Socialism: The Left’s Secret Religion

Capitalism works, as Adam Smith explained, because thousands of individual decisions made in the pursuit of self-interest, with the right laws and price mechanisms in place, yield a common good of rising prosperity. But the pursuit of self-interest is soulless. And some capitalists are wildly more successful than others. Socialism was a reaction to capitalism’s excesses, an effort to take power from selfish capitalists and give it to the state. Or, more precisely, to bureaucrats, who tend to be wiser and better educated than the rest of us. Today’s priests.

Here’s Karl Marx’s view of capitalism in his 1848 Communist Manifesto, 75 years after Adam Smith:

Modern bourgeois society. . . has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange [that it] is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. . .

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed -- . . . These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market. . .

Marx believed the proletariat, who controlled their own labor, would to everyone’s benefit seize power and usher in a utopia of equality. The Communist Party, the vanguard of the proletariat, would lead the way.

Socialism sought to achieve the utopia of equality peacefully. As an economic system, socialism is held in low repute today. The last half of the 20th century is a history of socialism’s failure to generate a better life in the U.S.S.R., in China, in Vietnam, in Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, and in India and much of the Third World. Now France, one of the birthplaces of modern socialism, is also turning away from a state-run economy.

But socialism has long been as much religion as economic system. A century ago, French socialist Georges Sorel presciently drew the parallel between the Christian and the socialist revolutionary when he wrote:

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.

Now, The Nation’s Ronald Aronson’s discussion of God’s decline in America similarly recognizes that:

Living without God means turning toward something [emphasis added]. . . creating conditions in which people are free from the kinds of existential vulnerability that have marked all human societies until the advent of Europe's postindustrial welfare states. Markedly more religious than any of them, the United States provides a life that is far more unequal and far more insecure.

“Europe’s postindustrial welfare states.” That’s code talk for socialism. Aronson’s new religious ideal for America is achieving European socialism, which he contrasts with the “unequal and far more insecure” life Americans know under capitalism.

In fact, workers in America do better than they do in Europe. But try telling that to someone whose religion teaches him otherwise.