1848+: Last and First Men

And interesting older text: Socialism, by Michael Harrington, a book from the seventies that younger readers may not know. (isn’t Amazon great? you can get an old copy for two and half bucks)
Watching the charade of rightwing ideology in action, to the point of accusing Obama (!) of socialism, I am mindful of a lost world of liberal/left culture and thought that is being asphixiated by neoliberal media tactics, devastatingly successful.
I am often stunned by the sheer idiocy of the current generation, even of educated persons. The work of Fox News has been done well: idiots roll off the assembly line
I am a critic of Marx and Engels and have posted frequently on that issue, but the current prejudice against socialism, despite the left’s idiocy on the legacy of Stalinism, is a form of historical ignorance, and often the result of the mindset described in Frank’s What’s The Matter With Kansas: the working class mindset poisoned by overdose watching of Fox News into the rejection of self-interest. Basically the rightist elite understands the low class asshole hooked on Fox News: he is easily turned against himself to be a compliant idiot in the system from which he can receive no profit.

We can see this in clever way propaganda has reversed the idea of revolt in the stupidity of the Tea Party movement. etc, etc….
These phenomena were foretold fairly well by Marx/Engels.
The right wing is trying to destroy American democracy, and in the process have distorted the meaning and usage of the terms ’socialism’ and ‘liberalism’.

Michael Harrington, although his book is out of date, has some nice pieces that endure in this text from the days before even Nixonian conservatism.

He makes the case for the democratic Marx in the wake of 1848, and as a consistent socialist clarifies the way in which Lenin along with the right wing destroyed the socialist idea.
It is not complex: any right thinking citizen-voter untouched by the Fox News poison machine would naturally embrace basic elements of socialism, or, at least, welfare economics and social democratic pseudo-socialism.
One can disagree with these statements, but the idea of socialism should at least be used in a proper usage even by critics.
Harrington would have a hard time in the current scene where unrepentant leftists of crypto-Stalinist persuation have coopted the idea of socialism as badly as those on the right. Harrington was a rare thinker, and insisted on the need for the left to resurrect socialism after and apart from the Bolshevik theft of the idea.
Anyway, his book is a minor classic of reasonable and intelligent socialist discourse.
It might help, even for critics of socialism, to insist at least on the right use of the term, instead of the current systematic mystifications of the increasingly fascist right in the the US.

Everything that Marx predicted is rapidly coming to pass in the US, and the result could be catastrophic very soon.
An archaeological study of the ideas of socialism and the left are essential, but that is very difficult because of the kind of distortions of the record, right and left, that Harrington uncovered with considerable foresight in the seventies.

SOCIALISM HAS KNOWN increments of success, basic failure and
massive betrayal. Yet it is more relevant to the humane con-
struction of the twenty-first century than any other idea.
The American system has struggled and failed for over a century for simple health care, an achievement pulled out of a hat by Bismarck in the nineteenth century (to coopt the left). As that point a grave danger arises, as the ‘enough is enough’ tipping is reached.

This book is about the future of the socialist past. It is not
a narrative or a chronology, but a search for a living tradition,
and it will therefore dwell on what has been only insofar as it
touches on what might be. That, however,does not mean that
I approach history like a fundamentalist preacher rummaging
through scripture to find authority for his own favorite apoca-
lypse. Such amoralistic account of socialism would not in the
least help in changing the world. So it is in the interest of my
intense partisanship to be as ruthlessly honest as possible: my
subjectivity forces me tobe as objective as I can.

I begin, like every student of the past and future, with a con-
viction about the present. Man has socialized everything except
himself. He has rationalized his work and nature and the very
planet in every respect save one: with regard to their underly-
ing purpose. And, just as the socialists predicted more than a
century ago, he is in conflict with an environment that he himself
has brilliantly, and thoughtlessly, created. His genius threatens
to overwhelm him.

Under capitalism, an intricate system of antagonistic coopera-
tion makes a single individual more productive than a thousand
once were. Science, the community of human knowledge, is
casually employed for private purposes with revolutionary pub-
lic consequences. This creates the highest living standard ever
known, rots the great cities, befouls the air and water, and em-
bitters classes, generations and races. Under Communism, these
contradictions are collectivized, not resolved. The state owns the
means of production, and a bureaucratic elite owns the state.
Its interests, which are every bit as egotistic as those of corpora-
tions, are imposed upon the system by totalitarian command. The
anti-social is thus consciously planned rather than being dictated
by the “will” of the market.
Unfortunately, most of the people of the world do not even
have the luxury of suffering from such sophisticated ironies. In
the age of space exploration they struggle to satisfy primordial
needs for food and shelter. More often than not the unification
of mankind has made them more miserable. Trade more effec-
tively than ever exacts a tribute from the poor nations to the rich,
both capitalist and Communist; medicine saves a baby from an
ancient plague only to deliver him up to a new kind of hunger;
a miraculous seed threatens rural unemployment and even starva-
tion because only elite farmers can use it.
The ultimate in these contradictions is both unprecedented and
obvious to the point of banality. Nuclear science has penetrated
the innermost secrets of our world and discovered there the possi-
bility of annihilating it. It is as if the human race had perse-
vered through the millennia only to reenact the drama of Adam
and Eve. In the goodness of the fruit of the tree of knowledge
there is the taste of evil.
These things need not be. Even the most superficial critic of
society now realizes that it is not our knowledge, but the way in
which it is organized, that menaces us. But beyond that humanist
cliche there must be the specifics of a tough-minded, socialist
solution: exactly how are we going to socialize the already social
means of production? For one need not any longer ask whether
the future is going to be collective-if we do not blow ourselves
to smithereens, that issue has already been settled by a technology
of such complex interdependence that it demands conscious regu-
lation and control. The question is: What form will twenty-first-
century collectivism take? Will it be a totalitarian, a bureaucratic
or a democratic collectivism?
Socialism answers: Our technology could indeed be the instru-
ment of enslavement; or it could, for the first time ever, provide
the material base for a genuine human community that would
democratize economic and social as well as political power. That
socialist possibility, which will be detailed in the last three chap-
ters, is not the insight of some radical prophets. It is, as the next
chapter will show, either an observable tendency of social reality
or it is a delusion. The history of socialism, then, is not simply
the accumulation of a certain wisdom; it is the process whereby
men and women have themselves defined what socialism is in
the course of struggle. The past I am concerned with here is,
in short, alive.
Indeed, I have often been struck by the way in which the
theorists of some of the most daring and vanguard ideas of the
contemporary Left are only faint and unwitting echoes of some
long-dead socialist giant. Among the college-educated and upper-
middle-class American activists of the sixties and early seventies,
I have glimpsed the wraith of that most proletarian of French
revolutionaries, Auguste Blanqui. He, too, thought that the work-
ing class had been so stupefied by the capitalist system that it
would have to be saved from itself by an elite conspiracy which
could only permit democratic freedoms once the people had been
properly reeducated. Or, to take an even more remarkable an-
ticipation, in the debates of Gracchus Babeuf and his Con-
spiracy of Equals in the 1790S, one glimpses Stalin and Mao
waiting in the wings.
So the early socialists asked the questions that still bedevil us,
and that is one of the many reasons they deserve our attention.
But I do not propose to people this book with a race of prophetic
supermen. On the contrary. It is important to root out every bit
of messianism from the socialist vision, to reject the notion of a
secular redemption that, like the incarnation of Christ, claims
to make all things new. Every time men have acted upon that
kind of chiliastic definition, the result has been totalitarian. There-
fore the rich history of socialist tragedy and error is as important
as the record of its profundity. Marx and Engels, to cite a single,
spectacular instance, mistook the rise of capitalism for its decline.
Only if socialists learn a chastened empiricism from such facts
is there any hope for the plans and projects outlined in the last
chapters of this book.
More generally, the demystification of Marx and Engels will
be a central theme in this analysis. Their words are now used to
justify theories and practices they would abominate. They are
seen by most people as the fathers of totalitarianism and as ma-
terialistic simpletons who taught that economic interests neatly
determine the entire course of society. As long as that falsifica-
tion of the socialist past prevails-and it is a state religion in
Russia, China and other Communist countries-the graven images
of Marx and Engels are among the greatest obstacles to the so-
cialist future.
There also are socialist classics that must be recovered if the
next century is to be decently created. In 1914 Lenin wrote that,
since they had not studied Hegel’s Logic, for almost half a
sentury “none of the Marxists understood Marx.?” My attitude
is almost as extreme and arrogant. I believe, as Chapter V will
document, that Das Kapital has been barbarously treated by its
contemporary academic critics, like Paul Samuelson, and even
unfairly handled by sympathetic thinkers, like Joan Robinson. As
a result, there is much in that magnificent book that, despite the
fact that it was published more than one hundred years ago, is
new. I propose to rescue it from the distortions of the professors
and the rigidities of the keepers of holy writ. For it could help
us, not simply to understand the world, but to change it.
An overview of socialist history also illuminates an idea that
is crucial for understanding what is happening today under Com-
munism, in the Third World and within the welfare state. This
is the concept of anti-socialist “socialism.”
Bismarck was, as will be seen later on in greater detail, the
first of the anti-socialist “socialists.” In 1878 he outlawed any
organization that even advocated socialism, By 1882 he was tell-
ing the Reichstag, “Many of the measures that we have adopted
for the welfare of the land are socialistic and we need more so-
cialism in our state …. ” Clearly, the Junker leader had not
undergone a sudden conversion between 1878 and 1882, moving
from the Right to the Left. He had shrewdly understood that
the socialists had mass appeal, and he was determined to use
socialist slogans in order to fight socialism.
Even before Bismarck attempted to co-opt the socialist appeal,

Marx had understood the potential of anti-socialist “socialism.”
In the 1850S he analyzed the Credit Mobilier under Napoleon III
in France as “Bonapartist” or “imperial” “socialism.” And in an
attack on Proudhon he used an even more telling phrase. “Com-
munism,” Marx wrote, “must free itself from all the ‘false broth-
ers’ ” of the fashionable socialisms of the time. He did not realize
that in the twentieth century the “false brothers” were to become
world powers, and worse, that they would call themselves Marxist.
. Early on, then, a sophisticated conservative understood that
socialism had accurately anticipated two of the most important
tendencies of the modern age. Technology was indeed making
economic, social and political life more collective, even when it
operated under the auspices of laissez-faire; and millions dreamed
that this process could be made the instrument of their emanci-
pation from poverty and servility. The collectivizing trend meant
that the state would have to take a role in directing the economy.
The socialist aspirations among the people could be used to
provide popular support for such policies-even when they were
in the service of some new, or more efficient, form of exploita-
tion.
Thus from Bismarck to the present moment, dictators and
charlatans as well as democratic socialists have fought for the
possession of the word “socialism.” Joseph Stalin invoked it to
justify psychopathic purges and the totalitarian accumulation
of capital; Clement Attlee used it to help build a democratic
welfare state in Britain after World War II. But the most mon-
strous single definition of the term was unquestionably the
“National Socialism” of the Nazis. Gregor Straser, the “Left-
wing” Nazi, said that Hitler was responding to the “anti-capitalist
yearnings” of the masses.
If, then, socialism is to have any meaning-past, present or
future-a way must be found to distinguish between the various,
and often murderously hostile, claimants to its name. And this
is particularly important in the 1970S when one is confronted by
Russian, Chinese, Yugoslavian, Israeli, African, Cuban, Chilean,
Indian, Arab and other “socialisms.” In the Tower of Babel that
is the Left, is there any empirical test that can establish the differ-
ence between the authentic and the spurious socialisms?
It was one of the many accomplishments of Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels to demonstrate how this can be done. One must,
they said, go behind the socialist rhetoric of a given movement
and discover who is making the decisions and what interests
are being served. Using those criteria, they realized as young men
in the 1840S that the times were giving birth to two new move-
ments: to socialism and to “socialist” anti-socialism. In The
Communist Manifesto they pointed out that there were reac-
tionary and conservative “socialisms.” They told of aristocrats
~ho hated capitalism because it was anti-feudal and wanted to
march back to medievalism in the name of “socialism.” And
there were small businessmen who wanted the capitalist giants
who threatened them to be controlled; intellectuals with blue-
printed panaceas; and even utopians among the bourgeoisie
itself who dreamed of a harmonious capitalism free of conflict.
They all called themselves “socialists.”
The hallmark of these “socialisms” was that they were the
creations of ~seeking minorities, ruses whereby feudalists or
\ shopkeepers or businessmen sought to cloak their special interests
in soaring universals. But capitalism, Marx and Engels said-and
they were, as will be seen, both right and wrong-was creating
a new and vast majority which owned no means of production
and whose common good required nothing more than the democ-
ratization of the economy and society. A genuine socialist move-
ment was one that led the struggles and articulated the needs
of these people.
Marx died in 1883 and thus did not have the opportunity to
see how Bismarck would turn the/anti-socialist “socialism” de-
scribed in the Manifesto into a state policy. But Engels lived
long enough to see through this trick and his disciple, Karl Kaut-
sky, the famous “pope” of Marxism before the First World War,
even gave it a new name. He called it “state socialism,” a strategy
of government intervention into th€economy, including the
nationalization of certain enterprises, for the purpose of shoring
up capitalism.
These distinctions from the socialist past must be carefully
explored for they are crucial to the present and future. In 1917
a socialist revolution triumphed in a Russia that lacked the pre-
conditions for socialism. Eventually, most of the revolutionists
were murdered in the name of the Revolution and a new form of
class society, anti-capitalist and anti-socialist, came into being.
Variants of this bureaucratic collectivism have now appeared in
Eastern Europe, China and; in new and. unexpected mutations,
throughout the Third World. Do these cases then prove that the
socialist vision of the people emancipating themselves is a hoax?
The welfare state poses a similar problem in a radically differ-
ent context. The reform of capitalism was achieved largely be-
cause of the presence of a mass socialist movement (or, in the
United States, of the unions) and over the outraged protests of
businessmen, who gained enormously from the change. The ad-
vances that were thus made are quite real and the result of a
democratic struggle. They are the very opposite of those “revolu-
tions from above” carried out by a Bismarck or a Stalin. But the
danger is that the welfare state is then equated with socialism
itself. In their daily battle to make capitalism more tolerable,
socialists could lose their vision of a fundamental transformation
of social relationships. The classes would remain and the domina-
tion of private, minority priorities would take on much more
sophisticated forms. With the unwitting cooperation of the so-
cialists themselves, their dream would become the new facade
of an old order.
So it is possible that, in quite different but parallel ways, the
socialist ideal will be expropriated under Communism and the
welfare state and in the Third World. That would mark the cor-
ruption of the future.

Class -societies have, of course, always justified themselves in
the name of the highest values of religion or honor or freedom.
But if socialism were to be effectively turned into a rationale
for new modes of exploitation, then there would be no hope of
a just order of things. That has not yet happened, for despite the
monstrous crimes committed in its name, the socialist vision still
speaks to the majority of mankind. In the Communist sphere, for
instance, every movement of opposition and protest-the East
German general strike of 1953, the Polish and Hungarian up-
risings of October, 1956, the Czechoslovakian spring of 1968 and
the Polish strikes in the winter of 197a-1971-was trying to
create the “human face of socialism,” not to return to capitalism.
Paradoxically~ as Zbigniew Brzezinski has noted, in Eastern Eu-
rope, “socialism has wide •popuiar support whereas Communism
as an institutionalized belief has not.” Thus the distinction be-
tween the socialist ideal and its manipulation, first formulated by
Marx and Engels, has enormous practical significance for the
present and future
But if the people were to accept the anti-socialist “socialisms”
as genuine, then one of the most crucial elements of the socialist

possibility-a conscious mass movement-would disappear. The
millions would have internalized the definition of dictators or
bureaucrats that the people cannot rule and must passively ac-
cept orders from on high. That would be the death of socialism.
And that is why I will take such pains in this book to understand
anti-socialist “socialism.”
Finally, this book describes the necessity of socialism, not its
inevitability.
I am not at all sure that there will be a socialist alternative to
Communism and the welfare state. It is certainly quite possible
that the twenty-first century will belong to bureaucratic collectiv-
ism and that the dream of human self-emancipation will turn
out to have been mankind’s noblest deception. But I am sure that
if men are to master their own genius-if the fantastically pro-
ductive and destructive and interdependent technological society
we have blundered into is to be our homeland and not our prison
-then they must socialize themselves along with everything
else. So after so many failures and betrayals the socialism de-
fined here does not pretend to be the wave of the future. It is
simply our only hope.’