Notes on Ball & Dagger text, Chapter 5:  Socialism and Communism: More to Marx

Lecture notes:

There is a long history of socialist thought.  We will be concerned specifically with the socialist thought that was written in response to classical liberalism and the social conditions that it seemed to be creating or at least justifying.

Liberalism:  preserve maximum liberty through minimally intrusive government and free market:  liberty to make (& keep) money, liberty to spend money, liberty to control what one owns.  Government an umpire.  To a classical liberal previous to Marx, government exists to protect people's liberty to make & keep money, as is stated quite frankly in Federalist #10 (q.v.).

Several strands of critique:

• Liberty:  Even if political liberty exists, there is still an economic enslavement that comes about because of the separation of economic relations from political relations.  "Rights" = the right not to care;  the right to exploit others;   the right to starve to death.
• Equality:  Creates great, growing, and apparently permanent inequalities, which are protected by government.
• Fraternity:  Violates fellow-feeling:  pride & distrust above;  envy and anger below;  general alienation.
• Justice:  rejection of the free market and class relations.  Racing with backpacks image, where rocks indicate control and terms of trade.  The desire for justice implies levelling.
• The purported material benefits of classical liberalism are not realized:
  • The benefits of competition not spread to everyone.
  • Relative deprivation, even if overall standard goes up;  even greater inequality

This is the socialist critique.  What do socialists propose as their solution?   Four solutions along a continuum of centralization and government control:

1. Public ownership:  centralized socialism, where the State controls everything.  (USSR)
2. Leninist socialism, where the State controls only the "commanding heights" of the society (energy, banking, steel, etc.)
3. Worker control:  decentralized socialism, where the workers decide.  (Yugoslavia;  Mondragon cooperative)
4. General, spontaneous cooperation

All of this depends on a view of human nature.  If humans are inherently competitive, greedy, selfish, etc., then no form of socialism will work — or, more precisely, can only work under a great deal of repression. If, on the other hand, human beings are fundamentally cooperative, sharing, loving, etc., then socialism will work just fine;  all we need do is get rid of the oppressive institutions and let the cooperative human emerge, as with the idea of the "New Soviet Man".

Unfortunately, human nature is uncertain;  it is difficult to define it independently of the human society that molds us.  We get a tautological (circular) relationship between the way humans are raised and the institutions they believe are right. This is expressed in the important concepts of institutionalized and internalized oppression.

Institutionalized and internalized (mental) oppression:

Note that institutionalized and internalized oppressions are interconnected.  No "New Soviet Man"-type change without fundamental support from the citizenry.

The History of Socialism

Normative socialism;  generally local, small-community, agrarian images;  "primitive communism":

• Plato's Republic (380 B.C.E.):  socialism among the Guardians.
• Early Christian communities (33 C.E. — ca. 150 C.E.)
• Some monastic orders (still existing today)
• More's Utopia (1516)
• The Diggers (1640s)
• Charles Fourier (ca. 1800)
• Robert Owen (ca. 1813)

"Scientific" socialism:  decline of the individual, rise of interconnectedness (i.e., modernity) implies need for experts and an economy planned by them to apply technology in the service of all (i.e., a technocracy):

• Saint-Simon (ca. 1800)
• Compte (ca. 1835)
• Marx???  (mid-19th century)

The labor theory of value, means of production (forces of production, relations of production), social class determined by control of the means of production, which allows expropriation of surplus value.

Marx acknowledges the benefit(s) of capitalism — one of which is to make us rich enough to be able to afford to overthrow it!

But two basic critiques of capitalism;  their differing emphases leads to two different strands of Marxist thought:

• Injustice;  exploitation.  Envy & levelling?
• Form of life created:  alienated from each other & from the product of one's own labor (self-expression).  Destruction of society as everything is for sale, nothing is sacred.  "Commodification";  "colonization of the lifeworld".

Base & superstructure:

• government & ideologies are derivative of material power relations
• "false consciousness" of the workers

Marx's theory of revolution:  contradictions;  class consciousness;  inequalities;  immiseration / pauperization

Now, consternation:  attempts to ignore or conceal or disguise the connection between government and economics.  Note the rise of the APSA, the AEA, and the APhilA around this time.

Questions:

• Name any of the pre-Marx socialists who are discussed in this chapter of the text.

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