The Nonage

PROLOGUE

A vast amount of research has still to be done before a history of modern socialism in action can be written that will meet the requirements of scholarship.

Not every reader—not even every socialist reader—will approve of the central position this fragment gives to Marx and Marxism.

I have a personal bias here.

in the matter. For me, the fascinating thing about

Socialist policy gets its special intellectual and moral dignity is its clear and close relation to a doctrinal basis.

It is theory implemented by action or inaction turning on the true or false perception of a historical necessity. (See Part I.) Even considerations of expediency and mere tactics carry that character indelebilis and always have been discussed in the light of that principle. But all this is true only of the Marxian streak; no truer, of course, than it is, within the bourgeois compound, of the Benthamite radicals—the “philosophical” radicals as they were significantly called.

All non-Marxian socialist groups are more or less like other groups and parties; only Marxists of pure persuasion consistently walked in the light of a doctrine that to them contained all answers to all questions. As will be seen, I do not admire this attitude unconditionally. It may well be called narrow and even naïve. But the doctrinaires of all types, whatever their practical disabilities, have certain esthetic qualities that raise them high above the common run of political practitioners. Also they command sources of strength which mere practitioners will never be able to understand.

«««< HEAD

CHAPTER 24: THE NONAGE

=======

THE NONAGE

b19c1bcc4b186bb880f5d917dca1116cb886ee4e

SOCIALIST doctrines, in some of their roots presumably as old as articulate thought, were dreams, beautiful or hateful—impotent longings out of contact with social realities—so long as they lacked the means to convince anybody that the social process worked for the realization of socialism. Socialist effort amounted to preaching in the desert so long as it had no established contact with an existing or potential source of social power— to preaching of the Platonic type about which no politician need bother and which no observer of social processes need list among operative factors. This is the gist of Marx’s criticism of most of the socialists who preceded him or in his day offered competitive teaching, and the reason why he called them Utopian. The point was not so much that many of their schemes were obviously freaks or otherwise below par intellectually, but that those schemes were essentially unimplemented and unimplementable.

A few examples will illustrate this and will stand instead of a survey of a large body of literature. Also they will suffice to show how far Marx’s judgment was wrong.

Sir Thomas More’s (1478–1535) Utopia, read, admired and even copied right into the nineteenth century—witness the success of Cabet and of Bellamy—unfolds the picture of a frugal, moral and equalitarian society that was the exact opposite of English society in More’s day. This ideal may be but the literary form of social criticism. Perhaps we need not accept it for a presentation of More’s opinion about the aims of practical social planning. However, if it be understood in the latter sense—and so it was—the trouble with it does not lie in its impracticability.

In some respects it is less impracticable than are certain present-day forms of idyllic socialism. For instance, it faces the question of authority and it frankly accepts the prospect—exalted no doubt into a virtue—of a modest standard of life. The real trouble is that there is no attempt to show how society is to evolve toward that ideal state (except possibly by conversion) or what the real factors are that might be worked upon in order to produce it. We can like or dislike the ideal. But we cannot do much about it. To put the practical dot on the i, there is nothing in it on which to found a party and to provide a program. Another type may be instanced by Robert Owen’s (1771–1858) socialism.

A manufacturer and practical reformer, he was not content to conceive—or adopt—the idea of small self-sufficing communities, producing and consuming their means of livelihood according to communist principles in the word’s boldest acceptance. He actually went about realizing it.

First he hoped for government action, then he tried the effect of setting an example.

So it might seem that the plan was more operational than More’s: there was not only an ideal but also a bridge leading to it. Actually however that kind of bridge only serves to illustrate more precisely the nature of utopianism. For both government action and individual efforts are introduced as dei ex machina—the thing would have had to be done just because some agent thought it worth while. No social force working toward the goal was indicated or could have been indicated. No soil was provided for the rose trees—they were left to feed on beauty. 1

The same applies to Proudhon’s (1809–1865) anarchism.

But in his case, definite economic error is much more in evidence than it is with most of the other classics of anarchism who despised economic argument and, whether stressing the ideal of free and stateless cooperation of individuals or the task of destruction to be accomplished in order to make way for it, avoided errors of reasoning largely by avoiding reasoning.

Like “poet, lunatic and lover of imagination all compact,” they were constitutionally unable to do anything except to upset socialist applecarts and to add to confusion in situations of revolutionary excitement. It is not difficult to sympathize with Marx’s disgust, that sometimes was not unmixed with despair, at the doings of M.Bakunin.

But anarchism was utopianism with a vengeance.

The pathological species has been mentioned only in order to make it quite clear that such revivals of fourteenth-century mentality should not be confused with the genuine brand of Utopian socialism which St. Simon’s (1760–1825) writings display at its best. There we find sense and responsibility coupled with considerable analytic power. The goal envisaged was not absurd or visionary. What was lacking was the way: again the only method suggested was government action—action by governments that at the time were essentially bourgeois. If this view be accepted, the great break that put an end to the nonage of socialism must in fact be associated with the name and work of Karl Marx.

We may then date it, so far as in such matters dating is possible at all, by the issue of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) or by the foundation of the First International (1864): it was in that period that both the doctrinal and the political criteria of seriousness were met. But, on the one hand, this achievement only summed up the developments of the centuries of nonage and, on the other hand, it formulated them in a particular way that perhaps was practically, but certainly was not logically, the only possible one.