I would like
to call your attention to a virtually unknown little book, The
Lost Literature of Socialism, by George Watson, Fellow
in English at St. John's College, Cambridge and editor of the New
Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. As the publishers explain on the back of this book: "In this
hard-hitting and controversial new book, the author examines the
foundation texts of socialism to find out what they really say…
and the result is blasphemy against its canon of saints. This study,
the first review of socialist literature since 1945, reveals how
closely socialism was linked to conservative, racist, and genocidal
ideas. As a literary critic the author's concern is to pay a due
respect to the works of the founding fathers of socialism, to attend
to what they say rather than to what their modern disciples wish
they had said. The book forces the reader to abandon long-standing
assumptions in political thought, enabling a genuine debate to be
revived."
In this brilliant
work examining the foundation texts of socialism, Watson provides
a powerful indictment of their reactionary, racist and genocidal
ideas. There is a direct line from Marx and Engels to Hitler and
the Holocaust; to Lenin and Stalin and the liquidation of the Kulaks
and the extermination of the Ukrainians; to Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald
and Auschwitz, and to Kolima, Vorkuta and Karaganda.
What distinguishes
"socialism," the political/economic ideology, and its ideological
twin, "sociology," the social science, are their common inheritance
and origins from backward, reactionary ideas (anti-individualism,
collectivism, anti-capitalism) and thinkers (Hegel, Comte, de Bonald,
de Maistre, Southey, Saint-Simon). Scholars such the sociologist
Leon Branson, The
Political Context of Sociology, and Nobel Laureate F. A.
Hayek, The
Counter-Revolution of Science, have thoroughly traced and
documented this non-liberal lineage. These horrific ideas were explicitly
formulated and conceived against those of classical liberalism,
individualism, and free market (laissez-faire) capitalism. But today,
according to established authorities in academia and the media,
they are the height of "progressive" thought. How did this all come
about? Here is how Murray Rothbard put it in his magnificent For
a New Liberty:
"(W)e must
first remember that classical liberalism constituted a profound
threat to the political and economic interests – the ruling
classes – who benefited from the Old Order: the kings, the
nobles and landed aristocrats, the privileged merchants, the military
machines, the State bureaucracies. Despite three major violent
revolutions precipitated by the liberals – the English of
the seventeenth century and the American and French of the eighteenth
– victories in Europe were only partial. Resistance was stiff
and managed to successfully maintain landed monopolies, religious
establishments, and warlike foreign and military policies, and
for a time to keep the suffrage restricted to the wealthy elite.
The liberals had to concentrate on widening the suffrage, because
it was clear to both sides that the objective economic and political
interests of the mass of the public lay in individual liberty.
It is interesting to note that, by the early nineteenth century,
the laissez-faire forces were known as "liberals" and "radicals"
(for the purer and more consistent among them), and the opposition
that wished to preserve or go back to the Old Order were broadly
known as "conservatives."
"Indeed,
conservatism began, in the early nineteenth century, as a conscious
attempt to undo and destroy the hated work of the new classical
liberal spirit – of the American, French, and Industrial
revolutions. Led by two reactionary French thinkers, de Bonald
and de Maistre, conservatism yearned to replace equal rights and
equality before the law by the structured and hierarchical rule
of privileged elites; individual liberty and minimal government
by absolute rule and Big Government; religious freedom by the
theocratic rule of a State church; peace and free trade by militarism,
mercantilist restrictions, and war for the advantage of the nation-state;
and industry and manufacturing by the old feudal and agrarian
order. And they wanted to replace the new world of mass consumption
and rising standards of living for all by the Old Order of bare
subsistence for the masses and luxury consumption for the ruling
elite.
"By the middle
of and certainly by the end of the nineteenth century, conservatives
began to realize that their cause was inevitably doomed if they
persisted in clinging to the call for outright repeal of the Industrial
Revolution and of its enormous rise in the living standards of
the mass of the public, and also if they persisted in opposing
the widening of the suffrage, thereby frankly setting themselves
in opposition to the interests of that public. Hence, the "right
wing" (a label based on an accident of geography by which the
spokesmen for the Old Order sat on the right of the assembly hall
during the French Revolution) decided to shift their gears and
to update their statist creed by jettisoning outright opposition
to industrialism and democratic suffrage. For the old conservatism's
frank hatred and contempt for the mass of the public, the new
conservatives substituted duplicity and demagogy. The new conservatives
wooed the masses with the following line: "We, too, favor industrialism
and a higher standard of living. But, to accomplish such ends,
we must regulate industry for the public good; we must substitute
organized cooperation for the dog-eat-dog of the free and competitive
marketplace; and, above all, we must substitute for the nation-destroying
liberal tenets of peace and free trade the nation-glorifying measures
of war, protectionism, empire, and military prowess." For all
of these changes, of course, Big Government rather than minimal
government was required.
"And so,
in the late nineteenth century, statism and Big Government returned,
but this time displaying a proindustrial and pro-general-welfare
face. The Old Order returned, but this time the beneficiaries
were shuffled a bit; they were not so much the nobility, the feudal
landlords, the army, the bureaucracy, and privileged merchants
as they were the army, the bureaucracy, the weakened feudal landlords,
and especially the privileged manufacturers. Led by Bismarck in
Prussia, the New Right fashioned a right-wing collectivism based
on war, militarism, protectionism, and the compulsory cartelization
of business and industry – a giant network of controls, regulations,
subsidies, and privileges which forged a great partnership of
Big Government with certain favored elements in big business and
industry.
"Something
had to be done, too, about the new phenomenon of a massive number
of industrial wage workers – the "proletariat." During the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, indeed until the late
nineteenth century, the mass of workers favored laissez-faire
and the free competitive market as best for their wages and working
conditions as workers, and for a cheap and widening range of consumer
goods as consumers. Even the early trade unions, e.g., in Great
Britain, were staunch believers in laissez-faire. New conservatives,
spearheaded by Bismarck in Germany and Disraeli in Britain, weakened
the libertarian will of the workers by shedding crocodile tears
about the condition of the industrial labor force, and cartelizing
and regulating industry, not accidentally hobbling efficient competition.
Finally, in the early twentieth century, the new conservative
"corporate state" – then and now the dominant political system
in the Western world – incorporated "responsible" and corporatist
trade unions as junior partners to Big Government and favored
big businesses in the new statist and corporatist decision-making
system.
"To establish
this new system, to create a New Order which was a modernized,
dressed-up version of the ancien régime before the American
and French revolutions, the new ruling elites had to perform a
gigantic con job on the deluded public, a con job that continues
to this day. Whereas the existence of every government
from absolute monarchy to military dictatorship rests on the consent
of the majority of the public, a democratic government must engineer
such consent on a more immediate, day-by-day basis. And to do
so, the new conservative ruling elites had to gull the public
in many crucial and fundamental ways. For the masses now had to
be convinced that tyranny was better than liberty, that a cartelized
and privileged industrial feudalism was better for the consumers
than a freely competitive market, that a cartelized monopoly was
to be imposed in the name of antimonopoly, and that war
and military aggrandizement for the benefit of the ruling elites
was really in the interests of the conscripted, taxed, and often
slaughtered public. How was this to be done?
"In all societies,
public opinion is determined by the intellectual classes, the
opinion moulders of society. For most people neither originate
nor disseminate ideas and concepts; on the contrary, they tend
to adopt those ideas promulgated by the professional intellectual
classes, the professional dealers in ideas. Now, throughout history,
as we shall see further below, despots and ruling elites of States
have had far more need of the services of intellectuals than have
peaceful citizens in a free society. For States have always needed
opinion-moulding intellectuals to con the public into believing
that its rule is wise, good, and inevitable; into believing that
the "emperor has clothes." Until the modern world, such intellectuals
were inevitably churchmen (or witch doctors), the guardians of
religion. It was a cozy alliance, this age-old partnership between
Church and State; the Church informed its deluded charges that
the king ruled by divine command and therefore must be obeyed;
in return, the king funneled numerous tax revenues into the coffers
of the Church. Hence, the great importance for the libertarian
classical liberals of their success at separating Church and State.
The new liberal world was a world in which intellectuals could
be secular – could make a living on their own, in the market,
apart from State subvention.
"To establish
their new statist order, their neomercantilist corporate State,
the new conservatives therefore had to forge a new alliance between
intellectual and State. In an increasingly secular age, this meant
with secular intellectuals rather than with divines: specifically,
with the new breed of professors, Ph.D.'s, historians, teachers,
and technocratic economists, social workers, sociologists, physicians,
and engineers. This reforged alliance came in two parts. In the
early nineteenth century, the conservatives, conceding reason
to their liberal enemies, relied heavily on the alleged virtues
of irrationality, romanticism, tradition, theocracy. By stressing
the virtue of tradition and of irrational symbols, the conservatives
could gull the public into continuing privileged hierarchical
rule, and to continue to worship the nation-state and its war-making
machine. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the new
conservatism adopted the trappings of reason and of "science."
Now it was science that allegedly required rule of the economy
and of society by technocratic "experts." In exchange for spreading
this message to the public, the new breed of intellectuals was
rewarded with jobs and prestige as apologists for the New Order
and as planners and regulators of the newly cartelized economy
and society.
"To insure
the dominance of the new statism over public opinion, to insure
that the public's consent would be engineered, the governments
of the Western world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries moved to seize control over education, over the minds
of men: over the universities, and over general education through
compulsory school attendance laws and a network of public schools.
The public schools were consciously used to inculcate obedience
to the State as well as other civic virtues among their young
charges. Furthermore, this statizing of education insured that
one of the biggest vested interests in expanding statism would
be the nation's teachers and professional educationists.
"One of the
ways that the new statist intellectuals did their work was to
change the meaning of old labels, and therefore to manipulate
in the minds of the public the emotional connotations attached
to such labels. For example, the laissez-faire libertarians had
long been known as "liberals," and the purest and most militant
of them as "radicals"; they had also been known as "progressives"
because they were the ones in tune with industrial progress, the
spread of liberty, and the rise in living standards of consumers.
The new breed of statist academics and intellectuals appropriated
to themselves the words "liberal" and "progressive," and successfully
managed to tar their laissez-faire opponents with the charge of
being old-fashioned, "Neanderthal," and "reactionary." Even the
name "conservative" was pinned on the classical liberals. And,
as we have seen, the new statists were able to appropriate the
concept of "reason" as well.
"If the laissez-faire
liberals were confused by the new recrudescence of statism and
mercantilism as "progressive" corporate statism, another reason
for the decay of classical liberalism by the end of the nineteenth
century was the growth of a peculiar new movement: socialism.
Socialism began in the 1830s and expanded greatly after the 1880s.
The peculiar thing about socialism was that it was a confused,
hybrid movement, influenced by both the two great preexisting
polar ideologies, liberalism and conservatism. From the classical
liberals the socialists took a frank acceptance of industrialism
and the Industrial Revolution, an early glorification of "science"
and "reason," and at least a rhetorical devotion to such classical
liberal ideals as peace, individual freedom, and a rising standard
of living. Indeed, the socialists, long before the much later
corporatists, pioneered in a co-opting of science, reason, and
industrialism. And the socialists not only adopted the classical
liberal adherence to democracy, but topped it by calling for an
"expanded democracy," in which "the people" would run the economy
– and each other.
"On the other
hand, from the conservatives the socialists took a devotion to
coercion and the statist means for trying to achieve these liberal
goals. Industrial harmony and growth were to be achieved by aggrandizing
the State into an all-powerful institution, ruling the economy
and the society in the name of "science." A vanguard of technocrats
was to assume all-powerful rule over everyone's person and property
in the name of the "people" and of "democracy." Not content with
the liberal achievement of reason and freedom for scientific research,
the socialist State would install rule by the scientists
of everyone else; not content with liberals setting the workers
free to achieve undreamt-of prosperity, the socialist State would
install rule by the workers of everyone else – or
rather, rule by politicians, bureaucrats, and technocrats in their
name. Not content with the liberal creed of equality of rights,
of equality before the law, the socialist State would trample
on such equality on behalf of the monstrous and impossible goal
of equality or uniformity of results – or rather,
would erect a new privileged elite, a new class, in the name
of bringing about such an impossible equality.
"Socialism
was a confused and hybrid movement because it tried to achieve
the liberal goals of freedom, peace, and industrial harmony and
growth – goals which can only be achieved through liberty
and the separation of government from virtually everything –
by imposing the old conservative means of statism, collectivism,
and hierarchical privilege. It was a movement which could only
fail, which indeed did fail miserably in those numerous
countries where it attained power in the twentieth century, by
bringing to the masses only unprecedented despotism, starvation,
and grinding impoverishment.
"But the
worst thing about the rise of the socialist movement was that
it was able to outflank the classical liberals "on the Left":
that is, as the party of hope, of radicalism, of revolution in
the Western World. For, just as the defenders of the ancien
régime took their place on the right side of the hall during
the French Revolution, so the liberals and radicals sat on the
left; from then on until the rise of socialism, the libertarian
classical liberals were "the Left," even the "extreme Left," on
the ideological spectrum. As late as 1848, such militant laissez-faire
French liberals as Frédéric Bastiat sat on the left in the national
assembly. The classical liberals had begun as the radical, revolutionary
party in the West, as the party of hope and of change on behalf
of liberty, peace, and progress. To allow themselves to be outflanked,
to allow the socialists to pose as the "party of the Left," was
a bad strategic error, allowing the liberals to be put falsely
into a confused middle-of-the-road position with socialism and
conservatism as the polar opposites. Since libertarianism is nothing
if not a party of change and of progress toward liberty, abandonment
of that role meant the abandonment of much of their reason for
existence – either in reality or in the minds of the public.
"But none
of this could have happened if the classical liberals had not
allowed themselves to decay from within. They could have pointed
out – as some of them indeed did – that socialism was
a confused, self-contradictory, quasi-conservative movement, absolute
monarchy and feudalism with a modern face, and that they themselves
were still the only true radicals, undaunted people who insisted
on nothing less than complete victory for the libertarian ideal."
As classical
liberalism underwent a "crisis of faith," in the late nineteenth
century, so to did socialism: the "crisis of Marxism."
The "crisis"
developed out of the failure of Karl Marx's prediction regarding
the increasing immiseration of the working class. This impoverishment
of the proletariat, as the result of economic recessions, was not
occurring.
In fact, just
the opposite was happening. Working conditions in industrial countries
were improving. Standards of living and purchasing power for consumers
was increasing due to the innovations and entrepreneurship of capitalism.
These predicted
economic recessions under capitalism, said Marx, would result because
the working class is unable to buy the full product of their labors.
The ruling capitalists would continue to consume all of the surplus
value created by the proletariat. A proletariat or socialist revolution
must occur, according to Marx, where the state (the means by which
the ruling class forcibly maintains rule over the other classes)
holds its tight reins.
It was out
of this late 19th century "crisis of Marxism," that four new major
strands of thought or ideologies developed:
Revisionist
Marxism, or Social Democracy, tried to come to terms with these
contradictions of the orthodox Marxist faith, and put forth a program
of adaptation and revision we have come to call "the welfare state."
In contemporary America, these are the neoconservatives goosestepping
behind Bush and the Republican party, and the progressives marching
in lockstep behind Obama and the Democrats.
Marxism/Leninism,
or Bolshevism, ignored these inherent contradictions, and put forth
a program for the seizure of power by a revolutionary vanguard elite
acting in the name of the people ("the Dictatorship of the Proletariat");
Fascism, emerging explicitly from the far left-wing socialists during
this "crisis of Marxism," combined elements of syndicalism and elite
rule, and put forth a program of revolutionary populism and nationalism,
which over time once established in power, became known as "the
Corporate State," or corporatism.
And finally,
National Socialism. George Watson, in his The Lost Literature
of Socialism, has an intriguing chapter on Adolf Hitler, where
he cites evidence from published accounts of Hitler's private conversations
and remarks to confidants and followers such as Hermann Rauschning
and Otto Wagener, that National Socialism was based on Marx. His
version of socialism based upon nationalism and race would unify
Germans and be successful. Communism, based upon internationalism
and the class struggle, only sought to divide and would consequently
flounder and fail. Both socialist visions had a common enemy, the
bourgeois individualism and classical liberalism of democratic capitalism.
National Socialism was the true expression and fulfillment of the
Marxian vision. Watson refers to a seminal article by Friedrich
Engels, "The
Hungarian Struggle," published by Marx in January, 1849 in his
journal, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, where Marx's valued
collaborator and financial angel explicitly calls for the genocide
of Serbs and other Slavs, as well as Basques, Bretons, and Scottish
Highlanders. "The Marxist theory of history required and demanded
genocide," Watson observed, "for reasons implicit in its claims
that feudalism, which in advanced nations was already giving place
to capitalism, must in turn be superseded by socialism. Entire races
would be left behind after a workers' revolution, feudal remnants
in a socialist age; and since they could not advance two steps at
a time, they would have to be killed. They were racial trash, as
Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history."
Another excellent volume exposing these racist, imperialist and
genocidal ideas of Marx and Engels is Nathaniel Weyl's Karl
Marx: Racist.
A
very good article on Benito Mussolini and the origins of fascism
resulting from this "crisis of Marxism," is David Ramsay Steele's
"The
Mystery of Fascism."
Four excellent
books which further explore these subjects are:
What we are
fighting against is the corroded, diseased vestige of reactionary
ideas of two centuries ago, ideas which have brought untold death,
destruction, and misery to millions.
We must never
fail to point out to our adversaries this central fact.
