Socialism

My daughter posted recently on Facebook concerning the recent election and its aftermath, and was roundly condemned as a SOCIALIST (the reader's capitalization) by one of her readers. Briefly I was quite angry about the characterization, but then decided to just consider the source.

It got me thinking about how I treated socialism and communism when I was teaching western civilization. What follows is a short summary of what I said.

At about the beginning of the nineteenth century, a movement began in Europe and spread to the United States that came to be called Utopian Socialism. These Utopians believed that communal living was the most likely way to produce happiness and prosperity. Here in America, the best remembered of the communes was New Harmony Indiana. Work there was to be done willingly according to the skills of the residents, and proceeds were to be shared according to individual needs as determined by the community. In most communes,  people lived in family apartments or separate houses but usually ate communally and spent leisure time together. There probably was daycare for small children.

Outsiders often despised them. Part of the reason may have been the way in which the communes approached self-sufficiency, at least in staples, but I think what really got the goat of neighbors was suspicion about the sexual activities that might have been taking place in the communes. (That's  also a large part of what caused the animosity between the early  Mormons and their neighbors, but that's another story.)

These communes didn't last very long, by and large. Arguments about workloads and distribution of resources, coupled perhaps to the propensity of people living and working together to form romantic liaisons, brought them down.

By the 1840's they were mostly gone. That didn't mean, however, that people weren't still in favor of a more just distribution of the rewards of life. The hereditary aristocracies of Europe, along with the newly rich capitalists there and in America, were clearly taking the lion's share of the wealth created by laboring people.

Enter Karl Marx, a German who spent most of his life in England, working away on his analysis of economic history, living in poverty, supported in part by Friedrich Engels. Marx insisted that his interpretation was scientific, and he regarded the Utopian Socialists as foolish dreamers. According to Marx, history was moving inexorably towards real democracy. In the dim past, humanity was ruled by tyrants, but gradually a noble class had arisen which forced the absolute monarchs to share power and economic rewards with them. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, economic power had been seized to a large extent by a new class of entrepreneurs - capitalists - who further democratized things. It remained only for the proletariat - workers - to finally widen the economic democracy by seizing the resources of the earth and the man-made means of exploiting them. Then a great new day would begin in which everyone would share the fruits of labor, from each according to his ability to each according to his needs.

But of course the current possessors of wealth would not surrender peacefully, so a violent revolution would be needed. This, Marx seemed to believe, would not have to be protracted or very bloody. Until then, the resources would inevitably be concentrated into fewer and fewer hands as businesspeople were squeezed out of the middle class (read bourgeoisie) into the ranks of the workers.

Marx defended his theory tirelessly. Anyone who offered any adjustments to it was attacked vociferously. Still, as years passed, many people who accepted parts of Marx's analysis started to reject parts as well. Most particularly, socialist parties rose in Europe that believed in Marx but not in violent revolution. Socialist success would come through political organization leading to victory at the ballot box. Some of these people were ready to take whatever little triumphs they could, winning improved conditions for working people gradually. By the early years of the twentieth century they were a force to be reckoned with in European politics.

I won't go into the Russian socialists and communists here, except to say that Lenin turned Marx on his head with his theory of a "vanguard of the proletariat," and that revolution could come first in a comparatively backward country like Russia. (In fact by Lenin's day there was a large class of urban working people in Russia.)

Well, I would ask my students, what do you think? Do you see our own country as a place where wealth is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands which care only about monopolizing resources, or do you see opportunities for clever people to prosper in ways that the financial oligarchs never anticipated?

And that's about it. I'm just left wondering if my daughter's critic knows any of this or is just throwing out an epithet for someone he disagrees with.