A View From The Left- Origins of Scientific Socialism

Workers Vanguard No. 1097	7 October 2016

Origins of Scientific Socialism By Joseph Seymour

(Young Spartacus pages)

The following is an edited version of an August 20 talk given in the Bay Area by Spartacist League Central Committee member Joseph Seymour.

There does not exist in the U.S. a major party or mass movement that calls itself socialist, much less Marxist. So those of you who are not members of the Spartacist League, how did you come to be sufficiently interested in, or sympathetic to, Marxism to attend this class and presumably do the preparatory readings for it?

Probably you have confronted the contradiction between your own liberal beliefs and values and the realities of American society. You’re likely outraged by racist police atrocities, the rampant killing of unarmed black men who are not even engaged in what’s considered a crime in the U.S. today. You’re likely appalled by the vast and growing economic gulf between the wealthy and the rest of the populace. This was the main focus of the Occupy movement of a few years ago. In short, you want to change society in the U.S., and presumably in the rest of the world, according to your beliefs and values so as to create a good and just society.

If so, you’re in very good company. Obviously, Karl Marx did not begin as a Marxist. He began as what could be called a liberal idealist. This is how Marx expressed his personal philosophy in an essay on graduating from the German equivalent of high school at the age of 17:

“History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy....

“If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people.”

— “Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession” (1835)

Most of the members of the Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth Clubs were originally motivated by sentiments, though not as eloquently expressed, similar to that of the young Karl Marx. I myself traversed the path from liberal idealism to Marxism as a high school and college student in the late 1950s and early ’60s. I don’t know how political philosophy is taught in the U.S. today in middle school and high school. In my day, we were taught that the principles underlying American society and its government were expressed in the famous passage in the 1776 Declaration of Independence: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” I believed that at the time.

In the late ’50s and early ’60s, the U.S. was engaged in the so-called Cold War with the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Any high school or college student who was seriously concerned with politics had to confront the question of whether capitalism or socialism was the better economic system, that is, better in terms of their own basic beliefs and values. I did not support communism as practiced in the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, I concluded that socialism, not capitalism, better corresponded to my own liberal principles. If all men have a right to the pursuit of happiness, then they should have equal material resources to do so, at least initially. Obviously, someone born into an affluent or even average middle-class family in the U.S. was much better positioned to pursue personal happiness than someone born into a peasant family in India or Brazil. In other words, I drew socialist conclusions from liberal premises. And this was not unusual at the time. A number of my classmates in high school and college pretty much thought the same way.

Now, there were two basic differences between what I would describe as my liberal idealist concept of socialism and Marxism. One, I viewed socialism primarily as a means of bringing about an egalitarian redistribution of consumption levels, or living standards, especially on a global scale. I did not then view socialism primarily as a means of raising production and labor productivity to a far higher level than that prevailing in even the most advanced capitalist countries of North America and West Europe.

It’s quite possible, even likely, that some of you have been engaged in environmentalist causes and campaigns. We’ve written a fair amount on environmentalist radicalism as an intellectual current and movement. Several years ago we wrote a reply to a lengthy letter to Workers Vanguard by a left-wing environmentalist, in which we explained our differences with what could be called the environmentalist worldview or mindset. A key passage from that response is:

“The basic goal of Marxist socialism is to liberate the creative powers of humanity, which have been shackled by the capitalist system and earlier forms of class-divided society. Marxists regard the development of the productivity of human labor power as the prime mover of social evolution and the underpinning of historical progress.”

— “In Defense of Science and Technology,” WV No. 843, 4 March 2005

The other major difference between my liberal idealist concept of socialism and Marxism was that I had no idea how to achieve the kind of society I thought should exist, but did not. It was an ideal, not a guide to action. If all men have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, how come they actually don’t have these rights and never have had? There have been constant wars throughout history, wars in which not only soldiers but also civilian populations including children have been killed en masse. Slavery and the subjugation of one people by another have been commonplace throughout history. In fact, the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, was himself a slaveowner. He justified black chattel slavery in practice, if not at the level of political philosophy.

When I first encountered Marxism, black people in the American South were deprived of all democratic rights and lived under a racist police state. Blacks in South Africa, the large majority of the population, were exploited and oppressed by a privileged white minority. The Arab and Berber populations of Algeria were subjugated by French colonial rule.

So how did one explain the contradiction between liberal and humanitarian principles, principles that I believed in at the time, and social reality past and present? Marx answered that question. He explained: “Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development which this determines” (Critique of the Gotha Programme [1875]). In other words, what is generally considered to be right and wrong, the kind of behavior that is rewarded or punished, is basically determined and conditioned by the level of production and, in class society, how that production is organized.

But let’s start with pre-class society. In particular, let’s consider infanticide, the deliberate killing of newborn children. Today, infanticide is almost universally regarded as a horrific crime, and also an unnatural act on the part of mothers whose children are killed. However, for almost the entire history of our species, infanticide was commonly practiced. The development of agriculture, the cultivation of plants for food, and the raising of livestock for meat occurred only about 10,000 years ago. In the countless millennia before that, human beings lived by gathering plants in the wild and hunting game for food. However, a hunter-gatherer economy can sustain only a very small population relative to the potential reproductive capacity of the human species, especially in the face of sudden changes in climatic conditions such as severe drought.

Our Stone Age ancestors therefore had to and did practice population control. One means was for women to nurse newborn children as long as they possibly could in order to delay subsequent pregnancy. But the main means of population control was infanticide, especially of females. In the main, this was done just by depriving newborn children of the nurturing care needed for them to continue to live. A modern American anthropologist, Marvin Harris, has written in this regard: “Infanticide during the paleolithic period could very well have been as high as 50 percent—a figure that corresponds to estimates made by Joseph Birdsell of the University of California in Los Angeles on the basis of data collected among the aboriginal populations of Australia” (Cannibals and Kings [1977]).

The level of production and how that production is organized not only determines how people—most people in most times—behave, but also how they think. Let’s consider religion, or, particularly, the rejection of religion. Since you’ve come to a class on Marxism, I assume that you’re atheists. If some of you are not, and believe in an omnipotent supernatural being, then we’ll have a very interesting discussion after this class.

But unlike the people in this room, there were no atheists in medieval Europe. Or at least if there were, they didn’t let it be known. Everyone, however great their differences over religious doctrine, believed in a supreme being who not only created the world, but actively intervened in the everyday lives of men and women, for good or ill depending on their behavior. In the literature and documents of the time, there are no references to the term or, more importantly, the concept of atheism. There were frequent accusations that some people worshipped the devil but not that they denied the very existence of God. Personally, I have always found the devil a much more interesting imaginative creation than the Judeo-Christian concept of God. This is purely a personal prejudice, not the Spartacist party line.

Atheism as a distinct intellectual current arose during the Renaissance, in the 16th and 17th centuries. This was the period that also saw the birth of modern science. Disbelief in all-powerful supernatural forces coincided with increasing knowledge of natural forces. Science provided a more realistic and effective understanding than religion of the workings of the natural world. Equally importantly, the application of scientific knowledge through technology mitigated the often destructive effects of natural forces on human lives.

You will notice that I’m wearing eyeglasses. Like many people, my eyesight has deteriorated over time. It’s not a problem for me, because I can acquire and use corrective lenses and adjust the necessary correction every few years. Eyeglasses were first invented in Italy in the late 13th century. However, for many centuries they were a luxury item accessible only to the wealthy. It was only in the 19th century that eyeglasses became available to many people, if not most people, in the Western world. Before then, if your eyesight was deteriorating you had no material means to rectify that condition. So doubtless many resorted to idealist means, that is, they prayed to God to restore their former eyesight.

There’s an interesting historical connection between atheism and optics. One of the main intellectual forerunners of atheistic materialism was Baruch Spinoza, who lived in Holland in the 1600s. He was born into a wealthy Jewish family, but he was expelled from the Jewish community in Amsterdam as a heretic for questioning the literal truth of the Old Testament. He then made a living by grinding high-quality lenses for microscopes and telescopes. In that way Spinoza acquired knowledge of the most advanced science of his day, not only at the theoretical level but also in a practical hands-on way.

After he died, Spinoza became associated with materialism in a different sense, in the conventional vulgar use of the term meaning money-grubbing acquisitiveness. It became fashionable for wealthy men who considered themselves modern-minded to collect lenses made by Spinoza. Pretty soon the demand for Spinoza-made lenses exceeded the remaining supply. So enterprising craftsmen fabricated lenses that they claimed had been found in Spinoza’s old workshops. Fake Spinoza lenses became like the fake Rolexes of the day.

Since the Renaissance, there has been an enormous expansion of scientific knowledge and corresponding applied technology. Nonetheless, religion continues to be a significant component of popular culture, especially in the United States. How come? In the modern world, religious belief is no longer primarily a subjective response to the destructive forces of nature. Rather, it is a subjective solace to the destructive forces of capitalism—the sufferings caused by war, economic immiseration, national, racial and class oppression.

One of Marx’s best-known expressions is that religion is the opium of the people. However, the passage from which this phrase comes is rarely quoted in its entirety. And when it is, it’s usually interpreted in a way contrary to Marx’s intent. Marx was not here addressing pious Christians, exhorting them to go cold turkey on their religious addiction. Rather, he was addressing his fellow atheistic and politically radical intellectuals. He was arguing against the notion that religious belief among the masses could be dispelled through rational argumentation. Thus he wrote:

“Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also a protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

“To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions.”

— “Introduction to Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law” (1844)

In other words, the mass of people will forego the illusion of happiness in an afterlife only when they believe in the possibility of real happiness in this life.

In a broad historical sense, that is actually what happened in much of Europe in the latter part of the 19th century. The spread of atheistic materialism among the working class in Germany, France, Italy and other European countries coincided with and was conditioned by the development of mass parties and trade unions that looked forward to a socialist society, not in some remote future but in the lifetime of their members.

That, however, did not happen in the U.S. The American ruling class has been able, to this day, to exploit and manipulate racial and ethnic divisions so as to prevent the development of what we call political class consciousness among the working class. One consequence is that religiosity is much more prevalent and politically significant among workers in the U.S. than in most other advanced capitalist countries and even some more economically backward Third World countries. In short, religious belief among the exploited and oppressed is inversely proportional to their belief in their ability to overcome their conditions of exploitation and oppression.

Now, the main reading for this class is Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880) by Friedrich Engels, who was a lifelong intellectual collaborator of Marx. In this work, Engels contrasted the early schools of socialism that were prevalent in the first part of the 19th century with the doctrine and program developed by Marx and himself, which became the dominant current in the workers movement in the latter part of the 19th century. In particular, he discussed the movements associated with Robert Owen, Charles Fourier and Henri de Saint-Simon. Why did Engels describe these movements as utopian?

One major reason was that the leaders of these movements appealed to members of all social classes including especially the supposedly benevolent and enlightened members of the ruling elite. The main socialist current in the early 19th century in Britain and also the United States was inspired by the ideas and activities of Robert Owen. Owen started out as an industrial capitalist, a factory owner in Scotland. However, he developed a deep-going sympathy for what was then called the laboring classes. In 1813 he wrote a book titled A New View of Society, in which he expounded his socialist theory and program. He dedicated a section of this book to the prince regent of Britain.

Some of you may be thinking, “How could Robert Owen, an experienced businessman, be so naive as to imagine that the British royal family would introduce socialism into their realm?” However, most of the social groups in the U.S. today that call themselves socialist, even Marxist—such as Socialist Alternative and the International Socialist Organization (ISO)—do effectively the same thing. To be sure, they do it in a less upfront and more camouflaged way than did Owen. Socialist Alternative and the ISO are not calling on the Obama administration to introduce socialism into the U.S. But they do appeal to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party to carry out policies that would benefit the working class at the expense of the capitalist class: for example, massively cutting the military budget while proportionately increasing government expenditure on things like education and public health.

But let’s return to the early, pre-Marx schools of socialism, which were a lot more interesting as well as honorable than the small-change reformist groups that we see in the U.S. today. Let’s consider the changing socioeconomic conditions that gave rise to the early socialist movement, and its support among significant sections of the working, lower classes. Until the late 18th century, almost all non-agricultural goods, for example many of the items that you see in this room—chairs, tables, books, clothes, shoes—were made by independent artisans using hand tools and working in small shops. The original and literal meaning of the term “manufactured” is “made by hand.”

What is called the Industrial Revolution began in England and Scotland in the late 18th century. Increasingly, goods were made in factories using machinery driven by steam power. The flood of cheaper factory-made goods drove a large fraction of the artisan population into economic ruin, what was called “pauperism” in the language of the day. Destitute artisans were forced to become factory workers, a condition in every way worse than when they were independent artisans.

Owenite socialism appeared to offer a way out of that dilemma. The crux of its program was the formation of economically self-sufficient communities based on pre-industrial technology. These communities would include farmers and various kinds of artisans—masons, carpenters, weavers, shoemakers—who would produce the necessities of life in the traditional way. The goods would then be pooled and distributed equitably among the members of the socialist communities.

A number of attempts were actually made to establish Owenite collectives or communities, especially in the northern part of the United States, where land was cheap and the governing authorities at the time somewhat more tolerant of such social experiments. The Owenites envisioned that such socialist communities would coexist within the broader capitalist economy and society. More and more people would see for themselves that this was a much better way of organizing society. They would then form additional socialist communities, which would gradually and eventually displace capitalism. In other words, the Owenites projected that socialism would be brought about by force of example, rather than by force of force.

The movement inspired by the ideas of Charles Fourier played a somewhat similar role in continental Europe to that of Owenism in the English-speaking world, though it was not as influential. Like the Owenites, the Fourierists advocated economically self-sufficient collectives (they called them phalanxes, I don’t know why) based on pre-industrial technology. There was, however, a very important difference in everyday life in a Fourierist phalanx and an Owenite community, and that difference profoundly influenced the later Marxist concept of a future communist society.

Robert Owen adhered to conventional social and sexual morality. The basic social unit in an Owenite community was the nuclear family. Charles Fourier was a radical sexual libertarian. A distinguishing feature of his vision of socialism was the liberation of women from their age-old condition of oppression and subservience. He not only championed the full social, economic and political rights for women, but also—and this was very unusual at the time—their right to sexual gratification. He condemned the petty tyranny of the patriarchal family, in particular the sexual repression of youth by their parents and other authorities, notably the Christian churches.

The Fourierists were the original socialist advocates of replacing the family by communal means for nurturing and socializing children. They believed this could be attained in the here and now—or more precisely, in the there and then. We Marxists understand that such a radical change in social institutions, and in gender and generational relations, requires a society of material abundance in the future, and a corresponding change in cultural attitudes.

Interestingly, one of the earliest attempts to actually establish a Fourierist phalanx took place in, of all places, Romania. A wealthy but eccentric Romanian nobleman and landowner decided to set up a different social organization based on Fourier’s principles for the peasants who worked on his estate. One of these principles was what in the 19th century was called “free love.” It turned out that these young Romanian peasant men and women enjoyed their newfound sexual freedom. Reports of the strange and scandalous goings-on on this estate soon reached the local Christian clergy and government officials. According to some accounts, they organized a right-wing mob to attack and destroy the Fourierist commune. The peasants bravely defended their “free love” commune but were overcome by superior force.

Unlike Owenites and Fourierists, the Saint-Simonians were not primarily concerned with a more egalitarian distribution of the means of consumption. Rather, they were concerned with increasing production, especially industrial production. Henri de Saint-Simon was a wealthy French nobleman who, among other things, claimed descent from Charlemagne, the founding father of the European feudal state. Far more honorable, from our standpoint, he also served as a French officer in aiding George Washington’s army in the War of Independence against Britain. He was actually a member of the Society of the Cincinnati, which Washington formed for his veteran officers. Interesting guy.

Even in the very early stages of industrial capitalism, Saint-Simon recognized severe irrationalities in this economic system. Some factories went bankrupt and closed down, not because they were technologically deficient but because their owners had misjudged future market conditions. Technical innovations that would increase labor productivity were not utilized because their inventors lacked financing. There were periods even in the early 19th century when production as a whole declined rather than increased. As a result many workers were thrown out of their jobs and suffered economic immiseration. Saint-Simon himself, strictly speaking, was not a socialist. Rather, he was an advocate of what could be called centralized capitalist planning under the direction of bankers.

However, after he died, in 1825, his followers took the next logical step. They advocated the socialization of the means of production under a centralized administration. In their own words:

“A social institution is charged with these functions which today are so badly performed; it is the depository of all the instruments of production; it presides over the exploitation of all the material resources; from its vantage point it has a comprehensive view of the whole which enables it to perceive at one and the same time all parts of the industrial workshop....

“The social institution of the future will direct all industries in the interests of the whole society, and especially of the peaceful laborers.”

— “Exposition of the Doctrine of Saint-Simon” (1830), quoted in George Lichtheim, The Origins of Socialism (1969)

This is the germ of the Marxist program of a centrally planned and administered socialized economy. We owe this to the Saint-Simonians. While the Saint-Simonians considered that the working class would greatly benefit from such an economic system, they did not consider that it was the workers who would institute or govern this new social order. That role they assigned to what we call the technical intelligentsia, scientists and engineers. The Saint-Simonians believed that scientists and engineers were committed above all to the rational organization of society and the economy, to increasing production. In this respect the Saint-Simonians expressed liberal idealism in its technocratic variant. They also expressed intellectual elitism.

We sometimes encounter similar attitudes today among young intellectuals—typically university students—who have been newly won to socialism. They think that pretty much everybody like themselves can be convinced of the superiority of socialism. Why is such a belief illusory?

Let’s consider, in particular, the technical intelligentsia. In all capitalist societies, scientists and engineers are a privileged social group whose material interests are much more closely aligned with the capitalist class than the working class. Most engineers are employed by large corporations. Their financial rewards and career advancement depends on their contribution to the corporation’s profits. The men who design new cars for General Motors and Ford and who develop new oil fields for ExxonMobil and BP, are often part of or work closely with these firms’ top management. To be sure, most scientists are not as directly tied to large corporations. Usually they’re employed by universities or government agencies. Nonetheless, their research is ultimately determined by the interests of the capitalist class.

In the latter part of the 19th century, the early schools of socialism were displaced by the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels. In fact, very many more people learned about the ideas of Owen, Fourier and Saint-Simon from Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific than from reading the original writings of these pioneer socialists. There developed political parties and affiliated trade unions supported by millions of workers, whose official program and doctrine was Marxism.

This development was not mainly because Marx and Engels had provided a more realistic and profound analysis of capitalism, although they did do that. Rather the further development of industrial capitalism created the preconditions for a proletarian revolution leading to a socialist society. The steady increase in production and labor productivity indicated the possibility of eventually eliminating material scarcity entirely, that is, creating a society in which the means of consumption are freely distributed to everyone or, in Marx’s words, “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”

At the same time, the progressive development of labor-saving technology pointed to the possibility of radically reducing the total labor time necessary to produce both the means of consumption and the means of production. In a fully communist society, most time will be what is called free time. Everyone will have the available time and access to the material and cultural resources to fully develop their creative capacity. Everyone will have the opportunity, for example, to engage in research in particle physics, if they want, or to investigate the archeological remains of ancient civilizations, if they want—or to do both, one one year and one the next.

Now, you may think, “Well, that’s a wonderful vision of the future, but how do we get there?” What are the social forces capable of overthrowing capitalism, instituting a planned collectivized economy to open the road to communism on a global scale? In a word: the proletariat.

During the latter part of the 19th century, the further development of capitalism resulted in the increasing demographic and social weight as well as the better organization of the working class. Conversely, there was a decrease in the demographic and social weight of petty proprietors. Many of the sons and daughters of peasant small-holders left the family farm and got jobs in factories or other industrial facilities. Likewise, so did the sons and daughters of artisans and shopkeepers.

At the same time, the destructive irrationality of the capitalist system—based on the private ownership of the means of production and the anarchy of the market—came increasingly to the fore. Periodic economic crises resulted in a massive decline in production. Millions of workers lost their jobs. Factories and other productive facilities were idled.

There is only one progressive solution to that contradiction: proletarian revolution. As Engels explained, in the concluding section of the book that you’ve read:

“The proletariat seizes the public power, and by means of this transforms the socialised means of production, slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie, into public property. By this act, the proletariat frees the means of production from the character of capital they have thus far borne, and gives their socialised character complete freedom to work itself out. Socialised production upon a predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible. The development of production makes the existence of different classes of society thenceforth an anachronism. In proportion as anarchy of social production vanishes, the political authority of the State dies out. Man, at last the master of his own form of social organisation, becomes at the same time the lord over Nature, his own master—free.”

A decade or so after Engels wrote this, capitalism entered a new historical period, a period that is still with us. This is the epoch of modern imperialism. One of its main features is increasing conflicts between the major capitalist nation-states over raw materials and spheres of exploitation on a global scale. These conflicts have led to two world wars between the major capitalist states. The Second World War ended with the use of a qualitatively more powerful weapon based on a radical breakthrough in technology: the liberation of nuclear energy through the splitting of the atom. In 1945, the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on the civilian populations of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There’s a commonplace, somewhat vulgarized, notion that Marx and Engels believed that the proletarian revolution leading to a socialist society was historically inevitable. They did not. And this is clearly stated in the beginning of their most famous and widely read work, the Communist Manifesto (1848):

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or”—I repeat, or—“in the common ruin of the contending classes.”

With the development of nuclear weapons, the destructive irrationality of the capitalist system threatens to destroy civilization if not to annihilate mankind as such. And with that uncomforting thought, I’ll conclude.