Some Thoughts on Isms and Their Discontents

Some rather scattershot paragraphs including observations on socialism as generally understood, as Marx understood it, and the right-wing arguments against it.

*

That 'National Socialism' was and is, in fact, not a movement of the left should be clear to anyone who has any objective understanding of reality.  It is only partisan hacks and trolls of the right (oh, and sometimes Tory MPs) who are genuinely or strategically confused on this point.  You don't have to be a leftist to recognise that National Socialism (and we'll stick with that term, as a sop to Petersonian pedantry, and as a way of demonstrating that we don't have anything to fear from the term) was a right-wing movement.  This is simply a historical fact, otherwise we're living in an Alice in Wonderland world where there is no solid ground upon which to base any conclusions.  The National Socialist state persecuted people on grounds of race and religion, it oppressed women as a matter of policy, it suppressed left-wing political parties, it suppressed democratic elections, it suppressed trade unions and strikes, it was intensely nationalistic and imperialistic, it detested internationalism, it fetishised the family, it persecuted homosexuals and gender non-conforming people generally, etc.  The National Socialist Party loathed "Marxism" which they took to be both Jewish and communist.  We could go on both adducing further points and developing the ones already made.

After all this, the only remaining basis for claiming that the National Socialists were of the left is the idea that they were 'statists', and that 'statism' is inherently left-wing. This is, of course, the actual basis of the reactionary claim that fascism was and is left-wing.  It is, if not the ‘rational kernel’ of the argument, at least a kernel with some connection to a real and interesting question which does, in fact, require explication.  Explication can be achieved without giving any ground to the reactionary claims; and doing so not only illuminates interesting and crucial points but also shows the crudeness not only of the reactionary view of history, but also of the entire mainstream view. 

The irony is that defining a political regime as left-wing owing to its essential economic character is, at least in principle, a step in the right direction.  It begins to recognise the economic basis of society, and of a society’s political and social character.  However, it stops half way down the road towards analysing the economic basis of society, and so ends up with an understanding only of superficial and structural characteristics, imagining them to be part of the base.  Far from it being Marxism which (when applied properly) sees a society’s character is determined by who owns what, Marxism actually understands that ‘ownership’ is a social form taken by underlying relations.  The same relations can take other forms.  To understand the nature of a society, one must penetrate beneath the social form of ‘ownership’, or ‘property’ (be it private or public), and analyse the underlying relations of production. 

Also, to ignore the actual content of a polity in order to define it solely according to its forms of ownership and the extent of its state power is rank idealism, reductionism, determinism, etc.  It is, in short, everything Marxism is always accused of but which actually, properly understood and executed historical materialism dissolves by insisting upon analysing societies as dynamic interactions between history and present, people and system, structure and agency, base and superstructure.  You can’t define socialism as state ownership, adumbrate the existence of reactionary social policies and features in societies thus defined as socialist, and deduce that socialist societies are therefore inherently given to such policies and features.  This is reasoning backwards from arbitrary premises.  It ignores the variegated characters of the many societies which have called themselves, and/or been called, socialist (entirely separate from their actual characters as analysed objectively).  It is almost a recognition of the fact that the actual features of a society are not products of the ideas of those in them, or those who run them, or the ideologies that dominate them, or the parties or governments that rule them.  Thus, again, is it almost progress.  But, again, the progress stops halfway down the road (and the same insights are always ignored or forgotten when it becomes convenient.)  

If it were in fact the case that Marx saw socialism as a form of society in which the state has full ownership and total power, then it would be reasonable to observe societies in which the state enjoyed full or near full ownership of the means of production, and full or near-full political control over the population, notice that such states tend to be authoritarian and reactionary, and deduce from there that socialism as an economic and state system is - at least on the evidence so far - inherently given to produce authoritarian and reactionary societies.  Indeed, this is the core of the right-wing argument.  

However, this argument falls down on three different counts.  

Firstly, it fails to take into account the fact that societies do not exist in isolation from history or the rest of the world.  It is not reasonable to amputate the material conditions prevailing in socialist societies before they became socialist and continuing afterwards.  (People should check out Bad Mouse’s excellent video on why East Germany’s economic backwardness was down to pre-existing material realities.)  Neither is it reasonable to amputate those material realities continuing to exist after the transition (because societies do not simply flick switches and instantly transform), or those pertaining in the rest of the world and thus impinging on socialist societies (this is especially true with regards the aggression and imperialism - economic, military, or both - of market capitalist societies against ‘socialist’ societies).  The argument amputates history and context.  

Secondly, the argument unwarrantedly excludes those societies, and categories of societies, and those features of societies which it aims to absolve from implication in its final indictment.  Crudely, people will shout “Venezuela!” as proof that socialism always fails, forgetting the existence of China.  Reminded of China, they will freely move goalposts and switch criteria for ‘success’ or ‘failure’, often blithely substituting entire categories.  Cuba has many things to boast of as a society.  Reminded of this, whole criteria for judging social wellbeing will simply be dumped as worthwhile, often via hypocritical sanctimony and moralism.  

Again, I do not myself accept the categorisation of these societies as ‘socialist’, but they are generally understood to be so, and the way they are thus treated gives us an illustration of the bankruptcy of right-wing arguments against socialism, even apart from their lack of understanding of what it actually is according to the scientific socialist - i.e. Marxian - viewpoint.  And here we arrive at the most important problem with the right-wing argument which is that it simply misrepresents the claims being made for socialism by socialists - most particularly Marx.  

Here we must allow the right some latitude because their fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of socialism is hardly exclusive to them.  Indeed, it has been shared by a huge number of people and currents on the left.  This may sound like arrogance, sectarianism, and the No True Scotsman fallacy all rolled up together, but it is simply not the case that Marx defines socialism as a system in which the means of production are all owned by a state which exercises total political control over society.  Manifold evidence exists in Marx’s writings, and in the writings of Engels which Marx either collaborated in writing or saw and ‘okayed’, to show that Marx’s view of socialism was of a mode of production based on the free association of the producers, that is to say production organised according to the democratic decisions of workers at the point of production.  There is no sense in which a society could be said to even approach this on a quantitative level, let alone achieve it on a qualitative level, by simply declaring the capitalist system transformed into a socialist system because the (as Marx calls it) “juridical form” of ownership has been transferred to a state claiming to act on behalf of the working class, even in the absence of a class of private capitalists, or even in the presence of a certain level of workers’ participation.  It is true that Marx and Engels envisaged a transitional phase in which aspects of capitalist society would linger, but the idea of a ‘transitional society’ or ‘transitional mode of production’ is absent.  This might seem like a fine distinction but it is an important one.  Marx speaks of a process whereby the new society would shed the remaining traits of the old, not of ‘socialism’ being a distinct form of society between capitalism and communism, retaining some aspects of the former while constructing the latter.  The revolution, which Marx envisages as the “movement of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority” and “the task of the working class themselves”, is the seizure of the means of production.  This seizure is defined by the abolition of the separation of the workers from the means of production.  It is self-evidently nonsensical to imagine the revolution without the abolition of this fundamental separation in the relations of production, whether it takes the social form of legal ownership of the means of production by private capitalists or any form of hegemony over the means of production by a state or class of state managers, even if they claim to be acting on behalf of the workers.  After all, the claim of bourgeois politicians in the capitalist state to act on behalf of the public in no way means that the public are separated from the levers of power.  Similarly, it is clearly not the case that the claim by state managers to act on behalf of the working class necessarily means that the working class wield power over the means of production.  Indeed, the very existence of the intermediate layer making the claim shows the claim’s hollowness.  The separation must take the form of direct control of the means of production by the producers.

Famously Marx and Engels look forward to the “withering away of the state”.  To them, the state is an expression of the rule of a particular class over another class.  It is not simply an expression of force but of the force which a class which has hegemonic control over the means of production of a given society can and must therefore exercise over the class under them which does not have such control, which is thus separated from the means of production, and which is thus exploited by the class which is not.  This very relation of separation is precisely what constitutes the working class in capitalist society, and its absence is precisely what constitutes the ruling class.  The withering away occurs because the working class after a revolution now are the class which exercises control over the means of production.  This is their new relation to the means of production and to the newly expropriated former-ruling class.  The immediate aftermath of the revolution will involve the victorious working class needing to exercise class power, and thus state power, over the defeated class.  The development of society and the productive forces along these new lines will lead to the disappearance of the defeated class, and thus to the disappearance of the state.  Society will cease to contain classes since all will now stand in the same relation of non-separation to the means of production.  The cessation of class relations entails the cessation of the cause of and need for the state as an instrument of class rule.  As it becomes unnecessary, the state will become non-existent.  

Clearly this has not yet happened in any society which has survived for any length of time and also called itself socialist.  While this lays socialism open to the justified charge that its predictions are as yet unproven, it negates the charge that socialism necessarily entails an authoritarian state, still less that the essence of left-wing politics is state control… unless we simply ignore definitions and categories so as to make socialism whatever we wish it to be at any given time, so that it may be ‘demonstrated’ to be impossible and pernicious all at once.  This is, of course, the very nature of the actual right-wing critique, demonstrated with amusing incoherence and flagrant bad faith in the writings of, say, Mises.

The standard view, which is really only a watered down version of the right-wing view, elides two entirely different conceptions of what a state is.  It elides the capitalist state with the socialist state, and these two types of state are fundamentally different - precisely because they are the expressions of the rule of two different classes, and therefore expressions of two entirely different forms of control over the means of production.  This is more than mere sophistry.  A socialist state, for Marx, is an entirely different kind of beast because the society which it expresses is characterised by its structure as a free association of producers.  It is not just a state with socialists, or even workers, in charge.  It is a state upended.  It is a state run from the bottom up.  It is a state because it is a structure separated (to some degree) from society in general and expressing the rule of a particular class, but it is one of a fundamentally different kind, precisely because the rule of the working class is the rule of the majority rather than of a minority, a producing class rather than an appropriating/exploiting class.  By definition, the rule of the working class must be based in the process of labour, since any class which does not labour is not a working class.  It is therefore essential that the workers’ state must be based at the site of labour.  It is precisely the process of social labour which makes the working class what it is; in order to be a workers’ state a state must therefore emanate from the actual position of the workers, i.e. the site of collective social labour. The separation of the state from society is thus minimised and on course for dissolution from the very first, by the very nature of the seizure of power by the working class.

*

It is true that, according to some calculations, the Soviet Union was responsible for causing a greater number of deaths than Hitler's Germany, and that therefore, by a certain way of looking at things, 'Communism' killed more people than 'National Socialism'.

National socialism wasn't just an ideology. It managed to kill so many people because it helmed a modern, industrial, capitalist, imperialist state. Germany's economic base was no less capitalist for being run by fascists. Indeed, the Nazis were privatizers as well as statists.  All the fascist states were capitalist, imperialist states under the control of the most militant wings of counter-revolution. (Spain is the outlier, being less developed - but that's why Spanish fascism was heavily religious and monarchical in character.  It was semi-feudal in character because it arose in a semi-feudal country as a reaction against a revolution led by both city workers and rural peasants or semi-peasants.)  Fascist imperialism and warmongering was based on a militant expression of the same drive to expand and seize resources that always drives capitalist powers to imperialism.  Such imperialism has always been organised along lines of racism, be it the British Empire, French imperialism, the Belgian colonies, pre-Nazi German colonialism, American settler-colonialism, settler-colonialism in Australia, etc.

Non-fascist forms of empire were also based on aggression, violent repression, slavery, and genocide (structural and sometimes deliberate), just as fascist forms were. It wasn't just that the economics of fascist societies drove them blindly to this imperialism.  Fascist societies consciously modelled themselves on the violent racial dynamics of British, American imperialism, etc. Hitler conceptualised his plan as making Germany the America of Europe. His 'East' would be like America's 'West', complete with 'natives' to annihilate.  If fascist imperialism was often more ferocious and destructive, this is because fascist imperialism arose in capitalist societies which came late to the feast and faced reduced opportunities for expansion, harder opposition from established empires, etc.

Meanwhile, quite unlike fascism, 'communism' isn't supposed (please note the cautious wording here) to be a form of government for a capitalist society. It is supposed (see above) to be a fundamentally different type of society, with a fundamentally different economic base.  Comparing fascism and communism is comparing a form of capitalist ideology/government with (supposedly) an alternate type of economic arrangement. Apples and oranges. (We'll complicate this below.)  One might well point out the similarities between fascism and what came to be called 'communism'. One might well point out 'communism's' failure to fundamentally alter human society in its ambit.  Trouble is, this leads us to the insight that what we called 'communism' was, in fact, a form of state capitalism. It was a particular kind of statist organisation of capitalist social relations, as was Nazi Germany, wartime Britian, New Deal America, etc etc

In 'communism', industries were state owned and directed, but the workers were still exploited. Surplus value was still extracted. It just went to state-managers rather than private capitalists. 'Communism' had to compete on the world market. And it seems persuasively arguable that the competition between state owned industries and plants within the Soviet Union amounted to competition in the sense that Marx talks about it when analysing ‘private’ capitalist societies, in which the law of value operates by competing firms jockeying on a market and thus striving for profit via ‘efficiency’, i.e. production disciplined by socially necessary labour time.  By this analysis, there is really very little difference between ‘state capitalism’ and regular capitalism.  In both, the objective source of value is abstract, homogenous social labour, as measured and determined by socially necessary labour time, as determined by the realisation of profits on the market.  The state ownership of capitals is no barrier to their competition and becomes merely a different social form of appearance of the same underlying relations of production.  In the one case the capitalist class is composed of “warring brothers” as Marx put it; in the other the same class is composed of warring comrades.  The common state ownership and employment of the comrades is simply a different way of expressing, organising and consolidating the existence of the class.  Remember, in Marx’s view a class is nothing more than a way of expressing a social cohort who stand in a particular relation to the means of production.  When a group of people in one country plays essentially the exact same social role in relation to the means of production as a similar group of people in another country plays to their means of production, it is meaningless idealism to declare them in some way a fundamentally different kind of class simply because they name themselves differently and operate under different legal arrangements.  Names and “juridical forms” (as Marx put it when making essentially this very point) are not how Marxism judges things; it judges things based on the content of the relations of production.  It is an expression of the proper Marxist view, and thus of the penetration offered by properly-deployed historical materialism, to declare the Soviet nomenklatura a capitalist class in different garb and jargon.  To imagine that they in some way express the power of the working class is not simply to misunderstand things, it is to stand Marxism directly on its head, not only in terms of its actual political objectives but also its basic philosophical outlook.  Indeed, the two are actually the same thing.

The true basis of capitalism isn't who owns what. Private ownership is, as Marx knew, one legal form of capitalist social relations. Marx and Engels understood the possibility of one state capital. They mention it.  Capitalism itself, according to Marx and Engels, is the self-expansion of value via the exploitation of the propertyless worker for the surplus labour they produce in the alienated commodity production process. This happened in 'communist' Russia as much as in Roosevelt's America, or Hitler's Germany.  State-directed industries always exist within capitalism (which can't survive, and never has survived, without state support and hefty state sectors) and always replicate capitalist exploitation and integrate with the larger value process. Once one realises this, everything falls into place.

'Communism', far from being uniquely destructive owing to its nature as an evil ideology, a basic nature it supposedly shares with fascism, was in fact a form of capitalism which prevailed in certain places owing to a combination of historical contingency (the external attack upon and internal defeat of the October Revolution, etc) and the necessities of development - Russia, for instance, had to industrialise at breakneck speed to compete (as imperialist powers must) with competitors. Not least because competition from without threatened to violently crush her.  (Something of the kind would probably have happened anyway, the Revolution being a byproduct of the crisis of Russia as an expansionist empire while midway through the openings of capitalist development greatly funded by foreign investment.)

'Communist' Russia replicated, in a terrifyingly concertinaed spurt of time, the rise of capitalism in Western Europe - which,like C20th Russia - generated staggering suffering, as Western European capitalism arose through primitive accumulation, imperialism, slavery, genocide - all the same horrors seen in both communism and fascism. This is precisely because 'communism' and fascism were variations on the same thing: capitalism.  The horrors wrought by non-communist, non-fascist forms of capitalism - so often just called 'capitalism', or 'democracy', or 'liberalism', or 'the West', etc - are simply not felt to require the special explanations demanded of communism and fascism.  They are, to an extent, admitted - though all too often forgotten and/or hidden - and then glossed over as peculiar tragedies, mistakes of the past which can be accounted for by the prevalence of bad ideas that ‘we’ have no abandoned, etc.

So those who want to stick to a view of 'communism' and 'fascism' as kindred twisted ideological aberrations find their position untenable, if not childishly simplistic.  What's more, that position is self-contradictory. Either communism is - as the original revolutionaries intended - a fundamentally different kind of society with a fundamentally different economic base, in which case comparing it with fascism is comparing apples with oranges, or communism was similar to fascism precisely because it was a form of capitalism, and was actually also similar to those societies admitted to be capitalist. Similar in the same horrific ways, and for the same reason.