US socialist Hal Draper wrote Two Souls of Socialism in 1966 while working as a librarian at the University of California Berkeley. In the previous two years, student protests had turned the campus upside down. Radical left-wing politics was resurgent in the United States, after decades of stultifying McCarthyism.
“For the first time in the history of the world”, Draper supposed, “very likely a majority of its people label themselves ‘socialist’ in one form or another; but there has never been a time when the label was less informative”.
Among those carrying the socialist label were European social democrats who had abandoned challenging private property. The Soviet Union was at the height of its power, and Communist states modelled their economies on the one-party dictatorship, willingly or under the violent thumb of Russian imperialism. In the “Third World”, nationalist leaders from Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt to Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana adopted socialist rhetoric, while Mao Zedong in China and Che Guevara in Cuba won young disciples in the West.
Then there were revolutionary socialists, like Draper, who insisted that socialism did not exist anywhere in the world, and that the regimes masquerading as socialist were dramatically unequal countries where workers had few democratic and political rights. Swimming against the stream, Draper wrote Two Souls of Socialism to salvage the authentic revolutionary tradition from the morass of Stalinism. He argued that working-class self-emancipation was the essence of socialism, and that the history of socialist thought could be understood through the competing visions of “socialism from below” and “socialism from above”.
Socialist ideas of one sort or another have existed for a long time. Every society that has produced wealth and privilege for some, and deprivation and misery for many more, has had opponents. Political ideas calling for equality between peoples and freedom from oppression have repeatedly surfaced. So too has popular resistance, from slave uprisings in ancient Rome and peasant rebellions in medieval China to strikes and mass protests in modern capitalism.
While “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle”, as the Communist Manifesto famously asserts in its opening, the content of socialist political thought has varied widely depending on the social class it is rooted in.
Draper locates the origins of modern socialism in the radical political currents that proliferated following the French Revolution. Most eminent left-wing thinkers of this time were sympathetic to the plight of the labouring classes and believed that communism would lift the majority from oppression. However, by and large they did not conceive of the masses leading a socialist transformation of society.
An archetype of “socialism from above” was the French revolutionary Babeuf, who believed that an enlightened minority that had risen above the intellectual and moral strangleholds of capitalism needed to seize state power in the interests of the majority. This was a conspiratorial vision of revolution “from above”, one that Draper summarised as being “frankly a dictatorship over the people—with very good intentions”.
The “utopian” socialists arose soon after Babeuf and were path-breaking political thinkers. Draper highlights Robert Owen and Henri de Saint-Simon as socialists who advanced the first systematic critiques of early capitalism. They were, nonetheless, utopian as they dreamed up elaborate models of socialism and sought to procure resources from the propertied classes and the wealthy to impose their schemes onto the existing society.
Owen sought rich financiers for establishing socialist communes. Saint-Simon did believe that popular struggle could exert powerful influence, but wanted to utilise it as what Draper calls a “battering ram”—a lever that could force the existing ruling class towards a fairer society, while leaving political and economic power in their hands. The utopian socialists advanced devastating critiques of inequality, and their dreams were radical. But their vision was nevertheless “socialism from above”, in that socialism was a blessing to be bestowed on the masses.
Karl Marx began his political life where the utopian socialists left off, believing that workers would be the “heart” of a revolution while philosophers would be its “head”. Initially, Marx held to what Draper called the “illusion of the Savior-Despot”: of a beneficent ruling class. But through his experience of being a political activist, and witnessing workers’ strikes and bourgeois revolutions across Europe, Marx broke for good from the charitable, paternalistic attitudes towards workers and peasants of the utopian socialists. The apex of Marx’s revolutionary theory (“Marx’s Marxism”, says Draper, “not the caricatured monstrosity”) was that workers could achieve liberation only through their own self-activity. As Marx’s close collaborator Frederick Engels wrote, repeating the aphorism of the emerging workers’ movement from the 1840s onwards in Europe, “The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself”.
Socialist ideas and popular struggle had crisscrossed for an eternity. Marx’s breakthrough was to fuse them theoretically in the vision of, and commitment to, working-class revolution. This was made possible due to the historically unique position of workers, as a collective, exploited and socially powerful class. The great productive capacity of capitalism had created a surplus of resources such that the material needs of all people could realistically be met. The barrier to this kind of equitable distribution was that the ruling class that commanded economic power was driven, not by the objective of meeting human need, but by competition to accumulate profit. The system’s crucial weakness was that it was not the ruling-class minority, but the working-class majority, that operated the tools and machinery that created the immense wealth of society in the first place.
Unlike earlier socialists, Marx did not view workers as pathetic and eternally downtrodden, and nor did he approach working-class struggle as merely a tool to exact concessions from the ruling class. Instead, Marx understood that workers had the potential to achieve something no previous oppressed class in history had been capable of. The democratic potential of capitalistic workplaces, and the abundance of resources in capitalism, opened up the possibility that workers could abolish class division and the state by taking control of production and reorganising it. A free and equal society could be brought into existence, not by a messiah or knight in shining armour, but through workers realising their collective power over the course of a revolution. Marx was explicit about this, as Draper quotes: “We say to the workers, ‘You will have to go through fifteen or twenty or fifty years of civil wars and international wars, not only in order to change extant conditions, but also in order to change yourselves and to render yourselves fit for political dominion”.
Self-emancipation is the soul of Marxism, the crux of Draper’s socialism from below. Not kind ringleaders, nor the design of fantastical communes, but a commitment to thoroughgoing democracy, a belief that through rupture and upheaval, workers could transform capitalism and themselves in the process.
Draper insists that socialism has always been embroiled in a battle as to whether it will be achieved “from below” or “from above”. Marx and Engels fought for revolutionary workers’ democracy against conspiratorial anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin and state socialists such as Ferdinand Lassalle, who advanced the view that through universal male suffrage the masses could exercise political influence over the existing state and push capitalists to establish workers’ cooperatives. These early reformist ideas shifted the locus of socialism from working-class collective organisation and self-activity to the state. The German revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht would continue the struggle for socialism from below against the socialism from above expressed in the reformism of the Second International (an international association of socialist organisations), which conceived that working-class revolution was unnecessary, if not impossible, in an era of parliamentary democracy. Instead, the state was the change maker and state aid the content of socialism.
By the 1960s, socialism from above was winning the battle for the soul of socialism. The combined impact of social democracy and Stalinism had made socialism synonymous with state planning. Draper stresses the historical continuities between reformism and Stalinism as projects based on assuming political power through the capitalist state. This was fundamentally at odds with the principle of revolutionary socialists that the state was an instrument by which one class oppressed another class: the capitalist state was a tool for capitalists to manage their system and keep workers down through violence if necessary. To succeed, a workers’ revolution would need to smash the capitalist state and create a new means of running the economy democratically. Reformists and Stalinists, on the other hand, sought to govern the capitalist state as it existed, maintaining the exploitative social relations it was based upon.
Stalinists fetishised state-centric economic planning. Having all decisions made by politicians and bureaucrats was supposedly an alternative to the anarchy of the capitalist market. “The key words are Efficiency, Order, Planning, System—and Regimentation. Socialism is reduced to social-engineering”, Draper writes. Nowhere does working-class initiative factor into these ultra-planned schemas. Rather, the various state-driven economic plans for which Stalinists are renowned, whether the Soviet Union’s Five-Year Plan or Mao’s Great Leap Forward, involved extreme authoritarianism. Working-class freedoms were completely subordinated so that every drop of productivity could be squeezed out of them, through institutions such as the gulags where workers did not even have the choice to leave their place of work, or methods including the forced collectivisation of peasant land in China that directly led to widespread famines.
And what was it all for? Stalinist regimes directed their economies towards increasing the industrial and military capacity of their respective states. Their supporters posited that this was necessary for collective betterment. But all capitalist states say workers sacrifice for the greater good. It is a lie in the United States, and was a lie in the Soviet Union.
The socialism from above of Stalinism had not only abandoned the goal of working class self-emancipation, but removed working-class rights from the political equation entirely. State planning and industrialisation had become the touchstones of “socialism”. Draper usefully highlights that this process led to Stalinists enthusiastically championing Third World nationalists: “It is all right to smash or prevent free trade unions under Nasser, Castro, Sukarno, or Nkrumah because something called ‘economic development’ is paramount over human rights”.
This trend continues in the modern day, Stalinists supporting despotic regimes from the impoverished dictatorship of North Korea as a state-driven economy and the Iranian theocracy for being an enemy of the United States. An enduring legacy of Stalinism has been to make it normal for “socialists” openly to support the national interest of capitalist states, however badly workers are mistreated.
In the end, the distinction is not so much between “socialism from below” and “socialism from above”, but between socialism and a version of capitalism itself. Even in places where reformists or Stalinists have captured state power, the class struggle continues. As Draper famously concluded his pamphlet:
“When the Hungarian people erupted in revolt against the Russian occupier, the question was: which side are you on? When the Algerian people fought for liberation against the ‘socialist’ government of Guy Mollet, the question was: which side are you on? When Cuba was invaded by Washington’s puppets, the question was: which side are you on? and when the Cuban trade unions are taken over by the commissars of the dictatorship, the question is also: which side are you on?”
In Two Souls of Socialism, Draper compellingly appeals that working class self-emancipation is the strategic and moral heart of revolutionary socialism.
