If you want to learn what socialism is about, perhaps your last resource should be American conservative preachers. That is not to discourage anyone from listening or reading what they say about socialism. It is simply to say that their views of socialism are perhaps too tainted by their background and lack of exposure to give a full picture of what socialism is. An example of a preacher's inadequate background to define socialism can be found in the video that will be reviewed here (click here for the video and start at the 30 minute mark).
The presentation is on statism and socialism by Dr. W. Robert Godfrey (click here for a bio). I remember Godfrey from my days at Westminster Theological Seminary even though I never was in one of his classes. I admired his perspective on the Reformation and theology as well as the kind of person he presented himself to be. I still hold that same admiration and reasons for that should be evident by viewing the whole video.
But here is the problem that I have with what he said about socialism for the last 8 minutes of the video. His views of socialism seem largely colored by his life as a conservative American. He has a view of socialism from the outside, but even with my limited exposure to socialism, my view from the inside of socialism can see blind spots in his presentation.
The positive part of his comments on socialism is that he understands that socialism is not monolithic. That is because the word 'socialism' can have many different meanings. But he then at least partially counters what he just said by reducing socialism to this characteristic: socialism is where 'the state should own and operate the means of production for everyone.' Now at first, that doesn't seem to be misrepresenting socialism at all--at first that is. But from that, he synonymously says that government owns everything. And the problem here is that those two ideas are not only not synonymous, one can have those conditions without being socialistic. That is because there are other factors that qualify a system as being socialist than what that one statement describes. That is especially true for Maxist Socialism.
So what is meant by the state must own the means of production to be a Socialist state. In the early 1950s, Iran's oil fields were owned and run by a British oil company. That meant that those who were profiting the most from Iran's oil fields was a private British company. By the some time in the 1940s, national sentiment favored the nationalization, which would be state ownership and management, of those oil fields. The pressure built when it was revealed that the U.S. had brokered a deal with Saudi Arabia that would give Saudi Arabia a bigger cut of the profits than what Iran was getting from the British. The British offered Iran a deal but the deal did not include an increase in Iranian input managing the oil fields. Iran eventually elected a president who promised to nationalize the oil fields. Then the British sought to destabilize the nation in hopes of weakening the Iranian President's status. When that failed, England convinced the U.S. to join them in overthrowing the Iranian government. They succeeded and installed the Shah who ruled as dictator in 1953. His rule eventually resulted in the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and that has given us the Iran that we see today.
So what is the alternative to nationalizing a resource and industry? For Iran, the alternative was let another nation own one of its national resources so that the greatest profits went to the private sector of another nation.
However we should challenge Godfrey's parallelism here. Does the state owning and operating the means of production result in the state owning everything? And if the state does own and operate the means of production, is that automatically Socialism?
Here we should note that just because the state does own and operate the means of production for some resources and industries, that doesn't mean that the state owns everything. For example, for Iran during the 1950s, the nationalizing of oil fields only meant that the state would own and operate those oil fields and the government could disperse the profits of those oil fields to a greater portion of the population. So in such a case, the state would not own everything.
We should note that in the following year, when the elected Guatemalan President campaigned on introducing agrarian reform so that some of the land owned by a U.S. fruit company would be given out some of the people of Guatemala, the U.S. orchestrated a coup and replaced that President with brutal dictator in order to protect the interests of that fruit company. Did that mean that the state would own everything in Guatemala had the elected President been able to carry out his plan?
This is where we need to check out a quote from Eugene Debs who was a famous American socialist and actually ran for President in the early 1900s (click here for the source):
Private appropriation of the Earth’s surface, the natural resources, and the means of life is nothing less a crime than a crime against humanity, but the comparative few who are beneficiaries of this iniquitous social arrangement, far from being viewed as criminals meriting punishment, are the exalted rulers of society, and the people they exploit gladly render them homage and obeisance.
Is it socialist for a nation's government to nationalize its nation's natural resources? It can be. Does it make sense for a nation's government to want to nationalize a natural resource? It very much seems like a rational decision. But Venezuela has shown that such a decision doesn't always work out. And we should also note that such a decision does not result in the state owning everything.
From one Marxist perspective, whether state ownership of the means of production is socialist depends on two factors here. First, what are the demographics of those in the state who are managing a given industry? Second, is the structure of state ownership is vertical or horizontal?
The reason why the first question is important is because Marx believed in a proletariat dictatorship that would overthrow the oppression of the bourgeoisie (the wealthy owners). Thus, if the state isn't being run by the workers, then such an ownership would not make it a Marxist socialist venture. Marx was clear on that. For a venture to be Marxist, the workers would have to be in charge (click here to see how Noam Chomsky shows that Lenin did not install a Marxist Socialist state).
Next we need to look at the structure of state control. Why? It is because a top-down structure is not a structure employed by Marxist socialism. Chomsky already pointed that out in his presentation previously mentioned. He noted that when Lenin destroyed the local soviets (a soviet was a workers' council where its members were democratically elected by their peers), he destroyed socialism in the Marxist tradition in Russia. Chomsky also explains why Lenin did that.
But then there is another factor to be included. This factor reinforces what Chomsky said, though it was written during the time of Lenin, and again shows the distinction between Marx's proletariat rule and as opposed to the rule of the Bourgeoisie (click here for the source):
Lenin and Trotsky, on the other hand, decide in favor of dictatorship in contradistinction to democracy, and thereby, in favor of the dictatorship of a handful of persons, that is, in favor of dictatorship on the bourgeois model...
Yes, dictatorship! But this dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination, but in energetic, resolute attacks upon the well-entrenched rights and economic relationships of bourgeois society, without which a socialist transformation cannot be accomplished.
It should be clear now that, from the Marxist tradition, state ownership of a part or all of production does not automatically result in Marxist Socialism. Not only must workers be in charge. Those workers must not model their structure of governance on the bourgeoisie model of a top-down organization. Conservative American Christian theologians have not often felt the need to look at some of the fine print of Marxist socialism to understand that. They seem content enough in using some of those nations that have called themselves Communist or Marxist as the standard for what Marxism is. And we shouldn't be hard on them for that. Martin Luther King Jr. made the same mistake when discussing Communism/Marxism in his book Stride Toward Freedom.
There is something else about Marxist Socialism and government ownership of property. When Marx attacked private property, he wasn't attacking all private ownership of property or private property per se. Rather, he was attacking the political power that some ownership of private property brings (click here):
Nevertheless, the political annulment of private property not only fails to abolish private property but even presupposes it. The state abolishes, in its own way, distinctions of birth, social rank, education, occupation, when it declares that birth, social rank, education, occupation, are non-political distinctions, when it proclaims, without regard to these distinction, that every member of the nation is an equal participant in national sovereignty, when it treats all elements of the real life of the nation from the standpoint of the state.
Here we should see that there are sufficient grounds for saying that Marxist Socialism isn't looking for the state to own everything. In fact, there are some European nations where the state has owned certain industries without owning everything. And we have seen the Socialism of such states, granted that they were not socialist states from the Marxist tradition, benefit the people of those nations. There is also sufficient grounds for saying that when a state does own and manage the means of production of all its industries, other criteria must be applied to determine whether that ownership and management qualifies a state as being called Marxist Socialist.
We should also note that forms of Marxist Socialism have changed over the years. The form of which I am most familiar recognizes the need for hybrid attempts that combine Marxism with Capitalism--something Rosa Luxemberg would not approve of. I remember a video in which Marxist economist Richard Wolff talked about Germany's codetermination laws. Those laws require that a certain percentage of a company's executive board consist of workers who were elected by their peer. The percentage required depends on the number of employees in the company. Those laws just might make Germany the most Marxist state in the world.
Hybrid attempts at government that include ideas from Marx and Capitalism and other isms and ideologies have an advantage over other forms of government. That advantage is that such attempts presuppose that no political-economic ideology is omniscient. And thus we need the insights of a variety of ideologies to come up with solutions that help most of the people of a given nation without exploiting others. But those who listen to religiously conservative American preachers when they talk about Marx and Socialism would be leery of including Marx and Socialism in any mix of ideologies to better meet the political-economic needs of America.
Religiously conservative American Christian preachers, especially those who have always lived in America and were predominantly exposed to political conservatism, most likely have not studied Marx and Marxist Socialism enough to see the distinctions in big government or government ownership of property and Marxist Socialism. Because of their lack of exposure to Marx, they also would not be able to understand the differences between what Marx wrote and the governments that were Marxist in name only--such as the Soviet Union or China.
And so rather than sound the alarm on Marxist Socialism, they perhaps would do better to call our attention to Church History over the past few centuries. For what that Church History reveals is that the dominant branch of the Church for many nations has all too often sided with wealth and power at the expense of the welfare of the people of those nations and consequently the reputation of the Gospel. And that fact should be included not just in the teaching of Church History, but in any discussion on Marxism and Socialism.
References
- https://www.ligonier.org/learn/conferences/upholding-christian-ethics-2022-national-conference/statism-and-socialism
- https://www.wscal.edu/academics/faculty/w.-robert-godfrey
- https://www.azquotes.com/author/3810-Eugene_V_Debs Look up Private appropriation quote
- https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/constitution/
- https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/dec/03.htm
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsC0q3CO6lM
No comments:
Post a Comment