Guest Post by Frank Cunningham, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy & Political Science, University of Toronto
Premised on the philosopher, George Santayana’s often-proven adage that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it, this intervention in the (Canadian) New Democratic Party’s current debate over the “S” word situates these deliberations within the history of socialist and social-democratic movements.

The aim is to urge in-depth reflection as opposed to short-term strategizing about election rhetoric and to draw some lessons from one, important part of socialist history.

Let us start with a pivotal moment in socialist/social-democratic movement history, namely the Gotha Conference of 1875 at which the Socialist Workers Party of Germany was founded. This party replaced the earlier Social Democratic Workers’ Party, which, for its part, was the result of an earlier merger of two left-wing organizations, a reformist Association founded by Ferdinand Lassalle and a revolutionary one founded by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, whose most famous member was Karl Marx. The Lassalleans favoured parliamentary activity to achieve economic reforms, while the Marxists looked to political organization of industrial workers to achieve more radical transformations. Reflection on the Gotha Conference episode already muddies the terminological waters.

The party issuing from the Conference was called Socialist; while the merged party it came from was called Social Democratic, though it was headed by the revolutionary Bebel. A principal organizer of the Gotha Conference was Eduard Bernstein, often identified as the founder of #socialdemocracy. Fifteen years later the Socialist Workers Party that issued from the Conference again changed its name now to the Social Democratic Party of Germany. No doubt participants in and around the Conference devoted attention to and even agonized over what titles to apply to their parties, but subsequent thinking and activity on the left quite rightly ignored such concerns, attending instead to the substance of the political alternatives being debated. The spectrum of such alternatives is illustrated in the variety of orientations of those prepared to accept the socialist label.

The term “socialism” was probably coined in 1831 by a Swiss writer (Alexandre Vinet) and appropriated the next year by the editor (Pierre Leroux) of Le Globe, an influential journal of followers of the social theorist, Claude-Henri Saint-Simon. Though St.Simon was criticized from the left, especially by Marx and Engels, his views were more radical than those of British progressives such as Robert Owen, who also adopted the term socialist. Other early socialists in one or the other of these streams included Louis Blanc, who advocated a strongly welfare state and Charles Fourier, who looked to overcome the constraints of a division of labour. Also influential were Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (he coined the phrase “property is theft”), who favoured federations of manufacturing and agricultural communities, and Étienne Cabet, who projected a coöperativist and egalitarian community modeled after early Christianity.

Despite their differences, these early socialists shared a belief in the power of education and the example of experimental communities to win converts from all classes who would work in an evolutionary way toward the goals they favoured. This belief distinguished them from other self-described socialists of the time, and in particular the “Blanquists.” These were followers of Louis-Auguste Blanqui, who, like his inspiration, François-Noël Babeuf, saw the French Revolution as the first phase of a more revolutionary and class-partisan transformation of society. While the practical efforts of followers of Saint-Simon, Owen, and Fourier were mainly to construct sample utopian communities, the Blanquists engaged in direct, revolutionary action, famously seizing most of Paris (the “Paris Commune”) in 1871.

The major differences among these socialists were well-known to participants in the Gotha Conference, as they were later to leaders in the overthrow of Czardom in Russia. The Mensheviks charged their rival Bolsheviks with revolutionary Blanquism, while Lenin counter charged by associating the Mensheviks with the reformist views of Blanc. The main lines of debate were also in the minds of subsequent socialists such as William Morris, the Fabian Socialists, and G.D.H. Cole, the last of whom promoted a national association of manual and professional workers (Guild Socialism) to coordinate industry in the interests of the public good.

What lessons are to be learned from this history?

Lesson One: Socialism is Multi-Dimensional

Surveying the web of shifting political alliances, debates, and theories in the early years of socialist organization throws into relief three distinct but often fused questions:

• What is the overall goal or vision of socialism or social democracy?

• How is the goal to be governmentally and economically institutionalized?

• What activities and organizations are required to achieve the institutions?

It is, of course, possible and even likely that, despite a penchant for advocates to phrase their recommendations in universal terms, there are no generally applicable answers to these questions. But taking the questions one-by-one in any specific national context helps to focus practically relevant debate, as opposed to rhetorical posturing.

Institutions. Economically, the major differences among both 19th and 20th Century protagonists are over the nature and extent of markets. That the actual achievement of #socialism in the Soviet Union attempted total state economic planning obscures the fact that nearly all other socialists/social democrats wished to maintain competitive markets. At the same time, none wanted market transactions to exhaust economic practices and structures but favoured exemption of some things from market interactions and state regulation of market processes and outcomes. So Fourier saw his utopian communities (the Phalansteries) as including markets, but ones strictly confined in terms of permissible income levels and labour relations. In the manner of later advocates of workers’ self-management, Proudhon looked to markets without capitalist ownership.

As to the NDP, it clearly wishes to maintain a market economy, but one that preserves and extends public control of some services, such as health care. Whether it will strive to secure (or retrieve) public control, by direct ownership or by more extensive regulation, of social housing, national energy, the pharmaceutical industry, the banks, and so on, are or ought to be major topics of deliberation regarding the economic-institutional question. With respect to governing institutions, the NDP rests content with parliamentary democracy, though recognizing room for improvement (proportional representation, Senate reform, etc.). Perhaps there are ideas to be garnered from earlier proposals, such as devolution of some political decision-making to something like Cole’s associations of self-regulating professions.

Means to Achievement. Again the NDP option is clear: political-party activity within the Westminster parliamentary-democratic system. If there is room for debate here it is about how to try constructing a left-oppositional coalition and whether such could or should lead to a merger with other parties. Revolutionary vanguardism as proposed by Babeuf and Blanqui and implemented by Lenin are clearly off the map, as is the non-democratic, paternalistic approach of Saint-Simon and most other utopian socialists. But there may be room for consideration on the part of the NDP of more extensive cooperation with a broader variety of social movements than trade unions and for the vigorous, imaginative public educational campaigns of the sort advocated, for example, by the #Fabians.

Visions. Of the three dimensions of socialist/social-democratic politics – visions, ways of institutionalizing their realization, and means for achieving the institutions — the first of these is the guiding one. Without the vision of an overall goal, it is not possible to know what political and economic institutions are needed, and if the history of Soviet-style #socialism has taught us nothing else, it has shown that unless the goals of a movement govern means taken to achieve them, the goals are not achieved at all: the dictatorship of the proletariat becomes simply dictatorship.

In first employing the term socialisme, Vinet opposed it to individual “particularity,” thus expressing one vision expounded by many subsequent socialists and social democrats, namely a society variously described as communalist, solidaristic, or coöperativist. Proudhon, by contrast, emphasized the autonomy of the individual, freed from what he saw as the conjoined shackles of capitalism, the state, and the church, as the main goal. Owen was primarily concerned to eliminate poverty. Socialists in the Blanquist tradition leading to Marx and #Lenin looked to a radical form of economic democracy, where working people controlled the means of production, availing themselves of exclusive state power for this purpose.

In both its 1933 founding Regina Declaration and the subsequent Winnipeg Declaration in 1956 (which substantially qualified the earlier endorsement of extensive state planning), the NDP’s forerunner Party, the #Co-operativeCommonwealthFederation, or CCF, identified “supplying human needs” as its paramount goal. More recent documents and press releases of the NDP list menus of major policies it will pursue – a green economy, strengthened social services, better pensions, global peace, and so on. The twin goals of “economic growth and social equality” look to be the closest to a generic vision, but such a vision needs to be fully articulated and defended at the level of generality found in previous socialist/social-democratic movements.

Lesson Two: The Name of the Game is Equality

Despite divergent focuses, all the socialist visions have one vital element in common, namely commitment to social and economic equality. Cabet, a champion of solidaristic communities, saw equality as an essential component of them. Fourier, who, like Proudhon, envisaged a society conducive to the full exercise of an individual’s powers, also included income floors and ceilings in his imagined society so that everyone would have this opportunity. Following Saint-Simon in projecting a principle of distribution in a socialist society of “from each according to ability, to each according to work,” Marx, again like Saint-Simon, wanted this to be combined with social equality, importantly including the equality of women and men. He saw socialism eventually giving way to thoroughly egalitarian, “communist” societies where each is expected to contribute according to ability and to be rewarded in accord with need. Equality has also been a constant theme in both iterations of the CCF and in the NDP.

It is not enough just to announce that one’s goal is equality, since this term, like all other politically charged ones, admits of alternative interpretations. One candidate, echoing the otherwise diverse views of Fourier, Proudhon, and Marx, is that of Canada’s own C.B. Macpherson who advocated a society where everyone equally possesses the opportunities and the resources to develop his or her potentials to the fullest. Other conceptions of equality are, of course, possible.

Lesson Three: Substance Trumps Terminology

It should be obvious that it is more important for those who champion an egalitarian society to deliberate about and publicize their views about what forms and measures of equality they favour and how to institutionalize them than to debate terminological questions about what an egalitarian society should be called. Similarly more important than terminology is to defend egalitarian goals against overt anti-egalitarians, against those who limit equality to only legal matters, and against those who advocate suspect institutions supposed to deliver some measure of equality, for instance, a trickling-down free market.

As to how a political party aiming at equality should designate itself, my own view is that at least in Canada today “social-democratic” is good enough. As the history sketched above shows, this term is sufficiently broad to encompass a wide variety of orientations. Those, both in the NDP and in the Canadian public in general, who value equality would do well to put political rhetoric aside and focus on how, in the face of severe and growing inequality, to achieve the egalitarian vision.

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