by CHRIS GILBERT
German philosopher/sociologist Karl Marx (1818-1883) PHOTO/IZQuotes
German/US theoretical physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) addresses a group of scientists in Berlin, lecturing on the concept of “space-ether,” which his theories helped overturn PHOTO/Bettmann/Corbis/Wired
Why should one seek socialism? It is common to adduce that socialism would be more just and fair than capitalism, but that does not fully resolve the issue, since people are not always motivated by social justice. Moreover motivation — especially for undertakings that are difficult and risky, such as changing a whole society! — is in fact a complicated affair. Not only are motivations not necessarily rational, but there is also the troubling question of how durable they are in time and whether the individual’s motive, while it lasts, will coincide with that of others long enough to coalesce into a viable socialist project.
It should be pointed out that, as long as socialism was seen to be a necessary consequence of an inexorable historical development, there was no need to ask, “Why socialism?” In the period following Karl Marx’s death up through the first part of the last century, socialism was often understood to be so inevitable that it could be viewed as not especially desirable for humanity but nevertheless inescapably on its way (basically the stance of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter1).
Perhaps this is the real importance of Albert Einstein’s rightly esteemed article “Why Socialism?”2 Over and above the specific contents of Einstein’s reflections (for example, his interesting claim that a planned socialist economy is the only way to overcome capitalism’s crippling of individuals) this brief text of 1949 forms a historical watershed because, by its very approach, the physicist’s writing recognizes that socialism is not inevitable and has to be wanted. That is to say, Einstein’s text implicitly recognizes that socialism needs to be actively sought after.
Albert Einstein’s take on this question was surely influenced by the general crisis of 1914 to 1945, which profoundly shook the faith in inexorable progress and the belief in universal schemes of history. The lessons of that crisis still mark our present moment: historical determinism, outside of the academic cloisters of analytic Marxism,3 has very few adherents today. Additionally, the era of neoliberalism and global chaos that began around 1970 and continues to the present has been no less efficient than the earlier crisis in destroying our confidence in necessary progress. For these reasons, the question of why socialism —why one should want and struggle for socialism — remains as pressing for us as it was at the time of Einstein’s writing.
A “Red” Thread in Marx
Karl Marx himself may have been inclined to sidestep the question of why socialism (what motivations one has to work for a socialist society). This is in part because his work was born in an effort to respond scientifically to the pipedreams of the Utopian socialists and in part because, influenced by the widespread determinism of his moment, Marx often assumes that the mere accumulation of labor struggles and the numeric growth of the proletariat are enough to ensure a revolutionary subject.4 That being said, there is nevertheless a string of literary clues in Marx’s oeuvre that point to the crucial, “existential” question of the motivations for socialism: the reasons for doing the revolution.
Marx has two related figures for the communist revolution that both allude to Shakespeare’s Hamlet: the “spectre” that opens the Communist Manifesto and the “old mole” that appears in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. These Shakespearean references are both derived from Act I of Hamlet, in which the ghost of the protagonist’s father visits Elsinore castle. When the ghost of the murdered king is above ground he is a spectre — he is called an “apparition,” “spirit,” or “ghost” –butwhen he is below the stage boards and insists that Hamlet swear revenge the ghost figures as a “mole.” “Well said, old mole!, canst work in the earth so fast? A worthy pioneer!” Hamlet remarks when the now-underground ghost asks him to swear.
Hamlet is a play that is often taken to be constitutive of modern consciousness. It tells the story of the title character’s struggle to restore a lost order that has been usurped by his uncle Claudius, who has murdered the old king, Hamlet’s father. Like the somewhat later Shakespearean invention of the ambitious Macbeth, Claudius is a character who, because he has taken destiny into his own hands and is a “self-made man,” may be compared to a bourgeois. Thus, in this play which dates from the dawn of European capitalism, the protagonist struggles against the self-made “bourgeois” class and his inspiration comes from a figure that is old: a parental figure. It is an old mole or forgotten spectre — a voice from the past.5
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