Chapter 52 Part Two Results Chapter Thirteen Ideology: The Secular World 2

2 While the liberal ideology thus lost its original assertive momentum (and even the inevitability and popularity of progress began to be questioned by some liberals), a new ideology—socialism—reinvented An ancient truth from the 18th century.Reason, science and progress are its solid foundations.The difference between the socialists of this period and the eulogists of the perfect society of public ownership that periodically appear in the historical literature is that the former embraced the Industrial Revolution unconditionally because it created modern socialism. possibility.The Count of Saint-Simon has traditionally been classified as a forerunner of the "Utopian Socialists", although his thought was actually in a more ambiguous position.He was the earliest and most ardent advocate of "industrialism" and "industrialists" (two words coined by Saint-Simon).His disciples became socialists, adventurous technologists, financiers and industrialists, or some combination of these identities.Saint-Simonism therefore occupies a special place in the history of both capitalist and anti-capitalist development.Owen in England was himself a very successful pioneer in the cotton spinning industry.His confidence in building a better society stems not only from a firm belief that human beings can achieve perfection through society, but also from the visible creation of a potentially wealthy society by the Industrial Revolution.Engels, although reluctantly, was also engaged in the cotton textile business.No neo-socialist wanted to turn back the clock on social evolution, although many of their followers did.Even Fourier, the founder of socialism who was least optimistic about industrialism, believed that the solution lay beyond industry, not behind it.

Even more paradoxically, the classical liberalism that established capitalist society is also the most easily used theory to attack capitalist society.As Saint-Just said, happiness is indeed "a new idea in Europe", but the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people that people are most likely to see, and apparently unrealized, is the happiness of the working poor.Also, it is not difficult to separate the pursuit of happiness from selfish individualistic assumptions, as Godwin, Owen, Thomas Hodgskin, and other Bentham admirers did."Happiness is the ultimate end of all existence," Owen wrote, "but happiness cannot be attained by any individual alone; it is useless to hope for isolated happiness; happiness must be shared by all, or it can never be enjoyed by a few. "

Even more telling is the fact that classical political economy, in the form of Ricardo, should have been transformed into an anti-capitalist theory; a fact that would cause middle-class economists after 1830 to look at Ricardo with horror. , or like Carey (1793-1879) in the United States, he is regarded as the spiritual source of social destroyers and rioters.If, as political economy argues, labor is the source of all value, why do the vast masses who create value live on the brink of abject poverty?For, as Ricardo shows (although he finds it inconvenient to draw these conclusions from his theory), the capitalist appropriates in the form of profit that part of the surplus value produced by the worker which exceeds what he receives back in the form of wages. (The fact that the landowners also take part of this surplus has no significant bearing on the question.) That is, the capitalists exploited the workers.Therefore, the only thing to do is to get rid of the capitalists and thereby eliminate exploitation.A group of Ricardo 'labour economists' soon sprang up in England to analyze and propose their moral standards.

Such critiques would lack resonance if capitalism had really achieved what was expected in times of political and economic optimism.Contrary to common assumptions, there has been little "living-raising revolution" among the poor.However, during the formative phase of socialism, between Owen's New View of Society (1813-1814) and the publication of the Communist Manifesto, the economy declined.Falling money wages, severe technical unemployment, and doubts about future economic prospects were all too prominent (the word "socialism" was coined in the 1820s).Critics are thus able to notice not only the injustices of the economy, but also the many flaws in its functioning and its "inner contradictions."An eye sharpened by aversion thus detects this inner cyclical fluctuation, or so-called "crisis" of capitalism (Sismondi, Wade, Engels).The proponents of capitalism ignore such crises, and indeed, the "law" associated with the name Sai does not recognize the possibility of such crises at all.It is difficult for critics not to notice that the increasingly unbalanced distribution of national income (“the rich get richer and the poor get poorer”) during this period was not accidental but a product of the operation of the capitalist system.In short, they were able not only to show that capitalism was unjust, but to show that it worked badly, and, what was more, that it worked in the opposite way to what its defenders expected.

So far, the claims of the new socialists have only pushed the arguments of Anglo-French classical liberalism beyond what the bourgeois liberals wanted to achieve.The new society they preached did not insist on abandoning the tradition of classical humanist and liberal ideals.A society in which happiness is enjoyed by everyone, where everyone can realize their potential fully and freely, a society where liberty reigns and despotic government disappears is as much the ultimate goal of the liberal as it is the ultimate goal of the socialist. Target.The point of difference between the various members of the ideological family descended from Humanism and the Enlightenment—liberal, socialist, communist, or anarchist—is not mild anarchy (that is their shared utopia) but the way to achieve it.At this point, the traditions of socialism and classical liberalism began to part ways.

First, socialism breaks radically with the liberal assumption that society is a mere aggregation or combination of individual atoms; that the dynamics of society are individual self-interest and competition.In this rupture, socialists fell back on one of humanity's oldest ideologies, the belief that human beings were born to live together.People naturally live together and help each other.Society is not a necessary institution which diminishes unlimited natural rights, but the abode of his life, happiness, and individuality.The idea that the Adam Smith school of exchange of equivalents in the market somehow guarantees social justice is both incomprehensible and immoral to socialists.Most ordinary people hold this view, even when they cannot express it.Many critics of capitalism criticize the apparent "dehumanization" of capitalist society by condemning the entire history of civilization, rationalism, science, and technology. (The term "alienation," as used by the Hegelians and early Marx, reflects the age-old notion of society as a "home" of man, and not merely a disjointed arena of individual conduct.) And the new socialists -- unlike the old artisan revolutionaries like the poets Blake and Rousseau -- carefully avoid it.But they absorbed not only the traditional idea of ​​society as people's home, but also the ancient notion that, before class society and private property, people somehow lived in harmony.Rousseau expressed this conception by his idealization of primitive man, and by the immature and radical pamphleteer by the myth that once upon a time men lived in freedom and love only to be ruled by aliens. conquered (Saxons by Normans, Gauls by Teutons).Fourier said: "Genius must rediscover the original way of happiness and adapt it to the modern industrial environment." After centuries of development, primitive communism finally provided a model for future communism.

Second, socialism takes an evolutionary and historical form of argument that lies within, if not outside, the classical liberal tradition, but which has received little attention.For the classical liberals, and indeed the earliest modern socialists, their social plan was natural and rational as opposed to the artificially irrational society imposed by ignorance and tyranny.Now that the progressive thought of the Enlightenment had told people what was reasonable, what remained to be done was to remove the recognized obstacles to progress.Indeed, the "utopian" socialists (Saint-Simonians, Owen, Fourier, and others) tend to be so convinced that truth, once proclaimed, is immediately accepted by all educated and reasonable , they want to limit their efforts to realize socialism to the following two aspects.The first is to target the influential working class, which, while undoubtedly benefiting, is doomed to be an ignorant and backward group.The second is to build, as they did, the pioneer factories of socialism: communist villages and cooperatives.Most of them are in the open spaces of America, where no historical backwardness stands in the way of progress.Irving's "New Harmony" village in Indiana.The United States accommodated 34 imported or home-grown Fourierian "Phalansteres" (the social grassroots organization Fourier dreamed of building), as well as numerous colonies founded with the encouragement of the Christian communist Gabe and others village.The less socially experimenting Saint-Simonians never ceased to look for an enlightened despot who might carry out their social program, and, for a time they believed to have found it, was Muhammad Ali, the ruler of Egypt, who someone who is unlikely to help them.

There is an element of historical evolution in this case of classical rationalism in search of a good society.Because progressive ideology also means that the concept of evolution may be a concept that must evolve through several stages of historical development.However, after Marx shifted the focus of socialist theory from its rationality or desirability to its historical inevitability, socialism acquired its most terrifying spiritual weapon, against which people are still building polemical defenses.Marx derived this method of argument from a combination of French, British, and German ideological traditions (British political economy, French socialism, Germanic philosophy).For Marx, human society has inevitably broken through primitive communism and divided into classes; it will inevitably evolve through the sequential replacement of class society.Every class society, despite its injustices, was once "progressive," and every class society contained "inner contradictions" which at a certain time became an obstacle to its further development and gave rise to the the power of.Capitalism was the last of these class societies, and not only did Marx not attack it at all, but he proclaimed its historical achievement with eloquence that astonished the world.However, the inherent contradictions of capitalism can be proved by political economy, and these contradictions will inevitably become obstacles to its further development at a certain time, and make it fall into an inescapable crisis.Moreover, capitalism (as can also be shown in terms of political economy) necessarily creates its own gravedigger—the proletariat.The number and discontent of the proletariat must increase, while economic power is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, making capitalism easier to overthrow.Therefore, the proletarian revolution must overthrow it.However, this also shows that the social system that meets the interests of the working class is socialism or communism.Just as capitalism prevails not simply because it is more rational than feudalism, but because of the social forces of the bourgeoisie, so socialism will prevail through the inevitable victory of the working people.It would be foolish to think that the eternal ideal of socialism could have been realized in the time of Louis XIV if only people were clever enough.Socialism is the offspring of capitalism.It is not even properly articulated until the social changes that create the conditions for socialism arrive.However, once the conditions are ripe, its victory is certain, because "human beings always only set themselves tasks that they can solve."