Socialism’s Response to Failure—A Change in Ethical Standard

The only way for the collectivist Left to proceed was to take a more radical approach. First, socialist intellectuals distanced themselves from the eyesores: National Socialism in Germany under Hitler was not socialism, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics under Stalin was not socialism. Neither were Castro’s Cuba, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, nor Mao’s China. Socialism had never really been practiced correctly anywhere in the world. “On paper,” it was argued, socialism works; it is nice, friendly, and based on kindergarten ethics—all we ask of people is to share or be sent to the naughty chair.

Having absolved socialism of any wrongdoing through the actions of careless nations, the Left began a new strategy of increased criticism of capitalism. Previously, the main critique was that capitalism does not provide for the needs of its people. However, by the 1950s not only were socialist nations having that exact problem, capitalist nations provided for citizen’s needs so well that they became overweight, hedonistic, and too comfortable to be interested in a revolution. Thus, the target of criticism needed to change, and it did: from need to equality.

The German social democrats took the lead in developing a new strategy. They would no longer criticize all business as exploitive and greedy. Instead, using their new ideal of equality, they would only criticize what they now called “big” business, corporations. Alongside this, socialists began applauding and seeking support of what was now called “small” business. These businesses were small and local,

and unable to compete with the larger, often multinational, players. Equality meant fairness across the marketplace.

Another change was to the meaning of poverty. Before, poverty meant not being able to meet basic needs; it was an absolute term. Every human being needs a few basic things, like food and shelter. With the new strategy, however, poverty was to become a relative term. Popularized by Michael Harrington in the United States in the 1960s, it was not a malnourished capitalist population that might rebel, but one agitated by envy of the wealthy. A psychological bug was thus to be placed in the ear of every working American: having a white picket fence, the American dream, was no longer acceptable; instead, it was to have the same wealth as your neighbor, i.e., equality. Similarly, some Leftist intellectuals also turned to agitate women and ethnic minorities about their lack of parity in wealth to men of European descent.

The environment became another avenue to attack capitalism. Socialists ignored environmental conditions in socialist nations and attempted to turn the attention of their listeners toward the environments in capitalist nations. Rooted in Marx’s concepts of exploitation and alienation, the immense wealth of capitalism could only have been sourced from strip mining the Earth, figuratively and literally. Wealth had a cost, it was argued, and the environment was one of them. Industry, once a symbol of working-class socialism, was now a sin against the planet.

The essential point was that economic production and environmental health were incompatible, and for one to gain, the other had to lose. This is where concepts like “carbon footprint” emerged, which implies that each of us, by our very existence, puts a cost on the planet’s well-being.

Previously, Marxist socialism had lauded technological mastery over nature, as was symbolized by the Soviet hammer and sickle, but now, egalitarian critics argued that we cannot put human interests above the interests of the planet. All life was also given an equal moral footing, so a human and an aardvark had equal value. This came to be called “deep ecology” and essentially removed the humanitarian elements from Marx and inserted Heidegger’s antihumanist values. High-tech socialism was replaced by lowtech egalitarianism.

Wealth was also attacked, led by the soon-to-be leading philosopher of the New Left, Herbert Marcuse. Previously, wealth, at least in a moderate amount, was considered necessary to any nation and its people. Now that capitalism was shown to be the superior producer of wealth, that very ability to be productive needed to be considered evil because a comfortable populace is distracted from their historical duty to transcend capitalism and make progress toward socialism. In other words, wealth was now framed as a malicious distraction that capitalism uses to put its populace to sleep. Joe six-pack became the “one-dimensional man,” from the title of one of Marcuse’s popular books.

Socialism, concluded Marcuse, needs to watch for capitalism’s technocracy to inevitably repress human nature until the masses burst out into irrationality (Freud would likely have also suggested this). These irrationalities, then, were to be encouraged in order to break the system. Socialists should seek out the marginalized, the outcasts, including poor but intellectually eager students, those least fogged by the luxurious haze of capitalism, and “emancipate” them into activists. As a result—and it is hard to see this as purely a coincidence—a flood of Marxist socialist

terrorist groups formed in the 1960s, including the Black Panthers in the United States and the FLQ in Canada. The New Left was looking to take advantage of the turmoil in the 1960s. After the death of Marxist icon Che Guevara in 1967, student demonstrations, particularly in France, came to their peak in 1968. But by the mid-1970s, much of the destruction had ended—the New Left seemed to have lost its steam.

When Marcuse was asked in 1974 to comment on the winding down of the movement, he replied, “I don’t think it’s dead, and it will resurrect in the universities.” And it did, but under a new intellectual banner composed of namely Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, and Rorty. But why these four? Upon examining their biographies, all were within seven years of age from one another, all studied philosophy, and all were strongly committed to Left politics. They also experienced the crises of socialism in the 1950s and 1960s and watched the New Left fail in the 1970s. These four philosophers rose to leadership to signal a new direction for the academic Left, which became postmodernism. Having reviewed its philosophical history, we can now soberly examine postmodernism, the focus of our final chapter.

On the following page, one can find a summary of socialist strategies, including its many paths, some of which have failed and others that have not yet resolved themselves.

Chart 2: The Evolution of Socialist Strategies (Or: From Marx to the Neo-Rousseauians)