The Little Red Blog

Labor Day: The Issue

{The following is excerpted from a speech delivered by Eugene Debs in Girard, Kansas in 1908. Debs was running for President on the Socialist Party ticket, which he did five times, never receiving more than six percent of the vote. Interestingly, Debs' final presidential run was in 1920, while he was incarcerated in federal prison.}

“Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization. Progress is born of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation. I have taken my choice.” (Eugene V. Debs)

"The issue is Socialism versus Capitalism. I am for Socialism because I am for humanity." (Eugene V. Debs)

Eugene Debs, “The Issue”:

I am in revolt against capitalism because I love my fellow men. I am against a system in which labor is simply merchandise; in which the man who works the hardest and longest has the least to show for it. If there is a man on earth who is entitled to all the comforts and luxuries of life in abundance it is the man whose labor produces them. If he is not, who is? Does he get them in the present system?

I wish to say in the broadest possible way that I am opposing the system under which we live today because I believe it is subversive of the best interests of the people. I am not satisfied with things as they are, and I know that no matter what administration is in power, even were it a Socialist administration, there will be no material change in the condition of the people until we have a new social system based upon the mutual economic interests of the people: until you and I and all of us collectively own those things that we collectively need and use. As long as a relatively few men own the railroads, the telegraph, the telephone, the oil fields and the gas fields and the steel mills and the sugar refineries and the leather tanneries--own, in short, the sources and means of life--they will corrupt our politics, they will enslave the working class, they will impoverish and debase society, they will do all things that are needful to perpetuate their power as the economic masters and the political rulers of the people. Not until these great agencies are owned and operated by the people can the people hope for any material, improvement in their social condition. Is the condition fair today, and satisfactory to any thinking man?

Such a condition as this is indefensible in the twentieth century. Time was when everything had to be done in a very primitive way, and most men had to work all their days, all their lives, to feed and shelter themselves. They had no time, they had no opportunity for a higher development, and so they were what the world calls “illiterate.” They had little chance. It took all their time and energy to feed the animal; but how is it today? Upon the average twenty men can today, with the aid of modern machinery, produce as much wealth as a thousand did a half century ago. Can you think of a single thing that enters into our daily existence that cannot be easily produced in abundance for all? If you can I wish you would do me the kindness to name it.

Man has long since become master of the natural forces and made them work for him. Now he has but to touch a button and the wheels begin to spin and the machinery to whir, and wealth is produced on every hand in increasing abundance. Why should any man, woman, or child suffer for food, clothing, or shelter? Why? The question cannot be answered. Don’t tell me that some men are too lazy to work. Suppose they are too lazy to work, what do you think of a social system that produces men too lazy to work? If a man is too lazy to work don’t treat him with contempt. Don’t look down upon him with scorn as if you were a superior being. If there is a man too lazy to work there is something the matter with him. He wasn’t born right or he was perverted in this system. You could not, if you tried, keep a normal man inactive, and if you did he would go stark mad.

Your material interest and mine in the society of the future will be the same. Instead of having to fight each other like animals, as we do today, and seeking to glorify the brutal struggle for existence--of which every civilized human being ought to be ashamed--instead of this, our material interests are going to be mutual. We are going to jointly own these mammoth machines, and we are going to operate them as joint partners and we are going to divide the products among ourselves.

We Socialists propose that society in its collective capacity shall produce, not for profit, but in abundance to satisfy all human wants; that every man shall have the inalienable right to work and to receive the full equivalent of what he produces; that every man may stand fearlessly erect in the pride and majesty of his own manhood; that every man and every woman shall be economically free. We are not going to destroy private property. We are going to so establish private property that every worker may have all the private property necessary to house and keep him in comfort and satisfy all his physical wants. Eighty per cent of the people in the United States have little or no property of any kind today. A few have got it all. They have dispossessed the people, and when we get into power we will dispossess them. We will reduce the workday and give every man a chance. We will go to the parks and we will have music because we will have time for music and inclination to enjoy it.

When we have stopped clutching each other’s throats, when we have stopped enslaving each other, we will stand together, hands clasped, and be friends. We will be comrades, we will be brothers, and we will begin the march to the grandest civilization the human race has ever known.

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Eugene V. Debs - Wikipedia

Eugene Debs is of the three most prominent figures to come from Terre Haute, Indiana, along with novelist Theodore Dreiser and NBA legend Larry Bird (who was technically from French Lick, Indiana but who starred in college at Indiana State University in Terre Haute).

The Socialism of Everyday Life

{Sergei Bulgakov (1871-1944) was a Russian theologian, philosopher, and Orthodox Christian priest who lived in Russia during the years of the Bolshevik Revolution. I have no reason to think that Bulgakov was familiar with Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” from which I posted a brief excerpt yesterday, but I present the following passages from Bulgakov as a counterpoint to Wilde. Wilde’s essay depicted a dream of life under socialism; Bulgakov wrote about the reality of socialism (well, Bolshevism) he had experienced. It is worth noting that Bulgakov agreed with the ethics of socialism; what he contested was socialism’s materialistic worldview and the lack of grounding it provided for those ethics.}

Sergei Bulgakov, from “The Soul of Socialism” (1929):

The life of the nations at the present time is lived under the sign of socialism. Its red star stands in the skies of history like a threatening portent, a sign of judgment or prophecy—but in any case an unavoidable historical reality. There is no escaping it; it is a sort of fate decreed for the next generation, if not for ourselves. It confronts us like the riddle of the Sphinx, ready to devour anyone who does not give it an answer.

Considered as an ethical issue, socialism does not present any problem at all; rather, it is a natural postulate, so to speak, of Christianity’s social ethic. Labor must be protected from illicit exploitation, and justice demands that it be rewarded with the fruits of its work, and that these should not be sacrificed to the power of capital. But insofar as socialism is also a spiritual outlook, we cannot evaluate it on merely ethical grounds. Socialism is not only a socio-economic movement; it is also a world-view, a sense and style of life in which different aspects of human nature find expression. Socialism possesses not only an historical ‘body’ but also a ‘soul’ or spirit; in this sense it can have the significance of a pseudo-religion for its adherents—a world-view with total claims, practical as well as theoretical.

The ’body’ of socialism is there for all to see, in the social problems of our day—industrialism, the tyranny of the banks, class hostility, crises in industry and finance, unemployment, the emergence of socialist political parties, communism and the dictatorship of the proletariat—all those subterranean shocks and tremors that constantly threaten the stability of the old world and have already partly destroyed it. The ‘body’ of socialism is like Proteus; it has many forms, always changing. While yesterday it led an illegal, underground existence, today it has become a powerful and sometimes even a dominant reality. It is now generally true that the human race is dressing itself in more or less socialist garments and is turning into a socialist anthill; its spread seems to be unstoppable. Anyone now coming into the world finds him- or herself in a period in which socialism is continually widening its frontiers. Understood simply as a question about poverty and wealth, socialism has always been present in human history. But now it has become a fact of our inner as well as our outer life, for socialism has a ‘soul’ of its own—a soul that is wholly pagan—and a ‘spirit’ which has so far been decidedly hostile to religion.

The ‘soul’ of socialism is defined by its anthropology, its doctrine of human nature; its two fundamentals are sociologism and economism. Sociologism begins from the collective character of human existence, expressed today in groups and classes, the mythical abstractions of sociology. The telescope and microscope of modern social thought, dictated by statistics and the social sciences in general, bring before everyone’s eyes the reality and autonomy of the social corpus, although they have yet to recognize any comparable reality in personal existence; on the contrary, this is swallowed up in the totality of society and even denied in the name of society. In this way, belief in human personhood comes to be lost. Sociologism is a distinctive social atheism, and the first article of its creed proclaims that there is no such thing as personal being; from which it follows that there is no soul and no God, but only, ultimately, the social Leviathan. The devastation that sociologism’s negation of personality causes in souls is not hard to assess.

The second fundamental of socialism, economism, is the general recognition of the dependence of human personhood upon nature—a dependence that is both realized in and overcome by labor—but also, in and with these, the whole of human culture. Our age is entirely saturated with the development of economic knowledge with its particular, conventional, one-sided, and stylized account of human life, the economic trend in historical science, in the press, in society at large. The world as ‘economy’ and man as ‘homo economicus’—that is the basic vision of socialist anthropology. Social Darwinism is complemented by a crassly materialist perception (or rather misperception) of the economic process. There is no recognition in socialism that economy is not only the slavery of man under the yoke of elemental nature but is also a continuing revelation of the human spirit, the triumphant revealing of humanity itself. Man’s economic life is not characterized only by self-interest but also by the creative and artistic calling of human beings, the service of an ideal, and—like all human enterprises—by the struggle to grow beyond the self. The struggle against materialism must restore spiritual significance to the economic process and to the elements of economic life.

By now, the traditional organic style of living has been completely destroyed; on its ruins has risen an artificial and rationalized form of life, grounded in technical and economic teleology, and marked by industrialization, urbanization, and in general the collectivization of human life on the basis of the ‘general good’. This can be designated as the socialism of everyday life, independently of its economic form; in this sense the supremely rationalized society of capitalism is no less socialistic than the coercive regime of communism. Humanity is running out of breath and losing its strength in the hopeless conflict of the egocentricity of individualism and the sadism of communism, between the soullessness of Statism and the snarlings of racism. In its search for meaning, society is exhausting its powers. It is only on the spiritual level that our crises can be averted.

"Everyone will live..."

{Oscar Wilde was one of the more notorious members of the 19^th-century British intelligentsia. His essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” was written in 1891; it espoused a kind of libertarian socialist viewpoint, one which Wilde adopted after reading the works of Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin. In the essay, Wilde criticizes charity on the grounds that, by alleviating the suffering caused by capitalism, it helped perpetuate the capitalist system. Coincidentally, the same year Wilde’s essay appeared in Britain, a famine was devastating Russia. While Leo Tolstoy and other Russian luminaries sought international help for the starving peasantry, the young and then-obscure Vladimir Lenin took a position not unlike Wilde’s: since minimizing the consequences of the famine would help prop up the tsarist regime, Lenin insisted it was better to let those consequences play out (i.e., mass starvation) in hopes of bringing about a revolution. Had anyone taken note of Lenin’s position, it might have provided a cautionary hint of his disregard for human life.}   

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Oscar Wilde, from “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”:

Many of the socialistic views that I have come across seem to me to be tainted with ideas of authority, if not of actual compulsion. Of course, authority and compulsion are out of the question. All association must be quite voluntary. It is only in voluntary associations that man is fine. If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first.

The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism – are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence; it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease. They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life – educated men who live in the East End – coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins.

Under Socialism there will be no people living in fetid dens and fetid rags, and bringing up unhealthy, hunger-pinched children in the midst of impossible and absolutely repulsive surroundings. The security of society will not depend, as it does now, on the state of the weather. If a frost comes we shall not have a hundred thousand men out of work, tramping about the streets in a state of disgusting misery, or whining to their neighbours for alms, or crowding round the doors of loathsome shelters to try and secure a hunch of bread and a night’s unclean lodging. Each member of the society will share in the general prosperity and happiness of the society, and if a frost comes no one will practically be anything the worse.

Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and insure the material well-being of each member of the community. It will, in fact, give Life its proper basis and its proper environment. But for the full development of Life to its highest mode of perfection, something more is needed. What is needed is Individualism.

At present, in consequence of the existence of private property, a great many people are enabled to develop a certain very limited amount of Individualism. They are either under no necessity to work for their living, or are enabled to choose the sphere of activity that is really congenial to them, and gives them pleasure. These are the poets, the philosophers, the men of science, the men of culture – in a word, the real men, the men who have realised themselves, and in whom all Humanity gains a partial realisation. Upon the other hand, there are a great many people who, having no private property of their own, and being always on the brink of sheer starvation, are compelled to do the work of beasts of burden, to do work that is quite uncongenial to them, and to which they are forced by the peremptory, unreasonable, degrading Tyranny of want. These are the poor, and amongst them there is no grace of manner, or charm of speech, or civilisation, or culture, or refinement in pleasures, or joy of life. From their collective force Humanity gains much in material prosperity. But it is only the material result that it gains, and the man who is poor is in himself absolutely of no importance. He is merely the infinitesimal atom of a force that, so far from regarding him, crushes him: indeed, prefers him crushed, as in that case he is far more obedient.

Private property has crushed true Individualism and set up an Individualism that is false. It has debarred one part of the community from being individual by starving them. It has debarred the other part of the community from being individual by putting them on the wrong road and encumbering them. Indeed, so completely has man’s personality been absorbed by his possessions that the English law has always treated offences against a man’s property with far more severity than offences against his person, and property is still the test of complete citizenship. The industry necessary for the making money is also very demoralising. In a community like ours, where property confers immense distinction, social position, honour, respect, titles, and other pleasant things of the kind, man, being naturally ambitious, makes it his aim to accumulate this property, and goes on wearily and tediously accumulating it long after he has got far more than he wants, or can use, or enjoy, or perhaps even know of. Man will kill himself by overwork in order to secure property, and really, considering the enormous advantages that property brings, one is hardly surprised. One’s regret is that society should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful in him – in which, in fact, he misses the true pleasure and joy of living. He is also, under existing conditions, very insecure. An enormously wealthy merchant may be – often is – at every moment of his life at the mercy of things that are not under his control. If the wind blows an extra point or so, or the weather suddenly changes, or some trivial thing happens, his ship may go down, his speculations may go wrong, and he finds himself a poor man, with his social position quite gone. Now, nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. Nothing should be able to rob a man at all. What a man really has, is what is in him. What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. With the abolition of private property, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. Everyone will live.

Oscar Wilde. The Soul of Man under Socialism (marxists.org)

"To an ice floe--go!"

{The title of this post borrows from Whittaker Chambers' 1957 review of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, in which Chambers wrote: "From almost any page of the book, a voice can be heard, commanding: 'To a gas chamber--go!'"} 

American conservatives are surpassingly fond of the late Austrian economist F.A. Hayek, whose 1944 book The Road to Serfdom became a surprise best-seller and quickly attained the status of a right-wing classic. A copy of Hayek’s masterpiece can be found, usually unread, on the bookshelf of every genuine conservative, next to Democracy in America and the Federalist Papers (also unread). ¹

Hayek, however, was too interesting a thinker to be reduced to an intellectual icon. For one thing, as my recent post “Losing Our Nonfactual Beliefs” indicated, he was an agnostic, which put him at odds with the religious elements of the modern conservative movement. His agnosticism prevented him from believing in “God-given” rights; in fact, he rejected the idea that people have any “natural” rights at all. Rights, according to Hayek, arise (or evolve) out of social interactions and are part of the rules which humans design for those interactions. The only rights anyone has are those that a given society, through its laws and customs, recognizes and is willing to enforce.

That said, Hayek offered plenty of red meat for his conservative followers. His final book, The Fatal Conceit, was a direct attack on socialism and on its view of human nature, which he traced back to the baleful influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

In any society, conflict between an individual's emotions and what is expected of him in an extended order is virtually inevitable: innate responses tend to break through the network of learnt rules that maintain civilization. It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who first provided literary and intellectual credentials for reactions that cultivated people once dismissed as simply uncouth. Regarding the natural (read `instinctual') as good or desirable is, in his work, an expression of nostalgia for the simple, the primitive, or even the barbarian, based on the conviction that one ought to satisfy his or her desires, rather than to obey shackles allegedly invented and imposed by selfish interests. In a milder form, disappointment at the failure of our traditional morality to produce greater pleasure has recently found expression in the nostalgic idea that “small is beautiful” or in complaints about the “joyless economy,” as well as in much of the literature of “alienation”.

The invocation of “traditional morality” always meets with approval from those on the Right, as does the dismissal of “alienation” as a symptom of selfishness.

On the other hand, The Fatal Conceit contains passages that may take conservatives aback. This next passage, for example, would not pass muster with either the Family Research Council or the Idaho Republican Party:

Mere existence cannot confer a right or moral claim on anyone against any other. Persons or groups may incur duties to particular individuals; but as part of the system of common rules that assist humankind to grow and multiply, not even all existing lives have a moral claim to preservation. A practice that seems so harsh to us—e.g., wherein some Eskimo tribes leave senile members to die at the beginning of their seasonal migration—may well be necessary for them to bring their offspring to the next season. And it is at least an open question whether it is a moral duty to prolong the lives of suffering incurables as long as modern medicine can.

Death panels? Did Friedrich Hayek advocate death panels? Was he in favor of rationing end-of-life healthcare? Worse, was he some sort of moral relativist who, confronted with barbaric tribal customs, simply shrugged and asked, “Who are we to judge?”

Unlike contemporary conservatives, Hayek did not fetishize human life; instead, he subjected it to a rigorous cost/benefit analysis. He believed that those who do not contribute in some measure to society are nothing but “parasites” who have neither any rights in society nor any entitlement to its benefits. ¹ In Hayek’s somewhat Dickensian view (“Are there no workhouses?”), such useless eaters can either get with the program, fend for themselves, or die and reduce the surplus population:

Such questions arise even before we ask to whom such claims can be validly addressed. Rights derive from systems of relations of which the claimant has become a part through helping to maintain them. If he ceases to do so or has never done so (or nobody has done so for him) there exists no ground on which such claims could be founded.

Relations between individuals can exist only as products of their wills, but the mere wish of a claimant can hardly create a duty for others. Only expectations produced by long practice can create duties for the members of the community in which they prevail, which is one reason why prudence must be exercised in the creation of expectations, lest one incur a duty that one cannot fulfill.  

According to Hayek, the bestowing of rights and benefits on persons who do little more than take up space and who do nothing to justify their existence or to earn their place in this crowded world is the fundamental error of socialism:

Socialism has taught many people that they possess claims irrespective of performance, irrespective of participation. In the light of the morals that produced the extended order of civilization, socialists in fact incite people to break the law. Those who claim to have been `alienated' from what most of them apparently never learnt, and who prefer to live as parasitic dropouts, draining the products of a process to which they refuse to contribute, are true followers of Rousseau's appeal for a return to nature, representing as the chief evil those institutions that made possible the formation of an order of human coordination.

Hayek insisted that those who do not or will not play society’s game(s) should not look to society for succor:

I do not question any individual's right voluntarily to withdraw from civilization. But what `entitlements' do such persons have? Are we to subsidize their hermitages? There cannot be any entitlement to be exempted from the rules on which civilization rests. We may be able to assist the weak and disabled, the very young and old, but only if the sane and adult submit to the impersonal discipline which gives us means to do so. ³

In his summation, Professor Hayek chastised his fellow academics for indoctrinating their students with the ill-conceived theories of the past:

It would be quite wrong to regard such errors as originating with the young. They reflect what they are taught, the pronouncements of their parents - and of departments of psychology and sociology of education and the characteristic intellectuals whom they produce - pale reproductions of Rousseau and Marx, Freud and Keynes, transmitted through intellects whose desires have outrun their understanding.

I have, you may surmise, some serious disagreements with Hayek, but to give him his due, I cannot think of a better statement of the human dilemma: "our desires outrun our understanding". To know that may be the beginning of wisdom.

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¹ I say this from personal experience, having once, long ago, joined the Conservative Book Club and having received those volumes among my initial choices. I believe I also received James Burnham’s The Suicide of the West and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. It was, as I say, long ago, and I was young.

² Of course, one first must define “contribution to society”. You could argue that the chronically unemployed, those on the dole, and the incarcerated all contribute, if only in a perverse way: they serve as cautionary examples, as role models in reverse, and as living proof of the wages of sin. Parasites and losers give the Solid Citizens of the world someone to look down on, someone to whom they can feel superior, and someone to point to as scapegoats for society’s imperfections.  

³ Caution: to acknowledge society’s responsibility to “assist the weak” is to create a loophole big enough for Leviathan itself to slip through and a slope so slippery not even Nancy Kerrigan at her best could maintain her balance.

International Women's Day 2021

#ChooseToChallenge #IWD2021

A challenged world is an alert world and from challenge comes change.

So let's all choose to challenge.

How will you help forge a gender equal world?

Celebrate women's achievement.

Raise awareness against bias.

Take action for equality.

International Women's Day 2021

Bread and Peace

On March 8, 1917, on the Gregorian calendar, in Petrograd, the capital of the Russian Empire, women textile workers began a demonstration, covering the whole city. This marked the beginning of the February Revolution, which alongside the October Revolution made up the Russian Revolution. Women in Saint Petersburg went on strike that day for "Bread and Peace"– demanding the end of World War I, an end to Russian food shortages, and the end of czarism. Revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky wrote, "23 February (8th March) was International Woman's Day, and meetings and actions were foreseen. But we did not imagine that this 'Women's Day' would inaugurate the revolution. Revolutionary actions were foreseen but without a date. But in the morning, despite the orders to the contrary, textile workers left their work in several factories and sent delegates to ask for the support of the strike… which led to mass strike... all went out into the streets." Seven days later, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, and the provisional Government granted women the right to vote.

International Women's Day - Wikipedia

Born in the USA

For an event championed by international nongovernmental organizations and major global corporations, it may surprise some that International Women’s Day was born out of the U.S. socialist movement in the early 20th century.

In 1909 the Socialist Party of America organized a New York City march commemorating a garment workers’ strike the previous year. The party called it National Women’s Day, and women organized by the group demonstrated for better pay and working conditions as well as the right to vote, according to the International Women’s Day website.

The Socialist Party continued to hold Women’s Day celebrations on the last Sunday of February for the next few years, and newspapers from the era mentioned International Women’s Day on Feb. 27, 1910 — when thousands of women organized by the socialist movement gathered at Carnegie Hall, according to World March of Women, an international grass-roots campaign.

European women, meanwhile, were championing similar ideals. At the second annual meeting of the International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen in 1910, Clara Zetkin, a prominent Marxist activist from Germany’s Social Democratic Party, proposed the idea of holding an international day for women. She thought that women should press for their demands for equality and suffrage on a single day of celebration. The conference agreed.

IWD, consequently, was celebrated for the first time in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland on March 19, 1911. Women in these countries demanded the right to vote, to hold public office and the right to work, according to the United Nations.

Russian women began celebrating IWD in 1913, after which the day was officially changed to March 8, and more European women began rallying against World War I on the IWD celebrations that followed.

Socialist History of International Women's Day | Al Jazeera America

Saturday Lecture: How We Might Live

"You may say I'm a dreamer / but I'm not the only one..." (John Lennon, "Imagine")

William Morris, from "How We Live and How We Might Live":

When men are organized so that their labor is not wasted, they will be relieved from the fear of starvation and the desire of domination; they will have freedom and leisure to look round and see what they really do need.

Now something of that I can conceive for my own self, and I will lay my ideas before you, so that you may compare them with your own, asking you always to remember that the very differences in men's capacities and desires, after the common need of food and shelter is satisfied, will make it easier to deal with their desires in a communal state of things.

What is it that I need, therefore, which my surrounding circumstances can give me—my dealings with my fellow-men—setting aside inevitable accidents which cooperation and forethought cannot control, if there be such?

First of all, I claim good health; and I say that a vast proportion of people in civilization scarcely even know what that means. To feel mere life a pleasure; to enjoy the moving one's limbs and exercising one's bodily powers; to play, as it were, with sun and wind and rain; to rejoice in satisfying the due bodily appetites of a human animal without fear of degradation or sense of wrongdoing; yes, and therewithal to be well-formed, straight-limbed, strongly knit, expressive of countenance—to be, in a word, beautiful—that also I claim. If we cannot have this claim satisfied, we are but poor creatures after all; and I claim it in the teeth of those terrible doctrines of asceticism, which, born of the despair of the oppressed and degraded, have been for so many ages used as instruments for the continuance of that oppression and degradation.

And I believe that this claim for a healthy body for all of us carries with it all other due claims: for who knows where the seeds of disease which even rich people suffer from were first sown: from the luxury of an ancestor, perhaps: yet often, I suspect, from his poverty. And for the poor: a distinguished physicist has said that the poor suffer always from one disease—hunger; and at least I know this, that if a man is overworked in any degree he cannot enjoy the sort of health I am speaking of; nor can he if he is continually chained to one dull round of mechanical work, with no hope at the other end of it; nor if he lives in continual sordid anxiety for his livelihood, nor if he is ill housed, nor if he is deprived of all enjoyment of the natural beauty of the world, nor if he has no amusement to quicken the flow of his spirits from time to time: all these things, which touch more or less directly on his bodily condition, are born of the claim I make to live in good health.

Now the next thing I claim is liberal education; opportunity, that is, to have my share of whatever knowledge there is in the world according to my capacity or bent of mind, historical or scientific; and also to have my share of skill of hand which is about in the world, either in the industrial handicrafts or in the fine arts; picture-painting, sculpture, music, acting, or the like: I claim to be taught, if I can be taught, more than one craft to exercise for the benefit of the community. You may think this a large claim, but it is not too large a claim if the community is to have any gain out of my special capacities, if we are not all to be beaten down to a dull level of mediocrity as we are now, all but the very strongest and toughest of us.

This claim for education involves one for public advantages in the shape of public libraries, schools, and the like, such as no private person, not even the richest, could command: but these I claim very confidently, being sure that no reasonable community could bear to be without such help to a decent life.

The claim for education involves a claim for abundant leisure, which once more I make with confidence; because when once we have shaken off the slavery of profit, labor would be organized so un-wastefully that no heavy burden would be laid on the individual citizens; every one of whom as a matter of course would have to pay his toll of some obviously useful work. At present you must note that all the amazing machinery which we have invented has served only to increase the amount of profit pouched by individuals for their own advantage, part of which profit they use as capital for the production of more profit and part as private riches or means for luxurious living, a kind of bonfire in which rich men burn up the product of the labor they have fleeced from the workers beyond what they themselves can use. In spite of our inventions, no worker works under the present system an hour the less on account of those labor-saving machines, so called.

And I may say that as to that leisure, as I should in no case do any harm to any one with it, so I should often do some direct good to the community with it, by practicing arts or occupations for my hands or brain which would give pleasure to many of the citizens; in other words, a great deal of the best work done would be done in the leisure time of men relieved from any anxiety as to their livelihood, and eager to exercise their special talents, as all men, nay, all animals are.

Now, again this leisure would enable me to please myself and expand my mind by travelling if I had a mind to it; because, say, for instance, that I were a shoemaker; if due social order were established, it by no means follows that I should always be obliged to make shoes in one place; a due amount of easily conceivable arrangement would enable me to make shoes in Rome, say, for three months, and to come back with new ideas of building, gathered from the sight of the works of past ages, amongst other things which would perhaps be of service in London.

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Nothing to my mind is more important than this: if I am a member of a community I must do my due share of work—my due share of what my capacity enables me to do, that is; no fitting of me to a Procrustean bed; but even that share of work necessary to the existence of the simplest social life must be reasonable work; that is, it must be such work as a good citizen can see the necessity for; as a member of the community, I must have agreed to do it. I will not, that is, submit to be dressed up in red and marched off to shoot at my French or German or Arab friend in a quarrel that I don't understand; I will rebel sooner than do that. Nor will I submit to waste my time and energies in making some trifling toy which I know only a fool can desire; I will rebel sooner than do that.

Again, if the necessary reasonable work be of a mechanical kind, I must be helped to do it by a machine, not to cheapen my labor, but so that as little time as possible may be spent upon it, and that I may be able to think of other things while I am tending the machine. And if the work be especially rough or exhausting, I must take turns in doing it with other people; I mustn't, for instance, be expected to spend my working hours always at the bottom of a coal-pit. I think such work as that ought to be largely volunteer work, and done, as I say, in spells. And what I say of very rough work I say also of nasty work. On the other hand, I should think very little of the manhood of a stout and healthy man who did not feel a pleasure in doing rough work; always supposing him to work under the conditions I have been speaking of—namely, feeling that it was useful (and consequently honored), and that it was not continuous or hopeless, and that he was really doing it of his own free will.

The last claim I make for my work is that the places I worked in, factories or workshops, should be pleasant, just as the fields where our most necessary work is done are pleasant. There is nothing in the world to prevent this being done, save the necessity of making profits on all wares; in other words, the wares are cheapened at the expense of people being forced to work in crowded, unwholesome, squalid, noisy dens: that is to say, they are cheapened at the expense of the workman's life.

I believe people would find, as they advanced in their capacity for carrying on social order, that life so lived was much less expensive than we now can have any idea of, and that, after a little, people would rather be anxious to seek work than to avoid it. Then would come the time for the new birth of art, so much talked of, so long deferred; people could not help showing their mirth and pleasure in their work and would be always wishing to express it in a tangible and enduring form, and the workshop would once more be a school of art.

That word ‘art’ leads me to my last claim, which is that the material surroundings of my life should be pleasant, generous, and beautiful; that I know is a large claim, but I do not think it possible under the present circumstances to speak too strongly on this point. I feel sure that the time will come when people will find it difficult to believe that a rich community such as ours, having such command over external Nature, could have submitted to live such a mean, shabby, dirty life as we do. There is nothing in our circumstances save the hunting of profit that drives us into such degradation. It is profit which draws men into enormous unmanageable aggregations called towns, for instance; profit which crowds them up into quarters without gardens or open spaces; profit which won't take the most ordinary precautions against wrapping a whole district in a cloud of sulphurous smoke; which turns beautiful rivers into filthy sewers, which condemns all but the rich to live in houses idiotically cramped and confined at the best, and at the worst in houses for whose wretchedness there is no name.

It is almost incredible that we should bear such crass stupidity as this. We shall not bear it once the workers get out of their heads the illusion that they are but an appendage to profit-grinding, that the more profits that are made the more employment at high wages there will be for them, and that therefore all the incredible filth, disorder, and degradation of modern civilization are signs of their prosperity. When they shed those illusions, they will claim as a matter of course that every man and every family should be generously lodged; that every child should be able to play in a garden close to the place his parents live in; that the houses should by their obvious decency and order be ornaments to Nature, not disfigurements of it; for the decency and order above mentioned when carried to the due pitch would most assuredly lead to beauty in building.

All this, of course, would mean the people—that is, all society—duly organized, having in its own hands the means of production, to be owned by no individual, but used by all as occasion called for its use; otherwise, people will accumulate private wealth for themselves and thus waste the goods of the community and perpetuate the division into classes, which means continual war and waste.

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I will now let my claims for decent life stand as I have made them. To sum them up in brief, they are: First, a healthy body; second, an active mind in sympathy with the past, the present, and the future; thirdly, occupation fit for a healthy body and an active mind; and fourthly, a beautiful world to live in.

These are the conditions of life which the refined man of all ages has set before him as the thing above all others to be attained. Too often he has been so foiled in their pursuit that he has turned longing eyes backward to the days before civilization, when man's sole business was getting himself food from day to day, and hope was dormant in him, or at least could not be expressed by him.

Indeed, if civilization (as many think) forbids the hope to attain such conditions of life, then civilization forbids mankind to be happy; and if that be the case, then let us stifle all aspirations towards progress—nay, all feelings of mutual good-will and affection between men—and snatch each one of us what we can from the heap of wealth that fools create for rogues to grow fat on or better still, let us as speedily as possible find some means of dying like men, since we are forbidden to live like men.

Rather, however, take courage, and believe that we of this age, in spite of all its torment and disorder, have been born to a wonderful heritage fashioned of the work of those that have gone before us; and that the day of the organization of man is dawning. It is not we who can build up the new social order; the past ages have done the most of that work for us; but we can clear our eyes to the signs of the times, and we shall then see that the attainment of a good condition of life is being made possible for us, and that it is now our business to stretch out our hands, to take it.

And how? Chiefly, I think, by educating people to a sense of their capacities as men, so that they may be able to use to their own good the political power which is rapidly being thrust upon them; to get them to see that the old system of organizing labor for individual profit is becoming unmanageable, and that the whole people have now got to choose between the confusion resulting from the break-up of that system and the determination to rake in hand the labor now organized for profit and use its organization for the livelihood of the community: to get people to see that individual profit-makers are not a necessity for labor but an obstruction to it, and that not only or chiefly because they are the perpetual pensioners of labor, as they are, but rather because of the waste which their existence as a class necessitates.

All this we have to teach people, when we have taught ourselves; and I admit that the work is long and burdensome; people have been made so timorous of change by the terror of starvation that even the unluckiest of them are stolid and hard to move. Hard as the work is, however, its reward is not doubtful. The mere fact that a body of men, however small, are banded together as Socialist missionaries shows that the change is going on. As the working classes, the real organic part of society, take in these ideas, hope will arise in them, and they will claim changes in society, many of which doubtless will not tend directly towards their emancipation, because they will be claimed without due knowledge of the one thing necessary to claim, equality of condition; but which indirectly will help to break up our rotten sham society, while that claim for equality of condition will be made constantly and with growing loudness till it must be listened to, and then at last it will only be a step over the border, and the civilized world will be socialized; and, looking back on what has been, we shall be astonished to think of how long we submitted to live as we live now.

William Morris - How We Live and How We Might Live (marxists.org)

[Per Wikipedia: "William Morris (1834—1896) was a British textile designer, poet, novelist, translator, and socialist activist associated with the British Arts and Crafts movement. He was a major contributor to the revival of traditional British textile arts and methods of production. His literary contributions helped to establish the modern fantasy genre, while he helped win acceptance of socialism in Great Britain."]

“How We Live and How We Might Live” was a lecture delivered to the Hammersmith Branch of the Socialist Democratic Federation (S.D.F.) at Kelmscott House, on November 30th, 1884. It was first printed in Commonweal, 1887. I have edited it for length.

Labor Day

A Modest Proposal: What this country needs is a strong labor movement and a nationwide general strike.

"The issue is Socialism versus Capitalism. I am for Socialism because I am for humanity. We have been cursed with the reign of gold long enough. Money constitutes no proper basis of civilisation. The time has come to regenerate society—we are on the eve of a universal change." --Eugene V. Debs

Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.

Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.

We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever-growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.

These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.

https://archive.iww.org/culture/official/preamble/

The General Strike (speech by Bill Haywood, 1911)

How anyone can take the position that a general strike would not be effective and not be a good thing for the working class is more than I can understand. We know that the capitalist uses the general strike to good advantage. Here is the position that we find the working class and the capitalists in. The capitalists have wealth; they have money. They invest the money in machinery, in the resources of the earth. They operate a factory, a mine, a railroad, a mill. They will keep that factory running just as long as there are profits coming in. When anything happens to disturb the profits, what do the capitalists do? They go on strike, don't they? They withdraw their finances from that particular mill. They close it down because there are no profits to be made there. They don't care what becomes of the working class. But the working class, on the other hand, has always been taught to take care of the capitalist's interest in the property. You don't look after your own interest, your labor power, realizing that without a certain amount of provision you can't reproduce it. You are always looking after the interest of the capitalist, while a general strike would displace his interest and would put you in possession of it.

The justification for political action is to control the forces of the capitalists that they use against us; to be in a position to control the power of government so as to make the work of the army ineffective, so as to abolish totally the secret service and the force of detectives. That is the reason that you want the power of government. That is the reason that you should fully understand the power of the ballot. Now, there isn't anyone, Socialist, S. L. P., Industrial Worker or any other workingman or woman, no matter what society you belong to, but what believes in the ballot. I know, or think I know, the power of it, and I know that the industrial organization, as I stated in the beginning, is its broadest interpretation. I know, too, that when the workers are brought together in a great organization they are not going to cease to vote. That is when the workers will begin to vote, to vote for directors to operate the industries in which they are all employed.

So the general strike is a fighting weapon as well as a constructive force. It can be used, and should be used, equally as forcefully by the Socialist as by the Industrial Worker.

The Socialists believe in the general strike. They also believe in the organization of industrial forces after the general strike is successful. So, on this great force of the working class I believe we can agree that we should unite into one great organization--big enough to take in the children that are now working; big enough to take in the black man; the white man; big enough to take in all nationalities--an organization that will be strong enough to obliterate state boundaries, to obliterate national boundaries, and one that will become the great industrial force of the working class of the world.

https://archive.iww.org/history/library/Haywood/GeneralStrike/

                                                                                              
 

The Urtext

Preface: Michael Minnicino’s seminal essay, “The New Dark Age,” first appeared in the Winter 1992 issue of Fidelio, from the Schiller Institute, a German-based organization founded by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the wife (now widow) of Lyndon LaRouche. The essay is widely considered the Urtext for opponents of “cultural Marxism”. *

In 2010, certain public events led Minnicino to address his former involvement in the LaRouche organization (cult?). In doing so, he disavowed, sort of, his essay on the Frankfurt School:

Actual free inquiry is impossible inside the LaRouche organization: too many possible conclusions or lines of research must be consciously or unconsciously dismissed because of LaRouche's prior "thoughts" on the matter. The same is true with my Frankfurt School work while I was in the organization. I still like to think that some of my research was validly conducted and useful. However, I see very clearly that the whole enterprise - and especially the conclusions -- was hopelessly deformed by self-censorship and the desire to in some way support Mr. LaRouche's crack-brained worldview. So, in that sense, I do not stand by what I wrote, and I find it unfortunate that it is still remembered.

With that mea culpa in mind, let us briefly consider Minnicino’s 1992 essay, “The New Dark Age”.

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“Who will save us from Western civilization?” (Georg Lukacs)

Everything you need to know about Michael Minnicino’s "expose" of Cultural Marxism you can glean from the following excerpts:

The Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was a religious celebration of the human soul and mankind’s potential for growth. But the concept of the human soul has been undermined by the most vociferous intellectual campaign in history…

The cultural shift away from the Renaissance ideas that built the modern world began as a formal political conspiracy ¹ to popularize theories that were specifically designed to weaken the soul of Judeo-Christian civilization in such a way as to make people believe that creativity was not possible, that adherence to universal truth was evidence of authoritarianism, and that reason itself was suspect. This conspiracy was decisive in planning and developing, as means of social manipulation, the vast new sister industries of radio, television, film, recorded music, advertising, and public opinion polling. The pervasive psychological hold of the media was purposely fostered to create the passivity and pessimism which afflicts our population today.

So successful was this conspiracy, that it has become embedded in our culture; it no longer needs to be a “conspiracy,” for it has taken on a life of its own. Its successes are not debatable—you need only turn on the radio or television.

Our universities, the cradle of our technological and intellectual future, have become overwhelmed by Comintern-style New Age “Political Correctness”. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, our campuses now represent the largest concentration of Marxist dogma in the world. The irrational adolescent outbursts of the 1960’s have become institutionalized into a “permanent revolution”. Our professors glance over their shoulders, hoping the current mode will blow over before a student’s denunciation obliterates a life’s work; some tape their lectures, fearing accusations of “insensitivity” by some enraged Red Guard. Students at the University of Virginia recently petitioned successfully to drop the requirement to read Homer, Chaucer, and other DEMS (“Dead European Males”) because such writings are considered ethnocentric, phallocentric, and generally inferior to the more “relevant” Third World, female, or homosexual authors.

In Minnicino's telling, the Cultural Marxism conspiracy originated in Frankfurt in the 1920s at the Institute for Social Research (ISR), the brainchild of Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs. The ISR was intended to fill an analytical gap created by Marx’s materialism, which held that the life of the mind and of the human spirit—ideas and creativity—were merely byproducts of economic forces and therefore irrelevant to the Marxist program. Marxists like Lukacs wanted to apply a Marxist critique directly to culture; Lukacs spoke openly of the need to harness “diabolic” and “demonic” energies to create the kind of religious zeal that characterized early Christianity.

Michael Minnicino reduced all this to a caricature:

The task of the Frankfurt School was first, to undermine the Judeo-Christian legacy through an “abolition of culture”; and, second, to determine new cultural forms which would increase the alienation of the population, thus creating a “new barbarism”.

The Frankfurt School brought together, Minnicino alleged, a diabolical mix of “Communists, non-party socialists, radical phenomenologists, Zionists, renegade Freudians, and at least a few members of a self-identified ‘cult of Astarte’.” Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the group quickly ran afoul of Stalin, who terminated Soviet support for the ISR in the late 1920s and forced Lukacs to confess his deviationist sins. ³

With Lukacs back in the Stalinist fold, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse emerged as the prominent figures of the Frankfurt School; they each fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and emigrated to America, where they continued their work. The philosophers Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin are also associated with the Frankfurt School, though their actual involvement was peripheral at best. ⁴ 

Marcuse, who worked for the US government in the 1950s as a “Soviet analyst,” gained his fifteen minutes of fame in the 1960s when he became a guru to America’s “New Left,” largely on the basis of his book Eros and Civilization. Adorno and Benjamin, on the other hand, were pivotal, or so Minnicino claimed, in “the shaping of the electronic media of radio and television into the powerful instruments of social control they are today.”

In “The New Dark Age,” Minnicino contended that Benjamin and Adorno sought to challenge the objective validity of all aesthetic, epistemological, and moral judgments; they conspired to separate the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, the better to deconstruct and “desacralize” them all. They observed that, while the miracles of modern media could make great art, literature, and music available to millions, the processes of mass reproduction and mass distribution would inevitably trivialize the resulting cultural “product,” making it just another commodity: consumers could choose from postcards bearing photos of the Mona Lisa or of Mickey Mouse, both for the same price.

All that, of course, is simply what capitalism does; it needed no help from a conspiracy of German emigres. Understanding the pernicious potential of mass media, however, enabled the cultural Marxists to use it to “demoralize” and further alienate the masses and to “disengage” the popular mind. Minnicino quoted Theodor Adorno (writing in 1938) on the effects of mass media on the general populace:

“Subjects develop certain capacities which accord less with the traditional concepts of aesthetics than with those of football or motoring. They are not childlike, but they are childish; their primitivism is not that of the undeveloped but that of the forcibly retarded.”

In other words: mass media makes idiots of us all, which makes it the ideal weapon for undermining Western civilization.

Contrary to Minnicino, however, Adorno and his colleagues did not promote commercial mass media; they denounced it and its debilitating effects, and they sought to unmask the corporate interests and political agendas behind it. While much of the Sixties’ counterculture was succumbing to the lure of “tune in, turn on, and drop out,” Adorno and Marcuse were working to keep young people politically engaged rather than distracted, misinformed, tranquilized, and alienated by corporate media.

With “The New Dark Age,” its inaccuracies notwithstanding, Michael Minnicino was said to have identified the forces stalking the academy: for cultural conservatives, “Frankfurt School” and “cultural Marxism” were henceforth to blame for America’s fin de siecle turbulence.

Minnicino’s eventual retraction attracted, as is customary, almost no attention at all.

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/7/26/161347/099

https://archive.org/details/TheNewDarkAgeTheFrankfurtSchoolAndPoliticalCorrectness/page/n7/mode/1up

*Journalist Andrew Woods traced the history of Lyndon LaRouche’s obsession with the Frankfurt School in a 2019 article for Commune: https://communemag.com/the-american-roots-of-a-right-wing-conspiracy/ Among other observations, he notes that the phrase “cultural Marxism” is a gloss on the Nazis’ fevered denunciations of “cultural Bolshevism”.

¹ There was, of course, no “formal political conspiracy”; preaching as he was to a paranoid choir, Minnicino chose his words accordingly.

² Since Minnicino later disowned his essay, I will not engage in extended rebuttal of his claims; suffice it here to say that his portrait of American campus life is beyond risible.

³ Stalin’s attitude toward culture resembled that of the character in a play by Nazi author Hanns Johst: “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun.” (The actual quote is “When I hear the word culture, I release the safety on my Browning.” I prefer the misquote.)

⁴ Benjamin committed suicide in 1940 in a small town on the French-Spanish border while fleeing from the Nazis; his work received little if any attention until the late 1960s, when Hannah Arendt brought it to public attention. As for Gramsci, he spent the last decade of his life in Italian prisons, where he died in 1937 from mistreatment and deliberate medical neglect. His contribution to "cultural Marxism" was immense, and I will discuss it at length in a later blog.

The Fabulous Fabians

{Caveat Lector: This post got away from me. Proceed at your own risk.}

Have you ever found yourself wondering “Whatever happened to Fabian socialism?” If so, you may be relieved to learn that such a thing still exists, as does the Fabian Society itself, although to claim that it is alive and well might be a stretch.

{Fabian Forte, 1959; not, as it turns out, connected to the Fabian Society at all}

First things first: Fabian socialism, in case you’ve forgotten, was the Victorian-era, respectable, genteel British version of socialism. The Fabian Society took its name from the Roman general Fabius, who famously used a strategy of delay and patient waiting against the Carthaginian army and its leader, Hannibal. Fabians emphasized nonviolence and gradualism; in deliberate contrast to the violent radicals and revolutionaries of their day, they were more likely to be found in lecture halls, libraries, and drawing rooms than at the barricades or in prison.

According to the Fabian Society’s website (https://fabians.org.uk/):

The Fabian Society emerged in 1884 as an off-shoot of the Fellowship of the New Life. The new Society soon attracted some of the most prominent left-wing thinkers of the late Victorian era to its ranks. The 1880s saw an upsurge in socialist activity in Britain and the Fabian Society was at the heart of much of it. Against the backdrop of the Match Girls’ strike and the 1889 London Dock strike, the landmark Fabian Essays was published, containing essays by George Bernard Shaw, Graham Walls, Sidney Webb, Sydney Olivier and Annie Besant. All the contributors were united by their rejection of violent upheaval as a method of change, preferring to use the power of local government and trade unionism to transform society. The early Fabians’ commitment to non-violent political change was underlined by the role the Fabian Society played in the founding of the Labour party in 1900. The society is the only original founder of Labour party that remains affiliated to the present day in unchanged form.

The names most often associated with the Fabian Society are Beatrice and Sidney Webb, whose circle of friends and distinguished acquaintances included the likes of Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes. Beatrice Webb was a groundbreaking economist, sociologist, labor historian, and social reformer; she helped found the London School of Economics and is credited with coining the phrase “collective bargaining”. Alas, the Webbs’ reputation was ultimately tarnished, even among their ideological sympathizers, by their public praise of Soviet Russia and their apparent acceptance of Bolshevik and Stalinist atrocities; their book Soviet Communism: A New Civilization was termed by one historian “the most preposterous book ever written about Russia.”

For those on the political Right, Fabian socialism was only and always a Trojan horse, an attempt to sneak anarchy, tyranny, and terror into the manor through the servants’ entrance. Even in the 19^th century, critics of Socialism refused to distinguish it from Communism; the slightest step to the Left, they insisted, would lead to (and was designed to lead to) a headlong slide down the slippery slope to Bolshevism.*   

To understand the radicalism that provoked such concern, we need only consult the Fabian’s “mission statement,” which explains that the Fabian Society exists "To promote greater equality of power, wealth and opportunity; the value of collective action and public service; an accountable, tolerant and active democracy; citizenship, liberty and human rights; sustainable development; and multilateral international cooperation."

No wonder the nerves of respectable Englishmen and Englishwomen were rattled, not to mention the fine china and the chandeliers!

In America, a Fabian branch was established in Boston in 1895, but it never amounted to much; eventually, FDR’s “New Deal” accomplished (so say critics on the Right) most of the Fabians’ agenda, and the modern Democratic Party became, in effect, America’s homegrown Fabian Society. Here is how one anti-Fabian commentator puts it:

Fabians in America would go on to have influence in at least two different Presidential Administrations. Walter Lippmann, who served in Woodrow Wilson's administration, was a Fabian, [as was] Stuart Chase, who was a member of Franklin D Roosevelt's “Brain Trust”.  As a testament to how successful Fabianism was (and still is) in the United States, it was Stuart Chase who coined the term "The New Deal" in one of his books.

How did the Fabians have so much success? It was the Colleges and "institutions of learning". And the fact that the further they got away from the word "socialism", the more success they had. The Intercollegiate Socialist Society, founded by Harry Laidler, had two important members, Walter Lippmann and Stuart Chase. Chase was also involved in the Fabian's attempt to create a mirror of their London School of Economics (LSE) here in the US, the Rand School of Social Science.

http://progressingamerica.blogspot.com/2012/02/who-founded-fabian-socialism-in-united.html

As if that were not insidious enough, an even scarier picture is painted by Fabian Freeway: High Road to Socialism in the USA. This overlooked 1966 classic, written by Rose Martin and made available today for free by the Mises Institute (link below), has been described as “both prophetic and illuminating”. Ms. Martin’s anti-Fabian tour de force “documents the rise and progress of socialism in Britain and the United States and tells the story of the many early triumphs of the philosophy of socialist incrementalism known as Fabian Socialism. Martin emphasizes Fabian influences on Wilson and FDR, and continues the discussion through the 1960’s.”

The Mises Institute offers this precis:

When the British Fabian Society was first founded, its members, echoing Marx’s own views, believed that socialism could only be introduced to Britain and the United States through a strategy of very gradual change disguised as reform. Less than 150 years later, the Fabian strategy has been enormously successful. Both Britain and the United States are heavily regulated and heavily taxed societies with highly socialized economies where government agents exercise vast control over the movement of capital and currency through an enormous bureaucratic apparatus.

Since the end of the Cold War…we find that Fabian Socialism is far more dangerous than revolutionary communism. Highly attractive to so-called “reasonable” and “moderate” people, and compatible with the ideologies of so many center-left and center-right political parties, Fabian Socialism…has exhibited a staying-power already shown to be much stronger than anything revolutionary communism has yet produced.

https://mises.org/library/fabian-freeway-high-road-socialism-usa **

All this might be of only academic interest, were it not for the current Republican Party’s explicit vow to fight to the death against any socialist incursion in the USA. “We will never allow America to become a socialist country,” promises Donald Trump, who is echoed by his many followers. Is the “socialism,” Fabian or otherwise, against which they rail a genuine threat, or is it more of a phantom menace?  To answer that, here is Jerry Bowyer, writing at Forbes back in 2008, warning us against the Fabian candidate, Barack Obama:

Barack Obama is a Fabian socialist…He is telling the truth when he says that he doesn't agree with Bill Ayers' violent bombing tactics, but it's a tactical disagreement. Why use dynamite when mass media and community organizing work so much better? Who needs Molotov when you've got Saul Alinsky?

So here is the playbook: The left will identify, freeze, personalize and polarize an industry, probably health care. It will attempt to nationalize one-fifth of the U.S. economy through legislative action. They will focus, as Lenin did, on the "commanding heights" of the economy, not the little guy.

As Obama said, "the smallest" businesses will be exempt from fines for not "doing the right thing" in offering employer-based health care coverage. Health will not be nationalized in one fell swoop; they have been studying the failures of Hillary Care. Instead, a parallel system will be created, funded by surcharges on business payroll, which will be superior to many private plans. The old system will be forced to subsidize the new system and there will be a gradual shift from the former to the latter. The only coercion will be the fines, not the participation. A middle-class entitlement will have been created.

It may not be health care first; it might be energy, though I suspect that energy will be nationalized much more gradually. The offshore drilling ban that was allowed to lapse legislatively will be reinstated through executive means. It may be an executive order, but might just as well be a permit reviewing system that theoretically allows drilling but with endless levels of objection and appeal from anti-growth groups. Wind and solar, on the other hand, will have no permitting problems at all, and a heavy taxpayer subsidy at their backs.

So far, so good, comrade!

The banking system has already been partially nationalized. Bush and Paulson intend for their share purchases to be only non-voting preferred shares, but the law does not specify that. How hard will it be for Obama, new holder of $700 billion in bank equity, to demand "accountability" and a "voice" for the taxpayers?

I can’t say that one worked out for the Fabian-in-Chief, but I’m sure he tried.

The prescient Mr. Bowyer—remember, he was writing in 2008—warned us what was coming:

Will Obama's be the strong-man socialism of a Chavez, or the soft socialism that Clement Atlee used to defeat Churchill after WWII? I don't know, but I suspect something kind of in between. Despite right-wing predictions, we won't see Rush shut down by Fairness Doctrine fascists. We won't see Baptist ministers hauled off in handcuffs for anti-sodomy sermons. It will more likely be a matter of paperwork. Strong worded letters from powerful lawyers in and out of government to program directors and general managers of radio stations. Ominous references to license renewal.

Ah yes: the soft tyranny of “strong worded letters” with their “ominous references”.

Anyway, as a result:

The psychic propaganda assault ¹ will be powerful. The cyber-brown-shirts will spew hate, the union guys will flood talk shows with switchboard-collapsing swarms of complaint calls aimed at those hosts who "go beyond the pale" in their criticisms of Obama. In concert with pop culture outlets like The Daily Show and SNL, Obama will use his podium to humiliate and demonize those of us who don't want to come together and heal the planet.

“Humiliation” and “demonization” were certainly the bywords of the Obama presidency; the man just could not stop using phrases like “enemy of the people” and “human scum” when talking about his political opponents. Maybe it was a Kenyan thing?

Bowyer concluded, chillingly, “You've heard of the bully pulpit, right? Well, then get ready, because you're about to see the bully part.”

He could not have been more right; tragically, he was eight years too early; plus, he had the wrong guy, but other than that--spot on!

To be clear: Fabian socialism—“Socialism with a human face” or “a kinder, gentler Socialism”—remains a clear and present danger. America has so far dodged the Bolshevik bullet that is Bernie Sanders, but with the likes of AOC and her hive/swarm/coven/cabal, and with Elizabeth Warren off the reservation, and with Obama and George Soros pulling the strings and the ghost of Saul Alinsky calling the tune and…

Sorry; I seem to have lost track of what this post is about.

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*Bolshevism per se did not exist, of course, until the beginning of the 20^th century, when the Russian Democratic Socialist Party split into a “maximalist” (Bolshevik) faction and a “minimalist” (Menshevik) faction.

** “Fabian Freeway provides a well-documented and rigorously compiled account of the first eighty years of Fabian Socialism. Anyone with an interest in the history of socialism and capitalism in the West should not be without a copy of this significant volume.” And, may I remind you, you can download it for free!

¹ Psychic Propaganda Assault is—you guessed it—an excellent name for a rock band.

Further information at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_Society

You Say You Want a Revolution?

{The following is from my forthcoming collection, “My Correct Thoughts on Russian History”.}

“The Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, were hardline revolutionaries who would not have known a scruple if it bought them a drink.” (Richard Cavendish, History Today) ¹

"You say you want a revolution / well, you know, we all want to change the world." (The Beatles)

In late July and August 1903, a number of would-be revolutionary groups in and from Russia sent delegates to the Second Congress of the Russian Socialist Democratic Labor Party (which existed then in name only) where they intended to (a) hash out their differences and unify around common principles and goals, and (b) agree on a detailed program of action to achieve those goals. The first meetings of the congress were held in Brussels, but the Brussels police soon forced participants to relocate to London (where Lenin, among others, was already living) to conclude their business. Paul Feldman provides some detail:

Although nominally their second congress, in practice it was the inaugural meeting of the RSDLP. The previous congress held in Russian in 1898 was attended by only nine delegates. It had only decided the party’s designation and adopted a general manifesto. The objective of the second congress was to unify the scattered groups in Russia and weld them into a revolutionary fighting organization with a common program and strategy. That, at least, was the plan. Events turned out differently.

The congress lasted – or rather raged - until August 23, almost a month after it had started in Belgium. The minutes show that there were no fewer than 37 sessions. Present were 43 delegates from 26 organizations in Russia and another 14 observers. Eight of those present were women. Two tendencies – the Bolsheviks (Russian for “of the majority”) led by Lenin and the Mensheviks (“of the minority”) led by Martov – have their origins at this historic gathering. ²

Their name notwithstanding, the Bolsheviks represented, then and later, a minority of the Russian revolutionists; they were opportunistic enough, however, to claim for themselves the nominal mantle “of the majority”. The fact is, Lenin stacked the Second Congress with his allies, having worked tirelessly behind the scenes for at least a year to ensure that his “hard” views would prevail over the “soft” views of his opponents. The organizing committee that set the congress’s agenda and its procedures consisted of Lenin and two of his cronies (one of whom, Martov, broke with Lenin during and after the congress); as a consequence, there was never a chance that the Second Congress would unify the revolutionists or seek any sort of compromise—compromise being anathema to Lenin—between the various factions.

In Three Who Made a Revolution, Bertram Wolfe offers this unflattering description of the gathering:

One gets [the] impression of watching a congregation of somnambulists. The treasury—contributed by well-to-do (“bourgeois”) sympathizers—dwindles to exhaustion. Agreement on fundamental principle seems virtually unanimous, yet nerves grow frayed with sleepless nights, endless wrangles, summer heat. Men squabble unceasingly over procedure. The discussions get tied up in knots. The delegates grow inordinately angry, gesticulate with inexplicable violence, lacerate each other’s spirits...the exhaustion was general: funds, nerves, energies, throats, capacity to sit or to listen.

While Lenin, Martov, Trotsky, and Plekhanov wrangled with delegates (and with each other), events elsewhere unfolded without them (a pattern which would be repeated in 1916-17):

In Russia at this very moment events are moving…through student demonstrations, peasant mutinies, liberal banquets, assassination of officials, general strike, toward some unforeseen outcome. But [at the Congress], so many strong-willed, high-strung, single-minded, nonconformist personalities, avowed comrades-in-arms, are battling with each other in mutually induced excitation over motions, rules, by-laws, formulations that seem to be infinitely remote from the first general strike that is at this very moment sweeping over southern Russia and the Caucasus. The least of these [delegates] have been away from Russia for months and will be for many more; the leaders have been away for years, decades…

It would be funny if it weren’t, in retrospect, so tragic: a few dozen quarrelsome Russians meeting in London, debating picayune details and procedural minutia, orating in high dudgeon, bringing friendships to an end and spawning enmities and mistrust that would last a lifetime. In the aftermath of the RSDLP congress, the Russian revolutionary movement seemed more fragmented than ever and, as a result, less likely than ever to accomplish its goals. ³

The eventual revolution, which occurred spontaneously in response to conditions on the ground in Russia, was hijacked in October 1917 by a small group of men who had spent the preceding decade (and more) out of the country, polishing their ideas and their rhetoric, preparing to lead a revolution they could never have accomplished on their own. This is not to dispute the sincerity of Lenin and his Bolshevik allies; it is only to acknowledge that many of them had enjoyed, in exile, far too much time to concentrate on their ideas and theories to the exclusion of considering or even knowing the complicated realities of Russian life.

Moreover, one suspects that the frustration of not having been at the forefront of history, despite all their preparations, and of not having been the ones who finally overthrew the Tsar, heightened the resolve of Bolshevik leaders (Lenin especially) to cut to the front of the revolutionary queue, to claim the revolution for themselves, and to steer it in their predetermined direction—the direction set at their contentious congress in 1903.

Pavel Axelrod, who opposed Lenin at the congress and later became a leader of the Menshevik faction, paid grudging tribute to his adversary. Speaking of Lenin’s decisive influence, he explained, “There is not another man who for twenty-four hours of the day is taken up with the revolution, who has no other thoughts but thoughts of revolution, and who even in his sleep dreams of nothing but revolution.” You can picture Axelrod shaking his head in frustration as he concluded, “Just try and handle such a fellow!”  None of the Russian revolutionists individually—not even the elder Plekhanov nor the younger Trotsky—could “handle” Lenin, and his foes collectively were unable or unwilling to unite against him; consequently, Lenin got his way in 1903—and Clio, the muse of History, took things from there.

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¹ The quote is of no real relevance here; I just happen to think it’s funny.

² http://www.aworldtowin.net/resources/1903.html

³ Bertram Wolfe’s assessment: “The convention, which, after two decades of longing and two and one-half years of intensive planning, adjourned…hopelessly divided. It had been assembled to constitute a party. It would take at least ten years to realize that it had really constituted not one party but two.”