This means that the underlying political/ideological battle of the past 120 years, socialism versus capitalism, is now front and
center. Now more than ever, clearly identifying and
defining one’s terms is vital. I think it’s indisputably important to
understand clearly what one is debating. How, then, do we understand socialism
in the political/social context? [See my ‘What makes someone a socialist?'
for a definition of socialism.]
Nordhoff offers a facinating look inside more
than six dozen communist enclaves established in the United States in the 19th
Century.
These societies are based on the common
ownership of all property, central economic planning, abolition of wages for
labor, sharply regulated social life including marriage and even sexual
conduct. In exchange, everyone’s needs are provided for out of the common fund
based on the principle of strict economic equality. "Luxuries" are forbidden
or at least frowned upon. The communist societies are governed authoritarianly
by an individual or small elite. Some kind of democratic process is generally
involved. They differ in details and implementation, but all adhere to the
basic socialist doctrines, usually rooted, implicitly or explicitly, in Christian theology.
The crucial common feature of these societies was that they were strictly voluntary.
They have their own constitutions, which conform to the laws of the United
States. Everyone who is accepted in—some who apply are rejected—must contractually
agree to the terms, agreeing to turn over all personal property to the
society’s collective pot. People are free to leave, and when someone does, s/he
is usually compensated to some extent based on their original property
contribution, or some other criteria established by prior contractual
agreement. People can be expelled for non-compliance. No coercion or violence
is ever used to keep people in, and disputes are resolved in a civil manner, although
occasionally must be resolved in the courts of the United States.
These societies built and ran agricultural and
manufacturing industries, and traded with the “outside” capitalist world.
Profits are deposited into the common fund, and either used for the members' material
needs or invested frugally, for the long-term benefit of the members. All members must
learn skills and work, unless too young, or indigent. When needed based on demand for their products, the rulers
hire outside labor for wages.
One of the communistic societies Nordhoff
describes, the Perfectionists, was established by John Humphrey Noyes, who
himself wrote a book, History
of American Socialisms, which I also own and
have read.
Interestingly, many of these communistic
societies were established by devout Christians who fled Europe in the 19th
Century, which was still burdened by the tyranny of church-state unity. These
people were persecuted, and ofthen prosecuted and even jailed because their practices differed from
the views of the established religious/political authorities. So they emigrated
to the United States, because the U.S. guaranteed their freedom to establish
their socialisms.
This is really important. European socialists
were coming to the capitalist United States of America because this is where
they found the freedom to practice their socialist creed. Melvin D.
Barger, writing for FEE about another commune, Robert Owens’ New Harmony, said
this:
The New Harmony movement also had wide support in the new American
nation, and Owen had even been given an audience with President-elect John
Quincy Adams and the Secretary of the Treasury when he arrived in Washington.
There was a kindly tolerance of new ideas, and if New Harmony had been a sound
and workable system, the United States had both the political freedom and the
available land for thousands of such communal enterprises.
Then or now, nothing in the fundamental American idea was opposed
to the socialistic communities of the early 19th
century, since they were voluntary arrangements and used peaceful means.
[My emphasis]
The American socialist movement of the 19th
Century featured two primary branches, Owenism and Fourierism. There were
religious, semi-religious, and non-religious manifestations. Some attempted to
abolish the family as the primary unit, replacing it with 100% loyalty to the
community. Others attempted to leave a place for the family, but as a subordinate unit. There was even one
attempt to incorporate “sovereign individualism” into the communistic
framework.
There were many different practical applications
of the socialist principles. With few exceptions, they all failed to last very
long. Noyes concludes that socialism in principle is synonymous with
Christianity, and that the experience of the few that lasted the longest
indicated that the path to socialism runs through religion, in particular,
Christianity. Even socialisms that rejected organized religion were motivated
by basic Christian principles.
Success or fail, they were strictly voluntary
arrangements, with none attempting to legally force their creed on others. And
almost without exception, the socialisms failed. Also without exception, the
architects of the socialisms offered excuse after excuse for why their
particular attempts failed. The 19th Century socialists blamed their failures
on everyone and everything, except their own theories. “[T]he time had not yet
arrived” [P. 312] for socialism, observed one architect. “[W]e very much fear,”
observed another, “that [socialism] will be unsuccessful on account of the
selfishness of mankind, this being the principal obstacle to be overcome.”
“General Depravity, all say,” observes Noyes, “is the villain in the whole
story.” Quoting another socialist historian, whom he relied heavily on in this
book, Noyes writes, “Macdonald himself, after ‘seeing stern reality,’ confesses
that in his previous hopes of socialism he ‘had imagined mankind better than
they are.’”
Through it all, they never questioned or lost
faith in the principles of socialism. “We will try and try again” [P. 346] was the sentiment. Does this sound familiar? Does the
wail of the latest reincarnation of socialism,
today’s Democratic Socialists, that “real socialism has never been tried,” come
to mind?
This reminds me of a
passage in Atlas Shrugged, in
which a character tells a society in crisis:
Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your
code of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the
scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish
to spill all the blood it required. You damned man, you damned existence, you
damned this earth, but never dared to question your code.
Opposed to the free-wheeling capitalism existing
under American governing principles, a capitalism they saw as “corrupt” and
“selfish”, the 19th Century socialists saw themselves as pioneers. Their
experiments were designed to find and demonstrate to the nation and world the
path to a fully socialst society. Through failure after failure, they never
lost faith, because faith was all they had. They believed that “years may be
required, before we shall see the first red streaks of [socialism’s] dawning. [P. 381]” But see it they would, they believed. In one chilling passage,
after one of the failures, Macdonald says in undying faith:
Yet my belief was as firm as ever in the coming abolition of
conflicting interests [capitalism], and the final harmonious reconstruction of
society.
That sentiment weaves through the fabric of the
19th Century socialist movement. But neither Macdonald nor these benevolent
socialists could have envisioned the dark future that their pioneering hopes
portended. They could not have foreseen the economy destroying, bloody
socialisms of their future disciples' attempts to realize the dream of that
“final harmonious reconstruction of society.” They could not have imagined the
nightmare of political socialism of the 20th/21st Century. From Communism to
National Socialism to all of the hybrids right up to Chavez/Maduro Venezuela,
they continued to try and try again--but without the burden of getting
voluntary consent for all involved.
Despite the philosophical similarities with
modern socialists, there is an important distinction to be made between the
early pioneers and their 20th Century successors. The 19th Century pioneers respected
the American form of government. Noyes echoes Nordhoff in paying tribute to
the United States of America, and by implication to the Founding Fathers. He
observes,
The example of the Shakers [one of the longer-lived voluntary
socialisms] has demonstrated, not merely that successful Communism is
subjectively possible, but that this nation is free enough to let it grow. [P.
669, my emphasis]
Where the 19th Century socialists appreciated
the government’s responsibility to secure their right to experiment with
socialism, their 20th Century successors turned, like Al Capones run wild, to
the government as their hired gun to forcibly impose socialism on everyone.
Ironically, these voluntary socialisms existed simultaneously with the vicious model of socialism that portended the horrors of the 20th Century socialisms that would grow out of the unification of economics and state—the Confederate slave plantations. These communistic enclaves featured cradle-to-grave welfare, equality of outcome, and coercive centralized control. Historian C. Bradley Thompson, author of
America's Revolutionary Mind, documents the political ideology underpinning the Confederate slavocracy. One leading intellectual defended the plantation slave system as “the beau ideal of communism.” Citing an extensive array of quotes of the most influential pro-slavery thinkers, Thompson thoroughly documents the socialist essence of the state-imposed plantation slave system, including its parallels with Marxism as well as the "common intellectual heritage" that the 20th-21st Century Progressives share with their 19th Century pro-slavery intellectuals. The South’s proslavery ideology centered on collectivism--the “good of society” over the individual, the “will of the people'' as expressed in elections, and the explicit rejection of unalienable individual rights (Epilogue, Page 359-386). While the voluntary socialisms observed
the principles of America’s free society, the Confederacy explicitly rejected those principles, instead giving America its first demonstration of Democratic Socialism.
Since the Enlightenment gave rise to modern free
market capitalism—the only kind of capitalism, the
enlightened social system of inalienable, equal
individual rights to life, liberty,and the pursuit of happiness through work,
trade, and earned property—history has provided plenty of opportunity and
freedom for people to voluntarily choose socialism, right up to today. There
have been other voluntary socialist societies in the U.S. The Amish have a
variation. American
Kibbutzim, modeled on the Israeli
Kibbutz, have been established
around the country. There were the 1960s
hippie communes. But confronted with
the choice explicitly, most Americans will not willingly give up their “means
of production”--their lives, liberties, property, businesses, and pursuit of
personal happiness--to a central planning authority. Not many people will, when
confronted with undiluted socialism, go for it voluntarily. This is true even in
societies that are highly conducive to socialism in the abstract. Given the freedom to choose socialism, in real life, very few
people have, which means that the only path to a socialist country left to try
is through political power--the power of the gun--totalitarianism.
And try the socialists did. This goes to the
heart of my point in this article. Socialism is perfectly compatible with a
free capitalist society, if everyone respects the rights of everyone
else to live by their own values and judgement, and to freedom of association.
Why? Because in a free society, like America in its Founding principles, the
government neutrally protects that freedom by law and constitution.
Unfortunately, the 20th Century saw a new and
malignant manifestation of socialism, political socialism. Instigated by
Karl Marx, the socialism we speak of in today’s debates is not the benevolent,
peaceful, voluntary socialisms of Nordhoff and Noyes I just wrote about.
Today’s reality-blind, sociopathic Democratic Socialists of America is of the
virulent, intolerant later variety of Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, and Adolf
Hitler. Today’s socialism is a tyrannical, top-down system imposed by force on
the entire society regardless of whether anyone wants it or not, and regardless
of the long history of its results. This political socialism is from beginning
to end an organized crime enterprise. It is weaponized socialism. It is criminal
socialism.
Today’s Democratic Socialist movement is a
manifestation of criminal socialism, because it's proponents are acting through
government force. Rationalized as “democratic,” it follows on the heels of communism,
national socialism, fascism, et al. It rejects voluntarism. It holds that
enough votes to win an election is enough justification for imposing one’s
socialism on the entirety of society without everyone’s voluntary consent.
Bernie Sanders, Occasio-Cortez, and company don’t seek to organize their
supporters by voluntary consent. They go into politics. Why? Because they seek
political power. Why political power rather than the power of persuasion?
Because political power, as one of Marx’s most loyal disciples observed, “grows out of the barrel of a gun.” On “Why go into politics to
advance your cause?”, today’s democratic socialists would answer—to paraphrase
a quote attributed to a famous bank robber—because “that’s where the guns are.”
Criminal socialism is truly the system by and for sociopaths.
Here’s the bottom line, and the reason for this
post: When the government remains in its proper, neutral, rights-protecting,
American-ideal mode, capitalism or socialism is a personal choice. The millions of supporters of
today’s Democratic Socialist movement don’t have to wait for politicians like
Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to gain political power. They can
live their socialist dreams right now, by forming their own communities based
on their common values. All they need to remember is to respect the rights of
others. They can form their communities by the voluntary consent of all of
their members, leaving anyone with different values free to go their own way
unmolested. The Democratic Socialists don’t need politicians. They want them,
because they
are, to be blunt, criminals. Any method of
forming communistic or socialistic associations, other than by universal
voluntary consent, “legal” or not, Legislative or not, is the method of the
criminal.
That’s worth remembering, because here is where
we are today. Capitalism vs. socialism is the underlying political battle of
America.* But having studied the whole history of American socialism, I have
concluded that that characterization is not precise enough. The choice
capitalism vs. socialism is really capitalism versus criminal socialism,
since capitalism is perfectly compatible with voluntary socialist
arrangements.
Related Reading:
The Dark Side of Paradise: A Brief History of America's Utopian Experiments in Communal Living by Lawrence W. Reed for
FEE
