Capitalism, Socialism and other terms to be avoided

Capitalism is a term coined, or at least popularised, by the enemies of the system they labelled capitalism. It was understood from the start to have a pejorative connotation and the term’s use is still dominated by that pejorative connotation. Despite the efforts of supporters of capitalism-so-labelled to reclaim capitalism as a positive, or at least neutral, label; particularly based on historical experience.

One should always be wary of any term where the pejorative element built in. Even if you somehow do not let the pejorative element infect your own thought, it is going to be there in the mind of many, often most, readers.

Socialism is a term coined, or at least popularised, by the proponents of the system they labelled socialism. It was understood from the start to have a positive, indeed overwhelmingly positive, connotation and its use is still dominated in many quarters by that positive connotation. This despite the efforts of the opponents of “socialism” to give it thoroughly negative connotations, particularly based on historical experience.

Capitalism has at least has some vague consensus on what the term means. Socialism does not even have that, as recent American politics has demonstrated, thanks to the attempts of Sen. Bernie Sanders, self-proclaimed socialist, to win the Democratic Party nomination for President of the United States.

Capitalism has some vague consensus regarding what the term means because almost everyone agrees that there is currently, and has been, a lot of it. Apart from some labelling of command economies as state capitalism, there is a general consensus that we more or less know capitalism when we see it.

There is no such consensus around socialism, mainly because socialists typically want to dissociate the term from every command economy that has ever operated, or patent embarrassments such as Venezuela. Conversely, the enemies of socialism what to hang every command economy that has ever operated, and embarrassments such as Venezuela, on any use of socialism.

If socialism has never been “really” tried, then it can never have failed. Or if there is this new form or conception of socialism that has never been tried, then clearly it has nothing to do with any command economy that has ever operated, or any embarrassment such as Venezuela.

Of course, one might suspect that this attempt to constantly separate socialism from history might be a bit of a warning sign. Especially if folk want to play the game of comparing the ideal of socialism (carefully separated from history) with the practice of capitalism (often using carefully edited, selected or re-construed bits of history).

For me, there is a simple solution. Avoid, as much as possible, using either term. Then you can at least aspire to some analytical rigour.

Other possibilities

That does not remotely foreclose considering new social possibilities. It just means trying to do so with some analytical precision without dragging along the deadweight of fraught ideological conflicts.

Moreover, contemplating the social possibilities that do not seem to be much explored can be a very useful exercise. To consider the dogs that don’t bark in the night.

If not separating workers from the product of their labour, or simply having the workers in charge, is such a fine thing, one might think that would be entirely possible to set up worker-controlled companies. Then the non-alienated, self-controlled workers might be expected to produce so well that they can outcompete capital-owned firms in the market place.

Of course, if your notion of alienation covers any attempt to produce for exchange, then even in a worker-controlled firm workers will be alienated from their labour. Of course, not producing for exchange then reduces Homo sapiens to the economic level of every other species on the planet. One might consider the possibility that producing for exchange permits the scaling up of production and consumption far more extensively or efficiently than any other way of dealing with the issues of subsistence and surplus. So, perhaps giving up an advantage that may predate our emergence as a species is not a good move.

Let’s assume that something we have been doing for maybe 320,000 years or so (and certainly for 200,000 years), exchanging things we have produced, is not some alienating disaster, and go with worker control is good. Worker-controlled firms is still an entirely possible option. So, why don’t we see far more of such?

What is a firm? A firm is a mechanism for lowering transaction costs and dealing with risk. Do we want to dump risk on to labour or on to capital? Surely, on to capital. So, a labour-controlled firm is going to make the decisions, and is going to need capital, but will also want to dump the risk onto the holders of capital.

So, which firms are going to operate better? Those where control ultimately rests with those who have to deal with the risks or those where control ultimately rests with those who get to systematically dump risk on to others?

Clearly the former. The owners of a capital-owned firm get the residual income from the firm because they also cover the residual losses from the firms.

Moreover, when we say “worker controlled”, which workers? The original workers presumably. But what if you want to hire new staff, do they get the same control rights? Suppose the firm has too many workers, it needs to lay off staff, how do you decide that? What are the dynamics of a group of workers who every so often may have to vote on who gets to be ejected from the firm?

Capital-owned firms solve these problems by essentially having a market in control. The more you are willing to buy in, the more control you have. If you want to leave, you sell your control rights. Decisions about hiring and firing are left with those who are managing the firm. (And firms with mechanisms for workers to become shareholders are still capital-owned firms.)

What about coordination issues as a worker-controlled firm gets bigger?

At this point, we can see why the somewhat Darwinian selection processes of markets select for capital-owned firms and not worker-controlled ones. It is not that worker-controlled firms are illegal, it is that they represent a risk-and-decision profile that no one (including workers) are likely to invest in. The closest we get are partnerships, and they represent human-capital firms, not worker-control.

And about the state

Consider again the question: which firms are going to operate better? Those where control ultimately rests with those who have to deal with the risks or those where control ultimately rests with those who get to dump the risk on to others? Here’s something to conjure with. Is not: a structure where control ultimately rests with those who get to dump the risk on to others, a pretty good description of the state?

People (often with good reason) complain about the socialisation of losses and the privatisation of profits. But that is precisely what an awful lot of state politics is about. Shifting benefits to one group and costs, including risks, to another because the coercive power of the state makes that a game that can be played (and is obviously one with significant potential pay-offs). When one sees risks being shifted from capital to labour, there is generally some state action underlying it.

This is why the term state capitalism has a little bit of purchase behind it. If you squint just right.

In a command economy, the state owns all (or almost all) the capital. So, in a command economy, risk regularly gets dumped by the capital-owning state on to labour. Including risks of mass starvation or environmental degradation. But that is not because capital owns the state, but because the state owns the capital.

Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc. did not control the state due to their ownership of capital, they controlled the creation and use of capital due to their control of the state. To call such capitalist or capitalism is to get the causal drivers entirely the wrong way around.

So, yes, it is significant that state owns the capital in a command economy. It affects its patterns of behaviour and means there is no significant non-state control of surplus, so no significant basis of institutional resistance to the power of (those who control) the state. But the capital is entirely subordinate to the state. So, the society is not capitalist.

And we are back with avoiding the use of terms so weighed down with emotionally-laden connotations. Because, without those connotations, there would be no incentive to so badly mis-characterise the relevant social, political and economic dynamics.

Save us from historically tone deaf academics living in intellectual bubbles

The Evolution Institute wants to apply up to date Darwinism to politics. In their own words:

The Federalist Papers sought to convince the citizens of New York to adopt the newly written American Constitution. This would create a UNION (a word that they capitalized) capable of accomplishing more than any state alone and would showcase America’s Enlightenment experiment as an example for the rest of the world.
Today, that UNION is in such disarray that effectiveness of democracy itself is being doubted. Everyone knows the system is broken but no one seems to know how to do better.
Until now, and from an unexpected source: The current incarnation of Darwin’s theory of evolution.

So far so good. Lots of people are concerned about the level of polarisation and political alienation in US society.

However: 

Many people link evolution with Social Darwinism, the idea that competition is the law of nature and deserves to shape human society. This view misses the point that cooperation is often the fittest strategy. In The Descent of Man, Darwin described how we, as a social species, survived only in interdependent cooperative groups, not as individuals. He wrote: “Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence, nothing can be effected.”
A science of society built on the biological necessity of cooperation can be called “socialism” in the truest sense of embodying our inalienable social nature. Hence, we call the toolkit of ideas outlined in these papers “Socialist Darwinism”. Historically, the Socialist Darwinian focus on cooperation actually preceded the Social Darwinist focus on competition, and the former fits the latest evolutionary science better.

How historically tone-deaf do you have to be, to offer the world another version of "scientific socialism"? Karl Marx explicitly thought he was applying Darwin to the social world. Look how well that worked out.

As economist Bryan Caplan correctly points out, the term socialism has become a provocative equivocation. Adopting the term utterly unnecessarily alienates large numbers of people, across a wide range of the political spectrum, from your project. In what sort of intellectual bubble do you have to be living to not even twig that you will be doing that? Or, if you do, not caring?

Historically tone deaf folk living in an intellectual bubble. What an awful start to what could be a worthy project.

[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

The persistence of (belief in) socialism

I find the persistence of belief in socialism surprising (an example here), particularly given that Venezuela and North Korea both, in their different ways, display, yet again, the disastrous results in poverty, human misery and tyranny of "actually existing socialism": that is, state domination of the economy. The lesson of Venezuela is, if anything, even stronger, as it is an example of the "democratic path to socialism".

Now, it is possible that by socialism such folk mean something other than a state-run and dominated economy, but if they do, they need to pick a different term because that is what, socialism, in practice, means. Trying to get it to mean something else this late in its history is not practical. And using socialism as a placeholder term for some unspecified system of "common" ownership is empty moral self-indulgence parading as political commitment.

Recently, I had drinks with a very well-read friend who grew up in the Soviet Union and so has some lived insights into this. He made two very cogent points:

(1) What other language of justice-inspired of major social change is there? There remain all sorts of reasons to be morally repelled by aspects of contemporary society: what is the alternative political vision for a post-capitalist society? If there isn't any, then "socialism" wins by default, as it has no effective competitor in the moral marketplace.

(2) For the Left, history is not the past, it's the future. For folk like my friend and I, history is what happened in the past, from which we can learn and draw lessons. For the Left, history is what is going to happen, it is what has an arc that bends towards justice while the past is something to be judged, censored and transcended.

(As an aside, it is a nice illustration of a wider tendency for secular appropriation of religious ideas that Barack Obama liked quoting Martin Luther King who was quoting Theodore Parker on the arc of history bending towards justice, but turned what was a "kingdom of God" religious point into a very different secular claim.)

This second point coincides with something I had noticed about modern progressivism--what I had come to think of as the history is their bitch phenomenon: the recurring confidence that, if their policies are adopted, the legacies of the past can be swiftly surmounted. But [alas for such hopes] history happened, lives on, and provides a rich source of lessons: history informs and constrains.

If, conversely, history is the future and the past is a record of sin and failure, of Haan history, to be judged, censored and transcended, then elevated hopes for what their policies can achieve, including the persistence of belief in socialism, is much less surprising.

But no more justified. Wishing does not make it so, and a lack of an alternative articulated vision of a post-capitalist society does not make socialism a worthy project. The unending record of failure of actually existing socialism is not some weird happenstance, it reveals key features of the entire project of socialism, as things show their nature in their history.

Four strikes
The first error is the implicit notion that public (which functionally means state) ownership of the means of production will somehow abolish selfishness, sociopathy and psychopathy. On the contrary, it creates a single, all-encompassing hierarchy for the self-servingly ambitious to climb. Socialism does not lock out selfishness, it gives it the keys to the entire kingdom. Socialist states always end up creating corrupt and exploitive hierarchies in particularly pathological manifestations of the late Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy or sociologist Robert Michels' Iron Law of Oligarchy.

The second error is that state ownership destroys key information for the functioning of an economy. This is the Mises-Hayek socialist calculation point. As is common for these sort of predictions, Mises and Hayek underestimated the ability of people to make adjustments, to get around the inherent dysfunction of the system they are stuck in, but Mises and Hayek correctly identified an inherent and deeply dysfunctional flaw in the entire project.

The third error is to wildly overestimate the capacity of the state apparatus to efficiently use the information that is available to it. Anyone who deals with government bureaucracies (or any large bureaucracy) will be familiar with this phenomenon. But the effects get much worse when government bureaucracies are the only significant users of information in the society and have coercive power backing them. Historical anthropologist James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State is a classic analysis of the problems involved, which extend beyond his revealing analysis and are compounded when the state is the (formal) economy.

The final point is the emptiness of the notion of democratic socialism. Socialism is inherently tyrannical, Hayek's Road to Serfdom point. The point is often somewhat obscured by the tendency to see democracy as some teleological endpoint of the arc of political history, whose apotheosis is finding the "correct" system for counting votes to elect officials.

Moving from theory to history, democracy is a system for entrenching and operationalising the broadest level of social bargaining and there can be no effective social bargaining with or within a state that runs everything. In a state-dominated society, due to having a state-run economy, there is no independent basis of social information and action outside the all-encompassing state, so no basis for genuine social bargaining. Democracy will never tame socialism, socialism will always eat democracy.

The state was born in coercion and expropriation. Democracy is not some magic talisman that can somehow eliminate those features from a state in charge of everything. On the contrary, democracy becomes a casualty of the all-encompassing state becoming more intensely a system of coercion and expropriation.

These features explain socialism's history of tyranny and massive human misery. A record of human experience that any serious analysis must grapple with rather than airily dismiss.

Returning to archetype
Socialism is not a modern invention. The first states dominated their economies so thoroughly that they can reasonably be called socialist. That the remaining command economy, North Korea, has ended up with a god-king dynasty running everything is not some weird aberration, it is a return to the origins of the state once the state has become the society.

The reality is that history is not progressivists's (or anyone's) bitch: as the entire socialist project demonstrates. So, while socialism currently may be the only game around for aspirations for a post-capitalist society, it is not a game anyone should seek to play. The real work is not in trying to find a way to make socialism "work": that is a project doomed to failure and which leads only to human misery. The real work is to come up with an alternative vision of the post-capitalist future. That the state is the easiest substitute for private firms based on ownership of capital may make socialism the default alternative to capitalism; it does not make it a worthy one.


ADDENDA: Reacting against the human suffering and moral failures which are part of the rise and practice of capitalism is fine, but if one then discounts (on whatever grounds) the mass murders and starvations, human misery and tyranny which are so saliently and deeply part of the history of socialism, one's politics clearly are not based on human suffering and concern for human flourishing, but something else.

FURTHER ADDENDA: Much of the trumpeted sins of "capitalism" are either things that have no intrinsic connection to capitalism (such as slavery and imperialism: both which have proved eminently compatible with socialism) or which came from capitalism supporting more effective and capable states (such as imperialism) or have their (often worse) counterparts in other social systems, all of which further points to the doomed nature of basing or anchoring one's search for social structures more conducive to human flourishing in reaction to capitalism.

NOTE ON USAGE: Nothing above should be taken as an endorsement of the term capitalism which I dislike as it is typically ill-defined and often used to conflate phenomena together: in particular commerce and government action. Commerce cannot be relied upon to exclude people by social category, so governments have to intervene to get such results--for example, the economic side of Jim Crow or adjustment of the New Deal to disadvantage African-Americans.  Calling the results "capitalism" obscures rather than revealing.

E.O. Wilson quote: wonderful theory, wrong species.

[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

Attitudes of voters and candidates: examining the political class

Given the recent political upset in the Massachusetts Senate election, the problematic connection between voter attitudes and those of what is sometimes called ‘the political class’ has particular resonance.

Katharine Betts’ 2004 article People and Parliamentarians: The Great Divide in People and Place looked at data for the 2001 Australian federal election from the surveys of voters and candidates. Using that data, she examines attitude differences between candidates and voters. She found, amongst other things, that:

Coalition candidates are quite close to their voters while Labor candidates are quite distant from theirs (p.73).

And that, overall:

… many people who run for federal parliament have strong opinions on economic and social questions and that these opinions are not shared by a high proportion of voters (p.74).

I found the piece useful and informative. There was, however, a persistent problem in it which is common to so much academic analysis of contemporary events, even those well-above the academic ruck such as Katharine Betts and Judith Brett.

This is the persistent mischaracterisation and misconstrual of the nature of the economic reforms that have so marked the last 25 years across the developed world (and beyond).

Getting economic reform wrong
The first is the use of that peculiarly Australian term of art ‘economic rationalism’. This is strictly an Australian term whose usage is very unhelpful, since it encourages the (completely erroneous) implication that we are dealing with an Australian-specific tendency in public policy. It has also become associated with a lot of abusive and misleading baggage.

Like most academic commentators, Betts also displays no understanding of the fiscal pressure of an expanding welfare state (in 1965, 3.5% of working-age Australians were on government income support; by 2001 16% were) in motivating economic reform by increasing the premium on economic efficiency.

Then there is the use of that unfortunate academic term ‘neoliberal’ and its cognates. ‘Neoliberalism’ is just economic liberalism applied in the context of large welfare states. There is nothing ‘neo’ about it. It is not an ideology – governments right across the political spectrum have engaged in economic liberalisation. There has been no break in the liberal tradition, particularly not economic liberalism. (For example, Ludwig Erhard’s ‘bonfire of the regulations’ in postwar West Germany belongs firmly in this policy tradition, and is indistinguishable from policies since labelled ‘neoliberal’, but doesn’t ‘make the cut’ in the normal usage of the term because it happened before 1973 even though the term ‘neoliberal’ was sometimes used in Gernany to describe such views.) Furthermore, to the extent that economic liberalisation has been applied (as it frequently has) by social democratic governments, it simply represents a very long-term process in social democracy.

Patterns of social democracy
Social democracy is the merging of liberalism with socialism. The long-term tendency has been for the liberal element to increase and the socialist element to decrease because of the fundamental problem: socialism doesn’t work.

Stage one was the adoption of liberal politics (electoral politics, parliamentary government, etc.) Since the only ‘socialist’ politics were either mass agitation in the hope that something would turn up (Kautsky), revolutionary vanguardism (Lenin) or catalytic violence (Bakunin – even if he was an anarchist), this was hardly a surprising development in constitutional states, though it did generate huge and bitter ideological debates. Bernstein gave this adoption a Marxian gloss, but it was the choice adopted by mass socialist (and labour) parties everywhere that votes mattered.

Stage two was the abandonment of nationalisation as an active policy (the first stage in the acceptance of economic liberalism) when it became clear that public ownership didn’t create more efficient and effective economic units. This was the stage reached by Anglosphere Labour Parties in the late 1940s, the SPD in the late 1950s and the French Socialists in the mid-1980s under Mitterand.

Stage three was the adoption of privatisation and de-regulation (the second stage in the acceptance of economic liberalism) when the huge expansion in the welfare state increased the premium on economic efficiency to the extent that governments were faced with little choice. Antipodean Labor Governments (Hawke-Keating in Australia from 1983-1996, Lange-Douglas in NZ from 1984-89) were at the forefront of this because they also suffered export squeezes at the same time, greatly increasing the relative premium on economic efficiency. Betts notes the change (p.65), but the lack of understanding of the domestic fiscal pressure element means she misses the full significance – which would actually reinforce her point that the change was not made for ideological reasons. Similarly, that economic reform has allowed an expanded welfare state to be funded makes much more explicable the apparent antimony she finds between economic reform policies and candidates’ preferences for increased redistribution (pp69-70).

Stage four is the abandonment of the nationalisation of the household, as ‘passive welfare’ is equally discovered not to be the path to social improvement. Latham has been at the forefront of advocacy this but the most dramatic example of this is the welfare reform under Clinton in the US, under pressure from a Republican Congress. (Which, by the way, is yet another way the US has greatly improved its long-term position vis-a-vis Europe.)

The use of ‘neoliberal’ cuts events off from their history, both that of economic liberalism generally and trends in social democracy more particularly.
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Economic reform as electoral benefit
Betts also claims that the adoption of ‘neo-liberalism’ (sic) ‘almost certainly’ lost Labor votes (p.70). Huh? The incumbent Government with the best vote-retention performance since Federal politics became evenly competitive after the 1966 election until the Howard Government was the Hawke-Keating Government of 1983-1993. The average two-Party-preferred swing against the incumbent Government in the period 1969 to 2001 is -2.6%pts. The Hawke-Keating Government managed -1.5%pts, -0.9%pts, -0.9%pts, +1.5%pts for an average of -0.4%pts, by far the best performance. Even including the 1996 debacle (after Keating had adopted a very unpopular cultural program, had taken back the L-A-W tax cuts and could be punished for the 1992 recession without immediately getting a GST), the average was -1.4%pts. (Howard’s average 1996-2007 was 1.6%pts.) (For a more detailed discussion up to the 2001 federal election, see Incumbency as Wasting Asset: Structural shifts in federal politics, Australasian Parliamentary Review Autumn 2002 17(1), 17-25.)

The ALP is currently in power in five States and both Territories, in all cases on a promise of not screwing up the finances. Betts’ own data shows that certain key elements of economic liberalism are more accepted by voters (including Labor voters) than candidates (especially Labor candidates: compared to Labor candidates, Labor voters are more keen on tax cuts, less keen on more social services spending, less keen on income redistribution and more likely to believe high taxes have negative effects). How can adopting economic reform be said to have ‘almost certainly’ cost Labor votes?

Candidates as ‘cosmopolitans’
Where Betts is actually relying on her own analytical skills rather than following unfortunate academic fashion (for why academic fashion might tend to be unreliable, see this post), the content is much better. Betts’ thesis is that the ‘new class’ has developed a ‘cosmopolitan’ ideology that has become strongly attached to the ALP. In talking about the move of the ‘cosmopolitans’ of ‘new class’ to being firm Labor supporters, Betts stresses, citing the work of Brett, the effect of Whitlam and his 1975 dismissal. That may well have been an aggravating factor that may well help explain some of the intensity of intelligentsia conformity in Australia. Surely, however, there are similar patterns of adherence to left-of-centre parties by this group elsewhere in Western democracies.

Since Betts has provided full tables, one can examine the data oneself. It is notable, for example, that candidates tend to keener on redistribution than voters. Not so surprising, gives a bigger role for people like them. Candidates are much less impressed with capital punishment than the general electorate – capital punishment means a more horrifying role for people like them.

By far the largest and quickest shift in voter sentiment was the collapse of hostility to the present level of migrant intake between 1996 and 2001. In 1996, 63% of voters thought too many migrants were being allowed in. In 2001, 34% did. This suggests that Howard had significant success in defusing immigration as an issue. (I noted the strong evidence from Robert Fogel of how negative the effects of mass immigration were for resident workers in the US in the C19th.)

The general trend of opinion is moving in favour of the views of the ‘cosmopolitans’. Given that their views dominate the universities, the school system, the national broadcaster, the ‘quality’ media and is a strong presence in much of the popular media, it is hard to know whether to be impressed by their success in moving opinion in their direction or by their failures to convince a majority. (The political saliency of some of these issues has also shifted somewhat.)

In 1987, 80% of voters thought high taxes reduce work effort.
In 2001, 68% did.

In 1987, 45% of voters thought income and wealth should be redistributed to ordinary working people.
In 2001, 55% did.

In 1987, 65% of voters preferred reducing taxes to increasing social services.
In 2001, 42% did.
(As Betts notes, more recent figures that specify more spending on education and health get stronger results. Such spending is more clearly of general benefit than transfers to more marginal sections of society.)

In 1987, 19% of voters thought equal opportunities for women hadn’t gone far enough.
In 2001, 38% did.

In 1987, 60% of voters thought that the dealth penalty should be re-introduced for murder.
In 2001, 56% did.

In 1990 (the question wasn’t asked in 1987), 58% of voters thought too many migrants were coming in.
In 2001, 34% did.

In 1990 (the question wasn’t asked in 1987), 21% of voters thought equal opportunities for migrants had gone too far.
In 2001, 34% did.

In 1987, 70% of voters thought that govt. assistance for Aborigines had gone too far.
In 2001, 47% did.

In 1987, 69% of voters thought that Aboriginal land rights had gone too far.
In 2001, 50% did.

As an aside, who thinks that coverage and commentary on the ‘national broadcaster’ comes even remotely close to reflecting the spread of opinions among those whose taxes pay for it? This is, of course, a general problem for public broadcasting.

Voters and candidates
But the ‘headliner’ data is the gap between Labor candidates and Labor voters. With the exception of their ranking of environmental issues, Labor, Democrat and Green candidates are essentially a homogeneous group, all very distant from working-class voters. As Betts says:

The most marked division within Australian politics is not between different groups of voters (working versus middle class) but between a majority of voters, including the traditional working class, and candidates for the Labor, Green and Democrat parties (p.79).

Not only are there smaller average differences between Coalition and Labor voters than between Labor voters and Labor candidates, the average differences are smaller between Labor voters and Coalition candidates. On economic issues (effect of taxes, redistribution, tax cuts or social service expansion) the average differences over the 14 years from 1987 to 2001 were:
ALP candidates and voters: 35%pts
Coalition candidates and ALP voters, 29%pts
ALP voters and Coalition voters, 16%pts
Coalition voters and Coalition candidates, 13%pts.

The pattern of ALP candidate differences from their voters being greater than Coalition candidate differences from ALP voters is even starker on cultural questions (govt. help for women, death penalty, immigration intake, govt. help for migrants, govt. help for Aborigines, Aboriginal land rights). There the average differences were:
ALP candidates and voters: 38%pts
Coalition candidates and ALP voters, 14%pts
Coalition voters and Coalition candidates, 12%pts
ALP voters and Coalition voters, 11%pts.

(Calculations by me from the data supplied in the article.)

If democracy is about representing the preferences of voters, then the ‘new class’ has stolen the working-class’s Party from it. And the Coalition is more ‘democratic’ in that sense than the ALP.

An even more stark example is the average differences in 2001 between ALP candidates and:
Democrat candidates, 6%pts
Greens candidates, 7%pts
Greens voters, 19%pts
Social professionals, 26%pts
Democrat voters, 28%pts
Labor voters, 37%pts
Working class voters, 48%pts.

ALP candidates are closer to Green and Democrat voters than they are to Labor voters and a long way from the views of working-class voters. Hence, the rarity of Labor politicians sticking up for working-class values, and the denunciation of Martin Ferguson, on the last significant occasion that happened.

As Betts’ says:

But the old meanings of left and right have changed to such a degree that the clearest way for these [Labor] politicians to see their constituents is not as old comrades whom they are proud to lead and protect, but as narrow-minded strangers tending towards the racist right (p.80).

Betts makes the point that the gap between the private views of ALP candidates and their voters is not necessarily disabling, provided Leader and policies can bridge the gap. Where, however, such bridging is not seen as sincere (as over border control in 2001, despite identical policies), there may be a price. (Betts points out the biggest gap between Coalition voters and candidates is over immigration – One Nation provides an obvious cautionary tale there. One that the recent success of the BNP in Britain suggests the British political class has not learned.)

Betts wondered whether Latham’s attempt to strike a more independent notion over the American alliance will be all that successful. In 2001, those prepared to put ‘not very much’ or ‘none at all’ trust in the US helping Australia if our security was threatened were:
Coalition candidates, 5%
Coalition voters, 8%
All voters, 16%
ALP voters, 18%
Labor candidates, 44%

Latham’s stand may have accorded with Labor candidates, but was more likely to have ended up just accentuating the difference between them and the bulk of the electorate.

The data makes quite clear how rational the adoption of anti-democratic politics by the ‘cosmopolitans’ is: their attempts to acts as opinion ‘gatekeepers’ excluding alternative views from legitimacy (thus, bipartisanship in immigration is praised when it excludes popular preferences and denounced when it reflects them), their preference for increased judicial activism, for increased internationalisation (reference of decisions to unelected international bodies and use of such decisions to delegitimise dissenting local preferences) and so on.

Betts stresses the conflict between the internationalist views of the ‘cosmopolitans’ and the national loyalties of most voters. You can read this as a sign of the 'cosmopolitans' more elevated moral sense. Alternatively, it is a product of status-seeking against the society around them by asserting themselves as superior to it and most of their fellow citizens. Typical reactions to international events suggest strongly that the latter is more important. Consider the case of the Falklands War, where a military junta which had conducted a ‘dirty war’ which involved killed thousands of people like those same cosmopolitans militarily seized a territory to which it had no valid claim and whose residents did not want them there. Yet the effort to military retrieve the Falklands was widely denounced within ‘cosmopolitan’ circles: apparently being anti-Western was enough, nothing was so evil as defending the West with military force against a murderous military junta. (Whose defeat, we note, has resulted in Argentina being a democracy ever since.)

Examples have multiplied since. ‘Cosmopolitan’ ideology expresses a sneering superiority to the society around it, it does not engender it. There is no requirement from simple global humanitarianism to see the most democratic, free, prosperous, societies in history only in terms of moral failing. (To the extent that they are denounced because other societies are poor yet also denounced for being rich – thus being guilty of both being rich and because other people aren't – while any suggestion that less successful societies may seek to use the societies who successfully achieved mass prosperity as positive models was long regarded as risible.) Particularly not for the emotional heat so often involved.

If the 'cosmopolitan' outlook is a matter of status-seeking through assertion against the societies around them, clearly hostility to right-of-centre politics, and culturally assertive and confident right-of-centre figures (and the most powerful Western society), are going to be inherent parts of the package. There is still much to be learnt from Katharine Betts’s analysis.

Clearly there is also an issue in gaps between the ‘political class’ and the general electorate. And not only in Australia: a recent Washington Post poll found (question 40) that 58% want smaller government with fewer services, 38% what larger government with more services. Perhaps not quite what the Washington Democrats are currently delivering or the Republicans previously delivered.

ADDENDA: A wonderfully cynical view of the politics are big-spending, big-regulating government produces:

Any government that annually spends $3-plus trillions of dollars, and regulates trillions upon trillions of dollars worth of other resources, will inevitably be targeted by special interests and their lobbyists. And any government manned by persons capable of the duplicity, pandering, and cheap theatrics required to win elections will inevitably and without shame put itself at the service of these special interests.

The nature of social democracy

Andrew Norton posted the question of why there were not any great social democratic thinkers. He was responding to a comment in an article by Tim Soutphommasane:

… social democracy has never had a political philosopher who has succeeded in offering a comprehensive articulation of principles.
… But social democrats arguably lack a political philosopher of the same stature as John Locke (classical liberalism), John Stuart Mill (progressive liberalism), Friedrich von Hayek (libertarianism), or Edmund Burke (conservatism).
The closest we get to an authoritative statement of social justice is the one offered by American philosopher John Rawls. Even then, his two major works, A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, at best offer highly influential statements of an American Left-liberalism whose application elsewhere is limited by the vagaries of American constitutionalism.

The following is a more extended version of the comment I made on Andrew’s post.

Social democracy is a merging between liberalism and socialism. It starts with one strand of socialism taking on political liberalism (elections, Parliamentarianism, etc) in the later C19th, rejecting revolutionary politics. The “revisionism” of Eduard Bernstein represented the embracing of such politics within German social democracy. In places where the revolutionary tradition had little hold, it was natural for socialist and union activists to embrace a version of electoral politics: which is to say, in that context, a form of political liberalism, even if their mode of operation was generally more collectivist than that of the established political forces.

Then, at various times, forms of social liberalism (essentially, extending equality before the law to Jews, women, blacks, gays, etc; removing restrictions on aspects of personal life such as censorship, availability of contraception, etc) have been embraced by social democracy. As Andrew pointed out in reply, the focus in doing so has remained on equality. This seems correct to me: my point is not that social democracy is a form of liberalism, but that social democrats have increasingly adopted liberalism. (Since what the US nowadays calls 'liberalism' seems to be essentially politically cross-dressing social democracy, it also makes any differences between the two ever more minor.)

Since the mid 1950s, social democracy has taken on various aspects of economic liberalism (abandoning further nationalisation, later moving to deregulation and privatisation motivated by a concern to have an economically and financially sustainable welfare state). The idea of nationalizing the economy has been abandoned. The difficult issues now are how much nationalizing households is effective or needs to be retreated from.

Essentially, social democracy took on aspects of liberalism either because socialism did not have anything specifically useful or because of widening realisation that such socialism did not really work. The “romantics” have always claimed that each step is some sort of sell-out of socialism or social justice ideals. The reality is that brute experience has been driving policy in a liberalising direction is much less palatable. (Hence, for example, the denunciations of “neoliberal” policies.)

A case in point was listening to an ABC radio presenter give a very soft interview with Indian writer Arundhati Roy, who complained about the rise of Hindu nationalism, treatment of Indian Muslims and the growth of “neoliberal” policies. In the interview (really, mutual agreement) during the discussion of the last, neither the “Hindu rate of growth” or the Permit Raj warranted any mention. Yet the change in Indian policy cannot be understood without that context—especially relevant given Roy’s apparent nostalgia for the economic policies of the pre-1991 era.

To return to the original observation, if social democracy is a process of socialism retreating and liberalism advancing, an evolving merger of political traditions, it is hard to see how it could generate any great thinkers.

Moral universalism versus moral instrumentalism

One of the enduring divisions in the Western left has been between “anti-fascism” (that opposition to fascism is such an imperative any useful allies should be sought) and “anti-imperialism” (the central moral problem is the wrongness of the capitalist West).

The Euston Manifesto is a recent manifestation of the anti-fascism-is-trumps outlook. [So is Richard Just's recent essay in The New Republic (via Norm): he characterises the position as human rights being trumps, which is a more general label, though possibly somewhat American in terminology.] This outlook is one of moral universalism (i.e. a common set of moral principles for everyone) and having no truck with movements such as Hezbollah and Hamas nor regimes such as Saddam Hussein’s or the Assad's. [A nice statement of anti-imperialism not being enough is here. Clive James propounds a firm moral universalism and criticises the reticence of Western feminists and intellectuals over (dis)honourcide and non-Western repression of women here. In support of moral universalism, there is evidence that children engage in common moral reasoning across cultures.]

Marxist philosophers Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s book Empire is something of a flagship for the anti-imperialist tendency. One adherent of revolutionary socialism puts the matter very clearly:

To put the matter as starkly as possible: from the standpoint of Marxism and international socialism an illiterate, conservative, superstitious Muslim Palestinian peasant who supports Hamas is more progressive than an educated liberal atheist Israeli who supports Zionism (even critically).

As clear an example of “anti-imperialism” trumping “anti-fascism” as one could hope for.

Such a view also abandons any sense of moral universalism: the criteria of opposition to Western capitalism trumps all else. A form of what we can reasonably call moral instrumentalism: having some goal determining moral judgement.

This sort of view is often criticised as moral relativism, but that is not very accurate. So-called “moral relativists” typically conjoin moral absolutism about the evils of Western racism, sexism, global warming etc with moral relativism about other matters. What such folk are typically displaying is moral instrumentalism: the overriding goal in such cases usually being to establish their own membership of the moral elite. A form of moral instrumentalism entirely compatible with judging things according to the goal of the revolutionary transformation of society, for what are those who work for such glorious transformation other than a moral elite?

Buddhism and Christianity—both religions of moral order (i.e. their injunctions do not purport to be laws, however much they may hold that their moral perspectives should animate the content and implementation of laws)—are typically morally universalist religions. An example of this is Pope Paul III’s 1537 bull Sublimus Dei which held of the inhabitants of the Americas that:

… the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.

A moral perspective that leads quite naturally to such statements as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Conversely, Islam, a religion of social order (i.e. it does purport to provide binding laws) is typically a religion of moral instrumentalism: the goal of universal submission to Allah as sovereign legislator of the universe is paramount. This leads to a very different perspective on what may be done to non-believers in the furtherance of this goal and to have a moral and legal order which rates people according to how much they adhere to this goal. [It also means that apostasy is a form of treason, hence its traditional penalty being death.] This moral instrumentalism also leads critics of Islam to make much of the doctrine of taqiyya or deception.

Bertrand Russell noted the similarity between Islam and Bolshevism:

Bolshevism combines the characteristics of the French Revolution with those of the rise of Islam....Marx has taught that Communism is fatally predestined to come about; this produces a state of mind not unlike that of the early successors of Mahommet....Among religions, Bolshevism is to be reckoned with Mohammedanism rather than with Christianity and Buddhism. Christianity and Buddhism are primarily personal religions, with mystical doctrines and a love of contemplation. Mohammedanism and Bolshevism are practical, social, unspiritual, concerned to win the empire of this world".

Not only do they share having a universal goal, but they are also morally instrumentalist: making moral judgments about actions, institutions and people according to how much they adhere to their universal goal.
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Judaism, as a religion of community order (having religious laws which bind the community of believers but do not have any authority over non-believers: Ismaili Islam has a similar perspective) is legalistic but is not morally instrumentalist. Indeed, the Noahide laws provide a form of moral universalism.

Edmund Standing has a post on the group blog Butterflies and Wheels on the far-left campaign to silence critics of Islam. Standing is referring to the phenomena whereby criticism of Islam is taken to be criticism of Muslims so analogous to (or a form of) racism: hence the term Islamophobia. An ostentatious moral concern displayed by people who would never worry about criticism of Christianity being criticism of Christians nor either being any form of racism. [A nice tongue-in-cheek check-list for "Islamophobia"].

The “Islamophobia” nonsense seems to be just a fairly grotesque form of ideological hypocrisy, but makes more sense if one examines the underlying worldview. Particularly if we see it as a manifestation of moral instrumentalism.

Standing is examining patterns among adherents of various forms of Marxism, so starts his analysis there:

Marxism is, at heart, to use the 'buzz words', a 'totalising narrative'. It is essentially based around a deterministic view of history which has much in common with conspiracy theory and theology. The Marxist historical vision incorporates disparate historical events into one unified narrative through the notion of class struggle. Where the religious see the 'plan' and guiding hand of God as the underlying reality that ultimately 'makes sense of' history, the Marxist sees the ongoing phenomenon of 'class conflict' as being the glue that binds historical events and social changes into an intelligible, explainable whole. As with all totalising narratives, the Marxist vision is at heart a simplistic and often black and white system of thought that can be used to 'explain' any social phenomena as having relevance to the Marxist understanding of history and politics.

While there are followers of Marx whose world-view is rather more sophisticated than that, Standing is describing a strong tendency within Marxism—particularly Leninism and its derivatives.

This outlook means that:

An immediate problem with Marx's analysis of religion is that it greatly oversimplifies the phenomenon of religious belief. In this view, religion is not an end in itself but must always be seen as a 'cover' for something else, something politically intelligible. Marxist materialism overcomes religion, then, not through criticising religious texts and doctrines but by looking beyond them to what is perceived to be their underlying 'cause': political and economic oppression.

Just as the more obsessive monotheist believers might see the hand of Satan everywhere, such ardent Marxists are always looking for the “underlying” class reality. Needless to say, this is a massively impoverished (indeed delusional) way of looking at the world. In either case, however, the seekers always seem to find what they look for.

Of course, we can all engage in dubious framings:

Many Marxists see the resurgence of political Islam not as part of a rising tide of irrationalism but rather as an essentially political and rational response to the supposedly oppressive and intrinsically 'racist' and 'imperialist' nature of Western liberal democracy.

The resurgence of political Islam can reasonably be seen as something other than part of a “rising tide of irrationalism”. But Standing’s point about the falsity in obsessively seeing the West as having such great causal potency that it trumps everything else is a sound one.

Seeing religion as a mere epiphenomenon on deeper class issues has natural consequences:

It is rare to see the Marxist writers who currently engage in a McCarthyite denunciation of critics of Islam and Islamist organisations actively engage with the religion of Islam itself. This is unsurprising, as their concern is not defending Islam but rather (supposedly) defending 'Muslims' (often seen as a monolithic block), who are seen to be the latest victims of the Western bourgeois Capitalist conspiracy. In the strange worldview of these Marxist campaigners against 'Islamophobia', almost any criticism of Islam, Islamist politics, or Muslim organisations is seen to be little more than a thinly veiled form of 'racism'. The fact that these writers apparently cannot distinguish between legitimate criticism of a religious belief system and its texts and outright expressions of racial hatred says a lot about the simplistic nature of their worldview and their underlying anti-intellectualism. There is something sinister and totalitarian about the far-left's campaign against critics of Islam. It is a dishonest campaign that seeks to silence dissent and critical thinking that does not conform to the 'party line' through demonisation and name calling.

This stream of thought then feeds into wider hypocrisies. Notably the “rednecks have no speech rights” attempts to legislate against “hate speech”—laws that are offensive both on freedom of speech grounds and in the patent hypocrisy of their implementation. In practice, it is clear that the guardians of such matters only care about some types of “hate speech”—those instances offensive to progressivist opinion.

Attempts to use the cry of “racism!” against dissent has lots of problems:

False accusations of racism can have very serious repercussions, and falsely equating criticism of religion with racism is not only slanderous towards anti-racist critics of Islam and Islamism but also risks trivialising the very real phenomenon of genuine racial prejudice and hatred.

But what is really going on is trying to shore up various worldviews and de-legitimise dissent there from. Widening the definition of ‘racist’ narrows the range of acceptable discussion.

In this case, the object is to keep the focus on Western sins (real, exaggerated and alleged) rather than dealing with things in their own terms. The perspective that was maintained by all those who followed Stalin’s lead from August 24 1939 to 22 June 1941. Of course, that did not work out so well for Stalin, who found the Nazis were a much more serious military threat than the Western allies: just as jihadis can recruit far more easily from a much greater population base than Western revolutionary socialists. Including people with sufficient commitment to kill and die. Islamic radicalism clearly has greater appeal within Europe as an “ideology of contestation” and has supplanted radical secularism in its activist appeal within Muslim communities in Europe and elsewhere.

If the attempt to police public discourse is rational enough in an instrumental sense, the underlying world view is less so:

Far-left politics are not based on a realistic and rational assessment of the world. As I have argued previously, 'revolutionary' leftists are 'dreamers of the day': fantasists whose worldview is grounded in a conspiratorial and deterministic framework; black and white thinkers whose rigid idealism mirrors religious faith. Once this is understood, the current 'left-wing' campaign of demonising liberal, rationalist critics of Islam and Islamist politics is placed in its proper context. When liberal humanists and progressives find themselves routinely denounced for supposedly holding 'Islamophobic' (and by inference, 'racist') views, it is clear that the self-appointed witch finders throwing around such accusations have an underlying agenda – a political delusion based on faith in the existence an imagined 'racist imperialist' conspiracy and a conviction that they are a morally pure elite who will one day lead ' an aroused people' to revolutionary glory.

Yes, there is the animating sense of moral identity: that is very important to understand what is going on. But, as with religion, one has to understand that there are other hopes and fears involved. One of the notable features of our time is not merely the far-left effectively making common cause with jihadists (particularly Hamas and Hezbollah), it is people moving from Marxism to Islamism (including the full jihadi package). For Marxism and Islamism have a similar underlying appeal. What Francois Furet called the revolutionary illusion:

Modern society … is characterised by a lack of politics in relation to the private, individual existence. It is blind to the idea of the common good, since the members of society, consumed with relativism, have their own individual ideas of the common good and modern society can conceive of it only in terms of a taste for well-being, which divides its members rather than unifying them and thus destroys the community supposedly constructed in its name. The revolutionary idea is the impossible attempt to circumvent that calamity.

So is the Islamist idea.

Revolutionary Marxism and Islamism (including the jihadis) not only have common enemies, at the deepest level they have common ambitions and a common judgment that their end-goal is so worthy that it trumps all other considerations. They share a universalist ambition of achieving profound social harmony with moral instrumentalism and a sense of identity of being an elite validated by that. No wonder Islamism has been recruiting from former Marxists and no wonder so many Marxists (and similar) find even jihadis preferable to their mutual enemies. Deep calls to deep, as my old teacher David Stove would say.

Moral universalists of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but the chains of failing to understand what is going on.

ADDENDA This post has been updated, additions in [square brackets].

The Lost Literature of Socialism

Like most of the sins of materialist politics, killing people by category had religious precursors. The Islamic injunction that polytheists and animists had to become Muslim or die and Christian endorsement of extermination of "sodomites", not to mention of "witches" and the odd heretic, obviously well pre-date the secular versions of killing by category.

Nevertheless, genocide in secular politics—including extermination of people by race, ethnic or class category—is a socialist idea whose only significant public advocates from the 1840s to the 1940s all called themselves socialists. So George Watson tells us in his slim but revealing volume The Lost Literature of Socialism. It starts with Marx and Engels writing in the Neue Rheinsiche Zeitung in January 1849:

The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward,

includes H. G. Wells concluding his 1902 Anticipations with a programme of socialist genocide, George Bernard Shaw welcoming the Soviet adoption of the exterminatory principle in a 1933 preface to On the Rocks, a principle thoroughly endorsed by Lenin in his 1908 essay Lessons of the Commune:

there are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies in open armed clashes.

Plus less public support—Jack London supporting it in private correspondence, Virginia Woolf complaining in her diary on 9 January 1915 about meeting a distressing line of imbeciles "It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed", Beatrice Webb complaining at a 1932 tea party about the "very bad stage management" which allowed British visitors to the Ukraine to see cattle-trucks of starving “enemies of the state”

Ridiculous to let you see them … The English are always so sentimental. You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs.

Shaw writing to Webb on 6 February 1938 that it was perfectly reasonable for the state to weed out “undesirable” strains:

We ought to tackle the Jewish question by admitting the right of States to make eugenic experiments by weeding out any strains they think undesirable, but insisting they do so humanely as they can afford to, and not to shock civilization by such misdemeanours as the expulsion and robbery of Einstein.

All culminating in Lenin and Stalin putting theory into practice, as did that most embarrassing of all socialists, Adolf Hitler.

Of course, it was far from true that all socialists endorsed genocide (Orwell being one of very many examples of very much not doing so). But if all endorsers of genocide for a century called themselves socialists, and if socialists introduced the notion as a systematic program into secular political thought, then something is going on.
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But the socialist provenance of genocide has gone down the memory hole. As has quite a lot of ideas from socialism’s history, a forgetting that is also the subject of George Watson’s The Lost Literature of Socialism. A volume which deserved somewhat better of its publisher—there are missing spaces between words, one sudden lurch into a different typeface and a few editing errors (Marx and Engels did not publish in the Neue Rheinsiche Zeitung of 1949).

Despite the failings of the publisher, Watson’s book is highly readable. It is a book about (and against) forgetting (Watson quotes Milan Kundera’s dictum that

the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting

on the first page of the first chapter). About how ideas, critiques and arguments can flourish and then be forgotten: sometimes to be re-invented and sometimes to remain in obscurity.

Something else that has gone down the memory hole is the association of socialism with imperialism. All the above were proponents of European imperialism and, from Jack London on, of specifically white imperialism. Again, practice followed theory. Socialist states have been systematically far more militarised than capitalist ones, including engaging in old-fashioned territorial imperialism (the Soviet occupations of Georgia, the Baltic States, parts of Poland, Romania and Prussia; imposition of controlled regimes under occupation on Mongolia, Eastern Europe and Afghanistan; China’s occupation of Tibet). Lenin may have denounced “capitalist” imperialism, but he was an ardent practitioner of the “proletarian” variety.

Then there was National Socialist imperialism. Nazism was a socialist ideology though Nazi Germany was no more a socialist state than Sweden is: in both societies, productive capital being mostly privately owned and exchangeable in markets. (So, if Sweden is a socialist state, then so was Nazi Germany; if Nazi Germany was a capitalist state, then so is Sweden.)

But Watson concentrates on socialist writings far more than their practical realisations (although such clearly gives grim context to said writings). His preface explains that the book is about writings by socialists and about socialism, it is not a history of socialism. In the first chapter, he notes that socialism starts in about the 1840s but has late C18th precursors, and that there is a tendency to have a somewhat reverent attitude to its founding fathers. So much so, that how much perspectives have changed has been greatly obscured.

His first chapter cites John Millar’s forgotten 1771 book The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, for

there are still social historians who take it for granted, for example, that comprehensive theories of social difference began with Marx, although Marx himself did not think so (p.8)

to examine what was a commonplace at one time becomes forgotten or obscured later. Millar’s book is the first theoretical book on social difference in all Europe and has entirely passed out of mind.

But Watson shows that people often became socialists prior to reading any of the key texts. Indeed, Louis Althusser managed to make an academic and intellectual career as an interpreter of Marx without bothering to read much of Marx at all: and not a word of Aristotle or Kant, despite lecturing on both (p.13).

Watson brings to light a series of prescient critiques of socialism published in the C19th and early C20th that predicted (accurately) the tyrannical tendency inherent in the socialist project. So Max Hirsch, a radical and disciple of Henry George, published in Australia in 1901 his Democracy versus Socialism warning of socialism creating an “all-pervading despotism” under the rule of a new managerial class (as, of course, happened in all the Leninist states). But Hirsch was also confident that his warnings would not be heeded; because socialists were deaf, confident in their conviction that social reform could only mean socialism (p.14).

Watson delineates false convictions about socialism that have become orthodoxy—that socialism is always left-wing and can never be conservative; that it was always about class and never about race (so can never have advocated genocide). And related convictions—that Left means radical, that revolution means radical change.

In his second chapter, Watson examines Millar’s book in its context, starting with Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois (1748) and later writings by Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith all of whom, like Millar, were interested in social differentiation and none of whom used the modern concept of class, which they had never heard of. For them, social differentiation was about subordination of ranks: rank being a much more differentiated concept that the crudity of class and one far more in tune with common understandings of how things are. They also saw human societies as displaying an underlying constancy of human nature in the midst of flux, wealth as an agency of change and economic structures as underlying historical movement.

Watson is at pains to make two points here: as Marx and Engels themselves rightly said, Marx was not original in seeing economics and social differentiation as drivers of history. So claims that comprehensive social analysis was born in the 1840s are false and based on ignorance of both Marx and of intellectual history. Second, what made the previous tradition (which in various forms stretches back to Aristotle) unappealing (and Marx appealing) is that the earlier tradition saw social differentiation as desirable.

The third chapter is on the idea of conservative revolution. Watson establishes the idea that a “real” revolution was one of radical change very much dates from the French Revolution. It was not an idea that had struck earlier times. For them, revolutions were part of a cycle of history and could easily be preservative: such as the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Indeed, as he points out, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 was a conservative revolution (against the modernising secularism of the Shah). Watson does, however, overreach in this chapter. He wants to define revolution as any violent seizure of power and he tries to maintain that revolution was only conceived of in conservative terms. The first strikes me as too broad a definition and the second goes beyond his evidence. Indeed, against the notion of the recurring cycles of history that people typically operated under.

Chapter four is on the Tory tradition of socialism. That socialism was a conservative idea was a commonplace of early C19th thought. Liberal capitalism was transforming society and overturning old social norms and arrangements. Socialism—by its hostility to markets and private property—was seen as a natural way to stop such transformations and preserve a more static, status-bound order. As, indeed, it has proved to be. China, after all, abandoned socialist economics not because it promoted too much change but because it permitted too little—as Bertold Brecht would remark

communism is not radical: capitalism is radical (p.44).

While, as Watson points out, all the Leninist states promptly became very hierarchical societies. The Tory socialist John Ruskin, particularly his book Unto this last, was cited by many British Labour figures as deeply influencing their own political thought.

And the answer to question of why socialists declaring themselves to be Tory, or Tory influenced, was not denounced by liberal and radical opinion was: they were, the debate has just been forgotten. The binaries and simplicities of Left v Right, socialist=Left, Left=change have proven too powerful.

The next chapter examines de Tocqueville (and other liberal thinkers and writers) prescient discussion of the burden of liberty. There were and are psychic and social burdens to liberty and autonomy, and liberals such as de Tocqueville, Dickens, Turgenev, Ibsen, Henry James, John Stuart Mill were well aware of it and wrote about it perceptively. They did not turn against freedom but, particularly de Tocqueville and Mill (indeed, Mill from de Tocqueville) saw limited and representative government as the way to deal with such pressures.

Watson then moves on to two forgotten French critiques of socialism by Adolphe Thiers (De la propriete) and Alfred Sudre (Histoire du Communisme) writing in the context of the 1848 revolution that overthrew the Orleanist monarchy, briefly led to the Second Republic and then the Second Empire under Napoleon III (who regarded himself as a socialist). Sudre’s book was the first history of socialism (or communism) in any language. It was a critique of the idea that the abolition of property will help the poor—from the other side of the dead of the collectivisation famines and the grinding poverty of Leninist states, hardly an outrageous argument. But one mounted decades before 1917 and just as The Communist Manifesto was being published. Sudre held socialism to be a conservative, hierarchical and, indeed, naturally tyrannical idea, as the powerful will just use the state for their purposes. Thiers mounted a similar, but more narrowly economic, argument. Sudre’s book is apparently not mentioned in any history of socialism.

Mill does not refer to either book in his (published posthumously) point-by-point critique of Louis Blanc’s 1839 Organisation du Travail. Mill attacks socialists for their recklessness:

Those who would play this game on the strength of their private opinion, unconfirmed as yet by any experimental verification … must have a serene confidence in their own wisdom, on the one hand, and a recklessness of other people’s sufferings on the other (pp69-70).

Again, from the other side of the mountain of corpses piled up from 1917 to now in socialist “experiments”, Mill was clearly spot on.

Watson devotes a chapter to Hitler’s citing of Marxism as the key source for National Socialism, Hitler’s repeated private and public declarations of being a socialist and how such has been fairly systematically ignored since 1945. (Hitler's claims seem much less strange if socialism is seen as creating a static and hierarchical society.) Another chapter examines the genocidal theme within socialist writings from Marx to the Holocaust. A chapter on Orwell follows, which is well worth reading on its own: a deeply perspicacious discussion of what Orwell was about as a writer. Though it is somewhat disconnected from the rest of the book: the connections being that Orwell was very much not a person for forgetting—struggling revealingly with how to have truthful experiences, and then how to evoke them in ways that were both truthful and persuasive—was deeply humanitarian and (along with Koestler) revisited themes (the hierarchical, status-driven, static nature of socialism) that they seem to have independently rediscovered, in ignorance of previous writers.

I am not entirely convinced by Watson’s use of the word conservative. He seems to mean it in the sense of preservative or static or even returning to, but they are not the same. Abolishing or hugely restricting legal private property seems a fairly dramatic change: in a capitalist society, full socialism is not conservative. But that it will then create a static (and, indeed, hierarchical and controlled) order is also true. As is that socialism was often seen as a way of preserving traditional morality (again, not without reason). Still, one can agree with his underlying thesis while not entirely agreeing with how he expresses it.

Watson concludes with a final, brief, chapter on The Great Amnesia summarising how ideas, arguments and critiques have arisen and been forgotten. The preference for simple binaries (particularly Left-versus-Right) he regards as a prime culprit for the

successive series of suppressions, a repeated refusal to look (p.105).

That and the sheer embarrassment (for both conservatives and socialists) of finding socialism has often been seen as conservative, the embarrassment that genocide was born on the Left and within socialism, that Hitler was avowedly a socialist, that there were capitalists who profited from Lenin’s rule. As Watson says, there are more comfortable things to believe in.

But that truth may not be comfortable does not make it any less the truth. Watson’s slim volume is a worthy blow against forgetting. One suspects, however, that the forces for forgetting are too strong, even as socialism slides into the detritus of history.