Socialism Lives

Brad Carson is a former Democratic congressman from Oklahoma. In the May 10 Real Clear Politics he said, “it is equality and social justice—the essential progressive values—that define what the common good really is”. Carson’s sentence lays out the difference between progressives and classic liberals. The Jeffersonian liberal wants “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;” Isaiah Berlin’s “negative liberty.” The progressive, in the tradition of the French Revolution, seeks equality and justice even at the expense of “negative liberty.”

Socialism is the once-respectable, now somewhat discredited, term for a political system that used class warfare to secure economic equality and social justice. Today, one sees the old socialist left still alive in the fight against “Globalism,” corporate domination of the world economy. And in the Latin America of Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, and Cuba’s Fidel Castro, socialism is even more openly operating once again.

In his article “Why Isn't Socialism Dead?”, Lee Harris attempts to explain how socialism survives in the face of so much evidence that state-run economies don’t work. To do so, Harris goes back a century to the French socialist Georges Sorel, who indicated that socialism is a myth, a religion, not subject to scientific proof:

why did Sorel, trained as an engineer and knowledgeable about science, reject scientific socialism? The answer[:] Sorel suspected that socialism, in practice, simply might not ever really work. . .Sorel himself was skeptical. . . about the possibility of socialism as a viable economic system.

For example, in the introduction to Reflections on Violence, Sorel says that the French thinker Renan "was very surprised to discover that Socialists are beyond discouragement." He then quotes Renan's comment about the indefatigable perseverance of socialists: "After each abortive experiment they recommence their work: the solution is not yet found, but it will be. The idea that no solution exists never occurs to them, and in this lies their strength." (Italics mine.)

Sorel, for whom religion was important, drew a comparison between the Christian and the socialist revolutionary. The Christian's life is transformed because he accepts the myth that Christ will one day return and usher in the end of time; the revolutionary socialist's life is transformed because he accepts the myth that one day socialism will triumph, and justice for all will prevail. What mattered for Sorel, in both cases, is not the scientific truth or falsity of the myth believed in, but what believing in the myth does to the lives of those who have accepted it, and who refuse to be daunted by the repeated failure of their apocalyptic expectations.

The shrewd and realistic Florentine statesman and thinker, Guicciardini, once advised: "Never fight against religion...this concept has too much empire over the minds of men." And to the extent that socialism is a religion, then those who wish to fight it with mere reason and argument may well be in for a losing battle. Furthermore, as populism spreads, it is inevitable that the myth of socialism will gain in strength among the people who have the least cause to be happy with their place in the capitalist world-order, and who will naturally be overjoyed to put their faith in those who promise them a quick fix to their poverty and an end to their suffering.