Socialism

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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. 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).

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.[2]

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.[3]

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."[3]

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."[3] 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 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''

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 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. ↑ Diary of Napoleonic Footsoldier, p.71 link
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Marx, "Communist Manifesto"
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