Origins on how did the 'socialism' as phenomenona even emerge.

[Milos Uzelac]

"With the rise of modernity and the abolition of the Ancien regime in Europe, centuries old traditions and habits of life, together with a common sense of meaning, broke down. People were forced from their own land, removed from traditional ways of life and thrown into the horrors of modern industrial regimes. 

To be a socialist, simply meant to recognize the social crisis or as it was called then 'the social question'. 

Out of this recognition sprung various figures, cults and movements offering their own peculiar solutions. 

Ranging from establishment of various communes to those seeking a return to feudal relations. 

Communist manifesto discusses many of these tendencies: reactionary socialism, petty bourgeois socialism, feudal socialism, German 'true' socialism, conservative socialism, critical-utopian socialism

In light of this, Marx and Engels offered their own unique and unprecedented approach to the social question, which came to be known as scientific socialism. 

However to ask a definition of this socialism would be antithetical to the very socialism Marx and Engels imbued meaning to, for as Engels in Anti-Duhring noted:

"To science definitions are worthless, because always inadequate. The only definition is the development of the thing itself, but this is no longer a definition."

With regards to Marx's work specifically he had this to say, Engels Preface to Capital, Vol. 3:

"[We should not expect to find] fixed, cut-to-measure, once and for all, applicable definitions in Marx's work. It is self-evident that we're things and their interrelations conceived, not as fixed, but as changing their mental images, the ideas are likewise subject to change and transformation and are not encapsulated in rigid definitions, but are developed in their historical and logical process of formation."

Marx criticized in his own time such definition mongering, as evident in his response to Proudhon in the Poverty of Philosophy:

"To try to give the definition of property as an independent relation, a category apart, as an abstract and eternal idea can be nothing but an illussion of metaphysics and jurisprudence." 

Marx would always start with a complete analysis of a concrete situation and would only then arrive at some contingent and continual definition or principle:

Engels, Anti-Duhring:

"The principles are not the starting point of an investigation, but their final result; they are not applied to nature and human history but abstracted from them, it is not nature and the realm of man that conform to these principles, but rather the principles are only valid as in so far they are in conformity with nature and history."

Therefore, after doing a complete historical analysis and theoretical work would Marx sum up his results but only provisional. It was a given to him that definitions and principles cannot exhaust the meaning of a thing one is trying to define, the real premises of what one is trying to define always escape the definition. 

Marx and Engels, The German Ideology:

"The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and both those produced by their activity."

In other words, for Marx the foremost appearance of socialism depend on historical, civilizational, geopolitical and economic circumstances of the population, their level of development and organizational structure, as well as complete needs of the people among other things, only then after careful, empirical analysis of these circumstances would Marx make pronouncements whether something is socialist or not, reactionary or progressive. 

Marx sought to locate and distill contradictions, and therefore possibilities of building a common sense of sociality in each country and according to each countries conditions of existence. 

Marx and Engels, Letter to Domela Nieuwenhuis:

"The thing to be done in any definite given moment of the future, the thing immediately to be done, depends of course entirely on the given historical conditions in which one has to act. But this question is really in the clouds and therefore is really the statement of a phantom problem to which the only answer can be - the criticism of the question itself."

Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

"[V]ery anticipation of yet to be proven results seems to be disrupting to me, and the reader who wants to follow me at all must resolve to ascend from the particular to the general. "

To have a ready made formula, a rigid definition or a formalised concept first, and then judge reality by the standards of such abstraction is something that Marx viciously fought against through his entire life. 

It is one of the way in which he criticized Hegel and the young Hegelians in his Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right:

"Hegel develops his thinking not out of the object, rather he develops the object in accordance with ready-made thinking out together in the abstract sphere of logic."

Proceeding this way means thinking in a very sterile way, in a way which can give birth to already dead conclusions. It can lead only to the most sadistic rectification of the actual lived reality, in the name of grey and dull abstractions. 

The appreciation of actually well put human history and of all the treasures of mankind are foreclosed, and for what? For the moral satisfaction of crucifying the reality of the people. 

As we can see this is npt how Marx thought and approached reality, for him, socialism had nothing to do with any imagined utopia or any other abstraction. It has nothing to do with the way people understand classless, moneyless, stateless society or worker's ownership of the means of production is nothing more than a dead abstraction.

The bourgeois ideologues had fantastical ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity that realized themselves historically through revolutionary dictatorship and terror, and subsequently with Bonapartist consolidation, Marx did not only judge reality by the standards of these fantastical ideas, but actually recognised this reality as the objective truth behind these ideas themselves. 

For Marx, the beautiful utopias and the moral prescriptions are contradicted by actual reality so much worse than the former, in this context Marx said:

"But had any eighteenth-century Frenchmen the faintest idea, a priori,  of the way in which the demands of the French bourgeoisie would be accomplished? The doctrinaire and necessarily fantastic anticipations of the programme of action of the revolution of the future only divert us from the struggle of the present."

Source: 

Marx's response to other forms of socialism and the answer to the 'social question' itself was not another utopia, but an entirely different approach to this question in the first place. Instead of judging the world by the standards of ready made abstraction, Marx recognised that such procedure leads to impotent arrogance at beast or genocidal chauvinism at worst. 

For Marx socialism generally meant an open-ended process as far as its particularties were concerned. It was not a moral concept but a scientific one. 

Socialism meant reclaiming some sort of meaning and common sociality after modernity while still retaining fidelity to this modernity itself. It was about refounding modernity on a new basis. 

But as far as for the particular idioms of socialism, Marx claimed little can be said:

Engels, Letter to Otto von Boenigk:

"The so-called socialist society is not anything immutable. Like all other social formations it should be considered in a state of constant flux and change. It's crucial difference from the present order lies naturally in production organized on the basis of common ownership by the nation of all means of production."

Therefore when Marx tried to sum up his understanding of socialism and communism, he would say that:

Marx and Engels, The German Ideology:

"Communism for us is not the the state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal by which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which sublates the present state of things. The conditions of this movement arise from the premises now in existence."

Karl Marx, Letter to Arnold Ruge:

"[Communists] develop new principles for the world out of the world's own principles. We don't not say to the world: Cease your struggles they are foolish, we will give you the true slogans of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something it must acquire, even if it doesn't want to."

To an extent Marx talked about future socialist society at all he did so negatively not positively or prescriptively, for Marx communism was not an utopia but something imminently practical within the context of an independent proleterian party. 

Marx, Letter to Arnold Ruge:

"I am therefore not in favor of hoisting a dogmatic banner. Quite the reverse. We must help the dogmatists clarify their ideas."

In this spirit to clarify the idea of extending the ideas of liberalism - liberty, fraternity and equality - what isn't recognized here is that this extension is entirely dependent on liberalisms sublation (aufheben), that is to say a certain kind of break from that very liberalism where it completely changes its form. Some sort of recognition of this fact was not only common to Marx but to all socialists through history. 

In the universal application of these principles of liberalism implies a fundamental break from how these very principles manifest themselves. 

Marx already criticized these notions in his own time, he clarified to such dogmatists that when you simply talk about extensions of principles of bourgeois society, instead of their sublation, that is refounding them on a new basis, you are essentially defending the existing establishment, because it is only on the basis of this existing establishment that the illusion of universalization of existing liberalism seems possible. 

Engels, Anti-Duhring:

"Our ideologist may turn and twist as he likes, but the historical reality which he casts out of the door comes in again at the window, and while he thinks he is framing a doctrine of morals and laws for all time and for all worlds, he is in fact only fashioning an image of the conservative or revolutionary tendencies of his own time, an image which is distorted because it is torn from its real basis, and like a reflection in a concave mirror, standing on its head."

Marx, Poverty of Philosophy

"X does not see that this egalitarian relation, this corrective idea he would like to apply to the world, is itself a reflection of nothing but the actual world, and that therefore it is totally impossible to reconstitute society on a basis which is nothing but an embellished shadow of it. In proportion as the shadow becomes embodied again we perceive that this body, far from being a dreamt transfiguration of it, is the actual body of existing society."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited August 22, 2021 by Milos Uzelac

[Epikur]

I thought it is quite accepted that socialism is the secular version of christianity.

I would go farther back and say it is partly the bigger version of tribal equality. I call it tribal socialism. You might have it still in some countries like the Philippines. If one has money in the family he gets so much harrassed till he shares his money.



 

Edited August 22, 2021 by Epikur

[DocWatts]

The core of Socialism simply means giving workers access to the means of production (and thus autonomy over their Labor), which in practical terms means worker owned workplaces and industries.

Edited August 22, 2021 by DocWatts

[Preety_India]

Maybe with worker's unions.