What's Wrong With Socialism? Part One

Part One: the Fetishisation of the Worker.
I am not a Marx scholar, nor do I believe I need to be in order to criticise the broad ideology and movement called socialism. My arguments are not directed at those who are at the cutting edge of political philosophy, for whom socialism is an altogether more fine-tuned, complex or abstract notion. I aim to address the wider political realities of socialism, and in particular to offer a criticism of the views of those odd creatures (I say this with utmost affection) known as socialists.

Though nobly motivated by their concern for those least well off people in society, the way in which the socialist frames the debate is itself flawed. The classic class conflict, broadly speaking between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, directs us to focus our attention on relations of labour. Who works, and who are they working for. The socialist asserts that all profit is derived by the exploitation of labour by the owners of capital, which is easily enough understood. If that was the whole story, there seems little to object to.

The problem is when this relation is taken to inform an entire ideology. While labour relations are an important part of our world, they are not the only part. What of students, and people who do no paid labour but are carers for the young or infirm? The socialist may respond by broadening the definition of worker to include these people who carry out useful activity in less conventional forms. This feels like an unwieldy, quick-fix solution, and our intuitions rightly cry out that these activities have far more to them then simply being a different form of production (wherein the product is one's own self-development, or the wellbeing of those being cared for).

In truth, relations of care are important in their own right, as distinct from relations of production. Also indeed, that cultivation of human excellence and the improvement of our society in a wider sense which it is supposed (perhaps wrongly) may be achieved through the pursuit of learning, this too appears to be a very different kind of activity to what we understand labour to be. Finally, the young and the infirm themselves fall into none of these categories, and often are workers under no conception of the word.

Thus the great struggle for the emancipation of the working class carries with it an unacknowledged and deeply unpalatable void with regard to the right treatment in society of those who do not fit neatly into the restrictive labour/capital binary which is so preeminent in socialist thought. And that, folks, is what's wrong with socialism. But one final question: how has this come to be?

My sketchy diagnosis, having heard of Weber and Marx significantly more than I have actually read them (yet), is that this socialist fixation on labour is a product of that famous situation, the protestant work ethic. Production is fetishised, in a similarly uncomfortable way to that in which consumption appears to be fetishised in our current economic system. Both of these activities are at their most basic level merely about meeting our material needs, and surely there is much more to politics, and life, than just that.



My next criticism of socialism will be of the particular problems of revolutionary socialism in liberal democracies, and how it is doomed to be either corrupted by violence or incapacitated by pacifism.