Democracy In The Socialist Order

The judgment passed by orthodox socialism on the men of the nonage must be revised for the following reasons:

1. If the socialist schemes of those centuries were dreams, most of them were rationalized dreams.

What individual thinkers more or less perfectly succeeded in rationalizing were not simply their individual dreams but the dreams of the non-ruling classes. Thus, those thinkers were not living completely in the clouds; they also helped to bring to the surface what slumbered below but was getting ready to wake up. In this respect even the anarchists, back to their medieval predecessors who nourished in many a convent and still more in the tertiary groups of the Franciscan Order, acquire a significance which Marxists usually do not accord to them. However contemptible their beliefs may seem to the orthodox socialist, much of the propelling force of socialism comes, even today, from those irrational longings of the hungry soul—not belly—which they voiced. 2

2. The socialist thinkers of the nonage provided many a brick and many a tool that proved useful later on. After all, the very idea of a socialist society was their creation, and it was owing to their efforts that Marx and his contemporaries were able to discuss it as a thing familiar to everyone. But many of the utopians went much further than that. They worked out details of the socialist plan or of certain variants of it, thereby formulating problems—however inadequately—and clearing much ground. Even their contribution to purely economic analysis cannot be neglected. It provided a much-needed leaven in an otherwise distressingly stodgy pudding. Much of it moreover was simply professional work that improved existing theory and, among other things, stood Marx in good stead. The English socialists and quasi-socialists who elaborated the labor theory of value—such men as William Thompson—afford the best example of this.

3. Not all of those whom Marxists include among the utopians lacked contact with mass movements. Some contact inevitably resulted from the fact that the social and economic conditions which set in motion the intellectual’s pen will also set in motion some group or class of the people—peasants or artisans or agricultural laborers or simply the vagrants and the rabble.

But many of the utopians established much closer contact. The demands of the peasants during the revolutions of the sixteenth century were already formulated by intellectuals, and coordination and cooperation steadily became closer as the centuries rolled on. “Gracchus” Babeuf, the leading spirit of the only purely socialist movement within the French Revolution, was considered of sufficient importance for the government to pay him the compliment of executing him in 1797.

England best illustrates this development. We need only compare, from this angle, the history of the Leveller movement in the seventeenth and the Chartist movement in the nineteenth centuries. In the first case, Winstanley joined and led as an individual; in the second case, groups of intellectuals reacted in a body and though their cooperation tapered off into Christian Socialism, it was not merely an affair of the student’s closet entirely divorced from a contemporaneous mass movement. In France, the best example is afforded by Louis Blanc’s activities in 1848. In this as in other respects, therefore, Utopian socialism differed from “scientific” socialism in degree rather than in kind: the relation of the socialists of the nonage to class movements was occasional and not as a rule a matter of fundamental principle, whereas with Marx and with post-Marxian socialism it became precisely a matter of fundamental principle and similar to the relation of a government to its standing army.

A very important point—I hope it will not prove a stumbling block— remains to be made. I have said that the doctrine which avers the presence of a tendency toward socialism,3 and the permanent contact with an existing or potential source of social power—the two requisites of socialism as a serious political factor—were definitely established around the middle of the nineteenth century in a way that was logically not the only possible one. Marx and most of his contemporaries imparted a particular slant to their doctrine by hold ing that the laboring class was the only one to be actively associated with this tendency and that hence it was the only source of power for the socialist to tap. For them, socialism meant primarily liberation of labor from exploitation, and “the emancipation of the workers must be the task of the working class itself.”

This is why the conquest of the labor interest appealed to Marx more than any other course. But the idea has become so firmly rooted, also in some non-socialist minds, as to blot out completely some facts which it takes a lot of trouble to explain away, viz., that the labor movement, though often allied with socialism, has remained distinct from it to this day, and that it proved by no means so easy for socialists to establish in the workers’ world spheres of influence in which their creed is accepted as a matter of course. However we may interpret these facts, it should be clear that the labor movement is not essentially socialist, just as socialism is not necessarily laborite or proletarian. Nor is this surprising. For we have seen in Part II that though the capitalist process slowly socializes economic life and much besides, this spells transformation of the whole of the social organism all parts of which are equally affected.

The real income and the social weight of the working class rise in this process, and capitalist society becomes more and more incapable of dealing with labor difficulties.

But this is a poor substitute for the Marxian picture of labor being goaded into the grand revolution by increasingly intolerable suffering. If we discard this picture and realize that what actually increases is labor’s stake in the capitalist system, we shall inevitably think less of the particular call addressed to the working class by the logic of evolution. Still less convincing is the role that Marxism assigns to the proletariat in the catastrophe of the social drama. There is little for it to do if the transformation is gradual. And if there be a grand revolution, the proletariat will simply be talked and bullied into consent. The spearhead will be formed by intellectuals assisted by the semicriminal rabble. And Marx’s ideas on the subject are nothing but “ideology”—just as utopian as any beliefs of the utopists.

Thus, unlike most of his predecessors, Marx intended to rationalize an existing movement and not a dream, and also that he and his successors actually gained partial control of that movement.

The difference is smaller than Marxists would have us believe.

There was, as we have seen, more of realism in the thought of the utopists, and there was more of unrealistic dreaming in Marx’s thought than they admit.

In the light of this fact, we shall think better of the socialists of the nonage because they did not exclusively stress the proletarian aspect. In particular their appeal to governments or to classes other than the proletariat will appear to us less visionary and more realistic than it appeared to Marx. For the state, its bureaucracy and the groups that man the political engine are quite promising prospects for the socialist looking for his source of social power. As should be evident by now, they are likely to move in the desired direction with no less “dialectical” necessity than are the masses. And that excrescence of the bourgeois stratum which we shall term (a potiori) Fabian Socialism 4 is also suggestive. Marx’s choice of social motive power thus produced a special case which, though practically the most important, yet stands logically on a par with others that are frauds and heresies to the orthodox.

Marxists will naturally reply that those phenomena are mere derivates of the genuine one, mere effects of the forward march of the proletariat. This is true if it means that the latter is one of the factors in the situation which produced and is producing the former. But taken in this sense, this proposition does not constitute an objection. If it means that there is a one-way or purely cause-effect relation between proletarian and state socialism, then it does constitute an objection but it is wrong.

The socio-psychological process described in Part II will, without any pressure from below, produce state and Fabian socialism which will even help to produce that pressure. As we shall presently see, it is a fair question to ask where socialism would be without the fellow traveler. It is certain that socialism (as distinguished from the labor movement of the trade-union type) would be nowhere without the intellectual leader of bourgeois extraction.