Leftism
9. From Romantic to Scientific and International Socialism
A. Proudhon
In Proudhon’s numerous books and pamphlets one finds notions and ideas which any true lover of liberty or any true conservative could underwrite, but which really are part and parcel of the “arsenal” of rightist thought. He did belong to that not so very rare category of theorists who, given the right contacts, the right friends, and the right ambiance, could have overcome the magnetism of the left.
Let us just cite a few passages to give at least a vague idea of the part of Proudhon’s mind that was bound to conflict with the later socialist outlook which was dictatorial, centralizing and “democratic.”
A book he published in 1846, Système des contradictions economiques ou Philosophie de la misère, was the reason for the clash with Marx. The bourgeois from Trier furiously assailed Proudhon in a savage writ, La Misère de la philosophic Although Proudhon and Marx dreamed of a “withering away of the state,” Marx sought the fulfillment of his ideas by revolutionary means, by the use of brute force, by the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Proudhon, on the other hand, was an “evolutionist”: The right order of things should be discovered, not arbitrarily blueprinted. Socialism should come gradually, in stages, without upheavals, by persuasion: It should encompass the globe through voluntary adherence and finally unite mankind not under one centralistic superstate but in a federal system, by federations deeply rooted in local customs, institutions, and traditions. Father de Lubac notes Proudhon’s sentimental attachment to the part of France in which he was born and reared—the Franche Comtè which had been under Spanish rule for a long time and where the feeling for personal liberty was particularly strong.
B. Marx and Lassalle
The materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach made the deepest and most lasting impression not only upon Marx but also upon Engels, and it hastened their break with German idealism. Feuerbach’s criticism of religion in general and of Christianity in particular, combined with a violent materialism, (Der Mensch ist, was er isst—“Man is what he eats”) laid the foundations for Marx’s unwavering rejection and hatred of all religions. Feuerbach’s notion that culture and education can and should supplant religion has a rather German and romantic tinge, but his idea that one has to replace the readiness to “believe” with the readiness to “will” shows the direction in which Marx and Engels were also moving. Morality, Feuerbach insisted, will never be sustained by religion, but only by an improvement in living conditions—in other words, by “social betterment.” This of course is a notion which not only became typically Marxist but which is shared by the American moderate left, if not by American folklore. After all, the great consolation to so many in this valley of tears is the childlike belief in the automatic character of progress. Here we find the fulfillment of Dostoyevski’s prophecy (through the mouth of his “Grand Inquisitor” in The Brothers Karamazov) that the time shall come in which science and the sages will proclaim the nonexistence of criminals and sinners—there are only hungry people. In popular terms this means, “Poverty. . . . Poverty breeds socialism: If people have not enough to eat, they will develop a ‘communism of the stomach.’ ” This, however, is just another fallacy. And while Marx learned from Feuerbach only through books and articles, he established direct contact in Paris with disciples of Saint-Simon and also with the count’s former secretary, Auguste Comte, the father of Positivism. Comte’s effort to explain social laws by the laws of nature (which are not the “natural law”) also left a permanent imprint on Marx’s thinking.
In 1845 the Prussian government asked the French to expel Marx as a dangerous agitator, and the French complied. Thus he went to Brussels where he published his pamphlet against Proudhon in 1847. In 1848 together with Engels he issued the Communist Manifesto. A month later he was asked by the Belgian authorities to leave Brussels, whereupon he returned with Engels to a Paris seething with revolution. Louis-Philippe was then overthrown. From Paris they went to the Rhineland, to Cologne, where the revolutionary fervor reached a high pitch. There Marx published a daily paper, Die Neue Rheinische Zeitung with the subtitle Demokratisches Organ. In November of that year the paper incited its readers not to pay taxes and to engage in armed resistance against the Prussian government which had dissolved the National Assembly. Thereupon the newspaper was confiscated, Marx was arrested and tried, but acquitted by a middle-class jury. To avoid another arrest he went back to France where the government had become less radical in temper. He was thus given the choice either to leave France or to settle somewhere outside of Paris. Yet Marx had to be near big libraries—he was a real bookworm—so he went to a country which already had its own socialist movement—Britain. He found an abode in London and stayed there, working ceaselessly in the reading room of the British Museum until his dying days. His financial support came mainly from Engels, whose Calvinist-Pietist family had “paid him out,” and from the New York Tribune. Without the dollars and the marks of capitalism, there probably would have been no Socialist and Communist movements.
The Manifesto then goes on to praise the “bourgeoisie” (a term, by the way, without any real equivalent in other European languages) for having overthrown feudalism and its culture, but berates it for creating an iron rule of its own. A violent critique of bourgeois civilization follows which, when all is said and done, brings out the dominant characteristic of Marx: self-hatred. Marx, the typical product of bourgeois culture, is antibourgeois; Marx, of Jewish origin, is anti-Jewish; Marx, a permanent resident of capitalist Britain, is anticapitalist; Marx having married an aristocrat is anti-aristocratic. In the third part of his Manifesto Marx even becomes boiling mad about “aristocratic socialism,” about the pro worker attitude of aristocratic opponents of the bourgeois outlook. The self-hater typically wants no allies, no help from anybody.
Still, Marx praises the bourgeoisie for having established the firm domination of the city over the countryside, for having effected mass migrations of persons to the cities, “tearing them away from the idiocy of the rural life.” Here is the voice of the rootless intellectual.
Marx also extolled the bourgeoisie for its antifeudal, antiaristocratic trend toward centralization by promotion of “one nation, one government, one law, one national class interest, one customs area.” He raves about all these achievements. But then he tries to prove that technology is in complete opposition to the then prevailing ways of production. The bourgeoisie is in the midst of a terrible crisis. Wars, general starvation, and economic chaos are menacing bourgeois society from every corner. Production is too high. The only way out is the conquest of new markets and the further brutal exploitation of the old markets. The bourgeoisie have to create new crises to survive. On the other hand they have created the working class of the proletariat that will eliminate them as they themselves have eclipsed the old ruling aristocracy.
What now follows is surprising in a way—not so surprising, however, if we remember German romanticism. It is a furious and not entirely unjust critique of modern industry, of the entire machine age, of the servitude imposed on the worker by the precursors of the assembly line. The worker, Marx says, is enslaved by the machine and by the overseers in the service of the exploiting bourgeoisie. And here he comes to the other evil: The worker receives only a fraction of the wages due to him.
But there is one consolation. The big bourgeoisie pressed everybody down to the level of the proletariat. Bigness is seemingly victorious all along the line. There are petty bourgeoisie who join the ranks of the proletariat willy-nilly. And within the proletariat a new civilization already exists: the relationship of the proletariat to wife and child, to State and nation is already radically different from the older patterns. He has no fatherland, no bourgeois morality, no religion. And whereas in the past only minorities fought for their interests, the proletarian movement is an “independent movement of the vast majority in the interest of a vast majority.” Since, in addition, the proletariat is the lowest layer, the basis of society, it cannot rise without blowing up the rest of society.
While in the past small social segments could rise socially, the worker cannot do this. He gets poorer and poorer under the iron heel of the bourgeoisie. Yet, with the proletariat the bourgeoisie creates its own gravediggers. Its downfall and the victory of the proletariat are equally unavoidable. (But if history works “automatically” why then organize a movement, one might ask.)
The ensuing critique of “bourgeois” property, education, morality, and sentiment is filled with weasel words, little insincerities, and wisecracks. An oblique attack is made by declaring all these values to be already nonexistent for the vast majority of the people. Nine-tenths of the population, Marx and Engels claimed, have no property anyhow. “Bourgeois marriage” is bankrupt. The Manifesto goes on to say that the Communists would not abolish the right to own individual objects, but then again it insists that private property would come to an end in the Communist order.
Yet unlike later developments in Russia there was to be step by step transformation. “The proletariat is going to use its political domination to deprive the bourgeois gradually of its capital, to place all the instruments of production into the hands of the state which means to centralize it in the hands of the proletariat organized into a ruling class, and to increase as fast as possible the mass productive energies.
“This, of course, can only be achieved by despotic interventions against property rights . . . measures which might seem economically insufficient and untenable, but which in the course of the development achieve a wider scope and are unavoidable as the means for the transformation of the entire system of production.”
1. Expropriation of real estate, the rent being used for the expenses of the government.
2. A highly progressive taxation.
3. Abolition of the right to inherit.
4. Confiscation of all property of emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of all credit in the hands of the state through the agency of a National Bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of all means of transport under state control.
7. Increase of national factories and the means of production. Improvement of lands based on a common plan.
8. Universal conscription of labor. Organization of industrial armies, especially for agricultural purposes.
9. Unification of industrial and agrarian production. Efforts to eliminate gradually the differences between town and country.
10. Public and free education for all children. Abolition of factory work for children in its present form. Amalgamation of education with material production.
Then comes a large section which criticizes and ridicules with bitter remarks all the other Socialist and leftist trends and parties. The Manifesto ends with the declaration that Communists are ready everywhere to support the despised bourgeois in their struggle against the remnants of feudalism and monarchism. “The Communists foster the cooperation and mutual understanding of democratic parties of all countries. The Communists disdain to keep their views and plans secret. They openly declare that their aims can only be achieved through a violent overturn of the present social order. Let the ruling classes tremble before the Communist Revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Proletarians of all countries, unite!”
Point Three is practiced in the West in another form. In certain countries death duties have reached a level which renders them confiscatory. As a result fortunes are frequently amassed in such a manner that they can easily be transferred invisibly or be smuggled abroad. The millionaire dying in a hotel room with three suits in his closet after having gradually given away everything is a symbol of our times. (Here again the “wicked reactionary Fascist aristocratic landowner” who cannot escond his property pays the full penalty.)
Point Four is academic in the free world, but it is all the more fervently practiced east of the Iron Curtain.
Point Five menaces all of free Europe. The “exclusive monopoly” does not yet exist in a general manner, but there is a strong tendency to nationalize the banks. Thus all the big banks of France and Austria are fully nationalized and as a result the smaller banks literally have to compete with the state.
Point Seven is far advanced in free Europe and elsewhere in the world—in India, in Africa, Latin America. In 1945-1946, in the shadow of the Red hysteria that affected even “Christian Democratic” parties from the Channel to Vienna, nationalizations were enacted right and left—partly in order to please the Socialists, partly as a manifestation of “Christian social consciousness.”
Point Eight, to tell the truth, has been more to the liking of National Socialist and other similar regimes which introduced a compulsory labor service. “Labor armies” on a voluntary basis, however, also were seen in the United States during the New Deal.
Point Nine has to be understood in the light of the Marxian notion of the “idiocy of rural life.” The farmer was always and still remains the stumbling block to Socialist experiments everywhere. Since he raises his own food and usually lives in his own house, he can be less “controlled” than anybody else. The urbanization of our civilization is a worldwide phenomenon needing no aid or planning. Whether it is a blessing is quite a different question. Yet in Russia the dream of the Agrogorod, the “Agrarian City,” is always reappearing in leading Communist circles.
The Manifesto by no means gives us the full Marxist theory. Still, the list of steps to be taken immediately after the proletarian victory clearly reflects the mind of the allegedly “non-Marxist” left which, partly knowingly but largely unknowingly, is imbibing ideas and notions from Marxist sources.
None of Marx’s other prophecies relating to the evolution of “capitalism” (an unhappy term) came true. Marx lived too early: He wrote about free economy like a young man writing about life while knowing only his own age group. What a youngster writes about older persons is fatally bound to be erroneous; it can only be sheer guesswork. Later in his life Marx was fully convinced of the importance of technology and it strongly figures in his calculations, but it was then much too new an element in our civilization and too rapidly evolving for us to use it as a fixed cipher in our equations. (Nor can we really assess the coming impact of computers and automation today.) There seems to be some indication, though, that Marx was emotionally so deeply immersed in his theories that he consciously-subconsciously overlooked a number of new phenomena which must have come to his attention in the years between the publication of the Communist Manifesto and his death in 1883. Torn between his fanaticism and his burning intellectuality, he also had a quasireligious vision patterned after Biblical notions. It conceived history as starting with an innocent, paradisiacal prehistory, followed by the evil rise of classes, the family, religions, the government, and iniquitous exploiting systems of production, until he (a real prophet) and his friends were to arrive on the stage to preach the new Gospel of Salvation by writing the new Holy Scriptures. The millennium of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was not far off and it would lead to the old Paradise Lost in a better, more progressive, and more modern version. Marx, however, was too clever and also too cautious to paint that picture of a redeemed humanity with the ridiculous precision of the Utopian Socialists. He wanted to be a “scientific Socialist,” a logician, rationalist, scholar, researcher—even if his daydreams led him completely astray.
Owen returned to England in 1829. He, the man of mere reforms, had now become a radical Socialist. Because of his attacks on “organized religion” and on the basic tenets of Christianity he lost much of the general respect as well as the public support he had received in earlier years. Although he was one of the cofounders of the first trade unions in 1833, Owen’s interest lay rather in the guilds and cooperatives than in modern type trade unions. With advancing years his crotchety and cranky ideas multiplied. Actually he founded a new ethical system (rather than a religion) which his supporters spread all over England in “Halls of Science.” The essence of this teaching was that man is essentially a product of his environment, an idea which profoundly influenced Marx and can be considered today an almost essential part of the folklore of Western half-education. For Marx it was the system of production that formed man and created the superstructure of all thinking: Marx attacked free will no less than Owen, who was convinced that through environment anyone’s character could be formed, made to order. His strong belief in education found a powerful echo in Northern Europe and North America. Yet in spite of his determinism, his attitude toward ethics was a far more positive one than that of Marx. Before his death Owen turned toward spiritualism.
Nor did Marx get along with another dashing person, Ferdinand Lassalle. Son of a Jewish merchant in Breslau and the first organizer of the German workers, Lassalle was an immensely colorful character. Again and again accused of this or that political misdemeanor, he was frequently acquitted. Courageous, witty, a lover of the fair sex, and a playwright, he was liked neither by Marx nor by Engels. Long connected with Countess Sophie Hatzfeld, whose lawyer he was, he was finally killed in a duel with a Rumanian near Geneva over the hand and heart of Helene von Dönniges, the daughter of a Bavarian diplomat.
Lassalle was intellectually not unique, but he had an excellent mind and published several essays on a variety of political and social questions as well as a volume on Heraclitus from a Hegelian viewpoint. He dreamed of the emancipation of the German worker through the aid of the state and made a passionate appeal to William I to transform the Kingdom of Prussia into a “social monarchy.” Bismarck, who knew him well and respected him, said in his eulogy in the Diet that Lassalle had been a thorough royalist, though not quite sure whether Prussia should be ruled by the Hohenzollerns or the Lassalles. A brilliant conversationalist, impeccably dressed, a gourmet, this high-living man who was the idol of the German working class unavoidably became the object of Marx’s intense hatred. Had he lived longer—he was only thirty-nine years old when he died—he would in all likelihood have given an entirely different turn to the development of socialism in the heart of Europe and thus to the world. Marx must have breathed more freely when his competitor died in 1864. Three years later the first volume of Das Kapital was published.
C. The Fabians
Revisionism or rather a more elastic version of socialism was also born in Britain. In 1883 an ethical discussion club in London fathered a special group which slowly assumed a Socialist character. George Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb (later Lord and Lady Passfield), and William Morris belonged to it. By 1887 the “Fabian Society” (“Society of the Fabians”) had a definite profile. Soon the Fabian Tracts began rolling from the printer’s press. The society took its name from Quintus Fabius Maximus Cunctator, the Roman general famous for his hesitant and cautious way of waging the Second Punic War. In other words, the society adopted a manner of investigating and promoting Socialist ideas entirely at variance with Continental dogmatism and very much in keeping with the trend toward understatement, compromise, and halfway measures so characteristic of the English (and, one might add, the Austrians, who have their own version for the word “muddling through.”)
Much of the economic theory of the Fabians was supplied by George Bernard Shaw, whose persuasive arguments and dashing literary style were the talk of the British intellectual world. (Still, the Irish in him often made him talk with his tongue in his cheek, and he could be extremely nonconformist among these neoconformists, for instance, by praising Mussolini which evoked shrieks of indignation.) Sidney Webb criticized the Marxist theories concerning the increasing misery of the working class and the inevitable collapse of the entire capitalist system. Orthodox Marxism was rejected as much as the theory of class war. These ideas just did not appeal to the English character. Yet there was considerable enthusiasm for the nationalization of the means of production, which included the soil. This reflected the potent influence of the American Henry George and his single tax.
Fabianism is more than just the organized and publicized outlook of a group of intellectuals. It represents a version of leftism most congenial to Britishers and Americans. Fabianism has been instrumental not only in undermining the belief in free enterprise, individuality, and personal responsibility in favor of the Versorgungsstaat, the “Provider State” rather than “Welfare State,” but also in spreading an atmosphere of illusion and confusion as regards the dangers from the East. Psychologically and intellectually American pseudoliberalism, the entire left-of-center mentality not only west of the Atlantic but even west of the Channel is deeply indebted to Fabianism which in that area, to be true, often met halfway with popular notions and concepts. The ideology of the “moderate left” in the English-speaking countries, however, is by no means harmless or only of academic interest. As we are going to see in another chapter, this mixture of prejudices and ignorance has already led twice in our century to major catastrophes whose effects are still with us all. It might even lead to further evil developments.
