Get into an argument with a socialist — any socialist — and you will sooner or later be informed that you just don’t understand, that you don’t know what socialism is, you’re ugly, and your mother dresses you funny.
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| "I'm not ugly . . . I'm a mirror." |
Wait a minute . .
. didn’t we just repeat ourselves?
Yes. The problem with socialism and the socialists
(whether or not they want to or even can admit what they are) is that socialism
is the same thing under many names. Perhaps
Karl Marx said it best when he declared in The
Communist Manifesto (1848) — communism being the most extreme form of
socialism — “The theory of the Communists may be summed up in a single
sentence: Abolition of private property.”
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| Not particularly ugly, but they dressed funny. |
Instantly
socialists of all stripes — especially those who claim not to be socialists —
set up a howl. Socialism isn’t like
that! Some socialism permits private
ownership! Property has changed! You just don’t understand! You’re ugly!
Your mother dresses you funny!
Nor is this
anything new. While researching the blog
series on common sense, we came across an article in the Boston Evening Transcript of November 27, 1908, “The Fading
Fabians.” This caught our eye, for the Boston Evening Transcript was, to all
intents and purposes, a “georgist” newspaper, at least up until the death of
Henry George, the agrarian socialist, in 1897, and Henry George was a strong
influence on the Fabian program.
Although we had
been looking for something else, a word or two caught our eye, and we read the
entire article. It was chock-full of
some rather fascinating statements by George Bernard Shaw. Most interesting was the claim that the
Fabians deliberately mislead people as standard operating procedure:
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| Shaw: No money if people weren't confused. |
No doubt the Fabians have made an impression in London and in
England that is not recognizable as their work.
By the very law of their being, these Opportunists are not to vaunt
themselves openly — least of all to claim the exclusive leadership of the
social movement of British politics at present.
At a recent meeting, quite fully reported in the official organ of the
society, Mr. Bernard Shaw congratulated the Fabians on there being in most
people’s minds a certain vagueness and confusion as to what the Fabians really
stand for: “You get a good many subscriptions [i.e., donations] from people who
would not subscribe if they were entirely clear on the subject,” he said, “and
you also get a certain width of sympathy, a broad idealism which is helpful.”
(“The Fading Fabians,” The Boston Evening Transcript, November 27, 1908,
p. 10.)
This, however,
had backfired — at least according to Shaw.
The article went on to explain,
As there are all sorts of stripes of Liberals and of
Conservatives, there are of Socialists.
He [Shaw] admits that there is this danger to the Fabians in their
vagueness, that such a society may be captured for purposes foreign to its
ends, “just as Christianity has been captured by commercialism, so that there
is nothing in the world less Christian than what is called Christianity.”
But these quips and brilliants of Shaw’s cannot conceal his
real concern, showing throughout this address, over the schisms and secessions
that have taken place among the Fabians.
With his characteristic candor he owns up to the loss of half a dozen
sorts of Fabians — one typified by the prominent member who “left us because we
did not adore Mr. W. E. Gladstone”; another who wanted the abolition of
marriage in their programme; and another (the son of a clergyman) who wanted
anti-clericalism made a part of the faith.
Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, it appears, once called himself a Socialist,
“but he did not know what Socialism was then, and he does not know now when he
says he is not a Socialist.” (Ibid.)
Twenty years
later, Shaw still insisted that Fabian socialism and distributism are the same
thing, while Chesterton still insisted that they are not — “[Chesterton] is a
distributist, which means today a Redistributist. He has arrived by his own
path at my own position.” (“Do We Agree? A Debate Between G.K. Chesterton
and Bernard Shaw,” 1928.)
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| Henry George: New Age economic guru. |
Chesterton, of
course, denied that distributism means redistributism . . . but never really
said how people are to become owners otherwise.
Perhaps that is why so many of Chesterton’s latter day followers agree
with Shaw and not with Chesterton, especially in their adulation of the thought
of Fabian socialists Arthur Penty, E.F. Schumacher . . . and Henry George.
George’s ideas
were integrated into Fabian socialism and expanded beyond land to all forms of
capital, then mixed in with concepts from theosophy (what Chesterton called
“Esoteric Buddhism”). This made for a
rather unhealthy and inedible mass of contradictory assertions directly at odds
with basic common sense. Shaw complained
in his talk about Fabians who wanted to limit the understanding of socialism to
“the extinction of private property in land,” viz., “It is a revelation of the extent of the spread of the
doctrines of the American, Henry George, in other countries than his own.” (Ibid.)
Oddly, today’s
distributists — or, at least, those officially sanctioned by the Benevolent
Association of Fanatical Factionalists Leading Every Distributist (BAFFLED) —
appear to be of the opinion that distributism cannot survive without georgism .
. . or so one of the Inner Circle of Kindred Yahoos (ICKY) claims. This (as you might expect) leaves us a
little, er, baffled, for a fundamental tenet of georgism is that you can’t own
anything you didn’t make with your own labor, like land and natural resources .
. . and (assuming they’re being consistent) livestock. In this rather icky scenario, the
distributist mantra of “three acres and a cow” becomes “three units of
something you can’t own and another thing you can’t own” as a way to restore
private property. . . .
In an effort to
bring a stop to all the confusion, Shaw stated his definition of socialism
clearly and forcefully: “ ‘Whether a man’s motive,’ he says, ‘is the usual one,
the rescue of our civilization from its present misery, or whether it is
something else, he is a Socialist if he advocates this substitution of public
for private property.’ ” (Ibid.) Karl Marx couldn’t have said it any better .
. . in fact, Marx said the same thing in slightly different words, as did Pope
Leo XIII:
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| Leo XIII: Inviolability of private property is the first principle. |
[I]t is clear that the main tenet of socialism, community of
goods, must be utterly rejected, since it only injures those whom it would seem
meant to benefit, is directly contrary to the natural rights of mankind, and
would introduce confusion and disorder into the commonweal. The first and most
fundamental principle, therefore, if one would undertake to alleviate the
condition of the masses, must be the inviolability of private property. (Rerum Novarum, § 15.)
Now, we don’t
expect the socialists to agree with Marx, Shaw, or Leo. After all, the Catholic Church has repeatedly
condemned socialism in no uncertain terms, and the last thing socialists want
is certainty about what they’re talking about . . . from other people, anyway,
as Shaw explained. The more you can keep
people confused and off-balance, the better off and more effective the socialist movement will be. And the more money you'll collect.
The problem is
that in confusing others, many socialists have only succeeded in confusing
themselves, again as Shaw pointed out.
So, while the authorities we’ve cited agree that socialism can be summed
up as the abolition of private property . . . what does that mean, exactly?
Tune in Monday to
find out.
#30#
