Socialist Philosophy

Haven't blogged in a while so just to keep things active here are some brief and ill thought out musings on philosophy and socialism that I have had for a while. As in many other cases this will suffer from my decision to avoid ever using negative exemplars, but on the whole I think that makes my blog better. So feel free not to believe me, and in this case these really are just ill thought out musings - not really meant to persuade and which I am not sure I could defend. But I am sure I am not the only person who wonders what, if anything, philosophy might do for socialism, so maybe if that's shared between us my thoughts will spark something useful in you. (Just a note: I am going to link to lots of positive examples of the sort of thing I mean. Feel free to follow them up, I think they're all interesting texts that socialists should engage with! But one couldn't coherently agree with all of them, some of them aren't even socialist, so I don't link to signal endorsement and don't advise anyone tries to build a worldview out of this post.)

I take it that necessary for socialism (perhaps not sufficient but necessary) is quite a drastic reordering of how we divide social labour, how we divide the fruits of labour, and how we manage the process of production. Socialism must involve democratising ownership and command of the means of production, must not involve any inherited aristocracies of wealth, command, or privilege, and must share burdens and benefits of social living in such a way that exploitation and avoidable suffering are minimised. Or, at least, some sustained effort towards these things must be made with some non trivial measure of success. Otherwise even if one professes to be socialist what one has is pseudo-socialist, or a failed attempt at socialism, or something of the sort. 

So what, in society as it presently is, do I think philosophy can contribute to this project? Quite a lot! The first (though not entirely uncontroversial) thing to say is that building a broad consensus in favour of our ideals will be necessary if a more democratised society is to look more like a world we should prefer, and ethical argument will be part of how that consensus is produced. This should include things aimed at working out the details re how to proceed among those already convinced, works making the basic case for socialism that are explicitly popular, and, ideally, works that are both. Also part of building consensus is recognising that we're often opposed by quite spurious arguments or faulty modes of reasoning that can be shown fallacious by philosophical skill sets in critical thinking, which we should seek to popularise. 

(In fact, and this qualification should be understood as given at every point though I am only going to make it explicitly here, such argument is also necessary for checking oneself that one is actually in the right. Philosophers should - probably, to maintain consistency! - not be dogmatic, and that includes about socialism. But for the rest I shall write as if one is convinced that socialism is indeed the better way forward, understanding this to be always open to being reconsidered as new evidence and argumentation is presented.)

Further, though this point tends to be over-emphasised by analytic philosophy circles, evidently the terms involved in my too quick definition of socialism can be vague or ill defined in such a way as might impede action; to that extent (but only to that extent) it'd be useful to explicate them. For instance, it is a traditional goal of socialists to end exploitation, but working out what exactly is meant by exploitation is difficult. Philosophers can help here.

Another evident but sometimes overlooked point is that we cannot first win power then develop models of government and economics. If we are to succeed in actually achieving our aims we need to hit the ground running, and indeed convincing people we could do so is part of establishing our own legitimacy.  This cannot be an entirely a priori affair, but it is a modern prejudice (and one I do not share) that philosophy should proceed in an entirely a priori manner. We need knowledge of what has historically worked and what has not. We need to know what can produce and sustain socialist social arrangements. For the sakes of avoiding repeating past errors, we also need to know what has generated those features of society we dislike.  What is more, again, if our goal is democratisation, such knowledge must be disseminated.  Philosophers should not be the only people working on these issues and many of the above works are by people who would not identify as philosophers, but I think philosophical expertise can assist in all these projects. In fact it is this sort of work I give the most examples of because I personally think it likely to be of most value - socialist intelligentsia are to my mind far too focussed on making the case that socialism would be good to attain and far too little on how we should make it work, which I think is the better use of our distinctive skill sets.

All this to say, I am very far from being a philosophy sceptic here, and just in general I think the perennial "theory vs praxis" debates leftists get in are unhelpful and absurd. But I write this post and try to give these exemplars because I do often think that, in academic work that purports to be leftist, it is rather difficult indeed to see how it might connect to these issues. The above works, even at their most abstract, do seem to me to bear some connection to actually rearranging society for the better. Certain sort of socialist works, in some sense those which profess to be the deepest and of greatest significance,  often strike me as not even trying to connect itself up with the sort of problems that philosophy may help socialism address or overcome.