I’m sure most people presume that the history of economics must be boring pushed to a life-draining extreme.
In fact, the history of economics is a grand story, full of drama, tension and surprising twists; ideas come to life as characters, and the thinkers behind the ideas complete the cast. Granted it’s thin in romance and razor thin in the steamy stuff. But it’s thick in irony.
The history of socialist thought is a treasure trove of irony.
For starters, the bulk of 200-plus years of Continental European, British and American socialist writing is about capitalism, not socialism. The critique of capitalism dominates this massive literature; it is and always has been central to socialist thought. Socialist writers have also had something to say about society, human nature and fellow socialists. They have had little to say about socialism.
That’s observation, not criticism, and the observation is not controversial. Historians of socialist thought as erudite and diverse as George Lichtheim, Robert Heilbroner and Michael Newman have all made note of how much socialist thought has to say about capitalism and how little it has to say about socialism.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the two most renowned socialists of all, provide a prime example of the irony. Their critique of capitalism is fierce and voluminous. Their critique of other socialists is fierce and extensive. How economic decisions would be made in a socialist system? Crickets.
Marx and Engels stated what every socialist understood then and understands now: that socialism is a system in which private enterprise is prohibited. Beyond that, Marx and Engels said nothing about socialism as a system.
Prominent in the history of socialist thought is the charge that capitalism is grounded on individualism and competition, whereas socialism is grounded on solidarity and cooperation. What makes this ironic is that socialists have a long history of being at odds with each other. Numerous socialist writers have commented on the irony, including British socialist Anthony Wright.
Wright’s excellent book, “Socialisms,” published in 1986, opens with this: “The history of socialism is the history of socialisms. Moreover, it is a history not of fraternal plurality, but of rivalry and antagonism.” A sentence later: “Many socialists have reserved their sharpest arrows for attacks on other socialists.”
Marx and Engels are prime cases of this irony, as well. The vitriol with which Marx and Engels laid into socialists who failed to toe the Marx-Engels line is eclipsed only by that of V.I. Lenin, when, in his “Conditions of Admission to the Communist International,” he “declared war on the whole bourgeois world and on all Yellow social-democratic parties.” By “all Yellow social-democratic parties,” Lenin meant all socialist parties not in lockstep with Soviet communism.
Socialist thinkers have consistently championed the “working class.” Of the many moral outrages that socialists find in capitalism, the exploitation of the working class tops the list. Socialists have also claimed that environment determines perspective: grow up bourgeois and you’ll interpret life from a bourgeois perspective; grow up working class and you’ll interpret life from a working-class perspective.
The irony is that working class championing socialist thinkers, almost to a person, have come from thoroughly bourgeois backgrounds, while members of the working class have shown little interest in socialism but great interest in being able to live bourgeois lives for all the work they contribute to bourgeois capitalist production.
The unwillingness of the working class to shake its “working-class style bourgeois” mindset has frustrated socialist thinkers for a long time. So, next time you have a hankering for irony, there’s a treasure trove in the history of socialist thought just waiting for you.
Reg Murphy Center