by Christopher Winch

One of the reasons why socialism is struggling is that socialists do not really know who they are and where they came from. Many think that they are a species of liberal. After all, socialism grew up alongside liberalism and both are opponents of conservatism. Both socialists and liberals favour democracy and rights. Surely socialism just means taking liberalism a bit further?

Despite the apparent similarities there are good reasons for thinking that socialists should resist the excessive penetration of liberal ideas into socialist thinking. There are a number of areas of concern.

Liberals tend to believe in three interconnected propositions:

• Absolute individual rights,
• The right to private property
• The unconditional sanctity of the market.

Each of these beliefs support the other.

Socialists, who are capable of seeing that the market can be an efficient way of conveying some information about preferences and availability, only see it as having conditional value. It is good as long as it delivers the goods and can only do so when kept under control.

Individual rights:

It is impossible for socialists to avoid talking about rights if they want their claims on behalf of people’s vital interests to be taken seriously. So rights arise from vital interests. But different groups of people may have somewhat different interests. Liberals prefer to ignore the fact that we may often also have collective interests so there can be collective rights.

However, many if not most liberals think that rights are a kind of fundamental, irreversible gift that every individual has. According to the late Robert Nozick, individual rights are so powerful that it is questionable whether the state can do anything to override them.  This way of thinking means that the individual comes first and must always be deferred to even in the face of powerful collective interests. This view of the individual right to private property explains partly why property rights, especially in the United States, appear so extreme. The left has often been badly led astray by rights rhetoric. Having bought into the individual rights agenda, it has allowed itself to be distracted by various forms of special interest politics that should really be the province of liberals and which are not particularly congenial to the goals of socialists, which are to do with the development and promotion of the interests of wage-earners and their dependents in the broadest sense. In this context questions about the interests of women, the family, minorities and the environment can have a proper place as the broad mainstream sort out their priorities as part of the development of a political programme that has to cater for diversity.

One major problem with putting special interest politics first and then dealing with socialist ideas later is that radical liberals, and socialists influenced by liberal ideas, have mistakenly bought the idea of strong autonomy, as a political ideal, which involves the claim that any individual can choose what they wish to do in life so long as it does not harm other people. So it is quite ok to be a drug addict or surfer so long as you do not interfere with the rights of others to do as they like.

It is easy for socialists to be tempted by this doctrine because we all live in a society that values a wide range of individual choice about how one lives one’s life and because socialists, as well as liberals, tend to value this ability. What the liberal often ignores, however, is the existence of a common good and the closely associated idea of a public interest which is affected by the actions of everyone, whether or not they wish or do not wish to harm other people.

Once one takes into account the impact of one’s actions, both intended and unintended, indirect as well as direct, then it becomes much more difficult to maintain that we should enjoy autonomy in a strong sense. Rather, we should be autonomists who believe that people should be able to make life choices that take account of the common good. This does not mean that citizens should not be able to evaluate what counts as the common good, but it does entail that this should continue to be a reference point for individual choices. Individual rights need to be exercised in the context of collective ones. Private property: Most liberals hold this to be inviolate. Yet the claims of the supporters of private property are extreme. Private property gives its holders exclusive control over assets, even if their control of those assets adversely affects the interests of other people. Yet the theoretical justification for private property, which comes from Locke, is very weak. Locke also admits that one should only own enough for use and that one’s ownership of private property should not derogate from the rights of those who already enjoy benefits which are part of that property. Yet these provisos are ignored as a matter of routine.

Liberals seem happy with the institution of private property as it is currently constituted, rather than as liberal ideology would have it. Even Nozick admitted that past injustices in the appropriation of property need to be rectified, making for example the continued holding of land in Zimbabwe by white farmers difficult to justify on liberal grounds. Hegel argued that people needed private property as a means of self-realisation. But you don’t need the extreme liberal version of private property in order to enjoy enough assets in order to realise yourself.

Socialists need have no problem with the possession of personal property nor with the possession of some forms of private property. They can even agree with Hegel to some extent that the possession of private property is an important condition of self-fulfillment. There is no reason, though, for them to give assent to the extreme and unreasonable notions of private property that have legal sanction within our own society. Liberals are particularly vulnerable on this question since they have failed to develop a satisfactory philosophical or ethical justification for absolutist notions of private property.

Socialist have not done enough to challenge them on their own ground on this question. In fact it is not difficult to give Locke’s arguments a socialist twist. If we take self-sufficiency seriously, together with the need not to take away from people’s enjoyment of a previously commonly held asset, then private property need not look so unshakeable. Locke’s argument that private property results from mixing the land with one’s labour formed one of the elements of Marx’s labour theory of value and of exploitation. But one can simply argue that if ownership arises from labouring on natural materials, then employees must be entitled to a large component of the production of any economy, in particular the value that they have themselves added to a natural asset. One can argue this on good liberal grounds and undermine liberal ideas about property from within.

The market:

Liberals have a thing about the market. Even those, like Mill, who considered himself to be a socialist, thought that the market was the best way to ensure economic efficiency. This is also true of modem welfare-oriented liberals like John Rawls. This belief ties in well with their beliefs in property and individual rights. The market presupposes a strong form of property right so that assets can be traded unconditionally, and also strong individual rights to buy and sell. In addition, the market is thought to be the best way of allowing individual choices to make themselves known and to provide the widest possible scope for individual choice.

Socialists, who are capable of seeing that the market can be an efficient way of conveying some information about preferences and availability, only see it as having conditional value. It is good as long as it delivers the goods and can only do so when kept under control. The liberal, however, often sees the market as the guarantor of rights, including property rights. Take away the market and it is difficult to exercise these rights. Although most liberals make out the case for markets in terms of efficiency it is not unusual to hear the market described as something that is good in itself. There don’t seem to be any circumstances in which most liberals would be prepared to entertain giving up the market as the main mechanism for allocating resources. To a socialist, such an idea is absurd since the market is only as useful as the results it produces.

Conclusion

There is no reason for socialists to believe in unconditional individual rights. Rights arise from interests and are defined by social institutions. Property rights are not absolute and the market’s value is conditional only. These beliefs are opposed to those of fundamentalist liberals. Because socialists believe in self-realisation, democracy and political freedom, this does not mean that they have to buy the liberal agenda. Adopting a more critical attitude towards it would help socialists to be less deferential to ideas that are hostile to their own and to be more self-confident about their own ideas and values.

Reprinted from the March 2003 edition of our magazine.  The whole of which is available as a PDF at https://labouraffairsmagazine.files.wordpress.com/2024/01/ltur-126-march-2003.pdf. 

Comment by Eamon Dyas: “In the almost 21 intervening years in the context of the ascendancy of absolute individual rights we have had the development of transgenderism that has taken the whole philosophy of individual rights to the absurd level where it actually comes into conflict with the idea of women and men as biologically based.”

             Comment by Chris Winch:  “We all underestimated the nihilistic tendencies in liberalism, which can no longer be ignored. The dissolution of society poses no problem for these liberals. What should worry us is that much of the left has subscribed to this agenda and it takes precedence over whatever socialist sentiments they may still have.”