to both teams opposing each other on a basketball court.
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. People who are trapped and exploited cannot
flourish, he says, under a system of equal rules. Rather, what is needed is to “treat unequals
unequally to produce an equal result.”
This shifts the focus to the equality of outcome. If we were to continue our analogy to sports,
we would see that this is like the “handicapping” system in golf, bowling or
horse-racing, where those of lesser attainment are given a bonus to equalize
their chances.
Anatole
Various socialists have advocated
some form or another of equality of property and/or income, achieved either
through a redistribution of what occurs within a market economy or through the
allocations made by a collectivist economy.
Fried and Sanders tell us that in the eighteenth century Babeuf wanted “equality of wealth.”4 We recall
that Sir Thomas More and Campanella had earlier
wanted a “community of goods” in their respective utopias. In the late nineteenth century, Edward
Bellamy described his proposed system of equal remuneration to all members of
the society when he set out the following conversation: "'By what title
does the individual claim his particular share? What is the basis of
allotment?' 'His title,' replied Dr. Leete,
'is his humanity...' 'The
fact that he is a man!' I
repeated, incredulously. 'Do you
possibly mean that all have the same share?' 'Most
assuredly.'" 5
In his "Manifesto of the
Equals" in 1796, Sylvain Marechal had called for
"the Community of Goods! No more
individual ownership of the land: the land belongs to no one. We are demanding... communal enjoyment of the
fruits of the earth."6
More recently, Norman Thomas has
written that there ought to be changes in the national distribution of
income" and also in the world distribution.7 The Dolbeares tell
us that Bayard Rustin argues in favor
of the black liberation movement 's "insistence that emphasis be placed
upon equality of condition rather than equality of opportunity."8
In the May, 1979, World Marxist
Review, published by the Soviet bloc Communist parties, there is an article
on "New Frontiers of Soviet
Economic Science." We are told that
"an important place is held by the problems of distributive
relations." These are said to be
"linked with the implementation of socialism's principle 'from each
according to his abilities, to each according to his work,' and also of the ways and means of gradually
effecting a transition to the community principle of 'from each according to
his abilities, to each according to his needs.'"9 This ties in with Marx's phase-theory
that there would be a "socialist" phase under the dictatorship of the
proletariat, followed ultimately and
finally by the "communist" phase.
Absolute equality involving "payment according to needs" is
not to come until the communist phase.
It is remarkable that Soviet Marxists are still talking theoretically in
those terms. (They are somewhat reminiscent of the early centuries of
Christianity, during which Christians looked forward to the imminent second
coming of Christ.)
It ought to be obvious that the
extent of redistribution will depend heavily upon how far the particular
socialist is able to take his society from the existing bourgeois competitive
system. Advocates of a welfare state and
social democrats in general are not in a position to incorporate total
levelling or a complete “community of goods” in their program.
Most people are unaware that Nazi
ideology strongly emphasized equality.
David Schoenbaum has spelled out what this
amounted to in his book Hitler’s Social Revolution: “The Third Reich offered a labor ideology…
The centerpiece was the labor ethos, focusing
not so much on the workers as on work itself… An idealized, generalized image
of the ‘the worker’ was invoked to achieve the psychological assimilation of
the worker into the life of the nation… Equality was a key word, not economic
but, as it were, spiritual equality… Ley declared
officially, ‘There are no longer classes in Germany. In the years to come, the worker will lose
the last traces of inferiority feelings he may have inherited from the
past.” Schoenbaum
quotes a prison camp guard as saying that “nowadays, six nights a week, all the
seats in the theatre cost the same.
First come, first served.
Sometimes the Hubers sit in the tenth row, and
we sit in the twentieth. But my wife
knows that’s because the Hubers live nearer the
theatre.”10 George Mosse says “the Nazi
system was not to be a mere dictatorship from above, but was supposed to be
based upon a truly democratic principle of government. The worldview is basic once again to an
understanding of the Nazi meaning of democracy.
Fuhrer and Volk were equal in kind because they shared the same race and
blood.” He includes a passage from Jakob Graf that says that “if we reach this goal, then all
party and class divisions sink into nothingness.” As part of carrying this out, the Nazis had
university students work “side by side with working-class or peasant youths” in
the Labor Service (the Arbeitsdienst), according to Mosse. “By
performing manual work in the fields or on public-works projects, the
university student became the equal of everyone else.”11
The recent Polish film “Man of
Marble” shows scenes from the earlier Stalinist era that are startlingly
similar to the scenes of collective élan depicted in Hitler’s propaganda film
“Triumph of the Will.”
Nevertheless, some socialist authors
have not wanted to emphasize equality. Sombart supported
Nazism, but was able to favor
paying "each according to his due. The command of justice requires this,
for where there is equality, there is always injustice."l2 Clinton Rossiter
quotes Stalin as having told the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934 that
"it is time it was understood that Marxism is opposed to
levelling." Rossiter
points out that it was in his Critique of the Gotha
Programme that Marx made the" distinction between the "socialist" and
"communist" phases.l3
Freedom. Certain styles have developed in the semantic
of modern ideology. If someone uses the
word “liberty,” the usage generally indicates he is a classical liberal. Someone who uses the term “civil liberties,”
as most modern welfare liberals in the United States do, is dropping economic
freedom from his intended content, focusing on the various freedoms associated
with participative political processes.
The
work “freedom” itself is used in many senses.
Anything a speaker considers harmful to people’s interests will perhaps
be referred to as a type of “unfreedom”; and anything
that enhances their interests can, just as amorphously, be thought to enhance
their "freedom." When used in
this way, "freedom" is synonymous with "well-being."
The proponents of each social
philosophy necessarily think they are speaking to the main issues that bear on
human well-being ''as best understood" (i.e., as understood by the
philosophy). It isn't surprising, then,
that each philosophy appropriates the major emotive words --
"freedom," "equality," "justice" -- on behalf of
its proposals about how society should best be constituted.
Classical liberals see coercion as
having been the central problem in history blocking human well-being. The word
"freedom" (although they prefer "liberty") refers to
minimizing coercion.
The Left, however, perceives
millions of people as trapped and exploited. The coercive power of the state is
considered liberating if it acts on behalf of the have-nots as against the
exploiters. The resulting redistribution
or planned economy is thought to be quite "free" compared with the
alternative system, which is exploitive.
Even National Socialism in Germany
talked of "freedom." This was
the freedom to fulfill one's destiny as part of the
master race. Such fulfillment
could not be attained if each
individual just lived for his own purposes.
My review of the uses given to the
concept of freedom in socialist writing will need to be broken into several
parts:
First,
we should notice the opposition voiced to the classical liberal concept of
freedom to pursue individual purposes.
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, of freezing to death,
of sleeping naked among the
beasts of the forest!"14 Norman
Thomas has complained about “this persistent identification of freedom with the
right of strong or lucky men to make great profit out of absentee ownership or
out of management and exploitation of other men’s labor.”15
Second,
probably the main use of the word
“freedom” among socialists is to refer to the overcoming of exploitation and to
provide the “means of life” to people who have lacked them.
Adam Ulam said that socialist freedom consists of “the doctrine
that freedom is a positive concept rather than a negative one and that it
consists of opportunities for self-expression rather than of the lack of
constraints upon liberty.”16
Ferdinand Lassalle wrote that “the course of history is a struggle
against nature, against need, ignorance and impotence… The progressive
overcoming of this impotence, -- this is the evolution of liberty.” The state was to play a liberating role in
helping organize the working class: “It
is the business and duty of the State to make it possible for you to take in
hand the great cause of the free, individual association of the working class…
Now, do not allow yourselves to be deceived and misled by the cry of those who
will tell you that any such intervention by the State destroys social
incentive. It is not true that I hinder
anybody from climbing a tower by his own strength if I hand him a ladder or a
rope.”17
Thomas Kirkup states Louis Blanc’s view as having been that “the
intervention of a democratic government on behalf of the people, whom it
represented, would remove the misery, anarchy, and oppression necessarily
attendant on the competitive system, and in place of the delusive liberty of laissez-faire, would
establish a real and positive freedom.”18
This concept is sometimes used in a more
generalized way that goes far beyond overcoming the plight of the have-nots and
refers to making possible anyone’s "full achievement of
potential." Hubert Humphrey, an
American liberal, asked "how free is a scientist if he does not have
equipment and facilities with which to do research?"19 We should notice that Humphrey is not asking
whether the scientist has been coercively denied the equipment. His usage is consistent with Leslie Derfler's observation about socialism that "socialism
possessed an individualist ideal, to assure everyone the 'integral development
of his personality.'"20
Third,
another of the main uses of the word "freedom" by socialist thought
has been to describe the fulfillment an individual is expected to receive from
becoming part of a movement larger than himself. He gains "freedom" by losing
himself in the higher destiny. The form
the larger movement will take differs from one type of socialism to the next.
Hegel
identified monarchy with a system in which "all are free."2l He wrote that "since the state is mind
objectified, it is only as one of its members that the individual himself has
objectivity... (T)he individual's destiny is the living of a universal
life."22
There
is no difficulty seeing how this fed into both leftwing and rightwing
Hegelianism. The Nazi Gerhard Wagner could later say that "loyal to the
will and the instructions of the Fuhrer, we shall fulfill our tasks in the
future: to form the new German man, the new German people, which will assert
its place in the world in strength, in honor, and in freedom." Another Nazi, Walter Schultze,
wrote that "we proceed here from a notion of freedom that is specifically
our own, since we know that freedom must have its limits in the actual
existence or the Volk. Freedom is conceivable only as a bond to something that
has universal validity, a law of which the whole nation is the
bearer." He said that
"ultimately freedom is nothing else but responsible service on behalf or
the basic values of our being as a Volk."23
The
Marxist perspective has been a combination of this "freedom through
immersement in the collective" concept and the preceding idea that freedom
comes through having been provided the means to a satisfactory life. Engels wrote that after the revolution and the
socialization of the means of production "'Man, at last the master of his
own form of social organization, becomes at the same time the lord over Nature,
his own master -- free." And
Lenin wrote that it only "becomes possible
to speak of freedom" after the withering away of the state leads to the final stage in the dialectic of history.24
Fourth, a
very different idea of freedom,
which arose in part from the desire by members of the New Left to negate the
bourgeois preference for responsibility and in part relates to the
individualistic anarchist’s opposition to all constraints, has been the notion
that freedom is "doing your own thing." Chernyshevsky
yearned to suffer no limits. This
appeared in his philosophy, say, about the relationship between the sexes: "I loved her much, and would have
violated my nature to put myself in greater harmony with her; that would have
given me pleasure, but my life would have been under restraint."25 Rousseau had railed against the constraints
civilization placed onto people: "Civilized man is born and dies a slave.
The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is nailed down in his
coffin. All his life long man is imprisoned by our institutions." He said
"the natural man lives for himself."26 For obvious reasons, the more disciplined
factions within the New Left opposed this attitude, since they knew that
collective effort, first for revolution and then to make socialism work, would
require the individual’s much greater commitment to group values.
Fifth, there
are assorted other uses. As Friedrich
Hayek has pointed out in a chapter that compares the different meanings,
"freedom" is some times used narrowly to denote just "political
freedom."27 This usage
is objectionable from a classical liberal standpoint because it tells us
nothing about the fate of the individual.
There is also
a meaning that" refers to "spiritual " freedom. This a usage
appears, for example, when we say about a person who has died after long
suffering that "he is finally free."
The stoics thought a man free who made himself a pillar of strength,
counting on nothing from the rest of the world.
We can even speak of the "freedom" of someone who is in chains
if he somehow manages to cultivate a soaring and independent spirit.
It is worth
noting that socialism has suffered a loss of momentum in its advocacy of
freedom. Ralph Miliband has written that "one
reason for the present crisis of socialism is that it is not generally taken to
be related to this concrete libertarianism but to bureaucracy and repression,
at the limit in the form of Stalinism.
The future of socialism, in England and elsewhere, is bound up with the
rehabilitation of the idea that it is a libertarian project."28
We are reminded, at least in part, of classical liberalism’s loss of reformist
thrust a century ago.
Social
justice. TheLeft's concept
of "social justice" is so impressed on our minds that we have
difficulty thinking of an alternative.
To the Left, there is "social injustice" in the perceived
system of entrapment and exploitation; there is "social justice" in
overcoming the exploited’s predicament. The Marxist,
of course, superimposes his dialectical view of historical processes: social
injustice is present in all phases of history until the dictatorship of the
proletariat finally gives way to the withering away of the state and to the
"classless society." I should
add that in the literature the term "distributive justice" is often
used as a synonym for "social justice."
This
is all very much at odds with the classical liberal view. The classical liberal considers it just for
people to receive the benefits or burdens of their own success or failure
within the voluntaristic milieu of the market place. He sees injustice in deviating
coercively from that process. There is
"distributive justice" in the successful making more and those who
are less efficient in serving consumer demand making less.
Compassion.
The classical liberal believes a market economy serves human well-being better
than any alternative, and so he does not agree that his philosophy "lacks
compassion." But the egalitarian
socialist, with his view that there is widespread entrapment and exploitation,
emphasizes the compassionate aspects of caring about the plight of those who
are exploited. David Caute
accordingly speaks about "sympathy for the oppressed."29
Needless to say, this is major theme for the Left.
This emphasis
can be misleading, however. Atrocities that surpass anything ever before
committed in history have occurred in the twentieth century in the name of
socialism, both left and right. The world is well aware of the enormities
committed by the Nazis; it is not nearly as aware of the greater atrocities
perpetrated by Stalin and Mao and by the Communists in Cambodia. The brutalities have not all been the result
of unfortunate turns of events, warping what have otherwise been good
intentions. The Nazis held explicitly to a theory of brutality. If words mean
anything at all, the Marxist-Leninists have to know, especially now after so
much graphic experience, that their call for revolution and for a dictatorship
of the proletariat is a call for effusive bloodshed and repression.
Most
people reading a history of socialist thought will think of Proudhon
as one of the leaders of humane socialist thinking in the nineteenth century.
He was aligned with neither of the later totalitarian schools, Nazism or
Marxist-Leninism; and his name is associated with anarchism, which suggests an
opposition to all oppression. But
here is the sort of thing he actually
wrote: "Let us conclude, with the mystics Ancillon,
de Maistre and Portalis,
... that war in one form or another is essential to mankind.... God forbid that
I should preach the gentle virtues and joys of peace to my fellow men... (W)hat
I like most in man is the bellicose temperament." In 1847 he was one of the first to
suggest the extermination of the Jews!
Here is what a footnote to his Selected Writings tells us: "Proudhon's diaries reveal that had almost paranoid feelings
of hatred against the Jews. In 1847 he
considered publishing... an article against the Jewish race, which he said he
'hated.' The proposed article would have
'Called for the expulsion of the Jews from France, except for those married to
Frenchwomen; the abolition of all their synagogues; the denial to them of all
employment; the abolition of their cult... The Jew is the enemy of the human
race. This race must be sent back to
Asia, or exterminated."'30 (Emphasis added)
The compassion shown by modern socialist thought reflects an alliance of the intellectual with the have-nots. Accordingly, there must always be the suspicion that the compassion is only as permanent as that alliance. There is an abundance of evidence to indicate that compassion is not an inherent part of the psychological make-up of many socialists.
Elitism.
The ideological superstructure of equality, freedom and compassion is
also contradicted by the elitism that has been so recurrent within socialist
thought.
Elitism
isn't unusual in itself. What is unusual
is that a point of view that has championed the cause of the have-not should
have a significant strain of elitism.
Lichtheim tells us that "Proudhon
in 1848 confided to his diary the rather undemocratic thought 'The
representative of the people -- that I am.
For I alone am right.'" He
also says about the Fabian society in Britain that
"there was never any question of' enrolling numerous members. The Society was elitist and determinedly
so." Lichtheim comments that "Shaw... was
an instinctive elitist, as his subsequent adoption of Nietzschean
doctrines (not to mention his later flirtation with Mussolini) was to show...
(B)y the later 1890's Shaw had become totally cynical about democracy and
convinced that the principal obstacle to the spread of socialism was 'the
stupidity of the working class."'31
Lewis
S. Feuer writes that "for a number of years, the chief spokesman of the
alienated intellectuals in America was C. Wright Mills. He explicitly urged that Marxists should rid
themselves of their 'labor metaphysic' and overtly justify the role and rule of
the intellectual elite as the sole progressive force in the world." Feuer adds that
"the intellectuals -- in Marx's term, the 'ideological class' -- have in
all societies felt themselves an aristocracy, an elite."32
Two books
that are informative in this area are Konrad and Szelenyi's The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power,
which dissects the situation within the Soviet-bloc countries, and Alvin Gouldner's The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of
the New Class.33