Socialism
1. The Abolition of Private Property
The fundamental nature of this principle is emphasized, for instance, by Marx and Engels: "The theory of Communism may be summed up in a single sentence: 'Abolition of private property,'"
(Communist Manifesto).
This proposition, in its
negative form, is inherent in all socialist doctrines without exception and is the basic feature of all socialist states. But in its
positive form, as an assertion about the actual nature of property in a socialist society, it is less universal and appears in two distinct variants: the overwhelming majority of socialist doctrines proclaim the
communality of property (implemented in more or less radical fashion), while socialist states (and some doctrines) are based on
state property.
2. The Abolition of the Family
The majority of socialist doctrines proclaim the abolition of the family. In other doctrines, as well as in certain socialist states, this proposition is not proclaimed in such radical form, but the principle appears as a de-emphasis of the role of the family, the weakening of family ties, the abolition of certain functions of the family. Again, the negative form of the principle is more common. As a positive statement about specific relationships between the sexes or between parents and children, it appears in several variants as the total obliteration of the family, communality of wives and the destruction of all ties between parent and child to the point where they may not even know each other; as an impairment and a weakening of family ties; or as the transformation of the family into a unit of the bureaucratic state subjected to its goals and control.
3. The Abolition of Religion
It is especially easy for us to observe socialism's hostility to religion, for this is inherent, with few exceptions, in all contemporary socialist states and doctrines. Only rarely is the abolition of religion legislated as it was in Albania. But the actions of other socialist states leave no doubt that they are all governed by this very principle and that only external difficulties have prevented its complete implementation. This same principle has been repeatedly proclaimed in socialist doctrines, beginning with the end of the seventeenth century. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century doctrines are imbued with cold skeptical and ironic attitudes toward religion. If not consciously, then "objectively," they prepared humanity for the convergence of socialist ideology and militant atheism that took place at the end of the seventeenth century and during the course of the eighteenth. The heretical movements of the Middle Ages were religious in character, but those in which socialist tendencies were especially pronounced were the ones that were irrevocably opposed to the actual religion professed by the majority at the time. Calls to assassinate the Pope and to annihilate all monks and priests run like a red thread through the history of these movements. Their hatred for the basic symbols of Christianity--the cross and the church--is very striking. We encounter the burning of crosses and the profanation of churches from the first centuries of Christianity right up to the present day.
Finally, in Plato's socialist system, religion is conceived as an element in the state's ideology. Its role amounts to education, the shaping of citizens' opinions into the forms necessary to the state. To this end, new religious observances and myths were invented and the old ones abolished. It seems that in many of the states of the ancient Orient, official religion played an analogous role, its central function being the deification of the king, who was the personification of the all-powerful state.
4. Communality or Equality
This demand is encountered in almost all socialist doctrines. Its negative form is seen in the striving to destroy the hierarchy of the surrounding society and in calls "to humble the proud, the rich and the powerful," to abolish privilege. This tendency frequently gives rise to hostility toward culture as a factor contributing to spiritual and intellectual inequality and, as a result, leads to a call for the destruction of culture itself. The first formulation of this view can be found in Plato, the most recent in contemporary leftist movements in the West which consider culture "individualistic," "repressive," "suffocating," and call for "ideological guerrilla warfare against culture." We see that a small number of clear-cut principles inspired the socialist doctrines and guided the life of the socialist societies in the course of several millennia. This unity and interrelatedness of various socialist doctrines was fully recognized by their representatives: Thomas Müntzer cites Plato as an authority; Johann of Leyden studies Müntzer, Campanella considers the Anabaptists as an example of the embodiment of his system. Morelly and the anonymous author of the article in the Encyclopédie point to the Inca state as a corroboration of their social views, and in another article from the Encyclopédie ("The Moravians," written by Faiguet), the Moravian Brethren are cited as an example of an ideal communal order. Among late socialists, Saint-Simon in his last work, New Christianity, declares: "The New Christianity will consist of separate tendencies which for the most part will correspond to the ideas of the heretical sects of Europe and America." Further examples of this sense of kinship among the socialist currents of different epochs could easily be produced. We shall only point here to the numerous works with titles such as Forerunners of Scientific Socialism produced by spokesmen of the socialist camp, where among "forerunners" one can find Plato, Dolcino, Müntzer, More and Campanella. ...
It is of course true that in different periods the central core of socialist ideology was manifested in different forms: we have seen socialism in the form of mystical prophecy, of a rationalistic plan for a happy society or of a scientific doctrine. In each period, socialism absorbs certain of the ideas of its time and uses the language contemporary to it. Some of its elements are discarded; others, on the contrary, acquire especially great significance. This is not unusual: such a pattern applies to any other phenomenon of such historical scope.
In another work on socialism, I referred to religion as an example of the same kind of historical phenomenon which is transformed in the course of time just as socialism has been. Now, however, it seems to me that this juxtaposition rather underscores the unique character of socialist ideology--its unprecedented conservatism. Since the time when socialism's basic principles were formulated in Plato's system, the religious concepts of mankind have been completely transformed: the idea of monotheism has acquired universal significance in the world; the concept of a single God in three essences, God-manhood, salvation by faith and a series of other fundamental ideas have arisen. At the same time, the basic principles of socialism have not changed to this day; it has only altered its form and motivation. The unity and cohesiveness of the system of socialist conceptions becomes apparent, together with an astonishing conservatism, in the way that certain details recur again and again in socialist societies and doctrines that are little related one to the other and sometimes widely separated in time. The probability of accidental recurrence is negligible, unless we assume that the similarities are inexorably determined by their exceptional spiritual closeness. We shall cite only four examples from the large number of such coincidences:
a. The coincidence of many details in More's Utopia and the accounts of the Inca state, which lead to the question posed in the French Academy concerning the influence of these accounts on More (which would have been chronologically impossible).
b. The custom of mummification of the heads of state and burial in stepped tombs of pyramid-like design, which is met with in states with strong socialist tendencies (although the states in question may be separated by many thousands of years).
c. In Deschamps's True System we find this vivid detail: Describing the future socialist society, he says that "nearly all people will have almost the same appearance." Dostoyevsky expresses the same thought in the notebooks to The Possessed. The character who is called Pyotr Verkhovensky in the novel and Nechayev in the notebooks has this to say about the future society: "In my opinion even men and women with particularly attractive faces should be prohibited." (92: XI: 270) Dostoyevsky gathered material for his novel from the ideological pronouncements of the nihilists and the socialists, but neither he nor they could have known Deschamps's work, which was published only in our century.
d. In The Republic, Plato wrote that, among the guardians, "none have any habitation or storage area which is not open for all to enter at will." Aristophanes speaks about this in almost the same words in his Ecclesiazusae: "I'll knock out walls and remodel the city into one big happy household, where all can come and go as they choose."
This particular coincidence may be explained by the fact that the authors lived during the same epoch, but the motif is encountered again in More, who, in order to underscore the kind of communality in which the Utopians lived, describes the entrances to their dwellings: "The doors are made with two leaves that are never locked or bolted and are so easy to open that they will follow the slightest touch and shut again alone. Whoever wishes may go in, for there is nothing inside the house that is private or any man's own."
More, of course, had read Plato and could have borrowed the thought from him. But we meet with a law against the closing of doors in the Inca state as well. Still later, in Crime and Punishment, the character Lebeziatnikov expounds on the question of free entry into rooms in the future society: "It has been debated of late whether a member of the commune has the right to go into the room of another member, male or female, at any time. ..well, it was decided that he does." (92: VI: p. 284) This is not merely an artistic contrivance. Dostoyevsky understood the nature of socialism and anticipated its future role perhaps more astutely than any other thinker of the last century. Of the multitude of petty details that he knew about nihilist circles, he selected some of the most characteristic, among these the very same free entrance into dwellings mentioned almost two and a half thousand years earlier by Plato.
And finally, we encounter this motif in the first years after the revolution in Russia. The force of the explosion experienced then dislodged and threw to the surface deeply buried elements of socialist ideology that had earlier remained almost unnoticed and that were later again displaced from view. We will therefore be turning frequently to this period, which presents multiple facets of socialism in an entirely new light. In particular, there appeared at the time numerous ideas on how the new forms of life could overcome the old ways and make life more collective--for example, by replacing individual kitchens with huge factory-like kitchen facilities, or by housing the population in dormitories instead of apartments. One enthusiast published a book based, as he claims, on Trotsky's ideas (93): "It should be made clear that I do not consider the idea of rooms necessary; I believe that it will be possible to consider a room only as the living space of an individual person. After all, isolation in a room is quite unnecessary for collective man. ...The isolation needed in certain hours of love can be had in special pleasure gardens where the man and his female companion will be able to find the necessary comforts."
It would seem that socialist ideology has the ability to stamp widely separated or even historically unlinked socialist currents with indelible and stereotyped markings.
It seems to us quite legitimate to conclude that socialism does exist as a unified historical phenomenon. Its basic principles have been indicated above. They are:
Abolition of private property.
Abolition of the family.
Abolition of religion.
Equality, abolition of hierarchies in society.
The manifold embodiments of these principles are linked organically by a common spirit, by an identity of specific details and, frequently, by a clearly discernible overall thrust.
Our perspective on socialism takes into account only one of the dimensions in which this phenomenon unfolds. Socialism is not only an abstract ideological system but also the embodiment of that system in time and space. Therefore, having sketched in its outlines as an ideology, we now ought to be able to explain in what periods and within what civilization socialism arises, whether in the form of doctrine, popular movement or state structure. But here the answer turns out to be far less clear. While the ideology of socialism is sharply defined, the occurrence of socialism can hardly be linked to any definite time or civilization. If we consider the period in the history of mankind which followed the rise of the state as an institution, we find the manifestations of socialism, practically speaking, in all epochs and in all civilizations. It is possible, however, to identify epochs when socialist ideology manifests itself with particular intensity. This is usually at a turning point in history, a crisis such as the period of the Reformation or our own age. We could simply note that socialist states arise only in definite historical situations, or we could attempt to explain why it was that the socialist ideology appeared in virtually finished and complete form in Plato's time. We shall return to these questions later. But in European history, we cannot point to a single period when socialist teachings were not extant in one form or another. It seems that socialism is a constant factor in human history, at least in the period following the rise of the state. Without attempting to evaluate it for the time being, we must recognize socialism as one of the most powerful and universal forces active in a field where history is played out.
In a general sense, such an approach is not new. Book titles alone testify to that: The Socialist Empire of the Incas; The History of Communism and Socialism in Antiquity; State Socialism in the Fifteenth Century B.C., and so on. Wittfogel (in the work quoted above, 89) gathers vast amounts of material about the states of the ancient Orient, pre-Columbian America, East Africa and certain areas of the Pacific, for example the Hawaiian Islands, characterizing the states he describes as "hydraulic societies" and tracing the multitude of parallels between them and the contemporary socialist states. The history of the socialist doctrines is no less thoroughly researched, as can be seen from the numerous "Histories of Socialist Ideas," which usually begin with Plato. Koigen has even remarked ironically: "Socialism is as old as human society itself--but not older."
It would seem that this should be taken as the starting point of any attempt to understand the essence of socialism. Despite being quite general, such a point of view strictly limits the range of those arguments that are applicable: any explanations based on the peculiarities of a given historical period, race or civilization must be discarded. It is necessary to reject the interpretation of socialism as a definite phase in the development of human society which is said to appear when conditions are ripe. On the contrary, any approach to socialism ought to be based on principles broad enough to be applicable to the Inca empire, to Plato's philosophy and to the socialism of the twentieth century.
The Socialist Phenomenon by Igor Shafarevich
