The rise of the Democratic Socialists of America has made it clear that socialism endures, even after a century of catastrophic failure. There has never been a successful socialist country, but American socialists have won many of their biggest victories yet this year, most recently in Michigan.
Their platform involves much public (state) ownership of things, just as historical socialism has. If someone ever tries to tell you otherwise, remember this passage from The Communist Manifesto: “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest … all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State.”
Naturally, opponents wonder why socialists seem completely unfazed by how bad their record is. The reason can only be understood if we understand the thought processes of the socialist. They are quite different from what you are probably used to. We must understand the utopianism and the relativism of the Left.
For utopianism, the German Marxist Ernst Bloch is informative. In his monumental book Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origins, Growth and Dissolution, the historian Leszek Kolakowski devotes an entire chapter to Bloch. Bloch states that “man is the root of all things.” That is to say, man is the master of reality itself. He can mold it as he sees fit, regardless of what the “facts” might indicate.
Normally, we have thought outward based on the rules of reason: the law of noncontradiction, modus ponens, Occam’s razor, etc. Not so for the socialist. Based on Bloch, the socialist thinks from utopia backward. Reality is made to conform to the utopian ideal, not the ideal to reality. As the root of all things, all man needs to do is make the necessary changes to bring utopia about.
Thus, the facts of failure do not matter because, as Kolakowski explains, “‘facts’ have no ontological meaning [to the Marxists] and may be ignored without hesitation: what matters are the premonitions of the anticipating fancy.” Simply put, the socialist puts feelings over facts. If there is sufficient belief, it can be so.
This kind of thinking is only possible thanks to the relativism of the socialists, best expressed by the French Marxist Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre proclaimed that “existence precedes essence.” This is a denial of there being an objective human nature (or “essence”). Human “nature” is merely whatever we humans in existence choose to make it. Humans are not only the clay, but they are also the potter (the entire notion assumes atheism). Man may be inherently selfish now, but he can make himself inherently selfless.
It was this thinking that allowed for the concept of the “New Soviet Man” in Russia, and for Reddit socialists to dismiss fundamental problems because “People that will actually live in a communist society will neither think nor behave like you.”
EDITORIAL: THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S RADICAL NEW SOCIALIST AGENDA
If man is the master of both reality and his own nature, then everything is subject to the collective conscience. If enough people believe and try hard enough, the socialist paradise can be achieved. Past failures merely indicate a lack of one or both.
These thinkers may show the problem of the Left. It is rooted in an optimistic crusade to remake man. This is, of course, impossible, because man does have an objective nature. He is not a blank slate. It is still self-defeating to say “nothing is objective except that nothing is objective.” What is needed among DSA supporters is a return to the laws of reason as a starting point. For, as C.S. Lewis writes, “reason is the natural organ of truth.”