The View From 1776

Reader Richard Symonds, responding to Obama Bombs In State-Planned Industrial Policy, commented that my understanding of socialism is confused.

Mr. Symonds:

As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, “the term socialist has been so evacuated of content over the last century that it’s hard even to use in any sensible way...”

My response:

Professor Chomsky is wrong that the term socialism has been “evacuated of content” over the last century Rather, there have been many different definitions of socialism for at least 2,350 years, from Plato’s utopian communal state to the hard-nosed socialism expressed by Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. 

Another definition was advanced by Bertrand Russell, one of the world’s most prominent spokesmen for socialism, who said of it:

“For Social Democracy is not a mere political party, nor even a mere economic theory; it is a complete self-contained philosophy of the world and of human development; it is, in a word, a religion and an ethic.  To judge the work of Marx, or the aims and beliefs of his followers, from a narrow economic standpoint, is to overlook the whole body and spirit of their greatness.” (from Lecture One, German Social Democracy).

In arguably the best compendium of socialistic schemata, The Socialist Tradition, Professor Alexander Gray writes, “What, it may at the outset reasonably be asked, are we to understand by socialism?  The definitions of socialism that strew the expositions and the criticisms of socialism furnish a depressing prospect.  Some are foolish; some are vacuous; some are contradictory; some, which appear commendable up to a point, leave gaping omissions.”

I suggest that Mr. Symonds’s definition leaves gaping omissions, on which I will comment below.

Mr. Symonds:

But the Soviet Union was about as remote from socialism as you can imagine. The core notion of traditional socialism is that working people have to be in control of production and communities have to be in control of their own lives. The Soviet Union was the exact opposite of local control, the working people were virtual slaves. Chomsky suggests the collapse of the Soviet Union was in fact a great victory for socialism…

There are attempts today to describe a detailed vision of a socialist future and some of the most extensive and detailed are examples like Participatory Economics, and the moves toward an extension of democracy to the industrial sphere through worker-owned co-operatives.

My response:

Mr. Symonds’s definition of socialism implicitly assumes that local “communities” and a reified abstraction called “working people” spontaneously and harmoniously come together within a socialistic political state to order their economic and political daily life.  Nowhere in history has this phenomenon ever been observed in a society beyond the tribal level.  Even relatively homogeneous and low-population socialistic states like Norway and Sweden have had continuing political strife.

Worker-owned co-operatives function where privately-owned businesses agree to work together within a limited economic and geographic sphere.  Applying that model to the whole of a large, varied, and capital-intensive industrial society is a very remote possibility.

Socialism is, and must always be, imposed top-down upon a political state.  Plato envisioned a planned society administered by philosopher kings schooled from birth in morality, but it was necessary that an outside agent, in this case Plato himself, form a plan to which citizens theoretically would happily agree. 

In real life, people who own property do not willingly hand it over to central planners for “the good of society” as defined by a socialistic elite.  “Working people” and “communities” cannot gain control of production without forcibly confiscating private property or by legislatively or judicially cramming something like Obamacare down the throats of a strongly opposed citizenry.  Every variety of socialism, no matter how benevolent its proclaimed intentions, inescapably tends toward collectivized tyranny.

Hitler, by the way, in a 1927 speech said, “We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.” (a quote from John Toland’s 1976 “Adolf Hitler”).

Marx saw violent revolution as the necessary means to implement socialism.  Lenin is supposed to have said that socialism emanates from the barrel of a rifle.  Even the bloodless gradualism of British Fabianism required gaining the reins of power in Parliament and Whitehall in order to apply the full weight of the state to compel adherence to socialistic policies.  For British society as a whole, there was nothing voluntary about it.

Mr. Symonds:


Philosopher and educationalist John Dewey’s main work concentrated on democracy and he pointed out that as long as we have industrial feudalism — that is, private power controlling production and commerce — our democracy will be very limited. We have to move to what he called industrial democracy if we hope to have democracy of any significance.

My response:

The Soviet Union (which Mr. Symonds comments “was about as remote from socialism as you can imagine...") was Professor Dewey’s model of industrial democracy.  He and his colleagues who journeyed to the Soviet Union were enthralled with its economic planning and its educational system, which they promoted in Columbia University’s school of education as the means to inculcate Dewey’s hypothetical industrial democracy in the minds of callow students.

Mr. Symonds:


The way for individuals to realise the democracy “in their own hearts” was through community. As Dewey wrote, “it is through association that man has acquired his individuality and it is through association that he exercises it. The theory which sets the individual over against society, of necessity contradicts itself.”

My response:

Acquiring individuality “through community” reminds one of the 1960s and 1970s hippies who sought individuality by all sporting long, greasy hair and smelly, unwashed bodies, and indulging in addictive drugs. 

Individuality has little to do with membership in a community, other than the Judeo-Christian commandment for each individual to do the right thing in dealing with others.

Mr. Symonds:


Dewey believed that direct participation in a democracy would foster an unexpected talent for thoughtful deliberation in ordinary citizens.


“We lie in the lap of an immense intelligence,” he said. The difficulty was to unleash this intelligence, which remained dormant until “it possesses the local community as its medium”. In The Public and its Problems — Dewey’s only work of formal political philosophy — he outlined an elaborate programme of truly participatory democracy, one built around face-to-face interactions in “neighbourly communities”.

My response:

Dewey’s “unleashing this intelligence” reflects the standard liberal-progressive-socialist belief that individuals are incapable of recognizing their own best interests.  Socialists must “possess the local community” in order to inform the ignorant masses of what to do, how to do it, and when to do it.

Mr. Symonds:


Socialism is the idea that people should be in control of their own destiny and lives, including the institutions within which they work and the communities within which they live. This is the potential and my vision for local government.

My response:

The idea that, under socialism, people can be in control of their own destiny and lives is belied by universal experience.  For example, under socialized medicine, here and abroad, people’s access to medical care is severely circumscribed.  In the UK, people have no voice in government decisions that are hugely increasing their electricity and other energy costs.  President Bill Clinton, when asked why not cut people’s taxes, notoriously said that he opposed doing so, because people would spend the money on the wrong things.

Under socialism’s taxation and regulatory schemes, people’s work product and income are considered to be socialized state property.  The Marxian formulation was “from each according to ability, to each according to need.”

All varieties of socialism have common elements, among which are:

- A top-down approach in which a collective body - the political state or subdivision thereof - promulgates rules and regulations designed, to one degree or another, to circumscribe individuality and to impose uniform obedience.

- Belief that only a liberal-progressive-socialist elite has the intelligence and knowledge to promulgate those rules and regulations.

- Rejection of God and spiritual religion as unscientific ignorance.

- Belief in philosophical materialism, i.e., the ideology that recognizes only material conditions and material things as the determining agents of human behavior.

For more details, see Once Again: What Is Socialism?