Excerpts from
The Socialist
Phenomenon
by Igor Shafarevich
Originally published in Russian in France in
1975, by YMCA Press
See Preface
Foreword by
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
It seems that certain things in this world
simply cannot be discovered without extensive experience, be it personal
or collective. This applies to the present book with its fresh and
revealing perspective on the millennia-old trends of socialism. While it
makes use of a voluminous literature familiar to specialists throughout
the world, there is an undeniable logic in the fact that it emerged from
the country that has undergone (and is undergoing) the harshest and most
prolonged socialist experience in modern history.
Nor is it at all
incongruous that within that country this book should not have been
produced by a humanist, for scholars in the humanities have been
the most methodically crushed of all social strata in the Soviet Union
ever since the October Revolution. It was written by a mathematician
of world renown: in the Communist world, practitioners of the exact
sciences must stand in for their annihilated brethren.
But this circumstance has its
compensations. It provides us with a rare opportunity of receiving a
systematic analysis of the theory and practice of socialism from the pen
of an outstanding mathematical thinker versed in the rigorous
methodology of his science. (One can attach particular weight, for
instance, to his judgment that Marxism lacks even the climate of
scientific inquiry.)
World socialism as a whole, and all the
figures associated with it, are shrouded in legend; its contradictions
are forgotten or concealed; it does not respond to arguments but
continually ignores them--all this stems from the mist of
irrationality that surrounds socialism and from its instinctive aversion
to scientific analysis, features which the
author of this volume points out repeatedly and in many contexts.
The doctrines of socialism seethe with
contradictions, its theories are at constant odds with its practice,
yet due to a powerful instinct--also laid bare by Shafarevich -- these
contradictions do not in the least hinder the unending propaganda of
socialism. Indeed, no precise, distinct socialism even exists;
instead there is only a vague, rosy notion of something noble and
good, of equality, communal ownership, and justice:
the advent of these things will bring instant euphoria and a social
order beyond reproach.
The twentieth century marks one of the
greatest upsurges in the success of socialism, and concomitantly
of its repulsive practical manifestations. Yet due to the same
passionate irrationality, attempts to examine these results are
repelled: they are either ignored completely, or implausibly explained
away in terms of certain "Asiatic" or "Russian" aberrations or the
personality of a particular dictator, or else they are ascribed to
"state capitalism." The present book encompasses vast stretches of time
and space.
By carefully describing and analyzing
dozens of socialist doctrines and numerous states built on socialist
principles, the author leaves no room for evasive arguments based on
so-called "insignificant exceptions" (allegedly bearing no resemblance
to the glorious future). Whether it is the centralization of China in
the first millennium B.C., the bloody European experiments of the time
of the Reformation, the chilling (though universally esteemed)
utopias of European thinkers, the
intrigues of Marx and Engels, or the
radical Communist measures of the Lenin period (no wit more humane
than Stalin's heavy-handed methods)--the author in all his dozens of
examples demonstrates the undeviating consistency of the phenomenon
under consideration.
Shafarevich has singled out the
invariants of socialism, its fundamental and unchanging elements,
which depend neither on time nor place, and which, alas, are looming
ominously over today's tottering world. If one considers human
history in its entirety, socialism can boast of a greater longevity and
durability, of wider diffusion and of control over larger masses of
people, than can contemporary Western civilization.
It is therefore difficult to shake off
gloomy presentiments when contemplating that maw into which -- before
the century is out -- we may all plunge: ...and before which
contemporary Marxist thought stands baffled, having discerned its own
hideous countenance
in the mirror of the millennia. It could probably be said that the
majority of states in the history of mankind have been "socialist." But
it is also true that these were in no sense periods or places of human
happiness or creativity.
Shafarevich points out with great
precision both the cause and the genesis of the first socialist
doctrines, which he characterizes as reactions: Plato as a reaction to
Greek culture, and the Gnostics as a reaction to Christianity.
They sought to counteract the endeavor of the human spirit to stand
erect....
The author also convincingly demonstrates
the diametrical opposition between the concepts of man held by religion
and by socialism. Socialism seeks to reduce human personality to its
most primitive levels and to extinguish the highest, most complex,
and "God-like" aspects of human individuality. And even equality itself,
that powerful appeal and great promise of socialists throughout the
ages, turns out to signify not equality of rights, of opportunities, and
of external conditions, but equality qua identity, equality seen as the
movement of variety toward uniformity.
Even though, as this book shows,
socialism has always successfully avoided truly scientific analyses of
its essence, Shafarevich's study challenges present-day
theoreticians of socialism to demonstrate their arguments in a
businesslike public discussion.
ALEKSANDR I. SOLZHENITSYN
See Preface and
Marx's Concept of Man
Transcribed by Robert L Stephens
http://robertlstephens.com/essays/shafarevich/001SocialistPhenomenon.html