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). Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tagTaken 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.

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."[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.

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.

Notable socialist states

Further Reading

References

  1. ↑ The New Era of Socialism this article draws heavily on this Infrared Vision video
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Marx, "Communist Manifesto"
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