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(overhaul, mainly based on this infrared vision video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbu-AAlqDJg&t=239s and the communist mannifesto) |
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Socialism was never premised on a definition; rather, it was a real phenomenon only later given this name.<ref>[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbu-AAlqDJg&list=PLAJIhnd1mbiCVeVI3Pu8NihIZzfWMhg5h&index=5 The New Era of Socialism] this article draws heavily on this Infrared Vision video</ref> Socialism was the spontaneous response of consciousness to an objective apocalypse of traditional order and meaning in every sense which took place in late 18th and 19th century Europe. Concretely, this apocalypse took dual form as the Industrial Revolution in England and the political revolution in France. This gave rise to the '''Social Question'''. As the "feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations" which formed the fabric of Ancien life were torn asunder, the cold brutality of all against all, dog eat dog, and every man for himself took their place. Socialism was simply the practical recognition of this fact and some corresponding program to remedy it. Production had to be reconciled with the majority of people's actual lives, serving social ends to guarantee a minimum of dignified, human life. | |||
For Utopians like '''Simon''' and '''Fourier''', this was an intellectual problem, one which they considered themselves to have solved. Marx departs with the simple premise that capitalism would never voluntarily annihilate itself in service of better angels, as the Utopians suggested, that instead it would ''involuntarily but automatically'' annihilate itself as a mode of production due to objective contradictions essential to its very process of reproduction. Circulation of commodities at exchange value would lead to a falling rate of profit and economic crises which trigger the consolidation of capital under fewer and fewer firms. Somewhere along the line this process would no longer be sustainable as a free system without intervention. | |||
Marx and Engels recognized capitalism as a force of disruption and immiseration, but in it they recognized also the forces which would inevitably lead to socialism. Never did they assert this trajectory as voluntaristic, self-conscious construction of a new system by individuals subjectively opposed to capitalism. Rather, socialism was the inevitable conclusion of tendencies integral to capitalism itself. '''''Capitalism was for them the process by which Socialism constructed itself,'' independent of any individual subjective will.''' | |||
== The Dual Revolution and the Social Question == | |||
England's enclosure movement and industrial revolution destroyed the familiar, stable and traditional way of life that peasants had been accustomed to for centuries. Peasants without land faced unprecedented social and economic insecurity. They were crowded into cities, where the same state that had driven them off their land refused to provide for them, leading to controversy over the Elizabethan Poor Laws. | |||
The French revolution overturned the stable hierarchy of Feudalism, tearing apart the Great Chain of Being in which had long allowed commoners to identify themselves in a meaningful social reality. What hatched in Paris soon spread wings, as Napoleon carried world-history across the continent, smashing the Holy Roman Empire and laying the groundwork for German unification through a legal and political leveling process. Aside from formal changes, the wars upended the unspoken traditional hierarchies of Ancien Europe; as a German footsoldier in the ''Grande Armee'' recorded in his diary upon taking Moscow:<blockquote>Everyone was disguised in furs, rags, and pieces of cloth; they wore round hats and peasant caps on their heads, and many had priest’s robes from the churches. ''It was like a world turned upside down.''</blockquote>Taken together, the dual revolution ushered in Modernity. For common people, this was more or less a biblical apocalypse. In Marx's immortal words:<blockquote>Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.<ref name=":0">[https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ Marx, "Communist Manifesto"]</ref></blockquote>It is in this context that the '''Social Question''', long an object of contemplation for humanist philosophers, first acquired real-world relevance. European humanists such as '''Hobbes''' and '''Rousseau''' had inquired as to the real premises of man, but before the eruption of modernity and its attendant restlessness, these realities were ultimately ''unwritten'', and could safely remain so. It was taken for granted that societies had a way of relating to the ineffable, sacred and sublime thing that made them whole. That sociality had to be reflexively, explicitly named implies a devastating loss of the ability to relate to it implicitly. By 1848, this crisis and its attendant question had become apparent to all. ''Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies'' - none could ignore it. | |||
For common people, there was no clear solution, only a growing awareness that the crisis could only be responded to in a correspondingly social way. Utopians responded by imagining an ideal society and how it would run from scratch. Naturally, the blank canvas of the American frontier was ideal for the implementation of these ideas. Indiana's New Harmony, Ohio's Utopia, and New Jersey's Phalanx Square reflected both the lengths and the limits of Utopian thought. Utopians looked to the factory, at that time the most advanced expression of Capitalist social organization, as the model of socialist Utopia, and in practice, American Utopians implemented it. As diverse and peculiar as they were, these projects were understood as real instances of Socialism or Communism. Thus, by 1848, thinkers like Engels would view America as "the proving-ground of Communism." Engels held this position not because these projects conformed to a pre-ordained definition of socialism, but simply because they put into practice an acknowledgement of the fact that economic relations were relevant at a common, social level. | |||
Today, this sounds like a truism. In the 21st century, one his hard pressed to find a politician or thinker who will separate economics and social welfare. Contemporary microeconomics even maximizes the latter as a mathematical variable. But in the 19th century even the very recognition of common, social realities could not be taken for granted. As the 'feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations' which formed the social fabric of Ancien life were torn asunder, the cold brutality of all against all, dog eat dog, and every man for himself took their place. Socialism was simply the practical recognition of this fact and some corresponding program to remedy it. Production had to be reconciled with the majority of people's actual lives, serving social ends to guarantee a minimum of dignified, human life. | |||
== Variations == | == Variations == | ||
In the '''Communist Manifesto''', Marx describes more than half dozen socialist currents popular circa 1848. From every conceivable disaffected corner issued a corresponding socialism, articulated to varying degrees of seriousness. | |||
=== Reactionary Socialism === | |||
'''Obsolete aristocrats''' in France and England upbraided their bourgeois successors. Dismayed, not so much by the conditions of the proletariat but by the attendant social instability, their cry went up: "half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the past, half menace of the future... always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history."<ref name=":0" /> | |||
'''Petty-Bourgeois adjuncts''' (Sismondi at their head) decried capital only insofar as they found themselves tumbling from its seat and thrown beneath the wheels. Competition doomed them, and they sought therefore to constrain it, to cramp productive development to the point of their own preservation, making them both reactionary and Utopian. | |||
'''German philistines''' imported and presumed to correct French socialism, forgetting meanwhile that they did not import the conditions of France along with her literature. Against every modest gain of bourgeois liberalism they ham-fistedly flung the rhetoric of Socialists in France (a country in which such rhetoric was deployed against an already developed bourgeois state), serving the absolute governments more than anyone. After 1848, this type lost their appetite for such rhetoric and became full-throated reactionaries. | |||
=== Bourgeois Socialism === | |||
Typified by '''Proudhon''', Marx includes here "economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind."<ref name=":0" /> They enjoyed bourgeois society as a whole, but decried its extremes, which they proposed to prune away until they are left with self-propagating fruit sans tree. These are the reformists. | |||
=== Utopian Socialism === | |||
See main page: [[Utopian socialism]] | |||
The systems of '''Owen''', '''Fourier''', and '''Saint-Simon''' (which Marx explicitly called properly Communist or Socialist) did not lack historical vision. These men understood that the crisis was both irreversible and progressive, and therefore that the only way out was foreword. They differed from Marx chiefly in their understanding of class, a difference which Marx ascribes to their prematurity. Utopians saw their theories as ''above'' class antagonism, and sought a new social science with which to improve the condition of all classes. They appealed to society at large, with particular emphasis on the role, not of the proletariat, who they deemed significant only insofar as they suffered more than others, but of the upper class. To the benevolence of whom they entrusted their historical mission. They saw socialism as a naturally and universally appealing idea, the realization of which required nothing but for level-headed men to read their book. | |||
'' | == "We already live in socialism" == | ||
See main page: [[''We already live in socialism'']] | |||
'''Bourgeois socialism''' is a term used to describe bourgeois states bearing resemblance to socialism, with things like [[Central planning|central planning of the national economy]]. In | '''Bourgeois socialism''' is a term used to describe bourgeois states bearing resemblance to socialism, with things like [[Central planning|central planning of the national economy]]. In 2021, [[Haz Al-Din]] put forth the theory that [[''We already live in socialism''|we already live in socialism]], stating that we have already transitioned into an incipient socialist mode of production, but because this is not reflected by society's institutions, one characterized by the continued rule of the now dynastic and semi-hereditary capitalist class, which accumulates derivative profits from a more or less centrally planned economy. | ||
==Notable socialist states== | ==Notable socialist states== | ||
| Line 32: | Line 61: | ||
*[[Second Republic of Seychelles]] (1977-1991) | *[[Second Republic of Seychelles]] (1977-1991) | ||
==Further | ==Further Readin== | ||
*[[Karl Marx]] | *[[Karl Marx]] | ||
*[[Islamic Socialism]] | *[[Islamic Socialism]] | ||
Revision as of 01:28, 29 January 2024
Socialism was never premised on a definition; rather, it was a real phenomenon only later given this name.[1] Socialism was the spontaneous response of consciousness to an objective apocalypse of traditional order and meaning in every sense which took place in late 18th and 19th century Europe. Concretely, this apocalypse took dual form as the Industrial Revolution in England and the political revolution in France. This gave rise to the Social Question. As the "feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations" which formed the fabric of Ancien life were torn asunder, the cold brutality of all against all, dog eat dog, and every man for himself took their place. Socialism was simply the practical recognition of this fact and some corresponding program to remedy it. Production had to be reconciled with the majority of people's actual lives, serving social ends to guarantee a minimum of dignified, human life.
For Utopians like Simon and Fourier, this was an intellectual problem, one which they considered themselves to have solved. Marx departs with the simple premise that capitalism would never voluntarily annihilate itself in service of better angels, as the Utopians suggested, that instead it would involuntarily but automatically annihilate itself as a mode of production due to objective contradictions essential to its very process of reproduction. Circulation of commodities at exchange value would lead to a falling rate of profit and economic crises which trigger the consolidation of capital under fewer and fewer firms. Somewhere along the line this process would no longer be sustainable as a free system without intervention.
Marx and Engels recognized capitalism as a force of disruption and immiseration, but in it they recognized also the forces which would inevitably lead to socialism. Never did they assert this trajectory as voluntaristic, self-conscious construction of a new system by individuals subjectively opposed to capitalism. Rather, socialism was the inevitable conclusion of tendencies integral to capitalism itself. Capitalism was for them the process by which Socialism constructed itself, independent of any individual subjective will.
The Dual Revolution and the Social Question
England's enclosure movement and industrial revolution destroyed the familiar, stable and traditional way of life that peasants had been accustomed to for centuries. Peasants without land faced unprecedented social and economic insecurity. They were crowded into cities, where the same state that had driven them off their land refused to provide for them, leading to controversy over the Elizabethan Poor Laws.
The French revolution overturned the stable hierarchy of Feudalism, tearing apart the Great Chain of Being in which had long allowed commoners to identify themselves in a meaningful social reality. What hatched in Paris soon spread wings, as Napoleon carried world-history across the continent, smashing the Holy Roman Empire and laying the groundwork for German unification through a legal and political leveling process. Aside from formal changes, the wars upended the unspoken traditional hierarchies of Ancien Europe; as a German footsoldier in the Grande Armee recorded in his diary upon taking Moscow:
Everyone was disguised in furs, rags, and pieces of cloth; they wore round hats and peasant caps on their heads, and many had priest’s robes from the churches. It was like a world turned upside down.
Taken together, the dual revolution ushered in Modernity. For common people, this was more or less a biblical apocalypse. In Marx's immortal words:
Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.[2]
It is in this context that the Social Question, long an object of contemplation for humanist philosophers, first acquired real-world relevance. European humanists such as Hobbes and Rousseau had inquired as to the real premises of man, but before the eruption of modernity and its attendant restlessness, these realities were ultimately unwritten, and could safely remain so. It was taken for granted that societies had a way of relating to the ineffable, sacred and sublime thing that made them whole. That sociality had to be reflexively, explicitly named implies a devastating loss of the ability to relate to it implicitly. By 1848, this crisis and its attendant question had become apparent to all. Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies - none could ignore it.
For common people, there was no clear solution, only a growing awareness that the crisis could only be responded to in a correspondingly social way. Utopians responded by imagining an ideal society and how it would run from scratch. Naturally, the blank canvas of the American frontier was ideal for the implementation of these ideas. Indiana's New Harmony, Ohio's Utopia, and New Jersey's Phalanx Square reflected both the lengths and the limits of Utopian thought. Utopians looked to the factory, at that time the most advanced expression of Capitalist social organization, as the model of socialist Utopia, and in practice, American Utopians implemented it. As diverse and peculiar as they were, these projects were understood as real instances of Socialism or Communism. Thus, by 1848, thinkers like Engels would view America as "the proving-ground of Communism." Engels held this position not because these projects conformed to a pre-ordained definition of socialism, but simply because they put into practice an acknowledgement of the fact that economic relations were relevant at a common, social level.
Today, this sounds like a truism. In the 21st century, one his hard pressed to find a politician or thinker who will separate economics and social welfare. Contemporary microeconomics even maximizes the latter as a mathematical variable. But in the 19th century even the very recognition of common, social realities could not be taken for granted. As the 'feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations' which formed the social fabric of Ancien life were torn asunder, the cold brutality of all against all, dog eat dog, and every man for himself took their place. Socialism was simply the practical recognition of this fact and some corresponding program to remedy it. Production had to be reconciled with the majority of people's actual lives, serving social ends to guarantee a minimum of dignified, human life.
Variations
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx describes more than half dozen socialist currents popular circa 1848. From every conceivable disaffected corner issued a corresponding socialism, articulated to varying degrees of seriousness.
Reactionary Socialism
Obsolete aristocrats in France and England upbraided their bourgeois successors. Dismayed, not so much by the conditions of the proletariat but by the attendant social instability, their cry went up: "half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the past, half menace of the future... always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history."[2]
Petty-Bourgeois adjuncts (Sismondi at their head) decried capital only insofar as they found themselves tumbling from its seat and thrown beneath the wheels. Competition doomed them, and they sought therefore to constrain it, to cramp productive development to the point of their own preservation, making them both reactionary and Utopian.
German philistines imported and presumed to correct French socialism, forgetting meanwhile that they did not import the conditions of France along with her literature. Against every modest gain of bourgeois liberalism they ham-fistedly flung the rhetoric of Socialists in France (a country in which such rhetoric was deployed against an already developed bourgeois state), serving the absolute governments more than anyone. After 1848, this type lost their appetite for such rhetoric and became full-throated reactionaries.
Bourgeois Socialism
Typified by Proudhon, Marx includes here "economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind."[2] They enjoyed bourgeois society as a whole, but decried its extremes, which they proposed to prune away until they are left with self-propagating fruit sans tree. These are the reformists.
Utopian Socialism
See main page: Utopian socialism
The systems of Owen, Fourier, and Saint-Simon (which Marx explicitly called properly Communist or Socialist) did not lack historical vision. These men understood that the crisis was both irreversible and progressive, and therefore that the only way out was foreword. They differed from Marx chiefly in their understanding of class, a difference which Marx ascribes to their prematurity. Utopians saw their theories as above class antagonism, and sought a new social science with which to improve the condition of all classes. They appealed to society at large, with particular emphasis on the role, not of the proletariat, who they deemed significant only insofar as they suffered more than others, but of the upper class. To the benevolence of whom they entrusted their historical mission. They saw socialism as a naturally and universally appealing idea, the realization of which required nothing but for level-headed men to read their book.
"We already live in socialism"
See main page: ''We already live in socialism''
Bourgeois socialism is a term used to describe bourgeois states bearing resemblance to socialism, with things like central planning of the national economy. In 2021, Haz Al-Din put forth the theory that we already live in socialism, stating that we have already transitioned into an incipient socialist mode of production, but because this is not reflected by society's institutions, one characterized by the continued rule of the now dynastic and semi-hereditary capitalist class, which accumulates derivative profits from a more or less centrally planned economy.
Notable socialist states
- Soviet Union (1917-1991)
- Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), known colloquially as North Korea (1948- )
- People's Republic of China (1949- )
- Republic of Cuba (1959- )
- Lao Democratic People's Republic (1975- )
- Polish People's Republic (1947-1989)
- Socialist Republic of Romania (1947-1989)
- Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1945-1992)
- German Democratic Republic (1949-1989)
- Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (1969-2011)
- Syrian Arab Republic (1963- )
- Socialist Republic of Vietnam (1945- )
- Republic of Iraq (1968-2003)
- United Arab Republic (1952-1970)
- People's Socialist Republic of Albania (1946-1991)
- Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (1948-1989)
- Hungarian People's Republic (1949-1989)
- People's Republic of Bulgaria (1946-1989)
- Mongolian People's Republic (1924-1990)
- Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979)
- People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (1967-1990)
- Second Republic of Seychelles (1977-1991)
Further Readin
- Karl Marx
- Islamic Socialism
- Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Friedrich Engels
References
- ↑ The New Era of Socialism this article draws heavily on this Infrared Vision video
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Marx, "Communist Manifesto"