What exactly is wrong with socialism?

In the wake of the recent electoral victory of Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire, it has been common to see Christians of an apostolic bent wondering if it is wrong or right to support Bernie Sanders. These conversations (see Micah Conkling here and here, Fr Dwight Longenecker here, Barbara-Marie Drezhlo briefly here, an older piece by Metropolitan Nicholas of Mesogaia here, some of the tangential discussion on George Michalopulos’s post at Monomakhos here) are interesting, in part because they are trying to draw clear distinctions between ‘totalitarian’ and ‘democratic’ socialism, saying that the former is what stands under religious condemnation – whether of Papal pronouncements or of Orthodox social teaching – and that the latter is not only supportable but may even be preferable, from the standpoint of Christian social ethics, to other forms of economic and political organisation. I’m not going to comment on the advisability of an Orthodox Christian in America voting for Bernie Sanders, but I would like to offer a little bit of pushback on perhaps a couple of the directions the political-philosophical discussion is heading.

Let’s take a look first at the common objections to socialism one sees. From the American side, a particularly common (and most particularly common among American Protestants) objection to socialism is the abstract and idealistic political-philosophical stance that all charity ought to be ‘voluntary’, or else it doesn’t count as charity. This is often coupled with an argument that state involvement in programmes which benefit the poor are necessarily coercive (and therefore irredeemably bad), and detract materially from the voluntary exercise of charity. These don’t quite constitute a cogent objection to socialism in the first place – by which a public or communal ownership of the means of production is indicated – but rather to welfarist or progressive forms of taxation. Further, the latter claim is an empirical one, and it does not seem to be true even on its own merits. The countries which are most generous on an individual level (as defined by the World Giving Index) include nations like Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, with very high levels of government consumption as a percent of GDP (which implies high national tax rates), and which have historically been marked by relatively robust redistributive transfer payments.

But even looking at the principles we can see these are also flawed. For Orthodox Christians particularly, from the historical point of view, there has been no objection at all by the Church to the idea of progressive and redistributive taxation, neither to their receipt of tax funds for charitable use, which were ‘coercively’ collected by the state. Both in Byzantium (even from the early days of Emperor St Constantine the Great), and even in the decentralised and decidedly less-brutal Kievan Rus’, tax funds were distributed by the government either to the Church to aid the needy, or directly to the poor. This economic setup whereby the state would share its tax funds with the Church was justified largely through the principle of symphonía, or cooperation between the Church (whose duty was charity) and the state. The modern idea that charity is something which ought to be wholly private and voluntary, is a notion which arises from the highly un-Orthodox view that government and religion ought to be completely separate. Though it is now aimed at ‘socialism’, the logic of this argument is at odds with the historical development of the apostolic, Christian faith.

The second objection to socialism is that it ‘doesn’t work’, and that it is not based on ‘sound economic principles’. The often-unspoken corollary to this, is that capitalism does ‘work’, and that it is based on ‘sound economic principles’. It isn’t really necessary to refute this objection, so much as to question the entire premise. What is an economic system supposed to ‘work’ for? Or rather, for whom is it supposed to ‘work’? Capitalism, particularly in its extreme late form, has delivered massive growth in overall productivity, true – but it has also: consolidated power over finance and capital in the hands of a rootless, cosmopolitan, globalist very-few; accrued most of the growth it is responsible for to the same few; continued to plunder cheap labour and cheap raw materials from underdeveloped countries; undermined the principle of the living wage; subjugated the natural family to the corporation; caused untold ecological damage globally; polluted our politics with lobbying, special interests and ‘soft money’; and brutally destroyed uncooperative polities and actors. If you have no problem with these outcomes (as, indeed, most defenders of capitalism don’t), then sure, capitalism ‘works’. And if you don’t demand of economic principles that they account for these externalities, then it’s very hard to convince you that the principles are ‘unsound’. But even the logic of this particular objection to socialism, that it ‘doesn’t work’, hides two philosophical commitments: the first is to the ethical theory of consequentialism, and the second is to the metaphysical theory of materialism. Those who claim that an economic system ‘doesn’t work’ are judging the means solely on account of the ends by which it can purportedly be held responsible, and these ends are always, always based on a metric of material well-being. Those who object to socialism on this particular ground point specifically to the lack of consumer choice in states with planned economies, or to other metrics corresponding to a lower standard-of-living, defined materialistically.

Which brings me to the third objection to socialism – which is the only objection I happen to share, as it applies even more to capitalism. Socialism is materialistic. It aspires to the same bourgeois ideals of material comfort and goods that capitalism does, with the exception that it seeks to spread them out through public ownership across a broader swathe of people. As with capitalism, it doesn’t object to environmental devastation per se; nor is it capable of a critique of growth-at-all-costs. As with capitalism, it doesn’t object to agricultural monocultures, to mass extraction or to modernist architecture. It actively cheers the capitalist-led death of traditional life-ways at the hands of the urban market, particularly those associated with rural people and communities, as well as those associated with the natural family.

Note well: this last objection does not make a distinction between ‘totalitarian’ and ‘democratic’ forms of socialism! ‘Totalitarian’ and ‘democratic’ socialisms are both capable of the anti-Christian stance that ‘man liveth on bread alone’; thus, ‘democratic’ socialism does not render itself less objectionable by the fact of its adherence to democracy alone. Note well, that during the interwar period and after the Second World War, the ‘democratic’ socialists even more so than the ‘totalitarian’ ones were at the forefront of crushing the peasant-led Green Rising in the most undemocratic of ways. On the other hand, however, there are socialistic ideas and forms of organisation which are not materialistic in this way, of which the Green Rising itself took full advantage: cooperatives, credit unions and labour unions (or guilds) – are all socialistic modes of ownership (insofar as they constitute communal ownership and management of property), but they do not necessitate a managerial, consolidating, growth-oriented or anti-traditional mode of governance. Nor are they particularly amenable to the materialist world-view.

It is largely for this reason that I don’t necessarily pay too much attention to whether or not a given socialism is ‘red’ or ‘black’ – that is to say, authoritarian or anarchist. What I generally try to pay attention to, rather, is whether or not its insistence on communal forms of ownership is motivated by a striving for material comfort and bourgeois uniformity; or instead by a striving for a just, stable and transcendentally-oriented organic order. Remember that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, that great anti-Soviet dissident, did not object to the soviet communes. He didn’t even object to an authoritarian government! What he objected to most strongly of all was the all-pervasive lie of materialism, and how ordinary Russians were meant to go out of their way to deny the very noses on their faces, all to uphold this lie.

What’s wrong with socialism, therefore, is exactly what’s wrong with capitalism. And even for the same reasons. Many people aren’t used to looking at these two political and economic setups as two sides of the same coin, so to speak.