The Socialist Phenomenon

...This part attempts to bring together the two separate and apparently irreconcilable historical manifestations of socialism-"as a doctrine (chiliastic socialism) and as a state system (state socialism)"-by presenting them as "two embodiments of the same ideal...

...Part three of the book ("Analysis") deals mainly with the Marxian concept of socialism, although occasional references to the doctrine of "National Socialism" (as represented by the German Nazi ideologues) are also made...

...It may be true, as Henry Adams believed, that history takes the path of least resistence, and if the path of history is indeed frictionless, then one might be tempted to conclude that the socialist phenomenon is like a marble striking other marbles on a smooth surface: The action, once commenced, never stops...

...But this second principle has never been fully applied in any socialist state: In terms of social practice it manifests itself only "as a de-emphasis of the role of the family, the weakening of family ties, the abolition of certain functions of the family.'' The third principle is the abolition of religion...

...One must be aware of this if he is to understand Shafarevich's image of the contemporary West...

...Thus, he notes the similar roles played by irrigation [in the , primitive "hydraulic" states] and heavy industry [in the socialist states...

...and, finally, between the thirteenth and third century B.C...

...But whereas Marx saw the eradication of (bourgeois) civilization as liberation, Freud saw (the ego-superego) civilization as necessary for the control of aggression...

...Aggressiveness was not created by property...

...That the germs of modern totalitarianism (Shafarevich's socialism is nothing but the main form of totalitarianism) are to be found in Plato is not new...

...As with the connection between Plato and Marxism, the link between them and modern socialism (including anarchism) has not escaped earlier intellectual historians...

...The most original aspect of Shafarevich's book becomes visible in the second part, in his attempt to relate "Chiliastic Socialism" (religious and then secular) to "State Socialism...

...that the impulse to self-destruction (even if it is one of many tendencies) plays a role in human history...

...Wittfogel," Shafarevich writes, "points out the numerous features that these [primitive despotic] societies have in common with the socialist states of the twentieth century...

...For the most part, The Socialist Phenomenon seems to have been written in the late 1960s...

...Shafarevich thus poses Freud against Marx, even though at times he readily, perhaps too readily, incorporates psychoanalysis into what he calls "the socialist world view...

...Perhaps the connection between what Freud actually said on the subject of Marx (the abolition of civilization will release aggression) and what Shafarevich says on the subject of Marx by appropriating a Freudian category (socialism rests on a gigantic death wish) is that the release of aggression will be so violent that its broad psychological impact will be a desire for womb-like tranquility, or that through the Rausch of violence will come the pristineness of death...

...It turns out that socialism as a state system emerged not only independently from, but also long before, the first formulations of the communistic-equalitarian principles of socialist doctrine by Plato...

...While this might be true of a reader with first-hand experience of the Communist version of "socialism," the Western reader would have benefited from a brief historical-terminological analysis of the concept...

...Curiously, the Enlightenment is surveyed very briefly (over scarcely a dozen pages) and without any mention of the most influential political thinker of the time, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or discussion of the contribution this anti-Enlightenment figure made to the coming of Marx...

...And during the 1930s Stalin decided that the proponents of the theory of "Asiatic production" were simply enemies of the people and counterrevolutionaries, to be treated as such...

...Concerning the future, I share Shafarevich's belief that Communism is not irreversible, but it is also not a transitory historical stage-Shafarevich's main thrust is that the socialist phenomenon always has been and always will be with us...

...If Shafarevich does not mention them, this is certainly because their books are unavailable to the Soviet reader...

...He obviously agrees with the main thrust of Dostoevsky's ideas, but in stressing the heretical component of modern Utopian socialism, he implicitly refuses to see the latter, as Dostoevsky clearly did, in terms of a mere extension of Roman Catholicism...

...On the other hand, there is the total lack of change, the stasis and even paralysis of Soviet society of the last twenty years or so, ever since the halfhearted if not simply hypocritical attempts at de-Stalinization ended in failure...

...In his chapter on "State Socialism' ' as well as in the concluding part of the book, "Analysis," Shafarevich acknowledges his debt to Karl Witt-fogel's important study of Oriental Despotism (1957) and, with minor differences, follows the latter's views...

...They can be reduced to four...

...The latter coinage (meaning etymologically, "the power of death'') seems to me to summarize the spirit of Shafarevich's entire book...

...Matei Calinescu is Professor of Comparative Literature and West European Studies at Indiana University and author of Faces of Modernity {Indiana University Press...

...The French rebels of May 1968, for instance, have become the "Nou-veaux philosophes" of 1978: In the words of one of them, Jean-Marie Benoist, they have become aware of the fact that even "Marx is dead...

...The "cultural" prestige of the New Left, riding so high in the late 1960s, has by now completely vanished...

...and, almost identically, during the eighteenth dynasty, in the second millenium B.C...

...Many of the radicals of that period have become the neo-cpnservatives of today...

...An ex-Marxist, Wittfogel set out to analyze Marx's concept of the '' Asiatic mode of production,'' one of the most controversial notions in the history of Marxist thought...

...This key sector of the economy is the property of the state, which in this way achieves complete control over the economic and political life of the country...

...As Solzhenitsyn notes in the Foreword to Shafarevich's book, "Scholars in the humanities have been the most methodically crushed of all social strata in the Soviet Union since the October Revolution...

...but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature...

...In abolishing . . . private property," Freud wrote, "we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, though certainly not the strongest...

...The hope is reinforced by Shafarevich's observation that the chiliastic impulse is an impulse to change, to go beyond, whereas state socialism rests implacably on stasis, on an inert status quo...

...Other examples of non-doctrinal socialist states, totally unrelated to the former, are encountered in South America-the Inca Empire and, patterned largely after its model, the small and isolated Jesuit State in Paraguay, formed in the seventeenth century and dismantled by the Spanish army in 1767-68...

...or Thomas Molnar's Utopia, the Eternal Heresy (1967), in which one of Shafarevich's major trains of thought is quite closely anticipated, with the difference that Molnar writes from a Catholic standpoint while Shafarevich, in rejecting the heretical world view, also speaks of the "internal failure" of the Catholic Church itself, and even of its "sin" along the lines of the Eastern Orthodox critique of Roman Catholicism...

...Both are activities that do not produce any goods but constitute a necessary base for production...

...But then, Marcuse is not a "controlled" experiment with which to test the Freudian flaw in Marxism, for he consciously appropriated his concept of pacification from the death wish...

...In his discussion of the latter, Shafarevich points out the quite interesting fact that the eighteenth century philosophes (from Montesquieu to Voltaire, in his Essay on Rights), in spite of their well-known anti-clericalism, saw the quasi-totalitarian rule of the Jesuits of Paraguay as a " triumph of humanity.'' (By disinterring this faux pas by Voltaire and by treating Rousseau as not even a silent partner on the road to socialism, Shafarevich may intend to transpose slightly our common understanding of the role of these two figures in intellectual history, and thereby nudge us closer to an appreciation of the complexity of intellectual interplay...

...Now in many ways the Marxist conception of historical development resembles a Freudian conception of psychological development writ large, for, as Shafarevich notes, there is a similarity between a society divided into classes, one of which exploits the others, and a mind divided into categories, one of which tyrannizes over the others...

...And modern socialism, if ever it passes, will effect another variant of the socialist phenomenon...

...The term "death instinct," which the author uses several times to describe the "socialist ideal," is obviously borrowed from Freud, discerned within Marxism, and hence diagnosed, as Freud would diagnose a patient, as its fatal weakness...

...This kind of socialism can only be achieved through an abolition of private ownership and through a systematic rejection of what its proponents call "bourgeois democracy" (including pluralism, liberalism's "formal freedoms," and bourgeois conceptions of social justice) in the name of a "dictatorship of the proletariat" which will last until the final "withering away of the state" and the complete "socialization" of the individual...

...At the very least it can coexist with the practice of democracy, for within a truly pluralistic society, it can play a useful role in the political debate, even (if not primarily) for those who disagree with its specific approaches and programs...

...Instead, as is the case with Plato, his interpretation of the similarity between earlier Utopian thought and modern socialism is nu-anced and sophisticated enough to admit lacunae in the connections...

...This thought might have appealed to Freud in particular, insofar as he argued that the historical development of a race is retraced by each individual...

...But Freud himself-in Civilization and Its Discontents, discussed by Shafarevich at some length-was openly and lucidly opposed to Marxian Communism, whose psychological premises he believed to be based on "an untenable illusion...

...Second, the abolition of the family (implying, in its radical form, the community of wives and the "destruction of all ties between parent and child to the point where they may not even know each other...

...Examples of socialist states are to be found in the ancient Orient (in Mesopotamia and, more specifically, in Sumer...

...The first part of Shafarevich's book, "Chiliastic Socialism," is a history of what one might call the "utopian mentality," starting with an analysis of Plato's Republic...

...When one comes across such a book, accepting the author's views (partially or totally) or rejecting them becomes less important than the ongoing intellectual experience in which agreement and disagreement alike seem fertile...

...Both the West and the Eastern bloc have thus given up the utopianism of their common chiliastic heritage, but where the West is experiencing a resurgence of the dynamic part of that heritage, the Communist world is left only the dreariest stasis of oriental despotism...

...The author takes it for granted that the kind of "socialism" to which he refers will immediately be recognized by the reader...

...in China-during the Yin and the early Chou periods of classical Chinese historiography...

...Once the essence of socialism" is grasped, Shafarevich writes, it becomes "necessary to reject the interpretation of socialism as a definite phase in the development of human society...

...in Phar-aonic Egypt, during the first six dynasties of the Ancient Kingdom, in the third millenium B.C...

...This ideal itself, Shafarevich thinks, can be understood in its profoundly paradoxical character "only if we allow that the idea of the death of humanity can be attractive to man and...

...More specifically, "thanatocracy" brings into focus one of the most memorable theses formulated by Shafarevich, namely, that socialism naturally tends toward the "mummification of the heads of state," a custom "which is met within states with strong socialist tendencies (although the states in question may be separated by many thousands of years...

...The system of "universal slavery" and structural corruption has already been chal lenged in Catholic Poland...

...Optimistically, he believes that "salvation" - through a religious and specifically Christian revival to start in Russia, the modern nation that has suffered most from the evils of socialism-is still possible...

...Such books are rare and needed...

...But what are, in Shafarevich's analysis, the basic principles of socialism...

...The great turning point in the history of modern socialism occurred after the panoramic Utopias of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (More, Campanella), in which the secular-rationalist world view was still not completely separated from elements of theocentrism...

...For it seems . . . that the freedom of will granted to man and to mankind is absolute, that it includes the freedom to make the ultimate choice-between life and death...

...Lenin employed the concept of "Asiatic production" for anti-czarist polemical purposes before 1917 but, significantly, never used it after the Revolution...

...It is this latter collectivistic, Utopian, and irreducibly anti-individualistic version of socialism, espoused most prominently by Marx and Lenin, which concerns Shafarevich.*Interestingly, both Shafarevich (who is a mathematician of world renown) and Zinoviev (who is an equally renowned specialist of modal and mathematical logic), represent the scientific rather than the humanistic community in Russia...

...Nevertheless, such distinctions are less important when one chooses as a point of focus the utopian dimension of both Platonism and the gnostic tradition...

...Thus, the chiliastic impulse, once commenced with Plato, gave rise to the medieval Utopians, who disgorged the eighteenth century rationalists and the nineteenth century secular Utopians, who are the direct forbears of Marxian socialism...

...That Marx made only occasional pronouncements on the "Asiatic formation" (in the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and very briefly and sketchily in Capital) is illustrative of the ambivalence he felt to this concept he fathered...

...Such changes, which affect mostly the intellectual elite, are perhaps less spectacular than one would wish, but they are clear signs of an increasingly post-utopian Western mood...

...It can be considered the most significant essay in political philosophy to come out of Russia in recent years, if we do not take into account the political philosophy in novelistic disguise of Alexander Zin-oviev {The Yawning Heights, The Radiant Future...

...Beyond the always imprecise confluences of cultural and social history, the only material fact remains that Soviet Communism is more than ever in the grip of the "death instinct," an instinct whose political expression, I would propose, is practical "gerontocracy" and ideological "thanatocracy...

...Without ever developing or detailing his views, Marx nevertheless spoke of the Asiatic type of production as a full-fledged "social formation," in which private property did not exist and in which the state, despotically ruled from the center, was actually based on a system of "universal slavery...

...Still, Shafarevich believes, since the principles of socialism have been elaborated almost exclusively in the West, their implementation in twentieth-century Russia cannot be seen simply as an "Asiatic restoration...

...And the fourth-enforced com-munality or equality-implies a complete "suppression of individuality" and what amounts to the construction of an "anonymous society...

...All the more so as, like many of the most widely used (and abused) terms in today's Western political lexicon, the term "socialism" conveys different meanings, some of them mutually contradictory, to different groups of people...

...Shafarevich then proceeds (maybe a little too abruptly) to discuss the utopian elements of the various gnostic heresies of the late antiquity, which set the pattern for the numerous millenialist and apocalyptic movements of the Middle Ages, from the Cathar sects through Joachim of Flore and Amalric of Bena to the Reformation...

...Plato's "utopianism," one should remark, was highly "intellectualistic," while the medieval heresies were strongly anti-intellectual movements, anarchisti-cally mystical and, whatever their social impact, based on an extremely crude version of philosophical dualism...

...Did it perhaps dawn on him that Marxian socialism, once realized, might be nothing but a revival in modern conditions of ancient oriental despotism...

...But this is not what Shafarevich is saying, for he states not that earlier marbles cause later marbles to move, but that, whatever causes them to move, there is a structural similarity in their motions...

...What is new in Shafarevich's contribution to the Freud-Marx debate is his discovery in socialism of "the death wish,'' the strand which unites chiliastic socialism with state socialism...

...This interpretation of socialism is by no means exclusive of the idea nor incompatible with the ideal of Jeffersonian democracy...

...On the contrary, any approach to socialism ought to be based on principles broad enough to be applicable to the Inca empire, to Plato's philosophy, and to the socialism of the twentieth century.'' Pessimistically, Shafarevich proposes that universal socialism is a manifestation of man's (or mankind's) death instinct*, indeed, it is a death instinct which is broad enough to be applicable to the Inca empire, Plato, and socialism...

...It was during the age of the Enlightenment that the course of history was set for socialism, for the consequences of the Enlightenment's increasingly exclusive "cult" of critical reason were, politically, the French Revolution of 1789, and ideologically, the subsequent emergence of ''utopian socialism" (Saint-Simon, Owen, Fourier...

...Karl Popper, in his famous book The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), saw Plato as the first advocate of "utopian engineering" and as a precursor of totalitarianism generally and of the Fascist state in particular (the Fascists occasionally acknowledged Plato as a distant model...

...But what is "socialism...

...This critique is summarized in Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer and in his famous "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor," both of which Shafarevich discusses...

...The same ambivalence is found in the writings of Engels, who used the notion only rarely and even then very cautiously (and not at all, as one would have normally expected, in his 1884 The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State...

...If this is so, then the Marxist-Leninist version of the socialist phenomenon, which really has no direct historical progenitors, only look-alikes, could cease at any time...

...If so, he would have had an excellent case-in-point in the work of the socialist Herbert Marcuse, who wanted to ''pacify existence'' (that is, achieve womb-like tranquility) through "liberation" and "spontaneity" (that is, untrammeled aggression...

...Ironically, it is entirely possible that in socialist societies the Western ideals could turn on the oriental reality, fomenting dialectical change...

...By then, the parallelisms between the "Asiatic formation" and the Stalinist socialist state had become more than obvious, as a matter not only of theory but also of social practice...

...Plato resembles socialism, but he is not its ancestor...

...In order to set the Marxian concept of socialism in historical perspective, both as ideology and practice, Shafarevich devotes the first two parts of his book to the "doctrinal"-philosophical, religious, moral-sources of socialism ("Chiliastic Socialism") and to a survey of past societies that evolved spontaneously, but that can be seen as structurally compatible with the principles of socialism, and, in particular, with its cardinal tenet, the abolition of private property ("State Socialism...

...Seen in the light of these principles, the only signal differences between the older despotic societies and the modern socialist societies is that today's despots apply these principles consciously whereas those of the past applied them unconsciously...

...Shafarevich's essay attempts to give a broad and often quite detailed historical overview of "socialism'' (as a state system, on the one hand, and as a doctrine, on the other...

...Plato is also considered a "reactionary idealist" by those revolutionary materialists, the Marxists, and Plato's Hellenic timelessness contrasts markedly with Marx's dialectical historicism...

...Orthodox Russia may follow...

...Possible, but by no means certain or even probable...

...Indeed, whereas Marx saw the bourgeois class as transitory, and therefore capable of elimination, Freud saw the ego and superego as eternal...

...It is also a passionate book, and as such it is very likely to stir the reader's own political passions...

...First, the abolition of private property...

...For many of both its adherents and opponents in the West, socialism is a form of liberalism, which sets out to promote, through reform (or through what Karl Popper calls "piecemeal social engineering," as opposed to the Utopian-totalitarian variety), the fundamental values of the liberal mind-freedom, social justice, the elimination of privileges and formal inequalities, and so forth...

...I have in mind such works as Norman Cohn's classic study of medieval mil-lenialism, The Pursuit of the Millenium: Revolutionary Messianism and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements (1961...

...This is the very last sentence of The Socialist Phenomenon and, beyond its immediate content, it strikes a note of urgency, of "alarm and hope" (to use the phrase of Shafarevich's fellow scientist and dissident, Andrei Sakharov), a note which one cannot help heeding, whether one agrees or disagrees with this or that particular idea expressed in the course of the study...

...The second and contrasting concept of socialism, advanced by the representatives of international Communism (and by certain splinter groups such as the Trotskyites or the Maoists), regards socialism as a stage in the "revolutionary" development of each and every society toward Communism...