Against Socialism

From the hip.

I’ve noticed for a few months that I’ve distanced myself from the label “socialist” and have even started using it to refer to some political position besides my own. I think for a while I’ve been bothered by the idea that there are true or false socialists, that Nazis and similar sorts appropriated the label to deceive an idiot general audience for whom ‘true’ socialism was actually attractive—but still, for some reason, couldn’t distinguish one from the other. It’s hard to square this narrative with the fact that fascism not only emerges from socialist currents such as syndicalism, but that these currents (and their associated tendencies like antisemitism and national chauvinism) predate Marxist “scientific socialism” and persisted throughout the history of workers’ movements. It’s not difficult to see why: workers’ own immediate interests are as sellers of labor-power, and the most common form of workers’ organizations function as cartels regulating the sale of that precious commodity, whether negotiating with capitalists or competing with out-group workers. You don’t need a grand theory to figure out why unions then often devolve into racist or anti-immigrant gangs, or why workers’ politics do the same on a mass scale. One could say that this is only true for that aristocratic subsection of the working class who identifies with the capitalist class on the basis of nation or race or whatever, but even lower strata of the proletariat (according to nation or race or whatever) have reactionary tendencies aimed towards valorization of their group identity. When the word “socialism” indexes a movement to abolish capitalism and class society seems to be more the exception than the norm.

On these grounds, I’d like to submit a new perspective on the phrase “scientific socialism” which Marx and Engels invented to distinguish their “socialism” from others. I’ve noticed online communists have interpreted this phrase in a new stupid way, namely that it refers to a society ruled according to the scientific method to meet people’s needs in as optimal a way as possible. Yeesh… No, the distinction between utopian and scientific socialism is about whether the politics is motivated by a pursuit of higher ideals or by one’s historical subjectivity as a member of a social class.

One thing is common to [utopians]. Not one of them appears as a representative of the interests of that proletariat which historical development had, in the meantime, produced. Like the French philosophers, they do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanity at once. Like them, they wish to bring in the kingdom of reason and eternal justice, but this kingdom, as they see it, is as far as Heaven from Earth, from that of the French philosophers.

Frederich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Chapter 1

But did Marx and Engels truly represent the interests of the proletariat? Again, Lenin puts the blame on the message having been first received by the English ‘bourgeois proletariat’ who benefited too greatly from the heart of the world’s foremost imperialist nation-state to seek self-abolition. Then, you know: the lesser-but-still-developed capitalist states like Italy and Germany had a flirt with fascism, before soon being absorbed into global capital; and the banner of “communism” was raised by (at most) semi-capitalist countries resisting proleterianization of their peasantry, and who mostly built welfare states to compete with global capital and industrialize on their own terms. I don’t think we can answer historically what and for whom socialism is and, in hindsight, “scientific socialism” seems like more of an imposition on those whose interests it claimed to represent than its competitors.

Yet we have good moments, right? I’ve been thinking about the history of Christianity and Abrahamic religions more generally. You have this grand movement in the first century CE of communism and anti-imperial iconoclasm, which then quickly domesticates itself into a moral philosophy and patriarchal organization. Then you have another grand moment of peasant revolts and anti-imperial iconoclasm, which then quickly domesticates itself into an ideological framework for liberal capitalism. Likewise in political history. My favorite quote from Anti-Oedipus gets to the point. “Psychoanalysis is like the Russian Revolution; we don’t know when it started going bad.” Same with the Chinese Revolution, as well as maybe the liberal bourgeois revolutions in America and France. We run into the problem then of trying to return to those moments, claiming that there was some continuity that was lost but could be recovered in all its glory. I don’t think there’s any continuity to this, though, whether inside socialism writ large or inside Marxism specifically. This is how I make sense of Walter Benjamin’s notion of messianic time:

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. For historical materialism it is a question of holding fast to a picture of the past, just as if it had unexpectedly thrust itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject. The danger threatens the stock of tradition as much as its recipients. For both it is one and the same: handing itself over as the tool of the ruling classes. In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it. For the Messiah arrives not merely as the Redeemer; he also arrives as the vanquisher of the Anti-Christ. The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, Thesis VI

So, yeah. I don’t think socialism is a useful descriptor or tradition, but there’s moments in socialism to which we should hold fast. I think that’s the only useful way to conceptualize scientific socialism: not as a conscious tendency within a larger socialist tradition, or even as the tendency which specifically and specially represents workers’ interests, but as the moments which proved exceptions to the continuity of chauvinistic ideology and practice. If that makes sense?