Some Background on the Socialists and other Collectivists

Today I was thinking about collectivist social reformers, especially those who have been influenced by progressivism and socialism.  Out of that morass of arrogant human ideologies that have plagued us since the French Enlightenment, the scariest have always been put forward by those who, while claiming to love “mankind”, obviously in the abstract, were willing to sacrifice individuals to their utopian dream of reshaping human nature itself.

Here we find the tyranny inherent in Jean Jacques Rousseau’s concept of the “General Will”, where the rights of the individual are sacrificed to the common good.  When, in the French Revolution, Robespierre tried to carry out Rousseau’s vision thousands were executed because they were seen as obstructions to a new “Republic of Virtue.”  This vision of liberty, equality, and fraternity became, in fact, a dictatorship of the “Committee of Public Safety” which killed people for disagreeing with its definition of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

This helps distinguish the American Revolution from that of the French.  The original flag of our revolution was a rattlesnake.  Below it were printed the words, “Don’t tread on me!”  Notice that personal pronoun.  The American Revolution was all about people being left alone by would be human saviors of the human race.  According to the founder of modern Conservatism, Edmund Burke, it was actually the British Parliament not the Americans that were the revolutionists.  They were the ones who tried to take away the traditional rights, that Americans believed were God-given, in the name of a political and economic philosophy called Mercantilism.  A more stark contrast than that between Rousseau, Robespierre, and our founding fathers is hard to imagine. 

As the nineteenth century progressed so did the ideologies of collectivism.  Both the revolutionary socialism of Karl Marx and his ilk and the evolutionary socialism of groups like the British Fabians emerged.  Both believed the problem of society was too much focus on the individual.  Both claimed that all human problems came from human selfishness and that they had the solution to it.  Since they believed that human nature was the product of physical causes (circumstances and the ideas they create), all that needed to be done to change human nature was to change the social and political environment of humans.  Force people to do “the right thing” long enough and it will become part of human nature.  If you make people “share” long enough they will do it without questioning why they should.

The socialists soon realized that the only human institution available with enough coercive power to force people to change their behavior involuntarily was government.  So, they believed that first people who thought like them must gain control of government and then they could use its power to change other people’s behavior and “save” mankind.  They thought selfishness was, at least, partly the result of private ownership so the goal would be to eliminate the private and “selfish” use and ownership of resources.  The revolutionists, like Marx, believed this could only be done through violence.  The evolutionists, like the Fabians, believed the process could be gradually achieved through influence in the educational and political structure of the society.

Many people listened to the socialists, as many still do, because they saw that some people seemed, to them “unfairly”, to have a lot more worldly goods than others.  From believing that the well-off should share many took the fatal step of believing it was right to force people to share.

In the eastern hemisphere and in the Caribbean and Central America, the revolutionaries were able to overthrow several governments and use a “dictatorship in the interest of the workers” to begin trying to create the new humanity.  The Soviet Union was one such attempt.  Out of “love for mankind” leaders like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Fidel murdered millions of people who offered any perceived opposition to their vision of the perfect society.  And as recent years are showing the revolutionaries attempts to create a new humanity failed miserably.

In the West, the evolutionary socialists are still at work and they have made major strides in the Western democracies toward achieving their goal of governmental control by likeminded people.  While in Europe, the term “socialist” was an acceptable political term; it soon became apparent that to call one self a “socialist” was not likely to gain much public support in America.  Early on, the term got a bad reputation here.

NEXT TIME I WILL CONTINUE WITH AN OVERVIEW OF EUROPEAN AND AMERICAN PROGRESSIVE SOCIALISM