For P. T. K., an ever-enlightening interlocutor
Socialism is a topic that, like many other contemporary “-isms,” I do not think has a particularly stable definition. One can provide rough histories of the topic that either associate it with the theorizing of figures like Karl Marx or reasonably connect it to the workers’ movements of England and many other countries. To be charitable to the concept, we might suggest – with the acknowledged provision that this definition is as tenuous as any other – that socialism is something of a political movement, that may or may not advocate for the use of government, to transfer wealth from the better off to the less well off and to provide various protections to workers that their employers may not otherwise provide. This ethic has taken on a number of fashions, but I would posit that the general thrust has at least somewhat been accepted across many countries as seen in the growing prevalence of what is typically called the ‘Welfare State.’ This is not to suggest that a welfare state is socialistic, as it frequently is merely a placation of socialist interests, but rather an acknowledgement that there is something of a common impetus in both enterprises if judged generously.
Now, some people who are familiar with me might assume that I have little time for ‘socialism,’ of course granting the confusion of any two people likely having rather dissimilar notions of what that is. The gist is that they know me to be somewhat conservative in my temperament and a practicing Greek Catholic – how could such a person have any time for ‘socialism?’ To be fair to this reading of me, someone who thinks this of me would be correct in that I find much to criticize in the works of Marx and Engels, not to mention the lesser neo-Marxist thinkers who have emerged in the ensuing decades; this does not, however, mean that I find myself entirely opposed to aspects of the socialist impulse. In many ways, I take it to be predicated on a warped understanding of Christian charity, a moral position which – when not warped – I tend to espouse (and live quite imperfectly).
Nonetheless it is my (perhaps assumptive) view that many people today do in fact believe that someone who is temperamentally conservative and Christian must be utterly opposed to socialism – an effect of our rather silly ‘political spectrum’ thinking in North America. To be conservative and Christian must make someone ‘right-wing,’ but to be socialistic is to be ‘left-wing!’ I, however, think this is pure foppery, and I always enjoy returning to one of my fellow Canadians to reflect on this point: George Grant. He was a philosopher and something of a historian of ideas, but he never was nor is well known – as most Canadians tend not to be. This is, in my view, unfortunate, as he possesses a rich and unique worldview for someone who only died 1988. Grant has much in him that is a revival and love of the past, a deeply conservative man, and yet he often supported what would be otherwise called ‘socialism.’ I think understanding how Grant thought about this to be enlightening and worth reflecting on to try jarring us contemporary folk out of our rather lazy political thinking.
To radically oversimplify, the liberalism of modernity – arguably its most enduring ideology – pushed for the emancipation of the ‘self,’ which tended to be understood as a movement toward exercising liberated desires and performing kinds of personal experimentation in so far as this did not prevent others from also trying to do so for themselves (an awkward phrasing of J. S. Mill’s Harm Principle). This led to a focus on the individual and strengthening each person’s capacity to be as ‘free’ as possible in doing what he pleased. The evident problem with this is that it inevitably winds up leading to collisions between people and perhaps even groups or classes of people, but the entire system is predicated on the idea that everyone should be as free as possible. There needs to be, therefore, some sort of government intervention to equalize the playing field to ensure each person can exercise himself fully – a phrase that already begins to sound self-contradictory, as what does it mean to be ‘self-actualized’ through state-intervention?
Nevertheless, Grant notes that Marx’s thought, arguably the height of socialist theorizing, was an attempt to pick up on this very trend. Liberalism, when mixed with modern science’s capacity to utterly control nature and therefore (supposedly) eliminate scarcity, would usher in a new age of ‘free’ human beings; in many ways, Marx’s rhetoric of the failures of liberalism and needing to get beyond liberalism are indicative – he means get beyond by going through and past, implying that liberalism was on the right track but insufficiently developed. Intriguingly, however, Marx also recognized that this would require a massive amount of coordination among the ‘free’ men. Such coordination, however, would seemingly run contrary to the liberal notion of freedom (which I believe it fair to say that the historical record has borne out). It therefore seems impossible for a society of such cooperation and common cause to allow for self-emancipation that manifests in pursuing one’s desires and experimenting with one’s own life insofar as this never harmed others. The self-contradictory elements of liberalism merely compound in Marx.
For these reasons, Grant argued that “there is confusion in the minds of those who believe in socialism and the emancipation of the passions.” The cardinal sin that Grant points to here is greed: the freedom of liberalism has no way to combat greed insofar as it does not manifest in violence, yet this is inimical to the Marxist project. What ultimately is borne out of recognizing this contradiction is the realization that to be a socialist requires that there be a reasoned vision of the human person that admits of responsibilities and duties to which all members of the political community must adhere. In other words, socialism requires a recognition of a moral order; the individualism of liberalism must be rejected for socialism to be viable. Once this is admitted, however, it seems that one is thrust back to an earlier reality – which some may call ‘conservative’ – in which human interactions, mediated most perfectly by the family and local community, were subject to a range of restrictions. One cannot identify with his impulses and inclinations and be a socialist; a socialist must have a rational anthropology.
Through this engagement with Marxism, Grant – in my opinion – undermines the entire ‘binary’ manner of looking at North American politics. Construed simply, the binary of North American politics tends to hold that people on the ‘left’ end of the spectrum are functionally relativists when it comes to morals, but they argue for policy that will encourage economic equality that they hope will ameliorate the injustices wrought by labour exploitation and the threat that mass inequality poses to political stability. Conversely, those on the ‘right’ end of the spectrum tend to be more rigid in their moral views (typically of a religious variety), but they tend to believe that economics are not subject to the usual moral scruples – some things are “just business,” and the only parameters are effectively the outlawing of outright slavery and the consent of both parties in labour contracts. (It is fascinating to see that mere ‘consent’ seems sufficient to those on left when it comes to moral and especially sexual issues, whereas ‘consent’ is sufficient in economic transactions for those on the right; both then decry this simplistic claim in one another.)
What should evidently strike us about this description of our current political discourse is the fact that the two sides of the ‘political spectrum,’ in some sense, complete one another. In each case, ‘morality’ and ‘economics’ are distinguished and then one side of the spectrum holds that one realm is entirely subject to consent while the other should be subject to strict laws – the ‘left’ and ‘right’ merely differ on which realm should be treated in which way. We could imagine how one could easily generate two far more coherent ideologies: both ‘morals’ and ‘economics’ either should be governed by serious, regulative principles or should be entirely based on individual whim and consent. On its face, this would make far more sense – yet we see time and again that this is not what happens in the ‘center’ of the political spectrum despite that this is supposedly the point where the “extremes” meet and ‘correct’ one another. (Of course, we must recognize that there are historical contingencies that frequently cause us to be less than coherent which cannot be ignored.)
In short, this analysis from Grant suggests to me that everyone is recognizing that we both need to have certain aspects of life regularized and others to be open to question. Regardless of what aspects of life are more solid and which are less so, this suggests that we need some regulations in life to provide stability so as to ensure that we can feel secure to come into our own, but we also must be given some freedom to ultimately make the world our own by freely finding our places within it. We are trying to understand how there could be both fixed laws in our very being to which we must adhere, but that we curiously have the capacity to disobey such ordinances. The problem, however, is that we have maintained our allegiance in many ways to the liberal notion of freedom as the elimination of ‘inhibition,’ despite that both sides have recognized that not all can truly be uninhibited without creating deadly anarchy; ultimately, we must recognize that liberal freedom cannot be the grounding reality of politics – but then what is it?
Hoping for Clarity 