1. It is often not easy to work out the origins and history of religious and political movements, but in the case of social democracy, all roads lead to Rousseau.
The real parent of the sentiments, the passions, the manner of looking at social life and appraising it, that resulted practically in the birth and growth of social democracy was Jean Jacques Rousseau.
There have been throughout history movements, in China, India, Persia and the European Middle Ages that "are amazingly similar to the doctrines of modern socialism." And this is not surprising,
for the sentiments on which socialism proper, as well as anarchism, so largely rests are in no sense peculiar to the generations that are at present living in Europe and America.
But today's socialism and anarchism do not descend from the old doctrines.
They rest on purely rationalistic foundations and are a spontaneous outgrowth of the intellectual and moral conditions that prevailed in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Rousseau was the first to formulate the doctrine clearly that
Socialism and anarchism have a common seed in the doctrine which proclaims that man is good by nature and that society makes him bad, overlooking the fact that the structure of a society is nothing more than a resultant of the compromising and compensation and balancing that take place among the varied and very complex human instincts.
And it is Rousseau that
formulates the notion that absolute justice must be the basis for all political institutions
condemns, therefore, all sort of political and economic inequality
[exhibits] feelings of rancor towards fortune's favorites, towards the rich and the powerful
All of which are front and central to socialism today.
Rousseau wrote at the beginning of Part Two of his Discourse on Inequality that
The first man who fenced in a plot of ground and then thought of saying "this is mine"... was the real founder of civilized society.
But the most conclusive passages occur where Rousseau argues
that agriculture, and therefore private property and inequality in fortunes, preceded any social organization at all, and that there must, therefore, have been a period of anarchy when everybody was fighting everybody else and when the rich man had most to lose.
Here lie the assumptions behind the collectivist principle to abolish ownership to prevent exploitation, and the anarchist principle to abolish government to prevent rulers from exploiting the ruled.
Just a year after Rousseau published the Discourse in 1754 a Code de la nature was published, proposing
(1) There should be no private property
(2) Every citizen should be a public official
(3) Every citizen should contribute to the public welfare
Thus, the author Morelli argued, "the state should feed every individual and every individual should work for the state."
Then came Abbé Mably in 1776 who argued that "property has to be abolished" and Proudhon is 1778 that "property is theft." In the 1789 revolution, if socialist doctrines were not formally enacted, the times were certainly not good for "property owners and wealthy men." Then in 1796 came Babeuf's attempt "to end oppression and privilege by abolishing private property and concentrating all wealth in the hands of the state."
In 1826 Buonarroti rehearsed Babeuf's doctrines and influenced the revolutionaries of 1830. But meanwhile there were Fourier's books of 1808 and 1822 and Saint-Simon's Nouveau Christianisme of 1824. For Mosca, the socialist doctrines were pretty well worked out by the French before 1848.
Then there was a "proletarian novel" the Voygage en Icarie by Cabet in 1840. It imagines "a country where there is not private property and describes the bliss that men enjoy under such a system,"
2. Given all this doctrinal development, what was left for Marx to do in 1848 and later? Mosca merely notes that "the socialism of today is a far more disquieting phenomenon than the socialism of sixty years ago."
Time was that revolutionary instincts focused on democratic movements, or liberation of subject nationalities. But now all concerns move "toward substantial reforms in the prevailing social order." There is a perception of social evil "and confidence in the possibility of promptly alleviating it."
There is a widespread conviction that there is a social question, that important reforms in property rights, in the family, in our whole industrial and capitalistic system, must inevitably come about, and governors and sovereigns do little else than make efforts and promises in that direction.
In this environment two churches have grown up. "The one is made up of believers in collectivism, the other of believers in anarchy."
3. Mosca now sets forth the postulates of collectivism, or "social democracy."
[T]he state represents the collectivity of citizens. It is sole proprietor of all tools of production, whether they be capital proper, machinery of land. The state is sole director and the sole distributor of economic products. Since there are neither owners of real property nor private capitalists, everybody works for the benefit of society as a whole; and the social organism provides for all[.]
In the older formula, the provision is made "according to the needs of the individual." This is the "communist" formulation. In a newer formula, the provision is made "according to the work that the individual does." This is the "collectivist" formulation. Ideally the collectivists prefer the first formula but recognize that it is "not immediately realizable."
The whole machine so organized is administered and directed by leaders who represent the people. The function of the leaders is to dole out to everyone the type of work for which he is best fitted, to see to it that the products of labor and social capital are not squandered or unduly exploited, and at the same time to distribute to every individual, with perfect equity and justice, the exact share that is due him either as the product of his own labor as honestly and infallibly calculated, or for his own needs, of which those in control will, with the same impartiality, furnish the exact estimate.
Ok, says Mosca, suppose we ignore the violence needed to implement this program, the hatreds it would provoke, and that the reforms have all been implemented and the centuries have dimmed the memories of the wars that forced the new social system. Suppose the wealth of society had not been too much reduced, "as the economists insist." Maybe the ethics trumps the economics.
But let us ask the "political" question:
[W]hether, with the realization of the communist (or the collectivist) system, justice, truth, love and reciprocal toleration among men, will hold a larger place in the world than they now occupy; whether the strong, who will always be at the top, will be less overbearing; whether the weak, who will always be at the bottom, will be less overborne. That question we now answer decidedly with the word "no."
[Mosca's 2nd edition of Elementi di Scienza Politica was published in 1923.]
Whatever the setup of the collectivist society, there is still going to be a guy on top to manage the public wealth and he would determine who gets what -- and be "far more powerful that the ministers and millionaires we know today." "[H]e will always be a despot."
Under collectivism, everyone will have to kowtow to the men in the government. They alone can dispense favor, bread, the joy or the sorrow of life. The great of the earth will be absolute masters of everything, and the independent word of the man who fears nothing and expects nothing from them will no longer be there to curb their extravagances.
And given that there would be no private capital, but only "commodities for private consumption,"
It would certainly always be possible to distribute such commodities either gratis or for a consideration, and so electoral corruption, and many other forms of corruption that feature bourgeois societies, would reappear.
4. The strength of socialist ideas is "their minute, pointed, merciless criticism of our present organization of society." The distribution of wealth leaves much to be desired. "Between the service that an individual renders to society and the reward that he receives there is almost always a wide, and often a glaring, discrepancy."
The economists have tried to fight back, and have failed. So Mosca tries another tack.
No social organization can be based exclusively upon the sentiment of justice, and no social organization will ever fail to leave much to be desired from the standpoint of absolute justice.
For everyone conducts his life upon a compromise between justice and personal interest. So the socialists say that their system will achieve "a radical change in human nature."
But there is really no evidence that such a change is possible. It is difficult to alter the moral level of people, and history does not indicate any successful experiments. Indeed if there have been improvements it is usually because a ruler has been "curbed and balanced by other men." There is a need for a multiplicity of social forces so that "various political forces can be balanced in the administration of the state.
Collectivism and communism, like all doctrines that are based on the passions and the blind faith of the masses, tend to destroy multiplicity of political forces.
They would lead to tyranny, as has always issued from "oversimplified political doctrines." Of course, legislative remedies have the potential of reducing social injustice. But no improvements could ever approach the perfect society promised by the socialists to their followers. Neither does the physician ever promise "an infallible remedy for all diseases." Only a charlatan does that.
5. The anarchists, of course, don't just want to transform society; one Italian anarchist wanted to kill everyone down to children of two or three. Anarchists want to abolish society, after Rousseau's doctrine that mankind is best in the state of nature.
Mosca attributes Rousseau's notion to years of degradation in his youth -- for which he blamed society.
But what would happen if society were destroyed? Mosca says that "arms and weapons" would still be there and also people willing to use them to enslave others. We would get a "feudal" society, just as happened when "the collapse of Charlemagne's empire disrupted such little social organization as had survived the fall of the Roman Empire."
Anarchism would result in wholesale slaughter, and depopulation, as prophesied in the novel Caesar's Column, published in 1890.
6. The doctrine of the class struggle, "common to all parties of subversion," is incomplete, trying to explain all history as ruling classes keeping themselves in power and lower classes trying to throw off the yoke. Of course, many events are completely outside the class struggle, such as ancient Greece against Persia, and the Italian Risorgimento that was "much more due to the influence of poets and novelists than to economic factors."
From time to time the lower classes have rebelled, sometimes due to "unbearable oppression." But rebellions by the manual workers are regularly repressed with relative ease. It is only newly influential elements that have succeeded in obtaining "a share in the government of the state which they thought was being held from them unjustly." The plebs in the later Roman empire succeeded, and also the Third Estate in the French Revolution -- and the lower class benefited too.
Indeed to divide up society into a "parasite class" and a "class that does everything" just for "the bare necessities of life" and to say that "the whole ruling class, made up of landowners, capitalists, businessmen, clerks, professional men" contribute nothing seems "supremely unjust." The modern economy requires the cooperation of all classes. Without the manual laborers, the directing class would decline, and without the directing classes, manual laborers would experience a severe decline in "moral and material status."
A great modern liner... was built through the cooperation of capitalists, naval engineers and working men, and... it operated through the cooperation of a number of officers and larger number of ordinary sailors and stokers.
Who gets the earnings of the liner? And who deserves it? "It is the combination of wealth, higher education and manual labor that produces what in sum is called civilization, and on the whole improves the condition of all."
Of course there are parasites in the ruling class that earn a lot more than they are worth. And the workers and those in the ruling class not in on the grift pay for it. Protectionism benefits the few and injure the many. Bad banking policy benefits those who get credit by favoritism; the rest suffer. It is ignorance in the ruling class that allows these exploitations. Exploiters come in all flavors, from the man that "squanders a fortune in luxury," to the politician who gets into office by duping the voters, the civil-service employee who runs "crooked errands for some politician." There are exploiters and exploited at all levels of society, although "the exploited in the lower classes are more wretched... and more to be pitied... [than]... the exploited in the middle and higher classes."
Many socialists have interpreted history as a conspiracy "to exploit the working classes." But this requires them to assume that the rulers knew what they were about.
Contrary to what some socialist writers seem to think, Christianity was not adopted because it was a religion that promised happiness in another life and guaranteed that the powerful could quietly enjoy their wealth in this life. Modern wars have never been waged in order to increase the public debt and hence the political influence of nonproductive capital.
The socialist historians generally cite laws "detrimental to those who live by manual labor" and then argue that the ruling classes have determined "to pauperize the lower classes consciously and purposefully." Mosca cites Marx in Das Kapital complaining about the Statute of Labourers of 1349 right after the Black Death. But governments are always making such efforts to stem the rise of prices after a war or a pestilence, efforts which they think "could either mitigate or prevent the serious economic disturbances that resulted from sudden or excessive rise in... prices... including human labor."
7. The question remains as to whether "socialism" could be beneficial to the great majority of people
even if it is not based on an accurate observation of the laws that regulate social life, and even if it aims at an ideal that cannot be attained until human nature has radically altered.
Possibly the "moral" influence of socialism can make things better. A spirit of brotherly love "breathes through the works of... Rodbertus or of Carlo Marlo." Henry George has a "noble and tender compassion for he weak." But then there is the other kind, with Bakunin, Marx, and Lassalle, where
the predominant sentiment is an aversion to the rich... [in] the form of unremitting irony, sarcasm and invective."
And then when it gets down to the masses, the message gets garbled. The upshot is to regard the capitalist
as a man of virtually another race, another blood... a rival and an enemy... through whose ruin alone the redemption and salvation of the working classes can be effected.
No doubt a political movement must appeal to "the savage passions," but to the virtual exclusion of all else? Is it a good idea to represent human happiness as purely issuing from material means? Is it a good idea to idealize the individual human and ascribe to the social order most of the individual vices and weaknesses in human nature?
There are many kinds of poverty: one kind is material poverty and want; another is envious poverty of the man envious of one who enjoys pleasures he can never hope to have; there is the poverty of economic catastrophe and its aftermath. There is no doubt that a material standard of living is a part of human happiness; but so are sentiments like "a kindly disposition."
Other political doctrines that deal with "the grave and tormenting problem of life" have proposed different remedies than the socialists. The Stoics taught their disciples to endure unhappiness bravely. Early Christianity taught its believers the "scorn of material pleasures and... the joys of the flesh."
Socialists are not the first to preach equality and absolute justice. But it may be better to bid the rich to "Give!" rather than encourage the poor to "Take!" It might "lead to significant differences in practical results."
8. Mosca now looks at the causes of the socialism phenomenon. An important factor is universal suffrage, that has encouraged candidates "to pamper popular sentiments and prejudices" and this alienates more conservative people from public life.
Another factor is the revolutionary tradition, still strong in Latin countries and encouraged by ruling classes. Still another is for young people to need a model of virtue and perfection. The model held up to them has not been "the knight who dies for his lady," nor "the public servant, the magistrate, the soldier," but the "militant revolutionist," the rebel. The only problem is that there are no "Bastilles are left to storm," so the rebels "storm institutions that have survived old revolution." And if the old revolutions achieved so much, who can doubt "that a still more radical reform of society is possible?"
But life cannot be all revolution, all the time.
[T]he methods by which governments, religions, or political parties are kept alive, and the sentiments and passions that have to be cultivated if they are to be kept alive are essentially different from the means and sentiments that have served to bring them into being.
It is true, also, that the exploits of speculators and the way in which the rich enjoy their wealth has become a scandal and "publicized by the daily press." Then there is the war on religion, excessive taxes, public debts, unproductive expenditures, the dishonesty of politicians and parliaments, all of which discredit the current system.
Social hygiene in the ruling class is just as important as hygiene in food, water, and housing. But is the ruling class up to the task?
9. It seems to many people in Europe and America that social democracy will eventually triumph. Educated people believe in a continuous arc of progress, and collectivists and anarchists just "believe" in the triumph as the early Christians believed in their paradise. The early socialists writers prophesied the triumph of collectivism at the end of the nineteenth century or the early twentieth century.
Of course, for Mosca, the implementation of collectivism is "impossible," although there remains a possibility for social democracy. The experiment "would weight grievously... on the... generations on which the experiment would be made" and would force a "return to a much cruder and more absolute form of government." Still, the prognosis is not certain, in Europe, and more complicated in the case of the "English colonies and the United States."
It would be hard to transform society given the the institutional strength of the current "bureaucracy and the standing army." But if the social revolution did succeed it is doubtful that the existing officials would continue to function. Anarchy would ensue, making the attempt to establish collectivism impossible.
Present society has immense powers of resistance: bankers, merchants, manufacturers, employees, bondholders, bank customers, property owners: a great army. People that sympathize with social equality would think otherwise when their personal interests were threatened. The government would also have enormous resources, including the police and the army.
However, the incessant propaganda of the social democratic cause might weaken the will of people to resist, since they are taught to "doubt the justice of their own case."
But making predictions is difficult because any leap to social democracy will be "fixed by unforeseen events," such as a disaster in war, a "grave industrial and agricultural crisis or financial bankruptcy on the part of one of more great European powers." However, the longer the revolutionaries have to wait, the less likely is their revolution, since "it is difficult to keep up any sort of agitation in the masses for very long when nothing concrete is being done" to implement the glorious future. The longer the wait, the less likely there would be leaders "of the necessary experience and prestige in a position to direct the course of the revolution."
10. Suppose a violent movement is avoided.
Even so, social democracy will not cease to be a violent disintegrating agency in modern society, and if the new doctrine is not subdued the order of things now prevailing will always remain in a state of instability and have be be upheld to a great extent my sheer physical force.
But force against the social democratic movement will not make it go away. Yet, if force is not used against the socialists European civilization will be on the defensive and forced into a decline. If force is used, it "will represent a real retrogression in the safeguarding of justice and in juridical defense."
Even if all abuses are done away with and justice "is made more equitable and effective, it will not end the problem. For
social democracy aspires to absolute justice, to absolute equality, and these can never be attained... Unlike the God of the Christians, the real socialist... wants the death of the sinner. He does not want him to reform and live.
One proposed remedy is more state control to cure injustices and sufferings from economic individualism and "merciless competition:" regulation of working hours and child labor, government involvement in assisting the poor. In the old days in Europe there were intermediate organizations between government and the individual, and these still exist in India, Muslim countries, China, and Japan. But in western Europe, the family is "practically the father, mother, and minor children."
There is now widespread support for state control beyond "mere relief of distress," in effect taxing the rich to give it to the poor: even conservatives support this. But this is dangerous, it would "kill the goose that lays the golden egg." And it would make collectivism appear as an improvement.
There are other proposals, including a state obligation "to pay salaries to all the unemployed, to break up "great landed properties," a maximum eight-hour day, a minimum wage, a "heavily progressive income tax." These would "destroy private capital" in a few years.
Many people regard Christian socialism as a means of "neutralizing atheistic, materialistic and revolutionary socialism." But "Christianity and socialism are... two plants of a very different nature."
Vain, therefore, is the hope that a Christian shoot inserted into a socialist trunk will ever change the fruit, eliminating all its bitter flavor, its ever harmful quality, and leaving it sweet and wholesome.
11. The remedy to the socialist evil, "the intellectual malady of our age," is of a different order. Socialism has benefited from the disappointment of parliamentary democracy. "which set out to inaugurate a reign of justice and equality in the world, and has failed miserably to keep that promise."
Similar ideas to those that produced parliamentary democracy are now seeping us towards socialism and anarchy. Once faith in political equality and universal suffrage fails to produce political equality in the fact, it is natural to go the whole way and destroy all disparities.
Democratic doctrine has provided services to civilization. Representative government has "has contributed to important improvements in juridical defense" through a system of free discussion throughout Europe. But by carrying the notion too far, "the same doctrine is disorganizing the countries in which it prevails and forcing them into their decline."
This is because the premises of the democratic doctrine are not justified by the facts.
Absolute equality has never existed in the human condition. Political power never has, and never will be, founded on the explicit consent of majorities. It always has been, and it always will be, exercised by organized minorities... that impose their will on the multitudes.
In the world in which we are living, socialism will be arrested only if a realistic political science succeeds in demolishing the metaphysical and optimistic methods that prevail at present.
What is needed is "the discovery and demonstration of the great constant laws that manifest themselves in all human societies" and thereby demonstrate the impossibility of the democratic ideal. Only when the intellectual classes "get" this will social democracy fail.
So far, some social scientists -- notably economists -- have demonstrated the fallacies of certain socialist policies. What is needed is that
A whole metaphysical system must be met with a whole scientific system.
And so far, in the social sciences in the latter half of the nineteenth century, metaphysics has been met with metaphysics.
The task is immensely difficult, in part because the truths of the new science "will not be generally popular, since they will shock many passions and cross many interests." And will prompt opposition.
There is little likelihood that the new doctrines will find much support in our governments, or in our ruling classes... Interests, whatever their nature, love propaganda, not impartial discussion.
If science, the new political science, triumphs, it will be the achievement of honest scholars that "seek and expound the truth."
Next: Theory of the Ruling Class
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