The spirit of experimental socialism

Does socialism still have a future? The answer seemed to be in the affirmative during my recent participation in the eighth biennial Herbert Marcuse conference, held on 10–13 October 2019 at the University of California, Santa Barbara. If there was a common theme in this conference, it was the idea of socialism as a possible horizon of liberation from the current crisis of the human condition. This conference renewed my earlier intention to re-read Axel Honneth’s The Idea of Socialism: Towards a Renewal (2017) and to contrast it with Zygmunt Bauman’s Socialism: The Active Utopia (1976). In fact, the subtitle of Bauman’s book summarizes Honneth’s major argument. Honneth, however, is a utopian realist who aspires to trace the defects of the socialist project and introduce corrections so as to restore some of socialism’s former vitality.

Before exploring Honneth’s project, it is very relevant to examine Bauman’s construction of socialism as the active utopia. Despite the widespread disenchantment with utopias, Bauman argued that socialism is still to some extent the utopia of the modern epoch, i.e. the counter-culture of capitalist society. The ‘activeness’ of modern socialism, like all utopias, is derived from its ability to relativize the present, i.e. its ability to think of alternative solutions and to give insight to unexplored futures. The driving force behind the search for a socialist utopia is the principle of hope, which recognizes human will and speaks in terms of the possible. Socialism, like all utopias, does not defend the existing reality. Rather it always reminds us of the gap between the promise and reality (Bauman, p. 16).

Socialism does not call for a come-back rationale, and future planners embraced modern industry and technology without any nostalgic dreams about the lost pre-industrial paradise (face-to-face relations, pastoral beauty, the moral vigour of the countryside, its habits and repetitions from which human beings drew their emotional security and mastery over their own life). Socialism, in Bauman’s discourse, is seen as a radical but logical extension of capitalist liberalism. In other words, capitalism is an essential and perhaps inevitable vehicle of a socialist future (Bauman, p. 57).

Bauman in 1976, and later Honneth in 2015 (the year of the German edition of his book), made long detours to discuss these ideas in his references to Robert Owen, Saint Simons, Emile Durkheim, Joseph Schumpeter. The aim was to uncover the early socialists’ emphasis on economic factors, the control over means of production, and the conscious centres of society. Bauman and Honneth argued that these factors represent the structure of the system, not the structure of socialism itself as a body of beliefs and attitudes in its own right. It is the desire for justice and social freedom which is key to understanding the historical active role of socialism.

The Soviet experiment, according to Bauman, embraced the bourgeois values of progress measured by the number of factory chimneys, work discipline and puritan morality. It contributed to ‘an unqualified support for the concept of progress measured in GNP, to the reduction of human problems to those of economic efficiency, to erasing the problem of alienation from the agenda of human liberation, to restricting the international problem of freedom to the narrow frame of national sovereignty, and to a reinforcement of the state in its alleged role as the sole lever of human emancipation’ (Bauman, p. 100).

Bauman referred to Gramsci as the first Marxist thinker to understand capitalism’s vitality and resilience, stressing that the broad humanistic ambitions originally attached to the idea of common ownership (reduction of toil, elimination of inequality, liberation of the producer from his subordination to the machine, making labour pleasant and creative, restoration of control to the producers, overcoming of alienation, etc.) have been gradually shelved, if not abandoned or branded as heresy (Bauman, p. 103).

It is this lack of a real cultural transformation of needs and aspirations, of consciousness and sensibility that pushed both Bauman and Honneth to revive the ideal of the early socialists and the conception of a community of creative, equal and self-governing individuals, on a world scale.

Honneth’s philosophy, unlike Bauman’s social theory, reflects an optimistic utopian orientation that advocates a gradual transformation based on reforming current reality with the help of past lessons and continuous experiments. It is precisely for this reason that Honneth argues that socialism ‘still contains a vital spark, if only we can manage to extract its core idea from the intellectual context of early industrialism and place it in a new socio-theoretical framework’, one which would underline the ‘normative horizon of modernity’ (Honneth, p. viii).

Unlike Bauman, who spent his life criticizing the underside of modernity and its transformation from solidity to liquidity, Honneth strongly believes in the normativity of modernity, regardless of all past and contemporary critiques of the modern secular project in its capitalist and socialist versions. Honneth does not attribute the ‘sudden decline in utopia energy’ and the withering of the ‘deep-seated capacity for utopian transcendence’ to the failure of representative democracy, to past colonialism and contemporary neo-colonialism, to the US will to power, to its military adventures in the Middle East, to its support of dictatorships, to its neoliberal policies, or to the global separation of power from politics, but to ‘reification’, i.e. ‘the predominance of a fetishistic conception of social relations’ (Honneth, p. 4).

Honneth distances himself from current praxis, avoiding the attempt to ‘draw connection to current political constellations and possibilities of action’, i.e. avoiding the strategic question of how socialism could influence current political events. He assigned himself only the modest task of answering the question of ‘how the original intention of socialism could be reformulated so as to make it once gain a source of political-ethical orientations’ (Honneth, p. 5).

Honneth had to uncover major defects of the early socialist project, and then introduce corrections to it. Firstly, the early socialists confined the community of liberty, fraternity and solidarity entirely to the economy, thus ignoring the relationship between the economic sphere and hard-fought political freedoms. Secondly, the founding fathers of the socialist project burdened it with a metaphysical theory of history (historical determinism). Thirdly, they conceived of history as a class struggle with the proletariat as the revolutionary subject.

These defects are explored by Honneth in detail through very long detours that go back to the nineteenth-century debates among the followers of Robert Owen in England, the Saint-Simonists and the Fourierists in France. All of them rejected the post-revolutionary social order because the expansion of the capitalist market prevented large sections of the population from tasting the freedom and equality proclaimed by the French Revolution.

According to Bauman and Honneth, it was French sociologist Emile Durkheim who introduced the common aim shared by the currents of early socialism: the subordination of economic functions to the authority of society as represented by the state. This definition of socialism, according to Honneth, does not adequately capture the normative intention of socialism, though it reveals the common ground shared by all ‘socialist’ movements and schools of thought. Even John Stuart Mill and Joseph Schumpeter tried to grasp the chief ambitions of socialism, yet they failed to understand the true moral motives or ethical intentions of the project, reducing the socialist project to the desire for a more just distribution of resources. Early ‘socialists’, however, were driven by genuine normative principles of the French Revolution, even if they were the least influenced by it (Honneth, pp. 8-10).

This is the major thread that Honneth tries to weave and prove its continuity in modern socialist thought. The reductionist economic view is salvaged by Honneth’s reference to a hidden and unexplored good intention that places emphasis on free cooperation and solidarity, i.e. the ideals of the French Revolution: ‘liberty’, ‘fraternity’ and ‘equality’. The latter often played a subordinate role due to its merely legal or individualist understanding of freedom. Socialists sought to expand the liberal concept of freedom in order to reconcile it somehow with the aim of ‘fraternity’. The contradiction could not be solved as long as liberty was understood solely in terms of the private egotism characteristic of competition in the capitalist market. The aim of fraternity, of mutual responsibility in solidarity, could be achieved only if individual freedom was understood as a relation in which the pursuits of individual members of society complement each other in the economic power-centre of the new society, rather than the private pursuit of interests (Honneth, p. 12).

The ultimate aim of socialism, in Honneth’s view, is what he calls ‘social freedom’. Distribution of resources by means of a new economic order is not the ultimate end, but the moral purpose of production, i.e. transcending the private and self-interested character of the liberty proclaimed by the French Revolution. This is the dialectic role of socialism, i.e. accepting capitalism’s normative bases of justification – liberty, equality and fraternity – while interpreting these values and reconciling them with a less individualistic and more intersubjective conception of liberty.

‘Social freedom’ is the answer, and it refers to a broad semantic field that includes free intersubjective relationships under certain normative conditions, especially the mutual sympathy found only in communities of solidarity, i.e. acting ‘with each other’ and ‘for each other’, thus advocating a communitarian life-form, rather than merely a more just system of distribution (Honneth, pp. 27–28).

With this original idea of socialism, Honneth proposes a socialism of a post-Marxist form. According to Honneth, Marx’s sociological fiction of a revolutionary working class was already undermined by the early Frankfurt School under the direction of Max Horkheimer. After the Second World War, within a ‘post-industrial society’, and due to the structural transformation of the labour market and the dissolution of the labour movement, the proletariat disappeared and the industrial working class could no longer assume the role of revolutionary subject. Honneth’s post-Marxist form of socialism can be summarized as follows:

First, all citizens are expected to be the addressees of socialism, not only the working class, the service proletariat, the marginalized, the deprived, or minority groups.

Second, markets and labour should be socialized and humanized by opening up space for other models of the market as equally valuable alternatives to the capitalist market: the market as Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’; as an ‘association of free producers’; and as an exercise of social freedom in the economic sphere and democratic will-formation.

Third, this renewed socialism must be understood as a process of experimentation, and the major principle of efficacy is the realization of social freedom.

However, this experimentation required Honneth to introduce a high level of abstraction that goes back to John Dewey and Hegel, i.e. an optimistic ontology that conceives of human history as marked by the gradual expansion of communication and social interaction.

Here we come to Honneth’s favourite theme of the 1990s: the struggle for recognition, one which is permanent and eternal, transcending socialism as a class struggle between collectives with seemingly fixed interests. The renewed and revised socialism is presented as a permanent vision of new groups who constantly seek to draw public attention to their own demands, to tear down barriers to communication and thus expand the space of social freedom.

Instead of historical determinism, Honneth proposes a post-Marxist ‘logic of historical experimentalism’ or a post-Marxist ‘spirit of experimental socialism’. This logic/spirit seeks to ‘strengthen the social’ in the economic sphere; to ‘socialize the market’; and to ‘humanize labour’. This experimentalism requires revised socialism to assemble an internal archive of past attempts at economic collectivization, such as construction of social housing, union efforts, suggestions of guaranteed minimum income, etc.

The accumulative institutional and legal reforms are the only guarantee for the realizability of socialism. Honneth puts it this way:

In any case, once we no longer think of social collectives but of institutional achievements as the true embodiment of the demands of socialism, then everything changes. The addressees of socialist experimental insights will no longer be the members of a certain social group, but all citizens – provided the latter are convinced that their individual freedom can only be realized through cooperation in solidarity in significant spheres of social life. The guarantee for the realizability of socialism will no longer be the existence of a social movement with corresponding aims, but the capacity to bring about institutional reforms within the given social reality – reforms that point toward future change. The more legal reforms or mental shifts that socialism can look back upon in its search for traces of its own intentions, the more it will regain confidence in the realizability of its visions in the future. (Honneth, p. 74)

Following Hegel and Marx, Honneth attempts to apply the properties of living organisms to social entities, and thus conceive of the structure of social spheres with differentiated functions as a kind of living organism, whose independent parts support the functioning of a superordinate whole. With a normative reading of this organic analogy, Honneth aspires to stress the functional differentiation between independent, yet harmonious and integrated, parts that support each other – like the organs of the body. This perception does not advocate a fixed vision or an ultimate destination, and it only provides a ‘primary’ guiding conception and a source of orientation in an ever-changing experimental search for institutional possibilities.

This organic analogy is not confined to small groups with intimate trust and personal relationships, and it extends also to include collective movements and nations.

Here it seems to me that Honneth avoided the most important question and raised it only in the last few pages of his book: ‘We still need to deal with a question that reaches far back into the history of the workers’ movement: Must socialism be understood as a national or as an internationalist project?’

Honneth is aware that this experimental ‘organic’ analogy can be achieved within the framework of the nation-state as the institution or authority that could manage the relation between all independent spheres, yet we are living in times of globalization and transnationalization. To overcome this dilemma, Honneth draws on John Dewey and Jürgen Harbermas, thus advocating the concept of ‘political public sphere’ and ‘democratic public sphere’. It is the public sphere of deliberating citizens that must take over the role of supervising the functioning of the entire organic structure and of making the requisite adjustments. This is a clear abandonment of the illusion of a fixed, already existing bearer of the socialist cause, and an enhancement of the normative guideline of ‘social freedom’ (Honneth, pp. 97–99).

As a genuine socialist, Honneth advocates the vision of socialism as a transnational socio-political project in its experimental search for possibilities of expanding social freedom. Honneth’s renewed socialism is constructed as an international theoretical political doctrine, and an ethically compact theory adapted to the cultural features of a certain region. It is the application of the notion of social freedom to the spheres of economy, politics and personal relationships that guarantees the possibility of eliminating coercion and domination, nationally and internationally.

Honneth’s very optimistic Hegelian ontology in this book misses a dialectic approach to the human condition, underlining only the forms of recognition based on social freedom: love, respect, solidarity and law. In fact, Honneth did not miss this dialectical stance in his earlier work in the 1990s on the struggle for recognition. In this book, however, social freedom in the various independent spheres is taken for granted without explicit reference to the dominance of the forms of disrespect: abuse, denial of rights and exclusion, denigration and insult.

Honneth’s real utopia is based on gradual reform rather than radical transformation of needs, consciousness and sensibility, yet without any reference to the role of art and religion in this experimental socialism. This is a methodological decision that aims at building democracies without depending on external sources, as if democracy can survive without religious foundation. Democracies can reproduce themselves, and socialism can be understood without relying on religion. Socialism can do without religion. It is a self-sufficient alternative religion, so to speak.

Art, like religion, is not a systematic element of ‘the spirit experimental socialism’. It was historically important, but there is much doubt that it can be empirically important in present times. Art was necessarily seen as a socially useful labour, and it was not merely a private investment or activity. Rather the state sponsored artists in the form of paid positions, stipends, and ateliers for experimentation. Yet it seems that neither religion nor art is expected to play any role in the spirit of experimental socialism that Honneth advocates.

Religious belief is intentionally removed from experimental socialism as it should not exercise any influence on the legal system or the system of rights. Equal social and liberal rights should be completely independent from religious influences. This humanistic experimentation places emphasis on the human formation of democratic will, even one that is indifferent to religious sensitivities. Democracy, according to Honneth, needs to recognize everyone as full citizen, and it is wrong for democracy, for example, to deprive sexual safety of same-sex marriages. This is actually the promise and the risk of Honneth’s revival of the spirit of socialism.