WEEK 10: SOCIALISM

1. Is socialism dead? The questions about the survival of socialism arose out of the Soviet Communist demise;
2. Yet, Soviet Communism was only one of many socialist experiments, not the paradigmatic case of actually existing socialism;
3. Indeed, Leninism and Stalinism may even represent a narrowing of socialist possibilities; other (preceding) versions are religious and secular socialist utopias, anarchism, social-democratic movements and (the following) anticolonial and postcolonial liberation struggles
4. Four reasons to study socialism today:
1. The death of socialism in its Bolshevik guise frees the Left to reassess its rich history;
2. The continued importance of class conflict in contemporary politics (poverty remains a persistent problem for some groups);
3. The vision of human liberation and fulfillment that socialist ideas offer;
4. The need to distinguish what is Marxian (Marx’s actual idea) from what is Marxist (ideas espoused in his name);

The Origins of Socialism
1. The origin of the term is unknown; perhaps, it was first used in 1835 to refer to the utopian socialist community of New Lanark founded by the English industrialist Robert Owen;
2. Definition referring to Owen and Fourier: socialism proposes that a society living together should share all the wealth it produces
3. Albert Fried’s definition: socialist conviction that each person’s obligation to society as a whole is the absolute condition of his equality, that society is a brotherhood, not collection of strangers drawn together by interest (the usual interpretation of the contract), that the individual derives his highest fulfillment from his solidarity with others, not from the pursuit of advantage and power;;

Utopian Socialism
1. Utopian socialists believe that all of society—rich and poor—will voluntary join socialist utopias after observing how they operate; Charles Fourier’s idea of the phalansteries;
2. Religious utopian socialism: the United Society of Believers (Shakers), led by Mother Ann Lee moved from England to America and founded their first community, Niskayuna, in 1776 near Albany, New York;
3. According to the Shakers, Ann Lee represented God’s second coming in the form of a woman who should redeem the sins of Eve; they were organized as celibate families of brothers and sisters and ruled by strict sexual taboos; those families were governed by Elders and Eldresses; the latter were organized in communities led by a Holy Anointed Mother and Father;
4. Although Marx was an atheist, some of his themes sound similar to religious socialism: liberation theology and spiritual themes; Marx regarded religion, especially Christianity, as politically conservative primarily because it asks human beings to surrender control over their destiny to divine powers;
5. Marx’s account of labor under capitalism parallels the human condition after the Fall; in both cases, humans suffer because they are separated from essential aspects of their being, other people, and their God.
6. Schumpeter describes Marx as a secular prophet who espouses socialism as the new millennium;

Hegel
1. According to Marx, history is dialectical and materialist; dialectics refers to the humans’ self-creative process; according to Engels, dialectics comprehends things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection, concentration, motion, origin, and ending;
2. According to Marx, Hegel’s greatest contribution was a concept of history as a process of man’s self-creation through the activity of labor;
3. Hegel sees human creation as vehicles in which a higher power—a self-manifesting and self-knowing Idea or “Spirit”—assumes historical form;
4. According to Marx, this should be put upside down “if you would discover the rational Kernel within the mystical shell;” Marx turned to the materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach, a Left Hegelian, who argues that Hegel, by portraying humanity as a manifestation of “Spirit,” denies humans real, material, sensuous existence; Feuerbach: “Spirit,” if it exists at all, is a creation, or, more precisely, a projection of human beings’ own creativity;
5. According to Marx, Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into human essence, but the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. It is reality in its ensemble of social relations;”
6. The hope that human beings can live meaningful lives: Marxism bases that hope on humans’ self-creative capacities as species-beings; according to William Adams Marx traces human creations to the social “foundations of economic life and revolutionary practice, instead of attributing them to an eternal cause, be it God or Nature;
7. Marx’s critique of political economists: in their civil society, the individual appears detached from individual bonds; worse still, the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, an external necessity; political economists tear apart the dialectic relationships between individuals, societies, and history; this allow them to achieve their aim to present production as encased in eternal natural laws independent of history, at which opportunity bourgeois relations are then quietly smuggled in as the inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded;
8. According to Marx, the materialism of political economists is mechanic, static, or both; rather than isolated individuals, human beings are social animals who can only individuate themselves in the midst of society;
9. Marx’ structure and superstructure of society; the economic structure includes the mode of production or technologic base, a division of labor, class relationship, and property ownership; superstructure is composed of the various aspects of legal, political, and intellectual life; there is a circular relationship between them;
10. Yet, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life;
11. Although Marx says social relations are independent of human will, he does not mean that people cannot affect them—only that they act within a context that limit their options;
Class, Capitalism, and Consciousness
1. Classes are defined by their relationships to the productive forces of a society; only the structural relationship between its members and the mode of production establishes a class; class relationships are conflictual, not symbiotic;
2. The classes in conflict under capitalism are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat;
3. Marx uses the concept of class in the objective sense (objective relationships that are empirically verifiable), and in the subjective sense (the question of class consciousness: how does a class, especially the proletariat become a revolutionary force?);
4. According to Marx, capitalist societies have four major problems, each of which contributes in a different way to the creation of a revolutionary proletariat:
1. Contradictions;
2. Exploitation;
3. Alienation;
4. Fetishism.


Democratic Socialism, Revolutionary Communism, and a Third Way

Marx’s Theory of Revolution
1. Two phases of Marx’ revolution: the initial phase, which he calls proletarian dictatorship or crude communism, still carries the birthmarks of capitalist society, and they account for many of its flaws—during this phase, (bourgeois equal rights are achieved); the second phase implies the transition to the communist society where the principle is: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs;
2. Politically, the dictatorship of proletariat also represents a transitional phase; although Marx is not able to show us how the institutions of that regime would work (hence offering us no political theory cue); the most that we know from Marx on that issue are his praises about the political institutions of the Paris Commune: 1) replacement of the standing armies by the armed people; 2) introduction to universal suffrage, immediate recall, and workers’ wages for government officials; 3) integration of executive and legislative powers in a single body to clarify responsibility; 4) separation of church and state;

Democratic Socialism
1. Eduard Bernstein’s (SDP) central concern was the gap between socialist theory and practice, more specifically, the tension between revolutionary rhetoric and electoral strategies;
2. Bernstein argues that history proceeds, not through dialectical contradictions, but through organic evolutionism; liberal capitalism evolves gradually and steadily toward democratic socialism;
3. According to Bernstein, Marx was too materialistic and too deterministic—a Calvinist without God;
4. Bernstein points out that the economic contradictions Marx anticipated have not emerged; what Marx saw as economic crisis, Bernstein portrays as trade cycles;
5. Bernstein insisted that the socialist revolution must occur through democratic means—or not at all;

Revolutionary Communism
1. The program for organizing a revolutionary communist party was outlined by Lenin in his What Is to Be Done? Lenin focuses on the Communist Party, more specifically its revolutionary vanguard, as the mechanism for transforming society during and extended dictatorship of proletariat;
2. Lenin’s two consciousnesses of proletariat: 1) trade union consciousness; 2) revolutionary consciousness;

A Third Way
1. The New Left chapter in the story involves an initial attempt to combine the anti-communist, anti-utopian politics of the Old Left with an American-inspired vision of participatory democracy;
2. Tom Hayden (one of the original authors of “The Port Huron Statement) and Dick Flacks describe Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) as a fusion of paths that yielded a vision informed by a democratic American radicalism going back to Thomas Paine, one that attempted to transcend the stale dogmas of the dying left as well as the liberal celebration of the New Frontier as Camelot; they trace the concept of participatory democracy articulated there to John Dewey, a democratic populist, and C Wright Mills, a plain Marxist;
3. Among the political goals of SDS was renewed emphasis on domestic politics, including social reforms and voting rights, fueled by the civil rights movement;
4. The fusion of populist democracy and left-wing politics did not survive the pressure of events, among them the Vietnam War, multiple assassinations, and violent repressions of antiwar protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention; the democratic left splintered into left-wing extremists, including the Maoist-inspired Weathermen, and the counterculture, which combined an existentialist celebration of individuality with renewed interest in utopian social experiments
5. Hayden and Flacks also articulate the crucial question the New Left poses in the history of socialism: perhaps the two stands—the grassroots radical democratic thrust and the need for an organization with a program—can never be fused, but neither can one live without the other;
6. Norberto Bobbio’s distinction between an “included middle”—a position between the opposing poles—and an “inclusive middle”—a higher synthesis of the poles; the included middle is essentially practical politics without a doctrine, whereas the inclusive middle is essentially a doctrine in search of practical politics.