[This is Chapter Nine of Murphey’s book Socialist Thought.]
Chapter 9
REJECTION OF BOURGEOIS LIBERALISM
In so-called bourgeois society,
millions of average people pursue their own happiness and make decisions for
themselves within a facilitating framework of law, institutions and ethics. A
classical liberal sees this as in large measure fulfilling the historic
aspirations of the human race. Far from being sick and befouled, it is humane,
democratic and rewarding; it is mankind in its normalcy, a rightful state to
which most men aspire. (For this reason, the classical liberal would generally
not be inclined to call it "bourgeois," since that suggests it is
limited in its usefulness by a cultural relativity.) Despite my consciousness
of the shortcomings of such a "free society," I share the classical
liberal perspective of it.
This view is certainly not shared,
however, by the various alienated ideologies. In this chapter we will notice a
few samples of the many frontal assaults socialist writing has made on
bourgeois society.
The opposition appears very directly
and candidly in the passage by R. H. Tawney where he
says 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 Tawney, one
of the leading British socialists, wanted a "Functional
Society." He considered bourgeois
society an "Acquisitive Society" because its "whole tendency and
interest and preoccupation is to promote the acquisition of wealth."
Lenin gave the bourgeoisie
backhanded credit, as a Marxist dialectician is quite ready to do, for
presiding over the age that ushered in the proletariat, but in every other way
he excoriated it: "As long as there is private property, your state, even
if it is a democratic republic, is nothing but a machine used by the
capitalists to suppress the workers." Speaking of the
Engels wrote that "I have never seen a class
so deeply demoralized, so incurably debased by selfishness, so corroded within,
so incapable of progress, as
the English bourgeoisie."3
Proudhon
spoke of "the haute-bourgeoisie, which... has reached the lowest possible
degree of intellectual and moral vacuity."4
Herbert Marcuse
saw American society as one "which compels the vast majority of the
population to 'earn' their living in stupid, inhuman, and unnecessary jobs;
which conducts its booming business on the back of ghettos, slums, and internal
and external colonialism; which is invested with violence and
repression...."5
Charles Reich began his The
Greening of America with the words, "
Mussolini, wanting "the common
denominator of a great sacrifice of blood," spoke of the "insipid
spirit" of the "middle class and the bourgeoisie."7
Hitler
was in spiritual revolt against the normalcy of a peaceable free society:
"The greatest revolutionary changes on this earth would not have been
thinkable if their motive force, instead of fanatical, yes, hysterical passion,
had been merely the bourgeois virtues of law and order." He said that ''as a young scamp in my wild
years, nothing had so grieved me as having been born at a time which obviously
erected its Halls of Fame only to shopkeepers and government officials... Why
couldn't I have been born a hundred years earlier? Say at the time of the Wars of Liberation
when a man, even without a 'business,' was really worth something?!"8
This
animus is worth noting for its own sake, especially if we understand that it
runs across the many permutations of alienated ideology. In some ways, Tawney, Lenin, Engels, Proudhon, Marcuse, Reich,
Mussolini and Hitler were very different men; but it is clear that they harbored a common hatred.
An
aspect that is important as we read socialist literature is that so few of
these writers have any comprehension of or empathy for the society they hate so
steadfastly. They show virtually no awareness of classical liberalism as a body
of thought worth discussing, much less refuting. George Bernard Shaw, for example, wrote about
"political economy" that it "becomes an impudent demonstration
that the wages of the poor cannot be raised; that without the idle rich we
should perish for lack of capital…."9 Like a sophomoric
debater, he is more interested in making a point than in fathoming what
classical economic theory was saying. Even the much more level-headed Norman
Thomas was capable of saying that "no serious thinker" disagrees with
the need for increased governmental control.10 At the stroke of a
pen, he wrote off all classical liberal and conservative objections to the
increasing role of government as simply not being serious thought.
This
can be explained in part by the fact that classical liberalism, long on the
defensive, has not sufficiently been a part of the mainstream of modern
intellect to be taken seriously. Such a fact is, needless to say, an enormity
of the first magnitude. It produces a critically important void within modern
intellectual sensibility.
Another
part of the explanation lies, of course, in the self-centered
failure of most thinkers fully to understand opposing points of view. This is
not a fault exclusively of socialists, since I know that most anti-socialists
have not been inclined to give themselves an empathetic understanding of just
what it is that socialists are saying. It is typical of people in general.
Nevertheless, it is a significant
flaw in the alienation.