In upcoming blogs I will discuss how socialism in the 21st century might work. But before venturing down that path, I am duty-bound to point out the hazards of discussing any political system.
Political theories tend to cause suffering, often on a mass scale. Fascism, communism, nationalism, the divine right of kings, theocracy in all its forms, and even liberal democracy have led to intensely destructive wars. Some (not all) political ideologies have led to concentrations camps, police states and mass murder.
It might be that people take political ideology seriously only when they are under social or economic stress; therefore, an otherwise peaceful and secure society would be unlikely to split along ideological lines. However, as an American living and writing in 2018, I need not waste thought on stable and unified societies.
And although political theories tend to cause suffering, a society with no particular shared beliefs is driving a lonesome highway with the headlights off. And those shared beliefs will necessarily include political ideals. So as hazardous as political theorizing may be, the alternative may be even worse.
Political ideologies, and Left movements in particular, suffer from reification. Marx posited that class struggle determines history. The struggle between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie in the late Middle Ages, for example, led to the ascendancy of capitalism. And if you adjust the focus just right, it does appear that something like that was happening….at times.
But there was a lot else going on as well. Was the Swiss Confederation a bourgeois institution, or a peasant one? Perhaps both? This isn’t a minor question, since the Swiss did much of the actual fighting required to discredit the medieval aristocracy. Switzerland was the lab where local democracy and a flattened class structure were tested for all of the West.
Then again, it’s easy to see the Reformation as a largely bourgeois movement, but the Bohemian landed aristocracy and the Basque merchants are counter-examples. There were certainly peasant Protestants—the Waldensians, for example—and there were plenty of landed aristocrats in France who were Huguenots (Henry IV, the founder of the House of Bourbon, was the most notable, although to secure his crown he eventually converted to Catholicism: “Paris is worth a Mass.”) We may see Protestantism as a bourgeois movement because the bourgeois Protestants were mostly the ones who survived the religious wars—they had the economic resources to resist. The Huguenot aristocrats and artisans were swept away, and likewise the Bohemian nobility and peasants. The Counter-Reformation did its work well. Protestantism came to be dominated by the British and Dutch, with their dynamic economies.
And it’s possible to view the rising prosperity of the late Middle Ages and early Modern era as involving an amalgamation of the nobility and merchant classes. The merchants were eager to buy estates, and the gentry were not averse to investing in overseas trade. This is quite clear in England, where the titled aristocracy was small in numbers and by necessity had to socialize and intermarry with wealthy commoners. While a title of nobility might be prestigious, the English lords had to deal realistically with the economic and political power of the merchant class, who were often their neighbors and cousins. And big landowners who were not members of the nobility had little reason to shun rich merchants—they could only improve their credit score, so to speak, by having a few merchants as friends or in-laws.
In other words, the concept of “class struggle” is in fact an approximation, and ignores the fact that human beings often form political, religious and social alliances across class boundaries.
For an example of how destructive it can be to reify the concept of class struggle, consider the Tet Offensive in 1968. The communist plan was to attack everywhere, which they believed would lead to a mass uprising among the urban population. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had good intelligence and realized that the urban population was deeply dissatisfied with the Thieu regime. But the urban population did not rise up; it did not in general favor an NLF takeover. For one thing, eight or nine years into the Viet Cong’s armed struggle, most urban dwellers who favored the communists had already joined them in their rural strongholds. For another, much of the urban population simply opposed any autocratic government, particularly one that might persecute Buddhism.
But Le Duan and his supporters in the Hanoi government could not envision a “third answer” in their analysis of the urban population’s views. Either the urban population favored the NLF or they favored the Thieu government, and clearly there was little sympathy or support for Thieu.
Perhaps some of this error was simply wishful thinking, but it’s reasonable to suppose that the concept of “class struggle” might interfere with grasping a complex political situation in which class was not the most important factor. Even where class is important, people may nevertheless perceive their interests differently from what a Marxist analysis would indicate. A fair number of South Vietnamese peasants would have preferred a non-Thieu, non-Marxist alternative. If LBJ had run for president of South Vietnam, how many votes would he have gotten?
On the other hand, the concept of “class struggle” does indeed shed light on many situations. It might be impossible to understand the history of France or Spain without this concept, to take a couple of examples.
It’s interesting to note that Marx and Engels were quite aware of the dangers of reification, particularly with the over-arching theory of historical materialism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism#Warnings_against_misuse . Marx described historical materialism as a “guide for study” which would have been big news for the hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—who were accused and sentenced for “revisionism” during the twentieth century. Marx’s big theory, the model of historical change on which all of Marxism rests, was seen by Marx himself as a starting point or framework for deeper inquiry, which would obviously include re-visiting some of the original assumptions of historical materialism, if the evidence so indicated.
In other words, part of the founding ideology of Marxism was a recognition that historical materialism itself might be wrong or incomplete. The Communist Party has never accepted that, to say the least. Even differences in the implementation of socialism (e.g., Trotskyism), have resulted in summary executions, so questioning historical materialism itself—or suggesting it was only a starting point—was clearly out. “Reification” is almost too weak a term to describe this process.
Another example of reification would be Marx’s theory of the alienation of labor. Anyone who has ever worked at a repetitive, low-level job will recognize the process of de-humanization and psychological dislocation involved.
And yet….people often love their jobs, even difficult and alienating ones. Simply being able to do something can be a powerful and dignifying experience. Pouring concrete for hours in Texas heat, trying to beat sundown, is difficult in the extreme, but at the end you feel relief, even joy. Whatever use the building is put to, whatever success or failure the people who occupy it experience, that concrete will serve its purpose. Your endurance and labor will live on in it.
So Marx captured one aspect of capitalist labor, but not all of it.
I could point out reifications on the right-wing, but it’s hardly worth the trouble, right? References to “market forces” almost uniformly ignore the fact that some markets are inefficient, for example the market for healthcare in the US, in which lack of information is a key problem. But it is difficult to distinguish between reification and straight-up propaganda when it comes to right-wing arguments.
So what does reification mean for socialists in the twenty-first century? It means that our arguments, goals and policies must be everywhere linked to, and based upon, specific examples. If we complain that capitalism is undermining public health then we must also say: through opiates, tobacco, high-fructose corn syrup, pollution and lack of timely medical care. And when we say that, we must also propose specific counter-measures—a ban on HFCS and much higher taxes on tobacco, for example, and universal healthcare specified in painstaking detail.
A problem with reification is that specifics are often neglected, as we saw above with the Tet Offensive. A serious estimate of urban support—of people actually willing to fight for the NLF–would have yielded a number too small to matter strategically; however, that estimate was apparently never made. If you believe you understand the vast sweep of history—including the future—you may become so intoxicated that you forget to ask the right questions, you forget to order the right tractor parts.
And after we anchor our arguments with specifics, we must think critically, always searching for counter-examples to our own assertions, always seeking alternatives to our own explanations.
So, two guidelines: first, link our arguments and observations to specifics, and second, always search for counter-arguments and alternative explanations: our theories should be as robust as we can make them.
And to link this argument to specifics, I refer the reader to “At the Kroll Opera House,” and the history of the SPD. The pragmatism of the SPD—whose first thought at dawn was to help the people—and its attention to detail is what I’m getting at here. The best check on reification is to constantly test our theories against reality.
And lastly, we must practice ahimsa. As I pointed out earlier, most political theories lead to human suffering. Given this, we must keep harmful words, thoughts and actions at arm’s length. God knows our righteous indignation is thoroughly justified, but still—for the good of the people, always for the good of the people—we must practice restraint and compassion. We should speak clearly and passionately about the suffering that capitalism causes, but we must avoid hatefulness, which is “something like” emotional reification.
Life is vast, and our enemies may yet turn to friends.
The Socialist Investor 