Thou Needn’t

Socialism is neither young nor untried. It is the oldest temptation in history, and it has worn the costume of every age. By David Boos.

Hugo van der Goes - The Fall of Man and The Lamentation

This essay first appeared in German, in three parts, in early 2024. It has been condensed into a single piece and translated for an English readership, with revisions made in the course of the work.

There is a consoling story told about socialism, and like most consoling stories it is false. The story goes that socialism is a noble idea spoiled in the execution; that the famines and the camps were betrayals of the dream rather than its harvest; and that the thing itself remains young, barely attempted, forever about to be done properly the next time. History, however, seems to disagree, as none of this survives contact with the record.

Ideologically charged socialist movements have been with us for more than two thousand years. State socialism is older still, nearly as old as civilization itself. And the horrors that socialist societies have reliably produced were unfortunately never simply the residue of a botched attempt. Rather they were, often unbeknownst to its minions, the thing working as designed.

The clearest map of this terrain was drawn by Igor Shafarevich, the Soviet mathematician and friend of Solzhenitsyn, in a book whose German title says the quiet part aloud: The Death Drive in History, known in English as The Socialist Phenomenon. Shafarevich separated two things that are usually confused. On one side stands what he called chiliastic socialism: the theoretical dream of a perfected communal society, the utopia held in the mind before it is laid upon the body. On the other stands state socialism: those societies which were, in their actual workings, socialist. The second kind is ancient and nearly universal; it surfaced in old Egypt, in the China of the Qin, in the Inca state strung along the Andes. The first kind, the utopia as theory, seems to be an almost exclusively Western disease.

Heresies in the language of their age

Starting from Plato’s musings on the ideal state, the dream passed into the gnostic sects of the first Christian centuries, and from there it ran like fire through the heretical movements of the Middle Ages and into the early modern world. By the Reformation the most radical of these heretics were openly competing for primacy: the Hussites, and the followers of Thomas Müntzer, who rode into battle, as it happens, beneath a banner of the rainbow.

It is not too much to say that the Reformation was the first successful socialist revolution in the West. Lutheranism prevailed not because it was the purest expression of the impulse but because it was the most moderate, the most willing to compromise, set beside the absolutists of the Cathars, the Adamites and the several breeds of Anabaptist. Lutheranism, in other words, was socialism light, and that is precisely why it won where the harder heresies broke themselves.

What deserves notice is how little the substance changed beneath the religious dress. Strip away the theological vocabulary of each century and the same demands recur, almost word for word:

• the abolition of private property;

• the dissolution of the family and its replacement by “free love”;

• the abolition of religion in favour of belief in an ideology;

• enforced communality and equality, and the suppression of the individual;

• the vision of a new world and a new man waiting to be made;

• the levelling of inherited hierarchy in favour of a bureaucratic order run by a chosen few;

• and an unqualified readiness for violence against anyone who stands in the way.

It would be foolish to assume these were just local accidents. When Thomas More published Utopia in 1516 he described a far-off commonwealth in which most of these demands had been fully realized, so fully that readers later wondered whether he had modelled it on the Inca state, that closest of all approximations to a developed state socialism. But the Spanish did not reach the Andes until 1531. More imagined from first principles what the Andes had built in fact. Apparently, the dream needs no contact between cultures to recur.

The Enlightenment changed the costume, not the body beneath it. Where the medieval heretic dressed his socialism in scripture, the philosophe dressed his in reason. Jean Meslier, forgotten now though he worked a deep influence on Voltaire, translated the old utopia into the idiom of his age. The Jacobins held him in such regard that when the Convention enthroned the Cult of Reason in 1793, Anacharsis Cloots proposed setting a statue of Meslier in the Temple of Reason, since it was he who had first cleared away the “confusions” of religion. One could find the philosophical fumbling of these men almost endearing, were it not for the trail of blood their ideas dragged through the Revolution and its tremors across Europe.

The nineteenth century swapped the cult of reason for the prestige of science, above all in the historical materialism of Marx. This is the costume most people now mistake for the body itself. Yet, once again, the Bolshevik terror was no misreading of Marx; as it was a fairly faithful application of him, however unwelcome that observation remains in the company that still grows misty-eyed over his revolutionary genius.

The redeeming butcher

The early Soviet terror, before Stalin closed his grip, shows the splintered character of every socialist movement. Like the medieval heresies and the warring clubs of the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks were far less a single bloc than hindsight makes them. The famous fissure ran between Lenin and Trotsky, but Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin each carried their own shade of the creed, which is why the purges fell as heavily within the party as upon its enemies.

Stalin ended the quarrel, by consolidation or by extermination as you prefer, and set in its place a working state socialism. That he put a stop to the internecine bloodletting, always conducted on the backs of ordinary people, is part of the strange hold he keeps on a certain Russian imagination despite a genocidal ledger. The sheer scale of his killing obscures a stranger fact: Stalin was fairly unideological. He was the stable compromise, pragmatic to the marrow, indifferent to the global utopia his colleagues dreamed of. In this he resembled Napoleon, whom no one mistakes for a visionary, and who likewise put an end to the ideological squabbling of France’s revolutionary enthusiasts.

The pattern is worth holding onto. The ruthless men, Napoleon and Stalin, even Luther if you care to go that far, do not embody the socialist ideal. They are the compromise that answers the chaos the utopians make. The chiliasts are never one thing; they fracture into a dozen mutually devouring sects, united only, and only for a while, by their hatred of the order that already exists, be it monarchy or the patriarchal household, or whatever order already stands and already works.

This is cold comfort for conservatives, because the compromise comes with a hefty price and the revolutionary impacts are coming closer. One might almost speak of a revolutionary half-life. More than two hundred and fifty years separate the Reformation from the French Revolution. But only a hundred and twenty-five separate the French Revolution from the Russian. Barely fifty years after the Russian Revolution, 1968 happened and the legitimate question arises, whether we’ve entered the state of permanent revolution Trotsky dreamed of. The intervals are rounded, but the quickening is real, and it raises a question about our own moment that the rest of this essay must try to face.

A word on China, conspicuously absent so far. The Western paint called communism certainly marked the men of Mao’s era, most catastrophically in the Cultural Revolution; but the order that settled after Deng looks less like a Western compromise than like a return to the autocratic bureaucracies of ancient China, the thing Karl Wittfogel called oriental despotism and which Marx struggled to fit into his scheme under the awkward heading of the “Asiatic mode of production.” Where individualism never struck deep roots, state socialism met little to resist it.

Thou needn’t

When we speak of modern socialism we usually begin in the 1960s, and though it would be wrong to see something wholly new there, a real difference does separate the men of 1968 from the revolutionaries before them. Earlier socialists wanted the immediate seizure of power. The children of 1968 were the heirs of Antonio Gramsci, perhaps the most consequential communist theorist of the last century, whose demand for cultural hegemony became their watchword.

Gramsci worked out his theory in one of Mussolini’s prisons, at almost the very hour Stalin was taking the Soviet helm. Against the open autocracies of his day he set a soft totalitarianism, one that would establish a new socialist order through the slow work of the intellectuals and make it acceptable to ordinary men. His chosen target was the institution that still set the cultural terms of the West: the Catholic Church. Only by offering men an alternative structure of belief, a substitute religion in plain words, could Marxism hope to take the Church’s place.

The Devil, who is of course the source of all these godless utopias, had taken a lesson from the Russian Revolution. In the Soviet Union the Bolsheviks tried to forbid religion and failed, for a forbidden thing only grows more desirable, and many Russians kept their Orthodoxy alive in secret. The persistence ran so deep that Stalin is said to have ordered the icon of Our Lady of Kazan flown above Moscow to shield the city from the advancing Germans. Whether faith or opportunism, the gesture admitted what a quarter-century of repression had not managed to undo.

So in the West the Devil changed his sentence. He no longer said thou shalt not. He said thou needn’t.

The wreckage of the Second Vatican Council on the religious sense of the faithful is the clearest case. In its announced wish to keep step with the times, the Church took the lead in dismantling its own certainties, opening “room for interpretation” where once the beauty of dogma had stood. Mass shifted, in the felt sense of it, from a necessity to a preference; attendance began a fall from which it has never recovered. No one had been forbidden anything. They had merely been told they needn’t.

The 68ers were more patient than their forebears. They did not lunge for power; they planned across decades. One has to take one’s hat off to the strategy of Rudi Dutschke’s “long march through the institutions,” all the more so since the march met little rough ground. Well-meaning conservatives handed the marchers every opportunity to settle into the universities, the press, the schools and the offices of the state.

And here the explosion of the graduate class since the 1960s has to be read as a central beam of the rebuild. With degree rates running at a third to a half of the population across much of the West, and past half in Russia and Canada, the men of 1968 manufactured in a single stroke both the architects of the new hegemony and the educated mass ready to welcome it. All of it was accomplished, to borrow the phrase, without a single shot fired.

The same gentle method dissolved the family. No one was compelled. The decoupling of sex from procreation by the pill, working together with the steady celebration of promiscuity, was enough to recast the ordinary family as a quaint and expiring arrangement. The bill for that hedonism now arrives in plain figures: in loneliness and a soured peace between the sexes, and in birth rates across the developed world that slope towards demographic winter. The full conscription of women into the labour market did not only halve the prevailing wage, the natural result of doubling the supply of workers; it pressed both parents into work to afford a modern urban life and handed the raising of children, by degrees, to the state. Long before any university was printing theses on the liberating powers of polyamory, or a German campaign at Greifswald was urging women in so many words to “end their bloodline,” parenthood had already been quietly discouraged into retreat.

With the Church’s nerve broken, two of socialism’s oldest demands were met without anyone seeming to will them: religion abolished and ideology installed in its room, the family loosened at its joints. And the religious hunger did not vanish when the faith was hollowed out. It went looking for substitutes, exactly as Chesterton predicted and Dawkins did not. Lately it has found them in a personified and suffering nature, Gaia weeps, propped up by a scientism that treats the latest finding as a final revelation. The Fall is rewritten as a new original sin, ecological or racial or merely a matter of unearned privilege, from which we cleanse ourselves by kneeling, or at the least by recolouring a profile picture. They are indulgences, sold as they always were.

The horseshoe and the billionaire

One expects the free market, enterprise, the maker’s instinct, to stand as the creative pole of resistance to all this. It has not. Over recent decades the great supranational bodies and the men who staff them have made plain that socialist measures from above can run hand in glove with the interests of a global class of oligarchs.

LEO author David Engels gave this condition its name some years ago, reviving from Spengler the term billionaire socialism and making it respectable. The ambitions of the great corporations, he argued, are best called pseudo-socialist, because liberalism and socialism in their actually existing forms

are no longer to be thought of as fundamental opposites, but rather as converging forces which, though they argue from different starting points, finally belong to the same ideological school by virtue of their materialist picture of man.

Marx had foreseen capitalism’s drift towards monopoly and command, but he wrongly supposed socialism would overcome it. Engels answers that the two now work as complements, not antagonists.

The Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han traced the inner mechanism. In The Burnout Society he marked the passage in the late-modern economy from the repressive thou must to the apparently liberating thou canst, the yes, we can, which ends not in liberation but in self-enslavement, and so in depression and burnout. Made the entrepreneur of his own self, set loose in an economy of attention and limitless self-improvement, modern man becomes at once the victim and the author of his own exploitation. The freedom turns into a yoke, and a heavier one than any master could impose, since the labourer who drives himself needs no overseer. Han’s thou canst is the exact positivist twin of the socialist thou needn’t. Both bind by releasing.

Which yields a quiet irony worth sitting with. The most perfect form of socialism could only have grown in the most liberal soil. It needed the language of freedom to do its work. And so when the smiling promise arrives, you will own nothing, and you will be happy, it does not come as a threat. It comes as relief. You needn’t carry all this. Just sign here, says the Devil, and he is still smiling.

The reaction against the individual

Why should the loss of the last restraints end in servitude rather than freedom? Paul Gottfried offered part of the answer in Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, where he described the slow mutation of mass democracy into a managerial apparatus that, to justify its own existence, takes on the work of educating its citizens. What he called a therapeutic tyranny is, on closer view, the natural ripening of a mass democracy defined by an ever-lengthening list of rights and grievances to administer. The engine of that missionary zeal he located in a liberal Protestantism given over to the search for personal salvation and the permanent crusade against discrimination.

Individualism is not usually counted among the marks of socialism; it is taken for the opposite of the collective. Yet freedom too needs its hedges. Where even the last constraints, thou must and thou shalt not, are surrendered to the open field of thou canst and thou needn’t, freedom curdles into its reverse. The free individual becomes the atomized one; individuality becomes the regimented delirium of inventing oneself as a forty-seventh gender.

Here Shafarevich reaches for Karl Jaspers and the Axial Age, that span across the first millennium before Christ when, from the Mediterranean deep into Asia, the picture of the world was overturned. In the place of the god-kings of the oriental despotisms, those first forms of state socialism, there now stood the individual as a maker of history. It can be seen in Greece, among the Hebrew prophets, as far off as the Buddha, and it crested in the birth of Christianity.

Follow that thought to its end and a strange conclusion waits. Against everything we are told, socialism in all its colours is not a revolutionary force but a reactionary one. It labours to undo the great revolution of the Axial Age, to dissolve the individual back into the collective from which he once stepped free. And it does this, Shafarevich argued, not from cold calculation but from something deeper and less governable: the death drive named in his title from the first page.

The death drive

The term is Freud’s, set down in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. He found two drives at the root of man, the drive towards life and a drive towards death, the latter “an expression of inertia,” an urge in the living thing to restore an earlier, lifeless state it had been forced to abandon. Shafarevich carried the idea up to the level of whole societies, and he was not alone in doing so. Herbert Marcuse, whose influence on the modern movements was vast, had already taken Freud’s drive and charged it with a social meaning, until death itself could be made to wear the colours of freedom:

Death can become a token of freedom. The necessity of death does not refute the possibility of final liberation. Like the other necessities, it can be made rational, painless. Men can die without anxiety if they know that what they love is protected from misery and oblivion.

One does not have to strain to find that wish at work now: in the case made for euthanasia and abortion, and in the choice not to have children at all, so that the planet might be spared. Each is the life drive overrun by its opposite. And the drive, Shafarevich noted, never shows its face; it throws over itself the robes of religion, of reason, of the state, of social justice and national feeling and science, and works the more powerfully the longer it stays hidden from the mind that carries it.

The sharpest turn comes from Han, who finds the very same drive in capitalism. Quoting the economist Bernard Maris, that the great cunning of capitalism is to channel the forces of destruction, the death drive, into growth, Han argues that capital is piled up against death as the absolute loss, in flat denial that death is real. But in fleeing death the system tears from life the one thing that gives it savour, for life is bound to death at the root. The attempt to outrun the end kills the living thing in the running.

So the two creeds we had taken for enemies turn out to be two faces of one coin. Socialism and capitalism alike are in flight from death, and both, in fleeing it, deal death. The quarrel between them was never the real story.

A revolution of consciousness

If the diagnosis is right, then the answer to modern socialism is not, in the first place, a political one. It is a thing of the soul. “Every political revolution,” Han writes, “must be preceded by a revolution of consciousness that gives death back to life.” He looks for it in Eros, the life drive, as the power that breaks the hold of narcissism and opens man at last to the Other, for it is only in that opening, and not in the locked room of the self, that freedom is really tasted.

Shafarevich, no easy optimist, ended by pointing to the Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, who held that humanity must first live through individualism in its most extreme form, must set it even against God, and only then, by a conscious act of that same individuality, find its way back to Him. Those who can make nothing of Christianity will hear in this only an affront. But the shape of it is worth weighing even so: the road out does not run backwards into the collective but forward and through, by way of an individual freedom that finally bends itself towards something greater than itself.

We are not the first to stand where we stand, and the dream has been turned back before. The peasants of the Sanfedist rising broke the Jacobin tide in Italy. The Catholics of Poland helped lower the Soviet Union into its grave. Neither did it with the better pamphlet or the cleverer argument. They did it with a faith that could not be administered away, the one thing the long march was never able to reach. The Devil offers his release with a smile and a paper to sign; he has been refused before, and can be refused again.

It is worth remembering that he fears almost nothing. But he has always feared the light.