[This is Chapter Eighteen of Murphey’s book Socialist Thought.]
Chapter 18
LIFESTYLE
There
are some major themes within socialist thought about lifestyles and values, but
there is certainly no unanimity.
Some of the themes deal, of course, with
what socialists oppose. Since socialists generally agree upon their opposition
to the middle class and to a market economy, their writing emphasizes
anti-bourgeois and anti-competitive themes.
Many socialist authors also stress their opposition to "materialism,"
which in this usage refers to the affluent, comfort-oriented lifestyle of an
"over-productive" society.
It is not
nearly so clear what socialists would establish in place of the society they
oppose. One significant branch of
thought wants a lifestyle of relaxation, play, sexual fulfillment,
serenity, pacifism, and freedom from the boredom and pressures of work. This theme has been repeated throughout the
history of socialist thought, but it is perhaps best known from its expression
within the "counterculture" of the American New Left in the 1960s and
early 1970s.
A significant
theme runs counter to this, however. It
stresses a yearning for "heroic" values, "the strong life,"
picking up ideas expressed so forcefully by Carlyle and Nietzsche. Sometimes it extols war. A variation of this theme stresses
"righteousness," which points toward the ascetic.
The
opposition to "bourgeois materialism and competition.” These themes extend into a criticism of
virtually every facet of bourgeois culture.
Rousseau spoke unfavorably of "this
desire of being talked about... this unremitting rage of distinguishing ourselves."l He thereby
established a theme that was elaborated upon at length by Thorstein
Veblen in Theory of the Leisure Class and that
has been explored voluminously in modern literature. The opposition to
competition quite naturally extends to such things as the giving of grades in
school, so that the Dolbeares mention a desire to see
the "abolition of the grading system."2
The desire
here is for human relationships that are self-fulfilling while at the same time
mutually supportive. The feeling is that competition diminishes both parties:
to the victor, it substitutes a lesser set of values; he comes to see winning as the goal rather than
attainment for its own sake; and it tells the loser that his own attainment is
second-rate. These concerns are apparent
among those parents who prefer that their children participate in sports that
"are for fun, rather than for seeing who can win." They are articulated frequently at the
Academy Awards ceremony for motion pictures when a recipient says that he's
sorry that there are awards because there is an implicit slap at "the many
creative people who did not win."
In my
discussion of classical liberalism in the preceding volume, I observed that
classical liberalism seeks to carve out a substantial place for such a
non-competitive value system when it supports "feminine"
role-assignments for women. Such a cultural differentiation tends to commit half
the human race to nurturing, supportive, accepting relationships. Although classical liberals have not often
analyzed such things, they can see considerable value in this
differentiation. They recognize, though,
that there needs to be a tougher dimension, at least in the world as it exists
and will exist for a long time. The
"masculine" dimension involves grappling with a hard world, the
cultivating of an ability to deal with the sterner aspects of reality. Thus we see that one of the points of ideological difference between classical
liberalism and much socialist thought is about whether both sexes should be
"feminized." (Ironically, the
"women's liberation" movement, despite being influenced by many of
the concepts of the Left, often presses to make women more masculine by
insisting that they join the competitive nexus.
Needless to say, the longer-term goal of the Left is to lessen the
competitive features of life for both sexes.)
There is also
opposition to the "materialistic" features of bourgeois society. Fried and Sanders write that socialist
thought is "in a sense, anti-economic," in that it wants "to put
the economic forces in their place, to subordinate them to human life."3 Werner Sombart wrote
that "'Comfortism,' the name I have given to
this practical materialism, which means the deviation of the direction of human
life toward amenity-values, brings the whole body of people to decay... The
necessity or filling the void
created in the materialistic soul after each enjoyment by a new enjoyment, has
led to the chase in which modern man spends his life."4
Probably the
most sophisticated discussion of the spiritual effects of a materially-oriented
culture comes from Marx’s early writings, which were rediscovered in the middle
of the twentieth century and became important to the New Left. This involves the Marxian concepts of
"alienation," "reification" and "the fetishism of
commodities," all of which are associated.
Predrag Vranicki has
written of "the 'thingification' of man, as one of the essential forms of man's
alienation in bourgeois society."
He explains the viewpoint quite well: "The classic society of
commodity production has converted everything into a commodity, into a thing.
The worker in such a society sells his ability to work just as everybody else
sells whatever is at his disposal -- a commodity, his mind, his ideas, a trade,
his body, or his talent. Relationships
have clearly been deprived of the fundamental characteristics of humanity if
the entire society amounts to a relationship of buying and selling, if man has
become a statistical cipher, and if man is regarded as though he were part of a
mechanism... This alienation of contemporary man's everyday life is the
foundation and source for all the other forms of his alienated condition... (T)he commodities
which he produces counterpose themselves to him as
either a power or a challenge. The
fetishism of commodities…5 (His emphasis)
This
criticism of bourgeois society has, of course, been made quite independently of
Marx. It is in the tradition of Thomas
Carlyle's complaints about the "cash-nexus." And writing before Marx's early writings were
rediscovered, Werner Sombart caught the essence of
it: "The declining scale is as follows: from spiritual value to
performance value, from performance value to result value, from result value to
value of visible result, from value of visible result to value capable of being
coined."6
In the same
vein, Mussolini complained that "anything in those days that did not have
a material value seemed to be superfluous. These were years when men's hearts
were grey."7
I discussed
this same issue earlier in the present volume in connection with the alienation
of the intellectual (which is, by the way, a different usage of the word
"alienation" than Marx used in the analysis we have just
discussed). The reader will want to
reread those pages to recall my criticism of the position.
Advocacy
of a lifestyle of relaxation and play.
Most people think of the New Left's "counterculture" as the
prime example of a "do your own thing; let it all hang out" way of
life. What they don't realize is that the so-called "New" Left
adopted virtually all of its ideas from nineteenth century socialist thought.
Charles
Fourier in the early nineteenth century wished, according to Fried and Sanders,
"to formulate a social order in which work should be nothing but
play." There was also a strong
sexual emphasis: "The crux of Fourier's scheme was the principle of what
he called passional attraction. The evils of the world existed because human
beings were not permitted by 'civilization' to live in accordance with their
passions. For many of the Fourierists, free love was prominent among the
remedies...."18
The latter
point also appeared in Feuerbach’s thinking. Lewis Feuer tells
us that "German philosophy had negated the human body; the new
philosophers, disciples of Ludwig Feuerbach, affirmed
it. The root meaning of 'alienation' for
Feuerbach was, it must be emphasized, sexual; the
alienated man was one who had acquired a horror of his sexual life."19
Charles Reich
has said of Marx that "he could write as a Utopian in The German
Ideology that with the advent of communist society, it would be ‘possible
for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish
in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I
have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or
critic.’"10 We see Marx, then, as a source of the
anti-vocation viewpoint that was so prominent during the New Left in the
writings of Jack Kerouac and Charles Reich.
Chernyshevsky expressed the viewpoint best: "I have
a few hundred rubles, and I wish to live at my ease and without doing
anything. When I grow weary of idleness,
I shall look for work. Of what sort? It is
of no consequence. Where? It matters not. I am as free as a bird, and I can be as
careless as a bird."11
The opposite
theme: socialists who yearn for the "heroic" or for ascetic morality. In
Chapter 1 we saw how Campanella imagined a utopian
society in which martial virtues were stressed.
In our own century, Mussolini found life's meaning in overcoming
obstacles: "The difficulties of life have hardened my spirit. They have taught me how to live."12
Werner Sombart in
Proudhon wrote that "war is divine, that is to
say it is primordial, essential to life... Death is the crown of life. How could man, who is a thinking, moral, free
being, have a more noble end?... Strength, bravery,
virtue, heroism, the sacrifice of possessions...."14 Kirkup said
of Proudhon that "his life was marked by the
severest simplicity and even puritanism."15
John Stuart
Mill's description of Auguste Comte reminds me of the
other-worldliness of Augustinian Christianity: “Any indulgence, even in food,
not necessary to health and strength, he condemns as immoral. All gratifications, except those of the
affections, are to be, tolerated only as ‘inevitable infirmities.’”16