Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

The Crisis of Socialism [EP audiobook]

This is the fifth chapter of the audiobook version of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.

Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism [mp3] [YouTube] [74 minutes total]

Marx and waiting for Godot [mp3] [YouTube]
Three failed predictions [mp3] [YouTube]
Socialism needs an aristocracy: Lenin, Mao, and the lesson of the German Social Democrats [mp3] [YouTube]
Good news for socialism: depression and war [mp3] [YouTube]
Bad news: liberal capitalism rebounds [mp3] [YouTube]
Worse news: Khrushchev’s revelations and Hungary [mp3] [YouTube]
Responding to the crisis: change socialism’s ethical standard [mp3] [YouTube]
From need to equality [mp3] [YouTube]
From Wealth is good to Wealth is bad [mp3] [YouTube]
Responding to the crisis: change socialism’s epistemology [mp3] [YouTube]
Marcuse and the Frankfurt School: Marx plus Freud, or oppression plus repression [mp3] [YouTube]
The rise and fall of Left terrorism [mp3] [YouTube]
From the collapse of the New Left to postmodernism [mp3] [YouTube]

Previous:
Chapter One: What Postmodernism Is [mp3] [YouTube] [38 minutes]
Chapter Two: The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [72 minutes]
Chapter Three: The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [50 minutes]
Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [mp3] [YouTube] [102 minutes]

Forthcoming:
Chapter Six: Postmodern Strategy [mp3] [YouTube]

Related:
The Explaining Postmodernism page.

The Climate of Collectivism [EP audiobook]

This is the fourth chapter of the audiobook version of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.

Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [mp3] [YouTube] [102 minutes]

From postmodern epistemology to postmodern politics [mp3] [YouTube]
The argument of the next three chapters [mp3] [YouTube]
Responding to socialism’s crisis of theory and evidence [mp3] [YouTube]
Back to Rousseau [mp3] [YouTube]
Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment [mp3] [YouTube]
Rousseau’s collectivism and statism [mp3] [YouTube]
Rousseau and the French Revolution [mp3] [YouTube]
Counter-Enlightenment politics: Right and Left collectivism [mp3] [YouTube]
Kant on collectivism and war [mp3] [YouTube]
Herder on multicultural relativism [mp3] [YouTube]
Fichte on education as socialization [mp3] [YouTube]
Hegel on worshipping the state [mp3] [YouTube]
From Hegel to the twentieth century [mp3] [YouTube]
Right versus Left collectivism in the twentieth century [mp3] [YouTube]
The Rise of National Socialism: Who are the real socialists? [mp3] [YouTube]

Previous:
Chapter One: What Postmodernism Is [mp3] [YouTube] [38 minutes]
Chapter Two: The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [72 minutes]
Chapter Three: The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [50 minutes]

Forthcoming:
Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism [mp3] [YouTube]
Chapter Six: Postmodern Strategy [mp3] [YouTube]

Related:
The Explaining Postmodernism page.

More on Marx and violent revolution

In an earlier post on Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, I offered two explanations for why the 1848 Marx held that communism could only come about by violent revolution.

In response to that post, Tibor Machan pointed me to this passage from an 1872 speech Marx gave in Amsterdam:

“We are aware of the importance that must be accorded to the institutions, customs, and traditions of different countries; and we do not deny that there are countries like America, England (and, if I knew your institutions better, I would add Holland), where the workers can achieve their aims by peaceful means. However true that may be, we ought to recognize that, in most of the countries on the Continent, it is force that must be the lever of our revolutions.”[1]

Interesting exceptions. America, England, and Holland are, arguably, the countries in which capitalism had achieved the most development. Machan’s explanation is that Marx came to believe that in such advanced countries workers’ advancement could come about by gradualist methods: “Bit by bit, step by step, at municipal, county, state, and the federal levels of government, socialism can be instituted by democratic process.”[2]

(And adding up the bits, according to my math Marx was right and we’re over 50% there.[3])

Sources:
[1] Karl Marx, Selected Writings, second edition. Edited by David McLellan (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 643.
[2] Tibor Machan, Revisiting Marxism: A Bourgeois Reassessment (Hamilton Books, 2006), p. 156.
[3] “Marx’s 10-point plan 50% realized in USA.”
[4] And just to be clear: “Am I really a Marxist revolutionary?”

Marx’s philosophy and the *necessity* of violent politics

Last week in my Contemporary European Philosophy class we discussed Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto. One question we raised toward the end was why Marx and Engels rejected achieving socialism by democratic and reformist methods. Why the insistence upon violent revolution?

Here’s Marx in an 1848 newspaper article: “there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.”

One set of reasons we considered in class was about impatience with political change in a democracy or republic. To be successful in those systems, socialists must first get organized. But that will take time, and they will lose elections. Finally, they’ll win some elections, but still be a minority in the lower legislative chamber. After more time, they’ll get a majority in the lower chamber, but legislation will be vetoed by the upper chamber. Eventually the socialists may also get a majority in the upper chamber, but their bills will be vetoed by the president and/or the judiciary. At the same time, the education and journalism establishments will be against socialism or become reformist slowly. Even if socialists overcome all of the above obstacles, the rich bourgeoisie will bribe whomever to stay in power. Or they’ll use the police and military to suppress threats. Who has the patience to endure all of that?

But for Marxism there is stronger philosophical reason that rules out democratic reformism: environmental determinism. Marx holds that except as a malleable potential, there is no human nature — “the human essence has no true reality,” wrote the early Marx. Consequently, humans are plastic and shaped by their circumstances. “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their lives,” Marx wrote, “but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”

The word “social” is important in that quotation: the determining circumstances are fundamentally social. Marx sees individuals as vehicles of collectives and not as autonomous individuals: “Activity and mind are social in their content as well as in their origin; they are a social activity and social mind.” And again: the individual “exists in reality as the representation and the real mind of social existence.”

Further, it is their economic circumstances that are the fundamental social-environmental forces. In Marx’s words, for example: “As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.”

So Marxism is committed to collective, economic determinism. Anyone’s belief system is a necessary consequence of their economic social being. What we think is true, reasonable, and good is determined by the economic circumstances in which we are raised.

What of the capitalist economic system in particular? Marx holds that capitalism divides people into polarized economic classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Members of the two classes are born and raised in fundamentally different and opposed economic circumstances. “In proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the laborer must grow worse. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery at the opposite pole.” This set of economic circumstances combined with environmental determinism means that the bourgeoisie are conditioned to one set of truths about what’s reasonable and good while the proletariat are conditioned to an opposite set of truths about what’s reasonable and good.

Given their conditioning, there is no way for individuals of different classes to communicate effectively with each other, to understand the other’s position, to change the other’s mind. Each side has been molded to embody an opposed set of beliefs.

It follows that for Marxism the democratic process is a pointless sham. Democracy presupposes the effectiveness of reason — that individuals can observe, think, and judge for themselves, that they can learn from experience, be open to argument, and change their minds. Marxism, however, rules that out on epistemological principle: knowledge is conditioning, not rational judgment.

In final consequence, it follows that when differently-conditioned individuals meet, the conflict can be resolved only by force. Socialists cannot argue capitalists into socialism. They cannot objectively present reasons or appeal to reason. They can only take over by violence and remove their social enemies. As Engels put it longingly in 1849:

“The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward” (“The Magyar Struggle”).

That’s also a big part of the explanation for the post-Marx-and-Engels socialist tradition of violence: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Guzmán, Hobsbawm, and the rest of that long, long, list. Often, philosophy drives politics.

Related:
“The Crisis of Socialism” [pdf]. Chapter Five of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.

Marx’s 10-point plan 50% realized in USA

The ten-point list from The Communist Manifesto, with my rough quantification:

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
[Partial check: property taxes, zoning laws, the federal government alone owns 30% of all land in the USA. .6 points.]

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
[Check. 1 point.]

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
[Partial check: inheritance tax rates range from 18% to 55%. .4 points.]

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
[No check. 0 points.] (See * below.)

5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
[Check: Federal Reserve, US Treasury. 1 point.]

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
[Partial check: roads, airspace; controls on riverways, telecomm. .5 points]

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
[Partial check, but very hard to measure rates of state-ownership or regulations in research, manufacturing, and agriculture. .5 points.]

8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
[No check: though suggestions of mandatory volunteerism and national service. 0 points.]

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
[No check. 0 points.]

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.
[Check. 1 point.]

Total: 5 out of a possible 10 points.

Workers of the world, rejoice! We’re halfway there!

* Update: Neil Baxter informs me of new exit taxes for US expatriates, and Jeff Perren argues nicely that this ship has sailed too. So this should be a partial check, and we’re over 51% there.

Marxists and violence

Following up on a series of recent posts on Marxism and its fellow travelers (Engels, Mao, Guzmán, Hobsbawm), a question about whether Marxism’s brutal history is a built-in consequence of its principles or an accidental by-product of well-intentioned theory.

So a series of quotations from some principal figures:

Marx in 1848: “there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.”[1]

Engels in 1849: “The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.”[2]

Lenin in 1917: “The state is an instrument for coercion … We want to organize violence in the name of the interests of the workers.” And in 1920: “A good Communist is at the same time a good Chekist.”[3]

Dzerzhinsky, Cheka chief, in 1918: “The public and the press misunderstand the character and tasks of our Commission. We stand for organized terror — this should be frankly stated — being absolutely indispensable in current revolutionary conditions.”[4]

Trotsky on Stalin in 1940: “Under all conditions well-organized violence seems to him the shortest distance between two points.”[5]

So in explaining the enormous death toll in communist societies in the twentieth century, we have two options:

Option 1. Communism is a humane theory, but its practitioners somehow mis-interpreted Marx and/or things got out of control unintentionally.

Option 2. Communism is a theory that calls explicitly for terrorism and the extermination of people.

Sources:
[1] Karl Marx, “The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna,” Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 136, November 1848.

[2] Friedrich Engels, “The Magyar Struggle,” first published in Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 194, January 13, 1849.

[3] Vladimir I. Lenin, quoted in George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police, Oxford University Press, 1987.

[4] Felix Dzerzhinsky, press interview in early June 1918, quoted in Leggett, The Cheka.

[5] Leon Trotsky, Stalin – An Appraisal of the Man and his Influence, unfinished manuscript published in 1941.

Related:
On the New Left turn to violence: “The Crisis of Socialism” [pdf], Chapter 5 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.
Soviets and Nazis — which were worse?

Friedrich Engels against liberal peace

A good example of how political philosophy is driven by ethics.

Here is Engels, Karl Marx’s collaborator in writing The Communist Manifesto and other works, criticizing liberals despite nineteenth-century liberalism’s great accomplishment in reducing war and promoting peace between nations:

“You have brought about the fraternization of the peoples — but the fraternity is the fraternity of thieves. You have reduced the number of wars — to earn all the bigger profits in peace, to intensify to the utmost the enmity between individuals, the ignominious war of competition! When have you done anything ‘out of pure humanity,’ from consciousness of the futility of the opposition between the general and the individual interest? When have you been moral without being interested, without harboring at the back of your mind immoral, egoistical motives?” [1]

Three observations:

1. In the second sentence Engels subscribes to the “capitalist peace” thesis — i.e., that free market trade promotes peace between nations: one doesn’t want to harm one’s customers or one’s suppliers with whom one has profitable relations. Interesting, since typically (or when it suits their purposes) leftists and especially Marxists argue that capitalism causes war by promoting competition for economic gain. But while Engels grants that the capitalist peace thesis is true, he doesn’t like it.

2. Engels is an anti-egoist and anti-consequentialist: the consequences of liberalism — peace, fraternity, and mutually-beneficial transactions — count for nothing because they come from “egoistical motives.”

3. And Engels’s account of proper motivation is Kantian. The final sentence requiring that one be “moral without being interested” is straight out of Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork: “Now an action done from duty must wholly exclude the influence of inclination,” and “I am willing to allow that most of our actions many accord with duty; but if we look more closely at our scheming and striving, we everywhere come across the dear self, which is always turning up; and it is on this that the purpose of our actions is based — not on the strict command of duty, which would often require self-denial.” [2]

Sources:
[1] Friedrich Engels, “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy.” Quoted in Tom Palmer, editor, After the Welfare State, Jameson Books/Students for Liberty/Atlas Network, 2012, p. 37. [Thanks to Richard Lorenc for bringing the quotation to my attention.]
[2] Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, translated by H. J. Paton, Harper Torchbooks, Sections 397 and 407.

Related:
Is commerce rendering war obsolete?

Philosophical Foundations of Education course

Here is the syllabus and schedule [pdf] for my graduate course this semester.

I’ll be doing a few experiments with the course this time. One is using my online lectures in Philosophy of Education as assignments for class preparation, along with reading from Howard Ozmon’s textbook. I’ll also be asking the students to read and write a critical review of Jerry Kirkpatrick’s Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism, a fine historically-informed survey of educational theory.

And in the second half of the semester I will be working with Marsha Familaro Enright, who will lead several Socratic discussions on key philosophers of education — including Plato, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, John Dewey, B. F. Skinner, Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Marx, and Henry Giroux.