Socialism

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Socialism was never premised on a subjective definition or injunction; 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. Socialism is therefore the sublation of Capitalism in the precise Hegelian sense: in preservation (cartels setting prices, central banks ordering the economy) it passes away (competition ceases, property becomes hereditary and institutional). [2]

Marx and Engels recognized capitalism as a force of disruption and immiseration, but in it they recognized also the forces which would 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. Communism is the real movement which gives discursive and political recognition to this fact.

The Dual Revolution and the Social Question

George Grosz, "Explosion"

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 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 old 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.[3]

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.[4]

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.

Variations

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx describes more than half a 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."[4]

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."[4] 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.

Utopian Socialism

See main page: Utopian socialism

The systems of Owen, Fourier, and Saint-Simon did not lack historical vision. These men understood that the crisis was both irreversible and progressive, and therefore that the only way out was forward. 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''

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx used bourgeois socialism to refer to certain reformists of his time who sought to remedy the ills of capitalism within capitalism. However, certain remarks about the efficacy of joint-stock companies and banks in Engels Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, and in the third Volume of Marx's Capital, may be coupled with Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage to historically analyze the bourgeois economic developments during the 20th century. Although neither Marx nor Engels use the term in this sense, one could use the term bourgeois socialism to describe the way in which - especially in the wake of the Great Depression - bourgeois states began to manage their economies through central banks, public work programs, and other means.

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 that this is not reflected by society's institutions, which are characterized by the continued rule of the now dynastic and semi-hereditary capitalist class who accumulate derivative profits from a more or less centrally planned economy.

The Need for the Transition to Socialism

Marx noted that the growing accumulation of capital naturally supposes its growing concentration and power. The contradiction between the general social power into which capital has developed and the private power of the capitalists over these social conditions of production develops more intensely and blatantly. At the same time, this development also contains its solution - that the the conditions of production are now raised into general, communal, social conditions in accordance with its social power. This transformation is brought about by the development of the productive forces under capitalist production and is the manner and form in which this development is accomplished. The natural development of capitalism, of its internal contradictions, forms the basis for socialism.[5]

This is illustrated, briefly, by two 'cardinal facts' of capitalist production outlined by Marx in Volume III:

(1) The concentration of the means of production into few hands, which means that they are transformed on the contrary to the social powers of production.

(2) The organization of labor itself as social labor through cooperation, the division of labor, and fusing of labor with the natural sciences.

Marx then notes that on both accounts (1) and (2), the capitalist mode of production abolishes private property and private labor, even if in antithetical forms.[6]

Marxism understands the capitalist development of the productive forces of social labor as its historic mission and justification. For that very reason, it unwittingly creates the material conditions for a higher form of production. Capitalist production is not an absolute, but only a historical mode of production, corresponding to a specific and limited epoch. Marx's scientific analysis of the capitalist mode of production shows that it is a mode of production of a particular kind and a specific historical determinacy; of its historically transitory character. [7]

The Formation of Joint-Stock Companies

Marx & Engels saw in the emergence of joint-stock companies the following:

(1) Tremendous expansion in the scale of production at enterprises which would be other impossible for individual capitalists (read development of productive forces).

(2) At the same time, capital, which is inherently based on a social mode of production and presupposes a social concentration of means of production and labor-power, now receives the form of social capital (this is what a joint-stock company is, i.e. a public company) in contrast to private capital, and its enterprises appear as social enterprises as opposed to private ones. This is the abolition of capital as private property within the confines (context) of the capitalist mode of production itself.

Marx calls this precisely the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself, and hence a self-abolishing contradiction, which presents itself as a mere point of transition to a new form of production.[8]

Notable socialist states

Further Reading

References

  1. ↑ The New Era of Socialism this article draws heavily on this Infrared Vision video
  2. ↑ “just where it fancies it is pursuing its own self-preservation and particular interest, is in fact doing the very opposite, is an activity that results in its own dissolution, and makes itself a moment of the whole.” (Preface to the Phenomenology, ($54))
  3. ↑ Diary of Napoleonic Footsoldier, p.71 link
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Marx, "Communist Manifesto"
  5. ↑ Capital Volume III (Penguin Edition), p. 373.
  6. ↑ Capital Volume III (Penguin), p. 375.
  7. ↑ Capital, Volume III (Penguin), pp. 365-8, 1018.
  8. ↑ Capital Volume III (Penguin), p. 569.
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