The thin red line

We Americans should not be averse to considering socialism in far more depth than we do, rather than simply using it as a curse word or a dismissal. Socialism is a long, rich and diverse history of economic thought. It encompasses movements which have been heavily nationalistic, alongside those which have been every bit as stolidly internationalist. Socialists engage in whimsical flights of utopian fantasy, and they embrace the reality of the downtrodden in all its grit – sometimes even within the same strand of thought. Socialists hearken back to ‘when Adam dalf and Eve span’, and they look toward an apocalyptic future wherein the proletariat finally seize the means of production and herald in a classless society. Socialists focus on the local community; they also advocate for a single, centralised government over the whole world. Socialists embrace parliamentary democracy and they produce some of the most acerb critiques of it. (Likewise with totalitarian, personality-cult dictatorships.) Socialists embrace and reject violence as a means of social change.

Each of these debates has merit. Some, though, I would argue, are merely surface-level distinctions, while others carry far greater import. It’s generally assumed among those of us in the West that ‘democratic’ socialism, or ‘social democracy’ (two different things in themselves, by the way) are preferable to that old hideous Soviet beast, which trampled down freedom under a brutalist iron-mailed fist of centralist dictatorship. It’s still common in American liberal and radical circles, for example, to hear discussions about whether reform is tactically preferable to revolution (though how that revolution would occur is too often a question beyond the scope of these radicals). I would argue, however, that these distinctions do not get to the heart of what distinguishes a healthy socialism from an unhealthy one.

We have seen, in recent decades, a drift of the social-democratic and democratic-socialist parties of Europe toward the bland, banal centre. This is a drift we have seen in the Nordic countries as the social-democratic parties there have quietly trimmed and privatised public services; and also in the British Labour party under Blair as they embraced both privatisation and the agenda of American-led imperialist warfare for corporate gain. This is a drift which fudges the distinctions between public and private (though always in the service of well-connected private interests) and seeks to calculate everything from the commanding heights; the only functional difference, it often seems, between the average capitalist politician and the average modern Western European socialist, is how much of a bone they are willing to throw to the plebes to keep them sedentary and submissive.

In general, the reaction against this drift has been driven by the elements from the historically-defiant countryside, which even though they are by no means wholly right-wing have nevertheless been easily glossed by defenders of the status quo as ‘populist’ or ‘nationalist’. But the plain-spoken agrarian tendency to decry such violent conflicts has been expressed with archetypal bluntness (several times) by Belarus’s left-wing populist leader Aliaksandr Lukašenka. Lukašenka, far from being a typical Marxist (in spite of the strong state sector, strong presidential power and atmosphere of Soviet reverence in Belarus), pursues policies much more recognisably in line with the protectionist, agrarian programmes of Czechoslovakia’s Švehla and Bulgaria’s Stamboliyski than with his Soviet predecessors – but that is a post, I think, for another time. Even so, the distinction between the relatively-complacent urban social-democrats and the arguably more-radical rural agrarian socialists is a meaningful and important one: much more so than the democratic-undemocratic distinction.

But: the most high-profile critics of the war agenda have been religious leaders. These are leaders within the Roman Catholic Church (with both the sainted John Paul II and Benedict XVI having spoken out against the Iraq War), the Anglican Communion (with Robert Runcie and Rowan Williams having spoken out against it) and of course the Orthodox Church (with many major sees in Eastern Europe and America speaking out against the Iraq War, but in particular Patriarch Alexy II and the then-Metropolitan, now-Patriarch Kirill). In practically each and every instance, these same religious leaders have also spoken out against the excesses of capitalism and the encroachment of high finance and its subservient technocracy on the livelihoods of the common people. Pope Benedict XVI, for example, spoke highly of democratic socialist parties in Europe; Patriarch Kirill has gone a step further and advocated for an economy wherein the physical, real value of labour (rather than the abstracted and – in his words – ‘fraudulent’ value of capital-based checkbook credit) is central.

This reaction against imperialism and against the financial turn of the major Western economies from major religious leaders suggests strongly to me that the distinction between the religious socialists (with values firmly moored in the precedents set by their respective faiths) and those secular socialists who are more amenable to triangulation, militarism and the compromise of truth for political power, is also a highly important one for our time. When certain anti-war socialists are being subjected to wild McCarthyist speculation for speaking up against American involvement in Syria or the Ukraine, it is all the more important to listen to these alternative voices.