Socialism

4. Democracy, power and freedom

The claim that socialism produces the conditions for the realization of liberal political values has been central to arguments for socialism that appeal to the values of democracy and freedom. The argument can take both weaker and stronger forms. The former asserts that many of the standard liberal rights and freedoms are empty without the material conditions for their effective exercise, which the market systematically fails to guarantee. This view is sometimes stated in terms of a criticism of ‘negative’ conceptions of liberty as the absence of coercion, proposing instead that these material conditions should be included in the definition of liberty itself (see Freedom and liberty §3). Alternatively it may simply be argued that if (negative) liberty is valuable, then so too are the conditions for its exercise. In response to the objection that the market’s unequal distribution of material conditions is the unintended consequence of a spontaneous order, and hence should not be seen as a constraint on freedom, the socialist may argue that the market is not the outcome of natural events but of social decisions aimed at its creation and/or maintenance, that its distributive consequences are both foreseeable and alterable, and that there is no justification for restricting one’s conception of liberty to the absence of intentional constraints.

The stronger form of the claim that socialism realizes liberal values is that it represents their consistent application to the economic sphere. A version of this position can be found in Marx’s early writings, in which the ‘ideal’ community of the liberal democratic polity is contrasted with the egoistic realm of modern civil society; correspondingly, the rights of citizens exercised through their participation in the political community are set against the ‘rights of man’ exercised by the private individuals of civil society. The project of socialism is then expressed as bringing the ideal world of the polity down to reality through the democratic transformation of economic life. This strategy of pointing to the divergence between the rights and freedoms of the ideal liberal political order and their absence in the economic sphere has also been employed in other contexts: for instance, by contrasting democratic participation in the political system with the authoritarian nature of power relationships within the capitalist firm.

To such claims that socialism represents the completion of the democratic project, two main responses may be made: the liberal and the radical. The first denies that there is a conflict between the capitalist economic order and the liberal polity: rather, the existence of a market order, in which individuals enter freely into voluntary contractual relations, is itself a condition of the political rights and freedoms that define the liberal polity. It is not a sufficient condition: authoritarian states are compatible with capitalism. However, it is a necessary condition: political liberties are only to be found in free market economies. The socialist order, by concentrating economic, social and political power, destroys the space of civil society in which individuals enter into voluntary relations independent of the state, and which provides the cultural and social conditions for opposition to state power (see Civil society). This objection applies primarily to centrally planned socialist economies with state ownership of the means of production, and is often endorsed by market socialists as a further reason to support their own proposals. Alternatively, it may be argued that the existence of such concentrations of economic and political power is compatible with restraint in its exercise, and that the absence of liberal political rights in state socialist societies such as the erstwhile USSR can be explained by reference to factors other than the absence of markets – for example, to the lack of liberal democratic institutions prior to their revolutionary transformation.

The second, radical response is concerned not so much with the cogency of the socialist critique of liberalism but with its completeness. In effect it extends the socialist criticism of liberalism to socialism itself. By placing its emphasis on the economic sphere, socialism has been blind to other sources of power, in particular those concerned with race and gender. Thus the feminist criticism of traditional socialism: that by confining its attention to the ‘public’ sphere of economic and political life it fails, like liberalism, to address the primary origin and location of women’s oppression, in the ‘private’ sphere of the family and in ‘personal’, including sexual, relations between men and women (see Feminist political philosophy §4). Two replies may be made by socialists to this kind of critique. The first is to claim that these other asymmetries of power can themselves be explained in terms of the organization of economic production. The second is to accept the existence of diverse sources of social power and to re-conceptualize the traditional socialist project in the economic sphere as simply one component of a wider programme of human emancipation.